The Pomp Podcast - #407: Alexander Leishman On Building A Bitcoin Company
Episode Date: October 14, 2020Alexander Leishman is a Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of River Financial. Prior to that, he was the Engineer and Investor at Polychain Capital and the Security Software Engineer at Airbnb. I...n this conversation, we discuss what River Financial does, why they only focus on Bitcoin, how it is going so far, why so many boomers are using their service to buy Bitcoin, what self-custody products they offer, and how he sees the current economic situation. ============================== Want to sell your wonderful internet business? Tiny partners with founders to give them quick, straightforward exits that protect their team and culture. We’ll make an offer within a week, close the deal within a month, and keep your business operating for the long term. Get in touch at tinycapital.com and we’ll let you know within a couple of days. ============================== Masterworks.io is an exclusive platform that makes it as easy as trading stocks online. And the best part is: you don’t need to know anything about art. Their experts will create a custom portfolio to meet your investment needs. With Masterworks.io you don’t have to choose between big risks and big returns. Sign up today, select PODCAST and you can skip the 70,000 waitlist to get first dibs. Just go to www.masterworks.io and use code "POMP" ============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com
Transcript
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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.
Alexander Leishman is the CEO and co-founder of River Financial. Prior to that, he was the
engineer and an investor at Polychain Capital and the security software engineer at Airbnb.
In this conversation, we discuss what River Financial does, why they only focus on Bitcoin,
how it is going so far, why so many boomers are using their servers to buy Bitcoin,
what self-custody products they offer, and how he sees the current economic situation.
I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode,
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And if you want the daily letter that I send, go to pompletter.com. Let's get into the episode
with Alexander. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek
Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions
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This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Super excited to
have Alex here. Thanks so much for doing this, man. Thanks for having me, Pomp.
Absolutely. So you built one of the most fascinating companies in crypto. You're a Bitcoin-only business. We'll get to that in a second.
But before we kind of jump into River Financial, talk to us a little bit about your background, kind of what you did before you started the company.
So I got into Bitcoin because of an interest I had as an undergraduate at university.
I studied aerospace engineering at University of Maryland, but was really interested in economics.
Eventually, I read a paper called The Denationalization of Money by Friedrich Hayek
and got really obsessed with this idea of building a financial institution that offered
private money. I thought I would make my own money someday backed by commodities or something like
that. But then I started going down that rabbit hole and realized that there's a lot of challenges
trying to do it yourself. I saw what happened to Liberty Dollar, Liberty Reserve. It didn't
end too well for them. So when I discovered Bitcoin, I was like, holy cow, this fulfills
the prophecy. It's neither private nor government controlled. It's this new system, new paradigm
we've never seen before, but it's fascinating. And I became instantly obsessed. And so I moved
to Silicon Valley at the end of 2013 and been out there pretty much ever since working mostly in the
Bitcoin space and then started River about a year and a half ago. Before that was working,
I went to actually, I went to grad school out there. I helped TA the first Bitcoin class at
Stanford. I also worked at an investment fund called Polychain Capital, helping them lead some
of their Bitcoin investments and also helping them build some of the technical infrastructure
to help them manage their assets. And so, yeah, I've had quite a fun time out there.
Absolutely. And so when you left Polychain and you decided to go and build River,
what was the general impetus for wanting to start a company? And what was that initial idea as to,
hey, this is what I'm going to go build? So the initial impetus was kind of the itch I had back
as an undergrad to build this financial institution. I had seen a lot of people in
the space build exchanges and focus on offering access to multitudes of cryptocurrencies.
The big long tail, Coinbase had started with Bitcoin and then expanded very quickly to
supporting as many coins as possible. And I had never seen anyone go down the route of actually
focusing only on Bitcoin and building more of a bank looking institution around it and going deep
on Bitcoin and brought across financial services. I felt like the exchange business was really cool,
but it's really, I see it as a local maximum and the global maximum is building a Bitcoin
financial institution. And so I, you know, all these other companies went right and no one went
left. And I, you know, I saw that as a big opportunity and that's the whole hypothesis
this behind river. Got it. And so what did you build first and kind of also talk a little bit
about like why Bitcoin only? Yeah, so right now we're a Bitcoin brokerage and custodian in 31
states. So we focus on the higher end of the market, the mass affluent to the ultra high
net worth individuals. And we make it really, really easy for people to buy Bitcoin and securely
custody that Bitcoin. Over the next year, we'll be expanding across financial services,
providing things like, well, we already provide access to self-custody services and then other
things like tax-advantaged accounts, lending, and other financial services that banks offer.
