Digital Asset News hosts discuss the Clarity Act's failure, Bitcoin custody risks, and forward-looking investment themes
Rob and Jerry from Costa Rica, co-hosts of Digital Asset News, discuss the apparent collapse of the US Clarity Act for crypto regulation.
Summary
Rob and Jerry cover the failure of the US Clarity Act to advance, noting it was pushed back to a September 15th target date with little confidence it will pass. They give credit to opponents — including Ben McKenzie and Senator Elizabeth Warren — while arguing that Bitcoin's long-term trajectory does not depend on regulatory clarity. The episode also covers Russia's new five-point digital asset framework, Bitcoin custody risks across hardware wallets and ETFs, and a forward-looking discussion of AI infrastructure plays including Terrafab (associated with Elon Musk's vertical chip integration ambitions), Tesla, and Nvidia. Jerry argues that a debt refinancing crisis over the next 18–24 months could trigger a cascade of corporate failures, while both hosts agree that money printing remains the likely government response to any downturn — benefiting asset holders.
The episode also includes an extended discussion of Canton, a blockchain being used by a major global custodian for recordkeeping, with Jerry cautioning that technological adoption does not automatically translate to investment returns for coin holders. Rob walks through RWA.xyz data distinguishing 'distributed' from 'represented' asset use cases on-chain. Additionally, Rob shares a personal account of losses from the Celsius collapse, including a missed margin call that resulted in Bitcoin liquidation, and mentions Ionic Digital shares issued to creditors as partial recovery.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and Audio Check
Rob: Well everybody, looks like the Clarity Act is in the books and I think it is DOA. However, there are things to look forward to and there's a lot of positivity out there. So let's talk about that today with a friend of the show, Jerry from Costa Rica. Jerry, how you doing?
Jerry: I'm doing well. Hi everyone. I hope you're enjoying your Sunday.
Rob: Yes, this is a great day. Nice relaxation day. Go to church, relax, do nothing, maybe watch a little crypto video. Pretty good. So before we move on, I need to ask everybody a question. Our microphone is out — the always faithful SM7B, which is pretty much the standard for great audio. So now we're using the DJI, which is the mobile one, until we get a new microphone which comes in either tomorrow or Tuesday. So how does the audio sound? Is it too low? Is there any kind of hissing noise in the background? Is there a boatload of echo that you just cannot stand? Because if we don't have good audio and you can't hear me, then what's the point of doing all this?
As a little reminder, Bitcoin is not the Clarity Act. The Clarity Act doesn't really need Bitcoin. I've been around since 2017. Jerry's been around roughly the same time. We went from essentially $1,000–$2,000 per Bitcoin when we got in to over $125,000 without any kind of regulation being passed. Now I know we had the GENIUS Act, which was around March–April, maybe June 2025, and we did okay. But the Clarity Act looks like it's not happening. We'll see where it goes.
Sounds good. Too low. A bit too low. No echo or hissing. What's that? Speak up? This is as loud as I'm going to get, so maybe you've got to turn up your volume and go from there. Sorry everybody. Maybe if I stick it right in my face everybody can hear it. Yeah, is it loud? It definitely is louder.
Jerry: I didn't have a problem hearing you before you put it right there.
Russia's Digital Asset Framework
Rob: All right, let's get into it. So today we talked about this a couple of days ago and unfortunately the audio was so bad I had to delete the video. So just as a reminder, we just got punked by Russia. They beat us yet again. First Sputnik and now this.
Russia, under Vladimir Putin, has come out with their own clarity act for digital assets. Here's what it actually entails — five points. I don't think it's really that great, but they did get a little bit of things on the books to move forward.
First, central bank oversight — requires exchanges, brokers, and digital custodians to register in a special state registry and obtain licenses. That sounds pretty reasonable.
Second, retail investment caps — there's a limit on non-qualified investors. If you're not an accredited investor in Russia, you can only purchase a maximum of $3,800 per year, or 300,000 rubles, often requiring a prior knowledge test. So even to get to be a regular investor, you've got to take a test. It's not a bad idea actually, because if we did a test out here, I wonder how many people would actually pass it.
Third, global trade exception — explicitly permits Russian importers and exporters to use crypto freely for cross-border settlements.
Fourth, payment ban — in Russia as just passed, you can't use crypto for goods or services purchases. So essentially it's all speculation.
