The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin At $58K Despite JPMorgan & White House Backing Clarity

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Bitcoin has just 4 weeks of Senate floor time before August recess to pass the Clarity Act — the bill that could unlock billions in sidelined institutional capital — and the political clock just got brutal. Trump is refusing to sign the housing bill (which carries the four-year CBDC ban) unless lawmakers approve a voter-ID bill, threatening the entire legislative track, while JPMorgan officially endorsed the Clarity Act today but loaded it with stablecoin restrictions designed to protect their deposit business. But the bull signals are stacking: DTCC's NSCC just went 24x5 (Wall Street catching up to crypto's 24/7 reality), and Fidelity outlined 5 catalysts that could end the bear market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bitcoin is trading at $58,000 despite J.P. Morgan and the White House backing clarity. And, of course, despite the new strategy framework for how their company is going to operate into the future. We're going to talk about all of that today. Of course, with Andrew and Tillman, but with someone else who's much smarter than all three of us, one Mr. Austin Campbell. Let's go. What is up, everybody? Welcome to Tuesday. We like to self-deprecate here. but Tillman and Andrew are actually very intelligent.

I can't speak for myself. Now, one of you guys is to say how smart I am. Go ahead. You're so smart. Thank you. Thank you, Tillman. Can't say it about yourself. Today I'm drinking a LaCroix that is called, do you guys speak French? Pastroquay.

I think it's a watermelon. It's a watermelon. Pasterquay, sponsored by LaCroix. All right, gentlemen. Let's start. Listen, I wasn't actually, you know, we kind of talked about it yesterday, but maybe we should just start at strategy. I'll get a little article up over here in a second, but they obviously have completely changed what they're going to be doing moving forward. And I think a lot of people thinking it's a good thing, a lot of people thinking it's a bad thing,

and we seem to be emotionally detached along those lines. So, Austin, maybe we'll start with you, give your thoughts. I can also break down what it is if people don't know, but maybe just give your thoughts first. Yeah, I mean, fundamentally all of this is just managing a math problem that strategy has, right? Like, let's, as you said, remove the emotion from it and think about what's going on. You have a large stack of Bitcoin behind the company's balance sheet, and then you have a set of debt obligations, convertible debt at the top of the stack and then a bunch of preferred equity. And you have cash flow requirements coming, well, cash flow requirements coming out of

the debt, cash flow requirements at some indefinite point of time coming out of the preferreds, because I will remind everybody in extreme situations, they can pause the dividends there. But fundamentally, you're asking, is Bitcoin going to go up faster than their cash flow obligations are going to run? Because strategy does not really generate cash flow from like operations in the traditional sense of the thing. So part of the problem, I think that sailor and team created for themselves issuing the preferreds and to some extent the converts is it changes strategy from being a bet on Bitcoin over an indefinite time frame to a bet on Bitcoin over a definite timeframe because now you have these cash flow requirements.

Like today as we're doing this show, Bitcoin was just at 59K but is now at 58K. And if it chops sideways for another five years, strategy is paying out a ton of money without any gains, it's just decaying the amount of Bitcoin available to the common stock. And this is fundamentally the problem. So, Scott, what they put out is a management framework as to how we're going to manage this. But it is essentially we're going to try to keep cash on hand. We're going to try to issue common stock when we're at a premium. But the reality is, as you read through, if the market doesn't go their way, there is a point in the future at which they become a forced seller of Bitcoin. Right, and they've approved 1.2-ish billion, which is to cover those obligations that you mentioned.

But I kind of in the fine print, there's also a billion-dollar buyback of MSTR and a billion-dollar buyback of STRC. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that that's two billion more dollars in potential Bitcoin selling that's effectively been approved. But you nailed the point I keep making to all of the critics. I think the part that drives me nuts is people use words like bankrupt and insolvency and all these things. I'm like, you have $50 billion in the bank. in Bitcoin and you idiots are talking about bankruptcy, they have duration risk and that's it. It's how it's Bitcoin going down and how long it stays there. And the part that makes me kind of bullish is that nobody seems to even be entertaining

the argument that Bitcoin just kind of goes up. I do agree. Go ahead, Austin. I was going to say, I do agree that all of these problems for strategy fundamentally go away and a Bitcoin up, especially Bitcoin significantly upworld, because remember the cash flow part, that covers that, no problem. But the thing that I would ask that I think a lot of people have missed in this debate, Scott, I agree with you, strategy is nowhere near going bankrupt. And anybody who's arguing that is crazy. Like, they have a huge amount of Bitcoin.

The real question to ask yourself is, will I do better holding strategy stock? Or will I do better just owning Bitcoin myself? Because even if you want the equity, you can just buy an ETF. have. By the way, if you want leverage, you might be able to get it cheaper than what strategy has done, depending on how you're structuring it. I think the real comparison, at least as I'm trying to conceptualize this thing, is between strategy versus just owning Bitcoin outright. Yeah. And listen, I've become somehow like the poster child for strategy fanboy, apparently, on X, according to everyone, I don't even own the stock. I just hate misinformation.

and there's so much of it about him that I've found myself clarifying things which makes it looks like the cheerleader, but I bought MSTR, I think, in the 150s or something, it was low, it popped up to 170. I put a stop right where I entered and I didn't make anything and I didn't lose anything. It passed through Rastoplas.

It happens, right? But I do own some SCRT, but very small position and because I think they'll pay the dividends. So, you know, I do. But, Tilman, you were jumping in there, go ahead. But yeah, I would much my Bitcoin than anything else. Well, I think there's a place for both. I think there's some entities that can't buy Bitcoin, right?

