Transcription
Volatility was once Bitcoin's superpower, but according to Caitlyn Long, CEO of Custodia Bank and one of the sharpest minds in digital finance, that era may be over.
These Bitcoin treasury companies have crushed Bitcoin volatility. Bitcoin historically been the most volatile asset. And the Fed was able to crush volatility in pretty much every asset class.
She argues the so-called Bitcoin Treasury bubble wasn't in price, but rather in volatility. And Wall Street's financial engineering has fundamentally reshaped the market.
Well, the bubble was in volatility is now what we look back at it. It wasn't in the price, it was in the volatility, which got crushed because everybody was pursuing the same strategy.
In this interview, Caitlyn reveals why legendary long-term holders are finally selling.
The CDD measure has been trending up, which tells us that long-term hodlers are, you know, have awakened. And when they do tend to awaken, they tend to do one thing when they move their coins, which is sell them. There's just some liquidations of people who were in relatively early and they're just taking profits. I don't think that that is fundamental. Nothing has changed fundamentally.
How Bitcoin treasuries are rewriting the rules and why tokenized dollars and stable coins could be the Trojan horse that ushers Bitcoin into the heart of global finance. We also dig into Operation Chokepoint 2.0, regulatory capture, and Caitlyn's vision for how tokenization will transform payments, securities, and banking over the next 5 years. That's dope.
[Music]
Let's do.
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You and I are recording on October 1st. Of course, it'll come out a few days later, but once again, we have this October meme that price just goes up magically in October after a difficult September. And as I'm looking, I'm sure it'll be different, but prices 17,500 after starting the last day of September below 14,000.
Yeah. Well, you're you're forgetting of course the 100s because of course we're uh we're we're at 117. But um
did I say
you did say 17 and 14?
I'm starting again, Caitlyn. We're starting again.
That's fine. Let's do it. Yeah.
that that's embarrassing. It shows you where my my brain is at.
Go for it. We'll start again.
Resets or something. That's a rare one for me. So good.
We're recording this on October 1st, which of course is the first day of October. And magically, Bitcoin price at $117,400 as we're recording, and it was under $114,000 at the end of September. This is supposed to be a meme. It's a joke. But here we are. Bitcoin magically rising on the first day of October.
Yeah. Uh it's it's amazing. It's October and uh it seems like it happens every year year. You were just pointing out that there was one year where there was a 10% up day on October 1st. And uh yeah, I I spent some time uh after the podcast that you just released with Mike Alfred, who's one of truly the best investors in this space. I mean, just magic touch. And uh uh he had a a tweet yesterday that said, "God, there's so much market manipulation for quarter end." you know, just hold on. Some things were were, you know, probably being kicked around, but so that, you know, asset managers could show certain returns. Um, that always happens for tax reasons in Q4. If people have losses, they tax loss sell. But, uh, apparently it's also happening in Q3. And he was he's he's been just so bullish and he's been right. Um, so yeah, it's, uh, here we go. I I I I took a look at because one of the big questions that nobody really knows the answer to is why hasn't all this Bitcoin Treasury company activity pushed the price up as much as people expected it to given all the buying volume that was coming in and given that the miners aren't selling. And uh I think a lot of the answer is these old wallets just yesterday, a 2010 wallet with $44 million worth of bitcoins u woke up and everything had gone into that wallet from a mining um uh from mining. But you know, every it's not every day, but but there's a lot of that going on. the CDD measure has been trending up which tells us that that older long-term hodddlers are, you know, have awakened and when they do tend to awaken, uh, they tend to do one thing when they move their coins, which is sell them, um, for obvious reasons, otherwise they're not going to move them because they're long-term huddlers. And so we're we're just seeing the handoff from the the long-term term huddlers who, you know, built bootstrapped this network to the Wall Street, you know, a lot of it is boomer um that is more actively trading. And we're just seeing more and more of that happen. But so much, as you well know, of Bitcoin is still held in wallets that haven't moved in years. Um, this is still a very concentrated asset among those who were here early.
It's interesting because it's one of those glass half full, glass half empty scenarios with the long-term holders. We obviously know very transparently because this is Bitcoin as you said exactly which wallets are moving coins and selling. And we've had very transparent sales like 80,000 executed by Galaxy that was very public. I mean huge trunches, hundreds of thousands of coins at this point. So the glass half empty part is the hold forever crowd is giving up right that's one narrative that they were supposed right they were supposed to hold forever they don't believe in Bitcoin anymore and anecdotally I have had conversations with Yago and Bruce Fenton some of the very early Bitcoiners who have said that they know guys and gals who now it's so much money and they don't like the institutionalization and government adoption of Bitcoin and therefore have said listen I've got billions of dollars and Bitcoin isn't what I thought it was going to be. So, I'm out.
But the other side is if Bitcoin is going to become what we need it to be, then coins always have to go through those transitions from, we won't call them weaker hands, but from older holders to newer, and you have to set a new floor of demand and have a new class of interested buyer to keep that floor rising. I don't know which side of that argument you stand on or how you view it, why you think these people are selling. I think it's just so much money and that's what it is 15 or 10 years, right? And their concentration of wealth in one asset class that still let you know, let's be honest, it's still largely experimental, right? It's institutionalizing. I don't think that we have much risk of a zero-day exploit, but that's an asmtote that never reaches zero, right? And um so you know is it is it just people saying it reached a magic number? I am a partner in a venture capital fund that made distributions of both Bitcoin and ETH that hit their price target and um that happened relatively recently. So there's just some liquidations of of of people who were in relatively early and they're just taking profits. Uh I don't think that that is fundamental. nothing has changed fundamentally. Um but it it um the the other thing I was thinking about as as I was preparing for this is just how much these Bitcoin treasury companies have crushed Bitcoin volatility. It's very unusual that Bitcoin, you know, it's historically been the most volatile asset. And the way that asset managers think about volatility is they want returns that are not correlated with everything else. But the Fed
idiosyncratic.
