Rollup TV: December 8th, 2025

Transcript

How about the How the [ __ ] the back? Black

JP Morgan, Black Rock, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions. It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. I'm bullish. You said it. You finally said it. I'm so bullish. These boys, boys. We're boys. above the mother.

H above the How the [ __ ] is heading to the top? If we're not

already at the top, we're going to the top. We're on fourth floor today. We're gonna be on floor one and then we're headed straight to the moon, boys. >> I love it, guys. We're really going to the moon today. Uh if you haven't already seen our uh our saviors of the market, the the the head chefs of the two biggest digital asset treasury companies. This seems coordinated. Uh, I'm not a conspiracy theorist here, but the fact that, you know, everyone was running for the hill saying that Sailor and uh and Tom Lee were running out of cash, you know, they they were getting ready to sell Michael Sailor was like, "Hey, you know, I if we end up falling

under MNAV, we're going to end up, you know, selling Bitcoin derivatives in order to, you know, uh, buy back the share price." They went and just bought a billion dollars of Bitcoin today. Uh, you got to think that is why we're green. Um, but guys, happy Monday. Uh, looks like it's gonna be the start of a new week. You know, we were up. Bitcoin's back under 90, so who really knows what's going on in the market, but if you are a quantum secure monetary owner, you're happy. Zcash up like 20%. Uh, so that's doing quite well. Hope everyone had a good weekend. uh personally was uh taking it easy uh enjoying some time outside and now it's time to uh to lock in and have another

great week ahead of the holidays. We've got a great show for you guys today. We've got uh couple of Bitcoin projects. We're going to be talking to Meanwhile. Uh this one's pretty cool. They're doing they're doing uh life insurance on Bitcoin. uh capitalize on Bitcoin's growth and minimize your taxes with the future of wealth preservation. Uh this is pretty cool. Uh so we're going to be hearing from uh Danny and I think we're going to start to see a lot more of this and generally what makes this such a productive and useful uh market is that I I think I think you guys also agree is that Bitcoin is the most pristine collateral that exists

today. uh what we're going to do to extend the value proposition of Bitcoin beyond just sending it back and forth. No one's going to use it to buy coffee with Bitcoin. We've kind of proven that. I used cash to buy or US dollar equivalent to buy my coffee this morning. Um so, no one's going to be using Bitcoin. Uh if you still believe that uh go buy a bag of Bitcoin Cash and and sit up sit down and shut up. Uh the reality is that we're using US dollar stable coins. We're using US dollar equivalents. That's how we're going to be using uh that's how we're going to be buying our coffee and making most of our transactional purp purchases throughout

the day. Bitcoin is a store of value and it is a collateral asset that we can use as a reserve asset for the foundation of a lot more markets and a lot more forms of the economy. Uh life insurance and insurance markets are a very substantial part of that. And so we've got meanwhile doing life insurance on Bitcoin and we're going to get uh Danny in in just a moment. Uh, and so afterwards we've got uh we've got Mc Brennan from uh Project Zero and then we've got Adam from Contour Network. And so guys, we've got a great show. It's

just me. Andy's uh laid up on a beach somewhere celebrating Art Bosle in Miami trying to get a little bit more inspiration and taste going in his life because he's been a bit zoomed in as of late. I don't know if you guys noticed, I hung up inspired by our our Basel in Miami. Uh, one of my favorites, Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, got this print at the Chicago Institute of Art when I was there over the summer and uh, and I'm particularly enjoying it, adding it to the collection. And so, guys, zoom out. Things are happening. Uh, apparently Trump is going to make a uh, economic announcement today. We're going to bring you guys uh everything that is most important and top of mind in the crypto markets and

broadly uh as part of our show today. So, let's do a quick standby as we bring up our first guest. Do a quick commercial break. We'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. This is Rollup TV. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. from the team that pioneered cold storage.

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Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered Cold Storage, Treasure has just released it's All right. All right. We are here with Danny. Danny, welcome to the show. It's your first time on and uh we are big believers in Bitcoin capital markets. Bitcoin native life insurance is what we're talking about today. it's your first time on the show. Give us a little bit of uh where you're at, how's it going, and uh how how you ended up here.

What's what's uh yeah, the the origin story. >> For sure. Yeah, appreciate you having me on, Robbie. Big fan of the show. So, uh pleased to be here and love talking Bitcoin Capital Markets, so it sounds like we're in the right spot. Um so, I I work at a company called Meanwhile, uh after the two co-founders and our chief insurance officer. I'm the fourth I've been around the fourth longest. Uh so pre prego to market helped build out go to market for our first our first product. But what we are as a company is uh we're the first licensed and regulated life insurance carrier in the world that uses Bitcoin as our currency.

So we're Bitcoin denominated life insurance carrier. Um so that actually means like our balance sheet, our income statement, all of our externally audited financials are stated in Bitcoin. >> You can imagine how ridiculous our financials look. They're stated the Satoshi. So, nine decimal points for each line item, which is a little bit overwhelming to read for some, but uh we think it's pretty cool. Um, so I help lead revenue at at meanwhile. Um, we've been at market with our flagship product, which is whole life insurance denominated in Bitcoin. Uh, we've been at market with with that product for over two years now, and we're working to build out uh a few few new products that we're excited about uh ranging from retail focused to institutional focused.

>> Epic. Wow. Awesome. Okay. So the life insurance market in general right is basically we're paying premiums and you know in the case of uh an unfortunate event in which life insurance would be paid out you would get paid out in this case are we paying the premiums in Bitcoin? Are we paying the getting the the output in Bitcoin where walk us through like what a life insurance deal would look like from someone who would you know be be taking on one of these policies. >> Yeah. So again our carrier exclusively touches Bitcoin as our currency. We don't even call it the price of Bitcoin.

We call the exchange rate of Bitcoin. Um, so everything in our product, similar to the carrier itself, is exclusively denominated in Bitcoin. So for our policy holders, they're buying whole life insurance. Some countries call it permanent life insurance, but that's different than term. So term is you buy like 10, 20, 30 years worth of coverage. If you outlive that, then you don't get any payout. Okay? Whereas whole life or permanent life is no matter how long you live, whenever you pass away, you will get a payout, which is more than what you pay in. So with our policy, our policy holders pay premiums for 10 years in Bitcoin, one payment per year. So if they pay 10 total, it's they pay one bitcoin per year for 10 years. Or if they pay one

total, they pay onetenth of a bitcoin per year for 10 years. And then whenever they die, they'll receive some number higher than that. And that calculation is dependent on their medical underwriting. So the younger and healthier you are, the longer we expect you to live, so the better that multiple is frankly. Um, but it's all in Bitcoin. So an example of a policy might be, I agree to pay 10 bitcoins of premium payments over 10 years, and then whenever I die, my beneficiaries will receive 15 or 20 bitcoins uh at that time. And the beauty of this is not only are you passing on more Bitcoin, but the reason we started with whole life insurance is that people buy whole life insurance not necessarily for that payout, but because whole life insurance

is assigned these amazing tax benefits by the IRS. So people are incentivized to buy whole life insurance because of those tax advantages because governments and and regulators hate like the widows and orphan story. They don't want people to be poor or left out to dry in the in the horrible event that like the primary bread winner gets hit by a bus. >> So, um there are like three very basic benefits of whole life insurance, which is just true of our product or it's true if you buy whole life insurance from Northwestern Mutual in dollars.

>> I always use Northwestern as an example because they're one of our largest investors. But, um if you buy whole life insurance in dollars or in our case in Bitcoin, you get a guaranteed payout whenever you die. So you could buy a million dollars worth of coverage or you could buy 10 bitcoins worth of coverage in our case. That payout pays out to your beneficiaries income and capital gains taxfree. So those tax benefit there. >> The second is the policy grows over the lifetime of the insured and those investment returns that growth compounds taxree. So you might buy dollar denominated insurance that grows four and a half percent that's like four and a half percent taxfree return or in our case you get 2% Bitcoin denominated

growth. So it's like you're getting 2% Bitcoin yield that compounds taxree over your lifetime. >> And then the third benefit is you can use whole life insurance as an asset to as collateral to borrow against during your life. And those loans those policy loans are taxfree. So, people buy whole life insurance to essentially borrow from themselves as opposed to going to the bank and borrowing from the bank. And you typically get better interest rates. Um, and you get the flexibility of choosing to either never repay the loan because whenever you die, the payout of your life insurance policy covers the outstanding loan balance, or in our case, because it's in Bitcoin, if the price of Bitcoin is volatile, you

can repay your loan if the price of Bitcoin drops for cheaper than maybe you took the Bitcoin out, the Bitcoin loan out to begin with. So, right, >> most people are buying this product from us because they believe the price of Bitcoin will be higher in the future than it is today. Mhm. >> And they want to be able to live off of that Bitcoin wealth tax efficiently by borrowing against their policy to sell Bitcoin taxfree. >> Yeah. Wow. Okay. This this makes sense for all of the reasons that you mentioned, you know, that the tax advantages. Uh, not only is there a custody issue with Bitcoin and for a long long time it was like how do we pass on do we, you know, put this seed phrase in a safe, bury it underground, put up some treasure map and pass that along to our kids and have them go on

this on this treasure hunt when, you know, when someone passes. Um, no, now we have custody solutions. So, at least, you know, we're not we're not digging, you know, holes in the backyard anymore. Um but this is also a way to do that that passing on to beneficiaries uh in the most tax advantageous and advantageous way. And so you mentioned the IRS looks favorably on these whole life insurance policies. And so now my understanding is like there's inheritance taxes, there's estate taxes. You're saying none of like if someone takes out one of these life insurance policies, they don't have to worry about any of those. No inheritance tax, no estate taxes.

caveat there. So whole life insurance, the payout of the policy pays out income and capital gains taxree. The growth of the policy over the lifetime of the insured compounds tax-free. Now if an individual owns a whole life insurance policy when they die, that payout might settle into their estate. So it could be subject to that inheritance tax or that estate tax. But there are ways to structure ownership to to work around that. So rather than Danny Bear owning a whole life insurance policy, the Danny Bear irrevocable trust could own a life insurance policy on Danny's life. And that way when I die, when Danny dies, the payout instead of going to Danny

goes to the irrevocable trust, which then >> which then settles outside of my estate and therefore therefore avoids that estate tax. So So um >> that's actually a really important point around like structuring of ownership of whole life insurance. This is again true of dollars or bitcoin >> even outside of the bitcoin crypto realm. This is just this is just thinking ahead and being very thoughtful about how someone is structuring their their portfolio so that in these inevitable cases we we take things the most tax advant advantic way. >> Exactly. So, so the so really one of the first questions we ask is is your primary use case that you want to live off of your Bitcoin tax efficiently?

Because if that's the case, then you just own it yourself, borrow as much out against your policy over your lifetime. >> And the reason that people do that, and maybe I'll I'll spend five seconds on this or more than five seconds, a little bit of time on this. So the the taxfree policy loan, again, the collateral of that loan is your life insurance policy and that in our case is denominated in Bitcoin. So your life insurance polic might be worth one or five or 10 or 30 or 50 bitcoins. >> That is collateral. We allow people to after two years to borrow up to 90% of that value. A 90% loan to value ratio.

We charge 3% interest rate. And that loan itself is not in dollars. It's in Bitcoin. So if my policy is worth 10 Bitcoin at some point in time, I can borrow up to nine Bitcoin out. M >> but the reason that's important is because those nine Bitcoin when they hit my wallet get assigned a cost basis of whatever the price of Bitcoin is at that time. >> So if Bitcoin goes to a million dollars in 10 years I could borrow nine Bitcoin out in this example. I could sell those nine Bitcoin for $9 million of cash and I would owe no taxes on that sale because I'm selling them at cost.

>> I see. I see. >> My loan is nine Bitcoin against 10 Bitcoin of collateral. not $9 million. >> So if the price of Bitcoin drops, I'm never at risk of getting margin calls. >> Right. >> And in fact, if the price of Bitcoin drops, I would just buy cheaper Bitcoin and use those cheaper bitcoins to repay my loan. >> Right. Right. >> Um so that's important. And then if if your if your primary use case of this policy is to do that, then you just own it in your own name because your goal is by the time you die for your loan balance to be equal to the payout of the policy. Mhm.

