What Bitcoin Did - Bitcoin Is Still Winning | Cory Klippsten

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

Cory Klippsten joins the show for a conversation on Bitcoin, power, and what is actually happening beneath the surface of the crypto industry. We break down why offshore exchanges are tolerated by governments, how surveillance and enforcement shape market structure, and why much of the crypto economy exists to extract rather than create long term wealth. Cory explains why Bitcoin adoption advanced structurally in 2025 despite a flat price, why tariffs and macro uncertainty weighed on markets, and why the old four year cycle narrative is likely dead. We then get into Bitcoin treasury companies, MicroStrategy, leverage, preferred structures, and why most companies holding Bitcoin are not actually competing in the same game. We also get into self custody risks, education versus attention driven media, prediction markets, macro liquidity, and why Bitcoin is maturing into a real macro asset even if price action has not caught up yet. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY SWAN FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/\_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Cory Klippsten: https://x.com/coryswan

The reason that they allow it to be tells you what its purpose is. It's censorable. It's trackable. All five eyes and all the three-letter agencies are in the database watching everything. And they're actually actively encouraging some crime to happen in hoping that people like roll up and trip. The function is money laundering. Their goal is not to make you and your family independently wealthy over the long haul. They're there to extract your money and put it in their pocket.

Corey Clipson. Thanks for me in L.A., man. This place is there. L.A. gets a lot of heat, and I don't really get it. I think it's beautiful. It's obviously beautiful. That's why we're here. I'm sure there's parts of it that are struggling right now.

But where we are, I went for a walk last night along the front, went for dinner. Like, it's so nice. Yeah. Well, you're chilling here in Manhattan Beach. It's not a normal part of the world. This is quite the little enclave here. it is very nice down here. It is very nice.

But happy new year. We're into 2026. Let's do a bit of a recap on 25. All right. Because lots of good stuff happened, but Bitcoin didn't really do a lot. Like we ended the year just a little bit down from the start of 20, the start of 25. How do you take it all in? Do you think it was disappointing or do you think we had a good year?

I mean, I personally was disappointed by the price. I certainly thought there was a really good chance of punching through 150. And I would say I probably had 180 as kind of my midpoint. Like 50% of scenarios would have gone above 180 and 50% below. So that was disappointing in that respect. I think we hit 126 as the high. But there were a lot of weird things that happened in the market from the blow up of all the offshore crypto exchanges

and market makers on October 10th. And there were a lot of things on the pro side, obviously structurally, a lot of good. things happen for Bitcoin and Bitcoin adoption across institutions and countries, etc. through the year. So that was pretty cool. Cycles are probably dead. I think we front ran the, you know, if there was a cycle, we front ran and plowed it all into 2024. And this is the first time, you know, after big pumps in 2013, 17 and 21, we didn't see it in 25. And then I would say the last thing that I think is the biggest drag on Bitcoin price for the year has just been the

the administration's tariff policy. That's the drag on risk assets in general. And in particular, Bitcoin is just uncertainty around what's going to happen. And I think it just freaks people out. It'd be different if you just said, this is the way it's going to be. And you just stick to it. But the fact that it bounces around a lot, I think

is causing tons of uncertainty. And it's probably the number one drag on Bitcoin price. So I would say, like, if you had Trump being pro-Bitcoin and even just running all the grifts and, you emoluments and self-enrichment on the crypto side, but absent tariffs, I still think you would have had a ripping Bitcoin price run in 25. I think it was the tariffs that thwarted that. What do you think of Trump's first year? Because specifically on Bitcoin, otherwise, there's way too much to talk about here. But he obviously came out with his grifts after he did sort of

a soft, like he did the SBR, but nothing's really happened with that. I can't help but feel that's disappointing too. I don't think he's really followed through on some of the stuff he said he was going to do. It looks like they even sold the samurai coins from that case, which was, I believe, not meant to be allowed according to the executive order. Do you think he's let himself down on the Bitcoin side? So, I mean, Bitcoiners and Bitcoin companies didn't donate to the campaign. Crypto people funded 50% of the last election cycle in the United States, and they wanted stable coin legislation and market structure. They tossed in SBR for marketing vibes, but it isn't anything that anybody is holding the administration or any of these legislators

to account over. Nobody is beholden to have to put that through in any way or to buy Bitcoin in some way for the government. It's just a thing that they just kind of hung out there that is super low priority and it's not on anybody's like must-do list because it doesn't make Coinbase more money. it doesn't make BlackRock more money. It doesn't, none of the people that donated and that are in bed with New York and D.C. Give a shit about it. They cared about stable coins and they care about market structure. So that's the priority in the legislature.

And do you think the stable coin bill is a positive thing for the industry broadly? I think it's completely irrelevant for Bitcoin. All it is is just, you know, trying to extend dollar hegemony, saying the quiet part out loud as so many people in the crypto. dose space don't realize you're not supposed to actually say that. That's that's quiet. That's behind you're not supposed to be in favor of that, but they got tripped up and started marketing that. It's pretty hilarious.

But that's just more digital dollars. Like that's not an alt-coin. It's not Bitcoin. It's just dollars. And it doesn't really matter whether it goes over banking rails or centralized rails with Tether or Paxos or whatever. Like it's censorable. It's trackable.

Five-Eyes and all the three-letter agencies are in the database, watching everything. And they're very deliberately partnering with these companies so that they can watch everything. And they're actually actively encouraging some crime to happen and hoping that people like roll up and trip and like uncover, you know, new international criminals or terrorist organizations. So like they're actually like a lot of, you know, it's kind of like the plot of the departed, you know. So there's a bunch of these Jack Nicholson types, right? There's a bunch of these Frank types that, you know, seemingly are a criminal mastermind. minds of sorts, but they're actually informants too. And so they're allowed to continue to operate

and use stable coins on these networks, but it's because the government can roll them and get them to turn informant any time they want. Do you think that's really how they're setting this up? Is that why? I think that is actually the function of the stable coins today. Interesting. And so we were talking a little bit before about the reason that the chick coin markets are allowed to operate the way they do as well. And I guess that would be a similar dynamic. Is that right? It's very similar. Yeah. So again, and we can get into this and we did this in the, and kind of the pre-prep. So the analogy between stable coins and basically the people that could shut it down or who allow it to be, the reason that they allow it to be tells you what its purpose is. So its purpose

