The Pomp Podcast - #609 Building A Crypto Unicorn with Michael Wu

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

Michael Wu is the founder & CEO of Amber Group, a Hong Kong-based crypto finance startup that provides trading and asset management services. In this conversation, we discuss building a crypto unicorn, servicing institutions, market making, crypto finance, and centralized vs decentralized services.  ======================= Remote makes it easy for companies of all sizes to employ global teams. We take care of international payroll, benefits, taxes, and local compliance, so you can focus on growing your business. Sign up for Remote today and receive 50% off your first employee for the first three months. Check out remote.com/pomp and enter promo code POMP to get started. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= You don’t have to be a hedge fund guru to know that markets can rise and fall quickly - remember Dogecoin? Sometimes, the most attractive growth can be found in some of the oldest of places. Despite being hundreds of years old, the art market is poised for tremendous market capitalization growth. Deloitte projects the total wealth held in art and collectibles to expand from $1.7 trillion to $2.7 trillion by 2026. I largely attribute this to the rise of securitized assets, opening the doors to the art market for all. Founded in 2017, Masterworks dot IO is the leading platform for blue-chip art investing with over 185,000 registered users. They have purchased over $180 million in art from artists like Banksy, Basquiat and KAWS. I’m a huge fan of Masterworks dot IO and have spoken with founder Scott Lynn twice now on the pod - so go back and give those episodes a listen! Check out Masterworks dot IO today and skip the waitlist with promo code POMP today. See important disclaimer at Masterworks slash disclaimer

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. Now let's kick this thing off. Michael Wu is the founder and CEO of Amber Group, a Hong Kong-based crypto finance startup that provides trading and asset management services. In this conversation, we discuss building a crypto unicorn, servicing institutions, market making, crypto finance, and centralized versus decentralized services. I really enjoyed this conversation with Michael, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Remote. When you use Remote, you can employ people in other

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old, the art market is poised for tremendous market capitalization growth. Deloitte projects the total wealth held in art and collectibles to expand from $1.7 trillion to $2.7 trillion by 2026. it's going to get larger. I attribute this to the rise of securitized assets opening the doors to the art market for all. Founded in 2017, Masterworks.io is the leading platform for blue chip art investing with over 185,000 registered users. They've purchased over $180 million in art from artists like Banksy, Basque, and Cause. I'm a huge fan of Masterworks.io and I've spoken with founder Scott Lynn twice now on the podcast. So go back and give those episode to listen. You can check out masterworks.io today and skip the wait list if you use

promo code POMP. That's right. If you want to invest in art, but you don't have millions of dollars, you can do that now through my friends over at Masterworks. Big fan of the platform, big fan of Scott and the rest of the team. Go check them out at masterworks.io and skip that wait list by using promo code POMP today. All right, let's get in this episode with Michael. I hope that you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs POMP Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy,

but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Mike here with me. Thank you so much for doing this, my friend. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Pong. Absolutely. Let's just jump right into Amber Group. Obviously, you guys have built a really, really big business very quickly and serving users in kind of unique ways. Let's just start with what is Amber Group? What is the products that you guys kind of present to the market today? And then how has it been going so far? What metrics can you share with us about the business? Totally. So Amber Group, in short, is an integrated crypto finance platform.

Our slogan is Your Gateway to Crypto Finance. We provide pretty much everything under the sun as related to crypto finance, to our global user base. If you look at a business, you can kind of think it. Institutions, you can think of us as almost like a crypto investment bank

or crypto prime brokerage where the hedge funds, the VCs, the crypto companies, They use our services to trade, to invest, to do asset management, derivatives, et cetera. Now, the second part of the business is more consumer-facing. You can think of it as a crypto private bank or crypto private wealth manager, where an individual customer could be as large as a billion-dollar family office, or it could be a young guy, a Gen Z millennium that just got into crypto.