>> So that your the payout, the death benefit covers your outstanding loan balance and then you're effectively passing on nothing because you're not worried about passing it on. You're worried about living off your Bitcoin wealth during your lifetime. Yeah. Now, if you have cash flows and you're not worried about living off your Bitcoin wealth and you simply want to pass it on to the next generation most tax efficiently, then you would own it via a trust or some other structure and that way it would avoid the the estate tax when you die. Are there outside of the Bitcoin realm, you know, which I know is their specialty, but just zooming out a little bit, is there any other like portfolio management sort of things that you think are sort of flying under the radar, you know, for for people that are sort of maybe amassing more and more

wealth as, you know, crypto continues to appreciate in price? What are some of the portfolio construction strategies that you've seen in your experience be most advantageous? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a great question and it's something that people, to your point, need to spend more time thinking about as the overall crypto market cap increases because people are getting more and more wealthy. I always say when I'm on the circuit talking in front of audiences that like Bitcoin itself has, let's just call it a a$ two trillion dollar, it's like $1.8 trillion market cap today. Up until a year and a half ago, two years ago, that was completely owned by individuals in retail. It's only been the last year or two that institutions have gotten into the game. So that's $1.8 trillion that

has been of wealth that has been created for individuals who maybe like bought it as a flyer back in 2015, forgot they owned it. Now they remembered and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I've got millions of dollars in this asset. I have no idea what to do with it." Um so so what we're seeing is as the space the Bitcoin space matures so too are the policy or not the policers are the are the owners of Bitcoin >> right maybe someone 10 years ago when they were 25 bought some Bitcoin they're now 35 they now are married they have families they're thinking about legacy and planning for what what you know is beyond their life um and that's where a lot of the structuring and planning

comes place. Now, we touched a little bit on irrevocable trust. If you're concerned about the estate tax, now if if you're an individual, it's like $14 million of lifetime exemption. So, if you don't have $14 million, you don't really need to worry about it. If you're married, that doubles because you and your spouse combine your $14 million of exemption. Um, but if it is something that you're concerned about, irrevocable trusts are an effective way to to pass on wealth tax efficiently, intergenerationally. And I would just say the one thing that we talk about with our product is if I own Bitcoin in my name and I die, my beneficiaries receive that Bitcoin and it gets a stepped up cost basis, which is great from a tax perspective because if they

sold it, they wouldn't own they wouldn't owe as much in capital gains. >> They would Right. But and if and if that wasn't the case and they sold it, they would owe capital gains tax from way when the cost basis was originally calculated. >> Exactly. Right. And so, Robbie, the the important piece here is that first step that people are taking to plan if they have significant wealth in this asset is many of them are moving Bitcoin into an irrevocable trust to plan for that estate or that inheritance tax, >> right? But if they if if they stop there, if they just move Bitcoin from their name or their individual or their revocable trust to an irrevocable trust, when they pass away, because that Bitcoin is no longer in their estate, it no longer gets a stepped up cost basis.

So your heirs will their the beneficiaries of that trust will receive it with the low cost basis that you acquired it for >> unless they >> unless they unless you don't stop there and you take it a step further, >> right? >> And you have the trust buy the life insurance policy for meanwhile use those bitcoins to pay the premium. So when you die, the life insurance policy pays out brand new Bitcoin to the trust and therefore your beneficiaries get more >> assume the greater cost basis. >> They get more Bitcoin at a higher cost basis. So they benefit in both those ways.

>> Awesome. Okay, that really helps paint the picture of this the the tax advantages of not only moving into an irrevocable trust, which sounds like it makes sense around that 15 million mark or maybe the 30 million mark if you're married. Um, and then beyond that, buying a life insurance policy assumes a greater cost basis when you ultimately pass on that Bitcoin. That that makes total sense. The next question is earning more Bitcoin, right? So, not, you know, if you put put 10 into the policy, you're not just getting back 10 at a greater cost basis, you're getting 10 plus whatever the the yield on that Bitcoin is over time. The question when it comes to these things, it's the same question that it it always has been, which is where does the yield come from?

you know, are you guys selling options? Are like where you know that incremental uh, you know, juice in Bitcoin that comes over the five, 10, 15, 20 years, where where does that additional Bitcoin come from? >> Might be surprising you, Robbie, you're not the first person to ask me this. So, so >> always the question, man. Where does the yield come from? >> Yeah. Um, so in our case, the the yield primarily comes from tax arbitrage. So, we actually have a product um that we've structured that is specifically tailored for uh miners, hedge funds, traders, uh anyone in the world who wants to sell Bitcoin in order to create more Bitcoin.

So, if you're a trader, you want to sell Bitcoin when you think it's low or sorry, you want to sell Bitcoin when you think it's high so that you can buy more when it's low. If you're a hedge fund, you do the same thing. If you're a minor, you have dollar denominated operating expenses, but you cash flow in Bitcoin. So, you generate Bitcoin, but when you need to like pay for your power, buy new machines, pay your payroll, whatever it is, pay your legal fees or advisory fees, those are in dollars. So, you're selling Bitcoin to to make those expenses. Now, if you have lowcost basis Bitcoin and you're a publicly traded minor or a private minor, you don't want to sell that low cost basis Bitcoin to pay your payroll because you're incurring a 21% corporate

capital gains tax hit every time you do that. So what meanwhile has done and what we're able to do as a life insurance carrier is we've structured a product where we essentially swap Bitcoin with these miners or these hedge fund LPS or these traders so that instead of disposing of low cost basis Bitcoin they can dispose of new cost basis Bitcoin taxfree and they're willing to pay us three and a half% to do that as opposed to paying 21% corporate capital gains tax rate. So in this example, and I'll just walk you through it very briefly, is let's say Robbie Mining LLC has a 100 Bitcoin that you acquired for $0.

You could >> for mining it, right? So I purchased the hardware, I purchased the equipment, I've been mining it for two, three years. I've been able to mine 100 Bitcoin over >> or for 10 years or 15 years or however long. You have a bunch of Bitcoin that's that you have that you had acquired at a at a price significantly lower than today's price. Mhm. >> You don't want to sell that to pay for your power or your machines or your payroll because you would incur 21 21% cap gains tax hit on that appreciation. >> So what you would do instead is you would come to meanwhile and you would send us 100 bitcoin those 100 bitcoin.

We would send you 96 and a half bitcoin back. >> So that's >> at the higher cost basis. You would receive those 96 and a half brand new bitcoin with a brand new cost basis. So you can sell them at cost taxfree. >> So you paid us three and a half percent. That's the difference between the 100 and the 96 and a half, >> right? >> And then at the end of a year, this is a one-year term. You can either send us three and a half more bitcoin to roll it for another year or you can close out, it's structured as a repurchase agreement. You can close out the repo by sending us 96 and a half new Bitcoin in exchange for 96 and a half of your original lowcost basis Bitcoin back. So it allows you to like leverage your

lowcost basis Bitcoin for funding operating expenses. >> Okay, >> acts efficiently if you're a minor or you're a trader or you're a hedge fund, >> right? So I can pull a greater cost basis forward. I can use the greater cost basis here today. Sell that basically taxree cost me three and a half%. And I would forego 25 or 30% depending on short-term long-term cap gains. So I I forego, you know, 20 extra points of tax, pay three and a half to you guys, pull that forward, and then when I'm ready to close that, that's not the end of the deal. I still have to pay back and get my original low cost low cap uh cost basis Bitcoin. Exactly. So,

so it's structured as a repurchase agreement. And the whole point, the whole reason that you're not getting taxed is because you are obligated to repurchase your original lowcost bases Bitcoin back. So, if you think that you can mine 110 Bitcoin over the course of a year, just using >> round numbers as an example, you would say, "Great, I'm going to send Meanwhile 100. meanwhile is going to keep three and a half of those as as the interest rate or the expense of this deal.

Meanwhile, then is going to hold the other 96 and a half in a segregated vault non-rehypothecated so that you know in a year's time or if you roll it for multiple years, whenever you close out the repo, you get back the exact same 96 and a half satoshi's that you sent us. Mhm. >> So that you maintain that co that original cost basis. But you do this because you could say great, I'll send me another 100, they'll send me 96 and a half back. I'll sell them taxfree. I'll do all that to like mine more bitcoin or to trade to acquire more bitcoin because I think that in a year I'll have 110 bitcoin. Now of that 100, you send 96 and a half to get your original 96 and a

half back. So you've net made uh 10 bitcoin. and you've done it without incurring that 20 to 30% tax. >> What happens if you know like it turns out you know my data farm gets struck by lightning or if I have a bad year trading and and for some reason I can't buy back the 96 and a half original Bitcoin. >> Yeah. So, so then we claim that we take that as the collateral because you failed to to repurchase it and then it's just deemed as a sale. >> I see. So, so that's actually why meanwhile our business, we love this product because you've given us the interest and the collateral on day one.

So, we take no credit risk >> in this operation. >> Right. Right. >> And we get a one year's worth of duration on on the loan. We So, that's the primary way that we get the return. Mhm. >> Um and and and it makes sense for all these miners and traders out there because they're the alternative is either they sell their Bitcoin, pay a much higher capital gain tax rate, or they borrow dollars against their Bitcoin >> and they pay 12 14%. It for a lot of miners, frankly, it's like 18 to 20% interest rates on these loans. Um, so it's just a much more more cost-effective way to to leverage that what has historically been captive lowcost basis Bitcoin on their balance sheets.

>> Yeah. >> Um, we we also do some like prime lending uh what I would describe as prime lending but like Bitcoin denominated loans to like market makers who want liquidity. >> Um, we want to do less of that or we do less of that because we are having to underrate credit risk. >> Right. Right. Yeah. in that situation, you know, like if we have an unsec or an open term or even a one-year loan outstanding uh >> if that count if that borrower or counterparty defaults, then like what our credit team spends their time doing is like negotiating into these master lending agreements all of the covenants that protect our principal. So maybe there's like a rental guarantee or we're

the most senior outstanding debt in their cap in their in their cap structure or things like that to protect our principal. Whereas the the repurchase agreement that I described is great because we take no credit risk in that in that um in that investment. >> Right. It makes total sense. Like you said, you get the interest and the collateral upfront. There's really no downside at all. You can uh capitalize uh on that opportunity, pass on the tax savings to that institution. And this is very similar to assuming the greater cost basis like you mentioned for people that maybe aren't necessarily interested in passing on Bitcoin to their beneficiaries. They're just interested in getting the most tax advantageous use out of their Bitcoin which again you got like you get like you said you could greater you could assume this greater cost basis uh and just use that and

borrow against that uh and pay that at cost uh and and it's effectively these institutions that are doing something very very similar and that uh is how you guys generate the yield to to end up paying out these life insurance. I I'm curious a little bit more. Uh I think it makes total sense from the customer perspective what the customer journey looks like, what some of these different products looks like. Uh both at the at at the policyholder perspective and then also from the institutional perspective. Um I would anticipate that a lot more companies are going to realize this. They're going to realize not only the opportunity at at a business point here, but also that Bitcoin is one of the best forms of collateral and there are multiple opportunities at doing this more. I'm curious like how much traction

have you guys gotten up until this point? Uh you mentioned Northwestern Mutual is on the cap table. How many policies have you guys been able to write and how much this is effectively another form of a Bitcoin treasury company like you you're just selling different products in order to maximize your Bitcoin holdings. You know, I was just talking earlier, you know, Bitmine and the Ethereum world went out, they bought another I think $450 million of ETH. They're doing things. They're going to be staking. They're going to do things to try to yield on their ETH, maximize their Ethereum holdings. Micro Strategies going out there. They're trying to maximize their Bitcoin holdings per shareholder. This is essentially another forum, but it's a more active uh business and a more active business model to maximize your

Bitcoin holdings. How much Bitcoin do you guys have uh on the balance sheet today? >> Yeah. So, so I think you made a couple of really important points there. Um the first in terms of traction like like are people excited about what we're doing? I think is kind of the first question. Um we raised $122 million this year alone. That's that's brought our total funding since um the beginning of 2022 to $144 million. Uh this year we've raised money from the likes of I already mentioned Northwestern Mutual, but Apollo, Bang Capital, Han Ventures, Pantara, um Fulgar Ventures, Framework Ventures, and a number of others. So, uh, we're really excited about that. Not only because a it's just nice to have money,

dollars or Bitcoin in the bank, but B, they're like, in our view top tier investors in the world with great relationships and distribution channels and things like that. So, so they're not just capital providers to us, but they're great strategic partners as well. Um the reason I think that they're really excited about it is they they they view they see the vision in that life insurance is really um strategically different capital in the world than most other financial institutions.

