The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin Is Headed to $300K and Nobody's Ready | Bill Barhydt

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Bill Barhydt is the founder and CEO of Abra. In this conversation, we break down why bitcoin is climbing despite rising rates and macro headwinds, where its next wave of demand will come from, and how... the debt spiral drives inflation. We also discuss AI agents, the future of wealth management, tokenized yield, and how Abra is building a neo-banking stack for crypto.=====================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! =====================GalaxyOne is a financial technology platform built for people who want their cash working harder. → https://go.galaxy.app/HMiq/pomp Galaxy Premium Yield is an investment note issued by Galaxy Digital LP and guaranteed by Galaxy Digital Holdings LP. It is not a bank deposit, is unsecured, and is not FDIC or SIPC insured. U.S. accredited investors only. Cash deposits held at Cross River Bank, Member FDIC. Securities products are not FDIC insured, not bank guaranteed, and may lose value. GalaxyOne Crypto is not FDIC or SIPC insured. Terms apply.=====================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/pomp=====================0:00 - Intro0:51 - Why bitcoin is rising despite macro headwinds4:08 - Shrinking volatility & bitcoin cycle returns9:15 - Is there a way out of the debt spiral?15:10 - AI is turning everyone into a software engineer20:17 - Why RIAs are falling behind27:48 - What Abra is building with tokenized yield & lending33:49 - Tokenization & the next generation of investors36:30 - AI financial advisors & regulation38:38 - The end of apps & the agentic future

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Starting point is 00:00:52 Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. If you look at the charts that everybody likes to show with Global M2 versus Bitcoin, they're all saying Bitcoin should be around 250 to 300k-ish in that range. That feels right to me based upon where the markets are going. I was at the Treasury conference yesterday, and I heard somebody say, hey, if Bitcoin's not at 300K in 24 months, then my thesis on Bitcoin was completely wrong. What's going on, guys?
Starting point is 00:01:27 Today we've got a great conversation with Bill Barheight. He's the founder and CEO of Abra. In this conversation, we talk about what's going on with Bitcoin, the macro backdrop, why Bitcoin is likely to be worth much, much more in the future, but why is it not there yet? Then we also talk about tokenization, artificial intelligence, agents, and what's going on in the RAA space. And then we dig into Abra on what he's doing there with liquidity, lending, and many other things that most people are interested in. Hope you enjoy this conversation with Bill Barheight. All right, Bill, it seems like Bitcoin's at a very interesting point right now.
Starting point is 00:01:54 Every single microeconomic point says that Bitcoin should be. lower. You've got oil at higher prices. You've got the 10-year blowing out, you know, over 5%. You've got an interest rate hike. It's just like, all that should be headwinds. Bitcoin is higher, though. Clarity failed. Bitcoin is higher. What does that tell you about the price of Bitcoin and where it could be gone? Well, okay. So I do believe that Bitcoin tracks liquidity to a large degree. But I also think there's a certainty slash uncertainty factor that has played into all of this with the Trump trade and, you know, everything else going on around clarity. I think I think having clarity that we're not going to get clarity was in and of itself a good thing
Starting point is 00:02:32 because I think markets just don't like ambiguity, right? And I think the next level of ambiguity is the midterms, which are probably not going to end well for this administration, but at least we'll have less ambiguity, right? I think the markets, the bond markets have known all along that rates are going higher, at least in the short term. And so I think that this administration, desperate wanted lower rates that ship sailed a while ago, and it's not going to happen now. I thought maybe they would figure it out with yield curve control, but it just wasn't going to
Starting point is 00:03:05 happen. And so I think to a degree, you know, Bitcoin has done runs with higher rates than where we're at now, right? But it's the liquidity that ultimately Bitcoin needs to catch up to. And I think that the gap between, if you look at the charts that everybody likes to show with Global M2 versus Bitcoin, they're all same. Bitcoin should be around $250 to $300K-ish in that range. That feels right to me based upon where the markets are going.
Starting point is 00:03:37 I was at the Treasury Conference yesterday, and I heard somebody say, hey, if Bitcoin's not at $300K in 24 months, then my thesis on Bitcoin was completely wrong, right? And I probably should have just dumped it at $70K. So if Bitcoin is not at $300K in 24 months, this person said that... My thesis on Bitcoin was just wrong because, you know, like it's not, it's right, or, or, right, I'm super excited that, you know, we've instituted austerity, the government is acting responsibly. And, you know, I'm super bullish on the future of our monetary system and, you know, the banking system. And obviously, you know, the point being that none of that is going to happen in this person's opinion. and therefore Bitcoin should continue along its previous trajectory of shrinking volatility with runups in between,
Starting point is 00:04:33 which we thought maybe that wasn't going to happen, but it looks like that is the case where we are going to basically continue these runups at least for one more cycle with shrinking volatility. At least that's how I see it playing out. And then we'll see, right? I mean, it does make sense that as it gets more and more adopted, the interest cycle volatility should shrink. And that's, look, if if the lows were in in the 50s, then the volatility shrunk significantly from the left cycle, which happened versus the previous cycle, right? And so if that continues, you know, we'll get Bitcoin at a couple of million, but, you know, at a slower rate. There's a lot of people who are very excited about lower volatility when it's going against them, I'm going down. Rightfully so. Now, if we go back to, let's use the, I guess, 2018 to like 2021 cycle. Bitcoin bottom somewhere on $3,200, and then went away $69,000.
