What Bitcoin Did - The $1 Trillion Bitcoin Loan Market Is Coming | Mauricio Di Bartolomeo

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

“There’s no balance sheet in the world that can cough up a trillion dollars.” In this episode, Mauricio Di Bartolomeo explains why he believes Bitcoin-backed loans could become a $1 trillion market within the next five to ten years, and why traditional lender balance sheets cannot finance that growth alone. Mauricio breaks down Ledn’s $188 million Bitcoin-backed securitisation, the significance of its investment-grade senior notes, and how institutional capital could transform Bitcoin lending into a global credit market. He also explains partial liquidations, auto top up, tokenised gold and the potential for hybrid Bitcoin-and-gold collateral. The conversation also explores the hidden risks behind “no-liquidation” loans, why cheaper borrowing can conceal dangerous counterparty risk, and whether parts of the industry are repeating the mistakes that preceded the last crypto credit collapse. We also get into the ongoing changes in Venezuela following Maduro’s capture, the devastation caused by the La Guaira earthquakes, and why he believes the country may finally have an opportunity to rebuild. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: LEDN SWAN ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE BITKEY CAPE FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles Mauricio Di Bartolomeo: https://x.com/cryptonomista

We believe, we estimate that in not too long, five to ten years, there's going to be a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin back loans out there. We need to know where you're going to get a trillion dollars. There's no balance sheet in the world that can cough up a trillion dollars. We were the first company to ever do this. It is the first time SMP has ever rated a Bitcoin product, and it's the first time that it's given an investment rate rating to a Bitcoin product. This is the first true, in my opinion, Bitcoin credit instrument.

There is a maturity and there is a coupon and there is bankruptcy remoteness. All right, ma'am. Cheers, man. Good to see you. Great to see you. Thank you for coming in for this. Hey, man. My pleasure.

I've got, I listened to you on Natalie's show. And you said, people don't wake up in the morning and think today's a good day for a loan. That's not true. About two months ago when Bitcoin Prize crashed, I woke up, looked at it and went, today's a good day for a loan. That's fair. And I didn't mean that to be sort of like an absolute statement. Like there are times in the market where you see something you like an asset comes by and

you're like, that's the day. But it's usually driven because of an opportunity that lands on your lap or it's not something that you just take for the sake of having it. You take a loan to deploy it typically, right? Like most people don't borrow to keep the money, you know, borrowed. But that's more so what I've met. But yes, to your point, like we are, and this is, I know sounds a little bit, counterintuitive to some people, but we are seeing a big pickup in first-time loan,

first-time borrowers right now because a lot of people feel much more comfortable borrowing at 60 versus 120, right? Because they're sizing the potential risk of a drawdown. I've done basically both of those. I've already above 100k last year at some point and that one had to be topped up a couple of times. And then this is a good segue which is like the price at which you borrow It almost shouldn't matter because you should be planning appropriately, regardless of wherever price you're in, right? Like, if you're 120 and you think we're going to 60, like, you want to have enough Bitcoin to withstand that.

If you think we're going to 40, even from 120, you should have enough Bitcoin to withstand that. Yeah. So we, to me, that's the biggest determinant of whether a person has a great outcome or a person gets caught off guard, is how much time do you spend planning, sizing up the loan, how many diligence questions you ask. And there's like a direct correlation between the people that are diligent and plan and ask questions and do like, you know, take out the loan and they keep until they want to and they never get liquidated. And these are the people that, you know, have great

experiences. And then there's all there's cases at times where life also happens, right? Like you may have had that budget, but something else happened and you had to use some of that budget. And then all of a sudden it caught you of guard. Or it caught you travel. Or it caught you travel. and you didn't set up auto top up, right? Like that's happened. And so... Didn't that happen when we were in Sydney? Which one?

Did it not happen with you where you were traveling? For me, for my own loan? Yeah. Well, it's happened to me and it's happened to me before. Like, you know, every, like not every member. I want to say, I don't know about every member, but like, definitely I would... No, it was sorry, I got it totally wrong. It was happened to me while we were in Sydney together.

Yes. Because I had, I was getting emails and I was like, Oh yeah. We were having me. We're sitting having that drink. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember now. And you're like, damn.

But that happens, right? And that's why we built Auto Topop. And like I said, you know. Yeah, that saved me. Like things, and it saved a ton of people. It's not a single person this year, by the way. And the statistics are 99.9. Because as I mentioned in Nico's show, there's been case,

or one case of a guy that did leave Auto Topop op on, but he had dust. And so it went to the loan, but they didn't budge the LTV much. But every single person that's used AutopopUpUp Up this year with a Bitcoin Malice in their transaction account, none of those people have been liquidated. None of them. Autotop adoption is up to like 40% of our loans right now. Damn.

Which is we love to see it. Bare market things though, right? Correct. Right? In bare markets, people start thinking more about, hey, downside protection, which makes a lot of sense, right? One thing that I can share here, which I'm really happy, is very soon, Adelaide will be rolling out partial liquidations. So today, if your loan hits 80% LTV, you get the loan gets fully closed. When we move to partial liquidations, we will only be selling enough Bitcoin to bring the LTV back to 65, and the loan remains open for whatever amount is left.

That's very cool. Yeah. And again, it's more so about trying to be as, you know, trying to do the bare minimum to cure the loan as opposed to and give you the options. Yeah, because you're on the same, you're on the same team in that. Like, you don't want to take anyone's Bitcoin. No, we only make money when the loans are open. Yeah. Right. And we want people to keep their loans open if they need them.

Right? I'm not ever going to tell somebody to take a loan you don't need. But so long as you want, you don't want to have it closed, we don't want to have that happen to you either. And so we want to do whatever, like, that's what we built out of top of. That's where we're moving to partial liquidations. That's why we have the planning tools in the website. You can say, okay, if I take my ITV now and Prick-Price goes to X, where do I get liquidated? How much more Bitcoin will I need? So a lot of those things you can do proactively and you'd be surprised how well it works. I know it sounds trivial, but a lot of people just do, you know, not a lot, but like I would say, people, some people take action, impulse, like impulse driven action and they don't really think about Bitcoin going down. So that's why, you know, I emphasize, just plan, run the math, run the scenarios, keep the Bitcoin aside and have an action.

and have an action plan. Also, some people wait until the very last minute to top up their loans from external addresses. And then they try to send that transfer, networks congested. I wish it was congested. It's never congested anymore. No, but in the February, in the February drawdown,

there was some congestion. Like, there were some tickets that were, because I saw some of these transfers coming in, and some were taking hours to confirm. It also depends on what fees you're putting in. Some people were putting in, like, very low fees, and they got stuck. And so again, just don't...

A block might just not be found for an hour. Like, who knows? Let's, you know, you have to just plan and not ever try to take it to be proactive, right? Like, if you're being proactive, the best thing I love is when people proactively top up their loans before they even get a notification, before the top up kicks in. Yeah. Like, people are on it. Yeah, these are the things that I think about a lot, because obviously you guys sponsor the show. Thank you very much, for the way.