We've got to remember that according to your charter and according to what kind of, you know, securities you can hold, commodities you can hold, there's an attractive product that Sailor has created that obviously he's been very successful in raising a tremendous amount of capital behind. I do think Austin's spot on. He went from betting on an unlimited time period for Bitcoin to appreciate to a very limited time period. And when you do that, you will run into problems. That is not an if. That is a win. Because when you try to time the market, you're wrong sometimes. And the question in those moments, really to me is, are you betting on the horse or the jockey?

And I think Saylor has proven a track record of being able to pull enough levers and pull enough strings to get through very difficult times. It reminds me of a time when everyone was saying he was going to go bust if Bitcoin hit $17,000. And it was at the Bitcoin conference. People were booing him. It was and it did hit $17,000. He didn't go bust and, you know, look at now. Wait, if it was 30, they said it at 25, 7, they said 25, 21, all the way down to 17, while he literally said if it goes to $3,000, I'm okay. Here's the math. It doesn't mean that the concentration risk doesn't exist. It doesn't mean that what he's done hasn't put him in a different risk profile in terms of the holdings. That's not necessarily a bad thing. He's obviously

continuing to raise capital. I think there's a couple of things that I would do if I were him that I think he should do going forward is addressed the dividend issue by us either a dedicated capital raise where they segregate the funds and they go, these are dividend payments. And we've got five years or whatever. So they went to 2.55. I mean, that's what they said, but now they're at 2.55, 17 and a half months. That's what they're saying with another 1.25 in billion.

1.2 and billion in Bitcoin, they can sell to extend that to 20-something months. I know. I know that they have that now, but there's nothing that they've put from a mechanism's perspective to keep them from dipping into that to buy more Bitcoin and to do other things. Like they've said that in the past and then they bought more Bitcoin with it, you know, like the next week. And so I think, by the way that I keep hearing is that they,

it's never, ever moving goalposts. Like I won't buy Bitcoin below this MNAV. I won't do this. I won't do that. And they do change. And that's a fair criticism. And so, you know, I would love for him to segregate some funds and say, these are just dividend payments and there's nothing else we can do with them but that.

That would provide, you know, some under, under, there's some pin underpins, if you will, to the volatility of it. The volatility, though, is the aim. You got to remember for that as well. They're not just playing the upside. They're playing the chop. And the chop when people have a lot of fear is more than it when people don't have fear. And so these types of events, the volatility can be harvested in ways that I think a lot of people don't add to the equation.

And they don't really analyze like how much could they pay their dividend out of the volatility yield they can produce, not just sell. of the Bitcoin. And that is a conversation that's kind of at the tip of everyone's tongue these days. So those are the only things that I would add to it. But I agree that there's a lot of fear. There's a lot of criticism right now. But I think he's up to the challenge. That would be my bet. I mean, just for clarity, I think you're right. But like the policy they set forth yesterday was that this money, which is now 2.55, can only be used for dividends and interest coverage. Beautiful. It's a board. It's not a segregated. It's not a segregated. funded, I think, technically, but the board has approved that money only for those purchases.

I don't think, I could be wrong, but I don't think he's allowed to buy Bitcoin with that money. That's fantastic. Here in my mind, I think that's what he needs. And I think that's why the market, listen, a lot of the big critics that I actually saw on X kind of were under it and they were like, this decent. Or we're like, I guess we'll talk about this in 18 months. That's what a lot of people said, you know, but that's what he wants. He wants to kick the can down the road far enough that Bitcoin goes up and you forget that we had this conversation. I mean, another important point by having a board resolution and making that so public is their hands are somewhat bound, not just in that sense, but also if you're making that as a representation and people go and buy now and then you do something else, now you're going to get the mother of all shareholder lawsuits and they are going to win because you just made very clear representations about that at the board level.

So, you know, one thing that if we're going to legitimate critiques of strategy, it's basically you keep moving. the goalposts, you guys keep over-complicating things with some of the capital stack that you have, and you set a bunch of things that open you up to shareholder lawsuits, and that can be very destructive to certain people or parts of the capital stack, if that goes badly. Right, like, do not go out there and market STRC as a savings account again. That's a terrible decision, right? Like, don't do that. But, you know, to some extent, the curse and the genius of Michael Saylor are the same, which is like, can't stop, won't stop. So, you know, you're going to get that, part of the package here. I want to raise one more point, Tillman, I want to throw this question over to

you. If you were strategy, would you be looking at buying back STRC with where it's trading right now? Great question. No, I wouldn't. I think, again, to your point of over-complicating things, I think there's a big, I think the rumor mill is churning that strategy was the only thing supporting Bitcoin's price. I think the self-dealing type of circular logic and flywheel jargon is over. I don't, I don't think people, I think people want to see new money saying this is good. Right now it's good. Market price, no funny business, you know, willing buyer, willing seller. That would be my, my two cents. But I think that they've opened the door to do it if mathematically it's accretive to micro strategy or strategy shareholders, which, you know, if you do the math and it is,

I can see the argument for buying some of it back. And people would be thrilled if all of a sudden that thing flew back up to par. Andrew? Public markets are hard, man. It's not an easy game. He's played it for a long time. He's won some. He's lost some big ones.

And so, you know, we find ourselves in a very different position as a really to Bitcoin and Microstrategy than we were 18 months ago. There's enormous competition for capital, enormous competition for capital. And so when the, you know, not just the narratives, but the actual capital flow meaningfully changes, that's a very difficult position to be in, right? And then you add, you know, all manner of players in capital markets, which can, you know, not only just nip at your heels, but take large chunks of flesh out of your Achilles heel, right? So that's what Sailor's dealing with right now.