It doesn't matter. The person can really, you know, enjoy all the services, almost the same kind of institutional grade services that we provide to the first group of customers via our platform. You know, so our customers can also buy and sell crypto with us. They can park their cryptos and stable coins with us for a very attractive yield. They can do structural products with us. They can do asset management with us. They can do borrow landing payments, et cetera, all with us on the same platform in a one-stop kind of services way. Got it. And so when you start thinking about kind of this all-in-one

platform that services everyone from institutions all the way to retail, what metrics can you share with us in terms of the user base or the growth or what products are most popular volumes? Just what are you comfortable sharing there? Totally. So in terms of the customer base, On the institutional side, I think we have a bit over 700 different institutions that onboarded with us that trade or do crypto asset management with us. These are, again, the billion-dollar hedge funds, the multifamily offices, the crypto companies, projects, et cetera. On the other end, on the individual side, actually, we only launched our product suite late last year. So it's only been nine months of the journey, but we saw a very fast adoption of our product and it was very well received. So combining together, now we manage around $2 billion of crypto assets for our customers.

And also being one of the largest liquidity providers in space, I think up to date, we have traded over $500 billion of crypto assets. On an average day, I think we account for 3% or 4% of the global crypto volume. In terms of the popular products, I think the most fundamental product we offer is what we call the Amber Earn or the interest earning account. Essentially, our customers, they like to park their crypto with us because on the floating side, they get 3% to 4% annualized floating yield, which is very appealing. and that there's no cap size on how big you want to park there. You wire that to our Amber wallet.

You enjoy that floating interest every day. And then if you are willing to lock that up for a longer time, say six months, 12 months, or any customized date, 190 days to 157 days, up to you, you can get a much higher fixed term deposit rate. So for Bitcoin and Ethereum, it can go up to 7% or 8%. And for dollar stable coins, it goes up to 10%. So that is, again, a very attractive fixed income kind of yield our users can enjoy with us.

Why did you guys start with institutional services first? And then what was the impetus for bringing the institutional services to more of the retail market? That's actually a wonderful question. And it ties back to kind of the DNA of the company or the background of the team. The team was really started about four years ago by a bunch of Morgan Stanley traders, Quants, Bloomberg system engineers. So our background was dealing with the institutions. So we knew how to handle them.

We knew how to provide the services they need. And let's be honest, these are very picky customers, right? They are used to be serviced by the Goldman's, Morgan Stanley's of the world. So they require very high standards of professionalism, very high standards of product offering very high standards of risk management, and we were able to deliver that. It was very easy, very simple, and natural for us to start initially focusing on the institutions. Now, why we ventured into global consumers was because after two to three years of servicing these institutions and really gaining the customer loyalty, they're very sticky to us.

They keep referring other institutions, other family offices to us. We realized, okay, we also have the technology DNA. We really know how to build technology. We really know how to automate things. Actually, the firm really had always, from very early days until now, about 70% or 80% of our headcount is always in some kind of developer or R&D roles. We realized, okay, if we use that technology to build a platform to automate things, we can bring the same kind of institutional-grade services. The big guy that was so happy was to all the global consumers. So we just decided to do that. And we launched our process at the end of last year. We keep iterating our mobile app, our web portal, and we think this is exactly what we are doing. We are now bringing the same grade

of institutional-level services to global customers through technology, through our platform. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. And also, you guys are one of the largest market makers in the industry, from what I understand. And so not only are you serving kind of institutional and retail, but by sitting in this kind of very unique position of the market, you actually have a lot of access to data and you can see trends and you can see kind of what's happening across the market. And so from that seat, what are some of the trends that you're seeing today that maybe people aren't aware of or the things that have caught your personal attention that you think are either surprising or worth noting? Very interesting question. I think, you know, one of the things, you know, speaking from someone that's in Asia that can offer, you know, might not be familiar to the Western customer base or guys in the West is that, you know, I think we noticed kind of the timing or the shift of crypto adoption. You know, 2017, 2018, I think, you know, the most adoption of crypto was actually East-led.

You know, it was China, Korea, Japan, all the Asian countries that, you know, jumping into crypto with, you know, a lot of speculative nature as well, right? And then the market kind of quiet down in 2019, early 2020. And then, you know, the March 12th or March 16th double dip happened in 2020, where, you know, I think a lot of the Asian miners that was, you know, overly leveraged got flushed out in that event. And then we started to see actual institutional adoption in the West. This is probably what, you know, the audience or the crypto users in the West are familiar with, you know, all the PayPal or the Fidelity or the BlackRock alike. They started to get into crypto, get into Bitcoin, at least, as an asset allocation. And what we noticed is there is a small lag. It wasn't until pretty much end of 2020 or beginning of 2021 when I think the crypto adoption in the West has already happened for about half a year that Asian adoption kind of happened again.

