The Pomp Podcast - #275: Yassine Elmandjra of ARK Invest on Bitcoin

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

Yassine Elmandjra is a Thematic Analyst at ARK Invest focused on Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies. In this conversation, Anthony and Yassine discuss ARK Invest's philosophy on crypto, why they are so bullish on Square, what people should understand about Bitcoin's volatility during COVID-19, how the halving should play out, the latest on Libra, and how Yassine thinks about Ethereum. =============================== Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link http://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. ===============================  Ledger hardware wallets empower you to optimally secure, own and control your crypto. Visit ledger.com and give yourself peace of mind by knowing that your cryptocurrencies are safe. ===============================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Yasin Almandra is a thematic analyst at ARK Invest, focused on Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies. In this conversation, we discussed ARK Invest's philosophy on crypto, why they are so bullish on Square, what people should understand about Bitcoin's volatility during COVID-19, how the halving should play out, the latest on Libra, and how Yassin thinks about Ethereum. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. But before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our two sponsors. The first is Crypto.com. Crypto.com

is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. They have a vision to put cryptocurrency in every wallet, which is why we are all here. The Crypto.com app offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well-designed user experience, and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell, and pay with crypto. These guys have been longtime supporters of Off The Chain and keep launching new product after new product. So do yourself a favor and go to Crypto.com to check them out. Again, that's Crypto.com, the place where mass adoption is occurring. Our second sponsor is Ledger. Ledger's pre-recorded an advertisement that I'm going to

play now, and then we'll get into this episode. I hope you enjoy it. Bitstamp, Crypto.com, Indax, and Dunamu are already using Ledger Vault to operate their business at scale while maintaining the highest standards of security to protect their clients' funds. Visit ledger.com

slash vault to learn more. Control, scalability, agility, because security is not enough. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital

or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Yasin here. He is coming to us live, I guess, kind of, um from morocco uh so thanks so much for uh doing this thanks for having me it's uh it's an honor to be here for sure um let's jump in uh how long have you been at arc invest and kind of what you know for those that don't know just your investment philosophy in general sure so uh i joined arc in uh july of 2018 right after college i'm definitely not an og

Bitcoiner. So I don't have any stories about, you know, how I bought a hundred Bitcoin and lost my private keys or anything like that. Um, so my, my break into Bitcoin was actually happening kind of serendipitously, uh, over overlap with my general approach to college and finding a job, uh, and really kind of figuring out what I wanted to do. Uh, in my first few years of college, I definitely, uh, knew what I didn't want to do. Um, and I know you have a, a recent, uh, you had a recent podcast with David Perel, um, that kind of talks about his break into figuring out what he wanted to do. A lot of what, what he does overlaps, but I, what I, what I kind of broke, how I broke into it. Uh, and, uh, effectively, um, I, I, I walked into like

an info session, um, on my, my freshman year, uh, everyone was kind of wearing a suit. Uh, everyone kind of had an accompanied stack of business cards with them and they were drooling over these recruiters of investment banking and consulting and kind of getting one step closer to landing that interview to get that summer job once you get that summer job you kind of land that full-time job and then from there you're you basically um and so realizing this i kind of told myself that i didn't want to fall into this trap uh and that there was definitely kind of another way to do that uh and so in in college i i studied system engineering and finance um and so So I kind of knew I didn't want to do investment banking consulting, but at the same time kind

of wanted to apply both the kind of finance side of things and system engineering side of things to figure out some sort of overlap. My junior year of college, I interned at a venture capital fund, and they kind of typically don't really hire first year analysts. So very quickly, I realized that there was only so much added value that I could provide beyond just kind of basic KPIs and industry analysis. And then that's where kind of crypto and Bitcoin came in, where I had kind of heard of crypto through the grapevine, but never really had the opportunity to dig deep.

This was at the time kind of before the ICO boom. And so I kind of asked the partners at my VC if I could kind of look into crypto from both the tech and investment perspective. And then realized very, very quickly that this was really a small but growing market that was underestimated. And so I found out that, you know, in very few things where expertise and experience doesn't matter, I found that crypto was one of those things. And so throughout the remainder of my college, I kind of learned obsessively about kind of Bitcoin and told myself that this is kind of what I want to do full time in the space. I was definitely by no means an expert, but that summer I kind of created a Twitter account, started sharing interesting ideas, and actually stumbled across ARC through Twitter. And so I know you had Kathy on the podcast a few days ago or a week ago or whenever this is going to be published.

And she kind of founded ARC based on kind of two premises. The first was that kind of the research that the way that research is set up in kind of traditional asset management firms, there's kind of a huge, huge lack of that. And in particular, the way that asset management firms kind of set up their research in a way that the compliance is set up to kind of vet that research is very, very limited in terms of how that research can then be used and shared. And so a combination of that in technological disruption and disruptive innovation more broadly made it such that she founded Arc in 2015 and focusing exclusively on disruptive innovation and across a wide array of what we call technology platforms. Of those technology platforms is kind of crypto and blockchain. So ARK, in particular, Kathy's relationship with Bitcoin, actually predates ARK's founding. So, you know, in the most recent interview, Kathy mentioned that she had this weekly brainstorm session where she and the analysts kind of gather every week to discuss any provocative news, any breakthroughs in research. and so it was actually back in her time at Alliance Bernstein in late 2011 when

the first kind of brainstorm session was conducted about Bitcoin. Obviously at the time we were kind of far from any means to gain any sort of exposure but fast forward to 2015 when ARK really started to take Bitcoin seriously and we published kind of our first white paper on if Bitcoin could kind of serve the three roles of money and then a few years later, we took our first position in GBTC or the Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust when Bitcoin started to trade around $200 and then a few months after that, we published a second white paper on Bitcoin as really the birth of a new asset class at the time when kind of Chris Berniski, who's

now a placeholder, was kind of leading the research there. We get this question a lot because we were one of the first investors in, quote unquote, GBTC, or we're the first kind of public fund manager to gain exposure to Bitcoin. But we don't actually hold any underlying Bitcoin. And our exposure to the kind of crypto opportunity more broadly is actually exclusively in kind of public companies that offer potentially interesting derivative exposure to Bitcoin. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about how you guys are gaining that exposure. And then we can talk more, I think about just institutional investors in general, but starting with you guys. So you're investors in GBTC, then you invest in a number of other businesses, almost exclusively in the public markets. And those publicly traded companies, maybe something like a square that has

a number of different products or kind of revenue streams. One of them could be Bitcoin, right? So almost get like indirect exposure to bitcoin through a business that benefits from bitcoin uh as a product or something that they offer uh and then combine that with the gbtc you're really kind of getting exposure in multiple ways is that correct that's exactly right so there are definitely public companies that offer interesting derivative exposure to crypto um and you know square is actually one of our highest conviction names where you know square's primary business model has nothing really necessarily to do with bitcoin or crypto But when you actually dig deep into potential kind of revenue streams down the line, you start to realize how interesting the opportunities there are.

