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The infrastructure layer is the reading list: inference, labs, factories, and quantum safety
1 day ago
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4 min read
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137 docs
This period’s most credible recommendations look below the app layer—from inference hardware and lab automation to data-center-enabled manufacturing and quantum-safe Bitcoin transactions.
Standout: learn the physical stack beneath the model
Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s conversation with Neil Movva — video discussion
- Creator / link: Hosted by Patrick O’Shaughnessy, featuring Neil Movva — open the discussion.
- Recommended by: Scott Belsky, who called it “a great discussion (and education)” and linked O’Shaughnessy’s post.
- Key takeaway: The discussion is framed as a “401-level class” on inference across software, chips, and power. Its agenda includes latency versus throughput, chip pricing, kernel engineering, compute arbitrage, data-center design, power strategy, and open versus closed AI.
- Why it matters: This is a practical map of inference as a physical and economic system—not merely a model-quality problem. It is the most useful recommendation here for understanding where AI costs, bottlenecks, and competitive advantages can migrate.
Where AI becomes physical work
Ruxandra Teslo’s thoughts on Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard — X analysis
- Creator / link: Ruxandra Teslo — read the post.
- Recommended by: Packy McCormick, whose Not Boring roundup says Teslo has “some good quick thoughts” and tells readers to read them. The roundup describes the underlying standard as a way for agents to operate lab and manufacturing instruments in parallel.
- Key takeaway: Teslo explains MHS as a common interface for agents to control equipment such as microscopes, liquid handlers, lasers, and manufacturing machinery. Standardized “drivers” could reduce hardware integration from weeks or months to hours; she gives Claude’s iterative laser-alignment experiment as an example. She sees removing this “boring friction” from biological research as potentially more valuable than targeting individual discoveries, while worrying about what full scientific automation could mean for human involvement.
- Why it matters: It turns “AI for science” into a concrete infrastructure question: how much research capacity is lost to bespoke equipment integration, and what changes when agents can operate instruments directly?
The Layman’s Case for Data Centers — article
- Creator / link: @12Palehorse — read the article.
- Recommended by: Garry Tan, who shared it with the concise endorsement: “Datacenters create prosperity and good jobs.”
- Key takeaway: The essay argues that data centers are an enabling layer for robotic manufacturing: robots need large-scale compute for training, simulated practice, and fleet learning, and the author says factory automation can make domestic production economical. It uses Hadrian as an example of a software- and AI-directed manufacturer whose automation supports jobs rather than simply removing them.
- Why it matters: This is a useful industrial and labor lens on infrastructure buildout. It asks readers to evaluate data centers not only as power consumers, but as inputs to physical production and skilled-trade demand.
A historical lens on infrastructure markets
Fordlandia — book
- Creator / link: The discussion names the book but does not identify its author or provide a direct book URL; discussion context.
- Recommended in: Ben Horowitz’s AI-infrastructure discussion, which uses Ford’s rubber plantation and company town as the example.
- Key takeaway: Ford tried to own the complete vertical stack, but the car industry eventually developed multiple supplier layers. The discussion’s broader rule is that expanding markets fragment, then tend to consolidate when growth slows.
- Why it matters: It is a compact way to think about AI infrastructure without assuming today’s largest companies will capture every valuable layer. New categories can emerge at the margins even when incumbents dominate the core.
A protocol-level technical pointer
Quantum-safe Bitcoin transactions (QSB) — open-source technical resource
- Creator / link: A team Balaji attributes to Ben-Sasson and others; the direct project URL was not supplied in the transcript. Balaji’s Bitcoin Asia discussion provides the access context.
- Recommended by: Balaji Srinivasan, who says anyone unfamiliar with QSB “should definitely know about this.”
- Key takeaway: The transcript describes an open-source approach to making Bitcoin transactions quantum-resistant through scripts layered on existing Bitcoin. The tradeoff is higher transaction cost, while a protocol change may not be necessary.
- Why it matters: Unlike a general prediction about crypto, this is an implementation-level lead with a clear compatibility-versus-cost tradeoff—useful for readers tracking long-horizon security risks in deployed protocols.
The infrastructure layer is the reading list: inference, labs, factories, and quantum safety
Research extraction
Verification is partial. The bundle does not provide an exact title for the item or mention Packy McCormick's recommendation; it contains a dated X post linked to the @RuxandraTeslo account, dated Aug. 27, 2026.
- Author/item: Ruxandra Teslo; the supplied material supports identifying it as an X post, not as a separately titled analysis.
- Substance: Teslo explains Anthropic's Model Hardware Standard (MHS) as a common standard for AI agents to safely connect to and control scientific and industrial equipment, with standardized software “drivers” intended to reduce hardware-integration work from weeks or months to hours. She highlights Claude iteratively aligning a laser via camera feedback and then writing an automation script.
- Interpretation: Teslo views reducing the “boring friction” of biological research as potentially more valuable than using AI to target individual discoveries, while noting that broader scientific automation is early and could displace human involvement—a prospect she finds troubling.
- Non-commercial context: The supplied text discusses scientific/industrial equipment and research but contains no statement establishing that the post or analysis is non-commercial, unsponsored, or free of commercial affiliation.
- Concrete recommendation takeaway: If recommended, it should be labeled accurately as Teslo's Aug. 27, 2026 X post rather than given an unverified title, and positioned as a concise resource on MHS's practical value—especially standardized hardware integration and the laser-alignment example.
Balaji Srinivasan
Profile
Balaji Srinivasan recommends the resource he names “farm GKB.” He points to it in the context of pharmacogenomics, saying genetic testing can help anticipate a person’s reaction to a drug and that the underlying technologies have existed for 20 years.
Balaji Srinivasan
Profile
- Quantum Safe Bitcoin (QSB) transactions — open-source technical resource/research project. Balaji Srinivasan says people unfamiliar with QSB “should definitely know about this,” calling it potentially “the most important thing happening in Bitcoin this year.” He attributes the work to Eli Ben-Sasson’s team and says it enables quantum-resistant Bitcoin transactions through scripts on top of existing Bitcoin; the technical details can be examined, and the approach costs more than a normal transaction without necessarily requiring a protocol change.
Not Boring by Packy McCormick
- Ruxandra Teslo’s quick thoughts on Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard(X post) — Packy McCormick recommends reading Teslo’s analysis. The central takeaway is that the standard could automate tedious lab and manufacturing tasks such as laser alignment, allowing humans to focus on science; it is designed to let AI agents operate multiple instruments in parallel. Read the post.
scott belsky
Video discussion — Neil Movva on inference infrastructure: Scott Belsky recommended a discussion with Neil Movva, calling it a “great discussion (and education)” and linking @patrick_oshag’s post: watch the discussion. The discussion is presented as an unusually detailed yet clear “401-level class” on inference across software, chips, and power, covering latency versus throughput, chip architectures, compute arbitrage, AI data centers, power strategy, and open versus closed AI; the post author says, “I learned a ton.”
Ben Horowitz
Profile
Ben Horowitz recommends Fordlandia as “a great book” in a discussion of Ford’s attempt to vertically integrate its auto business through an Amazon rubber plantation and company town; he uses the example to illustrate how industries eventually develop multiple supplier layers and fragment.
Garry Tan
- Garry Tan endorsed the article The Layman’s Case for Data Centers by @12Palehorse, sharing it with the recommendation that “Datacenters create prosperity and good jobs.” The article’s central argument is that data-center computing enables AI-driven robotics and domestic manufacturing, while the buildout creates substantial demand for construction, electrical, and other skilled-trade jobs.
Bitcoin Asia 2026 | Day 2 Livestream
1 of 2
highlights
0:08You got me.
0:33you.
0:58You build me.
1:33Wow.
1:37N want love.
2:23You got me.
2:31You found me.
2:58You don't me.
3:07Golden me.
3:49You got me.
3:58Good night.
4:23love.
4:35W love.
4:58Happy Friday and welcome into Bitcoin Asia 2026. Welcome into the live news desk here. I'm Grace Remington alongside Sean Hagen bringing you live coverage from start until close on everything Bitcoin for day two of the conference here. Good morning to our friends in the east. Good evening to all our friends in the West and the United States. Thanks so much for being with us today as we start day two of the conference, Sean.
5:20And I think it's safe to say day one was a success.
5:22Day one was a big success. You know, we had a lot of exciting speakers. We had a lot of exciting uh you know, booths and events. We had people riding the mechanical bull.
5:31Um but you know, just overall energy was really high. I I think price action obviously helps, but it's been incredible to see everyone who showed up. I think it's a a substantial turnout. It's been a lot of fun and and the vibes are certainly high. Yeah, I mentioned this yesterday, but whether you're a newcomer to this event or you're a seasoned vet, you've been coming for years and to all the different locations, there's really something here for everyone. We have the keynotes happening on the Nakamoto stage, the Genesis stage, those speeches at at the Nakamoto stage, you'll be seeing all day long here on this live stream, so stay tuned. Um, we had the
6:00symposium hosted by BFC and Deal Day happening yesterday. There's booths, like Sean mentioned, all around the facility, so you can meet vendors, get some hands-on demos, uh, get some merch. We have Bow Bow, our mascot.
6:12Oh, yeah.
6:13Walking around. So, snap some picks with with him. And uh the mechanical bull. I feel like we should get some bets going.
6:18Who uh who here on our team needs to jump on there at the end of the day?
6:23Maybe.
6:24Yeah. Yep. You know what? That was easy.
6:26Okay, so we already have our answer there. But plenty of action ahead. So, let's get into some of the headlines. Uh Bitcoin sitting at 80.4 today. It's rallied about 25% this month. and breaking 80 felt like a really important move, but we're starting to see some traders warn that momentum isn't keeping pace with price. So, Sean, how sustainable do you think this upward move is?
6:45Yeah, look, I mean, uh, I I think that sentiment is is justified. We're entering into some uncharted territory here. We're popping up. Price has been running like crazy, right? We just had a seven sigma event last week. And so what these traders are seeing is that price is continuing to rise the past 6 to 8 days as open interest has drifted sideways and volumes have started to drift down. Right? So I would say that that could be expected after such a violent move to the upside. But that is a sign that momentum is dwindling
7:14nonetheless. Um you know at the same time there's there's a lot of catalysts coming up as well, right? One of them being uh in the next couple hours there's about a $6.2 2 billion shelf of options that expire. Um, and there's a massive sell wall at 82,000. So, you know, 3.6 billion of negative gamma exposure is really concentrated here at these levels. And I think that if we break that 82,000 level, it it should be expected that that some market makers are going to have to be uh, you know,
7:44kind of going long or hedging uh to accelerate this rally potentially just so that they don't get caught too off sides. Um, another thing that's interesting is that 82k level that that we're discussing. Um, you know, we're that we're approaching rapidly. You know, even though that that interest and that volume is going down, there's kind of those pockets of of potential incendiary moments. Um, they could be pushing us above the 50we moving average. You know, a lot of the TA uh commentators on YouTube or Twitter always talk about the 50WE being uh kind
8:13of the the truth teller of if we're in a bull or a bear regime, and I think that they tend to be right. um you know, anytime we move confidently below it, uh historically that tends to be the start of a of a larger, you know, at least one-year bare cycle. Uh anytime we move it above it, it tends to lead to a multi-year rally. So, I think that this uh will be interesting to see, you know, maybe we do kind of hit one of these incendiary catalysts and we can pop to the upside. If we're able to do that convincingly with some pace, I would say that that should put a lot of doubts to
8:42rest that that we are in this new bull regime. But having said that, previous cycles we we tend to test it at least once and get rejected first, which we have not done this cycle. So, um wouldn't be surprised to see us face at least a little bit of resistance uh before eventually making our way through it.
8:57Well, you mentioned the volume trading and some of the catalyst for this recent pump. How important is it to see the price rise due to demand rather than market behavior?
9:05It it's very important, right? You can have some of these short violent uh moves. If if you're at home listening, think about uh the game the infamous GameStop short squeeze, right? Uh anytime anytime you get these squeezes or or leverage driven plays, it can be very explosive very fast, up to the upside or the downside. Um but what really sustains long-term growth uh in either direction is that spot buying, people buying and people holding or people actually selling the underlying asset and not returning.
9:33Um, we might have some more changes coming recently because the Fed meeting at Jackson Hole opened yesterday and we're expecting to hear some remarks from Kevin Worsh in about 12 hours here.
9:43So, what type of impact could he have on the market?
9:46Yeah, look, so tomorrow's meeting in Jackson Hole, uh, it's a big deal, right? Because of all these things happening in in the macro environment, right? We have, uh, tensions globally.
9:58We have our own yield we're trying to get under control. Um and the Treasury has kind of made uh I wouldn't call them unprecedented. You know, we we've we've made similar interventions even this century, but um you know, relatively modern interpretation, unprecedented moves of trying to have active yield control potentially, right? Um you know, whether it's refinancing long-term debt into short-term treasuries, whether it's using uh you know, their their actual capital account to purchase some of
10:27these down. Um, you know, Bessant is wanting to come in and attack what he perceives to be to be a problem. Uh, it'll be interesting to see how Wars responds to that. I think it's important also for everyone to keep in mind this is this is not a traditional Fed meeting, right? There's not going to be a decision made. Uh, we're not going to get new interest rates. We're not going to get um any kind of dot plots or anything like that that we that we're used to seeing. But it'll be interesting to hear just kind of the vernacular that Wars will choose to choose to use, right? Is he going to be uh in support of what Bessant is doing? Is he going to
10:56skirt around the issue entirely? Is he going to try to come out and be strong against it? Worsh is a guy who came in and his whole thing was, hey, I don't want to be setting forward guidance. I want the free market to choose. Right?
11:07So, uh, seemingly, uh, Bessence's direct intervention into the free market is a contradiction of that. So, we'll see if the Fed and the Treasury are going to go to war or if they're going to try to work together here to solve this problem.
11:18Volatility obviously something we cannot escape when talking about Bitcoin. And we talked yesterday about the recent volatility spike. was the highest in 3 years. Well, today Kelshi is saying its traders predict Bitcoin crashes to 56,000 this year. How likely do you think that is to happen?
11:34Uh I think that's the same crowd that, you know, two weeks ago was expecting Bitcoin to crash to 30K. I uh and now they're paying about, you know, a 2.5x premium for for being a hater. And uh I I think you never want to be too short Bitcoin. I think that it's reasonable to expect we we will get some sort of some calming in the momentum. Um some sort of retracement um likely in the near term, but I think our bottom is is fairly probably in. I think 58K will end up
12:01being kind of the the the true bottom of this bare cycle. That's not to say that it's up only from here, of course, right? I know a lot of people can kind of get carried away and be too extreme one way or the other. Um I wouldn't be shocked, for example, with that 50WE if if we kind of bounce around there, maybe have to come and retest it one more time. Uh things are never this easy in Bitcoin where it's just going up, right?
12:21A lot of our rallies end up having, you know, 30% plus retracements even during a bull market rally. Um but nonetheless, I I think people expecting 56k are probably largely sidelined and idealistic.
12:34Well, the haters always end up paying in some form. But for what it's worth, the Bitcoin fear and greed index sitting in the green today with a score of 71. And on the other side of this, we had CZ here yesterday uh predicting Bitcoin goes to 1 million and much more quickly, he thinks, than the 25-year timeline that most people uh think. What were your takeaways from his keynote?
12:53Yeah, I thought his keynote was really interesting, right? CZ is one of these guys where he's always been hyper bullish. He's believed in the Bitcoin thesis for a long time. Um but, you know, he he he also uh tries to be, you know, fairly measured and and realistic.
13:06Um so to hear hear him come out and predict a million this cycle, right?
13:11saying, "Hey, look, this 25 year projection that a lot of people say, um, you know, I I think that's out the window. I think things are fundamentally changing." I think we're going to see something like a gold Bitcoin parody, um, imminently. Um, you know, that's that's really interesting to hear from a guy like him who kind of has this this macro global perspective.
13:30All right, we're going to take a quick break. Lots more on the other side. Jury Wadabe of Metanet and podcaster Stefan Loa joining us next to preview the day. We'll be right back.
13:50Easy.
14:15Heat.
14:35Everyone has an opinion. We want evidence.
14:42No hype, no echo chamber.
14:49Just better questions and better answers from the biggest names in Bitcoin.
15:07This is BMTV.
15:16I'm Grace Remington.
15:18And I'm Sean Hagen, bringing you market insights you can't find anywhere else.
15:23We'll see you weekday mornings at 9:30 Eastern on Bitcoin Magazine TV.
15:29It started with an idea. An idea without borders, without permission, without limits. One network connecting millions through one shared belief that financial freedom should belong to everyone everywhere. Because your Bitcoin can power what's next. And with Salt, you can tap into your Bitcoin's liquidity without ever selling. Now with rates starting at 7 12%. Salt providing Bitcoin backed loans for the past
15:58decade.
16:04Every year this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year the stage gets bigger.
16:23Sound money center stage. So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history?
16:33You come home.
16:36Nashville, July 2027.
17:15Welcome back into the live newses at Bitcoin Asia 2026. I'm Grace Remington with Bitcoin Magazine TV. Alongside me now is Stfan Lavera, host of the Stfan Laa podcast, and Duri Wadanab of MetaPlanet. So excited to have you guys up here. We have patrons starting to trickle in today. Thousands on hand yesterday, and energy was really good.
17:34So excited to have another another fun day here with us. But Jury, I want to start with you. Um, with MetaPlanet being the title sponsor for this event, I don't think most people know the the culture in Tokyo when it comes to stocks and investing is so much different than the states in the West. Um, and you work on the community side for MetaPlanet. I saw a stat for every subway car in Tokyo, one person is a MetPanet shareholder. That's crazy.
18:00Yeah. I mean, I think we're the one of the fastest growing companies. Um, and we are changing the narrative of Bitcoin again. And so, it's really exciting to be a part of that and um, make our shareholders harness the future with Bitcoin. M um and the best thing I think about being in the space is the community aspect. Um our CEO Simon Garvich, his um part
18:28behind the community is that you know shareholders typically the journey is a very lonely journey but being part of the MetPanet community it's no longer a lonely journey and you're part of this bigger wider global Bitcoin community which is awesome. So yeah, very happy to be here.
18:45By the way, Simon Garvich speaking at 3:30 on the main stage local time. So you can watch him right here on the stream. Um Stefan, you also have one of the keynotes today from self custody to shareholders with our own David Bailey, CEO of Nakamoto. Can you give us a little preview of that panel?
18:59Sure. So actually um I had an earlier panel just yesterday with David and he was actually kind of on his mind is this idea of what role should corporates have in Bitcoin governance, right? because we saw recently the whole BIP 110 thing.
19:13David was commenting on that and I guess maybe we'll see more of that to come like maybe there'll be a kind of a quantum debate and so on. I think the other broader theme is just that this idea of you know many people who have been around for a long time as David has been since I don't know 2012 or something very early days uh there was this kind of more cipher punk libertarian aspect of it and now it's kind of suit coiners right and hey many of us are also suit coiners as well um are we selling out or is this actually just
19:41part of the maturation of Bitcoin and we're going to try to address some of those questions also well you bring up suit corner and you mentioned that yesterday and I I just think it's so funny when anyone everyone uses that term. I personally like wearing suits, but um the it's kind of a a provocative title or just or theme I think because you talk about the purist versus what it's become. Do you think um this has always been a natural evolution for Bitcoin or is it is it some more of a tension do you think?
20:10Look, I many of us when we were early in Bitcoin, we thought, "Oh, it's all going to happen so quickly. Hyper Bitcoinization is coming in a year or two." No, like it's, you know, it's it's been over a decade, right? It's probably going to be a few more decades. And that's why we need these big pools of capital, whether that's MetaPlanet bringing in, you know, Japanese or and global shareholders, whether it's um access to larger pools of capital. So, we can still have our cipher punk and libertarian ideas, but at the same time, we have to attract new forms of capital, new people into the Bitcoin community over time. And so, I I see it as we
20:40should have a big tent approach.
20:42And Dre, I want to go back to you. um MetaPlanet as the title sponsor of this event. What what are you hoping to achieve by being here?
20:48Well, we just want to have exposure to the wider global market. Um and I think Hong Kong is one of the best places to be for that. And I saw an excite a really exciting stat of um how Bitcoin usage in Hong Kong really went up in the past year. Um and it being in a space like this um it's really interesting to see where traditional finance has been such a big part of the um country's growth in the past few years. So or not
21:17past few years but forever.
21:19Yeah. One of the main themes of this event and obviously you know being on location in Hong Kong is that Hong Kong's trying to position itself as kind of the hub um for for Bitcoin and and as that convergence point between Bitcoin and Tradfi um being based on you know in the east here. How how successful or how close do you think uh we are to getting there in terms of the full Bitcoin adoption?
21:44Yeah. Yeah.
21:46I think um every year we're getting closer, but of course there's always going to be the haters that you've mentioned earlier. Um but um the more you know I always like to say no publicity is bad publicity.
22:00Um the more noise we make, more people will understand, more people will start questioning what our system is like currently. And I think that's even having, you know, even saying Bitcoin um is everyone saying Bitcoin is one step forward to changing the narrative of what sound money is, right? Yeah.
22:19And remind you, you're based in Dubai, correct? Okay. So, yeah, you have a front row seat to this too, kind of the east versus west. How important is Hong Kong in this whole play?
22:28Well, I know it's a obviously a big massive business hobby in Asia. A lot of, you know, high net worth families and capital pools are here. Um, so yeah, I I think there's a there's competition as well around, you know, attracting these wealth flows and we're see we're sort of seeing like an urban flow and of course some of this is just like, you know, there I think we've seen bull and bear seasons in Bitcoin and we're going to see the same thing on the way to hyperitonization that might be another 15 or 20 years out, but you know, you just got to you've got to ride those cycles um as they go. So I think number
22:58go up is going to attract people and then that will cause a new round of interest and there'll be new people coming to treasury companies holding Bitcoin doing various things.
23:07Okay, amazing insights. I hope you guys have a fun day. Thanks for joining us on the desk. It's always great hearing from you guys.
23:12Thanks for having me.
23:13All right, Jury Watab, I got it right. And Stefan Laa, thank you so much. We're going to head over to the Nakamoto stage now for our free our first keynote of the day making Hong Kong the Bitcoin study.
24:35Good morning, Hong Kong, and welcome back to day two of Bitcoin Asia 2026.
24:43Thank you so much for joining us here today on the Nakamoto stage. My name is Jeremy Chang. I'm a Hong Kong and Bitcoin loving enthusiast, someone who's passionate about sound money and the future of this great city. So yesterday we had an amazing lineup of speakers from Brandon Green at BTC Inc. to Gracie Chen at Bitco and of course Justin Sun and CZ. But I promise you that today
25:10will be just as exciting. So to open up this morning, it's my pleasure to introduce a very special person, someone who also shares my love for Bitcoin and Hong Kong. Please welcome to the stage the CEO of the Whale Lounge Hong Kong, Gail Weisenberg.
25:40Good morning. Welcome to Hong Kong, my favorite city. I'm Gail Weisenberg. I am the director of the Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong and we are going to change this city to the Bitcoin city.
25:54So for over a decade, I manufactured cloth diapers and um the idea of washing diapers is very scary probably as scary as being your own bank, right?
26:09So, we are conditioned to dispose, yet we have the most sophisticated washing machine and detergent. I'll spare you the details on club diapering. Um, it's as niche as Bitcoin and you are as crazy if you use them.
26:26No major retailers back then carry them and it was a great product, but it was very difficult. We would convince the parents. We would have to go over and over. They would look at us like if we were really crazy and um I would go until they would say yes. Sounds very familiar. It's almost like orange peeling.
26:54So that's exactly what happened when you try to orange peel anyone or if you try to tell a retailer that they should accept Bitcoin. the same look, the same conditioning that says this sounds risky. Which planet is she from?
27:12But here is what I learned about diapers and that is also true with Bitcoin. When they start being Bitcoin educated, they finally get it. They can't go back. They fall in the rabbit hole and they become advocates. That is the magic. So nine nos for one yes. I converted parents and retailer one at a time. If you ever wonder how I got my PhD in rejection.
27:45So Charlie Banana was the first club diaper brand that landed in Target store nationwide in the US. And when I sold it in 2020, we were sold in 66 countries. So I I know I can do this. So it all started from here, from my flat in Hong Kong because Hong Kong is a city where anything good can happen.
28:14So, here we are again with another grand mission, my son and I and the Bitcoin Association to turn Hong Kong into the Bitcoin city. So, I love hates. Um, Chinese love eight and eight is a very auspicious number.
28:37Bitcoin was born in 2008 if you didn't know. It's a very good sign. So I have a simple question. 17 years ago is almost two decades. Why aren't there more merchant in Hong Kong and in the world that accept Bitcoin?
28:57Merchant today are losing two to three and a half% on every transaction to convenient credit cards, PayPal strap, etc. They have chargebacks, fraud disputes, three to 30 days settlement cycles. A wire transfer costs $90 and it takes a week for them to arrive. It's faster to get on a plane to carry the money to deliver your money. It's crazy. We accepted it. It's the fiat cost of doing business.
29:31Every business in the world should be accepting Bitcoin. Every invoices on the planet should have an extra line at the bottom that says we accept Bitcoin. To every charity, organization, churches, synagogue, Bitcoin donations are borderless, instant, and final. No payment processors scheming a cut between a donor and a cause. If you care about your mission, you should care about where you hold your financial reserves.
30:10So why am I bullish in Bitcoin adoption in Hong Kong?
30:16There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. We've already mined 20 million. Corporations are buying like mad. Countries are building reserves. Two to three millions have been lost forever. 70% of coins are custody. They'll never see the light on exchange. So we're roughly left with two million coins. That's it. If every millionaires in the world wanted to buy half a coin, there's not enough stock. People don't realize how Bitcoin is so scarf, finite.
30:56The sooner all the CEO and all the CFO understand Bitcoin as a capital, the better their business will be.
31:08So, can Hong Kong be the forefront of Bitcoin City adoption?
31:13Yes, it can. Because Bitcoin City didn't wait for permission. While the world argue about regulation, Hong Kong acted. Bitcoin is classifi is classified here as a digital commodity. We have 13 license exchanges, more than anywhere in Asia. We launched Asia first spot Bitcoin ETF in 24. The stable coin ordinance passed in August 25. The framework is built. The rules are written.
31:51Out of 8.2 billion population, 741 millions of people have a crypto wallet today and it's growing by 12% annually.
32:03That's huge.
32:05Hong Kong alone has 2.2 million crypto wallets on a city of 7.5 million. Not to mention all the people that are coming here. Hong Kong receives 35 million tourists every year and we lost a lot and recovering from COVID. We have crypto events every week. There is a decent number of crypto wallet holder passing through.
32:34European, Canadians, American, Dubai refugees, as I call them, are leaving their country and looking for a fairer tax system, Bitcoin friendly city, safer country. Bit Hong Kong has it all. We need to attract the right tourists. We need more families. We need more talents. We need more business creation. In 24, El Salvador had had 22% increeded tourism after Bitcoin adoption. They don't even have hot water.
33:11And excuse me, but I don't like papooseas. We have the best food. In Hong Kong, on the other hand, we have Michelin star restaurant and amazing food. Worldclass hotel, the more diverse nature surrounding us, incredible energy, no capital tax, no property tax, no suction tax, crypto rules are are clear in Hong Kong. Fast business setup and it's very safe. I am super bullish on Hong Kong and the entire greater Bay Area.
33:52So my son and I, we have the great goal to on board merchants across Hong Kong to accept Bitcoin. We set up already 28 in a month. There are about 45,000 merchant in Hong Kong and we're ready for the rejection. We can't wait for the next Bitcoin Asia to show you all the progress we've made.
34:21There is a map that you can follow on btcmap.org and you can show it see all the progress that we're making. So we simplify the whole process of for Bitcoin transaction and for business. We offer a basic point of sale powered by a Bitcoin wallet and our own basic app.
34:42They work exactly like a POS for credit card. The staff just need to tap the number and press charge. The owner, the CFO control the wallet. We install, we train the staff. They don't have to understand Bitcoin. It's just as easy as anything else. We connect every merchant Bitcoin friendly accountant, lawyers so that they're fully in legality.
35:09So what convinces them to say yes?
35:13Zero processing fee. Let me repeat. Zero processing fee versus two to three and a half%. That's about 30 grand on a $1 million purchase. Instant settlements, no chargebacks, transactions are final, and there's no fraud, dispute, no reversal notice. As we say in Hong Kong, momentai.
35:42So accepting Bitcoin is legal in Hong Kong and treated like gold in accounting practice. We have lots of jewelers, so it's not new to them. Many have been asked to accept Bitcoin before, but until us giving them the guidance, they were a lot of hesitation. Not anymore. So this is Hong Kong as we say 5D 5D. Everyone wants things fast. A Bitcoin lightning is 5D.
36:21So what holds merchant back?
36:24Accountant need to be educated in crypto accounting as well as the auditors and we will help the university as the association. And we will make sure that all those new student coming out of accounting school get the proper education and are not scared of Bitcoin. The big one is volatility and it's a fair concern. Bitcoin is better money. Full stop. It does not inflate and you cannot print anymore. Bitcoin volatility is like gold.
37:00Think about a gold merchant. Gold swing 20 to 30% annually sometime more. Does a jewelry get rid of the inventory? Absolutely not. They hold. They understand that gold is a reserve asset or over time the direction is up. Bitcoin is the same logic just harder, scarcer, and more portable. It needs to be managed. So here's the practical reality.
37:34When Bitcoin is lower, every payment you receive gives you more sats for the same dollar amount you build. You are naturally buying low just by running your business. When Bitcoin is higher, you spend you sell to manage your cash flow. You enjoy the upside. At first, the bo the volume will be small. You will get comfortable and the volatility will not will stop phasing you.
38:05Best performing asset on earth averaging 60% annual growth in the last 10 years.
38:12Bitcoin wins.
38:16I used to tell skeptical parents to try at home and at night. Babies almost never poo at night. Once you try, you realize how much better they are and how brainwashed you've been by the black rocks of diapers. Do the math. 6,000 diapers versus 24 diapers, right? A lot more satsling in your baby's wallet.
38:43So, same to the merchant in this room and beyond. Try get set up. add some Bitcoin to your balance sheet slowly by accepting Bitcoin the same way you would save gold but easier to transact with. You are not reinventing your business.
39:03You are opening a door to the new type of client. a global highspending sorry a global highspending loyal tribe that will roll straight into your business because you accept Bitcoin you'll get comfortable now this is important you can we can sign up every merchant in
39:31the world but if none of it work without you Bitcoiners, I'm talking to you. Dust off your wallet anywhere and everywhere that you pay for something. Ask, do you accept Bitcoin?
39:51You are not just a holder, not just an investor. You are the demand side of a two-sided market. And without you showing up and spending, the merchant have no reason to move. by just asking. I bought two cats in Monkok and I pay for my good friend's team funeral in Bitcoin. That was not his last wish, but I thought he would get a kick out of it.
40:17You are when no bitcoins are left on exchange. That will be the only way to acquire any. Get set up.
40:28Thank you.
40:48Everyone has an opinion. We want evidence.
40:55No hype, no echo chamber.
41:02Just better questions and better answers from the biggest names in Bitcoin.
41:20This is BMTV.
41:29I'm Grace Remington.
41:31And I'm Sean Hagen, bringing you market insights you can't find anywhere else.
41:36We'll see you weekday mornings at 9:30 Eastern on Bitcoin Magazine TV. market analyst at BMTV, Shan Hagen, the CEO of Salt Lending. Shawn Owen, the co-founder and chairman for the foundation for research on equal opportunity and the chief strategy offer at Strive Ocroy and the founder and senior physicist of the Hong Kong Institute of Physics, Joseph Wang. Let's give him a round of applause.
42:45All right. All right. Thank you everybody for being here. Uh like you said, I'm joined with Sean Oic and Joseph. We're talking about how Bitcoin can unlock capital uh throughout the world. You know, a lot of people here own Bitcoin. Um but right now it might just be a number on the screen. So, a lot of this is talking about as an individual, as a nation, state, as a corporation. Um how do you how do you unlock that capital and perhaps make it more useful? Um gentlemen, why don't we
43:14go around the horn and just tell us a little bit about who you are, what do you do, and how do you see individuals unlocking their Bitcoin?
43:23Uh Sean Owen, founder of Salt Lending, uh based in the United States, been a Bitcoiner for 15 years, running a lending company for a decade. Very excited to see the price up and also be here in this wonderful city. Um huge fan of Bitcoin. It's great to see the adoption and I think that there's a great conversation here for what it looks like for every one of us to continue to build wealth and save wealth in the form of Bitcoin uh and how that translates to corporations and
43:53eventually long-term capital underpinning all of the credit worldwide uh as we talk about how this expands across all the different borders. Um hand it off from there. My my name is OCI Roy. It's spelled Avi K, but pronounced OIC just to confuse you. I am the chief strategy officer at Strive, which is one of the world's largest uh corporate holders of Bitcoin with over 21,000 Bitcoin in our balance sheet. And we're known for our SATA product, which
44:21is a preferred dividend, which gives you a 13% yield on on your savings. So, that's uh that's our core product. I'm also the chairman of the foundation for research on equal opportunity which is a think tank headquartered in Austin, Texas and a senior adviser to the Bitcoin Policy Institute. So I spent a lot of my time in the public policy space thinking about the policy environment for Bitcoin and obviously I spent a lot of my time also my my day job is with Strive helping to build out our digital credit strategy.
44:51Hi, my name is Joseph Wang and um you can look at my uh profile on LinkedIn.
44:56So I'm an astrophysicist and so uh I'm a founder of the Hong Kong Institute of Physics. And so one of the questions is what is an astrophysicist doing here? And so um one way of describing who I am is I I feel like a space alien that got trapped a couple hundred years in the past. So I'm always trying to push things uh to the future.
45:16And so uh my background is I've got a physics degree from MIT uh PhD from um University of Texas at Austin and also uh worked at JP Morgan during the financial crisis. And I've been doing Bitcoin for the past 10 years. And my interest in Bitcoin is um uh if you look out around the world, okay, it's a total mess. Uh, and I'm really excited to be in this moment in history in this place
45:44in Hong Kong because this is the place where the new financial system, the old financial system is dead. All right? It it's dying and it's going to be gone within like the next couple of months. And this is the place you are the people who are going to create the new world.
45:59Couple of months. That's a that's a call.
46:02All right. Well, you know, there's definitely a lot of headlines recently, a lot of uh potential crises on the on the sovereign debt side of things. Um, let's open it up first kind of on the on the individual level. Gentlemen, uh, you know, there's probably a lot of people here, I would assume, at a Bitcoin conference that that own Bitcoin. What's the most important thing they could do practically to turn this asset from just a number on the screen to working capital?
46:27Never sell your Bitcoin, I think, is the mission here. Number one, it's very tempting. It's very easy. Uh, but it's the most expensive money you'll ever borrow is the lost opportunity of selling your Bitcoin and then paying whatever it might be for voluntary taxes andor lost opportunity. So, as simple as that seems, I think that is still principle number one. Everything that I've seen in the last 15 years tells me that that's more true now than ever. And as much as of a trope as it sounds, it really is just that simple. Just don't
46:57sell your Bitcoin and whatever you can earn, earn it in Bitcoin and save as much as you can after you spend and you will be doing phenomenally better than you might imagine in you know a few few years.
47:09I agree with all that self-custody is an essential feature of Bitcoin. It's part of what makes it censorship resistant money along with being sound money.
47:17Obviously at Strive, what we also try to do is build products that help people use Bitcoin to maximize their returns in their conventional brokerage accounts, right? So if you have a conventional brokerage account, one of the challenges that Salt is trying to solve is if you have a lot of Bitcoin, how do you make that Bitcoin productive by borrowing against it? Things like that. But I think we would all agree that today it's still very hard. The interest rates that you have to borrow at to borrow against your Bitcoin are high. In conventional brokerage accounts, the borrowing can be
47:47at much lower interest rate. And then you combine that with instruments at like Strive's common stock, ASST, and our preferred instrument, SATA or SATA. That gives you the options in your conventional brokerage account to to take advantage of Bitcoin's sound money properties because our entire balance sheet is backed by one thing, Bitcoin.
48:06Um, and use that to improve the returns, riskadjusted returns in convent conventional brokerage accounts. So that's that's been our solution. How do you get more normies who maybe aren't ready for self- custody to understand how Bitcoin can help them? Uh that's what Strive exists to do. And then on top of that, I would say and we were talking about this a little bit backstage and maybe relates a bit to your comments. Um we are we are not that far away from a real fiscal crisis in the United States. what uh Scott
48:36Bessant, the Treasury Secretary, did last week to partially monetize the debt using the Treasury Department's funds to me was the canary in the coal mine, which is kind of an expression to say the signal that a crisis is close in hand. And while Bitcoiners, I think, conventionally are like, well, if if the US falls apart, this is going to be great for Bitcoin. We're all going to be lapping all the way to the bank. be careful what you wish for because if there really is a fiscal crisis, the US government is not going to just sit
49:04there passively and watch it happen. They're going to swing into action.
49:07They're going to try to prevent people from buying Bitcoin with US dollars and perhaps other instruments like the Hong Kong dollar which is pegged to the US dollar. So, uh this is something we all need to be very closely watching and a lot of my policy writing is on this topic for the Bitcoin Policy Institute and for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and people can find that writing at the bpi.org.
49:29bpi.org and freeop.org f reop.org.
49:34So I tell a story about uh in the 1940s my uh mother uh it was in the middle of the civil war they needed to move money from one place to the other and so what uh her parents did was to sew gold coins into her uh jacket and and they were able to hide the coins and move from one place to the other. Right. So, uh, and and we I I I believe we still have that that that bit of gold from from from the 1940s. So, uh, I don't know what's going
50:03to happen in the next few months. I don't know what's going to happen next year, but I know it's going to be completely crazy. So right now uh I think the the the thing to do is to put the money in either physical gold and it has to be real gold, none of the paper stuff. Put it in uh digital Bitcoin, real Bitcoin, and just wait to see what happens because uh uh once we know what the new world's going to look like, then then we can convert the Bitcoin or gold to something else. But right now uh it's
50:31going to get wild. Uh, also one other thing is the um it's starting to go downhill and one one thing I I I want to show you that to just prove how things go downhill is um uh if you just go outside and look at the prices. Okay, just uh I I think if you go uh to lunch here at the convention center, you can buy uh a really good lunch for I think uh the equivalent of about $20 US. Now think of what what you can get for $20 US in the US right now. So things are
51:01things are already starting to go downhill and the problem is that we're in a stage where the more they try to keep things from falling apart the faster things will fall apart and um I wish it was recoverable but I I don't see any way that it's it's not going to end in something really dramatic and and it's already starting.
51:22So, if we continue to go down this path and and things do accelerate and and you know, as Joseph says, there's there's this kind of new system born. Um, what does that look like for, you know, Bitcoin lending products or treasury companies who are are kind of already kind of the intersection of the two systems, right? Seemingly on better footing to weather the storm. Um, you know, what is kind of the outlook on those fronts with these services that are kind of the middle ground or integrated in both systems? I mean, I
51:52think we probably share this in common somewhat in that we see bridge instruments and creating credit on top of collateral in the form of Bitcoin as an essential part of what the economy needs. There's many people older in age, let's say, for example, who are in that phase where they just need uh cash flow and or yield or they may not know that they really need Bitcoin underpinning that and so this is the closest kind of gateway to it. And uh that has been true all along up until now and I think as
52:18things do accelerate if true that we could see a change more towards the Bitcoin side of it underpinning it. But in the meantime I still think that there's this reality no matter what the actual currency rate is where you have a collateral form that is global. It doesn't require courthouse to no providence. There's no UCI, you know, there's no QIP number. There's no deed.
52:41it's just onchain and it can serve as this foundation for a new form of credit and whatever that might be ultimately that there's still this need for currency and right now that need for currency comes in the form of yield generating uh borrowed capital andor on the other side putting capital to work in yield and I think that that will persist even if we were to see this really accelerate.
53:05Yeah. I mean uh you know I think from the Bitcoin treasury point of view I think one of the things that's been interesting to observe is the various efforts to launch Bitcoin treasury companies in different markets. So of course we're based in the US and Strategy the pioneer of this whole uh sector is based in the US but Metaplanet obviously proved in Japan there was a a lot of utility to this model. Um and uh Moon Inc. and and others here in Hong Kong are trying to do the same thing.
53:32Our friends at UTXO have invested in a lot of the the different uh uh country specific uh treasury companies. There are a number in Europe. And I think as we at Strive and and I as the chief strategy officer, part of my job is to keep an eye on all these things. Um, as we observe what we see around the world as as people come up with these local champions in in the Bitcoin treasury space, it's really interesting to see how the legal regimes and the regulatory structures in different countries
54:00provide advantages and disadvantages. So to give an example, one of the big advantages that we've had in the US is the ability to issue dividends irrespective of our profitability. So, our company actually runs at a small net operating loss, but that doesn't prevent us from issuing return of capital dividends to our preferred equity shareholders. In a lot of jurisdictions, you can't do that. You're not allowed to issue dividends outside of you have to draw the dividends from profit. So, if
54:30you're not profitable, you can't do the exact strategy we're doing. And then to give another example in Japan, one of the reasons why Metaplanet really took off uh and was really the second great Bitcoin treasury success story is because Japan had this interesting structure where the capital gains tax for cryptocurrency gains was far higher than the capital gains tax for gains in the stock market. And so by metaplanet creating this instrument, a lot of people who wanted to bet on Bitcoin
55:00could do so in a more taxefficient way using MetaMoplanet. Now there's talk in the Japanese legislature of eliminating that arbitrage, but it still exists today and has been a big part of their success.