Starting point is 00:05:25 So call it $30-ish-X, give or take. Last cycle, we went from 1516K to 125-ish. So call it 8x or so. That's a pretty big compression of volatility on the upside. Now, there is one argument that says, oh, that's because no one really knew about Bitcoin. All this capital is going to flow in. AI agents are going to increase the addressful market,
Starting point is 00:05:45 and actually it's going to go back to 10, 20, 30x type returns. traditionally, history would tell us, actually, the volatility will continue to compress. And so in the next up cycle, if you just cut it in half, Bitcoin would only get a three to four X. Sure. So how do you think about like squaring those two things of like the fundamentals of the industry versus just like big numbers are hard to keep growing at very high rates? Yeah. It's also the power law basically says if we're going to go to a, what does that take us to be like a $20 trillion industry, it's very very,
Starting point is 00:06:19 very hard to justify going from 20 to 50 the same way we went from, I mean, I remember when Bitcoin hit a billion, right? And everybody was like, oh my God, this thing is way over price. Right. And that's intra-tech movements now. Literally, it's crazy. It's crazy. But going from 10 trillion or where we are now, 5 trillion to 20 trillion, that's a massive,
Starting point is 00:06:49 you know, movement in absolute terms, regardless of what it means for Bitcoin on a relative basis. And so you get to a point where you got to say, okay, well, where is all of this value coming from? What are people selling to buy Bitcoin? Are they taking cash off the sidelines? Are they selling treasuries, right? The government is highly incentivized for that not to happen.
Starting point is 00:07:09 We have a massive 60-40 allocation problem in the wealth management space. And the Treasury Department knows this. And that if all of these customers of R.I. start selling the 50% of the portfolio, interest rates are just going to keep climbing and climbing and climbing and climbing because the demand for their shit debt is just not existent. And so, you know, like that is the most likely scenario for Bitcoin climbing higher is the reallocation. And that's not a, it almost looks like a death spiral in some way.
Starting point is 00:07:41 But even that debt spiral can't get Bitcoin to a hundred trillion, right? It's just not enough money. This is a very interesting point that I don't think a lot of people quite understand, right? So let me use maybe something that the Bicorinters have wrapped their head around, which is like this digital credit. So if, you know, SATA or a stretch, they wanted to get more capital, they could raise the interest rate. If they feel like they've got too much demand, they could lower the interest rate. And so they're using the interest rate as basically an incentive tool to how much capital they want to raise. With a stated par value around the underlying.
Starting point is 00:08:13 I'm like dumbing this down significantly. The U.S. government, to a degree, the charge of the trade, the state is. Treasury yield kind of does the same thing, right? The higher the yield, obviously, the more people want to put their capital in, the lower the yield, the more capital comes out. What you're essentially saying is like if they don't feel like there's enough demand, it is a negative reinforcing thing where they have to keep ratcheting it up to get that demand to show up. And if that yield keeps going higher and higher and higher, that changes things quite a bit. The lever is inflation because somebody has to pay, right? So when you're printing money to service,
Starting point is 00:08:47 your own debt in, you know, right, we're physically printing money. But logically, we're basically printing money to service our debt. We don't even have to print it anymore. We just change numbers in a database. Exactly. So, so what does that actually mean? It means that, you know, remember, well, we weren't there. But if you read history, during World War II, we had these war bond things where everybody would go out and say, support the war effort, buy bonds. Well, that would, the more people, the more demand there was, one, the more money they could raise, but two, the more they could raise at a lower interest rate, right? And so the way you deal with the lack of demand is you pay people more, right? And so what does that do? Well, it increases the cost of borrowing. And he basically
Starting point is 00:09:27 get into this vicious kind of circle or what I call death spiral almost. But if the government ends up being the buyer of last resort, which is historically what happens when nobody else wants to buy the debt, right, where does that money come from? Well, they print it. And that's what causes inflation. So ultimately, inflation is the lever that goes up and down based upon the demand versus the amount of debt you want to create, right? Less debt means you don't need as much demand, which means inflation is less likely, right? Way more debt with less demand means you have to buy it, which means inflation is more likely. And that's where inflation ultimately comes from, currency inflation, which leads to price inflation, right? And we're at this point now where I don't know
Starting point is 00:10:15 how to get out of this vicious cycle. I was just going to say, what is the solution? Just buy Bitcoin? Stop doing stupid shit, right? So stop financing wars you can't afford. Stop policing the world. Stop, stop, you know, basically running massive deficits, building, you know, I was at the All In conference a couple of weeks ago.
Starting point is 00:10:32 They showed the video of Nick Shirley, who is just amazing guy, the train, the train to nowhere, right? They laid, what, 100 feet of track for $20 billion. Congratulations. Yeah, congratulations. They said, right, I could get nowhere fast. So where did this money go? Right.
Starting point is 00:10:48 So if we stopped. We know where it went. Yeah, well, right, exactly. But good luck proving, you know, putting them in jail. So if we stop spending the trillions of dollars we don't have, so the other part of this is the immorality of this. Because what you're basically saying is I am committed to my quality of life at the expense of my grandkids, great grandkids and great great grandkids quality.