So actually part of our research and part of our thesis is that you have these technology platforms that are kind of converging. And so the idea of having like a traditional tech analyst or traditional auto analyst or traditional energy analyst in this new world does not necessarily fit. And so when you kind of look at like a company like Square, there are so many kind of different ways where you can tackle the investment thesis. So obviously the one that a lot of us know is kind of at high level, you have these retail banks that pay between $350 and $1,500 to acquire new customers. And you contrast that with a company like Square, which has one of the most popular digital wallets in the cash app, which has a customer acquisition cost of around $20. And so this goes back actually to one of ARK's overarching theses, which is around this idea that cost declines are a primary force behind technologically enabled disruption. And so the same holds true in consumer banking. And so our fintech analyst, so I don't actually cover Square to Stop, but our fintech analyst, Max Friedrich, has done incredible work on how this kind of unlocks a massive market where you say that there are, let's say, 20 million people in the U.S. who are still unbanked.

To put this kind of into perspective, you know, Citibank has 20 million customer accounts in the U.S. today. And what's really interesting to see is when you see the comparison of the FDICs on bank rates and Google search trends for Square's Cash App, which Max did a lot of work on, there's a very compelling kind of geographic overlap that makes it such that Cash App dominates the southern states where the rates on bank are highest. You have kind of these features like direct deposit, which Square introduced in 2018, that lets Cash App users generate these kind of routing and account numbers that you would kind of get in normal checking accounts.

And then they can then pass that on to facilitate the deposit to their own employers. And you can basically spend paychecks from your Cash App balance with a debit card that Cash App issues. And so when you combine that with an extremely savvy network-based marketing strategy with a clear product roadmap, you basically come to what could be a fully functional digital bank. They've built a robust user base targeting specific consumer networks. You have extremely sticky P2P payments. And so there's a growing realization that most banking functions can basically migrate to your iPhone. Notice how in none of that, Bitcoin, did Bitcoin ever really come up.

And so then you layer on top of that, you know, something like Bitcoin, where you look at Jack Dorsey as being the only CEO of two public companies that truly understands Bitcoin's value propositions. And I've said it before and I'll say it again, I think that we can't underestimate the role kind of Square and Jack are playing in kind of bringing Bitcoin to the masses. And there are a few interesting angles that Square has taken in its involvement in Bitcoin that I think is very unique. I mean, at one level you have, let's say, you know, the Cash App providing an easy interface to buy, sell, send Bitcoin. And, you know, what's interesting is that the cash app isn't like a Bitcoin first product.

And so it's almost like, oh, by the way, there is another avenue by which you can learn about Bitcoin and it's through the cash app and you already have the cash app downloaded on your phone. And so there's this educational on ramp and normalizing of Bitcoin that I think that Square is doing that many people don't yet realize. And then on the flip side of that, you have something like, you know, a year ago where where Square set up, let's say, Square Crypto. And that is basically a separate corporate entity

whose really sole function is to sponsor Bitcoin developers and further the Bitcoin ecosystem. So kind of foregoing short-term profits to the benefit of Bitcoin. And so having a public company that has to appeal to shareholders holders that then acknowledges that, you know, ultimately, we're long term investors and Bitcoin success, Square's success is a really, really interesting kind of angle that I think

that very few kind of public companies have the foresight to take. And so when you combine that with the fact that Square also has access to millions of merchants, they could end up hypothetically cutting out card networks entirely if you about both the customer and the merchant who are on board and in doing so using potentially Bitcoin as a settlement layer. And so there are several layers to this, so that's kind of how we view Square more broadly.

And I think that it's a very, very interesting, unique way of getting kind of that derivative exposure to the Bitcoin opportunity. For sure. And then maybe talk a little bit about GBTC and kind of the other end of that argument, right? So you get the exposure through public companies that are kind of derivatives of Bitcoin, but then you also go and you get direct exposure.

Although you guys aren't holding the Bitcoin, you know, GBTC technically is holding it for you. What's the logic there? Sure. So GBTC is traded basically over the counter. It's a trust where you, for one, only one of our ETFs holds GBTC. and we have kind of specific restrictions on how much GBTC we can actually hold. And then Kathy kind of went into detail on that in the last episode.

But basically, at a high level, if more than 10% of gross profits are attributed to, let's say, GBTC or any commodity, then anything above that 10% is kind of deemed unqualified income. and that's kind of just the very nature of how the product is set up so given that we are kind of an sec registered or for ria there are only specific products that we can hold in our portfolios so we can't necessarily just hold like custody bitcoin private keys and say that we have explored to bitcoin and so gbtc given that it trades over the counter allows us to get kind of that exposure, but obviously there are trade-offs to the specific, um, to the specific product. So for instance, you know, everything from kind of additional management fees that are

incurred with something like GBTC to kind of the premium, um, that GBTC has as a function of its kind of, uh, redemption, uh, or, or, or lack thereof. Um, and so there is a, so, so effectively it trades on the secondary markets. You have to be an accredited investor if you want to go through the trust at NAV. And then you have what is now a six-month lockup period in which then you can attempt to harvest that premium when it then trades on the secondary markets. And so as an ETF, we kind of buy and sell on the secondary markets and so have kind of that exposure to the premium on the volatility. But at the same time, this is really kind of the only product that is really out there that allows for us to get exposure, albeit limited

and with its own kind of inefficiencies. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. Help us understand, as you guys are thinking through GBTC or Square or other companies, you guys obviously have a position on Bitcoin and crypto in general. So forget about how you're getting the exposure? Like what is that philosophy that ARK has around Bitcoin and crypto in general? Sure. So I would say that it's definitely evolved over time. I would say that in general, if we kind of take a step back and look at kind of the different philosophies of the crypto space more broadly, you have kind of this, two salient distinctions between kind of, you have basically two camps. You have, you know, at the simplest level, tech versus money, or what I like to call

