The $1 Trillion Bitcoin Loan Market Is Coming | Mauricio Di Bartolomeo

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38:02That's bitkey.world and use the code WBD. So I'd want to ask you another question about reducing volatility in these loans. But I think we should set this up a little bit because you've just announced that you're doing Tether Gold now as well. Yes. Why don't you explain what that is? And then I have a few questions on it. Definitely. So Tether Gold, the asset itself, is basically, think of it as almost a stable coin for gold. Are Tether now the largest private holder of gold? I have to double check, but I believe they're up there. Yes. In terms of private, privately, I believe they are. in terms of like sovereigns i think they're actually up there like north of some bunch of sovereigns but if you look at tether's model for their stable coins is you give them a dollar they store that dollar into a treasury and they mint a token a dollar token and you go and use that token and you can redeem that token eventually one day for for the dollar in gold it works pretty similar you bring a bar of gold to their vaults in switzerland you give them the vault you put it in the in the safe or the cage and you get a gold token and you move it around and so one token one bar one token one dollar it's the very it's a very similar model to the stable coin but now applied to a sovereign precious metal right and so what that does is if you um you know most people that own gold today in size they hold it at a vault somewhere um or at multiple vaults and like with everything physical you try to send that gold somewhere you try to move that gold the buyers have the buyer pool has to be in that vicinity if you want to transfer that goal or move it to different countries a nightmare and so gold has a lot of physical constraints uh just by the nature of it and holding it already has built-in counterparty risk because beyond the few things you own you don't want to store vaults or gold bars in your house yeah and so you already have some of that and um the asset itself i think it's a fascinating proposition um because it's i think it can do to the gold what the stable coin did to the dollar you put it on a digital rail and all of a sudden the physical constraints go away you can get financing with anybody you can send it at any time on a blockchain and we think that and again a lot of the added ton of counterparty risk but Yeah, but again, it's not dissimilar to the counterparty risk that a stablecoin has.

40:26No, yeah, 100%. And a stablecoin is wildly popular. I meant compared to gold, though. Well, compared to physical gold and compared to Bitcoin. No question. There is no question. However, it's been proven that when you create a better format of the same product, a US dollar versus a stablecoin, and you put it on digital rails, all of a sudden, a lot more people can use it. a lot more people can access it and you can start doing things with it that were previously you didn't even consider yeah right so i think the same thing is going to happen to gold and again it might not be for everybody some people might prefer still to hold their gold physically and i understand that and that's totally fine um but to many they will like this idea that hey i can get my gold exposure through this token that allows me to you know in the future get a loan from latin i can sell it really quick i can move it really quick i can settle with a counterparty really quickly uh it's much more versatile than my physical gold and i think that's going to resonate with a lot of people um a lot of bitcoiners believe it or not especially some of our clients um a few in particular took loans uh in the middle of last year with bitcoin to get into the precious metals rally and they did fantastic uh many of them started trying they said mal i want to bring i did really well with my leaded loan because i got into precious metals i want to i love leaden i can i can never do what i do at leaden with my gold with my physical gold and i want to do the same at the time we obviously didn't have a solution for it but midway through last year that was actually just happened to be the time where we were getting together or starting to talk more with the tether team about them they eventually made an investment into leaden in november last year and through getting to know them and through visiting and learning about xct we said, well, this could be potentially an answer for some of the things our clients were looking for.

