Rich Rines on Bitcoin Hitting $1M

Transcript

because I've been in Bitcoin since 2013 and it's my life's mission to get Bitcoin in the hands of billions people around the world and they won't stop until we do very clear that the rest of the market has kind of been washed this Wall Street will not stop at spot they're going to want derivatives they're going to want Structured Products they're going to want Bitcoin yield welcome back to the rollup your home for technical talks and open conversations that shape the modular future nothing on today's show is to be construed as Financial advice you can see our full disclosures list at the roll up.co Ventures sit back relax and enjoy today's episode after a quick word from some of our awesome Partners innovating Finance Global institutional and onchain deep liquidity to drive Capital efficiency now maximize yields on institutional grade liquid

staking with M unlock trillion dollars of capital via F Bitcoin all of this secured by Mantle's treasury of billions in Stables and E Capital Pools this entire ecosystem is coordinated by a vast network of season BC's that are aiming to create the next generation of Banking and Financial technology this is mantle all right we're in Hong Kong Rich good to have you back on the podcast your first time yeah excit to chat live yeah man it's our first time meeting which is great how's your experience here been so far how's it it's been super good Hong Kong is my favorite city in the world so I love to

come come here I eat like my body weight and delicious canes food Indian food Etc that I can't get other places so yeah I came here first on November uh last year and I was I was blown away I did like all the hiking was like 75 degrees sunny everywh and I was just like am it I've always told people it's like New York but in Asia so it's like if you it's like you know SCH orphic with New York in a weird way and like I I feel right at home here what different in me has been the cultural uh differences in the way that the event is r and and in the way that the people are here uh you know you walk into rooms and I don't really know most of the people whereas eat Denver next week yeah you're going to

walk into the room and you know you're going to know half for crowd right and so that is one thing that I've been grateful for the other thing is just experiencing how the Eastern world thinks about crypto and blockchain and if it's a whole different like mindset compared to how things are in the west couldn't agree more I think like Hong Kong is one of the most International cities in the world probably other than maybe maybe Paris and it's so amazing that you get kind of the east meets west kind of viewpoints here that are really interesting and novel and it's not just kind of echo chamber yeah I agree so I think the big Focus here is institutions and I think that that's been I think so I was on a podcast where we were actually interviewed and I was asked what the trend for the summer is was

defi summer 2020 last year was like salana summer or something if you will this year is like I said it's just goingon to be institutions it's gonna be which projects can get institution backing outside of BTC and so on way like who is going to be the ones that lead that way because I think we'll we'll see a lot of like dispersion in the asset Performance Based on those who are able to be kind of front basing and uh appealing to institutions so yeah what's your take on on that like give us the update on the Bitcoin institutional side the demand side and kind of what you're seeing from Gore's perspective as well so I totally agree with that Point first and foremost and I think like mem

coins hyper hyper accelerated that right where like it actually took that lowf float uh High fdv meta and then accelerate even further we like now there's no market for most tokens and it's really now a flight to Quality and one of the best ways to demonstrate quality staying power Etc is to really be able to have a beach head with institutions and this has been a big Focus for core really for the last like year and a half and I think we've shown with our new LST product we're partnered with Maple bitgo hot hex trust copper like some some really you know tier one institutions and now some you know trafi banking Partners as well that we'll be you know chatting about here more soon but that's a big Focus for us because we're actually trying to deliver real value and I think that's the other you

know big piece of this cycle is King get to product Market fit and for a long time product Market fit in crypto just meant retail use cases right it was like okay can you build a better D5 protocol and I think what we've realized you know as a space collectively is that there's these very large you know largely untapped pools of capital that can be put to better use and crypto rails are a 10x better Improvement on to go do that and at least for us in the Bitcoin space the spot ETFs were really the best things that ever could happen to us because you went from people not having access to both access and legitimacy in a very different way and many of the conversations that we have are okay what comes next for Wall Street and as I've been telling people now for the last

couple years is Wall Street will not stop at spot they're going to want derivatives they're going to want Structured Products they're going to want Bitcoin yield and this is the play that we're making because we think we can power kind of this next wave of Bitcoin adoption because it will not happen on bitcoin L one it's too slow it's too expensive it's not programmable so you need a symbiotic layer like core where you can go realize these possibilities and a lot of what we do is education and I think what we've seen over the last little bit here is you're now seeing Bitcoin staking become a thing and like people are now getting excited about that I think we're way off from institutions doing full Bitcoin defi like I think I think that's not a technical problem I think that's a desire problem but um but yeah we're