And fifth, judicial protection — grants formal legal property status and court protection to digital currency holders who report their asset holdings. So they're actually protected.
Before we get into the Clarity Act, Jerry, what are your thoughts about Russia? Did they nail it or desire?
Jerry: I think it's a sign of the times. Russia is the ninth largest economy on the planet. And when these top ten economies start pulling together — whether it be laws, regulation, rules of the road, so to speak — I think it's a very positive sign. We know Japan is working on their version of a clarity act. We know Brazil, again the tenth largest economy. Japan is the fourth. Germany's got laws on the books. So even if the US and its banking lobbies keep getting in the way, the global market space is maturing and continuing to go in a direction that allows our favorite assets to further legitimize themselves.
Rob: And that's a good thing regardless of our political stance on Russia, whether they're good guys or bad guys. They're the ninth largest economy in the world, and creating clarity for their retail investment population is only a good thing.
I think if we can just move the needle a little bit, then it just becomes more of a regular, normal, run-of-the-mill type of thing — whether you say that's a hedge against inflation, peer-to-peer transactions, or just straight speculation. People get into it and go, that's great.
The Clarity Act Failure
Now, a lot of people have been putting a lot of their eggs into one basket, which would be this thing called the Clarity Act. And I didn't want to be right, but it looks like we're not going to get it. There is a staunch opponent — CryptoKaren Elizabeth Warren. I'm not going to play this video, but I will say: touché. They did a good job not getting this passed by putting the fear of God into everybody, into their constituents, about how this is awful and the worst thing of all time. And to be honest, it's not like the Clarity Act was a great bill anyhow. It wasn't the most fantastic thing they could have written. There were all these different provisions coming out.
It looks like we are moving in the direction of it not happening. It was supposed to happen in July. Then it was supposed to happen this week. And now it looks like it is going to be kicked down the road to Tuesday, September 15th, sometime in the 2 PM hour. Let's hope it does. But as a reminder, I've done quite well in the crypto and digital asset space. I think Jerry's done really well. And if we don't get the Clarity Act, it's not the end of the world. These are just how things go.
But I'd like to give a little air time to the people that beat us, because you've got to do that. You've got to tip the hat and say, you know what, that was pretty well played. So this will be Ben McKenzie as he talks about it.
Ben McKenzie: "I'm having a beer. Why? Because today is a good day. The good guys won. I teamed up with Indivisible and Americans for Financial Reform and together we beat the corrupt crypto bill, the Clarity Act. A few months ago, the odds of it passing were 75%. Now it's dead. In fact, we beat it so bad they didn't even bring it up for a vote. This is a win — not for us, but for the vast majority of Americans who are sick of Trump's crypto corruption. Sick of the hundreds of millions of dollars the crypto lobby is spending to corrupt our democracy. Sick of the lying and the nonsense coming out of Washington. I want to be clear, the fight against crypto is far from over. The Clarity Act could still come back like a corporate zombie rising from the dead. But today, we won. And because of that, I'm having a beer — to the most corrupt president in history, and to the crypto bros everywhere. Cheers."
Rob: That was a sick burn. Jerry, what do you think about that one?
Jerry: I think it speaks to the magnitude of money at stake.
Rob: Right.
Jerry: Ben has long had his own views. I respect that he has his own views. I don't agree with his views. But one thing that we can all agree upon is that there is a tremendous amount of money at stake if companies that are not the regulated bank-licensed entities are able to hold depositor cash and present a yield incentive to it — which is that whole rewards on your coins. Now the question is, will Coinbase and Kraken and these other legitimate companies be allowed to continue to issue that reward even if the Clarity Act doesn't pass? Because that is literally the largest sticking point. And if that were to be removed, would the Clarity Act have any relevance? All of this will unfold itself over the next couple of months and over the next couple of years, and I'm hoping that we become more reasonable.
Rob: Reasonable sounds good. Provisions and concessions kind of come down — yeah, that's how it works.
Jerry: But again, I think you make a great point, Rob. It does not crush us. In other words, people who believed in the digital asset space, who were investing in the digital asset space, who are building companies in the digital asset space — I don't think the Clarity Act is the go/no-go marker to predict success.
Responding to Crypto Critics
Rob: And as this has come through, there were some things that Ben talked about that I think he and I agree on — the insider trading, the insider nonsense that was going on, the greed, and some of the corruption. Let's be honest: some parts of this sector were not the most above board. And there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that, because every single sector has the same thing. You think there's not insider trading going on with stocks? You think there's not spoofing going on with precious metals? You think there's not some kind of shenanigans going on with real estate? It's happening everywhere. Unfortunately, crypto gets a magnifying glass.
