Morning, everyone. Welcome to our next session here at Barclays Financial Services Conference. I'm Ben Budish, an analyst covering the brokers, asset managers and exchanges, and for this talk, I'm delighted to have from Galaxy Digital, Founder and CEO, Mike Novogratz. Mike, thanks so much.
Thank you.
Maybe just to kick it off, can you give a bit of background on Galaxy? You know, how did you come to start the firm? What does the business look like today? And then we'll dive into some more, you know, kind of crypto-specific topics.
Sure. So I was a Hedge Fund Manager at Fortress Investment for 12 years, trading macro. And while I was there, I invested in Bitcoin when it was, like, 100, and it was more of an interesting side hustle. I left Fortress and, you know, when you leave a Wall Street company, you figure, "What do you do next?" I started a family office. It was a very nice gig. People come and pitch you ideas, and I had a bunch of crypto and crypto investments, and so I kind of started paying more attention, and the more I would dig in, the more excited I got. And so by 2017, it was kind of dominating the volatility of my net worth, and decided.
I always thought I was not gonna go back to work unless I could do something where I worked with young people, where I was learning something new, and I had something to contribute, and crypto is mostly young people. In lots of ways, it's a venture business, and I'd not done venture before. It's kind of a cross between venture and macro, and I thought I had something to contribute because I actually understood legacy finance and how Wall Street worked, and most of these crypto kids didn't, and so that was the genesis of Galaxy.
I took a bunch of assets that I had, vended them into a Canadian shell company, and it raised a couple, $250 million , and we had this idea of four businesses that we would build: an asset management business, a trading business, an advisory business, and a merchant bank, where we'd invest our own capital. And, you know, for the first couple of years, it was just the merchant bank. Like, crypto collapsed 96% in 2018. Literally 96%. And so the idea of the robust asset management, robust trading, you know, was kind of just an idea. But we did a really, really good job of managing firm capital. Right? In a market that was down 96%, we were down, like, 27%.
And so when crypto bounced, we had the resources to invest in these businesses. And if you fast-forward now, about six years, another boom-bust cycle in between, we are 511 people, offices in New York, London, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, and a couple small offices. We still have basically that footprint. We have three main business lines now. One is we call the markets business, which is like a sales and trading business at an investment bank, derivatives, lending, OTC trading. We're doing more and more on-chain, which is, you know, kind of the pure crypto DeFi trading, so DeFi lending, DeFi trading. We have an infrastructure business, which is probably the most exciting part now.
We have a big mine, Bitcoin mine down in Texas called Helios, and we do a lot of hosting as a service, which is running the infrastructure for these crypto blockchains. What's most exciting about Galaxy right now is that this Bitcoin mine, which we bought to put our machines in the mine, it happens to be perfectly suited to be a data center for AI, and so we are deep in discussions with hyperscalers to try to figure out our plan to become a data center business. And I think we have one of the best sites in America. It's big, it's green, it's 800 MW, permissioned already, another 800 coming in a few months. 300 built out, another 200, another 300, which we've built out by April of next year.
We've got a lot of power now, and so that is, I think, keeping our stock price buoyant when Bitcoin doesn't do as well, but it is probably the most exciting thing going for our company, because it will be diversified income stream relative to. One of the problems with crypto is that when Bitcoin goes up, your asset management fee goes up, your staking fees go up, all the crypto service fees goes up, and when it goes down, they go down. And so having a business that's not correlated to that will, I think, be a big positive. And our third business is asset management. We were picked by the FTX estate. We took their assets, and we gave them back $8 billion in cash nine months later. So I think did a spectacular job there.
That allowed us to accelerate the growth of some of our other businesses. We announced a partnership with State Street just a few days ago, or launched our fund yesterday, where we're doing equity-based ETFs in and around new innovations, so Bitcoin, AI, and other things, crypto, AI and other things. We have a partnership with Invesco on ETFs, a partnership with DWS. And so we've seen our role to partner with legacy guys who have huge distribution efforts as crypto and Bitcoin become a mainstream asset. And so put it all together, it's a pretty diverse business. Our operating businesses should do about $400 million of revenue on less cost than that, but unfortunately, not a lot less. You know, the cost of doing business in America because of this administration's anti-crypto stance has been brutal.
