What if your business could protect its cash, outpace inflation, and build lasting wealth — without relying on Wall Street? In this episode of Executive Connect, host Melissa Aarskaug sits down with Tillman Holloway, All-American athlete turned fintech innovator, to explore how Bitcoin Treasury strategies are transforming the way companies and investors protect and grow capital.

Tillman reveals how his firm, ARCH Public, helps small businesses and executives automate Bitcoin investing to hedge against inflation, leverage blockchain automation, and create generational wealth. He also explains how NFTs are evolving into real-world utility, how tokenization is changing ownership, and why digital scarcity could be the greatest financial opportunity of our lifetime.

If you’ve ever wondered how Bitcoin, automation, and AI are reshaping money, this episode will open your eyes to the future of finance.

Chapters:
00:00 Bitcoin Treasury Strategies Explained
01:24 From Athlete to Fintech Entrepreneur
04:00 Why Bitcoin Is the Most Secure Network on Earth
07:08 Inflation, Scarcity, and the Power of Math
10:26 Why 10 Percent of Profits Should Be in Bitcoin
12:14 NFTs with Real-World Utility
18:46 The Future of Tokenization and Fan Ownership
22:10 Automated Trading for Everyday Investors
26:32 How Institutions Are Adopting Bitcoin
29:38 Bitcoin for Businesses and Treasury Strategies
31:24 Protecting Wealth from Inflation
33:14 Final Thoughts and How to Get Started

[Tillman]

We’ve had more people reach out to us with this notion of we want to start a Bitcoin Treasury strategy, and we want your software to help us to do that. We did not experience that last year. The Bitcoin Treasury strategies that have popped up in the public sector have been wildly successful.

 

Has the power to change the middle class of America in a way that I don’t think we’ve seen anything else have the power to do? If every small business in America started buying Bitcoin with 10% of their net profits, most businesses would.

 

[Melissa]

From flattening defensive lines to flattening the learning curve in crypto, today’s guest knows how to play and win on any field. Meet Tillman Holloway, all American athlete turned fintech innovator. He’s the founder of NFT Glee and the brains behind the arc public where Bitcoin meets automation for everyday traders.

 

If you’ve ever wanted to outsmart the markets without getting wrecked by your own emotion, this episode is your new playbook. Welcome Tillman.

 

[Tillman]

Well, thanks for having me. I’m happy to be here.

 

[Melissa]

Now your story is anything but typical from dominating the field at the University of Texas Austin to now leading cutting edge technology and fintech companies. What sparked the pivot and tell us a little bit about your story?

 

[Tillman]

Yeah, I love all things technology. I’m a little bit of a nerd, but I fell in love with Bitcoin early on just because it democratized the access to banking systems and to what I believe is a better form of money or gold 2.0. So when I found that this technology could be accessible to everyone and that essentially all you had to do was participate. And it was based upon a proof of work system that really rang my bell, so to speak, that got me excited about what the future could hold and how many people could participate in the adoption rate therein.

 

So that was back in 2012. And when I first saw Bitcoin, I saw it in the light of a miner. I became a miner myself and turned on several computers and started to learn about the network and what the capabilities of it were.

 

And I fell in love with the math behind it. And so, you know, early on in my life, I always dreamed of being an entrepreneur. My dad was an entrepreneur.

 

And when I got out of school, I was kind of looking for the next big thing. I think that I could attach myself to that seemed, you know, capable of delivering the type of lifestyle that I wanted to live. And I wanted to be at home.

 

My parents were fortunate enough to work from home. And I wanted to have a big family and work from home. And Bitcoin and mining seemed like a logical path in which I could pursue that type of a lifestyle.

 

And that freedom is something that once you understand that your money can work for you instead of you working for your money, and that Bitcoin offers that to everyone, I think that it’s something that really changes your life forever once that kind of hits home for you or it becomes personal to you.

 

[Melissa]

Yeah, I love that. Working, not working for your money, but your money working for you. I’m on that track myself.

 

Not quite accomplished that yet, but on the way there. Now, the noise of crypto has been so loud with all time highs, but you’ve been really laser focused on Bitcoin through and through. Like you mentioned, why is Bitcoin at the core of innovation for you when it comes to scalability and long term adoption?

