Hey everyone me kevin here back with another episode of the meet kevin show. Today we are going to interview the ceo of a new bitcoin, a mining etf, uh, new fund provider of ready funds, and i'm super excited to have wes here with me, they're about to pass 20 million dollars in assets under management, their of fund uh, ticker symbol, Riggs uh has returned uh what 99 percent in the last six months as as y'all, are investing in bitcoin miners and i'm super excited to understand, uh the mission and the prospects for the future, so welcome aboard wes. Thank you. So much for being here thanks, kevin nice to meet you and thanks for having me absolutely so tell me uh bitcoin mining.

What what got y'all into the idea of we're going to launch a fund we're going to start with bitcoin mining you've obviously got to be bullish on bitcoin to have your first fund product be a bitcoin mining, etf yeah. I i think we're somewhat unique to the founding team and and the operations team here is that you know our background is in sort of traditional financial markets, investment, banking asset management, uh. You know working for some reputable firms over the past me in particular, 17 years and and uh earlier this year and after that, after a certain uh stint in capital markets, i was uh ceo of a public listed cryptocurrency minor for a couple of years, so hands-on Operational and build experience, learning what sort of drives these operations in terms of like profitability and cash flow and all the struggles they go through, go through scaling operations so married. The two skill sets and and uh decided to try and marry a thematic asset class with sort of traditional financial markets through the launch of riggs on july 20th.

This year. Congratulations so july 20th r-i-g-z is the ticker symbol uh, and so you just launched it's. It's obviously been an incredible six months for you, because uh i mean look or even less than six months. It's been like four and a half months, because uh bitcoin was essentially cratering.

In the summer uh we had fears of inflation were going away. At the same time, we had all the china drama going on and and now the sudden uh bitcoins roaring again, so i mean what a perfect time to launch a fund. First of all, so, congratulations, but i want to know from from y'all what were you thinking in the summer, because there was a lot of fear going around about bitcoin the future of bitcoin. There was a lot of supply chain.

Fears tell me about those i mean you know: those affect minors, obviously yeah. Certainly the glutton semiconductor supplier. The constraints at the foundry level have impacted the ability to sort of source hardware, as the mining community competes against other sort of big industry, auto cell phones, whatever um. But you know we started this process to list rigs and get the approval of blessing in the sec in april.

Was our filing prospectus filing? Typically, it takes about 90 days. Ours took a little bit longer than that, given the fact that we were a crypto product. But you know we are a actively managed fund investing in crypto equities, crypto, cryptocurrency mining equities with a clean spin to them. He focused on operations under pin by renewable source of energy and also holding the semiconductor companies as well going down the value chain trying to hit the whole sort of supply chain stack.

But but it's an infrastructure play within this ecosystem. The miners are providing that essential service to the network, which is the validation of verification of trades and and despite the ebbs and flows in in cryptocurrency prices, the underlying sort of asset class that these individual. These corporations are exposed to. It's uh, you know, there's a real industrial operating business here.

You know they generate real cash flow if they buy right and they build uh efficient operations, leveraging industrial scale, economic cost power. There's a great business here. So, despite the despite the sell-off on the back of a few tweets from elon, you know we weren't all that sort of deterred in in the initiative to get this listed in trading and it's the first sort of thematic product of its kind and, as you mentioned, Like yeah, it's been a it's been a wild ride since we launched it's only been about 12 13 weeks now. I wish it was in six months because you know maybe we'd be at 50 60 70 million in aum right now, but um you know it's.

It's a great product with an active strategy and and leveraging that background we are sort of you know, using our capital markets, expertise and sort of boots on the ground. Understanding what makes these operations tick, what makes them profitable to identify the the mispricings in the marketplace that we think are pretty relevant prevalent now? How? How do you do that? Because i'm just looking at your fund holdings here uh and let me make sure i actually have the screen showing properly one second, oh yep, nope: let's do this! There we go. So how do you do that? How do you go through and value these companies? I mean you got marathon digital here, you've got hut, you've got bit farms, i mean these have just skyrocketed uh. Then, of course, you've got nvidia here at a 4.4 allocation phenomenal company.

It's just been crushing it you've got amd here. Uh taiwan semiconductors, i mean you've, got you've, got 18 holdings here and the biggest ones are obviously the miners, which makes sense but you're also getting the chip plays in here. But i mean 13 14 marathon hut. How do you value them? Are you looking at underlying bitcoin assets and then trying to to you know, determine a return on equity that these companies are producing or what are you looking for? Yeah? It's a it's been an interesting sector um, and even even with the bull running btc this year.

