Bitcoin Asia (HK) 2026 Day 1 Interviews

Hey everyone, Stephan Livera here. Welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. We are coming to you from Bitcoin Conference Asia in Hong Kong. I'm joined by Adam Poulton from Get Paid in Bitcoin. Adam and I have known each other around Bitcoin for a decade, for a while. So Get Paid in Bitcoin is new one. But yeah, give us, give us your thoughts, you know, how are you seeing kind of the Bitcoin space nowadays?

Bitcoin space has been weird with the bear market, but I'm looking forward to twenty twenty what, seven next year, and, yeah For adoption, I think there's a lot of inflation pressures around the world, and that's what we're focusing on at the moment is, you know, the, the pressures that everyday Australians, 'cause we're based in Australia, feel in their everyday lives, but, you know, what's the next step? How do you solve that? How do you opt into something, that, you know, one simple change can change your, financial future? Yeah.

Now it feels like you've been running back, get paid in Bitcoin for, forever. Yeah. Petrol, how, what's the basic idea of how it works?

Well, the basic idea is that, you know, we've got this new money now that is programmable, and we need to program it into every single, space where we transfer value in real life. I've chosen wages, I think it's a really, really good way to, for someone to, to opt into something to receive a portion of their wages in something that's hard and that they can save in for long periods of time. And, you know, so we're building integrations Into zero, the accounting platform, and so someone can register with us, opt in, get their details through to their payroll, and next payday they get, you know, a hundred bucks worth of Bitcoin.

Yeah, gotcha. And so, basically the gist of it is people can get pay-- get, tell their employer, hey, instead of paying me fiat to my bank account, or you're still paying fiat to the bank account, that's what it looks like to the employer, but actually the customer is getting-- Yeah, but the customer is getting paid out in Bitcoin. Yes. What's Like, is it just an address or like you do the xpub thing or how do you do the silent payments or what are you doing there?

Well, we've got xpub as well. you know, that's probably more for the technical users, but, clients can sign up with us without a Bitcoin address, yeah, and we'll do custodial for them for a short period of time. if they do have a Bitcoin address, they just put that in our portal and we send every single pay directly through to that Bitcoin address. Yeah. So that, that might be a Wherever they wanna hold that value, they can do that.

Yeah. And now, how do, how are you finding new people? Like, do you find new people just kind of, is it like word of mouth or is it like advertising or is it just, you know, they hear about it online, they saw an article?

Yeah, it's a, it's a little bit of everything. Like, we've got a lot of educational stuff on the website so people can actually, you know, I'm curious about this, I wanna investigate a little bit more. we're talking His, his orange pill, and he wants to actually give that opportunity to his staff. And, you know, we're starting to have more and more of those conversations with businesses because they feel the inflation pressures. When their staff asks for a five or six percent pay rise, then they're offering them two or three percent, and there's a real disconnect there. And, you know, that builds over time, over a decade of, you know, three or four percent below real inflation. Yeah, people feel like they're getting poorer, right? And it kind of feels

like we're seeing this divide And capital and investment, investment, if you hold assets that are going up and the assets are going up faster than the wages are going up, now obviously this is why we have Bitcoin, but a lot of people don't understand that yet, right?

No, no. And, and you know, we've got a lot-- like you said, we've been around forever. we've got a lot of clients that started off with twenty bucks or fifty bucks of their wages, they've now got a quite a good cushion, and so if the price drops a little bit, they don't care Yeah. Because they don't really need the feed anymore, you know, they, they wanna save actually long term for the kids. Yeah. And so that, that's really interesting.

Do you find more signups obviously during the bull cycle, like is that typically like in the bulls you get a lot of signups and in the bears people kind of turn it off or whatever? Yeah. Which ironically, in the bear is when they should be doing it.

Yeah. Yeah, if you want Bitcoin, you know, today you're getting twice as much Bitcoin in your pay as you were six months

ago

A hundred and nine, I think.

Yeah, right. Yeah. So, so I, anything else in the Australian, Bitcoin ecosystem, what else is interesting that you are seeing?