You know, and this time it was led by actually, you know, a lot more mature and sophisticated investors in Asia, the family offices, right? Some of the wealth managers, they started to follow, you know, the Western counterparts and started to get into crypto. And I think, you know, this kind of dynamics is really interesting from our perspective because we have a lot of institutional flows from US, Canada, Europe, et cetera. And we also see, you know, all the adoption, you know, all the buying, all the staking on the Asia side from these family offices. And I think, you know, this kind of interesting dynamic also gives us a lot of long-term confidence because crypto is very resilient, right? We've been through, you know, roughly two cycles of ups and downs. And, you know, you see in every bull run, there's actually always new money, new type of money that come into the industry. And, you know, then even in the sell-off or in the bear market, right, some of those, you know, might become stale.

But you see, you know, most of that actually stay, right? I mean, we've had a kind of a sell-off for the past three months, but I don't think, you know, the money that went into the market will exit completely. They might not be active for now, you know, they might take some market loss, but they're there for the long term now. So you see throughout every cycle, the market becomes bigger and bigger. And we see in our real eyes, you know, crypto adoption is happening day by day in bull market or bear market. What's fascinating to me is you described almost kind of a retail-led in the Eastern world early on in the industry. The West was kind of the second follower. In the institutional world, it was the West first, and now the East is kind of following.

And it would make sense, right? There's many more kind of institutions in the West and North America specifically than necessarily in the East. But it's still fascinating to kind of see how one side makes a move of the world and then the other side follows, you know, kind of six to 12 months later. And then you guys actually see it in the data. Are there any other insights that you think are kind of interesting in terms of either East versus West or other things that you see, you know, through the usage of the various products? Sure. I think also another very interesting trend is, you know, again, you know, I think the market is becoming more and more sophisticated. I mean, the market started with a very speculative nature, which is fine, which is what, naturally, early markets are.

But right now, if we look at our customer base, I think they're getting more and more sophisticated. A lot of them, they don't take a lot of leverage. They don't rush into a lot of altcoins. They don't understand. Instead, they know how to hold the blue chips of crypto. put their assets in Bitcoin, Ethereum, the top tokens they like, the blue-chip DeFi coins. They ask us for advice to construct those baskets, those indices that they want to hold long-term.

They know how to use structural products that we offer. One of the very popular structural products we offer with our clients is something called a yield boost, which essentially is an option-linked structure that gives them the option to either accumulate Bitcoin or Ethereum at a lower price or discounted price over time, or give them a high yield that essentially comes from option premium. This is very popular among our sophisticated users, which are from these family offices to, I think, a lot of even the small retails. After a while, they start to understand those products. They start to understand their own investment thesis and they utilize this kind of tools. So I think, again, I think the theme here is really, I think the market is

becoming more mature. The investors are becoming more sophisticated, which also means they are more long-term. Instead of trading the next 100x thing tomorrow, a lot of them start to understand crypto is more about, okay, this is still a young industry and young asset class. There's a lot of upside. The biggest upside come from getting in here and being this for a very long time. What do you see in the usage of different assets, right? So maybe Bitcoin, stable coins, and then the other assets. Are there specific things that you're able to kind of pick apart or understand as kind of industry trends across the various assets? Sure. I think, you know, now really Bitcoin as an investment asset or Bitcoin's own narrative,

is very widely accepted. And it helps with people now have curiosity or interest to look at other crypto. Because before, a lot of new investors were still asking about what Bitcoin is all about. Now pretty much all the customers we talk to, they understand, oh, Bitcoin is digital gold. It's in storage of value. They get it. Now they are asking, so what is Ethereum about? What's Ethereum? Why is Ethereum different from Bitcoin? What are the other tokens about? What's DeFi about? And it makes our job a lot easier to explain to them because once they accept, they really mentally accept, okay, Bitcoin, digital gold, then we can tell them, okay, Ethereum is kind of like the oil in a new digital economy. And they get set because

