TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #719: Bitcoin Is Winning Even In A Bear Market with Alex Leishman

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

Marty sits down with Alex Leishman, CEO and CTO of River, to discuss Bitcoin adoption trends in the current bear market, the Lightning Network's growing momentum, institutional vs. individual ownership shifts, AI's impact on productivity and hiring, quantum computing risks to Bitcoin, and River's vision for the future of Bitcoin banking. Alex on X: https://x.com/Leishman River report: https://x.com/SDWouters/status/2024507942708351443 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 Promo Code: TFTC99 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc Lygos: https://bit.ly/4koiJmB 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 And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Alex Leishman, CEO and CTO of River, one of the best and most focused Bitcoin financial institution. How are we describing ourselves?

Yeah, you call us a financial institution. Can't say bank yet, but. Yet. Interesting, interesting characterization there, but one of the best in the world. Good friend. been on the show many times but it's time to catch up the world is chaotic out there many people are worried bitcoins at 67 000 uh it's it's detached from the nasdaq gold and silver are pumping uh epstein files have been released it's all over sir yeah you know apparently

epstein's satoshi uh it is uh it's been a combination of hilarious and tiresome watching the narrative slow through over the last few weeks but yeah um there's been a lot of new information uh you know i think it one of the problems with the whole epstein thing is sort of you know it's like the ultimate boogeyman right and uh this guy who is very rich and connected for uh a long time emailed people in all walks of life all over the world and unfortunately some of those people were working on bitcoin and so any any everything seems to get sucked into his orbit um unfortunately it's sort of like a like wikipedia you you know how many uh how many hops does it take to connect two things it's sort of like what's the hop between anything important and jeffrey epstein

it's basically like you know one or two uh and so i think everything you know not just bitcoin is getting pulled into all of that yeah it's almost like it was a concerted effort to to wrap uh almost everything in his web um yeah exactly but we don't have to uh belabor the epstein files i think uh why i love catching up with you is because you have some deep behind the scene knowledge of what's actually happened happening uh in terms of adoption of bitcoin i mean you interact with your clients with individuals and businesses every day uh your research team shout out to sam and everybody um putting putting a lot of effort into your research reports trying to figure out what's actually happening on the network and um this morning you released

your uh your basically state of bitcoin adoption light and uh reports and there was a lightning network report that went out yesterday um and so i think it'll be good to start there like what what are you guys seeing behind the scenes in terms of bitcoin adoption in this are we calling it a bear market or is this a bull market correction right now i'm i would call it a bear market i think it's a bear market um yeah we gave a little taste of our adoption research and we're gonna have a much more thorough report coming out uh next next week um but but really i would call this a bear market um you know the price is down over the last year when you know tech stocks, gold, other things have rallied a lot. But what's different in this bear market,

and we've been through a lot of bear markets at River, I've been through even more just personally at this point, 13 years working on Bitcoin, adoption hasn't really been slowing down in this bear market. Historically, we saw capital flee, we saw adoption really come to a halt during previous bear markets when Bitcoin was in a much smaller era of its life. And that's not really happening right now. Business adoption of Bitcoin continues to grow. Individual adoption of Bitcoin continues to grow. The smart money continues to allocate to Bitcoin. And so that's, you know, happy to dig into that. But I think that's like what's really interesting here. Uh, and, and, and so, you know, we're, we detail a lot of those findings in this report

we're going to put out. Well, that's, that's one of my favorite, uh, periodic updates you give is the type of businesses that are, uh, onboarding to river and adopting Bitcoin. I think that is high signal. And I think this could dovetail into, um, the adoption and distribution of ownership charts that you guys have been putting out, uh, over the last week. But this is a signal that I always look for is somebody who runs a business. Yes, we're a media business focused on Bitcoin specifically.

So it makes sense that we would invest in Bitcoin as a treasury asset and use it for payroll and other things as well. But I think I've always been waiting for that sort of mainstream breakthrough for business owners who have nothing to do with Bitcoin, recognizing that it's worthwhile for them. to hold some on their business balance sheet and it seems like that's accelerating yeah what we've seen in the last year is that the individual ownership of bitcoin has decreased um or you know the net sort of the amount of bitcoin in existence the percent held by individuals has gone down and the percent held by businesses has increased substantially so um yeah if you at this chart you know you can see that um uh the basically the the bitcoin help individuals has been eaten up by by businesses now it's important to point out you know individuals

at the end of the day are still the owners of businesses and and dtfs and things like this um but i think what this is showing is the bitcoin is maturing um it's now like this never would have happened in a previous bear market, right? In previous bear markets, who would have thought that, you know, the transfer of Bitcoin would be happening from individuals to businesses and Wall Street. And on the business side, what we're seeing is this isn't all just financial institutions. This is also Main Street businesses. So in the last year, right, the Bitcoin prices went down And the amount of businesses that accumulated Bitcoin at River doubled. So, you know, we saw record growth in the amount of businesses buying Bitcoin despite the flat and down market.

