Bitcoin Meets Gold: Sunny Ray on Tokenization’s Future

[00:00:01] [SPEAKER_02] This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. Today on the James Altucher Show. I've been pounding the table that this is the year for tokenization and this is the biggest use case for crypto. BlackRock keeps making more and more announcements about how they're tokenizing treasury bills and last week they announced they were tokenizing real estate.

[00:00:29] [SPEAKER_03] I don't know if you have heard this stat before but it turns out that Indian women own more gold than the United States government. We're bringing all the benefits of Bitcoin to gold and we're doing it by digitizing gold on top of the Bitcoin blockchain network. And if you look this morning I think it was like 63% or 64% of the entire crypto market is represented by Bitcoin which is just crazy to think right. It's up against 20, 30 million other assets

[00:00:58] [SPEAKER_03] Bitcoin is 63% and it's growing. I think we sit at a very interesting point in time James. The opportunity is ginormous in our view and we think the fact that we're bringing gold and Bitcoin to the marketplace is timely.

[00:01:16] [SPEAKER_02] Sonny Ray is working on an incredible project involving Bitcoin. His company and the company that he's the president of Matador public company, they are digitizing gold. They are turning gold into crypto and he's a Bitcoin maximalist which is different from what I am. I believe that there are many crypto tokens out there that are important and useful. Bitcoin maximalists, Michael Seller is one,

[00:01:42] [SPEAKER_02] the CEO of MicroStrategy. Sonny Ray is another one. Anthony Pompliano who's been on this podcast is another one. Bitcoin maximalists believe that you don't need any other tokens, just need Bitcoin. Bitcoin could do everything. And both sides are correct, but I feel myself that it's a little easier using other tokens that are specifically made for certain purposes. But I understand the viewpoint of

[00:02:08] [SPEAKER_02] the other people as well. But we talk about where Bitcoin is going, why we're bullish on Bitcoin and crypto in general, what's the need for digital gold, what's going on with tokenization in general. So when I say digital gold or crypto gold, turning any real world asset into a crypto is a process called tokenization. And the leader of this right now is the largest financial institution in the world, BlackRock. They're tokenizing tens of billions of dollars with the treasury bills and they're also tokenizing,

[00:02:37] [SPEAKER_02] turning into cryptos, real estate. So we talk about this, we talk about a bunch of things relating to crypto. And this is a repeat of a recording I did a day or so ago on a crypto call I have with certain subscribers. I hope you enjoy it. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask me on Twitter at Jay Altucher.

[00:03:04] [SPEAKER_01] Well, good afternoon, everybody. It is Monday, May 5th. Cinco de Mayo, welcome. We have a special guest for you today. His name is Sonny Ray and James is going to introduce him here. Just real quick before we get rolling on today's call. This is going to be a call for the ages. I can guarantee you that we're going to get some insiders take on what's going on with tokenization in the crypto space. Sonny's going to help us understand what Matador is doing. So James, you're on, sir. Yeah. I'll introduce

[00:03:33] [SPEAKER_02] Sonny. He's a president of a company called Matador, which tokenizes or let's call it digitizes gold. So they create digital gold, which he'll describe further. And I have plenty of questions about this and other questions related to tokenization. Many on the call might remember I've been pounding the table that this is the year for tokenization and this is the biggest use case for crypto. BlackRock keeps making more and more announcements about how they're tokenizing

[00:04:02] [SPEAKER_02] treasury bills. And last week they announced they were tokenizing real estate. And also, Sonny, correct me if I'm wrong, you were pretty high up at Kraken, the exchange Kraken.

[00:04:11] [SPEAKER_03] You got it, James. Yeah. I was the head of global business development back in 2018, 2019.

[00:04:18] [SPEAKER_02] Why are all the crypto exchanges so hard to use? Like customer service is just awful everywhere. And I'm talking Coinbase on down. And I feel like in order for crypto really to hit the mainstream, these exchanges have to be user friendly.

[00:04:36] [SPEAKER_03] I don't know how to answer that one. My wife works customer support at one of the big exchanges, so I'll probably get an earful. But I think it comes down to mainly a function of the fact that this tech is new. It can be a little bit complicated to work in terms of private key, public key management and things of that sort. And I think the exchanges still have a long way to go

[00:04:56] [SPEAKER_02] before we can make it more appealing to the masses. So what did you do for Kraken? What sort of

[00:05:02] [SPEAKER_03] projects did you have? Yes, I was the head of business development. And so when you think about a company, any company, a smaller big one, growth tends to be kind of the number one focus, right? And so there's really three ways to grow a company. One is to build innovative tech. The second is to go out and maybe buy companies. And the third is to partner. So I was more focused in that third wheel. I would deal with everything from smaller startups, crypto, Bitcoin startups, all the way up to large

[00:05:30] [SPEAKER_03] financial institutions, like many of the ones that have recently adopted ETFs, like the ones you mentioned. And so yeah, but with a common theme really towards trying to find strategic alliances and to grow the business long term. When did you first get into crypto? Ooh, I think I read the Bitcoin white paper around 2012. It could have been as early as early 2012. And like I was telling you before the show started, I'm an electrical engineer. So I started,

[00:05:59] [SPEAKER_03] graduated from University of Toronto. And I spent the first 10 years of my career in robotics, a space that seems to be getting a lot of attention lately. And yeah, my job was essentially to travel the world and help outfit a lot of the major robotics labs around the world. So Stanford, Georgia Tech, MIT, IIT, and everything in between was part of my role. And so I, on behalf of that company, I moved out to India in 2011, 2012, and I was helping them expand.

[00:06:29] [SPEAKER_03] And it was around that time I discovered the Bitcoin white paper. And I've been pretty much, you know, full time in the industry since then. It's been quite a ride.

[00:06:38] [SPEAKER_02] Now, you know, a lot of times, you know, people in the US are always very focused on how many people in the US are using crypto, but really outside of the US where currencies are not as, you know, even though people here complain about the dollar all the time and say the dollar is going to crash, the reality is the dollar is by far the strongest fiat currency out there. So in India, or other countries that you've experienced, are people using crypto? Are people actually using it for transactions or as a store of value? Like what's the use outside of the US

[00:07:07] [SPEAKER_02] for crypto right now?

[00:07:09] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know if you have heard this stat before, but it turns out that Indian women own more gold than the United States government. You know, and so just to note on my personal journey, you know, I'd never really had a lot of deep questions around money until I graduated from university. And I remember it was those first couple of bills that came through when you're paying your student loans and rent and this and that. And we were just realizing quickly that,

[00:07:34] [SPEAKER_03] you know, there was more month than money at the end of every month. And that kind of like suffocating feeling led me to start asking deeper questions around what is money? How does it come to be, etc. And I, in fact, pursued a career in financial services, becoming a financial advisor, running a brokerage for many years. And truth is, is I felt more confused about money than I did at the beginning of that journey. And it was really not. Why is that like what confused you about money?

