The Wolf Of All Streets - How Miami Is Becoming The Bitcoin Capital Of The World | Mayor Francis Suarez

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

Mayor Francis Suarez has led the charge for city and state adoption of Bitcoin and crypto. His relentless commitment to technological innovation and welcoming companies and individuals with open arms has quickly made Miami a contender for crypto capital of the world. Be careful if you listen to this episode, because there is a good chance you will feel a strong urge to pack up everything and move to Miami if you don’t already live there.  -- Arculus: Arculus is the new crypto cold storage wallet that combines the world’s strongest security protocols with an easy-to-manage app. Store, swap, and send your crypto all with a simple tap of your Arculus Key™ card. Order the safer, simpler, smarter crypto cold storage solution today at: https://thewolfofallstreets.link/arculus -- Kava: Kava connects the world's largest cryptocurrencies, ecosystems and financial applications on DeFi’s most trusted, scalable and secure earning platform. Kava lets you mint stablecoins, lend, borrow, earn and swap safely and efficiently across the world’s biggest crypto assets. To learn more visit https://thewolfofallstreets.link/kava --- 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 ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This podcast is sponsored by Kava and Arculus. Stay tuned for more information about both of them later in this episode. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast, where twice a week, I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, music, art, sports, politics, basically

anyone with a good story to tell. And today's guest certainly has a good story to tell. And today's guest certainly has a good story to tell and fits into more than just one of those classifications. Now, the main narrative surrounding Bitcoin over the last year has been adoption, mainstream adoption, institutional adoption, country adoption, and of course, adoption by cities. Now, many of us talk about El Salvador and what they've been doing as a nation, but the reality is that one mayor and one city was doing it first,

and that was Francis Suarez in Miami. And so we're gonna talk to him about his story and what's coming next for Miami, the future crypto capital of the United States. Mayor Suarez, thank you so much for taking the time. Scott, thanks so much for having me. I think we both have a little bit of a Basel hangover, but I'm happy to be with you today and to talk about one of my favorite subjects.

Great. I'm so happy to have you that we finally got this on the book. So listen, I moved away from Miami on the last round four years ago, and my wife and I and all of our friends used to joke that everyone in Miami seemed to have money, but nobody in Miami seemed to have a job, right? And every person I would talk to in Miami, I'd be like, what do you do? This, a little this, a little that. That has changed immensely. Now, when I visit Miami, I'm there for meetings. Everybody is doing serious things. Can you talk about that transition? First of all, that might just be in my mind, but I really feel like Miami has become a serious player now with people doing very serious things. Well, it's absolutely not in your mind, Scott. The KPIs are there to prove what you feel anecdotally, which is that we're number one in the nation

right now in tech job growth. We're number one in the nation in tech job migration. We've moved over a trillion dollars of assets under management companies to the city of Miami in the last 16 months. And PitchBook just released its findings for the year. And we increased 200% in VC deals, you know, pre-pandemic. So everything that you're feeling is showing up in the statistics. So it's not just anecdotal. It's not just something that you feel. It's something that's actually happening. And I think what happened was there was a confluence of macro factors. I can't take, you know, all the credit myself. There was a confluence of macro factors. I can't take all the credit myself. There was a confluence of macro factors that came together from the salt deduction, which happened a few years ago, going away to COVID, which has been obviously devastating, but has had a positive impact in many ways on Miami

because we're more open and remote work allowed people like you and others to be able to work from wherever they wanted to be, not from where they felt like they had to be. And when they did that, they realized that something had changed in Miami. Miami had changed that the critical mass of doers and innovators had reached a level where you wouldn't sacrifice anything by being here. You know, the great weather, the great taxes, the great quality of life. Now you can do business and you're not at a disadvantage. And I think when you had people like Ken Griffin from Citadel coming down here, you had people like Keith Rabois from Founders Fund coming down here. Marcelo Claudio, who spends a significant amount of time down here from SoftBank that created the Miami initiative that started off as a $100 million pledge for new Miami companies and companies that were moving here. And to date, in less than a year, they've already allocated over 250 million dollars so you know to all the unicorns that have been created just this year alone and papa and reef and and uh you know so many a pipe

