How Bitcoin Could Get To $10 MILLION Per Coin

That's what Bitcoin is to me. Bitcoin is insurance from war. And when more people recognize that when you're in the middle of a conflict and you can suck it off the internet onto a cold storage device and take it to you around the world, that is a tremendous application and use case that we saw firsthand. I think the government is really gearing up to inject a lot of liquidity in the market. This could be one of the reasons why they initiated the conflict because they needed a reason to go and inject liquidity into the market into print. And I in my mind have no doubt that in our lifetime we'll see 10520 million dollar Bitcoin if not more than that because what's going on guys? Today we got a great episode with Brian Dixon. He is the CEO of Offthechain Capital. And in this conversation we talk about is war and the conflict in Iran good for Bitcoin or bad for Bitcoin? How should we think about the asset in terms of it being risk on or risk off? And then we go around the horn look at all the different things. What are the macro headwinds or tailwinds? What's going on in the regulatory environment? How are they thinking about the treasury companies? How does Bitcoin fit in with gold, S&P, AI, and much, much more. Brian has a lot of unique thoughts that you probably haven't heard anywhere else. So, I highly suggest that you listen to the entire conversation. Here's my conversation with Brian Dixon. All right, Brian, thought a great place to start this conversation is uh is war good for Bitcoin? Obviously, we've seen the United States, they went and they grabbed Nicholas Maduro. Uh then we went to Iran. We set off a bunch of bombs there. Uh Cuba seems to be, you know, a potential thing that we may go do. And so Bitcoin, you would think if it's trading with software stocks should sell off aggressively, >> hasn't done that. Actually, it's gone up. How do you think about Bitcoin in the current geopolitical environment and kind of some of the macro factors that we're paying attention to? >> I think in the short term, we often see people try to sell off like it is a tech risk stack, but over time, I believe more people are going to recognize what Bitcoin really is, which in my opinion is insurance for more. So when you're in a geopolitical conflict and you want an asset that you can be able to take with you off the internet if you need to to flee to another country in a conflict situation, Bitcoin is the best designed asset for that. And I think more and people are starting to understand that over time. And in addition to that, we're seeing very very unique applications and use cases built for Bitcoin beyond just the store of value, but payments and other thing in other jurisdictions. And so as that continues to expand, people are having additional applications they can use it for beyond just a store of value even in a conflict scenario because if you have a uh group of people that comes in and shuts off your bank system as an example, what are you going to do? You can't pay, if you can't transact, that shuts you off from the rest of the world pretty much. But Bitcoin is a saving grace in that regard to a lot of people in these conflict zones. >> What I find so interesting is um Bitcoin is usually talked about especially uh with me and and many of the guests as an asset in an investment portfolio. And so, you know, Iran, uh, we say, "Hey, we're going to go and we're going to strike them." Somehow, we always do this stuff on the weekends, right? Um, and, uh, Bitcoin was the only thing that was, uh, was trading. It goes down. Didn't go down substantially, but, but definitely went down a little bit. >> All the other markets are closed. >> Now, what you're seeing is people are starting to uh, kind of re-calibrate their portfolios and figure out how much equities do I want, where in the equity market do I want to allocate capital to? Uh, gold, is that going to be the, you know, kind of war hedge that people think it uh, should be? what's going to happen to bonds? How do I think about Bitcoin? What about real estate? Is, you know, all of a sudden, is oil going to spike, which everyone thought it was going to spike, you know, 50 bucks a barrel? Um, that didn't happen. And so, you know, there is a lot of this change that occurs when you start to see a conflict kickoff because people are basically trying to look forward and say, "Hey, I need to prepare myself in case this is going to be uh kind of a prolong thing." Now, what I find interesting >> is that we're hearing the exact opposite coming out of Washington. They're like, "This is going to be short. Mhm. >> This is not going to be a prolonged thing. And so do you think that has an impact on how people think about Bitcoin or the rest of their portfolio in terms of if this is only 2 or 3 4 weeks maybe I don't really have to change that much because I'm looking you know a little bit past that four four week uh time period. >> There's a few components there. One is you're right whenever the first thing happened in Iran it was on the weekend. So people are going to go sell the first thing that's most liquid that's available at that point in time whenever they get scared right the fear kicks in. Then when the markets open up on Monday, they're going to start looking at the rest of their portfolio and what's liquid, what's easy to move around, how do I rebalance that. I also think another thing people probably aren't thinking about enough right now is even if this is a short conflict, let's say it's four or five weeks, I think the government is really gearing up to inject a lot of liquidity in the market. This could be one of the reasons why they initiated the conflict because they need a reason to go and inject liquidity into the market into print. And one of the ways that's happened historically is when we go into a conflict scenario, the money printers get turned on to finance and help assist with the conflict. And when that occurs and that liquidity gets injected in the market, you see risk assets traditionally fly and do very well. And so that's something that people could be thinking about as well. Maybe like, oh, if we inject liquidity into the market, gold or some of these other store of values that are good in a conflict scenario could do well, but also Bitcoin could do very well also. >> When you think about um the current situation, they are printing money. they turn QE back on. Uh we've cut I think six times since September of 2024, cut three times going into the end of the year