The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin DROPS As Treasury’s $6 BILLION Bond Rescue BACKFIRES | Matt Cole

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

Bitcoin and markets are heading into a major political and macro week as Trump ties a $5,000 dividend and the end of the war to the midterms, while Treasury’s $6B bond buyback fails to stop yields from climbing. Strive continues aggressively adding Bitcoin as SATA nears a $1B market cap, and Brian Armstrong says crypto will get regulatory clarity even if the Clarity Act fails — a notable shift in tone ahead of the Sept. 15 vote. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bitcoin price is dropping as Treasury's $6 billion bond rescue backfires. Also, PPI numbers just came in slightly hot and markets are not loving it. But I think all of that is noise. And I'm excited today to have a conversation with Strive CEO Matt Cole about all the things that actually matter. And I have a feeling we're going to talk quite a bit about that bond intervention and macro. Can't wait to get into this one today, everybody. Let's go. Good morning.

Happy Thursday and welcome to the show. Before I bring Matt on, I just want to unpack one thing that's literally too embarrassing to do with Matt on stage, which is talk about what I wrote my newsletter about this morning. Hunter Biden's laptop hit $400. Now it's 80 cents. I'm sure that you guys were all watching with bated breath the entire saga of the laptop meme coin launch that happened yesterday. but this went exactly as it was always going to go. And once again, thousands of retail investors were damaged. Now, this thing went to, I think, a $144 billion. It's just so absurd. A fully diluted valuation with a $48,000 liquidity pool,

meaning that a few people got really excited and bought the hell out of it, and so did bots. It went absolutely flying. There was no liquidity. People bought it, and there's reports of people, you know, putting in $200 grand at the top, it being worth less than 200 bucks, just a matter of hours later. I mean, the fact that these things are still happening,

at least we can have bipartisan agreement on family grift. The fact that this doubled almost the evaluation of the Trump token, by the way, in a matter of hours on paper, is so absurd. Now, if you didn't see it, Hunter Biden did respond, and of course he blamed the evil media for their coverage and said it's doing great in case you were wondering. but here's the 15-minute chart of that. So we're now down at, I don't know, $280 million.

Once again, this went to $144,400 down to $0.75 right now. I just got the update. So doing great. So listen, this is the corner of crypto that we purposely ignore, and there's a reason for it, but I can only just say this is a cautionary tale, once again, not to participate in any of this nonsense. I'm going to go ahead now and bring on Matt

so we can have a conversation about things that actually matter. Good morning, sir. Hey, Scott. How you doing, man? So how much laptop did you guys add to your treasury yesterday? Absolutely zero, actually. I hadn't heard about it until this morning. And I purposely waited to retweet. I was going live with you until you were done talking about it. You're a serious person. I'm going to start a laptop. Treasury company now that we've got you. Maybe you can give me some advice on how to do that. Okay, so first of all, let's dig in the, well, we've got quite a few lead stories here today,

but I think the biggest one and the one probably that I want to hear the most from you since you're a bond guy, is this Treasury intervention. Obviously, we have the bond market, Robops U.S. Treasury Plan to buy back $6 billion in government debt. Now we've effectively tripled the original plan. Here's a quick chart of the 10-year. Oops. This thing is absolutely flying. That's on the weekly chart. So the idea here, obviously, and what makes it probably most interesting for us is that the first announcement of this intervention is actually, arguably the spark that sent Bitcoin up, and it's remained relatively high since then. But markets are not believing this. The bond vigilantes are not believing this, and that's the world that you were in for over a decade.

Yeah, I wrote about this in depth in late August, and, you know, I never expect when I write about something for it to play out so quickly. But, you know, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. But the bottom line, and I guess starting with buybacks is you can actually learn a lot about buyback strategy by looking at corporate America and even looking in the, quote, dat land. And I think sometimes what you see is buybacks start as a marketing strategy where there will be a release that we are going to do buybacks, whether you're a Bitcoin treasury company, a debt, or you're the U.S. Treasury and your. Scott Besant. And so I think that's what he did. And I think in every single instance, using it as a marketing exercise does not work. Because it kind of shows that you see the problem, you're going to make an announcement. And I think the hope for some of those strategies is that

the markets do the work for them. They say, oh, the Treasury is about to buy a bunch of 10 years. we're going to get in front of that. But what happens in practice most of the time, and I think should be the base case in a learning here, is that the market does the opposite. They say, okay, they see the problem that they're not actually stepping in with the size necessary to fix the problem. And ultimately, what needs to happen is if your security is trading substantially cheaper than it should. And you firmly believe that. You got to step in with size. And you got to step in with size whether you're a corporation or you got to step in with size if you're the U.S. Treasury. And so the U.S. Treasury obviously has the TGA, which is close to a trillion

dollars, not quite a trillion dollars of capacity to do these types of buyback interventions. Bessent has said that kind of floated that out there that he would use it. And then he, in increased his buybacks from $2 billion to $6 billion. We have $40 trillion of debt. It's laughable. I mean, I think that's the problem. The market's sniffing it out. And what the post I laid out in late August called for was the 10 year.

