The Pomp Podcast - A Massive Bitcoin Bull Case Is Forming | Bill Barhydt

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

Bill Barhydt is the founder and CEO of Abra and a longtime leader in digital assets and crypto wealth management. In this conversation, we discuss bitcoin’s relationship to global liquidity, money printing, and geopolitical risk, as well as why retail investors still drive crypto price action. We also cover new crypto regulation and the Clarity Act, Abra’s plans to go public via SPAC, the rise of tokenized equities and real-world assets, and how AI is transforming financial services and business operations.======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 80+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $1,000 in rewards.======================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.======================0:00 - Intro0:55 - Why bitcoin is holding up during war & market panic5:17 - Private credit, private equity, & where cracks could show8:40 - Crypto regulation & The Clarity Act13:18 - Why Abra is going public via SPAC15:30 - How wealth advisors are changing around crypto17:51 - Tokenized portfolios & the future of digital assets22:30 - Will AI replace financial advisors?25:11 - How Abra uses AI internally & building AI agents33:33 - Machine-to-machine payments & crypto36:20 - What’s next for Abra?

All of that equates to incremental, significant money printing this year. I wouldn't be surprised if we see stimulus checks this summer going into the midterms. Crypto is screaming right now. I mean, we've never had more tailwinds in our space. But if you're just talking about price, I think you need retail. My biggest concern, and I've been very clear about this publicly. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great conversation with Bill Barheit.

He is the founder and CEO of Abra. And in this conversation, we talk about what's going on with the Bitcoin price given all the context of the Iran conflict, what's going on in traditional assets, how's it going to impact your personal portfolio. Then we get into regulation and the new SEC CFTC rules that came out, the Clarity Act. We also talk about his big deal that he just announced, where Abra's going public via SPAC transaction. And then we finish up with some talk around artificial intelligence, how they're using it internally, how he's using it personally, and how it could impact the finance industry more broadly. All that and more in my latest

conversation with Bill Barheit. All right, Bill, I thought I'd really start the conversation as the Iran war kicks off, we're dropping bombs all over the Middle East, and now we've got to figure out what does that mean for Bitcoin? Very interestingly, almost everything else is sold off. People are really worried, oil's up, inflation concerns, but Bitcoin's hanging in there. Why do you think Bitcoin is doing so well? I think the two points are mutually exclusive. I'm not convinced that it's because of the war that it was falling or going up. I think Bitcoin is still a macro liquidity suck, and I think you're going to see this year significant improvements in the liquidity situation. We've got a trillion dollars in

debt financing, debt servicing we've got to finance. We've got 10 trillion in debt that we have to basically refinance. We were trying to do it last year at lower rates. They're going to do what they have to do, in my opinion, to get those rates as low as they possibly can. All of that equates to incremental significant money printing this year. I wouldn't be surprised if we see stimulus checks this summer going into the midterms, right? So again, to me, it just all equates to more money printing. I don't think Bitcoin is front running that yet. I don't think the market believes everything I'm saying yet. I'm probably have a little bit of a contrarian on that view. DXY is actually up the last like what, 90 days, which is usually a leading indicator

on liquidity. And I think that's why Bitcoin fell in Q4, Q1 is the liquidity didn't come. Uh, and, and so I think Bitcoin has kind of stabilized in that, and I think it'll stabilize for a while in that kind of 65 to 90 K range, which for the, the non-integrated people sounds like that's a, that's not a range that's insane. Right. But for our world, that's a range. Right. And I, and I think that's what we're going to see.

You know, we may see a wick to 55, but I, I, I wouldn't be surprised if the bottom is in. It feels like, um, I don't think in the Bitcoin's history, we've ever seen like a double extreme fear in the sense of, I think I saw the fear print. The lowest I saw was like a six on the extreme or the fear and greed index to go to six, recover a little, and then like get another, you know, extreme fear like that. Maybe there's some existential shock that would occur that it's at 70 K doing that. Correct. And so it's like, okay, sure. Maybe something else could happen, but given the facts that we have right now, you kind of have hopefully the worst behind