Two years ago, before Bitcoin ETFs had launched, Microstrategy was the only game in town to get, you know, Bitcoin adjacent type of a position. That's long gone, right? very, very long gone. And now we're at a spot where even people that, you know, have been in Bitcoin and made it, you know, their life's work for a decade have said to themselves, there are currently other opportunities which offer me upside that I believe is way, way bigger, not me personally, but they believe is way, way bigger than what Bitcoin offers.

And so now you've got forces from both sides, from top and bottom, smushing micro-stratologies, you know, capital opportunity. And thus, you know, my initial point, capital markets are not for the faint of heart. That's for sure. Yeah. I actually, I would say that one of the other criticisms, which is the one that, you know, we have very, with a certain bias, pointed out repeatedly on this show, obviously, since you, you guys, you know, we all are part of a algorithmic trading company is how he bought Bitcoin in the first place. I mean, we have, you know, we've got literally, I was just bringing them up as you were talking, but you guys had these awesome case studies. We've shown them before. You know,

the Pioneer, the Pioneer revisited MSTR, but particularly this one, his policy was raise capital cash and never save any cash immediately spend that cash on Bitcoin no matter what. And it always seemed to be the joke that he was buying the highs. If he had even strategically purchased Bitcoin and not always at the highs, the spread on where he would be in his loss is like astounding. I mean, we went through your case study before, but even just using like your algorithms that would have bought slight dips on those days instead of buying the top, what was the spread, Andrew? You, I'm sure you remember it. I don't have the number. I can open the number. I mean, it's the better part of, you know, 40%. Like currently,

year to day out, right? He wouldn't even be out. Yeah, right. Yeah. But that's what I mean about the volatility opportunity. He's not harvesting that, but he's starting to and other, and, you know, there is a lot of chop. There can be a lot of churn profits that can be harvested off of Bitcoin. And he holds so much that that's a logical place for him to go. Even if he just turned part of his stack to defy, you could generate a tremendous asymmetric yield. off of it. But yeah, it's one of those things where Sailor has got so many levers that we don't even know about. I'm not worried. I mean, it's going to be a bloodbath until then, but people don't know what they don't know. And that's why the markets, that's why it's a buying opportunity.

But I still look at Bitcoin, to your point, Scott, earlier, like no one's even talking about Bitcoin going up from here. That's a really good sign to me, you know, that I've been in enough Michael's to know kind of where the where it feels like the bottoming is happening and there's a lot of institutional money that now is aware of Bitcoin and if you talk to institutional money they're not going for five Xs they're not going for 10 Xs VCs are but hedge funds are but regular institutional you know boring they're looking for 10% they're looking for an 11% they're looking or 7% with some upside in terms of a dividend. And so I think that what we're going to see is kind of a leveling out.

And I think we're going to potentially see all of this go away just on the back of Bitcoin going up. But we'll see. Yeah. Just go up to that point. So Austin, a final thoughts on strategy before we move on. I think we'll go to our topic clarity next. Well, I was going to say it may be that strategy in some ways is its own worst enemy. on the going up part, right?

Because, Tillman, the other thing I've found, you know, you were saying strategy is the only thing holding Bitcoin up. I'm going to give the counter thesis, which is strategy is the thing holding Bitcoin down. And what I mean by that is when you run around and talk to who would be the logical next leg of buyers on the institutional scale, so pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, central banks, extremely large corporates,

none of them love the idea of piling into a market with a 5% holder like Michael Saylor, who's making this kind of ruckus to the news, right? And so in a weird way, it may be one of those. We're probably going to chop for a while until there's some sort of better resolution here, purely because like the large piles of money, as you've said, you know, Andrew earlier on this show, there's a lot of competition for capital right now. They can deploy it elsewhere and they can just wait this one out. I mean, maybe the actual best resolution. So there's the, he has to die camp, which I think is absurd. Like nobody ever has to die for Bitcoin to go up, right?

Maybe actually it's just that he's kind of kneecapped and he stays slightly below MNAB and he just can't do anything for a while and then we don't need to think of it. And it just exits the narrative and nobody can argue that if we're sitting here still at 60 and he hasn't bought in a month, it's not a problem anymore. And the market can absorb it and move up. That might actually be the best case scenario is he just stops buying for a while. Yeah. Yeah.

Or Trump sells you're a monopoly. and I want part of it, and we're going to put it in the Strategic Reserve, and then everything goes to the baby. There's a thesis. Foreign governments, if we need a strategic. Also under the heading of, you know, capital and where it goes and how it collects, like it shouldn't go unnoticed that both Anthropic and OpenAI looks like they're pushing their IPOs in 2007, right?

So even the most, you know, height, biggest private corporations that, you know, we've ever seen in the markets are giving meaningful consideration to do we want to jump in quickly into public markets? Like that is flat out a different game than it is staying private. You know, private companies have stayed private way longer in the last 15 to, to 20 years than they ever did in the previous 50. And so when you have 800, 900 billion companies saying, maybe we'll just pause here for a moment, give it some additional thought. Again, that is competition. Once you jump into public markets, man, it ramps it up to the power of a hundred. And you've got to not only be on your game, but every, quarter is a new opportunity to be the hero or be the next guy that is absolutely gets slaughtered.