And I used the 10 year over the 30 year because it has more of a long-term history. It's easier to look at that it would break into the 5% to 6% range where he ultimately blinks. I thought it was interesting this last week that Louie. Groman called it potentially go at as high as 7%, which I do think is the natural rate. I think the question is how much pain is Bacent and Warsh willing to take before they step in with size? And I think if you throw a five and a half handle or something like that on the tenure, I think they'll come in with size. But until then, I think the market's going to test them. And it'll be interesting to see how risk assets respond in the meantime.

So effectively, he sent a signal by saying that he was going to do it, but it's a drop in the bucket. they're not buying it. Did he think that just sending the signal was going to be enough to talk down yields? Or do you think that he expected this and is just preparing the market for that larger intervention? Because, I mean, they went down for what, on the original announcement for five hours, six hours? Probably he felt like why not try would be my best guess is, you know, we have a trillion dollars of dry powder. If we have to use it, we will. but I would rather not.

So let's try everything else that way, maybe even for cover for himself, when he deploys a trillion dollars to buy back long-term treasuries, he can sit there and say, I tried everything else, guys. It didn't work. I had to do that.

I think maybe that's what it is, but clearly it didn't work and it makes sense why it didn't. So where does that leave Kevin Warsh? Because it seems like they're moving in opposite directions when they're supposed to be moving in tandem, and we know exactly what his, theoretical directive is from the top.

I still will never, I may, I say this all the time, I will never understand why he took this job. He's got like billions of dollars in Estee Lauder money. He made hundreds of millions himself. He could be on a yacht right now. And he's just, it's like Chuck Rhodes and billions or something. He just wants to get, you know, tortured. Yeah.

Warsh and percent, in my view, are probably two of, if not the two smartest guys, at least in my professional career that I've seen in those seats. The problem, in my view, is not them. It's the structural problem of the debt crisis. It's the fact that we are moving to a fiscal situation where it's the actions of the debt crisis and the Treasury that will matter more than the Federal Reserve hiking rates, 25 basis points or 50 basis points. And ultimately, and obviously we're Bitcoiners and we're Bitcoiners for several reasons,

but a big reason is the debt crisis and the debasement problem in the United States and in the developed markets. And ultimately, there's, there's no way out. So, you know, if I'm Bessent, if I'm Warsh, the best approach is to try to preserve the dollars as a reserve currency for as long as you can. It's not going to be that forever. But like, if I'm in their seats, okay, I'm, I can't take, be a fiscal conservative. I can't, the Congress will not fix the debt crisis. It's not going to happen. And so Bessent has come out and said, we're going to try to do high growth. It won't work in saving the dollar, but I do think it's the best approach of every single bad option out there because we're in this AI revolution period. So why not turn things up

a notch, try to accelerate growth, try to preserve and make the U.S. one of the premier winners, allow capital markets to be open, but ultimately the cost will be the dollar. And I think I think the dollar over the next three to five years, as measured at least by like the DXY index, I think we'll move down about 30%, which will be the biggest move down in Bitcoin's history. Bitcoin has generally gone on bull runs during bear markets in the dollar, but they've been pretty minor relative to historical bare markets, like in the 80s or the early 2000s. I think that's ultimately what we're setting up for here. It wouldn't surprise me to see Warsh and the Fed play a little bit of tough guy over the rest of the year,

hike rates, 25 basis points, 50 basis points. And maybe that ultimately is trying to give them cover for what will have to be a large operation, that they're not completely folding. I don't know, but really because what really matters is the fiscal situation, all lies should be over there, not on if the Fed raises 25 basis points. It's not going to matter at all. You know, I think Peter Schiff tweeted it yesterday and said that exact same thing. And I was like, hey, Peter, you hate Bitcoin, but I agree with you on 99.9%.

of other things that you say, right? And I think that directly, that's correct. We all know Lynn Alden points to fiscal dominance and nothing stopping this train. But I think the Fed is completely neutered. 25 points, 50 points, none of it's going to do anything. And we saw what happened when Powell tried to lower rates. Same interest rates went up. I mean, that's the thing is like interest rates go up on every attempted intervention to bring them down so far for the last few years. And I would ask you, and I think I know what your answer will be, but what do you think the rational move for the 10-year and the 30-year when you look at the debt situation would be if the Fed high interest rates up 100 or 200 basis points? I think you keep going up regardless. It should move higher because the U.S. debt crisis gets worse, right? And so that means, to your point, they're neutered.

