TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Mainstream Finance Finally Embraces Bitcoin at $120K | Bitcoin Alpha E009

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

Bitcoin Alpha explores the mainstream adoption of Bitcoin as CNBC analysts predict $500,000 price targets and major institutions embrace cryptocurrency. The discussion covers BlackRock's iBit ETF success, Rick Edelman's 10-40% allocation recommendations, and Figma's $100 million Bitcoin treasury strategy. The team analyzes Trump's fiscal policies, deficit spending, and Federal Reserve dynamics while examining Bitcoin dominance versus altcoins. Topics include rare earth materials policy, industrial reshoring, inflation concerns, and the social contagion effect driving corporate Bitcoin adoption across Silicon Valley and traditional finance sectors.

The following is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed as financial advice. This discussion is a presentation by 1031, the leading institutional investor focused on the Bitcoin ecosystem. 1031 has over 10 years of experience in Bitcoin and has deployed nearly $150 million into the leading opportunities in the space. To learn more, visit 1031.vc. Well, I am a firm believer that it's going much, much higher from here. Think about corporate adoption. Corporate adoption is probably only about 2%. Central banks, only about 3%. Those are both going higher, much higher. Retail investors going much higher. So look at it through, I'll leave off with this, look at it through the market cap of Bitcoin. That's around 2 trillion, let's say. Look at the market cap of gold. That's around $20 trillion. Maybe it doesn't have to be gold, but if it closes the gap to 50%, you're looking at $500,000 per Bitcoin. And I do think that

in the eye shot, you're looking at $250,000, $350,000 pretty easily for crypto. There's a couple of things, a couple of hurdles, but I think those days of it losing 80% of its value and then rallying up are long gone there's too many people that are looking for the asset john you are the artisanal curator of the list and the cold opens you you picked this this week why is that yeah i i have been known for my uh my dank cold open selections so hopefully this one qualifies um random uh random boomer on cnbc says bitcoin's going up yeah huge buckle up no one's never going down, he said. No, I mean, I think it stuck out to me just because I think it's emblematic of a shift that I think is important to keep in mind. If you're in Bitcoin, if you've

been looking at Bitcoin for a while, if you've owned it for a while, or if you're coming to it kind of for the first time, this cycle is seeing it break 100K. Regardless, I think it's important to look at a clip like that and remember what it says about where we are. You're living in a timeline where, Grant, to your point, your average boomer CNBC talking head is without any kind of reservation just on the midday show or Fast Money or whatever it was, telling people he's very convinced that Bitcoin is going to a price target that $500,000, that would have made most traditional finance folks, you know, laugh you out of the room just a few years ago. I mean, a couple of years ago, we were at the, you know, the bottom of the 22 cycle, the blowups,

post FTX. A lot of those same CNBC boomers were telling you that Bitcoin was finally dead. This is finally the end. No coming back from this. And now here they are having capitulated like everyone does and floating that, you know, Bitcoin should get to, you know, gold parity, maybe not quite gold parity, but close to there in the next few years. And there are too many people looking at it for it to have an 80% drawdown again, which by the way, I'll take the under on that. But we're just in a, in a stage where that kind of viewpoint that again would have been like Bitcoin Twitter or like Bitcoin talk forum, like fan fiction, like five years ago is just a run of the mill thing that a mainstream guy on CNBC says. Now it's, it's, you don't even

bat an eye at it right that would have been like the the headline you know that fed bitcoin twitter for days a few like last cycle right now it's it's basically just you know it's wallpaper right it's it's something you can kind of look at and then immediately scroll past so just to frame up you know that's where we are right now bitcoin's made an all-time high another new all-time high over 120k and no one even really thinks it's interesting that cnbc guys are telling you it's going to 500k plus yeah welcome to the party pal great to have you people have been saying that but yeah i mean it's he got a lot of things wrong i mean he also said that central bank did he say central bank adoptions at like two or three percent is that what he said or was it in reference to

something else he said institutional adoption is three percent if he said the central bank comment i missed that but yeah if so that's not that it's not not correct i actually ran the uh ran some central bank analysis i talked with a swiss bitcoiner this morning on tftc the swiss national bank does have i believe 184 million dollars worth of mstr stock on its balance sheet uh norges bank which is norway's central bank holds uh about 500 million dollars worth of mstr saudi central bank has 25 000 uh shares of mstr and there's a few others with de minimis exposure so if that's what he's determining to be like central bank adoption of bitcoin maybe that's the bone we'll throw in there okay yeah steve grasso if you're out there i apologize no but i

think the overarching thing to take from this i the phrase i kept thinking about john as you were explaining why you pick this as the cold open is like death by a thousand cuts and death to the fiat boomer having to capitulate that bitcoin is a thing by a thousand cuts over 16 years i I think – I don't want to say it's safe to say, but we may have reached the point where the thousandth cut has been slashed into the body of the fiat boomer. And they're being forced to recognize that Bitcoin is a thing that is not going away and something that they have to deal with and reorient their world view around. Yeah. I mean, you can't underrate the power of social consensus as it relates to especially the way that I think successful people with a lot of wealth and established careers, especially, you know, there are a lot of those out there that have worked really hard to reach that place in life. Um, it's really tough, I think, for someone in that position to take like an extremely variant viewpoint on something like magic internet money, like Bitcoin.

Um, and so it just takes, you know, going around in the round on the mountain, you know, up and up and up over time, kind of passing the same point, but from a higher and higher perspective each time, um, you need these, you need these touch points and you need to see like these constant, you know, to use your phrase, you do death by a thousand cuts of like your friends your peers your colleagues all kind of like simultaneously slowly shifting in a certain direction like um that's that's what's necessary ultimately to turn the aircraft carrier of uh those that have the most wealth in society towards something like bitcoin and and i think yeah it's it's pretty clearly happening it's it's slower than a lot of us

would like or hope for or expect maybe but uh yeah clips like that i think are just we're seeing you know one of those pretty much every day now if not more and i think that definitely tells you something about the way that the the boomer for lack of a better word kind of zeitgeist is shifting well this is a perfect segue into the next topic and we have a chart for it and this i think whether it's that spiraling upwards trajectory that you described which i think is much more palatable than death 5 000 cuts or something as visually stunning as this chart like I mean, you look at this chart, look and pull it up, the iBit chart we put in the chat, and you just look at the success of iBit in the first year and 10 days and all the other

Bitcoin ETFs versus some of the largest ETFs that have ever been launched. And it's pretty astonishing how quickly the iBit ETF got to $80 billion compared to some of BlackRock's other large ETFs. We're talking about 1,200 days here, four years faster than the second, more than four years faster than the second largest ETF. Yeah, and I think it's important to realize when you look at that, too, like you could maybe write some of that off as, well, yeah, like Bitcoin's kind of just ripped since the ETFs were launched to some extent. So it's just getting the benefit of price appreciation. But a lot of it is organic inflows. I think the complex overall has taken in over $50 billion of net inflows.

