2025 crypto ETF outlook: Solana, XRP and Dogecoin funds with Eric Balchunas

Transcript

GM good morning welcome to the milk Road show The Daily crypto show where we bring crypto insights with the same Killer Instinct as Michael Jordan I'm your host Jay Hamilton it's Tuesday February 18th and today we are joined by Eric buunis senior ETF Analyst at Bloomberg author of two books the institutional ETF toolbook and the bulgo effect Eagles fans still grinning from ear to ear after the parade in Philadelphia today we are going to talk about everyone's wondering when the Bitcoin strategic Reserve is going to come I mean if it's going to come well what if Elon through Doge could make it happen soon we're going to explore a little bit of an interesting prediction there Litecoin salana Doge which of

these is going to get an ETF first when are they coming and what Mike flows look like we're going to talk about the ETF uh situation and predictions from Eric and then also we're going to end with we're going to chat about Eric's book the BOGO effect where he talks about Legend investor Jack Bogle if you don't know who Jack Bogle is we're going to get from Eric why he spent two years writing a book about this guy lots to learn before we jump in guys tomorrow we are going live with the bitwise boys that's Matt Hogan and Ryan massm here on YouTube so subscribe hit the Bell so you get notified that's at 12:05 PM Eastern join us so you can ask your questions to them today's episode is brought to you by byit you guys need to check out their

new trade GPT it's an AI powered assistant that makes token analysis really simple today's episode is also brought to you by crypto.com my favorite crypto card no annual fees a whole bunch of perks lounge access and so much more check it out without further Ado Eric welcome to the milk Road Show hey great to be here thank you very very happy to have you my man uh it's an honor to be able to get some time sitting down with one of the great ETF analysts in the space uh let's just start before we jump jump into ETFs I'm going to bring up a tweet that you commented on the other day of um somebody predicting how the Bitcoin strategic Reserve actually could happen rather quickly here um let me

just break this down so basically elon's been asking everybody like hey what should I look into and everybody's giving their opinions on Twitter uh and Zero Hedge said hey somebody should look into Fort Knox and count the gold and see if all the golds there he's saying that the last time somebody looked was actually 50 years ago uh I don't know if you can confirm that not but here's what he's predicting could happen Okay so if Elon pushes Trump to look and do an audit of Fort KNX the audit reveals that there's actually less gold than there should be so the calculation is wrong then Trump realizes that China and Russia have way more gold than the us but very little Bitcoin then Trump issues an executive order for the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve citing National Security the money printer goes

Burr and the US buys as much Bitcoin as the market will sell the price of gold collapses in Bitcoin terms China and Russia realize that Trump got the jump on them and they start trying to acquire Bitcoin the price of gold collapses further and then for good met measure Peter Schiff is admitted to a mental hospital what is the what is the likelihood is this actually possible so first of all I I just was fascinated by this because of the specificity I mean there's so many specific things in this you know I come from the traditional cell side you know space and like no one talks like this and it's just interesting to me um even a little humor at the end and I also

find it very crypto that it's not here's what could happen he's like here's what's going to happen and he lays out like it's just like it's like this thing that might be have like a one two% chance he's like so confident so specific and I just thought it was funny so I just asked people what percent chance they thought it could happen and mostly a lot of people from my trafi followers were like zero ridiculous but some of the crypto people thought it was possible I think some thought one through four more likely um a lot of people thought nine was going to happen regardless that's shift going to the mental yeah I just it was one of those chances for a little fun on a Sunday or whatever the other thing is I will say

like I have now and I you know and I there's been multiple things that have happened in the past uh that are that have turned out to be true that sounded pretty absurd at the time and so I I really when I see something like this where there's no gold in Fort Knox you know in 2014 I you know 10 years ago I'd be like that just sounds like a crackpot Theory I move on with my life but so many things have happen that I'm like who knows I mean so I have a little more open-mindedness towards stuff that might sound conspiracy is um and so I was H only half kidding I thought man there's

a half serious chance there isn't the gold there I know that all the crypto people surrounding Trump might say let screw it let's just go with Bitcoin so there is a sort of like logic to it you know some of that being possible um but on the flip side um some people were like well if there's no gold there like they might not say that publicly either but then again the way Elon is so transparent I think they'd have to I don't know the whole thing is fascinating I think if you pulled people and asked them is the gold actually there um I think you know I I'd probably guess it' be around 5050 um now does that lead to all those other things I don't know but certainly Bitcoin is I think seen as digital gold

and there's something about what this person's talking about that is somewhat smart um but I I think you could do it without the gold not being there I think that's the part of the that sounds a little little like tinfoil hadish but again like I know that our social security funds are not really there I mean supposed to you know they've already took that money and just put IUS in there so I don't know so we'll see it C it certainly seems it what what I like about it is it it's it could equip Trump with a reason to push this faster and harder is really what the crypto perspective of this is and you're totally right crypto is

