The Wolf Of All Streets - BTC Breaks $82K… Next Stop $100K?! #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

Live from Consensus in Miami, Dave and guests discuss Bitcoin around $82K, surging institutional adoption, and tradfi professionals entering crypto. They cover tokenization, stablecoins, blockchain integration in traditional finance, DTCC’s tokenization efforts, ETF potential, and the shift toward on-chain rails over the next 3–7 years. Additional topics include MicroStrategy’s strategy and Michael Saylor’s comments on selling small amounts of Bitcoin to fund STRC dividends while remaining a net buyer, tax loss harvesting, BTC-per-share growth, and shareholder value for Bitcoin treasury companies. They also explore DeFi challenges (AMMs vs. order books, stock loan disruption), AML/KYC and regulatory issues (Clarity Act), and the rise of institutional credit and lending products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good morning, everybody. I hope people can hear me because I'm on my cell phone sitting in the Platinum lounge at the Consensus Conference in Miami. Anybody can hear me for this working? Oh, good, Dave. Okay, cool. Yeah, I went back to the AirPods as opposed to the beats, which everyone yells at me that they doesn't sound good. But there's a lot going on in the world of crypto. And, you know, obviously people like talking about markets. So Bitcoin has kind of fallen back a little bit now, a little bit below 82, but there's a lot of optimism. And it is, I have to say, it is amazing to me that I can walk into a crypto conference and see a dozen of my old colleagues from Tradfied, many of which I didn't know had anything to do with crypto, all now working for crypto firms or doing things with crypto firms.

So the world is definitely changing. And it is, you know, despite all the geopolitics, it seems like people are just in head-down building mode right now. So, I mean, I don't know what other people think. I don't know if any of you are down here in Miami, but it is, it is interesting to watch. Yesterday, watching Mike Sealing, who's the CFTC chair, followed by, you know, a panel with, you know, an old friend of mine from the New York Stock Exchange with Carlos from security. and everyone talking about tokenization, and it's bringing us a very fascinating point. We also have Michael Saylor to talk about. You know, he announced in his earning call that, yes, we can in fact sell Bitcoin,

and then he explained on a podcast that will air Sunday that I happen to have been watching live, you know, why and how, and that's worth talking about. So I don't know which direction everybody wants to go in, but, you know, either I'll call on people or whatever. But, you know, since you flashed 100%, Maurizio, I mean, we're seeing Bitcoin and we're seeing crypto becoming more and more mainstream and lending is about as mainstream as it comes. I'm curious. I mean, what are you seeing right now? Are you seeing any differences, people talking about stuff? Hey, Dave. So I'll be actually a consensus tomorrow, so I might catch you at the conference.

Yeah, me. Yeah. Let's chat. So, yeah, I was just in Vegas. a week ago. And I think the attendance at the Vegas conference in terms of the sheer number of people felt, you know, it was slightly down from the year prior. It's funny because we had almost the exact same location at our booth and we kind of got to see a sort of true comparison between last year and this year. And I would say although last year there was more people, this year, the questions were a lot more sophisticated

and you can really see the the people that are still there are pretty bought in. They really get it. The theme of the Bitcoin Conference in Vegas, I would say, overarchingly was credit, was institutional credit with this idea of lending structured products around Bitcoin. There was a lot of, you know, we presented about our bond

and I was actually surprised to see how many people came by our booths. to basically talk to us about the bond. And the amount of Trad-Fi people coming by our booth, whether that was banks, advisors, underwriters, there's a lot of Trad-Fi circling because I believe they're seeing the writing on the wall that Bitcoin institutional products are here to stay,

and there's demand on the other side of that trade. And so I haven't been to consensus yet. I don't know what the vibe is there at the moment, but I would say that the crowd is definitely, switching to a more institutional crowd. And what we see in our numbers that led, and I think I made this point a few weeks ago when we were here, was that we were starting to see, as of now four to six weeks ago, a lot more bullish positioning. And by that, I mean people taking on more loans to buy Bitcoin, as opposed to partially paying down loans or asking questions about the downside

or the liquidation risk. They're more thinking long term up and to the right. And I think that's materializing right now in price action. I think that actually makes sense. Brian. Hey, everyone. Yeah, I was just going to echo both of your sentiments. I'm at consensus as well. I'd say that from my viewpoint, it's really well attended. The attendance or the sentiment has been a lot better than I would have thought, given prices. Having a lot of conversations with folks, I think that there's a general acceptance that crypto is really a tale of two cities right now, the stuff that's working is around traditional finance coming in, like stable coins, tokenization, maybe AI agents, but that's still early.

And then for a lot of the more speculative, I guess, traditional areas of crypto, there's a general acceptance that that stuff may not catch on. And then I'm also noting noting all the big traditional finance and tech institutions that are here, like JP Morgan, DTCC, Google, SOFI, many others. I'm spending time talking to all of them, trying to understand exactly what they're doing, how quickly they think it'll catch on, whether they're going to utilize public or private blockchains, and coming away quite encouraged. Everyone is basically pushing really hard on to incorporate blockchain technology. They're doing this because they're seeing demand from the customers. They want to improve customer experience, and quite frankly, they want to stay relevant.

My big takeaway, it's not going to be like one year where everything, all of a sudden, sudden is tokenized and the whole world is using stable coins. And it does seem like there's certain areas that are more ripe for disruption than others. But I do think like in three to seven years, it will be the case that a material amount of finance has moved to these new blockchain base rails. So sentiment is up and finding it quite encouraging. Yeah, I would echo that. I mean, we'll see if we need to find each other since we've never met in person, to my knowledge. but the truth is that people in the crypto world are trying to figure out what the hell does this mean for me in my bags. And that's not as obvious as it seems.

