Crypto is Unstoppable & a Major Political Force with Mike Belshe

open for freedom, et cetera. Party alignment is strong.

Pretty Much every single one of our institutional customers needs this. They've been doing various forms of you know, on chain, you know, self custody. I'll call them hacks. And while that works great for individuals, when it comes to businesses, they really can't be holding their own keys. They don't want to hold their own keys. They know this. So we've spent a ton of time. We got super fast withdrawals straight out of cold custody. It's in qualified custody

all the time. And the reaction that we had, you know, a couple of years ago is like, well, you know, I got other operational processes, et cetera. But this year, you know, the tune has really changed, and so people are really excited about that. Other than that, you know, the bull market carries everybody we've expanded our trading offering, we've expanded our our custody offering, and you know, pretty much kind of at all time highs I guess for the company in terms of how things are doing. Uh,

the ETF markets have helped. Obviously, we're custodying a number of those, some of them we haven't heard about yet, which are coming as well, but as we're good. And then lastly we're finally getting our full network of you know, global custodians together are fully fully operationally, I should say, it takes time, you know, get the regulatory clearances for all the parts of the stack. Bicko does a tremendous

amount of staking. For instance, we spend a lot of time with regulators understanding what it means to be doing staking from within uh, from within qualified because see, of course we did that in an institutional way that it never has any friction with the regulators. But there's so much confusion about how this industry works that we have to do a lot of time with it. So anyway, Tobai is very close to being up and running Singapore, very close to being up and running our Boffin license.

You know, European entity is already running and that's been growing very well. It's one hundred percent MEEKER ready today. So actually, from Bicco's perspective, you know, we'd like to like to have MEEK go into effect. Effect Earlier we went with the hardest regulator we're in in Germany with

Boffen that's like the New York dfs of Europe. But looking forward to you know, being ready for the next wave of institutions, and you know, the next wave brings in the more and more conservative folks, so pension funds that previously couldn't touch crypto because the infrastructure wasn't ready. We want to make sure we've got the infrastructure ready. That's what we're doing and so far it's got really good positive signals.

kind of oil and energy. They're looking to diversify. They are spending in tremus amount of resources to bring technology that includes you know, obviously crypto, bitcoin, et cetera, so includes AI and things like that. So the regulators there, we find are very much trying to understand what the issues are, how they can provide great service. I think they've got a real opportunity to become like a global hub of finance over the next ten years. They're definitely they have a great attitude.

and understandable business climate, we will win. And this is where like the current events are so troubling. I mean, obviously, on the US dollar side, sanctions controls, I understand the need for politically to have sanctions et cetera. And of course you know we fully abide by that, but the US needs to be very careful when you tell the world that you might take away their money and use

it to fund their enemies. In some cases, if if you go a foul of US policy, you're telling the world like, hey, you need to be really extra careful about using US dollars as a reserve reserve currency. Further, on the law front, you know, whether it's the SEC or other, when we make it difficult for businesses to predict how they're going to operate. They won't operate. But you know, the demand is there. Crypto hits I forget, fifty million Americans today globally, it's growing on a daily basis.

It's absolutely unquestionable that the people of the world, not just the US, want to have good access to crypto and the United States has a choice either a regulators, you know, get off their high horse and start working with business to figure out how to bring it here. And you know, it may have faults to do that, it may seem uncomfortable for others to do that. I tell you, you know, Bicco is here to help make it

work well for regulators coinbases as well. There's a bunch of stand up companies that are really working hard to make it so that regulatory needs could be met. But if we do that, we can bring all the business here. We can do it over an interative period. You get the business here first. And there's two things. I mean people worry about, like you said, you know, us money

leaving the US to go find better regulatory environments. But don't forget there's also the opportunity to have all of the world's money come to the US markets right, and as long as we don't have our act together, I get specific examples as we go deeper. I know you want to talk about SEV one twenty one and stuff like that, but if we don't get our act together, that money doesn't come to the US, which otherwise by default, we have the strongest, best, safest markets here today. It's our solution.