I'm just still looking at adoption. You know, there's millions of people out there that, that have a real problem and they wanna solve it somehow. you know, there's a million and one solutions. You know, save on this subscription, you know, Get a frequent flyer point on this, purchase, but none of it compares at all to Bitcoin, in my view, in your view? Yeah. Of course. And so, you know, it's just a massive education piece. Yeah. And, and, you know, a massive problem that millions of people want solved. Yeah. And, you know, once we start actually getting, you know, hundreds of thousands of people on this platform, you know, we need to look internationally as well. Yeah.

What do you think people-- I guess last quick question. Yeah. What do you People who are stacking sats, what do you think, you know, is, like a concern that they might have that listeners might, might, might not know?

Well, many years ago, I changed my thinking, you know, a lot of people get into Bitcoin and they think, all right, well, I'm, I'm up fifty grand, I'm gonna get out and I'll have fifty grand. you and me, we both denominate our financial lives in satoshis, so I wanna be increasing my, satoshi count every year, doesn't really matter what I want to do. And so, you know, that's the whole change of mindset that people have to get through, and it takes years, I think. Yeah. It does take years. you know, when I-- Bitcoin first kicked off, I thought Yeah, okay. This will probably take a while, probably three or four years, and we'll have mass adoption, you know, a decade later. Yeah, yeah.

But, anyway, I guess we'll just have to, we'll have to accept that it's, you know, it's gonna take longer than what we initially thought. Yeah. So be it. so anyway, we'll leave it there. Adam Poulton from Get Paid in Bitcoin, it's getpaidinbitcoin.com.au, right? Dot AU, yeah. Right, there you go. Thank you. Hi everyone, we're back at Bitcoin Conference Asia. I'm here with Giovanni Santostasi from, well, Scientific Bitcoin Institute. Yes. Many of you will know him for his work on the Bitcoin power law. let's just start with a little bit on, you know, the price and the power law, obviously. I know you were chatting a bit about, how, you know, people kind of talk this power law floor, but you were saying that's like a bit misleading. Right. But it's kind of funny that it kind of did

bounce off there, right? Yeah, Some people, it's almost like a superstition view, they thought the floor is a something that can't be ever crossed, right? Of course it can be crossed because it's a statistical thing. So if a price goes there for a couple of days, it's fine, right? Yeah. then it recovers and it goes. So it's kind of a band, you can think about almost like an area or a band, right? Yeah. So in that way, then it's meaningful. And in fact, we are creating a dashboard, like I was telling you, that- Is going to actually explain this thing. He's got, he has like a, a region that tells you the statistical significance, the deviation in statistical terms. So it's a real thing that there is this floor, but it needs to be understood scientifically. And so we, we stay there, we kind of oscillated around that region, and for several days, actually, we were following the power law, right? You could see a line that was, parallel to the main line going along that line that is lower than the- The user is analogy of, like an highway, right, where you have many different lanes. Yeah. You can be the, the fast lane, the slower lane, but everybody's moving parallel, right? So it's the same thing with the power law. Even when the price goes away from the center line, we're still moving along the power law. Yeah. And then we go back, right? And this is one of these jumps where we are trying to go back to the reference line. Gotcha. And, but yeah, it's funny that it bounced from that. It's Regularities that you see in Bitcoin. That we're kind of bouncing between these areas. Yes, exactly. We were kind of in the low range for now, now we're kind of-- Every time you start to have some doubts about that, me included, because I am human, then Bitcoin shows how regular it is. That is the beauty of Bitcoin.

Bounces back up and--

Yeah.

Actually, this is an interesting thing as well around, I guess. like the quantile kind of fifty or versus OLS, can you explain a little bit? Yeah, yeah,

there are all different ways of showing the things. The, these aren't really different models, these are different ways, of, of seeing the same thing. I, I use the analogy of, you go to a doctor and the doctor does, many tests on you. He does a blood sample, he does, X-rays, he does, an MRI scan or whatever. So the quantile is not different from everything else, it's just way of showing some Bitcoin properties, right? It, it quantifies these deviations from the power law in a more consistent way, right? Than just say, "Oh, we are, just a, a fixed amount from the reference line." It's just different statistical tools, so they should be used all together. And again, now because I want to advertise the work of the institute, we are creating this very beautiful dashboard where the quantile will be one of the things that you can look at, right? I see. one, sometime, invite me again on your show, I will show you this beautiful dashboard, it's amazing. Right.

Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe when it comes out, when's it coming out?

October or something, when we launch it, maybe you, you can, yeah, sure. as a nonprofit, so we want to offer value to the community, and this is, hopefully something that-- and we call it an observatory, yeah, because we want, want to offer like a scientific understanding of these measures, right? Everything is explained scientifically, we tell you when to apply, when to not to apply, what is the accuracy of, what are the sources, where we get the data, you know, we want to do it differently from anybody else, like if it was a real scientific observation of Bitcoin.

And then when it comes to like projections and, the, kind of how much science versus art is there when it comes to like looking at projections?

So some other scholars, they actually publish a paper, yeah, and they say if you are within six months from now, the best ga-the best, prediction is price today equal price tomorrow, is the most trivial type of pre-prediction, because Bitcoin has a property called autocorrelation. Yeah. That means it has a memory, so the price today is not going to be very different from the price tomorrow, even when it jumps, it's close enough. That is the best you can do. Yeah. Now we showed that if you go beyond six months, the power law beats anything. So if you do any prediction, but if you are inter-- This is a, it's a very valuable thing. Don't use the power law to tell you what is going to do tomorrow, but if you're interested in what is going to do six months from now or beyond, the power law beats any other approach. Okay. And it's not even us, but is a, is a professor from Portugal, from a university in Portugal, that just published a paper Paper on this topic.

Okay. And then, is it fair to say that it's something like, there's like a pull back towards the, the simple power law, which is a

mean reversion. Right. It's a very, it's a window

above the line, you're kind of tricked back to the line. Exactly. It's almost like a rubber band, right? If you

stretch it too much in one direction or another,

it comes back to the kind of the simple trend line. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So you see that as like that simple power law trend line is You kind of come back to correct, correct, correct,

correct. Okay, exactly. You got it right.

Yeah. Interesting. Okay. And so then maybe that has implications on things like when, even when people are doing things like, you know, if you're a miner, you're trying to project what the price will be, or you are doing collateralized lending, you want to sort of have an idea

what the price is gonna be on a five, eight, ten year basis, right? So, and in fact, we are also creating a tool like that, right?

Yeah. For example, You know, like you too, you will really be buying hard, yeah. Actually,

one of our, a member of the institute, he's both a banker and a PhD mathematician. Right. This is a Pio. You should, you should in, in, in, in, interview him. His, name is Pio Springer. Yeah, Pio, the banker. Pio, Pio, the banker. Yeah. He's actually, one of the people in the movie The Big Short. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, he's okay. For Dutch Bank. Dutch Bank was one of the few banks that actually shorted during that cri- crisis. so he's a very interesting fellow, he has a lot of interesting story, interesting interview, but he did an experiment where he randomized the buying of Bitcoin and he showed that even doing it randomly, you would have been better, than what sellers did. Right. You know, in ter- because sellers was a, up and about buying at the top. But I think, but I think the thing with that, it was more like

he was able to raise capital at a certain time. Sure. But maybe if you do it cleverly, yeah.

If you do cleverly, then you actually create value for your investors, right? Yeah. So, this is one of the things to, to consider when you have one of these treasury companies, buy at the bottom,

yeah.

Don't buy, maybe buy a little bit at the top, but make

less, right? Right. But the idea is to Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Okay, and, what's the-- any feedback been on the book? I know we did a podcast about it, but what have people been saying

about, your book? Yeah, the book, by the way, is the Physics of Bitcoin, and, it, so far everybody tells me, and it's not just self-vertising, this is the book, by the way, the Physics of Bitcoin, you can see, it's a huge big book, it's almost like a university textbook. Yeah. Yeah Reviews on, on Amazon, everybody tells me I really enjoy, and what, what person told me he, he read Venture Book twice, which is more than a thousand pages. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah. So I'm very, I'm very happy because I was, a little bit worried about explaining the concept, in a simple way for people, you know, because, it's a lot of ideas and so on. And every, so far everybody left me very nice reviews. I'm very happy. Well, that's

great to see, and I'm, as listeners know, I'm a fan of PowerLaw, so, go and check it out. thank you so much. Thank you, Giovanni.