42:16So there's, like, I've got no problem with gold. I think it's a cool product. I think, I totally understand why you're doing it, but I'm sure there's people that have been like, why are you adding this shit coin? You know what? Surprisingly, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We haven't had. It feels like gold is the only thing you could have got away with. You know, it's funny because, and again, you know, when you think about, we already support stable coins okay so you could you could argue that hey we already support tether we already support usdc like we support i'd rather have a stable coin backed by gold than the dollar well and you know tether actually i think the tether had one but they just discontinued it um and while that's a really good idea and i think that in a previous life or maybe five years ago i would have taken off what's happening right now with genius act is it's driving most of the stable coins at scale to hold the paper like the treasuries yeah because of the incentive the government has right i think the free market will be the free market and you're going to get some of that too um but um in my opinion you know if you can get comfortable with the way a stable coin works and if you look at who is the issuer okay the issuer is the group that we are already trusting with hundred plus billion dollars worth of dollars in treasuries yeah right you know if anybody is going to do this and then if anybody has an incentive to do this right and the know-how to do this right it's them right and so we can we got comfortable with the asset itself um we listed it right now you can buy it and sell it um we you can't borrow against it just yet but you will be able to soon and the interesting part about it is like you still get again if you go beyond the custodial risk and the fact that you know there is third-party risk because it's sitting at a vault somewhere in the same way your u.s treasuries are going to be sitting at you know some of their um accounts um if you get past that it's a fantastic asset in that it gives you a lot the same hard money benefits that bitcoin gives you it has a lot less volatility um and because of those because of the lesser volatility um i anticipate and again i can't confirm these yet but i anticipate that the terms on goldback loans like in terms of ltvs and rates um you're gonna get actually an incremental benefit um on those terms relative to bitcoin because you have again a lot less volatility, much bigger market, and a much bigger bidder base, right?

44:44So I think it's going to be, the more we can, once these loans, once we roll out the loans, I think people are going to start seeing, okay, this could be an interesting compliment. It will never replace Bitcoin. I want to be clear about that. The thing that I think is really potentially interesting, I know you've said that you're going to do gold-backed loans. I like the idea of a sort of cross collateral backed loan? Because that would be a way of reducing volatility. Like say you did 80 % Bitcoin, 20 % gold. Don't get ahead of us, Danny. But no, we're thinking about a lot of these potential things too.

45:17Like how do we keep, how do we help our clients reduce the risk of a liquidation? Because no, we don't want it. You don't want it. Keep giving you some of that hard money attribute, the anti-debasement of the collateral. Can you start thinking about, you know. Like hybrid. hybrid ways of potentially doing these things like um so again you have to at letter we like to say you you crawl you walk and you run right you can't just start running out of the gate because you know you want to be making sure that every step you're taking especially in this in the business of lending like super careful you have to be incredibly deliberate you have to be incredibly thoughtful you have to dot your i's cross your t's and then you uh you can announce it.

46:02Or you can, you know, bring it to market. I can get ahead of myself though. Like I like the idea of almost like a slider where you can completely set your own, um, like amount of Bitcoin or amount of gold in the loan, like adjust it to your volatility preference. Like, I think that's really interesting. I'll, I'll, I'll set up the meeting with our product team. It's very cool. Um, we should get onto the other thing that you, we, we've had so many announcements since we last spoke. Tell me about the bond. Ah, the bond, man. Um, the bond was super interesting because to me it's the biggest news in the financing or credit market, even in the Bitcoin credit markets.

46:39I know everybody's focused on debts and treasuries, but the biggest news in Bitcoin credit, I'm obviously biased because it's our baby, but Ledin did the first Bitcoin-backed loan securitization ever this year with S &P. S &P was the ratings agency that rated the vehicle. But what that does is basically we took a chunk of our loan book,$200 million worth of loans, made up of 5 ,000 plus individual loans from people in 30 plus countries. And we packaged them into a$200 million offering and we got that rated by S &P. And we reached investment grade on that bond. What is investment grade? Great question.

47:25So investment grade is a qualification or a rating that is issued by two approved ratings agencies, which is the two of them are S &Ps and Moody's. So we chose S &P and we work with S &P. What is an investment grade rating? An investment grade rating, you can think of it or a rating on a bond. You can think of it as the report card on the bond. Right. so the the the ratings agency will go will sit down with the issuer and they will work with the issuer for you know as long as it's needed with us it was like over a year over a year long process it's very grueling because we were the first people to ever do this and and you need a lot of things to even be considered for this so we can we can talk about that in a second but a rating is basically a grade on your report card and so the better the grade the less risk your bond has right And what the agency does is they take your loan book and they basically look at all of your operations, your processes, your legal agreements.

