A Massive Bitcoin Bull Case Is Forming | Bill Barhydt

All of that equates to incremental significant money printing this year. I wouldn't be surprised if we see stimulus checks this summer going into the midterms. Crypto is is screaming right now. I mean it's never we've never had more tailwinds in our space. But if you're just talking about price, I think you need retail. My biggest concern, and I've been very clear about this publicly.

What's going on, guys? Today we got a great conversation with Bill Barhight. He is the founder and CEO of Abra. And in this conversation, we talk about what's going on with the Bitcoin price, given all the context of the Iran conflict. What's going on in traditional assets? How's it going to impact your personal portfolio? Then we get into regulation and the new SEC CFTC rules that came out, the Clarity Act.

We also talk about his big deal that he just announced, where Abra's going public via a spec transaction. And then we finish up with some talk around artificial intelligence, how they're using it internally, how he's using it personally, and how it could impact the finance industry more broadly.

All that and more, my latest conversation with Bill Barhite. All right, Bill, I thought a great place to start the conversation is the Iran war kicks off. We're dropping bombs all over the Middle East. And now we've got to figure out what does that mean for Bitcoin? Very interestingly, almost everything else is sold off. People are really worried, oil's up.

Right. Inflation concerns, but Bitcoin's hanging in there. Why do you think Bitcoin is doing so? I I I think it's the two points are mutually exclusive. I th I I'm not convinced that it's because of the war that it was falling or going up, right? I think I think Bitcoin is still a macro liquidity suck. And I think you're gonna see this year significant improvements in the liquidity situation. We've got a trillion dollars in in debt financing, uh uh debt servicing we've got to finance. We've got

10 trillion in in debt that we have to basically refinance. We were trying to do it last year at lower rates. They're gonna do what they have to do, in my opinion, to get those rates as low as they possibly can. All of that equates to incremental significant money printing this year. I wouldn't be surprised if we see stimulus checks this summer going into the midterms.

Right. So so again, to me it just all equates to more money printing. I don't think Bitcoin is front running that yet. I don't think the market believes everything I'm saying yet. I'm probably have a little bit of a contrarian on that view. Um DXY is actually up. the last like what ninety days, which is usually a leading indicator on on liquidity. Um and and I think that's why, you know, Bitcoin fell in Q four, Q one is the liquidity didn't come.

Uh and and so I think Bitcoin has kind of stabilized in that and I think it'll stabilize for a while in that kind of sixty five to ninety K range, which for the The non-integrated people sounds like that's a that's not a range. That's insane, right? But for our world, that's a range, right? And I and I think that's what we're gonna see. You know, we may see a wick to fifty five, but I I I I wouldn't be surprised if the bottom is in.

It feels like um I don't think in the Bitcoin's history we've ever seen like a double extreme fear in the sense of I think I saw the fear print, the lowest I saw was like a six. Yeah. on the extreme uh or the fear and greed index. Yeah. To go to six, recover a little and then like get another, you know, extreme fear like that. Maybe there's some existential shock that would occur that Yeah.

Correct. And so it's like Okay, sure, maybe something else could happen, but given the facts that we have right now, you kind of have hopefully the worst behind us. And so as you get this stability, do you think that there's any credibility to uh global large investors saying, wait a second. There's global instability happening. There's uncertainty on the horizon. Oil prices are up. Gold, stocks, bonds, everything is selling off. Bitcoin is not.

Maybe I should do some more work here. Maybe maybe this is a non-correlated asset. This is something that should be in my portfolio for moments like this. Yeah, I think there was a a rotation that happened in Bitcoin. Uh, I think that rotation is kind of reaching an equilibrium state right now.

I think what's really happening is is that retail money is nowhere to be found. And retail sentiment in general for the overall investing environment outside of like prediction markets and short-term bets is very, very low. And so I think until we see significant money coming in uh in from a government liquidity perspective or some other source of liquidity, I don't think we're gonna basically move outside of that.

range that I mentioned. I think it's still a retail, I think crypto is still by and large a retail market. Everybody's, including ABRA is about is excited about the institutions coming, but even ETFs at the end of the day are an interface for retail to buy securitized versions of Bitcoin via their their broker, right? And and that's penetrated what, 15, 16, maybe 20% top.

of of the Bitcoin floats and the rest is basically, you know, um not securitized. And so I'm I'm still convinced that we need retail uh if we're talking about price. If we're just talking about the dynamics and the value add. Of digital assets, smart contracts via stable coins, you know, now tokenized equities, tokenization of real-world assets.