Yeah, my pleasure. Nice to see you.

Hey guys, we are back at Bitcoin Conference Asia, coming to you from Hong Kong. I'm joined right now by Jeff Walton, aka Punter Jeff from Strive. Jeff? I know you guys have been stacking a lot of Bitcoin recently over at Strive. You bought like a thousand, one hundred coins. Yep. tell us a little bit about what you think this means for digital credit.

Yeah. So digital credit, our per, our SATA, our perpetual preferred equity product that pays thirteen percent annually, payable daily, is, is now back to par. We've raised a decent amount of capital on it in the last, couple of weeks, and, really we're, we're starting to see the evolution of these products in this Our ecosystem. So, one thing that's really fascinating that, you know, I, I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand is we are, we are creating two different securities based on our balance sheet that are interesting to, to two different new pools of capital. So the, the common stock, is very volatile. It moves at a beta of two to Bitcoin. So that means for every one percent that Bitcoin goes up, our common stock moves about two percent. And the way that we're doing that is we're- We're carving off the excess risk and the excess return and delivering, a low volatility, a lower volatility product to the senior holders of SATA. So that excess risk and excess volatility goes to the common stock, and we're able to create this new instrument that's, interesting to credit investors or incomes, income-seeking investors. And one of the most fascinating things is that, that we've been noticing is that The credit security or, or SATA itself is incredibly Liquid, relative to its size, and compared to other perpetual preferred equities out in the market, i-it's, it's nearly ten times more Liquid on, on a relative basis compared to its market cap. So I, I think the reason that is happening is because there are computers and algorithms that are trading these instruments, not necessarily-- There's a lot of humans that are trading the instruments, but we've made the security That are interesting to both humans and computers, and in a world that's moving more digital, we think that's going to be far more important. Interesting. So

I think most people would just look at the price, but why isn't the liquidity also a very important factor here?

Yeah. So liquidity is incredibly important for, multiple reasons. One for the, for the holder. If you think about the, the holder of any instrument, understanding your size and scale in that instrument is pretty important, because if I had a A very significant amount of anything, and I needed to get rid of it. There, there's going to be a decision on, on how much is that going to move the market, how much slippage am I going to have based on how much trading volume there is on the, underlying asset. So in other words, it's

like if you are a large holder of, let's say, ADA, and you need to sell a lot of it, you need there to be a Liquid market for you to sell into without dumping the price, without dumping the

price, right? Exactly. I mean, that You know, a large portion of the real estate market needs to exit and get liquidity very quickly, the price of the, the instruments falls, right? So liquidity is important in every single market on the planet. a-and so w-if as an investor thinking about liquidity, your size and scale relative to the liquidity is an important decision-making process. Now, one thing that's unique is if you go look at the entire landscape of the credit market, the credit market itself is very illiquid. So- People that are buying credit instruments with duration, for example, like if you were to go buy the Ford twenty sixty nine bond, there are very few buyers of that very specific instrument because it's got a very specific risk profile, it's got a very specific duration, it's got a very specific interest rate, and there's no liquidity on it. So we, we've created this credit security that's interesting to investors. Now, for us as an issuer, the amount of capital that we- We're able to raise as a function of the liquidity. So, if, if you go look at, we, we've got shelf ATM, on both of these instruments, on A S S T and on the

SATA side. A

S S T and, and on SATA. And a, a function of how much equity you can sell is a function of how Liquid that market is, like how, how much trading volume there is in the market. Gotcha. And I guess you're getting at this idea

that because it's perpetual, buyers and sellers- Don't have to align on the exact, time. Correct. It's just, it's just a perpetual-

It's, it's perpetually, perpetually trading. Yeah. Okay. And one more thing I wanna add here, and because this is a unique nuance, people that hold Bitcoin Are so bullish on Bitcoin that they wanna get leverage on Bitcoin. This is a broad, this, this is a broad thing. Ev-everybody that likes Bitcoin, they want more Bitcoin. So traditionally, how would you go do that? You gotta, you gotta

take

debt and lever up. I gotta, I gotta take debt, I gotta go take margin debt, or I gotta go get a loan somewhere. Loan terms are particularly bad. I gotta take on margin risk. Generally, there's liquidation risk that, that somebody needs to take in order to get leverage. And, and so It means is there's, there's also a d-a duration risk. Now, with our capital structure and our company, we have created an instrument that a, that allows for perpetual leverage. The common stock is a perpetually leveraged product. The, the leverage of ASST is aligned with the duration of Bitcoin.