and so many others i mean you have uh a new narrative a new miami that really in my opinion is the epicenter of five major markets south america uh new york silicon valley uh europe and and the middle east and no one of those five markets is closer to the other five than we are. And I think that allows us to sort of graduate from being known as the sort of capital of Latin America to really the epicenter of capital or what I call the capital of capital. Do you see that in the future, it could literally replace New York as the financial capital of the United States? I do. And I'll tell you why. If you look back at the history of this country and you look back at the history of the world, the rate

of disruption, the way companies are being disrupted has never been greater. It's basically exponential now. And when you look back at, you know, cities, even in America that were very prominent cities, you see that when something changed in the macro markets, they were disrupted. You know, Detroit's a great example of when the auto industry, you know, went overseas and how much that issue was disrupted. There's so many cities across America, particularly in rural America, that when they lost the manufacturing jobs, their entire population dwindled down to almost nothing. And so, you know, we're now seeing a new revolution, which is not the industrial revolution, but the technological revolution. And that has a

massively disruptive impact. And the cities that embrace that disruption, like we did with crypto and with Bitcoin, are the cities that are going to forge ahead and those that are slow to react are going to get behind. Right. It's interesting. You listed a whole bunch of sort of external factors that led to more interest in Miami, but obviously that wasn't taking credit where it was due for the fact that it's been extremely, extremely well-planned and thought out to bring those jobs and those companies to Miami. So can you talk a bit about why you decided to make that commitment? That's what you decided to focus on and how that's worked. Well, Scott, I think I'm at a sort of an inflection point in my life. And this country's at an inflection point, right?

And I think I'm young enough to understand the tech, but old enough to do something about it. And so this idea of creating a technological ecosystem in our city was really a 10-year bill. You know, oftentimes you see companies scale. And I'm reminded of a saying that you hear in some of our churches, they see the glory, but they don't know the real story. You know, so the glory is that scale moment, that direct IPO moment. But people don't realize a lot of these companies were started in a basement, you know what I mean, in a garage, that people, you know, ate, you know, leftover food for three days, you know, couldn't couldn't pay their bills.

And so that's what often is forgotten when you see these successful companies. People forget where they started and where they came from, which is why I love reading a lot of books on how this happened. And so for us, it was similar. We were a small business. We were trying to create a tech ecosystem. And we did it bootstrap with friends and family, money, very, very little investment. But we started creating the building blocks. We created a tech conference called Emerge.

We created, you know, accelerators and, you know, and we brought some like 500 startups and Endeavor, which started its first Endeavor city in Miami, Endeavor Miami. So we started getting the accelerators, the, you know, the, to come to Miami. And that's what started creating sort of the ecosystem. Then we had what I call the direct IPO moment, right? Which is when a year ago, somebody put out, hey, what if we bring Silicon Valley to Miami? And I tweeted, how can I help? And just to give you a sense of what has changed aside from all the KPIs that we talked about was when I put out that tweet last year, December 4th, it got 2.9 million impressions. There's a lot of impressions for a tweet, right? We put that tweet out again, December 4th this year. Right now, currently, it's at 5.6 million impressions. So it is almost doubled in terms of the landscape of people that have paid attention to what's happening in Miami. And I went from, I think, 30,000 followers a year ago to 130,000 followers this year. So we've totally changed our brand impact. We've totally changed

our perception. And if I would have told you on December 3rd of last year, hey, we're going to be the most talked about city in tech for a year, you'd be like, dude, you're crazy. You got to go in a sale asylum and look at city in tech for a year. You've been like, dude, you're crazy. You got to go, you know, go in an insane asylum and look at some white walls for a bit. I mean, that's the story of Bitcoin as well, right? And crypto in general. I always make that comment. I'm like, if you had told me a year ago that, I mean, fill in the blank, I would have told you that you were crazy and I wouldn't have believed it. And to the point of you building, you know, that's sort of like the old joke. It takes 30 years to be an overnight success. Nobody sees all the work that goes into you know, it's sort of like the old joke. It takes 30 years to be an overnight success.

