Dan Morehead on Crypto's Biggest Year in 2025

[00:00:01]consensus Hong Kong 2025 is where the global crypto Community converges to shape the next era of web 3 from February 18th through the 20th Hong Kong becomes the meeting point for leaders across Finance technology and digital assets this isn't just a conference it's where deals are made Partnerships are forged and New Opportunities emerge consensus features exclusive networking lounges expert Le sessions and invaluable insights from Top industry voices whether you're expanding your network building your brand or closing your next big deal this is the event that moves markets visit coind des.com consensus dhk to secure your spot and use realvision 15 for 15% off don't miss your chance to be part of the industry's defining moment hi everyone sorry to interrupt but this is the cheesy podcast bit that gets on everyone's nerves but it's really important to me please if you can like the channel and also subscribe it helps me a lot to get the best guess in the world for you guys so click like And subscribe appreciate it thanks he everyone sorry to interrupt but this is the cheesy podcast bit that gets on everyone's nerves but it's really important to me please if you can like the channel and also subscribe it helps me a lot to get the best guest in the world for you guys so click like And subscribe appreciate it thanks join me Ral pal as I go on a journey of Discovery through the macro crypto and exponential age landscapes in the journey man I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together Dan Morehead how the devil are you I'm great it's good to see you again yeah always good to see you my friend hope you had a good break over Christmas and New Year it's good and um you know black never stop so the markets get more interesting every year you know you and I have probably known each other 25 years and been doing crypto together for a decade feels like 2025 is going to be one of the big ones for me it's all feeling a little bit like 2017 all over again there's there's a lot of similarities and well I want to hear all of your thoughts of let's talk about 2025 because I think it's what people want to hear you've got some views on it there's a lot going on politics regulation macro everything so let on me you know sometimes a lot of bad things happen at the same time and then you know sometimes a lot of things uh are all positive at the same time and that's what I'm feeling about right now is that you know the lack of regulatory Clarity uh was essentially holding the industry back for a while and we've had some big uh changes like the largest ETF of all time happening a year ago uh and then you know the election should bring you know more changes in the US and you know the US does lead the world in um you know kind of regulatory you know uh kind of feelings or or The Impressions that that investors get and so I think this year having all that uh kind of change should be good for our market so we'll dig into some of that but let's start with the macro because you and I are macro guys at heart the macro and I don't know if you knew Scott Besson I I met him back in the day when we were both running hedge funds yeah and I've Scott for a while as well so I want to see what your where you think the macro is and how the the new Administration might fit into that hi R here listen I think we've got until 2030 before the economic Singularity arrives now it might not be the exact date but it's around then so we have about six years to figure out how to unfuck our future I've put together a report to help you called prepare for 2030 it's going to help you take the first steps in that journey to make sure you're secure past 2030 so just click on the link below and start your journey now I've had a very out of consensus view on Macro for three four years now actually um I think the economy is just red hot and uh the FED made a massive mistake keeping rates way too low way too long and as you know kind of unwinding mistakes is a lot harder than kind of doing a little bit at at the time if you think back back um March 2022 fed funds were minus 830 basis points real rates fed funds were still zero and inflation was 88.3% that's just a massive massive uh kind of inflation impulse and then of course the FED bought 9 trillion of debt and basically dared everybody in America to buy a house and they did a record number of people bought houses every house in the entire country is up 40% from when they started and so those are massive inflationary impulses and they really take a long time uh to to work through and so I think the FED um you know really has no room to cut and I did notice the first time a newspaper article about maybe starting to tighten and and that was uh my prediction back in December of 2021 fed funds were zero and the 10e note was 1.3 and I said both were going to five and staying there for a long time and that's still my view I think fed funds should be five or higher right and um I think rates probably are going long rates are probably going up the 10e notes only 100 basis points over inflation that's that's not really paying you to take that kind of risk so the big picture on on macro is I think the fed you know has to keep uh keep tightening or staying tight or tightening the issue is with that is because they have to refile the debt you end up increasing the debt burden all the time yeah how do they deal with that because you know they don't really want to do QE because everyone knows what the game is which is money printing how do they deal with the excess Supply that comes from just having higher rates without you know a lot of the debt increase is just the servicing of the debt itself uh yeah you my friend if you knew the answer you'd be smarter than me I have no idea how they get out of this it's really tough uh the US now spends more on interest than they do on defense which is a wild place to be um the deficit is 6% of GDP in literally the best of times like there's you know full employment everything's great like if you have a 6% deficit when everything's as good as it possibly get you know what's going to happen when you know some kind of uh rainy day shock happens