#57 Cryptocurrencies, Digital Assets, NFTs and the Future of Blockchain with Mike Novogratz

What this episode is about

This discussion features Mike Novogratz, a prominent figure in the digital asset and blockchain space, who shares insights into the evolution of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and their potential future. Highlighting his journey from Wall Street to founding Galaxy Digital, he explores the significance of digital assets in today's economy, including the impact of unique transactions like the sale of a tweet as an NFT.

Key takeaways

• Bitcoin turned skepticism into revolutionary optimism, redefining trust beyond borders in a distrustful world.
• Blockchain empowers transparency: a global ledger that keeps powerful entities honest, even in a world rife with corruption.
• The NFT boom began with digital art, but its potential spans ownership, identity, and decentralized governance.
• Investing in blockchain isn't just financial; it's a bet on rebuilding societal structures—an egalitarian revolution in finance.
• From speculating to believing: blockchain's passionate community transformed crypto skeptics into advocates for decentralized futures.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Lynn Tomman (Host) · 13 min speaking
• Mike Novogratz (Guest) · 31 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Galaxy Digital, Goldman Sachs

Notable quotes from "#57 Cryptocurrencies, Digital Assets, NFTs and the Future of Blockchain with Mike Novogratz"

• Fund he became a big believer in blockchain and digital currencies and in 2018 founded Galaxy digital to promote the growth of and to invest in blockchain-based businesses and…

  about Galaxy Digital · at 0:40

• Create in essence WRA dollars the dollars that back those currencies are kept with a Fed Bank we already have one called usdc run by coinbase and circle they have about $25…

  about USDC · at 27:36

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Mike Novogratz — Person · Main guest · 2 mentions
  Primary interview subject explaining blockchain, crypto markets, NFTs, and the broader societal implications of digital assets; he also discusses his career path and founding Galaxy Digital.
  I'm excited to be with Mike Novogratz...

Companies & orgs

• Galaxy Digital — Company · Business focus · 1 mention · first at 0:45
  Founded by Mike Novogratz to invest in blockchain-based businesses and digital assets.
• Goldman Sachs — Company · Business focus · 1 mention · first at 0:31
  Mike Novogratz's former employer, mentioned as part of his career background.
  To another episode today I'm excited to be with Mike novag who's been described as a whale in the digital markets Mike started his career at Goldman Sachs held positions in…

Products & tech

• USDC — Product · Case study · 2 mentions
  Presented as an example of a stablecoin and the potential for private companies to issue digital dollars.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 welcome to the three takeaways podcast which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers Business Leaders writers politicians scientists and other newsmakers each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with Mike novag who's been described as a whale in the digital markets Mike started his career at Goldman Sachs held positions in Tokyo Hong Kong in Latin America and then left to run a hedge fund he became a big believer in blockchain and digital currencies and in 2018 founded Galaxy digital to promote the growth of and to invest in blockchain-based businesses and digital assets I'm excited to learn about blockchain digital currencies and

0:58 digital assets like n FTS including digital art and other digital assets I'm looking forward to understanding how the first tweet which was a single sentence by Twitter co-founder Jack dorsy sold as an nft a digital asset for millions of dollars Mike welcome and thanks so much for our conversation today glad to be here before we start I have to say the following our content is intended for informational purposes only nothing contain in this discussion constitutes a solicitation recommendation or endorsement to buy or sell any financial instruments or Investments this discussion should not be relied on for investment advice you should do your own analysis based on your own personal circumstances and consult with your own advisors we do not make any representation or warranty Express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of any of the information three takeaways Lyn tomman and Mike

2:00 novag Gratz expressly disclaim any and all liability relating to or resulting from the use of this information Mike novag grats may buy sell or hold investments in some of the company's digital assets or protocols discussed okay glad that's done Mike digital assets are so interesting how did you first get interested in them I was a macr Trader most of my career macr Traders look at politics and economics and big trends and make bets in Broad instruments Equity indices interest rates and I got a call from a partner of mine who was a guy on the other side of the investment Spectrum right he was a credit guy within details and he asked me about this thing called Bitcoin and so I went on Google and I googled it real quickly said it's cool technology there are a lot of Libertarians at this point that we clamoring this was in 2012 right after the European financial crisis or during the European Financial

