Transcription
We're entering a global peer-to-peer world where we don't always need the middleman, the banks as we know them in the center. It's going to be a much more empowering future for entrepreneurs and people in finance with all sorts of ideas and consumers.
Hi everyone, welcome to Wealthon. I'm Maggie Lake with Brett Rentmester, founder and managing director at Windrock Wealth Management. And today we're going to talk all things crypto. Hey Brett. Hi. How are you? I'm doing well. So I'm excited about this. It has been a big year for crypto. Just explain to me a little bit your involvement. You know, when did you start looking at it? How far are you all on the learning journey with your client? Sort of. Let's set the table with with your relationship and how you're thinking about this asset class.
Yeah. I mean, I I guess the good news is we go way back with this, you know, back to uh the earlier days of Bitcoin. It's it's been something on our radar and that we've actively invested in for um well over a decade. Um and you know, really I think two or three things. One is I think it's important for people to realize that the Bitcoin was born out of the 2008 financial crisis. That's when it kind of came into existence. And at the time there was a real loss of faith in the system and banks and you had all these failures. So, it offered this appeal of almost like a people's money, a peer-to-peer transaction system that didn't require a middleman bank. And back in the early days, our vision was, well, someday a payment system like this might have a value greater than something like a PayPal or maybe in a best case greater than a Visa. You know, not surprisingly to anybody today, Bitcoin is now, if you want to look at it, kind of a top five asset just behind Apple in market cap. and having surpassed Amazon. So, um just to to put that in context and if you look at it as a currency relative to global currencies, it's a top 10 currency. So, it's obviously come a long way and uh been a very exciting story.
Yeah, that's amazing that to to have that sort of breath. Um I think it's a huge advantage because a lot of people have kind of jumped on the bandwagon afterwards. And I think what's drawn a lot of us to it uh or certainly a lot of people watching this is probably just the price momentum, right? They've seen it go up and they thought, "Oh, I I I got to get it get a piece of this," which is fine, but understanding that sort of broader genesis and and what's driving the innovation in that space, I think, is hugely important. And so I'd like to sort of drill down on that a little bit because I think that's what a lot of us are lacking in this conversation around crypto. So talk to me a little bit about the evolution as this went from this idea and I love that you were thinking about it from a payment point of view because that's super interesting and I I understand that part of it, the sort of frictionless payment aspect, but there's so much going on. There are so many cryptocurrencies. These are so many platforms. There's so many so much innovation. I'm curious how you've been creating a framework to think about all of this momentum. So, you know, going just from Bitcoin to now this entire universe, just how are you breaking it up? How are you quantifying it? How do you approach it?
Yeah. Well, that is the key question I think in this space for investors. It's having a framework that guides you because it was the wild west when we got involved with it, but now it's the wild west on steroids because I mean there's tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of coins and teams and upstarts and it's almost impossible to to to have your hand on the pulse of all of that, right? Um let me just start by answering what you were getting at is, you know, it's not just price going up that's getting people in. It's also looking at crypto as a technology and just like the internet or cell phones, there's an adoption curve. You know, the early movers, the mass market, etc. And we're moving through that cycle and and we're more in that, you know, mass market kind of mode now where people have heard about it, they understand it, etc. And of course, it all started with Bitcoin. And um let let's start with Bitcoin. The early days of Bitcoin were exactly on that premise of like can there be a money system that doesn't involve the banks. It's just peer-to-peer. You you to me wherever you are in the world. And even uh I think President Obama at the time famously said it's like have Bitcoin is like having a Swiss bank account in your pocket, right? It's like nobody nobody's tracking you. You can do whatever you want with it. But early on people had this vision of it. I'm going to buy things in Bitcoin transactional. And that didn't really materialize in the way people thought. But there's a very important concept behind that which is called Gresham's law which is bad money drives out good money. So I remember being faced with this dilemma. Hey, do I try to buy that in Bitcoin or do I just pay cash? And I always come back to well I want to hold on to the Bitcoin. I think that's going to do well. I'll just pay cash. So people ended up instead of transacting a lot in Bitcoin kind of hoarding it. And early on people thought maybe it was failing because people weren't using it transactionally. But I think what's it it's evolved to is it's more of a store of value. You can transact in it, but you're probably only going to do it if it's a big transaction, right? So, a company to company or you're going to buy a house with it. And so, I think that's an important insight on how these things evolve. It's not that token system of trading. I think stable coins are going to become that that intermediate kind of mechanism, but backing some of that will be things like Bitcoin.