 

[Tillman]

It’s the largest network that’s ever been built by mankind. So that’s something that should be noted. That scale and that size has tremendous value, and the value of that scale and size is the security of the network.

 

The proof of work guarantees that no human being gets to inflate the currency, just like the dollar is being overinflated in a lot of people’s perspective right now. Bitcoin, that can’t happen. It’s impossible.

 

It’s written into the code, and the code is there for everyone to see. So as long as you, if you want to participate in the network, you have to participate in the same code that everyone else is using to run the network. And that code precludes more coins than being created than what’s been prescribed in that code, and that’s 21 million total coins.

 

So there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoin. So if you just think about it on simple math terms, anything that has scarcity, that also has utility, and let’s talk about the utility for a second, that network and that connective capability or functionality, the utility behind that is transferring value instantly without trust. So there’s some payment things that people a lot of times take for granted or don’t think about, but if I pay you in a credit card, for example, that’s using what’s called an intermediary exchange.

 

There’s fees attached to it. There’s disputes that can happen between us. I can put a charge back on that credit card and tell the credit card company, I didn’t get what you told me I was going to get.

 

My credit card number can be stolen and can be used for fraudulent purchases. That’s a very inefficient system of commerce. What would be efficient is if there was a way to host electronic payments that were trustless, and what does a trustless transaction look like?

 

Well, a trustless transaction means that when we leave the parking lot and I hand you cash, you don’t have to worry about me calling back the cash. You have instant settlement in the transaction. That is something that human beings in this day and age, it’s crazy that we don’t have that in our money system.

 

So the easiest way to look at Bitcoin is imagine a network that allows you to email cash. That’s what it is. So instead of me having to worry about payment overseas, I can just email money overseas, I can just email somebody cash.

 

And right when that email arrives in their hands, it’s no different than me handing them cash and settling that transaction right then and there, never to be clawed back, and everyone in the world that uses that money knows that that transaction happened and acknowledges that I have the cash to send and now you have the cash that’s sent. So it’s a public ledger. That utility and that functionality, largest network of its kind, most secure network of its kind, most transactionally perfect network of its kind, you know, who wouldn’t want to own a piece of that.

 

And what that translates into is a fixed denominator of coins, 21 million total, an ever growing money supply, M2 money supply. Governments all around the world continue to print cash. So that number going into a fixed denominator, what is that going to do?

 

It’s going to make the price of that fixed denominator go up. Scarcity against an inflated currency essentially makes the price go up. No different than what you see in a gallon of milk, the price of a car, the price of homes, all of those things have seen prices increase because we inflate our dollars.

 

There’s more complications in the direct price increase of those goods. So for example, the milk increase could not be directly proportionate to the money supply. It could be proportionate to a disease that’s killed off a certain number of cows that’s made milk scarce.

 

Like there’s all sorts of other factors that go into that. Bitcoin is the most perfect and most accurate indicator of global inflation that we have ever created in the course of humankind. So if you’re worried about purchasing power being lost to inflation, if you’re worried about holding a lot of cash, if you’re a company, there’s a, there’s a diversification tool that is counter to that inflation in that inflationary loss.

 

And we did a case study at arch public that essentially looked at, okay, over the course of Bitcoin’s history, 16 years, how, what percentage of my available cash would I have needed to have in Bitcoin to offset the loss in inflationary value that I have. And the, the results really surprised us. Uh, but it’s indicative of the power of Bitcoin’s price appreciation curve is you have to have 10%.

 

So you have, if you have a hundred percent of your cash and you’re eroding that cash at a 9% rate erosion rate per year in terms of global inflation, in order for you to offset that, you basically have to take 10% of your available cash and put it into Bitcoin. That, that is not that much to, to preserve the purchasing power of the hundred percent. Um, and so what we are telling people, and we’re doing it on the back of kind of some of the most brilliant minds in the financial spaces, like Larry Fink, um, he’s saying Bitcoin, he believes we’ll go to between 500,000 and $750,000 per coin, this cycle before the next pullback.

