S17 E34: Cory Klippsten on Bitcoin Cafe, Swan & Big Bitcoin

Cory Klippsten is the CEO of Swan and one of the most persistent voices in the “Bitcoin, not crypto” camp. He’s also a regular on this show: every summer, whenever he finds himself on this side of the Atlantic, we sit down for an hour or so and compare notes on where the industry is heading. This time he joined me from London, in between a croissant and picking up his kids, for S17 E34 of the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast.

We started with the least comfortable topic: the collapse of the leveraged Bitcoin equity trade. Cory advised Sequans, the semiconductor and IoT company that pivoted into a Bitcoin treasury strategy and has since sold most of its stack. According to him, the company still holds “a decent little chunk”, but it never reached the scale that the strategy actually requires: somewhere in the range of 800 million to 1 billion dollars worth of unencumbered Bitcoin NAV, meaning coins that aren’t tied up in the covenants of convertible debt deals. With the Bitcoin price cut in half between October and the spring, raising that outside capital would have been “wildly dilutive to shareholders”, and a board that also runs real semiconductor and IoT contracts wasn’t going to sign up for it.

He put Sequans in the same bucket as Empery Digital, Anthony Pompliano’s ProCap, Nakamoto, and Semler Scientific (before the Strike combination): companies with a decent amount of money and a decent amount of bitcoin that never hit escape velocity. In his view, the only two horses left in the US leveraged Bitcoin equity race are Strategy and Strive, “and Strive is tiny and Strategy is huge”. Cory still maintains that the thesis isn’t wrong, but he argues that the biggest mistake was distribution: these vehicles should have been sold to institutions instead of being pitched to retail with, in his words, AI videos of hot girls on the beach retiring on preferred equity.

Since we’re on the topic of incentives, I also relayed a question from the chat about his compensation for promoting the treasury company. Cory answered it directly: a small equity stake that Swan only took possession of in early 2026, so he rode alongside shareholders, plus a cash retainer for marketing, PR strategy and Wall Street meetings that was “sub 20K a month” and ended a while ago.

The more interesting part of the conversation is why he decided to go back to daily media. Cafe Bitcoin started in early 2021 on Clubhouse, migrated to Twitter Spaces, and ran until some point in 2024. It’s now back every weekday for what Swan calls the 50 Days for Freedom campaign, running from July 21st to September 8th, with the buy fee cut to 0.5%.

The trigger, according to Cory, was a series of news items in late May: the UK social media ban for under-16s (which he happened to be in the country for, and which in practice means everyone over 16 has to attach a government ID to their accounts), a VPN ban in Utah, an accelerated timeline for the digital euro, and age verification for the major LLM tools in the US. His conclusion was that this looked like “a march of really dystopian” encroachment, and that it put him back in the mental state he had when he first found Bitcoin, when the pitch was freedom money rather than portfolio allocation.

That framing became The Battle for Monetary Independence, which follows his earlier essays about the intransigent minority and The Race to Avoid the War. The article is unusually personal: it’s built around the war journal of his grandfather Philip Klippsten, who served on the second USS Yorktown (the first one was sunk at Midway) as a radar and communications man, and whose diary was transcribed by one of Cory’s cousins for a master’s thesis.

The best anecdote from it, which he told on air, is about a day when the ship shot down more than a dozen enemy planes: everyone was ducking and scrambling, and his grandfather’s instinct was to hit the deck, until he noticed the admiral standing upright and breathing calmly. That was enough for him to stand up and go back to work. Cory admits the analogy to a bear market with lots of infighting is “the loosest of analogies”, but the takeaway he wanted to leave with the audience is that this is the wrong moment to abdicate responsibility, and that pulling out of a bear market is more fun than wearing Bitcoin merch at 250k.

Then we got to the parts where we disagree. Bitcoin is about to experience two hard forks in August 2026: the one that comes from the anti-inscriptions camp, and Paul Sztorc’s Ecash, which activates BIP300 drivechains. Cory hadn’t heard about the second one at all: he told me that it was the first time in about a year that Drivechains had come up in his world, and that he assumed Paul mostly wants a live environment to test things. His position is that forks empirically dwindle against Bitcoin over time, and he pulled up a Bitcoin Cash chart to make the point.

My counterargument is that five years without a consensus change since Taproot creates a queue of builders who either wait a decade or go prove their ideas somewhere else. As for who gets the airdropped coins, Cory pointed out that the vast majority of coins ever purchased through Swan sit with clients, and that of what remains, roughly a third is with Equity Trust (the retirement accounts) and two thirds with Bakkt and BitGo, so the decision belongs to regulated custodians rather than to him.