So if you think about what the product that we sell today is we are generating like 40year liabilities. You give us capital today and we promise whenever you die hopefully 40 50 years from now to pay you out what we owe you. That that gives us the ability to take much longer duration focus in terms of deploying capital >> in the crypto world over the last 5 10 15 years every everything's been about like how do we get as rich as possible as quickly as possible and now we're like slowing it down. You know, we we talk about being like the tortoise to the hair. We want to be slow, conservative. Our our mandate is no

principal risk. >> We're willing to offset some returns to maintain that conservative because we can handle periods of low return, but what we don't want to do is put put capital or principal at risk um and have periods of negative return. >> Right? So, there's a reason that every high-rise in Manhattan is owned by a life insurance company is because they want long duration assets because their liabilities are long duration. So, that's really different. Um, and that that allows us to be like investors and capital providers to like the most consequential businesses in the Bitcoin or the broader digital asset ecosystem going forward, which we're really excited about.

>> Yeah. >> Um, we're expanding internationally. That's what a lot of this fundra has gone towards. um we're we'll we're launching a product specific for the Asian market by the end of this month. Um and that's what a lot of this capital is going towards because as a life insurance company, as a regulated entity, um we have to hold a lot of regulatory capital anytime we do any business. So if we put capital at risk, that can include selling a life insurance policy because if we sell a life insurance policy and you get hit by a bus the next day, we owe you the full payout. So, we're putting capital at risk that way or making an investment.

If we make an investment, we're putting capital at risk because that that credit or that borrower could default. Um, and every time we do that, we have to hold a little bit more of our own Bitcoin as regulatory capital. You can think of it as a buffer, >> right? >> If we ever lose any money for any reason, we lose our regulatory capital before we ever lose any customer deposited funds. and and that's the protection that our regulator has put into the business model and >> it's true of any insurance company that's regulated in Bermuda. Uh because if we start to eat into that buffer, they'll just shut us down before we ever get to a point we're losing our customers money, >> right? And so if I if I buy a pol a life insurance policy for 10 bitcoin and I'm planning on making a one bitcoin payment

every year for the next 10 years, but I get hit by a bus after I make my first payment. >> You get the full 15 or 20 or whatever the promise was um based on the underwriting >> and you get that on that day when you get by. You don't get it 10 years later. >> Exactly. It's just normal life insurance. So your beneficiaries of the policy would submit a claim. Yep. Uh they would send in a death a death certificate like any other life insurance company. Yep. >> Um and they they would get the full payout. That's exactly right. >> Yeah. But you got to do actuarial math and make sure that things >> we're just a normal life insurance company that operates in a foreign currency that happens to be Bitcoin.

>> Right. Totally. >> We do everything else the exact same. And and the last piece uh that I'll mention based on your question is um we undergo all the same reporting requirements as any other life insurance carrier. So Ernston Young is our internal auditor. Harrison Troder prepares our external audit. Anyone that wants can go online and look at our publicly stated external u externally audited financials. We're excited by the end of Q1, I believe, or maybe it's like a couple weeks after the end of Q1, uh we'll update our our publicly listed financials to the 2025 audit. uh those numbers will look pretty dramatically different from uh last year based on the $122 million that we raised. But um but but that's something that's just

completely different than any other crypto company that's out there is is we have Bitcoin denominated externally audited financials that are available to anyone online. >> Very very cool. Um okay, I got one one last question for you. I know we're over time, so I'm gonna I'm gonna just make it quick. Um you know this guy Brian Johnson? Yeah. So this guy's trying not he's like don't die. That's his >> Yeah, we love him. We love people like that. That's great for us. >> So like what? He's trying not to die. Obviously people not dying throws life insurance actuarial science into a into a loop, right? Into like how do you possibly plan? What could if if what he's suggesting and there is potential

for people not to die in this generation of people, what would that do to the life insurance market? >> So, from our perspective, it's it's an amazing thing because we're underwriting people to die at some point and if they die later on, it means that we've been more conservative in our underwriting assumptions than actually plays out. Um, and and I've actually spent some time talking about this, too, is the the smartest people that I know um are obsessed with three things. They're obsessed with Bitcoin, they're obsessed with AI, and they're obsessed with longevity. And actually, those things all play a central role in our business.

Um, interestingly enough, because if you live longer than you expected, you might not save enough for retirement. And in our view, a protection against that is to have access to tax-free capital that appreciates faster than inflation erodess it. So buying a whole life insurance policy in Bitcoin that you can use as a source of taxfree capital during your lifetime is a protection against living outliving the wealth that you've accumulated during your working years. um in terms of like direct impact on the business, the very like and this is a gross

oversimplification of how life insurance works, but if we say um Robbie, you you pay 10 bitcoins of premium, we promise whenever you die to pay your beneficiaries 20, it's because based on your medical underwriting, we believe we can turn your 10 into something more than 20. But if you live 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 years longer than we expected, that's just all added profit to us because we've underwritten you to live until you're 85. But if you live to 100, we're making that conservative return for another 10, 15 years on the capital that you've given us.

>> Yep. Yeah. It gives you guys more time to produce a greater return >> and it allows you the ability if Bitcoin continues to appreciate over that time to leverage your life insurance policy to fund your your your lifestyle. >> Yeah, makes complete sense. Danny, thanks so much for coming on, man. Uh guys, if you're uh curious about Bitcoin life insurance, which I think it makes sense from all the tax advantageous reasons uh also for the yield benefits uh assuming a greater cost basis if you just want to use your Bitcoin in the most tax advantageous way. um meanwhile.bm.

They can go in there uh they can get in contact with you uh with Meanwhile and they can uh they they can start dipping their toes into uh Bitcoin native life insurance. >> That's right, Robbie. Appreciate you having me on. Thanks so much. >> Yeah, would love to do it again sometime. Thanks so much, Danny. Talk to you soon. See you. >> See you, man. >> Very very cool. Um yeah. Uh so that was uh that was Meanwhile. Uh guys, I don't know about you, but um I enjoy Bitcoin. Uh I think crypto Twitter is criminally underexposed to Bitcoin. Uh whether you know it's this financial nihilism uh that they think they've got to hit it big and Bitcoin has gotten too much uh

uh you know, too big and they don't really have the potential for returns anymore for whatever reason. Um you know, Bitcoin is here to stay. you can't really say the same for a lot of other assets and altcoins uh in this industry. And so I think it behooves everyone to take a look at some of the strategies that Danny was talking about. Take a look at meanwhile look these guys ro raised he's at 110 million I see 82 million they are going to be around for the long haul obviously Northwestern Mutual is and the biggest life insurance policies are taking a look at what they can do with Bitcoin. This is part of the institutional wave that we see coming in to not just Bitcoin but uh but DeFi as a whole. Um next we've got another team

positioned for the institutional wave. We've got Mc Brennan who is coming in from Project Zero. This is Solana's prime broker. So why don't we bring uh we got Mc Brennan up in the back. Let's bring him up uh so we can chat about all of this. Mc Brennan, welcome to the show man. >> Hey, thanks for having me. Absolutely. Um well, it's your first time on the show. Uh would love to get a sense of uh uh you know, how you got here and uh generally what what the origin story is. Tell us a little bit about the lore behind uh behind your story and uh and project zero.

Uh yeah my story in a nutshell is uh worked in tech and finance um uh started you know health tech company uh sold that you know started two trading firms um exited those um built margin fire which was like the fastest growing D5 product in the industry in in 2023 and then um saw an opportunity for uh cross margining and and like just a bunch of capital fragmentation with with margin and so building prime bro uh building a prime broker now uh which is project zero. Yeah.

>> Yeah. I think the question that I just asked our last guest he was doing a bitcoin native life insurance uh uh company uh called meanwhile again with you guys the question is always where where does the yield come from? Um and so I'm curious from your sense you know you you saw the fragmentation of liquidity out there. We've seen it, you know, Ethereum, mainet, Salana, not just fragmented by L1, but also by different strategies. And so, how does how does a prime broker onchain help kind of bring this all together and then ultimately provide some greater yield opportunities? Um, let yeah, let's let's start there.

>> Yeah. So, DeFi is extremely multifaceted. You know, you have lending programs, you have per programs, uh, etc. You know, interest rate derivatives and that resembles finance. finance is extremely multifaceted. The problem is is that we're now at the point where DeFi has hit this inflection point. There's people who are starting to win their corners of the market. They have staying power. They have um unique uh uh value ads to the end user. I'm thinking of teams like like a is a good example. Uh Drift or Camino is a good example. Hyperlid is an example. And so if you're the average DeFi user, um, or actually if you're any DeFi user at all, um, you're probably using at least two

of these venues. You probably have your money in more than one single spot. I actually don't know many DeFi users that only, you know, arrive on chain and just use a and call it a day. No, they have like some money on a, they have some money on Hyperloop, they have trading purpose on Drift, they have some like lending positions on Camino, etc. And so the minute you have more than one venue that you're using at the same time, you run into capital fragmentation, right? If you have a hundred bucks, maybe you have 50 bucks here, 50 bucks here. So now a trading opportunity comes up. Um, and what are you going to do? You can maybe borrow against your $50 here if you don't want to liquidate that position. You can migrate your one position over to the other venue to get, you know, better borrowing. It's it's a

nightmare. And to make matters worse, you know, this might be a complex uh exposure that you've set up. Maybe you want to be delta neutral between two venues, for example. And so you're long here, you're short here, and these two, you know, deltas are offsetting each other, uh, which should enable you to borrow more, but neither venue knows you have an offsetting position on the other venue. And so, uh, now you need to like unwind if if you know a trading opportunity comes up and you can't use credit effectively. both these venues myopically view your your position as extremely risky. So situations like all the above is what we're fixing. Um so we allow you to use the venues that you love using for the reasons you're using them but we provide

you a smart uh risk and liquidity engine on top of that. >> So my my understanding of how these these uh margin uh based accounts work and and especially when we're unifying margin across multiple venues, right? typically there has to be some liquid uh venue in which we can swap out of that in the case of liquidation and and a margin call and so I'm curious how extensible is the credit universe that you guys have where I can come on is it any asset that I can use as collateral or or are there some limitations?

>> Yeah. So this is an is an extreme test of risk management. So when we go we go venue by venue, market by market, asset by asset. So if we're you know Camino is a live venue in project zero for example, that doesn't mean every single market and every single asset on Camino is able to be used as collateral. Um we have our risk engine perform an independent assessment for every single asset within every single market that we add to be zero. U this is like a really holistic risk assessment. Um, so and and we take that approach with with with all venues.

>> So we need to we need to protect the integrity of the credit that we're we're providing. We have our own credit pool which has about $250 million of liquidity in it. About 100 million of that is borrowed. Um and uh and so this is essentially yes just like an extreme test in in risk management. >> Got it. You you seem like a pretty young guy. like how did how did you generally come into this and and get exposed with a global risk management system? Was it cryptonative? Did did you have experience on Wall Street? What were what were some of the things outside of crypto that kind of gave you inspiration to build a system like this?

