The Crypto Surge Will Continue & Change Investing! with Christopher Perkins

trillions of dollars coming in that's non yielding. Well, I personally think it's going to be the token of choice in the developing world. Would you rather have your local currency? Would you rather have dollars? Probably greenbacks? Right.

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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. Hey, folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host Tony Edward and we are recording out a Station three in New York's Financial District, and my guest is Chris Perkins, who is the president of coin Fund. Chris, great to have you, Tony.

have issues around security. Maybe we'll talk about maybe some issues around how do we balance that with customer protections, privacy, national security. These are hard problems and the best way to solve them is to sit down with policy makers and talk, right, And that's exactly what I'm seeing now. But that's normal. That's the way it should be. Right, this should not be exceptional. We're supposed to be engaging and solving problems together, right, And then people are like WHOA.

Like the IPO markets, the equity markets, they're open, Like that's the way it should be, right, our public markets, we have the greatest capital markets in the world. They should be open. We shouldn't be as scared and afraid. And so, you know, I feel like we've been gas lit into this feeling that oh my gosh, this is exceptional, not you know, no, this should be the norm. And I just wanted to thank all those people who stepped

up to serve. You know, it's not easy to serve, like it's you know, you leave the private sector and you lose a lot of flexibility, wear a suit every day. We have some really amazing people that are trying to make things right, and I'm grateful.

Paul Atkins, and Mark E. Wada as well, did a complete well change the sec completely. We got roundtables, we have transparency who they're meeting with. I mean, to your point, this is how we should have been, but it was completely different.

all these crypto companies now going public doing IPOs. It's again surreal but also very exciting. I'm just really curious what the future looks like from an innovation standpoint, Which new companies are going to come in, what new technologies are going to build the much more.

you really get rich? You invest in those private early stage companies. But we're not allowing Americans to do it. It's crazy. Eighty one percent right. It's good to hear the chairman. He's saying, listen, it's time for us to unlock these things. And I think the solution here is through what we call Internet capital markets or tokenization. I think they're going to work on a couple of exceptions, like we have a company called Superstate with a program

called opening Bell. But really in the United States, there are three ways to take a company public. One is through IPOs, where you go with bankers. We're seeing some of this happen with Circle, right, and this is a good thing because we're making private companies become public via the old fashioned way.

them right without those intermediaries. This is where things get very interesting because if you can come up with a way through tokenization to allow people with access to the Internet, you know, the market sets the price in a direct listing. Guess what our markets are pretty robust. If you look at the last administration under Gensler, there were only two tokens that were that we were known commodities. That was

really bitcoin and meme coins. Right. And by the way, I talked about the eighty one percent, what's like the one thing that you could have gotten really early stage if you're just a normal person, that was bitcoin, right, and it made a lot of millionaires because people were able to access that market. Okay, but anyway, let's step back and look at meme coins. Meme coins last year one hundred and forty billion dollar market cap. Do you know what the market do you't know how much money

was raised in IPOs last year in twenty four thirty billion? Right? So Trump the Trump token, people hate it, they love it whatever, fifteen billion dollars market cap over thirty six hours on a weekend. So the true power of these blockchains is capital formation because anyone with access to the Internet can buy something. Right. I'm very excited about the future of direct listings where we're able to take companies using tokenization on chain and make them available to the

masses earlier stage. That's going to be cool.

the SEC has talked about possibly rolling those back or do they even need to roll it back if it's going to be in a tokenized form and I can buy two tokens if I want.

so people retails a lot smarter these days. And so you know, does it really do these rules make sense? I don't think so.

if you have trillions of dollars coming in that's non yielding. Well, I personally think it's going to be the token of choice in a developing world. Would you rather have your local currency? Would you rather have dollars? Probably? Greenbacks? Right? And now you can access them for the very first time in a very easy way. But the problem with that is that they are non yielding. They're depreciating assets.

So what are people going to do. They're going to go into DeFi, right, and then they're going to go and they're going to find their agents. We have a company called Giza and they have a really cool agent called Arma and this is not investment advice, but they can actually go and optimize that yield, right. And so you have this one structural buyer coming in. Those are the stable coin folks, right, and the hop is going

to be DeFi and AI agents to optimize. You have another structural buyer, which are the four one case coming in. Trump made that executive order, so that's new capital coming into the system. And then you have this third innovation that a lot of people didn't see a coming, and those are the dats, the digital asset treasuries, and so against regulatory risking, against that structural buying, against macro we saw you know what Jpal said today, It's a really interesting time to be in the market.

