The 500M BNB Treasury Company, with David Namdar, CEO of BNB Network Company

[on-hold music] Welcome to another episode of 51 Insights. I'm Marc.

Today, I sat down with David Nadar, crypto OG, co-founder of Galaxy, and today CEO of BNB Network Company, one of the biggest BNB treasury companies.

We talked about the early days of digital assets, the current cycle, treasury companies, the BNB network, and what's yet to come for digital assets.

What I'm personally fascinated about is how those very early crypto OGs think about what's happening today and how they position themselves in the future.

If you wanna find this out, you don't wanna miss this conversation. It was eye-opening. Enjoy. Welcome to another episode of 51 Insights. Today with David Nadar, CEO of BNB Network Company.

David, welcome to the show. Thank you, Marc. I'm super happy to be here. Yeah, and it's a, a pleasure to have you here, David.

Can you just talk a little bit about when did you start, what brought you into crypto, and how did your journey look like in the last twelve years? Well, sure.

So, uh, I guess what I credit really to opening my eyes to the crypto world was I started my career in Hong Kong, working at a bank there at UBS, and I was covering all the Asian markets, but really also trading a, a number of global markets.

And then I had moved back to New York in two thousand and ten, and I started working for one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, Millennium. And while I was there, I was still focused on covering global markets.

And I'd heard about Bitcoin, and I actually remember one of the first interactions I had with it was I'd sent a message around to an investor group, uh, an email that said, you know, "The world's fastest-growing currency isn't a currency at all.

Bitcoin, grown from one dollar to thirty dollars, has fallen back to three dollars." And this was in twenty eleven. And so I sent a message around telling people, "You know, I don't know about this. It looks interesting.

I think we should try to dive into it a bit more as an investor group, uh, maybe try to l- learn how to earn some free ones online."

And so fortunately, it opened my eyes to it, and I started to go to some of the earliest Bitcoin meetups in two thousand twelve in New York, um, got to know a lot of the earliest entrepreneurs in the space.

And, uh, and then I left Millennium, uh, to start my first company in the space called SolidX Partners in twenty fourteen. And the idea was I was a finance guy.

I was coming from the, the hedge fund world, and I was trying to connect the crypto with the capital markets. And so I tried to do a Bitcoin ETF.

Uh, it was second in the world after the Winklevoss twins, who founded Gemini, uh, and, uh, also tried to create the derivative side using total return swaps.

Um, and even then, at the time, Arthur Hayes, who founded BitMEX, was a friend of mine from Hong Kong, and he had reached out to me for help raising his seed round, uh, back in twenty thirteen.

And, um, you know, and he, uh, succeeded at helping to build the derivative side, uh, over at BitMEX. And so after that, I had-- a couple years later, I joined Mike Novogratz i-in his family office,

and it was kind of the bigger version, or we started to build the bigger version of my first company, SolidX.

That became known as Galaxy Digital and then brought the opportunity for us to, uh, build, uh, kind of the biggest hedge fund and, uh, biggest crypto investment bank at the time and then to take it public.

And so we did that in Canada in twenty seventeen. Uh, that's now a seven, eight billion dollar public company. And then in the last couple years, I'd started a crypto fund called Coral Capital.

Um, I had taken another company public in Canada. I've been investing in advising more companies and projects than I can count on-- count on the space and just helping, you know, as you know, uh, a lot of friends,

helping them get deeper and deeper in the space, invest, get jobs, anything I could do. So you've seen the breadth and depth of crypto unlike almost anyone else in this space.

If you compare crypto today to what it was ten years ago, what's so different and what is still the same? Sure. So what I love about crypto, and I, I come up with this phrase a number of years back, that it's really

the greatest non-zero-sum game the world's ever seen, right? Where everybody's coming at this, that trying to grow the pie and grow new pies. We're trying to reinvent, you know, whatever background people came from.

If they came from investment banking, if they came from the venture capital world, if they came from marketing, if they came from real estate, whatever they-- wherever they came from, they're now looking and thinking about how can this be decentralized?

Should this be decentralized, right?

And so I really like that it, it causes-- I've seen a lot of people who were retired, and they, they got out of retirement because they were so excited about the idea of all this information flow that happens in, in crypto.