>> Uh yeah, so my first uh venture scale company was actually solving information fragmentation in health tech. >> Okay. Uh so which is like a very similar kind of problem set. Um and and yeah, that that you know I built that for a year bootstrapped with a good friend of mine from from Brown and then uh that got acquired and then I had been tracking uh crypto assets for a while and I'd seen this explosion in DeFi and the problem historically with DeFi had been a lot of venues didn't have staying power, right? like they would show up, people would use them and then they would die. And so there's a ton of market risk associated with building any sort of um universal margining system

over these things as well as you know smart contract risk and then just quantitative um financial risk as well. Uh those are like three prongs of risk we kind of think across and that has changed now. So, you know, in in the interim, yes, you know, built Marginify, which is like this isolated lending venue. Um, helped start like uh Temporal, which is like a a big R&D firm on Salana. Um, you know, co-ounded margin research was like most dominant uh propri proprietary trading firm on Salana um during its its its run. Uh so I I I you know got a lot of experience, got a lot of financial experience, was was working with risk systems pretty in-depth. um and saw this maturation

happen where like I know Camino is going to be here tomorrow. I know AB's is going to be here tomorrow. I can start to build and I know users are using all of these, right? And so I can start to build universal margin over this. >> Got it. And so we have you guys described here as Salana's prime broker, but that's not really the case, right? You guys are leveraging uh some of the existing uh money markets on chain from different L1s, not just Salana. We've started on Solano and I use I use teams like A and Hyperliquid because they just have got a ton of name recognition. They're great products and I would love to like I we will integrate them at some point. Um we started on Salana for like two primary reasons. One

is on the risk side. we need a, you know, fast, predictable, low fee, um, uh, risk engine and, uh, Salana is really like the only L1 that can effectively give us that. Um, and I just see a lot more opportunity on Salana. Like I think this is more formatted for what what DeFi the DeFi I envision essentially. And so, um, I see a lot of growth there. you know a lot of DeFi activity is happening there but that is not to say our risk and liquidity engine will live on Salana for the the reasons mentioned uh for the foreseeable future but uh this architecture this framework that we've

built is extremely extensible it can go to hyperlquid it can go to a and and it will yeah because there's there's huge sources of collateral um in in these venues >> yeah it makes sense that this product is going to flow to where the liquidity is and it's ex it exists on all of these chains uh and so we unify that across all these chains just is it's inevitable but you got to start somewhere. Uh we've also seen this just zooming out a little bit and thinking a little bit more about these onchain apps. We've seen a a m maturation in this process as well and I think this is um as a result of not only institutions coming on board but also the maturation of wallet and and the browser of these apps uh becoming a little bit more abstracted from the the

base level protocol. And what I mean is we've we've had conversations here where we talk about what the new interface is going to look like and and it seems to be that these neo banks are taking off is it's either uh traditional banks that are upgrading their infrastructure. You know, we're seeing Western Union go and and launch uh uh you know, stable coins. Revolute is getting involved in this world. uh generally uh these these banks are building out more of their online presence, more of their their digital native banking uh services and we're also seeing cryptonative companies launched their their version of these financial super apps, these neo banks and so I could very easily see how these neoanks become this convergence point of

which you can access all of these different onchain applications. Even if you go to Coinbase today, they let you integrate Morpho. And so we're going to want to pull in all of these different margin accounts from these different venues into one of these neo banks. Have you guys thought about how the discoverability of these venues is going to work in the near future? Are you thinking about, you know, building your own super app or or how you think your customers are going to discover uh uh project zero? Do you think they're is it going to be going directly to the URL, going directly to the app, or do you end up do do you think you're going to end up seeing more uh uh customers come in through some of these distribution

channels? >> It's a good question. Um I'm very focused on like two archetypes of immediate users and these are these are two user sets that get a lot of benefit from us right now. Um, user archetype A is yield farmers, which are like just DeFi power users. And the reason for that is yield farmers are inherently using multiple venues, right? They have their money across a bunch of different spots, but when a trading opportunity comes up or when they have some sort of credit need, um, they run into huge fragmentation issues. If they need to borrow, that's a nightmare for them. So, this is like a very passive larger DeFi TAM, but like DeFi as a whole is still a

smaller user base. uh user segment that gets a lot of benefit out of P 0. And then on and then the other archetype B is um people who are running interest rate uh trades, carry trades and basis trades. >> So for the first time ever, you now can collateralize a position on like Camino and borrow against that natively on P 0. So that means if like Camino has like a 7% rate for an asset and you can borrow that asset or an asset with similar market beta profile at like 5% on P 0, you're now capturing a 2% delta, right?

>> Uh and that has never been possible in D5 before in a generalized sense. And so that user archetype as well is getting like a ton of benefit um out of this product. And this is where we're initially focused right now. Now, as new uh venues come on chain, uh yes, we we're going to prioritize them in order of user demand. And so, you know, as as these two user archetypes want this and also, you know, increasing as new user archetypes emerge, you know, we'll be really receptive to that. Um, but I'm going at this from like user first, like sort of the demand side rather than the supply side. Um, and that allows us to, you know, really fine-tune the product.

The product's still young. you know the product was launched in September but that's allowed us to like really fine-tune this product to these users demand the the needs of these users and then we can just expand the the scope and the coverage of the product in terms of the different venues the user is using which I think will to your point be increasingly these like neo banks and you know wallets that resemble neo banks essentially >> right h how much traction have you guys seen since September since the launch Yeah, I mean sub since September, we've been one of if not at times like the fastest growing D5 product on Salana. Um we've had we've had incredible growth.

Like we we were averaging up until this delever this very recent delever point uh over a million dollars a day in uh deposits and borrows. Um and borrows were growing initially at a slightly flat faster clip than um uh lend lending was which was just like a really good indication of demand. Um and this is with uh only two venues and I think four markets live uh which is Camino and P 0. So we're about to go live with Drift.

We're about to go live with Jupiter. Soon after we'll go live with Jupiter Lend. This will exponentially not linearly like quite quite literally exponentially increase the opportunity capture on the platform and I know we have a lot of users waiting for these drifted in and Jupyter lend integrations and so um yeah we I' I've been very happy with our roll out thus far. >> Yeah, there's a very clear uh connection between solving some of these engineering product features like adding new markets and expanding your TAM. It it's not like you're going out there and having to do education. Everyone knows that they want this. Everyone everyone knows what it is. It's just a matter of doing doing the engineering work to to safely add these markets um and and increase the the addressable uh assets

that you can use as collateral. Uh that make that makes complete sense. I want to get get your take on something that might be happening offchain now, but I anticipate will come onchain. And I'm curious about your perspective because you brought up the basis trade and my understanding is that right now a lot of this is happening um between the more regulated markets. You see things like the ETFs and and look we know these are hap these have tremendous flows both inflows and outflows. Black Rockck said that this was their number one revenue producing vehicle uh the entire year. It came from their Bitcoin ETF. uh and crypto ETFs in general have been their their largest uh revenue producing uh product. And so we know that a lot of

flows are coming into these ETF vehicles. Uh and and my understanding is that a lot of those are uh buying the ETF and then using that as collateral to sell uh future on CME and just capture the basis uh between those assets. Um and so you know they're getting paid this this basis trade. Uh I had a conversation last week uh and it was it was around it was around Galaxy's acquisition of Aluvial uh and how you know they anticipate that these staking ETFs could come come uh live particularly for ETH but eventually for Salana as well and and you know maybe down the line from there and that would provide even greater basis because then you have a staking yield that you can

that you can use as part of the basis trade as well. How are you perceiving the basis trade from someone who is looking at this uh and looking at the flows and understanding the basis trade at a very deep level? How how much validity and substance do you think is attributable to the basis trade? And then and then eventually if you think it's it's a really significant part of the flows in this asset class, h how do you anticipate that coming onchain? Yeah, I think the basis trade is like a very legitimate and one of the strongest trades currently um in crypto. I I'm very familiar with the Salana um a bunch of different Salana basis trades in

particular. One one really fascinating, you know, thing that's just emerged is, you know, Salana has a staking rate. um people want to capture the staking rate and uh that creates these like distortions in the market essentially. And so um you know a good example of this is any across any sort of permissionless lending market the borrow rate of Salana should be essentially at par um with the staking rate of Salana because if not you have this this uh opportunity and and crypto assets like you know in traditional finance we had we always had like the risk-free

rate um and crypto assets kind of bring their own uh embedded rate. You know, I won't call it a risk-free rate, but it's essentially, you know, with soul it's the staking rate. With ETH with ETH, it's also the staking rate. uh Bitcoin natively doesn't have one like like these these basis trades and carry trades that are be being done with Bitcoin right now um are sort of a creation of at like a at a large scale um this this premium that uh yes uh any sort of derivatives can provide like like you mentioned with with futures but also you know like the the whole um uh uh strategy like this premium to like

this business that exists offchain with like some additional revenues attached to it and the ability to now actually um use full portfolio margining with your Bitcoin allocation. Like the reason a lot of people want to hold Bitcoin with strategy, right, is because they have a ton of stocks and a ton of commodities and if they were to hold that Bitcoin on Bitcoin or if they were hold it wrapped on Salana, they would lose that that cross margining uh that they've grown used to with their portfolio. So in order to have cross margining capability they wrap it in um you know in this case uh strategies you know bitcoin product and now their broker

uh re you know recognizes this is a source of collateral. So, this is like very much um maybe you've like given me a layup here, but this is like kind of exactly why this product is so important, right? Like we're doing this onchain. Um and if we can start to unify these bits and pieces offchain, uh we would solve like these weird distortions that are being created in the market simply because of margining. Yeah. >> Yeah. Okay. Um well, it's good. you rec recognize layups rec game recognized game. Um, >> yeah, >> there's two there's two pieces here. one is I I I'd like to understand a little bit more about how you think about Solana's basis trade uh because it is

quite a bit different from Bitcoin's basis trade as as you're talking about and I think Solana's is a little bit more indicative of um how we should think about an L1 specifically like I don't I don't want to Solana is not proof of stake but it has a staking rate right so like how we should think about staking rates as part of an L1 basis trade um and how that could differ from a Bitcoin uh basis trade as we see it play Yeah. Uh there's there's quite a bit with with with staking rates. So Salana has inflation and then it has like network revenue and then it has MEB. And all three of these are pretty important distinct things. Inflation in and of itself is in uh you know perfect world is like not even a cost on the

underlying token. Like if everyone just st their soul inflation would not be a cost. Um but everyone doesn't stake their soul and especially you know now as we have more and more uh traditional finance exposure to soul and people want exposure to soul they're holding these in these custody accounts and these off-chain accounts and it's actually like much messier to stake it. Um, and when they do stake it, there's this like there's these layers of fee capture that happen. So that at the end staking rate they're getting maybe when they could be getting, you know, 7% with MEV as well, they're getting like 4%. Which is quite drastic at these larger scales. Um so that starts to open up this weird uh

basis trade where people with access to the validators and people with access to the MEV the inflation rate and also the opportunities afforded by uh having soul and seeing you know block or being able to do block ordering essentially have a much higher rate than people who are just passively staking especially if they're passively staking through these off-chain custody providers. uh and all these layers of feet capture are happening. So that is essentially just allowing sophisticated individuals to benefit off of less sophisticated individuals as well as just again people that are kind of stuck in this reggg capture land that has immediately evolved. Um, I think that part gets

better if the Salana staking rate decreases because it just sort of like reduces the delta that people are um missing out on. And I think >> I'm I'm very bullish on this happening. Uh, a friend of mine mer recently, you know, advocated for a proposal written by someone on his team, the Helios team for a decrease in native soul um, inflation. And uh I think that will just do a lot of good things at this off-chain layer. Um where again we're just allowing like really sophisticated individuals to run sort of capture the full extent of this this ARB. Um now yeah. Yeah. W with with um then there's

then there's the whole mev side. So one thing like >> before before we get to the mev side real quick just I you're 100% right and we've seen this happen on several L1s. It's not just Salana. We're we're they're talk you know we're all talking about decreasing the staking rate and the reason is you wouldn't see stakers drop off too much. This this is this is stake that uh inflation that is getting captured by a very small group of actors. It's not getting passed back. It's not really helping secure the network. Um Hyperlid Celestia uh Salana they're all across the board. We had conversations with Hib uh Tun and they talk about how this is we're just paying the validators because of this you know

validator cabal and for some reason we kind of threw and threw a dart and we said yeah 8% 10% inflation is where we need to be in reality um the the staking rate can come to a much more reasonable conclusion as far as what is necessary to secure the network >> I fully agree yeah >> and so uh so you I didn't mean to cut you off there is another important part of this equation Yeah. So, uh there's yeah, there's there's inflation and then there's MEV. And um one thing we actually pioneered recently, which uh I think we're we're still one of the only teams in crypto to this is we we enabled u native stake as collateral um as a collateral option on

one of our products uh at P 0 and we're actually about to bring it to P 0 itself. It's live right now on uh the margin pipe product. Um but it'll be live soon with like add additional functionality on the the project zero uh product. And so this is really cool because what this allows is for validator operators who are um staking to their validator and also capturing the full extent of uh me agnostic of whatever fee capture they're um charging on their validator. It allows them to uh now use that post that as collateral and be able to borrow soul against that. So

that means if you know with inflation plus me they're getting you know 7 and a half% any borrow rate that is less than seven and a half% affords them an opportunity. Um and we we see people doing this on the native side. There's a ton of people doing this uh on the LST side because these LSTs like really nicely package a lot of this MEV. A lot of validator operators pass on 100% of their MEV to LST holders. And so um that is why you you constantly see the sole borrow rate at or slightly below the the staking rate and and like that will continue to exist unless some other you

know better rate sort of supersedes that. I I I just don't see that like staking on Salon is one of the most secure things you can do. The problem is it just like cuts you off from all the things that are forwarded to you with DeFi and so like LST's fixed that this native stake product fixed that um and that's like a critical component of just Salana DeFi use in general. >> Yeah, makes sense. The last thing I wanted to ask you about McBurnen is uh kind of this just bring this back full circle to to the beginning of this basis trade which mostly happens offchain right now. uh like you mentioned cross margin is a really important piece of this and you know you guys are starting on Salana I'd imagine you know first you're going to move uh into some of the L1s you mentioned a mentioned hyperl

this is a very reasonable place to start but eventually I could see a world where you incorporate some of these off-chain venues and you can have commino LP positions right next to your your ETFs staking ETFs and some of these different positions what is the road map and the path to get there >> I think that's 100% % possible. Um, >> is it regulatory? Is it engineering? You know, what what what are some of the roadblocks to really unify? Because we've been saying it, tradi, the line is getting blurred. This is just finance now, but we still need, you know, the tools to combine these two worlds.