 

So if that’s the potential upside that we’re looking at, you, you can’t really afford to not look at it as a way to disproportionately expose your, your portfolio to a lot of upside with very relative downside. Because if you’re, if you stand to gain a six or 700% return on 10% of your money, that could just, that could be equal to the returns on your 90%, right? Um, so it’s just something that is, doesn’t come around very often.

 

And I believe if you’re really rooted in math and you understand mathematical curves, uh, the evidence is just really, really hard to ignore.

 

[Melissa]

Money Rebels is on a mission to help professionals just like you get their money working harder for you. Their clients free up an average of $35,000 their very first year without having to work extra hours to show you how they’ve put together a powerful training called cashflow secrets. And the listeners of the executive connect podcast can get it completely free.

 

Just visit money, ripples.com forward slash secrets and enter the promo code E X E C. Yeah, that’s huge returns versus what our standard returns on the stock market. It seems like a no brainer to me to, you know, put 10% of your cash in Bitcoin.

 

Um, so I, I love your analogies there. Now let’s talk a little bit about NFTs, you know, they’re, they’ve been the hype I, you know, that I don’t know a ton about, but your company, NFT Glee took a very different path focusing on real world utility. What is NFT utility actually look like when practiced and why is it key and making it all work with Bitcoin?

 

[Tillman]

Yeah. Um, great question. Uh, NFT Glee, we were a little ahead of our time.

 

We, but NFTs are, it stands for non fungible tokens and the, the world thinks of them as artwork or pieces of art. Um, that are digital that’s because that’s one use case that got very viral and got everyone’s attention, but that’s really not the intrinsic value of what an NFT is. Um, the Bitcoin is not an NFT.

 

What does that mean? It means that if I own a Bitcoin and you own a Bitcoin, there is no unique electrical way to look at my Bitcoin and distinct distinguish it between your Bitcoin. They’re identical in every way.

 

There is no serial number on my Bitcoin that goes, Oh, I own number 19 million, 72,422, and she owns 21 million. You know, so there is no unique identifiers. Non fungible tokens are the exact opposite.

 

So why is that unique? Why is that important? Well, let’s say a U an artist wanted to come out with, um, limited edition music pieces that had, um, kind of all on uncut raw footage that they released only to 1000 people.

 

And you wanted to issue that on the top of an NFT and you wanted to issue that at, uh, you know, a hundred thousand dollars an album. Well, there’s a certain subset of collectors that would find that a very appealing and then them being able to digitally prove to the world that they owned that, and now they are getting content that no other person gets to, to listen to other than them and the other owners of that. It’s like owning a very fine wine that had very limited production and getting to show everyone in the world that you own it and watch, have them watch you drink it every day.

 

It’s a very intoxicating type of a feeling and it builds status very quickly. And that’s why you saw, um, these NFT projects trying to say it was about community, well, why are they saying that? Well, they’re saying that you get status of being in this community by owning this NFT board.

 

AP yacht was a good example of that, right? Um, people were paying insane amounts of money because it made them feel like they had access to the celebrities that owned those board AP yachts. And, um, you know, you were included in this club.

 

That’s not too far from what reality will be, but it will actually be reality. Like I see a day where, um, someone like Taylor Swift, who is digitally forward and, and, and, and wants to be this person. If Taylor said tomorrow, you cannot come to my concert unless you own these NFTs.

 

Here are the NFTs and that she basically issued them as unique tickets to the concert. One A, one B, one C, one D, one E, A, A, A, B, B. So she could literally do that.

 

And the technology’s there to do that. Well, think about that. Now, when you look at my Facebook profile, or you look at my Twitter profile, or you look at my Instagram profile, I can prove to you that I’ve been to all those concerts and I can prove to Taylor when I engage with her on social media, that I’ve purchased front row tickets to the last 18 concerts and I bought 25 front row tickets and brought all my friends.

 

And it’s an independent, absolute trustless way to validate and verify money and contribution to the community. And, and that’s a very powerful thing that we’re not going to lose, um, just because NFTs, you know, kind of lost their, their shine for the time being. That will be something that gets picked up by somebody and gets ran with.