Exactly. the Fed was able to crush volatility in pretty much every asset class. That's happened since the 2008 financial crisis and Bitcoin was different. So that's one of the reasons why hedge funds were so interested in it in the early years because it was trending upward with very little correlation. Well, now here can here come all the financial engineers, which is the Bitcoin treasury companies who are monetizing V. And the price of Bitcoin has not gone up very much. Hasn't gone down much either. It's kind of traded sideways pretty much for the last quarter, give or take, but it has but V has been crushed. The daily changes are not as high as they once were. So, this is le it's become less interesting to that crowd. But it also means that those who had a business strategy to monetize the volatility. What I mean by that is you can basically um this is this is the this is what micro strategy perfected. It's just a way of describing the financial engineering that they perfected in the early years which is they had a very volatile stock because it was the the stock price was trading with a high correlation to the Bitcoin price which meant it was volatile when Bitcoin was volatile and in finance terms you can sell off that volatility. there are in the derivatives markets people who can monetize that um and if they sell it cheaply then then money can be made and that was what was happening but here's the problem when when too many people were pursuing that strategy markets worked volatility got kind of crushed because so many were pursuing the same strategy I mean Scott I've never said this publicly but three different companies recruited me to run Bitcoin treasury companies or tried to um and I We talked about this in Vegas because it was right after Nakamoto launched and you and I sat down in Vegas in person and I said this to every guest. I was like, I've been pitched 20 Bitcoin treasuries in the last four hours.
What's going on?
Because I didn't realize how big of a bubble this was going to be on.
Well, the bubble was in volatility is now what we look back at it. It wasn't in the price. It was it was in the volatility, which got crushed because everybody was pursuing the same strategy. Now that said, some of the really smart people in this space who whom I respect were were some of those people who were really um excited about about this prospect. I made introductions at their request in some cases. I don't know how many people piled in. Um I dipped my toes in briefly and I look back at it and think, okay, yeah, this was I should have in in the in the coming from a Wall Street background where the convert market that's what that's where the ARB is. It's in it's in mispriced volatility and Bitcoin volatility was was not mispriced at the time. That's that's what a lot of folks have had to learn the lesson the hard way. Now, nothing about the fundamentals of Bitcoin has changed. Nothing at all. But some of these companies who pursued the Bitcoin Treasury strategy presuming that Bitcoin volatility would continue to remain high and they could use that as a financing technique to sell cheaply and and earn higher returns. Um, that strategy hasn't worked in the short term. That said, boy has it been pretty much crushed. Um, and so, you know, a lot a lot of those um investments may very well be cheap. You and Mike Alfred talked about that. Some of them may very well be cheap. Yeah, I I agree. So, it's very interesting because I don't think people realized until this sideways consolidation period exactly what Michael Sailor was doing and exactly what strategy was doing.
Dave Weissberger talks about this all the time. The fact that it's really the volatility that they need to continue to be able to offer the notes that they do and to continue to see the stock price go up. So it's almost like no volatility is worse than price going down for companies who are
who are executing that strategy.
That said, we also know that historically Bitcoin tends to do all of its fun and all of its huge games like 10 days a year.
Well,
right. So like there there will be another day when maybe we see another Bitcoin candle from 125 to 140.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean obviously if you look at a lot of models it's cheap or has been cheap right now, right? But then it has an update like today and some of that underperformance you know gets captured. So as you as you and I have talked in the past I think the price is the least interesting aspect of Bitcoin. That is where most people right now are spending their time and efforts though. And to your point some of the early Bitcoiners none of us cared that much. I mean we all knew that price mattered because think of the seven network effects of Trace Mayer right? you were gonna have to get to financialization before you get to world reserve currency which is his seventh and final one. We're in the financialization stage pretty pretty clearly now. And Trace and I kind of disagreed about the value of that. He he didn't which is so interesting because both both of us came from the Austrian school of thought on leverage that commodity based leverage is fine but circulation credit in other words money created out of thin air that's not backed by real savings that's where you start to get real problems and he didn't have as much of a problem as I do with with that financial financialization of le of bitcoin where people are creating you know leverage spirals in bitcoin that may unwind there. I just saw a really interesting um LinkedIn post. I can't remember who wrote it, so I apologize for not crediting the person, but it talked about Coinbase offering 10.82% yields on USDC. It wasn't on Bitcoin, it was on USDC, but they were pulling it apart. Where is that coming from? You know, you can make X percent on staking the underlying ETH, but it but that doesn't that's not all of it. And you know, a lot of folks were rightly saying, "Did we learn nothing from BlockFi?" Right? If you anytime you see
I was just going to say that was that was the uh baited hook that had me on Voyager and I believe at that point USDC was 9 something%. So it was actually less there.
Yeah. And now Coinbase is offering 10.8.
Of course, Luna was like 20% on USD or something. I don't remember how high it was, but CFI across the board floated kind of 9 to 12%. And I'm making no claims that Coinbase is doing anything on TOR. I have no idea. Like if your spidey senses don't single, don't don't tingle at the same level yield on stable coins now as
well look those platforms.
Super simple. You can earn 4% risk-free on short-term treasury bills right now. You can earn You tell me what the percentage is on staking. What is it? Two or 3%. Right. So
yeah, I mean ETH ETH staking two or 3%. Salana's in the seven.
So So if you're doing a, you know, ETH USDC at 10.82%, okay, you can maybe see where seven of it comes from, right? And that's the pro part of the problem is I'm mixing apples and oranges there because if you're because there is not 100% correlation between the staking rewards. You can't earn both, right? you've got to actually have some invested in the reserves as well, right? But if you were to be generous and say, let's assume all of the reserves are invested in T bills and all of the ETH is staked now, you're at seven. Um, and how do you get to 10.82, right? So, um, there's some there's some alchemy going on. And again, not all of it's bad. You know, I I like to point out when the when the Trady people look at this and poke fun of it, they don't understand staking. They don't understand that.
Yeah, they obvious.
