The Wolf Of All Streets - Preparing crypto for the masses with Dr. Julian Hosp, creator of Cake DeFi

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

After a whirlwind experience of building a company in the fire that was the 2017 crypto bull market, Cake DeFi founder Dr. Julian Hosp learned what it truly meant to be both on top of the world and exiled from the very thing you loved. The lessons he learned from one of crypto’s largest ICO’s have directly translated into his successful DeFi project and personal philosophy. Today, Hosp has taken on the personal mission to champion the entire crypto space, rooting for its success while contributing in any manner he can. Follow Julian Hosp: ​https://twitter.com/julianhosp In this episode, Melker and Hosp discuss a range of topics including: ・Professional Kite Surfing ・An $80 Million ICO ・“More money mo’ problems” ・The truth about exit scamming ・More money, more problems ・Cake DeFi ・The Asian Blockfi ・Tokenizing stocks ・Decentralization maximalism ・Adopting Bitcoin for the masses ・Facebook’s Diem ・Elon Musk’s Bitcoin ーーー Nexo Try Nexo’s full-suite, instant crypto banking service, featuring: savings accounts with up to 12% interest on crypto, stablecoins & fiat; flexible crypto-backed credit lines at just 5.9% APR; an exchange with 75+ crypto and fiat pairs and best-price guarantee. All this and more wrapped up in a single Nexo Wallet. Start banking at https://thewolfofallstreets.link/nexo or download the app on Google Play or the App Store. ーーー Bitcasino Now until June 27th Wolf of All Streets listeners will have the chance to WIN 1 of 3 Teslas! A 0.05 mBTC wager gets you in on the action and enters you to win a Tesla Model 3 Performance Vehicle! Start playing today for your chance to WIN. Be sure to use my personal URL for each upcoming tournament to be entered https://thewolfofallstreets.link/bitcasino Vroom vroom! ーーー Cosmos Visit https://thewolfofallstreets.link/cosmos to learn about the Cosmos Hub and how the $ATOM can connect every blockchain. Cosmos is the port city connecting chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum to ensure your liquidity on any chain can be used anywhere. Find new staking opportunities, applications, or build your own parachain at https://thewolfofallstreets.link/cosmos ーーー 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

Today's episode is brought to you by Voyager, Mina, and Matcha. Stick around to hear more about them. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Now, crypto can be a confusing and scary place. Almost every day, there's a new batch of misinformation, FUD, controversy, and exhausting debates. Developers have been tribalistic, shutting out their own leaders over the slightest difference of opinion. Today's guest understands this more than anyone. While building a massive company from the ground up during the peak 2017 bull market, Julian began to feel the team at the company he co-founded slowly beginning to turn against him, and he was eventually exiled. Today, he's moved on to bigger and better things

in DeFi that I'm excited for him to share. I also want to really hear his story and find out what life in a crypto company really looks like. Dr. Julian Haas, thank you so much for coming on. Scott, it's a pleasure. That intro is quite spicy. Looking forward to it. You know, we got to get the hook in very early so we can reel him in, right? So before we get into the questions, once again, you're listening to the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast, which airs twice a week, where I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, politics, anyone with a good story to tell. This podcast is powered by Blockworks. You can check out everything they have going on at blockworks.co. And you can check out everything else I have going

on at thewolfofallstreets.io. Now to get right into today's episode. So I read you're a professional kite surfer for 10 years, and I watched some of your videos. Now that you're in the DeFi rabbit hole, do you still find time to kite surf anymore? So whenever there's no lockdown here in Singapore, yes, but Singapore is not the best place for kite surfing, but Southeast Asia is fantastic. So Vietnam, Philippines, Australia. Yeah, I do. Not on a professional level though anymore. So you're only a couple hours away from some of the best kite surfing in the world at any given moment, I would imagine. Do you surf as well? I do, but I was never that good.

Yeah, just not enough practice. And was this before you got into crypto or were you doing both somehow at the same time? No, no. I'm 35 right now. I started kite surfing when I was 17. So man, it's like, yeah, a long time ago. And then I, yeah, I, I, I kite surfed until like I was, uh, end of 26. So yeah, 10 years ago.

I mean, so I went from, uh, DJing and producing music into the crypto space. How did you get from kite surfing professionally into the crypto space? So there was one stop in the middle. I studied to be a medical doctor, was training to become a trauma surgeon. Didn't want to do this for the rest of my life. Quit working as a medical doctor in 2012. So it's about nine years ago. And I was looking for any kind of business to start in the medical space.

And yeah, in 2014, learned about blockchain, thought, wow, this is going to disrupt the medical space by storing patient data. Yeah, and then I got stuck in the financial space. So that's how cryptocurrencies got me. That's funny, because one of the worst investments I ever made in the crypto space was Patientory. PTOI was the coin ticker.

Man, I took an absolute bath on that. Also believing that they were going to revolutionize the medical space with blockchain. I think right now is a good timing with the COVID vaccinations, actually. Yeah, it seems like this would definitely be ideal. Talk about how could blockchain be used to improve the COVID vaccination process? I mean, at the end, it's no one trusting each other um so you can transparently display a vaccination status of a of a patient so all the government's uh hospitals could kind of work together they have signatory keys um everyone could read the the vaccination status of a patient it's uh on the one hand, a lot of privacy,

but on the other hand, completely transparent. So it would have a different function than the censorship resistance of Bitcoin, for example. But yeah, I think Singapore, actually, the government here is really pushing in that direction. I think the US is also having some ideas in how to do that. So if COVID persists over the next two or three years, and it's still a global topic, I would be almost 100% positive that we're going to see a medical blockchain in that space. Incredible. Well, I hope that we see the medical blockchain, but I hope we do not see COVID

persist long enough for that to be the use case. So talk about, let's just get right into 10X. Obviously, that was the company that you founded that I alluded to in the use case. So talk about, let's just get right into 10X, obviously. That was the company that you founded that I alluded to in the introduction. How did you start that? What was it about and what happened there? Yeah, so in 2014, I wanted to actually stay more in the medical space. My very first video ever made on blockchain

was blockchain is gonna be amazing, Bitcoin, yeah, very questionable. I changed my view on that 180 degrees. But yeah, that was my very beginning seven years ago. I actually never wanted to get into the crypto space. I had two partners back then. I would call them friends. Now I would call them, I think enemies is an understatement to people who really cheated me over. At least I felt cheated over. So I think that's the right way to put it. But there were two people that I met in Thailand

and they were totally convinced about Bitcoin and said, hey, why don't you come to Singapore? And yeah, we would love to kind of create a debit card you could spend Bitcoin with. And that was in 2015 in May. So that was actually when I came to Singapore. I only came here for cryptocurrencies. Singapore was very open, very pro cryptocurrencies, very open and finding a mix between being

entrepreneurial, but still being trying to protect the end consumer. And yeah, and in 2015, I was still skeptical about the entire kind of space. It was still coming back from this bear market in 2014. But then 2016, I permanently moved here. We raised a million dollars. Then we had one of the largest ICOs in the blockchain space with like 80 million US dollars. Everything was flying super well.

We did, we had, when I got kicked out, so I was kicked out end of 2018. When I was kicked out, we had 100 employees. I was the president of the company. We had a banking license in Liechtenstein. We had cards live in Asia. And yeah, we hadn't signed a couple of the documents, which at the end gave them really good bargaining power

and kind of put me in a lot of pressure. And yeah, when money is not an issue anymore, egos take over, pride, jealousy. And I came back from Christmas, beginning of 2019. I was in Austria, where I'm from, with my wife. And yeah, I came back, came into the office, and everything was there, prepared for me to step down. I was given no other choice.

