What does it really take for businesses to add Bitcoin to their balance sheets, and why does it matter now more than ever? Brandon Karpeles, CEO of Sovereign, sits down with Block & Order hosts Kyle Lawrence and Moish Peltz to unpack the practical realities of adopting Bitcoin in the world of business. Brandon discusses why Bitcoin should become a staple on company balance sheets and how businesses can leverage digital assets to drive growth. From treasury strategy and security best practices to tackling common misconceptions around custody and regulation, Brandon draws on his years of experience guiding companies through every stage of their Bitcoin journey. The conversation covers navigating crypto winters, building long-term conviction, securing digital assets, and strategies to safely accept cryptocurrency payments. Brandon also explores real-world examples from different industries, security approaches to managing bearer assets, and the importance of professional guidance when entering the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Sovreign’s website: https://www.sovreign.io/

Subscribe to Block & Order to learn more about the latest news on the legal side of digital assets!

Follow B+O on Our Socials:

Twitter: @BAndOShow
LinkedIn: Block & Order
Instagram: @blockandorder
TikTok: @blockandorder

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome to Block & Order
03:06 – Introducing Brandon Karpeles & Sovreign
05:31 – Making Bitcoin Accessible for Businesses
08:17 – Bitcoin Education, Treasury, and Payments
10:40 – Security: Custody, Quantum Risk & Physical Threats
18:00 – Real-World Case Studies of Bitcoin in Business
22:00 – Overcoming Business Owner Resistance
38:33 – Closing Thoughts

Watch or listen to the podcast here:

   

Transcript:

**This transcript has been prepared automatically by AI and may contain inaccuracies**

Kyle Lawrence [00:00:10]:
Welcome to Block Order, the show that brings order to the manic pace of legal news in the world of Web3, AI and beyond. I’m your host, Kyle Lawrence, and with me, as always, I guarantee you he shoveled his driveway. Mr. Moish Peltz.

Moish Peltz [00:00:26]:
No, Kyle, your guarantee carries no weight here because there’s two feet of snow outside and that’s not happening.

Kyle Lawrence [00:00:32]:
Have you been outside to even attempt to tackle it?

Moish Peltz [00:00:35]:
It’s, it’s like an explorer when you, like, put one foot on the land and then you, like, say, yes, this is mine, and then you go back inside.

Kyle Lawrence [00:00:41]:
Yeah, that sounds about right. It is quite the Sisyphean task, if I may say. It took multiple shifts and two of us to get just our dog to be able to go outside. I wish I had a picture of her standing up on the thing and then sinking slowly through it.

Moish Peltz [00:00:56]:
Oh, no.

Kyle Lawrence [00:00:57]:
Yeah. We could talk about the snow that is impacting the northeast and has crippled the entire 95 corridor. But we have a very special episode for our guest today. Brandon Karpeles, the CEO of Sovreign, joined us for a really lively discussion. And one of the things that I really liked about talking with him is something that we’ve talked about now, having gone through multiple crypto cycles and live through a couple of crypto winters and literal winters, is that the price fluctuations, you know, it shakes the tree. It gets rid of a lot of the riffraff. And when prices are down like they are, to have somebody like Brandon who’s, who understands the space and understands what bitcoin and crypto can do for companies that have all this excess, excess cash or who want to diversify their portfolios. It was really interesting conversation, and one that, you know, I had met him a couple times and I know Sovreign a bit, but having him on was, was really fascinating, especially at a time like this.

Moish Peltz [00:01:54]:
Yeah, I agree with you completely. It’s, it’s always fun to hear old heads speak calmly in times of volatility. And that, that was great. The one, the one thing that I like, I love the entire conversation, but I’m, like, sitting here scratching my head. Is, is the quantum one where he’s completely unbothered? And I think there’s a lot of, you know, know, chatter about how. So I, I, I leave it to our audience, you know, are you unbothered or are you bothered? And if so, why. And I mean, you’ll hear, you know, Brandon’s take on it. So I’m curious what, what the audience thinks.

Kyle Lawrence [00:02:30]:
That’s a good Point. I remember at the bitcoin conference in Vegas last year, bringing that up to several people, because at that time, that was top of mind for everybody. And a lot of people were apprehensive and, you know, there was trepidation. And every once in a while you’d encounter somebody who’s like, it’s fine, doesn’t matter. And Brandon, someone who knows the space as well as anybody was fell in that camp. So maybe, maybe they’re right. Who knows? I guess we’ll see when we.

Kyle Lawrence [00:02:56]:
When we kick it over to our conversation with Brandon right now. So it’s always fun when we have somebody on the show who specializes in bitcoin education and bringing crypto and bitcoin to the masses. And as Brandon so eloquently put it right before we started recording, bitcoin is not having its best day, but we’re not going to talk about that. Bitcoin is perfect. Bitcoin is going great. Everyone’s portfolio is really swimming. Doing. Going really well today.