I also love that in some ways, it's one of the most, like, meritocratic games the world's ever seen because in a couple months of focused work, you can become an expert on any new blockchain.

And so I think it's a lot of the ambition and ideas that people had or ambitious ideas that people had from early on, now we're seeing some of them or a lot of them start to be implemented.

And I think what, what I l- still love about the crypto space, uh, there still is an aspect of, like, hopefulness and dreaming and kind of enacting the vision that, you know, I, I think exists more than in pretty much any other space in the world or any other area of tech or finance.

Yeah, and i-if you've been in crypto for a while, you've heard talks about that vision many, many times. I remember two thousand eighteen, nineteen, uh, people already talked about tokenization and stablecoins.

What do you think makes this cycle different than what we've seen four or five years ago or, or even ten years ago? Yeah.

Well, it's, it's actually what, what keeps happening is, you know, in, in one cycle, we see the spurts and starts of certain things like tokenization of real-world assets- And then, you know, the hype kind of overshoots what actually is able to implement at the time, and you need the right mix of investment, venture, early stage, late stage.

You need the right regulatory environment, you know, and, and at different times, certain markets lead the way, right?

Like what's really been driving the past, like this cycle for the past year or so, the regulatory environment in the US has become much more favorable.

And so that's allowed-- it's brought a lot of entrepreneurship back to the US and, and the US capital markets, and then it's caused a lot of other markets who had been, like even some of the markets that in the past were very open to crypto and then it kind of shut down for a while, like Korea, for example, and even China, that now are racing to kind of improve their own regulatory framework so they don't miss the boat.

You know, and so it's always been a joke every year or two, um, or multiple times a year, China's gonna ban Bitcoin. What does that actually mean?

I think, um, might have been Matt Roszak or another friend of mine who'd said, "Every time China bans Bitcoin, you should buy it."

So I think after, right now, we have more history of these things than ever through the different cycles.

And so now going back to today, the other thing, and this is what's gotten me very excited and active, as you know, is just the situation now with digital asset treasuries.

And so again, this is an idea from the last cycle. Michael Saylor has been at this. It was just the five-year anniversary of when he first put Bitcoin on his balance sheet.

What he's been able to achieve in the last five years has been unprecedented for almost, I think, any company in the world, right?

To be able to accumulate seventy, eighty billion dollars of an asset, especially one as special as Bitcoin, on his corporate balance sheet.

And so now he's been also planting the kind of groundwork for others to follow in his footsteps.

And he'd been, like, running the Bitcoin for corporates and explaining both the merits of Bitcoin and also the kind of feasible ways of, you know, incorporating it. Yeah.

And so now we've seen a number of people like David Bailey at Nakamoto, UTXO Management, go and seed some of these other ones.

Also, my partners at 10X Capital too, are some of the best in the world at seeding other international Bitcoin treasuries and other opportunities because they realize just how global the environment is, right?

The US capital markets are leading the way, but now it's kind of like we're, we're turning on or finally linking the crypto markets with the plumbing of the capital markets.

And in any market around the world, you have an opportunity now to all of a sudden have hundreds of millions and then billions flow in from the traditional financial system into crypto.

And that's actually a perfect segue to the big topic we wanna talk about today. That's crypto treasury companies, and you introduced it perfectly with Saylor's MicroStrategy that started five years ago.

Let's take a step back and unpack that a little bit. What did Michael Saylor do five years ago, and how did that MicroStrategy thing work? Sure.

So, you know, he'd been running, uh, he's a very fascinating, has, has a fascinating career arc because he's essentially been running his software company from the internet one point o days, and it's, I, I think it's the only company he's ever been a part of, or the one he's been known for his entire life.

And so the company was struggling. I think they were valued at maybe under a billion market cap, and they had four hundred or five hundred million of cash on their balance sheet.

And so he was, as the largest shareholder, and he saw the, uh, kind of merits of Bitcoin.

And actually, I think one of the inside stories that I'd heard before was through Block.one when they went and bought the domain voice.com from him for thirty million dollars, that that's actually the key thing that opened Saylor's eyes to the Bitcoin market because he's like, "All right.