kind of the innovation maximalists versus the monetary maximalists. On the innovation maximalist side. You basically have a camp that views these networks as kind of software first. And so they kind of look at the killer app as being these multi-sided marketplaces where kind of the primary consideration for or investor focus is really around expressive, upgradable, kind of composable base layers with extremely large feature sets in which the network infrastructure priority is kind of around scalability. So when you take that premise and when you got that premise, you look at Bitcoin as really just this slow, boring, kind of reliable thing that just does something extremely simply. And so isn't, you know, there's an interesting quote from an A16Z partner that

basically says like, you know, if Bitcoin is really the only thing that can come out of this, or we there's basically a failure of imagination um and so on the on the other side of that you have kind of what i deem kind of the monetary maximalists where if you look at these crypto assets from a value cruel standpoint and you understand really what these are and these are not kind of productive assets um these are really effectively money um or kind of money obfuscated by technological jargon, then you realize that the killer app is not necessarily these multi-sided marketplaces that have these bootstrap mini economies, but are rather, the killer app is really money. And so if the killer app is money, the investor focus

should be really around kind of having a network that provides specific assurances to maintaining that monetary integrity and so by doing so uh your your your infrastructure your network priority is no longer around kind of feature sets and scalability but rather is around kind of the ability to provide these assurances to wealth and the ability to do so in a very trust minimized manner um and so as we kind of you know kathy has a has a pretty strong monetary economics background And as we dove into where most value is going to accrue, we tend to focus more heavily on the monetary maximalist side, where you look at these as effectively money, and that money tends to, or currencies more broadly, tend to be natural monopolies. and so this tends to be kind of a winner takes most if not all game and the winner is going to be not one that kind of can diversify on features because ultimately in the open source world you

know tech the tech side of things i think is highly commoditized but those that kind of provide extremely strong assurances that are kind of almost irreplicable um and when you kind of spin off a new network and so that's why you know we have extremely strong conviction in bitcoin specifically, you know, that's why our focus on research kind of remains on Bitcoin and kind of how to view these kind of what we like to call new novel social economic institutions as monetary kind of as a mechanism by which you can reliably, neutrally and permissionlessly kind of store and transfer of value. Yeah. And I think really what you're talking about here is like, there's this element of money's a belief system, right? And all the features in the world can be replicated,

but if people just don't believe in that actually being the currency of choice or the currency that holds value, the features are relatively unimportant to somebody. Precisely. I think that what's interesting to see is, you know, when you take a step back and you see all the experimentation that's been done and all the kind of misallocated capital we see that the engineers and the tech gurus really mistook a monetary revolution for a software or technological one and it's been really interesting to see kind of the different mindsets that are that I would say are still prevalent today but that don't really recognize these as kind of political and social experiments

first, but rather as kind of this new gadget or this software that has specific kind of tech implementation details that something like Bitcoin could never provide. So you kind of like think about, you know, if only, you know, we could create a more efficient database or if only kind of Bitcoin was faster, if only, you know, there was a different monetary policy to Bitcoin. And that kind of dismisses the underlying questions to what makes Bitcoin kind of so unique. And to your point, to some degree, the way that kind of a monetary good accrues value is exclusively based on reservation demand or the willingness to hold the asset. And that willingness to hold the asset is kind of based on kind of the network effects that it has or that you speculate it will have.

And that in itself, I don't think is a kind of non-arbitrary belief. I think that belief is backed by kind of the specific, again, assurances that that network can provide. So everything from kind of the credibility of monetary policy to the assurance that the asset itself won't be kind of arbitrarily seized or frozen, that, you know, that transactions actions won't be censored, that the value can actually be seamlessly stored and transferred. So all these things kind of create this feedback loop that to many seems circular, but that at the end of the day, there is a reason why kind of Bitcoin is the most liquid, that there

is a reason why Bitcoin has the strongest network effect. And that is because of the explicit trade-offs that it has had in saying, okay, we are going to have a hard, extremely predictable monetary policy. This is going to be slow, but it's going to be extremely secure. And it's going to do a few things, but it's going to do a few things extremely reliably. And so that's kind of where I think investors are starting to realize that there's going to be kind of a shift from look at how many features that this network can provide for me versus look at just the few features that it can provide and rely on. Yeah, it's super interesting. What are your guys' thoughts on Bitcoin's reaction to the liquidity crisis or

liquidity trap that was caused by COVID? So obviously there was this massive sell-off in most asset classes. Bitcoin at one point, kind of the black Thursday or whatever you want to call it, sold off 50%, ended the day down about 30%. And there's a lot of people who are saying, hey, this looks pretty correlated to me. And also, it doesn't look like so much of a safe haven type asset. How do you guys look at what's transpired over the last six weeks or so? Sure. So I'd say we're still very far from returning to kind of business as usual. So there's questions definitely that remain as to when we'll get back on the horse. And I don't really know what the timetable there is, but I think it's been very interesting to your point

to see Bitcoin's response to the recent uncertainty. There's some great work that's been put out by the Coinmetrics of the World. There's a recent piece from the CEO of XBTO who shared his views. I think there are a few things that we need to consider here. First is that in a crisis, whether it's coronavirus coronavirus or a financial crisis or a geopolitical crisis, there's always a crisis of

liquidity. And there's a vicious cycle that occurs where you have basically over-levered investors who need to sell across asset classes, across every asset class. And that creates kind of a rush to liquidity where the comfort of cash basically drives correlations to one. And I say this because I think it's been interesting to see how we've seen this evolution of narratives around Bitcoin during coronavirus, where, to your point, there have been these two competing narratives that have now been heavily questioned during this first quarter. The first is, again, Bitcoin as this uncorrelated financial asset. Second is Bitcoin as this kind of safe haven asset. When we look back at the month of March, I don't think people were expecting to see it as severe

of the drop as what we saw it was i mean bitcoin suffered its second largest daily drawdown in price history uh and i think it was less than 15 minutes you you saw it go from 7200 down to 5400 it broke its 200 week moving average for the first time in seven years and then can continue to sink to below 4k um and post sell-off we realized that one of the largest contributors was uh Like the kind of these Bitcoin liquidations to satisfy margin calls on kind of the BitMEXs of the world, where you saw BitMEX on Black Thursday had almost a billion dollars in liquidations, which is the most over a 24-hour period in years. And you combine that with kind of the exchange outages that it saw and all of the uncertainty around growing coronavirus. And so you kind of get this kind of natural sell. What was interesting to see, and you actually mentioned this with Cathy, was that it appears

that the speculators were flushed out and that longer term investors continue to hold. And so for true believers in Bitcoin, the fundamentals haven't changed. And when you dig into the numbers, and Coinmetrics shows this, most of the sellers were actually short-term holders. And so if you take a look at Bitcoin's revised supply, which is how many old coins came back into circulation after being untouched for a specific period of time, the vast majority of the activity involved Bitcoin that had been held for less than a year. And so this kind of suggests that long-term holders really appeared unfazed.