so uh so I actually literally don't know and that's why I'm so bullish blockchain because it ain't going to be good for paper money is basically the answer however I I don't know which way the government's going to try and get out of this but the us went essentially to an adjustable rate mortgage a while ago and financed all the debt at very very short intervals it's all coming due as you say has to be rolled over uh rates you know used to be 1.3 for a tenure they should have done a lot of thatb issuance at that level it's 4.3 now and it could be 5.3 or 6.3 in the next few years so um I I really am worried you know as a as an American citizen like how how's our government going to get out of of this cuz they have an enormous amount of debt they're piling on 6% of GDP every year you know that's a huge new amount of debt rates are heading High they're much higher than they used to be heading higher um and most countries when fac with that you know inflate the rate out of it you know it's uh us hasn't historically done that uh there's only 13 countries on Earth that have not defaulted on their debt or had inflation above 20% the US is one of them uh so the US hasn't done it but like they could my view is that they do it more slowly using debasement so that's the liquidity the printing of money in lots of hidden ways there's lots of ways throughout the system and from my measurement the global central banks and and governments combined are increasing the global supply of money or debasing the currency by about 8% a year so it's like it's a tax you don't see most people don't understand it the price of scarce assets keeps Rising because you're lowering the denominator you know this from Emerging Market Days most people don't really understand this mechanism but that's what that's what happens so you know your wages don't go as far and the assets keep going up to make housing unaffordable and 8% a year but the flip side of that is without doing that you end up with a huge crisis which is even worse so I kind of it's a rock and a hard place right no I I agree with you and and um we have seen this movie before in the EM markets that we were in all those years and inflating your way out by printing more money is is really the the common way people get out of this and so I think it's going to happen and that's why I think you're right that when you talk about the value of scarce assets when priced in paper money terms keeps going up right Gold's at a record high you know stocks are at record high real estate's record high bitcoin's record high maybe they're not moving it's the price of paper money that's going down right and and panta once did a graph that probably old Twitter feed would have of the price of all those things price of the US dollar price in bushels of corn you know a share of the S&P 500 gold an ounce of gold and it's pretty much the same graph it's the price of paper money that's crashing rather than the price of all these things going up relative to each other what I've been doing at Global macro investor is dividing all assets via um via Global liquidity which is an index we build and what you find is the S&P 500's pretty much gone nowhere there's a bit of growth driven by the tech stocks gold has gone nowhere Real estate's Gone nowhere none of this has gone anywhere except NASDAQ and crypto obviously because they're both technologies that are being adopted and crypto is the big outperformer so I found that yeah a hurdle rate for assets is 8% a year for debasement plus let's say 3% inflation is 11% just as a hurdle rate which people haven't got their heads around yet yeah and that that really is the story for fixed quantity things like Bitcoin or other cryptos is that if the governments around the world are currently debasing at 8% a year they're probably going to have to speed up um you know why be in something you know is is being debased right uh why not be in something that that has at least kept up with inflation like a bunch of those things you just mentioned like gold and S&P or hey why not get into something our our our Bitcoin fund's 11 years old it has a 90% compound annual growth rate right it almost doubles every year that's pretty good compared to minus 8 right like Plus 90 versus minus 8 and again you know investors shouldn't put they shouldn't put 100% of net worth into crypto but like uh for the majority of institut you and know I've been there for a while 100% what no that that was that was probably not a good idea probably you know put a little pressure on the the spouse and everything but uh yeah uh but you know if you're you know somebody who doesn't have any exposure yet you know you really should have some to to essentially hedge the risk that governments do uh continue to debase their currencies if you think about currency debasement it used to be pretty straightforward right when I was a kid silver colored money was silver right like dimes and quarters were made out of silver and now they're made out of some cheap uh alloy right and even pennies right pennies used to be made out of copper it's a fiveyear criminal sentence if you melt a penny in the United States because the intrinsic value of a old school real penny is more than one cent right and so the government has to criminalize accessing intrinsic value there and my favorite one is a pound sterling right is of course used to be worth a pound of sterling silver it costs 184 pieces of paper pound sterling to buy a pound of sterling silver so governments are really good at debasing currencies unfortunately I think they're speeding up like all the stuff that you're talking about with deficits and and you know paying more more in interest than than defense speeding up and so you know again that's why everyone's going to crypto you know a couple hundred million people are using crypto now four billion people have a smartphone and that's all you need to operate crypto so um seems like a billion people will be using crypto in the next say three four years yeah I mean I've got um my measure for to get to a billion I think it could be yeah two or three years probably it's reasonably fast the other one of the macro before we move on from that is um when