We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this Wednesday's release of the podcast where we're talking about Bitcoin. On today's show, I interview Mr. Bill Barheight. Bill has a storied background in entrepreneurship, finance, and tech, and currently is the founder of ABRRA, which is a digital asset investment app. Bill's vision for ABRRA is to build an open global financial system that's easy and accessible to everyone.

Starting point is 00:00:23 And on today's show, we cover a wide range of topics. We cover issues and concerns of stable coins being integrated into the legacy financial system. We talk about regulations and policy expectations, Bill's thoughts on using Bitcoin as collateral for down payments on mortgages, and much, much more. Bill's an incredibly smart individual that has a ton of depth on how the financial system works. So I hope you guys enjoy our conversation today with Bill Barheight. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone.

Starting point is 00:01:11 So like I said in the introduction, I'm here with Bill Barheight. And Bill, we've had a few conversations on Clubhouse and some other spots. And the thing that I always tell myself after leaving the conversation is, wow, this guy is brilliant. And I wish I had more time to talk with them. So I'm really excited to be able to do a one-on-one like this. Wow, what an introduction. Well, hopefully I can live up to that. No, this is great.

Starting point is 00:01:34 So I want to start off by just hearing your Bitcoin story. you get into this in the first place, and then we'll just go from there? Bitcoin was almost like a long time coming for me. I've been working in internet and payments and tech and capital markets and just the intersection of all of that for really 25 plus years and worked on a lot of certificate authority deployments and SSL deployments for banking during my Netscape days. We actually partnered with Digi Cash, if anybody remembers that company. Didn't go very well, but we did. And so, you know, I had the long hair, the earring. Cypherpunk days going back to the early 90s, believe it or not.

Starting point is 00:02:13 But look, when I read the white paper, couldn't have been more than three months after he posted it. I was working on a remittance project in Haiti at the time. The timing was incredible because it was just one frustration after another on dealing with cross-border money transfer. Regulation, people trying to stop me, and we just had an earthquake now in Haiti. and the damage and the devastation from the last one, even though it wasn't as powerful, was much worse because it was right in the capital. And remittances couldn't get in the island. The Western Union outlets were literally buried under rubble.

Starting point is 00:02:46 And so anyway, this became super interesting to me. And immediately I said, wow, this could really solve a lot of problems. If you could eliminate a lot of these regulated intermediaries, lower the costs, there's some challenges. But from kind of a middleware perspective at the time, I wasn't thinking digital gold yet because it wasn't worth anything. This is really interesting. And then as the months went by, I really dug in more and I said, wow, this is incredible.

Starting point is 00:03:10 Personally, I started to get into it, started mining a little bit once I could figure out how to install the software. And then over a couple of years, infrastructure started to develop. We had Mount Cox, you can actually get liquid, which actually started to show me, hey, you could actually use this as a middleware layer because you can get money in and out on both sides. And anyway, so that really pushed me down the rabbit hole of trying to see if could you build a bank replacement using Bitcoin to facilitate financial inclusion? Obviously, today, that means also speculation. But at the time, it was, could I do it for payments? Could I do it for money

Starting point is 00:03:45 transfer? You know, other forms of financial inclusion, potentially lending, small dollar lending, cross-border lending, all things that are super interesting to me today, where I immediately saw the opportunity evolve for Bitcoin and to help a lot of people. So that's crazy to me that you were so early on the email list of this white paper going out and having access to this and just kind of recognizing that there's something really unique about this. What was one of the things that kind of just struck you early on with the white paper? We all knew that the holy growl was solving the double spend problem.

Starting point is 00:04:20 And when I first read it the first time, I was like, I think this guy thinks, he's solved the double spend problem. And I looked at it and I said, I think I understand what he's saying. Now I read it by paper and you can kind of, I almost understand every sentence, but I've read it 600 times. The first time I read it, it's like, I think this guy's full of crap because he or she thinks that they're going to use every single computer in the world to solve this problem. And I don't think that's realistic. So I kind of brushed it aside. And then a couple other people in the mailing list mentioned it to me and asked me, I said, hey, Bill, I know you're interested in this kind of this digital currency banking stuff, that you really dug in on this

Starting point is 00:04:57 paper, do you have an opinion? And I went back to it again and again, and I said, man, there's something here. I mean, the audacity to think that you could do this to solve the double spend problem was just annoying at me. And again, I wasn't thinking digital gold, wasn't thinking this would be a monetary system yet. I was just enamored with the idea that you could have a trustless solution to the double spend problem. And that was pure tech perspective, which is what most of us had in the early days. Could this even work? Is that why you started mining it then? Is because that was the issue or the thing that you kind of found to be maybe not practical?

Starting point is 00:05:32 I wanted to understand it, honestly. But that wasn't, when I say right away, I wasn't mining yet. This was literally weeks after it was released, the white paper. I don't even think you could at that point. I don't think the software was released. So it took me a while to come around to say, okay, there's something here, right? And then it was a few months later. Then I basically tried to get the software to run and I couldn't get it to run and it was really

Starting point is 00:05:56 buggy. And, you know, the make files didn't work and all this other stuff. And finally I figured out how to get it to run. And actually, there was an engineer at my last company that helped me to get it running. Yeah, I don't even remember all the details, but I think it was built on Windows originally. And I wasn't even using Windows at that point. So I don't remember what he did, but he did something to help me get it to run. I just remember it was like the fans started spinning on its Windows laptop and we got it to run finally.

Starting point is 00:06:24 Were you involved in much of the forums? Because the forum posted I go back and read just were so enlightening and there was so much more that was shared in the forums just beyond the white paper. Was that anything that you were participating? I read them. I read them. I didn't know enough. I was out of date already on the crypto and the hashing algorithms and all that stuff to ask intelligent questions. There was a lot of questions in the early days, like civil attacks and stuff like this.

Starting point is 00:06:50 And I was already, like I understood the questions, but I didn't know enough to figure out how to ask the questions. So I'm like this guy, I've studied computer science, but it was a long time ago. And Netscape, I wrote a little code. And as time went on, I wrote less and less code. Now I can read the code, but you wouldn't want me to write it. So I'm at a point now where I'm kind of really annoying for our tech guys because I'll get involved, even though I probably have no right to be involved. But because of where I came from, I understood the implications of what he was trying to do.