going to keep um we're going to keep fighting the good fight over there and I think you'll expect big things from us so what would you say from uh for the other Founders and kind of DC is watching the show we have a lot of kind of sophisticated retail researchers Founders DS Etc what are some of the core capabilities no pun intended that uh a Founder like yourself or a project like core embodied to appeal to institutions like what do they what do they want to see to make a high speculative investment like any kind of like non top three token investable for them like what makes that what what makes a project

institutionally investable so so I love I love the way that you asked that question because that mindset is actually effectively the worst way to go about it and I don't mean that pejoratively so what happens when most folks try to approach institutions is their pitch is come buy my token and that's essentially the worst way that you can get into these uh get into these you know kind of relationships or engagements because what you need to do is convince it there's value there so one of the things that we did you know really uh really intelligently in my opinion was we attached ourselves to bitcoin not because we're you know trying to do it for a narrative but because I've been in Bitcoin since 2013 and it's my life's mission to get Bitcoin in the hands of billions people around the world and they won't stop

until we do but how we lead is we try to give more than we take so what I mean by that is we approach all these people that now understand Bitcoin at least for the most part and there's a huge gapping between Bitcoin and ethereum on like a lot of these trafi players and how we say is okay you've got Bitcoin where if your bitcoin's yield bear and then you go through all these different cases of like what's the risk what's the yield like you go through all these different pieces but the idea there is there's no hey buy my token at the end that's not the goal and a lot of it's trust building and I think in the Bitcoin space in particular what people have really misjudged is they've tried to get people who are Square Peg and round hole so it's like okay if you're now you know

holding atfs for the first time trying to say hey come go use like 5x leverage and Bitcoin defi that is a terrible sales pitch like that is just the total wrong audience so what we have created is the list of products from Bitcoin staking dual staking the full evm ecosystem to go meet people where they're at today and to not rush them because the quickest way to burn all the trust is try to race people from Z to 100 and we realize these are 14 touch Point conversions these are multi-year relationships and like for get good examples the Bitcoin Miners and the mining pools that are on core those took two years of BD like there's a lot of work there to go build that trust you break bread you figure out how to make it work and that's how you really start to approach these folks but it's really

institutional sales process if you haven't started those who are already who have started already are well at he things take a long time to kind of build I that's totally true I mean look at all the work that salana has been doing for the last couple years to go get an ETF you know and like that's going to pay dividends and I think that's really smart and I I think you're going to see more and more people trying to do it but there's a point of maturity I think with which you can do this where you need to have probably some sort of trading track record you probably need to have some amount of credibility some other groups that can vouge for you some key material Partners important introductions and I think that's also another piece is like yes you should start yesterday but you

need to make sure you're ready to have those conversations because you only get to make one first impression and like you know I sold call Center Software a long time ago whatever and you move your way up to different deal sides everything else and a lot of these are relationships take time like people don't necessarily convert on that first touch Point people might come back when they're ready for Renewal or ready for a new use case they've got a new innovation budget whatever that is and that's exactly when you need to be there yeah I mean I I feel that if it there's going to be a dispersion in this return to fundamental kind of idea which I've been pushing pretty hard on Twitter I I think we want to see that I think we had the Seesaw of high Dy low float coins kind of have come and then we had the

meme coins hit it and that kind of s shipped it and now we're kind of s back in the middle I think we have crowd sale platforms for new token mches memes aren't as Fair as we caught somewhere in the middle but I think if there's one thing that can lead to more dispersion in flows on performance of crypto assets this year it will be gets the institutions on board uh and so the clearer example of this is Bitcoin Bitcoin is hanging out right now around like 95k we need to get to deep into specul kind of price action top but it's very clear that the rest of the market has kind of been washed um for better for worse while Bitcoin is kind of steady and consolidate so do you think the institutional Capital has changed

the four-year cycle for Bitcoin or where do we go for here for Bitcoin in terms of the institutional do auction going forward so I think you have structurally different demand curve right and like the etf's really kicked that off now you have potentials uh you know National Bitcoin reserves different countries like that's just a very different kind of category than any other crypto asset and I think it has changed the fouryear cycle because you don't get that waterfall right like I don't think all the Bitcoin wealth then kind of comes back and flows back into alts I think you saw memes extract a tremendous amount of speculative Capital both of which have really altered kind of what that cycle looks like and I think now like do we have fouryear Cycles anymore is really hard to judge I think we're in some sort of like kind of trough of