So, you know, so then you could ask then the obvious question is, well, if all of this is happening, then why is the price dropping? And I think that is actually the most interesting question there is. And I don't think anyone knows the full answer. It's obviously a market full of millions of actors each making their own decisions. But I think what we're seeing is while this transition is happening, there's some short-term price – downward price movement because some of the individual Bitcoin being transferred is like early whales selling. We're definitely seeing some of the early big holders selling and sort of establishing and diversifying their wealth after holding Bitcoin for over a decade. But then we're also seeing, I think, the result of some more sophisticated, maybe less ideological large institutions own Bitcoin, using it for leverage, trading it when needed, selling it because it's the most liquid asset out there on their balance sheet to sell when there's

any sort of um scare or or fear in the market and so um i think this basically like the price downturn is the result also of the institutional adoption of bitcoin uh for various reasons but i think long term this is bullish yeah as you see here on the chart too you have the 2024 figure of net bitcoin moving from individuals and it was negative i think 525 000 bitcoin around there if i recall correctly so around 1.25 well let's just say one and a quarter million bitcoin moving out of the hands of individuals towards the sort of entities on the left side of this uh chart here and that's what i think i think a lot of people look at businesses see plus 489 000 and they think oh this is the digital asset treasury company is

scooping up all the bitcoin but and they're certainly getting a large amount of it but it's not just these types of businesses right yeah absolutely and you know we're also beyond just operating businesses well actually just to give you a taste of like who's buying you know bitcoin at river we really see it all we see uh summer camps um you know putting their excess cash in Bitcoin or using our Bitcoin interest on cash product to earn, to hold some cash, but also earn Bitcoin on the interest. Um, we see construction companies, real estate companies, restaurant change, um, food manufacturers, uh, a cool one, uh, a really cool one is, uh, there is this, um, there's a, uh, an, an order of, uh, uh, I won't be too specific,

but sort of a a um a christian group a catholic group that has been saving in bitcoin for a long time and they're um they're they use the the capital gains on that to finance some construction of new buildings um and uh so we see we really see like a really broad array of uh of uh institutions and businesses buying and using bitcoin and uh it's really really cool to see because all the news on Twitter you see is like this Bitcoin treasury company, BlackRock, and everything we see behind the scenes is real main street institutions allocating to Bitcoin. So freaks, when you take Bitcoin seriously, you start with custody. You want to control your keys, avoid single points of failure, and make sure your savings cannot disappear because you or

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constant attention or expertise because it's built for the long term. Inheritance is built in so your Bitcoin can move securely into the next generation. It's Bitcoin self-custody built for real life. and for february only for you freaks okay february only you got 28 days not a leap year i'm pretty short 28 days you listeners tftc listeners can get bicky for 99 using code tftc99 at bicky.world that's b-i-t-k-e-y.world use the code tftc99 and you're gonna get a bicky for 99 yeah and i think the um the pumping of the treasury companies and blackrock and all that and the blackrock stuff really drives my gears because everybody's like black rock bought this amount of bitcoin today

or black rock sold that amount of bitcoin today and it's like well actually like they have customers that are buying their etf and they have to go out there so i think the um me i mean black rock is buying it on behalf of their customers so technically they are buying it but there's a bunch of individuals um driving those flows in and out of that ibit etf but i think one thing because we did it was funny you guys dropped this chart last week the same day here at tftc we made this um ownership distribution sort of infographic video for lack of a better description on the go here and many people are looking at this chart watch that video and said oh my gosh like the individuals are giving up their sovereignty and it's true obviously to an extent it's

undeniable from the chart more individuals are selling their bitcoin as you said earlier a lot lot of whales um but i think getting into the sort of the the nature of this rotation and is it okay is bitcoin losing its ethos this is peer-to-peer digital cash system for for individuals to to leverage or is this just uh the product of of maturation and should this be expected I think that it's to be expected. If you look at any mature asset, there's a lot of institutional involvement, right? No asset can hit maturity and be globally important and have no major institutional involvement. I don't see how that could possibly work. But that said, I do think it's important that as actors in the Bitcoin community, if you want to call it a community or just in the Bitcoin network, we recognize that there's an increasing amount of actors in this network who are less principled and sort of don't really share the early ethos of Bitcoin. And so we need to make sure that the governance of the protocol doesn't get taken over too much by people who don't actually follow the ethos. So exactly how to accomplish that, I think it's going to be something we have to sort out over the coming years.

