The Wolf Of All Streets - "This One Catalyst Could Trigger Bitcoin’s Next Collapse" | Mike Belshe

Episode Date: February 7, 2026

Bitcoin has survived every crash so far, but this cycle’s biggest threat isn’t price, hype, or retail panic. In this interview, we break down the structural catalyst quietly building beneath Bitcoin’s market, from custody and exchange risk to the growing influence of institutions, regulation, and market structure. If you think the next collapse will look like the last one, this conversation will change how you see Bitcoin’s real vulnerabilities and what happens next if they’re ignored.

And imagine being a financier and you don't know how to invest money. And your best idea is a 10-year T-bill. Well, first off, if I'm hiring you, like I can put it into 10-year T-boles myself. So stable coins are for a deposit, retail deposit, like better banks than you've ever had. They're very safe, one-to-one-backed. You can have an auditor come in. You audit it twice a month. I mean, you don't have any banks or audited twice a month. It's 100% reserve. It's almost no fees. and it moves 24-7. So it's a better bank than you ever had.

And Larry Fink, you know, from BlackRock, he says everything's going to be tokenized. So every equity, every bond, every fund, it's all going to be tokenized. So don't take my word for it. Take his. I'm Scott Melker, host of the Wolf of All Streets podcast here with Mike Belchie, the CEO of Bitco.

And Mike, you've had a pretty big few days here. Well, thank you. Look, I think we try to always keep it fun. as for me, like, you know, I enjoy watching the markets. Also, we've got, you know, OpenClaw, which has been all over everything. I've been playing with that. Look, I think there's a lot of great stuff that's happening in the world, in spite of, you know, seeming like instability, you know, there's change.

It's exciting times. So let's talk about specifically what's happening with Bitco, obviously. You were the darling IPO of last week, the first crypto-related IPO of 2026. Maybe you can give us a background on that process, why the timing, how it finally happened. Sure. And then, you know, look, right after you do an IPO, I'm not allowed to talk about certain things. But I can talk about the business and just what are we doing and why do we do this, right? So you've known Bicko for a long time.

It's been great to know you, Scott, for, I think, forever. Thank you for your contributions in the industry and with keeping all of the news straight and center. But Bicko is an infrastructure company for digital assets. We've been around since 2013. A lot of what we do is prove to our clients that we are worthy of their business. And in the early days, it was like, how does your technology work? What is this two out of three model that you guys are pioneering? How does it work with multi-sig and MPC and this chain and that?

And over time, the types of things we do to prove it continues to get more and more in depth. So after the initial technology review, it's like, okay, well, what's the operational controls and the stock audits, and how do you have insurance behind it, and how do you do cold storage behind that? What's your regulatory framework? What's your regulatory framework in each of the jurisdictions around the planet? How do you build market structure, which Bickgo does, to make trading capable straight from cold custody?

And then, of course, our latest step is moving into the public markets. And one of the nice things about being in the public markets is that everything is transparent. You know, all the faults of the SEC, you can't complain that it isn't providing a really deep look, at who is BITCO, how are the finances, what are the risks of the company, et cetera. So it's all out there in the S-1 and our clients can see it. And when you start talking with Wall Street, many of whom are public companies themselves,

century-year-old organizations. You know, it's much easier for them to interface to BITCO today than it was last week. So how about the timing? I mean, was that a function of when you got approved and you went for it? Was there any plan behind that because you did? get to be the first in 2026, of course, with a long line of potential IPOs for the crypto industry coming, and obviously we had quite a few successful IPOs in 2025. Well, without throwing too many superlatives out there, I'd like to think BICO is frankly

a bit stronger than most of our competitors, and so we were just ready earlier. This is something that we started working on last year. I think we're pretty close to having it all ready to go back in October when, you know, the government decided to take a little shutdown for a little while. So, you know, that's kind of pushed the timing back, but that was the only reason. Other than that, we've been anticipating this. We like it because we think it makes our business stronger, and it's as simple as that. And, you know, one of the things that you do is part of this whole process.

