Bitwise mid-year 2025 predictions update with Ryan Rasmussen

Transcript

GM. Good morning. Welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that explains crypto like your buddy would after two beers. I'm your host, Jay Hamilton. It's Thursday, June 19th. Today's episode was recorded on June 9th. We have got Ryan Resmusen, head of research at Bitwise in the house today to give an update on their 2025 crypto predictions. We did an episode with them at the beginning of the year, midway through now. We're getting their update. We're going to get their update on their price predictions for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana, and Coinbase stock. We're going to talk about a couple predictions that they got right. One in particular, which honestly nobody is paying attention to.

It's in regards to the Department of Labor, so it's not very sexy, but it's very, very, very bullish. We're going to talk through that. We're going to talk about how we believe it's really still Bitcoin's year and Bitcoin dominance will likely continue throughout the year as a result of institutional inflows, governments buying. And we're going to talk about the outlook, the tailwinds, and the headwinds, where we see everything going from a macro perspective. Before we jump in, if this episode makes you want to do any swaps or any trades, you should check out Milk Road Swap. Why? Because it's got some of the lowest fees in this space. 0.15% fees on any swaps you make on Ethereum base arbitrum. You can also trade on Salana there all in one place. Check it

out at swap.mmillgro.com. Also, if you're going to be at permissionless in New York at the end of June, so are we. And on June 23rd, we're hosting an event. Hit the link in the show notes to sign up for the event. Would love to shake hands and meet you guys there. And if you need tickets to permission list, we also have a link in the show notes to get $100 off your ticket. Without further ado, Ryan, welcome back to the Milk Road Show. Thank you. Happy to be here. How you doing? Great to see you. Well, your video is uh is off right now. I don't know what happened. We're live, but let's figure this out. You were you were coming clear before you came on.

Terrible. Terrible noise. Let me uh It's zoomed in on your face, maybe. Yeah. Let me Let me try. Okay. Ryan's Ryan's Ryan's dropped off. We lost him momentarily, but he'll be right back. It's always fun when you go live and then something like this happens. Here he is. He's back. There you go. We're back. That was probably That was Matt from afar with usion, but no be here and excited to talk midyear update to our 2025 predictions.

It's been an exciting year, so there's a lot to get into. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Uh, I feel like Matt doesn't have a chance to defend himself today. So, uh, sorry, Matt. We might we might throw some uh some zingers your way. Okay, let's So, you guys came on the show uh back at the start of the year. You gave us your predictions. Today's episode all about updating those, seeing what's changed, what hasn't changed for the year. Uh, let me bring up uh your predictions that you made at the beginning of the year. Let's start with uh I mean, I almost want to hold this one to the end because this is the price. Everyone loves price predictions and everyone wants to see this, but your first predictions were um your predictions for Bitcoin, ETH, and Soul.

Walk us through each of these predictions that you made. Tell us what you made at the prediction at the start of the year and then give us any updates to what you're thinking here. Sounds good. So, yeah, everyone loves talking price predictions. We typically don't put out price predictions at Bitwise historically, but we wanted to do that this year. our prediction for Bitcoin for the end of year 2025. And now remember we published this at the beginning of December. So we hadn't yet had that run up uh to all-time highs through the inauguration day and subsequently. And so our prediction at that time for Bitcoin was 200,000 for Ethereum was 7,000 for Salana was 750.

In our mind there was a lot of tailwinds setting us up for a very strong year across Bitcoin and other crypto assets. I think we've seen a number of those tailwinds really materialize, but there also were some potential headwinds. And I see you have it up here, you know, on on the screen about things that we thought could hold us back, right? What were the obstacles that could emerge that would stop us from reaching the the price targets that we had put out there? And, you know, a lot of these actually have materialized. So, I think this is a story and I'm happy to dive into either, you know, any of these specific price targets, but I think the big picture here is that all of the potential risks that were out there, whether it was a macro shock or, uh, you know, disappointment from DC or anything like

that, we've seen a number of those headwinds materialize. Okay, let's let's talk through those. But first, just to to cut to the chase, and I know price predictions are difficult, and do not nobody will hold you to these. This is very much directional, and nobody's perfect with price predictions, but 200k Bitcoin, you still feel good about that. Uh, we're holding strong on Bitcoin. Mhm. Okay. ETH, you predicted 7K ETH. You holding on that? You changing that? We're out here. You know, Memorial Day just passed, but we're we're slashing prices here at Bitwise for uh not not the slash that people want, but Okay, tell us tell us your slash. It's not for Ethereum and