Kyle Lawrence [00:03:21]:
Right?

Brandon Karpeles [00:03:22]:
Well, bitcoin’s always having a great day. The protocol never changes. It’s exactly the same. It’s the most stable thing out there. It’s as sure as the sun rising and the sun setting every single day. So bitcoin itself is doing great. It’s just priced in a. A fake monetary unit.

Brandon Karpeles [00:03:41]:
And. And that fake pricing mechanism is not doing so well today.

Kyle Lawrence [00:03:45]:
That’s a really fair way to put it. And a couple weeks ago, when it had slid down to 80, I had joked, and we even flashed the meme on the screen where Bitcoin is 122 grand. And people are like, that’s crazy. I’m not buying that. And then it drops to 80 and they’re like, I’m not buying that shit. That’s $80,000.

Brandon Karpeles [00:04:01]:
It’s a great meme. Everyone’s lining up at the high number and then the low number comes around and one wants to buy it.

Kyle Lawrence [00:04:09]:
Well, you got some true believers here. Joining us today on Block and Order, we have a very special guest at a very special time, Brandon Karpeles, the chief executive officer of Sovreign. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say it was Sovreign without an E. It’s a mistake that I, and presumably a lot of people make when they try to reach out to you or find you online. So we’re going to put on the screen editor the correct spelling of Sovreign right here. So everybody knows you’re also. You’re also the host of the Bitcoin for Business podcast.

Brandon Karpeles [00:04:39]:
Technically it’s the Bitcoin business podcast. No, no. 4 but yes. Well, I, I just say that because I’ve had people searching for the Bitcoin for Business podcast and they can’t find it and then haven’t searched the Bitcoin Business podcast.

Kyle Lawrence [00:04:55]:
I think I also might have conflated the the Business Case for Bitcoin book that Sovreign had put out. And I was just rehearsing it in my head, which is always a mistake, you know, when you are presenting or whatever. I think I was, I entered this doom loop of I wasn’t sure which was which was which. So thank you for.

Brandon Karpeles [00:05:11]:
Okay, just go to the website S O V R E I G N IO and everything’s there. So great.

Kyle Lawrence [00:05:18]:
Well, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time and love the, the sunglasses look. I’m not cool enough to pull it off. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what Sovreign does and how you and what you do for Sovreign.

Brandon Karpeles [00:05:31]:
Yeah. So at Sovreign, our, our big hairy audacious goal is that Bitcoin is on every balance sheet. And so our goal at the end of the day is to get Bitcoin onto the balance sheet of companies. Now we prefer that be both a treasury asset holding some of your cash reserves in it and also accepting payments in that. And so we go out, we help educate businesses about Bitcoin to the extent that they need some education or learning, introduce organizations and businesses to Bitcoin, explain what it is, why Bitcoin’s money, why it’s important, sort of the technical aspects, the high level technical aspects of it and why it’s important for businesses as we enter the digital age. And then sort of the next step is helping them get set up. What’s a good custody set up? What’s a good way to accept payment? How many people. Do you want to have keys? Do you, do you want to have a multi institution custody setup? Do you want a personal setup? Obviously we recommend self sovereignty first and foremost and at no point will we ever recommend or implement an exchange or a third party holding your Bitcoin, something like that.

Brandon Karpeles [00:06:49]:
The farthest we’re willing to go is a multi institutional custody where you can see the addresses and have full visibility into it. And then we have all sorts of payment options. We work with some great companies like Zap, right Flash, we even have support for BTC Pay Server if you want to run your own instance. And so we kind of COVID the gamut on that front and then lastly we have just some operational consulting and advisory. My former life, I spent almost two decades in training tradfi, helping distressed businesses, working with distressed businesses. Well, helping, that’s maybe not the right word. Working with distressed businesses, helping my employer maximize the value of distressed businesses after they lent them money they couldn’t repay. And from that I spent a lot of time doing cash forecasting, working with third party consultants to do cash for forecasting operational concerns, how to get some operational inefficiencies taken care of, inventory management, receivable management, cash flow management, all that kind of stuff.

Brandon Karpeles [00:08:03]:
And so we are happy to help advise on that front as well to the extent of business wants that resource, wants to sound, bounce something off us or anything like that as well. And that’s. And then we also help businesses integrate Bitcoin into their businesses. Different 401k options, HSA options, employee benefit programs, all that kind of stuff as well. So it’s really a soup to nuts, white glove, high touch, high personal connection offering to a business owner that, that wants some help, that wants professional expertise, wants professional guidance. We understand there’s some people that are going to go out there, plug it into Grok or Claude or whatever the latest ChatGPT, whatever the latest iteration of AI happens to be at the time, and do it on their own. And that’s great too, we’re happy to do that. We have kind of a step by step guide that we offer for a nominal fee on the website as well.