At the same time, you had this sell-off that was severe, and it was in tandem with an equity market sell-off. And so there are legitimate questions that are raised around if Bitcoin is worthy of allocation, if its claim to fame narrative is around its non-correlation and its safe haven attributes. If you dig into the numbers, though, historically, Bitcoin has been relatively uncorrelated with, let's say, the S&P. Since 2012, the correlation has been roughly between negative 0.15 to 0.15, which is pretty

low correlation. Over this last month, that kind of increased to new all-time highs. And so the question then becomes, does the recent correlation then justify people saying that Bitcoin and the S&P are now suddenly correlated? And the answer, I would say, as many would say, is probably not. And so although you saw these short-term correlations shoot up, you have to recognize that they were under very unique market circumstances. You had the news of the spreading of the coronavirus that continued to grow.

You saw investors across every asset class rushing into cash. And back to my earlier point, in any risk-off environment, it seems like there's really no safe haven, especially not something that's like, you know, has as thin of order books as something like Bitcoin, where a lot of the activity and trading activity is driven by speculation. But, I mean, we even saw this with gold, right? The correlation between the S&P and gold was also tied since 2013. And so I think that we're going to see some sort of kind of reversion to the mean between

Bitcoin and S&P, but that in the short term, there may very well be kind of strong high correlation between the two. On the safe haven asset side, I would say, you know, gold has traditionally been used as that primary example of a safe haven asset and many like to coin Bitcoin as a digital gold. And so, you know, usually on certain times you see the price of gold increase relative to other asset classes. And Bitcoin and gold's correlation historically has been relatively low. Like they haven't had, there hasn't been very strong correlation. In fact, at the extremes they've been negative. And so when we saw Bitcoin and gold's correlation also spike up in March,

similar to Bitcoin and S&P and gold and S&P, you know, does that mean that gold also failed as a safe haven asset? And I would say the answer there is also probably not, where you start to realize that although Bitcoin and gold may not act as safe haven assets during kind of a global pandemic they may act as a safe haven asset you know in times of monetary inflation or qe and so you know let's say given the recent trillion dollar injections that we've seen from the fed it's possible that you have bitcoin like gold that may act um as a safe haven response to some events but not others um and so that's kind of where where i uh where i stand with kind of our reaction where it's like you know we we could be in the midst of what could be an

interesting inflection point um where if you continue to see kind of central banks inject these money into the economy at these rates then you know then it could act as that safe haven during that particular shock um but really the broader point is that fundamentals haven't changed um that there needs that that bitcoin is still working as designed it's producing roughly you know uh you know a block every 10 minutes it has an audible and transparent supply uh and it enables kind of permissionless mortgage and transfer of value so yeah and it feels like the the whole argument around correlation non-correlation the first thing uh that just blows my mind is you have people especially on twitter and stuff like holding up two charts back well these two charts look like

they look similar right right and it's like though correlation is actually a math equation so people one has to realize like that there's actually math that goes into this and we were talking there about kind of 0.15 down to negative 0.15 is a way to quantify how uh correlated these two assets on top of that i i love the example of well gold and treasuries and real estate equities and everything's sold off so does that mean that there is no such thing as a safe haven asset then right other than maybe the dollar and what i think people have to understand is like we're still in the middle of the crisis. So if you go back to 2008, 2009, when gold sold off 29% over the summer of 08, what is everyone doing? Yelling and screaming, gold's no longer a safe haven asset.

But all of a sudden, if you then zoom out to the full lifetime of the crisis, gold ends up over 300%, right? Hits an all-time high. And so I think it's really hard to kind of make these determinations or form opinions in the middle of the crisis because you don't have all of the data of the hindsight of being able to look back and say, well, this is what happened throughout the entire thing. Because what you think six to eight weeks in, probably not going to be what you think on the conclusion of this for better or for worse, right? Because you're just going to get more data and that has a high probability of actually changing your mind or what your assumptions or conclusions are. I mean, I think you bring up an excellent, even broader point where even on a

returns basis. So many people like to look at specific timeframes and cherry pick specific returns. And in Bitcoin in particular, we see this so often, but it's like, you know, if you are a long-term investor, and I think that, you know, especially with these things that are so volatile, it's in your best interest to be as long-term as possible. It's like, you got to take a step back and look at kind of longer-term holding periods. So when you do provide that extra context and that extra context being kind of a lengthened time horizon, then things start to look a lot more attractive. And so that's kind of, I think, a fallacy that a lot of shorter-term investors and particularly traders fall into, where they look at one immediate

reaction. And they think that, you know, everything prior to that is now, now needs to be completely dismissed. And this is our new reality. So just different, different kind of perspective on, on, on time periods as well. For sure. You guys have done a bunch of work on Bitcoin mining and done a bunch of research there. Maybe talk a little bit about the work you guys have done and some of the conclusions that you guys have come to based on that research. Sure. So we've done a lot of work on Bitcoin mining. I think Bitcoin mining is one of the areas of research where I kind of really dug into earlier on. We recently published a white paper kind of laying out kind of the different, the state of Bitcoin mining, where you kind of start

out with, you know, what is Bitcoin mining and what is proof of work and is proof of work computationally intensive? Or is it just there by design? And then go into the evolution of mining hardware, looking at each layer of the supply chain and realizing where competitive advantages exist, where they are increasingly becoming less relevant, and then coming up with some sort of interesting overarching conclusion that Bitcoin mining is here to stay, but that it is increasingly going to become kind of commoditized or going to replicate returns, very similar to what we kind of see in the commodities industry, where today kind of Bitcoin mining is profitable, but highly volatile, highly uncertain, attracts kind of a pool of capital

that I would say is more risk seeking. But as kind of the, as you see kind of depth in capital markets, as you see length in hardware cycles, as you see more predictability around the economics of mining, that the levels of profitability are going to kind of asymptotically converge to something that would be more attractive for, let's say, risk neutral or someone more conservative who wants to kind of replicate a traditional or typical kind of cash flow business that offers kind of low and consistent returns. And so when you get when you get like a more mature derivatives market and when you get kind of more predictability on hardware and the economics, you start to unlock, I would say, pools of capital that today would be kind of less interested in Bitcoin mining.