You get introduced to the biggest and best investments in asset managers out there, you know, $100 billion funds, $1,000, $1,000, $1,000, dollar funds. And it's true, they haven't really looked at crypto companies very much, in part, because they haven't been public. So look, it's just been part of our strategy for a long time, and it's a lot less about, like, some particular timing around the market or whatnot than it is about this is good for us. I think that's unique. You know, most businesses, they're probably like, they're raising a bunch of money because they want to go build some data center, or they've got some particular thing they need to do. In our case, and you can look at our finances, you know, or in pretty solid shape, I think.

And so it was really more about how do we make sure that people can interface with us and understand, if you're a fiduciary on the board of a public company, fiduciary to shareholders, how do you know that the providers that you're using as you get into the digital asset markets are the best ones for you?

It's interesting because we see the article that's a first crypto company by blacked out. Do you lose me? I went black there for a second. It's not locked. so it doesn't matter. We're still recording, guys. We're good. Okay. It's interesting because these articles described you as the first crypto company of 2026, but I think it's unfortunate that everyone's still lumped together. You look at a bullish, an E-Toro, a circle, cracking, Gemini, the ones that we've

talked about from last year, you're very different. It's almost entirely separate and strange that you're even lumped together. Well, thanks for pointing that out. I mean, that's right. We've seen a bunch of retail exchanges go public already, and there hasn't been a lot of differentiation. So BITCO is an infrastructure provider, or mostly known for storage and custody. But actually, we've been trying to help build, you know, market structure. And these days we're a full-fledged financial services company for digital assets. So we look very different. We're also institutionally focused instead of retail focused. But you're right, there's a lot of people that just bundle it all together as crypto. I guess it's convenient.

But you're in a very different part of the industry, as we said. So maybe talk about – I mean, there was a story – You want to talk about market structure? Yeah, that was exactly where I was going, because it's become – you might mean something different than the Clarity Act that everybody's looking at, but, you know, it's going to come from the industry to get sensible views on how that should be structured. Yeah. Well, first of, let's talk about clarity.

we would very much like to see clarity get done. Having spoken to all kinds of participants that have been mostly on the sidelines here to four, having clarity is really like the government stamp of approval that there's a path forward. Clarity itself, it clarifies a couple of things, but for the most part, it delegates that out to the CFTC to determine over the next couple of years.

Nonetheless, we think, like, we as an industry, would greatly, immensely benefit from, having clarity done, even if it's got imperfections. And we can talk about the stable coin component in a moment. But let's talk about market structure. Market structure is something most people don't know quite what it is. And, you know, it sounds good. Yes, we should have it.

And we know that there's no market structure in crypto. But what are we really trying to accomplish here? And in my opinion, there's a few basic protections that markets should have and do have in all other asset classes except for crypto. and we're looking for how to bring crypto into that fold without doing something that stifles innovation or prevents us from you know making things even better so if you look at the traditional markets I believe there's a couple of things that that are true first off the US has the

largest capital markets in the world they've lasted for over 100 years they are not even close in there's nobody else even close in comparison as the world goes digital those markets will become digital and And as such, any risks that are inherent to digital will fall into the traditional capital markets. Now, I think what we've always done with market structure is we've protected the exchange. Exchanges, they lead themselves to monopolies. That sounds terrible, but, you know, it's not really, right? Like a great exchange is the largest collection of buyers, the largest collection of sellers coming together

to be able to trade and get the best price. So, you know, it's natural that CME is a monopoly, that New York Stock Exchange plus NASDAQ monopolies. And the same thing will happen with digital. As such, if that monopoly, that center player, that exchange should take a fault and go down, it would kill the capital markets. So there's two key risks that need to be identified, in my opinion. One is custody risk.

You know, we have never had the New York Stock Exchange, the CME, et cetera, take custody the assets they're trading. It just doesn't happen. Crypto is the first where this does happen. And the reason it happens is not because people thought it was good, but because in the early days of crypto, there wasn't any choice. It was this brand new asset class. There was nobody to hold it. So we've evolved to where we are, but it's time to evolve further.

And sadly, with digital assets, they are the hardest things to custody ever, right? They are bearer instruments, and if you lose them, they're gone. Unlike, you know, equities or anything else where you can probably rewrite a database and get back up in a couple of days if you had a fault, If the New York Stock Exchange were holding digital assets and had a failure, the exchange would be gone. The capital market would be gone. So you can't have a digital exchange holding custody in my opinion. Now, that might sound self-serving. Let's move to the second risk.