48:27And then they start playing out these scenarios. Like what happens if Bitcoin crashes to this? What happens if what happens if what happens if this? And they run God knows how many models. And you can read the report. I can send you the link if you want to put it in the show notes. The report S &P did on us. And so based on all those models, they get what they call an expected loss. What is the expected loss if all these things happen? and the smaller the loss the better the grade why is investment grade so important investment grade is an a okay like there's different so you have like triple a double a a correct but but the real cutoff is there's like all the ways like triple b minus is where investment grade starts and everything below that is considered junk okay in the finance world in the bond space it's not so much about the actual letter it's about it's a pass fail on investment grade or not investment grade okay right so if you're investment grade you're in the bucket if you're not investment grade you never get to see what's behind the curtain okay why is that important in the abs market the asset-backed securitization market the buyers the the 90 to 95 percent of all bonds issued in the abs market are investment grade why because the buyers of these bonds the biggest buyers the pension funds the insurance companies the reinsurance companies they have a mandate that they can only buy bonds that have been great rated investment grade by either s &p or moody's so when you hit the bar you unlock 90 of the demand when you don't hit the bar you you're stuck selling to like hedge funds and more risk more risk taking people and it's just it's obviously the rate is higher and so you don't really we didn't want to go to market with a sub investment grade offering we wanted to we believe we have what it takes and we did uh to reach that we were the first company to ever do this um it is the first time smp has ever rated a bitcoin product and it's the first time that it's given an investment grade rating to a bitcoin product and we are a first time issuer that has received an investment grade rating so that's awesome this is honestly like the other thing i mean i can talk about this thing for hours but the other thing that's super fascinating to me is most abs bonds in the past were securitizations of american loans american mortgages american car leases american credit cards and in the there's like a handful of previous issuances where they've taken 80 % American loans and 20 % Canadian loans.

51:05And the second they do that, the risk shoots. And so, and it's based, but they did it because, you know, they wanted to test a few things. But before that, the most countries in the most borrower countries to be in a bond were two. Oh, wow. And you did 30. At Lennon, we did, yeah, it's 30 or 28. I have to double check, but it's basically the most countries. Why? Why? Because of Bitcoin. because the collateral is not bound by a geographical constraint. If I want to exercise my right to repossess a car in the US, it's very different than my right to repossess a car in Canada. It's very different than my right to repossess a car in Mexico.

51:46Bitcoin, our bond was the first time that in the eyes of the bondholder, the countries don't matter. That's cool. That to me is one of the most incredible things about this offering. beyond that like this was this is more related to let it specific right but if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of what it takes to a even be considered by one of these ratings agencies let alone get an investment rate rating um you need to have um well first of all you need to have a team that's willing to open the kimono and share things with the regulator or the ratings agency and you have to have your eyes dotted your t's crossed everything's going to go through an x-ray And so that willingness and having all the documentation that they're going to need and the ability to answer all their questions, the right data, the right tape.

52:35We have eight years of tape. They need to see at least one full business cycle, including a period of stress, meaning we're the only lender that qualifies for that. And so we believe that we had an opportunity to open up the market. and the way the bond market works is the longer you're in it and the more issuances you have the farther ahead you get and there's no real way to catch up other than time and so by starting ahead and being the first ones to ever do it our goal is to drive that market not from 200 which we did a 180 million dollar offering we believe and we estimate that in the in not too long five to ten years there's going to be a trillion dollars worth of bitcoin back loans out there.

53:20We need to know where you're going to get a trillion dollars. There's no balance sheet in the world that can cough up a trillion dollars. So what's the benefit to the company of issuing this bond? Oh, many. So for one, it's, it proves that we can securitize our debt beyond our bilateral partners. Is it basically like a mortgage-backed security? Yes, that's what it is. It's the equivalent of that in Bitcoin, right? If you look at how most Bitcoin-backed lending companies today are funded they are taking say a large loan from an institution from an institutional lender say they're taking you know 50 million dollar loan and they're doing like one million dollar two million dollars five hundred thousand and then they're just redistributing capital right what we have done is we've now taken our loans that we've originated and gone to the public markets and said hey public markets buy our buy our buy a part of our loan book right So that kind of reduces your reliance on the tethers of the world and people like that.

