Economists Uncut

US Bitcoin Reserve About to Happen? (Uncut)

US Bitcoin Reserve About to Happen? 2 Scenarios How Quickly Trump Rolls It Out | James Lavish

Hey everyone, welcome back to Kitco News. I’m Jeremy Safran. Well, let’s jump into it here because the mainstream media is focused on U.S. President Donald Trump taking office.

 

We have renewed tariff threats and the global elite meeting at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Now, my next guest is shedding light on something that’s went largely underreported, and that is the fact that the U.S. Treasury has reached its debt ceiling limit and is now using, quote, extraordinary measures to continue operating. Here to help us all break it down and to understand what’s next for Bitcoin and what Trump in office will likely mean for the asset, as well as the new fund he is launching is our friend James Lavish.

 

Of course, James is the co-founder and managing partner of the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, which is a hybrid investment fund that makes public and private investments in the Bitcoin ecosystem. He’s also the author of the Informationist Newsletter. Hey, my friend, nice to have you with us again.

 

Hey, great to be here, Jeremy. Thank you for having me. And you can see I’m in beautiful Miami in a hotel room.

 

I heard there’s some snow over in Florida, too. It’s been funny weather. Not this far south.

 

Not this far. OK, we got lots to get into. I need to talk to you about this, because prior to Trump’s inauguration, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that the government will reach its statutory borrowing limit on January 21st and begin employing, quote, extraordinary measures, also known as special accounting maneuvers intended to prevent the U.S. from hitting debt ceiling and the risk of a potential catastrophic default.

 

In the letter Yellen sent to Congress leaders, she states, quote, the period of time that extraordinary measures may last is subject to considerable uncertainty, including the challenges of forecasting the payments and receipts of U.S. governments months into the future. Yellen also called on Congress to raise or suspend the debt limit to protect the full faith and credit of the United States. All right.

 

Let’s talk about this, James. First, can you explain what it means to the Treasury? What it means that the Treasury reached its statutory borrowing limit and what these extraordinary measures are? Yeah. So if you remember, let’s recall back to two years ago and in that June when we hit the debt ceiling and we actually we hit it in the fall of 2023 and Congress had to kind of figure it out while the Treasury had to deal with it while Congress was figuring it out.

 

So if you remember that, we went for months and months and months with the Treasury executing what were called extraordinary measures. And so at that point, as soon as that debt ceiling was raised, of course, the debt skyrocketed again and went straight up. And so we’re kind of at that point now.

 

But when that happened, what Congress had done is they had just extended, they had just paused it and said that there is no debt ceiling for now and we will just continue on with our current budget and not worry about it. Well, we added over $2 trillion of debt during that time. And so now here we are, that extension expired on January 1st.

 

So now that debt ceiling was effectively reset to where it was on January 1st. So what happened was it was over $36 trillion. And then the next day, there were some inter-government kind of payments that they were able to grab and ended up getting about $50 billion of breathing room.

 

So the Treasury used that over the course of the next few weeks, used the Treasury General Account, the TGA, to meet expenses. And now, as Yellen said, we’re over the limit. We’re back over the $36.1 trillion limit.

 

And so she’s having to do what’s called extraordinary measures. So what are those? Well, it’s kind of just accounting voodoo within the government where they’re not making payments in inter-government agencies and they stopped certain state and local government bonds. There are certain retirement and disability funds like the Postal Service Retirement Benefits Fund and the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund that they just stopped making payments to.

 

And they’re just going to do this and play these games and pretend that it’s not a problem until Congress can get itself its act together and raise the debt limit again, because there really is no other choice. Yeah. How long is this going to last here? I mean, James, you think about it, you’re talking about that amount of debt, these new extraordinary measures, just grabbing things out of thin air.

 

I mean, how long can this last before what you’re talking about going back to Congress? Yeah, it could last for months. I mean, Yellen said that they could do this, they could use these extraordinary measures all the way into the summer. So this could last for a long time.

