 Well, I'm visual asset news or Dan for short. My name is Rob and today what I want to do is I know we're getting bombarded with FTX information and who scammed this and what's going on behind the scenes and and Crypto.com and they're they're they're pushing out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Worth of a theorem all the place and and just everything that's been happening And what I want to do is just kind of slow things down and get a little bit of Perspective from someone who has been in this business for over a decade now and what I'm talking about here is friend the show Simon Dixon and Simon if you don't know he's been an early investor into Crypto and digital assets more importantly Bitcoin and as far as the back is 2010 when it was a couple of bucks and On top of that. He's also got this little business called Bank the Future and he's he's invested into small little startups like Bitfinex Kraken Coinbase Bitstamp Ethereum coin payments BitPay Circle Circle Abra Ripple Labs and that's just on the first page If you just take a look here and just go to all the companies that Bank of the Future that invest into and also their disclosure of how much they've actually invested into those companies. It's 12 pages long and I can I link this in the description the website you can check it out But you've got I mean oh honey. I don't know what that is Delaware Corp with Operation based on New York a FinTech company about a million bucks yield that 310,000 not a big deal first digital trust five million Exordium then we go to like page two and we go to this thing called I don't know if you heard about this one It's called Robin Hood almost about a billion dollars there and then Baltoro Crypto holes and of course just let me confirm Abra and let's just goes on and on and on and these of course Are all available for you to check out. Oh Ripple. Look at that almost 300 million dollars circle. Is that right 4 billion? Yeah, so anyhow, so Simon's got a pretty good wealth information We don't know where we're going till we know where we've been so what we did is Of course when we did this interview this was a pre-record interview was just a couple of days ago So I know things move at the speed of light but the things you talked about are I think are super important and what we asked them is The first one was could FTX have been avoided Next one was one of the next steps Forward when we talk about regulation as well And then I asked the question is is this the worst year ever in crypto because you have to understand Simon has been around since I mean 2010 he's gonna talk about when Bitcoin crashed From $30 to $3 and it was like the worst week, which if you get us like 90% you understand That's a pretty bad week one week So for that to crash and for him to hold on and the people around him. It's pretty amazing So again, this is a pre-recorded interview. It's about 20 minutes long But I will be here as we come back because I want to go over just a quick a quick recap on why Voyager and Celsius cannot Reorganize in a new business is pretty much out the question And we'll talk about that and then of course the very end will do a little Q&A and who knows Simon might even show up He's over at the UK. So a little bit later, but we will see so without further ado Let's jump into the pre-record interview With myself and Simon Dixon. Let me just get out of here and off we go Again, thanks for coming back to the show It seems like the whole world's changed since we last played I thought everything was going just swimming we fine in June of 2022 and now here we are November and FTX just Just took a big just Swallowed up the entire crypto industry. So Simon. I got a couple questions and hopefully you can just make make sense of things The first thing is this we got to talk about this the thoughts on the FTX And where do you think what do you think we go from here? Then the next one is since you've been here since the early days 2010 2011 crypto Is this the worst year you've ever seen it or do you think like this is just one more year in the long progression of crypto Next I want to talk to you about the Celsius and the exclusivity re-up as they start to Put forth the information for the illegal process to retain their exclusivity to get that Their new plan together and lastly just your thoughts on regulation Do we need it is really important or how do we all make this work? So the first things first my man FTX What happened? What's gonna happen where we go from here? Yes, FTX is what happens when you put a short-term speculative trader in charge of one of the largest exchanges And so essentially Sam Bankman freed SPF because he you know He made all his money in the kimchi premium, which was essentially an arbitrage between The fact that Korean people in South Korea were willing to pay more because of capital controls for their Bitcoin and then in the in another country or another exchange And so FTX is a classic example of what happens when you take a hedge fund venture capital fund in exchange a VC investor a market maker a custodian a transfer agent and All of them and make them one person that controls the whole process and then you allow them to Print money like a central bank and when they print that money, they then use it as collateral to make VC investments And then they dip into client money when those investments go wrong In order to prop up and rehypothecate and create what a dirty bubble media called a flywheel And that flywheel blew up as soon as it got to the tens of billions And Unfortunately those that hold deposits All of those shareholders that invested in it they get wiped out All of those that have deposits they become creditors and