Transcription
We got a double flush yesterday, can you believe it? The first flush was with these PPI inflation numbers, which came in hotter than expected. And then we got a second flush on the markets yesterday when Scott Besson came out and said pretty much they're not going to be buying any Bitcoin. We're talking about a number way above 750 billion.
What's the story on gold? Look, we've got the large gold holding. I doubt we're going to revalue it, but we are going to keep it there again as a store of value for the American people. We've also started to get into the 21st century with a Bitcoin strategic reserve. We're not going to be buying that, but we are going to use confiscated assets and continue to build that up. And that caused a second flush. We said we're not actually going to be buying it, we're going to be using confiscated assets.
I want to address these two things and then I want to talk about probably what is the biggest narrative of the cycle, the thing that's driving the whole cycle and that's treasury companies because today we're going to go deep into one of the most exciting treasury companies out there. I'm telling you this conversation today is absolutely going to blow your mind. So listen, big show today, Friday banter, that sounds good to you. Let's get the show on the road, guys.
I really hope that you weren't one of the lettuce hands that got stopped out yesterday or panic sold yesterday because of the PPI numbers which came in hotter than expected. I mean, are you telling me that you don't believe we're going to get an interest rate cut in September? If you are, you should be probably watching another channel. And then listen, the US was never ever going to buy Bitcoin, right? They all they said is that they could and I tweeted about this yesterday. I said the US was never going to buy Bitcoin. What they said is that they will accumulate Bitcoin if it's in a budget-neutral way. Now the only way that they can accumulate Bitcoin in a budget-neutral way is if they mine Bitcoin with excess electricity. Problem is that if they've got excess electricity right now, the AI war is probably the more important war to be using the electricity on. So it was never part of the plan for them to buy Bitcoin. So, I really hope that none of you got shaken out in this little shakeout. And as I said at the bottom of my tweet, in the shakeout here, I guarantee you that ETH will actually break the highs in less than a week because I think all that happened here was that it was an RSI reset and now I think that ETH is going to start making its move to actually destroy the all-time high. So, I'm staying super bullish until further notice. If anything changes, obviously, I'll let you guys know.
I also want to be talking about something big today. We know that this cycle has been driven by the treasury companies, right? We know that the tokens that have good solid treasury companies, those are the ones that are going to get that have got a bid this cycle if you can attract Wall Street money through these treasury companies. And so I figured what we need to do is we need to dive deep into these treasury companies. And today I've got probably one of the best interviews that you're going to hear on Banter and it's into one of the most fascinating treasury companies in the world today. And that's going to be absolutely amazing. But before we get there, you know, it's Friday. Fridays are brought to us by NordVPN. They are the crypto VPN. They keep us safe by making sure we don't expose our IP addresses to our government and whatever else. If you want a NordVPN, honestly, it's the best investment you're going to make in crypto. Four dollars a month, that's it. You pay four dollars a month, you get yourself a NordVPN, and you protect your crypto. There's a link below here. It's right here in the show below. Trust me, get NordVPN and get the add-ons, the incogn, the threat protect, which you can see in the link here.
All right, I don't want to waste too much more time. I want to get straight into the meat and potatoes of the show, the alpha of the show, and I want to start speaking about treasury companies. And now with all these treasury companies, you need to find the ones that are actually going to make an impact. And we're going to be meeting with the founders, with the CEOs, with the chairmen, with all the chair people, chair people, I'm not going to say chairmen, of all the treasury companies that we think are interesting. Now, one of the ones that I find the most interesting is the new one that's actually been launched around Ton. And what I've managed to do is I managed to get Manny, how do I refer to you? Do I refer to you as the founder, the CEO, the chair? What you, I know you're the Michael Saylor of Ton, but I don't know what the title for that is.
Executive Chairman. You know, Saylor is also Executive Chairman of Strategy and the other good example is Tom Lee, who is the Executive Chairman of BitMine. So, Executive Chairman would be best. So, you're the Executive Chairman of the New Ton Treasury Company. For those people who don't know what it is, it's this company over here. It's called Verb, right? That's the company, right? And I think it's rebranding, right?
That is correct. We launched basically Monday last week and then we closed on Thursday and announced a billion-dollar ATM already on Friday. So, that's all record time and now for the first time really I can talk about this. I'm very very excited to do it with you, Ran. Thanks for having me on the show.
So, wait, hold on. So, you actually went from zero to a billion faster than SharpLink went from zero to a billion.
On paper, yeah. I mean, look, it must be some kind of Guinness Book world record. This was kind of an idea like a month ago, and now we're a billion-dollar company public on NASDAQ. Now, granted, it's a balance sheet company, right? But still, you know, it's been a hell of a July.