It's interesting, though, because, you know, I've had hundreds of these conversations, obviously, and everybody talks about how amazing it is to be in crypto and and ever all the incredible things that their company is doing. But nobody really talks about sort of the dark side of it, which I feel like from the outside is very obvious that these things exist, right? I mean, a lot of these companies fail, a lot of these companies struggle. The biggest names from the ICO boom in 2017 are all, you know, have fallen in market cap and all, you know, sort of, you know, dropping into irrelevant. So, I mean, you touched on the fact that being egos, but what are the other challenges, I guess, of starting a company like that, especially when all of a sudden you're flooded with $80 million in ICO funds, you know, when you probably didn't need $80 million for the company, right? 100%. I mean, 100%. I think, so a couple of mistakes, right? First of all, we should have raised probably $20 million. I think if we we had raised 20 million, that would have been fantastic. It would have put off a lot of the pressure. I think that the size,

so when we did the ICO, we were about 20 employees. We had our product life. We were just about ready to scale. So it would have been, I think if you compare it to a traditional startup funding round, it would have been a sizable series A, sizable.

Like let's say $100 million valuation. I think this is what's realistic on the momentum that we were at, the kind of perspective that we had. So selling 20% of the company for $20 million at a $100 million valuation, I think this would have been super easy. We had budgeted a burn rate. I was very transparent, actually. So I tried to make blog posts and super

transparently communicate that. We had about a burn rate at around 700, 800,000 a month. So it would have given us, yeah, it would have given us one and a half years, two years of runway. I think super like exactly the right thing to do. Yeah. And we just thought, hey, you know what? If you do something you do something do it right do it big i think at the end it put out a lot of the i put out a lot of the the pressure and a lot of the the kind of uh fire under your ass and uh yeah and i think i really destroyed the culture eos raised like a billion dollars right or more why i think three three yeah right a few billion dollars so what what could a company possibly

need billions of dollars for to operate and scale? You know, the crazy thing was this. A lot of people thought we had misused a lot of the money. And so until I was there, until the end of 2018, I put my hand into the fire, whatever, right? I swear on anything. Our salaries were super reasonable. It was on the lower end of six figures a year, right? It's super, super, absolutely reasonable. I would have gotten the salary at any company that I would have worked for. There were no private chats. There were no yachts, nothing. It was super, super reasonable. But at the end, that also caused a lot of the frustration, I guess, in my partners, because they feel like they should be living rich.

Yeah. And there was another problem that came into this. At the end of 2017, I had sold, luckily, I have to admit that, a lot of my crypto holdings. And so I had no financial worries, where they hadn't sold these off, because they had believed crypto is going to go through the moon like everyone thought at 2017. And I think that just aggravated the entire situation, the entire problem. And yeah, look, looking back, I hope there's going to be a point in the future where my biggest regret in the entire thing was not that it happened. I think, I don't know, I don't blame myself for how it went down. I blame myself for not communicating. I tried to hide. I was ashamed. And I think that was the big mistake because I was the public facing person and people were just like,

oh, so Julian is exit scamming. I didn't. I didn't get a single dollar. At the end, the company came out with a blog post and actually confirmed that. But that didn't matter. People still thought I was the one exit scamming. And afterwards, the company went down. So they were like, oh, Julian saw that it was going to go down. I was like, hey, come on. The company was flying super well. I thought this company is going to become a billion dollars. And I think that was the big mistake. And so that was such a big lesson to me. When there's a crisis, you need to go all out and not try to think it's going to go away. And I think that was my big, big, big mistake. I think such a big lesson learned.

And obviously the other one, you can have too much money. I really think that too much money is going to put so much pressure away. And it's just not going to make you hungry enough. And to be honest, it all comes down to picking the right people you work with. So you mean you can have too much money as a company or too much money as an individual? I think actually both. I'm financially doing super well. Crypto has blessed me with a lot. I see this with a lot of my friends. Some of my friends who've also been doing really well, they really sit there sometimes almost depressed. They sit there and they're like,

yeah, I don't deserve this. I just got lucky. What happens if this entire thing crashes? But on the other hand, they're FOMOing. What if this goes up? They're living in constant fear and FOMO, fear of losing, fear of missing out. And the interesting thing is, as soon as they get sick, so their throat hurts or something, all the problems go away. There's only one problem. That problem is your throat hurts. So sometimes if all the problems go away, and look, I always want to have money in comparison to not having money. But I'm saying there can be too much money because you're just losing a lot of the focus. You're losing a lot of the drive. You're losing a lot of what actually motivates you. And I think as a company, it becomes super apparent, probably for an individual, you

will always find something. I got a, I have a six month old son now. So obviously a lot of things change when it comes to getting up in the morning and doing stuff, right? But yeah, I think as a company, it's definitely an issue. So the old hip-hop adage, more money, more problems is a real thing. I mean, I don't want to have... Yeah, if I can choose between having a lot of money and having no money, I always pick a lot of money. But I'm not saying that someone, I know that someone who has little money thinks money is going to solve all their problems. It's going to solve a lot of your problems to a certain point.

And at some point, you're going to have so much money, hopefully, that you're going to have a lot, a lot of problems. And yeah, sometimes it's the sweet middle. I've seen that sort of, I've seen the similar statements across the crypto Twitter community and across friends of mine who are young and are traders and all of a sudden found themselves all this money. And I think they realize that, okay, now what? I still don't have a wife. I still don't have kids. I'm still can't go out. I'm still not having fun. So I guess I can buy a watch, which brings happiness for five minutes. And I think that you really brought out a major issue in this space that the money comes quickly and it can go away just as quickly and just causes more anxiety than it's worth to some degree.

It's really interesting. I'm curious, though, with that in mind and what happened during the ICO boom, we're seeing that when companies generally raise now, it's like the goal is to have as small of a market cap as possible. You know, maybe that's because they want the coin to go up and to take as little funds. So you think that that was truly a bubble, that that was done completely the wrong way in 2017, and that we're seeing a better way now? Yes and no. So I always see this as a startup boom. A lot of the coins that are in the top 10 today,

some of them come from the ICO times from back then, and they were highly profitable for their investors. They turned out to be exciting projects. And so, again, it's like a startup. It's probably 1% of the company survived, 1% of the coins survived, and 99% just died. I think today it's just a bit of a different scenario. In last year, I started a blockchain project together with a group called DeFi Chain, which is DeFi around the Bitcoin ecosystem. We didn't do an ICO, we raised zero

funds. It was free airdrops for Bitcoin holders, free airdrops for the community. And the company now, the project now has a billion dollar market cap. And we raised zero funds. I would have not dared to raise a single dollar because I knew people were going to criticize me for it. But you know, so I'm going to tell you the honest truth. Today, I sit here and I wish we would have raised funds from institutional investors. We would have raised funds from larger whales,

not to have the money to actually have people with skin in the game because there are so many people today who got these coins for free. They have no skin in the game. Because there are so many people today who got these coins for free. They have no skin in the game. And you actually start seeing the challenges when you have a project maybe where you don't have those large whales to be seasoned. So it's always a flip side. I would have still done it the same way,

but it's so interesting to see this flip side where we on purpose didn't raise any funds. And yeah, it's not always perfect there's there's always a downside to everything so it sounds like there's a happy medium like raising 80 million dollars is way too much raising nothing is way too little you need a couple strategic vcs who actually 100 want to push the project so you would have done it somewhere in the middle yeah that yeah that that makes perfect sense so talk about the project that you're doing now to talk about cake yeah so there's two things so one is a company it's called cake DeFi, which is a one-stop

platform for the end user. People call it, people call it the Asian block fire. I think in the U S people know block fine. So we are like a little bit like the Asian block five. We offer a lending service. We offer a staking service. We offer liquidity mining. We're basically trying to offer all those DeFi services that are sometimes a bit tricky for people to use. And we try to offer them on a one-stop platform in a very easy manner. At the same time, we always believed, hey, we need to offer DeFi in the Bitcoin ecosystem. We forked Bitcoin, made a sidechain to it, and that is just a regular blockchain. I have no extra coins in comparison to anyone else. I just got the same kind of airdrop as everyone. We're just excited

and hopefully this project grows big. So these are the two things that we're working on. Cake is doing really, really well. We've had a record quarter. We've done 170 million in revenue. It's absolutely berserk on the scaling and the growth this entire space allows. These are numbers that sometimes I don't believe myself. It's just, whoa, it's so exponential, so explosive. You don't sleep. It's quite exciting. Guys, it's time to wake up and go earn some money one of the most exciting use cases of crypto is both to earn yield and take low interest credit loans especially since your actual bank is giving you nathan nada nothing in interest nexo is leading the charge in this arena with 360 degree crypto banking services if you're just

