Latest / Bitcoin for Financial Services Podcast / What Actually Gets Built in a Bear Market | Bitcoin Venture Capital & the Future of Bitcoin Finance

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What Actually Gets Built in a Bear Market | Bitcoin Venture Capital & the Future of Bitcoin Finance · Bitcoin for Financial Services Podcast

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And there'll be VCs that say like, oh, this is great, but can you also build a data center?
0:04
Like, you know, like, that's not a good sign.
0:09
Kind of the equivalent of like your barber asking you about Dogecoin or whatever.
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Bitcoin is a currency on the internet.
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If you don't trust any other currency, this is where you go.
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It's going to outperform everything.
0:20
Bitcoin could eventually be worthless.
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Every day is a good day to buy Bitcoin.
0:24
Bitcoin reached its highest price to date.
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Bitcoin getting a new high.
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It really has reached escape philosophy.
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There is no second best.
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Who cares about Bitcoin?
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It's the only secure database that's ever been invented.
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Antisocial.
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Bitcoin is the real deal.
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Stupid.
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Everything is bullish for Bitcoin.
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Immoral.
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It's going up forever, Laura.
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Fix the money.
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Fix the world.
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Waterwork is a registered investment advisor, and the opinions expressed on the show are
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their own and do not reflect the opinions of the Silk LLC.
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Joining us as a CPA, and the opinions expressed on the show are their own and do not reflect
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the opinions of trusted CPA or other affiliated firms.
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Information presented for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer
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or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies.
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Investments involve risk and almost otherwise stated or not guaranteed.
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Information expressed is not taken into account your specific situation or objectives is not intended as a recommendation appropriate for any individual.
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Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.
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Welcome to Bitcoin for Financial Services Media, the podcast where sound money meets professional services.
1:25
we explore how to build the Bitcoin financial services industry within the principles, values,
1:31
and ethos of Bitcoin. A big part of that is our flagship event coming up in Denver from October
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20th through 22nd. Legacy finance is being rebuilt in real time and Bitcoin is at the center of it.
1:42
The Bitcoin financial services summit brings together the people actually building the
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infrastructure, RIAs, lenders, CPAs, miners, treasury companies, and Bitcoin native operators
1:52
all in one room. If you want to understand where Bitcoin Finance is going next, get your tickets
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now at bffs.media.com. Looking forward to seeing you there. Joined by an amazing guest, amazing show,
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Vijay Vastner, operating partner at Epoch Ventures. Let's get started.
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Welcome back to Bitcoin for Financial Services Media, and welcome back, Jordan.
2:22
Thank you. I appreciate it. I, I, uh, I don't know what I said, uh, the last time I was on a,
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you know, an episode and got banned, put in time out for a little bit, but I'm glad that I was,
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uh, allowed back on, uh, on the show. So thank you, Wyatt.
2:38
Dude, well, we're, we're happy to have you back. You know, we believe in
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injustice here at BFFS Media. You served your time.
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Second chances.
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Come out, come out on the other side. Um, I do want to hear your thoughts on,
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on Prague, but we got to get to our intro here first, joined by a special guest, Vijay
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Vesnaver, BFFS veteran, operating partner at EPOC. Welcome to the show, Vijay.
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Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. Friend of the pod, never been on the pod before,
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but have enjoyed your programming in real life. It's good to be here digitally.
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Yeah. So Vijay, for the audience, what do you get into? We just figured out, I mean,
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humble brag before we went on, Harvard Law grad. I mean, I've got to just say it, you know,
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got to say that. And then, but what do you get into during the day when you're not,
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you know, wasting your legal, your JD, I guess?
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Well, we, for those who aren't familiar with what we do at EPOC, we run a venture fund in
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the Bitcoin ecosystem. Me and Eric Yakes, who I'm sure listeners know. So that's how I, you know,
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spend most of my time talking to founders in the Bitcoin world, looking at deals, hopefully
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investing in some founders and helping them grow their businesses. And then, you know, working with
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our LPs to keep them happy, get them some returns and grow Bitcoin. Yeah. Okay. So are you normally
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on the investor side or on the founder side?
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Are you back and forth on both of those?
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Do you focus on one more than the other?
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Yeah, we're a startup kind of ourselves still at this point.
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So we are pretty scrappy.
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It's all hands on deck most days.
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Most of my time is spent on the pipeline,
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working with founders.
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And my role coming in as an operating partner
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is intended to be a little bit more hands-on
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with the founders even post-investment.
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So working with founders on strategy
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or when they get into critical binds, things they need to work through,
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being kind of a thought partner, helping them connect to, you know,
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being sort of a little BD guy on the outside,
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connecting to folks in the industry that they might benefit from partnerships with
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and working on helping them raise capital for future rounds, that kind of stuff.
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But then also, yeah, you know, we're also, we're not currently fundraising for a fund,
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but always kind of thinking about that and talking to investors and that kind of stuff.
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So we all do a little bit of everything.
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We wear multiple hats.
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We think we have the best hats in the biz.
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That's very true.
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It was funny.
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Jordan and I were in Austin earlier this year at Bitcoin Takeover,
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and I saw somebody wearing an Epoch hat.
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And I was like, holy smokes, that's like the first Epoch hat.
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It's a rare, rare sighting.
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It turned out it was Clark Moody.
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I had met him previously, and I came up,
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And that was my conversation opener and got to know him at all.
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I know Eric's talked about him a lot.
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So that was a fun moment for me.
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But I actually want to kind of double click on the first thing you mentioned,
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you have pipeline investing in companies operating the Bitcoin ecosystem.
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The classic tale that I've been told as a good and humble maximalist
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is that bear markets are for building.
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Are you guys kind of seeing like a bunch of new companies and ideas come online?
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Is it actually harder during the bear market?
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Like I feel like you guys are kind of ground zero when it comes to building.
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Yeah, I think we have our finger on the pulse.
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You know, it's I don't know.
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I don't think that you get more people building.
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And in some ways you get you don't get less people.
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You get I think that you get higher quality.
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Like when the wave goes out, you know, you see who's kind of naked.
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And the people that were just sort of like fair weather fans are there for the short term hypey stuff tend to disappear.
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So you get the pipeline from our perspective ends up being much higher quality.
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You know, there's a benefit.
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I think there's more.
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We're not competing with the big kind of crypto funds on valuations and stuff, which is good as well.
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And there's, I think, just more time to work with founders and kind of think through how to turn an early stage thing from something that might not work right now into something that's really cool.
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because there may be people looking for work you can connect founders with
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to build the team strategically at this phase
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or interesting opportunities for early stage guys.
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So it is much quieter in terms of the hype,
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which leaves a lot of room for high-quality building is what we see.
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And yeah, so I think from our perspective, the vibes are good.