[00:08:00] [SPEAKER_03] Good question. Yeah, I mean, people would talk about strategies and tax savings and things of that. But when you just ask simple questions like, what is money? I would get these blank stares, you know, and you could ask grandmother, you could ask a CEO of a bank and I could never get a straight answer about the history of money. Why do we have money? And it was only after I discovered Bitcoin, I would say Dr. Ron Paul had a huge impact in terms of my understanding of money and eventually me moving

[00:08:26] [SPEAKER_03] out to India and just seeing the infatuation with gold. And you know, and it's not just a money thing there. It's cultural, it's religious, it's got to do with weddings. And I mean, you know, come payday, every 10th store, first of all, in India is a gold store. And then you'll see people lining up,

[00:08:43] [SPEAKER_02] turning their fiat into gold, right? And so that is that because they don't trust the fiat, they don't trust the ruby or they feel a ruby could collapse.

[00:08:51] [SPEAKER_03] And again, I don't know if people can articulate like down to the bullet points as to exactly why, but I believe that is exactly why, you know, as a country, people have really gravitated towards gold. And so it was in just questioning these things like, well, why was, why was gold? Gold was never dictated upon us. It was never told that it needed to be money. Instead, it emerged through certain principles. And it was those characteristics of gold that only when I started to appreciate, was I able to take the deep dive into Bitcoin and say,

[00:09:20] [SPEAKER_03] hey, wow, there are all these beautiful parallels. And in reality, Bitcoin could surpass gold on a lot of these vectors and happy to go into that as well. But yeah, let me ask you about gold versus

[00:09:30] [SPEAKER_02] Bitcoin for a second. Like when I look at gold, I sort of see this historical, you know, it's a precious metal only because 5,000 years ago, somebody said it's a precious metal. And other than that, it's sort of a rock that just happens to be gold. Maybe it glitters a little bit. I don't know. But Bitcoin has, you know, over a million man hours of actual useful software in it. People say, oh, Bitcoin is just ones and zeros. Gold is, you know, is rare and has value. But it seems to me it's the reverse.

[00:10:00] [SPEAKER_03] So I mean, if I had to just put it into like a table format, right, like those characteristics I was referring to. So one of them is scarcity, right? So let's say, imagine, you know, fiat, gold and Bitcoin. If we were to put it in a new table, you ask yourself, how scarce is fiat? Not very. Gold? Far greater so, right? I could argue that Bitcoin is even more scarce than gold in the sense that as gold demand increases, miners will spend more money to mine gold. Or for example,

[00:10:28] [SPEAKER_03] you might have an Indian temple that finds a million tons of gold that they never knew about was underneath this temple. Or maybe Elon Musk figures out how to take down comets and find unlimited amounts of gold. Whereas Bitcoin is hard capped to 21 million Bitcoin. And so, you know, that's one characteristic. Fungibility is another, right? So if I have an ounce of gold and you have an ounce of gold, we can trade it between each other and it's equivalent. Bitcoin is the same way in that sense. You have things like divisibility, right? Now, gold is divisible,

[00:10:58] [SPEAKER_03] but you could argue that trying to do grocery shopping with gold is probably not as simple as, let's say, with Bitcoin or even your debit card because coin is divisible. In fact, it's divisible up to nine decimal places. So all these things and more really, you know, again, am I saying Bitcoin has surpassed gold? Probably not. We're only in year 10 or year 12 of Bitcoin being around. But we see these properties and we're going to get more into it. But Matador, we're really at the precipice of launching something very, very exciting. We're bringing

[00:11:26] [SPEAKER_03] all the benefits of Bitcoin to gold. And we're doing it by digitizing gold on top of the Bitcoin

[00:11:33] [SPEAKER_02] blockchain network. And so I do want to get to that because it's very interesting. And tokenization is what you guys do. And it's a big trend. Just first, overall, how do you see, you know, this is the first time we've discussed this. How do you see the Bitcoin landscape shaping up right now? Like, you know, Bitcoin has been on the rise since the ETFs and the halving and all that. Ethereum sort of slid

[00:11:58] [SPEAKER_02] off. Perhaps, perhaps there's a lot of competition for Ethereum now with both Solana, Cardano, Avalanche. Who knows? There's, there's all sorts of speculation why Ethereum is down. From a macro level, we have for the first time this pro crypto US administration, which is very important. Like, you know, six of the cabinet members in the US own crypto. Trump's family obviously owns like a billion dollars worth of crypto. There's BlackRock, the largest financial institution in the world,

[00:12:26] [SPEAKER_02] is getting heavily into crypto with tokenization. You're seeing a lot of companies now take a strategy where they take their cash reserves and instead of just putting it into treasury bills, they're putting it into crypto. This seems to be a big trend. But of course, there's been volatility, particularly lately with tariffs and worry about recession. What's your kind of global macro view right now?

[00:12:48] [SPEAKER_03] Hyper bullish. You know, back in 2013, if you would have asked me, Sonny, well, what is the most bullish outcome that you could paint for the future of Bitcoin? I'd probably think about it for a few seconds and say, I don't know, the United States government saying that they're gonna view Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset might be one of them. I mean, I can't think of a more bullish kind of sentiment. Yeah. And so I am hyper bullish on Bitcoin. In fact, I'm more bullish today than I was

[00:13:14] [SPEAKER_03] even 10 or 11 years ago. You touched on a couple other things, Ethereum, right? So I was fortunate enough because I'm, although I built UnoCoin in India, I'm actually Canadian. Matador is a TSXV listed company. I spend most of my time in Toronto. And so I actually had a front row seat to watching kind of like the, you know, the birthing of Ethereum. In fact, I can close my eyes and just remember as if it was yesterday, you know, asking Vitalik, oh, tell me about Ethereum, you know, what's going on?

[00:13:41] [SPEAKER_03] And, you know, although I have, you know, the utmost respect and reverence for these guys, there were a couple of things that stood out as being a bit, you know, funny. For example, when I asked, hey, what's the limit of the number of Ethereum that will ever exist? And I was told that there is no limit. It's not 21 million like Bitcoin. It's not deflationary. In fact, it's disinflationary. Just the fact that it was Turing complete and programmatic and doing

[00:14:07] [SPEAKER_03] that at the layer one level gave me some pause. I felt like, you know, maybe this opens up certain security vulnerabilities. And then if you fast forward even a few months into Ethereum's birth, there was the big DAO hack, right, where the leadership team decided to fork Ethereum away from its original code base and launch another one. And so all these reasons and many more, you know, made me realize that Ethereum is, you know, innovative, it's exciting,

[00:14:31] [SPEAKER_03] it's technologically trying to push the borders. But it didn't feel like something that institutions would eventually adopt it and feel like they were really narrowing. In fact, if I just sum it up, I have a hard time feeling that Ethereum stands for something. Whereas when you think of Bitcoin, there's like this feeling of freedom and limited cap and decentralized money and all these beautiful narratives, whereas Ethereum lacked those. And happy to say that, you know, now almost 10 years later,

[00:14:59] [SPEAKER_03] Bitcoin has evolved to enable a lot of those core functionalities that Ethereum has done. And those are the kind of taproot being one of those. And those are the kind of innovations, along with many other factors, right? Regulatory acceptance, you could talk about market cap, right? What's the market cap of Bitcoin? $2 trillion, $1.5 trillion versus a couple hundred billion. And I just want to just sit around the topic of Ethereum, right? If you look at Ethereum, it's a couple hundred billion dollar market cap. And you look at all the things that are built on top of

