The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin’s Explosive Rocket Fuel with Bill Barhydt, CEO of Abra

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

Bill Barhydt, recruited by NASA and the CIA at the age of 18, stood out as a computer genius and cryptographer. Branching out of government work, Bill pursued his passion for IT ultimately leading him to Bitcoin and resulted in him giving the first-ever TED Talk on the subject in 2012. Bill’s early crypto adoption saw him found crypto exchange Abra, a US-based company offering exposure to digital assets and ushering Bitcoin towards its role as a global reserve asset.  In this episode, Melker and Barhydt discuss a range of topics including: Hacking and programming Working for NASA and the CIA New reserve asset A collapsing bond market Bitcoin’s “rocket fuel” Living to 175 years old Crypto banking A yacht as collateral Elon Musk and Doge The world computer Bitcoin leaving exchanges A massive wealth redistribution ––– RSK Trade, lend, and borrow on the most robust smart contract platform. Spend without selling on the most trusted network in the world. Hop onto rsk.co/openfinance and be part of the future and start making money on your Bitcoin today. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 9.5% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account. --- Mina Protocol Mina is the world's lightest blockchain, powered by participants. Rather than apply brute computing force, Mina uses advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs to ensure a super-light and constant sized chain, that allows participants to quickly sync and verify the network. The team behind Mina is backed by VCs such as Coinbase Ventures, and Mina's adversarial testnet was the largest public testnet outside of ETH 2.0. To get involved ahead of Mina’s mainnet, visit https://minaprotocol.com/wolf --- Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co

What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Today's guest is the founder and CEO of Abra. With a strong tech background, Bill's cryptography skills were sought after by both NASA and the CIA before his entrance into the world of business and entrepreneurship. In my research on Bill, I was fascinated by a TED talk he gave all the way back in 2012 on Bitcoin, which is one of the reasons I wanted him to come on the podcast. Today's company, Abra, is challenging the modern notions of finance and banking, built off his passion for the positive impact IT can make on people's lives. Can't wait to explore what it's been like for him to experience all of the cycles of Bitcoin and talk about the

growing retail interests he's watching firsthand at his company. Bill Barheit, thank you so much for coming on. Hey, thanks, man. Good to be here. So before we get into the questions, once again, you are listening to the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast, where twice a week, I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, and politics.

This podcast is powered by BlockWorks, the fastest growing media company in the digital asset space. They have 20 Bitcoin and crypto podcasts. I'm excited to be a part of the network. Visit blockworks.co for access to the highest quality information in the space. If you like the podcast, follow me on Twitter, check out my website, join my newsletter where I share all my trades, charts, analysis, basically everything

else that comes out of this brain. You can do that at thewolfofallstreets.io. So now to get to what's important now that we're done with all that. So I mentioned in the intro, your passion is information technology and the positive impact it can have on people's lives. Where does that passion stem from and what does that really mean? Yeah, I mean, I was a hacker, programmer, whatever you want to call it as a kid. I was always glued to the screen, you know, learning the next language. Went from basic to C, C++, later on Java, JavaScript, all that stuff. And so eventually my interest took me

around the world, right? As a kid, I wanted to learn computers, period. As I got older, I wanted to travel and I wanted to leverage what I could do, which was computers to see the world. And eventually that took me to places where people weren't so fortunate. I ended up spending a lot of time in the last 15 years in the likes of Haiti and Guatemala and rural parts of the Philippines and Indonesia and really got to learn about how people live. Now, at the same time, a lot of my work was centered on payments, banking. I developed a lot of 1.0 internet banking services. And that interest kind of coalesced initially around how do things like

remittances work, but also just basic payments in developing markets. And that's really been a passion of mine for the last, certainly the last 10 years, probably longer now. So very interesting. And I read that you were literally a cryptographer for the CIA somewhat as a child. Is that accurate as a teenager? I mean, I was recruited at 18. I guess you could say relative to where I am now as a child. I call that a kid personally, but I'm also in my 40s. Kid, whatever. I have teens, so I can relate. And so, yeah, I mean, in those days, it was very different than today, right? I mean, the computers couldn't do a lot.

It was IBM 360. It was secure messaging between embassies or whatever they were doing. It was very hard to develop. Security, you know, was something very, very different, right? Today, it's all about, hey, if they can see the message, make sure they can't read the message. Then a lot of it was make sure they can't see the message because there wasn't a lot you could do with heavy encryption like today. And a lot of the techniques didn't even exist.

So it was a very different time, a very different environment. But I learned a ton. I also learned about how anecdotally I learned how governments work. I learned how they don't work. But from an entrepreneurship perspective, it also gave me a lot of perspectives on moving quickly, breaking things versus moving slow, and that whole kind of monolithic culture of the government. You just said how governments work and how governments don't work. Is it fair to say that we're saying that governments just don't work? Well, sometimes governments work too much,

right? And so doctors have to take a Hippocratic oath, which says, hey, at the end of the day, I'm going to do no harm. Well, politicians don't have to take the same oath, right? Politicians can do all the harm they want and call it doing something, right? And so, you know, sometimes it's okay to take a step back and say, what is our role, right? If people can take care of themselves, how do we best enable them to do that? Well, we have a helicopter society today where the idea is to drop solutions on top of everyone and almost force them on people. And it's just not, it's not in my DNA to want to force my ideas on anyone.

It's in my DNA to give people tools to live their best lives and make their own choices. And I feel like our government, and both parties, by the way, I'm not picking on any one party. Both governments have this whole kind of helicopter parenting perspective. And I wonder where that comes from, by the way. So I don't know how to get out of it. But yeah, I do think that governments aren't working because in some cases, they're actually doing too much. One way or another, it seems that all of your experience very clearly circles back to Bitcoin. Right. And I mean, you can understand in 2021 why you would have reached all of these conclusions, but it's interesting that you were already talking about it in 2012. You were far ahead of your time. What led you to Bitcoin? And what was that, I guess, the moment where it clicked for you so far ahead of everyone? I'm sure they called you nuts. Absolutely. I mean, it wasn't so much nuts when I gave the talk as most people didn't understand what I was talking about. I was like, well, what is double spend? I mean, how can you spend money twice anyway? Why is this a problem that needs