>> Yeah. Yeah. The it's it's it's possible. The main hurdle would definitely be engineering first and you know solving for any sort of regulatory second. Um the reason that we built P0 fully onchain and permissionless is for like a lot of the reasons that makes DeFi like so cool. You can audit solveny immediately. So you know when you think of prime broker like think of like Genesis right like ran into a bunch of issues. Um, just think about the whole bad day, bad debt contagion cycle that happened post FDX that hit a lot of prime brokers and no one knew what was going on. And actually what you saw a

lot of what you saw during that is people moving their money onchain and depositing it into like a because they knew you know they could check uh the solveny of that that program and exactly every asset that was used as collateral and all the risk configurations were you know onchain. um the same reason that's why we're we're building P 0 onchain as well so you can always audit its its solveny you can see the risk uh onchain the code is open source um we can't hide and so that is like the that's the the the next step we've made and so what we would need for an effective off-chain integration if you want to collateralize your like Apple stock that you're holding in a Fidelity

account for example in order to borrow uh Bitcoin natively on chain is uh we would sort of need to adapt that uh we we need to build some sort of blockchain resembling uh layer where you can then post those assets as collateral. there is if we need to, you know, if you then borrow Bitcoin against that Apple stock and Apple stock falls and we need to liquidate your account, like we need to have like permissionless liquidation. If we have that transparency, that auditability, that verifiability, that is what makes DeFi products so cool and the reason we built P 0 onchain and we're like the first prime broker to do

this. If we can introduce uh software that enables that for off-chain assets, the problem is solved and it becomes essentially engineering and integration and working on that integration and and you know adapting our risk model to that. Um so I think this is 100% possible. I would love to see it happen and I and you know hopefully it will happen because this is a better model than the models of the past. Yeah, makes perfect sense. And the way Larry Frink is talking about tokenization, it may happen sooner rather than later. Um, yeah, Mc Brennan, thank you so much for coming on, man. Uh, really appreciate it. And I think you you guys are building uh in the right direction.

Congrats on all the success so far. Just had the launch in September and you guys are already seeing awesome traction. Um, so I'm I'm really excited to see you guys continue to expand and uh thanks so much for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. >> Yeah, absolutely. See you next time. All right. Um, next up, we're going to keep things moving. Uh, yeah, this is, uh, a really, really awesome product, especially as, you know, we're continuing to see centralized exchanges like, you know, get more involved in DeFi lending. Coinbase gives you access to Morpho directly. They just give you a little popup, a disclaimer. Um I can imagine um

you know we end up seeing look you can buy ETFs through you know Bitcoin ETFs through Vanguard now you can you know start to custody crypto assets in regulated banks. These are setting um the the building blocks for an industry that is going to be built on top of it. Uh, and both of the the guests that we've had so far, um, you know, we had Danny talk about Bitcoin, native life insurance. Then we had Mc Brennan come on and talk about prime brokerages on top of, uh, all these different diverse collateral types. And, uh, you know, this is this is really we're still building the tool. So, imagine when things really heat up. Next up, we've got um, last but certainly not least, we've got Adam

uh, who has been around a very, very long time. I saw in his bio he's got Counterparty in there which I remember from the Bitrex days uh when I first got started back in 2016. So this one should be a fun one. I think Adam is behind the scenes now. Let's bring him up on stage and keep things rolling. Adam, how's it going, man? Good to see you. >> It's going well. Yeah, good to see you, too. Thanks so much for having me on. >> Yeah, absolutely. Um and so I know you've got a couple things going on. you've got Counterparty, but then you've also uh you you've also got um Meta Protocols and uh kind of everything that uh you're working on now uh at Contour.

And so I'd like to hear kind of like how you know how how you're balancing these two things. But but first, I mean, Counterparty is one of the true OGs. I remember this was part of the whole proofof work um uh Cambrian explosion that happened you know back in like 2014 to 2016 when we saw you know just multiple networks kind of blossom after a result of Bitcoin success you know I I I'm curious about your origin story how did you originally get involved in in Bitcoin but then ultimately get involved in Counterparty and uh you know you know kind of take take this this industry by the horns.

>> Yeah, it's an interesting history. Um I mean I I was sort of like watching the Bitcoin space back back a few years before that even like you know 2011 2012. Um and then into 2013 a lot of ideas started like just sort of percolating in the space. People were just sharing this ideas. They were speculating what we could do with blockchain technology sort of beyond using it for tokens and payments and there were yeah Bitcoin talk was really the the forum where a lot of this stuff happened. Um there was a lot of a lot of like general discussion and people were especially interested in using blockchain technology for building decentralized exchanges. No one had built one yet. Um this was after like Mount Gaus went under, right?

>> And uh using them for financial derivatives. I remember uh a post by Vitalic Buterine, I think it was 2013, on how to do contracts for difference uh and as a like as a simple generic financial derivative protocol. And no one really knew how to build these or knew what they were, you know, the the place to do it. And um in particular there was a there was a project created at the end of 2013 called Mastercoin which was which described sort of the how to build a a meta protocol for general smart contracts. Actually the idea for a meta protocol I just learned recently went back even further to 2010 when Hal Finny described embedding data inside Bitcoin

scripts then parsing it out deterministically. But the first person who like revived the idea was this guy J.R. will it? And they didn't actually build anything for a long time and um I am others got a little frustrated that they weren't actually building anything that this sort of idea was out there and so I just sort of sat down and and wrote the reference implementation for for the counterparty indexer um what's now called indexer at the end of 2013 and launched in January 2014. >> Incredible. And so, um, Meta Protocol, like you said, kind of started back then and it's for, um, basically this more diverse, expressive set of applications that can be done with the underlying financial primitive. Um, you've now gone and, you know, had a long, uh, history

at Counterparty. Um, but I think the thing that you're more focused on these days is contour. Is that is that right? >> So, >> yeah, that's right. Yeah. >> Yeah. Tell tell us a little bit more about contour. How does it build on this core primitive of meta protocols and help extend Bitcoin's expressivity? >> Yeah, so people have been trying to I don't know extend Bitcoin, make it better, make it faster, make it do, you know, do more stuff for a long time and there are two main philosophies of how to do it. The first is to sort of treat Bitcoin as a database and to scale it horizontally to actually build like separate networks, side chains, rollups, um merged mining, whatever it is to scale the system and then you can add additional functionality and then you build a two-way peg. The problem with

that is that a consensus system like you know Bitcoin is inherently self-contained. And uh I've always sort of favored the the the architectural pattern of building up not out and reusing the sort of all of the Bitcoin infrastructure, the Bitcoin network, the Bitcoin mining network, the Bitcoin um just the whole the whole protocol and leaving it as it is and not trying to compete with it, but build rather on top of it and and and using Bitcoin as the underlying layer. And that's sort of what meta protocols do. they can be understood as just a simple extension to the functionality of Bitcoin as if you just added a code module onto Bitcoin core.

You just sort of said Bitcoin Core I can now do more stuff. That's more or less how protocol works. >> And Counterparty had Counterparty used this architecture um to add a lot of I mean of the first smart contracts. Um, it had the first decks, it had the first prediction market in oracles, it had the first trustless gaming, it had the first financial derivatives, and had a lot of the first NFT collections, um, including rare pepees, spells of genesis, that kind of thing back in, you know, 2015, 2016. And but but it was very much pre-Ethereum and so it didn't have the ability to allow users to build their own applications on top of it. um the the functionality the smart contracts and

counterparty are hardcoded. They were hardcoded by you know sort of whatever I wrote into the protocol. Uh so there's sort of one way to do asset issuance and one way to do um prediction market and counterparty ended up being all of these early sort of um early smart contracts and on Bitcoin not on another another chain and it's had a long story history at the center of this of this meta protocol ecosystem but it's also not super dynamic at this stage.

It's over 10 years old. Um, and people sort of treat Counterparty like what it is, like what it was when it was launched in 2014. And it hasn't changed a lot over the years. Like a couple features have been added. Uh, but it it's it's largely stayed the same. It's not designed to be super extensible, and the appetite for extending it isn't very high. I came back to sort of to the counterparty project after leaving for eight years now two years ago and uh took back over the lead the lead maintainership brought the codebase back up to snuff fixed the tests fixed performance fixed some cons you know consensus problems all this sort of just housekeeping cleaning up and adding some neat features including these like

trustless atomic swaps using PSPTs and so on and all of that to say Um, I got reexited about the meta protocol architecture and seeing how that could actually solve a lot of outstanding problems that there are today in the Bitcoin ecosystem still when people are more there's a lot more interest and hype around side chains and ZK roll-ups, but I think that they don't actually solve the problem that needs to be solved. Contour is a new next generation meta protocol that brings a lot of really critical functionality to the Bitcoin blockchain and lets Bitcoin scale in terms of functionality in a way that hasn't really been possible before where um you know there there are other

meta protocols ordinals runes and now alanes uh BRC 2.0 I know is in development. Those are all very limited in what they can do. And Contour is designed not to be limited to be able to actually sort of build a fullfeatured ecosystem around extending Bitcoin functionality. >> And so we've seen we we the world did a whole series on Bitcoin and beyond and and we talked to all these Bitcoin L2s. We had guys from Tapoo Wizards. We had, you know, a bunch of people from the Bitcoin ecosystem that were at various levels in their belief that Bitcoin should have covenants and how expressive Bitcoin should be. And so we saw Bitcoin L2s. Yeah. You know, essentially what

what we concluded was that there's a spectrum and as you get more expressive, you get further and further away from Bitcoin proper and require a bridge in order to use that expressivity. And so that kind of prevents pre presents this issue where you know people that want Bitcoin they want to stay on Bitcoin maybe they want some of that expressivity but they don't necessarily trust a bridge and so we saw Taproot and SegWit and we saw these things like BRC's and runes where it really was and like inscriptions right was another big thing where a lot of times it was like we were it wasn't quite an exploit it was almost like this cool fun experimentation

to see how we could use some of these soft forks or upgrades or pieces of Bitcoin script to really like explore what what is possible in this particular segment of the Bitcoin codebase and we saw a lot of those experiments play out. But the more ex, you know, every time we kind of hit the ceiling. We hit capacity on how expressive the Bitcoin protocol could be. And if we wanted to be more expressive than that, we had to take a bridge somewhere else. And so, you know, we we, you know, saw a lot of these different implementations of these Bitcoin L2s. And then we kind of saw like, okay, one way to bring these two worlds together would be opt, but without, you know, concatenation and

some of these pre-ompiles and op codes, it wasn't really going to be possible to bring these two worlds together. Are you saying Meta Protocol expands that core Bitcoin primitive or would you say it's a little bit more like the Bitcoin L2? Is it or is it somewhere in the middle and it's kind of like this more unique thing that is is sort of not on either end of these of the spectrum? >> That's a good question. Um I'm here to challenge the idea that we're limited in what we can do in Bitcoin. Um that you need to change the op codes, that you need to change Bitcoin in order to get all of the things that you want. um that you can do it all on Bitcoin and I think it's sort of a funny historical thing that people haven't explored this much

yet. Um ordin is a good example, right? Ordinals have been incredibly popular, incredibly successful, but it's extremely limited in what what it can do. It's more or less colored coins from 2012, but with, you know, taper inscriptions. Cool, right? Like that's that's what it is, right? Um, and there's been, you know, I mean, the ordinals community isn't super interested in expan expanding it significantly. Runes is of course an incremental improvement. Um, I mean, you know, yeah, again, BRC BRC BRC20, these are all very limited what in what they're designed to do. There's no real reason to do that if you if you sort of design your system correctly.

