The Breakdown - Tyrone Ross on Why the Institutions Are Building During This Bear Market

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io, Circle and FTX US.   In today’s interview, NLW talks with returning guest Tyrone Ross about the state of financial advice and why the biggest institutions in the world are spending the bear market gearing up for the next cycle. They also discuss Tyrone’s new 401 Financial and Turnqey Labs ventures.    Find our guest on Twitter: @TR401 - Nexo Pro allows you to trade on the spot and futures markets with a 50% discount on fees. You always get the best possible prices from all the available liquidity sources and can earn interest or borrow funds as you wait for your next trade. Get started today on pro.nexo.io. - Circle, the sole issuer of the trusted and reliable stablecoin USDC, is our sponsor for today’s show. USDC is a fast, cost-effective solution for global payments at internet speeds. Learn how businesses are taking advantage of these opportunities at Circle’s USDC Hub for Businesses. - FTX US is the safe, regulated way to buy Bitcoin, ETH, SOL and other digital assets. Trade crypto with up to 85% lower fees than top competitors and trade ETH and SOL NFTs with no gas fees and subsidized gas on withdrawals. Sign up at FTX.US today. - “The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell and research by Scott Hill. Jared Schwartz is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. Music behind our sponsors today is “War” by Enoch Yang. Image credit: Yutthana Gaetgeaw/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk. Join the discussion at discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8.

The overall sentiment from the actual IAs couldn't be worse. It's just been mainly a crypto story where this is everything we said it was. It was tulip bulbs is going to zero. Clients shouldn't be invested in it. And there were tweets that were dig up of advisors talking about their clients being in Celsius. It got bad, right? Stop telling your clients, oh, you can get yield here. You can go to block fire. You do this or that. If you don't know how they're getting that yield and you haven't researched it, but you just want to be the cool advisor, it'll come back to haunt you. And I think a lot of, there was a lot of haunting. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io, Circle, and FtX, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. What's going on, guys? It is Monday, November 7th, and today we are featuring an excellent breakdown interview with none other than Tyrone Ross. But before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go. So subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit. LY slash breakdown pod. Also at disclosure, as always, in addition to them being a sponsor of the show, I also work with FTX. All right, folks, well, today I welcome back Tyrone Ross to the show.

Tyrone got involved in crypto through the path of wealth management and thinking about how investment advisors could be a vehicle for more adoption. His journey has led him to both think about what the crypto industry needs the do to open itself up to this new cohort of investors, but also how investment advisors need to think differently more broadly, not just with regard to crypto, but specifically in terms of generational attitudes and norms around money. He's now leading two projects coming directly at that, Turnkey Labs, which is building APIs to get better data from crypto to IRAs in the tradfai space, as well as 401 Financial, which is the next generation investment advisory practice. In this conversation, we discussed the bare market, the state of wealth

and financial advice and why institutions just keep flooding in. All right, Tyrone, welcome back to the breakdown. How are you doing, sir? I'm great, man. Good to see you again. This is going to be fun. Yeah, I'm so excited for this. I've wanted to catch up for a while on the show. You know, we were just talking before. I think you have sort of a privileged seat to a lot of things that I think are happening right now that are hallmarks of and reflective of this particular bear market. So I'm excited to dig into them. But just by way of kind of both introducing yourself and or for people who are familiar catching up, you have recently launched two different new

companies. And I think they kind of help frame maybe the parts of both this space and just in general kind of what you're interested in. So let's talk a little bit about each of them. and maybe use that as a way to kind of introduce yourself in your story too. Yeah, absolutely. I think those that when they hear about the two companies, they immediately see my vision of what I'm trying to accomplish here, right? Like when you build AWS, the first customer should be Amazon, right? So I'm the principal and founder of 401 Financial, which is a registered investment advisor

that is serving that 25 to 45 segment digital. first with a human experience, crypto hippies, of course, right? Because I'm very much in the crypto rabbit holes and advisor for going on eight years now, which is crazy. And that's kind of where my background started. I got introduced to crypto Merrill Lynch back in 2015 and been doing crypto ever since.