 

Now, just remember, these extraordinary measures, it’s kind of like pausing your payments on things that you will have a grace period on. So it’s as if you were pausing your payments on your health insurance and your car insurance and your home insurance, knowing that they’ll give you 30, 60, 90 days, whatever it is, and then you can make up those payments later by just opening another credit card. And that’s literally what we’re doing.

 

We’re just going to open up another credit card, pay those down later and not worry about it, just pile on more debt. That’s literally what is happening in the government, the U.S. government right now. Yeah, of course, we’re seeing these delinquency rates on credit cards climb massively last year to this year, too.

 

Okay, it’s important to note, obviously, that one of Yellen’s last acts as Treasury Secretary, this was one of them. I mean, as these extraordinary measures came into effect, Yellen’s already out of office. I mean, Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary is, of course, billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Besant.

 

How do you see him dealing with all of this? Well, I mean, part of it is going to be, it’s going to come down to the Doge Commission and just how much they’re cutting in expenses. You can get on the debt clock and you can see that they’ve cut already $8 billion or something going into this morning. I haven’t looked at it today, but it’s still just a drop in the bucket.

 

Part of it is how effective can they be? It’s really not Besant’s problem. It’s not his responsibility, the spending. It’s his problem in enabling it.

 

He’s got to figure out how to manage these accounts to execute what that budget is, and the budget is whatever comes out of Congress. What I believe he’ll do is he needs to figure out a way. What people are not talking about here, Jeremy, is what’s important to understand is that the big thing that Yellen did over the course of the last couple of years was she pushed all of those treasuries and all of that borrowing to the short end of the curve.

 

You’ve got over $7 trillion of bonds that are due this year because she’s been issuing so many T-bills. The problem is that Besant’s going to have to figure out a way to move that out on the curve without blowing the bank at the treasury and with blowing up the deficits. If those long-term rates continue to rise up towards 5% or higher, then it’s going to make his job very difficult to manage the duration of the curve.

 

That’s really his big challenge that people aren’t really talking about. Yeah. It’s far from the first time that this has obviously happened, by the way, but can you lay out what’s possibly next for us? You just mentioned it.

 

We’re going into the unknown here, but it seems as though they’ve got to clean up a mess. Yeah. It’s going to be a big mess.

 

They left Trump with this problem, which is he’s already over the debt limit and his treasury is using the extraordinary measures to keep it all going. Yeah. Thanks very much.

 

Here’s your pile of mess and it’s up to you to clean it up. What’s going to happen likely is that Trump is going to do whatever he can to get the productivity of this country up, even just in nominal terms. People are worried about inflation and they’ve been concerned about it.

 

The bonds have shown you that. The 10-year, the 30-year, they’ve all moved up in yield over the course of the last number of months going into Trump being inaugurated. The reason for that is that there’s high expectation for further inflation.

 

There’s a little bit of concern about just how many bonds we’re going to have to issue coming into this year. Another issue that we should discuss is the fact that the first quarter 2025 fiscal year, the first quarter of the US government, that budget has been released. We ran a $711 billion deficit in the first quarter, which is about 35% higher than last year.

 

And so if you just do the math on that, that’s a $2.8 trillion deficit. Last year, we ran a $2.1 trillion deficit. That’s 2.8. Now, there are different payments that happen in different quarters, so you can’t really extrapolate perfectly like that.

 

But you can see that the expenses were way higher this first quarter than they were last year. And that is an issue. So that’s another issue he’s got to deal with.

 

Yeah. Not to mention some of this upcoming economic data too. Okay.

 

I want to switch over and talk about the Trump and Melania coins. I mean, obviously, it’s been making a ton of headlines. And I liked what you recently posted on X, quote, and we’ll show the tweet here.

 

I live in Las Vegas, but I never go to the casino. I also own Bitcoin and no other cryptocurrencies. There’s a lesson in there, which is why I wanted to get your thoughts on Trump and Melania launching their own meme coins here, James.