Brandon Karpeles [00:09:03]:
And we understand there’ll be people like that too. But this is for the people who say, I want some professionals in this space, I want to work with human beings, I want people I trust that I can count on and I want my hand held through this and I want to be shown how to do this so that I can learn how to do it on my own as well. And that’s, that’s what we’re doing at Sovreign so.

Moish Peltz [00:09:25]:
Well, that’s super compelling because a lot of that really resonates with, with us, you know, both obviously in our role as advising clients on these topics and saying, all right, but now go set up the wallets and figure it out on your own. That’s not really our job to set up and do wallet management and custody and all those concepts. But then from the law firm business owner perspective, we accept Bitcoin for our payments. We have a payment processing function that we invoice in USD and we accept Bitcoin in exchange for that. We clear some of that, you know, to the business and we keep some on our balance sheet and we custody, including self custody, bitcoin. So I’m saying this because even though we started doing that four or five years ago, it’s like, well, you’re saying all these things and you’re saying different providers. And as you’re saying it, I’m like, well, when’s the last time I, as a business owner have taken a full stack reevaluation of that, right? And it’s like, oh, I got a lot of things going on. So it’s, it’s really, it’s a really interesting way you presented.

Moish Peltz [00:10:40]:
And I can just see like for, for all the advisors in the space, how important it is to have someone like you that could help advise on those sorts of topics.

Brandon Karpeles [00:10:50]:
And we, we have someone exactly like you’re talking about. They’re a bitcoiner. They had their wallet set up. They, they knew how to invoice customers and get bitcoin payments. But they were like, you know what? I want a better setup. I put this setup in place five years ago. The technology has improved immensely. I’m not really that up to speed on everything that’s going on.

Brandon Karpeles [00:11:13]:
I want to run my own node. I want to get lightning set up on and on and on. It’s like, boom, here’s a package for you. We’ll get you set up on it. And the guy loves us. He’s probably our biggest fan. And all we did was come in, sort of do an assessment of his current status, and then said, let’s upgrade you in these areas if that’s what you’re asking for. Some people are fine with their setup and that’s cool too.

Brandon Karpeles [00:11:38]:
Like, if you’re good staying with what works for you and you don’t want to change anything, that’s, you know, you want to run Core 19 and use Blue Wallet, that’s cool too. Like, no problemo. But there are better tools and we can come in, help you get set up on that. And then just this week we had a situation where someone, two people actually came to us asking for a legal referral. And that’s when we raise our hand and go, that’s not something we do. But we sent them both your guys way. And so that’s another thing too. If it’s out of our expertise, if we don’t know what we’re doing, we have a network of professionals, lawyers, CPAs, mining experts, that sort of thing, where if those are your questions, that’s what you want.

Brandon Karpeles [00:12:23]:
We’re not going to try to do it ourselves. One that, I mean, I’m not a lawyer, but I know that’s a very poor legal decision to do, but it’s. It’s an opportunity for us to. Just like you were saying, just like we can be the expertise for technical setup and that sort of thing. Hand holding, making people feel comfortable, better security, better custody of their setup. There’s other professionals in the space that do other things, too. And we’ve built out a great network on. On that front, too, to know exactly where to point people so they don’t end up with some shyster lawyer or some shady CPA.

Brandon Karpeles [00:13:01]:
Scotty Pippen, CPA. That’s a deep cut if anyone gets that right.

Kyle Lawrence [00:13:05]:
Yeah, nice pull.

Brandon Karpeles [00:13:07]:
And. And just making sure people are treated well by good professionals that, that we vetted and we trust.

Kyle Lawrence [00:13:13]:
So it’s interesting. You talk about giving people the advice. One of the biggest misconceptions that people have about what Moish and I do for a living is that they think that we’re the decision makers. You know, we tell clients what to do. Clients hire us for our advice. We make decisions. And clients can make their own often misguided decisions. So I’m happy to hear that in this circle, you’re in.

Kyle Lawrence [00:13:36]:
In the same boat. And listen, people are going to make dumb decisions. People get stuck in their ways. It’s part of what. Why what you do is so important in this space. Because you probably encounter business owners who have been at it for decades, and they’re good at what they’re good at. They’re good at making widgets, they’re good at making food, whatever it may be. When you approach them and offer this new way of doing business and a new way to maximize their profitability.

Kyle Lawrence [00:14:02]:
I’m sure you encounter pushback from that. You know, I mean, the fact that they reached out to you in and of itself is a good thing. But how do you. How do you push up against that or how do you know without being aggressive, handle that?

Brandon Karpeles [00:14:15]:
Yeah. Fortunately, most of the people we’re seeking out here are at least Bitcoin curious. So they’re willing to acknowledge that. Okay, there’s something here I don’t know. I do need some expert guidance. I’m willing to listen to other people. And it’s funny what you mentioned about. I spent like half my day on the phone with attorneys back doing my.