You worked at City Bank just last week, I think it was we heard a report at City Bank once to launch your own stable coin, get involved in crypto. What are your thoughts on all these banks now looking to jump in.

what are you doing in crypto? And I say and they say, you know, why are you not trying to fix your settlements? Why are you not trying to improve, you know, your tech systems? And they're like, so effectively, they're really trying to catch up. I think it was pretty amusing. You saw the ABA come out against some of the Genius Bill provisions, so like, wait a second, you can still get interest and as they start learning about that, they're like, uh oh, but look, the banks

are smart. There's one thing that continues to hold them back though, and that's those are the regulatory capital rules, the bosal rules, so banks have to hold capital based on their behaviors, and the the BIS still requires them to hold a lot of capital, so it's still kind of holding them back. So that has to get solved for them to really participate. It's a long story, but watch the Basal rules and you can go to BIS and they continue to indict, and they hate stable coins

and they hate crypto. They're gonna have to either figure it out or be left behind. But that's holding the banks back. But generally speaking, all the banks you know, are now moving. The other thing that they' struggled with over overtime is talent. Right, so when bull markets come, people as they start learning about the opportunity in the space,

like wait a second, I can do go into aving. Wow, this is so cool, they tend to jump native pretty quick, but you don't see too many native people jumping back, so they're gonna have to really figure out talent. I know there's a lot of talent challenges across the traditional finance.

slice it. Maybe by twenty thirty, right, will banks be offering crypto, custody, trading, and access to all these things. And maybe it's more for the boomers and the generation after, but for the younger folks, maybe they're just doing it in a robbinhood or their apps.

how it works there, send them to defile whatever. Now all of a sudden, we have these dats that pop up, and what we're doing is we're taking crypto native tokens and we're turning them into securities. Right. Securities used to be a death sentence under Gensler. Now it's not. Now it's actually really exciting because as a security you can navigate all the very scalable enterprise ready infrastructure, prime brokerages,

margin lending, all this stuff. Right, And so as we see the world folk going forward, Look, people are asking me all the time these dats, is it a bubble? Is it this you know? Or is it is it here? Are they here to stay? My answer is usually like yeah, because look there's a little bit of there's a lot

of hype right now. But at the same time, if you're a major foundation, it makes sense to have that foundation going forward, and also that DAT because now you can avail yourself of all that traditional infrastructure and capital markets that really make our country great, very scalable. Right, So, so how did the banks end up somewhere in between? I mean, they can service a lot of the dats today,

it's just plug and play. A lot of the traditional players can enter the dats, and for some folks entering through the traditional window is going to make sense, you know. But for others, you know who, you know, like my kid who's trying to figure out how to open a bank account, but and then he open to phantom all and goes crazy, like maybe that's more natural for them. But in the end, these worlds are going to converge

and it's going to be really really interesting. And by the way, there's gonna be a basis, right, There's gonna be trading opportunities, you know. Can you trade an ETF against a DAT or a future like I think the future is is like one common UI where you have your equities, you have your tokenized products, you have everything all in one place. They all have slightly different economics and things going on, and you can trade them against each other with the.

or ether or whatever. But if I go raise billions of dollars to buy that asset, does that open up a new level risk?

The risk is, Like, dude, I was in futures, right, I remember when oil the price of oil went negative on futures, right, Like, weird stuff happens, Bad things happen. The market is the market. And like in my career, I've always you always end up in the tail one way or the other. And so could you have a negative m NAV which is a multiple to NAV. Yes,

it's happening, It's happened, it will continue to happen. A good management team will be able to navigate those instances, right, And so as you start thinking, and I'm again not investment advice, but if you start thinking about underwriting one of these investments, what do you which would you consider? Well,

you got to look at the management team. You got to look at the fundamentals of the underlying token, right, you have to look at their ability to interface with those Do they have the expertise you know, not only the treasury operation side, you know when to issue equity, when to hit the ATM, when to you know, issue converts or whatever else. They have to have that expertise. They also have to have amazing investor relations. So there's

many many elements where could things go wrong. Well, if they don't have you know, sufficient capital put aside to help support the m NAV, you know, should it drop into a negative situation, do they not have the right controls? You know, is there an issue with you know, security or slashing. You know, do they have insurance? But as these things mature, you're going to see or do they take too much debt? Right, and then the token crashes.

