# Why Anthony Scaramucci Is Playing the Crypto Long Game | The Important Part

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** SoFi
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocp-OVd2_es
- **Дата:** 15.04.2026
- **Длительность:** 45:29
- **Просмотры:** 7,175
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/45892

## Описание

Crypto has had a volatile start to 2026. After reaching an all-time high above $120,000 in late 2025, Bitcoin has pulled back significantly and is now trading in the mid-$60,000 range — a drawdown of roughly 40–50% — amid macro uncertainty and shifting institutional sentiment. 

But Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, isn’t backing down.

In this episode, Scaramucci explains why he became an early believer in crypto, what drew him to the asset class before it went mainstream, and why short-term volatility hasn’t changed his long-term view. He shares how he thinks about crypto as an emerging technology — and why periods like this are part of the cycle.

Scaramucci also discusses the role of regulation in shaping crypto’s future, and how it could influence broader adoption within modern finance.

About SoFi®: A finance company that could help you get ahead. Get Your Money Right® with SoFi.

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## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

I would say if 100 people do 100 hours with the research, 90 to 95 of those people will end up buying Bitcoin. We made a strategic decision to go in big. This monumental decision that you're talking about. So these in my neighborhood are Italian singles and I'm always carrying a lot of them, but I think you could say it's probably the best performing asset in the last 15 years since its inception. It went from a penny But in volatile fashion. Hi there, I'm Liz Thomas, head of investment strategy at SoFi and this is the important part. There's been a ton of volatility in crypto lately if you've been watching. Bitcoin is down about 40% from its highs and sentiment has shifted quite a bit. If you're an investor, you're probably asking yourself is this just another dip or is something breaking? If you're Anthony Scaramucci, you are saying this isn't the kind of drawdown that's a warning sign. It's the price of admission. So we're going to talk about that today. Anthony is founder and managing partner at SkyBridge Capital, a global investment management firm focusing on alternative investments including crypto. He's also one of Wall Street's most vocal advocates for Bitcoin and digital assets. So happy to have you here. — flattering introduction. Thank you. — Good. We like to start everybody out on the right foot. — good. Also, I have to say to everybody listening, nothing in this episode should be treated as a recommendation from SoFi and is not investment advice. And make sure that's out there. Okay, so let's get the big stuff out of the way first. Bitcoin's down. The last I checked it was early this morning, it was somewhere in the 70,000 range. So that means down 43% from its highs in October, which is better than it was at some point earlier this year. Bitcoin's down 43% from its highs as of today. You're still bullish. I don't think that's a secret, right? So we're going to talk about why. First tell me though what started this dip and what kind of put fuel behind it? — Well, I mean I think I want to go to what started the rise to 126 if that's okay cuz it sort of peaked at 126 down 43 now, but it actually got down almost 50%. It was at its low for at least this cycle. It was down about 49%. There's this regulatory component. So now the expectation are that two different pieces of legislation are going to pass. One is the Genius Act and around stablecoins and one is the Clarity Act, which is around market structure. And so the thought was in 2025 we'd get both of those pieces of legislation passed and so Bitcoin zoomed up to 126,000. In October that was the peak. — But you know, as everything happens in our businesses, I'm this is my 38th year of investing and I've been through 10 bear markets. People at the top get over leveraged, they get very ebullient, they get very talky optimistically at the top. Chatty at the top. And so what ended up happening was the legislation seemed less likely to happen. Uh-huh. — And then you may remember on October 10th the president was talking about rare earth minerals in China. It could have been anything for that matter, but it sort of pulled the pin on the situation and then we had a cascading effect where the where the you know, Bitcoin specifically other coins did as well, but Bitcoin specifically traded down. So it's important to lay out that backdrop. And so if you're sitting there as a Bitcoiner, I think another thing that happened the ETFs came into place. BlackRock now has probably one of the largest ETFs in the world, their Bitcoin ETF known as IBIT. You saw a lot of buying into that ETF. It was from I don't know whether it were the individuals, some institutions, some pension funds, etc. And then concomitant to that you saw whale selling. And so you literally had people that were holding Bitcoin from 10, 12 dollars, 100 dollars. They made a decision that north of 100,000 that seemed like a good time to sell. Maybe they had that in their heads from years ago. If it gets to 100, I'm going to take some money off the table. But all that notwithstanding, I think we're in the typical four-year cycle for Bitcoin. And so what typically happens is just to give people a quick refresher, Bitcoin launches in 2009. If you read the Nakamoto white paper, you're basically going to have supply put into the marketplace. It's going to be fairly consistent supply and then every four or so years as it gets to a certain hashing moment, you'll have a having of the supply. And so the supply having happens every so four years or so. About two years ago

