Unchained event

2024-05-30

Thank you so much for coming today. We really appreciate it. Bitcoin Commons is all about bitcoin and we have a co-working space and we host events just like this. If you want to learn more about the Bitcoin Commons, then come talk to me any time. Ray is the CCO from Bakkt, he's going to do a quick introduction and a toast.

Thank you everyone for coming. Welcome. Thank you to Unchained Capital and Bitcoin Commons as sponsors. I am the chief commercial officer of Bakkt and we're also a sponsor here. Bakkt is a publicly traded company in the crypto space. We provide infrastructure for trading and custody and other digital asset services. We're excited about tonight because it comes at an interesting time. Tonight speaking will be Cathie Wood, CEO of ARK Invest. Welcome Cathie. In the chat also will be Rob Rudey, the CEO of Bitcoin Park up in Nashville. Welcome.

Part of my duties here tonight is that I want to take an opportunity to ask a few questions. I want to get to know the audience. Work with me here a little bit please. How many people here are individual investors or enthusiasts just on their own? How many people here work for a vendor service provider or someone else in the space in the service industry? How many people here are institutional traders or investors? Okay, got it. Interesting. My next question which is a sentiment question and maybe this will inspire some conversation is, how many people in the room today when they look at either this conference last year or this time last year are less bullish or enthusiastic? Okay. I know where we're going here. Who here is more enthusiastic? Okay. I knew that would be the answer. That's called a segue.

These are really interesting times. The last couple weeks have been amazing from my perspective. I started observing May 8th when Donald Trump created the Crypto Football. We can thank him for at least one thing. If you're pro crypto then be pro Trump, and that initiated a sentiment change in Washington. You now have SAB 121 and some Democrats broke rank on that. FIT 21 is the big bill-- I think there are 78 Democrats in the House that broke ranks. Then there was the Ethereum ETF approval ((audience boos)). For my perspective this is the intersection of winter and springer and it really feels like things have changed. Cathie is right here at the tip of the spear leading the charge on a lot of things all things technology and crypto. I welcome Cathie and Rod and I hope they have a great conversation.

R: Thank you very much. I was wondering if I would get booed or yay'd. Parker, I still can't believe you let me get on stage with all the bitcoiners here. Who here has been to Bitcoin Park in Nashville? Thank you. Thank you again. We have a tight timeline. I will jump right in.

R: Can I ask you a personal questoin to start?

C: Sure, Rod.

R: Why do you love bitcoin so much?

C: It occurs to me as I thought about my education that and even before that, in the 70s when I was growing up in Southern California- my father was an Irish immigrant engineer but had no education and was not well paid. Really we were on a tight budget. I remember we went through that inflation of the 1970s and I remember my father coming in and that's how I learned what inflation was by listening to my father. It put a real constraint on our budget for what was going on. We're seeing a bit of an echo of it in the last few years especially when we talk about food prices. My professor at USC (Aud Laufer) and he starts talking about inflation and going off the gold exchange standard in 1971. I was starting to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Art Lauffer is known for his fiscal policy. You may have heard of that. But he is a monetary scholar. His mentor was Robert Mundale who won a Nobel prize for his monetary theory. he is as passionate about monetary theory as about fiscal policy. I started my career and moved to New York in 1980. We were in the middle of massive double digit inflation and interest rates. We had Paul Volkner on monetary policy, we had Ronald Reagan come in, and I was looking at the damage to the financial markets that interest rates and inflation were doing both to financial markets and personal lives and how big this mistake was and how many people it was effecting. Really because of what I was doing at the time I was doing, starting in economics, to make the call on interest rates and inflation. I became at the very early age a maniacally focused person on monetary policy. When we did our first paper on bitcoin in 2015, so-- we're going to look at any disruptive innovation. In our private firm we started in 2011 actually. But in Ark it was in 2014 and we asked ourselves should this be one of our platforms. We didn't break it out in the beginning. We had next generation internet as a platform in our understanding. Then two things happened. We did the whitepaper in collaboration with Art Lauffer and he said to me, wait a minute. I've been waiting for this. I thought he was going to critize it and throw the bums out in terms of the kind of paper we wrote. But he read it, and he said wait a minute, if this is what I think, then I've been waiting for this since 1971 when they closed the gold window in the United States. He was in DC when that happened and he was mortified. He is feeling now that he can get redemption with bitcoin. I think his-- everything-- my life experience and what he taught us; and my own experience in my career have caused me to love bitcoin. This is an answer to a lot of the world's problem.