So the RAA is set up to work with a younger audience that is looking for an advisor, kind of do it yourself, but definitely want a tech-driven experience. We have an awesome tech stack that we built. And that is coming off the heels of some folks know that I was a CEO, co-founder, VaughnR-R-R-N-R-R-R-N-R-R-A. We were building technology for advisors. So I've been front and center with this for a really long time, even with my R-A-A-B-B-4, trying to get solutions, and there was just nothing there.

The 401 financial is also acting as an incubator for my new tech startup turnkey, T-U-R-N-Q-E-Y, which, again, as I told you, I'm not going to say the platter of crypto, but just think of it. The tagline is integrator, aggregator marketplace, right? So we basically want to take all of the data from the crypto ecosystem. As you know and others know in the space, it's not accurate. It's fragmented. It's hard to get data that is clean and concise, especially for advisors, because we need to look into a client's financial picture and we need that accurate. So we're taking all that data, cleaning it, standardizing it, and then putting it in APIs and piping that into the platform. that RAs and advisors use.

So the goal and my master plan here is, as we were building our technology stack for 401, we don't have anything in our stack right now that has complete crypto data. I knew that. And I knew that that was going to be an issue. And I'm blessed now to have relationships with a lot of CEOs of these companies and are like, well, Tyrone, where are we going to get really good data? I'm like, well, I got the solution. So that's why I'm building Turnkey.

So as we integrate Turnkey into some of these platforms, it'll make our data inside a 401 better. And it will be able to say, hey, here's NLW's crypto portfolio and how we were able to advise him before. But here's what it looks like now where we're able to see all of his NFTs, not only the floor prices, but the individual prices of the NFTs. We can track hops across exchanges. We can calculate unrealized, realized cost basis.

We can help him with his estate planning. We can help him with a billing model that works. So we don't have to bill on the crypto. He has full control. So it's really, it's a really neat model that I think when the two come together, folks who really see what I think is the future, which is an AUA, right, assets under advisement, non-custodial, not non-custodial mean hardware, whatever, but just non-custodial, meaning the clients are going to have assets everywhere, right? You could buy crypto with a firm right now, right? And then discretion where NLW is going to say to Tyrone, I want you to have discretion over my accounts, not necessarily to trade them, but I want to give you discretion to be able. go to see them, pull them into your software, and then give me advice and guide me on making changes. So there's a lot, I think, that's super interesting here. So first, a lot of this for you, I think, you know, one of the common themes that we've always talked about when we've

been together is your interest in updating the role that wealth advisors and wealth management can have in helping people think about their portfolios and why it's sort of, you know, of historically, from the standpoint of crypto in particular, kind of an under-examined area where, you know, as we think about sort of expansion or kind of evangelism for these new areas of the financial sector, it wasn't like there were people out evangelizing RIAs, despite the fact that they were sort of front lines for a lot of their clients. Yeah. What's kind of interesting about where you've taken it with 401 and particularly the combination

of 401 in turnkey is that in some ways, you're doing kind of two things. simultaneously. One, you are, you clearly still thinking about how that sort of subset can be more of a sort of an asset supporter connected to crypto, right? That's sort of the data play. But you're also, I think, obviously taking on what that sort of sector should be like for a new generation of clients. You know, crypto is obviously going to be a prominent part of them, particularly for you, you know, kind of people know you from this sector. But I imagine that the goal of 401, you know, crypto is not incidental. I don't want to mean it's kind of a diminishing way, but it's sort of, it's a native part. But what you're trying to do is a better experience,

sort of writ large, whether someone cares about crypto or not. Is that, is that accurate? 100%. So our whole treasury is crypto, right? Noses safe, Maltis. Like it's pretty slick, but that's behind the scenes. That's our piping. But if you look at what I, it's funny, I just posted our updated branding on and marketing material on Twitter, it should look and feel like nothing that's out there, the colors, the music, the background. So yeah, we set it up where we're getting so many folks that are working with an advisor for the first time or folks that are leaving an advisor saying, that's what I want when I want to work with a firm, right? So it is very much built with the client in mind, right? Our experience is top-notch. We use a notion for our CRN,

which is blowing people's minds. Our financial plans are interactive. We can send videos and looms inside of the plans. We're using a company called Kubara, which is probably the best fintech I've seen, especially as wealth tech is concerned, as our hub, if you will, of where we build everything around. We are essentially around the clock. Clients can reach out when they want. We're only taking 25 clients to start. Clients get NFTs, right? They have NFTs to provide access. to the gated things that we do. All encompassing, it's different. We don't use the term wealth management.

