Title: S17 E34: Cory Klippsten on Bitcoin Cafe, Swan & Big Bitcoin
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Cory Klippsten (CEO of Swan Bitcoin; former adviser to the Sequans BTC treasury)
Published: 2026-07-30 (recorded as a live conversation from London; Cafe Bitcoin / 50 Days for Freedom campaign era)
Duration: 1:15:33
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2026-07-30_s17_e34_cory_klippsten_on_bitcoin_cafe_swan_big_bitcoin.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2026-07-30_s17_e34_cory_klippsten_on_bitcoin_cafe_swan_big_bitcoin.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: the pipeline's local Whisper medium.en transcript (int16) with speaker diarization (Guest A -> Cory Klippsten). It was compared word by word against a full local small.en pass (int16, VAD, word timestamps), and every disagreement was reviewed. YouTube auto-captions could not be fetched (YouTube bot check), and no independent verbatim transcript of this episode exists in the local transcript collections under bitcoin-takeover-best-quotes, bitcoin-takeover-articles/transcripts or btctkvr-transcripts (only unrelated S15 E34/E36 material). Speaker turns were checked with a full-episode local speaker-embedding scan (two reference voices: Vlad, Cory). 82 doubtful stretches were re-transcribed locally from short audio clips with medium.en (int16). Fixes include: sponsors (Braiins Hashpower, LayerTwo Labs, SideShift.ai), Sequans / Empery / ProCap / Nakamoto / Semler Scientific / Strive / Strategy, "unencumbered Bitcoin NAV", "beholden to their shareholders", Swan vs "Swando", Cafe Bitcoin relaunch and The Battle for Monetary Independence (swan.com/battle) built around Philip Klippsten's WWII war journal, "natural path" (was "natural ass"), digital euro / ChatGPT / Anthropic, Bakkt and BitGo (Mike Belshe), BIP 300/301 and BIP 360, Satoshi's coins, Klutch Sports and the Cleveland Cavaliers (Bitcoin Season documentary), Swan Sovereign / Vault / Safe custody spectrum, "stats for your buck", Max Keiser, and Cory's closing "people like Vlad and I" (medium clips sometimes heard "Claude"). The short DM-number exchange at 00:13:51 was merged into Cory's turn ("No, don't check it. What I'm saying is I was going to send mine to you"). Names and jargon were checked against the title, the feed keywords/show notes, Vlad's long-form episode write-up, and the web (Swan Bitcoin Season PR: Klutch Sports, Cleveland Cavaliers, Full Surrender Films). Notes: Vlad and Cory both say "Cafe Bitcoin" / "Bitcoin Cafe"; Sequans is kept as spoken (Vlad tries the pronunciation three times). Cory's "I got to go — subbing in for wifey, kids here in a couple minutes" is the best local hearing of the wrap line. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: ...].
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[00:00:46] Vlad Costea: Hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is season 17, episode 34. We are live with Cory Klippsten, and this episode is sponsored by Cake Wallet, Braiins Hashpower, Orange Rock, LayerTwo Labs, and SideShift.ai. It's really good to have you, Cory. I know it's been an interesting year, and Bitcoin is quite different from what it was like a year ago when we last talked. And let me put this out there from the get-go. Like Sequans, or Sequans, or Sequans, whatever, the treasury company that you're advising, I think, sold all of their Bitcoin.

[00:01:25] It seems like this paper Bitcoin...

[00:01:27] Cory Klippsten: They still have, they still have a decent little chunk, but definitely did not successfully get to scale on a leverage Bitcoin equity strategy, which requires like 800 million to a billion dollars worth of unencumbered Bitcoin NAV. And that may have happened eventually, but it would have been a long slog and a lot of dilution for the shareholders to raise that outside capital. And obviously, there's something that you can't affect, which is the Bitcoin price itself. And that having gone down by half, you know, since October until the spring, made it a very difficult path.

[00:02:03] And they kind of found themselves in a similar position as Empery and I forget, ProCap was Pompliano's thing, and then, you know, Nakamoto, and really where Semler was as well before Semler combined with Strike. But there were there were those four or fives that had a decent chunk of money and decent chunk of Bitcoin in the U.S., but did not it scale to the point where you could actually lever up and do the thing that it's supposed to do. The only two horses in the race as far as leverage Bitcoin equities in the U.S.

[00:02:31] Are just Strive and Strategy. And that's it. And Strive is tiny and Strategy is huge. But unless you can lever up with, you know, and actually do the function of an LBE, which is basically providing leveraged Bitcoin exposure and frankly should be sold to institutions, which was the plan for Sequans, was not to go chase retail and make AI videos of hot girls on the beach retiring on preferred equity. You know, it just didn't work out. So glad if it worked out again, I tried. You know, so look, we definitely tried.

[00:03:07] The thesis is not wrong. There are lots of people that tried it. Most never even got off the ground. Sequans did get off the ground. I didn't get to scale. And, you know, I don't run the board. I don't have any influence over there beyond advising on Bitcoin Strategy and a little bit of marketing and some relationships on Wall Street, things like that. So did our best to help them. And, you know, I can't really fault Georges and the team for making the decisions that they did, because in the end, they're beholden to their shareholders.

[00:03:38] And, you know, again, with those two factors of not knowing when Bitcoin price might go up again and knowing that if they were going to raise a ton more outside capital to be able to get enough unencumbered Bitcoin NAV, that's not subject to covenants of invertible debt deals, basically. That would just be wildly dilutive to shareholders. And they weren't all on board with that because a lot of their shareholders actually really like the semiconductor business and their IoT business and they have good contracts and things like that.

[00:04:08] So, you know, disappointing. I wish it had taken off and worked, but I also understand why they made that decision.

[00:04:17] Vlad Costea: What about Swan, though? How is it going? I did see that recently you announced the relaunch of Bitcoin Cafe, which is a series of daily shows, conversations that you have with people. I think it started out on Clubhouse and you moved to Twitter.

[00:04:35] Cory Klippsten: Yeah. Yeah, we started Cafe Bitcoin beginning of 2021 after that was kind of the payday of social audio. And obviously the social audio scene basically moved over to Spaces on Twitter, which is good and bad. It's probably slightly better for the audience. It's probably slightly worse for the people on stage actually talking. That was a better speaker experience on Clubhouse. But yeah, we ran it for, I don't know, three or four years, probably 21, 22, 23 into 24, I think, and across Clubhouse and Twitter. And yeah, it just felt like this is the exact right time to bring it back.

[00:05:17] All of this basically came from a series of events and announcements that caught my attention in a big way in May. So in late May there was, I happened to be here in the UK on the day, that's where I am right now, I'm in London. I happened to be here on the day that they passed the social media ban for under 16s, which of course means that everybody 16 and over has to give the government their ID. And tie it to their social networks. So that was the first thing.

[00:05:46] Another day or two later, the state of Utah passed a VPN ban. Another day or two later, there was a big announcement about an accelerated timeline for rolling out the digital euro. And another day or two after that, it was age verification for using the major LLM tools in the US. So Claude and ChatGPT from Anthropic and OpenAI. So it's just this kind of march of really dystopian kind of encroach of leviathan, tyranny type news back to back to back to back that just looked really ugly.

[00:06:22] And I think for me, it just spurred a lot of just a mental state that felt a lot more like when I first really got into Bitcoin. It was really more like the Bitcoin is freedom money and Bitcoin is the last bulwark against tyranny. And it may be the only thing that can stop this kind of natural path that any institution tends to take of wanting to grow and wanting to grow and grow and grow. Government's the worst because they have the guns and they can tax us and steal our money.