And so we are working on getting that down. But it's a good business, and we have a balance sheet still, partners' equity, over $2 billion, that operating cash we use to run the business, that's $1 billion of crypto. It's some venture in private equity debts. And so right now, I'm probably more bullish about the company than I've ever been. And that's because, you know, if Larry Fink was here, I'd give him a hug. We went from being kind of a fringe asset class to legitimized this year, right? As much as Gary Gensler hated to do it, by approving the both Bitcoin and then Ethereum ETF, the government said, "Crypto's here to stay." And we will see rapid change in D.C.'s legislative process after this election.
If Trump wins, which looks less likely after his fiasco last night, it's gonna be wildly bullish for crypto. But if he doesn't win, it's not gonna be horrible. Harris has already said she will not be an anti-crypto president. She will be pro-crypto president. The Democrats have learned painfully in lots of ways that this is a really passionate voting bloc. I told people, there are more crypto owners than dog owners in America, and right now the Democratic Party is the party that doesn't like dogs. Like, it's just stupid politics to say, "I don't like crypto." And it all came really from Elizabeth Warren, who made a deal with Biden to get Bernie to drop out. And so it really has stunted our industry for four years, or three and a half years.
But the bright news is that era is coming to an end, and I've spent a ton of time in D.C. with both the Senate and the House. Democrats are ready for legislation. Matter of fact, we'd have bipartisan legislation right now, other than the fact that JD Vance has said, "No, no, no, no. Don't, don't give the Democrats a win until the election's over." Schumer was ready to push through a market infrastructure bill. And so we're gonna get regulatory clarity. We have institutional adoption, and the real piece of regulatory clarity we need isn't just the SEC, CFTC market infrastructure and stablecoin bill.
It's the OCC. It's a direction from the administration to the OCC and the Fed that it's okay to let Barclays and JPMorgan and State Street and Bank of New York into the crypto space. Right? What has kept lots of legacy big players away is the banking regulators. Like, "No, no, no, no, no, don't do that." And, you know, it's not a big enough opportunity to really piss off your bank regulator, to fight them. And so Bank of New York should be the biggest custodian in crypto, and they're not. They custody everything else. I think that will flip in the next 12 months, no matter who wins. And that's gonna unleash a tremendous amount of capital into our space. In some ways, it'll make my job far more exciting and more difficult, right?
The phone's gonna ring, and Citibank's gonna be trying to hire my traders. But the amount of capital that will move in our space will go up quantum.
Great.
Long answer, sorry about that.
No, no. Great. Well, you answered a few of my next questions here on, you know, what the environment looks like coming from D.C., but maybe could you unpack a little bit more of what could be unleashed when we get this sort of new regulatory framework? So it sounds like maybe low-hanging fruit is banks are gonna hire more traders, or become more active custodians.
Yeah.
What are the other, like, innovations that could be coming or could be?
So.
Unlocked?
You know, crypto's a big word. There's a lot of stuff that goes in it, right? First, people think about Bitcoin, which has literally become just digital gold, like this store of value that's literally based on a social construct. I think it has value, you think it has value, and therefore it has value. Well, now there are, you know, far over 100 million people around the world that have decided to take some of their hard-earned worth, net worth, and store it in this community. But that is only going one way, right? It is a story of adoption. It was interesting, you know, we kicked off the ETF, but the big platforms, the big RIA platforms, like Morgan Stanley's and many others, didn't even get started until, like, the last week or two, selling it.
Bitcoin's always been sold, not bought. What I mean by that is, if you're sitting out there, you're like, "What is this?" It's the responsibility of somebody to orange pill you, to explain it to you, to get you comfortable with it, right? Larry Fink did not like Bitcoin, and then a concerted effort of really smart guys, you know, got around him over and over, and he finally said, "Oh, I get it." And now it's a huge part of Blackstone's business, BlackRock's business. And so we're unleashing these sales forces who are now talking to their clients to say, "Hey, you should put a little bit of this in your portfolio." And no matter what day you look at it, it has been a diversifier and positive alpha to any single portfolio. Right?
Been one of the best performing assets in the last 15 years on against anything. And so you're like: Well, I'll put a little bit in. And that's happening over and over. Forget what's happening overseas. So, but that's only one section of what crypto's promise is. Payments, and I saw you had a payment session before I walked in. In the U.S., we don't see a lot of great innovation around crypto payments because our payment system works pretty damn well. Apple Pay, you hit the taxi, and it's done. But overseas, stablecoin usage is exploding. There was more stablecoin transaction volume last year than Visa plus Mastercard combined. And so this isn't a small-scale operation anymore. Everyone low income in the Middle East, sending remittances back over. They're sending Tether on Tron.