Counterparty credit risk. We don't see a lot of this in digital assets today, but you're starting to see it as we've got market structure. How do you extend leverage to traders? And counterparty credit risk, extending leverage, has always been isolated away from the exchange. So here think Lehman Brothers, 2008, 100 plus year old organization, you know, very fine institution, and yet, you know, sooner or later humans make mistakes. They overextended, they didn't exactly know who owed them what or how they would recover, and of course they end up dying. Now imagine if Lehman Brothers had been inside of the NASDAQ, and NASDAQ had disappeared. It's terrible that Lehman was lost, but it would be absolutely devastating if the NASDAQ were lost.

So exchanges should not be allowed to extend counterparty credit risk. And, you know, in the crypto world, exchanges have been a one-stop shop. They take the custody risk. They take the counterparty credit risk. And they want to say, oh, but we can do it better. Look, you isolate these things out. You build some amount of fault tolerance so the exchange can never die. And, of course, this is what you should be doing.

So I'll bring it back, though, to a more practical example, which is Bicco. One nice thing about that market structure. Here in the US, when you buy equities, you go to your broker, and you can pick from any brokers. He's got a duty of best execution, best X. He's got to get to the best price. He's got to get to the best price, whether it's on the NASDAQ or the Boston Exchange or the American Exchange or whatever. And it's market structure that allows this to happen. So you work with your broker, and he gets to the best price.

When you go to crypto, you pre-fund some exchange. This is the way it works across the entire planet right now. And those exchanges, they don't have a duty of best X. They just get you the best price on their exchange. But we all know that the best prices can be anywhere. As traditional finance comes into crypto right now, they're assuming that they can go to like somebody who looks like a pretty good-sized exchange. It might be a big exchange.

Might even be a public company. But they're surprised to learn that, A, that exchange is a relatively small set of global market share. And then B, it doesn't get to the best price. All right, so Bicko, what did we do? We were different, right? So we started out building wallets, secure custody, safety. The bottom foundation of everything that we do in financial services needs to be really, really robust. So we built that.

We do 100% cold storage. Our clients love the cold storage. They're storing billions of dollars of assets with us. They don't want it online. They love what we do, the security that we go to, the regulatory we have behind it, the insurance, etc. But when they wanted to trade, they'd have to take it out of that cold storage and go put it on some rickety exchange somewhere. They don't want to do that. Why should they have to trade off between security and liquidity? You should be able to have both. Market structure is what gives you both.

It allows you to have the security and safety of where it is that you're banking or storing. It also allows you to have liquidity, get the best price anywhere. So Bitco's model, of course, we're not an exchange. We're not going to be an exchange. But we get to the best price around the planet, no matter where it might be. We connect to all the market makers, all the exchanges, and that's market structure. So we do a duty of best acts, not because some regulator told, this to, but because commercially, that's what our clients want. Anyway, that's what market structure is, in my opinion, and very much welcoming changes here in the U.S. to make it stronger.

It's interesting because the narrative that we see in the media and with retail around the Clarity Act and what market structure is from the government's perspective very rarely talks about the duties of an exchange or the roles that they should play that are actually, as you pointed out, pretty natural in every other market. We're focused on what's a security, what's commodity and whether you can have yield on stable coins. But what you described is actually the more fundamentally important part of market structure that is being actually discussed in the Clarity Act. Nobody's talking about it. Yeah, look, I mean, most people don't know how our current markets work. And frankly, once they're set up and running, you really don't need to. They're

hard to change. You don't want them to change very often. But we're at this unique moment in time where we have a new asset class coming into play. And people are wondering, like, wait, this this asset class is so different. Does it need the same type of market structure we've had? Does it need something different? How can we make it more efficient? These are all great questions. But at the end of the day, I think the way you solve it by saying, okay, what risks are we trying to mitigate?

Let's identify those. And let's figure out how we're going to do that. And once you start doing it that way, I think things start to break out much more simply. You're right. Clarity Act does answer a couple of basic questions of like, who regulates this asset? Who regulates? Very important. Got to get that done for sure.

