TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #699: TradFi's Secret War Against Bitcoin with Ryan Lane

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

Marty sits down with Ryan Lane, founder of Empory Asset Management, to discuss his journey from traditional finance to Bitcoin treasury strategies, how legacy banks are covertly fighting Bitcoin adoption while publicly embracing it, and why sovereign treasury adoption could be the catalyst that finally stabilizes the asset. Empery Digital: https://ir.emperydigital.com/ 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/4pOv2L4 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](https://drinksote.com/) 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/](http://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. Ryan, thank you for joining us. I think this has been an interesting discussion because I think you've been heavily immersed in what many would deem to be the TradFi world for years with Embry Asset Management. You founded it in 2008. So I think you've been through a couple of TradFi

cycle it's a interesting founding uh an asset manager in 2008 when the world was a bit more chaotic so i think to really set up this conversation is let's go back to 2008 starting empery asset management um being very successful uh in that world and then coming to find bitcoin and really lean into it full bore yeah it's really through conversations like this that makes me think back to what that was then because 2008 was a fascinating time right it was a you know a true financial crisis right driven by finance you know consequences to finance it was just financial all all around right money markets trading at discounts to to their uh you know par value or a dollar right that's you know hard to fathom that cash is trading below cash so but you know we managed to

get our uh funds together and we were supposed to launch with 50 million bucks uh we ended up launching with five uh because everyone just panicked like literally like had signed subscription agreements and just panicked so you know we've seen it we didn't hold people to you know their subscriptions uh because everyone was just too nervous and we just said you know hold your money and watch us perform and come in when you're comfortable uh because everyone was scrambling for every dollar they could sort of secure at the time so it was interesting and then when we first started the biggest risk was we held cash right and depending on where your cash was and what bank it was in like cash was at risk if that bank went under so we had multiple bank accounts we had

goldman we had jp morgan we had jeffries and we had like td uh and we i every morning i had wire instructions with the balances in the accounts to be able to move them out based on, you know, the bank potentially collapsing. So I could just quickly move. And that was, you know, you couldn't do electronic wires. So it was sort of like you're faxing or scanning wires to the prime broker to get the funds out and trying to be ahead of everyone else. Because you know, if you were a little bit slow, you were going down with the ship, right? And then you got to go unscramble the eggs and get your money back, which could take a decade in worst case scenario or maybe long case scenario. So that's what we were dealing with. It was investing was

like almost secondary. It was protecting our cash and then finding interesting things to do. So we've seen, I think, the worst right out of the gate. And then we performed well. We stuck to our discipline and we made money. We effectively were doing and still are doing private equity style investments uh in the public markets right structuring transactions with public companies and funding whatever their mission to you know growth was and we've been doing that for almost two decades now generating good returns what what's it like structuring these deals is it sort of white label go in depending on what the uh particular company is what their goals are really sitting down with them and getting it done? Or is there some formula to this?

It's very much a bespoke market. Every provision, every aspect, every term is negotiated with that issuer based on what the risks are there, what we're seeking for upside, how much risk tolerance do we have, right? Are we structuring as equity or structuring as a convert, right? We'll go all the way up and down the capital structure from senior secured debt to just plain vanilla common uh with you know no rights whatsoever so we'll we'll go depending on what the situation is right because that's kind of what investing is it's fitting your structure and the capital to their needs uh if you like the situation so you know hundreds to sometimes thousands of pages of documents for each transaction we've done over 2,500 in the last

18 years so we have we have a machine but it's it's a it's a very cumbersome machine and then it's also organizing all the investments you've made and all understanding all those provisions which you know the the current iteration of ai and all that stuff is helpful with that but you've got a you know you've got a big file to manage uh as well so you have to have a good operational team for that so doing this uh since 2008 so just as you're describing that i'm thinking uh in my head like how how much is the scale of these like of these individual deals changed as you've had qe1 qe2 covid stimulus how much more money is being demanded by these deals i'm just curious specifically i mean back in 2008 it's a good question back in 2008 it was the only it was

it was very spotty transactions like very little was getting funded uh and it was only things that you know made a lot of sense that were like distressed like heckler mining was one where it was like the biggest silver producer in the country it was on the verge of bankruptcy so you go in and you fund that and you kind of resurrect that asset and you take bankruptcy off the table and then it really performed really well it was very kind of you know niche things like that that made sense to finance in that environment and then covid was the exact opposite right covid was people were throwing money at everything because liquidity was crazy and performance was crazy and you could manage a ton of money and recycle that money with returns i mean that i don't think

you could get more of a disparate time than from financial crisis to like COVID. And then it's, you know, it's the risk capital has been off since the end of COVID really until the last 12 months. And even that's been spotty, right? Biotech's come back, obviously the AI boom, there's different sectors that are moving, but we don't have a, you know, a broad market rally. There's some interesting things going on within the market that has kind of kept it from being broad right there's just a lot of change happening do you think it's just over indexing on the ai boom specifically or i think that's attracting a lot of capital right and then you have this whole like what's happening to the middle management world right within all these corporations ai is

sort of replacing a lot of the mundane work right as a as a senior person uh how many middle management and junior people do you need when you can just get your information from you know a chat bot right and when you have the smartest person within each sector available on an ai engine at least to start your work and you know initially educate you on that how you know how much how much work do you need from your middle management how much of that can you slice out and i think we're seeing that across the board and a lot of you're seeing law firms you're going to see in accounting firms right you're going to see it in you know even companies like amazon and you know all these you know cloud computing companies right you can eliminate a lot of that data analytics because

that can just be automated so it's a the economy is kind of trying to figure its way through this employment's trying to figure its way through this right because it's the other it affects different ends of the spectrum different things i think about here media company of four or five people what it's allowed us to do to extend our productivity and efficiency it's been miraculous over the last two years really leaning into it but then you have these behemoths with tens of thousands of employees where they're going to meet in the middle so i i've been very vocal about this if you're a small team starting up right now it's never been a better time to start a business but if you're yeah a large corporation with a bunch of head counts and sgna there's going to be some