55:12So um if you one of the cool things about Hong Kong is that Hong Kong is a place where different um financial systems interact. So you've got the mainland Chinese financial system, you've got the western financial system, you've got the Middle Eastern financial system. So uh one of the thing uh places in Hong Kong to look at is uh there's this place called Chunking Mansions.
55:32It's uh two subway stops um in a place called Jim Satsu and it looks like a place out of Bladeunner. literally looks out and if you go in the front door there like a whole bunch of money shops and so what's the the situation is that the uh connection between Middle East and uh Asia is already on crypto. So when somebody in uh the Middle East buys a whole bunch of cell phones in um in uh from China, they they they they don't
56:02use bank transfers. They're already using Tether. Now what happens is that it's still built on top of the US dollar. So once the US dollar something starts happening to that, the the the foundation's going to move over to Bitcoin. The other problem is that you've got five billion people in the world uh that want their cell phones, they want their electric cars, they want their stuff and um right now we're in a dollar economy and there there's just no way that you you can have that amount of
56:31dollars. the US can issue that amount of dollars to get five billion people to like uh develop levels of standards of living. So, it's going to be built on something else. It's going to be built on Bitcoin. And if you think of all that trade that's going um that's going to move on to Bitcoin as a foundation layer like gold, uh you you can just see the price of Bitcoin and gold just skyrocketing to just absolutely amazing levels.
56:56Yeah. CZ said yesterday he thinks that we might hit gold Bitcoin par this cycle even. Um, but on that thought, we're we're talking about that that that sheer demand for for dollars and how it might need to be another system. Um, you know, how how do things like the Genius Act tie into your viewpoint there, right?
57:13Where you see the Treasury refinancing a lot of their longerterm debt into short-term T bills at the same time as they're introducing this legislation to hopefully issue those into synthetic onchain dollars.
57:24Yeah. You know, it's it's very interesting. You know, again, from a strive perspective, I look at the debate about stable coins in the US and think of it as almost like Congress is fighting the last war, right? So, there's this huge fight for those who haven't filed this debate in the US between stable coin issuers and banks because in a in a US bank, if you have money in a checking account or a savings account, you're getting basically zero interest on that, which means on an inflationadjusted basis, you're losing money every year. Now, the stable coins,
57:53some stable coin issuers want to pass on some of the yield from their treasury uh bond holdings to their users, maybe 2% of the 4% or something like that. And the banks are going crazy trying to fight this. And so there's this huge fight in Congress about whether uh stable coin issuers should be able to issue any form of rewards or interest to their users. But we're talking about 2% here, 1% there, 3% there. Then you look at an instrument like SATA uh which is
58:23not uh a stable coin but is you the dividend yield on SATA if you own $100 worth of SATA is $13 a year or 13%. That's way higher than anything in a stable coin or a money market mutual fund or any of these other instruments.
58:39So the way we look at it is let Congress and the banks and the stable coin issuers fight about what they should have been doing 10 years ago. We've we feel have built the future of short-term cash-like deposits with SATA. And and on that similar thought, you know, you see some people speculating online. I think maybe even sailors use the term, you know, the the yield curve of Bitcoin with his various preferred instruments.
59:05Do you feel like there's uh going to be a flow of capital out of maybe long-term treasuries, medium-term treasuries into these built uh you know, Bitcoin instruments?
59:16you know, um it's we're in very very early innings. So, you know, I I don't know. I I think what I'll say there's a couple of things that we're observing.
59:25The first is just in the last year or so, gold surpassed treasuries as the single largest holding in central banks worldwide, which hadn't been the case in since I think the late 1990s, if I'm recalling correctly. So, a big part of gold's runup over the last several years has been driven by central banks saying, you know what, we're not confident in treasuries anymore. We're going to hold gold. Which is again a kind of a leading indicator for what you're describing.
59:52Um, central banks are a little bit more skeptical about holding Bitcoin. But hedge funds, other financial institutions, obviously individuals can take that same line of thinking and use it to hold Bitcoin or Bitcoin backed securities like ours. And I do think you're seeing more of that over time.
1:00:09But today, again, if you think about the entire scale of the Bitcoin backed preferred equity digital credit market, it's like $15 billion. And there's hundreds of trillions of dollars of capital that's on on the sidelines right now from that standpoint. So, we look at this market as extremely large, and we're just scratching the surface of it today.
1:00:31So, I I've got uh some things to say about stable coins, right? So, one problem uh one thing about stable coins, the way they're used in Hong Kong is that nobody wants to hold stable coins.
1:00:41So, what what the way that works is uh I want to buy some cell phones from the Middle East or I want to buy gold. And so, I use the stable coins to send the money between Dubai and Hong Kong. The moment I I have stable coins in my hand, I go into the money changer and change it to the paper cash. And the reason why is that people I mean people just don't trust stable coins. But for stable coins for trade, you only need to hold it for for like 10 minutes and as long as things don't blow up in those 10
1:01:09minutes, you're good. But nobody in Hong Kong wants to hold stable coins. Now, as far as stable coin bills in the US, I see this as a very negative sign because let let me ask you a question and and and this this hurts me because I um I'm an American born Chinese, but what does the US make, right? I mean, what can it build? It can't build cars. It can't build missiles. It can't build batteries. So, the only thing that the US makes is money. Now, the problem with making money is that in the short run, okay, I'm just printing a whole bunch of
1:01:39money and and it looks like I'm getting rich. But in the long run, what happens is that the more money you print, eventually people realize that you're just printing paper. And that's the situation that we're in. And unfortunately, that's the situation with stable coins because what the the reason why they're pushing the stable coin things is that they're looking for more ways of of printing money. And as long as you start printing money, eventually it's all going to fall apart. And we've reached that stage where people are starting to realize that this is what's going on.
1:02:06I'm going to disagree with you a little bit there, Joseph, because uh the world's largest exporter is China. China exports three trillion US dollars a year of uh goods and services. The rest of the world Okay. Uh the second largest exporter in the world is the United States. The United States exports $2 trillion of goods and services around the world. We may not make the same things that we used to make that China now exports, but we make quite a few things. We make pharmaceuticals. We make oil. We make uh
1:02:35airplanes. Uh there are a lot of things that the United States still manufactures the rest of the world. I would not say that the United States doesn't make anything today. In fact, I think there's a a resurgence of hardware engineering technology powered by AI that's that's actually very exciting in the US right now. I don't think that's the problem with the US economy. The problem with the US economy is the federal deficit and the federal debt which is rising and getting worse every year. And as interest rates go up, that means the ability to finance the debt
1:03:03becomes a lot harder. Right now, the United States spends more on interest payments on the federal debt than it spends on national defense. And that problem is only getting worse. That that started last year in 2025. And as interest rates go up and the Treasury Department fails to suppress interest rates, that's the thing that's going to make the US economy weaker and weaker.
1:03:24I mean, I'm going to comment on your original question a little bit here just to go further is that what stable coins really do illustrate is that you can cut all of the fat out of all the banking branches, the Fed, the whole pipeline, if you will, when you are just issuing something direct. The real issue is that the money itself is issued on the premise of debt and so there's really no way out of that. I mean you can't pay back the fiat system. It has to continue in that direction. So to the question about is this going to flow more into
1:03:53yield seeking instruments. Absolutely I think it will. If you look at the total assets all capital let's put it in all capital on the planet from all people. Uh, Bitcoin is tiny still. And even if you were to look at everything being dollarized to to some degree, even though it's not all the way, uh, all fiat currency has the same premise in in place, which is give it maybe longer than a couple months, maybe if you went out 50 years. Uh, you know, Bitcoin is just superior when it comes to what it
1:04:21does compared to gold, what it does when it compares to real estate, what it does to any kind of asset class where you're really just looking to build collateral and save for the future. And so then again, everybody needs yield and we're all stuck in a system where we must pay in something that's issued out of debt.
1:04:37So debt is uh an instrument of the system by definition and is inescapable for as long as the system exists.
1:04:44However, the alternative rails are here and Bitcoin does show what that looks like when you have a longer duration, higher preference of what saving value is in a superior finite asset. Uh and I just think it's going to continue to take flow from every type of capital stack there is every generation even further more and become ubiquitous in a way that is unstoppable.
1:05:08It's a real opportunity for Hong Kong, right? Jurisdictions that have take a pro- Bitcoin stance and create a regulatory architecture that allows people to hold Bitcoin, raw Bitcoin. It doesn't have to be securitized Bitcoin. That's where a lot of this capital will flow over the long term as these trends continue to get worse.
1:05:27Okay. So, so what one thing about is I I hate regulation because you don't Okay, one of the basic things is that I have a right to hold my money. I have a right to own stuff. I don't need permission. I mean, the government needs permission from me to to to to take my stuff.
1:05:42Yeah. Um, so one one of the things that uh one of the reasons I got into Bitcoin, right, was that okay. So, so I I I worked in in traditional finance and uh so so I can do math. I can do complicated stuff. I can make like tables and tables of equations. And one thing I learned is that the more complicated you make it, the more it's somebody's trying to take money from from your wallet. So, the thing I like is I like physical gold, the the the yellow shiny stuff I can hold. I like paper cash because I can count that. And
1:06:11I like Bitcoin because, okay, you you you do need to trust the math a bit, but the math is pretty solid. Everything else you should be suspicious of because if you start with these three things, you're based on math, you're based on physics, you're based on something you hold. Anytime you do all this complicated stable coin, debt, whatnot, right? There are people like me that that are there people like me that that that are going to write complicated equations to take your money. So So that that that's
1:06:41why I got into Bitcoin because I couldn't stand it. So, you know, we have some some disagreements on on how this happens and and what the the the causations might be, but directionally we're all very aligned.
1:06:55Why then do we have the perspective of Bitcoin? Why is Bitcoin the unique tool to help unlock this capital around the world? I mean, one example, just a very quick one is uh great friend of mine who lives in Dubai uh recently just was telling a story about how he's making bids on his friend's gold who they were trying to sell at a discount to get out of the zone as fast as possible. Now, they had saved that gold for a rainy day and the rainy day came and then they wanted to get rid of as fast as possible and it's because it wasn't portable.
1:07:24It's not as easily divisible. It's very heavy. It's not transferable that way.
1:07:28Um, and Bitcoin serves that purpose. And so, it's not that I'm not a fan of gold because I am, and I agree with you wholeheartedly. It's that there's different use cases and that they both are they compete for um, you know, these these unique propositions that are similar, but Bitcoin just is superior when it comes to finite, transferable, portable, somewhat funible enough to be usable collateral that you don't have any other form of.
1:07:54So, you know, I would I would add to that. But I agree with everything you said and I would add to that this way that the the principle that makes Bitcoin better than gold, if we really want to kind of use one word to describe it, is resilience. Like you you were mentioning how your parents had to sew the gold coins into their clothes to to get out of the country. You know, with Bitcoin, you don't have to do that. You can it it's just there in on the blockchain. Now, having said that, I do think that one area of Bitcoin
1:08:22resilience that is underappreciated in the Bitcoin community, but is incredibly important going forward with all the things that we've been talking about is the conversion of US dollars to Bitcoin. The one thing we do not have today in the Bitcoin world which we will need in the future is a decens decentralized censorship resistant exchange mechanism for fiat currencies in the US dollar.
1:08:47Today if you want to sell your US dollars and buy Bitcoin, you either have to do it on a street corner, you know, as as often is done in in certain places around the world and used to be done in the US or you go to Coinbase or Kraken or some big exchange and do it there. The big exchanges are not censorship resistant. The government can shut them down in a crisis or at any other time.
1:09:08And so and the stable coins that are licensed in the US and in other jurisdictions are censorable. In fact, that's a condition of their lensure. Uh and all these laws that we were talking about before like clarity and genius, that's explicitly in those uh legal texts that say we the Treasury Department have to be able to censor this stable coin in other in order for it to be legal. So the big problem is if that's the case, how do you how do you if the US someday says we're not going
1:09:36to allow you to exchange bit US dollar for Bitcoin because we're worried about capital flight, how do you how do you uh scale Bitcoin Bitcoin's you utilization in that environment? So I think one of the most important things that some people are working on in the Bitcoin community, but it doesn't get nearly enough attention is that problem. How we create how do we create a decentralized mechanism for US dollars or digital US dollars to be exchanged into Bitcoin in a censorship resistant way for Bitcoin to be truly resilient. I think that's a
1:10:06thing that we need to do that we aren't doing today.
1:10:09So, so I can answer that by what happened on day one of the Iran war. Iran sent a few bunch of drones. They shut down the Dubai airport. Once you shut down the Dubai airport, gold shipments and paper shipments stop dead.
1:10:21Now, the Iranians are being really nice right now and they're they're letting gold shipments go through the Dubai airport, but they're making it very clear they could stop it. Now, as far as the money in the banks do uh Iran shot a few warning shots at the Amazon data centers, they can cut down the data links. They can they can block Starlink.
1:10:40So, at that point, you realize that the Iranians are being really really nice and there's this huge negotiation because the Iranians don't want to blow up the world economy. Now, once we move to the new world, right? Everybody wants some something that that that can including the Iranians, right? They they know they can shut things down, but they they there's going to be probably this agreement that okay, I want something that you can't stop me, but I can't stop you. And it's going to be Bitcoin because um if you're in Dubai and you
1:11:08had gold and the airports are shut down, you're host. If you if you just remember those 12 words, Satoshi wallet, your money's your money's good.
1:11:18Awesome. Well, thank you, gentlemen.
1:11:19Again, this was Joseph Wong, Shawn Owen, and OIC Roy. Thank you guys.
1:11:24Thank you.
1:11:53Welcome back into the live newses here at Bitcoin Asia 2026. More faces, more patrons trickling in here. We're we're starting to to really feel the energy here. Um, good gate day two ahead of us here and new faces on the desk with me as well. Spencer Nichols, EP, producer of just everything at Bitcoin Magazine and Isaiah Austin, our social media. We just saw our buddy Sean Hagen leading a panel on stage called How Bitcoin Unlocks Capital Throughout the World.
1:12:18And Ovroy started out hot. He really did not hold back. He brought up the worst case scenario right away where if we reach extreme inflation in the United States, the government might prevent people from using USD to buy Bitcoin. So Spencer, I'll start with you. How do we get ahead of that now?
1:12:33Yeah. Yeah. I think OID brought up a really good point is what becomes the incentive structure of the United States when we do see something like financial repression? uh we see high inflation, negative real yields for a long term, perhaps severely negative real yields.
1:12:45Um and what is the response function there? Um and I do think, you know, there's a case to be made that the United States would not like to see people exiting the system for something like Bitcoin. Um I think for us and for us here at Bitcoin Magazine, that's something we often think about is um you know, will that be what takes place or is there a way to align the incentives of a sovereign like the United States with the interests of something like Bitcoin? Um I personally I think this kind of brings to mind something like bit bonds um where we back US treasuries with a small amount of Bitcoin. Is that
1:13:14a way to hedge that inflation risk um you know to provide a positive real return for bond holders potentially and keep us away from that tension? But I really do think um that tension between you know the US government and Bitcoin holders is something very real.
1:13:27Yeah, definitely. And you know in the United States right now we're very blessed to have a pro Bitcoin uh administration in office. But I mean the reality is you know it wasn't Bitcoin, it was stable coins last year where the conversations were happening with the Clarity Act uh on banks coming in and saying hey you know if we offer yield with these stablecoin products uh and and rewards then you know it's essentially a bank run like they can't offer that return to their clients. Um so they essentially won that argument.
1:13:56They won the that the the crypto industry got the short end of that stick. Um so it's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out with Bitcoin. I think the Clarity Act passing, you know, there's certain uh certain acts within the Clarity Act that prevent FinScent from essentially spying on on people and getting their home addresses and names whenever they make Bitcoin transactions. So, getting that kind of legislation uh through the finish line will be huge for preventing the government uh or a future tyrannical government or institution from being
1:14:25able to censor or block Bitcoin transactions. Real quick followup also brought up the need to decentralize the on andoff ramp for acquiring Bitcoin in order for it to be truly resilient. What do you think that looks like?
1:14:35Yeah, I think that's a really important outstanding question. He talked about the centralized nature of stable coins in their current form. Um, and if people want to be able to get out of, you know, the the US dollar-based, treasury based financial system into Bitcoin. Um, how do they do that in a way where the government can't just lock the doors and say unilaterally, no, you can't exit.
1:14:52Um, I think there are some interesting things out there. Frankly, I think it's an area we need to do a lot more digging, but stable channels is quite interesting. Um, and yeah, something like stable channels has been explored, but um, I do think it's an outstanding question. OIC has said this very often and it's certainly a risk that we need to be cognizant of. Um, Isaiah, do you have any thoughts on the matter?
1:15:10Yeah, no, completely agree on that point. you know, throughout the entire world, there's all sorts of different regulatory bodies that that can stop Bitcoin transactions from happening or at least at least spying or getting into uh people's phones and able to track their information and their details uh about who they are, you know, where the money's headed. Um, but I I really think once again I I just brought up the Clarity Act, but the Clarity Act passing I think in the United States specifically uh will be really good for preventing that. And I think once that
1:15:39bill is passed or we have some form of jurisdiction from the from the CFTC, I think just like we talked about yesterday, I think that the world will follow and there will be lots of jurisdictions around the world that will follow suit.
1:15:51He also brought up the conversation, you know, the fight in the US between stable coin issuers and banks and kind of the tension there. Um, should stable coins have some type of reward? Obviously, banks don't really feel too kindly about that. But he uh he brought up his product SATA comparing it to yield on savings and returns on money market funds. Um obviously SATA the first of its kind pervert stock that pays dividends every single business day. So Spencer do you think SATA could be a substitution for traditional yield
1:16:19instruments? Yeah, I think um that was initially how something like stretch issued by strategy um I think was marketed is they were saying hey this could be an a competitor to money market funds and you know the addressable market of that is absolutely gigantic.
1:16:33Um I think we saw much greater volatility in uh stretch particularly um than people had anticipated. Um and so really kind of brought to clarity that you know that might not be the case at least not now. Um I think the future of these instruments is something that is yet to be determined. I think you know um on the bull side you have bitcoin appreciating rapidly significantly above the interest paid on this perpetual preferred equity something like stretch something like seda um you know you could see these things trade uh very competitively you could see credit
1:17:02spreads compress um you know I think uh you know remains to be seen um where we are on this journey um but I think it's going to be quite a while before these really become uh the preferred method of of savings that's you know short-term very liquid but you know who who knows with Bitcoin appreciating rapidly uh you know, we've seen crazier things. Um Isaia, I'm curious. We were talking off camera. What do you think about, you know, these perpetual preferred instruments?
1:17:24Yeah. Well, if you're bullish on Bitcoin, you should be bullish on these perpetual preferred instruments. Um because, you know, they're offering, I think, uh strategies uh STRC product somewhere. Is it 12.5% 12% off? Yeah, I haven't checked. And then SATA is 13%.
1:17:41Um so, if you think Bitcoin is going to clear that hurdle rate, uh you should believe in these products. Uh but I do think the distinction for me and where where I sort of get lost in the whole like money market argument for these things uh is that a lot of investors look at money market funds, you know, all investors are different obviously, but as short to medium-term investments.
1:18:00Hey, I'm about to buy a house. Hey, I'm about to get married. I don't want to be in the volatile market. I need to know that this money is going to be available to me in the next year or two. And although it's not FDIC insured, uh these banks have so much liquidity that they're able to fill even in a down market. uh with these products we saw recently falling very deep below par and now you know coming right back to par which is incredible but if you needed that money in a very short-term basis that could be difficult so I I kind of see it as more of a medium to long-term investment right now but that thesis
1:18:29certainly can change as Bitcoin continues to progress gets more institutional adoption and volatility uh retracts and decreases a little bit yeah and I think we just need to see the credit risk on uh Strategy and Strive and others uh compress uh for for you know, these to really take off and that just requires Bitcoin to appreciate very strongly to make that happen. Grace, over to you.
1:18:50Good stuff, guys. All right, Isaiah, Isaiah Austin, Spencer Nichols, thanks so much. Let's head back to the main stage now for a Mandarin language panel, the rise of financial super apps.
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1:36:24Offspring hours.
1:36:36Welcome back into the live newses at Bitcoin Asia 2026. I'm Grace Remington.
1:36:40Sean Hagen back with us now and Hafa Zaguri, new CEO of 21 Capital. Thanks so much for joining us. Your first time in Hong Kong and this conference. How you enjoying it so far?
1:36:49Great. You know, it's actually very good. Pleasantly surprised to see how busy this is, right? Particularly on a bare market. Uh so very very happy to be here and thanks for having me.
1:36:58Yeah, the energy has been awesome here the last two days. Um I want to start off with you recently taken over 21 Capital as CEO. How's that transition been going?
1:37:06So far so good. I've actually been involved with the company for a little bit longer than just uh this month that I've been a CEO. Uh you know, for a while we've been thinking about how to set up the the company and now it's time time to build. So very excited for it.
1:37:20And when you talk about building, right, one of the things that separates 21 Capital um from the rest of the pack perhaps is your idea of kind of modeling more similarly to Birkshshire Hathaway, right? Buying things and holding them for a long time. One of those being operating businesses. What is your outlook like there? what kind of businesses are you looking to acquire?
1:37:36What are you excited about acquiring? Uh and how does that fit into your long-term strategy?
1:37:41Yeah, so it's exactly right. I think there are several pillars that we're looking to build at 21. The first one and the most exciting one is around operating company. So I think 21 is the Bitcoin operating company and we have 43,000 plus bitcoins right now in our balance sheet, right? Which is the kind of like using your analogy to Burkshshire Hatway, that's our permanent capital, right? We're going to use it in a way to acquire profitable cash flow positive business that can deliver value
1:38:09to our shareholders at the end of the day. Uh and that's one of the key advantages of being in a bare market which is right now you have a lot of assets, a lot of very good teams out there. Uh and it's been very active on on conversations on on that front right.
1:38:24Um it's a very different model than I think the traditional treasury model which is very good also but I think in terms of capital allocation when you think about you know my job as CEO should do capital allocation right and if you think about capital allocation the way that they do capital allocation is much more similar to how hedge funds would do capital allocation looking for dislocations in the market looking for ways to leverage what they currently have and then acquire more Bitcoin the way we're thinking about it is just more similar as you said to Birkshshire
1:38:53Hatway looking at companies that are profitable, sustainable, that are growing, right? And then the long term, that's what's going to drive shareholder value in Bitcoin terms for our for our investors.
1:39:04And one thing I think that that is interesting, you talk about capital management, right? And how you're going to deploy some of this capital perhaps to buy these uh distressed assets coming off of a bare market. You know, seemingly your treasury is down as well, right? Having to market to market it it's down. um are are you planning to use mostly stock transactions to buy or what is your acquisition strategy going to be?
1:39:25It's a good question. I think it depends depends on the target that we're looking at, right? So, right now our stock is trading at a discount to NAV. So, it probably wouldn't make sense to issue stock at these levels, right? But we're pleasantly surprised that in some conversations we're having, right, we could look into using our stock at NAV as a currency to to acquire other current companies, right? Uh but as I said, that's going to depend from time to time. We also, if you look at our treasury that we have, roughly twothirds
1:39:54of our treasury is unencumbered. So we could use that to issue more debt and then potentially acquire more companies. But as I said, this will depend on company by company, situation by situation and market, you know, the market change very quickly, right? But now at 80,000, who knows? Maybe Bitcoin will continue to go up, maybe go down, right? And we try to be very nimble and very opportunistic in how we approach that.
1:40:16Are you taking more of a regional approach or or are you looking at global companies as well? uh global companies. We look to companies everywhere as long as they are Bitcoin native or companies that are related to Bitcoin that can help the Bitcoin ecosystem will be open to through anything.
1:40:31Hafa Zigguri, CEO of 21 Capital joining us on the live desk right now. You are just minutes away from your keynote on the main stage and the title of it, Here Be Dragons, Bitcoin's first ever hash rate bare market. That title is intriguing to me because here be dragons. I'm curious what is the actual dragon here? What's the single biggest danger this hash rate bare market poses that people are underestimating?
1:40:53Yeah, I think the analogy of hereby dragon. So what the hybrid dragon comes from is that in the 1500 you had this uh the first globe that was created the Linux uh globe right and it was an artifact in copper where they put the continents that they knew and then the area that they didn't know it was written in in Latin hixon draon which means here be dragons right and the message there was that that's unchartered territory that's new territory that you don't know you don't
1:41:22know if it's good or bad eventually it actually a lot of it became very good, right? But it's unchartered territory and I think Bitcoin is at uncharted Bitcoin mining is at unchartered territory that for the first time we're seeing a slow gradual decline in network hash rate which for miners is actually very positive and very good because what it means is that they have you know they they are less diluted. If you look historically on average Bitcoin network hash rate has increased by 50%
1:41:52yearover-year in all of the models that we use you know that we're thinking about usually 50% was kind of like the gravity number that we had that that's where we're pulling towards in the last year we had actually a decline in network hash rate and from the top that we hit at 1.275 275 zeta hashes we are down 30 40% from that and there's no indication that it's coming down very different than what we saw for example in 2021 with the China ban where network
1:42:19had collapsed and then it gradually went went up with time here it's gradually going down and it keeps going down and when you think about mining I think this is actually a very good opportunity because you're in a position that Bitcoin price is very compressed potentially Actually I think it's cheap to where it is right now and then at the same time you have network hash rate coming down. Uh so for miners this could be a very opportune uh time and the
1:42:48reason for natural hash rate coming down is because you know first of all price being down hash price being down but also a lot of the large scale bitcoin miners are pivoting to AI HPC uh so focus on electron which is the company that I founded is to continue to be focused on bitcoin mining steer the course be very focused on cost savings right having very low sgna to% as percentage up for revenue and that's how you know we we want to be here for the
1:43:17long long run.
1:43:18Yeah. And one trend in that sector for sure is is the integration of Bitcoin mining and AI compute as well. Um you know as you're thinking about the evolution of that space and maybe the blurring of that line where a lot of these business models are now intertwined.
1:43:32How does that tie into the 21 thesis of of perhaps it makes sense to tie on acquisition of some energy or AI computer infrastructure as well?
1:43:41Yeah, very good point. I think well we announced the intention of Lar transaction with Electron right I mean the there's no transaction yet it's an announcement that's going to take some time but if we think about Bitcoin mining right in general not only Electron I think it opens a whole new set of optionality uh in Bitcoin that I think it's extremely exciting mining brings together two transformations I think the energy transformation that we're seeing in the world right now and then the monetary transformation that we're
1:44:10seeing with Bitcoin Right. Uh and energy, it's where energy meets Bitcoin. And to your point, if you think about Bitcoin at the end of the day, just like steel, right? Steel, it's pure energy, right? You have to put energy on it to actually get your output. At the other side, Bitcoin mining is the same thing.
1:44:29It's you have ASIC, you inject energy on the ASIC, right? And at the other side, you get the best monetary asset that was ever invented, which is which is Bitcoin, right? Um, so we will look into energy opportunities. Uh, we will look to companies I think on on that side of the business as well. And to your question around how interacts with AI and HBC, I think Bitcoin mining is the most flexible load that we've ever seen, right? You can turn it on and off at any time at the whim, right? Uh, no other industry can do that, right? Going back
1:44:58to my steel analogy, if you turn down a steel factory, it takes months to turn it on on again, right? while Bitcoin mining we can you know and we've been doing that we're buyers of uh last resort and sellers of first resort as well when the market needs like in markets like aircot and other markets so it's a very exciting market very different than ah we see that needs redundancy full uptime most of the times right for us we don't care and we can be
1:45:25deployed anywhere and I think we'll see a segmentation of the market between opportunities for Bitcoin mining and AIHPC but that's very exciting for for us as well.
1:45:36Really cool stuff. We got to hit a quick break, but Hafa is going to stay with us. Nico Moran's going to join us on the other side of this. We'll be right back. This is Bitcoin Asia 2026.
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1:48:50Welcome back into the live news desk here at Bitcoin Asia 2026. We got a full house on the desk now. I'm Grace Remington now joined by Nico Moran, founder of Simply Bitcoin. We've been talking to Hafa Zaguri, the new CEO of 21 Capital and my partner in crime, Sean Hagen. Um, Nico, you've been in the space for a long time. You've been to all the conferences, but first time here. How's Hong Kong treating you so far?
1:49:12Absolutely fantastic. You guys do such an incredible job at every single conference that you guys throw. The only one I haven't been to is Bitcoin Mina, but I I gotta say I got I checked Hong Kong off the list and you guys did great like always.
1:49:27How's it different from the other ones so far that you It's just the vibe. Um and it's actually very interesting because on the first day I just ordered room service cuz you know whatever. And my wife's like my wife's like what did you order? I'm like spaghetti bologn. She's like, "You're in Asia and you ordered spaghetti bolognes.
1:49:43What are you doing?" And I'm like, "Sophie, it's a bare market. You got to save money." So, I got to admit, I went out with a group and we defaulted to Italian as well. So, you're not alone. But we we we'll be adventurous another time. Um, okay. So, you put out a daily Bitcoin show. So, you have a read on the market sentiment that's probably better than than most people out here. Um, Bitcoin obviously coming out of a bare market. We we had this recent volatility spike. What's been the reaction from just people you interact with?
1:50:09Yeah, so like I I've been in Bitcoin for a decade and from a Vive's perspective, this has been by far the worst bare market I've ever experienced. And from a sentiment perspective as well. And just to add to the pain, the cold card exploit, the people that did every single thing right were fundamentally affected.
1:50:31And and that's tragic. It's a huge step back for the whole self-custody movement. I think self- custody is going to come back stronger and better than ever before. Hafa, you actually wrote a piece about this. Exactly. Recently um and uh it's just it's just a very interesting situation.
1:50:48Yeah, I think you know you're absolutely right. I think this is one of the worst bear bare markets that I've ever seen in pretty much any not only Bitcoin, in any industry, right? We saw a leakage of talent. So a lot of talent that was in Bitcoin went to work in financial markets, went to work in AI, HBC, right?
1:51:05Uh and that's bad for for Bitcoin in the long term. I think it all comes back with time, right? Uh the morale, I think everybody is like, you know, just look at Twitter, everybody's fighting everybody everybody else, right? We had a a fork out of consensus, right? So all of these things together show that this has actually been, I think, a very painful bare market for everybody. But bare markets always come to an end, right? I think the most important thing to always is zoom out, rethink about
1:51:34what Bitcoin really is, the potential that it has, right? The addressable market that it's looking to capture and none of that has changed. Bitcoin is still a drop in a notion of liquidity out there. And you know, we know that long-term number will go up is going to come back, right?
1:51:49So what I'm what I'm reading between the lines, Hafa, is you're saying we're still early.
1:51:54We're very early. We know that, right?
1:51:57Bitcoin is 1 and a.5 trillion. Gold is 30 trillion. Real estate's 300 trillion.
1:52:03Right? So, it's it's as I said, it's a drop in the bucket. And why is Bitcoin competing with these assets, right?
1:52:09Because at the end of the day, gold and real estate, they're mostly used as a way to store value, right? Money is a memory of work at the end of the day. That's how you store your savings.
1:52:20That's and Bitcoin is the best savings technology that we've we've ever seen. I believe it's completely clear very different than what we see you know if a Federal Reserve and Treasury secretaries that just change their mind overnight you know a group of 12 people in Federal Reserve banks can change their mind this is the monetary policy here it's written in code fully transparent you know anybody can review it we know exactly how many bitcoins are going to be issued approximately every 10 minutes as a new
1:52:48block is found right and that's new for a human uh in human history and I think that's the most exciting thing about Bitcoin and none of that has changed. If anything, it got better with everything that we're seeing outside of Bitcoin right now.
1:53:01Yeah, absolutely. So, Hafa, you released uh this shareholder letter recently. Congratulations, by the way, being appointed CEO of 21 Capital. You released a shareholder letter that went absolutely viral on X. And one of the things that stuck out to me in the shareholder the most and what I care about the most as a Bitcoiner off is you talked about uh the mining ecosystem.
1:53:22You talk about node operators. You talked about software op uh software developers and you were talking you were basically making the case that you feel that you should support these uh these operators with no strings attached.
1:53:36That's one of the things that really stuck out to me in the shareholder letter. Could you expand on why that's important to you? Yeah, we're all shareholders at the same asset which is Bitcoin, right? If Bitcoin doesn't succeed, you know, pretty much none of this is is going to be around, right?
1:53:53And to support for the network to succeed, you need to invest in the network, right? And that's at the protocol level, that's helping development, that's helping research. Um, so we are committed to doing that, right? To to the shareholder letter.
1:54:08Just going back, excuse me. um it did get very good traction you know I can't tell you like here how many people will come to me and say well I read your letter I think that's exactly what we should be looking at and there are five pillars that we put in there and you kept it exactly right because you know capture exactly right because I think above the five pillars there is the bitcoin pillar bitcoin is the foundation to everything that we build right and that's exactly why we want to support the network and make sure that we continue I came from bitcoin a little
1:54:36bit from the tech side as well I remember one of the first things I wanted to do when I started to look at Bitcoin it was like oh I want to review the code right and I learned very basic C I wish we were in the time of AI that you could just you know plug it in and ask okay what does this say which part of the code that says right and it's beautiful like the whole thing around the bitcoin the difficulty adjustment right how consensus is really another thing that I wrote about how consensus is really driven right it's just amazing
1:55:05uh but it needs to support and it we can't just think that the network is going to support itself because it it won't absolutely you know the the Bitcoin developers in particular they have a very tough job um you know and it's a very ungrateful job as well uh for a short period of time I ran uh an open-source uh project and it's it's ungrateful people will complain all day long uh you get paid nothing for it right you have a lot of downside because you need to make sure
1:55:34that security is around it so uh it's exactly one of the key things we're looking to do at 21 as well.
1:55:40Hafa, you and I are are originally we come from the same part of the world, right? And my family originally comes from Venezuela. Your family comes from uh Brazil. You are from Brazil. Um and one of the things that inspired me the most when I was reading the shareholder letters talking about your lived experience in Brazil and how obvious something like Bitcoin is to really fix the problems that that you know our countries face.
1:56:03Yeah, we were in uh in Bloomberg this morning, right? Then they ask a similar question. I think it's to understand Bitcoin unfortunately you have to have experienced a few things to really understand it quickly right and when you live in a place where you know a couple of funny things that used to happen in Brazil when I in the in the mid late 80s early 90s when we had hybrid inflation of a thousand% a year right so you can imagine what that means right uh and I remember like one of the funny things
1:56:32that go in a supermarket and they would change the prices midday uh several times midday and my mother I was small my mother would say get a shopping cart these are the things we need to buy you see where the guy is that is changing the prices go ahead of him get the cans or the things before him so that you don't have to and when you these things impact you deeply right because then I knew that money as a store of value was just a fiction right uh and uh coming
1:57:00from backgrounds like that I think it helps us right um then you have to gro all the other aspects of bitcoin which very different as well the technological one you know the game theory one and so on but uh you know in a sense I'm very grateful and lucky to have lived through that because it g gave me and to you as well I can imagine in Venezuela right with everything that has happened a very different perspective of the of the world absolutely I mean it gives you like a deeper appreciation of what the problem
1:57:29that Bitcoin fixes that I think a lot of us in the west we have this financial privilege where you know as Jeff Booth says it the inflation rate isn't as big so you don't realize you're being actively stolen from. Now, often, one of the things that fascinates me, and you know, I've known you for years now, is your Wall Street background, right? You came from a world that I've told you many times, I have a friend that I'm not going to name the bank on TV. You know who you are, uh, but I'm not going to name the bank that he works at, but, you know, he he out of my five friends that
1:57:56I grew up with, he's the one that still has not been convinced about Bitcoin. He fundamentally just disagrees disagrees with it. He doesn't like it. What made you switch? What made you realize, you know, that Bitcoin is true? And you had some very interesting stories that you've told me in the past that you would, you know, pitch your co-workers and they would just look at you like, what are you talking about?
1:58:17Yeah. I think a pivotal moment for me was 2007, 2008 during the financial crisis. So, I worked at Maro at the time. Mero, just to give an idea, Maril Lynch had like two massive trading floors, um, you know, football size, uh, football field size each of them, right?
1:58:35And uh one night I was leave the financial crisis was exploding. I was leaving home going from the bank home uh and I got a call from my boss saying well come back bank is being sold this we're we went under bank is being sold this weekend to Bank of America and that just showed to me how fragile the the system really was. Uh I think the newer generation that came to Wall Street after that doesn't realize how much it has changed. Uh when I graduated like the dream job of everybody was like I want to get a job in Wall Street. that's
1:59:04where you know the smartest minds are. That's where I'm going to learn a ton. That's where I can make a lot of money, right? And that has changed a ton. Banks became much closer to utility companies after that. But it also made me real realize how fragile the financial system was at the end of the day.
1:59:19And and ha, you talk about how this might have been the most difficult psychologically uh bare markets in Bitcoin history, right? The talent drain, uh the cold card attack, all all these major problems at hard fork even or maybe we might have one. We'll see with the BIP 110 crowd, but at the same time, we've only had about a 50% draw down. Historically, it's been much deeper, closer to 80%.
1:59:42Uh, so Bitcoin's held up. It's been very resilient. You also talk about your lived experience with inflation. It seems like the Treasury might be in a place where where they might be forced to run it hot.
1:59:51Bitcoin is is seemingly kind of holding up very well here in a place of relative strength. What's your outlook for Bitcoin and kind of the dynamic uh of potential financial dominance here in the US? Yeah, I think as I said, I think longterm nothing changes, right? I think Bitcoin is still going to capture all the monetary premium that we we were discussing, right? Shortterm, who knows what's going to happen. Uh, but it is interesting that we only seen, you know, we've seen a smaller draw down that we've seen historically. But if you think about the last bull market also
2:00:20wasn't as exciting as the previous bull markets, right? So, who knows what's ahead of us, right? Uh, it's good to see. I think the the world still needs to understand a little bit better what Bitcoin really is, but in a world of uncertainty, right? We're talking about Birkshshire Hatway. Charlie Mer actually has a good quote which is, you know, predictability should always trade at a premium and Bitcoin is much more predictable that pretty much anything else that we have out there in terms of
2:00:50monetary savings technologies, right?
2:00:52And that's what you want.
2:00:54Really great stuff from you both. Haori, Niko Moran, thank you so much. Your speech is coming up in just a few minutes. So stay tuned for the stream to listen to more of his great insights. We're going to hit a break now and on the other side we'll hear from British Huddle. Stay tuned.
2:01:40Down down down down down.
2:01:51Downtown.
2:02:56I want to take you down.
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2:05:06Hey
2:05:30Heat. Hey, Heat.
2:05:55Mhm.
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2:06:52Here we go.
2:06:57we go.
2:07:03Here we go.
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2:08:29Welcome back into the live newses at Bitcoin Asia 2026. I'm Grace Remington with Shan Hagen. And now joining us on the desk, Ovicroy, chief strategy officer at Strive, senior adviser to the Bitcoin Policy Institute and chairman of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. I think I got it all there, right?
2:08:44You did, Grace. Great job.
2:08:46Well, you guys just came off the Nakamoto stage, had a great panel up there. And OIC, I love right off the start, you were not holding back. You kind of presented the worstc case scenario where if we reach extreme inflation in the United States and the government prevents us from using USD to buy Bitcoin, what happens next? That's exactly the important question. I think we're not asking enough in the Bitcoin community. Like in the Bitcoin community, we tend to say, "Yeah, we're we're a bit doomers. We're sort of negative about the broader world, fiat currency, etc." And we sort of, you
2:09:15know, joke about it and say, "Hey, it's going to be so great when the world collapses and our Bitcoin goes to a million." And my message to the Bitcoin community is be careful what you wish for because if that if and when that fiscal crisis happens and my argument is that it's going to happen within the next 10 to 15 years, if not sooner in the US context, the US government's not just going to sit around and let it happen. They're going to be pretty aggressive about doing what they can to stop it or stem the tide. And the and the one of the first things they're
2:09:44going to do if we look at the playbook of other countries that have had fiscal crises or even the United States in the 1930s, what do they do in the 1930s?
2:09:52They they suspended the convertability of the dollar to gold. They seized everyone's personal holdings of gold. So you can imagine them going back to that playbook. A lot of the people at the Fed studied the depression. Ben Bernani most famously. So it's very easy to say to Coinbase and Kraken and the other exchanges that Americans use, for example, say, "No, you're no longer allowed. we're going to suspend the convertability of the US dollar for Bitcoin. They could say to corporations, you're not allowed to hold Bitcoin or we're going to buy the Bitcoin that you hold and take it from you. These are
2:10:20things that governments do. And so the qu question I have for the Bitcoin community is what are we doing to make Bitcoin resilient to that scenario? How can we make how can we create a censorship resistant decentralized mechanism for exchanging US dollars and other fiat currencies for Bitcoin? And I think there's some early development efforts in that regard, but we're very very behind on that.
2:10:43And it's not just the impact on Bitcoiners or the government fighting back as well. It's it's about what about what about people that aren't holding hard assets, right? If you're wishing for the collapse of the current system, you're wishing a lot of real pain on a lot of real people as well. You know, you know, what did they what did they do after those measures, right? They they ran it hot to kind of grow out of some of the problems, right? They had inflation higher than than the yields people were getting. We went from, I think, debt to GDP was 150% down to almost 20. Uh, you know, you hear the current administration talking about how
2:11:11they they want to be, uh, able to kind of pull off something similar to what Reagan was able to do. Well, well, he came in after they ran it hot for a long time. And so, you know, it's not just going to be um, you know, kind of these positions against Bitcoiners, things like freezing the conversion of gold to dollars. Maybe they'll do something similar with Bitcoin to dollars, but also, you know, what happens to people who are saving cash and living paycheck to paycheck in a world where we have this inflation running hot for a period of time.