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

we went into a having, Bitcoin having where we went from 900 coins per day to about 450 coins. And so what that does is it shrinks up the supply and it changes the dynamics for the miners, the people that are mining Bitcoin. And so what you've had over the last three, four cycles, these four-year cycles, you've had a period of rising in the beginning of the cycle and then you have anywhere from a 30 to 50% correction as you get to the middle of the cycle, which is more or less where we are. And then if I'm right about this, the cycle will start to regain traction towards the beginning of the fourth quarter of this year. So you'll start to see probably movement and activity, appreciation by October of this year. And so that's very consistent with how a traditional Bitcoiner would think about it. I saw you on a flight. We were on the same flight to Miami, I think. — Mhm. And it had we had just gotten through that crypto winter. — Right. And I remember — iConnections conference. I think it was here. — we said hello and I said how are you doing? You said I made it. I made it through this one. — Yes, somehow you know, — but I made it with my hair intact. I was actually very happy about it. I thought most of my buddies were losing their hair during this period of time, but I haven't sold any, you know, and I've been buying it regularly. And I think what you have to do with Bitcoin, and I say this to people, you have to study Bitcoin and you have to do the research on Bitcoin. And people that do say the requisite 100 hours of research, I would say if 100 people do 100 hours with the research, 90 to 95 of those people will end up buying Bitcoin. I'm not saying everybody, but I believe that people who really understand it look at it and say, "Okay, that is a hardened asset. It has the technical properties that we've always looked for in money. Got to think about it for what it actually really is. And this is this hardened global fully transparent, fully distributed, decentralized spreadsheet. And so the tokens are the pieces of property, the digital property on the spreadsheet. They're immutable. They can't really be changed. There's 21 million of them. There'll never be any more of them. Some think maybe one or two million of them were destroyed just from the lack of storing them properly in the beginning of Bitcoin. So you have a very small supply. And I think you're going to have lots of global demand over time. Will it be the universal exchange? Will it reach what Michael Saylor talks about, the Bitcoin standard where it will be our global monetary system? I'm not in that camp. God bless him for being in that camp. I see it more as a digital store of value. digital gold. And people my age don't believe that because when you had the currency debasement fears going on in 2025, gold shot up. You had a K going on. Gold was going up and Bitcoin was going down, which tells you that the people above the age of 60 that have the money, Liz, they are still thinking about gold in the old-fashioned traditional way that we think about gold. But I would submit to you that people that are my children's ages in the low 30s will 10 years from now be in their low 40s. And as they get into senior positions in asset management firms, they'll see Bitcoin differently than their moms or dads did and they'll see Bitcoin as a digital store of value, easier to move around than gold, a lot more transferability, but sort of the same properties and sort of the scarcity of it. Mhm. And I think it reaches the market capitalization of gold. Now gold is at a quite a run, but it's also had quite a setback recently. Yeah. — And I think we lost 15 Is now a good time to tell you that I was one of those people buying gold, but I'm not 60 or over. I at the time was in my late 30s, early 40s talking about gold and it went well for me for a while. — Yeah. Gold outperformed the S& P over — for three years. So it went well for a while, but I think and I want to talk about this, but back to this particular drawdown. A couple other theses that I heard about it. It was accelerated by a huge leverage unwind. Mhm. That's one. And the other thesis, much like the one that you're talking about, these four-year cycles that Bitcoin tends to go through, that it was actually a little early for that to be happening, but people knew that might be coming. So in anticipation of said four-year cycle, they just started to sell. Okay, so that's two. Let's those are the two that I heard most often because I think those started to come up because people were having a hard time explaining it because the correlations broke down, right? We wanted to able to say, "Okay, this is just risk off. It's completely correlated with the Nasdaq. " And that