That's a great way to look at it. And I love that that explanation because I was sent off on stories to try to spend Bitcoin and it was impossible. You know, there was no for the ordinary person. So, I love the idea of that. All of that um hodddling is is is exactly what ended up happening. So, it makes sense that became a store value. So, what about all the other cryptocurrencies that have cropped up? I mean, I think that most of us understand it's not really a currency. it's a rapper and you really have to think about what that ecosystem is doing or what it stands for. So, ETH seemed like it was the second most popular and then that kind of hit a rough patch. It it I don't know where we are, where you think what your thoughts are on where we are now with that, but but how are you looking at the rest of the universe? If Bitcoin is a store of value, what else is there?
Yeah. So, so let me mention that. I think in a lot of categories, what makes this interesting is it's a winner take all kind of proposition. So, Bitcoin's so exciting because if that becomes a de facto store of value, that's going to stand on its own and be a global story, right? So, if you go down to other categories, so let's call that store of value and let's call transactional things. There are different coins and tokens doing that, but let's just call that maybe the stable coins that are US dollarbacked and stuff take a lot of that that space. The next category I would call um finance, smart contracts, decentralized finance or DeFi. You hear a lot of terms and Ethereum is really the the granddaddy so to speak of this category, the early mover and you know it's been criticized over the years and it's going through a little bit of a slow patch now but I think if you look to smart players in the space that are building on top of it like Coinbase has their own chain now called base and they decided to build that on top of the Ethereum infrastructure. So obviously Coinbase is pretty knowledgeable and they see a lot. So they're giving a strong validation that Ethereum has a pretty significant place in the ecosystem at least as a settlement layer or something that the finance industry needs stable secure protocols to build on top of right so it's not the fastest chain if you're trying to do a something a quick transaction and have it take two seconds that might not be Ethereum but for finance applications where you need security you need you know a system that's been around with the network. You know, I we think Ethereum still plays that role in in that space. So, let's call that the second bucket of I'll roughly call it decentralized finance or DeFi. I think and again, these are examples. I should point out this is not investment advice. These are examples of names and representative coins that just kind of articulate what this framework is. Many of our interviews delve into investments you can only achieve by being an accredited investor. By signing up to our accredited investor list through the link in the description below, you'll get our 15 fulllength Rick rule symposium interviews for free, plus our free reports on investing in rare earth, uranium, and copper, some of the hottest metals right now.
Yeah. Like we would talk about sectors in the equity market, right? like there's there's a way for us to wrap our head around, you know, to try to watch for trends. So, I think this is kind of an exercise in doing the same kind of thing. It's just that like a lot of us don't have the vocabulary. So, what about what about the things that some of us might actually interact with or touch or that mass market element that we've all been waiting for the bridge, you know, for when we are spend some kind of token or c is there anything happening there? Is that a bucket?
Yeah, absolutely. That's probably our third bucket of how we think of things, mass market, consumerf facing. Um, you saw this, you saw this with Ethereum way back when, but more recently in the last cycle with Salana and others doing NFTTS or these nonfgeible tokens, you know, the coin with, you know, whatever Dogecoin, things that are memecoin oriented, but something that has to be very quick, like I want to buy it now. I want it in my wallet. I want to send it to you. And there's a lot of applications. Um, I've often said that there's no reason Facebook and some of these platforms exist because it's you and I sharing our stuff together on one platform. Like a the future a crypto mechanism um like a decentralized network should manage that. And so the future is, hey, I want to tip I I like the article you did. I'm going to tip you some coins. And that's got to be a space where there's quicker moving uh tokens than Ethereum. They might not be as secure, but people don't care. It's quick, smaller transactions. And there's things like Salana is an example in that space. Stewie, which are ex Facebook people when they were developing a coin, is in that space. And there's many others, but I think that's a whole third segment that's kind of a core bucket.
Yeah, that's interesting. I know I I know some people who are um essentially building a social network with using on the Salana uh chain. So that makes sense that that is that sort of consumerf facing um aspect of it. What are some of the other buckets that you're looking at?
Yeah. Well, the fourth major bucket and then there's some others I I think and it's just developing but it's very exciting is what we call decentralized AI artificial intelligence. So of course all the headlines we're hearing about are you know the big tech companies developing their own large language model you know AI systems. But the fundamental problem to that is, you know, human intelligence to me is too important to have any one company control and be able to dictate some of the output on what, you know, we're told is truth. So, enter AI with cryptocurrency and now you can have a decentralized platform. So think of a platform where AI teams on their own building things can come to that helps regulate their activities and helps incent them in a way that maybe venture capital does in the normal world. So they're building applications on platforms but in a decentralized manner and it's kind of like pure capitalism. Um, and so instead of a small team with an idea having to join Microsoft or Apple or something else, they can be an upstart, plug into this platform and create the next version of something that just works better than what big companies are doing. So I think that's the whole next frontier of what people are going to be excited about is decentralized AI.
