And banks themselves will issue on the same technology as stable coins. They'll issue a coin it'll be just as interoperable as a stable coin, but it'll have a couple of extra benefits. One is it will be able to pay interest, not yield. It'll be FDIC insured, it will have Reggae consumer protections, and all those wallets will have identity.
This episode is brought to you by Uphold, which is a great crypto platform that I've been using since twenty eighteen. Uphold makes it easy to buy, sell, trade cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and all coins. In fact, they have three hundred plus cryptocurrencies on their platform, and they carry precious metals such as gold and silver, and you can swap between these assets, so it's really unique. Uphold is safe and reliable. I've never had any issues with them, and they are
one hundred percent reserved. You can review their transparency report. They don't commingle or lend out your funds. Now recently launch a great product called Uphold Rewards, and it's packed with many benefits. You can earn up to five point twenty five percent on stable coins, get twenty four our early access to new token listings, and unlock exclusive crypto insights and a support a variety of stable coins such as PYUSD that's PayPal stable coins Circles, USDC, and USBC.
They will be supporting Ripples's upcoming launch of RLUSD. So this is a really great rewards program and if you'd like to learn more, please visit the link in the description. Welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward and my guest today is Greg Kidd, who is the co founder of hard Yaka and the CEO of USBC. Greg, great to see you, Great.
To have you back on Hey, thanks for having me. Greg.
You've been head of the curve in many ways in the crypto industry, investing in different crypto companies and projects going back years, and we've spoken i think a few times over the years. So I'm curious what's the latest with hard Yaka and any new investments, any new developments on your end.
So the big thing for hard Yaka now is we're all in on USBC, which is a deposit token runs on the same rails as stable coins, but it'll be issued directly by banks and including our bank, which is Vast Bank, which will be the initial bank to issue a deposit token running on either Permission Ethereum or on Solana, and that will be new to the market. Right now, it is still a stable coin, but shortly we will bring it over and bring it within the banking ecosystem.
We can kind of talk about the pros and cons there, but that's the big focus of hard Yaka going forward, especially with the stable coin legislation coming down the pike in this country in the next six months.
Yeah, let's talk at bit about USBC because I'm a user of Uphold, a platform you've been invested in and a platform I've bought and solo crypto on, and they have a rewards program where they offer five point two five percent on USBC if you were to participate in that program. So you mentioned it's a stable coin format now, but you said it will be or evolve or be transformed into a deposit token, right.
So, currently for stable coins, they're issued by FinTechs like Tether's a fintech circle is issuing USDC along with Coinbase, and USBC is currently issued out of the Bahamas under the darract. It's a regulated entity out there. All of those have their funds invested in banks and other marketable securities. But the difference will be going forward with deposit tokens is the middleman will be cut out and banks themselves will issue on the same technology as stable coins. They'll
issue a coin. It'll be just as interoperable as a stable coin, but it'll have a couple of extra benefits. One is it will be able to pay interest, not yield. It'll be the FDIC ensured, it will have Reggie consumer protections, and all those wallets will have identity. For stable coins, they might have identity, they might not, And maybe that's okay for some folks, but for folks who want to know that the entire ecosystem is green, it always has identity.
Deposit tokens will have few that feature in a way that stable coins can't match.
So do you see both of these products coexisting as the digital economy un full of stable coins and depositokens? And do you see depositokens being used more on the commercial side while stable coins on the retail site.
They will coexist. There are a lot of situations where the fact that the stable coin can be held in a non custodial wallet without identity is not problematic. It's actually desirable. There's a lot of DeFi stable coins are really popular in trade file so like the most liquid piers are, for instance, tether, Bitcoin or te Solana, So
there are going to be uses for that. But when it comes to actual things like day to day commerce, we're betting that kind of the protections you have, like when you use bank money and something goes wrong and you can get it back, that'll make a deposit token still using all the benefits of stable coin technology for being able to be moved twenty four to seven really really cheaply and in a way that's programmable, good for developers. So we think that both of those will coexist. We
think they'll be liquidity providers. Will be one of those liquidity providers. We'll make sure there's one to one parody between the stable coins and the deposit tokens.
