Latest / CRYPTO 101 / Ep. 762 Why the Next Big Crypto Winners Might Not Have Tokens with David Wachsman

Transcript

Ep. 762 Why the Next Big Crypto Winners Might Not Have Tokens with David Wachsman · CRYPTO 101

0:09
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, everybody.
0:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back to another action packed high caliber episode here of the crypto 101 podcast.
0:15
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm your co-host Bryce Paul as always joined by my good buddy, Brendan Viman looks like Brendan got a little cat scratch fever.
0:23
[SPEAKER_02]: This bull market.
0:24
[SPEAKER_02]: What's going on, Brendan?
0:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I love the tell you I was fighting the bears away I was trying to do a good deed for all of crypto currency got in a huge fight with all of the bears out there but unfortunately it's not as cool as that it's just the good old sun here in Florida taking away a little bit of me at a time but nothing serious.
0:45
[SPEAKER_02]: little dermatology appointment gone wrong.
0:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, thanks for joining us despite hopefully everybody's just listening today and not on YouTube.
0:54
[SPEAKER_02]: No, just kidding.
0:55
[SPEAKER_02]: We've got a very studly guest today and somebody who's not bandaged up, but we've got David Waxman, who is the president of Hawkeye Digital and the founder of Waxman joining us today.
1:08
[SPEAKER_02]: David, how are you?
1:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It's great to be here.
1:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm also here in Miami and I've got a safe Brendan.
1:14
[SPEAKER_01]: We haven't had that much sun recently.
1:16
[SPEAKER_01]: So I know it's kind of shameful.
1:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I know.
1:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just, uh, I can't be able to adjust.
1:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not a local.
1:25
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think my skin's just in the process of adjusting to this Florida weather.
1:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's gotta be it.
1:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
1:32
[SPEAKER_02]: David, we we greatly appreciate the the opportunity to speak with you today.
1:36
[SPEAKER_02]: We've worked with your company.
1:38
[SPEAKER_02]: for a long, long, long time.
1:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I would say, even since the inception of this podcast, Waxman is an incredible firm representing many of the top crypto leaders in the space.
1:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we wanna start with a little bit of your background and just have the audience get to know you and then we'll dive into a little bit about what you're working on today with Hawkeye Digital.
2:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure, so back in early 2014, I was working for a small communication firm in New York and KPR agency.
2:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And we had no rhyme or reason between our clients.
2:12
[SPEAKER_01]: So I had like a billionaire real estate developer, a billionaire debt collector.
2:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I've launched a billionaires restaurant chain.
2:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess the one thread that tied everyone together was they were mostly billionaires as clients.
2:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, I was at a tech part of helping me to think a hundred percent that high standards.
2:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And I met the CEO of one of the first Bitcoin exchanges a company called CoinCenter.
2:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And long story short, we debated with a lot of beers throughout the night.
2:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Went out again the next night, this time to a hookah bar in the East Village.
2:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't smoke hookah, but he loved that place.
2:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And we were out to a four in the morning.
2:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the second night, he convinced me to Bitcoin was not a scam.
2:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Took took two nights.
2:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Long story short, took a month's client, a year later, launched Waxman as the first specialized public relations firm focusing on the Bitcoin industry.
2:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And got lucky, right in crypto, they're sorry, in 16, crypto tripled in 17, crypto 30x, and Waxman was the largest firm in the world the whole time.
3:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And so even building a global communications and strides you firm since 2015, that's when it was the official birthday was.
3:14
[SPEAKER_01]: So now we're a little over 11 years old.
3:17
[SPEAKER_01]: and I've got to say I've seen a heck of a lot of carnage throughout the years, a lot of ups and downs and Brandon appreciate you fighting the bears because feels like there's a lot more sentiment or negative sentiment than there should be right now.
3:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you should talk a little bit about that.
3:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just completely misplaced.
3:33
[SPEAKER_01]: People are
3:34
[SPEAKER_01]: it's they're very myopic and incapable of looking more than about five minutes in reverse or ahead.
3:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's I think the reason why sentiment is where it is.
3:43
[SPEAKER_01]: But any event throughout the years noticed a few trends and we'll get into Hawkeye later on, but essentially
3:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Back in 2018, I realized that there needed to be a confluence of investment banking and public relations.
3:57
[SPEAKER_01]: It turns out those two things are neatly tied together.
4:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I started an investment banking division within Waxman that I had to jettison because of the 18 bear market that was an actually tough bear market.
4:07
[SPEAKER_01]: We went down by 90 percent that year.
4:09
[SPEAKER_01]: It was huge, huge drawdown that was
4:14
[SPEAKER_01]: But put crypto in really a perilous position and look, we saw what happened after 19, right?
4:18
[SPEAKER_01]: We saw after 18.
4:19
[SPEAKER_01]: We saw a defy summer.
4:20
[SPEAKER_01]: We saw the rise of NFTs.
4:22
[SPEAKER_01]: We saw the crypto boom of 21.
4:24
[SPEAKER_01]: We saw institutionalization of digital assets in the thousand different ways, right?
4:29
[SPEAKER_01]: All that happened after, but was by far the worst bear market that I've ever seen.
4:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And Waxman was born during a two year bear market in 2015.
4:37
[SPEAKER_01]: In an event, I think we're in a much better place today and I couldn't be more so about what we're doing with both watsmen and separately with Hawkeye.
4:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, absolutely, it reminds me it's like the character bane from Batman, like I was born in the dark.
4:52
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, your businesses were born in the bear market.