54:18On any bilaterals. Yeah. And the other thing is bond investors are incredibly risk adverse. So by virtue of us having a bond, the bond facility itself is bankruptcy remote from Lettend. So Lettend could get hit by a bus and light up on fire and every loan in that facility and every bond, every note holder is going to get paid to maturity because there is a a backup servicer there's like all of the pieces are in place so that the loan arriving to maturity does not depend on that and if anything happens to let it that's a benefit not just to the to the person buying the bond but for the borrower yeah right and the more of our book we can put in that the the other thing is if your loan is when you when your loan gets vended into the letter bond you get an email saying hey danny your loan's been vended into the letter bond when you get that email, you know your Bitcoins have Fidelity because Fidelity is the custodian for all of the Bitcoin collateralizing all the loans in the bond.

55:19So you will know with certainty where your collateral is. You can see the facility. It's public. I can give you the ticker. Anybody can see it. And so it's much more transparent. It's much more resilient. It's much more scalable. So is this just a win-win for customers, the business, everyone? Yes. And I've been trying to make this case in every opportunity that I've gotten. But I know it's a bit of a dense topic. It's a complex thing. I've had people come to me being like, hey, I saw you guys got into the institutional loans. Who did you give the bond to? And I'm like, no, no, it doesn't work that way.

55:59And so a lot of people don't necessarily have the... The TradFi people, like the guys that work in banking and the people that understand this, people were reaching out to us and saying, wow, I can't believe you guys did this. Like, how is this not bigger news? Because also it came out in the middle of the bear market in the middle of the February. So people were just looking at different things. But this is a massive news. in in the this is the first true in my opinion bitcoin credit instrument not preferred equity there is a maturity and there is a coupon and there is bankruptcy remoteness what is the coupon uh 684 on the on the senior tranche 999 on the junior and there's a small piece of lead and equity as well in the bond.

56:53So it's our first time. I expect these rates to get much better over time. But again, so again, the other place that this is a win is it will potentially drop people's rates over time. Over time. But more importantly, now you can see as a borrower, where like you can see that we have a 200 million dollar facility. You can see how much that facility costs. If we're showing you that facility costs 6.84 and 9.99 and we're not offering you a loan at five you should be asking questions yeah yeah you know what i'm trying to say like we are all about being transparent like we want to show you and tell you to the best we can where the money comes from what's the cost of the money where's the custody we believe our borrowers are smart enough to piece it together yeah right and if you're a person that doesn't really care about the math not mathing you're not a letting client necessarily right like if you're the kind of guy that's going to be cool with them borrowing a 10 and you somehow getting a loan at five good luck you know what i mean like i i totally it's um and so you did you did 200 million on the first one i imagine you want to do a few more of these yes are you close or can you not talk about where you at with it we so we we i don't want to get into the sort of timing or promising uh but it is something that um like the market was incredibly excited about it it was two times over subscribed on the senior three times in the junior so the market oh wow the market wants more um and we're growing um so it's definitely something we're looking at but i don't we don't really have like a timeline for the next one you can't be promising um it's you're gonna see another one i just don't you know i don't want to say oh tomorrow i don't like over promising and under delivering uh but you're gonna see more of these for sure very cool led to the good spot man yeah man i i'm very happy I mean, this is the most, I'm trying to find the right word, but it's like, I feel like this is the most zen I've ever been in a bear market.

58:51Like it is a bear market. Don't get me wrong. Like, you know, prices are down. But in terms of like how well everything is running on our side, like the solid foundation that we're on, like the bond, you know, the support of our investors, the support of like our clients. you know the book being as resilient as it has been during this downturn that's another thing um in previous bear markets a lot more people would have historically gotten impacted with the liquidation yeah right um because the product also hasn't you know yes has been doing it for years but like people not everybody on the book has been through a cycle of course yeah but now the more people like this isn't the first road people are learning about position size correct And so that makes me very, that encourages me quite a bit as we look at potentially the next bull run, because all those guys that kept those loans open are about to see their wealth hopefully double in the next one to two years.