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There's people building interesting stuff, stuff that needs to get built,
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and we continue to chat with those founders,
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which is exciting. And you kind of get a, you know,
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a little early sense of what the next kind of cycle might bring or how,
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how the ecosystem will kind of scale to support the next wave of people
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coming in and the next two to three years. Having been, I've been,
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this is, I went down the rabbit hole super early.
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So I've been around a few times and it's,
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it's always interesting to see how like, you know, well, I guess,
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I guess so. The, it's cool to see how like, you know,
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So one cycle, there's kind of like the seed of a narrative that people get really excited about, and then it sort of fizzles.
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And then three years later, actually, you know, the people building the real stuff on that in that vertical are still there.
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And now there's something that's like ready for, you know, loaded for bear, ready to go.
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And that's where we're kind of excited to see like which one of these verticals really takes off in the next three to four years.
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That is interesting. Curious. Yeah. Kind of like post-op on the last bull market.
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and the bear, you know, for seeing another goal on the horizon,
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would you be able to kind of like define narratives for each of those?
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Have you thought about that at all?
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Yeah. I mean,
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and I'm sure Bitcoiners also are all sort of tapped in and aware of this,
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but maybe everybody has a different perspective on it.
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I think I was surprised,
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like when we were starting investing out of our fund one in kind of 2024,
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going into 2025,
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there was a lot of energy and excitement around kind of this Bitcoin layer two ecosystem,
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which we've looked at most of them and engaged with most of them in many ways.
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I was kind of surprised at how quickly the energy there, like I kind of expected it to be early and maybe take a cycle for some of those to mature into real ecosystems with a lot of activity.
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But I think it sort of got eclipsed more quickly than I would have anticipated by the Bitcoin treasury company stuff, which sucked a lot of oxygen out of the room last year.
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Like there was maybe a quarter where, you know, that was everything we were looking at.
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And, you know, I think there's a place and an interesting perspective on it.
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We didn't end up investing in any of the deals, but it did make it hard to kind of pay attention to some of the more, you know, fundamental technology or new applications that we would prefer to be looking at.
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And I guess that also kind of, you know, we almost got like kind of two meta narratives and condensed into a cycle that have both kind of had their own roller coaster rides since the end of since the end of 2025.
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I do suspect both things will kind of have a resurgence in some form.
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I won't make specific predictions, but it has been interesting to see how as the Layer 2 ecosystem evolves,
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they're each finding kind of their own little niche and sort of sets communities of developers and potential customers.
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They're each positioning themselves differently for different kinds of applications.
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and in the midst of all the debate about BIP-110 and scaling Bitcoin,
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it'll just be interesting to see how people experiment
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and what comes out over the next few years
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and where there's new interesting use cases.
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Because I do think there's like, in each of these narratives,
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there's a nugget of truth where somebody will build something
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that kind of unlocks a new use case that is hard to predict.
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Those are the two main ones.
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And then I do think that the last cycle, and this might be my bias, just given my background, like, you know, the institutions are coming was sort of a meme for maybe two cycles, really.
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And the last cycle, I think, was really the most meaningful kind of embodiment of that actually coming to fruition.
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But at every step, I worked at Coinbase for a couple of years while they were standing up their policy team.
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Yeah. So I helped them stand up their policy team at the time. I was on the biz ops team there.
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So you're anti-de minimis kind of guy?
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Anti-de minimis tax exemption?
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Yeah.
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I'm pro getting rid of taxes, if that clears things up.
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Yeah. I mean, well, there's a side quest on the policy stuff that we can talk about.
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I'll finish the thought on the institutions, which is like, I was surprised at how, you know,
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they had spent many years building out an institutional business in like 2017 that nobody
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came for. And then by 2021, there were people there, but because you couldn't like collide it
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with reality in the interim, there was stuff that was breaking or wasn't quite ready, you know?
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So I think by this last cycle, a lot of the bigger kind of CeFi, you know, centralized crypto people
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we're more ready for the institutions. And then the regulatory environment started to shift in a
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way that I think will be productive. But I'm also don't think we're sort of at the end of that story
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either. I suspect there will be backlash and, and little eddies, you know, or roundabouts that we
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encounter in the years ahead. It'll be interesting to see how all of these new laws that are getting
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passed get implemented, because that's where the rubber really hits the road, like when it gets
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13:20
Let me, oh God, sorry.
13:23
I was gonna go back down the policy rabbit hole.
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Yeah, let's do it.
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Because I am a legal nerd.
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So I do like the trend since I was in the belly of the beast kind of working on it that has been, it was always actually very exciting for me.
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It was like when I was in law school, I basically spent the whole time in law school trying to get people to care about Bitcoin.
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And nobody cared for the first couple of years.
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And then part of my time in law school was kind of the 2016 craze.
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So there was a period, there was a moment in law school where everybody came to me and was kind of like, weren't you that guy that was talking about Bitcoin?
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Like, we should, can you, can you help me get some kind of thing?
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And so spent a lot of time building community there and working in the early days with some
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of the kind of lobby, like the blockchain association and some of the people that were
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working on policy stuff.
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And so seeing how, how little politicians were willing to really meaningfully engage
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with this stuff at that point in time was, was really depressing, you know, cause like
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I cared about it.
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I thought there was a really good faith way you could approach thinking about, you know, reasonable policymaking regulation.
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It was one of the many black pills I've had in my life.
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I'd be like, oh, no, they don't really care about this thing.
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This sucks.
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But when Coinbase started really getting involved in policy, like it was really refreshing to see the way the congressional,
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both members of the Senate, members of the House of Representatives, and then their staff were just like really engaged.
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They became much more curious. And it might just be because, oh, now there's like, you know, a big whale on the scene who spends money on lobbying.
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So I'm not really sure what drove them there. But the engagement really did change the quality of the conversation and the thinking in D.C. in a way that I think is beneficial.
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But the big risk going forward is, you know, now you have even even for the best, the most well-intended political actors or sort of lobbyists, like there's just always this looming risk of capture and and kind of creating structures in regulation that make it harder for kind of like the true self-sovereign Bitcoin is money use case to flourish.
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and that doesn't have as big of a war chest behind it.
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You know, the constituency is less obvious
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and there's lots of competing incentives against that.
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And it's a big part of what we're trying to do at EPOC.
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And I think anybody doing Bitcoin Venture
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is like trying to support, invest in technologies
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and products that, you know, are profitable businesses
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that also provide the ability for Bitcoiners
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to use Bitcoin in the way that it maximizes its utility and usefulness as kind of freedom
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money and a neutral monetary standard in the future.
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I think we have to build that foundation now so that regardless of what happens on the
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regulatory front, it kind of thrives.
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Yeah, I mean, I think we got to touch on the whole, there's so much back and forth right
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now on Twitter between kind of the Bitcoin VC class up against the Treasury guys, right? Like
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the Parker Lewis versus the PR Richard. Do you mind to just kind of opine on that? It sounds like
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we might know what your perspective is, but I'm just curious from Epoch's seat,
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do you see the Treasury companies playing a role? Are they just too big of a risk
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for the broader environment?