but there are some bills that may solve it. But what are your take what's your take on this entire situation.

is a side show. It's not the real issue. Now, before I go deeper, I want to I want to make it clear. I don't think this is a political issue for Democrats versus Republicans. This is this is a political issue, but it's individuals, and there's only a few of them, you know. So Joe Biden has made it very clear he is anti crypto. You know, Elizabeth Warren obviously is on that list. We've got Brad Sherman, We've got Maxine Waters. We've got a few people here right

that are bad apples. And you know, by the way, there's a there's a jeriatic problem with all of these guys not understanding technology as well, which is interesting, but we'll leave that for somebody else who's more expert on politics. When it comes to SAB one twenty one, I think they've consciously decided to make it look like it's all

the SEC's fault. But actually that's not the big steal, because even if we were peeled SAP one twenty one, the traditional banks would not be coming a non crypto And that's because there's actually three agencies that matter, and the SEC is probably the bottom of the list. It's certainly the bottom of the list when it comes to supporting bitcoin as opposed to you know, other types of

crypto assets. So what I mean by that is the three agencies that matter is the OCC, the FDIC, and the SEC, and I would rank them in that order. So the OCC is the Office of the Control of the Control of the Currency. And remember under the previous administration, Brian Brooks was the interim OCC Controller and under that administration they made it available that crypto could there's a path for traditional banks. This is Bank in New York Mellon, this is State Street, this is JP Morgan, etc. To

be able to cuss see crypto. And of course, if you want to de risk this industry, the number one thing you should do is go and list the guys that are the experts in risk. Right, So these are the biggest institutions of America. They know how to do it well. They absolutely should be invited into the ecosystem, and Brian Brooks made that possible. Then we had a new administration under Joe Biden come in and not a single law was changed, not a single regulatory written word

was changed. And yet all of a sudden, the new Comptroller of the Currency, and this is interim Comptroller, Michael schu had a night and day, black and white, completely opposite interpretation of the exact same regulatory and legal constructs. Now, if this doesn't piss off Congress, I don't know what should, because they have been made completely impotent by the administration. And I don't believe that this makes good business. What do we want in America? We want to have businesses

have a set of rules to comply with. You can agree or disagree with them, but they shouldn't change just because the President switches seats. Right, something written should have happened, and yet nothing was written, and yet the policy went completely in a different direction. This is a real problem in the United States. This indicates that the US may not be the bedrock of stability that it once was

when it comes to law. All right. So anyway, Office of the cum Ful of the Country, Currency absolutely is the gateway. They claim safety and soundness issues with regard to bitcoin and digital assets, and they will not allow any federal chartered bank today to touch crypto. So that's a problem. Now. Even if you get past there, and there's some good news, we've got a federal federal powers versus state powers, there's a whole bunch of state powered banks that are not governed by the occ they are

not regulated there. So look, a bunch of state chartered banks are absolutely in on crypto. And for the most part, you know, that does give us still some avenues into the banking system, which is critical for building a great ecosystem for the new wave of finance. But introduce the FDIC also a federal agency. So obviously pretty much every bank in America wants to be FDIC insured, and that means they are subject to the scrutiny of the FDIC regulator.

FDIC regulator I Guy was his name, sort of the g He might be retiring, he's pseudo retiring anyway, he's been absolutely negative on crypto for quite some time. In April twenty twenty two, he came out and said Gruenberg. Sorry, yeah, that's his name. He came out in April twenty two and said, if you guys are touching crypto any of my regulated entities, If you're touching crypto, I'm going to put you on extra scrutiny. I need more documentation. I

need to know exactly what you're doing. And basically what he did is setting said, if you get into this part of the business, your life is going to get harder. And every bank had to make a choice. And look, they're trying to businesses just like everybody else, and they want to participate in the future and what's up and coming. Of course they do, but they've also got their mainline business in traditional finance, and do they want to take on that battle. So a number of state chartered banks

have dropped out as a result of the FDIC. And then the guy at ranked third is actually the SEC. Now, the SEC is critical if you're launching something that somebody might determine as a commodity, I'm sorry, a security. Bitcoin. You know, it's pretty much already been declared a commodity. I think eth has now gotten the past as well. I think it's now officially a commodity, even though it kind of went up and down for a little while. So the SEC is important for information disclosures, et cetera.