2:11:37Yeah. And Sean, I'm I'm really glad you brought brought that up in a in a paper I published in 2024 called Then They Fight You. At least that then they fight you is the title in the Bitcoin Policy Institute version and then the the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity version has a slightly different title. But I have a chart in there that describes wealth distribution. So if you look at uh US dollar fiat wealth distribution in the United States, something like the top 10% of households in terms of wealth own
2:12:07about 30% of the wealth. Okay. When it comes to Bitcoin, the top 3% of wallet addresses own something like 97% of all the Bitcoin. And I I bring that up to say that if there is this kind of fiscal collapse in a democracy like the US, if Bitcoin goes to a million and the people who were able to hodddle all this in all those years leading up to the crisis do very well, but that's a small minority
2:12:36of the population, everyone else gets a vote, too. And so I think that's the the kind of um uh you know, that's one of the fragilityities, I'd say, the political fragility of Bitcoin. You know, the protocol is very resilient, but politically Bitcoin is more fragile, I think, than people realize.
2:12:54You mentioned it earlier, but the need to decentralize the on and off ramp for acquiring Bitcoin in order for it to be actually resilient. What does that look like?
2:13:02Yeah, I mean there's a number of different efforts as I mentioned uh that people are working on. Some use the lightning protocol to say okay can we create some sort of uh lightning based approach where a stable coin and uh bitcoin can be exchanged much like for those who are familiar with unis swap you know use the automated market models to have a kind of a uh a kind of a people are kind of on both sides of the trade and generating a kind of return basically facilitating those markets that's one approach some people are using nostster uh combined with
2:13:32lightning so there are a couple of uh things like that I think one thing here because we're here in Hong Kong. I think one thing that's interesting to me is because the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the US dollar. In theory, if there's a Hong Kong dollarbased stable coin that's outside of the US regulatory system, if the US says, "Hey, we're not going to allow for USD to be exchanged for Bitcoin, but HKD to Bitcoin exchanges are still possible, then maybe that can be an alternative, too." So, there are a lot of currencies around the
2:14:00world, the HKD is one of them, that are pegged to the US dollar. The Eastern Caribbean dollar is another example. There are many others. And so it may be that a regulated stable coin of a current a fiat currency that's pegged to the US dollar becomes another um on-ramp and offramp.
2:14:16This is all really fascinating. We got to uh head to the stage now, but thanks so much OC. This is enjoy the rest of your time here. Uh we're going to head back to the Nakamoto stage now for an announcement from Astra Enterprise by Adam Win. So I want to say a big thanks to our last two panels for conducting their conversations in Mandarin. Our next presentations will be back in English.
2:14:54So coming up next, we have a special announcement from the chief oper operating officer of Astra, a Bitcoin focused treasury company and digital asset platform. Please welcome Adam Newan to the stage. Good morning everybody. My name is Adam. I am the chief operating officer for Astra Enterprise. I only have about six minutes to get started, so I'll be brief.
2:15:29So, Astra at a glance, we've been around for about 45 years, listed in Bangkok, but in July last year, our Bitcoin consortium did a a takeover and we converted it into a Bitcoin treasury and we're now growing it into a bigger business that combines several types of finance business lines.
2:15:55The strategy that we're looking into is what the west had been building versus what the east is building. On the west you'll see apps that are built from one type of business model like payments specifically or a exchange specifically think like Coinbase. But in the east the business model of a ecosystem a super app exists. Think WeChat, think RAB,
2:16:23think businesses like Alipe and how it's transformed the region. For us, we see a vision for Astra to be of the latter form. So, Astra is a Neo finance super app.
2:16:39This is where the west builds tools, but the east builds ecosystems. And for us, we see six areas where we'll grow our business. The first is the Bitcoin treasury. That's been done. But moving forward, we will expand into digital custodianship, asset management, brokerage, exchange, and then banking as well. These six pillars will be the crux
2:17:06of our core business. The operating loop for Astro will function as such through a license capacity. Because we are officially licensed in Thailand, we'll be able to scale and have institutional customers be part of our business. That will allow us to grow our revenues in multiple magnitudes and then that revenue will let us build new products that will continue to magnify our ecosystem.
2:17:35This creates a virtuous cycle for us to continue to grow in the region and make our business the leading super app for digital finance backed by crypto.
2:17:47Now why Thailand? I think I should touch on this a little bit. There are two phenomena in Thailand that makes it uniquely positioned to help us grow in this fashion. The first one is the tourism market. Thailand is the or Bangkok specifically is the most visited city in the world with recurring international flows of customers coming by spending a lot enjoying the luxuries of the the country. But secondly, in terms of liquidity, it's the Ashon
2:18:16leader for liquidity. Number one in the stock market, number one in crypto, number one in gold trading, FX number two. As you'll see, the data backs up a lot of this narrative to be the headquarters for growing a NEO finance strategy.
2:18:35Liquidity is very high. There are numerous numbers for why it makes sense to do it in Thailand. Just a few of them I'll name right now. Have 13 million ties that have used crypto which makes up around 18% of the population. That's huge for the region. And then trading accounts over 3 uh 3.13 million. Oh, one one other thing actually before I jump back.
2:19:05The government has also supported a lot of this. G token was actually sponsored by the Ministry of Finance and it's helped propel crypto and digital assets in the country as well. It's not common where the government supports this type of initiative. And in terms of liquidity, SCT combines ashen leading secondary liquidity with unusual activity for the primary market.
2:19:31As the numbers I mentioned earlier, this volume's continuing to increase and the trends have been growing rapidly. We're number one in action for stock market activity and for a a bit Bitcoin treasury business to be listed there. It is also advantageous to take part of this in this trend. And then the regime itself is supportive of digital assets. There are three supportive tailwinds for this. There's a comprehensive framework that's out.
2:19:58There are pro-investor taxes and tax access. And then lastly, government implementations that have helped us propel ourselves just within the last year. I don't think we would have been able to hit this timeline if this government support infrastructure was not in place.
2:20:16So now I'm going to talk a little bit about what we've done to date because this is important. Over the last eight months from our takeover to a licensed custody, we've done several types of things to grow the business. Step one back in July was the capital formation, the takeover, and the revamping of the business model. We formed our Bitcoin treasury around the uh the September following that.
2:20:42Then most recently, we've acquired the licensed digital asset custodian business. There are only two licenses in the country and we have one of them. This allows us to hold Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, not just for ourselves, but for our customers throughout the country as well. Moving forward, we'll be building an asset management arm, exchange, brokerage, and further banking adjacent businesses to boot.
2:21:14Thailand is first, but the Meong Delta is the the future. Thailand will be our HQ, and moving forward, we'll expand into Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and then the rest of APAC.
2:21:28And so just to wrap it up, we're looking for partners and investors that want to come along with us in this journey and help us build within the region the first Neo finance super app. If you this speaks to you and you guys are interested in joining us on this journey, please feel free to reach out to me. Thank you.
2:21:56Welcome back in to the live news desk at Bitcoin Asia 2026. I'm Grace Remington with Shan Hagen and Ovik Roy, chief strategy officer at Strive remains with us. In your talk earlier on the main stage, you brought up the fight among US banks and how you know they're not too willing to offer a reward for holding stable coins whereas you know a typical checking account is turns into a negative. But how is Strive and SATA offering a solution on that front? Yeah, I mean obviously uh we are not issuing stable coins, we are not issuing uh
2:22:26cash, but the SATA our preferred equity dividend uh yielding product is similar enough to a money market mutual fund.
2:22:35It's not like it's not it is not a money market mutual fund. So imagine if you're an American and in in other countries, the cash that you hold in your brokerage account is is often invested in something called a money market mutual fund, which generates a yield of maybe 2% 3% something like that, much like a stable coin yield. It's like basically they take the the interest rate from the treasuries and the other things that they hold on the back end and they share some of that interest with you. Now imagine that instead of h having that cash in your brokerage account yielding
2:23:042%, instead it's yielding 13%.
2:23:06That's what we're doing. That's what strategy is doing with their version of the product stretch. And uh what's really interesting about Strive is that that's the only financial product we have. So if you look at strategy, strategy first raised money to buy Bitcoin by issuing shares of their common stock. Then they started issuing convertible debt and then they started experimenting with preferred and then they got to stretch. So Stretch is like the 12th thing they tried and they really hit pay dirt with that. And we at
2:23:34uh Strive were able to benefit from watching all that experimentation and basically skip to the end of the movie and say, "Hey, that stretch thing is really cool. Let's do that." And so we are the only Bitcoin treasury company that has no debt. We have zero debt on our balance sheet. We only have SATA. Um and uh in fact, Michael Sailor has said that if he had to start all over again and built a treasury company, build a treasury company from scratch, he'd build something build he would build something looked exactly like Strive. So that's been pretty cool. and you found a lot of success especially coming off of
2:24:03the the winds of of it perhaps entering a new bull market here along with the Bitcoin rally. Strives common has rallied maybe 100% approximately this month. Now now one of the forces driving that in the treasury world is traditionally seen as as leverage and debt driven but as you mentioned you don't have debt instead you have what's called amplification. Could you please dive into that for the people at home?
2:24:25Yeah so a simple way to put it is to just look at the results. So one one of the questions that we got when we launched Strive uh last summer uh that and that was when Bitcoin was at $120,000 US right and so a lot of people if you tried to explain to them what we were trying to do what Strategy is trying to do they said okay I understand how if Bitcoin is going up you're going to go up more because you're buying Bitcoin and so the Bitcoin per share in each share that I own is going to increase over time compared to an ETF
2:24:53where the Bitcoin per share is constant.
2:24:55That's the whole point of an ETF. With a a stock like our common stock ASST or strategy MSTR, the Bitcoin per share that you hold goes up. So in theory, if Bitcoin goes up, you're going to make even more money. But the downside in theory is that if Bitcoin goes down, your stock should go down more. So the question we would often get from investors was, I get how this works in a bull market for Bitcoin. How is this going to work in a bare market? And ironically enough, basically when we
2:25:24went public last September. Since then, there's been a massive bare market until the last couple of weeks. And so, we've had the opportunity to demonstrate how this works, which is yes, there's been a bare market for Bitcoin. Bitcoin went from 120,000 to 55 or 58 or wherever it ended up, but we went from having zero Bitcoin to now having over 21,000 Bitcoin. Um, and so our balance sheet is much stronger. To your point, we have no debt. We use this preferred equity instrument to raise money from the
2:25:52capital markets to buy more Bitcoin. And basically the way the math works is if Bitcoin appreciates at 5 to 6% a year and all these statistics are on our website strive.com we will be able to fund our dividend expenses in perpetuity. It's not debt because we're not borrowing money from everybody. We are offering a dividend to our shareholders which can be adjusted over time based on the demand. So right now, SATA, our preferred equity, trades at about $100 one depending on the the
2:26:21moment in the market. And the way it works is as people want to buy more and more of it, in theory, the price should go up to 101, 102, 103. And to keep the the shares at $100 exactly or close to it, we sell more SATA into the market to balance that demand out. So the more demand there is, the more money we can raise. And that's what we use to purchase Bitcoin. And we uh we are now at a point where probably by uh next week we'll be the fifth largest corporate holder of Bitcoin in the world.
2:26:50Amazing accomplishment. Ovicroy, chief strategy officer at Strive. Great insights. Really appreciate you hanging out with us today.
2:26:55Thanks Grace. Great to be here.
2:26:56We're going to head back to the Nakamoto stage now to hear from Hafasauri on the hash rate bare market.
2:27:04Morning barely. Good morning. Um so in the early 1500s as navigators were going around the world they created this first artifact which was basically a globe in copper and in that globe they had the areas that they had already mapped part of the Americas Asia but there's a vast area that wasn't mapped and what they would
2:27:32do they would write in that globe hicksung dragons in Latin what basically means here be dragons and it doesn't necessarily mean that it was something bad it just meant that was something unchartered and I think in Bitcoin there's some exciting times ahead definitely unchartered that we should be thinking about and we're living I think through the first bare market in hash rate that
2:28:01we've ever seen in Bitcoin history for a long time And you know I founded Electron Energy which became one of the largest mining companies in the world. And for a long time as we were thinking about models how to think about hash rates and how hash rate was going to be growing we looked at long-term trends.
2:28:22And long-term trends are massive. Year after a year if you look at very long-term trends with network hash rate almost doubled every year. And if you're just looking shorter periods of time, 50% was the number that a lot of people had in mind. And for a minor, that's important because if you're mining, that means that a network hash rate goes up.
2:28:43You're getting more diluted. You have less of a network share. And eventually, that's actually bad less revenue for for you.
2:28:52That has changed. It has changed substantially, particularly in the last year. We're living through something that looks very different than what we saw in 2021 with the China ban. So when mining was banned in 2021, you look at network hash rate and what it happened is that it collapsed very quickly and it gradually recovered as those machines that were in China were allocated to other parts of the world.
2:29:18What we're seeing now, it's very different. We're seeing hash rate. We hit close to 1.3 zeta hashes late last year and it's been gradually still gradually coming down. Uh this has been the longest period that we've seen uh from an all-time high until recovery. Back to Bitcoin mining. We hear this a lot. I think there are two big accusations that we hear about Bitcoin mining. one that it's bad business and two that it's waste of energy.
2:29:55Let me start with the first one that Bitcoin mining is a bad business. And commodity businesses, they don't come in good and bad, right? They come in where you are in the cost curve. If you're extracting a commodity at very high cost, yes, it is going to be a bad business for you. But if you're at the left side of the cost curve, that could be a prof a very profitable business and potentially extremely healthy.
2:30:23Bitcoin is a very unique commodity when you think about commodities, right?
2:30:27First of all, just like oil, it is funible. Uh but I think it's the purest form of commodity that we've ever seen.
2:30:35Satoshi embedded in quote the difficulty adjustment which basically means that no matter how much more hash rate you have out there on average a block is still going to be mined every 10 minutes and that's very different because when you compare for example with oil or gold typically higher prices lead to more development to more mining in different places which eventually leads to more supply hitting the market and prices
2:31:03eventually coming down in Bitcoin mining. It doesn't matter. We can turn off our hashing machines that we currently have. The market wouldn't fill it in two weeks. We're going to have a new difficulty adjustment.
2:31:15And I think when we think about how many pe how you know why many people failed in mining in the past, it's much more about their capital structure and their cost structure than it is about hash price, about Bitcoin price, and about where we are in the network.
2:31:34Just look at an example. If you pick two miners and if you look at their different unit economics, imagine they just bought one a fleet of AS6. One has very low cost of energy, very efficient machines. The other one has higher cost of energy and less efficient machines.
2:31:52what it means in terms that's the difference between having very high margins and having to shut down your your production and the market of course improve from where it was but hash price is still compared to historical levels relatively low.
2:32:12big question we get all the times and by the way on 21 Capital the first thing we think about as we're thinking about opportunities is how does that opportunity perform compared to Bitcoin Bitcoin is our standard Bitcoin is our benchmark and if you can't beat Bitcoin investors should just be buying an ETF at the end of the day because that's less risky than holding an operating business and in mining we get that question all the time about if I have a dollar should I be looking to investing in mining or should I be buying buying
2:32:42Bitcoin.
2:32:44And the answer is if you only have $1, buy Bitcoin first. I think that's the best way to express your view. But in a diversification, if you're looking at investing in larger scale, mining can make a ton of sense.
2:33:01Fundamentally, when you think about Bitcoin mining, right, at the end of the day, and I'm going to simplify here a ton, Bitcoin mining is going to outperform Bitcoin in a scenario where Bitcoin price goes faster, goes up faster than hash rate. So if Bitcoin price is going up by 50 100% a year and network hash rate is flat you have a much higher chance of outperforming.
2:33:32I think for a company as I was saying the right decision was never about buying Bitcoin or mining there were probably the risk the better risk adjusted allocation is to have a little bit of both. Let me address I'll come back to that but let me address the second point because that's an important one that Bitcoin mining wastes energy. Uh we hear that all the time you know it's repeated as rhetoric a lot that it's bad business for the environment that it's a waste of
2:34:01energy. So let me tell you a story. Uh, back in 2002, a while back, I was at Yale, had my summer job at Yale, and instead of going to Wall Street, I decided to do something completely different at the time. Uh, I went back to Brazil to where I'm from, and I went to a project in the middle of the Amazon. So, this is a place where to get there, you fly to Manau, which is already remote. Then, you hop into a a
2:34:31very small plane. You land in a dirt airfield. Then you hop into a boat. You go up a stream, you know, maybe for five, six hours, and then you get to somewhere you are. One of the most beautiful places you can think about, very rich in terms of having, you know, there's no starvation. You can just literally just pick fruit uh of the trees. You can fish. Very a lot of wealth in that perspective. But they
2:35:01lacked one thing. There was no energy in that city. That city was called Manikur. It's middle of the Amazon. You can look it up. There's green, a horizon of green all around you. And with no energy, you know, we would see people dying from diseases that, you know, have been eradicated in other places for decades. And that was still happening there because there was no access to medicine.
2:35:23Medicine would go bad. There was no refrigeration. We saw kids studying and they the school is all open because there's no of course air conditioning. At night falls and the forest reclaims everything. Energy is the substrate of everything that we call development. Lack of energy is equal lack of development.
2:35:48So I think that's the first thing we should have in mind that energy consumption by definition is not bad. is actually relate directly related to human progress. In fact, if we look at the data, right? So, this is a data that is showing um a cor very high correlation between GDP per capita and energy consumption. And a lot of people look at this chart and they will tell this doesn't tell you exactly uh what's
2:36:18cause and consequence, right? Is the correlation inverted here? And when I get that question, I go back to the store in the Amazon. I say, "Listen, I've seen the other side of this, which is being at the bottom side of that curve where you have less energy consumption and poverty.
2:36:38The other thing about mining is that it's extremely flexible. It's the most flexible load ever invented. Right? If you have a steel mill, which steel basically is energy, what you're doing is that you know you're inputting a lot of energy to get your output at the other side and you shut down a steel mill. Depending of where you are, it can take months to get back online. So when they lose energy, it's a problem. It's a massive problem. Mining, we don't care.
2:37:04Machines can be turned on and off at the whim at the end of the day. We're starting to have I think very good conversations particularly with governments and energy companies exactly about that which is there is load that is just sitting there. It's not going anywhere. Most of the cities actually have excess load. Right. And mining can come in and stabilize the grid massively from where it was.
2:37:31So when we talk about, you know, wasted energy, I don't think that, you know, fish are wasting energy when they're swimming up upstream, right? We saw that in the Amazon as well. They're swimming upstream to create a new generation.
2:37:47I don't think that where we are is similar to what we saw in 2021. It's very different. Um I think mining also opens a set of optionality that we didn't have in the past and we see that you know the obvious one is on AI and HPC opportunities and the use of energy all this optionality that you have with Bitcoin mine it's rarely put into the pricing of it
2:38:16and that optionality comes from the energy option which I just mentioned the share option You know, the beautiful thing about Bitcoin mining being in a bare market of hash rate is that for those that stay around, for those that stick the course, they naturally get a higher share of the market.
2:38:37The proximity option of being close to Bitcoin, right? At the end of the day, you know, we look at our team at Electron, we're all Bitcoiners. We all came to to doing mining because we were originally Bitcoiner. mining gets you very close to to the protocol level to understanding the protocol level and then the last one is infrastructure.
2:38:58Mining is I can tell you like there were a lot of investors that I had conversations with that when you talk about mining investing in mining it's something that for them coming from the real asset world it's much simpler and much clearer through Grock than investing in Bitcoin because for them that's a real they can see it right it's like you see the mining see the data data centers um that's another advantage I think we are at a stretch that you know we're extremely well positioned for
2:39:27Bitcoin mining uh for the first time at scale exactly because of what I mentioned. I think in one side you have the Bitcoin price at a very compressed level and at the other you have the dynamics in network hash rate being very well positioned. I can't you know I didn't need to tell you this but if you look at the public mining companies out there there really isn't anybody staying the course to mine Bitcoin at scale. Pretty much everybody
2:39:54is leaving the industry right now. So I'll finish here. Um as I said I think you know Bitcoin mining is at the crossroad is at the best place where energy the energy revolution meets the Bitcoin revolution and exciting times ahead to continue to be building. Thank you.
2:41:05Heat. Heat.
2:41:23All right. Hello everybody. Great to see this audience. Uh Brian, thanks for being here. Um really excited about this. Why don't you introduce yourself first?
2:41:32Yeah, thanks Russ. Uh I'm Brian Roberts.
2:41:35I head up equity product development at the Hong Kong Exchange. So my team will oversee our equity derivatives structure products and ETF uh platform. But I think uh real quick beyond just my experience at HKX and kind of developing ETFs uh here in Hong Kong, uh I also spent about 12 years at Vanguard uh heading up their ETF businesses in different parts of the world. So I'm kind of here more kind of talking from
2:42:03like a global kind of ETF kind of industry veteran rather than just from an exchange perspective.
2:42:10Yeah, I think that's important. You were you were a buyside guy literally looking after Vanguard's ETF business and then now you've come on to the exchange side and you're effectively the guy that proves the products before they go to market.
2:42:22Right. So yeah. Uh my first question um after kind of two decades plus in this space when you saw what happened in the US with IBIT and and these the launch of these these Bitcoin ETFs which we all know broke a number of records uh and has has has made sort of a I I would say a big wave uh of change in the ETF space. I mean, what's your take on what
2:42:50that has done to the industry as a whole? Talking more globally, I think, first before we dial it back to Hong Kong.
2:42:56Yeah. Yeah. I I think when I when I think about Bitcoin and just cryptocurrencies kind of making their way into the ETF industry, I you know, first I think of it as it was a significant milestone for ETFs. And you know, I've had a lot of experience developing, you know, products in the ETFs, but it's all from the traditional financial infrastructure, equities, fixed income, commodities, exotic thematics, and things like that. But I
2:43:25think the with ETFs bringing in cryptocurrencies, it really was the bridge across the traditional finance and also the decentralized finance uh infrastructures. Um, and I think that was important for I think ETFs as an industry because it just kind of proved once again ETFs as a what I kind of consider a financial technology really just kind of brought a very complex
2:43:54asset into the mainstream world. And I I think this was really just fundamentally important for ETFs to be that kind of mechanism versus any other mechanisms out there to bring this asset into the mainstream world. I think it's also important for cryptocurrencies because you know for a long time I think Bitcoin and Ether and others have always kind of worked in a very call it alternate kind
2:44:24of world especially from where I'm kind of sitting. I've always been in the traditional financial uh side of it all. Um, and so it's always been something that I think it's been out of reach for most investors, whether it's institutions or retail. And what the ETF did was it took something that was relatively complex to access and it just it it brought it into the ETF structure.
2:44:51It simplified access. It made it efficient. And to me it was really this big distribution breakthrough I think for cryptocurrency to get access into institutional capital, retail capital and things along those lines. So no now you can access cryptocurrencies through a traditional financial uh uh mechanism and now it's available through wealth management channels. I can go online and trade it through my retail broker. I
2:45:20don't have to have a wallet and trade on other exchanges.
2:45:23Yeah. So, uh, I think Michael Sailor famously called it the, uh, IPO moment for Bitcoin because it just really opened a lot of new channels.
2:45:32Y, so let's let's let's dial into Hong Kong. Take us back to product discussions um, closed door discussions on your side. you know, was the the push for a Bitcoin ETF in Hong Kong retail driven or was it really coming more from the ETF uh providers or the issuers deciding that you know they found product market fit here in Asia and um you know obviously we're watching the movements in in the US.
2:46:02Yeah. So you know there had been this has been a discussion with years in the making in kind of various shapes or form. Um ETF issuers have obviously wanted to do this for a very long time.
2:46:17I think they wanted to break down those distribution barriers. They obviously want to grow aumum uh to generate revenue. um more and more retail and more and more institutional investors wanted access to this asset as well. And they just, you know, for them, you know, it was it was a challenge to kind of get through all the different kind of compliances and have a whole completely different setup for accessing the cryptocurrency asset. But even with all
2:46:47of those kind of demand forces kind of pushing it, it was actually for a Hong Kong perspective, it was more of a top-down governmental um kind of regulation that really kind of broke through. And this goes back to the Hong Kong government's uh digital asset strategy that they put forward, you know, several years ago that really kind of formed the catalyst for the ETF ecosystem, the regulator, the uh the
2:47:15SFC, the exchanges for us to actually do this. And I think once it was accepted from a governmental standpoint that this is an industry and an ecosystem that Hong Kong wanted to develop, um it really just started breaking down a lot of the barriers for us to bring this out into the traditional finance world. and and and I think at that point, you know, this was happening when there was a lot
2:47:42of pressures in the US to bring out um you know, the spot-based crypto ETFs as well because the future-based ETFs had last had existed for several years and there was kind of this a little bit of um maybe this is more just in my head a little bit of a race around who could be first into the market. Um you know, and ultimately the US got out there first. I mean they have massive ETFs there but I think this has been a big breakthrough
2:48:10for Hong Kong and I think this is an important kind of component as they as Hong Kong really develops this whole uh kind of digital asset kind of ecosystem and industry here in Hong Kong.
2:48:21Yeah.
2:48:23So you made the decision to launch with uh in kind from day one. Uh I think Hong Kong may have been the first to do that globally.
2:48:32Yeah, we were the first.
2:48:33You're the first. So I mean I think the US is starting to catch up to that.
2:48:36We're seeing some of the regs change and the the bar to be able to actually do in kind move from higher levels to lower lower level notionals. But what was behind the inkind decision? Uh because it was quite pioneering. Was it was it also driven by investors or was it something that the exchange wanted to do?
2:48:57Yeah. Um it it's really something the ETF issuers wanted to do. Um and it was for us to have I think when we were looking at this as an ecosystem and and as kind of part of the government um we wanted to we wanted to be a leader you know globally but you know if it wasn't a global leadership position a regional leadership position and really being this hub for digital assets in Asia
2:49:26Pacific um and when we were bringing out the inind mechanism Um, I would actually probably say when we kind of go back to this, you know, probably more in my head, this race between us and the US around who could really bring these products out first, this was actually a a component that actually slowed it down. If we would have actually been able, if we just focused on doing the cash creation redemption process, we would have actually been out there a lot earlier.
2:49:55Um and so for us doing the in kind creation redemption process was important for a few reasons. Number one, it's a uniqueness factor. Uh there was demand from more institutional and retail clients to have that. Uh and I think with this we wanted to take a little bit longer to really get the right market structure in place. So it's like put aside the headline of being first to market and what that'll buy you
2:50:23for that one day, but it was like let's put in the right market structure that we have so that we can have lasting successful products coming into the market. And I think you know the US followed suit. Um you know I don't know if they were envious envious of us and and things along those lines but I think it's an important feature to have in a proper functioning ETF structure. the ability to in kind create and redeem
2:50:50with the physical asset itself.
2:50:53All right, let's talk about the US products a little bit. Um they've obviously gathered tens of billions uh while Hong Kong has remained a bit smaller. Um is that a scale issue or is something more structural do you think?
2:51:08And I mean who is actually buying here?
2:51:11Yeah. So the ETF or the US market is obviously dominating. I think globally there's over a hundred billion US dollars allocated into cryptocurrency uh ETFs and the US is the deepest and most liquid capital market in the world. So you know for us it's not surprising that they are leading in terms of of AUM. Now when I come back to Hong Kong, you know,
2:51:39while I think we've been quick to market in terms of bringing the products out and I think the regulations to bring product out has been in a leading position. I do think where we are lagging right now is actually regulation advancement in the distribution of cryptocurrency ETFs here in Hong Kong.
2:52:01They're still regulated in a very complex manner. there's a lot of additional due diligence that investors have to uh pass um in order to trade these ETFs if they're doing so here in Hong Kong. Um and so I think the distribution regulations have to a degree lagged what you see in other markets and I think that creates a barrier for growth for us. Um so I think that's the first thing. The other thing that I'll say that I'm actually really
2:52:30interested in the Hong Kong perspective is, you know, not so much on the cryptocurrency ETFs themselves, but it's the tokenization process that's actually happening now. So, I talked about in the beginning how uh cryptocurrency getting into ETFs was a distribution uh breakthrough for uh cryptocurrency. I actually think the reverse is happening now within tokenization because we now have 11 ETFs
2:52:59tokenized here in Hong Kong and that is actually giving ETFs on traditional assets, equity, money markets, fixed income a whole new distribution channel that is happening uh for ETFs. So for me, I think with all of this kind of digital asset, it's not just about the spot crypto ETFs. It's also about how traditional financial infrastructure, decentralized financial infrastructure is actually converging right now. And
2:53:28again, I think we're leveraging it in a different way to actually have distribution mechanisms or breakthroughs for just ETFs and traditional assets.
2:53:38Uh for those of you here that are not familiar, there's a program between China and Hong Kong called the Stocknneck program that allows uh Hong Kong investors or actually global investors to access the local China market, the Asshare market, and then the reverse is also the case where mainland Chinese, which is primarily retail investors, can buy Hong Kong stocks. Um not every stock's included in that program. So there are certain qualification requirements.
2:54:07uh but it has been probably I guess one of the most impactful things that the exchanges have ever done uh in creating that that mechanism. I think it was 2014 launched and that really was able to free up a lot of mainland Chinese capital to to invest offshore without needing uh QI or QDI quota.
2:54:31that connect program is very difficult to qualify for and we know at this stage ETFs I I think there are 30 30 to 40 ETFs that have been uh approved for that program to give access to mainland China.
2:54:46Do you think that products like this the Bitcoin ETF will ever reach mainland investors through the connect program?
2:54:52Um what would have to be true for that to happen?
2:54:57Okay. Yeah. So the stock connect program that Russ mentioned is probably been one of the most um successful exchange to exchange collaborations globally. Um coming south from mainland investors coming into the Hong Kong market, they account for 25% of our average daily turnover. And then for international investors going into the ashare market, we trade about 350 billion remman a day. That's probably
2:55:26about 6 to 7% of the combined turnover in Shenzhen and Shanghai. So, this has been a material two-way kind of facilitation and opening of of China Capital. Now, from the ETF side, the ETFs for uh Southbound, it accounts for about 15% of our ETF volume. Hong Kong is actually the fourth most traded and actively traded ETF market globally. So we trade about 67 billion US dollars a
2:55:55day. Now in terms of getting more and more of these products included right now it's it's really focused on equities um in order to get more of these kind of products like cryptocurrency ETFs. Stock connect has always been built on mutual recognition right so we have stocks they have stocks that we want to get access to. We have ETFs. They have similar kind of ETFs. I think in order for this to
2:56:23happen, it will have to be mutually recognized. Um they would need to have ETFs tracking cryptocurrencies similar to what we are so that it is equivalent in nature. So I think that's going to be probably have to be the big breakthrough for for this to happen at this point.
2:56:43So a little ways off in I would probably say so. Uh Brian, thank you for both for being here and for being uh consistently one of the key, you know, drivers of innovation at the exchange. Uh always been a pleasure working with you and and you're an important figure there.
2:57:01All right. Thanks, Russ. And it's been a pleasure working with you as well and thank you for having me.
2:57:05Thank you, everybody.
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3:03:11Welcome back in to the live news desk at Bitcoin Asia 2026. I'm Grace Remington with Shan Hagen. Jury Watanabay community manage or engagement at Metaplanet and the one the only Bow Bow official mascot of Bitcoin Asia 2026. I know we've had a cast of characters all day long, but I actually think this might be the all the most allstar crew on the desk yet. Bow, can you tell us how's the day been going for you so far?
3:03:39I think that means great.
3:03:41I think that's that's a good sign. Well, we learned Bow Bow has like a much broader wingspan than he looks because he almost just knocked Jury off her stool here. But I'm glad you're still with us.
3:03:51I am too. I am too. But he's fiery.
3:03:54Does Metaplanet have a mascot of sorts?
3:03:58We actually have Satoshi Sensei. And as you can tell by the name, he's Satoshi teacher.
3:04:05We got to bring him here next time. Yeah, let's just get the whole mascot army.
3:04:10I think that needs to be a thing. It'll be really really fun that way.
3:04:13Okay. But Jerry, we were talking um with you earlier this morning about um MetaPlanet's role just in in kind of the investing world. And a lot of our American audience doesn't know, but there is a huge cultural difference in investing in American companies versus Japan here or uh Japan where you're based. And um that's what you do in your role is kind of building it really is a community of shareholders in MetPanet.
3:04:37So what does that look like for you?
3:04:38Yeah, I mean I've had actually some shareholders come up to me at our um annual shareholders meeting um saying you know because I invested in MetPlanet um I have a whole new group of friends that I've never had and you know they connect online they connect offline as well and it didn't just open up the finance world for them but it's really opened up their social world and I think that's really beautiful. I think people
3:05:06in Bitcoin stick together. Um they cry together, they laugh together, they um p like go on together and I think that's what we're building at MetaPlanet as well.
3:05:18Now this has been probably the the first major bare market that that MetPanet seen. You know, I remember the the first one Micro Strategy went to, a lot of people kind of packed it up, thought it was over, and then they got to go back and and everyone got to witness the recovery firsthand, and then, you know, it wasn't as painful and as dramatic the second time around. How how is the community held up throughout this bare market? Do do you still see a lot of positivity?
3:05:43Are people kind of weathering the storm?
3:05:46I think the more people learn about Bitcoin, um, they have been able to weather the storm. Some people are brand new to Bitcoin and they their first exposure to Bitcoin is through MetaPlanet and it is it it's a shock right when you first experience that um bare market. But I think the more they learn about it, the more we put out the information, they're kind of to realize like it's a you know long-term strategy.
3:06:10It's not a short-term thing. So we're um sticking together again, crying together, laughing together, and succeeding together. I'm so curious because you mentioned the community or at least an online community or like social network that that you've built with MetPanet. What do those demos look like? Are these people who have held Bitcoin in the past? Are they net new buyers? And then age- wise, I'm curious on that too.
3:06:32Yeah. um at our shareholders meeting um one of the greatest sites I see is like a young 12year-old kid with their parents and you know the 12-year-old kid actually has metaplanet shares on their um so the youngest I think we have like the 12year-old and then the oldest we would see like around the 60s7s but we have a whole range um for some people uh they invest in MetaPlanet because they
3:07:01love Bitcoin But for some people um they started to know about Bitcoin because of MetaPlanet. So we have the whole wide range here.
3:07:10I was able to go to the shareholder meeting last year and uh as a western investor coming to Tokyo, the culture was so different for how shareholders are treated. It's unbelievable. It's like uh imagine your favorite airlines reward program but 10 times as magnificent. Uh you know, it's a good comparison.
3:07:28Yes. Yeah. you're you're you're treated you're treated like a king as a shareholder and and there's a lot of pride I think in and and uh respect for a company's shareholders and you get gift baskets and you're treated well and I think that that's something that kind of happens regular regularly throughout the year. So how are you thinking about that as the community lead? What are you doing for your shareholders to make their experience special? Again, I think um it's
3:07:55showing up for that. I mean, it sounds a little cheesy when I say this, but like it's showing up for them even when the market is a little sad. It's showing up for them when the market's happy. Like, we're always sticking together and saying we're here to, you know, um I like to say harness the future with you.
3:08:12Um and we're here to help you. We're here to uh secure the future. Um, so I think um, not just that, I mean, we have the shareholders program as well, which I didn't really know that it was not a thing outside of Japan.
3:08:25I'm jealous now. Um, we have a whole, you know, health, wealth, and joy is our, um, I not motto, but like, um, pillars for our shareholders program.
3:08:36So, you know, we like to take care of uh, someone's joy, health, and wealth as well. How do you find that creating that emotional connection with the shareholders kind of impacts their behavior as buyers?
3:08:49Oh my gosh, that's a good question. Um, I think it just makes the whole journey fun, right? It makes it a little bit more personal versus just like, you know, you're investing a little bit of your um money into our stocks, right? So, I think it helps actually um to weather the storm, so to speak, like you said, um versus just making it like a cold connection. Like it also feels like you're making it more
3:09:18accessible to invest too because sometimes it can be a little intimidating.
3:09:22Yeah, I think um Bitcoin is a very intimidating topic still in Japan. And I mean at one point um we were probably we were the earliest adopters of Bitcoin and then we had that Mount Gox issue um and then it became a very uh controversial topic, right? So by us have creating that um community feel and making information and online offline communities more accessible. Yeah, like
3:09:51you said, I think it makes the idea of Bitcoin more approachable.
3:09:56Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us. I love hearing about this. I gotta I think I got to make it out to one of those meetings now. You've inspired me.
3:10:04Everyone should.
3:10:04Yeah, we're gonna have Bitcoin in Japan in 2028. So, we might be there. Let's make it happen.
3:10:10Definitely will.
3:10:11Yeah. Bow Bow, any final words from you?
3:10:16I think that translates roughly to we like the hotel.
3:10:18We love it. Okay. Um we're going to go back to the Nakamoto stage now. Jury, thanks so much for your time. Up next is the collector's mind, art, scarcity, and Bitcoin. We'll see you soon.
3:10:42What's up, David? What's up, AJ? Do we feel out of place here or I don't know. It kind of feels like home, man. Feels like home.
3:10:50Yeah.
3:10:50Nice. So um you want to go first or I'll go first or please you go.
3:10:55So hi everybody um good afternoon. So me and AJ we are basically from the collectible market and me myself personally from the art market. Um you know being art for the last 24 years. I actually did my 20th anniversary collection show three years ago. So amazing.
3:11:16Yeah. So it's been a long time man. But so been collecting art for many years and created one of the largest um art fair um in China and um it's for it's our 15th um edition this year. But I've also been collecting well I started when I was I don't know like six seven collecting sports cards back in the '90s. So um recently you know everyone knows like trading cards has been going
3:11:45crazy. So, for the last um three years, I created this um new fair fest, whatever you call it, uh Mojo Fest in Shanghai. So, that's what I've been doing.
3:11:56Killer.
3:11:57Yeah. I mean, we uh we're connecting backstage. I feel like all collectors, there's just a immediate bond, a nostalgia, and a nerd gasm that that that happens there. But yeah, I mean, I'm AJ. I'm the founder and CEO of Treasure Trove and Solari Capital. At Slari, we invest and incubate technology companies, sort of a multi-stage VC growth equity firm. And along the way, in addition to a long-standing affinity to Bitcoin, I've also been a a
3:12:27collector. And that that same heristic around scarcity and monetary debasement applies here. And I think that's exactly why we were invited to talk about this topic and exactly why you can see and see down here we've got tons of of trading cards. We have people buying and selling collectibles. I mean, how did you take me back to your origin story when you were six or seven? What what piqued your interest as an early collector?
3:12:54Well, I think I always say, you know, if you have that collecting bug, it's a disease, right? Once you hit that disease, it's never curable, you know.
3:13:05So, I wish there's more people who can um get that disease, you know, the collecting disease. But, um yeah, no, I started off I remember watching um you know, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant when he just came to the NBA and I stumbled upon you know, some packs of cards, start opening it. Never thought that it's going to have the kind of market that we have today. You know, let me give you some perspective. You know,
3:13:33the most expensive card I bought back in 1998 was a Michael Jordan PMG Green.
3:13:43So, everyone knows that's um that's a real treasure in in the collectible market. I paid 8,000 US back in 1998, which I'm sure it felt like a lot at this time.
3:13:52It's so expensive back then. I was 13, 14. 8,000 was a lot of money, right? Um, but now that car it's it's never it hasn't been sold in years.
3:14:03You know, the last copy I when I sold mine, I sold it for 350,000 US to um our friend Ned Turner.
3:14:10That's right.
3:14:11Who happens to be the uh the owner of PSA Collector Group. Um, but they would estimate that car to be right now at least 10 million US.
3:14:21I believe it. I mean, we actually did an analysis at Treasure Trove recently trying to understand what is the collectible value of just Michael Jordan.
3:14:33Yeah.
3:14:33If you add it up all of his 1986 Flears, the PSA 8 9 and 10, if you went down through all of his trading cards, his jerseys, his sneakers, etc., and you get to a number around $2.5 billion dollar, right? So to put that in perspective, the value of the Chicago Bulls franchise last transacted at 6 billion. So you got one guy, one player over 40 years has
3:15:02created billions of dollars of real value for collectors. And you see that again and again and again across different athletes, whether it's Tom Brady or Steph Curry or increasingly in soccer, Ronaldo Messi. I know you've been collecting hockey cards recently as well. Is that right?
3:15:21Yeah. So, Gretzky, Sydney Crosby, those those kind of guys.
3:15:26Definitely.
3:15:26Yeah.
3:15:26Definitely.
3:15:27So, let me ask you a question, AJ. Um, you know, in the collecting world, you became really famous this year.
3:15:35You know, um, Michael Jordan was my thing, but you're a bit younger than me. Not much, right?
3:15:42But I know Pokemon is your Michael Jordan.
3:15:45Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you want to tell your story about how you acquired the most expensive Pokemon card in the world? Sure. Sure.
3:15:53Yeah. I mean, similar to you, as a kid, I had a a fascination with Pokemon. I'm right at that age where I I grew up with it in the US. I was eight or nine or so when those first video games, Pokemon Red and Blue, hit the shelves. And, you know, at the time, people were collecting the cards, but they're also playing the game. And uh you know very quickly really over a 30-year period we've seen that market in trading cards
3:16:20balloon to now a $30 billion asset class.
3:16:24Yeah.
3:16:24Like if you go on Card Ladder and you go to PSA Beckett and CGC and you add up Pokemon cards, it's like a midcap company, right? Oh yeah. And I think you know for me it was I mean people thought it was contrarian.
3:16:38I thought it was an obvious bet. I mean, if somebody put or somebody bought $16 million of equity in a $30 billion company, no one would blink an eye. And yet, you could buy the number one collectible and the highest grossing franchise of all time for $16 million.