Nobody sees all the work that goes into it. They just see sort of what happens at the end. But it's one thing to woo all these jobs to say, how can I help? I know you guys had billboards up in Silicon Valley that were telling people basically to come to Miami. But it's another thing to actually adopt the underlying technology and the standard, which for you, I believe, was Bitcoin. Right.

So I'd love you to talk about why Bitcoin and why Bitcoin is so important and such a part of the Miami story now. Well, when I created, when the How Can I Help movement began, right? When I put out that tweet, I realized that I was on a runway alone, right? This runway of innovation. And then I was the only mayor in America, essentially, that was telling innovators to come to that. You know, famously in New York, you know, Amazon 2.0 or HQ2 had been kicked out by the powers that be. Famously in San Francisco, you had somebody saying F Elon Musk,

and Elon said, you know, message received, and he left to Austin. So, you know, I was the only mayor in America that said, this is crazy. We should be doing exactly the opposite. We care about our cities, and we care about our people. We should be doing exactly the opposite. So that counter-narrative of how can I help really, really stuck. And then what I realized is I have this runway to really communicate. And I started communicating about things I was passionate about, things that I authentically cared about. So I communicated

800 more times, 800 more tweets just in the month of December, which got 27 million impressions. And what I realized is every time I would talk, I was a member of the Florida Blockchain Foundation. I was on the Florida Blockchain Task Force at the time, and I had been on it for years. And every time I kept talking about crypto and Bitcoin particularly, my KPIs or analytics would go through the roof, through the roof. And I realized right then and there, I was like, wait a second, this is way more systemic, way more ingrained than what people think. When you talk about the silent majority, there is literally an enormous silent majority that people really don't know. It's almost like the fight, you know, when you talk about Fight Club, you know what I mean? And they have like the black guys.

I literally, I was, I'm going to tell you this story. It just happened to me right now. I was with a university president, Okay. And I was talking about Bitcoin and crypto. And I said, I said, you know, what's, what, what, what's incredible to me is when I walk around the city, I had servers and I have back of house people in hotels, domestic helpers, housekeepers that will come to me and thank me because they own crypto. And as I'm saying that, the waiter comes up and I said, by the way, do you own any crypto? And he goes, yeah. And he walks away. I go, I swear to you, I've never talked to this guy before. I don't

even know who he is. Okay. And so people just don't know, you know, what it is. So then, so what I said was I started playing with it, right? A little bit of pomp and, and others who are friends, you know, kind of challenged me a bit. And they said, Hey, let's see what's the first government that can put, um, you know, the, the Satoshi white paper on, on their website. And, you know, we were the first government in America. We're the second government in the world after Estonia. I'm never going to lose to Estonia ever again on anything. And, um, we, you know, a lot of people like to talk about El Salvador and some of the stuff that they've done, which is incredible, but we were way ahead of them, like way ahead of them. We were talking about this way before they were. And then, and then,

you know, you know, then after that, I followed up with, you know, the laser eyes and people went crazy. And then I, and then I had, you know, then I put out a resolution, which was substantive. We wanted to be the first city in Americaica really the first government to pay its employees in crypto and bitcoin to allow our residents to pay for fees and taxes in bitcoin and to consider holding bitcoin on our balance sheet and so when that when i put that out there again on a thursday night it went ballistic and so we've already um you know we've already actually had two employees get paid in bitcoin i was number two um it was a big deal when i when i said i was taking my salary in bitcoin then the mayor of new york decided he I had two employees get paid in Bitcoin. I was number two. It was a big deal. When I said I was taking my salary in Bitcoin,

then the mayor of New York decided he wanted to do it too. We've had, I think, 12 mayors since then. So we've sort of led national mayors on that front. And then I think that what's cool is we've been playing with this technology called MiamiCoin, which is now going to give us a Bitcoin yield. And that Bitcoin yield, we're going to distribute as a Bitcoin dividend to all of our residents. So for the first time in America, you're going to have a city that is innovating and creating resources in Bitcoin that they're going to put in a digital wallet for all of its residents. Yeah. I have to say that some of the other mayors who have started to take at least a month or two salary here and there in Bitcoin, looks like they just