So for the folks who are listening and they're like, wait, deposit token, I've not heard about this. So let's say this goes live right for USBC, will I would users be able to take the token and be able to use it the same way to use stable coins.
In addition to yeah, just think like a stable coin is a dollar that's on chain. It has an address and you can just send it from one address to another, just like crypto, but it is a US dollar. This will be the same. They'll have one additional feature. It'll also have a bank account number. So there's no way, for instance, for you to get your paycheck deposited directly into your USDC address because it goes through a different system.
It goes through the banking system, and so this will basically be a bridge between the banking system wire transfers acch fed now and the crypto rails, which is blockchain, right, and so there's no reason. Remember the days when phones you had a CDMA phone or something else and they said, well why don't we put both chips in the phone? Or used to buy a laptop and it was either one ten or two twenty and if you plugged it into the wrong one, it blew up, and then they
just started making things dual voltage. Well, that's what a deposit token is. You'll have both a crypto address, but it'll also have a banking address, and so you can use it in either world.
Wow, that's interesting. That's definitely going to be a disruption of the stable coin market. It seems like with maybe taking some market share, people going to deposit token versus stable coins.
Well, come on, right now, the whole stable cooin market's only two hundred billion. I expect within three years to be ten x that. So this is this is just the fact that all money is going to shift from being digital to being tokenized, whether as a stable coin or a deposit token. It's just a better form of a digital dollar. And so this is going to be a growing market. So I think this can be a huge increase in stable coins. I think, you know, it'll
just be right alongside that will be deposit tokens. And that's the way that the banking industry will participate. They don't need stable coin legislation. They already have the authority to hold a deposit. They just need to make sure that deposit operates in the same efficiency as a stable coin.
So would that in mind, and to repeal as saw one to one in the FD I see saying they're going to remove some restrictions. Do you see this year being a boom for deposit tokens and stable coins and these banks kind of what you're like, what you're doing going all in?
Well, you know, our bank. The when we bought I bought Beast Bank, it actually had the first non objection letter from the OCC to do crypto. Now we're not actually doing cryptos. So when I talk about deposit tokens or even stable coins, we're using blockchain and we're using distributed ledger technology, but we're not actually using or holding cryptos.
So even with SAB one twenty one being repealed, I don't think banks like mine, I don't think we have any particular advantage in crypto over companies that are pure custodians or incidental custodians because they're already in exchange, they already have those skills. I think the best thing that we can do this is just our decision is be a bridge between the dollar world, which we live in,
and the crypto world. So we might have customers that are crypto companies that need to hold dollars at a bank, and they'll have a choice, you know, they could hold dollars in a stable stable coin function, or they may want to hold them in a bank function because once again they won't be held in this system in a pooled account like they used to do, like for a square wallet or the way Coinbase, every user will have their own actual account, and companies like crypto companies, when
they need to deal with dollars on behalf of their customers, they won't need to hold those dollars in a pooled account. They can just access those dollars directly through open banking. So this is a different way of the banking industry serving the crypto industry. They'll give crypto companies a treasury account, but they won't need to hold pooled funds anymore. That's how we got into trouble with FTX and finance too.
The banks had an opegue FBO account. That will end, we believe, and people will move to having their dollars directly at the bank, but in a form that's on chain and then through APIs. All those crypto companies or other fintech companies, they can still do everything they used to do with a pooled account, but now they'll just be able to do it by interacting directly with the bank's ledger, which happens to be a blockchain ledger. So I think it's good for all parties concerned. I mean,
there'll be more compliance. Crypto companies and fintech companies will be able to do everything they've done before and more they'll get closer to the rails of ach and wires and they'll be able to just jump right into DeFi or whatever else they want to do trade FI. So I do see all parties working more closely in this new arrangement.
Now, what you're doing to usb C is a proprietary. Are you planning to sell this technology or lease it out or go to other banks and pitch this technology?