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This is a first. It's never existed until now. You need to absolutely check them out at the wolfofallstreets.link slash Cosmos, C-O-S-M-O-S, and see everything they have going on. Across the industry though, we're seeing a lot of, yet again, sort of a challenge that comes with this boon in adoption and in money is that we're seeing scaling problems everywhere, right? I mean, you touched on BlockFi. Maybe they haven't had as many,

but I know that certainly a lot of the American exchanges are having trouble just keeping up with the new signups, much less getting deposits and withdrawals, and people are having a lot of frustration with platforms. So how do you scale when the whole industry goes absolutely bonkers and everybody wants in and you haven't hired for it? You need to train new customer service. I mean, how do you scale? Yes. At the moment, we have one poor customer service person. Oh my gosh, how is that possible? And we have over 100,000 customers.

So that poor guy is really doing more of a 20-80 principle. So if your request is urgent and important, he's going to deal with it. Otherwise, at the moment, you're just going to get an automated message. So we're trying to hire there. We had a bit of a KYC hell in the first quarter. I think that was the major challenge. And so what we actually did was we pretty much bought out an entire KYC agency and said, hey, we're taking you guys over.

You can stay independent, but we're kind of taking you over. You're only working for us. And yeah, the owner was glad or was happy to kind of do that. So we have this one agency now who's just working with us and doing pretty much all the KYC. That was the limiting that the KYC issue that was actually the main limiting factor in Q1. Yeah. And what kind of interest rates are you guys currently offering? On I mean, from two, so we offer up to 100%, which is on liquidity mining. So obviously, it's highly volatile.

For your average consumer who's familiar with putting their money in a bank and letting it gain yield, what is the basic user getting? 5% to 7% on Bitcoin, ETH, and I think 10% on stable coins. Yeah, so it's standard. Interestingly, it's April 27th as we're talking here, so people know, but you said, you know, the BlockFi of Asia as we're talking here, so people know,

but you said the BlockFi of Asia. I'm a user of BlockFi actually, but they announced their new interest rates yesterday and it was a huge slash. Whenever they do this, the next day, like today, we had thousands of signups in a single day, right? Yeah. So. Yeah. So I was curious if you see the results of that, which you are, but yeah, they went from basically they're offering 2% on Bitcoin on anything over a half a Bitcoin holding. I know. So, but isn't there a line where the counterparty risk is not worth it? Like, you know, is it worth letting somebody else hold and lend your bitcoin at two percent over just putting it in cold storage and never thinking about it again yeah i mean look we cannot i think cake does not want to compete with block fi and we can for the very simple

reason that block fi is so dominant in the us and i think many americans just want to work with american companies right sure for us we don't want to we don't even want to try to compete there. For us, what we want to compete is, we want to be an Asian company, a Singaporean company for people that say, you know what, maybe I don't want to have my coins in the US on purpose. Maybe I want to have them in the Switzerland of Asia. Maybe I want to put them there just for diversification that's kind of the the angle so if you entrust an entity for two percent look i diversify my coins over various companies even for zero percent just for pure diversification so at no point would ever even though i i know this is against my own interests but i i still at the end i believe i want to have the best interest for a customer and a customer is going to appreciate that.

I would always diversify. I think that's a major, major thing. And so at the end, you just need to understand, okay, is it worth for you to have 2% or maybe then it's a, hey, maybe I just put it at 0% and put it at another institution or something. That is maybe a question. Yeah. I think we just benefit, at Cake, we just really benefit mainly from people who see Singapore as the Switzerland of Asia and just say, you know what? I like this company.

This company is super cool. Our key focus is always transparency. We show every single step along the way. Our customers appreciate that. That's what makes us quite appealing to a lot of people. Right. And it seems that, you know, DeFi companies or CeFi, as people probably like to call you, but, you know, like you said, the ones that are sort of familiar to retail that do all

the backend work for you so you can just collect your interest. There's a lot of mystery as to how each individual company is actually finding that yield, right? And so I think with BlockFi, it's somewhat apparent, whether a rumor or true, that it was largely the premium on GBTC, right? They were one of the biggest holders on GBTC. That premium has disappeared. No mystery that their rates are going down. And by the way, nothing against them.

That's the responsible thing to do. If you can't offer the yield, you don't offer it. Right. Of course. But what other ways are people finding yield for their customers? I know the cash and carry trade is huge now with the future expectation of Bitcoin. But that only works on tether, on dollars. Yeah. It doesn't work on Bitcoin. Right. Right. So there's a cash and carry trade where everything's in contango and you basically just short the futures and buy spot and it's free money until the futures aren't, until the future expectation isn't high. So is it the cash and carry trade that people are primarily taking advantage of? Is it securities lending? I mean, what's really happening behind the scenes? So for us, it's a couple of things. And we work with a large, large fund here actually in Singapore who's regulated. They called Signum and they basically ensure all the coins

for the customer. We're working with a prop trader called Sparrow and part of their goes there as well. So it's a mix of various strategies. On the one hand, it's a lot of lending, for example, to large exchanges who use these coins for leverage trading on spot markets. The other one is very simple. You use a super small amount.

You use this for going with a call option. At the same time, you're selling put options at higher levels. You butterfly those out. They're using something called like shark fin options strategies on how they kind of arbitrage that risk out. So yeah, at the end, the 5% are razor thin calculated. So there are some weeks where we're making a slight loss on that. There are some weeks where we're making a small profit on it. Over the year for us,

the lending is actually the least profitable product in the entire kind of, yeah, in the entire kind of offering. I see this more like, yeah, getting the foot into the door with the customers. So it's a benefit to the customer. You do it because you want to gain the customer's trust and bring them in and you make money in other ways. I mean, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. But what happens when there's no demand for leverage

or the cash and carry trade disappears? I guess the question is, I'm not worried about companies like yours blowing up at all. I'm just asking, when does this like fairytale end? You know, when are we not getting 10% on our USDC indefinitely, which literally is all any human being in the world would have to do to acquire wealth if that lasts 20 or 30 years. Like if USDC, you can get 10% stable for 30 years, you're going to be rich, pretty much. No, 100%. I mean, at the end, like any kind of arbitrage comes from the other side expecting that this arbitrage is rectified, right? So if you are an investor, and I don't know what's the futures right now, I think annualized, they're probably at 25% at the moment, just because the premium kind of collapsed a bit. But so let's say it's 25%. So that means there's someone on the other side

who's very comfortable or very confident that Bitcoin is actually gonna go up more than 25%. And look, if you ask the average Bitcoin holder, what is it? They're gonna say, of course, Bitcoin is gonna go 300%. Right? So- Yeah.