2:59 Cris crises and after the great financial crisis and so people were worried about inflation there was a distrust in government and I thought the Chinese are buying this is going to work and so I bought it originally Bitcoin as a speculative bet and it wasn't until I started being asked to speak about it and I was paranoid looking stupid on stage I had to start really researching it and digging in and as I dug in I found this passionate community of people that believed in it and then I ran into to Joe luin who was ironically one of my college roommates 1987 Princeton and he had been working on the ethereum project which was bitcoin's cousin and he was a co-founder there and I went into his office and I found this Dynamic group of people that were L plotting out a revolution and it was at that point I was like well this is a lot bigger than a speculative object this is about rebuilding the financial

3:54 architecture of the world and something that's more egalitarian and transparent and fair and I was like it's fun to be of a revolution five six seven years later you're seeing it right now breaking out all over the world before we talk more about Bitcoin let's talk about the blockchain technology the tech that underpins Bitcoin can you tell us about that technology what it is and how it's changing the Way businesses operate Bitcoin was the first asset on blockchain and so we all thought of Bitcoin and blockchain almost as the same it took me a long time as a simple-minded guy that with a computer scientist and boil it down as something I could understand and Bitcoin was the first digital asset that you couldn't counterfeit up until then control copy paste so the internet was great at reducing the cost of information because everyone could get it but it was terrible at creating value around

4:49 information blockchain technology and so step back what is a blockchain a blockchain is a big database that's owned by more than one person think of an Excel spreadsheet but it's updated every so often by lots of different people and they get a copy of the database and so it allows for transparency and finality which doesn't exist in most places right even at a place like Princeton I think they're going to be honest about my grades but someone could change my grades and how would I know now we do trust lots of organizations they have vested interest to tell the truth but there's plenty of places we don't trust there's Devastation going on in Afghanistan and I almost know with complete certainty that next week you're going to hear that the Taliban has frozen the accounts of most people in Kabul and has confiscated their wealth that's a horrible thing to happen where if you're on a global blockchain on a

5:49 global Ledger they can't that money is yours it sits there everyone knows ures and so that concept of shared databases and an open source so we can a peer-to-peer transaction and cut out the center is really really powerful and again it started with Bitcoin as first digital money and then just digital gold but now people are seeing it it can be for anything for any intellectual property for transactions payment systems and so you're going to see I think the world's infrastructure rebuilds we can call it web 3.0 there's lots of different taglines for it but really this serious of databases that are open sourced and shared that are transparent you're going to end up building all kinds of systems on top of can you describe some of those what do you think will be possible with blockchain technology in the next five or so years let's just start with payments right now I can take my phone and I can send you a picture of myself

6:52 with my glasses without my glasses making funny faces I'm one of like 72 different apps that you'd get in a millisecond for free but if I wanted to wire you money or send you money especially if you were not in the United States it's three days and a lot of money that's insane I should be able to tap and go and you get $86 or $86,000 depending on M you give you and so you're going to see Payment Systems all change for remittance payments for overseas workers back home to just payments sending your kids money now we have venmo which is a junior varsity version of it but but it's a closed system you're going to get a varsity version of it built on a blockchain and it literally is going to change the way payments happen that's just one use case it's going to happen in art we're going to have digitally native art that gets creative artists used to not create digitally because too easy to counterfeit control copy paste but now

7:48 you can guarantee this is a unique piece or it's one of four or one of 10 and so you're seeing a new generation of artists use their own creativity use AI combine it to create new beautiful things to evoke passion to evoke emotion when I started talking about that five six years ago people looked at me like I was crazy and all of us now we're getting the first bit of it first Blossom of nft art generative art has become a big deal right using Ai and humans combin to create art but it's way too early to know what part of that's going to work I just know it's going to work because there's so many bright people moving in I actually did a keynote at krisy and I laughed so hard because I was a crappy art student in elementary and junior high and I was like only my teacher can see me now I'm sitting up here and it was fascinating because you have this whole new world of artists you have old artist also moving into the