4:54
[SPEAKER_02]: You weren't a fair weather fan who said at the very peak of the market, you're going to launch a company, but you know, you, you know, kind of dug in your heels through bowl and through bear markets.
5:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And you've got some great firms that you've got running under you.
5:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm curious if you could go back and kind of like,
5:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Like everybody comes to the market from a different way, different ethos, different you know desires and so I'm just curious like what was it back in 2014 2015 that you said hey I'm going to leave this cushy job working with billionaires probably getting wind and dined and I'm going to go to this very fringe.
5:34
[SPEAKER_02]: where you might even get laughed at, right?
5:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you're in New York City, the Wall Street Mecca.
5:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm gonna go to this very fringe area called Block Chain in Crypto.
5:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Did you see the future of tokenization and defy?
5:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Or were you, you know, almost one of these folks that are very libertarian and politically driven towards a stateless money?
5:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Kind of what's your high level of why you're here and building in crypto?
5:58
[SPEAKER_01]: It's such a great question, Bryce, because you're taking me back in time, so in 2015, when Waxman started, the idea was to spy on the specialized, because remember I said previously, my firm had no reason to connect these different companies, so like a media list, like let's say, all the best podcasts for one client would be completely irrelevant to another.
6:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And the reason why I decided to specialize in Bitcoin as opposed to in one of those other categories was simple.
6:28
[SPEAKER_01]: This was way more fun.
6:30
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't that I thought this was guaranteed the future that everyone was going to be using the Bitcoin standard.
6:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't religious about it initially at all.
6:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It was simply, I saw IQ point flowing in the space that were insane.
6:40
[SPEAKER_01]: It was unbelievable.
6:41
[SPEAKER_01]: The amount of talent on a per capita basis.
6:44
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like nothing else I'd ever seen before.
6:47
[SPEAKER_01]: The most brilliant minds in engineering and computer science in many other fields, it's cryptosuper built to disciplinary.
6:54
[SPEAKER_01]: They were all going into the Bitcoin industry.
6:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I said, I think there's got to be a future here.
6:59
[SPEAKER_01]: But bluntly, I didn't think it was going to be a very big future.
7:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought I was going to have at most foreign employees.
7:04
[SPEAKER_01]: That was my dream.
7:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Me and foreign employees working on a handful of different clients in the small little Bitcoin niche that to your point everyone mocked.
7:15
[SPEAKER_01]: This was intentional, was at 110 Wall Street.
7:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So Wall Street, for those of you not from New York, is actually a super short street.
7:23
[SPEAKER_01]: It goes from Trinity Church.
7:24
[SPEAKER_01]: It's been around since, well, it got kind of burned down during the War of 1812 down to the water of the East River.
7:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's really small.
7:32
[SPEAKER_01]: There's only a few blocks and there's only so many buildings on that street.
7:34
[SPEAKER_01]: So we were at one-ten, but just kind of on the south-easterly part of Wall Street.
7:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And the reason the office was there was it was clear.
7:42
[SPEAKER_01]: There wasn't gonna be an intersection of the Bitcoin industry and Wall Street
7:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I didn't think much of it.
7:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, honestly Bitcoin didn't really pay the bills very well.
7:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Quite literally I got paid in Bitcoin from most of my clients.
7:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And yes, I sold.
7:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't even want to say how much Bitcoin to quite literally pay the rent.
8:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, clients were handing over a ton when you know, Bitcoin is trading at what a hundred bucks, 150 bucks, something like that.
8:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And the companies were like a hardware wallet called Treasure, it's the first hardware wallet, a software wallet called AirBits that later on evolved and came.
8:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Edge wallet, great company out of San Diego, an AT&T.
8:24
[SPEAKER_01]: We know call CoinSource.
8:26
[SPEAKER_01]: It calls the best.
8:27
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a real crypto OG.
8:30
[SPEAKER_01]: The Exchange CoinCenter, which later on sold a crack at the end of 15 and early 16,
8:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And basically, that was it.
8:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And Satoshi Labs, which makes the treasure, also had a mining pool that I did a lot of work with at the time, too.
8:43
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was that, it was that trunch of clients that were all across the Bitcoin industries.
8:47
[SPEAKER_01]: You can see kind of one in each of the different categories that gave me a pretty broad view of the market.
8:52
[SPEAKER_01]: But Bryce, to your point,
8:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't religious, but sometimes my clients work, and that led to the most fun brilliant debates.
8:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of like what we're having here, except it might be with the CEO of Satoshi Labs, again, the maker of Treasurer, who was an ardent libertarian who didn't believe that there should even be a police force.
9:10
[SPEAKER_01]: That the only reason government should exist, I remember these conversations, and these would be very nuanced conversations with super, super smart people, and I would take the other side, even if I agreed with them on something, just because it's more fun that way.
9:22
[SPEAKER_01]: and they'd be arguing for why government should just enforce contracts and nothing else.
9:28
[SPEAKER_01]: If they did that, property rights and contracts, then that should be sufficient for market forces to create the rest of it.
9:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And there were a lot of those hardcore all the way libertarians who were building some of the Bitcoin infrastructure at the time.
9:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it was, it really was kind of a
9:47
[SPEAKER_01]: a total sea taste in center, right?
9:48
[SPEAKER_01]: We've seen, yeah, I think many people are probably pissed about it, but I think it's kind of great that Wall Street has actually now embraced crypto.
9:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's great that you can have many flavors of this, but the technology has just been improving over and over and better and better.
10:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's the natural evolution of things and to take a very religious
10:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense and I just, yeah, I love here in the journey from, yeah, over a decade ago, and, you know, you've come, you know,
10:24
[SPEAKER_02]: come a really long way right from from a small shop to now a massive shop plus a firm like Hawkeye digital and I really do want to kind of center the conversation around Hawkeye digital and I just want to know a little bit more about what you guys are up to at a high level merchant banking private equity crypto focus walk us through to you know kind of where you're at now
10:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So Hawkeye Digital is publicly traded on OTC markets and are implied market cap is roughly $200 million today.
10:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're trading Justin OTC for now and the ticker is HWKE.
11:05
[SPEAKER_01]: What we're doing principally is what's called merchant banking, which is a phrase that most people don't know unless you're a finance nerd.
11:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Fortunately, in crypto, we have a lot of finance nerds.
11:15
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a lot of people who are probably watching this podcast today.
11:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And merchant banking premiered with the medites back in the 1400s.
11:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And essentially, it's almost a combination of investment banking with asset allocation, right, with asset management.
11:30
[SPEAKER_01]: we put our own money into a company.
11:33
[SPEAKER_01]: We shepherd that company through the capital markets process very often helping do some M&A or taking a company public.
11:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And we do this in league with partners at investment banks.
11:43
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, on the cap table of Hawkeye is a company called Think Equity, which is an investment bank in New York that's behind BitMine, Tom Lee's BitMine, among many other great companies throughout the years.
11:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Or one of the most prolific small cap, meaning sub $2 billion in
12:01
[SPEAKER_01]: full service investment bank.
12:02
[SPEAKER_01]: So they they're one of our major partners in critical to us and we and as I said we help companies through that process They raise money.
12:10
[SPEAKER_01]: They may go public.
12:11
[SPEAKER_01]: They may go through a Could be a spec or an RTO.
12:15
[SPEAKER_01]: It could be a direct listing could be a straight IPO It could be through going through on OTC and then Doing what's called an uplist thing and any of these ways we essentially are making bets on one thing
12:27
[SPEAKER_01]: that a lot of companies in crypto and adjacent industries are going to want to go public.
12:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And that might be controversial.
12:34
[SPEAKER_01]: We've only seen a few companies in the digital assets based go public.
12:37
[SPEAKER_01]: We saw large companies like coinbase, more recently companies like secure ties and bit go, et cetera, who have been going public through different routes.
12:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, of course, you saw last year the rise of the deaths.
12:50
[SPEAKER_01]: the digital asset treasury companies that went public very quickly, just by filling up in more or less mimicking strategies Bitcoin treasury model.
12:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, we think there's going to be just regular companies, maybe even small cap companies, going public, because if you're willing to issue a token, you might be willing to go public too.
13:08
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, I'd say to a lot of overlap and there are definitely some significant changes and they need some handholding, but a lot of
13:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, that's a name.
13:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Talk to us a little bit more about that.
13:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would some of these crypto companies maybe be better suited to to go public as opposed to other ones that are out there in different industries?
13:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'd argue that.
13:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Not all.
13:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't be very clear.
13:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
13:40
[SPEAKER_01]: But a lot of tokens don't need to exist.
13:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm guessing you guys would feel the same way.
13:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
13:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So I feel like, yes, but that level of tokens that shouldn't exist is decreasing over time.
13:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I do feel like we're past the stage, not to derail things.
13:58
[SPEAKER_02]: But I do feel like we're past the stage of like, everybody gets a token.
14:01
[SPEAKER_02]: You get a token, launch this, launch that.
14:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Now it's seen, like, the market is kind of sniffing that out.
14:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, sure, the meme coins and stuff, those are always gonna exist, like a casino's always gonna exist.
14:11
[SPEAKER_02]: But I do feel like, you know,
14:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, now they tend to, um, have like, you know, more value accrual to the token holders and people have kind of susced that out.
14:21
[SPEAKER_01]: But I do a lot of talk about that.
14:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
14:23
[SPEAKER_01]: That's interesting.
14:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And I agree with you.
14:25
[SPEAKER_01]: But here's the thing.
14:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Four years.
14:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was due to regulatory issues, especially the United States, that they're also overseas, but particularly the United States.
14:35
[SPEAKER_01]: It was essentially impossible to have value accrue to a token.
14:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's explore this a little bit more deeply.
14:43
[SPEAKER_01]: If you were a token issuer or a company that was creating a token of some sort, you probably were contorting yourself to not have your token be labelled in the future a security.
14:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Because doing so, of course, would open you up to all sorts of issues, and there was no way to try to do a token, a security token legitimately in America.
15:03
[SPEAKER_01]: having worked with every one of those companies that have tried.
15:06
[SPEAKER_01]: So for example, block stack later on stacks.
15:09
[SPEAKER_01]: They did a reg a token, if you are familiar with that, which is a mini IPO essentially.
15:14
[SPEAKER_01]: They did everything right.
15:15
[SPEAKER_01]: They paid Wilson Sonsini, one of the top law firms in America, and essentially the guys who created the pathway for token legitimacy, a ton of money, so to did another video streaming company.
15:26
[SPEAKER_01]: They did the same thing.
15:28
[SPEAKER_01]: They did a reggae offering, essentially almost exactly the same time.
15:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Waxman worked on both of those.
15:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Muniv Ali, if he hasn't been on your already, will tell you, it was essentially impossible to go and satisfy the SEC back then.
15:41
[SPEAKER_01]: No matter what you did, you could tend millions of dollars on lawyers.
