It's really cool to have Mike from Galaxy. You know, we've talked a couple times on video, this is the first time I'm seeing you in person. As you guys know, we've, we launched coverage of this space, about two years ago. We probably put out about 110 reports the last two years, and we have our weekly web sessions, really, you know, talking about different aspects of this ecosystem for digital assets. What's really nice is actually Mike can talk about all of it, since he's been, you know, involved, as from the very early days as well as, you know, what Galaxy does. First, thank you, Mike.
Thank you.
Maybe first we can start off with, you know, let's just talk about Galaxy itself. You know, I think founded in 2018. What created and what, you know, what is Galaxy right now?
Sure. Well, thank you. Galaxy is a public company in Canada that was started with the idea that we'd be a bridge between this crypto universe and institutions. We always took a institutional DNA in the way we approach transparency and compliance and how we dealt with our counterparties. We have three big business lines. One is our markets business, which feels like a traditional sales and trading business at an investment bank. We've got an investment banking business that does advisory, but it's lending derivatives. It's connecting liquidity to 850 counterparties and trying to provide them ideas and service. We think that'll get accelerated in the second half of this year as we're rolling out GalaxyOne. It's our automated prime offering.
We think it'll be the best prime offering in the space, where we connect all the liquidity we see, and all the different custodians to these customers to kind of make it one stop shopping. That's been a profitable business for us. We've recently benefited from the demise of about 80% of our competitors. Our biggest competitor was Genesis, over, you know, very full-service shop, and they've, you know, ran into a buzz saw. They were probably four to five times the size of us. I always scratched my head, and they were four to five times the size of us 'cause they were taking immense risk on their credit book. You give people credit, and they'll trade with you.
The market has certainly pulled back in terms of risk tolerance, and that's benefited us. Our second business is asset management, where we manage other people's money. It's a $2-plus billion AUM. That needs to grow for us. We have about half of that in venture-type funds, which are high fee paying, and half of that in either index product or beta product through partnerships with Itaú and CI Group. Itaú in Brazil, CI Group in Canada. We're using kind of a partnership model to scale the lower fee stuff. Big focus there.
Traditionally, we had taken a ton of risk on our balance sheet and both our venture portfolio and our overall coin portfolio, the portfolio I ran, probably was a top 5% crypto portfolio in dollars in the $2.8 billion after tax, after compensation, after running the business from low to high. That number as of last earnings was about $1.7 billion. If I had to do it over again, that would have been the asset management business, and we would taken fees on it instead of have the balance sheet run up and down. We have a big balance sheet. We're starting to shift that investing and that talent into the asset management bucket.
Hopefully, over time, to have less volatility of our earnings and more, you know, fee earnings from fee and promote from asset management. Our third is infrastructure solutions. We have a big mining operation, or we're building a big mining operation down in Texas. We bought a custody company called GK8 out of Israel, we'll be able to provide solutions for qualified custodians. It's really a software business, if you wanna think about it. We're doing market making as a service offshore, starting to look into the validator business as well. We think that where you build the infrastructure for the space will be a great business. You put them together, there's a lot of diversity. Again, there's a big balance sheet that we've invested well.
Good. Maybe we can talk a little bit about customer composition, right? You're headquartered in Canada. How does that affect customer base? Is it family offices? Is it hedge funds? Are you seeing asset managers? Just what is the customer base composition?
If you think about where crypto started, it started with 98%, 99% retail. Maybe I was a knucklehead for not hanging a retail shingle up early on. I had this idea that the herd would come, that institutions would come, and it took them a lot longer than we thought it would. Matter of fact, it wasn't until post-COVID that they started showing up. Our biggest customer base originally, and continues to be big, were crypto companies. Crypto companies that raise money, protocol companies, crypto hedge funds, crypto venture companies, right? Providing services to those companies. That's where our banking business thrives and a lot of our trading. You saw family offices and hedge funds, right? Every macro fund now trades crypto. And a lot of the TradFi multi-strats, Brevan Howard types are creating crypto pods.