always going to say oh this this is a guarantee this is going to happen that's why we're going to talk about Jack BOGO later in the episode because everybody listening in if we're we're all we're not experienced investors with Decades of experience behind us you know we we got some stuff that we need to learn and maybe our confidence is a bit too much sometimes uh you you did you did look into this how much gold is there supposed to be in Fort Knox and when is the last they so I just Googled it I was just curious like how much buying you'd have to do of Bitcoin to copy the gold that was in Fort Knox and I Googled it and like you know how they give you the AI answer at the top AI said six billion

and I was like that's it so I basically was like six billion is like a month of ETF flows it's like it's no big deal I wouldn't get too worked up about it but then people were telling me that the gold hasn't been marked up since like the 70s and it's actually worth more like 800 billion that makes more sense to me that sounds more like a true Reserve um I don't understand why it hasn't been marked up and I don't understand why Google's AI wouldn't be on to that but um it's not like it said it's six billion but if you Market by today's price of gold it's this that's what AI should have said so just note to self don't always trust the AI That's one Mor old the story here um but the other is you know you know when you get

close to a trillion dollars in gold that's a lot um you know that that blows away how much ETFs hold of gold uh ET gold ETFs have like a at least in the US about 130 billion um and the Bitcoin ETFs about 130 billion so that that would be a monster number if the government were to buy that of of either gold or Bitcoin so that's a that's a whole different story six billion obviously I was wrong so um I get why now you know it kind of makes sense why someone would be thinking that if you wanted to sort of make a new reserve of Bitcoin you got to talk in these bigger numbers all right well Elon if you're listening please go count the gold in Fort Knox so we can all know the answer

to this question uh okay one more uh fun little tweet before we jump into the ETFs uh you posted about a a Bitcoin Maxi said that they have transferred this is Plan B uh on Twitter so they've transferred all their Bitcoin into an ETF which is very very interesting and basically they cited ease of use in terms of managing the funds ease of being able to manage it alongside their the rest of their portfolio their stocks their bonds Etc and this this is a big move is how do you see the future are people going to buy more on the I don't

want to get into the self- custody debate but are people going to buy more on the ETF side or people going to buy more of their crypto on chain and especially from the institutional side is where I'm really interested well there was some great numbers that if if you look at the Bitcoin ETFs in the past year uh I think they were 2third of all the buyers and I think Michael sailor was like onethird everyone else was a net seller combined now of course there's some buyers in those net sellers but it just shows you how powerful the ETFs are in this first year I premised that they kind of made the price go from maybe 30k to 70 I think Trump optimism help to go above 70 to like 100 but I think ETFs should be given credit for a good chunk

of that move up um and the reason and I I've been to a couple bit Bitcoin conferences like Plan B in both Lugano and El Salvador so I've gone right into the sort of lion's then of crypto as the trafi suit guy and basically said listen um you have to respect the ETF a little more this thing is very disruptable or disrupting it's not something Wall Street loves ETFs make no money for Wall Street they they'd rather sell mutual funds and high level hedge funds and all annuities ETFs are a lean and mean you know and um that's why they're so popular you know they are uh almost free you get you know the Bitcoin ETFs 20 basis points I mean

that's very low fee and they are very liquid so the the liquidity means that when you trade them there's just really no trading costs and then there's no commissions on your brokerage account like there's free trading of ETFs on the major brokerages so you're looking at free trading free exposure almost um and you've got the sort of trusted brands of Black Rock and Fidelity to boot in a very regulated structure so you have a lot of it's a benefit Rich vehicle and the bit some of the under understated benefits are just convenience um you know people love things that are convenient and also this idea of like well you know peace of mind like if you have keys

there's been some people who got robbed recently there's also been people who lost their keys in the fire in La I heard obviously if you Outsource it to Black Rock you maybe go against the ethos of Bitcoin but you certainly make sure you you have access to those that Bitcoin later because it's held one to one with coinbase every ETF is held one to one they're all physically backed it's it would be illegal not to do that so there's a real security and all that and now you can just walk around like not worrying about it now on the flip side if if you think like Society is going to like crumble and like ha having actual Bitcoin that you can transfer yourself is going to be valuable and like a Mad Max afterworld um and you think the

government might confiscate um Bitcoin like it did gold if you're at that level I would not use the ETF I think the peace of mind would come from having your own wallet to be honest with you so just think it depends on how far on that Mad Max Road you are um and I think the vast majority of people do not think Society is going to collapse and it's going to be like a Mad Max afterworld and so they're like look it's a cool invention um I get why it can store value a lot of smart people are buying it and I don't want to kick myself later I'm very happy to Outsource it so they are happy to let Black Rock handle all that and in personally the reason gold ETS is so popular is the friction of

going to buy gold bars getting a safe putting them in your house there's an equal amount of digital friction for a normal person to go do the whole wallet thing so ETFs I mean think about it you can take an ETF there's an ETF that just holds the Magnificent Seven stocks that's seven stocks and it's got a billion dollars I mean that's not that much friction you could go buy the seven stocks pretty quickly but so if you eliminate just a little friction you'll you see some buyers you eliminate a lot of friction you're in business and that's what the Bitcoin ETFs have done and that's why this guy is interesting that said this and honestly the two million followers is what you know I thought his name even plan B and the replies sometimes I tweet something and