Gotcha. Which I guess you would use the term amplified instead of levered here, though, right? Yeah, amplified. Yep. Yeah. Yep. And I guess that's just like another slight distinction. Actually, explain that. What's the difference between leverage and amplification?

Well, yeah. So I, I guess leverage-- There are, there are many ways you can think about financial leverage. the, the primary way Is thinking about debt as a, as a form of leverage. Debt having a principal maturity or a cliff maturity that you need to pay at some point in the, in the future. And our balance sheet, we don't have any debt. We have a hundred percent perpetual preferred equity financial leverage or amplification is what we're calling it. And, that, that just means that the financial, amplification or leverage that we have on our balance sheet doesn't have a cliff maturity. There is, there is no maturity on the balance sheet. Right, because it's

perpetual, that's the key point, right? And I guess the point is also that you, you're kind of building it into the structure of the balance sheet per se, as opposed to, "I've got a loan due in one year or two years or whatever, like this kind of thing," or "You have a note due at this time," correct? This kind of thing. Yeah. And I guess people will compare different treasury companies, obviously, strategy, the big dogs, they've got some convertible notes still, I believe, on their balance sheet and others, other smaller Perpetual.

So, so on, on that, on that point of, that, that kind of clean leverage that's perpetual, like the common stock, and I think it's helpful to understand the common stock. the common stock, it trades at a two, a two beta to Bitcoin, right? So it's trading more, volatile than Bitcoin. That's interesting to people that are trading and hedging. So if there is a company or, a market maker that wants to hedge Bitcoin exposure based on, you know, trading and market and- environment and Ibit or whatever is happening in the spot market, they can go do it with leverage, and they can do it in the options market, they can do it in the derivatives market, they can do it on

spot, like they can go take their own leverage, is what you're saying? Instead of- Well,

they, they can, they can hedge, right? They can hedge leverage in, in just so many different ways of the ecosystem because it's very clear, clean, and transparent. It, it's not opaque. They understand the financial leverage we've got and, and the, the You can see it move, in an amplified fashion, and that's what we've seen in the last two weeks. I mean, our common stock's up eighty-five percent in two weeks,

right? Yeah. When

the price of Bitcoin's up, what, twenty-five, thirty percent? Gotcha. Yeah,

'cause Bitcoin went from what, fifty-eight K or sixty-ish, sixty-three to like, what are we now? Seventy-eight K-ish. Yep. And then your ASST went from thirteen dollars to close to twenty-one fifty. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So obviously there's been What do you think the critics are missing? What are the main things that they are getting wrong?

I, I think they're missing that this is a, this is a sustainable business model and, we are attracting new pools of capital that historically wouldn't buy Bitcoin. Gotcha. So, so I, I've been kind of pulling on this thread of, of trust, which I think is a pretty important, like Bitcoin is trustless, but that word trustless is kind of a misnomer in and of itself because you trust the protocol, you trust the miners, you trust Like the, the, the people that are-- Or the software implementations, or your hardware wallet, or these different things. Exactly. There's, there's a lot of trust in this trustless thing, but it, it makes trust cheaper. So instead of having to trust the dollar and all of the audits and the Fed and banks and the entire, you know, infrastructure around it, you, you have to trust the, the protocol, wh-which is a huge innovation, right? We, we'd all agree on that. Now Companies building on top of this is natural, right? There, there's, there's trust extension in, like a bank is trust extension on top of fiat, right? Like what we're building is trust extension on top of Bitcoin, which is incredibly legible, you know, everybody can see, the amount of economic power that's held in, that, that's held in Bitcoin. So this, this concept of, what, what I'm trying to get to is people and investors, capital investors, don't wanna hold the keys. They wanna trust somebody else to hold the keys. In different ways, equity investors and credit investors. The same way that, a real estate investor doesn't wanna hold the keys to a house,

right?