Crypto is is screaming right now. I mean, it's never we've never had more tailwinds in our space. But if you're just talking about price, I think you need retail. Yeah, it's very uh it's very fascinating. Now, when we think about um uh kind of the fallout of some of this stuff, like private credit having cracks.

At the same time, there's geopolitical instability, people are going risk off. Like that all seems connected to me, right? Is if I'm worried about what's going on in the market, then I want to raise cash. I want liquidity. We see the fund manager surveys, all these things that cash is definitely being raised. So then people start to redeem the private credit, and the question then becomes like, is this whole chain reaction kind of you know global financial crisis 2.0?

Where if private credit has problems, then private equity has problems, private equity has problems, then that is going to reverberate throughout these portfolios. What what's your general feel there? So uh I'm not an expert in in private credit markets. My background is more in traditional. Well my my capital market's background is more in traditional fixed income, but I would say I look at the leverage.

And I kind of follow the leverage when I think about the winding up and the unwinding of these things. And private credit and private equity basically are still in the kind of post ZERP uh hangover uh uh headwinds. And that unwind hasn't happened because it hasn't needed to happen yet. In other words, if you're in private equity and you have a 10 year fund.

And you basically were able to raise a lot of money in Zerf, put that money to work. And you're in year four when that happened and you're in s year seven right now. You're still basically a few years away from ha being forced to take a write down on many of those deals where you finance those deals at close to zero and you've got to refinance them at a number much higher than zero.

That's when you know the proverbial chickens come home to roost, in my opinion. And and and that's the leverage unwind that I'm I'm looking at in in those markets. And I do think there's going to be more pain to come there for sure. the things that uh people that I you know uh find very smart and and uh look to in these moments, uh they are all not talking about private credit. They're all talking about private equity.

And so they're like, Look, uh, I was just talking to somebody and and she was saying that the private credit is the top of the stack. Like they are first in line. If they have problems, well, what's the equity worth? A hundred percent. And and a lot of it is software, right? So so look at the SAS. The SAS world has been decimated. Um, will it recover? Is it is it overblown? I'm not sure, but I can tell you that a lot of mid-cap CIOs are gonna be looking at

an off-the-shelf SaaS second to meet a lot of their immediate needs because they can develop and prototype things in minutes now. And so why would you be paying Oracle and NetSuite for things you don't necessarily need?

Right. I know you doing this with your own tools that you guys have developed, right? W w for AI. So so uh if you've made a lot of bets in private equity in SaaS that you haven't had any liquidity event for and you're in year seven of those ten year funds and you haven't taken a a write down That can get ugly real, real quick. Now, I don't know how those numbers affect the overall GDP because they are private.

Um, but I can tell you that um I have not seen a lot of public write down or failures of these private equity funds. And I would not be surprised if we start seeing significant uh write downs or failures of private equity funds. Well would I write it down if I don't need to? Right.

Um let's talk regulation. Uh obviously the Clarity Act is starting to make a lot of progress, but uh we also saw the SEC and CFTC. They're like boys, you know. Uh Paul and Mike seem to be uh Yeah.

Sympatico. They just released this brand new guidance, I think is maybe the way to describe it around uh how they're going to categorize all of these different crypto assets. The list was a little bit longer than I thought it was going to be. There's like five, I think five different categories. What was your general take? Good, bad, and different? I I mean I was blown away, honestly, because it was the first like for years it's been a very simple message.

Whether we like the rules or not, tell us what the rules are so we can all follow the rules if there needs to be rules. Right. And and so We went from everything is a security being the rule, which none of us ever believed was the case in the first place, but it was more like, hey, you startups can't afford to fight us anyway. So everything's a security. Right. I remember getting uh a request.

Uh, I think I could talk about it now. It's been many years, from the SEC, where they basically gave our company a list of like 30 assets and said, Can you please identify which of these are security? And included Bitcoin and Ethereum. I said to my lawyers, I said, none of these are securities. They said, well, we can't we that that can't be our answer. I said, well, what do you mean it can't be our answer? It's the answer. I said, well, I'm not doing that. You go figure it out.

