[upbeat music] Welcome back to Blockspace Live, presented by CleanSpark, y'all. We're coming at y'all live on Friday, nine AM PST, twelve PM ET. We've got a packed lineup today for news.
The Obamas are producing an FTX series. [laughs] Put a little tip into the, uh, tip into the tip jar for Marty Bent was right about conspiracy theories.
[laughs] Um, and then we've also got a TradFi update that's really three-pronged. We're gonna try to condense it into one segment. Nasdaq is cleared for token-based equity listings.
We've also got Coinbase rolling out perps for non-US users, and this comes on the heels of Morgan Stanley filing an amendment for their Bitcoin ETF filing with the SEC. We got a ticker.
We know where it's going to be trading. For the last news item today, an update from our friends at CoinDesk on Clarity.
And for our interview segments, we've got Aydin Kilic, CEO and President of Hive, on to talk about their AI expansion.
We've got Bitcoin developer Portland HODL on talking about how you can supercharge your vibe coding with Claude. And we've got the boys from The Bugle. We've got Rod on to talk about Bitcoin maxi madness.
If you're into March Madness, this is going to be for you, except it's not basketball, it's maximalist. [laughs] Blockspace goes live Monday, Wednesday, Friday at noon Eastern.
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This show is brought to you by our friends over at CleanSpark. Let's kick it off. We will kick it off with the hashrate index update brought to us by our friends at Luxur.
And actually some good news here because hashrate has been coming offline. A few notes on that in a minute, but just a quick snapshot of the Bitcoin mining KPIs. Bitcoin's hovering just around seventy thousand right now.
It sold off in what I would say is kind of a macro liquidity crunch or sell-off recently. Gold tumbled, silver tumbled, stocks have been weakening as bond yields and the dollar actually rise.
Uh, we've got hash price at thirty dollars and forty-six cents per peta hash per day. Not all-time low, not that great either though, y'all.
And network hashrate, this is the big thing for today's update, is down to nine hundred and thirty-seven, about nine hundred and thirty-eight exahashes a second.
On the seven-day average, it has lost a big chunk over the last week. I'll get into some commentary on that in a second from the Luxur team, actually.
But the other big news from this, we are ninety-nine percent through the current difficulty epoch, so probably while we record this, potentially even, we will get a difficulty adjustment.
But it's going to be upwards or, or down-- it's going to be a downward difficulty adjustment of roughly seven point two three percent.
That is a big move, and it comes after, uh, the last difficulty adjustment was just about half a percentage point.
Uh, pretty significant moves, though, for hashrate this week, and I just want to zoom in on that before I toss it to you, Charlie, for other thoughts.
If you look at the seven-day average on hashrate index, we are just absolutely plummeting, man. I mean, we were at about one thousand eighty-six exahashes on February twenty-eighth,
which was the onset of the war in Iran. That might have something to do with it. I, I'm, um, you know, it seems crazy, but we'll get to that in a second.
And now it is down to about, yeah, nine hundred and thirty exahashes. So over the last two weeks or, you know, three weeks or so, you've had, you know, almost a hundred exahashes come offline. You've had, um, a good...
Or sorry, excuse me, you've had more, um, than a hundred exahashes come offline. And to, to me, I, I asked one of the whizzes at Luxur, um, what was going on with this, my boy Dan on the derivatives desk.
And I said, "W-are y'all keeping track of this?" They keep track of all these things for their derivatives instruments, and I said, "What do you think is behind this?" He, he postulated a few things.
He said, one, you know, there's obviously still pivots from public miners and big miners to go into AI, so, you know, that makes sense. Some of this hashrate's probably coming offline because of that.
He did also throw the possibility of the Iranian war throwing some operations, if not in Iran, in the Middle East, out of whack.
We had a show, uh, I believe almost a year ago at this point, with, um, a Iran-an Iranian Bitcoin miner. There's actually a decent amount of mining that goes on in Iran.
It's not a lot, but that could be one explanation here. I don't want to overstate that though, because we don't know for sure. But if you're looking at macro events, those are one of the only things that line up.
Also, you know, hash price is depressed right now, so, you know, people could just be coming- But we are- [laughs] We're, we're, we're up, up and away, man. I mean- Yeah... this...
So if you scroll up, Colin, um, uh, one interesting thing, I don't think we've ever had this on a, uh, live stream before. We could see the difficulty adjust midstream here.
So we only have a few more blocks, and if they come in quickly, we could see it happen within the hour, hour and a half.
Um, and I don't know if you said this, it's a negative seven point three, seven point two three difficulty estimate, so some relief comingFor bitcoiners, uh, for Bitcoin miners.
Also, Bitcoin's price is up a little bit, you know, was sixty-five, went up to seventy-five, back down to sixty-nine. So- Yeah. No, it's, it'd be better if it were up around seventy-five, seventy-six. I, yeah, I know.
But, you know- You know, and the fact that we're above seventy, that was...
A lot of people were chattering about whether or not we're finally seeing Bitcoin serve as, you know, a kind of risk-off asset and, or, sorry, risk-on asset. And, um, we actually had
the, the CEO, um, of 2Prime on, on one of our recent shows, Alex, uh, talking about, you know, how he thinks it's a little bit too early for that.
What we might be seeing right now is the fact that Bitcoin is rallying because it was just so oversold.
You know, I mean, we had basically four months of nothing but, but down only, so it kinda stands to reason that we'd see a bounce.
One last thing I just wanted to point out, th-this is proving to be one of the wildest quarters, uh, or, or you could say wildest two quarters for Bitcoin's difficulty.
I mean, [chuckles] if you just look at this, th-th-this chart here, this is the, Bitcoin's difficulty adjustments going back to October.
Uh, out of the last, let's see, two, four, six, eight, 10, 12 with this next one that we're about to get, out of all of those, nine have been downward, and that, that does not happen, y'all.
Bitcoin's hash rate typically is always marching upward, and you usually see these things going the other way.
But once we did get, uh, one of, one of the positive ones we did get was almost 15%, which is a nuclear upwards adjustment. I mean, Bitcoin's hash rate is just getting thrown all over the place.
Miners are coming offline for AI, other miners are coming offline 'cause they can't afford to mine anymore. And it's been pretty interesting to see that play from a data perspective. And we had the winter storm.
We had the winter storm across Texas and, and Tennessee. Like, we had four major back-to-back-to-back events, each which swung, uh, hash rate in the opposite direction. I got whiplash, man, you know?
How do I collect my insurance check? Who's the CEO of Bitcoin? Yeah. I mean, who is the CEO of Bitcoin?
[laughs] I, I wish they could, uh, g-get, I wish they could figure something out about all these different issues- We'll, we'll have them on later on in the show. [laughs] Yeah.
But, you know, just, I think just to recap, it has, a-and I, I, I've said this on other streams before, but I just wanna rehash it here.
Th-this kind of movement with Bitcoin's hash rate and the, and the extreme volatility and undulations i-is something that we haven't really seen since, uh, the China mining ban in 2021.
So if y- I, I don't know if y'all can see it on the screen here, but all the way to the left, you can see these huge drawdowns in difficulty followed by this big spurt in May of 2021 after some hash rate came offline, then went back online.
But when China banned Bitcoin mining, that affected roughly 50% of Bitcoin's hash rate, and the re- the entire industry or most of the Chinese mining industry ended up migrating across the world.
And we are seeing, with the AI pivots and some of the weather events, similar disruptions to hash rate that are really quite historic if you actually zoom out and, and look at the difficulty chart.
So, you know, I've said this before, and I, I think that it's proving out actually, I'll, you know, I'll, I need to hold my tongue 'cause it could explode by the end of the year, but I would be shocked if Bitcoin's hash rate saw meaningful growth this year.
Like, it, it should, if, if, if all, all things being equal and this trend continues, we should expect Bitcoin's hash rate to be, grow at a smaller percentage or maybe even be flat this year, you know, depending on how- Yeah...
Bitcoin's price shakes out throughout the rest of the year, and depending on whether or not miners can a- actually find jurisdictions to mine in profitably.
'Cause right now, the US has tapped out most of that, most of those electrons are going to AI now, or in the future will go to AI- Yeah... as these miners, uh, revamp their operations.
And that, and that vibes with the Valentin Rousseau, uh, mod DPills, who was on our previous show. That, that, that, that vibes kind of with Valentin Rousseau's, uh, prediction, uh, over the next few years.