they enter into this extremely painful process that we now call chapter 11 Where we figure out who owns what how it gets distributed and unfortunately Sam has stepped down and he's in a lot of trouble Yeah, I mean very well said so this would be leaving me to the follow-up question So when we talk about FTX first of all it Was there a way to avoid this situation or was this just in Inevitability and this really comes from in there's an ethos and crypto digital asset space Which is you must do your own research. You must make sure you do your due diligence. However, we see somebody like Kevin O'Leary Mr. Wonderful he did he's got a mass amount of people to do the research for him And he got fooled into investing in FTX We just saw Anthony scaramucci the mooch he came on to MSNBC and said look he goes I'm not gonna use the word fraud But these are the things that we're looking at right now and he said also, you know We sold 30% of Skybridge capital to them Was there a way for this to be avoided in in any certain way other than the fact of we can always just tell people to of course in The retail side make sure you take everything off exchanges, but was there a way to avoid this Yeah, and I've been involved in Bitcoin since three dollars been through every cycle And I still had tens of millions on Celsius and no credit to that now so it happens to the best of us and Really the the it's the The you know the way this could have been Prevented could have been rented so there's a difference between a bad investment in the scam right so a bad investment is you invested in something a Scam which is a very overused word in crypto that we just call everything that we don't like a scam now But there are actually, you know real definitions of a scam and so when you fraudingly, you know use client money And you represent that you're you continue to trade when you're insolvent These are actually legal things that you're not meant to and allowed to do And so essentially FTX is the banking system in the 1900s And we had to go through the great panic of 1907 to realize about market manipulation And the need to have some regulations there and then we had to go through the 1920s You know a crash boom and bust in order to learn that People when you put all these actors together in one place and you allow them to be an exchange and an issuer and All of those things that you have Then you get market manipulation over leverage and then people get on hold of a bubble And then they all over lever themselves and then you have an almighty crash when the leverage runs dry And the price doesn't perform so that we've also seen that When you have a bank that goes boss like in Lima brother situation You have rules for investment banks rules for retail banks and rule for brokerages Right and normally rather than going through this painful process you go through you know a different liquidation process Where another bank takes over and takes on those relationships? And then you have various other Mechanisms in place. So what we're experiencing right now is what we experienced What the banks experience in the 1900s and in crypto change the technology, but it's moving at a lot faster pace But we forgot in all of the rules and all of the everything that prevented all Okay, so Simon it makes a lot of sense especially we're talking about as far as like the history and we are actually going in reverse We're we are forgetting the failures that we've had in in the prior generations But the question then would be I'm not to skip around though because this will make a lot more sense You talked about you know the things that we could actually do what if Because the banks when they went through through these collapses There was parts where different parts of government to step in and regulation came about so my question then would be is What are your thoughts on? Regulation right now because right now the ethos for most crypto investors as they are adamant against any type of Regulation whatsoever, which I personally don't Don't get the whole point of why people will be around or against Going against regulation as far as on just an exchange I understand what the projects and defying like that, but the exchange itself. I don't understand So it just gives your thoughts on regulation then Yeah, and this kind of goes back to the SPF thing. It's really the the difference between regulation but good and bad regulation for a star And then centralization and decentralization. So what what a lot of people do is they take a decentralized Ideology and apply it to a centralized institution and that's where everything gets messy So if you look at you know lunar and doquan Essentially, you had a central banker that was managing in the legal hedge fund Based upon a token and liquid token that was backing an algorithm of a stable coin And so you slap a decentralized sticker on top of it But then when shit hits the fan you realize that there's just a centralized actor There's managing a central bank and trying to do you know Trying to manage an algorithm is stable coin right then you put the Celsius scenario where you say well I you know the you know, there's a there's a centralized company That actually if it was treated as a security as it was So if you thought you were investing in a in a in a hedge fund, right? Then you would have known that you were taking risk with your money and you wouldn't have put your life savings in it And you would also have You know been disclosed exactly what was happening with your money So those are all investor protections and just good regulations then you get bad regulations So, you know anti money laundering is just an immense amount of data collection And then the money