R: Parker Lewis, do you know where Dr. Lauffer lives by chance? No? Cathie?

C: Nashville?

R: I'm just throwing that out there, just in case. He is a good person and came on my podcast. It's great that he was one of the impetus to invest in 2015 and wrote the whitetpaper.

C: We wrote the first whitepaper and the three rules of whitepaper and the second whitepaper was in the collaboration with Coinbase when they were doing a series B. "Bitcoin: Ringing the bell for a new asset class". I have to give credit to Kris Perniskie. He started at ARK and fell down the bitcoin rabbit hole and couldn't pull him out. He was next generation internet and said no I want to do bitcoin.

R: With the ETF and these other folks, it seems like they are coming into the game in the last year or two. You have been in bitcoin since 2011, and then 2014-2015 too. How do you maintain this level of conviction for bitcoin?

C: It's only been growing. Research is the key to everything.

R: Does anyone listen to my Bitcoin Brainstorm podcast?

C: Yes. Let me just tell you. Every time I have the privilege of being on Bitcoin Brainstorm because Rod and ... they bring on people who are making this world happen. We're interviewing them and I'm coming from lesser knowledge, but I can make more connections, right. I've seen a lot going on in the world. I can tell you almost every bitcoin brainstorm podcast I come out saying wow you too. You do it literally. You say wow. But I go oh man this is.. this is so important. People need to... if you haven't listened to the Bitcoin Brainstorm podcast, and maybe you already know all this stuff, but your eyes will be opened in a way that mine have been.

R: In 2011, people told me to get into bitcoin nad they told me the way to get into it was going on Craigslist and meeting people in shady streets or something. In 2014, the young kids in New York were telling me to get into bitcoin. I opened up a Coinbase account and it was like $10 bucks and I didn't do anything. In 2017, I logged back in and my $10 was like $700. I'm on the left side of the bell curve. But you're on the right side of the bell curve where you got it early with Dr. Lauffer and others. How do you maintain conviction through all these cycles? You invest in disruptive technologies too. How do you keep that?

C: One of the reasons I mentioned Bitcoin Brainstorm is that the more that I meet people, the more my conviction grows. In 2019, I had the pleasure of meeting Core developers at a confab in Uruguay. I met some very young developers and some most seasoned developers. They both had the same kind of love for monetary theory that I did, and that increased my conviction. The people building this ecosystem and the first global digital decentralized rules-based monetary system in history. That's a very big idea. That's what Art said at that time: this is what I've been waiting for. It's also a technology and it's a new asset class. No matter what other crypto asset you talked about, no other one has those three. Bitcoin does. It's a global monetary system too. It's very exciting. In terms of that-- that's the conviction side of it. In terms of the inspiration side of it, this is going to transform people's lives. That's what keeps me passionate.

R: How do you stay so--- you have calls at 630, 8pm tonight, some of those are passed my bedtime. How do you have that energy? You mentioned Uruguay. You mentioned core devs. We're not going to open up the can of worms around FOSS development until July. But we might learn about multiplication and revenue vs profit in July. One thing about regulation is that Senator Haggerty was going to be here-- he did a panel at Coindesk Consensus about CBDCs. I remember last night whoever was at a Coincenter dinner we gave a speech around Gensler. Instead of talking about the US, you were just in El Salvador with President BUkele. From a global competitive standpoint, did you learn anything?