So, you know, like there's two topics that we could talk about. I don't really care which one we do. I'd like to talk about both of them. One is what it is becoming clear that public blockchains are actually going to get used by traditional financial companies. and there's some pretty good reasons for that. I did a post about it this morning. But that doesn't mean that, you know, you're going to see 10,000 percent gains in public blockchain native tokens

because there's no way, it doesn't make sense for the value, you know, to be like that unless something really radically changes. And then the other topic is we should talk about STRC and what micro-strategy is doing, at least in terms of Bitcoin. So does anyone care about the topic of public blockchains because one would think it would matter? that's Marie Tia. Yeah, I'm curious to see what you're hearing because the conversations do keep in mind that this was a lot of institutions at a Bitcoin event. I'm talking more so

about anecdotal chats I had in Las Vegas, especially in the context of what's happening in decentralized finance and the AVE bad debt exploit and the defy United and all this stuff. That I think, as I made the point last time we chatted, has exposed that there is risk in defy. There are that the guardrails that exist in TrotFi are very different that those that really don't exist in DFI. And I think that presents a big challenge when regulated entities are considering connecting into these public blockchains, not necessarily maybe a public blockchain for the purposes of settling a stable coin, but for the purposes of accessing financial services, right, like tokenized or not tokenized,

but on-chain financial services. There isn't yet, I think it's still an open question, what's going to happen with KYC, AML, and other types of compliance requirements to connect to those services. I think the Clarity Act does a lot of things, but doesn't answer that question. And so I'm curious if that's come up on the conversations you're having. Yeah, I think that people, there's a misapprobation, right? You know, people tend to think of defy as a blob, and it isn't. There's multiple things that you can do in a distributed way. in a decentralized way.

You can search for yield and create yield, you know, looking engines like an AVE. And that has the promise in terms of multiple verticals and finance to come out with more open architectures to create competition, right? So there's like securities finance, the repo market, interest rate, swaps markets. These are all very large businesses on Wall Street that are, they use closed systems. Those are going to take a while, right? So you'll see, defy right now is on the edges. So institutions go into it, it will be driven by the users.

So if you take a look at stock loan, it's an easy one to understand. There's a cabal of prime brokers, big banks, that basically control the market. And this pisses off both the lenders, i.e., the people who hold the stocks, the big retail platforms, et cetera, index funds, et cetera, because they get a very small percentage that prime brokers get the majority and the borrowers, the hedge funds and others who are shorting and or using this for hedging, etc. And what that, that business is ripe. The instant there's an ability for there to be an open protocol, the PBs will lose their edge. And that's almost certain to happen.

If you talk to them, they kind of know what's going to happen. But that's not going to happen using the kind of technology like Avey does. It's just, I'm sorry, it won't be. It'll be much more bulletproof, much more, you know, it won't be bridging from one thing to another and playing around. and so it's different. The other piece of DeFi, which is the trading side, I will continue to tell people that I understand the AMM model and the liquidity pool model, and I have said for five years or six years that it's a piece of garbage,

it's a terrible way to trade. It makes no fucking sense. And it's going to go the way of the Buffalo. It was there for regulatory arbitrage. It's illogical. Order books make much more sense and auctions make more sense. The AMM model is just a technological. solution to regulatory arbitrage.

And as people like hyperliquid prove that you can have an order book and be decentralized, that's going to win. And there will be new market models, etc. that will evolve. But so a lot of the kind of weird plumbing that evolved in defy is going to change over time. But the concept is going to stay the same.

Anyway, yeah, it's a bit of a ramble. And I didn't answer your AML question because the answer to that is governments are going to do what governments do. And so they're going to try to figure out a way around it. The only thing we do know is, Mike Sealy was very clear about this yesterday, that they do want a way to have software developers not be brokers and have brokers be brokers.

And we'll see how that works out because he did not make that clear. And no one asked that question. Anyway, David. Yeah, Dave, while you're on the subject of stock loan, didn't know if you wanted to discuss what the DTC is doing in terms of the launch of its own tokenization service. Obviously, it's going to impact more than stock loan. You know, this is something that goes across all securities and arguably helps to facilitate 24-7 trading. Yeah, I mean, it's funny.

I don't know if he's listening to me, but I'm at the table with someone who probably would have something to say about that. But the DTCC state move in the words of Carlos from securitize is a baby step. and it's not a bad baby step, but it's not where you really want to go. What you really want to be is actually tokenized securities, not tokenizing something on top of an infrastructure that basically has pieces of paper sitting in a vault under 55 Water Street. And so it is interesting. It is the kind of baby step you take, but it is far from a be-all and end-all.

But if you're DTCC and you have a closed system and your utility that everybody relies upon, obviously you want everyone to keep relying upon your utility. So it depends what jersey you're wearing, is the short answer to that question. But it clearly is a step in the right direction. They're just trying to stay relevant. Well, it's not about stay relevant. It's about, yeah, I mean, that's the, that's this,

look, they're the 800-pound gorilla in that space. I mean, they settle, you know, just unfathomable amounts of transactions and transaction value. I mean, the human brain can't comprehend a quadrillion. I mean, I certainly can't. But yeah, they are relevant, and there is a lot of institutional inertia every time you're trying to fix or change the system. But there are people out there who are actively working on a better system, and eventually that will break through. I mean, I've seen this movie before, right?

You know, actually just putting the finishing touches on a book where I talk about a lot of this, electronic trading was capable of being used in the early 90s, but it didn't really. break through into 2005 because the New York Stock Exchange specialists and market makers had so much vested interest in keeping the system slow and manual. So yeah, you're going to see the same thing play out here for sure. It'll be faster than that, but you're going to see it play out. Does that answer your question, David? Oh, yeah. Thanks. Yeah, they actually discussed it in a panel yesterday, and so it's fresh in my mind. I mean, you know, sorry. Who was that? Oh, sorry. It was Brian. I was just going to share one

additional thought. So I have a lot of friends that cover broker dealers and understand like market microstructure and talking to them, their view is that there are going to be different areas and different financial instruments that will be quicker to tokenize. Their thought was things like ETFs make a great candidate to be tokenized because they're already like a wrapper like product. But then other things like equities will be a bit slower because it's already decently efficient and there's centralized clearing and netting, which lowers liquidity needs and capital requirements. So just kind of thinking like what areas will be first,

it seems like ETFs and others might be the low-hanging fruit. Well, yeah, I'm glad you said that. So the ETF point is absolutely true. I agree with that. The point on the centralized settlement netting is such a bullshit argument. It is one of the biggest bullshit arguments that gets used, and I totally don't understand how people are dumb enough to fall for it.

