"The Banks are Feeling FOMO" on Bitcoin Lending w/ SALT Lending CEO Shawn Owen | BMP Ep 10

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]It's clear as day like the next leg up is very large treasuries. Like we're talking the average size are in the hundreds millions and you have [music] to up the game and say like look Bitcoin is evolving the services are evolving. I mean we've had [music] I've had more conversations with investors coming interested in this for the first time ever. You got to remember 10 years ago no bank would talk to you, no lender would [music] trust you. They'd always say what what what happens if Bitcoin goes to zero. Now they're feeling a bit of FOMO saying wait a minute this seems like the best platter. You're paying how much in interest? We want to fund that.

[00:00:31]Welcome back to the Bitcoin Magazine Podcast. I'm your host Brandon Green.

[00:00:36]With us today live from Bitcoin 2026 we have the one and only Shawn Owen CEO and founder of Salt Lending. Shawn how you doing? Dude I'm doing great. This three days it still feels energized and awesome vibes. It's really not at all feeling like a bear market. Feels like a good bull with lots of good announcements. So the environment's great. If you haven't been you should definitely come. Just it's a lot of fun.

[00:00:58]Hey it's been a great time and you know comfy chairs. Obviously yeah. I mean the comfy chairs are a great touch. But you you know when we're planning a conference like this we're always like okay you know Bitcoin's drawn down or the vibe's going to be muted. Is it going to be quieter? Um but this has been a it feels like a bull market event.

[00:01:14]>> You totally get here and then nobody's paying attention to that at all. You're just vibing and checking out all the cool stuff and new friends old friends connecting. You know there's been a ton of good announcements a lot of great people. This one's been pretty excellent right? How many people attended? Yeah well we can't announce that yet because so we're a public company now. So we have to you know everything has to be publicly filed and and all that fun stuff. But yeah I know it's been a phenomenal turnout and we're we're excited to put all that out there when we can.

[00:01:42]But yeah so you know you mentioned that there's been a lot of announcements here. You guys just made an announcement. Do you want to talk about that here to to kick things off? We did two actually. So yeah I guess I think the one we're really excited about your TV. Do we have to be we We say that right? Of course.

[00:01:56]>> That's going to be awesome. So, you know, there's been so much media and I I can't help but go back to the old days, you know, with some of the people who founded the your guys' company when it was a magazine or it was like a microphone and just the incredible growth that has happened is just been one to support and there's more than enough news now to cover. There's more than enough content to cover. You can't even follow it all. So, I'm really excited to see the TV production and just be able to do the studio right. Uh you guys obviously have what it takes and I think that's going to be awesome.

[00:02:23]Yeah, absolutely. And we're we're excited to have you. You mean you guys have supported us all the way. So, uh it's it's amazing to try and launch this with you guys and uh I think it's going to be a great show and, you know, if we can bring uh more news, more information, uh uh nice sound bites, great production value to the the Bitcoin news ecosystem, then I think it's going to be a a great thing. But, uh you mentioned you had another announcement, too.

[00:02:45]>> So, the other one we were we we were internally just pushing out there that we're doing switch. So, Salt Switch.

[00:02:50]Anybody that's looking to check us out if they have a loan from anybody else or anything else and they're feeling the twitch, maybe they want to check something else out. They can come to Salt and we'll beat the rate at 1.1 and 1/2% down to a floor, uh which we've never done before and I'm really excited about that. Plus, we're doing some bundled packages with um what we already announced last year that we're still pushing um which has allowed us to have a lot of conversations with treasury companies, people holding Bitcoin, ultimately just anybody interested in what's the next step of Bitcoin, uh what can I do with it that's safe, how do we grow as an industry, uh how do I continue to save and feel good about it.

[00:03:25]And we're we're pretty pumped about that. So, that's been fun. That's amazing. Well, as I say, it's an awesome uh product to to launch, too. So, to take a step back, for people who are watching who don't know what Salt is, I mean, you guys have been around for ages now. Is it 10 years?

[00:03:40]>> We're about to have our 10-year anniversary.