is basically spying and anti-crime. crime and that's its purpose among the powers that be. And they're okay with all of the other things happening on stable coins, even if the banks complain about this or that or the other, they let them keep going because it's so valuable as a spying network on international crime and terrorist organizations, et cetera. And the analogy then that would map to offshore crypto exchanges and their actual function, not the majority of the economic activity, which is trading and gambling, but their actual function because they could be shut down if the powers that be didn't want them to do this

is money laundering. So the function of offshore Asian crypto exchanges and all the finance activity and all these new projects all the time, keeping that propped up and having, you know, Asian crypto VC money flow into that and incubators and all the buy a bit and HTX and Justin's son and CZ and all the stuff. The function is money laundering because that is the one thing that they want to keep open. by Justin Sun seems untouchable and et cetera, et cetera. And I think the tell what really told you,

and I'll go back for another analogy here. So in Q2 of 2022 after the C-Fi lenders basically all blew up, so it was Celsius and Voyager and BlockFi and all the small ones had blown up. And then Sam Bankman-Fried from FTX and Alameda started talking about wanting to buy BlockFi Voyager Celsius. And that didn't make sense because those companies had negative equity. They were worth less than zero and they had negative brand equity.

They were torched. No customer would ever want to deal with any of those brands for any reason ever again. And so all you had to know was that that didn't make sense. And so therefore, SBF was lying about something. It turns out that the reason that he was trying to buy them was to hide the fact that he owed them tons of money. And so if he bought them and that never saw the light a day and didn't hit, you know, the bankruptcy lawyers and the estates, et cetera, then he could hide that. And that's what he was hoping to do in particular with BlockFi and Voyager.

So similarly, the tell in the middle of 2025 was that $1.5 billion hack of Bybit, which is just one of many supposedly competing offshore crypto exchanges in East Asia. And within six hours, a couple of other crypto exchanges, their competitors, filled the gap, gave them the money to fill it. And that tells you right there that there is somebody else pulling the strings. And it's probably whatever the same sort of apparatus is that lets Justin Sun run around the world and, you know, do Justin Sun things. And, you know, keeps on propping this whole thing up. The whole point is that it's an online Macau, right?

Macau is basically set up as a place where lots of CCP folks can go and get their money out of the country. You know, the classic, you know, go, go put half of it on, you know, just best. red every time with lots of money over time and eventually you only lose, you know, 4% of your money and that's cheaper than laundering it through a cash network. This episode is brought to you by Anchor Watch. The thing that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin cold storage. And this is where Anchorage comes in. With Anchorage, your Bitcoin is insured with your own A plus rated Lloyds of London insurance policy and all Bitcoin is held in their time locked multi-sig vaults. So you have the peace of mind knowing your Bitcoin is insured while not

giving up custody. So whether you're worried about inheritance planning, wrench attacks, natural disasters, or just your own silly mistakes, you're protected by Anchor Watch. Rates for fully insured custody start as low as 0.55% and are available for individual and commercial customers located in the US. Speak to Anchorage for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage. Visit anchorwatch.com today. That is anchorwatch.com. With Fiat money constantly debasing, wealth preservation isn't optional. That's why I recommend Swan Bitcoin, a team of dedicated Bitcoiners who work with families and businesses to build and secure generational wealth with Bitcoin. Strong relationships with clients are at the

centre of everything Swan does. A dedicated Swan private wealth representative, which is a real person that you can text and call, will help you build a Bitcoin wealth strategy using Swan's comprehensive platform of Bitcoin services, including tax advantage retirement accounts, advance Bitcoin cold storage using collaborative self-custody, inheritance planning with both trust and entity accounts, tax loss harvesting, asset back loans and more. Swan have helped over 100,000 clients since 2020, and if you're serious about acquiring and securing Bitcoin, I recommend Swam. Meet the team at swan.com forward slash WBD, which is swan.com forward slash WBD. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack Bitcoin at the same time? Well, by mining

Bitcoin with blockware, you can. New tax guidelines from the Big Beautiful Bill allow American miners to write off 100% of the cost of their mining hardware in a single tax year. That's right, 100% write off. So if you have $100,000 in capital gains or income, you can purchase $100,000 of miners and offset it entirely. Blockware's mining as a service and enables you to start mining Bitcoin right now without lifting a finger. Blockware handles everything from securing the miners to sourcing low-cost power to

configuring the pool, they do it all. You get to stack Bitcoin at a discount every single day while also saving Big Comtax season. Get started today by going to mining.blockware solutions.com forward slash WBD. Of course, none of this is tax advice, speak to your accountant or tax advisor to understand how these rules apply to you, and then head over to mining.com slash wbd, and you'll get one week of free hosting and electricity with each hosted miner purchased. And when you say CCP people go into McCown doing this, do you think it's, who's the person at the top of this? Do you think that is CCP?

pay? No, it interestingly, like, it doesn't all bubble up. I think there's a lot of people with fiefdoms. And I don't have deep knowledge of China. So a lot of this is just kind of secondhand. And we all read the same sources and books. But, you know, I've been reading about China for the last 14 years, I guess. It's kind of like a pet thing. And so there are a lot of people that get away with a lot of things and get really, really rich, both in business and in government there. And they're, like, as we've seen. So, an example, even when they shut down mining, it doesn't go from 50% of hash rate to zero. It goes from 50% to 20%. Yeah. Because there are enough people that are well positioned enough that pay off enough of the right people and can kind of keep their fiefdom and keep the

hash rate live. So there are a lot of people, obviously, as you see the real estate market in Manhattan Beach here on the strand, you know, this is mostly, most of these houses on the strand here are empty. Oh yeah. When I was walking back through there's almost nobody living. No lights on. Yeah. Right. So that's all, you know, just folks from other countries, lots of China that just buy that to store value. Obviously, Vancouver, Seattle, lots of cities, Toronto. You know, it's kind of the same thing. But yeah, to get that money out of the country, one of the main ways they do it is the typical casino money laundering thing. And crypto casinos are actually better at that and easier to do from afar than having to walk your physical self or one of your agents who you now have to trust. really deeply and like walk them into Macau. Not to get too conspiratorial, but with SBF, do you think he was just a, do you think his rise was natural and that he was this, like he was pretty smart. He was clearly smart at doing what he ended up.