Um, so, you know, starting, uh, starting the company in 2019, uh, was a very interesting
experience. And then the transition between the 2019 era to the 2020 era, uh, into the COVID era
has been very fascinating and, um, it's been pretty crazy ride. Yeah. Talk a little bit about
maybe, uh, other companies in the space. They've gone on to add other assets than just Bitcoin.
You guys have kind of held steady on Bitcoin only.
How do you look at those other businesses?
Do you think that those are kind of, hey, that's for each company to kind of make their own decision?
Do you think that that's a bad strategy?
Just talk through that a little bit.
So the way we view this is that being Bitcoin only is economically in our interest and allows us to move much faster than the competition.
Because we focus on Bitcoin only, we can provide unique features that our competitors can't.
For example, we offer access to the Lightning Network.
We have this cool feature where you can connect a hardware wallet and see all your Bitcoin that you self-custody.
And then when you buy Bitcoin and River, you can easily transfer it to your hardware wallet and see all the tax information transferred as well.
All these little things that we do would be orders of magnitude more complicated to do if we supported multiple cryptocurrencies.
Just adding one more cryptocurrency to a product like ours, 4 to 10x is the complexity of the systems on the back end that we have.
And so we see it as a massive competitive advantage. We see this long tail of assets that these other companies are focused on kind of just providing trading services for as kind of interesting things to bet on or gamble on. But really, we don't see it as money. We see Bitcoin as money.
And so if Bitcoin is the next money of the world, somebody needs to build the next banking services around Bitcoin.
And that's why we're focused on Bitcoin, because we don't see any other asset that sits at that level.
Additionally, as a business, our goal is do one thing and do it well, right?
And why spread ourselves thin across 100 different cryptocurrencies when the vast majority of people only really want Bitcoin?
And that's what we rarely get asked by our customers even to support other cryptocurrencies.
So that wouldn't really make sense for us.
Absolutely.
One of the things that you've been able to kind of build out is this white glove service, right?
It really makes people feel special.
It really kind of seems like, hey, River cares.
Talk a little bit about that process and kind of how that came to fruition and how you guys executed.
Because I've seen people posting the photos online and it just looks really cool is kind of a short way to say it.
So, one of the biggest shortcomings we saw from existing cryptocurrency companies before starting River was the client services and the client experience.
I knew people with lots of money on Coinbase who couldn't even get anybody on the phone.
Can you imagine wiring millions of dollars to a financial institution before ever talking to somebody that works there?
And yet, that's what a lot of these Silicon Valley kind of startups expect people to do.
We saw that and saw that one of the biggest barriers preventing people from buying Bitcoin was the fact that there wasn't a company out there that just had really good service because Bitcoin is very intimidating.
From a business perspective, the way we view our client services is if we can make Bitcoin much less intimidating for people, we can grow our business really well.
And so that's really the goal with our client services is to take away the intimidation from Bitcoin, make people feel appreciated, and that we don't take their business for granted and earn their business.
Got it. And so talk through kind of who's buying now and how's it going so far? You've been at it for 18 months and any metrics you can share or kind of any updates in terms of how it's actually going?
So we see the full spectrum of clients at River. However, most of our volume, in fact, probably I'd say 70% or so of our volume comes from people over the age of 50. A lot of people, a lot of older people are buying Bitcoin right now in significant sums.
In absolute terms, significant sums, they typically start with a small percentage of their own assets.
But if you look at the wealth in the United States and the wealth in the world, most of it is held by older people, which is kind of natural because older people have had longer to accumulate wealth.
So COVID and the subsequent social instability and economic uncertainty that has come from that has really been a big catalyst for a lot of these older people deciding to finally buy Bitcoin.
And it's for a number of different reasons. Some of them, their own family has been through wealth confiscation in other parts of the world, and they viscerally understand how important it is to have assets that they can completely control and get out quickly if something were to really go south fast.
Other people who have significant amounts of assets, they ask themselves, well, let's see, 99% of my wealth is tied to assets that are real estate, equities, things that are very locked down to the United States.