You're, starting to see sort of some of the like analyst community, come out with some some metrics that don't make a whole lot of sense right. That will like ev to install megawatt or, like you know, because at the end of the day it doesn't matter how many megawatts you're running it. You know the primary sort of impact or profitability for these mining operations are the efficiency, the hardware you're running. If it's a new generation, how much terra hash you're generating per unit of energy consumption, in addition to the power price, the power you're, paying with being your single biggest operating expense.

So we've tried to sort of impart real fundamental sort of valuation metrics and how? We look at allocating to stocks in terms of you know, revenue multiples, even multiples, earnings, multiples, knowing what we know about crypto, cryptocurrency mining operations and and that drives our allocations within the portfolio. Certain names, like you mentioned, marathon, heidi, etc, have grown to be bigger pieces. As of late or bigger allocations, as of late largely due to their the stellar nature of their performance um, you know we we did from inception from day one of trading we uh, we, you know, taught bit farms, honey marathon were our three top picks and, and They actually happened to be the best performing stocks in q3 2021, as well as year to day 2021. So we've been pretty good so far, and - and i think that sort of like our our methodology to allocations is - is very applicable to identifying these missed pricings.

Now, what do you think competition wise? I mean? Is it possible that if this is such a profitable business for these companies, uh that uh that we're gon na see a whole lot of competition come in? I mean, i think, hud 8 uh their their valuation, is somewhere around seven or eight times how much bitcoin they actually hold, because i've spoken with their ceo before and i know they love hodling they're, the the bitcoin they mine kind of like the micro sailor approach, But you look at micro, sailor, uh, michael saylor, at microstrategy and and they don't actually get any kind of boost to their company valuation beyond the bitcoin. They actually hold they're only valued at the bitcoin they hold, which i don't think you have microstrategy in here. I'll. Ask you but yeah uh for oh, so you don't: okay, so for hud, 8, you're, really paying for the technology of the mining, which opens up the door to potentially competition and maybe adding other companies in the future.

Can you tell me about that? Why no microstrategy, and why these companies, it's the verity, cleaner energy, crypto, mining and semiconductor etf and and with you know, sort of regulatory oversight that you've got to sort of adhere to being the sec managing a product. Managing a thematic etf, they're naming conventions that you have to have to sort of guide your investment principles. So we target about 80 percent of the funds asset being invested in direct cryptocurrency miners that that meet our definition of a minor which is based on sort of the revenue they earn in in terms of like percentage versus overall. In addition to about a 20 allocation to the semiconductor companies, but uh, you know what why we're investing in companies like honey mara? It's yes, it's it's partly because - and this is a new new evolution - certainly 2021.

The digital ass inventories that are growing on their balance sheets, heidi hudy from inception, always took the practice of inventorying all their btc. They sold some a little bit along the way, but you know and have been able to utilize that inventory to open up new forms of financing using it as collateral for debt facilities, but um. You know in 2021, everybody's been huddling that wasn't the case. In 2019, 2020 2018 people were selling btc production to invest in hardware, to expand, uh their operations and try and maintain their market share or increase their market share as a function over overall hash rates.

But you know we're owning groups like heidi for the balance sheet exposure. Of course, the digital asset inventory, but but mainly because of the sort of in place and uh on the com like future cash flows anticipated from mining, btc or or other leading altcoins. Do you have any concerns about uh uh? You know when the supply chain constraints go away, that that maybe that does unleash a lot new, a lot of new competition, any kind of inflection point there with the supply chain constraints. Or do you think this will just be great news for the miners that you have in your fund? It's been a phenomenal time to be a north american miner at scale running btc operations right or cryptocurrency.

Mining operations is because of you know. Obviously the crackdown in china that was announced in june and outright ban of cryptocurrency trading in september that was announced in china. Like this, you know, if you had scale there was a dramatic drop in network cash rates. So if you were running one percent of the network overnight with a matter of you know days, you were running, you know 1.5 1.6 percent of network capture.

It's you. You saw an immediate increase to your production, all and and an immediate impact. Your revenue, all things else, you know being equal in terms of crypto pricing and transaction fees, etc. So it's been a great time to be a north american miner in terms of semiconductor supply constraints.

