William Quigley on Tether, MiCA and the stablecoin race

Transcript

It was the single biggest I think uh strategic blunder he's made. He's made a lot of great decisions. I would say even launching the metaverse that the downside of that would have been swept under the rug had he launched a stable coin. >> Micah is pushing crypto out of Europe. The Clarity Act is stalled on the finish line. Bitcoin is back over 65K. Is all of this government regulation going to drive people back into permissionless assets? or is centralized control the future for all of us? Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that crypto legislation sounds great until you read the fine print. I'm your host, John Gillan. Today is Wednesday, July 15th, and today we are

joined by William Quigley. William is a pioneering cryptocurrency entrepreneur and investor best known as the co-founder of Tether and as the co-founder of WAX, a purpose-built NFTts and gaming blockchain. Will was an early investor in Coinbase, Kraken, and over 30 other projects in crypto. He's going to give us a ton of alpha today and we're going to unpack some things that neither one of us have thought about until now. Uh so if that all sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe. Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it. Today's episode is brought to you by BitGet Stocks 2.0 with real liquidity, real dividends, and securitize the regulated rails for tokenization. And without further ado, welcome back to the Milkro Show. William, how are you, sir?

>> Doing good, thanks. >> William, I'm excited to have you here. And as the co-founder of Tether, I thought it would be interesting to get your thoughts on some of the recent developments we've seen with regulation in Europe around crypto, around digital assets overall. Tether and Binance and several other players have left the European Union in response to this Micah law that's come out. And I'm curious your reaction to this news and what you think this means for the future of crypto in Europe and more broadly. >> Sure. Um well I would say in an ideal world tether would be available as well as the other stable coins would be available anywhere in the world wherever you are because tokenized fiat is such an amazing way to do payments to settle

especially crossber uh payments but every jurisdiction wants to impose its will on the uh the companies that operate in their jurisic iction and in this case um I can't say Micah the MICA the the the regulations surrounding things like like stable coins and crypto you can't say it was sprung upon us you know this has been in the works for probably 5 years um the first draft I think was available in 2023 so we've seen it coming but um in the case of Tether the reason I think Tether has decided

not to uh comply with Micah and therefore has decided to withdraw is is mainly around the way it would have to reorganize its its its reserve math uh in order to be compliant with Micah because as um you know just for one high level thing the Micah legislation would require Tether to have 60% of its reserves in EU banks and um the that wouldn't work for a whole bunch of reasons with the way Tether is currently run. In addition, if it was going to do that, I'd say it would be willing to do

it if that was the only market Tether operates in. But the vast majority of Tether liquidity and Tether trading occurs outside of the EU. you know, the EU has never really been as important in crypto as either uh the US or or Asia. So, u for Tether, it would have it would come down to basically uh an economic decision. Does it comply with the rules of of Micah but greatly lower its own economics or does it simply withdraw?

And uh there's a whole bunch of details in there and things Tether could do. You know, Tether could uh of course uh well, why doesn't Tether just operate a subsidiary? And there's we can talk about that. Why? Maybe it wouldn't want to at this point. So, it's not a surprise that it withdrew. Uh it was a business decision to do it. I think the EU crypto customers are much worse off not having Tether. Uh but at the moment that's the reality they have to deal with. Now I should also point out it's not illegal to hold Tether. Even post this Micah legislation. You can still hold Tether. You can self-custody Tether

but um it's just EU regulated exchanges can't trade it because they can only trade Micah compliant stable coins. >> Guys, listen. We are at a very crucial point in time right now. AI stocks have ripped. They're going to keep ripping. Our analysts on the AI side are up like literally 100% or more on quite a few calls and crypto is about to boom again or at least it feels that way. If you want all the insight on what we're buying, what our analysts are doing, what's on their watch list, all of that is in Milkroad Pro. So join at the link below.