Now, I'm not saying you, but I'm just saying it really is dumb. Now, here's why. In the world, when you have an option to do something, it doesn't mean you have to do it. So if you're token, if equities were tokenized, that doesn't mean you're going to have atomic settlement. What it means is you can have on-demand settlement. So you could easily have sessions with netting within a session so that, you know, like every eight hours market makers can net. And so you can buy, sell, buy sell, buy sell, and then settle. And you can settle on the blockchain.

at eight hours in one second or two seconds. In the current system, you're settling still with an overnight back office, you know, lift. I mean, anyone will tell you how much money was spent to go from T2 to T1 was a huge deal because it's a back office. Now, you're talking to someone who literally my first job at Wall Street was to work on part of that

batch system for Morgan Stanley. And I'm told some of that code is still in production. And so that should tell you something. First of all, I wasn't, you know, the best coder in the world. Second of all, it's from 40 years ago. So, you know, it's, you can do it in a tokenized world. But yes, they're going to fight like hell to keep their inefficient system. And so, yeah, it's going to be baby steps.

But that's really the point. And it's funny because so many people keep talking about it. Yet, you know, in a market where, you know, I ran to a friend of mine who, you know, she worked for State Street. And, you know, they're doing more on the digital asset side. She's on the traditional ETF side, and she came down here because they said, hey, we have a ticket. Do you want to learn more about this? So your point about ETS ultimately getting tokenized pretty quickly, I think it's absolutely right. Does that make sense, Brian?

Yeah, it definitely does. And I'd also be curious if you have a view on, like, which participants would want to push this along the fastest. I think, like, DTCC obviously wants to stay relevant. I think the exchanges have, you know, motivation to move in this direction. seems like maybe prime brokers would not. Like if you can lend out your stock, you know, for shorting purposes yourself and you don't have to go through a prime, like maybe some revenue streams for these intermediaries get disrupted.

I don't know if you have any thoughts on like who's pushing for this and who's not. Well, I mean, you nailed it. You're absolutely right. But the thing is, is that if you're a prime broker, you have a ton of businesses. I mean, J.P. Morgan has a ton of businesses. Yes, they have a huge crime broker, but they do a lot of other things. And, you know, these companies have learned. I mean, I was there at Citigroup when all these markets changed to go electronic.

And so, yeah, of course, you know, that created lots of disruption. But, you know, you try very hard to, you know, embrace the disruption when it's happening because you don't want to be irrelevant if you kind of like to take your head to sand. So, you know, that's true. You know, as I said, my friend who runs some sort of. is on the strategy side for the New York Stock Exchange is actually ICE. You know, ICE is their parent company. But, you know, they're all in on pushing towards tokenization.

You know, you've seen from NASDAQ as well, you know, CBO has been involved in the space. I mean, these guys are the 800-pound grills in the exchange base, and they know that this is going to matter. And, you know, what do they not want to have happen? Well, they don't want to have happen is for their market caps to be dramatically lower than startup crypto. firms. I mean, we heard yesterday someone from Robin Hood talk about how they think that these conversations, these are false distinctions, right? Because, you know, it's just finance. Yes, right now we have crypto and we have tradfied, but how many years it's before? It's just five, right? You know, I don't know if that makes sense, but that's going to happen. That answer your question?

Yeah. Yeah, it makes total sense. You kind of got to move on this stuff so you're not disremediated by those who do right and so that's what that's what's going on and you know the other thing that we've heard in the last couple days which is fascinating is you know i also know what's going to happen with the clarity act but my my my intense skepticism is that it will now pass and the reason i think it will now pass is because of a very simple but not really well understood point which is that with the cfTC and cc now having a text autonomy, having agreed literally among themselves how to divide up the world and are now working on rule sets that there's a very real chance that the market can move in the direction where

the only thing that clarity really does is create legislation that says you can never in the future regulate by enforcement. And I'm not saying that's not valuable, but it's not strictly necessary for a lot of people, which means that if you don't get a clarity act, but the Genius Act is the only law, which means that the banks have their, they're terrified of the whole interest thing on the yield and stable points. So what does that mean? What does that mean? It means that the banking lobby is going to be pushing for clarity and watching Democrats

cage. That's what I think is going to happen. And, you know, if you read the body language, as I said, Mike Sealy talked yesterday, and Paul Ackin spoke at the milking conference. And so if you read, if you watch both of them, they're basically saying, listen, we got a couple of years, we are going to be regulating this stuff in a rational way, and we're moving forward, which is from the industry's perspective, exactly what you want to hear. And if you're the banks, now all of a sudden, maybe we're going to push it on it. And so I think that this does

matter. Maritia, you think you think differently? No, I 100% agree with you. And this actually goes very much in line with some of the thinking that I heard from some other people. And again, this is a bit of a more skeptical long-term view. But again, the Clarity Act, does a lot of things, primarily to your point from a sort of power dynamics perspective, it goes to fix, quote, unquote, what the banks think it broke through the Genius Act. So I think, number one, they have an agenda to sort of plug that hole, if you would. And the other open question around the Clarity Act, which I think, again, is not talked about enough in our crypto circles or Bitcoin circles is that it does not address the AML and KYC issue.

It does not address, like it addresses a lot of other things in terms of structure, but it does not necessarily give a sort of white flag or a green flag for tokenized services to basically run, like do whatever they want, because it doesn't address that particular topic. So this could be, you know, clarity could come through fixing, quote, unquote, the bank's issue that they want to get sorted through their stable coin yield. And then longer term, it leaves an open door for four banks to a, or for, legislators to actually bring down not a hammer, but more clarity per se, further clarity around what is permissible or not from a compliance AML KYC perspective. And I think that is where

the banks potentially find comfort and that sort of long-term protection, if you want to call it that. But that is very in line with some of the thinking. I heard from some really smart people. And so I echo what you said. Yeah, I think that's right. I do want to make one point, though, that is funny. We always put AML KYC in the same breath. They started very, very differently. So just is a bit of a rant, but it's more people to understand.