us. And so as you get the stability, do you think that there's any credibility to global large investors saying, wait a second, there's global instability happening. There's uncertainty on the horizon. Oil prices are up. Gold, stocks, bonds, everything is selling off. Bitcoin is not. Maybe I should do some more work here. Maybe this is a non-correlated asset. This is something that should be in my portfolio for moments like this. Yeah. I think there was a rotation that happened in Bitcoin. I think that rotation is kind of reached an equilibrium state right now. I think what's really happening is that retail money is nowhere to be found and retail sentiment in general for the overall investing environment outside of prediction markets and short-term bets

is very, very low. And so I think until we see significant money coming in from a government liquidity perspective or some other source of liquidity, I don't think we're going to basically move outside of that range that I mentioned. I think it's still a retail, I think crypto is still buying larger retail market. Everybody's, including Abra, is excited about the institutions coming. But even ETFs at the end of the day are an interface for retail to buy securitized versions of Bitcoin via their broker, right? And that's penetrated, what, 15, 16, maybe 20% tops of the Bitcoin floats and the rest is basically not securitized. And so I'm still convinced that we need retail if we're talking about price. If we're just talking about the dynamics and the

value add of digital assets, smart contracts via stable coins, now tokenized equities, tokenization of real world assets, crypto is screaming right now. I mean, we've never had more tailwinds in our space, but if you're just talking about price, I think you need retail. Yeah, it's very, it's very fascinating. Now, when we think about kind of the fallout of some of this stuff, like private credit, having cracks, at the same time, there's geopolitical instability, people are going risk off, like that all seems connected to me, right? Is if I'm worried about what's going on in the market, then I want to raise cash, I want liquidity, we see the fund manager surveys, all these things that cash is definitely being raised. So then people start to redeem the private credit and the question then becomes like, is there's a whole chain reaction kind of global financial crisis 2.0 where if private credit has problems, then private equity has problems, private equity has problems, then that is going to reverberate throughout these portfolios. What's your general feel there? So I'm not an expert in private credit markets. My background is more in traditional, well, my capital markets background is more in traditional fixed income. But I would say I look at the leverage and I kind of follow the leverage when I think about the winding up and

the unwinding of these things. And private credit and private equity basically are still in the kind of post ZERP hangover headwinds. And that unwind hasn't happened because it hasn't needed to happen yet. In other words, if you're in private equity and you have a 10-year fund and you basically were able to raise a lot of money in ZERP, put that money to work, and you're in year four when that happened and you're in year seven right now, you're still basically a few years away from being forced to take a write-down on many of those deals where you finance those deals at close to zero and you've got to refinance them at a number much higher than zero. That's when the proverbial chickens come home to roost, in my opinion. And that's the leverage unwind that I'm looking at

in those markets. And I do think there's going to be more pain to come there for sure. One of the things that people that I find very smart and look to in these moments, they are all not talking about private credit. They're all talking about private equity. And so they're like, look, I was just talking to somebody and she was saying that the private credit is the top of the stack. They are first in line. If they have problems, well, what's the equity worth? 100%. And a lot of it is software, right? So look at the SaaS. The SaaS world has been decimated. Will it recover? Is it overblown? I'm not sure, but I can tell you that a lot of mid-cap CIOs are going to be looking at, you know, Claude and other tools first and off the shelf

SaaS second to meet a lot of their immediate needs because they can develop and prototype things in minutes now. And so why would you be paying Oracle and NetSuite for things you don't necessarily need, right? I know you're doing this with your own tools that you guys have developed, right, for AI. So if you've made a lot of bets in private equity and SaaS that you haven't had any liquidity event for, and you're in year seven of those 10-year funds, and you haven't taken a write down, that can get ugly real, real quick. Now, I don't know how those numbers affect overall GDP

because they are private, but I can tell you that I have not seen a lot of public write-down or failures of these private equity funds, and I would not be surprised if we start seeing significant write-downs or failures of private equity funds. Well, I'd write it down if I don't need to, right? There you go. Let's talk regulation. Obviously, the Clarity Act is starting to make a lot of progress, but we also saw the SEC and CFTC. They're like boys. Paul and Mike seem to be simpatico. They just released this brand new guidance, I think is maybe the way to describe it, around how they're going to categorize all of these different crypto assets. The list was a little bit longer than I thought it was going to be. There's like five, I think five different