No, he wasn't. You don't think he was. I know he wasn't. Why? Because from the very beginning, what they raised the money for FTC on was fake too. So he actually didn't win as a trader with Alameda. in 2018 and 2019, that was a Ponzi scheme as well. But so he claimed to be doing like the kimchi trade at scale.

Yeah. Right. Which was like Harvey. Because he was from Jane Street originally arrived. He was there for like 18 months. Okay. He wasn't some big star trader. Hmm.

He, I think basically took advantage of, you know, the style and method and network of his parents, which was, you know, being kind of Democrat, Democratic party operatives and bundlers and academics. and I think you have to look at what he actually said. If you learn the right shibboleths, if you learn to talk and act in the right way, I think it was all basically an act. Like he knows better than to show up on stage

in Davos and white socks and shorts to meet with ex-presidents. Like, he knows better than that. He's not a real autist. He's a fake autist. Do you think he was a plant? No, I don't think he was a plant. I think he was just a good scammer.

He just exposed the system. You should look at him pretending to be like a nerdy, coder, gamer, genius, the same way that you look at like Elizabeth Holmes, you know, with her black turtleneck and her deep voice, right? It's fake. So it was an act. Well, I do think one of the most positive things that has come out of Bitcoin in recent years is that it doesn't feel like, and to be fair, I didn't call the SPF thing beforehand, but it doesn't feel like we have any glaring and obvious scams in the system that could

have like a systemic risk on the Bitcoin price, Bitcoin market. Do you think we're kind of past that stage now? From within our little ecosystem for now? Yeah. And I did foresee Doquan and called it. And I did foresee Mishensky and called it. And I did foresee SBF and called it. And I don't see anything like that from within the Bitcoin ecosystem or Bitcoin adjacent ecosystem that looks like that. Now the risk is that we are part of the broader financial system. And we are a macro tool and we're a macro asset. And we're subject to the whims and disruptions of that. And we're very small in that world.

We're a drop in the bucket. You know, we're 0.2% of global store value or something, right? So we can just get whipsod and, you know, if the market's going to crash on Monday morning, well, Bitcoin crashes on Friday night, right? So yeah, we get that whole new fun thing. And, you know, someday, someday one of these chartered banks, you know, may get hacked, right? Or a big custodian that custody is a bunch of ETF, you know, know, might get hacked or get confiscated. Maybe it won't happen in the USA. Maybe it'll happen with one

of these custodians in a, you know, second-tier country or something like that. And it'll get confiscated and that'll be the government stash or some new tyrant stash or something like that. So that's the type of risks that we are subject to now. And when people talk about Bitcoin being like a Trojan horse into the financial system, obviously with that comes risks. Like the Trojan horse worked once. We don't know if it'll definitely work the next time. How do you kind of weigh that up? Do you think Bitcoin will be okay? Or do you think there is still a risk that it gets sort of co-opted in this process?

I mean, Bitcoin's going to be fine. It can't really be co-opted in that way, I don't think. I guess the big risk is that self-custody or something gets banned. That seems like the most, the easiest lift for a government who was against Bitcoin. That's probably true. But unless they're able to pull it off in the USA, which seems very, very unlikely. given our separation of powers and sort of libertarian freedom bent, I think that's an exceptionally small percentage chance of that happening. It's non-zero, which is why you must remain vigilant

and fight against those things and always look for legislators that are keen to push something through about enshrining the right to self-custody into law, which we all do all the time. And that's what all the different policy orgs are working on in the U.S. all the time. Because this is the market that matters the most. It's where probably more than having. half the Bitcoin is held and it's the center of the financial universe on this planet. And so this is where you want to make sure those rights are enshrined. Yeah. Another one of the things that I think is really interesting now in the Bitcoin market is that the progression of going from owning no Bitcoin to owning actual self-custody Bitcoin

has totally changed. Yeah. Like when I first got into Bitcoin, I used Coinbase. I had Bitcoin, Ethereum, Lightcoin as my option. And if you want, like, once you bought Bitcoin on Coinbase, to go from there to self-custody in Bitcoin, super easy step. You just literally send a transaction. You have Bitcoin in your wallet that you control.

Yeah. Now with the new people coming into Bitcoin, ETFs are probably the main vehicle. I don't know what you've seen at Swan. Yeah. Do you think that's right? Yeah. So look, the market changed, the structure of the market changed completely. So let's set it up.

So from call it about 2017 with the ICO craze through about 2023, so six years, you had to fight it out as a Bitcoin company, Bitcoin educator, financial services company like Swan. You had to fight it out with all the altcoins for that first purchase. You're trying to get them to buy Bitcoin instead of one of these thousands of all coins, right? And the opposition was fueled by $100 billion of altcoin VC money. Everything was a better Bitcoin. Bitcoin is slow. TPS reports. all the things that were just just look hilarious. All the all the profligacy and skullduggery of

Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia and all the Asian crypto VCs and Galaxy and everybody else, right? And that's what you were fighting against for six years. And then Larry, thank from Black Rock, decides he's ready and starts pushing on a Black Rock ETF in early 2023. You dropped the XG narrative. You realize this is going to happen, you know, because they, I think it was 575 out of 575. 276 ETF applications for them have been approved. You know, he's got everyone at the SEC will come visit him and do his bidding. And so they decided how they were going to structure it, which was as a grant or trust, which will be really important.

And I'll get to that in a minute. And then in the fall, you had kind of like the side narrative for the crypto bros claiming that the gray scale case had something to do with getting ETFs approved. It didn't. It just allowed them to convert theirs and have it be the same structure as fidelity. and Black Rock. So that was another little false narrative that persists to my chagrin. They had nothing to do with it.