C: President Bukele and also his brother Ibrahim I also met, an important duo I would mention, there's bitcoin, AI, education, economic reform, education reform. He's going to do it. He will be inaugaerated on June 1st again. He is a man on the move. The GDP of El Salvador is only $30 billion dollars. The average income of an earner there is $450 per month. From what that low of a base, Art was actually with me there, and my colleague David back there-- where is he? He's in the back here. Okay. We were in El Salvador and from that low of a base, I truly think that given his focus and desire to pull his country out of years of civil war and gang warfare after that, he has put them all in jail, and now he can get down to business. I really believe that he will increase GDP 10x during his 5 year term based on those four variables. El Salvador you know was pegged to the dollar for a while. I forget what their currency is called. It was already pegged to the dollar and they had that going from them. But he felt so strongly about bitcoin transforming El Salvador and really making it an oasis in Latin America. ... make sure this happens, already put in some great tax incentives, anyone interested in doing bitcoin in...

R: We're recruiting for Nashville not El Salvador.

C: Well, Mark is living in El Salvador right now, and he's AI and crypto or rather bitcoin--- the incentive system being put in place is going to create an oasis for both bitcoin and AI and those are two of the biggest most profound innovation platforms in history. So he's going to make history.

R: Every time I talk with you, you get amped up around bitcoin and AI and then you go on this riff around converge and it's really got me thinking about a number of different things. On the El Salvador side, how do you think about all these disruptive technologies converging both from an investment view and life view?

C: It's very interesting. We have centered the firm's research around disruptive innovation. Innovation platforms that meet three criteria. I can get into them if you want. The five are: robotics, energy storage, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and multi-omics sequencing in the life science space. Each one of those is moving in to its own S-curve. We're moving into prime time in terms of adoption. I think the reason the world is going to feel chaotic even to us in some sense, we havebeen disappointed by some earnings results because in the AI world things are happening that we wouldn't have expected. It's moving very quickly. If you look at consumer sentiment metrics out there, consumption is kind of down and consumers aren't feeling good. I think a lot of it is where the price level is in the economy. But if you look at surveys of people making $100k or more, their fear of losing their jobs is moving up dramatically because of AI. Unemployment follows with this line, and if that happens, it will end up in the 6-7% range in the next year or so. That's something that is happening and is unsettling. This is much like the late 1800s where you get telephones, electricity, and the internal combustion engine changing the world completely. Society was very uncertain and unstable regarding this. There was angst. All this innovation has huge ramifications for wealth creation and standards of living and productivity gains and we think productivity is going to boom here and we think real GDP growth could appreciate from where it has been in the last 125 years where you have real GDP growth with compound annual rate, with China bringing up the rear recently, and we think this will go to 6-8% in the next 5-10 years. Most people think that's nuts. The other side of this is that it's highly deflationary. All of these technologies are deflationary. Bitcoin fits right into this new world as the payment ecosystem. But in terms of the convergence... each one into its own S-curves, and these are massive growth opportunities, just massive opportunities. So what do we have here? We have S-curves feeding S-curves because of this convergence. That's what you're feeling. It's going to create for these converged platforms, super exponential growth. When our chief futurist put that into our big ideas for 2024, and I said most of the people in the equities business don't understand exponential growth. Exponential growth means you will sustain that growth rather than decay. Super-exponential means growth rate but also acceleration of that growth rate because of these convergences.