We've seen it so many. Keeping volume on your symbol is incredibly hard. Keeping volume that's not just market maker volume. And not saying stupid things if you don't know what you're doing. I mean, just look at, like, no offense, but like, look at Bailey, you know, like how many dumb things you said that have made Nakaboto be the one that's down 99% instead of, you know, how the other's, it's just, it's a wild space. I do want to move on.

I think we beat the strategy horse to death here. There's a couple stories around clarity, but I think we can just kind of talk about where clarity stands and what we think. So you may have seen that there was a note from a bunch of law enforcement groups that came out of completely left fields criticizing the Clarity Act.

Apparently the White House media on that great. But this is the one that kind of got my spidey sense is tingling. JP Morgan urges, strong safeguards, Congress, Ways, Crypto Market, Structure Rules. Most of the headlines around this are J.P. Morgan officially steps in and support Clarity Act. And if you look at it, they're talking out of both sides of their mouth and playing both sides, obviously. It's like J.P. Morgan supports it, but only if we completely crack down and crush the industry in the process.

This is kind of how I read it. They're trying to control the uncontrollable, in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah, and I think, what's the right way to say this? The big banks have gotten themselves into a very confused position on clarity. think a lot of it comes from own goals that they've scored on themselves over the past like 15 years. You know, a lot of the post-Dodd-Frank reforms for the big banks, that is to say, tighter capital, restrictions, safeguards, et cetera, have caused them to get significantly more risk-averse.

A lot of the most aggressive people have left the banks and are now at asset managers, hedge funds, etc., maybe in crypto in a few cases. and the banks miss some big opportunities. If you look at the share of like the big foreign private credit markets, it's actually shocking small. If you look at their market share in equities trading, it's much smaller than people would expect. And so they've just missed, missed, missed, missed. And I think what they're worried about here is, oh, God, something else is going to change and we're going to miss that too. And at some point, I think what we're going to be forced to confront to this country and clarity is kind of sharp.

this distinction is sort of the awkward position we've put banks in post Graham Leach Bliley, which for those of you who are not super old and bankrag people is when we repealed Glass-Steagel, but also post-Dodd-Frank, which is kind of when we were like, well, maybe that was a mistake, and then partially reinstated it, but poorly, of forcing us to look at this and being like, what do we mean here? Do we mean the big banks need to compete in unrestricted fashion, in which case let them do that, but also go do that? Or do we mean, actually, we just want to go back to Glass Stiegel. Because right now, I think we're kind of faced with like a half pig, half fish,

and that's how you end up with J.P. Morgan being like, we love it, we hate it, we love it, we hate it. And I'll tell you my personal opinion is a former J.P. Morgan person and knowing a lot of people there, if you asked eight people at the firm about clarity, probably only two of them would know what was actually in it. And from those two, you'd probably get like four different opinions if you sat them down to talk to each other. Well, that's the funniest thing is when you get like J.P. Morgan supports it. And then it's like a blog by two executives at J.P. Morgan. You're like, how many people work at J.P. Morgan?

Tens of thousands, I would imagine. Hundreds of thousands. Right. So, yeah, I love these stories. Goldman Sach has Bitcoin to $2 million. It's like it's like a junior analyst who got hired last week. Well, it's the classic banking thing. Look, a vice president to J.P. Morgan.

For those who don't know, VP is the mid-level title. There's two more above that before you even get to executives. Yeah, to Austin's point about post dot Frank, you know, all these banks went from having 15, let's call it 19 business lines to basically four. And, you know, you take a look at a place like Morgan Stanley, which did all manner of things, had multiple trade desks covering all sorts of stuff. And now it's basically wealth management and wealth management. Neutral.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, so they put themselves in a position where, you know, it's well documented the amount of money that J.P. Morgan makes an interest associated with. That's why they want clarity. They're having a hard time with Clarity Act and are trying to come to some sort of, you know, 50-50 type of solution where somehow Coinbase doesn't take meaningful amounts of our business over the next five years. But yet we still look like we're cool. So let's do some crypto stuff. And again, it can't be understated, to Austin's point, it can't be understated that banks were stripped of so much business after 2008 and 2009. And the risk to associate, even mortgage businesses, you know, you still have to be, you know, some sort of shining beacon on a hill to get a normal mortgage from a bank. And that's, you know, we're now 15 years nearly post the mortgage crisis. So they don't make a bunch of money from that. They don't have trade deaths really anymore, anywhere that does any meaningful amount of business. And so it's interest and then it's, you know, retail banking, but mostly wealth management.

And that's where a lot of their, you know, a lot of their profits come from. Certainly on the, you know, the investment banking side of things, those organizations got little down almost nothing, right? Morgan Stanley in 2005 made 20% of its annual revenue from wealth management. Now it's like 70%. So just a huge shift based on, you know, circumstance and then regulatory, let's call it, capture, you know, after an event like that. It's huge changes to banking and investment banking.

overall. It's hilarious. Well, Caitlin Long was on the show last week and she shed light on something that I was not, I knew in the back of my mind, but I really hadn't thought it through and played it out. But the arbitrage that's going on between the top 22 banks or top 21 banks and the rest of the banking world and right, they're getting cheaper money. And that wrench in the system is not just pinning crypto, exchanges against the banks. The Clarity Act really doesn't solve ultimately the biggest problem for them, which is they've been a monopoly for a long time and they've been in collusion with one another

for so long that they're getting attacked from every side. Venmo, PayPal are attacking their market share. Robin Hood, Coinbase, any integrated exchange, full service exchange is attacking their base. Crypto itself and the investment vehicles that the banks don't offer versus the other ones also attacking their base. And so if you look at what Caitlin was talking about, the community banks are also wanting to attack them. They want a level playing field. And so they have no friendlies anywhere other than the government. And so the government and them are trying to figure this out. But the reality of it is is that they need to pick an ally. They either need to pick the crypto exchanges and say, you're our ally and we're going to ride into the future together and we're going to go get market share.