like the crypto Twitter people like they give me the context like oh this is a buffoon he doesn't know this and you've missed the backstory and I'm like okay I'll delete it but I looked at the replies to this guy it looked like people were generally like dude why would you do that like it seemed like a there was a couple people who came into my mentions and were like uh this guy isn't the most trustworthy person but it seemed a little more like cope than real actual problem um and anyway it just is one of those moments where someone from the community actually prefers the ETF so anyway this is all part of my theme of which is basically like ETFs are potent they're powerful in my opinion they're like tokens but with a lot of

extra benefits and I I think Bitcoin is also but I'm an ETF analyst and I got into ETF because I saw their potential early on just like you saw crypto and they have really fulfilled that they're you know very popular and I it's normally though the sort of Boomer advisor picture you have of the person buying these ETFs not this guy with the handle Plan B and so it anything against type is interesting to me um now if I saw a boomer adviser go get their own Wallet that' be equally interesting totally you know what I mean yeah completely you know the crypto crowd would tout that they'd be like look well and and and and I don't like

um I think we we we could do a whole episode on the uh the centralization versus decentralization argument I think that really there is a you nailed it we people care about convenience really in the end convenience matters and there is the ETF is much more convenient the thing that stands out to me is so Abu dhabi's Sovereign wealth fund has been buying Bitcoin right and they've been buying it they've been buying ibit they've been buying black rocks Bitcoin ETF so that that was very interesting to me because it made me think okay when these large when more governments more Sovereign wealth funds more Pension

funds these these large institutional funds when they buy Bitcoin and obviously here here I am being the Crypt bro saying when if uh but will will they buy ETFs is that the path for them yeah so I think for most of these uh big institutions uh the the ETF is very convenient I wrote a book called the institutional ETF toolbox about 10 years ago and I interviewed institutions about why they use ETFs what they don't do is they don't buy like the Vanguard 500 ETF like they don't do that they can get the they can get all that in a separate account but what they do use GS4 is liquidity and they use it to complete portfolios things they can't like hire a manager

for or the too friction to do on their own so the gold ETF is very highly used GLD in institutional portfolios because it's regulated there's no like you know a lot of these people who manage other people's money they're terrified of getting in trouble or like career risk we call it so like if you just buy the ETF and it's got black Rock's brand name or Fidelity like you don't have to worry about something going wrong and I think that's why you'll find them use the ETF and they'll use the US ETFs despite where they are in the world because the ones here are much cheaper than the ones elsewhere and they're more liquid so we got the liquidity the institutional level fees already and we've got the brand names so that's why the

institutions will probably use the ETF over direct Bitcoin not all of them but I I think most will the one thing though is they move like aircraft carriers so imagine an aircraft carrier turning in the water it's going to take a while whereas small Ras and Retail they move quick they're like little speedboats so an institution is going to take a while but when they do turn they usually come in a herd-like pattern so there's been a couple pensions Sovereign wealth funds and one endowment so far um I would expect those to multiply over the next 10 years and even five years but it you got to be patient like spy and GLD are good examples they have many of these types of investors in there so that's why I think uh that that is an important

one is that institutions have access to anything they can call Black Rock and black rock will do whatever they want for this institution they'll roll out the red carpet they'll do it for cheap because they have so much money and so if they use an ETF I've studied why do they use it so in the case of this they they probably use it because it's just easier to complete a portfolio this way there's no manager to hire it's not like you're going to hire hedge fund just to buy Bitcoin and store it for you um and the liquidity is awesome if they ever want to like do an option on it to like hedge it or they want to like short it or cut the exposure down a little bit if there's a selloff all this can happen quickly without them being seen in the

market too you know I bit trades two billion a day so to hold like a couple hundred million you could sell that in in one day without moving the market too much so that's why um the the institutions are going to use the ETF you say they move like aircraft carriers I hope they move better than Delta Air flights that are landing Pearson Airport this week I fly a lot so it's just like I don't I hate that thought of you're just sitting there and then like tragedy happens this is so scary but it's totally yeah I I I I told my wife I wasn't goingon to show her the news because I knew her anxiety the next time we fly would just be through the only thing is like if if you are a stat person though what are the odds of that

versus like a car accident and cars to I think the difference is when you drive a car you're in control like it you know I guess in Uber you're out of control but also an airplane it's not your control you're you know something else externally happened to make a problem and that's so frightening and nightmarish plus I think at the end of the day there's something about an airplane that feels like you're pushing what humans should and could do to the extremes like a car feels a little more natural to like The Human Experience an airplane sometimes I'm like I can't believe I just sat in this tube for 13 hours and I arrived in like Vietnam or Australia two places have gone in the past two years it's wild it's a miracle