>> Right. Okay. So I think all of this is helpful context and great details to point out about this. Um, I'm kind of curious your thoughts on Circle USDC and EURC, which are the stablecoin products in the dollar and the euro that are put out by Circle. Circle's kind of gone the other way on this. They have been MICA compliant. They have gotten chartered as a bank in the United States. And it seems like they're rising in dominance and market share in Europe, especially because of Tether being pushed out here. Do you like you said you think it would be a better world when you know we had open permissionless access to all of these things and let the market decide but it seems like legislation is picking winners and losers. I'm curious your thoughts on how that plays out and what the consequences are for the digital

asset landscape if you know more and more companies and products are forced to make these decisions about either complying or not complying with some of these regulations. Circle made a decision that it wanted to have a foothold in Europe and um it had to do things. I think Circle's subsidiary is um is based in France. I could be wrong, but I think that's right. And uh because it's Micah compliant, it is the dominant token. I think EURC and Circle, I guess they'd probably be like 90% of the u of the liquidity bucket that you you uh can trade into. And uh for them

it was it was you know they were always number two compared to Tether, right? Um Tether is the dominant uh uh token and Tether is uh dominant in many ways. um not just by market cap because you could look at it and say, well, they're whatever it is, 25% the size of Tether, but in terms of trading pairs, the most uh uh the dominant trading pair for every crypto pretty much on Earth is the native crypto versus Tether, right? So, um uh if you are number two and a distant number two and you you want to find a way to uh uh expand, you might go

into a market where your bigger competitor for various reasons doesn't want to play. Um and so that's the logic of of Circle. They were willing, they had less to lose by by uh uh by operating under the micica compliant rules and so they were willing to do it. It's um I think things would be different if uh tokenized euros were were a thing, right? But um they're really not. No one wants the euro. uh you know I'm old enough to remember pre and post uh introduction of the euro the euro was was heralded as the competitor

to the US dollar uh you know at the time people thought you know the Japanese yen the USD and then then maybe this euro uh currency would uh would be sort of become equals at some point but that's never going to happen. It's a it's a lame regional currency and it works fine for the I don't even remember 25 27 EU countries but um if people around the world wanted to hold the euro uh I bet you you know Tether would say fine we'll tokenize the euro we we'll allow you to use tokenized euros but but they don't so uh that's also a factor in in why Tether maybe doesn't think of it

as an important uh place to fight. I'd also say um something to consider is any decision that you can reverse is not a decision that you should be paralyzed in making, right? And I I've always followed that rule as a as a business guy. There are some decisions that are essentially irreversible. This is not one of them. anybody, you and me or Tether can at any time uh as long as we play by the rules, we can launch a Micah compliant stable coin. So the the way to think about Tether in in the EU right now is currently it's not being offered, but that doesn't mean it can't

in the future. But what would happen if in 5 years euro uh the euro uh share the EU share of crypto trading is 5% of global volume instead of whatever it is I haven't looked in a long time maybe it's 20 whatever then that would be a shrinking market that wouldn't matter anyway you know you see so that's also an important thing that for whatever reason Europe was never that important for crypto. And uh so naturally enough, you know, stable coins aren't as important either. I mean, if you asked

Circle, would you rather be dominant outside of Europe or dominant in Europe? You know, it's obvious what they would say, >> right? Uh, William, I'm curious your thoughts on this from a more like a macro perspective because a lot of people in the United States have been very vocally opposed to central bank digital currencies. In other words, like a stable coin issued by the central bank that's totally operated and controlled by the central bank. And there's been like legislation and and like a lot of like public outcry against these things. And yet it seems like tacitly, implicitly, Circle by complying with these regulations is sort of moving to become sort of the de facto central bank digital currency of the United States.

And I'm curious your thoughts on that, if you think there's any truth to that, and what sort of the risks are if we move towards like a centralized system for for stable coins as opposed to a more open permissionless system where there's a lot of competition and options and just what that looks like in your mind. >> Sure. uh we could write many many books on this subject you've just outlined. So uh I'm going to try to to synthesize it. Uh so directly to answer your question uh no I don't think circle is becoming a de facto central bank digital currency.