59:51And listen, that may or may not lead to more loans. Historically, what we see is people say, oh my God, this loan works financially for me. You know, now you have more wealth and you think to yourself, well, should I sell some equity to pay back the loan? probably just keep it like i'll just keep it rolling or i'll invest in somewhere else but as the wealth effect kicks in um in on the good side of the loan experience where the collateral does rise um we want to be there we want to be there returning your excess bitcoin we want to be there helping you to get that incremental loan to fix your kitchen if you want like that's that's what we're here for it's awesome congratulations thank you that's very cool and i do want to talk to you about something totally different so last time we did a show in DC, wasn't it?

1:00:34We did a lot on Venezuela. You told your story. If anyone wants to listen to that, you should go back and listen to that show. We won't do the whole story of your family escaping the Maduro regime. I remember we were talking about Maduro and you wanting basically America to come in and help. And America came in and helped. Dreams come true, man. So tell me everything that's happened since that. When did you find out that it happened? I imagine the next morning. No, during the night. So it was, I can't remember why, but it was, it happened at like 3 a.m. on a Saturday. And I woke up, I can't remember why, because I was sleeping.

1:01:09And that night, that night I woke up, I think my phone was just going. Yeah, I bet, going crazy. And I usually keep it on silent and never wake up at night. But I woke up and I woke up and I didn't hear my phone. So I'm like, oh, maybe I just, I went to the bathroom. I came out, my phone's buzzing again. I pick up my phone and my group chat with my high school friends from Venezuela is blowing up with all these images of these apache helicopters and at this point there's no word about maduro there's just like a bunch of helicopters and bombs and explosions and caracas and everybody's like it was like what's happening what's happening um so the the chat continued to be lit on fire i was it was 4 a.m for me i was like out of it my kids were like daddy come back and so i basically you know went to help my daughter fall back asleep and i just kind of forgot until 8 a.m i woke up 8 a.m i looked at it again maduro's gone and they've extracted at maduro and it was like a little bit of my initial reaction was like a little bit of a of a shock right like i just i was in disbelief uh that they did it um that they did it so surgically like that not a single casualty on the u.s side it was just like i played out like a movie yeah like if you look at the footage like that thing looks like a movie and then came the sort of realization that maduro's gone so now what of course the sad part is venezuelans couldn't go out and celebrate in venezuela because they would have gotten shot by the regime that all you all they took was maduro yeah everyone else his henchmen are still there they're still trying to figure out what to do as well well and slowly so so they took out maduro okay so then the question became okay what next right well america wants to take the venezuelan oil no shit like you think we don't know right like of course they want to take the oil and then so did the chinese and so did the russians and so did the iranians then we never saw the oil nobody's complaining about not seeing the oil money anymore because we never saw it right and so yeah okay america at least they're gonna put hopefully some new infrastructure to extract it because these last guys were so incompetent they didn't even fix it just stopped yanking it out of the ground okay so we're now down to like 800 000 barrels a day america's doubled it in like three months wow we're not seeing any of it i mean at least to my knowledge the venezolanan people haven't really been on the receiving end of that money but at least it's producing twice the output that it used to and there is some investment happening now the the challenge uh previous before the earthquake okay because i think we can get into the earthquake in a second but what happened after maduro got taken away was the people that remained delcy and all of maduro's you know buddies and crew they understood very quickly that their only way to not have the same outcome as maduro was to play ball with america like if they play ball with america and they give america what they want maybe america won't care about a transition in government right and that was their play and i would argue that up until the earthquake that plan was working for them so the regime wouldn't actually change that much no it just said whatever it just did whatever america wanted it's like oh you want a safe zone for your executives to go into the oil extraction sites no problem oh you want us to um you know change the uh um um uh resource extraction law so that you guys can build faster no problem we'll we'll get that done for you so before the earthquake um had life changed much for the people in venezuela the expectation like the the illusion is there like day to day doesn't really change right like then and there like it's not like new goods come into the shelves and prices go down like two things happened um number one inflation uh stopped that the basement stopped falling off a cliff like it just reached a room temperature 100 year over year which is normal for us uh from the 500 to 300 it tamed so the the rate of the basement of the bolivar dropped significantly after the americans took maduro and the other thing is assets started getting repriced like there wasn't a lot of people buying and selling but you know i'll give you the example like i had some people some family members that were like looking to sell a warehouse like a some warehouse out in the middle of the country and before the maduro extraction they were saying you know i'll take anything you know i'll take 20 dollars like an arepa you know i just i'll let it go right and now when maduro got taken away they're like take off the listing take off the listing it's like well no but I have somebody interested $100 ,000 people went from like this is worthless to everyone in America is now going to want to buy my whatever asset I have it's essentially they just got hope back correct and that to me was the most important thing is to get back the hope that things can get better in the future yeah that was starting to create some frustration because yeah all this hope but you eventually you want things to turn into real progress.