And if something did happen in the United States, God forbid, what could I get out so that me and my family would have something?
And there's gold and Bitcoin, and gold has its own set of challenges.
Good luck getting a lot of that out.
so um and then and then third is the third category is really people who just see it as
an uncorrelated asset in a world where it's unclear where your money should be i mean stocks
are all-time highs but it's unclear why because the markets i mean there's look at all the
unemployment and the economic you know uncertainty that we face uh that's not really justified
they're printing trillions of dollars every year now um so where do they where do i put my money i
mean, there's only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoin, that's pretty simple. And so, you know,
we see a lot of different, you know, paths people take towards Bitcoin, but all of them kind of
are around this idea of like increasing instability.
Got it. And when people come in, it sounds like they're making kind of a small purchase,
and they kind of crank up in terms of larger and larger purchases. Any idea from the clients that
you guys have where they're getting to from a portfolio percentage standpoint? Are we talking
about getting to 1% allocations, 5%? Are people at the age of 50 going to 25%? Any ideas there
where they're actually getting? I think they're typically starting around 1% and then going
anywhere between 5% to 10% is what we've seen largely. There are the unique people who do go
further, the ones who are really into Bitcoin. But we're also in the very early innings here.
So it, and, and, and all of our clients are, are on a, on a journey and they're all on
different steps of the journey.
So that's what we've seen so far, but who knows where that will go longer term.
So, um, but, but so far we don't see most older people going all in.
What do you think it'll take to change, uh, that, right?
Like what will it take to get the older people to go all in?
Well, I don't think, I think most of them, I doubt most of them will ever be 100% in Bitcoin. I mean, they own properties and businesses. Those are big parts of their net worth. And those aren't things that they would necessarily replace with Bitcoin.
I think really the bigger question is how will more older people or more people in general get initially exposed to Bitcoin, and why aren't people buying Bitcoin today who otherwise might?
If you look at the numbers, especially in the older demographic, only about 10% of the people who are interested in buying Bitcoin actually have it.
And so an interesting question is like, well, why haven't they bought it?
And I think it's really, it's just very intimidating.
Younger people have internet communities that they have access to, to ask questions and socialize.
If you think about the average older person, you know, they're not on Twitter every day.
They're not on Reddit every day.
So they have this curiosity in Bitcoin, but none of their friends know anything about it.
No one they know knows anything about it.
So they're kind of just on their own island.
And I think the question is, how do you reach them on that island?
And that's what we try and do.
And I think that's also there's a big opportunity for, you know, content creators like yourself to reach these folks because we've noticed a lot of them when they find a podcast, they also really love listening to podcasts.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
And I guess as you guys kind of see these people trickle in, it feels like there's an entire demographic of people who they know they should own Bitcoin.
Like they've already decided, yes, this would be a good idea.
But the action of going to buy it, it's almost like they've mentally convinced themselves, oh, that's the decision I should make, but they don't execute. Do you see kind of the service-based approach you guys have taken? Does that break down that barrier? Does that make it easier for people? Or do they kind of look at it as, hey, this is no different than an exchange, I just happen to have a phone number attached that I can call?
The human element 100% breaks down the barrier.
At the end of the day, everyone, I think, really appreciates human engagement with the business, especially when it's a positive experience.
And we see our goal as educating our prospective clients, whether or not they decide to buy Bitcoin or not.
We don't give financial advice.
We don't tell people you should buy Bitcoin.
Our job is to educate people about Bitcoin and make it easy as possible for them to do so if they wanted to buy it.
And so I think 100% though, the human element that we add to the experience is the game changer.
Got it. You guys also have a self-custody product from what I understand.
