TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #693: The War for the World's Reserve Asset with Ryan Gentry

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

Marty sits down with Ryan Gentry to discuss his new $220 million SPAC aimed at taking Bitcoin operating companies public, the five-year evolution of the Lightning Network from single-digit millions to $10 billion in annual volume, and why Bitcoin businesses are finally mature enough to compete in public markets. Ryan on Twitter: https://x.com/RyanTheGentry STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Brian Gentry. I would say it's been a while, but it hasn't been a while. We catch up behind the scenes quite frequently, but it's been a while since you've been on the show. Five years. Five years. Five years depriving your audience of me, Marty. I mean, but in serious, five years,

that's a long time um especially a long time in bitcoin isn't it it's basically a third of bitcoin's life we've we've gone without catching up on the show that's a wild way to think about it yeah i mean five years ago november 2020 bitcoin was at what like mid-teens let me check 15k so i just started buying like i go on the five-year chart it's been six like it doesn't even come up on the five-year chart at the go to all what was it november 2020 i think so yeah yeah we were climbing we were climbing we were at uh 17k 17k ran all the way up to uh 65 back down to 16 here we are sitting at uh 89 332 dollars and everybody thinks our pets heads are falling off they don't know how good they have it they don't know how good they have it

they really don't uh in honor of your first our first catch-up on air in over five years i'm gonna have a beer for for you og freaks with our cheers the original ryan gentry appearance on uh on this show we drank a lot of whiskey talked a lot about the lightning network talked a lot about texas uh things were much different at that point and we will probably do a retrospective on what happened between now and then and look at what we were saying back then what actually happened and where we maybe may have been wrong where we were right but first uh you've got some big news personal news launched uh the bitcoin infrastructure acquisition corp looking for

bitcoin operating businesses another spac equity spac hitting the space a lot of uh a lot of attention on this part of the market over the last six months what are you trying to do here what are you doing i'm really excited um i think you know in the five years since we've talked The whole ecosystem, Bitcoin, and most importantly, the companies building Bitcoin products and building products around Bitcoin, the asset and the network, we've all grown up. We've all grown up significantly. And I think public markets, as seen by the ETFs, as seen by MicroStrategy, as seen by kind of the wave of, you know, digital asset treasury companies last year, or this year,

rather, public markets have a huge appetite for Bitcoin. And so I was approached earlier this summer with an opportunity to raise a SPAC, a special purpose acquisition corporation that's charged with taking an operating Bitcoin company public. And so we just completed that IPO this week, raised $220 million. Very excited to note that the deal was five times oversubscribed. Again, there's a really big appetite amongst public markets investors for Bitcoin company exposure. They're excited about the possibilities and the prospects of Bitcoin native companies and what they can do from a cash flows and growth perspective.

And I want to be really clear here that I'm not... This is not a debt. This is not a Treasury company. I'm not interested in competing with Michael Saylor, with Jack Mallers, with Adam them back, etc. You know, my five years at Lighting Labs, you know, was all focused on building, you know, real products and services and working with Bitcoin focused entrepreneurs that have customers and, you know, again, cash flows. And so that's where I'm specializing. That's where I'm focused is the companies who've been building Bitcoin products for the last, you know, seven, 10, 12, 15 years, right? Those are the companies that I'm focused on and I'm focused on wanting to take them into public markets in a manner that materially benefits

their companies, right? I think one thing that we've learned, that I've learned at least, is, you know, being a public company, there are specific advantages, specific things that you can do as a public company that you just can't as a private company. And I think there is a subset of the Bitcoin space that is ready to take advantage of those. And I think in order to take the next leap in their businesses and to provide kind of the next amount of value to their customers, to us, right, as Bitcoiners, they need a vehicle to take in public. and i i'm really excited to have the opportunity to provide that opportunity to you know one or a couple of our favorite companies well maybe since you framed it in that way maybe

it is a good time to do a retrospective on our conversation for five years ago when i understand you re-listened to it recently and we're laughing not only at our mental state but the conversation we had and i think maybe the retrospective we jump into it right away it's just to really highlight where we thought the market was five years ago where we thought it was going and how it's actually progressed since then and why you think now is a good time to be launching this particular SPAC looking for operating businesses in the bitcoin space serving bitcoiners yeah i think that the core part of our discussion that as i was listening back to it i was like you know we really we were on to something here and are on to something here was you know we talked

about how like what the bitcoin revolution is really is you know a war for the world's capital a peaceful economic war. But as you're growing a brand new store value from scratch, necessarily the value that is coming into Bitcoin is leaving other assets and is leaving US Treasuries, is leaving German bonds, is leaving you name it, all the other assets in the world world, and coming to store itself in Bitcoin. And I think we talked a lot about the order of operations of how that, again, war, quote unquote, progresses. And one thing that we bonded a lot over when we first met was how enthusiastic we were

over how the first cohort of big companies that really got Bitcoin or were interested Bitcoin was the energy industry through preferred mining. We talked a lot about oil and gas back in the day, but look how that has panned out. All of these companies that went public, a lot of them actually via SPACs that were mining companies in 2021, 2022, have since become hugely important in the AI build-out space, where they first got started just focusing on Bitcoin mining. They built great relationships with energy producers and utilities and all the folks in the energy industry generally. And then now have these hyperscalers just paying them outrageous amounts of money to leverage the skills that they built

in the Bitcoin industry to build out this next great thing in the AI space. So I think that's where things started and where we've seen, again, public companies, companies that took the leap and became public, really benefit from being public companies and from having their name out there and being able to raise the capital. In Iris, Iren just raised a billion dollars at 0% coupon convertible note. They don't have to pay back for five years or something like that. It's absurd what's been happening. And I think those are all companies operated by Bitcoiners, right, that are out making a difference in the world, building with Bitcoin treasuries, operating a company on Bitcoin principles.