C: To give you a few examples, we can get into AI and bitcoin in a moment. AI is the biggest catalyst. It will catalyze innovation and speed it up more than any other innovation out there. A couple of ideas first. Autonomous taxi networks. Robo-taxis. Tesla. Largest AI project on earth. It is the convergence of robotics-- autonomous vehicles are robots; energy storage-- they will be electric. Sometimes that is controversial, but it all has to do with costs. Electric will be much cheaper than gas power. I know I'm in Texas but still. And three, artificial intelligence- these autonomous vehicles are powered by AI. That's why we think Tesla and robo-taxis is such a great idea. It's $5 trillion or more of revenue waiting there. To put that in context.. I meant $8-10 trillion in revenues. The global GDP today is about 120-130 trillion dollars. So this will move the needle. There's also going to be as a result of this a lot of creative destruction. This will get at the unease I mentioned earlier. Another one in terms of profound ramifications is in the healthcare space. It's not just DNA. It's methylation, epigenetics, and multi-omics sequencing. The convergence of those two-- so artificial intelligence and sequencing, and CRISPR gene editing, is going to cure disease. We have the first approval of a drug or a therapy created this way, two of them actually, in the US, UK, and Europe for beta-thallesmia and sickle cell which were previosuly incurable. Now these people after one edit to the genome now that we know what is the -- we know what these six billion bits of code are and what's normal and not normal. Editing one abnormal gene cured these people. That's how profound and exciting this world is. It's going to transform healthcare.

C: In terms of AI and bitcoin, I think, you know, our bitcoin brainstorm podcast on that convergence -- anyone know who roasbeef is? Yeah everyone knows who he is. I think he was in Africa at that moment when we were doing the podcast and he was describing how the convergence of bitcoin and AI was completely re-defining the really the distribution of labor.

R: Paul at Stackworks, Guatemale and El Salvador was describing this as well, these AI agents for micro-tasking or something along those lines. How many people in the audience here are parents? Okay, good. Cathie, you know I' ma father of four. Selfish question. What should I be teaching my kids or pointing my kids to be learning with all these creative disruptions and wealth opportunities?

C: You should focus them on disruptive innovation. Get them on the right side of change. That's the most important thing you have to do as a parent. From an education point of view, and I feel so strongly about this, that we launched three or four years ago, ARK Education Initiative. It's ARK Research made age appropriate is the 6th grade science curriculum throughout a county. 70,000 students. We took to El Salvador with us two books. One on bitcoin and one on AI, targeted at 6th graders for President Bukele. He just jumped. He said he would pay anything. He wants to get into that program. That's how-- Florida had something to say on education. It had one of the worst track records in the country but now it's turning around because it's willing to experiment and try. We came in and this is the public school system... and will be throughout the middle school. Your daughter will get it, yep, and we hope to go from toddler through high school. Getting young people inspired. Middle school is such an important age for young people. This is a big fork in the road for a lot of young people. Social things going on, but you have to inspire them.

C: During COVID we went to a place called Jerico Partnership in Conneticut when I was still living there. The president said I am going to lose these young people because they are from low socio-economic homes different circumstances and I will lose them because they can't come into school anymore. We did some seminars, one on drones, one on 3d-printing. At the end of that seminar, I was able to say to these young people that you know what you know more about drones than 98% of the people in the world. Did you enjoy the drone app? Sam chorus? Did he inspire you? Go follow him on twitter. At the time it was called twitter. Go follow him. Because a lot of this-- when they start learning about something and we see this with bitcoin too; when they start learning about something they become voracious. They want to become the leaders of their class and the knowledge of their particular breakthrough science that others aren't talking about. That's becoming cool to students. Very exciting and such an important moment in history to be doing this.

R: So you have a whole group doing the education route. For adults you do bitcoin monthly and a whole research team as well.

C: For people working on the research, we put out logs, whitepapers, and I announced this yesterday with Peter McCormack... but I did announce one of the projects and David Well, I think he is leading it if I'm not mistaken, anyway, it's on decentralization. This is an important subject especially with ETFs in the mix and mining and the questions around centralization in mining and all of that. We're developing an index for decentralization to keep us all honest. We need to present red flags or yellow flags when they are happpening. Half of the solution is understanding the problem.