Talk a little bit about what you guys are doing on the custody side.
so one of the things that is big in the bitcoin ethos is having the ability to fully control your
own wealth and our our motto here at river is we want to be the company that you can trust but you
don't have to trust so our goal is to make it as easy as possible for our clients to self-custody
their own bitcoin if they ever wanted to and and removing the barriers to self-custody that are
there right now it's very challenging to do so so one of the products we built out was a deep
harbor wallet integration with river so when you set up your river account and you buy bitcoin
you can actually connect a harbor wallet and pull in all of the information from that harbor wallet
into your river account so you can see all of the coins that you custody yourself and all the coins
that river custody is on your behalf. And so then when you buy Bitcoin and river, you can actually
transfer over the Bitcoin to your Harbor wallet with a click of a button, because we've actually,
we have the ability to generate new addresses for you to view all your historical transactions,
and then in self custody, those coins yourself without losing any visibility into the tax data
and the balance. So if you have a ledger, and you have your river at Bitcoin, you have your
Bitcoin or River, you can see all the Bitcoin at once when you log into River, whether you
control it or we do. I'm assuming people love that. It's been pretty popular. It's a beta
feature. We're still working out some of the little UI things. It's really non-trivial because
no one's really done this before. So there's a lot of user research that we've had to do
to learn how to describe what this is to new users. One of the biggest fears we have is someone
connects their ledger and thinks that we have their Bitcoin now, and they can just throw their
ledger away, right? Because a lot of people don't really know the ins and outs of how this stuff
works. So getting that stuff, those little things, right, is what we're working on before we take
this out of beta. And we also have a mobile app coming out soon. So if you connect your ledger
to your River account, then on the go, you just open your phone, you can see your whole Bitcoin
stack on your river app even if even if you're custodying it got it and in terms of um seeing a
lot of uh kind of customers come in use these different products what are the features or
products that they want that you guys haven't yet built but kind of are think are interesting
or on the roadmap the app is a big one so we've been working all summer on getting a mobile app
out and that's one of the biggest pieces of feedback we've gotten um we actually do regular
we started tracking NPS recently. So net promoter score to get feedback from our clients about
would they recommend us to a friend and if not, why? And so we collect all these responses about
what customers want from us. We have a really high NPS score, actually. It's 74, which is
pretty high up there. For example, Charles Schwab is in the 50s. So we're doing pretty well. But
But in terms of what people have said that is still missing, another big one is when you buy Bitcoin from us, you can buy it in one of two ways.
You can wire us the funds and buy that Bitcoin.
That's what people do for larger orders like $25,000, $50,000 plus.
And those Bitcoin are available to withdraw immediately.
But most people, they buy via ACH.
So they connect their bank account and just click buy.
And then we actually front the money to buy those Bitcoin for people.
And you can buy 24-7.
But it takes six to 20 business days for that Bitcoin to settle in your account, meaning you can't withdraw that Bitcoin for some time period.
So we're really focused on shrinking that settlement time because a lot of people want to be able to access their Bitcoin faster and get it off the platform faster.
So that's one of the other big pieces of feedback that we've been trying to address.
And a lot of that is just in all of the backend systems that we have to build.
And then another big one has been like earning, like yields on Bitcoin has been something people have asked for.
IRAs is another popular one, being able to buy Bitcoin into an IRA.
You know, a lot of people, you can actually, if you have an IRA LLC, you can already buy Bitcoin and River through your IRA LLC.
But, you know, that's something that's definitely very interesting to people who want to buy Bitcoin in a tax advantaged way.
Yeah. Talk a little bit about kind of building the company itself, like the team. You've done this in the heart of a global pandemic and economic shock. It seems like everything that could possibly go wrong in the world has gone wrong in 2020. How has that been just as kind of the founder of a company and building out that team? And have you guys made any changes that are material in terms of how you've thought about that?
so when we raised our latest financing we raised it in the depths of the pandemic like the worst
days of the pandemic uh i was on the phone with investors we pulled it off we were one of the
very lucky few companies that was actually able to pull off a fine fundraising then um and one of
the saving graces for us was that if anything was gonna be like the black swan that came out of this
mess, the phoenix coming out of the ashes, it would be Bitcoin. And I think that's where we're
seeing that happening. That said, it hasn't been all smooth. I mean, COVID has brought its own set
of challenges. Building a product organization that is effective in a remote environment is
tough. There's so much that you get just from being in the same room and eating a meal with
somebody ideas just spark and being able to replicate that online is very very challenging
and um so there that's been a big focus of ours is just figuring out how to you know build good
remote teams uh and then on top of that i think um in many ways this covet thing has kind of been
good for business uh you know it's driven a lot of trends that are in bitcoin and are that are
that are tailwinds for bitcoin but um you know so so i don't know uh i don't know what's going
to happen at the end of the day here with the fallout of all this i think it's still very early
and you know the next decade we'll we'll see what what the end result is yeah it's fascinating to
me how teams are having to kind of figure this out in real time uh thankfully a lot of the products
that were are in place your platforms are in place to allow uh some of this kind of remote
communication i had a friend who basically said imagine if all of this happened and we didn't have
uh the internet or you know some of this technology like what would people do right yeah yeah no
exactly um and you know we're seeing some other some other like it's also accelerating the move
away from cash, which is, you know, it's kind of scary, right? Because cash is one of these
ways you can use money anonymously and securely. And now this is driving a trend towards everyone,
you know, kind of having money. Everyone's transactions are now kind of accessible to
the surveillance apparatus. And so privacy is a big, we're losing a lot of privacy, you know,
as a country. And so, you know, how does Bitcoin come in and replace that gap? I don't know.