[00:03:41]>> like uh who uses Salt and and what sort of products do you offer and uh why would me, a Bitcoiner, uh want to uh you know, jump into Salt? Well, so, Bitcoin has really done one thing well, I would say from the beginning, right? And it hasn't veered, it hasn't really changed.

[00:03:55]Had a lot of interesting narratives around it over the years, but it's still doing what we all hoped it would do, and it's doing it well, which is help you save. And early on, I say I would say the early Bitcoiners had the exact same problem that any new early Bitcoiner has, which is it's a bit to take in to learn. It changes the way you think about things. You you believe, I understand, okay, this is something of value. I definitely want to hold it longer term.

[00:04:20]Um that is the trend, and then you you kind of need a place to figure it out, but Salt was really just there saying, "All right, this is not a currency today, although we, you know, it could be, and and we think it may, and and back then we had like some early traction towards that." But none of us really wanted to spend it as much as we wanted to hold it, and so we needed solutions. You go to the bank, and you know, they would just not give you credit at all. If anything, they might shut you down in those early days, and so it was well, how do we just get people to see how enthusiastic we are about saving this and treat it like collateral. You know, fast forward all these years, and now look at we're we're literally reshaping I would say Bitcoin is reshaping what credit fundamentally is. The digital credit narrative is building huge amounts of additional wealth that Bitcoin is bringing into the public markets, and underneath all that there's still this fundamental truth. Why is it doing that? Because people want to buy it and hold it for a very long time, if not ever. And so we just set out, you know, it's a bit naive thinking we could we could do it real quick and make it back in some stuff to figure it out. It's taking a while, but you know, we're still steady and true. We've had um 100% of the return paid back to lenders over 10 years. That's never heard of in lending.

[00:05:29]>> Yeah, it's incredible.

[00:05:30]I wanted to ask you, like, you've been around for 10 years. You've seen three bear markets. Three full ones.

[00:05:36]>> Three full drawdowns of 50% or more.

[00:05:39]Yeah, and and you've seen almost every other lending book that's tried to compete with you guys get washed out in one of those downturns. Just about.

[00:05:46]>> about. There's still some good players around. There's more coming. I think it's very validating. We like to see institutions and people coming and look at new spins, whether it's from the the DeFi angle, the trustless angle, the custody angle, um the institutional angle. Like there's a lot of space for credit to be built.

[00:06:03]>> What what if what would you say like what did you guys do differently that, you know, when they when they didn't make it, you guys did?

[00:06:09]>> You know, I think a lot of things went our way. We were early. We put a lot of time money into building technology, which at the time there was none. You couldn't just go off the shelf and say, "Hey, let me get a QuickBooks and then whatever else in custody." So, we really had to embark on how do you do this right um and double down on that.

[00:06:26]And then I do think there's something about the anti-fragile is a thing people talked about back in the day, which is just the more that Bitcoin gets attacked, the stronger it gets. And we wanted to embrace that. I think it's maybe a little more painful as a human to have that, but the technology stack is it it's really good for it. And so like every one of those has taught us a Okay, we've we've moved the needle up a bit. We've we've gotten lenders to accept at least that we're crazy enough to hold on to this stuff and pay them back. Um as that would evolve, every market cycle would really make us stronger. And, you know, we we'd just keep heads down going. And I think sometimes there was a lot of really fake yield for a while, right? Like if people got a little too excited. Uh it's easy to do if you just chase the yield.

[00:07:08]You know, newcomers, it's easy to get sucked into that. And that really steered uh the market in a way where people say, "You guys stop coming. You can't do that. Why are you not giving us, you know, 20% yield or whatever?"

[00:07:20]And we're like, "Well, we can't cuz this is the math doesn't work." And >> [laughter] >> It reminds me of the Alan Farrington old, you know, where does the yield come from, right?