That's why you have to really understand imagining. Now here's the good thing. These are public securities, so they have like like it or not, some people hate sucks. They have regular you know reporting, you know where you where, they have disclosures, they have all those things that every equity needs to have. So you know, if you're a normal person, you can read it or you can load it up into chat GPT and see what it says.

But but for sophisticated investors, they're gonna be able to look at how the company is being run, just like any other security and this is some of the beautiful this is one of the beautiful things of that rapper.

drive a really superior MNAV. So good good on him. But bitcoin doesn't natively yield. Ether does. And so one of the things that we built at coin fine, which we built something called CAESAR, which is the compost ethereum ether staking rate. It's essentially the risk free rate of ether ethereum. And so essentially that serves as a beta. Now if you're in ethereum, because that's going to be one of the natural drivers of your m NAV because you have eth and now you have this real yield

round three percent or whatever. That's just that's table stakes because if you took that eth and you staked it, you should make at least this SASER rate. Right now, what we're looking out for how do they outperform that rate? Right And and again the higher yielding asset the higher you can yield, the more it contributes to the m NAV because it's going to generate additional profit, additional yield

and profitability over that that that that asset. So this is where things get really interesting as the sophisticated folks come in to manage treasury apps not only on the equity issuance, but also on the yield, the yield side of things. Do they know how to use defive, do they know how to use you know, staking restaking, and you know, do they deploy insurance? Do they ensure the yield? You know, we you know, we were actually seeing for the first time not only insurance on slashing but also

yield itself. And so as you start entering into this world of yield, there's a lot of opportunity, but there's also risks. Anytime something is yielding there that you know, usually there's some kind of risk associated. So you need to make sure you're able to manage slashing risk, you're able to manage lost yield. And we're already seeing products coming out in the insurance from that. Do that and then expertise, and you know, there's other types of risk

as you enter into DeFi. You know, hacking and things of that sort of smart contract risk. This is where things get really interesting. We've got a number of different you know, token projects out there now. Their ability to drive that yield, in addition to having that knowledge of treasure operations is going to be really interesting to watch. That's how they're going to differentiate.

as you see, and that was always our thesis. It was one of convergence, and so we wanted to bring the best of the old with the best of the new. And so as we're starting to see new forms of derivatives evolved, I'm like, okay, that makes sense, or you know this new type of equity of dat you know, we're able to say, well, okay, let's look at it through an equity lens now, because we have we have done underlying expertise and so we've been we've been very, very active in the space.

a point of where these assets become less wolatile because in more liquidity comes in. Is it a ten year lifespan or more than that?

track additional capital flows. And remember this is all against the backdrop of regulatorid D risking, so a lot of institutions they're still getting their act together to say, okay, now I can do it. How can what's my business model? So I still think we're looking pretty good. But markets

are cyclical, right, they go up, they go down. I think in the long term, as I mentioned, I think these dats are going to be a permanent part of market structure, right where you're going to have a foundation, and you're going to have a DAT maybe if you have if you're a big project like Bitcoin or theem you'll have a few of these things. But again, the

data is that interface to the traditional side, right. The data is where you're using that token exposure, you know, to be cross margined against something else from another equity that's somewhat correlated. Right. So this is going to be a permanent part of market structure, I believe, and it's going to have a pivotal role. I was talking to a founder of one of the top projects in crypto, and you know, he was really struggling with the DAT. He's like, I don't you know, I don't I don't

know if this makes sense. Da da da da. And after a long conversation I tried to explain, you know, he's like, do I support one of these guys as a foundation or not? I don't know why I want to do it. But it's really important to recognize that this is a new important part of market structure that provides structural buying potentially and also a really important interface with the very scaled world of traditional finance.

to that, but but why wouldn't we have a tokenized dat? Yeah, because now we can trade that against other tokenized products as well, you know, bitcoin against the dat. Now you have a natural delta. If there's a postive veendmap, you can start trading basis in the same tokenized world. Right. So again, what does this tell me? It's this massive period of convergence made possible through some of the regulatory progress we're made. And there's so much opportunity out there.

You know, we haven't even got to tokenize dats yet, right, but pretty soon you're gonna be able to trade them against each other, against against the native asset.

four seven markets? Is it? To your point of convergence, we have AI agents that can help us monitor our portfolio while we're sleeping.

not a good space to be in. You know, that's one thing that we definitely have to address.