Uh there's no chance of that. the uh as you remember just going back a few years there was so much uh uh momentum towards this idea that the US would launch a central bank digital currency and then it stalled and the reason it stalled was um probably more to do with marketing than with reality. Uh a lot of people particularly online were worried about a uh a central bank controlled digital currency suddenly having an ability to uh know every transaction you're making to be able to

uh remove you from the banking system if you you know you you said something politically that they didn't like and so forth. Now, I wish what I'm about to say was better known, uh, because the reality is, I'm sorry, people, that shit's been going on for 15 years. In fact, more than 15 years since the Patriot Act, probably the single worst piece of legislation that's passed in my lifetime and with a pathetic name, right? And this, by the way, this is the lesson of rapidly passing legislation when people are in this, you know, this this um uh anxiety state. And that was

what happened with the Patriot Act. It passed in in 2001 or 2002 right after 911. And the the stated reason was, oh, we need the ability to track terrorists and where their money is, right? But um that that was it never did that very well. And worse, what it really did is it gave many different entities in the United States in particular an ability to uh weaponize the financial system. And no one knows that better than people in crypto. Uh many many people in crypto lost access to banking. uh constantly had to fight to maintain bank accounts

for no other reason than they liked crypto. And so US uh uh the the idea of a US central bank digital currency enabling the government and financial institutions to monitor all your your transactions and then restrict your access to banking. Like I'm sorry, they already have been able to do that. So I always thought that was a a a an incredibly naive take on the matter. There are reasons you might not like a central bank digital currency, but but um uh because it empowers the government or banks to see how you spend is absurd because we already know that the US government can anytime it wants uh access the banking records without your

permission and without even a freaking court order. And and they do this constantly. uh they do this constantly and they do it illegally, but they do it anyway. And so uh I thought the value of a central bank digital currency would outweigh the negatives because the perceived negatives already exist in the current world we live in. Um so that's that's my take. I did believe in 2015 after we rolled out Tether, I thought the the notion of tokenized fiat was so incredibly positive that and this would be even from a private issuing entity like Tether as opposed to a sovereign.

But I thought it was so powerful that my thinking was by 2030 the majority of the world's big economies would have tokenized their currency. And it's it's it's paused. It's taken longer than I thought. Though I still believe it's inevitable. And it's inevitable because the value of tokenized cash is so profoundly high. And this is an area where the vast majority of people, the vast majority of business people don't understand payments, don't understand the payment networks, how complicated they are and how much fee extraction takes place in particular around uh currency conversion. Uh, I believe it's

probably a trillion dollars is taken from global businesses and consumers every year from the 5,000 or so entities around the world that are allowed authorized by their governments to do currency conversion. It's a stealth tax. So, uh, with tokenized cash, it makes it very easy to not convert and therefore you could just hold cash in different, uh, of different, uh, currencies and then use them as you need, never having to constantly be forced to convert and get that tax. So, it's still a very valuable thing to do, but whether it takes another 5 years, 10 years, 15

years, I don't know, but it will happen. One of the things that a lot of people have said needs to happen before that can happen uh is the passing of the Clarity Act. And I'm curious your thoughts on this because we've already got the Genius Act on the books. We've kind of seen the micro legislation rolling out in the European Union, but the United States is sort of dragging its heels on the question of this Clarity Act. I really appreciate, by the way, that transparent take on central bank digital currencies and saying like, yes, there are some drawbacks, but the benefits far outweigh it and putting dollar figures on that I think is really helpful. What is the big unlock that you see that would come for the economy overall if the Clarity Act came into place and like you know what does that look like as that starts to play out and

we move more towards tokenized fiat tokenized everything? >> Yeah. The so the Clarity Act for those people who don't know but it's the omnibus legislation that would provide a framework for how crypto is regulated in the United States and uh if if um if passed is prologue whatever the US does everyone else will wind up doing some version of. In fact, if anything, it's kind of surprising that Micah passed before the US uh Clarity Act passed. But be that that it's May May, they're they're going to be somewhat similar.