Okay, I need to just for those people who don't know who you are, we've obviously spoken extensively and we've built quite a good friendship, but just walk me through who are you and how the hell did you get here?
Sure. I'll try to keep that brief. So, I'm an entrepreneur myself who happens to be an investor. I started my own investment firm coming out of Goldman Sachs roughly 12 years ago called Kingsway Capital based in London. I built a multibillion-dollar asset management business from zero. We're around five billion today. And then really five, six years ago, we got into crypto and today we've got over half of our assets in crypto and first I became the biggest investor in Toncoin. We bought well over 100 million coins starting four years ago and so I became the biggest investor in Toncoin. I brought a lot of other investors in. Ton is backed by Sequoia, Benchmark, Rivbit, and the biggest backers of Elon, a firm called Vy Capital. And then I also got involved with the foundation where I served on the board of the foundation since inception really and then I became president at the beginning of this year. And look, I've known Michael Saylor for four years personally. I went to his 100K party this past New Year's in Miami. And of course, he's having a wonderful midlife crisis. I find, credit where credit is due, really pioneering this new segment, almost this new strategy, right? And what for me is fascinating about Saylor and strategy is that of course Bitcoin is up 11 times or so since he started this five years ago but his stock has outperformed NVIDIA in the AI boom and is up roughly 35 times. So two-thirds of the return on the stock came actually from the capital allocation from the strategy while only one-third of it came from the underlying spot performance and of course that has been wildly impressive. But the other maybe important example I would like to give is BitMine. You know, BitMine BMR is only 45 days old as an Ethereum treasury strategy company. In 45 days they have delivered something like a 15x. You know, Ethereum is up like two times, pretty impressive, but the stock is up 15 times, right? And I'm happy to explain to you how we can perhaps even beat that. I mean, we have, we're standing on the shoulders of giants and we are effectively executing the BitMine playbook which I'm happy to walk you through how it exactly works.
Okay. So, I mean just before we actually get as to how you're doing it, I saw that Pantera is all in, well they're now all in on Ton, but they're also all in on treasury companies and they also backed Tom Lee and they wrote a an article, they wrote a newsletter this week and in the newsletter they basically broke down how treasury companies can outperform the individual stocks, the individual tokens, right? And so their thesis was it's probably better to own the treasury company than to own the underlying asset because of the math behind it. Just walk us through why should any investor look to buying a treasury company and not just hold Ton? If I like Ton, why should I buy the Ton treasury company and not just go onto the market and just buy a whole lot of Ton tokens?
Absolutely. And I think this analysis definitely holds let's say in a bull market, right? And also huge fans of Pantera, they've been big supporters of Ton, they're investors in the PIPE in Verb as well and big shout out to them to really putting their name out there to really also help the understanding of the segment, right? I mean look, the the the trillion-dollar question is what why on earth are trading these companies these stocks at a premium to book to NAV, right? And I think the simple answer is there's probably a hundred times more capital that can buy coin that can buy stocks than can buy coins. And that's true even for Bitcoin, even for Ethereum or Solana, right? And whatever the true number is, Ran, you can add one more zero. It's probably a thousand times bigger in terms of capital that can buy stock compared to buying TON. Toncoin is not yet even listed on the largest US spot exchanges such as Coinbase or Robinhood or the largest Korean one such as Upbit. Right now you might have seen Coinbase with Ventures just announced their investment in Toncoin a leader at that, right? But that is I think one of the reasons why these stocks are trading at a premium to book and why I think we should even arguably deserve a higher multiple to book because it is even so much harder to buy Toncoin behind the line especially for US investors than to buy our stock right now. The second point is maybe slightly less obvious. What really Saylor figured out in my mind is that this is a permanent capital vehicle and that's a huge difference compared to let's say an ETF. Now, if you sell the ETF, the ETF sells the coin, not a permanent cap vehicle. Now, if you sell our stock or strategy stock, the coin stays. Now the stock can go down but the coin does not move, right? And what this means is it's a listed corporation that can trade at a discount or at a premium to its book value but also can do something about that. Can buy back its stock, can issue more stock, issue other securities, can stake, you know, we can stake like other proof of stake protocols the treasury companies who are pursuing that and have a massive advantage over the the Bitcoin companies, right? Just imagine you have a balance sheet with a multiple and suddenly a P&L or cash flow statement also with a multiple, double that, right? And then also we can be included in the index and ETF can do none of these things, right? So, the name of the game here is to grow book value per share, right? Which is precisely the two-thirds of the return for strategy that came from its strategy rather than one-third from the underlying spot performance. Now, how do we grow book value per share? Well, at its simplest form, we issue let's say common equity at a premium to book and that is not dilution. That is basically a creative dilution or anti-dilution because you buy more Toncoin at book, right? And of course it's all about really maximizing the spread of cost of capital and return on capital. Now clearly the underlying needs to be exciting. I would never ever do this with an underlying I wouldn't have full and long-term conviction in but of course that is the case for Ton and I have to talk about the case for Ton itself as well, it's hugely exciting. It's all about Telegram that doesn't need introduction but we can maybe cover that in a different section because this is really about the the treasury strategy, right? And so if we can do this well, I mean, BitMine grew its NAV from like four dollars a share on the 30th of June to like in the high twenties now or something like that, right? So this is basically, what is it, sevenx or so in a month and a half, right?