I think the term wealth management is inherently exclusive. As you know me, I'm an inclusive person. I want everyone to feel like they could come to 401 and get the advice that they need on their terms, not ours. And we're not AUM. That's the other thing as well. We're not AUM. We are an AUA model, right? Or flat fee subscription where you pay us 500 bucks a month, but you get a family office in your pocket.

And I would put our offering in terms of what we're, We're doing investment management, financial planning, everything. I'll put it up against whatever else is out there. And we're more than 50%, sometimes 75% less than what's out there. So we're excited about what we've built. But it plays right into what you said. It should look and feel different. And I think we accomplished that.

So this is actually a great segue into something that I wanted to kind of catch up with you about. One of the kind of common threads, or one of the interesting aspects of crypto that sometimes discuss not always is why the sort of permissionless nature of it has been so disruptive in terms of how people think about or are invited to think about their own kind of wealth creation process, right? You know, so if you take kind of a traditional perspective, I think there's broadly speaking a perception that, or historically speaking, investing is for people who are already wealthy, right? You don't see a lot of discussion of investing as a mechanism for wealth creation, perhaps wealth expansion, but it sort of starts with wealth, right?

Like even that word wealth is not something that people kind of associate. Until they start associated with that with themselves, they don't think that necessarily investing is for them. Part of what's been so disruptive about the last few years, and it's come with a lot of bad too, but is between crypto, between Robin Hood and meme stocks and all these things, you've started to see a shift in that discussion where people actually start to have this sort of identity,

this investor identity that becomes kind of a part. part of them. The challenge is that, you know, especially with sort of the Wall Street bets period and certain parts of crypto, it's also kind of been often a cynical thing, too, a kind of a, you know, if the system's going to give me nothing, I'm going to kind of rewrite the rules to make it work for myself. How have you seen that played out over the course of the last, you know, the transition maybe from the bull market to the bear market in the sense of, you know, as you're interacting with people, as you're seeing kind of sentiment shifts, how do you see the kind of the larger trajectory of people feeling, you know, even if they're kind of not wealthy yet, that they have a

path to actually making money. And this is not just crypto. This is sort of crypto and beyond. Yeah. It's one of the things that has me energized, which is why I wanted to start my own firm and kind of lead the way there. Because I think what you've seen is, and I've been saying this for so long, and again, you've heard this before. If crypto did nothing else, it just shined this big light in the corner of this gap of financial services in general. Like, you guys are just missing the mark. There's so many people here you're not helping. It's slow. It's expensive. Right. So there's been a lot of solutions built out. And I think if you look at the data of whether it's RAs that have been launched, right? Think about this. Every RIA in existence, right, half of them, half have been launched since the end of 2014.

It's a growing market where advisors are coming in and starting RIAs and saying, all right, here's a way for me to help more people and be really niche in what I offer. You've had your embedded finance kind of take hold now where there's super apps, did add budgeting and investment management and all these other things. So now people don't feel like they have to work with an advisor. And then you're starting to see a lot of traditional firms move to a hybrid experience. We talk about the D5 Mullen in our space, but I think you're kind of getting that with wealth management where it used to be my firm. I'm an advisor as to client, right? I work at Merrill Lynch. I'm the advisor at Merrill Lynch.

You're the client. I give you advice. Now it's client led. The clients are set in the standard. And then it's, I want to work with an advisor like Tyrone and LW. And then where are you again? Oh, 4.1. Oh, okay.

