Thank you everyone for joining us here today. Excited to have a panel here on crypto. We've got a few different perspectives, so we're calling it a crypto worldview. I'm Alex Markgraf. I cover fintech and crypto for KeyBanc. We have Fred Thiel here from MARA , James Gernetzke from Exodus , and Gary Simonson from Coincheck . We've got about 55 minutes. I'll maybe stop halfway through and we can poll the room for questions and just kind of help that guide us for the rest of the conversation. To start, I think just given the nature of the three respective businesses, it'd be helpful for an introduction from each of you personally and just a quick, you know, 30 second, 60 second overview of the business.
Sure. Fred Thiel, Chairman and CEO of MARA Holdings. We're the largest publicly traded Bitcoin miner in the world. The company is really essentially eight years old at this point. We started in 2017. Started with an asset light model, then began vertically integrating and grew very quickly and have raised, I'm going to say, about $5 billion of capital, almost $6 billion of capital over the past eight years. We're the second largest holder of Bitcoin of publicly traded companies in the world with over 50,000 Bitcoin on our balance sheet. We are not a BTC treasury company, just to be fair, but we have, if you look across our holdings, a little over half are self-mined and the rest are purchased. We're very active in two primary areas today. One is essentially converting underutilized energy into compute, which primarily is Bitcoin. We operate 16 data centers on four continents, up and down a corridor, kind of from Texas through North Dakota, Ohio, as well as Finland, UAE, and Paraguay. In Finland, for example, we heat 80,000 homes with the offtake from one of our data centers, two of our data centers. The other two areas we operate in are managing our own treasury assets of Bitcoin, and then, more recently, we began to focus on inference at the edge and sovereign cloud technology. We just announced yesterday an investment, the majority control investment in a French company called Exiaon, which is a company that was kind of incubated and then held by EDF, which is the largest low carbon energy producer in the world and now one of our partners in deploying that to data centers. We believe that the Middle East, meaning the Gulf regions, and Europe are huge opportunities for growth for AI and inference at the edge. We look forward to kind of utilizing our energy assets to maximize the value per megawatt that we have.
Thanks, James.
Thanks. Yep. James Gernetzke with Exodus Movement. We are the only publicly traded self-custodial digital asset wallet. The company's been around for 10 years now, and we've grown significantly. We have a couple of unique things about us. We support over 40 different blockchain networks and have some of the best customer service in the industry. We're the only publicly traded company in the world that has a common stock token. We're happy to get into that a little bit more later. We just announced a deal with Consensys MetaMask on Monday. Talking about our growth, we've learned a lot in the past 10 years, taken a lot of those different things that we've learned as a self-custodial, multi-chain wallet and have taken a lot of those things and we're not only offering them to obviously our own user base, but now we have partnerships with Ledger, Magic Eden, and now MetaMask. Some of the largest names in the industry and providing services for them as they go about their primarily self-custodial, but multi-chain journey. Yeah, and so much more we could talk about, but I'll pass it on.
Thank you. I'm Gary Simonson. I'm Executive Director, President and CEO of Coincheck Group NV. We're headquartered in the Netherlands, Nasdaq traded. We went public in December of last year. We have two subsidiaries, Coincheck Inc., which is one of the largest crypto exchanges in Japan, and also Next Financial Tech, which is a node staking operator headquartered in Japan but provides staking services globally. I'm a TradFi, people in the room that know me, been in banking financial services a very long time. I look at the space from that viewpoint. We just announced this week a partnership with Mercari in Japan, which is one of the largest, if not the largest, consumer-to-consumer platforms in Japan. They have 23 million daily active users. They have a super app, and that super app is Mercoin. If you want to do trading in Bitcoin, Ethereum, or XRP, we announced a partnership with Mercari and Mercoin that the Coincheck API will embed into that app and users of Mercoin can do their crypto trading through us and for other coins. We're very excited about that partnership. We've not released any more information other than they have 3 million users on the Mercoin app. It's the app within the Mercari app. Our basic strategy is to be a global crypto services financial holding company. Coincheck Inc. only operates in Japan. We'll continue to operate in Japan. The holding company is looking at acquisitions and opportunities globally. We have a global perspective on what's going on.
Thanks, Gary. I want to sort of get to your respective theses around digital assets. I think for the amount of attention that the sector gets, there's still a lot that's sort of undefined and untested. I'm hoping to get some differing views up here. Why don't we work in reverse order? Gary, maybe start with what digital assets sort of represent to you. I mean, I think there are several buckets that folks like to put them in, whether it's store of value, whether it's a payment rail, or just a sort of higher risk asset class. You can add to that if you want, but maybe you start and just give us your thesis and the Coincheck thesis, and then we'll move down the line.