in 2025. Um every single thing they're doing, you would expect inflation to be surging. >> Mhm. >> We're not seeing that. And so one of the things I've been trying to think through, and I've got maybe some theories, but don't yet have like an answer or full confidence on is is part of the Bitcoin selloff from the all-time high down to $60,000. the fact that we don't have the inflation, deflation is the bigger risk. Bitcoin is forward looking and saying, "Wait a second. If we get some sort of real deflationary pressures or we even get to true deflation, >> that's actually a headwind for asset prices." Like you you you expect assets to go up when there's inflation. If there's deflation, does that mean they all go down? >> Yeah. So, the Bitcoin sell-offs are interesting. So I think something to think through and this is one of our theories but we haven't been able to substantiate this yet is if you look over the course of the last year year and a half the biggest draw downs in bitcoin have happened around a few strategic points in time. So the first point was when Trump passed the strategic bitcoin reserve on the executive order he gave the government agencies I think initial 30 days plus another 30-day on top of that to audit their books and then report back to the strategic reserve how much bitcoin they held on their books. Then they would have to submit it to the treasury for the strategic reserve. Well, over that 60-day period, Bitcoin went from 108,000 and I think drew down to the high 80s, low 90s. So, that was the first draw down. The next big one that we saw was right around when Bitcoin had its all-time high. And right around that time as well, one of the government agencies seized 127,200 Bitcoin approximately from a Cambodian hacking group that was doing these pig butchering scams and stealing people's Bitcoin. The agency received it. At that point in time, Bitcoin drew down significantly. And then we invade Venezuela and there's allegedly 60 billion of Bitcoin in Venezuela. At that point in time, Bitcoin draws down significantly. >> What are you saying? >> So although I haven't been able to substantiate, one of my ideas is that if you're a government agency and you know that if you seize Bitcoin from elicit activity and then you're required after a certain period of time to transition that over to the Bitcoin strategic reserve, you don't want to do that theoretically because that's dollars out of your balance sheet in your budget. So if you seize that Bitcoin and you sell some or all of it, you get to keep those dollars. And some of this is tens of billions of dollars of Bitcoin. And so I think that's possibly one thing that's going on. I haven't been able to substantiate this, but the timing is very indicative that every time one of these big seizures or the initial effectuation of the strategic reserve occurred that Bitcoin drew down pretty hard. And so that's something I've been kind of bouncing around in the back of my head that maybe these government agencies are selling a portion of it because they want to keep those dollars on their balance sheet. It would be very interesting if that's where the sell pressure is coming from is actually from the US government because you essentially have a non-economic seller. >> Sure, maybe they, you know, if hey, we're a little bit better at selling, we get a little bit more dollars. But if you have the uh kind of binary decision of I get zero dollars or I get 10 billion, >> 9.5, 10 billion, it's all kind of the same, right? A little slippage here or there, just, you know, kind of dumping on the market. U maybe there's some great traders, you know, in some of these organizations. probably not. And so, um, that would, you know, lead to this thought process of like maybe there's a little bit more flushing going on there than, uh, than you would otherwise see from like sophisticated market participants. >> Yeah, I think so. I think that's possibly one thing that's going on. I would also look into the derivative side of the market because when you really look at the derivatives market, it's 250 times bigger than the next biggest market below that. And so, the scale at which we're seeing capital being deployed on both the long and short side of things, there's potentially some manipulation going on. You know, we saw the information recently come out about what it was occurring with Jane Street and how that potentially could have led into a lot of the situations that happened in 2022 with the dislocation FTX and some other events with Teral Luna. And you think back to that, you're like, "Oh, yeah, that seems very reasonable, right? When you have that much capital and that much sophistication in the derivatives market and you're really manipulating things on the long and short side, you can be trying to clip profit on both sides pretty easily." And we know the crypto selloff that was happening around 9:30, 10:00 a.m. every day. And then since that Jane Street information came out, that's really ceased. And so it's possible that could been indicative of what's going on as well. >> Do you think that um there are other macro headwinds for Bitcoin other than just uh potential deflation? >> I do. So I think if we look at the institutional landscape of what's occurring, there's a couple components. One is the market structure actually. This is being worked on. I know Trump just released some information on I believe it was last night saying that we really need to get this across the finish line and the banks need to quit trying to slow down the Genius Act for stable coin interest and reward payments. But on the market structure side, I mean, I've met with some of the biggest banks in the world, both in the US and in the Middle East, over the last few months, and the uniform thing that I'm learning is they're waiting for that regulation to pass, and they have significantly scaled up their crypto teams. So, they're looking at their direct digital asset exposure, investing in funds, figuring out how they can stack more Bitcoin up. And a lot of them are waiting for that regulatory market structure to go in place because then they're going to know, okay, the SEC governs this section of the market, the CFTC governs this section of the market, and which other regulators may come in as well. And that gives them the regulatory sandbox to play in that they understand. That's what they've been waiting for for all these years. So, as a lot of the retail investors right now, I think, are in extreme fear because Bitcoin's drawn down 48%. Um, the