And and and so at least now we're having an intelligent conversation about what a digital commodity is. Right, what a digital security is. And the fact that something can be c can be a digital commodity and you can raise money in a securities style offering, which may require disclosures.

But selling that, you know, digital version of a Pokemon card later may not be a security offering, just like selling Pokemon cards is not a security offering. Somebody has finally come to their senses and documented that. And and that is really, really good news for our space, probably on the order of importance of the Genius Act itself for stable coins, because this affects thousands.

of potential digital asset projects that are out there that needed, you know, that clarity. And I'm also not a hundred percent sure they would have done this if they didn't think that the Clarity Act was coming because they want all of this to be to be consistent. So to a certain degree, I think they're actually front running the the Clarity Act itself, which is also good news.

Yeah, it's kind of like they were uh it's like a um a parent whose kid is learning how to ride a bicycle. Yeah. And you're kinda running alo alongside it. You kinda hey, go here, go here, right? Okay. Right. But the kid thinks that they are uh riding the bike. Yeah, but you know where the bike's headed and and you can steer'em. I that's a great analogy. I totally agree with that. Yeah. And was there any downsides or things that you saw in there that that you were

are actually worried about? No, honestly, no. I think they did it so far. You know, I I've I've read it. I've also had, you know, my my internal AI rate read it. compared it to our own, you know, thoughts on the matter. And I've been shocked at how useful, accurate, um, yeah, and and and well done this has been so far. Now that we have it, does the Clarity Act matter more or less when it actually gets done? Okay, so I have a different feeling on the Clarity Act.

My my opinion on the Clarity Act is is not uh necessarily about the nuanced details of how we deal with stablecoin yield or this or that. My biggest concern, and I've been very clear about this publicly. is we need a regulatory moat around the digital asset space that makes sure that everything we're codifying now stays the way it is, regardless of who is in power in the White House. Right. Who is running the Senate finance or banking committee? Who is running the ag committee?

Right. We can't basically be changing our stance on what's a digital commodity and what's a digital security every four years because we have a different person in the White House who's putting different people in power. So we need to codify what they're saying, not just as policy, but as law.

Right. And Chevron I think I'm not a lawyer, but I believe Chevron also makes this clear, right? They can be interpreting existing law today very, very clearly. But if somebody interprets that law differently, we're back at the courts again. And we need to codify this so that we don't have uh Warren Gensler two in four years and it undoes everything that we've been working on for the last eighteen months.

It does feel like uh there's a lot of momentum and energy behind getting that done. Um, it also now as we start to get more clarity, opens the opportunity for people to say, hey, I can grow my business. I can go and kind of play offense. You guys just announced that you are going public via SPAC transaction. Describe a little as to what the thought process is behind doing it and what the deal structure is.

Sure. Well, the thought process is is uh to build on what we just talked about, the tailwinds in our space are real. Um tokenization, stable coins. We'll talk about wealth management and and you know, being in the wealth management space, we not only want to service our clients, but other wealth managers who need to offer uh digital asset solutions to their clients in a hundred trillion dollar.

markets, right? So so we believe that that the headwinds we had before have now become tailwinds. I don't think the tailwinds are going to get any stronger than they are now, except maybe if we stop uh bombing other countries and, you know, World War Three doesn't doesn't break out. But independent of that, the tailwinds are there. It's clear to us that as a public company,

Right. As a as an registered investment advisor with the SEC, we're now in a position to establish ourselves as the future de facto leader in this emerging intersection between the digital asset space and the wealth management space, which is basically on zero. Right. I mean, you know, we use this phrase, get off zero, right? Well, the the the wealth management space outside of small exposure to Bitcoin ETFs is basically on zero. Most of them are still managing 60-40 portfolios.

when everybody in our shared world thinks that that that allocation is dead.

That the 40 allocation makes no more sense, but that's where they still are. Why? Because they don't talk to their clients more than a couple of times a year, most likely. Right. Or in some cases, maybe the the client has passed away and nobody knows. Who knows? Right. But that reallocation or inheritance and movement of those assets to the next generation away from what I call the boomer money into, you know, the next gen money is about to happen.