to be solved? And why would they call it Bitcoin? And does it relate to BitTorrent? So no one had heard of it. Anyway, look, how do I feel about this? I think that at the end of the day, the premise of the talk in 2012 was, is it time for a new reserve assets? And I felt the UN had come out with a report back then saying it was probably time. And here we are nine years later, we've, I think, tripled the money supply since then, artificially, dead trees. And the only ones living are the ones behind me, by the way. Everything else is dead. And so I think we're clearly there. The question is, how is that transition going to happen? And I was reading this morning, people complaining about the volatility of Bitcoin. Well, how do you basically create a new reserve asset from

nothing without volatility? What kind of dumbass comment is that? How is it something supposed to go from zero to trillions of dollars of value with no volatility? So this loan diatribe basically means to me that the dollar is in an end game. The bond markets are in an end game. I only foresee a collapse in bond markets. I don't actually see, if somebody would say, give me both sides of the argument where the bond markets don't collapse, where interest rates don't go negative permanently. I have a very hard outset. Well, there is one. If governments abandon the dollar and move to a hard assets and we absorb a decade of pain. So like what happened in Japan, that's nothing compared to the pain we would have to absorb for that transition to happen. If we did that, the bond markets might

not collapse, but we'd have to write off a lot of debt. So save that. I don't see how this end game doesn't end badly, right? And that's where we're headed. And so, you know, I think Bitcoin would be successful, for example, without the dollar collapsing, without bond markets collapsing. But this is certainly rocket fuel to saying, OK, we're in the end game. We need this now. Now that that that's kind of the reserve assets that that's actually even though I saw that early, that was the title of the TED Talk, that's not actually why I was initially excited about Bitcoin. Because I could also, like I said, back then, it wasn't as stark that we were in the endgame. Back then, my interest was I was spending a lot of time in Haiti. I was living near where you are, Miami. And I was looking at all these developing markets who were getting screwed by the government. Remember, there was this thing called Project Chokepoint, which was basically meddling in the banking

system of other countries via remittances and other services. And I thought, how cool would it be if you could replace banks with people? Meaning I could become my own bank and move money back and forth. That was actually my initial interest in Bitcoin. Now, that was, it still is, by the way, a big interest of mine, but it's premature because the more I studied this, the more I realized that you can't go from basically becoming, you know, dealing with banks that own your life to becoming your own bank by flipping a switch. It doesn't work that way. We need something

like Bitcoin to become a reserve asset first. And Austrian economists predicted this 40 years ago. I had to go back and reread all this stuff that I had read before to put it in the context of Bitcoin. And they predicted this would happen, meaning it would be hoarded. Bitcoin would be hoarded. It would become valuable. It would become a reserve asset. Then people would start to use it for payments. So what's interesting now is my prediction is, then people would start to use it for payments. So what's interesting now is my prediction is, is you're going to see a massive redistribution of wealth, right? It's kind of the opposite of what people think would happen via or could happen via MMT, right? We're going to see a massive distribution of wealth via deflationary asset

because the ultra rich who are holding this deflationary asset are going to have no choice but to eventually spend it. And because they can't make more of it, it's going to find its way into every nook and cranny of every society in the world. And so- You call it economics, but it actually works. Yes. Yes. And thank you. And so it's a 25, 30-year transition, just like the internet itself was a 25, 30-year transition. I like the internet itself was a 25, 30-year transition, right? I mean, I worked on 1.0 internet projects in 95, and that's what, you know, 26 years

ago. So we're in a similar transition now where we're really super early. It's like early days of, the analogy would be for the techies out there, it's like early days of TCPIP before there was a web, before there was a commercial internet. And now we're moving towards like the 1.0 commercial internet finally of Bitcoin. It's so interesting because you came for the peer-to-peer cash, the use case that was laid out in the white paper. Then it obviously actually became arguably a potential reserve asset. And obviously, whether it's a reserve asset or not, digital gold and scarcity, and then you think it will come back to the original intention after

that happens, which is not a trajectory that I've really considered. So that's really, really interesting to me. I want to touch on one thing you said, because I know you were talking about when you brought up the volatility and how now there's the argument by namely Nassim Tlaib, obviously saying that Bitcoin's done. It didn't work because at these high prices, there shouldn't be volatility and it can't work as a reserve asset if it's going to be this volatile. Therefore, it's over. Yeah, that's just a ridiculous comment. I'm very surprised. I mean, I'm actually a big fan. Black Swan has always been one of my favorite books. I don't know if there's... Anyway, he's always prided himself on the big picture. I'll call it like it is no matter what. But in this case, I mean, the argument is so

easily refuted. When you have a deflationary asset, when there's a fixed amount, when it's the hardest asset ever created, you can't have created. Again, the point is you can't have a transition from zero to global reserve currency status without volatility. And there has to be a path. Nobody's claiming it's the world's reserve currency today. They're simply claiming that the people who think it's going to be there and make the bet first are going to make a lot of money along the way. That's fine. But the two are mutually exclusive phenomenon. Just because people are making money in volatility in the short term doesn't mean it's not going to be the reserve asset in the long term. And I would actually posit there's no way to get there without the volatility. How can you go from zero to be trillions of dollars of worth,

net worth without volatility? It's not possible, right? There's no switch you can flip and say, okay, reserve asset has been created. It's now worth $10 trillion. Have a nice day. It doesn't work. So the whole argument just doesn't make sense to me. Yeah. He's asking if the timeline ended today. Like all of a sudden we were on this long timeline, but he's decided that it's over.

Yeah, that's right. It doesn't make much sense. It makes no sense. And I can get that he personally doesn't like the idea of putting his money in it. That's fine. It's not for everyone. You know, everybody, everybody will get there, I suppose. But to say that it can't be this because of the volatility, that's the part that I just don't, I don't get. And it's fine. Like I said, he's just, he's just one guy. Like I'm one guy, right? I mean, I don't have the end-all be-all perspective on this. I've just thought about it a lot. I've watched and seen firsthand what's happened over decades. And I'm convinced now that I'm right, but I have to grant that it's possible I'm wrong, which is perfectly fine. He was just such a surprise adversary. I adversary. He really did flick on a switch, it seemed. And I think that took a lot of people off guard. But yet again, I agree with you. I don't really

think that the argument holds water. We talked earlier about two sort of paths, the bond and dollar being at the end game and collapsing, which I think is something that a lot of Bitcoiners have certainly been lucky at for a long time, or the flip side where it doesn't, which would be effectively austerity and depression, right? That would actually be arguably bad for Bitcoin, right? I mean, if everything became deflationary. It could be, but the question becomes, how do you put the government in check? It's not even, I'm not actually saying it's posterity and depression. I'm saying it's a new monetary system and the absorption of significant pain. But if productivity leads to the kind of deflation