I actually just wrote an internal thesis. I thought about passing it around, but then maybe not a great idea. I've got a very simple thesis, and I've said this for years, because it's a bigger thing than what coins are going places. I've said the old boss is going to look a hell of a lot like the new, the new boss is going to look a hell of a lot like the old boss. The old truth is it's all going to be regulated, right? That's the really first undertone. It's all going to be regulated globally. There's no way to escape it, and that really shapes it all. What's interesting, and I want to say right up front also, is I think I've called a lot of things right. I can be opinionated. I've also called some things wrong. The biggest thing I've called wrong in the past couple of years is I thought that the people in the space that were doing it right probably had a two or three-year run to grow and expand globally while the players that didn't do it right were distracted. It's really hard to do vendor management with a bank if you've got a bad reputation or you're screwed up with things. It's really hard to get through the SEC if you've got questions on culture or things internally and messiness. Trump changed all that. That's a really important thing for the room to know. Where I was right was that it was all going to be regulated. Where I was wrong is the speed in which the change is occurring of the bad actors or questionable actors or those on the edge who are trying to fight authority are now racing to join authority. Trump said the U.S. is going to dominate the world in crypto, changed everything globally. Suddenly, whether it's Japan, whether it's Europe, the rate of change and adoption to compete with the U.S. dominating crypto is making everything move quicker globally. On the DeFi side, there is now this race to acquire and landgrab assets globally. They don't worry so much about integration. They're worried about landgrab and figuring out how to integrate later, and that's in the crypto players, but also the DeFi. I think it all becomes, and TradFi. I think it all becomes TradFi, actually. That's my thesis. I think it's all TradFi. They've got the deeper, broader customer bases. There's a low barrier of entry in crypto in any area of it. Really low barrier of entry. Technology is changing so quickly. I don't know if anyone in this room thinks they can keep up with where crypto is or what crypto is globally and how it's changing or what Trump is doing globally. Raise your hand because neither one of those can anybody keep up with. That influence means that the crypto DeFi culture has suddenly embraced TradFi, tried to get in bed with TradFi. TradFi is looking at all of it. You see, you look at what Coinbase is doing, or Robinhood is doing, all the mixture of assets of structured products and traditional financial products being blended, all the super app. It's all global and it's moving quickly. I think that's the biggest influence. It's all about scale, which is no different than traditional financial services have been. If you think about my career has been bank mergers and acquisitions, financial institutions, mergers, acquisitions. If you think about the 1990s in the U.S., why banks merge, you're seeing that in the crypto space now globally. That's the first part I'd say. Then the product parts of it, how many stablecoins does the world need? It's going to be a really interesting question. You know, we worry about the U.S. dollar decide, if it's going the way it's going right now, the U.S. dollar is sitting in a pretty good place because it's a stablecoin based on the U.S. dollar, right? The rails, and who controls the rails controls the world, pick a SWIFT. That's an interesting part. You know, custody, all of this, by the way, I think becomes very low margin in many areas. Again, that's one of the big issues, right? The competition, the scale, retail gets lower margin globally. So much of it becomes commoditized. That's why you've got to get scale.
Thank you. I think if we're looking at digital, the question is like, what do you think about digital assets? I would take a slightly different approach. I would start from a technology-first approach. I think I would say that everything will be tokenized. If you think about what, and it goes backwards from there and what those implications are, obviously, you know, people in this room and at the conference here, you think financial systems, right? That's obviously an easy spot to see where things are and who will be disintermediated. We'll probably spend the most part of time talking about that. It will go beyond that. I think it's like Worldcoin and some of the things people are doing with identity and tokens like that. It actually really does go beyond just things in the financial world, whether you're talking about tokenized car titles and all of the implications beyond that. If you just stick with, you know, and obviously regulation has an impact on that. It's just a matter of timing. I would look at regulation as if you look at the previous administration and how much they slowed adoption and how much they slowed innovation, and then compare that to the floodgates, as Gary mentioned, and just how everything is open now and how the pace of innovation is going up. We definitely see a world where you can, you know, everything will be tokenized and our products are building for that and building for it in a way that is also, you know, obviously we focus on self-custody and we're building things where you can disintermediate all of the intermediaries that you want to. There will always be a world for custodians and things of that nature. We think that even if you look at paper stock certificates and common stock tokens, for example, right now it is very legal. You can go and you can have your stock taken, your Tesla stock taken out of your brokerage, put it in book entry, tell the transfer agent you want a paper stock certificate. Gary and I, Gary can give me, I don't know what they're trading at, $1,500 worth of cash, and I can give him my stock certificate. That's a perfectly legal thing to do. The problem is it just doesn't scale. The technology of tokens and tokenization and DeFi and all of these things make that possible, make peer-to-peer and self-custodial and make it possible for the masses at scale. That's where we see the future. Fred?
