Tether co-founder on why the Bitcoin cycle pattern broke

Transcript

People love to acquire assets when they are highly priced and they don't like them when they decline. What's up everybody? It's LG Det here and welcome to the Milkro Show, the daily crypto show that's the only place where boredom makes you panic. Today is December 12th, 2025. Today we're joined by William Quigley, co-founder of Tether, the most traded stable coin that there is in the world. William is also the co-founder of the WAX blockchain and he's a seasoned tech investor. And it's the last part there that I really want to ask him about because obviously there's a lot of stuff going on in the market right now. The last time he joined us June 23rd, he told us that the Bitcoin cycle pattern was broken. He told us that he was buying again but planning for a 75% crash and he was skeptical of DATs. And

we're going to ask him to circle back on all those thoughts today and also give us his outlook for where things are at right now and of course going into the new year. Today's episode is brought to you by Reserve ETFs, the onchain equivalent of ETFs. Chain link link web 3 to Wall Street and Bridge. Send stable coin payments instantly. Simple, global, frictionfree. William, welcome back to the show, man. >> Thank you. Good to be back. >> So, what's changed? Listen, we got to ask. Listen, I gave you that I I I almost threw you under the bus with that intro, but you did. This is June and you said we were due for a pretty significant pullback. I don't think it's been that huge yet. Uh but it definitely feels pretty tremendous right now to be kind of down in the dumps. So give me

your give me give give me your instant thoughts on what's happened the last six months. >> Sure. So one thing I will say though is um and I know it's nuance but I have not been saying there'll be a 75% decline in the price of Bitcoin during its bare market cycle. What I've said is if prior patterns were to persist, that's where it would go. Whether or not it goes there is unknown, right? It's the future. Who knows? What we do know is the traditional bull market cycle post the happening which happened the most recent one happening in April 2024 that uh never occurred. We didn't get that

bull market. Had we gotten a bull market and had the prior patterns been consistent, we would be at like in October, we would have been somewhere around 300 to $350,000 Bitcoin, maybe $15,000 to $20,000 Ethereum. And as you know, everything else is linked. So all the other tokens would have gone up in value. And that just never happened. From the absolute lows of the $15,000 price of Bitcoin in 2022, we got up to 125,000.

So, you know, whatever that is, 9x from the absolute lows, but I never look at it like that. I look at it as what's the price of Bitcoin when the happening occurs? It was about 65,000 in April 2024 and it about doubled, right? Got up to 120. I think it hit 125, but uh a double is uh that's what you get on Nvidia in a bad month these days, right? So for most people, crypto was about tolerating extreme risk of substantial downside. because the in incredible upside potential 10x or

more. Well, if you don't get the upside, then you shouldn't tolerate the downside. And so, here we are. It's December and u we never got the bull market. We can talk about speculate why we think that might have happened. But now we are in danger zone because this is when historically the price of Bitcoin and therefore everything else has started to slide. It's often dropped you know more than 70% in its in its um from its peak during these bare markets.

And the last bare market was a long time. It was like three years right of just [ __ ] performance. So I think we nobody knows but there you know the the uh the back and forth dialogue with my people and with other crypto investors is well if you didn't get the upside does the downside come? I I just don't know if there's a logical way to come up with an answer to that. It you know it's it's u it's not like we're following a rule anymore. I do believe though once you break a pattern it is and I don't think the market has fully appreciated this once you break this pattern it's it's uh it's very dangerous because a

lot of what you'll hear about crypto even from professional investors is it's gambling right let me just say it is the opposite of gambling it has nothing to do with gambling when you gamble You have literal percentage odds of winning. You've got a six-sided dice. You know mathematically what the odds are that you will roll a three or a four. You play poker, any gambling. Gambling is all about uh statistical probabilities. No, the what what's the most uh scary area of investing is when we enter the realm of randomness.

Randomness is we have no idea. There's no pattern that and no statistical probability. That's where we are with with crypto. We are in random territory. And just like a lottery ticket, you can put money allocate money into that area uh when it's a random asset, but you have to be very measured in how much you put in because there's no telling what's going to happen. And uh the only the only consistent thread I see in the last several years has been where goes the general financial market, so goes crypto. Uh unfortunately, we get part of

the upside, but we get worse than the downside, right? That's it's it's kind of like the way Bitcoin is to other tokens. If Bitcoin doubles, the other tokens go up 50%. If Bitcoin drops, the other tokens drop by more than what Bitcoin dropped by. So, I think that's where um that's the the baseline for where we are right now in December. Well 2025. >> As you guys are listening to the show, you know that there's something hanging over the entire economy, and that's AI.

