The FIRST Bitcoin-Focused Investment Platform with Dr. Arman Meguerian

one hundred percent reserve. You can review their transparency report. They don't commingle or lend out your funds now. Uphold 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 listenings, and unlock exclusive crypto insights, and they support a variety of stable coins such as p Y USD that's PayPal, stable Coin Circles,

USDC and USBC. They will be supporting Ripples's upcoming launch of r L USD. 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 doctor Arman mcgerion, who's the founder and CEO of Timestamp. Arman, great to have you on.

path I ended up following. So I left that career to work on bitcoin, and that's how I ended up here talking to you.

twenty thirteen. I was doing a surgical fellowship in Armenia, of all places, at a surgical hospital, and there were several people there from the United States, including a friend from back home, and he's very libertarian leaning. He was a Ron Paul type, and we ended up in a bank in the center of the city and we were exchanging dollars for the local currency, and I very very clearly remember him saying, you know, if we had bitcoin, we wouldn't have to be doing this right now. And

I was like, what hold on, let's go back. What do you mean by that? And you know, he tried to tell me as best he could. Remember this is twenty thirteen, where we had very little information. We didn't have all these books and resources, so he did the best he could. He tried to explain to me. But like most people, the first time I heard about bitcoin, I thought, great, that's very cool meat de he nerdy money.

But it's never going to amount to anything. So I just completely forgot about it, went about my life, you know, my career path becoming a doctor. Then kept hearing about it again and again and again an event truly, I said, Okay, I think I have to dig into this a little bit further. And so by the time twenty fifteen twenty sixteen came around, I think that's when I started becoming obsessed to the point where I think my family can attest to it. They thought I'd gone a little mad,

quite frankly. So that's around the time when I started really becoming obsessed with it and it for me. You know, when you look at my career path, you know, you wonder, how does someone that's a doctor and an academic become

a bitcoiner that's focused on this entirely. It's because those two ships crossed in the night, right like the my love for bitcoin and my dismay of the medical system eventually just overlapped so hard that I just felt like I needed to put the brakes on the medical career and start focusing on something I truly loved, which was bitcoin. So I took the leap. I decided to end up focusing on bitcoin, and I couldn't be happier about it.

which has the world reserve currency. And do you find, you know, with your experience, and I think you said Armenia right, that people there gravitate more to bitcoin.

Africa or even other nations around the world. And most people don't realize that a lot of these nations, I think over sixty nations are dollarized, as in they have their current currency and they also have the dollar because their currency is so weak they don't need another currency that they can save in and the dollar has become a savings mechanisms for a lot of these people. Now, what I find interesting is that here in the West, when we think about bitcoin, we think of it as

an asset class. We think of it as part of our portfolio. Look at how it fits into your portfolio. If you add just two percent or five percent, it's going to outperform this portfolio that's just SMP five hundred and bonds by x amount. And that's great. I'm happy people are doing that. I'm happy people are putting it into their ETFs and whatnot or saving into bitcoin, and

people should continue to do that. But when you go to these other places that have a dysfunctional currency and you start talking to them about bitcoin, it's not a hard sell. You basically sell them on the fact that, hey, it's this money that can't be printed, there's a set supply, it's a predictable issue and schedule. The government can't stop you from sending it or using it. And all of a sudden, you see the wheels turn and they click,

and then it starts becoming part of their lives. And so what we're seeing is the adoption is different in different places based on their experiences, and so people in South America, for example, are using it as part of a portfolio of money essentially, where they have their daily currency, which is what they earn in usually let's say, for example, apeso, and then they have a dollar which they use as a short to medium term savings, and then something like

bitcoin which they're using as long term savings. So you don't see that kind of stuff in the way West and the West you see it as a privilege and an asset class that you can invest in. And I think we're very lucky to be there, but I would caution people in the West to take it a little bit more seriously because once the game of musical chair stops, you're going to be want wanting to hold the hardest money that there is out there, and that's bigcoin.

all these great attributes. And even in the West, like you said, where we're a privileged and we have the world reserve currency, we can use it, but people around the world can give benefit from it. So it doesn't even matter what walk of life you're in. It's there to meet you or meet your need around currency, store value in these different things.

medium of exchange. And then some people that are all the way at the end of the spectrum are actually using it as a unit of account because they're already living on a bitcoin standard. And those are the people that are the hardcore times, right, there's very very few of those. But I think we're all living on the spectrum because we're living in real time during this monetary transition.