Like what comes with that? So it's flipped. and the clients now are in control of that because they have so many awesome options. And I think because of that, what you're seeing is now RAAs and independent broker dealers and hybrids and wirehouses have to chase that rabbit. But it's completely accessible. Business models are changing as well, right? Folks that are billing like us on a subscription.

The AUM set it and forget it. I'm going to charge you 1% on whatever. That's being challenged. I think the data is starting to prove that out as well. And I just think you're seeing overall we're in a time where if you are not in someone's pocket, if you're not in their pocket, you just don't exist. Like you have to be where they are and they're doing everything from their phones. You can see this transition for a long time now.

And that's why we have a web app with 401. Like we're in your pocket. You need two apps when you work with us. A Notion app for your plan and you need Kubera. And it's in there 401 Financial. You click it. Your whole financial life is in there. nothing we don't miss. And I think that's what every firm is going to have to evolve to.

And I think we're only, again, chasing that rabbit because right now I'm sure for you, in mind, most of the financial apps, they're in your pocket. Want to keep more profits when trading? Get the best possible prices and trade with 50% lower fees on NXO Pro. The new Spot and Futures trading platform uses aggregated liquidity of over 3,000 order books collected from multiple sources. Utilizing the complete NXO Suite, allows you to earn interest and borrow funds as you wait for the next trade setup. Visit pro.nexo.io. That's p.r.0.n-nexo.io and sign up today.

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Bitcoin and other digital assets, with up to 85% lower fees than competitors. There are no fixed minimum fees, no ACH transaction fees, and no withdrawal fees. One of the largest exchanges in the U.S. FDXUS is also the only leading exchange that supports both Ethereum and Solana NFTs. When you trade NFTs on FTCS, you pay no gas fees. Download the FTCS app today and use referral code breakdown to support the show. How have you seen among your clients, how are their sort of attitudes or how are they thinking about where we are from a market's perspective perspective right now. This could be

sort of crypto in general. It's kind of a sentiment analysis. Are people depressed? Are they kind of like frustrated but understand kind of where in the cycle we are? Is there, you know, growing you know, whatever? I'm just kind of interested because you have so many different conversations across lots of

different types of folks, that sort of front line view of how people feel right now is super interesting to me. So I will say this. I've never in my, again, my eight years, I haven't seen the sentiment as bad as it is in the wealth management space, like during despair. It's bad. Like, there's just, it's a no-go in the wealth management RAA advisory space. It's just, it's just not happening. My clients are bad proxy because they've been through

it with me before. They kind of understand it. So they're not like, oh, this sucks. It's just kind of like, we should be accumulating, right? Like, this is, you go a layer deeper with just broad conversations. I do think there are a lot of people that are just like, I'm never coming back, which is unfortunate because they got sold a dream, right? And I've had some conversations like that. It's funny, having this conversation with you on the heels of doing an event last week for Philly Financial Week, right, of having a conversation about defy and what defy means, you know, could mean, and I think it does mean currently to underserved communities and everything else. And you can tell folks have that, I burnt my tongue on a slice of pizza, right? Like, I don't even know.

if I want pizza anymore. Right? So trying to get them to understand. No, you got to stay. You got to understand that this is something that you should learn, should ask questions. You should do it better the next time. You should be diversified. So on and so forth. So I think there's some hard lesson still, which is why, again, I think we, and I say we, one, me and you as what I feel are leaders in the space. We as in financial advisors. And then we as a black man and people of color that our people came into this en masse because they feel like it's their opportunity. We got to stay in front of educating people and getting them to understand. There's a right way to do this.