Stablecoin interest, that's a little bit of a curveball, not really related to market structure. Basically, there's an infighting between different parties that each want to be able to have the business that gives interest. And there's three different parties, not just two, by the way. But that's an interesting side show that's not really related to straight market structure. Let's talk about the side show, though, because it's a great topic. So why is stable coin yield such a big question for the Clarity Act, especially when we just passed the Stablecoin Act, Genius Act? Yeah. Look, so stable coins are for a deposit, retail deposit, like better banks than you've ever had. And it's technology that brings them to light. We haven't been able to do this before.

It is the combination of the blockchain. It is the combination of the one-to-one backing with a treasury, et cetera. They're very safe. These are something that, you know, Genius was able to wrap it, set around very quickly. The idea is you get one token. It's backed one-to-one. There's no algorithmic stable coins. We're not talking about any of that stuff. One-to-one backed. You can have an auditor come in. You audit it twice a month. I mean, you don't have any banks that are audited twice a month. It's 100% reserve. It's almost low, no fees. And it moves 24-7. So it's a better bank than you ever had. All of a sudden, the banks are afraid that they're going to lose their deposits. And then they say that's going to cause a systemic problem. Well, look, it won't. And we know it won't,

this is not the first time this has happened in history. And, you know, for your watches, I haven't heard this before, but this happened in, you know, 1970, 1971. Back at the time, there was a piece of regulation called Regulation Q, which prevented banks from offering too much interest to their depositors. So there was a limit. And then as inflation started, to rear its ugly head, sound familiar, you know, the money market guy said, hey, what if we create a money market, backed 100% by T-bills, and just give the 8% or whatever the interest rate was at the time. And the banks cried bloody murder.

They said, oh, my God, there's going to be run on the bank. It's going to be end of the world. Okay, I don't know how many different money markets there are. There's he bill back today. Obviously, we got past this. Regulation Q doesn't exist anymore. There was no run on the bank. It's all going to be just fine.

So faction number one is the banks are worried about, you know, being competitive against stable points. And rather than try to compete, you know, their first option is like, well, if we can just block this regulatory-wise, we don't have to compete. Let's keep same-old, same-old, it'll be great. That's the first player. Now, there's crypto generally. The camp I'm in is that in the end, of course, it's your money. If all we're doing is going and putting in a T-bills and getting the risk-free rate, I believe we have a fiduciary duty to give you back that money. It's not even a choice. Like the idea that a regulator is going to say, like, hey, you're taking no risk

on the client's money and yet you should keep it. Seems a little strange to me. Okay. And then there's a third thing, which is, all right, so genius is really the bill which already blocked interest on staples. Clarity is coming along and fixing what's now known as the loophole. Now there's only one company on the planet that I know of that is capable of actually exercising the loophole. I believe there should be no loophole for anybody. There should also be no loophole. There should also be blocking from genius. It's really genius that needs to be changed to allow interest and everybody should be able to do it and compete in the open markets. What we have is option A, which is, you know, I guess keep genius the same, which would continue to block interest.

Option B would be to modify genius to allow interest. I believe that's the right answer and history will ultimately get us there. And then there's option C, which is what to do about this loophole. Look, there's one company that's fighting for the loophole. They're saying that it's about making sure everyone can get interest, but actually it's about preserving their loophole so that they can continue to provide an interest. It's like, okay, I kind of understand, but if you're really... A good call of rewards, correct? We're talking about Coinbase. Mike doesn't want to say it, but obviously, Coinbase, very famously, you know, Brian Armstrong was credited with blocking the

Clarity Act. I also don't think that's exactly what happened, but they've made a pretty big statement by saying they would rather, you know, no bill than a bad bill, and that stable coin yield is at the center of one of four or five things that they view as an issue. But to your point, right now, as it stands, they're offering rewards, which look a lot like interest and nobody else really can. That's right. Look, I think if we're going to have a loophole, like everybody should have a loophole, in which case it's not a loophole, or we should have a loophole that nobody has access to. It should be one or the other. It shouldn't be a case where there's really just one guy that's capable of doing it. And, you know, they might argue, no, anyone can do it.