it's supposed to, I think the pain would actually be much shorter than we otherwise think because people would be highly incentivized to innovate their way out of the mess. They are anyway, but I think that the incentives, the financial incentives are, you know, only lead you down one path. So, you know, I don't think it's, I don't really think it's this idea of, you know, let's just keep the existing dollar, right, a system as is, and just, you know, cut our way out of this cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, balance budgets. That's, that's not what it's gonna,

that's not gonna work. There's too many incentives for exceptions for politicians to, you know, again, don't have this do no harm mantra to just not go there. Or if they say they're going to go there, break the rule. We go to war with somebody, we bomb some brown country, and all of a sudden... And so, I don't know. I just think the only way out of this is a hard asset-based monetary system where the bond markets can't work through the levels of leverage that we've created today. They have to work through innovation, through falling prices, increases in productivity, where that productivity can be captured by hard assets. We capture productivity by an asset whose value declines by 4% to 7% a year, it makes no sense.

And you cannot work your way out of that. You cannot do it. It's so nuts. I mean, we have these conversations every single day, but every single time I have someone on here and every time they articulate it, it's so irrational. It's hard to believe that that's the accepted system. Right. I'll tell you, I tell you what would, what would probably change this permanently. If there was one switch that could be flipped and everybody in even the

United States where, where we can leverage our reserve status to kind of protect the dollar. But if we had a switch, we could flip and all of a sudden, everybody lived to be 175 years old. And one day, just switch. Everybody would get this problem immediately. Of course. Immediately. Today, we don't think about it because for most people, they actually don't live long enough to realize, well, they don't save, especially in today's modern society and don't live long enough to really realize that the value of what they're holding has been eroded by 80 to 90%.

That's part of how the government perpetuates the house of cards. And so the easiest way to deal with, or not the easiest, but ironically, the way where this become the most darkest that this is a problem is longevity, life literally living to 175. And I actually think that's going to happen. I actually think that, you know, with technological singularities and the ability to replace body parts and all these other things coming, I do think people are going to be living to 150 and longer eventually. And at that point, the existing system simply can't work. The monetary system cannot work. And this whole idea of intergenerational wealth and the erosion, it just,

nobody's going to care. And so we'll see what happens, but it begs for a different perspective. Anyway, it's going to happen either way. We're in the end game. My only point now is what is going to be replaced with? And I didn't want that to happen. I still don't, but I don't see a way out of it. I really don't. So it's actually a lot of people obviously talk about the end game, but you very much put your money where your mouth is. Right. So, so, I mean, you obviously you're this CEO of a platform that surrounds this. So as far as work you are, but you very publicly said that you moved 50% of your wealth, which may be larger at this point. Yeah, I mean, I said it before the most recent run-up, so you can do the math.

I haven't sold anything. So into Bitcoin. It's Bitcoin and a little bit of Ethereum. I have actually now it's grown. There's no alpha on Ether versus Bitcoin right now, at least not yet, although I think there will be, at least for this year. But right now I'm like 80-20 and it's certainly more than 50% given the run-up and the fact that I'm not going to be selling anytime soon. And again, you don't have to read charts. I read your newsletter. I know, you don't have to read charts.

I read your newsletter. I mean, you don't have to be a genius to say, you know, okay, well, a lot of people are claiming they're geniuses right now, but you don't have to be a genius to see that when you have a deflationary asset, when you have almost no retail and no institutions who are playing yet, and the hordes aren't there yet, that this has to, there's just not enough to go around. And so, you know, I spend a lot of time talking about technicals like you do, but honestly, you can throw that out the window and just talk about supply and demand. That's all you have to do. I hate to say it, right? I agree. And so, I don't know what else to say. And you asked about retail earlier. I mean, we're so early.

I mean, the average person that I talk to in Silicon Valley, they know what Bitcoin is now, which is obviously very different than the TED Talk in 2012. They don't own Bitcoin, most of them. They don't understand why it keeps going down so much and goes up so much. They don't understand why it keeps going down so much and goes up so much. They don't understand. And so this tells me that even though people talk about the fact that there's probably 60 to 100 million Bitcoin wallets out there, there's seven and a half billion people. Right. So that's like, what, 10, barely 10 percent. So, no, it's like less than that. So, yeah, it's way less than that.

It's a couple of percent. So anyway, it's so early. Right. Now, that having been said, we're melting up in terms of real consumer interest right now. And we're moving from kind of super early tech enthusiasts slash anarchist adopter to more of a early adopter mainstream investor who's willing to dig in a little bit. And that'll get us probably to a couple of hundred million wallet holders, whether they're on chain or on an exchange or in a wallet like Abra. That'll get us to a couple of hundred million, probably in the next year or so would be my guess, if not faster. But that's still so early, so early. I mean, you're on the front line. So you're actually seeing this and you have metrics that you can attach to it, right? A lot of people

are vacillating about retail came in 2017. They got rent, they left. It's institutional and retail's not back yet. But I think retail is coming back in a big way right now. Are the signups that you're seeing supporting that notion? Yeah, there's a few things that are different this time around. I think that the first time around you were kind of relegated to just using exchanges and that's difficult for a lot of people, right? A lot of people don't know what an order book is. They don't know what a bid-ask spread is. They're not comfortable trading. If I just want to buy Bitcoin or if I just want to buy Ethereum or maybe there's a couple of altcoins or maybe I heard about it being the Doge pump, whatever. It needs to be simple. And I think the difference is, first of all, you're seeing a lot of, in Bitcoin numbers, you're seeing a lot of Bitcoin leaving exchanges.

Love it. But the dollar value of what they're holding is going up because the value of the Bitcoin is increasing at a rate faster than it's leaving the exchanges. So that's creating, it's allowing them to hide the facts and the reality that I'm not convinced. First of all, there's too many exchanges. Second, I don't know how all of them are going to survive anyway, because I don't think the future of banking is Bitcoin exchanges or crypto exchanges. I think it's crypto banking plus self-sovereignty, meaning people are going to move in and out of crypto banking services combined with the fact that they're going to have their own wallets that are basically offline. And that's what we do. And so our numbers are ballooning because this next

generation of people, they want simple, they want quick. If I want to store it online, I'm happy to earn interest. But if I want to take it offline and put it on my own wallet, I don't need an exchange. And so I do think that we're in part of this next phase is a bit of a transition from just the pure exchange mentality to where we're starting to see a meaningful percentage of the volume coming to companies like mine, Abra and BlockFi and other players in the space that are adding value beyond just what's the order book depth, right? And we can leverage that liquidity in lots of people's order books and add a lot of value on top. And that's driving huge retail demand for us, but also other players in the space as well. So it's about yield. It's about yield.

