00:00The company, CEA Industries, had historically been involved with the agricultural equipment business.
00:04There's no actual part of the business that's dealing directly in cannabis.
00:09And then we had just completed an acquisition. But the figure was vape.
00:11It was vape, but we changed it to vape because we completed an acquisition of vape stores in Canada called Fat Panda.
00:18And now, as of August, we kicked off our B&B treasury strategy under the brand name B&B Network Company,
00:23and we've managed to accumulate over 500,000 B&B in the last couple months.
00:27I was going to say, when the strategy was first announced, the company, CEA Industries, in the trade,
00:32I mean, the thing just soars in July. And then steadily, it's been trading back down and back below levels
00:38before that you first announced this. Do you think that investors are not fully appreciating what you're doing?
00:44Or what's going on? Do you think that you initially had all of this hype and excitement, and since then, it's just kind of trailed off?
00:51I think that's a broader kind of market condition of what's been happening around the digital asset treasury wave,
00:56that there's been a lot of excitement, a bit too much over-excitement.
00:59I've actually tried to really caution people from buying into the hype, buying into when you see an announcement.
01:05Oftentimes, investors see that a deal happens, but they don't understand where the capital actually comes in,
01:10whether it's a pipe, whether some other mechanism.
01:12And so, you know, it's important to kind of understand a lot more of what the actual underlying value of the assets are
01:17before buying into it.
01:18And so that's kind of been what's played out over the last couple months, and now it's led to an opportunity
01:23where a lot of these treasury companies are trading significantly below their net asset value.
01:27This is an interesting asset to choose because, you know, CZ was obviously a felon, the founder of Binance,
01:34before he helped the Trump family make a lot of money with its USD1 and then got a pardon from the president.
01:41The U.S. government has said this is a currency that was used to fund Hamas, to fund Iranian terrorists,
01:48to fund Russian drug dealers.
01:50Why would you choose this as the basis of your treasury company?
01:54Well, I think that story is really misunderstood.
01:56That, to me, when I think about what BNB is, is that it's really been the most overlooked and misunderstood asset in the space,
02:05and I think, as well, undervalued.
02:07And so BNB has become kind of the asset in the crypto space that powers the entire crypto economy.
02:15It has the most usage on centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, and stablecoin activity.
02:20And I really think that as the story, now that the pardon is out there and has more regulatory clarity,
02:26is just for the whole crypto market, we're going to be hearing a lot more about BNB.
02:29Can you just, for the layman, explain the difference or explain the important aspects of BNB?
02:35Because I know that you burn coins, which is different than what we would know about Bitcoin or Ether.
02:41Sure.
02:42So BNB was introduced eight years ago as Binance Coin, as you alluded to,
02:46and then it evolved five years ago to BNB chain.
02:49And so since then, it's powered by or related to Binance,
02:53which is by far the largest crypto exchange in the market.
02:56Just to give you a perspective there, Coinbase is publicly listed about 100 billion market cap today.
03:01Binance is somewhere between five to 15 times larger than Coinbase,
03:05and it might never be publicly listed.
03:07And so BNB is, in a way, the only way to get exposure to the Binance ecosystem
03:11and now its own thriving ecosystem across all of Web3.
03:15And then additionally, it's the only large crypto asset that has a burn or deflationary mechanism,
03:20which is similar to a share buyback, where the supply is getting reduced by 4% to 5% per year.
03:24So now that CZ has his part in hand, do you expect him to play a bigger part in the Binance ecosystem,
03:31and what might that look like?
03:33You know, as a friend, I'm very happy that it happened.
03:35As an investor, an entrepreneur focused on BNB, I look at it that there's a number of positive catalysts.
03:41Anything, if Binance is able to reenter the U.S. market in a big way,
03:45if U.S. investors are able to access overseas exchanges, a lot of them are going to end up on Binance,
03:50and all of that leads to significantly more holders of BNB, which should benefit the asset long term.
03:56You know CZ used to work here.