you look at the the rolling debasement it like 2017 the US were actually tightening the balance sheet raising rates and um and M2 was falling so all liquidity was shrinking in the us at the time they used their general account uh because after the election and the debt ceiling the big one in 2017 was the Chinese and it feels like we're we're about to replace that exact rule book again because the Dollar's been too strong for them they're pretty [ __ ] they're going through a debt deflation they've got the Aging population slow growth we've seen the entire rule B before right oh yeah yeah no I I agree and you know China's always the unique interesting different thing out there and at some point we'll probably get around to talking about what I think is going to be an arms race to acquire Bitcoin once the US has a Bitcoin strategic Reserve in China being the most interesting one because they have their entire history Savings in an asset the US Treasury secretary can cancel I mean that's pretty wild right like they have $2 trillion do in something that if things became more adversarial uh you know the United States could cancel so they're going to have to take a hard look at Bitcoin as a strategic savings vehicle over us treasury notes so that that as well could put pressure on rates in the United States as foreign Nation decide they need to save in something other than us treasuries so let's talk about that um about the Bitcoin strategic Reserve what format do you think it's going to be because we we saw some noise on tape today that it might not just be Bitcoin it might be other us um crypto assets you know xrp or whatever it may be salana um what's your thought on all of this is the US going to be openly buying crypto is it going to be stuff that they've they've seized and ongoing seizure from Criminal stuff what do you think the US does own 1% of all the world's Bitcoins already um and um we actually participated in the first US Marshall Service auction in 2014 or whatever that was uh which is really cool to see the US Marshall service star on the Bitcoin page you know um so I I you know this is just my own professional hunches but I think what'll happen is the US will do a strategic Reserve but just Bitcoin um the analog would be old school gold Fort Knox we have an enormous amount of gold stored as a currency uh Reserve we don't have padium or silver or anything else right like so it's easy to get one very well-known thing that has 60 something per marget share through so if our bet man I would say it's just a Bitcoin strategic Reserve not kind of blockchain generally and there's actually three different ways the president could or the United States could acquire uh new Bitcoins uh the first one is uh the president could decide to direct the US Marshal Service to stop selling the Bitcoins that the US has seized from criminals um that is about $14 billion do of uh of crypto and for comparison we have 650 billion of old school gold so you know it's a it's a pretty small amount relative to other things um there is a old thing called The Exchange stabilization fund which allows the president by executive order to stabilize currencies you know and I no one's tested their Bitcoins like a currency or not a currency in that definition but it probably is so the president could do some of that uh and then Congress I think would have to pass uh any legislation to buy like a significant amount like we really wanted it to do you know some times people talk about buying a million Bitcoins or whatever uh that would take Congress but there's been a huge swing in Congress too so it's not un Unthinkable you know obviously prior to this election that that would have been Unthinkable but uh from what Tally's I've seen the majority of the people in the house 270 or so support crypto and in the Senate it's probably a lot less maybe 20 or 25 uh so it's it's it's definitely uh something that could happen but the point being there's three different ways that Bitcoin could end up uh staying on or getting bought by the US government and I think at least one or two of those will happen and maybe all three and then that begs the question of who next we know the Middle East is doing it whether it's via their family offices but maybe not directly in the Sovereign wealth funds it makes total sense for them because they want to be part of this entire thing so what do you think Middle East next major player yeah yeah I think you're spot on like um I think it's very sensible that the US save in something other than just gold um you know Gold's been great for 5,000 years but you know it's passed itself cell by date digital Gold's a great thing so I think you know the US will do it and then once the US does it you're right there are all kinds of both strategic alliances and competitive Dynamics out there and and that's the thing I think people forget is it does seem likely that that places like the gulf uh that want to stay align with the United States will will replicate a strategic Reserve that seems to make sense but equally it I I think the countries that view themselves as adversarial to the United States would want to hedge you know uh China being an obvious one but there's a lot of countries out there you know they're certainly not fully aligned with the United States and would want to say at least have some of their uh savings or FX reserves in a currency that's independent of you know whatever the US Treasury secretary wants to do so um I I think you're going to see it from both sides the the US and people that want to be aligned with it uh and then people that are worried about us hemony in the financial syst yeah I mean it was one of the most I think you wrote about this as well I'm sure we spoke about it one of the biggest mistakes I think the US made was the seizing of the Russian private assets and then the seizing of the reserves essentially making them worthless because that sent a signal to everybody that US money is not good well it certainly sends a signal that you don't want to have all of your savings and something that somebody could seize and so you know I think on the margin that's going to you know encourage countries to think about saving