they already accepted, okay, Bitcoin is digital gold. So it's easier for them to follow that train of thought and accept the narrative or the understanding of other crypto assets. Stablecoin, I think, is a huge innovation in a way that I think it goes beyond what people understand at the moment. I think stablecoin is not just, okay, now we finally have something that's in crypto form, you know, that's stable against the dollar in value. So, you know, people are happy

to park some money there. And, you know, the stablecoin yield is a lot higher than fiat dollar yield. So there's structured yield pickup, which is a huge driving force for people adopting to crypto nowadays, right? But I think it goes a lot beyond that. If you think about it,

Bitcoin, Ethereum, all of these are crypto native assets. Stablecoins are not crypto native assets. They're essentially traditional fiat or traditional assets that got mapped into the crypto world through blockchain. And this is going to be done over and over again as we speak. More and more assets that will be mapped into the crypto world, like dollar stable coins, and they will transact against Bitcoin, against Ethereum, against other crypto in the same

form. This is what we talk about when we say crypto finance. I think crypto as an asset allocation or as an asset is widely accepted. The next step for people to understand is crypto is way beyond that. It's not just an asset you invest. It's actually a form or a technology to revolutionize how financial services should be done. And the dollar stable coin is such an example. You move asset from the traditional world to the crypto world.

You get a better structural yield. It's easier for payments. It's easier to transact. It's formless and seamless between different asset groups once they are all in crypto form. So that's why we promote. We think by using crypto finance technology, actually, we can service not just the crypto native crowd. We can service not just the crypto native assets. Actually, we can service all kinds of financial needs. We can cover all kinds of financial assets. Of course, it takes time. The regulators need to get comfortable with it. But I think inevitably, the better technology eventually prevails. And I think we have real proof that this is a better technology. Absolutely. And when you think about this crypto finance, is that decentralized finance or is that

something different? How do you think of DeFi, regardless of where it happens from a protocol basis? How does that fit into your idea of crypto finance? So now on this, I might have a slightly different view than many guys in the industry. I'm actually, first, I don't think decentralization and centralization is a binary concept. I don't think that. I think it's a scale, right? I mean, you can be extremely decentralized or you can be extremely centralized, but always, always, I think most of the time we're somewhere in between leaning towards one or the other. Secondly, I think for crypto or for crypto finance to really adopt in a global scale, I think the industry, the participants, the users, the builders have to be open-minded

and they have to be pragmatic on the centralization. Because I think essentially, We all know Bitcoin, crypto started with a fundamental CCS that centralization is good. It is good. It's great. It eliminates a lot of key counterparty risk. It makes things transparent, democratize finance. But there are also cases where either for practical reasons or for for technology reasons, that things can't be or would not be that decentralized. And it's fine. If you take an extreme end of this, is a lot of the central bank digital currencies.

A lot of people argue with me, are they crypto or not? And I think they're crypto. Why? Because a lot of them are programmable. They can interact with Bitcoin, Ethereum. Their ecosystem can interact with this decentralized ecosystem. So even though they are centralized, you can include them into the same system. I mean, if you really think about it, dollar stablecoins are not decentralized.

I mean, they use Ethereum as the base layer protocol, but the issuance and all of that is centralized. So you have to have an open mind about this, I think, for crypto finance really, really, really to be big. I wouldn't take it even a step further. there's some decentralized protocols that claim to be decentralized that aren't, right? And by the way, there's plenty of maybe people who call centralized services that actually have more decentralization to them than they're let on as well, right? So it kind of works in both directions.

But I don't think that you're necessarily sharing a perspective that is completely out of left field, right? I actually think there's some rational thought there. What about things like tokenized stocks. So we see FTX and others starting to essentially create synthetic stock exposure. So you don't get governance rights and some of the things that you would get with traditional stock, but you get all the price action, one of the reasons why people come to buy or trade stocks. And so how do you think about that fitting into the ecosystem? I think that's great. I mean, the technology has always been there, right? I mean, You know, what you just described in traditional finance is like a CFD, contract of difference,

right? I mean, this is essentially, you know, a bilateral contract to bet on the prices, right? I mean, it's great. You know, a lot of people, you know, all they want from a stock is its price and its price actions, the opportunity to make or potentially lose money, right? So, you know, that is easily done, you know, in crypto because, you know, it's essentially, one of the largest application of crypto is still trading or speculation. So I think that's the first step.