Starting point is 00:07:20 Amazing story. So you start Abra. What time frame are we talking that you start the company? I had the idea really to go all in an Abra, probably 2014 or 13, maybe late 13, 14, I really didn't fully commit probably until late 14, early 15. I had some other stuff going on. And again, to use Bitcoin for banking beyond just speculation, right? I mean, I remember meeting with Brian and Fred in the early days.

Starting point is 00:07:50 Actually, before they even started the company, I think, in some of the friend's house in SF. And I thought it was really interesting. But speculation wasn't really like a driving interest for me, like just pure speculation. I mean, global access to wealth was interesting to me, but just the idea of running an order book wasn't in my DNA. I know how to do it. I worked at Goldman, but I wouldn't start.

Starting point is 00:08:09 I've started a company just to do that at the time. I wish I had in hindsight, but I didn't. So the idea of using Bitcoin as the basis for banking was really the original idea. And I would say I was really all in by early 15, maybe mid-15 at the latest, trying to figure out how to do this. No, you couldn't hire people. Most investors weren't interested. What the hell is Bitcoin?

Starting point is 00:08:32 Banks won't talk to. I had three bank accounts shut down. I was lying to banks about what we were doing to get a bank account, just playing whack-a-mole with banks, you know, as they were shutting me off. I didn't even have, I had no employees, and we had no software. They were still shutting my accounts down. What were they saying the reason for shutting it down was? I think FinCEN had already issued their guidance around prepaid access, which basically points the money transfer rules and whatnot. And so, and also you could Google me and find out

Starting point is 00:09:02 that I used to run a remittance company. You put two and two together, and that was it. And it was nothing nefarious. Like I said, well, I didn't need a bank account to run the business except to pay employees. So finally, I was able to work that out and, you know, it's all good. But it's a little different today. You can get a bank account to pay employees if you're in the crypto space. To store customer funds is another story, but certainly to pay employees. So, but, you know, it was, it was a lot of heavy lifting to figure out what could you really do with crypto that is useful in the early days of Bitcoin? I mean, nobody said crypto. It was Bitcoin, right? In the early days of Bitcoin, could it be useful for anything? And that was really tough. And I'm a very

Starting point is 00:09:42 skeptical person by nature, but I also knew the magnitude of the problems and the holes left in the banking system for the kind of bottom half of the pyramid, not just the destitute, but the entire bottom half of the period. Well, it was interesting because, so this is whenever I first started coming into it, is in the 15 time frame that you're talking about. And I just remember distinctly back then, it was just so speculative. Like, the price was in the 200 range. Later in that year, it started going up to 300 or whatever, 400. You know, I just kind of remember that we had no idea like the speed at which this might take place. I just remember looking at previous price charts, and I know it went up to 1,000 and that it just crashed extremely hard,

Starting point is 00:10:29 80% down. And it seemed to be finding some footing there. But no one had any. type of expectation of like what the code was doing and this idea of it becoming scarcer. I mean, we kind of knew, we understood that that was part of the process, but we didn't really fully understand how these four-year cycles were really going to like create these waves of adoption, I guess. I guess I'm just trying to put myself in your shoes back in that time frame. You didn't want to do it just as like a speculative exchange. You were thinking in a banking kind of way, which I guess for me, I wasn't even like

Starting point is 00:11:04 remotely in that frame of mind back at that point. So walk us through some of that. I had two kind of competing perspectives, which still didn't really involve pure speculation from a business perspective. I'm a hardcore libertarian, right? I always had this perspective pre-Bitcoin that the Federal Reserve should have competition. And I had written an outline for a book on this that I think I've ever talked about, actually, I think it was in the late 90s. I wrote this outline that, you know, there should be multiple feds. You wouldn't call it that. You would just have competition. And this was even before I read, you know, a lot of the Austrian economists' ideas on the topic about private money. And they did a way

Starting point is 00:11:42 better job of explaining it than I ever could. And I give those papers to people all the time now. But I had this innate idea that the government shouldn't have a monopoly on money, right, without knowing full tilt that there was this whole Austrian school about it and, you know, Ron Paul's ideas about it. And then I had the second idea that we've got to solve this money transfer problem. We've got to solve this remittance problem. We've got to make banking and lending accessible and capitalism accessible to everyone because that's the rising tide that lifts all boats to me, having watched it in, you know, firsthand in time I spent in Asia and other places. And so could Bitcoin facilitate this? I was researching for a short TED talk I did for a

Starting point is 00:12:27 closed session at TED on Bitcoin when it was, I think it was training about a dollar. And I came up with this crazy concept of marrying these two ideas I had. One, could it basically be the basis for money transfer payments and banking? And two, I had just recently read comments that a group at the UN had decided that the dollar wasn't a viable reserve currency anymore. And this was basically in 2011. And so in 2012, I gave this talk and I merged the ideas and said, hey, is it possible that you could end up with a non-government actor creating a reserve currency? And could it end up being a trustless currency like this. Now, I just said in two sentences, way better what I could have said in 2012, because we didn't have any lingo for any of this, by the way. Yeah. Things have changed a lot.

Starting point is 00:13:12 And so I was just flying by the seat of my pants to try to make a point that this trustless system that no one had ever seen before with the theory with no off switch already, which was super powerful already, even in 2012, it was the most powerful supercomputer in the world, right? If you just looked at its collective hash power back then. And could that become the basis for, a new monetary system. And that was simply the question that I asked back then. And it was only a result of the fact that I'd had this annoying idea in the back of my mind. But why do we simply outsource money to the government automatically? And we just blindly accept it. It makes no sense to me. It does make sense to me why many people blindly accept it. But we shouldn't.

Starting point is 00:13:56 We should question it at least. And then maybe accept it or not. I obviously come out on the or not side of it, but we should at least question it. Yeah, for sure. I mean, when you're, when you're looking at the promise that your buying power of the work that you've already performed is going to be eroded, no matter what, I'm with you 100%. It makes perfect sense. There's access as well, right? So there's two parts to a monetary system. There's what is the store of value and what preserves that store of value? For a lot of people, they don't care about that. For example, if you send a remittance to Mexico, most of that money is spent before it's received. They're not overly concerned with the pesos purchasing power over time, okay?

