Bitcoin Custody Rules Have Changed | Michael Tanguma SLP763

**Stephan Livera** (0:00)
Hi, everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Rejoining me on the show today is Michael Tanguma. He is the CEO and co-founder of Onramp. Welcome back to the show, Michael.

**Michael Tanguma** (0:08)
Glad to be back. I always get a trip down memory lane hearing your voice, Stephen, because back in the day, you were one of the few podcasts that existed that were Bitcoin only and got a lot of learning, specifically technical learnings. So yeah, always good to be back.

**Stephan Livera** (0:21)
Yeah, no worries, man, of course. And it's very topical right now. Obviously, the cold card entropy vulnerability was a catastrophic event for just many people. And obviously, that's caused a lot of discussions. I know you've been out there talking a lot about, obviously, what you're doing with multi-institution custody and I guess the broader community, whatever we want to call this Bitcoin ecosystem, Bitcoin network, a group of Bitcoin enthusiasts, whatever we are, having conversations about self-custody. Now, the extreme views are like, oh, self-custody is dead. And on the other hand, it's more like, no, people just need to do multi-vendor, multi-sig or whatever other thing, pick another hardware wallet.
So give us your overview on that.

**Michael Tanguma** (1:04)
Yeah, I mean, I think the key principle that I believe you're here for, a lot of people listening and myself personally, is that one of the greatest mishappenings, any negative connotation you could put, is around inflation and debasement of the individual's time and purchasing power. And Bitcoin was that first time, I think, and honestly, Bitcoin opens up this whole aperture into like, well, gold outperformed most things over the past 30 years. And it's like, we need to return back to a hard asset from economy when it comes to value, attribution, just everything that we see a lot of the negative consequences. So if we go there, then the core idea for anything I'll talk about or what we build is how do we make it accessible? Because my background was traditionally in, it was in traditional tech and then was building out collaborative custody solutions. And I just recognized there was a ceiling on the skill, the inherent limitations on that.
And this is timely because I've heard and you've probably maybe you've heard this. I know individuals listening have at least three to five individuals I've heard that were prospective clients that said they were thinking about trimming or getting rid of their Bitcoin position. And I think that sounds crazy to us because a lot of individuals that I think listen to your show and where we kind of came up in this industry, like we're going down the ship, right? It's like it doesn't work. What else do we got? But you have to remember, there's a lot of individuals that are like halfway through that metaphorical Bitcoin standard book and they're like, like it, get it. But really, when you look at flat price from 21 and then all the other second order effects like post Trump and all the other things happening, and now you have this cold card incident, and even if they weren't solely affected by cold card, it's like, oh my God, because everyone said this was the thing, they used it, right?
And like the people that were positioning that it was a solution. And where do I go from here? And I think that that is the more like thing I would like to discuss. And I think just a broader conversation that needs to be had is we've only had the room that's existed in we have to self custody this asset and take full ownership of it, or we have to leave it with a third party custodian. And when you think about it at its face value, that's kind of doesn't make sense because if Bitcoin is that radical of an asset, there would be a fundamentally new way to manage it and hold it. And I always go back to the 90s and the internet, like when Time magazine or whatever article that used to review in paper like this, when it went online, it first looked exactly like this. There was nothing dynamic about it. It was just you're looking at the exact static. And then you can look, call it five, 10, 15 years. Really the iPhone was that ability to hold something on your person that had GPS. And that's where the consumer internet in my view thrived when you think about Uber, geolocation, et cetera. So anyway, the point being is I think that we're still so early in Bitcoin that we're walking around the dark. And what worked in 2012 is expected to work in 2026 when the price is six figures and AI is proliferating. And it fundamentally doesn't, but nobody's having that conversation. They're still thinking it's ETF or a hardware device.