And um uh the the biggest impact will be probably invisible to most consumers but not u invisible to to businesses because the movement of money is is so extremely important in in you know digital economies and as a result of that there's lots of little feeders who are grabbing their fees whenever money gets moved from one business to another. The biggest effect will initially be a massive increase in the uh in the amount of businesses I think that create stable coins. I believe that it would be wise for many many big companies and big

companies of a particular type to issue their own stable coin. And and those types of companies would be companies that have hundreds of millions of consumers or companies that operate platforms where they have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of enterprises operating on their platforms because there's a lot of money going back and forth in those in those platforms captive to those platforms that would move faster with lower fees, you know, lower friction if the entity that controls that had its own stable coin and uh you know Mark Zuckerberg uh and uh at the time Facebook now Meta

they were on that path as you remember and uh and then for various reasons after uh Zuckerberg presented to the US Congress about his plans for a stable coin u he walked away from it. My my uh belief is that he walked away from it because he was clueless because he did not have any understanding of what a stable coin would do for his business. And it this is an example by the way of a businessman who uh created the created a giant platform. Two and a half billion people globally using it. A very sophisticated guy. But when it comes to

Treasury functions and such, I assume he knows very little. And when I watched him present before Congress, uh, when they dragged him to to a committee to speak, I thought this guy probably got briefed a couple of days earlier. He had some talking points. He had no uh passion for what he was trying to do, and he sort of like shrugged his shoulders and said, "You don't want me to do this? Fine, I won't." The reality was there was no law against him offering a stable coin. None at all. Uh he just he just didn't understand it and he was preoccupied with the metasphere or whatever the metaverse. It was the single biggest uh I think uh strategic blunder he's made. He's made a lot of

great decisions. I would say even launching the metaverse that the downside of that would have been swept under the rug had he launched a stable coin because maybe no other company on earth would have benefited more from a stable coin. Two and a half billion people being able to transact instantly at virtually no cost with with no risk of chargeback, no risk of payment fraud. That's wild. And um uh he could have done a blended currency that had you know various other currencies in it or he could have just done one where you know take the top five currencies in the world and you could pick your currency

how you want to transact with people on Facebook marketplaces or peer-to-peer payments. Uh to me that would have been a fabulous business and it would have blown Wall Street away once they realized how big of a deal it was allowing people to use it on WhatsApp and so forth. Uh but that will happen. Amazon will do it. Uh uh Apple will do it. Obviously Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, any company that has a large amount of enterprises or consumers should launch its own stable coin or it should do a a consortium type of play, a co-op. Now that's what the US banks are doing. uh you might have seen a month ago or so about 140 banks a and other

financial institutions came together and they said we're going to operate a cooperative and we're going to have a stable coin or maybe our own branded stable coins but they'll all be interchangeable. Uh it I I would say for anybody who wants to dig into this, it is a very similar model to what we saw the US banks do with the AC network back in the 60s. Uh it's a nonprofit cooperative that is just an interchange system that allows them to rapidly transfer money at virtually no cost. But now that will be even more effective and faster and less prone to fraud once you get uh a stable coin that everybody can

use. And and we you know there's an million ways this could go. I have fun sometimes sitting with my crypto friends trying to figure out will one crypto one stable coin be the dominant one like US dollar or will there'll be thousands tens of thousands of stable coins u I lean towards that I lean towards more people having different types of stable coins than I think one dominant but you know we'll know in 10 years >> real world assets like funds treasuries and private credit are still running on rails built decades ago. Gated, paperwork heavy, slow to settle.