That's new money flowing in and that's net of GBTC outflows, which I think were like, you know, a $30 billion headwind, maybe $20, $30 billion. Have to go back and look at that. But that was a huge headwind to it. So all that is to say, like, yeah, this is getting some benefit. I bet and the others are getting some benefit here from price appreciation, you know, being very rapid on Bitcoin versus things like the S&P. Um, but a huge amount of this is just net new organic, uh, long demand flowing, um, rotating out of, you know, other things and into IBIT and other ETFs. Um, and I think it's, you know, the other headline that it's not, uh, it's related to

this that we saw, you know, the last week or two, not represented obviously by this chart. But I bet for BlackRock now, as reported, drives more revenue to BlackRock than the revenue they get from the fees on their S&P ETF, which is pretty remarkable, right? Like the S&P is the de facto savings account essentially for most of the United States, at least most of the United States that has not adopted Bitcoin yet. And granted, BlackRock doesn't administer, they don't known VOO or SPY, which are the two biggest, you know, by far S&P ETFs. So their version of that is not nearly as big as the biggest out there, but it's, it's, it's pretty wild again, just like frame up where we are, right? Like a year, we're a year and a half into these things launching and

already, even on a basis of what their fee is still like 21 bps, right? I think that's probably going up over time, but for now it's like a very low fee. Um, and you know, it's, it's already driving revenues in excess of what they're, what they're, uh, clipping off the, their S and P ETF. Um, so just to, as, as we get bored with price action going sideways, sometimes as we get bored with being in between 110 and 120 K or whatever the range happens to be just again, remember, remember where we are. So you're already bored. You're just, as we're bored right now with price going sideways we haven't had a new all-time high in 24 hours i mean it's there's nothing going on well i i think eric buchanis the black bloomberg etf analyst said yesterday that it's the most

profitable not only more profitable the s p etf but the most profitable etf this year for black rock which is stunning and if you're pointing out the all-time high like we didn't even mention it yet on the show but we surpassed 123 000 earlier this week we've corrected a bit hovering uh in the mid 16 116 000 right on 117 000 it seems like the coiling that we experienced for the first half of the year has broken out to the upside we'll see how much further it goes from here but i certainly get the sense having been in bitcoin for 12 years that we're beginning to enter one of those phases that could end in some euphoria at some point later this year and that's just another factor driving the inability of for lack of a better term i guess we're running

with the the fiat boomer tradfi guy to to ignore bitcoin any longer and i think this is um a headline that came out last week that proves the point is only going to accelerate the social adoption of Bitcoin, at least being socially for Bitcoin, because it's pretty clear, we said this a year ago, that the career risk today is to not have exposure to Bitcoin or, number two, recognize that it is a thing that's here to say. Rick Edelman, who is vaunted as the king of the RIA world, came out with some pretty bullish allocation recommendations for people looking to get exposure to Bitcoin. Yeah. So if I have it right, Rick Edelman, who runs an RIA or network of RIAs managing collectively $300 billion of AUM, like roughly give or take, is now out there

telling people again with a straight face and making this recommendation very seriously that portfolios should have anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of an allocation to as he calls it crypto yeah here we go um and so again like this is the kind of thing where you know this isn't like your uh wealth management friend who was kind of a libertarian in college and he runs like a small book in in your hometown and he wants to you know find a way to put one percent of his client's uh net worth in into bitcoin right which he'll then rebalance he'll be half he'll have to rebalance when it you know doubles or whatever like this is a very different kind of you know weight behind a recommendation like this and to make it you know aggressively and publicly you

know 10 to 40 these are um we've said it on the show before but everyone you know seems to be whether it's uh rick edelman or larry think everyone kind of goes through this progression with Bitcoin of, you know, starting seeing it first as like a flyer, um, you put, you know, uh, 10 grand into it maybe. And then you think, well, I'll put one to 2% of my portfolio in it. And then it just, you know, it creeps up you both in terms of its natural price appreciation, but also like you, you start to want more and more of it in the portfolio. It starts to look more and more like the best risk adjusted bet. And before you know it, it's, you know, something like, uh, you know, this level of an allocation and that's how the talk track has been from all

the, uh, our, our CNBC talking heads and from, you know, Larry Fink and, and major kind of asset management leaders. Um, so this is probably the most extreme example of that phenomenon that I've seen yet of publicly calling for portfolios to kind of move in that direction. Um, but yeah, just yet another kind of data point that we can stack up, uh, in, in favor of this idea that we're, we, you know, we're just going to slowly grind higher and higher, both in terms of price and, social acceptance among large asset managers. One more social acceptance data point. Logan, pull up the tweet. I'll just put it in the chat. The other John Arnold also came out with some pretty nonchalant views on Bitcoin. John, you were sharing this. You wrote about it collectively.

The two John Arnolds are worth multiple billions of dollars. This is very good to see that we have that collective amount of wealth being this bullish on bitcoin but i think again john arnold prolific hedge fund manager philanthropist came out he i guess he was just calling out a lot of the the froth that he sees in the market and highlighting juxtapositions that exist and misconceptions people have about where they should be allocating money and he has a line in here about spec live tokens over bitcoin it's like implicitly saying that bitcoin is a safe investment that people should probably have in their portfolio but people feel compelled to go out in the risk curve and speculate with crypto tokens yeah i mean just even like um i you know i i share

a name with the guy and we we share alma maters as well um at vanderbilt so a lot of a lot of connections there in addition to the you know the overlap in our net worths um but uh yeah i think it's that that tweet was interesting to me because if you look at it it's the bitcoin comparison is just kind of wedged among like a bunch of other things you know he's talking about like kind of um you know new up-and-coming artists versus like you know your established artists that have been around you their paintings have been loved for hundreds of years or whatever and he's talking about um i can't remember all the other kind of examples he throws out i recommend you go back and look at the list, but basically like among the, among all these different examples of kind of

juxtaposing, uh, speculative, uh, high velocity, trash economy type, you know, things that people are increasingly getting into. Um, you know, he has speculative tokens versus Bitcoin and just the idea that, you know, a very, you know, successful again, kind of mainstream billionaire who's been successful in, um, the world of traditional finance and is now a full-time philanthropist who generally, you know, if you look at kind of his viewpoints, I certainly wouldn't say he kind of leans in kind of the libertarian direction. This is not like, you know, a MAGA guy by any means or something like that, that someone like that would come out and just kind of take it for granted that among all these lists

of kind of speculative things versus established things like Bitcoin, clearly it belongs among kind of these established assets or these established themes. You know, again, just a couple of years ago, there was no differentiation or thought given to how Bitcoin might relate to or be different from the rest of crypto. But the fact that, you know, it's just it's seeped into people's consciousness now that it is kind of like the boring thing in the cryptocurrency space. And it's something that you can kind of think of as at the very least, it's probably not going away. Right. Whether you think it's worth, you know, five hundred thousand or a million or ten million or twenty one million, as Michael Saylor says, or beyond that, it's tough to argue now that it's just going away or going to evaporate. And that, again, is like the subtle indication of the slow sea change among kind of the wealthiest and most successful people among us on Bitcoin. Yeah, he seems like he understands, you know, the difference between Bitcoin and everything else.

and would be like the language suggests that he may approach it with a longer term perspective rather than like this instant gratification point of view um i think the comment or the you know the headlines from the edelman uh article you know it suggests i think it's I mean, that is it's pretty crazy that you see the evolution like the shift and someone going up that curve and maybe years ago suggesting an allocation that was much lower and gradually increasing it. And I think we would probably argue those recommendations aren't crazy. You know, you'll find plenty of people who have studied Bitcoin for a long time and they consider Bitcoin a risk off asset, that everything else is risk on assets. And they view the right allocation as something significantly higher than 40 percent. And there's plenty of people that view the right allocation as 100 percent.