If these guys are able to pay me thirty million for the domain, there must be something to this." And that kind of first, that was one of the sparks that opened his eyes to Bitcoin.

And so then what he did was he took the cash on his balance sheet, got shareholder approval to put all that into Bitcoin, and the market loved it and traded at a premium.

And so then he started creating this idea of a flywheel where he could sell more equity or sell debt in order to buy more Bitcoin.

And so he started that process, and from doing it, you know, like I said, he's now kind of what he's been able to accomplish in five years, he's been able to accumulate over three percent of the Bitcoin supply, right?

And that, uh, current price is, is, uh, seventy billion dollars.

And his narrative five years ago was that, uh, Bitcoin is a deflationary asset, and it's a hedge against the dollar, and it's probably a good idea for most companies to buy Bitcoin for their treasuries.

And if you buy our stock, you don't only buy Bitcoin, you also buy a leveraged bet on Bitcoin. Why, why do you think it took five years for people to realize that and catch on? Well, I don't think it took five years.

I mean, I think it was always trading at, you know, or generally, I think for most of it, the last five years, it's traded at a premium. Only for brief periods it's traded, you know, the, the NAV has compressed.

Um, so plenty of people saw it. Some saw it earlier than others, the opportunity here.

And it's also just that, that he's been right, that owning, you know, I think all of the kind of merits of Bitcoin, why, you know, people like myself and others and everyone who's been in the space a long time, what first attracted us, us to it was the idea that, you know, it has a finite supply.

It has a lot of incredible properties that make it superior to gold, superior to fiat currency.

And so the idea of then holding it on corporate balance sheet and actually, as you said, to also kind of lead the way for others to hold it on their balance sheets.

You know, or even earlier today, I was mentioning to somebody that, like, it sets a precedent that companies around the world, instead of just being tied to the dollar system, and, and that historically, a lot of companies around the world have made a point to hold onto US dollars, hold onto US Treasuries, um, you know, to be earning very small rates of interest on them, but it's been a way to kind of protect their kind of value from their own, like, heavily inflating currencies.

Well, it turns out that Bitcoin is even a better asset to hold, right, and protects them more and has protected them more- Versus inflation than any, than the dollar or any other fiat currency.

Now, in the last, uh, I would say year, we've saw a plethora of treasury companies entering the market across all chains, Ethereum, then BNB Chain, Solana. Why do you think they started this now?

Well, I think it's the right time and opportunity that after the model's been kind of validated, right, over the last five years by Saylor, and then a couple of more recent ones that have succeeded, MetaPlanet in Japan, um, which really, like, I think they caught this narrative change, and people saw it.

It went from having, you know, one or two billion market cap to five to ten billion, right?

And it showed just how quickly when you have a, a team that's really experienced and able to execute in the right way and get the flywheel going, just how quickly that kind of inflection can happen, and the capital can flow in.

So now in the last three months, what's been achieved in the Ethereum ecosystem and with the number of Ethereum Treasuries has been amazing too.

That, that really, the-- they've woken the market up to realize that there are other important assets in the crypto space, um, a handful of them really, that also make sense to own for the long term.

And so to have the ability as a corporation to kind of accumulate as much of them as possible in a digital asset treasury is really attractive today.

And so I think Joe Lubin with, uh, Sharp Blink had really helped kick that off and catalyze it, and then Tom Lee came in with BMNR, Bitmine, and really, like, provided even more rocket fuel because of how much, uh, he's been able to get presence on TV and everything and amplify the story.

But now we're seeing a lot of other people that have, that are heavily qualified and really have deep expertise within the Ethereum ecosystem, like Maiia Vijenovic, like

Andrew Keys, you know, others who've been around it for a long time, that now are leading some of the other treasuries.

With the BNB space, you know, I think this is one of the ones that's, uh, that's very special to me, and one of the reasons why I decided to get involved and take the CEO role here is that I think that BNB is the most overlooked kind of blue-chip crypto asset in the entire space.

That the amount of times I see people mention a list, and they talk about Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, or Bitcoin, XRP, Ethereum, and they kind of just completely overlook BNB when BNB is tied to Binance, which is by far the largest company, the largest exchange in the entire space.

I came up with this metaphor recently that imagine if in the US we didn't have access to Apple, Google, Facebook, now Meta.