So when are these premiums gonna collapse? They're gonna collapse when people don't believe anymore that Bitcoin is gonna go up more than the premium is. It's very simple because you always need the other side. If you don't have the other side, supply and demand is going to go together. And yeah, the premiums are going to go to what? 2%, 3% on average, right? Whatever you believe it's going to go up, if not in backwardation.

So because people are going to believe the price goes down. I actually think about these things a lot because I believe right now, this kind of information arbitrage, how I would almost call it, because so many people just don't understand that it exists. This information arbitrage is going to get arbitraged out at some point. And you need to find new business models for us. And I've been very vocal about this, I believe, for the next one, maybe one and a half years, but but I would say probably another year, I think we can live really well as a company from the profits we're making right now. I think it's going well. But I think at some point, just like Coinbase mentioned actually in their filing, where they say, hey, our transaction fees, they're probably going to go to zero.

We need to figure out new business models. And I think we're going to see the same thing. For us, one big thing that we want to do is we want to do those synthetical stocks or any kind of synthetic securities, be it stocks, bonds, real estate, not real estate, yeah, REITs maybe, but commodities, traditional currencies, and synthetically tokenize those.

And that's going to be a major thing. So we have really kind of been preparing as a as a platform as a company to really kind of go this route um yeah and i think that's going to be a major major thing on the one hand like in the u.s wealth front betterment what like what they're offering to their customers and we want to offer the same thing but not only for one jurisdiction but actually on a on scale. And yeah, so that is kind of the direction that we're going to be adding new features this year. And then probably the other ones are going to get phased out.

Yeah, FTX has clearly led the charge on, you know, the tokenization of everything. And you can bet on everything and trade everything. And now, I mean, even just again, yesterday, I think Binance announced MicroStrategy, Microsoft, and Apple or something like that. And they already had Tesla tokenized. But all of them, as far as I know, and maybe you tokenized. But all of them, as far as I know, and maybe you know this better, but all of them, as

far as I know, they're actually true security tokens. So to me, that's why, for example, FDX is not offering it to US customers. Binance has been barred. Now in Singapore, Hong Kong. Yeah. So we'll never be able to, the Americans will never be able to do any of this unless the stock market becomes tokenized, which is a conversation for the future, I guess, which is possible because I mean, clearing houses are disaster. Robinhood and GameStop clearly exposed the issues with having a 48 hour clearing, you know, for a trade,

which would not exist if they just tokenize them, which is a which is NFTs. I mean, people don't realize they think about art and collectibles with NFTs, but a tokenized stock would be the true endgame for NFTs. I mean, I'm not an expert on US security law, but as far as I understand, owning a Bitcoin or having to write to a certain amount of Bitcoin, because that's representing a Tesla stock, but it's not backed by the actual Tesla stock. it's backed by the price feed on that Bitcoin. Such a Tesla stock, it's not a real stock, should actually be legal as far as I understand in the US because it's basically the same as owning a fractional Bitcoin. So that could be a complete game changer. Let's see. Yeah, it's gonna be interesting. Yeah, it's going to be interesting. But, and listen, like Robinhood offers that, you know, and Robinhood, people think that

they're buying stock, but they're not. People were liquidated who owned one share with no leverage, who thought that they just owned the stock, but in reality, they didn't, which is a whole nother conversation in and of itself. But you just, to that end, you talked about Coinbase saying, hey, listen, we're gonna have to eliminate fees for our future business model, right? But E-Trade eliminated fees and TV and all of these companies eliminated fees. But the problem there that people don't realize is you become the product instead of the customer when you don't pay a fee. Correct? Always, always. Right. Because all of a sudden, anything that you're buying is

being lent and has risk that you don't understand. Nobody reads the 97 page terms of service. If you're not paying for service, but on the back end, the company talks about, hey, we're making hundreds of millions of dollars, like where's the money coming from? Right? So someone else is paying for it. So yeah and uh so i would never forget that yeah so like that's a wolf in sheep's clothing though like i'd rather pay the stupid fee no i own it i or or at least have the choice like i think there should be the choice where you have both options okay you know what i don't want to pay for it i'm okay if i'm product uh productized um or someone else says no i, I'm happy in paying my subscription fee,

but in return, I want to be sure my data is mine. So let's say a company like Coinbase eliminates fees. How are they going to make money? I know it's conjecture. I know I'm not asking. I'm asking your opinion, obviously. Lending all of your Bitcoin? I mean, is the answer that they lend everything?

I don't know. I'm not even sure Brian is the answer that they lend everything i don't know i i i i'm not even sure brian knows the answer um hasn't he had didn't he didn't he say that 20 of their budget is going to go into going for moonshot the ideas and doing like crazy stuff like i don't think that's too far fetched to be honest i don't know if they know i i really don't know if he has the answer i think if anyone had the answer right now buy-in surely doesn't have the answer because Binance is just really good at copying and then just really executing, right? Binance is not innovating. Binance is just really, really good at executing. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if anyone has the answer right now. Yeah, right. I think it scares me that they might,

well, I think that they'll do it, you know, stock markets, you know, I think that they'll take your whatever you buy, and they'll find a way to lend it. But like we sort of just talked about, I mean, there comes a fork in the road where like, maybe there's nobody to lend it to or the premium disappears. And then, then what? Because you don't go back to charging your customers fees. Right.

And it just scares me that like all of these kinds of companies that the more creative you get with the ways to make things free for your customer or the ways to, you know, squeeze out that little bit, when those things come to an end, there's more pressure at each step to find a way to keep delivering it. And I think that's, you know, maybe what we're seeing with BlockFi, but at least they're reducing their rates. I would be scared if we all knew that the gbtc trade was gone and block fi still had the same rates yeah especially if uh and again i think it was quite clear that this was the the main way how they were getting their yield uh yeah then obviously you would kind of get scared i mean the same is here in in asia you hear a lot of people using that

kimchi premium with korea and there was a lot here in Asia. You hear a lot of people using that Kimchi premium with Korea. And there was a lot, a lot of funds. Yeah. And a lot of funds also contacted us and said, hey, listen, do you want to lend us Bitcoins? We can really get you some nice arbitrage. And I always say, hey, you know what? I'm not sure.

Like these things, they come and go. And I don't want to have to rely on those. So I rather be razor thin on my margins. And that's not my main cash flowing product for us. But it's a really nice door opener. So yeah, but at least our margins are or our returns are very, very likely to keep going. Well, it's interesting, you touched on with your customer service, the idea of the I guess the Pareto principle, right, the 80-20 split, at least in crypto, your company and companies like you are taking that approach with their customers, right? Because anyone could lend. I mean, banks lend,

they just don't pass it on to their customers. I'm talking about real banks, you know, in the United States, we get less than 1% interest, they're doing the same thing you are, right? So at least in crypto, we have the benefit of companies that want to pass on that benefit to their customers. Right. True. Yeah. But is that the only difference? I mean, banks are not doing anything different than what you guys are doing. They're doing, they're taking advantage of these same opportunities. There's just less inefficiencies in the stock market, I guess, than there are in crypto. It feels like all the crypto yield stuff is like the stock market 30 or 40 years ago when they discovered

options and discovered all these... Yeah. I mean, look, to be honest, I don't think you're far off. I mean, if you look at ICOs, right? ICOs are nothing new. They're fundraising. So they're more like the IPOs in the 1990s, early 2000s, right? It's nothing new. So and at the moment, we see the same thing again. The big thing, right? And let me kind of bring it down to one thing why I really believe on the web blockchain, maybe as a whole is going to take a bit of a different turn is this interoperability. So I just think that the future in this entire finance space is going to be that you can go from an Apple share to a Tesla share without having to go via the dollar. You can actually go directly because yeah, it's synthetic. So you just go

directly and then, oh no, you know what? I want to go into gold. So the fees are going to be completely in a different structure. I think the future here, and if we talk about, let's talk about how to monetize that. And we have a lot of discussions. So my partner Yuzan, he's super smart. He's Singaporean. He has been in the space since 2010 or something. Had one of the first exchanges in Asia. And he just really understands the space well.