laundering is do it all anyway through their means anyway, right? And the innocent people just end up having to give all that data And also accredited investor for example, so now accredited investor is just lazy regulations. It's right a lot of retail people Complain when things go wrong and then they just say screw it We'll just leave it to the rich people so we don't have to deal with all this stuff But the right way of doing that is just making sure that there's user experiences like what we had to create a bank to the future where You only allow them to invest a certain percentage of their net worth and you disclose the risk So suitability and disclosures and so what happens is you get this mixed match of all sorts of different ideologies Where you have Bitcoin which is doesn't require any regulations and is completely counter-intuitive because it's fully decentralized Right, and then you have an exchange and you apply the Bitcoin ideology to the exchange when really you could have had segregation of client assets suitability disclosures Auditability disaster recovery business continuity bans custody versus investment and all of those good things to protect you Take those out, but then you've got one more part of this There's obviously corruption in regulations and there's no perfection in regulations as well Otherwise it wouldn't happen in traditional finance and so you need an exit which is where you need to decentralize so if a CBD C Becomes predatory in a regulated environment, then you need an exit to Bitcoin to compete with if you have a centralized exchange that's Becoming you know overbearing and counterproductive you need to decentralize exchange to compete with it So this whole application of different ideologies you almost have to take your head And apply it to a different, you know filing box when you're thinking of different things and it's that crossover that causes all the issue Yeah, so I mean to me it sounds like I mean we can have a little bit of regulation We can have the best of both worlds, but we have to temper it just to make sure that we don't have over regulation There's some things that actually do work out pretty well as far as regulation goes and that would actually just to talk real quick this is from I guess one of your one of your initial investments Jesse Powell on the former CEOs of Kraken and he put out a great a great tweet This will be a link in the description and a number of leavening talks about this US lawmakers and regulators have some accountability as he's talking about the different problems that are arising in the central exchanges He states you drove this business offshore because you refused to provide a workable regime under which these services could be offered in a supervised manner enforcement wrongfully focuses on convenience off or onshore good actors And when he's trying to get to the point right there is that this we can have a regulation We'd like to have regulation just give us some guidance a little bit as far as some clarity and we can move forward I think what you just said correct me if I'm wrong is that we can have both these things and it can actually work We have to make sure that they actually are tempered Yeah, you absolutely need regulation of centralized financial institutions and you need to embrace the technology otherwise you lose your competitiveness and so there's that balance in between where um the the US And jurisdictions like the UK. I remember we spent three years in the early days trying to secure a license to allow companies To you know people to invest in Bitcoin companies It took three years and then we ended up saying they ended up saying well You can only work with UK companies and UK investors and there were no UK Bitcoin companies and very few UK investors You use a global solution so we had to go literally I had to move house Regulate it get regulated with a more globally minded regulator So that certainly does happen. It can drive people to different jurisdictions in order to get what they want But at the same time There are a lot of regulations in the US that these companies are just not complying with so if you look at the Celsius situation They had an earn account where you were investing in a security And there should have been full disclosure and you received a yield Based upon risk. That's a security. There's loads of securities laws already and with lending they had crypto back lending You can fit in with traditional lending regimes. It you know, it makes you have Plans collateral all of that still works whether the collateral is crypto or not and And then you have custody custody is just segregation of assets Making sure that they have title to it And you know segregating those closely so all of those regulations exist It's just that in the US you have that little bit of is the underlying crypto currency a security or is it a currency or is it a commodity? But once you figure that part out, then you can just slot it into the existing regulations Or you can do what's happening in a lot of countries right now, which is virtual asset service provider regimes Putting together the right regulations for the right technology Thanks a lot of sense if we can get it done First of all, we should have already had that part done and then we wouldn't have all these people going to Barbados and the Virgin Islands and just kind of sidestepping so Simon before we get to the I'm gonna switch things around again before we get down to the Celsius Issue I want to ask this this one main question, which is this you've been around for quite some time Bitcoin at $3 for example 2010-2011 is this the worst year you've ever seen in crypto or is this just one more