Imagine if the largest social network, the largest tech company, the-- and something like NVIDIA, was entirely outside of the US market and only existed in Asia, in Europe, or in the Middle East, right?

It would be unheard of because that company would be getting exposure to the US capital markets and giving US investors and Western investors a way to access it.

So that's kind of how I feel about what's been happening with BNB, is that BNB is tied to what is the largest company in the entire crypto space by a scale of five to ten times, right?

Investors in the US are very familiar with Coinbase, but-- And investors are familiar with Binance as an exchange.

But most users in the US haven't found ways to access Binance, and most don't really understand just how much growth there is to BNB and the entire BNB Chain ecosystem.

And can you explain a little bit, how does that value accrue to the BNB chain when it's tied to Binance, the company? Sure.

So in the past, there was a direct revenue burn, so the revenue of Binance was used to kind of buy back and burn and reduce the supply of BNB token.

Now that link has been kind of shifted, so now as BNB has evolved and kind of grown up, and now it has the ties to Binance, but also has a really entire thriving DeFi and, like, Web3 ecosystem that it fuels.

It's-- Now there's kind of two burn mechanisms to it, um, that are tied to the activity of, like, all the activity that happens on BNB chain.

And in a way, you know, the activity of Binance still does drive value to it because all of the users of Binance, almost all, I think I've seen numbers as high as ninety percent, right?

But let's just say even if the majority of them, the majority of Binance's two hundred and ninety million users utilize BNB as a token to pay for reduced gas fees.

And so what that does is it creates a mechanism where it's actually the most heavily used crypto asset off-chain because all of that's happening on Binance.

But that activity still drives value to helping to burn, uh, and helping to increase the value of BNB over time. And i-if you compare BNB to other big chains, uh, like Bitcoin is said to be the digital gold.

Ethereum is said to be the productive settlement layer with yield. Where does BNB fit in, into that puzzle? Is it big in stablecoins? Is it big in tokenization? Or, or where does that road for BNB lead to?

So this is where, like, I think one of the best phrases I've come up with on this or seen is that, all right, if Bitcoin is this digital gold, right? And people see it in different ways.

Ethereum has kinda become this digital oil, right? And the heaviest or the number one use case, especially at Wall-- being pitched to Wall Street, is around stablecoins.

Well, BNB then is kind of this digital infrastructure equity of the entire Web3 universe, right? It actually has more activity in stablecoins than Ethereum does.

Except, again, most of that is happening outside of the US and outside of kind of what we see now, you know, with Circle and all the, between Circle and Coinbase.

You know, we see a lot of the activity, um, uh, with, um, what do you call it? Uh, since, since the IPO, we see a lot of the stablecoin activity in the US, but we don't see a lot of it what's happening outside.

And so, you know, I think that's a key part of it.

But then also it's kind of the, the number one chain or w- I think will be the number one chain in- More and more in the future for AI, for robotics, for a lot of these other like kind of very, very expansive use cases.

And we're th- we're talking things like that we're gonna see transactions eventually in the trillions and trillions. And so BNB has a much lower cost profile than Ethereum and Solana even.

And so I think that's an area where, you know, as the demand for these transaction scales, I think BNB is gonna be the best position to scale with it.

And David, you've been in this space for a while, and you saw many Layer 1 chains come and go. And how do you see the future of Layer 1s evolve?

Do- is that a, a multi-chain world, or is this a winner-takes-it-all market? How do you see that? I think it's gonna be a, a winners take all. So meaning, you know, I don't think...

And this has always been, you know, a- as we saw in prior cycles, this kind of proliferation where we saw a never-ending stream of new L1s, and then, you know, there's a lot of fight over mind share and fight over developer mind share and financial mind share.

And so, you know, I think there, there are gonna be a couple of winners, right?

Like even right now, if I had to, I, like looking at the top hundred crypto assets, I think there have been times where I've owned a hundred to two hundred different assets.

At this point, I'm at ten or below and getting-- and reducing that.

Um, you know, I think there-- One of the ways I like to think about this is sometimes I ask people, "All right, if you have a gun to your head, what are the one or two assets that you'd hold for the next five years?"