[00:15:28] [SPEAKER_03] it, maybe $50 billion to $100 billion, right? Stable coins, DeFi, all this excitement. And if you look at what's built on top of Bitcoin, it's represented in less than $5 billion market cap. So one of our core thesis is that the puck is moving towards Bitcoin and that, you know, fast forward five, 10 years out, that $5 billion worth of things built on top of Bitcoin will expand exponentially. And like I said, we're here for it. That's interesting. Like right now,

[00:15:57] [SPEAKER_02] I sort of view Bitcoin as the kind of currency and Ethereum as the programming language of this whole ecosystem. And when I say Ethereum, I'm also including all the other layer ones like Solana, Cardano, and on and on. And it seems like the benefits of an Ethereum or Solana or any of these other coins is that it's made it much easier to program a decentralized application, like an exchange

[00:16:22] [SPEAKER_02] exchange or a bank or a betting market or whatever. Whereas Bitcoin still doesn't really have that functionality. It could have it, right? They're all sort of equivalent to each other, but Ethereum has made it easier. And Ethereum and these other coins like Solana.

[00:16:38] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, that's a great point. In fact, just this morning, I was looking at one of Vitalik's tweets and he said, you know, and as many of your listeners, I'm sure know, Ethereum has lost a tremendous amount of ground to Bitcoin in the last three years in terms of market cap. It's down considerably. The team is really trying to do some soul searching to figure out where do they end up. And Vitalik tweeted this morning saying, hey, we need to simplify Ethereum. We need to learn from

[00:17:03] [SPEAKER_03] Bitcoin. And we need to really adopt some of these measures because by simplifying your core kind of code base, you attract a lot more users. The narrative is simpler, less security vulnerabilities. And a lot of the reasons that I had kind of mentioned, I'd paused, you know, 10 years ago, six years ago now with Ethereum, they're starting to realize now. And yeah, my best kind of analogy for this is that Bitcoin does money really well. And it's essentially a calculator at its core,

[00:17:30] [SPEAKER_03] right? If you think of it that way, whereas Ethereum was aiming to be more of a computer right off the get go. The way they approached it, you know, whether you look at things like staking and proof of work and all these things we can get into as well, Bitcoin won that race in terms of market cap and in terms of capturing people's imagination. But keep in mind, Bitcoin is open source, meaning it's not just some pile of code that sits in someone's or some company's server and

[00:17:56] [SPEAKER_03] collects dust. It is alive, it is breathing and it has evolved. So, you know, one of the most recent important innovations has been this thing called Taproot, which really enabled people to just embed data within a sat within, you know, a Bitcoin within the Bitcoin blockchain. And, you know, ultimately, programmability, tokenization, digitization, all of these concepts really come down to data.

[00:18:20] [SPEAKER_03] And so the fact that, you know, Bitcoin has opened its Komodo now to being able to embed data, others have figured out, you know, layer two technologies like RSK, Rootstock, Liquid, which is another kind of famous one, Lightning. These are all things that are very, very exciting and have taken form. But what we've seen in the last few years, there's a new technology called Ordinals. And Ordinals actually allows users to embed information into layer one. So we're talking

[00:18:49] [SPEAKER_03] layer one, like the actual Bitcoin blockchain. It's not on some server or some other, you know, set of computers. It's on the Bitcoin blockchain. So just by way of example, NFTs that were minted into Ethereum, you know, the JPEGs and things like that aren't actually in the blockchain itself. They have a pointer that points to the image existing on a server. And so when, for example, the FTX debacle happened, a lot of the people that thought they owned those NFTs found out really

[00:19:18] [SPEAKER_03] quickly that they didn't when they were pointed to like the FBI seizure website or whatever. But with Bitcoin, the JPEGs are actually on the Bitcoin blockchain network, thus making them censorship resistant, making them, you know, transparent and immutable and etc, etc, all the benefits we get. And so, again, it's in fairly new development, we are taking a bet on this. It's not to say that Bitcoin is superior to these other chains from a programmability perspective, but we see that the writing is on the wall, we think it's already happening, and it'll just continue

[00:19:47] [SPEAKER_03] to happen. And once that does, due to regulatory clearance, market cap, technological innovation, number of Bitcoin wallets out there, companies like BlackRock, etc, will eventually build on top of Bitcoin.

[00:19:57] [SPEAKER_02] Well, I'll ask you about that in a second, because so far it looks like they're using tokens like Avalanche and Ando Finance and so on. So I want to ask you about those. But right now, like every year, it seems like there's going to be a different killer app for crypto. Like two years ago when AI was really starting to come out, all these tokens like Tau and Render and Akash, with the decentralized physical infrastructure, those exploded upwards because presumably some

[00:20:27] [SPEAKER_02] big companies were using their tokens for extra computing power. You know, now we see tokenization as this killer app. When do you think there will be a tipping point when people finally say, okay, crypto really is here to stay? Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me.

[00:20:52] [SPEAKER_02] Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at altitra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks. This episode of The James Altucher Show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Listen, as many of you know, I have gone broke, I've been depressed, all sorts of things have happened to me,

[00:21:20] [SPEAKER_02] and therapy has literally saved my life. And sometimes though, it's expensive. It's expensive either in money or in time, but your mental health is worth it. But that's why with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save on average up to 50% per session. Like your mental health is worth it. And with over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform,

[00:21:50] [SPEAKER_02] and it's helped over 5 million people globally. Your wellbeing is completely worth it. So visit betterhelp.com slash James to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P.com slash James.

[00:22:14] [SPEAKER_02] Like now, I think a lot of crypto people are convinced and maybe some of Main Street. I think people are, you know, people like Nassim Taleb, you know, famously think it's going to zero. So there's a lot of well-known people out there who still insist crypto could potentially be going to zero. It's just a scam. Now, I think it's here to stay, but what in your mind is going to be that tipping point where, just like I would say with the internet, this combination of e-commerce

[00:22:39] [SPEAKER_02] and social media, probably like in the early 00s or around 2005, when there was a billion users worldwide, that was sort of like the tipping point for the internet where people finally said, oh, this is not a scam. So what do you think that moment comes and what is that moment for crypto?