tough conversations moving forward yep like my my son runs a 3d printing he's like 15 runs a 3d printing business out of our basement and i could have never even dreamed about doing that right because everything is automated he gets all his own and they can run a full business while in school right that just the ability to leverage that technology and leverage automation leverage information right he's like oh i want to buy a new 3d printing hey chat gbt compare these two models tell me what's better for this and that and that and i'll categorize all the you know areas where different you know 3d printers are better different engraving machines are better right from the community it has to the how you repair it with you know uh youtube videos and

who has more youtube videos to be able to make a repair on something or replace a part or whatever it's just it's a different world and like you were saying it's not just that you lay people off it's that you never hire them in the first place because you can leverage your internal resources and grow yeah so it's fascinating that's funny we had um a 15 year old on the show last week stella and she's at the alpha school in austin where they're really leaning into ai and she was she was showing um her masterpiece project which is some game storyboarding app that'll eventually become like a gaming application all built with claude code and speaking with her and made me very encouraged for uh the younger gen z's and gen alpha because it seems like they're leaning

into it and it's going to be massive for them right they can leverage it we're we're we're not smart enough to be able to do that because we're not we didn't grow up with it we're just trying to survive speaking of survival and transitioning to bitcoins and i think um that's one thing i'm into bitcoin for like i think we're in this transition into the digital age and uh we sort of got to shed the skin of the incumbent system a big part of that incumbent system being the financial system which is riddled with debts and perverse incentives depending on where you look and i view bitcoin as a solution to a lot of these problems particularly the debt issues that exist i think we need to recapitalize the system with better collateral and obviously

what you're doing in emperor digital um it seems like you have come to a similar conclusion so what led you from um what you had been doing to really i don't want to say drop everything but like look at bitcoin and say oh i need to lean into this pretty heavily so i i will say out of the gate you say shed the skin i think it's a really good comparison because uh in this world that we live in today let's just say tradifies the snake skin that doesn't want to come off right it's not it's not like the snake skin where they voluntarily shed like here bitcoin's trying to insert and the skin's like i'm not letting go i'm hanging on to the snake right uh so it's the transitions tough um because there's a lot of fighting overtly and covertly right i see that

on a daily basis especially coming from tradfi and understanding how it works um but my our transition started um because for the longest time like we were a registered investment advisor with the SEC, right? And SEC was enforcement, enforcement, enforcement, right? They were going after anyone in the digital asset world, whether you're doing something right or whether you're doing something wrong. And like any industry, a lot of people are doing things wrong and some people are doing things right, but it didn't matter because they just, they had a blanket approach to, if you're in digital assets, if you're in Bitcoin, if you're doing things within crypto, you must be doing something wrong. That was kind of the approach. And for us as a registered

investment advisor that could be audited by the SEC, you know, any given day, right. They come in every couple of years or every few years and they could do it at any time. And, you know, I didn't want to be in the position where I was even having to address that. Uh, right. I got enough problems, you know, you know, organizing our business as it was and, you know, presenting it to the sec in a way that gets them comfortable and then you go uh and you add this whole thing on right and then you just give them this avenue to just dig and explore and you know they put their radar off so under gensler at the sec not something that we were willing to dabble into as much interest as we had in it and i did struggle with it to be to be fair um i struggled with

the purpose. And the purpose is a lot easier to describe when you don't have all these bureaucratic hurdles, right? Once the bureaucratic hurdles drop, and you can actually see the thesis playing out, which is the ultimate store of value, right? And, you know, fighting the debasement of all these currencies, right? Take away that bureaucratic, you know, ceiling, and then have that thesis and starts to look really interesting. And that's when we were like, okay, like, Administration is clearly behind this. Gensler's out. All the enforcement people at the SEC were eliminated. Right. And everyone, even if you were involved in fraud related to crypto, you were still getting closing letters from the SEC saying we're no longer pursuing this matter. It's closed. Right. You start seeing stuff like that and you're like, okay, this is a safe zone for someone like us who's trying to stay on the straight and narrow. And we like it, but how can we actually get in it?

And the DAT was a very fast way to get a ton of exposure to Bitcoin, you know, kind of overnight, right? As principals of a fund, as investors for our fund, we thought that they should have exposure to it. We as individuals wanted exposure to it. And then we're capital markets guys, right? Like I started out describing, we do transactions in the public markets, investing in all these public companies. That's what a digital asset treasury is, right? It's a capital market strategy to try and cheaply raise money or efficiently raise money

in the public markets with all the relationships that we have to add Bitcoin per share. and if you if you're right in that sweet spot then and you like the bitcoin asset it just seemed to make a lot of sense to just kind of take our team don't take the risk of building a new team right we had our hedge fund team plop the four people in that were had the skill set to be able to execute that capital market strategy within the public markets and boom you're off to the races uh then the trade blew up but that's a that's a separate discussion and you know probably a longer discussion 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 multi-sig you have one key on the hardware wallet one key on your mobile device and block stores a key in the cloud for you this is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up a passphrase. Again, BitKey makes it easy to use, hard to lose. It's the easiest zero to one step, your first step to self-custody. If you have friends and family on the exchanges who haven't moved it off, tell them to pick up a BitKey. Go to bitkey.world, use the key TFTC20 at checkout for 20% off your order.

That's bitkey.world, code TFTC20. What's up, freaks? This is what was brought to you by our good friends at Unchained, who brings you this message. Is Bitcoin risky or is ignoring it the greater risk? On January 7th at 10 a.m. Central, join Unchained and Parker Lewis for Bitcoin is the Greatest Asymmetry, an exclusive online video premiere exploring the forces behind Bitcoin's risk-reward profile.