 

So, uh, I’m, I’m high on NFT technology. I’m low on NFTs without utility. I think NFTs and utility need to go hand in hand.

 

And again, a great example of that would be, is if a sports star issued their NFT collection, no different than a playing card, um, and you got the physical playing card mailed to you as long as you owned the digital playing card and whoever owned that digital playing card had the rights to order the physical card, right? That would be a very unique thing. What would that allow you to do?

 

Well, let’s say that person’s career starts to go really well. They hit a hundred home runs in a season, whatever it is. And that card goes way up in value and it starts trading secondarily on the open market on these NFT marketplaces.

 

You buy that card for a thousand dollars when the player got paid on the royalties of the card being sold at $2. Well, now the player gets to participate and get $10 off of that transaction. They’ll make five times as much on that one transaction as they did selling the initial card in the one transaction.

 

Well, let’s say it sells the next week to another person at $140. They get 10% of that. And the next week at $200 they get to, it’s this reoccurring ever expanding revenue stream that’s attached to the value of their brand.

 

That’s, that’s too hard to pass up. So I believe that it will come back, but it will come back on the back of true utility.

 

[Melissa]

That’s a great example. I just, I was watching something the other day and my mindless scroll, like we all do these days, um, where somebody bought the, a microscopic Louis Vuitton purse for $75,000. So they could showcase it, but your point is perfect, right?

 

Your point to be part of these clubs that you otherwise wouldn’t is key. And I think I love that you explained it that way. Cause you know, with Taylor now owning all her music rates, that could be something that is going to set her apart from other people that have to use different venues, different agencies that take huge cuts of, you know, her show, her talent, her efforts.

 

So I love that analogy.

 

[Tillman]

Well, the way that that will happen is, is that one of these stars will figure out how much money they can make their fans. So let me give you another example of like, if, if you did this correctly and you had a large brand with the large following, right? Uh, Barstool Sports would be a good example of this.

 

Taylor Swift would be a good example. Beyonce would be, so, you know, the, the, the, the people that have like the super fans that will do anything and buy tickets at Adele, you know, buy tickets at $1,600 a piece, you have those fans and you, you have a database. There is your fan club.

 

It’s your, it’s, you have the names and emails of all these people. There would be nothing that would keep one of these celebrities from issuing a Taylor token and that Taylor token being the only token that you can buy merchandise with, for example, or an exclusive line of merchandise that you could only buy with this token. Well, she could gift the token to her fan club right out of the gates.

 

As much as she wanted to, she could gift them the NFTs the same way. Well, what does that do? Well, it creates a value as other people want these tokens that she’s now gifted to our fans, they are the liquidity to the market and it creates millionaires within your fan base.

 

So if you look at like a board API type of an injection of value, there are billions of dollars of value inside the board API community. Imagine if there was new billions of dollars of value inside of Taylor Swift’s fan club community. What does that do to the loyalty inside your fan club?

 

Well, oh my gosh. I mean, you just made all your fans a bunch of money. That’s the most stickiness that you could ever do.

 

And if somebody does it right, it will be something people will do a case study about because it’s essentially allowing somebody to buy stock in a human pre them being famous. And as you, as a fan, look at them continue to grow in their fame. You’re, you’re owning a piece of that fame.

 

You’re owning a piece of the economic value of it. That, that, that is a really interesting case study that I think we’ll see played out here shortly.

 

[Melissa]

Yeah, that’s a really good analogy. I love that you share that now switching gears on you a little bit and divisitifying automated trading with our public. You know, most retailers are at the mercy of the market swings.

 

Like we talked a little bit about, um, and probably their own emotions as well. Talk to me a little bit about our public is trying to level the playing field here. So what does automatic trading actually look like for everyday investors?

 

And maybe a little bit about how does your platform keep things accessible for everyone?

 

[Tillman]

So trading automation’s been around for a long time. Uh, if you’ve heard terms like high frequency trading, um, that essentially is what this is, it’s, it’s software that’s programmed to execute trades at specific parameters, if this happens in the market, then do this. And that, that software is, is the most widely commonly used software amongst the big players, the institutional traders that, um, you, you can’t imagine 70 plus percent of the markets volume is done through automated trading, the retail consumer is the only person that doesn’t have these types of tools.