 

I mean, you know, we are promised a new era of legitimacy for the crypto industry under the Trump administration. And before we get to that, what are your thoughts on this move? It was kind of surprising to me, I’ll be honest. I can’t get into their heads.

 

I know that Trump and his family are very focused on always being profitable personally and making money. And so I think they got into this world and they were advised and they realized that they could make a lot of money really quickly. And the reason they did it before he got into office is just to avoid trouble of using that office to make money personally, which is obviously against the law.

 

So I think that that was the timing around it. But launching a Trump coin, then launching a Melania coin, I think it was fatiguing for the Bitcoin community because it was disappointing that that’s what they were doing right before they came into office. But in reality, Jeremy, the truth is, it probably will bring more people into the space.

 

They see these coins, they figure out how to buy some, they’re in the space, they realize that pretty quickly, if you’re playing around in that world, you realize that the value and the one coin, or there’s just a few that have any real underlying value. And so it’ll gravitate. I think that that money will gravitate over into the Bitcoin space and some of those other coins that actually have some value.

 

Right. Yeah. I mean, we’re seeing it.

 

I mean, just for reference to our viewers, Trump’s new crypto token soared to more than $10 billion in market value on Monday. Right now, the token market cap is back about $7.5 billion. I mean, you know, with all this talk about liquidity in our market, not really being there and all time highs on the stock market, I mean, where’s the money out of? I mean, obviously people still have some capital.

 

Yeah, that’s a good question. So going back to the meme coin, kind of what is going on there? Why are people playing in these? And the meme coins, like I said, they have no value, they don’t have utility. And so you have utility in Bitcoin and some of the other things like Ethereum and Solana, there is utility there for those protocols.

 

Whereas these meme coins are just, they’re meme coins, they’re just basically the casino. And so why are people buying them and where are they getting the money from? Well, part of it is that there’s a younger generation that just likes to play in the space and they’re going to use their discretionary capital to do it. And they’ve either given up on owning a home or they just can’t keep up and, or they’re just have some discretionary capital and this is where they play.

 

So that’s one thing. The other thing is there are people out there, and I’ve talked to people out there who are buying these things because it’s literally a lottery ticket to them. And they feel like they have to do something to catch up.

 

And so they’re playing with these in order to get caught up. They just can’t keep up with all of their discretionary expenses and they don’t feel like they’re ever going to get ahead. So they’re taking whatever they have left and literally buying lottery tickets with them.

 

They know it, it’s all out in the open. They understand there’s nothing real here. They’re just trying to play the momentum game and hopefully get that 10, 50 or 100X return and make a whole bunch of money in a night.

 

Yeah. And some people did. I mean, I like your example about the casino because in my experience, the house always wins there.

 

And of course, at the same time, on the same date that Donald Trump took office, his crypto venture company, the World Liberty Finance, it purchased $47 million in wrapped Bitcoin. It’s kind of interesting to put this all together. What does that tell you? Yeah.

 

I mean, it tells me that the administration does understand that Bitcoin is really where the value is, and that that’s where you can store your value, even if it’s wrapped, which is not optimal. But it tells you they understand that that’s where it is. So was it opportunistic? Probably.

 

I can’t speculate. I don’t know Donald Trump. I don’t know his family members.

 

So I can’t really speculate on what their thinking was, but that’s what it appears from on the outside. And so, but here we are. Quick trade, quick trade.

 

Okay. Looking at the next four years under Trump, what are your core expectations, James, in terms of crypto and Bitcoin? I mean, let’s start with the end of Chokepoint 2.0 and the full repeal of SAB or SAB 121. I mean, talk to me about this a little bit.

 

Yeah. So back about a year and a half ago, we had a little over, about a year ago, it was repealed. So, but during Gensler’s administration, the SEC, they, what they did was they kind of did an end zone run around Congress.

 

And what they did is they had looked at the gap accounting and they came up with their, they made a review of it and kind of a bulletin, right? So, and by doing that, they basically said they put all these risk parameters and, you know, warnings around holding crypto or holding Bitcoin on your balance sheet if you were a financial institution. And so it basically said you had to hold it as a liability as well. And so that, and it opened up banks and financial institutions to scrutiny if they did, if they did do that.