Originally presented at the Old Parkland debate chamber in Dallas, Parker breaks down why the probability of its success matters more than short-term price movements, how monetary design shapes outcomes and what today's market and policy environment may mean for the years ahead if you want a clear framework for thinking about bitcoin's opportunity don't miss this video premiere register now at unchained.com tftc that's unchained.com tftc let's dive into it because i think it it ties in i think there's a lot of broad skepticism of the digital asset treasury play obviously because since um really going back to beginning of the year when strategy started coming off uh its highs and then obviously in the summer when things really accelerated and

now um probably 28 to 30 off bitcoin's all-time highs people are asking the question was this just a fad or is there something here and so i think starting with the debt strategy at a high level like does it actually make sense obviously i think you do like why does it make sense um to to deploy a strategy like this and then we can get into the sort of incentives that have been introduced with individuals and companies like um empory digital um leaning into this like is it is it viewed as a threat to trad fi and are there moves being made to quell the threat yep yep uh does the that thesis make sense um it does under very specific circumstances right like i understood that this was a big fat trade when we started on the journey like from from

i literally from when i came up with the idea to when we closed in the 500 million dollars it was six weeks like i we banged it out right we had the thesis we identified the bankers we identified the public company that we would that we would go into uh and then we put our roadshow together, our presentation materials together, you know, refine the strategy, figured out where we wanted to live within the debt world, right? Because a lot of the stuff we were looking at from the hedge fund side was, you know, everyone seemed to have a lot of expenses associated with their debt, whether it's this asset manager agreements that were like between like 1% and 3% for doing what? Like the public company was outsourcing the management of that asset to a

third party for some exorbitant amount of fees. That didn't make sense for us because you're like, as the public company, that's your job, right? You're the fiduciary over that asset, manage that asset to the best of your ability. And if you don't have those capabilities, probably shouldn't be in the strategy, right? And you got to keep all those expenses down. You can't have big corporate overhead. You can't have big salaries, right? So we came in really cheap, right? Low salaries. And we're put $25 million from our hedge fund in. So we're like, okay, now we are all aligned with the investors and we got to run this thing really efficiently, right? Keep the corporate overhead down, the salaries down, keep the option packages. So you're not issuing more options. You're not

milking this. This is not like a lifestyle public company, like a lot of these smaller public companies are. We're like, so when does this make sense? And I think it makes sense. And we did it because we felt that we could make it make sense. And a lot of them are just too bloated. And when the trade collapses right when you come near nav or below nav um how are you servicing all those expenses because are you selling bitcoin right because you can't sell your stock anymore because that's you know you're diluting bitcoin per share and are you selling bitcoin uh you know you're slowly going to bleed out bitcoin to service the public company that's not a good scenario right do you have the internal capabilities to be able to trade derivatives and get some yield

on that stack? Can you sell calls? Can you sell puts, collect that premium? Can you do put spreads and call spreads? And can you play that game without risking your stack and actually generating value for your investors? And I think if you can't do all those things, then it's a stupid trade. It doesn't make sense. And even if you can do all those things, who knows if the market even cares. Maybe they just rather own Bitcoin directly. So we remain with the thesis that I can protect your Bitcoin because I can have multi-custodial relationships. I can have it in cold storage. I can have insurance at each custodian. I can have an overlaying insurance product that protects the Bitcoin generally. I can trade derivatives around it to generate

cash flow to offset corporate expenses. I can do capital markets transactions like buy my stock back to add Bitcoin per share and modestly leverage against that stack. So there's a lot of tools that you can pull from. And I think if the public debts are set up like that, where you have the flexibility to use your stack to borrow against it, where it's not leaned up right out of the gate, where you have a senior secured convert against it, and it's sitting in some account control agreement where you can't touch it, you can't post it for collateral. Because as you probably know, if you're going to trade on Darabit, you're going to trade with these market makers like a Falcon X or a Gemini, you got to post your BTC. And if your BTC is stuck

in an account control agreement, you can't post it. So you can't trade derivatives around it. So you're kind of like stuck. So if you've got the right setup, I think it can make sense. I think a lot of people get nervous about holding their Bitcoin. So I can hold it and protect it for. I can trade derivatives around and then I can do capital markets transactions to add Bitcoin per share. If I can do all that, then I think you've got something, but you also want the asset to work, right? Underlying the whole thesis is the asset's got to work, right? And so you've got to believe in Bitcoin and you got to start there. And that's, we started there and then we built it behind it and you know it has been a difficult asset for the last

call it three months right started to break a lot of people's confidence in the asset and i think that's a you know that's a topic worth exploring is we got all these tailwinds but something's not right yeah a lot of tailwinds it was interesting because we posted um it doesn't make sense to a of people what's happening obviously the administration you mentioned the sec the bureaucratic morass that the industry has been subjected to for for many years seems to be behind us we want to be the bitcoin crypto capital of the world executive order around a bitcoin strategic reserve you have banks announcing it seems like daily at this point some sort of integration with Bitcoin focused products, allowing their customers to buy trade

and ultimately use Bitcoin as collateral. The ETF, despite the fact that Bitcoin was down however many percent in November and for much of this month, it still has net inflows outside the U.S. You're seeing a bunch of positive headlines in relation to the mining industry and uae and other other countries buying exposure to bitcoin and to your point just a lot of people are sitting here scratching their heads like why why isn't the price reacting appropriately and obviously you have um this confluence of events too where the price did run up to 125 000 we saw looking at the on-chain data it looks like a lot of people have been holding bitcoin for over a decade said okay market's liquid it's valuable enough i'm gonna take some chips off the table

famous so we had galaxy facilitate the sale of 80 000 bitcoin for some estate sale that was uh demanded by um the estate owner who had passed away i'm pretty sure um and so i think we're we're at this point where it seems like it's all systems go but the price is not it's not uh reflecting it's not reflected in the price going up yeah if i were to you know do what you just did articulate if we didn't have the benefit of being able to see the price right and i would articulate all those reasons that you just articulated genius acts table coins on top of all of that right and i said to you okay so start the year bitcoin was at 100 000 right or trump administration comes in bitcoin moves 90 100 000 and i were to tell you all these things

that happened over the last 12 months, you would say, oh my God, it had to have doubled, right? Something like it had all those tailwinds. But don't forget the efficient market theory, right? As a TradFi guy, the efficient market theory basically says that all that stuff is priced in advance, right? So that $100,000 price that you saw back at the beginning of the year, right? That was pricing in all this great stuff that was likely going to happen because of the position the Trump administration had taken. So you could have easily predicted that all these things were going to happen. And some of them were delayed, like the legislation, you know, you know, through the Senate has been slowed down. It's not going to get done before the end of the

year. And the SEC coming out and saying that it was, you know, going to get done before the end of the year. That was, it's just not how the congressional process works. It's not that fast. Right. But I think people were hoping for that. But so there was some stuff that was slowed, but a lot of stuff happened uh and you could say that that was predicted back then so we're sort of where you would have expected from a a tailwinds perspective to be right but then you have this whole thing happening under the surface right which is the banks are scared to death of this asset i don't know right and i i truly believe that because if you just play it out right banks rely on deposits, right? Deposits, that's their fuel for everything they do, right? They got to