It's, uh, less dramatic, um, barring some kind of white swan event. So, do we wanna swap- Um, I think we will go ahead and just cover a few more things here.
Okay. And then we'll move on to news. Um, yeah, I just keep coming back to this. I, I, I... Th- there was this tweet that was claiming that,
you know, Iranian Bitcoin miners can mine Bitcoin for, like, $1,300. And there's, I, I, I keep coming back to this idea as like, is this hash rate, uh, blackout because of Iran?
And when I saw that tweet at first, I was like, first of all, that's just, like, not true. That's- Whenever you see someone like- Yeah...
"This is how much a miner makes Bit- uh, can mine Bitcoin for," there's no way to actually know that, and you can maybe try to get an average out, but that doesn't mean that every single miner is gonna actually be able to do that.
Those are often misleading. And
the ar- actually, the argument in that tweet was even more convoluted because they were saying that miners are, you know, now they're having to sell because of the Iranian war, and that's causing pressure on Bitcoin's price.
Or rather, they were selling before the war, now they can't mine, so they're not selling anymore, which is, you know, a ludicrous theory for saying why Bitcoin's, uh, price is being suppressed right now.
But I, I do have to say, it is really curious, just going back to this one more time and we'll leave it after this, that at the outbreak of the war, Bitcoin's hash rate hits a local top, and then it goes down.
So at the very least, it is a interesting coincidence. At the most, maybe there's something here. Maybe there's some alpha in the fact that there's actually more mining going off. Yeah.
And there's also a decent amount of mining, I would say, going on in the other Gulf states. It's not a crazy amount, but the UAE and Oman do have a decent amount of hash rate.
You do have to wonder if some of the military action is disrupting those operations as well. I, I don't know for sure, but it at least comes to mind.
Well, you know, and just speculating, it could be, like, you know, response to anticipated increase in energy prices, which has happened since.
I mean, nat gas has spiked if you're, if you're, if you're trying to buy gas which was refined somewhere in the Gulf, like-... Qatar. So LNG plants- Right...
now, um, affecting, LNG plant throughput in the Gulf now affects your Bitcoin hash rate.
So add that to the list of weird things- [laughs] Add that to the list of things you have to consider when you're trying to hedge your hash rate exposure. Yeah.
Um- All, all of a sudden, all of a sudden the terminally online monitoring the situation people, uh- [laughs]... seem to be very well primed for trading hash rate futures on Luxor's hash rate futures derivatives, yes.
So we'll, we'll leave that there, and we'll go ahead and move on to our first news story of the day, which I almost moved this out of the hero spot because the, the- [laughs]...
NASDAQ stuff is actually more consequential, but this is just super interesting. And that's Netflix is, uh, the, Netflix is rolling out a series called The Altruist, which chronicles the rise and fall of FTX.
A few housekeeping items on this that are worth noting. The Obamas, via their Higher Ground Productions company, are producing this. They're the executive producers listed on the credits for this series.
It, it's going to be an eight-episode series. I, I, you know, it's gonna be, I think, a limited series, probably just one season. If they, if they string this out into two, that would be kind of wild.
This is one of the analyses that I found very interesting, though, and to me, it ex- it exposes this as something that's going to be less about the fraud that was committed and more about the muddier side of the FTX- Wait, give, you know- Give that to me.
I'm all-... polyamory Obama mansion... I'm all about that. I don't wanna hear about the fraud. I know too much about the fraud. I wanna hear the salacious details.
I do think that that's what's going to sell the series, but this is a way, this is how historical revisionism creeps into the minds of the masses, you know?
[laughs] And apparently this is going, the show is going to center on S- SBF and Caroline Ellison's relationship, and, you know, there's this quote from the trial where Caroline said, "I wanted more from our relationship but often felt he was distant or not paying enough attention, much attention to me."
So there's the hook for the religious conflict, and it's going to be kind of framed as this Gen Z... Although I don't think they're Gen Z, they're Millennials, right? No, no, no. Whatever.
Bonnie and Clyde, which is, which is kind of funny to even think about them as Bonnie and Clyde, 'cause Bonnie and Clyde are running around with Tommy guns- Yeah... you know, blasting through banks.
And Caroline Ellison and C- and, and, and, um, SBF were, you know, just sitting in their Bahamian mansion, crushing Adderall, figuring out how they can steal billions from their customers, you know?
Uh, and, and if you just, one last thing I'll say, Charlie, and I'll throw it over to you. Yeah.
Just looking at the people they have slated for this, they've got Anthony Boyle playing Sam Bankman-Fried, and they've got Julia Garner playing Caroline Ellison. They glowed these people up, man.
[laughs] They absolutely glowed them up, and this is maybe the most detached-from-reality casting I've seen in anything. And there are a bunch- Okay...
of characters that, like, I think are just gonna be stand-ins for multiple different characters that don't technically exist, like this Hannah and Lucy.
They also have the psychiatrist or psychologist, Doc- uh, psychiatrist, Dr. Lerner, who li- [laughs]...
in the Bahamian mansion, and I'm pretty sure he was the one who was involved with making sure everyone had Adderall and Vyvanse prescri- uh, uh, prescriptions, but- Look, it's hard to cast Sam and Caroline.
I will say Julia Garner's off a heater of, uh, past few years with Ozark and then recently Weapons, which I think got an Oscar. Um, so yeah, we here on this show, we do pay attention to pop culture.
Um, I do think Sam's gonna be the hardest to nail because how does Anthony Boyle gain all that weight? [laughs] Maybe he's a method actor.
I mean, Christian Bale got- Maybe- Christian Bale did for, uh, for, um, uh, that documentary featuring, uh, the, George Bush's... Whatever. Okay, I'm, uh- [laughs] You talking about, uh, Veep? Or not Veep- Yeah...
sorry, uh, Vice. The, the Vice President, yeah. W- who's that? Yeah. The, the Cheney doc? Cheney doc. Dick. Yeah, Dick Cheney. Yeah. I didn't know that he was in that. Um- Yeah, he, he was Cheney...
I mean, you know, it would be- And he looked like Dick Cheney. So- No, that, that was Christian Bale... hold off the... It was Christian Bale as Dick Cheney. It looks- Yeah. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah.
Maybe he will do a little Christian Bale here. It's like- Yeah... maybe we'll get, like, a progressive weight gain as the stress mounts- Yeah... on SBF, you know, and he continues to slam veggie burgers or something.
[laughs] You know, I, I do think that this is...
The, the other thing that I thought was really fascinating about this, and I, I would, I'm curious how many of these will actually go to production, but this is one of three FTX biopics that are being planned right now.
Lena Dunham is apparently doing one for Apple, and o- based on Michael Lewis's book, Going Infinite. And Amazon Prime is apparently doing its own limited series with the, with the Russo brothers.
What, what is this mat... Like, I get it. Right. This was one of the biggest frauds to ever hit the North American financial markets. But w- where is this rush to do all of these biopics on this thing?
You know what I mean? Why are people chomping at the bit for it? Why do we have three of these things? I mean, I- You only really need one, and but it's gotta be done well.
I don't think any of them are gonna be done well. They're going to, I think, probably whitewash a lot of the situation. Well, yeah, don't, don't count your chickens before they're, uh, green-screened.
I mean, so does- [laughs]
Uh, I, I will say, you know, they sh- they shoveled tokens down our gullets, rugged those tokens, stole our Bitcoin, and now they get the last laugh by selling their biopic, their, their stories?
Man, uh- That's a good question. Do you- Yeah...
I mean- Do you think they'll get- I don't think anyone will get royalties from this, but could you imagine, like, SBF's legal representative, uh, like, you know, going to bat for him while he's in, in a cage- Yeah...
being like, "Hey, you know, this is, there's some intellectual property here. You're gonna be paying for my client." Yeah.
We'll, we'll do it for, uh, yeah, we're in, but at, uh, you know, 5 million in FTT token [laughs] or something like that. Um-All right. Let's, uh, let's move, uh, to...
I, I think we should probably either go to the next, um, news, which is the NASDAQ, or we could bring, we could, uh, bring on Portland Hoddle. I see him in the audience. I think, I think we should, uh,
I think we should bring on Portland. Let's do it. Okay. Here we go. We're gonna bring on my boy, Portland Hoddle. Welcome to the show, Portland. You're muted. Good morning, gents. Good morning. Welcome.
What is going on, Portland? Life is- Um-... excellent. I am very thankful. Bitcoin is TikTok next block as usual, and, uh, yeah, couldn't ask for anything more.