And it's only been fifteen years since bitcoins is inception, so that may feel like a long time, but really it's nothing if you look at it on the grand scale things.

a psychological barrier. Everyone thinks of one hundred thousand as a big milestone, and it is, but when you look at it relative to other asset classes like gold, it's still less than ten percent of gold's market cap, So it is tiny in comparison to everything else that is surrounding it in terms of traditional asset classes, whether it's gold, real estate, other currencies, and and we have to be cognizant of that when we talk to people that feel

like maybe they miss the boat. I do get that a lot a lot of people who feel like, oh, maybe it's too late to be into bitcoin, and so I won't even bother with it. And people are not seeing that it's a monetary technology. And ultimately, when it comes to monetary technologies, you want to be holding the best money there is out there because the consequences of

not doing so are serious. If you're holding a money that is inferior to bitcoin or inferature, whatever you think is the most superior type of money, you're losing your purchasing power over an extended period of time. And then you look up five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, and all of a sudden, all that work you put in to earning value, earning money, keeping yourself sustainable, keeping your family, keeping your generations, well, all of a sudden

that evaporates. And we have evidence to show that the dollar is a great example of this. Even the US dollar, which is the strongest currency there is out there, is the best house in a bad neighborhood, even that loses

ninety nine percent of its value over a century. And so if your grand great grandparents or your grandparents decided to save in the US dollar in the US banking institution that somehow managed to survive over one hundred years, even then they would lose ninety nine percent of its value.

And that's the tough part of it is, even if you get all those things right, you somehow manage to make it to the US, You somehow manage to save in the dollar, You somehow manage to save in a US banking institution, say like Chase, that survived for one hundred years, you still lost ninety nine percent of your value because the currency itself that you're saving in is being printed and it's being expanded in terms of the currency supply, and all of a sudden you're left holding

bags and you're wondering what the heck happened.

understand that, right. And now I should say politics is downstream of economics. So people but Democrats Republicans, right, and they're at each other, but they don't understand the underlying problem, which you know, bitcoin definitely fixes.

very short timeframe. We didn't see prices rise. People were very happy, they were getting stimulus checks, they were spending left and right on all these sorts of things. And then what we saw was a year or two later, the prices of everything was slowly starting to rise. But more importantly, and I think maybe some people don't realize this, asset prices rose, so that money printing really affects the lower and middle class more than anyone else. And the

reason being is when the money is broken. When money is being printed, the people that are in the know, the people that have wealth, are investing that wealth into assets, so things like real estate and stocks, and so what happens is the people that are living paycheck to paycheck, lower to middle class, or the people that have a tiny bit of savings, they're not able to attain those assets.

So take a look at real estate. Now, most people our age, quite frankly, are not owning a home and have no reasonable path to actually own a home anytime soon. The reason being is when the money is broken, a lot of people decide they need to park their money somewhere, and the safest place to park it is in assets. So real estate prices decide to skyrocket. You have everyone and their mother trying to invest in real estate, whether

it's foreign entities or investment banks. We've seen people entities like black Rock investing in real estate. They're all trying to park their money somewhere because it's a melting ice cube that you're sitting on if you're holding cash, and

so you've got to find somewhere to put it. And the avenue for most people nowadays in this current era is real estate and stocks, and so you see those prices of those assets skyrocket in a way that doesn't necessarily make sense because when you look around you you see people struggling, right, You see people struggling with their grocery bills, you see people struggling with their car payments. And then you see asset prices go up, and you say,

how does this make sense? The economy's not doing well because look at everything around me, But then you see these asset prices going up. So you're seeing this cognitive dissonance of the day to day economy in your life, the day to day economy in your neighbor's life, your community's life is getting worse and worse and worse. But asset price is rising, and that's all related to the broken money that we're living with.