Like, what do you do? You just have to preserve. the situation. I mean, I'm a, you can't find more of a fiscal conservative than me, but at a certain point when the, when the weight of the debt becomes so heavy and you know that Congress will not take actions, it's kind of like a, I call it sometimes a patient with terminal cancer. It's like, it's sad. It stinks. What do you do? You try to preserve the life as long as possible, make them comfortable. And I think that's unfortunately the situation for the dollar. And, And that doesn't obviously mean the dollar collapses next year or even in 10 years from now, right? But that is the place we are in this cycle.

And hopefully for our country, and I am pretty hopeful on this because I feel like it almost comes across as a doomer. I actually think that it's kind of like it's darkest before the dawn. And I think that's kind of the moment that we're living in. We have Bitcoin. We have what I think will be abundance through AI, through robotics. And so part of me is just like invest in it. accelerate growth, and ultimately the release hatch will be the dollar. But on the back end, you know, you'll have abundance through AI, robotics, and you'll have Bitcoin. Doesn't sound too bad.

We have Bitcoin. You have a lot of Bitcoin. So first of all, drive stated here's $1 billion market cap. As strategies, STRC continues to underperform, we can ignore the back half of that headline for now. But, you know, even as we saw Treasury wobbles here, you guys have performed exceptionally well. Obviously, we had that brief moment when things were dropping below par, but you recovered it very quickly. And it seems like your machine is still firing, you know, on all cylinders. So, A, how much Bitcoin does Strive have now? And, you know, is this SAT reaching a billion a meaningful level?

Or is it, you know, just a brief stop on the way to much higher? So we have over 24,000 Bitcoin now. one year or two years in two days will have been public for one year. We started with just over 5,000 Bitcoin. So we've more than four-xed our Bitcoin in a Bitcoin bear market, obviously a tough environment for companies trying to amplify Bitcoin exposure. But, you know, it is what it is. Since the October crash, I think we're the only that's outperformed the underlying asset.

B. Riley came out with a release on that. So the performance of strive to date has been strong. Obviously, though, it's been a better market. And we're playing for Bitcoin to go to millions, ultimately, you know, infinity because fiat currencies are worthless. And so I'm looking forward to see how the engine that we've built performed in a bull market, and I'm pretty constructive that we might be there. Seta, you know, it ended the last week at $999 million of Notional Outstanding.

We started with 250 million notional when we IPOed it last November, so effectively it's 4xed in under a year, which is great demand for the product and SETA is our primary product, and it continues to grow exponentially. I think it's been a combination of different factors on the retail side. And retail I would include mostly like high net worth investors, which I think is our average investor, but just an individual or a family. They love daily dividends. It helps provide them a daily cash flow stream. Obviously, 13% interest is a very attractive interest rate. And it just blows things out of the water. And a lot of people are waking up to the fact that there's a debt crisis. And people are questioning, why should I have debt in my portfolio? Why should I buy debt during a debt crisis? It just doesn't really make sense. And so getting a higher yield by taking more risk with us and buying a preferred equity, I don't think stretch for a lot of people because a lot of people don't like debt. It's like, okay, like,

I already know it. It's like debt heads I lose, tells I lose, at least with something that's backed by Bitcoin that pays 13 percent, I could potentially outpace monetary debasement. So that's the retail side. On the institutional side, we have some investor protections that have been wildly popular, things that I think make a lot of sense we intentionally put in there. But as an example, we can't lower the interest rate on SETA unless the average price for the month is over $99. If we don't pay all dividends on SETA, no management, no one in management gets any bonuses. The interest rate ratchets up if we stop paying. It's cumulative.

And so board seats are given. So basically these protections, they're credit protections. And so when you think about a preferred equity and I think, you know, there's been a lot of conversation on digital credit. Well, it's preferred equity, right? But preferred equity, you could have a preferred equity that's basically effectively like all equity, or you could put credit protections that makes it on a sliding scale more debt-like. It's just a spectrum.

And so preferred equity really means nothing. You have to dig a layer deeper. And we intentionally put those credit protections in to try to give investors comfort that we're putting in our money where our mouth is and we're going to be credit good on these. And that's been well received. And I think that's why we've been able to grow this to a billion dollars very quickly. So when STRC launched, I sat down with Sailor at Money 2020, and he sort of made this quip in passing that I thought was really interesting where he said, I wish I had been able to start at STRC.

You know, he's like, I wish, he's like, I obviously learned through the converts and STRD and STRK and I sort of evolved into the perfect instrument. And I wish I'd been able to start there. Would you say, and you and I have to discuss this, I think, in the past. actually, but that you had the benefit of watching him go through that entire process, so you were able to just laser focus on the thing that worked at the end and really hone that into how it worked. I mean, I can say personally, I own your stock. Okay, I don't own MSTR. I do own STRC and I do own SATA, right? And I loved to buy EST. I was buying STRC in the 70s when people were telling me that I was insane. But there's very specific reasons that I own yours instead

of MSDR, which is that, you know, it's a much easier structure for me to understand as an investor. I think you've really like nailed exactly what matters and what works. Yeah, well, thanks for the compliment on that. And, you know, it is very true that we were watching strategy like a hawk. You know, two of our first executive hires, Ben Workman and Jeff Walton, I would say were two of the people that I think were thought leaders in following strategy and investing, probably irresponsibly long investing in strategy. And so if we were to have been first, there's no way that we would have started with a common equity and say it. Right. We watched them. We learned. We saw devolution, the innovation that Saylor made with STRC, right, with famously with Chat,