I agree with a lot of what's been said. I'll start there. They have spent a lot of time at the White House and with Beau Haines and David Sacks over the past six to nine months, or even longer, actually spent time with Trump prior to the election, so that he and his team would really understand what crypto could do, Bitcoin being the base of his approach to things. Worldcoin and World Liberty was a company that Wyckoff's son started before the election, that was a launch for this as well. I agree that the floodgates opened because Trump essentially mandated the administration to go make it happen. The fear quickly evaporated from people who had been beaten down by the former administration, and a lot of things happened. As I look at the impact of digital assets and what the real implication is, I think a couple of things. One is everything is going to be on the blockchain and everything's going to be run by an AI agent. From a bottoms-up approach, what does that mean? It means that everything can be tokenized, including your healthcare data, including your buying behavior data, including your car, your home. Everything can be fractionalized, including your car, including your home, including you could sell your healthcare data if you wanted to. Stock certificates, ownership in buildings, real estate, partnerships. The world of public-private is going to very much meld into a gray area. What is absolutely necessary is we need market structure for these assets to define what are securities, what aren't securities, which is why the legislation that's on the docket for this fall, hopefully, will get passed because if the Clarity Act isn't passed, we're going to run into a hard wall, which will get unwound in three years because unless it's legislated and put into law, enacted into law, it can be undone by a future administration, which will put a full stop on investment by the large players. I think that TradFi and DeFi are going to meld a lot, but it's going to meld in a way I don't think a lot of people realize, in that when you start tokenizing everything, you can have 27 million different stablecoins. It doesn't matter. They're all equal to a dollar and nobody cares because there will always be a place you can exchange them and due to network effects, eventually some of them will disappear and they'll have zero volume. There will, because they're all tied to the dollar, it doesn't matter, right? If you were on a commodities exchange and you're trying to exchange corn for X, that would be much harder and the network effect laws would rule. When everything is tied to a dollar, it's just a different version of a dollar. The banks in this country used to produce their own dollars. I think there will be gazillions of stablecoins, just like there are gazillions of affinity programs. They'll operate within their own ecosystems or outside of it. The U.S. government is, and the dollar is going to be the biggest benefactor of that because they're all going to have to hold treasury assets. The other thing I think is that Tether is going to own the market. If looking at exchanges, looking at wallets, looking at all these, look at what Tether's buying today. They can spend $5 billion a quarter to buy things. The companies that you see that have size and heft will either be disintermediated, bought by Tether influence, and Tether is not national in any way. They operate across the world. They're global. They don't care about individual countries and they hate centralization. I think you're going to see a battle between the centralized authorities, banks, for example, and people like Tether. You're going to see a battle royale actually go on and it's going to be a race to the bottom for fees. You're going to find a way to issue yield on stablecoins through one mechanism or another. Now that you have staking allowed by the SEC, if that gets instantiated into law, then that's the form and that will take Tether's kind of fuel out of their sails because it's the interest off treasury bills that funds all their money. Lastly, I think the under 40 crowd who don't like index funds, they don't like traditional financial instruments. They love to bet on meme stocks. They love crypto. You can look at some of the stodgiest organizations in the world, endowment funds. Do you know that Harvard has over $100 million of IBIT on its balance sheet? When institutions like that start buying crypto assets, for lack of a better term, it says it's really here to stay. I think, yes, it's here to stay, but what I think is dead are national stock exchanges. We're going to be trading 24/7, 365 on a global basis, and it's going to be very transparent, the marketplaces, and it's going to cause all sorts of havoc for hedge funds and traditional funds because it's not a nine to five job anymore. It's going to be trading just like crypto trades 24/7. I think there's a lot of disruption that's going to happen. You're going to see a lot of companies that get dislocated and displaced, and potentially there will be a number of large banks whose revenue streams have depended on this who will suffer because new players will dominate from other countries and they'll be able to attack. A little bit dystopian maybe for the industry, but I think you're dead on.
I think everyone wants to get more anyway.
Yeah, I think you're dead on. It's a question of how long it takes. I do, you know, I've been in this space a long time. As a bank regulatory lawyer, you made the comment that you go back before the National Bank Act and every bank issued their own bank note. Now, if you were in Missouri and you were some farmer and you wanted to go to New York and buy some barbwire or something and you took a bank note to New York, how the hell did they know if that bank was even there anymore, right? When the telegraph came, they could communicate back, but it was not a greater efficient system. Federal Reserve system, the National Bank Act, all these things came along and we've got one dollar. What is it? It's a promise to repay a dollar now. It used to be based on a commodity, right? Silver certificate, gold certificates. You can call some store value. What I find so different now is, yes, there can be an endless number of coins traded or stablecoins. How many have full meaningful traction to do large, large institutional or cross-border trades? That's who decides, who decides and who do you bet on that's going to be the winner and losers is really hard when you're seeing the change so quickly.
Yeah, but to Fred's point, I don't think people are going to care. There's going to be 27 million. Even right now there's a ton of, you just go on our platform and look at all the different stablecoins that we support and have supported for years. A lot of people don't realize, say USDC, it's on multiple networks. It's on Ethereum, it's on Algorand, it's on Solana. Tether, same thing, right? On our platform right now, you can very easily trade USDC on Solana for Tether on Ethereum. If, say, Amazon comes out with a stablecoin and Walmart comes out with a stablecoin, if, you know, I'm cheap, so I might deal mostly in Walmart stablecoins, but maybe I have to pick Gary and he's higher class than I am, so he's going to want Amazon stablecoins. We're building products and we already have the ability to support any of these stablecoins that come out and we have the ability to make it seamless. You don't even know, and the people won't even know. They don't care. They'll just see a dollar. Platforms like Exodus will be able to say, "Hey, you know, James has $100 of Walmart coins. He needs to pay Gary." Gary only takes Amazon stablecoins. Behind the scenes, we'll make that simple, easy, and you'll never know. I'm just paying $100 to Gary.
Just like you use Zelle between banks today, you'll send digital whatever.