And I'm not actually too worried about it, but it is something we should be thoughtful about. yeah no i think people look at this this chart right here institutions may own a majority of bitcoin within a decade and shriek but some i mean i think mvk made this clear to me many years ago it's like hey bitcoin successful everybody's going to want a piece and whether we like it or not these institutions have way more firepower in terms of capital to deploy into this and as i was mentioning earlier i think it's also important to recognize that many of these institutions represent thousands sometimes millions of people as well yep you know exactly and so then this chart is really just like if we linearly extrapolate what we're seeing which may or may

not happen uh but i do think it's illustrative of if this trend continues here's what it looks like in 10 years yeah which is it's wild to think and i think i'm a big fan i've been reading a lot of scott adams books and a big uh big fan of reframing i think reframing this is like wow it's been incredible that individuals have been the largest adopters up to this point 17 years and we should be incredibly thankful um that we were crazy enough to take the risk before any of these institutions did yeah um i mean this is you had a lot of pioneering crazy individuals uh driving this thing forward and risking sometimes risking it all uh for over a decade to make this thing and to make bitcoin important and yeah i love that reframing um wow how

incredible yeah we're gonna win we're gonna win and then i mean it's uh again going back to like we're in a bear market price is down people are freaking out wondering are we gonna lower is it over uh stuff that both you and i have seen throughout our uh our more than a decade of experience in in bitcoin i find it funny when we get to these points especially now that we're above a trillion dollar market cap and we have all these institutions adopting bitcoins like it's never been more de-risked and if the price goes to these levels you should view it as an incredible opportunity but this is just on the um sort of adoption of bitcoin as a as a store value asset but the other um research that you guys released yesterday that i was mentioning earlier on

lightning network too and lightning's had um this i think lightning has been besmirched and sort of thrown to the wayside particularly by those in broader crypto who think there's better ways to do things but uh last year was a banner year for lightning i think uh in november alone sam's data and again you have to sort of guesstimate because you guys i think it would be helpful for you to helpful for you to describe how you guys actually go about that lightning research specifically um but it was a 1.1 billion dollars in in volume in november 2025 alone yeah Yeah, exactly. And, you know, one of the cool things about Lightning is, you know, it's built the Bitcoin way. It's built in a decentralized, it's a decentralized L2.

So unlike a lot of the, you know, Ethereum or other L2 networks that just are basically just databases, centralized databases, the Lightning network has no central place where you can observe all of the payments happening. So you have to kind of triangulate the metrics. And we're in a pretty good place to do this because we've been a pretty sizable node on the Lightning Network since we started, really, for seven years, almost seven years now. And what we do is we look at our own data, and then we partner with other big participants in the Lightning Network, other node providers, other exchanges and node operators, and we info share with them. we have them share their data. And then from that, we sort of extrapolate and make an estimate of what we think at least a lower bound is on the transaction volumes happening in the network. So yeah, it's great to see. It's nice to see the growth. And I think what we're seeing is

a lot of this is driven by more and more exchanges having adopted Bitcoin. I mean, And having adopted Lightning, Coinbase, I believe the latest is around 10% of their Bitcoin transactions are on the Lightning network, which is pretty good. I think where we see where the challenge still is for Lightning is self-custody consumer Lightning wallets. Because of the way the Lightning network works, it's challenging to get those functioning really effectively. there's some cool companies really trying to you know level things up there um and you know i think like let's see it's a hard technical problem it's a hard economic problem so let's see what progress those companies can make in the coming years companies like moon wallet um async uh light sparks kind of got its own l2 lightning hybrid uh called spark so well pulling on that thread i

think 2025 was another banner year for lightning in terms of um having a clear product market fit and the meme has been like its best product market fit is this connective tissue between all these disparate um sub protocols that exist outside of lightning like spark liquid um chami mint's arc the arc protocol now uh and what are your ideas about around that and particularly when it comes to like scaling and creating these um consumer consumer apps to make it easy to use bitcoin like you have bull bitcoin with their um liquid uh liquid to lightning sort of uh functionality breeze i believe they're leveraging spark in their sdk and so you're beginning to see all these different sort of implementations of um of a wallet infrastructure

uh that that leverages multiple protocols to provide a different trade-offs for end users Yeah, I think really the bigger question is, what is Bitcoin's short to medium term potential as a medium of exchange? um because i think that if bitcoin is highly desired as a medium of exchange that economic force will pull forward all this innovation and we'll just figure it out um i think the actual biggest headwind to these technologies really getting in the hands of consumers the self-custody payment network type scaling technologies is just there isn't that big of a demand for bitcoin as a medium of exchange today um it's growing um uh but it's not like you know tether is still far more popular than bitcoin for example right the global demand for a medium of exchange is um still

overwhelmingly dollars and and i think that's actually like the biggest thing and i don't know that any technological innovation solves that i think you could say let's say we develop the perfect scaling technology that was perfectly decentralized perfectly censorship resistant perfectly private infinitely scalable for bitcoin tomorrow um i don't know how much that actually moves the needle on people using bitcoin as money um i think that's like the right thought experiment and so i think like there's a you know until like the inflation really starts getting crazy with the dollar i don't think we'll see bitcoin widely used as a medium of exchange i think i would agree there unless you're like die hard like living on a bitcoin standard