That's a great first step. The second step, I think what's more interesting is actually moving the assets into crypto. Instead of just essentially have almost like a... I always give this example. There's a great trading book called The Reminiscence of a Stock Operator. And it talks about the bucket shops, where essentially people trade on those bucket shops to speculate against the price. They don't really own the stock, but they can trade against.

So the CFDs or these synthetic stocks in crypto are essentially the bucket shops on blockchain. I mean, they're great for the first use, but I think what's really more interesting is actually move the assets onto crypto form right you actually want the whole thing because if you have the whole thing then you can actually break it down right you break it down to you know the what we talk about price is essentially come most from you know the the economic perspective right then you have the voting which is kind of the governance perspective you have all of that right and if you really have the asset you can you know combine different assets you can you can do structure products around them to create new assets. I think that's a lot more interesting.

Now, while we are not there yet, the technology is always there. Actually, I take that back. I think the technology to replicate the assets or put them on blockchain is always there. That's the easy part. The harder part, which we are working on, I think a lot of the guys are working on, is what's the technology there to solve the problem of transition? transition both for the regulators to get comfortable with that transition, since moving from the traditional financial ecosystem to the crypto ecosystem, and also for the current stakeholders to be comfortable in that transition. The current shareholders, how do they understand once their stock is in crypto form, what does that do to them? For the ones who don't understand

technology, who still custody their stock with traditional brokers, depositories, what does that that mean to them, right? Do they lose any of their rights? Do the other guys get better liquidity and therefore it should be priced differently? I think all of these need to be ready for this to be happening. And I think these are solvable problems and we are trying to solve them. A lot of guys are trying to solve them because eventually we think the crypto finance form is a better form, it's a more efficient form. It will happen. It's just a matter of how and when. I completely agree. How do you think regulators respond to all this? Whether it's the synthetic stocks, the DeFi protocols, regardless of where it happens in terms of the actual technology stack,

let's just fast forward 10, 15, 20 years and say, okay, it all did happen. How do regulators respond? What do you anticipate as their progression into this industry? I think the regulators we interact with, I actually got to give them credit. I mean, they get the big things right. I mean, all of this is evolving too fast. If you think about the regulators, right, they are usually, you know, an office of, you know, not too many people, right? And they have many things to do. So, you know, unlike us who really can, you know, dig deep into this crypto rabbit hole every day, they cannot, they don't have the luxury to, right? I mean, they might have a few guys to look at it, but, you know, they just don't have the

same resources to do so. So for them, right, they need to get the most important things right. And For most regulators globally, I think they care about two things the most. One is AML, KYC, anti-terrorist financing, basically making sure this is not helping illegal activities or illegal money. Secondly, it's to protect the small retail investors. And if you follow their train of thought based on these two core principles they operate around, you'll find, okay, they are happy to not look at a lot of activities in crypto yet because they think, okay, number one, if it doesn't break the first or second principle

on a lot of retails getting hurt there, or it doesn't involve a lot of fiat transactions and let me leave it alone for now and get back to you later when I actually can. What they care most is, okay, so if this either involves a lot of fiat transactions, which they kind of have to deal with from a global regulatory perspective, or if this will involve a lot of small average retail, they have to put a very harsh standard on it. Now, back to your question, how this will happen is, you know, step by step. I think, you know, the industry needs to get regulators comfortable with these two things first. Do these two things absolutely right, right? Have the best technology and, you know, have the best protocol to make sure, you know, the AML, KYC, and all of that is done properly. And also, you know, design.