Again, I don't disagree, but if you look at, say, Toyota is paying all their invoices globally through a stablecoin, right? They're going to, maybe they're going to show a stablecoin or they're going to use one stablecoin. They're not going to probably go out in the market and buy 10,000 different stablecoins. You're going to say this is a stablecoin paying our invoices, right? I do think you're going to have volumes that flock to a certain number. I don't know that number. Yes, you'll have, because they're also, you know, if you have 300,000 stablecoins, a million stablecoins, what happens, as you said, when one falls out of favor or use and suddenly goes away? What happens with someone that's got that coin?
As long as the stablecoin follows the rules and holds the actual dollar resources, somebody will just trade away from that coin into Tether or USDC, and that coin will fall away. Nobody loses any money.
The verification, this is the verification that they follow the rules, the verification, the audit system of what is backing that coin. You've got to have a regulatory system.
That's why the Clarity Act is something.
Right. You're talking U.S. Let's talk globally. You've got to have a system that is regulating how it's clear, it's transparent, you know what is backing it.
The biggest fear, sorry to take this to a ghost track.
No, I think it's good.
The biggest fear, and you bring up Toyota as an example, a lot of people don't realize this, but many multinationals actually operate on U.S. dollars as their internal accounting methodology because it's such a big trade partner. Even though they may be a Japanese, German, Brazilian company, there are too many currency fluctuations and they do too much export or they do too much import, so they're already dollarized. I think what this really says, moving away from how do you audit these things, is that the world is going to become dollar dominated. This is what really is the beauty of this whole concept with stablecoins, is they're only stable as long as the rate of exchange amongst them is constant. The only way to do that is they'll have to be worth the exact same thing. Yep. If they're all worth a dollar, forget about euros, yens, Swiss francs, right? Those currencies will exist, but over time they'll disappear. Anyone who lived in Europe with the transition from individual currencies to the euro, you had about a year where everything had two prices, you know, francs and euros, and then it disappeared. Today nobody even remembers how to denominate something in those currencies. I think we're going to go to universal galactic credits or whatever that was from whatever TV show or movie that was, right? At that point, you remove all the friction from transacting. When money has velocity, businesses have velocity. When you combine money velocity and energy velocity, you'll have future productivity gains when you then layer on AI and what's going to happen. I didn't want to take it down that route.
That's great. That's what I was hoping for. It's a spicier taste of it.
Again, if you're an investor now, where the hell do you put your money?
That's actually the next question.
Yeah, where do you put it? No, I'm just kidding. Yeah.
I want to talk about the sort of proliferation of Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Fred, I think you're in a good position to address this. I guess maybe just give us the sort of MARA perspective on one, why companies are doing this, which I think you addressed a little bit earlier. As you think about the holdings on the MARA balance sheet, just deployment of those assets over time.
Sure. We're a Bitcoin miner. It's like a gold miner, right? If you're a gold miner and you think the price of gold is going to move at a rate that is greater than your average weighted cost of capital, then you wouldn't sell your gold. You'd hold it if you could, and you would just raise money in the public markets. In the Bitcoin mining world, we've had the luxury of, for years, being able to raise money to fund operating expenses, essentially fund a burn rate because we didn't want to cash in the checks we were being given by our customers, meaning the Bitcoin we get from when we mine Bitcoin. If you look over the past 15 years, excluding three years, Bitcoin was the highest performing asset of any asset class. Today, it's the fifth largest asset, I think, by size, and it still generates a huge return. I mean, our mark-to-market gain, I think in Q1, Salman, my CFO's in the front row, so he'll keep me honest on this, was equal to, I don't know how many times our revenues, right? It generates a huge return for us, and that's the right place for us to hold our assets. Plus, we essentially create Bitcoin at a discount to the spot, though we do go in the market and buy it. I think it makes sense if you're in the business to hold it. Now, if you are a medical device company, Semler Scientific, for example, and you all of a sudden decide to become a Bitcoin standard company, if you're losing money in your operating business and you're holding Bitcoin in the balance sheet, that shouldn't cause you to all of a sudden have a 10x share price increase. Today, I think there are 72 Bitcoin treasury companies that are live at this point, most probably, that are public, possibly, or going through the G-Strategy.
Treasury strategy, the people that hold Bitcoin balance.
Yeah, there are a few hundred that actually hold Bitcoin of some amount on the balance sheet. There's a website you can go to, right? Bitcointreasury.net, I think it is, that shows that. You have a lot of companies that do this. Does it make sense for them to do? I mean, should Apple hold a certain percentage of their assets in Bitcoin? That's a treasury decision. What will happen over time is that, A, the volatility in Bitcoin price will decrease, which is what it's been doing. The vol is now under 40, I think, right? Which is pretty calm compared to where it was before. You're not seeing these huge drawdowns, and when you do have a drawdown, it comes right back up. We saw one last week, for example. As volatility comes down, though, also the price appreciation starts slowing. The attractiveness of Bitcoin as an asset on the balance sheet, from an asset appreciation perspective, will start declining. It will likely remain in the 20% year- over- year, just simply because of its finite amount and people's desire to hold it. Because if the dollar is essentially losing 7% - 8% value year -over -year, if Bitcoin gains 20% in dollar denominated terms, you're pretty far ahead. I think as long as we have this, you know, essentially fiscal financial policy in this country of driving the dollar down, while trying to stimulate growth, you have a bonanza world for assets like Bitcoin. For the foreseeable future, that's likely an interesting place to put your money. Would I put 100% of my money there? I'm personally over-allocated to it. I wouldn't recommend it to people because I think, A, you need to have money to spend. If there was a major drawdown in Bitcoin, you would want to have assets that are not correlated to Bitcoin. Bitcoin, by the way, is very correlated to equities, especially the NASDAQ. It's not correlated to gold. It's not an anti-inflation hedge in any way at all. I think you need to go into it eyes open and realize that it is a store of value that doesn't generate yield and you have to make it work for you if you're going to have it. We certainly have to make it work when we hold it. We are happy if we can generate 5% yield on it. I could do that today with treasury bonds. It's the price appreciation that we really drive. Yeah.