Ben and a lot of people who hate crypto tend to have four main arguments. Let's just break them down.
First, economic nothing — the greater fool theory. If you held Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, and I believe Argentina just had their currency collapse — Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Argentina have all had massive inflation and currency collapses. If you'd held things in Bitcoin, it would have actually worked out pretty well. Also, in the United States, we have a $40 trillion debt. We keep printing money. If we keep debasing the dollar, everything's going to go up. Inflation will never stop. And if you just look at what Bitcoin has done from 2017 to now, you can see that just to buy a house would be pretty damn sweet if you'd held Bitcoin. So I still see it as a great hedge against inflation long-term, not short-term.
Second, the decentralization myth. You got me on fartcoin. You got me on the meme coins — they're not decentralized. However, if we look at Bitcoin, the amount of nodes out there — we're looking at roughly 24,000 reachable nodes across the world. As far as Bitcoin mining, there is a bit more centralization, especially if we look at Foundry, F2Pool, and DIA. There is a lot of centralization for those mining pools. However, as miners tell me, "Rob, I can choose to unplug and go somewhere else." For some of the altcoins, absolutely there's a centralization issue. But for Bitcoin, it's not a big thing for me.
Third, illicit activity, which is what Elizabeth Warren is always talking about. Cryptocurrency does involve billions, but how much is that in the grand scheme of things? It's roughly 3.4% — beside 97% of illicit activity happening elsewhere. And as Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA, said, Bitcoin is a boon for surveillance. We would rather have you do that.
And then lastly, the greater fool theory again. If you're going to talk about altcoins, you got me — you're right, some of it is trash. However, if it was a greater fool theory, why don't you give me a couple of Bitcoin and just leave it at that, because Bitcoin's worth nothing. Well, give me one and everybody shuts up.
There are some things that Ben said that are correct. But anyhow, Jerry, before we go to the next piece, what do you think?
Jerry: I totally agree. We've seen the things that we can count on — deficit spending, increasing the M2 money supply. Therefore, scarce desirable assets will continue to appreciate commensurate to the money supply. If we understand that as a basic tenet for every financial decision we make, we're better off than 98% of the population, because they don't understand the mechanism that creates inflation. We have been educated and therefore are much better off. So whether it's Tesla stock, gold, Bitcoin, or real estate, we understand a mechanism to get out of the "have funds staying poor" category.
Rob: "Have fun staying poor" — Dwan. I'll never forget that one. That was pretty good. Well said.
And then MetaLawMan said it pretty poignantly: "Congratulations to the big bank lobby and Senator Elizabeth Warren on defeating the Clarity Act for now. But Trump and his family can continue to do whatever they want in crypto." And I don't think anybody likes that. Also, crypto exchanges can continue paying unlimited yield on stablecoin deposits. Well played. Touché.
I'd like to see us move forward, but if we don't, let's just keep doing the same thing. But let's look forward, because we can delve on that and it's an entertaining prospect to talk about.
Macro Markets: Berkshire, Burry, and the Debt Cycle
Let's talk about what's going to happen in Q3 or the end of Q4 into 2027. This was interesting to me. Berkshire Hathaway — you know, little guy named Warren Buffett, not a bad investor — they have been hoarding cash since 2022. They have almost $400 billion. And as of Q2, which was just released not too long ago, this is the first time they have deployed capital. They deployed a modest amount — what Jerry would call a modest amount — $32 billion put into equities, into stocks. This is a pretty big thing.
I take a look at this and think: did they miss something? Because wasn't 2022 a pretty good time to buy stuff?
Jerry: Towards the end of the year.
Rob: Well, December–January of '22 was a completely different market than December of '22.
Jerry: Yeah.
Rob: Remember, '21 was our high water mark and then it felt like we went off a cliff.
Jerry: For that whole year.
Rob: For crypto for sure. But take a look at the S&P 500. Michael Burry told us to sell January 31st, 2023. In 2023, Berkshire Hathaway went into cash. It didn't deploy a lot. Michael Burry is the same way. And now here we are at all-time highs for the S&P 500. So if we're looking forward — where should we be right now? Was this a good time? We've got Berkshire Hathaway saying "I'm going to buy." You've got Michael Burry saying everything's going to collapse. Where are we, Jerry? Where are we in this market?