Starting point is 00:11:14 of life unless something else changes. Now, of course, the bet is, well, productivity is going to go through the roof and our AI overlords and the robots, which are basically going to create 10% GDP growth are going to save us all. And if that happens, couldn't be happier. That is a massive bet to take to say, hey, we're basically going to stave off disaster. And, you know, I actually spent a solid hour with Jordi Visser, your buddy yesterday. We had this pretty healthy debate about what does this all mean from a macro perspective? Because his take is, is that, hey, you know, 40 trillion in debt is meaningless, right? Because we basically have infinite productivity capability now with what's coming in AI. And that may turn out to be true. And as a tech nerd who's basically
Starting point is 00:11:58 made his entire career on exponential tech, that sounds amazing. But that is a huge bet to make with people's lives when the alternative all along could have been do the right thing. It's not that hard when you have the will. And by the way, we should have made it illegal to do the wrong thing, right? To start. Technically, that was the spirit of the law was to prevent people from doing that stuff. It's just that when you have the people who make the rules incentivized to only make rules for everybody else, but not follow it themselves, then you get this like dual class in America
Starting point is 00:12:35 where insider trading is legal or, you know, various other examples that we have seen, like of course. I mean, for whatever you want to say about Charlie Munger and his beliefs in Bitcoin, the guy nailed, show me the incentive. I'll show you the outcome. Absolutely. That will always be true. You know, look, I think that we're at a point now where Jordy needs to be right in so far that we really don't have a choice anymore. 100%. Right? There's, there's, we have no choice but to let the death spiral play out. And hopefully. and pray that we can get massive productivity gains, which I find ironic because ultimately all of this is attacks on the middle class at the end of the day, and the productivity gains are actually a net benefit to the middle class because you're basically lowering inflation as you're servicing the debt.
Starting point is 00:13:31 And these are the same people that are now basically crying that AI is bad, right? Which I find equally ironic, which is, you know, I actually think, and I'm not, I'm not one who's easily taken to conspiracy theories, but the mother of all sciops for the last six months has been the geniuses who have figured out that they can basically, you know, influence American policy by subterfuge with this idea that data centers are bad and, you know, all this nonsense that, you know, I live in a state where, well, I spend part of the year in a state where it takes
Starting point is 00:14:03 a gallon of water to grow one almond. That's great. Okay. That is crazy, right? in a state that basically has severe multi-year droughts every 10 years like clockwork, right? And we're complaining about water and power usage for AI to the point now we're going to have to go spend
Starting point is 00:14:20 trillions of dollars putting data centers in space when what we should stop doing, first of all, is stop growing almonds in the desert, maybe, and focus on the real problems we have and let the tech do what it's done for 50 years, which is increased productivity gains, increased quality of life, right? The lowest middle class people in this country carry a phone that is more powerful than the computers I worked on back in my NASA days.
Starting point is 00:14:48 And everybody's complaining about quality life. I do get that inflation is a problem. But there's nothing that, whether it's Harris in the White House or Trump in the White House, there is physically nothing that they can do to keep inflation below 3% now. There is literally nothing that they can do because nobody has. has the political will to absorb the pain. Mm-hmm. Right? So we should be embracing the things that can address the price inflation, right?
Starting point is 00:15:19 Which is massive GDP growth, which is being solely driven by the AI trade right now. Today's episode is brought to you by Galaxy One. A lot of people got their money working for them. But the question now, how hard is it working? Well, the folks are over at Galaxy One, they're taking a very different approach. Everyone earns 3.5% APY using Galaxy One. And if you make over $200,000 a year, that means you're probably an accredited investor, and then you can earn up to 8% on your cash guaranteed by Galaxy Digital.
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Starting point is 00:16:12 but I 100% believe it's true. Up until six months ago, if somebody said, look at his career, look at what he's done, they'd be like, oh, he's a non-technical person who understands some business stuff, he invest, he operates businesses, does the media stuff, all that. Everything was non-technical. I'm going to change my bio on Twitter to software engineer.
Starting point is 00:16:31 I got the same capabilities as they do. Absolutely. I retrained myself. Absolutely. I now can build us. Now, do I have a computer science degree? Absolutely not. We have some of the best AI engineers that we have.
Starting point is 00:16:41 Don't have computer science degrees. But it doesn't matter, right? It's just ultimately, can you produce the end result or not? The fact that my dumbass now has that capability and was able to retrain myself in a relatively short period of time? Okay, so there is a difference. What is that going to do? What is that going to do?
Starting point is 00:16:56 I'm going to defend software engineering for a moment. There is a difference. And by the way, I... You're defending me. Perfect. Exactly. I agree with 95% of what you just said. There's a difference, though.
Starting point is 00:17:09 The Pure Play Software Engineers have another two years of half-life. And the reason is I actually spend a ton of time right now with AI agents who are developing next-gen stuff for ABRA. And a non-technical product manager could not do what I'm doing. 100%. Even though the AI is doing all of the heavy lifting in the background, I am having deep technical architecture discussions with the AI around next-gen stuff around tokenization, yield generating platforms, RIA level integration that, you know, a salesperson, for example,
Starting point is 00:17:48 in our company couldn't have, which is fine, right? Now, is that going to be true three years from now? I can easily see where that's not true, but I think it's going to be true for the next 24, 24 months. But if I actually think that the big difference for companies like us is the difference between a product manager, who a technical product manager slash architect, software engineer, they're all becoming the same
Starting point is 00:18:13 person. And that is the biggest change we've seen, which means that we need way fewer people to do the same task, which given that we're not letting people go, means our productivity as a company has never been higher. Never been higher.