If you're building securities that one's still getting sorted out. It looks like increasingly tokens sold as tokens are not securities. It doesn't mean that they couldn't be sold or packaged into security type products, which the CEC absolutely has purview over, but in general, you know, anyway, they'll sort out. So

SAB one twenty one is down there. As you know, the FIT twenty one bill, which starts to do much more interesting things for crypto, which is introduce regulatory market structure, which would actually greatly expand the safety and stability of our markets that we trade on for crypto. It also effectively neutralizes SAB one twenty one. So anyway, sorry that was so long winded, but I think it's really important for people to understand, like who are the federal agencies

that matter? And it's interesting to note that when a new administration comes into power in the United States, he pretty much immediately puts new people in charge of all of those, right, So really what it comes down to is whatever the president says goes. And this is why in this electrical cycle it's so important to think if you are a crypto voter, you have to be voting for a president that's going to support crypto, and you know, unfortunately the current administration just isn't it.

why do you think they are so anti crypto? Because even the younger Democrats in the House and some in the Senate were you know, joined with the Republican colleagues to repealself one to one to pass the FIT twenty one bill out of the House. But you have this, these handful of folks, and I'm scratching my head trying to figure out, you know, is this a currency control issue?

Is it we can't properly understand or tax this, or we don't control it, and that's why there's this Okay, we're not going to allow you know, following Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Brad Sherman, what do you think that is?

for freedom, et cetera. Party alignment is strong. So the fact that there's a few you know that don't like crypto in Congress or in the White House shouldn't be surprising. I mean, of course there's different points of view out there now the individuals involved. Look, I do think that age is a problem. I think they really have a hard time understanding how new technology is going to fit affect the world, and they're just afraid of it. And I think this is something that you know, is not

specific to these individuals. I think it's it's a human nature thing. You and I are going to go through it as well. As we get older and older, we will also become a little bit you know, grumpy and be fuddled about whatever it is that's coming next. It's kind of our destiny, all right, unless we live forever, I guess, and then maybe maybe we forget that technology will be okay. But you know, these individuals also happen to be a little bit farther on the statist curve.

So there is a group of people that believe in the absolute power of the centralized government, and they think that what's best for the people is for the centralized government to have control of all things. And it's very interesting that, you know, when it comes to money, that is the number one way that you can control people politically.

One great example we saw was with COVID nineteen. We had the truckers protest, right, and this of course was in Canada, but Canada and the US are very similar here, and Canada came out and said, we're going to freeze

the bank accounts of the truckers that are protesting. I mean, this is an incredible thing to do, right, You're going to attack somebody's finance the livelihood of not just them, but they're family based on their political viewpoints and their desire to protest against the government that they disagree with. I mean, certainly good news is that was in Canada, not the United States. But it's absolutely antithetical to you

know what I believe every American, every American patriot believes in. So, like some of these folks that are status level people, they very much want to have the dollar continue to dominate. These are not financial experts. They do not understand free markets per se. They do understand control, and they're afraid that, you know, bitcoin will take away some of the control that they have today with the dollar. It's true bitcoin will, So they should be afraid of that if that's what

you're really afraid of. But if you are actually for the people, if you actually want the people to have power and so that the banks to have power, then of course you should believe that people should have the right to access to money. They should have private access to money. You shouldn't be judged based on your trans actions. The government shouldn't be able to supervise all of it

through a CBDC. These are just very basic things. If you want to really give power to the people, So all right, Anyway, we've got at least three different factions we've talked about right here. Right We've got some at the federal level that want to increase federal level federal powers all the way up to centralization and statism. We've got those that believe in strong federal powers, maybe not quite as extreme. And then the third, you know, where

should the state powers be with regards to banking. You know, should the FDI see really have this ability to overlay and influence all of the state banks, preventing them from being able to compete in business, whether that's crypto, whether that's gambling, whether that's you know, whatever your other unsavory political topic may be.