[00:07:28]>> 100%. And it was And then eventually it kind of all came back around. I really do think that a lot of that really didn't have anything to do with lending, but it did wipe out all lending once we had some of the fraud and FTX and other things. And so it just shows you how important it is to keep building off of a solid principle foundation. And and the North Star we never really veered from which is just Bitcoin is this excellent store of value. If it doesn't do anything else but protect our wealth, and we all believe that we're going to protect our wealth that way, then you have hope tomorrow that your your savings going to be better than it was, and you're not going to just it's not going to disappear. I I still think that is the core mission. And you know, we chose the name Salt because it was what historically put on meats and stuff to preserve your wealth. The salary was the word. We kind of went technical and smart contracts and then gets secured automated lending technology and ways to make these automated lending terms. And I still think the long tail of that is we're heading towards a decentral open transparent world with a foundational Bitcoin base layer. And I think that is becoming more and more true every block.

[00:08:30]And uh you know, we're here for it. We think that if you just stay true to that, you get you build all the other additional tools that banks have out for everybody which we didn't have. We're getting much closer. There's still lots to build. Uh but we're seeing the adoption. And I think that we're going to continue to see that. And at some point it becomes just a bridge that you can treat like any other asset. And I think at that point then it becomes clear it's the superior Yeah. asset for this for this use case. No, absolutely.

[00:08:54]I I love that. And uh talk to me about like So, again, you guys have been around for a while. Obviously, your first customers were probably uh Bitcoiners who barely had access to you know, normal financial tools.

[00:09:06]>> Maybe no bank. Uh yeah, maybe no bank at all.

[00:09:09]Uh uh you know, then you started to see institutions come in a little bit. You started to see the miners. Oh yeah, absolutely. Uh needing needing access to to leverage like that and and you know, uh lending.

[00:09:20]Then now you're seeing Bitcoin treasury companies, institutions enter in a really big way, the ETFs, you know, like how are you evolving the product offering? And how are you evolving these relationships with these new uh customers that, you know, totally look different from you know, where we started 10 years ago?

[00:09:36]>> Yeah, it's a that's a great question.

[00:09:37]So, it's it you can one way you can look at it is the average loan size, let's say it was $10,000 at one point in time, like early on. And then you get to like $50,000 average, and it was just individuals because there was no such thing as a company treasury. And the companies that were holding Bitcoin, they were a few, like maybe a couple really, and they were Bitcoin companies.

[00:09:55]Uh and as that would evolve, then we started seeing new use cases, and the averages go up a bit. And then as as the Michael would the the market would appreciate, of course people are like, "Okay, this this size can go up." Um and as that scaled, you we started seeing a lot of people who are in real estate or other traditional businesses say, "You know, my banking I have banking, I got great rates, but it's really slow and illiquid. And if I pair this with Bitcoin, I can get the best of both worlds, which is still true." There's a lot of companies coming in to to kind of take that narrative and run with it, which is good. Like if you add Bitcoin to mortgage, better. If you add Bitcoin to car, better. If you add Bitcoin to just about anything, better from a collateral standpoint. And so, we've now seen the loans really start to go up in the larger size. I mean, 200-plus thousand on the average. Wow.

[00:10:38]>> you're seeing that these these are turning more into family offices and customers that are uh companies, but still individuals. And there's it's clear as day, like the next leg up is very large treasuries. Like we're talking the average size are in the hundreds millions, and they're they're really treating it serious. Like they you have to up the game and say like, "Look, Bitcoin is evolving, the services are evolving. We are going to continue to evolve and build this out for you the way it has to be." And so, that's exciting. I mean, we've had more conversations with investors coming interested in this for the first time ever. You got to remember, 10 years ago no bank would talk to you, no lender would trust you. They'd always say, "What What happens if Bitcoin goes to zero?" Now they're feeling a bit of FOMO saying, "Wait a minute, this seems like the best collateral. You're paying how much in interest? We want to We want to fund that." Yeah.

[00:11:22]>> and so like it's it's I feel like right now that there is a specific period of time where things are really changing, the fundamentals of what credit is built on. And we're seeing the leadership of some of the larger corporates, of course, strategy and others that are that are showing that on a large scale.

[00:11:38]But it's true, if you look at the announcement from merchants from Square, 800 plus thousand new merchants. It's true from your guys' corporate, Bitcoin for corporates, awesome program. Yeah.