Jerry: I think a lot of what Burry is using as a basis is kind of the debt cliff that I've shared with you privately. When corporates are so leveraged in debt that when it comes time to refinance their debt, they cannot refinance enough to cover what they owe and what they need. In 2020–2022, you could borrow mega amounts at anywhere from zero to 2–3%.
Rob: Damn.
Jerry: Well, we're in 2025. We're just now starting that window where a lot of that debt that was originated at that unreasonably low rate needs to be refinanced. If you're refinancing at 5%, 4.5%, 6.1% — the amount that you can borrow to make your debt payments is completely different. Therefore, what it sets up is a cascading — we'll call it a 2008 financial crisis all over again. It's the inability to service debt. Now, companies are not like the government. Companies don't have a printing machine. The only pseudo machine they have is the ability to issue more debt. So can they issue some attractive super high-yield bond scheme? And is there enough money in that market to cover what they actually need to generate to cover their debt rollover? That is the big question. The next 18 to 24 months will give us the answer — either there's a huge appetite for high-risk, high-yield bonds and they'll cover, or there isn't and we'll start to see companies unwind. And companies unwinding is a lot of times where that snowball thing starts to happen, because then it's a mad scramble for liquidity. It gets really interesting. That would be the Burry base case, and I think there is a legitimate case to be made to support that.
Now the other side of that argument is that the Fed lowers the overnight rate to borrow money and we start seeing a very friendly liquidity cycle open up where you can borrow money close to the range that you did in 2022 when we had the big expansion. And if we can borrow money cheaply again, then we just kick the can down the road for another six years.
Rob: By you saying that, I think to myself — people are going to try to time it. We all want to time it. But if you look at 2007, '08, '09, we ramped up the money printer a reasonable amount. And we ramped it up even tenfold when we had this thing called the coronavirus. And all of a sudden they just started to print like crazy. Now we're at $40 trillion in debt. I think if we have a soft spot and things were to go down, what are they going to do? There's only one thing they can do — they're going to start printing money. So if you're in the space and you have assets, you're a winner. If you're in cash, you're losing.
We the people that are listening are not losers, Jerry. That's what Elizabeth Warren calls them per my thumbnail. And because of that, we can win. We just got to stick it out. I agree with you on that one. I just think that at some point they're going to start printing money like crazy and then we'll be back at it.
Bitcoin Custody: ETFs, Hardware Wallets, and Insurance
But looking forward in the traditional markets, we have to talk about this information — this email that was sent to me. It doesn't matter how much we make, it's how much we keep. And if we're in a cold wallet or a Coldcard and we lose everything, what's the point?
This is from a first name Carl. He asks: "Hi Rob. You can now purchase and hold Bitcoin on Charles Schwab. My questions are: do you think you are protected more from losing your Bitcoin on here than in self-custody cold wallet? Do you know if Charles Schwab has any sort of financial protection?"
It's a great question, because when I think about Coldcard, I think about this: it's not the things that I know that get me, it's the things that I don't know. A lot of us got caught with Coldcard because of the entropy — there wasn't just enough randomness. The bit rate was too low and it was hacked. Did we all know about this? No.
So to answer this question, we go down a little rabbit hole. Schwab crypto is not FDIC or SIPC protected, meaning if it gets hacked, you've only got so much. You own the coins held mostly in cold storage by Schwab Premier Bank plus Paxos. Cash balances get FDIC up to $250K. Crypto itself — zero. So if it gets hacked, we are in big trouble.
How do they protect themselves? They use MPC — a multi-party computation key management system — which means the key never fully exists in one place. The key is split into multiple shares. Those shares live on separate machines. To sign a transaction, the parties run a cryptographic protocol. An attacker has to compromise multiple independent systems at the same time. But the question is, well, that's what Coldcard could have done — it's just that the way it was set up was trash and we got stuck.
As a reminder, IBIT — that's BlackRock's ETF — holds roughly $48 billion in assets as of August 2026, with its Bitcoin custodied by Coinbase. Coinbase carries a $320 million commercial crime insurance policy covering theft, hacks, and similar events. But Jerry, let me do some quick math here. $320 million is less than $48 billion in assets. Is that correct?
Jerry: Yeah, that would barely cover the cost of the lawyers.