saw how excited everyone was about you doing it or trying to get some national attention or some votes. I'm perfectly happy that we have a mayor in New York who's willing to take a salary in Bitcoin, but it's very clear that he's, in my opinion, that it's for optics. Listen, imitation is the highest form of flattery, number one. And Eric is developing a relationship with Eric and a friendship. And so part of it has been sort of that fun,

hey, let's do fun stuff together. And let's really show the world that we as cities need to innovate. And we need to be on the forefront of innovation to survive not only as cities, but as a country. Guys, unless you've been living underneath a rock for the past few months, then you've definitely heard me talk about one of my favorite platforms, which is Kava. Kava connects the world's largest cryptocurrencies, ecosystems, and financial applications on DeFi's most trusted, scalable, and secure earning platform.

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thewolfofallstreets.link slash Arculus. That's A-R-C-U-L-U-S. Secure your assets, secure your future with Arculus. Yeah. Talk about MiamiCoin. You just brought it up. I know the team. I think the guys are incredibly impressive. I know the team at Stacks as well, and I'm a huge fan of them. So how did you link with them and what does that actually look like now in practice? So the fact that I'm a pro Bitcoin mayor has led other people to come and be attracted to us. So FTX, for example, came and did a $200 million deal with our arena. And Sam Bachman-Fried, who runs FTX, said, hey, we could have done 10 deals in America. He goes, we did Miami because Miami was the epicenter of crypto. Miami was the epicenter, was sort of the blockchain capital. We attracted the

blockchain conference from LA to Miami. And we're going to have our second annual blockchain conference now in April. So we have branded ourselves as this. And because we branded ourselves with that, the Citicoin guys, you know, came to me and I'll be honest with you, initially, I was very skeptical. You know, I'm a kind of a Bitcoin maximalist myself. And so I was like, you know, I don't want to really touch anything that's not 100% Bitcoin. And they're like, No, this is this was built on the Bitcoin blockchain. This produces a Bitcoin yield, right? And so what's exciting about it is that you take, you know, Bitcoin's decentralized nature, the power of its blockchain, and you combine that with stocks, which creates a smart contract functionality with a blockchain that hashes

onto the Bitcoin blockchain. And then you created a token that has a percentage of its mining revenue goes to the city or the cities in its digital wallet. So it's the exact same concept as Bitcoin. The only difference is instead of the miner getting 100% of the revenue, that's shared revenue. And then we're staking the Miami coin, and we're producing a Bitcoin yield, which is 10% of what we have. So we're going to actually give back 100% of that to our residents.

So our residents are not only going to be able to learn about Bitcoin, they're actually going to hold Bitcoin. And it's incredible. Oh, we did this all before El Salvador, just FYI. Yeah, I'm aware that you did, and it's incredibly impactful. And what I have found interesting over the last year, the infrastructure bill being a perfect example, right? There was this one line about cryptocurrency. Nobody expected it to gain any attention.

And basically, the bill was frozen for three days by the crypto community, right? Who don't have a political action community. We don't have lobbyists. But there was loud enough voices there to freeze that entire bill for a few days. So I have to believe, you know, I guess we all know that in politics, the most important thing is getting reelected, finding votes, representing your constituents. I think now maybe, and maybe you can tell me, we're getting to a point where the crypto community is loud enough that politicians everywhere are going to have to start listening. Maybe you were first to recognize that,

and many of the older boomers have not, but it seems like that's inevitable. There's absolutely no doubt about it. And I remember when Uber sort of came and disrupted in our city. And I remember it because they were regulated by Miami-Dade County, our county, and we had, I think, 2,500 taxis. And the medallion system was sort of sacrosanct, right? And, you know, it was almost like a mafia that controlled it.