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Bit stocks 2.0 is different. Real NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange depth through licensed brokers. Prices mapped one to one. Dividends paid to your account in real time. Plus, you get the lowest fees in the market at just 0.04%. 04% and you can trade them like any other crypto as margin in earn in grid trading. Tokenized stocks finally done right. Head to milkroad.com/bitgget to get started. >> William, I think it's it's a really fascinating subject and I I agree with you. It's going to take a long time to see all these things play out. But I'm glad you brought up this open USD project with this 140 different, you know, participants, this consortium they're building because I think a lot of people are wondering, is that sort of

the the future state that we get to where everybody has their own stable coin and they're sort of interoperable or do you think that there is continuing value to, you know, a single company like a Circle, like a Tether that issues their own stable coin and businesses just use that? Do you think that, you know, the market's going to like take a long time to figure this out and both will find a role or like how do you see these as like competitors or or um you know, sort of like uh cooperating in the uh continuing adoption of stable coins? >> Again, we could write books on this. Uh there's a lot of hypotheticals you pose there, all reasonable ones. Uh I guess I would say this the uh as a guy who's been investing in

technology and you know innovative platforms for 35 years now what I'd say is um the pattern seems to be this. there's a uh an innovation. Almost always uh a group of of uh new players see this innovation and figure out a way to to do something valuable with it. Uh pretty much every innovation I've ever seen, this is how it's happened. Obviously, crypto especially.

And and they get very good at it. Now one of two things happens that market that they invent with this new innovation get so big and valuable that these new these new companies effectively dominate that market forever and uh companies that were big that didn't try to go into that new market are just too small and of course the internet is the best example of this almost every giant company that we would call like internet centric was created natively as part of the the adoption of that platform, right? Google, Facebook,

um uh Amazon and and so forth, Alibaba. But if if the due to regulation, it's um it's hard for businesses, small businesses to use this new technology and do something with it. Crypto would be the perfect example. Then you give enough time to these slow ass big companies to gradually figure out and see what's going on and then they go one day, ah, this is actually something we should do. But they don't have to worry about these giant native emergent companies that have figured everything out before them because regulation is

strangled those companies. the fact that crypto is as important as it is and we basically have Circle and and Tether or Circle and um and Coinbase as you know the dominant public companies both puny market caps compared to like you know how we think of new industries. I mean, look at anthropic and open AAI, you know, trillion dollar market caps with no revenue and no business model that seems to work. But those guys have, you know, 20 times the market cap of a of a Coinbase. And the reason is because the regulators and the existing companies in

the financial markets did everything they could to kill crypto and they did a pretty good job of it. In the case therefore of something like a stable coin u the biggest one out there is tether and it's not that big you know it's got 180 billion under aum call it that I mean that's a very small little regional bank asset base compare that to the whatever $15 trillion base of a black rockck so the way I see it is the dominant stable coins are going to be issued issued by the giant banks, giant financial institutions and maybe

eventually central banks. But there'll be a role for private issuers like Tether and like and like Circle. I think the role there will be they will be more likely to embrace new technology because big old established financial institutions don't generally do that. They wait because they're run by a bunch of W2s. So they're afraid of doing anything. And so there is a role for for uh private issue stable coin issuers. But I think the the in terms of plugging stable coins into uh the existing $100 trillion global GDP annually that's going to be done by the big banks because the big

enterprises are going to use their traditional payment rails which are run by these big banks. And um maybe you'll see, you know, a certain group of people want to use the privately issued stable coins because they offer more capabilities, but um the big institutions are going to go with big financial institutions that offer them. And uh that consortium uh o what is it OSD or something? uh that that I suspect will do pretty well because it's going to have so many important member institutions and as I said there's an analog to it which is the AC network which is worked out incredibly well. Uh