It's not proprietary, and really any other bank is welcome to join. The technology is not rocket science, really creating very little here. What is necessary is you got to get the licenses. So the hard part to do basically a deposit token is you've got to be a bank first, and you've got to be a bank that's willing to have some of its assets it's deposit asset's sitting on
a blockchain. Now, there aren't that many banks out there that are comfortable with that, and the ones that are, to some extent, like a JP Morgan coin, they're doing it in a very siloed way. What I'm suggesting with USBC is the tokens aren't to be issued by one bank, but a consortium of banks. So every dollar that's out there, some percentage of it it's going to be of this bank or that bank. It's not like this deposit tokens at Bank A and this deposit tokens at Bank Pepe.
They'll all share in the float of the USBC. And that means, you know, you don't get a run on any one bank. It's a collection of banks. You can think of it as like there's a collection of banks behind the visa or whatnot that are collectively issuing tokeniyes deposits, and they can shift the balances around between them, depending on one has a bigger loan book or one has a smaller loan book. But the point is the people on the other side, the people that hold these tokens,
just like the people that hold stable coins. They'll have an address and they can just move it around, just like you move a stable coin around. The difference here though, because it's a bank and because of the licenses, it'll be FDIC insured and it'll have consumer protection. What consumer protection means if your money you wake up one day and it's gone, you can say I didn't authorize that. Like with a bank account, you get your money back
when I wake up in my money's gone. At coinbase, they're like, have a nice day, right, Like they're not under the same regulatory regime, and you know that gives them some freedom, but it also gives pause to some consumers who'd like to know and some businesses who'd like to know that if your money moves without your authorization, I don't care for whatever technical reason, you get your money back. And so that's the world of banking. It's different than the world of money transmission.
Now we know FDIC insurance set up. It doesn't cover the entire deposit amount I think was up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per person or whatever. Maybe will this be different or is follow the same model?
Well, that's true, it does just cover up to two hundred fifty thousand. There are a bunch of secondary market schemes. I used to work at Promontory. We had the Promontory inter Financial Network, which had a very clever amount of software that just took deposits that were above two fifty and cross deposited them at other institutions. So if you had five million dollars, your money would actually be cross
depositive at other banks. That network routed over three thousand banks, and so there's a way to basically by by basically breaking up into packets to make depositive charts extensible so you don't lose it simply because you have a big deposit concentration. Now, Silicon Valley Bank had a problem in that regard, and you know, people just took it as safe until it wasn't, and then they realized a lot
of their money wasn't insured. But for almost every other bank and certainly banks that participate in these networks of redepositing, virtually all the funds can end up FDIC insured, and so that level of confidence is achievable.
And I think you may have answered this, but I want to make sure I understand. So USBC right now in stable coin format once again, I can earn rewards on it five point two five percent on like uphold. Will the token itself be morphed into fully a deposit token or it will be split some of it as a stable coins.
We'll just move it all over to deposit token because to us, you'll keep doing everything it does as a stable coin, but you'll us get better guarantees. And so that that's just a matter of when we move the technology that's already operating offshore and bring it on shore to work with a bank. And so to get it to work with a bank is just going through all the regulatory clearances to make sure they're comfortable that the ledger we're using as bank industrial strain.
And you mentioned it will be on the Ethereum and Salona blockchains. We've seen stable cord issuers, you know, try to put their token on different blockchains so that you have more into operability, more reach. Are you planning to expand to all the blockchains?
We're also working with Stellar right now. We're open to other chains at the end of the day, though the user shouldn't even know which chain we're on. If they dig underneath, they can see. But if they're just moving money from one user to another, you know, we'll make all that. You know, like it shouldn't matter when you're making a request on a browser whether you use Safari or Chrome right and to us, all those chains just
they have different pros and cons. You will eventually just work our way down the list and and do them all because we're not we're chain agnostic for USBC, and.
I know I think you mentioned it earlier, but I'm assuming this the USBC can be a access globally right wherever you're at.