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And then also, do you feel like the treasury companies
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actually helped?
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Something I heard in Prague was it helped us not go as low
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as we maybe would have this cycle
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because there were those buyers.
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So I'm just curious to get all your thoughts
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on all the drama that we see on Twitter day in and day out.
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It feels like right now.
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Yeah, I won't comment on any specific people in the drama.
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I guess sometimes jump in myself,
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But on the question, so like I, our ethos tends to be pretty pragmatic.
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Like we're Bitcoiners, but we also are working, we understand that nobody's a perfect predictor of the future.
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And that founders, like building a business is a process of experimenting, trying things out, seeing what fails, trying to find your customers, meeting their needs.
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You know, some of those customers are going to want stable coins and, you know, whatever.
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I think fiat sucks, but one day they'll realize that.
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And if you're building the infrastructure that supports stablecoins, it also supports Bitcoin.
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So it's kind of a, you know, a trudging horse kind of a situation.
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So that's kind of how we think about...
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You guys, maybe like this isn't like an official epoch stance or something, but you believe that you're kind of on the bandwagon or, you know, thought process that stablecoins will help Bitcoin adoption?
18:10
I guess I think that that's a possible, you know, version of the future.
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My preferred version of the future is everybody's orange pill tomorrow and we just move over.
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But I think one route to get there is, well, the banks all think they want stable coins.
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So they build all this infrastructure that supports stable coins and then the dollar dies.
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And it's going to be very easy to move that over to a Bitcoin standard.
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So that's totally a possible future that we've sort of written about in a couple of different places and think about when we're investing.
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I think the stable coin kind of meta within VC more broadly is a little overhyped.
18:44
I don't think every grocery store is going to have their own stable coin.
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it just fractures liquidity and creates a lot of problems. And it's better to have
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a neutral monetary standard that everybody settles in. And I think that the world will
18:55
converge on that point. But it's sort of like, what are the stones you need to lay in the grass
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to get all of the various parties in the economy, the individuals and the businesses to kind of
19:05
converge on this standard? What's the right scaffolding that's going to bring everybody
19:10
there? And I think that's part of it. Or at the very least, kind of like, it's unavoidable. It's
19:15
happening. And so how can we use it, you know, to, to, to the advantage of, or to, to help kind
19:19
of realize the future that we see unfolding in the, in the medium to long-term. And I have a
19:25
similar kind of perspective on the, on the Bitcoin treasury companies. Like, I think we've been a
19:29
little critical at times or, you know, we'll, we'll jump in on the, on the, on the ragging on
19:35
them when it makes sense, when the MNAVs are crazy or whatever. And like I said, we didn't invest in
19:39
any of them. I understand what they're trying to do also. And like, it would be hard for me to say
19:42
as a Bitcoiner, you know, it's stupid for a company to have a Bitcoin balance sheet,
19:47
because I think every company should have a Bitcoin balance sheet. And so I think there's
19:52
definitely a role they're playing in the ecosystem that is, you know, mixed. I think there's maybe
19:56
there's a scenario where they get too big, and it becomes a risk. I don't know that we're there yet.
20:00
I think they're probably one of the buyers in the market that helps. Although like, I think
20:04
having the ETFs is also a part of that story, even and then even just like the broader kind of
20:10
geopolitical environment where we're kind of moving to a more multipolar world and sovereigns
20:16
are starting to think about like, what else should we, what else should we be holding on our,
20:20
on our balance sheets? I think not necessarily that like, there's a bunch of secret central
20:24
banks buying Bitcoin, but you know, I think the conversation is making its way into the zeitgeist
20:28
in a way that like is causing there to be more natural buyers, even outside of micro strategy.
20:34
But I do think they're an important part of that. I think that the question about like,
20:38
are they adding value to the ecosystem is kind of one of the trust but verify.
20:44
I believe that they want to use their Bitcoin in a way that generates more Bitcoin on the balance sheet,
20:52
which should in the long run involve deploying it into something or by acquiring operating businesses,
21:02
doing things that build value for shareholders outside of just holding Bitcoin.
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And I think that that's the real like sort of if there if there's a role that they play that's super positive.
21:11
I mean, and I'm biased as a VC because that's what we're trying to do.
21:14
But like Bitcoin is, you know, the greatest store of value, the best collateral, the best money ever invented.
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But money at the end of the day is a ruler.
21:23
It's a way you measure your and preserve value.
21:27
It's not in and of itself.
21:28
It's not wealth.
21:29
Wealth is building stuff in the world, real stuff that people consume and use and improves the quality of life for everybody.
21:37
So I think the cool thing about being in venture in Bitcoin or a Bitcoin or part of the community is that if we're all right, over time, value will flow into the Bitcoin economy.
21:50
And because of that, we'll be able to reinvest that wealth into the sort of future that we want to see.
21:55
And that will be Bitcoin businesses. But in the future, like every business will be a Bitcoin business.
21:59
So it might just start to look more like businesses run by Bitcoiners.
22:04
And that might be part of what MicroStrategy and the others end up doing.
22:09
You know, maybe they end up sort of operating kind of like banks.
22:12
Like in the early days of banking, banks actually held assets as their capital base, like land banks and gold banks.
22:19
And a Bitcoin bank makes a lot of sense. That's a possible future.
22:23
Right now, I sort of understand the criticism that people bring.
22:29
But I also understand all the kind of like financial engineering arguments from the big boosters of that business model.
22:37
And so I'm kind of an observer.
22:39
If people start coming for Bitcoin venture and saying like, well, you guys are, you know, that's just as bad or whatever.
22:46
That's where I kind of disagree.
22:47
I think, you know, you got to put your Bitcoin to work to make the future of Bitcoin, to kind of secure that future for the world.
22:54
It's not going to happen on its own.
22:56
I mean, to some extent it will because Bitcoin is super anti-fragile.
22:59
Bitcoin doesn't care about what we're doing in some ways, but it'll accelerate it and make it a better future.
23:05
We all have a role in doing that, I think.
23:08
Yes. Okay.
23:09
So you would take, because I am curious, like, I do think it's an interesting argument where it's like, you could just buy Bitcoin, right?
23:15
Or you could deploy your capital into one of these ETFs or one of the treasury companies.
23:24
Or you could deploy your capital into a VC fund.
23:27
And it's kind of like, it seems to me, outside looking in, it's everyone is trying to see, can you basically get a return on your investment that is greater than the baseline Bitcoin rate of return, right?
23:43
Yeah.
23:44
Yeah. I mean, so it's, we kind of think about Bitcoin evolving in sort of stages. And I don't
23:51
have a strong sort of perspective on whether it's linear or a little bit of all three of these things
23:55
at once. But, you know, people talk about the kind of store of value phase, medium exchange phase,
24:00
unit of account phase. Like, if it is a linear thing, we're still probably in that,
24:04
mostly in the store of value phase, always trying to butt up against the medium exchange phase.