15:45
[SPEAKER_01]: You could do absolutely everything by the book and then some.
15:48
[SPEAKER_01]: It didn't matter you were going to be punished.
15:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And so consequently, you kept seeing token teams
15:54
[SPEAKER_01]: They say, try to contort themselves to not find ways to accrue value to the tokens.
15:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So you saw arcane models, governance tokens that maybe weren't necessary, et cetera, et cetera.
16:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, what I'm trying to say is this, now you are starting to see more tokens exist with maybe revenue attached to them, dividend attached to them.
16:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And now there's at least clear frameworks from the SEC, from CFTC and others of what is a security and what's not.
16:21
[SPEAKER_01]: We were hoping that the Clarity Act would have passed in which case that would have been, you know, enshrined in law, but things are as they are.
16:27
[SPEAKER_01]: In any event.
16:29
[SPEAKER_01]: There's something more akin to a backing of tokens today than there was before, but still, lots of tokens are don't need a backing, but the issue, or sorry, lots of tokens that were launched in the past probably didn't need to exist, and the companies that launch those tokens raised a lot of money.
16:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Those companies might even generate real revenues today.
16:49
[SPEAKER_01]: They can't take their revenues today and their profits and pass those along to the token holders.
16:54
[SPEAKER_01]: They can't.
16:56
[SPEAKER_01]: What they can do is pass them along to shareholders.
16:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'd argue that those companies should have more shareholders than just a few VCs.
17:03
[SPEAKER_01]: They should be able to open it up to regular people and it turns out there's this crazy thing called the stock market where that's possible.
17:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'd say that if you're a token holder, you can also be a shareholder.
17:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we've seen in crypto that this is the enormous amount of overlap between those two things.
17:17
[SPEAKER_01]: We've seen a lot of interest in tokenized equities, including tokenized secondaries for or pre-IPO companies.
17:23
[SPEAKER_01]: We've seen a lot of interest in that, right, on some of these perp dexes.
17:27
[SPEAKER_01]: It's fascinating.
17:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I think in the same way you're going to see a lot of interest in these small-cap crypto companies that can finally give some love to their communities by maybe giving them shares.
17:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So do you think then that we will have maybe less crypto token launches moving forward and more of those companies that would traditionally launch a token?
17:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's the way it's worked in the past, right?
17:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a crypto company of a crypto service, typically speaking, you'll launch an altcoin and that's kind of your go-to.
18:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess what,
18:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Or correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think what you're saying is that those companies in the future that maybe instead of launching a token, they will just go public instead or go on to the stock market or is it case, yeah, I was going to say could it be both could they launch the token.
18:18
[SPEAKER_00]: and be publicly traded, and then maybe, but then I guess what's the point of the token, right?
18:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Because what we see here, it could be a discount to services, for example.
18:26
[SPEAKER_01]: It could be lots of the many things that tokens have always been able to be designed to be.
18:30
[SPEAKER_01]: But the point is, you wouldn't necessarily see people hoping that there's value a cruel based on company performance to a token that is inherently not designed for that, like it's not.
18:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And so things don't make sense.
18:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And so,
18:44
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why I think you've seen sometimes companies succeed, but their tokens don't.
18:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm sure you've seen on Reddit, on Twitter, etc.
18:53
[SPEAKER_01]: All sorts of people complaining about that.
18:54
[SPEAKER_01]: How is it possible these people are doing so well, their companies seem to be killing it, why is it token not doing well, why aren't they doing token by-backs?
19:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm not a securities lawyer, but I have a lot of securities, friends, and they would probably tell you that a token by-back is a hallmark of a security.
19:09
[SPEAKER_01]: That could be, if they start, if a company started doing that, it might be such that they would, they being a regulator would consider that the token that was issued is now a security because it's being used like one.
19:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, our cane problems that companies don't need to deal with if they simply go public.
19:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
19:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea of buybacks and adding, you know, we call it making better tokenomics, right?
19:33
[SPEAKER_00]: You can label it one way or another, but the idea of buybacks, burns, profit-sharing, whatever you want to call it.
19:40
[SPEAKER_00]: That has been,
19:41
[SPEAKER_00]: you know increasingly more popular you've seen a lot of tokens kind of pivoting towards that and then attempt to make better tokenomics and there's been a lot of projects a big projects that have been you know really pushing for that in the last year or so or changing over the models that do that.
19:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that make you nervous then?
19:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Because again you look at a lot of the big projects that are out there now you know hyper liquids obviously the big proponent of it you see pump that fun doing it you see uh you need swap that's you know post unification up
20:12
[SPEAKER_00]: handful of others as well that are kind of switching over to these buybacks or burns or profit sharing in one way or another.
20:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think that that goes away?
20:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think that those are the first companies that might want to go public?
20:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that make you nervous that they have these kind of things already in there?
20:26
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I think it's great.
20:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Look, I guarantee you they've got an excellent attorneys at each of those companies and they understand the current legal topography extremely well.
20:35
[SPEAKER_01]: So they understand what risks to take and what they can do or what they
20:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm certain as well as anybody on the planet.
20:43
[SPEAKER_01]: So great for them.
20:45
[SPEAKER_01]: But for every UNISWOP, there's lots of other types of companies that don't necessarily have a token that A, lots of people use every day.
20:53
[SPEAKER_01]: UNISWOP does, I'd argue.
20:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And B, probably would be better suited to satiate their community by offering their community stock as opposed to a token with limited value.
21:06
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what I'm trying to set and of course it could be both.
21:08
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no reason you can't do both.
21:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you know, we're entering a totally new era where you could have multiple different tokens from a company for various different reasons But as I said like at discount to services for example, it had to make sense
21:21
[SPEAKER_01]: But like as a kind of a universal coupon type thing, that probably should be a token, it's better to be that than a share.
21:28
[SPEAKER_01]: But when you have tokenized equities, you can do all sorts of things with them.
21:32
[SPEAKER_01]: We love D5 because you can start rehypothicating or starting to use assets as novel collateral.
21:38
[SPEAKER_01]: That's just fascinating stuff.
21:40
[SPEAKER_01]: that only because of crypto, it's really taken off, and that's why I think there's going to be just brilliant brilliant, it's going to be a brilliant future for finance when we start seeing almost everything financialized.
21:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm this glad that in the United States and beyond, the regulators are actually pro-innovation now.
21:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's possible for these constructs to actually
22:02
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't see a lot of tokenized equity trading today, so that would be a really good reason to kind of shit on what I'm talking about saying, hey, no one's actually trading this stuff, and look at what happened with OKXI, right?
22:13
[SPEAKER_01]: The full page ad taken out in the Wall Street Journal.
22:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's all noise.
22:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this is going to be a huge future.
22:20
[SPEAKER_01]: It's simply better tech, and I think it's going to be pretty much on the present of the decade from now.
22:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
22:26
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, yeah, I definitely think that the tokenized equities and trading could, you know, could go either way.
22:33
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's still so new.
22:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm curious, are you guys making a bet one way or another, you know, are you going to help folks tokenize equity alongside bringing them on New York Stock Exchange NASDAQ, that kind of thing, or are you going to go one way or the
22:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Bryce, I can't say things that haven't been already announced, that's the, okay.
22:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately.
22:59
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the rule problem with being a public company officer, but watch this space.
23:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Watch this.
23:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
23:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I'm excited.
23:07
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to add it to my trading view alerts for for all the news flow and stuff.
23:13
[SPEAKER_02]: But if we come to take a step back, I mean,
23:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, hopefully these are questions that we prepared that are able to be answered.
23:20
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't get many folks who are officers of public companies and stuff.
23:25
[SPEAKER_02]: So forgive us if these are off the mark.
23:28
[SPEAKER_02]: But in terms of maybe not a specific deal you're working on, but what about the quality of companies that you're looking at that you think are worth investing in or investing your time in?
23:41
[SPEAKER_01]: one of the great things about crypto is that it probably has one of the most mature and robust VC landscapes that it possibly exists.
23:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because if you think about it ever since the beginning of crypto, this is even before I started in 14, there were venture firms who were in the space.
23:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the first venture deal was Tim Draper back in 20,
24:03
[SPEAKER_01]: 11.
24:03
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what I think in crypto.
24:04
[SPEAKER_01]: So we've had some 15 years of VCs investing in the digital asset space and they've deployed billions and billions and billions of dollars.
24:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not saying all of it had been well spent, but there's no doubt, right?
24:18
[SPEAKER_01]: There's been a lot of funding in the space.
24:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And after the boom of 21, and to an early 22, when we saw interest rates skyrocket starting in May, and as I'm sure you guys remember, this is all during the exact same time that Tera Luna crashed, yeah, and then we saw three hours capital, and that was the one you later we saw FTX, right?
24:37
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was all that.
24:38
[SPEAKER_01]: But the point is is that we saw this huge boom kind of conclude, at almost exactly that time.
24:43
[SPEAKER_01]: You can almost pinpoint it by May June of 22, we started seeing VC activity
24:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to a point here.
24:53
[SPEAKER_01]: The companies that were funded throughout that roughly 11-year timeline before then, preceding that, had built up businesses.
25:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of those businesses actually make money.
25:03
[SPEAKER_01]: You be shocked, even in crypto.
25:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And those companies, we think, might be really good candidates for a go public.
25:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Mature enough businesses that that product market fit that might have received venture backing before.
25:14
[SPEAKER_01]: have good founders that simply need additional support.
25:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the type of company we want to work with.
25:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So product market fit, preferably even a positive.
25:22
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't necessarily have to have audited financials, which is a thing you're going to hear a lot more about going forward in crypto.
25:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Some great crypto companies have been doing audits for financial audits for years.
25:32
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, if you have a Swiss foundation, for example, which a lot of the very early ICO companies do,
25:37
[SPEAKER_01]: those companies all needed to have audit financials since the very beginning.
25:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So again, you're going to see a lot more of this.
25:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And I can't wait for crypto analysts to be looking through cue filings in the future.
25:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that that's going to be a really exciting time where people can be digging out gold from these SEC filings.
25:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that'll be awesome.
25:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was just going to say, like, are these deals where, you know, you'll, I guess if you're helping them go public, you guys as an investment bank might put some money in and help raise money from all sorts of different folks, what would retail be included in this?
26:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Could be, in a real IPO, of course, that's part of it, and I think that could be quite interesting, but as a merchant bank, we put our own money in.
26:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's important.
26:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been encrypted for a long time and founders in this industry, they want people with skin in the game to join them.
26:34
[SPEAKER_01]: who actually care about them and are real partners.
26:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what we endeavor to do.
26:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So we want to make sure we're hearing from the best and most interesting founders on the planet.
26:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And we want to be their best friend.
26:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And to prove it, we're putting money in.
26:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're going to help them raise money through our partners, our with our partners, and take them on a journey that we fortunately know the way.
26:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and you guys will, you know, we'll be able to kind of use a lot of discretion in the deals that you guys, you know, take take out it's, you know, whatever you guys want, you don't have to, you know, you're not going to get stuck with a deal that, you know, you might think is over hyped or, you know, not going to be worth it over the course of the next, you know, 10, 20 years.
27:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I guess my question is what?
27:17
[SPEAKER_02]: sector or what kind of business like, you know, I was talking to somebody the other day and, you know, they were saying they think custody businesses for crypto are going to be, you know, the biggest sort of 10x opportunity in terms of, so they're invested in companies that custody different crypto.
27:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Or maybe you think, oh, it's going to be AI-related crypto stuff, or companies working on decentralized energy resources.
27:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Is there a certain niche that you guys are maybe diving into first?
27:50
[SPEAKER_01]: All of those are interesting, and I've seen deals already, and we've only been around since April, and I think every one of those categories that you just mentioned, for example.
28:00
[SPEAKER_01]: We're looking for the best value to be honest.
28:02
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're not sector specific, but I mean, I may as well say, I think there's tokenization platforms,
28:09
[SPEAKER_01]: The models are going to change, but there's no doubt everything's going to be tokenized.
28:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And some of those companies performing services might be very good investments.
28:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Custity, of course, is the root of a lot of the things.
28:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I think cyber security, we're seeing a huge AI enabled series of hacks.
28:27
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's quite frightening right now.
28:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So companies in the cyber space are quite interesting.
28:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, we've seen a lot of quantum security companies as well across our plate, those are interesting.
28:39
[SPEAKER_01]: That seems a little bit in the future.
28:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Today, there's a pressing need for any sort of cyber security-related services and products.
28:49
[SPEAKER_01]: My God, I mean, the hacking attempts, the phishing attacks are just incredibly sophisticated.
28:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, AI needs crypto.
28:57
[SPEAKER_01]: We've seen a lot of deals in the data center space.
28:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I know right now there's a lot of people talking about the over supply of Neil Clouds, but I don't, I wouldn't bet that we're going to go and see AI inference compressed to the point where there's going to be lack of demand.
29:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's probably wrong.
29:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm guessing we have a
29:17
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of supply that needs to still exist.
29:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And two-bed end, there's some really interesting trades out there that I've heard about.
29:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything from not just precious metals, but traditional commodities that are going to be required for everything from energy to expenditure to new types of, like, literally piping that are going to be required for these data centers to come online.
29:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And those are all sorts of opportunities we can take.
29:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Point is, we're seeing things across the board.
29:42
[SPEAKER_01]: We want to see any sort of value.
29:46
[SPEAKER_01]: We like companies that have already shown some sort of product market fit that's the main thing we're looking for pre existing product market fit.
29:53
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not quite venture And it's not quite Already a public company.
29:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It's right somewhere.
29:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm between and I guess there's two ways to look at this right because in one lens you're saying okay, well
30:06
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we think that this will impact existing companies and existing institutions?
30:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And what do they maybe want or need the most?
30:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the first way.
30:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the second way is saying, OK, we'll separate it away from the companies and the institutions.
30:21
[SPEAKER_00]: What about the average person?
30:23
[SPEAKER_00]: What does the average person need or maybe want the most when it comes to blockchain technology?
30:28
[SPEAKER_00]: When it comes to DeFi, when it comes to tokenization, to really just the way that we're applying blockchain in different ways.
30:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And I guess a lot of the ways that we are to use cryptocurrency for, what does the average person maybe want or need?
30:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And then what does the average institution or company want or need when it comes to this stuff?
30:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Would you say that there is a difference if you're a buy versus build if you're a company?
30:50
[SPEAKER_01]: So right now this is kind of strange, but there's not a whole lot of economic buyers of these companies of crypto-related companies.
30:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So that the principle acquires, if you look at the M&A landscape for digital assets, are larger companies.
31:05
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's the corp dev shops, and you should use companies that's buying something.
31:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And to your point, Brendan, each of those companies is making decision.
31:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Should be buy a pre-existing firm and then integrate it
31:17
[SPEAKER_01]: or should be built at ourselves, and they're all making that decision.
31:21
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the son of the corporate website.
31:23
[SPEAKER_01]: But there are a lot of, let's just use financial services.
31:26
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of financial services institutions all over the world that they know, like, game over, they need to compete.
31:32
[SPEAKER_01]: They can't pretend like digital assets isn't going to work.
31:36
[SPEAKER_01]: They can't pretend like,
31:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, it's going to be a band by the government and it's not going to happen.
31:41
[SPEAKER_01]: So to that end, each of them is exploring this to the extent they can, and I think you're going to see a lot of M&A activity just selling some of those large corporates all over the world, not just the United States, because each of them is going to have to find a way to attack this or effectively be dying the source, right?
31:56
[SPEAKER_01]: So you can look at the holes that they have and help them help the figure that out.
32:01
[SPEAKER_01]: But more importantly, as soon as you can help from Hawkeye's position, let's say we invest
32:07
[SPEAKER_01]: While we're preparing them for either a public market opportunity for some sort of M&A, we should be looking at the landscape and saying, you know, how can you control your company to best fit the need of, let's say a firm an asset manager in Asia, making something up here, that desperately needs something similar to you.
32:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Like we've seen some really interesting
32:30
[SPEAKER_01]: obviously without saying names, digital assets, it's some very, very large institutions.
32:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And they just say, here's my laundry list.
32:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's the things that we'd like to buy.
32:38
[SPEAKER_01]: It's shocking how transparent they are, but they quite literally have said, we can't possibly build it fast enough ourselves.
32:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It's funny that you bring this up because I was just talking with with drummers labs.
32:51
[SPEAKER_00]: They're CEO.
32:52
[SPEAKER_00]: We were just chatting back and forth about this for those of you who maybe missed the podcast.
33:00
[SPEAKER_00]: They're the people that the I guess the parent company we can call them of error drum and fellow drum.
33:05
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the points that he made was exactly what you're saying is that a lot of companies, whether they are crypto-related or triad-fire-related, they are coming in partnering because they simply can't do all of this on their own.
33:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, some will, right?
33:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Some will, and they have the ability to, and you see that.
33:22
[SPEAKER_00]: But other ones don't, and the example that he gave was like, even Coinbase, right?
33:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Big crypto company.
33:26
[SPEAKER_00]: They went over to Aero Drum, and they're like, hey, can you guys help?
33:30
[SPEAKER_00]: build out and run the tokenized stock section of our platform.
33:34
[SPEAKER_00]: They said, absolutely, and they've been doing that.
33:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things that they were able to accomplish is getting about 60%, at least on the day that we were doing it, about 60% just under that of the tokenized stock volume on Ethereum was being ran through this.
33:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And
33:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's a lot of other companies out there and we're just scratching the surface of how this is happening.
33:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's going to be a lot of other companies doing similar partnerships in different areas too, right?
33:56
[SPEAKER_00]: There's going to be some people going to the stablecoin companies and saying, hey, help us with this.
34:00
[SPEAKER_00]: People going to different defy purposes and saying, help us with that, tokenization, help us with that.
34:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And the list goes on, right?
34:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It's infinite in kind of how this can be applied.
34:08
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's a really good point.
34:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can kind of just expand on that.
34:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that's something that we're going to see of a lot of down the road.
34:16
[SPEAKER_00]: is maybe traditional companies that we're familiar with, bigger names, whatever it may be coming in and saying, hey, help us partner here or do this or that.
34:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And that could be a really exciting thing.
34:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that the implications of that could be also really big.
34:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this is the sign of the maturing industry, right?
34:35
[SPEAKER_01]: But we've seen this with all sorts of other types of industries in their different market cycles, where there might be some like native-born companies, like Coinbase has always been a crypto company, for example.
34:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Crackens has always been a crypto company.
34:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Those companies, I think, are going to be financial services giants for the next 50 years, I really do.
34:53
[SPEAKER_01]: But then you're also going to see some the smart ones of the pre-existing giants.
34:59
[SPEAKER_01]: They know that they need to evolve with the times, and that means that they're going to probably either need to buy or build all of those different elements, whether they're trying to offer what's called prine, right?
35:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Which is a whole stack of different services kind of collected into one for institutional.
35:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Can they do that by themselves by building all that those apparatus is or are they going to want to go in and buy companies it's really exciting times and I I think you're going to go and see many giant companies some are hodgepodge of pre-existing brands and and really awesome you know with bang crypto companies that that we love That may be a bin on this podcast, you know 30 times those guys I think you're going to see in as senior executives at multinational corporations pretty soon
35:43
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'll say this.
35:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I think Bryce, you asked me earlier, where are we in the air?
35:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Our deal flow from I like just tuning your podcast and watching the different founders you have on trying to call them up afterwards I like it that's good data are good alphores good alpha for everyone that's listening to the podcast, right?
36:00
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I mean, look, there's just green pastures for this whole space and I guess one of the questions that I always come back to is like, you know, you close your eyes.
36:12
[SPEAKER_02]: You think about what is finance going to look like?
36:15
[SPEAKER_02]: What is commerce going to look like, you know, 10, 20 years from now?
36:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it going to be, you know,
36:22
[SPEAKER_02]: the same old, same old crypto fails, and we got what we got.
36:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Probably not.
36:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it gonna be, you know, traditional finance fails, and it's all crypto, probably not.
36:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I have a feeling it's gonna be an intermeshing, and I think, you know, there's gonna be,
36:41
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, deployments of, for instance, JP Morgan just launched on Ethereum, right?
36:47
[SPEAKER_02]: They had like a stable coin that they've been using in their own, you know, back office, but it was kind of like their own blockchain.
36:55
[SPEAKER_02]: They just launched, I think it was JP Morgan coin on Ethereum recently where it could kind of be more out in the wild and that kind of thing.
37:01
[SPEAKER_02]: And so do you kind of view like, like, or how do you view this intermeshing of, and I like, like what you kind of said is like, you might have, you know, one day like a,
37:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
37:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I hate an Adam's type character who founded Uniswap.
37:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe, you know, he comes over and merges with a bank and he's running their defied division.
37:20
[SPEAKER_02]: So is it, or can you imagine that?
37:23
[SPEAKER_02]: That would be crazy.
37:23
[SPEAKER_01]: That would be crazy.
37:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, my God.
37:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
37:26
[SPEAKER_02]: That would be crazy.
37:26
[SPEAKER_02]: But like, yeah, just kind of, I don't know, take us through how you would think about finance evolving with these two kind of crossroads.
37:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's start here.
37:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I firmly believe that Bitcoin, ETH and a number of other digital assets, Salatah, a lot of others, people are something to have.
37:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's room for definitely room for a few great layer ones, and a lot of, I think even some app coins, and a lot of other tokens that that we know and love today.
37:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's going to be a long future for a lot of those.
37:56
[SPEAKER_01]: But why not both price?