We're going to combine the value of our brands. They need to combine with the community banks and go the Caitlin Long route and say, we're going to integrate blockchain at the fabric level and give it to the people. And they don't even know what they're getting, but it's going to provide so much better service and such a fresh breath of air in the banking system. And I just look at their only competitive advantage. They have one. And if they focused on it, they would really make a thrive back, which is the brick and mortar. People still like to go into banks, talk to the managers. And if they focused on that niche, yes, their market share would dwindle.

But at the same time, they would actually have a purpose right now. I think they're kind of a floundering. They don't know who to serve or what to serve at this point. So I want to push back on that point because I don't think. think that story is actually true about the I don't want to go to a bank well let me let me let me give you some data on that one that I found fascinating this is the advantage of being a former banker who's now a business school professor so over the past three-ish years if you combine all of jp. Morgan Wells Fargo city bank and B of A and you pit them against solely SOFI it appears that

sofi has opened more accounts for 35 and unders than all of the big for combined. I think what we're really seeing here is sort of a generational line being divided between, call it the boomers at the high end, the millennials at the low end of that barbell and Gen X is kind of in the middle and a mixed bag. Like they're the ones who can kind of do the branch or not the branch. But for the younger people, they don't want branch banking. They really do not want branch banking under any circumstance. And so I think the problem for many of these banks, if I'm being brutally honest with them. And like, guys, I know I have some friends there

and I know some management listens to me. So I'm saying this from a place of love. You're too old. And what I mean by that is if you're like a 60 plus year old senior manager at a bank, you probably genuinely don't understand the needs or desires of the young people you need to be the next generation of customers. And unless you get some people onto like your operating committees and boards who are like, at least Scott's age, if not younger,

you're fucked in that space because you just don't understand what's going on and you're going to lose. And part of why the community banks are dying, Tillman, to your point, and like Caitlin, I know knows about this because we've talked about it, is you have customers who are super sticky. They love you. They're local. They do great business with you. They get old. They die.

And their kids don't bank with you. And then the money leaves. Right. That is how that works. It's not that you're losing your current customers to like dissatisfaction. It's they're literally dying. and their kids don't bank with you, right? Because, like, you know, great example.

I live in New York. There's a local bank here called Apple Bank that when you look at it on the surface, you're like, this is a great deal. It's like 2% on your checking, 3.6 on your savings. Like, these psychotic people have two different apps just to manage your debit card versus your checking account. By the way, they don't agree with each other. So like, what the fuck?

Right? Like, as somebody who, like, has a phone, I'm staring at this in a horror. if I want to use this thing. And like this is repeated over and over and over again. So I think the other angle here where banks really are just getting whacked by things like Robin Hood or so fire, God knows what X money is going to do to them, right? Is that you need to meet your customers where they are and you're not, that's not a brick and mortar for anybody who's a millennial or younger. Yeah, Gen Z doesn't want to talk to anybody, much less talk to a talk to a banker, right? They don't even talk to their own friends, right?

Like, it face to face. So, you know, going into a bank for somebody that's 22, 23, 27 years old, I'm like, I don't want any part of that, you know? I don't know. The value, I think, is an asset that can be leveraged of the real estate itself. I also think that if you partnered with a Robin Hood and used it as a Trojan horse to onboard people into a new, you know, digital, you know, ecosystem. I think there's some, I think there is, there's time left to salvage

some value there, is I guess my point. How about X money? You know, everyone was waiting for the launch of X money, 6% API. I think that's going to not last. I think it goes down, but 10 million of FDI insurance, unlimited, 3% cashback. I mean, it seems like they're doing all the things that so far I would do. Austin, right? I mean, does this take more shine off crypto? I wonder if it's just not not even in the same ballpark. I mean, so to some extent it kind of does. They're doing it a very different way. So let me give a disclaimer first, which is I haven't seen any of the terms and conditions

on X money yet. So X people, if you're listening and you want me to have a look at this and give you my honest feedback, give me access because I haven't seen it. So I got a caveat the hell out of this right now. So one, 6% is completely unsustainable. That will not last. That's marketing. that's a promotional thing. There's no way to generate that, maintain your profit margins while holding

capital as a banker. That will with certainty come down. Two, I don't think the 3% on the card is going to be sustainable either. That looks to me. Again, I haven't seen it like a debit card. Your maximum interchange there would be about 1.5 if you're below the Durbin threshold. So like, guys, I've got so many questions. That's clearly marketing too. On the FDIC insurance and account structure, Now, that is interesting, right? If you could get a decent rate of return, not six, but let's say something like three, and you've got 10 mil of FDIC coverage and it's properly structured, so we don't have like a synapse like situation here.

But instead, it's like a fully segregated one-to-one pass through multiple partner banks. That's very appealing. That is a well-structured product. I've done bank suite products before. I helped build something called Flourish back in the day. Like that is doable and it's good. I don't really care about the X creator thing for the super majority of people. Most people are not X creators.

That's nice for Scott, but most people don't care. You want to buy another dinner. Right, exactly. Wires, bill payments, checks, good. That's table stakes, but that is very good. The ATM thing is good. They're going through Visa. That's good.