24:10
So I think in this era, like holding Bitcoin is going to be, it will be very hard to beat that as a strategy for building and accumulating wealth.
24:21
And so that perspective makes sense to me that like if you're a hardcore maxi that just wants to buy Bitcoin, we get that perspective.
24:28
And when we were fundraising, you know, like we were always talking to potential LPs and saying like, you should have a Bitcoin position before you invest into Bitcoin venture.
24:37
at the very least just to understand it better
24:39
and because we think it's an important part
24:42
of a diversified portfolio.
24:45
At the same time,
24:48
I mean, certainly in the long run,
24:51
like when we get to hyper-Bitcoinization,
24:54
Bitcoin is money.
24:57
Sound money like Bitcoin should be a good base
25:00
of any portfolio to preserve wealth.
25:02
Like in the utopian future that we all live in,
25:06
Bitcoin sort of functions like the S&P should. It's like it will grow with the economy.
25:12
Now, the price won't go. One Bitcoin will be one Bitcoin, but the amount that you buy with that
25:16
Bitcoin will increase over time as the economy becomes more productive. That's the role that
25:20
money should play. We don't have that. So we have all these crazy indices and stuff that people have
25:24
to do instead. And in that phase, if you want to get excess returns, you need to invest the Bitcoin
25:31
you have into risk capital.
25:34
And so I think for each individual person, it's sort of a different, like some people
25:39
are already living in that future where they have a big enough stash of Bitcoin or they
25:44
feel secure with their store of wealth that they need and they want to find ways to grow
25:50
it.
25:51
I think it makes sense to diversify into venture and other asset classes that are going to potentially outperform over certain time horizons And we think of Bitcoin as kind of our internal hurdle rate and our LP base
26:07
And I think that the community of people that invest in Bitcoin Ventures is sort of varied,
26:11
but a lot of the people that are Bitcoiners who are investing in Bitcoin Future,
26:16
Bitcoin Venture, you know, want a return on their Bitcoin,
26:19
but also understand that Bitcoin is a great financial asset.
26:23
And if we can keep up with it, so, you know, you put your Bitcoin into a venture fund, the
26:28
venture funds investing in Bitcoin businesses that grow and, you know, meet the return of
26:33
Bitcoin, you've built a business and get the Bitcoin back.
26:36
That's kind of the worst case scenario.
26:37
And ideally we outperform Bitcoin and you get a little bit of yield on your Bitcoin.
26:41
But like getting a, you know, traditional venture, you're trying to get like 20, 30,
26:45
50% IRR in Bitcoin terms.
26:48
that's very tough right now at this phase as we're still kind of the kind of sucking value in from
26:54
the rest of the world. So yeah, that's kind of how I think about it at a high level.
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27:37
no i think that's smart and and that's a good answer and yeah i mean it's just kind of like
27:45
the common company you know it's like when we are living on a you know hyper bitcoinized world on a
27:51
bitcoin standard like obviously we'll still have an economy you know people make investments and
27:54
we're just all using right sounds of money um i'm curious just you know as a businessman somebody's
28:00
seen a lot of different business models do you have any kind of thoughts or want to opine on
28:05
how you think treasury companies may deploy Bitcoin to generate more Bitcoin?
28:11
Yeah, I think there's a couple different avenues. And one of the challenges, so
28:14
I think, you know, the big initial unlock of the Bitcoin treasury thing was like, oh,
28:19
if you're a public company, you have access to public capital markets, you can raise a ton of
28:23
money to buy a bunch of Bitcoin. That's a huge unlock. Being a public company also comes with
28:29
some constraints in terms of what they can do with the Bitcoin potentially.
28:34
And that's one of the things we've sort of looked a little bit into because there are
28:38
people building businesses now to try to support the Bitcoin treasury companies in finding
28:44
ways to generate yield.
28:45
So the most kind of Bitcoin native way would be to provide liquidity on Lightning or other
28:51
layer twos and generate a yield.
28:53
I think that will, I think, slowly increase over time as the sort of low risk.
29:00
It could end up kind of becoming like a risk-free rate of return, depending on which layer two you're talking about or which use case.
29:09
The challenge there is, you know, as a public company, you might have custodial requirements for how you have to store your Bitcoin.
29:16
And so, you know, running a Lightning node or working with an LSP might take some time with your compliance team or working with regulators to confirm that you can do it.
29:27
And so I think some of that still needs to get worked out, but I think it will.
29:31
So that's one obvious thing.
29:34
And then similarly, you know, they could be kind of in the vein of being like a Bitcoin bank, you know, deploy capital either through credit or, you know, equity investments into other companies.
29:45
that's a common, you know, a lot of businesses have a corporate venture arm or do other kind of financing.
29:51
It could be a big part of what they do to generate yield in the medium run.
29:56
But again, they might be kind of constrained in how much of it they can deploy.
29:59
The real constraint is like, I think public companies can't really hold too many securities on their balance sheet
30:06
or they end up becoming investment companies, which is kind of a different regulatory structure.
30:10
and so I think that's gonna
30:12
I mean they could
30:14
some of them could pivot into that structure
30:16
but it might not work quite as well
30:18
for the model that they're thinking about
30:20
and it cuts off I think
30:22
some of the scalability of doing more
30:23
kind of like you know options stuff
30:25
financial engineering they can't quite do that
30:27
at the same scale potentially
30:29
which I think is good because
30:30
it might force them to do more real world
30:34
stuff like acquire businesses
30:35
invest in businesses and have real operating
30:37
Bitcoin businesses
30:39
that are generating some of that yield.
30:43
I was going to jump in, and I know we talked a little bit about this prior to the call.
30:48
Just if you could talk through what you're seeing on the ground in terms of AI in the startup space.
30:55
I mean, now with the coding agents and being able to write code so much faster,
31:01
and then how it relates to Bitcoin mining versus deploying those ASICs over into the AI,
31:09
world. Just would love to get your perspective on what you're seeing on the ground, whether you think
31:15
that the AI stuff might be overblown and might have to retrace and how it all ties back into
31:23
Bitcoin businesses, be it on the mining side or in the startup world. Yeah, I mean, at a high level,
31:28
I definitely think AI is sucking a lot of the energy and liquidity out of the room in a way
31:33
that's, I don't know, at times frustrating, you know, being in the space or as an American person,
31:40
just kind of concerning. Like, you know, for the longest time, I think Bitcoin was sort of the
31:45
purest, you know, devaluation trade, the purest trade against the money printer.
31:53
That works great until you end up in an environment where the money printer is like
31:57
shoving everything into one specific thing. And when that's AI, now that becomes the most perfect,
32:02
the best debasement trade.
32:06
And so it makes sense to me in the short term.
32:07
But the problem, I think, how long does that survive?
32:10
When does the bubble?