And they don't want to use the boomer systems. They don't want the sixty forty portfolio. Most of them are like, what is this treasury stuff? I don't, I don't get it out of here. It's losing me money. Right. They're on Robinhood. They're on Cauchy. You know, they're on the next gen platform. They're looking at crypto. Right. So, so we're gonna help that wealth uh management space get off zero. When you start looking at um these RAs.

Is it fair to say some of them are very skeptical and still like, I'm not touching this stuff? And then others are like, How do I upgrade and, you know, replace cash with stable coins and like they're all in and everything in between? Or do we now have uh maybe shame towards the RAs who are still, you know, this is worthless. Like that's kind of a a a dead perspective.

I I I see okay, so I've been speaking to RAs quietly for years, probably five or six years now. So I speak for example at Rick Edelman's events and he hosts RA big RA events every year. So I get to meet with them and I've seen the transition. So five years ago, I'd be presenting, and the questions I'd get from the audience was, I really don't understand this Bitcoin thing. Can you explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old? That doesn't happen anymore.

Now the questions are, okay, so I have clients who are holding Bitcoin separately on a hardware wallet and they're telling me that they want to borrow against it, and I don't know what they're talking about. Or, or like two years ago when I was at one of the events, I was talking about next gen uh, you know, smart contract platforms. I said, I'm really bullish on Solana personally, for example, or bullish on Suey or Aptos. And

Last year, like so n the year after, I'd have individual wealth advisors coming up to me, Oh, thank you for talking about Solana. I ended up buying some and I've done really well with it. I said, Oh, great. What about your clients? And they were like, Oh no. Can't can't can't do that. I can't put my clients in it yet. I said, well, well, why not? And they said, well, it's it's usually a a compliance legal decision within the company. Now we're having discussions with say, how do we do this?

Right. How do we legally do this in a way that's compliant because the demand is growing? Right. And so that's a totally new set of discussions. My clients want to borrow against their portfolio. They want to earn yield on their digital assets. They don't want them on hardware wallets. They don't want all their equities over here and all their digital assets over here, you know, buried in the in the backyard. They can't deal with that in their trust or be it for inheritance and

And and so we're already seeing that with our direct clients. So we validated that. We know that business model works and the demand is real today. That's our existing business. Now what we're saying is we're in a position to for you to offer it to your clients as well. That's starting, they're starting to get it. It's starting to resonate.

Are there gonna be digital asset only RIAs? Like if you think about it from the perspective, they won't actually have their clients wanting traditional assets, it'll just be all crypto, everything's tokenized, et cetera. I I think okay. So it's uh another way of asking the same question is do we get to a world where the traditional model for custody of equities moves completely to digital?

Are we in a model where therefore the custodians that an RIA would use are now completely digital, meaning they m look more like Abra, right, than they do like, you know, a Schwab, right? And I think the answer is all of it is gonna move. To be digital. So the question becomes kind of moot because every portfolio, by definition, becomes 100% digital assets over the next 10 to 15 years or sooner, right? It's just a question of how fast.

We can get, you know, uh tokenized equities live in the US, deal with the clearing issues and the custody issues. I think you'll see uh tokenized public equities live in the US this year for the first time. And then after that, it'll simply be a question of how fast they get adopted by wealth advisors and then how fast you can start to do custom portfolio construction within the wealth advisor space based on the fact that I have tokenized Tesla shares.

or soon tokenized SpaceX shares and b Bitcoin, which is a token, and Ethereum or Solana, and they become one tokenized portfolio that I can build custom construct, you know, do custom construction around. That will be available in the next year, in my opinion. I'm I'm I'm making some assumptions that will certain things will get figured out in the market.

could be off a little bit, but I think you're gonna see a mass migration to tokenized portfolios over time. Why? Well, number one, you can borrow against, in theory, the entire value of your your asset portfolio using DeFi. That's huge. Two, they trade 24-7, which is what people today want. Right. Remember, when you buy Bitcoin in an ETF, you're literally buying uh a an exchange traded product that trades 35 hours a week. Bitcoin trades 24-7. That's a problem.