to speak. And it's not going to solve every problem, but at least can help them to retain their purchasing power and outpays the debasement and the inflation and for them and even their future generations. Right because like for me, my plan, Like I have a six year old, there's some bitcoin I'm not selling. I'm it's gonna go to her. And because I see, you know, bigcoin really open my understanding of the economy, how the money system works, the

federal is there, what central banks are doing. And it's like a blessing and a curse to know that.

telling you, I'm sure you've experienced this as well. You're often shouting into the void for years and years and years and people you love, it's people you want to help, and they just that there's a dissonance there, there's something that's missing in terms of the connection. And so I found that the best way to do it is to do what you do is to keep putting yourself out there,

keep talking about it, and eventually they'll come around. Maybe it won't be the first time, but usually it takes one, two, three touch points and eventually people will say, Okay, tell me about it now, I'm ready. They have to be ready to actually be able to take in that information.

the nation state side. So on the retail side, there were people like myself and you who saw the value in bitcoin and decided, Okay, I'm going to start using bitcoin as my savings and consider that a store of value. I believe it's a better money than x, whether it's a dollar or gold or what have you. And so by being early compared to most other people, you benefit from holding that currency and your wealth and your influence

grows with that. And so like you're saying you want to hold some bitcoin for your daughter, the why do you want to hold it for your daughter? Because you know in the future that it's going to do well compared to all these other currencies. It's going to hold its value well, and you want your daughter to be in a position where she can use that wealth to exert her influence on the world and actually make a significant impact. And so we all think like that, I

do the same thing. I mean, I have some bitcoins sort away. I have some bitcoins sort away for those family members that don't listen to me, because I know that'll eventually come back, and I have like a little portion sort away for them. Now, that's all well and good. On the retail side, I've been around for over ten years now. On the bitcoin side of things, this last cycle, i'd say the four years or so has been very different. We've definitely crossed rubicon here where it's no longer the

cipherpunk libertarian retail investors only. We've had a lot of institutional adoption. So let's take Michael Sailor as an example. On the corporate side of things. He really, really, you know, pioneered the corporate side of things, started adopting bitcoin as a reserve asset in his corporation and then started doubling and tripling down on it by essentially borrowing money to buy more bitcoin. And so I promise you this, A lot of people in the corporate world are looking at

him and thinking, huh, that's interesting. We're sitting on a pile of cash. Where Apple or where Microsoft or where whoever? And you know those things are like yeah, right, Like it's not easy to shift that yacht and actually be able to maneuver to do that. Michael Saylor was in a unique position because he was the standing CEO, the standing leader of that company for thirty plus years. He had voting power, so he could actually exert his influence

on that company. Some of these other companies are not set up that way. So what we're seeing is the nimble and flexible types are able to access this, both in the corporate world and on the nation state side. So a great case study here is El Salvador. El Salvador had nothing to lose when they decided to adopt bitcoin. Their currency was in the gutter, their country was in

societal dismay. Let's say there's a lot of criminal issues, there were a lot of issues in terms of poverty, and President Bukela came in there and said, Okay, we need to figure out a way out of this. And so our options are basically allied and basically adopt a dollar as a secondary currency officially and go down that route, go work with the IMF, basically borrow a ton of money and be a slave to the central banks, or we can try out this bitcoin think, and he decided

to go down the bitcoin route. So, just like Michael Sailor in the corporate world, Bukele did it in the in the on the nation state side of things, and we've seen how much El Salvador has prospered their their wealth has grown significantly in just a few years and in fact has attracted so much capital into the country people. I know several people in my life who five years ago couldn't find El Salvador on a map, and now they're they're living there, and that's because El Salvador is

very friendly to them. El Salvador allows them the freedom to work on bitcoin, to live with bitcoin on a day to day basis, and to build a community there, and they get the benefits of being early adopters of bitcoin. So when it comes to strategic reserves, I think it's an inevitability that all of these entities are going to eventually adopt a strategic reserve. The question is gooplnks first?