Rob: Gotcha. BlackRock's official filings state that neither the trust nor the sponsor insures the Bitcoin, and assets lack FDIC or SIPC protection, meaning full recovery is not guaranteed in a major loss event.
So what it comes down to is I spread out my custody. I've done this for years. I have a good amount in custodian services. I've got it in Ledger. I've got it in Tangem. And I just added a fourth one which I will not be telling you about, because I just don't think everybody should know everything.
The problem with hardware wallets is seed security. Coldcard — what we should be looking for now that we know about effective entropy — they had it at 40 bits, and the time to crack it at 1 billion attempts took about 18 minutes. We didn't figure this out until it was too late. I don't know if it's an inside job — that's the rumor going around, but I don't want to get sued. Although it's hard to sue me since they're going bankrupt.
Coldcard MK4 and MK5, if you did it the right way and rolled some dice, could take 75 to 150 years to crack. Trezor is 128 bits, which means it takes 10 to the 22nd power years — that's a long time, it's not going to happen. Trezor and Ledger are the winners here. Ledger is 256 bits, which means it takes many times longer than the age of the universe to hack. And for Tangem — they use the same 256-bit security internally and on chips, which means it's almost unhackable. When generating an optional seed phrase, it supports both 128 and 256 bits depending on your choice. You can verify that at tangem.com.
Jerry, what are your thoughts on this? Does this put your mind at ease a little bit?
Jerry: I think it's really important to have an understanding of how your assets are secured — whether you're with Schwab, Fidelity, using Ledger, using Tangem, whatever. None of these things should be gone into blindly. We should understand how these things work. We should understand the counterparty risks associated.
I think the biggest takeaway for me with this conversation is: when will a Coinbase, Kraken, or Strategy-type company who's all-in on this space actually raise capital and create insurance mechanisms — no differently than FDIC insures your individual accounts up to a certain amount of dollars? When will a Coinbase or a Kraken or a Strategy create insurance —
Rob: That you pay for?
Jerry: No differently than the way you pay your medical insurance, your homeowner's insurance, your car insurance, your dental insurance. There will be an asset protection insurance. Give it another 24 to 36 months. Somebody will raise some capital and start doing that, because insurance is a profit center for every company that issues it. The industry as a whole is a money maker. It's just a matter of time before the asset industry that we're in follows suit. It's not an if, it's a when.
Rob: That's a good one. I never thought of it that way. Just ask Blue Cross Blue Shield and Aetna — they are not going broke. They are denying claims left and right and making money hand over fist. So yeah, if someone could do insurance, I think that'd be fantastic.
So we are doing okay. And this is about diversification. R.J. says he moved some of his crypto over to IBIT — zero maintenance fees, but a 1% fee for withdrawals. I have no problems paying 1% because I don't want to pay 100% to the hackers that are stealing everybody's Bitcoin.
And then looking forward, me and Dre did a reasonably good job talking about dynamic DCAing and how to DCA yourself to a million — regular DCA versus dynamic. There's a link in the description for that one.
AI Infrastructure and Forward-Looking Investment Plays
But looking forward, we know we're all in Bitcoin, and I want to get Jerry's opinion about this one. SpaceX did a great job of rebounding. They're not at all-time highs, and unfortunately Elon Musk is now a lowly billionaire instead of a trillionaire — I started a GoFundMe, maybe we can support him, because nobody wants to be a lowly billionaire. But SpaceX has done a pretty great job so far. The stock was at $118. The unlocks for a good portion of their stocks just came out last week, and there are more unlocks coming. Yeah, $133 now.
It's not just SpaceX — it's xAI, it's Starlink, and also SpaceX itself and the things they're actually doing because of the infrastructure they're trying to build with AI. I took a look at this and looking forward there's a company called Caterpillar. If you're into picks and shovels, these are the guys that have the backhoes and the drills and everything else you need to create infrastructure in data centers. That's looking pretty good. Nvidia over the past five days is up 13%. Then Tesla — Jerry's favorite — it's not doing too great. It did okay after the stock splits. I think there was one in 2020 and one in 2022, but going into 2023 forward, you're still up.
Jerry, what are your thoughts on moving forward looking into that AI play?