And so when we discuss over lunch and we kind of brainstorm, so often this entire idea of like a monthly subscription model comes up, where it's not so much about you paying for a certain service on on the transaction fee or on the amount, it's really more on you pay 99 cents a month or $4 99 a month. And you have an entire bandwidth, similar like how a phone company or your internet provider kind of works. And then suddenly that gives you the entire access to the financial world.

And I think that's more the model maybe in 10 years. And I think banks just can't do it, even if they wanted to, because their rails that everything is built on is so archaic, it just doesn't work. And blockchain can't do that. And I think that's where I see the future going. It's going to be more of a subscription model, more of an allowance kind of model for you having access to whatever, because at the end, the transactions, they're going to be negligible. So interesting. And when you think about it, I'm a trader, obviously. And you know, one of the most challenging things when I first got into crypto was understanding that

interplay between Bitcoin and everything else. You know, sort of the old meme, like even in dollars down in Bitcoin, because as you know, your first instinct is to check your dollar balance and you don't realize that you're losing Bitcoin. Well, you're talking about a world where I can trade other stocks to like gain more Amazon stock, right? I have my core Amazon position and I trade around it on Amazon pairs, like on a Bitcoin pair and get myself more or less Amazon. That is cool. No, 100%. And it's going to bring a fundamental question again to what's a currency and what's value and what is it that you're actually spending? Because at the end, I just foresee a future where literally like a michael saylor talks about where you have everything in bitcoin and all you're doing is you're kind of

taking a loan against that bitcoin consistently and i want to kind of expand it a bit because i just don't see that again to me i'm not religious about bitcoin i'm i'm religious about transferring value into the future so i i i ask myself what's going to be the best vehicle to transfer value into the future? And I just see Bitcoin as fantastic right now, as I do many other cryptocurrencies. But I just think in probably five, seven years, the price discovery is going to be so good on these new currencies. And so many people understand these concepts that we're not expecting 100% per year increase anymore,

but suddenly new kind of ideas come up. And so what I just see the future is going to be more, instead of you loaning against Bitcoin, I see it more like you with you drawing from entire basket that has to be super interoperable. And yeah, that's just where I see the future a bit more. And obviously, if these things are interoperable, the transaction fees go away. And that's just where I see the future a bit more. And obviously, if these things are interoperable, the transaction fees go away. And that's super important because otherwise, if you try to withdraw like a tenth of a Tesla share and you pay a little bit for this, suddenly all the transaction fees add up together. That's the same thing with credit cards right now. So many credit card companies don't want to accept or so many shops don't want to. They want to have a minimum on your spend for the transaction cards for for the credit cards, because you always pay this minimum kind of transaction fee.

And obviously, that kills the entire transaction. And that would then completely go away. And we're seeing the same thing with gas fees on Ethereum. Although as we speak, they've actually dropped. But I mean, you just touched on something that any beginning trader or small portfolio trader who was having a great time maybe a year ago on Uniswap now is like, I have to pay $130 to buy $100 worth of this coin. I can't do it. Or your beginning NFT artist who used to be able to mint an NFT for $7 and now it costs

$100 to mint the NFT that they're going to sell for $10. Yeah. And look, I'm going to say a couple of things that obviously some people really, it's going to get people on, I'm stepping on some people's feet. And one of those things is, especially the Binance Smart Chain right now,

it kind of highlights again how maybe a lot of things in the crypto space don't need to be fully decentralized, even though people believe it has to. But at the end, it may be not, maybe it's not the absolute necessary step. And the average person maybe doesn't really understand what full decentralization is. And maybe it doesn't need it.

And I think that's just also a very interesting kind of question because I think so many people in the crypto space, they are so kind of tied down to this idea that everything has to be 100% decentralized. And look, Bitcoin is my largest position. We try to set up DeFi chain as decentralized as possible. There's no central party. There's nothing you could attack.

We try to do it the same way. And still, I actually question maybe a lot of things in the future don't have to be as decentralized as, for example, Bitcoin is. And it's still fine and again i think just saying that in a crypto space sometimes be crazy because people are like oh uh decentralization maximalists and yeah yeah i think that's i think that's fair but i think that um you know it's always been my opinion that there's the fully maximalist view like you just said full decentralization bitcoin is a global reserve currency of the future. Banks disappear and are replaced by crypto, all of these things. I don't think that that's a likely future. I think parallel rails is a much more likely future and that each person has a system

that they're comfortable with. If you're comfortable with the banking system, you bank. If you want to be in some like 10%Fi, you're in maybe a Voyager or Celsius or Nexo, Cake, BlockFi, et cetera, all the way down to people who literally never touch a bank ever again or yield farming 1,000% APY and taking full risks. I agree with you. I think you can be maximalist and find a way to do it yourself, but I don't think you can expect everyone else to, and that there may be a comfort level for each person. And that's what we need to build is, you know, parallel highways for each of these comfort levels.

100%. I mean, I couldn't agree more. And the reason I even see this, I see this with our customers because all our services, right, and this is such a prime example here, what you're saying. All our services, we're even transparent where these services are, how they work. We show the original percentage people would be getting. And then, okay, if you use it by a cake, we take a service fee.

That's our cut. And we just take care of everything. You have a customer support and so on. And people still come to us. They're willing to make less because they are okay in having us as a service partner, right? And so this just shows exactly what you're saying. That yes, there will always be people who say, oh no, I don't want to have this central custodian. I want to take care of this myself.

Not your keys, not your coins. Fair. I get it. But then you have probably a majority of people that are thinking a bit differently. And even this idea, right? And I see this sometimes where people push every single person to have your own keys. And I'm pro, I'm pro for people having their own, like controlling your own key. But there are just a lot, a lot of people. If I just think of my mom, my mom is 60 years old, she's retired, she owns Bitcoins,

but she couldn't do it herself. She needs me as customer support. So if I wouldn't be doing it, she would need a service that helps her with this. So if you're this maximalist and says, well, then she shouldn't be owning Bitcoin. Really? That's the argument.

Yeah, that's the argument that doesn't work, right? And so if then you go and say, oh, she should be able to do it herself. I agree, but she doesn't. And for me to, and if I would have to tell her, look, mom, you have to do it yourself. She wouldn't be doing it. And then she wouldn't be going into Bitcoin.

And I'd rather have someone owning Bitcoin and someone helping her with it, even if it's a centralized platform, than someone not owning Bitcoin. I agree a hundred percent. But, and even to take that further, her with it, even if it's a centralized platform, then someone not owning Bitcoin. I agree 100%. And even to take that further, isn't that a failure? Even a failure might not be the correct term. It just says we're early. But isn't that a failure of the systems that exist to make it easy to hold and not a failure of the person who's just not familiar with it and maybe doesn't have the technology. I mean, listen, like, yeah, I have multisig, you know, and I can chase around the entire country trying to find a way to send my own Bitcoin. I've made it so difficult for myself to

send any Bitcoin in case anybody tries anything. Right. But rationally, that's insane. Yeah. Like I have five devices, each one that could fail. They're geographically spread. They're all locked down. No other person in the world can get to them without a scavenger hunt, the level of like a TV game show. Right. But like nobody else is going to do that. So one day there should be a system where I pick up my phone and I click on it and some, I don't know what it is, but it's all secure. It's all safe and it's all easy so i think we're just not there yet so the maximalists have to understand that there's a path to getting there and you can't want everybody to adopt bitcoin without accepting that they're going to need a way they can do it safely and comfortably at the end it comes down to this very fundamental

like if we if we play the elon musk game and like asking ourselves, like first, let's think from first principles, what's the main problem we actually have to solve? And what we actually have to solve for is identifying ourselves against a network of machines without a centralized custodian or someone that can actually say, oh yeah, that's Scott. No, that's not Scott. And the way we do it is through super long numbers. And the probability that there's another person out there that has the same number as you have is just so unlikely that this network out there accepts that if you come with this number called a private key, that this is actually you. And this is the fundamental problem of the entire system. So how to solve this?