the only thing they'll have to deal with is potential uh antitrust issues. So like the AC network they'll have to make it open and available to anyone who meets the standards. Um, and then the rest of the world will, you know, they'll have their own native systems. But, um, if you offered the Chinese an ability to have a tokenized dollar or a tokenized R&B, 99% of the time, they would say, "Give us a tokenized dollar." Uh, so as I've always said, this could be and the US government, the people there aren't smart enough to understand how a tokenized dollar would be make USD even more dominant than it already is. Uh,

but they don't understand it enough to figure out that they should be pushing for it. They shouldn't just be questioning it and wondering at this point whether it's a good idea. I think some of them are starting to wake up to that, which is why we're finally getting some movement on this. But you're right, we'll have to see how these things play out. I'm curious your thoughts on is as we see more of these like centralized entities, whether it's, you know, a company or a central bank, uh, start to bring out their versions of these digital asset products and services. Do you think that this drives demand in the market, appetite for things like Bitcoin, like Zcash, like Ethereum, things that are open, permissionless, censorship resistant digital assets? Do you think that that thesis gets stronger, you know, let's say over the next 5 to 10 years as some

of these more centralized uh, you know, fiat currencies start to come out as well or or like how do you see these things uh evolving together as we go forward here? >> I'm glad you asked these questions. I mean, if I knew the answer, you and I would be the richest men in the world to that. Um I'd say that is that's you know among the top three things we ponder as people who are deeply in the crypto world like with all this activity going on these the regulation that's trying to standardize the practice of stable coins for instance and and let's be clear like it shouldn't be controversial to say this but you always have these weirdo Bitcoin

maxis who think this the the real prize that came out of blockchain is clearly stable coins. That's the real prize. I mean, the trading volume of Tether alone dwarfs uh Bitcoin. So, stable coins is what really came out of it. Now, how that relates to all the other tokens that are out there, um it's uh we can only guess. You can make an argument that stable coins are a way to interact more easily with other tokens and therefore if you own a stable coin you kind of have a key to starting to try out these other tokens. But for the most

part, what drives the volume of these tokens? It's just arbitrage on big exchanges. And what have we seen in the last like 10 years? more and more trading volume concentrated in a smaller number of exchanges and um as maybe Robin Hood and other traditional uh uh regulated exchanges start to adopt stable coin trading or um other kind of tokenized asset trading, I think the concentration will even be more pronounced. And so either these other tokens are going to be orphaned and there'll be just a real small sideshow or there will be some utility people see

in them which will drive them to have relevancy and people will use. I'm not sure which one it is. I I see one one extremely strong argument for the existence of u let's say the nonstable coin and pretty much non bitcoin related cryptos and that is what I talked about earlier and and innovation it's much easier for those tokens to innovate new ideas to offer new services particularly in the area of defi right that you can do so much in defi that you could never do in the traditional financial markets.

So, um the the the desire of people to to innovate would probably push them more towards the permissionless blockchains where uh you can see all the code. It's not all IP protected and you can do things that simply will never happen or will take years to happen on a like a JP Morgan or a Robin Hood uh based uh chain. So for that reason, I don't see them going away. But in terms of capturing a market and keeping it on these permissionless uh open chains versus the highly regulated sort of closed chains that you see big companies want to do. Uh it'll

come down to a use case and and that just is a roll of the dice whether one where it goes one way or the other. >> Yeah. So it's still something we have to see happen. But I do agree with you. It's been really exciting to see a lot of the innovations that have come out of these um these blockchain ecosystems like Salana, Ethereum, and many others. Um and so I'm excited to see where that goes. William, we're getting close to time here, but I do want to ask you one final question. I know that, you know, crypto digital assets overall are in a bare market. I know that you've been sort of skeptical of the valuations that a lot of AI companies have had, but I'm really curious what you're excited about investing in right now. I've heard you say you're passionate about video games,