But, like, and I think Lennon's an awesome product. I use it. and I think people who need to take out a loan against the Bitcoin, there's no better place to look. The problem is, I struggle when I'm trying to, like, advertise it to be, I want to be really meaningful and cautious with my words,

because, like, if you do this wrong, it can really get you in some trouble. Done right, it can be a super useful, powerful tool, but done wrong,

it can get you in trouble. And so, like, how do you try and suggest people, like, first start thinking about this? Yeah, so obviously,

in terms of, like, probabilistically things that can happen. Obviously, there's a wide range of probabilities. Like anything's possible, right? But if you look at the models, because we run models and try to assess, you know, historical drawdowns and what that would look like if you alone. And the most aggressive drawdown we've had in, you know, in Bitcoin. And since Leibon's been around was the March 14th, 2020 crash. Of course.

That was a 50% drop in a matter of 24 to 48 hours. Yeah. No, we, like Bitcoin has never seen a drop like that. Even in these price, these bear markets are, bear markets for ants compared to those bear markets. And in that case, so the, if you run the model of a loan that started January 1st, 2020, and experienced the COVID crash, that person had to add 50% more Bitcoin relative to the original collateral.

Okay, so about half of what you put in initially to cure that drop. And the additional problem there is it's not like you're drip feeding that over months. It would like that had to be done in a day. Correct. So that one was like a pretty bit. I'm trying to put it into the extremes so that you can, you know, the likelihood of that happening again. Well, when else are we, well, soon will we get a global pandemic that closes the economy? I don't know. But it's happened before. And so in that most extreme case, that person needed to come up with 50% of the original Bitcoin in 24 hours. Immediately. Right. And so of course, I share that example.

more as from a quantum size perspective, right? I would recommend that you should have at least an equal amount of Bitcoin than you're using for the initial loan. Available and ready. And when I mean available and ready, I don't mean I have to go to three volts to get my keys and authorize the thing and it's going to take me two days. Like that's not available and ready

because you might need to respond faster than that. So when I say available and ready, I mean something that you can feasibly transfer, Or if most people do it, not most, but about 40% of people do it now, they send the Bitcoin to that in proactively. They leave it in the transaction account, which is a custody account. We don't do anything with that. Bitcoin is just to service the loan if and when you want to use it.

Turn it on out of top up. That Bitcoin sitting in that transaction account is not part of your collateral. You can withdraw it at any time. It's just there in case your loan needs it at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, right? If Bitcoin ripped and you, you're not. your LTV went down to 20% and you now have released excess Bitcoin or you want to keep it at 20 just so you don't have to think about it. You can turn off auto top up, withdraw that Bitcoin and not have to think about it anymore. But it's really for those who want to use it,

it's meant to give you the option. And it came from, we had a few clients, but in particular, there was a few guys who had these cabins up in northern Canada. And they would go for months. and they were like, I'm not going to have any cell phone. I'm not going to have my keys. I need you guys to help me protect my loan. How do I respond in this situation? And we said, well, we built auto top up. And we said, okay, well, how about we do this?

We will let you keep a balance here. We'll move it if and when the loan needs it. Love it. This guy loved it. Another guy had a similar situation because he went on boating trips a lot, not the sarcastic voting trips, but the real boating trips. Yeah, yeah. And so he was also having issues, or not issues, but was concerned.

Yeah. And so we built auto top up, and that's really the intent behind it. And people are increasingly more and more using it, which we love to see. And we'll continue to do more things to protect people against volatility and the downside. Which we can segue into another point, which is in these bear markets, it's also a natural thing that people are thinking about the downside. Right? Like, what's the worst that can happen? How do I protect my loan? Right? And there's no free lunch in life. Okay? Like, if it was easy to get rid of liquidations or margin calls or this type of setup, we would have figured it out for equities in the 200 years we've been lending against them. Absolutely. Or gold. Or we would have found a way not to evict people when they default on a mortgage. Right? Like, doesn't exist. These things are very hard to do at scale and responsibly.

If you hold Bitcoin long enough, there's going to come a time when you need some dollars. It might be a tax bill, a business expense, life getting in the way, but whatever it is, it might come at a time when you don't want to sell your Bitcoin. That's where Lennon comes in. Lennon lets you borrow against your Bitcoin instead, with tiered rates that go as lower 9.25%, so you don't have to sell your stack if you don't want to. Lennon have operated through every market cycle since 2018 and have originated over $11 billion in loans.

But the important part for me is the way Lennon handles these loans. your collateral is held in custody and never lent out to generate interest. And leaden's more than just loans. Tether gold is now live alongside your Bitcoin with instant trading across 10 pairs. And later this year you'll be able to borrow against gold in the same way that you do with Bitcoin. Leiden really is an awesome company. I've used them multiple times. The applications have taken me less than 15 minutes and you have the dollars in your account within hours.

If you want to check out Leiden, go to LEDN.com and use the code WBD for 0.25% off your first loan. That's leaden.com and use the code WBD. Do you want to pay less in taxes and stack more Bitcoin? Of course you do. Well, by mining Bitcoin with Blockway, you can. Under Section 168K of the US tax code, Bitcoin mining servers qualify for 100% bonus depreciation. This means every dollar you spend on miners

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Get started today at blockware solutions.com forward slash WBD and use code WBD for $100 off your first miner. That's blockware solutions.com forward slash WBD. If you own a Bitcoin ETF, especially if it's GBTC, you need to listen up. spot Bitcoin ETFs provide price exposure to Bitcoin, not direct ownership. You can't withdraw it, you can't self-custody it, and they charge you a management fee every year to hold it. Well, Swan recently announced Swan Real Bitcoin Exchange, and it's ready to use right now. RBX is a structured in-kind exchange that converts your Spot Bitcoin ETF shares into real on-chain Bitcoin. It does that without selling on the open market, and it's designed to support a tax-efficient outcome.

So, for example, if you hold GBTC, you're paying 1.5% a year in management fee. fees for Bitcoin price exposure. But by swapping GBT for real Bitcoin with RBX, you can drop that figure as low as 0% by just holding it in self-custody. This is designed in a way that maintains your cost basis and in a manner that supports the deferral of capital gains tax. So if you own a Bitcoin ETF, especially if it's GVTC, you need to talk to Swan Private about RBS today. Head over to swan.com forward slash WBD and booking a call with one of their team. That's S-W-A-N.com forward-slash WB-D. But there are companies coming out saying they can do loans without this now,

without the risk of liquidation. What concerns me, and I'm starting to see some risk creep in the Bitcoin back loan space again. Bitcoin back loan space or general crypto back loan space? Well, most of the emphasis right now is Bitcoin back loans, because really that's been proven to be like the best collateral. I don't have the crypto-native assets, right? And so everybody's trying to do Bitcoin back loans now. And they're always trying to compete with established players like us,

and they can't completely compete on reputation. Many of them don't even have proof of reserve. So what they try to do is they try to basically offer some of these things that are too good to be true at prices that are too good to be true, right? Like hedging options exist, right? You can even take them proactively and they're more cost effective. But to buy a hedge when you need the hedge, it's very, very expensive. And so, you know, we are, we are led and we are exploring a lot of these ways to protect

and hopefully allow clients to extend the liquidation or protect them against the liquidation. So this is why you're doing like the partial liquidations. Correct. That's a step in that direction. But at the core, okay, when you're doing collateralized loan, there is a risk of the collateral going under the value of the loan that was issued. And that creates a problem. That creates risk.

that has to be managed. Okay. In the current model, that risk sits with the borrower, okay? And the borrower is supposed to be managing that risk. If the borrower fails to manage that risk,

that's a problem for the borrower. Yeah. Okay? When you try to do these, don't worry, we won't liquidate you. Mathematically, you, there's always the probability that you will have to liquidate.