The big watch words always, they're in all of our strategic docs, they're in the principles and strategy for the bank. And what they're really in is in the executive order that came out from the White House that uses two words open banking and fair access. And to US, open banking means as long as you have the credentials and you've delegated responsibility any third party application, any app the developers ought to be able to get access to your
funds with your permission to do what you want. And fair access means if it's legal and it's licensed, going to be non discriminatory, and so it's not just race, religion, and gender, it's also national origin. We don't see why somebody who has proper compliance credentials should be disallowed from holding a US dollar simply because they live on one
side of the border or another. Obviously, stable coins they don't have any concern with this, But even for deposit tokens, we view it as a fundamental principle of non discrimination and fair access that everybody ought to have access. Now, if you're on like the O fact list, your uses may be sharply curtailed, right, And so we expect everybody in the world to have access to US dollars in
a compliant form. And really one of the differentiations from stable coins is stable coins just basically service those same people by plausible deniability. You know, it's in a metamoskqualle it has no identity, We don't know who holds it. Yeah, you know, Tether issued it, maybe they knew who they issued it to, but two hops away, it's it's just out there, right. And so for some use cases that
may be okay. But you know, I personally don't think that Walmart's going to want to show up with, you know, three billion of payments from wallets with no identity. I mean, maybe they're okay with that, but I think at some point in time when a bomb goes off or you know, some big tax evasion or money laundering scheme and you find out that you're part of it because you had
no idea whose money you were taking in. Yeah, that like nobody's really talking or thinking about that right now, because we're all in you know, hey, stable cooint you celebration time because we're going to get some rules, but those rules aren't going to fix those problems. But those problems didn't go away, they just haven't really come to
the surface yet. And so we're kind of taking the long term view that eventually there'll be a bunch of people that are okay dealing with the gray market of wallets with dollars in it that don't have identity, but we're going to be focused on the green market of wallets that or sorry addresses that all have identity. And so you cannot hold a USBC without an identity. That's just part of the smart contract that's built in. And it can be privacy preserving, that's a that's a different issue,
but it can't be anonymous. M got it.
Yeah, I mean, and it seems like all the regulations are moving towards having fully KYC AML set up for whether it be stable corn issuers.
Crypto ex only KYC at the point at which it's issued and redeemed. But there's a world in between, right, and so that is a big glaring you know, it's a big glaring loophole. It's like, you know, in America, all gun dealers have to you know, put people through background checks. But if you buy online, you know, peer to peer, or you go to a gun show, no checks, and guess what happens when you have that kind of regulation. Yeah, you get what you get, right, and so you know, look,
that's the world stable coins are in. We like it. I mean, I participate in the wild West world. But I'm also like put my regulator hat on and my law enforcement hat on, and I know that for some economic activity to bring that into the to bring that into blockchain and distribute the Ledger technology, you're gonna need some You're gonna need some compliance, and you're gonna need some identity.
So on that note, obviously market Structure bill in play is here stable coin legislation. How do you think distable coin legislation will affect what you're doing? Is it just gonna amplify it, you know, be better for you guys, because to your point, this is where the puck is going. As far as regulations, well.
I think it's gonna bring in a whole bunch of integrators of people like we've already seen them starting come in, like with Visa and Stripe, they're already integrating stable coins into their stack, and USBC works just like a stable coin, it just has more compliance built into it, and so
it's terrific for us. The more uptake there is of stable coins, once again, that just raises the opportunity for USBC is just one more type of token that you can plug in if you're concerned about compliance, consumer protection, and security in terms of insurance and whatnot. So we're definitely psyched to be along for the ride for sure.
And Vasbank Outside of what you guys are doing here with the deposit token, are you planning to offer any financial services to crypto companies, banking services and other things like that.
We'll do all the standing boarding stuff. You want to get a checking you know, we'll do all that as well, But really it's the inbound from their legacy world. Wire transfers still come in. You know. Think of it like the window at the casino. You know, somebody's got to run that window where you buy your poker chips. But let's be clear, nobody hangs around the window at the casino. They go to the tables, right, and so you know, we will still provide window services to every type of
fintech crypto company. We're going to do all the boring stuff as well, and we're going to keep it boring because you know, the fintech's and the crypto companies, they're doing the fun stuff and we're just trying to basically remove friction at the window so you can get right to the casino.