32:11
I do think it's overheated.
32:13
Just from what we're seeing in terms of like,
32:16
we'll talk to founders that are,
32:19
they talk to Bitcoin VCs, but they talk to other VCs.
32:23
And they're building a retail facing fintech application
32:28
to help people build wealth with Bitcoin
32:30
or something like that.
32:31
you know, and there'll be VCs that say like, oh, this is great, but can you also build a data center?
32:36
Like, you know, like, like, that's not, that's not a good sign.
32:41
It's kind of the equivalent of like your barber asking you about Dogecoin or whatever.
32:46
And so, yeah, I think there's some, there's some overheating happening.
32:51
And from, from the perspective of the health of the Bitcoin ecosystem,
32:55
it does concern me that like it's muscling out a lot of the capital that does need to go into
32:59
supporting mining, you know, to keep a healthy security model for Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin has
33:05
great incentive adjustments to make sure that that will continue to happen over time. And I think like
33:11
the Bitcoin mining provides something to the grid that I don't think is exactly replicated by AI.
33:20
I think what will end up happening is, you know, particularly for the public companies have a lot
33:25
of pressure to do the AI compute stuff, but it's not exactly the same thing.
33:31
It's not as easy as like unplugging all the miners and plugging in, you know, AI chips
33:35
or whatever.
33:36
It's that they have different latency requirements, different uptime, different geographic, you
33:40
know, optimization.
33:41
And so I think it'll be a both.
33:46
And I haven't quite worked out exactly what the long-term balance is and how we, you know,
33:51
encourage other capital providers to continue supporting the mining ecosystem.
33:55
but it has been a tough year or so,
33:58
or probably a couple of years really,
34:00
compared to the past on the mining side.
34:03
As far as founders go,
34:04
so it is great.
34:05
Like the leverage
34:07
and the force multiplying factor of AI
34:10
has been great from what we've seen.
34:13
The founders that we're working with,
34:14
like lots of the teams that we've invested in
34:17
have been able to ship really cool stuff really fast
34:19
with a really small team, which is great.
34:24
And as we start thinking about the future
34:25
like we'll eventually do a fund two.
34:28
And thinking about,
34:30
I think even the broader venture world
34:31
is gonna have to reckon with this
34:34
in a way that it hasn't quite figured out yet.
34:36
I think that the model might need some tweaks.
34:39
So it's an interesting time to be thinking about it.
34:42
And then there's a lot of natural overlap
34:43
between Bitcoin and AI.
34:46
The whole kind of narrative around
34:47
agentic payments and all that stuff.
34:50
It's hard to see where the value accrues,
34:52
but it is to me,
34:55
And apparently to many agents, very obvious that Bitcoin works great as money for agents.
35:00
And so, you know, I expect that will continue.
35:02
I expect that, you know, the more and more stuff we're building autonomously, the more those things will kind of have a new demand for Bitcoin.
35:12
That could be one of the catalysts that kind of pushes us more into the medium of exchange phase.
35:17
one of the reasons being that like, you know, if you're running a corner store and you want to
35:23
accept Bitcoin because you're a Bitcoiner or you're running a website, an Etsy shop or whatever,
35:28
and you want to accept Bitcoin, like if your customers aren't Bitcoiners, you're going to
35:32
lose sales, you know, so you're not, you don't want to force it down your customers throats.
35:35
But an agent is not constrained in the same way that we are. Like if I, if I was not a Bitcoiner
35:40
and I encountered a checkout that was Bitcoin, I would be like, well, I'll just go get this
35:44
somewhere else. But an agent might say, oh, I can figure that out in 15 seconds with a couple of
35:48
tokens or whatever and pay for this. So I think it'll sort of remove some barriers as people are
35:53
having more and more like kind of agentic workflows, either in their personal life or
35:58
their business life. Yeah, those are kind of my thoughts. I do, it's similar to the,
36:06
it is another kind of hype cycle that sometimes we start to worry is like a distraction or the
36:11
The other thing I worry about is it's one of these things where nobody really has an incentive to say that it's not good or it's not helpful.
36:20
Every founder you talk to is going to say, oh, of course, I've 10x my productivity with AI.
36:25
But I also hear kind of rumbles and mumbles that actually the code that AI ships is still pretty buggy.
36:32
and it's great for a first draft, but the real work of building a tech company involves maintenance
36:39
and scaling the code base in a way that meets the demand of a huge organization.
36:44
And AI isn't always great at that.
36:46
So I think there are trade-offs and it's hard to get your finger on the pulse of where exactly we are
36:52
and how quickly the transition will happen.
36:54
But so far, I think it's been a huge value unlock across our portfolio and the founders we're talking to.
37:01
And even for us as a fund, like we're doing a lot internally to try to kind of become AI native and automate a lot of things that free up time for us to, I think, add more value to founders and LPs.
37:12
Yeah, I like I think that it's it's very it'll be very interesting to see the actual productivity gains, you know, maybe at the end of this year. And it kind of do you have any thoughts on that then further like devaluing devaluing the dollar quicker and actually maybe pulling us into a world where, hey, like technology is getting making things so much more cheap.
37:38
And we're still living in this world where prices have to go up, but everything's more efficient.
37:44
And the whole Jeff Booth world of abundance plays out much faster.
37:50
And then you see people starting to wake up.
37:52
They're like, wow, I can't buy a house anymore because it's $1.2 million.
37:56
It used to be half a million dollars.
37:58
Do you see a world where that, if it does play out where efficiency gains are actually realized that it does help Bitcoin, I guess, adoption rise quicker?
38:09
Yeah, I mean, I think I do, but maybe from a still kind of a more pessimistic perspective.
38:17
So because what I think part of what is likely going to happen or what has happened over the last whatever 20 years, most of my lifetime is the money printer is going.
38:33
The money ends up in the hands of people that already have a lot of money first.
38:36
first. To me, it has always blown my mind, I don't know if you guys know, but the modern
38:42
monetary theorists, but they'll talk about how it's possible to print money without inflation.
38:48
But if you think about it, what that means is the people who spend the money
38:52
on stuff that you measure in inflation aren't getting the money.
38:57
So if you print money and the hamburger price doesn go up it just means that the asset owning class got all that money and got to buy assets which is why housing prices go up and asset prices continually go up
39:09
And so that trend, I think, is actually probably likely to accelerate where, you know, the productivity gains that AI unlocks will accrue first and foremost to the people that own that intellectual property and control those systems in a way that will kind of turn the screws more tightly on people.
39:28
And it might not, you know, the price inflation, you know, might for the stuff that you live on day to day might not be insane right away.
39:36
But I think the asset price inflation will continue in that environment, particularly if you get kind of a bubble burst and, you know, they step in and print more money to bail out all these, either the AI firms themselves or the private credit funds or the VCs that were investing in it.
39:50
If you get a situation like that, you know, you'll get lots of asset price inflation.