James, anything you want to add?
Yeah, at Exodus, we also have over 2,000 Bitcoin in our treasury. We're also not a Bitcoin treasury company per se. We have always had Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Where we're different is we actually generate our revenue in Bitcoin. If you want to work at Exodus, you have to take your salary in Bitcoin. Basically, we've grown the vast majority of our Bitcoin holdings from operations.
By the way, does the salary go down as Bitcoin price goes up?
No, it's, I go back and I look at when I started in 2019 and Bitcoin was at $3,500 and I look at my pay stubs, I'm like, damn you, mortgage. It creates a bunch of unique perspectives as you're going about just from, you know, I was also a former Certified Treasury Professional. I let that lapse. If you think about treasury departments, large companies like Apple and all these places, they don't just put their money in a bank or even T-bills, right? I mean, maybe Warren Buffett is different, but anyway, if you think about Bitcoin, and more companies like Tesla, et cetera, are going to add Bitcoin, some allocation of it for the reasons Fred mentioned. That brings up a whole new set of examples. For the past 10 years, as we've gotten to hundreds of millions of dollars in our treasury and our company's grown larger and payroll has become more complex and to pay 210 people regularly has become more and more complex. We've had to develop systems. I always go back to the best Christmas movie ever made, Die Hard, and you think about all of the security systems because there, you know, Nakatomi or whatever, they had all those bearer bonds in their treasury and all the protections that they had around it. I think there's going to be a real opportunity for companies to support Bitcoin treasuries because, especially as you mentioned earlier, people under 40, it's just the norm. For all of us old people, it's a little bit harder to just fathom and to think about why in God's name do they like Bitcoin better than Ford stock. Coming out of the Great Recession and everything of that nature, I think it's just the generational mindset that's going to change everything, even to stodgy old corporate treasuries.
Just think about why did Gen X go to index funds? Because managed money didn't perform any better than.
Exactly.
It all went to index funds. Now it's all moving to crypto and meme and back to managed.
Yeah, exactly. It's a beautiful world.
We already support corporate treasuries with our Coincheck Prime product, so we're seeing that in Japan. Japan does not have real institutional adoption right now. They're waiting for the next regulatory evolution. They could, but again, culturally, they're waiting for certain signaling for institutions really to go into crypto in Japan. On a corporate level for treasury, we're starting to see through our product more and more demand for it. I agree with that part. One question that I ask all the time is, and I really want, this is not on your list probably, but I really want your opinion because these guys, these guys know a lot. They're very good. Do you think there's any chance technology comes along and usurps Bitcoin and there's something in its place?
Why would I just invest in a company that has a quantum computer?
Yeah.
Let me answer that more fully. Today, if you take today's quantum computer, you need 100,000 of them to be able to even have a first crack, and it's only Bitcoin wallets. It's not the Bitcoin blockchain. Quick thing about quantum: quantum computers are really good at factoring math problems. If you think about RSA encryption, log onto your bank account, log onto your email, those are all RSA encryption algorithms. They are asymmetric. It's a factoring. That's how that public-private key works. The Bitcoin blockchain is a symmetric algorithm, so it is not susceptible. However, 1.6 million wallets of the original old Bitcoin wallets are very susceptible because the public key is known. You can just take that, run it, put it into a quantum computer, and get a result. Not yet. You need a lot more powerful quantum computers to do it, but five to ten years from now, potentially. You're either going to have a soft fork in the Bitcoin blockchain for those 1.6 million wallets, or you're going to see people start moving, like you saw recently, these older wallets to new quantum-resistant wallets. You can implement quantum resistance today with Bitcoin. I would be much more worried about quantum computers hacking BofA and all the other places because what you have to realize is with quantum, it's not the data you have today, but they've already got huge amounts of internet traffic they've captured that they can then go back and hack and have all your passwords. They don't have to hack the bank. They have all this transaction traffic they've already collected, nation states, that is China, Russia, North Korea. The minute they want to, they can either bleed pennies or just open the hoses. There's a lot more money there to be taken than Bitcoin, and they can't stop that. The problem with Bitcoin is the minute you move something, everybody knows about it. That doesn't happen with banks. I sat with the President of Citibank in a conference and asked her about when they were going to implement quantum resistance. She said, "Oh, we're already quantum proof." I said, "But you're still using RSA architecture." She said, "Yes, it's quantum proof." I said, "No, it's not. Go talk to your CIO." The banks don't really know themselves when they're going to do this because it's hugely expensive and it's like Y2K, necessary evil to have to do it. It's super expensive. They have to rip and replace a lot of technology, and the only reason I know anything about this is I was part of a group that helped NIST figure out what quantum resistance means. You'll see over the next five years, more and more quantum resistant—there are three algorithms that NIST has selected—will roll out for use in banks and websites and all that sort of stuff. At that point, you push the quantum curve out another 100 years, most probably.