Yeah. I mean, you you're taking protocol risk, but you're not taking the kind of counterparty risk that you take in a leverage structure. So, um, there is a yield that can be earned in the proofofstake protocols. There's protocol risk. There's more protocol risk. I'm not a big fan of those. I still think that that it was a mistake for Eve to switch from proof of work to proof of stake. But um, but but of course, you know, if you look at it objectively, staking is a is a way for you to earn yield and the risk that you're taking, you're being compensated for is protocol risk. So,
right, smart contract risk, protocol risk, which by the way, I I have literally no idea how to handicap.
No. Well, I mean, to be honest, so far nobody does, right? This and this is back to my point about zero day exploits. It's an asmmptote. The older it's it's what's it's called the Lindy effect. I think the longer technology has been around.
The longer it exists, the more likely it is to continue to
Exactly. And the asmtote it, you know, just keeps approaching zero every day, but it never actually gets there. Um, so you know, you get to the point where you can accept that there's not as much protocol risk, but to your point, there's more contract risk, too. I should say should have said that earlier. That's a good That's a good call out because
it's the idea that you can always sort of uh if you know no matter how far you are away from a wall, you can always step halfway closer.
Exactly.
And and never reach it. So there there's always some sort of some sort of risk there. I want to go back a bit to the Treasury conversation
because you made a really interesting point. These are all very smart people obviously,
but anyone who knows markets knows that any inefficiency like what we saw Michael Sailor take advantage of for so long with the volatility will eventually be arbed away by an efficient market, right? I mean, there just at some point enough people realize it that the opportunity disappears, right? The arbitrage never lasts forever. These opportunities never last. We've not really seen that many enter the market versus how many I expect. So, do you think that the finding creative ways to take on leverage or debt to buy Bitcoin part of the Treasury strategy has been somewhat proven to not work beyond, you know, strategy and maybe one or two other players? Do you think the treasury trend ends as a result of that or you just think that maybe we see a better and more responsible treasury trend? Because in my mind, taking cash flow from a company and putting Bitcoin on your balance sheet with your profits instead of holding cash really good idea.
Exactly. Right. Yes. If that's how you define treasury companies, then there are
But shouldn't that be a treasury company? Because it feels like the what we call treasury companies are actually hedges.
Yeah. Well, right. Yeah. So, as with so many things in this space, um that the terminology isn't exactly accurate and means different things to different people. So, I look at Bitcoin Treasury and digital asset treasury companies as those that take their operating cash flow and hold it instead of in T bills or bank deposits or money market funds, which is typically what a corporate treasurer would do, they diversify that into crypto of some sort. And I'm on the board of a company that announced they were doing that in in they were looking at it in May and made the announcement last week that they're doing it. Nobody picked up that it was a treasury play because it it to your point they're doing it with operating cash flow. Um and they are unrolling they announced they're unrolling it in their payments gateway as well. So um you can pay with with crypto in instead of just paying with US dollars. Um and they're bringing stable coins etc. So all that got announced last week. I didn't see that get picked up in the Bitcoin press and I think part of the reason is that well a it wasn't really new because they announced they were looking at it in May which was when the news occurred and it did get picked up in the in in the crypto press but also it's what you're talking about that that that's like a pure play treasury company who where a corporate treasur is taking operating cash flow and making investments with it as opposed to a hedge fund that is trying to play the volatility ARB and and and raise you know borrow cheaply and invest dearly. That's that's what that that play is. All that said, um you know, Sailor did did stumble on that R, but and stumble is the wrong word. That doesn't give him enough credit. It was deliberate.
Yeah, he he he definitely created this,
but he he created it, but he also is helping the space in in one regard, which is that he's creating a Bitcoin yield curve. And we really truly need a Bitcoin yield curve that's not driven just by the derivatives markets because I think we all know the derivatives markets are odd. And um and I'd much rather have a secured lending curve for Bitcoin that is more of a pure play and not driven by all the Greeks, you know, in in derivative land, Delta, Gamma, etc. Um, I I'd much rather have something that's pure play for borrowing and he is creating that. Uh, now it's it's got the counterparty credit risk of micro strategy associated with or strategy associated with it as well. It's funny. It's like I still call Twitter Twitter. Can't call it X. I still call strategy strategy forever be Micro Strategy. And it's not only because the name is so permanently stuck in my head because I can not say strategy strategy.
Yes. I've tried it so many times. Micro Strategy Strategy rolls off the tongue better than the strategy strategy. It's
well if you think about the timing of when he would have named the company Micro Strategy, Microsoft was, you know, the the gorilla. It still is in many ways um in in the software business. But I get why he used that name, you know, 25 years ago when it was hot. But anyway, so um but your your point is well taken. I I hats off to him for for being the one who's doing the price discovery and for using the cap table of the company to use to to create that price discovery for you know different teners of Bitcoin secured lending and that's going to have a broader impact. That's I suspect Scott that that's the lasting impact of all this um that the
Yeah, I think what he's
Yeah, go ahead. Well, it's the short in the short term, the Bitcoin Treasury thing was everyone realized that it it wasn't the bit it wasn't fundamentally Bitcoin. It was fundamentally financial alchemy. And yet, um, what comes out of it is is not a complete deflation of that bubble. What comes out of it is a true Bitcoin lending secured lending market where we know the different tenors of interest rates for term loans not just overnight but going out I wouldn't say 30 years but going out at least five years.
Yeah, If we want to take a favorable view on all of it at least they're doing financial alchemy to own Bitcoin. So there's a very stable underlying value to what they do
that's up and to the right.
You know I I've had a lot of Yeah. I've had a lot of conversations with Mark Moss about it. I know, you know, he's very was very passionate about Bitcoin treasury companies and I was sort of always voiced my concerns and he would just say, "Scott, listen,
at
the end of the day, even if it goes bad for shareholders now, if you believe Bitcoin will be at a much higher price in four years and they just hold, maybe they would underperform Bitcoin, but it still should go up dramatically and you should see value because they're holding a lot of Bitcoin."
Correct.
Well, but that's also part of their strategy. That's the financial alchemy to your point though. It may very well underperform Bitcoin in bare markets, but that allows them to reload because that's when volatility will go up and they can start monetizing it through through the convert market, right?