It's still very early. There's still a lot you don't know. It is complicated. But I don't. And it's hard for me because being in the space, I've never been more bullish to see the things that are being built and the founders that I talk to and the conversations that I'm having, as you know, I am uber bullish. I think this next bull run is going to be, and I'm not a price.

target guy, but this is going to be a face ripper here. But also talking to individuals, again, our clients is one thing, but just talking to people on the street, I do think people are, they've just been led astray. And that was the one thing to bother me. I think this run up, which is different from the one in 17, 18. There were a lot of scams, man. A lot of people got scammed. A lot of people lost money. A lot of people got hurt. So I think it's a mixed bag. But as far as where I stay, the ecosystem of RAs and wealth management, sediment has never been worse. It was a lot of dancing on the graves, if you will, on Twitter and in social media. When it comes to that kind of wealth management sentiment, does that also have to do with just

the fact that we're, I mean, this is part of a kind of a broader macro shift that's the first time in, you know, a significant number of years that we've actually had monetary policy driving things down, or is this sort of super crypto-specific? Great question. I think it's super crypto-specific mixed in with the macro because when it was the institutions are coming or we want to get advisors in, what were they selling them? It's a safe haven. It's a store of value. And it was all busted, right? Yeah. And that's why it always bothered me about that, about that, using that narrative with the CIOs of RAs, where I've stroked to a ton, a lot of different people. The other part of it is, it was very

easy to say, and think about this, you know as well as I do. The market was kind of headed down before all the hacking and the Terraluna stuff started. It was starting to crack. So then, all right, rates started to rise. The macro environment started to shift. And then, you know, dollar strength pressured Bitcoin and so on and so forth. Right. So goes Bitcoin, so goes the market.

But then the hack started to happen and the scams. And it was just, it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. And a lot of advisors were kind of like, in a lot of wealth managers and anyone building in space. We're faced with that now. It was too much to overcome. And it just got ice cold. We're not doing it. It's scammie.

There's still things missing. We're not doing it. And what's interesting is from March to June, I was on the road talking to every RIA, traveling everywhere, just having conversations and a low inside baseball here. I resigned from on-ramp March 1st. March 3rd, I was sitting in Omaha, Nebraska. I was meeting with Carson. And those are no, Carson. Carson is a $16 billion RAA massive. Is it the biggest? No, but it's just big in terms of the size of a firm, 5,000 coaching advisors, I think 200 advisors at the firm.

Also met with the CEO of Orion, Eric Clark. Again, Orion is a star worth of advisor tech, right? $60 billion RAA. They have $1.2 billion of AUA assets. And I borrowed an office at Carson. and I was having a conversation that was already set up with the folks at Black Rock and Aladdin and they were basically going through their paces just having conversations about what they

ultimately announced. At that moment, I realized I'm like, there are conversations with betterment, had a lot of conversations behind the scenes. So when I left, I knew that this wave was coming, but I didn't think it would be,

it would happen like now where it's just the sentiment is awful, but you're just starting to see announcement after announcement after announcement, which is interesting to me because the overall sentiment from the actual IAs couldn't be worse. But the providers and the infrastructure providers to advisors are just, again, setting the road ahead. So it's been interesting, man, but it's just been mainly a crypto story where, all right, this is everything we said it was. It was tulip bulbs. It's going to zero, right? clients shouldn't be invested in it. And there were tweets that were dig up of advisors talking about

their clients being incelsious. It got bad. So it was a whole thing to me where I was like, all right, advisors need to learn. There's something called the Wirehousehousehouse out selling away, right? Stop selling away. You're telling your clients, oh, you can get yield here. You can go to block fire. You do this or that. If you don't know how they're getting that yield and you haven't, you know, researched it, but you just want to be the cool advisor, it'll come back to haunt you. I think there was a lot of haunting once the price dropped 75%. Super interesting. So I want to come back to this interesting disconnect between sentiment and what we've seen from

traditional finance players because that's, I think to me, one of the most fascinating parts of the spare market. Just to say for one more moment on sort of the sentiment down, you know, one, I think that it's interesting, it does feel like there's an interesting opportunity to the extent that a broader base of investment advisors understanding this space is a one of the way. ways of, you know, we talk about consumer protection like it's only a government thing, but that's a potential area, you know, the sort of common sense thing that you just said about if you don't understand where the yield is coming from, don't kind of advise it, you know,