 

So during, so he kind of, instead of going through the proper legislative measures, he, they did a review of it and they posted this bulletin and then it basically put everybody on notice who was in the bank. You know, it said, if you don’t abide by this, then we may, you know, come in and have more scrutiny on your company. And, and they don’t, they don’t even have to say this explicitly.

 

It’s understood that you kind of open yourself up to an audit if you, if you trip up on anything on this. So then they, they gave a lot of pushback. There was a lot of public pushback about it.

 

Congress came in, both the House and the Senate had passed a repeal for SAB 121. I was actually in, in DC when this happened and I ran into Senator Lummis on the street right after their vote and they had repealed it. And it was really exciting.

 

It was great. Okay, great. We can put that behind us.

 

And then mere weeks later, just, so Biden comes in and he just turns around and vetoes it. He vetoes the repeal. And so it was back, it was back in order.

 

And so now the, the Trump administration has said they’re going to repeal SAB 121 and that would, and they’re going to, through executive order, they’ll, they’ll issue that executive order and once in all, it will be repealed. And so I think that’s a really big deal that, another thing that has not been a real focus of Bitcoiners, but it’s a big deal because this will enable banks to start operating in this space, offering products that are not currently offered for, for their customers. So you could buy Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever, right alongside your, your other holdings in your bank.

 

You can hold it there and they can offer, soon start building and offering products around that, whether it’s lending products, whether it’s insurance products or borrowing, there’s going to be, there are going to be some things that they can do that they’re currently not doing. They’ll be easy for everyday customers to use that they currently can’t. And the banks are just, they’ve just been too cautious to get into it because of that one kind of not ruling, but bulletin.

 

Yeah. Those regulations. And of course, I do want to point out to our audience quickly that Donald Trump’s second day in office, a new security and exchange commission cryptocurrency task force was announced and the task force aims to, as James was just saying, to bring greater clarity to the rapidly growing digital asset industry.

 

I mean, with this and what you were talking about, you know, going and repealing that, what are the expectations for the next four years while he’s in office here? Yeah. So what’s really important about this administration is that the prior administration was antagonistic to our industry. I mean, they were, they were fighting us in every corner.

 

You had choke point 2.0, you had Saab 121 that was repealed, then that was vetoed. You know, you had a Senator Warren’s anti-crypto army. You know, it was just, there was a lot of pushback and noise and friction for any of us operating in this space.

 

And it was a very difficult time. So now this administration is the exact opposite. They’re embracing it.

 

You may have heard Trump in Davos today said that he intends to make America the leader in the crypto space. And so that’s incredibly important. Something you just mentioned, it’s really important is that we’re talking about getting regulation.

 

We want regulation. We want to have an idea of exactly how we should be operating in the space. We’re not asking to be unregulated.

 

We’re asking for clarity and we’re going to get that now. And we’re going to get it without, you know, forceful pushback and antagonistic behavior. Yeah.

 

Yeah. And it’s sure been happening quick here. I mean, we’ve been watching these executive orders come about.

 

This will age very quickly, you know. I’d like to also get to the elephant in the room. We’ve got to talk about the establishment of the U.S. Bitcoin Reserve.

 

Of course, you just mentioned Davos. And we recently heard from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who is speaking at that event in Switzerland, talking about the strategic Bitcoin Reserve under President Trump is a real possibility. Of course, we’ve been hearing this.

 

We also didn’t hear that announcement at his inauguration speech. But Armstrong explained that the U.S. has reserves in many forms, including gold, oil, palladium and other rare minerals. He added, quote, as the world moves to a Bitcoin standard for money, any government holding gold should also hold Bitcoin as a reserve.