or demand it like the other thing like merchants need to demand it employees need to demand it um we have many tftc that do and so this would be a nature of those demands that get paid in bitcoin we have to use it as a medium of exchange to make sure we can make payroll for them but yeah i mean bring this to stable coins like and obviously i think we can combine a bunch of things here you got stable coins you've got the political environment here in the united states particularly around crypto and the very specific focus on stable coins and at the same time we've got this emergence of this ai agentic economy and everybody's racing to give these agents different types of wallets and um it seems like this administration has been

overly favorable towards the uh crypto lobby because they threw a lot of money at the administration during the election uh and now they're getting a lot of influence on on capital how do you um what are your thoughts on this sort of nature of we're sort of in the room now but crypto is in the room as well and a lot of uh what i would deem to be idiotic ideas are being taken seriously and maybe some distractions away from the signal that is bitcoin yeah i think um You know, the unfortunate reality is, you know, the confluence of politics and capitalism is that sort of short-term money, even if it's coming from bad ideas or scammy things, can get a lot of influence in politics. And I think that's what we're seeing a lot of. Um, and, you know, I think that it's overall probably good that they're just like chilling

out a bit, um, from a regulatory perspective, the real challenge for all of us was getting debanked and the fact that that risk is basically is, is, you know, a fraction of what it was is, you know, better for everybody in this industry. Um, I also, yeah. So, you know, as it relates to all the legislation being debated, yeah, it is kind of interesting right because you have there's a small group of the bitcoin crowd like us that are just sitting there watching all these other people debate in dc about things we really don't care about um all the debates are around the things that are going to make the big guys

the big crypto casinos a lot of money and that's stable coins and um uh moving tokens away from the sec as the regulator into the cftc and uh and so yeah it's kind of like i watch it i watch the debates but i also don't really care about what what they're talking about because it just like you know it's just none of it's about bitcoin so that's how i feel i think stable coins are like i think they're interesting if you live in a country that has capital controls and you want dollars other than that i have a hard time seeing where they're really going to take off I could be totally wrong, but it just doesn't seem like for a domestic use case in the United States, stablecoins just don't seem that compelling. RFID signal jacking, silent. The cardholder does the same thing. It's much sleeker, fits in my

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saute d-r-i-n-k-s-o-t-e.com use the code tftc for 15 off seriously game changer in our house my wife drinks it i drink it our boys drink it stay hydrated it's a beautiful thing well hey they're gonna get this yield on our savings now it's like i mean i could already have get that right uh so it's it's kind of just like this weird abstraction on the bank account that is unclear anyone really needs uh well it seems to be a big uh big topic of contention right now on capitol hill between the banks and queen base specifically i mean this whole and then that's another interesting sort of sub theme this sort of clash or intersection who knows ultimately what it will prove to be, but it seems like the TradFi guys are looking at Bitcoin and crypto becoming

more prominent and clutching their pearls a bit. This fight over sharing the yield on stablecoin is very interesting. Yes. The banks don't want the stablecoin issuers to be able to pay back interest to the holders because then they're worried that that will give them competition because these big banks are scamming everyone, basically. like you're checking you're checking in savings accounts if you just have like the default ones at the largest banks jp morgan uh chase bank of america wells fargo they're paying like 0.01

like most of their account holders and they're just eating all of that money for free um and so they don't really want super consumer friendly ways to earn actual market interest rates um so uh you know they're fighting that um but i mean we already offer a high yield and straight river like if you have cash remember you earn 3.3 percent and you earn in bitcoin so you know fintechs are already competing with them um but uh i think like just bank accounts are so sticky in general that you know you get so many people that they've just had to chase account their whole life and they're okay just with chase basically taking all of their interest taking it putting it in a carry trade levering it up like 10x more so they can profit yeah that's

the interesting i talked to some guys at a treasury i was at a bpi event in dc and they're saying the banks are worried because they'd have to unwind all that it makes them have to have a much more narrow focus but to your point these um alternatives already exist they exist at river when cash in uh get yield it's automatically converted into bitcoin and i think this gets to an interesting point because like um the the again the big clash right now on capitol hill is coinbase versus the banks like we want to share the yield and the market's treating this like the banks are withholding this innovation from the market like if coinbase wins we'll be able to get our yield it's like hey it already exists which points to maybe positioning a narrative

problem that we have in bitcoin like these these things already exist you just need to find you seem to go out and find them yeah you know i do wonder if the stablecoin debate is more around the international uh like opportunity um but it's also like coinbase and circle see what tether's doing they're like i want to box them out totally um i do think that really you know we're still in in this this build mode and then when the economic forces that are basically um set in stone really start to hit inflation um and continue to devalue people like people's saving the dollar savings we'll continue we'll see an like in the future we'll see a large exodus from these these big banks um you know wherever we're building the financial institution for a future