so you look in that area, but like, you know, at this point in this market, what what are you excited about investing in right now? What has your attention at this moment? >> Yeah, video gaming has been a strong interest of mine forever. Uh particularly once my partner and I developed uh the uh virtual item trading marketplaces, which we did very well with. Um, and and by the way, for your listeners to one of the reasons I did WAX, cuz I wanted to allow people to freely trade video game virtual items without the the game publishers uh shutting off your account, which everybody knows that's how it works. The only company that's been semi-open has been Valve, uh, where they've allowed

trading on some of their games, but most publishers hate it. Um, and so, uh, uh, but we never did find a an ability or a use case, uh, a mechanic for video games that worked really well with blockchain. Uh, it was mo mostly a lot of dgens just trying to trade a token to make money and and it didn't really add to the to the uh to the game entertainment value. Um I think uh real world asset tokenization is uh is the most uh interesting area to me. Uh there's it the the thesis there is very simple. The

way we trade assets is very clumsy. You have to do so much work to ensure that what is being traded is real. You know, there's all these fiduciaries that are checking things to make sure that the assets on any kind of big regulated exchange actually correspond to a real legal title to an interest in that asset, whatever it is, a commodity or a stock. So uh real world asset uh trading is using blockchain is is has very strong arguments for it and that that is where I put a fair amount of my time as well as new video game items. I um yeah

AI as you said I' I've been uh obviously everyone likes what you can do with AI so that's not the issue but I've been around long enough as investor to know um it's not enough to create value uh in fact you know you can make no money creating massive amounts of value and there's an infinite number of cases I could show you of that what you uh you have to figure out is a is a business model to capture for the value that you create. I don't know how to do that with a lot of these AI companies. Um, and to me, you know, listening to Sam Alman, he doesn't do it as much as he used to, but he talked a lot about the word utility,

right? Who here thinks investing in utilities is a is an amazing way to make money? They have reliable cash flows, but they're generally highly regulated. They're the public utility commissions dictate how much they can charge and they're massive capex dependent, right? And they're essentially inflexible too and what they can pivot into. So I never thought his his analogy of a utility was a very good one. Um but I think uh the hyperscalers have put in hundreds of billions soon trillions of dollars in what they're doing. I do question how they're going to get the

payback for that. I'm uh one of those people who's skeptical that LLMs are the the the final method we're going to uh roll out and use AI. So, um uh I would be very skeptical about these companies as public businesses and that's what I tell people who ask me for advice on that. Uh there's obviously a hype cycle where things become worth more than they than they're intrinsically worth. Uh but but eventually the market says, you know, as as uh Warren Buffett always said, the market in the long term is a weighing machine. It weighs how much cash you're generating. It's not a

popularity machine. uh when eventually these companies have not figured out a way to to return all of that capital that they invested in capex, they're not going to be worth much. So, um as a result, I'm still on the things that I think are quite attractive, profitable, and add a lot of value, real world assets. And then, you know, in the video gaming world, uh I wish there was something post AI, you know, uh that was interesting. I haven't seen that yet. I'm um I'm also a bit of a skeptic on how much value in in the next 25 years people are going to make in space-based businesses.

Similar reasons to AI very competitive uh you know no moat and uh and very capital intensive >> William Quigley co-founder of Tether and WAX very interested in video games. I love that about you and I I wanted to talk about that so I'm glad we got to talk about that a little bit but thank you so much for being on the Milkro show. Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online? >> I'm I'm on uh Twitter, whatever X uh mainly. I I don't publish a lot. You know, I speak a fair amount, but I don't publish a lot, but when I do have things I want to say, it's usually on on X >> and that's William Quigley.

>> I hope our audience will go find you there. Thanks so much again for being on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you all for joining us. I hope you all learned something today. So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of the Milk Road Show. Thanks for being here, everyone. Bye. Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event? Subscribe to our channel and join the Milk Road daily and pro newsletters and start investing like the top 1%. This show is for educational purposes only. Nothing we say is financial advice. Investing is risky. Never invest more than you can afford to lose.