Tether is a dollar-based stablecoin kept outside of the U.S., and Tron is a blockchain, and so you're going to continue to see payments, and we're seeing all kinds of innovation, and then there's the rest of crypto. The rest of crypto really is this series of databases, blockchains, that promise to increase in speed and in privacy, and have things built on top of them, where not one person controls the blockchain, and that allows for peer-to-peer everything. So I was with one of the legends of the music business yesterday, and so far, Web3 hasn't really hit the music business, and she was saying, "You know, it's so easy to see where it will," but it hasn't yet, and so people have gotten into this space because they think it will.
It will, it will disintermediate banks, it will disintermediate the music business, it will disintermediate so many of these businesses. The technology's ready. It wasn't ready two years ago. It's not 100% ready, but it's getting there. When I say ready, it's got to be fast and reliable, right, and so blockchains like Ethereum have all these Level 2s built on them. Blockchains like Solana are working really quickly, and so you're seeing more and more projects, so up until now, most of these other projects have almost been like a giant casino, where the crypto community is moving money around based on narrative. And listen, the casino business has always been a great business, and it is a very passionate group of people that have their money in crypto.
But we're at that inflection point where you're going to start seeing more and more use cases in gaming, in all kinds of areas, and so that's the most exciting part. And last but not least, I'll talk about tokenization. Tokenization is going to be one of these things that happens real slow and then happens real fast. And so companies like Apollo are spending lots of effort, lots of time trying to tokenize some of their funds to understand it. When I talk to the people at places like Citibank and Goldman, they already have big, big teams, because, a nd all the asset managers are worried that once we start tokenizing things, we better be in on the gig. And so I don't know when it actually hits that inflection point.
I just know a lot of infrastructure is being laid, and the only place right now you're seeing tokenization scale is stablecoins, right? We tokenize a dollar. Galaxy's gonna tokenize a euro with Deutsche Bank and DWS, and it's going to be regulated by BaFin. And why is that important? Well, it's important because we're moving from a paper world to a digital world, but we're also moving into a computer world, right? With the advent of AI, we're finally going to get, you know, Internet of Things money transfer. So the Boeing engine jet, when it's running efficiently, is worth more money than when it runs inefficiently. And you'll be able to literally have micro payments between these, you know, lessee and provider.
And so we've talked to some of the, y ou know, Siemens came up to us, and they were like: "Wow, as soon as there's a regulated European stablecoin, we've got all kinds of use cases." And so I really do think we're at the inflection point, and it might not be this year, it might be next year, where crypto goes from beyond stablecoins and Bitcoin to actually being used in society.
Great. I want to ask you maybe two follow-ups on tokenization and stablecoins. So maybe first on stablecoins, not to pick on Tether, but there was a fairly negative article in The Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago, maybe like a broader crypto question, but it seems to, you know, be maybe in that context relevant to stablecoins. How do you think about, like, the risk in the system right now? It feels like a couple of years ago, a lot of risk was flushed out. Do you think the worries around Tether or, or wherever you're seeing it overblown or, or?
I think Tether has one of the best businesses on the planet. And God, there was a time in 2016, 2017, where they were having trouble, and they had a, they had a senior partner there who wanted to sell it because it was impacting their other business, and I was dying to try to buy it. And, and now that business kicks off about $6.5 billion of EBITDA a year.
Like a hundred employees, right?
With a hundred.
Not too bad.
Right. They have a $120 billion interest rate arbitrage, right? They borrow at zero, and they lend at whatever the Fed fund rate is. And they are wildly overcapitalized now because they've made so much money. The group of people there are very sharp, have gone out and said: "Okay, we've got all this money now. Let's see what we're gonna do." So they've bought some Bitcoin, they've invested in other businesses. They are a big infrastructure player now. But that's with their profits. And so Tether is backed one to one. Why would people leave money in a security that doesn't pay them interest when they could take it out and put it in a bank? A lot of it is money that has, you know, fled regimes that they didn't want them to flee, right?
So if you're hot Chinese money and you left China and you put it in Tether, you don't care that you're paying a - 5% carry, you're using it to do other things, right? There are eight billion people on this planet, and only 330 million live in America. And so they have a very stable and growing. Now, are there innovations that could knock their perch? Of course, there are now interest-bearing stablecoins. There's one that a friend of mine, Charles Cascarilla at Paxos, launched out of Abu Dhabi regulatory regime. That scares every banker, you know, shitless, every central banker, because think about this: If you have a tokenized dollar that pays interest, why would you leave your money in a bank? It's safer than a bank, it's treasury bills, and it pays interest, right?