disillusionment after we got too far above our skis probably on the Trump election everything else and now in a little bit of a low but I do expect both 2025 and 2026 to be good years primarily driven by product Market fit and real adoption and I think institutions are are one key piece of that and it's also just are you building products that people want on your other side which is usually a consumer side and if you have kind of a marketplace where both of these people can get real value I think that's how you get these increasing returns to scale but it's really hard if there's no one using your product to actually go out there and have a successful cryptocoin this year so is there a limit that we should uh want institutions to be buying or better asked does Michael sailor own

too much Bitcoin already I don't think so I mean like you get a lot of these like are they co-opting like crypto itself right like and that kind of comes up fairly often like there's that whole Black Rock like Fork fud where it was like they're going to Fork Bitcoin I just like kind of laughed at it yeah exactly well it's also just like it's a rist disclosure right like you're just misinterpreting like kind how this works but I think what I want to avoid on that side is not necessarily the ownership of Bitcoin but potentially like the wall stre ification of like Bitcoin mining decentralization so we have this security budget problem in Bitcoin that I've been harping about for like the last several years and I think the Bitcoin M pool right now is empty there is no transaction Revenue that's coming there and we have to go solve that and

like one answer maybe some l2s will start to generate more fees core has an exogenous block war for Bitcoin miners we're all trying to find ways to keep Bitcoin decentralized because what I'm nervous about is we could get to a spot where you wind up with like essentially altruistic mining or mining that is subsidized by centralized products and you get to a spot where Maybe Bitcoin miners actually can't produce uh profit on their own so you want with the ETFs actually being the large Capital Pools or micro strategy that actually want up subsidizing because it's net more creative for their business or if they get other fees that can kind of allow that to run into a loss and I think that's actually how like Bitcoin gets captured right like and that's what I would be more nervous about because you get rid of the decentralization of

Bitcoin I think a lot of that value prop goes away and I think that would be you know very net negative for crypto as well yeah so the the the core isue here is that we need to effectively keep Bitcoin at on a steady logarithmic rise to um adhere to the cost of like of electricity Rising but really it's about the HS um meaning that the amount of Bitcoin generated every 40 years get cut into H into half half am out so 6.25 I think Bitcoin every block right now um we went down one it's like three I believe okay 3.25 or 3.125 a big CL block yeah and so there was a and it wasn't there um and so you mentioned l2's kind of bring some transactions

potentially by settling all their transactions into a single transaction on the L1 that you know that could grow but we kind of saw that Trend kind of come and go in a way and what happened because we did that Bitcoin Beyond yes content series we were very specific with who we brought on I think all those teams are still kicking that's that's impressive picking and still doing well um but there was a lot of them that had like sketchy Chinese whales and uh in incomplete technical designs yes what so what maybe speed on us on like what's the state of the Bitcoin L2 space now and like what happened over the last

nine months since it was kind of like all the hype last summer so I think if we go back to early 2023 we had ordinals we had BRC 20s we had like Bitcoin got exciting again and like we had l in early 2023 been working on it for years prior so we were actually not expecting that sort of like hype cycle to really happen till about now so like it FR front run a bu of those expectations which was amazing for us and that sort of thing but I think a lot of people realized they were behind so what people decided to do was okay let me try to get something out there let me look at Ethel 2s like kind of look at other things that were very sexy at the time and you people kind of pattern matching like okay does this make sense does it not

make sense and I think a lot of the technology was just very much not there at the time I think the end of 2023 we had the first version of bit VM which was pretty impractical at that period of time but was again an amazing achievement by Robin and crew and what people did is they kind of took this okay eth L2 type thing with maybe some bit VM pieces and said okay let's go kind of tell everybody that's here now and what wound up happening is a lot of people really over promised on what was live or possible today and they front ran like an entire cycle and we saw that like you know early January through like April May last year there's about 200 Bitcoin l2s or something at that period I think now we're about down to what 27 so like you've already had like a 90%

reduction and and I think that's because most people were just trying to play The Narrative hype game they weren't really trying to bring sustain economic value whether it's incomplete designs more nefarious things like there was all sorts of stuff that kind of quickly kind of came in there and I think since a lot of the Bitcoin aspect has kind of cooled because we've now come right past the realistic expectations and you have kind of a general negative Market sentiment that's probably exacerbated that but I think that's actually now why it's so interesting to get involved in Bitcoin space again because we all know this is $2 trillion today Bitcoin defi is going be hundreds of billions the next couple years easy and maybe trillions in the next like 10 years and that's just such an amazing Mark you'll understand it I think you've now seen a flight to