get spreads. They got to collect that money and then they got to lend that money through all these different mechanisms, right? Whether it's financing someone's jet or financing someone's home, right? Or financing someone's apartment complex that they're developing, right? That spread is, that's their bread and butter. Then they have the prop trading desk and all other stuff they're allowed to take from a risk perspective that's a little higher on the risk spectrum but the bread and butter is that lending business and that lending business needs those assets and if you can control your own wallet right and we've been now transacting in bitcoin for a few months actively right because we got the big stack and we can move it around

between wallets and custodians and and places where we're posting as collateral for derivatives trading it is so elegant and beautiful to move around right you get your wallet address you do your little test of you know 0.0001 you send it over it's received uh you can see all the history in that wallet that's ever happened uh right all open ledger stuff and boom sunday night at 8 p.m i can move 100 million dollars from one wallet to the next i can move it from galaxy over to falcon next. That's amazing. I've been operating within the confines of the banking system and the Fed system since I started my career where we're doing wires. And I got to get my wire set up and I got to get it released before the Fed cut off and the bank's internal cutoff policies at 4 p.m.,

even though the Fed's closed at 6 p.m. And then I'm stuck from Friday at 6 till Monday morning when I can't really do anything. And you're financing transactions where it's really difficult for me to send a wire over 5 million bucks, right? It's getting a ton of scrutiny from the bank and it's going through this whole process and I just don't even know when my wire is going to get out,

if it's going to be able to get there for the closing of the transaction. And so internally, we have all these procedures in place to make sure we're set up for closing, that we're wiring a day early so we don't mess it up, right? All that stuff is out the window. with Bitcoin, right? It's just such an elegant asset to move around. It puts all the control within the owner of that asset. And that's a real threat to the banks, right? And then as soon as

the insurance starts to make more sense, right? And then you get the charters issued. So all these custodians can exist without filing individual applications on the state level. So you can get the federal charter and then those federal charters, although now you can't borrow with the Fed window and you can't lend on those five charters that were issued to the crypto custodians, eventually you'll probably be able to. And then it starts to look much more like a traditional banking system, right? And Fidelity, you know, they're TradFi, right? They're within crypto, they're TradFi, and now they have a bank charter. So they're in a really good spot. Seems to me that they've already done a really good job at gathering assets within their brokerage

accounts so they'll be able to get gather assets within their within their crypto custodian accounts and do it on more of a traditional system that people are accustomed to so it's a threat it's real and i think i checked last week i think fidelia has something like 7.2 trillion in assets under management so to your point yeah i can definitely bring it in and so and they span both tradfi and crypto like they're in it they're in a sweet spot and they've been in bitcoin for 11 years now 2014 yeah abby yeah had them getting in so you know what they're doing and so you say the banks are scared and as a part of the list of headlines that i listed off earlier was that banks are implementing it do you think they are in an oh shit like this is happening uh bitcoin's

not going anywhere and so we need to basically stave off the the sort of native bitcoin and crypto companies long enough while we implement everything so that we can capture some of this market or do you think they still want it to go away i think it's it's the latter uh but they're pretending it's the former and i'm i'm not a conspiracy theorist guy i just i see it happening right they're they're out front saying they're supportive of it just like they said they were supportive of the new charters but behind the scenes they're trying to kill it in every way they can right lobbying against it fighting you know anyone who is in support of it and trying to you know convince them that it's it's risky right the things they're saying publicly

right versus the things they're saying privately like they're literally telling people that are fans of it that it's too risky of an asset, that it's not appropriate for the masses to own, and there shouldn't be charters that help facilitate this because you're allowing people to take risks that they don't understand. But publicly, they're saying, oh, we're building blockchain. We're going to allow our FAs to buy it, right? So the disparity between those statements that are happening in the public versus the private, I think that tells you everything you need to know. They don't want to be the idiots who publicly were bashing it when the train has left the station and it's probably happening, but they also want to slow it down and

kill it and be like, I told you so. We originally told you so. We tried to get on board, but we told you this was risky and look what happened to MicroStrategy. That thing got crushed. Everyone was a believer and that thing got crushed and you shouldn't have been owning that. Right. So in hindsight, and they're really powerful institutions with tons of capital to be able to move stuff. So they can make these Monday morning calls when they were actually the ones on the field affecting the place. Right. They can say, oh, I told you, you know, MSTR was risky. You know, we brought the margin requirement up to 95%. That's why we did that because it was risky. It's like, no, no, no. the margin requirement going to 95 is what caused the asset to go down and why you can now say that it was risky and you made the right move i told you so it's like okay you were pulling the puppet strings that made the puppet collapse and you said the puppet was going to collapse so it's it's a lot of that so let's dive into this specifically because like we've we've been

talking uh offline um for the last few weeks and i think that's one thing that made me really excited to have you on the shows because you've seen this you know how these large capital allocators can use their large amounts of capital to influence things and i think everybody is looking at micro strategy this year and going oh gosh this is this is terrible but to your point about the margin requirements i think that was a a clear sign to me at least like hey they don't like this why would they just ninja launch a massive increase of margin requirements overnight and so what effect does that increase have on people that not only own mstr but are had at that point been using it as collateral for a loan. Yeah. So if you were a longtime Bitcoiner and

MSTR came along, you said, oh, wow, now I can, instead of just owning Bitcoin, I can sort of be a little bit levered to Bitcoin so I can own MSTR. I can still love my Bitcoin and own Bitcoin, but I can also own MSTR and I can borrow against it, right? Because you can post it in your brokerage account, in a margin account, and you can borrow cash against it and you can buy more MSTR, right? So you can effectively use the bank's money to get more exposure to MSTR, right? On top of the fact that they have the preferreds and the converts out there where they're effectively levering their own equity to it by using the preferred capital to juice the equity returns that you can get on the Bitcoin, right? So it was a great thesis for the Bitcoiners because

just modestly increases in value. It's a flywheel. And so I totally get why all the Bitcoiners were really into that debt. And it also made them vulnerable because inside these big institutions, you can see how much money you're lending against MSTR in the aggregate. You can say there's 10 million shares held of MSTR with inside JP Morgan. And you can say, okay, we've lent 5 billion against it. If we increase the margin requirement from 50 to 95, you got to basically, people got to post, you know, $4.9 billion, $4.8 billion. So you, you know, the effect that things like that will have on the asset and they, you know, they called it you know a a risk department call right the risk department decided that they had

