A Massive Bitcoin Bull Case Is Forming | Bill Barhydt

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All of that equates to incremental, significant money printing this year.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see stimulus checks this summer going into the midterms.

Crypto is screaming right now.

I mean, it's never we've never had more tailwinds in our space, but if you're just talking

about price, I think you need retail.

My biggest concern, and I've been very clear about this publicly.

What's going on, guys?

Today we got a great conversation with Bill Barheight.

He is the founder and CEO of Abra, and in this conversation, we talk about what's going

on with the Bitcoin price given all of the context of the Iran conflict.

What's going on in traditional assets?

How's it going to impact your personal portfolio?

Then we get into regulation and the new SEC, CFC rules that came out, the Clarity Act.

We also talk about his big deal that he just announced, where Abra is going public via

a spec transaction.

And then we finished up with some talk around artificial intelligence, how they're using

it internally, how he's using it personally, and how it could impact the finance industry

more broadly.

All that and more of my latest conversation with Bill Barheight.

Bill, at that agribus start, the conversation is the Iran war kicks off.

We're dropping bombs all over the Middle East, and now we've got to figure out what does

that mean for Bitcoin?

Very interestingly, almost everything else is sold off.

People are really worried, oils up, inflation concerns, but Bitcoin's hanging in there.

Why do you think Bitcoin is doing so well?

I think it's the two points are mutually exclusive.

I'm not convinced that it's because of the war that it was falling or going up, right?

I think Bitcoin is still a macro liquidity suck.

And I think you're going to see this year's significant improvements in the liquidity situation.

We've got a trillion dollars in debt financing, debt servicing.

We've got a finance.

We've got 10 trillion in debt that we have to basically refinance.

We were trying to do it last year at lower rates.

They're going to do what they have to do in my opinion to get those rates as low as they

possibly can.

All of that equates to incremental significant money printing this year.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see stimulus checks this summer going into the midterms.

So again, to me, just all equates to more money printing, I don't think Bitcoin is front

running that yet.

I don't think the market believes everything I'm saying yet.

I'm probably have a little bit of a contrarian on that view.

DXY is actually up the last, like what 90 days, which is usually a leading indicator on liquidity.

And I think that's why Bitcoin fell in Q4Q1 as the liquidity didn't come.

And so I think Bitcoin has kind of stabilized in that, and I think it'll stabilize for

a while in that kind of 65 to 90K range, which for the non-integrated people sounds like

that's not a range, that's insane, right?

But for our world, that's a range, right?

And I think that's what we're going to see.

We may see a wick to 55, but I wouldn't be surprised if the bottom is in.

It feels like, I don't think in Bitcoin's history, we've ever seen like a double extreme

fear in the sense of, I think I saw the fear print, the lowest I saw was like a six on

the extreme or the fear and greed index.

To go to six, recover a little, and then like get another extreme fear like that.

Maybe there's some existential shock that would occur that 70K doing that.

Correct.

And so it's like, okay, sure, maybe something else could happen, but given the fact that

we have right now, you kind of have, hopefully, the worst behind us.

And so as you get the stability, do you think that there's any credibility to global, large

investors, say, wait a second, there's global instability happening.

There's uncertainty on the horizon, oil prices are up, gold stocks, bonds, everything

is selling off.

Bitcoin is not.

Maybe I should do some more work here.

Maybe this is a non-correlated asset.

This is something that should be in my portfolio for moments like this.

Yeah.

I think there was a rotation that happened in Bitcoin.

I think that rotation is kind of reached an equilibrium state right now.

I think what's really happening is that retail money is nowhere to be found and retail

sentiment in general for the overall investing environment outside of like prediction markets

and short-term bets is very, very low.

And so I think until we see significant money coming in from a government liquidity perspective

or some other source of liquidity, I don't think we're going to basically move outside

of that range that I mentioned.

I think it's still a retail, I think crypto is still by and large or retail market.

Everybody's, including Abra is excited about the institutions coming, but even ETFs at

the end of the day are an interface for retail to buy, securitized versions of Bitcoin via

their broker.