Which major nation decides to go first, because that triggers a domino effect in terms of how people decide to act, And there is a lot of geopolitics involved in this because you have to remember, the US is a world reserve currency. Russia and China are looking at the US trying to figure out what to do, because the second they decide to enact a Bitcoin strategic reserve then is essentially, you know, firing the gun to say, Okay, the race is on. Let's see who's going to stack as much

bitcoin as we can, and let's go for it. And so it is an inevitability that this is going to happen. The question is how it happens, how public it is, because remember a lot of this could be done fairly quietly until it can't and it's exposed, and really, what

are the consequences of it? So this is excuse me for going down this rabbit hole as well, But I do think we're entering an era where in a sense, I want to caution people in terms of trying to advocate for a quick transition to a Bitcoin standard or a quick transition off fiat currencies. I believe that a quick transition off any currency is generally a recipe for disaster.

You want to make sure that enough people understand what is happening enough people have a way to actually access bitcoin, which we're starting to get there, to understand it, to use it, to be able to save in it, so they don't get wiped out overnight like a Great Depression type of situation. So we're entering a very interesting era

where we're seeing the transition of these currencies. We're seeing it at different stages in different places, but the people who hold the hardest money there is are ultimately going to benefit. The question is how long is it going to take, Who's going to bling first? And what are the consequences in terms of the timeline.

and can't do. And so what I found previously is I would speak to people that are leading these funds, people that are worth billions and billions of dollars, wanting huge funds, and you would talk to them and they would all own bitcoin individually, but they would say, you know, I wish we could hold it in our investment fund, but we can't because we just if we just don't have the green light yet, you know, we just can't

do it. Meanwhile, they own you know, double digit, if not triple digit amount of bitcoin in their own personal wallets. And so once the ETFs got approved, all these people that were just standing on the sidelines were like, Okay, we've got the green light, let's go. Let's do it.

And obviously, on a retail side of side of things, when it comes to people like you know, my mother or my aunt and uncle who might not feel comfortable with holding bitcoin in self custody and don't don't understand hardware wallets, this is a nice alternative for them to be able to hold bitcoin in a retirement fund or

an IRA. Of course, there are trade offs when it comes to that, and I'd always recommend considering self custody, but it is an alternative that was not available just you know, a year ago, and so it's been a major change, and I think it's yet another signal of the direction we're heading in where it's a one way door. There's no going back. Now. Pandora's box has been opened, and we're just heading in that one direction.

are not tech savvy and so forth. But to your point, Pandora's box has been open, and I see the amount of buying that that's happening on Wall Street, and you got the strategic Reserve, you get the states in play, you get countries doing all these in Bhutan, El Salvador, and it's like wow, I mean, I'm really excited to see what happens next year as things become more friendlier in the US, you know, with the pro crypto president coming in, pro crypto Congress and so forth, and even

the next five years. What is twenty twenty eight having looks like it look like with all these things in place.

people that want fair treatment. And I don't know if you had a chance to ever listen to that speech or if your viewers did, but if you remember when he gave that speech, the biggest cheer was about SEC

Chair Gary Gensler, And there's a reason for that. I think a lot of people in this space have been very frustrated with the arbitrary rules and regulations from regulatory bodies, and they see that President Trump's election is signaling a change in that, and we've seen from his appointments, his rhetoric that that seems to be the case.