Larry gets what he wants. And then so I started writing, I think, in like, you know, few four of 23 about the ETF multiplier effect and how it would create a massive new top of funnel that would be much higher signal. And then I think I posted about it in January right after the launch and kind of showed this timeline on a funnel image or something like that. And so basically from 2024,

until structure of the market changes again, the cleanest top of funnel where the most signal is and the easiest way for most people to get into Bitcoin for better or worse is to get some price exposure in their brokerage account just by buying a ticker. It's just super easy on Robin Hood, on Schwab, on whatever, Morgan Stanley, Golden Sachs account, private clients, whatever. And so for the year of 2025 at Swan, as near as we can tell, like when we ask and actually get data on it, somewhere between, I'll give a wide confidence in a I'd say 60 to 75% of our new clients already had a Bitcoin ETF. See, that's crazy to me.

Yeah. I would not have guessed it would be that high. And I guess this kind of, so my, the reason I was sort of setting this up is that for me, going from originally Coinbase way back in the day, because it was basically the only exchange I knew, to get to owning self-questly Bitcoin, very straightforward. But then now with the ETFs, that's not straightforward in the sense that instead of just being able to do any kind redemption, which I don't think I bit or anyone allow yet, you have to sell that ETF, pay tax if you've made some money on it, then go out, find another place to buy Bitcoin,

buy Bitcoin, and then move it to self-custody. That's a lot more steps that we've added. So I don't know how easy it is now to go from sort of top of funnel buying Bitcoin to self-custodying. Yeah. So it seems like it has a lot of friction and it does. It does have a lot of friction. and that's on purpose because Tradfai Wall Street wants assets under management. They don't want to make it easy. So they market these things as cash create, cash redeem. Yeah. Right.

And they're never going to try hard to get in-kind distribution of the underlying asset. Like BlackRock's not going to send you the Bitcoin. Yeah. Right? They're just not going to. Why would they? They want to keep on charging their fees. What do you think, like, more broadly of the state of sort of education in Bitcoin right now?

And do you think that's one of the things that hamper's, adoption in any way? I mean, there's so much of it. There is so much, so much more than there used to be. And so, you know, look, I think it would be more interesting to go up to like 30,000 feet here and just talk about something. It was actually having this conversation with someone who's built a community of like 70,000 business people and upwardly mobile people, whatever. And they're in Florida and they like Bitcoin and they're kind of educating their crowd now about like Bitcoin and blockchain and crypto and defy and things like that. And, you know, if you're running a media business or a media and events business or if you're in politics,

I mean, there are a lot of areas where basically what matters is attention, not quality of information. Yep. And with YouTube and X, attention matters way more, like all caps headlines where you deliberately say Bitcoin when actually the news is about shit coins, things like that. Like the point is the attention because that's what you can monetize. You know, if you have built a big audience by having, you know, a bunch of altcoin founders on your show while you purport to be a bitcoiner and over seven or eight years you build a massive audience by giving softball interviews to crypto company founders, you amass a large audience and almost no one in 2026 is, is aware of or even really keeping track or caring about.

all of the scamming that you've done over the years, right? There are few markets where signal, like few customer segments where signal and truth actually matter. One of the reasons, along with market structure and the launch of the ETFs that Swan went so far up market and it's basically the Swan Bitcoin wealth platform, we structurally built for seven or eight months the wealth platform and launched on July 1st of 2025. And that's where all the recurring revenue comes from now. And it's like a very different business that's very focused on high net worth folks and

owners of businesses where we serve principles, not agents. So not serving institutional and not serving low end retail. It's basically like wealthy people and businesses that they own and control. Yeah. Is Swan's sweet spot. And the reason is they're the only people that give a shit about the truth. They're the only people that can that can care to tell whether information I'm giving you is different or better than information they get from somebody that's an attention seeker

that's monetizing their media. And so what's really different about Swan's Media Engine, and you can look at like YouTube numbers or whatever, like since, you know, we've been content led since the beginning, education research. Nobody else in the industry ever even did that. We were the first company to do that. It's something I had done many times in other verticals and startups. And, you know, I used to run a decent chunk of YouTube sales strategy when I was at Google,

stuff like that. So I kind of understood that world and, you know, obviously started my career in journalism in the late 90s. So I've always been around content and creation, doing things like what you do. And if you can, if you can build trust through education and content and signal and actually have taste and only promote things that are true, not things that are false, you know, long before I went after Do Kwan for his bullshit and all of the big Twitter accounts and Bitcoin, quote, unquote, podcast sucking off Do Kwan in early 22, I had already gone hard at Plan B and his fake models

starting in 2020. And that was because I needed to, I basically needed people to stop talking about them when they were guests on our shows. So we would have like Swan Signal Live and somebody would come on and start talking about this bullshit. And I don't want bullshit going out to to our audience. And so I had to explain and sit down and show how the math works and what the stats are and explain in detail why he was full of shit starting in 2020. But the main reason was so that people would know not to talk about that shit when they're on Swan platforms.

Interesting. Like don't even bring that here. So that was the way that I handled that. And enough people got the signal. And we stopped, you know, accident because we would never promote it. And we had people stop accidentally promoting fake models. on Swan shows. So, you know, basically where we're at is we have built a massive media engine at Swan.

You know, since inception, if, you know, you think of like the Bitcoin-only YouTube channels, we not only have more views than any other Bitcoin-only channel, like I think it was 57 million views or something all time versus, I think number two is in the 30s or something like that. the next most from a Bitcoin financial services company is like $2 million. So it's, you know, 25 times more views than any other Bitcoin financial services company. And it's similar on Twitter and, you know, kind of anywhere you look are massive, massive content operation. And it's because our client base gives a shit. And that's just like that's what you, that's what you have to care about.

You have to be maniacal about it. And it's a slow burn because you can't get to millions and millions of followers right away because you're not chasing eyeballs because you're not monetizing through media. So this is one of the things that, I mean, I literally only monetize through media because that's this business. But it is one of the things that I struggle with in that I could, you know, clickbait my shows way more. I could make them much more extreme and alarmist and get more views.

But I don't feel like you build a good audience doing that. Like I want a core group of listeners who like care about Bitcoin. They want to hear like real Bitcoin conversations, not someone just telling you it's going to go to a million dollars next week. But that's like quite a fine line to balance. Like I just put out a show with Saylor this morning. And like if I had have done like the YouTube thing and had him like screaming on the thumbnail and stuff, I'm sure it could have done more views. But like brand is so important that you have to kind of tread that balance. And it's really hard to do.