in a stateless currency right like that's what Bitcoin is is a separation of money and state right so it's a currency does everything other currencies do but it's not controlled by any one uh Nation so if we're looking at the US regulatory sub what what are you expecting to change you know because I'm starting to think you know how far do we move towards back towards some variation of icos for example because it is a great vehicle for Capital formation needs tightening up you know you know things like the US users can't use perss and other margin products while everybody else can where do you see the regulatory landscape shifting over the next year or so yeah I actually don't spend a ton of time on the regulatory side since we can't really influence it ourselves um the main theme though is regulatory Clarity and that's been I think what's lacking is that uh because of the lack of clarity some things like trading of tokens went offshore to place like the Bahamas and you know we've had some uh negative consequences from that so I think any Clarity that the agencies in the United States could provide will be helpful and um I had served as chairman at bitstamp for a long time and it is difficult to manage a business when there's nothing written down you have no idea what is a security what's not a security so as soon as there's more clarity on that that will help and then I I think the bigger part is to help instit institions get engaged in the space in 2021 and 2022 a lot of uh very big uh institutions were doing a ton of work going to get engaged some did some small investments in the space and then you know we had you know teral Luna and FTX and all these bad things happen and with the lack of regulatory Clarity it kind of scared off a lot of Institutions and they put it on ice that's my biggest prediction is that once we do have regulatory Clarity bigger institutions will come back to the space over the next two years and really start investing in in a real way I also think the finance sector will go all out for this as well because they know how much efficiency is within this whether it's in the payments or whether it's tokenizing equities and all other kind of financial assets for settlement clearing everything else uh it feels like that is going to be whether it's this cycle or next cycle but that's going to be enormous when that happens no I agree with you and um I think the ETF was huge in in kind of breaking that Log Jam where for years I'd be out there evangelizing for for blockchain and you know you talking some firm and they would say oh we can't invest in Bitcoin for compliance Reasons I'm like well that's interesting I've run a couple compliance departments and uh I have no idea what you mean what what do you actually mean by that like why can't you do Bitcoin for compliance reasons and then they just give the circular well for compliance reasons you know and so now that black rock and all these very reputable firms have Bitcoin products out there that just kills that that was kind of the last you know inan reason to say no but it was a reason a lot of big entities said no but now that you have you know uh 35 billion dollars float into branded ETFs you know like uh Black Rock and Fidelity and bitwise and others so with that I think it opens it up and you're right Wall Street you know spends bill each Company on Wall Street spends billions on all these silo databases and then every day they have to reconcile them to their own databases inside and then they got to reconcile to the outside clearing houses and all that stuff and I think that'll take you know the better part of a decade for all that to really actually happen but it's coming and uh Mike kagne at figures a very good leading example that he had previously been a macr Trader with us back in the day and then a a founded Sofi and they're doing mortgages on the blockchain and I actually started out as a mortgage Securities Trader and it's amazing how many people take a bite out of your mortgage payment right like there's all the services and the people you know it takes 55 days for the check to get from one person to the other person so putting in on the blockchain is is very efficient and his his uh company figure uh already has 10 billion of mortgages on the blockchain you know like and everyone's talking about rwas you know that's real like that's a real world asset and there's 10 billion of it already on the blockchain so those are the things that are helped big institutions get in the space most the main um alternative managers you know like Apollo and black rock they're doing funds now they're on the blockchain um you know I think those are a bit more proof of concept than than you know huge uh hugely important today but it just you know opens the the direction we're going uh Grant another great example Ando is putting treasuries on the blockchain and so you know the us as you said needs to export two trillion of debt every year right and what better thing than via you know Ando or stable coins cuz you're finding new buyers in every little Hamlet on earth right anybody the smartphone can now be a lone government loan money to the US government right like anybody with a a smartphone in the weirdest corner of the Earth can buy a treasury on onto or whatever so you know there's that kind of stuff that is actually happening in the real world yeah the the other thing that we're looking at at real vision and where are the world's moving is I think we will disrupt Asset Management itself the idea of crowdsourced tokenized asset management where people form an opinion about maybe this is a basket to invest in you spin up a token and it creates the ability for people to create their own product there's no real reason we have asset managers in many instances you know any group of smart well educated people can get together and and try and outperform versus hedge funds or benchmarks or whatever it is oh yeah no I I I love that concept that if there's some talented managers wherever they are around the world you can have all kinds of League tables that show their uh risk adjusted Returns versus everybody else the money can flow to the better managers you know all that is