I know vlat was just on here and it was executed a little bit clunky, but I thought it was genius. And so like, let's talk a little bit about what that meant. As I mentioned, you know, eighty one percent of companies are a private that's not cool. And then you have this thing called tokenization where anyone with access

to the Internet can get access to these things. What I think is going to happen in the future is that you're going to have exciting companies and rather than someone just like acquire some of their private equity and try to tokenize it, they're going to work with a provider and and the regulators. You know, I think there's some regulatory work to do as well. But what if you're you ever see one of those like anglerfish down

in like the great depths of the ocean. It has a little like it has like the little light like attract people, then it bites it. I think that you're going to see companies work with through tokenization to start issuing out a little bit of private equity to see how the market responds on crypto rails right, and to the extent that it's received well and there's they can capture a pretty liquid price pretty quick, it'll give them

an indication is when to take their company public. So I think that's going to be something on the horizon. I'm excited to see more. We need to find a way to get private equity and early stage investments to the masses with risk. We need to disclose those risks and then people need to be able to underwrite, do

their research and have access. But I think these days of telling people that they're not allowed to participate in the most innovative companies is coming to a quick end, and I think a guy like Chairman Atkins is going to do that.

I mean, look at stable coins. This is the best thing that ever happened to the dollar, right, there's almost an insatiable demand for it overseas and a developing world. Why wouldn't we want to take this step after stable coins and let our companies, let let anyone in the world with access to the internet access to the innovation that's happening on shore via our companies. I think it's

a very good thing. Now, look, there's some national security things that we have to be monitoring, and there's ways to do that, and we could talk about it, but I think it's a good thing to globalized markets.

I think for the people. You know, I've lived in some pretty rough places in my life, and like, yeah, you know, it's not a bad thing to keep despotic government honest. Right by providing a dollar alternative and giving people access to financial services for the very first time on their phone, I think that's a good thing.

all the benefits, maybe fifty years from now or one hundred, we're gone. Do you think this technology can be used to fix the FIAT system or change it to a brand new system where there's not this debasement.

Who you banquet, but your local bank manager may call you up and say, hey, we now offer the ability to access bitcoin, eth and so on and so forth, will custody for you and could you also get access to certain stable coins to earn yield?

almost a bank account. They're competing with the banks direct. You know, do people start you know, it's not banking per se, but it's it's using those same services. So I do think that there's going to be an interesting battle and interesting partnerships that will be forged. Like you're gonna hear announcements about big partnerships because like a lot of these banks, they don't have it's hard to get the talent, so it's either build or buy, and so

in many cases, partnerships are going to be forged. Be on the lookout for some of those in the near future, because that's the only way that they can kind of leap frog the competition is through big partnerships M and A as well. M and A is tougher for banks because a lot of reglatory reason to prevent them from time to time. But so you'll see some building, I think, a lot of buying and a little bit.

recording this. On August twenty second, Jome Powell made his speech at Jackson Hall and the markets are ripping. So do you think the top is going to be Q four or Q one twenty six non Financial Advice.

of them made it, some of them got burned. But now as it's normalizing, So it used to be people would have a lot of reputational risk for being in the space. Industors are always comfortable taking market risk. That's what they get paid to do. They do incredible analysis. Sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they get it wrong, but that's their expertise. They don't get paid for reputational risk. And that reputational risk manifested itself in reglatory risk class cycle.

Now that regulatory risk is gone, there's still some elements of reputational risk. I would argue maybe around security, like you do this amazing investment, you get hacked, but by and large the reputational risk. Now, there's reputational risk if you don't have a crypto strategy. So you see all that structural buying coming in as well. So I've remained bullish. And then of course we're seeing the FED now you know, projected to lower rates, so so macro seems to be

lining up. Then you have then you have that that the normalization and the buying. Like I'm pretty bullish, and I think it's hard not to be.

going to see a ton of latency. And that's why that that that the structural buying and the moving into our space is still still building because they have to put you know, let alone just wanting to do it, the infrastructure. They have to find custodia relationships, they have to find middleware reporting to their end users they have there's then they have to do all that within the context of whatever regultory, RAPPID, then their r A whatever.