Yes, it's obviously a concern. It's a good thing for groups like nvidia to be able to sort of like carte blanche, increase in pricing and in an opportunist market marketplace, but um the cryptocurrency miners themselves, like most of the manufacturers, are out there, locking in way for production slots. You know one two years ahead of what their current sort of production rate is, so for the for the immediate term, not a not a major concern, especially when you look at all the announcements by this emmys in terms of like capacity expansions and major investments in New way for production, so uh right, but it but one thing it does do trying to predict where network cash rates are going, which is certainly a major impact on profitability of these hardwares of these mining operations. If you've got one percent of the network now and you don't grow, you can naturally assume that a year from now you're going to have less than one percent, because people will continue to plug in hardware.

The sub cuts the supply constraints, the inability to increase sort of uh manufacturing slots or procurement of chips by the manufacturers creates a little bit more predictability. Around hash rate growth, new computer shipments, how how things are going to grow in the near term and medium terms? So we factor that all all into our models, and and and and really do our analysis in allocations on a 12-month forward basis, looking at announced hardware orders and where companies are going versus where they're at today, because to be frank, a year ago. Most of these companies were running fractions of what they're running now and what they're running now 12 months from now are gon na look like fractions of where they're at so uh. You know a lot of it's on the come and - and we do do take a very forward-looking approach to uh to our allocations now.

You've you've got obviously i mean a huge exposure here to crypto mining. You know semiconductors are going to be here, but crypto mining is there a risk that bitcoin goes away. Bitcoin goes to zero or, what's more likely, bitcoin going to zero or bitcoin going to a million. I i would sit in the in the latter camp for sure.

I mean: is it gon na be a million by the end of december? No, is it going to be a million by next summer, probably not um, i would say highly highly likely, not um. You know i'm sort of in the the plan b camp, the uh, you know, stock to flow model, we're sitting somewhere around 110 next year. Does it go away? No, i think it's too distributed. There's there's too much momentum in the sector, the institutional flows that we're seeing the adoption by major global fis with new products creating access to to uh for their clients to crypto products.

We saw that the etf futures products start trading a couple of weeks ago, approved by the sec like this is this is here to stay uh? It's it's really, it's not a question whether it's coming it's a question of how big it gets. If btc goes to, you know does approach a market where we're in a significant sell-off um. You know our bet is on the miners that are at the lowest end of the cost curve, because they're, the ones that are unplugging far far far longer. If, at all, when other higher cost miners are, are you know can't run profitably, can't generate positive margins in iran? So so you think the smaller miners are going to be able to be more versatile in in times of stress in bitcoin.

Is what you're saying not necessarily smaller miners? It comes down to like cost of creation of one of those those units of computing power at terra hash. So if you're running the best efficiency hardware at very, very low power costs with efficient operations and the ability to manage your fleets and and guarantee like good uptime in your hardware, you're going to stand the test of time and be operating a lot longer than the Sort of average retail miner that may be hosting their equipment or third-party party facilities at significantly higher rates or running old gen equipment, whatever whatever have you so our bets on the you know, the operators that are sitting at the lower end of the cost curve got It so what about uh, you know all the mining equipment that these miners uh purchase. Isn't it i mean there's gon na be a massive depreciation curve. For these i mean how long are these miners actually going to remain competitive before they have to replace their entire inventories, and it just seems like the cost of constantly cycling.

That inventory is, is potentially just going to exponentially increase in time here. Is that not a risk factor for the miners? Yes, it always has been, and i lived and breathed out as the former ceo of bit farms uh, you know you're, always looking at you know being prudent fiduciaries of capital of opm of other people's money as you're out there deploying you know, money capex into hardware And expansion facilities and making sure that you can generate reasonable returns and decent like shorter payback periods, so that you, you know you're not taking any sort of undue financial risk. Um am i concerned about the sort of shelf life of new generation mining equipment, not as much so as i was with some of the older stuff three years ago like, but but the shocking thing is even in s9, which is like released in the spring of 2016 over five five years ago, five and a half years ago now can still run quite profitably. You know you're you're talking about wow 80 yeah, 85, 90, joule, and so so like i don't want to get into technicalities, but using about 2.4 kilowatts or last 2.2 to 2.4 kilowatts of energy to generate a tear hash if you're paying 5 cents.

For that power. Your cost to generate a terror hash is around 10 cents and today you're getting paid 38 39 cents in revenue per terahash, so you've got 75 operating margins on an s9 much and the vast majority. Certainly in the public markets, most people wrote off and depreciated their s9s years ago. So it's all upside there's, no balance sheet amortization or depreciation charge.