There's some, uh, as a SWE though, software engineer, I'd say AI has been the biggest change and probably on the front of everybody's mind right now- Yeah, and the-... including my own.
Yeah, and, and this is, this is why, because, like, okay, everybody's got to have their little AI segment, and so we do, too. Uh, you dropped in one of our chats that you had used over a billion tokens.
A billion anthropic tokens. What? And Charlie- What in the world? What are you doing, Portland?
Um, first of all, I, I would just like to, g- like, the grandioseness of that statement, I figured out after asking a few people, I'm actually, like, kind of on the lower tier of high amounts of usage.
Um, so basically- [laughs] Well, hang, hang on, hang on. You're in the lower tier at a million tokens? A billion tokens. The bottom of the top, you could say. Yeah, so like, you kinda like...
So I was like, okay- Oh, a billion... I'm gonna use a billion tokens, and I was like, I thought, oh man, 'cause, like, it was kinda my goal for February.
I just wanted to hit a billion tokens and build everything I've always wanted to build.
Anything, any dashboard that didn't exist, anything that was a pain in my butt, anything I wanted to automate, all these things are now possible in a limited fashion because I'm gonna caveat with, like, bunch of problems that c- come along with this.
You can build anything you want, so I was like, okay, I wanna use a billion tokens. I started, like, I've, as... It hit, like, 500 million. I was like, okay, I'm just gonna go the whole way.
It's gonna, I'm, I got some... I'll generate some revenue, I'll pay for these things. They'll, they'll make me a few, few sats, right? And, um,
yeah, some users, I think the highest I saw was somebody used 1.5 billion, but it's still high, but there are bigger fish out there. Uh, but yeah, in, in general, I've been using, like, specifically
I tried a tool, uh, OpenClaw, and I kind of didn't really build much useful with it, didn't really enjoy it as a tool.
Clod Code combined with Cline and, like, VS Code, like hands down, like that was just anything I wanted to build, hey, I got a project outline, a plan. I had all my, my MD files set up, et cetera, and yeah.
So I've just been, um,
other than just building everything I want to build, paying for tokens through Anthropic, I've had to kind of realize that there are a bunch of nuances to being a software engineer right now, and that I truly think that the majority of software engineers are going to have a very hard time dealing with the fact that you have to use these tools very likely to be competitive at the workplace, and this is probably the most deflationary technology I've ev- I've ever witnessed because my, my kind of anecdote on this would be like, okay, like you have, like you're trying to sell yourself as like somebody who's like somewhat senior.
I want my 180, $250,000. People can now come in with doing the exact same thing, probably using AI to a heavy degree, and build the same thing and a- ask for far less.
And so that's, that's my biggest like how do software... Oh, so I'm just gonna say the overt part out front, and this does relate to Bitcoin as well because look, we- we're using this to build stuff in Bitcoin too.
Um, how does a software engineer ask for the current salary that they probably are earning when the reality is that a lot of these software engineers are just kind of prompting AI into their, their code base at this point to 80 to 100%?
So s- we can get, we can get into existential. I wanna actually hear about something you've built, Portland.
Like, what is a thing that you've built, maybe hopefully something that like an average listener to the show can understand, like what you built that's useful? Yeah. So, uh, one thing I used a- specifically all AI for?
What have... Yeah. Something you used tokens for. Okay. Yeah, so something I've used token for was the Miniscript FFI interface to Bitcoin Core.
And so what this is, is currently if you're building a project using Rust, and you wanna use any Miniscript descriptor, like for example, like you have like this multisig, a time lock, and you got all these spending conditions, and you kinda wanna define like do I wanna use Taproot or pay-or-witness script hash.
Like, all these cool features, you have to use a Rust implementation, uh, by Andrew Poelstra, rust-miniscript-bitcoin. I like that library.
I, I'm fairly certain it's incredibly sound, but I didn't quite trust it completely. And so what I did was Bitcoin Core also includes an implementation of Miniscript.
So I took Rust and then using tokens through Anthropic Opus, "Hey, I would like you to do the following thing. I would like you to bind to Bitcoin Core's descriptor logic and Miniscript logic. Can you do this?"
"Yeah, sure. This is how I do it." "Okay. Well, I still don't trust that you're gonna do the right thing 'cause you make a lot of mistakes even though I tell you not to make mistakes.
Um, can you also replicate the entire test suite from Bitcoin Core as well into the Rust FFI library?
Then do the validation that, hey, we have the correct, um, the, the test cases passed, and that we have exactly matching behavior."
And then so after a little bit of manual review for mem- memory safety at the end, in an evening and plus like 50 bucks in tokens,
we have a working FFI library so you can literally build Bitcoin Core in Rust dur- during the com- compilation process, connect into it, and you can validate side by side that whatever's executing on your Rust side will also match what's in Bitcoin Core, reducing the chances of errors, or you could use this to-...
fuzz, for example, hey, I'm just gonna send off a bunch of random inputs or maybe targeted inputs, and we're gonna see if they always match.
Maybe we can find a little divergence somewhere where somebody has not implemented something correctly. So- Uh- Yeah. Uh, [clears throat] Portland, I, I wanted to latch onto something you said in your first answer.
You said... and this is a two-part question, you said that a lot of developers are going to have a hard time moving to AI to do their work, they're gonna be stubborn. Why do you think that is?
And number two, what is the biggest benefit that AI gives you as a developer? Like, what is the thing that it helps supercharge in your work? Okay, so here's the, the two-part answer.
I didn't say that developers would have hesitancy or, like, pushback, though it is definitely a thing culturally within businesses right now.
Like, they, they don't wanna see this, because it presents an, an issue where, like, there are only so many seats at the table, because it is a productivity multiplier, right? Like, you can get more code written.
You don't need to ask somebody else to please build this while I build this thing. Both are integrated now. Um, so but yeah, essentially, like, at the end of the day, um, I think to
do well with AI, individuals need to be very high agency. And what I mean by that, they, they need to have control, they need to have vision, they need to use it as a tool to force multiply their existing skills.
But with that said, uh, if not necessarily in the Bitcoin space, Bitcoin typically s- seems to have a lot of very high agency individuals, very in- inquisitive.
They're always wanting to pry open every box and build all the coolest stuff. But for the general, like, company like Intel, Intuit, et cetera, I, I'd say, like, 80% of people are low agency. Like, they don't...
They kinda go there, they do their three to five commits or pulls a month, and they collect their check. Those
people are going to have the hardest time, because the people with higher agency are basically, you don't need to ask them to do things for you anymore. So they just literally, it'll...
They'll just do the work themselves, or they'll prompt. And I'll get into, like, how that works in a second. But essentially, they just won't ask for it.
And so you'll see very smaller, flatter teams, I think as Jack Dorsey pointed out. Like, he had a notorious, like, tweet where he's like, "Hey..."
And I think maybe I've heard rumors that he's pulling a couple people back in, but yeah, 40% of the company was wiped out because of specifically the statement, "AI tooling is reducing the need for these individuals."
And so ultimately, like, what does AI do for a developer at this scale, like, when you start using APIs?
I'm not talking, "Hey, I'm gonna take my code snippet and then put it in ChatGPT, and then can copy and paste it back and forth."
But once you start getting these, like, agentic tools, like Claude Code, even, even like OpenClaude, these kind of things where you can, like, send out these little minions and armies to start doing work,
you literally just have them do tasks. Everything that you didn't have time to do, you have time. You have the force multiplier, the ability to produce basically unlimited code at this point.
Like, whatever you dream, you could probably ask it to make. So that, that's where I'm just, like, really stoked about it as a developer.
'Cause like I, I feel I'm pretty high agency, and, like, I have all these things in my backlog of things I wanna do.
Like, for example, the other day, like, I, I was like, "I want to test PSBTs on the Jade," like, without actually having to bust out my Jade hardware wallet and then, like, connect it up and, like, do the QR scanning.
They have a simulator, but it's kinda hard to use. "Hey, Claude Code, can you make me a Docker container that will automatically do this so I connect to it?
Oh, they're asking a few questions about, like, 'Hey, you need to verify.' Can you remove these warnings? 'Cause I don't care about them. I'm just testing here." Bro. And it just, it does all that. I did the same thing.
I, I had Claude build... yeah, set up Docker for me on my, like, Ubuntu instance here. Yep. So yeah, like, I get that. Okay, okay, you've danced around the question. Uh, how much does a, a billion credits cost? Seven hu-
uh, depending on the type of token you use, which I was a very even mix with, uh, Anthropic, uh, specifically, I'll go into why. Um, it cost about 1,000 bucks. And I was Opus, which is, uh, the smart model.