I think that's super important. Yeah, I'm looking it up. It was IRN just did $2 billion, $1 billion at $25 basis points, $1 at $1, and CleanSpark projected 1.15 billion earlier this year or last month less than a month ago um as well yeah so they're raising a ton of capital is that the only advantage to being public in your mind that's a lot of what no we hear and i mean i'm i think there's when i think about it from first principles i think there's three there's three main categories that i would I think number one for sure is being able to raise like having a public trust from a kind of debt and equity capital perspective.

And I think there's kind of two ways that you can raise the money. So first is like, you know, being able to raise debt capital through these convertibles or through preferreds like MicroStrategy is doing. Like you just you can't do that as a private company because you don't have the public equity to pair with the debt capital. You can only really do that as a public company at being able to issue securities. The other thing is, you know, I was I had the great pleasure of talking with MicroStrategy CEO Fong Lee yesterday. And also he's doing a little roadshow and he was talking about this new USD reserve that they built, the dividends. And he was like, look, we did this mostly to combat the FUD. It helps me sleep a little bit better at night, but it wasn't really necessary. But we raised $1.44 billion in eight days

just by selling equity on the public markets through the ATM. That's absurd. Think about it. mean you're you know vaunted venture capitalist now marty like how hard is it for a company to raise 1.4 private company to raise 1.44 billion dollars and on like what timeline even 100 million dollars like on what time long does that take it depends what if you're an ai right now maybe not as long as others but yeah it's not as easy it's definitely not as easy right and so that's and not Of course, not every company is a micro-strategy, so not every company can do that. But it's materially easier as a public company to be able to do that type of stuff. But that's not the only benefit.

I think that's the most obvious one. The second one that I think is very important is public trust from a business development perspective. Um, having the audits, having, um, the kind of rigor around the financials, having the just trust that you're a public company, it just makes it easier to do deals, especially with kind of banks and the more, um, uh, the more conservative entities and public markets. It's just easier to do that type of stuff, to get those doors opened. if you're already a public company versus a private company. And so I think, you know, especially for the kind of Bitcoin companies

that are financially minded, financial services minded, that will materially improve their ability to gain new enterprise customers. And, you know, also having a public equity, right? Letting your customers share in the upside of your business, right? that was always the the argument for tokens um in the shitcoin crowd right but you don't need a token you just need a public equity to um and maybe it'll be tokenized maybe that public equity will be tokenized at some point in the future you know and at some point maybe um we'll see i'm i know there's you know i'm following the clarity act with interest i'm not super optimistic but

maybe they'll figure out something that works there it's possible um but so two is i think public trust from a BD perspective and institutional customers will... You have more substance as a public company than you do as a private company. And retail customers getting to share in your upside is a big deal. And then third is just hiring and retention. As we were talking about before the call, not all potential employees like being paid in illiquid stock options. Being able to pay your employees instead in RSUs, restricted stock units and public equity that they can sell whenever they like, that makes a big difference for a certain class of employee. Employees that have families or different situations and aren't really

willing to take the startup risk. Being a public company allows you to just hire and retain a certain class of employee that you just can't get otherwise so i think those three are like those are real material benefits it helped offset you know the downside of being a public company you have to spend a couple million dollars in compliance costs and audit costs like every year just to just to be public right and so there has to be some benefit for that additional cost and i think for a certain class of companies those benefits very materially outweigh those costs yeah and i mean and all these benefits can only be gained too if you have something legitimate to bring public so i think that's again going back to the retrospective

really leaning into the timing of this and why it's right now is i mean for the when we met five years ago outside of industrial scale miners how many companies were in the right spot from a product market fit revenue cash flow ebita perspective for this to even be viable outside of maybe coinbase and a few others and why that's what i think is that's exactly what i think is so interesting about thinking about this time and in terms of the order of operations that we talked about because the way we talked about it's like look if you wanted to you know as a Bitcoin community, march forward and grow Bitcoin's total market cap as a measurement of world domination of reserve asset. First, you'd want to start with the energy industry.

You want to make sure that energy executives, energy companies were aligned and bought in on Bitcoin, understood the value prop and were hodlers and incentivized to protect 21 million. And then the next area you want to verge into is financial industry, is TradFi. And you'd want to make sure that companies were holding Bitcoin on their balance sheet. You want to make sure that the financiers were comfortable with Bitcoin as collateral. And we're starting to adopt Bitcoin as a collateral for people to borrow against. And I think we're right smack dab in the middle of that right now. And I think there's a lot more work to be done there. But it's interesting that this current cohort of Bitcoin companies, crypto

companies, if you'll excuse the term, that are going public, right, are companies like BitGo, companies like Kraken, companies like Circle. But this next wave after Coinbase are the fintechs built on Bitcoin and crypto rails. And that makes sense. That's the next wave of companies that got started in Bitcoin, that started making a lot of money in Bitcoin and are at the scale where they can be public and bear the cost of being a public company, but also tap the upside. They're everything, all the new things you can do as a public company. So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three

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building around the use case of bitcoin is collateral um or bitcoin as an asset you can put an ira or whatever it may be how important do you think access to the public markets is for them to flourish i think a very like you know simple left curve model of it which you know which we also talked about five years ago i think the bell curve meme was like new and so we talked about that a lot uh but it still remains i think the best model of the world and i try and be as as left curve as possible as much as possible um think about like a bitcoin lending business that's lending against you know dollars against btc and that i think is you know although of course we would all love to be um just 100 bitcoin only spending

bitcoin through you know all the square terminals of sport lightning now which is a fantastic development um there just necessarily is a need for dollars um if you're operating in the modern world um and i think if you're lending against bitcoin your main challenge right now is the interest rates are high right like i think you know unless you're borrowing i think like Like, LeanSpark borrowed $100 million against Bitcoin from 2 Prime, and they paid like 7% to 8%, 7.75% or something like that, which is, you know, that's probably the best rate against Bitcoin that I've seen because they borrowed $100 million. dollars. If you're retail and you're borrowing $50,000, $100,000, something like that, I mean, you're paying like 10%, 12% something. That's steep. So you think about these businesses that are lending, their cost of capital, what they're doing is they're borrowing dollars from somebody