Trust me, I've spent and I run a lot of long distance. I do a lot of like sports. I play golf. There's, I don't know, it's probably weeks of thinking of how to solve this. And I don't come up with a good idea. To me, it comes down to two things. Either Elon has a breakthrough in neural link so that we can link up our brains somehow to a machine and identify ourselves clearly right or we find some other way be it a social proof system or something where you and i can identify ourselves clearly

against a group of machines without a trusted intermediary And that's what makes this entire decentralization problem unusable for the masses at the moment without having centralized custodians. So hopefully someone listening to this, watching this, maybe someone has the right idea. It is the PayPal moment or the online payment moment of online shopping in the internet. That's at the end.

The reason why Amazon became so big was because they solved logistics and online payments. That's what they did. And that's at the end what blockchain still needs for mass adoption. I totally agree. You just touched on PayPal and goes to the same theory. I happen to think it's amazing that PayPal is allowing people to buy, sell and hold Bitcoin. 100%. Amazing. 100%. Because I want more people to care about Bitcoin. And there's obviously people who say, not your keys, not your coins. You can't even send it. It's not yours. But I think they don't

understand that 99.9% of people, A, don't give a shit if it's theirs, and B, wouldn't even understand the difference. And I just want them to know about Bitcoin, right? 100%. 100%. Yeah. So I mean, how many Bitcoin maximalists do I have? And also here in Singapore, right? And Facebook here is very strong actually with Libra or DM now, where they have very strong kind of outlet here in Singaporeapore because it is the switzerland of asia and and and i'm very close friends with the with the compliance officer there and we have some very constructive conversations on public information i want to be clear so there's no insider sharing or something but uh it's incredible how he says how people push back especially bitcoiners about this idea of having Diem.

And I just don't understand that. I'm pro central back digital currencies. I'm pro Diem. And again, I'm probably the minority here, but I just think this is at the end going to push adoption for cryptocurrencies. People will understand the difference. And as long as they have some onboarding, to me, this is just going to I think that's just going to help it.

And whenever I have this discussion with some of my Bitcoin friends, they're all like, oh, Julian, you're so naive. This is the back door. This is the wolf in sheep's clothing. And I disagree, actually. So I don't know. How do you see that? I mean, I tend to agree with you.

I think Libra was unique because people just see Facebook and get triggered, right? So obviously they lost their partners. Now it's not a basket. It's really just a stable coin. They rebranded. Fine. Stable coins are great, right? They serve their purpose.

Central bank digital currencies, I couldn't agree more. I think that it's the future. No matter whether you like it or not, money is going to be digital. And people are going to all learn how to use a digital wallet. They're going to learn how to transact digitally. And then they're going to realize they have zero privacy and search for something better. Great for Bitcoin. Great for it. Right. So I 100% agree with everything that you said there. But I want to also say a caveat, like I love maximalists. I love them. I think they're the greatest thing for this space. Their passion is what's brought

us to this point. I think, I think there just comes a time where you have to compromise. And so I don't blame them for the way that they feel. Like I said, I kind of support the core beliefs. But going back to what I said, I just think that we need a little bit of everything for everyone, because I do want everybody to own Bitcoin. I mean, a million percent agree. I made a YouTube video once and I got so much hate for it where I said, I hate maximalists, but I love them. And I mean this from the bottom of my heart. On the one hand, I don't understand one bit their entire philosophy, but I truly appreciate and love them for the entire fandom for whatever coin they support and you probably even would have to go and analyze how many true maximalists does actually a coin have

and and the more the better um even though they might be very irrational but it's super super essential to yeah to the dire times in a project yeah so but i guess that that leads to the dire times in a project. Yeah, but I guess that that leads to the next question, which is you have this like maximalism and passion for projects for whatever reason. And the XRP army and the Link Marines and the Bitcoin maximalists, why? And people like you and I obviously think like it's very clear.

I'm assuming you agree that a you know, a rising tide lifts all boats. Like I cheer for everyone. You know, like I want, I don't use Coinbase, but I'm buying Coinbase stock, you know, like, just because I want to see, I think if they do well, we all do well. Where do you think this inherent tribalism comes from? And how do you think we get past it so that we stop doing that damage and get everyone to work together? Is that just a pipe dream? I think it's a couple of things. It's pure laziness on the one hand. easier and less scary than going out into the jungle and maybe getting eaten by tigers and bad animals or by an opposing tribe. And so it's easier to just say, you know what, what I have is the best and everything else is bad. I don't want to deal with this. And I think

that's where a lot of the fundamental tribalism actually comes from. It's, yeah, because it's a bit laziness. And it's probably also just, it's the easy way out. I truly believe that. The hard way is, like, you're learning about Bitcoin. And now you learn about this new coin and new coin. And you have to learn about all these coins. And then suddenly people are like, okay, so, and then it comes down to, so now I need to learn about every new coin. No, it's not about learning every new coin.

It's just about being open and learning something new. There was this point that you had to learn about Bitcoin. And then at some point you stopped. You stopped learning about something new. Because you thought whatever you have is the right thing. And you call it the only true thing. At the end, to me, it's laziness. It's very understandable from an evolutionary

standpoint i was just going to say it's like it's like reading the book sapiens or something yeah i mean it makes it yeah 100 percent stop evolution right and it comes down to being scared that someone else builds the higher tower and since it's very difficult for you to influence the own tower because it's very difficult to to actually improve bitcoin it's's very difficult for you to influence the own tower, because it's very difficult to actually improve Bitcoin. It's just very difficult because it's so decentralized. So instead of taking this risk of trying to focus on your own tower, you have to somehow destroy all the other towers constantly. Because it's so difficult to build in your own tower.

And again, I disagree there because I believe what you're doing here, right? Where you go out and you spread the word, you educate people, you give people a platform to share ideas. At the end, the good ideas will spread. The bad ideas, yeah, they will spread a little bit, but then they quickly run dire. And I think that is the way how to build a higher tower.

And I've never been hateful or jealous or or full of vengeance if i see like i don't own any dogecoin but if like doge makes 5x or 20x i'm not kidding i sit there and i literally open a bottle of wine i'm like man i need to drink on that that's just that's just freaking fantastic right? Like how crazy awesome is this market? And then I read this story about this one guy who's like, you know, I follow Elon Musk and now I'm a millionaire. I'm like, you know, man, it's like winning the lottery. Like I totally give it to you. I hope you learn something and I hope you don't waste it on stupid stuff, right? But I'm really, really cheerful about all these things. I don't know. It, maybe it's my nature. No, it's me too. But I, yeah, again, I just, I think any win is a

win for all of us, you know, even if they're small and, and, and, you know, it's easy, I guess, if you're new and I only started in 2016, so I'm new by, by any stretch of the imagination. But at that time, like one piece of good news rocked the whole market. Like if you saw like a mention of Bitcoin in Forbes or Businessweek, it was like the biggest thing. Now it's, you know, it's mainstream and you don't remember that. But if you came from that earlier time and you much earlier, obviously, I think you remember what it was like. But I think you remember what it was like to get any win in the mainstream. You know, now the problem is a bit more also if Bitcoin gets a mention, Ethereum immediately starts firing against it.