3:16:56I didn't really expect it to go that viral and I've been pretty quiet as a collector really up until that that moment. But I think just Logan Paul's involvement, Ken Golden's involvement, the the true spectacle of it, it it almost almost feels like these auctions are turning into sporting events in some ways, right? And I and I got to tell you time and time again uh I mean a lot of the stuff we'll buy treasure trove is in private transactions but as we were talking backstage when we do buy things
3:17:26at auction almost always we're bidding against somebody y from Hong Kong or mainland China and you know I'd say here Middle East North Africa and the West notably the United States those are the three pillars of the collectible economy and it's just it's increasing and increasing year-over-year. Yeah, exactly. So, I see a lot of like cryptogized collecting getting to the physical collectible market too, right?
3:17:52Um I'm sure a lot more in in in TCG, the Pokemon side than more than sports cards.
3:18:00Yep.
3:18:00Right. So, what do you see the future?
3:18:01Cuz cuz right now the the the reason why car like sports cars are going up like crazy was because people from my generation they grew up and some of them are doing pretty well.
3:18:13Yeah. Yeah. So that's why they're spending a lot of money buying cards and we see all these like baseball and and and basketball team owner who are starting to collect. That's why the sports car collect booking became expensive. Definitely.
3:18:24But what about the now? Well, obviously the Pokemon guys are growing up like you. Um yeah, what do you see the future?
3:18:31Yeah, I mean I'd say the trading card market is actually still a a pretty small category in collecting. It's about an $80 billion market cap category.
3:18:42there's about a billion dollars a month of transaction volume. So, it's a pretty high turnover, pretty liquid asset class. But for fine art, as an example, just in private hands, like forget museums, nation states, and foundations, just private individuals own in excess of $3 trillion of art, right? So, there's a lot of room to grow in trading cards. It's a it's a high torque category. It's also a phenomenal form factor as a store of value because it's
3:19:10it's so small. you can store millions, if not tens of millions of dollars of value in the palm of your hands and easily transport it. And I'd say, you know, the the sign of a really healthy collectible market is when you see not only intellectual property franchises like say One Piece, Magic the Gathering and Pokemon or different sports leagues like NFL and MLB etc involved, but where you also see grading and authentication, right? In the same way there's Moody's in the United States that's issuing a
3:19:40rating whether it's AAA triple B to your stock or bond. We now have that infrastructure in trading cards. And something we were talking about too is is lending, right? So in the same way Ken Griffin can buy a $200 million Basot painting and take out a 50 to 60% LTV loan at 67%. You can now do that in the trading card market. So you know all these different categories particularly at the top the best of the best the true
3:20:07grails the one of ones exhibit the same characteristics that we see in Bitcoin as a monetary debasement trade and a lot of smart money is now moving into this space heavily for the first time on on the international stage and I know you just hosted a trading card expo right you had 30 to 40,000 people show up I mean tell us tell us more about that event Yeah, that's um well basically you know we like I always do like 20 years
3:20:36ago with art um I feel like right now in the China market we are lacking a proper infrastructure um of this whole collecting um thing right so I started this fest with my very good friend Edison Chen who was u a a rapper pop star in Hong Kong back in the days but now he's mo mostly known for his brand fashion brand Clot and also So obviously on Instagram every day he only posts sports cards and trading
3:21:05cards. Um he taps into he right now his focus is mainly on um entertainment cards.
3:21:12So he spent a lot of money buying acquiring basically the best entertainment collection which I think he's smart because that's I still think very underrated market.
3:21:22You know he's buying Disney Marvel but he's spending like over a million dollar on some cards.
3:21:28Sure. for that.
3:21:29You're you're saying Ste something about how music culture is coming into the market too, right? I think K-pop stars like Jenny and Lisa are now entering the trading card market. Say say more about that.
3:21:40Yeah, I mean um like similar to what Edison's collecting with the entertainment card, right? We I think you know we are going to see this revolution where you're going to see the more famous people not just celebrities cuz right now the boundary between internet phenomena influencers celebrities are very vague but we're going to see tops eventually maybe producing cards for Mr.
3:22:06Beast.
3:22:07Sure.
3:22:07Right. speed.
3:22:09You know, those guys where their first card or their rookie card will become so important and so expensive.
3:22:17Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting, right?
3:22:19Because it's whether it's the card market or the art market, indies, collectible, asset classes, it's like a derivative format to trade in some ways on the likeness and the popularity of characters and individuals, right?
3:22:33because you can't I mean it'd be sort of weird to you know try and buy you know Lisa or Jenny's stock. I mean it doesn't exist right but I mean like in trading card we already see this vastly transparent improvement from traditional collectibles like art you know I would say if we don't change well I mean we as the art world doesn't change the whole gallery model the whole Christ ses
3:23:02traditional auction models if we don't become more transparent the whole art market will be H say more about that. I mean how do we become more transparent as an industry?
3:23:15I mean collectibles something that's difficult about it relative to Bitcoin.
3:23:18Bitcoin you have decentralization, you have transparency, you've got the ledger, etc. Here in the collectible market you have a really high degree of opacity and there's a lot of uncertainty around authenticity and tracking and tracing. I mean say more there. Well, like you you mentioned a very good point where you know one reason that pushed trading cards into what it is now was because of this movement of grading.
3:23:42Yeah.
3:23:43Right. And because of grading we have very transparent data. With data we have you know um statistics where we can track how much each cards have been sold or how many population there are. Y but with art that's not possible because the traditional model was where the galleries in the auction houses doesn't want you to know how many copies there are of this artist where it is and how rare it is you know that's um very
3:24:12important because they created the essence that art is very rare but come on Picasso has over 100,000 you know various paintings drawings or whatever you don't call that rare Definitely.
3:24:27But there are some very major pieces that's very iconic.
3:24:31Yeah.
3:24:31And rare.
3:24:32Yeah. Yeah.
3:24:32Right. So in art I I always thought like there needs to be more open data more I know it's impossible to grade a piece of painting or an installation.
3:24:43Sure.
3:24:43But maybe we can find some ways with with the technology AI with um with well back in a couple years ago with the whole NFT movement. I thought that could change.
3:24:53Sure.
3:24:54The the traditional art in some format.
3:24:56Sure. Sure. Yeah. I' I'd say too like not just art, but even more esoteric topics like movie props or dinosaur fossils or insert any collectible category, traditional collectibles.
3:25:10Collectibles. Yeah. There there's a lot of opacity and you're you're relying in part on auctioneers. you're entrusting them as fiduciaries as they buy and sell. But I think the democratization of that data and seeing really a Bloomberg terminal moment for collectibles is what's happening for sure in in trading cards.
3:25:32Oh, for sure. Like like we were talking backstage, you were mentioning well the first time I actually knew you were buying more than just um popular like pop culture stuff, right? Trading cards, pop culture. Um you you mentioned you you buy manuscripts books.
3:25:47Yep.
3:25:48So in my view if a Michael Jordan card today can be sold for 2030 million US but a Shakespeare first folio is only 8 million.
3:26:02Totally.
3:26:03That doesn't make sense.
3:26:04Totally. Totally. You know, I think you're right. And and I I think there's insane arbitrage opportunities in collecting for that exact reason. Things are completely mismatched. There's very limited price discovery. You know, that Michael Jordan card that you sold to our friend Nat, you hasn't transacted in in years, right? So, there's there's a cloud of uncertainty. I mean, we're living in a zone now where even modern-day players like a Shohi Otani
3:26:31can sign a dual logo man card and within 48 hours you have an 11 million transaction, right? So, yeah, I just saw Shine posted. He got it.
3:26:41Yeah, that's crazy. That's crazy.
3:26:42I mean, what are what are some areas broadly that you're really bullish on in collecting, but also bearish? Where where areas you would also avoid?
3:26:52Well, typically I don't really get into ultra hyped market.
3:26:58Sure.
3:26:58Doesn't matter what field it is like in cards with the super ultra new um rookie stuff like football cards.
3:27:06Sure.
3:27:07I I do buy some vintage football, but nothing new of every year's rookies. Not that kind of stuff. So, similar to art, I don't touch, you know, all the super hyper modern artists.
3:27:20Definitely. Definitely.
3:27:21Yeah. Yeah.
3:27:22What about you?
3:27:24Yeah. Well, I mean, there's so many unique emerging categories. Like, as an example, we've we made a play or a few plays recently in the video game category. So, we we bought the origin of Super Mario Brothers. This is a 1985 NES game, factory sealed, PSA, you know, grade graded and authenticated with us. It's the highest graded known copy. There's only three of these things that have been found over the last 41 years.
3:27:48And you know, video games does as a category more revenue than cinema, right? And people are starting to recognize that collectible category as art.
3:27:58I'd say manga and Zashi is a huge area, too. I mean, whether it's Naruto or One Piece or Dragon Ball Z, the origin of those franchises in the 80s and 90s have been a really great place to to deploy capital. I agree with you though in that in the sports card market seeing a lot of heat right now. A lot of heat just on the backs of Fanatics Fest. Uh you we had 180,000 people show up total pandemonium. I think Tops and Fanatics
3:28:27have done a really good job. Props to them for stirring the pot and Oh yeah.
3:28:31and increasing the appetite for for sports card collectibles. But I I just see a huge dislocation in the cards relative to say gameworn jerseys. So we we just we've been buying like as example we just bought Joe Montana's final gameworn Super Bowl jersey and that jersey he wore in his last game in the 1989 season. Dropped the mic, went 4-0, won Super Bowl MVP, threw for 300 yards, five touchdown passes.
3:28:58It's history. And but you can get that for a million and a half dollars, right? And you're you're you're telling me I mean there there's some modern cards that are selling for five 10 or even 11 million, right?
3:29:12I mean that just reminds me of I was checking my post this morning. Um I should have bought that, you know. I I I thought that item was really going to go over 10 million. The Maradonna Oh, the ball.
3:29:28The god of hand. I mean the head of God ball was sold for what? Like 3.3 million.
3:29:34That's too cheap.
3:29:35Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Well, here's the thing, right? I mean, for Bitcoin, you have true real time price discovery. I mean, I like to think of Bitcoin in some ways as a perpetual auction with hundreds of millions of individual participants, tens of billions of dollars a day of daily trading volume.
3:29:50For collectibles, there isn't really true price discovery because it it only takes two to tango. you and I can show up at an auction, you bid, I bid back and forth and we've we've got a price and that that price in some ways can be a bit of a an illusion because a lot of people are not aware that these auctions are happening or the these private sales are happening and again that creates huge opportunity for for arbitrage plays. Well, but I'm seeing more and more like a lot of my friends and you know some definitely
3:30:17vendors here who are actually starting um kind of like a market exchange place but using USD to um trade let's say the most volatile cards um the top 100 cards for example like that in Pokemon especially.
3:30:34Sure.
3:30:34Right. But I know that's more for the kind of you can't not say that's mass cards, but more for the population that has at least you know 10,000 20,000 40,000 kind of population cards.
3:30:47Mhm. Well, I'd say I'd say too maybe to riff off this is I know probably a lot of people in the audience have some real justified PTSD from the 2021 zero interest rate phenomenon where NFTTS were just flinging themselves onto the scenes. You know, Dogecoins was at 40 billion. People are buying board apes for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I mean, how do you how do you think about
3:31:14this moment in the collectible economy relative to say that moment 5 years ago?
3:31:19Do you think this time is different? Do you are you concerned about about this category overheating or do you actually think this is the beginning of a of a maybe multi-deade run in the category?
3:31:31I think long-term wise I'm bullish for sure, but short-term wise I do think there are well there are misses and opportunities. You know, even with the grills, even with the Michael Jordan, I think there are I think the speculation market have moved from nobody to the grills.
3:31:50Yeah.
3:31:50There could be corrections in that too.
3:31:53You know, Michael Jordan is he's always won, but there might be times that he might lose now, right?
3:31:59Sure.
3:31:59But I still think like example like the Maradona ball we talked about the Montana jersey that you bought. There are opportunities, but you have to find the underpriced opportunities and and the grills where they are.
3:32:12Definitely.
3:32:13Yeah.
3:32:14Definitely.
3:32:15Yeah. I mean, what advice do you have for people that, you know, they own Bitcoin, they're curious about getting into collectibles? Like, where where would you start?
3:32:27I would go to the biggest fest and fairs and just talk to the the best in industry. Find out who they are. Study, learn.
3:32:36Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Study the best.
3:32:37Yeah. I think that's that's a characteristic for all, you know, uh, crypto people. Um, they always study well.
3:32:44Yeah. Yeah.
3:32:45What about you? What do you think is is the best opportunity where the best opportunities and collectibles are?
3:32:52Yeah. I mean, I think the I really like right now the kind of fantasy sort of fictional character space, right? You mentioned your I think your your business partner was investing in say Mickey Mouse or Disney IP. I think for characters like Monkey Duffy and One Piece or Goku and Dragon Ball Z or Pikachu and Pokemon, those entities, well, they're not going
3:33:20to get a laboral tear. They're not going to mess up their meniscus. They're not going to go to Jeffrey Epstein's island. I say that kind of tongue and cheek, right? So there's there's great opportunities to invest derivative of the largest IP franchises of all time.
3:33:35Yeah.
3:33:36So in summary, basically um the IPS or culture phenomenon that has impacted human history 100%. Right.
3:33:46All right man.
3:33:46This has been great for sure. Thank you.
3:33:48Yeah. And thank you all.
3:33:54Heat. Heat.
3:36:22Okay. Um, good afternoon everyone and uh, of course, thank you to everybody for joining today in what has been a long week, a long year. Um, I think what I wanted to do, uh, we have half an hour, but I wanted to do just a very quick introduction from everybody with the idea that the the audience understands when they're answering a question, what hat are they wearing? Um, maybe we can start at the end with with Jason and come back. Just a very quick introduction on what you guys do.
3:36:51Yeah. Um, I'm Jason, founder of Sor Ventures. Been in the crypto industry since 2015. uh last two years we've been investing quite heavily in the Bitcoin treasury uh companies. So uh we've done uh the early days you know MetaPlanet and then Moon in Hong Kong and then Astra in Thailand and then Bit Planet in Korea uh and Taiwan. So we have a public company on NASDAQ as well. So yeah still still still investing.
3:37:22I'm Angela. I'm the managing director for APAC at Bitco and a couple of days at the White House meeting, Donald Trump referred to us as a big deal in the world of that thing being this thing that we're all in here together. Um we're a digital asset infrastructure company. So we provide full stack services um trading uh custody staking um and and you know any sort of infrastructure services for institutions that are looking to enter into crypto
3:37:52and digital assets. Great to be here.
3:37:54Uh this is Jay. Um my job is unsexy job. I'm a lawyer helping on the crypto clients and other uh uh companies as well. I uh help clients on the uh tokenization and also some other disputes as well. So if we have any issues, let me know. Thank you.
3:38:16I'm John Cahill. I run Asia for Galaxy Digital. We're a US-based NASDAQ listed company that does everything in digital assets from trading to investing to infrastructure and we also have a data center business uh out in Texas where we cross into the the AI world. Very nice.
3:38:36Um, so when I stepped into the space back in 2018, there was uh almost no regulatory um and no policies, no procedures and uh no effectively no licensing remitt. Fast forward to today where sort of there is across 100 different countries in my in my research for this um and uh we've seen a huge amount of adoption from that. So I wanted to sort of maybe ask you all individually how and from your firm's
3:39:04firm and client's perspective how this regulation has changed. Uh maybe focusing obviously a lot on the good but maybe some of the bad. Um and maybe I'll start with um with Angela coming from your historical uh licensing background.
3:39:18Yes, thanks for exposing me Ryan. Um I am a rapidly recovering regulator. Um prior to joining the private sector I spent over 10 years at the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Um and so you know I I think when it comes to regulation what do regulators regulate? They regulate things that are you know having a significant impact on the market. And so the regulation came in as adoption came in and and they were like okay you
3:39:46know this is serious and and I think in in the last couple of years they've seen the kind of impact that it can have on the broader financial system. So what impact has regulation then had on the industry? Um, I think that for companies like BitGo who have really leaned in, I think it has opened up a whole new opportunity to engage with non-cryptonative institutions. Um, we we chose to get licensed in some of the
3:40:14hardest uh jurisdictions in the world. We are a federally chartered trust bank in the US. We have an license in Singapore with the MAS. We have a license in um Dubai with VAR mika license in Frankfurt and really this has kind of become a strategic advantage for us right our licensing footprint when when clients um especially clients who themselves are heavily regulated institutions um they're choosing infrastructure partners when when they when they they
3:40:46know that when we're when we're regulated and licensed in this jurisdiction they know that it means something to them that we're being held to a certain bar and I think that has helped to confidence um when we say that we provide institutional grade infrastructure that that is really being um you know held to a certain bar by regulators that they know and understand.
3:41:07Yeah, John, you go for it.
3:41:09I I think regulation is a double-edged sword. You know, I think I I spent a long time in Tradfi. I worked at Goldman Sachs for a long time and every time there was a new rule, you know, you you stress out because it's it's more reporting or more obligation, but it also offers new opportunity and I think the the journey we've been on and it's really a global one. We operate, you know, in in you know 20 jurisdictions around the world. It's one of, you know, regulation enabling a broader access to permanent pools of capital. That's
3:41:39pension funds, that's endowments, that's sovereign wealth funds.
3:41:43we're we're they're the biggest pools of capital there are and regulation enables that. You know, I think the ethos of a lot of the industry uh around self-s sovereignty and independence is very important. I think it's important that we keep that as one of our principles. But I think also unlocking this permanent capital is is the way to make it bigger, is the way to make it grow. And so we're constantly having to reassess and evaluate and frankly spend more money on lawyers and
3:42:12consultants to navigate the the the different jurisdictions we operate in. But the endgame and we're getting closer to it every year is a permanent fixture as a you know investable asset open to everyone uh and more experimentation once you kind of clear the regulatory hurdle.
3:42:31Um I guess uh Angela and also John have given us very good perspectives on how crypto companies and assets crypto assets are now because of the regulations have been able to approach new um investors new um people which they previously they did not but also I'm helping different clients you know crypto companies but also traditional
3:43:00FIS and companies. So in my view I mean those are those view all very good but also from different angle from traditional FIS and other companies regulations help them to go into market as well. For example now we see send the charter bank can issue stable coins in in Hong Kong. If we go back as you said 2018 nobody imagined that you know traditional bank like charter bank could
3:43:29issue stable coins but now under regulations they can do it. HSBC can do it and then also if we go to US uh NASDAQ is looking into how they can do use blockchain and some other also tokenize and also uh use tokenize the stocks as well. So because of the regulations there are many players from traditional banking and other uh capital
3:43:58markets and other industries who can go into crypto space as well. So that's another angle that I think regulations help bring up to the space.
3:44:09That's my view. Yeah.
3:44:11Sure.
3:44:12Yeah. I mean um on our side we uh you know 10 years ago we were investing in tokens and there wasn't a lot of regulation. So and now we're investing in public companies and there's a lot of regulation. You know a lot of the work that we do uh is beyond investing now. It's working with the regulators trying to figure out how we can bring digital asset into traditional finance. Right.
3:44:41And um it's it's it's a very difficult task now that I've done this you know across six markets very difficult task and you know obviously our industry has been growing a lot but you'll be surprised uh how early we are when it comes to regulation you know for example um uh it's very difficult for institutions to buy digital asset in Korea infrastructure around Southeast Asia is very very early you know a part
3:45:10of reason why people um are still not kind of comfortable with buying digital assets is because the lack of infrastructure and clarity, right? And so um you know 2 3 years ago when we started investing in this entirely new narrative around Bitcoin treasury companies, we're not thinking about hey how can we make money on top of these public companies or grow the business.
3:45:33We're also thinking about what can we deliver for the region you know how can we bridge kind of that gap? How can we make it easy even easier for people to access Bitcoin?
3:45:46And and that that statement which is how to access Bitcoin had changed quite a bit in the last 10 years. You know, for example, 10 years ago for you to obtain Bitcoin is you got to mine Bitcoin and then you know 8 years ago you can access Bitcoin if you have account on Binance, right? And then uh two two three years ago you can access bitcoin in the form
3:46:12of ETF right now there are different asset class of bitcoin right there is CBS there are stocks there are prefs right all different form of asset different asset that's powered by bitcoin right the sailors talk about you know digital credit all powered by Bitcoin. Um so that's how early we are
3:46:40because you know Bitcoin is obviously not the only asset in our industry. Uh but I do think where we're heading now is uh a period where even us as investors we're forced to work with a lot of regulators because that's where the industry is heading. We will definitely see a lot more products beyond what we see today, beyond pre products that are powered by Bitcoin, but I think that path will be a lot more
3:47:09straightforward today compared to, you know, 10 years ago.
3:47:14I I also want to just chime in. I like not all regulations are created equal.
3:47:18There there are good regulations and bad regulations. Good regulations enable commercial opportunity. They enable in uh innovation. They bring in entrepreneurs and capital and some of those reg the regulations we've seen around around different regions and and the globe don't do those things. You know the US is a is a leader for capital markets globally getting clarity act has been a journey it's not yet done. And I
3:47:47think ultimately you need regulation to unlock a lot of these things and enable entrepreneurs to go and build, investors to go invest with some degree of visibility into what the future looks like.
3:47:58You know, we're we're we're investing out on 5 10 year horizons. You need to build those investments on solid foundation. Without that, you don't have the level of innovation or you force people into the dark corners, which is actually not what the regulators want. The regulars want to enable good actors, good investors, good entrepreneurs to build businesses.
3:48:18Yeah, I think it's a great point. I think that the the whole idea behind regulation and trying to make it move faster was exactly that people want to trade Bitcoin. So you either regulate a venue locally and let people trade Bitcoin or they will go elsewhere and then there is no safeguards, no protection, etc. And it kind of goes flows into the next question which is around liquidity and the fragmentation of liquidity. So as you mentioned ETFs brought a huge amount of of volume into
3:48:47the space. It opened up a huge amount of institutional uh you know liquidity and and uh opened a lot of doors. But what we've also seen now and in the past is unregulated not illegitimate but just unregulated providers doing a huge amount of volume. You know, if you look at um you know, not to pick on anybody, but if you look at Binance, Binance have had a huge amount of liquidity over the last years and parts of their businesses were unregulated and of course you can't go without mentioning hyperlid and how
3:49:16um you know how much volume they do and on on the spot and the per etc. So sort of the question for the for the panelists is do we think that do we think that the the volume will be taken and pulled away from unregulated and decentralized venues into regulated venues or do we think that the trade the the institutions will step and sort of open the door and and head into the hyperlquids um and and and and sort of the un unlicensed venues to get access
3:49:44to that liquidity.
3:49:46Yeah, maybe the regulator didn't go again. I think you know when you think about decentralization as a construct public blockchains that is dec decentralized right and already today we see so many regulated institutions the last year or two starting to do more and more on public blockchains. So you know this I I think it's not so binary I you know why why not the licensed space and the
3:50:15decentralized space coexist together. I think what we'll see is actually more of a convergence and and the question then is you know from a security standpoint right from an infrastructural standpoint which of these um ecosystems give the regulated infrastruct regulated players the most comfort to build on that and yeah and I think you know in terms of the institutional liquidity that's coming in from traditional finance they it it it will seek that kind of security
3:50:44and it will seek that kind of instit institutional grade infrastructure.
3:50:50I think it um both ways must happen in the sense that um the regulators will try to regulate those we call unregulated defy and dex uh species as well. uh because as you have seen historically speaking when there's no regulation whatsoever something happens and then you know many investors you know lose their money and
3:51:19other things. So then eventually it will trigger regulators to look into how they can regulate those so-called unregulated uh crypto businesses. But also on the other hand I uh some of my clients which are regulated businesses are trying to copy whatever is popular in unregulated hyperlid or some other uh businesses as well. So I think somehow both ways will
3:51:49uh happen and then somehow there will be some convergence between two sort of two ways. That's why how I can see maybe Jason.
3:52:01Well I mean everything is relative. So I think um in terms of like where the industry is heading and regulation is heading the I think what's really clear is that infrastructure is improving um and that the space that we used to you know have which is mostly onchain products those are becoming more and more connected to traditional products. Um so
3:52:28for example like exchanges right um they use most of their volume used to be on tokens now a lot of exchanges are getting involved with tokenized stocks right um you know equity isn't uh it wasn't their primary revenue back then but I think in maybe two or three years a lot of the primary revenue from digital asset exchange will come from tokenized equity um so like that that means I think our our just the world is
3:52:57connecting the dots. Uh you know we have public companies you know most in most of the major countries in Asia uh you know our form of investment somehow also kind of brings more liquidity and brings more money into those regions. uh whereas in the past maybe foreign capital wouldn't be interested in like a Thai public market but because of the work we've built the the products we've built then people are now interested in
3:53:26a tie public market um but more importantly I think it's because there there are opportunities that digital asset can solve in those public markets that you know I think it's going to be up to us to to bring to market. I don't think it's going to be the traditional traffic guys who are going to be solving and kind of connecting the dots. That's where I see the opportunity is like things that people haven't done, we will do it. Liquidity that hasn't exists, we will build it.
3:53:56I I I agree on that. I'd like to build on it. F first of all, Binance is one of the most regulated companies around. I I they probably hold licenses 50 60 jurisdictions by now. They have thousands of lawyers on stuff. like that that transition has already happened, you know, away from from being unregulated. And that's true for all the big crypto exchanges. They're all moving this direction. They're all now multi-asset. It's not just crypto stuff.
3:54:20It's it's, you know, wherever there's appetite for liquidity. They're they're there. That's their job is to be the venue for that. Hyperl is in a slightly different category, but I think what they have done, they built an enor enormous business and a great business around delivering a good product and owners of the token have an equity-like participation in the business. Oh, well, isn't that a novel idea? You know, passing value back to to holders is how
3:54:47you build uh a good investment base and and people who want to use the product and it kind of self-reinforces. So I think their model has been really good and because they've been they've been so successful because we see you know weakened volumes on hyperlquid driving the traditional markets it's putting pressure on the traditional market operators to think about what does 24x7 look like? How fast how good is our technology stack? How can we do that?
3:55:12They're they're a proof of concept. There's there's there's risk appetite on nights and weekends outside of trading hours. And now the rest of the trady markets have to catch up. It's it's it's very much the other way around than than it used to be.
3:55:24Yeah. I mean, I think SpaceX was a great example trading a billion dollars a day, you know, pre pre IPO. Um, so getting a little closer to home in terms of Bitcoin. Um, obviously you've seen through we've all seen a number of different cycles. Um, and with those cycles that's again we sort of talked about a little bit before some goods and bads. Um, you know, we had the ICO bubble, we had the meme, we had DeFi summer, we had meme meme coins, and what has what was very obvious about that was
3:55:52that was sort of driven by a significant push in and and a and a move up in Bitcoin. Um, and if I've heard it once, I've heard a thousand times, if only I just kept my Bitcoin and didn't chase the the next narrative. So the question is a little bit around as we see and and hopefully see an in an inevitable 100,000 again. Do we think that there will be another narrative that dare I say piggy banks on the back of a Bitcoin move? And um and do we think that people have
3:56:21learned their lesson? Do you think people will chase a next narrative? Do you think that they will and because obviously just to for again for for everybody in the room is all of those narratives died you know and are significantly down if not 100% down. So do we think that Bitcoin will take the next narrative up again or people will be a little bit more cautious and say let me just stay in my my my my ultimate position which is Bitcoin.
3:56:46I wouldn't say the narratives are dying.
3:56:47I think the narrative are changing right. Um so 3 years ago when we you know experimented with this Bitcoin treasury model and then you know started MetaPlanet with Simon and we didn't expect this will blow up. We didn't expect you know the term DAT and all that would exist. Um but it only lasted for 2 years right and then you know market had a correction again and people are asking us like what's the next big
3:57:17thing right? Um I think that is a very interesting question because that's where the money is going to be being made. Uh, all I do know is that I think it's not going to be if you look at the history of digital asset, it's not going to be the same thing again, right? So, you mentioned memes, um, you know, like protocols, all that.
3:57:40It's not going to be that. It's going to be something new. And, um, right now our companies are all kind of mostly investing a lot of time on RWA.
3:57:52And I think when you think about RW RWA um you know people think of just bring asset on chain I think there's going to be a lot more than that right I think um RWA is a very broad term right on so I think there's going to be a very big components where um you know some of the public companies we have they're all transforming into more of a how can we
3:58:19combine you know public company and the the utility of public companies with traditional, you know, tokens or tokconomics, right? That's what I'm kind of experimenting and at the same time um always thinking about like how cuz I think that's where the industry is heading. Yeah. So, I think that will be a big part. I think next year if we come back again I think
3:58:46it's going to be RWA. We we spent a lot of time in this industry and on stages like this talking about why you should own Bitcoin and things like that and a lot of that was about access. A lot of it was about just having it as part of the portfolio construction conversation. I truly think a lot of that job is done.
3:59:07Getting access whether it's through an ETF or one of the many venues you can go and buy Bitcoin. I think a lot of that work is is finished.
3:59:14So the access part is done.
3:59:16Understanding like why you should own Bitcoin is still that's still relevant. I think that's still really important.
3:59:21Um, but also the ownership of Bitcoin has changed a lot. It's gotten way more dispersed. You know, a lot of the people that have been Bitcoin OGs have diversified their own investment strategies and they're looking at AI and robotics and some of that's driven some of the weakness in in Bitcoin and the lack of energy around it. And so I think will Bitcoin be the thing that leads us forward? I I I I would say maybe not because maybe if the AI narrative starts to lose a little
3:59:50steam, we'll see capital redirected into a new space. If the robotic story starts to, you know, crest and then kind of come come in, there'll be some more capital deployed. If the the you know, all these IPOs that are sucking all this mind share and liquidity out of the market, you know, they they play out and and they're going to trade where they trade. I I think those will be bigger drivers than, you know, Bitcoin price by itself.
4:00:13Yeah, I I kind of agree with that. Um, I think for us as an infrastructure provider, the narrative that we see and the one that we live every day, maybe it's a little bit boring, but it's it's really the the building that's that's happening in spite of all the the market narratives, right? Um, and and I think that's the that's the thing that's really changed in the last um couple of
4:00:40years. um where you where we are we're working with institutions that want to build digital asset infrastructure and and they're not building it for like like John says they're not building it for this year or this month they're building in like 5 10 year horizons and so that has been happening in spite of the of of whatever is happening in the market now and whatever will happen in the market in future I think we we still
4:01:08see that continuing and that is going to be a durable narrative that that I think will drive the long-term growth of digital assets um both uh you know crypto as well as you know tokenized the RWAS h in my view which may be a little bit different from all of you but uh um I don't I am not the galaxy I am bitco I am not a fishy maybe uh my angle is
4:01:37maybe one of the many many many investors M uh and then as a lawyer who was helping different companies working on crypto projects uh I tend to agree with the Jason uh in the sense that narrative is changing has been changing and will change but maybe uh the nature itself of a bitcoin what bitcoin is is always the same but
4:02:04somehow the adoption changes and then people how they think of Bitcoin sort of changes as well. looking back uh bitcoin maybe was invented it was only bitcoin it was not a cryptocurrency right and but somehow uh you know they after ethereum was invented and then the uh t USD was invented and then oh people
4:02:31call them uh cryptocurrencies but now move on from cryptocurrency to crypto assets now digital assets we change but the bitcoin nature maybe always uh same but somehow it's a way of people finding the utility use cases all those things.
4:02:52So but uh and also if you look at the history gold when people dig out gold many many uh centuries ago they didn't know that it will be used as an inflation hatch right but somehow people has people have found that you know it could be a good inflation hatch so over the years uh the narrative will change and they will find a way to sort of uh how we can use bitcoin in the
4:03:22in the real world.
4:03:23Sure. Thanks. And I think uh we've got basically a minute to go. So just very quickly um and I you know I think everybody's talked a little bit about it and touched a little bit on it and and Bitco has made some investments recently. Where do you think smart money is going in, you know, in in 20 seconds each? Where do you think the smart money in the coming 6 to 12 months are is going in the space? Is it is it is it stable coin infrastructure? Is it RWA?
4:03:48Is it licensing? um uh just in a word convergence and we've talked about it in different ways and different things. It's traditional markets and and like the crypto infrastructure are coming together. The story of everything will be tokenized is happening in real time. Crypto bare market raging bull market infrastructure. We we've never been more busy doing projects with asset managers and increasingly banks. And that's 100% where there's a ton of investment going.
4:04:18this for me tokenization because that's where I see a lot of clients you know asking me about how they can do it and how the regulations work. So I think that's the uh maybe in uh 6 month or one year tokenization will be the one who is getting which is getting a lot of attention and money.
4:04:41So we say money talks, right? We talked to D money. Um, Bitco just acquired um, NYDIG's institutional bit trading business. And so I will say that spot money is going after institutional capital.
4:04:55Yeah, I I think I think again I broadly speaking, I think it's going to be RWA, but if I have to be very specific, then probably tokenized securities.
4:05:05Perfect. Uh, perfect timing. Thank you everybody for for your time everybody in in the audience and uh happy Friday.
4:05:13Thank you all.
4:05:48Goodbye.
4:06:05down.
4:06:21Hey down.
4:06:22Yeah.
4:06:32Down.
4:07:00Hey, hey, Howdy, howdy, howdy, howdy. So, they made me put Only Bulls as the name of the company, but really I'm a Bitcoin purist. I started mining Bitcoin in 2011. Um, but Only Bulls is a consumer brand of ours, so I had to plate to Bitcoin Asia, uh, cuz they were worried I wasn't going to talk about Bitcoin. But I started mining Bitcoin in 2011.
4:07:44Um, I don't know if I can legally admit this now. I don't know what the statute of limitations is, but if you guys were in Bitcoin and back in 2011, do you remember how you used to buy it? Like we'd federal express money somewhere and you guys all remember that or not?
4:07:57Anybody remember federal expressing money and figuring out how to sell? Oh, there we got someone over there in the corner. Um, I want to talk to you about how 37 years of tradial finance, which is what I've been I started my career at Dean Witter. Most of you have never heard of it. It's probably uh you know it is Morgan Stanley today. We um we consider Bitcoin to be pristine capital and I want to talk to you about how we use AI and Bitcoin to borrow money. So I'm the
4:08:26executive chairman of a public company on the New York Stock Exchange called Hypers Scale Data. The symbol is GPUs and and we are a data we data center in Michigan. We also own a private equity firm and we've been buying Bitcoin um and making every mistake in the world about how we mine it, how we sell it, how we use it. But over time, we really became a believer that it is pristine capital. And I'm going to walk you
4:08:54through how it is pristine capital. Um, we borrowed, this is incorrect, but we borrowed about um almost $50 million from Morpho. Has anyone here used Morpho at all? Anyone ever borrowed against Morpho? So, I understand that we're the largest borrow against Morpho for a single loan as a public company. We were the 41st largest owner of Bitcoin according to Bitcoin
4:09:21Treasury um up until recently because we sold some Bitcoin to build an AI data center. But I want you to imagine the idea that in traditional finance in order to borrow against our Bitcoin and I really need everyone to understand that pristine capital is coming and Bitcoin is the solution. We ran a real-time experiment. We were able to borrow $50 million against our Bitcoin permissionless.
4:09:52I didn't have to ask mother may I from some regulator or some bank or institution. And this is what makes this conference so important. Bitcoin Asia is being able to borrow $50 million against your Bitcoin and our average rate was 4.9%.
4:10:10Now what did we do? We built systems around monitoring Bitcoin to be able to make additional deposits and withdrawals to use AI to make sure the capital stayed pristine and that we were always in compliance because I didn't want to get liquidated, right? But this is the worst it's ever been, right? This is the worst today it's ever been. You can take Bitcoin, go to go to Morpho and probably within 15 minutes have the money available in your account. And this is something that we did as a real world
4:10:39experiment.
4:10:42for our public company.
4:10:44So why is it such a big deal and why do I think that eventually over the next 20 years what what you consider to be reserve banking is going to go away? I'm building a blockchain, the alt blockchain which is part of only bulls which is part of alt markets. We're a competitor to hyperlquid. This is something I wanted to do for the last 10 years and effectively administration has made it effectively legal for there to be built alternative markets on rails
4:11:12that are blockchain and the idea that you can take that collateral move it around and not get permission. I want to walk you through how we borrowed money for Bitcoin before and that is we went to an institution. They made us transfer to a custodian our Bitcoin. They made us overlever the Bitcoin. They charged us 15%. They made us pay a monthly payment against the Bitcoin. And it's really
4:11:39really absolutely still sort of a morbid process to be able to go borrow against your Bitcoin versus do it completely in DeFi. So, we came to the conclusion that why is it such a big deal? Verifiable onchain, global liquidity, 24-hour discovery, and programmable c custody. The concept that the banks don't understand is that eventually you're all going to figure it out.
4:12:07You're going to be able to go to your Only Bulls app, use AI, right, in built-in Only Bulls, say, "Hey, I've got, you know, 40 Bitcoin. Where's the lowest rate I can borrow? Press a button, fund your account, and with what Andre and Horowitz is doing, how they're funding onboarding services, have actual almost any denomination of currency in your wallet ready to spend in less than about 15 minutes. We believe right now
4:12:35with Only Bulls, you can go make a deposit and withdraw money or add money faster than you can use a current ATM.
4:12:44So, for those of you who have been in web 3 for a long time, like me, web 3 is a nightmare for deposits, bridging, moving over. But with new technology like holiday, which we've in integrated into Only Bulls, it's easier than you taking your ATM card out and getting money. Believe that or not, it's absolutely true. The capital without selling Bitcoin, access to liquidity, avoiding equity issuance, and retaining exposure.
4:13:10The entire time that we sold uh that we borrowed against our Bitcoin, we never had to leave access to the upside of Bitcoin. We could easily sell our Bitcoin. We could add or subtract it with Morpho. And that became a really important Someone really famous must be back there. They're cheering for him. Um so being able to borrow at substandard I mean imagine you today. None of you can borrow at 4.9% for a loan that you don't have to pay back or don't have to make a payment. I I can't believe that more
4:13:39people aren't doing it. And that's the interesting thing about it is the rates are set because there's so much little demand to borrow against your Bitcoin. When we got up to $50 million at one point, we were barely paying almost 5%. This is unprecedented in terms of the value of how you assess whether collateral is good or bad or whether it's pristine. And right now in the banking system, it's just sort of unheard of.
4:14:07access to liquidity, avoiding equity issuance as a public company, and retaining exposure. Capital without selling your Bitcoin. I can't stress how this is coming in a bigger way. Um, the loan never sleeps. The collateral, the rules, the liquidity are all programmable. You know exactly when you use AI or their formatted dashboard, you know exactly where you stand in real time. Your loan can be adjust adjusted.
4:14:33You can add or subtract C capital. and we made agents that allow us to monitor it and add or subtract Bitcoin depending on the best rates you can borrow against. So I just think this part is just mo one of the most incredible parts of the company. Um the variable rates over collateralization and liquidation risk.
4:14:53So let's talk about that. The liquidation risk is if you get up to 86% on morpho you're going to probably get liquidated. We try to borrow and never really go above above 72%. But I think that the average person can get really comfortable borrowing between 45 and 48%.
4:15:12Now, it's still a little archaic on how you pay it back. You do have to withdraw your Bitcoin. You have to sell it, put it back on. And I won't talk to you about looping because I would not suggest anyone loop and borrow against on Morpho to buy more Bitcoin. But from a perspective as a public company as we create an environment where we do more of these the idea that you don't have to go to a bank to do this we think is going to
4:15:42sort of revolutionize the way corporate treasuries operate right so we see Bitcoin as a scenario where Bitcoin is pristine capital is always there in the background it's always a treasury asset you can go access to it but we don't see it is we don't see it as investment capital as much as we think we see it as a reserve asset. Right? As Bitcoin becomes more popular as a reserve asset, the number of of lenders that become
4:16:10available make it easier and easier and easier to borrow and the current rail system that is being built around this process is making it easier to onboard and offboard. I wanted to give uh I guess we didn't put it up there. I wanted to give you guys an example of of how um we do that. And if you're interested in learning about the process for the dashboard, I keep my contact information available at all times. You can reach me on X, Instagram, or my
4:16:39LinkedIn, and I'll send you a copy of the Morphe dashboard if you want to use it for your own company. So, we recently undid the the loan and we did this maybe to prove a point which is what kind of Bitcoin exposure do you want to have at all times? And I I think that those of you how many people in the room have actually used Morpho of any capacity?
4:17:01Like you used it, you used it, you did you use it. So very few people are using something where four to 5% access to capital is just unheard of.
4:17:12And I don't really understand exactly why that's the case, but I think that where it changes is you see what's happening with Coinbase. Coinbase is now saying we're going to have Bitcoin back mortgages. I think you're going to see more and more uh institutions like us um make those available. So, let me talk to you really quickly about what we're doing at Only Bulls. So in the coming weeks ahead with only bulls you're going to also be able to borrow against virtually almost all cryptocurrency in the top 10 whether it's Tron whether
4:17:41it's Bitcoin Salana etc. And the same scenario morphol like uh scenario will be allow you to use your only bulls app to control whether you want to borrow more capital whether you want to deploy more capital but more importantly whether you want to deploy your bitcoin into a lending pool and as what I think what you see in reserve banking is that you're going to see more and more people building these lending pools to where we
4:18:09as as a society can go and say hey I'm willing to take a little bit more risk in this pool or that pool, etc. And living proof of this is what's happening with strategy, right? Strategy itself isn't really borrowing against its Bitcoin like it could. I'm I'm interested to see ultimately what Michael Sailor does and the team does there in terms of how much digital credit that they provide. Obviously, they're taking in to to control this Bitcoin. But if you play this out for a
4:18:39long period of time, I see these scenarios where funds are going to pop up, where credit cards rates are going to come down. The idea that any of your own collateral can be used for multiple things like purchasing cars, where there can be structured finance around the time frame that you borrow against the Bitcoin. And so for us, we continue to accumulate it. Again, we sold some Bitcoin. We sold 850 Bitcoin to fund the uh $1.3 billion data center we're
4:19:07building in Michigan. But and it was very painful for me to want to sell it, but it you know it's hard to offset the fact that you have this big data center contract. Let me wrap back into you with what AI is doing for us. And that is using AI contemporaneously the same time that you're going to get these loans.