I don't mean to say that in a bad way because I don't want to get, like, emails and stuff like, oh, you called a taxi driver. But it was a heavily government-controlled situation. And Uber, instead of playing by the rules, Uber just came in and established itself, right? And overnight, the true market of on-demand drivers was 7X that artificial market, right? So Uber driver, we had 14,000 Uber drivers to 2,500 taxis. So the reason we could get an Uber driver, an Uber in a minute or two minutes was because of the number of Uber drivers that were out there. Right.

And so the number of code enforcement officers that you have to chase those 14,000 Uber drivers to tell them that they're not following the law is woefully insufficient. Right. So there just isn't enough officers to be able to regulate that. And what I realized is, you know, everybody has one of these things, right? Like you're not going to be able to regulate Bitcoin in the way that you want to, because there's just too ubiquitous at this point. And so, and I think you gave a great example of how big the quote unquote silent majority is, when they're not so silent when they're, you know, someone's going to do something that could hurt their interest. And I'm glad they weren't, by the way. And I urge them not to be in future instances, which hopefully won't come. But if they do come, you know, we're going to need

the community to speak up and express themselves because politicians do pay attention, particularly when they're up for election. I'm blessed. I was elected by 85% when I first ran 80% a couple weeks ago in reelection. And so I'm focusing on just creating the best city on the planet and a city that my children can prosper in and a city that every child born here can have an opportunity to be successful, a greater opportunity to be successful. Can federal regulators threaten any of the plans that you have in Miami right now? For example, if they just sort of flippantly deemed everything a security and, you know, change or made laws that basically pushed innovation in the crypto space offshore because they were impossible to comply with. Are you concerned at all about federal regulation and how it could affect what's happening? Of course, I'm concerned. I think like some of it was a phenomenon that I described, which is that it's more systemic. I think that they believe, right, this is not you can't kill it in the crib when it's no longer in the crib. Right.

Number one. Number two, I think China has given us a huge gift. Right. They ban mining and they ban Bitcoin. And we need to take advantage of that. And I think number three, you know, we've got to do a good job of trying to explain to boomers, many of which are still in power. Right. Why this is a generational opportunity of prosperity and democratized prosperity for our country and for the world. If we can do that, and we can hold on tight, we can guarantee America's supremacy for a generation or more. That's how strong I believe this opportunity is. And I'm hopeful that I, you know, that I can influence that going into the future. You touched on mining in China's big mistake, which we all, I think, agree was probably going to be the end of them to some degree when they had such an opportunity to control Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining.

You've famously been wooing miners to Florida with the promise of cheap nuclear clean energy. Maybe people don't realize that nuclear energy is clean. How has that effort been going? And do you think that we will see a lot of miners relocating to South Florida? It's going very well. I think we're going to see a lot of miners just relocating everywhere to urban cities where there's excess power. I think that's going to be, you know, that large mining market share that China has forfeited is going to be taken up by U.S. miners. And it's going to be done in a very ESG compliant way. Why do I know that? Because I'm talking to them. You know what I mean? I talk to them on a constant basis.

And I've been to their facilities and their facilities are currently a carbon. Most of them are carbon neutral facilities or very close to carbon neutral facilities. So that doesn't happen in any other industry. And that's all because, frankly, they've been blamed for things that they haven't even done, right? They've been blamed for things that China and Russia have done, which is, which is going to end up being probably the most positive thing that ever ended up happening for Bitcoin, which is that there's this perception that it's not good for the environment. And so, you know, every American company that does it is going to do it in an environmentally compliant way. And then we're going to change that narrative immediately.

Yeah, I think that narrative has already changed. And at this point, it's just, it's really complete. It was already nonsense, to be quite honest, because the statistics just didn't support it. Yeah, it really was. But you know how media driven narratives are. And I think that's why podcasts are so popular, because people want to get away from this 24 hour news cycle where they're trying to drive an agenda, you know, and I totally I hear you. I agree with you. Yeah, I mean, we have these recycled stories literally every time Bitcoin drops, right? It's like Russia, China, India, only for criminals and ransomware. And then of course, mining being bad, bad for the environment. So what is the future vision for Miami in this space? I would like to think that you're just scratching the surface of what's