It's that last bullet that really gets my attention is if they actually successfully use X to become a pure to peer payment network to send, receive request, right? And it is basically free to use. Scott, that's where it's like, how is this, like it's using a very different technology. It's not a stable coin. But functionally, it starts being less and less different than a stable coin over time if you're using that. That is a very interesting thing because the hardest part of any payments network, and Elon knows this. He's a PayPal guy. So like on this one, I'm sure he knows what he's doing is building that end-to-end network. You guys have thoughts on this? I'm curious what the network is as well. I think that's the

million dollar question here. There have been technologies that have done this on X-Dash-coin. I looked it up. It's DogePoint. I'm happy to know. Is it Doge-coin? No, I'm not. Big news. Scott Melker says Doge-coin. That's what the people said. Remember everyone was like Elon Musk, X-Payments is going to be Doge-going to the moon. But, you know, it does. To Austin's point, it's not US dollars. And so, you know, in the age of brands being able to create digital tokens that are at par with value of the US dollar, but they're not the US dollar, but they're called X money. You know, that's the reason why the Clarity Act should pass. And it's because that's part of the, you know, the issue here.

And that's why I'm in full support of Caitlin. I do think that whatever stable coin policy we choose to move forward with, it should all be derived with backing in U.S. treasuries or U.S. dollar equivalents because that supports the U.S. dollar. That supports our existing system. I mean, to a similar point, maybe back to the point on branch banking, I don't think the value there is the deposit network, but there is definitely value in the lending. side of branch banking, right? You'll hear that from a lot of people

about local lending projects, right? Like, I know Caitlin knows this. If you guys have ever talked with Ram Aloalia, I know him well. He says that all the time about the local bags. Jill Castilla, Citizens Bank of Edmund and Roger Bank. Like, same thing. Where they're like, we know local businesses.

We know small to medium-scale businesses. They're too small to get Chase's attention because they're a behemoth. But, like, I'll lend to the coffee shop. I'll lend to like, you know, the auto dealer, like those sorts of things. And well, and if you also look at the origination of mortgages and Fannie Mae's adoption as BTC backed mortgages, it could be an on-ramp for collateral BTC, which would put them right back in the game, in my opinion.

But I agree. But like the core point about clarity, right, that I think both sides have underdiscust. By the way, the community banks have largely missed this. see my comment about management being too old, is this is the ideal moment to create some sort of collective fund that is allocating deposits to anybody you can do lending business efficiently locally, right? It's kind of saying to your average community bank where right now, if you're 12 dudes in Arkansas trying to run a small bank, you are lending, gathering deposits, running an anti-financial crime program, managing your asset liability risk, and trying to figure out what the hell the Fed is doing.

And to be honest, you're good at one of those, maybe two. Right. And so being able to restructure this thing where you tell all the local community bankers, please know your community and do the lending. And if you want, gather some deposits. We would love that. Stop trying to run an anti-financial crime program where, like, people impersonating people who are actually in Cambodia or trying to onboard with your bank. Right. Like we really need to rethink this whole structure, especially in the world of AI. Because back to that whole nobody wants to go to a branch thing. Well, you're going to have to

authenticate that human somehow. Couldn't agree more. And I do I do think that if you talk about the lending piece of what they do, they may not even be good at it, but the brick and mortar gives them the territory advantage that, oh, it's just a net. They're going to catch lent loans. And, you know, Bitcoin's going to be at the center of that based upon what I see going on with collateral. Yeah, Austin, can I ask you one more question before I let you go? Oh, you might have other stuff on your mind. But I was just kind of looking at that post. And a $10 million FDIC insurance, like, have we seen this?

Because obviously a normal bank account has like $250,000 max FDIC insurance, right? So is this because of the way they're doing sweeps that they just basically move or like washing money through so many accounts that you can get up to $10 million? dollar that's pretty novel is that happening elsewhere yeah the way you do that um having built a thing that does something like this before is so you're the bank on the front head i believe don't quote me on this but i think cross river is the main bank there yeah it's okay cool so it's cross river bank so what cross river is doing in the background is scott let's say it's your account so you've got an account titled scott at cross river bank but they will go open up accounts for you at other banks So what they're doing is stacking together like 20 other institutions.

And it's 40 to get to 10 million. I mean, it's 40. Correct. But there are sweet vehicles. There's things like intrafi, et cetera, where you can allocate these deposits around. But also, if you have a network of partner bank you put together, they could have individual titled accounts in your name, multiple banks, right? And every bank you add is 250K of coverage.

So 10 banks, 2.5, 40 banks, as you said, 10. And given that this is X and the scale of their users, it's probably pretty easy to get banks interested. Right. So it would not shock me if they had a proper partner bank like structure behind this thing. This is why I really want to see the T's and Cs from them. Hell, if the Cross River or X people want to talk to me. Right. You know, what if what if I guess you're FDIC insured?

But if, you know, if 17 of your 40 accounts close at the same time, you're now dealing with 17 different. claims on FDIC insurance and $250,000 each. But that's relatively quick. And here's why I was saying I really want to see the T's and Cs, because let me give some like consumer knowledge to people. If you have individually titled bank accounts below the 250K FDIC limit, even in receivership, we've seen that those funds are typically made available immediately by the FDIC. If you look at signature, if you look at Silicon Valley Bank, et cetera, the fair was not the

insured deposits. Until the FDIC runs out of insurance funds, you're getting your money back on those has been how they run it. Where you should be terrified is when you're over the FDIC limit, because then God be with you in a bankruptcy. Maybe you get bailed out. Maybe you don't. And that's why people leave giant balances at JPMorgan and not local banks, a different issue. But below that limit, you tend to get your money out pretty quickly. The thing you need to be careful about, we saw this with like synaps and evolve. is is that money actually in your name and is there good tieout between these two entities? Because the nightmare scenario is that X didn't do their fucking job.