And the problem with AI content is that almost no one explains what the news actually means for investors. Our new AI newsletter fixes that. Twice a week, we break down the moves, the winners, the risks, and where the puck might be going. If you invest in tech at all, the link is in the description below. Check it out. So, you're telling me basically that that the way you see it, crypto's movements haven't made any sense lately, and that that's pretty scary to you because because what? because the rest of the economy is behaving as expected due to liquidity conditions and the larger macro picture. But somehow crypto is diverging from that and no longer following everybody else while the S&P booms, AI booms, uh gold is doing well.

You're scared that crypto unexplicably is failing or if not failing but underperforming. Yeah, I would say it's underperforming and whether or not we say it's inexplicable. I think that's a reach because you know there's plenty of narratives we can come up with unfortunately usually after the fact about why it's doing what it's doing. I think you can you can safely say wherever the financial markets global financial markets are going you know people's perspectives of uh economic growth in 2026 risk areas wherever those may be some people think risk areas are in uh the top tech stocks that have seen huge

increases in price due to the enthusiasm maybe maybe euphoria for for AI and whatever wherever ever the markets whenever the markets feel nervous the first thing the professional investors uh sell are their high-risk assets. So I tend to think of Bitcoin in the in the in the realm of the traditional financial markets. The traditional investors hold Bitcoin and think of Bitcoin and put it in the same bucket as a recent IPO of a biotech stock. And for those of you who don't know how biotech stocks work, they usually go public with

no revenue. They go public with a promise that one day they'll get governmental approval to release their new drug. But if it doesn't get approved, it collapses and maybe comes back. And so biotech stocks look a lot like crypto. They can be enormously successful, but they're also fraught with risk. And uh strangely I I don't think the traditional markets should view Bitcoin this way. Uh Bitcoin, if you've been around a while, remember this was the the anti-asset. This was the non-correlated hedging asset that was supposed to protect you from the ups

and downs and schemes of traditional financial markets and corporate surveillance, capitalism, and all that. That is not how it's traded. It's traded just like a widget. I mean, how many people on Wall Street are thinking about what are the tremendous opportunities to build new things in blockchain? None of them. And so, uh, I think if you if you are exposed to crypto, let's just say Bitcoin right now, if you're exposed to that, you have to be looking at how the traditional markets are going. And yeah, the S&P is what almost uh 6,900.

It is up, I don't know, 20% for the year. And a lot of the PE multiples are, you know, north of 40. I think right now the the the S&P 500 PE is 30, right? The Schiller PE, which is a is a 10-year moving average, is higher because we had inflated pees prior in the last couple years. So if if uh anyone is worried about 2026 then whether it's the continued economic growth, rate of inflation, central bank uh monetary policy and rates or even just housing cost of living in general uh then you have to understand that

Bitcoin will be the asset that's sold first. And obviously the the great beneficiary of this anxiety in the financial markets has been gold, right? I mean, crazy to think from from the year 2000 to now, gold has, I believe, outperformed the S&P 500. Wow. Like that's amazing, right? Gold is supposed to be this boring asset that maybe gives you a return of inflation. >> Yeah. And here we are like, you know, whatever it is right now. 4400, whatever. 4,300.

>> Yeah. 43. Yeah. >> Right. It was like 200 bucks. Some 250 in in the year 2000. Mhm. >> I mean, and I'm kicking myself a little, I'll tell you, because one of the my uh the best crypto trader uh who I've ever worked with, she has instincts that defy me. Uh she uh said many years ago, start to allocate some to gold. Gold's going to have a very good run in the in the 2020s. And I was just like, you don't understand that gold is never a good place to park money if you want an upside. Uh that not true, right? And then you know if we go if we remove or

