Strategy CEO: 'We Are the Central Bank of Bitcoin'

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:00)
On today's Public Keys from the New York Stock Exchange, will Strategy beat Bitcoin to the next bull market? Circle, American Bitcoin and Galaxy Report earnings, and I have a special co-host today, Deus X Capital CEO Tim Grant joins the show. I'm Jen Sanasie, let's get into it.
Happy Monday, everyone. Price action this morning is a little sleepy with Bitcoin flat near $65,000, but underneath it, more than a billion dollars flowed into spot ETFs last week. The strongest showing since April, and we are deep in earning season. Tim, thanks for joining me today.

**Tim Grant** (0:34)
It's great to be here, Jen. It's my first time at the Stock Exchange. It's a great time to do it.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:38)
I love when people come on the show and say it's their first time at the Stock Exchange. I'm glad that this, so, okay, well, first of all, Tommy, what's your initial reaction?

**Tim Grant** (0:45)
I look, this is one of the last sort of bastions of capitalism in 20th century. So it's great. It's really genuinely a bit of a thrill to be here. Although it's funny, there's a guy sleeping down there. We've just noticed, so it's not quite as active as it was back in the day.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:58)
Well, kind of interesting that we're doing a crypto show from the New York Stock Exchange. I got to ask you, what have you been watching lately? What's been on your mind?

**Tim Grant** (1:07)
Well, I woke up this morning knowing I was coming onto this, and I just thought I'd look at what was going on. I thought, wait a minute, this is Groundhog Week. It's the same news stories that have pretty much been driving give or take everything for the last four months or so. It's, well, stocks are making their highs, gold's looking tasty.
You've got the Fed and Warsh and how are we handling this new communication mechanism, and that has its issues on the debt markets as well. And then you've got the micro strategy, which we will obviously talk about today. What did they do this week? What did they do today? And you've got AI, is there something that's gonna move the market?
And you've got the Middle East, and that's it. That's the same things that have been driving our market for weeks on end. And in all of this, as you said, sleepy markets in crypto, crypto's pretty much been flat the whole time. And then you've got clarity as well. Like is that clarity on clarity? So these are all the things that we're all watching. We're sort of scrambling for something else. But at the end of the day, that's the topics we're all focused on. So let's see what happens this week in each one of those topics.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (2:05)
We're gonna unpack some more of that throughout the show. Something I've been watching is this cold card hack and attack on self custody. And kind of juxtaposing that against the narrative, I just mentioned, we saw almost a billion dollars flow into Bitcoin and ETFs.
If instances like that are pushing folks to more centralized custody, pushing folks to digital asset treasuries, ETFs and centralized exchanges, it just feels like kind of really the antithesis of what we've talked about the crypto industry for so long.

**Tim Grant** (2:34)
Well, that's the sort of the funny, if you've been in this game as long as I have, we've been here about 10, 11 years, you do remember the wide-eyed excitement and the libertarian ideals that were driving us a decade ago.
And slowly but surely, they've been eroded by, at the end of the day, the common sense, and we'll talk more about this later, I suspect, you can't change the basic way that we do things. And it turns out, when you come fast forward to today, we're kind of going back to those regulated wrappers and those constructs that are secure for us as investors. And it is creating an entirely new kind of landscape in DeFi and on-chain stuff. It's not as interesting as it was before, but that's all part of the evolution. I think it's inevitable at this point.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (3:13)
All right, we'll talk about that a little more. Let's get to our first guest now.
Phong Le is the president and CEO of Strategy, the company formerly known as MicroStrategy and the most prominent corporate holder of Bitcoin. Phong has been at the centre of the company's transformation from an enterprise software business into one whose strategy has become closely tied to Bitcoin. Phong, great for you to be here with us.

**Phong Le** (3:33)