It's all straight to the bottom line, all their mining margins revenue, less power, spend so uh shocking. To see that we're we're here, five and a half years later after the generational release of this hardware, but the new equipment will, i think, have a much longer shelf life in the hands of good operators, that that have good, consistent operating environments and can sort of Manage their uptime at the end of the day and take care of their equipment, because you know we're not going to see major major efficiency advancements from one gen within the next generation of hardware. Just given given chip chip restrictions, electronic computing restrictions, wow, that's incredible - i mean that's a perfect example: 2016 chip uh. Just to reiterate this, you said you're looking at about 38 cents in revenue per terra hash uh, this is going to likely cost you about five cents.

In energy and five cents in opex, leaving you with about that 75 margin, huh cost you about 10 cents in energy, 2.4, 2.2 to 2.4 kilowatts of power to generate one tara hash in a 24 hour period, if you're paying five cents at an industrial scale. For your power two point four times: five: twelve twelve and a half cents, so your margin is almost 75. gotcha. Okay, okay, okay got it so your gross margin, you're testing, my math after a long day.

So uh! Oh! No! It's look! If, if i don't get it, then then somebody watching is not gon na get it exactly. So this is interesting, so you really uh i mean that's, that's still a wonderful margin, but it's also. Your goal is getting that energy for five cents out here in california. For example, peak hours, i'm paying 40 cents a kilowatt hour, so so i would be losing uh 42 plus cents, uh uh per per terawatt or uh per tara hash, essentially trying to mine out here during peak hours in california - and this is this - why everybody's in Canada uh yeah, i i scaled the cryptocurrency mining operation at about four cents u.s per kilowatt hour in the province of in the province of quebec.

You know with with 70 megawatts of infrastructure, by the time i left and another 100, almost 100 under contracts, so yeah there were jurisdictions globally that people are chasing that have that five, four three and a half cent power a lot of a lot of like uh Miners chasing stranded energy, where you can get like your your power costs running gen sets off uh sort of uh nat flared net gas for like a penny, a penny and a half cents a kilowatt hour. So there's there's much better opportunities. I sit in toronto. My peak peak power rates are about 21 cents, so same situation.

I can't run s9s in my office here, but you know wow. I can run a long extension cord to my neighbor and maybe run a few few machines for free. Oh, my gosh, that's incredible! So jeez i uh, i notice here as well that uh so you you said you were uh an executive or you said you were the ceo of bit farms did i get that right, yeah, and so they are your third most popular allocation in this fund. You seem to like marathon and hut more than the place you used to work.

What's up with that is that just the market we started out with uh pretty much equal allocations to all three, but marathon and hud have been pretty pretty strong performers. Obviously um. You know in the public markets in in general. Certainly you know earlier this year and and still to this day, there's been a pretty big disconnect between some of the canadian based and dual listed uh valuations or canadian listed valuations relative to the u.s stocks.

I mean. There's still some some some cowboy-esque valuations in the u.s markets, driven by the number of like reddit or stock twits followers that don't make a whole lot of fundamental sense. But we are a pretty strong believer and you know the the rubber will hit the road in the terms of like financial disclosure as a public company. You've got reporting obligations and the numbers will will ultimately sort help, help sort out the sort of valuation and mispricings in our differences in the public markets.

So what and and we're hedged accordingly or taking our active bets that certain names are going to outperform others. So you're a big fan of the stock to flow model. Do you think that, on this note of uh regulation that regulation, whether it has to do with regulation of cryptocurrency stable coins potentially having to get uh banking licenses, is there a potential risk factor that a lot of liquidity ends up getting frozen or eliminated from the Crypto market thanks to regulation, whether that's of stable coins or of the industry as a whole, that that could lead to a substantial decline in crypto asset prices. It's certainly a risk that a systemic risk right uh, you know, there's there's, obviously been a lot of uh fairly negative press around the issue um.

I do think that there's enough positives, potentially on the near term horizon that could outweigh some of the potential risk to the downside, one being the the approval of a of a spot etf in the u.s. You know that that would certainly generate a ton of buying activity, you've seen the volumes and the brochures the valkyrie product um, but but you know again the wonderful thing about this mining business, which is so incredibly eloquent, given that this protocol is 12 years old is You've got this thing called difficulty coded into the protocol, so um, you know you're sort of think of it like a governor on a golf cart. You're targeting uh 2 000 16 blocks being created every 14 days. If it takes 15 days, the network self adjusts it ratchets down the difficulty to speed up the block creation time.