Very few tokens, very expensive. Haiku, which is my favorite, that's a fast, quick one. I'm just like, "Hey, just do lots of stuff. Keep doing more stuff for me."
And then, um, yeah, Sonnet is kinda like that blend of like, okay, Haiku, you're failing really hard. Can you just go a little bit higher without just breaking the bank? So it's about a grand.
Sonnet's like a, like a- How, how long did it take you to burn through?... middle manager. What'd you say? How long did... Um, sorry, Charlie, go ahead.
Oh, I was saying, uh, Sonnet's like a, like a really high agency middle manager. Go for it, Colin. Uh, how, how long did it take you to burn through a billion? Like- Uh, uh- Like a- Feb...
Uh, it was about 28 days, almost a month. [laughs] No, it was like, it was just in a month. I was just like, I, I just started February 1st, and it was a very, like, lots of sprints going on.
So, like, I'm a contractor for Anchor Watch, and, like, there was lots of like- Right... in, in, not in the core logic, but like, like I said, like, I want to build more tests, right? Tests are...
It doesn't really hurt to add more to your CI pipe. So I was like, okay, well, I want to add just, like, I wanna make sure these things are bulletproof.
These are all tests that would take me too much time to hand write, but I still want them. Okay, go through and make these- Um- Right? Oh, you go. Portland, last question, maybe a lightning round here. Um- Sure.
I've got lightning round questions too. Okay. Yeah. Uh, I think w- that's, that's the last question on the prep sheet, so you wanna go ahead and field it, Charlie, 'cause I think it's, like, a great question. Okay.
I'm, I'm gonna hit you with a few lightning questions, uh, r- Portland, and we're gonna... we're, then we're gonna dance you off. Um, uh, you can only answer one. You can't qualify this. Okay, here we go.
Lightning round. Claude Code versus Codex. Claude Code, hands down. Claude Bot versus Claude SDK. Claude Bot. [sighs] [clears throat] Uh, X402 versus MPP.
Don't know thatOkay, that's good. Those are the new two main-- the payment protocols. Portland, thank you so much for coming on Block Space Live. You're a rock star. Um- Thank you...
we'll, yeah, we'll have you on when you, when you do a trillion tokens. Um- I-- That will-- Unless I'm making a lot of revenue, to get more stats, that probably will not happen. [chuckles] A hundred grand.
That's a million bucks. All right. Yeah, that's more, that's a million bucks. Yeah. [chuckles] Yeah. Later. All right. Thanks, Portland. Catch you later. Bye. All right. Let me catch my...
[clears throat] [chuckles] Sorry, I had to catch my, uh, screen here. Thanks a ton for watching. We're gonna take a word from our sponsor, and then we'll get back to Nasdaq and the Bugle.
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Now for our next story before we have our next interview segment, which will be with Idan Killick. He's running a little late, but we'll get him on here in a second.
And that is the SEC approves Nasdaq's move to support tokenized securities trading.
So this is a three-parter, uh, n-news segment because we had really three kind of big intersection of crypto and Tradfi stories hit the wire this week.
Th-this one I think was, uh, o-one, one of the bigger ones to come out, and the headline kinda says it all.
So the Securities Exchange Commission has approved Nasdaq to let certain securities trade in a tokenized form on a blockchain. Don't know what that blockchain will look like yet.
Uh, we don't know if it will be a proprietary thing or if they will use a public blockchain. I would imagine it'd probably be proprietary. But this is news that's been a long time coming.
Um, Nasdaq's tokenization plan ties into a pilot run by the Depository Trust Company, DTC, which will be handling clearing and settlement for the trades. Nasdaq first filed for this regulatory clarity back in September.
So now they've got the green light. And as for the rollout for this, that is the one, I think, kind of murky thing so far.
We don't actually have-- Nasdaq has not come out and said like, "We're gonna go live on this date with this."
They have said that, uh, the first token-settled trades on Nasdaq could potentially take place by the end of the third quarter 2026.
That's when DTC is expected to complete the necessary systems updates to participate in this rollout.
Um, and Nasdaq's own filing says that, uh, basically, you know, probably be available by the end of Q3 2026, subject to regulatory requirements.
So we don't really know for sure, but it's looking like it'll come sometime soon, within the next few months and, and, and almost certainly this year.
But this also comes on, uh, comes on the same week that Coinbase is rolling out perps for non-US users.
So non-US users will be allowed to trade perpetual stock futures to take leverage positions on company, large cap stocks like Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, as well as ETFs and S&P 500 and Nasdaq indices.
And the reason I, why I included this one in is because I, I think that with Nasdaq getting approved for tokenized securities, you kinda have this tug of war where either side is trying to infringe on the other side's turf in a way.
It's like Nasdaq is saying, "We're gonna start trading tokenized stocks," and Coinbase is saying, "Well, we're gonna start doing the same thing," uh, you know, allowing, allowing US, non-US users to trade these futures.
And these exchanges have already started rolling out some real world assets, uh, uh, tokenized real world assets to allow people to trade. Like you can go to Kraken and Coinbase, um, and trade stocks, uh, today.
Uh, and you can do the same thing on Cash App, although that's a little bit different 'cause Cash App is kind of, you know, a neobank. They've always had the Tradfi angle and the Bitcoin angle.
But, you know, you're j- you're starting to see the intersections of both Tradfi and crypto really ramp up and both sides trying to protect their piece of the pie here.
I mean, uh, wait, what I hear is that I actually can trade shit coins on Cash App 'cause apparently I can trade stocks. [chuckles] I mean- [laughs] I mean, uh, uh, what's...
it's wild because I, you know, if you're paying attention broader crypto, you may have seen that Hyperliquid traded more volume in gold, silver, and oil than it did any other crypto asset on its platform over the past week.
Now, obviously, those are like the hot things to trade, but it's kind of, it is, it is wild. We have been, uh, really ramping up the, you know, tokenized everything. Um, uh, it does become, you know, a bit
questionable what, who, wh-which, uh, is the tail wagging the dog? Which of us is the tail? I'm not really sure.
Well, it's the new hot button topic I think for-- This is the one of the new bull theses or they call them RWA. They- Yeah... the, the ethereal and long-cut thing. They, they call them real world assets, RWAs.
And-It makes sense to me that we would move in this direction, but it-- I think where you have to kinda throw some cold water on it is this is not going to look like the DeFi landscape.
You know, it's like Nasdaq and all of these other players are probably not going to be using like an Ethereum or a Solana public blockchain for this. They're gonna want complete control over it.
It's going to be a kind of black box environment, I would imagine, where they can do whatever they want. They wanna be able to roll back transactions.
They want to be able to freeze assets for people who, uh, you know, are not, uh, you know, for whatever reason, are barred from trading, right?
So definitely seems like one of the bigger narratives as we, you know, kind of chop along here in what really feels like bear market territory, although some people are in denial about that.
[chuckles] And well, there- but there, there are, you know, going on, on that note, there are reasons to be bullish outside of, you know, tokenizing everything from, you know, shares of Tesla to your grandmother's condo in Florida,
because Morgan Stanley is-- filed an amended S-one with the SEC for their Bitcoin ETF.
This, this wasn't more prominently featured in the show because they've already filed for this, and we've known about this for a while.
But we now, we have a ticker for it, and we know that once it goes live, it's going to be trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker MSBT.
So there, as far as I can tell, there's no clear timeline on when this will hit. I, I think that I've read, you know, estimates saying this will probably go live sometime this year.
A lot of these things are slower moving. But a lot of people have made the comment that this is kind of a big kahuna in terms of getting the Bitcoin ETF to the masses.
Morgan Stanley has deep penetration with retail investors and m- and, you know, uh, portfolio management for your average Joe as well as institutions. So- Yeah...
kind of a three-parter there for, you know, Bitcoin and Tradfi. Even though Bitcoin's price is getting kicked in the nuts, there's still plenty going on behind the scenes.
Uh, clearly the interest has not died down, you know, even though Bitcoin- Yeah... is at like seventy. It is a great tragedy that all the good tickers are taken.
Um, kinda like how the boomers took all the good band names. Like all, all the early like crypto funds took all the good like four-letter, uh, crypto names.
Like, uh, is it like the, uh, is there, you know, there's the WAGMI fund, there's the ha- there's HODL, um, which is great. Uh, I feel like maybe there should be some kind of like domain like squatting, uh, rule to this.