Starting point is 00:18:29 Now, I'm somewhat joking about the software engineers. But you're not wrong. But there's a, now, the thing I will say is, I was a product manager at Facebook. And so there is this weird dynamic of like, if you've built products before. I know you're making a point selling yourself short at the same time. But you can, I'll tell you this. I've talked to a couple people on our team. And it was eye opening for me, but also I think a little scary for them.
Starting point is 00:18:49 Because I said, by the way, you're doing the same thing. Talking on Slack to somebody. I turn. I talk to the chat, you know, AI agent. Go back to Slack. I almost didn't care who was on the other end. Was it code or was it a human? I was just talking through a chat
Starting point is 00:19:03 and work was getting done. By the way, that's the person I was talking to. They were doing the same thing. They were talking to me on Slack. They were turning to an AI agent. And so like, hold on a second here. We all now are just interfacing with these chat bots, but sometimes there's a human on the other end
Starting point is 00:19:18 and sometimes there's an agent and increasingly, it's shifting to more and more agents. And so it does feel like, you know, the ground shifting a little. 100%. I have, I'll tell you two stories. I can just watch on. I've got the phone in my pocket. It's a beautiful watch.
Starting point is 00:19:30 You got a great jacket, great face. Yeah. So I'm, I'm, keep going. I got time. Keep going. So. Been working out. Yeah, nice.
Starting point is 00:19:39 Keep going. No, that's good. So, so I get messages from my agents all day on the watch. Okay, here's what I'm working on. Here's the status. Is it okay if I do this? I keep computers in certain places that are offline other than access to the bots via VPN. And so they'll say, hey, can I make this change to your system?
Starting point is 00:19:57 because if I do, I can run this, this and this. And to the point now where I'm just pressing a button on my watch, right, to basically give agents permission to do. You're just encoding on your watch. Yeah, exactly. Or I'll just basically talk into it, which it can now transcribe. And so, like, my, I have a Jarvis, which I affectionately call Max, which I've given my exact team at Abra and a couple people in my personal life,
Starting point is 00:20:19 selective access to the first version, it was a nightmare because it was all or nothing. Meaning, if the person was rogue, they would literally be. able to basically say what's what's in his email yeah yeah exactly but now i can literally give it selective access to to my team member's selective access so like so max has like a legal slack channel a finance slack channel and she knows how to segregate that across different people which and that was six months ago that i couldn't do that um without massive amounts of custom coding work and now i just tell her tell her you know okay do this um and you know so so but each person is now even able to access it via different channels, like via Slack, via, you know, I message or even via
Starting point is 00:21:03 voice. Like I had it hack a custom voice channel so that you could basically on the go open up Safari on your browser and, you know, just try the button and just talk to her. Yeah. And you're just having a two-way phone conversation. Another thing that I have wrapped my head around, I think that the RIAs, like a lot of the people that you guys work with, it doesn't seem like this has hit them yet, but it's coming, is all of the old software just became a database.
Starting point is 00:21:28 So I catch myself now actually handling my highest priority email. I don't actually see it in my inbox first. An agent across one of the many platforms tells me this is there. And then sometimes I just, hey, reply with this. Usually I'll go into the email, especially if it's like, sensitive, you know, high priority and I'll go and I'll answer whatever. But the other thing is I build a piece of software to help me kind of just like organize and priority list and all this stuff, whatever.
Starting point is 00:21:55 And then recently I was like, you know, what if I hooked up Grockbot to the software that I built? So I don't even have to go into that software and like, you know, there's a drop down for like priority levels. And I was like, I just tell GROC to do it. And then all, you know, took me, I don't know, an hour, maybe. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:22:10 And I was like doing other work while I was building and all this stuff. And I was just like, okay, this is getting weird. Yeah. Awesome, but very weird. Yeah, very weird. And so, like, if you think of Abra's business, like, you are interfacing with RIA,
Starting point is 00:22:23 you're dealing with money managers, like this is very regulated, very sensitive, you know, all the stuff. It doesn't yet feel like they're using all of this yet. They can't. So they're at a big disadvantage, right? When I say can, it's not totally true, but the disadvantage is it's a very heavily regulated business,
Starting point is 00:22:43 which acts as a drag on speed of execution. Now, the positive spin on that is it's meant for investor protection, leveling the playing field. There's a ton of marketing rules. When we put out tweets about ABRA, they have to go through an audit process, right? As an RIA. I just can't just basically say, okay, yields at 4% have a nice day. It doesn't work that way for a wealth advisor. And then the SEC has the audit rights on everything you do. At most RAs in this country, at some point, get audited, not a financial audit, but like a best practices audit by the SEC. I'm not using the legal terms, but they'll come in and say, I want to see, I want to see your marketing materials.
Starting point is 00:23:25 I want to see, you know, how your accounts are segregated. I want to see, you know, the reality of how you price something versus how you market the pricing of something. And most industries don't have that. If you sell a widget online and for $5, you sell it online for $5, the marketing message isn't working, you change it the next day. You do split testing, right? You product manager. You know what A, B testing is. It's very hard to do that in the wealth management world.