[00:06:53] So it's like that's the worst institution that has institutional momentum to continue to grow unchecked. You have to check it. So it's just that's what this whole campaign that we launched and kind of the third leg of Swan's mission statement, which is The Battle for Monetary Independence, which follows in 2020 when we launched. That was 10 million Bitcoiners, the intransigent minority. A couple of years later, I wrote the Race to Avoid the War. And then this is kind of a super set of those and it was those things, but brings it all home in a bigger wrapper that is The Battle for Monetary Independence, which I highly recommend reading. Spend some time on it.

[00:07:30] Swan.com/battle. If you want to check that out.

[00:07:35] Vlad Costea: I'm looking at it right now. So it's swan.com/battle. Let's see if it has nice graphics like, oh, it's an article.

[00:07:49] Cory Klippsten: It's an X article.

[00:07:51] Vlad Costea: This is a war journal from — is this your grandfather? Yes. Philip Klippsten. Yeah.

[00:07:57] Cory Klippsten: Yep. That's my, my grandfather. We're very Germanic. So he was sent to the Pacific theater, uh, not allowed to fight on, on the European side. Um, and so basically the, the theme of the article is basically saying, you know, 250 years ago, that generation in the colonies, the, the, the war, right. I should say the work of their generation was political independence. And that was writing the declaration of independence and then launching into the revolutionary war. And I draw parallels between that and our generation now today, and that the great work of our generation is The Battle for Monetary Independence that we are trying to further Bitcoin adoption.

[00:08:41] We're trying to make sure that, you know, that we don't, again, this, this hearkens back to the, uh, the Race to Avoid the War framing where ideally we have a soft landing for the dollar and kind of the Western system and that governments kind of shrink naturally, uh, as Bitcoin rises. What I'd love not to happen is a dark period of 20 or 30 years where Bitcoin and Bitcoiners are basically under attack coordinated by the only entity that can actually coordinate some type of attack like that, which is the U S state department.

[00:09:12] Which again is why it's so important that people make the Bitcoin castle or the Bitcoin Citadel look so formidable through privacy tools and Noster and all of the Bitcoin development and just making sure they know that they can't stamp it out. And don't even try. So that's, that's the Race to Avoid the War is to basically get strong enough to a point that we never actually have to fight. So we run, run, run, run, run, and no matter what happens, you know, we have, you know, president Ocasio-Cortez in the U S and half of Europe turns like truly communist socialist.

[00:09:45] We would still be okay.

[00:09:48] Vlad Costea: I mean, in the article, it does also seem that this article is quite personal. So it's about your family history and you're tying this to American freedom. And the principles in which you believe. I want to ask you, how does Swan contribute to this battle for freedom and independence?

[00:10:10] Cory Klippsten: Yeah, I mean, we're we're an adoption focused firm, as you know, we've been we've been spending our own money and time on Bitcoin education since inception. We build useful tools like, you know, obviously we're the ones that invented being able to trustlessly extract a thousand addresses from an expo without exposing your expo. We open source that and gave it to everybody. And that's how people actually do their withdrawals from Swan without address reuse. We've always done things from an economic perspective, deliberately set up to support self-custody, which is why over 80% of Bitcoin ever purchased in Swan is in self-custody.

[00:10:48] So that means we've always paid the network withdrawal fees since inception for every single withdrawal that's ever been done from Swan. That's important. I think, you know, we've always had low transparent fees and super tight spreads, which is, you know, something that's not been common usually than a company in the U.S. We'll drop these to zero or something. They add a 200 basis point spread, which is what Strike did and what Catch-up did. So I think, you know, we we we put our money where our mouth is for this 50 days for freedom campaign over the summer.

[00:11:23] So it basically runs July 21st through September 8th. That's you mentioned bringing back Cafe Bitcoin. I'm doing it every weekday through the summer, basically up through Labor Day in the U.S. And throughout that entire period, our buy fee is actually 0.5%. So it's the cheapest way most stats for your buck by far of any way to buy Bitcoin in the U.S. Straight to self-custody, no network fees, half a percent. It's less than a Coinbase market order on the pro exchange. So if you haven't tried Swan, like I highly recommend it.

[00:11:57] We have seen a huge increase in volume since launching back on Tuesday, last week, so about six days ago. And just really trying to contribute that way and then obviously through a lot more on the education. And as we always do, like we try to encourage other people to do whatever it is that they want to do to contribute. And we're trying to coordinate that and match people up. And a lot of what Cafe Bitcoin does is find people and let people reach out and tell us what they're doing.

[00:12:25] And then give them an audience where they can talk about and find contributors and find people to help and collaborate. So whether it's an open source project or it's a new company that's doing something or somebody looking for a job or somebody hiring for a job. Or a new conference that needs to get the word out or a new book that came out. Whatever it is, we're just a good venue for coordinating that and helping people find each other and get our work done toward adoption.

[00:12:53] Vlad Costea: Well, that's really cool. Now, let me contribute to your battle by adding a $100 reward during the show. What I need from you, Cory, so non-KYC Bitcoin that they're going to receive straight to their wallet. What they need to do is install KYC wallet, which is a sponsor, and write a number in the chat from 1 to 100. And you, Cory, will have to write down or think if you don't have anything to write down a number from 1 to 100. Don't say it to me.

[00:13:24] Don't show it to the camera or whatever. We will reveal it towards the end of the episode and see who's going to win. Everyone who's listening to this has to guess the number. And only one number per person. If you spam the chat with numbers, I'm not going to count that.

[00:13:42] Cory Klippsten: Sounds good. Do you check your Twitter DMs during the show or no?

[00:13:48] Vlad Costea: I can check right now if you really want to.

[00:13:51] Cory Klippsten: No, don't check it. What I'm saying is I was going to send mine to you.

[00:13:58] Vlad Costea: Just make sure it's not 21 or 69 or 100 or 1 because these are the most common ones. Just pick something different.

[00:14:06] Cory Klippsten: Fair enough. Sounds good. That's funny. And then, yeah, look, it's really just a through line. I have been thinking a lot about both of my grandfathers fought in World War II in the Pacific. My maternal grandfather more in the South Pacific, kind of the southernmost islands more. And then my paternal grandfather was on the USS Yorktown. The second one, the first one got sunk at Midway. And then they named a boat that was about to launch in early 44, named it the Yorktown again. So he embarked on that and was on it throughout its entire year and a half plus mission to Japan.

[00:14:48] And, you know, actually landed in Japan and got to go on the mainland and the whole thing. And unsurprisingly, as kind of runs in the family on both sides, he was a communicator. So he was like the radar man and the guy collecting messages for the admiral on the observation deck and like spreading out his orders and making them go, that kind of thing. So telegraph, radio, et cetera. So I just he kept a journal every day throughout that entire time. Thank God about 15, 20 years ago, one of my cousins did a master's thesis and transcribed the entire thing.

[00:15:22] So I've had it in PDF for the last 15 years. And there are stories in it that are just really, really cool. And I think about those things, you know, when you get to a lot of history on the timeline and out there as you approach 250 years. It just got me thinking about his war journals and these things were coming into my head about freedom and how Bitcoin can help and ensure it. And it just seemed very natural as a conceit for the article to include three or four.

[00:15:55] I think there's four quotes from his journal that actually open each section of it. My favorite story of all from his war journal is is basically they were they were under attack. I think they shot down something like 13 enemy planes that day. This is my kamikazes and some some others just coming in and shootings and people were kind of scrambling and ducking is running behind walls and things like that. And my grandfather's instinct was to duck as well. So he kind of like hit the deck and he kind of looked around and realized the admiral was just standing there, you know, kind of upright, breathing calmly, watching all this chaos everywhere around him.