Just this whole new world and democratize things, And you know, obviously with money and the movement of value with crypto, and I'm like, I wonder what the world's going to look like in a hundred years that these people are fighting so hard, but we know disruptive technology always wins. They may put up hurdles right and it slow us down, but throughout history and civilization, disruptive tech always wins. It's just fascinating. I feel like I want to write a book, another book about it.

point zero. In the early days of starting to deploy that out and garner support to make it an actual stand, there are a lot of naysayers and people are like, ah, Mike, you know Microsoft's never going to do this because I was at Google and I did that, and you know there's too much infrastructure that has to be replaced, et

cetera now. And what I always said in response is I said, look, if we don't make the new version so much better than the old version that people aren't willing to take those costs to do the upgrade, then we don't deserve to be the two point zero version, it's not worthwhile. So actually, some of this I would throw back to the bitcoin and digital asset ecosystem. We

still have a boatload of work to do. I know, there's a lot of people that are you know, making a lot of money on early tokens, on early projects. There's a lot of exploration. It's global. It's definitely changing the way people think about money for those that are involved. But we have to make it even easier to use, We have to make it even easier to keep secure.

We have to make it more private. I mean, you know, for most kind of non technical normal people out there, this idea that you put your transactions on the blockchain and then they can be traced by almost anybody. Look, I think this is a real problem. And you know, part of this gets back to regulatory Like the regulators have told you know, Bicco and other companies that they don't like privacy coins. They think that they are solely for the purpose of you know, defrauding the government or

drugs or whatever. Look, that's not true. People have the right to the freedom of money, and we have seen persecutions that happen when people are able to trace and infer often wrongly ideas about other people's transactions. So all right, anyway, there's no stopping this technology so long as we continue to provide enough value that this is so obviously better than the system that came before it that people will move to it. And we're not done. We got a

lot of work. I would like to rally, you know, another million developers to come into the crypto space to really work on these problems. And I don't mean just issue new coins that are going to be a token, et cetera, like, really solve the problems that matter for people with money. And if we do that, of course it's unstoppable. I think it's unstoppable anyway. Maybe I'm just asking I want the pace to go a little faster.

an example of that. Can these guys come in and start to help with custody and basic banking on ramps and off ramps, of course they can do all those things, and then we can start to really focus on how do you have a world that's got a combination of You can have your assets custied at a single bank.

You can have the custody that multiple banks at the same time, like multiple banks are required in order to authorize certain transactions, we can have self custody side by side, you know, I mean, the options and potential is limitless, but yeah, we need everybody to be able to participate.

lose all the money. You know, as of today, we do multi say, we do multi sake and smart contracts, we do threshold signature MPC, we do a whole bunch of technologies on different blockchains, and absolutely that should be used. And once that's used, and then you standardize the format for how each of the key shares or the key parts are accessed, then you can start to distribute them. So today, you know, people are used to this idea. I bank at Wells Fargo or I bank at Bank

of America. Now imagine you're banking at Wells Fargo and Bank of America. And for a lot of purposes that might be overkill, Like you know, for your regular checking account which has got a small amount of your your funds that you're kind of using for your day to day bills. You probably don't need something so crazy, but for large amounts of money, for sovereign wealth funds that you mentioned earlier, for the reserves of the governments of the world, which is coming right. We already have an