And it's like, oh, you know, you should be mentioning Bitcoin. You should be mentioning us. And then XRP is actually coming in. And then, I don't know, this fee-less coin is coming in. And I don't know. It's, yeah, people sometimes tend to forget. Maybe it's because we're doing too well as a community, right? When you're doing too well,

we're actually circling back to the very beginning, right? When you're doing so well, suddenly so many problems actually appear. If we don't do well, suddenly we focus on the core thing. It's actually coming back to the discussion that we had at the very beginning that we started. People say they love building during the bear market because it's almost impossible to bull market, right? Because in the bull market, you're just trying to scale.

You're just trying to keep up. But in a bear market, you can actually not worry about price and your wealth and build something special. It's true. So we've talked about Elon Musk a bunch of times. And the big news the last few days is Tesla sold a little bit of Bitcoin, right? So it's a perfect example of what we're saying. This guy has been the hero of all things, Bitcoin, Doge, crypto. And the minute he sells like 10% of his position, he's the enemy. So I made this tweet today and obviously people weren't amused, but that's fine.

I gave this example about this monkey experiment. It's a very famous psychological experiment. They gave a monkey a banana, and then the monkey got to eat it. Then they gave the monkey two bananas. Obviously, that monkey remembered, oh, I only had one banana yesterday. Now I have two. Wow, that's just amazing. And then they gave the monkey four bananas. They took one away. So the monkey still had three bananas, more than yesterday, but one was taken taken away and the monkey got super angry right completely frustrated super angry and the craziest thing is it's the same freaking thing right now in crypto elon goes and buys a hundred percent of bitcoins now he takes ten percent and sells them

so he still has ninety percent and they're up yeah it's insane. And then Elon. He still has way more Bitcoin than when he bought. Way more. Dude, he still has way more, a thousand times more Bitcoin or 10,000 than any normal investor out there, right? And people are like, oh no, what a hater. He doesn't have the vision. He doesn't have the horizon if elon would have just bought 50 of the coins and never sold any he would have 40 less than right now than right now but people would be like happy it's just such an example of this monkey thinking right it's unfreaking believable i will never understand it hey where the humans are part of the great apes right so nothing surprising there but that's interesting because i'm a trader and I talk about trading psychology all the time. And there's a phenomenon,

I don't know if it's named or whatever, but everybody's experienced it. You're always comparing your present balance to whatever it was when it was literally the best and never the progress that you've made over a certain amount of time. So if someone's made, you know, if someone's portfolio was 10 million, you know, last week, and it was 1 million three months ago, and it's 8 million today, they talk about how they're down 2 million and not how they're up 7 million. Right? But I think that's always, I think that's just a fundamental part of human psychology. Yeah, 100%. And then out of the entire news, like Elon's tweet, right? Again, no one knows exactly how many Bitcoins he owns personally.

But he said it. He admitted it. He said it, right? And so to me, that was not the news. The news was Tesla selling 10%. That's the news, right? No one gives a crap. Just the people talk about it.

But the real news should be, right? No one gives a crap. Just the people talk about it. But the real news should be, hey, Elon owns Bitcoins personally. Yeah, because he said, I didn't sell any of my own Bitcoin. He's never once before even alluded to the fact that he personally owns it. And people also like, you know, and I think, but I think that this is good perspective. Because yet again, it's sort of like we were talking about before. I love Michael Saylor so much. It's like, I, you know, I wish he was family because he's a maximalist and he is the one who's driving this entire thing. But you, but because he was first, people have this expectation that everyone's going to behave like that. No companies are not going to be, you know, half their value be based on their Bitcoin holdings and companies are never going to say,

I'll never sell. Tesla had the opportunity to, like any trader would, take a bit out and play with the house's money, right? I mean, you take out your initial investment and some profit, and now literally anything they do from now on is completely free. They're riding the trade, and they were able to pad their quarterly earnings. And let's bring it down to something even more fundamental to me. Very few people, very few companies will be able to identify with Michael Saylor. I had him on my YouTube channel in German.

We translated the entire video into German, subtitled it, right? People loved him. I love him. He's fantastic. But very, very few people will ever be able to identify with this risk-taking that he's doing, right? And I hope obviously it pays off. Here's a key concept. What Elon is doing right now, that's relatable for companies, because companies now can look at Tesla and are like, holy crap, I can make money.

Yes, I can make money and I can actually sell this stuff. It's not that I have to buy this and then I have to hodl this for the rest of my life. Dude, I can actually make money off this. It's liquid. Tesla has shown it. This is super relatable for other companies. What MicroStrategy is doing is super inspiring, right? You need those extreme athletes. You need the LeBron James and the Steph Currys as the massive inspiration. But let's face it, 99.999% will never play basketball like they do. But they are the inspiration for millions of kids worldwide to pick up basketball, right? No one picks up basketball because of me shooting whatever,

10% from the three-point line. They pick it up because of Steph and LeBron and so on. They are the inspiration. It's like Michael Saylor. But are the inspiration. It's like Michael Saylor. But at the end, what's also super relatable is to then have people who are not in another universe. They are actually where you can go and you can say, oh, wow, I can actually be like them. They're not the same inspiration as maybe a Steph or a LeBron, but you can actually suddenly start to relate and you're

not getting discouraged if you go in and then you just get hammered out 21-0 or something. And it's the same thing there. And that's why I think what Elon actually showed here, I think people really underestimate the power in this. They underestimate what the statement he's making for other companies and the statement he's making from a personal level. I think that's completely underestimated by so many market participants right now. Yeah. You know, it all relates back to everything that we've talked about this entire time. I love this conversation. Absolutely. I know we're getting up against it. I'm curious what you're looking for. You know, we're in the, I mean, we're in the height of this like bull market and people are starting to get euphoric

as an owner of a company, seeing all of this mainstream adoption, seeing all these customers come in. What do you think the next, I'm not asking for a price prediction, but what do you think the next six months, next year, next five years? I mean, what do you think they look like? Do you think it's just more of the same and growing or do you think we see fundamental changes? I mean, so many people talk about 2021 being like 2017, and then 2022 potentially being like this crypto winter of 2018. To me, I see this very different. So the first crypto winter in 2011 actually happened because of this Bitcoin euphoria up to $30, and then this crash to $2. People just forget it had nothing to do with the halving. It was just suddenly everything, everyone was so euphoric about this magic internet

money that the price pumped and then people realized, okay, actually, it's probably not worth $30, it's only worth $2. In 2014, we had a crash, had nothing to do with the halving of 2013. It had everything in 2000. Yeah, 2013. Yeah, no, 2012. Sorry. 2012 had everything to do with the Mt. Gox crash. That was the major issue. 2016 halving had nothing to do with the 2018 crash. It had only to do with the ICO hype. So now we have the 2020 halving, and people are talking about history repeating. So what? Like people suddenly believing that this magic internet money is like something completely

new now? I don't think so. Are we going to see a new exchange blowing up that is going to drag the market down? I don't know who should this be. And I don't see a new shiny object. I don't see DeFi being that shiny object or NFTs that's actually going to pump the price and then completely deflate it. I just don't see a new shiny object. I don't see DeFi being that shiny object or NFTs that's actually going to pump the price and then completely deflate it. I just don't see it. So I'm actually not a prop.

I actually don't believe in the super cycle kind of idea that Dan Held from Kraken, I think, kind of tried to put in. I don't see that as much. I also don't see that we're going to see another crash next year. 85% drawn out. Yeah. And let me define that. A crash to me is minus 50% for at least six months. That's to me a crypto winter. A 30% drop, I couldn't care less. That's a healthy correction. That's par for the course.