Starting point is 00:23:49 That's part one. Part two, and a lot of these RAs are my clients, so may not be a great thing for me to have to say, but the reality is a lot of them are not incentivized to talk to their customers. Why? Well, I just said we have a big 60, 40 allocation problem. Why does this problem persist? Because there's a misincentive, back to your other point about show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome, from RIAs who should be reallocating those portfolios, which have been a drag on returns for years,
Starting point is 00:24:15 not for the RAA itself, but for the consumer they've been a drag on returns, right? because the RIA's incentive is don't move the assets, right? Because I get my one and a half or two percent or whatever it is regardless of the outcome. When the right way to do this is the hedge fund world figured this out a long time ago. Yeah, you can basically get a small management fee, but really we should be aligned from a performance perspective. And I would go so far to say that most RIA should be aligned with the beta of a market, meaning I shouldn't even make money unless maybe I take a fixed fee, right? which would be a disaster for the RA industry.
Starting point is 00:24:51 And I basically say on top of that fixed fee, there's a beta, meaning if I just put your money in a 60, 40 portfolio of a bond ETF and an S&P 500 tracking ETF, the beta is probably 5%. And it would be higher if I put it in 100% S&P, but let's just call it 5%. I shouldn't make money on anything under that 5%. And I have a hurdle rate, which, you know, of course, there would be riots in the Street. Right. Nobody, no RAA would do that. Certainly not voluntarily. But if you wanted to design the killer RAA in the AI era, it would be a fixed fee. It would be a beta of the market be some formula. And I'm going to do custom AI based portfolio construction and also have it be tokenized so that I can do a whole bunch of fancy things with your portfolio that I couldn't do before. And I think that's coming. And to your point, Obviously, they're not ready for this.
Starting point is 00:25:50 The SEC is not ready for this, right? There are no rules that would easily. There's a robo-advisor category for advisors that could get away with this, but the people-based RIAs are woefully unprepared for this. They don't even run their own systems, most of them. They outsource them to other companies, and that's the companies that, you know, ABER is working to integrate with now so that RIAs can have access to crypto, have access to crypto-based yield, have access to lending, have access to the tokenized
Starting point is 00:26:19 stocks that are coming down the pipe that we've been reading about from, you know, partnerships with NYAC and NASDAQ and their international brethren that ABRA is in the middle of in order to facilitate loans against those tokenized shares and yield on tokenized shares. That is the future of portfolio construction. Now, we're preparing for that now, but the RAAs are going to have to completely change three things, in my opinion. One, they're going to have to rethink the speed at which they work. Yes. They're going to have to rethink, which, and I would say it's kind of a one, that's like
Starting point is 00:26:52 one A, one B would be like, we have to rethink the value of the individual RAAs themselves, the people that are basically made, as fiduciaries that are making decisions. So number two, we're going to have to completely rethink how we do compliance and technology, right? Meaning, like today, it's very rigid what we can offer clients, right? Because it all goes through compliance reviews. And that's fine. I get all that.
Starting point is 00:27:18 But if you look at perpetual futures, prediction markets, you know, tokenization, crypto, the R.A. market is shut out of all those products today. Not because it's illegal for them to sell it. It's just they don't know what to do. They literally don't know what to do, right? So we're working on next gen stuff that makes all of those things available. But more importantly, let's the RIA start to use AI-based tools. to do portfolio construction in a way that the clients will understand.
Starting point is 00:27:52 And they still have a person to interact with, say, let me explain to you, you know, what our max is recommending for your situation today, which, by the way, can change week to week, right? My portfolio should be adaptable week to week, month to month, however often I dictate. And maybe I want an active portfolio, which changes every day like a trader. Or I want to go to zero on stocks at the end of the week. You know, that may not be necessary in where this is going with 24-7 trading, but maybe I want it anyway, right? No RIA can do that today, right?
Starting point is 00:28:25 You're starting over on Monday. What are you talking about? Their heads would explode, right? And so, you know, I think this space is about to go through the biggest change in the U.S. kind of financial industry versus everything we've seen for the last, like, 50 years. I think it's going to be seismic, right? What is the latest at Aber?
Starting point is 00:28:49 You guys have a number of things. You guys have yield focus. You've been doing lending. Like, talk just a little. So, we went through this multi-year kind of transition, and it's finished now to being an RIA ourselves, which means we're a fiduciary for our clients, which means we have to do right by our clients, which is fantastic. Like, our industry needs that.
Starting point is 00:29:10 But it's actually merging with the traditional industry. So let me explain. So we started out, like, we, we. We offer the ability to custody Bitcoin, custody other crypto assets, earn yield on stable your dollars, earn yield on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, whatever you're staking, staking yield. Fastest growing business has been borrowing against crypto. So borrowing against Bitcoin, borrowing against Ethereum, stuff that you and I have been involved with for many years now.