Quality even of the project Founders where so many of the project Founders now are really really impressive and I think you've get people doing groundbreaking research that are trying to earnestly do their best but it's still a lot left to be figured out and core's approach has always been different which is we've been more product focused versus research focused so we've been trying to do is not wait for new OP codes or not wait for BBM we've been trying to say how do we deliver value today and then as that stuff becomes available how do we incorporate into our design and it's a lot more like kind of practical if you will but that's been super helpful and us actually achieving product Market fit to scale but we have a lot of This research from other people to thank for some of the work that we've done yeah

and there's more coming I mean there are a ton of teams that we can name but so I think one thing that we talked about on the show a lot is well two things one being purpose built so I think Bitcoin is very purpose-built as a L1 as a Bas layer it's very much just it was originally for peer-to-peer cash right in the original Vision uh but I think it's now more of like this uh extremely immutable and Trust minimized uh Bas layer it's aely a store is May for now stor in value um and still good for for peer-to-peer paintings but not as good as some of these other networks um that are faster and cheaper but that's that's okay it's just in my view it's very purpose-built now for being the centerpiece of storing the global value that's its purpose it's

that's why it's there doesn't have it has basically very little execution uh doesn't really do much on the da side and it's it's very a very minimal in a way kind of like Celestia it is very focused on its its thing and then it's able to then kind of scale in this horizontal way and so I think that's a big thing that I am seeing with with what you're saying here is we had 200 l2s now we have 27 the vision hasn't changed Bitcoin still needs to kind of go into this horizontally scalable Direction This modular kind of scaling path with L2 side chains but it it it also has a chance to what people call Leap Frog a lot of the developments in

ethereum so maybe you could explain why uh this horizontal scaling is crucial for Bitcoin in general in blockchain designed why this is basically the only way or the the preferred way and um why there's a potential for Bitcoin to quote unquote leap frog some of the developments from ethereum salon and others surpris to like just kind of summarize you know to a degree like this whole kind of Bitcoin scaling wave is separating Bitcoin the asset from Bitcoin the rail right like Bitcoin is slow expensive not programmable and that is a feature not a bud and it's just appreciating that's what that is and I think like that's why I'm very bearish on like native Bitcoin defi on bitcoin because it's not meant for that it's too expensive it's too hard to do maybe with

new OPM in the future you get closer or whatever but at least as of now I think it's you know totally not there and I think with that means if you want to go put Bitcoin into morally highly uh utility based environments you need to do an on scaling solution like a core right you need to be fast cheap fully programmable you'd be able to realize all these different defi activities and kind of net new use cases that we haven't even seen yet but it just by definition cannot exist on on the Bitcoin L1 and then we'll continue to see is more and more push for performance more and more push for new use cases because Bitcoin has no execution layer right you like it's very different than the ethereum uh kind of L2 world where you're actually competing with ethereum and I think for ever it

was like is it parasitic or not I think it's now pretty understood once metallic says yes it's parasitic that it is a problem and for Bitcoin it is actually symbiotic because you cannot do these things with Native biglin and I think that's a very powerful potential and I think then you get into okay who can do it faster better cheaper who can have the better use cases the better environment and that will hopefully get to a more competitive ecosystem continue to push more and more Bitcoin use cases forward and that's what we're super excited about and I think if I go to bitcoin's purpose built nature I think it actually changed so originally we wanted it to be money I bought a lot of really expensive coffees that was a mistake it would it's it's not a money it's a collateral asset and I think

that's actually how we get to the original Bitcoin vision of be your own bank be an all term traditional Financial system it won't happen on bitcoin itself it's going to happen on scale Solutions like core you'll have like Bitcoin Neo Banks other things where you have a little bit of Bitcoin you can borrow against it use stable coins and now your Tam is like three billion people and I think that's actually how we get rid of the middlemen how we like how we actually kind of go back to that original vision and that's what we're trying to push forward and for some people that's not like the sexiest New Meme use case whatever and that's okay for us we're trying to deliver real value to real people and that's a love large numbers game right like that's where you can actually not only have like change and usefulness for

a large amount of people but you can actually like push the space forward and we're super excited about that because I firmly believe Bitcoin should be in the hands of everyone and you just can't do that on bitcoin while one not just for the technical pieces but it's just too expensive yeah yeah there's there's a there's learnings that we could have from ethereum and I think that while ethereum maybe views some of these high TPS uh chains as more of a of a competition I think I think and this is the question for you do you think that that Bitcoin l2s are more of a threat to ethereum l2s than anything else in terms of if if we can have highly scalable networks on bitcoin then why do we need