categories. What was your general take, good, bad, indifferent? I mean, I was blown away, honestly, because it was the first, like for years, it's been a very simple message. Whether we like the rules or not, tell us what the rules are so we can all follow the rules if there needs to be rules, right? And so we went from everything is a security being the rule, which none of us ever believed was the case in the first place, but it was more like, hey, you startups can't afford to fight us anyway, so everything's a security, right? I remember getting a request. I think I can talk about it now. It's been many years from the SEC where they basically gave our company a list of like 30 assets and said, can you please identify which of these

are securities? And included Bitcoin, Ethereum. I said to my lawyers, I said, none of these are securities. They said, well, that can't be our answer. I said, well, what do you mean it can't be our answer? It's the answer. So I said, no, you got to list a couple of securities. I said, well, I'm not doing that. You go figure it out. And so at least now we're having an intelligent conversation about what a digital commodity is, right? What a digital security is. And the fact that something can be a digital commodity and you can raise money in a security style offering, which may require disclosures, but selling that digital version of a Pokemon card later may not be a security offering, just like selling Pokemon cards is not a security offering.

somebody has finally come to their senses and documented that. And that is really, really good news for our space, probably on the order of importance of the Genius Act itself for stable coins, because this affects thousands of potential digital asset projects that are out there that needed that clarity. And I'm also not 100% sure they would have done this if they didn't think that the Clarity Act was coming because they want all of this to be consistent. So to a certain degree, I think they're actually front running the Clarity Act itself, which is also good news. Yeah. It's kind of like they were, it's like a parent whose kid is learning how to ride a bicycle. Yeah. And you're kind of running alongside it. You kind of, hey, go here, go here, right?

Okay. Right. But the kid thinks that they are riding the bike by themselves. Yeah, but you know where the bike's headed and you can steer them. That's a great analogy. I totally agree with that. Yeah. And was there any downsides or things that you saw in there that you were actually worried about? No, honestly, no. I think they did it. It was so far, I've read it. I've also had my internal AI read it, compared it to our own thoughts on the matter. And I've been shocked at how useful, accurate, yeah, and well done this has been so far. Now that we have it, does the Clarity Act matter more or less when it actually gets done? Okay. So I have a different feeling on the Clarity Act. My opinion on the Clarity Act is not necessarily about the nuanced

details of how we deal with stablecoin yield or this or that. My biggest concern, and I've been very clear about this publicly, is we need a regulatory moat around the digital asset space that makes sure that everything we're codifying now stays the way it is regardless of who is in power in the White House, right? Who is running the Senate finance or banking committee? Who is running the ag committee, right? We can't basically be changing our stance on what's a digital commodity and what's a digital security every four years because we have a different person in the White House who's putting different people in power. So we need to codify what they're saying, not just as policy, but as law, right? And Chevron, I think, I'm not a lawyer, but I

believe Chevron also makes this clear, right? They can be interpreting existing law today very, very clearly. But if somebody interprets that law differently, we're back at the courts again. And we need to codify this so that we don't have Warren Gensler II in four years and it undoes everything that we've been working on for the last 18 months. It does feel like there's a lot of momentum and energy behind getting that done. It also, now as we start to get more clarity, opens the opportunity for people to say, hey, I can grow my business. I can go and kind of play offense. You guys just announced that you are going public via SPAC transaction. Describe a little as to what the thought process is behind doing it and what the deal structure is.

Sure. Well, the thought process is to build on what we just talked about. The tailwinds in our space are real. Tokenization, stable coins. We'll talk about wealth management and being in the wealth management space, we not only want to service our clients, but other wealth managers who need to offer digital asset solutions to their clients in a hundred trillion dollar market, right? So we believe that the headwinds we had before have now become tailwinds. I don't think the tailwinds are going to get any stronger than they are now, except maybe if we stop bombing other countries and World War III doesn't break out. But independent of that, the tailwinds are there, it's clear to us that as a public company, as a registered investment advisor with

the SEC, we're now in a position to establish ourselves as the future de facto leader in this emerging intersection between the digital asset space and the wealth management space, which is basically on zero, right? I mean, we use this phrase, get off zero, right? Well, the wealth management space outside of small exposure to Bitcoin ETFs is basically on zero. Most of them are still managing 60, 40 portfolios. When everybody in our shared world thinks that that allocation is dead, that the 40 allocation makes no more sense, but that's where they still are. Why? Because they don't talk to their clients more than a couple of times a year most likely, right?