JPMorgan or Barclays, I'm guessing if I look at my savings account, probably pays me 11 basis points. Last I looked at JPMorgan, it was literally like two, and your checking account, nothing. Right? And so when I talk about crypto being progressive, having a digitalized dollar that pays interest, is shockingly good for the consumer. Now, who's it bad for? It's bad for the central bank, and that's why the government's not going to let it happen. Right? Reach into your pocket, I think I have $1,000 of hundreds. They don't pay interest. And so the U.S. makes a huge amount of money just on the float on our cash. But this is where the tension, this is where the regulatory tension and the technological tension is going to come, right?
Crypto is building better products than we have, and the legacy world doesn't like it. We don't have blockchain-based ticketing now because Ticketmaster is holding on for dear life, and they're very tough. But intuitively, blockchain-based ticketing makes 100% sense. Like, you wouldn't design a system like Ticketmaster, you would design one with blockchain-based ticketing, right? What the blockchain gave us was private property on the internet for the first time. That was Satoshi's radical breakthrough. He deserves a Nobel Prize because before Satoshi, there was no private property on the internet. And if you think about it, before private property, there was no capitalism. Before private property, George Washington famously said, "Without private property, there's no freedom." You look at emerging markets, the moment they get property rights, the emerging market does better. And for the first time, the internet has private property.
It hasn't sprouted as fast as I would have liked, but it will.
Very interesting. Maybe one other follow-up to your prior comments on tokenization. Just about like the sort of process of going from where we are now to broader use. It seems like beyond the stablecoins, when we look at, like, BlackRock BUIDL Fund or the Franklin Templeton Tokenized Mutual Money Market Fund, it seems like a lot of those are ways for, like, crypto native firms to access, you know, yield vehicles and treasuries, but on a blockchain.
Yeah.
How do you think about, you know, is it going to be crypto native adoption, or what's the kind of tipping point where a traditional institution says, "We'll take some of that, too?
Listen, so there's no difference between buying a tokenized money market fund and buying a money market fund, right? And so if you're a money market fund investor, why wouldn't you buy the tokenized money market fund? You can move it faster, you can use it. So it's one of those things, and I said, "It's going to go slow until it goes fast." When enough people actually think of it as the same, and it's more convenient to use the tokenized form, because it is, you'll see a huge flip. That's why I keep saying, "It's going to go slowly until it goes quickly," and I don't know what that turning point is. I do know that every major asset manager we speak to is frantically working on this stuff, right? They see this will happen. Why should it happen?
Let's say we're going to tokenize, you know, the Fortress Credit Fund, which I still have a huge amount of my net worth in. Unless I want to get it, I need to sell for liquidity. I now got to go to Fortress and sign forms, and they got to find a buyer, and it's a really inefficient process. Why would they care if I'm taking my 1% share of their fund and selling it to the guy across the street? And so you're going to end up seeing private investment vehicles tokenized. It makes all the sense in the world. It hasn't happened on the scale yet. It's happened on plenty of them, but not in scale. Until you get scale, you don't get liquidity. And so again, it's this problem of when.
But everything I see, or all these guys are making investments just as insurance, that if they never pay off, they'll be happy. And that's, you know, there's certainly, I would be less confident if I didn't see what was happening overseas and how fast things are moving.
Got it. So in terms of, like, unlocking these things, there are probably more innovations that need to happen to make it easier for banks to engage. So, you know, you.
There's a regulatory thing that needs to happen. The government has to say, "Guys, it's okay to use Engage." I mean, to give a small example, the SEC jammed some stupid accounting rule in on the legacy banks that say, "Well, you need to hold all this stuff like it's an asset even though you're a custodian. As a custodian, you need to hold the stuff on your balance sheet." It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. You know, finally, the Senate vetoed or the House overrode you know, this bill and then the voters say, "This is a stupidest law.
This is a stupid law." And Biden vetoed it foolishly because, you know, he had told the congressional caucus, "Hey, to vote against it," and they did. They did it. And then, but he didn't wanna let it go through because of the guys that did vote against it. And I mean, the stupid politics. But like, Gary Gensler and his cohorts have thrown up these stupid blocks to stop the growth of this business, solely because Elizabeth Warren has this bee in her bonnet. It has driven me crazy because I'm a Democrat, and I have consistently thought this is one of the most progressive movements I've seen, progressive technologies. Has the potential to be the most progressive technologies.