[00:16:37] And that that alone, just seeing one person stand up and just be chill was enough for my grandfather to just go and chill and stand next to him and just do his job amid the chaos. Like if a plane's going to hit you or shoot you, you're going to die, whether you're crouching and scrambling or standing there calmly. So it's that kind of calm in the storm. And we are not facing something remotely like that. So it is the loosest of analogies. But I think in a bear market with lots of infighting and lots of kind of vitriol the last couple of years, I think it is a really good time just to remember you can just stand up.

[00:17:16] You can just be calm and you can just keep on doing your job, you know, to the best of your ability and to advocate that responsibility just because it seems like not as fun as it used to be. You know, if you've benefited from Bitcoin, which any of us that have been in the space for a long time, we have in many, many ways, you know, personal and financial or whatever. You know, this is not the time to abdicate your responsibility. If you feel any responsibility, this is actually the time to act on it.

[00:17:48] It's much more fun in the bear market anyway. You actually have something to do with pulling out of the bear market more than just being a dummy that's rallying and wearing a bunch of Bitcoin gear when it's about 250K.

[00:18:04] Vlad Costea: I sort of agree. But I do think we should get into the topic. So no, no. Before that, I need to ask you a question from the chat. It's the only one that I actually got. And you can feel free to decline answering it. But for the sake of integrity and to show my viewers that I care about their questions, I'm going to ask it anyway. That Man Walks Zero says, can you ask him how much he was compensated to promote sequence? It was never disclosed. That's what he says.

[00:18:35] Cory Klippsten: So it was disclosed. We got a tiny little bit of stock invested like way, way later. I think we took possession of the stock in early 26. So we basically rode and I was very transparent about that at the time that we rode alongside shareholders and I was pitching it on Wall Street. And I just always believed that leverage Bitcoin equities ought to be marketed at institutions. And of course, I'm also a freedom advocate and people should be able to do what they want. So you're going to get some people, traders, professional investors jumping into that idea, that theme too.

[00:19:16] But I just never really liked a mass retail approach to marketing these things. And I do think that's where in as much as the theme has gone wrong over the last year, I think that's probably where most of the blame lies. It's probably on that decision to market it heavily to retail. So anyway, I don't know that there's another solution to that because again, these things are path dependent. And once you have a stock price and you have shareholders and you have like a duty to do what you can to make the stock price go up.

[00:19:50] This is when people make decisions that are in the interest of the stock price, which is not necessarily in the interest of the people buying the stock. And that's not just true of. Strategy. It's true of almost every company with a stock price. The other small component was we had a small cash retainer just to help with like marketing PR strategy, go to meetings, things like that. So that was like sub 20K a month or something like that. And that ended a while ago.

[00:20:21] Vlad Costea: Okay. I guess it's much less than what the Nakamoto guys were making. And now I'm taking a punch with David Bailey, who wanted to buy himself a private jet and join my show, I think in November and was like, you know, I never actually bought my private jet. I was like, it's fine, David. I never got my Supra either. We can complain right now. It's fine. We were wrong about our assumptions. Markets punished us. David Bailey is walking around with four bodyguards at conferences now. I wonder why.

[00:20:54] Anyway, I'm way past this point. Like, it's last year's bull market narrative, which blew up. Let's talk about Bitcoin maximalism. And you said something interesting like two minutes ago about being a freedom maximalist and not caring if people do what they want. We're going to have two hard forks, I think, next month in Bitcoin. Seems like the community has reached a point where we're going to have a hard fork. And we're on one hand, you're going to have the people who are obsessed with not having ordinals, wanting to have their own fork.

[00:21:31] And then you have some builders who have their own fork. What do you think about this?

[00:21:37] Cory Klippsten: What's the other one? Is that Paul's thing? Three hundred?

[00:21:42] Vlad Costea: Yeah. 110 and 300.

[00:21:46] Cory Klippsten: Yeah, 300. Does 301 come with that as well? Is it like together? I'm not super close to drivechain stuff.

[00:21:53] Vlad Costea: I'm actually curious if Swan is going to give people airdrops or is going to sell them and add

[00:22:00] Cory Klippsten: The money to the treasury. It's not it's not our decision, first of all. I mean, remember, first of all, the vast majority of coins ever purchased through Swan are in the custody of our clients. And then of what's left, about a third of that is in custody with Equity Trust, which is our retirement accounts. So that's that's IRAs, Roth and traditional in the U.S. And then about two thirds of it is with Bakkt and BitGo. So Bakkt and BitGo, you know, regulated custodians, public companies, OCC chartered firms.

[00:22:35] It'll really be up to them. So you got to ask, you know, and if I cared that much, I guess I would spend some time asking Mike Belshe and Akshay Naheta what they planned to do. It just doesn't feel like it's really worth my time yet to care. And neither of them seem to be actually gathering much economic steam so far. It's literally the first time I've heard anything about drivechains in probably like a year. I had no idea that fork was coming.

[00:23:11] Vlad Costea: Oh, really? It was announced like three months ago or something. Yeah.

[00:23:17] Cory Klippsten: Yeah. I mean, I may have seen it and just not realized that it was actually real. It was actually forking off. Yeah. I mean, that I just I don't really care. Like he wants a little test net to try some things and like whatever. It's very clearly going to be a fork. And I don't think he believes in any way that it's going to. I mean, just going back to like when I used to pay more attention to Paul and actually chat back and forth with him on Telegram long ago, tried to run drivechains.

[00:23:43] So I'm just purely speculating here and I'm sure you know better. But I'm assuming he just wants to be able to test out a bunch of shit and kind of like prove out or try out or experiment on some things essentially on a test net. And it'll have some economics with it. I'm sure wherever it launches, it'll dwindle versus Bitcoin price over the long run. But it doesn't mean you can't trade it, speculate it, pump and dump it, whatever. They were able to pump the hell out of Zcash with a coordinated Silicon Valley pump last year.

[00:24:19] So maybe you can pump his storage plan.

[00:24:24] Vlad Costea: Well, yeah, but I do think that this is a consequence of Bitcoin not adding any more upgrades over the last how long has it been, six years since Taproot. And some people are getting tired of the situation where they have stuff that's ready to ship, but they cannot have it. So they can either wait for a decade hoping that they're going to get it or they can try to prove it right now. And if they prove it right now, this creates some monetary inflation, which means that the market is going to have more versions of Bitcoin.

[00:24:56] And of course, the buyers will be maybe not splits, but there will be sort of a divide there or percentage of the buyers will buy the Luke coin or buy the Paul coin. Empirically it has not happened historically, though. And if we were in a situation where Bitcoin was really winning, it would trend toward zero. And it really makes you wonder, like, what are we doing? Are we still cypherpunks or we just want to let BlackRock be in control? So you're saying that you would want people to buy,

[00:25:38] Cory Klippsten: You want people to buy this chart, like that's the chart that you want people to buy? Well,

[00:25:49] Vlad Costea: First of all, that's nobody's going to buy at the all time high. That was a long time ago. Certainly their hashrate went up. They have new higher points. So here's

[00:25:58] Cory Klippsten: The here's the that's year to date. Here's that. That's year to date. Bitcoin cash versus Bitcoin. Like nobody cares about cash. It's a little test net or whatever. People

[00:26:09] Vlad Costea: Around the world, we don't care about savings. They just want to send money from ATB. And in that 10 minute time frame when it's going to happen, they don't care about where the price is going. They just want to go into dollars. This used to be a popular use case for Bitcoin remittances. It's not so popular anymore.