And then and so it remains kind of a fundamental kind of part of what makes Bitcoin secure. And and it's something that I think increasingly you'll have pools of capital that that today don't have exposure that will kind of increasingly have exposure. Um, uh, a, an area of research, uh, on that point, uh, that, that I recently dug into with, uh, my analyst, with our industrial analyst, um, Sam, um, he, we, we asked kind of what, what do the economics of mining look like for, let's say, like, let's say a natural gas peaker plant or to mine Bitcoin with its excess capacity. So kind of to take a step back and provide context, this area of research was initially triggered from an article that was published on Bloomberg last month in early March, where you had news of a natural gas peaker plant in upstate New York. I think they were called Greenwich Generation, that announced as part of the plant renovation

that they were going to be deploying kind of thousands of mining rigs that would be used to mine Bitcoin with unutilized capacity. And so people are increasingly seeking ways to mine Bitcoin. And so we asked ourselves, you know, if this application in particular had the potential to become widespread and what the economics of basically pairing bitcoin mining with a low utilization power plant would yield um so peaker plants uh they're typically uh they typically only operate uh on the hottest and coldest days of the year when there's peak demand for energy hence their name peaker plant um and so as a result the capacity utilization of an average peaker plant

ends up being about 10%. So another way to think about that is that you basically have peaker plants that are typically only running 10% of the electricity possible relative to it having run 24-7. So what this means is you basically have these peaker plants that have highly variable cash flows, highly variable profitability, and if there are no hot or cold days in a year, then the peaker plan is is effectively uh deemed useless and so what if um instead of you instead

of just turning off or shutting down the peaker plant on days where there is no demand you you mine bitcoin instead like what would the economics look like there and so we kind of built out a model that baked into a bunch of assumptions um where you can basically at a high level divide the analysis into two, you look at what the return on capital of a peaker plant would look like without mining Bitcoin versus what it would look like with mining Bitcoin. So without mining Bitcoin, you basically kind of back into an estimation on the operating and maintenance costs. You take a low capacity utilization and you try to calculate what the cost of electricity would need to be, and then any additional capital costs there. And you roughly

yield like a 12% return on invested capital, which is about the median return on invested capital across industries and is actually higher on the higher end for utilities project. And then on the mining side, you basically have assumptions that are threefold. You have an assumption on kind of your mining operations, on mining hardware, and on the Bitcoin network itself. So if you assume you have the most cost-efficient hardware, that hardware has like a depreciation, depreciates roughly every four years, has a lifetime value of every four years, and you're incurring a cost to maintain that hardware, and you combine that with kind of assumptions on price and hash rate, you actually calculate a return on invested capital

of around 19%. And so if you net the two and you combine the invested capital, you go from a 12% return on invested capital of just a peaker plant without Bitcoin mining to a weighted 17% return on invested capital. Obviously, there are assumptions with Bitcoin's price and growth and hash rate.

But really, this is a really interesting way that investors or plant operators started exploring as providing additional uncorrelated sources of revenue, where in the case of the peaker plant, the result is not just increased returns from mining Bitcoin, but you also get a more profitable core business from these lower costs of capital. And so you're adding this new source of revenue in Bitcoin mining, and you're lowering your operational risk, and you're delivering more consistent returns. And when you think about this in the context of how Bitcoin mining has evolved from like,

you know a hobbyist activity where cpu is drawn from desktops to having these highly specialized data centers that perform um kind of operations using exclusive hardware it's like there are these very very interesting secondary effects of the bitcoin network that have spawned entire industries that we today like can only can only recognize in hindsight and i think that increasingly we're going to start to see these innovative ways of of uh of figuring out kind of um how to uh continue to kind of support the bitcoin network while also kind of adding uh sources of revenue and profitability in other areas that don't have direct that don't have like a direct uh uh link to kind of bitcoin i'm going to turn on my light yeah and i think that part of this um now uh as

you do the equation on if i'm a power producer uh should i start to explore bitcoin mining as a revenue source uh the price of oil all of a sudden tanking makes it even more interesting right because there's certain power producers or energy producers um who say wait a second if i take these goods and I sell them into a market where the price is literally falling off a cliff, today we're seeing $10 or so for a barrel of oil, which sounds insane. There might be better uses of my power. That's not obviously everyone in the energy production world, but definitely that goes into some of the equation as well, I would think. Absolutely. This is really just only one application of of how to kind of utilize something like a power plant to to figure out ways to mine

bitcoin but i mean to your point there are so many other avenues that that people are exploring whether it's kind of the stranded energy assets that you see in hydro um whether it's kind of just you know uh you know flares natural glass gas flares that you're seeing like upstream data they're they're working on um where it's where you know there's a question of oh wow bitcoin is like so wasteful, and look at all the energy that it's consuming, without recognizing that there are some very unique, innovative pockets of energy that otherwise would have been dumped, and sometimes dumped at a loss, that can now be used to, you know, convert electricity into a are monetary asset. And so, you know, that combined with, I think even, you know, institutions are

starting to realize that as well. What's interesting is, you know, the CME, it's a public company, they're an exchange, they actually, you know, have cash settled Bitcoin futures listed. They recently had like an annual kind of board meeting election where one of the nominees has actually made the case for the need to diversify revenue streams within the CME by mining things like Bitcoin, where it makes sense, similar to how you see kind of a lot of, let's say, oil traders who actually have exposure to the underlying kind of rigs to offset the volatility exposure, you're likely going to see that with something like Bitcoin, where you want kind of exposure to every layer of the stack to create much more consistent and

reliable kind of returns on capital. And I think really this is only the beginning stages of that. It will be interesting to see kind of how Bitcoin stands the test of kind of this disinflationary monetary policy and the economics of mining Bitcoin as we kind of go into, let's say a fee a fee reward based error yeah it'd be super interesting what uh what are the thoughts on bitcoin halving that's coming up yes um so i i i think it's going it's going to be very interesting uh there is a a you know a huge debate on this um about kind of its impact on bitcoin's price uh you broadly have kind of two camps that have formed um you have one that kind of believes that the having is already priced in um you kind of citing mark uh efficient market