That's wild. What's the payoff for those developers? because I think I just saw some eyewatering salary that was given to someone to join. I, you know, can't remember what it was, but it was just like, yeah, it's meta. I think you're thinking of meta. Yeah, it was likeundred millions of dollars for superstar, right? Exactly. Just so so why would young, really talented developers want to go on this sort of decentralized AI platform?
Yeah. Well, it's it's like a lot of things in life. Do you want to go work for the big company for 20 years and then be the person that gets paid those kind of dollars or do you want to start your own? Do you have your own idea? Uh because what AI and crypto together is allowing is anybody with an idea to potentially build something at very low cost, right? I could be a 15-year-old that knows tech a bit and I could plug in and if I'm on um there's a couple systems that I'll mention just as examples. I'm familiar with one called Bit Tensor, which is a system that's developed that again it helps coordinate different independent teams that can plug into it and then has an incentive system where people that are invested in Bit Tensor can put some of their waiting or some of their tokens into different ideas that are succeeding. So, it's kind of like if I'm a developer, I have like a, you know, venture capital kind of community of investors that if I have the right idea, I can plug into this platform and money can find me and I can scale in a different way than I can working for a big company. There's also things like on the base network again just an example virtuals is is a platform where people are basically building these agents or bots where you're empowering uh these agents to go out with AI intelligence and and you know complete tasks where you're not having to be the one driving it all. So I'm not a techie. I'm I'm you know I I look for kind of the big picture trends but I think we're at a point where crypto's top in people's minds and so is AI.
Yeah. So yeah, that's amazing. That's a really amazing. By the way, if you have, you know, if you want to do work that is about helping the world solve some really important problems and you can't get those VCs to pay attention to you, this is that would be a fantastic place for some really good work to be done. That's right. You're not going around pitching people on an idea for two years. You're just you're building and proving immediately what you can do and money will find you based on how these systems are set up. So I think it's incredibly empowering. And if I just go one level forward, some people envision the world completely being run like that in the future. Everything being a DAO or a decentralized autonomous organization, which means I don't need a CEO and a corporate headquarters and I just need an incentive system and a platform where different people from all over the world can come together, contribute their talents and get reasonable compensation for what they're doing. It's a very empowering freedom kind of idea.
Yeah, it certainly is. um and and very experimental. Right. I'm super fascinated on on the social aspect of that and it's it's something that you need to understand. Not Dowo like Dow Jones, Dow DA. That's right. That's correct. That's correct. It's the new DAO. Uh so what about how do some of these coins we hear about fit into the universe for you as well? You know, they're the Trump coins? There's, as you said, every other day it looks like there's a coin that pops up. We don't even know where they pop up from. and somebody made enough money to sit on the, you know, like s retire for the rest of their lives. It's like, you know, I don't know if that's urban legend or what, but how does how are you thinking about that space?
Yeah. Well, so I think the four categories I mentioned are where we're focusing our attention. The four majors. Now, there are other categories and everybody's got different framework, but let me just throw out a couple. Um, what you're talking about we call meme coins. They're like whatever. It's just a phenomena of that's a cool image. That's a cool like cartoon character turned into a coin. It's a Trump coin. Whatever. And it seems crazy and it's highly speculative, but you know, we're a speculative gambling society. I I think I saw something I think this is accurate that more money was spent in 2024 in lottery tickets than all music and sports venues combined. So, you know, I think younger people that are looking at the cost of living are saying, "Okay, I can go to Las Vegas. I can do an online bet or whatever, but maybe I should just put a little in a memecoin." And I know it can go to zero, but maybe it can go up tremendously. So, that is definitely a category. It's it's gambling money. There's no question. But it's a category that exists, right? I think aside from that, there are some really practical ones that are interesting. I won't go in great depth, but I'll call them like utility or linking the real world to crypto. So, I mean, there's one, for example, where you can lend your computing power or your GPU power um into a pool and be incented for it. So, some people will say, uh, hey, we have all the computing power we need because half of the world's sleeping while the other half's working. If we could just get everybody to lend their excess capacity and have a system that incents them to do that, those are pretty empowering ideas. So there's a whole category under that hood that you know can make sense. And finally um the last one is is kind of this move towards you hear real world assets or the idea of tokenizing everything or having a tradable coin for everything. Um, for example, you more recently you hear companies like Robin Hood talking about tokenizing all sorts of assets, including existing stocks that can now trade 247, but also illquid assets, things that previously you might have been locked up for five or 10 years. Well, maybe there can be a real-time market for that now. So, those are other, you know, categories that are out there and and there's others beyond that, but just to keep a simple framework, I think that's how we're thinking about the world.