I think the first part, I think, you know, people in the industry, players are generally getting better. As long as you put enough efforts on this, you tend to be able to do KYCML right, unless you don't care and you're not willing to. But the second part is where it's not easy for a lot of industry players because by putting a lot of restrictions on things like leverage, having higher standards of assets that you offer on your platform, you're protecting the end consumers. But you're also sacrificing a lot of potential revenue and profits. A lot of guys just are not willing to do that. They go for that growth-first mentality. Let me make the revenue first. Let me grow the business first.

Then worry about protecting my customers later, right? This is, I think, what really is confronting with the regulators. Now, but at the same time, I think the industry has evolved that there are players. There are large players even, or somewhat large players. like ourselves that can afford to do both. We can afford to pick, okay, let's protect our end consumers. But at the same time, I think we can still make good revenue or grow a large business based on these principles. And if more players really adopt this approach, I think the regulators will find this industry more acceptable. Completely agree. You recently raised a lot of

money and achieved a billion plus dollar valuation. Tell us a little bit about the fundraise and what you guys are going to do with that money. Thanks. So for us, you know, the company is very, Amber is very fortunate to be profitable early on as a startup. I think the industry presents a lot of opportunity and, you know, financial services, you know, it's naturally, you know, a positive margin kind of business. So the fundraise this round or, you know, last round in 2019, neither were about the capital itself for us. You know, it was really about to bring the right partners

who can help Amber grow long-term to the scale that we really want to be. We think in this industry, there's going to be companies of scale, Google or Facebook or Amazon, right? We try to become one of those. Now, in 2019, it was about to bring the best crypto-native investors in the space, Paradigm, Pantera, Polychain, Coinbase, all these guys for us. This round is rather about to bring a lot of traditional names that can help us grow and can help us be known by non-crypto folks and non-crypto institutions.

It will also help us hire a lot of the best talents that are still somewhat on the sidelines crypto. We bring guys like China Renaissance, Sequoia, Tiger Global, because these are household names for even people outside of crypto. When we hire the person from, say, Tencent, from Google, they don't just look at us as a crypto startup. They look at us as a tech company that's backed by these tech investors that know what they're doing and have done their due diligence for them. Similarly, when we push our products to new customers that are still undecided about crypto or even have some skepticism about crypto from their previous experience or from the media article they see, now they at least look at Amber's platform and say, okay, these guys, these traditional investors have done their due diligence. They've done the homework for me. So at least this is something I think that's legit and I'm willing to try.

So that's really what helps. And of course, you know, no one complains about having more capital, right? So, you know, having a larger capital base will help us, you know, be more aggressive, even more aggressive in our growth. So we are very aggressively hiring globally. We're very aggressively pursuing, you know, licensing or regulatory setups globally. You know, we're very aggressive in, you know, getting our names out, working with marketing and media partners, KOLs, and all of that to really push our products to our global

customer base. Yeah, it's awesome. What are you most excited about looking for? Let's say the next 12 months internally, the thing that you're either working on or you're focused on as a business, what's the thing that's most exciting to you? I think our product roadmap is very exciting. I mentioned that we really try to be this integrated crypto finance platform. And we think we can offer really every service category to the best, to our customers. And I think we will see that over the next 12 months with our product suite. It'll be very integrated. Right now, you know, we have an app and a web portal, right? The two, you know, are already linked. And I think

they will be further integrated. So you will have almost the same seamless experience, right? Smartly guided, you know, when you do anything crypto, trading, you know, asset management, treasury, borrow, lending, spending, you know, on your phone or on PC, right? And also, you know, Another integration is between what we call the more CeFi versus the more DeFi services. Right now, if you go to our web portal, you already have access to DeFi products through our web portal in an easy, convenient-to-understand way, right? But I think the next step is really to further integrate that experience. So I think right now, the one problem with DeFi is still the entry barrier is a bit high,

especially for folks who are not so familiar with crypto, right? We try to really lower that experience. So in the end, you know, it will be natural for our customer base who might be very new to crypto to have access to DeFi without even realizing it, right? And I think that's an empowering experience and that helps with adoption as well. So all of that will happen in the next 6 to 12 months on our platform.