I just wonder how many of them can monetize it when you have an ele like a gorilla in the room as big as strategy because Michael Sailor is clearly never going to stop and is their thirst for strategy number 27.
Yeah. Well,
like th their notes. That's what's always worried me about this trend. And it's not a concern anymore for Bitcoin. I've been I've been talked off that ledge. I had the this is bad for Bitcoin uh gut wrenching reaction at first because I figured they would all be forced sellers at some point, but that might just be a 10% bigger draw down where some will be anyway. They might be the block fives,
but I just don't understand what kind of risk, you know, company 27 doing convertible notes is going to have to take on or offer to compete with the bigger ones in the room. And so maybe my concern should have been more directed at shareholders, which we've al obviously seen already with
a number of these.
Yeah, for sure. Right. It's it's in the in the stock prices. It just makes them it's kind of like the gold miners, right? there's a very clear cycle to gold miners to the mining stocks that's that it's they're just leveraged plays on the underlying right and and that ultimately I mean that's kind of what the Bitcoin miners were although the Bitcoin miners of course in a number of cases have become HPC companies so they have they have broken that trend in a number of cases and again to Mike Alfer's point he was ahead of that he really was he was banging the table on a couple of stocks and boy did they
was very unpopular
yeah when it was very unpopular.
But he said something to switch gears a little bit that also resonated with me and I'm sure you thought of it at the time when he talked about backed having been the slow and steady that went and worked with regulators and was never willing to do anything outside of the four corners of what they were permitted to do because they were owned by the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, ICE, which was not going to allow them to be cowboys. and that so many in the past few years of the companies that were Cowboys and and did play in the gray zone and did not go up the middle of the fairway to mix all kinds of sports metaphors there. Um um won in the last few years because the Gendler Grunberg bar you know Operation Showpoint 2.0 try to kill the whole industry for Elizabeth Warren strategy failed. Okay. And so it worked out for those companies that they could be swashbuckler risktakers. But um the backs of the world and by the way I put custodia in that same category. Slow and steady tried to work inside the boundaries of what we knew we were approved to do. And I and and Mike said like that's part of the reason why he joined backs board is that he sees that this the pendulum is swinging to to paraphrase him that those who actually did play inside the boundaries we know how to work inside the regulations all the kinks that are going to be faced by companies in this space who are getting regulated by the first time and examined by the you know for the first time there's going to be so much that they're going to have to learn and those of us who have just quietly, you know, clearly not made the right choice short term in the past few years for trying to work inside the regulatory perimeter. Um, we that our day is coming and and that really resonated with me when he talked about it in Back's case. I don't know that company. I've never met the people there. But
I think the sad part is how many backs in the world didn't make it to this point because they got crushed during the last regime and aren't here to
Oh, 100%. You're right about that.
Collect the spoils, right? I mean, custodial accounts as well, but
we don't even we we all know the stories of the banks that got crushed as a result, but there's probably a hundred other companies that were on the fringe that just didn't make it through that four year.
Yeah, absolutely. And it's not over yet, right? Um,
that was going to be my first question, by the way. If we hadn't have had October and something to talk about that was so exciting, I was literally just going to ask you, is Operation Chokepoint 2.0 over?
No. I just talked to a CEO yesterday who called for advice because they had just been debanked again. So, no, it it's
I I keep hearing that it's happening and I I keep hearing that it's happening. So, listen, I I know that these things take time to wash their way through the system, but still very concerning that there's debanking happening for crypto companies in the United States and and and worse things.
Yeah. And this was an egregious one um because I'm not going to reveal who it was or what the facts were, but they did everything right um in getting pre-approval to do something and then got rugpulled um and their account closed. So, you know, they they it raises an interesting question. Should you should you know there were there was the Sam Bankman Freed Cowboy swashbuckler criminal approach which is I'm going to call Alamita Alamita research so no one knows it's crypto when I open bank accounts and I'm going to deliberately try to you know obfuscate to to the people that I should be disclosing to and I'm going to commit bank fraud which is what Sam Bankmanfrey did. Okay. He should they they could have gone after him for bank fraud for all that. They didn't but they could have they still probably could. They're still inside the statute of limitations if they wanted to go after him for more. And I wish they would because man oh man did he cause a lot of problems including and especially for my own company. But um um but but you know people who are open and honest and try to make sure that they have durable relationships you know end up getting rugpulled. Um, and you know, it's one of those things where one person at a bank says it's okay. And then it goes all the way up to the top and the top says, "I don't want to have to have an explanation of this to my bank examiner in during my bank exam. Close the account." And then of course the bank has to go somewhere.
I thought they wouldn't have to answer those questions anymore. We have friendlier bank regulators. So is that a fear?
Okay. So is that at the highest level? Do you think that that's disbelief that things have actually changed? Is it a fear that Democrats take the Senate and Elizabeth Warren's right back on top of the Senate Banking Committee and it in a year or a year and a half and you know we all got too excited too early. Or is it those people haven't kept up and don't know that times have changed? Welcome to the party. I I don't really understand it. Like what are the last vestages of operation choke point 2.0 I guess should be the real question. Is it still the Fed?