else, and then they're lending those dollars back out to the end user. So their ability to make money is 100% dependent on how can they lower that cost of capital? How can they lower that cost to borrow? And that's something that's really only unlocked by accessing bigger pools of capital. And the way to access those bigger pools of capital is to do what MicroStrategy is doing in terms of getting credit ratings, which necessarily involves to get the best possible credit rating, being a public company, selling debt for lower and lower costs, and just kind of through growth, through selling securities, through working with the credit agencies, getting that cost to borrow down closer to whatever a bank has to pay, which is closer

to 4% or 5%. So there's like a big delta between this current cost of capital for these private Bitcoin lenders and what kind of like the terminal cost of capital should be. And I think that's only unlocked by being a private company or being a public company. I think it's very important to dive into the details of this, too, because I think a lot of people will look at the rates attached to the Bitcoin collateralized lending desks that are currently private across the industry. and they see 10 12 14 depending on where you go and they say oh these guys are are ripping us off not understanding that the company itself would love to give you a lower cost of capital but they have liquidity providers to that desk that are demanding a higher cost and they simply take a little rip on top of that there's a delta between the cost of which their lending provider

gives them the cash and the cost of which ultimately you take the loan out and the company issuing the loan or your counterpart whether any of the companies offering collateralized loans just takes a little a little rip on top of that and to your point to like make more money in this product you need to basically get more volume more more liquidity on that desk and so the new only way to attract that more and more liquidity is to get those rates down the cost of capital down for the end user and then the the margins on top of that cost of capital will be similar but you'll just have so much more volume that you're able to make more money and i think that's an unfortunate reality of the currency of the bitcoin lending market because a lot of people

think the companies offering new services are ripping off the end customer but they're really beholden to the risk takers on the other side who are offering private credit dollars exactly and i think that's that was a really interesting thing that um you know falling from microstrategy said yesterday was uh you know this is public information um when microstrategy got their credit rating right they got a b minus credit rating the ratings agency like didn't value their 59 billion dollars worth of bitcoin at all right like it didn't count for their credit worthiness despite the fact that like it's 59 billion dollars right and that's like obviously a mistake and obviously an oversight. But one thing that is just, again, if what's really

happening here is Bitcoin is competing to store all the world's capital and just needs to be convincing bigger and bigger institutions of its creditworthiness and of its safety as a store of value, as he talked about how next year, the big banks are going to start releasing custody products for Bitcoin, right? Morgan Stanley is going to not just offer iBit, but it's going to offer being able to buy Bitcoin that they custody or BNY Mellon or somebody custodies. And the next step beyond that is just logical for them to be able to count your Bitcoin as collateral in a mortgage or something like that. But before these big banks can do that, they're going to have to go to the credit agencies and say, hey, I want to lend against

my customer's Bitcoin. I want to give them some dollars for it. How should I score this? Can I lend it at 40% loan value? Can I lend it at 70? What's the right number? You got to give me some guidance. So, you know, although of course we all got into this or to disrupt the banks or to allow people to be their own banks, ironically, just due to the power of Bitcoin and the incentivization that it takes hold in all institutions that touch it, where all of a sudden like they start acting in its best interest, the big banks are ironically going to be, you know, kind of acting on our behalf to help Bitcoin on its next leg in its journey. Right. And I think that's one of the things that, you know, to me running the SPAC,

I see that and I say, oh man, Bitcoin native lenders, Bitcoin companies that we all know and love, you have like a year to start getting big or else these banks are going to come in And it's going to be really tough to compete with Morgan Stanley rates if they're cussing Bitcoin, right? It's going to be really tough to compete with the entities that have the lowest cost of capital in the world unless you really start raising money and getting big now. And so I think there's a sense of urgency for these companies if they want to maintain their business. And I don't just want to sell out to the banks to take the leap. now yeah how do we uh how do we square this round hole is bitcoin being co-opted is this good is this what we want it's inevitable great question bitcoin is for enemies right

um bitcoin is for enemies and i think the co-option question my Bitcoin is not being co-opted because I hold my own keys and I run my own node. Right? And I think as long as a plurality of Bitcoiners

have that attitude and maintain their social sovereignty and as long as protocol development is focused on making that barrier to entry as low as possible, then i doesn't really matter what the big institutions do with their bitcoin like microstrategy has done all of this work and bought all this bitcoin they only own three percent

of the network right and they've been at it for five years and they had this for five years and like who is gonna come out and buy 650 000 bitcoin to eclipse that right um I totally understand and get that the focus on TradTri adoption appears antithetical to Bitcoin principles. But again, it's like, if the goal is to become the global reserve asset and the global reserve currency, at some point, these big boys are going to have to buy it, right? you really believe in what bitcoin's about and you really believe in you know bitcoin's principles and you focus on the fundamentals of like what does actually decentralization mean

one big entity buying 100 000 bitcoin does not affect bitcoin's centralization at all bitcoin's centralization is up to all of us to hold our own keys and run around nodes right And I think as long as the protocol development focus isn't focused on how do we make it easier for MicroStrategy to buy more Bitcoin, which is, I don't think any of that has come up in the knots versus core debate. I think we're fine. I think we're okay. I really do. no i do too and um it's been tough this year because you're you're seeing obviously the digital asset token companies spax you're hitting the market this year really force people to be

like what's going on here um and if you're not pragmatic and nuanced it's easy to and again i'm not trying to speak from a high horse or i'm off his pompous but i i've thought long and hard about this and i've had to grapple with it myself and it's like yeah to your point like what did you expect to happen to see that for wall street and all these institutions to see us uh plebs riding the uh the monetization wave and not not participate eventually like this is part of the process and to your point it's incumbent upon us to make sure that we're holding on our our own keys running our own nodes supporting payments infrastructure to make bitcoin everyday money which you dedicated the last five years of your life to um or many more six or seven you still are