You'll also have a lot more structured products. And these structural products are essentially tailor-made for different investment needs. The one I just described, you know, it's tailor-made for guys who want to accumulate crypto but don't want to rush in, right? We'll also have, you know, index products for guys who want to diversify their crypto portfolio, but, you know, might not have the expertise or the time to do all of that themselves, right? There'll be a lot more of that. And I think, you know, I don't want to give too many spoilers. I think, you know, our users will find them on our product within the next six to 12 months. I love it.

I love the optimism and I love the enthusiasm. Before I let you go, I've got three questions that you get to ask me one. What's the most important book you've ever read? So the most important book I've read, there are many, but, you know, a recent one is really, I love Blitzscaling. You know, I think it's a really good book and, you know, it really resonates for me as an entrepreneur. You know, I think, you know, what internet e-commerce has done to traditional finance with network effects, with scaling is happening exactly with financial industry, with crypto finance. So that book resonates with me a lot. What about your sleep schedule?

Our friends over at Eight Sleep, they got me sleeping on this absolute ice-cold, thermoregulated bed. I sleep like a baby now. What's your sleep schedule like? So, I actually try to be healthy now with, you know, two kids and everything, you know. I try to sleep, you know, around midnight. You know, of course, you know, crypto happens. So, sometimes, you know, you're up the whole night. That's just part of crypto life.

But other than that, you know, I try to go to sleep around midnight and, you know, wake up early so that, you know, every day, you know, it's exciting to wake up because, you know, there are so many things happen in crypto. And we try to have a lot of things happen every day in the company. And, you know, every day is just exciting for me to get up and get to work. Absolutely. I feel you on sometimes you just got to stay awake. Things are happening. Last question. Aliens, are you a believer or non-believer?

i i am a believer uh in fact i'm not only a believer of aliens uh i am a belief of you know there's some form of a uh higher being that we might not understand right and you know uh i i'm not and there's an interesting theory right called the big a big simulation right and we are all being simulated world right i i'm not saying you know i 100 believe in that but i think you know the reality might be some form that's close to that, you know, in the end of the day, we could all be living in some system, you know, that's, that's, uh, that's, that's programmed by an alien kid. Who knows? I mean, that would be wild if that was true, but anything is possible.

That's for sure. What one question do you have for me to finish up? So, um, um, I, I think you've talked to a lot of, uh, uh, crypto entrepreneurs, you know, crypto companies, right. Um, And over years, right, you've seen a lot of success and failures. What would you say the biggest differentiation between the guys who succeed in the end to different scale versus the guys, you know, that have more setbacks and failures? I think the biggest thing is focus and delivering exactly what your customers ultimately want. Like it's super basic stuff, right? There's no magic bullet.

I really do think that it's just having the focus to understand we're in this business. let's be the best at this one business. And then we can earn the right to go into other business lines or build other products or do other things, but let's be the best at this. And if you're able to do that, again, it gives you access to other things. So I would say that's one. The second thing then is just, you got to build something that people want. Sometimes they know they want it. Other times you got to build it and then they realize that they want it. But ultimately, you got to find that product market fit. So some of that's more art than science um but but i would say really that's it just focus and build things that people want and

then you got a shot not no guarantee but at least you got a shot to uh to build something big and valuable i really really agree with what you said but you know one one add-on question uh just throwing there do you believe in uh do you believe good guys will win the end or it doesn't matter oh i definitely think good people win it's a it's a like an attrition game right and bad people uh especially people who build a bad reputation for doing bad things, treating people poorly, not paying people well, all that, eventually they just kind of stop getting phone calls. They stop getting investment opportunities.

They stop getting people that want to work there. And so it's kind of a death by a thousand cuts more so than it's just like one single blow up. But, but, but I'm a very big believer. You got to do the right thing in order to have kind of a lasting, enduring career. Totally, totally agree. We believe so too. All right. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find more about the

business? Sure. Please go to our official website, three w dot Amber group.io. Oh, you know, feel free to email us contact at Amber group.io. And,

you know, we're very excited to talk to all of you. I think, yeah, crypto is exciting. It's just an exciting day every day to interact with people who are interested in crypto. Awesome.

My friend will listen, Mike, thank you so much for doing this. We're definitely gonna have to do it again in the future. Totally. We'll love to be back. Thank you.