A lot of the talent that was in the crypto hedge funds that blew up are starting to repot themselves in traditional hedge funds. You're seeing a migration, so us covering all those is very important. We know those from our previous lives. Our board chair, Michael Daffy, was Goldman Sachs' head of hedge fund coverage for 25 years. There's not a hedge fund that we don't have access to. You are starting to see e-endowments, pensions, in the US and in Canada. That's slowed a lot post-Sam Bankman-Fried. People just felt stupid after that, right?
If you think about the two biggest or two of the biggest Canadian pensions, one put $300 million into Celsius, and one put $400 million into FTX, and the money was zero literally three months after they made the investment with their pensioners' money. So it's gonna take a lot of courage for the next Canadian pension fund guy to say, "Hey, let me get in there." So that part of the business, I think, is slowing. There was a lot of people that got to the one-yard line and didn't invest and then saw the world blow up and now are saying, "Hey, this was my opportunity." What we've been seeing since the beginning of the year is, you know, crypto goes from 16,000 to whatever, 23,500 right now.
16%, 23.5%, 45% up, I should have bought the lows. What has always worked in crypto is price begets interest. Why did it rally? Because everyone that needed to sell had sold because there was no leverage in the system, and there was the quintessential blood on the streets. China, you know, Xi Jinping, after his people started protesting, you know, zero COVID and zero G, right? That big spontaneous protest, he pivoted to COVID's over and regulation is gonna be scaled back against tech and crypto. You're starting to see the Chinese crypto market thaw. You're seeing those trade by hedge funds I talked about, hey, they're just getting started buying. You saw short covering, and now you see lots of new interest.
Europe, we were talking about before, there are a lot of phone calls ringing in Europe. You're not seeing big institutions putting in checks, but everyone wants to figure out how to get involved. There's not an asset manager we speak to here in the U.S. that isn't wildly focused on tokenization. There's some piece of the crypto ecosystem, if it's tokenization or stablecoins or Bitcoin or, you know, rewards programs. You look at Starbucks. You read Mastercard now doing all of their purchases on blockchains, creating tokens per purchase. This idea that blockchains will eat the world and that tokenization is coming and that as you blend crypto in one big basket, everyone's got some interest. It's not all the same interest, right? Let me tell you, there's no real shtick in tokenization yet.
But 5 of the biggest financial institutions in the world have been in our office in the last 6 weeks talking about tokenization and how they can get engaged. No one wants to miss it. So that overall energy, I'm positive crypto is not going away. The government is trying to, you know, they call it Operation Choke Point 2. I think the Democratic Party felt so stupid after FTX, right? The number one donor. I make the joke that Sam was sitting on Biden's lap for Christmas pictures, and I'm a Democrat. That they've backed way. It's given the regulators kinda carte blanche to go after crypto. Elizabeth Warren hates crypto. She keeps putting in bills to say crypto should be illegal, which is weird because it's very progressive. Gensler is on this jihad.
Even with that, if you think about every crypto company is getting subpoenas and Wells notices and, you know, Paxos is run by a guy, Chad Cascarilla, who is a good friend of mine. I had literally just given their company keynote, they were all excited 9 days ago, and within 9 days, you know, the New York DFS kinda shuts them down, and they get a Wells notice. He runs an unbelievably straight-laced, you know, compliant system. There is an attack. There's an attack on CZ. Everyone's worried that he's some sinister guy. It really in my gut feeling stems from the fact that everyone got fooled by this kid in Bermuda shorts, and they feel stupid. I talked to Tim Adams, who runs the IIF.
IIF is the International Institute of Finance, it's got, you know, Chairman Powell is a member. You know, central bank governors, bank CEOs. It had 2 crypto members, Brian Armstrong and Sam. Guess who gave their keynote 2 weeks before FTX blew up? Sam. They feel stupid. The Sam Bankman-Fried thing went so much deeper in the institutional world and in the official world than a normal blowup. A lot of this is reaction to that. This too shall pass, the technology is plowing ahead. We're not seeing any slowdown in the amount of young kids that wanna get into these ecosystems. I said publicly recently, crypto will come back because retail will bring it back. It has always been a retail product first, right? People see this as their ecosystem.