Brandon Karpeles [00:14:39]:
Yeah, I signed. I put a lot of attorneys, kids through college, that’s for sure. I signed a lot of legal bills. But to your point, the majority of those calls were not going through documents or anything. It was a sounding board. What’s our strategy here? How do we navigate this bankruptcy? Okay, this creditors class is going to do this. What’s going to be our response? A lot of it was just being on the phone playing like four or five chess moves out and being prepared for one of those, one of those moves and getting the expert guidance and getting responses that, that I feel good about and I’m getting someone who is giving me good advice was invaluable. I could not have done my job without it.

Brandon Karpeles [00:15:23]:
I absolutely could not. So to that point, we’re just, we’re just that. But instead of for the legal system, it’s for the Bitcoin system, for the Bitcoin protocol. And we can be that sounding board for you, help navigate everything with you, and even just talk through it. Like, I mean, we’ve, we’ve talked to, we’ve talked ourselves out of business because we’ve gone through something, talk to the, the business owner. It’s like, this doesn’t make sense for you. That’s not right. We’re not, you know, it’s not like we get to go bill, you know, Medicare or whatever.

Brandon Karpeles [00:15:57]:
Let’s just do this surgery and get refunded by some third party insurance provider. Like, we actually care about our customers and want to do what’s right for them. It’s not just about lining our pockets every step of the way. And so being transparent like that, having that openness and working with people that actually want to work with you. Like, the worst scenario I had when I was going into troubled businesses was when I got down, when I sat down and the guy was like, I know more than you. You don’t know how my business is running. I’m just like, this is going to be a disaster. This is an abs.

Brandon Karpeles [00:16:35]:
And the best workout workout is what it was colloquially referred to in the industry was when I sat down with someone and they’re like, listen, I know we got a problem. I don’t like it, you don’t like it. We don’t have to like each other, but let’s work together on this. And it’s like, that always worked out better. And those are, those are the better relationships. We don’t even really try to entertain these sort of, if we go in and we get major pushback or, hey, you guys don’t know what you’re talking about, or the whole thing’s just, it’s like, cool. Not your time. You know, consider the seed planted.

Brandon Karpeles [00:17:10]:
We’ll walk away. So we really start out the relationship with a professional understanding of, of what we’re doing here and who’s, who’s great at what. Yeah, I don’t, to your point, I don’t know how to manufacture. I don’t know how to run a CNC shop. I don’t, I don’t know how to put the computer graphics into cast parts for a Boeing 747. Like, I don’t know that stuff. That’s your expertise. But I’m here to be the expertise on Bitcoin and that’s how we’re going to have a good connection and relationship here.

Kyle Lawrence [00:17:46]:
Yeah, that, that’s a great, it’s a great way to approach it. And I completely agree. And listen, you can’t, you can’t win them all, which is certainly something, you know, Moish and I are on countless pitches, client pitches. I don’t know which one of us is on more, but between the two of us, it’s a lot. And some of them, you know, they don’t hit. And it’s like baseball rules, you get 3 out of 10, you’re in the All Star game. That’s not bad.

Brandon Karpeles [00:18:08]:
Exactly. Right? I mean, that’s exactly what it is. It’s, we’re going to go out there, we’re going to try to have the conversation and if it, you don’t like it, you don’t, you don’t like what we’re selling, you don’t have to buy. And that’s cool. That’s cool too. And we don’t want to force anything. We don’t want people to be uncomfortable because as we were talking about today, we’re having a large drawdown in the fiat price and we don’t want to get you in a situation where that scares you or you don’t understand what you got yourself into. Like, we don’t want to take you for a ride.

Brandon Karpeles [00:18:42]:
We want to have you build the conviction, you understand that this is a long term proposition. This is a five year minimum lookout into the future and establish that rapport, establish that relationship, Set good ground rules, set good expectations and make sure that’s the relationship we have as opposed to just trying to force something into a situation that’s really not ideal for either side.

Moish Peltz [00:19:11]:
So I want to talk about two issues on my mind since you’re, you’re so knowledgeable about custody. And the two biggest concerns I have, and the two biggest concerns I, I talk to others about when it comes to custody are one, physical security, there’s huge, you know, you read the newspaper, people are getting kidnapped and held ransom and so forth. And the other is quantum risk, which is a different risk entirely, but I think another just kind of amorphous concern of like. Oh no, you’re even talking about before. What if I don’t upgrade my software? What kind of risks do I have? So let’s start. Let’s start with physical custody.

Brandon Karpeles [00:19:57]:
Okay.

Kyle Lawrence [00:19:57]:
What?

Moish Peltz [00:19:58]:
Yeah, go, go.