institutional investors are loving it because they're scooping it up at a cheaper price right now and they're looking for much more longer term holds. And when you look at how institutional capital is allocated, they're not putting small dollars in. They do it systematically. They do it over multi-year time frames and it is billions and billions and billions of dollars that get deployed across the ecosystem. So that's a huge tailwind that I think people aren't taking into consideration enough >> when these institutions participate. Um what has changed, right? Why is all of a sudden are they now allocating capital? Like we're we're talking about like is war good for Bitcoin, right? And I think that uh most large institutions that I know are not day traders. They are not making decisions. Oh, this conflict's happening. This conflict's happening, right? They may say, okay, there's a regime change from a monetary policy standpoint. Maybe there's a change in terms of economic policy because of a change at the White House. Um maybe they believe that uh there's certain technology trends. You know, AI is going to be big. We should, you know, go and allocate there. Um but at the same time, Bitcoin looks very different today than it looked 10 years ago. you know, volatility has compressed significantly in some cases maybe more than 50%. Um, the asset is bigger and so now you've got a, you know, a trillion plus dollar uh asset to to go and and buy. You have some career risk that's been uh derisked because you've got, you know, Paul Tudtor Jones and Stanley Draen Miller and Fidelity and Black Rockck and all these other participants. What what was the like tipping point now all of a sudden to get all these guys in in buying Bitcoin? >> I think it's everything you just noted kind of all combined as a confluence of events in one. So they need the regulation in place. They need the growth of the asset class to get to a point where they don't have the reputational risk. I think that's one of the most important things. If you look historically at these big institutions, the first ones like university endowments as an example, some of the first university endowments that allocated to Bitcoin were the very forwardthinking technology focused ones. And then as that scaled up, you could then use that as a leverage point to other institutions to say, look, they've done it, you should consider looking into it as well. I also think from an institutional lens they look at Bitcoin very much with the store of value narrative. So they see the things going around with the world right now, the increase in liquidity being injected in various markets and so they look at gold and and Bitcoin is this digital gold 2.0 and that's another alternative for them to start allocating to. But they're also getting a tremendous demand from their client base. You can only tell your clients no for so long before your clients leave and decide to go with the competitor. And after so many years of that happening, they have to start to acquies to that as well. You know what's very interesting is about 10 years ago I sat down with one of the biggest banks in the world and explained them Bitcoin and I was like look this is going to happen this is why it's important this is why it's important as part of a diversified investment portfolio and at that point in time they were thought it was like a joke like this is never going to happen it's never basically laughed me out of the room right and then 10 years later now that same in type of institution is coming back wanting to get exposure to the space and wanting to re-educate themselves on it so it just takes time the institutions don't move quick they need a lot of ducks to get in a row before they can start making these allocation decisions. >> When you think about um the conflict that's happening right now, one one aspect that uh we did not talk on is if you don't think about it in an investment portfolio, you actually think about it from the people on the ground or the people who may be affected by this. Uh you all have some experience actually helping people that were in a conflict zone use Bitcoin for economic benefit that isn't investment related. Talk talk a little bit about this experience. >> Of course. So this is remarkable. In the United States as an example, we think of Bitcoin mostly as an investment. most people do. Not a lot of people are transacting with Bitcoin today. If it is, it's a very small percentage of the population. But in other countries around the world, Bitcoin can literally be your saving grace. And so, as an example, one of the things that we helped with a couple years back is there was a group of women in Afghanistan that for many years were building websites and they were getting paid in Bitcoin and that was their form of payment. And the reason they did that is because they were very cautious and concerned that if the Taliban took over and shut off access to the banking system, then they would lose all their assets and their value. Right? So that's exactly what occurred. We worked with the charity actually to get a plane over to rescue these women and get them out of Afghanistan. They were able to take the Bitcoin they earned from building these websites, put it in a cold storage device, put it in their shoes, get on the plane, get out of the country, fly to New York, and re-upload that Bitcoin right back to the internet and had 100% of the value that they had accreated and earned from building those websites with their labor over time. Now, that is a true use case like in a conflict environment. That was their saving grace. That was insurance from war for them. That's what Bitcoin is to be. Bitcoin is insurance from war. And when more people recognize that when you're in the middle of a conflict and you can suck it off the internet onto a cold storage device and take it to you around the world, that is a tremendous application and use case that we saw firsthand. When you have those situations, it doesn't feel like there's enough buying pressure, right, to like really move the Bitcoin. Again, it's a trillion plus dollar asset, but I do think that those stories help people understand there's 8 billion people in the world, right? That that that is possible. um when you all are thinking about like what Bitcoin is worth today, do you incorporate those types of use cases into some sort of model or do you just look purely at the numbers and say, "Hey, you know, maybe it's hash rate or or whatever. Here's what we think the fair value of