We also went back and forth on payments. Cory’s model is three S curves with a 15 to 25 year lag between them: Bitcoin is still coming out of the flat part of the store of value curve, medium of exchange only takes off near the top of that one, and unit of account follows after that, with all three functions arriving “by the end of the century” for most people.

His explanation for the disappearance of the remittance narrative is the dollar’s monetary network effect reasserting itself through stablecoins, helped along by the GENIUS Act, the banking charters being handed to crypto firms, and the fact that regulated apps can now display balances as plain USD with the stablecoin in the fine print. I brought up the cases where a dollar token is exactly what you don’t want, like sending value between people on opposite sides of a war or a border regime, and where confiscation resistance matters more than price stability.

On the $15 million development consortium that everyone learned about last week, Cory was skeptical but not alarmist. His understanding is that it functions as a pledge rather than a pooled fund: each company decides unilaterally where its money goes, there is no committee, and no single view on what should be built. He expects some of it to be wasted and some of it to go toward quantum work that he considers largely performative.

His read on the quantum narrative is blunt: he thinks it was pushed into Bitcoin discourse by people who had watched quantum penny stocks get pumped in the first half of 2025 and wanted the same treatment for their funds and portfolio companies, and that it helped guarantee there would be no bounce after the October 10th deleveraging. His practical heuristic is to watch what Google does with its own security certificates before worrying. On BIP360 and any proposal that touches Satoshi’s coins, he was unequivocal that he would fight it “tooth and nail”, while also doubting that Blackrock or Strategy would ever attempt something that stupid.

The second half turned into a conversation about Bitcoin media, which is where Cory’s Google background becomes relevant (he used to run sales strategy work for YouTube). His timeline: almost no Bitcoin signal before 2018, then Saifedean’s book, TFTC, Stephan Livera and What Bitcoin Did all arriving that year, and a solid five-year run of education cutting through the noise. The break, in his telling, was the January 2024 ETF launch, which came 4 to 6 years earlier than he expected and convinced a lot of people that the war was over and that the institutions would handle it from here.

The result has been two and a half years of fewer voices promoting real on-chain bitcoin and self custody, at exactly the moment when the top of the YouTube results turned into engagement-optimized slop. His silver lining is that the models scraping all of this were trained on the good content, so the answers aren’t terrible, they’re just no longer ours, which is an argument for making sure your transcripts exist and are indexable.

The best thing he said in that stretch came from his 2023 Pacific Bitcoin opening speech, and it’s a fact that anyone who has worked in video knows: more than 99% of views happen on new content, not on the archive. So if somebody discovered Bitcoin through your show, you have a responsibility to tell them everything, even if it’s the fourth time in seven years that you’re pointing at Bitcoin: Worse is Better, Stephan Livera’s episode 71 on Austrian economics, the free version of The Bullish Case for Bitcoin, Nathaniel Popper’s Digital Gold, Jonathan Bier’s The Blocksize War, or even Roger Ver’s Hijacking Bitcoin. We also gave credit to BTC Sessions for a decade of sticking to tutorials, and Cory clarified that Sovereign Sessions is a spin-off with multiple hosts rather than a replacement, plus a shout out to Brady, who has been hosting Swan Signal Live every Friday since 2020 after starting Citizen Bitcoin around the same time that I started this podcast.

We closed on Swan’s actual mechanics, because Cory insists you can argue with his opinions but not with his economic incentives: over 80% of the bitcoin ever bought through Swan is in self custody, the company has paid the network fee on every single withdrawal since inception, and it open sourced the method for extracting a thousand addresses from an xpub without exposing the xpub. Self custody is free, collaborative custody is 2 basis points a month, and delegated custody costs more on purpose. He’s also a believer in keeping brokerage and custody under separate roofs, the way Nasdaq and State Street are separate, because that’s where the incentive to mess with the ledger disappears.

For the people who want more, he recommended the Swan Canon learning modules (including a privacy rabbit hole curated by Matt Odell), mentioned the Bitcoin Season documentary about Swan’s basketball partnerships with Klutch Sports and the Cleveland Cavaliers, and reminded everyone that his Twitter DMs are a lost cause but his email works. And in the spirit of two people who supposedly shouldn’t get along, we did this again, for the third summer in a row.

Cory’s number for the giveaway was 85. There were three winners in the chat, so the $100 in non-KYC bitcoin got split into three chunks of$ 33.

This episode is sponsored by Sideshift.ai, Orange Rock, Cake Wallet, LayerTwo Labs, and Braiins Hashpower. Special thanks to all the sponsors for making this freely available to everyone on the internet!