to bump up that merger requirement but that doesn't it doesn't make any sense it doesn't reconcile with with anything that mstr was doing at the time or bitcoin was doing right but then because you have so many bitcoiners that own mstr and people associate michael saylor with Bitcoin, when that thing starts to come down, right? When it goes from over 400 to under 200, you're sort of breaking people's confidence in Bitcoin. And I think that was part of the overall strategy was to hurt MSTR, hurt Bitcoin, hurt the confidence and thesis in the asset bring the vol back up right and then put this narrative out there that that seller could potentially have to sell bitcoin and they own a large percentage of the bitcoin that's that's

issued so then start to panic people right and then it's selling begets selling begets selling and that's that's how history always plays out no one wants to catch the falling knife no but Let's dive into this too, the risk department too. It's like, okay, our risk team has determined that we need to increase the margin requirement and just playing through the thought experiment. Okay, what are they protecting their clients from? Is it the case like a strategy goes down

and they don't want them to have to sell their positions? But conversely, if that's your whole goal of managing risk for your clients is to make it so they don't lose their assets in the form of this the security of the stock the shares in this company like isn't increasing the margin requirement doesn't that end up with the same goal because you're just gonna have to force people to sell or post collateral and if they don't have collateral to post or to sell down their positions that's the irony yeah yeah that's the irony the whole thing and and let's let's be clear. They're not increasing the margin requirement to protect their clients. When a

risk department increases the margin requirement, they're doing it to protect their own balance sheet because they say, okay, if we go from 50 to 95, that means the stock can basically go down 90% before we, 95% before we start to get in problems with the loans that we have out against it right so if they move it to 95 they're effectively expecting a 90 move in the stock right which that only happens if the asset collapses too and were they predicting a 90 move and in bitcoin down they're predicting it goes back to 10 000 right that just didn't seem to be on the table. None of it seemed to be on the table, right? The stock was pretty stable. Bitcoin, the underlying asset, was at the lowest vols it had ever been at, right? On a trailing

period. MSTR's volatility was declining, not increasing, right? You would increase margin requirement when the vols go up because the higher probability of a big move. underlying asset falls down mstr stock falls down didn't make sense yeah didn't make any sense there's no risk there's no risk model or unless they have some ai bot that you know is predicting things that no one's ever seen in their life which ai doesn't do that ai can only work off data that exists that's why it's not a good predictive model right and you know that's where you need humans 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 90s and it's more imperative that you use the right vpn a vpn that cannot log because of the way that is designed and that's why we have partnered with obscura that is our official vpn here at tftc built by a bitcoiner carl dung for bitcoiners focused on privacy you can pay in bitcoin over the lightning so not only are you private while you're perusing the web with obscura but when you actually set up an account you can acquire that account privately by paying in bitcoin over the lightning network do not be complacent when it

comes to protecting your privacy on the internet go to obscura.net set up an obscura account use the code TFTC for 25% off. When I say account, you just get a token. It's a string of token. It's not connected to your identity at all. Token sign up, pay with Bitcoin, completely private. Turn on Obscura, surf the web privately. Obscura.net, use the code TFTC for 25% off. What's up, freaks? Been seeing a lot of YouTube comments. Marty, your skin looks so good. You're looking fit these days. How are you doing it? Well, number one, I'm going to the gym more trying to get my swell on trying to be a good example for my young son to fit healthy dad but part of that is having a good regimen particularly staying hydrated making

sure i have the right electrolytes and salts in my body that is why i use salt of the earth i drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt the earth i'm liking the pink lemonade right now it's my flavor of choice uh this is their creatine i've added this to my regimen they have it in these packets as well uh makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling you want to work out while you're traveling but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder going through tsa it's very very uh nerve-wracking at times you have to explain hey it's it's not what you think it is it's creatine i'm trying to get my swell on um make sure you're staying hydrated i have become addicted to these it's made my life a lot better i can supplement this

for coffee in the morning and be energized right away i can supplement i can bring the creatine wherever i need to just put a couple packets in here before i head to the gym bring this to the gym drink out of a glass bottle make sure i'm not injecting any microplastics into my body go to drinksote.com use the code tftc and you'll get 15 off anything in the store that's drinksote.com code tftc so i guess my other question is like how long is is that just one shot is that like one arrow in the quiver that they have because i imagine you bump up margin requirements uh to 95 and then anybody who was engaged in sort of using mstr as margin to get leverage um you'd have sort of the books clear you'd find ultimately find

another equilibrium and then go from there people who were overextended get wiped out people who were not overextended are fine you just sort of find an equilibrium and things can reset from there or is is that how you view this playing out or is this like a sustained uh quote-unquote attack for for lack of a better term i think it was their first not their first i think it was one of the there are more public attacks on the asset uh where they thought they could really have a you know financial impact and a you know emotional impact and the emotional impact you cannot discount how powerful that is right people you know big bitcoin believers start to question everything right is this asset subject to manipulation and you know am i exposed to

that and you know just starting to conspiracy theories swirling right has it been hacked is there more asset out there than we than we understand like all these crazy things were happening because they tapped into people's confidence in it once the confidence breaks right because that's what all these things are right at the end of the day any currency right what's the USD worth? It's worth what people are willing to believe it's worth, right? Because you've got a huge leveraged balance sheet that, you know, if that was any corporation, it would be bankrupt, right? But USD is the best currency in the world. So it's just confidence. And people say, well, you know, Bitcoin is, you can't articulate what it's worth. It's just, you know,

digital a digital asset it has no actual value no currency has actual value like people who say that are just missing the mark it's all confidence so jp morgan adopting that theory i think was like okay so if we break confidence in it like any currency whether it's you know japan or argentina right uh if you break that confidence in that currency then you damage the value of that currency. And that's doesn't go away overnight. So I think that they took a big shot across the bow, right? They probably got a leak in the boat. And then they kind of were in there trying to make that hole a little bigger by saying, you know, going off the NASDAQ 100, going to get kicked out of the MSCI, like pulling back, you know, pulling old, you know, articles and data and