And I guess my point is, we probably wouldn't argue that those are crazy allocations, but I think it's being set up in a way, like if you think about the guy on CNBC and this idea of the social consensus, now there's more of these TradFi people who are starting to pay attention and starting to believe that having exposure makes sense and believing that it's going to keep going up and believing that there's never going to be an 80% drawdown. I think it's setting up for a lot of people in this group to get absolutely wrecked. I think the 10% to 40% allocation can make sense, but I think you have to approach it knowing that it's a long-term allocation and that you're not worried about instant gratification. You're not concerned about instant paper wealth loss because it's not about the amount of dollars that you have. It's about the amount of Bitcoin.

So someone who might take these recommendations, they might be watching CNBC and seeing, you know, it's going up to 500,000. Someone seeing, well, you got to put 10 to 40 percent in, but recognizing what's behind the other John Arnold's comments that we live in this instant gratification society, like the dopa monster, whatever he called it. I think that group who decides to finally dip their toes into Bitcoin, they're likely not to approach it with the long term perspective that it will require. even if those recommendations make sense. Yeah, this reminds me of a conversation I had a month or two ago with Sean Bill and Adam Back from Blockstream. And Sean, who comes from the traditional pension world, he made it a point to basically explain when they're going out and pitching pensions today about an allocation to Bitcoin. They're strongly arguing against rebalancing quarterly or even annually because Bitcoin's about time in the market, not timing

in the market. And so to your point, Grant, I think a lot of these institutional investors are going to have to learn the hard lesson of working outside their traditional processes of portfolio management process with Bitcoin specifically to go into it with the knowledge that they shouldn't rebalance for probably at least one cycle, maybe two, if they want to get the full, if they want to capture the full value appreciation of Bitcoin and the benefits of that for the people there is money they're managing. Yeah. Yeah. The other, the other dynamic that I just found interesting, which is, is related is when people in the U S were celebrating new all-time highs you were seeing some of the uh commentary on social media saying well we haven't

hit an all-time high yet and you know name your other currency that you know bitcoin hit an all-time high in the argentinian peso and then it hit an all-time high in the u.s dollar but there were some currencies that hadn't yet which was a reflection of the strength of you know relative strength of fiat currencies to one another. And it highlights the importance of maybe looking at it differently. You're pricing it like the price of Bitcoin priced in something that's deflating or inflating. That may not be the right way to think about it. I mean, Bitcoin priced in gold is certainly not at an all-time high right now. Yeah, I think we're just bumping up on uh, key resistance levels. Um, not that I, uh, am anything like a TA expert. That's something,

a chart that I check every day, but, um, you saw Ter's tweet then. Yeah. Oh, did he have a tweet about it? Yeah. We're about to, we're at those resistant levels. Got it. Um, I've definitely seen tweets about it in the last few days, um, as I'm sure a lot of our listeners have, but yeah, I mean, I think it's a great point grant, um, that you gotta, you gotta check the denominator and know what you're pricing and it reminds me of the uh the weimar republic the famous weimar republic uh gold chart um as you know gold goes parabolic in um in marks uh it increasingly you know makes less and less sense to you know even have a price in that denomination and certainly don't think we're anywhere close to that with with the dollar but um the same dynamic applies

on on smaller scales too well to this point like i think we all as individuals and as a fund a 1031 think this way like you have to shift from fiat gains that are realized by your bitcoin exposure and just think about your bitcoin exposure overall like how much of the 21 million supply do you have as an individual as a corporation as a fund whatever it may be and like really use that barometer like what slice of the overall pie are you getting and do you think you should be comfortable with yeah i think that actually speaks to to like grant the longer term mentality that you're exhorting people to have um i actually i'm somewhat bullish actually that you shouldn't fade i don't i definitely don't think we're past like 80 drawdowns like

there's gonna be you know there may be a lot of tops they're gonna be uh levered games being played and and bitcoin will continue to remain crazy for you know many years to come um so definitely don't expect uh no drawdowns anymore but i do think people shouldn't fade the power of like we keep using this term boomer it's not really fair i just mean like anyone who has like you know an ira or like a brokerage account right a lot of generations of people from like you know generations prior to us to millennials to boomers even younger people are coming into the workforce like we've been trained for like decades to to buy the dip right and to just like keep dca'ing Like, there's so many accounts out there that aggressively buy all dips and have been trained to do that for the last, like, 20 years in the stock market.

And I don't have the data in front of me, but you should go look up how active, you know, retail investors, so-called, were during, you know, Liberation Day chaos and how aggressively they were buying. And thus far, that seems to have worked out kind of because we can talk about this later, but the system, it kind of doesn't function if the stock market doesn't continue to make gains every year. Um, but people have been trained that that is kind of like what you do to build long-term wealth. Like you don't necessarily, uh, think about how much the S and P is up this year. So you can go have like a, you know, a nice like ski trip. Like, yeah, maybe you'll carve off like some of your gains in a given year to, you know, for your lifestyle, but people have been trained to just like set it and forget it, put it

away, keep accumulating, keep DCA in, um, in their equity portfolios. And I think with the advent of the ETFs and also just like easier and easier ways to access Bitcoin, a lot of which are provided by the companies that we that we support at 1031, whether that's Strike or Unchained or many others. There are increasingly these ways to just apply that exact same kind of mentality to Bitcoin, right? To set and forget an auto DCA, apportion some of your income each month to acquiring more Bitcoin, to acquiring a greater share of that fixed $29 million pie, and to think of it as a retirement asset, right? Or this is going to pay for my kid's college, or this is going to do something for me in 20 years. I'm not going to touch it for a very long time. I just want to build it and build it and build it. the the vehicles to be able to do that um you know they have greater and lesser kind of sovereignty

trade-offs and greater and lesser cost and all these different kind of things we could talk about but like all those vehicles are just uh only expanding um in a way that i think is different certainly from prior cycles and logan if you pull up this other chart um this bdcd chart that i put in the uh the chat i think this is relevant to uh as as context for like this whole conversation with kind of your as we think about boomer investors retail investors however you want to everyone think about it just kind of the mainstream coming to bitcoin um this is a chart of bitcoin dominance which is basically bitcoin market cap relative to the market caps of all other cryptocurrencies you can define it different ways and it's not like a fantastic metric