But really, if you look practically, there's not an ability for anyone else to replicate that model. It happens to be historic. It comes out of like how we got here over the last, you know, seven, eight years. And there's a bunch of folks, Tether, deserves a ton of credit for pioneering the space and the zero-interest environment. Circle deserves a ton of credit as well. Totally agree with all those points. So I'm not trying to slight anyone in that regard. But as we talk about, like, what should the policy be on a go-forward basis?

Of course, we want every company to be able to offer interest reasonably back to their clients. And I guess if you want to go a little deeper, I have one more thought about how this should be thought of, kind of in the broader context. So, do I go there? Please. All right. So ETFs and stable coins, I think, are pretty similar. BlackRock offers a Bitcoin

ETF, the most successful ETF, I think of all time in terms of speed and growth. And BlackRock takes a 25 basis point fee for administering that ETF. That fee covers their operational costs. It covers their

regulatory standing. It covers their audits a little bit more. I think a stable coin is actually a very similar type of activity. You've got again a little bit of operational, you've got some regulatory, some audits, and then you're managing a one-to-one reserve. Very similar types of products.

So really, we should be thinking about how do we get stable coins to the point where the issuer is keeping somewhere in the neighborhood of 25, maybe 50 basis points. We can argue about that number. But it shouldn't be like this 300, 400 basis points, which is kept today. So I think that's where we ultimately land. And once we do that, the stable coin market will get better faster. today since you can't pass interest through anyone that wants to start participating in stable coins

is like well I want to be the issuer because I get to keep all the money and the law requires me to keep all the money right but once that's not an issue not not the case anymore now you can start to have a few stable coins that emerge provide reasonable administrative fees and just get ubiquitous and people won't want to create like a thousand different stable coins when there's not like this massive you know, reward, created, frankly, by the regulatory capability that we have under genius today. Created by the regulatory capability, but also the blueprint laid out by the banks, which is taking the deposits and make all the money and give the deposit or nothing. Yeah, look, the banks have got another thing, and this is not just here in the U.S., but also

abroad, you know, in the EU. The EMI license requires that if you're an issuer, you're going to keep, I think it's 60% of the backing at depository banks. And, you know, it's interesting. People think of just the layman's term bank. It's supposed to be, you know, safety and stability and all that. But a depository bank is a fractional reserve bank. We had a bank die just last week, which one with the silver crash? Which one was it?

Do you remember? I go something, something. It didn't even make the news cycle. more than when a bank collapses. Yeah. Well, it was a tiny one, right? It was only like $250 million. But the point is, fractional reserve is a risky business. Here's a funny thing that, you know, just how tied up we are in nomenclature. If you look at the Clarity Act, it talks about insured banks. And if I talk to you as a layman, well, an insured bank sure sounds better than an uninsured bank, right? So as you know, Bicko is an OCC, National.

bank. Now we're not an insured bank. Insurance, of course, is really talking about FDIC, federal deposit insurance. We are not eligible for insurance because we're not fractional. Like, you need insurance if you're taking the risk of being fractional reserve. But if you're not taking that risk, you don't need the insurance because you actually have the money. So it's interesting to talk about insured banks. And generally you're going to think, oh, insured bank is safer than an uninsured bank. But actually, that's not true. An insured bank, that's a fractional reserve bank,

is got a bunch of risks in it and needs insurance. What Bicko is, which is a 100% reserve bank, is actually less risky by definition. And yet, the nomenclature that gets thrown around is intended to make you think bank safe, oh, insurance, even safer, when actually the insurance is the safety net for when those banks ultimately do,

make mistakes. And, you know, this is a great place where you segue into, let's take a look at what the fancy bankers did with Silicon Valley Bank just a couple of years ago. Incredible. Oh, do you want to get that now? We can redo that next. I was just saying, but it's an incredibly interesting point because when the meeker regulations came out in the EU, Tether and others pointed out that the biggest risk now to tether was the amount of money that they had to keep in a certain kind of bank in the EU. And that's what we saw with Silicon Valley Bank and the risk at least for 48 hours

before the Fed fired the bazooka to USC, which was circle because they had $3 billion sitting in Silicon Valley Bank. There was a 36 to 48 hour period where nobody knew if that hole was going to be filled. Of course it was. And there was a 10% effectively haircut on the value of a dollar-pegged stable coin

for a few hours, right? It was down trading it like 90 cents when it was supposed to be a dollar because that was a tenth of their reserves. Absolutely right. Look, you know, the bankers, You know, you grow up in America, you're taught these are guys that really understand finance, they know how to keep money really safe.