Starting point is 00:14:43 At least not intuitively. It wouldn't be intuitively obvious they should be. What they're concerned is, can they get the money? Is it cheap? How much money did they have to lose in sending the money they got? How easy was it to get? And if the banks or ATM machines are offline, am I screwed? That's what kind of goes through the mind of certain people in certain segments of the population. But then there's, of course, our segment of the population, which is we're getting screwed because we simply have, again, the proverbial finger on the print button. It's not that simple, but that's more or less what's happening. And so both of those things are happening at the same time with the same monetary system.

Starting point is 00:15:24 And different people have different perspectives on why that matters to them without thinking about the other person's perspective at all. So talk to us more about the mission of the business. So you stand up the company. Was the idea to always kind of go into this borrowing and lending piece of Bitcoin? Or, yeah, so talk to us about that. Not the way we're doing it certainly today, but it was. I mean, my mission remains the same.

Starting point is 00:15:51 And that is to build a global bank that democratizes access to anything that we do. I want to offer services to every single person on this planet. Now, that's not realistic for every feature we launch out of the gate on day one, but that's the end game for me. I want to build a global bank with crypto and Bitcoin at its core, smart contracts, Bitcoin, all of it, and enable all forms of lending, wealth management, payments, money transfer, and displaced the middleman.

Starting point is 00:16:21 The way I looked at it is, is that from the earliest days of Netscape, where I watched businesses get disintermediated from the inside out by software and the internet, that has not happened in banking, right? We have the nice, sorry, lipstick on a pig kind of model of banking software where the web apps or the mobile apps look cool, but it's the same core, it's the same Fed, it's the same repo markets, it's the same interbanking markets, it's the same BIS we've had, same BS we've had for 100 years. It has not been disintermediated from the inside out. This is our opportunity. That's our mission, is to help facilitate that. Now, we may put ourselves out of business over time, right? Because over time, it may turn out that all of this

Starting point is 00:17:05 can become trustless and you don't need a company like ABRA to facilitate any of the services that we're facilitating. And it's possible, right? It's possible we become a pretty front end on a lot of different things. Today, we're not there. You need a custodian. You need, I know a lot of people don't agree with me, but you need the custodian, you need the service provider, you need liquidity management because we have an existing banking system, and you need the hard line into the matrix, as I call it, to make these things work. We may not in 25 years. That may be great, I don't know, but we do today. And so that's how I look at it, is how can we facilitate democratization of access to all financial services on the assumption that they're all going

Starting point is 00:17:49 to be crypto based in the coming decades. So let's talk about the policy side of things. This infrastructure bill was massive for just like everybody in the space is talking about the few lines of descriptions that were in this bill. The amount of conversation, the amount of buzz around it was crazy. Yeah, I wonder if Moses had as much feedback when he came down the mountain. I mean, it's crazy what's been going on for these, you know. or lines of text.

Starting point is 00:18:22 So talk to us how you are perceiving as a person who's in the borrowing and lending space and perceiving the terminology that really seems like it's going to evolve is digital asset and digital asset security. Seems like the two big catches, the two big buckets. That's right. So I think that there's so many things happening at once here. And I was shocked. I don't know if you saw the video that I shared that Ted Cruz put out, which went total.

Starting point is 00:18:48 I think it was the most retweeted tweet I've ever had in my umpteen years on Twitter where he basically said, there's not five of us in the Senate who actually understand what the hell this thing is. Yeah. Yeah. We're willing to regulate it to hell. He's absolutely right, right? It makes no sense whatsoever.

Starting point is 00:19:03 So, okay, so let's put that aside. Let's, you know, those of us on the inside, we accept the fact that they don't know what it is, but they're going to do something anyway and accept that. I mean, look at the bid license, right? I mean, the bill license shouldn't exist in that form. that was hastily written, you know, before Bitcoin was really even a big thing, mostly in response to the FinCEN guidance, right? So without actually understanding where the market was going to go.

Starting point is 00:19:27 And that's my big fear here. And the other thing I'll say is words matter, right? So the IRS or Treasury is trying to make the case now, well, that's not really our intent by basically, you know, extrapolating this potentially broad definition of broker. Well, as a citizen, I have to look at this and go, well, yeah, I guess, you can try to interpret intent, and we do that all the time. Back to the original, you know, Federal's papers, whatever, but you don't need to here. If this is your intent and you're in cahoots with the people who are writing it, fix the damn language. The words matter. It's not that

Starting point is 00:20:02 hard. And so since it's not that hard, really, given that they are in cahoots, you have to take a step back and go, okay, why are they really leaving it this way? Why are they giving themselves such broad leeway to interpret the word broker any way they want to potentially go after a software developer or a minor. Do I really believe they're going to do that in the next three years? Probably not. Does my opinion matter? Probably not. The fact remains that they have broad-based leeway according to this document to do that. And you get another nut in FinC or the IRS or the SEC who interprets this some other way, look out. And so that's very worrisome. And I think it deserves a fight. And I have to agree with Senator Cruz on this. They don't know what they're doing. And so, or they do

Starting point is 00:20:54 know what they're doing, which is even scarier. Yeah. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo, Yord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year, bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world, many of them operating on the front lines of history.

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Starting point is 00:25:00 That's Shopify.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. Yeah, I kind of side on the first take, but you don't know. Is this, are they saying that or do they actually know what they're doing? You said something else, by the way. You said we're going to fight, they're going to fight DFI. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:20 And I have, I'm struggling with that one because I don't think that they can. And I think that the SEC and the CFTC understand the difference, meaning most services today that call themselves D-FI aren't D, meaning there's an off switch, right? And so if you can go after the old. off switch and you fall under existing regulation, in their opinion, you should expect they're going to come after you. It's the difference between running uniswap the web page and uniswap the protocol or a defy protocol that you can't shut off because it's sufficiently the contracts are out there and are running on a, let's call it sufficiently decentralized system like Ethereum

Starting point is 00:25:58 with no off switch. I believe that they would recognize that they can't shut off those services and they would also recognize there's no one to go after, unless you want to put somebody in jail for doing something that is already out there and can't be shut off, which BitToran has already shown us, they'll go after the users and fail before they'll go after Bram, the protocol creator. So I do think there's going to be a lot of cases brought against services that market themselves purely as D5, but aren't truly D. And we'll see how that plays out. But I think there's going to be a lot of rude awakenings in the coming months. I get the impression that Gary Gensler views it as there's Bitcoin and then there's everything else.

