Bitcoin Meets Gold: Sunny Ray on Tokenization’s Future

23:10And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small and medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. like now i think a lot of crypto people are convinced and and maybe some of main street i think people are you know people like nasim 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 and social media, probably like in the early 00s or around 2005 when there was a billion users worldwide.

24:11That was sort of like the tipping point for the internet where people finally said, oh, this is not a scam. So when do you think that moment comes and what is that moment for crypto? 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 of those. It's a tough one, right? But what I can speak about is Bitcoin. There's this famous chart on CoinMarketCap called Market Dominance. And I have a little bit of an ongoing friendly bet with one of my best friends, Antoine, who's actually the CTO here at Matador, that over the last five years, he's like, oh, Bitcoin's going to get eclipsed by the rest of crypto.

24:52But 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 is past this. I used to be a financial advisor back in the day. And there's something about this 10-year mark, right? Like when something, a mutual fund or a 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.

25:32But it definitely raises a lot more eyebrows and a lot of people 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, I have not been as excited about anything within the crypto space as I was about Bitcoin. 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, 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.

26:06But I do believe that Bitcoin is kind of where, 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 MetaPlanet, MicroStrategy and Matador. Our company, we went public in December and we've acquired 64 BTC already.

26:45And 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 the micro strategy 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.

27:26MetaPlanet was like a proxy for Bitcoin. But when you're a proxy for one 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, okay, Bitcoin's been done. Now let's take the fifth most popular crypto, Solana, and do the same thing as MicroStrategy for Solana.

28:00That doesn't seem like a correct strategy to me from a financial point of 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 Amorati, 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 against him. I do think my Solana play is quite interesting and intriguing.

28:37But 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. If you look at its downtime, it's potentially comparable to a third world country or whatever. These kind of things, again, is it novel? Is it exciting? Absolutely. Is it something I'd want to bet the farm on or bet my future on or my kids' future on? Again, I don't have that kind of conviction. I guess I've spent a lot of time in this space. And then your comment around you're seeing more and more companies adopt this. I think the most noteworthy one, the one I'm super excited about, another friend is Jack Mahler, starting 21.

29:19What an announcement, right? I mean, and if you listen to kind of just to back up before I go into that, 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 definitely working.

29:49And 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, as I see the 21s of the world, you know, MicroStrategy is adopting this Bitcoin treasury play. I don't lose any sleep.

30:25I, in fact, 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 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.

31:01We also want to do this treasury thing is, in our view, you know, affirmative. And it really gives us a lot of hope. 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 trending upwards. You specifically, you make digital gold.

31:36What is that? Is that like, can I go on a Uniswap and buy crypto gold coin? Or what do you do? Yeah. So first of all, gold is, from my research, 15 to 20 trillion dollar 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.

32:12Just 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 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 a partner 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 piece of artwork. So we've got one of the top kind of artists in the crypto Bitcoin space. His kind of 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.

32:57And 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 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.

33:33And in our case, an image, which is that unique piece of artwork that is, let's say, James's one grand 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 sad. 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 that you're actually buying and selling, it puts us into a different regulatory category where now it's because there are a lot of countries where there's a lot of rules and regulations around gold tokens.

34:14But 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. We'll mark it in the ordinal and we'll send you that gold as well. So you can take ownership of it. 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?

34:45Gold art. We call it printable gold art is what we call it. But do I find it on a crypto exchange? 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 Bitcoin inscription services and exchanges in the world. And we're partnering with them to bring it to market. So that'll be our first foray into it. So you've probably heard of like Magic Edens and whatnot. So it's something like that.

35:17And 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 24-7 tradability, right? Right now, if you want to trade gold, you're kind of stuck to these markets that are open eight hours, Monday to Friday, which is super weird.

35:47Well, 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, the cornerstone of the idea came from the guys looking at the last bull run, 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.

36:23That'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. 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 stablecoin to invest in gold.

37:00This would be the way I would do it. Yeah, exactly. That's one way. And why do stablecoins 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 stablecoin 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 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.

37:35And so I was going 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. Now, obviously, that opens up a whole can of worms in terms of things that people can do with it.

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38:40First of all, our website is matador.network. Yeah. I just want to make sure I get it right. Yeah. I believe it's M-A-T-A-F, as in Frank. You got it. M-A-T-A-F, yeah. That came from the NASDAQ. I looked it up online, yeah. 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, you know, Apple stock on a crypto exchange yet? That's a good question. I mean, I don't know if you followed that news recently.

39:18Kraken launched the ability to buy stocks on their platform. Are they like cryptos? Like, am I buying a token? No, you're not. 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 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 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.

39:59So 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? 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 fractionally, the fact that you're able to fractionalize these assets as well, I think are the top three reasons as to why someone like Larry Fink is super, super bullish on this.