And that's penetrated what, 15, 16, maybe 20% tops of the Bitcoin floats and the rest

is basically not securitized.

And so I'm still convinced that we need retail if we're talking about price.

If we're just talking about the dynamics and the value and of digital assets, smart contracts,

via stablecoins, now tokenized equities, tokenization of real world assets, crypto is

screaming right now.

I mean, it's never, we've never had more tailwinds in our space, but if you're just talking

about price, I think you need retail.

Yeah, it's very fascinating.

Now, when we think about kind of the fallout of some of this stuff, like private credit

having cracks, at the same time, there's geopolitical instability, people are going

risk off.

Like that all seems connected to me, right, is if I'm worried about what's going on in

the market, then I want to raise cash.

I want liquidity.

We see the fund manager surveys, all these things that cash is definitely being raised.

So then people start to redeem the private credit and the question then becomes like, is

there's whole chain reaction kind of, you know, global financial crisis 2.0, where if

private credit has problems, then private equity has problems, private equity has problems,

then that is going to reverberate throughout these portfolios, which are general feel there.

So I'm not an expert in private credit markets.

My background is more in traditional, well, my capital markets background is more in traditional

fixed income, but I would say I look at the leverage and I kind of follow leverage when

I think about the winding up and the unwinding of these things and private credit and private

equity basically are still in the kind of post-Zerp hangover headwinds.

And that unwind hasn't happened because it hasn't needed to happen yet.

In other words, if you're in private equity and you have a 10 year fund and you basically

were able to raise a lot of money in Zerp, put that money to work and you're in year

four when that happened and you're in year seven right now, you're still basically a

few years away from being forced to take a write down on many of those deals where

you finance those deals at close to zero and you've got to refinance them at a number

much higher than zero.

That's when the proverbial chickens come home to roost in my opinion and that's the leverage

unwind that I'm looking at in those markets and I do think there's going to be more

pain to come there for sure.

One of the things that people I find very smart and look to in these moments, they are

all not talking about private credit.

They're all talking about private equity and so they're like, look, I was just talking

to somebody and she was saying that the private credit is the top of the stack like they are

first in line.

If they have problems, well, what's the equity worth 100% and a lot of it is software,

right?

The SaaS world has been decimated.

Will it recover?

Is it overblown?

I'm not sure, but I can tell you that a lot of mid cap CIOs are going to be looking

at, you know, Claude and other tools first and off the shelf SaaS second to meet a lot

of their immediate needs because they can develop and prototype things in minutes now.

And so why would you be paying Oracle and Net Suite for things you don't necessarily

need?

I know you're doing this with your own tools that you guys have developed for AI.

So if you've made a lot of bets in private equity and SaaS that you haven't had any liquidity

event for and you're in year seven of those 10 year funds and you haven't taken a write-down,

that can get ugly, real, real quick.

Now, I don't know how those numbers affect overall GDP because they are private, but I can

tell you that I have not seen a lot of public write-down or failures of these private equity

funds and I would not be surprised if we start seeing significant write-downs or failures

of private equity funds.

Well, I'd write it down if I don't need to, right?

There you go.

Let's start regulation.

Obviously, the clarity I can start to make a lot of progress, but we also saw the SEC

and CFTC.

They're like boys, you know.

Paul and Mike seem to be simpatico.

They just released this brand new guidance, I think, is maybe the way to describe it around

how they are going to categorize all of these different crypto assets.

The list was a little bit longer than I thought it was going to be.

There's like five, I think five different categories.

What was your general take good, bad, and different?

I mean, I was blown away, honestly, because it was the first to look for years.

It's been a very simple message.

Whether we like the rules or not, tell us what the rules are.

So we can all follow the rules if there needs to be rules, right?

And so we went from everything as a security being the rule, which none of us ever believed

was the case in the first place.

But it was more like, hey, you startups can't afford to fight us anyway.

So everything's a security, right?

I remember getting a request.

I think I can talk about it now.

It's been many years from the SEC where they basically gave our company a list of like

30 assets and said, can you please identify which of these are securities?

And included Bitcoin and Ethereum, I said to my lawyers, I said, none of these are securities.