um it's just like yeah we're we're playing in this ocean with with bigger fish now and we just gotta hold hold our own and that's like at 1031 like we have the uh the bitcoin development co spack out there right now and we're looking to acquire just an operating business that wants to bitcoinize right and like that's like like if wall street's getting in we want quote-unquote mainstream to get in as well so you want businesses that have nothing to do with bitcoin but would benefit from incorporating bitcoin whether that's if they're an energy company into their systems if they're a large retailer into their payment systems and then obviously any company no matter what industry in you're in i think it's incredibly advantageous

to use bitcoin as a treasury asset and uh this makes people uncomfortable but this is what growing up is like look at us five years ago i had a beard great covid lockdowns i was drinking whiskey like a sailor now i got a nice nice sweater on enjoying a nice pint of guinness on a friday afternoon uh you gotta go were you a dad yet five years ago i was i was yeah we were okay so that's i mean that's been a big change i guess that wasn't a change for you that's obviously been a big change for me right that changes your whole perspective on what's important and where priorities lie and yeah i have you know a little one now and another one on the way and yeah yeah growing up it happens i was a father of one at the time and uh two more have been

added since the last time we talked on air yeah and uh at that i mean the more children you add the uh the more chaotic in a good way etiquettes it's all it's all wonderful for sure um but it is i think going back to like what we're doing here is we're helping bitcoin progress and like soak up more and more of the world's capital as it becomes the global reserve asset you know one thing that i think a lot of us just didn't understand was um you know what that actually requires in order like you like you know the cypherpunk looks at kind of institutional mandates and you know investment agreements and all this stuff is like that's just nerd lawyer talk right like you should just buy the bitcoin but like you know these insurance these pension plans these insurance

companies that you know legally they they have to hold 40 of their money in bonds um or in like public securities right like that's the brilliance of what microstrategy is doing is they're kind of meeting these investors where they are who want bitcoin exposure um and they're saying okay well, here, we've created this little funnel, where you buy our preferred, because you can, we'll give you what you want, which is this cash flow, so you can, you know, pay off your pensioners and all that different stuff. And we'll go and buy Bitcoin with the proceeds. Because you can't, right? And I think that's, that's kind of the state that we're at, where they're needing to do these kind of clever financial engineering in order to allow these

big pools of capital to get the Bitcoin exposure that they desperately want and need is just the work that's required for this next step. And I think, again, what we were talking about before we got on the call or before we started recording is um the thing that we didn't understand five years ago was that rather than bitcoin like out competing with all the world's capital and being adversarial against you know all the nation states of the world what we found out is like oh no the u.s dollar system desperately needs bitcoin like it desperately needs more high quality collateral to support the system right all of these different fiat institutions are struggling just as much as you know individuals

in the face of inflation and rampant money printing right and they need a lifeboat um just like we do but they're not able to just buy bitcoin with the dollars right they need different sort of structures and products to be able to do so. Sup freaks. Have you noticed that governments have become more despotic? They want to surveil more. They want to take more of your data. They want to follow you around the internet as much as possible so they can control your speech, control what you do. It's imperative in times like this to make sure that you're running a VPN as you're surfing the web, as we used to say back in the nineties. And it's more imperative that you use the right VPN, a VPN that cannot log

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That's unchained.com slash tftc. it's almost like it's too good to be true like wait a second what's happening and that's all and i would attribute this reality to the very understandable apprehension like are we being co-opted right now it's like maybe maybe some maybe some people are maybe some institutions are but i think the the stronger force is this external recognition of oh crap we've got a big problem here and bitcoin is a tool that can help us begin to solve that problem and i think maybe taking a slightly different direction too and bring it back to the bitcoin industry specifically in the companies within it um and why they should go public now i get access to public markets

and then putting it in the broader concept context of spax which particularly post 2020 had a uh negative connotation associated with them yep spack offerings were simply in retrospect proved to be uh sort of exit liquidity mechanisms but i think you and i we've talked about this at length over the last um last few months like the timing for these bitcoin companies again if you're mature you're you've got revenue product market fit your cash flow and you got material ebita and if you basically take what we've been discussing today particularly with the institutional foray into bitcoin if that's happening in earnest like the upside potential growth potential for these companies is is massive as well as we're looking

at a 1.8 trillion dollar market cap right now there's vanguard open up the floodgates bank of america one to four percent square rolling out to four million merchants like the need for individual consumers enterprise consumers to get access to bitcoin infrastructure is only going to increase from here i couldn't agree more and i think like obviously um i think what's what's important too is you know one of the things that you know my chairman of my board um parker white who's a you know an austin bitcoin guy um worked at kraken for a number of years um and is now you know the cio of a public debt um you know one of the things that he kind of convinced me um on when he was pitching me on the opportunity was he was like look this merging of public markets and like

private crypto Bitcoin companies is happening now. It's a one-way merge. And these TradFi people have no idea what they're doing, right? Like they have no idea what value looks like. And so if people who, if nobody who understands where like real value is in this community, in this ecosystem, don't stand up, all this TradFi money is going to go into a million avalanche stats right like it's just gonna all get destroyed and all of these capital markets people are gonna feel like they got scammed just like what's happened in every single crypto boom and bust cycle we've seen so far right and so i think there's you know uh there's a responsibility to try and direct some of this capital into some of the great companies that we know exist right and

that we know around and put it in the hands of um you know quality responsible entrepreneurs um that can really put this cap over work and you know not only build great companies but also be great spokespeople for bitcoin like are we happy that you know obviously saylor does a great job but are we happy that the other people they get to talk about crypto all the time is tom lee hey we're going to do it in january of next year like is that the representative or do we want you know i don't want to put any people on the spot but just like people that come top of mind like wouldn't we love to have alex leishman talking about bitcoin on cnbc and giving that perspective um right wouldn't we love to have elizabeth stark wouldn't we love to have you know

joe and drew from unchained uh you know you go down the list right um there's there's all of these wonderful representatives of the bitcoin community that have focused on you know their customers and their products and their companies but i do think at some point there's a duty to educate the rest of the world and traditional financial markets on like what real value looks like and instead of just hoping and being disappointed when the masses fall for your coin scams over and over and over again what about the zcash debt that's a big one just unbelievable right but i mean we've we've been in this ecosystem long enough that like i i'm not mad i'm just disappointed yeah well i mean this brings up a good point it's something like obviously i