They've been left out of finance. They're either younger people or people that felt left out, and you're seeing them come back. That's sucking institutions in. Anyway, it's a really interesting dynamic. I think this is gonna be a hard year for institutions. You know, for Galaxy, we're gonna grind it through and build. I think it doesn't mean I think prices will go up, but I think getting the institutional adoption everyone's still a little tentative. The rules are less clear. I don't think you have anything horrible come out of D.C. in terms of legislator, right? The Republicans are pretty pro-crypto, the head of the House Financial Services Committee, really pro-crypto.
The majority whip, Tom Emmer, he seems to like just to beat on Gary Gensler for sport. Pro-crypto. They're gonna hold the SEC accountable as much as they can in their watchdog role. I don't think you get legislation, 'cause even though the Senate and the Democratic Senate was really moving towards pro-crypto, it just doesn't feel like it's right for them at this point anymore, like, because of the Sam thing. You probably get stalemate, and Gensler is gonna push as hard as he can.
I wanna follow up a little bit more on the regulatory and, you know, what D.C. but also other countries might do. Before we hit that, you know, you'd mentioned that your customer base started with a lot of crypto native companies and, you know, we're hearing the same thing and seeing the same thing. A lot of the crypto native funds that I talk to are landing in traditional funds, and they're actually raising money from the pension plans and endowments as part of the alternative investment bucket.
Yep.
Because, you know, crypto is not gonna pass their risk committees now. Are you seeing what does your pipeline look like in terms of institutions that are coming to you and how fast it is to open an account with them?
We have different pipelines, right? We have a pipeline for businesses that we trade with, lend to. That pipeline is robust. Let's pick on Alan Howard because he's a friend of mine. Like, they set up a billion-dollar crypto multi-strat. How was Alan able to raise $1 billion for a crypto multi-strat? 'Cause he made a ton of money for people in his other multi-strat. It was the same investors. Hire some smart guys. Hired one guy from us. Now he's hired my son as well. They're gonna have an easier time raising money than Multicoin, who was down 80%, you know.
If you're gonna put money in, it's gonna end up going to something that used to look like TradFi because people say, "Well, they understand risk." I do think the wrapper of where crypto gets done will look more like traditional hedge funds than it did these hedge funds that came out of nowhere, you know, Arca and Multicoin and, you know, Three Arrows Capital. You know, these guys were run by young guys. They had spectacular ups, and they had spectacular burnouts. sometimes in fraud, sometimes just terrible risk management. I don't think that stops people from investing. I just think they're gonna invest in people they consider a safe pair of hands.
You know, given those teams, many of them have actually, you know, worked with you in the past, although they're just, you know, on a new platform. Does that bring business to you?
That should bring business to us. In some ways, it's easier to deal with people that we've known from their previous lives. That said, the key person in each of those places is not the PM or the trader, it's the COO. This is really an operational due diligence game for our team to sign people up. If you're Millennium, if you're whoever, it's your pipes, your custody, your... We have a pretty big balance sheet. You know, I wish it was bigger, right? 'Cause you're getting people to trust to deal with you. We're in a better shape. We are in better shape than any other crypto company in doing that. And right now, we have the advantage that the Goldmans and the Citibanks can only really offer futures product.
There are plenty of hedge funds that are like, "Okay, we'll just do the futures product," until they get more comfortable with us. For us, it's a hand-to-hand combat job of working with their credit side and working with their COOs, really their operations, you know, the ODD side. The good news is we know how to do that, but it doesn't scale like this. It's a linear scaling job. You pick the biggest guys and you go after them.
Glad you left out B of A when you talked about trade desk, although we do trade futures.
Yeah.
I want to go into the, you know, the different trends and themes in each of your businesses because, you know, it really does captures a lot of the ecosystem. Before we do that, you know, given all the regulatory and enforcement and all the stuff that's happening and, you know, we don't have to go through what happened really last year because, you know, I think we've already talked about that. Really, do you care most about what happens from a regulatory legislation perspective in the U.S., or does what happens in the E.U., what happens in Singapore, Hong Kong, does that help you, hurt you?
You know.
What does it do?
I was just on with one of the bigger crypto players before I walked in here, he was like, "We will never even think of dealing in the U.S. anymore." He was like, "Screw those people." Most of crypto happens outside the U.S., right? Every company like ours, we have it, an offshore operation. It's getting bigger, I foresee it getting a lot bigger. The U.S., partly because we're stuck until the next election, who knows who wins the next election. I'm not sure who I want to win the election at this point. We don't see a lot of clarity in the U.S. I think the U.S. is by far the most important in the long run. You know, the long arm of the U.S. law is really long.