Starting point is 00:26:40 Do you see it that way? And how much does that matter that Gary Gensler feels that way versus all the other participants and key stakeholders that are involved in this? There was an interesting public comment from, I think it was a Republican, I want to say Congressperson who's on the oversight committee related to the CFTC who said, hey, you're overreaching here. You, of all, people know the difference between the CFTC's writ and your writ in the SECC. Now, he understands crypto tech better probably than his counterpart overseen the CFTC. And I don't know that for sure, but I'm guessing having taught at MIT and I spent time with him when I presented there that he doesn't know what he's talking about, at least in terms of how it works at a very high level. Kind of like mine, you know, I'm not a coder anymore, but at a high level he can explain it. And so, but he's totally wrong.

Starting point is 00:27:30 A lot of what he said at the Aspen's, I agree with in terms of their ability or the CFTC's ability to go after some of these defy services under certain circumstances. But the automatic assumption that everything is in security is just nonsense. Even enforcement will tell you it's facts and circumstances. The lawyers would tell you it's facts and circumstances. Okay, what are the facts and what are the circumstances? And so, you know, they're going to have to pick and choose their battles because fortunately he's not going to get the army of people he probably wants from Congress.

Starting point is 00:27:59 He's going to get more, but he's not going to get an overall. army, they will pick and choose their battles, and they'll go cherry picking people who are probably running basically either issuing security tokens or enabling the exchange of security tokens and D5 services, whatever. They're certainly going to go after them. I have very little doubt about that. I do think that a lot of the comments around everything is a security don't resonate with me, right?

Starting point is 00:28:22 Ethereum is not a security. I'm sorry to my maximalist friends. Migrating the proof of stake does not turn Ethereum into a security. Cardano is not a security. These systems are use utility tokens as gas. Maybe the way they raised money by today's standards was a security offering. You can maybe make that case. But that ship is sale.

Starting point is 00:28:46 They had no guidance. They didn't go after anyone in those days. And to do what they did. For example, in the Ripple case now makes no sense. I believe what Ripple did was a security offering when they raised the money. But to wait seven years, I'm guessing billions of dollars. later to go after it. It makes no sense. Do you think that they're doing the Ripple case to try to set a precedence or some type of case law that then be used against other protocols and developers

Starting point is 00:29:12 and whatnot? Do you think that they strategically picked Ripple because they saw that as being their highest probability of getting a favorable win? Well, they don't want to lose. If you're an enforcement lawyer, part of what you're going to do is you're probably going to go work in private practice at some point. You really don't want to have a track record of losing and picking bad cases, I'm guessing. On the other hand, right now, crypto is a shiny object. So if you have a, if you're an enforcement and you have the ability to choose what kind of case you're going to work on, I'm guessing right now, if you could choose, you'd probably prefer to work on a crypto case. So you've got to combine that. You want to work on a crypto case and you want to work on a

Starting point is 00:29:49 crypto case you don't want to lose. So in there somewhere is the belief on someone's part that what Ripple is doing as a company is a security offering, they're wrong, and we can win. Otherwise, I don't think they go into this thinking, we have no chance of winning this, but we'll make life difficult for them for five years. I just find that hard to believe. How about the time frame? So none of that has even taken place. And then after it does, we're talking like two, three years before any of this becomes real. And I just think about how much this market has matured in a two or three year timeframe. And a lot of things can be fixed, between now and then as well, or broken more.

Starting point is 00:30:27 What do you mean by that? You can have bills that fix wording in the definition of a broker. You could have bills that actually make it worse, in theory, right? To your point about it won't be adjudicated for a few years, you don't know who the interpreter is going to be on the regulatory side. And that was my point earlier where if you get some, sorry, some nut who just doesn't understand the original intent and decides to go full tilt towards our worst fears, Who knows what that could mean?

Starting point is 00:30:55 It could mean another China, too, where we migrate mining out of the U.S. again three years from now. I pray that's dreaming that that could even happen. But I don't think it's a zero probability outcome that given the current wording that you could end up with someone in a regulatory position of power who could interpret this that way for whatever political reason they choose to do so. I would say the odds are against it happening, but it's a non-zero probability, which is why this needs to be fixed. So I saw you commenting, retweeting some of Caitlin Long's posts recently and kind of what she has going on with Avanti. How are you viewing her decisions from a regulatory standpoint? She seems to be really kind of understanding at a very high level where this is all going. So help us understand some of the thoughts that how you see what she's doing and how she's positioning herself and then maybe how that applies to you at APRA.

Starting point is 00:31:49 It's super interesting. We talked every once in a while. She's brilliant. I mean, her ability to go deep on this stuff is just awesome. Thank God we have her in the community, not just for Avanti, but in the community at large. So, Katie, thank you for what we do. We've come at this from a different perspective. I understand originally the money transfer, you know, kind of FinCend guidance on prepaid access.

Starting point is 00:32:10 I've been a prepaid card issuer. It just turns out that in the early days of crypto, the regulations, most of the regulations stemmed from that world because we didn't have the idea of Bitcoin or virtual currencies in that regard in existing regulation. So FinCEN, IRS, and others states use that existing regulation and layered on top. Turns out I came from that world. She came this more of an eye from the traditional banking world. And so we're kind of meeting in the middle now in terms of our understanding of where this is all going.

Starting point is 00:32:43 I mean, she's taking a very ambitious approach in terms of being able to issue true dollars, not just even stable coins, $2 through Avanti and being able to access the Fed directly. And we'll see. I think she'll get it done. I think it's going to be tough. I think the fact that she's servicing institutions only and not retail is probably the main reason why she'll be able to get it done in the next couple of years. I think somebody doing what she's trying to do directly for retail would have it five times

Starting point is 00:33:11 harder at least. But we'll see. And I think that's one of the reasons why I'm bullish on, for example, Circle. I think there's a much better chance that Congress will enable the Fed and others to work with private industry to back stable coins than necessarily just to come up with a central bank digital currency and just given the politics of it, it's going to be very difficult. That's interesting that you say that. So I agree with you. It seems like not everyone would agree with the two of us on that playing out. Part of my reason for thinking that is I just think

Starting point is 00:33:42 it's a little complex for the government to do technologically and then to manage that without going into some type of outsourced model. The time for them to mature the tech, to put somebody on contract, to test it, to make sure that it doesn't disrupt the entire global economy if there's a mistake. All of those things seem to me like it's going to go down the path. You're talking about digital seniorage, first of all. Yeah. And most people don't really know what seniorage is. So, I mean, it's the process of creating money out of nothing effectively, right? You know, it's a debt-based instrument, but effectively out of nothing. And so I'm not a macroeconomist, so I'm sure I got it wrong. But that's how I look at it. It's way easier to get

Starting point is 00:34:26 a money transmission license, a money transmitter license to put a bunch of reserves in a bank account and issue a smart contract to give you access to that reserve than it is to replace 100 years of senior edge processes and the contracts that underlie what a Federal Reserve node is from scratch in digital form. I haven't looked at all those regulations, but I know they're extremely complex. The processes are extremely complex. What goes on behind the scenes to get that money minted is extremely complex. And it's not going to be easy.