Maybe there is, I don't know. But, um, you know, I've, I've... Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like, uh, dot com names. It's like you think- Yeah...
you should have just like got- gotten the, the ticker in there just in case it pays off. If, if imagine if Mark Cuban could have bought a four-letter, uh, [chuckles] stock ticker.
[laughs] He would go on another thousand podcast run talking about how he's a genius. Son, I would've done that too. Yeah, 100%. And you, you do, you do kinda have to wonder...
I just think going back to the, to the Morgan Stanley thing, and then we'll, we'll leave it here.
If this ETF gets approved, is that enough of a bullish signal to take us back up to like 100K, or are we just kind of in chop consolidation hell, and we're kind of at the whims of the macro market? I don't know.
But, you know, it- it's, it's-- a lot of people are really bullish on this news, and I just, I know that it'll probably help Bitcoin, but I don't really see in the near term how it's going to take us back up to six figures.
But I could be wrong. I'm kind of pessimistic on these things. It'll help the boomers, uh, sell their Bitcoin through the new hot Morgan Stanley ETF. Okay, enough, enough about that. Let's bring on our next guest.
The man himself- Mr. Aydin... Aydin Kilic. Aydin Kilic, CEO and President of Hive Digital. How are you doing, sir? Hey, good morning, gentlemen. [clears throat] Good. I just got back from, uh, NVIDIA GTC.
It was a remarkable conference seeing Jensen's keynote, him, uh, unveiling the, uh, next generation, uh, Vera Rubin, uh, Vera Rubin Ultra.
So this, these are the engines that are gonna power the advancement of AI as we know it over the next year. Uh, lot of really cool industrial applications.
There's a lot of talk about, uh, [clears throat] Open Claw, which has been this new, uh, agentic tool that maybe you guys have heard about. It's, it's sort of the new latest trend that's spreading like a wildfire.
And, and really what's interesting about it is that I was actually talking to an engineer from XAI, uh, a friend of mine, and, um, he, he's, he's working on, um, on building, um, uh, AI applications within X.
And they actually have some pretty cool enterprise stuff, by the way. It's worth checking out. There's something called X Search [clears throat]
where you could actually have, uh, an agent on X aggregate, uh, opinions from thought leaders that you follow. So for example, if, you know, Matt Siegel at, at VanX, prolific tweeter, or sorry, you know...
Do you still call it tweet now that it's X? Whatever. I do. I, I do. Yeah. I, I can't. Old habits, you know? Yeah. And so- Yeah. We'll have to fight over my dead body.
And so there's a lot of really smart guys like him, and I don't have time to track everybody's tweets all day. Um, and especially like, you know, like I'm an electrical engineer and now a, a, um, a, a data center CEO.
So, so my area of expertise is rooted in that realm. But I'm not, I'm, I'm not a hedge fund trader or a macro economist.
So like if you wanna get expert opinions from people that are tweeting, the agent on X can consolidate on a daily basis and just give you a live feed summarized for you from whoever you want to follow.
I thought that was a pretty, pretty cool tool.
Um, [clears throat] and, um, but any rate, what, what's interesting is that with, with Open Claw, it's you're basically giving root access-To this, to this agent to get into your system.
And that, that to some people, especially if you know IT is kind of scary, but most people don't understand. So they're just like, hey, cool, look what it could do.
But, um, you know, what cost of, of privacy, private, uh, privacy. So then the flip side to that is, uh, Jensen was really big on promoting Nemo Claw, which is the NVIDIA version of it.
And so it comes with ostensibly, it's going to come with some guardrails and, um, uh, they're selling a box, which is interesting.
It's loaded with a GB 300 and, um, like a workstation, like a, like a really high end workstation, but it's $160,000 and it's preloaded with Nemo Claw and, and a GB 300 processor. So just really interesting stuff.
Um, we go to a lot of conferences the week before, uh, I was in New York at the, at the Cantor conference, shout out to Cantor. That was a fantastic event. So yeah, it's been super busy.
Um, put out a couple of press releases this week as well on our advancements on HPC and AI. So yeah, gentlemen, that's, that's what's new with me. It's good to be here. Thank you. Yeah.
Well, um, yeah, thank you for joining. I'm glad you mentioned those press releases. I'd like to dive into those really quickly and kind of two-parter to this.
Can you give us an update on the Manitoba expansion and the, um, Asuncion, uh, Paraguay expansion? Both of these are HPC rollouts.
What can you tell us about progress on those sites and what can you tell us about timeline to energization? Yeah.
So the strategy with Bell, uh, which we announced last year as a partnership with them, it's really to have a really quick ramp to market to bring on AI clusters for our GPU cloud. It's as simple as that.
Now Bell of course, is Canada's largest AI telecom company. So I would say it's quite prestigious, uh, that they have selected Buzz and they've partnered with Buzz.
And so we go in there with our, our team and the expertise, and we build these clusters of NVIDIA reference architecture GPUs. And so we announced a thirty million dollar deal recently.
Uh, so that was a two-year contract for a cluster of five hundred and four NVIDIA Blackwell B200s. And in the press release that we put out, so those are, those are being rented.
And so that's what increased our, our annual run rate revenue from twenty million ARR to thirty-five, right? So thirty year, a thirty million dollar contract over two years. So fifteen million per year.
So if we were doing twenty million a year, we're now doing thirty-five million a year, seventy percent increase just like that. So that's super exciting.
And on the heels of that, uh, that is, uh, we had this update that we're four X-ing the capacity in, in Bell across Canada, notably two facilities in British Columbia. So what does that really mean? I'll break it down.
I, I, I'm a numbers guy, right? And especially for people that just want to learn about the sector or understand what Hive's doing, and even just the dollars and cents and the kilowatts and how it all adds up.
It's, it's, it's actually pretty simple. So a pro-- I'm going to give you round numbers. Um, a cluster, a, a cluster of like five hundred again, round, not five hundred and four. It's actually five hundred and four.
And what, why is, why is that? It's because you're, you're doing a, a sixty-three node cluster. So typically it's sixty-four nodes, but you have one rack that's dedicated for networking equipment.
So you have sixty-three nodes of actual GPU racks, and there's eight, uh, GPUs per node. So you go sixty-three times eight. So you've got five hundred and four GPUs. That uses about one megawatt.
And so for people in the, um, you know, Bitcoin mining sphere, they understand megawatts well.
Well, in this one megawatt, um, if you're doing fifteen million dollars a year of steady contracted revenue, that's, that's really, really good, right?
So in, in the Winnipeg site, which is four megawatts, that means we could fit two thousand Blackwell B200 GPUs or similar. Now, in the press release that we just came out with, um,
where we're expanding that portfolio of data centers with Bell into British Columbia.
I'm based in Vancouver, by the way, um, and filming from my mom's place just 'cause I, uh, she, she had a, she had a, a kidney stone surgery, so just a little post-op care. I was on the road always this Holy Mary. Uh,
and so, um, uh, they, we, we had a, uh, near term five megawatts of, of IT load, and that will, uh, with it, uh, up expansion to, uh, twelve and a half megawatts in twenty twenty-seven.
Now, it's a slightly different metric when you get into the Grace Blackwell architecture. So the Grace Blackwell architecture is more power dense.
So this is like, you know, in crypto mining, you're talking about like, okay, are, are you talking about like an S21 or, you know, an S21 XP Hydro. One produces a lot more hash rate, consumes a lot more power, right?
So think of the Grace Blackwell as, as a high power density, uh, just bigger, meaner machine.
And so the, the GB, if you had a cluster of, of, of say, um, two thousand GB200s, for example, that, that would take up five megawatts.
So the, the first phase in, in British Columbia, that five megawatts, you could fit like two thousand, um, GB200s, the Grace Blackwell, not the B200, the GB200.
And what, what does it, uh, really add up to when you talk about the economics? Well, that cluster will do like sixty million dollars a year of revenue in, in that five megawatts.
So when you, when you kind of do the math, you say, okay, well if you've got, um, a ramp where you've got an immediate five megawatts available, and the demand is crazy, like just coming back from, uh, GTC, um, you know, Frontier Labs, Model Builders, Enterprises, like all these different types of businesses that want AI compute, they wanna rent GPUs for three, four, five years at a time, thousand, two thousand GPUs, like big clusters.