[00:11:48]The orange stuff that you you know, all the businesses that are in there, it's a lot. It is.

[00:11:51]>> There's a lot of them. And so it's really profound, I think, to see going from just a couple crazy people back in the day that believed to everybody else coming along the way and believing. And everybody goes through this kind of journey, whether they're in a large corporate institutional lab corporate, you know, publicly traded company. If they're in a government, right? We see people wearing orange ties and that's great. You know, so you know, the next leg up really feels like it's time to show that you can offset this even more so in the favor of the borrower because there's so much treasury belief where before it was all about work the dollars taking all the priority. Now, the dollar is still really juicy.

[00:12:27]It's it's like bond rate payouts and dividends for something that I would say is the best collateral ever. So, I think that a lot of other people are figuring that out and they're saying I can blend both sides of this out really well and I need some cash flow and I want to hold Bitcoin and there's this nice trifecta in there that it's all underpinned by Bitcoin. Yeah. Well, what do you what do you think about uh you know, if I were to do my Saylor impression, you know, uh now we have digital credit, right?

[00:12:53]You know, how do how does that you know, how does Salt look at that and and um does that does that impact how you're thinking about continuing to build Salt? Do you see interplay there? Uh do you see opportunity?

[00:13:05]>> Absolutely. So, like I probably won't do as good of a personation of Saylor, but I totally do it from time to time because I think it's um it's aggressive and to the point, but it's true. Just like saying there's not a second best, there isn't, right? That is a fact if you look at it from that perspective, which I do. And so like for us, we're totally all in on saying we we understand the Bitcoin is reserve strategy, that's what we've been doing forever. That literally is saying hold Bitcoin, right? Like that's what it means. To say I want to have extra. Uh we understand that that's our digital assets coming in looking at more of a broad spectrum, but all of them end up coming back usually to like Bitcoin as the core. Uh and and the digital credit it is soaking up tons of money into it because there's a there's a need for it.

[00:13:48]Where are you going to go and how's that going to play out if you don't kind of come along and say, "Well, wait a minute. If there's that kind of yield."

[00:13:55]And And for putting it really easy to understand terms, that's a financially engineered product, right? That does something very specific that generates yield, strips out volatility, gives you the upside of Bitcoin without having to know much about it. That's literally what our product does for people who are interested in that in a in a almost a more direct way. And we see that those two are going to go to the >> the other side of that trade, right? The other side of the lending trade, yeah.

[00:14:19]Yeah, so like you could do the instead of MSTR and stretch, you could say you got salt and and land or yield. And you say, "Here's for the person looking for the longer tail upside. I can hold for a long time." Traditionally, that would have been like the equity uh growth stock, right? Bitcoin just serves a great purpose for that. And then you're going to outpace Bitcoin's performance because real revenue. Where does that come from? It's coming from this transaction where on the other side somebody says, "I don't I don't need to know. I don't know. I'm sure you guys are smarter than me. I just have to have 30 years of cash flow automatically put out there because my mandate is that I have to beat yield and inflation. It's okay.

[00:14:57]That's proven that there's a way where this over-collateralized instrument, whether it's in a treasury company and you're doing the over-collateralization cuz there's uh a treasury full of Bitcoin like Saylor, or if you're putting it in a loan product where the borrower is saying, "I'll take the first position risk cuz this is what I care about."

[00:15:12]You're getting effectively the same dynamic, which is that two parties normally couldn't come together. They both want the same thing, which is more of the thing that they're holding. One of them is just for cash cuz they need to have cash flow and the other one is just looking for Bitcoin so they need the long-term upside. In in between there's there's a lot of ways to play in the volatility. I think Saylor is totally right that we're going to see an explosion of more products like that.

[00:15:35]And uh you know, I'd be lying if I didn't say it feels good to see the narrative finally come around.