El Salvador. Some presidential candidates are saying they might put bitcoin on the US balance sheet. Those are going to be large sums of money, and then you're going to want to, of course, be able to do that. By the way, this is what bic Go's doing. It's part of why we have seven licensed custodians around the world. Imagine a world where you come to bicco, you sign up for your wallet, You're like, I want a key in Switzerland, I want a key in Germany, and I

want a key in Dubai. Oh and by the way, I want to have the administration of that cussy, the qualified cussy, out of the United States, so we can actually build these things. And that is what we're building U. So it's incredibly powerful. All of a sudden, the ownership of money is no longer subject to the failure of a single entity, and it's no longer subject to the

failure of a single government. Now, by the way, one last I often get a question about that, like, well, Mike, but don't you contry all of those trust coming is a fair question. Look, over time it will open up across multiple custodians. But even now, the thing that people need to know when we open up a licensed regulated entity in Dubai or Singapore or whatnot, the regulators there absolutely care about the autonomy and so sovereignty of that

entity away from Bitco, you know, the United States. And so while it's true I am the CEO of the the overarching set of companies, each one of those I have zero access to. Keys is through a number of independent controls teams on the ground in those regions that absolutely have a regulator that they report to as well. So no, it is not possible for Bitco to just say, hey, we're going to take across all those Anyway, I think it's a huge innovation. I think we're the first to

do it. It's coming, and this is going to be good for everybody.

arbitrage between the ETF pricing and other pricing. So there's more work to do on the ETFs. I don't know the timeline for these things to happen. I fear that the regulators move probably in intervals of years, whereas companies move in intervals of days and weeks. That's a big spread. We got to fix that, I think at the regulatory level for the next wave of money to come, regardless of that is in digital form.

of others. Right, So if you're managing someone's ethereum and you're saying, hey, i'm going to keep twenty percent of it in a liquid pool, and I'm going to stick the rest on this interval, and I'm going to give you a net yield of that amount, that starts a look a lot like a security I mean, you know, as much as like the crypto industry wants to say nothing's of security, I mean, yes, some things are securities in some of the some of the exchanges have embarked

upon that, and I think they actually did create securities. Now, whether that should be regulated by the SEC or not, I think it's a different question, and probably more likely to say I don't think the SEC sh to worry about that. But that's the way the law is today.

Another example is reward systems. May know this, Some are creating this clever idea where like, hey, we're not gonna we're not going to give you a return on this, but if you deposit it with us, we will give you a reward which allegedly comes from our balance sheet but happens to be very coincidentally close to like the on chain staking yield, or if it's a stable coin,

the bond rate that they get behind it. Okay, I think those are thinly veiled wrappers around securities or potentially are all right, Well, BICCO does though, like, look, we don't pool funds, so we don't take an each clients and put them together. So there's no question about that. And by the way, I think staking pooling is different from the concept of pooling that the sec is traditionally

dealt with. Traditionally, that's about like, hey, two people coming together to buy a particular product or to enable something. I think putting it into a common wallet, you know omnibus walllets banks use them all the time. It's not really pooling. It's a it's a method of efficiency for the storage of the asset. But nonetheless that the sec and the securities world is not clear on this point yet,

So Biicco doesn't do it. We never pool assets together, and the yield we get is not derived by bico. It's whatever's on chain and that's what you get, so we don't have any control over it. Oh. One last thing that's really important. When you deposit a bicho, we don't stake it by default. You know, you have to say, hey, I want to stake it. You know, we work at the client's direction, so as an investor, you tell us

what you want to do. If you want to move it from your account here to your account there, we would do that. Of course, we're acting as as your agent to do it, but we are not creating a security anyway. So anyway, what we do is a little bit different, and I think it's important to navigate those waters for now. I do think we'll get clarity from the SEC at some point on you know, how to

handle staking in a really clean way. But again, like I do, think there's so much change happening so quickly in digital assets that, yeah, the regulators are having a tough time keeping up. I don't think we should be mad at them about that part. I think that part's actually okay and natural. And you know, Go and other companies are here to step up and help educate and provide backstops and make sure it's get done in a very safe way.

and guidelines. So hopefully we get there soon. Hopefully twenty twenty five is a year.

