#740: Hard Asset Lending For The 99% with Sadi Khan

“A quick one liner on the product that we're looking to launch is we're looking to launch what we hope to be the best in class Bitcoin backed lending product, which is a credit card secured by Bitcoin with the ability to draw 10 fixed rate plans with an APR as low as 7.99% interest rate.”

“Avan never lends it out. There's no rehypothecation. You stay in control, and guess what? You can lock in a fixed rate for up to ten years. That's 10 times longer than most lenders out there, or go interest only for up to five years. Rates start at 7.99% APR for a product that lets you keep your stack and still access liquidity.”

“Of all the assets that we you and I can conceive of, the digital asset class is probably the lowest risk asset class to borrow against, for the consumer and also to lend against as a lender. And if you think back to that equation of the cost of the risk is the risk free rate plus the cost of the risk plus the cost of the transaction, the transactional cost should be the lowest and the risk should be the lowest.”

“And that requires them to be highly intelligent, very hardworking, and mission aligned in what we are trying to achieve in the world. These three things are the kind of pillars that we look for. And I know the intelligence piece can be sometimes controversial to some folks, but it is like, you know, uncompromising in how we grow our hiring process and our hiring bar.”

“I think, you made the comment it's gonna replace middle management which I think is, becoming very clear to people. I think, Sequoia and Block, Jack, and Olaf wrote that paper together and and it's becoming clear that it's going to make the smart humans, the intelligent humans, even smarter and more productive.”

“But I've been a believer in in the structural value of this, largely because I grew up in Bangladesh, Zambia, where inflationary currencies are the norm. And I think in a lot of circles, there's a lot of comparison between Bitcoin and the value of Bitcoin as an asset class compared to to USD. And I think that's a that's kind of a red herring. Actually, I think the value of Bitcoin is against, you know, the Zambian quaqa and and another inflationary currency, and we can go through many of them.”

“As that clarity has now emerged over the last year or so, we felt more comfortable about building and launching this product. And the third piece is, you know, we wanted to be able to kind of leverage the infrastructure on capital markets and in compliance that we built out over the last few years. And obviously, the technology infrastructure that has come together over the last few years to be able to build, you know, the best in class product.”

“And we spent an enormous amount of time building out engineering infrastructure that effectively allows our agentic system to say, actually, I don't know. Instead of having a bullshit answer, it says, I don't know. And this is effectively what the fancier way of saying it is that we sacrifice recall for high precision on the recall PNR curve. And we operate at a very high precision point in the threshold of the system.”