Well, almost everybody, when I ask people that question, almost everyone I ask says Bitcoin and includes that. I get a lot of other answers. A lot of people say Ethereum, Solana, um, a couple of smaller ones.

And the other thing is, actually, let me-- Going back earlier this year when I asked people that, very few people said Ethereum, and people were overlooking that. And it turns out, you know, people were wrong.

And so Ethereum's been up, you know, uh, over a hundred percent since the beginning of the year.

And I think BNB is now positioned in the same way, that I think the Ethereum story is playing out, and I think they'll continue to grow from here.

But I think the, like what gets me excited about BNB is I think it's the most overlooked story.

And actually, I even have my own conviction, and it continues to grow as I get deeper and deeper, to the point where I have very high conviction that BNB is gonna outperform Bitcoin and outperform, you know, almost anything else over the next five-year period.

And why would an investor invest in your treasury vehicle versus buying BNB directly on an exchange? Sure. Another great question, and this is where I really am trying to make sure.

Look, like I've been an investor in a handful of treasury companies, and I approach this like-- In the whole space, I'm always trying to help people get exposure to the space, do it in a smart and sensible way.

What ends up happening a lot of the times with these treasury companies is there's an announcement that gets made.

The stock of like a very tiny small-cap company jumps up five to twenty times, and investors rush in and immediately are down fifty to eighty percent from where they buy, right?

So I really have been trying to caution people from buying into the hype and announcements, right? You need to kind of wait, give it a couple of days. See how the-- you know, learn more about the company, the strategy.

See how they're executing long about-- learn about the long-term vision and, you know, the underlying asset, and make sure the underlying asset is something you'd wanna hold. And if all that stuff is in play,

then the treasury companies can be a very special investment because the difference of holding a, an ETF and holding a treasury company is, even though you're paying a premium today, if you hold an ETF and the price goes up or down over a couple year period, you still end up with the same amount of underlying asset per share.

With a treasury company, if they succeed at executing on the strategy and selling at a premium and getting the flywheel going and selling kind of the volatility and also accumulating more through staking and other revenue or revenue-generating activities, then you can end up with significantly more of the underlying asset per share than what you started with.

And so that's really the beauty of this treasury strategy, is I look at it like you're investing into a team who you're kind of giving the mandate to accumulate as much of the underlying asset as they can. Mm-hmm.

And, and can you talk a little bit more about that strategy? How do you create yield and deploy that BNB beyond just holding it?

No, and that's where I, I'd say, like what-- I mean, historically, there have been a lot of opportunities within the BNB chain ecosystem to earn yield and kind of participate in different aspects within the ecosystem.

And I think that's where, you know, we haven't fully put out kind of a detailed plan of all the ways that we're gonna be participating, but it's something that, you know, I'm, like I said, I'm getting more excited about the opportunity here as I go along because I think, you know, a- as I learn about all the different things and I-- and try to be like really plugged into everything that's going on, it gets me excited about the future of BNB chain and where things are headed.

And so I think we're gonna find, uh, we're gonna put out a lot of announcements in the future about different ways and different things that we're getting involved with.

Um, and I think there's, there's also gonna be-- My expectation is similar to what's happened with Ethereum over the last couple of months and what now we're seeing with a couple of big Solana dApps that are in progress and being formed.

I think there's gonna be a number of other BNB-focused dApps that emerge all over the world, um, and we're gonna see a lot of capital and a lot of kind of attention driven to the whole BNB world.

So one of the reasons why those treasury companies work is because they trade at a NAV premium. So that's a, a premium investors get that buy the stock instead of the underlying asset.

And I think Arthur Hayes said this a couple of months ago when we saw all those Ethereum treasuries, uh, coming out, that those NAV premiums will ultimately decline.

How do you see that unfold, and, and what does that mean for treasury companies in general? Sure. So, and, and look, like I said, I've known Arthur for a long time.

I think he's spot on, that we are gonna see a lot of the premiums decline, but we're also gonna see some of them persist for a lot longer than people think.

People have been betting against MicroStrategy and trying to short sell it from the beginning, from as soon as they put this strategy on.

Well, at the time when they started, like I said, they were a one billion dollar company with four or five hundred million of Bitcoin, and today they're a seventy, eighty billion...

