Morning, man. You ready? Morning. All right. You are a Bitcoin OG. You've been around for a very long time. If you look out in this audience, somebody made the assessment yesterday. There's not a single hoodie in this audience, which is about 180 degrees difference than probably 15 years ago or so. How do you look at Bitcoin's rise, success, maybe some of the negative trade-offs that we've made as this thing has gotten more mass adoption and become more successful?
So, I don't really do these much anymore. And so, in prep for this, I had to kind of jog my memory about the early days of Bitcoin. And so, I heard about it in 2011.
You got involved. What year did you get involved?
I was late. I was pissed.
Yeah. You had to buy a four-year head start on me.
I know. You had to buy at 200 or something. Yeah. So, in this crowd, I mean, there's a bunch of OGs here and you know, when I kind of reminisce about the early days of Bitcoin, you know, I always think about how what's happening right now was felt so inevitable but also so unlikely. And if you think about the evolution of this industry and this asset class, in a very, very short period of time, this has grown into a multi-trillion dollar asset class, the fastest growing asset class in history. And it feels like every two, three, four years there's this press cycle that it's over. It's going to zero. And I love this. I like the way things are right now. And I think this is like the builder day, right? I love these periods of time when everybody's, you know, really sad watching the price because the people who are building, everybody's just heads down building and everybody who believes in the importance of decentralized money and digital currency and digital gold, we're all like, you know, we look at everybody who's kind of the naysayers right now and we know we're right. We know that they're wrong and we get to just, I think, build something that has been and is going to transform financial markets and capital markets. And so I'm super excited about where things are right now. And this period of uncertainty and dislocation, I don't know if it's going to last for two more weeks or two more years, but this is the most exciting time to be in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.
When I think of you and DCG, you guys really came at Bitcoin from a very interesting spot with, you know, kind of the secondaries market and understanding, you know, where capital markets were going. And then you essentially picked off vertical by vertical, hey, here's businesses that either need to exist and don't exist or areas where maybe somebody's not doing this as well as, you know, we think we can do it. Can you talk about maybe the businesses that you guys went into and then where do you see those opportunities now, you know, in terms of maybe future businesses or things that you guys are interested in?
Yeah. So, the first business was Grayscale and so that was in 2013 we launched the Bitcoin trust. And like in 2013 if you wanted to invest in Bitcoin it was, I mean, I think it was probably Mt. Gox and a few other exchanges, really hard to invest. So I knew that if Bitcoin was ever going to become kind of digital gold it has to be a lot easier to invest. So we launched Grayscale and that was 2013 and we were buying so much Bitcoin that we had to set up a trading desk and that trading desk ultimately became Genesis Trading. And then, let me think of the order, and then during one of the crypto winters there was no media covering crypto and CoinDesk was about to go out of business so we bought CoinDesk for half a million dollars and to support kind of information and they had a Consensus event. And then during another cycle the whole world was worried that China was controlling Bitcoin hash rate. So we decided to launch a business to focus on Bitcoin mining to bring Bitcoin mining hash rate into the US and so we launched Foundry. So Foundry got involved with Bitcoin mining and financing Bitcoin machines. So today Foundry is the largest Bitcoin mining pool in the world. Then we bought a company called Luno which is kind of like a Coinbase for Africa. Then we launched a mining business for the long-tail cryptocurrency proof of work tokens called Fortitude. I'm going to forget, we launched most recently something called Yuma which is focusing on Bittensor. And then while we're doing this we're probably the most prolific investor in the space in terms of number of investments. I think we've invested in maybe 300 companies around the world. So, we're sitting in a very unique position where we get great insight as to kind of like what's happening in our conversations.
One of the things that has really stuck out to me is this intersection of Bitcoin and crypto and artificial intelligence and it feels like there's a lot of folks that are talking about like AI payments and stablecoins and Bitcoin and all that kind of stuff. I think you see some other areas where that intersection of Bitcoin and AI are going to show up. Talk about what you're excited about there, what you guys are spending time on.
Yeah, I think most of it is kind of in that, you know, a lot of projects are saying, 'Hey, we're AI.' There is clearly, I think, a very big opportunity around the convergence of crypto and AI. And there's certainly, you know, we're definitely, we're obviously seeing it on the infrastructure side with compute and Bitcoin miners diversifying into or pivoting into kind of into AI. But I do think that the ability to incentivize contribution, the ability to incentivize stakeholders in unique ways around AI is super exciting. And so we got involved in something called Bittensor which is a decentralized open source protocol just like Bitcoin but instead of incentivizing security of the network it incentivizes people to essentially kind of compete and try to solve complex problems in the world. So Bittensor is comprised of over a hundred of these different subnets. These subnets are competitions where people are trying to predict sports outcomes or discover drugs or incentivizing compute or storage. Super, super interesting intersection of kind of crypto AI. There's a few other projects that I think are interesting but this definitely is the first one that has reached escape velocity.
Why do you think that Bitcoin has not been performing maybe the way the Bitcoin investors think? Is it that AI has also become, you know, a place to speculate or drive capital or kind of what is your take? You've got, you know, a decade plus of experience now, almost 15 years of experience watching this play out. It does feel like this drawdown in this, you know, bear market is maybe a little bit different.
Do you think it feels different?
On one hand, I think it's a better bear market because the drawdown has been less volatile even though it doesn't always feel that way. On top of that, I think there's a lot of folks who came in the 2017 bull market that this is now, you know, kind of the third time they're going through a drawdown. And I think it is the third time. You're kind of like, do you think it's going to zero? Like it's coming back, right? So I do think it's hard.
See that FT article that came out, but Bitcoin going to zero where they changed the title?