I love that. I think that's a fantastic framework for us all to think about and by the way for us to be able to have a conversation when we're thinking about should I have exposure to this and we'll we'll get to that in a minute. Um so the four big buckets and then the other which sound like I think we can kind of figure that they're a bit more speculative so you got to think about that exactly as as you describe them. What do you how are you measuring success or or the opportunities you see in those buckets? Like you know in stocks we look at earnings, EPS, you know, things like that. What constitutes sort of success and interest for you within those buckets? Is it adoption? Is it activity on the chain? Like how do you look at whether this is an area I want to lean into or not?
Yeah. Well, I think one is it's kind of what some of the big tech companies have taught us from the Facebooks on down. It's like network effect is real. So if you can create a huge network that has power. So I think in some of these are they in an area where their use case makes sense and is their is their usage of their network and what is their network look like of users of developers and you know these things are evolving. So you know what what what what's leading the way today in 10 years might be very different you know I don't know but I think those are some of the basic things in the categories we talked about we were talking about winner take all type economics so store of value bitcoin I think is the clear winner there um it's still up in the air all these other areas who some of the winners are going to be but I think for most investors instead of trying to find the next new idea that's just being created I think you're probably better off trying to find the ones that have proven themselves, have the right network and are maybe in a baseball analogy in the second or third inning and you've still got a long way to go if you get it right. And so we're trying to find those kind of ideas um in part through our own research and knowledge and in part with collaboration with partners and other researchers that know this space intimately. And that's a full-time job, right? It's it's not easy, but especially with the evolution of the space, there's so many new ideas coming to market.
Yeah. Fascinating. Do you uh when we're thinking about expressing that are are we looking mostly at the currencies or coins associated that represent the ecosystem like ETH, like Bitcoin, or are companies in play as well who are really kind of on the forefront and doing some really interesting things? I'd imagine most of them are in the private market still, right?
Well, I mean, your question is a timely one in the sense that I think with the regulatory environment having turned in the US and some other countries, we're now starting for the first time to see almost a blurring of lines between the crypto side of things and the traditional finance side and the public markets and the private markets. It's all kind of merging together. So I would say a lot of our focus remains on owning direct cryptocurrencies but there's a secondary component which is there are more public companies now um that some just own and are you know leveraging crypto like Micro Strategies is an example of that kind of thing but others are creating stable coins and banking solutions etc. So I I think those are fair play. And the third category are private companies that are in this space that are building, you know, things for the crypto or new finance ecosystem. And so I think, you know, the emphasis is we're entering a global peer-to-peer world, I believe, where we're going to blur all these lines. And it's like the uh may the strongest survive type thing. They might be coming from the crypto world, they might be public companies today, or they might be private. It's going to be a big pool of seeing what comes out.
Exciting. Do you I I feel like there has to be a lot of M&A that's coming with this. Like the strongest will eat the innovators, right? To some degree. Although, you know, like in the crypto world specifically, the concept of merging, I don't want to say doesn't exist, but it's not like public markets. It's more like um the Darwinian evolution like you know it's like for example Bitcoin if you go back in its history there was a point where people were calling into question like we were talking about the transactional nature of Bitcoin was it fast enough and it actually had a fork which is a term for groups of people wanted to split in different directions. So all of a sudden now you at that point you had Bitcoin but you also had a branch off of it called Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold and a number of other things. So it was more of an experiment like if a group of people don't like the path they can just kind of split off but the strongest is going to survive and Bitcoin the original survive as the strongest at this point. So I think we're going to see things like that and I do think you're right in the public and private markets I think we will see merging of things and because scale and network effect really matter here and so I wouldn't be surprised to see that.
So what what are you anticipating for the future? I mean uh you know as we're speaking it it's been crypto week in DC. We just see huge momentum and change a sea change really this entire year with the Trump administration coming in. What do you what do you anticipate for the future?