AML is anti-money laundering. And effectively, the most important place to control money laundering is into and out of and in the stable coin world. There is a reason why payments is going to be in this hyper-regulated stable coin world. So one of the things that crypto used to really drive regulators bad shit crazy. And I'll never forget sitting in a room at the SEC with like 40 of them trying to explain this. But if you buy IBM stock, you can't sell IBM stock to buy a house.

You can't you can't sell it for dollars to buy the house, but you can't exchange. I can buy a house. Bitcoin clearly you can, and that scares them. A lot of other cryptos are tokenized other stuff. they are going to fight tooth and nail so that you can't swap your IBM or Tesla stop to buy a house or a business or use it in payment. They want that to go through stable points.

So they want to maintain something that crypto and the notion of pairwise trading could allow. And so if you do that, then you can enforce most of your money laundering on the stable coin side. That's what they think. And you can poke holes of that if you want and that's fine. I do myself.

But I'm telling you that's how they think. KYC is know your customer. And KYC started for, is this investment prudent? Does it make sense? Are you selling the wrong thing? And it was really based on brokerage, you know, doing an advisory to retail. But with the rise of self-directed trading, that's kind of gone. I mean, you know, you just make people say, you know, you're going to click through a thing that says,

I recognize these investors have risk, I do this, it's not solicited, et cetera. And so KYC, with the exception of knowing who they are for the AML perspective, is going to go boom. And that's not really going to impact it. And so the rules, I think for each show is what will happen is it's going to pop up around payments and stable coins. And look, you could get a lot of cypherpunk people up here to tell you the same thing about to say, which is that the AML rules have more or less failed. They don't work. And it's not like this fact that's lost on anybody.

you know, there's, just look at the number of fines in the banking system for AML. It's kind of crazy. No, as of Venezuela, I agree with you. You know, I still have a lot of friends and family that cannot open a bank account. They, just because of where they were born. And I'm not saying it's perfect by any means, you know, at all. And there's a lot that can be fixed. But, you know, just, just again, to compare.

And this is more just a, this is not a secret, right? Like right now, there's, it's almost like there's two standards, right? Because, you know, a centralized company will have to have, you know, an army of lawyers, an army of compliance people, eight different licenses to service one state. And then on the other side, you can just spin up some code and say that, you know, it's decentralized and then offer the same services without the lawyers, without the agreements. And so I think at some point, if you look at who this, biggest centralized players are in the world today, they're the banks, right? And every single other

trad-fay institution you mentioned has those same armies of lawyers and requirements. And so, I think it's just going to be interesting to see how this, you know, does collide or doesn't? But it's interesting. I'll tell you what. I mean, I met with three different neobanks,

people who are much lighter touch in terms of regulators and where it's going, and I think that that's going to get a trend, right? And that have some pretty big investable impacts, right? But, you know, right now, yeah, you're probably right. I mean, look, I think that a lot of this stuff is going to matter from a crypto holder perspective, like, you know, people worrying about what, you know, what coins are going to do what,

what token is going to do what. And I think that the most important question really is, if you try to evaluate an asset, is where's the value coming from? I mean, let's say for the sake of argument that the entire, you know, whatever, trading market, you know, all of it is going go out of the Solana. Now, I'm not saying it's going to happen, by the way. I'm just saying this as a thought experiment, what would that mean for the value of the Solana token? And my answer is, it's not 100% clear, right? You know, the same thing can be said for any other token. And so you really need to be able to follow that through. And this is the thread that I think it's important for the audience to pull through. It's like, what does all this stuff mean?

Because the one thing we know for sure is technology is going to become ubiquitous. We know that. right anybody have any any thoughts here other than the other than listening to marion i talk although we could talk all day i mean i'd be fine by me but i mean lawyer you know if you've been listening all this stuff i mean to make you crazy or or you see what's going on no i same old i mean i don't see what i don't think that i have anything meaningful to add but you know powerful the course yeah it's it it it's you know all i could say is watching TradFi come into crypto, the one thing I do know is when markets move into something, every single one of these people want to try to figure out the best way for them to make

money. And so you just have to remember that. Now, generally speaking, what will happen is they'll take investments in what they're going to use. And so that will end up being good for people who are in that investment first. And so I would say move accordingly. I mean, Jamie, you know, you host a lot of shows and you talk to a lot of people from the crypto community. I mean, do you think people have their eyes open as to what's happening? Yeah, I do. I think it's mixed. I think there's a, you know, still resistance within the core, you know, Bitcoin, Morse-related that the Trafai is, you know, hopefully not going to continue to take over. I think, especially after the conference, the Bitcoin conference,

there was a clear message that this is a bad sentiment across crypto of where this is headed and what's it going. So, yeah, I think it's going to be interesting. And then hearing what you're saying from consensus, it kind of confirms it. So, I mean,

I think it's something we're going to have to get used to, and we're going to have to find a way forward, especially with the crypto and the Bitcoin ecosystems together. Yeah, Greg, I see your end up. Yeah. I think, can you hear me clearly? I just want to make sure.

I'm just a new headset. Okay, perfect. I think the relationship between Bitcoin and all other crypto is incredibly close. And I think just from day one, when we look at Laswell, Skaena, the 10,000 Bitcoin for two pieces, Bitcoin started off as a mean. It was a joke. Now it's not a joke anymore.

And so you have all these powerful institutions taking their position, and it just begs for one thought, and then just kind of curious to see what you're, your response is on this. It strikes. You view strike from Michael Steller. Do you view that as a net positive or a neutral or negative in a space? That's just my question for you.