High K networks on ethereum it's less there's less security there by means of market cap and centralization risks Redstone is def's modular Oracle supporting over 100 clients on over 50 chains offering 1,000 assets Redstone is the leader for Bitcoin staking and yield bearing assets they offer the most robust customizable price feeds available in any model join the Redstone X exhibition [Music] today I think security is one aspect of it and I know the ethereum people love to always harp on the Bitcoin security

budget and like Justin Drake will talk about like shorting it and like all that sort of stuff I think that is a factor I think my bullishness on like Bitcoin defi is I think it will strictly dominate ethereum defi because a better Bas layer asset and I think E I think ethereum is it because liquidity part is De liquidity but it's also a collateral asset that now nation states are willing to to hold and you don't see strategic ethereum reserves anywhere and I don't think that's going to change I think Bitcoin has this very special place and I don't see why at scale it wouldn't actually beat it if it is a substitute that is competitive and I think that's a lot of the question right now is like can you beat ethereum Defi and potentially could you do it with full Bitcoin security and I don't think

that's fully possible yet but I think that's what we're you know kind of all striving towards in the space but I I do think at scale you'll see an ethereum ecosystem that will exist at size I think you'll see a salon ecosystem at size that maybe is dominated by memes or whatever and then you'll see a Bitcoin ecosystem and I think that's kind of the vision of the world that that we see and I think these things can exist in a nonzero some way where there's just different use cases that are available potentially in in different ecosystems and I think that's a totally fine end State yeah I don't we don't need to get into the technicals we've done it a a couple times but we can talk about how there's tradeoffs around Bridges and Bitcoin still yet to be kind of figured out also

the data availability and kind of data posting problem or situation ethereum is kind of gone ahead and figured some of these things out but also ran through now a ton of other challenges and there's going to be more and more kind of competitors if you will come out uh but we believe that that there's going to be thousands of chains and they will exist in parallel for Niche use cases for different Target markets and for uh you know different purposes effectively however so the early Bitcoin people and still to this day are very much against this idea of outside of assets outside of crypto how do you explain this phenomenon to institutions or to other

investors friends who want to invest outside the space are you are you of the mind that that Bitcoin is is investable um as as a sole asset in crypto or if you of the mind that there's other investable assets and that um you know there there's other quality out there I mean I'm obviously biased but but but in general like it's all about like it's less does this product actually like have value to you it's similar to a does this stock appeal to your interest or like do you have some sort of bias around it and I think one of the things in crypto that like we continue to do is like try to distance ourselves from other things that we understand so like I think what memes have shown us is we're actually a lot more like the stock market than you'd

think why these are effectively pink sheets right that that's effectively what that is right and then you've got your smaller indexes your like gaps and you continue to kind of work your way up and we're just becoming more and more like traditional Financial system like as much as we want to disagree with it we're looking more and more like that it's important that you have to do your own research you have to figure out what makes sense to you what makes value what you're long on what you're short whatever that's totally fine but it's but like we lump these things all together is like it is good or it is bad I just don't think that's the financial decisions that that people make and I think we just need to realize that there's going to be crazy amount of dispersion that doesn't mean that all

these things will ACR value and I think forever there was kind of this idea you'd raise the round it'd be you know some demand for whatever you did regardless if it had value or not and that's not true that's pre pump that fun pre that was when there was a higher barrier to launch a to totally andain basically totally that the commoditization of the of the launching of new assets and chains changed the game completely totally and and I think that has now changed this demand curve forever and I don't think there's any putting that Genie back in the bottle no and I think that you know is bad in a lot of ways that like these things are you know fairly extracted but I think it also now puts like spotlights on things that can actually deliver value yeah it's a filtration mechanism it's a there's a bifurcation