And I think that's why half the Democrats are now like, "Of course, we should be pro-crypto." I had Ritchie Torres at my house two nights ago. He's an amazing advocate for our space, as is Jake Auchincloss and even Hakeem Jeffries. And so we are slowly winning the intellectual argument with both Dems and Republicans. But remember, we were kind of a fly on an elephant's ass a few years ago, and it was only recently people were like, "Wait a minute." This year, crypto companies are the single largest corporate donors to presidential campaigns. Think about that. Not banks, not tech companies, crypto companies. It is a very passionate community of people that really think they're doing something right for society.
Very interesting. You know, I wanted to ask you a kind of a broader question about innovation. You know, you run the investment banking business at Galaxy. Can you talk about what you're seeing? But maybe one more kind of follow-up, just in terms of the regulation versus like the technology. So think about like tokenization. How does it solve for like the regulatory legal aspects of like private property? So like you guys, I think early in the year, you tokenized like a 300 -year-old violin, which I thought that was super cool. How do you translate like the ownership? But I say, you know, mortgages always come up. Like my, I own, I bought a house in New Jersey.
My, you know, there's a piece of paper in a lawyer's office saying, "Ben owns this house." How do you tie in like that with the blockchain section? How do we get there?
You know, it's interesting. So blockchain works best in a digital world, right? And more and more our lives are gonna be digital. Where we cross from physical to digital, right? We tokenize the Stradivarius. Why would you do that? Well, it was supposed to show we could, and now we're lending against those, that ownership. And so basically, it was taking a contract on paper and putting it into, onto a blockchain. What blockchains are unique at is you can't change them, right? And so one of the first ideas was we should put all titles, property titles on blockchains.
The story is to say, when Gaddafi took over Libya, he literally, in the town square, took all the titles of people's property and threw it in a fire and said, "It's all mine." You know, your family had owned this piece of land for a long, long period of time, and this was your proof of it, and it disappeared. On a blockchain, it doesn't disappear. It's there for time im memorial. The way blockchain blocks stack on top of each other, it makes it statistically impossible to actually change the database, right? Data has become so much more important in our lives, right? Why? Because we can manipulate it, right? Give me your Uber, and I can tell you exactly what your life's like. Look at it. He lives here, but he goes to this address all the time. Hmm, what's going on there?
Right? It's shocking how powerful data is, especially when you put, you know, large language models behind it. And so something as simple as your DNA data isn't that simple anymore. It tells you a lot about somebody. And so what blockchain allows us to do is protect our data. And again, we didn't need to protect it before. But now, as you saw during COVID, the Canadian government decided if you were protesting COVID, and you were one of those truckers, we were gonna freeze your bank accounts, right? In India, right, who has the biggest single nationwide ID program, which is a huge success, Modi decided he didn't like the guys up in Kashmir, and he literally erased eleven million people, erased them from the national rolls, and therefore, you have no ID you can get no services. Don't like them.
When power is concentrated and data is so manipulatable, it's a really toxic mess. We have a country where half the people believe one set of news, and half the people don't believe the other, and so trusting our government doesn't feel so good to half the people. If it's like, "Oh, just give us your DNA, and we're gonna do good things with it," we'd be like: I don't want. If you're a Democrat, I don't want Donald Trump to know that I'm gay, and there's a gay gene, right? Bolsonaro was the President of Brazil. They were pitching to have a stablecoin where the government had complete transparency into it. Again, if you were gay, you'd say, "They're gonna know all my shopping patterns." He's just said gays just don't deserve to exist.
Like the President, there's 11 pages on Google about it, and so you'd be scared. And so we're at this world where trust is broken down, and so this idea of using blockchains to protect yourself from data is an idea whose time has come, and it is coming. Listen, there'll be, you know, a 10-year experiment to see if it actually can work, right? Because what AI does is the most amazingly centralizing technology, and the yang to that AI has to be, or at least should be, you know, something that keeps it in check. So I think that's the real use case that's coming. Now, how that gets built in is probably by guys smarter than me.
