Bitcoin as a US Strategic Reserve | Britcoiners by CoinCorner #137

Transcript

Fold is set to list on NASDAQ as the first publicly traded financial services company powered by Bitcoin. They announced this just before the conference kicked off, probably timed it well to get ahead of everyone else's announcements. A lot of people announce before conferences because they realise that making announcements at the conference is a terrible idea due to all the noise-you just get lost. Unless you've got a Trump-level announcement, anything else would have got lost.

Talking about Fold going public, this is interesting. We see this every bull market: companies looking to move and go public. We saw Coinbase back in 2021, I think it was, going public at peak bull. Everyone tries to aim for that to maximise their market cap valuation. Fold is going in at, what, 345 million or something like that? Nearly 365 million, actually. That's big. I'm honestly quite surprised at how big it is. We're not in America, obviously, so we don't really have access to use the app and do all that. Fold was popular for a period, for a year or two, when they had the spin the wheel feature. They might not go for 365 million-that's pre-money-so they could be lower. The transaction implies that they've fully funded it in terms of doing the roadshow now to get the 365 million. I wonder if it'll finish lower. A thousand Bitcoin on the balance sheet is a significant amount for, and I don't want to offend Fold in any way, but in terms of a smaller Bitcoin company, that's a significant amount.

I don't know much about Fold. Have they been around since 2019? But much earlier than that, I think 2014. But in their official release, they said 2019. Maybe they had funding in 2014 but were just building out the product. It took them five years to build the product out, which was confusing. I'm not sure, honestly. Fold is mostly a cashback system. You get a Visa card with them, you spend on that, and you get cashback but in Bitcoin. I didn't realise they introduced buying Bitcoin. I didn't know that was a thing with them, but apparently, they introduced that at some point.

They've been quite quiet, haven't they? I don't see much or hear much from them. That's why I'm surprised at the valuation. I don't know how many customers they have, but we think it's probably about 350,000, maybe about 400,000 customers. I don't know how many of them are actively buying with them or using the card. The only numbers they've given out were, I think, $2 billion in what they call volume, but that's people spending on the Visa card, for example, over the five-year period they've been live. They also gave out how much they've given back; was that 20-something million dollars over five years? Obviously, they make a cut of that.

It'll be interesting once they do go public, once they file their S-4 document, which is like saying, "Here's the official information that we're going live on the public stock exchange." Once that's out there, that will give you full breakdowns. You'll see revenue numbers, customer numbers, etc. So you'll get a full breakdown. It will be a good benchmark for our industry, for Bitcoin-only companies, to do this because they'll be the first Bitcoin-only company outside of a mining company that's gone public. So it'll be a good thing to pay attention to.