necessarily on kind of short-term basis but the long-term trend is really interesting because you have like what you're seeing is the rick edelman's of the world the steve grasso's of the world the John Arnolds of the world, increasingly having this differentiated view of Bitcoin and getting comfortable with it and getting comfortable with the idea it can go to 500,000 or a million or whatever as an asset that just grinds up and up over time. All that's happening, not against the backdrop of what we saw in 2021, where all of the broader crypto complex was just blowing up. People were buying everything that wasn't tied down, anything they could get their hands on, Dogecoin, FTT token, you know, you name it, Terraluna, you name it. Like what this chart

is showing is that in 21, Bitcoin dominance just fell off, fell off a cliff as the whole like broader crypto ecosystem kind of blew up alongside, you know, Bitcoin's price run. And actually in many cases, you know, for certain pockets of time outpaced it. And what we're seeing now is like people are getting more and more comfortable with Bitcoin and only Bitcoin, right? They're only really adding to their Bitcoin positions. They're not really, you know, buying Bitcoin and 20 other cryptocurrencies to kind of like, quote unquote, diversify. The only thing they're talking about on CNBC mostly is Bitcoin. And, you know, the, the, the only ETFs that are really winning are Bitcoin ETFs. And, you know, you can, you can see it just borne out to some extent in this chart.

So it's, it's a, it's an interesting data point for the backdrop as we consider the, the mainstreaming of of bitcoin and only bitcoin so this period right uh in 2021 when you see that coin dominance take a sharp decline i mean that was a time when the price was just booming right yeah so i'm curious what do you think like let's let's just say we're still in the early innings of where price could go here. And again, priced in dollars, I mean, it's like perhaps a less relevant measuring stick. But we haven't yet had the Fed cut rates. So we're still, I would argue, likely very early in this run. So let's say the price starts to run from here. Do you think that we see a sharp decline in this chart?

or are you arguing that this time is different and now everyone's recognizing that um you know bitcoin is the clear winner well i'll just say i'm not necessarily arguing this time is different i'm arguing that i'm arguing that we've made like substantial all-time highs right against the backdrop against what to me looks like a pretty different backdrop um and actually i mean i i'm even more bullish on bitcoin to the point that you're making as well that we're seeing all this happen with benchmark interest rates at still multi-decade highs and the money printer not being aggressively turned on and liquidity not being aggressively pumped yet into the system to nearly the same degree that it was in 2020 and 21. But Marty, what do you think?

I was just going to say Bitcoin, the Bitcoin is a low interest rate phenomenon. I mean, has completely been dismantled over the last three years um there is an archetype of tradfi investor and crypto investor that straddles the world of tradfi and crypto that are really beginning to get out there and beat the drum about stable coins and ethereum specifically so who knows it'll be if it will be a last gas pump for ethereum but there does seem to be some institutional momentum in terms of pushing that narrative um we can get into the reasons why i think uh it's not going to happen ultimately maybe there will be some price appreciation but will ethereum get widely adopted and implemented into the global financial system i'm highly

skeptical of that and i think it's funny that the tradfi uh supporters of ethereum this time around really pushing stable coins where when if you understand how the dynamics between each layer one and the layer twos work we've seen this many times again and this is why you see stable coin chain hopping happening it's like ethereum is a victim of its own success if people begin to use it more gas fees go up and the economics the economic feasibility of actually using stable coins at scale sort of diminishes rapidly as as activity increases um so i could see that but no i i think i agree overall that there has never been a clear demarcation between bitcoin and and broader crypto and i actually think if any of you who are listening to this have not seen

alex gladstein's presentation at the bitcoin policy institute summit uh last month go check it out because i think he made a really good point in the second half of his uh speech which was we need to get to the point where uh if you're describing crypto a lot of times these pundits and tradfi guys will say crypto and they really mean bitcoin and a few altcoins they should be specific are you talking about bitcoin are you talking about ethereum are you talking about solana god forbid are you talking about ripple like be specific because there are incredible vast differences between each protocol i think we're pretty wholly convinced that the bitcoin is the only one worth i mean i could say with a hundred percent conviction it is the only one

worth paying attention to and building around for the long term but i do think this conflation of crypto uh and the the pundits and uh traditional finance people really trying to push these these narratives these days not being specific is not only doing them a disservice but but their end customers their end clients at the end of the day as well yeah i think there's uh this this cycle there seems to be a bit more of a gravitational pull towards bitcoin rather than some of the other assets you know although i would note on i guess it must have been yesterday that the former ceo Barclays was on CNBC talking about a treasury play for some random crypto coin. So I think, you know, perhaps there's still going to be some of that, but it feels like a lot of the opportunists

who are recognizing a cyclical time in the market where liquidity is starting to become available, markets are loosening up a bit, that, you know, those type of people are gravitating, you know, there may be more of a gravitational pull towards Bitcoin because of some of the opportunities like the Bitcoin treasury companies, for example, where, which, which those, you know, some of them do feel like cycles of the past where, you know, 2016, 2017, like the ICO boom, and, you know, you could get into the ICOs early and get an early allocation and get a discounted price relative to what the rest of the public was going to get. And a lot of those same themes, you know, you sort of they rhyme in some of these treasury plays that you see.

Well, you're you're able to invest at one times now before it trades up and you can get an early allocation through the investment banks before they begin trading on the public market. So I think, you know, some of that capital and attention that otherwise would have gone elsewhere seems to be going more into Bitcoin, which will ultimately have, you know, a positive short term impact on the price. Now, how that plays out with some of these treasury companies, I think that remains to be seen. But I think we're all agreeing that Bitcoin certainly has probably a bit more support from a relative market share perspective than it has in the past. Yeah. To really tie up the section of external anecdotal social indicators, talking about a lot of traditional finance, people who are throwing their support behind Bitcoin. But I do think it's important to note, this is a headline that came out, I believe, two or three weeks ago. It was really pleasantly surprising for me to see, which was Figma, which filed an S-9 to go public after the regulators under the Biden administration sort of prevented them from getting acquired by Adobe, merging with Adobe. They went back to the sidelines, sort of buttoned up everything, and are now set to go public.

Figma is one of the darlings of Silicon Valley, used by many designers and developers. I believe the stat in their S9 is 95% of Fortune 500 companies leverage Figma to some degree to do some product design and prototyping. And it was disclosed in that S9 filing that they have $70 million worth of iBit shares on their balance sheet and have the ability and intention to buy $30 million worth of spot Bitcoin to put on their balance sheet as well. So that was a pleasant surprise for me to see an established Silicon Valley unicorn on the cusp of going public, basically letting the world know due to the process of going public that they have a good amount of Bitcoin on their balance sheet. A hundred billion dollars is nothing to scoff at. Yeah. And it's again like it, you know, it made headlines in kind of Bitcoin circles and it was on Bitcoin Twitter. It was on Noster. You know, we we talked about it internally. But the the interesting thing to me, again, is kind of like these other points that we're highlighting, like it's kind of just in the background.