Right? They don't wanna manage the house, they don't wanna manage the tenant and, and, you know, do all of those things, right? It's the same concept here, like it- The, an investor in the equity market or the credit market doesn't want to do all of that. They want somebody else to do that. Yeah, they want to do it for me. Yeah, do, do it for me. So,

and to be fair, you can have, you can have a mix, right? You can have some self-custody Bitcoin and some ASST or whatever, some other, you know, you can have a mix of these things. So it's not like, I think people sometimes get stuck in this kind of all or nothing mindset, and that's maybe not helpful Right. They're trusting various levels

or institutions to manage things for them. Yeah. So, so you're now, like, you're now asking these people that are trusting institutions to pull out of an institution and go be self-sovereign. Very difficult to do, especially with real money, real, real power. They wanna, they wanna trust an institution just like they trust an institution in a, in a different location. Now, now it's, it's on a, much more More legible trust foundation, right? Like Bitcoin is a much better foundation to build trust on top of. Like, all corporations, every company here at Bitcoin Asia is building trust Around Bitcoin. Like, you, any, any company, any, hardware wallet is, that's, they're building trust around what they're doing. A-and that's exactly what we're doing. We're just, we're doing it to the capital markets. We're building infrastructure for capital to onboard into Bitcoin. We're, we're all aligned.

Would you say, and this is probably another kind of common criticism line now, as I, as you know, I'm pro-trustee companies myself, but a common criticism is, "Oh, you're just like stopping Bitcoin people who would Or Bitcoin, and they're, you're selling them your common equity or your SATA instead of those people going and buying Bitcoin. What can you share on who are the buyers of these

things? Yeah, I, I think that's just a, a naive understanding of, of capital markets. the, for example, let me just give you a concept for, from the insurance industry. I, I used to work in insurance. An insurance company about, eighty percent of the assets that an insurance company holds is in bonds. Okay? The other twenty percent is in equity. Now, what, why, why does that even exist? that exists because there's regulation on what type of, securities and instruments an insurance company can hold. And an insurance company gets eighty-five percent capital credit for holding a bond, and they get forty-five percent capital credit for holding an equity. So if they're going to hold an equity, it's got to be like a high performance equity, something that's very deep duration on their capital structure, and then the, the bonds, the bonds are got a kind of lower duration. Now, they literally can't buy Bitcoin. If they held Bitcoin, they wouldn't get any capital credit for it.

Right. Are you talking about in like the Basel risk weighting? No, no, no, this

isn't even Basel. This is like US insurance companies regulatory. Oh, right, sorry, gotcha. Yeah, yeah. So Basel insurance regulation is like another kind of whole other, yeah, whole other thing. so literally they get zero credit, zero credit for, on their balance sheet for the Bitcoin as capital. So there's zero incentive for an insurance company to hold it at all All, because they can't leverage against it. Like that's the entire business model is, you know, issue insurance policies, generate premium, buy assets that have a float before you pay out the liability in the future. That's, that's exactly what an insurance company does. Now, they, they have zero incentive to hold Bitcoin because they literally can't. Yeah. They, they get zero credit for it. Now, they can hold an equity. Okay, that's, that starts to become interesting. Now I can hold an equity, now, now having an equity exposure to Bitcoin that, that, like, that I can do. I can have the equity in the equity bucket. Now the preferred equity also fits in the equity bucket. Yeah. So for an insurance company, an insurance company may be less interested in holding the preferred, because it only, like, for say that it only pays thirteen percent, their equity bucket of an insurance company, they wanna hit the home runs. They're buying SpaceX and Apple. You know, they're buying the high volatility things. And so the, the future of where this evolves is structured products around SATA or the preferred equities that can start to fit into that bond bucket. And, I, I think that's the, the biggest opportunity in terms of size and scale for, like the future here. And