The fact that the collateral value can drop below the lower amount doesn't change because you told me that I'm not going to liquidate you. The risk is just being transferred from the borrower to the lender. And the problem with that is that if the lender is not being clear about how they are offloading that risk and how they are managing that risk, if the lender gets an issue or has a problem, that's everybody's problem. That's every borrower in that platform's problem.

So what I have, and I've seen. And you say that because if it puts the lender's, the lender's, balance sheet of risk, then everyone's in trouble. Correct. The lender's insolvent. And so the missing piece out of a lot of these offerings that have been mentioned or named out to the market

is, what are you doing in the back? Because the prices that you're charging, if you look at the premiums that some of these companies say, oh, you pay 1%, 2%, and we won't liquidate your loan. Go price that put option. You go price that put option.

Price the hedge. Don't take it for me. price the hedge. What would it be? If you want to do it on a 12-month term, roughly between 8 to 10%. It's like the going rate to hedge a put a year out, right? If you try to shorten the term, that starts dropping a little bit. But when we've priced these and we've, you know, we've looked at some of these structures, you end up for a full year term, basically having to double the price of the loan. If the rate is roughly 10, you have to basically pay another 10 to ensure the loan or protect the loan. But importantly, You're not saying you won't liquidate the loan. If the loan is below the 80% LTV when the hedge runs out, you still have to liquidate. You see what I mean? Yeah. And so you're just deferring.

Wait, I don't, so I don't pretend to know how option markets work. So like when that contract, the pot option closed, would that not, would the amount of money that you made on that not cover the rest of the collateral that was put up? But that means that you're now basically saving that loan at 80% because you're hedging to 80%. So at the end of the term, you have a loan at 80%. I see. So either the loan basically gets topped up to a healthier LTV so that it allows it to renew or you're not able to renew the loan, right?

And that's if the hedge, you know, everything worked out, right? And so the challenge with that is there's still a scenario where, great, the hedge is here. The hedge makes up the difference to get to the 80% LTV so the loan never went underwater. But it's not whole. But the hedge runs out. Right. And so, yeah, fine. You get the economic benefit of the hedge and the loan sits at 80% on maturity.

What then? Right. How are you going to hedge 80% for another 12-month term? The price is going to be astronomical because the price of a hedge to 80 when you're at 50 is much cheaper than the price of a hedge to 80 when you're at 80. Yeah. And so there is no free lunch in that sense. Like you're always just moving risk around, if that makes sense.

And so the companies that are offering this, what do they suggest you do at the end of the 12 month? And would you have to, would you have to roll it? I don't think that there are any of these offerings that have been out for longer than the term of the loans. Yeah. So we don't know. I don't really know.

But more importantly, what I think is a much better. question is, how are you ensuring that you, the lender, are going to be safe? Yeah. And we're doing this right. Like, I'll give you the example of Blockfields. Blockfields was a firm or a firm that was doing loans and they dealt in the options market. And a lot of people like to conveniently not remember this, but they just blew up earlier this year.

See, I didn't even, I actually found out about that on the show I recorded before this. I had never even heard of them. Yeah. So they were trying to do these things. And of course, they didn't hedge it properly. They made a hole and they became insolvent. Is that what blew them up? Well, I mean, you can look at the filings, but basically that is, in my interpretation of the facts

and the activities that I knew they did, that is my running assumption about what happened. And it was most likely it was options related. So it was either unhaged that or a loan that you didn't hedge or you sold an option. and you didn't buy the option in the back. You didn't hedge the options, right? Like, you kept the risk and you didn't have the balance sheet to absorb that loss. It's funny, because I was going to say to you,

it looks like the entire space has matured a lot. Because last bare market we had Celsius, FTX, BlockFi, like, well, FTCs weren't lending, but like all of these companies that were trying to do sort of yield on Bitcoin and lending products that didn't manage their risk properly and blew up. And I think you were one of the only lenders that actually survived that bare market.

Has it got better? It has. It has in many ways. It has in many ways in that right now, rehypothecation is a dirty word, right? Like most of the programs that are out there right now at least claim they're not re-hypothicating. Which is a good thing.

Which is a good thing. And not a lot of people are, not as many as I would like to see are doing proof of reserves, but there are some more proof of reserves coming around. You know, in that sense, it's good. There's also a big emphasis on Bitcoin. as collateral, there's not as much of a push to do, you know, basic attention token back loans or Doge coin back loans.

Like if you remember back before, right before the blow up, Doge was all the rage. Companies like Gemini were coming out with yield products for Doge. I did not know that they did yield products. That's crazy. Yeah. And so again, what brought down many of these companies in large part was not their collateralized lending. It was their yield products. Yeah. Because they were taking in the billions of dollars in tokens. And to generate the yield, they had to lend those assets unsecured.

And they lent them two groups like three arrows. And when three arrows blows up, they don't have the money to pay back. These guys don't have the money to pay those guys. Insolvency, close the doors, bankruptcies. Yeah. So the other thing is, again, you know, going to this, staying on this topic of like risk creep. There was a statement that came out yesterday or yesterday this morning from Hester Pierce, the SEC Commissioner, Crypto Mom.

And it says, stop doing handstands and somersaults or summer vaults, she said, to avoid regulation. Because what's happening right now is you're starting to see some of these defy offerings that are all unregulated and many of them younger than my four-year-old are getting wrapped up and put in front of regulated fintech front ends. Is this things like morpho? An example of that, yes. Because people go into a platform of a branded exchange and they swear they're borrowing from the branded exchange. They are not.

There is no liability to the branded exchange when you're taking these protocol loans. I don't know if you can't say or don't want to say it, but this is like morpho and Coinbase. Yeah, it is. It's one example. Yeah, right? And so, again, the statement, and again, this is TBD and 2B, you know, wait to see how this plays out. But Defi is this interesting thing where none of these parts of the Legos, none of these financial Legos are regulated. None of these Legos have any sort of governance restrictions.

They are run by these Dow's. nobody knows who the actual people are. There's a foundation over here, and there's a DAO over there. Nobody's responsible, right, for these issues. For example, we just had the ABBA issue. There was going to be a loss.

So I don't even know what happened here. Sorry, I don't pay much attention to crypto world. The Kelp Dow hack, you weren't paying attention to that? Honestly, my knowledge of the broader crypto space is embarrassing. Well, listen, like, not to get into like a whole defy thing, But I think this year so far has been the biggest year for defy exploits to date. And I guess the point I'm trying to make is these protocols get exploited almost on the daily, right? And many times that the protocol is big enough or has a big enough treasury or the community rallies so that there's no losses.

We haven't been through a defy insolvency event just yet. As in, an example would be with Ava, right? like there was a bad actor that came in with fake collateral, borrowed $200 million. Oh, I did see this. One click, $200 million, whoop. Yeah. And then you said, well, what about the collateral is worthless?

So the protocol is out $200 million, right? And so in that moment, you say, okay, what happened in DFI, which is super interesting, is that the permanently online people that see the flows said, oh, my God, there's something wrong. I'm pulling my money out. So everybody pulled their money. Like the people that were there, the fastest, pull their money out. Of course. All of a sudden, withdraws stop because there's no more liquidity to process more withdrawals.