think you'd be an incredible representative but it is it is frustrating like fucking excuse my language almost 17 years in because i remember when i first got in like 2013 2014 you had brian kelly on cnbc tom lee was around back then they let trace mayor on obviously he's had his downfall like still the quality of people actually like highlighting where the value is and listen credit where credit's due like sailor and other people now like the last six months it's been all this dat thing where it's like all right it's going up like buy the stock um i think strategy is far and away like separated and demarcated from um a lot of the dat focused uh companies that have hit the market this year but like again i think really bringing the public the message of

like hey this is superior savings and payments technology that is objectively better when you actually touch see and feel it i mean you saw this and you see this at lightning labs like the ability i was just talking about i was on noster we were live streaming was live streaming walker uh three hours ago and people were sending bitcoin to his wallet as we were live streaming it's like that is a twitch competitor that nobody realizes yet but it is superior like you don't have to wait once a week once a month whatever it may be like you are getting paid immediately you have the proliferation of other second layer solutions like arc spark cashew mints or e-cash mints uh liquid these are all becoming interoperable obviously um the development at the

protocol layer with many scripts and what you can do to secure your collateral is getting extremely robust and it is true sci-fi tech that is better and we need my opinion and i think in your humble opinion as well more people telling this side of the story which i think is being very under appreciated obviously we have luckily i mean i think outside of jack miller's i can't think of anybody who's going on cnbc and telling the story like this exactly and i mean i think there's bitcoin has always had you know a little bit of a not a marketing problem but like it's had a marketing problem you can say it yeah it's not a marketing problem right and then i think bitcoiners are not predisposed to the salesmanship and the marketing that needs to happen but it just

it's important right uh it just is um and i do think that you know now that we're at this at this point and at this level of scale you know i think there's a real responsibility you know there's kind of like there's kind of two choices that you have um when you've been a bitcoin for a long time one which is you know respectable is to ride off into the sunset with your bitcoins um and just go enjoy your life right and um be financially secure and kind of do whatever you want the other one is the other choice is to give back um to the community that's given you so much um and you know incur a little bit of self-sacrifice to help get other people into the lifeboat right and i think that that's kind of a little bit where we're at where um

you know as we've heard this year has seen a ton of ogs selling right we're over 100k if you bought bitcoin at 10 bucks 100 bucks something like that like you know congratulations that's fantastic you retired your bloodline that's awesome um but i would challenge those people that like you know there's a there's more going on here we're not done 100k is 1.8 trillion dollars is not the terminal end of bitcoin right like we got another 100x to go to really fulfill the mission and this next leg of the journey is just necessarily takes a little bit more than just buying and holding, right? There's more convincing to do. There's more convincing of entities that aren't just retail people looking to make money, right? This is like serious institutions that

need to be convinced of volatility, of safety, of that the custody of the Bitcoin is with reputable entities etc etc like there's more work to be done on this next leg of the journey um and i think we need all hands on deck um and you know i think that's kind of the next thing that i'm really interested in really passionate about doing and you know i can um i think i have a unique skill set to be able to do that and so that's why i'm focused on on this back and um on working with you know the best bitcoin founders to take this you know next leap of the journey with me what uh you're is a you're gonna find a founder with an operating company spinning out cash flows set up for growth but before you find that that founder it's gonna be you you're gonna

be on cmc we've heard uh we've heard the pitches from sailor and everybody it's digital capital it's the best asset on earth what would your unique pitch be why we should lean into bitcoin why bitcoin why now is it a store value hedge like how how would you paint the full picture because i think you are particularly suited to to do a good job of it one thing a term that's been rattling around in my head for the last several months um has been like look i'm outside of bitcoin if you remember like my background i'm an engineer right like i started my career at intel which was like a lot about the first episode we talked a lot about that in the first episode it's like it was the i think you know arguably the preeminent american

manufacturing company um you know for like our entire lives right you had kind of you think about the you know ge boeing intel right intel does massive massive investments in manufacturing in in the u.s and so one thing that i'm like extremely interested in and i've been following very closely is all of the efforts to kind of reshore manufacturing in the u.s and like bring back um you know those the post-covid bring back supply chains and things like that and so this is a long-winded way of saying that like in order to do that work and another thing we talked about five years ago is that like bitcoin is just as much a hardware evolution as a software one right but in order to do that work we need to without inflating everybody away we need to re-collateralize

the financial system right like the financial system is dramatically under collateralized and without re-collateralizing this financial system, we will not be able to successfully make the capital expenditures we need to make to bring back manufacturing and ensure American national security. And I think if you adopt that frame, what asset can we use to re-collateralize the financial system? It's not going to be treasuries. Gold's been doing great, obviously, but like gold kind of had its time as collateral and we're not going back to it. Really, the only option that you have is Bitcoin, right? And imagine if adopting Bitcoin as a collateral asset to lend against, to re-collateralize this dollar system as Bitcoin

goes from $1.8 trillion to $100 trillion, right? Like that 50x in growth could provide you know, I don't, depending on what multiple, like another hundred X of capital expenditure of dollars issued in order to, you know, provide new productive capacities in AI and robotics and space travel and all the things that we want to invest in. But like, you need that underlying collateral in order to do that lending to productive entrepreneurs. You just, you have to have it and so i think that's that's the thing that i've been really interested in is like thinking about bitcoin as the tool that allows us to recollateralize the financial system and invest in all of these new productive economies that we're so excited about another way to say

is we're uh we're for the bitcoinization of finance it's not the financialization of bitcoin right it's a thousand percent i mean that's and so that's you know elizabeth stark is is you know my former CEO boss and CEO at Lightning Labs is phenomenal at kind of all things branding and terms of phrase. And so she was about Bitcoinizing the dollar. That's what we were doing with Tappert Assets. And I think similarly to your point, Bitcoinizing the financial system, building it, allowing it to grow on a firm, solid foundation based on 21 million, based on lack of rehypothecation based on you know audit auditing and verifiability that's a better way to to organize as we move into the future yeah i'm not sure if you caught