Starting point is 00:29:35 And that's all been growing really well for us. We're starting to tokenize the yield. What does that mean? So today, if you want to earn yield on Bitcoin, you'd deposit. the yield into an ABRA separately managed account. Think of it like a vault. And you earn yield. And Bitcoin is is auditable in the vault. And you're earning yield. And then when you want to make a withdrawal, you just basically withdraw from the vault. We've now created tokens using this Abrafi platform, BTCAF for Abrafi, USDAF, where you actually are earning yield on the Bitcoin. So
Starting point is 00:30:10 Bitcoin in, Bitcoin plus more Bitcoin out, right? Dollars in. And like circle or tether in and tether or more circle out on the other side. That's what USDAF is. And you can trade them, just like I can trade normal Bitcoin or move them around, but it's basically tokenized yield. Why would I want to do that? Well,
Starting point is 00:30:29 I can now take the yield-bearing tokens where ABRA is using its, you know, powerful systems to generate that yield and use them as collateral for other things. That's interesting. So now if I'm going to go borrow against my Bitcoin, I'm actually borrowing against Bitcoin that's also generated, a yield, which massively offsets my borrow cost. Because right now, the going cost in defy for borrowing against Bitcoin, it's about four and a half percent, right? We're generating
Starting point is 00:30:56 between three and four percent yield right now. And I can't promise that that will be the yield in a year, but when you net those two, right, plus our fees, the cost of your loan is close to free. That is a fantastic, you know, deal, right? And so that's getting a lot of interest in the market. And you'll see those tokens, dollar yield bearing, Bitcoin yield bearing, Solana yield bearing, using a bunch of DAPs that we're going to be announcing this year, both ourselves and with third parties, lending DAPs, futures, DAPs. It's just awesome collateral. The other thing it does is because all of those tokens are being released on Solana first,
Starting point is 00:31:35 any DAP that has the ability to absorb Solana tokens can now basically take multiple forms of collateral at the same time, which is the biggest problem in Defi right now is what's the most pristine collateral in Defi? Bitcoin. What's the problem with Bitcoin? Well, it's its own blockchain. And every DAP is running on its own blockchain, right? So Hyperliquid knows nothing about Bitcoin. You know, and you pick your favorite AVE knows nothing about Bitcoin. And we've solved that problem with this wrapping technology, which is awful. And so we've created a tokenization system that solves that problem, right, so that you can use the tokens for collateral in different types of DAP environments. And so basically, think of us as like building almost like a neo-banking stack one step at a time. Okay, well, we need
Starting point is 00:32:24 tokenization to bring all the assets in, starting with crypto. You're going to see stocks coming into the Abra platform, also tokenized with yield. So we have tokens all coming in. And I can earn yield on all my tokens. Next step is, well, I can use them as collateral. I can borrow against all my tokens. I can borrow against my Bitcoin. I can borrow against my QQQ shares. I can borrow against my Ethereum. And the next step is other apps that use those tokens as collateral, whether it's futures contracts, payments, prediction markets. It's all basically comminglable now into one portfolio of collateral, right, which systems have never been able to do before. That's the value of tokenization ultimately. But think about it.
Starting point is 00:33:05 We have, if you look at what NASDAQ's doing, what I slash NICE is doing, they're all using different blockchains, right? We're basically working on a way to give people kind of fungible, normalized access across all different types of tokens to earn yield, treat it as collateral, borrow against it, et cetera, et cetera. Every person listening to this show, you probably own Bitcoin and you got it the same way. You paid full price on an exchange. But there's a smaller group of business owners, family offices, and investors with sharp CPAs, and they're quietly getting theirs a very different way. They own the machines that make it. Mining. Here's how it works.
Starting point is 00:33:40 You buy the miners and simple mining hosts and runs them at their facilities in Iowa on industrial power rates that you could never get on your own. The Bitcoin they mine goes straight from your machine to your wallet. There's two reasons I find this interesting right now. One, the economics. Cheap power lets you convert electricity into Bitcoin at a discount to spot. You're acquiring the asset below the sticker price that everyone else pays. But second, and listen closely, you've got a big income year. Miners are classified as computer equipment.
Starting point is 00:34:06 Equipment means depreciation. Qualifying buyers can write off the entire purchase in your business. year one. It's the same playbook. Real estate investors have run for decades pointed at Bitcoin. Your CPA will want to see this before the end of the year. And so with attractive financing available, you can deploy these assets without selling any of your assets to do it. There's not some garage operation. Simple mining runs over 40,000 machines and which just ranked the fastest growing company in Iowa on the Inc. 5,000. They put together a valuable resource called the 2026 Bitcoin Mining Blueprint. It covers the five mistakes investors make when allocating to mining and how to avoid
Starting point is 00:34:39 them before deploying capital. You can access it for free at simplemining.io slash pomp. That's simplemining.io slash pomp. Go check it out today. When you move more towards this tokenization thing, do the RAs have to learn what tokens are, or will they just interface and or users and just say, hey, I'm just buying Apple, I'm just buying QQQ. I don't think they need to understand underlying what it means for a smart contract to instantiate rights in a token. What they need to understand is it represents a very different systemic way of doing things, right? And what that means is, is because AI will be layered on top,
Starting point is 00:35:16 you'll have different types of portfolio construction, you'll have services you couldn't offer before, right? RIAs are about to get into the perpetual future space in this country for multiple reasons, biggest reason being their customers want it. By the end of next year, RIAs will be able to offer perps, prediction markets access, you know, tokenize yield, none of which they can easily offer right now,
Starting point is 00:35:37 without actually figuring, go building a bunch of stuff themselves, which they don't do. Right. So this is just, like I said, it's the biggest change to the space overlaid with, you know, very, very smart AI overlords who can do portfolio construction based upon your risk tolerances, your profile, and your requirements, which they can't easily do today. They basically have a list, right, of tell me about yourself. And it goes, check, check, check, check. And ultimately, you fit in one of ten boxes.