[00:26:27] Cory Klippsten: That's the rise of stablecoins, which is basically just the dollar's monetary network effect rising its head. And it's going to it's going to keep on fighting on the turf wherever transactions happen, wherever money gets transmitted. If somebody else and some other currency pioneers at first, you can bet that the dollar, somebody will try to figure out how to jam the dollar in there instead. And that's what's happened with crypto is, you know, it was there was money being transferred. And of course, there's this natural incentive for the Fed and the Treasury and the State Department and the U.S.

[00:27:04] And the Western system generally, because all of the Western system essentially pegged to the dollar and underpins like treasuries and the debt is ballooning and we need to roll these treasuries to be able to to sell more of them. Otherwise, everything collapses. They're going to find ways to jam dollars in there. And that's what Circle and Tether are about. And now there's hundreds and hundreds of more stablecoins and the extra letter before or after USD is disappearing and all the apps post-GENIUS because they're regulated and they're able to just USD balances with like stablecoins in the fine print instead of all these different branded stablecoins.

[00:27:40] And that's precisely why they are giving these OCC banking charters to all the crypto firms, including like Ripple. And I'm sure Binance will get one eventually, which was a big part of pardoning CZ, et cetera, because the entire Western fintech and Wall Street and banking system is being turned into very aggressive marketers of dollars. And that's that's where the that's where the remittance volume has gotten has gone to dollars.

[00:28:11] Vlad Costea: Right. But it's not the entire volume, because if you think about it, let's say you have someone from South Korea wanting to send money to his cousin from North Korea, or you have someone from Ukraine wanting to send money to a friend from Russia. You have all of these situations where stablecoins are sensible and not the thing that you want to use for that particular use case. And they're going to look for something which is sort of reliable, which means that there is good security to it and there are low chances of confiscation.

[00:28:41] And are they going to use Bitcoin for this? I'm not sure if they will, if we keep promoting it as just something that you save as opposed as something that you use for freedom.

[00:28:52] Cory Klippsten: Yeah, well, you and I touched on this two summers ago and probably last summer and we'll touch on it again. I just think we're very early in the adoption of Bitcoin as money and we're still early in the adoption of Bitcoin as a store of value. And if visually you can think of three S curves from left to right with like a 15 to 25 year lag between them. I think we are still at the inflection point, just coming out of the flat part of the curve and heading up the steep part of Bitcoin as a store of value.

[00:29:26] So it's still early in store of value and not until you're somewhere near the top of that, that steep part of the S curve and it's kind of an accepted store of value, widely used by lots of people throughout the Western system. Will you really see it take off as a medium of exchange? And similarly, not until it's a widely used medium of exchange will it charge up the S curve on unit of account. But I do think by the end of the century, you know, 2080, 2090, something like that, Bitcoin will be all three functions of money for most people around the world.

[00:30:01] Vlad Costea: I mean, I do look forward to that because after I saw the news about the consortium, I think that's the word that we had to learn last week about this group of companies that together they sort of searched for change behind our couches and found 15 million dollars. And then they said, well, we're going to steward Bitcoin development for the next few years with this money. I'm not even sure what that means, but it seems like the only upgrades to which they agree is the quantum one.

[00:30:31] And the stake of the quantum upgrade is that they want to freeze Satoshi's coins so that they will have a lower supply that's available on the market.

[00:30:42] Cory Klippsten: So, obviously, I'm super skeptical of initiatives like this and try to dig in. So, first of all, my understanding is that regardless of what they call it, it's actually more of like a pledge.

[00:31:03] First, a week before, and each of the companies controls unilaterally what they actually decide to spend money on and where they want to put the funding for the development. So it's a little bit more, there's nobody that, there's no single committee or person that decides what they're spending money on and they don't hand the money over to anyone. So in that respect, if you think about the economic setup and the incentive of what it is, I mean, some of these companies will just waste the money. And you can probably look at the names and ask which ones will probably just waste the money.

[00:31:37] And some of them will probably try to do something related to quantum proofing. I think it's really just performative. I think that stuff is already being done and is already pretty well understood and you don't have to worry about this stuff anytime soon. Most of the quantum FUD was basically just blockchain crypto people seeing how successful and pumping and dumping quantum penny stocks, some shady operators were in the U.S. and Europe early in 2025, like the first half of last year. And they were like, oh, well, maybe we can raise some some L.T.

[00:32:08] Money for our funds and raise some money for Singapore portfolio companies if we just fund the shit out of Bitcoin with quantum. And they did. They successfully put it into the narrative. I do think it kind of kneecaps, the bear market was fucked anyway after October 10th and the big blow up in the offshore exchanges and that massive deleveraging. But I do think the quantum FUD made it pretty certain there wasn't going to be a bounce. That said, you know, every cloud has a silver lining. And, you know, as much as I think the intentions and the incentives of the people that pushed quantum FUD were nefarious.

[00:32:50] It's also true that there's nothing wrong with having a few more people interested in thinking through the game theory of how you upgrade and what that'll look like and what the different potential solutions are and spending more time reaching out to, like, Google and Microsoft in different labs and actually understanding what the real threats of quantum are. And, you know, you don't have to worry about any of this until, like, Google upgrades their security certificate. That's when you'll know that they actually think quantum is coming sometime soon.

[00:33:19] Until then, you're just full of shit. So I don't mind that at all. I'm very much in the camp of not touching Satoshi's coins. I do not think we should ever do that. I think BIP 360 is retarded. I don't even think Jameson probably believes that. He probably just wrote it so that somebody was going to write it eventually and might as well have his name on it. But I think that's stupid. And I don't think that there's a uniform view across all of those companies, not to mention was it nine companies.

[00:33:47] There's no way that all of the nine people that are technically in charge of this at each of those companies actually understand the issues. There's no way there's like a unified view of like what they're planning to do with that. That is a dumb risk. And it would be really stupid if, like, you know, BlackRock strategy coin decided to try to confiscate Satoshi's coins and do like tail emission or some dumb shit like that. So I will fight tooth and nail against an idiotic move like that.

[00:34:16] But I also don't think it's going to happen.

[00:34:19] Vlad Costea: Well, I don't think they need to do any of that. I just think that they will try to control the narrative, which means that they will be able to pump and dump whenever they want so that they can make more U.S. dollars. I think in the end, that's what it comes down to. And unfortunately, this means that whatever is happening, that is cypherpunk is going to be more ignored or possibly get discouraged. We've already seen two years ago, I think that was sort of the day when Bitcoin died, when the samurai developers got arrested.

[00:34:55] It was very unfortunate. And then you saw all the privacy projects just go dark, disappear, or if you still want to use something, I think it's very grassroots and it doesn't have much volume. And it's really unfortunate. It just became more corporate. And if you saw this year's Bitcoin conference and where was it?

[00:35:19] Cory Klippsten: Are you talking about, like, the Bitcoin Magazine crypto conference, the Vegas one? The Vegas one, yeah. That's like, if you look at it, it's the biggest crypto conference now. It's even bigger than consensus among crypto conferences.

[00:35:33] Vlad Costea: Well, yeah, I think it has been since 2021 when they launched, they did their event in Miami, which was the only one during the pandemic and everyone went there. But my point is that we had the CIA director on the stage of a Bitcoin conference telling us about the virtues of open source software. Like, yeah, it doesn't make its much of a revolution at this point.

[00:35:56] Cory Klippsten: I think it was the FBI guy, right? Crash Patel. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Look, you and I are in the same camp of thinking, you know, I mean, BMAG has always made its money by selling affinity to Bitcoin. Yeah, I mean, well, but you think about it, like, of course, there's not that much money, sponsor money for Bitcoin conferences. I mean, really, it was just a little window there of like three or four years, but basically, Bitcoin miners could sponsor it a little bit because they were selling their stock.

