Alan Kohler

A recent watershed profile by Colossus revealed that this tiny team generated over $900 million in pure profit last year, operating 24-7 with zero venture capital backing.

They've even started tokenising traditional macro assets like gold and oil.

My question, when an 11-person tech protocol can build global financial architecture that matches the profitability of major institutions with virtually zero overhead, what does this mean for legacy exchanges like the ASX?

Are old world brokers and clearinghouses structurally cooked or will regulatory moats protect them?

Interesting question.

Yeah, it's also worth saying that I think that the financial disruption brought by the blockchain, which was basically the fundamental thing that Bitcoin brought, apart from speculation, has taken a bit of a backseat lately with all the sort of hype on AI and also obviously the

war in iran and everything so no one's really talking about that and bitcoin is going nowhere but um you know i think that that disruption is still going on you know blockchain is there and people are working on it and it is kind of there um and also central banks are working on central bank uh currencies digital currencies that are also based on the blockchain that they're running themselves and you know i think that eventually that'll happen

And so you're probably going to eventually end up with some sort of form of programmable money because central banks want to do that.

So I think the disruption is happening.

To what extent it's kind of, you know, little teams like Hyperliquid or, you know, more official, I don't know.

But it's definitely going on.

I mean, I do think that the Treasury was surprisingly pessimistic in its estimate of the impact of the CGT and negative gearing changes on the building of houses where they predicted it would result in 35,000 fewer houses, only offset by 65 more houses from the infrastructure fund of 2.1 billion that they're creating.

So that the net, you know, the net change from the budget is plus 30,000 houses.

But, you know, the negative gearing is supposed to be focused or will be focused only on or available only on new housing, which is designed to result in more new housing.

I don't know why they…

being a bit pessimistic about it, but I guess that that's the CGT change.

It's really meaningless, isn't it?

Yes, and do you think that just while we're on this, do you think that they'll cave in and confine the CG capital gains tax change to property only and exempt start-ups and businesses?

I don't remember either.

Yeah.