They said, well, we can't, that can't be our answer.

I said, well, what do you mean a can't be our answer?

It's the answer.

You've got to list a couple of securities.

I said, well, I'm not doing that.

You go figure it out.

And so at least now we're having an intelligent conversation about what a digital commodity

is, right?

What a digital security is.

And the fact that something can be a digital commodity and you can raise money in a security

style offering, which may require disclosures.

But selling that digital version of a Pokemon card later may not be a security offering,

just like selling Pokemon cards is not a security offering.

Somebody has finally come to their senses and documented that.

And that is really, really good news for our sales.

Probably on the order of importance of the genius act itself for stablecoins, because

this affects thousands of potential digital asset projects that are out there that needed

that clarity.

And I'm also not 100% sure they would have done this if they didn't think that the clarity

act was coming because they want all of this to be consistent.

So it's a certain degree.

I think they're actually front running the clarity act itself, which is also good news.

Yeah.

It's kind of like they were, it's like a parent whose kid is learning how to ride a bicycle.

Yeah.

You're kind of running alongside it.

You kind of go here, go here, right?

Right.

Right.

But the kid thinks that they are riding the bike by themselves.

Yeah.

But you know where the bikes headed and you can steer them.

That's a great analogy.

I totally agree with that.

Yeah.

And was there any downsides or things that you saw in there that you were actually worried

about?

No.

Honestly, no.

I think they did.

It was so far.

I've read it.

I've also had my internal AI read it, compared it to our own thoughts on the matter.

And I've been shocked at how useful, accurate, yeah, and well done.

This has been so far.

Now that we have it, does the clarity act matter more or less when it actually gets

done?

Okay.

So I have a different feeling on the clarity act.

My opinion on the clarity act is not necessarily about the nuance to details of how we deal

with stable coin yield or this or that.

My biggest concern, and I've been very clear about this publicly, is we need a regulatory

moat around the digital assets space that makes sure that everything we're codifying

now stays the way it is, regardless of who is in power in the White House, right?

Who is running the Senate Finance or Banking Committee?

Who is running the Ag Committee, right?

We can't basically be changing our stance on what's a digital commodity and what's a digital

security every four years because we have a different person in the White House is putting

different people in power.

So we need to codify what they're saying, not just as policy, but as law, right?

And Chevron, I think I'm not a lawyer, but I believe Chevron also makes this clear, right?

They can be interpreting existing law today very, very clearly.

But if somebody interprets that law differently, we're back at the courts again.

And we need to codify this so that we don't have Warren Gensler 2 in four years.

And it undoes everything that we've been working on for the last 18 months.

It does feel like there's a lot of momentum and energy behind getting that done.

It also now, as we start to get more clarity, opens the opportunity for people to say, hey,

I can grow my business.

I can go and kind of play offense.

You guys just announced that you are going public via spec transaction, describe a little

as to what the thought process is behind doing it and what the deal structure is.

Sure. Well, the thought process is to build on what we just talked about.

The tailwinds in our space are real tokenization, stablecoins.

We'll talk about wealth management and being in the wealth management space.

We not only want to service our clients, but other wealth managers who need to offer

digital asset solutions to their clients in a $100 trillion market.

So we believe that the headwinds we had before have now become tailwinds.

I don't think the tailwinds are going to get any stronger than they are now, except

maybe if we stop bombing other countries and the World War III doesn't break out.

But independent of that, the tailwinds are there.

It's clear to us that as a public company, as a registered investment advisor with the

SEC, we're now in a position to establish ourselves as the future de facto leader in this

emerging intersection between the digital asset space and the wealth management space,

which is basically on zero.

We use this phrase, get off zero.

The wealth management space outside of small exposure to Bitcoin ETFs is basically on zero.

Most of them are still managing 60, 40 portfolios.

When everybody in our shared world thinks that that allocation is dead, that the 40 allocation

makes no more sense, but that's where they still are.

Why?

Because they don't talk to their clients more than a couple of times a year, most likely.

Or in some cases, maybe the client has passed away and nobody knows who knows.