Yeah, they're trading at, they're trading at a three they're trading at about a three-X premium to NAV then because they're trading at about 61 dollars now. Yeah, I think this they probably book value per share. I mean again Ethereum has gone up so much it might be 30 already. I think it's actually trading with a two handle probably but yeah I mean it's it's still been very very impressive and it's even been worth paying high multiples to NAV in the beginning of the phase of these strategy companies. I mean you could have paid two times for MicroStrategy three years ago and still made a very very good return because book value per share has grown so much.
So how much of the premium between book value and net asset value is attributed to debt finance? In other words, a lot of these companies aren't only going to issue equity. They're also going to issue convertibles. They're going to issue debt. And the difference between what they repay the debt holders and what they can accrue for the capital holders must make up for some kind of portion of the premium. Right.
Yeah, that's definitely the case for mature treasury companies like strategy. You know, we are 100% common equity finance and we will stay 100% common equity finance, maybe forever, but at least for quite a while. I mean, just to quote Charlie Munger, right, who said, "Smart young men like you and me go broke the three different liquor and ladies, ladies, liquor, and leverage, right?" So, my point is, I mean, I don't want to be too politically incorrect here, but ladies, liquors might be fine, but no leverage, right? Because, you know, I do worry about what the wise man does at the beginning, the fool does at the end in the treasury companies, right? Yes. As long as these are trading at a premium to book, people will create more of these treasury companies. And the minute you see not world class, not experienced team wrapping coin number 75 in a NASDAQ shell with leverage, I would probably be careful with that.
Okay, hold on. I have to ask you a question because you and I are, I would like to say, smart crypto investors or at least I know that you're a smart crypto investor. I'm still working out whether I'm a smart crypto investor. Would you rather buy ETH or would you rather buy BMR at three times book, at three times premium to ETH itself? I mean, honestly as a crypto investor, if you've got 100 dollars in your pocket or 100,000 dollars in your pocket or in your case 100 million dollars in your pocket is there any way that you can justify buying this asset as opposed to just going to buy ETH?
I look, I love the BitMine team. I think they've outdone Saylor at being Saylor. I mean, having grown book value by like seven, eight times in 45 days, that took Saylor years to do, right? I would I would continue betting on the winner and I think, you know, ETH will do well. You know, if ETH doubles, which I think it will, but it might take some time. Bitcoin will more than double because as I explained earlier they can grow book value per share by buying more of it by issuing equity at a premium to book but also every move in ETH also benefits their book as well, right? And so I think this still has legs to run and again I think even for strategy I would probably say the same thing. I think if Bitcoin doubles, a strategy stock will probably more than double. I think you can arguably say, "Well, once Saylor hits like I don't know 10, 12 percent of for Bitcoin or so it's getting harder and harder, but you know, he's I think at three and a half percent or so." But the difference for me between again strategy and these guys is that it's Saylor's has a way of engineering very smart fixed income, repaying his fixed income guys and enriching his equity holders. Now I don't know how many of the other treasury companies are going to be smart enough to engineer like and be able to attract the the fixed income capital and I don't know, I feel okay with my strategy position, but I think if I was holding this one, I don't know. I mean, it would be great in the bull market, but on the day that the bull market turns, I kind of think I want to be in ETH.
Absolutely. Look, in the what happens is in the bear market, I think the premiums will not only compress, I think these stocks will trade at a discount to book, right? And, you know, SA traded at roughly 30 percent discount if my memory serves me right. But if you followed our three golden rules, number one, no hard financial leverage. Keep in mind you can do soft convertibles but let me just let's say no hard financial leverage. Number two, which is the advantage for us and BitMine but has a problem but for the Bitcoin companies, you know, we can quite easily have, call me old-fashioned, revenues minus expenses greater than zero. We have staking yield, right? And the staking yield, it's a scale game and you, it makes a difference if you have an asset manager with 100 billion or 10 billion, right? You don't have 100 times the cost, right? And even if you go from 10 billion NAV to five or god forbid two and a half, you're probably still profitable, right? But that's not the case if you're starting at a small position. And so but absolutely right. I think these stocks will have leverage on the way up but also not financial but like embedded leverage on the way down and you know what we would do in that scenario, number one, if we are profitable and if we're debt free, we can just ride it out, right? I mean of course not a great basically day for our stock perhaps but there's no risk of going bust, right? Number two, maybe better than that, we could use some of our cash reserves to buy back our stock, right? If you do that at a discount per share, per share, you're growing book value on a per share basis. Number three, you could even choose to, but you don't have to. We never want to be a forced seller, but you could choose to sell the underlying coin at least gently and use the cash proceeds to also buy back your stock, right? And that would also be accretive. So, my point is you have to be thoughtful about this, but and yes, if you can time the market, I think you want to ride them on the way up and be in the underlying asset on the way down. But my job is growing book value per share relentlessly and work for the common stock although in the long term.