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[00:16:29]It's interesting to watch um Bitcoin and sort of the the Bitcoin as collateral narrative and movement and and sort of idea start to really come into its own. I think that's like a major theme of the past especially year I would say and uh you know, you see sort of the interplay with pri- private credit, private equity, like uh it it's going to be an interesting couple of years and I'm curious >> you know, uh I mean, I'm sure there's got to be banks that are just you know, pounding on the door right now wanting to to figure out how to position themselves around this and you know, if if I was uh if I was JP Morgan and I was saying, you know, Shawn, what what do I do about this? You know, how how do I make sure that I don't get disrupted by uh the Bitcoin backed and the Bitcoin based credit markets digital credit that's going to come and merge like what should I be doing? There's two things that I think are really interesting in that, right? One, there's there is this dynamic playing out around yield, right?

[00:17:30]Off of say stable coins. And now we have this new entrance which is yield based off of actual yield but packaged possibly like a stable coin and or an instrument like stretch, right? That would be a stretch, yeah.

[00:17:42]>> Yes, and that's the best example, right?

[00:17:43]So if you said USDT that everybody knows and stretch like there's two ways of looking at that equation. From a bank's perspective, um they're they're more probably interested in the first one at at the beginning. There is a lot of strategy about how that can be a good thing for the economy at large, adoption of say like dollarization and spending. Um but there's also this thing about what about the risk, you know? I think banks tend to be very conservative more than people ever really give them credit. Like they are just low. And I think we're a few years away from them being able to really enact anything and we've kind of always taken the the assumption that we're we're either going to outcompete to the point where it will just change fundamentally or we'll have what you need in order to kind of understand it where you don't have to go muck it up, you could just you can just adopt, right? Like eventually everybody adopts, right? Um including banks. And so what's really interesting to me in that is that now with with such the success of yield coming off of stripping out the volatility of Bitcoin and handing some back over to lender in a more synthetic way, um I think that will force potentially this conversation to really become more of a larger conversation and even if you abstract back a little bit, it's like okay, maybe we've finally come to the point where you just see there's almost a return to this is a money you save, this is a money you spend and in between there's a lot of products and everybody can benefit if you do it right. Uh in the old old days that was kind of Gresham's law and you had gold and then whatever else wasn't quite as good as gold, whatever it was silver or anything else.

[00:19:07]I think we're kind of coming back to that narrative and I think the the politicians and the bankers get it and see it, they're not going to rush into anything, but they're also not going to ignore it. As you're going to see there's plenty of that here, those conversations are happening. And so the best advice would be probably, you know, don't fight it, don't bet against it.

[00:19:26]Just look at why so many people believe in this and care about it. It's because there's a never-growing number of people, and we're all just people, that see that there could be a better, hopeful world, and we can have a better form of money. We can be more energy efficient. We can have a longer tail of innovation. Like those are things I think are just principles that deep down humans believe. And if you take away the it's a fight, I think it gets a little easier. Yeah, I love that. Well, and and now I'm going to ask the question on the flip side, right? Uh you know, I'm a I'm a Bitcoiner. I believe in hyperbitcoinization. You know, uh I don't come from a big financial background. I see this financialization happening. Uh it it gives me heartburn, but as I learn more about it, I wonder is this an inevitable step on the path to hyperbitcoinization? You know, is is going and just taking over the credit markets, you know, the I don't even know what the TAM of that is in the trillions and trillions of dollars. Is is that what's going to be the thing that propels Bitcoin into, you know, a new stratosphere of value and and uh interoperability?

[00:20:31]>> You know, I to use the quote, I do think in retrospect it was inevitable if Bitcoin continues. I really do. And more so every time you do retrospect, like you look back and it's more inevitable.

[00:20:41]And it just takes time for these things to play out, but if you imagine it out like the game theory and you say, well, at some point in time we'd have some countries, we'd have banks, we'd have presidents, we'd have people having to jump on that bandwagon. Now we've seen it, right? Now that sounded crazy 10 years ago, but if you did the logical math, you would say if this goes that direction, this would a lot of this would have to play out. And so it it is heartburn inducing somewhat, right? That you look at it and you say, well, let's make sure this does not go wrong. Like we don't nobody wants something too dramatic. Nobody wants huge market crashes that are that are just undue where there's no real there's just only a few winners and everybody else loses.

[00:21:18]Nobody needs any of that. And how do we like protect against that? There's a transition period I think.