Bitcoin is." >> Yeah. So, for our fair value models, we're generally looking at the traditional metrics, but a lot of people ask me like, "What do you think Bitcoin's value today?" And my response is always, "It's priceless." And if you think about this from an internet perspective, early on when there was 100 million people using the internet, it was not super valuable at that time. it was getting more valuable. A lot of people say this is worthless. It's never going to work. But now it's priceless. We cannot think of a day that we would go by where it's not integrated with every single thing that we do. I mean, it runs our whole financial markets. It runs everything that we do. And Bitcoin is becoming that same thing. In the early days when there was a small group of people using it, it was kind of worthless. But then as the adoption grew and the organic growth of the asset and the system grew, it's going to become priceless over time. It'll be integrated in literally everything we do in time. But in terms of the traditional models that we look at, we look at things like uh metaf's law where you take the number of users in the network and you square it and you multiply it by the transactional value. We'll use traditional logarithm logic analysis over the historical correlation of bitcoin. We'll use different kinds of stock toflow models with both dollars as the monetary unit and gold as the monetary unit and power law models. And today what all of those models indicate is that bitcoin is very very undervalued. >> What is like the general you know fair value of bitcoin? A lot of the models that we use, I would say they fall somewhere between 150 to 250,000 on average. >> It should be valued today. >> And so we didn't even in the uh last all-time high, we didn't even get to what you guys would consider fair value. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, our um our logarithmic scale model shows Bitcoin today I think should be around 220 to 240 um for a single bitcoin. So we know it's trading significantly discounted today. >> And why do you think it trades at such a a significant discount to those models? >> I think it's still misunderstood. I think it takes time for people to really wrap their head around the use case, the store of value narrative and there's still so many people that are used to very traditional investments and especially in other areas around the world like I spent some time um in the Middle East in a region where I was meeting and teaching Bitcoin educating them about what they do with off the chain and what I learned is that there's people are so primitive in their understanding still and some of these families had tens of billions of dollars and they were scared to write a $100,000 check into Bitcoin and the biggest reason is because in some of these territories, it's still not regulated. And when it's not regulated there, they bucket in the same category as elicit activity, even though it's not. And I had conversations with family offices that are worth 10 to20 billion that would say, "Brian, I want to give you money and you tell me how many Bitcoin I own." Like that simplistic, having no idea that they could even get it on their own through some of these different brokerages or providers. And so, I just think we're even though to us we've been in it for a long time, so it seems that we're very advanced, in reality, we're still very early where this game is going to go long term. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account but don't have any crypto in that retirement account? Then listen up. This message is for you. Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for retirement. They're helping smart investors diversify their savings with access to over 80 cryptocurrencies. With world-class customer service, militarygrade encryption, and a vertically integrated licensed trust company, it's no wonder more than 200,000 Americans trust Bitcoin IRA to secure their financial future. Getting started is quick and easy. It takes just three minutes to open an account. 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And when you start looking at things like uh Bitcoin compared to the S&P, Bitcoin compared to gold, etc., uh there do seem to be these like competing narratives, right? You know, I would argue that uh Bitcoin is trading similar to software stocks mainly because the people who are buying Bitcoin today are institutions and hedge funds and you know, ETF holders etc. Uh and they look at Bitcoin and AI complimentary as like innovative technologies, but there is some competition, right? there is this idea of like, oh, AI is the new shiny thing and maybe I should go allocate more capital here than I would otherwise to Bitcoin in the past. How do you think about Bitcoin's relationship to these other assets? So, I think that the AI is an interesting one. So, we think about AI, and this is what I advise people on a lot. If you believe in the future of AI and you're segmenting your digital asset exposure away to invest in AI because you think it has a shorter high growth potential, I think you're making the wrong decision. And the reason I think that is you should be allocating to both because if you're an agentic system or one of these digital assets that can be integrated into it. These agents, these AI agents, they can't go set up an account at Bank of America, right? So they're got to get paid in a native digital asset that is internet native to them and easy to move around and quick and fast and processes and something that they understand which is computer code. That's what an agent agent is computer code. It's going to do transactions and computer code is the monetary value. So if you believe in tremendous growth of AI, which if you pay attention to the space and how quick it's growing, I think we know over the next 5 years is going to revolutionize our life in more ways than we can even conceive, you inherently need to believe that digital assets will grow just as big, if not bigger, along with that because that will become the monetary system of AI. And if you're looking at gold or stocks and some of these other asset classes, I think it really depends on the demographic, right? So if you're an older demographic, you're going to be having more of a traditional portfolio in the stock market and in gold. But the younger demographic, a lot of people don't even touch those. They're all in on digital assets. They're all in on Bitcoin. And now they're starting to find unique ways to get exposure to the AI space