Brandon Karpeles [00:19:59]:
Well, can we switch it around? Because. All right. The quantum one I just want to get over with. The quantum one bores me. The physical one, it’s like actually excites me. So to address the quantum one, this quantum stuff has been around for, for 15 years. You know, we’ve been told about a quantum computer forever coming around. And listen, if, if, if quantum.

Brandon Karpeles [00:20:22]:
If quant. A quantum computer happens, we’re going to. Everything’s going to break. The entire system falls apart. And Bitcoin, not just crypto, but not. Yeah, exactly.

Moish Peltz [00:20:32]:
I mean, all the sas, everything.

Brandon Karpeles [00:20:36]:
Bitcoin’s like a one and a half trillion dollar asset. I mean like you probably go after someone’s Schwab account, you know, or a whole host of Charles Schwab. They’re holding a lot more than 1 1/2 trillion dollars, I can assure you that. So like there’s airplanes.

Moish Peltz [00:20:52]:
Schwab can say, let’s roll back the clock. I guess the Bitcoin network could do that. But that would be different, right?

Brandon Karpeles [00:21:01]:
I mean it.

Moish Peltz [00:21:02]:
That wouldn’t be. Chuck. That would be like a consensus mechanism.

Brandon Karpeles [00:21:05]:
Yeah, I mean, I guess my point is it’s just all hell is going to break loose anyways. Okay, that, that I’ll accept that premise. Yeah. That being said, it’s all still theoretical. It’s so far off in the future from what I can tell, that it’s just not a concern. There are people working on some solutions. There are things out there. Like we do have an emergency break glass solution already out there.

Brandon Karpeles [00:21:30]:
Yes. It would require transferring over to a new protocol and a soft fork and some other things. But. But there is a break glass in case of emergency solution out there. So that is out there. It would slow the network down. It would make it way less efficient. It would take time.

Brandon Karpeles [00:21:47]:
We probably would have a massive drawdown. But there are emergency life raft options out there for quantum already. And, and so I. It’s. It’s just not. It’s just not high on my concern of things. Like I said, it’s been around forever there. You know, this is all theoretical.

Brandon Karpeles [00:22:10]:
It’s. It may, may never happen. Ever. So it’s just not something I want to dedicate a ton of time to. And there are some solutions out there, and I’m sure the solutions will just get better. And, you know, it may just be finding us, you know, the old solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist. So I’m less concerned about that one. It’s just not something that bothers me.

Brandon Karpeles [00:22:37]:
Physical custody, that is something that is something everyone needs to take very seriously. Something that we really try to

Moish Peltz [00:22:51]:
work

Brandon Karpeles [00:22:52]:
with people on in terms of what’s the best setup for them. Now, in the past, listen, if you wanted to hold your own gold, if you wanted to hold a bearer asset of any sort, you’re always under the risk of kidnap, right? Attack. Like, rich guys have been dealing with this stuff forever. There’s a reason they live in gated communities, hire private security. Michael Saylor walks around with, like, 52 bodyguards. At every one of these conferences.

Kyle Lawrence [00:23:17]:
We met some of them.

Brandon Karpeles [00:23:19]:
Yeah, exactly. So it’s like rich guys have been dealing with this crap forever. So, you know, back in the day, the first slide when I give a webinar is a picture from the 18th century of a gold caravan moving, moving gold across the Siberian tundra. And there’s people and horses. They’re running super fast, so they’re harder to get. There’s guys with guns everywhere. Like, physical security has been an issue forever. So, like, this is nothing new.

Brandon Karpeles [00:23:50]:
This is not something unique to Bitcoin. It’s the same thing. Back in the day, they had bearer bonds. It was like every villain movie from the 80s had some guy with bearer bonds and, you know, some people. Russian accent. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, this is. This is not a new issue.

Brandon Karpeles [00:24:06]:
The question is, what’s the best way to deal with it? And so instead of holding physical gold bars or a suitcase full of bearer bonds, you hold a steel plate. And maybe it’s two steel plates or four steel plates or whatever the number is. Maybe you have a passphrase stored on a different steel plate. But either way, it comes down to you properly securing those steel plates. And I really. I’m going to go off on a little personal tangent. It just drives me crazy when people say, oh, it’s stored on a little plastic device in your desk. Like it’s this fake fud.

Brandon Karpeles [00:24:41]:
No, it’s not stored on the plastic device. It is. It’s stored with your keys, your 24 words, or your Bitcoin. There’s all sorts of nuance around that. And you actually just control utxo Blah, blah, blah. We don’t have to. Thank you. Thank you.