if we move away a little bit from Bitcoin then you know all the other cryptos in 2025 all the vast majority perform much below expectations. I mean god think about it. Ethereum peaked at like 4,800 in 2021 and here we are four years later, more than four years later and it's at I didn't look today, 3,300 or something. >> Yeah. >> Like dude, it it it's really terrible if you buy something and four years later it hasn't gone up because inflation means in real terms you lost. we're at like 60% of where we were, 70% of where we were uh in real terms, forget about

um or in nominal terms, forget about real terms. But we have no pattern right now other than crypto seems to be correlated to markets, but but more volatile. And so if next year we have a booming stock market, I would expect to see Bitcoin and Ethereum do quite well. Would you still say I mean do you think it's fair to say that it hasn't moved because you've still had ETH go to almost 5K like within $50 of 5K and of course for long-term investors that's you know it feels stagnant because now we're down back down to like 3200 but I'm just challenging that idea that people that maybe are more in tune with the market and more willing to make

moves more often would have taken I hopefully I mean I don't know people were able to take some profit in August and September, but seeing a huge because because you had a huge return even from the tariff flow, right? You had a you had like what 1500 of the tariffs and that's a huge buying opportunity and you you made a 3x in in five months. Right. So, >> right. If >> I'm saying as opposed to being assets that haven't moved at all for five years right? >> Right. So, I tend to look at things as um I look at prior highs and then I look at, you know, where we are against the prior highs because as it turns out, uh most people buy stocks at highs, not lows, right? I mean, Warren

Buffett's been talking about this since I was a kid. Uh you know, people love to buy stocks when they're overvalued and they shun them when they're on sale. That's he's been saying that for 50 years at least and and it's been true. So I mean all you have to do is look at the volumes of crypto when we hit these significant lows and no one wants them on the fire cell prices. Even though I've been saying and I have been saying this for probably 10 years once I started to understand this. What's the what's the north star we need to look at? It's sentiment because these assets despite what most people will tell you and I'm not uh including stable coins here but all crypto assets are uh 100%

uh driven by sentiment. Now that differs from a traditional stock because a stock has a promise one day anyway of of dividends right and it also owns assets whatever those are non-physical and physical you know copyrights patents and streams of revenue so crypto does not so uh the price is driven exclusively by sentiment and we have a sentiment indicator called the fear and greed index as I've said many times uh you you want to it's is from for those who don't know it basically goes from one to 100. 100 is euphoria and one is despair. You can ignore the fear and

greed index between 21 and 79. That's noise. There's nothing to do. 80 and above you should be uh withholding purchases. above 90, uh, depending on other factors, including your tax situation and whatever, you'd probably want to be reducing your exposure. All right. Now, 20 and below, 20 and below is a great time to be accumulating. And in the rare instances in the last 15 years where it's been below 10, you should if you can take all of your assets that you can that are liquid and move them into Bitcoin and whatever other cryptos you feel comfortable with

because it is uh it's always been the case that you will make a lot of money usually within a year of fear and greed being there. And it is a it is one of those puzzles, right? It's a paradox. When the market is the most gloomy, the upside potential is best. And so we're at 29 now. So what based on what I told you, that's noise, right? It's it's by the way, it's better than being at 79. uh 29 would say to me risk of a substantial sudden decline in Bitcoin is lower when it's like in that like less than 30 range because people are already feeling glum,

right? Uh above like 50 they're feeling pretty good. Above 70, hey, things are going well. And then 80 and above I I kind of say is more like exuberance. And so right now we're in the not terribly helpful as a guidepost range for fear and greed, but it it tells us maybe we would call that a cautious cautious kind of conservative stance in crypto right now. Looking at that fear and greed, which you might say is the same for the S&P at 30, you know, um that's pretty high. Not as high as it's been historically. it's gone up to I don't know what was it 44 in the uh uh.com

bubble. So, um that was that was a time to reduce your exposure. And you know, Coinbase also is a pretty good proxy these days for crypto. you know, in April or so it I'm I'm rounding maybe it peaked at like $450 and um then it dropped I think in the summer it dropped to like 150 >> and then I think now it's like 4 and it' be like 250 2 something. So it's sort of like yeah 146 at the April lows right at the April 7th there and then >> it's like something >> peaked at 440 that's right in July.