GPT. He came up with the idea of STRC. It was genius. But it's kind of like an analogy would be that, just in traditional corporate America, you have the large incumbents and then you have smaller growth companies. And a well-run small growth company almost always trades at a higher multiple and is able to achieve higher levels of success than the incumbent. Not that they replace the incumbent, but it's just the incumbents like a cruise ship. And if you want to move it, it takes time. It's massive, and we're like a little nimble speedboat. They have 800,000 Bitcoin. We have 24,000 Bitcoin.

So for us to be able to see things move and be nimble is much easier. For them at their size, they outgrew the convertible debt market. They then started to go into the preff market. And, you know, preff investors were probably not willing, at least an iteration, number one, to do some novel security that's ever been seen before. So you have to start with something that's more. similar to what they've seen before, then kind of move out the novel risk spectrum of you've helped those investors make money. And so I think Saylor has done an amazing job with MSTR, with the

innovation of it. But to your point, it's created a complex capital structure. They've publicly said they want to retire the convertible notes. They want to have pref only. I don't know that they'll only have STRC. They haven't said that, but at least a pref only structure. And to me, you know, when I think about our common equity, simplicity is a major reason for our success. I think another reason is we have no debt and we have a, I would say, a well-supported but high amplification ratio on the common to Bitcoin while Bitcoin's cheap. And so you can sit there and say, and we can talk about macro and Luke Groman when he was talking to Lin-Alden this weekend, he thinks that Bitcoin can make a new all-time low if the tenure pushes to 7%. And I would say, well, if the tenure does

to 7% that's probably true. I just don't think it's going to go to 7%. But I don't think he's crazy in that view. I would disagree with him in a little bit, but basically we're disagreeing about where does Besson blink, not like where is the trajectory going. We completely agree on that. But regardless, with our common structure, we don't have to worry about that because even he says, if that happens, I'm buying Bitcoin hand over fist because I know what's going to happen and I know where's going to go. Right. And so for a company, we have to think. longer term like in that scenario there's no way we could be positioned to load up the amplification boat during a two-week or one month blip to 40-50k right like you got to you got to load the boat

now and be ready i would love that so much i can't even like i i wake up in the middle of the night with cold sweats hoping that that happens as much as you know i would expect probably in that scenario are common to not do well for a month or two i actually hope it happens to because it's like energy If it goes down like that, you know the reaction upwards based on the action of the Treasury and or Fed is going to be so massive that it probably pushes the ultimate bull market price of Bitcoin way higher. And so I'm kind of, I don't, I would couch the odds of that happening at like 10 to 20%. Not 1%, but not, you know, it was not my base case.

But I kind of do hope it happens. But ultimately, I think it we probably don't. I think the bottom is most important. I thought it was, you know, I thought it was like 10%, 15, 20% chance when we were at 64. But I personally can't ignore the largest, you know, short squeeze, move up, higher floor that we had. And I think that that was a regime change for the market and made it much more unlikely. It doesn't mean it's not possible. Obviously, there's still things.

But like you said, I mean, he blinked at the 5.3%, 5.2% on the 30 year, right? With the 10 year below that, 7%. I mean, unless they're in. prevention completely fails. That would be the only way, but they're going to, by five or six percent, they're trying everything humanly possible to stop it. So that means they really fail and we're out of control rates. I agree. I think now is the time to load up on risk, but also be cognizant of leverage that can wipe you out. That's, to me, is the only caveat I would give to that, but I don't see why right now when you're seeing what happens, you know, there's risks to both

sides. There's risk that if you're off sides and it goes down, you get burned if you're using leverage, but there's a bigger risk is that you're not properly positioned for what I think will be the best macro background of Bitcoin's entire history. I 100% agree. I think we can objectively, though, take a look at the Bitcoin Treasury space over the past 14 to 15 months and say that outside of a few of you, it's been a bit of a dump fire. Right. And so I think obviously the reason you guys have performed well is because you've always been clear with your messaging and you've always actually had a plan, right? And I think some of the fair criticism of a lot of the others was they sort of bought the top, no way to raise capital and

just held in hope for the best. And so a lot of them have obviously been under fire, but I would say that the one that's been the most under fire this week has been Metaplanet. So I've covered this already, but men of planet stock tanks over ballooning executive share pool and more, I mean, to my understanding, for the audience in the most TLDR terms, they had a 20% share pool for executives, and that rose with their dilution of shares that they were using to buy Bitcoin, so they effectively went up 600% in their share count. So shareholders were being diluted not only to buy Bitcoin, but to pay the executive. Right.