it's a is a miracle insane yeah that's why everybody needs to clap on Landing not just because you actually landed but because it's a freaking Miracle it's incredible okay let's let's go to uh the ETFs so I'm going to pull up your your list here can you take us through what's the current list of ETF applications crypto ETF applications yeah so xrp has been acknowledged so this thing is we basically have to update it almost every day but basically if you look at these filings the the I think the most notable one is is Litecoin now Litecoin is like a is Bitcoin basically more or less so it's viewed as a commodity so this was filed during the gendler SEC and anything filed in the gendar SEC that

they saw was a security got the phone call from the staff saying withdraw this Litecoin didn't get that call so Litecoin has a head start because it was started in the gendler era and it should be no problem with this era because they're more liberal now so that's good to go we think that's got a 90% chance to go and with the next one launched now they have till October to make a final decision will they use all that time I don't know maybe Hester Pur and Atkins will make a point of like just getting it out be why wait I don't know but uh October would be the final date then you've got these salana ones which just got acknowledged the fact that the salon and xrp got acknowledged is is maybe the

biggest news of all this because in the past again they were like get the hell out of here they tried you know they always try every like six months they like let's just test gendler and they all got withdrawn including during the lame duck session after Trump won and before gendler you know left the building and drove out of there they got rejected I mean not you know withdrawn so the fact that they lasted long enough to be acknowledged by the SEC opened up for comment it's it's not like that's weird that's normal but normal is outstanding or positive when it comes to these security type cryptos and what it does point to and this is something Scott Johansson

said although I I I you you can't we'll never quote me and James on this because we don't want to go that far but he thought this was a a direct sign that they would have to resend these lawsuits or Tamp that all that down because you can't technically approve it if you see it as a security so IP it's ipso facto you now you can I'm not going to say that's gonna happen that's a little beyond my depths but I will say I mean that would be the way that would happen um and then Dogecoin is wasn't named but either way this one is filing the others and we just think basically if you're going to be positive about salana and xrp not being Securities you're good with

Dogecoin and then you've got cardano and has uh a 19 V4 has not been acknowledged yet probably will and then we've got H bar polka dot which have s1s but not 19 b4s now the reason the 19 B4 matters is you have to get that approved so if you only file the S1 it's sort of like not a complete attempt at a filing yet it's like a half attempt so those aren't even really on the register but I think there's also this other situation I don't want to won out too much but Rec shares filed for xrp salana in a 40 act vehicle doing this thing with a Cayman Island subsidiary to get around some

rules they've done this a couple times in ETFs with commodity type ETFs and to have all you do is invest in the Cayman Island subsidiary then that invests in it so it's kind of like a little bit of a maneuver I'll call it if that goes through that would go through in like March or April and that could front run all these is that a true spot ETF not really it's it's got that asterisk next to it and we found that investors tend to love the real deal they want to buy the ETF that which in turn goes and buys the underlying and stores it that we call like a true spot ETF like GLD or ibit so this list here is

all ETFs trying to be GLT and ibit like the Rex shares is it's not like BTO which was Bitcoin Futures but it's somewhere in the middle and I think that'll be interesting if if that does have like a three-month lead or head start on the rest does that matter I don't know anyway this is all part of this sort of jockeying that we see I don't know if you're you're probably not old enough to remember the movie Cannonball Run with Bert Reynolds yeah it's a it's a it's a really fun 80s comedy and it's basically all these people who have a illegal race whoever can get from New York to Los Angeles the fastest wins a million dollars and one

one team dresses up as priests that's a Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin um Jackie Chan is in it as this sort of Japanese Spy Hunter car that can like you know fly and stuff um two ladies kind of like dress uh you know Li liberally and uh this is also so they when people get pulled over they can get out of it and then Bert reynolds's team is in a um a hospital like a ambulance so they're pretend to be doctors so all these people are like just basically doing whatever they can to to evade law enforcement to get to La the fastest this is what this reminds me of it all had the Bitcoin race had the same thing there's a Cannonball Run kind of element which is just trying this trying that

and the reason is because if you get to out to Market first and you start to get the lineon share of the assets it's almost impossible to catch that person um especially once they get liquidity um that's why you know people are so interested to get out first even with these coins that they're like I don't even know if there's interest but just in case there is I want to be the first out so that's why there was an explosion of filings the week after gendler left the building and drove away um now we got think like 55 is total filings and that was like 12 before Trump won something like that so it's happening fast for sure and and probabilities just just go through your

probabilities quickly here so we and iin 90% salana xrp 70 65% Dogecoin is now 80 because that did get acknowledged oh I'm sorry xrp is also 70 so xrp is acknowledged 70 you get an extra five if you get acknowledged Doge goes up to 80 so 90 70 70 80 this is a little this is is pretty much where poly market's at Poly Market's a little more optimistic than us but we have we've lived through too much to go all the way because we we thought there was a couple times they didn't approve back in the old days and this is when Trump 1.0 was in and