year? Yeah, and so I have been through the $30 to $3 crash in a week. That was a pretty rough week and Yeah This one's pretty rough But it's the same thing that we see time and time again But each time the numbers get bigger and the number of people get bigger and the stakes get bigger So as we're getting bigger and bigger adoption in every single cycle It feels more chaotic because there's more people involved and the crashes just get more Spectacular and the products get ever more sophisticated. So I would certainly say that this has been one of the most For me, it's just been business as usual because I just dollar cost average every month no matter what's happening And I have a set strategy and I never deviate from that strategy no matter what the markets do it But however, I have been dealing on Twitter spaces with you know people that From one extreme to another, you know, they've been suicidal and and some have actually literally committed suicide And so it's been a very traumatic year for many people because of a number of reasons firstly The traditional markets are giving people massive financial anxiety And then the crypto markets we've seen our normal cycle, which is that you get You know a pump cycle based upon something that happens in traditional markets Then you get a lot of innovation and a lot of new adoption and a lot of excitement Those people haven't learned the lessons of the past. So they put all their money on an exchange That exchange makes a bad act whether it's a hack or or a fraudulent activity That then leads to a big correction and fear that then leads to a regulatory crackdown And then you go through the cycle again and you tend to then go through a building cycle And then that leads to the next halving cycle with Bitcoin And then you get everyone trying to find the next Bitcoin killer to try and get more and more returns That then leads to the next the bunch of people that the pump in that they're just here for the fiat currency not here for the for the for the mission and then you just repeat the cycle but each time it hits new or time highs And then you get you get more and more people more adoption a bigger market cap And the more money involved the more people come along So I expect the same cycle again, but this was a rough rough year and unfortunately We all learn best through experiential learning and there's nothing that teaches you more than losing your cold hard money putting your neck on the line and experiencing a chapter 11 process because You will you will learn a lot more from that or your legs in the market Yeah, and then it's perfect and the great thing is that we have time I think we have time especially what's what's happening. There's there's two things actually bring up before we get to the Celsius issue first of all when you talked about The rules the things that you do and you don't deviate I you can't see right now But I have the rules up right below me and it's always the same thing don't invest more You can afford to lose everything's a scam until promote otherwise don't leave anything on exchanges. That's why I have zero percent exchanges Don't use leverage 1500x is a little bit crazy and take profits along the way and then also just like what you talked about You know just don't deviate just stick to your schedule. Everything works itself out people learn the lessons It's all it's all cycles. There's always a bear cycle is always a bull market cycle four-year cycle still intact And we'll see how it works out and back when Simon was picking up Bitcoin for nothing And 2011-12 they went through their first cycle having all-time high dip reset 2016-2019 the same thing with having all-time high in 2017 a dip and a reset then again in 2020 We just hit our all-time high last year 2021 November now. We're going through a dip. We're gonna see probably further Losses I I am assuming then 2023 who knows what will happen 2024 will be a halving I can guarantee that then all-time high potentially in 2025 not to say that's gonna happen But that's just what we have and then Simon to finish us up. Let's get to the big stuff Which is this part here Celsius? So we know you've been going through a lot of different motions a lot of things to get a plan to actually work I know Celsius trying to get their plan in action kelvin I personally don't think it has a snowball's chance in hell of actually making it work And there's what they've come out with just yesterday Celsius today filed a motion requesting approval to extend the exclusivity Period in our cases. This is the period when Celsius has the exclusive right to submit a plan of reorganization I said basically look if you haven't Got one out and since June I mean Simon's already had like three or four iterations of these things So if you're telling me that you can't get it out in four months and even another however many how long it does You're just using up my money your money and everybody's money just to pay the insiders Simon talk to us about this real quick and any updates on the plan that you guys have moving forward for Celsius Yeah, so it's been one heck of a journey since we last spoke But in the nutshell I've learned a lot about the chapter 11 process and kind of just from speaking to so many people Understanding so many creditors understanding the people that have the most on the line and being the 21st largest credit to myself I was always thinking about what would I sign off on so I've got bitcoin I'm probably going to lose 50% of the bitcoin that I had on Celsius. It's only a percentage of my net worth. So You know, it's not Disaster for me because I was using those principles But what am I going to sign off on and and eventually put together a whole