Starting point is 00:36:07 and that box spits out, you know, an allocation roadmap for you. And they don't like changing it for the reasons we already talked about. This should be able to do things in real time for you with an infinite number of combinations. I actually think the coolest thing, okay, so let's think about what's about to happen, right? So let's say there's 20 trillion sitting in wealth managers in the U.S. and maybe another 20 trillion in Europe. Okay. When the kids start inheriting that, what's the first thing they're going to ask?
Starting point is 00:36:34 Well, can I move it to Robin Hood? right can i can i can i can i can i basically go play with you know uh perps and prediction markets and you know put the money to work and i don't want this boomer 60 40 shit i don't even know i don't even know what treasury bonds are i don't understand like and they don't make me any money so but what if i could basically create a portfolio which is completely tokenized where it's all basically at the same time collateral so it's earning yield but i can use it as collateral for anything so i can say to my wealth advisor Okay, Mr. Wealth Advisor, I want a down payment from my house. I want an instant loan against this portfolio.
Starting point is 00:37:12 I also want to take 5% of the portfolio across the top, and I want to use it as collateral on a perps venue so that I can basically do a 20% levered bed on AI, which I think is going to Valhalla right now, right? But it's just 5%. And the system will automatically know, okay, if he... It's like natural language, basically. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:37:31 You just described... I heard if you saw recently a copseller. probably launched called, I think it's called Super Take. Mm-hmm. And I was looking at it this morning, actually. Very interesting. Yeah. Hey, I think that there's gonna be a lot of snow this year.
Starting point is 00:37:42 Yeah. Well, that's an idea you have or a take. Right. How do you invest? Yeah. How do you make money? One of the things that I used to always ask people is, okay, there's a lot of people who are convinced that stable coins
Starting point is 00:37:53 are gonna be much more popular than they are two years ago. How do you make money? Right. You can't buy the stable coin because it's just a dollar, right? So then you'd be like, well, you can't buy tether stock. Circle wasn't public at the time. time, then you say, okay, a prediction market, like, you don't know what to do, how to do it. And so, like, this is promising, or at least, you know, the idea of it is that it will figure
Starting point is 00:38:13 out how do you make money off of this? Now, if that company launched three years ago in the U.S., they already would have gotten a call this afternoon from the SEC going, we'd like to talk to your, you know, counsel or whatever. The SEC would have a super take. They would have a super take. And the super take is you may be acting as an unregistered fiduciary. And so I'm not saying that. that's what they're doing. I'm just saying that they would have called even if they weren't.
Starting point is 00:38:38 Right. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter. But my point is, it was calling the call. It does open up a lot of questions around the legal frameworks against which all of these systems are going to operate under, meaning, you know, defy, if it's pure play with no off switch, may get a pass. But if there's a company that you know you can shut down that's developing systems that are processing all the questions that you're answering people, right? Then do they need to be? be a registered robo-advisor or something like that. And we'll figure it all out. But my point is, like, this is about to change, I think, in the U.S. first and Europe second, the entire framework under which we offer fiduciary-based services for people. And I think that it's going to be
Starting point is 00:39:23 difficult for the older generation to get their arms around it. But the people who are using Robin Hood now who are going to be inheriting all of this money, it's intuitively what they're going to Of course. But they can't have it today. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Well, it's just, I think about it with Sylvia, right? It's like, okay, we built this AI-CFO, great.
Starting point is 00:39:43 I literally, there's a real conversation that I had the other day. Most of the engineers are maybe 30 or younger. So, and maybe there's one like 31, 32, but for the most part, they're all like in their 20s. And I was talking to them and I said, you know, I need to apologize to you guys. The current product we have is because that's what I'm used. is because that's what I'm used to. But I'm old. Grant scheme of thing, you know, if I talk somebody who's 70,
Starting point is 00:40:09 they're not old. Funny how I knew where you were going with this, right when you said it. But like, I was like, dude, my entire life, I have logged into a piece of software, and I hit a dashboard. And the dashboard has a bunch of numbers. And like, by the way, based on the old standards, this thing is a killer. This is amazing.
Starting point is 00:40:22 Yeah. And you could chat, but blah. I said, dude, that's not how software's going to get built anymore. We need to go full, agentic. We need to, I need to talk to it over text, message and, you know, bots or Slack or like, what, and like, then it can do things on the platform, but like, I don't need to see the dashboard anymore. That's right.
Starting point is 00:40:40 And so it was where it would be built on the fly. Correct. And so, like, I was going through this whole thing. And I was like, and I literally apologized to him. I said, I have been looking backwards in building this. We have to now, now we've got the foundation. Now we just got to go. Let's go forward.
Starting point is 00:40:53 And you could see all of them even like, I mean, I'm 38. Some of them are 28. You know, 10 years is a lot, but it's not a lot. And they were even like, oh, yeah. Oh, hold on. second here, even they were thinking that way. And so I think this is going to happen to all these businesses, right? People are going to have to start thinking about even the way you build the product,
Starting point is 00:41:09 you design and how you think about the interface with the user, all of that stuff's going to change. And it sounds super like tech oriented, but it is quite literally, this has penetrated the moms. And this to me is the biggest thing. My wife, all of her friends, all the little group chat she's in with the moms, et cetera. Instinct? These women are like, this is the greatest invention literally ever. Forget sliced bread.