And instead of opening up an account for Scott, they have an omnibus account or they haven't titled your funds correctly because then you do not have FDIC insurance. Yeah. Yeah. This is going to be interesting because I know BitGo, they offer 10 million insurance on deposits, but it's due Lloyd's of London. And so the question will be is that does the FDIC compete from a cost perspective and from to your point? It seems pretty archaic to me that you have to go open up 10 bank accounts to get $2.5 million in coverage. That seems a little crazy to me, but maybe I'm wrong. I mean, it's a vestige of how the FDIC was created.

If you look at the 1933 Banking Act where they made it, they attach a specific amount of insurance to a legal person at a specific. specific bank. Right. And so fundamentally, if we want to change that structure, that's a Congress question. Yeah. And they probably should. Considering that we print more money every day than any failure of any bank represents, it seems like a something. But that's why you said we keep your big balance at J.P. Morgan because they're already too big to fail and you know it. So you have no doubt that Jamie Diamond is getting, you know, backstop no matter what happens. I mean, to go the other way, JP Morgan has technically bailed out the U.S. Treasury twice. So like I know where I'm leaving my money in an extreme situation.

But like, yeah, Tillman, to your point, all U.S. government numbers should be indexed to inflation. Like, what are we doing here, guys? Which is why that the point that Austin made and, you know, all deference to his former employer and colleagues, that's the reason why people put up with the super shitty wealth management part of J.P. Morgan. Like their products stink, all that stuff stinks at JP Morgan, but because it's essentially a fortress that can't be broken, people do enormous amounts of business there. That makes sense. It's just, I mean, you have to play within the system.

You're dealt regardless of how fixed that system is, I think. Right. I'm sure as you get more wealth, you continue to realize that that's the case. Austin, any other topics we miss before I let you go? any final thoughts? I mean, I guess I'll give one joking final thought on Andrews thing here. I think it's actually good for the world that J.P. Morgan is shitty at wealth management. Because like, imagine a J.P. Morgan that's really good at that shit.

Yeah. There would be no other banks. There would just be one bank. Agreed. Absolutely agree. Great point. Awesome, Dan. Thank you so much.

Always great to have you on here and on spaces and everywhere else. Welcome back anytime. Love the perspective. All right. Thank you, everybody. Have a good one. Thank you, man. Have a good one. All right. God, you're smart.

He is. Really like you, Austin. I see in the back there still, man. It's great to meet you in person down in Miami, too. All right, guys. So, listen, we kind of hit on it before we, you know, I pointed out the fact that maybe the biggest point against Sailor is the way that he bought and where he would have landed.

So interestingly, you know, you guys are opening up equities. And you had another unrelated. but same company on what would happen trading micro strategy using obviously the tools. And I opened it here. I think we had that main slide, Andrew, you had said to me, but I had this open anyway. But maybe walk through this since, you know, this is kind of, I think, the first case study for what the equities, algos are going to do. Well, the reason why it's important is because we know a lot of your listeners own micro strategy,

right? We know that if they're Bitcoin folks and over the past, you know, two, three, maybe even a little bit longer, than that years. They've also decided on exposure with micro strategy is a good idea too. And so the numbers are super compelling. Those three boxes there, you've got a three year, a two year, and a year to date. And across all of those, you know, the numbers there, it's just extraordinary outperformance. You can hold the security. You know, 20 years ago, buying hold was kind of the norm. It's turned into, okay, your financial advisor who's not at J.P. Morgan is probably a good one is going to tell you to DCA into positions. But even in the DCA portion of these numbers,

our algorithmic work, our strategies absolutely crush. I will tell you, in my mind, the biggest number here is not the biggest number on this page. It's that 20.2%. But that's year to date on micro strategy, right? Microstrategy has gotten hammered as a stock this year. I think the number for buying hold starting on January 1st is like negative 26%. You've got nearly a 50% overperformance. You're not down on your position in any of these situations. You're actually up. And so we knew that micro strategy was going to be a challenging case study, but at the same time, our algorithmic products absolutely shined here. Every count a time where you just ran these case studies and you're like, yeah, we

would have lost. The reality of it is is anytime you're not taking advantage of volatility, you're leaving money on the table. And so there's always a net positive. If you think about your Bitcoin holdings, for example, and you say to yourself, you know, people say volatility is an asset. Well, explain to yourself what you're doing. to harvested. It's kind of like the game where the pole drops and you have to react and catch it.

Volatility doesn't wait for anyone and it falls and it moves whenever it wants to and you have to be ready to catch it and you have to be focused on it and in anticipation of that event. That's a very difficult task to pull off in reality. When everyone's living a life that requires attention, you can't divert 100% of your attention to the markets. And, even more so you can't divert your attention across all of the markets to wait for those volatility events to take place. And so automation is it's going to be the most prevalently used way in which people interact with the markets in the next five years. And the reality of it is is because you can do things with it you can't otherwise do. And so seeing as believing,

if you aren't familiar with yield farming or yield harvesting, or if you haven't done, it. Our product is free to use. You can go to our website and book an appointment. We will teach you how to use the tool. It's completely user-driven. You can turn it off and turn it on whenever you want. You can set the settings however you see fit. It's going to have a completely unique output to you and how you program it. But we will be there along the way to teach you everything that you need to know. And we've continued to make it as simple as possible and we will continue to iterate on those fronts. But it really does when you wake up in the morning and you've capitalized on volatility