39:55
It'll take a while for it to trickle down to consumer price inflation.
39:58
But I think what people will feel is exactly what you said, Jordan.
40:02
I can't buy a house.
40:03
You know, they're already feeling like that.
40:05
It's going to become increasingly out of reach.
40:07
And feeling like you're getting left behind, I think, is part of what brings people into Bitcoin and realize it helps them realize like, oh, I can I don't need to buy a whole Bitcoin.
40:15
I can buy, you know, one Satoshi and that'll go up.
40:19
I can't invest in a house because that's too big of a ticket.
40:22
but I can buy a piece of this thing that seems to be a good hedge against this problem that I think people are also increasingly understanding.
40:30
Like that to me has actually been the craziest or the most inspiring development over the last whatever five or 10 years of kind of being, you know,
40:38
more actively involved in the Bitcoin world and outside the Bitcoin world really is like when I when I got into Bitcoin,
40:44
I would talk to people about fiat currency and nobody knew what that meant.
40:47
But like people talk about it on, you know, CNBC, whatever.
40:50
I hear like MSNBC people use the word fiat and like that, that kind of blows my mind.
40:56
That to me says people are starting to get it.
40:58
And I think the AI trend will accelerate that.
41:03
There may be some pain along the way, but you know, nothing good comes for free.
41:11
Truth.
41:14
No, that's really interesting.
41:15
and you know jordan and i are trying to lean heavy into it i think it it sets up an interesting
41:23
market dynamic i'm curious in your thoughts on like this narrative um that you know capital is
41:29
flowing out of bitcoin and into ai and i kind of want to frame the question a little bit here too
41:34
because just kind of on the mining point and you know the there's certainly you know involved with
41:39
this this is like one of those things that's just seared into my memory i think it was late 24 early
41:44
25 cathedras, you know, 8K or 10K, like they just straight up said, like Bitcoin mining
41:52
is not a shareholder creative operating activity for us.
41:56
And now you're seeing all these public miners, you have transitioned to HPC.
42:01
And, you know, from what I've heard talking to folks in that world is, you know, your
42:05
classic data center builders are booked out seven, 10 years.
42:09
And so, you know, the people who need computer, you know, knocking on the Bitcoin miners doors and it's like, oh, you guys put up like metal buildings with computers inside, right?
42:18
Like you're high.
42:20
Right.
42:20
Yeah.
42:21
But then when we look at the rest of the capital markets, you know, S&P 500, most countries have ever been put call spread on S&P 500 as low as it's ever been.
42:30
So everybody's bullish and everybody's making the same bet on AI.
42:34
And so in that context, do you believe this narrative that like capital is strictly flowing out of Bitcoin and into AI?
42:43
And then if that bubble pops, are we just looking at capital destruction or is that what it's going to take for like the next bull market in Bitcoin?
42:54
I think, so I think yes.
43:00
I think both.
43:01
Like I think capital will certainly be destroyed.
43:03
There will be empty husks of data centers that are never used or long-term power contracts that end up not really panning out.
43:16
I think when that happens, so I think some of what's happening is capital is flowing out of Bitcoin and into AI.
43:26
I also think there's like capital being created because of the way money is created through lending and all this stuff.
43:34
That's also flowing into AI.
43:37
So I don't think it's all capital flowing out of Bitcoin.
43:39
But it's definitely putting a – the parking brake has been pulled on Bitcoin's upward trajectory, I think, in large part because of that.
43:50
And I think when that bursts, it will be one of the places that capital flows back into.
43:56
I think like commodities generally have also sort of been victims of this capital flight situation.
44:05
But it does, it feels, I agree, it feels like sort of panicky and like everybody's, the herd is moving in that direction.
44:12
and one of the challenges I think for mining specifically like it's a lot easier to be
44:18
contrarian and just buy Bitcoin that's that's great you can you you benefit as a Bitcoin or
44:25
you benefit from the fact that the price is down if you can buy more it's harder to be contrarian
44:30
and say well everybody's moving to AI but I still know there is an accretive way to build a Bitcoin
44:34
mining business and we need to do that that becomes a lot harder in an environment where
44:39
you're competing for power contracts with people that can pay literally infinite money,
44:44
you know, or can pay contractors to build their data center, literally blank check,
44:48
do whatever you want. It just squeezes out all but the most efficient kind of creative hustle
44:56
oriented mining operations, which I think is ultimately good, right? Like it creates a more
45:02
resilient anti-fragile system of miners. And that's always been the way that it works, you know,
45:08
because of the cyclical nature historically of Bitcoin.
45:15
So like, I think that will be the outcome.
45:17
I think there'll be,
45:18
the builders will keep building
45:20
in ways that work in this environment.
45:22
And eventually the world will come around
45:23
to realize like, actually we need a little bit of both.
45:26
We spent too much on all this AI stuff
45:29
and it'll have a counter effect of like,
45:31
well, all those empty husks of data centers
45:33
now become actually very cheap Bitcoin mining hubs,
45:37
And like right now, miners are very cheap. So if you've set yourself up well on your balance sheet and you can deploy capital or you can still raise it to buy miners and build data centers, people can still do that.
45:54
I think the bubble popping will be part of the story that brings people back in.
46:00
But I also think there's scenarios where it doesn't quite pop, it plateaus and capital comes back in.
46:06
Or because of the increased productivity, there's just sort of more opportunity to deploy back into Bitcoin stuff.
46:16
I love it.
46:17
So I guess what's the coolest thing that you've got your eye on these days in this down market where, you know, like you said earlier, there's only the real ones are still sticking around.
46:30
Just kind of curious if you're allowed to say anything that you've got your – it's caught your eye, I guess, in the last several months.
46:38
Yeah, we've been spending a lot of time in kind of like the regulated, very boring space for normal people.
46:46
Like, you know, there's a lot there. The journey of bringing in traditional finance into the space and kind of financializing Bitcoin and bringing it to a place where it's a mature asset that's a part of the broader financial ecosystem.
46:59
So there's still a lot of work to be done there.
47:01
So we've, you know, been, been, I think we have a couple of deals that we haven't announced yet that we've made investments in companies that are, you know, building products and services that sort of, you know, for example, like allow banks to more easily land against Bitcoin.
47:16
Like right now it's, there's a huge problem where like capital can't really flow into that kind of product for lots of different reasons.
47:23
And some of them are kind of regulatory driven, some of them are product driven.
47:26
And so that's an area we've been spending time on.
47:29
And I think we'll continue to spend just given like my background and the deals we've looked at before, we kind of have a solid understanding of the way the regulatory environment works and is evolving in a way that could be helpful for Bitcoin founders.
47:44
So that's one big area. We have looked at a couple of kind of like AI related deals that are interesting, but kind of because we're very Bitcoin focused, like it's a stretch to fit into our mandate.