also, I know this has been a big thing, it seems to be a big thing on the strategy side with Michael and strategy, what they're doing to try to get the, like credit ratings. Yeah. So I presume that's gonna be a similar thing for you guys, also. Yeah, yeah,

we're, we're really focused on it. I, the, the- We, we've gotta get through rating agencies, right? Rating agencies are very old traditional companies, that have traditional infrastructure. rating agencies like the S&P, S&P, as for an example, they came out and they gave Strategy zero credit for the Bitcoin that they held on their balance sheet. And so that's, that's a hurdle that we've gotta get past. The reason that- They gave them zero credit for the Bitcoin on the balance sheet is because of the Basel three risk ratings, and, that, that is a, a challenge that we are going- So

that's when the Basel thing comes in. That's where

the Basel kind of comes in, but I, I think that's something that's solvable. I, I think the, the perpetual preferreds, there are rated perpetual preferred equities out in the market, but the, I, I think the rating agencies are gonna have a lot easier of a time if there's a structured instrument with a duration on it that, is more aligned to other instruments that are out the

market. I see, but these are perpetuals, so it's hard to-- So,

so just like you can, you can structure a Bitcoin bond, you can structure a SATA bond.

Oh, I see. Someone would-- Okay, gotcha. Yeah. So someone could build something on top of that, yes, and then have a credit rating on that thing, even if there's not-- Even if Satera itself doesn't have a credit rating. So what,

what, same thing that we did on our bounty, right? We got Bitcoin and now we've separated into a senior tranche and a junior tranche. And now, what if you take that senior tranche and you separate it into another senior tranche and a junior tranche? And that, that senior, senior tranche of, of SATA, you can calculate the risk profile on that, and we, we can, we can communicate that concept to a rating agency.

I, I think that's where it's going longer term. I think that's a

lot more palatable, surprisingly, it sounds like a lot of financial alchemy, but it's, these types of things happen every, everywhere. Like, for, for example, I, I found out about this the other day. Data centers, like one, one of the, the biggest ways that these data centers are getting funded is they're creating structured finance products around them, right? And so what the data centers themselves, are spitting off cash flow. Okay, so they, they, they take the data center and they structure it into a, a senior tranche and a junior tranche, and they've been able to design an instrument that was able to get an investment grade rating, by just, by, by using structured finance. A-and so that, that effectively gets that exposure into insurance companies and pension funds. So once that capital comes in the door, now they can go build the data center. So it's like, this is how the whole- The whole world gets financed. So it's kind

of a matter of packaging it for the right audience, and it's, yeah, you're trying to package it for insurance companies or certain funds, or pension funds, or retirement

accounts, or, you know, wh-who, whoever is

a buyer of- Gotcha. So there's, there's your argument. It's, it's actually attracting people from who aren't otherwise buying Bitcoin right now, right? That's kind of the end of, the end point of that argument. A

hundred percent. Look, I'm a big advocate of self-custody Bitcoin. I think people should do it. it's a very liberating exercise. It's, I think it's good. I kind of view, self-custody Bitcoin as an insurance policy for me, like a all hell breaks loose, I've got Bitcoin kind of thing. Yeah. and I, I know a lot of people view it very differently, and, and there's different ways to live and live your life in and around Bitcoin based on your skepticism of the future, so right? Like so. Operating within that,

within that framework. Yeah. Alright, well, let's leave it there. Good spot there. So, Jeff Walton from Strive, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. See ya. Hey guys, we're back at Bitcoin Conference Asia in Hong Kong. I'm here with Alex B. He is, ecosystem lead over at Ark Labs, working on Arcade and scripting and all these conversations. So, I know, this is something you've been passionate about in terms of trying to, let's say, emulate or do this kind of virtual, what's it called? The execution layer. That's, that's the term you guys use. Execution layer,

yeah. We've been playing around with, different narratives over the last, year, I think. And, I think the easiest way to look at Arcade nowadays is kind of like a generalized co-signer environment.

Right.

and what this means is that by creating, an on-chain arrangement via, think about Arcade, think about Ark in general, what you have is a two-of-two multisignature, system effectively

between- Exactly, exactly.