Brandon Karpeles [00:24:56]:
Nice soundboard. I like it. So at the end of the day it’s all about how do you properly secure those metal plates or pieces of paper. We obviously recommend people put it in metal plates. You have multiple copies, you put them in different locations and then it’s up to you, is there a trusted person you want to give one to? Is, you know, do they understand how important this is? And then it really just becomes a personal decision at that point. What is the best way to store your 24 words or your 12 words or your 24 words times three or multi signature setup or whatever it is. How do you best store that? And there’s all sorts of different options and, but at the end of the day it’s a personal decision how you do that. And, and really the, the goal is right back in the day people didn’t hold on to their gold.

Brandon Karpeles [00:25:48]:
They left it with a bank. And that’s obviously how we got fractional reserve banking and all that fun stuff. And so, but it, it was because they didn’t want to hold the bearer instrument themselves. And so, you know, Bitcoin is no different. If you don’t want to hold the bearer instrument yourself, I, you can go put it in a bank safe deposit box. But the feds might show up one day and take it, which is something that happened in Los Angeles a few years ago. They just broke into a safe deposit storefront and took everyone’s stuff out of there. It was like a six year lawsuit to get some of the stuff back.

Brandon Karpeles [00:26:23]:
And so you don’t know, but you’re trusting a third party again with your 24 words with your bare assets. So no different than maybe a family heirloom or a piece of high end jewelry or something like probably shouldn’t walk around the west side of Chicago with a hundred thousand dollar watch on your wrist. That’s a bare asset as well. So again, these are just age old security questions that each person needs to come to. And what Bitcoin offers is something really cool in that you can hold an infinite amount of money on something that’s this big. And that provides some optionality where whereas if you had a billion dollars of gold, I mean that’s how many trucks or you know, pallets or whatever, you’d have to figure out, maybe I put some here, maybe I put some there. It’s a big amount of gold. I obviously can’t dig a hole big enough in my backyard for this.

Brandon Karpeles [00:27:22]:
And so you have some Optionality with Bitcoin where you’re able to have an incredibly large amount of value with an incredibly small footprint and that gives you a ton more optionality with how you would want to store your Bitcoin and just presents more options for you as an individual, as a business owner to think about it. But all the old concerns of controlling a bearer asset are out there. And you know, until I, I mean, I personally, I don’t. There’s no magic code to that, right? Like you can memorize your words now. You don’t have anything. But what if you get hit in the head with a bowling ball? Like, you know, or you just forget them. I mean, which is. So how many times do people just, oh, I’ll remember this password.

Brandon Karpeles [00:28:13]:
And then they don’t use it for six months and it’s like, hey, so and so website, send me a password reset.

Moish Peltz [00:28:19]:
Yeah, so password.

Brandon Karpeles [00:28:21]:
Yeah. So even that has a flaw in it. So I, I don’t know if we’re ever going to be able to truly solve the bearer instrument security issue. It’s all kind of the same stuff just done on an easier scale that we’ve always had to deal with for thousands and thousands of years.

Kyle Lawrence [00:28:41]:
So that’s great. That’s. That was a fantastic answer. And just to. To make a quick joke about remembering passwords, one battle after another has a very key scene where Leonardo DiCaprio can’t remember something that he needs to remember. And it’s really important and they won’t honor it because they know it’s him, but they won’t honor it. So I won’t get into spoilers if you haven’t.

Moish Peltz [00:29:02]:
But just as an aside, I also have a good. You mentioned like the, the tundra of the, of the, you know, Russian winter. One of my favorite gold stories is. And maybe you’ll use it as an example or we’ll cut it for time. But in, in the Incan mines back in Spanish Arab, the Spanish inc. Like Armada was basically there to serve the South American gold and silver reserves. And they would bring those by meal truck across like down to the Pacific and then across the Panamanian isthmus and then into the Caribbean. And the whole reason there’s Pirates of the Caribbean is because they were waiting for the Spanish to bring it across Panama and then they would capture it as they made that run through the Caribbean back to Spain.

Moish Peltz [00:29:57]:
And so I, I don’t know. I was in South America and I was at the mines and I saw this as history. I’m like, oh, okay. But anyway, your story of the, of the, you know, train over the Russian tundra made me think of that.

Brandon Karpeles [00:30:11]:
Yeah. Imagine if you could have taken a seed plate and like wedged it between two, two planks in your ship. No one would have ever found that. So.

Moish Peltz [00:30:20]:
Yeah, but the, the pirates weren’t, you know, watching podcasts of the billionaire crypto founders bragging about how much crypto they had. So.

Brandon Karpeles [00:30:27]:
Yeah, they weren’t, they weren’t doing their 40 hours per week of precious metal podcasts. So.

Kyle Lawrence [00:30:32]:
No, I mean, we don’t know that for a fact.