 

And so our mission was to bring those tools to the retail consumer. So these are very customizable. These are individual, they are run by you.

 

We do not manage money. We do not trade for people. We do not have access to their brokerage accounts.

 

This is a tool set that you take home that you hook up through trading view to your brokerage account and that you set the parameters and you execute the trades with it. Now I will tell you, we will help you learn the software. We are excellent about that.

 

I have a whole great group of customer service folks that love to spend time teaching them people how to use the software and the software is essentially something that allows you to stay disciplined in what your goals are. If you’re somebody that wants to own Bitcoin and doesn’t know how to buy it and doesn’t know how to play the volatility that the market presents you, this tool is built for you. So you don’t have to be sitting at your computer waiting for the dips to present themselves, to buy a little bit of Bitcoin here, to buy a little bit of Bitcoin there, to sell a little bit of coin when it goes up a little bit, this software does all of that for you and it does it based upon your individual budget constraints and your individual investment goals and how much Bitcoin are you looking to own by what specific date.

 

All of those things are very easily executed within the software. So it’s a tool that I kind of give people the analogy. If you say to yourself, oh man, I wish I could have bought more Bitcoin when I’ve heard about it or oh man, I had Bitcoin and I traded it and bam, I shouldn’t have traded, I lost my stack.

 

Any of those kind of typical responses to Bitcoin, we’ve been there. That’s why this software exists is because we don’t like those feelings as much as you don’t. And this is going to keep you from having those feelings ever again, because it doesn’t require any attention.

 

Once you set it in motion, it’s completely hands off and it keeps you in a very disciplined, non-emotional state because you’re not sitting there approaching the markets from oh my God, I’m losing a bunch of money or oh my God, the price is way up, what should I do? You’re not having to deal and contend with that because you’re doing it in small incremental steps along a long period of time and that’s the way that most people deal with very volatile markets. It’s called dollar cost averaging.

 

If you’ve heard that term, it essentially means breaking up your money into very small chunks and buying little bits instead of large chunks along your journey of building your investment portfolio. That is the best way to manage volatility and that’s what the software does exceptionally well for you.

 

[Melissa]

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I love it. Now I want to kind of look to the future a little bit and and you know, a lot of institutions now are looking at Bitcoin or adding them to their portfolio. What does this shift mean?

 

Maybe share a little bit from your perspective and for companies like yours.

 

[Tillman]

We sponsored the Bitcoin conference this year and we’ve done it every year for the past five years. It is incredible how much growth we’ve seen in the space, but specifically this year and since the conference we’ve had more people reach out to us with this notion of we’re a company, we’re a small business, we’re a franchisee, we have this business that we’re making money in and we want to start a Bitcoin Treasury strategy and we want your software to help us to do that. That is not we did not experience that last year.

 

That’s a new phenomenon and we think it’s because all of the attention over the last few months have pointed people towards the Michael Saylor strategies of the world, which is take these what we call zombie companies that are publicly traded, but they’ve lost their primary use like Game Stop, for example, and they’re not making money anymore, but they have a public company that’s traded and it allows them if they have enough cash to accumulate a lot of Bitcoin and then their share price is essentially an extension of the Bitcoin price.

 

The Bitcoin Treasury strategies that have popped up in the public sector have been wildly successful. And when I mean wildly successful, I mean, it seems like it’s a seemingly endless bottom of cash. There’s new billion dollar purchases and raises happening almost on a weekly basis.

 

And so what we’re seeing now on our front from an arch public perspective is the private sector with highly profitable businesses that are cash flowing very nicely, wanting to appropriate some of their positive cash flow into an accumulation strategy into a Bitcoin Treasury strategy. And I’m exceptionally excited to see that because I think that will be a rising tide that consistently drives Bitcoin’s price up, but also has the power to change the middle class of America in a way that I don’t think we’ve seen anything else have the power to do. If every small entrepreneurial small business in America started buying Bitcoin with 10 percent of their net profits, most businesses would double their net profits.