And so in August, that was frozen, but they didn't roll it back. and there's been, I think, a lot of very fair criticism. And I think that all treasury companies, when these things happen, you kind of got thrown in the bucket. And you had a great, very long explanation of why you're different. So I would just like I would love to unpack what happened with Metaplanet and your thoughts on it. Yeah, I'll start with Metaplanet. We'd love to talk about how we approach compensation because I actually think it's, it was really thoughtful. And I think we were uniquely positioned to be able to think about it the right way, given my background and

Strives background of corporate governance, a corporate governance focused company, which does not typically exist in, especially in Bitcoin Treasury land. But, you know, Metaplanet, like in a sense like strategy, they started early. They started way before Strive. And they started as a failing company. And I don't think it was clear at the time the best metrics, because I think it was early. and also they weren't a corporate governance focused firm. And so I can kind of give some grace for why what I think was a compensation package that when you look at it is clearly not aligned with shareholders was to occur. I don't see any evidence that they ever made a corporate action that was not aligned with shareholders,

to be fair to them. I think it's important to be fair. And I think they've also performed really well since they started their Bitcoin Treasury strategy in 2024, they've outperformed Bitcoin by like 8x. That does not defend a bad compensation strategy. I think that they, when you look at what was paid with the incentive misalignment, it looks like too much. That amount of money that was paid, if the incentive structure was properly aligned and disclosed, could have happened. Like, it is possible because of how much Bitcoin they bought versus where they started from, that they could.

could have, they should have probably got very healthy paydays. But the problem becomes a incentive package that was misaligned. It was difficult for investors to understand. And I think it should have been proactively fixed, not fixed through investor outrage. And so I think that they have some work to do to earn back investor trust. I don't think it necessarily has to be too late. But I think it's kind of, I think Warren Buffett had a quote of something along the lines that I was reading in the context of the U.S. Treasury, not metapwinant it, but it was about trust. And it takes 20 years to build a trust, reputation. It takes one minute to break it forever, right?

And so trust is ultimately, and Jeff Walton talks about this sometimes on keynotes. We'll talk about trust and building trust networks. And sometimes it's like, okay, we're a Bitcoin treasury company. You're talking about trust. But that is so key because it is important when we are going out. there and obviously we're talking to you know mostly bitcointers but we got to traditional finance corporate america and tell them what we're doing trust is so important and track record is so important and so you know i think ultimately from my seat i i put a post out not about meta planet but

just about competition in the space and kind of use i used a uh a youtube video about Kobe Bryant plowing through his teammate paliselle's chest at the end of the other. Olympics and kind of like that that's kind of the competitive spirit we bring at strive but I want our peers to win I think it's actually really important I want to level it up to your point think in the bear market a lot there was a lot of bad in the space and I think we can be blunt about that right there was I would say to me the worst bads were companies that didn't even have conviction on Bitcoin that they purchased Bitcoin to try to get rich quick and then they hit the eject button in a Bitcoin bare market you know we can

you can go down the list. Sequins would be one that I would just call out, like, what were you doing? Why did you, why did you eject makes no sense? Clearly, you did not have the conviction that was, you know, staying on the sector. And then there's a lot that have real conviction of Bitcoin, and I think made a few bad decisions. And I think that those are potentially fixable in the future. Companies that took bad terms on debt that encumbered Bitcoin that ended up having

to sell Bitcoin when it was cheap, things that we saw that we have. avoided. But I think those can be learning experiences. And if they are learning experiences and they take that to heart and they learn from them, I think that there's room for someone with a deep Bitcoin conviction that stumbled to come out the other side stronger and rebuild. And I hope that's the case because that would be better for the sector. You know, we want to buy the most Bitcoin. We want to be the best performer. But we also, you know, we want to be in the MBA. We don't want to be the Harlem Globetrotters playing against a bunch of people that, you know, that can't compete. So it's like we want to train people up. We want to be a good steward in the space.

And I want to see forces X, and I think we will, actually. Yeah. It's an interesting spot because when things were bad and all the sailor fund was happening, I just tried to calmly point out that a lot of mistakes would be cured if Bitcoin just went up. I'm not saying any of these were great investments, but Bitcoin at $125,000. and all of a sudden it's going to make a lot of these failed treasury strategies look a lot better if they survive. It's just that I think people are frustrated that there was absolutely no plan, right? I mean, for most of them. And I wonder, maybe I'll ask you why we haven't seen more consolidation.

