Who Your Bank Is Really Working For w/ BitGo CEO Mike Belshe | BMP 016

**Mike Belshe** (0:00)
The banks are like, come on, we know you want a better banking system, but can't we just keep making a lot of money for now? Wouldn't that be nice? They are funding institutional businesses with lower interest rates than they should be paying by stealing from retail. And they don't want you to know this, it's one of many contributors to our K-shaped economy where those with assets are getting richer and richer, and those without are getting poorer and poorer. They put your money at risk in various loans and duration mismatches and all this kind of stuff.
You should get compensated for that. There's the risk free rate, which is putting it into a T-bill. So today that's 4 percent. But when you put your money at the bank, they give you percent. Why do they do this? Because they're subsidizing big business.

**Spencer Nichols** (0:46)
Hello and welcome to the Bitcoin Magazine Podcast. I'm your host Spencer Nichols. And today we sit down with the one and only Mike Belshe, CEO, CTO and co-founder of BitGo. Mike and BitGo operate at the center of the institutional adoption of digital assets. And Mike shares his inside baseball on what institutional investors are thinking of Bitcoin in the current market climate. Mike also discusses the fight between the banking and digital asset industries over the Clarity Act and why tokenization of equities he believes could cement the future of the US as a true leader in capital markets for the decades ahead. Thank you as always for tuning in and let's get into it.
Hello and welcome to the Bitcoin Magazine Podcast. My name is Spencer Nichols and I am sitting down now with Mike Belshe, the co-founder, CEO and CTO of BitGo. Mike, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

**Mike Belshe** (1:30)
Hey, Spencer. Great to see you. Thanks for having me on.

**Spencer Nichols** (1:33)
Of course. Absolutely. I guess first things first, recently we had the Bitcoin for Corporation Symposium in New York City. You yourself were there speaking on stage with Dylan LeClair. I just want your take on what the vibes were like there. I think we've gone through a pretty aggressive bout of volatility in the digital asset treasury space.
What were your takeaways from that event and how was it overall?

**Mike Belshe** (1:53)
Well, it was a great event.
Thanks for your guys' participation, helping, I think, indirectly organize it or I'm not sure exactly, but it's a good crowd. Actually, the thing I like most about the Bitcoin dominant, I wouldn't say it was quite specific, but pretty close to Bitcoin specific. The folks that are in there, especially have been around for quite some time, I think you don't have to worry about their ethos as much. Like they're in it for the right reasons. So anyway, a lot of really good people there that are in it because they see the long term potential and value of Bitcoin. So everybody's kind of scratching their head when you're in that space right now thinking like, look, we know that there's real issues with the US dollar. We know that Bitcoin can be used as a global settlement system in a way that we've never had the ability to do before.
And yet, you know, Bitcoin is not trading super great right now. And there's a lot of questions. So I think there's two things that are on people's minds. Number one is quantum.
And whether you believe that's an issue or not, that's not my point. There's a lot of people that are worried about that. And then the second thing that people are looking at, at least for the short term, is they don't really understand what Michael Saylor's products are, how they work. And they hear leverage. And look, leverage, obviously, a lot of bad things can happen when you're over-levered. They don't know whether micro-strategy, strategy and Saylor are over-levered or not. They don't understand the basics of it, but they are confused by it. So I think those two things are kind of leaving everybody befuddled as to why Bitcoin isn't performing a little bit better right now. And of course, we've got AI out there. So all right. Anyway, the vibes of the conference are very nice, a great group of people. And then, yeah, we go through ups and downs a bit, and I think everybody there is pretty patient.

**Spencer Nichols** (3:49)
Yeah. I think, like you said, a lot of people are very long-term oriented, and they also understand the long-term thesis of Bitcoin as this neutral sediment layer between adversarial counterparties, trust minimization, and all the way down the line. But I think to get us from Bitcoin as this rather speculative commodity where it's being used in bits and pieces to that effect, but really to get us there, it's how do we plug people into the network in a way that scales and BitGo is sitting right at the intersection of that.