Look, for the most part, I suppose there's some truth to that. But at least in the example of Silicon Valley Bank, basically what it boils down to, they had a lot of deposits coming in. And these guys, so that are these financial geniuses running the bank, they didn't have a single idea better than, hey, why don't we put it into a 10-year T-bow? right and imagine being a financier financier and like you don't know how to invest money and your best idea is a 10 year T bill well first off if I'm hiring you like I can put into 10 year Tables myself so I don't really need to hire somebody to to take my my interest and do that for me second it's rather shocking that they didn't have any better ideas and then what's really shocking is that it didn't occur to them like, hmm, we're in a zero interest rate environment. What happens if the interest

rates start going up and there's a run on the bank? And of course, then that happened. So the idea that the guys running the existing banks are, you know, really experts at what they do and capable of keeping your money safe, like, you better be interviewing whoever's running your bank right now and understand, like, what are they going to do, you know, as we go through this tumultuous period of our economy over the next 10 years. It's not clear to me at all that the inheritors of these 100-year-old organizations, I guess Silicon Valley Bank wasn't 100 years old, so I'm mixing things up there. But it's not clear to me that they are necessarily great stewards of your finance, your money, just because they've been doing a long time.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense, but it goes back to the conversation around where a trusted and fully backed custodian stands in the infrastructure that we're looking to build in the crypto market. I mean, it's once again, you look at a company like Coinbase, and I know that you didn't outright say that, but they serve all of the functions that are required to be separated in other markets, right? They're the custodian, they're the exchange, they're offering the yield. They've basically got the full breadth of services. Do you think that this market should basically be viewed like all others where those things are not allowed? If I have to pick a yes or no, I mean for the most part, I would say yes.

Let's shift the argument over to what New York Stock Exchange is announced. New York Stock Exchange recently announced they want to make everything digital. I've been saying for a while as clarity's been growing, like if I'm from the traditional space and I'm looking at clarity, which is going to give me as an exchange, a traditional exchange and equity's exchange, the ability to digitize and then participate on all parts of other business, including leverage and including custody, I'm going to go digitize everything, and then I'm going to go bring a one-stop shop together as well. My business can tremendously grow if I do that. So I think we do need to think very seriously, like what are the risks

we're protecting in our capital markets? I think it's imperative that the U.S. have the best capital markets. We have them right now. Nobody's even close. China is not close. You know, there might be close on GDP and things like that, but they are not close on having capital markets. Of course we should preserve that in the United States. And how do you do that? Simple. Identify the risks. And by the way, if anyone's got a different idea of risks that we should do, I think that's a good conversation to be having. It's not talking about like a particular exchange, crypto or traditional whatever. But once you identify those risks, super easy to figure out how you're going to solve those problems. And yeah, I do think we need more of it than less.

And Larry Fink, you know, from BlackRock, he says everything's going to be tokenized. So every equity, every bond, every fund, it's all going to be tokenized. So don't take my word for it, take his. And if you believe that, then the capital markets are all going digital. And then do you want those future digital capital markets to have the same types of risks that took down Lehman Brothers or that took down Mount Cox? Not only Larry Fink, but you have Paul Atkins, who is the SEC chairman. saying that, you know, with Project Crypto, that the entire capital markets will be basically tokenized by the end of 2026. And then you had the DCC themselves, who I think settled four or five quadrillion a year in transactions, right?

They said that they received a no action letter from the SEC and made announcements moving forward with Canton Network and others that they intend to tokenize everything by the end of 2026. This is definitely happening. Where does a company like BitGo fit into that? Well, look, we've been doing security and safety at the foundational level for like forever. Sometimes people confuse us still with like, hey, you're a custodian, you said it yourself, look, we're actually a national bank. At this point, we're a 100% reserve bank. I believe the banks of the future that you actually want are the 100% reserve banks.