roughly. And so we've pulled back about 40%, right? We're at like two, is it 250 or so? >> 267 right now. Yeah. >> Okay. So 270. Um and so uh that is, you know, if you bought and a lot of people did, you can see the volume numbers. When did they buy? They bought at like 300 plus, right? And uh uh you know, this is human nature. I've been doing this for almost 40 years. I've been an investor for almost 40 years. And I it's crazy to me what I learned in a finance class in college in year 1. Uh meaning not insight just like basic rules turned out to be literally the the guide the

guidepost for for everything since it still remains this way. People love to acquire assets when they are highly priced and they don't like them when they decline. And so, uh, uh, and right now I, as I said, I kind of think we're middling territory. So, from 65 to call it 90, that's like we'll say up a third roughly, right? So, um, if you bought at the SM, uh, if you bought at the, uh, beginning of the happening in April 2024, uh, you've not done bad. You're up 30%.

Maybe more, may maybe that third, that's like 40% maybe. Um, and uh, uh, but I think like if we were to compare that to the S&P, maybe you've doubled what you could have done in the S&P, but you have a lot more risk. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So, um, and gold gold's up like whatever. >> ETFs provide investors with a structured, disciplined, and diversified approach to crypto, which is cool, but the world is moving on chain. We need a crypto native equivalent. That's exactly what Reserve's decentralized token folios bring to the table. Reserve ETFs are rule-based baskets of crypto assets packaged into a single token like Coin Market CMC 20, crypto's version of the

S&P 500. Go to milkroad.com/reserve to find out what's on offer. Sure, tokenized financial products are the future, but there is a big sticking point. They all need to speak to each other. This is a tough problem to solve, but chain link does exactly that. It's the universal language for financial markets, linking Wall Street to web3, banks to blockchain, and so much more. See how Chainlink is linking the world by going to milkroad.com/chainlink. Okay. So, it's I'm glad you mentioned gold right at the end there because I wanted to ask you who who's this trader that you're talking about that was telling you to buy gold cuz let's just look at the gold chart to appreciate this. The annual gold chart. So, this is a 12-month gold chart where like the green candle this year is obscene compared to like anything on this chart dating back 30 years, right? Um, so

you're telling me you have somebody you know who's telling you buy gold in like this zone of 2015, 2016, 2017 around 1,100 bucks. >> Yeah. But this that trader also [ __ ] >> what else? >> Uh uh when um when Ethereum went to 16 cents, right? And my partner and I were the second largest buyer in the Ethereum crowd sale, we were like it it we had purchased it at 30 cents and then it went to 16. Uh and for I could kind of tell you week by week the price of Ethereum in the first like six months, right? because I was like laser focused

on it. It it you know went out and it went to like I don't know uh 33 cents or something and then uh dropped to like 26 21 and it got to like 16 cents and she was like I was like wow maybe it's a dog. you you your audience may or may not remember because I know it's been 10 years but uh Ethereum kind of like they raised 18 million in the crowd sale which at the time was considered a huge amount but then they kept it in Bitcoin so Bitcoin dropped in half so they had half the money they needed but they needed longer than the original plan to develop it so you need more time and money but you have half the money that you needed and so uh you know Vitalik was freaking out uh I had told him, you

need to freaking sell some of your treasury. He didn't want to do that. Uh but he did eventually he did start to sell the treasury. He thought it was going to collapse Ethereum. I'm like, it's not going to collapse. Like people understand you got to build the stupid thing, right? So you got to spend the money, but but be more careful with how you spend it. And anyway, um so we were wondering if maybe we should sell some of our position, which of course would have been catastrophically bad, but you know, that's how it is, right? we're we're all human. And uh she came back to me and my partner and said, "Can I borrow some money from you guys?" And I said, "Yeah, I'm curious. What do you want to do? I want to buy the Ethereum you want to sell."

And then it's so interesting how psychology is. And I said, "Oh, really?" She's like, "Yeah, I just uh you know," and then to be, it's kind of funny what she'll always say to us when we say, "Why do you want to do that?" She'll say, "Because you've said this. You've said when things are really beaten down, that's the time." And I'm like, "And see how easy it is to get in the stupid cycle where you're like, "Oh, no." So, um, we said, "You know what? Tell you what, we'll we'll we'll loan you some money, but we are going to keep our stuff, right?" So, I owe her so much.