So looking through this, we're at an investor conference for U.S. investors. It's sort of this interesting dynamic where in the U.S. there's, you know, maybe there's going to be unlocks around banks acting as custodians, more banks becoming more like trading partners, prime brokers. A lot of these use cases, you know, protecting your privacy, that sort of thing, really relevant outside the U.S. The ability to move money with Tether rather than the bank, ACH, Visa, Mastercard ecosystem. How do U.S. investors, where maybe the use case isn't quite as strong because we have a more developed banking system, where are like the investment opportunities besides Coinbase, Galaxy Digital, buying Bitcoin?
Well, well.
How should we think about that sort of?
To start with, what has always been true about our industry is Bitcoin leads it, and if Bitcoin goes up, money flows into the rest of the industry, it flows into the other ecosystems, and I don't think that's going away for the next few years. And so it's hard to be bullish crypto, even though there's plenty of things that should be uncorrelated to Bitcoin. And I have a business that's really diversified. If I'm really honest, it's hard to be bullish crypto if you're not bullish Bitcoin, because we're still only a 10-year-old industry. Why am I bullish Bitcoin? We saw a presidential debate last night. We saw one with the old president, you know, two months ago. We've seen countless press conferences and rallies.
Not one candidate on either side has talked about the fact that we're adding $1 trillion of debt every 100 days, right? I worked at the Office of Management and Budget in 1984 , tells you how old I am. I learned the federal government is supposed to spend 20% of GDP and tax 20% of GDP. And pretty much, we did that until about Trump, other than, you know, in a crisis, you should go above it and come back below it. But that was, that was the target. We're now spending close to 30% of GDP with the 6% structural deficit.
And unless you means test Medicare and Social Security, unless you raise the age on Social Security, unless you cut military spending, not raise it 10% like both parties want to do, we are going to continue to print bigger and bigger deficits, and we will be in a shitload of trouble at one point. And, you know, there's a thing called the Minsky moment in economics, where it goes from okay, okay, okay, oh, shit. It's out there. I don't know where, but you see it, and you saw it in, and I've been to 96 countries in my life. I was an emerging market investor at Goldman Sachs and then at Fortress. Once you lose the credibility of being the developed market, it goes fast. And so if you look at Nigeria, right? Nigeria is one of the stronger economies.
You put your money on Nigeria, see how much you have left. Turkey, right? Remember, Erdoğan, Turkey was like this miracle emerging market story 10 years ago, and, you know, 110% inflation two years in a row. And so when we have central banks and treasuries, you know, finance departments that have no sense of good fiscal stewardship, the currency goes to hell in a handbasket. I would argue that in the U.S. and in Europe, and in almost the whole world, we have lost any sense of fiscal stewardship. There is a profligacy going on. There is a, I mean, the idea that Elizabeth Warren and many others came up with, "Well, we've got this Modern Monetary Theory." I mean, my mother told me when I was eight, "You can't. Money doesn't grow on trees, right?
You can't print your own money," and that's really at the core of everyone who believes in Bitcoin, right? As a hard money asset. It's the, l isten, I own a lot of gold, and I have a podcast. We give everyone at the end of a podcast an ounce of gold. At the beginning of the year, I said, "This is going to $3,000," and you know, we're at $2,500. It was $1,800. Gold is gonna go to $3,000, and then gold's gonna go to $10,000. You're like, "How did gold get to $10,000?" It's gonna go to $10,000 because President Harris or President Trump doesn't want to take any pain. They wanna give, they wanna spend, and we have way crossed that point, right? We're at 130% debt to GDP. No country's come back from that.
And if you look at just their projections, with their rosy projections, the CBO has us going to 150% of GDP. It doesn't work. And so one of the things I sleep best at night is this huge stash of Bitcoin I own, because it can. Listen, it went to 73, it's at 56 right now. It will bounce around unless we get some lightning bolt and somebody comes up and says, "All right, guys, we're dealing with our shit," which I just don't see political will to do. You're gonna see Bitcoin go higher, which is going to drive our whole industry.
Fascinating. Maybe with the little bit of time we have left, kind of coming back to, you know, the investment banking business you've got, just again, thinking about what's going on in the U.S., you know, changes you expect in terms of the next couple of years. Do you think we're gonna see more, like, consolidation? You know, a couple of years ago, we had a lot more exchanges, brokers, like kind of.
Yeah.
You know, bank replacements. Where are the, you know, what's kind of coming that's interesting, we should be thinking about looking at?