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

wasn't really holding exactly as we thought it would. Or it's completely inversely correlated to gold. Or it's inversely correlated to the dollar. And then the dollar was going down and Bitcoin was going down. So, I think people ran out of ways to explain the drawdown. Yeah. And then the thesis was, "Okay, it must be some kind of leverage unwind. Or it must just be that sentiment is shifting ahead of this four-year cycle. " — more. Okay. Okay, this is the one where I was talking about. The third one was whale selling. Yeah. So, you had monumental volume hit the Bitcoin marketplace in 2025. Now, a lot of that volume, frankly, was absorbed by the ETFs. So, ETFs generally have had lots of net inflows over the last roughly 2 years. But, I would say to you that you had those two things that you mentioned, plus some whale selling. Yeah. And then you had uncertainty around the regulatory environment. And you know, people go on the air, they come on your podcast, or we may see people on CNBC describing it in different ways, an inflation hedge, store value, etc. I never describe it like that. Okay. I say this is an early technology still. It's 15 years old. It's been very hard for people to understand, and it's had the headwind of a lack of regulation or regulatory guidance to allow for its full acceptability. And so, uh that headwind has prevented Bitcoin from really going in the direction that it could go in. Having said all of that, it's probably been one of the best performing assets uh in the last I mean, I think you could make the statement I'd have to Google it or chat GPT it, but I think you could say it's probably the best performing asset in the last 15 years since its inception. It went from a penny But, — But, in volatile fashion. Very volatile. But, most technology is. Most technology starts out volatile. Well, and but I think that's important, the way you're framing it. Frame it as a technology, not as an asset in the portfolio that's going to hedge against something all the time. Not yet. I think it could be those things. — Okay, so what is — yet those things. What it is it's — It's loosely correlated to the Nasdaq. It used to be directly It's more loosely correlated to the Nasdaq. As we continue to scale, okay, I think it will fit the parameters that you see in gold. And I just remind people that gold seemed like a very stable asset until recently. Now, gold itself has had a lot of volatility. You look at gold trading patterns in the last 12 months, there's been way more volatility in gold than in years prior. And so, we have to accept that there's going to be volatility, but I do think over time this will become an adopted asset class. And I would just recommend to people to learn about Bitcoin. Uh I am always cautious with people. You don't have to make a big investment. But, if somebody like me is right, Yeah. a 1 or 2% position in Bitcoin, let's say I'm wrong. And I've been humbled by life. markets. And I certainly could be wrong. If it trades to zero, you haven't impaired your capital base substantially if you only have a 1 to 2% position. But, if I'm right, and it's a $1. 5 trillion asset, and I don't know where gold is right at this moment. I'm assuming it's about 30 trillion uh for the sake of this argument. I did the math this morning. About 30 30. 9, I think. Okay, so if you have a $1. 5 $1. 4 trillion asset that could potentially reach parity with gold over a 10-year period of time, and you put 1 or 2% exposure in it, and people like me are right, or Michael Saylor, or Michael Novogratz is right, I think you'll be well served. Cathie Wood, you know, — long So, we're talking about Bitcoin I just want to make sure everybody heard that clearly. So, Bitcoin right now is somewhere between 1. 4 and 1. 5 trillion dollar market cap. Right. That's with the 19 million coins outstanding. — million outstanding. And there could be up to 21. Right. So, does that include it going up to 21? — Yeah. I'm saying the overall market cap, 21 million coins into the marketplace, — Yep. I think could trade close to $30 trillion. That would be roughly Over how long? I would say it probably take 10 to 15 years. Okay. But, the question is that a good investment for you to go 20x on something uh in 10 to 15 years? For somebody like me, it is. And so, I own a lot of Bitcoin. And I've recommended it to people. And uh I made a decision and it cost me, by the way, I made a decision to pivot a port of our portfolio into Bitcoin way back in October of 2020. And so, um I think we've been generally right directionally. And I think we'll continue to be right. But, we got to get the regulation right. One of the themes of this season of the podcast is high-stakes decisions. So, I want to talk about when you made the pivot. So, you've been a traditional finance guy Yeah. for decades. Yep. And decided to make the pivot. You've already referenced this a little bit. SkyBridge went into crypto, but not