It's just like an assumed thing that, oh, they have like, you know, of course, a tech company would have some Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Like that's, it's not, uh, thought of as some like Utrecht thing that needs to, you know, that would be like critiqued by, um, you know, you're talking heads on CNBC or, you know, Wall Street analysts or something. Um, it's kind of just kind of came and went right as a headline. Um, so it's, again, I think just indicative of it's great to see, but it's also great to see in some ways that, um, the response to it was like somewhat muted. I think people are like that means partially people are underpricing, you know, the people are not pricing in the degree to which Bitcoin is becoming a standard treasury asset like that is not fully reflected in the price by any means.

But I think also the kind of the lack of reaction outside of the Bitcoin echo chamber, at least that I saw it to me also signals this is increasingly becoming something that it's not going to be on every company's balance sheet. But it also isn't, you know, it's not a meme anymore that a major tech company going public has, you know, some Bitcoin on its balance sheet. It's not something that you're going to see kind of, you know, mocked on, you know, The Tonight Show or something like that. It's just something that's, you know, a standard thing that a company like this would do. Yeah, I mean, I thought this headline was really interesting. For all the reasons you guys mentioned, I was just Googling right now to see how much money had they raised. Because one of the things that I didn't see anyone talk about, and I didn't pay a ton of attention to this, but it was more about just thinking about the implications of them having Bitcoin exposure on the balance sheet and, you know, potentially the intention to have more, right? But like, how did they go about doing that?

Well, it needs to be something that not just the management team was interested in, but also the board. I mean, so according to my quick search, perhaps they've raised over 300 million dollars. I mean, this is a this is a quintessential, like traditional Silicon Valley venture capital funded startup. So like, well, OK, peel back the layer who like who was involved in this decision and would have signed off on it. Obviously, they would have multiple people who are just sit in their executive leadership roles. But according to the S-1, I'll just read the quick bios of the people who are on the board, which presumably these are all people who signed off on this idea. There's a partner from Kleiner Perkins. There's a partner from Greylock.

There's a partner from Sequoia. So three big brand name Silicon Valley venture funds. uh there's a member of the board who is the cfo of cisco there's a member of the board who's the ceo of service now a massive public company like workforce a workflow management company um and then also index ventures another like big name venture capital firm so there's that's four big name VC funds right there that have all been like, you know, it's one individual partner sitting around the table. So not necessarily a firm blessing by their underlying management companies, but I just think that's a really interesting dynamic.

Yeah. And it makes you wonder how many other of these now private or unicorn level Silicon Valley backed companies have a material amounts of Bitcoin and how many need to either get acquired or go public and disclose this information before it becomes table stakes for any of these emergent tech companies to have Bitcoin treasuries. Well, the other grant, the other thing that it makes me think of, it's interesting is like we forget or it's easy to forget after the last decade how forward thinking a lot of your like silicon valley stalwarts were on bitcoin in like the early 2010s i mean mark andreessen had a piece on it in like 2013 or 14 um uh david sacks was really early into bitcoin and you know has tweeted over the course of the last decade about you know

kind of grokking bitcoin's differentiation versus everything else um and there are various others we could certainly point to uh peter teal uh was a big kind of early bitcoin holder and proponent um but over the last like five to eight years you know traditional v silicon valley vc has become very has become synonymous with you know uh shit coining essentially right um looking for the the next kind of altcoin project or the next project that's going to have a native token that will leverage this or that blockchain um usually some permissioned blockchain and usually the you know the vc has has gotten kind of early economics and early allocation in the uh the pre-mine for whatever the token is and so it's interesting that like silicon valley over the last decade or so has

become this hotbed this breeding ground for the altcoin industry and the kind of uh blockchain not Bitcoin industry. And yet here we are kind of with a company like this, you know, going public with some major Silicon Valley VCs on the cap table and on the board. And what are they holding on their balance sheet? Like there's one crypto asset that has stood the test of time that is worthy of being on this company's balance sheet. You know, it's not Ethereum, it's not Solana, it's not the thousand other kind of proprietary tokens that have been launched by a lot of these firms you know directly or indirectly to you know support their portfolio companies it's it all just comes back to bitcoin right um so it's it's an interesting kind of full circle moment to uh for

uh to to see kind of your your blue chip silicon valley names uh taking company public taking kind of a a major you know investment of theirs public and the one thing that you know is on the balance sheet of that company from the the digital asset ecosystem is is bitcoin and bitcoin only yeah i want to please forgive me for confusing uh s1 for s9 i have bitcoin miners on the mind at all time i was saying that earlier but uh no to that to that point it's like number one again how many how many of these companies out there that are doing this already and grant to your point um i believe if i recall correctly in the s1 they had 70 million dollars of ibit exposure and the intent to buy 30 million of spot bitcoin collectively 100 million dollars

and as you highlighted they've only ever raised 300 million dollars obviously they're um a very profitable company right now so they have cash flows extending runway but i think using that sort of barometer like they've raised 300 million and a third of what they've ever raised is held in held in bitcoin or bitcoin proxy exposure via the etf is is pretty interesting And with that, we'll transition more to the fiscal side of things, which is hot in the news right now and has been since our last episode, which is the big, beautiful bill. um after some contention some back and forth some re-votes officially passes uh and the deficits are projected to go higher after trump ran on a campaign of the department of edu uh the department of um government efficiency department of government efficiency yes it's so irrelevant

you've already forgotten about yes exactly um but this is the big big topic here it's uh a lot of how would you describe this john i i think a lot of literal sort of backflipping on policy decisions whether it's uh it's the intention to not cut deficits and really blow it out turn it on turbo um and then the other thing which you have on the list as well which we could probably tie these two together is his besent beginning to signal that he's okay staying on the front end the yield curve when um the trump administration came into office they were berating janet yellen for over indexing on the front end of the curve and now it seems like they're making an about face about that as well right now yeah i mean look like i think we were saying this on prior episodes

like i think we all mostly took the under on doge and i think we all felt like it was probably only ever going to go this way you know that that chart uh is interesting to me because it outlines all these different paths that the deficit could take under the one big beautiful bill um but if you were to look at it the the blue line on the bottom like with which is basically the the path of the deficit um or the debt to gdp debt to gdp over time without the big beautiful bill you know it's still going up dramatically and that's in like a relatively conservative uh estimate that I believe excludes the impact of like potential recessions, which would cause, you know, increase in, um, deficit spending. It's, it's, uh, very likely, uh, not thinking about, I think that

that's just like the CBO baseline estimate, which is almost certainly not contemplating, uh, increases, aggressive increases in defense spending, definitely giving, uh, you know, generous credit for, uh, you know, entitlement spending that's going to have to happen. when Social Security finally runs down the trust fund, which, by the way, I guess we should say one of the headlines that has popped up since our last episode is that's now going to happen a couple of years sooner than expected. So I think we're looking at depletion of that in 2034. So you put you pile all these things on and you look at us coming into the Trump administration well over 100 percent debt, GDP interest becoming a larger line item for the federal budget than

defense spending. You look at all those dynamics and it's like, OK, the Doge narrative was was nice. And yeah, maybe 20 years ago we could have pulled it off. But it's just it was never going to happen in the way that was being promoted. And it just like it was I think it was obvious if you listen to anything Trump said about what he wanted to do with with policy that that he could pay a lip service to cutting spending. But it almost certainly was was never going to happen to get, you know, multiple trillions of dollars out of the budget like, you know, Elon wanted to do. So all that is to say, here we are. And it seems pretty clear to me and I think to a lot of us and to an increasing number of investors that the plan now, like pretty explicitly is like