[00:22:54] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, I'd be hard pressed to give an answer on the general crypto thesis, just because, you know, there's what, 20 or 40 million crypto assets out there. And for me to have a strong opinion on all those are, it's a tough one, right? But what I can speak about is Bitcoin. You know, there's this famous chart on CoinMarketCap called market dominance. And I have a little bit of a, you know, ongoing friendly bet with one of my best friends, Antoine, who's actually the CTO here at Matador,

[00:23:21] [SPEAKER_03] that, you know, over the last five years, he's like, oh, it's Bitcoin's going to get eclipsed by the rest of crypto. But I'm just like, no, it's not. It's not. And if you look this morning, I think it was like 63% or 64% of the entire crypto market is represented by Bitcoin, which is just like crazy to think, right? It's up against 20, 30 million other assets. Yet Bitcoin is 63% and it's growing. Personally, I think Bitcoin has passed this. I used to be a financial advisor

[00:23:51] [SPEAKER_03] back in the day. And there's something about this 10 year mark, right? Like when something, a mutual fund or a company, or in this case, a digital asset like Bitcoin surpasses that 10 year mark. Is it like gold? Do you know 20,000 years? Absolutely not. But it definitely raises a lot more eyebrows. And a lot of people start to, ears start to perk up and they go, wait, no, there's something happening. I've been a Bitcoin maxi since the beginning. And quite frankly,

[00:24:17] [SPEAKER_03] I have not been as excited about anything within the crypto space as I was about Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin took me from the zero to kind of one feeling like, oh my God, there's hope. Oh my God, I need to have as many babies as possible. Oh my God, the future is bright. But a lot of crypto, I mean, you know, it saddens me to say, and again, I started one of India's first crypto exchange, and I'm a big fan of free markets. But I do believe that Bitcoin is kind of where it's,

[00:24:43] [SPEAKER_03] again, it's that apex predator. And I think what companies like MicroStrategy, led by Michael Saylor, companies like MetaPlanet in Japan, which I'd love to touch on as well later, I think are really showing us kind of what the next era or what the next kind of bull market will look like. I don't think it'll be ICOs and things of that sort. I think it'll be these public companies that are putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet. That's something that I should mention as well as

[00:25:10] [SPEAKER_03] MetaPlanet, MicroStrategy and Matador, our company, we went public in December and we've acquired 64 BTC already. And we're planning to scale that up, you know, 100 fold, you could say, right in the next year. We are very, very bullish on this because it really just opens up the market to a whole new demographic of kind of participants. And so here for it. Yeah, you guys have described yourselves as

[00:25:36] [SPEAKER_02] the MicroStrategy of Canada. And you know, just this past week, I started to see what maybe is a good trend. I started to see a bunch of small public companies announced that they were pursuing a Solana strategy, which to me feels really different than pursuing a Bitcoin strategy, particularly if you're only doing, I know you're a Bitcoin maximalist, but I will say there's, you know, MicroStrategy was like a proxy for Bitcoin. MetaPlanet was like a proxy for Bitcoin. But when you're a proxy for one

[00:26:03] [SPEAKER_02] of these altcoins, it doesn't feel as strong because Solana has competition. It's not 60% of the crypto market. And if the competition wins, your Solana strategy could fall apart. I think a multi-token strategy, if you're going to not do Bitcoin, at least do a multi-token strategy. And I know you're a maximalist, but these other tokens are used. So I'm a little nervous about this trend of saying, OK, Bitcoin's been done. Now let's take the fifth most popular crypto, Solana, and do the same thing

[00:26:33] [SPEAKER_02] as MicroStrategy for Solana. That doesn't seem like a correct strategy to me from a financial point of

[00:26:38] [SPEAKER_03] view. I mean, I tend to agree with you. However, I should also point out that I am really close friends with the CEO of Hanover, now dubbed as DeFi DevCorp. He's actually a dear friend of mine. In fact, Joseph Onorati, I've known him for over 10 years. When I was the head of global business development, he was the head of strategy at Kraken. And so we worked hand in hand together. He is, in my view, one of the smartest people I've ever met. And so I definitely wouldn't bet

[00:27:06] [SPEAKER_03] against him. I do think my Solana play is quite interesting and intriguing. But for me, sleeping at night is also something that I value a lot. When I look at things like, you know, what was it, Solana last year, I think was down for five hours. And if you look at his downtime, it's, you know, potentially comparable to a third world country or whatever. I mean, these kind of things, again, is it novel? Is it exciting? Absolutely. Is it something I'd want to,

[00:27:33] [SPEAKER_03] you know, bet the farm on or bet my future on or my kids' future on? Again, I don't have that kind of conviction. And I guess that I've spent a lot of time in this space. And then your comment around, you're seeing more and more companies kind of adopt this, I think the most noteworthy one, the one I'm super excited about another friend is Jack Mauler, starting 21. What an announcement, right? I mean, and if you listen to kind of just to back up before I go into that,

[00:27:58] [SPEAKER_03] how do we differ from MicroStrategy or MetaPlanet? That's, I'm sure one of the big questions. So we're definitely going to buy as much Bitcoin. We're going to be a levered play on Bitcoin, very similar to MicroStrategy and MetaPlanet. And by the way, MicroStrategy was the best performing stock in the world, I think, in the last few years, outperformed Nvidia, for those who don't know. And MetaPlanet was the best performing stock in Japan, I think even globally in this past year. So the strategy is

[00:28:23] [SPEAKER_03] definitely working. And when it comes to us, what differentiates us is that we also believe that not only again is Bitcoin this apex predator of value, this digital gold of sorts, but we also believe that it will be the base layer where things are built upon. And so we have this strong belief that building on Bitcoin is going to be a theme that most people are not seeing. And that's kind of where we separate ourselves. Just to kind of go back to your question though, as I see these small caps,

[00:28:51] [SPEAKER_03] as I see the 21s of the world, MicroStrategy is adopting this Bitcoin treasury play, I don't lose any sleep. I get more excited because keep in mind, the number of Bitcoin are limited. There's only 21 million. So it's this like weird scenario where the existence of Cantor and 21 actually helps MicroStrategy. The existence of MicroStrategy and these guys actually help us and

[00:29:17] [SPEAKER_03] really validate our business model. For years, our founding team has been talking about, let's make gold great again. Let's make gold sexy. Let's put it on the Bitcoin blockchain. And you know, a lot of people doubt that thesis, right? And so to see someone like Jack Mauler now go on blast and say, hey, look, we also want to build on Bitcoin. We also want to do this treasury thing is in our view, you know, affirmative. And it really gives us a lot of hope.

[00:29:41] [SPEAKER_02] Well, not only is it bullish just from the stance that it exists, but Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, his son is heavily involved in this. So again, there's a saying, don't fight the Fed, don't fight City Hall. City Hall is betting billions of dollars on Bitcoin and crypto. So it's very interesting. But I wanted to ask you more about use cases for you guys actually use Bitcoin to do things, which as you pointed out is unusual, but perhaps

[00:30:06] [SPEAKER_02] trending upwards. Specifically, you make digital gold. What is that? Is that like, can I go on a Uniswap and buy crypto gold coin or what do you do?

[00:30:18] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. So first of all, gold is for my research, 15 to $20 trillion market cap. And if you look at what's been digitized thus far, it's around a billion dollars. So do the math on that. I mean, it's a fraction of a percent. I'd say some of the big companies that have already started down this path is Paxos is one of them, Tether is another. But what we're doing is even a bit different from what they're doing. So let me just maybe back up and explain a little bit about how we're approaching it.