I would say it's about three things. It's about simplicity. It's about yield. And it's about control. Now, I think there's going to be a fourth component to that, which is about liquidity. And I think that's going to be driven by lending because as people become crypto rich, they're not going to want to sell that crypto, whether it's for taxes, because I think the price is going to go up, et cetera, et cetera. That's starting now, but it's super early. But I think simplicity, yield, and control are going to drive a lot of retail usage to these kind of what I would call next-gen crypto banking services like ours at Abra and others in the space who are also doing a good job in different countries than necessarily the ones we support. But it's a very different mindset than just the pro trader. The DeFi revolution

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Mina is a layer one crypto protocol that replaces the traditional blockchain with a zero knowledge proof, ensuring a super light and constant size chain that allows participants to quickly sync and verify the network. Their upcoming mainnet launch is right around the corner, and there are opportunities to participate in community leaderboard challenges for rewards. Visit minaprotocol.com slash wolf to find out how you can get involved and earn tokens ahead of mainnet. What are you seeing as far as growth in users, specifically in the platform? I don't know that you need to give exact numbers, but I actually just talked to Catherine Coleyley and she said that they'd done more signups in January, 2021 than they did in all of 2020 and more volume in January of 2021 than all of 2020 at Binance US. Yeah. They're, they're a new serve. I mean, they're still relatively new in the US, right? So I would expect her to say that they're adding more States all the time. So you turn on

one state, you get a big bump, right? So, and by the way, I love Catherine. She's, she's awesome. We talk, we talk every few times a year and I always enjoy those conversations. And by the way, she's Zabra, right. So, so it's kind of an interesting dichotomy between, you know, Hey, I trade and then I have my wallet. So, so the other thing I would say is that, yes, our numbers are up way up. I mean, we did, you know, we've doubled, I think, two or three times over the last like four or five months, the numbers have doubled and double again. And, you know, we're very profitable now. We've been profitable for a while. Our user base, the other thing is our user base is very loyal. We have very low churn. People have lots of options

in crypto. And one of the things I really like about what we're seeing is that they do like our simplicity and they don't leave even though they have options. And so, yeah, so just a few interesting tidbits, right? Registrations are way up across the board, but here's the interesting thing. We track a percentage of users globally, US, Europe, and then the rest of the world, more or less, percentage of users who register, but then also make a deposit. Because a lot of people like in September, October, they might've been registering, but they were setting price alerts, looking at average price charts. Even as a consumer, I may not be looking a sophisticated trader, but I still know how to read a chart. I know when the price is going up and I know when the price is going down. I know it's going sideways. Right. Now the percentage of

people who are making a first deposit, whether it's from a bank account via Bankwire or US via ACH or taking crypto off of an exchange, that percentage has exploded for us. And as the user numbers went up, I actually would have expected that number to fall because people aren't sure, they're following the crowd. But then when it comes to, hey, put your money where your mouth is, that percentage has actually also gone up. And so people are moving money off of exchanges now into this wallet model. Like you said, simplicity, yield, control. We have a lot of people who use Abra as an away station between going in and out via stable coins or moving via alts and Bitcoin, and then a hardware wallet. So I'd say half will store money in online or in our interest account and half use

Abra ephemerally where they come offline and online as they trade. And they can have, again, control. They can do that with an exchange as well, but they just like the simplicity of doing it this way. And then the fact that there's 125 different coins they can trade. And so, yes, I mean, the numbers have basically started, I would say July of last year is when it started for us, where the numbers were okay. And then just every month, it just up, up, up, up, up. And then around November, another switch flipped and the slope that was going up changed again. And then I would say right around the whole GameStop thing, the slope trickled up again. And now it's been, initially it was a lot of doge, but that's kind of died down a little bit.

But the Bitcoin, Ethereum and certain alts are still continuing to get that acceleration. And so I don't know if it's going to slow down. I have no reason to believe it's going to slow down. And by the way, we have an enterprise institutional business as well. And so that's also growing by leaps and bounds. We don't talk about it very much. It's in the background. It's how we generate yield on a lot of our interest accounts, but you know, that business is booming for us. It's a nine figure and growing fast lending book. So all cylinders are firing. The amount of interest coming in is accelerating, meaning the slope has been changing. It's now changed three times that we've seen. And so as I don't know if the slope is going to change again, it can't go much more than vertical. So, right. But it's not vertical yet, which means who knows it could even go faster.

So really, I mean, COVID's been the great sort of accelerator for slowly and then all at once. I think COVID's given people a lot of more free time. It's people are not commuting. People who are working aren't commuting. That adds at least 10 hours a week for the average person near a city back to your life 10 hours is a lot you do a lot in 10 hours a week um people aren't spending as much discretionary money because you know there's only so much amazon shopping you're going to do if you're not leaving the house uh and i'm talking about the coasts you know we're seeing this a lot um and and so it's a very interesting recipe for spending and you can't gamble easily in the u.s and I'm talking about the coasts, you know, we're seeing this a lot. And so it's a very interesting recipe for spending.

And you can't gamble easily in the US, right? And I talked to friends in the UK, they go on their sports bets and there are this, you can if you're highly motivated in the US. I'm actually not really up to date on how to do it. But this represents a way for some people to say, okay, I'm interested in investing. I don't want to throw away my money. And I'm not just talking about crypto, stocks and Robinhood. My kids use Abra and Robinhood. So for example, the teenagers. And so I love that because they started to ask more questions now. It may have been a little bit of follow the herd gambling, but now I'm getting a lot of questions because they've made some money and now they don't want to be stupid about it. That's good. But yeah, COVID has really changed the game in so many ways as it relates to investing, even gambling. We're not a gambling company, but it's changed the mentality for how people are spending their time. Sure. And you touched on that you have the other side of the business

that you don't really talk about with the enterprise side. And I think that that's a huge question for a lot of people is my bank doesn't offer me any interest. How could I go on these platforms and get 8%, 9%, 10%, 6%, 12%? What are they doing? The knee jerk is that it can't be real. It's some kind of scam. When you dig in, you realize it's just that the bank isn't giving you anything and they're doing the same thing. But I mean, how do you offer that? Yeah, it's two things. It's one, our willingness to pass the profits on to the consumer and still make money because we're a well-run, efficient business. I can generate, you know, a one to two percent NIM on deposits and actually be a profitable startup. There's a lack of understanding of what's happening in the crypto ecosystem that creates demand for dollars, which is what drives all of this yield that you were alluding to earlier.