[00:36:34] They don't have customers, the Bitcoin network is their customer. So really, if you see, you know, a miner stock ticker sponsoring something, that's all they're doing is recruiting stock buyers. And that floated a few conferences for a while. But otherwise, these things have to be pretty inexpensive, you know, or just have to rely on ticket sales. You know, you actually really have to know what you're doing to deliver money and actually make money on ticket sales without a lot of sponsors. And the other thing, and I was, you know, throw a bone to the BMAG folks, like, there would always be a big tent Bitcoin conference, whether it was them or somebody else, somebody was going to do it.

[00:37:15] And you know how much I dislike that thing and how I refuse to go for years and years and years and years. I didn't go to one since 2019 until last year. And I never even went in the show last year or this year. I just went to Vegas for meetings because it's all basically sponsored by crypto. This is where Celsius was like the main sponsor in 2021 and FTX was the main sponsor in 2022. And it's always been that way, 98% sponsored by shitcoins. That said, if it wasn't then, it would be somebody else and it would probably be something like Consensus, which is relatively dead now because Silbert ran out of ways to exist and steal, for the most part, other than GBTC, which is still drifting and stealing against all their clients that are stuck there.

[00:38:02] But, you know, I think it would be somebody else and I'm not sure that I'd be willing to roll the dice because as much as their opportunity is sticking,

[00:38:10] Vlad Costea: As much as I think they're going to be able to roll the dice. To be honest, like that's the place to go. MasterCard, Bank of America, you know, you go to the bankers.

[00:38:18] Cory Klippsten: They would throw a big Bitcoin conference or you're saying that would be the next set of sponsors for something like that?

[00:38:22] Vlad Costea: Oh, yeah. I mean, I've seen it in Latin America. There's LaBitConf, which is like the Lollapalooza of Bitcoin conferences. It's like a festival. You go there and you see MasterCard being a sponsor and you're like, where the hell am I here? But at the same time, it's fun. So it's conflicting. Feels like, OK, on one hand, it feels morally wrong, but then it's so much fun. You don't think about it too much.

[00:38:48] Cory Klippsten: That's that's kind of the tradeoff, I guess, you know, so I don't I do miss Pacific Bitcoin and it was a relatively large Bitcoin only conference. And I do think that's special. But I think that people that really seek that out have been going to Prague the last couple of years, including from America, which is pretty cool. And it does sound like somebody is attempting one in the States again in twenty twenty seven. That's basically in the kind of Bitcoin only but decent size, you know, a couple of thousand people plus kind of thing.

[00:39:22] So hopefully they'll be successful. I love that type of conference. It is very hard to do it profitably. It was basically a marketing expense in the end for Swan to carry that conference for a couple of years, which is why we don't do it anymore. That said, if we continue to grow and hit the kind of size I hope that we do in the next few years, like I would love to bring it back.

[00:39:47] Vlad Costea: Oh, yeah, I look forward to the new Pacific Bitcoin before we started this call, when we were still doing this microphone check, we had a very interesting conversation about content creators in Bitcoin and the fact that many of them are pivoting to AI or something else. I feel like this is a very interesting topic and we got to talk about that. But before that, let me plug my sponsors so I get this out of the way and we can have a free flowing conversation. Cake wallet, they're the ones giving away $100 in non-KYC Bitcoin right now.

[00:40:20] Write your numbers in the chat. I see that I got quite a few messages over the last 20 minutes. Download the wallet. They have silent payments and they also have pay joins for Bitcoin and Tor. And it's pretty cool non-custodial stuff. You can even buy debit cards or gift cards or whatever directly from the app. Check it out. There is also brains hash power, which is a service that helps you rent hash power. So if you want to support one of the forks that will be launching next month or 51 percent attack it or whatever, you can rent hash power from brains.

[00:40:57] Or if you want to mine Bitcoin like a lottery ticket, you can also do that. I think for like $100 you can get a thousand Bitaxes worth of hashrate for one day, which isn't that bad. When you think about it, it's much cheaper than buying the hardware and running it at home. Check it out. It's hashpower.brains.com Orange Rock is a place where you can trade without any limits and without KYC. It's really cool. They have a lot of trading pairs with stable coins and other coins and whatever it is that you want to trade.

[00:41:34] The good part about it is that you can just download an app. It's available on iOS right now and it's also coming out on Android and desktop soon. And you can even gamble, which means use leverage up to 20 X, which I don't recommend. Don't gamble your money. But if you really think you know what you're doing and you think you're smarter than me, go ahead. Lose your money, whatever. OrangeRock.com Sideshift is the place where you swap your stable coins for money that cannot be taken away from you.

[00:42:04] So if someone pays you in that CBDC wannabe, you can just not use gas tokens or touch Tron or salon or whatever. You put your bitcoin address into Sideshift, then you send the stable coin address to the person wanting to pay you. There's going to be a swap in the middle and you receive bitcoin directly to your wallet. Check it out. It's SideShift.ai. And last but not least, LayerTwo Labs. They're launching the drivechain and it seems like they're going to do a hard fork next month.

[00:42:35] For more details, check out ecash.com, which is the domain that they bought, and that's going to be the name of the new bitcoin hard fork. Okay, Cory, let's talk about bitcoin content now.

[00:42:49] Cory Klippsten: Let's talk about it. So what I was kind of just laying out is, you know, pre 2018, I don't think there was a lot of bitcoin signal. It was basically crypto, crypto, crypto. The ICO era saw some of the best known venture firms in the US, like literally, you know, three of the top five in Sequoia and Andreessen and the Union Square Ventures go whole hog into crypto, crypto tokens, friction tokens, network marketplace tokens, all this kind of stuff, right? And there just wasn't very much bitcoin signal.

[00:43:24] It wasn't until basically 2018. I think Safespot came out in like March and then I think TFTC and Lavera both launched that summer. I know there's longer standing bitcoin podcasts, but they were kind of small and didn't fit out of a mass market. And I think there was like a really good era of strong bitcoin signal kind of cutting through the noise. And do you think that Swan was a big part of that? I was part of that. And then I think it was just the launch of the ETFs coming so much earlier than I thought they would.

[00:43:59] They launched in the US in January of 2024. And that was like, you know, four to six years earlier than I thought that we would actually get Bitcoin ETFs. And I think a lot of people, it just kind of took the wind out of their sails to some degree. And they were like, okay, well, I guess the battle versus, you know, the seven year Bitcoin versus crypto war is basically over. We won. Bitcoin's 100k-ish. And, you know, the institutions have it now, right? And all the CNBC talking heads are these big Wall Street guys and like, what impact can I have if I have a podcast with like, you know, 30,000 weekly downloads or something like that?

[00:44:36] And these things are pro-cyclical. So there's already sort of retail adoption at the top of it and institutional adoption going into paper Bitcoin and the ETFs instead of real on-chain Bitcoin. And then that was sort of dissuading people from being loud about self-custody and the power of real on-chain Bitcoin in their control. And then there was less of it. And now it's been two and a half years of continued abdication of responsibility to promote real on-chain Bitcoin and the power of self-custody.

[00:45:11] And that's what I was kind of waking up to in a big way. And the freedom encroachments of multiple governments kind of at the same time in May is kind of what woke me up and spurred me to really want to take up the banner again in a big way. It actually put my own personal time into educational media again in a big way, which is what I've been planning and getting moving and now have relaunched. And so, yeah, that's really what I was kind of getting at.

[00:45:44] I think this is a great time to really try to stop that negative pro-cyclicality of the institutions have it. I'm not interested. I'm not going to recruit new people. No new people come in. The institutions have it. It's just kind of like this this corporate coin bullshit that I think you actually have to fight it against. And if you do it with other people and friends and we all kind of are doing it at the same time, then I think it becomes more fun and we will start to have more impact.