And then just on second of that, I'm very curious to see if we had over towards $100,000 in the next through the state three months, maybe even five, towards over past $100,000, how the overall market is going to respond. I see little market manipulations. around certain NFC communities. And I think Scott was joking last week about lazy lines. Like, I hope my lazy line value goes up. So for me, I'm watching how, you know, in a very manipulated market,

how people are positioning their bags so they can make money, maybe extract. You know, maybe it's not a negative. Backing to Bitcoin. But do you see strike as a positive or is it just kind of a negative or a net news school for you? I don't want to comment on them particular, but what I will say is this. There is a bifurcation. You know, people like me, I'm not alone, have, you know, kind of look at crypto as Bitcoin is a monetary asset and will, growing into its monetary assetness. And the rest of crypto are infrastructure assets that may have utility and will grow, live or die, appreciate or fall based upon how that utility gets done.

And it's getting much, much, much more obvious that that view of the world is what the market is, what the market is. pricing, right? And so when you look at, you know, some of the news on Bitcoin like today, so, you know, Saylor comes out and he says he makes a statement that you, if it had been a month ago or two months ago, if he, if all you saw was the headline, you know, Saylor says that, yeah, we can sell some BTC. I mean, it would have gotten crushed. But what he actually said, which is interesting is, you know, we're almost certainly going to stay a net buyer at BTC. But if we sell small amounts in order to fund dividends on our digital credit product as it's going higher, why wouldn't we do that? And it's very logical. And, you know, he made a point that, you know,

I hate to steal the thunder. It's going to be a really, it was a really good interview that's going to come out on Scott's channel on Sunday. And I strongly advise people to watch it. But he made a point that, you know, that Scott then talked about, so I'll mention this, which is that if he was completely unwilling to sell Bitcoin, then that would make the asset impaired and not useful. He needs to be able to have it on his balance sheet in an unimpaired manner. And so it has to be able to be sold. And so anyone, you know, like I saw various people on the internet saying, on X on this platform saying, well, you know, you see, lie to you. It's like, no, not a lie. It's just, it is what it is. And you need to understand that. And, you know, these are adults that are

playing in the real world with billions of dollars at stake, and they're not going to do things based upon, you know, some philosophy that, you know, you might think about as kind of, you know, important. Jamie? Yeah, I really like this, actually. So, I mean, for me, I'm kind of with you, Dave. I think the end result is that this increases the likelihood that the dividends and obligations are going to continue, right? I mean, the concerns always come up with, well, strategy can exercise. They don't actually have to pay it out, you know. So I think this kind of proves that kind of takes that argument out of the equation. I think it sends a message, you know, it's more so about smart treasury management than it is capitulation. I mean, he said he's going to sell a small amount

just to prove that they're liquid, you know, that they're going to do it to pay dividends and allows for some flexibility, maybe with some tax harvesting. You know, on the downside or on the, on the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, that's the, you know, I think it kind of delutes the arc of, you know, uh, sailor as, uh, you know, the champion, one of the champions who's taken us from 2020 through now and kind of breaks that hoddle narrative that, you know, that, that's really core to the bitcoins. But I think net positive, it's smart. It's, it's, it's something that, you know, uh, it is more important. than keeping the story that they'll huddle, and it's really what's about going to drive long-term success and stability. That's kind of what I would put my two cents on.

I'm curious what you think. I agree with you. Craig Zan Maritio. You know, I just wanted to say thank you for that layered answer. It's not whether it's a positive, negative, or neutral. It's what is the representation of SDR in the overall ethos? And I appreciate it. And Jamie, thanks for that context on that.

That really kind of helps to kind of reposition my thought on. kind of overall where Michael Seller is and the importance of it. Yeah, look, there's no way you can look at this market without understanding what's happened from BlackRock and BitWise and the other cadre of ETFs and from strategy and soon to be Jack Mahler's and what his company is doing. We saw a plethora of other also rands who pumped their stocks up and did some stupid things, including the guy who runs the Bitcoin conference. And, you know, there's no doubt that that had a lot to do with the psychology in the market. And it wasn't good. But, you know, we're getting to a much more professional balanced approach. And that is good.

And the prices, quite frankly, don't reflect it all yet, which is why I have been, and I took a lot of shit over the last couple of months, basically saying when I said autumn. And I laughed at people on the four-year cycle. And I talked about, you know, how much M2 has grown. It didn't really matter what the reasons are. But, you know, I'm sorry. But, you know, it just, it feels to. me that a grinding rally, which will not be as fast as people want it to be, that will frustrate

them is the most likely scenario. And I've been saying that for $20,000 on the Bitcoin's price. And I'm not changing it because it feels the same. Anyway, Mauritia. Yeah, I agree with your grinding rally view. I think that's pretty much what we're going to see. And it's going to frustrate a bunch of people like the previous market cycle top did. But I think going back to this SCRC slash we can sell Bitcoin comment, I've been watching some of Michael's interviews recently, and I've noticed a shift. And he's actually pretty open about it in that I think when I look at the soundbite,

this idea that, hey, yes, we can sell Bitcoin to pay the dividends. It's a comment that is, you know, at face value, you could perceive it as a negative comment for MSTR and a positive comment for STRC, right? And if you listen to him speak over the last little bit, he sort of has come around his thinking. And given the wild success that SCRC is seeing, he's realizing that it's better for him to be the champion of high predictable yield than that is to be the champion of Bitcoin. And so if his product is no longer superpower Bitcoin, his product is amazing yield, stable yield. And I think what he's realizing is he wants to go after the sort of money market pie, and that's an easier pie to convert than to convert corporate treasuries into buying Bitcoin or MSCR.

So the easier sell is, hey, stop earning 4% on money markets, a carbon 11.5 at STRC. Don't worry about how I pay it to you. I'll make sure you're good with the dividends. And I think for him, that basically feeds his flywheel, I would argue perhaps more productively with an MSCR, just given the signals he's sending to the market. But to me, this is a bit of a pivot into, from you're selling supercharged Bitcoin via MSCR, to you're selling incredible yield through STRC.