Yeah. So the monetization for people who stick to high signal and tell the, truth and like try to seek out the truth and actually share that as opposed to just chasing eyeballs. Yeah. Always comes in the side door. So it's basically business opportunities that come to you because people respect you. Yeah.

And so then you get to do some kind of partnership or a conference or whatever it is. I mean, it's, that's how you monetize basically is equity and cash flow from other things. Totally. So it's your signpost. You see a lot of like some of the best creators on YouTube don't have sponsors. you know, and they monetize their community through Patreon sometimes, but a lot of times, they just monetize through speaking engagements. Interesting.

Right? So, like, if you think of, we love to hate Peter Zion for his, the geopolitics guy that's always hiking because he says Bitcoin's, you know, going to go negative, whatever that means. But at the end of the day, you know, he doesn't take sponsorship. Yeah. And he just people, people like the way he presents information and it's good enough. and he gets really lucrative speaking gigs, you know, so it comes in somewhere else. He's not trying to monetize through advertising.

If you already self-custody of Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets, complex setups, clumsy interfaces, and a seed phrase that can be lost, stolen or forgotten. Well, BitKee fixes that. BitKee's a multi-sig hardware wallet built by the team behind Square and Cash App. It packs a cryptographic recovery system and built-in inheritance feature into an intuitive, easy-to-use wallet with no seed phrase to sweat over. It's simple, secure self-custody without the stress, and time named Bitkey one of the best inventions of 2024. Get 20% off at Bitkey.world when you use the code WBD.

That's B-I-T-K-E-Y dot world and use the code WBD. Do you wish you could access cash without selling your Bitcoin? Well, Let it makes that possible. They're the global leader in Bitcoin-backed lending, and since 2018, they've issued over $9 billion in loans with a perfect record of protecting client assets. With Leiden, you get full-costly loans with no credit checks or monthly repayments, just easy access to dollars without selling a single SAT. As of July 1st, Leiden is Bitcoin-only, meaning they exclusively offer Bitcoin-backed loans with all collateral held by Leiden directly or their funding partners.

Your Bitcoin is never lent out to generate interest. I recently took out a loan with Leiden. The whole process was super easy. The application took me less than 15 minutes, and in a few hours I had the dollars in my account. It was really smooth. So if you need cash but you don't want to sell Bitcoin, head over to leaden.io, forward slash, WBD, and you'll get 0.25% off your first loan. That's ledden.io forward slash WBD. The showup I would say this day was interesting. I'm sure you've not listened to yet because

it only went out sort of four hours ago or something. But I asked him a pretty basic question. I wasn't trying to be inflammatory with it. I was just asking, has the model change now with the preferred strategy offer, where just sort of issuing debt to buy Bitcoin has become less interesting to the market. And of the 200 plus treasury companies, how many can actually be sustained, sort of as of right now? And he kind of yelled at me. He called me ignorant and myopic a couple of times. But which I didn't... I will say, I will say, I only saw like a 30-second clip. And in that clip, it did seem like he was kind of talking about the pervert. I think, yeah. So I think he was using you as like a proxy for the crowd or something.

Yeah, that could be true as well. So I took it like he was talking to me, but I had to have a few people say that that maybe it was more having to go at kind of the Bitcoin Twitter armchair critics. Yeah. But at the time, at least, I took it as me. So I was kind of taken it back. I was a bit shocked. And one of the interesting things, again, that happened in 25 is I think a lot of the first Bitcoin buyers were buying treasury companies rather than actual Bitcoin. But But how sustainable do you think that model is going into this year? So first, let's talk about what we're actually discussing. So I would say that Sailor and everyone else did themselves kind of a disservice by labeling

it all Bitcoin Treasury companies where that includes anyone that has Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Yeah. Obviously, they're not all trying to increment BTC per share maniacally through capital markets activity. Yeah. Like what Bitcoin did is a Bitcoin treasury company. Sure. Yeah, as is Swan and as is, you know, some of my own personal LLCs, right?

Like, old Bitcoin. So that's not what Tesla is. That's not what, you know, most of these companies are. It's not what GameStop is, you know, like most of these are not. The ones that are trying to do what micro strategy does and has done are rightfully called leveraged Bitcoin equities, LBEs, which is, you know, I've stuck to that. And I haven't heard a better term. I think I put that out in like fall of 24.

and I still think it's the best term for those that are trying to do that. Internationally, there's one company basically off the starting block, which is Metaplanet that has scale and can do debt and can lever up, basically. In the U.S., there's two only. There's only two. There's micro strategy and strive, and that's it. No one else has a permanent leverage that you can buy in a ticker. So the primary function of an LBE should be that you can get leveraged exposure to Bitcoin

just by buying a ticker in your brokerage account and it has perpetual leverage. So it's always 1.2x Bitcoin or 1.3X Bitcoin or something like that. Why does strive have it when like a similar or someone like that doesn't? What's the difference? Well, they bought similar and that's how they got to scale and got off the starting block. Okay. Basically, to add perpetual leverage, kind of where the market's at is you need at least $500 million of unencumbered Bitcoin nav because the institutions that want to invest in your

first preff, your first perpetual preferred offering are wanting a minimum of $125 million in that deal. Yeah. And they want a minimum of 4x coverage. Makes sense. So that's 125 times four is the 500. So if you don't have 500 million of unencumbered Bitcoin nav, you're not in the game. You're not a leverage Bitcoin equity.

You can't give somebody leveraged Bitcoin exposure in a ticker the way you can with micro strategy and strive. I see. And so everyone else from Sequins, which Swan Advise, which is like New York Stock Exchange listed French semiconductor company, it's like IoT and semis to Empere, to ProCap, to NACA. And I think those are really the four. There's one more I'm missing.

I can't remember. Anyway, there's at least four, maybe four. five that are, you know, kind of 2,000 plus coins or something like that in the USA that are close, but aren't in the game yet because they can't lever up yet. So they have to basically wait for Bitcoin price to rise enough so that the Bitcoin that they do have that's unencumbered by convertible bonds, convertible notes, whatever, right? Because that doesn't count. It has to be the stuff that's not already pledged to buyers of a convert.