We just had that. Yeah, we just had that. But okay, let me give you three scenarios where I would immediately change my mind. Scenario one, and that has come up a bit now with Biden or the Biden administration talking about maybe increasing taxes, capital gains, even though it's only going to affect a small percentage of Americans. These Americans are very wealthy, and I think this could have some effect. And it might be the start of some trickling effect into other markets, right? Europe has been discussing the same thing. So it might have some trickling effect, and this could have? Europe has been discussing the same thing. So it might have some trickling effect and this could have a negative price spiral. That's the first thing.

So taxation. The second one could be regulation and especially regulation on a company level, on who can put it on balance sheets. This is something that I see also for my company. So right now, our company is very compliance light here in Singapore because we're not an exchange. We are just a custodial wallet, basically. And from a regulatory standpoint, this is very regulatory light. It still means we have to do KYC and we go through all these things,

but it's different than being an exchange. Singapore is talking about regulating us as custodial wallets, similar to how exchanges are regulated the us mentioned similar things europe is talking about the same thing so obviously this is going to put more cost on us and we have to somehow put this cost to the customer because otherwise suddenly we're running at the loss so so this can be something that could cause a bit of a pressure and the third thing and that's interesting to see is what happens if at some point this COVID thing is going to subside. People are going to be more open to travel. Vaccinations are up and people feel safer again. And they're going to start trading their assets into lifestyle credits. And when they start doing

this, yes, they're going to trade a lot of things like bitcoin tesla stocks tech stocks and that could to me could be the the big kind of uh interesting question mark here especially this year i yeah because we all know we've benefited we all know we've benefited from everything of course and everyone that's listening to this or watching this just ask yourself right like you're sitting all these games what are you waiting for why are you not cashing in you're not cashing in because there's nothing to really spend right now there's nothing really to buy but guess what guess what when all these travels are open when you can fly to whatever to bora bora to tahiti or to hawaii or wherever you want to travel to and suddenly like wow you know what two years ago this was really really expensive But now when my Bitcoin up 10x, 20x, that's actually

quite cool. Okay, you know what, this new car, I always wanted to buy that car. And that is something that could cause a bit of a negative price spiral. I don't think that crashes the market. I don't think that crashes the market. But I do think that if you have retail selling pressure as a result of that, that maybe it won't go up as fast, or you just kind of lose the volatility to some degree. You were talking about, interestingly, you pointed out each thing, and I know we're running out of time. I just can't stop talking. It's all good. You pointed out each of these things that sort of crashed the entire market. The implication that we would see the same cycle again implies that we have the same market,

which we don't. Because now, you talk about DeFi, NFTs. We saw a DeFi bubble last summer. It didn't crash Bitcoin. It crashed DeFi temporarily. We're seeing an NFT bubble that you're not going to convince me otherwise right now. But the value of NFTs can collapse. It already is to some degree. And it doesn't affect the greater market at all. So I think it's actually maturity, right? The Bitcoin market has taken sort of a life of its own. And all of these sort of like, you know, smaller parts of the crypto sphere do not have the power, in my opinion, individually to crash the market as a whole. No, we could ask ourselves why. Yeah, why? So we can ask ourselves why, right? What's different? Because if the things are not different, then you're just lying to yourself.

So something has to be different or otherwise you're lying to yourself. But it is different. What's different? What's different are the on-ramps. In 2016, 2017, there was only one on-ramp. And that was mostly actually dollars, dollars into Bitcoin, Bitcoin into ETH,

ETH into ICOs. And that was the entire flow. And you could see this. It was like a pig getting through a garden hose, right? That was the entire flow, right? And so now it's completely different. Now, if you want to go into coin whatever, there is an exchange where you can just go in via fiat. Coinbase allows you to go from fiat into so many other coins you don't have to go through bitcoin right and so now you're actually not if you're like you know what i want to go into this defy hype coin okay fantastic you don't have to go through bitcoin then ethereum then defy hypecoin you go fiat maybe ethereum but most likely fiat coin yeah yeah exactly tether and then yeah

yeah yeah so and that's what changed. And that's super important to understand in this entire analysis. That part and the fact that on the other side is that we actually have custodians for large amounts of money. I always joke that Tesla wouldn't have come in in 2017 and put their $1.5 billion in Bitcoin on a ledger and hoped for the best, right? So we have custodial. So it's like the infrastructure is so much more mature now. And I think that that was a huge part of the reason that we had that speculative bubble previously. And also, you didn't have all these derivatives. You didn't have futures. You didn't have options. Let's not forget, futures kind of

started end of 2017, beginning of 2017. literally the day that the market topped for bitcoin yeah correct right so that's when when future started and so they at the end they cause a lot of the kind of counterbalance right now and and so that is also really important to understand um at the moment the reason why bitcoin dropped from 65 to like 47, a lot of it had to do, obviously some selling was because of some profit taking, but a lot of the selling actually was pure liquidations. Yeah, exactly. Right. It was liquidations of massive leverage. Right. So this part, this small profit taking, if we would have seen the same thing in 2017, I don't know, the market would have gone from 65 maybe to like 60 or something yeah

exactly yeah right and you can see it if you pull up a chart like i love the bit stamp chart obviously because i believe that's sort of just where whales are there was way less selling volume on this drop even than the previous ones this year bigger drop but way less spot selling because the massive liquidation right and so and, at the end, that's good because that just always kind of shows, okay, there's not even this possibility when a market heats up like in 2017 and then suddenly goes through the roof.

Now it immediately kind of counteracts. And that's what, at the end, what makes it super healthy. People don't like it. They would want to have this like exponential thing, but that's just really going to go nuts. So that's what makes it so healthy. Yeah, I agree. Well, I know we're kind of out of time. Is there, do you have any parting thoughts? And then I want you to just tell people where they can find Cake, where they can find DeFi Chain, all the other things you're doing and where they can find you. But if you have anything else you'd like to share,

please have at it. No, look, I think i always try to have this parting thought in whatever you're doing crypto it's not about all or nothing it's not about going all in or go go all out it's not about getting the bottom and selling at the top it's about having skin in the game having some of your funds in crypto buying cheaper than what you're selling and if you just try to go for this you're gonna win and i think when you go in with this mindset, I don't know, taking profits is one of the healthiest things and the best feelings you can do because yeah, now it becomes house money. So that's fantastic. So these are really to me the most important parting thoughts. And just because people claim on Twitter that they're never selling. Yeah, I don't know.

They're probably selling while they're tweeting that they're never selling. Yeah, I don't know. They're probably selling while they're tweeting that they're never selling. What Elon is doing here is just, it's a prime example. I think he's actually leading by example. I think it's really good. And I hope that other companies are going to follow. And I think actually other leaders will, because they see what's there. And I think that's really important. I agree. He's given a much more realistic path. Yeah. Two things to share so obviously would love if you connect with me on twitter my handle is at julian hosp um so that's like julian my last name is like hosp like hospital so yeah and uh yeah our company website

is cakedify.com and uh yeah if you want to check out our blockchain project, go to DeFiChainOneWorld.com. I would love to connect and exchange ideas. Awesome. That information will be in the description as well. Thank you so much. I said to Julian before the conversation, I said, I don't like to prep too much for my podcast because I like to just have a conversation that's organic and see where it goes. And this one definitely was completely unplanned, but one of the best that I've definitely ever had.

I absolutely loved it. And I thank you for your thoughts. And I'm glad that we shared a lot of the same sort of opinion. I appreciate it. I appreciate it as well, Scott. It was really awesome.