And that comment in my mind reflects that. Well, I'm not sure I agree with that, but rather than letting me talk about it, Grain, did you just disappear? No, I'm here. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Yeah, I mean, this is your bailiwick. So why don't you go, Guy, I just want to let Grain jump in here because this is something.

think these experts. Yeah. So, so, this is awesome that Maritio is on the call. So, and you'll see how this is related

to MSTR and STRC in 15 seconds. So Maritia, I was talking to you at, at the Bitcoin conference, and I said, yeah, man. Yeah,

you remember this conversation? And I said, I said to you, and by the way, this was in a public setting. There was people around this. So you don't mind me retelling this story, correct?

Not at all. Right, right. So I said to him, I said, so Leden got a credit rating on their product. And they said, hey, can strategy get a credit rating? And what you said, and you correct me if I make any mistake about what you said.

And he said, it'll be hard for him to do it because he, like us with Leden, we're able to liquidate a Bitcoin position if it drops to a certain level. And since strategy is unwilling to do that, it'll be very difficult for them to get a credit rating. Is that a good paraphrase? Yes. And it's obviously a lawyer can probably. probably give it more nuance, but in, and not too many words, yes. Yes.

So now when you look at this, and strategy has done a tax loss harvest before in 2022, so now this has changed the way that they, the perception, because they've been more forthright about what they've said. And so now they can say, look, you know, if you're trying to short the stock, they're saying, look, we could sell. And I did the math and I did the post on it. They could say, hey, you know, we'll sell 50,000 Bitcoin. And that'll at $80,000.

It's worth $4 billion. They can book a tax loss on it. People would be like, well, why would that stop the shorts? Well, they can take a billion dollars of it and start buying back their shares. And now all of a sudden there's a buyer in the market with a billion dollars that you don't know when they're going to deploy that cash to buy back their shares. Or since I said there was $4 billion, in strategy said this, they could retire their converts, not all of them.

And they can say, we'll put a billion dollars towards the converts. And so now it's like, wait a second, they're getting rid of a delta hedge on their stock, which is the converts, right? Somebody takes the convert, then they dealt the hedge and short it. Now they have somebody saying, wait a second, he could buy back the actual shares for a billion dollars. He could buy back another billion dollars worth of the convert early. And then he still has $2 billion sitting in cash. And that increases the credit worthiness of the company.

And you're like, wow, why? because they sold the most expensive Bitcoin that they bought. They have a little bit over 100,000 Bitcoins that were purchased at, you know, above $100,000. So the crazy part about this is that this strategy works, as you say, this plan works, when right now when Bitcoin is low, if Bitcoin rips to 125,000, they kind of don't have any Bitcoin that's below their cost basis. So this would be better to do this now and buy back some shares or buy back the converts because they get the tax loss benefit.

And this is, this is, this is a big, a big change in what they've done. I'll answer any questions. Mauritio chime in. See if what I said make, if that makes sense to you. No, I, I, I, to me, what you, what you just laid out is this idea that it gives strategy and Michael and the board more flexibility on, on, basically it does not impair the Bitcoin position. It allows them to use the Bitcoin position for what's best for the company and share prices.

And I think as a shareholder, not, not necessarily. like a fervent bitcoiner. Like if you look at if you're looking at this through your bitcoin Maximilus glasses on, this is terrible because, you know, he was supposed to be the champion and never sell it and now he's saying he's going to sell it. So like from a Bitcoin Maximilist perspective, you can see how this is against the sort of, you know, the faith, or not the faith, but like the mission, right? But as a strategy shareholder, regardless of where you are on that stack, I think this is a welcome, you know, welcome statement because it does assure you that he's looking out for your better.

And for your interest, as opposed to, you know, making Bitcoin, you know, rise to a particular level. Yeah. And I want, you know, people to understand about this that, you know, it's one, look, they've acquired a lot of Bitcoin and they have different terms. Bitcoin yield is the net increase of Bitcoin per share. But then they talk about something called Bitcoin gain. And Bitcoin gain takes into account any debt or all the parameters for acquiring

Bitcoin. So in the fourth quarter of 2024, that was the best quarter. That was the best quarter for ever acquiring Bitcoin and the best Bitcoin gain. So that was a huge advantage to buying Bitcoin. But in other quarters, not only did they buy Bitcoin, but they bought it at a high price and a low MNAV. So this allows them to correct that situation. So this is like, this is where you have to think about there's multiple parts.

Not only can they, like I said, sell 50,000 Bitcoin just to keep the math simple, $4 billion and book a tax loss, but they're also able to pay dividends. And if their dividends is about $1.2 billion per year, but in one sale, in one sale, $4 billion, they get the tax loss and they can pay the dividends. And people are like, yeah, okay, but I thought the goal was acquiring more Bitcoin. You know what? One week later or two week later, they could buy back another billion Bitcoin. And people would be like, well, why would they sell Bitcoin if they're buying it back again?

Well, they're buying back the Bitcoin with STRC. they're selling Bitcoin at a high cost basis. And Josh Mandel made a comment. The wash rule does not apply to Bitcoin. But I would say as an operating company, now as a hedge fund, they would not take advantage of that. What they would do is they would sell the Bitcoin and they don't have to sell 50,000 in one shot.