hypothesis and then you have the other camp that expects kind of the happening to uh plant the seed for what is uh an increase in perceived scarcity and a change in supply-side dynamics or kind of like a supply shop. So historically, and Bitcoin has only seen two halvings, we've seen that it has been this sort of catalyst or there's been an interesting overlap between a halving and a run in price or kind of a catalyst for kind of the next bull run. But again, whether that's a coincidence or whether that's you know a a law that is baked into nature um you know you you get you get it back and forth i think that i i personally um kind of there there are a few things that i know will likely happen for sure um one i think we're definitely going to see kind of

minor lead selling pressure um where unless you do see kind of a bitcoin doubling um prices will you know, you're going to see kind of a decline in the breakeven price for a set of miners. And so these miners are likely going to have to either temporarily or permanently shut off their operations. We saw that with kind of the recent difficulty adjustment. And so that will likely see a drop in hash rate if kind of Bitcoin's price does not see that run up. But then the counter to that is like if you assume kind of constant demand and all else equal, then assuming that you have a cut in your supply, then you effectively have kind of half the supply now needs to be absorbed by the market versus prior to the halving.

And so the remainder is kind of bled into the circulating supply. And so that's kind of like, at the very least, a run up that many people argue is going to occur where, you know, you now need only half of what previously needed to be absorbed by the market after Bitcoin halving. um and then and then another thing is that you know there is this interesting shelling point around bitcoin havings more broadly where whether or not you believe that the price that bitcoin having is priced in you know bitcoin has no marketing and oftentimes kind of as a retail investor as someone who's just learning about this um seeing kind of this shelling point that everyone points to where it's like wow i'm actually increasingly realized that this is a kind of a strictly scarce asset and that at the end of the day um its inflation is is zero right

like they're they're a predefined kind of 21 million bitcoin and over time you kind of just get bitcoin just just unlocking and there's a debate is like is bitcoin created or is it discovered um and so i i think that you know at the very least what we can say is once the block rewards have minor revenue will likely be cut in half while minor uh costs will remain constant because revenue is denominated in bitcoin while costs are denominated in usd and and uh but that once kind of inefficient miners exit the market your profit margins will likely improve you'll get like a difficulty readjustment uh and that will reduce selling pressures and you'll likely see increases in price there uh but uh in general i think that you know it will be a positive event i am still

hesitant to say that like you know that the having is going to create a bull run like we've seen historically uh but again only time will tell there yeah it's gonna be really interesting too i think because when you start to evaluate um the having i always say that uh one has to happen right so like a lot of people i think just assume hey it's going to happen but we have to see that actually occur two is the whole idea of it being priced in would uh depend on everyone knowing that it's going to happen and also understanding the impact that it should have right and we all know that uh not everyone even knows that it's going to happen that holds bitcoin uh and also uh there's even less people who understand that it's going to happen and could explain to you what the impact

should be. And so I think it's just, you know, the debate is less about like, do 100% of people know or not? It's more about what percentage, like how big is that delta between the informed and the uninformed? And there's no right answer, right? It's more of just kind of speculation. And in hindsight, we'll be able to say, oh, it was either priced in or not. It just seems structurally, it's really hard to make that argument that it is priced in if 100% of the people don't understand right that's that's that's a great point i i guess i i would say that what's interesting and i go back and forth on this is that does it matter that people are aware of the having or does it matter that people are aware that like bitcoin is just scarce that there are

only 21 billion right and so it the the whole value proposition behind bitcoin is that there only for a lot of people is that it is this strictly scarce asset now whether or not it is unlocked um every four years or every eight years or every two years or if it's there and and and it's just going to be no no further bitcoin created um i think it's secondary to actually understanding that bitcoin is strictly scarce and so i would say that that's where like the pushback comes where you know it doesn't necessarily matter that there's a having um and what what is priced in is bitcoin scarcity and in fact since day one bitcoin's inflation is actually zero um but but again i i i go back and forth because there's also like kind of this

reflexive property or the nature of if you have you know a lot of people kind of uh uh banking on this halving creating a lot of buzz around bitcoin scarcity that can create some very interesting kind of second order effects i mean even anecdotally uh i had my my landlord who had who you know we've spoken at a very high level about bitcoin in the past and she recently came across an article about the halving and she was like oh yeah you were telling me that this thing scarce you know how do i buy bitcoin and how do i learn about this stuff um and so that's like you know who knows like that that that might be indication that actually you know the having is not priced in because although someone understands or or recognizes subconsciously that bitcoin is

scarce they don't really understand that that there are these kind of specific events in which the the scarcity is only reinforced um so i think that that's really what it is it's like a reinforcement of scarcity that allows almost for bitcoin to market itself as as strictly scarce for sure uh speaking of uh digital currencies in general there's been a bunch of uh changes i think or concessions when it comes to libra um and and a lot of that was driven by regulatory pressure, which obviously part of the value proposition of Bitcoin is there's no CEO or founder to kind of plug in front of government, you know, organizations or Congress or anything like that. Maybe talk a little bit about how you guys have thought about Libra and then some of

those recent updates to their plans. Kind of has that changed your mind positively or negatively? Sure. So to your point, Facebook, I think last week, they unveiled kind of a host of new changes. to Libra. It was actually set to launch this quarter, but obviously kind of given all the regulatory pressure, you had natural delays. And so I think the biggest thing, the biggest pushback that we saw was that this was going to be a stable coin backed by a basket of fiat currencies and government bonds, but that the composition of that basket would be to the discretion of kind of this Libra Association, which is this independent membership organization that is designed to facilitate the operations of the system and the administration of the Libra