Sorry, they're a hundred- over a hundred billion dollar company with seventy to eighty billion in Bitcoin. So the premium is b- is thirty billion today, and the underlying asset is seventy billion.

So they've managed to succeed accumulating a lot, and the premium's persisted and gotten much bigger than people could have imagined.

What I think will happen is, if we look across the entire, uh, DAT space today, I think outside of MicroStrategy, there's probably about thirty to fifty billion of assets accumulated, and there's somewhere between, you know, ten to twenty-five billion of premium baked into that.

And so what I'd say is, I could see in the future, I expect a lot more capital c- to continue to flow into the treasury space.

Really, I- my current expectations is somewhere between one hundred and two hundred billion over the next year.

And as that happens, I think we'll see the premium sit somewhere between twenty-five, fifty, and a hundred billion on top of that. And so during that process, there'll be some.

It's possible MicroStrategy's premium can come in entirely.

But that ten, twenty, thirty billion of premium that they have will probably go to some of these other companies that are more capable or, uh, to actually accumulate, uh, the underlying asset.

A lot of those, or basically all treasury companies started in a bull cycle. MicroStrategy started five years ago. That was the almost beginning of this bull cycle.

The rest of the treasury companies started one or two years ago. How do you see this play out when the cycle suddenly turns and we see a declining markets? Sure.

So this is where, like, I think, uh, having been around the space and been through a number of different cycles, you know, I'm definitely, like, battle tested and hardened.

You know, always prepared and always thinking ahead to, "All right, what can go wrong here, and how do you, how do you manage this and navigate, you know, the inevitable, like, downturn in the markets and everything?"

A couple months ago when I was at, uh, the Bitcoin Vegas conference, one of the key takeaways I had from listening to Michael Saylor speak, because everybody was poking holes at him and saying, "All right, so what do you do if your stock is trading down and Bitcoin is down and you trade at a discount?"

Well, he very calmly answered and said, "We'll just issue some preferred equity and buy back the common.

And anybody who's willing to sell common for below what the Bitcoin is worth, below our holdings, right, they're, they're missing out.

And everybody else who maintains the position and holds onto it and all the pref investors are, are benefiting from that and earning extra Bitcoin per share."

And so I think that kind of instilled in me really, like, what I think the key thing is for successful treasury companies is the ability to tap into capital markets and access capital regardless of the market environment.

So part of the bet when I'm evaluating treasury companies myself, and when I'm thinking about running one, is thinking of ways to access capital no matter what's going on in the broader market.

Um, and so that's where, like I said, with my, my partners at 10X Capital, with my relationships experience in the hedge fund and banking world, with our partners at EZ Labs, tied to CZ and his family office.

I think another thing that gives me a lot of pleasure and, like, excitement in building this company today is every interaction I have with my partners, they're focused on the long-term vision.

Every time when you see a little bit of volatility in the markets, CZ's been one of the people out there saying, "Don't get shaken out by volatility. HODL. BDL." Right?

Focused on building and building for the medium and long term. And you know what? Market's close to all-time highs, right? We're ten percent off the highs. He's been right more often than not. Mm-hmm.

And so to me, it's really like, I, I like to think ahead and think ahead through the next cycle and how and what this can look like.

And to me, I think, you know, we're at the start of something very special and gonna be able to make, uh, make this into a very special company over time. All right. Let's move to the last section.

Let's look ahead of David. If you look at the monetary policy now, the regulatory environment in the US, everything that's happening in the market, all those treasuries launching, how do you see that cycle unfold? Yeah.

So like I mentioned before, like, I think really, like, the number I'm currently working on, and, uh, and I'll adjust as, as I get some market feedback, is I think one hundred billion to two hundred billion is coming into the crypto market through these digital asset treasuries.

And I actually think it's gonna skip going directly to exchanges like it's happened in the past.

So hopefully, what that means is it's a little bit more of a kind of mature crypto cycle, meaning less capital goes to buy up all these meme coins and a lot of nonsense, and more of the capital goes to accumulating kind of the better and the more important crypto assets.

Um, that's what I'm hoping for. Now, we'll always see and we always get surprised by kind of pockets of exuberance in the crypto space because of just how fast the capital and value and attention moves.