1:06:19And that wasn't happening. Maria Corina Machal hasn't returned. She won the Nobel Peace Prize. And after that, she's kind of fallen out of favor or not fallen out of favor, but just like not in the media. Has she not returned because it's still too dangerous for her to return? I don't know the answer to that, but I think in my opinion is that it has to do with whatever the US wants. right now the US is calling the shots anything else is pretend so I think that when the US wants or when they believe and let's get into the earthquake because the earthquake changed the political landscape in Venezuela La Guaira, the area of Venezuela that was most impacted by this was Caracas's biggest suburb the capital in Venezuela the few times that a government has been overthrown it happens in Caracas because Caracas is where the presidential palace is Miraflores so historically previous revolutions you had the people take the streets they come down from the favelas or the hoods and they go to Miraflores and they pitchfork this guy out basically and they stay there until the military coos them and that's when Caracas lights on fire politicians listen and politicians get scared and so La Guaira in Caracas as a whole was a stronghold for Chavismo there was a lot of support because it was a very poor area the area that fell the white i was where their most fervent followers a lot of them lived they obviously their lives were nuked like destroyed and the regime did absolutely nothing it's like a month in the regime's done nothing and the people in la guaira got fed up of and not only nothing they when they did go down they started obstructing the locals from helping dig their own families out of the buildings and so people were losing it to with the maduro regime or with the delci regime so la guaira is fed up like venezuela at this point is fed up with delci it's fed up with chavismo it's fed up with any remnant of the Maduro legacy or Chavez legacy that's there.

1:08:40It needs change. Before the earthquake, there wasn't that much pressure or hostility. The earthquake racked that up by 10x. And last week, Jorge Rodriguez, which is Delcy Rodriguez's brother, who's the president of the National Assembly, came out you know unprompted to say we need to change the we need to basically do radical change we need to redo all of our electorate council we need to get new directors we need to get new machinery we need to get new processes we need to audit this whole thing and they're starting to lay the pipes for the eventual election and you think it would be an actual free and fair election yes I mean I don't know if those such things exist but like uh i think it would be as close to it as we probably would get in venezuela and my opinion one man's opinion yeah it's so lopsided that you it would take an immense amount of cheating fraud and deceit for us not to return to democracy so as horrendous as that earthquake was it might actually be sort of a turning point i think there's gonna be a before and after because it's it's almost like capitulation you know it's like a full capitulation of the regime itself like that that was their last sort of icing on the cake like you had a chance to help the people you said you would help you would help for 20 years you now had a tangible opportunity to make their lives better and not only did you not do that you made them you actually made it worse by participating yeah and so um that and also there was the the previous regime have built up an image that oh uh trump is a uh american uh uh you know uh whatever imperialists and all this stuff uh bukele oh cheat uh imperialist this and that and just talking crap about everybody that wasn't affiliated with them politically who sent the most rescue people Do you know?

1:10:47No, no idea. The US and El Salvador. And so what people saw in La Guayra was like the people helping them were American, not the Venezuelan regime. The people digging up the people out of the collapsed buildings were Salvadorian, American, Mexican, anywhere but Venezuelan. And so all these guys that you were talking about being the boogeyman were the guys that showed up unprompted and started digging new people out when all these other dudes were sitting around saying. And so culturally, it's been a huge change. It's interesting to hear you so sort of optimistic because I remember speaking to you after I'd done the interview with Leo Lopez.