This stuff does not happen overnight. It takes months, maybe a couple of years to be fully loaded. So we're still building. They're not here. There's there's a lot more to h it's not mature yet.

as far as investments companies coins projects, you're investing for sure.

all across crypto of course. And then we have a liquid strategy that is looking to take advantage of looking to invest in the most exciting token projects and the most exciting now equity projects, you know, as as you look at debts and everything else. So what excites us, man, There's there's a million different themes. We've been very very active. My partner Jake is very early on the intersection of AI and crypto. That's been something that's been been core

to our thesis since twenty one. Like we're really early there. But look, we get excited across the board. Every lately, we've been doing deals in the consumer space, We'll do DeFi, c FI infrastructure. Still gets as excited as we're starting to create that foundation, you know, and then I think

there's other big themes that I get excited about. I like to you know, kind of operate on the intersection, always looking for projects that are you know, I think, I think fixed income has a long way to go. Derivatives markets. One of the biggest gaps in our in our in crypto markets right now are derivatives. Like, yes, we have purps, but we're lacking like listed derivatives. So I think that's an interesting space to be as fixed

income starts crystallizing. Because institutions love fixed income, we don't really have like massive fixed income markets and crypto we have purps, but there's a lot of other fixed income elements that I think. Look, I talked about this often. Staking is a rate, and so we're going to start seeing more structured products around those rates. Really exciting for me.

But yeah, we're we're super active. We're out there meeting founders every single day looking for the best projects across payments, you name it. And here's another thing people don't realize. So if you look at the world, I think there's like thirty million developers in space. I talked about the capital that's now coming back into the system, but when you think about it from a founder's perspective, we think there's like thirty million or so developers a lot of

them stayed out of crypto because it was scary. They don't want to go to jail if you develop or whatever. Now that regulatory de risking is happening and the markets are coming back, they're like, wait a second, maybe I can join this crypto space as well. So you're gonna see talent coming back, big deal. And you know, don't hold me to it. But I think there's only like ten thousand full time developers in crypto right now against thirty million in the world. So let's say I'm off

by a factor of whatever. There's so much opportunity for these new developers to come into our space and then the magic happens. Capital new founders like innovation.

emergence of AI and it's just getting even more smarter and smarter and things are going to get automated with AI agents and much more. Will funds exist in ten to fifteen years one hundred percent.

that we're seeking. And so, yeah, is are there going to be Are people still going to be in the space. For sure, They're gonna be working a lot closer with these agents for the right outcomes, maybe toggling their waitings or you know changing, you know, toggling and tweaking them, pointing them in different directions optimize, like helping them to optimize even further.

And I've been talking to a lot of robot developers and people who are in this industry. And guess what they're talking about. Robots are gonna use stable coins and blockchain because they're not gonna use cash.

I think it's an opportunity, to be honest with you. Yeah, so you'll see next level cryptography use quantum. Yeah, one hundred percent. Yeah. I'm not an expert in the field, but it's it's definitely. I mean, I follow it. We're seeing more and more progress, more patents every single day. It's something that that's moving quicker than I think some people realize.

The reason why is because ETFs, by the way they're constructed, is they have daily liquidity, right, and so the problem that you have if you take a bunch of ETH and you stake it and then you have people redeem, they have to wait for the unbonding window to occur. Okay,

so it's hard to redeem if you're bonded up. And we've seen ethereum like today, the unbonding windows is extended pretty materially, right, So if you have to wait thirteen days to get your eth out and you have daily liquidity, that's a real problem, right, and so the solution to that would be you have to hold reserves, but are those reserves yielding? You know, can you hold them in a liquid staking token where you're still getting that yield

or not. It's just complex. I think it will be solved for but it's just going to take time to figure out. Or you have to when you reserve liquidity, then you have to bring your yield down from total return to partial return because it costs money to reserve that liquidity. So again, I'm pretty sure it's going to get sorted. There's some really smart people working on the challenge. But the Canadians at first like, yeah, you can stake it, but fifty percent is that the right number? Is it

the wrong number? I got no idea because I don't. It's also kind of wrong way risk because if something bad happens and everyone's trying to pull it out, the window extends. So anyway, that's a You're going to see more and more ETFs. Why because we're going to know what's a commodity and what's not. And that's one of the things that the SEC wants to deliver us. So very excited about that. On the ETF front. You're also going to see that on futures. People ignore the futures market.

The futures market bring it all together, super important. Why futures are regulated by the CFTC. So if you know something's not a security, you can launch a future. Genzo suppressed that because if an exchange tried to launch a future, they'd be like, not so fast, that's a security, stop it, right, So that's why we could. We couldn't even launch like Slana under his reign, right, okay, So why are future is so important? If you look at ETFs, why didn't

we launch did? What did he require before we launched the BITCOINYTF He required futures because he wanted that surveillance, right, So futures help liquid futures market help with that type of surveillance. What else did they do?