as well. So they're very tech- ccentric and tech forward with how they think about their portfolio exposure. What are the areas that you're worried about for Bitcoin? Right? You know, if uh if Bitcoin should benefit from conflict and war and uncertainty and chaos and be like, you know, kind of the insurance, if you will. What are the things that keep you up at night? I think one of the things that's starting to be concerning is the amount of capital and the situations we saw with Jane Street in terms of manipulation, right? So, when you have these massive quant traders that enter the market and they're just trying to clip a couple percent uh profit on the long side and a couple percent on the short side and they're trying to manipulate the asset, I don't think that's really helpful for anybody, but it's a function of how the derivatives market can work. And so, that's something I think is a little bit concerning. So making sure we've got the proper regulation and rules in place and that the SEC is closely evaluating this for people that are on the quantitative trading side because otherwise it creates a market impact that I think can create massive dislocations like we saw in 2022 and that harms investors, right? Like one of the main job of the SEC is to protect the investor base, right? And so if they're not able to do that, they need to advance the ways they're thinking about it and get better regulations in place so that these large organizations cannot screw over the smaller investors. I always say uh there's a couple of Q words that people know. One, some of them are good, quantitative, qualitative, etc. There's one bad one, quantum. >> Yeah. What about quantum? Is that something you guys worry about? >> I I don't worry about it very much. You know, I think there's brilliant people in the space. I think if we look historically at Bitcoin and the different upgrades that have had to occur at some point in time when it became a true threat, it needed to occur. They reached a general consensus that worked out and they moved to the next level. And I think that will continue to happen. I think people focus on quantum a lot with Bitcoin. And don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's characteristics of it that have to be resolved over time. And some of them may be even being looked at right now. But I think that'll get solved. And if you're worried about that, you should also be worried about quantum attacking your bank account and any other financial system, right? Like they have quantum proof things that are being integrated. But Bitcoin, I think the people argue about is that those systems can be integrated more centrally for quantum upgrades, whereas Bitcoin takes a consensus of the network. But if we look at historically how Bitcoin's done and how it's grown over time, it's always solved its problems. There may have been arguments at different points in time about how which direction it was going to go and different forks that have even occurred with Bitcoin. But you have to remember Bitcoin at its base layer. Um it's where all the adoption fell just like internet protocol in the early days. All the adoption fell on IP and that's what grew over time and that's what evolved as the system upgraded. And I think the same thing will happen with Bitcoin. There'll be challenge at certain points in time. I think quantum is just one of the buzzwords right now and a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt in the market around this and maybe it's even used more intentionally being pushed through the media so institutions can scoop up the asset at a cheaper price and so maybe that narrative is being spun more out of proportion than what it needs to be but I think it will get solved over time. >> You think the institutions uh really are uh that focused on acquiring Bitcoin? >> It depends on which ones and where you are in the world. So yes, I think the ones that truly get it, they're the more forwardinking ones, they're trying to scoop up as much as they possibly can. Uh some of my work that I've done in the Middle East, I've discovered that their sovereign wealth funds are doing significant sizing up of positions. Like some of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds, when Bitcoin takes a dip, they're tripling or, you know, tripling their stack basically. And as that happens and more funds around the world recognize that, they're going to be like, why are they doing that? Then that opens up the educational avenue to learn about it. They figure out why they're buying it and then they start allocating it to because they don't want to be last. Mhm. >> And for the institutions that don't understand it, do we just need their leaders to leave, retire, you know, go away and like young people have to ascend to the those roles or do you guys see and and you guys done a lot of education and meeting these people, do you see that hey, even if there's uh, you know, kind of the old dog can be taught new tricks uh type thing? >> It's a combination of both. So there are some groups where they don't want it to happen because they recognize how disruptive it is to their business model and they want to fight tooth and nail to protect what they've built. >> And then there's the other group of people where for many many years they were very resistant to it and then as their clients kept asking for it as the adoption grown as the market cap has grown and more and more use cases and applications develop around the space then they start to wake up and say okay please sit down and explain it to me so I understand it now because I was very resistant for all these years and they then they become more open-minded around it. >> Got it. That uh that makes sense. Then what about the uh the treasury companies? I know you guys have invested in a lot of those uh companies. You guys invested in our company but but uh other companies as well that have bought you know Bitcoin or other assets. Talk about kind of how you're evaluating the space right now. >> Yeah. So I look at treasury companies today as one of the most unique value investment opportunities that exist. I think around 40% of the market is trading at big discounts to their Bitcoin balance. So when you go look at a super unique Bitcoin treasury company that's executed well. Um full disclosure we're an investor in Pro Cap. We're an investor in Nakamoto. some of these different ones and you're trading right now at discounts below the balance sheet and you guys are doing excellent things by going and purchasing