is possible and it you know it's it's certainly coming and my favorite example that was Constitution Dow you know remember that a couple years ago yeah where in days a group of people that did not know each other didn't trust each other had no reason to be connected decided they were interested in the same thing purchasing the last privately held copy of the US Constitution they got $40 million together in a few days and they went into Christy's or other I forget which auction house had it and competed with it and the fun bit about that you know it they didn't win Ken Griffin the Ken Griffin stole it from them didn't he yeah yeah you know the founder of Citadel uh quote one the auction but the the the the concept was so cool to see and their final tweet was how much for Citadel and that is what it's about right it's like you can get a group of people maybe millions of people together and they could do that like start buying money managers and start you know intermediating you know credit and all that kind of stuff so it it's definitely going to happen well look at the instantaneous Capital formation that's happening on pump. fun and mean coins right so forget whether you care about the mean coins or not what you've got is instant Capital formation and instant value acrel sure which is to your point we've now gone from the um the the Dow idea to suddenly super liquid instant pools of capsule that follow an idea yeah it's you know as you say this is coming at everybody very fast they don't realize it but this is where it's going no no I agree I think it is fascinating and obviously there's going to be some things that flame out and go to zero and then there's going to be some things that that work well you know and that's what you know the creative destruction of of the markets are all about but I agree with you it's it's it's doing everything much faster and and much more distributed right or you know it's letting anyone with a smartphone participate in the financial markets so then that begs the question is where does that leave VC in like four years time BR it's a great question theoretically nowhere right we're going to get totally disintermediated and this little Dow is going to run everything but um you know I remember stepping onto the trading floor in 1987 and go wow this is all going to get arbed out it's it's all over a couple years and this all be over and you know 40 years later you know Wall Street Goldman reported 15 billion of revenues or whatever right like and so you know even though theoretically I kind of agree with it someday you know all that'll get arbed out I think it'll take you know more than our career to see that through you know that that yes in the future there are going to be decentralized things that have you know very strongly competed with Venture Capital funds or other types of products that coming that's decades the one that is coming is you know stable coins are basically money market funds on the on the blockchain right and that's that's working you know those work really well and so you know stable coins are the simplest proof of that obviously because it's very simple investment strategy compared to venture capital but it's the first step yeah it's super powerful so in terms of panta what kind of investors are you seeing and are you seeing it more on the VC side more on the liquid side hybrid you know what what are you seeing out there right now I don't think it's been the best Capital raising environment last year there was some money but not a great deal but what are you seeing what what's the trend and who's coming in yeah so that's a a good question and I actually don't know the answer to um we were fortunate to raise our last fund right before the bare Market in 2021 and so we had a lot of capital to invest when everything was really cheap uh we're going to finish up our current fourth Venture fund by next summer and so we're raising our fifth fund uh right now and through 2025 uh so we're just at the beginning of those conversations I would say though they're much more constructive than they were three four years ago when we were doing it last time um and in particular the Middle East uh the the GCC Nations you know much more interested than they they were earlier um and you know for them it actually makes a ton of sense because it's a it's essentially a frontier Market that has three trillion in market cap you know like the days you know we wander around trying to invest in Sudan or something like that you know you get like a half a million dollars into it here like you could put a lot of money to work in blockchain so it really does suit the needs of uh big investors like The Sovereign wealth funds in the gulf and that's my mental model of all of this is we're building a new economy it's going to go from three trillion today to 100 trillion maybe within 10 years and that is going to be the fastest growing economy of all time obviously the fastest ACR of wealth but it acts like an economy too it has GDP there's all sorts of things and it makes ttal sense when you say well they can look at this as a frontier economy that is highly investable yeah it is in particular you know Bitcoin traes 40 billion a day or whatever you know like you could put an enormous uh of assets into it so again that's why I think it's a it's a great space um because if you zoom all the way back you know uh when we were at Goldman they did the gsci and now everybody thinks of commodities is an asset class of course and then in '90s we were doing em together and everybody thinks of em is an asset class I think it's the same thing here you know in 10 years everybody's going to think of blockchain as an asset class they're all going to have an allocation uh and with most people starting literally at zero allocation today and you know they put whatever 600 basis points whatever the ultimate number is going to be and it it's going to drive value up and and the the cool thing is it's already investable now there's you know a few firms in the space that do it and few uh uh you know public companies and you know so it's already an investable space so what excites you in 2025 in the crypto markets overall what kind of areas