plan around how The funds that are left you just give it to people in custody so that they can then withdraw it It doesn't create a bank run because you get the segregation between Investment money custody money And people learn those lessons And you give them a security and the security is taking all of the assets That Celsius essentially bought with our money and given them all to creditors So that in the next run in the next bull run If the market recovers and is managed well All those assets should start to perform. So what we've learned is that Um There's only two out. There's only really two outcomes that are feasible Firstly the company if it did have a reorganization plan as you said It would if that was the priority it would have been released by now But regulators are looking at this. There's 60 state regulators as the sec. There's a cftc There's the ftc. There's a doj And really we've only got one shot from my perspective to give them a regulated model Where any custody if they allow us to get out of this Then custody has to be regulated custody Investments have to be regulated securities and lending has to be regulated lending And so we put together A process whereby We've put all that together and we can bid on the assets and then give all the assets To creditors rather than us being a predator buying up all those assets So this goes full circle into the fdx scenario. So fdx had a big hole So, uh, they were trying to go around to voyager and Celsius bid up or you bid for all those assets And then be able to fill their own hole by giving it to their shareholders Um, essentially we flipped the process on its side And said well, how can we utilize this process and we created two things firstly A way of using the bidding process so that you can bid And then give all the assets to creditors rather than to your own shareholders And then also went back to the future. We've learned a lot about the bankruptcy code And securities laws is what we've been doing for a decade So we've created a new product where creditors can actually import their There a claim on Celsius and then use it to take Who wins the bid and so they can back a bidder And then that bidder will go to the voting process And if you don't like their plan, then it doesn't go through And so you can we've we've tried to use financial technology as we always had in these disasters And now there's so many companies in chapter 11 And that we think we're going to be utilizing this for a lot more Clients that are in a queue right now so that we can just really try and get all of those assets and make sure They go to creditors rather than predatory bid in the worst market just before Christmas Two years before halving in a regulatory crackdown in the disaster market I gotta tell you this this would be the time right? I think this is the perfect This is the right place at the right time. Imagine if we were going through this and like I mean We wouldn't do it but in during a bull run if we can get this taken care of now Before the next big bull run that's huge and then we don't have to deal with the regulatory issues We don't have to deal with the the exchange is doing the funny business. We can really make a big dent I like that Simon before we take off. Do you have an example of that? An example of that on your website already. Uh, yeah Oh, yeah, so um, well, I mean on on bank to the future right now and we created um on my youtube channel I sent um, I created a video with a message to um judge glenn Um, so I'm Simon Dixon youtube channel Um, and uh on the second half of it I gave um, uh some screenshots and demos of how you can import your Celcius claim would be able to do at the or voyager claim Probably your fdx claim and then probably your block fi claim and then maybe your nexo claim wherever this goes next Um, and then uh companies that want to do right by the community Um can allow you to allocate their bids. So yeah, there we go that video there I gave a few um slides and I'll I'll be in future videos. We'll be demoing the actual feature but um, yeah It's a go to bank to the future.com Uh verify and certify your account Ahead of that. So if you're if you're a creditor in any of these companies Perfect. All right. I will link that video in the description for everybody that can check it out So simon, I know you're a busy guy, but thanks for stopping by it helps to alleviate some of the pressure that we see Especially with the the wisdom that you've had throughout the throughout the uh history of crypto. So thanks simon for stopping by Okay, thanks for having me again rob. All right. I'll see you All right. So I hope that made sense for what simon was talking about again You can't know where you're going until you know you've been and simon's one of those one of the very few people out there That can tell you where we've been he's been around since 2010. It seems like I mean, I like simon dixon. I like what he stands for But you gotta take it with a grain of salt because you just you you never know it seems like Some of the most trustworthy people by the ones that just have been around for a long time I know people they get a little perturbed at like some of the some of the rates of coinbase the coin has been around a long time And uh, if you take a look at some of those like rates for the exchanges. Yeah, I was pretty I was high But what's higher? Coinbase is whatever it was 0.5 to 1.5 percent per trade or was it the 0.2 percent for ftx Oh plus 100 of all the different cryptos that she lost. So again, I think just Time in sometimes just a little bit more important anyhow that concludes the interview And I just wanted to just to follow up and just talk about a couple of