All right, let's talk about the underlying which is TON. So I think this is the the first real opportunity for Americans to get their hands or American institutions to get their hands onto the asset which is TON. And I think that indirectly I'd like to think that indirectly that gives people exposure into the Telegram app which is not listed anywhere publicly and stuff like that. Let's quickly just like, let's marry the relationship between Ton and Telegram for those people who are watching this. What is the relationship between the Ton asset and the Telegram app? And I mean, I think I picked up around the Telegram app that the numbers are staggering. It's got a billion active users as of 2025. It's got 450 million daily active users. 45 percent of the Indian population uses Telegram while nine percent of the American population uses Telegram. Most people see that as a flaw. I kind of see that as one of the biggest opportunities in the world, especially since they've just launched their wallet in America. And I mean, it's got a whole lot of other stuff here, but walk me through the thesis for the Ton asset and the relationship between the Ton asset and the Telegram app.
Absolutely. No, look, you hit it on the head basically, Ran, right? I mean this is an N out of one asset run by an N out of one founder, right? You know, Telegram is a billion monthly active users and that already makes it the second biggest messaging app in the entire world after WhatsApp but WhatsApp is no longer growing and the first billion is the hardest in my humble experience, right? So the plan is one billion, two billion, three billion, maybe four billion, right? Pavel Durov, maybe the GOAT, the greatest of all time, is not stopping. No, he's the only living human being who not only has built an app that a billion people use every month. There's maybe five or six others, but he's the only one of those who owns 100 percent of that app. He doesn't even drink caffeine, let alone go alcohol. This guy is relentless, right? He's like Elon-level good, right? And Telegram, if you look at it, is the number six app in the entire world, right? Let's go through the other five and ask the question, which of them are doing blockchain, right? You've got WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, basically not allowed. And then you got two Chinese ones, Tencent, WeChat, and TikTok. Neither are they allowed. So then you've got Telegram. So it is the world's biggest that has done it. It is live. It's deployed. I can take on my Telegram right now and send you or anyone in the world basically Toncoin or stablecoins living on Ton or NFTs living on Ton by pressing a button, right? And just the scale of this needs to be fully understood. What is the relationship? So, you know, Ton the blockchain was originally developed by the Telegram team and they basically had to for regulatory reasons in 17-18 basically separate themselves. So Ton is an independent blockchain. It's a Layer 1. It is decentralized. It has a foundation but it is natively integrating with the Telegram messaging app and it has an exclusive partnership as well. So basically, Telegram has exclusivity with Ton. So Telegram could not do the same thing with either ETH, Solana, or anyone nor probably wouldn't want to given they're very proud of the technology. And what it means is that basically the entire for instance Telegram mini-app platform TMA is exclusive to Ton. So any developer developing a Telegram mini-app related to crypto it has to be a Ton wallet or Ton Connect it's called. Now of course you can bridge to Solana, you can bridge to ETH but it has to be built on Ton. Now Telegram has an ads platform all put on Ton rails and then Telegram also has a bots platform also partnering with Ton. All the developers are being paid out in Ton or USDT on Ton and so it's really like an all-encompassing partnership that is exclusive.
Has Pavel officially endorsed the, I mean I know he has because I've seen him talking at token 2049 and some other places but has he ever come out and said, "Guys, I hold Ton," or because I mean has he ever publicly admitted that he owns Ton?
No, no, no, he has posted this in his channel. I mean, without any ambiguity, this is not just a contractual partnership that is exclusive. There's pure financial alignment, right? I mean, frankly, the reason why Telegram is independent is that Pavel doesn't want to monetize the unethical way. He doesn't want to take away your privacy, take all your private data, mine it with the AI, sell it to the highest bidder, showing you invasive ads, and selling to the data to all the governments, which is what Facebook is doing, right? He wants to monetize you on honest way with Telegram Premium, non-invasive ads. But Ton is the most important piece of the entire global monetization puzzle for Telegram and Telegram is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, owner of Ton. He last publicly disclosed that he holds between, this is Telegram the messenger, 10 to 15 percent of the entire network, but he also respects decentralization so he doesn't want to go above 15 percent. And, you know, Telegram apart from having so much Ton to start with is getting more Ton because the foundation that pays Telegram in return for the exclusivity is paying Telegram in Toncoin and if you buy your Telegram username you can pay in Toncoin. If you buy your anonymous phone number or Telegram gifts or Telegram stars you can pay in Toncoin so Telegram is basically choosing to not go above 15 percent. So if they have done that they would never sell in the market but they would sell to long-term investors typically with a lockup structure over four years vesting but then they also don't want to be less than 10 percent. So this is kind of where where the financial alignment say so if Ton goes up Telegram dramatically benefits and of course that is really, really, really important for Telegram's future.