But that reallocation or inheritance and movement of those assets to the next generation

away from what I call the boomer money into the next-gen money is about to happen.

They don't want to use the boomer systems.

They don't want the 60, 40 portfolio.

Most of them are like, what is this treasury stuff?

I don't get it out of here.

It's losing me money.

They're on Robinhood.

They're on Kowshi.

They're on the next-gen platform.

They're looking at crypto.

We're going to help that wealth management space get off zero.

When you start looking at these RIAs, is it fair to say some of them are very skeptical

and still like, I'm not touching this stuff?

Then others are like, how do I upgrade and replace cash with stablecoins and they're

all in and everything in between?

Or do we now have maybe shame towards the RIAs who are still, you know, this is worthless?

Like that's kind of a dead perspective.

I see, okay, so I've been speaking to RIAs quietly for years, probably five or six years

now.

So I speak, for example, at Rick Adelman's events and he hosts RIA, big RIA events every

year.

So I get to meet with them.

I've seen the transition.

So five years ago, I'd be presenting and the questions I get from the audience was,

I really don't understand this Bitcoin thing.

He explained it to me like I'm a five year old.

That doesn't happen anymore.

Now the questions are, okay, so I have clients who are holding Bitcoin separately on a hardware

wallet and they're telling me that they want to borrow against it.

And I don't know what they're talking about or like two years ago, when I was at one

of the events, I was talking about next-gen, you know, smart contract platforms.

I said, I'm really bullish on Solana personally, for example, or bullish on Sui or Aptos.

Last year, like so the year after, I'd have individual wealth advisors coming up to me.

Oh, thank you for talking about Solana.

I ended up buying some and I've done really well with it.

I said, oh, great.

What about your clients?

And they were like, oh, no, can't do that.

I can't put my clients in it yet.

I said, well, why not?

And they said, well, it's usually a compliance legal decision within the company.

Now we're having discussions with, say, how do we do this, right?

How do we legally do this in a way that's compliance?

Because the demand is growing, right?

And so that's a totally new set of discussions.

My clients want to borrow against their portfolio.

They want to earn yield on their digital assets.

They don't want them on hardware wallets.

They don't want all their equities over here and all their digital assets over here, you

know, buried in the backyard.

They can't deal with that in their trust or be it for inheritance.

And so we're already seeing that with our direct clients.

So we validated that.

We know that business model works and the demand is real today.

That's our existing business.

Now what we're saying is we're in a position for you to offer it to your clients as well.

That's starting.

They're starting to get it.

It's starting to resonate.

Are there going to be digital asset only RIAs?

Like if you think about it from the perspective, they won't actually have their clients wanting

traditional assets.

It'll just be all crypto, everything's tokenized, et cetera.

I think, okay, so it's another way of asking the same question is, do we get to a world

where the traditional model for custody of equities moves completely to digital?

Are we in a model where therefore the custodians that an RIA would use are now completely digital,

meaning they look more like Abra, right?

Then they do like, you know, a Schwab, right?

And I think the answer is all of it is going to move to be digital.

So the question becomes kind of moot because every portfolio by definition becomes 100 percent

digital assets over the next 10 to 15 years or sooner, right?

It's just a question of how fast we can get tokenized equities live in the US, deal with

the clearing issues and the custody issues.

I think you'll see tokenized public equities live in the US this year for the first time.

And then after that, it'll simply be a question of how fast they get adopted by wealth

advisors and then how fast you can start to do custom portfolio construction within the

wealth advisor space based on the fact that I have tokenized Tesla shares, we're soon

tokenized space X shares and Bitcoin, which is a token and Ethereum or Solana, and they

become one tokenized portfolio that I can build custom construct, you know, do custom

construction around that will be available in the next year, in my opinion, I'm making

some assumptions that will certain things will get figured out in the market could be off

a little bit, but I think you're going to see a mass migration to tokenize portfolios

over time.

Why?

Well, number one, you can borrow against in theory the entire value of your asset portfolio

using DeFi.

It's huge to the trade 24, seven, which is what people today want, right?

Remember, when you buy Bitcoin in an ETF, you're literally buying an exchange-traded product

that trades 35 hours a week, Bitcoin trades 24, seven, that's a problem, right?