statements and kind of making them in the headlines like that's part of that coordinated attack like why why is an analyst at jp morgan talking about it being removed out of the index and talking about mstr as a you know risky bet when he doesn't even cover the company like pretty sure the analysts are pretty busy writing research and publishing on companies and doing update notes on the universe of companies they cover. And, but yeah, he's going off on some MSTR attack for a company that has no research coverage at JP Morgan, right? So it's just, and it's at the end of the day, that move was detrimental to their own clients. They wiped out billions of dollars of value in their own clients' portfolios, right? That was the ultimate

result of it. They basically attacked the stock by attacking their own clients because they knew that they couldn't post the billion dollars of collateral. So I think it's just confidence, confidence, confidence. And that was what they were, that's what they were firing at. How do you counterattack this? You call them out. It's the only way to do it. You got to go to the mat with them. I think that's the only it's the only and a lot of people are afraid to do that right because it's a big massive institution and people have exposure like we as a fund we have accounts with jp morgan right we have accounts all over the street but we were prepared to get the phone call saying we're

gonna shut your account down right okay shut my account down i'll post about that too right so i think that's the only way you beat them is you have to have a voice uh you have to know what you're talking about right because if you're wrong they'll destroy you but if you're right how do they really deal with you like as a tradfi guy i'm like okay i know enough to be dangerous about how all of this works i've seen this in different asset classes for my entire career, right? These big banks attack based on the knowledge they have under their umbrella, right? There's so many examples of when banks have attacked hedge funds, right? Hedge funds used to generally custody all their assets at one institution until in the late 90s, early 2000s,

the prime brokers or the banks were figuring out that we see exactly what this fund's exposure is, right? And they're my custodian, but they can use that information against me. And there are so many examples where they did, right? There's a case out there where basically a fund got taken down by a top five institution because they did a similar thing. They basically were shorting all the stocks that were in that fund's portfolio, and they were, you know, smaller names, so they could move, they could just lay on them and short them and short them and short them. And then they wouldn't increase the margin requirement on those securities, because they said, you know, they're under a lot of pressure, the vols up on these things. And, you know, we got to increase the

margin requirement, the fund was like, well, we don't have the capital to post for that. You are our prime broker you know that because we keep all of our assets with you and the response from the bank was okay we'll come back to you with a solution their solution was we will bid you for your entire portfolio below market right now you have that bank that's short and this is a public case you have that bank that's short you have the hedge fund that is long all that stuff and And the bank to cover their shorts, if they can buy it down here, they can pay below what they shorted it, that's great trade for them. And so they can basically go to that fund and say, you can't meet your margin requirement. We'll bid you for your whole portfolio. Just take you out of

it and fix your problems. And so that's what happened. They ended up taking them out. They shorted it up here. They bought it down here from the fund funds wiped out. And this bank had a great trade, right? Shorted it, took the positions from the fund, wiped the fund out, bought it all really cheap, wrote it back up, right? That, I mean, that, that happens all over the place. And that is why all these funds now have multiple custodians, right? We keep your shorts in one place to keep your longs in another place to trade your derivatives in another place no one can see no one has transparency into what your overall positions are so no one could take advantage of them and that was sort of what people started learning uh through your instance like

that and they're really manipulative but if you read your prime brokerage agreements most of it's allowed because you ultimately give them control when you take on margin right so that's the problem well that was another detail that emerged from jp morgan's posturing towards mstr and the margin requirements too is that there was a bunch of people stuck in that trade who said well if you're going to raise the margin requirement to 95 i can go over to fidelity or someone else who has not raised the margin requirement and i would like to do that can you please send my shares over to this broker and um they were not able to do so in a timely manner which all you explain this would signal that um they didn't have the shares because they were

locked up in in short positions yeah yeah and we'll we'll never know exactly you know the nature of those shorts but there there are multiple incidents that i know of where that happened And one very specifically, where I got all the details, I think you're familiar with a similar one, where this guy who had a pretty decent position of MSTR at J.P. Morgan, when they increased the margin requirement, he's like, I can't meet that, but I'll move my stock out to a place that doesn't have margin requirements that are that ridiculous. So at that point, it's in J.P. Morgan's interest to not let those shares leave, right? Because that kind of hurts their thesis. And two, maybe they can't let them leave because they don't even have them because either they put a short on themselves

or they're short it or they lent it out to some hedge fund on the street that's willing to pay for it and they can't get it back. They don't want to recall. You know, these prime brokers never want to recall. They never want to have a track record of recalling shares that they lent out

because then whoever put that trade on, it blows up that trade at the time when they want it to work. So they basically just... try to hold out as long as they can and try to find stock from other places to be able to deliver out on behalf of clients that are requesting to do transfers so there's a lot of information to be to be gleaned like them not being able to deliver the stock out regardless of the reason the exact reason why it tells you they were either they were directly short or indirectly short right

they're short the stock they don't have the stock to deliver so it's curious increase the margin requirement don't have a stock to deliver that's the those two things paired together plus you know making statements you know down the line after the after you already wounded the animal right after the ship has a leak and it's starting to sink and then you start to hit it with you know msci stuff and nasdaq stuff it just it it's just too much right just too much to to be a coincidence yeah like where was that statement a month ago when that msci report came out didn't do them any good then no right and do you think um they had it again how do we get out of like do you think people just need to move their

their money off of jp morgan if they think this is a believable thesis that they're attacking this and sort of just take their control of the margin specifically away from them yeah i do i think people should move their stock out of mstr out of jp morgan move their mstr stock out um i think you know places like fidelity or you know i think they although they are a trad phi institution uh at the core and at their founding i think they are one of the more uh you know crypto intelligent uh firms and i think they could benefit from the you know the big guys taking a hit so it seems like a good safe place to go because they seem to be on the right side of things uh as opposed to the you know more just deposit collectors like fidelity is less as less

of a deposit collector it's a brokerage firm right so the deposit collectors are the ones that are most vulnerable so i think those are the places where you move the asset out if you want to fight this this trend right because although like we spoke about the banks are publicly saying that they like blockchain they like bitcoin the systems that they're building that's not really blockchain right that's not a you know decentralized network it's a it's a centralized network it's a centralized blockchain that they control they're calling a blockchain to be on trend but it's just a ledger system that jp morgan will control and it has some blockchain technology right uh right whereas the bitcoin network is a true decentralized network uh and so