And now who's left inside the bag? We don't know because it's defy. But I would suspect that it's the more vulnerable, not permanently online DGents that are just going to get, we left holding the bag. And so the funny thing, the parallel in traditional finance is, When there is an event of insolvency, the operator has a legal obligation to freeze everything in the accounts, like to freeze activities. And then they need to see, they put up what's called a preference window. So if you are seen to have been furiously pulling out your assets immediately after the event or right before the event, and this is something you had never done before, you either were tipped off or you were able to respond. on faster than others, and you came out with your money intact,

and everybody else was left holding the bag, and that's what you want it, because you wanted to save yourself. Yeah, okay? In the CFI world, it doesn't work that way. In the CIFI world, if you got out with either privileged information or during the preference period, that's unfair to the people left holding the bag. And that's where consumer protections and a lot of these things kick in, where you say, hold on, Danny, like, great that you were permanently online,

but it's not fair for you to work. walk away on Scratch and for Billy to lose 70% of... And we saw this happen with Blockfire and all these companies. Correct. And Celsius is still going through it. Like, some of these are still ongoing. But the fact remains is that every single C-5 bankruptcy has had what's called recoveries. So if you were there and you lost some money, a court or an estate, sued everybody, they

had to sue, collected as much as they could. And here go, Danny. This is your fair share of what was left. Yeah. There are no guardrails like this in Defi. And this is why I think there's such an emergency in the community whenever there's a potential loss in Defi that has to be attributed. Because the second you have to attribute the loss, you're going to have to answer some really tough questions, which is, who got out? Do we know who got out?

We don't. It's Defi. How do you legally go after that person? You can't. Right? And the other question is, who's to blame? Like, how much are you going to take? How much am I going to take?

A lot of these things in court, like in bankruptcy law, a lot of it is stipulated. But D-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fi doesn't have this. And so, again, I think that there's inherent risk. And the way that historically we've had people pile on to risk is we dismiss it, number one. We say, no, that's not a risk. This is all programmatic. We got our basis covered. Like, if you ask BlockFi, what's the real risk on the yield?

We have the best team with the best this, with the best. And lo and behold, you know, they didn't have it. And the second one is you create a too good to be true offering, right? So you juice up the returns if you're asking people to deposit for yield, and you make the borrow rate absurdly low. Even today, right, you have some fintechs earning yield through a program that pays you 7% And that same protocol is lending on a different fintech at five. And so the math doesn't math.

And this is what concerns me. And so you're starting to see the warning, not warning, but I think this statement from the SEC is sort of, hey, guys, if you're doing financial transactions on chain, that doesn't remove the fact that these are financial transactions. And that somebody, and some of these financial transactions must be regulated. I think that that's starting to become more of a thing because these protocols are starting to get a little bigger.

They're starting to get adopted by some of these fintechs, and the regulators are starting to think, it reminds me a little bit, like this statement from Hester Pierce reminds me a little bit, and again, I don't want to draw an analog, nor I want to sound like I'm being a doomsday person. But if you recall, Gary Gensler, our favorite SEC chairman, basically stopped yield in CIFI.

in the US, if you remember. This was around 2000 in, I want to say it was like 2021. Okay. Gary Gansler came out and said, no more yield on CFI for Americans. And those accounts stopped, like BlockFi stops servicing their interest accounts and a bunch of other companies have to shut it down and settle. And that happened actually months, probably not a whole year before the eventual collapse of these companies that were offering these products.

Okay. And so in some ways, the regulators had a sense back then of the risk that was being pumped into the market and they were starting to try to address it, but they just unraveled on them before they could put a cap on it. This one seems to me a little bit like same thing, like very similar story, kind of deja vuish, which is, hey guys, these protocols are coming out and guess what? It's yield again. and it's stolen again, and now it's done by contracts. And none of the contracts are saying, none of the contracts take responsibility, right? Like when you're issuing a loan, you have a lender that depending on the, on the, that lender

should be following consumer protections. They should be getting, you know, complying with state lending laws, if there are any. And that, and they have a legal agreement. You know, there's like things you can and cannot do. In Defi, you're doing the same thing without the legal agreement. without their license, without the consumer protections, without the disclosures, and those things are there for when things go bad.

Yeah. Nobody reads the agreement and if your loan goes well and you repay your loan, that agreement was irrelevant. You read it, you got comfortable, you took your loan, you paid it back, no problem. When you start really digging into the agreement and reading each clause is when something goes bad. Yeah. Right? And so that's the thing.

It just shocks me that people are willing to put their Bitcoin up with companies. Like, people aren't pricing the risk appropriately, I don't think. Correct. And it's with Bitcoin, obviously, this is money that does not require trust. And there's no counterparty risk. But when you decide to use a product where you're, you know, I'm doing a Bitcoin back loan, trust is everything. And so like the only companies that I would ever look at doing that with are ones where like, I know how their operations are running. I know the people in charge. I know what's going. I'm amazed that people aren't pricing that risk and would rather have a loan at 6% with this sketchy thing rather than 10% with someone else. Like,

I take my Bitcoin very seriously. I don't want to lose my Bitcoin. Yes, but this is where you start getting into the, well, it's a protocol, but it's being offered through a brand that makes me warm and fuzzy. Yes. And most people aren't reading the terms and conditions. Yeah. Right.

And I think that's where the regulators are saying, that's what I think, that's why I think this is coming from, this Hester Pierce statement, is that you're making this stuff look just like everything else inside that app. Yeah. And it isn't. It's actually quite different. And so I think that's where that, we'll see how it plays out in the next few months. So we're not out of the Wild West when it comes to Bitcoin Bet Loans. Well, it's, again, I don't want to, there are good players. There's increasingly good players.

And I do think that the industry is in a better place today than it was four years ago. That said, when, when, especially during bear markets, and with the fierce competition, people start accepting more risk or taking more risk to survive, to grow, to get that incremental, to hit that number for the quarter, to not get no run out of runway. And so you may start subsidizing the product to try to get some more originations.

You may start trying to do, hey, well, you know, let's offer these no liquidation loans and like partially buy the protection, or maybe not buy the protection, or let's do some modeling and see if we do need the protection. And like, that's when you start getting into it. trouble because you're not, either you're not being honest or you're taking a lot more risk without explaining it or it's just closing it. And I think that's where risk starts creeping

into the system one way or another, right? And so again, I think you, you, if it's, like, I think at the core, it's like if it looks too good to be true, if it's priced too good to be true, it likely is. You got to start asking some questions. Yeah, because, listen, man, we've been doing this for eight years, okay? And this is all we do. I spend my living, breathing days, how to make loans better. And how can we innovate? And we have a massive team that does this every day and only this. And so, and there are, listen, we've looked at a lot of these things, right? We've looked at a lot of these options. And we've always come from the view that if and when we do something, we want to explain to you exactly what it is that's happening and how.

we're addressing that risk. What I never want to do is tell you, look at this, this is so much better. You have these much better terms and don't worry about how I get it. I'm just that good. Again, you know, it's a free market. But just ask the questions. Every Bitcoin eventually has to answer one question. If something happened to me, would my family know what to do? Could my wife or parents recover my Bitcoin and would my children inherit the Bitcoin that I spent years stacking. That's where Anchor Watch builds Bitcoin custody models to protect you and your family against real life, accidents, errors, kidnappings and even your own death. Every Anchorage custody solution includes their inheritance protocol. Designed so when the unthinkable happens,

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And then I have a few questions on it. Definitely. So tether gold, the asset itself, is basically, think of it as almost a stable coin for gold. Are you now the largest private holder of gold? I have to double check, but I believe they're up there. Yes. In terms of privately, I believe they are. In terms of like sovereigns, I think they're actually up there, like north of some bunch of sovereigns.