And, uh, she's been incredibly good at like when Bitcoin hit about 55,000 back in 2020. What had that been? 2021. Yeah, because it was at 23,000 in a in December 2020 and then by February it was in the 50s and then I think it uh maybe hit 55 or something and then went back down maybe almost 60. And she was like, "Hey, let's let's sell some. Let's sell." And she's always right in the big moves. And right now though, I will tell you, you know, she's not terribly enthusiastic. She doesn't think these are bad prices to sell, which would say, you know, it might it might retreat. I mean, I think it's I'm

100% certain that in the next four years, the price of Bitcoin, Ethereum will be lower than it is today. As I am, it will be substantially higher than it is today. And if somebody did the following, they would be, you know, the goat of all goats. If you knew like um if you had taken a philosophy that this is an erratic emotionally driven asset if someone figured that out earlier than we did then you would following fear and greed just never 100% off or on but reducing exposure when it's above 80 uh accumulating below 20 uh you know that's that would have been a fabulous and not

impossible to have figured out approach uh for your audience. I think the most valuable thing I can say is this. It is it is a sentiment-driven asset and you need to be counter to the sentiment. When they're euphoric, you're cautious. When they're super cautious, you're euphoric. And we measure that euphoria through fear and greed. uh if we were having a really sophisticated conversation which I've had with some people some traders you know we can talk about has fear and greed is it as powerfully predictive as as it has been historically and uh I think it's maybe a little muted it's not as good as it was but it's

still a very good broad direction with which to think about things and um I am not what you would call a trader because I don't buy and sell on a daily or weekly or monthly basis. I will accumulate more and I will reduce my exposure but maybe more the way I don't know like a long-term stock fund as opposed to the um lots of people who we know who are much more using leverage right and and you know if one one thing I will say about leverage I hate it I've always hated leverage leverage is is a toxin to the financial markets >> and Wall Street folks use a lot of leverage average. And this is one reason

why uh Bitcoin rallies are are just like uh always seem to be cut short and they seem to just suppress those rallies and then drop because you know the 100 to1 leverage is possible. The majority of trading is done in the futures markets right the spot market is kind of irrelevant and why is the futures market where the trading is done because that's where the leverage is. I think it would be very helpful and I haven't done this. It would be very helpful for somebody in a podcast to take a look at the cumulative leverage in the crypto system, you know, going back like 3 years from ago and just we all should be

tracking it. remember in 2021 how much leverage there was which we all didn't realize until the end and then we realized these freaking scammers at like like Celsius and uh uh what digital I forget the the trading company affiliated with u Gemini the you know the exchange that was that was fueling sending people over to these places where you could lend your Bitcoin don't lend your Bitcoin guys >> okay let's see right now Right now there is 15.5 billion dollars of open interest on chain. That's only on chain, William.

That's not that's not on the exchanges, but that's what's out in the open. And that since the last cycle, that's grown uh like a wildfire, reaching a peak of reaching a peak of 27 billion right before that major liquidation. Uh pretty small. I mean, obviously, we're talking a four trillion dollar market, so pretty small uh in that sense, but >> that's cuz onchain is irrelevant, right? >> Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Well, irrelevant is what we can see. It's what we can see. At least as an example, the big >> like what we want are, you know, all the exchanges, right? and and the exchanges have such reporting shortcomings and how this stuff and let's face it it's not it's not easy and it's u I remember in 2007

and then 2008 you know the whispers that there's a lot of people who are heavily heavily levered but the mechanisms that the uh financial regulators across the world including the US were using to aggregate leverage was not available so we didn't realize ized. Uh it was uh as bad as it was until the unwinding happened and when that happened uh as we know it it ruined the world for years. Uh leverage is very very scary. I would like far better uh metrics on the amount of leverage that's in the system.

>> I don't know if you'll get that anytime soon, man. Not not when people are expecting uh hoping for for number go up some more and and fewer. This is why in the in the clarity act which is the uh uh like the omnibus uh crypto regulatory framework that the US congress is working on. This is why um the clarity act it it it needs some improvement in these areas. It's always leverage. Leverage is the toxin that damages markets and it's it's it's because people can't resist. And and Wall Street in particular likes it because, you know, they can get they can earn 5% on a trade, but if they're 10x leveraged,

they earn 50%. Right? And so they they can't resist getting more and more of it. And the problem is we're all affected when that gets unwound. >> Yeah. And it is interesting. >> Yes. It it is interesting that with the probably hundreds of billions of leverage that's in the crypto system, almost none of it's onchain. >> The chains are not doing what we hoped. What's really going on is the tokens are just being traded by traditional financial systems. It's not uh sequestered within the crypto universe so that whatever goes on doesn't really affect the broader markets.