I mean, you've spent some time with Pavel. We've actually discussed it separately. And I mean you also, you are or you were the head of the foundation. In your discussions with him, how important is the Toncoin to him relative to everything else that he's doing and I include the messenger in that? I'm trying to I'm trying to get a feel for his priority set if you know what I'm saying.
Sure. No, I mean hugely important, right? And if that hasn't made it been abundantly clear, I mean Pavel's post over the last week or so, especially when we launched this company, hopefully speak volumes there, right? He basically called Ton, "even if Telegram was a nation this is the national currency." This is important, to the extent the US dollar is important to United States government Ton is important to Telegram, right? And yes, we've discussed this at length. Clearly Telegram itself is the messenger and that's the company he runs and created and 100 percent owns, right? But because Pavel has chosen not to monetize the unethical way and has chosen not to monetize the user with with sort of advertisements that are algorithmic and also frankly, selling your data, which is unethical, Toncoin is the most important puzzle piece for the global monetization of Telegram. So, basically, plan A is Toncoin, and plan B is also Toncoin and plan C is Toncoin. Now, plan D is basically for Telegram to refinance its debt, which you know, he has done. But only like plan F would be to take the company public which would be akin for Pavel to effectively sell his soul, right? He's come so far retaining 100 percent ownership of Telegram so and he wants to keep it this way as far as I understand. And so really it's Toncoin is the guarantor that needs to go well failure is not an option for for Telegram to continue to be financially independent.
Yeah. Okay. I mean look I I think I get it. I mean, I was also involved in the 2017 2018 ICO and I kind of watched that whole thing play out and I mean, yeah, I think it's it's very smart how we actually landed up here. I want to talk about the elephant in the room and I think the elephant in the room is there's this cloud over Pavel's head around he was detained in France at one point. He landed in France and he was detained in France for questioning by the authorities. I think to date they found nothing. And I think if I if I have this correctly, he's allowed to travel, but he's still under some kind of not sure what the correct legal term is, but still kind of under some kind of restriction from the French government. And I think that that's probably one of the reasons why maybe the the price of Ton has been quite hard hit because Telegram is not listed. There's no share price. So probably the only gauge as to how the market's feeling is the Ton token. And if you look at the Ton token, we're in the midst of the beginning of an alt season and you kind of look at this chart and this chart's not in the midst of that alt season. I mean, even though you can see it is beautifully on this thing here. I'm trying to get a feel for like how do you see the how do you see the, first of all, what is the legal situation? Is he under arrest? Is he not under arrest? Is he allowed to travel? Is he not allowed to travel? Where we at?
Look, of course I can't speak for Pavel. I'll tell you what I know and I guess I know more than most, right? But it's also frankly all in the public domain, right? So basically he is legally speaking a suspect. He hasn't formally been accused yet. There is an ongoing investigation and that has come with travel restrictions. So yes, he was detained but he was released after 72 hours and they took basically all his stuff, found nothing so far, right? And the case is a mumbo jumbo and very spurious. He's basically originally been accused that he should be personally held responsible for everything that might be used for that could be illegal, right? I mean look, if I have an Apple iPhone, right, which I do, right, and if I were to do something illegal with that iPhone, which I won't, but if they only knew what I had done with my phone then, but right, you know, if I did something illegal with that, which it won't, but you know, if I did, Tim Cook wouldn't land in jail. I mean, the US has thought about this. 30 years ago, the tech companies fought and won the battle to basically figure out that the user is responsible, right? And that is the sensible way of handling this. I'm from Europe. It's not our proudest moment, right? And so basically, yes, the travel restrictions have been eased and it is absolutely responsible. I think it's one of three reasons why the coin has not performed very well and you know we had some good news in March that the travel restrictions were eased and you can see the Toncoin bottomed in March around two bucks fifty. But frankly we're not that much higher than you know he's allowed to travel to Dubai. I don't know what's going to happen, but I think it's upside if you ask me because you're not going to wake up one morning to, "Oh, Pavel has a problem in France." You know, you went to bed with that reality knowing that last night. And I think eventually they're going to probably settle or something. It'll be my guess. I literally have no information there, but you know, he's I mean, it's it's frankly embarrassing what's happening there, right? And the other two, by the way, I take it almost personal, right? That this is, you know, I'm on team freedom. I know you and your audience are as well, you know, you kind of want to stuff it to the French and you know, the like I think, you know, this is a huge opportunity in my mind to also support Pavel and and and and and Telegram and this whole cause, right?