And that's a few things, right? So the first is dollar demand in general is through the roof in an up-marketing crypto. Why is that? Well, people want leverage. People don't want to sell their Bitcoin. They want to take advantage of the profits. Miners want to buy more equipment. There's a plethora of reasons, right? There's delta neutral hedging strategies that your audience might understand that a lot of people won't.

And all of that creates demand for dollars that the traditional banking system, when they hear the word Bitcoin and crypto is still not going to serve, even if it's a relatively low risk, because prime brokers will take a yacht as collateral. Which can be floating on the other side of the planet instead of sitting comfortably in their wallet. Right. Absolutely. I had this conversation with Michael Saylor a few weeks ago. He showed me his boat. He's like, yeah, I can use that as collateral at a bank in 15 minutes to get a multimillion dollar loan. I can't call that bank with any of my Bitcoin to get a loan. Well, that's crazy because they can sell the Bitcoin a million times faster than

they can sell the boat. And they could hold it. Right. I mean, they could require it. We know, but banks can custody Bitcoin now. It's like the greatest collateral asset ever. A hundred percent. This is my point. And so as people are, the banks don't get it. And because there's so much demand for the dollars here, it's basically created a different yield curve in crypto versus traditional banking. And I don't think it'll last forever, but I think it's going to last a few years. I think they'll converge because the banks have no choice. They can't compete. Right. So the first step is a lot of these banks are going to get into custody, like with Mellon and other simple prime brokerage services.

And eventually, they're going to become full-blown crypto prime brokers and then eventually full-blown crypto retail banks. And our advantage is we're the first that I know of to offer the entire gamut from retail to enterprise in a way that actually creates an entirely self-servicing banking ecosystem, the same way a traditional bank is meant to. Now, we do it borrowing other people's licenses. We work with Prime Trust, which is a trust bank in the US. We work with different custodians like Fireblocks. But the end game is still the same. And so, you know, it's, it's, like I said, from a, from a collateralization perspective, it's just common sense, but the, but the banks don't get

it. So the drives, the interest rates up. And that's why there's such a mismatch right now between dollar rates and crypto rates. Crypto rates are an average early Bitcoin, four and a half, five ether, four and a half, five.5%, excuse me, I know I can speak. And then dollars, anywhere from 9% to 12%, depending upon the week. Trey Lockerbie So we need a whole lot of people that want a short for this to continue. David Sherman I mean, I don't know how realistic that is, but there's demand and a lot of it is neutral strategies know, my team digs in to make sure we're

not putting people's money at risk. In some cases, if we don't get it, we just say, fine, give us, give us 150% collateral on a dollar basis and they do it. Right. And so it's one or the other, right. It's either our ability to understand what you're doing, which might give you 100% collateral requirements. Or like I said, it might be 150% to 100% extra collateral if we don't get it. I mean, we know that banks are going to come, as you said. I mean, we've already seen the OCC ruling. Now we see Mellon. I mean, they're not going to like... There's a reason Deutsche Bank is following suit. And I think you're going to see a lot of emerging markets. I think you're going to see a lot of Latin American banks.

Sure. I think you're going to see a lot of Southeast Asian banks. And I think they're going to see a lot of Latin American banks. I think you're going to see a lot of Southeast Asian their existing licenses already allow them to do this. They don't need to ask for permission. So, you know, a lot of countries, everything in banking is asking for permission still, which to me is crazy. But what's interesting is that we know they're going to come, but I personally, maybe I'm a pessimist, but I don't think they're going to all of a sudden start handing off all the yield to their customers just because it's Bitcoin or just because it's crypto and not dollars. So there's still going to be a much bigger place for companies like your own that do pass on the 80% of the earning to the customers. They're just going to do the same thing they're already doing, but with our Bitcoin.

Right. And the FDIC is not going to allow crypto collateralized insured deposits in the next two years. That's just not going to happen. And so now a prime broker that's also a bank might be willing to have their clients accept the fact that these aren't insured deposits, but the collateral is better than insurance. I understand that. I have all my crypto is in Abra because I know that the way the collateralization works, it's actually a better deal for a high net worth investor than FDIC insurance. But the average investor doesn't understand that

and the FDIC doesn't understand that and it's not gonna happen anytime soon. And so my point is, this kind of bourgeois startup space that's dealing with this mismatch has a lot of legs. Yeah, so it's interesting. So we're talking about obviously yield and what you can do on your platforms you touched on earlier. You personally are now maybe 80, 20 Bitcoin, Ethereum. Like when we talk about DeFi and we talk about yield, conversation is usually around

Ethereum specifically, right? So you and I have discussed this offline. I think both of us are very bullish on Ethereum, at least in the shorter term. Can you talk about that a bit more, especially as someone who may have been viewed as a Bitcoin maximalist going back nine years, maybe you weren't, but that was the market back then. I've never been a Bitcoin maximalist. I was on the other side of the scaling debate. I accepted the outcome. I didn't agree with the outcome, but I accepted it. It's fine. I'm probably a little closer to Relapal. I have a deep understanding of the technology, probably better than 80% of the people that

call themselves maximalists. I just don't care. I care in the sense that we need a better reserve asset and Bitcoin will probably, or has the best chance to be that. I also think we need technology competition because Bitcoin can't move fast enough. And it shouldn't because of its role now in society, which is still emerging back to the volatility discussion. And so we need the technology competition that comes from altcoins for different reasons. But Ethereum serves a very different purpose, right? All this discussion about Ethereum is a shitcoin, it completely misses the point. And it's not even about the spectrum of decentralization.