And so that's why you're seeing this shift in the ecosystem where people are really, um, utilizing their capacity for HPC.And so that, if you kind of read through our press release, you could kind of put it together and you could say, okay, so if you could do 60 million ARR in that first five megawatts, ultimately that can expand to 12.5 megawatts.
Well, that's like roughly almost $150 million in that 12.5 megawatts if you were to fill it up all with Grace Blackwells, you know, sort of over the course of the next year.
And so that kind of, we haven't announced the GPU deals yet for that expansion, but what we're explaining is that now we have the racks ready.
Like, it's kind of like, again, going back to Bitcoin mining days, you could just have a bunch of, you know, S19s on the floor, but they're not hashing, right? You've got to have your rack space ready.
So it's akin to, you know, back in the day, if a miner said, hey, we've just got 100 megawatts of rack-ready capacity good to go, and now we've just got to plug in the machine.
So that was kind of the flavor of that press release. And so, you know, what will soon follow are specific deals where we're saying, hey, we've just rented out a cluster of 2,000 GPUs for, you know, whatever term.
And that's kind of what's really exciting. And I'll kind of tie it in when I was in New York. By the way, is this stuff interesting to you guys? I don't know if you guys wanted to focus more on crypto or is this helpful?
No, this is absolutely interesting. AI is all everyone talks about. In fact, that's half of a, I mean, half of what we're talking about. I mean, I've got a question.
So it's been a while since I've been in a GPU data center. You know, these racks you're talking about, are they like the 3U or 5U racks? And, you know,
walk me through what it looks like actually walking into one of these because it's probably going to be quite a different vibe than your average Bitcoin mining data center. Yeah, very different vibe.
So what's happened is this is a big takeaway from the week at GTC and NVIDIA did a great job of laying this out. You have
now the electrical engineering and the mechanical engineering all integrated in one rack-ready solution.
So what I'm talking about is the power density of these racks is, you know, up to 170 kilowatts per rack for like a, so exactly what you're thinking, like a 3U rack or whatever. So like a singular data center rack,
170 kilowatts for Grace Blackwell 300 at peak load. And to cool this, it's now liquid cooled. So what you have is you have massive power whips. Like they actually had, we posted a little bit on LinkedIn.
Check out my LinkedIn and the Hive LinkedIn. Frank was actually filming and I was sort of pointing out they had a full rack, but everything broken.
Like imagine a car engine, but just every component broken down and pasted on a wall. And so for example,
on the electrical side, you know, you had the power shelves, but what was really interesting and, you know, like a conventional data center rack, you have a server,
a 2U server, and it's got CPU, memory, networking, and GPUs. And so, okay, that's what you could think of. You got a bunch of these.
And then typically when I gave you that analogy earlier about, okay, if you have a 64-node cluster, one of those nodes is used for networking, you'll have a dedicated rack. So Bluefield, InfiniBand, this is all stuff.
So there's two things happening. One is how do you stitch these GPUs in the cluster together so they focus, they function like one seamless brain? Like they're just
almost, they're not because they're in different servers on the rack. So each server has eight GPUs and you got different servers per rack, and then you have different racks.
So if you have GPUs that are not on the same server that are connected to the same motherboard, how do you make it look and feel like from a compute point of view that those GPUs are on the same motherboard and just instantly talking to each other?
And how do you cut out that latency from different servers on the rack and different racks? And that's what InfiniBand comes in. That was a huge, huge thing that NVIDIA was pushing the last few years.
That's industry standard now. So if you're going to be building this stuff, you got to use InfiniBand. And then the other thing is once you've got this big cluster, how fast can it talk to the outside world?
So there's this kind of external networking, the internal networking. But the cooling of this is where all the advancement has been made. So now you have manifolds where you've got
all these manifolds that, think of like a hydro miner, you know, where you've got, have you guys ever seen an industrial scale hydro mining facility? Right. So there's- It's way quieter than air cooled. Way quieter.
Except you have to go outside for the big cooling towers. So there's a whole other component to the mechanical electrical plumbing when you look at a hydro cool. Same thing with these racks. And so you see
all of the, we'll post photos and there's actually a cool video that Frank filmed for me, but you'll see the breakdown of, because these GPUs will have
like servers that are stacked so tightly and you could see the vertical manifolds that have these nozzles, like quick connect nozzles. And so at each level, there'll be, you know,
liquid coolant manifolds. So, you know, your liquid coolant can do a heat exchange and remove the heat from the server.
But a huge, what I'm getting at is a huge amount of now the design of these things, which is integrated into the product offering of NVIDIA is mechanical engineering. It is liquid cooling. And so before that was less.
It wasn't considered part of like the core reference architecture. So that's really cool. And I think thatThe industrial applications are, are remarkable.
Um, you know, Jensen was really previewing how, how these, uh, like the next generation's called Vera Rubin, um, how that performs compared to the current Blackwell and previous, um, Hopper.
And so they'll have, for example... It's all about tokens per second. So, you know, in mining, it was terahash. Well, in, in AI, it's actually teraflops. So your-- the speed of a processor is teraflops per second.
The other thing is, is VRAM, uh, how much RAM, virtual memory is on the server. And then the other thing is memory bandwidth. How quickly can that server move data on and off?
And there's one key component or one key metric, I should say, that measures it all, and that's tokens per second.
And if you wanna get really technical, which Jensen is super technical, it was like that, that keynote, which is on YouTube, highly recommend you watch it, is really like there's like a lot of, you know, PhDs and computer science people in that audience.
But it felt like a rock concert. Like he had like- [laughs]... we're in San Jose Sharks Stadium. There's like twenty-five thousand people there it felt like. Um, it was wild.
[clears throat] But it's tokens per second per watt, right? Tokens per second per watt.
Because again, what, what have we been doing at Hive for years and years and years and years is our-- the input to our systems have been energy, and the output has been compute. So are we mining Ethereum?
Are we mining Bitcoin? We started doing this HPC thing like three years ago. We had income for HPC as a line item going back three years ago.
So we very much, I would say better than any one of our peers, understand the difference in quantifying [sniffs] the dollar per kilowatt hour. At the end of the day, that's what you're doing is, is you're, you're, uh...
'Cause you get your power bill in, in dollar per kilowatt hour, right? So you really need to be able to understand your revenue in dollar per kilowatt hour, and especially if that's variable.
The really nice thing now [sniffs] with all these large contracts, [clears throat] um, sorry, just a bit stuffed up, is the, um, um, now they're, they're steady, right?
So if you sign a two-year contract, three-year contract, um, with an enterprise client, they just wanna rent two thousand GPUs for three years, that's, that's great.
All the har- heavy lifting's done in the beginning while you're negotiating that, [clears throat] that contract. What are terms of default, the SLA, so, you know, what, what does, what does a win look like?
Um, but once you build the cluster and, and y- and, I mean, of course, you've got your, your data center ops team and, and, uh, you know, continuously ensuring that over the life of that contract, the client's getting the service that they need.
But you're not beholden to, "Oh, shit, hash price dropped to twenty-seven dollars," like it did a few weeks ago. Like, I mean, that was, that was pretty, uh, that was pretty intense.
So, um, so yeah, that, that's kind of, uh, the high level. Um, I-I, and we're, we're running up on time here, but I got one more question for you.
You know, we've seen two diverging business models for the Bitcoin miners expanding into AI and HPC. Some are going the PowerShell route, where they're building the infrastructure, having someone else host those GPUs.
Others, like yourself, are going the Neocloud operating the clusters themself route.
Can you explain the, the la- uh, you know, the business strategy behind that and why y'all decided to go the Neocloud route rather than PowerShell? Yeah. I-- So, so we're doing both.
We're building and operating data centers, and then we're, we're building a GPU AI cloud. So it's in our, it's in our DNA.
We're just really good at, um, operating, uh, compute, and so we've been building large clusters of GPUs for almost a decade now. Um, number one. Number two, um, I think that, uh, the ROI is much quicker for A-AI cloud.
It's about two and a half years. The ROI on PowerShell is, you know, seven, eight years.
Now, in some institutions are gonna say, "Yeah, but you could just do a, a hyperscaler co-contract for fifteen years and just have steady cash flows."
And, you know, even if it's for a hundred thirty dollars a kilowatt a month, um, and the margin isn't, isn't crazy, [clears throat]
and, and your CapEx is high, like you're spending whatever, eight million a megawatt, um, whatever it may cost. If brownfield, greenfield, eight to ten million a megawatt.
Whatever that is, um, and you do the math, it's like, you know, roughly a eight, uh, eight-plus year ROI.