But if you look at Tether's model for their stable coins, is you give them a dollar, they store that dollar into a treasury, and they mint a token, a dollar token. And you go and you use that token and you can redeem that token eventually one day for the dollar. In gold, it works pretty similar. You bring a bar of gold to their vaults in Switzerland. You give them a vault. You put it in the safe or the cage, and you get a gold token. and you move it around. And so one token, one bar, one token, one dollar.

It's a very similar model to the stable coin, but now applied to a sovereign precious metal, right? And so what that does is if you, you know, most people that own gold today in size, they hold it at a vault somewhere or at multiple vaults. And like with everything physical, you try to send that gold somewhere, you try to move that gold. the buyer pool has to be in that vicinity if you want to transfer that goal or move it to a different country is a nightmare.

And so gold has a lot of physical constraints just by the nature of it and holding it already has built-in counter-party risk because beyond the few things you own, you don't want to store vaults or gold bars in your house. And so you already have some of that. And the asset itself, I think it's a fascinating proposition

because it's, I think it can do to gold what the stable coin did to the dollar. You put it on a digital rail, and all of a sudden, the physical constraints go away. You can get financing with anybody. You can send it at any time on a blockchain. And we think that, and again, a lot of... You obviously add a ton of counterparty risk, but...

Yeah, I mean, but again, it's not dissimilar to the counterparty risk that a stable coin has. No, yeah, 100%. And a stable coin is wildly popular. I meant compared to gold, though. Well, compared to physical gold and compared to Bitcoin. No question. There is no question.

However, it's been proven that when you create a better format of the same product, a US dollar versus a stable coin, and you put it on digital rails, all of a sudden, a lot more people can use it, a lot more people can access it, and you can start doing things with it that were previously you had been considered. Yeah. Right. So I think the same thing is going to happen to gold. And again, it might not be for everybody. Some people might prefer still to hold their gold physically, and I understand that. And that's totally fine. But to many, they will like this idea that, hey, I can get my gold exposure through this token

that allows me to, you know, in the future get a loan from Lenin. I can sell it really quick. I can move it really quick. I can settle with a counterparty really quickly. It's much more versatile than my physical goal. And I think that's going to resonate with a lot of people. A lot of Bitcoiners, believe it or not, especially some of our clients, a few in particular took loans in the middle of last year with Bitcoin to get into the pressure.

metals rally. And they did fantastic. Many of them started trying, they said, Mao, I want to bring, I did really well with my leaded loan because I got into precious metals. I love Lenin. I can never do what I do at Ledin with my gold, with my physical gold. And I want to do the same. At the time, we obviously didn't have a solution for it. But midway through last year, I was actually just happened to be the time where we were getting together or starting to talk more with the Tether team about them, they eventually made an investment into that in November or last year. And through getting to know them and through visiting and learning about XCT, we said, well, this could be potentially an answer for some of the things that our clients we're looking for. So there's, I've got no problem with gold.

I think it's a cool product. I think I totally understand why you're doing it. But I'm sure there's people that have been like, why you're adding this shit coin? You know what? Surprisingly, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We haven't had. It feels like gold is the only thing you could have got away with. You know, it's funny because, and again, you know, when you're, you know, when you.

you think about, we already support stable coins. Okay, so you could argue that, hey, we already support Tether, we already support USDC. Like, we support... I'd rather have a stable coin back by gold than the dollar. Well, you know, Tether actually, I think the Tether had one, but they just discontinued it. And while that's a really good idea, and I think that in a previous life or maybe five years ago, I would have taken off, what's happening right now with Genius Act is it's driving most of the stable coins at scale to hold the paper. like the treasuries because of the incentive the government has, right?

I think the free market will be the free market, and you're going to get some of that too. But in my opinion, if you can get comfortable with the way a stable coin works, and if you look at who is the issuer, okay? The issuer is the group that we are already trusting with 100 plus billion dollars worth of dollars in treasuries. Yeah. Right?

You know, if anybody is going to do this, and then if anybody has an incentive to do, do this right and the know-how to do this right, it's them, right? And so we got comfortable with the asset itself. We listed it right now. You can buy it and sell it. You can't borrow against it just yet, but you will be able to soon. And the interesting part about it is like you still get again, if you go beyond the custodial risk and the fact that, you know, there is third-party risk because it's sitting in a vault somewhere. And the same way your U.S. Treasuries are going to be sitting at some of their accounts.

If you get past that, it's a fantastic asset in that it gives you a lot of the same hard money benefits that Bitcoin gives you. It has a lot less volatility. And because of the lesser volatility, I anticipate, and again, I can't confirm these yet, but I anticipate that the terms on gold back loans, like in terms of LTVs and rates, you're going to get actually an incremental benefit on. those terms relative to Bitcoin because you have, again, a lot less volatility, much bigger market, in a much bigger, bitter base, right? So I think it's going to be, the more we can, once these

loans, once we roll out the loans, I think people are going to start seeing, okay, this could be an interesting complement. It will never replace Bitcoin. I want to be clear about that. The thing that I think is really potentially interesting though, I know you've said that you're going to do gold-back loans. Yes. I like the idea of a sort of, of cross-collateral backed loan? Because that would be a way of reducing volatility. Like say you did 80% Bitcoin, 20% gold. Don't get ahead of us, Danny.

But no, we're thinking about a lot of these potential things, too. Like how do we help our clients reduce the risk of liquidation? Because no, we don't want it, you don't want it. Keep giving you some of that hard money attribute, the anti-debasement of the collateral. Can you start thinking about, you know? hybrid ways of potentially doing these things. So again, you have to, a letter we like to say,

you crawl, you walk, and you run, right? You can't just start running out of the gate because you want to be making sure that every step you're taking, especially in the business of lending. Super careful. You have to be incredibly deliberate. You have to be incredibly thoughtful. You have to draw your eyes, cross your T's,

and then you can announce it. Or you can, you know, bring it to market. I can get ahead of myself, though. Like, I like the idea of almost like a slider where you can completely set your own, like, amount of Bitcoin or amount of gold and the loan, like adjust it to your volatility preference. Like, I think that's really interesting. Well, I'll set of the meeting with our product team. It's very cool.

We should get on to the other thing that you, we've had so many announcements since we last spoke. Tell me about the bond. Ah, the bond, man. The bond was super interesting because to me, it's the biggest news in the financing or credit market, even the Bitcoin credit markets. I know everybody's focused on that's and treasuries, but like the biggest news in Bitcoin credit, I'm obviously biased because it's our baby, but let him did the first Bitcoin-back loan securitization ever this year with SMP.

SNP was the ratings agency that rated the vehicle. But what that does is basically we took a chunk of our loan book, okay, $200 million worth of loans made up of $5,000 plus individual loans for people in 30 plus countries. Okay. And we packaged them into a $200 million offering. And we got that rated by S&P. And we reached investment grade on that bond. What is investment grade A? Great question. So investment grade is a qualification or a rating. that is issued by two approved ratings agencies, which is the two of them are SMPs and Moody's. So we chose S&P and we work with S&P. What is an investment grade rating?

An investment grade rating, you can think of it or a rating on a bond. You can think of it as the report card on the bond, right? So the ratings agency will sit down with the issuer and they will work with the issuer for, you know, as long as it's needed. With us, it was like over a year, over your loan process.