[00:30:45] [SPEAKER_03] Right. Just by way of example, let's take one kilogram of gold. So what we do is we take that kilogram of gold, we split it up into a thousand pieces. We call these, you know, kind of finite pieces Grammys because each piece is a gram. And then what we do is we have a partnership with the Royal Canadian Mint. We're also partnered with Kitco, by the way, one of our investors is El Cisco. So we have a lot of really prominent gold people. And what we do is we essentially take a unique

[00:31:14] [SPEAKER_03] piece of artwork. So we've got one of the top kind of artists in the crypto Bitcoin space, his nickname is Doomsday. Anyway, so what we're doing is we're taking this unique piece of artwork and along with a unique serial number, and we're etching it, laser etching it into that one gram piece of gold. And then what we do is we take that same exact unique artwork along with that unique serial number and we're etching it into a sat. A sat, I'm sure most of your people know this, but

[00:31:44] [SPEAKER_03] is essentially the smallest unit of a Bitcoin. So it's, you know, a 10 to the negative nine Bitcoin. So it's like, imagine nine zeros, right? And then a one, that's how small a sat is. And so the sat itself doesn't have any sort of like value, right? Or it's like a very fractional amount of a penny that it's worth. But again, because of Taproot, because of ordinal technology, because of some of the recent developments, we're able to again embed data. And in our case, an image, which is that unique piece

[00:32:10] [SPEAKER_03] of artwork that is, let's say James is one gram piece of gold that's sitting in the Royal Canadian Mint. You've got that same piece of artwork and that serial number etched into a sat. Now within our app, what we're able to do is we're able to represent that ownership of that gold by that sat. And so now you can do all these cool things with it. You can, first of all, buy the gold from us, you can sell it back to us, you can step, right? Or receive it. And again, because it's the artwork

[00:32:37] [SPEAKER_03] that you're actually buying and selling, it puts us into a different regulatory category where now it's because there's a, there are a lot of countries where there's a lot of rules and regulations around gold tokens. But the fact that the actual unique artwork that you're buying and selling and trading makes it a lot easier. And anyway, so you're able to buy it, you're able to sell it, you're able to send it, you're able to receive it. And, you know, excitingly, you're able to take possession of the gold. So let's say you say, send me that gold to my house,

[00:33:05] [SPEAKER_03] we'll mark it in the ordinal and we'll send you that gold as well. So you can take ownership of it.

[00:33:10] [SPEAKER_02] And that's how we're digitizing it. So it's basically, if I buy, do you call anything different? Like you call it gold coin or like what, how do I find it? Gold art. We call it printable gold art is what we call it.

[00:33:23] [SPEAKER_03] And, but do I find it on a crypto exchange or? Oh, right. Yeah. That was your question on where do you buy and sell it? So initially, it'll be on our platform. And we're partnering with, actually, maybe I won't mention the name, because I don't think we publicly stated it yet. But it's the biggest or one of the biggest kind of, you know, Bitcoin inscription services and exchanges in the world. And we're partnering with them to bring it to market. So that that'll be our first foray into it. So you've probably heard of like

[00:33:49] [SPEAKER_03] Magic Edens and whatnot. So it's something like that. And yeah, it'll be easily accessible on that platform to begin with. It'll be accessible on our platform. But eventually down the road, you'll be able to trade it with whoever you want without anyone's permission. I think one of the questions people might be asking themselves is, well, what are the benefits of doing this? Right? Like why put gold on the Bitcoin blockchain? If I may, I just want to touch on some of those points. One is 24 seven tradability, right? Right now, if you want to trade gold, you're kind of stuck to these

[00:34:18] [SPEAKER_03] markets that are open eight hours, Monday to Friday, which is super weird. Well, now you don't need to do that anymore. You're able to fractionalize the gold as well. So you're able to take it into smaller pieces and make it so that somebody who maybe couldn't afford gold in the past can now they can pay $50 or maybe even $5 to buy a digitized piece of gold. So there's all these kind of added benefits. And again, for us, ultimately, cornerstone of the idea came from the guys looking at the last bull run

[00:34:46] [SPEAKER_03] or the bear run rather and saying all these young people are aping into these NFTs that in our view would obviously lose value over time. But traditionally, people flock towards gold. That's where most people go. Yet this generation seemed to have missed that notice. And so one of our passion is to really bridge that gap between the oldest money that the world has ever known with the newest.

[00:35:09] [SPEAKER_02] So one of these Satoshis or ordinals is basically worth one gram of gold. So as the price of gold goes up, the value of this token will go up. You got it, James. For instance, if I have a lot of money in some stable coin and I don't want to change it to dollars, I just want to keep it in the crypto world. So I have Tether or Circle or whatever. I don't want to invest in any crypto tokens, but I wish I could use my stable coin to invest in gold. This would be the way I would do it.

[00:35:37] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, exactly. That's one way. And why do stable coins exist? One of the main reasons is because people want to keep their money on chain, right? They buy some Bitcoin, it goes up a bunch and now they want to lock that in. Well, instead of having to sell your Bitcoin, they can essentially just buy a stable coin and lock in there and not have to worry about, oh, I'm going to wake up in the morning and it's going to be down 10% or whatever. And what we're doing fits that same bill, right? Fits that same narrative

[00:36:02] [SPEAKER_03] in the sense that instead of now using stable coins as a store of value or as a way of pegging it, you can now use gold. And so I know you just want to say, I just want to say one more thing real quick. Sure. DeFi. That's kind of where we think this product of ours will become very, very exciting because now you're going to be able to use a gold-backed token inside of DeFi, where now obviously that opens up a whole can of worms in terms of things that people can do with it.

[00:36:39] [SPEAKER_02] My wife got her first Defender car in 1999 and now we're on our fourth or fifth Defender. And I don't even have a driver's license, but I love driving in it. It's got the ruggedness and the off-roading capabilities of the classic iconic Defender, but it's also got the beauty, the poshness of the newer models. So one day, for instance, you can go off-roading, have fun, have adventures. The next day you could dress your best and go out on the town. And this may adventure seekers don't want to miss Destination

[00:37:09] [SPEAKER_02] Defender, an epic weekend festival designed for Defender owners and enthusiasts taking place in Port Jervis, New York from May 16th through 18th. This is the thing about the Defender versus other cars. It's got an entire subculture of people who love it and adventure seekers do not want to miss Destination Defender. This unforgettable weekend includes inspiring talks, off-roading courses, chef tastings, live music, and more. So check it out. To learn more, please visit

[00:37:39] [SPEAKER_02] DestinationDefenderUSA.com. What's the US ticker? It's a public company. What's the US ticker for Matador? First of all, our website is matador.network.

[00:37:57] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. I just want to make sure I get it right.

[00:37:59] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. I believe it's M-A-T-A-F as in Frank.

[00:38:04] [SPEAKER_02] You got it. M-A-T-A-F.

[00:38:06] [SPEAKER_01] That came from the NASDAQ. I looked it up online. Yeah.