Oh yes, it's definitely still the Fed. the and and I keep pointing out the obvious which is that the the most anti-crypto regulation of the Fed has still not been rescended. It was voted on seven to nothing by the board of governors on January 27th, 2023 at and released at the exact same time as custodia's denial. And it says that banks can't touch dig can't touch um digital assets as principal and can't issue stable coins. And it says that using permissionless blockchains is presumed unsafe and unound, which is a banking term for you can't do it. So all that's still in play, Scott. And part of it is I've talked about this recently. Part of the the the why why is Trump going after Jay Powell? Well, that Fed Board of Governors is majority anti-Trump people. Okay. So why is it that the Fed Board of Governors hasn't rescended that when it's pretty clear that at least two of the seven people who voted for it wouldn't be voting for it today? They would want to rescend it. The answer is because it was 5-2 against Trump and now it's 4-3 because he got Steve Meyer confirmed. But it's still 4-3 against him, right? Why is he trying to fire Lisa Cook? Well, because he thought that might work. We're we're recording on October 1st when the Supreme Court just said that oral argument on that case is set for January. Well, that puts Trump in an interesting bind from the perspective of what he was trying to accomplish, which is to flip the board of governors 43 in his favor because he needs one more seat. Okay. So, if if firing Lisa Cook didn't work, um, and now that's going to get delayed till January, can he wait till January? Here's the reason why I don't think he can. the the Fed, the FOMC, which is what he's really focused on, consists of seven Fed board of governors, which are Senate confirmed. That's the group we were just talking about, which is now 34. Um, it's three pro, four against Trump. Okay? And then five rotating um Federal Reserve Bank presidents. There are 12 regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents like the New York Fed, like the Richmond Fed, like the Minneapolis Fed, right? 12 of those. So the FOMC consists of five rotating ones and one um permanent which is the uh New York Fed. Okay. So if you go look at who are those 12 Federal Reserve Bank presidents and you go you know through AI tools it's pretty easy to figure out what have their political contributions been in the past. You know in one case Austin Goulsby was a Obama administration official. Pretty obvious he's not going to vote with Trump. So, a majority of that group is not going to vote with Trump. Um, and and and frankly, there's been some academic studies, it's probably 80% are anti-Trump, right? So, what is Trump trying to do? Why did I go into that governance stuff? Because it's all about governance here. Trump is on February 28th, the board of governors is going to vote whether to reappoint those 12 Federal Reserve Bank presidents who were nominated by their by the banks in each of those districts. So, um Jay Powell's term is not up until May 31st, but February 28th is the key date because if he really wants to flip the FOMC to not having a majority anti-Trump, it's going to happen by February 28th. And the Supreme Court just this morning just said it's not even going to have oral arguments on the Lisa Cook firing until January. So I I I think that the probability that Trump fires Powell just went up because he's got to find another another way. Otherwise
So he just needs to find somebody of those four to get out and Powell is the easiest one for
so he gets a majority of that take a beating.
Yeah. Yeah. Now I I I think he could make cause cases to fire more than just Powell. Uh Michael Bar I've called publicly the Fed's debanker and chief. He's the one who pulled the trigger on Silvergate. Okay. So um I mean there there's you know it could if he wanted to he could make cause cases for more than just Powell. So it's going to be interesting because Trump now as a result of the decision that just came out is going to have to take action. And he keeps he keeps hinting that he's going to do something with Powell right over the weekend.
He's trying.
Yeah. He he sent out a meme. you're fired. Um, a cartoon. I think I think Baron must be um having fun with Trump's, you know, um, with AI and
I saw that Baron's made 60 million, by the way. I think I've se I just saw that Baron's made like 60 or 80 million in crypto.
Yeah, I mean, but, you know, he's he's a DGEN crypto trader, right? And and he's the one who told Trump to go on Joe Rogan and some other, you know, digital media. um which turned out to be right because he was able to reach an audience of younger folks that don't watch CNN, right? Um and it helped. It clearly helped. And uh so yeah, I mean, let's put it this way. I think um there's a definite increase in the tools, the electronic digital tools that Trump has used in his own Twitter account and his own, you know, truth social account. All the AI stuff. He sent like four memes out last night on his Twitter account. Um, and that clearly using AI, right? So, where's that coming from? That's probably not coming from him, you know, happened to just play around. I would guess it's probably coming from Baron. Um, having some fun and then his dad thinks, "Hey, this is great." And then tweets it out. So, and and you know, most people get a laugh. I'm sure it pisses pisses a lot of people off. But, um, he's uh he's he is definitely the troller and chief.
Just to check back in, I guess, on this topic since we've now kind of gone there. We always have this endless debate on whether the Trump presidency is a net positive or net negative for the crypto space. I obviously believe net positive, regardless of what his family does. If you look at the last four years, talk to someone like you at Gustoia,
forget all the speculation and meme coins and all of that. the penguin had swung so far in an irrational hatred and oppression of this industry that
it's swinging back is a huge net positive. But at this point, having seen
what they've done on the government level, which I would say is deliver on almost all of their promises or at least make massive progress towards that versus how much the Trump family has been enriched by involvement in this industry. I mean, how do you put that on the spectrum at this point?
Well, I point to what Senator Lama says, which is that what the Trump family has done has made her job harder and I think that's right. Um because there are a lot of people who have objected to it and um so I've stayed away from all that as as you know. Uh but
um it's it's I I I I acknowledge that um it has made those who have been trying to work through it and you know I stayed neutral. Um, I I'm I'm after what happened to us, um, I'm less so I'm much more, you probably picked up on my own Twitter, I'm much more, um, I'm I'm moving in one clear direction. Um, because as the longer this goes on where where just the absolute unethical, immoral, and probably illegal things that were being done haven't been fixed yet, um, the longer I I uh I I'm taking more of a clear position in one direction. But um I tried hard to work with both sides. I really did.
Yeah, I watched and and we talked about it. Literally, you and I literally sat and interviewed a presidential candidate and you said, "I'm not taking sides." Yep. So I I I know I know where you stand and how hard you tried to to remain that way. But I think what you described for you probably applies to a lot of people in this industry.
And as we were sort of discussing Operation Chokepoint 2.0, I know. I wondered if we're still maybe a little bit too complacent about the pleasant changes that have happened because I think a lot of people see how much it's changed and take for granted or believe that it will always be that way and there is a real risk that things could go I won't say all the way back the other way but certainly reset back in the other direction depending on how the next election goes. So it's very hard I would rem I would imagine in a position like yours where maybe you're finally starting to see some wins to remain on the sidelines and just say let's see what happens.