that's where the dollar is still um you're still stuck using the dollar as a medium of exchange because of the network effect but you it's not something you want to be saving in and so um you know we we envision a future we call like a dual money future where people save in bitcoin but they continue to primarily still spend and earn in dollars and we think that that type of account is going to real is going to replace the traditional bank accounts um and that's what building towards and you know that's there's it's pretty compelling today for people who actually believe in bitcoin but the real unlock is when people really start to see that saving in dollars just isn't going to work yeah well what would you say to people is who are looking

at the banks racing to integrate bitcoin and crypto and saying that all these bitcoin startups that are bitcoin first bitcoin only they're gonna get blown out by these institutions because Because they're going to have the capital, the scale, the network effect of a client base already to just implement this overnight. Yeah, I think that I'm not really worried at all about that because I like, you know, I don't see a future where JP Morgan is putting Bitcoin side by side in your checking account in the near future. They just don't actually they don't believe that they don't believe in that future. it'll always be this like side thing that uses a third party that's kind of a crappy user experience and like we'll get some people using it but like you're not they're not actually going to build a competitive product because the organization and its dna does not believe this is the future

um and so and if it is and if they eventually like realize that and they catch up well you know the markets move like you know a rising tide lifts all ships if jp morgan eventually integrates bitcoin as a first-class citizen we will have grown tremendously as a business as well um and it's it will because like a company like river has taken market share that's why they would start doing it and the the inertia that they have is so large um it's it's it's not like they're gonna die but we also it's it wouldn't be like a they would just be trying to catch up with us yeah I'm a big believer in that too this is like a Bitcoin

who knows we're early adopters who knows if the later waves the later adoption waves and the people come on those waves care at all I would find it very hard to believe to trust JP Morgan with my Bitcoin yeah I mean at the end of the day

they'll care about user experience and they'll care about what they're getting and I think that's where you compete they'll care about service user experience and economics yeah and i think the upstarts definitely be on ux and it's easier yeah well that's like that's another interesting topic we dive into like with this wave of ai tools coming to market uh i don't think i've talked to you directly about this like like are you guys leveraging

these tools at river and if so has it changed your perspective on what the future trajectory of the growth of your business from a revenue profitability standpoint but uh more importantly from a headcount standpoint uh has it has it affected your views on this at all i have kind of a two competing thoughts in my head at the same time about these things um on one hand i do believe that as these tools continue to accelerate in their capabilities they'll unlock tremendous potential to move faster for our business. It's already pretty heavily improved the productivity for our engineering team in a number of places, but not every place. And I think that really what a lot of these tools are surfacing to people is the hard part was never really writing the code

for most things anyways. There are certain tasks and aspects of building an application or a tech company where just like writing the code and getting this thing done is is like just a lot easier now but all of the consequential things that you do are usually not that the consequential things that you do are usually require humans to synthesize the complexity um and apply taste and their understanding of their client base to prioritize and make changes to the product and ai is accelerating like subsets of tasks that allow you to do that but it doesn't really accelerate a lot of our human decision making bottleneck there and i don't see a short-term future where it does so but there are some areas where it really accelerates things like yesterday

for example like when we generate account statements for uh for our customers right we we have historically we had to use this like pdf tool where we like generate the data and then like we use this other system that like generates the pdfs pdfs are like super complicated to understand how to make them but with ai i i you know i was like hey guys like try and just make the pdf directly now from and write the code to just generate the pdf directly because these ais understand how to make pdfs you know and they have all that information and they were like you know they were like a little hesitant because like no one ever suffered no one really does this um it's very unusual to do something like this and i was like hey guys like look it's a different world

right now let's just try it and we experimented for like half a day yesterday and it actually worked beautifully and so we're able to delete like this whole you know subsystem that we just don't need anymore um and so there are things like that where it's really like magical um but i don't think like it isn't unlocking us like making better product decisions or it's not prevent it's not like saving us time sitting in a room and debating like the right you know design decisions uh so that those are like my two sort of competing takes no and i i would completely agree i mean it's been we've been leaning in heavily over the last month and a half i mean we've been leaning in heavily for the last two years really but now like the the open claw um phenomena we've been

using that for like six weeks now or five or six weeks and it's really extended what we can do and to your point about taste like there's a ton of ideas i've had it was like okay i would love to do this but we're bootstrapped we run lean we only have so much capacity to try these things and now with open claw like it's allowing us to like sprint towards a lot of the the goals but taste is like we revamped our uh morning newsletter five days a week and it's pretty much not automated but the ai or a little clanker builds it but uh there's a lot of taste and it's collaborative sort of endeavor between myself and my agent martin is a more sophisticated version of marty um throughout the day to sort of just get the get the um uh the stories that

we're going to include in the newsletter and the structure uh but there's a lot of tastes like curating but now i have the ability instead of spending two three hours actually formatting and putting putting things into the newsletter i can just throughout the day put links in a google sheet with some notes voice to text notes about what i want to touch on with a particular topic and then at the end of the day hit up martin be like okay go to the google sheet look at what i put in there and let's put together the newsletter and 30 minutes later it's ready to go um like that that taste is extremely important but in terms of being able to get stuff done particularly with small teams it's accelerating that and i think there's a misnomer going around out there too