8:46 space Tom saak has done a really cool project Ur fiser did a really cool project and so these are guys are selling stuff for half a million million5 million doar in the physical art world that have now pivoted into the digital airport Mike can you talk about the application of blockchain to some areas where transparency would have a huge impact on social good I spent a lot of my time in the criminal justice space and we've been brainstorming a lot about that and one of the things when you talk to people who spend time in prison is they have all these stories the guard says one thing they say one thing and if you think about blockchains they provide transparency and so you could create a prison where guards log in and log out in the blockchains and that would hold people accountable we have no data around prisons in America it's hard to figure out how many people are on parole how long people spent in the solitary

9:43 what percentage of the population has spent time in solitary I would tell you having asked a whole bunch of them about 95% of people that spend any time in prison end up in the hole in solitary that's a shocking number it would certainly help with the narrative like we send people to prison and no one on the outside knows what's going on and so bringing some transparency to the system probably creates a more moral and fair system just one off thee cuff thought of where blockchain might help that's amazing and to think that blockchain will be applied everywhere there's such a range of possibilities in this digital world looking more at just the digital currencies to start with there's Bitcoin there's ether they're both created in very different ways and they use blockchain in different ways can you talk about the different digital currencies and how you see them I would break things up into a few buckets so

10:41 Bitcoin is almost its own beautiful ecosystem and it has won the lane in lots of ways as a digital store of value think of it as digital gold it's a finished product it doesn't have to get better it works and it is being adopted really quickly because governments around the world have been irresponsibly printing paper money Fiat money at an accelerating rate our debt is up quantums in the last 25 years and so we've gotten to the point in the US and Japan and Europe all over the world where it seems really difficult to come up with a ballet that allows us to pay that debt back any time and so people say the only way out is for them to inflate their way out to debase the currency and what we're hoping for ironically is that they can debase it just enough but not too much so it doesn't feel that painful if we can get inflation at three to 4% and over time we'll devaluate your currency but you

11:48 wouldn't feel it so painfully what some people fear is once you go down that road it becomes wart Germany or Venezuela or you have a real breakdown in trust in your currency that happens you have a breakdown in civil society and so people are buying Bitcoin as a hedge and it's a lot of ways a report card on how well the treasury and Central Bank do together and it's being adopted unbelievably fast because everyone's looking at the same macroeconomics and saying oh a trillion here a trillion here a trillion there pretty soon it's real money we are spending money like there is no consequence and we're spending it for some good reasons we've had 30 years where the rich poor Gap has gotten wider wider and wider now pre-revolution in France looks more balanced than we do and so the progressive s say we need to do something about it if it's free college pay for student loans Ubi or some version Ubi the child tax credit

12:44 all ideas that seem reasonable it's just there's a huge price tag and so that's what Bitcoin really has become digital gold to hedge against that de basement there are other groups in that lane Dogecoin which is a funny meme coin its only use case is the same as Bitcoins just it's a community of people that say I'm going to store my wealth in this I don't think Dogecoin has long-term viability but I could be wrong when I criticize Dogecoin I literally get death threats so there's this community of people that really peel passionately about their coin ethereum would go in bucket two which I'll call protocol level base level of trust Global decentralized supercomputer to authenticate in process data and so it's got competitors things like teral Luna Soul definity all kinds of different cardano even which I don't completely understand why it trades so expensively but most likely ethereum becomes the winner of that group now it

13:46 might be a few get pieced together they interoperate and so what do they do they process all these other systems so they process where nfts get minted and stored they process where decentralized Finance which is using a blockchain to disrupt traditional Banking and traditional exchanges go and so their value comes more from the network effect of being used than people think of them as a currency so it's really a digital asset it's part of a digital Network and then there are other things like stable coins which are just dollars wrapped in a token most likely as we move into this next chapter of digitalization you're not going to buy your cocacola or a nice sweater or a haircut with Bitcoin or ethereum you're going to buy it with the dollar the dollar just in a tokenized form your bank account is going to become a wallet right you're gonna have a wallet on here it's G to your crypto your dollars your stocks probably your