Or in some cases, maybe the client has passed away and nobody knows. Who knows, right? But that reallocation or inheritance and movement of those assets to the next generation away from what I call the boomer money into the next gen money is about to happen. And they don't want to use the boomer systems. They don't want the 60-40 portfolio. Most of them are like, what is this treasury stuff? Get it out of here. It's losing me money. They're on Robinhood. They're on Kaoshi. They're on the next gen platform. They're looking at crypto. So we're going to help that wealth management space get off zero. When you start looking at these RIAs,

is it fair to say some of them are very skeptical and still like, I'm not touching this stuff? And then others are like, how do I upgrade and replace cash with stable coins? And they're all in and everything in between? Or do we now have maybe shame towards the RIAs who are still, this is worthless. That's kind of a dead perspective. I see. Okay. So I've been speaking to RIAs quietly for years, probably five or six years now. So I speak, for example, at Rick Edelman's events and he hosts big RIA events every year. So I get to meet with them and I've seen the transition. So five years ago, I'd be presenting and the questions I'd get from the audience was, I really don't understand this Bitcoin thing. Can you explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old?

That doesn't happen anymore. Now the questions are, okay, so I have clients who are holding Bitcoin separately on a hardware wallet, and they're telling me that they want to borrow against it, and I don't know what they're talking about. Or two years ago, when I was at one of the events, I was talking about next-gen smart contract platforms. I said, I'm really bullish on Solana personally, for example, or bullish on Sui or Aptos. And last year, the year after, I'd have individual wealth advisors coming up to me, oh, thank you for talking about Solana. I ended up buying some and I've done really well with it. I said, oh, great. What about your clients? And they were like, oh no, can't do that. I can't put my clients in it yet.

I said, well, why not? And they said, well, it's usually a compliance legal decision within the company. Now we're having discussions with say, how do we do this? How do we legally do this in a way that's compliant because the demand is growing? And so that's a totally new set of discussions. My clients want to borrow against their portfolio. They want to earn yield on their digital assets. They don't want them on hardware wallets. They don't want all their equities over here and all their digital assets over here buried in the backyard. They can't deal with that in their trust or for inheritance. And so we're already seeing that with our direct clients. So we validated that. We know that business model works and the demand is real today. That's our

existing business. Now what we're saying is we're in a position for you to offer it to your clients as well. They're starting to get it. It's starting to resonate. Are there going to be digital asset only RIAs? If you think about it from the perspective, they won't actually have their clients wanting traditional assets. It'll just be all crypto, everything's tokenized, et cetera. I think, okay. So another way of asking the same question is, do we get to a world where the traditional model for custody of equities moves completely to digital? Are we in a model where therefore the custodians that an RIA would use are now completely digital, meaning they look more like Abra than they do like a Schwab? And I think the answer is all of it is going to

move to be digital. So the question becomes kind of moot because every portfolio by definition becomes 100% digital assets over the next 10 to 15 years or sooner, right? It's just a question of how fast we can get tokenized equities live in the US, deal with the clearing issues and the custody issues. I think you'll see tokenized public equities live in the US this year for the first time. And then after that, it'll simply be a question of how fast they get adopted by wealth advisors, and then how fast you can start to do custom portfolio construction within the wealth advisor space based on the fact that I have tokenized Tesla shares, or soon tokenized SpaceX shares, and Bitcoin, which is a token, and Ethereum or Solana, and they become one

tokenized portfolio that I can do custom construction around. That will be available in the next year, in my opinion. I'm making some assumptions that certain things will get figured out in the market. Could be off a little bit, but I think you're going to see a mass migration to tokenized portfolios over time. Why? Well, number one, you can borrow against, in theory, the entire value of your asset portfolio using DeFi. That's huge. Two, they trade 24-7, which is what people today want. Remember, when you buy Bitcoin in an ETF, you're literally buying an exchange traded product that trades 35 hours a week. Bitcoin trades 24-7. That's a problem, right? These models that we're talking about address that problem over time.