the stock back in the market to balance that out. You're getting discounted Bitcoin yourself. Um Nakamoto is another example. They went and they acquired just recently the transaction for the Bitcoin conference, UTXO and the Bitcoin magazine and they basically had this conglomerate of Bitcoin properties as well. Well, now they have an operating business just like you have an operating business, you know, and what that does is it generates real revenue, real IBITA, better things that you can actually value these businesses and they're still trading at discounts below the Bitcoin balance. So, if you think of Naka for example, that's trading at a discount below its Bitcoin balance significantly right now with analysts pricing it at like I think $4.50 a share over time and then you have this massive media properties with the Bitcoin conference and everything else that comes with those properties. And the procap side, what I think is so unique is you've wrapped in the CFO Sylvia and these agentic applications are going to blow up. People don't realize it yet. And I think what's unique about that is that if you haven't sat down and actually built with Chad GPT or Claude or Venice or some of these tools, you really don't understand how powerful it is. But then when you take the time and you build it out, you're you have that Eureka moment. You're like, "Wow, this is going to completely revolutionize and make us a thousand times more efficient than we can ever dream of today." And I think what you guys have done is excellent as well by wrapping that under the platform because you did it in a way where it's very uh you know additive to the investor base and I'm excited to see where that travels over time. >> Yeah, it is interesting. Take take Nakamoto. It's easier for me to talk about other people's companies than my own for regulatory purposes but um Nakamoto is trading at a significant discount. I don't know what it is maybe 40 50% discount to to NAV. Then you have a uh what I understand to be a profitable company, right? That is also sitting there. And so as if I take my investor hat and put that on, you can buy a company at less than the Bitcoin value plus you get the operating business essentially for free. For free. >> Now the one thing that I always caution people is and and I don't remember Naka situation but but all of these companies you got to go and you also got to look at well what's the convertible notes and the debt and you know there's more complex than just like how much Bitcoin do they have? What's the share price you know type analysis. Um, but I do think that this is to your point uh very interesting. We saw this before, right? You know, people forget GBTC traded a 50% discount to NAV for a long time. >> Mhm. Yeah. That was something that we were engaged with because with our value strategy, if we see discounted Bitcoin, that aligns with what we do with off the chain. So, GBTC was something that we worked very aggressively when we were seeing that trade at a 50% discount. That was a position that we were looking to size up on because we knew at some point that eventually the ETFs would get approved. And when the ETFs got approved, that discount would evaporate and go back to NAV. So that was a great opportunity from a value investment lens. And we look at the digital asset treasury market very similar to that today. There's a lot of these Bitcoin treasury companies that when you really dig into them and you you don't pay attention to like the draw down we've had because these markets go in cycles and there's been a lot of challenges with these type of business models over the last 6 to 8 months. But really dig into the weeds of what does the business own? What does it actually have? What are the operating companies? What's the revenue? What's the IBATA? what other value propositions do they have that are wrapped within this entity and then you look at the discount they're trading in the Bitcoin balance and like you noted before you're getting these operating businesses basically for free there's a lot of potential there so that's like a value investor's dream >> when um when you guys think of off the chain describe a little bit about the strategy and the firm and stuff because I think uh people who have been around for a long time they know you they they really respect what you guys have done um but I think for folks who maybe show up in the last two years or so that they haven't heard of you guys or or really understand just how good of investors you guys really So at a high level, we take Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham Dodd style of deep discount value investing and we apply it to the blockchain markets. So a little historic historical analysis on one of the big trades that worked out well for us early on was Mount Gaus. So if you've been in the space for some time, you may remember that Mount Gaus at one time was the largest custodian of Bitcoin in the world. They had 850,000 Bitcoin on the exchange that was hacked. Those Bitcoin were stolen and the company went bankrupt. Then the company went through the bankruptcy process. they were able to retrieve 141,000 of those stolen Bitcoin. So, the team that we assembled for the Mount A side of things were basically the ones that went to Japan, created a relationship with the trustee managing the bankruptcy process, and we originated the way to acquire those bankruptcy claims. So, in the early days of us doing this, and I'm going to preface this statement and say it's going to sound crazy, but in the early days of us doing this trade, we were getting Bitcoin for free. And what I mean by that is inside a bankruptcy claim, there was8 Bitcoin,8 Bitcoin cash approximately, and $700 in currency. And we were buying each claim for $500 a piece. >> So So you were getting for $500 you bought a bankruptcy claim. That claim was a claim on $700 of dollar or Japanese yen, but $700 worth of Japanese yen, >> 188 Bitcoin Cash, 18 Bitcoin. Yes. And this is what's unique about Japanese bankruptcy law relative to the US. In the United States, if a bankruptcy occurs, generally the assets cash value is struck at the point of the bankruptcy filing. This is how a lot of people in the FTX bankruptcy didn't get the upside in what happened after the markets returned. Japanese bankruptcy law is different. You get the liquid asset at the conclusion of the bankruptcy. So, that was our big light bulb moment because we work as a fund to try to outperform Bitcoin. And what occurred is that we said, "Oh, if we