I didn't know very many people there, and my mission there was just to learn as much as I could talk to as many people as I could that were working on bitcoin, and I was blessed to get to work with so many people that were that were so helpful. You know. I learned very early on that if you're humble and you ask questions, lots of people are willing

to help you, and that's what I did. So I treated it as essentially an internship where you know, I went from the top of the Totem bowl in medicine to all the way to the bottomn of bitcoin entrepreneurship, and so I learned as much as I could. I talked to people that were building wallets, people that were doing bitcoin mining, people that were building accelerators, and so I got to see a lot of the different avenues that are offered in the bitcoin space. And I compare

to the Internet of the nineties. How in the nineties you'd have Internet companies, and now that phrase doesn't mean much because every company is an Internet company. They're operating on that network. I see bitcoin in the same way. There are bitcoin companies. Now. Eventually all companies will be bitcoin companies because they'll be utilizing the bitcoin network in one way or another. So to get to that point, there's a transition period of people building the infrastructure for

bitcoin companies, for the bitcoin network. And what I found was that a lot of people that were building in this space were not able to access the capital they needed to actually fund their missions, to fund their companies because there are such a limited pool of venture capitalists and angel investor investors that are focused on bitcoin and crypto, and yet there are so many people that are bitcoin and crypto users that would love to invest in these companies,

but they just don't have access. So I started on this rabbit hole of trying to figure out how can I democratize access to investments in this space, and that let me let me down a very difficult path of trying to work with SEC and FINRA to get approval for an investment platform specifically geared towards bitcoin and open source companies. And it's a path that many told me it's not worth traversing. Many people said, good luck, let

us know how it goes. I received no funding for it, so I self funded this whole project myself, and after nearly two years, we got approval from SEC and FINRA to become an investment platform for bitcoin and open source companies, and recently we made our announcement and launch, and since then we've had eight projects already signed up on platform. On our platform, two of them are live and already

raising funds successfully. And it's a platform which I'm very proud of because it's open to everyone, So it's open to accredited and non accredit investors worldwide, so not just US investors, not just accredit investors, it's open to everyone. They're relatively low minimums compared to other investment avenues. So if you wanted to invest with a VC fund, oftentimes you'd have to write a check that's five or six figures, and even then you don't get the choice of what

you're investing in. You're giving them your money and they're investing on your behalf. Now there's some benefit to that. They're capital allocators. They know what's good and what's not good in theory, and they should be good at that. That's their job. But ultimately, we wanted to give you, the investor, the people a chance to pick and choose what they want to invest in, and relatively low minimums

and be able to access these investment opportunities. So I really believe that one of the keys to bitcoin success is the incentives. It drives incentives, and so when I built this company, I wanted to drive incentives as well. So I wanted to make it founder friendly. So we have no upfront costs for founders. We just do a success based commission. So if founders don't succeed, we don't succeed and our business doesn't work. We're very much focused

on driving our founders to success. For investors, it's free to join, it's open to everyone. And it's low minimums. We want to get as many people involved in the space as possible. So that is a lot of thought and effort has been put into that, and now we get to present it to the world. And so this is why I'm so excited to talk to you about it today.

But it's great that the common man can participate. So my question is, how is it that the average Joe and Jane can participate? Is there a change in their investment rules or around that.

So this specific regulation allows crowdfunding portals such as ourselves to open up these opportunities to both accredited and non accredited investors. Now getting to that process is very difficult to try to get the approvals, but it's also the regulatory bodies try to ensure that we are protecting these investors all we can, So we have the safeguards in place to protect investors. We have notifications for everything they do,

investment confirmations, following up with these companies. So there's Q and A forums for example, that where you can talk directly to founders ask questions. There are reporting requirements, and the best part for investors is it's a give and take. Right for these founders to be able to access to all these investors, they have to meet certain requirements, so they have to pass background checks. They have to file

what's called a Form C with the SEC. And for investors that's a great thing because if you look at a Form C on the SEC, you get everything you would possibly want about that company, information about who's the founders, their financial situation, the background checks, like I mentioned previously, So the key here is trying to give investors as much information as possible so they can make informed decisions.