>> William, I want to wrap this up soon. And the last question I want to ask you, um, is you referenced Warren Buffett, right? Uh, and his, uh, you know, he was sitting on a big pile of cash and he still is, and the one thing he's bought is Google despite it not, it's not in the dumps, you know what I mean? It's not at some low, but he he picked up a bag of it. What do you make of that? >> Right. I think it's pretty good. I Let me look here, Google. Um, >> my numbers might be out of date. Is it a 28 PE now or is it lower? >> Let's look. Uh, I'm not sure. That's a good question. Let's do a little stock exploration while we're talking.

>> Yeah. >> So, we've got >> it's at 30 30 31 right now, I think. >> 31. So, it's gone up. >> Yeah, roughly. >> It's gone up like from 28 a couple of months ago to 31. But if we uh and you know 3.75 trillion market cap but uh this company is extraordinarily profitable right and uh it has so it has an amazing balance sheet and so I think Warren Buffett who you know historically was such an anti- tech guy he that's probably of all of his failures I would

say He overcame almost all of them which is why he's so famous. But him not understanding that the world was moving to tech. He kept thinking of tech as an asset class that was unpredictable and is you know he believed for so many years that technology stocks technology companies couldn't maintain a uh a persistent advantage because new tech would come and it wasn't about brand. It was just about better, faster, cheaper. And so he missed the rise of the consumer tech space where brand did matter and but he's made up for it right he owned Apple I don't know if he still does uh and uh and clearly Google is a broad kind of u uh a broad position on

the um global consumer economy right because even today Google's first and and still dominating value is based on AdSense it's a It's a a company that makes almost all of its money on advertising and uh there was some worry that the that other companies were going to uh pass it in AI and then once they did that uh surge would be over. We've been in this AI thing for several years now, right? There are there's been some movement towards AI search, but uh the habitual nature of using Google to check where's the nearest restaurant or

whatever, that's a hard thing to move from and and Google's AI seems to be neck andneck with the others. So, um I think I if you said to me you can buy OpenAI and put in a million dollars, uh obviously it's a private company, but you could get exposure at what's the last valuation like 350 billion or something, I forget. >> Something insane. Yeah. >> Yeah. Or Google and we'll we'll come back in five years. Uh I would feel much better putting it in Google.

>> Right. Right. Open AI has more upside, but it's far more risky of an asset. >> Yeah. Yeah. They don't have they don't have the history of of being like a pillar of the internet the same way that Google has for 30 years now, right? And has shown adaptation to trends as well. Has been able to different business models to different as things have changed and stay relevant and >> build. I wouldn't say, but I would say acquire. They have >> Yeah. Yeah. Every Google is funny because every single thing they've ever done, they bought or stole from someone.

Every single thing. AdSense, they got that idea from goto.com, a company I was in. Android, well, they just took it. It's open source. Chrome browser, they took it. Literally, it was called Chrome. They just called it Chrome Google Chrome browser, right? Uh uh uh Google App Store, they copied Apple. Google, the Google Cloud, they copied Apple. So, >> Google Maps, just Map Quest, >> Google Maps, right? I mean, Map Quest and all the others. So, they've never had an original idea. They're not consumer uh savvy people. They're really good at buying or um just using their heft to to make money where everybody already has figured it out. So, good for

them. They're good copers. Uh uh >> why haven't they bought why why haven't they bought a block a blockchain? >> Why haven't they bought a blockchain? Uh >> do we see what's going on with blockchains? First of all, why would you buy a blockchain when you can spin one up in 15 minutes? >> Or make one or why why haven't they made one? Why haven't they made one then? Why what's what's wrong? >> Why haven't they made one? And you know why they haven't made one? Because the use case for it has not been made. That's why blockchains, as I have said many times, blockchains are the absolute worst way to do almost anything.