Doge didn't work. You know, how how committed were we ever to that in the first place? I don't know. But that didn't work. The tariff shock didn't really like get long term rates lower. We didn't scare people into into bonds and treasuries if that was ever the plan. So that's you know, we're still sitting here sitting here today, 10 years at four and a half. Hasn't been much lower than that. Thirty years, like so close to five. Um, so the, the plan then seems to be, uh, much more shifting, much more to what, uh, Besson has talked about with, um, trying to outgrow the debt, right. Trying to turn on the, the afterburners and spend as much as you need to, um, keep, uh,

incremental debt issuance, uh, to, to, toward the front end and the way that Janet Yellen, uh, decided she needed to do. Um, maybe, maybe Besson's kind of, whether he knew it or not going in, he certainly seems to be discovering now that, uh, that's, uh, she, she did that for a reason. We may all criticize her for it, but, uh, the, the treasury market was, um, giving her kind of only one option if she wanted to continue to fund the government. And so he's, you know, picked up that, that baton and is running with it. And, um, I think the, you know, we can, we can make criticisms of all that and, and, you know, wish it were something different. And I think everyone on this podcast,

probably many of our listeners want that, want it to be different and are not necessarily interested in seeing this trajectory continue. But as it stands, I just encourage people to think about if the explicit plan now is we're going to outgrow the debt, we're just going to grow GDP faster than the accumulation of debt and hopefully try to keep yields in check with front end issuance, kind of like an emerging market and do issuance on that front end, which is much more stimulative and much more kind of, you know, money like like, you know, a four week or an eight week or three month note. Those are much more kind of money like issuances than a 10 year note or 10 year bond.

If all that's happening, I just encourage people to ask themselves what that means for risk assets and what that means, especially for hard assets like gold to some extent, and especially for Bitcoin, if that's the environment that we are aggressively and explicitly kind of running into now. Yeah. And then on top of all this, you have Trump almost daily now at this point getting on true social and berating Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. You had Bill Pulte from FHA come out with a one word press release saying that he that Jerome Powell is hindering the ability of Americans to buy houses because mortgage rates are too high. and then at the same time you have inflation still below the history or still above excuse me the historical two percent target i believe the last print i saw was 2.6 there was talk of

switching the target at three percent so maybe um the trump administration is taking that number and saying you're below your new historical target uh and i i just worry and who knows i don't know if worry is the the right word but i think the consensus within the trump administration is that Jerome Powell either needs to lower rates or resign or get fired. It seems like they're looking for some sort of roundabout ways to fire him. I believe the Fed's building a new building or something like that. And the Trump administration is trying to figure out ways of that wasteful spending that could be deemed a fireable offense, which is crazy.

But long story short, it seems like their intent is to get rates lower as fast as possible with what i would imagine is the belief that it will help drag down the five excuse me the 10 year and the 30 year bond yields but i think people have amnesia like literally less than a year ago in september when jerome powell first lowered rates uh 100 bps 150 bps whatever he did in this couple of months like the yields went the other way they went up and i don't think there's a strong case to be made that that won't happen again this time around i think the the argument would be i agree with you if we had um a free and kind of unmanaged bond market and increasingly we already like for the last you know uh since

the beginning of the fomc we really haven't had that but certainly post-covid we you know we saw 2020 and 21 like we really didn't have it um and i think the the goal is ultimately going to be to move to a much more kind of Japanified system as it relates to kind of having an activist central bank that's going to do whatever it takes to fund the government and to, you know, to pin yields, right? So you can call that yield curve control or call it whatever you want, call it QE or call it some, you know, new made up acronym that they'll figure out this time. But I think the key is going to be like, they don't just need, I think you're right. They don't just need to get the Fed funds rate lower that's a part of it but they need an aggressive central bank that's going to play ball

and that's going to you know kick the balance sheet up another order of magnitude like like we did in 2020 and then like we did before that in in 08 right like um i think people i've i've started to kind of come around the viewpoint that people are maybe underestimating um how kind of shameless it can get in terms of what the what the fed can ultimately do in terms of growing its balance sheet just to make sure the rates stay where they need to stay. Um, and I think there's a lot more headroom to do that and to put it, put some crazy numbers out there to make sure it happens. Um, especially if Trump gets a guy in that seat, who's going to play ball, whether that's Kevin Warsh or Kevin Hassett or Scott Besson himself, um, or, you know, some, some unnamed

candidate, if you get the right guy in there, if you, you get people on sides, um, I think they can grow the balance sheet a lot to get what they need to get done. The question is just who pay, who pays for that you know it's not it's not free asset owners win from it bitcoin holders win from it gold holders equity holders etc real people who own their homes right with especially if they have cheap debt you know on top of it you know they they can all win from it um unfortunately it's going to be probably a worse deal for uh those that don't own many assets or those that are in kind of a net debt position and you know are struggling to pay for their groceries and struggling to you know pay for the basic things they need to support their families you know

that's, that's the release valve, right? It's, it's going to be, unfortunately, I think on the side of, you know, the currency. And I don't think we're heading into, I think we're far away from heading into kind of, you know, Weimar style hyperinflation. Um, it's a very different situation, but, um, I think, you know, the, the sacrifice is going to be, let it get uncomfortable for people for a while, let it get to like, you know, uh, mid to high single digit CPI prints, which really means like, you know, actual 15 percent, 20 percent annualized inflation, something like that. You know, no idea if that's exactly how it's going to play out. But if you look at just the way that, you know, Trump, Besant and the whole administration are operating right now with both the debt issuance and the commentary on the Fed,

it sure seems like the plan is just to pin yields and make non-asset owners take it on the chin, you know, yet again. send it on turbo as was said by elon musk earlier this year but at that point the i mean you you've smirked when you said besan but i think that interview on cnbc was incredibly telling and astonishing that he sort of would not answer the question of would you is there the potential that you could be the fed chair and the treasury secretary at the same time and i've had a lot of conversations on tftc over the last year where there are analysts like luke roman mill madison and others that are pretty wholly convinced that the the intent is to fully merge the fed and the treasury at some point during