Like we still have to see what else can help, you know, bring back some of the privacy as things are just really forced online during this era of COVID.
So these are things we're trying to pay attention to as well and see what opportunities there are there.
Because, you know, there are very interesting problems, new problems in society that we didn't have a year ago that I think people are just starting to wrap their heads around.
For sure. Talk a little bit about the economic situation.
You mentioned that there's a lot of people buying Bitcoin maybe out of fear or concern.
How do you guys see this unfolding?
And it sounds like you're pretty bullish in terms of Bitcoin's outlook kind of coming out of all this.
Absolutely.
I think this has brought a lot of people's attention to Bitcoin.
The best thing Bitcoin has going for it is that there's only ever going to be 21 million.
Everyone understands that.
Everyone understands there's only ever going to be 20 million Bitcoin.
The federal government just printed $2 trillion this year.
So you have all these people sitting on a lot of cash thinking, well, what the heck am I doing with all this cash when they're just printing it out of thin air?
Where do I put it?
And I think that's like I think just like that meme, that narrative is the game changer, you know, 21 million.
and so um i i think that's going to be the best thing bitcoin has going for it over the next few
years as every country in the world just prints unlimited amounts of money and uh gold kind of
is the gold is the historical you know hedge that people use but um in the computer era
you know as everything comes online i think people are are increasingly going to start
looking at Bitcoin over gold. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's headed in that direction. That's for
sure. One of the things I don't know if you even remember this story, but I want to tell it on here
when when we set this up is, I went out to to see you. And when I was in San Francisco came to the
office, you a bunch of your co founders and employees. And we were sitting there and somebody
basically was like, Hey, come into the office, right? So we're sitting in the conference room.
And I walked in and I'll never forget that your office was littered.
And when I talk about littered, I mean, literally all over the place with Venezuelan Bolivars, with, what is it, Zimbabwe dollars.
I mean, just all kinds of these currencies that have failed that I think gets bought off eBay.
Maybe talk a little bit about like, where did you get this stuff from?
Why was there so much of it laying around the office and kind of what you guys do with it?
Yeah, so we have a lot of stacks. It kind of looks like if Floyd Mayweather lived in Zimbabwe. It's kind of what our office looks like sometimes. We get stacks of trillion-dollar bills, $10 billion bills all over the office.
We have different suppliers for these, but we give these to customers and people who visit the office.
It's kind of our thing, and we send it to many new clients with a welcome package as a reminder of what can happen to government money and what kind of inevitably happens with government money.
and uh we you know we have a lot of things in our office to also just like
build the culture of the team and re-remind everybody why we're doing this right our goal
is to bring sound money access to sound money to people all over the world and um you know for
another example of this is we have a a poster of executive order 6102 in our office which is the
order that franklin roosevelt um the executive order franklin roosevelt issued to confiscate
people's gold in the United States. My co-founder, Andrew, who's also my cousin,
our great-grandfather had his gold confiscated by Franklin Roosevelt.
So these things happen, and they inevitably happen whenever there's a centrally controlled
money that you can just arbitrarily print more of. And so, yeah, I mean, it's just core to who
we are. And we like to remind our clients of that. I love that. Before I go to wrap up,
where can people find you on the internet or find more about River?
So we're river.com. It's really easy to find. Check out the website. I'm really easy to reach
at alexatriver.com or check out my Twitter. I'm at Leishman, L-E-I-S-H-M-A-N. And yeah,
So if you ever have any questions about Bitcoin or just want to talk shop, want to learn more about River, feel free to reach out.