 

You just mentioned Cynthia. I mean, on this front, we also saw the recently Senator Cynthia Loomis, of course, from Wyoming, chairing the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Digital Assets that was just announced. She called for bipartisan legislation that would establish a comprehensive legal framework for digital assets, including strengthening the U.S. dollar with a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

 

And I have to say this, James, we’ll show her tweet, but she just tweeted, digital assets are the future. And if the United States wants to remain a global leader in financial innovation, Congress needs to urgently pass bipartisan legislation. I look forward to shepherding this legislation on President Trump’s desk this year that secures our financial future.

 

So I imagine you agree with this perspective, my friend, but can you elaborate on how such a reserve might be introduced and more importantly, how quickly it could happen? Yeah, that’s a good question, Jeremy. You know, what’s important about Senator Loomis being involved in all of this and being put on that committee is that she’s been spearheading this for over a year and a half now. And so she introduced the bill, the Bitcoin Reserve Act.

 

And so it still needs a co-sponsor. You know, it’s very early in its drafting because of that. And there could be changes to what the current, you know, kind of thought about it is.

 

But with this new administration in office, there’s a likelihood now that this gets done in due time. How quickly it happens, it’s hard to say. There are a number of things that Trump could do.

 

And there are a number of things that Congress could do. But it would have to go through a legislative gauntlet. And if it’s going to happen the way that Cynthia Loomis, Senator Loomis wants it to happen.

 

And so that would mean it would have to go to committees, it would have to be revised, it would have to be approved. And so that it would take some time to do it that way. You know, there’s another, there’s of course, there’s another way that Trump can do it.

 

And he could use something called the Exchange Stabilization Act to just through executive order and add Bitcoin to the balance sheet that way. Now, that would be something that would happen pretty quickly. And, but it would be a smaller version of the Bitcoin reserve, right? So if they stay the course and they go for the Bitcoin reserve, then we’re talking about the US government buying 1 million Bitcoin over the course of five years, 200,000 Bitcoin per year for five years, which would be 5% of the total supply, which actually would be more than 5% of the liquid supply because there are millions of coins likely have been lost.

 

So this would be a very big deal. Now, what would happen would be that they would have to be passed that way. And then the government could go buy the Bitcoin after that.

 

So what do you think would happen if the United States government passes this? They say they’re going to buy a million Bitcoin. What do you think all the other governments and individuals in this world are going to do? Obviously they’re going to go try to front run the government and buy it before them. Yeah.

 

And obviously you can’t go and print more. It’s not, you know, you’re not, you know, it’s not a stock chart that you’re going to look at. So, I mean, we’ve been talking about volatility of crypto.

 

I think I had you on two months ago, you and I saw each other in New Orleans and we were just flirting with that $100,000 level. We know it took a little kick in the can and now we’re back up above $105,000. I mean, it’s been pretty wild.

 

But the things that you’re talking about here, what would that mean for the immediate long-term price? Well, I mean, there are a lot of things that are tailwinds. There are some developments that have happened that are tailwinds for Bitcoin. And these are some of them we’ve discussed.

 

SAB 121 repeal, finally being repealed. That’s a big deal. A Bitcoin Reserve Act, even bigger deal.

 

But before that, there have been a few tailwinds that we haven’t discussed. One of them is the new gap accounting. The new gap accounting, which was passed back in 2022, but it just went into effect this past December, was how you hold Bitcoin, if you’re a company, how you hold it on your balance sheet in your treasury and where you market at.

 

Prior to this new gap accounting, you would have to hold this asset. If you bought Bitcoin and it went down, you had to hold it at the lower of your cost or the lowest price that it went to. So you could see is if you go back at MicroStrategy’s balance sheet, you can see how Michael Saylor had to hold this Bitcoin on his balance sheet for years because it went down to under 17,000.

 

He had to hold it there. Anything that he bought that was at the lowest price that it went, and it was called an impaired asset. Now this new accounting is you can buy Bitcoin and hold it on your balance sheet at fair market value, which is normal for an asset.

 

So it’s a really big deal. The only way you could get off your balance sheet at an impaired value before was to sell it, and then you’d have to take the tax consequences of it. Even if it went all the way back above where you bought it, you still had to hold it at that impaired cost, that impaired value.