And I think you get the best of both worlds in terms of being on Bitcoin and all of the functionality that you would get with a side chain or a rollup. >> And so you're you're saying the full suite of what we've come to expect and and come to know and love in this onchain application world. Uh prediction markets, uh DeFi on uh AMMs and swaps and all all of these different things are possible. Not a side chain, not a rollup, not using a Bitcoin bridge, but natively on Bitcoin.

>> Correct. Very much. Yeah. >> This is a fascinating concept because a lot of people have tried to do this. What was the core innovation? Did you invent some like and and all without changing the Bitcoin script? How is this possible? >> It it honestly it hasn't been that hard. People haven't explored the space. Um there's been a huge amount of energy and development >> just like I mean just resources poured into side chains into rollups into uh altcoins in terms of all of these different techn much much much much less investment and effort put into expanding meta protocols because people have this idea in their head that bitcoin is fundamentally

limited that people don't want to do these things on bitcoin that bitcoin is just for payments right and uh there you know sort of the answer is staring them right in the face when you look at uh what what counterparty was able to do in 2014 the popularity of ordinals people still go around saying you know why does anyone want to use Bitcoin for something other than payments even though there are 110 million ordinal subscriptions out there right and that's all that the protocol can do there's absolutely no inherent limitation on what you can do with a meta protocol and yeah >> for I I just want to put this example out there I mean just less Than an hour ago, I had Danny from um Meanwhile, and Meanwhile is a Bitcoin native life

insurance product. So, they're using Bitcoin as a store of value, as a collateral asset to provide life insurance. And it's it's in kind. So, you put Bitcoin in, you get Bitcoin out, and they provide some tax advantageous ways of giving people yield on their Bitcoin, but ultimately preserving it, protecting it, growing it sustainably over 10, 20, 30, 40 year time horizons like a typical life insurance product. They're doing this offchain. I think it'd be nice if they could provide the same product, but use onchain Bitcoin rails and use custody solutions and escro services all within the Bitcoin protocol so that we don't have to take it and and put it in some written contract and this can all be enforced by

code. >> I hear very often people say, "I'd love to do this on Bitcoin, but there's no platform for it." I really do think we've been hamstrung by the technology that's available in Bitcoin. And again, the reason is cultural and historical. People don't expect that it's possible. They are used to seeing all of this effort go elsewhere. And there's been all this politics, you know, resistance from the Bitcoin core developers. Um, uh, just sort of, yeah, just, you know, the anti anti- just the Bitcoin maximalist movement, right, has at times been interpreted as being against any kind of innovation on Bitcoin. And this goes back to 2014.

It's unfortunate. The good thing is you don't have to ask anyone for for permission to build on top of Bitcoin. It's fundamentally a permissionless platform right? >> And uh I' I've been doing this for a long time and the it's now easier than ever to build on top of Bitcoin. >> And I'm very excited about what what we can do with Contour to expand the space of what's possible and offer like actual mature real platforms to people who want to build on top of Bitcoin and you know without without all the without all the without going off chain. You just don't have to do it, >> right? And so, for instance, with Contour, you could build a Bitcoin lending market for instance, right? A is one of the most popular onchain DeFi applications over on Ethereum. We're seeing lending markets pop up

everywhere. People want to borrow, they want to lend, and so it you're saying it's possible to build this sort of DeFi with native Bitcoin on Bitcoin uh with Contour. >> Yeah, very much. >> Very cool. And so how do you anticipate contour working together with counterparty with Bitcoin? How how are all these things going uh melding together in your mind? >> Yeah. So the nice thing is that you know people talk a lot about interoperability and um it's us it usually doesn't mean much because they're talking about different consensus systems. They're talking about totally different blockchain networks and they're saying well if we have some kind of you know trust minimized bridge then you can move an asset by you know whatever means to another chain.

>> The problem is that they're not on the same blockchain >> and counterparty and ordinals and contour are all on Bitcoin and they have this native built-in perfect interoperability layer which is Bitcoin script. So each one of those protocols can look at Bitcoin script and say that's what's happening and you can do things like have trustless atomic swaps from a counterparty asset to a contour asset, right? You can chain transactions. Let's imagine you want to use the Contour storage protocol to store more data that can fit in an encryption. You can use your Bitcoin from your regular Bitcoin wallet. You can buy the core currency. You can purchase file storage using core. And then you can do an ordinal inscription

that references that file data in a single confirmation because you're all doing it on Bitcoin. >> Okay. And so you you do you do a lot of this with uh atomic swaps for instance like my where I get hung up is the asset issuance of it, right? Because my understanding is you can't issue something like stablecoin on the Bitcoin network. >> Why not? Yeah. the the Bitcoin ledger has no concept of assets outside of Bitcoin, >> but it has concepts of data, right?

>> And we can sit we can fit data into the Bitcoin block. >> This is the way that I think about meta protocols. It's just an extension to Bitcoin core, right? It's just this extra protocol on top of it. So, you're still using the Bitcoin network and you're still using the Bitcoin mining, but you're you're just extending script. You're just sort of able to do more things. All you have to do is write the code and it all it just has to be deterministic and you're done. And again, this has been proven out. Um people have been doing this since you know for over 10 years now. Is there light bulb moments like because even to my brain it's like okay like I I realize that you know there's L1s there's blockchains that are out there and you know part of the value proposition of

those chains that you can issue you know assets on those things like because they have these ERC20 standards right but now on Bitcoin it it I've been like I like to think I'm an open-minded person but my my mind I I find it difficult to like conceive of assets on the Bitcoin ledger that are not Bitcoin. So that's why that's why no one's built it before. It's because of this this this expectation, right? This culture around it. Um people think Bitcoin is limited, right? The only way you can ex you can do something with Bitcoin is by >> building this other system and then having and moving your assets back and forth. It's just not the case.

>> Yeah. Okay. What what were some of the key unlocks that you had? If it's not, you know, I'm curious like light bulb moments or key unlocks that you discovered through your evolution in understanding the protocol that helped you realize there was more going on here. The basic yeah the actually the most interesting thing is and it gets it gets a little technical is is understanding a blockchain itself as what's called state machine replication. >> Okay. The idea is that you have this shared this shared order of transactions and then you have the state of the system derived from re by reading that that shared order of transactions deterministically. Right?

So every Bitcoin core instance is reading the ledger of transactions in the same way. and decoupling the ordering from the processing in my mind was very important because in Bitcoin they're actually smooshed together. In Bitcoin you actually have the the parties that are ordering transactions do a lot of transaction processing and validation the miners right miners aren't going to include an invalid transaction inside of a block. And that's an optimization. And understanding it as an optimization was really critical because it allowed me to sort of see see how meta protocols could work by just adding another state machine, adding another deterministic process on top of Bitcoin core where the

miners were still ordering the transactions. They were still ordering all of the all of the meta protocol stuff. They just didn't have to do all the same level of processing. And so once you understand Bitcoin as state machine replication as a just a dup like a like a a network of deterministic programs reading from a ledger of transactions then you can just add more state machines on top of it and you can do whatever you want. >> And when we're thinking about the Bitcoin miners and they're processing and ordering transactions um are they not just processing and ordering Bitcoin transactions? You're saying they have the the same miners, the same Bitcoin miners have the capacity to process and order assets that are not Bitcoin.

>> So every contour transaction is a Bitcoin transaction. It's embedded within it. It's in the metadata for of a Bitcoin transaction. >> Okay? >> And you can do neat things like you can put multiple contour transactions inside of one Bitcoin transaction, but ultimately there's always a Bitcoin transaction. And so the miners are still processing the transaction, but they're not processing the contour content. They're just sort of seeing, oh, I have a Bitcoin transaction and then a bunch of stuff I don't care about. This already happens in Bitcoin. This is how ordinals works. There's data that's that's inside the Bitcoin transaction, the miners don't care about. And there's no reason for them to care about it. As long as they're not getting As long as >> you're not Yeah. As long as Bitcoin script doesn't care about it, they don't care about it. Right. Um, all they care

about is getting their fees and Bitcoin fees are based on file size on on transaction size. >> Right. Right. And so it's it's the contour state machine that is processing and ordering the contour transactions, but it's the Bitcoin miners that are ultimately uh settling these transactions. You're arriving at finality right? >> Yeah. They're Yeah. They're establishing finality. Yeah. And Yeah. >> How Okay. Uh what's the go to market here? Like I cuz personally like I I say this a lot but you know if you're on crypto Twitter and you're kind of like in this like new neo crypto era like and and kind of not a lot of people own Bitcoin. It it feels like it's been commandeered by institutions. Michael Sailor bought another billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. There's a lot of uh

whales institutions that are um scooping it all up right oifying it and you know going to use it as a store of value. But I do think that there is a subset of individual people that are looking at it and trying to get more out of it. I'm one of those people. I want to use I want to use, you know, my Bitcoin for something. Um, and I still think that, you know, it has quite the value proposition. Are you trying to convince those others to like rediscover Bitcoin or are you tapping into this subset? What is like what's the go to market strategy to ultimately try to bolster more of a thriving ecosystem on contour and you know by by extension on Bitcoin.

Yeah, I'm one I'm one of those people too, right? I want to use Bitcoin. Um I think that those institutions are a mixed bag for Bitcoin and I think that they're laggers, right? They're they're they're followers. They're not doing the innovation, right? They're waiting for people to build stuff and they sort of have enough in just Bitcoin as it is today to, you know, buy a lot of it and build all this infrastructure around it, but they're followers, right? And they're they they would love to have a way of improving Bitcoin on Bitcoin. They don't know how to do it. They don't, you know, they're they're waiting for someone to do it and then then they'll then they'll be fast followers, you know, as a lot of financial institutions are. Uh I like building stuff, right? I think I think there's a lot to be done in the on the in the

building side and there hasn't been enough building because of of yada's history and culture around around Bitcoin, right? So, uh I'm I'm excited. Yeah. In terms in terms of adoption, yeah, I mean like add giving functionality to users directly. >> Yeah. >> Whether it's smart contracts, file storage, uh these kinds of things are really like it's enough of a value proposition. >> Yeah. Um, I think uh I think we're running on time here, but I my last question for you because I I mean getting involved in 2011 is a trip. It's always it's always fascinating the further back you go, it feels like there's like more unique and cooler stories that that come uh as a result of that. And uh and we've had Jeff Garzic on, we've had

core developers on, and we did this whole Bitcoin Beyond thing. What is Do you have any crazy stories? Like last thing here, just do you just from you know the the good old days or you know the OGs like tell us you know what you know what what were some weird stories that happened way back when? >> Yeah, many actually many crazy stories. It was a it was a strange time. It was the it was the wild west, right? Um and it felt like the wild west. It felt like no one knew what they were doing and you could just do stuff, right? >> Yeah. What's the weirdest, craziest, you know, thing that you remember from like the the that first cycle, if you will?