it but the um the national security strategy memo that went out this morning about like the uh trump administration it's pretty profound i've only read a few pages i recorded with somebody right before this about it. If you're listening to this episode and listened to the previous episode, you heard it was Susan. There's this whole idea of leading into reshoring. We're getting away from

the global wars. We're going to focus on the Western Hemisphere. I think that's another great frame for Bitcoin. It's like, hey, not only does the system need to be re-collateralized, but a lot of the banking infrastructure and securities infrastructure, if we're being honest

with ourselves is running on tech that was built in the 70s and it's not fine-tuned so we have this incredible re-industrialization or re-engineering of the financial system potential you can build a new banking stack a more sovereign banking stack uh obviously a modern banking stack on this protocol as well so there's a number of different narratives so there's re-collateralization the supports of the energy infrastructure build out and like one that i don't think is getting enough tick yet maybe it's because the timing's not right order of operations type thing is like literally i mean i think ethereum probably for being objective does a better job of marketing it this way but like you could rebuild the financial system on top of it and i think uh

i think that like seeing that in the minds of not only the administration but the american people of like hey there's an incredible opportunity here to do something brand new it's going to create a ton of jobs kind of opportunity and when it's all said and done the monetary and financial system is going to look completely different in a better way one thing that's really interesting about that and i agree with you is we talked a lot about this with you know tapard assets was at lighting labs the protocol was predominantly focused on stable coins and stablecoins to Lightning. But there was this whole other aspect to it of doing tokenized assets. And I always thought that that was a little silly and like, why would you mint a token,

a tokenized asset instead of just issuing equity on a stock exchange? But one thing that was really interesting as we talked with other folks is, if you grow up and you create a company in Mexico, in Guatemala, in Colombia, there isn't a capital market. It doesn't exist. You can't go and raise money or do the things that you can do as a US company in these other places. And one thing I've always thought about Bitcoin is what the revolution really is, is it's extending the best property rights the world has ever seen to anybody within an internet connection. If you want to have Texas-level property rights, you got to be

in Texas. If you're born in China or name a worse country in terms of property rights, you can't get that level of assurances over your property unless you move to the jurisdiction of Texas, with the exception of holding your own Bitcoin private keys. And I think extending that same level of property rights to people that want to issue equity, that want to raise debt, that want to do these different capital markets activities via the Bitcoin blockchain is an unqualified good. And I think to your point, I think that will unlock a tremendous amount of prosperity by extending these property rights to because, you know, as we know well from some of the best

entrepreneurs I worked with at Lightning Labs were based in Nairobi. Right. We're based in Medellin. We're based in, you know, Chiang Mai in Vietnam. Right. And, you know, thankfully, you know, they were able to get into the Bitcoin community, figure out how, you know, create a corporation and all that sort of stuff. But, you know, to take the next step, to really operate at you know billion dollar company scale like you kind of need u.s capital market's access um and and lowering that barrier to entry to just anybody with an internet connection i think is is an unqualified good yeah it's very optimistic too it's very uh motivational if you will there are a lot of black pills out there you can't do it

you can't do black bill it's all over black bill it's all open source all accessible not all of it but uh the protocols are mainly open source and you can you can build but i mean with that being said too i mean i think it would be remiss of me not to to really lean into lightning network how it's developed over the last five years and again mentioned it earlier but that's something that's made me incredibly bullish i think it's incredibly i mean it's not even on the radar of the broader public but it's incredibly underappreciated within the bitcoin in space which should be paying attention to it but like the emergence of the lightning network not only has this very decentralized distributed payments protocol on top of bitcoin but this

connective tissue between these budding uh second layer protocols that many would have assumed would compete with lightning but we're finding out they're actually symbiotic many years ago um a guy zacky manion who was like one of the main engineers and architects of the cosmos ecosystem i remember when i was at multicoin him telling me that like look the master architecture or like a blockchain based payments network and again this is a guy who worked on cosmos like he was not interested in lightning any of that sort of stuff because was like the master architecture is you have a single settlement blockchain um and then on the sides of that single settlement blockchain you have these you know um trustless two-way pegged

liquidity pools you know side chains roll-ups etc um and then all of those liquidity pools are connected with a payment channel network right so i've kind of always had that vision in my head of like how things what we're going to develop and it's just interesting that the Bitcoin community chose to have the settlement network and then build the payment channel network next, the interoperability layer. And then we had all of these custodial venues like Old Walls, Satoshi, the exchanges, which were kind of our liquidity pools, which obviously would be better if those were non-custodial. But now we have this heterogeneous mix of liquidity pools, whether it's, you know, Alpen Labs style rollups, Botanics style spider chains,

you know, Spark with state chains, ARK, of course, the cashew emits, all of which interoperate via Lightning. And the really funny thing about that choice versus the choice that the crypto people made is thanks to having a native interoperability solution, all of these bitcoin you know side systems just kind of work together naturally right like there's a there's a native interoperability language like going between roll-ups and ethereum is a fucking nightmare right like they still haven't solved that and they have no idea how they're going to solve well let's dive into that i mean again we make the order of operations which has been or theme of our conversations throughout the last 10 years or seven years however long we've known

each other um this is one of operations by like so like ethereum other blockchains went for like all right we're going to build these second layers and they're going to compete with each other but some properties that others want and if you're in this one you want to use that one like how do we connect on the bridge has become the popular nomenclature for how you connect them but then once you build these second layers is like how do you agree on a on a standard language for them to communicate and then you get into dick measuring contest and coordination issues where it's like oh you build the common language first built these individual second layers after that yeah i mean i don't think there was any intention behind that too to your point i think it just