>> But there's a few things a few things for which there is no equal to a blockchain. But right now, those few things other than stable coins, which are amazing, and yes, should they have a stable coin? Obviously, they should and they will at some point. All the big giant consumer oriented tech companies should have their own stable coin. I've been a little surprised that Amazon hasn't rolled out one, but they all will. Um, uh, but other than that, and maybe they'll have their own blockchain for that, but for your audience, maybe they don't know, but you can spin up a blockchain in like a day, right? They're the blockchain tech, you don't need computers for blockchain. You can build a blockchain with pen and paper. So they

they haven't found the need for it yet. >> Stable coins are the biggest use case in crypto right now. But let's be real, using them on chain is still way too complex. That's exactly the problem Bridge is solving. Recently acquired by Stripe. Yep, that's Stripe. Bridge helps businesses send, store, accept, and launch stable coins instantly. Explore the future of global financial infrastructure at milkroad.com/bridge. But as as cryptos moved into payments, William, like payments is also something that Google has slightly kind of added. It hasn't really worked. They haven't really been able to make too much foray, but they did they there is Google pay.

You can >> I wouldn't say crypto has moved to payments. I would say >> the payment industry has realized that the best way to conduct payments is with stable coins. It's the future of crypto is stable coins. Mhm. >> This is the big the big outcome. The big outcome of of the Bitcoin blockchain. It's like it's the original. It's the GOAT. But what it introduced was the concept of the tokenization of money.

And Tether, which I was part of, was the first. And now the US government has blessed it and said, "Yes, stable coins are where it's at. In the next 10 years, maybe it'll take longer, but I'll say 10 years, all of the world's global economies will have transformed their their currency system into tokenized cash and people can read up about tokenization of cash and why it makes so much sense. Uh, but yeah, for crossber in particular, that's the real like that's the real byproduct of all of this was we realized, wow, stable coins are amazing. No one is paying with freaking Bitcoin. And when you when I still hear

people who I feel like just don't really use it, they say, "Yeah, Bitcoin, it's the payment system of future." Bitcoin was the worst payment system ever invented by man. Like, it was the [ __ ] worst system ever invented. But there were elements in it that we extracted and we we we melded into stable coins which is the best payment system ever made by man. So no uh criticism to Bitcoin but it it it it was never going to be a payment system. It just it doesn't work.

>> I I wouldn't expect anything else from from one of the co-founders of Tether. That that is that's what I would expect you to say. But no and and it is funny. I think honestly the the best thing you've said to me today, William, as we wrap this up and something I'm going to take for a while because I think this is actually one of the best quotes I've heard in my time doing this show and my time doing podcast in crypto um is that blockchains are the worst possible way to do things, but there are certain things that they do that cannot be done in any any by anything else. And I love that. I think that's such a perfect like way to describe it that it's like blockchains are messy and clunky and annoying and just like there's only so many things that you

should put on chain because it's it's annoying but there are a few things that crypto does that it literally you nothing else can do that exact thing and that's where the use case comes from >> and and I'll just say to add to that why should this is not even a criticism it's just the nature of things it's as though somebody said, "You know, I love toothpicks. Toothpicks are amazing, right? They do really useful things." And let's make 747s out of toothpicks. Let's build cars out of toothpicks. Let's build radios out of toothpicks, beds out. It's like, dude, it's okay to say that thing has a great utility in a narrow area. And if you were around in

2017 during the ICO bubble, you remember everybody, every nonsense guy was like, "Blockchains are going to be the new internet." No, they're not. They're they're very precise and specific in what they do. And um and and this is why, you know, Google is still going, "What's the use case for that? They literally could spin up a chain in a day." >> Yeah. That's great. Well, that but you know what? I thought you had the perfect quote before, but now the toothpick, the airplane 747 made of toothpicks, I think, is is a is a fantastic takeaway for our audience. William, dude, thank you so much, man. This has been a great conversation. It's a great way to wrap up the week. Um, thanks for coming on

the show and and we'll we'll see you again in the new year. >> All right, great talking. >> Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event? Subscribe to our channel and join the Milk Growth Daily and Pro Newsletters and start investing like the top 1%. This show is for educational purposes only. Nothing we say is financial advice. Investing is risky.