[00:38:08] [SPEAKER_02] Yes. That's it. Okay. And so do you think, and I think we've had this discussion before actually, do you think eventually every stock, like McDonald's stock, Apple stock, Tesla stock, why haven't they been tokenized or digitized yet? Like, why can't I buy Apple stock on a crypto exchange yet? That's a good question. I mean, I don't know if you followed

[00:38:29] [SPEAKER_03] that news recently. Kraken launched the ability to buy stocks on their platform. Are they like crypto, like am I buying like a token? No, you're not. You're not. But I mean, again, Larry Fink, he's famously said in the last month or two that he believes that, you know, tokenization, digitization is a $10 trillion opportunity. And he sees this and, you know, Larry Fink is obviously a very, very famous person. A lot of

[00:38:59] [SPEAKER_03] people listen to him. And he really, truly believes that once regulators kind of put this in place, and there's more clarity around how to digitize tokens or assets rather, that this will be a huge, huge opportunity.

[00:39:12] [SPEAKER_02] So when he's tokenizing treasury bills, is he making it so that, okay, now BlackRock's products, like their funds for treasury bills are tokenized. So now I can go on Uniswap or some other crypto exchange and buy tokens that represent the treasury bills he's tokenized?

[00:39:29] [SPEAKER_03] I believe so. Again, you know, like I've watched his stuff, I'm like sure like many others have, but I think the kind of the TLDR is that it just democratizes finance, right? Right now, there's only a handful of people that can access capital markets, that can access treasuries, that can access even gold. But by making it available 24-7, making it available globally, by making it, you know, fractionally kind of, you know, the fact that you're able to

[00:39:56] [SPEAKER_03] fractionalize these assets as well, I think are the top kind of three reasons as to why someone like Larry Fink is super, super bullish on this.

[00:40:04] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And to answer some questions on the chat, people are saying, why not just buy gold ETFs? Well, Sonny sort of answered that, which is you can only buy a gold ETF Monday through Friday, between 930 and four o'clock. You can't buy it on the weekend. You can't buy it on holidays, but a crypto exchange trades 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Also, the gold ETF might have fees that you don't really know about. And there's also a brokerage fee. So you avoid this whole layer of fees.

[00:40:32] [SPEAKER_02] The other thing is that there's no middlemen kind of like taking bits and pieces of the trade. There's not like high frequency trading in the middle. The other thing with, with tokenizing and putting them on these DeFi exchanges is that, you know, I don't have to buy one share of Tesla. I could buy one, one thousandth of a share of Tesla. So it's, it's, it's more, as Sonny was saying, it's more divisible. And so there's, there's all these different benefits to, to tokenizing.

[00:41:00] [SPEAKER_02] Also another really important one is right now I cannot buy stocks on the German exchange. It's very complicated. If I want to buy stocks on another country's exchange, it's very complicated. You have to fill out all sorts of paperwork. There are all sorts of regulations about know your customer and, and so on with crypto, you just get a crypto wallet, you go on a crypto exchange and you buy whatever you want. That's trading there. As Sonny was saying, it democratizes buying.

[00:41:26] [SPEAKER_02] We're not limited to one exchange or one country or one type of ETF. Like right now in other countries, there are ETFs for all the tokens, but in the U S there's only ETFs for like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and not really anything else. So you're not really hemmed in by your country. So that's why this is a potentially big use case. Also, it's not like I can call a broker at Fidelity and say, Hey, buy me some corporate bonds. It's very hard to buy a bond. Like the bond market is this multi

[00:41:54] [SPEAKER_02] hundred billion dollar or trillion dollar market, but it's actually hard to, there's no like real public consumer bond exchange. And once financial assets that aren't normally traded the way stocks are, are digitized or tokenized and available on crypto exchanges, it gives you many more choices

[00:42:11] [SPEAKER_03] other than just buying stocks. Yeah. And just to kind of double down on that, James, as I mentioned, I started India's first Bitcoin exchange called Uno coin, which is still in business serving millions of users. I just wanted to explain that in 2018, the central bank, he came after the industry and shuttered many of our bank accounts. And so that was an awful obvious experience. We ended up taking

[00:42:35] [SPEAKER_03] the central bank to court over this matter. And, you know, it took us almost two years, but in 2020, 2020, we finally won that court case and all three judges ruled in our favor, essentially deemed that it was our human right to actually have a bank account. As long as we weren't doing anything illegal, which we don't do, we had the right to hold that bank account. But it just again, speaks to, you know, the market inefficiencies and just the fact that, you know, a lot of places around the

[00:43:00] [SPEAKER_03] world, it's not so easy to buy some gold or even the whole Bitcoin for that matter. Right. And so just to kind of rewind back this, this treasury kind of strategy that Michael Saylor has made famous that we're following in the wake of is actually quite interesting because, you know, if you look at, like I said, MetaPlanet, MetaPlanet has just crushed it in the last year. They've gone from like a $15 million market cap to well over a billion or a billion five. I heard they're buying like $15

[00:43:28] [SPEAKER_03] million of Bitcoin every week or every few days. It's just insane. But then if you compare a market like Japan to India, the average age in Japan is 50. In India, it's 28. You know, you look at the kind of propensity or that kind of desire for gold. It is culturally ingrained in places like India, whereas in places like Japan, it's not really that sought after. And if you look at, for example,

[00:43:53] [SPEAKER_03] the number of people that are unbanked in India, which is again, a concept that a lot of us in North America don't really think about. But there are a lot of people that don't have bank accounts. Think about that for a second. But when you take gold onto the Bitcoin blockchain, first of all, when you put Bitcoin on the balance sheet, number one, you open yourselves up to hundreds of millions of traders that don't need to now go and set up a Bitcoin account and worry about private key, public key, cryptography, and treasure wallets and all this stuff they could

[00:44:21] [SPEAKER_03] just, oh, okay, this stock here is MetaPlanet is tied to Bitcoin. Boom. So I'm going to buy it, get some exposure. And then again, if you think about bringing gold onto the Bitcoin blockchain, what it does is it almost overnight gives billions of people the ability to now transact in something that they're very comfortable with without that volatility risk of Bitcoin.

[00:44:40] [SPEAKER_02] Now, do you think in India, like you mentioned, women in India own more gold than the gold exists in the United States? Will they be comfortable buying digital gold, like gold on blockchain?

[00:44:52] [SPEAKER_03] Great question. Again, I didn't, you know, homework this morning, making sure I was ready, but 96 million crypto users in India as of the last check. In the last bull run, I would say India was number two in terms of crypto adoption after the United States. And why is that the case? Well, I mean, I think most of us know, I mean, there's a lot of, you know, I'd say this in an affectionate way, a lot of the big nerds in India, right? Probably more cell phone penetration than any other country

[00:45:20] [SPEAKER_03] in the world. You've got, you know, very young population, you've got, you know, smartphone adoption eclipses any other place in the world. You look at the middle class and the size of it, it's just, you know, blowing up right now. And from a stock market perspective, you could argue Japan obviously has some of the biggest companies in the world. But from a growth perspective, the last 10, 15 years have been pretty lackluster, whereas the Indian stock market has been on fire.