Jerry: It's not necessarily the AI play. I call it the expansion of the digital space. I think it's super important that people start to understand that there are literally two different capital markets in the US when it comes to stocks. There is a small handful of forward-looking companies — SpaceX, Tesla, Nvidia, etc. — these are companies that are blazing the trail of where we're going to be with goods and services in the next 20 years. And I include a small handful of energy companies — your small nuclear power plant that is literally the size of a 40-foot shipping container. Those kinds of innovations. And then you have all these old companies — Ford, AT&T, these monster companies that are absolutely decimated with debt with no way to productivity-generate their way out of it. Of the S&P 500 and the thousands of other companies incorporated in the United States, I think it's really important to start differentiating who's going forward and who's going to be a dinosaur — who's going to die — because I think in the next three or four years, you're going to see a mass extinction-level type exodus of companies that have been household names our entire lives going the way of the dodo bird.
Rob: I can see that. It's all about picking the winners, and that's why we're here.
Q&A Session
So anyhow, Jerry, good session today. Let's go into a little Q&A.
Jerry: Let's have Rob answer all your questions.
Rob: Yes, let's have Rob do that. Good question for Jerry — see, it says "Hey Rob," I think she misspelled Jerry. "Hey Jerry, just curious if you're hanging on to your digital shares. Did you have anything to do with Celsius?"
Jerry: I did, but I was one of the few that were able to get out, and the only thing I lost was a small amount of the actual ERC-20 Celsius token.
Rob: Oh, okay. Well, that's not too bad. I did a couple of rather decent-sized loans and I got margin called. I paid the first one. I even got the second one, but the third one I was traveling and I missed the margin call and they liquidated me. So that's a taxable event. They liquidated all my Bitcoin that I'd put up. So they got my Bitcoin, and then I also lost all the Celsius tokens I had on there and a pretty good amount of altcoins. Not too bad, but enough to where I was like, that sucks.
So they gave me these Ionic Digital shares. If you want to find out about how that works, follow Aaron Bennett, but it's very simple — they give you some information and you have to move it over to a brokerage. There's a list of the different brokerages that they have. They're able to move those shares over and then you actually own those shares. The stock itself hasn't done too bad actually, and we'll see how it goes. I'm hanging on to it because I haven't really done much with it — I wrote that off mentally a long time ago. I'm still surprised I got anything back.
And then this is a good one for Jerry. Terrafab is going to be epic.
Jerry: I don't know exactly how big this is. I know it's going to be built in Texas. I think it's going to be massive infrastructure for AI. But obviously chips are a monster constraint in the whole tech stack — energy, electricity, and the actual chips themselves are the bottlenecks. And the one thing I've learned about Elon is he and his team are extremely well positioned to innovate around what most people would consider constraints. And if you can engineer around constraints and eliminate them, then you're first to market. Look at what he did with SpaceX — look at the gap between Elon's company and the next competitor in that industry. The gap is massive. I think you're going to see the same when it comes to chips. And when you control the supply chain — Nvidia does not control their supply chain. They design and engineer and then send to a manufacturer in Taiwan or Texas to build their chip. Well, Elon is saying, "No, no, no. We're going to control the entire stack from the raw materials." Terrafab should be huge. I'm again — this is why I'm so in on Tesla, thinking that my Tesla is just going to become part of SpaceX, because I honestly believe they have the ability and the room in the cap table that SpaceX can literally absorb Tesla and the Boring Company without a fuss and without needing anybody's authorization. Elon holds enough SpaceX shares himself to make the decision and not need anybody else's buy-in. I'm sure he'll get a letter from the board that says, "Oh, that's a great idea." But it's not like he needs to go to a shareholder meeting and get them to authorize his desire.
Rob: That was a good one. I'm sure he'll get a nice letter. "Hey, good idea, boss." So yeah, nice one, Jerry.
Okay, here's what I got. "I'm buying SpaceX. I'm actually dollar cost averaging into it."
Jerry: Tesla only.
Rob: Tesla only?
Jerry: Because I told you my logic. I believe every one of my Tesla shares will become a SpaceX share.
Rob: That sounds pretty good. And actually last month I didn't make any allocation towards anything in Schwab — it was all a Bitcoin purchase through Coinbase.
Here's an interesting one: "The timing with the Clarity Act is uncanny with the four-year cycle. All of them rich, crooked politicians are not done loading their bags." And then Big Daddy says, "Why doesn't it seem like Bitcoin doesn't react to anything — bad news or good news?" Which is a good point. So Jerry, where are we here?