Clayton was the SEC he disapproved one so it is possible to have a trump SEC chair disapprove so um just know that that said this is before Trump got a a in a relationship with crypto people and I I think it's different now but you always got to leave a little you know it's it's you'd rather have people be pleasantly surprised than disappointed you know it's like when you're predicting the weather and you see a cloud formation um and you just th might as well throw a little raindrop in the cloud on the app yeah that way people go actually it was fine out rather than airing on the optimistic where they're pissed off that hey I thought it was not going to rain and it did Fu weather man

so I just think there's an element to leaning a little bit to the cautious but those are pretty good numbers I got to say those were all like under 10% U before Trump was elected at least there's that except for Litecoin Litecoin would have made it through regardless probably yeah expectations are certainly the what's your thought on Litecoin like the Litecoin people are a interesting breed they're like uh they're like um aici autos of like Pokemon or something it's like and then the Bitcoin Maxis come in and just take a crap all over their whole world and like it's just cryp crypto crime is like crazy but yeah Litecoin litecoin's a meme coin to me

that's that's the best way to categorize it there's no fundamentals to me to Litecoin there's no reason to have Litecoin it's it's a mean coin with it with a with a very passionate Community very like very passionate back in the day and they Dino coin it's a dino coin they bought it back in the day like that somebody called it a dead chain zombie chain dead chain Dino yeah those are the all the the terms and it's it's not the only one it's the one that's just done very well so in other words every time someone who's a Litecoin person comes in and says yeah all right this is happening and defends Litecoin they're not really defending it

for any real purpose I bought it back in the day and I want the number to go up exactly that's all this is okay that's all it is that's all it is um okay so here here's the question that I think everybody has is what's the uh poor Litecoin yeah I don't I don't I don't really feel bad um uh what's what's the impact of these ETFs so everybody knows the impact of the Bitcoin ETF I mean you mentioned it earli in the show it's enormous um ethereum didn't really see deem to have an impact but I actually want to talk about ethereum quickly with you because I'm curious from your perspective was the ethereum ETF a success or a failure because I think from everybody in crypto

it was a failure yeah you know again um I'm a hopefully you get this r i and I stick with this I got a lot of crap from The Ether people I pissed them off because I said ether etf's coming out after after Bitcoin is like Sister Hazel having to follow Nirvana you know if I'm putting it in 90 band 90s band Sister Hazel had like one hit and they have a small Niche following and if they were to play like the uh like a casino this Saturday they'd find an audience they just it wouldn't be that big are they successful I'd say yeah but they're not like Nirvana successful or you know they're

not on the same level as a a band uh so that's the difference coming after Bitcoin it was just unfortunate had they launched first and gotten like seven eight billion dollars or whatever it'd be like wow that's that's pretty good 7 eight billion in your first year is great it's hard to do a billion in your first year is good I've seen a lot of products just totally die you know just live in Oblivion or that takes them till like year three to get going Arc is whole totally successful but they had like that whole brand had less than a billion for like two years so to have that much money 120 billion in your first year is just ridiculous it defies all physics so to follow that

it's just unfortunate for ether so I would say ether is a success on its own I think relative to bitcoin though and as I said earlier it is Small Potatoes they hate that term but I'm like I just think at the end of the day silver is also kind of small potatoes to gold and the commodity space is a great parallel gold has about three four fours of all the precious metal assets silver has almost all the rest Platinum plaum fight for like 2% that's probably what you're going to see and where I was going with this that's where going they tried all kinds of they they tried um lean hog Futures aluminum nickel um oil natural

gas most of those came and went but like oil found a little audience natural gas a little bit and then every now and then one of these has like a crazy run like corn or coffee and it does get some action but then it dies down I think this is the same thing you're going to see here once you get to some of the more Mish coins um they might have some little bit of interest but I just think a lot of people who are going to trade like a trump meme coin are probably just gonna trade it on a crypto exchange because they're just really into all this stuff and they probably know the other 10,000 meme coins launch every day or whatever I just think that the type of person who wants ETFs is probably a little more into like the investment

Merit that said every now and then a shiny object comes along and as long as it's up like a jillion percent you know you might get some looks but at the end of the day you just need to keep focused on the Bitcoin ETFs they they are the real deal they are you know astronomically successful and I think they keep will keep being successful ether a little less so and then you know ether salana xrp if one of these gets some kind of utilization in the mainstream World some kind of an endorsement it could help I don't know who would or how but right now ether's obviously like the second most popular one but who knows maybe salana is used

in some way that like normal person is like wow the you know like the government or Microsoft or somebody like used this um and all of a sudden that coin starts to get a little halo around it a little glow and that could change things but even in that situation I just don't see much changing uh bitcoin's total dominance I mean yeah it feels it feels no I it feels like there's there's an opportunity for a second place finisher here and we don't know who that second place finisher is yet right is what I'm hearing you say but at the same time thing there is a the fact that black rock and Fidelity who are trusted

by all the Boomer advisers did just stopped it too is is interesting it's kind of like ether got the this so they haven't applied for any of these others no interesting so that's that matters for now we'll see how this plays out but to me that's pretty big because if you're an adviser you're like again you're like Larry finin says Bitcoin and ether are okay I you know and Larry fin gives a lot of the these people so much cover air cover to put some client money into it because he is the CEO of the largest asset manager on Earth so his what he puts into product they're like well he's done his research inv vetted it and they don't have salana or xrp but they could quickly could one of