Starting point is 00:34:59 And we'll have 10 competitors to circle in the market before we have central bank figuring out how to replace analog senior edge with digital seedage. So when I'm looking at the buyer bill, or at least the draft of the buyer bill that's out there right now, this seems to be the really big document. This is a 60-page document that's going to really kind of break out the terminology. It's going to, from what I understand, really put the restriction on stable coins. And a lot of the language it appears in this bill is coming out of the treasury. I had a really hard time until I think it was Caitlin that really kind of laid it out that helped make it click for me on why the stable coin piece was such a big deal. And what it really comes down to is just clearance times. And when you look at the capital requirements of these banks, and they're doing their risk-weighted and risk-adjusted asset capital requirements, they're used to doing this dollar-for-dollar capital requirements that have this overnight reconciliation period. And so if everybody's reconciling those books on a day-for-day basis, no one's getting clearance faster

Starting point is 00:36:07 than that. And now you enter in this stable coin market, which is absolutely exploding. Like, in the last nine months, like, you know the number's better than I do. But I mean, it's like exploding in market cap size. And your clearance is immediate or in some cases a couple minutes. And you're putting that up against something that these capital requirements are used to a 24-hour adjudication period of reconciliation. And they just... It's almost like comparing something that's moving 10 miles an hour to something that's moving at the speed of light. Yeah, she makes a really good case for this, for sure.

Starting point is 00:36:46 What are your thoughts on some of this? I have a slightly different perspective. We've talked about it, Caitlin and I, and I totally get where she's coming from. I think that the existing banking system as it relates to reserve management can be mostly fixed to address this. I think that the stable coin model is actually in some ways better. because banks that can participate in fractional reserve banking, meaning traditional bank, DDA-based issuing banks, can't with funds yearmarked for prepaid stored value products or

Starting point is 00:37:20 prepaid access products in general. That's my understanding. And a lot of this comes down to FDIC rules because they're the ones that the banks ultimately report to for these prepaid access products because they're considered in many cases high-risk products, not just crypto, but prepaid cards and other products. And my understanding is they have to maintain one-to-one. one reserves. Now, they don't necessarily have to be purely dollar-based. They can be treasuries and other things, but they do need to be, they do need to make 100% reserves. It was always my

Starting point is 00:37:45 understanding. Now, Caitlin's point is a little bit different in terms of the risks associated with reconciliation and settlement and the way things move on a blockchain and settle on a blockchain versus the way they move in traditional banking markets. I get that and I agree in terms of how things work today. My response is that I think that there's a better chance of fixing that than there is of the Fed, the Treasury, IRS, FinCEN, and everybody else with a state getting together and figuring out how to build digital senior systems. That's my gut. And I'm not deep in it enough to tell you what the answer is, but I understand the problem

Starting point is 00:38:21 on both sides enough to know where I place my bed in terms of what has a better chance of being fixed in terms of the risks. They need to move out on this like six months ago. And here we are. And the size of this is only like going exponential. It is. But again, I'd rather trust something right now, like Circle with 100% reserves, whether the reserves or treasuries or, you know, whatever, then a bank.

Starting point is 00:38:48 That's issuing a DDA. It's actually safer for everything I know, minus the issue she's raised. But that's you understanding what's going on. And some of the other participants in the system maybe don't, or they have, they're such a bureaucracy that they don't understand that here you are, you're comfortable, you know it's on your books, you're collecting this thing that's already cleared, like cleared at the speed of light. And they're holding things that they're re-hypothicating that they won't even know cleared for another 24 hours. And so there's this, it's entering into this operational

Starting point is 00:39:22 risk and this capital requirements risk that, or market risk, that I don't know all the players in the game really have an appreciation for. And if that's true, is it introducing a massive systematic risk to the global economy that they're losing control of? I don't know. Look, I mean, the prime broker model has been around for a very long time. I talked about this when the GameStop thing was happening, that we didn't know what kind of systemic risk was being created by prime brokers lending out stock stock stock stock stocking those shares. And, you know, who is going to be left holding the bag if retail and institutions end up fighting it out that way with equities that are basically being managed by banks because Goldman's a bank. So I think this is a much smaller

Starting point is 00:40:07 market than that, today, today, but it's growing way faster. I mean, I look at our lending business that didn't exist 18 months ago, and I'm like, wow. If I was going to disagree with you on that, so there's no way the GameStop rehypothecation is anywhere near the stable coin market cap size. That's one company. I'm talking about the entire market, right? So, yeah, you know, but you could end up with a model where this thing, if you've got people leveraged short and this thing goes to infinity because retail's gone crazy.

Starting point is 00:40:41 You know, there's got to be systemic risk that it's a very low probability for a company like GameStop, but it's a non-zero probability. I just think that that prime broker market is way bigger in the aggregate than the stable coin market is today and with the rehypification going on and with certain players in the market. But our space is growing way faster, an order of magnitude faster. And it is going to catch up over the next 10 years. And the bigger problem, in my opinion, is what's going to happen with the non, let's call them the quasi unregulated actors, right? And I'll put tether in that bucket for now, even though they've agreed to, with the state of New York, to issue audited statements on their

Starting point is 00:41:22 reserves, they're effectively an unregulated entity by U.S., I would guess by U.S. state and federal standards. And they're just one company, right? We can end up with these tether-like actors all over the world, re-hypothicating smart contracts against assets that maybe don't even exist. We'll ultimately have no way of knowing. And you know, you're starting to see things like I think Bitmex put out this proof of reserve. I wanted to talk to you about that.