I think that seems like a real interesting opportunity to kind of, you know, improve how things go the next time around. I guess were there, you know, of these sort of, of the breaks that happened this year, Tara, Celsius, sort of, you know, what has been kind of tops in terms of where that negative sentiment is coming from. Maybe particularly in the context of not just like what advisors have said in terms of why they've turned away, but in terms of what people have actually experienced. That's a really great question. There's so many I dig into here, but I think the one that kept coming up a lot and a lot

of the conversations I've had, no matter where I was, was Celsius. And it was it was just a poster child for these yields are nuts. There has to be some incredible risk that comes along with these yields, right? And then you had Voyager, right? And you throw BlockFi in that. And BlockFi, right, was something that advisors were very familiar with, right? And again, love Zach. I think Zach has done tremendous things for the space and tried to do the best he could

be for fright with this whole thing, but, you know, has been on with animal spirits and the folks writ Holtz or whatever. So he's kind of been around that space. So advisors knew that. And I think there was the whole yield generation thing, right, and how are you getting this yield? And then also juxtaposing it with where rates were, just in a macro environment. And then when that shift started, and then you started to see rates rise and then things come down and then again, compounding that again, when everything else was happening, hacks and so on and so forth, it was very easy for advisors to say it was a house of cars. It was built on nothing, right? And I think that's just kind of, they looped everything into it. So then the conversation became the regulatory environment, right, of this is why using these third-party platforms and there's no investor protections and there's no regulation and all of it was false, right? There is some protections there, not to, the ones we would absolutely need and expect. But to your point, advisors play a role in protecting investors, right? So Celsius kept coming up a lot, right, because of the whole banking aspect of it.

There was a lot of things there that advisors could pick at. And I think that one came up the most. But I think the other part of it is that it doesn't get a lot of headlines, and it probably never will is if you look at what an advisor does, advisors are there to help a client achieve their financial goals, whatever those goals is and working with the client and identifying risk. Clients risk tolerance. What is your risk tolerance, Mr. and Mrs. Client. What do you own? And then we do this analysis to figure out if you have the appropriate amount of risk based on where you want, so on and so forth. And that right there is the risk. Is the risk. analysis or the lack thereof, how does advisors look at this space and identify risk, right?

Identify it and manage it. There was nothing there. And I think that's what it just left this gaping hole where that was the whole thing that ever, it was just they put their finger in it. There's no risk control. There's no risk management. So I think that's the thing that didn't really get talked about. And that whole thing that you're just getting in this space and there's no risk control. There's no way to identify it or quantify it. for yourself or for clients. It's really interesting. I'll wrap this part.

So one of the things that I have thought since Defi summer is that part of why Defi hadn't stopped itself out, you know, it wasn't basically killed itself in the cradle kind of a thing, is that the barriers to entry were so high that even when people lost big amounts or there were these hacks or things like that, they were, the people who experienced those losses really knew what they were getting themselves into. You know what I mean? It doesn't make it less painful for them, but like they knew the game because it's so technologically complex.

You didn't have just people wandering off the street. And I think in a lot of ways you can look at the things that failed the most in 2022 as effectively they socialize defy losses to people who didn't have to have that sort of technological barrier to entry. So I think Tara, I mean, basically that was. a DFI product that all you had to do to have exposure to it was by the core token, right? So it's like no, no big barrier to entry there. And I think you can make the same argument for the kind of yield generating services, like,

to the extent that they were generating yield on the basis of being exposed to those D5 products, all you had to do was, I mean, there's still some barrier to entry, but it wasn't a lot. Yep. And, and I think that in a lot of ways, you know, when you look back at kind of 2022's legacy, that was the barriers to entry fell, you know, and. And so that kind of happened. But going back to this kind of point that you started to kind of give a firsthand account for. So you're seeing this sort of sentiment shift down.