those took off right yeah so uh so is the so from from an an investor perspective what this says to me is that if the the the likely price action that you want to see number go up is more likely to happen from the news than it is from the actual these these things getting an ETF these things getting an ETF although I guess it does sort of depend on how much the one thing about ethereum is it's market cap is so high so a few billion from an ETF doesn't make a difference doesn't move the needle Litecoin I have can't remember what its market cap is off the top of my head but it's it's not anywhere close to to ethereum so I guess from a percentage

standpoint it could move it more but I think the thing that stands out for me is this is it does feel like more of a uh it's the news that's going to make a difference on the price action not the ETF flows themselves unless you think for some reason there's going to be big flows in any of these ETFs well if like a xrp ETF is launched it just it just opens up it's a bridge to a whole another world and so you know it's like uh yeah more people are going to come into New York City once they built uh Brooklyn Bridge you know it's just going to help traffic but doesn't mean people are going to come in so I think the flow what the flows are is going to matter there'll be excitement when the ETF is approved excitement when it starts to launch but

like if the flows are mild which happened with ether also ether did launch and go right down it's better to launch and go up like Bitcoin did it kind of really was like it was kind of like it rained on its like launch month because it was like it just was falling that was bad so if you don't see any in the first couple day uh days or weeks um it could be a bummer because you had this excitement so uh I do think though over time just having ETFs tracking a crypto is better than not because it allows for a whole new type of audience to buy it if they are so inclined but just having that doesn't mean people are

going to buy it yeah yeah is is there any index ETFs that are being that are right now they might have just put it out hash deex has a Bitcoin like a greatest hits like a you know um I think it has Bitcoin and ether I think someone else put a Bitcoin and ether out I should know this off the top of my head but I don't I'm not that excited by these I don't really get that it feels coin shares all already had the Bitcoin and ether futures ETF but there will be multiple um spot where they merge them together but in the precious metal space

as I said earlier there's an ETF called glitter gltr and it has gold silver Platinum plaum has 1 billion so it has 7% of the assets I think people were just they just won Gold so I wouldn't look for these like index ETFs of all the cryptos together to do that much damage I think they'll be mildly adopted okay um before we jump over to Jack BOGO uh is there is there anything coming from The Innovation side like the one thing that everybody always says about the downside of the ETFs is like you look at e theum you can't stake in the ATF uh you look at all the onchain assets and there's a lot of benefits to

holding onchain you can do you can use defi you can do a lot of lending you can do leverage much easier anything coming like a staking coming to the ethereum ETF in your mind any any Innovation coming from the ETF side that might make these ETF more attractive yeah a couple things so I think in kind creation redemptions are probably going to happen black Rock's already applied and I Hester Pur kind of signaled she to prove that so that's one that's that's the equivalent of like adding like some cool fuel injector into your engine like you know most people aren't going to notice they don't care but in the plumbing of the car it's going to help the car a little bit uh you know it so that's one number two is staking in ether which

would help the returns so that's pretty good um those are and then what you going to find is stuff like this like there's probably going to be a Bitcoin ETF that comes out and says we'll actually let you redeem in Bitcoin like if you send us money we'll send you Bitcoin there's an ETF L this with gold called um a aaau and Oz that said if you do want to receive a gold coin in instead of your money instead of cash uh it's like a 2% fee to like send the gold coin to your house and you got to pay UPS most people by the way who go into ETFs and use them don't want any part of the underlying back they want cash back so I don't think that'll matter much but you'll probably see that you're seeing options

writing strategies on top of the Bitcoin ETF you're going to see like obviously leverage products basically all the kind of stuff that they try you know there's like coke diet coke Coke Zero Cherry Coke there's going to be like all kinds of versions of the Bitcoin ETFs and um you know a couple will carve out a little a little audience but again it'll all be Child's Play compared to the sort of Real Deal spot Bitcoin ETFs those would be the Innovations to watch but watch this there could be something that is tried that I can't even think of U the ETF industry because all the money comes here last ETFs took in $1 trillion this is where all the fish are biting so

if you have an idea for something you're going to try it here therefore people who have been doing this a long time and are motivated by capitalism are going to probably come up with some interesting ideas and there could be one or two things that I was like I never thought of that make sense last couple years we've had buffer ETFs and um Equity income ETFs which I did not think would be a big hit but they were and they came out of nowhere um and then single single stock leverage ETFs I didn't think would be so popular so just look for all kinds of spaghetti to be thrown at the wall and a couple things to stick okay let's let's talk about Jack Bogle briefly before we let you go Eric so you spent two years writing a book