40:52Yeah, 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 9.30 and 4 o 'clock. You can't buy it on the weekend. You can't buy it on the 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 brokerage fees. So you avoid this whole layer of fees. 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.

41:27The other thing 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 more, as Sonny was saying, it's more divisible. And so there's all these different benefits to tokenizing. 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 so on.

42:04With 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. 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 ETS 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.

42:39Like the bond market is this multi-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 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 Unocoin, which is still in business, serving millions of users. I just wanted to explain that in 2018, the central bank, actually came after the industry and shuttered many of our bank accounts.

43:17And so that was an awful, obviously, experience. We ended up taking the central bank to court over this matter. And, you know, it took us almost two years. But in 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 a lot of places around the world, it's not so easy to buy some gold or even the whole Bitcoin for that matter, right?

43:53And so just to kind of rewind back, this treasury kind of strategy that Michael Saylor has made famous that we're following in the wake of is actually quite interesting because 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 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 the kind of desire for gold.

44:32It 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, 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 Trezor wallets and all this stuff, they could just, oh, okay, this stock here is MetaPlanet is tied to Bitcoin.

45:13Boom, 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. 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 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, I'd say this in an affectionate way, nerds in India, probably more cell phone penetration than any other country in the world.

46:07You've got a very young population, you've got smartphone adoption, eclipses any other place in the world. You look at the middle class and the size of it, it's just 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. 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.

46:46But 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, most of our top programmers are all Indian women. And so, yeah, I don't know exactly what the reason is behind it, but what is it in the Bill Gates of America is 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.

47:25Now, 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 alt tokens. Like, for instance, BlackRock, he's not using Bitcoin for his tokenization. He's using things like Ando Finance, Chainlink, Avalanche. 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 steelman it. If you had to pick five other tokens that you think are useful other than Bitcoin, what would you choose?

48:06You mentioned before how your friend at Hanover is doing Solana. 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 having? And again, Andro just makes it easier to tokenize things. 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 Anzo Finance or Avalanche. 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.

48:44I 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, just to double down, I mean, I think there's been so many narratives 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, but that fill in the blank changes, right? Changes every year, changes every two years. but the one constant is Bitcoin.

49:21And 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 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 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, kind of boat on it.

49:57And 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. It reminds me of a 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.

50:39It'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 bit. I know it's a good point. And again, it's not to take away from Ethereum. I mean, I think Ethereum's 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 the Ethereums 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?

51:12nobody knows. Well, if the base layer 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 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 and i don't know if you can tell just through my passion in this call, but like, I truly feel that, right?

52:12And 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, 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.

52:48And it creates this story. 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 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? 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.

53:24I 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 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. You can do a lot of interesting things with digitization, like I said, fractionization and whatnot. So I definitely think this is where the party's at. I also wanted to bring up the topic of today's talk. You wanted to touch on the developments in the United States and what's happening in Trump.

54:00Should we touch on that a bit more, James? 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 following, kind of like down to the minute here. So there's the fact that 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 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.

54:31RFK, who's on his administration, 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 that is just insane. But a bunch of other small things that are maybe not so small things have happened. 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 administration to clamp down on these industries, which obviously is very painful.

55:12And 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 they've essentially said 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.

55:52And so, yeah, I just wanted to touch on a couple of those bullet points, given that you highlighted that as something that was important to your listeners. I think this is really critical because it reminds me of in the 90s when Bill Clinton said, okay, no taxes on e-commerce 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. Demand for the dollar exists because I need a dollar to pay my taxes.

56:25And 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 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, stocks are now a better buy than treasury bills. It takes a while to kick in that the government wants the stock market to go up, so I should start buying.

57:01And it's the same thing's happening right now with crypto, I feel. Yeah, what a beautiful time to be alive. Like I said, I did not expect 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. 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 the hard question to answer.

57:37I 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 whatever, it doesn't matter. Right now, in our view, it's time to accumulate Bitcoin. 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. And our Twitter handle is BuyMatador. 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. Yeah, and it's always a valuable resource on Bitcoin news in general as well.

58:17And 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 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. Can you give us that handle again? I assume that's on... BuyMatador. So that's B-U-Y. Matador is spelled M-A-T-A-D-O-R. And Tracy asks what the ticker was again. It's M-A-T-A-F. What is it in Canada?

58:57M-A-T-A dot V. V as in Victor. TSXV. A lot of great crypto companies in Canada. I feel like, you know, are you going to uplist in the US? Yeah, we're already on the OTC and we will definitely, that's part of our plans is to uplist in the US. Yeah, that's great. I think that's a good strategy because then you get the bump of being, everybody in the US 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.

59:36I think we've had this discussion before. I think you should make a tokenization platform, meaning I can come to your 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. 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 the Altature platform or something 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 the crypto community at large and your community and yeah it's been a complete honor to be on your show oh well Sonny great and I hope you come on again it's so much valuable information so I really appreciate it.