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

entirely, right? It was About 30% of the assets. — 30%. But, that's a big chunk. — Big number. Yep. So, and you what you committed to it. Yep. And committed, I imagine, like personal life mentality to it, everything. What convinced you at that point that, "You know what? I need to put a third-ish of my company behind this? " Well, I got it wrong. So, let's talk about where I was introduced to Hal Finney, who was the first recipient, a computer programmer, back in 2011. I was at a presentation. He was at the Ames Research Center. He was making a presentation on Bitcoin. I did not understand it. And I think I put out a tweet, "Bitcoin is ridiculous. Don't understand it. Caveat emptor. " There's a tweet for everything. And then I got introduced to it again. I was at our SALT conference in Las Vegas. And the Winklevosses came, and they were describing Bitcoin to me backstage in the green room, and my eyes were glazing over, and I was like, "Okay, I don't understand it. I'm not going to invest in it. " And so, I infamously was in the White House for — Yeah, for infamously for 11 days. Yeah, you got my ass fired after 11 days. But, I thought it was 10. No, don't me out of it. — it's that last day, okay? That was a big day for me. That's when I got fired. Yeah, that's true. But, but anyway, I'm in the White House, and this happened on a Wednesday, Liz. You know, I know because I was only there for one Wednesday. So, I know it was a Wednesday, okay? And these two guys came in from the Fed, and we were sitting in the Roosevelt Room with them. And they were talking about a white paper related to potentially digitizing the US dollar. And I was looking at them, and my eyes were not glazed over. So, I missed it in 2011, 12. 14. It's now 2017. I looked at these two guys. I said, "Wait a minute. You're going to digitize the US dollar? " It didn't happen, but the idea was to digitize the US dollar on the blockchain. Uh-huh. And they said, "Yeah, on the blockchain. " Like Bitcoin? Yeah, like Bitcoin. And I said, "Okay, I've got to get myself up to speed. " And so, I got fired. I went back to SkyBridge. And then I told turned to my staff. I said, "There is something here. We got to do more homework on it. " And so, I put down a checklist. I said, "Okay, so 100 million wallets. I can store nine figures of it safely. I certainly don't want to put it on a USB. Uh-huh. And if I had a good understanding about the regulation going forward. " So, let me just talk quickly. It got to 85 million wallets. Fidelity was allowing you to store it at Fidelity Digital. Uh and they had the backup systems, and they had insurance from Lloyd's of London. And then the third piece, the IRS deemed Bitcoin intangible property. And so, I didn't learn many things in law school. But, one of the things I learned is that when you have property rights in a country like the UK or the United States, they're sacrosanct. They go all the way back to the Magna Carta. And generally, your property rights in the country are protected. And so, when those three things happened, we made a strategic decision to go in big. This monumental decision that you're talking about. And it cost me. I got fired by some of the wirehouses. Mhm. Some of my clients fired me. Cuz they didn't want to be invested in it, or they just didn't believe in what you were doing? — in it. They didn't understand it. — Okay. And then, you know, listen, when somebody like Jamie Dimon is calling it a decentralized pet rock, and Warren Buffett is calling it uh rat poison squared, and other people are calling it internet magic money, and you're making a you know, nine-figure investment in it, Yeah. you know, it's a very controversial — Contrarian, to say the least. — Contrarian. It's a very controversial thing. But, what gave me the confidence was the scaling. is having invested in things like Amazon or Apple computer, or Nvidia, is that this was scaling, and it was scaling organically at an exponential rate. And as it scaled due to the scarcity of the actual asset, that just meant there was going to be a supply-demand imbalance. There would be more demand than supply over long periods of time. Now, certainly from October to today, there was a cascade of selling. Sure. But, if you zoom out, I bought it at 15, 16. It's at 69. Do I think it's getting to 150? Yes. Can I tell you the exact time? I cannot. It's very, very hard to predict. But, I think if you're talking about people making big bets in their life, or making a big decision, I would say the homework has got to come first. The conviction you can get fortified with a lot of conviction if you've got the homework right. Uh my buddy Michael Saylor, who you've seen on CNBC, and you know, when he wrote the forward for my book, The Little Book of Bitcoin, he hated Bitcoin. Didn't like it. Didn't understand it. Did the homework. He said, "Oh my god, this could become the operating layer for money transactions in the future. And of course, he was competing MicroStrategy was competing against a company called Microsoft. Didn't do too well. But now he has this