which is uh you're not going to have to work more but if you have high agency and willpower it's just like i've uh i've had more 1am nights over the last four weeks than i have in like the last two years because i'm just like oh we can go after these ideas now absolutely and i i think what it does and from a hiring perspective and headcount perspective is um it honestly hasn't changed our headcount projections um it's just solidified and hammered home the qualifiers that we have for who we hire um like we just will only hire people we think are high agency who have taste who can synthesize and understand the business problems um and uh they act like hire people who have the qualities that we need to solve the real human bottlenecks that still exist that these ais aren't

solving um and you can still get more done by hiring more of those people you just don't need the people who are doing busy work and the code monkeys who aren't thinking from first principles and understanding the business so that's my take yeah yeah it's a brave new world it's so funny because i get the sense that we're just like teetering like the world right now is like equally exhilarating and um completely uh unnerving because it's like we can go many different directions obviously geopolitically everybody's meeting the straight her moves right now to figure out what we're going to do with iran we get a like we said the epstein files here we got this ai explosion you've got the high velocity trash economy just accelerating at a crazy pace

with prediction markets uh now we have attention markets that just dropped on zora what is it oh yeah yeah remember zora was like a base they they pivoted and they're on salada now but you can point your content kind of thing it's like well not only that but people can um can bet on trends can and basically ride trends and monetize it somehow i don't understand how it works or why you would want to do it but well i think i think there is this thing where What we've seen in the last 10 years, especially in our industry, and what we're seeing now leaving crypto and just moving elsewhere with prediction markets is you just have this class of people that chases financialization and new games. They can convince normies to play because they can just extract. And I think we're just seeing that now.

I think prediction markets is a big example of that. has like some really legitimate cool use cases like trying to just understand what's going to happen for the truth um which i think is actually very cool and innovative um but actually like 90 something percent of the volume just sports betting um so it's like you know uh at the end of the day like you take these this technology and then it's just like oh let's just yeah like extract from uh a subset of the population who we can farm well i will say is like sports betting is um especially if you're spending all your money on it or all your time on it you shouldn't be doing that but if you're trying to compare it to like draft kings or like

the big books it's like okay i can see the argument like prediction markets um make more sense because there's no house to take it big and to play both sides like it's peer-to-peer if you want to take that risk uh you can also trade in and out of a position uh which is interesting you can like get out right yeah so like compared to the status quo i think it is net benefit for consumers from a fairness perspective but if you don't have impulse control you can still lose all your money um in these prediction markets i mean the real fight is the state the state level where you had texas and california had just source betting was illegal and now the prediction markets are going oh we're federally you know regulated everywhere

and then all of a sudden everyone in california and texas can now sports bet when they couldn't before and it's like this big states rights question uh which is also like kind of an interesting thing we'll see how that might end up in the supreme court yeah i feel like we're fighting all these battles i think the core of the battle is the uh the essence of our humanity as we transition to the digital age like what are we going to get are we going to get like a bitcoin standard with lower time preference and better capital allocation and better incentive alignment or do we just steamroll into ymar version 2 for the 21st century it's unclear um it's unclear i mean we might get a it might allow us to go back to focusing on real things

like i don't know a bulk you know a white pill scenario would be these ais allow us to get out of the email jobs like the email jobs go away and everyone actually has to go back to doing real things um and uh this like you know the last few decades where everything was just a financial abstraction and um um you know like fewer and fewer people did like real things uh in the real world um you know maybe that gets reversed because like a lot of that can just be done by ais and we all go back to you know manufacturing or farming or i don't know or maybe all of that just also gets automated with robotics because the ai advances so fast that and then we're all like well what do we even do now um and there's actually just like a thousand people who are

like high agency and high iq enough to actually be valuable and everyone else is just like you know permanent underclass right exactly like i don't know i honestly don't know but i had a conversation with justin moon last week about this and it's something i've been trying to grapple with in my head i think um particularly our generation i think we broke out of it but there's kind of like preconceived notions of how the world works and how humans operate and i think one of those is that there's just like a natural distribution of people who are high agency and those who have the uh the fluoride stare if you will and i don't know i've been trying to think like is there a way that you can instill and engender a culture of high agency um if we

recognize it is what you're going to need to have to be successful in this new age i go back and forth like i can totally and i probably lean actually towards there's just a natural distribution of people who have it and people don't um but i'm curious like is there like a spartan like culture you could uh you could put out there to convince people that you need to develop the skills to have agency i think i think they'll also you know be it more and more interesting conversations around collectivism or i think i think people like might start thinking about collectivism a little bit differently as the technology progresses if it really does truly begin to advance um and and you know i think there is like this has like in the last sort of 30 years or or