Now look, I want to touch on two other points, right? In my humble judgment, of course, altcoins overall have underperformed because we did not have the institutional bid in altcoins compared to Bitcoin which is number one, the ETF, but number two, the treasury companies, right? You know, Saylor has been doing this for five years and we've had a lot of copycats in Bitcoin, right? That is changing now for many of the large altcoins. That's clearly has basically resurrected ETH, right? And you see what's happened there in a very short time frame since we've had these treasure companies. And of course, it should do the same thing for Ton. You know, you got to understand one thing, Ran. I don't think there will be one ecosystem that will benefit more from the existence of the treasury company compared to the Ton ecosystem, right? You know, it took Saylor five years to basically HODL through the bear market and issue securities that neither you or I have ever heard of, right? And he got to barely three and a half percent of the Bitcoin supply. Now, that's huge, right? Amazing. But in Bit, right, the big, hairy, audacious goal is five percent. Right? Like, you know, we basically already own more Toncoin than Michael Saylor owns Bitcoin, right? We're going to go more aggressive than Saylor or BitMine have ever been, right? And I think the relative size of Ton compared to the size of even Ethereum, right, it's like 50x, right? Solana 12x, right? You can do the math, right? What this might do. And so and then and lastly look, I think the power situation will be resolved. I think alt season again might be good and and also crucially to understand, you know, Ton is the only large Layer 1 that is not available in the United States and that might be changing soon, right? You know, just to go back to the all-time high, we're looking at a two and a halfx, right? And, you know, ETH is kind of already there. And so, there's, you know, I think you want to quote Wayne Gretzky, "skate where the puck is going to be, not where it's coming from."
Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I kind of read this and I was like, okay. I mean, if Coinbase Ventures are in here, alongside Pantera, alongside pretty much every other Sequoia, alongside Mickey Mala's Ribbit Capital, it just feels it just feels to me like there's a very, very, very big mismatch between fundamentals and and price on this chain. In fact, probably one of the biggest mismatch between fundamentals and price. And I keep reading this news. I was like, "Holy [expletive] Coinbase Ventures. Holy [expletive] one billion ATM. Holy [expletive] Sequoia Benchmark." Like, and I'm like, "Do something." What can I say? I'm I'm I'm I'm here with you, right? Like, so I'm yeah. I just agree. But I'm happy to dive into this a little bit more, but I think yeah, in hindsight, it would have been obvious.
Okay. So the the the company that you've launched, the treasury company is a way for us investors to actually access this asset on mass for for the first time. What is the company going to do? So it's going to buy Ton and it's going to stake Ton. Is it going to do anything else or is it because I'll tell you why I ask because the way I see, yeah, I want to just I just want to give you an idea like the way I see it and tell me if my thinking is even in the right direction. Right. Like to me there's two foundations for an asset. There's the on-chain foundation. The on-chain foundation is a foundation that basically looks after the the on-chain presence of the of the asset, right? And then to me there needs to be a TradFi foundation which is almost like the the the TradFi version of the Ton foundation in in TradFi. One one pushes the the agenda of the the asset and the chain and one pushes the agenda of the narrative and the the investable product to TradFi. I don't know if that, does that make sense to you in terms of how I see it?