I think it will evolve. But we're a financial service institution, but you can't build those financial services without having a really strong foundation. And, you know, we had a lot of negative things to say about the traditional system on this call so far. But switching back to the positive, again, you know, the risk of financial services and traditional finances actually pretty well understood. It's because it stands on the shoulders of, you know, banks that are now 100 plus years old, all of them, State Street, New York, B&Y, J.P. Morgan, you know, tremendously old organizations. we very well understand their businesses. It allows us to build all kinds of things on top. You can't do that without.

So BitGo has started building that foundation. We went to the nth degree. Every single chain we do pulls out all the stops on the security level. We go and get the best compliance regulatory framework they can get anywhere. We meet our clients where they are. We're not just regulated here in the U.S. We're regulated in seven custodial entities around the planet. And that builds the core on which we can build.

The next steps are really about making sure market structure is preserved, isolate various types of risks for the markets. That will continue to happen for a while. But look, I think every financial institution in the planet that's behind a digital asset, they're going to be looking like where do they get the best infrastructure so they can build their products and services. And a lot of times they find BICO, so that's what we do. Are the B&Y Melons in the State Streets and the legacy custodians going to attempt to

out this infrastructure themselves or would they partner with a BitGo to just basically capture it more quickly and go with someone trusted and move on with their lives? Well, they get to announce their own products and services. So we don't always get the luxury of being able to say, oh, yeah, we're powering this brand and that brand. But yes, you know, public-listed financial institutions that you know are using BitGo absolutely. They haven't all been announced. 2025 was a big change. And these companies, companies tend to move a little bit more slowly, a little bit more conservatively, which is probably good. And their rollout times are 12 to 18 months, sometimes longer than that.

And number of the ones that you just mentioned, yes, they have already announced that they are getting into the space. They haven't announced how they are doing it yet. Look, I think when it comes to the actual handling and digital assets, they like what they see at Bicco. you know what we have is a hundred percent cold storage the you know when you're securing billions of dollars you just have to keep it offline otherwise you are vulnerable to these hackers 24-7 it's still our duty to provide great service and Bicko does that we've grown to a point where you know we've built all kinds of capabilities in terms of our personnel and technology we can still get you out in an hour on

pretty much anything and of course we still apply all the security principles on top of So we're still faster than any banking system ever was. We run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we fall of the sun. And yet you also get these benefits. So all of the traditional firms are making the analysis right now of how do they, how do they get into the markets? And oftentimes they're going to find Bickle. You and I have had a lot of conversations about the political environment and navigating it. Obviously, you decided to IPO once there was a favorable regulatory and likely legislative change. Do you fear at all that environment changing

and things potentially going back in some way to how they were before? Well, keep in mind, there just wasn't a choice under the previous administration. It wasn't like you had the option of trying. There were several companies that tried. You had E. Toro, you had Circle, you had Bullish, you had Galaxy, all tried to go public

back in 2021, 2022. All were blocked, and all of those are public companies today. So there wasn't an option before. Once you're out and you are public company, it's really a cat that's out of the bag. You can't put the cat back in the bag. So I'm not worried about that being undone. But no, I think there is work to be done in terms of codifying in law. And you probably recall, I did attend the White House crypto dinner at the White House. White House did it out of the White House. Back last February, I think it was, maybe March.

And there were a bunch of industry leaders there. And basically everybody said, thank you, Mr. President. We really appreciate the executive orders that you put in place, the change in posture, the openness to putting people in the charge of these agencies that actually are willing to give us a fair shake, not asking for any special privileges, just a fair shake.

Now can we codify in law. And so that's why genius and clarity have been so important. this is what sets forward, sets in motion, the ability for the regulating, the agencies to go and actually do the work to engage with our business. And once those are done, we're in good shape. Yeah, I mean, it feels like the legislative environment is more uncertain moving forward than the regulatory environment is at least for the next three years. We have very pro-crypto people at the head of the SEC, CFDC. I mean, literally at every agency, even if it's not financially related, they're all bitcoins somehow. And I can't imagine that's an accident. But it feels like even if clarity doesn't pass,

even if we get contentious bipartisanship about legislation moving forward, we still have three solid years for precedent from the regulators. And as one of my guests last week said, this is the time for the crypto industry effectively to become too big to fail over the next three years. If we become too big to fail, it won't matter what happens. That's one way to solve it. I think you're right about the legislative area is the place to