Starting point is 00:41:48 So I found that to be really interesting. Is this something that you're thinking about doing with? I just started looking at it. So I have to marry that with how we manage reserves. So we don't issue, for example, retail accounts directly. They're issued by a trust bank. And we work with different lending licenses and different models for different things. But that's legal.

Starting point is 00:42:07 From a technology perspective, I think it's super interesting and it makes a lot of sense. I'd love to be in a position where it's just all out there in smart contracts and on a webpage and everybody can validate it. I mean, you're marrying two different worlds. It's another hard line into the matrix, and you're trusting that the hard line is actually looking at the right matrix, right? So when you say proof of reserves, you're always trusting whether you're trusting the entity that has the look inside to get you the data. It's like digital identity.

Starting point is 00:42:35 Who's the unwrapped? Because you're trusting someone. Proof of reserves means you're trusting somebody who's taking a look to give you that data. But that's fine. It's better than what we have right now in most cases. Let's talk a little bit about trends. So as an exchange, as an entity of borrowing lending platform, you have access to just data and information and trends.

Starting point is 00:42:57 If you're able to share, I'm just kind of curious as of right now in the middle of August, 2021, what are some of the things that you're noticing or kind of like your eyebrow kind of goes up like, well, that's kind of interesting. What the heck is going on here? There's a lot of it. We have kind of a dual track in our company in terms of who our customers are. We have high net worth people, high net worth customers depositing millions of dollars to earn yield, for example, right?

Starting point is 00:43:24 Bitcoin dollars of stable coins, et cetera, et cetera. We have people in developing markets using the exact same service walking into retail with $50 in pesos or Philippine pesos and Guatemala and El Salvador doing the same thing. Literally walking in with cash, walking out with Bitcoin earning yield in their Aver wallet. And it blows my mind. They're also doing slightly different things, but that overlap is mind-blowing to me. That one will wire million dollars and the other one will walk in with cash and both for exactly the same reasons. So that's something that 10 years ago, that wasn't happening anywhere in Planet Earths with the same app. It's the same binary download for both iOS

Starting point is 00:44:09 and Android. And you just, if you're using it from a country where we support a cash deposit, you'll actually see that option in the app, but you won't see it if you're obviously a U.S. user, well, we don't have that option. So that's one thing. I would say, you know, we're also seeing a very different evolution of our retail and institutional business right now. The interest in the speculative aspect of the businesses is right now is much stronger on the retail side.

Starting point is 00:44:30 It was growing quickly in the first half of the year. It's definitely died down. It's still growing relative to the fact that it didn't exist a couple of years ago. But, but clearly, like, the retail interest right now is, like, way out ahead for us. We're seeing, and I think you're seeing that right now and when we bounced off the, I'll date the podcast a little bit, but we're seeing Bitcoin bounce off those lows of the last few weeks. It's all retail driven right now. And some of it is whales, right?

Starting point is 00:44:57 We're seeing a lot of whales that are accumulating and basically looking at prices to come in. But what we're not seeing is the institutions right now buying. And it's very similar to what we saw in like December of last year. It was actually a lot of high net worth family office money. People were using the word institution incorrectly. We're starting to see more of that institutional buying in the first quarter. But yeah, so I would say those two things have been super interesting for us to watch. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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Starting point is 00:49:09 Do you see a floor being set and the interest rate coming back up? And what is really fundamentally driving this for people that are trying to learn and understand some of those dynamics? Off the bat, I'll say a couple of things. One, we use a model of what we call responsible yield. And responsible yield means we never intend to subsidize yield. Never. And we always look. to generate a positive net interest margin on the business. We want most of the interest, the vast majority, in fact, to go to the depositor, whether it's a consumer or an institution, but we want a self-sustaining business. So we're not in the business of subsidizing yield, and we know for a fact that there are other companies out there doing that in order to grow the

Starting point is 00:49:53 business. It's not sustainable. By definition, it's not sustainable, right? Because nobody has infinite resources to subsidize interest payments to something. And I'm not even talking about the legality of any of that, I'm not an expert, but I would venture a guess that some regulators would have some questions about subsidizing you, at least as a core business model, maybe as a one-off promotion, I don't know, but anyway. So we'll start off there. Now, the crypto space has evolved kind of its own yield curve, obviously, for a few different reasons, right? The banks traditionally, or most banks won't play in our space. If you're a minor sitting on a billion dollars worth of crypto and you want to expand your business and use that as collateral bank, most banks won't

Starting point is 00:50:31 talk to you, at least not banks that do collateralized lending in some kind. Now, a company like ours that will gladly take that Bitcoin as collateral, it's a fantastic model. And so that's part of why this space has evolved, right? So we've got a combination of miners, we've got hedge funds, all basically sitting on myriad forms of collateral. And then obviously retail depositors that we can marry that with who've done quite well. And then, of course, there's defy. That's the smallest piece of our business, but it has grown significantly. And we've taken a very slow methodical tack to that in terms of contract audits and testing with small amounts of money and scaling and getting out if things don't look right to us in our tests, et cetera, et cetera. But it's actually

Starting point is 00:51:14 been extremely lucrative for the relatively small amount of our business that we've done it with. And I wish we were at a position to go faster. I just don't think that the market is really ready for that accelerated level of support just yet. And we've seen that in other hacks, but we also do a lot more code auditing. I'm guessing than a lot of consumers do who use defy directly. So the net net of all this is that the rates that we offer today are a direct function of all of those different lending models I just described, which have a demand model based upon where the markets are. If right now there's a lot of demand for dollars because miners are setting up shop in the U.S., but they can't get in business fast enough, right? The facilities aren't

Starting point is 00:51:57 ready, the transformers aren't ready, the A6 aren't here yet. So in some cases, there's a 12 to 18-month weight in line function for, you know, scaling up hash power in the U.S. So that's limiting some of the dollar returns. When the market is screaming higher, some of the exchanges that offer leverage are borrowing dollars to do that, borrowing stable coins directly. Those markets are a function of where the Bitcoin prices, right, as opposed to just hash power. And so So there's different things going on, different dynamics that are play here across the board. And then there's different coins and different DFIi projects that might be basically have different price action for different reasons.