Yeah. So to get that, you need Bitcoin price to rise or you need to do something in organic, like a combination, or you need to get somebody to come in with like a new pipe and just, you know, create a bunch of new shares and do a private investment into public equity and decide that you're the horse to back. So you don't think it's over for these companies in terms of business model. It's just like Bitcoin price will fix this eventually. Bitcoin price or deals. Yeah. Or like a sentiment change will fix this. Yeah. But there's a limited, it's not 200 companies. It's like two to our live. Yeah. And there's like four or five trying. And that's it.

right now. Everybody else is like tiny and larking. Interesting. So do you think, you know, well, they have Bitcoin on their balance sheet, which has, there's a whole host of other reasons. I mean, we have thousands of business clients at Swan. So obviously, like, we believe there are very good reasons to have some Bitcoin on a business's balance sheet. Yeah. But you're not serving the same function and you're not in competition with micro strategy just because you stack some Bitcoin.

Yeah. And they're the businesses that I'm really bullish on. Just, you know, like good businesses that have nothing to do with Bitcoin. They just have Bitcoin and balance sheet. That's awesome. I love that. I want to see every company do that. Yeah. Now, I mean, there's some question as to whether, you know, that's a good way to get Bitcoin exposure, if that's a good use of capital versus growing the business, which is, you know, the hurdle rate.

And it's basically like if you, if your expectations are that Bitcoin is going to grow X percent, then you always have this kind of back and forth of like, should I use that Bitcoin to grow the business? If I don't use that Bitcoin to grow the business, I'm implicitly admitting to the market that I don't know how to actually make money. Yeah. So this is what you're going to run into with these big Cantor Spacks, right? So Cantor has the 30,000 coins back and the 25,000 coins back.

And it's like, okay, what are you going to do with the Bitcoin if you are not going to do the micro strategy thing and try to lever up and do perpetual preferreds, whatever, you're going to try to be an operating business. Like, how are you going to deliver a return on assets that justifies the existence of your company. And it really doesn't pass muster for the most part with corporate finance people, like analysts in the street and like anybody looking at these things. Like they're, it's unknown what those piles of Bitcoin are for. So that's just a time will tell thing. Time will tell. Time will tell. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, it, it was kind of,

I think in both of those cases most, I mean, the vast majority, maybe all of, of, the BSTR Bitcoin was contributed into a Cayman entity, BSTRC, and I think was all Bitcoin being contributed. So it's just like an option value. And I don't, it's opaque. So you can't tell and see, you know, whether they can get it back for some reason someday or not. Like, I don't know if it's like fully gone and checked in or not. It might be a call option value. Like if the stock does well, then we'll sell the shares and buy Bitcoin back later. Who knows? I don't know how that works. And then the whole thing with, you know, Tether and Cantor and SoftBank, like, that's a tether thing. So who knows, you know, what they'll do or why.

It could just be a favor machine to try to, you know, leverage it for being able to hire Bow Hines for things. You know, like it just may be a way to distribute favors and they don't care what happens with the stock at all. Interesting. But again, it's deliberately not in competition with micro strategy. Like they've openly stated that it's going to try to make business. I think ProCAP is off the market too. Like ProCAP has said they're going to try to like generate yield and be a Bitcoin financial services firm someday or whatever it is.

Like they're going to try to be an operating business. They're not in that business of trying to aggressively use capital markets on a daily basis to try to stack Bitcoin per share like Microstrategy and Strybar. Interesting. So I mean, it's really going to be the next few years is going to kind of wash this out and see what's actually useful in the market. I can't imagine we get another paper Bitcoin summer where hundreds of these treasurer. companies are popping up.

There never were hundreds that popped up. There were hundreds that tried last summer. Only four got the deal done. All that rush around the Bitcoin conference in Vegas and everything, like four actually got done. Four deals. The rest are just. No one else did.

So sequins got done. Empry got done. ProCAP got done. And there was one more I'm forgetting that got off the starting block. And that was it. Like with a scaled raise of, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. There were four. Interesting. So it was a lot of noise. Yeah. You know, and then of course the alt coins piled in because Lubin saw that there was like so much noise and heat and that you're basically just completely destroying the eth thesis. If the only people that cared about Bitcoin as an investment, you know, we're plowing. Or if only people that cared about, you know, cryptos as an investment, it was Bitcoin only. So he just put a bunch of his own money to work and, you know, enriched people to get a little ecosystem of, you know, what I call shats.

asset treasury companies instead of they all tried to they tried to put bitcoin and crypto under one umbrella again the street did by calling them dats yeah so that was actually the mistake of calling them bitcoin treasury companies is you know i think lbes was better because then it allowed them to create an umbrella term for dats and then they a wall street calls them bitcoin dats so you know micro strategies of bitcoin dat versus this you know salonadat that pomp is backing versus this avax dat that you know mooch is backing or whatever. So they tried that again. And that also sucked a lot of the energy out of the market because those were just such blatant money grabs. Interestingly, and I know you love inside baseball. I love inside baseball. So the Bitcoin, I'm sorry, the the shats were just an evolution

of what's already been going on in that market for a long time, which is how do insiders of shit coin pump and dumps sell their tokens without crashing the price on an open exchange and without people being able to see those things like move on chain, showing that like the Hoskinsons and the garling houses of the world are dumping on their Marks heads. And so historically, that was mostly done through the shit coin asset management businesses. So this was like Osprey, Bitwise, Wave Digital in LA, like these guys.

So they basically set up as asset management shops, but what they actually are is insider token brokers. And so basically you would get like an example would be like, And by the way, like everybody's a mixed bag. Like I don't do everything perfectly. Don't make every decision right. And like, you know, blah, blah. So I'm not, I'm not, I actually like, I quite like the Bitwise guys.

I like what Jeff did when he was there. I think that, what's his name, Matt Hogan? Like really good Bitcoin advocate, right? They do other things. I get that. But like, you know, so we're talking. I would say Bitwise is like dramatically net positive for Bitcoin. Yep.

But they also historically have done some other things. And so I'm like not going to not talk about it. So they did like an Osprey had 19 of these by the way, at least single token trusts. I just happened to know, you know, secondhand. So again, I'm not going to let's put this all under allegedly. But allegedly the bit wise of a single token trust, they took $300 million worth of Avey tokens from insiders.