14:47 Bitcoin if you want some Bitcoin your opera tickets it'll all exist in your own wallet as opposed to at JP Morgan in the bank that's the big transition that's going to happen in the next five or six years and so those things will trade with less volatility because if the dollar is strong it'll be strong if the dollar is weak it'll be weak so you can put things in different buckets even decentralized Finance protocols that people invested they will feel a lot more like buying equities because you're going to buy into the governance of a project that as more people use it some dividend will go to the people that are supporting it even how we invest in them is not one uniform way one is okay adoption like gold one is oh my goodness how much business does this protocol do and so it's becoming a much more sophisticated area than it was five years ago people like crypto yes crypto no it's growing unbelievably fast so for

15:51 example the internet at its greatest adoption level got up to about 70% compounded adoption rate each year 70% more people are using the internet crypto right now is at 130% so almost double the adoption rate of the internet we went from about 120 million users to 200 million users globally in the last four months so an explosive growth which makes it a fascinating place when I started this business I had a hard time hiring the people I really wanted and now the list of analysts at our summer interns I could never get a job in my own company isn't there an international Case for digital currencies as well based on perceived risk that some currencies may become inconvertible or cases like India where the Prime Minister announced from one day to the next that the 1,000 rupe and 500 rupe bills would all be removed from circulation and in one blow he essentially removed close to 90% of India's circulating money I was talking

16:57 about this this morning with h earnings call with Afghanistan there's so many places in the world where it's unbelievably difficult to preserve your wealth if you live in any place with high inflation Argentina Venezuela Nigeria Tanzania you work your tail off to save a little bit of money and inflation erods its buying power over time really quickly there are places where governments like now in Afghanistan are going to come in and just confiscate get your wealth shut down your bank account say it's mine sorry that's happened from time to Memorial and so in the developed world we need to start looking at your ability to preserve your value as a human right Bitcoin has a human right in the rest it's a luxury it's a wonderful thing in the west it's a way of protecting against inflation there's other ways right you can buy real estate you can buy gold there are other inflation Hedges but in places like Afghanistan

17:57 right now or Venezuela in the last few years there isn't and so you see in Nigeria it's the second largest buy transaction user of Bitcoin in Iran Bitcoin has exploded and governments have a hard time shutting it down youd have to go door to door and say let me see your phone are because it's peerto peer and they don't control the system it's fascinating this is the first Global markets we've really had we've never had a global speculate Mania before 2017 when we had the first crypto and crypto has been a re ution of the people it's been Mr Mrs watab not the Japanese government it's the first speculative bubble that we ever saw that was started by retail usually it's by the taxi cab driver buys it it's over just started with Taxi capab Driver it's fascinating that now that institutions are getting in right it's a$2 trillion dollar market cap which is still small in global wealth Global wealth is probably 150 trillion and so

18:55 two out of 150 it's not even a percent I think there's huge room to grow in this thing digital currencies are obviously hugely volatile in value but how secure are they they're stored in so-called digital wallets which exist either on people's computers or their phones or in the cloud and these have been hacked and digital currencies stolen how secure are digital currencies they're getting more secure by the day I would say when crypto originally started a lot of the exchanges were Fly by Night operations set up by people in their basements and it wasn't that the cryptocurrencies themselves were ever hacked but it was the places people were trading and leaving them and then a whole industry grew up about how do I keep my crypto key safe we just bought a one and a quarter billion dollar company called bitgo which is the leader was the first real big custodian now it's the second largest custodian behind Queen

19:56 base of taking people's Keys taking them offline putting them in what's called Cold Storage providing ways they can get access when they need them and there's a whole huge industry growing up around this and so I think as more money moves in as more is at stake the security just goes up and up and up now what's interesting is you look at the internet itself there hasn't been one company that's survived being hacked one of the big National Security threats to the world is this wild culture of hacking of ransomware and so crypto is certainly part of that and it has its role to play in making things safer as you have these transparent open databases harder to hack but right now people are using Bitcoin as the ransom payment hey I hack your non- crypto company and say give me Bitcoin or I'm gonna never give you your data back and so it's just another piece of the complex puzzle of getting regulators and people comfortable with