[00:45:47] [SPEAKER_03] So just to kind of go back to your point, are those Indian women having babies that go into IT or engineering? You know, I did engineering here in Canada. In my class, if there was five girls out of 500, you'd be in a good place. But in India, as I said, I used to sell robotics equipment to all the top institutions. You walk into a class and it's like, half of them are girls, half of them are women. And so at UNO coin, you know, most of our top programmers are all our Indian women. And so,

[00:46:15] [SPEAKER_03] yeah, I don't know exactly what the reason is behind it. But what is it in the Bill Gates of America is, you know, Britney Spears, the Bill Gates of India is Bill Gates. People have a ton of respect for the Elon Musk of the world. So yeah, if you look at all these demographics, I truly believe that coin gold and India in the future will have this kind of arranged marriage.

[00:46:37] [SPEAKER_02] Now, you've mentioned you're a Bitcoin maximalist, and I respect that as a philosophy, like Michael Saylor is a Bitcoin maximalist. There are many other high profile Bitcoin maximalists. But there is value. It seems to me there's value to many of these all tokens. Like for instance, BlackRock, he's not using Bitcoin for his tokenization. He's using things like Ando Finance, Chainlink, Avalanche.

[00:47:03] [SPEAKER_02] And these are tokens that are, these are coins that are basically made to do tokenization. And so I want to push your maximalism for a second and just have you steel man it. If you had to pick five other tokens that you think are useful other than Bitcoin, what would you choose? You mentioned before how, you know, your friend is at Hanover's doing Solana, you know, and this has been a very popular token, particularly since the meme coin craze about a year or so ago. What other tokens do you see as

[00:47:30] [SPEAKER_02] having? And again, Ando just makes it easier to tokenize things like you don't have to kind of recreate the wheel like you might have to do with Bitcoin. If someone was starting from scratch with Bitcoin to tokenize, it'd be a lot harder than using Ando Finance or Avalanche.

[00:47:44] [SPEAKER_03] The part of me wants to pass on this question. But if I had a gun to my head, and I absolutely had to bet on something outside of Bitcoin, it might be something like Solana, I would say Sui, I saw some people commenting on that. But then I wouldn't write off Ethereum, just given how many developers there are behind it and the overall global momentum. But again, you know, just to double down, I mean, I think, you know, there's been so many narratives

[00:48:12] [SPEAKER_03] where it's like, I'm into fill in the blank, not Bitcoin, right? Oh, I'm into blockchain, not Bitcoin. Oh, I'm into DLT, decentralized ledgers or something like that, but not Bitcoin. Oh, I'm into, but I can't help but feel that that fill in the blank changes, right? Changes every year, changes every two years. But the one constant is Bitcoin. And so my guess, again, I don't have a crystal ball. But my guess is that people just haven't gotten the notice yet that it's even

[00:48:41] [SPEAKER_03] possible on top of Bitcoin, mainly because it wasn't in the past. And again, if you look at market cap, if you look at number of wallets, if you look at regulatory kind of clearance, if you look at the eyeballs, you look at the intelligence of the raw horsepower of the people behind Bitcoin, you look at mining, how it's now kind of unique in its own right, right? Like the fact that I mean, mining, Bitcoin mining is one of the most beautiful things ever. And people miss the whole, you know,

[00:49:09] [SPEAKER_03] kind of boat on it. And they go, ah, staking is better. But to me, staking is kind of a step back and in the wrong direction. And so I could literally write a book on this. And again, I don't mean to sidestep the question, but it's all roads lead to Bitcoin.

[00:49:23] [SPEAKER_02] It reminds me of the discussion like, okay, well, why do I need a programming language when I have assembly language? I can program everything in assembly language. But so why would I need C++ or Harz Python to program something? Like for instance, how do you get the price of gold second by second onto the blockchain? Like right now, when you use other tokens for tokenization, you can use Chainlink to take outside of real world information and get it onto the blockchain.

[00:49:52] [SPEAKER_02] It's made for this. You'd have to recreate this in Bitcoin to do it. You can do it, but you would just have to, you know, it's already been done. You'd have to reinvent the wheel a little

[00:50:00] [SPEAKER_03] bit. I know it's a good point. And again, it's not to take away from Ethereum. I mean, I think Ethereum has done wonders. And look, even part of what we're talking about now, digitizing gold on top of Bitcoin, you know, that narrative has been furthered by the Solanas and Ethereum's of the world. So, you know, again, my concerns root back to what I started the conversation off with is how many Ethereum will ever exist? Nobody knows. Well, if the base layer

[00:50:28] [SPEAKER_03] isn't limited, to me, that's one of the most exciting things about Bitcoin. The fact that why do people call it digital gold is because it's hard limited, right? You know, they pivoted towards staking. Again, it's been a kind of precipitous downward move since then for Ethereum, because I think the market has woken up to the fact that Bitcoin mining is far superior to staking. So there's all these kind of decisions that have been made. And here's the other thing. Satoshi,

[00:50:54] [SPEAKER_03] the day he, I think it was like a week ago where it was like the anniversary of him disappearing, right? To me, that is just such a beautiful thing. The fact that he just said, I'm good. This thing is ossified. It's on you guys now. Like, here's my gift to the world. And by just that single, like, sort of selfless move, he turned me into Satoshi. He turned you into Satoshi. He turned my kids into Satoshi. We are all Satoshi now, right? And I don't know if you can tell just

[00:51:21] [SPEAKER_03] through my passion in his call, but like, I truly feel that, right? And so the fact that, you know, if you wanted to take Satoshi out, well, first you'd have to figure out who he is, is another benefit, right? Whereas, you know, a lot of these other things, they have, you know, leaders of the ship and, you know, I hope nothing bad ever happens to any of them. But again, like, who knows, right? That's quite tough to the world and who knows what might happen. And so I just love, love, love the story behind Bitcoin. And yeah, proud to say that,

[00:51:50] [SPEAKER_02] you know, we're building on top of it. It is true that the mythology around Satoshi creates this mystery and people just almost biologically love mystery. And it creates this story that I'm surprised there haven't been movies yet made about this fictional Satoshi. But what would you say after gold, after obviously bonds, what do you think are tokenized assets that you think will really become useful and commonplace? Like people have been attempting

[00:52:20] [SPEAKER_02] real estate for years. Maybe the market's not there yet. I sort of feel eventually real estate will happen, but what other tokenized assets do you think people will start eagerly trading or wanting?

[00:52:30] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, I think if you fast forward 10, 15 years out, it'll be everything. It'll be real estate. I think you alluded to that earlier. I think it'll be stocks and everything else. But at Matador, we're laser focused on gold and then precious metals soon thereafter. So we're looking at things like silver and copper. And you know, the beauty of again, digitization is that you're able to digitize the gold that's above ground, but also the one that's below ground, right? Like you can do a lot of

[00:52:57] [SPEAKER_03] interesting things with digitization, like I said, fractionization and whatnot. So I definitely think, you know, this is where the party's at. I also wanted to bring up the topic of today's talk. You wanted to touch on, you know, kind of the developments in the United States and what's happening in Trump. Should we touch on that a bit? Yeah, absolutely. Do you feel like? Yeah, so I made a couple of points. So I said, again, for some of those people who maybe aren't, you know, following kind of like down to the minute here. So there's the fact that he's state