I mean, you obviously did, you know, with similar. But why we haven't seen more consolidation, some of these that are trading in a massive discount, why hasn't anybody bought those or bought their Bitcoin? I've heard rumor that some of them have just terrible, very long-term. deals where they're, you know, for custody and such and it's just expensive and it's not really worth it. But I would have expected to see that happen with these so down bad. There was definitely, I know, tons of discussions. I could talk about Strive's position for a second. Obviously, we basically one week after going public, we announced the merger, the next merger

with Semler and basically doubled our Bitcoin stack. But now we have 24,000 Bitcoin. The last couple weeks we've been buying on average north of a thousand Bitcoin. And so when you're at that scale and you're at that pace and you go down the list, why would we try to go through an M&A transaction that is a full-time job cost millions of dollars to get 3,000 Bitcoin? That's less Bitcoin than we'd buy in a good month. And so, and we're only going to probably accelerate from there. So you kind of start to see why someone like strategy has taken the business. that they're unlikely, not that they would never necessarily acquire a company, but it's not really a focal point for them. You could see why for strive in its early days, going basically

doubling our Bitcoin stack, that was transformational for our company. And you could see this as an example, because I do think you'll see more prefs come out, but I think they're going to struggle for a lot of the companies because of what we saw in our IPO process of SATA. So when we IPOed SETA, I mentioned earlier, we did $250 million. We actually started the IPO process at $125 million. And I'll tell you, the order book was weak at $125 because it was too small, and it was two times oversubscribed at $250. And so more size actually made it easier to get a preft to market.

And so when you think about some of these companies, and they would have to launch a $50 million prep or something like that, that, I think the people that will have to invest in that will basically be their current cap structure, people that are common investors that want to help them get a preff and maybe a lucky angel or something like that, but it's going to really struggle, it would be my guess. And so you have to get scale. And so I think that some of them would benefit if they're all in on digital credit from combining forces and actually scaling up to have a size.

but then why does M&A often not happen? You can even, again, look outside the Bitcoin treasury space, look at biotech space, where we called out when we went public last year that, I think it was 25% of biotech companies traded less than their net cash position. So they're cash after liabilities. Why aren't these things just evaporated? Because the management won't give up because they have their incentives and they believe in their mission and they think it's going to turn around.

And ultimately, I think that creates kind of a one of the most important, probably the most important thing that slows this down. And then I think the second is that when you look under the hood of some, you know, there's a lot of risk to companies. And when you have bad debt terms, you know, if you took Bitcoin to 40K, which to our point, we don't think that will happen. But it's not 0% probability. I think some would still be massive for sellers of Bitcoin in that scenario because of the terms that they have. And so how do you enter into a long-term agreement that takes months to play out when you have to deal with that type of a structure? It just becomes pretty hard. Yeah, I figured we would see some sort of fund of funds or some entity created that would consolidate a whole bunch of them.

But I know there has been chatter of it, by the way, behind the scenes. But it just hasn't happened, which I find, I guess, a bit surprising because prices have been down and things have been depressed for so long. It seems like if that was going to happen, it would have already. Yeah, I agree. Do you think that higher Bitcoin prices saves a lot of these? I do. I do. And I think that some of them will rise from the dead in a way that will be surprising. Not because they didn't make big mistakes or anything like that or didn't have the perfectly thought-out plan, but because strong Bitcoin will give a lot of strength back to some of these that have some plan.

and I think that they'll emerge and I think that they'll emerge stronger. So I think that'll be interesting to see. It'll probably be kind of like for some of them that are, I don't think it'll be all to be clear. And I don't necessarily know which ones, right? You just have a bunch of people that are working on things. And I think a few of them would probably pull off the hated rally. Yeah.

It will be very hated for sure. So another narrative, I think that's been sort of circulating as to certainly why we were seeing massive inflows into the ETFs, but I would assume that also includes any security that's viewed as Bitcoin exposure is the amount of hacks and problems that we've had of late. So the coal card hack, obviously, I would say there's been a bit of an existential crisis and self-custody in general. Treasurer seems to have a new hack every week of data.

I don't know if you actually saw this, but this is yesterday. I got an email. Yeah, our third-party email provider has been breached. Please be aware that the email named Critical Security Alert. Okay. So you're getting fished by Treasor now. besides the fact that they're just releasing your data. We've obviously seen this across the industry,

not just to pick on them. I mean, it feels like at this point, we should all just literally just send the hackers our information and tell them to have at it, figure it out, right? Because they're going to get it anyways. But have you seen, do you think, flows into your products for people who have maybe become disillusioned or given up on the idea of self-custody,

not your keys, not your coins? We haven't seen personal stories of flows into strive, but I have heard several stories of self-custody is way harder than I thought it would be. Maybe it's not right for me. I just have. I mean, people that I've personally helped get self-custody solutions over the years. And I think it just became, and I think this is true with all freedom, technology, all things with regards to your own personal sovereignty is it's hard, it's work. And that's true whether it's