things. Uh, first of all If you're looking for the video that simon was talking about he Let me see here this one He talked about this video in particular where you could where he showed you snippets of his website Where you could register it for anybody who's going through an exchange that is going through chapter 11 Which hints there's gonna be a lot more coming up. I think so that would apply to you voyager and celsius users First of all, watch that video and he gives you an example of that that video is linked in the description on top of Uh simon's youtube channel as well And then also I just wanted to bring this to everybody's attention because I know there's like some people like this They say well, you know, what if we just reorganize? What if we just reorganize this? We're gonna is that I think once you're in chapter 11, especially in crypto and Crypto exchanges, I think you just screwed and uh, this was from the uh voyager town hall meeting the voyager uc seeming Which was like about a week maybe eight or nine days ago And this is the legal team talking about why Voyager did not reorganize When it would have been easier to do so and I think a lot of people think about this is gonna have them with celsius I don't think it's gonna happen. So just listen. This is about two minutes. Then we'll open up to the q&a Mainly because yeah, there's always different permutations And different flavors that bankruptcy cases take but specifically I think what you're suggesting Is that there may have been a way to sort of save the voyager platform such that we didn't need to liquidate Which agreed this this basically is a liquidation I mean ftx is essentially acquiring customers and they happen to also be monetizing the crypto. There's there's no Question there that that's effectively what's happening The problem with uh, and this really goes to the standalone plan concept Some of you may have heard that term being thrown around at the beginning of the case That was the initial plan that the debtors had filed which basically called for voyager to continue What you have to understand and this is public information. You can look it up on every state's website Voyager did not have The appropriate regulatory licenses that they needed to operate their platform in a number of states And that is why a number of states Including new york are investigating the company and probably some of the individuals I don't know what they're doing exactly. It's the states that will do what they want But it basically made it so that it would be virtually impossible to reorganize this company Because you had a company that was operating illegally They didn't have the licenses that they need to operate and once you already have gone down that path You can't just fix that and get the licenses the states are going to come after you And so from our perspective from the committee's perspective There really was no way to sort of save the voyager platform as you know it today Because of this regulatory overhang. That was the big concern I'm not sure if your dal example was directed at some other construct But if it was how, you know, how we could have used creative crypto Organizations like dal is to sort of save the existing voyager. It really wouldn't have worked Okay, does that make sense? No, it makes sense. It makes perfect sense You basically have a you basically have like another voyager With states coming after them, you know, right, right, right? Yeah. Well, I mean what you just highlighted was was news to me Yeah news to me too. So I don't know if you were aware of that But apparently voyager was doing illegal activities. That's why the states were going after them and of course we saw Different states also go after Celsius as well. So again, if if we're talking about reorganization I know we're jumping around a bit But I just wanted to bring the service attention that if we're talking about reorganization for For a Celsius or voyager, that's not happening. It is not happening and it goes to my point again I know people don't I know some people don't like it But the majority do Which is when I talk about clarity and regulation for exchanges I have done multiple polls on my channel On youtube on twitter and it is 85 to 90 percent who say yes We would like some clarity and some regulation for these exchanges because they keep screwing us I understand about the whole projects and things like that You know, I don't want to get in the weeds here, but i'm just saying I know As people are going to be vocal in the comment section, but you're not the majority You're just not and I think that these regulations, especially now i'm tired I'm tired of playing In the kiddie pool. I'm tired of not moving things forward I'm tired of not being able to to get past these people who keep screwing things up Just because of of greed and ambition and incompetence That's it. So anyhow, that will conclude my rant and also today's video So look, if you like today's video, I'll give a thumbs up also consider subscribing I think it's talking about our very time sensitive especially right now And if you're in crypto right now, you have to understand this is not a set it and forget it You've got to be on it. You've got to do your Your you know your daily information or wherever you can get it And I think that's why you should probably subscribe to my channel and that's it for today. So look That concludes the news and all that good stuff. Now, let's get into a little q&a I'll answer all your questions the best of my ability as we go from there But you got to take off take off it's football sunday. So get out of here And that should do it now. Let's go a little q&a. Shall we let me get this banner out of here