If it takes 13 days, it ratchets up the difficulty because they're being solved too quickly. Supply is increasing too quickly, so they ratchet up the difficulty of making it more difficult to find a blocks decreasing the sort of efficiency of your computing power, the productivity of your computing power. So, even if the market sells off the miners as a sort of low-cost lowest quartile producer running that efficient hardware at low-cost industrial scale, power will adopt will become a bigger component of the network. As some of the higher priced miners get get get sort of forced to unplug um, so it's all about you know it's that it's a wonderful dust! You know industrial business where you've got this real, valuable, high margining, but uh sort of scaled economic model, underpinned by digital asset inventories in the balance sheet, with all this leveraged torque to the underlying commodity, and that's why the sort of miners have been flying.

This year's anything anything with a a proxy or leverage to the the digital asset has has had one heck of a bid in the public markets and uh. It's been, it's been a good year. Yeah no kidding, i mean just the uh bito pro shares, bitcoin futures etf, the futures etf, not even a spot. Etf now has assets under management of almost 1.3 billion dollars and the thing's been out for like two weeks.

That's insane uh. They, i think, there's a a substantial um, i'd like to say: uh luck there of being first to market with that futures etf it'll be interesting to see who gets the actual etf uh rather than a futures etf, which i agree with you, i think, is going To be a huge catalyst, looking at the at crypto long term and bitcoin long term, is it possible that, in your opinion, that a lot of the blockchain technology becomes sort of monopolized - and we finally find a blockchain that is is - is the best for transactions right Because right now, we've got hundreds of these different uh chains and and different ideas and iterations of chains. Is it possible this all collapses into just one really good blockchain and that almost becomes like a utility that we just use every part of finance? It's oh yeah. Everything's blockchain now um, i think both will live and breathe harmoniously, because i mean what bitcoin represents it's it's a medium of exchange at the end of the day that that banking to the unbankable uh, a utility, you know where you're you know, you've got going back To like the dawn of civilization, the days of bought or barter needing needing something to sit in between goods and services, of unequal value that don't stand the test of time.

I won't go there, but, like you know it's you know where you're, where you're sitting in argentina buenos aires dealing with like 40 inflation, year-over-year holding the peso it comes down to like what do you hold your wealth in your hard-earned savings, and how do you transact Internationally and how do you exchange money internationally, um, it's it's just a better system where you're not tied to the printing press or policies of when one individual government do is. Is there a need and do i think there could be sort of a consolidation or mass adoption of one particular blockchain technology or protocol? Absolutely i mean there's, there's utility there, the exchange of digital assets and in a trusted sort of consensus where you don't need intermediaries. 100 but btc, look, you know, you've got you've, got one hell of a bid and a lot of the altcoins people are making a lot of money. He's trading some of these other alternatives, but um.

You know i've seen it in good and bad markets. When there's a sell-off generally speaking, btc is a you know: the the strongest performer as the leader of the pack in the network, adoption and use cases and and users globally. I think it's just it's here to stay. I think it's going to be a permanent place in this evolving sector and uh.

You know it will be certainly interesting to see how things evolve going forward, but but you know i'm comfortable learning, good bitcoin for the long term and i'm a mat. I'm a self-proclaimed maximist at the end of the day, for sure i mean nice, nice yeah. So really i mean uh. The idea there is that uh, as a store of value bit bitcoin probably is, is going to be irreplaceable as what you're saying and you expect it - to follow the stock to flow model where we should be around 110 000 at some point potentially in 2022..

Now the uh, the other, the alts in all of this would would you personally invest in any of them? Would you invest in ethereum or solana or cardano, you know, would would you invest in any of these or as a maximalist, are you like? No, you know what i'm just going to stick with bitcoin, because if the others go away at least i know bitcoin's still going to be. Here i mean in the with the riggs product and and the allocations the holdings within the portfolio um. There are very few miners publicly traded miners, there's there's basically three that have anything but btc asic mine. So in terms of like my my day-to-day job like what i need to understand and be smart on and be comfortable owning, it's it's pretty easy.