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When you're looking at this um It does feel like the advisors in one hand are trying to keep up with the industry, but now they have clients that are so informed. Like they're getting information on the internet, on podcasts, newsletters, you know, X, whatever. The role of the advisor seems to be shifting a little bit. Are they gonna go away? Do they become more valuable? You know, I'm like very fascinated by the idea of like is AI gonna well, what jobs are gonna get replaced? Yeah.

And I don't know if I have an answer for the financial advisor. Like it maybe it's bifurcated. I I I've I've spent a lot of time learning about this industry, right? So so think about public markets and and public market CEOs. Cause I always say follow the money. What's the incentive?

You know, a as goes the incentive, so goes the strategy and the execution, right? Public market CEOs generally have a four year kind of incentive model because they receive stock uh, you know, grants or RSUs and they vest over four years. Um, you know, and and and so their actions tend to follow that model, right? The the single best thing you can do besides making your numbers every quarter is to to drive up your stock price is usually to buy back your stock.

And and so, you know, traditionally people who are on a five year tenure will will look to buy back stock, in my opinion, as quickly as possible because they know it's gonna drive the stock price up. In in the RAA world. You you you have RAAs that are being bought and sold constantly. Why? Because the owners retire, partners retire. And and so that changes things a lot in terms of how these companies are managed, right?

So like when Edelman Financial Engines was was was merged into a private equity company, it was an amalgamation of of two companies and since they've bought a lot of little RIAs. And they do that because they wait until these partners or CEOs retire and they're looking for a home for what they're doing because they want to cash out. Right. And so they usually cash out by looking for a place to sell or merge or, you know, they'll get payments over

many years. And and so I think this transition to um or the inheritance transition that's coming from the boomer generation combined with this next generation of people kind of cashing out is going to create massive consolidation within the RAA space. Um and there's also like 15 major platforms that are used in that space. None of them are are AI centric today. That has to go, that has to be fixed.

So there's going to be a another wave of consolidation from a tech perspective where people is portfolio constructed. So so anyway, so massive changes afoot, in my opinion, in in the whole wealth management space in this country.

With AI, how's it changing how you guys build the company internally? Oh God, it's it's taken over. I mean it's it's fancy what way. So so development, like we we prototype stuff. in in hours. We we use the tools. Um now when you're developing stuff that touches people's money, the AI in in at ABBA doesn't touch people's money today or crypto or anything like that. But if we're developing new features,

We're screaming. If we're if we're testing, you know, market messaging uh and we want to run it, we we can have virtual legal discussions because as an RAA you have a framework for for marketing that's different from a money transmitter, for example. Um, all of that we can test. Right. And and so I have, you know, I have a Jarvis I've built in my life that's fully integrated with every aspect.

Of our business that can basically run analysis for me in in real time. And I've opened it up to my exec team, for example, to be able to take advantage of. Um, if you're not an AI first company and you're less than 250 people, you're crazy because you're not taking advantage of the fact that you should be in a position to move literally 10x faster now than companies that have s entrenched systems.

that can't quickly move to the AI tools. Right. That that's the that's the key right now. Is is mids small to mid-sized companies should be able to move on a dime. Like switch on a dime right now versus the large incumbents that are having raging debates and are afraid

of the displacement that's coming. We're not afraid of the displacement. We need the help because we've always been running Abra uh hyper efficiently. Right. One of the reasons I'm excited to go public. But I'm not looking to hire hundreds of people. Yeah. What the Jarvis thing you built, how did you build or like what's a tech stack or

Yeah, I'm I'm a computer science guy so so so uh as a tech nerd I've I've created an amalgamation of a lot of different tools. I've I've spent a lot of time with OpenClaw. The problem with OpenClaw is is it's like it's just Swiss cheese for your life.

Meaning meaning it it goes both ways. So you really have to know what you're doing to lock things down, especially as a wealth manager. So I've I've I've tested that and created environments where I can give it access to documents, but I know that the outside world has no access, doing that is not for the faint of heart. Um, but I've I've you know integrated

So like but this is very interesting to me. So like open claw, like I I really got a new computer, right? So how about this? You tell me what you would do if you were me in terms of I wanna uh build a bunch of stuff to automate inside of our businesses or just in my life in general. Where do you think most people start? Right. And the reason I say that is because I do think that there is um a friend of mine, uh, PE operator on uh on X.