can buy this claim and we're getting a discount on Bitcoin, even at the point in time we're buying the claim and we get Bitcoin's future performance on all the years it takes for the bankruptcy to conclude, that's a massive discount opportunity." So, we did that and that was tremendously helpful in us growing our brand and our investment strategy over time. So, we took that same strategy and apply it to not only bankruptcy side of things, we do it to the liquid markets, we do it in private equity. So, we look for very mature blockchain companies that have early employees or seed investors that want liquidity. And because of the brand we've built, and we know a lot of these businesses that are very large and successful today, and we knew them when they were startups, we get access to those deals before most people would ever see them. And because of that, these people are buying homes, getting married, having a child, and they want liquidity and sell some of their stock. And we'll say, you we'll offer you that liquidity, but we want a 40% discount to the last round's valuation. And if they're motivated, they'll do it. And so, we do that on the private side. And then also on the liquid side of things, it's undervalued opportunities like we noted before. Is it the treasury place trying to get is it a discount? Um we have big exposure to B&B. We've had big exposure to BNB for a long time through different mechanics. And one of the ecosystems we're really looking at closely right now is Bit Tensor Tao, which is decentralized AI computing. And if you look at like GPT and deepseek and some of these protocols, there is a percentage of the response queries that are sucked from BitTensor's protocol. So some of these subnets within bit tensor and a subnet is basically an application within the bit tensor protocol. It is basically feeding some of these LLM engines the responses because the responses are so good. So they're actually sucking it from the Bit Tensor's open source protocol. >> Mhm. I mean it's fascinating, right? How uh how that can uh that can happen. Um when you think about uh those uh Mount Gaus claims, >> you said you were buying for $500. What was the8 bitcoin worth when you started to actually get paid out the claims? It was 2024. >> 2024. So, let's just call it 0.18 Bitcoin was maybe >> 7 to $15,000 somewhere in that range, >> I would think. Yeah. >> Yeah. Something like that, right? So, I mean, just that alone, right, pretty uh pretty valuable and that kind of value type investing. Um I'm actually surprised more people do not do that. You know, one of my favorite stories is Bill Miller, uh, who started buying Amazon stock, um, and, you know, he was known as this value investor, and the value investors basically like wanted to kick him out of the community, right? They were like, "Dude, this is crazy." And, uh, he's like, "No, it's a value investment. It's trading like less than it's worth." Yeah. And he's like, "Isn't that what value investing is?" They're like, "No, it's a tech stock." >> Yeah. >> And he's like, "No, it's a value investment because I'm buying I don't care. It's a tech stock, you know, a garbage company or whatever. I'm buying it for less than it's worth." And uh I always think of that story as like you guys are really value investors but you just happen to do it in the Bitcoin industry. >> Yeah. We're just 100% focused on the Bitcoin and blockchain space. And there's a great actually interview with Jeff Bezos back in the day after the do blow up when Amazon stock went down 95%. And he's sitting there in this interview and he goes people have to remember that the stock is not the company and the company is not the stock price. Right? Sometimes they correlate with each other. But he said when the 95% draw down happened he said my unit economics were getting better with Amazon. My revenue per customer was growing. our general growth economics were getting tremendously better, but the stock went down 95% because the dotcom blow up happened. So he said at that point in time, like you know that would be a value investor's dream right there, right? It goes down, all the business economics are growing tremendously, then you can get it a 95% discount and then look what Amazon's done over time. And so I think I'm looking at some of the Bitcoin treasury companies like that as well. Like if some of these companies work the way that I think they'll work, these could potentially be the new version of central banks in each jurisdiction around the world that have operating companies attached to them. >> Yeah, it's very fascinating to uh to kind of think through um Amazon goes down 95%. >> Strategy or previously know Micro Strategy went down I think 99.9%. Right? I mean, some of these companies have been very very volatile over time, but um there is something about, you know, just holding uh a good asset for a very long time. Kind of the Buffett approach uh seems to work out just perfectly fine. >> Yeah. So, we're very long-term investors, so we don't ever trade. And that's what our exact thesis is. If you buy something um you know, if you hold it for 10 minutes, you want to hold it for 10 years. That's kind of what Buffett would say. So, that's how we apply to our investment strategy as well. And then um when you all look at the market going forward, are there anything like milestone based that you guys are really looking forward to whether it's regulatory developments uh certain technology you know um um things that come into the market? Like what are you guys looking at as kind of these catalyst to uh to maybe put Bitcoin back to its all-time high price? >> I think the biggest near-term catalyst that we'll see is what we discussed earlier, which is the market structure bill. Because when that occurs and when that gets signed into law and they finally determine the specifics around the legislation that gives the banks, the large asset managers, the insurance companies, the pension plans, the big foundations, that gives them the regulatory compl clarity and the compliance guidelines for them to start allocating aggressively in the space. And once that happens, I think we will see trillions of dollars over time enter the digital asset markets. And it will create amazing opportunity over the next three to five years. Yeah, it's um it's gonna be very interesting to kind of watch all of this play out, right? I I keep coming back to um the more that people are pulled towards the shininess of AI, the more that people are pulled towards, you know, oh, Bitcoin is