[00:21:24]There are some scenarios that could play out where it gets a bit accelerated, maybe faster than it should. I've always been a bit worried about it going too fast. Yet, there's a point at which it's like, okay, once enough people understand something and you you structure it right, then it just works.

[00:21:38]And then so if it works, let it work. It doesn't need it doesn't need to like replace everything immediately. Just needs to compete and it's doing a good job of that.

[00:21:45]>> Yeah. Would you say uh not to to get any hot water here, but like Stripe has grown tremendously fast, right? And it's it's eating up tons of buy pressure for for Bitcoin on the back end of it like uh is that moving too fast? Like is it is it growing too fast?

[00:22:04]>> cuz like the way I would I would go up to people and I would usually like to say, you know, Bitcoin is audaciously competing for the largest TAM that humanity's ever known, which is money itself. And it's the most fundamental thing that abstract touches every human that has a market. Like there's nothing else that could be bigger than that other than what? Like I don't know there is one. I think that might be the biggest TAM. Yeah. And so when and TAM's usually one of these metrics where you can't really put it in scope, but it's easy to put it in scope if you say it's everything. You know, so if everything Bitcoin's going for everything when it comes to money, then you could say, well, the billions and the trillions is not that much. It it almost starts to make sense and you know, I think the market dynamics usually are the most pure indicator.

[00:22:48]Like markets tell you what's going on, whether you want to like it or not. Like whether you believe it or not, whether you wish it was happening. Markets have a tendency to just paint a picture of what's going on. And yield as we know is it's very attractive. It drives a lot of the conversation and especially older generations. You know, I think of my parents and they could benefit a lot from that steady yield that comes from it. And I and if there were anything underpinning that that I felt good about, it would one of probably the best one would be Bitcoin. Yeah. Structured the right way. Yeah. Um and so I I actually think it's possible that we see you know, in that chart sailor shows where it's like the all the perf pref and then there's the biggest one that's ever happened.

[00:23:27]Well, that was true in the last one, too, right? And then this one's biggest.

[00:23:30]I think we're going to see more of those types of scenarios where the adoption just looks giant in perspective of like dollar terms, right? Or what happened before, but it's because fundamentally different new. And so in that perspective, it's a very big market of derivatives and everything else in credit. It's huge. Well, so on that note, like we we kicked off the conversation saying like here we are at Bitcoin 2026. It's a bear market event.

[00:23:52]Doesn't feel like a bear market event.

[00:23:54]>> You've been through three bear markets.

[00:23:56]We have this new just digital credit revolution creating massive buy pressure almost inversely correlated to the Bitcoin price in some ways for Bitcoin, right?

[00:24:06]Is this the last bear market of, you know, old that we've seen? Is is Is there some sort of new market structure that's going to emerge out of this? You know, I I I do romantically like parts of the super cycle, right? I can see where it blends out eventually into it's too big and too large to really see the the volatility in it. Like for example, when you talk to somebody who spends dollars and that's all they've ever done and they've really never traveled other places or whatever, it is the most stable thing to them. You go look at a forex exchange, it's not stable at all, right? It's all over the place. And so we're we're seeing a more transparent world where the volatility is more um in your face. And the other way to look at it is if your home was constantly tracking like a liquid market, it would be terrifying from that perspective. But then you got to back up and say, "But I don't have to sell. It's actually a really good thing. I could sell." And so Bitcoin has this funny way of kind of takes a while for people to get that.

[00:24:57]And you see the volatility is this crazy thing. So, I would never bet against volatility cuz market participants like it, right? There's some amount of just vol that is healthy because it creates liquidity. And the the right thing to do is structure on all sides so you have enough access where everybody's got equal access to all sides of it. That's why I'm a big fan of the public markets of let's get as many quality things there as possible cuz these opaque private ones, you know, not everybody knows that's not really good for some people and better for others. Uh the more transparent it is, the volatility I do think it's blends out a bit, right? The more you can hedge out the risk, and the more there are tools are, the less you notice it. And it will always because it is competing for money, until it's totally dominated money, I think we're going to see it measured against everything else.