are interesting to you the fun bit about blockchain is there's dozens of interesting use cases so you know there's a lot of things that we've been focused on um the the probably the biggest of them is the intersection of AI and crypto uh obviously AI is AI is a big thing it's impacting lots of uh markets but it really needs crypto and that's something that's very important that uh you know an AI agent's not going to go uh get an account at Chase Manhattan bank right like you know so they need a natively crypto way to do business blockchain is it and so there's a ton of applications for payments within the the AI space the other one is you know AI is um you know best if it's not controlled by one person we tried that in social media and other things and it's a little it's a little tricky uh and so I'm a big believer that AI is going to be way better if it's decentralized both in governance and ownership uh and so we've invested in a handful of projects like Cent and Sahara that are trying to help uh the ecosystem for decentralized AI and then the last bit of that is the models have grown so fast they're so big and there's so much Hardware being thrown at it they've essentially learned from everything that's free on the internet you know they've they've read the internet and learned from it and blockchain is great at incentivizing people and you need incentives to get more data into the next generation of models and so we've invested a handful of projects that help uh incentivize people to contribute more data than they currently just have out publicly yeah because there is so much private data that everybody's got in all sorts of things that we don't acove value to or don't think it has value but we don't know what to do with it if we can yeah crave some economic value for that data exactly like if if you could give someone a financial incentive to to share something that's personal data or medical data or whatever they will what do you think about Barry silber's idea because I saw him recently at his event in uh in in ohigh uh about to and so the infrastructure layer part of of of the AI kind of protocols that are out there outside of the asianff any views on any of that I can't figure it out but yeah I don't have a strong view um on that project but I'm just the problem is with AI there's a lot of complication there's a lot of things that are too early to get real signal from as well you know the agents that we see online and not really Asian stuff like that what about what else is interesting to you defi where do you think that's going do I think stable coins are just going to continue to explode right no I agree stable coin solve a very very important use case uh there's a lot of cool prod projects out there that are allocating yield you know uh back to the users and there's all kinds of things that can happen there um you know we're still actually focused a lot on the competition in the layer one space you know that um been big investors in slana over the last uh year or so um and then one of the projects that we're invested in I think is fascinating is telegram's uh ton token because almost all the projects and according to uh coin market cap there's 24,000 projects out there almost all of them are very cool technology that's trying to build a community and it's been done but it's very hard to do that uh whereas ton is a massive Community almost a billion people that's trying to do blockchain and um that's probably not as hard uh to do and they have been able to uh spin up projects that are so much bigger than anything else that's out there just cuz they have hundreds of millions of people that could actually participate and and they're the only billion person community that can do blockchain right now uh Facebook tried to do it and they did a gorgeous design of a project you know four or five years ago uh but Regulators let that down U and in the big communities in China don't have the ability to do things so telegrams is interesting because they're the only massive community Comm that is doing blockchain and obviously you need a digitally native payment system on you know social media so um it's one of those things and we we actually did try it gosh seven years ago with kick Messengers uh Ken ecosystem right like it's a great idea that we tried earlier um maybe too early maybe got bad bad luck with um regulation back then or something but it's one of those ideas that has to happen we think T has a great shot of doing it if they don't do it somebody else will do it and also interesting to see Manny staltz coming in as the CEO and I've known Manny for a long time you probably have as well and they moved towards the us because there was always a lot of concerns around ton because of the ecosystem and you know the secrecy that was involved and all of that but it seems like they're coming towards the us and not away which is very interesting no I think that's good and again that's part of the whole thing about regulatory Clarity just help both sides right like if we both know what's permissible what's not permissible then you know we can create things and make products to help consumers right like we're trying to help people uh get things done and the alternative are really expensive you know migrants spend a months wages on their remittance companies right uh Visa Mastercard charges 300 basis points you know those things are very very expensive so I think it is good for the government to engage these systems that will allow people to move value and at a very very small fraction of what it costs right now you know so obviously there's some work to do but it's good that uh Nana is looking at the US now and do you think we're going to start to see the IPO Market open up for crypto firms now as well because there's a bunch of firms that have been waiting to go and it NE the VC Market the whole system needs the recycling of capital and it's been very slow for that stuff but we need Circle to go and maybe kenso and a whole bunch of these things any thoughts on that I agree with you it's it's massively important and um I'm very optimistic you know Circle a great company um we've actually been invested in it for 10 years right and it's