And, you know, originally the implementation was focused on enabling off-chain transfers, so effectively ARC and the ability to do, off-chain transactions, you know, smaller latency, more throughput and all of that, and the ability to eventually batch this on-chain. But what we've come to realize is that this is kind of like a model that applies to a lot of different, applications of Bitcoin. Yeah. You know, one of the Interesting one, which actually was-- we, we didn't invent any of that. It was actually created a long time ago, pioneered a long time ago, back, all the way back to twenty fourteen, Green Address, one of the OG Bitcoin wallets. Right,

like a two of two or was it?

It was a two of two, yeah. It was a two of two multisig with the Green Address server, again, serving as kind of like this, co-signing entity that would allow wanting fast zero-confirmation payments between Green Address, wallet users.

This is for like Merchant adoption back in the day, so they could know that they weren't gonna get double spend, right?

Exactly, exactly. But then also, security features for the users, right, where Green Address server was able to enforce spending, thresholds, spending policies, so spending policies, so you'd be, be able to kind of set a certain amount of Bitcoin that you'd be able to spend out of your wallet, on a daily or weekly or monthly basis. Yeah. And the idea is that if you were trying to go, if, if your wallet was trying to spend a transaction The, green address server wouldn't co-sign a transaction, effectively providing the kind of, same kind of guardrails that we're seeing nowadays with a system like Bitkey, right? So Blocks Bitkey is able to enforce the same type of policies while also serving as a sort of collaborative custody layer. So what we're doing with Arcade is kind of generalizing that architecture so that anyone that is a financial service provider, that has users and that want to offer perhaps the ability- See, for example, to do collaborative custody in that way, or perhaps to be able to serve as, you know, open their user and their application to a fast transacting environment, to plug directly into Arcade and do so in a modular way, right? When we think about Arcade, we think of, as it as an extension of Bitcoin. We think, we think of it not really too much anymore as kind of a layer two, because layer two gives this connotation where people have to move in and out of that layer two. which as resulted in friction, I think, over the years, people kind of- So you see

it more as like expressivity, smart contracting, but in a certain co-signing way. Exactly. What you're,

what you're doing, what you're, what you're doing is effectively simply, creating different spending conditions that aren't available directly on chain, but that are available in a collaborative manner. And why this is important is that it doesn't need to introduce too many layers of trust, right? Yeah. When you think about Bitkey, which is in- involve in your already sort of like collaborative custody, yeah, solution, you don't, you don't have to trust them with your Bitcoin. All they're doing is helping you sort of coordinate the security of your coins so that if one of your own personal setup fails, you're able to move Bitcoin to a new, I see, sorry, refresh, setup.

Yeah, I think you'll probably need a bit more explanation, might have to do a longer podcast on it because they're, they're about to start something up here, but, just quickly, Handing now to somebody else. This is the broader question of what, what's happening with swaps and exchanges? Are they gonna be facing a lot of AI attacks, and does that impact you guys?

They will absolutely, and, you know, Boltz was obviously one of our, important providers, so what we've looked at is not replace Boltz with another provider, but completely change the architecture so that with Arcade, you're now able to tap into, network of a marketplace of providers, right? Gotcha. And what this, why this is important is that it creates something Don't have to expose themselves also right, so publicly. With this public, maybe

it's more like it's not a public, ways of taking in the requests.

Exactly. So you don't have to advertise a public API where the attackers also have this as a target, but you're able to serve sort of a, our, we, it's our NRFQ model. So you get, you, you request a swap from the provider, the provider is in a short list of, within the application, and therefore you have more redundancy as well, right? So from the application the application and the user perspective, if one provider fails, there's other people that can service the application. Yeah. From the provider perspective, if, you want to have more distribution into many application, which has always been the challenge, imagine you're operating a Lightning service, you have a lot of liquidity, but you don't know how to distribute that into, users. Yeah. Well, now you can connect to Arcade. We call it Arcade Intents. You can, advertise yourself as a solver on Arcade Intents and now be able to effectively- you know, passing to that new market for the RFQs

and so on. Exactly. Gotcha. Yeah. Well, we'll probably need a more in-depth, chat, but for now, we'll leave it there. So Alex B from Arcade or Ark Labs, rather. Thank you.

Thank you.