47:58
But, you know, deals where like people are building AI tooling that's very kind of like freedom money aligned, self-sovereign AI, kind of privacy focused technology in the AI space, I think will be a big part of the broader Bitcoin ecosystem and something we might focus a little more on in Fund 2 or we'll continue to look at for Fund 1.
48:19
Those are exciting. Yeah.
48:20
I mean, even like, you know, the whole thing that happened with Fable, I guess that was last week, right?
48:26
Where, like, I started trying to think through how do you distribute the model economy, I guess, so that something like that can't happen, right?
48:40
You can't shut down the Bitcoin network, but obviously the government can strong arm an AI company to shut down a model because they don't like it.
48:49
I guess do you see any world where we, like the AI, just everything gets distributed a little bit more so that people are maybe running their own hardware and that's similar to people running a node and they're a bit more self-sovereign in the way they interact with AI models, especially given like a company that's, maybe they build all these workflows.
49:11
And I see this as a risk even for our firm.
49:14
If you get addicted to the tokens, right, if you're just plugging into an API,
49:19
and then all of a sudden Anthropic says, hey, we're going to triple or quadruple the price of these tokens.
49:25
Well, now it's not economic, but it's built into our workflow.
49:28
So, you know, what do we do then?
49:30
And then, of course, there's all the data you've got to figure out.
49:34
Where is what server is your data living on?
49:36
I'm just kind of curious if you, anything in that realm with that,
49:40
especially with that example last week,
49:41
that kind of rocked, I feel like rocked the world a little bit.
49:44
Yeah. I have my, I guess my,
49:46
my hot take on the Fable 5 thing is that, you know,
49:50
I think it's exactly what they wanted to happen because, you know,
49:54
it sets a great precedent for, I mean, it's a great narrative.
49:59
If you're going to try to go public, like, Oh, our, you know,
50:02
our AI is weapons grade. We have the best one,
50:04
But it also sets a precedent where the government can become a gatekeeper and prevent your competition from entering. And that's like the history of, you know, read Rothbard's history of the progressive era. That's the history of how regulation happens often or historically.
50:19
and so like I do think that will continue again for people with very well well well intentioned
50:26
people trying to keep the world safe will create a dynamic where it's hard for a closed source
50:32
model to compete with with the big guys and I think the natural consequence of that will be
50:39
more of a flourishing in the open source world I don't know if I'm so cynical like I've heard
50:44
people kind of pontificate about how like you know this is the first step into creating kind of like a
50:48
a caste system of people who can afford the most expensive tokens and people who are like, you know,
50:56
forced to be dumb forever because they don't have access to AGI because the tokens are too expensive.
51:01
Like, you know, I don't know if that's part of that's probably not part of the plan or whatever,
51:05
but like it does create an environment where the anthropics of the world can charge a lot more for tokens,
51:09
which means that there's kind of like, you know, in economic terms, there's deadweight loss happening.
51:16
that deadweight loss can be sort of stolen, I guess, from those guys through the open source
51:22
community in different ways, or redistributed if open source can kind of keep up. And that's
51:27
much harder to shut down. I think the question is, like, you can't shut down Bitcoin because it is
51:33
because of its decentralized nature. And it sort of runs on autopilot in a way where like,
51:40
you know, thousands of people around the world are just running it, you can't stop it.
51:42
The internet is sort of like that, but the internet has more choke points and open source development also can have more choke points.
51:51
You know, you need to, you need to coordinate around a place to, to share your code base and you need people building things on an ongoing basis.
51:58
And those people you can find and stop.
52:00
Um, so I do think, yeah, tool like tools that enable that movement.
52:04
to continue that, like, I don't think it's completely stoppable, but it, there will be
52:09
more, I think, back and forth on it.
52:12
And I think the challenge will be finding ways to monetize those products that keep that
52:19
ecosystem thriving and sustainable so that it can compete and kind of, you know, deliver
52:23
AI to the people who are, to us plebs who can't afford the, whatever, the Fable 5 tokens
52:28
in the future when they're charging like 10 Bitcoin for every token or whatever.
52:34
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52:41
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i haven't heard of the caste system philosophy but i will avoid whatever corners
53:12
well kind of kind of in that vein like the anthropic thing to me was funny because i mean
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they've been like the biggest fear mongers of like ai and kind of asking for the government to
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regulate it and then right for whatever reason they feel like they need to step in and then
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they're like, boy, who cries wolf, it's like, oh, we're getting like regulated. It's like,
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you're the company that answers the regulation, but whatever. In that vein, you know,
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how specifically when it comes to regulation, are you talking to founders and how to like,
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kind of navigate this landscape? Obviously, it's a little intimidating for them making,
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you know, big investments in like building something that want to get rug pulled by the
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government and a different administration.
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But it feels at least to me, who's somebody who's not like super plugged into this, we're
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in a little bit of a unique regulatory time because, you know, everybody was bullish on
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like, you know, the Trump administration, like the, you know, we don't like to use the
54:13
C word on here, but just for, you know, consistency's sake, like the war on crypto on the Biden
54:20
administration.
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but I don't think like a lot has actually been done to, you know,
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codify law and anything, you know,
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and the Trump administration for like rock solid protections.
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So how are you kind of advising founders on like this weird middle ground?
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Yeah, it's a great question. I do, like I said, maybe before we hopped on,
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I sort of said like my,
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my time in law school was a very expensive hobby because I don't,
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I don't practice law. But the, the, the real value that I,
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that I saw in it when I was doing it, even though I knew I might not be a lawyer, was that you can
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save a lot of money by just knowing when you have to go talk to a lawyer, like knowing enough to go
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ask the questions and who to go ask and to be able to kind of cut through the legalese a little bit
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with founders when they might get an answer from a lawyer that actually doesn't really know
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the space that well or the specific regulations or requirements Not to say that you know we giving founders legal advice but helping them find the right partners to work with or the right moments to go do that to keep their legal bills kind of efficient
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And also maybe letting them know like, oh, that business model you're considering is going
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to be a bear from a regulatory perspective.
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You could consider doing it this way instead.
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And that might be a little easier or is like an initial phase one to build a customer base
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before you want to go spend all the money on regulatory.
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I do think we're in a shifting environment.
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To some extent, I think the shift was happening even before, I mean, actually to a large extent, even before the election.
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The real problem with the kind of the Biden era war on crypto and even predated that really like the regulators, even outside of financial services, but the regulatory apparatus in the U.S. has so much autonomy and power to make basically make law beyond what the kind of four corners of whatever bill the Congress passed.