Always happy to talk.
How did you get the River.com URL?
Oh, that's a good question.
So we went through a period last year where we had to rebrand.
And we went through a three-month process of trying to figure out a new name.
And we worked with a domain broker to go through just probably hundreds, maybe even thousands of domains that were available that had a name that we would want.
And I saw River on one of the lists after probably two months.
And I was like, there's no way we could afford this.
But like, let's see.
Let's see what.
And so, you know, the guy selling it had owned it since the early 90s.
And, um, the price was actually kind of like reasonable and it, for us, it was a no brainer.
You know, we pulled the trigger and haven't looked back and couldn't be happier with our
name.
Will you say how much?
Uh, no.
Okay.
Fair, fair, fair.
Less than voice.com.
For those that don't know, voice.com, uh, was bought for $30 billion from Michael
Saylor, who's the CEO of MicroStrategy and recently put 85% of his balance sheet into
Bitcoin, which is a pretty crazy story in itself. All right. So I'm glad you spent less than $30
million. Zero to $30 million is not a big range at all. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
All right. Same two questions for everybody. Then you could ask me one to finish up. First one is
your favorite book or most important book you've read of all time.
The Richest Man in Babylon. My dad read it to me when I was a kid. Never forgot it.
That is a fantastic one. I always say there's three books for me, Rich Dad, Poor Dad,
Richest Man in Babylon, and Thinking Grow Rich. So that's a great one. Aliens, believer or
non-believer? Believer.
Why? I think that we're not alone in this universe. I think that at some point we'll discover
why we haven't been contacted but i think we're just it's such so early in our civilization
that wrapping our head around the wise is is too difficult aliens might might exist in different
dimensions um might exist in a reality that we don't quite comprehend uh so that's why i'm super
interested in space exploration but also just like fun deeply increasing our fundamental
understanding of physics i think we just have so much further to go in the fundamental sciences and
And we'll discover things that blow our minds hundreds of years from now.
I think that you're closer to being accurate than not.
So it's amazing, right?
Somebody sent me an article.
Who was it?
Oh, the founder of Athletic Brewing, one of the sponsors on the podcast.
Shout out to Athletic Brewing.
The founder sent me an article about fusion and the ability to try to get the heat and energy of a star.
recreated here on earth. It blew my mind. Like you start reading about this stuff, right? And it's
like, you know, they haven't done it yet, but they're getting closer and closer. And you're
just like, wait till somebody figures out how to do that. And then can you create like fusion
power plants so that you have, you know, eternal energy sources? And it's like, just like, okay,
this is gonna be wild. Hopefully I'm alive for that one, right? You could ask me one question
to finish up. What one question you got for me? When will the first central bank buy Bitcoin?
or have they already i think they already have yeah i think that it's probably a nefarious uh
actor like a venezuela uh an iran uh north korea somebody like that uh but i think for sure they
already have uh publicly i think venezuela said they were thinking about it like adding it as a
reserve asset but i i think we're past the point of somebody buying it i think the more nuanced
question is like, when will the first superpower central bank do it? Um, and my guess is that we're
years away, you know, five years away or something like that. Okay. What do you think?
Yeah. I mean, I think, I think I probably agree. There's maybe some fringe central bank that's
bought a little bit. Um, and I think that someone has to catalyze the first central bank to buy
Bitcoin. I don't think it's just going to happen. And so, you know, I think, um, I think maybe one
of the questions just for people in Bitcoin is, what do we all need to build to really push this
to the next level? And that's kind of how I think. I've got this theory that the only way a lot of
this is going to happen is for Bitcoiners to get into these positions, right? Exactly.
So at what point do we get, I don't know, seven or eight of, I think, the 12 Federal Reserve
governors or bitcoiners i always say bitcoin is an individual story you know every institution
that's going to have a massive allocation of bitcoin is going to have that because individuals
at that institution have gone down the rabbit hole and so you know i always think it's going
to be a story about the individuals and the individuals who end up running the institutions
of the world so it takes time i think that's a fair way to look at it all right alex listen
you're doing a fantastic job please keep building what you're building we need more bitcoin only
companies. And obviously, from the market response, I think that it's pretty clear people
want this. So we're cheering for you. And we will have to do this again in the future.
Thanks a lot, Tom. It was a pleasure.