We are working with the regulators, with legislators to try to make sure we don't do stupid stuff. As a patriotic American, like, if we screw this stable coin thing up, which we could, it's a disaster. I used to talk to Steve Mnuchin about this. I was like, "We have the largest deficit in the history of humanity to fund." People are moving from paper money to digital money around the world at record pace. Traditionally, there are more 100 dollar bills kept in pillowcases in places like Lagos, Nigeria, in Bogota, Colombia, China, than there are 1 dollar bills in circulation, right? The dollar has been the reserve currency of the world, it has been often not in the banking system.
Now you're gonna allow all that to go digital, and you're like, "Oh, no, let them put them into the renminbi or put it into the euro." Like, we're frantically working on a euro stablecoin proposition with partners. Like, the volatility between the dollar, the renminbi and the euro is nothing compared to the volatility of most of the developing world currencies. If you're in Lagos, you don't really care if it's a dollar, a renminbi or a euro. It's stable relative to your currency. I mean, if you look at the 185 countries, you know, 2/3s have currencies that depreciate more than 15% a year. Bitcoin itself or stablecoins are a lifeline. You know, it's a human right in some ways to have something to preserve your hard-earned wealth in.
That story is not going away. Why people love Bitcoin? They're like, "Well, Bitcoin is that thing because it's got no inflation." To be fair, most people in... I just keep picking on Nigeria. I can pick on Tanzania, I can pick on you name it, Venezuela, Argentina, would still rather dollarize, right? They still trust the U.S. dollar. If they can't get the dollar, they certainly take Bitcoin. If you start losing faith in the dollar because our politicians can't balance their own checkbook, we're gonna have a debt showdown, you know, the debt ceiling showdown. At the end of the year, we had that omnibus bill where we just jam everything in one bill and, you know, there's just so much shit that gets in that bill, and so there's no sense of fiscal prudency.
Chairman Powell has showed up as a Paul Volcker-esque character all of a sudden, one of the reasons Bitcoin came from $60,000, you know, to $16,000 was the Fed showed up as a real steward of an economy. You need two stewards of an economy. You need a Fed and a Treasury. The Treasury really is Congress. If both of those don't act in unison to over time have rational fiscal policy, a rational economic policy, your currency depreciates. That's the Bitcoin argument, that there's almost no way in this political world, in this populist world, we'll ever balance our budget again. Right, we have booming economy right now, right? Lowest unemployment in 60 years, we're hoping for a 5% budget deficit. 5% budget deficit used to be the crises, the, you know, the red lights flashing.
I remember when I worked at the White House in 1984, Ronald Reagan has a 5% budget deficit, that's all anyone could talk about. Now that's the floor. That's the Bitcoin story. The reality is that's a slow-moving game, I pray it's a slow-moving game. I don't want the dollar to plummet, for all our sake, right? Countries where the currency plummets, you lose civil society. Stablecoins is the answer for lots of people around the world. They are less concerned, right? Right now, the number one stablecoin in the world is Tether. It's a fine stablecoin. It's probably backed. It's not as regulated. It's run by guys that, you know, you might not want to do business with.
If you're an emerging market guy, they use Tether and they move it around on TRON, which is a centralized blockchain run by a Chinese guy named Justin Sun because it's cheap. My argument to the government and to lots of people is there's a huge opportunity for the dollar stablecoin, if it's Jeremy Allaire's at Circle, if it's a variety of stablecoins, to be the dominant payment system in the world. That's how you fund your deficit. If we, if we screw it up, you know, it's got, you know, I think, national, you know, national security implications. That's what the China-Chinese are playing for. They are ready with theirs. You go to Middle East, you see them all the, you know, Alipay and WeChat signs everywhere.
That's their access point for the digital renminbi. We'll see how it goes. I'm nervous. Frustratingly enough, there was decent stablecoin legislation, you know, on the floor right before Sam. We'll see what comes back.