The other thing I'd say is right now, the US has really taken a leadership position and is attracting a lot of the capital, both from around the world and through the US capital markets into the crypto ecosystem.

I'm expecting some really big moves from some of the other markets. There, there have been times over the last ten, fifteen years now where China, Korea, Japan, Singapore, have led the way for the entire crypto market.

Briefly, the Philippines and Southeast Asia. I think, um, and I expect, I- I'd like to see there be some kinda progress in Europe, you know, and, uh, more favorable towards pulling some crypto there.

There was a period where Switzerland was the most important, uh, country in the crypto space because of attracting all the foundations and environment there and being welcoming and open to crypto.

So that's something I'd say I'm eagerly looking forward to where-- which jurisdiction around the world is gonna succeed at being the next one to kind of drive innovation and attract a lot of capital and mind share in the crypto space.

Do you have any bets on that? I'd say somewhere in Asia. I'm hoping to get out to Asia in the next couple weeks just so I can really be tapped into the pulse out there.

I'm kind of, uh- I don't have a good read yet, but I'm excited to see whether it's kind of Japan, Korea, China, who's gonna lead the way in this, in the next crypto cycle here.

And is there something you're worried about, any risks that you're looking at? Um, another good question. Uh, I think, you know, I'm always looking for kind of exogenous events, right?

Like a couple years ago when we were blindsided by what happened at FTX and how that really rocked the entire crypto ecosystem.

You know, I think today any, like, large exchange hack, any hack or, you know, breach at a large custodian, and also I'm always kind of looking and, like, going back to what I was saying about protecting investors from buying into too much hype.

I'm trying to, like, hopefully put together- People in the crypto space tend to be kind of self-policing and trying to point out and root out bad actors. Um,

you know, and so I think hopefully people are able to point out, like, the next bad actors in the space before anyone causes too big of problems and kind of slows down the momentum overall. All right.

Uh, David, last question. Digital assets are still a small blurb in the whole universe of traditional finance.

If you talk to traditional investors, what do you think they misunderstand about digital assets, and how do you explain it to them?

Yeah, I think they, they misunderstand just how, one, like, they take for granted what value is and where it comes from and why the financial system has worked the way it has for the last 10, 20, 50 years.

And so what I really love about the crypto space and kind of the people that are driving it is researching.

Now, because of the internet, they're able to go and look back at kind of 10, 20 years ago, 50, 100 years ago, look at the origins of every industry and say, "Wait, why does the value accrue to this area?

Why does the value accrue to these companies?" And, you know, just because they're entrenched or have a regulatory moat, you know, why shouldn't it be this way?

And so I really like that kind of idealistic nature of a lot of people in the crypto space. They're saying and kind of dreaming up this vision of like, "Hey, why couldn't the markets work this way?"

Or, "Why couldn't the value accrue to these people that are kind of creating the value?"

And I think, you know, the blockchains and incentive, incentive mechanisms of different crypto assets really kind of enable more of those, like, visions of the future.

And so I think a lot of prior generations and people that, like, haven't opened their eyes to the crypto world are still missing out on that and missing out onto, like, the tremendous value creation ahead of us.

What a wonderful ending word, uh, David. Before we end the show, we do a quick lightning round. Those are very short questions with short answers. I'll start with the first one.

Uh, the first cryptocurrency you've ever bought. Bitcoin. Your hardest bear market lesson. Hodl. If you had to bet, in 2230, which asset has the bigger market cap, Bitcoin, Ethereum, or BNB?

Bitcoin, BNB, then Ethereum. One overrated chain. XRP. One underrated chain. BNB. And that's a, a good one, personal one. Favorite sports activity when you're not trading or building.

For a period of time, it was skydiving. Who's more fun at dinners, crypto OGs or Wall Street guys? Crypto OGs, no question. One word for the future of digital asset. Higher. [chuckles] All right. That's it.

Thank you, David Namdar, for coming on the show. It was a pleasure having you. Where can people learn more about you and BNB Network Company? Um, they can follow me on Twitter/X at, uh, @namdar and also at bnbnetworkco.

Great. Thanks for coming, David, and all the best. Awesome. Thank you, Marc.