this administration just so they have the japanese style control over the bond markets and in the Fed that that is necessary to do yield curve control. Yeah, increasingly, it just seems like it's the only it's the only path forward other than, you know, just truly let the bond market feel pain and have it go for a hard reset. But my sense is they're not looking to do that and totally blow up all U.S. hegemony and tell retirees to go take a hike and uh you know stop spending money on defense to uh counter china so i don't think that's the the path we're going to choose no i mean speaking of countering china you have this on the list this is interesting i didn't see it until you put it on the list did some research

on it but mt materials did a deal with the pentagon to become pentagon has become the largest shareholder mp materials the leading u.s rare earths miner uh signaling a shift of outright industrial policy. And then earlier today, I'm not sure if you saw this, John, but Apple signed a big deal with MP Materials too. So I guess one of the goals with this fiscal and economic policy of the Trump administration is, and obviously we see with tariffs and immigration policy, is to really try to reshore manufacturing,

bolster the U.S. jobs economy to ensure that if we are going to go through periods of higher inflation that americans are getting back to work and hopefully getting higher wage jobs and even just like basic access to to like to these materials and these minerals right like um if you look up you know what uh what industries kind of use and rely on different rare earth elements in different ways i mean it's like basically every physical industry out there like in some way and certainly like you know the semis um, you know, electrical infrastructure, uh, a lot of AI infrastructure is going to be relying on it. Um, a lot of, uh, defense, um, type infrastructure and, you know, weapons manufacturing,

you know, depends on, uh, rare earth inputs in some way. And, you know, right now, um, anyone who's kind of watching CNBC every day is getting hit with, you know, a headline every other day that there's some new export curve for rare earth materials out of China. China's leading supplier or at least one of the major suppliers of uh several key rare earth elements and um as the trade war has picked up that's obviously become a huge point of sensitivity and a huge sticking point and um you know a big leverage point um for china so interesting to to see this is kind of like if you're going to run this playbook that um the trump administration has decided they want to run this this does feel like uh an inevitable kind of element of something you

have to have, a leg you have to have in the stool is the ability to have access to the infrastructure that you will need to do the things you want to do to reshore, uh, to grow the manufacturing base. And even just to like, um, maintain a, a basic defense base that allows you to kind of defend your, your borders and, and wage your proxy wars, um, you know, with, without asking China for their permission or their help. Um, you know, there, there are a lot of, uh, reports. I don't, I don't have the data in front of me here, but, um, of the degree to which, you know, we've, uh, you know, run down like weapons stockpiles in the U S, um, shipping weapons to Ukraine or, um, how costly it was to do kind of the bombing run that we did in, um, Iran, uh, you know, a few weeks ago, um, with

the Israel Iran conflict. And, um, you just, you look at these situations and to the extent that you want to remain the global hegemon and you want to maintain a decent standard of living for, um, your citizens. So they won't, uh, vote you out at the midterms. You can't, uh, you can't suddenly have your entire access to key supply chain elements like this cut off. Um, and so it's just, it's, it's an interesting acknowledgement that this is strategically sensitive. We got to have it. It's a non-negotiable. So we're not going to nationalize this company. We're not going to nationalize this industry, but we are going to become, you know, the largest shareholder and um strike a very rich you know deal with them for um you know uh take or pay agreements and kind

of uh guaranteed offtake agreements if you look into the kind of the the details it's at least on on a top level view very very favorable to mp materials so um it's it's an interesting it's the latest salvo and like the the clearest indication i've seen yet of um a true like movement to explicit, uh, what you would call industrial policy. So explicitly kind of managing different key industries from kind of a federal like politburo, you know, level and having this very explicit public private partnership between key industrial players, um, which is kind of exactly what you'd expect to see in a situation where the, you know, we, we look at those budget lines that, that I, that we showed a few minutes ago. Um, if you're really kind of, uh, ripping

the band-aid off and running it hot running it turbo and you know trying to just grow as fast as you can and um pump as much stimulus as you can into the industries that you care about like you know the logical conclusion of that is is something like this um you know for for better and for worse probably yeah it's um i mean it's as we're moving away from completely you know globally connected economy into more survival of the fittest um you know everyone fends for themselves i mean that's the the extreme end but um it naturally means that uh there's going to be you know people people are trying to reshore manufacturing they're trying to get more control of natural resources can they do all this completely no but all of it it points to

inevitable um inflation like continuous debasement of the currency continuous deficit spending people are going to have to you know bolster their defense countries that that is going to have to bolster their defenses if you know they can't rely on other countries to protect them and everyone's starting to you know fend for themselves and i saw some interesting stats the other day, which was just highlighting the movements from the 2022 bear market lows of the markets to today. And from bear market lows of 2022, the S&P 500 up 80 percent, the NASDAQ up 120 percent. But like, where have we seen the gains? Well, NVIDIA, you guys probably know that stat right it's like 1500 but how about take a guess on palantir how much do you think palantir

is up it's up 2400 right so like these i think you're going to see more moves like this with continued spending continued event defense people trying to get access to some of these rare earth materials um it's uh it seems to be pointing in one direction and not to not to beat a dead horse but to bring it back to why we're all here um if if this continues right and you have this ongoing shift to a truly more multipolar world where you know to your point the the just-in-time inventory type uh approach to building industry right we've we've spent the last 30 years, at least in the U S and the West, um, kind of D stocking, uh, warehouses, you know, it's, it's been, you know, you've wanted to move toward like an asset light

model, like hold as little inventory as possible. And certainly there are like, you know, from a cashflow perspective reasons, you don't want to have, you know, too much, uh, aggressively tied up into inventory in any environment, but, you know, we've gotten to a point where, uh, and this was really exposed during COVID, um, it, the supply chains in the U S were operating on the assumption that at any moment you could get something from China or something from some international market where that we had effectively outsourced the, you know, the industry to in like two days, you know, two days or seven days or whatever. Like we had very smooth, um, supply chains, open, open sea lanes, open shipping lanes. Everyone got along, everyone kind of knew the

arrangement. Um, and then COVID happened and it was clear that, uh, you know, how rough it might look in the U S um, if we, if we couldn't rely on the just in time inventory framework, uh, for everything. And, you know, anyone who was around at that time will remember how hard it was and how long you had to wait to get, you know, just, uh, basic items that you would never think you'd have to wait on. Um, and that was really not even that, you know, we, we, we figured that out. And fortunately, you know, other than kind of like some, you know, sensitive medical equipment, you know, most people probably only just got inconvenienced by that. But it seems like we're moving more and more to a world where you definitely cannot assume that anything will show up at your door for, you know, a trivial price pretty much any time you order it. And so, you know, that's going to flow through to the heavy industry as well.

And in that world, that increasingly multipolar world, that's a that's a much lower trust world. It's a probably, as you say, Grant, a much more kind of inflationary world or just a world of where there's generally kind of higher prices than we're willing to pay there than we're used to paying for a lot of things, both kind of as retail end users and businesses. And in that world, it seems like they're in that that multipolar, low trust, highly inflationary world. It seems like there are certain assets that you really want to own. And I would highly encourage anyone to think about not financial advice, but consider the benefit of owning a neutral, decentralized, fixed 21 million supply asset that can be sent around the world for pennies, if that, at any time of day without permission or censorship. That may be a valuable asset to have in that environment. And if there's going to be increased demand for such an asset, what might it imply for the companies that are building the infrastructure, the products and services to make getting access and leveraging and utilizing that asset more easy? Might that be an interesting category of investment to consider?