That's what the SEC and FIN really care about once you get non credit investors involved, is investor protections, and so we take a lot of care and caution to make sure that that happens on our platform.

investments but likely not from you. Yeah, So there's a lot of people that are insiders. That are people that are venture capital funds or angel investors, people that are in the know that have I have the opportunity to invest in these companies and benefit from the growth and so by the time they go public, these are people that make a significant amount of wealth just based on being early. And so what this offers is that same opportunity to people to get involved in these companies early

when they are private. And so for these startups, and all startups are risky, right because they're ventures. Right, like anything that happened, a founder can go off track and do decide that maybe the one product is better than the other and make a wrong choice. They can make bad hires, et cetera, et cetera. There's a million reasons a startup can fail. They are risky investments in a sense.

But at the same time, there are also investment opportunities that have a ton of potential, especially if you're early on. So it's a trade off there. But the key here is the ability to be able to access them and have the choice. We want people to have the choice and then what they choose to do with it is up to them. So when it comes to these startups, the key here is for the founders, they can raise

in a variety of different ways. They can raise via safes, convertible notes, priced rounds, revenue sharing agreements, and when it comes to investors, they're able to view all of the offering documents on the platform and review the entire offering in detail to understand what exactly they're signing up for, what they're getting, and to be able to track it and manage it over time, so they're not left out

in the dark. They actually have the ability to track and manage this over time and be able to see the progress over time, whether it's through company milestones or the updating of share prices or whatnot, or the notification of the exciting acquisition or going public of a company which ends up being a very profitable moment for a lot of investors.

just trying to get people liquidity access to bitcoin. But what we're seeing now fifteen years later is that there are so many different branches of bitcoin. You can have bitcoin mining, people that are building hardware walls, people that are building phone wallets. There are people that are building AI services. So we have two companies actually on our platform that are building AI services that use private bitcoin payments as part of their flow, and so it offers

an alternative to some centralized services like chat GBT. For example, there's a company called Satlantis who's the founder is a well known person named Alex Sveetski. So he's building a travel on social app that's built on Noster, which is a decentralized protocol. So we're seeing so many innovative, interesting founders that are building these companies and they're looking for this outlet, and now all of a sudden, you see the company's flooding in, and now you're seeing the investor

interests flooding in as well. And I encourage people to go to the platform and see all the different types of offerings that are coming onto the platform so that they can understand what is happening in the ecosystem, even if they don't decide to invest. It's a great way to actually learn about what's being built in the ecosystem.

know you guys just launched. What can we expect in let's say early twenty twenty five.

that are building these great projects and companies. They're holding an event called Top Builder in March twenty twenty, twenty twenty five, and in the lead up to that event, there is a competition for all these companies to It's like Top Chef but for companies is the best way you can describe it. So we're Last year, I believe they had over sixty different companies compete in this competition.

This year, we're looking to do the same, have these companies compete, and Timestamp is going to be the flagship sponsor of this event. So we're very excited to support these companies as best we can, give them all the networking opportunities and give them an opportunity to get some mentorship as well.

And one thing on timestamp I'll say related to this is, you know, part of the reason why I started my own company is I was just unemployable. Man. You know, I'm the type of person that I just need my own thing. I can't take orders from people. But then you know, someone gave me good advice. It's like, look, you'll always have boss, and in this case it'll be your clients. Right, So who are your clients? And for me, I chose the toughest clients in the world, which are

founders of companies. They're neurotic, obsessive founders of companies. And you know what, that's the kind of stuff that drives me to build Timestam to be such a great company. That amis the standards of these founders. So when you ask me what I want to build, like in terms of a metaverse, I want to build this. I want to build a bitcoin standard. I want to do it with all these founders and all these people. The community that we're building.