And what I'm mostly said, one of the things in addition to watching ETFs grow is having the futures industry grow with it. This is the most exciting part of our growth. And I talk about having some issues and derivatives because you can hedge, you can drive yield strategies, and you can get that surveillance for even more ETFs. So it's an area. You know, we have a company that's like literally focusing on that NonStop and helping drive more futures products.

out my box. So you know, I'm never going to make any prediction to say, you know, it's not going down X or y, because I've been there and done that over and over again. So markets are cyclical, But I think when you step back, it's hard not to be bullish about the crypto space. Like I'm super bullish.

using our payments our power by stable coins, we're able to tokenize our artwork in our house and do a lot more with DeFi and create new revenue earning options and things like that.

gonna care right, You're just gonna pay. It's gonna be powered by by crypto rails in the background. It's gonna be cheap, fast and easy, easier than ever because you know, we see a million payments company. They're always improving on something, something something. But yeah, it's just gonna be seamless and easier.

yesterday I saw a X you and Chris John Carlo endorse a bill that was issued to fight cybersecurity threats along with crypto. Tell us about that what that bill is about.

in our industry right now is that of security. We have certain state sponsored actors that have been ravaging and hacking like the bibit hack. You know, we've had billions being hacked. And if there's one thing that's going to derail or momentum, it's that security threat. Like people don't get people get paid to invest, they don't get paid to have their assets hacked after they made a great investment. Right So to me, this is one of the biggest

threats facing our industry. It keeps me awake at night and it's a tough problem. Now, look at stable coins for example, they have this capability we need to call freezencies. Right. A lot of crypto libertarians hate it, but it's the fact of life where you're holding these assets if they

get into a bad guy's hands. And I always say bad guy, not bad girl, because there's some both, but like you know what I mean, what you can do is you can take those assets and seize them, provided you go through due diligence and you go through a judge or whatever else. It works, but it takes a long time. The problem with the environment that we exist

in today is everything is moving fast. By the way, this threat is going to get worse as well, because we talk about AI and and agents and deep fakes hacking is going to get worse. Their ability to get out of dodge and turn it into bitcoin and disappear is going to get better. So it's a pretty dangerous place out there. And I don't want to like frighten

away users because like this is there's also opportunity. But what makes me excited about this bill, and we've been pushing about this for a long time, we think the solution to this current real urgent problem actually lies in the past, and if you look at our history during the Revolutionary War, we had no money and we ended up winning the Revolutionary or that the textbooks will sow

we want them in the Battle of Yorktown. But one of the driving true drive factors is that we ravaged the British economy because what we did was we said, hey, we're going to authorize these private citizens, we call them privateers, take your ship out in Massachusetts and go ravage the British economy. And we did, and it hurt them badly, and that's one of the reasons why the war ended. They came back in eighteen twelve for the War of

eighteen twelve. Madison commissioned five hundred privateers to go after the British and I think that helped nd hostilities as well. Our founding fathers loved this concept so much, and it's called the letter of mark, where you issue this letter to an institution or an individual. They actually put it in our Constitution. It's in Article one and it gives the Congress authorization to issue letters of mark and reprisal. So the point here is that and by the way,

the Europeans thought it was a dirty business. They got out of it in the nineteenth century, but we love it so much. It's in our constitution. It's not going anywhere, just like our guns, I guess, but we think it's time to resurrect this practice. What better way to fight back against hackers and state actors who are maneuvering against our companies or startups than to commission private citizens and say, hey, listen, here's your letter, go for it. Now here's the killer

policy use case. Back in history, they would have these things called prize courts, and oftentimes the people with those letters would have to post bond. Today we call that staking where if you misbehave you get slashed. But once you seize those assets back, the private tier gets to keep a lot of them. You give some back to the victim, and you give some to the house. Guess what, that's your way to fund the strategic Bitcoin Reserve or the strategic Crypto arsenal at no cost to the taxpayer.

So that's the vision. This bill contemplates a version of that that thinks about, hey, how do we leverage letters of mark based on our history to go after cyber criminals. But I do think that the private sector are the only folks who are sophisticated enough to be out there on front, to move fast enough to stop these hacks. You know, even before the care here's the last killer thing. During the terrible regulatory climate and law fair the last

four years, we lost many founders overseas. But what if if we had these rules in place and this incredible security apparatus in place. I think it would attract them back because people will know, do not mess with Americans, you know, or we're going to let or we're going to set loose our privateers. So are they like go hack somebody.

risks through bonds and things of that sort. Yeah, so let's let's let's get it done.

and dealing with crypto, what would you be doing?