Starting point is 00:52:34 If Cardano's launching a smart contract system and, you know, the staking numbers are going through the roof where there's less Cardano in circulation. And that has implications for interest rates, etc. So all of this is happening at the same time in a way where the crypto kind of banking system has evolved in its own unique way versus the traditional banking system. Now, you can't pay interest in-kind on Bitcoin deposits forever because Bitcoin is a deflationary asset back to your other question about where this is going. So that's unsustainable.

Starting point is 00:53:04 You can do it in very small amounts. The interest is very small amounts so that it becomes unsustainable over a very, very long period of time. But the interest rates are high enough right now where it's unsustainable, probably more likely and like, you know, certainly less than five years out. I would suspect, given the rate of growth in the crypto space, Bitcoin rates specifically will have to come down, unless you're paying in something other than in kind, meaning in dollars or another token or rewards coin or something besides Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:53:32 This is the deflationary nature of Bitcoin, the number of people coming in, the math just doesn't work. But for the other pieces of the business, it's unclear how this is going to evolve over time. Now with Ethereum potentially becoming deflationary for the first time, and it actually did have a few days last week where it looked like it was deflating. Who knows how that will evolve? Super interesting. But, you know, again, our take from day one has been be the responsible method for generating

Starting point is 00:53:57 yield and be very transparent. I get the same question every Friday on Money Talks and every Friday I'm happy to go into in-depth and much longer than I am even right now on the explanation of how we generate that yield. Talk to us about stable coin yields. What's your expectation for that in a five, 10-year timeframe? because right now your yields are in a different universe compared to the 10-year treasury and anything you'd get from a traditional bank.

Starting point is 00:54:26 Is your expectation in five years from now that it's even more extreme than that? Yeah, but so is venture debt. The fact that I can earn 50X what I might earn in a bank account is not really the operative point. But there's lots of ways to make 10% yield be a lending, right? I mean, Yield Street and Fundrise and Condre. By the way, I went out and tested every single one of these services before we launched to ABA for a few years.

Starting point is 00:54:46 I'm still waiting to get money back that I lost in some of those services. So I get high yield. And I also worked in fixed income at Goldman. So there's lots of ways to generate yield. All of it has different risk models. And so let's be totally honest and transparent when we talk about risk versus yield. This is not a risk less investment that you're making. We map each individual deposit to a specific lending opportunity. And we have a risk management process. for doing that. I personally keep all of my liquid cash in crypto in this because I also know how the risk management model works, and I'm comfortable with that level of risk. I perceive it as relatively small, but it's not zero. Your comfort level is because it's over collateralized?

Starting point is 00:55:34 No, my comfort level is in, I know who the borrowers are. I know how we onboard the borrowers, how deep we go and do diligence. I know how the DFI piece of this works, et cetera, et cetera. And so I I sit in on those investment committee meetings when we're onboarding new counterparties. I listen in on the risk management. So at first hand, I know what's going on. It's not tenable for every customer to sit in on that meeting, but it is my job to articulate in forums like this that I'm comfortable with that process because I helped create it, approve it, and present it to our board.

Starting point is 00:56:06 So incumbent on all of us to understand that this is not a risk-less investment, right? So any service out there that's offering yield on crypto that's telling you that this is a risk-free return, they're lying to you. And so I think it's important that as a space, at least that we're upfront about the fact that we're making investments here. Billy, have you ever considered breaking the company into almost two different entities that would firewall the risk of, because your institutional books, my understanding is the model for a lot of the borrowing and lending platforms in the crypto space is that the institution aren't necessarily held to the same overcollateralization that a retail person is if they're

Starting point is 00:56:48 going to take out a loan. And so those rates, or so that systematic risk that's introduced by those institutions for not being over collateralized can spill over into the retail investors. Have you ever considered firewalling through a different EIN number so that if retail people wanted to ensure that there was no rehypothication and that they were absolutely over collateralized and that the risk of institutions couldn't spill into their deposits. Do you think that there would be a market for this? Is this something that you've entertained? And do you think that this is a good idea in the first place?

Starting point is 00:57:21 Yeah, I thought a lot about this. And as a customer, I thought about it. I don't think the demand would be there quite yet because the, I would venture, I guess, a lot of the people listening right now wouldn't be able to dig into the detail of the question. So they wouldn't want the lower yield? Because they, yeah, they, they, what are you? talking about, Preston, I don't understand the difference, right? Just tell me how much yield I can

Starting point is 00:57:46 make. Now, on the other hand, I'm all in. I've got, I manage my liquid assets this way, cash and crypto. So I'm not looking for a junk bond return here. And so, you know, we're managing this as if it was our own money because it is. Now, that having been said, I don't say, I'm not saying I don't like the idea you just outlet. I'm just saying that I think the demand is, You don't think the market is there. If you had to guess, how much of a drop and yield would this be? Because I think I agree with you. I think that if you would present this as a product, the people out there, at least the

Starting point is 00:58:25 people that I've talked to outside of like your hardcore Twitter, Bitcoin zealots, and I mean, I'm one of them. So I'm not like, not making fun of anybody. I think that small niche group of people totally get this. but they're very small in volume and you're a business trying to make money. And the conversation that you'll have on the street is, hey, I'm getting X percent from this platform. I should probably switch over to that platform because there's no discussion whatsoever of risk

Starting point is 00:58:56 that's associated with the corresponding yield. So what kind of yield do you think a person would get if they were buying a product like this versus what you can offer? I honestly don't know. I'd have to think about it. Do you think it'd be significant? I guess that's more of what I'm asking, because I suspect it would be. Probably.