Yeah. Well, you know, also a lot of what Trump did is administrative so that um if and when the well when the Democrats eventually come back in it could be reversed pretty easily through executive orders. Right. So um this is what's so fascinating about October 1st which is the government first day of the government shutdown with the OM director saying he d about a little over a week ago it came out that he directed all the agencies to create plans to permanently eliminate the non-essential jobs and um I I don't I'm not an expert in this but I saw a podcast this morning a very brief um from Peter Stan saying in order to do that in order to lay off the furled government employees, they have to have a 61day um um you know government shutdown. I don't know the details there, so I would encourage folks to go listen to his work as he's been all over this. But
my point is that I think that this one is different because Trump, you know, frankly, a lot of us, including those who haven't been political, are just appalled at some of the things that have happened culturally in this in this country. Um and and and it's just enough, right? The whole all these senseless murders of people, it's just enough. And
Charlie Kirk obviously swung a lot of things. That's not like outside. I I don't get political here. That's not worth discussing. It just as like objective fact, if you paid attention or talked to people, a lot of sidelined people became
spoke out for the first time
very quickly in the game. Yeah.
Yep. and and Arena Zitskaya, I think is how her name was pronounced. It's just and those two things happening one right after the other. It's just, you know, a lot of fathers saw their daughters potentially being in that position, right? And it's just it just made folks really angry. And um so yeah, I I I do think it's different this time. I do think that some of these things that have, you know, the pendulum over the last 20 years has swung toward just the government having just accepting that the government has all this power and can do whatever it wants. And then we all watched it be abused. And I know that there's I'm not making a direct connection between these murders and um and the abuse of government power, but I but but there is definitely a a zeitgeist where you know the government can do no wrong. And then folks like me watch as the government government power was abused against us and because of sovereign immunity there are questions whether there will ever be accountability against it. Now, I'll let me point to something that nobody really in the crypto press picked up. I'm on the board of the of a company called Public Square, which has a subsidiary called Cordova that finances firearms. And I that company was targeted by the Biden administration. This the CFPB, which is Elizabeth Warren's pet agency, opened an investigation into it in early 2021, right after Biden took the presidency. And then it was going going along going along going along. um Public Square bought the company I think la about a year and a half ago knowing that it was under investigation by the CFPB. Well, then Don Jr. joins the board of Public Square right after the election and it is public because the CFPB deacto apologized and admitted to wrongdoing here. Um it is public that uh that that the CFPB suddenly after months of inaction on that investigation um within hours ratcheted up the pressure and put that company in a vice grip. But what had also come out to try to get them to admit wrongdoing and and settle um before Trump took office and before this crew lost power. Um, but what what is also interesting is that they were making settlement demands that would have caused that company to violate federal firearms laws. So that put that company into a catch 22. Now step back, you know, where's the accountability for something like that? Is anyone in jail for abusing government power against a company that the now CFPB has said there was no wrongdoing? They closed the investigation, exonerated the company, and de facto apologized saying they've never seen a weaponization of government power to such degree. This is all on CFPB letterhead. Okay. Um, so if anyone out there is saying there was no debanking, there's exhibit A. There's the government admitting that that it happened and and de facto apologizing for the wrongdoing. So now the now the question is all right there were basically one of one of the social tenants that we have in this country is the assumption that government employees will be honest and will apply justice you know blindly and not target political appointees on either side of the aisle and not be not be ideological about their about applying their government power. And when
They are dishonest, and they use their government power as a cudgel to achieve social policy that they believe that they want, but not that Congress ever enacted or the president ever enacted because the voters never voted for that. What do you do in that situation? And that's part of the challenge is no one's in jail for having done that, right? Because of sovereign immunity.
Um, you know, it's even if the DOJ went after them, there are some things I think that were illegal in some of these instances, but because of sovereign immunity, the individuals who abused their government power aren't going to ever be held accountable. So, you know, how do you fix that, Scott? I, this is what's so interesting coming back to the the shutdown and why I think this time is different because there is a pathway. The Trump administration has said, "We're gonna tear down this whole apparatus of power," in so many words. That's what they've said. And so I do think that it is different this time precisely because they don't want it to ever happen again. And, um, and and that's, you know, I think I think people should be steeled for a for a a longer shutdown this time because of what the Trump administration itself has said it might do.
61 days is a long, I mean, that's a long shutdown to get to that finish line if that's >> get to the airport earlier. That was the uh one of the pieces of advice that I heard this morning. I mean, all of that, but also, you know, you put that in context of markets and the fact that that means no, whether you believe the data or not, that means no data, right? I mean, it does mean no data. Markets hold their, yeah, the markets hold their breath. Jobs numbers today and CPI tomorrow and PPI, whatever three-letter word you can come up with.
>> This is so interesting.
>> Maybe we get a free market.
>> This is so interesting, Scott. Exactly. Right. We're going to realize that there are private sources of that data, and we're going to realize that markets are going to go right along. And this whole notion that the Fed is data-driven, data-dependent, well, when there's not data, or they they only have, you know, non-standard data sources because it's private data, um, they're going to have to rely on that. So, it's it's going to reveal a lot of things. I just, it'll be fascinating to see if the Trump administration has the guts to do it, but I I I think it is different this time. I don't think that they're going to just back down. I think, um, I I I think that there are so many people who are disgusted by the abuse of government power, in especially the Biden administration, that they just want that whole apparatus of that was abused against, um, industries that the Biden administration disfavored. They want it torn down, and they want it gone.
>> So, I definitely can't let you go without getting a Custodia update and talking about all the exciting things that you've been doing. Obviously, we've talked at length about the tokenized bank deposits and the fact that that should be just you who's able to do it because of, uh, obviously your patents there. Where are things for you? Has that progressed further? And also, just, you know, is Custodia having any luck now with these more favorable regulators? Are we still stuck with the same garbage?
>> Good, uh, good questions. Um, uh, I don't want to get ahead of announcements. We're working on things. Um, it's fascinating. What I would step back and say is that folks are looking at the stablecoin market, which has just been on fire. It's, I think last I looked, $289 billion outstanding. But the more interesting data point is Visa's dashboard showed that the last 30 days transaction volume for stablecoins was $5.4 trillion. If you annualize that, it's $63 trillion, and the AC network in Q2, if you annualize that, was $93 trillion. So, I know that the data is not reliable. There's wash trading, and, you know, a lot of that stablecoin use is in crypto trading, and it's not really apples to apples to oranges. Concede all that. Um, but the the the stablecoin volumes are off the charts, and anybody who thinks that this is not going to fundamentally transform the traditional financial system is is just praying for regulatory capture to bail them out, and it's not going to happen. Um, so, so what do I mean by that?