21:01 it this is actually a hugely beneficial addition to society up until a couple years ago this was like who what is this is this Beanie Babies is this drug dealers is it and so it's in some ways a miracle that in 12 years it's gone from that to literally almost shutting down Washington two weeks ago during the Congressional debates around the infrastructure package when Congress tried to jam in a back way to regulate crypto in over three days they heard the community Roar and every Senator was deluged with phone calls not just from their constituencies but from the wealthier guys in their district from Big Business Leaders from Elon mus tweeting and DC was like uh oh we screwed up and I think it was a coming of age for the whole system I think that weekend and I was in France on of phone frantically that weekend DC realized this is a real industry it's here to stay and we've got to take it seriously

21:57 and no one wants to drive it offshore and that's the threat of how do you regulate in a positive way to create Innovation and again there's a lot of education is still happen I'm a progressive and none of the progressives in Congress see crypto is Progressive drives me insane I'm like okay wait Banks right now on average charge $450 $450 cents for an ATM withraw 122 billion dollar last year in overdraft fees charged to mostly poor people crypto is going to make banking free so how is this not Progressive but we haven't gotten the politicians to see it that way yet and so that's the real work of the next 24 months privacy is also an interesting idea there are two opposite ideas about privacy and digital currencies that are common but they both can't be true the first idea is that all digital currency transactions are private and Anonymous and the second idea is that all purchase and sales and

22:59 their sellers can be discovered which one is true that's a great great question so to start with every transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain and most blockchains is public you don't know who did the transaction but the transaction happened and there are very sophisticated research shops places like chainalysis or cyppher Trace that can do all kinds of analytical work and figure out broadly where the transactions are coming from and so from a bad guy using Bitcoin point of view it's a terrible thing to use matter of fact we hired the ex-head of the CIA Mike Morell to do a report and after eight weeks of a deep dive using CIA kind of training and how you do analysis he came out with saying if the government was going to build the system to catch criminals it would look like Bitcoin you don't give up all your privacy one of the unique things about the computer science is they have this ability now to give you the information

24:03 that you need but not all the information let's take a simple example you have a 21-year old daughter who goes to a bar and the bartender wants to see her driver's license he doesn't really need to know her address her height weight and eyes he just needs to know she's 21 years old and is eligible to drink but right now we're giving all this extra information that might or might not be used for the best of reasons and so in the future we're going to have the capacity to say hey here's the green light in the same way who gets to see all the information there are two ways crypto is going China who's banned Bitcoin is saying we want to see all the information about all our citizens all the time it makes us understand how we can control the economy better how we can control people better it gets us better data the Chinese have a long history of giving up privacy for the greater good it is terrifying to me terrifying because

24:57 crypto currency is programmable currency if I don't like gays and I would have shut off gay money and I have all the data on who's gay and who's not by what they shop and what they spend and what they search I can hit a button in China and gays have no money that's not the American way it's not the Western Way and so what you're going to see in the west is a more decentralized system of blockchains but some ability to know we're not dealing with Kim Jun or Bad actors and that people aren't using it to avoid taxes and so there's this fine line to try to walk that is going to be measured out and created in the next one to five years but it's interesting because the same technology can be used to really Empower tons of people can also be used in a different way to really control people so China is looking at creating its own digital currency and the US fed is reportedly looking into creating a us one what do

25:58 you think about Central Bank digital currencies and specifically Chinese and US ones well I think they're coming China is already here you'll be seeing more and more use of it so China wants domestically to control their population right now already 95% of Chinese payments go through a payment processing house so the Chinese already know what you're spending now they're going to do it through their crypto REM as opposed to just a digital REM be their bigger Mission though is to destabilize the dollar to move the dollar away from being the reserve currency and so when you travel to Africa when you travel to the mid East when you travel to Latin America traditionally people have done all trade in dollars and they've kept their money in $100 bills in the pillowcase there are more $100 bills overseas than there are in circulation there are $1 bills in America as we move to digital the Chinese say hey we want