They could sell it, you know, 10,000 or, you know, at a time. They can get the tax loss. Then they start issuing STRC and that increases their, amplification. So this is where it becomes more complex, but it becomes more accretive to the common shareholders. And the shorts have to be thinking now is, oh, crap, if he sells the Bitcoin and he's sitting on a mountain of cash, what is he going to do? He's going to buy back his shares. And by the way, Mag 7 companies, and I wrote a piece about this, they buy back about a trillion dollars worth of shares every year. So stock buybacks are common and they've been around for, I don't know, 50 years,

75 years, whatever it's been. But Apple buys back their own shares. And I wrote an article about this in September of last year and people like thought, well, that's a terrible idea to buy back their own shares. And I'm like, no, it's not. It just took a little bit of time for it to sink in. Yeah, I can follow up on that. Agree with everything that you said. To me, the simple explanation of all this is that it's really just in service of Bitcoin per share. I mean, that is the whole point of owning a Bitcoin treasury company like micro strategy. Otherwise, you might as well just buy Ibit. Obviously, they lost their premium multiple that they once had, given an influt of a lot of other copycats and us being in the spare market. So they're not raising equity via the ATM, or at least

they hadn't been. They then moved over to the convert market. They filled that market up. also it brings on additional credit risk that they don't really want. And so now they move to this model where they issue these prefs. And the very simple way to think about it is if BTC appreciates more than the yield on the press, then that was a good trade. And they need to basically keep issuing these prefs to continue to grow and to continue to increase BT per share. And there's no better way than to be able to continue to issue prefs than to say you have 60 billion of unencumbered Bitcoin that they can use for the dividends. And then the other thing that they can do, and this is to your point gains, is they can actually monetize the multiple in both directions. So when you trade

at this substantial premium, you issue equity by definition is accretive to your BTC per share. But then if you do happen to trade at a discount, you can basically sell Bitcoin, buy back your stock. You run over the shorts, but then you also, by definition, is additionally accretive to BTC per share. So I think like the whole point of owning MSTR is, last I calculated it, since August 2020, when they turned on this strategy, they increased Bitcoin per share at a 65% Kager. That's the whole reason why you'd be willing to pay a premium and buy less Bitcoin through MSTR than just buying Bitcoin outright because you think they're going to compound NAV and compound BTC per share over time. And pretty quickly, you'll be better off and own more Bitcoin through them.

I think this all just goes to be in service of that Bitcoin yield and PTC per share. Yeah, so look, I agree with what you're saying, but I want to make sure this nuance but important point gets across. Let's say I buy a house and the house goes up in value when they take out a home equity loan. I would prefer to take out the home equity loan at the time and place when, when, when the house is trading at a higher equity value to what I bought it. So sometimes, let's say they reduce interest rates or I refinance, a house price could jump up in price, and that's the point when I have the most equity.

So it's not only about increasing Bitcoin per share. It's about, and this is why BTC gain is a much different number than BTC yield. Not all BTC yield is the same. Because when strategy sells stock at 3MNAV, use the math real simple, This is when Saylor made the comment. I'm selling a $1 stock for $3. I capture the $2 arbitrage and immediately becomes accretive. And you're like, where did the $2 come from?

Because three times one is three. So you're selling a $1 stock for $3. And the difference between the $1 stock and $3 is $2. And that premium right there, getting that $2 in premium is the key part. That's the most accretive way to increase the BTCE. yield, BTC per share. But if he sells stock at 1.25 MNAV, right? If you just use a simple math, he's not getting that $1.75 a premium that he got from the market because the multiple was high. So while it's still BTC yield increases, it's nowhere near as close as a higher MNAV.

So this is the most important part. He's trying to ensure that his stock is based upon having the lowest cost-based Bitcoin, right? And he'll take any tax gain that he can get in order to do this. He did not use this term, and this is the term I wish they would use, is shareholder value. The goal of a Bitcoin treasury company, I'm going to give, right now I'm going to give away a trillion dollars worth of free advice to Bitcoin treasury companies and to digital asset companies. Okay, digital asset treasury. This is a $1 trillion free gift if you're listening on the call. If you have a publicly traded company, it is not about acquiring the most Bitcoin or the most Ethereum or any digital asset. That is not your goal.

Your goal is shareholder value and making sure your stock trades at a high price. That is your goal. That is a fundamental public market goal. That's a $1 trillion rule or law. You can say grain of salt said it. I wrote a book on this. But if you say, no, we're going to acquire as much Bitcoin. is possible, you know what?

Your stock may take a horrible beating, or you may say we're going to acquire more Bitcoin than strategy. Your stock takes a horrible beating. We're going to acquire Bitcoin at the fastest rate possible in case anybody thinks that I'm being not clear here, metaplanet. We're going to acquire Bitcoin at 500% BTC yield, but then you have a stock trading at $2. And that's because BTC yield without looking at the MNAV is kind of screwed up. Oh, but they're acquiring Bitcoin faster than strategy by 50X, right?

Because 500% is 50x more than 10% a year? Which strategy is metric? To grow Bitcoin yield at 10% a year, which means it doubles in about seven years. So their goal to do that, but it's to also preserve shareholder value. you acquire tons of Bitcoin and you do not preserve shareholder value, your shareholders hate you, you don't have capital formation, and you can't raise money, and you can't get out of preff. That's why, as of right now, there's only two companies that have a preface, that a pref that's out. One is strategy and one is strive.

That's it. That's all there is. So if your other Bitcoin treasury companies, right, or digital asset treasury companies, this is the trillion dollar idea. it all comes down to capital formation. Whatever asset you're acquiring, it has to be valuable in your stock price. And if you say, we're just going to acquire Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever as fast as possible to get the most, you have not, you have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders.

And if you don't do that, it's not going to be durable. Your stock will be impaired. I'll take any questions on that. I'm a little bit wound up, but that's the key point. Yeah, but I mean, look, obviously we have a counter example in Nakamoto, you know, which is like literally the exact opposite, you know, and he didn't vaporize a trillion dollars only because it wasn't that big, but he vaporized quite a bit of money. Yeah, by the way, I met collectively data as a whole, but, but no, I know.

I'm happy to make fun of him because, you know, it's like he puts himself out there and has done some stuff that I just. So let me let me recap. I lost funny there, but not nearly in the, you know, enough to be angry, but enough for me to basically make fun of some obviously bad fiduciary stuff. But look, I don't want to kill ourselves on the stock price stuff. It's all part of an ecosystem, and your point is well-aken. There's an ecosystem. And if you care about the coin the asset, if you care about other crypto assets,

then you need to know who the sellers and buyers are. And understanding that when MNAVs are high, that that means that there's going to be more assets bought because they're going to be liquidated stock. That's important. And when MNAVs are low, then it's going to be the opposite. So these are the sorts of cushions and liquidity dynamics that most people in the market are not really aware of.