So insider VCs and founders and loaded up this trust fund thing. with that $300 million AUM, and then they market that fund and say, hey, look, we've got all these assets, like, you should buy it too. But nobody actually put up cash for it. And so every time they sell a million dollars of it, they immediately, the insiders redeem that. Oh, that sucks. And so basically you're, you know, so you basically, you check in your shit coin to one of these trusts at the asset managers, the crypto asset managers, and you pay them like 1% per year

to be your broker. And you're just offloading the whole time. And all you're doing is just trying to sell off what you checked in. And so the shitcoin asset treasuries are the same thing. So it's basically they load it up with their random tokens. And it's just a new way for them to try to dump it on retail's heads. Interesting. Or dumb institutions, family offices, whatever.

I mean, family offices are often the best mark for stuff like that. See, I think bigwires have been good for Bitcoin, too, broadly. I like that they support development. with part of the ETF money. But one thing that I have seen them doing recently is pumping Zcash a lot, along with all the other Silicon Valley VCs. And I listen to All In, and I mean,

I don't even like the podcast, but I like to hear the perspectives of the people on All In. And Chimath was pumping Zcash again over the last few weeks. What do you think that's about? They have to pump something, right? Otherwise, altcoins broadly are completely dead. So you have to have, I think that the energy that was created,

was probably had a little bit of reality last fall. I think they made some kind of technological breakthrough that it's probably good for cryptography and maybe some aspect of it gets adopted by Bitcoin in 10 years when it matters or something like that. And it created like a little bit of a pump and then a bunch of the influencers on crypto Twitter, you need something to be happy about, right?

And the last time that an asset was green every day, every week for a number of months when everything else in shit coin land was red was Luna. And even though people knew it was bullshit, and actually they were, I looked it up. When I became aware and did the research in March of 22 and realized that it was actually a complete Ponzi, I went back through like some old crypto telegram chats

that I was still in. And there were people in December of 21 actually referring to it as the Luna Ponzi. You know, I just wasn't paying attention. Yeah. You know, so I think that, you know, with something like the Z trash pump, you know, that's just people needing to have something to point to say, hey, the whole altcoin thing isn't dead. Look, there's this one.

Now take these other bets. Here's the next Zcash. Here's the next Zcash. And it just gets the eyeballs because it moves. So it's kind of self-perpetuating. But it'll just like drain out over time, as they always do. Yeah. You know, look, every time you've got a new show and people don't necessarily.

know that we've run these numbers before. We updated every once in a while, but when Sam Callahan was research analyst at Swan, we went really deep on the entire history of alt coins and found that only two shit coins in all of history have ever had a new all-time high in Bitcoin terms. Oh, I wonder for who guessed them. After their initial pump. And it was Ripple in 17. And Doge coin.

Was in Doge, yeah. So Ripple and 17 was higher than it got in Bitcoin terms than it's 13 pump. Doge because Elon shilled it got higher in 21 than it did in its 17 pump. And every other shit coin in all of history has never recovered its all-time high in Bitcoin terms from its very first pump. They're all pump and dumps, all 30 million of them. Other than, and of course, Doge and Ripple are down like 90% since their second pump. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I love that. The interesting that I know you want to talk about this, and I think it's super interesting, The thing that's popped up in kind of the shit coin sphere is prediction markets have become huge over the last few years. And I actually really like the idea of a prediction market. I don't think it needs a token. I don't think you need to be using crypto to use them. But the idea of a prediction market is really cool. Why do you think they've gained so much prevalence over the last few years?

So prediction markets, there is something interesting and novel, just about being able to create a prop bet, basically, is what it is. typical gambling terms. Like I propose that this will happen and we'll watch it. It's very popular in sports betting. It's like, you know, a prop bet would just be like, what's, is it going to be heads or tails on the coin flip at the Super Bowl, right? Or will, you know, will, I don't know, will Sam Darnold, you know, fumble at least two times, you know, hopefully not. I'm a Seahawks fan. Will he fumble two or more times? That kind of thing is like a prop bet. And so you can create that for kind of anything. And if it has enough liquidity, then it starts to get featured and it starts to get interesting. And it's very popular for elections. And so there have been different ways to

whack at this over the years. The reason it's exploded in the USA over the last three years is because it's regulated differently. Oh, interesting. That's why it's exploded. So it lets people gamble at a younger age in more states. So that's why it's exploded for the most part. So there is a little bit of a tweak and a little like a tiniest sliver difference because I would argue like if you are someone who follows American football very closely, you have an edge similar to being a better poker player. Yes, it's gambling, but you can have an edge. And there are lots of people that are actually like very not many. There's probably like four or five percent of the market or something consistently win at

sports betting because they have better analytics and they're going against the market. And the market makers set the odds based on the volumes on either side of the bet, not based on what will actually happen. So if you can identify the sports bets where the odds are not in line with your model and you bet that intelligently over time, you can win like you do playing blackjack or like you do playing poker. You might win 52% or 56 or 62% of the time or whatever it is. So that's been the explosion of prop betting. What's really fun in, you know, just being a Bitcoiner and having said all this time that, you know, Bitcoin is for investing, Bitcoin is for long-term savings and eventually, obviously, money.

And crypto is for gambling is it's like the mask has been taken off. They're all starting their own predictions markets inside of Coinbase in Cracken. They've started an industry organization that's crypto and predictions markets. And it's all merging. So, you know, you've noted for a long time as we all have that crypto advertising is in all the exact same places as sports gambling and casinos. It's all the exact same ad placements everywhere on every medium. It's like flip a coin and that would be, you know, FTX or Mohegan Sun or, you know, draft kings. Yeah. Right. Same shit. And so it's kind of nice

to just see them admit what they are, which is the entire incentive of a crypto exchange is to get someone to trade as many assets as often as possible. Yeah. In and out of positions, and churn those positions and generate trading fees all the time. That's the goal. Their goal is not to make you and your family independently wealthy over the long haul. Yeah. They're there to extract your money and put it in their pocket. It's the Matthew McCona. Hey, that's Brian Armstrong with hair, basically. Yeah. And it's so glaringly obvious as well. Like when you, when you see like a swan or a river or any of these companies, like the marketing is by Bitcoin, either put it in self-custody or a as good a custody solution that's right for you as possible.