Starting point is 00:41:32 Like, this thing is awesome. It searches my email. It manages that house schedule. It goes and finds all this stuff. And they're like sharing and doing this, but whatever. And I'm like, yo. And so my wife will die laughing. She's going to be mad. I'm going to say this.
Starting point is 00:41:46 But I walked into our bedroom the other day. And she had some clothes out on the floor. And she was taking pictures of them. The AI is like, you can put these outfits together. I was like, oh, it's over. It's over. We've got to start adding some value. you real quick. I was like, oh, my God, it is over, right? And so, like, I think people know that, like,
Starting point is 00:42:07 moms in general, they control, you know, person decisions in the home. They tend to have very good word of mouth if a product can hit that channel, whatever. But I was like, all right, hold on a second here. Like, I'm talking about this in engineering conversations at work. And then the mom groups are talking about it as well. Like, dude, it's over. Like, literally it, the world has changed. That's it. So, okay, I think that we're going to have these devices. The next gen devices that are basically app-based, the OS of the device will literally be agentic orchestration and it will figure out... Just like an overlay on top of the apps.
Starting point is 00:42:45 Exactly. Well, it won't even be apps underneath. It will be building the apps on the fly and the interfaces will be things like AR, VR, VR, you know, whatever, you know, maybe traditional screens as well. But on the fly, it will basically say, okay, I'm pulling in data sources. I know where your assets are. I know where your tokens are. Here's what you own.
Starting point is 00:43:06 Here's the portfolio construction. Do you want, you know, I think you should consider this, this, this, and this. And it will just do it for you on the fly by interfacing with your RIA, who may ultimately legally have to push some buttons. I don't know. But my guess is if they had to do that today in three years to four years, they won't have to. Because it won't add a lot of value. Right.
Starting point is 00:43:25 And so that's that OS layer basically replaces the app. layer, right, with this kind of agentic orchestration, that's just going to be computing, right? That's all it is, right? And so your financial life, your personal life, it just doesn't matter anyway. It's all integrated. And it's, you know, like I was joking, I think we better start working on adding value. Very quickly, right? You know, hey, honey, can you, can you hang this picture on the wall?
Starting point is 00:43:58 And it's going to be, hey, you know, Mr. Tesla bot, can you hang this picture? on the wall. Listen, it is, we're headed to a weird world. Yeah, exactly. All right, where can we send people to find more about Abra? Yeah, so Abra Global on Twitter is always a great place to interact with the company. Obviously, Abra.com to sign up. I'm pretty active, Bill Barr on X as well.
Starting point is 00:44:21 But just go to Abre.com and find all you want about Abra. You don't know this. You know why I have a soft spot for you guys? Why? Because Abra Global, my Instagram account handle is Pomp Global. You know? Because somebody took Pomp. Like, who took that?
Starting point is 00:44:33 Right. Some guy, and by the way, he, uh, there was a DJ. He had at Pomp on like all the platforms. So I kept trying to get them to give it to me. And he was like, you know, you could imagine the numbers that he'd be throwing out. Yeah, I found out who you are. He's like, yeah. Well, I didn't own Aber.com when I started Abre.
Starting point is 00:44:50 And, um, it was, it was quite an interesting process to get a four-letter name. And not only that, it's, it works in every language. It works really well in every language. And, you know, there's a lot of words when you, go from English and sounds like, you know, screw a horse and Greek or whatever, you can't do that, right? And so getting Abra, it took me two years to get it. It was expensive?
Starting point is 00:45:11 It was relative to where we were as a seed stage company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not relative to what it's actually worth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just happened to be a company that had bought a software company, well-known software company in Europe, that had bought an HR software company that was named Abra. And they didn't need it.
Starting point is 00:45:30 And a friend of a friend, managed to get a hold of the person making the decisions. All right, give us X100K, it's fine, and call it a day, but otherwise that we wouldn't have been able to get it. Yeah, we just got Sylvia.com. Awesome. And similar, you know, you got to find the right person or whatever. But the at-pomp guy, he, by the way, he blocked me on Twitter
Starting point is 00:45:48 because he was getting tags so off. People were like screw it up. Right. He was just like, dude, he's like, who, what is going on? Yeah, I would have assumed. I would have assumed, yeah. But his opening offer was basically just like, retire me, my family, and all of my grandchildren.
Starting point is 00:46:00 Wow. Very good. And so how do you spell Sylvia, by the way? Well, this is an interesting thing, S-I-L-V-I-A. But... So you got S-I-L-V-I-A.com. Yes. And then we used to have...
Starting point is 00:46:15 It used to be C-F-O-S-F-A, and then we would have it spelled S-Y-L-V-I-A as well. And so then you start like, okay, well, how many times could people misspell or how do they misspell? Like, oh, you start trying to get all the domains. Yeah, it's like, every entrepreneur has played this game. We ordered dozens of domains at that hour. Yeah. And it's just like, all right, let me just keep a quiet. these and pointing them.
Starting point is 00:46:32 All right, thank you for doing this. Always great to see you. It was great to see you as well. Excited to what you guys are doing. We'll talk soon. Absolutely.

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