[00:46:15] We've got a nice influx of new people that we've never seen the names of over the last week since we got fees in half and kind of launched the new educational initiatives and the 50 days for freedom is what we're calling it this summer. So I encourage other companies and other educators to kind of do the same thing. And if you were not spending much time prepping for podcasts and weren't getting big guests, put some time into it and revamp your show. I'm not talking about you, but there's a lot of people that have just been kind of not doing many shows or have kind of quit, like come back.

[00:46:48] And if you moved off Bitcoin for a couple of years and started talking about fitness and selling brain powders and stuff like that, do some fucking Bitcoin shows again. Peptide, that's where it's at. It's all about GLP. How about BTC? Come on.

[00:47:05] Vlad Costea: I do see a tendency of Bitcoin podcasters to try to blend into this conservative American crowd, which means that they're trying to get audience from Tucker Carlson or from Alex Jones or Ben Shapiro or whatever. So they're trying to talk about politics. They're trying to talk about Christianity and perspectives on culture, but also add Bitcoin to it. So maybe that this is sort of their way of creating mass adoption. They're trying to get these people to hear what they already like to hear, but also get something new on top of it.

[00:47:44] So that's what I see from Marty Bent, for example. His tales from the Crypt show is like that. I did see that, for example, Ben Perrin, I think is his last name, BTC Sessions, has become Sovereign Sessions. And now he's into creating self-hosted cloud services and self-hosted A.I. and also fitness advice. So I don't know. It feels a bit weird, but I don't blame him because I haven't seen much Bitcoin hardware launching lately. It seems like, if anything, there is a consolidation where there is less of it, but only the strong companies are surviving this market.

[00:48:23] And I see a lot of guys. I remember you're right about 2018. There was like a renaissance of content at the time. Everyone was launching a podcast. I did that too later in the year. I actually released my first episode in 2019, but I remember... Peter launched what Bitcoin did launch in 2018 as well. Yeah. And now he's doing the Peter McCormack show or whatever to talk politics. So I do see that there is a tendency to try to blend into the mainstream. I think that there's a lot of value in trying to stick around.

[00:48:56] Like right now, when I started, I think I started around the same time as Brady, the BTC Citizen Bitcoin. We started our shows around the same time and we had sort of different paths. Like I kept going and he sort of blended his show into the Swan podcast. And then he's he's been hosting.

[00:49:24] Cory Klippsten: Yeah. Well, he was doing like he was doing two or three shows a week. That's how I met him is because I was a guest on on Citizen Bitcoin. It was an awesome show. If you want to go back and find the lead, I wouldn't be surprised if he relaunches it at some point and just kind of picks it up as a passion project. But yeah, I mean, he's been the main host of Swan Signal Live on Fridays since 2020 now. So it's over six years of doing a weekly show for Swan.

[00:49:51] That had a very similar format to what he was doing on a Citizen Bitcoin. But yeah, it's he's one of the best. And that's that's interesting that you guys started at the same time. By the way, shout out to BTCsection's Ben because he has done an amazing job. And, you know, to have had this kind of longevity with such a focus on the actual tools and like the code and tutorials for all this time where like you've noted so many other people at Fennekron for like the hot button issues at the moment and tried to blend in the macro or politics or whatever.

[00:50:25] And he's really stuck to it. Just so you know, Sovereign Sessions is like a split off show. So it didn't replace it. BTC Sessions continues and he has multiple hosts now. And he's kind of doing the, you know, kind of media network type of vibe. So there's multiple shows.

[00:50:42] Vlad Costea: Oh, good for him. I'm happy that he's expanding. I wanted to note that even before 2018, we had MadBitcoins and we had the Let's Talk Bitcoin network by Adam B. Levine. And there was also Bitcoin Uncensored, which I think was like the peak of Bitcoin memes and humor and maybe Bitcoin Car Talk. That was also around. And it was funny in its own way. It's weird. There's

[00:51:08] Cory Klippsten: Also Bitcoin And was around back then. It's still around. It's still around, but I'm pointing out. David Zennett or something. Yep. He's still doing it. Yeah, that was older than before I got into the space. I did listen to the LTV all the time when I first got into Bitcoin. That was one of the places that I learned.

[00:51:32] Vlad Costea: The funny part is that I think two days ago I interacted with the creator of Let's Talk Bitcoin, Adam B. Levine. And I've asked him if he wants to join my podcast to talk about podcasting and how the landscape has changed. And he was like, I'm never going to look back. I moved on. And I think a lot of these guys who are podcasting 10 years ago are kind of the same. I think part of the problem is that they got so rich they don't care anymore.

[00:51:59] They're like, yeah, whatever. I've learned everything there was to learn. I interviewed all the people that I wanted. Now I'm a successful businessman or whatever. I'm not going to waste my time with this. So maybe that this is part of the problem. But I also see that in this space there is a very fast changing of the guards. I see that every couple of cycles new faces emerge and they ask the same questions and they go through the same process. And if you stick around for too long, you're going to feel like you're sort of alone or getting lonelier as your audience isn't so increasing.

[00:52:32] It's actually the same people who started with you in the beginning and maybe some others who are discovering along the way. But you don't get too many newbies because you're not making content for newbies anymore. You've moved to a point where maybe your audience is different, but also that audience already knows everything that they want to know. It's kind of interesting. My pivot has been towards more privacy topics, which I really enjoy. And I've always been a privacy advocate. When I got into Bitcoin, I was already an Internet privacy guy.

[00:53:05] And I guess I had the wrong assumptions about how Bitcoin works. But anyway, I do see that some people get burned out and they leave the content space. And it's unfortunate because the knowledge that they get over time is very valuable and it could be shared. And I also think that many of these guys who are very passionate about BIP110 could benefit from the experience of those who have been around for a longer time and have seen stuff like this happen before.

[00:53:35] Cory Klippsten: So a couple of things that brings to mind. I'll do the second one first. There are some people that really enjoy teaching, let's call it like intro topics or the Bitcoin canon kind of the things that are important, that are evergreen. All the best of Bitcoin knowledge and subtopics and supporting areas like whether it's cryptography or macro or a little bit of finance, Austrian economics, things like that. I happen to be one of those people that just enjoys seeing other people kind of light up and get things and start down the rabbit hole.

[00:54:14] And I love helping to light that spark where they turn into an autodidact and start doing their own research. And so much of what we try to do at Swan is just try to meet people where they're at and just give them lots of different ways to attach to Bitcoin and get started. Nobody can do it for you. Eventually, you have to be the one that's direct from your learning path. We just try to find as many different ways and many different voices to help people do that.

[00:54:36] So that's kind of the first thing. And I think we also have the financial incentive to do that, which is great because we make money when people get into Bitcoin, they get into Bitcoin through us. And it's close to the goal with the education that helps you buy more because you gain conviction and you should buy what you know. So the more you know, the more you buy. So that all makes sense and is easier for us to do maybe than if we were purely a media company.

[00:55:03] There's more of an incentive to do it that way. The second thing I would say, and we did talk about this in the free show, is the rise of how easy it is to make content with all the tools and then obviously accelerated found in the last year by AI. There's just so much more Bitcoin-inflected content that the price could create. You know, good enough or to a noob would seem like it's there. I mean, I used to search just Bitcoin. I used to search Bitcoin on YouTube and just see what would show up.

[00:55:33] And, you know, I would, you know, read like two Swan videos in the first 10 and, you know, fix in the first 25 and then kind of chart it like that. And I would see all our buddies, you know, all the people, all the Bitcoin educators would be able top 10, top 30, something like that as you scroll through the screens. It's just nowhere now. It's just slop. It's just, you know, content creators, you know, these finfluencers or whatever, and they're better at YouTube and they're good at algorithms and they're good at thumbnails.