huge it's valuable it's really good they should be public and so hopefully they go public and you know frankly you know micro strategy shows how much desire there is for people to invest in something in the stock market that's positively correlated with crypto I think it'd be great for industry if we had you know a lot more public companies rather than just a couple and um Circle going public would be fantastic uh any of those companies you mentioned Kraken you there's some other good ones uh that are close behind so I I think it would be great and you know again it's a three trillion Doll Market that only has a couple public companies it's crazy right well I mean that's almost the point of it as well right in the end you know the public markets will be on blockchain you know it it's going to absorb all of this in the end yeah but I'm I'm I would love to see that happen um and then you know people could be trading go short you know if people don't like crypto companies it be short and you know all those things you really develop a normal market for crypto so you've been in this business a long time what are you seeing today that you didn't think you'd be seeing 10 12 years ago when you started looking at this I mean are you not thinking it's slightly La La Land now we've got you know and whole Administration that's in entirely behind it holding crypto balls and you know did you did you think we get here you know that's that is a good question I love that um just thinking back to the earliest days what were you thinking the world would be like versus what it is like yeah you're right and so there's a lot of things that we thought would happen overnight that you know haven't happened even in 10 years and all that um so yeah I would I would say that the nominees for Trump's cabinet and all of his picks from the vice president down his special advisers like Doge they seem literally universally very Pro crypto I mean I'm sure there's one or two out there that that aren't but like every time I hear a new name it's somebody that you know massive owner of crypto super positive on crypto so that really is pretty wild right that in the and that you and I are talking about a strategic Bitcoin Reserve I mean this is not yeah yeah yeah I um yeah I agree that the change is pretty St because uh president Trump did Go Pro crypto in early May so if we were sitting around in April of last year and said all that was going to happen that you would not have gotten many Believers so that that I would have to say is the most uh the biggest surprise the biggest change the other thing that I think is not yet thought enough about is the change in the Dynamics in Congress right so for a long time it was okay to be just a complete reactionary nut of anti-crypto person in Congress right you could just say all the old oh there's you know bad things happening on you know Bitcoin or whatever you know all that kind of old crazy stuff there's bad things happening with the US dollar that Swift you know cash all you know there are bad people and they they sometimes used all these different Payment Systems so you know there were a lot of negative people and they really influenced policy in the midterm elections the crypto super packs went 34 and four but no one seem to notice it just kind of you know they did a good job but it kind of went below the radar screen maybe because no Senators you know were up but this time you know uh you had handful of anti-crypto senators get get defeated and uh the crypto packs I think went 54 and four this time right and spent invested whatever you want to call it $200 million in the election cycle when you go 54 and4 people notice it right and so my kind of UNC consensus um observation would be I think you've heard the last anti- crypto stuff out of Congress forever right like I who who's the no voter out there like who's the constituent that's like you know if my Senator like Goes Pro crypto I'm voting for the other guy like who there's nobody out there like that right and so with no constituent out there being negative and 50 million Americans owning crypto and being positive and the Young Generation that they want the Young Generation it's crazy to be anti- crypto it really is it's crazy and then you know obviously you know Free Speech isn't free it cost a lot of money to to run elections and the crypto packs invested a lot of money and so you know I think the the huge change is not that Republican one the president the year the the house the Senate is I think forever you're not going to have anti-crypto people in Congress cuz it was crazy all the time like there was no reason to be anti- crypto but like you know they all want to get reelected they just they just saw what happened and the most amazing things is what you mention the young voters right and this is a theme that we've talked about a ton in our investor letters the majority of Americans are under 40 and young people love crypto and so there's no acts to be anti crypto like if you want to get elected and those people vote right and so this last election uh 2024 had something I haven't heard in decades young Republicans yes the majority complete change of males under 30 years old voted for the red candidate right I that doesn't happen right and even females under 30 swung 14 points towards president Trump which is got to be crypto right like there isn't you know so to my mind that's the huge change is that young people vote they love crypto the other candidate was not positive on crypto the Republican candidate was and as you know there are a lot of single-issue Voters out there and they love crypto so much if you're going to take it away from them you are taking away their hopes and dreams fact right you do not do that people are young kids are [ __ ] they can't buy a house they're never going to earn enough money they're so far behind in the economic system and you take the one shot that they have and you think they're going to vote for you never going to happen you know I I I actually totally agree with you I think that uh that the policies of the fed and Congress for the last four or five years inflated away the ability to buy a house for a lot of people and you know