about Jack Bogle I'm gonna guess that most of our audience does not know who Jack Bogle is they all know Warren Buffett but in your mind Jack Bogle deserves as much credit as Warren Buffett does from an investor perspective and the Legacy he left what what did he do and what can our listeners regular crypto investors learn from Jack yeah so I you know nobody's had a bigger impact on the investing industry in the past 50 years in my opinion a lot of the flows we see whether it's to like lowcost ETFs or to passive you pull the string on that you keep say and you go to the source you end up in 1974 when Jack Pogle set up a company called Vanguard and the

structure he gave it was that it would be mutually owned like an insurance company and what that means is that the investors are the owners so it's like a co-op and so every time Vanguard got money instead of spending the profits on like I don't know advertising on a sports Stadium or paying people a bunch of money extra or hiring too many people or renting out you know condos in the Bahamas um the the people who voted on what to do with the profit were the investors so they voted let's get lower fees and so you wash rinse and repeat that for 40 years and vanguard's fees on their index funds went from 50 basis points down to three and so they Bogle essentially made investing free and this

is what he had to do though by making a mutually owned company is you you make it you could he for he he gave up all potential riches for himself so there is a Satoshi like move here where this person was like I just want to do this for the good of the world and then they never cashed in their Bitcoin and you don't know who they are that was like a charitable act that is real easy to get behind and Believe In And so there's a whole group called bogleheads who similarly are like this guy's great he gave us free investing and he didn't do it in a gimmicky style there without Bogle there probably would have been someone to come along and offer up a zero fee fund or something but they would have tried to get money out of you

some other way it would have been a loss leader there is no other there there with Vanguard they they actually wanted to make investing cheap everyone else has to be cheap to compete with them now and so they're a special company and really he's a special guy without him and his you know unusual DNA and thinking and logic and his life experience I tried to break it all down as to how somebody could go to Wall Street and purposely give up a fortune it just is rare most people go to Wall Street want to make a fort and that's that nothing wrong with that so he was like an anomaly in physics to me and and I I really think there's a lot of things that can be learned here and one of those things I always thought when Sam

bankman fraud was doing his thing and I saw FTX on a goddamn catcher uh no an Umpire in baseball and I'm like first because I got Tom Brady they did this they did that and I'm like baseball no but that's not even the target market I mean how much money do this guy have he's advertising and I never saw an Umpire wear a logo they must have given the Major League Baseball a shitload of money and I was just like to me that was a red flag and I just thought Sam bankman fraud was out there talking about populism and how Bitcoin is like decentralized and all this but honestly he was like as greedy as any Wall Street fat cat I've ever seen and in the end he obviously took all the

investors money but to me Bogle walk the walk when it came to being a true populist for the people lowering fees and killing friction and decentralizing and dis intermedi he did it in a way that was uh he W he talked to talk and he walked the walk you rarely see that even some of these like coinbase took out a Super Bowl ad I mean no offense to them but they make a ton of money and they want to make that that the fees in the middle bogul just never advertised didn't do any of that that's why I took Vanguard here's a great stat uh 90 7% of vanguard's asset came after Bogle left

as CEO and he was CEO for 25 years so because they didn't advertise and they just like you know and they it it took a while to get down to like real low fees you know V it took a long time but they built a huge foundation and a massive amount of trust so even though everybody's cheap now people still prefer Vanguard a lot of them because of the trust Factor so I just think what this guy did was was uh you know anybody could learn from in any business not everybody is going to be as like Puritan as this guy he's hard to live up to but there's certainly things you could pull off of in any industry and I even had Matt Hogan from bitwise write the intro and the forward to my book way yeah

because Matt came from the ETF world and one time he put Bogle up as Obi-Wan Kenobi and the mutual fund industry was Darth Vader and you know so he was really into Bogle then he goes to bitcoin and he's doing his thing there and I thought it'd be interesting to get him and Bogle wasn't a fan of Bitcoin but it's different story he just didn't like uh he doesn't like Commodities um but I think they had this ethos with Bogle and crypto is similar um and if you read a lot of bogle's books half is like there's there's two or three books alone that just slam greedy CEOs and bankers and the Fed he has a whole book about 2008 that would read similar to um the sort

of white not all of it but like the idea that like you should spend all this taxpayer money bailing out these Banks he hated that so there's a lot of things that are overlap in ethos and spirituality with Bogle and crypto um he just didn't like Investments that don't have cash flows that's all but anyway Matt Hogan wrote a great way he threaded the needle between the crypto bit Bitcoin younger crowd and Bogle and the mutual funds because I thought and I cast Bogle as a punk rocker I was trying to say that this is a book about Bogle who's a a older guy mutual funds are boring but I'm going to show you the punk Rockery of this guy and I did my best in the book to to lay all that out yeah it's a great way to characterize Bogle in that sort of similar idea as