It's about, can you have a smart contract-based computing platform that runs applications that in theory don't have an off switch, that has nothing to do with a new reserve asset, nothing. Now, maybe it does in the context of that new reserve asset might be a counterparty or asset to one of those smart contracts. But the idea of having a computing system that has no off switch for running myriad applications is a parallel new revolutionary concept. And I look at it simply as that. And I don't worry about Bitcoin when I'm making that analysis. The overlap comes in public interest. And because Ethereum is starting from a different place and it's more volatile, I actually do think it's going to be more volatile up and down. But over the next year and a half, I wouldn't say sure, but I would be very surprised if we didn't see a run up to 15,000,

20,000 in that range. Again, I don't have a crystal ball. I don't give investment advice, but I just don't see how it doesn't happen. Now, long-term, Ethereum is very different, right? Because Ethereum is meant to fuel these decentralized applications that have an off switch. It's not meant to be a reserve asset. It's not to be any form of gold. It's not even meant to be money, right? I look at it like Chuck E. Cheese tokens that you got to put them in to run the games that are playing on the jukebox. And so those could be ephemeral, which means the value could be very low, or they could figure out a way via this new sharding technology where supply actually looks more limited than it does today because you have all of these shards running in

parallel. And so they're not even increasing the supply at a fast enough rate. I don't know if that's going to happen. I actually would be a little skeptical that that would happen, but it's possible. But all I know is in the short term, every analysis that I can do for myself tells me this thing's going up and it's going up faster than Bitcoin, at least for the next year and a half. And so if that's wrong, I'm fine. I'm totally fine. But that's the bet I've made for myself. Why is that idea so difficult for people who are hardcore Bitcoiners to, I don't know, to grasp because maybe they can, maybe it's an emotional dislike for anything that's not Bitcoin or a threat.

I don't know. The thing that bothers me about the maximalist discussion, and these are my friends, right? And so the thing that bothers me about the discussion more than anything is, is that it doesn't give enough credit to the person you're having the discussion with. Because, and I don't mean the maximalist, I mean the person they're having the discussion with. Because it's very, it is, you understand, you've used BitTorrent, maybe I have. I understand that the thing that makes BitTorrent exciting is that there's no off switch. It's a decentralized system. Okay. It doesn't require a token today, but it could in theory, I did, they didn't design it

that way. Maybe to incentivize, for example, people who are hosting files that they would give out. I don't know. I just made that up. I have no idea. My point is that all of these other decentralized systems that don't have an off switch could potentially add value, whether it's decentralized finance or decentralized social networks. And there's no way that maximalists are going to tell me that they don't understand that. They're just afraid that it confuses the discussion. Many of them are. Many of them don't believe anything can be truly decentralized except the way Bitcoin is, except for Bitcoin. Those people aside, and there's way fewer of those, there's no way that you're going to tell me that they don't understand that these applications

can exist. And many of them would say, hey, but they can exist on Bitcoin. That's fine. That's just competition at the end of the day. There seems to be this underlying fear that you're confusing the public by commingling this discussion of a reserve asset and a global computer, or a computer that enables decentralized applications that don't have an off switch. I'm sorry, but people may not understand how it's possible that Ethereum accomplishes this. But I think if you say to somebody, hey, I can actually create a stock trading application that the government can't shut off, runs 24-7, and doesn't run on one computer, but runs on all of them. People may be like, wow, that's amazing. I don't understand how that's possible, but I get the idea, right?

I get the need. And so don't belittle people's ability to grasp the difference between, oh, and I also understand that the dollar's value is being eroded to zero. The two may not have exactly a lot to do with each other other than the underlying technologies that solve those problems are similar,

but I don't beseech anyone's ability to understand both in parallel at the same time. Wow. Yeah. And that's the part that I think that rubs me a little bit the wrong way with my maximalist friends. And I've lost a couple of people. I had people I was really close to in the early days of Bitcoin. They just basically canceled me. And I'm like, that's perfectly fine. You can live in your bubble and maybe the rest of the world will catch up with you over time because I have

it completely wrong. Yeah. What's interesting is that the two could almost be completely different communities with very little tie to one another in general. It's just because I think everything stemmed from Bitcoin and the whole community grew out of one sort of small seed that these are even issues because if both of the technologies were created at the same time, they might not even have the same community. But from a core developer perspective, they are parallel universes. Of course. And so it's the trading, you know, everybody's a macro economist now in our world. So just like

everybody was a constitutional law expert in January of last year, everybody's a macro economist now. And so all of these macro economists look at both worlds. The developers don't because the developers are focused on the problems that are interesting to them. They don't look at it this way. And so they don't think that Ethereum developers don't think Bitcoin is dog shit. And many Bitcoin developers I know don't think Ethereum is dog shit. They just don't focus on it. It's only these macroeconomists wannabes that focus on it. It's true. I'm curious, because you touched on it earlier. I know that Elon Musk and talking about Doge and seeing it on Robinhood and Robinhood getting shut down, a huge part of the retail rush has been people

looking for somewhere to buy Doge, right? What do you make of this entire Doge craze? For me, I can just say, I love Doge. It's been the most fun thing probably I've ever traded in my entire life, but only because I know that I can catch the cycle and then wait a few months and do it again. Not because I think that it's going to continue up. So, and, and, and also you're smart enough to know that if you miss the cycle, if you get it wrong and it falls 80% while you were sleeping, it is what it is. Right. I mean, and, and so I would say I have a couple of feelings about it. One, it's fun. That's fine. And I think that's, look, Musk is,

I can't even imagine what his life is like, right? You know, dealing with all these companies, richest guy in the world, the media hangs on every word he says. None of us have that problem, all right? So he's in an entirely, he's in a league that didn't even exist. Like they created a new league for him.

Like that's how crazy his that didn't even exist. Like they create a new league for him. Like that's how crazy he, you know, his sphere of influence has become. And so even he said when he was doing his clubhouse a couple of weeks ago, when somebody asked him about Bitcoin, I have to be very careful what I say because I don't want to move the markets. And even then, as soon as he said that,

he moved the markets. So, you know, okay. So put that aside. I mean, he's, he's perfectly within his rights to, to have fun and he uses social media as an outlet to have fun. And that's, that's fine. He doesn't hurt anyone by doing that for the most part. Now, I think that there's nothing wrong with people. Like we talked about earlier, people have a lot more free time, no commuting, they're not seeing each other. And, you know, especially a lot of kids, they're on, you know, Reddit, you know, wall street bets, whatever, having fun. Um, I don't, I don't have a problem with that. I also don't, I, I have, I actually have a bigger problem with

governments coming in and deciding what's good and bad in that regard. I have a much bigger problem with that, um, than, than I do with parents or, or, you know, adults running companies to say, Hey, you need, you have an obligation to take a look at what you're putting your money in and understand that you could lose all of your money doing this. And I say that all the time, not because my lawyers tell me to, because I think it's a responsible thing to say. And so, yes, we've gotten a huge retail interest in Abra a few weeks ago because of Doge. But a lot of those people, I would say the vast majority of them are still using the product, right? Whether it's the whole Doge or

for other things. So even as that euphoria has died down, it's actually opened doors for people who've looked at other things, who've looked at crypto in a new way, right? Who didn't understand that even Doge was part of crypto, right? There's a relationship between Doge and Bitcoin. I didn't know that. Doge was its own thing, right? Yeah, exactly. What does Doge have to do with Bitcoin? Oh, it's another crypto. It's a fork. What's a fork, right? It's the same software. How is that possible? Why isn't it just called Bitcoin then? Right? So we get these questions every day. The support questions we get, a lot of them have nothing to do with just using Abra. It's about like, well, are Bitcoin and Doge the same thing? If