Starting point is 00:59:18 Dan Held has done a really good job of tracking the space in what I would call a responsible way. And he publishes a Google sheet of where he's testing services. It puts a lot of time into this, which has nothing to do with his day job. And he's a, you know, I call him a friend. We talk on occasion and we just met at an event in Mexico and caught up. and I'm very impressed, not just because he's also chosen Zabber, but because of the level of detail and the amount of time he's put into this. So people who don't follow Dan, you can go and look at his Twitter feed and read about what he's done to capture what's going on in

Starting point is 00:59:52 my world of both yield, high interest services, as well as retail lending. Jack Muller's had a big announcement recently where he's doing zero-fee trades, but just for Bitcoin. He's focusing solely on Bitcoin and ignoring everything else. I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts on this. Is this pose a major competitive risk to other exchanges that have every token known demand listed on their exchanges? Is he going to eat into one of their largest revenue sources by taking it to a zero fee? I like what Strike is doing. I like the idea. I like the idea of using like, I mean, look, where I came from, I like the idea of using lightning for money transfer. I'm enamored with it. I'm spending probably too much time on it right now

Starting point is 01:00:46 in terms of my own time, digging in, understanding how nodes work, the economic extendives of nodes. I realize it's not what you're asking, but that's their core business right now. Now, he's extended that by saying, if you don't have the Bitcoin, I'll give it to you with no spread. And I think, I think that's what he's saying. I haven't really dug it. I don't know how their app works in detail. I think they have an ACH function. The way the app is set up today, it's not going to eat into the speculative buyer market, at least I don't think so, beyond a lot of the hardcore Bitcoin Maximus who are huge fans of his, and deservedly so. But beyond that, I don't see, there's a lot of competition out there.

Starting point is 01:01:24 It's not just about price. And so he will get some business there, but I think he's going to find that he's going to end up subsidizing that at large scale in an Uber-like model. And at some point, his investors are going to demand that they figure out a business model. And it's hard enough to create economic incentives around Lightning, but doing it where you have a zero-spread business is going to be even harder. I really want that to succeed. I mean, we've looked at it ourselves to try to figure out what economic incentives will be in place to run Lightning those long term to deal with remittances and other things. Or is that one area in the business that we actually do subsidize? I don't know. We'll see what happens. But I

Starting point is 01:02:00 I think, look, he's been fantastic for the Bitcoin world. And we need a lot more people like him who are going to go out there and take risks. But I think from an economic perspective, I don't think that's a huge announcement, honestly. This is the last one I have for you. And I don't know anything about this question, but it seemed like the person who was asking it kind of had an insight as to maybe something you're working on. And the question was, will Aber try to disrupt the home mortgage model? What was this in reference to? Wow.

Starting point is 01:02:29 I'd love to know who asked that. I didn't see that in your Twitter feed if it was public. I hope so. Here's an interesting tidbit for you. So we, in the app, you can borrow in, I think, this is now a U.S. part of the, we can borrow globally pretty much. But in the U.S., I think we're up to like 46 or 47 states now. I think we just turned on, was it Wisconsin or another state today. And so California, New York are coming. And then, you know, there's, I think, one or two other states. So, and then if you want to borrow more than 100,000, we'll onboard you directly outside the app. And so we've had a lot of borrowers in the VC space moving from San Francisco to Miami who've actually borrowed the down payments for their home from Apple. And now, this is

Starting point is 01:03:10 creating problems in the mortgage space. And I'm going, I went through this recently because buying a home in Northern California. I'm one of the holdouts who's not leaving. So the banks won't deal with crypto. They just will not back to the original comment around lending. Yeah. And now we're talking about home mortgages. So how do you basically deal with qualifying for a mortgage if you're like, let's call it crypto rich in any way whatsoever? It's a big problem. So my answer to that person's question is, I hope so.

Starting point is 01:03:40 I hope we do end up having to solve this problem because it is a big problem and our lending business is growing quickly and it's created this problem. So help me understand because a person who'd be borrowing against their Bitcoin is paying a really high yield. Somebody obviously doesn't want to pay that type of yield when they're borrowing for a house payment that might take them years or whatever time frame. That's different. What I'm saying is, is that you may be willing to use Bitcoin as collateral for a down payment, but that doesn't mean you qualify for the mortgage, because most banks, if you simply borrow against the Bitcoin on Monday, won't take it for the down payment on Tuesday because they're going to insist on the source

Starting point is 01:04:26 of the funds. And they're going to see it's a Bitcoin collateralized loan and go, whoa, done. We're done. And so now they'll come back to Aber and say, can you help me? And they have been. So I could easily see Aber now needing to get into that primary business because the source of the equity for the down payment part of the business isn't recognized by the banking system. And by the way, these tend to be very wealthy people in the U.S. who have a higher net worth and more stable income and are probably better borrowers. Well, they can probably pay off the house three to ten times over. Yeah, but they don't want to pay capital gains or just being smart.

Starting point is 01:05:06 But the banks can't get out of their own way. So I think this is a huge opportunity. And the answer is, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up going full tilt into the mortgage business. So how do you get around that, though? You figure out how to under it. Ah, I gotcha. So there are two different loans, right?

Starting point is 01:05:25 So one is crypto collateralized, the under one is not. But if you can't get the other loan any other way, and let's just say, you know, at scale, that's worth 100 basis points. That's huge. For the underwriter, they're really just concerned that the collateral is still over collateralized, right? So you're giving them a lot of credit right now. I think they hear the word Bitcoin and they're like, we're done.

Starting point is 01:05:48 I honestly don't think it's as sophisticated as what you're giving them credit for. And this is with first-hand knowledge, by the way. So it's hard for me to speak for behalf of every bank making these decisions. But I personally went through this. And a lot of the feedback I got made no sense. Wow. Wow. So, yeah, we need some underwriters to figure out that they're not assuming a lot of risk.

Starting point is 01:06:11 Big opportunity. I mean, massive opportunity. Yes. You're talking about a trillion dollars of wealth that didn't exist in years ago. All this does is just further the special. speculative attack on fiaturrency as soon as you have an underwriter that actually understands that there's idle to no risk actually being assumed on their part. Unbelievable. We're so early and people are looking at the price and saying, oh my God, it's $46,000. I missed it and you have

Starting point is 01:06:41 not missed anything at all. Like we are so early. Bill, I could talk to you all night. I really appreciate you making time to come on the show. Give people a handoff if they want to find out more about you and about Abra. Yeah, so I'm pretty active on Twitter on occasion, Bill Barheights, and also obviously, you know, I have my day job at Abra. So please download Abra. Check it out. You can also follow Abra Global on Twitter and we're Abra.com.

Starting point is 01:07:07 But, yeah, I'm pretty easy to find. So I'm sure you listeners will find me real quick. All right, Bill. Thanks for coming on the show and making time. Oh, my pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Hey, so thanks for everybody listening to the show. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe to the show.

Starting point is 01:07:22 on whatever podcast app you're using, we really appreciate that. And if you have time, leave us a review. So thanks for joining us this week and we'll catch you next Wednesday. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses or forums, go to the investorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting. I don't know.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast)

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