Hi, I'm Vince Molinari, and welcome to FinTech TV.
We're broadcasting from the iconic New York Stock Exchange, and I'd like to welcome David Nandar, who's the CEO of BNB Network Company, also a dear friend and an OG in the space for many years.
David was previously co-founder of Galaxy Digital as well as SolidX Partners.
It is a great pleasure, my friend, to have you with us today.
Thank you so much, Vince.
It's so nice to see you.
Wow, absolute delight, and you know there's so much to cover.
Uh, the space is moving incredibly well, but I want to jump right in.
Uh, for our viewers, new listing, new public security, tell us about BMP.
B&B.
I'm sorry.
Well, B&B, it's an exciting story, you know, it's something that I've been following from really the beginning of my crypto journey, and B&B was introduced by Binance in 2017, and now it's gone to become the 4th largest cryptocurrency in the world, and you know I think it's a story that really a lot of People in the West are somewhat unfamiliar with.
And so when I saw the opportunity recently in the last couple of months around digital asset treasuries and just how widespread they've become, I saw that this was one of the best opportunities I've seen in the space in a long time.
I got to pull on that thread a little bit since we've been through so many iterations for the last 10 plus years in the space, and go back to Michael Sayer and micro strategy and kind of what he started with all of a sudden.
The recognition of these, you know, crypto treasuries within public companies, it's kind of the epitome of tradfi meeting DeFi or crypto mean tradfi.
Give me a sense of what you see really happening here.
Well now, if you remember, I was one of the first people to start to do a Bitcoin ETF back in 2013, absolutely with Solid X, and so it was us and the Winklevoss twins, and you know we helped a lot of people get into the space and it still hurts me a little bit that we couldn't get the ETF across when The point was around $100 to $200 but now in each cycle I've been following kind of where the crypto and capital markets could intersect.
And so that's why I've taken a couple of companies public and in the past it was through Canada.
Now in the past year as the regulatory environment improved in the US, really that's why we've been seeing a lot of more recent IPOs in the crypto space.
Circle, Bullish the other day, and what I think is actually the most exciting is around these digital asset treasuries because there was some.
That we never even from early on, we never anticipated that companies would be finding ways to lever up their balance sheets and accumulating underlying assets Bitcoin and other assets.
So I want to talk about that a little bit more as we're all about education and awareness at FinTech TV.
So we have this new phenomenon of crypto treasuries.
To your point, now all of a sudden it's a public company who's accumulating, having it there.
Never saw this coming, right?
Never thought of it.
So it's kind of this a little bit of a twofer to me where you have this exposure in a crypto asset.
And yet you have the public currency and equity typically on the exchange.
It's just a wonderful dynamic, right?
Exactly.
And as you said, Michael Saylor kicked this off.
It was just, I think, the 5 year anniversary of when he first converted the cash on his balance sheet into Bitcoin.
And so now in the past year, he had kicked off the wave and introduced a number of other Bitcoin treasuries and he's been doing his Bitcoin for corporates.
Bailey at Nakamoto actually I give a lot of credit because he'd been seeing some of the others like Metaplat in Japan.
Now in the last couple of months we've seen a number of approaches.
People do this around Ethereum and really that's why I saw the opportunity with B&B Network Company to do this around B&B.
And so this is where you know a lot of people still are not that familiar with just how incredible of a company and ecos. has been built around Binance and around the B&B chain ecosystem.
It is one of the largest chains.
It has the number one activity, the number one most volume indexes, and there's a lot of stuff that's been happening.
And on top of it, you know, people are very familiar with Coinbase and now Bullish and some other exchanges here.
Binance is somewhere between 4 and 6 times bigger than Coinbase.
It has almost 300 million users.
So, so maybe it goes back to the beginning of the conversation and less familiarity in the West in B&B.
What's C created there, right?
You know this is in a relatively short period of time historically speaking, we've got B&B also at all time highs.
You know we've got this asset.
How does it how does it play out from here?
Are we, is this, is this just the beginning of the next phase, you know, creeping towards institutional.
Option, what do you think?
Well, you know, everything like when I saw I read the ETF or even recently people are now focused on crypto being allowed in 401ks here in the US, and I think usually everything takes a bit longer than people expect, but then it happens very quickly.
And so that's what we're seeing now is, you know, the proliferation of all these digital assets treasury companies because they the opportunity right now.
It's kind of like the pipes of the financial system have been opened into crypto in a way that hasn't been before.
And what's incredible is it's a completely global phenomenon that I was saying a couple of months ago.
I think 50 to 100 billion of capital is going to come into the crypto market through digital asset treasuries.
Now I've already revised that higher.
I think it's going to be more like 100 to $200 billion in the next year.
That's an incredible leap.
So you make a big statement and point when you're talking about the pipes opening up.
I think it's it's the recognition that those pipes are not just domestic pipes, to your point.
These are globalization pipes, so the, the velocity of the flow through them are incredible.
Absolutely.
And that's where like really if I look at what happened in Japan in the last couple of months, metaplat had a premium of 100% and then all of a sudden it expanded from 100 to 200% to 4 or 500%, and they went out and expanded their offering and goals of raising an extra $5 billion of capital. order to buy Bitcoin.
I'm expecting to see the same thing play out in some of the other assets.
I'm definitely expecting there to be a number of other copycats doing B&B treasuries around the world, and so that's why I'm hoping to accumulate as much as I can before that happens.
Well, I don't know if you're allowed to disclose, but You've got a big differentiator.
You've got a pretty strong shareholder group with you.
Can you share any of those names with us?
Sure, yeah, so that's where you always I told my team this.
It's really it's a privilege to have something we're so excited about that we're able to bring in a number of investors.
It's a privilege to be in this position now to help the stewards of that capital and to help grow this.
Being a really special company, you know, I had a number of really like crypto OGs and dear friends in the space, a couple of the earliest guys from Bit Fury, one of the biggest mining companies in the space, a couple of other individuals there, a couple of the biggest VC funds, Pantera, one of the GPs of Polychain, and Arrington Capital, so really like a special, special investor base.
Well, I'll tell you what, it makes me so happy.
As your friend, as a fellow journeyman through many iterations, it's really, you know, yes, B&B is amazing and what's happening there, but a testimony to you and your leadership and the community that you built over the years and your integrity.
So so wonderful to see you as the CEO at the helm, the voter, the confidence that people are voting with their crypto and their pocketbook public equity, so.
You know, David, you have to come back and keep us updated.
I wish you all the best of luck in the world and so happy to see this happening.
All right, thank you so much, Vince.
Pleasure, my friend.