These models that we're talking about address that problem over time.

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When you're looking at this, it does feel like the advisors in one hand are trying to keep

up with the industry, but now they have clients that are so informed, like they're getting

information on the internet, on podcasts, newsletters, you know, X, whatever.

The role of the advisor seems to be shifting a little bit.

Are they going to go away?

Do they become more valuable?

I'm like, very fascinated by the idea of like, is AI going to, what jobs are going to

be at replaced?

Yeah.

And I don't know if I have an answer for the financial advisor, like it, maybe it's bifurcated.

I've spent a lot of time learning about this industry, right?

So think about public markets and public market CEOs, because I always say follow the money.

What's the incentive?

You know, as goes the incentive, so goes the strategy and the execution, right?

Public market CEOs generally have a four year kind of incentive model because they receive

stock, you know, grants or RSUs and they vest over four years, you know, and so their

actions tend to follow that model, right?

The single best thing you can do besides making your numbers every quarter to drive up your

stock price is usually to buy back your stock.

And so, you know, traditionally, people who are on a five year tenure will look to buy

back stock.

And my opinion is quickly as possible because they know it's going to drive the stock price

up.

In the RAA world, you have RAAs that are being bought and sold constantly.

Why?

Because the owner's retire, partner's retire.

And so that changes things a lot in terms of how these companies are managed, right?

So like when Adelman Financial Engines was merged into a private equity company, it was

an amalgamation of two companies and since they bought a lot of little RIAs.

And they do that because they wait until these partners or CEOs retire and they're looking

for a home for what they're doing because they want to cash out, right?

And so they usually cash out by looking for a place to sell or merge or, you know, they'll

get payments over many years.

And so I think this transition to, or the inheritance transition that's coming from the

Boomer generation combined with this next generation of people kind of cashing out is going

to create massive consolidation within the RAA space.

And there's also like 15 major platforms that are used in that space.

None of them are RAA centric today.

That has to go.

That has to be fixed.

There's going to be another wave of consolidation from a tech perspective where people

is portfolio-constructed.

So anyway, so massive changes of foot in my opinion in the whole wealth management space

in this country.

With AI, how's it changing how you guys build the company internally?

Oh God, it's taken over.

I mean, it's fantastic.

So development, like we prototype stuff in hours, we use the tools.

Now, when you're developing stuff that touches people's money, the AI and Abber doesn't

touch people's money today, or crypto or anything like that.

But if we're developing new features, we're screaming.

If we're testing market messaging and we want to run it, we can have virtual legal discussions

because as an RAA, you have a framework for marketing that's different from a money

transmitter, for example, all of that we can test, right?

And so I have a Jarvis I've built in my life that's fully integrated with every aspect

of our business that can basically run analysis for me in real time.

And I've opened it up to my exec team, for example, to be able to take advantage of.

If you're not an AI first company and you're less than 250 people, you're crazy because

you're not taking advantage of the fact that you should be in a position to move literally

10x faster now than companies that have entrenched systems that can't quickly move to the AI

tools.

Right?

That's the key right now is mid-small to mid-sized companies should be able to move on

a dime, like switch on a dime right now versus the large incumbents that are having raging

debates and are afraid of the displacement that's coming.

We're not afraid of the displacement.

We need the help because we've always been running Abra hyper-efficiently, right?

One of the reasons I'm excited to go public, but I'm not looking to hire hundreds of people.

The Jarvis thing you built, how did you build it?

What's a tech stack?

I'm a computer science guy, so as a tech nerd, I've created an amalgamation of a lot of

different tools.

I've spent a lot of time with OpenClaw.

The problem with OpenClaw is it's just Swiss cheese for your life, meaning it goes both

ways.

You really have to know what you're doing to lock things down, especially as a wealth

manager.

So I've tested that and created an environment where I can give it access to documents,

but I know that the outside world has no access.

Doing that is not for the faint of heart, but I've integrated it.

But this is very interesting to me, so OpenClaw, I've just got a new computer, right?

So how about this?