But at the same time, what some of us might have expected, institutions kind of abandoning it saying, screw that, that was over. The old narratives have failed. We've seen nothing but a steady drumbeat of basically trad-fi institutions expanding their offerings, building infrastructure. And, you know, I've been calling this post-narrative institutionalization because they're clearly not out here trying to win headlines, even if a thing gets kind of announced, you know, it's really not that sort of same game. It's clearly positioning for the future. But I mean, it sounds like that's been your experience as well, just given that kind of black rock conversation. But is that what you're seeing is sort of these, you know, the big players just doing nothing but kind of expand while, even while sentiment is so low. Yes. It is one of the thing. Again, being behind the scenes and being privy to. a lot of it, and then seeing some things that are still astounding to me, like NASDAQ announcing custody. Like, think about that. A traditional stock exchange announced crypto custody. The Black Rock Coinbase news was huge. The reasons that I said it was huge wasn't what everyone else was saying. It's the Aladdin piece, because now that's core infrastructure for advisors to quantify risk, manage portfolios, do all these

other things. And there was a lot of back and forth about what it meant for RAs and what it did it from people in the space. It meant everything for RAs. And if you said it didn't, you just didn't know the space. Aladdin is, again, probably one of the most successful fintechs ever built, which is why I tweeted that day. I'm like, there are a lot of product teams Googling Aladdin right now.

that's a big one uh what bitco announced with their wealth management um offering you know plaid with what they just announced google right you can search um you know ethereum addresses in google uh investnet what they announced with uh well first of all jemini buying bitria and then you know investnet making the announcement with gemini um a lot of these folks moving the tamps eagle brook with franklin templeton And it's out of control, right? And these are all big names, you know, Schwab, Fidelity, right? They launched it in exchange. Like it's just incredible. But there's one common theme. And I don't think people seeing what's going on there. It's all infrastructure because everyone knew when we got to, okay, let's just say at the top, we weren't $3 trillion in market cap.

Flawed metric, as we both know. Let's just say it was $1.5. Fine. Say it was half. That was out a dollar of meaningful advisory wealth management money. And you're talking about $120 trillion space all in. If you just go to the wealth management side, you're probably talking $5 to $7 trillion. There's $2 trillion in TAMP's alone, turnkey asset management platforms alone. So in this next run-up, advisors are going to have all the tools of their need to meaningfully get into the space. And I think all of these announcements, you just hold your head and go, oh, man, like there's nothing that are going to stop the inflows from these folks now when they get in. But there's so many more that we can go through. Lastly, if you look at it, true to Wall Street and true to institutions, you want institutions in. You know what they do? They're seasons at buying low and announcing when it's low and accumulating when it's low. And then they'll ride it all the way up and then they're going to dump on retail. It's going to happen again. It's going to happen. Right. And if you if you zoom you can see that's what's happening here. Everyone is, again, Fidelity just announced now you can, you know, get Ethereum, access to Ethereum and traded on their platform. It's just silly, the things that you can do. So I think this next run-up is going to be interesting, but you're just saying now the seasoned smart, well-heeled investor are putting their roots in the ground now while retailers, again, ran away and it's going to run up. And the next time it's going higher and higher.

higher, they're going to jump back in, rinse, repeat. This is weird, but, you know, apologies for sort of eternal optimism. But do you think that there's, and this is something I haven't really thought through, but is there a world in which the fact that the average person who gets into crypto could just buy a little bit, you know, like less than 1% of their portfolio because it's through the same portfolio, actually makes turns down the volume on like the sort of insanity of the space and what I mean by that is almost like if you look at previous bull markets if you got to the point of conviction in the space enough to actually jump through the hoops to get in there you weren't doing just kind

of like a casual 1% of your portfolio or something like that right you're going all in and you're all of a sudden you're plugging in your ledger and you're doing crazy shit you're you're going to dexas and stuff whereas like you know for the vast majority of people who just wanted it's kind of like this different type of asset class that seems to have stuck around. Is there sort of a, the potential that it actually, you know, people who might have gone way more ham in ways that wouldn't have been good for them can actually get in at a healthier level because they have their first kind of access experience through platforms that they already work with who are more traditional and conservative by nature?

Yep. Wait for it. Right. It's coming. Fidelity is going to make it available to retail. They've already showed their hand there. That's going to happen. They made that announcement months ago.