in the markets while you're asleep or while you've been. I remember John Deaton told me, he called me the first day he took a trade and he was like, I was in carpool line picking up my daughter from school. And boom, trigger event. It took place. And I couldn't have been more excited. I think my best impression of John. The point is that it's something that if you have,

have an experience you should. We're here to help you experience it for the first time and to give you access to these tools at no cost so that you can use them and really see behind the curtain. Scott, to your point about, you know, if we ever done a case study where a number is like, yeah, of course, of course it was down. Yeah, we've got a couple of Bitcoin case studies over, you know, a shortened period of time where it's down, but it's down significantly less than if you'd just, you know, I've known if it underperformed. Like if it underperformed what would be generally a benchmark of, you know, 9 a.m. every Monday. Listen, you can curve fit anything.

If I tell you to go pick the lowest price over the last 10 years of Bitcoin and you do the math on buy and hold right there versus. So the point is, is that it's really about the probability of success. It's like if I deploy a yield farming strategy that says, I'm going to take profits every time Bitcoin goes up by 2.5. percent and I'm going to buy a little bit every time Bitcoin goes down by 2.5 percent and I'm going to sell the same amount as I bought. Well, that's like a cash farm yield type of strategy. If the volatility happens, those events take place. If it doesn't happen, they don't take place. Whereas a bull bias strategy would be more like, I'm going to buy one unit and I'm going to sell 0.3 units when there's a pop in price. And I'm just going to harvest the third of my profit potential. So I can take, to reload the capital stack so I have dry powder for the next dip. And so there's, there's a lot of different variations. There's a lot of unique customer outputs. But the point of it is, is if you don't have a way to catch the volatility right now, here is your way to catch the volatility. Yeah, we, we've been having conversations with our current concierge client base

now for about two and a half weeks. And the response to this has been overwhelming, like just absolutely overwhelming. And the reason is kind of goes back to something that Austin said. I mean, people keep, people don't have 90% of their wealth in Bitcoin. Most people don't. Some people do. Very few people do. But most people have 5 to 10% of their wealth in Bitcoin. And then the rest of it is that JP Morgan or Schwab or Morgan Stanley in equities of some sort and ETFs. And so the opportunity to use these strategies, the opportunity to use this technology. I was on a phone call with a customer at 730 last night talking about what we do and how we do it. And he's like, man, this is really on the cutting edge of innovation. And that is true. The thing about innovation,

though, is it moves really, really, really fast. And so one, you want to be able to have people to talk to and experience this with and run things by. That's what our team does every day, all day. And, you know, another thing this guy said is, you know, the thing I almost love the best about it. This is anytime I can pick up a phone or get on a Google meet with Austin and, okay, how do I dial this in or dial that in or dial that in? And so as innovation moves, as markets go to 24-7 at some point over the next two years, this stuff is going to be ubiquitous everywhere. And you don't want to be behind the curve. You just don't want to be. Yeah.

and tax harvesting. We didn't even talk about that. Oh, for sure. Yeah. It's the same thing. It's volatility harvesting to the downside, right? When price moves against you, there's value in that movement. Haven't even dug into it. Well, we'll just unload my entire position, like right here at 50.

It will do whatever you tell it to do. That's the nature. I look, and the fees were so high. How much is it worth mathematically to dump and rebuy this entire? position from a fees perspective, you know? Well, and listen, that's an arbitrage exchange to exchange to find the best price to do it. Well, there's a lot of like nuance to that, you know, there's, there's daily maximums before rate adjustments take place. There's, every exchange, you know, has different pricing structures as it pertains to trades and volume of trades and volume

of dollars through trades. But that's one of the things that, you know, we, we have a lot of experience with all of them. They do change quite often, but we can we can give you some education as to where to, at the very least, where to look and where to find that information. All right. You can find all of that at archpublic.com. A-R-C-H-U-B-L-C-C-D-C-C-O-B-L-C-C-O. Look, our faces are so big. I didn't need to do that. Mine is always really big. That's a problem that I'm trying to deal with now. So, yeah, it's just, I got a little, I got some scruff. Yeah, you're working on it. be a beardy guy. Not like you guys though. You guys are underjacks.

Well, you don't have quite the under chin to hide as we do. I'm like me myself and Irene. Under 10 is this soft way of saying double chin. Yeah, there you go. Underbend double chin.

All right. Anything else? We got three minutes. Anything else I missed, does? No, what a fantastic show. The last two have been yeah, Austin. Yeah, man. Great guess. Great guess. We've been crushing it. It's been really entertaining. And I've just learned so much. Honestly, like, Caitlin and Austin are too.

Like, he's a professor, you can tell. He knows how to break things down for people in a way that they'll understand. Honestly, it was almost as good, you know, as yesterday when Peter Schiff said asset prices going up is not real wealth. I mean, you know, when you either that, that was. It was actually, you know, he was in his. Lane, well, you know, moisturized. Asset prices going up is not real well. That's an all-timer.

I got to say, that really is an all-timer. Tell that to every boomer who owns a house. It's just like, how does that come out of your mouth? I don't get it. I don't get it. I had one reply to guys say, well, you know, inflation. I'm like, the NASDAQ's up 600% in the last 10 years. What are you talking about?

What are we talking about? Asset prices. They go out. It's getting the way of a good narrative. of Andrew. Yeah, that's right. That's right. All right, guys, we got to go. Appreciate you. We will see you next Tuesday.

Bye, guys.