Um, and [clears throat] I think the reason why is the street likes long, stable cash flows 'cause then the end game is like, hey, you position it like a REIT, and then you get a crazier multiple.
That-- So I think that's like a Wall Street thing, which I respect and I get. Um, I think the other thing is, as the demand... Look, I started as an electrical engineer.
As the demand, and I saw this in wireless telecom, you know. We went from minutes to bytes of data.
You know, r-remember when your cell phone, you guys are probably a bit younger than me, but you know, your cell phone, we used to have phone plans on minutes for voice. Oh, yeah, I remember for sure. Yeah. There we go.
But then when it went to data, the game changed, and then your phone had how many megabytes per month? And then we got to gigabytes per month. Remember it was like a gigabyte. Now I don't even know. Is it, what- Yeah.
I think my plan has a hundred gigabytes per month. Location-based services, streaming, you name it, like there's just more and more data that we rely on 'cause the data is denser. The data tells us more.
And, and just with Internet of things and AI, there's all of this. As society and, and habits and patterns change, we need more data. And so I see the same with AI, and so I see the same with GPU compute.
I don't see GPU compute commodifying anytime soon. The CEO of Palo Alto Networks at the Cantor conference, um, really gave the same analogy 'cause he had a telecom background, um, on this.
And, and so I, and I was reflecting on it earlier this afternoon. I met, I met one-- a, a, a really, really smart colleague, um, uh, for lunch in Midtown, uh, that afternoon.
So I, um, I, I really think that [clears throat] as the street gets more comfortable with the amount of demand, and you see-- If you start seeing a lot of five-year contracts for GPU rentals, you are literally baking in two X ROI into a fixed-term contract.
Again, simple math. If your GPU's roughly ROI in two and a half years after direct operating costs, and you have signed a five-year contract, you have baked in a two X ROITo that operating contract.
And, and then at the end of that term, you have the residual value of the GPUs, and that's a sweetener. So I think that what's gonna happen is, um, you will perhaps start seeing with advent of more five...
Look, it happened to CoreWeave. CoreWeave's known for doing five-year contracts. They're not n- like we were doing on-demand earlier. That was our start. It allowed us to, uh, to test the technology, expand.
Uh, it's actually harder to deal with so many different clients, but, um, directionally the street likes stable revenues, right? That's why the street doesn't, um, like the volatility in Bit-Bitcoin mining as much.
So I think that there's a lot of value, um, in companies that can consistently deliver neo clouds. And then you're actually doing AI. Then you're actually serving AI workloads.
I mean, PowerShell, you're just kind of building PowerShell. You're not actually doing AI stuff. Um, but that's cool too, right? Um, so that, that's kind of where-- So we do it all.
And, and so then the, the thing, and I know we're coming up on time, the thing that I, uh, wanted to mention was that we also, with the Paraguay press release, in the spirit of that, we've actually sent a cluster of GPUs to a, a data center, uh, in Asunción, which is the capital of Paraguay,
and it's, uh, Tigo. So Tigo's the largest telecom company in Paraguay. The same way we've partnered with Bell in Canada, we've partnered with Tigo in Paraguay. Why?
'Cause they have existing Tier 3 data centers with the fiber and everything. So rather than spend a year building something, we sent a cluster of GPUs into Tigo's data center.
They went live last week, and this is the best part, boys.
We have a research team, award-winning research team out of Columbia University in New York that does neural network research, and they're working on, you know, how, how to do better distillation and, and really, really kind of like detailed, um, large language model optimization work on these GPUs in Asunción from New York.
So we're gonna evaluate the, the tokens per second and latency and bandwidth of that experience currently. And, and, you know, we know it's gonna-- it's a start. That is a proof of concept.
So once we do that, we know what we're gonna need to do when in Iwaizu, where our two hundred megawatt facility is, when we need to go and build, um, our next hundred megawatts.
We have a substation on the way, um, being sent to Paraguay and civil's being done.
That next hundred megawatts, we might just go straight into an AI factory because we'll know exactly what we need to build because we have the proof of concept, and that's what Hive is doing that nobody else, um, is doing.
Um, because a lot of people, Paraguay announced a fifteen-year PPA at three and a half cent power for AI. Amazing, right? So you're gonna get all these guys who are like, "Oh yeah, we're gonna build AI.
We're gonna get in there and we do all these great things." It's like, "But what have you done? Have you built..." We built three hundred megawatts in six months in Paraguay.
We're the largest operator there, and we're the first ones that have a cluster of GPUs live on a cloud being used by LLM researchers.
So we're gonna take that knowledge, that depth, and I think we got some really exciting things coming for AI in Paraguay as well.
And then, of course, in Canada, we have other sites that we've been land banking, so we're gonna come to the market with, again, building a PowerShell. That's cool too. We're gonna do that, and we will, [coughs]
pardon me. It's my mom's mug. Shine bright. [laughs] Um, we'll absolutely, um, be building a Tier 3 that we can, we can co-locate. So it's good to have a diversified income portfolio. You bet, boys.
And, and I might add, if you look at where we're valued at right now, I think that we're, we're a bargain. Um, I think smart money...
I mean, I b- I would say, like, Jensen came out and said they're doing a trillion dollars revenue next year, and they're at four trillion market cap. So in tech stocks, that's a relative bargain.
I would say, like, we're doing two hundred million revenue. That's our projection for this year, uh, just, just on, on AI cloud, and I think our market cap's a little over five hundred.
So I'd say we're an even better buy than, uh, NVIDIA right now. So it's [laughs] two X versus four X, right? Exciting times ahead for sure. Aydin, thank you so much for joining.
Appreciate the rundown on, uh, ins and outs of operating one of these clusters, man. Hope you have a good weekend. Thank you for having me, gentlemen. It's a pleasure as usual. Thank you.
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Now, we have our boy, the CEO and usurper of Bitcoin Bugle, Rod Palmer. Welcome to the show, Rod. How are you doing? Thanks for having me.
You know, I was really surprised in a pleasant way to find out that Hive has a CEO who likes to talk more than Frank Holmes. [laughs] It was good. It was very edgy. I mean, they've done exciting things going on.
I just... I didn't think that Frank could be topped, and he c- and he could be. [laughs] Yeah. Al-always a, a loquacious duo. Always come with fun takes. Um, so the, the, the topic today is Maxi Madness.
Um, for anyone who has been living under a rock, uh, what is Maxi Madness, and, uh, where are we in the madness?Well, if you've been wa-- if, if you turn on a TV in the past two days, you know it's March Madness in the United States.
College basketball's huge tournament. Everybody goes dancing, as they say. Um, lots of big upsets, lots of surprises. It's always fun. Maxi Madness is that without all the athletic ability, all the natural talent.
It's just Bitcoin influencers, podcasters, entrepreneurs, builders, a-and some other people sprinkled in who just happen to be, uh, on Bitcoin Twitter or the timeline, and nobody really knows exactly what they do or why they're here, but it's madness, and it's a tournament.
Except for instead of playing a game to determine the winner, you decide. Anybody can get on there, and you can vote. It's just a Twitter poll.
Um, we're actually doing a Nostr tournament this year as well, and that one's a little interesting because that one is not one purse or one end pub, one vote. It is...
You can zap as much as you want, so it's the ultimate amount of lightning, uh, network sats that you accumulate at the end of the twenty-four-hour poll. That's decide-- That's what decides who moves on.
So we have Twitter polls, uh, which is obviously the most immutable way to determine who is the maddest maxi. Um, who are some of the names this year, Rod? Um, who, who can I vote for or against on some of these?
And yeah, what are your favorite match-ups? This year, we are breaking down the four regions. We've got the Node region,
the Pioneer region, the Podcomp region, which is short for Podcast Conference Industrial Complex, and then the Hot region, which is just who's hot? Who's the hottest? And, uh, the Node region was my favorite.
It's the most interesting.
If you, um, if you don't know, there's been a huge battle, uh, in the Bitcoin industry, very, very niche battle, but it's, it's the node client war or the filter war, whatever you wanna call it.
Um, s- and this one is just, uh, letting everybody vote between, you know, Luke, mechanic, Tomer, Rod Hamilton, Jameson Lopp, Peter Todd, Justin Bachelor, NVMe. I mean, you can see the list on the, uh, screen there now.
This was my favorite region. Um, the Pioneer region, uh, Saylor, number one seed, of course. He battled Adam Smeka, the man with the highest IQ in the world.