R: Let's talk about the future some more. My four kids are going to be in high school and then they will be going to college in 15-20 years out. What does the world look like? How should capital allocators other than just using all their cash position to buy bitcoin obviously? You mentioned a number of things in the future. But in 15-20 years, what does the future look like and how can we take advantage of this?

C: In terms of investing and getting on the right side of change is so interesting. I'm on the warpath on a particular topic. For those of you who invest in the equity market, you might notice that there are a few stocks taking all the oxygen out of the room. We have been hurt badly because we have been pulling away from them because of truly disruptive innovation. Now they might-- they will enjoy the fruits of innovation but the companies we're investing in are not in benchmarks. Nobody is paying attention to them because when I say nobody I mean in the traditional asset management world. If a stock is not in a broad based benchmark, then they don't want to follow them. The benchmark is the bogey. I believe we have-- we are witnessing the most massive misallocation of capital in history. I really believe that. Most people disagree with me on this in the financial markets. The outcome remains to be seen.

C: One thing I would do is that if you're in a well diversified portfolio as most advisors would suggest, you want some of the broad based benchmarks and exposure to some of that. But if the world is going to be as disrupted as we think it is going to be, then you really do need to be exposed to those companies. They are down and out right now. Again, and we certainly did, in 2020 we had a massive run and now our portfolios are about a quarter of where they were in the peaks. That's how down and out they are. Just to, in portfolios where we cannot hold ARKB or where we can't .. or GBTC... we hold Coinbase, we hold Robinhood, Block for Cash App, and everything Jack Dorsey is doing around bitcoin, and a little of SoFi. We're looking for the digital wallet. That is going to be the biggest opportunity out there or at least one of them. That's what you get in our portfolios but you won't see those stocks in traditional portfolios because they are too scared of them.

R: I'm also interested now in, we've seen a lot of announcements about publicly traded companies and private companies holding bitcoin on their balance sheets. There's only one of importance in my opinion which is ARKB. I took my wife's 401k and pounded it into ARKB. Anyone in this room hold a bitcoin ETF? How do you see this adoption curve as it relates to the institutional side? You mentioned nation-state adoption of bitcoin ...

C: I think President Bukele is very smart. In emerging markets, what's the death blow for those markets? It's when they run out of reserves. Capital flight and running out of reserves. If these emerging markets put bitcoin on their balance sheet and it appreciates as their own currency falls apart, then that's a beautiful hedge and they will probably increase their allocation over time because they will see this is a real risk. Look at the trend for fiat currencies relative to literally everything. Even the dollar relative to gold has been a terrible investment. I think emerging markets will start. But people inside the emerging markets need this insurance policy and you use--- I used to say this, and then I met Katy G, and I used to say all you need is an internet connection and a smartphone. You have your insurance policy right there: you can buy bitcoin. But now, I guess, with a SIM card, you can access bitcoin. That's marvelous. Marvelous. Anyway, it's an insurance policy against confiscation of wealth, or inflation. It's absolutely confiscation of wealth as the Princess MBS cousin learned the hard way. Wouldn't it have been nice to have that key? They had a quarter of their wealth taken away. The way we have gotten to our bull price target and our bull price target for bitcoin probability on that has increased with the ETF..

R: What is that target?

C: It's $1.5 million dollars per bitcoin by 2030. There are three major assumptions we're making there. Bitcoin really becomes half the size of the gold market investments. So half that size. And the interesting statistic recent statistic there, David told me this the other day, if you look at 13F filings for the first quarter and this is mostly hedge funds we're talking about-- for every hedge fund putting money into a gold ETF or gold then there were 10 of them putting money into the bitcoin ETFs. That's pretty big. That's our first assumption.

C: The second assumption is back to the emerging markets if you look at global money supply nad you take away the big four, like US, Europe, Japan, and take them out of the global money supply and you assume the rest of the money supply, that 10% of it is really re-allocated to bitcoin... it's really the money supply. It could be through treasuries of companies, it could be through nation states, it could be through individuals or private investors trying to protect themselves from disruption or confiscation or infltaion. These are conservative assumptions.

