Welcome to Public Keys at the New York Stock Exchange. As you know, CoinDesk was just at Consensus Miami.

And on today's show, we're going to look at some of the top interviews unpacking crypto in the public markets.

Anthony Pompiliano has been one of Bitcoin's most prominent advocates for the last eight years.

His company ProCAP Financial holds nearly 400 million in Bitcoin and just completed the acquisition

of Sylvia and AI Agent Lab for finance, making it what it calls the first publicly traded

agentic finance firm. He joins us now. Hello. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for being here.

How's your consensus experience been so far?

It's going great. I think that there's a lot of people who, they're lost in the sauce, but it's all right. We're here to correct the record. All right. Well, let's talk about being lost in the sauce because I saw you tweeted just 22 hours ago that Most of the crypto industry is dead and never coming back.

What did you mean for that?

75% of the companies here aren't going to be here in five years. There's a lot of people who are still stuck in the 2018 dream of how the world's going to play out. And I think that maybe industry needs a little bit of a wake-up call. There's four areas that I think will end up being really valuable. Bitcoin, equity infrastructure, stable coins, and tokenization. If you're not working on one of those four things,

I think you're gonna have a tough road ahead. If you're holding a bunch of the long tail assets, the asset goes back to an all-time high is pretty low. And so you can dream or you can live in reality, but I don't think you can do both. and so I'd rather live in reality than be holding onto a dream.

So you just said all the things you think are going to survive.

Like what is something right now that is out there that people are bullish on that you think is just not going to work out? Go on coin market cap. Take from the 10th or 15th position, just scroll down, they're all zombies. They're dead. It's over. Game over. How are these assets going to come back? There's fractured

energy, there's fractured capital in this industry, and now there's a lot of different ways to play it.

And so if you don't have an institutional bid, well, where is the retail capital going to come from?

Why should they come and allocate capital to your crypto asset versus something else. And so if you think about

how many coins have been created, go and pick the 47th or 48th coin on that list and tell me why

should that thing survive. And so if the 47th one shouldn't survive, the 100th, the 300th, or the 400th

shouldn't survive either. And so the thing that's interesting about crypto, though, is you can get

these kind of ghost chains or these, you know, zombie type projects. And so in the traditional world, what happens is the three of us start a company where, you know, hard charging, think we're going to be successful. And it doesn't work out. For some reason, the company doesn't work. So what do we do? We return capital to investors. We shut down the company. Maybe we even file, you know,

some sort of, you know, protection with the bankruptcy courts, et cetera. But there is a starting point and there is a finish point. And that did not work. In crypto, that doesn't exist. The coins don't go to zero. The chains don't actually shut off. And so there's a bunch of people who are still caught up and like, well, it isn't at zero yet. It isn't yet not being used by one person. And so I think that's ultimately, those people are dead in the water. Let's just call it what it is. Let's move on to the things that are working. Let's get rid of that. Because an important part of business cycles is to reallocate the capital and the talent to things that are working rather than get caught in these kind of ghost chains. Okay, well you're talking about ghost chains. I have to say from my perspective, I've been sitting at this desk for the morning. I've talked to a lot of projects that are working on tokenization, a lot of projects that are thinking about agentic finance, a lot of the Bitcoin companies in different capacities, whether it's digital asset treasuries or building layer two's, building on Bitcoin. And so... You think 100% of them are going to survive? No, I don't. But it sounds like what you're saying is we're going to see even more of that, and then there's going to be some kind of consolidation within each of those sectors. This isn't very different than what we've seen in the industry before. I think that people have just gotten very comfortable with the fact that, oh, if the chain doesn't go to zero, but also look at the companies, right?

...