Satoshi against the norm looking for change the the one thing that you brought up there that really stands out to me from an investor perspective is we've we got a we've got a bit of an issue and this isn't a new issue but we got an issue in crypto right now that is is taking Center Stage which is the casino and the gambling and this need for 100x returns or or nothing and what it's leading to is it's leading to a lot of people to feel a lot of pain and to lose and to invest in meme coins like Libra which happened over the weekend or something like that and it's scary and I know Bogle talked a lot about the big law

and this you think more like a gardener and less like a gambler yeah can can you can you break that down for us and talk about why that's so important for for an investor to build long-term wealth and for an investor to really change change the course their life yeah I mean he had great data on it like as as bad as active mutual fund managers were do-it-yourself day traders of stocks were worse so if you wanted to lose a lot of your money um could he he had chart showing that if you buy an index fund and hold it you get to keep about 98% of all your gains use an active mutual fund you get to keep about like half of your gains you try to do-it-yourself trade you'll end up keeping 10% or something like that like

the the numbers were pretty damning um in no matter how you cut it on day trading and it but he was fighting more against stocks remember in the 90s there was a lot of hoopla around certain tech stocks and pets.com this is part of human nature so Bogle was really uh just he he was he couldn't understand the culture of trading in the 90s um or the 80 any you know but it's not normal to me I see meme coins and stock Traders and people using Robin Hood accounts to trade options is all the same it's not like me it's not like it's a crypto thing it's a young person I want to have fun and like feel something thing that's

all it is and you might as well throw in DraftKings and like Sports gambling right into that that's a whole culture of degeneracy but what we noticed in this book was that a lot of people graduate out of that um especially if you get into a relationship um you know your partner is can be like what are you doing let's say you have a mortgage so but in your youth it's just I I'm not I don't try to fight it I'm like you know if you want to be a Deen you know learn how hard it is go ahead and then might that might make you a better holder later on because you know there's no you use in doing all this crazy trading um there's also a long bull market that we have going on now and things get

craziest like the longer the bull market goes on so there's like a lot of froth like we have a one guy on my team he's like man this Market needs a hard rain you know just to wash away because some of the filings in the ETFs are getting crazier and crazier like 2x leverage stocks that are like uh Quantum Computing stocks that have a volatility of like 300% like there's some there's a lot of stuff that's just basically froth from the end of a bull market um a long bare Market will wash away a lot of this and people come back to reality and like only hold things that are really matter to them but I just don't really see any I don't really care there's a phrase also in a book that Jason swag brought

up Roe return on entertainment an Roe can be enough like as long as this person's like has a community they're they're like toying around with and they're getting entertained um I you know I spent as I said earlier I can't judge because I spent a ton of money doing things that were not healthy in my 20s and I knew they weren't healthy and I couldn't afford them and I did it anyway and uh you know I Grew From that here you are you did all right survived you know and I just think that's you know what's that phrase the youth is mispent on the young or something like that that's how I see it and I think a lot of times the coin that has the big

return or whatever gets the more action on Twitter in the stock space we I have this chart that like stuff that makes up 5% of your portfolio like the really weird makes up a lot of the media coverage because media loves to C highflying stocks so like so media will be fixated on one stock for like a week like Tesla or something like that but the reality is most people uh are holding things that are more meaningful for longer periods of time but the line I keep coming back to is the line for more games when the computer plays itself and ends up saying that the only winning move is to not play and I think a lot of people end up

there you just want to buy and hold and think like an investor and over time the numbers get really good and then you get compounding returns if you really want to learn about the the secret sauce to investing is compounding returns and the only way for compounding returns to really like have that magic where they the numbers start to build in big numbers you have to be patient it might not happen till year 12 13 15 17 so compounding returns are the is what I think most people should be after what they should teach in schools not the stock picking competition and I think this is just uh

the same culture that would pick stocks is now messing with meme coins it's but again nothing new Under the Sun this is just what young people do um in their you know to have fun with their you know fund money or whatever hopefully it doesn't get any more deeper than that I would just if I was a Bitcoin person and like in legitimate stuff I would try to I would group this with Robin Hood accounts options trading you know Quantum Computing stocks like draftking betting on like who will score the first touchdown like there's like such degenerate bets you can make like who will get the first hand off in the game I mean this is pretty pretty out there so I just think all of that is the same thing yeah and it's not going who buys

and hold Bitcoin simar buys and holds the S&P there is a Toler mentality that is similar between Vanguard and some of the Bitcoin people for sure yeah yeah completely you you bring up a a great point it's it's we did an episode uh a few weeks ago with Ryan Watkins uh I don't know if you know him he's a a crypto hedge fund manager and he talked about exactly this is this is why the best way to capitalize in crypto is to invest long volumes because there's going to be this degeneracy no matter what and all you need to do is capture that value by by investing in the tokens that have the trading that are part of the volume exchange that is happening

constantly and is not going to end any time Eric been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today thank you so much for your time and for your expertise in ETF and investing it's been wonderful to learn from you yeah thanks for inviting me on I'll see you next time thanks for joining in everybody have a wicked awesome day as always if you liked today's episode please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us if you don't miss out on the next one there's also a link in the description to our free 5 minute daily newsletter will we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game we're going to also leave a link for milk Road Pro you get access to our

portfolio where you can see exactly what we are buying this is your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this show is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice investing in crypto or any asset is risky and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose thanks so much for listening in my friends have a wicked awesome day