>> I mean, working with Overstock.com and Patrick Burn in 2014 to try and, you know, do the first stock market on Bitcoin, um, using Counterparty. That was a trip because he's a trip, right? Um, this is back when they were selling alpaca socks for for Bitcoin and and that sort of thing. Um uh I think that the I I I guess one thing I'll say about the history of Counterparty is um that was I think is I'm I'm very proud of was the the burn the proof of burn. Are you familiar with this? >> Yeah. Yeah, I think so. It's been a while. The what the way we launched Counterparty was by asking every we created an I I I I generated an unspendable address, a Bitcoin address definitely had no private key. And the way that we launched the counterparty

currency was by saying, "Dear random people on the internet, please send your Bitcoin to this unspendable address. Destroy your Bitcoin." >> And when you do, it will automatically create XCP, the counterparty currency. >> Right? >> And I was an anonymous person. I posted on Bitcoin Talk. I said, "I built this thing. Here's the code. Now destroy your Bitcoin." And people did it. Um, people destroyed 2100 Bitcoins in a month. And that's never that's just that's never that's just gone. >> Yeah. Gone. It's And it's sitting there in this address. You can look at it. Um >> no one can spend it from that address.

>> No one can spend it. Exactly. That's a pretty weird thing, right? Like destroying that that I mean at the time it was a couple million dollars. Um and people had no reason to trust >> more than that. >> Now it's now it's a lot more than that. Exactly. I think it's one of the the the largest intentional destructions of of money uh in in um at least in in this space, possibly broader. >> Uh so I'm pretty happy about about that that phenomenon having having occurred. >> That's really freaking cool, man. Awesome. Well, yeah, I appreciate you coming on and sharing some war story from the past and uh and also just going back to Counterparty and and rediscovering, you know, uh uh you know, uh a very important piece in Bitcoin's history, I think is uh is noble work and and contour as a meta protocol is also,

you know, going to prove crucial here uh uh uh in the coming eras of Bitcoin. So, keep up the good work, man. Thank you for coming on. Would love to uh to catch up as uh as Contour gets more and more developed. >> Yeah, sounds good. I really appreciate it. >> Awesome. We'll see you soon. Bye. >> Thanks, Adam. >> Yeah. >> All right, that was Adam from Contour. Uh guys, we're gonna uh take a quick commercial break and then we'll be back with our next guest. Um you guys know him, you guys love him. Maybe we don't even need a quick commercial break. If we're ready behind the scenes, then we can get going. Pretty fun guest today. Um,

let's uh let's let's get going here. Oh, there he is. You guys are gonna like this one. Let's get let's get the uh the proper headline. Welcome to Rollup TV. It's Monday, December 8th. Let's get our Let's get our boy up. Let's get him up, guys. Where is he? Take a guess. >> Where am I?

>> With those sunglasses. >> Where am I? >> Is your shirt inside out? >> No, dude. This is Arthur Hayes Shitcoiner shirt. >> Dude, it's fire. I was wearing the other Dream Temple one the last couple days. Um, yeah, it's pretty electric. >> You missed an hour and a half of uh of Prime Brokerage and Bitcoin native life insurance. Pretty pretty insane things happening on uh on chain. >> Yeah, pretty insane things happening in Miami this weekend uh in the last week. Bas tell us about it >> dude. I mean so first of all Miami is like all connections and like who you know and Basel's all these different like you know little galleries and so uh

our buddy Chris from Chainlink he's like the head of comms there right? He got uh he got special access to the collector's lounge of the main exhibition. got to talk to people and all this stuff. So, we did a couple days of of of art and a couple days of just kind of like there really wasn't much crypto happening. Like there was a Pudgy Penguin event for a week. They had like a openc thing. Jack Butcher did his uh NFT sale thing which was sick. This was the art basel that I've never like there's never been an art basel with less crypto focus. >> NFT are cut.

>> NFTs are dead. People don't even care. >> It's weird. It's really weird. Um, >> and >> but outside of >> No one's talking about it, >> outside of crypto, there's a lot of there's a lot of cool things happening. >> Yeah. I mean, like the main venue was sick and then the design Miami art exhibit was really really cool. >> I've I've been to Art Basle a couple times. I used to go when I was like a teenager really. I was like 13, 14, 15. And I went like three or four years in a row and we just went I went with my family and we just went to the art exhibit, right? just going around like it was a museum walking around but now they it's grown and there's all these satellite events like you're at Miami which is not it's kind of like an

offshoot from the main venue and there's kind of like these popup things right >> oh yeah there's there's pop-ups even still going on today there's insane DJs too John Summit was here um uh Black Coffee was here um Mau P was here Um, Marshmallow. It was It's like a very It's like not just art, it's art and music. Um, okay. The city was insane. Ubers have been such a pain. Um, everything's slow. It's It's been crazy. But like, yeah, I'd say the biggest like thing for crypto takeaway is like there was none. Like there was a couple events. Pudgy Penguins probably won again like they usually do.

>> Right. Right. Right. >> Uh, down here. >> But Andy, we didn't we didn't bring you on the stream today to talk crypto. So, we brought you on the stream today to understand all the things happening in Miami outside of crypto. >> Dude, I got to pull up my photos. Diverse. See it? >> Give me some diverse inputs. Give me some What was the most inspiring thing you saw this week? >> I mean, I met up with uh Stefan Diggs and he has launched a new art brand and he was just sitting at his uh exhibit by himself in the middle and it says like a background. It's like, you know, so and so, whatever the brand name is by Stefan Diggs. I just walked up to him. I was like, "Yo, Stefan, what what's good, man? Um, you mind if I ask you about

Sorry." He's like, "Yeah, man. What's up?" And I was like, "What inspired you to make these, you know, collection, right?" He he has his name on it, but you know, who knows what his level of input was. And he's like, "Oh, man. There's like this like, you know, way these like layers come together." And, you know, I'm really a fan of his contemporary style. And at the end of it, he was just like, "Yo, man. Honestly, I just lay on the floor a lot. I love laying on the ground. So, I just made hella floor pieces, bro. And I was like, "Yes, dude. Yes." He finally told me the real the real answer. So, you know, he gave me the runaround for 30 seconds about all this contemporary art stuff. And then he's like, "Yeah, man. I just love laying on the ground." So, I

made a bunch of dope ground pieces. >> I was like, "All right, dude." >> So, like yoga mats >> and then we took a photo and I just mogged his ass. Full mobed him. People were like, "Yo, you should be the tight end." He's like, "Bro, do you play football?" >> Mongum. Just straight up in the Arthur Hayes Dream Temple. Like >> no. >> Oh my gosh. >> Full full tape mode. So that was sick. Um that was random. Um and super fun. >> Um there Kraken was running ads and Ubers.

I thought that was interesting. They were the only crypto ad that I saw all week. >> Okay. >> It was a unique marketing point. >> Okay. >> Um dude, but seeing Jack was amazing. Jack Butcher, they raised 111 or $114,000. But what you did was you go up you would go up to the counter. You'd pay like tap to pay for like 10 bucks, 100 bucks, whatever your donation was. I'm sure people did a ton. And then basically you uh get this receipt that has a seed phrase on the bottom and it's got this soulbound token attached to it. So you get like a wallet created for yourself with this soulbound token.

>> I saw you holding up a receipt. It looked like you purchased some like uh some like one-of-a-kind piece of art. >> Yeah. like you everyone all the it was like it's a philanthropy thing. I'm pretty sure it's either a donation to Jack and he's going to donate it or I don't know if he keeps it or I don't exactly know how it works but um >> I was literally there on Sunday yesterday at like the last hour 4:30. He was so cooked. Jalil, his dev, the guy who created all the Opepin like uh mechanics to do a burn and to do the >> the reveals and the collections and everything.

Jalil is standing there in a terminal on his MacBook like looking like he had just ran a marathon for the last three days and it's just straight like grinding on the GitHub and on terminal to like fix people's like he's like checking the receipts. He's just like bro is mania mode. Bro is locked in. It was hilarious. >> Coding from the Art Basle exhibition >> straight up standing up just ripping code. >> Standing up ripping code in the Art Basle exhibition >> ripping. And then I mean we walked around a ton. was our bosom man was cool. >> Uh but the design Miami was definitely the best.

>> What's your art style? Like any particular type of I don't know if you saw but I got Nighthawks. This one's cool. This one's Edward Hopper. They're like staying in the uh the cool thing about this one is like there's a they're in a restaurant. Oh, did we lose him? Oh, we went solo shot there. So, the cool thing about Edward Hopper here is that it's called Nighthawks, and everyone's got like their own uh personality in here, but there's no door outside. And so, you kind of get the sense that like these guys, it's you kind of like you're like a fly in the wall, and you're looking into their bubble. Uh this is kind of like a family piece. Uh that was my aunts call that guy the wise man. Old bald Chinese guy.

So, like, you know, generally like >> Yeah. No, I feel you. I'm gonna I'm gonna send some to the uh to the guys in the back. Hopefully they can throw it up in the middle of the screen, show you guys some of my favorite pieces from the week. >> Yeah, that would be that would be awesome. >> It might just take a quick sec, but basically like I found myself going to the uh design Miami first and then finding pieces on the wall that weren't 3D and then just literally uh staring at them for like 10 minutes. And it is insane how when you stare at these super abstract pieces um more gets revealed to you over time. I I know it sounds silly, but >> no, the depth like you the longer that you look at it, the more that you notice. You become more observational,

>> dude. Yeah. Like all these different uh pieces kind of come about as you're looking at it. It's like, oh, you know, you see the one thing. And so like that kind of vibe I thought was like some of my favorite. >> Okay. >> There's a couple political ones I'm going to show. >> Yeah. Send them send them in the chat and we'll get them we'll get them loaded up here. >> But yeah, man. I mean, we we had a really fun time. Um >> that's that's awesome. really really cool and great weather. It was so it was so bummy in Tampa this past weekend. It was rainy and cloudy and crappy and it's been so so nice here. So yeah, we'll pull some up.

>> Can we get those on screen? >> I found that the um I found that the 3D design Miami like kind of setup was um far more sick and like far more of a vibe than um the uh single like this 2D art basil main exhibit. But like I I think I mean you know it's all great but the the the 3D like kind of like because like you're like looking at you know what could be somebody's living room and it's the most insane furniture setup ever. Um >> Yeah.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And so I Right. Because I've been to Art Bos, right? I've seen the 2D paintings on the wall. But like you're saying, like the art installations when it's more like interior design, furniture pieces, like you're saying, you it's like you're walking into someone's living room and you get inspired because you're like, "This could be my living room. I could set this up and it's more interactive that way because you could kind of see yourself in here." Whereas you're just if it's a painting on the wall, just kind of noticing things about it. You're not really putting yourself into it. >> 100% 100%. Um, yeah. Yeah, I mean I thought Yeah, it was cool. The the >> last night we ended up uh going to like a really chill kind of like uh like uh sound room is what they call them.

>> And it's like it's like these uh it's kind of like like an underground like kind of like club vibe, but it's not like a club. It's more of like um they have the best speakers set up in the entire like city. Uh a place called Jolene, I think. Uh, and basically you can feel the sound and hear it and it's like this very like it's just a very comprehensive experience. Like people just go there just for the sound system. Um, and so that was cool. I've never been to like a sound bar or like a sound uh track, but yeah. Um, that was that was cool. It was like a sound bar. It was like full-on like people go there to listen to specific artists and specific people because of how sick the stadium is or sorry the sound is like the sound system. And so it's like music, it's

certain like music artists that you'll go and you'll listen because it's a very unique sound that you >> Yeah. Like even put the best Bose headphones on on Spotify. The sound at this at this club is going to just be >> so much better. >> While while we work on getting these up, what? Tell me about Bele. Oh, here we go. Okay, >> dude. Bele was so funny, man. Yeah, >> I put a video up. I put a video up of Bele. Um, but basically what happened is he had like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's head on the like the electric dogs. Yeah. Like those like robot dogs. So he had like Zuck, he had like uh Trump, he had King Jong-un, he had like Alman or something and a couple others. And then at some point Kim Jong-un fell over and

the the robot dog was just like smashing smashing smashing smashing and uh trying to get up and he didn't he like end up going like taking a a flick with it. Yeah. >> And then one of the curators, like the like the uh you know, service providers who work there, they he came up, grabbed the robot dog, and like like uh people just like just get it out of here. It's fine. Like it's it's all good. And it was just like so iconic. This guy's just carrying out uh Kim Jong-un and he's like showing the crowd. It's like North Korean guy and he's just carrying him out of the out of the uh out of the setup >> like out of out of the global geopolitical landscape.