[00:25:40]And I think it's going to look very volatile, and I think it's going to look volatile on the long tail as an upward momentum, right? Over and over and over, it's going to crash and then go way up, crash and go way up, over and over and over. So, so then nothing's changed in some ways.

[00:25:51]>> In some ways nothing changes there. Um other than I do believe that it does There's There's quite a good set of data that shows that the volatility is actually shrinking quite a bit. And that we could see where there's no more um market like that. And especially the closer you get to the the um hyperbitcoinization, you do see that eventually where it could go away, especially when everything's priced in it. So, as soon as it becomes the denominator, not just in forex trading or in in the market where stocks are traded, when it starts to be traded, say, against oil and and milk and bread, like then the volatility just naturally starts to go away a bit. Um and there's another form of volatility that's not quite as aggressive. And so, I I would bet that we're going to see volatility for a long time, but I do think it's blending out. Do you think for this cycle we've seen the the bottom of the bear market? You know, I never want to say that we've seen the bottom cuz you never know.

[00:26:41]>> as you say it, you know, it drops like 50%. Yeah.

[00:26:44]>> Bitcoin likes to um take the the path of pain a bit, right? Because people like to try to jump in and figure out where it's at. And that kind of has this reinforcing factor. I would say I am very optimistic about where we're at right now in the the types of adoption and announcements. And I don't usually look at price only. I usually like to look at the adoption of Bitcoin more than anything cuz fundamentally that's what my my livelihood is based on and that's what the savings based on and the value becomes just like when you need to go sell, do you need to sell right now or do you want to borrow against it for later? It's a price mechanism that I don't like to look at too much, but the adoption has been absolutely incredible.

[00:27:22]Unbelievable. So like if you go back in the old old days, right, when I was one of the first businesses, I was the first one in Colorado brick-and-mortar. It was a public company to accept Bitcoin as a currency when there were no fees, and I thought it was going that way. And then we kind of had a little bit of a moment where I was really excited with Microsoft and Overstock. And and then the scaling war kind of said, "Nope, not yet." This time around with Square and the rails and how many times people have like the infrastructure, I look at all that as like a layer two scaling solution of some sort. Yeah.

[00:27:49]Even ETFs to a degree are scaling Bitcoin.

[00:27:52]>> some embedded, you know, trust uh uh mechanisms in them. But yeah, yeah, yeah, they >> Yes, for sure. All different times, all embedded like trust back verify mechanisms without a doubt. But they're they're serving this purpose, which is there's demand for Bitcoin of some sort in a way that works. Like Square's a good example, the treasury markets are a good example, the Dads are a good example. But if you look at that and even just the tone narrative, it is it is pretty exciting. And so I think we're more on the tail end of that than we're at the beginning by a lot. And I think the only place I wouldn't want to be is trying to bet against that. No, you don't want to be short Bitcoin right now. That's for sure. Not at all. Well, well, Shawn, but before we jump in, any last words or or final thoughts as we kind of wrap up? We're most of the way through day three of the conference. Uh anything you want to tell the the Bitcoin Magazine audience?

[00:28:43]You know, we would love to talk to you, of course, on the product side and then and then just in general, like the advice I always give our team when we're going out and I think it's true is that yeah you come to these things and you see people and you meet people and you build these great relationships of community and and uh about like what humanity is really about is what I think we all care about Bitcoin for is like at the end it's not actually about a number go up. That's the fun part, but really it's way better the friends you meet along the way. Every time there's new ones. Every time there's conversations, you know, I get really excited about that. So there's a lot of people I still love to see that I haven't I'm sure and I just think there's some element to this these these events that are powerful on that level and that we often times just look at the um the economic trail and the adoption. What about the just network adoption? It's amazing from a human element. And so that that's I guess what I would say is if we haven't met before or want to talk I'd love to.

[00:29:37]Keep coming to the events. Yeah, beautifully said. Well, thank you so much and uh thank you for tuning in to the podcast and um let's let's go have some fun.

[00:29:46]>> Many more. Yes, let's have some fun.

[00:29:47]Good to see you. Thank you, buddy.