4:19:25You can use AI to actually search for these loans to monitor these loans to alert you. And the alert system with AI is very important because you can move your collateral and loans really anywhere you want to you you want to move them in a way where you can constantly be checking rates and ultimately automating a system where instead of taking a liquidation you're actually adding automatically with an agent. And I would encourage all of you to think about and look at more. I I I'm not I'm going to be a competitor to
4:19:55Morpho, but I'm so impressed with what Morpho is doing and we running this $50 million experiment. But I encourage you to look at Morpho and look at other abilities to borrow and actually run an experiment for yourself. Go borrow against your Bitcoin. Do it even if it's a small loan. Get used to the system of how you create it, how you get new tokens, how you have to pledge them, etc. how quickly the USDC gets put into your wallet. And once you do this, you'll be in a scenario like us as a public company where you're going to
4:20:24want to borrow against your Bitcoin. You're going to want to use it as a utility. And I this is why my thesis is long-term that Bitcoin will be part of reserve banking and the rever reserve banking is ultimately going to be replaced over the next 20 years with with blockchain rails. Thanks everybody. Have a good day. Thank you. Thank you. Bitcoin Asia did a great job.
4:21:09Heat. Heat.
4:22:26Welcome back in to the live news desk at Bitcoin Asia 2026. I'm Grace Remington with Shan Hagen and our buddy George McCale. now joining us on the desk, managing director at Bitcoin for Corporations. You've been on the other side of the building this whole time. We finally get to see you, although I saw you at the symposium yesterday. How's it been going?
4:22:42Yeah, thanks for stopping by and hosting a session for us. The symposium was fantastic. Uh we had a full uh room pretty much the whole day. Uh fantastic conversations. You know, we got to talk about corporate adoption, institutional adoption. We talked about stable coins and how they're integrating into the Bitcoin ecosystem, which I think is an important conversation. Uh, but overall bullish. I mean, the vibes are high. The sentiment is definitely shifting and uh, yeah, it feels good to be right.
4:23:07Now, George, you know, there's there's a lot of members of BFC. It's been very successful. It's been growing. Everyone knows some of the bigger names like Micro Strategy that are members of BFC.
4:23:17Who are some of the members that you feel like maybe haven't gotten enough narrative or attention over the past couple months?
4:23:23Well, I mean, listen, I love all of our members equally. Uh I mean no like the chairman circle members are are probably my among my favorites. Uh and of course our founding member strategy um you know is is leading the movement really but yeah you look at MetaPlanet I think uh some of the things that they're doing are extremely innovative and uh they just announced the the acquisition of the public company in uh in the US. Uh Strive I think also is another one. Um but those like you know they're they are getting attention. So, uh, the question
4:23:52about, you know, who who are the ones that aren't? Well, hm, so many of them. Bite Federal in Australia, a Bitcoin ATM company that added Bitcoin to their balance sheet. Uh, Liquid Technologies, a Canadian Lightning uh, pro provider and leader in in AI. Uh, so I mean, I could go on and on and, you know, list all of our 40 plus members, but uh, they're all doing incredible work and they're leading the way.
4:24:16Real quick, because we're short on time here, but BFC is always launching fun new projects. Is there anything we should keep an eye on?
4:24:22Oh, uh, let's see. We are launching a event, a new event next year. Um, that's all I can share right now, but we are, we did four this year. We're going to do five next year, and we're going to keep, uh, we're going to keep scaling it up.
4:24:33Are you going to invite us?
4:24:35Uh, you can come. I don't know about this guy.
4:24:38Okay, awesome. George is my new best friend. Uh, George McCale, thanks so much for joining us. Enjoy the rest of your weekend here. Let's go back to the Nakamoto stage now for Bitcoin and the future of economic zones. Good afternoon, Hong Kong. Right. Uh first of all, thank you Bitcoin Asia for putting this amazing panel together. Right. Uh so be you know like we just have 20 minutes. Oh, it's only 16 now.
4:25:09Is you in the panel? Right. So I'll quickly try to get into the questions but before that I would like my dear panelists to kind of introduce themselves.
4:25:18Yeah. Uh hello everyone, my name is King Leong. I look after financial services, fintech, which covers crypto and also sustainability at Hong Kong. We are 100% Hong Kong government departments essentially helping overseas and mainland companies to settle down and do business in Hong Kong and also to help them to go global, expand internationally. Thank you.
4:25:40Over to you, Bow.
4:25:41Hi. Uh I'm Balbin Sakib, Minister of State and chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority which is a dedicated regulator set up in Pakistan. Um where we are helping navigate these emerging financial technologies. Um so yeah for those of you who will be wondering who I am so I'm the CEO of Taser. It's a blockchain protocol that we are venture building.
4:26:06I'm part of a PE fund. We have invested over 500 million in Southeast Asia mostly in fintech related companies and I'm also the president of the blockchain association in Malaysia. We I kind of spearheaded a lot of the action plans uh uh nationwide with the ministers in Malaysia. So I think we can start with you King right in terms of the first question uh for those who don't know in this room what it means uh what they call with special economic zones and bitcoin what does it mean for Hong Kong?
4:26:34Well this a great question. Now first of all I think for those of you who are um more experienced uh enough you have heard of this uh gentleman mutton Freeman it's the late Nobel laureates who have uh once economists who have once said this famous quotes if you want to look at capitalism you go to Hong Kong so Hong Kong is truly a free markets and that's why the almost any kind of financial products you can think
4:27:03of you'll find them in in Hong ong be it the derivatives, the warrants, the OTC, the offshore PE funds. So there are all kinds of products that are available in Hong Kong, but they're not available in onshore mainland China. So this is where that special econom comes in. So Hong Kong is practically like a sandbox in which a lot of freedom and ways for us to experiment, different innovation happens in Hong Kong. And of course, I
4:27:32think for Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency asset class is essentially just another major asset class that we'd love to bring on so that we are able to offer them to essentially diversify and broaden the choices made available to the investors. And by the way, we are managing uh 5.4 trillion US dollar of private web Hong Kong. So we love to get more products for our clients.
4:27:57Awesome. Right, Bilal. Uh recently you guys were talking a lot about uh Bitcoin strategic reserves right mind sharing a bit about it and uh what's your vision behind it?
4:28:07Um so the vision behind Pakistan's Bitcoin strategic reserve was never to about the Bitcoin price or going and buying um you know um Bitcoin with a lot of cash. I think we have to understand the premise uh and the premise behind making that announcement and and working towards that is that children that are going to school today in Pakistan they will be part of a workforce in 2080 and it's about the future. It's about
4:28:37preparing for the future and we don't know what the financial or the monetary system will be uh looking like in 2080. Right? And it was about preparing uh Pakistan for it. When we see around the world that there are states, there are financial institutions, uh there are financial companies that have recognized Bitcoin as a scarce asset. They've recognized Bitcoin as a strategic asset.
4:29:02So it was also about adaptability and capacity building that if this is what is happening around the world and Pakistan has traditionally been left out on these technological revolutions but this time on this financial uh revolution and how the financial plumbing is changing of the whole world.
4:29:21We wanted to make sure that we have the capacity to understand what is custody, what is governance and then it was also about a signal a signal where um the youth of the country is already made Pakistan the third biggest adopter of uh digital assets and that has been without any regulation right so it's about signaling and and letting the world know that Pakistan is open and Pakistan is a very forward-looking jurisdiction and we want to be at the right forefront of
4:29:51this technological uh change.
4:29:54I mean uh having a chat with him yesterday, I noticed that Pakistan is doing a lot of amazing things at time, right? Uh I mean if you continue doing this, I think Pakistan will be much ahead from a lot of the other emerging economies in terms of blockchain regulations and policies, right? So amazing good work there. Uh but coming back to Hong Kong, right? So when we I was like been visiting crypto events in Hong Kong I since 2016 2017, right? So it' been one of the uh you know like earliest markets to actually embrace
4:30:23Bitcoin among the earliest communities to actually understand it and actually start to build things around it and build a lot of products around it. But since then there has been like the ups and downs you know like in the ecosystem in here in Hong Kong and now you know like we still trying to see how the regulation is catching up right so what is with that pace right why Hong Kong decided to take a much uh what they call uh slower approach to the ecosystem well I think there are two ways to uh answer this question and first of all
4:30:53the one thing that we pride ourselves is consistency because again Hong Kong is a jurisdiction is a IFC uh Hong Kong is not strictly speaking like a startup with 10 people. So that's why the when you are laying out the rules for the market uh players to participates, it's almost impossible if the rules keep changing. So that's why we recognize that it is much better to have the consistent rule and then you basically
4:31:21every 6 months, 9 months, 12 months you have some new initiatives being launched but we stick with it, right? you lay out road map, you stick with it. So for business leaders, then it's much easier for them to plan the investment over the next say two, three, five years. That way now flip it around. If we are very jumpy, we are quick, right? You just launch something, oops, it doesn't work.
4:31:47You things blow up and you pull back again. The hot cold hot cold flip-flopping is impossible to do business. So that's why for us we feel that this is so valuable about that consistency approach in Hong Kong. So that's one. Now and secondly now first of all the Hong Kong embrace digital assets of course including the crypto but at the same time we also look at the bigger price because if we look at sheerely the bigger numbers in terms of the market share or market cap. Now of
4:32:15course crypto today is probably what 2.7 uh trillion or so at today's price and uh for gold it's like 32 trillion almost 10x right but for all the other financial products the equities the the fixed income of the world now you add them all it's roughly 320 trillion right it's 100 times of crypto so therefore for Hong Kong as a IFC number three in the
4:32:45Then we're looking at the transition of our ecosystem from the so-cal the the old banking rail the web two into the web 3. So in 10 years time who knows maybe we'll see all these financial assets I'm talking about the equities the the bonds alike we they will all on chain right is entirely possible. So that's the bigger price that uh we are we are going after. I think uh being a mature market being one of the largest markets Sri Lanka of course comes with
4:33:14its own uh you know like a set of challenges right because of course you have a higher risk to change things and you definitely investor will prefer some level of consistency there and in terms of pacing right uh I think I'm going to go the next part towards bilal right when we talked about uh pace itself I've been hearing a lot of good things coming out from Pakistan as well right where you guys managed to uh know like execute a lot of the task a lot of the what they call policies in a such quick time you know like and meanwhile also building
4:33:42the right structures at the same time doing it in such a cheap cost I heard you only used 8% of your budget that was allocated by the government might mind want to share a bit more on that yeah yes so we were able to build uh at record speed when you talk about execution but also at uh I think an unprecedented budget which we only utilize 8% of our budget to set up this regulator and I think that is the 21st century governance model. That's the new
4:34:10operating system when the cost of intelligence is going to zero and you have all of these AI agents that could work for you and could do a lot of uh work that traditionally you had to hire very expensive human resource to do. So we made sure that because we were building everything from scratch that we put together um to the very DNA of that organization uh how 21st century governance um uh
4:34:39should be done. So we we used less than 8% of our budget uh and we've launched uh the regulations in record speed. So it only took us 6 months from the time that the act was passed. Um and and why is that so is because we also have to understand and realize that uh the structures that have been built so far at least in the emerging economies they are on the 19th and 20th century rail but these technologies are moving at the
4:35:08machine speed at the internet speed. So policies must also uh move at the uh the compute speed not at the speed of committees. That is how traditionally uh policym has been done. And of course I think when it comes to speed uh this the speed is very important especially at signaling uh so uh you know signaling to really understand that we want to go into this direction. But when it comes
4:35:37to the execution of course on one's one has to be extremely risk mitigated in in in that approach which we also appreciate. But right now, especially for countries like Pakistan, these emerging technologies offer such a great opportunity where I personally believe that um the price of inaction will be way more than the price of action.
4:36:06Amazing amazing uh comments on that part. But I think my next question is more uh you know like for the founders in this room right so if let's say they are currently considering between your jurisdictions between Hong Kong between Pakistan why should they you know like what should the uh points or main reasons for them to choose your jurisdiction
4:36:25uh can we repeat the question again sorry so I mean if the founders currently is trying to decide between both of these jurisdiction why should they pick Hong Kong why should they pick Pakistan oh Um well I think I just mentioned it briefly. In fact uh Hong Kong has always been a very strong institutional market. I think most people are aware of that.
4:36:48But one part that is increasingly catching a lot of attention is our wealth management market. Now thanks to the policies from our secretary for financial services and treasury Mr.
4:36:58Christo Hoy, you know the fan office, you know, the the new migrant in entry scheme that attracted so much fam offices and private capital and by now we are managing as I just mentioned 5.4 4 trillion US dollar now and just just think about it in this context now traditionally when it comes to asset allocation is 6040 right the 66% equities 40% fixed income typically US treasuries now but now the world is
4:37:28changing a bit so people are would like to explore other vehicles beyond just US treasuries so then they look at alternatives now if someone is coming into looking for a jurisdiction in which they would like a tap into the capital base. This is now a golden time to offer something that is becoming you know a an alternative to traditional fixed income investments steady return but with a different kind of risk profile.
4:37:57Uh I I think for founders of course a mature um jurisdictions um if if they look at at today um but I think founders also should look at where certain jurisdictions are going uh in the future. So what we have to offer u is adoption. See Pakistan 250 million people 70% 67% under the age of 30 uh a
4:38:25very techsavvy youth and then what we also offer are a lot of problem statements that uh every single entrepreneur and founder needs from uh remittance which we receive $40 billion and that is coming through traditional rails. We have unbanked people. I think our biggest strength is not having a very strong legacy system. So that allows us and gives gives us the opportunity to actually leaprog just
4:38:53like we leaprogged on the telephone lines directly to mobile and mobile wallets. And I think that is what we provide is um um a complete uh blank canvas on how blockchain and digital asset companies can come and build the future with us with talent because we have worldclass talent that has already proven that they understand digital assets and are uh also building uh the future of finance out of Pakistan. Yeah,
4:39:22I mean I've definitely seen some of the amazing talent out of Pakistan and you know like some there are really good developers out of there and of course there's really good institutions and you know like exchanges out of here in Hong Kong who is actually quite mature so I do a lot of financial services made out of here as well but having towards my next question since we only have 2 minutes on the clock right I would like to ask you in terms of your vision where do you see your jurisdiction in the next 5 years around Bitcoin and blockchain ecosystem how do you see your jurisdictions in especially Hong Kong
4:39:51and Pakistan and how are they going to be driving this ecosystem forward? Your vision in 5 years?
4:39:57Um well the the short answer is is definitely by embracing technology. In fact, uh when you look at even some of the the wall street leaders such as uh the chairman of Black Rockck, he published a letter last year in which he laid out the future of tokenization. Now just simply on infrastructure alone because again the world needs a lot of uh next generation infrastructure, AI data centers, solar farms, right? Even
4:40:25ports and so on and the way that they size it is $6.8 8 trillion US just on this next generation of infrastructure alone. Now where does the money come from? Well, probably not from governments given a lot of governments are now under a lot of pressure from a fiscal standpoint. So therefore I think a lot of uh folks are now really looking at tapping into as I just mentioned the private capital because traditionally private capital allocate minuscule
4:40:54amounts into infrastructure but now that you have things like tokenization then you're able to offer this kind of investment where the return is quite steady long term at the same time you can fractionalize it in such a way that can bring down the threshold. So that's why if we have crystal ball looking ahead five years 10 years from now we see that there'll be a lot more I would say alternative assets being also off authorized are being offered on chain of
4:41:23course I think the whole uh financial markets even equities and fixed income is also heading that direction as well and and definitely Hong Kong we've been building infrastructure and ecosystem to prepare for that.
4:41:36How about you? So I would say um it would be that Pakistan becomes a role model for the frontier economy. Um and what I mean by that is um we create real world use cases on tokenization. Tokenization of land tokenization of illquid assets that the government has.
4:41:58Tokenization on how tokenization was able to help millions of Pakistanis break their economic classes. I want Pakistan to be the birthplace for all new blockchain cases. That includes moving the 100 million unbanked people into you know making them bank whether that is through wallets. Then um also how this remittance corridor changed outside that on the AI side of things. how
4:42:28Pakistan became the the country that gave birthplace to so many companies that were building for the future agentic economy and creating single do single person billiond dollar companies out of Pakistan because we have the talent we have the problem statements we have the right policies um and that is what is required uh to nurture talent and to make sure um that success happens
4:42:56I mean there you You have it, ladies and gentlemen. You have two different you know like special economic zones you restrictions that are currently with very different history very different background currently driving their way into you know like a blockchain and you know like maybe a future of aentic finance right uh but uh the the time's up on the clock I think that's uh our call to actually end the panel and thank you very much for actually uh having us here okay thank you very I should see it.
4:44:05Heat. Heat.
4:44:38to see the evolution of that. So now we're hearing about Bitcoin Treasury companies 2.0, 3.0, and even 4.0. So our next panel will discuss some of those ideas. It is titled the Bitcoin Treasury Reckoning: From Financial Engineering to Real Businesses. Please welcome our moderator, the CEO of Moon, Inc., John Rigggins, the CEO of American Bitcoin Corp. Michael Ho, the vice president and chief strategy officer at BitPlanet KK
4:45:06and the founder and CEO of Treasury, King Oi, good afternoon.
4:45:28another very international panel here which is is fitting for this conference in Hong Kong. Um but uh the reckoning uh I think in the past couple weeks it's been more of a reckoning for the shorts as I think uh the companies up here that are publicly traded now are up 60 plus% uh in the last month. Um but let's let's start there with um kind of how the market shifted in the past uh year being a little bit more bearish. Um let's start with what we've learned through the bare market um as a company
4:45:57accumulating Bitcoin. What's been the number one learning um and how it strengthened your business uh for future cycles and for future growth? Uh we'll start uh King.
4:46:06Yeah, sure. Thanks, John. Um so obviously strategy having created a model was kind of straightforward at the beginning. It was accumulating bitcoin and the market would give a premium to that right mnavs above two, three, four and even higher. And as we've gone through a very rapid uh boom and frankly also bus cycle for treasury companies I think the markets become more discerning and smarter and the companies have as well. And in this environment you need to earn your premium amnav uh which you do through an operating model growing
4:46:34bitcoin per share being differentiated um execution and a combination of those to to earn that. I think that's the key learnings.
4:46:43Ke uh learnings through the bare market last year.
4:46:48Well, uh quite interesting bare market uh in Korea especially when especially when the government is also not really reacting as they promised. I I think the bare market actually se the severity of the bare market deepens.
4:47:06So that's what we have experienced. But I think uh the resiliency and the risk management that we could we have shown uh I think uh is going to uh revive the business itself and I think we have strategized in order to make it better business plans to overcome this sub market situation which is very in terms of for us as well it was very helpful situation markets are a voting machine in the
4:47:36short run and it's a weighing in in in the long run. What we can control is the sentiment, it's the liquidity, it's the multiples. What we can control is our operational business. And at times, we've been able to benefit from the capital markets trade where we've been able to issue lowcost equity for a multiple back in Bitcoin. But we also have a very profitable foundational operating business that has mined more
4:48:04and more Bitcoin profitably every quarter. We mined more Bitcoin in the last quarter than any prior quarters. We started the company ABTC is a is a fairly young company. We started just over a year, not even a year and a half ago with zero Bitcoin. We crossed 8,300 this last quarter. And of that, over 900 were organically mined in in the last quarter alone.
4:48:28Wow. Um maybe let's stay there and talk a little bit about the advantages of kind of being on the production side as you're accumulating Bitcoin. um how are you approaching that moving forward?
4:48:38That last quarter sounds um like like it's you know been a successful way to do it. Tell us a little bit more.
4:48:44We've been doing this for a very long time. I I've been in the Bitcoin mining space for over a decade. I actually probably mined my first Bitcoin before I had my first legal drink back in 2013.
4:48:58Uh well, Bitcoin mining as as an industry has evolved a ton over the years. When we first started, it was GPUs, it was hobbyists, it was rigs in the garages. Now we see multi-und million dollar uh investments into very large scale data center facilities. Our Vega facility in West Texas represents about 2% of the Bitcoin network alone in
4:49:26one facility. This is a single contiguous building that is five football fields in length direct to chip liquid cooled. If you look at a picture of of what what is inside our facility and I contrast that to the early days of our GPU rigs, it's night and day.
4:49:46Incredible. Um uh KK, uh let's let's look at Korea and um kind of how you all have approached the treasury side alongside an operating business. um I think also a profitable operating business with within Bid planet. So uh how does that dynamic help you um accumulate Bitcoin and and kind of prepare for the next cycle of uh the the treasury operation that's um going to be valued by the markets here?
4:50:10No, thank you. Um yes, I I wanted to bring this up as well. I think uh each country uh would have a different uh regulatory perspective that they can play within. I think uh in US, Europe, ATM is a huge things for financing your bitcoins. However, in Asia, especially in a very regulated countries. It is uh something that you have to play alongside, but also I mean you have to
4:50:39be very creative in terms of a financial restructuring of it. But you also need a main businesses. Bitcoin treasury in Korea for example is a strategy. it cannot really be the main engine of the businesses. So we are diversifying our businesses. We already bit planet we already has started with the system integration businesses.
4:51:04uh but we are actually expanding our strategy in terms of the whole country's perspective of gross fund policy where we are seeing a lot of uh government uh policies focusing on the AIDC centers and we are actually trying to pay the ecosystem of the aid businesses from the generation of the energy storing transmitting it
4:51:31converting into the knowledge age and we are actually trying to be part of all the ecosystem with uh the parties who are willing to come to Korea for the new businesses and King uh maybe a little bit against the grain in terms of how y'all approach uh Treasury and the operating business or not. So can you tell us a little bit about how you see the operating business of Treasury moving forward?
4:51:55Yeah, sure. And just by background, we're also a new company. We launched last year. Um we were backed by Cameron Ty linkos and working towards listing and with a fresh company and also how the market's developed over the last year it's given us the benefit to be able to look at the market and where we think uh is the right fit for us as a team and a company and everything else and it's interesting where introduction it was said about financial engineering and I personally think financial engineering in itself is is totally fine it's actually a good thing it's all
4:52:23about execution and how you do it and for us the way we look at it is essentially uh the capital market machine is clearly super important and the European markets are wide open. Um, in terms of ATMs, no one is doing that yet. Fresh, no one is doing that yet.
4:52:36So, that's that's very much a big opportunity. And on the ad side of the balance sheet, we see Bitcoin as a an asset that um is part of your balance sheet, but you can also deploy to generate revenues/ yields from uh including lending volatility strategies. So, very much a Bitcoin finance company.
4:52:54And I would say the last opportunity my own background is in special situations investing and um certainly in this space I we think with uh a lot of multiples below NAV uh there's consolidation opportunities.
4:53:07Interesting. Um Michael, how do you view your balance sheet? I think you have the largest balance sheet on stage currently. Um what what's the benefit of uh 9,000 plus BTC uh moving forward?
4:53:17What you can do with it? How you can earn? Um how do you think about that?
4:53:22Having a having a very robust balance sheet I think is uh ultimately important to be able to ride through volatility especially as a company that has capex investments but the way that we view our capex investments which is really in the A6 it's a hard asset infrastructure that produces Bitcoin. So we really look at our operating business is how do we best leverage Bitcoin
4:53:49our common currency that is the baseline of our treasury and how do we use that to further enhance a yield on further Bitcoin production. So we leverage our existing Bitcoin stack to be able to operate AS6 to be able to create a return on on on on Bitcoin. I I really see our job as an as a management team. It's really in how we capital allocate.
4:54:15It's how we allocate capital and how do we make favorable returns that increase the Bitcoin per share ownership for all of our shareholders?
4:54:24Is uh is is that metric uh do you think starting to be more understood uh by investors uh through this cycle? uh what kind of what kind of questions are you mostly getting from analysts, investors about how you're measuring that performance of Bitcoin per share?
4:54:41It's not quite Google as of yet, but it is certainly becoming more understood and I think it's a very uh honest and objective way to be able to measure a company's performance. Now, as a reminder, the being intellectually honest with ourselves, the only benefit of buying an actively managed Bitcoin company over an ETF or spot is you are betting on the management company to increase your Bitcoin ownership for share. When you
4:55:08buy a spot or ETF, you buy one Bitcoin, it's always going to be one minus fees. When you buy ABTC or any of our other partners on the stage here, you're betting that your ownership per share of Bitcoin is going to increase quarter over quarter based on their decisions as a management team and how they allocate capital.
4:55:28King, do you have anything to add there on Yeah, also on how the markets develop.
4:55:32It's kind of interesting because obviously when um strategy started and people talking about valuation as public market investors do it was all about MNAV which it still is but the original MNAV definition was kind of a little bit um warped and it's changed right strategy announced the new metrics but it was basically the enterprise value being market cap plus debt divided by the Bitcoin value um which means that as a company added debt the MN futures go up and now uh they're using a net metric
4:56:00which means it's market cap divide by net bitcoin value being bitcoin value minus debt and the same for bitcoin per share. So we gone from gross measurement to net measurement which is I think also much more honest metric in terms of measuring that. So companies have to manage the balance sheets well to to increase it and that's the KPI bitcoin per share growth.
4:56:19Uh KK anything uh specific on the Korean markets and how uh investors and and analysts in Korea view the view the metrics to track for a bitcoin accumulation vehicle like BitPlet.
4:56:30Yes. Um I I think yes the the numbers and the valuations are very important as well but I think um I think the general public awareness the recognition and understanding of the whole Bitcoin itself is something that we really need.
4:56:49I mean I sit on a board of a large one of the largest financial group in Korea as an independent director. I s seldomly have I mean I most of the time I have hard time explaining about the bitcoin to my board members and they are actually keeping distance from me whenever I bring this digital asset or they call it virtual asset. So I think uh the awareness, the recognition and the the proposal that Bitcoin as the
4:57:17ecosystem is also very important to actually be implemented rather just than focusing on the numbers and the the evaluation of it itself. So that's something that I would like to stress.
4:57:31Yeah, if I may add to that, it's interesting because clearly if you um as a company talk to potential investors, you got to convince them of three things, right? That's why it's also kind of a challenge still early stages. One is Bitcoin as an online asset. They got to believe in Bitcoin. Then two, they got to believe in the Bitcoin treasury model and then three, why you're a company, right? So it's like it's like layered. It's very different from, you know, selling a chemicals company which is kind of straightforward, been around for hundreds of years. It's a new business model which is uh creates new challenges but also makes it interesting
4:58:00and still means we're still also earlier right on this in this rever.
4:58:04Absolutely. Um, Michael, American Bitcoin, uh, we're here in Hong Kong.
4:58:09Uh, how how does, uh, American Bitcoin view kind of the opportunities around the world, uh, that have developed as, uh, the companies that are the best operators, um, kind of rise to the top, uh, of of, uh, kind of the successful miners? What What opportunities do you see out in Asia, around the rest of the world, partners?
4:58:27Bitcoin is a global as a global market. We see everyone potentially as a partner, a shareholder, um a friend in the space. We're constantly looking for opportunities. Again, for us, it really comes down to being capital allocators with a Bitcoin denominated balance sheet and how we can drive the best risk adjusted returns against our treasury position.
4:58:53And then uh KK uh uh big trend in Korea this year. um uh some moves in the stock market uh based on new regulations. Uh what what kind of things are you all paying attention to when it comes to top down policy um and and what that looks like moving forward for for Bit Planet?
4:59:10See uh thanks for that question because uh it was very important to survive in Korea this year. Uh the equity index has actually doubled within the first half of this year. the two and they were focused in Samsung electronics and SK highix. Those two stocks have outperformed like two times that index meaning that all the other rest
4:59:38companies have lost their share prices throughout the whole first half of the year and everyone had to focus on how to maintain the equity prices. So what we have done uh this year so far uh was that um five things. First we we had to show the commitment of our management team. Second we had to really show that there is liquidity in the market for the
5:00:06investors who are willing to do it. Third we had to really present our business plans so that people could understand what we are trying to do. force uh because of the market cap of our size in terms of a bit BT DAT companies in Korea, we couldn't really have institutional investors actually participating in purchasing our shares.
5:00:30So we had to find another group of investors who would be willing to buy our shares. And fifth uh we had to really do the real good marketing on a weekly basis. we had to be on the presence of over every single media presentation or news presentation newspapers. So I think all the five things that we have done has paying off and now we have we are seeing our equity
5:00:58prices from 1,1 to 2,600 as of today within a month. So that's how we survived this bare market. Uh then King, y'all y'all have been um kind of in a listing process uh now and looking at different markets in Europe. Tell us about that uh timing and how maybe it's shaped out to be kind of a positive thing for you all to be looking at this year instead of last year.
5:01:25Yeah, so um European market is obviously a large market uh you know various countries all one currency and very little still happening in the in the Bitcoin treasury space. So, uh, there's a couple of them when the market is is big enough and wide open, especially on a main exchange. Um, we're, uh, we're looking to list on Euron next Amsterdam, which is one of the main exchanges, which means has liquidity, options markets, ATMs, press and all the whole playbook. Um, regulatory wise, Europe is uh, is known and factually lagging in
5:01:54the US and Asia in fact as well. Um, but the good thing is once it sort of it's there, it's it's sort of harmonized and um, and it goes a long way. So um we had Mika regulation last year coming into place that's been positive in general uh and and for uh for Bitcoin treasury companies were were certainly positive.
5:02:12Uh I think last thing is the um the infrastructure if you think about banks custodians uh institution investors the whole infrastructure that's also you can really see adoption increasing which is uh which is a big positive and obviously investor base is very large.
5:02:28Good. Good. U Michael, uh I have to ask while while you're here, uh you know, we've seen a lot of headlines about Bitcoin miners pivoting to AI, uh selling their selling their uh uh facilities in the US um for multiples like what they could have two years ago.
5:02:44Um if your if your goal is long-term bit Bitcoin accumulation and shareholder value uh through more BTC, how do you view that opportunity? Um price of Bitcoin now versus what it's going to be in in 10 years. uh just tell us how you're thinking about that overall.
5:02:59Well, this could be an hour panel on its own. You're It's true. You're seeing a lot of Bitcoin miners, not just unique to North America, but globally reposition their rack space that were originally used for AS6 for Bitcoin mining to a much higher monetizable use case, which is AIG GPUs. I'll be the first to tell you this, but if you look at the multiples in the public markets, a megawatt of power for Bitcoin miners is
5:03:29worth roughly about $3 million. A megawatt of AI data centers without the GPUs, just the AI data centers on collocation is worth $20 million. 20 million is far greater than three. And that is why a third of the Bitcoin network were primarily US public miners peers of ours. Majority of them are all in the process of pivoting or already have pivoted their rack space for AI uh
5:03:58customers. Now once those machines come off the network and they sign these 15 20-year AI data center colloccated contracts those AS6 are not finding their not easily finding their way back onto the network and that is why in a couple seconds here you'll see the network hash rate I think it was8 or 0.9. Now we were above one a couple months ago.
5:04:27Wow. We're now starting to see a deflating trend on network hash rate because of the point that you're touching on which is this is this is a a global repositioning of megawws from the Bitcoin network for AI. We've been in the power markets for a very long time. We've I've personally been on the ground looking at energy markets globally. the hydro excess hydro up in the Arctic Circle looked at geothermal in Iceland.
5:04:57We have a pretty good pulse on where global power markets are.
5:05:03And our other side of house huts, we have a 300 person bench, a dedicated energy origination team, a dedicated development team where I I would like to say that we have a pretty good sense of most deals and most opportunities when it comes to energy and site access. Now, not all sites are are applicable for AI today. If the site is applicable for AI and AI use cases are now a lot more
5:05:32agnostic to latency and location, but they still need connectivity and connectivity takes time to bring into rural areas. So there is still a sweet spot that we're able to develop sites regions of lowcost power. We have some of the lowest costs uh we have some of the lowest energy costs um on the network. Our cost of mining Bitcoin last quarter was only 36,500.
5:05:56So in a market where we're seeing capacity constraints, we're still finding those those silver lining opportunities of lowcost power at scale to grow our Bitcoin mining uh footprint.
5:06:11KK, any insight uh into that topic in Korea and how Bit Planet is positioning um around that trend?
5:06:19Yes. Uh I think um a lot of u as um Michael just said a lot of uh hyperscalers are also having very good eyes in into Korea as well as in Japan and the opportunity is there. The government is willing to put $150 billion US dollar into that uh sector as a national growth fund to focus on it.
5:06:44uh we want to be part of uh the uh infrastructure as well uh participating in the ecosystem uh where actually Michael and usa could have a good start of a new relationship there too.
5:06:59Good. Um uh you know if if you're acquiring Bitcoin at uh half of uh current value I think 39,000 uh you mentioned is your average price. um how does a a treasury company that's not on the production side compete with that when it comes to Bitcoin per share? Talk a little bit more about your plan to generate Bitcoin per share with um kind of the financing angle that you're you uh mentioned.
5:07:23Yeah, you can you can really uh grow Bitcoin per share two ways, right? Uh one is obviously uh selling equity at a premium. That's the the original strategy playbook which works really well in in the right markets. Um two is adding leverage. Um and three is um you know paying for that leverage with uh with revenues on your bitcoin and the other way is buying bitco spots for instance by mining operations and the way we're doing that is more in a uh I guess financial uh manner which is uh consolidation
5:07:52um so um we're we're working with a um uh an investment bank to look at other treasury companies that train NAV are too small and frankly have no reason to exist so it helps everybody to uh consolidate. Um, so that's that's an active strategy which means effectively you're buying Bitcoin below spot if you buy those below NAD.
5:08:12Yeah. And uh some of that uh M&A that um you know has happened within treasury companies in Europe has been interesting to see um a lot of M&A in the uh kind of data center AI space too. Michael, what what's your um approach to M&A opportunities moving forward? uh what's what are the kind of the key things that you're looking at um when it comes to um the Bitcoin treasury piece but also uh how you position to be stronger infrastructure- wise uh as uh as uh the
5:08:42energy markets get more competitive also I think the there's been a lot of discussion around uh M&A between treasury companies combining forces to get scale but in practice I think it's more difficult um when you have an acquirer that is trading above 1 MNAV against uh a target company that is trading at a discount to MNAV. It's hard to make the case to take another
5:09:10company's currency as opposed to simply just selling your liquid tokens to get up to par. Uh there are there are there there are transaction fees, there are shareholder votes, there's their management teams with their own plans.
5:09:25I think this idea has been floated around for quite a few quarters now but in reality we haven't seen as much M&A given in execution and in practice these are some of the challenges and KK uh we've seen I guess the companies that have launched in the last year in Korea with Bitcoin treasury strategies at the forefront um there have been different different challenges uh uh around new regulation for those um
5:09:53talk a little bit about how uh BitPlanet has been resilient in that and kind of the landscape of investable opportunities in Korea, what it looks like now and um how BitPlanet uh is kind of positioned for that moving forward.
5:10:06I think last year when we started we had two other competitors alongside with us. I think uh with based on the the strategy that we had to to be recognized as the only one legitimate or credible uh company that has worked out because we were able to participate I mean get relationship with the most prominent and promising wellestablished local Korean counterparties and I think uh and also
5:10:38having all the path the first path of transactions on every single Bitcoin treasury companies that we could have. We were able to really go through slowly but securely through the the every single transaction that the regulators could feel uh comfortable seeing us. So uh actually ahead of the other parties and I think we are gaining that recognition in the market and being seen as the sole DAT or Bitcoin treasury company in Korea.
5:11:13Yeah, good good place to be. Um King maybe uh talk about the landscape in Europe a little bit more. Um why Luxembourg strategic? Um kind of the the landscape there of other opportunities for investing in treasury companies where Treasury sits. Yeah, I think the the last is still very wide open. Um, Europe in general, Bitcoin adoption has been a bit less. Um, but there's very clear product market fit for Bitcoin conversion companies. For example, as a European citizen, I can actually not buy
5:11:42IBIT ETF, right? So, I want Bitcoin exposure um in my easy trading app. Um, the options are basically buy one of the US ones on the main exchange, but then you got the currency, you got the trading hours for your tax reporting is more difficult. So to be able to buy uh on the main exchange available in any app uh a European Bitcoin treasury company you get bitcoin exposure is is actually not possible at the moment and for an institutional investor if you're a European portfolio manager which I've been actually um and you want to buy
5:12:11exposure to either digital assets or a high volume high upside kind of stock also very hard to get right um so uh micro micro strategies option volume is double the three largest European option contracts combined all of Europe, right?
5:12:29To give you an idea. So Europe really lacks uh the kind of um features that a big company stock offers.
5:12:37Wonderful. So access in Europe uh the sole company treasury company in Korea um acquiring Bitcoin at half uh current value. Uh I think we have some interesting um advantages here with treasury companies that uh will be continuing to operate uh the treasury side along with operating businesses and I think we'll be around for a long time.
5:12:57Thanks guys.
5:12:58Thank you.
5:13:51in the main hall. And if you haven't heard of digital credit before, please listen carefully to our next speaker. Here to deliver a keynote presentation titled Bitcoin Scales at the speed of trust, digital credit and the next capital market is the chief risk officer of Strive, Jeff Walton.
5:14:13All right. Thank you. Woo. Okay. We've got a crowd. We've got an NBA style intro and uh I've got a fun presentation for you all today and we're going to be talking about how Bitcoin scales at the speed of trust. Okay, let's jump into it. So, I'm going to start with a little bit of background about myself. Uh my name is Jeff Walton.
5:14:36I prior to working in Bitcoin, prior to working at Strive, I was a reinsurance broker. So as a reinsurance broker, I sold insurance to insurance companies. And that was to protect the volatility of an insurance company's balance sheet.
5:14:53And there was a there was a situation I uh I had left my prior job and I got hired by this company called Vestu. And Vestu was this like really fast growing company. and they they were starting to write a lot of reinsurance business and I was super excited to go join this company and I got a text message from the my old boss and it was uh vestu under investigation by the FBI for a $4
5:15:21billion fraud. This was the largest fraudulent event in the reinsurance capital markets history and it turns out that they had $4 billion of fraudulent paper collateral. The collateral that they had posted in the market was fake. There were actors and th this w this company had been fraudulently operating in the financial markets for years. And at that moment, Bitcoin slapped me in the face. It was one of those, oh my gosh, Bitcoin is transparent collateral.
5:15:58You can see it. You can verify it on chain. and this is going to completely transform the entire market. Um, at that point I was already a bitcoiner. I was following along what strategy was doing.
5:16:11But I really identified that I need to go work in Bitcoin and that's uh when I joined Strive. So I joined Strive last year and uh as of today we have 21,356 Bitcoin and we are filing 8Ks every single Monday. And you can see our balance sheet and see how we're scaling it and growing it over time. So let's go to the next slide here.
5:16:39Okay, so last year uh I was on the stage and I was talking about this is the biggest story in all of Bitcoin and here I am today talking about the biggest story in all of Bitcoin. So last year Strive was really just an idea. We had about $750 million that we were trying to put into a publicly traded vehicle.
5:16:59And as of today, we have about $1.95 billion balance sheet. And the price of Bitcoin over that same horizon has gone from 111,000 to 79,000. So the price of Bitcoin's been down about 26%. Yet our balance sheet has increased by about 160%. So why did that happen? Let's see here.
5:17:23Well, the the last week that we had in Bitcoin was absolutely electric, right?
5:17:29Uh the price of Bitcoin was rising. We were seeing the equities that were trading around Bitcoin was rising. We were seeing the digital credit instruments um start to trade trade up to par. STRC's rising and SATA was trading within a single penny. And so in the capital markets this last week, we raised about $100 million. We purchased about uh 1,100 Bitcoin and our we brought our Bitcoin holdings from 20,000 to 21,000.
5:17:59Now, I'll I'll direct your attention over here on the right side of the slide and you'll see that our common stock, the equity, the orange line, was up about 72% last week. And we have our we have our perpetual preferred equity SATA, which was flat. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is about up about 25%. So what we've done is structured finance. We've effectively taken our Bitcoin balance sheet and structured it into two
5:18:27tranches. A senior trunch, the low volatility perpetual preferred equity, and then the junior trunch ASST, which is the more volatile, high performance uh common stock that trades relative to Bitcoin.
5:18:44So what what are we what are we doing here?
5:18:47This is um so this slide here is capital holds securities and not keys. Like why are we going this fast? What uh what has caused this environment? And the the fact is uh companies or or capital when they want access to capital markets they want somebody else to take care of the investment for them. For example, uh a pension fund, if they want to
5:19:16invest in real estate, they're not necessarily buying the piece of real estate and managing the property and finding the renters and maintaining it.
5:19:24They want to buy a company that's doing all of that work for them. Same with uh gold. Um if there's a a person that's got a lot of money and they want gold exposure, they're not necessarily going to buy, you know, $50 million of gold and and putting it into a vault at their house. they want somebody else to take care of that for them. Uh same with a factory or like making iPhones or Apple.
5:19:49And what we're doing is is very similar. It's just with Bitcoin and we are we are taking in capital from investors that want Bitcoin exposure and we are custodying the Bitcoin. We are managing the security. We are managing the dividends that we're paying on our senior perpetual or our senior perpetual preferred equity. And there are investors that are interested in both of those types of products.
5:20:16And so so what what what we've done by creating these two instruments is we've created exposure that uh investors can't necessarily get by themselves. And we're identifying pools of capital that are interested in Bitcoin exposure that have never been interested in Bitcoin exposure previously.