I want to talk about stablecoins more, but before we hit that, you know, so I'm a strategist with the research. I don't actually cover companies, so I have no buys or sells. That also means I spend most of my time with private companies, especially in this space. What's interesting is as I've talked to probably about 40 companies in the last three weeks, and the consensus I'm getting is the ones that are touching trading, the view is nothing is gonna happen in the U.S. this year at all. It's similar to what you just said. The ones that are, you know, building applications on top, you know, sort of like the MoonPays and those guys, they actually are super excited. They, you know, they're not being affected by the trading.
You know, the fact that they don't call it NFT anymore, so it's all collectibles and stuff and, you know, they're able to offer things that actually are building on this. Their pipeline has grown significantly, and projects have grown significantly. How does, you know, the two of those pieces work?
Listen, Gensler would love to regulate the NFT market as well, but, like, people get in these positions, and they just love to be the tsar. Everything through me. Smart not to call them NFTs. I think NFTs are going to revolutionize the way companies interact with consumers. Most NFTs will be given away for free. They will not be sold. They will not be, you know, people's $69 million NFT or even, you know, we're part of Candy, and we sell digital collectibles for the MLB and Major League Baseball. I was just at WWE a couple of nights ago redoing them, and I met this 7 foot 5 Nigerian giant, the biggest man I've ever met.
Like, there will be a niche for NFTs that people collect for a variety of reasons, but most, in some ways, are going to replace the cookie. You're going to opt in, and you're going to give your information to people through this new technology platform, and it's gonna be an opt-in, not gonna be the way we do it with, "Hey, will you take this cookie?" I do this all the time. I, like, say, "No more cookies." I start pulling up the website, and they're like, "Well, will you accept these cookies or you can't use the website?" I was like, "Exactly." That's going to shift to an NFT-like platform. We're seeing some in our interactive fund. Some amazing starts to things.
I do think the MoonPay idea, you know, on your on-ramp into that world is going to change how. You also have to remember, most of us live in Web 2.0, and we live in a mostly physical world. On Sunday, I decided a no-phone day, and that meant I was only down to 1 hour and 15 minutes of screen time. It's the lowest I've had by 3 hours in over 1 year. I average five and a half to seven hours of screen time. Like, I thought, that's so embarrassing until I grabbed my kids' phones, and they're higher. If you just look by age, screen time goes up. You think about we're moving more and more into a digital world, and in a digital world, digital private property, value, currencies, right?
I mean, if you think about Satoshi's breakthrough was he gave us digital private property. There was no private property on the Internet until there was a blockchain, right? You had an Internet that was feudal. There's no capitalism without private property. There's no freedom without private property. Satoshi gave us private property, and you're going to see that show up in so many ways. NFTs is the easiest version in some ways. you're going to see these ecosystems built out, and then you're going to see the AR piece come in, you know, VR piece come in. As we live in this hybrid world, think about it, you're a young chess player in Montgomery, Alabama. Your friends are not in Montgomery, Alabama. You know, they're in Russia and India.
Right now, it used to be you would just type to them on ch-ch-ch. All of a sudden, you can meet them in, you know, chess land, and your avatar is talking to their avatars. That's starting to happen. It's the technology is just getting there. You know, multiplayer technology on large scale is getting there. So media companies, music companies, sports companies, how do you create these environments that people interact in? Even at Candy, we're doing ticketing for MLB games. All of a sudden, you get amazing data on the-- So you've got to be careful because the whole idea of Web3 is people-- you know, you don't steal people's data. So where does your ethos go? This technology is going to be a data collection technology.
It's interesting stuff at Candy Digital. I want to go back to stablecoins. It seems like, you know, that is the other consensus view that if anything passes in the U.S., it will be the stablecoin bill. You know, do you care whether it's a dollar-backed stablecoin, a euro-backed stablecoin, as to what's happening? I mean, you know, with Chad, you know, out of the Paxos Binance stablecoin, you know, you have this shift of most of Binance's stuff going to Tether, right? It's not going to Jeremy at Circle. You know, Tether is certainly becoming stronger. It's you know, they're definitely, you know, they're dollar-backed today, they wanna do euro, but does it matter to you and does it matter to-
Listen, it matters to me as an American, who served in the army, who, like, walked on the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. I've worn the freaking USA flag on my chest my whole life, and so it's infuriating to me. As a crypto technologist, it doesn't matter, right? It really doesn't. The euro is a pretty stable currency. Roughly, if I look at the volatility between the dollar and the euro over 20 years, it doesn't move that much. It's giving people in the developing world access to something that they want. I think it would be a crime if we don't have our own stable coin in the U.S. I actually have a call with Jeremy this afternoon. You know, how do, how do we help in some ways? Here's a stat that most people don't understand.