Bitcoin goes up, does Doge go up? If Bitcoin goes down, does Doge go down? We get a ton of those questions every day. And when you think about it, it's kind of common sense because if the public doesn't know, but there's a herd that's basically saying, go buy this, they're going to have a lot of questions. And so what's been really interesting is how it's opened up a discussion and how it's kind of integrated itself into the broader discussion of where Bitcoin's going, where Ethereum 2.0 is going. And it's become kind of a meme for that, in addition to the meme in its own right of just this crazy crypto project that just has wild swings up and down and can potentially be traded and gambled upon. Yeah. Just from my own personal experience,

obviously it's anecdotal, but I used to post about Doge and it was the crypto community and it was fun and it was whatever. And now you post about it and there's a really hardcore community that for whatever reason, believes it's going to be the currency of the future for the world. Yeah, I don't. But hey, everyone is within their rights to believe that I have no problem. I shouldn't say I have no problem. I have no problem accepting that it was within everyone's rights to believe that. I hope that the people that are creating the narratives and responsible positions are also explaining the full story, right? Because at the end of the day, Doge is no better than the dollar in many ways, right? I mean,

you can just keep making more of it forever and that's, what's going to happen. So and, and, and so again, if I have no problem with the public getting what they want, the end of the day, we all get what we deserve, good or bad, right? So, but yes, I have seen some of these memes and narratives on the internet as well from people who don't fully understand the idea of a deflationary asset, for example. Yeah, a guy laid it out for me on Twitter today in response to something I had written. And he basically, he was like one through five, and he described

Bitcoin, but just put the word Doge at the end. I was like, yeah, you got the right idea, but the wrong asset, brother. Exactly. And there's a lot of that. Like I said, we get these questions via our support. There's FAQs online we run. We actually have a whole series of articles online that explain the basics of all the top 50 cryptocurrencies. Just go to abber.com and you can read them. People don't. They don't read them. A lot of people do, by the way. They get a lot of views, but then a lot of people will just send an email to support. That's the other thing. Not only have our download numbers gone through the roof, our support requests have gone through the roof. It's not because the app's gotten harder to use.

It's just because people are using support as a free tutorial mechanism to ask us questions about the markets and crypto. Oh, I saw Bill on a podcast and he said this. Can you explain this to me? I mean, yeah. Even in my, again, anecdotally, but my Twitter DMs are effectively Google at this point. People, instead of Googling something, they just put it in my DMs and assume that I'm going to answer the most simple questions. So Doge aside, I mean, there's some incredible things being developed in this market outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

I mean, I'm not going to ask you if there's any you're particularly excited about, but I mean, there's a lot of competition. I mean, is there a world where we see something that either just has been invented or hasn't even been conceived yet replaces either Bitcoin or Ethereum or becomes superior in some way? Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. And that is certainly possible, but it's also possible that other coins

that are created to promote new technologies, like let's say Mimblewimble making its way into Litecoin, which I think is fantastic. Thank God we have something like Litecoin that's kind of somewhat trusted by the Bitcoin maximalists to say, okay, it can act as a testbed because we

don't want to do this first. That's great. I love that. So it's not just a question of are Bitcoin and Ethereum going to die because they're going to be replaced with something better? It's definitely possible. I would say in the case of Bitcoin, highly unlikely because of the network effects. Ethereum is a little bit different because I actually think it's theoretically possible to port to better platforms. I mean, if you look at what Solana is doing, if you look at what Cardano is doing, they don't have the network effects, they don't have the developer support yet, but they're really exciting platforms. And developers have a lot of power because developers pick and choose where they want to spend their time. And there's way more development, for example, on Ethereum than there

is on Bitcoin. There's probably more development on Cardano than there is on Bitcoin. I'm actually not sure, but I would be surprised if it wasn't. I believe that's probably true. Right. And so it's a really interesting time. There's a lot of projects right now that claim to solve a lot of problems inherent with Ethereum, which is really getting the biggest target on its back. Bitcoin is getting less targets on their back. Ethereum is getting a lot. And a lot of it's for transaction throughput. You know, DeFi has basically shown us all of the weaknesses in Ethereum with big spotlights.

And that's great. But it's not like Vitalik and the community didn't know about these things. It's just that it's enabled the public to catch up. And so that's great. Like I said before, the more competition we have, the better. I have no idea if any of these projects are going to be around in 10 years, if any of them are going to replace. I suspect we'll have something like Bitcoin, something like Ethereum that becomes that world computer to run apps that don't have an off switch. And then we'll have niche chains that actually serve like one-off purposes, whether it's for healthcare, but public, meaning not like, you know, VM or any stuff where it's private. I think that stuff's all going to die. But I do think that there will be multiple public chains that people may gravitate to for different reasons that a lot of us won't even be aware of because they're niche services. I could see how that happens.

Yeah. It's an interesting point you made that Ethereum has the biggest target on SPAC because anybody who's, I mean, transacted knows that it's slow and it's expensive, right? And there are things that are faster and cheaper. So at the end of the day, that faster and cheaper is going to win. Whether Ethereum 2.0 solves that or not, I guess, remains to be seen, but there's going to be a lot of competition. What's more interesting is that you point out that Bitcoin kind of doesn't have the target on its back anymore. And I think largely that's because of the transition from the peerless cash to cash narrative to the digital golden reserve asset narrative, because trying to create another global world reserve asset now when you have Bitcoin seems kind of pointless. Yeah. I can't make a post about

Bitcoin in general without somebody replying with why Digibyte's better or why Bitcoin cash is better. But the volume on a relative basis of people doing that now has actually gone down before. That's true. Like every post that people would come at me in droves, shilling a better coin than Bitcoin. It still happens, but it happens less now. And my followers have gone way up. So clearly there's an acceptance that a lot of those projects are playing a different game. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So I know we're getting up against it with time. I'm curious now where you feel we are sort of in this next cycle, because you really have the boots on the ground to understand it, I think.