Yeah, we've looked at quantum actually very deeply also. I have a text I received yesterday, because we looked really deep and built a team that's very embedded in different parts of the ecosystem that are pretty knowledgeable. I will say, I wanted a confirmation, so I reached out to who I reach out to. If you're looking at the government level, they still think it's much further out than the investors do. That's always been the case. Everything we've looked at, it's real, just like crypto is real. That's why I'm a naysayer because all of this is real. It's just how long does it take and what are the true utility values? What is it really solved? Is it a solution looking for a problem, or is it a problem you're solving? What I find again about this is we can sit here and talk about where things are going all day long, but it's not what's happening tomorrow or next month or six months or a year. It's really hard to predict any of it. It's really hard to invest in right now. It's really hard to make the call because a lot of the technology in crypto is changing, right?
That's why people like Bitcoin treasury companies, because they can at least understand it.
I don't. I mean, I get it. For a while, there's also a book, a movie called The Big Short. You know, one might watch it again. I'm not, you know, it works for a while till it doesn't.
Yeah, and I think that's the interesting thing. I mean, at Exodus, you know, that's why we're multi-chain, right? Because, you know, we're not about picking winners and losers. I think the answer to the problem you phrased was in your comments where you said the investors are ahead of the government. I think that's one of the most beautiful things about the cryptocurrency ecosystem, that competition just rules. There's not a more competitive space than the crypto ecosystem.
That's true.
That's why players like Exodus, that's why we focus on multi-chain. We don't pick winners and losers. We are Switzerland. We don't care if you're a Tether fan or a USDC fan, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, we love you all. May the best chain win. Until that actually happens and quantum computing forces one over all the others or whatever, we're just going to be open to everybody. That's kind of our take.
Yeah. I want to pause just for any questions in the audience before we keep moving. Okay. James, it's actually a good segue to another question I had on here on competition. I mean, you talked about it being very, very competitive, but I'll direct this at you and Gary. If you look across the ecosystem from the retail standpoint, there is still quite a disparity in what retail traders are paying. Why is that if it's so competitive? Go ahead.
The dream of crypto and Bitcoin was going to be this incredible, simple system. Not real complicated, right? Crypto is the most complicated financial structure ever designed. It's not seamless. It's not as transparent as you would think because of different dynamics going on. Eventually, it will become. We keep saying eventually. You take a certain market with a certain regulatory environment or a certain culture. You're going to have a very different spread or margin that you're going to make than in another one. Maybe more open, more knowledgeable, more connected in how they're trading, who they're trading with. There's a ton of money to be made in really smart allocating through the system where there's these disparities.
Yeah, I think I generally agree with that. I think there's a lot of, you know, like anything else, you look at the value you receive, right? If you are an investor who needs a lot of education, very simple user interface, wide, depending on the pairs, like a Bitcoin-Ethereum transaction, that pair is going to be a lot more competitive than Bitcoin to Trump coin, for example. There are a lot of different dynamics like that. There are different dynamics of custodial versus self-custodial. If you're self-custodial, like if you use our platform, we have to factor in the network fees, right? Because we don't touch people's money. If you swap on our platform, you have to pay the network fee to get it out of your wallet to the exchange, and then the exchange has to pay the network fee to get it back into your wallet, right? Whereas a custodial service, they can just, they don't have to move anything. They could just say, I have a Bitcoin and half of it now belongs to Bob and half of it belongs to Sally. They don't actually have to move anything on chain when they're doing their transactions. Now you have all different, you could get into the pros and cons of custody versus self-custody, but there are just so many different dynamics at play that it's much like, just take stock trading, for example, right? I mean, you can go to Robinhood and through payment for order flow, you can pay zero. You can still go to a broker down the street and you can pay $50 a trade. There is still a wide variety of fees even in TradFi. I think you'll see that also for quite some time in crypto as well.
I think what I'd say is that Robinhood made it super easy for, you know, Gen Z, to trade stocks. I mean, my 20-year-old daughter uses Robinhood to trade stocks because it's just such an easy-to-use interface. I did a presentation to a group of retired folks, high net worth, ultra-high net worth retired folks on Bitcoin. Their biggest issue was the friction of investing in custody. I said, how many of you have an account at Fidelity? A number of people raised their hands. I said, they'll sell you crypto. Just use your, call your broker. You can buy it that way. You can buy an ETF. It's just like buying stock. You can margin it. It's just like a security. Think of it as an asset. No different than a different one. You invest in a stock. You're going to track that company and see what they're planning to do. That determines whether you want to take that risk or not. Bitcoin is no different. The moderator of that discussion later told me that of the people who were in the room, six opened accounts at Fidelity that day and went and bought. I think as you remove friction from the system, the velocity increases. I think it's the friction of money. If you could take friction out of the monetary system, stuff just moves a lot faster. There will be a race to zero, just like most of the brokerage houses don't do.