That makes sense, Ran. Yeah. And look, I mean, we've got a lot of ideas, right? And of course, your audience will be one of the first audiences to even hear this in a public forum, right? So, so look of course you know even doing it the basic way, basically raising capital at a premium to book to buy more Toncoin at book, you know, gross book value per share and that's a good start, right? And then of course we can stake our Ton, right? And of course there's the simple staking, right, where you get roughly maybe five percent gross, four percent net, maybe should squeeze those fees a little bit and that's tens of millions of dollars of revenues, right? Keep in mind we're going to run this with a pretty tight cost base as well, right? Now even better then we might end up owning our own staking infrastructure, right? where we basically pocket the gross staking fee without paying away any fees to any third-party staking provider, right? Even better, why don't we do delegated staking, right? You know, guess what? Who has been working with Sequoia Benchmark, so all these guys have a lot of coins outside of the listed company. Why don't we keep them in our own custody but let the delegated staking profits accrue here, right? Suddenly, you know, we can build a P&L that could not be like eight but maybe even nine figures, double that, right? And of course there's other ways to get yield on on-chain basis as you know and we're going to explore all those options, right? Another thing I would say just to give you a sense of the scale of the ambition, Pavel has posted, if you read his post, he wants to see a hundred billion-dollar company, right? Now how do we get there other than of course Ton going way higher and we're being the biggest owner and buyer of it and the biggest staker of it, right? I mean, let's just say it's discussed, you know, Circle is trading pretty well in the public markets, right? You know, why don't we consider building a stablecoin? I mean look, imagine 1,000 dollars, a thousand USD in your checking account, even for the average Telegram user, it's not an insurmountable amount of money to have in your bank account, right? Keep in mind they're rich people on Telegram, they're poor people on I see it the world's biggest bank is the average balance time the billion people. It's a trillion-dollar AUM business. At a three percent NIM, that's 30 billion dollars of cash flow a year. Even if you pay half that to Telegram, Circle, Coinbase, that's 15 billion dollars of cash flow a year. Whatever multiple you want to put on this, I think a hundred billion dollars is not the ceiling here, right? So I I will tell you, we are the most ambitious blockchain project in the world probably after Bitcoin. I don't think we are going to be ever bigger than Bitcoin, probably shouldn't be, but you know, I think we'll have more users than Ethereum and Solana combined. Right? And it's not like, you know, we're smarter or whatever. We have the distribution, right? You know, and that is, I think, you know, content is king, but the distribution is the queen. And she's wearing the pants at least. I don't know. I think in this case, distribution is the king.
I got to be honest. I mean, I've been watching what's happened with the stablecoin chains. So, Circle launches it stablecoin chain. JP Morgan talking about a chain. Stripe, Stripe, Plasma, they're all going after distribution. You're saying, "Hey, we got the distribution. We're going to have, we've already got wallets. If everyone just leaves 1,000 dollars in each wallet, that's a three trillion-dollar business." Hold on a second. That that's that's bigger than Tether, actually. Like, hold on. Whoa. That's, I just saw only as big as Tether is today, five years from now. You know, I'm I'm actually quite disappointed. I'm I'm actually really disappointed. But the thing I'm the thing I'm disappointed about is I'm disappointed in myself for not having seen this before because I'm supposed to be able to see [expletive] like this. And you've just shown me something like how did I not put together the fact that you guys could launch a stablecoin and have probably overnight the biggest AUM of any stablecoin if X amount of users just adopted it? I mean, how did I not pick that up? Like that's so disappointing. It's just Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just feel I feel so dumb. But anyway, I mean that's that's that's on me.
I need to ask you another question. So you guys you launched you said there was initially the launch was publicized with I think 550 million or so. 558 million dollars that was the number, right? And then immediately you went in and you did a an ATM and at the market at at a billion at a billion dollars for for another billion dollars. So I need to try and understand something. The initial capital that came into this company, the 558 million dollars, is that Ton, is that dollars? Is that Ton and dollars? Where did the Ton and dollars, where did this 558 come from?
Right. So, I mean, it's all been disclosed. So, I'll just explain for, you know, just ease. For me, it's like, you know, making a fine wine, right? You know, if you know, for instance, what the Bordeaux blend looks like, right? A little bit of that. 75 percent is Cabernet, right? So basically 75 percent is cash, cash is king, right? And then 25 percent is Merlot, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc. So that is Ton to start with. And then what we did, in order to create an entry valuation that of course you and other PIPE investors will have benefited from, we basically cleaned out Telegram for the locked and discounted coins they had to sell, and of course we got an attractive price and the rest is basically for spot buying, right? And that's a huge amount where we are gearing up for a, yeah, a program basically. And the ATM allows us to basically even grow that basically spot buying program, right? I mean, and again, we're not going to stop at a billion, right? I think BitMine started there. I think they just filed for 20 billion, right? I mean, you can just that the depth of the US equity market is is insane, insane, right? I mean, literally insane in my mind. And so, this is basically the biggest, you know, sort of, you know, look, I mean, I've been involved in helping other investors get comfortable with Toncoin, right? And you saw there was an announcement. Oh, 400 million dollars was invested in Toncoin. It was announced in March and that was, yeah, Sequoia, Benchmark, Rivbit, and Pantera and Ever, you know, we did more in a month than happened in four years, right? And we will do more in next month. And, you know, so this is just at another level, basically another scale and speed.
When you talk about a billion-dollar ATM, basically what that means is that you have the permission or the green light from the SEC to go out and raise the cash. But have you already gone out and started raising that?