Listen, I think you're gonna see people going from having checking accounts to wallets, and you're gonna have a crypto wallet, which is gonna have your securities, your bank, your bank accounts, your crypto, your tickets, and other assets, your NFTs. And so who wins that, right? Lots of companies are trying to become the infrastructure of that. Overseas, if you go to DBS Bank, they've got an amazing little app, and you do all those things. And so we haven't seen that in the U.S. yet. That will happen. You know, this is. For crypto to really work outside of Bitcoin, for most of you and most Americans, in some weird way, it's gotta be the back of the TV. Like, this is a plumbing business in lots of ways.
You don't really. It's gotta be a better product, and it's gotta be seen as contributing something. When I think about blockchain-based ticketing, yeah, it's a better system. Is it better enough that it's gonna work? I don't know. Certainly in payments, it's an easy one, right? You know, even now, if one of you guys needs to borrow money and you're in Germany, and I'm like, "Yeah, I'll wire you money," it is a huge pain for me to wire a friend, you know, $200,000 in Germany, right? And it comes a couple of days later. Where in Bitcoin or in stablecoins, it takes four seconds, and so it's a better product. Our user experience, our user interface, and our kind of, o therwise, this will still be Bitcoin, stablecoins, and a casino for crypto junkies.
And that's where I think this is the. And I don't know if it's gonna be this year or next year, but the next few years really is the test. But that's what you're betting on in lots of these venture buckets. And it makes sense to me to bet on it because, plus, I see it work, and I just on a small scale, and the question is: How does it scale?
We've got just a minute left. Maybe I'll just try to squeeze one last really quick question in. You mentioned something about a product, like, I think an ETF with Bitcoin and AI. Can you just maybe unpack that a little bit? You know, we hear a lot about the intersection of AI and crypto. What does that mean? What are you guys kind of working on?
Well, listen, so we launched a series of funds with State Street. One is mostly crypto companies, and so right now it's Coinbase and a lot of miners. We are trying to go public in the United States, and knock on wood, we will be public soon enough. There are another nine companies right behind us. And so I think you're gonna see a plethora of equity opportunities in the next 12 months. And so we've set up an ETF with State Street for equity investors to play in the crypto space. And it is a, you know, it's a mutual fund, or a fund, but it has the capacity to sell calls, buy puts, protect, you know.
I actually think, you know, there are times when the equities are very expensive to the underlying crypto, and there are times when the equities are cheap to the underlying crypto, so being able to understand the whole ecosystem is a really important part of it. Where AI comes in is, you know, crypto created the data centers to mine Bitcoin, which happen to be the biggest data centers in the country and in the world. I didn't realize how big my data center was until about a year ago, and I'm like, okay, there are very few 800 MW data centers in the country, and so partly luck that the crypto industry is sitting on these power contracts that are really, really valuable right now.
And if you look at just the AI plan of, you know, the big Microsoft and Meta and Google and everyone else, it's a staggering, staggering CapEx bill that's coming. And so a lot of, not all of the crypto miners, but some of them, including ourselves, are in the midst of that now. So that's the first AI angle. The second AI angle is, listen, you're gonna have AI agents in the next six months to 18 months, each, each one of us, and at one point, those agents are gonna actually spend your money. And the interchange for how that money gets moved, I think is gonna be some crypto version. It makes just so much more sense, computers speaking to computers, and crypto are those rails.
It hasn't happened yet, but so we're investing in our venture business and a lot of things around that. And the final is that authenticity. I mean, something as simple as a deepfake. The deepfakes are so good these days, you can't tell. And so having something authenticated on a blockchain and having a process to say, "No, this is real." Quite frankly, when I was thinking about Bitcoin in 2013 and how to sell it, you know, it was all about this thing called the double-spending problem and the Byzantine Generals Problem, all these computer science questions that Satoshi solved.
But to a non-computer science guy, I was like, "Well, that sounds like malarkey." And I simplified it and said, "Well, wait a minute, it was the first digital signature that you couldn't counterfeit." And if you think about what that means, I can have a digital piece of art that I know is authentic, that you can't counterfeit. Even if you control, copy, paste, I can prove that yours is a counterfeit and mine's not. And it's the old, you know, a real Chanel bag is worth a lot more than the Chanel bag that you buy on Canal Street. A real Picasso. Like, we have always wanted scarcity in the world, and that is coming. And so I do think there are three or four angles where crypto and AI will come together, but again, we're early.
Definitely. Well, unfortunately, we're out of time. Mike, what a great conversation. Thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate it.
Thank you, guys.