C: The third assumption is institutions, there are others like remittances but we assume institutional involvement that 6.5% of all financial assets are allocated to bitcoin. In global asset allocation, this does include real estate and commodities and gold and everything. It's 6%. The way we got to that number is that's maximizing the sharp ratio. The return per unit of risk. The return per unit of risk is maximized and really volatility is not a consideration. In that study, if volatility if you really care about it, then you ought to allocate to 2.5%.

R: I'm 100% right now. How's my portfolio? What's the time look like? Maybe one more question. Maybe some Q&A. Okay. Perfect. This has been awesome Cathie. It's so much fun. You touched on in 2019 and by the way, s... ARK Invest, we have a dedicated playlist on their youtube channel and on Bitcoin Brainstorm. The importance of FOSS development. You had this meeting and you were inspired by these developers. In July, we're going to dig in deep to that. We have a number of amazing guests lined up for that. But at a high level, how do you think about FOSS and bitcoin development?

C: At the Uruguay confab, I went back to my team and siad let's think about this. We need to figure out the right way to become a part of this movement. We feel like in a way we're part of the bitcoin community but how do we become part of the movement? So, 5 years later you might ask what took you so long. We thought there would be a bitcoin ETF. Right? We thought that would be the time. What happened? 11 ETFs were approved on the same day and the fees weren't 60 basis points where we thought they would be but 21 in our case. So we're not making any money on this. We're fine with that because if you think about it, bitcoin is a public good. It is the financial super highway. A public good. What we feel is something important for us to do is to maximize access. So that 21 basis points is helping us do that, and maximize access. It's not helping with FOSS. What is the F? I knew what the rest was. Free. Got it. Free and open source software. So plan B... we do have a plan B. We have private funds. It will revolve around that in some way that we will disclose in July.

Q: We recently saw the Wisconsin pension fund buy bitcoin ETF. How much of this is your focus?

A: It's interesting. Some state treasuries have come to us and some treasurers who probably want to become governors and they are bitcoin advocates and they want to put it into their state treasuries. Very conservative set of people. What you saw from Wisconsin is more likely to happen in other states. I thought they also invested in ARKB didn't they? Just the two? Okay. A number of have-- we have been in the mix as well. Wisconsin does use active equity ETFs tactilly they never come to us and speak about them, this is a tactical move for them. This is a tactical allocation. My guess is that this is how they are looking at the bitcoin ETFs right now. I might be wrong. I was surprised they bought our ETFs but it's in the same spirit because our ETFs act... but I do believe that right now they are using it tactily. Maybe to make sure they get this new if they are buying into this new asset class to get into the thinking who are working at the pension fund because these are very conservative institutions and they don't do anything risky. So that was interesting. But when you say new asset class, a light bulb goes off and people think maybe they should look at it. What does a new asset class mean? If you allocate to this new asset class, and you take from some other investment and allocate to this one, because the correlation of returns is low relative to other assets, then the return per unit of risk is going to go up over time. What does that mean? If one pension fund puts it in, it's signalling to all these other state pension funds that we're doing this and it's a new asset class and if it is a new asset class and it's going to increase our returns per unit of risk then we will beat you and get better returns. It will spread. SOme of it will depend on price, fear and volatility as all these things go. But this is another reason why corporate pension funds will do the same thing.

Q: Should we be making a Fort Nakamoto just like we have a Fort Knox?

C: I think we should, absolutely, for the same reason why I am saying bitcoin is great for El Salvador. I do. Should it be equal to gold which is our bull case in terms of institutional asset managers? I obviously think it would be more sensible-- this plays three roles: global monetary system, technology, and new asset class. So I would put more into Fort Nakamoto because those are three separate insurance policies.