happened almost yeah once you know it's it's i like i wasn't around at the beginnings of the lightning network i don't think like i do know that you know in the very very early days um i think because litecoin had segwit before bitcoin did i think actually like like i know lnd had support for litecoin for a number of years it was only sunset like in the last couple years but there was like some early ideas that it could be used for kind of cross-chain swaps but never like you know it took way too long to figure out that liquid and lightning were a good combination shout out to uh francis and the bold bitcoin team for really and the awkward yeah i mean like that works great and like you look at what what breeze has done with the breeze sdk you know building on

on liquid like they build like a really slick nice solution um what bolts did with with submarine swaps between liquid and lightning like that you know a great solution that you know really provided a good user experience like that was something that you know i think i was i was waiting a long time for and then when it once people finally started building it was like oh of course and now seeing it work with you know that was another thing that like in my years at lighting labs um you know i pitched a lot of things and a lot of things that were like not very well received the most well received pitch i ever gave um was to these bitcoin layer twos about integrating with lightning and the picture is very simple it was look you as new side system

you're going to get spun up and you have two options you can either go and do business development and get a direct integration with every single one of binance coinbase Kraken, Wallace, Satoshi, you know, every entity on the Lightning Network, which now is in the hundreds, thousands, you know, it's a lot of people, a lot of businesses, all of whom who have other roadmaps. And like, trust me, as a guy that did integrations with Lightning, like it is not easy. You can either do all of those integrations directly, or you can integrate with one submarine swap provider that will bridge your site system to Lightning, and you get instant deposits and withdrawals from all of those customers for free right and every single

bitcoin layer two was like oh i want option number two please like i want to integrate with the submarine swap provider and get all the whole lightning network for free right it's like it's the easiest pitch in the world yeah and then like the e-cash mints it's like you just natively build in the lightning gateway and for now the mint and it makes a ton of sense and again i think it's extremely underappreciated right now like i think baltic honey badger was an incredible example like they just ninja launched arc from arc labs their their implementation on the back end on the payment processors at the conference and it was so cool unfortunately one of two baltic honey badger conferences i've ever missed in my life but

like watching from afar there was people paying from e-cash mints to arcs it was like e-cash lately to ARK happened automatically, like completely interoperable. If you're an end user with your particular preferences, that's like the magic that people really

have not appreciated yet that unless you know ball, unless you know ball, you don't really appreciate it. And again, that's when you think of the potential to re-architect the financial system from the ground up, the banking system from the ground up,

And tying this into the whole conversation of people being worried that Wall Street is co-opting Bitcoin. It's like, no, this technology is superior. User experience is superior. The ability to build on it is superior because they're open, interoperable protocols. Like it's the shelling point is going to be through these systems, whether you realize it or not. And tying this whole conversation of companies, whether they're in the Bitcoin space or outside the Bitcoin space, going public to really accelerate this or to accelerate the Bitcoin integration into their businesses, like in comparing it to SPACs of 2020, which people really anchor to. It's like they don't compare. The upside potential here is massive.

It's massive. It's massive. and i think like again the the stat that i like i couldn't believe um when miles and square first started talking about it but is such a staggering stat it's like no the the 28 percent of u.s merchants can now accept payments over lightning we we we met right after we like we went we both went to like uh with the cost miles immediately after he got off stage but like i remember yeah it was like crap yeah macarola was being like oh my god this is crazy yeah i mean the yield that that was nuts again that was a number that i've been waiting for for

like 10 years a thing that we talked about five years ago was the lightning pool launch and about like earning yield as a routing node operator and how like eventually someday you know real businesses are going to be making real money um burning lightning nodes and now yeah i mean I mean, a non-custodial yield on your Bitcoin, the risk-free rate. You know, Nick Boddy was talking about that years before we got onto it. Like, it's happening. It's happening for a public company. For a Fortune 500 company, yeah.

Yeah, like a big one. Yeah, I mean, I think that's – Lightning has grown up so much over the last five years and has matured so much. And again, it's, you know – There's so much hate around it, though. Why do people hate it, I think? I honestly think people hate it because the mental model of what they thought it was supposed to do is not what it does. If you think about what Lightning does from a fundamental basis is it removes the transactions per second limit from the Bitcoin blockchain. What it did was it scaled the transactional capacity of Bitcoin.

but it did not scale the number of people that can hold private keys so like what and this is you know again the tie-in to um what we were talking about with these new site systems and interoperability is like what all those systems are really good at is allowing more people to hold their own private keys and transact efficiently what lightning is not good at is allowing people to hold their own private keys because you have to manage your own channel right and you have to hold manage your own hot wallet so i think you know the self-custodial lightning you know ux was was never really able to get up to par of you know a metamask extension or phantom wallet or something like that but that's not really what lightning is for

right we kind of always needed these additional systems to plug in at the end of lightning to solve that problem because what lightning is phenomenal at is allowing for instant global bitcoin transactions that settle you know for tenths of a penny um it's just it's not good at the supporting self-custody that's not that's not really what it's for yeah i think people people get upset about that but hopefully this next generation of lightning wallets that are built on arc that are built on spark that are, you know, built on these new, um, uh, I call them last mile solutions in a blog post I wrote a year and a half ago, um, that are based on these new last mile solutions will kind of change that opinion. Um, and you know, I think what lighting

is really good for is saving every 28% of us merchants from having to pay visa taxes, right. Um, MasterCard taxes, credit card network taxes, right. great framing just call them visa taxes not interchange fees visa taxes that's what they are yeah visa and escort are the like most profitable they have the highest operating profit of almost any company sap 500 they make like 60 gross margins or something it's outrageous at incredible scale an incredible scale for like not really doing that much right they just pass messages between banks yeah well right disruption i mean we could not that's why i like to nerd out about this stuff with you the other thing too is like the lightning network i would argue is so

good at what it does um particularly from a privacy perspective that's really hard unless you have companies like yeah block publicly reporting their numbers to actually know what's going on within the network and so people see that opacity i guess and say ah there's probably nothing going on but i i can tell you for sure i think literally via this podcast i receive at least maybe not every minute of every day but like every five minutes at the very least i receive a like on average every day it just it just keeps growing and i think you know there's so much of the comparison to is it was always comparing lightning to these other shitcoin systems but like if you just look at lightning's growth independently and not comparatively it's fantastic