So I want to get your perspective on Operation choke point two point zero. We're seeing a lot of information coming out of the Fed FDIC, many these folks conversations up blocking crypto companies from getting banking services. Look, I don't know what happened with SVP SVB, but it seems like there was an agenda to shut down these banks that were helping crypto companies. In hindsight, looking back in what you're doing, what's your perspective on what happened there?
Well, I mean Operation choke point KESS cost me a couple of extra years and many many millions of dollars to get like finally get my my bank charter. You know what I had to go through to get through it. You know, I feel very privileged and lucky and fortunate. I thank the team that I worked with, but you know, we had a lot of insiders and but even me who'd been a Federal Reserve regulator before, worked for years at Promontory, had cash, you know, promise to like not
do a lot of things. I'm lucky that we still even have running water and electricity at the bank because of all the things I had to promise I wouldn't do before they would let me buy a bank. You know, when we tried to first do this at a state charter level and had to go through the FDIC, you know, we had a year to close the deal. After we'd reached the commercial terms. We did the pre approval process.
All it was was a simple change of control. In the entire year period, the FDIIC never even acknowledged that our application was complete. They just ran out the clock. And so Operation choke Point is running out the clock on people, just give us a little bit more time.
On the last day of my commercial terms after a year, I received a letter of thirteen pages of single space questions for things like well, I can't say what was in the letter, but that was a year endo the process and the application had never even been acknowledged this file and so that type of coughish behavior, you know,
really was the hallmark of the last administration. You know, again, I'm not really I don't talk about this from a political point of view, but if anybody has any question as to whether Operation two point zero was real, it was real, and remnants of it are still out there. Obviously there's been a new memo at the top to knock it off, but you know, it takes a while for that to percolate down, and so you know, there are a lot of people out there still running around
checking boxes doing risk theater compliance theater. You know, we haven't gotten to the point yet where real risk and real compliance actually catching bad guys, worrying about real consumer protection as opposed to going through the motions is what regulators are doing in the trenches. Look, there are some good regulators, but look, a lot of what's still going on out there is just theater, and so it will
take time to change. I hope it does change. The tone at the top has changed, and they've told folks to focus on real risk and allow some competition and innovation in the marketplace.
Greg, what do you think about? This is something I've thought about over the years, and once again putting all the political stuff aside, the more I look at it, I don't think it was a political thing Demo crawd versus Republican type thing. It almost seemed like it was, Hey, we control the money, We're the Fed, we're the Treasury. We worked with the biggest banks in the world. JP Morgan, and you see the tone coming from Jamie Diamond. This
was more of a control thing. We can't see where the currency is going, as far as it going to stable coins, bitcoin, all coins and so forth, we're going to lose control. But now that there's etf rappers, now that we're going to put stable coin legislation through and make it law, now we're easing up. And maybe the political show or backdrop was just theater.
Well it kind of breaks kind of strange and weird. Like there's even a while back there with Jamie Diamond and Elizabeth Warren we're having like a bromance getting down. But you know, many different bedfellows and different people defected from the ranks to the Democrats at different times. We've seen that with tech, just depending on you know, who kind of put their interests ahead of their principles and whatnot.
But there's not a clear dividing line. Obviously, clearly Republicans were more willing and open to basically allow innovation in crypto. It didn't used to be that way. It used to be kind of flipped around. People got there on the wrong side of receiving donations from Sam Bankman Freed. You know, the Democrats went like, you know, one hundred and eighty degrees in the other way to be anti crypto, to show that they were no longer like under Sam's spell.