happening here the last couple years which what we'll see we'll see one interesting thing about watching though is that like things like lightcoin and some of these coins have been around so long they're uh persistent Perpetual machines yeah as long as there's miners or stakers in in prate networks so you have these coins that stick around forever uh that are you know trade that are that have earned the Lindy effect of being on exchanges and things but that's kind of like there's going to be that group there's also going to be coins that never made and teams that never made it on exchanges because just so many those will probably scrubble a lot harder and those will probably like actually go kind of away forever and then there's

going to be the ones that like there's going be the the staying power and I think that we kind of agreed that that's going to be institutional driven and value driven so I'm I'm curious to succinctly what is the what is what value does core bring to the world to the institutions to the average M and pop to uh yeah to the Bitcoin ecosystem so simply put core adds utility to bitcoin and for different people that means different things for a lot of folks that's just adding staking yield and making Bitcoin a productive asset for other folks that's full Bitcoin Defi and using Bitcoin as a collateral asset and all these other amazing things that you can go do but it's symbiotic with Bitcoin by being like a proof of stake layer on top of Bitcoin is kind of the easiest way to think think about it and

that has value to kind of the smallest retail user out there all the way to the largest institutions in the world easy uh Rich any key takeaways from Hong Kong any key takeaways what for those who couldn't make it what's the alpha do you have any Alpha for us for for core any upcoming interesting ideas or have you heard anything in the Bitcoin space are you privy to any ideas or thoughts or info or conversations that can be shared that would it help our audience make better choices or just uh be more in the not so little bit of core Alpha first uh so we announced LST BTC this is cores liquid staking Bitcoin token it's a partnership between Maple bitgo copper hex trust um and uh we're super excited

about it the idea is there's so many R Bitcoins out there these custodians are much more happy to partner with people that can help with distribution they can get it out there and also have attractive yield while retaining custody those assets and of course we want to get to trust minimize or trust the solutions over time but see that's not possible and inal custody is a great option particularly for institutions the market for decentralized Bitcoin right now is what smaller than people think and we think this will be a great new ENT into the ecosystem able to bring it not just to defi on core but to every several other ecosystems we're super super excited about that we're also really excited about corfi Cori is a micro strategy for for core it's going to be launching up up in Canada and we're super fired up about that no one's

really tried kind of micro strategy approach for an asset of the core S side so that should be a very interesting one we hope to have that launch by the end of the quarter um in terms of uh Hong Kong generally I think what we've seen is points are now officially dead dead and like I think for several time we've been like okay points met is over like there's the whole kind of IG layer thing that kind of Unwound or whatever but I think with you know some of the recent launches of some new chains some of those original promises were really not met and I think what we've you know for some of these liquid funds from some of these whales like people just don't trust points anymore and I think for new project launch and that sort of thing that makes it that much harder like that

fa entry keeps getting sharper and sharper or higher and higher and now you have to be able to deliver real yield and I think that's an important one where it's like can you get an ecosystem that can generate real yield for your users if you can the amount of staying power you can have is that much greater but there's just so much more scrutiny and the final piece from Hong Kong is I'd say people are overly bearish which is usually a good time to be counter and I think people are PR embarrassed in the Bitcoin space because of what happened last year and for folks like us Stacks Etc this is what we get way more aggressive because when people are just kind of the tourist that are just kind of playing narrative games whatever they switch to AI they do whatever we go let

them do that because we understand the potential of this Market yeah that's the Bitcoin way you just let them try they they always come back you always come back to bitcoin like no matter what it's just a boomerang it's just a boomerang um so yeah it's been a for me like we've all been there I don't mean to interrupt you making a lot of points I this we done so much in ethereum and so much in this ma space the last couple years and now I'm just coming back full circle to like man I need to have way more Bitcoin like it's just what what have I been doing for the last like like just it's just it's um you know I I I I have property in Florida runs a property thinking about getting others I'm just

kind of thinking myself like there's so many headaches associated with other assets there's so many there's so much less upsider with other assets and you can just throw your vidcoin in The Ledger this kind the saying issu is what my mindset is throating Ledger buried in my safe somewhere and never touch it but you're trying to unlock that value right correct uh but when I think of Bitcoin I don't want to you know I don't want to stake it man I I just want to hold it and have zero risk zero smart contract risk zero yield I just want to have safety but the idea of borrowing against it to never have to pay tax on the sale is extremely appealing to me because that means I can fund my lifestyle Bitcoin goes up over time as long as I