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and the FCC in particular, but many of the OCC, the Fed, a lot of the financial services regulators
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over the last 10 years were just getting out over their skis, in my opinion, in terms of what they
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were legally allowed to do. The courts, even in late 2025, the courts were pushing back on that
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in a serious way. And there were big decisions in crypto and in the broader world where the court
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said, hey, regulators, actually, we don't need to defer to you all the time. Sometimes you're
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going outside your legal authority. I think that started the brakes a little bit. But certainly
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under this administration, like just it is crazy to see how removing certain people from these
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regulatory bodies and putting in more open-minded, creative, kind of constructive regulators can
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create an environment where you can get a lot done in terms of changing rules or changing
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guidance or being more open to working with founders on, you know, I don't know that there's
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any real like sandboxes, but that kind of approach where you're creating a no action letter, which is
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basically just telling a founder, we're not going to sue you if you try this out. There's a lot more
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of that kind of stuff happening now, which is great and productive. But to your point, Wyatt,
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like it's not forever. And all that stuff is just as easily reversed without legislation. So something,
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you know, the stable, the Genius Act was, I think, an important first step, but it's, you know,
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not really Bitcoin specific. Clarity has some stuff in it that I think is good and important
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for Bitcoin. I'm worried about, I'm very skeptical that it will pass before the midterms
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just for political reasons and logistical reasons. And so my fear is that some of the stuff like
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protecting developers, protecting self-custody, that kind of stuff gets pulled back in a kind of
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horse trading thing where, you know, Coinbase gets to give yield to customers or whatever,
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whatever the trade-off is, it's one of the things I could see getting kind of thrown away and not
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being memorialized. I also think some of the protections in there could be strengthened,
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which would be good if we could get that to happen. But ultimately, in the day, I do think
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the courts are, I've always been sort of like a, I don't know, a judicial maximalist. This would be
58:23
a longer conversation on yeah like in my opinion courts really are the ones that make law And so they kind of hold the line like you know even the Congress can pass a bill that is unconstitutional right They
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can pass a bill that they don't have the power to do. And it ultimately falls on the courts to say,
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hey, no, that's not the law, we make the law. And I was encouraged that that was happening prior to
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some of the more, you know, political shifts on the regulatory and legislative side. And if that
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continues and I think you know it'll take longer it'll be more uncertain there'll still be a lot
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of it'll be very frustrating for founders because they will continue in some in a gray area in
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certain spaces but I hope that ultimately you know the courts realize like that the like the
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outcome for the samurai devs and tornado cash was was terrible uh and like I think better courts
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will realize that over time um that's kind of the court system is generally more like emergent
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it's an emergent way of making law. And that's why I think it's better. Just like,
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you know, Bitcoin is an emergent system. The economy is emergent. Those,
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those systems tend to get to the truth in the long run. And I think the truth is that we should have,
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you know, freedom money. So I hope that will eventually be realized.
59:40
Well, hopefully the courts step in on that Illinois law.
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Yeah, that's crazy. That's crazy. That's totally crazy. I don't know who the constituency is for
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that kind of stuff. Like, I think it's just the banks and stuff. But like, I can't imagine
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anybody's calling their congressman saying like, hey, you know, people are sending Bitcoin too
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much, we need to tax every transaction, you know, like, no, no, that's not a thing. So I think and
1:00:06
I think politicians will, you know, that was, I think, a big part of the 2024 election cycle,
1:00:11
like, the people that were trying to foment a anti crypto army or whatever, like, realize there's
1:00:17
So nobody cares about that.
1:00:19
There aren't people walking around that it's really hard to create that narrative.
1:00:24
But you can raise money for it, I think, from some of the more powerful kind of corporate interests that do have, you know, things to protect that Bitcoin threatens.
1:00:36
So I think it'll continue.
1:00:37
It's got to be challenging core, right?
1:00:40
It's got to be what?
1:00:41
Challenging core.
1:00:42
I would think so.
1:00:44
Yeah, yeah.
1:00:46
Yeah.
1:00:47
I mean, it will be.
1:00:48
I know it will be.
1:00:50
I've already seen lawyers saying that they're working on the case as we speak.
1:00:56
So it'll definitely be challenged.
1:00:57
And I hope they're successful.
1:01:01
Yeah.
1:01:01
Yeah.
1:01:02
It's always a long – the problem with the courts is it takes a while.
1:01:05
So we'll see.
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That – and I don't want to dox anybody.
1:01:08
But if you're a Bitcoiner, you still live in Illinois, you might want to think that through.
1:01:15
Yeah.
1:01:15
Or go on a boating trip.
1:01:18
Yeah, exactly.
1:01:21
All right, well, this is great.
1:01:22
I mean, Vijay, how can people find you?
1:01:26
Hold on, I'm sorry, Jordan.
1:01:27
I have one last question.
1:01:28
What?
1:01:28
Okay, we'll cut that.
1:01:31
Sorry, my bad.
1:01:33
No, you're good.
1:01:34
It not that important but standard VC question Vijay how many vests do you own Oh we vestless we vestless we hat hat focused we not vest guys i might have i might have one vest we don have any epoch vests though so
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um yeah i don't know maybe one day but i i feel like that could be a sign that
1:01:54
the the suits got to us i don't know the top is in yeah okay
1:01:58
maybe you guys are being katranians there but did eric say that he had a vest i know he has a vest
1:02:05
at least one
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yeah
1:02:08
okay
1:02:08
it's just the bear market
1:02:10
you know
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once the bull market hits
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the vest will come out
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maybe
1:02:13
that's right
1:02:14
that's right
1:02:14
I mean we can't all be
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as well dressed
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as you Wyatt
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I mean
1:02:18
are you going to like
1:02:19
a nice dinner party
1:02:21
after this
1:02:22
no
1:02:23
purely for
1:02:25
for the podcast
1:02:26
Bitcoin's a noble cause
1:02:27
and we should carry
1:02:27
ourselves as such
1:02:28
yeah
1:02:30
that's why I'm wearing
1:02:31
the formal
1:02:31
formal hoodie
1:02:32
look at least it's not an empty closet
1:02:37
that's good
1:02:38
alright so BJ
1:02:42
so how can investors
1:02:44
find you if they want to
1:02:46
beat Bitcoin Kager
1:02:48
over the next five years
1:02:50
and then also there's a ton of founders out there
1:02:53
I think that world has exploded
1:02:54
as the idea guy can now
1:02:57
actually execute on
1:02:58
a lot of things in ways they couldn't do
1:03:01
two or three years ago.
1:03:03
How can people find Epoch
1:03:05
and get connected with you all?
1:03:07
Yeah, you can look me up on Twitter or X.
1:03:10
Eric Yakes also on Twitter, X.
1:03:13
Our DMs are open.
1:03:14
And then our website is epochvc.io.
1:03:16
We have a little intake form there for founders.
1:03:21
But yeah, we're accessible.
1:03:25
Beautiful.
1:03:26
Okay, well, thanks so much for coming on the show, man.
1:03:29
And yeah, I'm sure we'll be talking to you very soon.
1:03:32
Okay.
1:03:33
Yeah.
1:03:33
Likewise.
1:03:34
Thanks for having me.
1:03:36
Thanks y'all.
1:03:37
See ya.
1:03:42
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1:03:44
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