Brandon Karpeles [00:30:37]:
Yeah, that’s true. I guess they did have some advanced technology. We don’t know how they did it. So maybe they did have like radio back then. You know,

Kyle Lawrence [00:30:47]:
I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the real world examples that the, the book talks about the business case for Bitcoin, because I found this really interesting. Not just because Moish and I do. There is some, some bleeding over between, you know, what we both do. Just advising people better ways to do business. What should you be doing with all this excess cash? So you have, you know, companies basically adopting the microstrategy flywheel and Microstrategy as we talked about. They’re doing great today. Everything is perfect right now. We don’t need to worry about them.

Kyle Lawrence [00:31:18]:
But the book talks about three different companies specifically. There’s a few, but it was Tahini’s. And I do have notes here. I’m cheating the restaurant franchise that had, you know, allocated all of its excess cash to Bitcoin. Summer Place Homes, a family construction company which hedged against counterparty risk, which is a great idea, having rep. I represent a lot of construction companies and they’re constantly, constantly dealing with this. And then real or real. Bedford fc, the UK football club, leveraging Bitcoin for new revenue streams.

Kyle Lawrence [00:31:50]:
Three different approaches, three completely different business models. What type of businesses, large or small, are really best positioned to take advantage of some of these opportunities? Is a company like strategy in the same, in the same bucket as the ice, the frozen ice store down the street? That was a terrible analogy given how cold that it is. But, but that kind of thing, you know, how would you, how would you moderate or modulate the approach based on those just vastly different business models?

Brandon Karpeles [00:32:18]:
It’s funny you came up with the frozen ice store. There’s actually a place here in Chicago that is a frozen ice place that explains accepts Bitcoin. But anyways.

Kyle Lawrence [00:32:26]:
Oh, really?

Brandon Karpeles [00:32:27]:
Yeah, yeah. So the, the short answer is any business can take advantage of Bitcoin properties. It’s all going to, to serve a business better. And so there’s exactly like you talked about. There’s the business that just puts it on its, its balance sheet, that uses it as sort of a savings vehicle, like, like a tahini. And that’s, that’s a company with high amounts of cash reserves. They, they have, they’re very profitable. They put the profits back on the balance sheet.

Brandon Karpeles [00:33:00]:
They don’t make a ton of distributions. They leave the value in the company. They, they’re trying to grow the balance sheet and they put a portion of it into Bitcoin. And that’s the, the true Bitcoin treasury option. And that’s, that’s one way to start building a Bitcoin position. And a type of company that can take advantage of that is one with large cash reserves and a large balance sheet and people that want to grow the company and grow the balance sheet and the value proposition of the business, as opposed to a lot of people I saw back in the day would just strip every extra nickel out of the company. Take it, go buy the vacation home, the yacht.

Kyle Lawrence [00:33:39]:
The McKinsey boys.

Brandon Karpeles [00:33:41]:
Yes, exactly. So those are people building for the future, saving and using it as a way to preserve, to preserve wealth as opposed to holding a melting ice cube of cash. Then there’s the company, like the construction company. I mean, I don’t know if you remember in 2023, we had all those bank failures and basically overnight, if, or over the weekend, if the government didn’t come in and bail out. I always get the names mixed up. I think it was Silicon Valley Bank. They didn’t bail them out. You were.

Brandon Karpeles [00:34:14]:
Every one of their customers would not have access to their funds. So how are you going to make.

Moish Peltz [00:34:18]:
They had some clients that were stuck over the weekend and didn’t know what to do.

Brandon Karpeles [00:34:22]:
There you go. So imagine if you couldn’t pay a vendor or make payroll all of a sudden. The old joke in my old line of work was you miss payroll once and that’s it and everyone goes home and then your business shuts down. So like, you get one chance to miss payroll. And if you can’t get people paid and, and you have no access to the fiat monetary system, and even nowadays everything’s become so politicized that you could do something as simple as piss off someone in politics or even just nothing you did on your, your nothing was your fault. But a bank regulator or someone reviewing the ACH you requested says not, we’re flagging this not going to happen. You might get delayed. So even, even stupid, innocent things where it’s just a mistake, even of the banking system.

Brandon Karpeles [00:35:18]:
Well, now you have this alternative to fall back on where you don’t have to worry about getting permission from someone to send money. You can do it. We had a customer come to us, and I won’t get too much into it, but the basic idea was they’re foreign and they don’t trust the US Rails anymore. And they said, we want some optionality and we want to have the ability to move money around the world if we need to. And so that’s a very real concern. So it may be jurisdiction, it may just be wanting to sleep at night and knowing that if a bank run happens, you don’t need to worry about it. And I would say that’s insurance or optionality for any business that’s out there, because there’s no guarantee you’re going to wake up and your bank will let you transact tomorrow for a multitude of reasons. And then the last one, the new customer acquisition.