[00:53:25] [SPEAKER_03] or Trump has stated that he's already signed an executive order to put Bitcoin on as a strategic reserve asset, I believe is obviously very, very big. And you know, there are numbers starting to kind of spill out in terms of how many Bitcoin they want to buy. I think at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville last year, he said they would be buying 1 million Bitcoin. You know, RFK, who's on his administration and famously the year prior to that said he wanted to put 4 million Bitcoin on the balance sheet. And keep in mind, there's only 21 million. So to say something like

[00:53:54] [SPEAKER_03] that is just insane. But a bunch of other small things that are maybe not so small things have happened. You know, Gary Gensler was obviously let go. And now we have someone who's far more pro-crypto. There's been rulings around banking, right? So a lot of the banks, that's why I told you the story about what happened to us in India. But I think the name for it has been Operation Chokepoint or Chokepoint 2.0, where a lot of the banks were given guidance by the government, by the previous

[00:54:19] [SPEAKER_03] administration to clamp down on these industries, which obviously is very painful. And those things have been turned around in recent weeks. So they've been given instructions in terms of the IRS also had unfavorable kind of a viewpoint on Bitcoin. That's changed. So again, you know, it's only 100 days in. And it was a little bit of a kind of a negative vibe around, oh, they haven't started buying it yet. I mean, you know, it takes time. Things like this doesn't happen overnight. But what

[00:54:48] [SPEAKER_03] Dave essentially says is in a budget neutral way, they will be acquiring Bitcoin. So they're not going to put it on the tax. They're not going to tax people to buy Bitcoin. But they will find budget neutral ways, whether that's maybe selling a little bit of their gold, whether it's maybe using some of that tariff money, or whatever it might be. And so yeah, I just wanted to touch on a couple of those bullet points, given that, you know, you'd highlighted that as something that was important to

[00:55:10] [SPEAKER_02] your listeners. I think this is really critical because it reminds me of in the 90s when Bill Clinton said, okay, no taxes on ecommerce transactions for now. And that basically kind of put the government's approval on the internet, and then the internet soared after that. And so I feel like you need those little nudges from the government, particularly when it comes to currency. Like typically a currency is used to pay taxes. So the demand for the dollar exists because I need a dollar to pay my taxes.

[00:55:37] [SPEAKER_02] And this is, Bitcoin's unusual in that I don't pay taxes with Bitcoin in any country. So it's kind of an unusual birth for a currency. So, you know, the fact that the government is now sort of going all in on this is very important. I think it hasn't even really caught on yet that people, people don't realize, this reminds me like sometimes when the Federal Reserve starts decreasing interest rates, but it takes like six to 12 months for the stock market to really realize, oh,

[00:56:05] [SPEAKER_02] stocks are now a better buy than treasury bills. You know, it takes a while to kick in that the government wants the stock market to go up. So I should start buying. And it's the same thing's

[00:56:14] [SPEAKER_03] happening right now with crypto, I feel. Yeah. What a beautiful time to be alive. Like I said, I did not expect that these types of developments to come so soon and early in our industry. I think we sit at a very interesting point in time, James, the opportunity is ginormous in our view. And inflation has been something that's been eating people's savings away. And we think the fact that we're bringing gold and Bitcoin to the marketplace is timely.

[00:56:41] [SPEAKER_02] And if you had to put a price prediction on Bitcoin in the next three years, what do you think? I know this is always like the hard question to answer.

[00:56:49] [SPEAKER_03] I would say look at Michael Saylor's predictions. He's predicting bear case $3 million of Bitcoin, bull case $50 million of Bitcoin. We're at $100,000. So these like 5% dips and you know, whatever, it doesn't matter. Right now it's in our view, it's time to accumulate Bitcoin.

[00:57:08] [SPEAKER_02] So again, Sonny Ray, you're the president of a public company, Matador, the symbol, Doug, if I'm correct, M-A-T-A-F. Yep.

[00:57:16] [SPEAKER_03] And yeah, and our Twitter handle is by Matador. So B-U-Y Matador. So we'd love for people to, you know, if you want to stay in touch with our news and things like that, give us a follow.

[00:57:27] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And it's always a valuable resource on Bitcoin news in general as well. And just following your journey is interesting to see this tokenization trend is going to be the biggest thing by far. There's 1.4 quadrillion dollars in financial assets in the world and it's all hard to trade right now, but in a crypto world, it becomes so much easier to trade, particularly as more of this friction goes away in terms of regulation and so on. I think this is the direction everything's going.

[00:57:54] [SPEAKER_03] Can you give us that handle again? I assume that's on... By Matador. So that's B-U-Y Matador is spelled M-A-T-A-D-O-R.

[00:58:03] [SPEAKER_02] And Tracy asks what the ticker was again. It's M-A-T-A-F. What is it in Canada? M-A-T-A dot V. V as in Victor. T-S-X-V. A lot of great crypto companies in Canada. I feel like, you know, are you going to uplist in the U.S.?

[00:58:21] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, we're already on the OTC and we will definitely... It's part of our plans is to uplist in the U.S.

[00:58:28] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, that's great. I think that's a good strategy because then you get the bump of being... Everybody in the U.S. becomes aware of you. I mean, you are public here on the OTC, M-A-T-A-F. And then it'll just be interesting when you get on the NASDAQ and so on. Well, Sonny, thanks so much. I hope you can come on again. This is really valuable. I really am excited for what you guys are doing with gold and other precious metals. I think we've had this discussion before. I think you should make a tokenization platform, meaning I can come to your

[00:58:54] [SPEAKER_02] platform and say, I want to tokenize my house or my baseball card collection or whatever it is. And your platform allows me to tokenize it.

[00:59:04] [SPEAKER_03] We've actually taken that advice very seriously, James. Yeah, I can't talk much about it, but maybe we'll name it after you or something. The James platform. Right. The Altature platform or something. Yeah. Altization. Yeah, and the way we built our current platform is essentially asset agnostic. We've taken that into account so that we can list other precious metals and other assets on there. But James, I just wanted to say thank you so much for bringing me on the show and for everything that you do for

[00:59:31] [SPEAKER_03] the crypto community at large and your community. And yeah, it's been a complete honor to be on your show.

[00:59:36] [SPEAKER_02] Oh, well, Sonny, great. And I hope you come on again. It's so much valuable. It's so much valuable information. So I really appreciate it.

[00:59:55] [SPEAKER_00] Stream all the movies and shows you love for free on Pluto TV. Say what now? Showtime. That means drama is free with heart wrenching stories from love and basketball, power, and Greenleaf. In this family, we live by the spirit. And laughter is free with gut busting comedies like P and Peele, The Neighborhood, Everybody Hates Chris, and Boomerang. Watch all the hits, all for free from all your favorite devices. Oh my God. I love it. Feel the free Pluto TV stream now, pay never.

[01:00:25] [SPEAKER_00] Pluto TV has all the shows and movies you love streaming for free. That means laughter is free with gut busting comedies like The Neighborhood, Boomerang, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Bueller. Mystery is free with countless cases to crack from Criminal Minds, Tracker, and Matlock. I'm a lawyer like the old TV show. And thrills are free with heart pumping hits like The Walking Dead and Pulp Fiction. The rest of the mundo. Be with a free Pluto TV stream now, pay never.