It's very grueling because we were the first people to ever do this. And you need a lot of things to even be considered for this. So we can talk about that in a second. But a rating is basically a grade on your report card. And so the better the grade, the less risk your bond has. Right.

And what the agency does is they take your loan book and they basically look at all of your operations, your processes, your legal agreements. And then they start playing out these scenarios. Like what happens if they're, coin crashes to this. What happens if? What happens if? What happens if? And they run a, God knows how many models. And you can read the report. I can send you the link if you want to put it in the show notes. The report that S&P did on us. And so based on all those models, they, they get what they

call an expected loss. What is the expected loss if all these things happen? And the smaller the loss, the better the grade. Why is investment grade so important? Investment grade is an A. Okay. Like there's different... So you have like AAA, AA, AA, A. Correct. But the real cutoff is, there's like all the ways, like, triple B minus is where investment grade starts and everything below that is considered junk. Okay. In the finance world, in the bond space, it's not so much about the actual letter. It's about, it's a pass fail on investment grade or not investment grade. Okay. So if you're investment grade, you're in the bucket. If you're not investment grade, you never get to see what's behind the curtain. Okay. Why is that important? In the ABS market, the asset back securitization, market, the buyers, the 90 to 95% of all bonds issued in the ABS market are investment grade. Why? Because the buyers of these bonds, the biggest buyers, the pension funds, the insurance

companies, the reinsurance companies, they have a mandate that they can only buy bonds that have been rated investment grade by their S&P or movies. So when you hit the bar, you unlock 90% of the demand. When you don't hit the bar, you don't hit the bar. bar, you're stuck selling to like hedge funds and more risk, more risk-taking people. And it's just, it's obviously the rate is higher. And so you don't really, we didn't want to go to market with a sub-investment grade offering. We wanted to, we believe we have what it takes. And we did to reach that. We were the first company to ever do this. It is the first time S&P has ever rated a Bitcoin product. And it's the first time that it's given an investment

grade rating to a Bitcoin product. And we are a first-time issuer. that has received an investment-grade rating. So this is, honestly, the other thing, I mean, I can talk about this thing for hours, but the other thing that's super fascinating to me is most ABS bonds in the past were securitizations of American loans, American mortgages, American car leases, American credit cards. And there was like a handful of previous,

issuances where they've taken 80% American loans and 20% Canadian loans. And the second they do that, the risk shoots and so and it's based, but they did it because, you know, they wanted to test a few things. But before letting, the most countries in the most borrower countries to be in a bond were two. Oh, wow. And you did 30? At Lenin, we did, yeah, it's 30 or 28.

I have to double check, but it's basically the most countries. Why? Why? Because of Bitcoin. Because of Bitcoin? collateral is not bound by a geographical constraint. If I want to exercise my right to repossess a car in the US, it's very different than my right to repossess a car in Canada, it's very different than my right to repossess a car in Mexico.

Yeah. Bitcoin. Our bond was the first time that in the eyes of the bondholder, the country's no matter. That's cool. That to me is one of the most incredible things about this offering. Beyond that, But like, this is more related to let and specific, right? But if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of what it takes to, A, even be considered by one of these ratings agencies, let alone get an investment rate rating, you need to have, well, first of all, you need to have a team that's willing to open the kimono and share things with the regulator or the ratings agency. And you have to have your eyes dotted, your teeth crossed, everything's going to go into an x-ray. And so that willingness and having all the documentation that they're going to need and the ability to answer all their questions, the right data, the right tape, we have eight years of tape. They need to see at least one full business cycle, including a period of stress, meaning we're the only lender that qualifies for that. And so we believe that we had an opportunity to open up the market.

And the way the bond market works is the longer you're in it and the more issuance as you have, the farther ahead you get. And there's no real way to catch up other than time. And so by starting ahead and being the first must to ever do it, our goal is to drive that market not from 200, which we did a $188 million offering. We believe, and we estimate that in not too long, five to 10 years, there's going to be a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin back loans out there. we need to know where you're going to get a trillion dollars.

There's no balance sheet in the world that can cough up a trillion dollars. So what's the benefit to the company of issuing this bond? Oh, many. So for one, it proves that we can securitize our debt beyond our bilateral partners. Is it basically like a mortgage-backed security? Yes, that's what it is. It's the equivalent of that in Bitcoin, right? If you look at how most Bitcoin bank lending companies today are funded, they are taking, say,

a large loan from an institution, from an institutional lender, say they're taking, you know, $50 million loan, and they're doing like $1 million, $2,000, $500,000, and then they're just redistributing capital, right? What we have done is we've now taken our loans that we've originated and gone to the public markets and said, hey, public markets, buy a part of our loan book, right? So that kind of reduces your reliance on the tethers of the world and people like that? on any bilaterals. Yeah.

And the other thing is bond investors are incredibly risk adverse. So by virtue of us having a bond, the bond facility itself is bankruptcy remote from Lennon. So Lennon could get hit by a bus and light up on fire. And every loan in that facility and every note holder is going to get paid to maturity. Because there is a backup service there. There's like all of the pieces are in place so that the loan arriving to, maturity, there's not depend on let and if anything happens to let it. That's a

benefit. Not just to the person buying the bond, but for the borrower. Right? And the more of our book we can put in that, the other thing is, if your loan is, when your loan gets vended into the leon bond, you get an email saying,

hey, Danny, your loan's been vended into the leon bond. When you get that email, you know your Bitcoin's have fidelity. Because fidelity is a custodian for all of the Bitcoin, collateralizing all the in the bond. So you will know, with certainty, where your collateral is, you can see the facility. It's public. I can give you the ticker. Anybody can see it. And so it's much more transparent. It's much more resilient. It's much more scalable. And so is this just a win-win for customers,

the business, everyone? Yes. And this is, I've been trying to make this case in every opportunity that I've gotten. But I know it's a bit of a dense topic. It's a complex thing. thing. Some people, I've had people come to me being like, hey, I saw you guys got into the institutional loans. Who did you give the bond to? And I'm like, no, no, it doesn't work that way, you know? And so a lot of people don't necessarily have the, the Tratify people, like the guys that work in banking and the people that understand this. People were reaching out to us and saying, wow, I can't believe you guys did this. Like, how is this not? How is this not? bigger news because also it came out in the middle of the bare market in the middle of the

February so people were just looking at different things but this is a massive news in in the this is the first true in my opinion Bitcoin credit instrument not preferred equity there is a maturity and there is a coupon and there is bankruptcy remoteness what is the coupon uh 684 on the on the senior tranche 999 on the junior and there's a small piece of lead in equity as well in the bond. So, you know, it's our first time. I expect these rates to get much better over time. Yeah.

But again. So again, the other place that this is a win is it will potentially drop people's rates over time. Over time. But more importantly, now you can see as a borrower where, like, you can see that we have a 200 million dollar facility. You can see how much that facility costs. Yeah.

If we're showing you that facility costs 6.84 and 999, and we're not offering you alone at five, you should be asking questions. Do you know what I'm trying to say? Like, we are all about being transparent. Like, we want to show you and tell you to the best we can, where the money comes from, what's the cost of the money, where's the custody.

We believe our borrowers are smart enough to piece it together. Yeah. Right? And if you're a person that doesn't really care about the math, not mathing, you're not a lenient client necessarily. Right? Like, if you're the kind of guy that's going to be cool with them borrowing,

at 10 and you somehow getting alone at 5, good luck. You know what I mean? Like I, I, it's. And so you did 200 million on the first one. I imagine you want to do a few more of these. Yes. Are you close or can you not talk about where you are at with it? We, so we, we, we, I don't want to get into the sort of timing or promising, but it is something that, like the market was incredibly excited about it.