So it was a sad four years and I'm glad that's in the rearview mirror, hoping for better going forward. I'm sort of in the political spectrum myself. You know, I ran for Congress last time, so I've got some inside baseball insights. But I think there are good folks on both sides of the aisle that are actually interested
in seeing the US be a leader. There are still some, I would consider them lutite segments that are still afraid of or just think this whole thing is like smoking mirrors and are going to keep their foot on the break. But I hope it doesn't just seesaw like four years on, four years off again. I personally believe this is an area like AI where the US could be a world leader. And you know, I want there to be good regulation.
I want there to be tough regulation, but you know, I don't want I don't want to be in a Tony Soprano kind of situation anymore where it feels like a shakedown world. And having been on the wrong side of the shakedown when I was at Ripple, to you know, being an investor in coinbase, to like having my application never being acknowledged as even being filed, you know, I'm ready just to roll up my sleeves and get to work.
And I really like the space, and I feel like we're finally at a time where what's going to happen in the marketplace is going to be determined by like who executes, as opposed to like who's the best at threading the regulatory needle. And look, I've been pretty good at threading that regulatory needle, but I don't think that should be the highest that that shouldn't be what determines success in this There's a lot of other people that are really good at building products and operating you know,
value add for for customers and businesses and stuff. And it's sort of sad that you know you have to be like you know, an insider to even get a seat at the table to play in this game.
So are you anticipating that we see a boom in innovation and building capital coming back to the United States, companies feeling less afraid right, no more in regulation by enforcement because we're going to have a better sec CFTC H. I mean, you got a White House cryptos Are you get a Secretary treasure of the Treasury who's pro crypto? All these people are pro cryptona.
Well, the boom is already on. The boom is definitely on right here. And I was at it for twenty eighteen, it was again in twenty twenty one. I'm sure there'll be another bus. There'll be a big shakeout. Like there's a gazillion people that are working on like stable groin stable cooin integration. We're putting a couple of bets in on that. But you know, it's like any gold rush, it's going to be it's going to overshoot and come back. Question is I you know, is that going to come
back later this year? Is it next year? But you know, we're in it for the long haul, and so we try not to get buffeted by these up and down cycles. But it is party on right now. People are really really psyched and are integrating stable coin solutions token I solutions at a breathtaking pace. Yeah.
So on that note, you know, with the boom and bus cycles, do you foresee there's going to be some consolidation with the stable coin market because it seems like everyone is launching a stablecoin, even Ripple as you know you mentioned you were. There's so many people doing it now.
I mean there's two different arguments. It's it's kind of like there is an argument why there could be like a gazillion stable coins, which is kind of I call it the wooden nickel argument, Like you go to every carnival and they each have their own wooden nickel. Of course you can't use the wooden nickel across the carnivals, and so there'll be a bunch of that wooden nickel stable coin ism and that'll keep a lot of people busy. But that's like, to me, a lot of little copy
serves and aol. So the big game out there, and really why we call it USBC versus us DC is a swing for the fences to make the US dollar the ubiquitous form of payment. The star trek kind of payment at a global level that works locally, and it's going to be kind of like Glengarry Glenn Ross. There's like you, first place is a Cadillac, second place is steak knives, and third third place use you're fired, right.
So I do believe there'll be some you know, some consolidation at that unless unless some of these tokens get some specialized you know, niche, there probably will be one stable coin that's really good for everything that likes to be done without identity. It's a little bit you know, because there's a lot of stuff in the world that I don't want to call it, like you know, shady
stuff in sunny places. There's a demand for that. But you know, the question is who's going to be the compliance solution that's integrated, you know, in the commercial realm for consumers and businesses. That mantle is still to be taken.
I think USDC has the lead there. We're obviously looking at coming in that with a different vector and and you know, other folks, the paypals, the ripples of the world that a lot of other folks are going to kind of try to be like, you know, grab that one percent, but like I'm not in that grab one percent kind of world. I'm in the I'm in the Catalyz versus stake lives fight. That's how I see it for sure.
Well you probably can't answer this, but you know, are you guys looking at possible acquisitions of some of these players, even if we startups building certain stable coin infrastructure or payment solutions and things like that.