>> Banks are trying really hard.
>> The banks are trying really hard. Yeah.
>> The banks are trying really hard. Well, it's funny because
>> they're really they're really upset with Genius now, which is funny because they got the provisions they wanted and realized that maybe they weren't so good for them, and now they're lobbying against
>> Yeah. And and I don't know if anything, let's put it this way. I don't think I don't think there's any chance that the Genius Act itself is overturned or that those provisions the banks don't like are going to be overturned. I don't think there's a. Well, let's put it this way. The Trump administration does not have a lot of patience for the banks because even though I don't think it's entirely fair, they the Trump administration does blame the banks for the debanking that happened to the Trump family itself. Um, I've said, I think it's 90% the finan the federal financial regulators, not the not the banks themselves, but, um, it's nonetheless, I don't think there's a lot of patience for for the banks. So I I don't think that'll be overturned.
Where back to your question, tokenized bank deposits, the the the buildup that I gave you with that data is that all that stablecoin activity is happening before the banks even get here, right? Because they've been they've been sidelined by by Operation Chokepoint and kept away. And remember, the Fed hasn't overturned that regulation yet. So, um, the banks, I I think are still trying to figure out what to do. There is definitely a lot of activity, and we with our partner Vantage Bank are right there, um, with a very, very compelling solution to the banks to be able to offer tokeniz tokenized dollars without threatening their core deposits and doing in such a way that is immediately accretive and doesn't require a big upfront investment. So we will share details on how we're going to be doing that soon. Um, um, I don't want to get ahead of folks because there's a, boy, is there a lot of work. Back to Mike Alfred's point about backed, you know, when you're working with regulators, they don't move at, you know, fintech speed. Um, bank regulators move at bank speed, and, uh, but when they make decisions, they do tend to be durable. So, um, so I I think the investment of time and effort that we've been making with Vantage since our announcement, since pre pre before our announcement in March, is going to end up u paying off, but it just doesn't move very quickly. We we will soon, uh, there is news, but we we will we will soon announce it.
And so the punchline for your listeners who don't necessarily care directly about what what happens to Custodia as a company is the the numbers are going to be big. I this is this, the tokenized dollars are going to be big. Yes, there's a distinction between tokenized bank deposits and stablecoins. Yes, right now all the activity is in stablecoins. We're going to link the two in a safe and sound way. And it's when City upgraded its estimate to three trillion from 2.4, I think their high end of their estimate is four trillion of stablecoin activity by stablecoins outstanding. So that's takes the 289 to four trillion.
>> market cap
>> by 2030, right? And and by that point, then the transaction volume because they're high velocity will will exceed a, um, what this is going to mean is those numbers are still too low. I think they're way too low. Scott.
>> I was just going to say it sounds so conservative to me and they probably think they're
>> I don't understand who's going to use banks if they have stablecoins and these actually become adopted and the banks are actually using the stablecoins themselves.
>> Well, you can already see this battle.
>> Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you can always see this battle between
>> our already existing public stablecoins and who's choosing to like, you know, partner with Coinbase on something stablecoin related, or who's choosing to park partner with USDC, but also who's starting their own Layer 1. What banks are announcing their own stablecoins? And then all of that is nothing compared to what you're doing. Well, because if someone can figure out, protected by intellectual property protections, how to deliver this technology into the core of the banking system. We're not talking about a bolt-on. We're not talking about sort of a side idea. This goes straight into the system, right? If you get those primitives inside the banks themselves, then the banks can then go build on those primitives. And and by the way, when Paul Atkins says that we're now going to start tokenizing securities, you know, I think the AC system within five years is essentially just going to die on the vine because people will just be walking away from it. And a lot of folks won't even know that what's happening behind the scenes is touching a blockchain. I think if the engineers do
>> that's the only way it works, actually.
>> Yes.
>> If they know we're not we don't get there.
>> Correct. And if the engineers do their jobs well, which I have confidence in their ability to do so, they'll abstract away all that complexity. And so, you know, just like I I taught a class yesterday at the University of Wyoming, and I asked people, "How many of you use Venmo?" Of course, you know, everybody's nodding their heads, right? And everyone who I was teaching about payment systems, you think that when you send Venmo to your friend when you're splitting a dinner check, and it immediately shows in their account that the money is there? No, it's not. It's an IOU. What's going on behind the scenes is it's going through this very, um, Rube Goldberg-esque, spaghetti-esque system of intermediaries, and credit got extended from your bank to the other person's bank until the payment actually settles through what's probably going to be the AC system two days later. Um, uh, so that's the kind of stuff that all of that complexity in the background is going to get abstracted away. It's going to help the average merchant who has, you know, a two or three percent profit margin, but they're paying three to five percent to the card companies. I don't necessarily think the card networks go away. I just think that margin's going to shrink. But the volume that's going to get put through all this, it's just like what happened in the stock market when the when stock trading went from fractions to decimals. Everybody was like, "Oh my gosh, the margins are going to go down because now you're defining profit margins in pennies, not eighths." But in fact, now, um, what happened? Transaction volume exploded higher, and everybody made more money even though the margins went down because volumes were up. And that's what's going to happen here too.
>> Yeah. And I believe that blockchains, stablecoins will become completely commoditized and as you said, abstracted away to the point where, listen, if a consumer needs to know if they're sending USDC or USDT or USD1 on Tron or Aptos or Ether, then it's not going to work.
>> Correct.
>> What's going to happen when this works is that you go to your bank or you do whatever, and you say, "I'm sending dollars to such and such." And that long Rube Goldberg process you described in the background is actually an instantaneous settlement on some stablecoin on some network that you don't know about.