He tweeted this whole long thing and he was like, You know, I've spent hours and hours and I don't know maybe twenty, thirty hours and he's like, and all of this stuff. I kept seeing the demos and this was cool and this and and basically the conclusion was like, This stuff is hard. Like, stop making this stuff look so simple for everybody. Right.

Like this is not something where you just like I woke up, I pressed the button, all of a sudden it's magic. Yeah. There is an element of like that's the light at the end of the tunnel, but there's a lot of work and patience and and and attention to detail to get there. Right.

And I think that's the the next step is that comment you made about how hard it is. I think that's about to change, but we're still in that phase of it's really hard. So let me let me be be specific. Right. So if you install OpenClaw today, which which I've done. And you want to give it access to your email, to your Slack, to your, to your, to have a voice channel, Telegram, text, uh, WhatsApp, which I've done.

But I've done it in a very locked down environment. It's most of that, and even my my my uh cloud drive, my local file drive, a lot of that is API-based, meaning there's no way to do it by just typing in, please access my Gmail. So you literally are going to, you know, different cloud service providers and getting API keys. I've already lost half your audience.

Right. When by saying that, they're like, well, I don't know understand what Bill's talking about. That's gonna change eventually because these services know that in order to maintain their client relationships, they're gonna have to d integrate with these AI agents by default. But right now I have to do the work.

of creating that integration myself, maintaining it, and making sure it doesn't break, especially when you become dependent on it. Right. So there's a couple of um, for example, keys that I use that expire by default. and there's nothing I can do about it. Which means every few weeks I have to go in and and

Yeah. And so um it's get it's I I now I think there's gonna be a wave that we've proven the demand uh and every um every LLM is looking to reproduce what OpenClaw did because they they want to own those relationships. to make those integrations infinitely easier for the lame and the mid sized company. But I also think it's going to create a lot of demand for for tech talent. Right. Of course. And and and so I think there's

gonna be a C shift in in how tech talent is hired inside of companies. Yes, you'll probably see, you know, a fair amount of cuts, but it's gonna be a reallocation. into the people that can make these services and tools work and train the staff to become the trainer, people in support, people in finance.

who are going to basically train, you know, their Jarvis on on how to basically understand the finances of the company so that you can quickly answer questions and do FPA at light speed, for example. Yeah it it's fascinating to me because uh I keep asking people like, Okay, cool, you built something, like wha what is the impact? What what is the thing? And I've heard everything from um there's a company uh they started with one agent internally, now they maybe have

S somewhere more than ten, less than fifty. I I don't know what the number is today, but they pretty much are trying to give uh an agent to each department inside of their company. So, you know, fairly large company, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue.

And um what they're trying to do is increase the like clock speed of the organization. And so one way to increase speed is you compress time it takes to do various tasks. And um it's crazy. It's like caught like wildfire inside of this business. I have other friends who are like, oh, it drafts my emails. For me.

I I don't think I can pass judgment as to one being more valuable or less valuable, but it does feel like there's kind of like a macro organization and then there's like the micro impact on the individual themselves. And you need to marry those two things together. Yeah. So so for me.

I I I agree with that. It it's drafted emails for me. It's drafted documents for me. I well I always proof amazing. Amazing. Amazing. It went we w and and this is a big transition over the last nine months. A lot of mistakes. I would say, certainly this time last year, like Huge transition to being like almost perfect now. Like remarkable the the difference. Like all the hallucination stuff we used to talk about. We don't hear so much about that right now.

The other thing that that I've come to realize is is like the holy grail of doing this right. Um, and and I think this probably true for most mid sized companies, is when you can reverse the model so that it's not you directing the tool, it's it's you become AI centric and in a way you almost work for it. So in other words, for the day-to-day things that are table stakes for running a business.

I don't want to have to basically direct any any AI tool. I want it, I just want to know that it's doing it and that it tells me in an interrupt-driven way where it needs my help. And I want to add value in super strategic ways that drive the business. versus dealing with the mundane day-to-day. And I want that to be true for my exec team as well. And then eventually push that further and further down so that becoming a domain expert

Right, is the value add as opposed to yes, I know how to answer support emails really quickly. Well, I don't really care about that at scale. I tell about I care about the fact that your domain expertise is helping the AI that owns the process do it a thousand times faster. And I'm happy to pay you a lot more for that if if it comes to that because um, you know, we're so much more efficient as a company.