possible and that this is still very much in this infancy. Do we get to a place where, you know, each citizen has a wallet and they pay their taxes in there and they earn their yield and they can manage their accounts and all of those things? And does it really become the crypto capital of the world? Well, I think we get to a place where it is very conceivable that we could run a city without taxes. If the $30 million revenue production scales and becomes a four or five X where we're at right now in terms of value, we could theoretically run our city without taxes. So that is a possible future outcome. I think that, you know, Miami is already kind of the crypto capital of the U.S. and potentially of the world because we have that brand, right? We have exchanges that are moving every single day here and that are opening offices every day here, you know, like blockchain.com, eToro, XPTO. I mean, there's so many that are coming. And we have investments in

all the major... So I think we just had an announcement on a mine with Homestead that Big Miners is opening in Homestead. So look, I think it's all happening. But I think at the end of the day, the fact that our government leaders are talking about it and being intentional about it, I think is the biggest driver of what we see, because listen, at the end of the day, there's a simple psychology and psychology principle. People want to go where they're wanted, right? Period. They don't want to go. They want to be in places where they're not wanted. And you see that as one of the biggest takeaways of this movement, right? Is that people have fled areas where they feel like they're not wanted, where they feel like they are a pariah and they're see that as one of the biggest takeaways of this movement, right? Is that people have fled areas

where they feel like they're not wanted, where they feel like they are a pariah and they're going to places where they're wanted, where they, where they feel welcome. And that's why that was sort of the magic of the, how can I help tweet that? It kind of rolled out a big red carpet and said, Hey, we want you here. We know that systems and countries that take away people's property and take away people's businesses don't work. They never have. And that's the country that my parents fled from 90 miles from here. It just doesn't work and it never will. And so what we have to do is create, use the technologies that we have, the innovation that we have to create more prosperity for more people and do it by doing things like MiamiCoin. Makes perfect sense. I can tell you that I've been going to

Art Basel probably for a decade. And this year I went and it felt like a crypto convention and not an art show. In fact, it almost felt like there was no physical art anywhere and there were just NFTs and crypto people all over the place. So you can see it on the ground. It's funny. It's kind of like, you know, South by Southwest started as a music festival and then became a tech, you know, and that's the same thing that just happened with Art Basel. It was an art show and now and then became a tech, you know, and that's the same thing that just happened with our Boswell. It was an art show and now it's become a tech conference. I mean, it's become a tech conference with an art component of it, but the NFTs, the, the,

I think we had over 150 tech events that we could count in the four days that it was going. It's insane. So can we hope that one day you'll be the first Bitcoin president? We can always hope. Who knows? I mean, I'm going to be president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors now in January, on January 3rd. And what's exciting about that is that we get to create an agenda for America that will serve, you know, 85% of the residents of this country, 91% of the GDP. And that's why I think the mayors are sort of following my lead on Bitcoin, because they understand that their cities, in order to be successful, have to continue to fight for bigger and bigger market share in that knowledge-based economy,

in the tech-based economy. That's our future. Competition, that kind of competition is healthy for our country, and it will make us more competitive globally. And so that's my vision for America, and we'll see where it takes us. I love it. I've always sort of said that local politics is where you can actually affect change for individuals. And the farther up you go, the less you actually help anyone seems like it would be top down, but I really don't think so. So thank you for all that you're doing. And for that example, where can everybody follow you after this conversation and keep up with what's happening in Miami? Thanks, Scott. So my Twitter handle is at Francis Suarez and my Instagram handle is at Mayor of Miami or at Miami Mayor, which was it? At Mayor of Miami. I got it right. And, you know, I appreciate it because one of the things I've

learned is that social media is incredibly important to get your message out there and to tell your story. If you don't tell your story, someone else is going to tell your story and you're not going to like their version of it. So it's important to be able to tell your story. If you don't tell your story, someone else is going to tell your story and you're not going to like their version of it. So it's important to be able to tell your story. Absolutely. Thank you once again for taking the time. I look forward to catching up a few months down the road to see how Miami's doing. Love to have you in City Hall, buddy.