manage my ratios well and don't spend out of my pockets and just live a humble life I can effectively live through the appreciation theoretically of Bitcoin while borrow against it taxfree so Juan totally agree with you on the on the borrowing use case shout out to Matt from mzo they're doing this whole like by now pay never and and I think that and I think it's a great slogan I've adopted it as my own um in terms of the Stak thing whatever I think that's like a big education problem right now at least in core's case there is no principal risk so you can just do it totally passively and earn yield your Bitcoin I think that's been a big selling point for these different pokes that have gotten involved so far and I think if you combine that now that's paying off some of that loan that gets

really interesting right because it becomes even cheaper to kind to kind of play that game and I think that's smart because people want upside exposure to bitcoin they want leveraging dollars that's the killer use case of Bitcoin but I don't mean to be uh dismissive but there's always risk like somebody there's some way that this system could not could not go well not in our case so you only have to trust Bitcoin okay so you do a Bitcoin native time lock and that Bitcoin native time lock mean smart contract on bitcoin or not smart contct it's a it's a mechanism that you can do with Bitcoin it's a relay over it's a relay over so you're never minting a token anything else against Factor consensus mechanism the worst thing that can happen in that case is you don't get your core rewards but critically your

Bitcoin is never vot the B so if cor the network had some sort of consensus issues rears or something it would not impact your Bitcoin at all correct so this is education that though that these institutions would cuz like even understanding whatever is into a reor into a consensus failure into not impacting your bit that must take weeks so so that like realization Loop that you just went through is effectively the conversation I have like 20 times a week because what what most people start off that conversation with is I'm never sending you my Bitcoin because they're assume there's a multi or they assume there no no to totally you're you're like two steps ahead of that right and and you got to go through this like objective objection handling really but the idea is to get people comfortable and notice that I'm not saying go do it

today I'm saying go do homework go do research like try it out totally and and that's like the best I can do here and like hey we've known each other for two years whoever keep talking who does eventually will do it but I need to move at your pace right and that's where so much and that's the key to the institutional sales process in my mind is like it's just so many questions and you might answer the same question 50 times and it might be kind of annoying to you but it's important to do that education I refer to myself as the chief education officer for for core and and that's all I do is just try to have conversation educate people and like you're one of the most crypto native people like I probably ever met right and like still have to have this

conversation so and I just I'm struggling to think about a more risk adjusted Financial strategy for those who are not stuck in five figure hell if you will or unfortunately there's a lot of situation across the world we get into like the depth of it but if you have a significant sit if you have a significant typ of allocation or you're working normal job you have disposable income investing into Bitcoin and then being will borrow against it especially with bitcoin's earning some sort of yield like you get the treasury rate or something like that less or more you get the upside of viin also the downside you get the tax-free ability to use that

Capital as you need it emergencies or you just want to spend it or you lever up and go buy more other assets not Financial advice yeah I was going to say not Financial advice and and you know that like like for for me Bitcoin is not like risky enough in in in a way but that's why I'm full boomeranging because it's like okay we've done quite well last couple years our adventure stuff is going well business is working now I'm I'm less so in like you know 10x 100x mode I'm more like okay if you're you give me a couple xes my next 20 years like even 10 years happy camper you know that preservation is is more important for me

I think now than ever I think that's why I'm you can never have enough Bitcoin and I think that's never been more true today is like the macro environment becomes a total mess and you have like Global instability so many different ways like you just never have enough Bitcoin it's exactly the the pitch that you made right like there's tax advantages there's you know kind of a hedge on all sorts of you know various collapses like I just don't really think you can go wrong and I think that use case is also like a very clear-cut use case that applies to everyone on Earth which is very rare because in most like crypto stuff it's like okay you're on the tip of the defi spear or something else but stable coins are an example it's amazing for maybe like less developed economic systems or people that cannot have

access to US dollars or whatever else and it's not as much for fit for the first world and in the first world it's cheaper and better or whatever but a lot of these things don't have quite as much staying power well for the whole world that same use case actually makes a lot of sense and and I think that is why it's such a critical piece and why that Bitcoin message goes through to everyone doesn't matter who you are you want Bitcoin exposure you want leverage in dollars and that's it and that's just such a powerful message and I think that will be one of the reasons that Bitcoin continues to to lead this trend you know forever rich thank you so much for coming on been a pleasure great conversation as always thanks for having me