And so I think people are going to start to realize that it's, it's, it's not as scary as you think to reverse the model. Right. And say, well, I don't want to work for some AI overlord. Well, that that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the table stakes of running a business day to day. Let it deal with it. Right. And then let's transition. And this is going to happen very quickly, in my opinion, over the next couple of years.

Yeah, it it does really feel like um as this AI stuff becomes more pervasive, like what you're basically talking about is like full on autonomy. And so I'm fascinated by uh Stripe and uh Tempo, one one of the uh companies that they're helping fund. Um

came out with the I think it's called the machine payment protocol, MPP. And it's this whole idea of they're trying to create a unified, you know, uh uh protocol so that people or or I'm sorry, machines can pay each other back and forth, et cetera. Yep. Like duh, no brainer, it feels like, right? Yeah. So I recently joined uh uh Algorand as chairman to kinda you know, to be blunt, to r kinda re hopefully re help revive.

uh the platform. I mean, it's it's a fantastic tech stack, you know, that they built at Algorand. It's got super instant finality for payments. And one of the things we're they're spending a lot of time on is this new X402 protocol, which kind of Coinbase wanted to be like the missing payments protocol that was in the original Netscape browser that we created back when I was there because it contemplated the idea of money for the internet. Now we're basically seeing that machine to machine

Payments is probably the future of smart contracts, right? Because if you're spinning up an agent and you say to that agent, what is the most efficient? Fastest, cheapest way for you to do machine to machine, agent-to-agent transactions, it's invariably going to come up with crypto. What it's not going to tell you is go, I need to go create a bank account.

That's not gonna happen. That makes no sense. Now, if you if it's using yours, maybe, right? But even then, I still am convinced that either native crypto or stable coins in the short term are the best way for these agents to transact. And they're figuring it out, right? If you ask most agents what the best store of wealth is, my guess is in many cases, it'll probably say Bitcoin for a lot of reasons.

But it may not want to use Bitcoin for transactions because they're too expensive, but it might say, hey, let's use Solana for transactions. Super easy. You know, we want obviously we want that to eventually become Algorand because of the advantages there. But it's going to be a a super awesome competition between all these L1s to become the transaction platforms for those agents. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it it is um it does beg the question then: is it Bitcoin, is it stable coins, is it another coin? Like how do how do you move money in this world? Right. And um Uh fast and final. The two Fs that I care about the most if I'm an agent. Uh Self explanatory final meaning that Reversible, it's done. It can't go back. Uh there's no charge. There's no chargebacks. It's it's it's cash in the in the traditional sense of you gave me my purchase receipt, I handed you the cash. It's done. Right.

Um and and so I think I think that's gonna matter a lot. And that's Yeah. There's there's not a lot of platforms that could there's maybe seven or eight platforms that that matter in that fast and final race. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, it's very fascinating. Um all right, what uh what's next for uh Abra? You gotta go and get the deal done? Right. Yep. But then what? So we're in a bit of a quiet period. We're we're you know, we've got a S four process to go through with the the SEC to to get the transaction approved. Um, you know, that'll that'll take a a little time and in the meantime we're we're building the business as fast and as

furious as as we can. You know, we're we're hiring on the the sales, the sales front. You'll see us doing more and more in the in the RIA world itself to help other RIAs in addition to our direct clients. And then facilitating more and more capabilities for for our clients in yield, lending, staking, you know, custody.

uh as the as the business grows, hopefully now looking at things like tokenized equities, um, which I'm super bullish on, facilitating loans against tokenized real world assets. Uh I'm I'm I'm I think this whole movement towards RWA tokenization is going to be huge for DeFi. And and that's a a bet that that we're making that we're going to be able to facilitate that for our clients as well.

I think that this is a unexplored lane that if you guys can uh can dominate it'd be pretty uh pretty fantastic. Yeah. It's been a long time coming, but we're here and we're excited. well congratulations on the deal we'll do this again if you want Thanks brother. Good to see you.