5:20:41So, how do we know this works? Well, we've been following the leader. The the leader is Strategy. And about 6 years ago, Strategy had a $917 million balance sheet. Since then, their balance sheet has grown, and as of today, it's actually about a $73 billion balance sheet. And what we identified over the last six years is they were providing access to Bitcoin that to to people that
5:21:09didn't have access to it. They provided exposure before the Bitcoin ETFs existed and then they provided perpetual leverage exposure to Bitcoin and now they've got the digital credit instruments which we're following uh which provides a credit income style exposure to Bitcoin. Now, a a couple data points to show you how crazy this is. So, strategy, their balance sheet
5:21:37increased 75x in 6 years, and they've now got a $70 billion balance sheet.
5:21:43Lloyds of London, which is the oldest insurance company on the planet, the oldest insurance consortium, they have about $50 billion and they've been they've been acquiring capital for about 300 years. And now you have a company that's adopted digital capital and they've got $70 billion of capital and they've 75x their balance sheet. Why?
5:22:06It's because they're providing uh so solutions to getting Bitcoin exposure that fits investors needs. So what naturally we followed the leader and we created a digital credit instrument ourselves. So we created SATA. For those of you are unaware, this is a senior instrument that sits in our capital structure. Uh we are paying 13% annually and the dividends that we pay are paid daily. We are the first company in capital markets history to pay a daily dividend.
5:22:44Now what what does that mean? And we we think this is a really big deal. the fact that SATA is paying a daily dividend. We've built this instrument not only for humans and people and pension funds and um all of those things, but we've also built it for computers. As we are moving and transitioning to a much more digital age, computers become more uh a higher proportion of the entire trading and the entire ecosystem.
5:23:11So why is that important?
5:23:15So, one, it changes how investors experience credit. One, you get paid every single day as opposed to once a month. Uh, once a month has been the standard uh for or it's been the uh yeah, it's been the standard dividend cadence for about 40 or 50 years and we are we are changing that now. Also, a daily dividend changes a risk profile for any trading environment. Um the the
5:23:44other instruments that are out there that pay at a high frequency are money market funds. Money market funds acrue uh acrue interest daily but they pay out monthly and this is changes how uh investors may park capital overnight or interact between other instruments and this will be all automated via AI. And lastly, future credit will be benchmarked against perpetual
5:24:13preferred equity uh with a risk profile of assets that are already on a balance sheet. And so what that means is when there are new uh companies that want to go to market and they want to uh issue credit in order to bring in capital to operate their business, they're going to have uh the opportunity cost. The investors are going to think about the opportunity cost and the risk return
5:24:42difference between the investment that's in front of them and these perpetual preferred equities that are paying a daily dividend. These are big ideas. These will develop and evolve over the next 36 months. Also, very few companies can do this.
5:24:57So, I've got a list here. There's about 5,900 public publicly traded companies across the NASDAQ and the NY and there's about 805 that have two listed securities and there's of those 805 there are 14 that have two listed securities and ATMs the ability to raise capital on top of them and then of those 14 there are only two companies that have two securities and ATMs with
5:25:25greater than a billion dollar shelf ATM on top of And so there are very few companies that have this type of business model and it's really strategy and strive at the moment.
5:25:40So why why do we have uh a billion dollar shelf ATM on top of this? Well, it it's because the the instrument itself is incredibly liquid and very um very interesting as a as a trading instrument as I've outlined over the last couple slides. And what this slide is really showing here is on the left hand side. This is comparing the pure perpetual preferred equities in the market compared to SATA on an average
5:26:08daily liquidity. Average daily liquidity for our peers is about $200,000 a day and for our instrument it's about $15 million. Now on a on the right hand side this is showing the turnover. So this is the average volume on the security relative to the shares outstanding. So it's how much does the security turn over relative to the market cap. So this is a liquidity measure and our instrument is about uh 2% liquidity.
5:26:37That means uh for every about 50 60 days on average the entire market cap is turning over. Why is that important?
5:26:45That's important because if you want to get in and out of the instrument in scale uh having liquidity impacts how much the price moves when you get in and out. So significantly more interesting, significantly more liquid than the pure perpetual preferred equities. Why? because the bitcoin on our balance sheet can be calculated uh the risk profile can be calculated 24/7 365.
5:27:13So I've explained SATA. Now let me explain our common stock ASST. So SATA what what we do is we're taking the Bitcoin exposure on our balance sheet and we're chopping off the risk and we're chopping off the return. There's no upside in SATA. We're paying a 13% income uh annually. Now, where does the excess volatility go? It goes to our common stock. It it there is a
5:27:41conservation of energy in the universe. It doesn't just disappear. That excess risk return. That excess volatility goes to our common stock. So at I'm going to bring this slide back up and you could see ASST our common stock is experiencing significant volatility and it's capturing that excess volatility that we peeled off of SATA. ASST is up 72%. BTC is up 24% and SATA is effectively flat. So this is structured finance.
5:28:12Now, ASST is really for the bullish Bitcoiners, but it's also for uh trading environments where market makers are using the instrument to hedge Bitcoin in multiple different directions because it provides a perpetual leverage exposure to Bitcoin without liquidation risk. We do not have any debt on our balance sheet. So there's not a situation where there's not a price point where we would be liquidated or any of our Bitcoin
5:28:41would be liquidated. So if you're buying the common stock, the perspective is you have perpetual leverage on the underlying Bitcoin on our balance sheet and the market's already voting. Um this is really the last week. Uh the the price of our common stock is up. We've increased our Bitcoin holdings by about 5% last week and uh we have been growing incredibly quickly. Uh we started our journey back in September last year. We had about 5,000 Bitcoin and as of today
5:29:09I think we were one of the fastest growing balance sheets on the planet. Not just fastest growing Bitcoin companies, one of the fastest growing balance sheets.
5:29:21So this kind of brings me back to my theme here. So corporations are trust extension technology. Trust is humanity's oldest technology. Trust has been around longer than money, longer than communication. It was how uh civilization has really scaled in in the world that we know today. Now, when you look around here, uh there there's trust everywhere. When you when you're walking down the street, you trust that the cars
5:29:51are going to stop at the stoplight. There's protocols everywhere you look.
5:29:56And that's really the the old system, right? Uh the banking system is trust built on top of the currency that the government provides and that banking system is very opaque. Uh there's additional costs associated with a banking system and you can't really understand or calculate the risk profile of holding your assets at a bank. It's really just you're trusting that if I need my assets, I can go get them.
5:30:22Now, what we're doing and what I would argue that every company in this entire room is doing is building trust in the entire ecosystem. It's just built on top of a more transparent asset being Bitcoin. And th this is important because you know we we file a SEC filing every week and you can understand how our balance sheet is moving and and it's
5:30:49super transparent compared to uh a a typical corporation uh or a typical credit instrument. If if you're an investor and you're buying a credit instrument, you have to rely on quarterly SEC filings that are already a month still by time uh you get any financial information. So it's very difficult as a as a risk investor to understand um what the future exposure is to a credit instrument. So we think this is changing how investors are
5:31:19utilizing instruments.
5:31:23And that brings me to the end really. So, Bitcoin scales at the speed of trust. Uh, we we think we are really developing the the trust ecosystem. We are filing SEC filings very frequently. You can see how the price of the securities are trading. And yeah, that's uh that's really the story. Thank you for coming to my talk. I appreciate it.
5:31:59Welcome back into the live news desk here at Bitcoin Asia 2026. I'm Grace Remington with Shawn Hagen and now Shawn Owen, CEO of Salt Lending joining us here. Um, you guys spoke on the panel earlier today. Great job, by the way.
5:32:11Um, I want to ask you, Sean, because you got into Bitcoin in 2011. I think you might be the earliest person to Bitcoin we've had on the desk all weekend. Um, what was the moment that convinced you this isn't just tech curiosity, this is real?
5:32:25Yeah, I think actually it's hard to pin an exact moment because there was so much around Bitcoin that as soon as I started thinking about it, it was like a mind virus of this is amazing. Uh, you know, from the obvious things I think at first you hear about it as maybe digital gold and this scarce idea, but the at this time it was when you could mine it on your computer and run a a node of just a wallet that you could imagine that was open and permissionless. That was amazing. And then, you know, the idea that you could get paid for running this and validating with no middle
5:32:54person in the middle was also amazing. And so, it was kind of just a explosion all at once that never stopped for really it really still hasn't.
5:33:03And Sean, you know, one of the themes we talked about on the panel was kind of this uh uh you know, how how how quickly is is the looming sovereign disaster uh developing and will it happen? How does Bitcoin react? And we're obviously coming out of a bare market. People say that this kind of sovereign crisis will cause a uh a super cycle, which you've all heard before. Probably not the case.
5:33:28Obviously, it's a factor you have to consider. But it brings up a point when it comes to products like Salt and it comes to lending and it comes to bringing your Bitcoin out of just being a number on a balance sheet and unlocking that capital. You know, as we're changing the seasonality that Bitcoin's in right now, how should how should people be thinking about their strategies around lending based on their Bitcoin? Does it change from bare market to bull market?
5:33:49I I actually think that, you know, I probably sound like a broken record to some degree because taking the position that Bitcoin is forever money and you should never sell it no matter what you have to do in order to hold on to it.
5:34:00You know, you will have to eventually sell some. But if you can stick to never sell your Bitcoin, you should. Um, as a principle, um, that it it changes the perspective. So, I care a lot less around the exact price at any point in time. I think looking at the price is a lagging indicator that can be deceiving and yet it does tell everybody something interesting all the time and people want to talk about it and so our panel earlier today was really kind of interesting right because you have one perspective of we we're third we're
5:34:28three months away and then maybe the next one is saying no we're three years away or 30 years away I tend to just blend it out and think that the principles of Bitcoin are true no matter if it's a year 10 years 100 years uh which it just all comes back to a long-term horizon.
5:34:43And just very simply, like let's say I'm a fouryear cycle enjoyer, right? Why would I not say, okay, I think we're near the bottom. I'm going to put my Bitcoin as collateral now because I think that Kagger is going to outperform kind of asymmetrically over the next 3 years.
5:34:58Well, I mean, yes, that's probably not a bad idea for people who can sense that or feel that or have the opportunity to.
5:35:04It's just also important to recognize just like dollar cost averaging is very good for a lot of people or going into index funds is very good for people. If you don't have all the time in the world to try to figure it out, then sometimes it's better to not worry about it and just get started wherever works, whatever suits you, you know, today rather than thinking about the price um or trying to time the market.
5:35:22Sean Owen, CEO of Salt Lending. Um I'm sure we'll see you on BT BMTV coming up September 14th, right? Proud partner. Okay, awesome. Well, thanks for your time. We appreciate it.
5:35:32Thank you.
5:35:33Let's go back to the Nakamoto stage now. our own Tyler Evans of UTXO Management and Metaplanet's Dylan and more on how to generate yield on Bitcoin holdings. Let's go, Treasury Bros in Hong Kong.
5:35:56Um, okay. So, we're here to talk about generating yield on your Bitcoin. Um, and yield became a very dirty word in Bitcoin after 2022 when BlockFi, Celsius, many others blew up. Um, so how do you think about generating yield on Bitcoin? And I think we should probably go down the line here because I think you'll all have slightly different ideas on this. Well, it's a it's a complex topic and I think maybe to couch the discussion a little bit, there is no no such thing as free lunch in in in
5:36:25Bitcoin yield and real yield. And so it's all about what risk you're taking to generate that incremental yield and whether you can understand and underwrite and manage those risks um that come along with it. And so, you know, when you look at the the market more broadly, I'll I'll let Sean talk about Lightning and what they're doing, but uh most of the yield strategies we see are really out of the derivatives complex around Bitcoin, especially on the volatility side. Uh and that's where
5:36:53we're most active today.
5:36:56You want to talk about Lightning?
5:36:57Yeah, I can talk about Lightning. So, we're we're a Bitcoin lightning network company. And for those you who don't know what that is, that's Bitcoin's layer 2 where you can you can send rapid fire transactions in milliseconds. It can handle massive scale. We have systems in 17 countries. Uh and what it is is you you have a series of nodes and channels. A node is just a server somewhere running in the world running open source lightning network software and you establish payment channels with other node operators. Anybody can hop on this network. Anyone can participate. We just happen to do it at scale with a
5:37:25public company and we've raised uh uh money through equity and we put a bitcoin to work on it. Now when you send a transaction over that network uh you actually pay a small amount of fees for the number of hops it goes through. It kind of works like internet traffic where if you're going to go to google.com your traffic will go out in front from hop to hop until it gets to its final point. In this case here you pay for every hop it goes to and that's how we earn yield. we're starting to see that yield expand because we're seeing uh the traffic on the on the network uh climb as the uh software's become more
5:37:53mature and the network is poised to to grow quickly.
5:37:57Yeah, I think you know there's there's a lot of as Tyler said there's a lot of different references to yield, right? Um you particularly sailor coined the term BTC yield for the growth of Bitcoin per share on common stock. There's also derivatives overlay. So call strategies, put selling strategies, other you know sophisticated options. Um you know for a while in 2021 especially the kind of the leading form of yield was the futures contango right? So Bitcoin is trading at
5:38:25say 100,000 futures is from a few months from now is trading at 110,000. There's a spread there that is risk-f free or delta neutral in dollar terms, right? So you're not taking Bitcoin risk. So there there's all those sorts of yields. You know, I I think I would like to invert the the question or invert the the uh framing a bit. You know, I think the biggest tam for Bitcoin yield and Bitcoin back yield is not issuers or managers of Bitcoin, you know, kind of
5:38:55trading derivatives or putting on trading strategies. The biggest TAM is there's $300 trillion of fixed income in the world and it's all based on fiat credit instruments. And so if Bitcoin's going to win, if we're going to take this thing from a trillion dollars to a hundred trillion dollars and 100x or or more, the real game to play is how do you build the bridge, right? And so how do you bring the credit markets to Bitcoin? How do you bring capital pools into Bitcoin that would never touch the asset otherwise? And so at MetaPlanet,
5:39:24we, you know, we're really focused on this. Um, we just acquired MetaPlanet Securities, uh, formerly SIBO Securities. It's a brokerage firm in Japan. um and and just issued our first series of bit bonds, right? And so this is this is a standard corporate bond, but in Japan, yields are 1%. Right? And so we offered a 4% yield backed by our $3.5 billion balance sheet. And to Japanese investors, there's no other credit instrument that's giving you 4%.
5:39:50Right? In dollar terms, you hear 4% and you say, "Well, that's what the Fed pays me. Who cares?" Right? But I think the the real thing to understand is there's pools of capital all around the world that will never buy Bitcoin. They won't buy Bitcoin stocks. They won't buy Bitcoin instruments. They'll never buy Bitcoin ETFs. So, how do you meet them where they are and provide them with a return that is backed underlying by Bitcoin, but isn't Bitcoin itself?
5:40:14So, I I definitely do want to come back to that, but I just want to start with you, Sean, cuz you were um you obviously you're running a Bitcoin lightning node.
5:40:20You're you're routing transactions and taking the fees from that. How do you sort of how do you evaluate the risk that you're taking there? Especially with the things we've seen like in core lightning recently like there is a risk on the lightning network with locking up funds there. Um and you I I don't know exactly the percentages you're generating like 8ish% something like that.
5:40:40Yeah, we in terms of yield we're looking up between three and 6%. It really varies depending on volume but in terms of risk and that is the right question to ask. You know we have a good chunk of our Bitcoin in custody. As a public company, we chose to use Bitco auditors liked it. And that's a very big deal for a public company. You have to have your auditors on board. And so we've also managed to set it up where they the auditors are able to audit our lightning nodes. But there's the security risk and the software risk where you have things out there where you have a portion of your Bitcoin out
5:41:07there. Yes, it is non-custodial. Uh but there's there's always going to be technology risk. We think that's very well managed and it's it's under control and uh and going to get stronger over time. But one of the things what we did and and we we went public in 2021 before that sort of treasury stuff, treasury push uh because we needed Bitcoin to be on the lightning network. It's it's a technical requirement. You must have Bitcoin on the channels. So our and our goal was to simply get as much as we possibly could. Uh but one of the things going through this last treasury cycle
5:41:37is that we looked at ourselves, you know, as a Treasury 2.0 you know, and maybe reclassifying things for our shareholders and reframing the the the treasury story as to not just MNAV, but B-NAV, Bitcoin NAV, and then having other other products like LNAV, lightning, lightning, or or credit product CNAV or derivative products D-nav, and start to frame them up and create a base where from there we can potentially build uh future Wall Street products that they can understand. to to your point, Dylan,
5:42:05and is that lightning yield that you can generate running a routing node. Is is that a temporary thing or do you think this is like a race to the bottom on fees and that as this grows out that they'll get crushed or or like how do you how do you look at that?
5:42:17Yeah, I mean certainly the fees are competitive out there. It is a volume game. So what you want on the lightning network is you want to see continued growth. I know you're going to earn yields that'll be in in line with the money market fund. And so what we're looking at down the line is you're going to it's a liquiditydriven network and you want to have as much Bitcoin on there as you can and we're seeing tripledigit growth. We've seen it go from 10 million a year to 1.2 billion in transaction volume and climbing quickly uh as the software iteratively gets better and it gets more and more out there and now you have stable coins are going across lightning network and but
5:42:47Bitcoin is still the marker. So you're going to and AI is going to use as well.
5:42:50So once you get that volume, then you actually have the need for as much Bitcoin as you can. And one of our future ideas uh which would have to pass regulatory uh scrutiny is to create a a bear bond. And so it would be an LQWD bearer bond. You could send your your Bitcoin in, you get the you get the tokenized bond. It would be actual security and if you you can choose to redeem it or or get the yield off it or you can trade out on secondary markets, effectively becoming a bond for for Wall Street. Uh this is some future stuff there. We didn't dare breathe about that
5:43:18four years ago under going public, but uh these are the kind of stuff that that we feel is going to come out there.
5:43:23Yeah, it's it's very cool. Um so, back to what you were saying before, Dylan.
5:43:27Um did you say there's $3 trillion out there that could potentially come into these credit markets?
5:43:32I said 300 trillion.
5:43:33300 trillion. I was only off by an order, two orders of magnitude. Um so, how do you get that? Because I know like Fong Lee, the strategy CEO, he came out and said that in terms of the people buying their products is still 80% retail. like the institutions coming is kind of a meme for now like it's not we've not actually seen it in a great deal like in a huge quantity like how do you get that to come to Bitcoin?
5:43:55Yeah. So, you know, I think what what is the purpose of a of a, you know, public company or a company in general, right?
5:44:01You know, because for the longest time, Bitcoin was driven by individuals and it still is an individual self-s sovereign movement, right? But what is the role of a of a company like Nakamoto or Metaplanet or Liquid, right? And it the the role is we can issue securities that have different risk return profiles relative to Bitcoin itself, right? So, Bitcoin is 50% volatility. The reality is, and I I've spent, you know, a lot of time, as everyone has on this panel, trying to convince people to buy Bitcoin, most people don't really enjoy
5:44:30a 50% volatility roller coaster, right?
5:44:33The bull markets are really fun. The bare markets aren't really fun. And so, how do you find that capital where they are and design instruments that match what they do, what they need to buy, right? And so, you know, most of the capital in the world of that 300 trillion has mandates. They have legal mandates, regulatory mandates. They need an instrument that looks, feels, and acts a certain way, right? So, you know, convertible bond buyers will never buy Bitcoin. Pension funds will never buy Bitcoin in cold storage in a wallet under their desk. Maybe they can buy
5:45:02IBIT or maybe they can buy a common stock security or maybe they can buy a preferred stock, right? And so, it's designing these sort of instruments. You know, I think I'm gonna I'm gonna pass this to Tyler shortly on because I I want to hear his uh I want him to explain the preferred strategy at UTXO, but Sailor is designing something really innovative and interesting with with Stretch, right? Which is we're going to give you a Bitcoin backed asset, but we're going to strip off 90% of the volatility, right? But it's still not
5:45:31perfectly stable, right? There's still this sort of risk, marktomarket risk.
5:45:35There's liquidity risk, execution risk, all of the like. it it still trades, right? So, it's still not a stable like asset. And so, you know, Wall Street for a long long time has tring risk return, right? Creating, you know, the same basket of securities. You can create junk bonds, investment grade bonds, and a very full spectrum of higher yield, lower yield, high return, low return, right? And so, and low risk, high risk.
5:45:59And so, for a Bitcoin treasury company, how do we go get that money? How do we go raise that capital? How do we plug it into the Bitcoin network? It's stripping off risk, stripping off volatility, and meeting them where they are. And I I would love for you to, you know, talk a little bit about what you're doing with UTXO.
5:46:15Well, I think that's exactly right. And and, you know, credit to kind of Sailor for pioneering this model and and Strive and the companies that have followed in their footsteps. I think it's it's cracking that institutional um barrier is really about translating these you know novel class of financial instruments into the very specific buy boxes or lanes that these institutional allocators are comfortable with that they can understand that they can get through their risk committee that they
5:46:45can underwrite and so um while while the the digital credit products have uh made huge progress in in one year I mean stretch is only one year old here in August. I think um uh you know, one of those things is just track record there.
5:47:01A lot of these fixed income allocators need a three-year track record or a 5year track record before they'll even consider allocating to it. But the you know, another big factor um is credit ratings. uh and and I think we've seen strategy make some significant moves and progress in terms of their corporate credit rating and trying to uh make their products appeal to the credit rating agencies like Moody's. And then the third um thing and and this is kind of one of the problems we're trying to
5:47:30solve with this new financial product at UTXO is really packaging it into a duration curve. And so while uh you know some investors may love a perpetual instrument and a perpetual instrument is absolutely the right choice for the issuer like MetaPlanet or or strategy. A lot of these fixed income allocators like an insurance fund has a defined life lifetime or term where they need to pay out their insurance benefits. So, they need a one-year bond or a 5-year
5:47:58bond or a 10-year bond or a 30-year Treasury equivalent that has a a a principal repayment period and a fixed duration. And so that's kind of the next iteration um that we see this digital credit market undergoing is like the further uh transfiguration to fit these types of uh really corporate bonds that fixed income allocators are are used to buying and that they can underwrite in their existing mental frameworks without
5:48:27having to necessarily understand Bitcoin. So is your plan there then to package these perpetual preferreds and give them a duration and then sell them to the market?
5:48:37Exactly. And and you know just like uh Jeff was explaining how you can can chop the volatility and and shift risk around between different asset classes. This is kind of the one of the oldest tricks in Wall Street books. the same way that um Wall Street packages auto loans or mortgages or mortgage backed securities into different uh risk capital pools that have uh different different returns, different collateral requirements that are taking different
5:49:04levels of volatility. And so just as uh you know uh Strive takes Bitcoin and and securitizes it into two different tanches uh we think even within those tanches there's a whole set of different layers that each appeal to a specific type of buyer.
5:49:20Okay. I've got a question. Anyone feel free to jump in on this one but obviously a few months ago stretch and all all the perpetual thirds went through a really tough time traded way below their par value. At any point did you look at that and think this could become like an existential risk and this this might be over?
5:49:38I I never thought it was existential. I I thought that the market had legitimate concerns about liquidity and the funding markets and you know Bitcoin was obviously not performing well, you know, teetering at 58,000. So there were there were concerns. The concerns were addressed. You know, I think having seen 2022 play out, right? And having seen a few Bitcoin cycles myself, I I think when consensus is 100% sure, you know, you you have people that spend their entire life, you know, being obsessed
5:50:07with Bitcoin and crypto. And when the consensus among that community or 50% of those people are saying the biggest Bitcoin holder is done forever and the story is over, the bears got a little ahead of themselves, I think. Right. And so there there was some I in my opinion and I've said this I think there was some slight mismanagement on you know the convertible refinance and some of the liquidity it's been addressed they've came out they've said to the market okay we're going to amend this we're going to segregate the dollar
5:50:34collateral or the dollar reserves I think the pref credit spreads have naturally reacted to that very very well right and so you know it's probably going to be a week or two and we're going to see stretch back at par and and the machines humming again right and so you know I put out a tweet. Sailor said, "What's next?" like five weeks ago. And I said, "Well, you know, probably bit, you know, bears run out of coins, Bitcoin goes up, the pref credit spreads tighten, the engine hums, and all the skeptics are screaming into the void, right?" And so, you know, that's what
5:51:03we've basically seen. Um, we've seen this kind of every four years. We'll probably see it again, you know, to be frank. Um, you know, I I wanted to add just one point to Tyler's uh point on on, you know, trunching the risk and return even further. Digital credit as these perpetual preferreds are called are technically equity, right? They are equity class classified. And so, you know, one of the things to step these instruments into something that the $300 trillion of fixed income can actually target is actually making it a credit
5:51:33product, right? And so, you can package these preferred slot, slice them up, chop them up, and create term debt, right? Investment grade debt, junk grade debt. You can get a rating on these, right? There's, you know, Leen, for instance, took a a pool of of retail Bitcoin backed loans and created an investment grade or a rated credit instrument that that Wall Street could buy, right? So, it's possible to to do these things. I think a lot of the Bitcoiners, you know, see Wall Street as
5:52:03some existential enemy and not an ally in the fight. And I think that's the wrong framing, right? If we're going to take this thing up 100x, we're going to need capital, right? And so, let's go to the capital centers. Let's find the capital, let's attract it, and let's plug it into the network. And that's I think what we're all working on.
5:52:20Sean, were you going to jump in there with something?
5:52:21I was going to say certainly uh you know, the last last few weeks seen the end of the There's nothing like a bull market to paper over mistakes we made during uh you know, the last run, right?
5:52:29And so, you know, we for companies and public companies, you know, we did our best to learn from our past mistakes and we didn't get over our skis during this last this last run because, you know, you only make mistakes when things are going good. But certainly, you know, the the bond market, I love that. that's really a credit nav and that would fit into their that whole B-Nav narrative and I like the reframing on that and I think it's very powerful um and uh you know the way that it's it's going out there. So these are the kind of products and services for you know Wall Street is not the enemy they're just there you know Bitcoin is this morally agnostic
5:52:59trust network that extends the very capabilities of the internet money and finance is its first use case it'll be used for many other things and effectively what we're dealing with here is a continuation of the revolution of the internet and and we're changing the way that trust is done around the world if you break down what what is Bitcoin at the end of the day it's trust it's a trust layer and extends the seven layer OSI stack of the internet and uh you know now we're and it's going to be used for many other things and I remember back in the day where um internet maxis and there were internet maxis and uh you
5:53:29couldn't use university lines for commercial goods and you couldn't and if you put an ad on your website the community would call you out and it was toxic but eventually the commercialization came in there too and it was used in ways that they didn't like and it didn't matter because it the internet itself is a morally agnostic network. Bitcoin is a morally agnostic network and it's an incredible uh computer science breakthrough. Doesn't care who you are, what you are, what you do, where you live. It just simply runs
5:53:58and uh people it's going to be used in ways you may not like and Wall Street's coming whether you like it or not. It's here and the world has turned and we're inverting the financial system as we speak.
5:54:09So Tyler, I want to ask you a question.
5:54:10So in 2020 when Sailor first started sort of pioneering this playbook um everyone was saying like the institutions were coming and and sure we got like Tesla and Block and there were a few other companies that put Bitcoin on the balance sheet and then a few years ago when like that was again the narrative during the bull market that institutions were coming and maybe institutions were here but in reality like let's say you take the strategy numbers of 80% retail still not really in a huge huge numbers. Do you think in the next few years that's when we're really going to start seeing
5:54:39institutional adoption?
5:54:41You know, I I think we really kicked off this in institutional wave with the launch of the ETFs in the US. And I think uh you know, that was that was a a process a decade in the making, you know, all all the way back to the the WLVs twins um uh and their, you know, first try under the Gary Gendler administration. That was the opening salvo, if you will. Um and uh you know what we've seen is is incredible success with the ETF products. You know, most
5:55:09successful, fastest growing ETFs in Wall Street history, which one should say something about Bitcoin. Um but uh that is was really just the opening salvo and and you know, we've seen a lot of those institutions uh crawling, walking, um starting to jog their way into Bitcoin. But um you know, as cliche as it is, we're just early and and it there's still a lot of career risk attached to pitching Bitcoin uh as
5:55:38an investment product, there's still a lot of plumbing and infrastructure. Um uh especially to like touch spot Bitcoin or physical Bitcoin that these banks and their mainframe legacy systems are trying to integrate. uh and there's the process of just build building trust if they've only been paying attention to the asset class for a couple years. And so uh it's actually very encouraging to see uh what's happening on that side.
5:56:05You know, in a in a bare market, none of it gets the headlines on the Wall Street Journal or the attention that it it would have last year. But um even amid this draw down in Bitcoin prices, we've seen uh just incremental progress from some of the largest institutions in the world like Vanguard and Charles Schwab and Morgan Stanley that have all launched new Bitcoin products or announced new Bitcoin features over the past 6 months to very little fanfare, but they're they're coming. It just
5:56:33takes some time. If I could if I could add a bit of color there, I you know, I think Bitcoin's price does a lot of the work and we prescribe narratives to it both on the downside and the upside, right? And so for for an example, um and I won't say say who or where, but over the last couple weeks, um you know, we have we have meetings all the time with various investors. Oftent times the investor isn't even a Bitcoin investor.
5:56:57They don't own you know, they're not an investor of MetaPlanet. They just, you know, that's what you do as a com as a public company. You go tell the story.
5:57:03you have you have investor meetings even if they're a skeptic, right? And so, you know, this particular investor runs, you know, billions and billions of dollars of capital. And he basically said, "Yeah, I mean, I'm really into Bitcoin and I believe in the four-year cycle, but uh frankly, we can't be in anything but AI bottleneck trades and and the memory and and you know, GPUs and the whole hyperscalers like it's basically career risk to not be in those trades,
5:57:31right?" And so, you know, this this es and flows, there are cycles and probably some point in the next 24 to 36 months.
5:57:39There's going to be career risk if you don't have a Bitcoin position on in your hedge fund, right? Or if you don't have Bitcoin exposure in, you know, whatever asset manager or vehicle it is, right?
5:57:48And so, this is just how it works. I think, you know, also the bit the crypto people, the Bitcoin people were often used to, you know, every cycle has a new narrative, right? And so, you know, it went from individuals and then there was kind of, you know, the venture capitalists and the macro people and now the corporates and people are saying, well, what's next? Logically, it's countries. And and of course that could be true. But I would say this, it doesn't need to be, you know, sovereigns
5:58:17next and the corporate cycle already passed. there just could be marginally, you know, we go from 1% corporate adoption or or 0.1% corporate adoption to 1% and that's a 10x, right? And so like to Tyler's point, it's really early. $1 trillion is a drop in the bucket. I don't even know how many trillion dollar companies there are these days, but you know, Nvidia is trading at a market cap of 100 million Bitcoin, right? And so if this is global money and we're we're directionally right on the thesis, then it's
5:58:46remarkably early. I I think to add to that I I totally agree that number go up fixes a lot of these uncertainties but I also think like if the bottom is in with Bitcoin and who knows 50% draw down is also going to be really good like it it shows the asset class is maturing I think um if you look ahead now like Bitcoin looks like it's bottom we've had a really good few weeks um what do you think is going to happen to treasury companies like what does a bull market in treasury companies look like now what do you think Danny
5:59:14my my skepticism is like I I don't necessarily think we're going to see like well in the last bull market MetaPlanet traded at like 7xm was that about as high as it went like I I struggle to see it going back there but I could be totally wrong. I think you know the the misunderstood thing is that for for a treasury company or a company with a balance sheet of say Bitcoin and say preferred or debt issued against it MNAV doesn't need to absolutely rip for them to be screaming home run performers
5:59:42right there's you can model it out MSTR let's just say just because they're the biggest can stay at 1xm nav for an entire bull market and absolutely crush the performance of Bitcoin. So I think there's a notion that you need this, you know, multiple expansion. Of course, that helps and that that pours gasoline on the flames, right? And it allows the the machine to spin faster. But the preferreds have really only seen a bare market. And so people have prescribed this narrative that they're they're
6:00:11parasitic and extractive and they're, you know, the cost of capital's too high. No, watch what happens in a Bitcoin bull market and these things are going to be screaming home runs just because of the embedded capital structure leverage, right? And so, yeah, I mean, I I think you could see an MNAV expansion in Amania or, you know, crazy things happen in bull markets, right?
6:00:29But what's the fair value of a company that can consistently grow it its business and its Bitcoin per share and grow its assets? Well, you know, most investors on Wall Street put a multiple on it, right? What is that fair value multiple? That's that's anyone's guess.
6:00:43But I I think the risk is uh actually to incumbents, you know, really the incumbents that are out there. And we talked about career risk. Whether it's this cycle or the next, at some point in the future, uh, you won't be able to buy enough Bitcoin or balance sheet. And you're going to see these Wall Street firms get inverted by some of these startups here because they they simply cannot matter how much fiat they have, they simply cannot buy the Bitcoin. And it will get down to how much Bitcoin you have, how you're putting it to work, how you're part of this whole new economy and the whole new inversion. And we saw this with, once again, we saw this with
6:01:12the internet. We saw the ones that were pure plays. And over time, everything else was taken out in front of it. And I think you're going to see over time, probably in the next 10 years, some major Wall Street firms be eclipsed by uh by some of the startups here.
6:01:27I think uh also um I I agree that I don't think the mania we saw uh last year is is going to get uh as crazy measured in the same metrics, but I think the the definition of a Bitcoin treasury company, it's also going to broaden a lot. Um and we're already seeing that uh in the market and kind of within the the number of companies we're invested in Bitcoin Treasury meaning everything from you know uh a hyper specialized financial institution-l like
6:01:55strategy that's creating all sorts of new securities out of Bitcoin where MNAV is maybe an appropriate metric to on the you know flip side something like a American Bitcoin that has a a Bitcoin native business to uh a Tesla of SpaceX like what's the what's the MNAV of SpaceX? It's very very high right now.
6:02:16And so as these companies mature and and do M&A, do consolidation, expand their their business lines, I think we're going to see a lot more diversity in terms of how these companies generate value rather than just trying to sell stock at increasingly higher prices. Um, and that will be healthy for the whole ecosystem. So Dylan, I was going to ask you a question about whether these companies that are issuing preferreds can be a victim of their own success in the sense of having enough cash like on the balance sheet, separate cash to pay
6:02:44dividends. Uh but we've got 10 seconds left, so I I don't think we can do that now. We we'll have to do a podcast on it. But um let's have a big round of applause for Tyler, Dylan, and Sean. Thank you guys. Thanks, Danny.
6:03:07Welcome back into the live news desk at Bitcoin Asia 2026. I'm Grace Armington with Shan Hagen and Jeff Walton, chief risk officer of Strive. Joining us now, thanks so much for making some time for us. Um, you were on the main stage earlier today and one thing that kept catching my attention is your use of the word trust. I mean, the name of your speech was Bitcoin scales at the speed of trust. You gave a few examples of trust in our daily lives that we we don't even realize like when you cross the street and the car stop for you. How important is trust as a foundation for
6:03:36Bitcoin and the products that offshoot from it?
6:03:38Yeah, it's it's enormous. It is foundational, right? Trust is foundational and really the the asset of Bitcoin itself has uh transformed how society can interact with money really like if you use a dollar you have to trust that the government is going to uh you know be solvent and that there's actually security behind that dollar and that the rest of society is going to accept that dollar and you've got to trust that it's going to work in that ecosystem. So, um, it's really
6:04:06foundational in how, um, really companies can build on top of it and you you need a a solid foundation.
6:04:13It seems like there's a lot of trust for your prep right now. It's the only one at par. Yeah.
6:04:16In the market. Uh, could you dive into why that might be?
6:04:20Yeah. So, uh, yeah, SATA is at par right now. It's it's been trading very well over the last couple days. It's really only moved a penny and we've had about $75 million of volume, which is really just phenomenal and super fascinating.
6:04:32And uh what some of the feedback that we've gotten in the market is we there's one element of SATA that's different than STRC. Those have been compared the most. And uh we actually cannot reduce the interest rate on the on SATA unless the price of the security itself has been trading at a $99 VWOP over the last 30 days. So it provides that um confidence and trust that you know we we can't unilaterally reduce the interest rate. So that's uh one element.
6:04:57really the daily dividend has been a a a gamecher in how um humans interact with the credit instruments and dividends but also um how computers are interfacing with these instruments right so computers daytoday may be trading across different venues or or or day trading and you may be able to set up an algorithm and at the end of the day the algorithm just has to end the day in SATA and that way it gets kind of an overnight dividend if you if you park your car in SATA at the end of the day and so I I think We're seeing the
6:05:27development of this ecosystem where the the downside risk of of holding the instrument is that you're getting paid a daily dividend pretty frequently and so the the trading strategies and the algorithmic uh trading and agentic trading that could be built on top of it is really vast.
6:05:45Yeah, there seems to have been a a distinction between the way that SATA and uh asset performed during this bare market. um you know help help us understand the the primary thing we see online is this idea of amplification versus leverage right and and you know they're they're very similar in a lot of regards for a lot of people at home though they might not understand what kind of that core differentiation is could you dive into that a bit yeah so uh really financial leverage can come in many different ways um you can take out debt or you can issue preferred
6:06:14equity and so for our balance sheet in particular we do not have any debt on our balance sheet so we run zero debt we only have perpetual preferred equity as the form of our leverage and we call this amplification. Um what that means and why that's important is because we do not have a cliff maturity or a big cash flow cash outflow um on the horizon that we need to manage. Um all that we need to manage really is our daily dividend obligation. And with uh the amount of SATA that we have outstanding, our our daily dividend obligation is
6:06:43about uh $420,000. So, we wake up every morning and we say, "Okay, we've got to go make $420,000 and we got to figure out how we're going to pay the dividend today and tomorrow." And uh you know, as of today, I think we have about 4,400 days of coverage already on our balance sheet, which is about 17.7 years. Uh so, even as an investor, your your question when you're um purchasing the security is, you know, am I going to get paid the dividend tomorrow? And you're you're underwriting the the liquidity that sits
6:07:11behind that um decision. I'm curious, Jeeoff, because you spent a decade in reinsurance. What did that world teach you about pricing risk that most people in Bitcoin or crypto finance get wrong?
6:07:22Uh, it it's really that there's so much math and that you can glean from Bitcoin and the the data in the entire ecosystem and all of that can be um compared relative to other instruments in the market. And and I think many people miss that. And just like I showed on one of the slides, um you can compare our instrument to traditional preferred or any legacy type of instruments and and all of that data uh can be, you know, compared across.
6:07:50Really cool stuff. Jeff Walton, chief risk officer of Strive, thanks so much for making time for us today. Enjoy the rest of the conference.
6:07:55Thanks for having me.
6:07:56Let's go back to the Nakamoto stage now for Jimmy Castro on Freedom Money in Asia. Recently, I was on the second floor of the Bitcoin Learning Center when a young woman from Myamar looked directly into my eyes. She was angry, not helpless, not asking for sympathy. Angry because she understood exactly what was being taken from her. She she said to me, "Everyone I know has two Apple IDs.
6:08:44One holds her real life. The other is the account she shows if the soldiers or police search their phone. But that second account cannot be empty. It needs to have photos, messages, app activity, enough ordinary history to look lived in. She maintains two digital lives, one to live and the other to survive inspection. A VPN, a contact, or the wrong app can place someone in danger.
6:09:30She was not protecting a password. She was protecting an entire life. This happened at our Bitcoin Learning Center in northern Thailand near the Myamar border just a few weeks ago. More than 1,000 people from over 50 countries come through our doors each year. So when I talk about freedom money, I'm not talking about theory. I'm telling you what comes through our doors.
6:10:10Then she told me about her family's money. Their currency has suffered roughly 25 to 30% inflation for four consecutive years. At that rate, a family could lose nearly 40% of their purchasing power in just two years. But inflation is not a chart to her. It's actual food that disappears from the table. and medicine postponed. It's a future that gets smaller while the number in the bank account stays the same.
6:10:55And then we ask, but isn't Bitcoin volatile?
6:11:00Do you think she cares about Bitcoin's volatility when her family's savings can lose nearly 30% of its purchasing power?
6:11:12every year when access to banking is often restricted when value cannot safely cross the border. Sure, Bitcoin is is volatile, but volatility is a short-term risk. Captivity is a certainty. At the learning center, people don't ask whether Bitcoin will outperform.
6:11:45They ask, "Can I preserve what I've learned? Can I preserve what I've earned? Can I send it to my family?
6:11:55Can I bring it across the border? Can I transact without permission?"
6:12:03When money could be inflated, trapped or censored, it stops being only money. It becomes a system of control. And control often hides inside the tools that we use. If a company, bank, or government can decide when your access ends, you are not in control of that tool. The gatekeeper is this is why free and opensource technology matters. People can inspect it, run it, adapt it.
6:12:48A community can keep it alive even when a government wants it gone. That is a freedom tool. a tool that leaves meaningful power in the hands of the person using it. Bitcoin brings that principle to money. Its code is open. Its network peer-to-peer. No single bank owns it. No government can switch the entire network off. After Myammar's military coup, people took to the streets. They posted online.
6:13:32They asked the world for help. But the help they hoped for did not arrive in a form that stopped what was happening. That taught us something painful. Freedom cannot depend only on the hope that someone powerful will rescue us. People also need tools they could use for themselves, especially when the rescue never comes. Bitcoin cannot stop a war. It cannot remove a dictator. It cannot promise anyone's safety.
6:14:14But it can let someone hold value without asking a bank to keep the account open. and move value without asking a border for permission. Bitcoin is not freedom money because its price goes up. It's freedom money because no government, bank, or border guard can decide whether you're allowed to use it. For most of us, Bitcoin may begin as an investment. For someone living under financial control, it can be an exit from permission.
6:14:56That does not mean Bitcoin is easy. The price moves. Self-custody carries responsibility. Privacy is not automatic. But freedom has never meant the absence of risk. Freedom means having the ability to act. Bitcoin may be permissionless. Access to it is still built person by person by the developer who makes a wallet safer, the teacher who sits beside a firsttime user, the merchant who gives someone a place to spend, and the community that makes open money useful.