Well absolutely, either either acquisitions or investments or having options. USBC will go public this year as a reverse merger. It's kind of a boring way to go public. You just buy a public company. We will be funded with bitcoin. Oddly enough, I think kind of crazy thing that you're actually going to fund it with bitcoin. We're not spending the bitcoin, that's just the capital base and the you know, the goal will be to basically use that public company
stock for acquisitions when necessary or to pay options. That is the vehicle. The reason to be a public company. I think USDC will through Circle will go public this year is people want the transparency, so we want the scrutiny, we want to be audited. We want to show that we're on the up and up. But USBC, remember it's not the bank, it is the scheme. You can think of it as as like a new form of visa. And so that's the entity that should be the public
entity that receives the scrutiny. Whether that invests in or partners with banks, with market makers, with ledger, companies, with identity credential providers, all those will be part of the eCos not clear that they need to be acquired, but they need to be part of the ecosystem. We always talk ecosystem and having taken a company public before, where I bought sixty two companies in nine months. What a pain in the ass actually owning stuff. It sucks, man.
So it's much better to have just APIs and aligned incentives because otherwise you feel like you got to put a suit on and it takes all the fun and joy out of out of doing this stuff.
Question on wallet support, tell us a bit about what you're doing there and plans to get other walls to support and eventually with the repeal it solable on one to one and all these things that are happening in the banking industry opening up. Could we see in banking apps the ability to move stable coins, supporting USBC and other things.
Yeah, the whole goal here. And it's really not difference between USDC or USBC is it's your coin, right, It's not your coin at this custodian or that custodian. I mean, you can have your money at a custodian or you can just have it self custodically and then it can appear just like USDC can appear in a MetaMask wallet. It ought to be able to appear in a Wells Fargo wallet if they want to let you do that, and the same thing in a square cash wallet or
a Venmo wallet. And so those all those wallets are going to have to decide do they want to be exclusionary and not let you see your stable coins or your deposit tokens because they want to push theirs, or they want to be inclusive. And you saw this battle play out when when Financed for a while kicked USDC off their platform, right they wanted people to use their stable coin. And that's that's kind of a channel conflict.
We won't be in that channel conflict. We're we're like, hey, you know, we're doing the coin, you know, comparing any wallet you know up to you. You know, we don't care what else is in the wallet user choice, right, and so in this world wallets might have some of the money being held by that wallet company custodially, but the question is will they support other non custodial sources of assets, including stable coins and deposit tokens. We hope
they will. We think that if they don't, they'll be kind of lame, and that everyone will be forced to basically let you see your money wherever you use it, whether it's in a wallet, a marketplace, could be a metaverse, you know, could be a remittance company. It's your money, it should appear and go wherever you go. Yeah.
Absolutely, I wanted to get your thoughts on the SEC. Obviously there's a regime change. The Crypto Task Force has been formed hester PURSS leading that, and we seem to have more friendliness coming up from the SEC. Do you anticipate that cases against coinbase and binance and these things will be thrown out? Non fraud cases, ripple settlement public coming in the works. What do you think those things will happen this year?
Yeah? I've never understood why if you have a problem with somebody's practice and it isn't like fraud, just go in and say like you know, let's have a conversation. The conversations don't have to be like, oh, mister Koshogi, come on in and pick up a wedding license and then you come out chopped up in pieces. And so that approach the disc work between the regulators and the innovators is to me, you know, fearful and ridiculous, but it has characterized sort of our country's behavior for some
period of time. So I do believe there will be coordination collaboration between the regulation. I want the regulators to
be tough on fraud and root that out. But if people are just trying to do things right and there's a market problem or a structuring problem, let's have rules right and regulations and we can have a public policy debate, like we can decide for stable coins whether states should be able to license those rather than just the federal government, and we can decide at ten billion dollars, you get both a federal regulator in addition to a state regular
that's just you know, intelligent people can disagree on those points, but those should be resolved through just like negotiations. And Congress should do its job, and it's doing its job right now in this regard and not like in court through like you know, reading the fine print and trying to dage like a rock fell on his head so it might fall on ours. Maybe we shouldn't do that, Like that's a ridiculous way to actually run a country.