You tell me what you would do if you were me in terms of I want to build a bunch of stuff

to automate inside of our businesses or just in my life in general.

Where do you think most people start, right?

And the reason I say that is because I do think that there is a friend of mine, a PE

operator on X. He tweeted this whole long thing and he was like, I've spent hours and hours

and 20, 30 hours, and he's like, and all of the stuff kept seeing the demos and this

was cool and this and basically the conclusion was like, this stuff is hard.

Like stop making this stuff look so simple for everybody, right?

This is not something where you just like, I woke up, I pressed the button all of a sudden

it's magic.

There is an element of like, that's the light of the tunnel, but there's a lot of work

and patience and attention to detail to get there, right?

And I think that's the, the next step is that comment you made about how hard it is.

I think that's about to change, but we're still in that phase of it's really hard.

So let me, let me be specific, right?

So if you install OpenClaw today, which, which I've done and you want to give it access

to your email, to your Slack, to your, to have a voice channel, telegram, text, what's

that step, which I've done, but I've done it in a very lockdown environment.

It's most of that and even my, my cloud drive, my local file drive, a lot of that is API

based, meaning there's no way to do it by just typing in, please access my Gmail, it can't

do that, right?

So you literally are going to, you know, different cloud service providers and getting API keys,

I've already lost half your audience, right?

By saying that, they're like, well, I don't understand what Bill is talking about.

That's going to change eventually because these services know that in order to maintain

their client relationships, they're going to have to integrate with these AI agents by default.

But right now, I have to do the work of creating that integration myself, maintaining it and

making sure it doesn't break, especially when you become dependent on it, right?

So there's a couple of, for example, keys that I use that expire by default and there's

nothing I can do about it, which means every few weeks I have to go in and, and, and

redo, redo, and so it's get, it's, I, I, now I think there's going to be a wave that we've proven

the demand and every, every LLM is looking to reproduce what OpenClaw did because they,

they want to own those relationships to make those integrations infinitely easier for the

layman, the midsize company. But I also think it's going to create a lot of demand for, for

tech talent, right? And, and, and so I think there's going to be a C shift in, in how tech talent

is hired inside of companies. Yes, you'll probably see, you know, a fair amount of cuts, but

it's going to be a reallocation into the people that can make these services and tools work and

train the staff to become the trainer, people in support, people in finance, who are going to

basically train, you know, their Jarvis on, on how to basically understand the finances of the

company so that you can quickly answer questions and do FPNA at light speed, for example. It's fascinating

to me because I keep asking people like, okay, cool, you built something like what, what is the

impact? What, what is the thing? And I've heard everything from, there's a company, they started

with one agent internally. Now they maybe have somewhere more than 10 less than 50 at, I don't

know what the number is today, but they pretty much are trying to give an agent to each department

inside of their company. So, you know, fairly large company, hundreds of millions of dollars

of revenue. And what they're trying to do is increase the like clock speed of the organization.

And so one way to increase speed is you compress time. It takes to do various tasks and,

it's crazy. It's like like wildfire inside of this business. I have other friends who are like,

oh, it drafts my emails for me. I don't think I can pass judgment as to one being more valuable

or less valuable, but it does feel like there's kind of like a macro organization. And then there's

like the micro impact on the individual themselves. And you need to marry those two things together.

Yeah. So, so for me, I agree with that. And it's drafted emails for me. It's drafted documents

for me. I always prove amazing, amazing, amazing. And this is a big transition over the last nine

months. A lot of mistakes. I would say certainly this time last year, like huge transition to being

like almost perfect now, like remarkable, the difference, like all the hallucination stuff we

used to talk about. We don't hear so much about that right now. The other thing that I've come

to realize is it's like the holy grail of doing this right. And I think this probably true

for most midsize companies is when you can reverse the model so that it's not you directing the tool.