I mean, obviously, it's my opinion that 2017 was a retail bubble. This time, we have a bit of more of an institutional, you can call it speculation, but I think they're speculating to hold this time. As you said, the coins are moving off of the exchanges. So we have different hold this time. As you said, the coins are moving off of the exchanges. So we have different buyers this time. So where does that put us in the potential of Bitcoin in this cycle before it kind of once again tops and becomes ridiculous? The analogy that I used when we were in the 20,000s was a hockey line change, right? So when you're playing a hockey game, a few times, every once in a few minutes, you have a line change where skaters leave the ice. I think we had a line change in

Bitcoin where basically we were doing a reset where people who basically were out of the money for the better part of three years were selling when all of a sudden they were in the money in the 20,000s, right? And a lot of that was going to institutional players and some retail investors who basically now had a floor on cost basis where there was no chance they were going to be selling at $17,000 anytime soon. And so now we basically had clear skies or clean air, to use the Formula One analogy, where we could race forward. And we're still pretty much in clean air territory with a combination of a very small number of non-crypto institutional

players. And by non-crypto, I mean companies that don't exist explicitly because of crypto. MicroStrategy, Tesla. MicroStrategy, Tesla are the two most well-known examples and a bunch of hedge funds that have basically either gotten into futures, made filings that they're going to, or may have in small amounts that we don't know about, which is probably even more likely because they're not, you know, they don't have disclosure requirements as hedge funds or the amounts are too small or some combination of both. And so that is unbelievably early. Right.

Like we're in a baseball analogy. I think we're at the top of the first inning. Retails come around, but I think retail is going to have a different perspective now. I think driven by the crypto banking services, people are going to have a much more long-term hold perspective. And I can see that in the volume of deposits going into yield generating assets and Bitcoin being put down as collateral for loans. In aggregate, that's probably an $8 to $10 billion business that didn't exist during the 2017 run up. And so a lot of this is giving me pause to say, hey, this is a very different game now. This is becoming a mainstream investment. It's a portfolio allocation discussion, not a speculative bubble discussion. For me, that's what it is. I still see CNN segments where it's a speculative bubble discussion,

but I see more discussions happening that didn't happen before about, hey, does this need to be part of my portfolio? Which implies it's like stocks and bonds and crypto, which means you don't sell. You don't say, okay, you may adjust the portfolio a little bit, but you don't take your portfolio to cash. Nobody ever says that. And so I don't think that's what's happening now. And so that's what I mean by this line change is basically gone from the speculative discussion to the portfolio allocation discussion, which says this has a lot of room to go. If this really is a macro portfolio allocation discussion and there's not enough to go around,

look out. And I think that's where we are, to answer your question. I think we're in the very first part of that game. And I think it's a multi-year run up to a million. And I think this year will be in six figures. And then we'll see if we take pauses or how that goes, or if there's macroeconomic and black swan shocks that could easily cause us to come down 60% before we go back up. But again, back to that question about how do you become a reserve asset without volatility? You don't. And so again, repeating myself, but yeah, we're that early. I love it. I love top of the first. We're better than a seventh inning stretch.

Exactly. But I mean, I agree. I agree. We're talking about five companies or less that are even really publicly talking about this and you know that they're all coming. So even if Retail doesn't, they are. So those kind of like quarterly, when you look at the calendar quarter earnings cycles, those are going to be very interesting for the next year

because there's going to be one interesting for the next year because there's going to be one or two every cycle that probably disclose something related to Bitcoin. Yeah, I agree. So what does the rest of 2021 look like for your company and for you specifically, if we see that sort of growth? Yeah. So Abra is spending a lot of cycles managing the growth. I'm happy to say we haven't had downtime. We really planned ahead for this. Unicorn. Yeah, we are.

In terms of revenue status, we're there. We don't talk about it much, but we are. And so I'm really happy for the team. A lot of people came into this where their parents and family told them, in Silicon Valley especially, you can go work at Google and Facebook and Apple, make probably 2x the salary and get some stock. And they said, yeah, but this is fun. I believe in this. And so we have a lot of that at Ever, right? And so I'm really happy for those people. But specifically for our user base, it's building out that crypto banking stack,

right? So we're in the early days of trading, yield, enterprise lending. You're going to see things like retail lending, payments, money transfer, the ability to borrow. All of that is basically building out that crypto banking stack. And then with the appropriate enterprise component as well on the backend to also enable the full cycle of banking, just like a traditional bank would. So the future is you guys replace the banks and we can tell them to shove off. I think that this is the next bank. And I think the biggest mind shift in the next few years is going to be, I'm not selling this Bitcoin, but I still have to live. And so there's going to be this whole kind of, it's not like an annuity in the sense of where

I'm just slowly selling my stuff over time. I'm actually using my reserve asset as a base asset class, and I'm able to borrow against it in some other, probably shit coin for now, until those shit coins go away, government shit coins, I mean. And that borrowing is effectively free, given the discrepancy between the movement of the two. One is falling in value and the other one's going up in value. And so that's going to be a big mind shift for the first generation of crypto holders over the next five years. And then slowly the rest of the planet think there's going to be a huge reallocation of wealth on the planet over many years where it's actually going to become much smoother long term. It may seem like there's a lot of like a very few number of crypto rich people holding the majority. That's a five to 10 year phenomenon. I think within 20 years, we're going to have more wealth distribution on the planet because of this than we've ever had before. Absolutely love it. So

where can everybody follow you, keep up with you after this and check out Abra? Yeah. So Abra.com, you can download the app and follow us there. Our Abra Global is the Abra Twitter feed. Personally, I'm Bill Barheit on Twitter. I'm pretty active. I answer lots of questions. My DMs are always open. I'm on Clubhouse a couple of nights a week when I can. I like, I like that app. Uh, but yeah, Bill Barhite on Twitter and Abra global on Twitter and Abra.com. That's it. Well, it's very kind that you're a glutton for punishment. Like my, like, uh, like myself and you keep your DMS open because man, what a Marvel that can be. Yeah. You get, you get a lot of crap, but, but I learn a lot. People have genuine issues, genuine concerns, and it keeps me close to the ground.

As do I. Well, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day. And it's nice to hear such a bullish vision that's grounded in fact and reality as opposed to, you know, hopium and steam. We try our best. And thanks for having me.

Really interesting discussion. I enjoyed it very much.