Listen to Cory Klippsten on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts & more!

Time stamps:

00:01:17 Intro & sponsors: Cory Klippsten joins from London

00:01:59 Sequans: why the leveraged Bitcoin equity strategy didn’t scale

00:02:28 Empery, ProCap, Nakamoto, Semler & the two horses left

00:03:30 Shareholders, dilution & the semiconductor business

00:04:48 Relaunching Cafe Bitcoin after the Clubhouse era

00:05:48 The May news cycle: UK ID checks, Utah’s VPN ban, digital euro, LLM age verification

00:07:00 Bitcoin as the last bulwark against institutional momentum

00:07:57 The Battle for Monetary Independence & the intransigent minority

00:08:28 Grandfather Philip Klippsten, the USS Yorktown & the war journal

00:09:12 The race to avoid the war: making the citadel look formidable

00:10:41 How to actually contribute: tools, fees & self custody by default

00:11:29 Why Swan pays network fees on every withdrawal

00:12:28 50 Days for Freedom & the 0.5% buy fee

00:13:35 Cake Wallet giveaway: guess the number from 1 to 100

00:14:39 The admiral who stood still during the kamikaze attack

00:17:53 Don’t abdicate responsibility in a bear market

00:18:56 Chat question: how much was he paid to promote the treasury company?

00:20:04 Path dependency, stock prices & retail marketing

00:20:53 Private jets, blown-up bull market narratives & moving on

00:22:09 Two hard forks in August: BIP110 and Paul Sztorc’s Ecash

00:22:34 Who claims the airdrop: Bakkt, BitGo & Equity Trust decide

00:23:33 “First time I’ve heard about Drivechains in a year”

00:24:56 Six years since Taproot: builders who won’t wait a decade

00:26:21 The Bitcoin Cash chart argument

00:26:44 Remittances, stablecoins & the dollar’s network effect

00:27:49 GENIUS Act, banking charters & the disappearing ticker letters

00:28:42 Where stablecoins are exactly what you don’t want

00:29:25 Three S curves: store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account

00:30:33 The $15M development consortium: a pledge, not a fund

00:31:14 Quantum FUD & the penny stock pump connection

00:33:00 Watch Google’s security certificates, not the headlines

00:33:42 BIP360, Satoshi’s coins & fighting tooth and nail

00:34:51 Samourai, the retreat of privacy projects & corporate Bitcoin

00:35:51 Kash Patel on the conference stage & the biggest crypto conference

00:36:58 Who actually pays for Bitcoin conferences: Celsius, FTX & miner stock

00:38:45 Mastercard at LaBitConf & the fun versus purity trade-off

00:39:20 Pacific Bitcoin, BTC Prague & a US Bitcoin-only con in 2027

00:43:21 No Bitcoin signal before 2018: the ICO era & the big VC funds

00:43:56 Saifedean, TFTC, Livera & What Bitcoin Did

00:44:53 The January 2024 ETFs & the wind leaving everyone’s sails

00:46:05 Fighting the “institutions have it” pro-cyclicality

00:47:37 Podcasters pivoting to politics, peptides & self-hosted AI

00:49:11 Citizen Bitcoin, Swan Signal Live & Brady’s six years

00:50:18 Credit to BTC Sessions: Sovereign Sessions is a spin-off

00:51:15 Madbitcoins, Let’s Talk Bitcoin & Bitcoin Uncensored

00:52:04 Adam B. Levine: “I’m never going to look back”

00:53:15 Burnout, changing of the guard & pivoting to privacy

00:54:08 Why teaching the same intro topics still matters

00:55:25 AI slop, thumbnails & who wins the Bitcoin search results

00:57:29 Blackrock’s marketing is fine, the product is the problem

00:58:38 The celebrity documentary & feeling replaceable

00:59:04 “We need more Bitcoin podcasters”: the Pacific Bitcoin 23 speech

01:00:18 More than 99% of views happen on new content

01:00:44 The reading list: Worse is Better, SLP71, Bullish Case, Digital Gold, Blocksize War

01:02:51 Swan’s model: brokerage and custody under separate roofs

01:03:28 Pricing, liquidity & why Coinbase Pro isn’t cheaper

01:05:02 Why Swan never wanted to be your custodian

01:06:04 2 basis points for collaborative custody, free for self custody

01:08:14 Yan Pritzker, Inventing Bitcoin & the Swan rebrand

01:09:26 The Swan Canon & Odell’s privacy rabbit hole

01:10:19 Bitcoin Season: the basketball documentary

01:11:30 LLMs versus humans: workforce intelligence & private client reps

01:13:09 The number reveal, email instead of DMs & closing thoughts