03:58Really? I did not know that.
03:59Which is pretty cool.
03:59Yeah.
03:59That is very cool.
04:00And you used to work, if I'm right, at UBS, Goldman Sachs, at Millennium.
04:05So you have a strong institutional background,
04:09and I wonder what you think about the institutional adoption of this currency.
04:14Obviously, a lot has been made about the institutional adoption of Bitcoin and Ether.
04:18What about Binance?
04:20So that's really one of the things that I'm out there trying to highlight.
04:22Because I've been around for so long, I used to come into this office dozens of times over the years.
04:28And what I've seen is that this year, particularly the last 12 months,
04:31the regulatory environment has been much more favorable to crypto.
04:34It's led to a lot of important crypto companies getting public, Circle, Gemini.
04:39It's led to this wave of digital asset treasuries as the crypto and capital markets converge.
04:43And that leads to some friction, right?
04:45But at the same time, it gives me a lot of excitement about where we're heading over the next one, two, three years,
04:50that we're only going to see a lot more institutional capital flow into the crypto space.
04:54And I think particularly a lot of that is going to end up in BNB as they learn about it.
04:58Does it hurt or help the widespread adoption of the digital asset treasury model?
05:05You've seen at least 100 companies so far do it this year.
05:08And they are as small as I think there was a nail salon in Japan that did it.
05:12You have marketing agencies, things you wouldn't necessarily connect with crypto.
05:16Is that a good or bad thing for the ecosystem?
05:19Well, I think one of the things I'd like to point out is actually if you go around the world,
05:23the amount of companies, both public and private, that hold U.S. dollars but are not U.S. companies,
05:28that hold euros but are not European companies, that's a natural thing to hold an asset that is superior to your local currency.
05:34And so what we're starting to see is a lot of companies around the world are realizing the merits
05:39of holding Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB much more so than their own currencies.
05:45BNB, if you could think about it, as an economy that has 300 million participants today.
05:49So if you're part of any small country, the idea of tethering yourself to that larger economy
05:54seems much more attractive than holding an inflating fiat currency.
05:58I don't know if I've ever told you this either, but you know I lived on Bitcoin for a couple weeks.
06:03Back in 2012.
06:04I know you held Bitcoin.
06:05It's the only thing I spent.
06:07I stopped spending dollars for two weeks.
06:08Did you eat?
06:09I bought, yes, I found a grocery in Greenpoint.
06:12I found a gas station that would take it.
06:13I found a bar that, you know, would sell me beers and stuff.
06:16Wait, was this for journalism or just for kids?
06:18Yeah, for work.
06:18Okay, yeah.
06:19But obviously I would never do that today, right, David?
06:22If I held the asset, I wouldn't spend it.
06:25And I'm sure the same is true with ether or BNB.
06:28So do you think we're ever going to transact in these currencies?
06:32Well, I think, you know, and I remember when you did that back then.
06:35And that's one of the mistakes a lot of people who've been early in crypto have been
06:37is that there's a lot of regrets about any time they spent their Bitcoin.
06:41Yes.
06:41And I think today as the market's evolved, a lot more people are comfortable with the idea of using
06:46Ethereum and BNB and some of the other assets to actually spend and interact with things and also to invest.
06:52So we're seeing stablecoin activity pick up.
06:54You know, a lot of the wave this summer after the Circle IPO and a lot of the Ethereum treasuries
06:57was around that stablecoin hype.
06:59Well, there's actually a lot more stablecoin activity even on BNB chain,
07:02and it's a significantly lower price point.
07:04So it's more conducive to having that activity scale over time.
07:08And you bought Bitcoin at $10, right?
07:10It's my earliest.
07:11I hope you didn't sell that.
07:13You know, I've been through a lot of ups and downs in the crypto space, so.
07:16All right.
07:16All right.
07:16That's good.
07:16That's pretty good.
07:17All right.
07:17All right.
07:29Ah, cool.
07:30So.
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