 

[Melissa]

So when when you look at it from like a personal outside of the business, so personally, is there anything leaders, investors should be watching or doing in the next wave of this transformation, like buying 10 percent with their disposable incomes per se that you recommend.

 

[Tillman]

Yeah, if you don’t have exposure to Bitcoin, I look, I tell you, you should get an exposure whether that’s buying an ETF through your traditional broker. You could do that. You could buy through our software on one of the crypto exchanges and hold the crypto individually on a cold storage wallet or on an exchange.

 

But getting some exposure, I think would be the first step. I always encourage people, again, I’m one of those folks that likes to know what I’m getting into. Nothing will educate you more about what the network stands for and what the value that you’re buying into.

 

Then turning your computer into a miner, it’s pretty easy. And you can watch a few YouTube videos and get it done in a few hours. But that will let you understand the value of peer to peer banking networks.

 

And that’ll make you a more proud owner of the asset that you’re buying. And it’ll help you understand what the potential is, because a lot of folks will say to me, well, it’s already at 117,000 or I think 18,000 right now. 118,000, it’s too late.

 

I’ve already missed the boat. You only have missed the boat if you think they’re going to stop printing money. So whenever you think they’re going to stop printing money is when you should stop buying Bitcoin.

 

I personally don’t think they’re going to ever stop printing money because that’s what they have never stopped in the past. They can’t afford to stop. The only way to get out of debt, especially the amount of debt that we have, is to create a lot of money, cheap money to pay off that debt.

 

So for example, I owe you our national debt. What is it? Like 30 trillion dollars, some crazy number.

 

I owe you 30 trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money right now, isn’t it? When you’re talking about printing five trillion dollars over the next eight years, 30 trillion sounds like a big number, right?

 

What if I was talking about printing 60 trillion over the next eight years? Does that 30 trillion look so big anymore?

 

[Melissa]

Not as big as the three, yeah.

 

[Tillman]

No, it doesn’t. So the answer to getting out of debt when you’re the government is to print your way out of debt. That’s the beauty of the printing press.

 

So if you believe that’s going to continue, you need to ask yourself the hard questions. What assets do I own that are not, that are inversely proportionate to the printing press, that are inversely that are protecting me from the loss of purchasing power that I see around me every day. And you need to ask yourself, am I in an environment where I see my purchasing power being lost every single year?

 

Is gas prices going up? Is milk prices going up? Is property prices going up?

 

Are utility prices going up? Are HOA dues going up? It’s everything going up.

 

Yes, it is. That’s a product of inflation. If you don’t have an investment strategy that has something in it that’s addressing that, you need to do some homework because it pertains to what Bitcoin can do for you because I think it will be very valuable.

 

[Melissa]

Well said, I love it. Any final thoughts that you want to leave with our listeners before we close up?

 

[Tillman]

I think we covered everything. I feel very fortunate to have been in the space for as long as I have. I’m excited about what it possesses in terms of potential for the future.

 

And just know that you’re not too late. It’s the very beginning. And just what your whistle as to how early it is, it’s vastly superior to gold in every way.

 

And it’s one tenth the market cap of gold right now. So even if it doesn’t do anything other than replace gold as an inflationary monetary indicator, you’re looking at a 10X from here. What other things do you have in front of you that can 10X your money in a relatively short period of time?

 

I think I don’t have very many.

 

[Melissa]

I love it. Well said. Tillman, this was awesome.

 

Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and wisdom with our listeners. For those who want to connect with you further and learn more about ARK Public, what’s the best way for them to do that?

 

[Tillman]

Yeah, just go to our website archpublic.com. A-R-C-H public. P-U-B-L-I-C.com.

 

Click on our Bitcoin algo. It’s completely free to use up to $10,000 of trading allowance per year. You can set up an account with Kraken or Gemini.

 

My customer service reps would love to walk you through the setup and get you up and trading. But I think that you’ll really enjoy it and see a lot of value in it.

 

[Melissa]

Thank you so much for sharing that with us today. That’s the Executive Connect podcast.