>> Exactly. metaphorically out of like this little like 10 by 10 square. Yeah. >> But it was like he just got he exited the glo, >> you know, >> just like North Korea is in the in the freaking >> Yeah. Yeah. So tell us tell us >> Yeah. This piece right here is this um I mean uh Yeah. So yeah, this piece is Okay. So Okay. So yeah, this is one of my one of the first ones that I saw of the weekend. Um, this one I just kept looking at because it kept more things kept coming like at first I saw the face in the left and then I saw a more and then I realized there was more faces and and kind of

like things in the top left and then I saw all these strings linking together uh and then like the feet and then like there's an upside down foot and the hand and so what goes through my mind in this is honestly like I don't even know it's just it's just uh yeah it was more of like a I appreciated the taste um in in the work. Uh it was a bit of an older piece I believe actually maybe it was just a couple years old. Uh so it doesn't have like that new art style yet that is kind of there's like this new painting style that we saw from 2025 pieces and beyond. I think it's from AI but it looks like it literally looks like a Google Gemini 3 Pro generated image but it's paint. So this new like metallic type of paint.

>> Um anyway so this didn't have that but I don't know. This just gives me like very calm, interesting colors and like this person's mind was like clearly in a space of abstract reality and somehow ended up on this. Like you I ought to think that they didn't sketch this out, >> right? >> I got to think that they maybe they did and then they painted it, but I think they just took a pen and a paper or a paintbrush and just kind of started.

Yeah, they probably took some complete concept. >> Yeah. >> And unbundled it, >> right? That's what >> Yeah. Some Yes. Some some some inspiration. >> Yeah. It It's kind of like an exploded view of different concepts, different body parts, different mental like figures. And they've also done that with colors as well. And so it's a very modular piece. They take something they totally unbundle it. It was like a a cool like fabric as well. I thought it was pretty cool.

>> It was like a cool like um I don't know. It wasn't like a It was like a kind of like um a vinyl almost, but it was more of like yarn type of feel. I don't know. It was almost like like a rug type of feel. >> A bath. That would be a cool. >> So, that was that one. That one I took a photo of. Thought it was cool. >> Got a few more here. Yeah, we'll put the next one up. There's a couple of them. Yeah. Honestly, I was a bit like let down by the lack of crypto presence.

Like I put out a tweet. I was like, "Yo, who's around?" And there's hardly anyone around. It was weird. Yeah. >> Like this because there was no Bitcoin uh Miami this week, right? >> Usually there's Bitcoin Miami at this time, but they did it in Abu Dhabi this year. >> I think that's what happens like the bit some Bitcoin conference is in Abu Dhabi right now, not in Miami. And so there wasn't really much of a showing. >> Yeah. >> Of crypto people. >> Yeah. >> Miami is still cool, man. I mean, sometimes it's good to get out of the niche. Like get out because it's like we want to bring we want to bring some of the culture like if you just get and we see it on crypto Twitter all the time, man. It's just so cynical, right? And people are just, you know, they're too

wrapped up in like the prices and and when you look outside, you can kind of get a sense of like all these other things that are happening that we can bring into the industry. And I I find that, you know, particularly exciting where we can go and we can get a sense of like, you know, what are some of these people thinking? Like how are people >> rejuvenated lust for uh life, but also just like, oh, there's levels to, you know, the economic stature. There's so many nice cars here. There's so many nice things here. But then there's also like, oh, there's the different types of people who don't even really give a [ __ ] about crypto, don't even think about finance.

They care about art. And it's like, oh, like those people have a completely different approach to the world, approach to their life. And so that that was like a unique, you know, just like because you don't get around that much. we're stuck with, you know, really smart uh investors, institutions, CEOs, devs, you know, builders, and the group of speculators, and it's, you know, it's there's a much bigger world out there. Also, the art speculation market was huge. Shout out to this guy. What's going on, man? What's up, man?

All good. Hell yeah, brother. >> Yeah. So, >> I'm staying at a great hotel. I think we're the youngest people here by like 25 years. It's a new generation, brother. >> Happy Hanukkah, baby. Happy [ __ ] Hanukkah. Shout out to Rob. So, yeah. I mean, there's no >> fascinated approach >> because because they're selling a lot of this is exhibits. You have artists coming from around the world. They're looking to sell these pieces. >> I I mean, I talked to them. There was prices anywhere from 30 40k for like smaller ones all the way up. I think we got our highest quote was like about 90 to 110 >> million.

>> Uh and you know, we would No, 90 to 110K. We didn't get any huge quotes because I mean I'm sure there were some yeah seven figure pieces out there but you know we asked and we asked a couple of the exhibits like hey did you guys sell out and they were like yeah we sold out all six of them and we we got lucky this year. So I would assume and you know my friends and I here we we we guesstimated that over half of the pieces sold like in general but there's a whole dynamic happening where the galleries get so much of the money and the artists don't actually get paid >> and it's really weird. I don't know exactly how it works. I didn't dig into it too much, but I kept overhearing it and people were Okay, so that was kind

of annoying. I think the screen just came up with a new piece. >> Uh, this one I stared at for like 15 minutes. >> Okay, tell us why. >> Oh my gosh. I mean, >> take us take us through the train of thought, right? What is your first impression and then generally as you see more, right? Take us take us into your mind as you develop a more refined view of this piece. >> Yeah, I wish I was more of an aristocratic art enjoyer, but I'm gonna I'll do my best here. Okay. Um, so, uh, I walk up to it and I'm like, first of all, I'm immediately like, all right, uh, I'm going to stand back far away, like, you know, not in front of it, like a good 10 feet behind it to get the full picture. Um, and I I look at it and I I

I see like veins. I see like a heart like like like squid, like these like And then I see like these orange and white uh kind of yarn. I was like like traffic cones. And then I just start going and the piece just takes you for a ride cuz like you'll follow one of the lines. So I started just following lines and then you see that the piece would connect to another part and then you your eye would switch off and then you would see it go and go for its own journey across the entire kind of I would name this piece Tangled like the movie Tangled.

Maybe not the best example, but that's kind of the vibe is like I would get I was just getting oh, you'd go and then you'd come back and then you'd hop on another like part of the of the structure and then you'd go for another journey and then you'd come out and you each time you'd see different things and I don't know. I thought it would be a sick I think it's a rug. It's like a rug uh tapestry >> tapestry. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, this one was sick. >> Yeah, this is very honestly. You also get a sense I mean I'm sure being there too you get an even better sense of the texture and so like you're saying you go into these different journeys and uh >> and it's like a roller coaster and it's taking you through and you're going into these ventricles and through these tubes

and each one it's like one feels cozy one feels more like >> like fast other ones are more soft >> and you just get a very diverse sense of this >> and and it's >> if you want to go philosophical it's like life is a big journey but it's full of like very like very different subjourneys and all of those different twists and turns all have their own contours, all have their different They're all different. >> Yeah. But ultimately they make up this one big structural and this one big journey that we all go through. >> Very cool.

>> Super based. Super based. Let's pull the next couple up. I uh I'd like to show the Stefon Diggs photo. I think that's cool. Um and then maybe there's one more piece. But yeah, the the the activation of the other part of the brain, super bullish, man. >> Yes, >> super um super super super bullish. Like, okay, I have not seen the uh artist side of the of the world for a while. I haven't, you know, done uh like Art Basel like in since I guess a year or two. My brain doesn't really think in uh this like more creative way, I guess.

I mean it does but it's always so actionoriented and it's just like very logically reasoned about >> right. >> Um so this was like a complete removal of that part of the brain and a complete shift. So that's why this piece was like one of my favorites honestly >> and it's like once you it's like how you see something you could see then you can start to see it everywhere right and so you know as we've been thinking more and more about the show cinematically it's like I watch a movie and I'm like oh that lighting it's like oh look at that vibe that they were able to orchestrate. Imagine pulling pulling a piece of that vibe into what we do. Imagine pulling like a certain texture here. It evokes a kind kind of like cozy comforting feeling. If like you're in that that top

left like pink tube there. >> Again, I don't know the texture, but it looks very soft, very comforting. You go kind of going down a slide, right? Imagine invoking that kind of feeling in our like a particular segment or piece of the show and and you kind of start to get this inspiration that you start to see everywhere. Yeah man. I mean that is the thing about the art is it just makes you feel. >> I also started thinking that things that I I think I think in I I was very good at science and math in class and stuff and school and whatnot. I think I think in science too much and not in art enough >> like there's there's a like there's a very scientific approach. There's a, you

know, >> right, analytical, >> a methodical approach to creating a business, creating a relationship, creating a life path, making your choices. >> There's a very like there's a very like rigid way to do things. >> Very rational way of doing things. Yeah. >> And then there's like the smoo and the finesse and the art and the creation of of just energies and feelings and forces because it's it's an art. There's a originality. There's a there's a feel behind it. There's a there's like a there's this self-expression that comes out.

>> Well, you get >> I I mean, you've played sports. I And I'm Yeah, >> I'm sure a a coach or you know, someone has told you about the intangibles. >> The intangibles, right? Like what it means to be a leader, what it means to be a captain, like some of the things that you can't quite describe or the some of the things that you can't quite teach or coach, but yes, you see it in certain players and you draw it out. And and the intangibles are what sometimes it brings it all together and it's kind of like the glue. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. That's exactly what I mean. It's like this like not it's not it's not um Yeah. It's not the okay X input.

>> Feelings aren't feelings aren't rational. >> Yeah. Exactly. It's not like X gets you Y or like a change a change in X gets you a change in the result. It's more of like a it's like a a shift in the way that you approach the craft. Like it is a craft. Like >> this business is a craft. Media is a craft. It's an art. Sports are an art. >> It's all a craft. So, >> right. And it's not necessarily there's one right way to do things like a rational person. >> But the right way is the self is the way that you express yourself and then you have this craft and slide is >> Yeah.

>> Yeah. Your craft is sharpening it. So, >> yeah. >> I'm going to phone off. I'm uh I'm about two hours out of flight here. Um >> we'll save travels. >> You had a good stream, bro. >> See you guys tomorrow. I'm I'm I'm gonna be on. >> Cool. Very cool. I'm excited. Uh I've got a trip coming up to New York. We're going to do a lot of uh out of brain vibe expression, self-expression. Again, different part of the brain, inspiration type. >> Um and I'll be I'll be seeing things and uh seeing people practice art at the top of their craft. It's one thing about Art Basil is you got the best artists around the world that are there practicing their craft. Go up there, see some shows, see people at the top of their game practicing. Yes. Uh the best people at the craft Stefon Digs.

>> All right, close us out here, Andy. >> Yeah, man. I mean, I told the story. This is just epic. I mogged him. I mogged him full on. He's six foot two, I think, is what they say. Six foot three. But they always add an extra inch or two on the >> on the depth chart. >> On the depth chart. And I just I was like, "Yo, can we get a picture?" I was with my buddy Chris. I was trying to get a photo. He was sitting down. I was talking to him standing up. I was trying to just get like this candid photo like us talking. But then Chris was like, "Do you mind if I take a picture?" And then he stood up and was like, "All right."

And I was like, "All right, bet. This is what we're doing." And we just kind of like mogged it out. And I got the picture back and I was like, "Yo, I was wearing this baggy Dream Temple shirt. Shout out Arthur Hayes." And I was just like, "Yo, I look like I just look like I'm just I should be in the in the locker room next to him type shit." I was ready to go. Like I was like, "Bro, let's go. It's bye-week this week. I'll I'll be at the game next week. Let's [ __ ] go." Dude, he's got three chicks pregnant right now. Guy's insane. He's He's He had Cardi B at his birthday party the night before. I go see him the the next day. I'm like He's like, "Oh, I'm a little tired, bro." I'm like, "Yeah, yeah. Yeah." I saw a video of

Cardi B just like shaking it at his birthday party the night before in Miami. So, I think that about does it for my culture of Miami, guys. Thank you for uh thank you for the vibes. Thanks for watching. Um, shout out Stefan Diggs. Hope you figure that [ __ ] out, bro. Uh, wrap it up, guys. Talk to you soon. >> Cheers, guys. Peace. Good stream. All >> righty.