the FTC. Like the list goes on. It's just that the ones that we're dealing with today is just the first tip of the iceberg part and then there's a whole bunch more that still coming. So having all this regulation does give the president an undue amount of power in my opinion in the United States, And obviously that I guess is a bit of a political thing. But the actual act of like who's in president, whoever's in the president gets the control and decide whether these things

are turned on or off. And that's why I think it's the individual in that office, not the party.

that's why people pick BICCO. So I don't want to be in politics. In my thirty year career, I've never had to voice political opinions. I do not want to disenfranchise anybody that you might be from the other side on other issues unrelated to crypto. But I also want to make it very clear that I am a single issue voter. So look, I like that jd Vance was put in with Trump. I think Trump is looking very

strong by the way. I also like RFK Junior. He's also been very positive on bitcoin, and then you can debate. Your audience can debate whether they like RFK Junior better or Trump better on the other non crypto issues. Bicco's happy to and I am happy to support both of them. But then President Biden has made it very clear that he is anti everything we're doing, and so of course I have to be anti anti that, but it's it's not a broader thing other than what we get high for,

which is to make digital assets great. Mm hmm, that's great again. Oh, better not say.

the markets. Look, it's interesting like if you go back to twenty seventeen when bicco was getting ready to launch wrap Bitcoin and kind of you know, Tether was out there, but other stable coins weren't around. I don't know when USDC came around, but it is about that time. You know, people were kind of afraid to launch stable coins because the interest rates were at zero. They were going negative

in Europe if you recall that. Yeah, and people were afraid, like geez, well what happens if interest rates go negative in the United States? How that stable coin even work? Which is a great question, But that didn't happen. Now interest rates are high, and everybody wants to capture the

interest rates bought backing the USD stable coin. So look, I think there's a bunch of these, but most of them are going to fail that we just don't need twenty different types, and in fact, it's painful to convert. So what it's really going to come down to is which one's the best. And like a lot of things with technology, you know, it's going to be probably more about the ecosystem than it is about the features of the coin. And you know, in an analogy you can

make with technologies like programming languages. So for those on your show that are not programmers, you've probably heard of things like JavaScript. You've probably heard of things like Python. You've probably heard of PHP, maybe Perl if you go farther back, look, the winners in programming languages in terms of which ones get used, is not always the best technology. There's something about the ecosystem, Like Perl has been pretty

much a despised programming language. I guess it's kind of dead now, So I'm dating myself, but it's not dead. It's used. You've probably a lot of places, but javascripts used everywhere, and I don't think there's very many people that would argue that JavaScript is the greatest language ever. So the same thing is going to come with stable coins. It's going to be about how do you make it so that the ecosystem can use it? And each one

of these guys taking a very different approach. You know, those that are going out securities like the black Rock type product. The only people that can touch it are people that already have access to US markets and securities, right, so it's not going to really penetrate, you know, much of the crypto industry as we know it. It's going to have a real tough time going across borders. Another

approach is like what Mountain Protocol did. So they're like they're going to return all the interests down to the holder, which sounds great, and then they're just going to lock out the US markets. So they're going to whitelist and blacklist and if you touch the US markets, they're going

to kind of kick you out. I think lopping off forty percent of the global market is a tough place to start, but you know, Americans often underestimate what can happen in emergence emerging economies, and frankly, you know a lot of those countries probably need it more than Americans to, so that could be a winning approach. And then you've got like the packs of this approach out of Dubai again, trying to make a regular distable point there that returns

interest back. So look, and there's gonna be many more. I do think that we're going to see change where the idea that circle can collect all the interest and give half the money to Coinbase, who turns around and competes with the entire industry, is not going to last. It just has to change. It's simply uh, you know, know none of us want to use it. I mean, I do think Coinbase is a good company. I'm really

glad that they're in the ecosystem. But the idea of supporting a token that funds my competitor, and I'm not really the biggest competitor, Like all the exchanges of course, are far more directly in line here, and you know, Coinbase competes everywhere there. They provide staking, they provide base layer,

they provide wallets, they provide exchanges, they provide cussy. Okay, look, it's just a tough place to be so but lastly, I think it's really important that you know some of that interest goes back to the rightful holder, and it will. So I'm probably rambled a lot on different stable coin options, but there's a lot going on. And this is what happens, by the way, when you open up innovation. Right the banking system has no innovation because it's so locked down

on the regulatory front. And here we've got a great We just listed six different models, and at the end of the day, the consumer is going to decide what they like, and that's going to dictate to business which way to go. And the ones that predict it right will win, and the ones that predicted wrong will lose, maybe go out of business. But that's life business. You've got to make it right for your customers or you lose.