Jerry: I think at the core of Bitcoin movement is always going to be liquidity — the ability to access cash in a whole risk-on profile. And as far as the other question about what will break the four-year cycle — again, it has the same answer. I think it's 100% associated to liquidity. All of the spare money is being gobbled up by forward-thinking speculation in AI, electricity, etc. And until there is the ability to borrow more money today than you could yesterday — in other words, until the credit environment changes — I don't think we're going to see a whole lot of movement. I think we're going to be rangebound until those macro events play out.
Rob: We'll see how it goes. I could be wrong. If other people have other theses, I hope you're correct.
Jerry: It would be nice. If we start dropping rates, of course, that will also lead to inflation.
Rob: Yeah, but if we're dumping all that cheap money into appreciating assets, we don't care. If I'm earning 15%, 20%, 30% on my cash that got turned into an asset, when my filet mignon goes up by 6% I don't care.
Jerry: That's the key. And see, you don't care because you're smart enough to get into assets. The problem with a lot of people is they don't — and not the people that are watching this video. They're the ones that actually feel it because everything goes up.
Rob: Here's my whole point. If you're not tuned in and getting educated on how to allocate your currency, then have fun staying poor.
Jerry: That should be the meme.
Rob: It should be a meme. It's tough to get everybody, but the people here get it. They know that we make money in the bear market. We don't make money in the bull. This is when we buy. This is when no one wants to do it. There's a reason why there are so many billionaires and millionaires in the world — it's because they do the things we don't want to do. Or they're just insider traders. Whatever. Pelosi.
Jerry: Or granddad gave them a big bank account.
Rob: Trust fund kids. Silver spoon.
R.J. says, "I wish you would allow closed captioning for us with hearing problems." I don't know if I can do that for live streams because they would have to annotate that as soon as I speak. But R.J., if you take a look at all the videos that we do, I have it enabled but it's for the recordings. So the live ones won't do much for you. But if you click on a recorded video and hit CC, it should have the closed captioning there. For live streams, I don't know.
Jerry: It's only for recorded. They don't have the tech to do it live.
Rob: Oh yeah, there we go. So for the other stuff, yeah, we're there. Sorry about that.
Altcoins — Jerry, what are you investing in?
Jerry: I'm not. But I can tell you I think there is an interesting case to be made about Canton. If in fact the global custodian for stocks in the entire world is using that blockchain as a way to facilitate their recordkeeping — chain of custody, the truth — then there's got to be something there. Now here's the thing: just because a technology is useful and gets used by the largest player in the world, it may or may not transfer value to you, the investor in the coin. You know what I'm saying? There was always that question, and I think you always have to ask yourself: how do I make money investing in this thing? What is going to drive that money? Not just because somebody uses it. My son when he comes to my house uses my free Wi-Fi. That doesn't make my free Wi-Fi valuable — even though he may be making thousands of dollars creating his app using my free Wi-Fi.
Rob: Well, that's why you've got to start charging your son.
Jerry: That'll be a nickel for every hour. Anyway, I think you can apply my response to that answer for Canton and 900,000 other digital asset projects in the space. How are you really going to make money from it?
Rob: And what Jerry's talking about — if you take a look at RWA.xyz and click on networks, they change things on me. For distributed — meaning they use the blockchain as a distribution layer so they can put things on there, create things, enabling on-chain investors to subscribe, hold, and manage assets directly — I think that's probably a bigger play. Because you've got Ethereum as the winner so far at $17.5 billion, BNB Chain at $6 billion, Solana at $3.7 billion, Stellar, Avalanche, Liquid Network, zkSync, Arbitrum, Polygon, all that stuff.
But if you come over here to "represented" — like what Jerry was talking about — represented assets use the blockchain as a recordkeeping layer, enhancing transparency, reconciliation, and operational efficiency. And you can see that Canton has $333 billion. Again, is that going to transfer over to making money? What Jerry said is correct.
Right now, Canton has been very rangebound since it was launched in roughly November 2025. It's now in the top 23. If we max this out — November 2025, what a bad time to launch, right as we were going down the tubes — it went from 13 cents to 6 cents. It peaked in February and now we're back down to roughly a dime. Circulating supply of 39 billion. Market cap almost $4 billion. But again, that's a lot of speculation. Good question. Not for sure.
What about this one? Jared Leisure says this is what he has: Tesla, Nvidia. I am interested about what you talked about as far as running the whole stack and creating everything. So it's going to be Nvidia and Tesla working together to create chips now — is that how it's going to work?