Reserve. And so immediately, you had Libra that was met with extremely intense backlash from these regulators that accused Libra of being a massive threat to monetary sovereignty of governments. So for one, I'll say an aside, I think that when we saw that, I think that was like really interesting to see kind of the regulators response to this. And when you look at this in the context of, you know, Bitcoin 10 years ago to Bitcoin today and cryptocurrency, however you want to define that, it's quite amazing to see this shift in narrative where you know you go from this thing is on this random kind of email listserv uh with a bunch of you know tech nerds and this is just basic nerd money to like you

know bitcoin and actually just being for drug lords and criminals and terrorists to you know actually bitcoin is you know for vcs to to have some sort of a mechanism to pump and dump um to to now recognizing oh wait this whole thing whether it's facebook or or uh or bitcoin but the idea of a cryptocurrency even if i argue that really the only thing related that the two are have and similar is like their label as a cryptocurrency um is now set on the world stage uh and regulators are looking at at facebook and we're seeing kind of facebook demise in that there is this almost single point of failure where you actually have this finger to point to where, you know, Facebook naturally not being even a crowd favorite. There is now

like an excuse. There is kind of this neck that you can choke all while Bitcoin kind of is slowly kind of working in the background where it's, I can't kill number one. Well, at least let me go to number two and so that's kind of what we saw with this this massive backlash uh some of the changes i thought were very interesting and i think you know there's questions of was this capitulation or was this a pivot i would say that this is much more of a capitulation than it was a pivot um a few of like kind of the main changes that were made uh you you had kind of uh libra saying that they were going to offer single currency stable coins um instead of kind of additional currency coins. So you basically, instead of having that basket of currencies

in which Libra defined the composition of that basket, you basically had of the currencies in that basket, kind of separate, fully reserved, single asset pegs to that coin. So a Libra USD, a Libra Euro, a Libra Singaporean dollar. And so for emerging markets or for developed nations, you could basically facilitate value transfer without necessarily having to shy away from the monetary policy of that actual nation. And so Libra made sure to emphasize that that the vision had always been for the libra network to complement fiat currencies and not compete with them which i thought was a very interesting concession and it also appears that libra now is basically just catering to central banks um where you basically have this now it's

like a platform for central bank digital currencies um where uh libra is even saying that you know we want to be there when a new central bank launches their own currency and have it on our platform. And so I would say that we came into this quite interested in Libra and what it was doing. And I think it was a very, very interesting value proposition, particularly for emerging markets, immediately we saw kind of a backlash where you had both emerging markets, like let's say India, that said that there's no way this is happening, and developed nations amongst kind of nations in the EU and the United States that are saying, we do not want this to happen.

And so it feels like now Libra is basically just an e-money provider or like central bank currencies um that they're that i understand that their kind of business model wasn't really around kind of libra in particular but was around kind of calibra or providing kind of infrastructure uh but even there like facebook isn't even building the infrastructure um in this newly revamped white paper where you actually have you actually need third-party service providers so If you live in a country that's lacking developer presence of Libra, or you have one that's sanctioned or restricted due to Libra's compliance checks, which was another one, then you basically won't be able to use that. I think that that was the biggest red flag for a lot of people who thought this was going to be an interesting way to on-ramp people into crypto, that if Libra allowed for you to export your private keys, that this would be a way for the everyday person. to see that they have full ownership or property of these private keys, but they go and they enter

kind of, we're going to kind of enhance the safety of this payment system with a robust compliance framework. What that entails is we're going to basically have it such that any kind of sort, any capital controls, any restrictions on specific nations must be abided by and any kind of unhosted wallet in specific jurisdictions will not be valid in kind of this Libra ecosystem. And so when you think about one of the principal reasons for having created Libra in the first place as kind of trying to serve this unbanked population, really as a mechanism for convenience of payments more than as like this new money um libra has been kind of completely stripped of

those features um and and so when you when you have to adhere to these strict capital controls and these regulations um then it basically just becomes uh like any sort of payment processor uh and and i i it would be interesting to see how and whether they they do end up pivot and And Calibra could still end up being a success, but they are shying away more and more from the value proposition of what these permissionless systems are supposed to enable. And I would say their last most notable one was completely saying that the transition to a permissionless system would no longer be within the interest of Libra, in that now Now we're going to basically have kind of an electoral based system to add new nodes and remove nodes accordingly.

It is. It's one of these weird things where it seems like Facebook legitimized Bitcoin and crypto in certain parts of the world. and then within weeks or months also legitimized why the decentralized permissionless components of bitcoin is so valuable right it's like by just them simply putting their their toe in the water and saying hey we think that this is valuable we're actually going to build a team here we're going to go after this opportunity there's a lot of people that kind of woke up and said whoa you know a lot of people might not like mark zuckerberg but not a lot of people think he's stupid right and so if him and facebook think this is important there must be something here but then they drag him in front of congress or senate right you know a bunch of other stuff that

goes on and people start to realize oh that's why that decentralized permissionless uh design is so important absolutely absolutely i mean it's been so interesting to see to see that you you kind of see kind of Libra now, everyone's eyes were on it during the time that it received such backlash. And you saw, and many were saying like, this is going to end up kind of elucidating how much or what Bitcoin's value proposition actually is. And that is like not having kind of these centralized governing bodies that are enforcing top-down control, but rather these open decentralized networks that are providing kind of bottom-up foundations for whatever assurance is being provided. And I think that, if anything, this will, to your point, kind of open the eyes as to

where the value propositions are and what people should be looking for. I think the JPM point was also, to a certain extent, a similar example to that, where they labeled it as a cryptocurrency when it was really just a USD account for institutions and said, okay, this is a cryptocurrency. This allowed for a lot of people who didn't consider this to be worthy of exploration to say, oh, wow, well, if JP Morgan is now coming out with something called a cryptocurrency, I probably should look into this. And upon looking into this, you start to realize just how different it is from, let's say, Bitcoin. And in doing so, you realize, okay, well, actually, I think Bitcoin is the most interesting thing of all.

So it's free marketing, I would say, for a lot of these cryptocurrencies. We will take it. Speaking of other cryptocurrencies, before we finish up, Ether and the Ethereum community. I know you have a bunch of thoughts there. Maybe share kind of what you guys are thinking in the second most popular cryptocurrency. Sure. So I think that Ethereum is increasingly starting to realize the importance of having Ether, the underlying asset, as showing that it is a money.

Very similar to how Bitcoin went through growing pains around its narratives of, is this a cash system? Is this a P2P digital gold? You know, Ethereum is starting to realize kind of the same things of, OK, maybe it is not a world computer. Maybe this is native asset that can fuel an economy of decentralized finance or whatever the case is. I would say that from a from a value accrual standpoint, from an investment standpoint, there is an increasing realization that, you know, value capture does not equal value creation. But again, these cryptocurrencies are not productive assets that a lot of the value is actually going to be driven by reservation demand, by the willingness to hold.