i mean like the growth of a volume the growth of nodes the growth of channels the growth of companies the growth of investment dollars into startups like all of the everything is up and to the right very steadily at you know like 20 to 50 percent CAGR or something like that like all of those things all of the metrics that we tracked were were great um and especially like the most important one volume you know like I think we were I don't know exactly where the network will end this year but you know uh if you look back at like the old river reports or the arcane um reports when they did like the state of lightning, you know, it was like five years ago, lightning was doing like single digit millions in volume annually, right? Two years ago, maybe lightning

got to, you know, hundreds of millions, if not billions. Now we're already on the order of, you know, potentially $10 billion in annual volume, you know, if not more, right? That's phenomenal growth. And there's hundreds of, you know, I think Visa and MasterCard combined generally for like one trillion dollars in total payments volume and about half of that is debit which is the right comparison for for lightning transactional volume right like getting up to 10 trillion dollars in total volume like the way i looked at that when talking entrepreneurs and businesses it's like look there's a hundred x here left right or a thousand x here and if it keeps growing at that rate we'll get there quicker than anybody expects exactly and like again like

And the way these network effects work is you just kind of unlock greater and greater scale as each entity comes on board. And Square bringing on almost a third of all US merchants access is an enormous unlock for scale. right and the fact that it works and it's being operated by a really quality professional company like block means these people are going to have a good experience and all of a sudden like this stuff goes word of mouth if you're as a brick and mortar retailer saving three percent because you switch to lightning you're not paying the visa taxes anymore you're not paying the visa taxes anymore you're gonna put a little note on your on your terminal that says please you know discount if you pay with bitcoin right this you know here's how you pay with bitcoin via cash app

that education is just going to be word of mouth which is um i remember in the in the early days of podcasting 2.0 with adam curry adam curry being like you lightning people don't understand how big this is every podcaster is going to be shilling lightning to his audience to his or her audience are all going to be saying here's how you set up a lightning wallet here's how you start streaming stats to me it's true yep and i mean podcasting 2.0 i've talked about this a few times but i think we were top five one of the first podcast one of the first five podcasts to put a lightning address in our rss feed like it is and it's like it's not obviously it's not going to replace advertising revenue overnight but like it is the the thing that makes me most optimistic is number

one it's been consistent up and to the right it's not crazy parabolic growth but slowly but surely more people are discovering fountain and other podcasting 2.0 apps downloading listening contributing um and it's happening the growth is there it has not it never like went up and then died and never went back up again it's been consistent up and to the right um and the other thing last thing is i know we've uh got families it's friday afternoon here the other thing it's important to touch on for anybody who's trying to compare lightning to other l2 protocols and looking at tvl specifically i think that's another thing they look like channel capacity you're like oh look it's up it's down it's not as much as what's in rap bitcoin on this chain or whatever

may be and completely misunderstand dynamics that that is actually an incredibly high signal that this thing is working because you can do more with less and another factor that many people don't taken into consideration when they're just opining on this as a pundit is the fact that the bitcoin price goes up so you don't need as much bitcoin as these channel in these channels as before if you're denominating the purchases in u.s dollars and it takes less bitcoin to complete that purchase absolutely right and and you know i don't pay nearly as much attention to the crypto people as i used to but it was really funny a couple years ago um when the uniswap founder all of a sudden started coming out and saying that tvl was a bad metric because actually what we should be

optimizing for is like capital efficiency volume divided by like tvl capital yeah yeah locked capital and i was like oh yeah that's what lightning people have been saying this whole time like yes like like we were supposed to be designing capital efficient systems here not just having people stick their bitcoin in hot wallets and put them at risk for vanity purposes like that was never that's always been done um and i think again like the fact that lightning can process the volumes is processing with the um well actually uh the signal of block being able to earn 10%, that is the natural signal that shows that there's a capital shortage in the network finally, right? That means that there is more demand for payment capacity than there is actual

capacity allocated. And that is the market signal that should incentivize more entities to add more capital to the Lightning Network to soak up that demand, right? And that's how it should work. now the tricky thing is like you know how do you actually measure that um it's kind of hard you got to like be constantly monitoring the network you got to look at the few rates that are being charged you got to look at like how often um certain nodes are opening and closing more channels right like you got to look at i think most importantly how much volume is flowing through lightning labs's loop service which is you know a big sink in the network and processes a lot of um a lot of submarine swap volume and without running the nodes yourself like that's kind of

hard to find it's it's doable to be able to suss out if you really know what you're doing but it's kind of hard to find and and really importantly the entities that are doing well they don't like to share their secrets on lightning because they're making a lot of money and they don't want to invite new competition yeah no but like now there's people that are noticing this marketing You have companies like Voltage, AmBoss, Lightning Pool, obviously. They're building the tools to make it easier than ever to do that, participate in that. Yield is a dirty word in this industry, but this is true yield.

You lock up your capital in a two-to-two hash time lock contract that you have control over, and you offer a service of facilitating transactions transactions on the Lightning Network and you're going to get paid for it. It's a useful service and becoming more and more useful every day. We're going to have to wait five years for the next one.

I'm going to have two more kids. My hair might be completely gone by then. Who knows? Who knows what's going to be happening in five years? I'll do my best to make sure it doesn't take that long this time. All right. Where should we send people? What should we look out for?

Last message. Follow me on Twitter, at RyanTheGentry. That's kind of where everything is happening. I think it's going to be... I'm very, very, very bullish on 2026. I'm always very, very bullish on Bitcoin. But most importantly, I'm bullish on Bitcoiners. And I'm really bullish on Bitcoiners taking this asset and this market to the next level and all kind of growing up together, professionalizing and winning the war for the world's global reserve asset.

In other words, we're going to win. Stay positive. We're going to win. We're going to win, freaks. Peace and love. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode.

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consider subscribing via fountain as well thank you for your time and until next time