Brandon Karpeles [00:36:12]:
I mean, I’ve talked to so many Bitcoin businesses on our podcast. People that say, hey, I’m accepting Bitcoin. And that’s how they get business. Those that is, it’s 80% of their customer base. Or it went from zero. You know, it went from zero percent of their customer base to half. And so in every single scenario, I’ve seen a business start accepting Bitcoin and advertising it. Not just, yeah, hey, we accept Bitcoin.

Brandon Karpeles [00:36:40]:
I turned the thing out of my square terminal. I don’t put a sign up in the window. I don’t put anything on the website. I don’t get on social media, like actually gone out and marketed. The fact that they’ve accepted Bitcoin and appealed to the Bitcoin community, 100% of those businesses get more revenue than they were getting before. Like that is without a doubt the case. So that is universal success if you’re willing to put in the work of letting people know that you’re accepting Bitcoin for your products.

Kyle Lawrence [00:37:07]:
It’s funny you say that, because as Moish mentioned before, we do accept Bitcoin and most forms of crypto. It’s always funny when I am on a potential client meeting and we’re talking about some sort of digital assets project, whether it’s an ICO or some estate planning, because they have a lot of whatever it may be, and invariably the person will ask, you know, do you accept Bitcoin by any chance? And I Say, of course we do. And they look at me like I have three heads. And they’re like, do you know how many law firms I’ve talked to who proclaim that they’re experts in the space, but they refuse to accept Bitcoin. That’s a shooting fish in a barrel. It makes no sense to me that people would be that obtuse.

Brandon Karpeles [00:37:47]:
Exactly. It’s. That’s an easy one. That’s a layup. I mean, and that’s what I try to tell businesses as I’m out there. Like, just turn it on in your square terminal. You’ll show up on this thing called BTC map and people will show up at your store just from that. Then do a little marketing on top of it.

Brandon Karpeles [00:38:04]:
You can convert it to fiat. Like if you don’t understand what’s going on, you can get dollars. But turn your square terminal on, you’ll show up on a map, put a little bitcoin sign in your window, and I guarantee you will get more revenue than you were getting before. I can 100% get, guarantee it. So agree. That one’s a no brainer. Every business should do it.

Kyle Lawrence [00:38:21]:
Completely agree with that. Well, Brandon, as we, as we wind down on time, do you have any, any final thoughts for the masses out there? Any suggestions or really anything, any, anything you want to say? The floor is wide open for you.

Brandon Karpeles [00:38:33]:
Well, given the fact that we are having this big drawdown and I’ve received a lot of text messages, just I can’t stress enough how important it is to understand Bitcoin from first principles. Understand that you hold a loyal title to something someone can’t print. And that is the value proposition of Bitcoin. We are incredibly early to this. People don’t understand what’s going on. That’s why you have this opportunity. That’s why you have this asymmetric upside to getting in and the money of the future and, and just do your homework, build your conviction. It’s really important in times like these, a lot of people, this is their first cycle, class of 2024, class of 2023, they don’t, they’ve never lived through this.

Brandon Karpeles [00:39:21]:
And it’s like, understand what you got, why it’s important and make sure you have the conviction so that you don’t get washed out in these scenarios and sell all your coins to Blackrock or whoever else and end up as the sucker at the table.

Kyle Lawrence [00:39:37]:
So don’t, don’t freak out, don’t freak out. Crypto winters, they happen. It’s okay. Don’t sell the bottom.

Brandon Karpeles [00:39:43]:
Exactly. Don’t be that guy.

Kyle Lawrence [00:39:44]:
Yeah.

Brandon Karpeles [00:39:44]:
So. Or gal. Yeah.

Kyle Lawrence [00:39:46]:
Or gal.

Moish Peltz [00:39:47]:
Or person.

Brandon Karpeles [00:39:47]:
That’s my final message. Yeah.

Kyle Lawrence [00:39:49]:
Well, Brandon Karpeles , chief executive officer of Sovreign, really appreciate you coming by and we hope to see you again next time at the top.

Brandon Karpeles [00:39:57]:
Awesome. Yeah. Thank you guys so much for having me. Again, the website Sovreign S O V R E I G N I O all of our stuff’s there. You get a hold of anyone on the team and. And the team itself. So thank you guys so much.

Kyle Lawrence [00:40:09]:
Thank you. Thank you coming by. Well, that concludes our conversation with Brandon Karpeles. Thank you so much, Brandon, for coming by. Don’t forget to like and subscribe and follow us on all our socials. Links are down below in the show notes. Remember, block and order is available on all podcast platforms, including YouTube. Remember, block and order is not intended to be construed as legal and or financial advice.

Kyle Lawrence [00:40:31]:
Please do your own research. Contact your own representatives before you take the plunge. Very special thank you to producer Abby. Without her, the show would not be possible. So on behalf of Moish Pelts, I’m Kyle Lawrence. Keep fighting the good fight, everybody.

Moish Peltz [00:40:44]:
See you next time.