Last year, 2022, stablecoin settlements, $7 trillion. Visa, $2 trillion. Mastercard, $2 trillion. Stablecoins were more than Mastercard and Visa combined. it's not, it's not a complete apples to apples by any stretch, but these are not small ecosystems anymore. This is money moving around. we don't Everyone here probably has Apple Pay. It's freaking awesome. Right? We don't really need stablecoins in the U.S. if we're wealthy. We have Apple Pay, and they don't screw us that bad, we don't think. and Apple's pretty good on privacy. but the rest of the world doesn't. it's a lifeline for people sending money back and forth from, you know, you're a crappy construction job in Qatar or Dubai and your relatives are in Bangladesh.
You know, that process of moving money, everyone wants to do it cheaper and more efficiently. Micropayments, all of that is happening around the world. We can be too myopic looking at it from a U.S. perspective. In the U.S., why are people pushing for stablecoins? It's settlement, it's 24/7, it's efficiency. It's mostly not payments.
The DTCC came out about 3 months ago and said about two and a half trillion dollars globally would be freed up if you could have a wholesale CBDC or an approved stable coin just from banks with windows to the central banks. Two and a half trillion dollars is also real collateral money.
Shocking. What's complicated with CBDCs to stablecoins and that whole, let's say, spectrum of where we want to end up is that it cuts to privacy. I tell this story, which is kind of aggressive, and I probably shouldn't tell it, but I tell it anyways.
It's just us.
Yes, just us. I was on a phone call with the Brazilian Central Bank governor, who's a lovely guy, and I'd known for a long time, and a bunch of people, and they were talking about doing this CBDC. This was early on in their process. To try to be provocative and an ass, I said, "Well, you know, I'm googling your president, and he really doesn't like gay people. There are 29 pages straight about how much Bolsonaro doesn't like gay people. If you're a gay citizen of Brazil, you'd feel really uncomfortable if you knew your government had all your spending data because they would know instantly you were gay by the AI.
What are you gonna tell your gay, your, you know, your gay constituents?" He was like, "You can't ask that question on an open Zoom." I was like, "So where do you draw the line of privacy?" Right? China, for their citizens, there is no line. Their citizens have decided to give up full privacy. That's part of their pact with their government. That's not the American way. It's not really the Western way. If you're a central bank governor, he was at that point thinking, if I have all this pricing data, my decisions on the economy are so much more effective, right? I know in real-time what people are spending. You know, we wait months for these reports on consumer spending on CPI. I know live time on inflation.
He's like, "I'll have the greatest dashboard in the world." I said, "Well, yeah, but how do you protect people?" There's technology. So in a simple world, the more decentralized the blockchain is, right? Run a stablecoin on Ethereum, it's going to have more privacy than a centralized version, right? How do we find that balance? We all will agree that kiddy porn and terrorist financing are pretty shitty things, and we should stop them. Where's the trade-off between I need to see all your transactions and where they're going, and your privacy? Sorting that out is a really nuanced game and a game that doesn't do well in public politics. That's what's at stake here. We all think our data's not that important, right?
We've given away our data our whole lives, but we never thought we'd be in a country where half the country, literally half the country, didn't trust Donald Trump one iota and thought, "Oh, my God, if he has all my data, I'm nervous." The other half doesn't trust the other side. Right? In Brazil, you're seeing the same thing. When you had cohesion amongst a country. Listen, Iceland voluntarily gave all their DNA to their government for a study. Every single citizen of Iceland said, "Yeah, have my DNA." The government of Iceland knows, they know who's got chronic illnesses. They know... Well, that's really dangerous information if it's in really shitty hands.