And we've seen the results in terms of retarding innovation and leadership that we experienced during the last administration for doing that.
Do you think we're going to get more all cots XRP Solana, Some of these ETFs filings have been piling up. We got bigcoin in e theorem, of course, hoping Howdy gets steaking as well.
I have no idea why there would not be you know, a Salona ETF or a x r P e TF. I mean it just it. At some point, you know, you're pretty too far down the you know, far down the map. But absolutely right.
Bitcoin reserve. Yes, a lot of states throwing their hat in the ring. Federal level. We have a bill. Do you think that happens this cycle? Or maybe I have the theory that they approve it. But it's not necessarily to start buying right away, but just holding on to the two hundred thousand plus bitcoin you already have in custody.
I think there's a strong chance that they'll get the foundation in. Like, people can argue about the number, but you know, it's hard for people. I mean, people will argue that the government shouldn't own any bitcoin. But to me, even if you you know, even if you're not a Michael Sayer fan, you got to acknowledge that from just from a risk point of view, do you really want to be like, have none of this asset. It's like, it's one thing to say you're betting on bitcoin, it's
another thing to say you're betting against bitcoin. So betting against bitcoin is kind of like going short on game stop. And I would not if I was the government sell down my position. I do believe that bitcoin is probably the best hedge against inflation and rampant government spending. You know, gold's done pretty well too, But but bitcoin is just it's got its advantages and stuff. So I tell people
it's a risk to not have any bitcoin. I'm not telling people to put, you know, fifty or even five percent of their wealth into into bitcoin, but to have none at all, I don't know. In a mad Max world, you probably need canned food and bullets and stuff like that. So probably have a little bitcoin on the shelf.
Yeah, absolutely definitely agree with you there. And there's talks of possibly, you know, as rumors, but crypto stockpile, not just bitcoin but a bunch of different digits.
Yeah, the same thing. I mean, like, you know, you don't want to just have peas, you might want to have some corn and Brussels sprouts as well, So I wouldn't you know, I'm not a bitcoin maximalist, but but I you know, I do have I do have some bitcoin down there in my in my cellar, right so, but you know I have the others as well, so that that's me. I'm not giving investment advice here, but I like gold coins.
Too for sure. So Greg, I got to ask you about this. I wish I didn't have to, but mean coins, it's madness right now. I have a love hate relationship. I believe in the free market, but I believe there needs to be some sort of guardrail because people are getting rugged. What are your thoughts on how does mean coin crazy?
I mean, to me, it's just silly stuff, and you know, like it is, it's, uh, you know, a Greater Fools type type theory stuff. And if you want to spend some of your life on that. To me, that's like just uh, you know, betting on the ponies and stuff like that. And and so I have some regulation, but at the end of the day, a fool and his money quickly parted, and and and But the point is with meme coins is did you have fun doing it right? Like?
You know, It's like what I said when I you know, you know, when I did business in Russia, I was like lost all my clothes and lost all my money, but had a lot of fun doing it right. So you just got to know what you're getting into when you're getting into it.
Yeah, I would prefer to go to Vegas to get some free drinks and maybe some nice girls walking around, you know, versus But it's the same thing, right it is.
But but you know, people like that stuff, and like I, you know, I I watch people just do all their money in the slots. But but look, I play poker, so we all have our vices, you know, we know, like just in moderation, right, So appreciate I hope. I hope people don't lose their life savings on meme coins. And to me, it's really not that different than just people buying lottery tickets and do another just wasting time and money in their life, and that's a great thing about being alive.
Yeah, for sure, Greg, great stuff. I'm excited for the future. Updates are on USBC and one it goes fully deposit token status, we'll have to have you back on to and talk a bit about some of that stuff, but thank you so much for joining me.
Sure, in the meantime you can just hold it as a stable coin and just earn some yield on it. I mean, it's not the most exciting thing around, but it is. You know, it's better yield than most stable coins, so just keep that in mind for sure.