26:56 to be where you keep your money if you're in Nigeria hold it in m&b here's the digit make it really easy for you they're three to four years ahead of the US and so it's now a monster monster national security issue in the US that we can't let China do this the treasury gets it the FED is a little nervous they're both so how are we going to do our version of a central bank issue digital currency there are two paths I pray and think we take the first path which is with guidelines from the OCC part of the treasury and blessing from the FED we allow private companies to create in essence WRA dollars the dollars that back those currencies are kept with a Fed Bank we already have one called usdc run by coinbase and circle they have about $25 billion dollar in circulation the dollars they keep are kept at us bankor and so it's just basically a digital representation of a dollar let five or six companies compete

27:59 in that let the FED make sure the dollars are kept in safe places and boom you're off and running Facebook's DM project is trying to do just that people are scared of it because it's got Facebook associated with it but what they're trying to do now in round two is just create a digital dollar and they could put it in the hands of two billion people the next day and so if I'm treasury I'm at least letting as many smaller of these companies like usdc do this and and I'm probably allowing Facebook to do it even though you could call Facebook the evil empire as long as I've got some assurances around the Privacy side because I think it's that important that the digital dollar gets out there in the world fast because China's coming the other path the us could take is to try to do what China is doing but our government is not a good builder of things no governments are good Builders of things but certainly

28:51 our government's not a good Builder things so for them to become technologists and build their own black people it's a 10-year project then we will have lost a battle three times over and so I think when they do the analysis you're going to see projects like usdc explode let's pivot and talk about blockchain and nfts can you start by explaining what nfts are and talk about some of the different areas of nfts when I came up with that Insight that Bitcoin was the first digital asset you couldn't counterfeit what's unique about Bitcoin is there 21 million of them they all look and feel identical so they're fungible one Bitcoin is the same as another Bitcoin an nft is a unique asset it's a non-f fungible token but it's the same concept I can now take a piece of intellectual property a piece of music a piece of art a piece of code uh a photograph and give it an address on a blockchain and make it unique and that's

29:50 a stunning breakthrough the internet allowed data information to be shared so information was completely shared the internet and therefore the value of information almost went to zero it's likely the pedia britanica was out of luck just Google and who got rich well the people that provided access to that so Facebook Google these big silos Who provided you access for money to this crushing of the price of information what crypto and blockchain Technologies are doing is going to say hey we can give value to information now not all information is going to have value just like not other all going to have value but some will and we have a system that can assign value and hold value and keep the scorecard of value very naturally The Genius of this move is just that and so you're going to see a shift of power from businessmen to creatives right creatives are going to get paid for their stuff finally and

30:52 there's all kinds of unique things that you can do you can have an artist where every time his painting sells he gets 10% of the new sale price or 10% of the difference between the old sale price of the new sale price or that 10% goes to his favorite charity or it goes to a family Foundation but what happens now is Young artist sells 10 paintings for $4,000 each 20 years later they're worth a million dollar each and he got his $40,000 and the art dealer made all the money and so how do you Ure that the creative continues to participate in the earning stream of his work now you have a way of doing it in the old days people would say that would happen and they they sign a smudgy contract and it would get lost and I remember meeting a jazz music Blues musician who literally wrote time is on my side that was the rolling stone song is and he died penniless Jimmy Norman and he was supposed to get

31:46 royalties but he just never did whose fault was it who the heck knows the Shady dealer the Shady maner but think about that you're one of the songs that we all know how to sing and you're dying penist you're not even getting a royalty this new system makes your word not just your word but a contract that is so exciting fascinating Twitter CEO Jack dorsy sold his first ever published tweet as an nft for almost $3 million the Tweet which just said something like quote just setting up my Twitter unquote that's it that's the digital asset what does the buyer do with that digital sentence I know the buyer he's made so much money I think it was a glory buy Jack dorsy is a legend in our business community and certainly in the crypto community so it makes sense in the frenzy of the very beginning of the nft that someone would pay for that just to Happ it it's like bab Bruce home run ball what he pointed at some I'm to hit