Jerry: There's a very real possibility that Nvidia may contract Terrafab to build GPUs.
Rob: Okay, that sounds pretty good.
Jerry: No differently than the way xAI is actually in their center called Colossus, renting space to Anthropic who runs Claude. Anthropic doesn't own their own massive data center — they contract compute from data centers. I think those frontier models like Anthropic and ChatGPT are going to be some of the winners. The big play is the infrastructure, the picks and shovels. Terrafab, Google is kind of moving into that realm, Amazon Web Services — those being the winners, and the frontier being between ChatGPT and Claude.
Rob: I don't know how that's going to work with Tesla because it's not like Elon Musk is a big fan of Sam Altman.
Jerry: Well, Tesla is not really an AI play. Tesla is efficiency in moving something from here to there — whether it be a human or cargo or something — with self-driving cars, taxis, trucks, eventually ships, eventually spaceships, robotics with Optimus, etc. Same deal — doing this manual thing, whatever that manual thing is. That's Tesla. And I think there is so much innovation and so much efficiency to be had going that route that Tesla's a slam dunk winner. And then all those other elements of AI fall into the SpaceX camp.
Rob: You know what's going to happen, Jerry? They're going to clip that. They're going to cut that clip and then when Tesla goes down like 10%, it'll be "look at Jerry, what an idiot." And then of course no one will talk about when it pumps 50% over a year or something. Anyhow, that's how it works in the social media space.
Leisure Suit says: "Real estate. I'm a big fan of my Fidelity Roth crypto account. Better than what Schwab offers." Sounds good. And Fidelity uses nearly all customer crypto held in offline cold storage — institution-grade custody through Fidelity Digital Assets national trust bank. No rehypothecation. I don't think rehyp — Celsius screwed that all up. All they had to do was not do that. Same thing with Voyager. All they had to do was not do an uncollateralized loan and they kept doing it.
Hey Jimmy says: "Question for Jerry. If the Fed raises rates, how will this affect the debt refinancing cycle short and long term?"
Jerry: It will put a dramatic strain on the currently heavily indebted companies and even countries that borrow from us. If the ability to borrow money is harder today than it was yesterday, then anybody who needs to borrow more money will be negatively affected.
Rob: Negatively. That's the key word.
Jerry: Negatively affected.
Rob: All right. And then Harmonic says, "Did Jerry just say Tesla is not an AI play?" Harmonic says it's the only AI play. So I think you could indirectly say Tesla is an AI play if you consider that cars and robots will have chips, and those chips will be running AI software. If that is how you view AI as a play, go ahead. I don't. Tesla will not be creating chips. Tesla will not be creating artificial intelligence models. Tesla will not be implementing any of that stack which xAI and SpaceX are doing. I don't consider that AI. The use of AI is not AI as a play as a core business. Now, if you're saying that because those cars and robots will have chips they will be a network to power software — okay. And if that's the way you interpret AI, cool. I interpret it the way I interpret it. And we're both able to coexist on this planet in harmony, even with different views.
Jerry: I think it comes down to what you consider the umbrella of Tesla. There's a reason why Tesla is over here doing the Boring Company and solar panels. Then you've got SpaceX and xAI and internet service and also what looks like they're branching off into cell phone service, which would be kind of interesting. So yeah, depends on how much you think the umbrella is.
Rob: And then someone says, "Trust me, bro. I'm a YouTuber." That's what I say all the time. That's on my business card when I go to the banks.
"Back up the Cybertruck if SpaceX hits $80." That would be a big slowdown, but anything's possible.
Jerry: The interesting element with any stock — it doesn't matter if it's AT&T or SpaceX or Tesla — companies can always, with board approval, simply issue more stock. So if they started with a million shares, they could issue a second million. And that is a drag because now that devalues or dilutes the value of the shares that I own unless I double my shares. I would have to buy another thousand shares just to keep up with the Joneses. And that exists in the capital market structure no differently than the way the Treasury issues more bonds to create more dollars. Everybody should understand that. Longtime Tesla people understand that because when we bought Tesla, Elon kept issuing more and more shares because he needed more and more money.
Rob: I don't know if anybody remembers, but there were many times where it seemed like Tesla was on the brink of going bye-bye.
Jerry: That's right. Yeah, and that's how you save it. That's the same thing that's going on with Strategy. They've got to sell some things to keep things afloat, and then shut everybody up. And we'll see how it all pans out.