It was two times over subscribed on the senior, three times on the junior. So the market wants more. And we're growing. So it's definitely something we're looking at. But I don't, we don't really have like a timeline for the next one. You can't be promising. It's, you're going to see another one. I just don't, you know, I don't want to say, oh, tomorrow.

I don't like over-promising and under-delivering. But you're going to see more of these for sure. Very cool. Led into the good spot, man. Yeah, man. I'm very happy. I mean, this is the, the most, I'm trying to find the right word, But it's like, I feel like this is the most zen I've ever been in the bear market.

Yeah. Like, it is a bear market. Don't get me wrong. Like, you know, prices are down. But in terms of, like, how well everything is running on our side, like, the solid foundation that we're on, like, the bond, you know, the support of our investors, the support, like, our clients, you know, the book being as resilient as it has been during this downturn. That's another thing. in previous bear markets, a lot more people would have historically gotten impacted with the liquidation.

Yeah. Right? Because the product also hasn't, you know, yes, has been doing it for years, but like people, not everybody on the book has been through a cycle. Of course, yeah. But now the more people, like, this isn't the first rode. People learning about position sizing. Correct. Yeah.

And so that makes me very, that encourages me quite a bit as we look at potentially the next bull run, because all those. guys that kept those loans open are about to see their wealth hopefully double in the next one to two years. Yeah. And listen, they may or may not lead to more loans. Historically, what we see is people say, oh my God, this loan works financially for me. You know, now you have more wealth and you think to yourself, well, should I sell some of it good to pay back the loan? Probably just keep it, like, I'll just keep it rolling or I'll invest in somewhere else. But as the wealth effect kicks in, on the good side of the loan experience where the collateral does rise, we want to be there. We want to be there returning your excess Bitcoin.

We want to be there helping you to get that incremental loan to fix your kitchen if you want. That's what we're here for. It's awesome. Congratulations. Thank you, that's very cool. I do want to talk to you about something totally different. So last time we did a show in D.C. wasn't it? We did a lot on Venezuela.

You told your story. If anyone wants to list that, you should go back and list that show. We won't do the whole story of your family escaping the Maduro regime. But I remember we were talking about Maduro and you wanting basically America to come in and help. And America came in and helped. Dreams come true, man. So tell me, like, tell me everything that's happened since that. So, like, when did you find out that it happened?

I imagine the next morning. No, during the night. So it was, I can't remember why, but it happened at like 3 a.m. on a Saturday. And I woke up. I can't remember why. I was sleeping and that night, that night I woke up for, I think my phone was just going, going crazy. And I usually keep it on silent and never wake up at night.

But I woke up and I woke up and I didn't hear my phone. So I'm like, oh, maybe I just went to the bathroom. I came out. My phone's buzzing again. I pick up my phone and my group chat with my high school friends from Venezuela is blowing up with all these images of these Apache helicopters. And at this point, there's no word about Maduro. There's just like a bunch of helicopters and bombs and explosions and Caracas. And everybody was like, what's happening?

What's happening? So the chat continued to be lit on fire. It was 4 a.m. for me. I was like, out of it. My kids were like, Daddy, come back. And so I basically, you know, went to help my daughter fall back asleep. And I just kind of forgot until 8 a.m. I woke up 8 a.m.

I looked at it again. Malo is gone. And they've extracted Malo. And it was a little bit of, my initial reaction was like a little bit of a shock. Right? Like, I was in disbelief that they did it. that they did it so surgically, like not a single casualty on the U.S. side.

It was just like, it played out like a movie. Like, if you look at the footage, like that thing looks like a movie. And then came the sort of realization that Maduro's gone. So now what? Of course, the sad part is Venezuelans couldn't go out and celebrate

in Venezuela because they would have gotten shot by the regime. All they took was Maduro. Everyone else, his henchmen are still there. They're still trying to figure out what to do as well. Well, and slowly, so they took out Maduro. So then the question became, okay, what next? Well, America wants to take the Venezuelan oil.

No shit. Like, you think we don't know, right? Like, of course they want to take the oil. And so did the Chinese and so did the Russians and so did the Iranians. Then we never saw the oil. Nobody's complaining about not seeing the oil money anymore because we never saw it. Right? And so, yeah, okay, America can, at least they're going to put hopefully some new infrastructure to extract it because these last guys were so incompetent.

They didn't even fix it. They just stopped yanking it out of the ground. Okay. So we're now down to like 800,000 barrels a day. America's doubled it in like three months. Wow. We're not seeing any of it. I mean, at least to my knowledge, the Venezuelan people haven't really been in the receiving end of that money.

But at least it's producing twice the output that it used to. And there is some investment happening. Now, the challenge. previous before the earthquake, because I think we can get into the earthquake in a second, but what happened after Maduro got taken away was the people that remained, Delci and all of Maduro's buddies and crew,

they understood very quickly that their only way to not have the same outcome as Maduro was to play ball with America. Like if they play ball with America and they give America what they want, maybe America won't care about a transition in government, right? And that was their play. And I would argue that up until the earthquake, that plan was working for that. So the regime wouldn't actually change that much?

No. It just said whatever, it just did whatever America wanted. It's like, oh, you want a safe zone for your executives to go into the oil extractual? No problem. Oh, you want us to change the resource extraction law so that you guys can build faster? No problem. We'll get that done for you. So before the earthquake, had life changed much for the people in Venezuela? The expectation, like the illusion is there. Like, day to day, nothing really changed right then and there. Like, it's not like new goods come into the shelves and prices go down. Like, two things happened.

Number one, inflation stopped, the basement stopped falling off a cliff. Like, it just reached a room temperature 100% year over year, which is normal for us. From the 500 to 300 it tamed. So the rate of the basement of the Bolivar dropped significantly after the Americans took Maduro. And the other thing is assets started getting reprised. Like there wasn't a lot of people buying and selling, but, you know, I'll give you the example. Like I had some people, some family members that were like looking to sell a warehouse,

like some warehouse out in the middle of the country. And before the Maduro extraction, they were saying, you know, I'll take anything. You know, I'll take $20, like an arepa, you know, I'll let it go, right? And now when Maduro got taken away, they're like, take off the listing. Like, take off the listing. It's like, well, no, but I have somebody interested. $100,000. A hundred thousand.

Like, people went from like, this is worthless to everyone in America is now going to want to buy my, whatever asset I have. It's essentially they just got hope back. Correct. And that to me was the most important thing, is to get back the hope that things can get better in the future. That was starting to create some frustration because, yeah, all this hope, but eventually you want things to turn into real progress.

And that wasn't happening, right? Maria Corina Machal hasn't returned. She won the Nobel Peace Prize. And after that, she's kind of falling out of favor or not falling out of favor, but just like not in the media. Has she not returned because it's still too dangerous for her to return? I don't know the answer to that, but I would, I think, in my opinion, is that it has to do with whatever the U.S. wants.

Okay. Right now, the U.S. is calling the shots. Anything else is pretend, right? So I think that when the U.S. wants or when they believe, and now, let's get into the earthquake. Yeah. Because the earthquake changed the political landscape in Venezuela. La Guayra, the area of Venezuela that was most impacted by this, was Caracas's biggest suburb, the capital, okay?