>> Yep. Tokenized deposit to tokenized deposit, more likely.
>> And it is actually instantaneous, right? Yes. You know
>> exactly. And it'll be bank-to-bank.
>> Banks should want that.
>> Yes. And the wild card is, will the US Treasury issue treasuries in tokenized form? That would be the ultimate leverage that the US Treasury Department has over the Fed because the Fed operates the payment system. They have famously kept out anyone that they didn't they don't like. Um, but by the way, famously also given legally ineligible companies and even a state like Texas Fed master accounts. Um, so there's been a lot of hoie, um, and, um, corruption in Fed master accounts. But the funny thing is, if the US Treasury decides to tokenize T-bills, then would anyone bother with Fedwire and banks anymore if they can just make a large value payment by delivering T-bills? Right. Stop and think about that. You there's always been this sort of, you know, um, friction between the US CBDC by
>> well, that it is, and a lot of people are concerned about that, but a, um, but but the US Treasury doesn't, even though FinCEN is under the US Treasury, they don't do KYC on T-bills.
>> Right. It's the banks that do that through the Fed. Right. So Scott Bessant has a very interesting card if he should try to play it. If if the Powell Fed continues to cause problems for the Trump administration, he's got a he's got some very interesting cards to play. A lot of people talk about the, um, Treasury General Account and how you can de facto, you know, um, do Operation Twist through repurchases of long-term treasuries or, you know, do QE through the Treasury General Account. These were things that Janet Yellen did. Um, she she's the one who sort of introduced those tools. The Treasury could dominate the Fed is to use one of Lyn Alden's very famous quotes, um, fiscal dominance. There's nothing stopping this train. The Fed is kind of a taker on some of these things because they can't stop it. Which is part of the reason why I look back and think they were so crazy not to work with Custodia and get all this inside the banking system. But they didn't. And instead, it's now developing outside of the banking system. The horse has horses have left the barn. Um, uh, they're running, just like the horses behind me, um, running away as fast as they can. And, uh, US Treasury is in a position where if it decides to pull that trigger and start issuing T-bills on Ethereum or Solana, just like, uh, the SEC chair Paul Atkins is saying, they're going to start letting securities be issued. Holy cow. Um, one of the big problems, by the way, keeping securities from being truly tokenized is that the corporate registrations are still done in analog form. I'm still working on this. I think you and I have talked about this before. My very first work with a government was with the state of Delaware in 2016, the Delaware Blockchain Initiative, trying to get the Delaware Secretary of State to run a node on a blockchain to allow people to have a choice whether to register their corporations, i.e., all their shares of stock, in analog form or in blockchain form. And Delaware has resisted that classic regulatory capture. They, you know, the reg the registered agents loved having analog pieces of, you know, paper or digitized pieces of analog paper to to pass around. They don't want natively digital securities. But once we get to natively digital securities, man oh man, do we just wipe away all that all that complexity in the back office of Wall Street. But that, you got to get tokenized dollars in the banking system first. Um, because it's you can't really get the benefits of tokenized securities a until they're natively digital issued, but b until the dollar leg of a securities trade can be settled in tokenized form as well. It's still true that stablecoins are pretty much their own, you know, external financial system. There's not a lot of connectivity because again, the Fed hasn't hasn't rescinded that that regulation yet that says banks can't own digital assets and can't, I mean, it's it's presumed unsafe and unsound if they are engaging with permissionless blockchains, right? So that pretty much explains why you haven't seen the big banks yet really participating in the stablecoin market.
>> You always make me think 10 levels deeper than I already was about all of these topics. It's about to get so.
>> It is though, Scott. I think the next five years are going to be so much fun because the amount of change that's coming is just staggering, and it's great. It's great for the end-user. It's great for the end consumer. It's going to be bringing down the cost of financial services. There's going to be a massive consolidation wave in the banking industry because those that don't future-proof their business are going to have to sell out to those that did. So, it's an incredible opportunity for the really tech-forward banks. And I love working with Vantage in part because the top two guys are IT guys. And so when you actually have a bank run by IT guys, they look at things quite differently, and that's that's how we've conceived of the idea of delivering tokenized deposits in the way in which we're going to do it and connecting them to stablecoins. And I think a lot, as we've had conversations, everybody's said, "Whoa," when they see what our idea is. It is unique. It is not something that has been talked about in the market before. It is going to be different. Uh, but I think, uh, when we can talk about it, folks will realize it's something really special, and it brings tokenization into the core of the banking system. For the maxis who might be questioning, why am I doing this? Because I think once you get those primitives inside the core of the banking system, it's not very far for the banks to then say, "Okay, let's start offering Bitcoin." And, um, this is an on-ramp into Bitcoin. May maybe, uh, we've always thought of Bitcoin as the Trojan horse, but maybe the stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits are the Trojan horse for
>> I think they are. That's how I I've always thought of them that way, Scott. It's funny. It's Do you realize we're coming up on the fifth anniversary of Kraken applying for its Fed master account, which I think is October 12th, so it's next week. And ours was October 28th, 2020. We're coming up on five years. But in Custodia's case, um, we had it as part of our business plan since early 2020. It's always been always been what our plan was was was to use this as a pathway to where we think the financial system will ultimately go, which is towards Bitcoin. But that's a long-term, that's a very long-term play. There's a lot to be done in the meantime, um, with stablecoins as as the, uh, as the most important infrastructure. I think.
>> Another incredible conversation. I can't believe, as usual with you, that we've cooked through an hour so quickly, but thank you so much again. And we'll have to catch up much sooner, hopefully, than last time. I guess it's only been a couple.
>> So much has happened. And then we had, but then we did the live one with Tilman where you blew his mind, right?
>> And Andrew. So, yeah, we, you know, I guess we we
>> those guys have been right too, you know. So congrats. You've, uh, you've had some great conversations. You've delivered some great content and
>> uh, let's, happy October.
>> Yes. Happy October indeed. And
>> see you next time.
>> Take care. Thank you, Kaitlin. [Music] That's dope.