Hey, all these people that get type 2 diabetes, let's just tax them, or let's just kill them because, like, you know, like, the bizarre thoughts that that power gives somebody. Data is power. Now that we can process data the way we can, it is a shocking amount of power. What the blockchain does, and you see this in the stablecoin debate, is allows you to say enough. We're getting close. The technology is not there, zero-knowledge proofs, there's this curve that all these smart young guys are pushing us up. They're gonna really allow limited data to go. You get to know on a need-to-know basis what you need to know. I use this example.
My daughter used to go to the bar and give her ID card, and she was 21, so she could drink, but it also gave her height, weight, and address. The bartender was like, "Oh, you live right around the corner." Why are you giving the bartender the address, right? That's just stupid. That idea of giving people the information they need, giving governments the information they need, the technology's close there, but these decisions are being made, and they're not necessarily, you know, being fully thought through. That's what's at stake.
I have lots more on market structure, custody, your prime business, deals on energy you're getting in Texas but we're not gonna talk about that today. I'd like to ask you, what do you think the outlook for, you know, just sort of token prices, given where we've gone just in the last five weeks? Because, you know.
We have had an amazingly strong rally. I gave you some reasons why I thought it was happening. I am surprised, you know, to be fair. Like I said, "Oh, you shouldn't sell," like, I'm surprised at the velocity of it. We see some of the money coming in. Like I said, the trade by hedge funds are getting engaged, we don't see all of it. We're not a retail shop, we're not in Asia nearly enough. When I look at the price action, when I look at the excitement of the customers calling, the FOMO building up, it wouldn't surprise me if we are at $30,000, you know, by the end of the quarter. I would have given both my shoes for that to be true just 6 weeks ago.
Like, "Oh, if we end the year at 30,000, I'll be the happiest guy. It'll give us time to kinda fix our stuff and build out and really have a great company." I just didn't want 10,000. In crypto, price begets interest. Right? These are ecosystems of shared value. All of a sudden, you're a Bitcoin and you're puffing your chest a little more and you're telling your friend and you're telling your friend and you're telling your friend, and that has created these cycles. You know, the halving talk will start in a few months. It's really hard to know where these things end. What makes me skeptical that we can have the explosive, you know, back to the old highs this year is Chairman Powell's become a tough son of a bitch.
Like, he really is doing what he says he's gonna do, and I don't see the Fed pivoting and cutting anytime soon. We're gonna have hawkish Fed policy. With 5%, 5.5%, you know, short rates, got $100 million, $5.5 million a year in interest. It's a much bigger hurdle to take a flyer on stuff.
Yeah, up on a risk asset.
Risk assets. I mean, again, one thing that I think is I wanna scream loud and clear because Jamie Dimon got on TV and was shitting all over crypto again. We did some real quantitative analysis of Ethereum and Bitcoin versus you name the stock, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, JP Morgan, from pre-COVID to the high, from the high to the low, from three years ago, two years ago. We've all adjusted it. We were even so geeky that we've all adjusted it using longer day count for the crypto since they trade, you know, 365 days a year. Ethereum on every single time zone has been the single best investment on every one we used. Three years, two years, pre-COVID, post-COVID, all adjusted. Bitcoin has been second or third.
Tesla, believe it or not, is the only other thing that compared. These have been great investments, even in a time of abuse, right? A time of fraud and, you know, excessive speculation. If you look at Zoom, which we use Zoom every freaking day. Zoom rallied about as much as Bitcoin. It's barely come back from its lows, unless I haven't looked at it in the last two weeks. You know, Bitcoin's still 3X from where it was pre-COVID. Bitcoin's, you know, you made 300% being in Bitcoin if you bought it the day before COVID and you made nothing in Zoom. While it feels like we've had this and it's heartless, the adoption of crypto continues. The spread of this crypto idea continues.
More and more people believe in it. You've got to step back a little bit and look at that trend. You know, it's kind of shocking, actually, that because you would have thought this had been the worst period for crypto that you can imagine. I mean, we had BlockFi and Celsius and Three Arrows. Like, it was a freaking rogue, you know, gallery of rogues. And even with all that, we're at better, you know, better vibrancy.
Well, good. That was great. Thank you, Mike. Thanks, everybody.
Thanks a lot.