6:15:44You may think, "I'm not an activist. I write code. I run a business. I make art. I raise a family."
6:15:56Good.
6:15:58Do what you're already great at. Build, teach, fund, create. Make freedom the consequence of your work. If you want Bitcoin to reach a million dollars, don't spend your life shouting about its price, help make Bitcoin indispensable to the people who need freedom. The value will follow the usefulness. Now remember the young woman with two digital identities. One who she really is. The other is who a system of power will permit her to be.
6:16:45Money, identity, speech, and artificial intelligence are merging into the systems around us. The danger is not only that those systems will know everything about us. It's that they may begin deciding which version of us is allowed to exist. Every day we reach for the easiest tool. We use closed artificial intelligence. We store our lives inside systems we cannot inspect, cannot leave without permission.
6:17:22I understand why convenience is powerful, but freedom has always required someone to make the less convenient choice before it becomes the obvious one. So use open-source technology, use open-source AI, give financial freedom tools, give the people building them, and give freedom users, give freedom funding, give it a future. Because when we choose Bitcoin here, we strengthen the escape route they need there in Burma and in Laos.
6:18:10Our choice may feel like a preference. To someone else, the strength of that network may determine whether they still have a choice at all. None of us knows exactly what artificial intelligence will become, but the next few years may be our last real chance to help shape its direction. Machines are learning from what we create, reward, and accept.
6:18:42If we show them a world built on permission, surveillance and control, those values will harden into the systems around us. So we cannot only talk about freedom. We have to make it visible. We need to give the future evidence that freedom works.
6:19:06This is it.
6:19:09This is the open window in which we still have the opportunity to shape what comes next. Once it closes, wanting freedom will not be the same as having the power to build it. Nobody is coming to build a different future for us. The good news is we are already here. You are already here. Use one open-source freedom tool. Teach one person what you learn. Support one builder, community, or business making freedom useful.
6:19:49I keep thinking about the woman on the second floor. She did not come to us as a victim. She came cleareyed. She came angry and determined to be heard. She was forced to build a second life that looked real. Our responsibility is to help build a future in which she does not need one.
6:20:16Years from now, your children or grandchildren may ask what you did when money became permission, speech became data, and the walls began closing in. You will not have to tell them that you watched. You could tell them, "I built, I taught, I helped keep a door open." The future is still unwritten, but it will not remain unwritten forever.
6:20:48If not us, then who?
6:20:52This is it.
6:20:55This is our time. Thank you. Here we are. Baby
6:21:51down.
6:21:57company into one of the largest corporate Bitcoin treasury companies in the entire world. That's the story of our next speaker when he saw the potential of Bitcoin. Speaking on behalf of MetPlanet, our amazing title sponsors with some of the best hats and t-shirts in all of Bitcoin. Hong Kong, get ready for a keynote presentation titled The First Asian Cycle of the CEO of Metaplanet, Simon Garavic.
6:22:27Thank you.
6:22:35Good afternoon, everyone. It's really nice to see you all here. So many familiar faces. What a great turnout. My name is Simon Gervich and I'm the CEO of Metaplanet. Just three short years ago, I was running a struggling hotel company in Japan. Co had hit us really hard. We sold every property except one just to keep afloat. Those were very dark times.
6:23:04Our market cap was just $14 million. At our shareholder meetings, there were more empty chairs than shareholders. Attendees could be counted on two hands. I know because I counted. In April 2024, we took what was left of our cash and bought Bitcoin with it. People said we lost our minds. Some of them said it very publicly and at length. Nevertheless, today we own 43,000 Bitcoin.
6:23:36That's the third largest position of any public company in the world and the largest in Asia by a lot. And the part that really matters, this happened in Japan, the market everyone said was too conservative for something like a Bitcoin strategy. Yet here we are. We're proud to represent Asia on the world stage. And I think our journey, as challenging as it's been, is the first sign of something much bigger.
6:24:10The first Asian cycle has started. And I would like to spend my 15 minutes showing you exactly why. First though, the honest part, because you've all lived it, too. This is a shared experience. A year ago at this very conference, Bitcoin was already past $100,000 and people were setting targets for $250,000, $500,000, even a million.
6:24:37What the heck happened?
6:24:40At the low, Bitcoin had lost half of its value. Our stock fell harder and so did every single company like ours. 2026 has been a very, very, very long year indeed. And then last week, the tape completely turned. This year's sellers sold because they had to. The buyers arriving now aren't going anywhere. I believe the bottom is in, and I'm expecting a much brighter rest of the year. But anyone can be bullish after a rally.
6:25:18Here's what we did throughout the draw down. We bought Bitcoin every single quarter. Not because we're brave, but because we built our balance sheet so that no week of the draw down could force us into a corner. And when the price fell, the same plan just got cheaper.
6:25:39And you know, the strangest thing happened on the way down. When we started this journey, we had about 11,000 shareholders. Today we have 250,000 shareholders, people all over the world who bought into a Bitcoin company while the price of Bitcoin fell by a half. The number still amazes me. Why would they do that? Mostly, I reckon it's because what was happening around us.
6:26:07For 30 years in Japan, doing nothing with your money was the smart move. It was prudent. Prices fell. cash one and a generation learned financial patience. That world is now gone. Inflation is back. The yen is at a 40-year low. Hoarding cash has stopped making sense. And every household in Japan can now feel it. Japanese households hold roughly $14 trillion in financial assets. About half of that sits in bank deposits earning almost nothing.
6:26:45And that's just Japan. Add Korea, Southeast Asia, and the wealth managed out of this place, Hong Kong, and you're looking at the deepest pools of patient savings on Earth. Nobody else in the developed world saves like this. And for the first time in a generation, these savings are looking for somewhere to go. In America, cash is about 13% of household wealth. Europe sits in between and that savings rate gap is the fuel.
6:27:20Right as that capital wakes up, the rules are beginning to change. Japan passed a law in July that puts Bitcoin under the same statute that governs stocks and bonds. And the tax on gains is set to fall from as much as 55% to 20%. And that roll out is targeted for 2027 and 2028.
6:27:43And the rest of the region is moving too. Right here, Hong Kong listed spot ETFs before most of the world and as stable coin rules in force. Korea is opening its door to institutions and Singapore has rung a licensed regime for years. The end of the cash hoarding strategy and new rules are arriving at exactly the same time. And together they set up what I think is the single biggest opportunity in Asian markets
6:28:12today.
6:28:14Let me show you where Asia actually stands. This is every public company in Asia that holds Bitcoin. 20 names. That's it. We're at the top with 43,000. The next largest holds 6,000. Now, we're proud to be at the top of this list, but it's the rest of the list that I would like you to look at.
6:28:35Add the whole thing up. Every company, ours included, and together, Asian public companies hold less than a tenth of strategy. The largest holder in the world, onetenth of one company, a region with the deepest pools of patient savings on Earth, rules being rewritten as we speak, and a 17-year-old asset well off its all-time highs. And this is the entire list. Now, some people will look at this and see how far behind Asia is.
6:29:10I've been a professional investor for a long time, and this is the most asymmetric setup I've ever come across. And let me be precise. The opportunity isn't simply that Bitcoin goes up. Anyone in this room can buy Bitcoin.
6:29:26The opportunity is that most of Asia's capital cannot. And there are only 20 companies and almost no products standing between a region full of savings and this asset. Gaps like this do not stay open. Somebody fills them and the ones who move early do very very well. So why is this list so short? It took us two years to fully understand the answer. Most of the capital in the world cannot buy Bitcoin. not won't can't.
6:30:02A Japanese retail investor with a normal brokerage account has no way to do it. No spot ETFs in Japan, and the account cannot hold Bitcoin directly. A pension fund can't own something with no coupon and no seniority, and a bond mandate won't allow it.
6:30:22What any of them think about Bitcoin simply doesn't matter. So the region's capital is locked out and that changes what the opportunity actually is. Build the things that Asia is allowed to buy and the capital will flow. So here's what we've been doing about it. In the space of 10 weeks, we made two acquisitions. In June, we bought a licensed securities firm in Japan and renamed it Metaplanet Securities, a regulated Japanese broker dealer.
6:30:59And last week, we announced Super Planet, a NASDAQ listed company. We're capitalizing with 2,100 Bitcoin from our own treasury, and the deal is expected to close in Q4. Now, the idea is simple. Bitcoin we already hold in Japan becomes the capital of a listed company in America. The treasury itself became the acquisition currency. And that's the bigger point. Bitcoin on a balance sheet is productive capital. Productive enough to acquire a NASDAQ listed company.
6:31:34That now gives our group two listed issuers in two currencies in two of the world's largest capital markets, Tokyo and NASDAQ. two engines raising capital to grow one consolidated Bitcoin position. And here's why the American side matters. Over the past 12 months, US investors have bought $16 billion of preferred stock issued by Bitcoin Treasury companies, a brand new asset class born in a bare market, paying dollar yields backed by a Bitcoin balance sheet.
6:32:11Now, whilst $16 billion sounds like a lot, it's just 0.01% of the global fixed income market. That is how early this is. Basically, hardly any Bitcoin backed yield product is being offered to anyone today. And that's the market Super Planet is built to enter. In fact, it's the same machinery Asian savers will need in their own currencies. Which brings me to my last point.
6:32:40There's a pattern behind assets and their surrounding infrastructure and it's as old as finance itself. Venice didn't become a mercantalic superpower by hoarding gold. It developed and built a sophisticated banking industry. On top of it, Amsterdam built the first stock exchange on the increasingly active phenomenon of trading paper shares. New York built and shaped our modern world firmly on the back of the dollar and created foundational liquid markets alongside.
6:33:17The prize never went to whoever just held the new money. It went to whoever built the market on top of it. Nobody has fully built out that market for Bitcoin yet. Not in New York, not here. We spent two years building a reserve, 43,000 Bitcoin, and now we're building what stands on it from Asia, but we would rather not do it alone.
6:33:43Which brings me to everyone else in this room. If you help run a company in this region, look at what a Bitcoin balance sheet did for a tiny $14 million market cap hotel company. The list I showed you earlier has room for a hundred more names. And every cycle so far has paid the people who moved before it felt comfortable.
6:34:08If you're an institution, be ready because the rules are changing faster than at any point in my career. Parliaments, cabinets, and regulators across this region are rewriting how our industry works. And the institutions that engage early will set the terms that everyone else follows.
6:34:29And if you're a builder, look at this stack because almost all of it is missing in Asia. Custody in your own jurisdiction, lending against Bitcoin as collateral, yield products a local saver can actually hold, and venues to trade and settle. All of it in local currency and under local laws.
6:34:52America has built most of its stack already. Asia has barely started. And America's version doesn't work here because our capital lives in yen, in Juan, in Hong Kong dollars, bots, rupees, ringit under different rules. In Japan, we've started on our own piece. That's what our securities firm is for. Custody and lending are where we're headed, but we're just one company in one country.
6:35:22Multiply that stack by every market in this region and you're looking at a decade of things that need to be built. 14 trillion of patient savings in Japan have waited 30 years for something worth buying. Somebody is going to build what it's been waiting for. We started. So will others here in Hong Kong, in Seoul, in Singapore and in so many other local markets.
6:35:54The next cycle doesn't need Asia to follow anyone. It needs Asian companies, Asian institutions, and Asian savers to lead at home in their own currency and under their own rules. So, I'll now end where I started in that room with the empty chairs. Cycles don't announce themselves. They start quietly in rooms like that one. And by the time they're obvious, the chairs are gone.
6:36:27And somewhere in this region right now, there's a boardroom where putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet still sounds insane. I've sat in that boardroom and that's where the next cycle is starting this year, maybe this week, maybe with someone in this hole. The previous cycles belonged to the west and the first Asian cycle has already started. The only question left is who builds it. Will you? Thank you very much.
6:37:50Everyone has an opinion. We want evidence.
6:37:57No hype, no echo chamber.
6:38:04Just better questions.
6:38:09and better answers from the biggest names in Bitcoin.
6:38:22This is BMTV.
6:38:31I'm Grace Remington. and I'm Sean Hagen, bringing you market insights you can't find anywhere else. We'll see you weekday mornings at 9:30 Eastern on Bitcoin Magazine TV of Bitcoin as a financial asset. To dive into this topic, we have a special fireside chat titled from self-custody to shareholders. Please welcome our host, the legendary podcaster Stfan Laa, who is joined by the CEO and chairman of
6:39:07Nakamoto, David Bailey.
6:39:22What's up, Hong Kong Bitcoiners? How's it going?
6:39:27I hope everyone's had a great time. It's been a great event so far.
6:39:30We uh we do these conferences all over the world and there's a lot of awesome Bitcoin communities out there, but I am convinced that the most hardcore Bitcoiners are from Asia, Hong Kong, China. So, it's a pleasure to be with all of you this week.
6:39:51All right. So David, you and I are probably similar vintage like we kind of came in, you know, I think maybe yourself late 2012, myself similar maybe early 2013. Obviously in those early days, we kind of had these lofty optimistic visions of where Bitcoin would go and hyper Bitcoinization and Bitcoin taking over the world and exiting fiat and all of this. And you know, here we sit today of course people as we as the topic is self custody to shareholders. How has the the vision
6:40:20shifted and are we are we sellout uh suit coiners now?
6:40:24You know, I I think hyper bitcoinization is playing out as it always was going to and I don't really think anyone had a clear vision 15 years ago exactly what it would look like. Um but you know it the vision was always to bring all parts of society all parts of the economy along with with Bitcoin adoption and Bitcoin on the balance sheet of corporations like hyper bitcoinization can't happen without bringing along the corporate world without bringing along the companies and the businesses that
6:40:54provide the products and services we depend on. So um you know I I think it's playing out exactly how how you know how it should.
6:41:03I think you're right. But maybe in the early days we were probably or at least I was I was probably more optimistic thinking ah it's going to happen so quickly you know uh obviously it's taking a bit longer than maybe many of us thought it would. What do you think?
6:41:15I mean it we're not doing bad. I mean I how many Bitcoiners were existed back then? 100,000 of us. Now there's 100 million of us. You know, I I think you know, the power of self-custody is Bitcoin's superpower, but you know, it's not always the same utility to it its users. Like, if you live in a place that's stable and has a stable government and stable rule of law, self-custody matters less. When you're in the extreme scenarios, you know,
6:41:44you're in an unstable environment, self-custody matters a lot. So, you know, I think this is just going to go through waves and people won't appreciate the value of self- custody until they need to. So, you know, one day when your Bitcoin gets nationalized, you'll appreciate self-custody. But until that happens, you know, it works just great to have it in your brokerage account.
6:42:07Yeah. And I think maybe that brings us to this other idea where it's kind of like the purists and the pragmatists, right? there's kind of this purist vision of no it should be only self- custody or maybe for some people that means no KYC or it means like certain forms of adoption that they accept as legitimate that should be promoted and other you know and maybe on the other side of that maybe you and I are both kind of more towards that pragmatist side of we're trying to grow adoption how do you see that that tension between let's say the idealist vision and let's
6:42:36say the pragmatist who is trying to get adoption yeah perfect way I um I've always found that one of the unique differences between the western Bitcoin community and the Asian Bitcoin community is like Bitcoin and Asia is taken from a much more pragmatic perspective and you know when you talk about things like uh no KYC or peer-to-peer or some of these these ideals I actually find that people who use Bitcoin here actually do these things a lot like they they value their
6:43:06privacy they value being able to work outside of the institutions because there's a practical value for them I think in the west these are just like ideals and so you know we we we we kind of project our value system onto them but there's not necessarily the same pragmatic reason to doing it. So yeah I I I really don't buy into the the dichconomy. It's like um you know Bitcoin is designed to be a pragmatic useful tool for people like that's the
6:43:34point of it. So uh it's not really designed to be a religious platform or to project your ideas onto it. So yeah, I I um uh I I think the pragmatist idealist uh divide exists, but the pragmatists continue to win. And maybe that's kind of a related question because many of us at least in that time came to it from a libertarian and maybe somewhat cipher punk ideology as you said. A lot of the new people may not
6:44:04share that. Right.
6:44:06Yeah. And I, you know, I I definitely, that's one thing I've noticed is like with the advent of the ETFs, you know, a very powerful moment in in every Bitcoiner's journey is like the first time they send a Bitcoin transaction, the first time they receive Bitcoin, the fear you have as you like type in an address and hope you didn't mess it up.
6:44:24And so that's kind of an onboarding experience that I think uh uh imbuss certain values or a worldview on Bitcoin for new users. And when you come in through the ETF, you have none of that.
6:44:34you just literally are, you know, buying and clicking your portfolio or maybe you're not even buying and click, maybe your broker's doing it for you. So, uh, there's definitely a loss that comes from that. Um, but, you know, I think back to the topic earlier, you know, people are going to do whatever they need to do to get exposure to Bitcoin.
6:44:54And if there's an easy way to do it, they're going to do the easy way. if the easy way in the future stops working for whatever reason, whether it's government regulations or whether it's, you know, uh risk in these entities, like people are going to go back the other way. So, I don't know. I feel like um as long as Bitcoin itself can't be changed, it doesn't really matter how people interact with it.
6:45:15Yeah. Well, speaking of Bitcoin changes, I think the um maybe the recent one around BIP 110, obviously you and I were both highly critical of BIP 110. Um, do you think there are lessons around what happened there around the failure of BIP 110?
6:45:32Yeah. Well, I think it's just like another reminder of how Bitcoin works and how Bitcoin governance works. Like, if you want to change Bitcoin, it's intentionally very difficult to change.
6:45:42And you need to have consensus from all the different stakeholders that are out there. you can't have just a a small group of loud people um push through a change that the rest of the network doesn't support. Um, and I think that there's been a lot of, let's say, boogeymanning of like economic nodes or or the exchanges, the people that that basically push the most transactions on chain. And um, you know, I I think this
6:46:10BIP 110 uh, experience was a reminder that economic nodes are part of the stakeholder process and you can't circumvent them. So, it turns out that miners aren't in charge of Bitcoin. You know, nodes aren't in charge of Bitcoin. Economic nodes aren't in charge of Bitcoin. You need all of the participants together to agree for something to change.
6:46:30And perhaps the lesson also is that of course if you do something in consensus, okay, that's easy enough because everyone agrees. But if it is controversial or an adversarial change, you better have the economic weight on your side because otherwise it's just going to stall out.
6:46:47Oh yeah. I mean, absolutely. And I and I think you know I I I think one of my takeaways from it is like the economic nodes who matter a lot in the process like they need to be engaged as stakeholders in the process and we could have really bypassed a lot of the BIP 110 noise if the economic nodes had came out earlier and stronger like hey we don't support this rather than just being silent about it. So I think we need to all the stakeholders need to be
6:47:14engaged in the process. Um and and we can avoid what we just went through which was six months of wasted time and a lot of yelling on Twitter.
6:47:24And on that around uh demonstrating or showing support things like fork futures or fu uh prediction markets this kind of thing that was important even in 2017 as I recall Bitfinex had as an example during the the 2X or no 2X they had B1X versus B2X on Bitfinex as an example. uh in this recent round with BIP 110 there was basically very small amount of volume suggesting support and I think
6:47:52that was also like an indicator for people to see okay there's really there's not really a lot of um economic weight on on that side. Yeah, I have to say I was a little disappointed with the the Chinese Bitcoin community because we used to be able to rely on y'all. Anytime there was a fork, there would be a listing where people could sell it.
6:48:12And this is the first fork we've had where I can't sell my fork coins. So, uh I would appreciate it if next time we can make sure that there's some future contract out there and um those of us that want to to dump can.
6:48:25And of course, this raises questions. I mean like we're talking about bit 110 right now but the point is what happens next time right what if there's a fight on quantum and people disagree about the right approach on how to have you know there I mean it's it's almost like climate change right you've got people who are like full you know quantum is BS you have people who like okay maybe it's a real thing in 15 20 years and then you got other people who are saying no we need to do something in the next few years for quantum and even on that there'll be all these questions what do
6:48:53people do with the early P2P coins or they'll say Satoshi's coins. Um what is the mitigation pathway? Maybe these are the questions that we'll have to sort of resolve.
6:49:04What do you think? Are there any lessons um from what happened into what may come next time if there's like a fight about quantum?
6:49:11Yeah, I mean I I think um there's going to be future governance fights. I mean I think probably right now we're pacing once every cycle there's like a solid governance fight. So I think we need to have a functional stakeholder process for for Bitcoin to evolve um that you know doesn't just uh outsource our decision-m to a handful of people. And so you know we learned from this experiment that economic nodes do matter. The takeaway shouldn't be then like okay well then economic nodes are
6:49:41in charge and we should just ask Black Rockck what we should do about quantum. Like that would be the wrong takeaway to have. So, um I would love for us to have a software that's maybe less controversial that we could get activated as a community and work together on um so that we have some experience working together collaboratively and productively before we have to deal with something like quantum which could be very divisive.
6:50:03And so to also the point we're talking about shareholders, what does it mean now that we have publicly traded, right?
6:50:09and you're obviously involved with Nakamoto, but whether it's Strategy and Metal Planet and Strive and whoever else, uh, how much of a stance should leadership of these companies take in governance fights?
6:50:25Well, I mean, they definitely should take a leadership role because they have all their money in Bitcoin, so they need Bitcoin to be successful. Um, you know, I I uh I have kind of thought about this question though of like, you know, when there are forks and there are hard forks that happen like you know which Bitcoin is the real Bitcoin and you know it's it's funny it's like Black Rockck you know uh or ETFs in general I won't call out any specific company like it's in
6:50:54the fine print in there like what they're going to do with fork coins and I don't know if that's really been like totally tested or thought through. Um, you know, it'd be very ironic if, let's say, BIP 110 had been successful and it turned out all the Bitcoin in the ETF was just on the wrong chain. That would be pretty dramatic. So, I think they have to be stakeholders because they have to represent their shareholders.
6:51:18They have to make sure that they are good um stewards of of Bitcoin. Um, yeah, and they and they need to make sure that they're holding the right coins on the right chain. And there could also be questions around things like if they split and dump, right? What what's the tax treatment? What's the governance treatment? Do customers should customers or end users get to have some choice in that matter or is it just like no Black Rockck or MSTR they make the decision and you're you're
6:51:46living with that choice? No, I mean explaining to our CFO how what a hard fork even is and trying to answer their questions about how would we be taxed on on an airdrop effectively on a hard fork. It's like I actually don't know the answer to those questions. So I think it's pretty novel novel issues and um yeah I I I wish this fork had had a little bit more juice behind it just so we could have seen the second order effects of how people manage this on
6:52:15their balance sheet.
6:52:16Right. But ultimately there is only one Bitcoin and it kind of flows to wherever the most economic value is because the miners have to follow that, right? Like they can't just keep pointing their hash rate to a dead or a low value chain. They're going to generally point their value to the high value chain and it will sustain, right?
6:52:34Yeah. I mean well so when we say that users are in charge and we say like economic nodes like your economic weight matters the reason why that is is because ultimately economic nodes are the ones generating transactions and they're paying transaction fees and so let's say you had um uh a fork of Bitcoin and a lot of the miners went to the the alternative chain well wherever the users are and wherever the fees are being paid those fees are going to accumulate and if block times go on a
6:53:02chain from 10 minutes on average to 30 minutes on average and that's where the users are. The fees are going to grow astronomically on that chain and it's not just the fees, it's the token value itself.
6:53:14Yes, true. Um, but like ultimately at the end of the day, it's like user demand to use that chain is going to drive the value of those tokens and ultimately the incentives of where miners are going to mine. And so users are still in control. And I think one of the things that BIP 110 misunderstood is they thought nodes represent users and they don't. Like people paying transaction fees represent users and you know Coinbase might have 10 million
6:53:43people that want to process transactions through them. So uh at the end of the day users are in control.
6:53:49Yeah. Now, I guess it's kind of bringing up maybe awkward questions for people because in 2017, people might have argued people who were small blockers.
6:53:57If you were a small blocker in 2017, early on you might have disagreed with Coinbase or Bitay saying, "We speak for our users." Because you would have been like, "No, I don't want that view. I don't want big blocks. I want the small block view." But then this time around, it's You get what I'm getting at? Now we're trying to go the other way and say, well, should those big entities decide on behalf of their users? And I guess depending on which way you want the fork to go, you might like that stance or not like that stance.
6:54:24Well, users have the ability to leave the services that they're using if they don't agree with the choices that they're making. And then ultimately, the users doing transactions is what determines which chain is Bitcoin. And so if you know a a user um disagrees with the outcome of their service provider, they're not going to do transactions there, right? And so I guess maybe what we're saying here is they should disclose how they're thinking about it and say, you know, if you are Coinbase or Binance or any large, you know, if you're MSTR or
6:54:53Black Rockck, you should, I guess, disclose in advance which way you think, like which one you think is right. So then the users can make their decision like if you're a shareholder, sell the share of that and buy some other thing. if you're a user, stop using that service, go use another one.
6:55:06Totally agree. Totally agree. And I mean, um, this the question is especially interesting if you think about it in the context of the 2017 fork. You know, all of these these, uh, Bitcoin balance sheets having to make a decision of, you know, what are they going to do with this this forked coin?
6:55:23And that like in 2017, the forked coin was worth almost as much as the Bitcoin was. So, you're talking about half the value of your balance sheet you need to make a decision about. Um, and I do think that the stakeholders in each of those businesses, they need to know where their business is going to land on the topic. Like I think this is why these they need to be engaged in the process and not just leave it to people guess what's going to happen when the client activates.
6:55:48Yeah. So also related to shareholders, we should talk about treasury companies. Obviously there have been, you know, cycles this time last year, you know, was it probably over 100k last year, right? And so let's talk a little bit about what went right, what went wrong, where you think uh you know treasury companies are going. So just start broad and then we'll later get to like Nakamoto specifically.
6:56:11Well, I think the past year has been extremely painful for treasury companies obviously probably uh none more so than ours. Um you know I think I what went wrong probably the biggest thing that went wrong is buying Bitcoin at 120,000 and then 6 months later being at 60,000.
6:56:27like that's kind of a tough tough thing to do. Um I think also the the the treasury company mania, you know, whenever there's a lot of hot money flowing, you see a lot of people pursue the same strategy. You see way too many vehicles get brought to market and the quality of them are is not all the same. So the market needs to have consolidation in order to determine, you know, what's a productive use of capital and what's not
6:56:55a productive use of capital. And I think, you know, there's been a lot of weeding out over the past year. It's tough to run a public company. It's it's it's even more tough to run a public company with an asset that's down 50%.
6:57:08So, um, but I think this is just all part of it. And I think, you know, uh, uh, we use the saying survive and thrive. So it's really about being well positioned so that when the bull market comes, you're in a place to make money and take advantage of the of the market window.
6:57:25I see. So you see it as, you know, survi survived the bare market so that you can ride the bull wave, per se.
6:57:30And and I think to answer your question about like what what has gone well and what hasn't gone well. I mean, I think the biggest thing that's gone well is we've expanded access to Bitcoin to millions of people. I mean, I think if you take the uh the cap table of MetaPlanet and Strive and Micro Strategy and Nakamoto and Orange and Capital B and Smarter Web and a like go down the list, you're talking about many many hundreds of thousands when you include
6:57:59Micro Strategy, millions of people that have gotten the exposure to Bitcoin that otherwise wouldn't. So, I think that's been incredibly successful and I think there's like a lot more work to do there. I think what's also gone really well are the prefs. I'm very impressed with how well they they've performed. They've been tested. They've come back.
6:58:15They've been very resilient. So, I think right now the the the Pref model is is is in the process of being validated. And um it'll be interesting to see how that continues to play out.
6:58:28And so I guess we're also seeing maybe arguments inside of Treasury Land of you know should they should Bitcoin treasury companies be like SpaceX and Tesla and Block or should they be doing you know MSTR style Metaplanet uh you know financial engineering per se? Do you have a comment on that and you know how the model is changing?
6:58:48Yeah. No, I I I think the you you need to measure performance and the track record over a full cycle. So like I wouldn't take the past 12 months or the 12 months before that to say okay this is the validated model or or not. You need a longer period of time. How do they perform in the bad times and in the good times? You know I I think that the operating company approach um we're going to see more op people acquire and do M&A with operating companies. It's what we're doing at Nakamoto. A lot of our portfolio companies are in the
6:59:17process of doing M&A. M&A deals take a while to do. So, I think um probably this the second half of this year, you're going to see the results of a lot of people working, you know, on deals this year. Um we'll see how they do. I I mean, I got to say I'm very jealous of uh Strive's ability to run SATA and, you know, it probably took I don't know four years, five five years, you know, before uh BTC Inc. made the first $5 million of
6:59:46revenue in the company's history. You know, when you have a pref product and you're running an ATM on it, you're pulling down like 5 million in a day and like you didn't do any work. Your bankers just ran the ATM and you get an email at the end of the day and it's like, "We sold this much stock at this price and the money will deposit in your bank account tomorrow morning." So, it's pretty incredible. And um if you can get that flywheel working, you know, it's much better to run an ATM than to have to build an operating business. is a lot
7:00:15harder to build an operating business perhaps. I mean whether we like it or not, we live in the fiat standard today.
7:00:20That's the globe. But we're obviously many of us believe we're going to a Bitcoin standard. But let's talk from a Nakamoto perspective. Do you see it as somewhat of a hybrid there that you're going to have operating businesses?
7:00:30Obviously you have BTC Inc. You know the creators of this conference and then are you also going to layer on let's say financial engineering aspects? Is that a plan for you?
7:00:41So we're watching all the preps. We're super interested in the topic. We've invested in several of them. Um so like I'm I'm someone who is always uh keeping an open mind and watching where the market goes and like you follow the money and you listen to the market. Um for us we focused on the operating company side because you know at the end of the day I can't control the price of Bitcoin but I can control if our products and services that we're building are valuable and they're making
7:01:09us money and you know we want to be as a company cash flow positive. So, we're just no matter how bad the market conditions get, we're in a place that we can take on risk and make bets. So, um we want to keep building our cash flow and and uh you know, we're right now our focus is on the M&A side.
7:01:29Yeah. And of course, you're doing all this work around advocacy. Obviously you have Bitcoin magazine the conference you have conference series let's say you you know you're trying to grow awareness and knowledge of the asset itself as well as covering and partnering with various you know treasury companies too um so I guess last few minutes I guess let's talk a little bit about where you see things going what other ways to pragmatically move things forward uh you
7:01:57know if you're you know listening right now and you're thinking how can I help grow this movement. If you believe in Bitcoin, what should you be what should people be doing?
7:02:06Well, you know, I think first off for anyone listening, you should be buying Bitcoin and you should be figuring out what job you have in the world where you create value and you can capture that value and you can park that value in Bitcoin. So, that's what everyone here should be doing. Um, you know, in terms of, you know, where do where do I see the trends going for this next cycle?
7:02:25You know, we're we're a company that prides ourselves in creating our own alpha and so we're always like looking for what's the next meta going to be and how can we facilitate it. There's kind of two things that I think are kind of coming next. One is Bitcoin size is really driving it to be integrated into the world at large as we know it. And so I think there's an opportunity for treasury companies to own businesses that are strategic for Bitcoin. Um,
7:02:52MeetPanet just recently did a a acquisition of a broker dealer in um, Japan. Uh, it's going to give them a great distribution platform to go and sell bonds to the Japanese market. Like that was like a real business that not a Bitcoin business that was a real financial firm and like it's given them a superpower to go and promote Bitcoin in in a new market through those tools.
7:03:16And so I think as the Bitcoin industry, if if if the Bitcoin nation was a country, like what are the businesses that give us strategic leverage in the world like for example owning energy uh infrastructure, energy resources, um you know, uh like owning things that are real in the real world that we can bring into the the Bitcoin uh ecosystem. I think one that's like a a meta that's coming. The next meta that
7:03:46is coming is I think the intersection of Bitcoin and and AI. And I think like AI is probably the most relevant thing that's happening in Bitcoin today. It's affecting basically all the different parts of Bitcoin, whether it's on, you know, cyber uh cyber attacks, whether it's cyber defense, whether it's fuzzy testing to test new core releases, um whether it's Bitcoin miners having to compete with energy resources for AI.
7:04:13Um, and I mean even the BIP repository itself for for Bitcoin core has been overwhelmed with AI slop. And you know I can't help but think like you know maybe a year from now it won't be possible to tell the difference between um a human drafted BIP and an AI drafted BIP. And you know uh once those BIPs are submitted then like people test the bips. Well they're using AI to test the bips and then people are trying to understand if a BIP is good or not. So
7:04:41they're asking AI, should I should I run this client? Is this BIP useful? And so I see like AI touching all different parts of the development process for Bitcoin. And I think like that's a pretty profound change in how Bitcoin has worked. It's also the first time that we've seen like a change in the UI UX of Bitcoin. Like in the past you had to type in a Bitcoin address and you know actually send a transaction. Now all of that can just be completely abstracted away from the user and all of the complex um you know fringe tools
7:05:10that we have with Bitcoin that are not very often used like your AI is going to make that super simple to use. So it really is like a complete change in how uh Bitcoin is consumed. And I think if we want Bitcoin to win, hyper Bitcoinization to happen, like making sure that the um AI economy, making sure that like the GDP of of a AI um is running on the Bitcoin standard. Like if we can make Bitcoin the money of AI, it's kind of game set match for
7:05:39Bitcoin's adoption in the physical analog economy. So I I see this as like uh a collision that you know nothing can stop at this point and I and I think you know even even just Bitcoin being a permissionless tool um it means that like AI is going to be trained on Bitcoin first like it's going to attack Bitcoin first like we're going to be the the the tip of the spear of how this stuff is actually being deployed into the real world. uh you know I think in
7:06:08the early days of Bitcoin we called it like machine to- machine payments and you know that kind of narrative faded away over the years but I think it now is the time to bring it back. Yeah.
7:06:18Now I guess the other criticism would be obviously we're bitcoin we want bitcoin to be used but agentic payments people will say no they'll use stable coins. So how's bitcoin going to win in that or fight in that? Well, I I think that whatever we build the agentic economy on needs to be built on an anti-fragile system. And like could you imagine how horrific it would be if you know a huge percentage of the global economy is is dependent upon AI systems and you know
7:06:47the stable coin that they were using was um what US Luna uh what was Luna's uh like the teruna thing. Teruna, but imagine if like, you know, you're using a stable coin and it implodes and you're going to just like completely freeze up the entire AI complex. So, more than anything, AI just needs the stability of a of a anti-fragile system. And I think, you know, the whole reason we created Bitcoin is because fiat currencies are fragile inherently. They're they're
7:07:16political. They're humanrun. And over a long enough time period, like they do fail. And so I I think you know AI is going to need to be built on something that has more staying power.
7:07:28Well, there you go. I think that's all we have time for, but uh I think the lessons uh are there in terms of Bitcoin growing and maturing as an industry. Um so let's leave it there. Everyone, please put your hands together for David Bailey from Nakamoto in
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7:11:15here.
7:11:34Welcome back into the live newses at Bitcoin Asia 2026. I'm Grace Remington with Isaiah Austin, our social media king, and Sean Hagen. Um, okay. We are just minutes away from Bellagi taking the Nakamoto stage, our final talk of the day. Um, to talk about the network school and his idea of the network state. And for those who don't know, he kind of posits that the order has always been state first, then money. A government forms, establishes controls over territory, and then issues its own
7:12:01currency that citizens use because they live under that government's laws.
7:12:06However, his premise kind of flips that around. He says, "What if globally neutral money aka bitcoin exists first and then everyone accepts that and moves in to a state together?" What do you think about his idea here?
7:12:19Yeah, it's very interesting. You know, the idea to get, you know, the smartest minds who who typically, you know, would agree on certain premises when it comes to money and sovereignty in the same room and then building a society around that. It's a really interesting idea. He's been building it for a while. Um, so it's going to be really interesting to see what kind of questions he gets today and uh how he answers those.
7:12:40Yeah, I I I think it makes sense. We understand his background, right? He was at A16Z, a well-known venture fund in the tech space. He was at Coinbase, so you know, very early into the crypto space. So I I think, you know, when you realize that that background is probably informing a lot a lot of his his viewpoints here, it it starts to be more clear what he's thinking. And and you know, I mean, politics has always changed and shifted over time, right?
7:13:03the the separation of church and state was a big deal. The separation of money and state with Bitcoin uh could potentially be uh an equally big deal.
7:13:11You know, obviously time will tell. I I I think that governments generally exist for a reason and uh you know, the proposition of of you know uh going and and forming your own nation state of sorts based on your online friends. Uh all you're doing is basically reinventing government. So um you know I I think it's an interesting idea. I think that uh people are probably going to end up trying it as as we see kind of uh you know del globalization continue
7:13:38to occur. Uh you know you see things like what's happening with with the US long-term uh treasury right now and the government is losing control of being able to kind of set those prices and the free markets coming in. So I think there's opportunity for free market individuals to kind of redefine a lot of things, but ultimately I think it'll probably all result back in some sort of uh central governance.
7:14:00A lot of innovation in this space kind of feels like any ideas is worth a listen at least once. So with that, let's go to the Nakamoto stage now to listen to Bellagi and Bitcoin Inc. CEO Brandon Green.
7:14:25All right. How we doing?
7:14:28Woo.
7:14:30Have we had a good event? How's Bitcoin Asia?
7:14:34All right. So, this is the last uh session for the day and I think this is one of the most exciting ones. We have the legendary Bali Shrinavasan here and uh you know we're going to get into a few different things but I just want to kick it off. Bali walk us through the network state today and and you've had a major change. Walk us through what's happening in Kazakhstan.
7:14:56Great. Yeah. So, um, I think of, you know, Bitcoin as being the digital and then network state as the physical and then network school is making all of that real because Bitcoin basically it renegotiated the relationship between a citizen and the government, right?
7:15:12Seizure is no longer feasible. The 20th century of fiat seizure is ending. And so now you can choose where you want to work, where you want to live, okay? But where do you where do you go? And I think it's not just sovereign individual but sovereign collective. It's a community. You know, you couldn't have done this amazing conference with just yourself. You need to work in a group.
7:15:29Bitcoin couldn't be built by just an individual. Needs a group. And I think the physical world is the same thing.
7:15:34So, network school takes Bitcoin's, you know, theory and principles from the digital world and says, what does an opt-in community look like in practice, right? And why a school? Because, you know, Harvard was started alongside the Massachusetts Bay Colony to help start America. And like Texas A&M helped kind of populate Texas, Texas agricultural and mechanical and Stanford helped build a bay area, right? So a school paired with a community is a way to bootstrap a community. Okay, so that's like background. So then specifics, we
7:16:04recently just moved to the amazing country of Kazakhstan. Beautiful country. You guys have seen some of the videos here, some of the photos from the place. And the important thing is we now have um essentially official sponsorship by the government of Kazakhstan. Okay.
7:16:17And so built in partnership here's the meeting with the prime minister and importantly we are building a fully digital state says president Kazan so digital state plus network state they want what we're doing so we're collaborating with them on recruiting global talent and training local talent synthesizing the two as Silicon Valley did for many years to just turbocharge them and that's AI government that's robotics that's drones of course that's you know Bitcoin um that's that's everything that tech can do which is a lot of things techno optimism was
7:16:46written into their constitution recently. They have um basically you know uh like billions in crypto. They've got very favorable taxes for for crypto and in particular they've got a new startup city called Altow which they want to build into a million person city on internet first principles. Okay. So built by the internet for the internet from the internet where it has lots of locals of course but also has lots of globals just like you know what is a global city like what New York used to be and what you know Singapore and Dubai
7:17:16have become a global city that's that's welcoming to talent and capital from around the world right and I think Astana and all can become those global cities within Kazan they have the ambition to get there it's also a really amazing country because it's uh as someone there said it's western Asian Russian and Muslim it's warm because it's western aligned Asian ancestry Russian speaking being Muslim religion and it's tolerant to people from everywhere. So almost everybody has a piece of themselves in Kazakhstan and it's a high-tech country that was built by digital nomads and so because all
7:17:44those things it's a very very very good place uh to go and build basically the Bitcoin enabled future. So that's why we moved there. Um there's more I can say but you know you can look at some of theou stuff afc um you know the new allia mega city the the PM meeting and then also this dome over here is this amazing dome that everybody thinks is AI generated but it's real is this amazing amazing amazing thing so come come to school Kazdan you should apply and check it out absolutely and and I think you
7:18:13know bali you've been kind of ahead of the curve on on many trends and you've been developing this this network state thesis alongside the network school. Um, obviously we don't have to get into the the things that happened in Malaysia. I I've looked into it. It seems like maybe there was a little bit of a winch hunt.
7:18:33That's my words. Um, but I am curious now that you've gone through this process. You you had an issue with one state. Now you're in a new state that's opening you eagerly with open arms. How have you updated your sort of network state thesis? Well, so first is I think it's clear that what we're doing is historically significant. Why? Because most people or most projects just don't nobody cares, right? No one would care
7:19:02what you were doing. Okay, but the fact that we have full sovereign support and yes, okay, there's some states that don't like it, but some states that really do. That's actually like what cryptocurrency was, right? Crypto community is what comes after cryptocurrency, right? Cryptocurrency was heavily opposed by some governments and heavily supported by others and it was a huge tug-of-war over years. Okay. Um you the meme wars raged for years.
7:19:26Okay. And you know we we lost some good men. There were some bankruptcies and so on and so forth. But net net we've come much farther. The cause of freedom of individual rights of democracy of capitalism. And you know the capitalism part is obvious because you know Bitcoin ends basically you know the the fiat century of Keynesianism right? So it reintroduces individual rights, individual capitalism as opposed to the Fed setting interest rates for everything. You have a market determined interest rate. So that part is obvious.