37:58
[SPEAKER_01]: There's room for,
38:00
[SPEAKER_01]: equities, and tokens, and debt instruments, and and and what I think we're seeing very quickly is that people are especially younger people are second tired of using old brokerage models and kind of farming out their their financial futures to wealth advisors who don't know anything right they they far rather trust
38:25
[SPEAKER_01]: themselves who are maybe the patents in this podcast go read some really great crypto news sites read the Wall Street Journal as well and they talked to Claude talked to chat absolutely a hundred percent and I think that's that's just that's where we're going to see things
38:42
[SPEAKER_01]: and people already have kind of hybrid portfolios.
38:45
[SPEAKER_01]: You're going to see more of that and it's going to be super commonplace.
38:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And now the digital assets are increasingly seen as legal.
38:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that many people don't forget a few years ago, if you had digital assets, you were essentially a criminal in the United States.
39:01
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's true that
39:03
[SPEAKER_01]: baggy counter being shut off for people involved in the crypto industry.
39:07
[SPEAKER_01]: I myself lost a chase baggy account year number years ago for both waxmen and me personally.
39:13
[SPEAKER_01]: They never said why.
39:14
[SPEAKER_01]: But I know it was because I was in the crypto industry and the same happened for so many others in digital assets.
39:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Then event, no one thinks Bitcoin's illegal anymore.
39:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's a great start.
39:23
[SPEAKER_01]: But five years, ten years, twenty years from now, I think it's going to be part of
39:28
[SPEAKER_01]: pretty much everyone's portfolio mix is going to be everything from stable coins to traditional digital assets that we know.
39:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And then all sorts of tokenized instruments that some of which we can't even dream of today.
39:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, man.
39:41
[SPEAKER_02]: So what's the next step for Hawkeye?
39:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Are there deals that you guys are going to be announcing?
39:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Where should we kind of follow along with the journey?
39:52
[SPEAKER_02]: What's next to be expected?
39:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, first we love going to great conferences and we love seeing you guys as some of these conferences.
39:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, you to alert the waxman team of your travel schedules and we'd love to have you as a media partners for all the different conferences.
40:06
[SPEAKER_01]: We are privileged to work with all over the world.
40:09
[SPEAKER_01]: We just have concluded token 2049, but it consents us earlier and actually, I think just this week, just past week, we were money 2020 wax with the H. Oh, nice.
40:17
[SPEAKER_01]: That's out in Las Vegas.
40:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was a lot of fun.
40:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And we've got some conferences up coming that I think will be great, and you'll see Hawkeye and Wax from people at all those places.
40:26
[SPEAKER_01]: But for Hawkeye, we intend to get some merchant banking deals off in the line, can't wait to announce those.
40:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And we've got some other news to share in the near future.
40:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And so as I say, watch this space, check out our Twitter, our HWKE digital and our our website, which is really bad right now, hwke.com.
40:45
[SPEAKER_01]: That's our ticker symbol.
40:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm hoping I can upgrade that in the near term.
40:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So it actually looks like a crypto company's website and not, I don't know, the world's worst IR platform.
40:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's put a current that looks like.
40:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Hey, one step at a time, you got a lot on your plate.
41:01
[SPEAKER_02]: My dad always says, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time?
41:05
[SPEAKER_02]: You, my friend, are eating a massive elephant right now with all that you're taking on.
41:10
[SPEAKER_02]: So we can't wait to see the updated website, see you guys at the conferences, and we will be on standby for whenever you want to come back when things are to be announced, you got a home right here to kind of debrief the world.
41:26
[SPEAKER_02]: on all things Hawkeye and all things Waxman so David we really greatly appreciate your time and he kind of last words for our audience before we let you go.
41:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Bryce, Brendan, thanks for doing this.
41:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a really important service that you provide and this is important for me to say.
41:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been at the intersection of the media industry and the digital asset industries for, right, over about 12 years now.
41:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think one of the saddest trends over the last year or two is we've seen fewer and fewer real media companies in digital assets.
41:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Market force to taking down some of the companies that brought great journalism to the industry.
42:04
[SPEAKER_01]: But without deep dives from people like you,
42:07
[SPEAKER_01]: How are people going to get good information?
42:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want advertisements to be the principle way that companies are educating consumers, especially when there's so many investors in the space like digital assets, right?
42:18
[SPEAKER_01]: We deal with digital bearer bonds when you think about it.
42:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's kind of scary.
42:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And people are random people chilling things on Twitter.
42:27
[SPEAKER_01]: that's just unacceptable that like that can't be the information source to people are relying upon to make investment decisions.
42:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd rather than go to a but to watch something like this yes use cloud yes use chat and then read real media where reporters with integrity are writing you know thorough reviews and getting into the least I think that's super important.
42:47
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think what you're doing is really critical and I applaud you for it.
42:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you very much.
42:52
[SPEAKER_02]: That means the world coming from you, especially.
42:55
[SPEAKER_02]: So look, like I said, the invitation is always out there.
42:58
[SPEAKER_02]: We could always get you on next day.
42:59
[SPEAKER_02]: You just let us know when and where.
43:01
[SPEAKER_02]: And I know you're traveling the world on a bunch of different times on.
43:04
[SPEAKER_02]: So we'll accommodate.
43:05
[SPEAKER_02]: But until next time, Mr. David Waxman, President and Hawke, I found her of Waxman.
43:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for joining, and we'll see you next time.
43:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Everybody at home listening, and we hope you enjoyed.
43:15
[SPEAKER_02]: comment in the show, comment feed if you have any other questions and we'll see you guys back.
43:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Same time, same place next week with some more great guests.
43:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you David.