Amazing. You know, let me just explain because I didn't really have that much experience with ATMs, right? And of course there are a lot of rules around this, right? This is US securities, right? So there's also limits what I can say, right? But with that disclaimer, you have to basically when you pick the company that you do these common equity PIPE, in the most important criteria is that it is ready. It has fully on file with all the filings. It is basically S-3 eligible so it can basically become what is a well-known seasoned issuer WKSI, which we are and that has to also be a minimum of 700 million-dollar market cap. We hit that basically on the first day. And then we can file without having any delay, any review from the SEC and basically sell shares in the market. There's no fundraising pitch. There's no even a dialogue needed, right? You can just basically sell shares in the market which is primary fundraising, primary capital. It could be just in the market. It could be blocks, right? If you did Kathy Wood called me up tomorrow, she just did it with BitMine and says, "Hey, Manny, can you give me 50 million or 100 million?" You know, I can pick up the phone and cross in the market. Boom. Done. right? And it settles T plus one and then I can use that cash to buy coin, right? And so the speed and scale of this is something that I think hasn't really been seen. It's not really something that I think computes to the average crypto investor who are putting together SPVs to run around with relatively small funds, right? And this is another level, Ran, absolutely another level.
Yeah, I must say I agree and I I don't know having spoken to you now I'm like, you know, I I have to trust that, you know, I I have to trust that the charts kind of tell you a story and you, you know, they said the chart show me the chart I'll show you the news and like I don't know, I've been watching this chart. This chart's been on a gradual uptrend. It like bottomed out over here and I guess this was more or less the time what happened why it
went down. So we peaked a year ago at eight bucks twenty, right? And then Pavel got arrested shortly after and this is this is basically bottomed then in March, right? As I told you and even the Trump election didn't really help.
You know, altcoins that underperformed, all the new money came into altcoins if at all came from the US. Ton is not in the US yet and all these things are not changing, right? So there was no treasury company, now there is one. I'm running it personally, right? This is really important now and the way we're going to do it, again, hopefully more aggressive than Saylor or even Tom Lee BitMine, right? And of course our ecosystem and market cap in Ton is so small that it doesn't take much to make a big impact, right?
You know, again, we're not yet listed on the US spot exchanges. You just saw the news on Monday, Coinbase Ventures invested, do with what you wish, right? And you know, there's Robinhood, there's other ones. You can look it up, right? It's public information where we're not on yet, right? And there's even South Korea where we're not on the biggest exchange yet, right? I mean, South Korea is a whole another level.
So many, many, does this mean that very soon, I mean I'm glad you came to Banter first, but does this mean that very soon I'm going to see you on like CNBC and like Fox? Are you going to do like the whole Tom Lee thing? I mean look, I have chosen to reluctantly give up my privacy here, right? Because this is too important to me personally and to the world, you know, this is nothing but the free world is at stake here, right?
Telegram is the single biggest free speech platform in the entire world, bigger than x.com, right? By a factor of 50 percent, right? This is also the reason why Elon bought X because it's really important, right? So Telegram is number one, right? And Toncoin is absolutely essential for Telegram's financial and overall independence, right? And so, this is really key. This is bigger than me, you or, and now we need to really make sure this succeeds, right? And yes, if it takes me to go on CNBC, I'm doing it, right? I've got stuff booked, you know, that I'm doing 15 or so TV or podcast interviews in the next like 10 days. But you did this one first. But this was the first. Yes. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.
Manny, I'm going to let you go, my friend. This has been amazing and I I just I really, really, really I can't thank you enough and I can't tell you how much I have much more faith in this project. You know, we've been big investors and big supporters for a long, long, long time and having someone like you around just gives me so much more comfort in in our investment just to know that like there's people like you around it. So, thank you. Thank you for being first on Banter. Thank you for all the alpha. Thank you for everything that you shared and obviously we'll keep up to date with you as to everything that's happening as and when it's happening.
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Ran, for not only being such a wonderful voice in ecosystem for giving me a platform and the first one to give my sort of maiden interview here as the executive champ, you're doing wonderful work here. This is important and you know, freedom isn't free, the mission has to be financed. I think this will be lucrative and also, yeah, please let's do this again, you know, we now want to be basically much more vocal about this and and also frankly give your listeners the edge. Really appreciate the time and yeah, I look forward for the next even the next couple months but certainly the next three, six, nine months I think will be very exciting for the ecosystem.
Amazing my friend, we'll 100 percent check in with you, my friend. Thank you so much, Manny. Socials as well, right? So, I'm on social. You can put this in the show notes. Maybe everything will be in the link. Everything will be in the all the stuff will be in the link. Manny, thank you my friend.
Guys, I don't know if that, I don't know if you still don't see the Ton picture after that, then I don't know. I mean, what do you tell people that can't see the Ton picture after that? It's just, Yeah. I mean, what do you think? Yeah. See, she's buying Ton. I hope you're also buying Ton after that. I mean really, that's like one of the best pieces of alpha that that I've had here in a long time.
Anyway, that brings us to the weekend and basically if anything happens on the weekend, you know, I'll be live and here with you. Otherwise, I'll see you again on Monday. Until then, trade well, my friends.