 

So now you can hold it at fair market value and that will, I think, enable some companies that have been on the fence and adding Bitcoin to their treasury, their balance sheet. Now they can do it without worrying about it being held as an impaired asset. So that’s a pretty big tailwind that just went into effect.

 

So I think we’re going to see some companies pop up here that are adding it to their balance sheet. They’re adding it to the treasury just quietly, slowly, but they’re not going to be standing back waiting for that new gap accounting anymore. That’s already done.

 

So that’s a really big deal. And then another big deal is, obviously, those ETFs from last year. They were launched, and you and I have talked about this.

 

BlackRock’s ETF, iBit, was the record-setting launch of an ETF ever. And so it gained over $50 billion in AUM in less than a year. It was a blowout offering.

 

It’s been a great avenue for institutional investors to have access to Bitcoin where they couldn’t before. And now I’m seeing institutions, I watch iBit, I watch FBTC, I watch Bitwise and some of these other ETFs that are the spot Bitcoin ETFs. I see them being adopted by institutions slowly but surely.

 

They show up in those holdings now, and you can see them on Bloomberg. And so why is that? It’s because it’s made it so easy for them operationally where they couldn’t do this before. They couldn’t hold their keys.

 

It was a fiduciary question about who is going to hold the keys, what the hierarchy is going to be. It was a personal responsibility, a fiduciary responsibility. And then where they were going to trade it, how are they going to trade it, who their trader is going to be, how they were going to settle it, where they were going to settle it, who is going to custody it.

 

I mean, there were just a litany of problems that they had to overcome, which have all been taken care of in one fell swoop with this ETF where they can just buy it just like any other stock and hold it with their prime broker custodian. They know what the leverage is on it. They know what the margin is on it.

 

It’s very straightforward. So that’s opened it up. That’s a big avenue for it.

 

Yeah. Huge avenue. Okay.

 

Well, I know that we’re talking about crypto here, but you’re also a gold bug. You believe in the value of those hard assets. So, I mean, are we forgetting about gold here when we talk about the U.S. Strategic Reserve? How should a balanced portfolio look like, even if it’s just for us? I mean, gold versus Bitcoin percentage wise, in your opinion? And I’m not Peter Schiff, but you know.

 

I do like gold and I hold gold because I’m a hard money guy. I want to have assets that will appreciate as the dollar is devalued, as it’s debased. So I do own gold, but my focus is truly on Bitcoin, as you know, and that’s why I opened the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund.

 

And so all of my excess capital is kind of pointing towards that personally now. But I do have nothing against gold, though I do believe that we are seeing the beginnings of Bitcoin demonetizing gold. And will gold go to zero? Absolutely not.

 

I think it will retain that store of value in the global universe of investable assets of $900 trillion. Gold is about 18 right now and Bitcoin is about two. But I do believe that Bitcoin is going to catch up to it and be that ultimate store of value for people in the future.

 

Yeah. I mean, you were talking about obviously the way of the world right now, which is why some of this money is going towards Bitcoin and gold with the fear of currency debasement. We’ve got the geopolitical tensions arising.

 

Let’s talk about the macro and geopolitical environment that play into this. I mean, what is expected that you’re keeping a close eye on? For instance, I mean, we’re hearing from JPMorgan Chase, for example, that its bankers are working through the night in a war room to assess the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration day executive orders. The European Banking Authority revealed this week that it’ll be assessing how European banks would react to this hypothetical spiraling of geopolitical tensions and ensure trade wars in an upcoming health check on the industry.

 

And it comes at a time as the global elite in Davos is telling us that the number one risk this year is armed conflict. I mean, they just put out this new global risk report. What’s your read here, James, on the macro front? Well, I mean, it’s hard to really assess exactly what the probability is of an all out war.