In Venezuela, every time, the few times that a government has been overthrown, it happens in Caracas, because Caracas is where the presidential palace is, Mera Flores. So historically, previous revolutions, you had the people take the streets, they come down from the favelas or the hoods, and they go to Mera Flores and they, you know, pitchfork the sky out, basically, and they stay there until the military coups them. And that's when Caracas lights on fire,

politicians listen and politicians get scared. And so La Guayda in Caracas as a whole was a stronghold for Chavismo. There was a lot of support because it was a very poor area. The area that fell, La Waida, was where their most fervent followers, a lot of them, lived. They, obviously, their lives were nuked, like destroyed. And the regime did absolutely, nothing.

Like a month in, the regime's done nothing. And the people in La Guaira got fed up of, and not only nothing, when they did go down, they started obstructing the locals from helping their own families out of the buildings. And so people were losing it

with the Maduro regime, or with the Delci regime. So La Guaira is fed up. Like Venezuela at this point, is fed up with Delci, it's fed up with Chavismo, it's fed up with any remnant of the Maduro legacy or Chavez legacy that's there. It needs change.

That, before the earthquake, there wasn't that much pressure or hostility. The earthquake racked that up by 10x. And last week, Jorge Rodriguez, which is Delci Rodriguez's brother, who's the president of the National Assembly, came out, you know, unprompted to say we need to change the, we need to basically do radical change. We need to redo all of our electorate council.

We need to get new directors. We need to get new machinery. We need to get new processes. We need to audit this whole thing. And they're starting to lay the pipes for the eventual election. And you think it would be an actual free and fair election? Yes. I mean, I don't know if those such things exist.

But I think it would be as close to it as we probably would get in Venezuela. And my opinion, one man's opinion, it's so lobsided that it would take an immense amount of cheating, fraud, and deceit for us not to return to democracy. So as horrendous as that earthquake was, it might actually be sort of a turning point. I think there's going to be a before and after because it's almost like capitulation. It's like a full capitulation of the regime itself. Like that was their last sort of icing on the cake. Like you had a chance to help the people you said you would help for 20 years. You now had a tangible opportunity to make their lives better.

And not only did you not do that, you made them, you actually made it worse by participating. Yeah. And so that. And also there was, the previous regime had built up an image that, oh, Trump is a American, you know, whatever, imperialists and all this stuff. Buckele, oh, cheat, imperialist, this and that. And just talking crap about everybody that wasn't affiliated with them politically,

who sent the most rescue people? Do you know? No, no idea. The US and El Salvador. And so they, what people saw in La Guida was like, the people helping them were American, not the Venezuelan regime. The people digging.

up the people out of the collapsed buildings were Salvadorian, American, Mexican, anywhere but Venezuelan. That's going to make... And so all these guys that you were talking about being the boogeyman were the guys that showed up unprompted and started digging your people out when all these other dudes were sitting around saying... And so culturally it's been a huge change. It's interesting to hear you so optimistic because I remember some people.

speaking to you after I had done the interview with Leo Lopez. Yes. And I think I was making the point that he sounds really sort of positive and enthusiastic and like there could be change. And you were slightly more skeptical. Because Leo's a politician, he has to be. Correct. But if you remember, and I've said, and I said this to Peter, think, look back at the episode I recorded Peter in 2019 with Alamachau, myself, and I can't remember the last person. He asked us at the end of the show, how do you think this resolves. And I said the only way this resolves is through military intervention. I said, I believe that eight years ago. I believe that seven years ago. And that's how it actually

eventually played out. And I'm not saying I have a crystal ball. I just know the power dynamics in the country. Yeah. And so that's how it played out. Now that the head of the snake has been chopped off, to me, I'm now optimistic because there is now a bigger gun that went down and said, you cannot hit your wife. You know what I'm saying? You cannot hit your children. That's not good. We won't allow that.

And we didn't have that. There was no... I was so shocked when it happened because... And again, it's one of those things like there's decades where nothing happened and then there's weeks where decades happened. Like, when was the last time

the US has struck anyone in Latam? I don't know. No. But within a few months, we now have Latam, you know, Iran. Like, again, I'm not saying it's all good. But it was something that was unlikely. And statistically, I think the odds were very low if you had asked anybody.

And now that it happened, I'm like, this is the piece that was missing. So if you do get free and fair elections, you get a new government in charge, like, it's still a massive rebuilding process, right? It's been destroyed. Correct. It's been destroyed. There's massive, like, there's also, like, infrastructure is collapsed. Like the infrastructure in La Waida is destroyed.

La Waida has our biggest airport, our biggest port. Like, it's, you know, it's an important part of the country that has to get rebuilt. But that said, rebuilding is a lot more exciting than waiting for the end. Absolutely. And so when you think about rebuilding, you can start dreaming. You can start looking up. You can start saying it will get better, right? And previously we were just trying to find the bottom, right?

Like when are we going to hit bottom? And I think we've hit it. Like the earthquake is the bottom. And from here, hopefully, we can from here we can rebuild. And I think no one deserves it more than the people of Venezuela. I mean, I've been through a lot. And I'm excited. I mean, I don't want to get ahead of myself.

Yeah. But I am optimistic. That's awesome. So when are you buying the holiday home in Venezuela? I mean, I have assets that I thought were worth zero, among them a place in Margarita. And now they're not zero, right? Like, now I don't think they're zero. Now I think I'm actually able to go back one day.

Would you go back and live there? Or do you go back, spend some of your time there? You know, the thing is for me, there's so much still has to change. Like, for example, as much as I would love to, I haven't been there in a long time. And I want to know, for example, like, if I was just, if I was just, if I was just, if I I was a single guy and I wasn't married with two kids. Like, I would tell you, yeah, Danny, I'll go because it's not on to me anymore. Like, I'll figure it out.

But I want to see, like, how are the kids that I would potentially be sending my, how are the schools that would be potentially sending my kids to? Yeah. Right. Like, the power still runs out every so often. You still get these rolling blackouts every so often. And so it's not like every problem is fixed, but I think over time we will get there. Eventually, I would like to, you know, spend more time there, potentially even move back.

Like, you know, I'm always a dreamer, man. And like, I never, you know, I dreamt about one day being a part of the Bitcoin industry and, you know, being on these shows and going to these conferences. Like, that was a dream to me that I thought it was a long shot, right? Like, where I'm come from. Like, I'm an immigrant. I've worked hard in my whole life. But like, nothing's guaranteed. And at the beginning, I was like, in the past, I was.

Like, I've always been a dreamer. And, like, you know, this one, now I'm here. Right. Now I'm talking to you. Now we have led it. Now we do one in three Bitcoin back loans globally. Like, I'm now at a point where dreams come true. Like, you can make your dreams come true.

You can will things into existing. And so I'm not stopping myself short to say, if I ever get a chance to play a role in rebuilding the country economically or politically, I would be open to it. Let's go. I don't know if that's going to happen. The future president of Venezuela. I let low, but I'm happy man. I want to be part of the team that brings joy back and yeah, would be great. Awesome. I mean, things are good and good for you, man. Yeah, man. I'm happy.

That's awesome. Thank you so much for doing this, Mal. We've got a fun night ahead of us now. Yeah, let's go. What Bitcoin did live, Pubkey, let's do it. Let's go. I want to see Hoddle. I actually want to see Hoddle. More beers. Let's do it. Thank you, Mal.