over, the more they hear, oh, the OGs are selling, you know, all these different components, >> I actually get more bullish on Bitcoin >> because in a way, um it's the most resilient asset. And uh there's a very smart investor. I've told a story before that um probably the the investor that I look up to the most. And he said to me um the hardest problem in finance is the intertemporal transfer of value. Okay, that's like smart people stuff right there. >> Yeah. Like what does that mean? Like like raise my hand. I'm the dummy in the room. What's that mean? He was like how do you give yourself a million bucks in the future? >> Right. And >> he was like it's just a very hard problem. Bitcoin is probably, you know, one of the best solutions. And, you know, I talked to him. I was like, "What about real estate?" And he's like, "Look, Detroit people thought, you know, would be a great place." Now, you know, obviously real estate values have come down. >> I think you're seeing now real estate values are coming down. You know, I know somebody who is uh uh a little bit older and uh they've got a home that they lived in for a long time. They don't live in it anymore. Uh they're trying to sell it. I was recently talking to uh to one one of the two people in the couple and um I had to be very respectful right but I said you know one of the things you may not be considering as to why you are not getting the you know bids and uh interest etc. Yeah, there's mortgage rates and all. I said, but you may have a product that like the next generation of which usually would be the new buyer. You just got a product they don't want, right? You live in the suburbs. You got kind of like a McMansion, you know, whatever. There are plenty of people who may want that. >> But a lot of young people, they're more, hey, I want to be closer to a city. I want to, you know, uh maybe having a big yard is a net negative, right? >> Sure. >> Like, you know, >> don't want the maintenance. Yeah. It just depends. they don't want to cook, they want to hit Uber Eats and you know if you live out in the country you know whatever so um it was very interesting to have this conversation of like you know I don't know what the answer is right I don't know why this you know person was having difficulty but um >> it it is changing of the guard and I think Bitcoin is you know a perfect example of uh those who understood it and believed it and held it seem to be doing uh doing just fine right >> in my mind Bitcoin is already 10520 million I'm just waiting for the reality to catch up. >> So like from the 100% like so for like the temporal perspective that you said and I think about this a lot like Einstein said time doesn't really exist, right? It's more of just you got to wait to get to where some of these realities catch up. >> And I in my mind have no doubt that in our lifetime we'll see 10 1520 million Bitcoin if not more than that >> because it's just going to get integrated. I think it's going to be integrated into everything just like the internet, right? Payments and with the advancement of artificial intelligence, they're going to need a digital asset native way to transact and is that there's going to be trillions of agents at some point where they're going to have virtual economies doing things we don't even realize they're doing, right? and they're going to need a native digital asset to pay for that because if you're a virtual agent, one thing that we know today with current way energy system works is that every time you query an LLM or you have one of these agents do a virtual task for you, there's a computational expense to that which means there's an energy expense. And until we go into zero point gravity energy where we can just pull it out of the universe, uh there's always going to be some type of expense that's needed for that. So there's going to be a payment required to some extent to handle these virtual tasks. And so that gets me even more excited about Bitcoin because as the AI universe scales infinitely that scales as well. And if you ask a lot of these LLM engines today, if you're going to be paying yourself, what's the asset you would choose? And a lot of them say Bitcoin. >> So they're already self- selecting that. >> It's uh we are entering wild times, right? Maybe the net new demand is just all of the synthetic uh workers that we create. Could be to go and go do it. All right. Well, awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Where can we send people to find you online or find out more about Austin chain? >> Of course. Yes. So, our website is offthechain.c capital and then uh if you want to check me out directly, my ex account is Brian Dixon06. >> Brian, I appreciate you having me on. Thank you very much. >> Yeah, thank you for coming on. I appreciate we'll do it again soon. >> Thanks.

Brian Dixon is the CEO of Off The Chain Capital. In this conversation, we discuss whether bitcoin acts as a risk-on tech asset or “insurance from war” during geopolitical conflict, the macro forces impacting the market, and why institutions are increasingly accumulating bitcoin. We also cover regulatory catalysts, bitcoin’s relationship with AI and traditional assets, and Brian’s value-investing approach to opportunities across the crypto ecosystem. 🔊 Audio Podcast Listen to The Pomp Podcast on the audio platform of your choice: http://pomppodcast.com 🖥️ From The Desk of Anthony Pompliano Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: http://pompdesk.com/ 📧 Newsletter Pomp writes a daily letter to over 270,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at: https://pomp.substack.com/ 👉 Follow Pomp on Social Media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/APompliano Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pompglobal/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonypompliano/ 🤝 Podcast Sponsors BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 80+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $1,000 in rewards. Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading. ⏰ TimeStamps: 0:00 - Intro 1:02 - Is war good or bad for Bitcoin? 2:23 - How investors rebalance portfolios during conflict 8:48 - Institutional demand for bitcoin 12:47 - Bitcoin’s real-world use case in conflict zones 19:50 - Bitcoin vs stocks, gold, & AI 21:46 - What risks worry bitcoin investors? 25:52 - Bitcoin treasury companies & value investing 29:35 - Off The Chain Capital’s investment strategy 35:47 - Catalysts that could drive bitcoin higher #Bitcoin #AnthonyPompliano #Pomp