so or maybe in 50 years you could say like americans like frowned upon collectivism because everything was just working really well for us and like being individual being independent and high agency this like made you wealthy um and if that stops being the case then all of a sudden collectivism might start being viewed differently like hold on a second like we need to all like who is my group who i band together with to make sure that like we all benefit and we protect ourselves um and put ourselves our group first because being a being alone you know just doesn't work anymore um and maybe like the fact that you know we were able to be have this ethos at all was just because the u.s just worked so well um uh and you know what's the future of that

just some unformed thoughts yeah because it's all i mean i've seen it up close and personal like it's definitely massively beneficial but it's still it's still not perfect like i have to slap my clanker around every once in a while like hey you did that wrong uh you're not autonomous yet they don't learn um and i think there's still some major like break there's still some major breakthroughs before these things are actually changing everything um well that's the other thing i wonder like how much how much of like what's being put out there by sam altman by dario others is just like them pushing their book and like trying to get their valuations up raise another hundred bill exactly it's hard to say um it's hard to relate because

obviously these things are revolutionary but at the same time um there's obviously something missing with them right um you know it's it's like that classical conversation of why does why do we need to train these things with gigawatts of compute or hundreds of mega you know megawatts of compute and all of the information on the internet um when a human doesn't need any of any of that um you know there's something like fun a human doesn't need to tell the information on the internet to be able to be useful so like there's something fundamental missing in our understanding of like building intelligence and the real maybe scary thing is if we figure that out that's when it gets scary and until then maybe it's actually

just kind of like i don't know these things are just really smart but dumb at the same time yeah that's the i mean i think there's been more discussion arising around this too i mean the just separating intelligence and consciousness like can you actually be um genuinely intelligent in the sense that you can learn new things and have creative thought if you're not conscious and can these things ever be conscious i think i think the answer is probably at some point we can get we'll get there but i'm also not convinced it's like gonna happen in the next few years yeah i'm not convinced it's like i could be wrong i i don't have like you know i wouldn't have predicted how good these things are today um five years ago so

i want to like you know i i do think we should consider a world where extrapolating these things getting smarter and smarter and accelerating pace does happen but at the same time i just like from the first principles perspective i have a hard time seeing how throwing more energy a compute solves that fundamental problem of these things aren't learning um these things can't aren't like aren't handling novel tasks um and you know every time you send it something like it has a context so it doesn't remember anything right and those are problems that they're working on the question is like how will they actually be solved in any near-term future i don't know yeah is there a problem as uh insurmountable as scaling logical qubits

for quantum computers who knows yeah um that's a big uh and a big uh what are your thoughts on the whole quantum debate you know i hate i hate being in a position where you're where or an arm my argument is betting against humans figuring something out right so like i hate sort of being somebody who sits there and says quantum computing will never work and here's why and the problem i hate being in that position because it um it's non-falsifiable right you can't you can't ever prove like you can't prove they won't figure something out um and uh but at the same time like there's there is some truth to it like it's a really hard problem i think it's probably overblown but like also what if it's not right um there's a lot of

information asymmetry here like understanding quantum computing is not easy it's a highly specialized field and um from what i can tell there is real progress happening and i don't think And if the, you know, what makes Bitcoin great is that I know I have high confidence that it's going to be functioning effectively 10, 20, 30 years into the future. And so we always want that to be true. We always want people to believe that Bitcoin will always function and be secure many, many years into the future. So because of that, I do think we do need to care about this. I do think we need to – we are – I mean, there is a lot of development effort already going into post-quantum signature algorithms for Bitcoin and what transitioning to that could look like. And I think that's important work, and I think it should be done with – conservatively, but with some urgency.

But we also don't want to rush something that makes – that creates a vulnerability. So that's my take. That – I completely agree. And I think that's been the most frustrating thing about the whole narrative around Bitcoin, its relationship with potential quantum breakthroughs at some point in the future is that people are saying, you're not doing anything. Will the devs do something? It's like, well, this has been an ongoing discussion for over a decade. There's a lot of research being done. And there's a BIP out there that could potentially be merged if you want to put your Bitcoin in an address that's nested in a tap leaf that is quantum resistant.

You may be able to do that at some point soon. But then to your point, I mean, you don't want to rush it because you could introduce some sort of critical vulnerability that destroys the network itself. But I think another interesting perspective that somebody like you could provide, like what would the logistics of your business, like the transition to this for your business look like? Like how many different sort of things would you have to change if we were to transition to this? So there's a few components here. One is cold storage. One is a hot wallet, which is where, you know, most transactions are going in and out of every day. what we would probably do is um so like let's just put totally aside how do we handle like

the lost coins or you know the coins that don't get moved over to a new quantum secure signature um let's just assume you know okay we have a soft fork it introduces a quantum secure signature um like sphinx plus like something like you know jonas nick is working on what we would probably do is move all cold storage coins over to that once we felt really, really confident about it. We wouldn't do it like right away because presumably this upgrade would happen many years before a viable quantum computer actually existed. So we would let it run its course, do a lot of testing, have it live on the network for hopefully a year or two. We'd move all cold storage coins over to this new signature scheme.