Bitcoin, it's true whether it's owning a gun. If you don't take, it's not a passive thing. It's not a thing where you put something on a treasurer or a ledger or whatever and you put it away and you forget about it. These things, you have to be constantly monitoring it. And I think with AI and the evolution of AI, it is scary. I mean, just to be honest, it's just, it's scary. And I think we're in this like messy middle period where you have old technology while AI is exponentially growing. And I think on the back end, I think there will be kind of a return, is my guess, of good custody, solutions, self-custody that is more AI proof. But right now it's like the technology and a lot of even the technology built on top of Bitcoin that you're seeing exploited right now,

it wasn't built with this exponential AI innovation in mind. And so these things just kind of set here, you know, we plan to be active in helping support the teams that are working to explain these vulnerabilities and fix them, the white hats here, because I think it's actually important for Bitcoin. This will be a continual issue. And I think it kind of resolidifies the view of. hold on to your Bitcoin and don't lose it. It's like the most important thing. It's the most important thing for us as a company, but it's also the most important thing for individuals. And I think

people should assess what the right amount of Bitcoin to hold in self-custody is. I'm still a big believer in self-custody. I just think it's harder than people thought it would be. And that's just the truth. And getting harder instead of easier, which is not the normal trajectory of you would expect from something like that. Right. It was a lot. easier when you weren't getting attacked by these sophisticated, these sophisticated. Final question, is that your home gym? This is my home gym. So I'm, I'll go out with the proof of work statement.

The reason that my office is a home gym is because when I joined Strive, I also had a couple kids and I basically stopped working out. So I'm in effectively the worst shape of my adult life. And as the CEO of a company, I get, you know, private, confidential calls all the time. so going to a public gym, not possible for me to actually go and do my job. It's like, I got to sit my butt down in a gym and work so I can actually start taking my fitness seriously again. And if I don't actually start taking my fitness seriously again, it's going to age really poorly

for me to sit in front of a gym for the next five years as I run strife. I love that it's orange. Not a coincidence, I'd imagine. You know, like anecdotally, I've been a pretty fitness guy my entire life to some degree, but I'm two months away from being 50. And now I just have literally like the worst gym in the world in my garage. I always went. I did CrossFit.

I did all the things. But the fact that I can just go do it for 20 minutes anytime and doing that five or six times a week. Instead of going to classes and doing all the things, I'm in some of the best shape of my life. But just because it's there and it's accessible and I can just go do it and not drive 20 minutes or whatever. So, yeah, it's the move. So you can just turn around right now and go use it. I just wasted three minutes of your gym time.

I'm sorry. Awesome. Well, thanks for having me, Scott. Thank you so much, Matt. I really appreciate it. And I hope we can do this again soon. Thanks for all the insight. Sure. Bye. Awesome. I need an orange gym. I literally don't know what I'm doing. My gym at this point is literally I have like a wobbly bench, a set of barbells, two bars, and then one of those adjustable dumbbell sets and a pull-up rack.

And that's it. All I use now for working out, I'm like going back to 19, 50s style and it's working. Okay, so for those of you who are keeping notes, just like you guys to know, um, laptops down more. Okay, that's the five-minute chart. So we started the show right around here talking about it at a 265,

now 254. So, uh, the funny thing is I've had people say to me, hey, should I just buy this now? Cause like, you know, no. Maybe you'll go up. I don't know, but like Trump token never went back up, if you guys recall. I don't see why people are going to now all of a sudden have massive faith. But it's really like the grift is so bad for us. You talk about the odds of the Clarity Act

happening. You know, like first of all, let's go see. There's a story here. And I agree with Brian Armstrong here, which is why I'm going to go ahead and bring this up really quick. But, you know, crypto wins, regardless of Clarity Act vote, Coinbase's Armstrong says. So first of all, this is finally we're hearing a lot of the people who said it's going to pass, kind of admitting that it's probably not going to pass. But I agree that the idea that the legislation is not going to pass, but the regulators are going to do the job. And once again, we need now to prove that our industry is worth being here with all of this.

And I don't think these moon coins help. I don't think they're a big problem, but I can't imagine now that there's anyone in the halls of Washington who saw a laptop. And it was like, okay, we got the Trump token and the laptop token. Great. And I hate politics. as you know, I would be remiss not, however. I'm going to go to this view.

Not to discuss this story. Wait, we're going to try to do something here. Okay, now I need to re-format. Please hold. High production. Trump promises $5,000 dividend to U.S. citizens if Republicans win midterms. We have gone so full retard right now

that I don't think anything could possibly surprise. me. But, okay, first of all, I remember, weren't we going to get money? We were going to get paid by the tariffs, right? What were the other ones? We were going to get tariff rebates. The Doge dividend, the tariff rebates. There they are right there. Now, $5,000 dividend to U.S. citizens and Republicans win midterm. So first of all, this is literally saying they're going to buy votes. I love that it's out in the open, if we're being fair. That's A. B, we don't have that money. And C, this would be completely illegal. But why shouldn't that stop you from saying it. I don't know if you guys saw this, but Donald Trump the other day in a speech said that he was

pulled out of the rubble of 9-11 by firefighters when literally like everybody knows that he was in his office uptown. Like, I don't care. This isn't TDS. It's not whatever, but like your politicians lie to you a lot. And they'll do it without even blinking. That's why we Bitcoin and, you know, that that's the entire point. But I mean, $5,000 to every citizen. He also said, by the way, that the war with Iran will end immediately after. the U.S. midterm elections in November, adding that Tehran was trying to influence the vote. So I would just like you guys to know that the war that we started in Iran was actually an Iranian plot to mess with our midterm elections. Obviously. Obviously, that makes perfect sense.