Q: One of your big themes is convergence. The two technologies you are excited about are AI and bitcoin and both of those require a lot of compute. What about opportunities in the public market that meet that need because they both converged at the grid? The data center? Opening up opportunity here? What about energy for these compute hungry technologies?

C: We're looking at the entire ecosystem. Quick story. During the early days of the internet, I was there, and we had the same controversies. Progress demands energy consumption. How do we make this sustainable in a way? The miners certainly just watching and listening on the podcast-- are thinking very carefully about this and it is a great opportunity for data centers to locate near renewable sources like hydro.

Q: I am an open source wallet developer. We have venmo in the United States and other convenient wallet apps. What form are you looking for this to look for? A bitcoin wallet that disrupts Venmo?

C: We took a lot of lessons from WeChat Pay. It was a wallet that incorporated commerce right into it. What would we have valued each user of that wallet as equity owners? It was $20,000 per user because it wasn't just all these financial services. It was financial services plus commerce and a two-sided market place and that's why we have our eyes on Cash App and how that is going to work out. The consumers are going to choose here. Is it Coinbase which is coming from the crypto angle? Is it Robinhood which has captivated with the--- it has the UI experience which is important to consumers. Is it Cash App? Is that more of an emerging markets play or will Cash App continue to proliferate even through the United States? It started targeted towards lower income parts of the country and it is making its way around. I don't know if many people have t here. But because of bitcoin a higher proportion of people in this room use Cash App here than other audiences I speak with. When Elon Musk is talking about the X everything app, I wouldn't put it past Elon with X because he started in payments and sold his company to Paypal of course. He has been thinking about this for a while I know. The consumer will decide the outcome of course. We're looking at the ingenuity and creativity from these companies and what the consumer is gravitating from.

Q: I would like to know your opinion about how do you think about the blockchain and changing the traditional business services? Like financial services, travel platforms.

C: Yeah, actually this is part of the digital wallet answer in terms of you rbusiness. But travel will be done in these digital wallets. It's the everything app. I think you should look for that. In terms of traditional financial services, we do think what Cris Pernsasnke calls the internet financial system rather than calling it DeFi. We think this will be disruptive long-term to financial services and take out the middle men. Go look at our big ideas 2023 or 2024 documents. You will see how many steps there are between a purchase and a seller. We're going to be eliminating a lot of toll takers and moving more p2p over time. It won't happen overnight. But the more that bitcoin goes up leading the way, the more capital, just like AI, the more capital will be added into the space and the faster it will happen. I will keep my eye on bitcoin. The more it appreciates and the faster it appreciates the more the traditional financial world will evolve into this new world if not disappear.

Joe Kelly will be coming up and saying a few words. This is the CEO and co-founder of Unchained. A lot goes into operating the Bitcoin Commons. How many of you are familiar with the University of Austin? This should be some exciting news for you. I'm personally a college drop-out. I knew I wanted to be a founder and entrepreneur early in life. I found over 10 years ago that University of Texas wasn't the right system for me. I left and found my way to startups. I've been excited to learn about the University of Austin right across the street from here. As I got to know Maggie and the leadership there, there's a lot of value alignment with those of us working on bitcoin. We're announcing an initiative where I am myself personally and at Unchained to create the first long-term endowment holding in bitcoin at a university.

Maggie: I'm the communications manager for the University of Austin. My late grandfather Jim Kelly passed away and was a vice president at Motorola. The last thing he told me before he passed away was he was reading about this thing called bitcoin and you should really check that out. So here I am. University of Austin is right over there in the other buliding across the street. We're a new university dedicated to the radical idea that we should be dedicated to the pursuit of truth through free inquiry and civil discourse. We're all about breaking down barriers that stand in the way of the free exchange of ideas. We want to prepare students with the agency and the skills and the backbone they need to succeed to be leaders in an increasingly decentralized and unchained world. This endowment is for our students. I'm excited to see how this grows and thank you for having me and bringing me into this community. University of Austin will have an open house on June 14th.