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with confidence. Sign up today at archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch, no hidden fees, just smarter trading. Your crypto, your exchange, your profits, ArchPublic. Go to archpublic.com and tell them I sent you. When you're looking at this, um, it does feel like the advisors in one hand are trying to keep up with the industry, but now they have clients that are so informed, like they're getting information on the internet, on podcasts, newsletters, you know, X, whatever. The role of the advisor seems to be shifting a little bit. Are they going to go away? Do they become more valuable? You know, I'm like very fascinated by the idea of like, is AI going to, what jobs are going to be replaced? And I don't

know if I have an answer for the financial advisor. Like it, maybe it's bifurcated. I've spent a lot of time learning about this industry, right? So think about public markets and public market CEOs? Because I always say, follow the money. What's the incentive? As goes the incentive, so goes the strategy and the execution, right? Public market CEOs generally have a four-year kind of incentive model because they receive stock grants or RSUs and they invest over four years. And so their actions tend to follow that model, right? The single best thing you can do besides making your numbers every quarter to drive up your stock price is usually to buy back your stock. Traditionally, people who are on a five-year tenure will look to buy back

stock, in my opinion, as quickly as possible because they know it's going to drive the stock price up. In the RIA world, you have RIAs that are being bought and sold constantly. Why? Because the owners retire, partners retire. And so that changes things a lot in terms of how these companies are managed, right? So like when Edelman Financial Engines was merged into a private equity company, it was an amalgamation of two companies. And since they've bought a lot of little RIAs and they do that because they wait until these partners or CEOs retire and they're looking for a home for what they're doing because they want to cash out, right? And so they usually cash out by looking for a place to sell or merge, or they'll get payments over many years.

And so I think this transition to, or the inheritance transition that's coming from the boomer generation combined with this next generation of people kind of cashing out is going to create massive consolidation within the RIA space. And there's also like 15 major platforms that are used in that space. none of them are AI centric today. That has to be fixed. So there's going to be another wave of consolidation from a tech perspective where people is portfolio construction. So anyway, so massive changes afoot, in my opinion, in the whole wealth management space in this country. With AI, how's it changing how you guys build the company internally?

Oh God, it's taken over. I mean, it's fantastic. So development, like we prototype stuff in, in hours. We, we use the tools. Um, now when you're developing stuff that touches people's money, the AI and ABRA doesn't touch people's money today or crypto or anything like that. But if we're developing new features, we're screaming. If we're, if we're testing, you know, market messaging, uh, and we want to run it, we can have virtual legal discussions because as an RIA, you have a framework for, for marketing that's different from a money transmitter, for example, all of that we can test. And so I have a Jarvis I've built in my life that's fully integrated with every aspect of our business that can basically run analysis for me

in real time. And I've opened it up to my exec team, for example, to be able to take advantage of. If you're not an AI first company and you're less than 250 people, you're crazy because you're not taking advantage of the fact that you should be in a position to move literally 10x faster now than companies that have entrenched systems that can't quickly move to the AI tools, right? That's the key right now is small to mid-sized companies should be able to move on a dime, like switch on a dime right now versus the large incumbents that are having raging debates and are afraid of the displacement that's coming. We're not afraid of the displacement. We need the help because we've always been running Abra hyper-efficiently, right? One of the reasons

I'm excited to go public, but I'm not looking to hire hundreds of people. Yeah. The Jarvis thing you built, how did you build it? What's a tech stack or- Yeah, I'm a computer science guy. So as a tech nerd, I've created an amalgamation of a lot of different tools. I've spent a lot of time with OpenClaw. The problem with OpenClaw is it's like it's just Swiss cheese for your life, meaning it goes both ways. So you really have to know what you're doing to lock things down, especially as a wealth manager. So I've tested that and created environments where I can give it access to documents, but I know that the outside world has no access. Doing that is not for the faint of heart. But I've integrated-