Um- Banned from- He had- Uh, banned from Steak 'n Shake. Banned from Steak... He, yeah, he owns Steak 'n Shakes. He is a franchise owner's worst nightmare, let me tell you. If you don't... If... Yeah.
Um, well, this is a, this is the Hot region right here. Oh, yeah. So number one is Lyn Alden, of course. Yeah. And she defeated Frank Corva. Love Frank, didn't stand a chance, but that's all right. That's Maxi Mad...
You know, that's Maxi Madness. It's March Madness too. The biggest surprise in this region, Aaron Redwing from the How Money podcast took down Ross Ulbricht.
In fact, at one point yesterday on the timeline, and this became the Zeus wallet dunk of the day, Aaron just posted, "Lock him up," when she was losing. [laughs] I- so the, the, the tra- the, the trash talk gets serious.
It gets very serious. I, I, I just want-- I wanted to point this one out because there's something broken in the polling here. If, if you've got Ross Ulbricht losing to Aaron, no, no shade against Aaron.
Love Aaron, but wh- where, where, where are you getting these votes from, man? Are people buying votes? That's a crazy loss. That is a wild thing for a Maxi Madness.
Maxi, Maxi Madness is a democracy, and in a democracy, votes are for sale. I don't know who's buying votes. I don't know who they're paying. I don't know who...
I don't know if, eh, if they're showing up to the polls, if they're mailing them in, if they're voting twice, if there's any voter ID. I don't know. I just know I-- 'cause I can't see who's voting. I can only...
It's a, it's a, it's a private ballot. Now, or a secret ballot. On Nostr, uh, it's a little bit more transparent, so as you can imagine, the... There's some big upsets there as well, but it's
a very esoteric, uh, participants. So there's some crossover. Uh, Jack Dorsey and, and Odell, of course, are both on both the X and Nostr brackets. But yeah, it's... We're, we're only in round two.
Round two just started a few hours ago. It's pure madness. Uh, I'd say the biggest... If, if anybody remembers around this time last year, if you went on Twitter, X, um, people were freaking out about Teddy Bitcoins.
Teddy Bitcoins last year swept the tournament. He took out Adam Back, Lyn Alden, Yellow, um, and then he defeated Michael Saylor in the final. And Michael Saylor, I mean, he was... Michael Saylor had a lot of votes.
I don't know who was voting for him. I don't know, but it was close. Teddy Bitcoins ended up winning. People were worried that that was gonna happen again this year. We put Teddy in the preliminary round,
uh, he, against Corey Clifton, and Corey Clifton outraced him.
So i-i-if Corey Clifton maybe his popularity has gone down, trended down in recent years, uh, maybe this will boost it back up because defeating Teddy Bitcoins is gonna be very popular with the Bitcoin clabs, as they call themselves.
So Maxi Madness is, is clearly the ecosystem king maker. Uh, if you win this, you are the CEO of Bitcoin until next Maxi Madness. I think that's the official rule somewhere.
Um, what, uh, who do you think is the shortlist for, uh, who's still... Who, who, uh, could take home the, the crown at the end of this madness? You know, it is anybody's game still.
I think that you'd be crazy to rule out Yellow. Yellow is a... He, he won in two thousand twenty-four. He probably would've won last year if it was not for Teddy Bitcoins. Um-So I think he's, he's definitely a favorite.
People are talking about somebody named Tim B, who is the podcast host. It's a what-- It's called The Bitcoin DieVor. Uh, he came out of nowhere and beat Dennis Porter yesterday. So that one's something to watch.
But I think going forward, because anything can happen, uh, we're looking at the prediction markets to kind of try to tell us what the odds are.
Uh, people have been making prediction markets on this, uh, this platform, this new platform called Predix. It is, uh, just like, just lightning. You, you, you buy yes or no with your lightning wallet.
It's not super liquid, but it is, um, you know, it's information. It is signal, and we're, we're gonna be following the prediction markets to determine who we think is the best bet to win Maxi Madness twenty twenty-six.
Rod, thank you so much for your selfless service. Thank you so much for helping us figure out through Markets and Madness, um, who the main character is this cycle. Um, thanks a ton.
Uh, maybe we'll have you back on when Maxi Madness concludes. Yes. If you are following Maxi Madness or you want to, just know we're taking a break for the weekend.
Let everybody catch up with the action, figure out what's going on, and the Sweet sixteen will start at nine AM Eastern Monday morning. All right. Cheers. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Rod. Appreciate it, man.
All right. We've got one more story, and we will get y'all out of here. And it's just a quick update on the Clarity Act that is, as CoinDesk says in their coverage here,
inching towards approval in the Senate. So Crypto Clarity Act inches towards Senate hearings as lawmakers weigh legislative trades. So the Clarity Act is the, uh, is part of this push for crypto market structure.
It is a complement to the Genius Act. And for those who don't know, there are a few key pillars of it.
At mo-- One of the biggest things it does is it gives the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over digital commodity spot markets while the SEC has jurisdiction over investment contracts.
Uh, it also will create tailored registration categories for different actors within the space, like exchanges, brokers, custodians, et cetera.
Clear carve-outs for DeFi for saying when something is clearly decentralized, it will be exempt from the market structure regulations.
And the bill also limits the SEC and the CFTC's jurisdiction over payment stable coins. There are a few other things. Those are some of the big ones. But in CoinDesk's coverage, they cover a few key, uh, a few kinda key
considerations that are either stalling or driving this forward in the Senate. So it's already passed in the House, and right now it's caught up in committees in the Senate.
And a few of the things that, uh, that are reported in this CoinDesk article that I think are of note are, are the fact that Cynthia Lummis was reported saying earlier, "We think we've got it.
Uh, we are really going to get out of the banking committee in April." And so she, Cynthia Lummis, one of the chief, uh, proponents of crypto on Capitol Hill, thinks that this is pretty close.
Now, that being said, it's still got a few hurdles to go through. Officials from Trump's administration are supposed to be involved in the discussions with the Senate Banking Committee.
Um, there's a second panel, um, that is going to be hosted, um, that needs to advance the bill before it will be re-- uh, before it would be repackaged for one final version for a vote in the Senate, and that will be the make or break before it goes to Trump's desk to be signed, or if it's dashed, it will be thrown into the waste bin, and we will have wasted all this time for nothing.
One last note on this. The Democrats are playing a little tit for tat here if it's going to be advanced through the Banking Committee.
They want senior government officials and lawmakers to be barred from profiting off cryptocurrency investments. Looking at you, big guy, in, in the Oval Office over there. That's really made finger pointed at Trump.
And they also want Democrats appointed to the party's vacant seats at the, uh, CFTC. So, uh, they're trying to get a few concessions here and so that Democrats will be on board for pushing this forward.
And the biggest thing in this article, at least that I thought, uh, in terms of the important provisions in this bill, is we might be getting closer to a resolution on the stablecoin yield provision.
Now, a big thing that's been hanging up the Clarity Act is that exchanges want their customers to be able to earn y-yield and interest on their stablecoin deposits.
The banks do not want this because this directly interferes with one of their core ways of generating revenue and with attracting customer deposits, you know, to lend out for loans and stuff like that.
So banks are saying, "No, we give interest on deposits. Sorry, you guys can't do that with stablecoins." Exchanges are saying, "Okay, we really need that."
It's looking like that there will be some form of yield offered on the stablecoins, but it probably won't look like interest. It will look something more like credit card rewards.
According to this article, quote, "On the yield issue, Lummis has said that stablecoin rewards programs that steer clear of bank line language on savings and interest may survive the compromise if insisting they're more akin to credit card rewards than interest from bank account deposits.
Lummis said Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, whose opposition to a previous draft bill helped derail an earlier effort to get to a Senate hearing, has been more flexible in recent talks."
So you might not get interest on those stablecoins. Maybe you get discounted trading fees. Maybe you get some sort of rewards token from Coinbase.
No one knows yet, but looks like they're leaning more towards that reward structure than straight up interest on those deposits.
Yeah, you know, at th-this whole time, we were building, uh, super hard money to disrupt the financial system. But the real edge issue apparently is interest on your stablecoins. So
with that, thank you so much for tuning in to Blockspace Live presented by CleanSpark. Shout out to our sponsors. Shout out to our guests. We do this Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
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It's still not too late to book that flight to our conference, OpNext, April sixteenth in New York City. O-P-N-E-X-T.D-E-V, opnext.dev for tickets and info. Otherwise, I'll see you next week. See you all Monday.
Have a good weekend, y'all. [outro music]