32:47 the home run a souvenir to collect will it be worth $3 million in a few years I have no idea I wouldn't spend $3 million on that tweet but I get the idea that value is always around things that create an emotional tie think about what Twitter is today it dominates politics it dominates the world and I own the first tweet might make you feel good but it might be valuable if you told somebody that a Picasso painting 100 years ago what 50 years ago was going to trade for $60 million they looked at you like you're crazy value is a very funny thing and we're learning now that the Federal Reserve is making money so cheap that people are putting value into things we never thought they might digital goods are trading people literally will buy digital clothing for their avatars and spend fortunes on them and people over 40 look like that makes absolutely no sense to me my mother thinks it's insane but my kids are like

33:48 dude dad I want my avatar dripping in Gucci you have expensive kids yes I do but if we're gonna move more and more into the metaverse and we have this weird world where we've got people hurling into the metaverse I mean gen Z was born with these things in their hand and they don't think we're going to visit the metaverse as an amusement park because that's intuitive to view my age oh my God you put on the VR headset or the AR glasses and you have this experience then we come back to our real world they're like oh you are so old dudes they are in the metaverse already in their mind it's just going to get better and better and so the difference between me dating an avatar who I think might be in Shanghai but is actually in pipy I think might be a beautiful woman but it's actually a short little fat guy with glasses but I'm still having this connection it's a really interesting world how fast is changing we're going

34:44 to have art galleries that are all nft that are don't exist anywhere but in the metaverse we're going to meet to watch sporting events real sporting events in metaverse lounges and esporting events in metaverse lounges these glasses are literally going to go from glasses to AR glasses where I can walk down the street and see you walking with a little nft birdie that you bought on your shoulder and you'll be like yeah it's the only one that exists and I'll be like cool bird it'll be like jewelry what's the difference why you have real earrings versus cool digital earrings and with ar glasses we're going to live in this hybrid World it all sounds a little science fiction until you actually see the projects and we invest in time and I'm seeing the projects already and it's not like next year's stuff it's already there and so give it 5 years and it will proliferate even the VR headset last year they took the chain off so now you

35:38 can walk around it's half as big it's beautiful it's white the Oculus and I got to think in three or four years it's a I'm G to look like that guy in Star Trek with the skinny pair of glasses sounds amazing Mike what are you most excited about I always kind of want to close my eyes and come back in three years and see where we're at I think we are at the beginning of this explosion right now of nfts and Defi and they're connected but they're separate but happy at the same time because the base technology is just about ready for them I'm most excited about seeing if we can disrupt the financial system because I think it hasn't worked well for a lot of people on the planet and so to me from the political economic side that's where my excitement is can we create a payment system that doesn't Cor people up every time me think about when you go to take $20 out of the ATM and they charge it $3

36:33 it's a 15% tax and so the poorer you are the higher the taxes it makes absolutely no sense but I'm just as fascinated with the creativity boom that's going to come what worries me is I was in college I was fascinated with this movie Blade Runner and then they made an update a Blade Runner Blade Runner whatever 2042 or something and if was this wild world where some of us lived in the metaverse and this cool stuff and the others really didn't and that we've got places my son always tells me Kash Z 7 million people that don't have electricity or out in Silicon Valley we have people living in this amazing space and then homeless everywhere that so much of this cool stuff is happening at a bre neck pace and we have the other half of the world that will they be able to protect participate or not what I'm hoping is yeah this phone becomes their Bank electricity shows up everywhere I think we've gone from 800

37:35 million people that didn't have electricity down to 200 million and so we're getting there but but that'll be the challenge too to see how all that plays out because we're living in a world that's changing so fast I mean we've got the Taliban with their 1100 government from the the stone ages almost showing up and running a Kabul is a city of five million people this not a small place true true absolutely Mike before I ask for your three takeaways is there anything else you'd like to talk about that you haven't already mentioned the one thing I would say is in a lot of ways this blockchain revolution is generational it's jenzi and Millennials who are looking up at the Baby Boomers and say you guys screwed up if you think about the Baby Bo generation Bill Clinton took office in 1992 so call it 29 years the last 30 years so Clinton Bush and Trump were born the same year to start with so you