And I like to view Ethereum, although I don't think that over the long term, I do think that Bitcoin is going to kind of accrue more value in a power law distributed manner than Ethereum might. I like to view Ethereum in the eyes of actually Ethereum killers, very similar to how Bitcoiners view Ethereum. There's a really, really interesting kind of bridge that is being formed where very similar to how Bitcoiners view Ethereum's odds at usurping it, Ethereans are now viewing Ethereum killers odds at usurping it in the same way.

So we saw kind of a number of these Ethereum killers that were planning to launch their mainnets where you saw like, you know, the algorithms of the world, the hash graphs of the world that had a lot of promise and that obviously in bull markets, you know, anything tends to trade up. We saw in the ICO boom, you know, when Bitcoin was trading, when Ethereum was trading at, know, um, like 19, $20 billion in market cap or $130 billion in market cap, um, you had, you had like the Cardano's and the EOS's of the world who hadn't even launched their main net that we're trading at 10, $20 billion.

So you had very, very questionable fundamentals. Um, but, uh, but you know, price really didn't reflect that, um, in bear markets, what we're starting to see is that the disposition is definitely to trade down. And so what's interesting is that a lot of Ethereans are now saying that it's very, very hard to justify valuations for these Ethereum killers based on kind of superior technology alone. So what we've seen is that Ethereum is basically saying it doesn't matter whether or not you have this next Ethereum killer that can provide much more smart contract functionality than Ethereum can. Because look at Ethereum's developer activity, look at its network's effects. And to Ethereum's credit, it has built out a robust set of stakeholders since mainnet and far more successfully than any sort of Ethereum killer.

But if you notice kind of the tone, I think that this tone we're starting to, we saw with Bitcoin versus Ethereum, we're starting to see Ethereum versus Ethereum killers. Bitcoin, in the same way, says that, you know, in the open source world, technology is nowhere near kind of a defensible kind of moat as to what we traditionally see. Ethereans are now applying that same logic to Ethereum killers. And so we understand kind of the characteristics of, let's say, proof of work based commodities like we're seeing in Ethereum 1.0 and Bitcoin, there is yet to be kind of a robust literature

and validation around kind of more proof of stake created capital assets. But I just find that the tone that Ethereans are now applying to Ethereum killers to be very reminiscent of what Bitcoiners have been saying this whole time. And this kind of really just goes back to what these are and where most value is going to accrue

is going to depend on kind of the network effects that these assets have been able to build and the willingness to hold these assets more broadly. Yeah, it is the most fascinating part of all of crypto to me is the debate between the technology versus the belief system. And I think part of what has surprised me, you know, having a background working at some of the large tech companies and understanding a lot of that community and ecosystem. And then also on the Wall Street side, the finance community,

they look at these problems very different, right? They're very biased in their perceptions. But in some weird way, the finance people understand money much better than most technology people doing this you know big over generalization but but definitely to some degree and it's almost like the winner of the debate right i kind of put winner in air quotes is going to be is it just money that matters and all the properties that come along with that or is it the technology that matters and all the things that come with that uh i think you and i have a perspective but i don't know if that debate has been settled in the sense of there's a market consensus, which then that leads to the opportunity, right? Is there's people kind of betting on both sides of both assets and

there'll be winners and losers over a long period of time. Absolutely. I mean, I think that you just have to divide them into two completely different investment philosophies. I don't think one is right or wrong. I just think that it's important to delineate between the two. And if I were to kind of just from a risk to reward standpoint you know look at you know historically how a lot of these other crypto assets have been kind of levered beta plays on bitcoin that within the cryptocurrency community there is still pretty strong correlation that if you if you're like an institutional investor and you're looking to kind of allocate into the crypto space i think you have to first be convinced of bitcoin before anything else and then when you look at where most

value is going to accrue, and you start to recognize this from a monetary lens, it's hard to justify from a risk to reward standpoint, allocating at least in the foreseeable future into things other than Bitcoin. Having said that, let's say 10, 20 years down the line, if the whole kind of internet 3.0 thesis does play out, and there are kind of interesting implications on reversing the internet stack and figuring out ways to kind of further disintermediate data providers there there could be some very very interesting vc type bets uh but i think that they're very i think that the the the way that most value is going to accrue is quite paradoxical to what we see in traditional venture capital of kind of the prey and spray model that that that

most VCs employ, they're now kind of employing to the crypto space. But again, this is an ongoing debate. I think that it is very, very interesting. And to see kind of the value of accrual dynamics evolve over time, really, that just goes to show that only time will tell. On Bitcoin, man. Before we end, I'm going to surprise you with something that you don't know, because since we started recording when we started recording oil was at about ten dollars a barrel and uh it is now negative it has literally dropped to under zero dollars and it's currently crude oil is currently trading at negative a dollar 43 people are texting so uh pretty nuts to see this happen that is crazy that is i don't even know what to say in our big idea as we said we had

peak oil demand in around 2022 so we're we're close to that it was like trading at 60 or 70 dollars a barrel uh that that when we said 10 to 15 people were in absolute shock like there's no way and uh and like kind of catherine likes to say you have commodities that are usually priced at the margin um and you know things like kind of the extra electric vehicle and and on autonomous angle i think is also kind of contributing to just this complete cascading effect that we've seen Obviously, you know, that's just, I mean, I'm blown away right now. I had to look at my phone four times because I was like, what the hell do you mean is negative? All right.

Where can people find you on the Internet and any of the research or work that you're putting out? Sure. So you can find ARK at ARK-Invest.com. We're also on Twitter. I'm Yassine Ark ARK and we have a bunch of Ark has its own Twitter account

and all of our analysts are also on Twitter so feel free to join us on the Twitter sphere you guys are fantastic I said it with Kathy but I just appreciate the kind of data driven research driven approach to innovative technology because it's funny how

if you do the work the data tells you some of the answer right Thank you. Well, I really do appreciate it. And I was saying this for a long Bitcoin short, the banks quoted pump. So thanks for everything that you do. I think that, you know, a lot of people who aren't relatively familiar with everything that's going on in the investing world now more broadly, you find a lot of value in just in listening to the things that you have to say and the guests that you bring on uh every one of my friends who's not in the investment world uh always ask what what's a good resource for me to just start to you know that dabble in

in the investing world and and you're definitely one of the first that i bring up so appreciate all your efforts as well i appreciate that very much well we will uh we will continue to do this as long as uh we continue to debate all these ideas so i appreciate taking the time to join us Thank you, sir. Have a great one and stay safe. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain

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