 

The Trump tariffs, we’ve been talking about this for months now. And remember, Trump likes to wield a big sword and he uses these tariffs as threats and to get what he wants. And so I think that people should have less concern about the tariffs being terribly impactful as much as how he’s going to use them to get what he wants for the United States.

 

And so I’m not terribly worried that that’s going to be incredibly disruptive to the markets. And so that’s not a concern of mine. However, it’s very difficult, like you said, to put a probability on geopolitical conflict or some sort of black swan.

 

That’s why they call them that. So there’s always that probability. There’s always that possibility because of the situation we’re in that we just discussed with the debt.

 

And this is not just here in the United States. It’s everywhere. All sovereigns have this issue.

 

Any sovereign that issues debt in its own currency, their debt to GDP has been growing and they have to debase their currencies to manage it. So what does that mean? That means that they have to borrow so much to keep up with all of this spending that they have to allow for inflation. So if we do have some sort of economic shock, geopolitical or just market shock, Jeremy, I believe that you’ll see a V-shaped recovery just like you did back in March and April of 2020, because the governments can’t let their economies collapse.

 

It would send them into a rapid debt spiral that they would not be able to get out of. So they would rather allow for liquidity to expand, the money supply to expand, and for there to be debasement of those currencies in order to allow for the pay down of that debt through cheaper dollars or euros or whatever it may be. Yeah.

 

Yeah. It’s fascinating to watch all of this take place. And I wanted to give you a chance to talk about what you were speaking about before, this new company, the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, because it’s been an incredible success.

 

Now you’re launching a second fund, which is looking to raise at least another $50 million. So briefly talk to me about this, James. I mean, maybe that’s why you’re in Miami.

 

Yeah, we’re talking to some family offices and investors here this week, but yeah, we launched the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund last year, Jeremy, and it has been a great success. It was a very difficult time to launch the fund, but we’ve been very pleased with how we’ve done. And so we have been asked by a number of investors, and now a new development is small family offices who want kind of access to this world and some capacity.

 

So we’re launching a second fund for that. And so that second fund is going to do the same exact thing as the first fund did, and it’ll be open, so we’ll have a longer timeline for it. But what we’re doing is the same exact thing.

 

It’s a public and private hybrid hedge fund where we can invest anywhere in the Bitcoin space, wherever we see opportunity, whether it’s early stage, late stage, public, private. It could be common equity, preferred equity, converts, secured debt, unsecured debt. We’ve pretty much done it all.

 

And we can use derivatives, options, option strategies around the portfolio in order to hedge out certain risks that we don’t want to assume, so we can isolate the opportunity that we’re trying to capture. And so that’s really where we kind of set ourselves apart. Coming from the institutional, the traditional institutional world, we’re doing the same exact things we used to do in our own public and private LPs and our hedge funds, and applying that to this space specifically in the Bitcoin universe.

 

Yeah, it’s been pretty fascinating to watch, as you mentioned, family offices, private equity wanting to get involved in a bigger way in this space, institutions starting to embrace it. How do people get involved, just the average of people like me and you? Yeah, that’s exactly right. So if you want to get information, just go to bitcoinopportunity.fund, www.bitcoinopportunity.fund, and just fill out the questionnaire there.

 

Really simple, just attest that you’re an accredited investor and we can send you information, jump on a call or whatever. But yeah, we’re really excited about this opportunity. We’re super optimistic about Bitcoin and this space and this new administration, I think is going to be a boon to this industry.

 

And we’re super excited about it. Yeah, well said. Well, as I mentioned, we still have a lot of unknowns about the presidency, some of these executive orders to come.

 

So let’s have you on again in the next 100 days. We’ll get a little update and see where you’re at. My friend James Lavish is a co-founder and managing partner of the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund.

 

Enjoy the weather down in Miami. Thank you, Jeremy. Good to see you.

 

I look forward to coming back sometime soon. You betcha. We’ll see you soon.

 

Thank you. And for all of us here at Kitco News, I’m Jeremy Safran. Thank you for watching.

 

We’re going to have some great content coming up all week long. So hit the subscribe button. We’ll see you next time.

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