38:34 got a concentration of decision- making from the same basic generation of people the average American has gained 30 pounds so we've gone from a relatively fit country to a fat and obese country 30 pounds that's the average the average woman is now 5'4 170 pounds in America it's incomprehensible so okay we polluted our food system with sugar check we've run up more debt than we'll ever able to pay back the single largest increase in debt in nominal terms and in percentage terms in the history of our country leaving their grandkids to pay it back one day if you look at when they took over we had about 70% of our children of the country under the poverty line and about 70% of seniors under the poverty line today we have 17% of children under the poverty line and 2% of seniors that's a staggering statistic they took the Apple from their grandkids mouth and they ate it themselves Jack oh and by the way I just

39:38 read this weekend that the pollution has gotten so bad or the global warming has gotten so bad people think the planet will be unstable in 10 years we have a generation of leaders that had their chance and really screwed up and there is zero humility in any of them zero humility I still need to make the decisions we've got a 7 year old president who listen I voted for because I didn't like the other choice but it's time for that generation to say hey maybe we haven't been so smart and the crypto Revolution is a little bit about that it's gen Z and Millennials looking up and saying dude you guys screwed up you really screwed up and we're not going to wait for you to move away we're going to build our own ecosystem our own culture of currency and so this is really much more I'm humiliated at then I'm 34 days a baby boomer I'm November 26 1964 so I'm like oh I hate those Baby Boomers and it's I'm one of

40:35 them I always tell people I identify as jenzy as a joke but but I do think there's something to be said there that the 74 year olds have to look around and say hey we didn't do so well and that it's time to at least be open-minded that there's another system that could take its place and maybe do better I hear that Non-Stop I came back to work in this field because I wanted to work with young people I find it more exciting you learn more and the best companies are filled with the younger and younger people my sister ACC being an agist and I said well the only safety I have is I am a baby boomer and so I'm beating on my own tribe but I think that's an important thing to at least meditate on because we've got Nancy Pelosi and Richard Shelby blocked this bill and so it's shocking how many people over 75 are running our country Mike what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today

41:32 one the crypto Revolution is here it's real and you should get involved two if you're scared just start get off zero make an investment I say crawl walk run or just get off zero either the same way the moment you actually own something you start focusing on it you read about it in the newspaper you get intellectually curious and I have not met one person who I have turned on to bitcoin or crypto that hasn't gone down what they call the rabbit hole that hasn't found it fascinating and exciting and exhilarating so that's two and the third one I think I'll play it off crypto is that this is about systems change our country our world needs a whole lot of systems change so it's not just using crypto I do a lot of work in criminal justice for form that everyone should look around and say okay what other systems need changing and you'll find a great parallel between the energy of this crypto Revolution which is often

42:36 mistaken right people like oh it's all about making money it really isn't when I met with Joe luin and his team and I said I got inspired they were literally plotting out the Revolution and could have cared less about the money and I think there's a moment right now where the world seems to be almost in tatters where we have China having pivoted away from engagement to a oneman emperorship scary where we have now we just saw what happened in Afghanistan where we have a breakdown really of what looked like a world order and so it's really time for people to think about how they contribute to changing this system that doesn't seem to be working Mike this has been great thank you thank you if you enjoy today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new Fresh weekly episodes be sure to sign up for for our newsletter at 3 takeaway.com or follow us on Instagram Twitter and Facebook note that thre takeaway.com is

43:35 with the number three three is not spelled out see you soon at three takeaways tocom

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "#57 Cryptocurrencies, Digital Assets, NFTs and the Future of Blockchain with Mike Novogratz"?

Lynn Tomman (Host), Mike Novogratz (Guest).

What is "#57 Cryptocurrencies, Digital Assets, NFTs and the Future of Blockchain with Mike Novogratz" about?

This discussion features Mike Novogratz, a prominent figure in the digital asset and blockchain space, who shares insights into the evolution of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and their potential future. Highlighting his journey from Wall Street to founding Galaxy Digital, he explores the significance of digital assets in today's economy, including the impact of unique transactions like the sale of a…

What is mentioned in this 3 Takeaways episode?

4 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Mike Novogratz, Galaxy Digital, USDC, Goldman Sachs. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "#57 Cryptocurrencies, Digital Assets, NFTs and the Future of Blockchain with Mike Novogratz"?

The episode runs 44 min; the transcript is about 7,566 words in 45 timestamped sections.

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