[00:56:00] And, you know, it's not just they're making videos about trading and Bitcoin and SpaceX and whatever. And, you know, the Bitcoin videos way outperform the native Bitcoin creators that actually give a shit about Bitcoin. So, again, the signal is low. The good thing is the AIs that draft their content are all fed by our content. And so it's actually not bad. It's just not us. And that's an interesting pill to swallow is like the educational content that's basically AI slop is not that bad. It's not full of lies for the most part anyway.

[00:56:39] And that's even true of most of the marketing out of, you know, Fidelity and BlackRock. Like it's pretty decent Bitcoin marketing. You know, it's basically what Cash App has been putting out for years is pretty much what the top 10 thing you'll see from BlackRock marketing about this point is pretty close. They just sell an inferior product that's needed to market against like real Bitcoin versus paper IOU. I don't mind that as a top of funnel for us selling real blockchain Bitcoin. So I think it's just, you know, it's never on a percentage basis probably have impacts that we did in 2020, 21, 22, 23.

[00:57:21] But that's part of what happens in any movement. It grows and gains adoption. By definition, there are going to be lots more voices in it. And there's going to be a financial incentive for other people to promote it too. And are we going to complain about that or are we just going to adjust to it and then get back to the business of impacting where we can. And making sure that the algorithms that, you know, go and crawl content see our signal, you know, and then that's what that's what the AIs pick up going forward.

[00:57:55] Right. So just make sure that you're transcripted your shows and make sure they're seated in the right places. And, you know, it's what the machines spread our words to.

[00:58:05] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I remember before AI, there was this documentary that David Bailey did called Things God for Bitcoin or something where he got a bunch of celebrities to read the script, which is very much like a Bitcoin podcast. And I remember seeing the trailer for that and I was like, now I'm useless because these guys have more influence and they're saying the exact same message that I'm saying. So why am I even here?

[00:58:35] Cory Klippsten: So this is another one. This is interesting. This ended up being my opening speech at Bitcoin 23, which was we need more Bitcoin podcasters. And where that came from was my cousin, who's a much more famous Klippsten than myself in Los Angeles, having grown up there and kind of knows everybody. He would come to Swan Salons, our private events for our private clients whenever they were in L.A. or nearby. And I remember in early 23, there was one where I don't know what I was just like kind of a little low energy or just felt like the content was a little bit repetitive.

[00:59:16] And, you know, I think I hosted a panel and, you know, I said a few things and I felt I felt. I felt drained a little bit because it felt like all of the things that I had said were something that somebody else had said before. And that didn't feel particularly insightful. It had the complete opposite reaction for new people, like our new clients and friends that they had brought. And my cousin, who, you know, was getting into Bitcoin, thought that it was all fantastic and loved and gear it, even though I felt like I was just repeating things that I heard other people saying.

[00:59:50] And, you know, what he told me is something that I should know, because I used to work with Google and just to hand out a sale strategy for YouTube and like everybody knows. We've known this for 15, 20 years that more than 99 percent of news happened on new content, not library content, not the archives. And so if you are the voice that somebody is choosing to learn about Bitcoin through, like if you have somebody that watches your show or listens to your show religiously, you actually have a responsibility to tell them everything about Bitcoin.

[01:00:20] And I think that's that's what I'm trying to remember is like it may it may be the you know, I might post something tomorrow and it might be the fourth time in the last seven years that I've told people about, you know, Bitcoin is worse, is better from 2011 by Warren's, you know. But like the people that follow me now and that started following me since 2024 haven't seen it and they don't know about it, you know, or they may not know about how good. Or maybe they don't know about the book by Stefan Lavera's episode 71, you know, Intro to Bitcoin, Austrian Economic Thought, you know, or they maybe think that Bullish Face for Bitcoin is only a book and they don't want to buy the hardcover, but they don't realize the article is still on Medium for free, you know, so that you can just kind of point them to these things.

[01:01:03] Or maybe they don't know about Digital Gold, the book by Nathaniel Popper in 2014 that's actually pretty damn good, you know. And it's interesting as kind of a historical artifact to look at that or read the block size for it. Or read, you know, a book by Nathaniel Popper in 2014 that's actually pretty damn good, you know. Read the losing side of history, you know, fucking hey, pick up the Roger book and see how he saw things from his side, you know, losing the block size war and going down the big cash path.

[01:01:29] Nothing wrong with that. So I think that's that's a really interesting kind of call to arms for an educator that cares about Bitcoin and freedom and believes that number of people actually matters, not just not just dollar volume from institutions. I certainly believe that this is the best rule that we've ever had for securing human freedom. And so that motivates me. That motivates me. And that's kind of the rallying cry of this, you know, battle from Ontario independence, of which the opening salvo is 50 days for freedom over the summer and us dropping our fees and running Cafe Bitcoin again and all these things.

[01:02:06] It was it was really just about number of people go up and I think the rest I think that's the leading indicator and everything else all ours.

[01:02:19] Vlad Costea: That sounds cool. I've always been fascinated with the way that Swan decided to introduce itself and sell Bitcoin to customers because you're not directly like Coinbase or Kraken or whatever. You are working with a custodian and you are basically reselling. But at the same time, you've got customers to like your interface, to humanly connect with the team and like the fact that you are Bitcoin only and stuff like this one. It's possible that maybe if they had a Coinbase pro account, they could get a better rate for purchasing Bitcoin.

[01:02:56] Cory Klippsten: Well, not a better not a better rate. So we are always at or below the market price for Coinbase. And we check that constantly and now our fees are less than market order on Coinbase pro. So you can't get Bitcoin cheaper in the USA than you can with Swan. That's really not an excuse for anybody anymore. The other thing that you should know is like if you are if somebody places a large order on Coinbase, someone matches that, the coins aren't necessarily sitting there on the exchange.

[01:03:28] You know, they may they may move those or they have different relationships through Coinbase Prime where they can instantly pull that liquidity on. And this is where, you know, the Sesamahanas of the world and jump trading and, you know, every hedge fund, they actually have instant liquidity that they can provide to any exchange wherever orders exist. You kind of have the world's liquidity at your fingertips these days through any of these guys. And that's exactly what we're funding to. So we're plugged into the same tools where, you know, it's just it's OTC that's on exchanges.

[01:04:01] And so if somebody enters a large buy on Swan, the coin source is the same as who's providing the coins on Swan, Vaser, Kraken or anybody else. It's just there's just all these traders plugged into API tools that connect across everything. That's kind of in this no matter as far as custody. You know, when I came in, my education in 17, 18, 19, it was just all about exchanges blowing up and stealing people's coins. And it seemed like the only thing you want to do was have possession of the coins for the least amount of time possible and get people into self-custody.

[01:04:40] So Swan was always architected to buy the Bitcoin and take it into self-custody. And that's why we always picked up network theories on the withdrawals and built auto withdrawals and built the Xbox tool so that we could do it, you know, pull down a thousand addresses and not do address renews and on and on and on. And it's also the way to get people that actually understand how finance and investing works, where you never have custody and brokerage under the same roof because that's when people fuck with the ledger and do shady things.

[01:05:11] The point is to actually have, you know, State Street here and NASDAQ and NYSCB exchanges over here. And they are not a custodian because then there would be somebody with the incentive to fuck with it. Right. So segregation of brokerage and custody was like a table stakes. And I think it still is. And I think it is the right model. The problem is the inputs. And unfortunately, in the early days, some of the Bitcoin and crypto custodians that served that function were shitty, like Trion Trust and Fortress.

