Mauricio Di Bartolomeo: Gold vs. Bitcoin Credit, the $40K Bitcoin Debate and Ledn's S&P Bitcoin Bond

**Mauricio Di Bartolomeo** (0:00)
This will be the first time we're announcing this. We're gonna have gold back loans. We have the king of digital hard assets, hard money, which is Bitcoin. Now we have the physical king, which is gold. Bitcoin's not quite there at the sovereign level yet, but gold is, historically has been.

**Natalie Brunell** (0:13)
It seems like we have an ideological battle right now. A lot of people are against the idea of anything credit-like when it comes to Bitcoin.

**Mauricio Di Bartolomeo** (0:22)
The beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that it means different things for different people. I've had so many calls with a couple. Husband's a Bitcoiner, wife's pregnant, wife wants to buy a bigger place, husband doesn't want to transfer the Bitcoin to someone else's custody, but husband has now a couple million dollars worth of Bitcoin, and wife says, well, isn't the whole point of this, so that we can have a good life and enjoy our time? The goal here is for you to use the product in a way that benefits you.

**Natalie Brunell** (0:53)
We have Mauricio Di Bartolomeo, co-founder of Ledn, back in the house. Mauricio, great to see you, and we're so happy that Ledn is a partner of the show. Thank you so much. How's it going?

**Mauricio Di Bartolomeo** (1:03)
It's going great. Very happy to be here in Prague, and excited to see you do this again.

**Natalie Brunell** (1:09)
There's so much to talk about since we last had our conversation. So let's just kind of start out with the news. I mean, there are a lot of announcements, new products that are coming out, so why don't we just go ahead and start there? What's Ledn up to?

**Mauricio Di Bartolomeo** (1:22)
Sure, so this will be the first time we're announcing this, so I'm pretty happy to share that we're going to be listing XAUT. So gold is coming to the Ledn platform. You're going to be able to buy it and hold it alongside with Bitcoin. And we're also rolling support for more stable coins, more functionality across the platform for USDT. So now USDT is going to have full compatibility across all of our products, disbursements, repayments, etc.
And we're also going to be listing USAT.
So the US Genius Act stable coin for Tether. So basically, we're going to have now, we have the king of digital hard assets, hard money, which is Bitcoin. Now we have the physical king, which is gold, in a tokenized representation. And now we have the stable coins that the world runs on. And so you can take a loan with your Bitcoin, you can use your stable coins to effectively earn yield. Now you can buy gold. And coming soon, later this year, we're going to have gold back loans, which a lot of our clients have asked for. And to me, it's a very fascinating and compelling compliment for the portfolio. We've all seen gold's performance over the last 12 to 24 months.
And you get a lot of the same, I would argue, hard money attributes and benefits with a lot less volatility, because of course it's a much bigger market cap. It's a sovereign reserve. Bitcoin's not quite there at the sovereign level yet, but gold is, historically has been. And it's a great way to compliment the high quality products and assets we already support.

**Natalie Brunell** (3:02)
Well, we have a lot of listeners who are hardcore Bitcoiners, Bitcoin only, but I have a lot of people in the audience who love Bitcoin and gold. So tell me a little bit more about how this decision came to be. Why did you decide to venture into this other asset?

**Mauricio Di Bartolomeo** (3:15)
Yes, great question. So at Ledn, we also have a lot of clients that are very into gold. And the question came up, you know, we were asked many times by our clients, hey, you know, would you guys consider listing gold? I really love the idea of tokenized gold because a lot of people that have physical gold, physical gold is a hard asset to manage. You have to put it in a vault somewhere. It's not really easy to get financing for it. It's not really easy to transfer it or move it around if you want to. And so with the tokenization of gold as an asset, you're seeing a lot of the same things that happen when you tokenize the dollar, right? When we tokenize the dollar and you put it on a rail and you call it a stable coin, all of a sudden the entire world can access it.
It's much, the distribution amplifies in a way that you could never reach in a physical format, right? And now, anybody that has a wallet that supports stable coins can now also use that same rail to use gold, to hold gold. And that makes gold a lot more versatile. That makes gold a lot more dynamic. And we think that it's a great compliment.