um and the hot wallet we probably still keep running with the old signature scheme but we start building and getting the you know getting things in place to to support this new signature scheme now there's a lot of open questions from a wallet experience perspective for both consumer self-custody and also businesses where some of the things that make operating wallets very convenient today might not work for example like bit32 derivation right um being able to derive addresses from a public key um uh the like you know by just those tools probably won't exist for post-quantum algorithms and so things might get a little clunkier um we might see signing longer signing yeah longer or like just the transaction might be bigger right the um you

know it might be more expensive and so it would be a it would be a um a hit to uh self-custody usability unfortunately but you know if that's if that's where the tech goes it's we don't really have a choice yeah yeah i had jonas and uh mikhail on we talked about this that's like what i think uh many people are like pushing a rush to this don't realize it's like hey we have a bunch of standards partially signed bitcoin transactions the lightning network you have the htlcs you have all these things you can't just like upgrade now and bork all the stuff that's been built over the course of 17 years it's like they have to think through this strategically coordinate um across the bitcoin network and all the individual actors within it and put a concerted effort for us uh

And then on the hardware wallets, I think that's actually a business opportunity for somebody who can build a beefy hardware wallet that is like high power, can actually sign the signatures in a timely manner, I would think as well. Yeah, it will lead to opportunities. Like you said, it's hard to suss out sort of the economic opportunist pushing the quantum fear versus the actual technical reality. And I think that at the end of the day, really no one knows, right? You can't – you don't know what's going to come out of the mind of some guy in the lab at Google. Or some model. Maybe the models figure out how to learn actually and they're like, hey, guess what? We figured it out.

I think what we do know for sure and we've known for Bitcoin's lifetime is theoretically, like the laws of physics do not prohibit this. It is an engineering problem. It is not a, does not require breaking the laws of physics. And, you know, at the end of the day, that's the scary thing about cryptography in general is there's no law of physics that says a certain cryptographic primitive is secure. It's more like we haven't been able to prove it's not hard, but we can't prove it is. So, you know, that's the, that's kind of the scary thing about math in general is it's not really constrained by physics yeah um just gave the 2025 retrospective we're almost two

months into 2026 what are you um excited about what are you looking forward to what are you focused on uh yeah whether it's that river or bitcoin generally right now we're focused at river we're focused on uh this dual money vision we want to you know historically we were this place where people came to buy bitcoin um we want to be the central hub for people's money we want to be that place where you bank um and so you know the future for us is this year like focusing on building the future of bitcoin banking um having dollars and Bitcoin in one place. We're not a chartered bank. We partner with a bank to provide dollar functionality. But, you know, I do believe that this is the future of money. And so that's our

focus. So we're working on things like bill pay, you know, being able to pay your bills from your river account, making it just more and more compelling and easy to use Bitcoin and dollars in one place. For Bitcoin more broadly, I think the quantum stuff is going to be a big focus of conversation. I think that we have a big opportunity there to show people that, again, Bitcoin is the most secure and certain chain in the world. And we think about the long tail risks. So I do think that conversation will dominate over the coming year. And I think every time a new blog post comes out from a quantum lab, it'll re-ignite these conversations about Bitcoin and quantum. And I think every month that happens, we'll have better and better answers for people.

yeah that's funny to me uh i think uh we caught at least some of the grifters yesterday because two weeks ago we had a large downward difficulty adjustment there are many people on the quantum side saying look the miners recognize the quantum risk they're unplugging they're giving up on their investment uh this was happening while a winter storm was was taking over most of the United States, and ASHRAE was either turning off because they were involved in demand response programs, or the actual data center had some disruptions due to inches of ice falling from the sky, and then yesterday we had an upwards adjustment of 14.7% or above where we were before that.

It's like, well, it wasn't quantum. Yeah, exactly. there's always someone who's got a bad take that goes viral and all of a sudden you know everyone's texting you about it unfortunately yeah just wait two weeks wait two weeks well alex it's always great catching up sir thanks for having me on honored to call you a friend and a colleague in this bitcoin network are we colleagues colleagues in the network is that what we're gonna call it i don't like community either i don't think yeah it's like you know we're actors yeah and that work is more of the mathematical term i guess

colleague is yeah i like colleague brothers yeah brothers brothers i like brothers brothers and arms here um we'll uh we'll link to these reports in the show notes keep crushing the research it's highly valuable and i think um it's it's great to be able to have this research to point to to be like hey lightning's not dead actually it's better than ever yes individuals are losing um their share bitcoin overall but businesses are adopting it alongside governments and institutions it's not just these large actors that people don't like coming in it's mom and pop main street businesses as well i think it's very beneficial for the pitch to people who are skeptical absolutely yeah excited to share more there all right well all right a little tease a

little tease to end it we'll uh we'll uh we'll catch up again at some point soon all right looking forward all right peace love freaks okay 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 five dollars a month

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