7:19:50True capitalism comes back. But actually also true democracy. And why? Because you have the ability to vote with your feet ballot and or wallet between states. So even if you lose the election or even if you basically you're in a country where elections don't work, okay, or a state like California for example, basically, you know, the the the party there always wins elections and it's not actually competitive multi-party elections. They've destroyed democracy in California. So what does that mean? That means your only real option is the more expensive vote, which
7:20:20is to vote with your feet to one of the governments around the world that will accept you. So you go from the two-party system to the thousand city system. Okay? And that is the democracy of foot voting. There's a intellectual tradition goes all the way back to t- bow sorting.
7:20:34Okay. The economist Charles TBO that basically showed that under certain theoretical assumptions this would mean that public goods get provisioned according to the preference of the people. For example, you know, let's say how clean do you want your streets? Do you want them as spotless as Kazakhstan or Singapore which are spotless or maybe you'll spend 80% less and get, you know, I don't know, 50% of the cleanliness or whatever. You know, some countries will make that trade-off. then that's going to be something that different countries can can make a trade-off on or you know how stringent do you want your biotech regulations to be how stringent
7:21:04different communities will have different preferences on these things and now people can migrate to the community that fits their preferences so really it's not the network state only but it's the network states plural right and um so the thing about this is uh well let me pause Eric more I can say but go ahead well so I was going to say um you know the arbitrage that you're talking about.
7:21:27Um, it you're already starting to see it. I I was doing some research uh ahead of this and I noticed that when network state moved the real estate in the island that network state was on before the network school before uh let's say it decreased after it moved and now I'm sure Kazakhstan is going to you know have this million person city potentially like that.
7:21:49It's an interesting um pairing of of the the physical.
7:21:53That's right. So if a if a state plays see normally you want to play a win-win game, okay? Like the citizen of the state or the community and the state have a win-win game. You guys, you know, like a community abides a lot abides the law, they pay their taxes and in turn they get peace and quiet and kick and build and so and so forth. If a state decides to play a win-lose game with the community where it persecutes that community especially for you know uh like let's say unreasonable reasons.
7:22:21Okay. Now that community has the option of collective exit. Okay? And collective mobility is a nonviolent alternative to a military. Why do I say that? So if you think about what it means to take a group of people and move them from one city to another city, everybody has to work together. It's almost like conscription because you basically are sort of opted in, you know, um because the community is going there. You can of course opt out, right? But basically it's it's something which is a communal whole community effort. Uh it is done
7:22:50under pressure from a hostile state. It's not something you want to get into. Just like war, you don't want to get into it. Uh it costs money to liquidate and to move, but it's completely nonviolent.
7:23:03Okay? And crucially, it's actually especially if you're outnumbered and outgunned, but you are what Amy Chua would call a market dominant minority. Okay? often the hostility of the larger state versus the smaller community is that smaller community is succeeding in the market and the larger group is angry or envious or there's some religious intolerance or something like that. They're going after the small community. So now that small community that's otherwise outnumbered or outgunned, we protect minority rights with collective exit. That community so
7:23:32long as it's organized and it has values, it can take the hit because mobility, collective mobility, it is an economic hit. It doesn't have zero cost.
7:23:40But that's I mean just like a military you know defense has non-zero cost a mobility defense has non-zero cost right and often this is phrased as you know like quote fight or flight but the new concept is it's not fight or flight at an individual level but at a collective level and really it's immobility or mobility. Why? Basically the ultimate sort of blood and soil nationalist is a wood and soil nationalist is a tree.
7:24:04Why? Because they're loyal to the land true to their roots. They can't cut and run. In fact, they can't even move.
7:24:10Okay. And the opposite of a tree is something that's really mobile and agile. We want to be that. Okay. We want to be like a like an eagle. We want to be able to fly. We want to be able like a flock of birds. Boom. Take off, right?
7:24:22Two suitcases, two hours, and you know, 2,000 people can move. Okay? If you do that, mobility is leverage against the state. Those 2,000 people might have the collective earning power of 200,000 people. And so, suddenly there's a penalty for persecution. It's not simply a win-lose. It's suddenly turned into a lose- win because another state wins since it gets all of that earning and that building and the first persecuting state does look bad and eventually regrets it. Like for example, Uganda
7:24:50many years ago they expelled uh people of Indian origin from Uganda and they called them parasites and so on and so forth and then the Ugandan economy crashed. There was famine, all these terrible things and then much later the Ugandan government said it was a mistake and we're inviting you back or whatever.
7:25:05Okay. Whether Indians would decide to go back, don't know. Okay. Point is, I think we're going to see that kind of thing globally. And I think we need to be ready with collective mobility as a nonviolent alternative to military.
7:25:16Okay. And it's, you know, Bitcoin a most peaceful protest allows that. Well, and it also in in my own experience, it reminds me of COVID in the United States even where you know the states started to have different um different requirements, different uh strategies around it and people moved and that forced a sort of moderating of of different policies and so uh it's it's interesting to see that continue to play out as uh you know as time goes on.
7:25:41That's right. And the big why does Bitcoin enable this? Because I want to be really precise. In the 20th century in the Soviet Union, Lenin's guys had to go house to house, farm to farm to like, you know, to to kill the father and take the, you know, farm and throw the son in the goolog and so on and so forth, right? And so there's a physical friction associated with that where you need to have guys with guns, guys with tanks and and so on and so forth, but especially guys with guns going house to house to steal all this stuff. And so
7:26:10that took a long time. Keynesianism innovates over bullsheism because to seize 10% of the wealth, you just hit a button and print a trillion dollars. And people even think they're getting richer. Number go up, you know, right?
7:26:22Number go up because value go down, right? If you have, for example, if let's say there's 10 shares outstanding and somebody holds one share, they have 10% of a company. Now 90 shares are printed and they're given another one share. Okay? So their nominal count goes up to two, but their actual percentage goes down from 10% to 2%. Okay. And so they think they're getting richer because one goes to two. Wow. 100% returns, but they've actually suffered um you know, they went down, right, from
7:26:51from 10% to 2%. They suffered like a Oops. What's going on?
7:26:56They've ultimately just been debased and and diluted. Um no, absolutely.
7:27:00Yeah. I'm trying to reopen my laptop.
7:27:02All good.
7:27:02Okay, it's fine. I'll take it off screen. Well, so I think you know, um, uh, to dive a little bit more into sort of the Bitcoin world, and this is something that I'm actually very curious your opinion on. So, uh, David was just on here a second ago, uh, and and he and Stefan were talking about BIP 110, right?
7:27:20And, you know, how do you, as someone who is now trying to innovate on an a level above Bitcoin, you know, on the the social layer, on the movement layer, uh, you're building on top of it.
7:27:31Yeah. How do you think about the sort of ongoing struggle of you know innovating within the technology of Bitcoin itself?
7:27:39Uh are you are you following these sorts of ideological um debates and arguments around the Bitcoin community? Do you not have time for that? Do you just need Bitcoin to do its thing? You know, how how did you question how did you Yeah. So um I think what's interesting is Bitcoin has now sort of shown a degree of immobility in an resilience whatever in an interesting way where uh in a sense
7:28:08it kind of resisted a challenge let's call it from its left and its right okay with big blockers and ultra small blockers have now both been rejected in a sense so it's kind of constant okay if if you'd call left being expanding blocks and right being constricting blocks, right? And reducing block size or throwing out transactions. It sort of resisted both. Okay. And um you know I think one can you know make arguments for for whatever position and I'm not even saying I disagree with all these arguments. Um but those can be done on
7:28:38other chains and now you know Bitcoin can remain unchanged. Uh and with that said the thing I'm most excited about at the technical level is uh the new QSB the quantum safe bitcoin transactions.
7:28:50So that the first quantum safe bitcoin transaction if anybody doesn't know about this you should definitely know about this maybe the most important thing happening in bitcoin this year QSB quantum safe bitcoin transactions because um Ellie Ben Sassin and others figured out how to or rather his team of people it's all open source um figured out how to make bitcoin transactions quantum resistant and uh that's really important because they were able to do it with script on top of existing
7:29:19bitcoin Okay. And uh technical details you can go and look at it. It costs more than a normal transaction but great you can still just build down a wallet. You don't have to change the protocol and making a quantum safe transaction if it costs like another whatever number of you know sats fine right because now you don't have to update the protocol necessarily. Okay. So so that I am interested in. Now there's another thing which is on the topic of AI and privacy and so forth. I think that um Bitcoin is
7:29:47not gonna it's not going to add it's not going to become wholly private because it's just too much of a change. However, its transparency is a feature in a very specific context which is if let's say Naive Blly wants to prove how much Bitcoin El Salvador has he can just post an address and then he can show himself moving funds from that address. Okay. If however and this is not obvious if he wanted to post a video of his Fort Knox with the gold bricks that would not be trusted in the age of AI. You could do a hyperrealistic video from every angle
7:30:16with people there that look exactly like they are. So, no one would trust a video of Fort Knox anymore, right? Fort Knox may as well not exist in a low trust era, but Bitcoin does. And so, Bitcoin's transparency, I think, means it becomes the reserve currency of Western institutions that need to prove solveny in the post fiat era, right? Like, you know, basically Bitcoin address or GTFO basically, right? And that is actually a way of partially reducing trust in a
7:30:46world where it's an internet first world. Okay. Um I think you you're still going to need ZK for many other kinds of things. Um AI is the attack. ZK is the defense. I think onchain transactions in Bitcoin, you know, chain analysis is becoming something that everybody can do. Okay. But that means that it's going to be I think the reserve currency of Western institutions because it is digital gold. So that means the price will go up. However, you may only want to possess it if you're in a country that allows for personal possession of
7:31:15it. And I think you're going to see all three regimes. Did I talk about this?
7:31:20Keep going.
7:31:21Yeah. So I think you're going to see Bitcoin atheist, Bitcoin monotheist, and Bitcoin polytheist regimes. Okay. So, a Bitcoin atheist, that's like a nocoiner regime that basically treats private ownership of Bitcoin like uh, you know, like almost like firearms or something like that where they just don't want you to hold it, right? And many countries will do that. They'll just try and seize the Bitcoin or at least deem it illegal and so on. Bitcoin monotheist says, "Okay, only Bitcoin. Bitcoin maximalist, right? And everything else is scam, blah, blah. Okay, of course, you know, I
7:31:50I understand that point of view. Um, and then Bitcoin polytheist will say Bitcoin and other currencies, cryptocurrencies.
7:31:56And I think you're going to see all three of these just like you see atheist, monotheist, polytheist in, you know, religions, right? Or you actually have atheist, monotheist, theist at the level of states. Why? The aist is an anarchist. The monostatist is like an imperialist. My country should rule the world. And the poly status is like a digital nomad. They abide by laws, but they switch countries as they see fit.
7:32:17Right? So I would call myself like polytheist, polyst, polycoinist, right?
7:32:21So nn, right? and others are like you know somebody who's an atheist uh anarchist Bitcoin maximalist is like 001 so even if I would agree with them a lot of things technologically they'll have different value propositions underlying it but once you know other people's values you can at least you know work with them and then you know to bring it back to the network state the idea would be each of them will have a state that's right so network state is nnn
7:32:48right so it is uh multiple states so it's relationally tolerant obviously multiple states and multiple coins. And basically the thing is I think Bitcoin becomes king of coins. It is king of coins where one of the things about the sort of defeat of BIP 110 is I think it's now every every stable coin ledger can write its chain tip to Bitcoin every 10 minutes because it's protected by proof of work. Okay. And so for the price of one transaction every 10
7:33:16minutes um so that's you know 144 transactions a day, right? And then over the course of a year multiply by 365 you can back up the state of anything in a provable way to the Bitcoin blockchain.
7:33:31I shouldn't say back it up but let's say prove the state of the chain and then anybody who sees a restoration of that database knows they can they can compare it to Bitcoin. Okay. So that's its second major function which will be I think as important the first a direct uh proof of value store and also a repository of everything that's important to prove existed at that point in time like a like a public notary right yeah I want to I want to push on this a little bit well not push on it but double click on it you know you mentioned prior uh you said something
7:33:59about you know ZK is sort of the defense to AI uh I've heard you talk in a few different conversations about you know even back to your Fort Knox idea we're about to go into this world where knowledge and information is just is going to be mass- prodduced. It's going to be AI generated and it's going to be impossible to tell what's real. Uh and then Bitcoin exists in this world also where it has this verifiable state. And so you know what do you see that playing any role outside of this the monetary?
7:34:29Um so I I think um if something is important to you, you have it offline.
7:34:37If it's important to others, you have it online. And if it's really important to others, you put it on shame. Okay, that's carefully phrased. Why? When something's really important to others, it's a target of fraud, scams, spam, all this kind of stuff, right? So, you want to put it in the equivalent of an armored car on chain, which is what Bitcoin is. Okay? And so, it's basically, you know, Bitcoin and crypto
7:35:03is what AI can't do, right? AI can solve partial differential equations but it can't solve cryptographic equations right basically mathematics gives a hard constraint I essentially unless our you know our complete understanding of elliptic curve cryptography and all this stuff is wrong right if if our understanding of number theory is wrong which it could be you know maybe some p equals ep okay so without discovering new mathematics um many of these things are provably
7:35:33difficult for computers to do and or impossible for them to do in any finite you or reasonable time horizon I should say and so that means that AI runs up against a hard wall which is a cryptographic boundary okay so it could be a very convincing human being could say all kinds of things it could speak in your language does it but show me you know the the cryptographic proof and then it's like revealed to be something else okay so that's going to be a very important thing for the digital world
7:36:02you're not going to be able to tell what's real like the void camp test for replicants is cryptography and it's what Bitcoin represents, right?
7:36:11That's amazing. Uh, okay. So then to bring it all back a little bit to what's happening now in Kazakhstan, uh, as someone who is a, you know, I would put myself in your your category, I guess, as the maximalist, uh, sure, uh, monotheist, you know, somewhere in there, right? Um, and I look at now what you're building in Kazakhstan. Um, how should I be thinking about it as an individual? Is this something that I should be, you know, signing up and and booking my flight right now?
7:36:41So, so go to ns. Let me see if I can put this back on screen actually. So, go to ns.com and you said go to ns.com. So, that's the network school website.
7:36:59Yes, that's right. So, let's see if we put this on screen. Yeah. So go to ns.com right here. Very easy, very easy URL to remember. Okay, only two characters. Okay, so and just click apply and apply number school and you can apply by the very importantly individual or couples or families or full teams. Okay, and we've got experience in hosting all of these um you know like look I love the tech bro you know I guess people call us tech bros but I'm also for the tech mom, the tech dad, the tech family, the tech kids. So we're very family friendly,
7:37:27right? So um so basically individual, couple or family or team and you can choose your sort of package like if you want to just save lots of money we can give you like a dorm rate but if you want to get the most you know maxed out kind of plan we can do that too okay and get you like a nice apartment and essentially um but if you want to live inexpensively you can come to network school and you can just lock in and work right uh or you can enjoy the beautiful outdoors. They've got amazing horse riding all this stuff with just 30 minutes outside. It's a two million
7:37:57almost two million person city. So it's got everything that a giant city has.
7:38:00It's spotlessly clean. So basically come and visit. That's the first step. Just come and visit because whatever your mental image is of Kazakhstan is like think about what El Salvador was known for before Belli. It was like crime and whatever, right? And then Blly has put it into a totally different category, you know? So Kan is similar. It is completely different than what you think of it as. You should come and visit. Uh we're up there. It's it's just this amazing beautiful country. And uh so that's step one. So go to ns.com apply.
7:38:28And and I'm curious too like when you think about the type of person you said a mom, a dad, a student even, you know, it's a network school.
7:38:36Um am I coming to start a business? Am I coming to to learn? You know, am I coming to just work?
7:38:41All of these things. So let me show you, you know, some of the things. So basically, you know, we're the new SAS.
7:38:46Like society is a service, right? So we basically bundle it. That's funny, right?
7:38:50Yeah. That's great.
7:38:51And so the reason is, you know, like SAS is dead. No, SAS is back. Okay. And we use we basically bundle all this together because when you move to a new, you know, city, if you ever done that before, you have to set up all this stuff for yourself. Like where's the gym and where's like, you know, where can I where's the pharmacy, where's the this, where's that, all of that we just give to you. So you're just productive very quickly and it takes a surprising amount of time set up, you know, monitor, all that kind of stuff. Boom. So Society is a service. So we enable digital nomad.
7:39:18It's a digital nomad hub. One way of thinking about it, okay, and as I mentioned, so this is our HQ there. this building that looks like a sci-fi building, but it's actually real. Okay. And so, as you as you asked, you can learn tech. So, one thing we're rolling out is pass an exam, get a job. Okay.
7:39:35So, rather than the 48 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars of a college education, we can compress that into pass an exam, get a job. And so, we basically have you take a proctored in-person test and then if you do well on that, then we get you a job. Okay?
7:39:50So, it's not just for tech founders. We like tech founders, but it's also for individual engineers, people who want to learn and break into tech and so on.
7:39:57Okay. Crucially, we have got to focus on fundamentals, which is you don't just want to learn how to use AI, but you want to learn probability theory and so and so forth. All of that can be taught by basically giving people books, having them have time and exam, exam, exam.
7:40:11Examination over duration. That is to say, rather than four years, if you can get it done in four weeks and you can prove the wetwware is in your head, why not just do that, right? So examination over duration and then you spread rather than a 48 months upfront you know college imagine you have that 48 months over your life and every year of 50 years of you know work career you're retraining like one month that's kind of what network school is it's like continuous learning rather than upfront learning right okay so learn technology that's a key part also work remotely in a community people have you know digital
7:40:40nomads are often lonely they're isolated now we group them together everybody understands what you're doing they understand where you're from and you can also meet the locals and so on, right?
7:40:50So, we have events, we have all that kind of stuff. So, it's not just tech.
7:40:53We have, you know, people do yoga, they do, as I mentioned, horseback riding, they do skiing, they do all these kinds of events, they go to the city, they go to parties and and whatnot, birthday parties, all this stuff. Our community actually knows each other and has moved up to Kstan together. So, it's a real digital nomad community, not simply individuals, right? That's a new a nomadic tribe, right? New thing. Then you know we're basically taking crypto tribes which are famous online for fighting and we're when we bring them offline they're cooperating working together seeing each other face to face
7:41:20building things right um so co-working community city country then third burn calories so we try to make it as easy to be healthy as possible so healthy food gym and then we're going to get like you know ampic retroide tepatide all that kind of stuff obviously you have to get a prescription for that and so on you know within the law but basically all the biotech enhancing stuff um as much or as little of that as you want you can get that okay and uh so it's basically like for the person who wants to self-improve right and then you know bring your family I mentioned that here
7:41:50so drop off tutors healthy days and host your company host events all this kind of stuff right so if if you're the kind of person who's in this audience you'll probably like network school right so just go to ns.com/apply it's basically printing out tech into the physical world amazing I I have two more questions so first of all let's say in a hundred years when you're still very young because you know longevity has advanced but you're looking back on uh the network school uh what will you be
7:42:19looking forward to define as success of this right now as an experiment you know like what would you say is the success state of it good question I think the most important thing is um if we can have um essentially a lot of network societies around the world okay so and the reason is that I you know I know I don't have all the answers. Okay, I want to see a Lutheran network state. I want to see a
7:42:48keto network state. I want to see you know things I couldn't even imagine, right? Um you know for example uh maybe something oriented around you know some people like the the you know this weather or that whether they want skiing or something like that network of ski resorts all kinds of crazy things will happen. People are just into physics and they have that right they want to do Sanskrit immersion, Latin immersion, they want to bring back a dead language, right? So there's all kinds of themes you could have and it's going to be empirical as to what actually works and because I don't have all the answers because I believe in democracy because I
7:43:16believe in capitalism I believe that having a thousand different communities and the ability for you to opt into your community just like right now at age 18 you apply to the best college that will take you eventually at age 18 you apply to the best country that will take you and in fact those are actually already kind of the same thing. The reason is for many years many of the foreign students that applied to US colleges they got their F1 student visa opt you know H1B and so and so forth that whole era is ending obviously in America everybody's okay fine so that's over in
7:43:46America but I still think that was a very useful path and if you take it and you take away any of the bad pieces and you keep the good okay because it did build a lot of high-tech you take the good pieces and now what you can do is you can have that for all kinds of communities around the world you can come there and you apply to them just like you would to a college and by The reason I say those three, there's the same thing. You applied to a college, got your student visa, then you applied to a company, you got your work visa, then you got your green card and permanent residency and then citizenship and you got your country. So college, company and country were actually one bundled package that took people 10
7:44:15years to get through. Once we understand that people want to buy that as a package, right? All kinds of talent around the world wants to buy that as a package. And that, by the way, includes Westerners, that's like British people going to Dubai, right? That is, you know, like, you know, Americans, you know, moving around the world, this huge American diaspora now, right? all of that when all that comes together that is basically what we're what we're doing. Okay.
7:44:34Amazing. Yeah.
7:44:35Okay. Last question then. Um you're you're famous for making very amazing predictions about the future. Uh you were making one to me, you know, just backstage before we got on about where you think Kazakhstan's going to go, but I'll let you take it in whatever direction. You know, 2030. What's something that no one is tracking on and that you think is going to be a huge trend in the next few years?
7:44:56Biotech.
7:44:57Yeah. So um you know my my career started in biotech with DNA sequencing and so on. And in fact the reason I got into Bitcoin is my first company DNA sequencing company um we sold it for sever several hundred million but uh I realized that the FDA was actually holding back basically decades of innovation. And now to be clear I'm not against regulation per se. It's often binarized as either zero or one. But obviously most things have more than one bit of complexity. That's why the two-party system also right. So like
7:45:27like a photo has many bits of complexity, not just a like a white or black pixel, right? So it's not just no regulation or regulation. You can reconceptualize regulation as binary classification. That's a concept from machine learning and it basically means you've got a bunch of widgets on assembly line and you want to let the good widgets through and block the bad widgets. Okay, that's the same as let's say a security line. You want to let you know all the normal travelers through and anybody who's a bad actor you have them off. That's the same as products at amazon.com. You want to let all the good
7:45:56products through and then flag the ones that are scams or frauds. And similarly for a regulator, they want to let all the good drugs, devices, etc. through and then only flag the bad ones. So the thing is a false positive and a false negative are both bad and they both have a cost. And if you just ban everything, then yeah, you don't let any bad things through, but you don't let any good things through either. If you permit everything, you let the good things through, but you let the bad things through as well. So you have some trade-off function between false positives and false negatives. That is
7:46:25what binary classification is about. So the next generation of regulation begins with quantifying and thinking about this in terms of binary classification. And so you can do that. That's the kind of thing we're going to be doing in Kazan. Okay. So um now one way of think about it. Why did I say biotech? We see what held back Uber and Airbnb the taxi and hotel regulations written pre- internet.
7:46:44Right? As Larry Page said, any law written before the internet is probably obsolete. At least it needs to be reinvestigated, right? Because it just changes so many premises. you know, instant global communication and broadcast and all this kind of stuff, drones, AI, like everything written before the internet needs to be reexamined in light of the internet.
7:46:59Even for example, quote, the right to bear arms in, you know, 776 is itself something that references a technology because firearms didn't exist for much of human history, right? Um, any laws on flight obviously reference planes that didn't exist, right? So, new technologies do mean new laws. Point is um once we saw what hotel and taxi regulations had held back once we saw what the SEC had been holding back in terms of Bitcoin ETF and all these things okay you can now infer what the FDA is holding back the reason we don't
7:47:28have limmer generation the reason we don't have these things is because of the FDA right the it is because of these ancient governments that you you have these problems right and so we just need is new governments where people can opt out take risk and actually build you know start societies with new regulations and that's going to enable biotech Amazing. Well, ladies and gentlemen, bali shinasan.
7:47:48Thanks.
7:47:50Thank you so much.
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7:50:15here.
7:50:33Heat. Heat.
7:51:02Here we go.
7:51:41Down.
7:52:21Heat.
7:53:04Heat. Hey, Heat.
7:53:09Heat. Heat.
7:53:29Heat. Heat. N.
7:53:41Heat. Heat.
7:54:14Good job.
7:54:47Down.
7:54:55Heat. Heat. N.
7:55:40Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, heat. Welcome back into the live news desk at Bitcoin Asia 2026. Grace Remington with Shan Hagen and Belagi Swini Vasan joining us now after the last talk of the day. So much good stuff from you. So I want to rehash just a little bit of it. Um but you said school is a fundamental input to build community.
7:56:12I'm curious how has Bitcoin served served as a form of education for you and for society.
7:56:17Sure. So, well, the first is Bitcoin taught us all about what fiat currency is and what the Fed is and the thing which is just a little bit too abstract for people otherwise. They see prices going up and they might scapegoat like you know Chipotle or something like that and as if Chipotle is wants to raise the price of guacamole, but it's actually the Fed that's doing that to everybody.
7:56:38And I think just understanding that and understanding how deep that goes and how that distorts every kind of thing from interest rates to prices to the whole economy and every transaction is maybe the single most important thing Bitcoin does in from an education standpoint.
7:56:55The second big thing is decentralization and the idea that uh you can actually have resiliency in a non-violent way where you just have multiple replicates of things. And the third is um basically making cryptography something that's universal and you realize that that's actually the foundation of the post internet order. You know people talk about the post-war order but the post postwar order is the post internet order. You can think of the post order as a pre- internet order. Now we're
7:57:22entering the the post internet order.
7:57:25And in your talk, I thought it was very interesting that, you know, you talk about how something like Fort Knox might not have the utility it used to have in a world where you can easily make, you know, AI fakes and, you know, you got the deep fake problems. You have the uh oversaturation of of false news and false narratives. You know, one thing you mentioned is is Bitcoin goes beyond just proof of reserves in Bitcoin itself, but perhaps stable coins might sync with the Bitcoin chain in a post BIP 10in world especially. Yep.
7:57:51Could you dive into that in a little more detail for us?
7:57:52Absolutely. Absolutely. So on the first point, a photo of Fort Knox doesn't serve as an audit anymore. Neither does a video. Not even a 360 video and so on and so forth. If the only thing that would serve as an audit is if somebody who you trusted in a chain of trust was actually there physically and said, "I see all these gold bricks." And what it actually does, it makes us, for lack of a better term, um, epistemologically humble because to a greater extent, you realize that you're relying on the chain of reporters. Like if somebody if you
7:58:22know a fact, the reason you know that fact is a bunch of people in a chain went and researched that fact and brought it back to you. And often you don't actually know who those people were. Frequently you don't know, right?
7:58:34Even when you read a news article, most people don't like look at the reporter as the key person who's telling you the story because it's put in like small font and the headlines put in big font.
7:58:43So it's like presented as if it's this impartial thing, but it's actually one person's report, right? And so to audit Fort Knox, you actually need an individual to go and do it. And then to the and so that's why what whereas with Bitcoin, you can post an address and people can actually see the cryptography. They can see that the assets are real. So that's part one of what you asked. Then part two is every stable coin in the world because every country is now adding their own stable coins. You know, I launched USDC on the Coinbase side at Coinbase and that was, you know, we put in the first 25 million
7:59:13off of, you know, our balance sheet and that's now a $75 billion, you know, global asset, right? That that keeps growing. And in many ways, it's funny because it's giving the dollar, it's the one thing that's a growth story for the dollar. It's giving it a new lease on life, right? Um, and uh, and we don't know where that goes. I mean, maybe that's a trillion dollars on chain. If if you add like USDC and USDT, it's certainly more than hundred billion dollars, right? It's only closing on 200 or something like that last I checked.
7:59:40Trillion is really not out of sight. So that like a dollar becomes a digital dollar. And then that's true for every other fiat currency. Now those chains are really important chains. A lot of economic activity is happening on those chains. What they can do is every 10 minutes or so they can take a a hash of their chain tip. That's somewhat a technical concept but like think of it almost like a um a computation that reflects everything that was done all the history right and they can take that they can post that on the Bitcoin blockchain and that means that in a
8:00:09sense every country is paying tribute to the king of coins which is Bitcoin right their economies are backed up on the Bitcoin blockchain and that's of enormous value and that gives an ongoing demand for basically Bitcoin transactions as this global notary public and you you all bitcoiners are familiar with kind of these themes of of the economy moving on chain and this increasing demand for for bitcoin its network uh you know you have things like the genius act we're all aware of driving demand for stable coins or at
8:00:38least the government is betting on that another thing you mentioned in your in your keynote at the end what Brandon asked you uh for your prediction uh you talked about biotech which you have a background in um you know we obviously you know everyone right now is raving about peptides and research and AI optimization and research and things like this. Do you see that impacting lifespans? And as people live longer and are healthier, how is that itself going to impact the economy and finance?
8:01:08Yeah. So, for example, there's a study I posted on a while ago where you have two mice which are the same age and one of them received an injection and you can see it that this one is like older and grayer and fatter and this one is basically looks young. Okay, so this stuff works in mammals. It's not theory.
8:01:27It actually works. And you know, there's other things. For example, there's a cancer drug that had a side effect of reducing inflammation and you can see it um like repigmentizes hair, degra hair, and so on and so forth. And these are like multiple adult humans that look like 15 years younger. All this stuff exists. It's like this enormous title wave of biotech innovation that has been help and especially longevity innovation, right? Live let you live healthier longer and so on and so forth.
8:01:51literally reverse aging and not simply stop it. That has been held back by biotech regulation in the same way the SEC held back the Bitcoin ETF in the same way that hotel and taxi regulations held back Airbnb and Uber. And so, uh, I think that what Bitcoin does is because it changed the relationship between citizen and state and you're a customer of your state. A business is also a customer of their state's regulations.
8:02:14And now there's more governments that are open for business. We've gone out of the age of like a single jurisdiction setting the rules for everybody in the world. There's a reason, you know, FDA regulates not simply America but the rest of the world because there's something called regulatory harmonization. You ever heard that term?
8:02:30It's maybe the single most important term in the world that people don't know. It's as important as fiat currency actually. Why? Regulatory harmonization just like the Fed exports the dollar globally. The FDA and the SEC and all these this alphabet soup export their regulations globally. Okay? So the Fed exports inflation, the FDA exports regulation. And why? Because it gets all these other countries to sing in harmony with FDA rules. That's called harmonization. And actually big pharma
8:03:00companies like this because then they just get the approval in America and then they can export it everywhere in the world. But of course that level of centralization is also a single point of failure. So you have something in the US where for example the FDA fasttracked all the body scanners that TSA has because that's like with the government and so they get a pass, right? Even though that's like irdiating everybody every day for very dubious benefit, right? But something that's longevity enhancing faces all this crazy scrutiny, right? This is finally starting to change with peptides where we're finally
8:03:29re-entering the era of large effect size drugs as opposed to low side effect size. Those are two totally different things. Large effect size like Bitcoin has large effect size. Bitcoin also has large side effect size. Haha. Okay. It's got volatility. It's got, you know, the the roller coaster and so on. But net net, we'd rather have the large effect size with the larger side effect size.
8:03:50And, you know, I'm not saying that the large side effect size of these peptides are all bad. By the way, you know, phase one testing of of safety is actually much easier than people think. It's always phase two and phase three that actually add a lot of the cost. So, you can go to a pure phase two is like uh efficacy. Phase three is like comparative efficacy. These are just technical terms. I can explain what they mean. But the point is there's more and more kinds of tests that are done on a drug than really need to be done to just guarantee safety. Safety is actually relatively easy to do. Toxicology is relatively easy to do. You can even do for example toxicology on your own body.
8:04:18Why? You can take like a skin sample and do a cell culture make an organoid and it's like a little mini me and you can expose it to a drug and you can see what the reaction is before it it affects you. Right? It's like you know you can also do genetic tests. You can do pharmarmaccogenomics and you can see what a drug reaction is going to be before you have it. All this stuff, the technologies existed for 20 years. You go to farm GKB, you can see all of this.
8:04:38The reason you don't have a Do you have a sequence genome?
8:04:41No. Do you have a sequence genome?
8:04:43Do not. The reason you don't is because FDA FDA blocked everybody from getting their own genome. Just like, you know, they're trying to stop self- custody of wallets. They're trying to stop self- custody of genomes.
8:04:53Okay. Literally the same thing.
8:04:55They're trying to force it. Just like they try to force all custody of your funds through a bank. They try to force all custody of your actually all custody of your wealth through a bank, all custody of your health through the medical system. Okay? Now, I'm not saying there isn't anything of value there, just like there's not there's something of value in banks, but you also want to be able to take care of your own health like you do take care of your own. You're the number one customer for that, right?
8:05:18So, all of that self-custody and self-care has been blocked and now we're going to reenable that much more I can say. And and is that going to add strain to our financial system if people are living longer or is it going to be uh you know decreased because people are actually much healthier?
8:05:32Well, I mean let's first solve the problem and like look put it like this.
8:05:35Longevity I mean you know you know Brian Johnson my friend Brian Johnson right?
8:05:39So you know when Brian and I it's funny because we're both in finance and biotech but I was in biotech first then got into finance. He was a he was doing a payments company then he got into biotech and we met each other. He said something like why have we not been friends for like 15 years because we have so much you know we share a lot of common interests. Um, what I said to Brian is, you know, what does the Fed do? It basically takes away 2% of your wealth every year. The whole premise of Keynesianism is if you uh like they they will agree hyperinflation is bad, but they'll also say deflation
8:06:08is bad because they'll come up with this thing about, oh, you'll hoard the money and you won't spend it and so on. In practice, of course, hyperdelation is Moore's law. It's a computer industry.
8:06:16Prices drop every year. In theory, that would lead to hoarding behavior. In practice that means you buy more computers than ever before. So hyperinflation is actually good. Right?
8:06:25So the entire mainstream Keynesian economics is bad in terms of thinking of deflation as bad. Nevertheless their doctrine as you see my point in a second. Their doctrine is hyperinflation is bad but deflation is also bad. So 2% inflation each year the so-called New Zealand target that's supposedly good.
8:06:39So every year you lose 2% of your wealth according to mainstream you know uh Keynesianism. Similarly the mainstream medical American medical association medical community FDA and so on CPT codes that whole rigmmoral they say yeah fast death is bad okay but trying to live forever longevity you know that's also weird right so you should just lose 1% of your health every year okay and die at like somewhere around
8:07:07100 minus plus minus right so these guys want you to lose 2% of your wealth these guys want you lose one to two% of your health every year Okay. And just like Satoshi and Bitcoin rejected the premise that one wants to basically go bankrupt slowly, right? Then you know what longevity does? It rejects the premise that one wants to lose health slowly and that maybe we can actually go back up.
8:07:30Okay, that's actually a really cool comparison between Satoshi and and longevity and biotech. So, we've talked about the side effects of drugs. Let's talk about the side effects of Bitcoin.
8:07:38And something you said earlier or in last year's conference is that when Bitcoin wins, fiat billionaires get flipped. And I believe the research last year said that happens somewhere around 100k to 1 million per bitcoin. Um what does the timeline look like now, do you think?
8:07:53I mean the thing is it's very hard to say on this, right? But when Bitcoin wins um everybody who holds fiat like there there's uh there's a point and you can so let's say there's this thing called the Bitcoin rich list okay which is just taking onchain Bitcoin addresses and looking at how much BTC they have okay now this the silly but let's say ballpark thing is to say one address one person why is it silly well on the one hand one address could belong to an
8:08:23exchange which represents many people right on the other hand one user could have many addresses. Okay, so it's very hard to say still if you and you can make assumptions on this as to whether this factor or this factor outweighs each other and so on or where they cancel each other. So you can make mathematical assumptions. Subject to those assumptions, if you take the Bitcoin rich list and just naively say that like each one is one individual where the exchanges and the many addresses balance each other out roughly, then once you get on the order
8:08:52of 2,000 onchain billionaires, that actually equals the number of fiat billionaires worldwide. Okay? And that actually happens very fast once you because once price really roars, okay, the next 10x means that property becomes cryptography. Like what wealth is is cryptocurrency. Like you don't have like the fiat system is like your petty cash in your you know it's it's like something which is not like real. Cryptocurrency is actually what's real.
8:09:21And so that's the internet first world.
8:09:22We're already trying starting to get there. Bitcoin is like in any country around the world. You can be in the Middle East. You can be in Latin America. You can be in Japan. Someone there will accept BTC. They will understand that it's valuable. It's actually already become global liquid reserve collateral. By the way, it's liquid in a way. US treasuries aren't.
8:09:40Okay. The whole point of US treasuries is, oh, that's a risk-free reserve asset of the global system. But you can't liquidate treasuries now or else the Fed and the US government will punish you for doing that or they'll give a bailout like they just did with Japan, right?
8:09:53So, treasuries are no longer liquid collateral. Okay? Bitcoin is. So, it's already basically replaced treasuries.
8:09:58The point is that world as we enter that world um I think uh that you can mathematically work it out around between 100,000 to a million you have 2,000 crypto billionaires 2,000 fiat billionaires the flipping okay that's a billionaire flipping that's thematically similar to what you said uh during your session with Brandon about how you know eventually nation states are going to have to use alternatively to Fort Knox Bitcoin as proof of creditworthiness how far away from that reality do you think we are
8:10:2610 years maybe you The thing is this stuff maybe maybe less maybe more but it's like like think about how far we've come okay like Bitcoin isn't that you it's 18 years old now you know any kid who's born today uh when were you born 1999 okay so the internet just always existed for you right and you know yeah I won't ask you I appreciate that okay but uh but let's say I don't know let's say the automobile always existed
8:10:55for our whole life okay but there's a point where automobiles aviation. Those are innovations. For any child who's born today, Bitcoin might as well be gold. It's been around as long as they've been alive. Their parents knew about it. They have an opinion on it and so on and so forth. So, it's something where like many heads of state, every not many, every head of state, every bank, every country has a policy on Bitcoin. And the initial thesis by certain statists was, "Oh, it was all going to get banned. Oh my god, blah blah." And that didn't happen. And what
8:11:25actually happened was the energy to ban it also led to the energy to accept it. And it's actually like a it's a policy lever. It's like you know many countries you can think of them as defined by a bunch of you know switches like um I'll try and come up with an example like I don't know is um I'll try to give a non-controversial example. Uh go controversial.
8:11:44Okay. Okay. Let's say firearms. Okay.
8:11:46Like are firearms legal in private arms or not? Okay. And many countries ban them and some allow them. Okay. But that really changes the character of society downstream. It's like light mode versus dark mode in your interface. But more important than that, there's a few switches like this that change the character of society downstream. You you have a totally different kind of society with or without these kind of switches.
8:12:05And whether Bitcoin is legal or illegal or heavily regulated or unrestricted is going to be one of those critically important upstream switches. I think Miklly was one of the very first of that. So like the end of fiat, we're in the middle of the end of fiat. It's one of these weird things where it's gradually then suddenly like what's happening with Japan and there will be a breaking moment. I think this year uh you're actually already seeing the last US aircraft carrier pull out of Asia. I don't know if you do you guys know about that.
8:12:29No.
8:12:29Yeah. It was not obviously for various reasons. It wasn't put in the big headlines, but you can see it. Last aircraft carrier pulled out of Asia. Um, and I think it's quite likely that the US basically pulls its military out of Eurasia in general after this Iran thing is over and it just focused on Latin America and the Western Hemisphere and uh maybe it expands into Latin America deacto or dour with you know Venezuela, Colombia, all these places you know going to, you know, let's say the the the US side of things but it basically
8:12:57abandons Eurasia and probably Africa and so on. If that happens, the dollar is no longer the global reserve currency. And so what is well it is going to be cryptocurrencies, you know, because you know that's like uh it bitcoin is global reserve collateral. I and I think there there's there's many counterarguments on this. For example, quantum QSB transactions are there now. Quantum safe bitcoin transactions that just came out today. May the biggest news of the day may of a while right very very big deal.
8:13:24It just costs more in transaction fees. Um there's privacy. There's all kinds of counter arguments. But I think that so long as Bitcoin survives this coming era of AI security attacks, there's Bitcoin Red team that's that's going through that, it actually becomes something that can't be seized and uh let's see.
8:13:39Okay, we just covered a lot. So, as we wrap the conference, wrap the show today, what is the one message you want our audience to take with them?
8:13:46Uh apply to network school, right? You know, but but here's why. Basically, if Bitcoin is the digital, we also need the physical, right? And network state is theory and network school is practice of building friendly opt-in communities that um are based on you choosing which country, which city, which community you join. And that's what Bitcoin represents. That's what network tool represents. So go to ns.com.
8:14:11Well, that's a great way to end the day. Thank you so much, Belgi. Fantastic insights. Hope we see you around again.
8:14:16Um and that's a wrap on Bitcoin Asia 2026. Before you leave, make sure you subscribe. Yes, let's hear the applause, guys. Subscribe to the Bitcoin Magazine YouTube channel and turn on those notifications so you don't miss the launch of BMTV on September 14th. A few thank yous to go around. Thank you to our title sponsor, MetaPlanet. Thank you to everyone at Bitcoin Inc. for your hard work on this event. To all the guests on site today, thank you for being here. And thank you for watching the stream for Shan Hagen Bellagi. I'm
8:14:42Grace Dington. We'll see you next time.
8:15:04Heat. Heat.
8:16:15Heat. Hey. Hey. Hey.
8:16:46My wheel.
8:16:52Go go go go.
8:17:32Hey.
8:17:58down.
8:18:03Hey, hey, hey.
8:18:22Heat. Heat.
8:18:39Hey, hey, hey.
8:19:15Hey, hey, hey.
8:19:37Heat.
8:19:46Hey, heat. Hey, heat.
8:19:52go down.
8:20:09Hey Heat. Heat.
8:20:44Yeah.
8:20:53Heat.
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Balaji Srinivasan
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Balaji Srinivasan recommends the resource he names “farm GKB.” He points to it in the context of pharmacogenomics, saying genetic testing can help anticipate a person’s reaction to a drug and that the underlying technologies have existed for 20 years.