that they they want they they want to say they're in favor but the things they're doing are just just like everything else they've ever done control the asset control the knowledge right be this be the center of the system so you can control the system and so you can you know be aware of what's on the system because it's part of your network right it's not it's it's totally disingenuous to to suggest that that they're adopting you know a a true true blockchain philosophy of a decentralized network that's not what's happening at all there's some smart contracts and loans yeah it's bullshit it is it's funny it's old is new again in this space digital digital uh ledger technology is back and back in the news back in vogue um but it's right it's too

interesting topic too which is like it seems clear to me i can go back to like the system needs to be recollateralized with better collateral bitcoin is the best collateral most pristine collateral that's ever existed scarce uh divisible as you mentioned earlier trade 24 7 365 it is not collateral like real estate or even shares an individual company which come with their own um which come with their own hair uh it's very hard to move a house the value of a share in an individual company is dictated on how well that business is being run and how profitable they are at any given point in time where bitcoin is just it's It's just this neutral reserve asset that is relatively simple and dumb,

which is a good thing. And many people, myself included, think there is room for Bitcoin to intersect with traditional finance, I think particularly in structured credit, where you use Bitcoin as collateral to help you buy a house or get a loan to invest in a business or something like that. And I think that's sort of the period we're in right now is we're sort of feeling out where this intersection makes sense and who are actually the good actors within this intersection that are going to build products the right way that actually give individual Bitcoin holders value and increased utility of their Bitcoin to actually be able to do things in the real world. And that's where I think the J.P. Morgan positioning towards MSTR and Bitcoin by extension is really unfortunate because there's massive opportunity here if done the right way.

And it will come down to, I think everybody's going to be hypercautious of rehypothecation and how these products are structured is going to be very important and should determine whether or not you interact with them in the first place. but there is a way to do it right uh particularly with like multi-sig escrow uh and being able to validate that that your bitcoin is where you think it is at any given point in time like there is a way to do this 100 will it happen and who's actually going to drive that yeah yeah we've we've seen that because we borrow against our bitcoin a little bit to buy our stock back and if you you know you can enter into all these different uh structures of these loan agreements and like you say multi-sig account control agreement where you have a wallet right and you have the capital provider and you have the you know lender right because because it's an

alternative market the capital provider is not necessarily the lender right you have the lender who's getting their capital from you know some bank or some foreign institution or whatever and then they're lending it to the borrower and but you should have an account control agreement That's a tri-party between the capital provider, the lender, and the borrower. And that Bitcoin should be locked in that account, in that wallet, and not move. And as you said, you can monitor the activity in any wallet address, right? So there are very good ways to do it without letting that Bitcoin get down to that capital provider and then him re-hypothecating it to 10 different parties because he re-hypothecates

it and then they re-apothecate and then they re-apothecate it and as the person who's bitcoin that actually is you sort of start to lose control over that right you could have a bankruptcy you know 10 steps down the road and your bitcoin could fall into that bankrupt entity and then you say okay yeah but i could get it back from the person who lent it to them but then they file bankruptcy or i get back to the person who lent it to them and then they file bankruptcy right so it's you know once the cascade of liquidations or bankruptcies start to happen it's very tough i mean they were unscrambling the bear stearns you know situation in the lehman brothers situation right lehman for 10 years right bear stearns that is why they saved it right because they knew that

unscrambling those eggs when you have all those different swaps and collateral agreements and all that mess out there in an operating institution could take 10 years right so same things for bitcoin you know once you have that network out there if you're just allowing that bitcoin to move around and allowing those assets to move around you could right you got to do it the right way you got to do it smart you got to learn from the you know mistakes that trad spy has made over the last 100 years so account control agreements but you got to have a sophisticated party who understands right what they're negotiating and so maybe it's like legislation where you have smart contracts that just dictate how it works and you literally prevent rehypothecation stuff

like that where you could protect the system a bit because like when you lend stock out when you lend bitcoin out you lend one bitcoin it gets rehypothecated rehypothecated rehypothecated that that that bitcoin can be sold 10 times short short short short short short right so although there's only one bitcoin it it cycled through the system and created the selling of 10 right and that happens in equities um so re-hypothecation is dangerous and i'm posting as collateral when people can do that is is dangerous right they're not aligned with the with the lender with the borrower no and there's no lender of last resort in bitcoin too somebody was i mean we learned this in 21 22 at three arrows gemini and their yield products genesis lending it out to people obviously

block five celsius ftx go down the list like there is you got it a very high potential i mean the counterparty risk isn't worth it at the end of the day that's like i'm not even sure how you get your hands around what the counterparty risk is when you can re-hypothecate because you don't even know who ultimately has it yeah and that's what like these tri-party agreements i think they need to be table stakes for anybody yeah doing it should be industry standard they should be that's what like companies like unchained debify that's what they're working to bring to the market in the private sector but that's my biggest worry as the banking sector is at least feigning interest in in getting in and are they just gonna

import their rehypothecation engine in equities onto bitcoin and their end clients are are none the wiser and i think we should demand the transparency and the sort of products that that are possible with these multi-sig trilateral agreements like if you're not using this like i'm not going to use your product right right right and i i'm not i'm not sure how you would draft into legislation other than preventing it but do you do you really want to you know have bureaucracy you know dictate the terms of these agreements i don't know the answer to that but i i think people have to be wiser to the different mechanisms and why hypothecation re-hypothecation is dangerous uh and all these like when we started negotiating our agreements

the the most clear uh like tell about the value of re-hypothecation to the people who are lending us money against our bitcoin is that if you allow if you do it in the aca uh it's uh ten and a half percent interest if you do it such that we can uh hypothecate and rehypothecate it we'll do eight and a half percent interest right so as the consumer you're like oh i don't care what they do with it no i don't want to pay the other two percent right i want to pay like 40 percent more or 20 percent more that i don't really care because i'm saving the two percent on a on a big asset i'll i'll i'll save the money right but in that two percent is a message right which is what are they doing with it that they want it so bad that they'll give it to you for two percent less