And you're extremely aware of it. But I think so it's valuable for people who own it. So anyway, I saw Vuda and then Brian. Hey, guys. Yeah, I just wanted to, yeah, I'm here. I want to comment on what Grain was saying. And just like really simply for the trade that Saylor was saying, hey, we're willing to do this. He's basically saying we're willing to sell one unit of Bitcoin to then buy 20 units of Bitcoin through the sale of STRC.

Just simply. And most of the maximalists are getting mad because of selling Bitcoin. But he's not selling Bitcoin at like 105 and then hoping the price gets to some level and hoping to select the bottom. he already knows the tax implication and benefit that he can get from harvesting that, and then immediately the next week buying multiples of his sale. That's not something hodlers have ever experienced or have ever been able to do. And I think that's a unique quality that people just aren't respecting. I think that's right.

In fact, he more or less said that. you know, as I said in the interview that you got a little pop on Sunday. He more or less said exactly that. He said, listen, yeah, we may sell, you know, 50 Bitcoin and buy, you know, whatever, a thousand, you know, or hundreds or whatever. You know, it's, you know, the tax loss harvesting is obviously useful, but it's not just that. It's also understanding and how the accounting is working inside the company. They have a variety.

They have an entire capital stack and a digital credit stack. It's not monolithic. So, yeah, your point is really good. Yeah, the stable, you know, him not selling Bitcoin, I think was an exercise in his own discipline. I think if he knew the optionality that was available to them, they could have done this earlier if they wanted to. But like Grant had pointed out, the people that were doing some of these kind of more aggressive optionality strategies started having issues. and Sailor waited until he was at a size and scale where he had all the levers that he can pull on to then say, okay, we're ready for this fight.

We have the scale, we have the capital, we have the size to be able to push, you know, the market into a corner if we don't like what they're saying or what they're doing or we disagree with them or we find opportunity and such. Exactly. And it's absolutely not being respected. For some reason, I don't know if it's unseen actor versus seen actor type of thing going on where this company is communicating so explicitly, continuously, continuously, nearly every week that it creates a vector for people to just scream in the void about. And I think, you know, you don't see any of this with almost any major company because they don't talk about what they're doing so explicitly every week.

And having the Bitcoin stack as a stationary stack with no utility creates a vector for shorts that Sailor basically has to stand in front of the boxing ring and get punched in the face and say, hey, I'm willing to take this volatility. But if Bitcoin's going down, this is an obvious vector for attack, and we can't quote unquote do anything right now because we're hoping there's no utility in the Bitcoin stack other than the collateralization of the product. So now he's like, hey, we're going to start accessing this utility. I'm going to start dodging.

I'm going to start throwing punches. That all makes perfect sense. Okay, so Brian and then Grain, we're going to let you bring us home. Yeah, thank you. I was just going to respond to Graen's comment. So completely hear you on issuance at different multiples. Like if you trade it two times, you're effectively selling a dollar for two or you're buying Bitcoin half off and you should issue as much as you can.

If you're trading at 1.05 ex-banker fees, it technically might be accretive but only slightly. And you probably actually don't want MSTR issuing there because if you're growing the company, you're just making future accretion harder. In other words, a similarly size, similarly price raise will be much less accretive on a much larger base. And then I think the other issue is that if you only use the ATM, you're almost definitionally buying high. And that's because you trade at the highest multiple and can therefore raise the most money when you're in a bull market when the price of BTC is high. And I haven't done this calculation, but my best guess is if micro strategy would have somehow been able to DCA into Bitcoin since they started this strategy in 2020, they'd have a much lower average purchase price than they currently do now. And so it sounds to me, grain, like what you're saying is like this new evolution of their strategy is something that could directly help with this.

Absolutely. I mean, I mean, this is the big shift here. Now, look, for a regular, this is for any stock investor. This is not, this is not financial advice. Look, tax loss harvesting has been around for, I don't know, 75 years. Maybe it's been around longer. So if you made a bunch of money on a whole bunch of stocks in one year, before you. December 31st, you then sell your losers, right? Now, assume that you think that your losers are going to

recover. You could then buy them back. This is why December 31st is an important year. In one year, you sell whatever losers you had or a percentage of your losers. You sell those. It offsets the gains on the winners that you don't want to sell. You don't sell those. Okay. But if you did sell those, you could then book your tax loss against what you sold. And so doing it in a time, tax year is important. What strategy is done here is they've looked back now and they're like, hey, we have high cost basis Bitcoin that we bought that we can now sell. And they tell you on, they told you in the presentation. I think it's $129,000 or $139,000 that they bought over $100,000. They paid for it. But if Bitcoin rips higher, it doesn't help them, but this, because

the stock will go up and Bitcoin goes up. It's not in a loss anymore. So I think they're going to do this sooner rather than later. And I'm going to predict the future. You're going to see a bunch of impaired Bitcoin treasury companies that are like, you know what, Saylor's signal to the market that this is okay. They will sell their high cost basis Bitcoin. They'll have a much better capital stack. And they'll be able to go back to capital formation because they sold off their high cost basis Bitcoin or impaired Bitcoin. And they'll be able to resume this and get it working.

I think Saylor, what he said, not only helped his own company, but helped the rest of the Bitcoin Treasury companies and say, if it's in your best interest to sell Bitcoin, do that strategically. that's the key point. So I don't anymore to add, Dave, but, you know, I use it. Thank you. I think that's right. Well, we're basically up against time. Does anybody else has any other thoughts? I'm going to go back into the conference. We're seeing what's going on. It was funny as I was talking. Kevin Leary was literally right behind me speaking. So I didn't hear what you're saying. But it's all, it's all interesting. Anyway, we'll see you guys all on Friday morning with less crap going on. I think we'll all be back at our desk.

and we'll see how all of this stuff progresses. So thank you very much and see you next time. See you, Dave. Great job today, Dave. You guys.