Yeah, it's not commoditized. It's all that.
They'll have to make money on the other side of it. I think Fidelity charges like 1% for crypto trades. For the person who's going to buy it, put it away.
Yeah, investor ignorance. Think about the reputation risk. Think about everything crypto's been through, right? People, convenience. You're right, there's all these reasons that there's a disparity, but it will change quickly.
The other thing also with people over 50 and 60, so more my generation, is you look at estate planning. Self-custody is scary for people over 60 when they think about how do I pass the keys on, how do I do this. Custodians like Fidelity and, you know, the banks are going to get a bigger and bigger volume of that. Crypto as an investment asset, I think, is going to end up being custodian by the centralized custodians. It's just easier, safer in their minds, and they don't care if the government takes money from them because they pay taxes.
I think you'll see, for the older generation, I think that there is some truth to that. You'd be surprised though at what the self-custodial market is, what advocates for it are doing. As someone who believes highly in self-custody, there is some friction historically, 12-word secret phrases, things of that nature. If you look at our products and our roadmap at Exodus, you can see some of the things we're doing to remove that friction. I think even things like estate planning and things like that, there are and there will be more and more different self-custodial approaches to the problems that you're mentioning. You're right, there definitely are some out there, but the pace of technology, going once again to the competition factor, the pace of technology is rapidly improving and addressing problems of that nature.
We offer both. Almost no one wants self-custody.
Yeah.
We've got our own proprietary wallet system. It's almost a self-custody within our platform, but it's not. It's a proprietary wallet, cold wallet, which is regulated in Japan to be that way. It's an ease of use. It's an instrument too, and there's some sense in where it is. It gets to what you said: if somebody feared to die or they, oh God, they threw out that coffee can and that coffee can had the damn thing in it or something, or ease of use. You know, how many apps do you want on your phone? How many of this do you want? How many of that do you want? These are challenges because in other ways, there's this person that goes, I don't disagree with it. It's, boy, I want to keep it to myself because it could get hacked. These yin yangs, I think it goes to more of an ease of use where it just, in fact, I don't even think it's a push or button. When I had my FinTech fund back in 2015, I used to travel the world to speak about FinTech. I didn't, at that point, wasn't going to buy Bitcoin. I thought I couldn't see the utility use of it. You could say I was wrong, but we'll see long term. I could be right 100 years from now, but I'd be long dead. Blockchain, I thought still had some issues, the cost of using it. Now we're, it works. I used to say, and again, I think this is where it goes and it's going to go much quicker than I thought because of AI. He's absolutely right. The business they're going in is really, I think, a good blend of the two parts of it. I used to say, close your eyes and think about a comet going through space. I think you may have heard this before, maybe not. Think about investing. You got a comet going through space, but it's a unique comet. Throws off particles of ice. That's what you see in a comet, but it's got a magnetic core, a black hole, and it sucks in things at the same time. Think about investing. If you could just pick what is investing, it's yield, duration, risk weighting, liquidity. That's it. Right? Isn't that all investing? Super simple. Yield is easy. I want to make 5%. It's got to be liquid A, duration one year. The risk weighting is the hardest damn thing in the world. I've run banks. I've been deep embedded in credit models. Who decides? Who decides? Who plays God? I’d say this is where it’s going to go, where you’ll be on a phone and you just go, oh, my paycheck that came in at $1,000, I don’t even know it came in. Instantly, it goes in, it pays utility bill, this or that with a token or something, boom. The other $50 instantly gets invested because I said I wanted to make 5%. I want this duration. I want this yield. I want this risk weighting. With AI, who decides? Who plays God? We will get the risk weighting. That’s where this really does all go. It does tokenize. It is this way.
That exactly is the use case for self-custody. If you think about who plays God, you play God as self-custody. If you think about DeFi and AI, if you think about things like your medical records, right? If you have tokenized, my personal tokenized medical records, do I want to trust someone with that? That answer may be very different for somebody who's 65 versus someone who's 25.
I think it's cloud. I think it's cloud. I think why bother with any of that? It's seamless. I don't want to think about it. I just want to go pick daisies every day. I don't think it's self-custody. I think this is all just a cloud.
This is a philosophical discussion that we have at our shop a lot amongst kind of the Bitcoin maxis of the group, which is all models are generally centralized. Even Ethereum is centralized. Most people don't think about that, but Ethereum is actually a group of people in a room. Bitcoin is the only truly decentralized because there is no central authority. There is a belief amongst the most radical thinkers in the Bitcoin world that you just, through layer two architectures, build medical record systems, et cetera, on top of Bitcoin because there is no central authority and you can obfuscate through encryption so that you issue a token, a layer two token to your doctor, which essentially you can make null and void at any time so that all of a sudden they no longer can see your data. They can't ever copy it, but they can see it. Same thing with your purchasing behavior. You may want to do a trade with Amazon that I'll give you, I'll let you track my purchasing preferences for six months in return for a 5% extra discount or free Amazon Prime. It'll get to that point, right? You may say, no, I'm not willing to do that. Data tracked on public blockchains that don't have a central authority are the only way you can actually get to trust because a self-custody wallet is really just running on a public blockchain, but the tokens you're holding are running on centralized blockchains. The only one that doesn't is Bitcoin. I think over time, what's going to end up happening is are you speculating in Dogecoin because it has no use, so you're speculating in it and you want to hold it and trade it? It's a meme thing. It's like buying and selling art. I explain to people who know nothing about crypto that most people who invest in crypto assets are investing in art. It's a piece of canvas with paint and you attribute a value to it that's a lot more than what it costs you to do. That's how it works. If it falls out of favor, it goes to zero.