1:11:32Yes. And I think I was making the point that he sounds really sort of positive and enthusiastic and like there could be change. and you were slightly more skeptical. Because Leo's a politician, he has to be. Correct, but if you remember, and I said this to Peter, look back at the episode I recorded with Peter in 2019 with Ale Machao, myself, and I can't remember the last person. He asked us at the end of the show, how do you think this resolves? And I said, the only way this resolves is through military intervention. I believed that eight years ago. I believed that seven years ago. And that's how it actually eventually played out.

1:12:08and I'm not saying I have a crystal ball. I just know the power dynamics in the country. And so that's how it played out. Now that the head of the snake has been chopped off, to me, I'm now optimistic because there is now a bigger gun that went down and said, you cannot hit your wife. You know what I'm saying? You cannot hit your children. That's not good. We won't allow that. And we didn't have that. There was no... I was so shocked when it happened because, and again, it's one of those things like there's decades where nothing happened and then there's weeks where decades happened. Like when was the last time the U.S.

1:12:45has struck anyone in LATAM? I don't know. but within a few months we now have latam you know iran like again i'm not saying it's all good but it was something that was unlikely and statistically i think the odds were very low if you had asked anybody yeah and now that it happened i'm like this is the piece that was missing so if you do get free and fair elections you get a new government in charge like it's still a massive rebuilding process right it's been destroyed correct um it's been destroyed there's massive culture like there's also like infrastructure is collapsed like the the infrastructure in la huaida is destroyed that la huaida has our biggest airport our biggest port like it's you know it's it's a it's an important part of the country that has to get rebuilt um but that said rebuilding is a lot more exciting than waiting for the end absolutely and so when you think about rebuilding you can start dreaming you can start looking up you can start saying it will get better.

1:13:49Previously, we were just trying to find the bottom. When are we going to hit bottom? And I think we've hit it. The earthquake is the bottom. And from here, hopefully, we can rebuild. From here, we can rebuild. I think no one deserves it more than the people of Venezuela. I've been through a lot. I'm excited. I don't want to get ahead of myself. But I am optimistic. That's awesome. When are you buying the holiday home in Venezuela? i already i mean i have assets that i thought were worth zero uh among them a place in margarita and uh now they're not zero right like now i don't think they're zero now i think i might actually be able to go back one day um and would you go would you go back and live there or do you go back spend some of your time there you know the thing is for me um there's so much still has to change like for example as much as i would love to um i haven't been there in a long time And I want to know, for example, if I was a single guy and I wasn't married with two kids, I would tell you, yeah, Danny, I'll go because it's not on to me anymore.

1:14:51I'll figure it out. But I want to see how are the kids that I would potentially be sending my, how are the schools I would be potentially sending my kids to? Are they good? The power still runs out every so often. You still get these rolling blackouts every so often. And so it's not like every problem is fixed. but I think over time we will get there eventually I would like to you know spend more time there potentially even move back like you know I'm always a dreamer man and like I never you know I dreamt about one day being a part of the Bitcoin industry and and you know being on these shows and going to these conferences like that was a dream to me that I I thought it was a long shot right like where I'm come from like I'm I'm an immigrant I've worked hard my whole life but like nothing's guaranteed and at the beginning i was like in the past i was like i've always been a dreamer and like you know this one now i'm here right now i'm talking to you now we have leden now we do one in three bitcoin back loans globally like i'm now at a point where dreams come true like you can make your dreams come true you can will things into existing and so i'm not stopping myself short to say if i ever get a chance to play a role in rebuilding the country economically or politically I would be open to it I don't know if that's going to happen The future president of Venezuela I let Leo But I'm happy man I want to be part of the team that brings joy back And yeah, it'll be great Awesome, I mean things are going good for you man Yeah man, I'm happy That's awesome, thank you so much for doing this Mal We've got a fun night ahead of us now Yeah, let's go Pubkey Let's go, I want to see HODL More beers, let's do it Thank you Mal Thank you.