[01:05:42] Now they're way better. Now it's good to go. Finally got there and provides good B2B2C service. Zero hash is pretty good. Bakkt is fantastic. Equity Trust, with our help, got there and can do that. And they basically invented alternative IRAs in the U.S. in the 70s for real estate. And now they've gotten into Bitcoin the last few years. So there really are good options now. And I don't think it made sense from a, you know, look, I don't begrudge anybody for going that route. And maybe they understood something better than I did, you know, six or seven years ago that the custodian as a service wasn't good enough.

[01:06:23] And that the better choice back then was to custody or cut from regular own coins. The other thing I didn't want was a big incentive for us to try to get people to custody with us. And that exists. If you offer custody as a service, like that incentive actually does exist. So when we price things, for instance, we also deliberately price collaborative custody and self-custody. Self custody is free. Collaborative custody for us is like two basis points a month. So that's Swan Vault. And it's less than delegated custody where you store it up to go or back deliberately.

[01:06:57] It doesn't have to be. That was my choice to make it two BIPs and to have it be three BIPs to leave your coins with us. I don't want you to leave your coins with us. I want you to learn self-custody or collaborative custody. So, you know, these things, people that pay attention, they know what we're about and always have been about. And you can quibble with my opinions on this, that or the other, but you can't really quibble with the actual economic incentives of what Swan does and how we do it.

[01:07:26] Because we make those economic choices time and time and time again to promote self-custody of real on-chain Bitcoin.

[01:07:37] Vlad Costea: Right. So what's your next, how should I put it? When you launched Swan, you put a book out there, which is by Ian Pritzker. The other order,

[01:07:50] Cory Klippsten: The other order, he wrote it in in early 2019 and asked if anybody wanted to read it and give him feedback in like March or April of 19. And he sent me the PDF and I read it over the summer. At the same time, I was launching what was initially GiveBitcoin that became Swan. So I announced that in like June, I announced that from the stage at the Bitcoin conference in San Francisco in 2019, built it that fall. Jan became an advisor, just like a tiny slice of equity, but he offered to sit in the team Slack with my dev team and he started chiming in.

[01:08:27] And it was like, I didn't know that he was like a long time CTO with three exits. I had no idea at the time. And his quality was insane. And my original fractional CTO was like Jan's amazing. You should see if he wants to do this. And by December he came on full time. And that's when we re-ran it as Swan and decided to do the full Bitcoin fintech instead of just the Git thing then. But yeah, that was the origin story.

[01:08:54] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And you put his book on your website when you launched. And I was going to ask you, what's going to be the next book that you're going to commission or offer to your audience so that they can learn something new about Bitcoin? Or do you make plans for this type of content? So,

[01:09:12] Cory Klippsten: So I would say that probably one of the most underutilized resources in the space is the Swan canon, which is basically a bunch of different little learning modules of, you know, six to nine hours each at swan.com/canon. C-A-N-O-N. And that has, you know, a privacy rabbit hole curated by Matt Odell. It has like a Bitcoin 101 created by me. It has, you know, all those different aspects of Bitcoin with little learning modules. So we're bringing that back in a big way this summer as well and creating some new ones.

[01:09:47] So that's pretty cool. We've done promos over the years with different books. Probably the biggest one in that vein right now is we have a movie that came out a few weeks ago. called Bitcoin Season that you can just type Bitcoin Season movie on YouTube. And it's a documentary. It's about our efforts to bring Bitcoin into the world of basketball. It's, you know, us and Klutch Sports and a new team, the Cleveland Cavaliers and a big international partnership with them. And it's really entertaining.

[01:10:20] And it plays with noobs. It looks like $10 million. It's just got a, luckily the director producer has the best friend who's a spectacular Hollywood editor. So it just looks really good. And it's just zippy. And it just, you know, I didn't see anybody get up when I went to premiere. About 150 people in the room and not a single person knew for the whole 89 minutes. And it was like a pause in the whole thing. And a lot of people were not good pointers. So I do think that type of thing is cool.

[01:10:49] And we'll just keep on doing different initiatives that we get passionate about. That makes sense.

[01:10:58] Vlad Costea: What do you think is the next frontier in terms of content? Because we had this conversation about content creators leaving the space or focusing on something else. And do you think that maybe an LLM that's trained on all the Bitcoin content out there is good? Or do you think that it's still nice to have a face behind the content and someone who can explain human to human how this works? I

[01:11:22] Cory Klippsten: Mean, you know where I place my bets. You know, we obviously use all the LLM tools and Swan is totally enabled. And my head of HR is now head of workforce intelligence because she also handles AI spend and all our agents and everything. So it's a little bit of both. But, you know, we also have Swan private client services with a team of reps that people can talk to. And what's great there is, you know, you might only have two or three questions that you want to knock out in 10 minutes on a quick call or WhatsApp chat.

[01:11:52] Or something like that. You don't want to have to go research it. And you don't trust the answers of the LLMs and having somebody that's actually done the work as a Bitcoin expert and understands how it maps to our services or other services in the industry and can help you do what you want to do, you know, for Bitcoin or with Bitcoin. That also is super valuable. So I think we're enhanced by the technology tools where it doesn't fully replace that, that's for sure. And I do need to wrap, unfortunately, I got to go — subbing in for wifey, kids here in a couple minutes.

[01:12:23] Vlad Costea: It's fine. We agreed for one hour. We went on for a bit longer and we also started later. I want to thank you, Cory, for your time. What is it that you want to promote in the end? And you'll also have to reveal your number.

[01:12:38] Cory Klippsten: Oh, yes. So we'll start there before you see it in the chat. I think I put 85. So that was my number. And then, yeah. And then, you know, I think this is interesting. Rest in peace, my Twitter DMs, they're always freaking full. Very few people actually use email. So if you want to share something with me or want to ask about something, like, feel free to email me. cory@swan.com. Our spam filters are amazing, so I'm not going to get [unclear: darker] scams in there.

[01:13:09] But yeah, email me cory@swan.com. And then I guess the other one I would just say is, you know, tell a friend about Swan in the US. I think, you know, at this point we are very clearly most stats for your buck in the US. It's a great place to get started. And, you know, we care a lot about, you know, helping you actually get to real on-chain Bitcoin and helping you figure out where you are on kind of the custody spectrum.

[01:13:37] We can completely go at your own pace. Supported self-custody with Swan Sovereign, collaborative self-custody with Swan Vault, or delegated custody with Swan Safe while you kind of learn and get up to speed to the point where you're ready. So that's it. We care. We care a lot. Working my butt off. Whole company's working our asses off all the time. And we really do care about the people that stay in the trenches, the real trenches of getting out there and continuing to spread Bitcoin adoption.

[01:14:05] So appreciate you sticking it out all these years and keep going and doing what you do. And, you know, also to anyone in the audience that would assume from the outside that people like Vlad and I would not be able to get along because of our different focuses and different views and the people that we tend to hang out with and stuff. I think this should prove to you that, you know, we keep coming back and doing this every year, every summer. Whenever I'm on the side of the Atlantic, we always do our cafe show.

[01:14:34] So with that, I'll finish my croissants and take my girl and be on my way.

[01:14:39] Vlad Costea: Thank you very much, Cory. And follow Cory / Swan on Twitter or X, whatever it is that you call it these days. And if you're from the U.S. and you want to buy some cheap Bitcoin, I think Swan has the best rates. Check them out. I don't have a ref link. I'm not that kind of influencer. Maybe Max Keiser has one for you. So funny. Thank you, man. I will see you soon and wishing you all the best. Bye. And there are three winners, by the way, for the prize.

[01:15:07] I guess I will split it in three chunks of thirty three dollars each.

[01:15:13] Thanks, Cory. Bye.