It's it's you become AI centric. And in a way, you almost work for it. So in other words,

for the day-to-day things that are table stakes for running a business, I don't want to have to

basically direct any AI tool. I want to I just want to know that it's doing it and that it tells me

in an interrupt driven way where it needs my help. And I want to add value in super strategic ways

that drive the business versus dealing with the mundane day-to-day. And I want that to be true

for my exact team as well. And then eventually push that further and further down so that becoming

a domain expert right is the value ad as opposed to yes, I know how to answer support emails

really quickly. Well, I don't really care about that at scale. I tell about I care about the fact

that your domain expertise is helping the AI that owns the process do it a thousand times faster.

And I'm happy to pay you a lot more for that if it comes to that because, you know, we're so

much more efficient as a company. And so I think people are going to start to realize that it's

not as scary as you think to reverse the model and say, well, I don't want to work for some AI

overlord. Well, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the table stakes of running

a business day-to-day, let it deal with it. And then let's transition. And this is going to happen

very quickly, in my opinion, over the next couple of years. Yeah, it does really feel like

as this AI stuff becomes more pervasive, like what you're basically talking about is like full

on autonomy. And so I'm fascinated by a stripe and tempo when one of the companies that they're

helping fund came out with, I think it's called a machine payment protocol, MPP. And it's this whole

idea of they're trying to create a unified, you know, protocol so that people or sorry, machines

can pay each other back and forth, et cetera. Yeah. Like, duh. No brainer. It feels like, right?

Yeah. So I recently joined the algorithm as chairman to kind of, you know, to be blunt, to kind

of hopefully help revive the platform. I mean, it's a fantastic tech stack, you know, that they

built at Algaran. It's got super instant finality for payments. And one of the things they're spending

a lot of time on is this new X4 or two protocol, which kind of Coinbase wanted to be like the missing

payments protocol that was in the original net scape browser that we created back when I was there

because it contemplated the idea of money for the internet. Now we're basically seeing that

machine-to-machine payments is probably the future of smart contracts, right? Because if you're

spinning up an agent and you say to that agent, what is the most efficient, fastest, cheapest way

for you to do machine-to-machine agent-to-agent transactions, it's invariably going to come up with

crypto. What it's not going to tell you is go, I need to go create a bank account. That's not going

to happen. That makes no sense. Now, if it's using yours, maybe, right? But even then, I still

think I'm convinced that either native crypto or stablecoins in the short term are the best way

for these agents to transact, and they're figuring it out. If you ask most agents what the best

store of wealth is, my guess is in many cases, it'll probably say Bitcoin for a lot of reasons,

but it may not want to use Bitcoin for transactions because they're too expensive, but it might say,

hey, let's use Solana for transactions. Super easy. Obviously, we want that to eventually become

Algorand because of the advantages there, but it's going to be a super awesome competition

between all these L1s to become the transaction platforms for those agents.

It does beg the question then, is it Bitcoin? Is it stablecoins? Is it another coin? How do you

move money in this world? Fast and final, to two Fs that I care about the most if I'm an agent.

Fastest self-explanatory, final meaning that you're reversible transaction. It's done.

I can't go back. There's no chargebacks. There's no chargebacks. It's cash in the traditional sense of,

you gave me my purchase receipt. I handed you the cash. It's done.

I think that's going to matter a lot. There's not a lot of platforms. There's maybe seven or

eight platforms that matter in that fast and final race.

It's very fascinating. What's next for Aubrey? You got to go and get the deal done.

Then what? We're in a bit of a quiet period. We've got a S4 process to go through with the SEC

to get the transaction approved. That'll take a little time. In the meantime, we're building

the businesses fast and as furious as we can. We're hiring on the sales front. You'll see us

doing more and more in the RAA world itself to help other RAAs in addition to our direct clients.

Then facilitating more and more capabilities for our clients in yield, lending,

staking, custody, as the business grows, hopefully now looking at things like tokenized

equities, which I'm super bullish on, facilitating loans against tokenized real-world assets.

I think this whole movement towards RWA tokenization is going to be huge for DeFi and that's a bet

that we're making that we're going to be able to facilitate that for our clients as well.

Yeah, I think that this is an unexplored lane that if you guys can

can dominate, it'd be pretty fantastic. It's been a long time coming, but we're here and we're excited.

Amazing. Well, congratulations on the deal. We'll do this again in the future.

Thanks, brother. Good to see you.