I think that's where you're starting to get into real world assets and tokenization in general. I think that, you know, that's where.
That's where the real future is because the digital asset world is monetarily large. Use case is quite small. Once you start looking at healthcare data, you look at all the information. AI systems need a source of truth. They will use a blockchain as a source of truth. All of these blockchains interacting, all of these AIs interacting with each other need a place they can validate data from. That is an oracle, as it's called, an oracle chain. That is going to be a blockchain, right? That is going to be, there will be in volume much more of that than there is, you know, digital token trading from an investment perspective.
We have just a couple of minutes left. I want to hit on maybe stepping back from the more philosophical stuff. You can sort of speak to it with respect to each of the three businesses, but just in the couple of minutes that we have left, I'd ask each of you more, less, and what's interesting categorically for each of you.
I mean, for us, it's consolidation of miners, consolidation in the AI HPC space. It will go faster because time is of the essence, and people will pay higher prices for it.
Yeah, we've been very public that we are actively looking at acquisitions. Absolutely more. In terms of what's attractive, there's a broad spectrum. There are just certain areas of our product where we want to add some functionality. There is also the regulatory floodgates that have opened and just the amazing competition in crypto. There's new stuff being invented every day. You've got everything from that spectrum, something we haven't even thought about yet that we're going to jump into that we think is really cool, to some existing technology where we either want to eliminate a middleman or just add some functionality to our products. Definitely more in general though. Gary.
It's the hardest thing in the world right now.
I didn't ask how hard it was.
Yeah. There's never been anything like this. I think in mankind, the rate of change, and humanity can only keep, there's a whole thing about brains and emotions and how much you can keep up with technology. If you're choosing to make an investment, you're a farmer, you know, global warming is real, right? We can say what's causing it, but you know it's real. You're planning your crop. You're going to get a good crop this year, next year, but eventually it's changing. We can see it changing. The crypto space, the same thing. It is where can you make immediate play? That's what hedge funds are going to do, where those opportunities are versus long term. I don't know where the hell long term is. When we did our payments deal five years ago, I said I could look two years out because it's changing so quickly. Three years, maybe five years, no way can I tell you where things are. I was right. In this space, I don't know. I do believe there's current opportunities. I completely say the whole thing right now, consolidation. It's either, it's just like banking. It's either acquire or be acquired. That low barrier to entry, your technology. Two years ago, three years ago, I couldn't understand why the big platforms had these big venture arms. I thought it was a public company. It's a waste of resources, distractions. You've got to have it because things are changing so quickly. You have to have that insight and you need a team that's focused on it because it's changing so quickly. There are spaces we like right now that have a run and I think they'll do really, really well. There are other spaces that I think it's all about how quickly it changes. I do believe that the traditional banks are going to do something they've never done before because I've been in this a long time. Legacy technology, nobody wants to leave it. It's expensive to change the horse you're riding while you're riding or the bicycle. Fix it while you're riding it. What I believe, because I've sat at tables next to people that had the tech programs and the big banks, they're going to do something that's the most painful thing you've ever seen in the financial industry. They're going to change to tokenization quicker than you would ever imagine. That's where, again, I've been in this space so long and it is stressful because it's really happening. They are not going to let themselves. They see the risk and it's truly real. Now, how quickly they can do it is going to be fascinating. Just look at JP Morgan suddenly, some of the things they suddenly did, these little indicators.
Right. The thing is Jamie Dimon was just doing a fud tactic by saying he didn't like Bitcoin.
Right. I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing. I'm not going to give you that advantage. I know what I'm going to do. We know where we're going. I think it'll work for a while. I hope it'll work for a long time. We'll have to be nimble. The whole thing is nimble, right? The whole thing is nimble. If I was in it for this moment in flash, I probably would have done a treasury play. I've been offered to do a bunch of them. I've not wanted to be distracted by it. Full disclosure, some of them, I don't own any Bitcoin. Never have. My son opened a Robinhood account. I gave him a little bit of money to dabble with. He sold it all because I don't like filling out the damn forms, which I don't have to fill out anymore. I don't want to bet like you. I'm agnostic. I want to be the picks, the shovels, the rails. You've got to be so nimble even on the picks and the shovels and the rails. One area I'll tell you where I think there's, take your time and really look at it. Our financial system's been the way it's been a long time. Big banks are not good at some things. They're really good at other things. One area you've always made money in the financial system is finding the friction, solving the messy problems. You can make good money. What I'm saying is the institutional space and crypto has got a real run because there's so many inefficiencies that you can take advantage of right now. The people that are in that space are going to make really good money for a while. I can't tell you how long. They'll make better money, in my opinion, than the retail.
Awesome. Fred, James, Gary, thank you for joining. It's a fun discussion.
Three months from now we can do it again, and we were wrong about everything.