Yeah, I think the future is dictated by a couple really big trends. The first one I just mentioned, we're entering a global peer-to-peer world where we don't always need the middleman, the banks as we know them in the center. It's going to be a much more empowering future for entrepreneurs and people in finance with all sorts of ideas and consumers. We also have a recognition that the world's afloat in debt and uh you know we have to keep printing money to kind of pay the bills. So I think that's a trend that's going to keep um pushing people in this direction. And I think governments honestly have gone from a very protective like uh trying to ban crypto and being against it to basically acknowledging that if you can't beat them join them kind of attitude like okay if the US doesn't own and control the future of crypto then China will or Europe will or some somebody else will so why don't we control it and own it. It's kind of a game of whack-a-ole. If you're just trying to keep take Bitcoin, someone is trying to ban Bitcoin. It's you you whack it down in China, but it's going to prosper in South America. You whack it down there, but it's going to pop up in Iceland. I mean, I'm just making this up, but the point is, you can't kill these decentralized systems. There there is no CEO to call in front of Congress. There's no corporate headquarters to to shut down. You're talking about a bigger phenomena. So, I think governments have now understood this and are getting behind it and maybe even see it as part of the path to get out of the debt problem we're in by fostering innovation and maybe helping support the value of of some of these tokens.
Yeah. Do do you see uh AI just getting more and more intertwined with the growth in in digital assets?
I do. I do because um I mean the AI phenomena although you know it might get overvalued at times there might be some risk points it's it's a trend here to stay it's powerful and it's really again a question of who's going to control that future the big few mega tech companies or decentralized platforms where any entrepreneurs with ideas to build apps you you know can do it day one and I would like to think as kind of a freedomoriented person that it's more of um the lack It's decentralized platforms of entrepreneurs where we can get all sorts of innovation accelerating at a much faster, more exciting pace than if we just keep this innovation bottled up in the hands of a couple big, you know, tech giants.
Yeah, I love that optimistic view of things and I think it's shared by a lot of the people who are building in that space. So, so given all this, what are some considerations that investors should keep in mind as they take a look at their portfolio and try to decide, you know, do I have enough exposure? What what should I be thinking about when it comes to this whole new world that's developing?
Yeah, I mean, I would start with a basic fundamental premise. You need to work with an advisor or someone that knows the space and can help you navigate it. Not only from a framework perspective, but managing emotions. um people that are new to it don't have an appreciation for the volatility of cryptocurrencies. It's at times it can crash 80% and people think it's dead and at other times it's euphoric and people want to put their life savings in it and both are dangerous. So you have to you have to kind of work with someone in a system where you're not getting you're not making the wrong decision at the wrong time. You know you're not chasing it at all-time highs and you're not dumping it all at all lows. Um so I think guidance and framework are really important um as two just you know uh fundamental pieces of it. I think also it's making sure you're investing in things that are secure. Historically a lot of cryptocurrency has been lost because people were noviceses and got wallets hacked. You know sent it to the wrong addresses there. There's lots of pitfalls for people doing this on their own. Now, you can fall back and do simple things like going to buy the ETF at a brokerage firm of Bitcoin or Ethereum. Those are the two main ones. But that kind of eliminates the rest of the universe. Now, I will say all the big brokerage firms I think are going to be offering direct cryptocurrencies in the next 12 months, including Charles Schwab's on record saying that. So, again, the merging of crypto and traditional finance as we know it is all coming together, but security of your coins is of utmost importance.
Yeah, absolutely. Uh, so I I liked what you said before as well and you know it's kind of where we started which is that it's the been the huge price moves that attracted people but this your focus has really been on technology on the problem it's solving for on the use case when you're talking about um you know uh things like payments and and problems it's trying to solve for. Um, so I think that that sounds like that is incredibly important.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, listen, I've been using Bitcoin for for well over a decade in in other cryptos and I know that I can send you money in, you know, 30 seconds. So why am when I'm wiring money for my business, is it taking two days to settle a wire and a business? You know, it's like we're living in an antiquated financial system and we all know it. It's just a question of how disrupted this all gets. So I think people ought to consider this as a portion of their portfolio. I mean the younger and more risktaking you are the more appropriate it is. There are some unique things as an adviser we can do that are harder for the average investor to access such as um you know we can own this in IRA or Roth IAS or accounts for kids and trusts. Um a lot of direct retail things don't allow you to title things that way. So, I mean, if it were, you know, me planning for kids futures, I'd be looking at, you know, where can you put this in a tax-free environment and look at growth for a long-term uh play. Um, those are the types of things that the right adviser might be able to bring to the table.
Fantastic, Brett. This has been such a great conversation. Um, I think it's it's a really great framework for us all to lean on as we look at all of the exciting things that are happening and we should be leaning into it with enthusiasm and not just fear because it's so brand new. So, thank you so much for that.
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