So yeah, I think, you know, when you look at the Hunter Biden launch and the Trump launch and the nonsense that's coming out of Washington right now, like I've been saying who cares about the Clarity Act for a very long time, but who cares about the Clarity Act? none of these people are going to help us. Now, I wanted to actually bring this up while we had Matt here, but I missed it. This is the CalShe odds, by the way, on a Fed decision in September. 62% chance of a 25-bip hike. I think everyone agrees that hike would do nothing even if they do it, and people think it's unlikely.

I think it's very unlikely. I can't imagine worse hiking rates. Fed maintains is only at 35%, and a hike over 25-bps is 2%. And if they're going to hike, that's, I mean, if they're really going to hike, that's what they should do. Right? And I haven't had the opportunity. I've got you guys here. Let's look at a Bitcoin chart because it's interesting. So yeah, we were talking with Matt, obviously, about the odds that Bitcoin would drop massively to do lows. I mean, I don't see a reason that Bitcoin would be trading down here yet, but I do see a very good reason that we're retracing right now, and I don't

necessarily view it as macro, right? Take a look at the weekly chart. This whole area is the most important area of resistance on the entire chart. If we get above this black line, bears are literally dead because we've made a higher high, right? And this is the 50 MA on the weekly, which many people have always viewed as the kind of bull bear market line. I mean, look, you broke it here. We haven't even touched it. This is the first time we've tested it. So healthy retracement to try to get back above those areas makes a lot of sense. So why a lot of people have been looking for kind of a move back into this area. I mean, we can pivot this to the daily. Right. Look, there's that golden cross. everybody's so excited about, but even a retest of the 50 and 200 MAs is like 70 or 69.

Right? 69 dudes. Bill and Ted's excellent adventure. 69, dude. That's the greatest movie of my generation, probably. But right, so Bitcoin at 76, in the 76 is to me not a surprise. But listen, I think we're going much higher. I take a look at the Kalsi odds here. What is that?

Get out of there. You guys can't see that. That's good. It was asking me to sign into my email. When will Bitcoin cross 100K again? Before January 2027, 25%. Before December, 2026, 20%. Before November, 26, 10%.

People are not buying that we're going anywhere near all-time highs ever again. Oh, I'm being pinged. I should take note. You can see right up in the corner that, as you know, Kalshi is one of our sponsors. And there's a link down in the description, $25 when you trade $25. for free. But I have actually been utilizing Kalshi myself. I've never used polymarket. It's not legal in the United States. I don't know if you degenerates know that. But I have been using Kalshi. I have been looking at their prediction markets quite a bit because I think it really is informative as to

where sentiment is at. And every time I look at any of these Bitcoin predictions, I literally can't see anyone figuring this out. I made a joke on, I'm not even going to say it. I made a joke. I made a joke that I was going to launch a treasury company, and it was a laptop treasury company, ticker bag of dicks. You guys didn't see my huge announcement? There it is. Here's an announcement. Starting a laptop treasury company, ticker bag of dicks, reverse merging with a publicly traded sex toy company. This is why I don't do most of my tweeting. 70% of shares will be allocated to T.M these will never dilute.

The launch a preferred called scam to fund purchases. Who wants it? I tweeted that before I even had a conversation with that. I feel dumb. But somebody in the comments is saying that they made a bag of Dix coin. And I don't want to know anything to do with that. Oh, my gosh. What did you say? Am I having trouble? Great.

Wendy's calling my wife. Whatever, man, you know? Laptop. Laptop treasury company. It's the move. And we have one last story that I did want to mention because we're off the rails. NASDAQ deepens relationship with payment, payward to advance tokenized equities,

and always on infrastructure. NASDAQ ventures announced agreement to invest $100 million in payward, the parent company of Cracken. So listen, Cracken obviously has not gotten public much to many people's dismay, but that's a $21 billion private valuation. That's big, right?

So Cracken, and this is obviously because they already They have a partnership on X stocks and with an effort to increase their exposure to tokenize equities, the world is moving very, very fast in tokenized stocks. My God, people are talking about it. I got to leave. Can't be doing the people launch a coin in my name or knockoff thing in the comments. So I'm just going to end it. It's been fun.

Matt is amazing. I'm going to go find his gym and use it. Ooh, I need to set an outro video. Don't worry about it. It means I can't leave yet. Thank you, guys. See you tomorrow.