It may just be. i mean to end on that note um i know we didn't decide exactly what we're going to talk what we wanted to talk about from our mid-year investor letter that we sent out to our lps last friday but i think i'm going to throw it to you too because you guys put in the yeoman's work to put it together the most beautiful letter that's ever been sent out by 1031 um i was proud of it and you guys should be extremely proud of it but felt good to get that out and i think that's one thing i guess i'll start with this like considering everything going on uh i feel incredibly fortunate and uh validated that we've made the decisions that we have to focus on our niche here

within bitcoin um because the companies are doing very well and bitcoin is a large factor in that particularly the Bitcoin treasury aspect that we've been very vociferous about as investors in terms of supporting companies, allocating a large portion of their raises and their cash flow to Bitcoin to sit in their treasury. yeah um i guess i would say in relation to like as we were aggregating our thoughts for like to put in perspective where we said obviously we all are very optimistic about the backdrop put aside like the macro situation is came you know it's pretty crazy and who knows where we're going to go from here but the backdrop specifically as it relates to bitcoin

is a positive one and there's not many places i would say not many uh industries where you have such a positive backdrop as we see with where we focus our time and we've been uh on the ground doing this for years now um you know all of us individually for a long time but then as a platform focused on helping drive development and investment into the space you know it's across a number of years a number of funds by now and we're now able to just track the progress of how things are going and assess you know what's the you know what's the state of the portfolio what's the state of individual companies uh how do we think we're doing from an investment decision perspective it also comes back to that question around well what do you you know we were talking

about earlier like what what do you ultimately price what do you price things in um you know are you pricing in dollars you pricing in bitcoin like is the opportunity cost really like how much of the total bitcoin supply do you have and so one of the measuring sticks that we've used from the outset is like, how do we think we're doing relative to Bitcoin? And we're only a few years in for, you know, our most recent fund. But I think, you know, I think we're all pretty optimistic about the results so far. And it's still early. There's there's lots of maturation still left to do among the companies and the funds overall. Despite what looks like some very early successes for some of the companies that have started to have breakout success, we think that there's a

lot more room to run. And the objective for us is certainly to outperform Bitcoin. And we think that's doable. And based on the performance so far, we think it's justified. Yeah. Couldn't have, couldn't have said it better myself. You know, I think, yeah, I'll echo all that. The only, the only thing maybe that I would add would just be putting the, putting the letter together, kind of reflecting back on, you know, the first half of this year and over the last couple of years as the portfolio has come together. Um, just that I, you know, proud to be kind of involved in constructing a portfolio in a way that we feel like makes sense to us. Um, you know, we, uh, are very focused on doing deals that, uh, make sense for both sides. Um, and in the best, when we're able to the best companies out there, right. We really want to work with the best of the best. And I think if you, you know, go to our website, look at our portfolio, um, you'll, you'll see that

kind of proven out and, you know, not necessarily just kind of following the latest, like, um, you know, meta in the space or the latest hot trend or the, you know, the latest hot company in the space, um, really just focusing in on what we think are the best long-term businesses out there and doubling down on those, you know, time and time again, as we see them continue to prove themselves out. Um, you know, proud of building a portfolio where in a ton of cases, you know, we are, you know, the only party at the table, the only investor that a company reaches out to, um, and, you know, not necessarily having a ton of overlap as a result in our portfolio with, you know, other, other investors out there. Um, and so just, you know, proud of having kind of

built it, um, you know, uh, in a way that honors what we think is, um, our focus on independent thinking and, you know, building a portfolio that kind of isn't just, um, it, we're not just there to, to be there. We're not just there to say that we were kind of involved. Like if we're there, we're there because we've had high, high conviction. Um, and we want to, you know, be there in size over time. So, um, yeah, I think that's how I, how I'd look at it. I mean, proud to, proud to be involved, proud to be along for the ride. And like you said, Grant, I think, uh, the best is very much to come. I don't think I can say anything better than that or add anything to that other than i'm proud as well to be on this journey with you gentlemen

um and i think we did we did a tight rip of artisanal alpha this week i think we fit a lot into an hour and 15 minutes here so any parting thoughts before we wrap up here are you going to make a an x price by conference today call are we not there yet no not there yet no no it's probably a good probably good move i will say i tweeted this out i wrote a newsletter about it last week but particularly about figma that was two weeks ago now okay do not um do not underestimate the power of social contagion particularly in industries where herd mentality um is pervasive and that would include stratify and Silicon Valley tech investing as two areas where that is pervasive.

And I think it's something that people aren't paying enough attention to, particularly with the Figma story, is if that becomes social contagion and table stakes, things get very interesting. Well, I think it actually, so actually my closing thought, it loops back, I think, to the thing we said at the beginning about kind of retail flows, passive flows into whether it's ETFs or, um, you know, underlying Bitcoin itself. Um, I wouldn't underestimate, you know, I wouldn't fade the power of passive flows at scale and the auto DCA set it and forget it mindset. And in the same way, I wouldn't underestimate the growth of, you know, a thousand or 10,000 or a hundred thousand companies out there on the bid for Bitcoin with their cash flows, right?

Not like running the MSTR playbook, not trying to weaponize the public markets to go aggressively acquire Bitcoin. That's going to keep happening and that's going to be a demand driver for sure. And we're probably a cycle away from this still. But the idea of having, you know, a bunch of figmas out there that are just passively allocating some percentage of, you know, the treasury balance to Bitcoin, seeing it as a long term reserve asset, the way that they would look at, you know, ultimately bonds, short term bills or, you know, equities that might hold in the balance sheet, anything like that. If they see it as just a kind of a boring piece of their cash balance that they're passively allocating into at some percentage over time, if you get a wall of thousands of companies doing that over time around the world, I also wouldn't underestimate that trend, right? Just the boring, passive stacking, you know, Chinese water torture from bidders that have really no huge price sensitivity and no real sensitivity to volatility or have like a need to sell anytime soon. Right. So two trends on both the retail and the corporate side that I think are very much underpriced at the moment. and sort of unrelated final thought for me um is just like i've i was thinking about this the

other day it just feels like there's so much to do like we're focused on so much and um there's a lot of excitement around like what else we can be doing for our business what else all the companies we've invested in can be doing um and everyone always says like build during the bear market i'm just sort of like what was going through my head is like build during the bull market um like don't get like don't get distracted by price sort of like this relentless stacking that john that you're talking about like just relentless just one step at a time one day at a time you know don't get distracted by the shiny object just keep you know keep keep working um and that compounds over time so that's sort of what's going through

my head right now i love it gentlemen it was a great rip everybody out there that was your bitcoin alpha of the week we'll be back at some point in the future with our artisanal alpha enjoy it