worry, not the regulatory area right now, but remember, the heads of the regulated agencies change if the president changes. So that's the part, the legislative part is the part we have to fix. I think we already are too big to fail, actually. I'm not really that worried about it. Are there going to continue to be economic fights and between companies? Yes, I think that's really the issue that we're starting to see with the stable coin side. regulatory capture is a terrible thing. It is bad for America, it is bad for consumers, it is bad for business. Unfortunately, when it comes to money, this is an area that actually we generally support more regulation as kind of a society. And this is because, look, over time, we've seen

all kinds of scammers. Nobody likes scams, right? And don't forget, one of the biggest scams Bernie made off nothing to do with crypto right so this happens in in all asset classes my own personal opinion is that if you lay too much regulation on top of it you end up with a industry that can't move and then you end up with products and don't really work very well and I think that's where we are with the banks I think you can't really undo regulation once it's in place but what's happening right now is we have a unique opportunity where the technology is different we're not running for action or reserve we're right

running 100% reserve. And so the type of regulation you need on top of a 100% reserve bank is frankly just different than with the fractional reserve bank. So we have an opportunity to change things. And the new model going forward doesn't have as much regulation on top of it today. And if we don't overburden it, it can allow us to grow in a way that works for consumers. You're going to get great interest back. You're going to get 24-7 payments. You're going to get global payments. All of these things are going to be doable. You're going to be able to put your money in all kinds of different things that work. Now, are there people out there that are going to to scam you. Yes. You might say, oh, we need regulators to protect us. I don't know

the regulators ever can actually protect you. I mean, you know, we had FTCX happen kind of right underneath their noses. We have Bernie Madoff happen right underneath their noses. I don't mean to offend the regulators. They're doing a lot of hard work. They get blamed if they don't do it right and they don't get any credit that they do do it right. But if we overburden with regulation, we will stifle better. finance for Americans and if we and if we leave it too light, look, people have to take a little bit more responsibility for what investments they make. And some guy, you know, showing up on Telegram that looks like Scott, may not be Scott and you probably should do some more diligence before you invest with that guy on Telegram. 100% not me. I can tell you that right now, but it happened a thousand times a day.

And it's one of – I'm sure you've had complaints to this exact issue, right? I have two. Literally, quite literally all day, every day. It happened today, and people have been unfortunately scammed for millions with accounts that look like my face. It's really unbelievable. Listen, I know we only got a couple minutes left, but I do have to say you've got a big Bitcoin logo right behind your head, and we managed to have a 40-minute conversation without talking about Bitcoin at all, which I think is interesting because that wouldn't have happened in the past,

but Bitcoin seems sort of immune as an asset, the reason that we love it from the very beginning to all of this. So you obviously started this to custody Bitcoin safely, and now we talk about politics and legislation and regulation and stable coins and yield, but they're still just Bitcoin, right? Well, look, we have bit in our name.

I have conversations with some traditional finance, people are like, you should change your name to this day because it has the word BIT in the front of it. I think ultimately, over the long, arc of history we are going to realize that that scarcity of money which only Bitcoin provides at that level actually is how you get the bedrock of safety and while we touch all kinds of coins you know in addition to Bitcoin today thousands of coins you know it's it's that safety piece which which matters

most and it's why it lasts the long arc of time so I think Bitcoin continues to grow it'll continue to have challenges none of this is done it takes hard work. You know, the Bitcoin ecosystem teams need to continue to work to make sure that people can fully trust Bitcoin, not just for what it is today, but on the go forward, make sure that it's resilient against attacks, make sure that we identify centralization where it might start to rear its ugly head and find ways to make it more decentralized. And this is never a done problem. So this would be ongoing. But good news, we as humans are pretty clever. And resilient over time and we actually do usually do this in spite of our our flaws. So I think that

we will continue to make Bitcoin strong and great. The digital asset markets are going to go up and down in this time of volatility, but Bitcoin will remain strong all the way through. Mike, thank you so much for your time and thank you once again for everything you've done for the industry and congrats on the public offering. It really is a huge step. Thank you, Scott. Appreciate it. Thanks for your time.