Do you think, but this is very interesting to me. So like open clock, I recently got a new computer, right? So how about this? You tell me what you would do if you were me in terms of, i want to uh build a bunch of stuff to automate inside of our businesses or just in my life in general where do you think most people start right and the reason i say that is because i do think that there is um a friend of mine uh pe operator on on x he tweeted this whole long thing and he was like you know i've spent hours and hours and i don't know i mean 20 30 hours and he's like in all of this stuff i kept seeing the demos and this was cool and this and and basically the conclusion was like this stuff is hard like stop making this stuff look so simple for everybody

It's very hard. Right? Like this is not something where you just like, I woke up, I pressed the button and all of a sudden it's magic. Yeah. There is an element of like, that's the light at the end of the tunnel, but there's a lot of work and patience and attention to detail to get there. Right.

And I think that's the next step is that comment you made about how hard it is. I think that's about to change, but we're still in that phase of it's really hard. So let me be specific, right? So if you install OpenClaw today, which I've done, and you want to give it access to your email, to your Slack, to have a voice channel, Telegram, text, WhatsApp, which I've done, but I've done it in a very locked down environment. It's most of that. And even my cloud drive, my local file drive, a lot of that is API based, meaning there's no way to do it by just typing in, please access my Gmail. It can't do that. So you literally are going to different

cloud service providers and getting API keys, I've already lost half your audience by saying that. They're like, well, I don't understand what Bill's talking about. That's going to change eventually because these services know that in order to maintain their client relationships, they're going to have to integrate with these AI agents by default. But right now, I have to do the work of creating that integration myself, maintaining it, and making sure it doesn't break, especially when you become dependent on it, right? So there's a couple of, for example, keys that I use that expire by default and there's nothing I can do about it, which means every few weeks I have to go in and redo it. And so now I think there's going to be a wave that we've proven

the demand and every LLM is looking to reproduce what OpenClaw did because they want to own those relationships to make those integrations infinitely easier for the lame and the mid-sized company. But I also think it's going to create a lot of demand for tech talent, right? Of course. And so I think there's going to be a sea shift in how tech talent is hired inside of companies. Yes, you'll probably see a fair amount of cuts, but it's going to be a reallocation into the people that can make these services and tools work and train the staff to become the trainer, people in support, people in finance who are going to basically train their Jarvis on how

to basically understand the finances of the company so that you can quickly answer questions and do FP&A at light speed, for example. It's fascinating to me because I keep asking people like, okay, cool, you built something. What is the impact? What is the thing? And I've heard everything from, um, there's a company, uh, they started with one agent internally. Now they maybe have somewhere more than 10, less than 50. I don't know what the number is today, but they pretty much are trying to give, uh, an agent to each department inside of their companies, you know, fairly large company, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. And, um, what they're trying to do is increase the like clock speed of the organization. And so one way to increase speed

is you compress time it takes to do various tasks and um it's crazy it's like caught like wildfire inside of this business i have other friends who are like oh it drafts my emails for me i don't think i can pass judgment as to one being more valuable or less valuable but it does feel like there's kind of like a macro organization and then there's like the micro impact on the individual themselves and you need to marry those two things together yeah so so for me i i agree with that. It's drafted emails for me. It's drafted documents for me. I always proof amazing. Amazing. Amazing. And this is a big transition over the last nine months. A lot of mistakes, I would say certainly this time last year, like huge transition to being like almost perfect now,

like remarkable, the difference, like all the hallucination stuff we used to talk about. We don't hear so much about that right now. The other thing that I've come to realize is like the holy grail of doing this right, and I think this is probably true for most mid-sized companies, is when you can reverse the model so that it's not you directing the tool, it's you become AI centric and in a way you almost work for it. So in other words, for the day-to-day things that are table stakes for running a business, I don't want to have to basically direct any AI tool. I just want to know that it's doing it and that it tells me in an interrupt-driven way where it needs my help. And I want to add value in super strategic ways that drive the business versus