I never forget, I was about to walk into a room and talk to a group of advisors up in Oregon about making it available at 401Ks, right? And all the plan administrators are like, no way, we're not doing that. It's going to come. And I think that's exactly right. When you look at what's out there now where retail has access to, right, 100 million accounts at Coinbase, you got 50 million accounts at Cash App, 10 million of which trade Bitcoin. You got 20 plus million accounts at Robin Hood. when it's just easy inside of a fidelity of Schwab, when it's easy in any of these platforms for someone to just say,

all right, I'm building this little nest egg for myself where I just want to start investing in. It's just right there. You're absolutely right. I think it's going to be so much easier and it will bring down a lot of the hype and I need to go jump out and do all this crazy stuff. And then also I think that's when we move from

mass acceptance to mass adoption, right? We're not at mass adoption yet as much as people want to say that. We're at peak mass acceptance where it's like, all right, it's not going away. I think that's what you're seeing with these announcements. And right when you cross over to mass adoption, it'll be people just saying it. Hey, I just put a little bit of Bitcoin in my whatever, betterment account with whatever, right? So that's going to be a really interesting thing. And then you're starting to see already that those folks putting the pieces on the chessboard fidelity Schwab you know you got all these different index providers now footsie russell smp global all these folks are trying to move around to get to make it easy right the easy button if you will but that's that's really good point and

i think that is the next step tyron i could talk to you for hours but just as a way to wrap up you know as you look out over the next three to six months call it what's sort of the the worst thing that could happen what's the best thing that could happen you take that from from any perspective in markets or crypto? The worst thing that can happen as far as markets, I'll segment it. Crypto markets, I think there's just some heavy-handed regulation and no one expected, and they completely freeze everything, right? Which I'm very worried about, by the way.

I don't have confidence in this administration. I think they're going to wield a heavy hand here. As far as markets overall, I think as long as things continue to happen internationally that the dollar just continues to be the best investment ever and it continues to strengthen, that's not going to be good. And then, you know, inflation just doesn't cool off. I think if it continues to stay here or even heats up more, it could get really, really bad, man. And then I think everyone knows what comes next after that is housing. The housing market is just, it's in the kill shot. the best thing I think is the antithesis of that where we get some regulation is regulation light right by the way don't understand why SBF is getting killed like this but first it was Nick Carter then him is really making me angry the way crypto behave sometimes very thoughtful

pragmatic I understand if you're really a crypto hippie that there were some things in there you didn't like but we are we need to get meaningful regulation I've been lucky enough to have a closed door meeting with Cory Booker I think he gets it and have some some conversations behind the scenes that I think are going to be thoughtful. But if we get regulation, just a nice framework. And lastly, with that, where the SEC and the CFTC comes out and gives unified guidance, my opinion, I think markets rip. In my opinion, I think markets rip meaningfully, if the SEC and especially crypto markets, if the SEC and CFTC comes out, give unified guidance or what is the path is moving forward over the next three to six months.

I think you'll see a meaningful move because now everyone knows what the rules of the game are, right? And then it's just, all right, full steam ahead. And all that infrastructure we just spoke about for the last 25 minutes will start to come into play. Yep. Tyrone, awesome to have you here, as always. Let's set a calendar for six months. We'll come back and check in on this. No doubt, my man.

Let's do it. Appreciate you having me on as always. Part of why I love having Tyrone on the show and why I think he's so disruptive is that there is this inherent idea that has been, propagated forever, that investing is for the already rich and that wealth creation is only for the wealthy already. You actually, for a long time, have had dual narratives. If you're rich, you invest, if you're poor, you save. Just go ask any Bitcoin or how saving versus investing would have done you over the last 10 or 15 years. I love that there's a new movement to include

more different types of people in these worlds of investing. Crypto is a big part of it, but it's not just crypto. I'm glad to see people like Tyrone taking on the infrastructure of that. Because it's one thing for me to talk about it on the show. It's another thing for people to have resources to actually help them on their journey. Anyways, I always find it encouraging when I talk to disruptors like that, so I hope you enjoyed it as well. For now, I want to say thanks again to Tyrone for being on the show. To my sponsors, next to dotio, circle and FTX for supporting the show, and thanks to you guys for listening. Until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.