you own a house I own a house so I'm fine right but 35% of Americans don't right like and they just got you know really bad policy driven to them and so it is rational to buy crypto right like all my kids friends when they're like hey should I invest in I'm like yes like it's it really is a rational way to to get yeah to get invested in the space and then as each generation cohort you know gets older they'll be buying more and that's why I'm so bullish on crypto for a lot of reasons but huge one is that is that you know this the current uh generation of I was going to say 20s somethings but you know you buy crypto with you know your smartphone when you're unbanked right that's everyone always thinks of unbanked as some adult walk around Africa right no it's a kid in New Jersey right is unbanked right but they can buy crypto um so yeah I I do agree with you and that's why I think it's a huge kind of sociopolitical issue and I think it's amazing that uh the Democrats didn't get that and it feels like it's a progressive Democrat thing no I know I we actually published a piece called the progressives dream listing all the features of Bitcoin this thing is the Dream from a progressive right like Financial inclusion for all four billion people on Earth and like no remittance fees and like it's amazing how they they shouldn't have made it partisan anyway but like to the extent it became partisan it should have been the other way around right it should have been the dims that were like oh Bitcoins they green product right get rid of all the bad Bank CEOs and the you know R companies all that stuff so so I agree with you that's why that's why I'm really pumped because they're mobilized now these young people vote they're going to make stuff happen and it's that's great I I really I really love seeing that yeah it's super exciting I'm talking to you I've just realized I think I might have orange pilled Scott Besson he came to my house in Spain for the global macro investor Round Table I think Dan tapiero was there um a bunch of other people that we know and he came for the r table because he was a global macro investor subscriber when he was at Soros and that's when I think ail Woods first pitched Bitcoin that's great that is great so maybe maybe yeah I orange pilled Scott back in the day oh that's great so final question for you why do you still do what you do why do you not become Wiis and just disappear what what motivates Dan to be at work building panta doing all this stuff when really you could just disappear quietly you won the game you won the greatest macro trade of all time went may be one of the greatest macro trades of all time but you up there with it so why oh so I thought about this early in the game and I still believe it is it um you know you and I have been you know investing money managing funds and things and yeah you know we probably help some p plan give another basis point to their beneficiaries right you know like you know trade dollan and you know all this stuff it's it's been good we've been successful at it but like in the end like does it really do much right I'm so passionate because this is going to change the world right blockchain is so important it's going to have a massive positive impact and we just talked about it literally for a billion people in the next few years right all the migrants that don't have to pay a month's wages the the remins company all that stuff just fun right and if I could be just like a tiny bit of pushing that change over the Finish Line it's great and so I I just I'm so energized by what you know what the community is doing together uh I really do want to just kind of see what I can do to kind of nudge it you know keep pushing it over the over the edge you can see the small in your face that you actually just still love it no it's great and it every every day something new and crazy comes up really is fun and sometimes you get maxed out and like your brain's about to overheat but um you know it keeps evolving and you know people often ask you know like what inning are we in you know we're really in the first inning still most funds have zero exposure most people you know have nothing you know really meaningful in the space so we're we're still I think there's decades more to go and yeah maybe I can't keep doing this for decades but like it's fun to do it you know to kind of get it to escape gate velocity right yeah and I as I said how I think about it and when we talk about it at our Thunder funds it's really with 3% of the journey if it's going to a 100 trillion and it's only three you're like when people say is it too late you're like it's only 3% of the way there yeah and therefore just relax it'll all play out over time I really agree with your broad stroke's view of how far we are and for 11 years people have been saying oh it's too late I missed it no you didn't miss it it just keeps going up and so um if it on average doubles every year the 11 years I've been doing this like yeah what if it only does it one more year like you still doubled your money right like and it might do it for another 10 years or whatever and and again like my main thing is don't put more than you could lose into crypto because it could go down 80% next week but you gota have some in it you know Dan as ever fantastic conversation my friend good to see you and let's see how 2025 plays out we're all pretty bullish and uh let's see great thank you so much fun convers as ever fabulous conversation with Dan you can see that this really is the greatest macro opportunity of all time Dan's certain of it he's been on that trade from day one and I've been on this trade for a long time too it is the greatest macro risk-taking opportunity the world has ever given us and our job is to not [ __ ] this up so I wish you luck follow the principles of don't [ __ ] this up make sure that you wise up get the knowledge that you need understand how to manage risk and then go for it see you out there consensus Hong Kong 20125 is where the global crypto Community converges to shape the next era of web 3 from February 18th through the 20th Hong Kong becomes the meeting point 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