You know, you've got you've, got three groups out there: mining some ether and a few all coins. You know during certain hours of the day, but but generally convert to get back to btc immediately um. But you know me personally: 100, like i'm constantly looking at other protocols, i do think there's a lot of really valuable work out there and that that will find its place in the world and become significantly bigger and bigger um. You know everything's different like, but this move to proof of stake protocols like cardano, very, very, like attractive components embedded in that initiative.

You know the the research funding proof of stake, smart contract abilities, you know defined uh, fixed cap on supply. There's there's you know, there's there's a need and a use and uh sort of attractive utilities. Of that token, i don't want to key in on one or another, but for sure i like personally very different answer than what we're doing at ferdi through riggs gotcha. I gotcha do you diversify to stocks or real estate at all, or you must sell crypto personally uh i've been in the financial markets for a long time, so yeah, i'm i'm very long, real estate real estate, because i i i'm gon na mine, my french here, But you know, because i'm very scared of the stagflation and hyperinflation on the horizon - and i just want, generally speaking, want to get my wealth and savings into things that will protect purchasing power long term like if you can, you can't increase the money supply the way We've seen uh and and expect uh, you know a gallon of gas or or uh summer homes to cost the same amount of money.

So it's ultimately just about like you work work hard for the dollars you put in your savings account. You know we want to make them capable of purchasing the same amount of goods in the future and uh. So so i i have a diversified portfolio, full disclosure. I use somebody else to manage it.

I like crypto, is anybody playing in crypto. Has some sort of uh heightened element of of uh non-risk aversion or just like ability to tolerate volatility and risk and uh? You know managing my own pa. In the early days i invested in a lot of like junior mining stocks. Some some were were 10 baggers and others were zeros, and so you know given given the time constraints.

In my day, i i rely on somebody else to manage my personal accounts to that that diversified strategy, but uh there are certain things. I still know how to do better than others. Ah that's awesome, okay, yeah! So i i i we're almost the end of our time. I want to ask you, though uh you, you just alluded to this.

Well, i mean you bluntly, said you're, fearful of this potential hyperinflation, stagflation uh. What do you? What do you say when you hear people like jerome powell, saying? Oh, don't worry, it's gon na be transitory, eventually, uh, you know what what do you think is this? Is this um like what happens in in your world if, if all of a sudden, they're right what if inflation does go down, is it all a big lie or or what's going on, though? What do you think it's i mean? Look the uh. I don't want to go too deep here we could we could. We could do an another hour on this, but like when you look at the sort of real measures of like cpi inflation, the cost of the consumer.

I mean i just i just i said toronto and i just put gas in my tank to drive up to our our our summer place for the weekend and it was like a dollar 75 a liter, you guys priced in in gallons, but that that's a lot Of money, that's i mean oil, where it is being almost half of where it was trading in 2008, 2009 at 147 dollars a barrel high, yet the prices of the pump are 40 higher than we saw back then yeah. That's like six dollars, six, six dollars and forty cents for reference. But then again that's canadian dollars right! Canadian, yeah! Okay! So maybe take another 20 off of that. Okay.

So that's still you're paying over five dollars. U.S, a gallon okay yeah, so that that is real inflation. It and i mean you know you look at you - know the price of price of a of an everyday like consumer staple like there's, there's real. You know uh pricing, i wouldn't say arbitrage, but like impacts being being passed on to the consumer, i mean when you look at your portfolio outside of crypto markets.

Like the other day, the real winners are gon na, be the large caps that are capable of passing that pricing on increasing their pricing and paying it passing it on to the consumer to maintain their their margins. But, like inflation, is real, it's it's here! It's coming! You look at the interest rate environment with like negative real yields across the world by some of the you know the majority of the g20 economies. This is this is a real concern, not just for me. It's all over the media um.

You know i just look at you, know: printing yourself, out of a pandemic and debt levels where they are and the options available to the fed and other treasuries. It's it's going to be an interesting time, some some volatile markets ahead and uh yeah. It's it's hard to predict, but but at the end of the day you know if, if we are headed into this sort of uh, uh macro economic environment, like the miners that we own semiconductor companies, all of them are very well positioned to um sort of increase Profitability, driven by increasing prices in btc and other digital assets as stores of value and and uh, i think in any portfolio it deserves its place and but but again, a prudent approach and diversified approach. Yeah.

So then last question is sort of then. The counter potential question is: if inflation continues the way it is. Obviously we expect uh bitcoin and the miners to do extremely well, like you've described what, if it plummets, you know what, if all of a sudden we go to, we went from oversupply or sorry under supply to oversupply of products like chips and supply and everything u-turns. It's like now we're so efficient with shipping that prices are coming down and we're seeing consumer price deflation.