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

opportunity to buy in his mind the software for the operating layer of the future of money transactions. That's why he's been so bold and so passionate about owning 3 or 4% of this network. And so for us, we owned it in a smaller way, but we're equally committed. What do you tell an investor who's never been in it before and is maybe thinking about getting in now? Is this a dip they should buy? What do you tell them about expectations they should set for their own time horizon? — such a great question. So the first thing I would tell them is you got to do the homework. Don't buy it indiscriminately without having some awareness of what I'm describing to you, this sort of decentralized hardened spreadsheet, uh which has the technical properties associated with things that we attribute to store value. You have to get conviction on that first. If you get the conviction on that, buy a small amount of it. You don't have to buy a super amount of it. I could be wrong, and I want people to know that. The third thing I would say is you have to have at least a 4-5 year period of time with Bitcoin. Don't trade Bitcoin. Uh I don't know anybody that has bought any high in Bitcoin uh that has not made money. So said differently, if you bought the high from 5 years ago, you're probably in the money right now. If you bought the high in October at 126, you're not in the money, but I would imagine uh between 2025 on your way to 2030, you'll be back in the money. Every rolling 5 years people have done very well in Bitcoin. And so you have to have a minimum of a 5-year horizon. Okay. What would you tell people to do their homework with? Is there a Besides your book, of course. Well, I think my book is a breezy book. So I don't actually recommend I mean I recommend my book for people that want a breezy cursory understanding of Bitcoin. Uh the the book that I would recommend, it's a little bit more academic and slightly denser, but if you read it and you get it, you're going to buy Bitcoin, uh is Saifedean Ammous. It's called The Bitcoin Standard. It's probably the best-selling book on Bitcoin. It's a little bit deeper than my book. It's a little bit more academic. The other book is Vijay Boyapati. Uh it's The Bullish Case for Bitcoin. Those two books are the two books that I recommend to people. But I like those books. They're more academic. If you can get through those two books, and you have a base understanding of what those books are saying, as I said earlier in this podcast, 95% of the people that read those two books generally want to get off of zero. Uh I think that's a big message for investors. I want you off zero. You don't have to have 100% of your assets in it, but if you have 1 or 2% of your assets in it, I think you'll be well served in terms of what's going to happen. Just imagine if you could get into Nvidia, or Microsoft. — There's a lot of people wishing that they got into — Yeah, well, exactly. But you know, but hindsight is not 20/20, Liz. Hindsight is 20/10. You can see way better with hindsight. — Yeah. We haven't talked about tokenization, but you may have saw that the Nasdaq signed a deal with Kraken, which is a crypto exchange, where they're going to start tokenizing stocks and putting them on 24-hour trading on the Kraken rail system. Mhm. Uh and so what we know, when I started in the business, if you were buying and selling stocks, it was called T+5. It literally took 5 days to get You bought the XYZ stock, it took 5 days for that stock to land in your account. Yeah, you owned it at that price, but it you didn't see it in your account for 5 days. Now it's T+1. Yep. But we know that over the blockchain, we could do this in an hour. you know, eventually minutes. And so then the question is, is that better technology? I believe it is. And so it's just like the telecom industry. We had a long-distance phones in 40 years ago. If I was in Italy, it was sort of like $5 a minute to talk to my parents. Now it's no dollars a minute. You can log into any internet cafe in Rome, and you could do a George Jetson FaceTime, right? You don't have right? And so things are changing. And I'm just saying to people, when you have technology that's better than the old technology, the first move is resistance. When you have a horse and a carriage, and somebody sees the horseless carriage drive by, they say, "Oh, well, that's a fad. " Well, I mean, that's what makes a market, right? And if we're thinking about Bitcoin as a market a technology that is traded on the market, then that's what you need. You have to have bulls and bears. There's bulls and bears, but there's also a point where something becomes generally accepted. You know, the Well, and I think that the institutional adoption helped that along the way. No question. — There and that was not a thing. I mean, back when it was sort of a retail phenomenon, right? There was no institutional adoption. There were no J. P. Morgans in this game. There were no Morgan Stanleys in this game. SoFi is a bank. We had to get out

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of the game when we got a banking license, and then regulations changed enough that we got back in December of last year. So and then we were the first bank to actually offer crypto to our members. You can buy, sell, and hold on our platform. The institutional adoption, I think, changed it quite a bit. What happened? Well, you know, this is really one of the weirder stories in financial economic history, because typically what happens is it goes from an idea to a venture capitalist, and then the venture capitalist goes to the investment bank, and the investment bank takes it public. But lots of institutions have already gotten into the idea in a private way before there's a public offering, where the public is able to experience it. This happened in the completely opposite. People got a hold of this idea. The real libertarians looked at it and said, "Okay, this could be new money. This will get us off the track of the inflation-based fiat currencies. " And so you had this whole sort of cult-like movement of private individuals. Ins- Institutions were not anywhere near it. And then it developed, and as it grew, and here's the other irony, as it got bigger, it became easier for institutions to want to come into it, you know. When Bitcoin's total market cap was $100 million, it was actually too small. But now at 1. 4 trillion, it becomes more meaningful. And so what happened here is belief. And I think we have to recognize how we think about money and value. Uh there's a baseball card, Liz. It was made in 1952. It's got Mickey Mantle's face on it. It's three-color process cardboard. It sold for 2 cents in 1952. The card right now in mint condition is worth $50 million. Uh and so we have value. We've ascribed this value to it. Uh The Mona Lisa, uh if we're really just being philosophical about it, it's on a walnut board. A brilliant man by the name of Leonardo da Vinci painted a portrait. He used uh you know, oil-based acrylic paints. I mean, what is it worth? It's on a walnut board with paint. You step back from it, it's probably worth 1, 2, 3 billion dollars today. So we have a belief in what certain things are worth. I would submit to you that gold probably has 5% of its valuation is from its manufacturing in jewelry. The other 95% is our assumption that this is a good store of value. And so we have this belief that starts to happen. And I think what happened for institutional investors, I think the switch flipped. I think people realized, "Okay, wait a minute. There is value here because of the expansion of the network. " If you went to the MIT professor Robert Metcalfe, uh he gave a very famous speech in the mid-'80s about telecommunications and the network. And he's basically saying the network effect, the network itself has huge value. One of his more famous quotes was, "Well, one fax machine has no value, but a million fax machines is like an information superhighway. " And so now you have hundreds of millions of Bitcoin wallet system able to make transactions with each other. And I think there was a step. I don't know the exact moment, but there was a step where people said, "Whoa, that's expanding. I've got to get off of zero. " So how do we think about Bitcoin, or just crypto in general, versus inflation? How do we think about it versus the dollar? If you're an investor, you know, I'm always trying to think about the what's the relationship between what I'm putting my money in and other variables that are going on. So I mean, this is the whole thesis of the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper. What he basically says in the white paper is that we get our money from a trusted third party. I mean, basically I'll summarize the white paper. Generally, human beings don't like and trust each other. But they've got to transact with each other. Generally, they don't. And so what do they do? They get their money, which is a form of technology. You and I are not bartering with each other. We have goods and services, and we have these denominations in our pocket or our bank account that allow us They're digits. They're technology that allow us to exchange goods and services with each other without bartering. Ultimately, that's what money is. So if you think about money, it's never really been something super uh expensive. Okay, I brought props, cuz I knew you were going to talk to me about this. Okay, so let me take out these props, and let me illustrate, okay? So these in my neighborhood are Italian singles, yeah, and I'm always carrying a lot of them. I may get invited to Rao's one night, and I need them, okay? But, let's take a look at these, okay? This is a If we're in philosophy class, this is a piece of linen and cotton. If you Google this

### Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00) [30:00]

it's 75% cotton, 25% linen. It's got a counterfeit strip, Uncle Ben's picture, but in it's generally worthless. It's just a slip of cloth. But, if I give this to the maître d, or valet, he's a happy camper because he can take this, and he can trade it for something that he wants. Right. So, when you get down to it, this is a piece of technology that we trust and we have accepted. So, what Na- Nakamoto basically said is, "Okay, listen, I'm going to create that for you. It's going to be immutable. impossible to add to it. And I'm going to create this rail system known as a blockchain, so that when I transfer value from me to you, it's 100% sanctified by the nodes on the blockchain, and now you don't need the third party, Liz. The government gave me this, but now it's just between you and me. It is a permissionless transaction between two parties. Mhm. And when you think about that, that's an ingenious thing, because if we can take the middleman out of our transactions, we're going to save a lot of money. Uh approximately $4 trillion is spent on third-party verification. That would include credit cards, wire fees, auditing, bank transfers. It would include, uh let's say you go to buy your house, we got to get all this verification. You're going to give me the wiring instructions for your bank account. I'm going to wire it from my bank account before you give me the deed. But, over the blockchain, we can do this thing peer-to-peer without all those third parties. If you come to the Hunt & Fish Club as an example, which thank God you have been to, my restaurant, someday you're going to be able to play pay off of the currency, could be a stable coin or Bitcoin, on your wallet. Mhm. You'll make a wallet-to-wallet transfer to the restaurant. That saves 3 and 1/2% on the credit card. Yeah. Um and so this technology, people looked at it and said, "Okay, this is fascinating technology, and this could expand if we can get the network effect up and running, as Nakamoto pointed out 15, 16 years ago. If it starts to expand, then it's hardened, and then we don't have to worry about the inflation. So, when you bring up the inflation question, what do we know throughout history of fiat currency? We know that we inflate it. Yeah. We know that the US dollar, uh it was $35 an ounce before we took ourselves off the gold standard in August of 1971, and you tell me what it is today. Is it $4,800 an ounce? — $4,300 this week. — $4,300. So, we went from $35 to $4,300. But, over the course of decades. Okay, but that's still devaluation. Yeah. It's still devaluation. We printed a lot of money. Uh if you go to trueflation. com, the US dollar has lost 28% of its value since January of 2020. The COVID situation and the inundation of all that capital created a lot of inflation and an affordability crisis in the United States. But, let me give you the most concrete example I can give to the average person. I'm going to use my parents' house. My dad, who was a crane operator on Long Island, bought the house in 1962 for $16,000. Wow. — Okay. At $35 an ounce of gold, okay, he he bought the house for 457 oz of gold. Okay. Okay, now think about what I'm talking about. Now, if you go to Zillow, Yeah. the house is estimated at $780,000. Okay. Now, my mom and dad think they made a killing on the house. But, if priced in gold, Liz, it's about 250 to 260 oz of gold. Yeah. So, the house actually lost value in terms of oz of gold, which would make sense because it's a 60-year-old house. It has older technology in the house. We've hurt ourselves. We've been drunk driving with the currency. And so, when you look at something like Bitcoin, you're saying, "Okay, that could, as it scales, it's too volatile today for it to be an inflation hedge. I'm not arguing in that. Okay. But, as it scales, and as it becomes part of our ecosystem, if there's a billion or 2 billion wallets, then yes, as it as the volatility ebbs, this could really be treated like a hard asset that you can't inflate it away. There's no government. It's decentralized. I wonder how much that will change, too. There's a belief, and I think it's true, that this generation, the younger generation right now, hasn't really seen inflation. I mean, they've seen what happened since COVID, but they never saw 1970s, 1980s, that type of inflation. And there is a belief that the central bank just takes care of it, or that it just gets taken care of in some way, shape, or form. It'll never stay sustainably above 10% or something

### Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00) [35:00]

like that. So, if something happens where we have inflation that doesn't get taken care of, I would argue right now it hasn't really been taken care of. It's much better than it was, but it hasn't really been taken care of. Then maybe the mindset shifts with that generation, too, and says, "You know what? Inflation is a problem. " So, adopting crypto becomes an even more important piece of the puzzle. I don't know. That's a I think you know, you're making the case better than I could make the case, but here's something I really believe, and this came from Milton Friedman, uh the Nobel Prize-winning economist who's now deceased. He said, "Make no mistake, deficit spending is unfunded tax liability. Make no mistake. " And so, you will eventually pay for it. And if you don't want to tax the people, uh what our government is doing is they found a more pernicious, the more pernicious and more regressive form of taxation, which is inflation. And so, this really hurts the poor and the middle-income people because they can't catch up. And so, you know, there was a year, I think it was 2022, uh we could look it up, but I think there was 8% inflation in that one year during the COVID crisis. It hit its peak at 9. 1% in June of that year. Okay, so 9. 1%. So, think about it, if I'm a worker, I've no assets. Okay, I'm not a SoFi uh asset management client, but I'm just a worker, and I get paid by the hour. If you paid me $1,000, okay, I now have $910 worth of purchasing power. See, you're stealing people's time uh alongside of their money through this pernicious thing known as inflation. But, that's a way for the government to erase a portion of its debt. So, nominally we have the debt, but 8% of the debt got erased by the inflation. And so, all I'm saying to you is in a society that is taxing itself less than it's willing or wanting to spend, and in a society where you have 1 to 2 billion dollars a year of deficit spending, and it's not a problem right now. You've made that case. I agree with that case. But, will it be a problem when the federal government has a $60 trillion debt, uh and the GDP's 35 or 40 trillion dollars? Will it be a problem when the debt-to-GDP ratio goes to 200% or 250%? Now, if you're saying to me it's never going to get there, and hope to God it doesn't, but we what we have seen throughout economic history, when countries run that type of a debt profile, something bad happens. You know, Ray Dalio's been talking about this for the last three or four years. And so, when I look at Bitcoin, I cannot predict the future. I always tell my kids, you know, the bad words, the curse words are one thing, but ought and should are even worse. Like, you know, the world ought to be a certain way. We ought not to borrow 46 cents for every dollar that we're spending. You know, there's oughts and shoulds. I can only deal with the world the way it is, not the way I want it to be, or the way it ought to be. And so, I'm just telling people in an environment where you're looking at a trajectory where we could head to 60 to 70 trillion dollars of debt on the balance sheet of the United States in the next 15 years, do I think Bitcoin could provide a hedge to something like that? I believe it could, and that's why I own a piece of it. And we're at 39 trillion right now. We're at 39 trillion, and I think our debt-to-GDP ratio is about 122, 125. — got to what, 220? I think that I think somewhere in that range, 220% before it needed to do something, and then it had to manage its yield curve for a decade. What are you most excited about in crypto right now? What's coming that's exciting? — Well, I mean, first of all, to really understand the stablecoin evolution, to notion that there's a US dollar now riding on the layer-one rail system of crypto. So, what are layer ones? That would be Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche. You can attach a contract that gives you the right to one US dollar that it converts into one US dollar, and that can sit on your phone, and we can now do transactions with each other uh in stablecoins. I think that is a monumental technology breakthrough. That's going to eliminate a lot of It's going to unleash a tremendous amount of innovation because as I said earlier, if you've got $4 trillion of money going into transaction verification, even if we cut that in half, and you put that additional two trillion dollars into AI or pharmaceutical research, or you pick the innovation, fixing the roads, the bridges and tunnels. I mean, it's a major amount of cost savings and potential synergies that can arrive in the overall economy just by

### Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00) [40:00]

using that technology. So, I'm super excited about that. Okay. Second thing I'm excited about is the tokenization of stocks and bonds. That you will have a rail system where we'll be able to trade 24 hours. Uh everybody in the crypto community is used to now trading 24 hours. We have the technology to do that in the stock and bond community. And I think it's been proven having more availability to trade reduces volatility, right? You don't have the trader at 3:58 on a Friday saying, "Oh, I've got to shed this position. Yeah. — There's a war going on in the Middle East, or I've got to buy this position. " But there's then there's the potential for a dislocation, right? And I don't want to get too far down this road, but you've got the tokenized version of a stock, and then you've got the underlying. What happens when they dislocate? And to somebody like me, I mean, stressful enough that the market's open from 9:30 to 4:00. I like the break, right? — I want the pause. — Well, you'll get you know, trust me. I I liked it, too. And when I started getting into Bitcoin, I said, "What the hell is this? It's trading 24/7. " But you get used to it. And weirdly, you'll feel calmer about it because it's there there's always available access if you need to do something. But I I would say to you, that's going to be an early stage problem, and that's something that has to be worked out in this Clarity Act sort of legislation. So, you're the point that you're making is a valid one. And that is an early stage problem where there could be an arbitrage spread between the token and the underlying stock, and we have to figure that out. And there's a there's there is a way to do it, by the way, which is frankly just tokenizing everything. And I think that's eventually going to happen. And so, we'll just we'll just have to see. But as you know, when new technology comes on, people don't like using it until everybody ends up using it. Well, it's not trusted right away. I mean, we're — on to that BlackBerry for dear life, Liz. I just want you to know that. I was holding on. — phone. — Clenching. Yep. Well, thank you so much for being here. This was wonderful. Yeah, I think our listeners will love it. This is actually one of the first crypto episodes we've done in a very, very long time. — Okay. Well, if you get feedback, invite me back. We have more to discuss about this whole world. Cuz I think I I'd like people to at least get their curiosity piqued and get off of zero. Thank you very much. — Good to be here. Wow. Well, that was the first episode on crypto that we've done in a very long time, and I am so glad that Mooch was the one to do it. I think he taught us a lot about crypto and about Bitcoin in that episode. So, some things I want to point out that he was very adamant about, and I think this is important for every investor out there, whether you're not in crypto yet, thinking about getting into it, or you're in it, and maybe you haven't done this yet. First and foremost, do your homework. Do your research in order to gain conviction in it as an asset class. Secondly, he talked about just buying a small amount, just a little bit, so that all of your assets aren't tied to it. You don't have to put 30% in it like he did, but just a little bit, so that you're in it. Come off of zero. And then, the third thing that he talked about was making sure that you have a 4 to 5-year time horizon in holding it, because this is not an asset that he talks about as trading. This is something that goes through cycles, and when it experiences a ton of volatility, you want to make sure that you have your expectations set for a longer holding period. And then, another thing that kind of weaved its way through a lot of different points in the podcast is the opportunity and the potential for Bitcoin and crypto to scale. And as it scales and gets more institutional adoption, gets more adoption by investors, gets used for different things, whether it's being exchanged to buy goods and services, or however things grow over time, there will be more confidence behind it. Now, of course, he said he could be wrong about this thesis. He Everybody a lot of things. But as it scales, the game will change, and then we're also waiting for regulations to come online to figure that out more, too. So, thank you for listening to this. I hope that if you had questions about crypto, we've answered some of them. And if you have more, we will bring more episodes on crypto very soon. Thank you for listening to The Important Part. We look forward to bringing you the next episode in a couple weeks. For more from me, read my weekly column in SoFi's newsletter On the Money and on the SoFi website, or follow me on X at Liz Thomas Straus. Follow The Important Part wherever you get your podcasts. The Important Part is produced by SoFi in partnership with Sony Podcasts. Investments are not FDIC insured, are not bank guaranteed, and may lose value. Elizabeth Thomas is a registered representative of SoFi Securities LLC and an investment advisor representative of SoFi Wealth LLC. SoFi Invest is a trade name used by SoFi Wealth LLC and SoFi Securities LLC offering investment products and

### Segment 10 (45:00 - 45:00) [45:00]

services. Robo investing and advisory services are provided by SoFi Wealth LLC, an SEC registered investment advisor. Brokerage and self-directed investing products offered through SoFi Securities LLC, member FINRA SIPC. For disclosures on SoFi Invest platforms, visit sofi. com/legal. For a full listing of the fees associated with SoFi Invest, please view our fee schedule.