right and that's that's where you got to be wary if they're if they're if they're making more money than that which they are otherwise they wouldn't give you that discount then how are they doing that and how is that gonna hurt me yeah right as as the borrower and so that that's the message yeah it's a very strong message that people don't pick up on either and to your point about legislation um i don't think it needs to go that path either i think it's going to be more dictated by the market like you need something like a fidelity the brand cachet there's a fidelity um to step out and say hey no like this is how we're doing it yeah this is the way to do if you're pledging bitcoin as collateral here's where it's going to stay and here's how it's

going to work and you can validate that it's not being re-hypothecated um that is i think the ideal path for forcing the market to to adopt this what i would deem to be i mean she's objectively safer market structure yeah what uh we're ending the year here it's december uh 22nd this will be released on 29th so leading up to um new year's eve uh obviously it's been a year of uh of scratches bruises punches to the face for the bitcoin market what are you looking forward to in 2026 do you think we're going to continue on this trend or you think the tailwinds are simply too strong that um the punches have been eaten or we're getting back on our feet and 2026 is looking like a good year how are you viewing uh bitcoin in 2026 so i there are still more

tailwinds right also because of the efficient market theory a lot of them are understood and probably probably priced in right but i think the one that's not priced in uh is you get legislation through senate right and you have a true framework where digital assets you know hopefully specifically large digital assets like Bitcoin, you know, maybe Ethereum will fall in it, maybe Solana will fall in it, where there is just a very defined framework for them to exist within the system. And once that happens, I think there will be more broad adoption, right? Because at the end of the day, there's still a very, very small percentage of the world consumer that owns bitcoin very small you know outside the u.s you know there's i don't think there's any country

that's above five percent uh right and the u.s is is still you know arguably between 15 and 20 for any ownership of any digital asset whatsoever uh so there's still a long way to go but i think the catalyst that really gets it going and breaks all of the naysayers is a massive buyer and there's no more massive buyer than U.S. Treasury and treasuries around the world. If the legislation goes through, I think that'll happen. I think there will be, you know, right now U.S. can own it. If they seize it, they don't have to sell it, right? New Hampshire, same. So, but if they actually acquire it, right, as part of a reserve where they're saying five, 10% of the treasury value should be in digital assets or Bitcoin or whatever, then that's massive buying, right?

And then other jurisdictions around the world will follow, right? That's just the nature of the beast. And then you should really start to see the assets stabilize. If the legislation happens in Q1 or Q2, I could see that happening in Q3 or Q4. I think that's in the administration's interest. It's in their interest financially, personally. And that's a large part of the way this administration works. And then I actually think it's in the interest of the country and many countries around the world because it will stabilize their economy. I mean, you can get rid of this whole inflation uh disaster all this currency debasement right if you if you owned one usd in 1920 right by 2020 it lost 96.6 percent of its value like that that's shocking

right that's when you look at inflation that way you really understand what's happening and if you have a fixed asset uh then you can really stabilize everything and i think if we can get there that's when we go to the next level like that's when this asset can really move uh and i don't think that's priced in okay strategic reserve market structure it's i mean it seems like the uh the tailwinds of that the light tailwinds are beginning to bubble up i mean the uae stepping in i think don't have any hard information on this but just perceptively looking at some of the headlines and having been at conferences around the world where some government officials attend it seems like everybody on the geopolitical stage at least

is sort of looking uh behind their shoulder and others and saying okay who's going to be first to do this and that's another bit of black swan positive tailwind as if you have some country it's like okay i'm not going to wait for the u.s i'm going to go first and the environment as such like the the pressure to do that is rising i don't think it's going away i mean the thesis is there i mean argentina they they've right they've been chasing their currency for the benefit of their citizens for decades and this could be a really quick fix for them to just stabilize it right instead of making your currency based off of gold like peg it to bitcoin it'll work yeah you can just peg it to bitcoin well they're starting

can't be more volatile than their currency you can see like they're starting with bitcoin mining i know there's government initiatives to um survey how mining can can be incorporated into their electricity system down there who knows what happens with venezuela um obviously tensions arising there but it's a very oil and gas rich nation if you have the madura regime fall um whether it's naturally yeah the will naturally or some regime change uh who's going to replace them and are they going to be looking at the state of the country and saying hey we can use these energy assets and bitcoin to sort of get ourselves back on our feet quicker that would not surprise me um yeah i think all these these factors and these variables are just

are pointing to somebody's somebody's got to jump at some point because the incentive is too strong yeah the thesis the thesis is 100 there someone's just got to make that jump and i agree with you that someone should make that jump before the u.s because the thesis is stronger for other countries like uh potentially venezuela if the regime falls or when the regime falls uh and then countries like argentina like it's it's a no-brainer but if the u.s does it first it makes it so much easier for them because then it's stabilized right if they're the first to jump in it's a little more dicey right but if the u.s does it and then it starts to be a real trend and then if every treasury around the world owns some of it i mean then you have a commodity that's

parked right our treasury is going to sell it yeah right then you just bring you essentially like suck up the float and that starts to look really interesting and then you can't manipulate it as much right so you know now you can swing it around i don't know if you call it manipulation or whatever you want to call it but for an asset that's 1.8 trillion dollars you can move it around with a few billion which that's that's probably going to change uh once you have treasuries uh start to suck it up yeah yeah we need to uh move into the deck of trillions cent a trillion market cap yeah to make it so you can't move move the market with billions yep right this has been incredible where can anybody who's so curious learn more about what

you're up to um learn about m3 yep you can follow us on x um m3 digital uh and then uh we're on instagram and we're on all the other socials as well but i think our majority of our presence is on x and you know i post a lot about this tradfi stuff and the the way the two worlds are starting to integrate together and the the good and the bad that comes with that and this is going to be interesting to watch it play out uh over the next 12 and 24 months uh whether this works or doesn't work it's going to be really interesting there's going to be a lot happening uh overtly and covertly so well that's the uh that's the beauty of bitcoin at the very least no matter what the price is doing it's always very interesting so yeah we'll be uh

marty i really appreciate you having me no thank you for coming on i was gonna say i was just gonna say we should do this again at some point next year do a little update see how things are progressing agreed there's gonna be a lot to talk about there is all right well you uh you enjoy your week the end of the year and uh we'll see you in 2026 sounds great happy holidays all right Peace and love, freaks. 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. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family.

We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free, helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time.

And until next time. Okay. Thank you.