dealing with the mundane day-to-day. And I want that to be true for my exec team as well. And then eventually push that further and further down so that becoming a domain expert is the value add as opposed to, yes, I know how to answer support emails really quickly. Well, I don't really care about that at scale. I care about the fact that your domain expertise is helping the AI that owns the process do it a thousand times faster. And I'm happy to pay you a lot more for that if it comes to that, because, you know, we're so much more efficient as a company. And so I think people are going to start to realize that it's not as scary as you think to reverse the model, right? And say, well, I don't want to work for some AI overlord. Well, that's

not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the table stakes of running a business day to day, let it deal with it, right? And then let's transition. And this is going to happen very quickly, in my opinion, over the next couple of years. Yeah, it does really feel like as this AI stuff becomes more pervasive, like what you're basically talking about is like full on autonomy. And so I'm fascinated by Stripe and Tempo, one of the companies that they're helping fund came out with, I think it's called a machine payment protocol, MPP. And it's this whole idea of they're trying to create a unified protocol so that people

or I'm sorry, machines can pay each other back and forth, et cetera. Yeah. Like, duh, no brainer. It feels like, right? Yeah. So I recently joined Algorand as chairman to kind of, you know, to be blunt, to kind of hopefully help revive the platform. I mean, it's a fantastic tech stack, you know, that they built at Algorand. It's got super instant finality for payments. And one of the things they're spending a lot of time on is this new X402 protocol, which kind of Coinbase wanted to be like the missing payments protocol that was in the original Netscape browser that we created back when I was there because it contemplated the idea of money for the internet. Now we're basically seeing that

machine to machine payments is probably the future of smart contracts, right? Because if you're spinning up an agent and you say to that agent, what is the most efficient, fastest, cheapest way for you to do machine to machine, agent to agent transactions, it's invariably going to come up with crypto. What it's not going to tell you is go, I need to go create a bank account. That's going to happen. That makes no sense. Now, if it's using yours, maybe, right? But even then, I still am convinced that either native crypto or stable coins in the short term are the best way for these agents to transact. And they're figuring it out, right? If you ask most agents what the best store of wealth is, my guess is in many cases, it'll probably say Bitcoin for

a lot of reasons, but it may not want to use Bitcoin for transactions because they're too expensive, but it might say, hey, let's use Solana for transactions. Super easy. You know, we want, obviously we want that to eventually become Algorand because of the advantages there, but it's going to be a super awesome competition between all these L1s to become the transaction platforms for those agents. Yeah. It is, it does beg the question then, is it Bitcoin? Is it stable coins? Is it another coin? Like how do you move money in this world, right? And- Fast and final. The two Fs that I care about the most if I'm an agent and some people- Fast is self-explanatory. Final meaning that-

Irreversible. It's done. It can't go back. There's no chargebacks. It's cash in the traditional sense of you gave me my purchase receipt. I handed you the cash. It's done. And so I think that's going to matter a lot. And that's, yeah, there's, there's not a lot of platforms that there's maybe seven or eight platforms that, that matter in that fast and final race. Yeah. Yeah. It's very fascinating. All right. What, what's next for Abra? You got to go and get the deal done, right? Yep. But then what? So we're in a bit of a quiet period where, you know, we've got a S4 process to go through with the, the SEC to, to get the transaction approved. You know, that'll, that'll take a little time. And in the meantime, we're,

we're building the business as fast and as furious as, as we can. You know, we're, we're hiring on the sales, the sales front. You'll see us doing more and more in the, in the RIA world itself to help other RIAs in addition to our direct clients and then facilitating more and more capabilities for, for our clients in yield, lending, staking, you know, custody as the, as the business grows, hopefully now looking at things like tokenized equities, which I'm super bullish on, facilitating loans against tokenized real world assets. I think this whole movement towards RWA tokenization is going to be huge for DeFi. And that's a bet that we're making that we're going to be able to facilitate that for our clients as well. Yeah. I think that this is a unexplored

lane that if you guys can dominate, it'd be pretty fantastic. Yeah. It's been a long time coming, but we're here and we're excited. Amazing. Well, congratulations on the deal. We'll do this again in the future. Thanks, brother. Good to see you.