And when you look at like a Coinbase ad, it's like, we've just added this new coin. We've added this new coin. There's just more and more to gamble on constantly. And so it's a real mask off moment. But the thing with prediction markets I love is that Bitcoin essentially operates like a prediction market. Like I think the idea of, you know, you said if the markets are going to crash on Monday, Bitcoin will crash on a Friday night.

that is almost Bitcoin operating like a prediction market. Because I think the interesting thing with prediction markets is it's like incentivized whistleblowing. Because I saw when Maduro got taken out Venezuela, the prediction market moved before any news ever broke. And so it's basically a place for insiders to go and blow the whistle on something early. And I feel like Bitcoin's price at least operates like a prediction market anyway. Yeah. And I don't know. That's one of the coolest aspects of Bitcoin to me.

So I've been kind of obsessed with macro generally since, God, I'm getting old, man. I'd say since probably 2000, 2001. Yeah, okay. So, you know, I was living in New York and you're around a bunch of bankers and hedges and all the stuff and you're just kind of the financial center of the universe and start to get interested in that stuff. And I was already a history nut. And, you know, macro is kind of like the merging of being into history and geopolitics.

with finance. Yep. And so it's interesting reading, even if you're not placing trades yourself. And I've never been like a macro trader except for my macro trade of my life, which is being long Bitcoin. And it is the ultimate macro asset in that respect. What is messy, though, is that because, again, it's like 0.2% of global store of value, it just gets, it still gets traded a lot like a risk asset.

Yeah. And so it's not trading quite like a macro asset. It trades like a macro asset sometimes. And sometimes it's like you can divine that it should trade this way because of news in the world or whatever. But then a lot of times it's just, it's so small that based on flows, it may seem like it should be a flight to safety and Bitcoin should go up. But because it's in so many people's risk portfolios and they're dumping S&P and Q's and

Mag 7 and Bitcoin, it goes down instead of up. Yeah. And I think what's funny is like when, sentiment is bullish on Bitcoin broadly, it gets held when people go risk off and it gets the boost when there's something macro going and when sentiment is bad, it just gets sold both times. Yeah, totally. Which is where it feels like we've been for a few months. But I think I do feel like we're ready to sort of turn the tide on that.

I'm feeling pretty good going to 26. Look, I feel good like we, you know, just being up in the first week of the year when every previous time, you know, in 14, 18, and 22. you know, this is dump month. Yeah. And it's not happening. Like, that's a win right there. I think, you know,

Well, sentiment is also completely shut. On the morning that we're recording right now, you know, here's a nice little sentiment. We'll see what happens, you know, by the time this airs. But, you know, BitGo flipped their S1 public this morning. And so they were supposed to go out initially, you know, in the fall and it kind of got held. And then I think they were supposed to go out in November. They have Goldman Sachs as their lead on. underwriter. So it's like a, you know, basically being treated as a blue chip IPO. And,

and Goldman pulled it and held it, even though their S-1 was public. And, you know, basically said, let's wait till January. Well, here we are. We're reporting on, I have no idea what day this is. We're on the 12th. The 12th, January 12th. And they flip public. So, you know, hopefully they'll kick butt on their roadshow over the next 10 days or so and price and be on the NASDAQ by the end of next week. And that's with Bitcoin being sideways. So that tells you right now that you, that's never happened before where Wall Street has been willing to take Bitcoin or Bitcoin adjacent companies public with Bitcoin price down. So they're not nervous about it. It's institutionalized. It's just a thing. People understand there's going to be cycles that revenue is sensitive to

price, et cetera, et cetera. And they're comfortable taking them out anyway. That means like, It's kind of like, you know, BlackRock wouldn't file the ETF unless it was going to get approved. Like Goldman doesn't flip the company public and start the road show unless the deal is going to get done. So fingers crossed, good luck to those guys. Again, one of those companies that I think is dramatically net positive for Bitcoin despite also having to do crypto things. You know, I think Mike Belchie is a really good bickliner. And that's why people like reared in code and LOP and all these guys started their careers there and built all of that infrastructure and pioneered multi-sig at a place like, like BitGo. So I wish them well. I hope they kick butt. That's awesome. I mean, despite price,

the last two years have been insanely bullish for Bitcoin. Everything has changed for Bitcoin. Yeah. To close out, Corey, not price predictions. I never try and put people under pressure to do a price prediction, but have you got any predictions for 26? Anything you expect to see happen? Look, man, I am really, really focused on the Swan business right now. It's an exciting time. I I think it's never been clearer what a company like Swan is supposed to do and what our function is to be, you know, that partner for families and businesses that are going long Bitcoin, you know, for the long haul. Yep. And their needs are multiplying because it's a bearer asset. And there are a lot of different ways that you want to own it and ways you want to think about inheritance, et cetera.

So like, I'm really, really focused on that. And then I'd say, you know, I think that you will continue to see the education. space bifurcate between attention getters and signal providers. And, uh, and I like that. And I like that people are starting to rebel in a big way against the attention getters. And it's like not cool, uh, to just be kind of an eyeball hunter and to try to provide signal.

Um, and, and I really, I like that some of the folks that have, uh, adhered to providing signal over the years are figuring out the ways that you actually monetize that, which doesn't have to be just through. eyeballs. Yeah. You know, so we monetize through financial services and serving clients. And, you know, you and Peter have a bunch of different other businesses, you know, alongside providing good, high quality content and information. And like, you don't have to be just like news cycle chasers and eyeball chasers. And I'm really glad to see that that is going by the wayside and is being kind of shunned. I love it. Bitcoin's growing up. Yeah. We're getting

Should, you get in there. Thank you, Corey. This has been awesome. Tell everyone where to find out more about you, more about Swan, where they can go. Yeah, so we're just Swan on X. I'm Corey Swan on X and Swan.com. So all pretty easy. And yeah, we're here to serve and we're in six countries now.

Let's go. And hoping to expand quite a lot more. So check out and see if we serve you guys yet at Swan.com slash international. international. But yeah, most of the business USA and just looking to expand our product line and keep doing good things for Bitcoiners. Love it, man. Thank you, Corey. That was awesome.