There's there's the Google, the clear leader with the giant share of the market, right, and then you still have being and you still have y'allhoo hanging around as far as search engines, is it like that there's going to be three, but one is a clear leader.

any interop protocols. So if you wanted software to work between two companies you want to sell it, you wrote for the IBM mainframes right come into the PC era. I don't know if you recall but there used to be more word processors than just Microsoft Word. There was Word Perfect and a whole bunch of others. But you know,

the center of gravity converged around eventually Microsoft Word. Which one why because when people exchanged documents they had to convert them from format A to format B, which always had some lack of fidelity. It's a communication tool that people use, so it kind of centralizes on a sing a single winner. The same thing has happened with PCs as a usage, just easier to interoperate and communicate both

inside a company and out. These days we have more abstractions, so now you can start to see some cross platform stuff works pretty well. At this point we added in mobile phones. But in each one of these arenas, I think when you really break it down, it comes down to people talking to people, and so with stable coins. Look,

here's the analogy. I imagine you walked into you know, you're in New York City and and you walked into McDonald's and they said, that'll be six year olds, and you'd be like, I don't have any euros and they'd be like, well, that's all we take, and you'd be like, okay, I gotta take me, missus elsewhere the same thing to happen with stable cooin. Do you walk in with seventeen USDC and if they say they only take tether, you know you're gonna have to convert it and that's painful.

So digital will make it easier to convert these things, but there will always be fees. So yes, I think in general we will continue to see things converge on just a couple of solutions, and then where there's real value differences, like it could be the US markets differentiate from non US markets. That's definitely happening today. You see

that with tether and USCC in particular. You know, maybe we'll see some pockets where like there's certain regions that have big winners that are different than other regions.

around nineteen seventy nineteen seventy one. This is when the first early origins of what became TCPIP started to emerge, email protocols kind of through the seventies you started to see those kind of come to life a little bit. Today these are all old hat, but you know, that's a full fifty years ago to get from there to where we are today. So if you consider the origin of crypto to be somewhere around you know, twenty ten,

maybe a little bit earlier. If you want to credit the very beginning of bitcoin fifty year timeframe, it's probably, you know, twenty sixty. I'd like to think, I guess says I say that out loud. I'd like to think that things are a little bit faster do to the technology that we have. But I think we're going to be gated mostly by humans and not the technology. I think that's what we're seeing right now here in the

United States. It's really about human ability to adapt to these new technologies, both from an individual perspective in terms of usability in terms of security, and then also from a government and regulatory perspective, And remember the Internet did not have nearly the right regulatory hurdles that money does. Money is very established businesses, whereas the Internet was kind of just new business. So we're also competing with incumbent players that are not certain about how they will win.

They are running into the innovator's dilemma. I think I mentioned that on your show a couple of years ago. But they're going to have a hard time figuring out how do they adopt the new technology without uncomfortably cannibalizing their old business and yet still becoming and still maintaining

the size of their business. So, but I don't know, I think fifty years is not that bad of a range for like how long it's going to take, which I guess means that we're still in the you know, first twenty five percent ish, maybe maybe the first thirty percent.

the protocol for how do you communicate? And there was like some chat stuff, and then it was like some news group stuff, and then it was some email stuff. On the blockchain side, and we started out with you know, store value, maybe some payments stuff. We got the smart contract stuff that led to stable coins stuff, and then you know, DeFi so we see innovations as we go. The time for all of this to disrupt the existing financial system, yeah, it's gonna take some time.