Maybe oil comes back down as well. Hopefully eventually uh is. Is that a risk for bitcoin or does bitcoin still have staying power even in a deflationary time? I think it does because, like again it comes back to like you know, look government of el salvador has to stop adopt bitcoin as legal tender. I mean you, you've got.

You know, initiatives in cuba and other jurisdictions. You've, it comes down to you know not everybody's living in the us or canada, with a stable banking system and access to debt, and you know a responsible law, semi-responsible government making smart monetary policy decisions. So it comes down to like whether you want to own the fiat available to you locally or hold your wealth and income in some other fashion, and so i do think it has its place in the world um. This is not the the line of questioning that i thought we'd get into, but you know, i'm always happy to happy to you know, have an educational chat on state of the union here absolutely well! Thank you for that yeah uh, so i mean we've.

We've hit a lot of different things here. We've talked about your holdings and kind of what you look for future value of of bitcoin inflation, deflation uh, even blockchain techs, uh er, very last one. If you had to pick one alternative other than bitcoin. What would it be? I'm uh, i i would say kurt, i don't know wow over ethereum mm-hmm wow, i don't think uh.

This shift to proof-of-stake is is actually going to come to fruition with ethereum and uh whoa yeah too too broadly distributed too much utility at this point, they're not going to get the consensus required to shift and uh. So you look at your alternatives to ethereum and new sort of better structured protocols where you don't have 60 or 7 million tokens sitting in the hands of the founders. I think you know. Protocols like cardano would be my best over over ether.

That's big! That's a big statement. There is solana, carry a chance in that or not as much yeah, also interesting a few hiccups, certainly in september um, but but um yeah. They need the nature of any sort of uh. New protocol got ta got bugs to work out as it scales and uh, but but again i wouldn't rule it out.

Um. You know my money to be made investing in supporting uh alternatives to btc. That's for sure. But again you go back to any sort of market weakness and uh.

You know, btc, the the market force, the sort of majority of of of the capitalization of all cryptocurrencies globally. It's uh likely to stand the test of time a little bit better than some of these old protocols. They'll sell off quite hard yeah i mean i have to say i'm surprised because it sounds like i mean that's a little bit of a bomb that you you don't believe. Basically that ethereum 2.0 is going to happen.

That's that's a big thing to end it on. I mean that i just want to clarify: that's basically what you're saying right well, if i'm wrong just go back and edit this out three or four months from now and we'll just pretend it never happened, but uh, it's big yeah sure i appreciate like. I am a big fan of alternative perspectives, and i mean you just gave one that honestly i've never heard of before. That's not saying that your perspective is wrong.

I didn't even think about it, not happening so so. Thank you. You opened my eyes to that that just that potential now i want to go down that rabbit hole. So thank you well, never say never, certainly in the next 12 months not gon na happen, that's that's my prediction, but but that's big yeah.

Okay, how do people get in contact with y'all learn more about y'all folly on social and invest in your fun, we're uh our website's www.verityfunds.com, i'm on uh twitter? I actually don't even know my handle. I think it's at west fulford and uh same with verdifunds at broodyfunds. It's twitter website um feel free to reach out, and i definitely look forward to seeing the comments in this uh broadcast after that that last prediction yeah. That's that's going to be interesting.

Okay! Well, thank you and then your ticker symbol is uh. Uh r-i-g-z, like riggs with a z, zed right, correct guys, so people should be able to apply that on. I imagine robin hood and all of the various different uh yeah yeah. It's uh.

It's definitely on robin hood, we're trading on the nyse yep. I say zed up here in canada. You say z down in the us, but uh, but uh yeah. Actually sorry are you from.

Are you in canada? Are you in the us? No, no! I'm in the u.s but yeah, you know west coast but yeah. My wife's half canadian father-in-law is 100 canadian. So i i'm familiar at least to some degree. I think it's awesome, so okay awesome well! This was phenomenal.

Hang out for one moment, then, if you don't mind for everybody watching. Thank you so much for being here uh. If you found this helpful share the video. If you've got a comment on that ethereum 2.0 bomb.

I want to hear about it in the comments down below uh. It's very, very fascinating! I'm going gon na look into this and uh. Thank you. So much for being here we'll see y'all in the next one.

Thanks.