Salana, we are revising our year-end uh price predictions for both both of those. So, Ethereum, we projected 7,000. You know, now our feeling based on what we're seeing both from an institutional adoption perspective, but also broader market sentiment, retail participation, and the macro factors that are at play is that we believe Ethereum and Salana both will hit their previous all-time highs. So for Ethereum, that's just over 4500. For Salana, that's just above 250. We think it's very possible and likely that both of those assets will hit their previous all-time highs. We had anticipated about a bit of a blowoff uh top once they got through their all-time highs going into the year, but again

macro headwinds have prevailed and the markets are a bit uncertain and I think that retail participation really isn't there in the same way that we anticipated it would be uh coming into into the year. Let me ask uh this question. Do you do you think that we still get that blowoff top but it comes in early 2026? Like the one one thing that's difficult about these predictions is we're predicting for the end of the year and there's a big difference between the year and the end of the cycle. I know you guys still believe we're in a bull cycle. Just curious how you think about the difference between end of year versus end of cycle. Yeah, that's a that's an interesting nuance and I think you're exactly right. you're we're putting a calendar year end to

these predictions, but you know, we are more long-term oriented here at Bitwise. And so, we do believe that we will, you know, reach these price targets that we had predicted at some point in the future and actually do believe in 2026 we're going to see uh the bull market continue and and likely we'll have that leg higher that we've historically seen towards the end of cycles. I think the you know excitement around the change in DC, the excitement around what could happen at a macro level was largely overshadowed in the months of you know March, April, May uh for most crypto assets by this this tariff tantrum and the uncertainty around the geopolitical environment and particularly with regards to the trade war. And so that's

to us led a to a bit of a slowdown in in terms of how quickly we expect that you know leg up at that part of the cycle to occur. But we certainly are, you know, bullish in the long term for Bitcoin and Ethereum and Salana. I not be surprised to see Ethereum above 7,000 and Salana above 750 12 to 18 months from now. Okay, great. Yeah, it's great context to get. Uh let's let's talk through some of the the catalysts and headwinds because as you said, there's been uh there's been a there's been a lot that's happened in the first six months of this year. when is there not a lot that happens in in crypto and in tech? Talk to us about how you're framing things right now, particularly on the macro

side, which is where there seems to be so much uncertainty that is really impacting markets. Yeah, I mean that's exactly it. It's uncertainty and what we do know is that investors, whether institutional investors or retail investors, they hate uncertainty and it's exactly what's played out this year. Of course, there was excitement around the inauguration and the initial momentum that we saw both across all markets, equities, crypto assets, other asset classes, uh, and what we saw around the regulatory pivot in DC. Those were both huge tailwinds for the first part of this year. But, you know, we've we've certainly seen those items be overshadowed. It was interesting that when you had the major market shock from

the tariffs uh going back to when those initially were put on by President Trump, Bitcoin sold off initially alongside other asset classes. But what we saw, you know, following that was this big decoupling of Bitcoin relative to equities that we haven't seen in a long time. And subsequently, Bitcoin actually has touched new all-time highs. And I know the S&P and the NASDAQ are few percentage points below their all-time highs today. But one interesting element of Bitcoin that we were talking about a lot at Bitwise, particularly with investors who were wondering why did this decoupling happen. Our view on that was that this is the first major macro shock where Bitcoin's been easily accept uh accessible by most investors. It wasn't easy for an institutional investor 18

months ago or 36 months ago or before that to hit that Bitcoin escape valve when they were met with a macro shock. And now that we have the Bitcoin ETFs, it's significantly easier. They can actually just rotate out of equities or other risk on assets into Bitcoin as that, you know, hedge against this volatility. And that's exactly what we believe we saw happen following the tariff tantrum. investors, they look at their Bloomberg and they don't know what to buy, they don't know what to sell, but they do know is that gold and Bitcoin act as a hedge against this, you know, greater uncertainty and uh it can't be tariffed in the same way of course that companies can. And so that was relatively interesting. I would say the macro outlook today is probably uh

you know people expect there to be more uncertainty than we think they will. We think the tariff crisis will get solved. We think the trade war the trade war will settle down. when we think interest rate cuts are coming but probably not as aggressively as we're anticipated at the beginning of the year. So I do think you know the the the disappointing macro environment the disappointing rate cuts have hurt prices. There's also this element from DC that's happened as another headwind where there was so much excitement about around the regulatory pivot that happened and we saw the SEC disentangle a lot of the mess that was created by the Biden and Gendler era policies. We've seen a strategic Bitcoin reserve and a digital asset stockpile be put into place. We've seen progress on stable coin legislation, a little bit of

progress on market structure legislation, but I don't think what anyone anticipated, and we certainly didn't here at Bitwise, was that the president was going to launch a memecoin the weekend before the inauguration. And uh, you know, we've certainly seen that be used by anti-crypto legislators and policy makers and really the the Trump family's broader leaning into the crypto industry. seen that be used as a way to argue against progressing legislation and policy around crypto. And I think that ultimately has led us to have a bit of a disappointment from DC in the broad scheme of things even though there's been a bunch of little wins along the way. Mhm. Yeah. It's so hard to predict what's going to happen on the government side and it feels like and it's it's one

of the things that I think it's almost the the caveat that every in you know the headline risk with a president like Trump is very strong and in today's markets where we are all digital and the reaction of markets to headlines like Trump posts something on true social the reaction is is almost instant. It wasn't like that five t years ago. That's a that's a new phenomenon that markets react so quickly. And so it's it's difficult to it's difficult to predict that. And that is but I think as you said it feels directionally like hey we're at a we're we're in a good place right now. I mean, the thing that I

really really stands out to me is the money printer is already on in parts of the world, right? China's stimulating, not a ton, but a little bit. Europe a little bit. Japan is stimulating. The US, not quite yet, but the big beautiful bill is certainly uh going to inject billions. I mean, we'll see what shape it takes when it actually goes through, but it feels I mean, the the the the TLDDR to me right now is money printer is going to come on because we have these governments have no choice but to continue to print money in order to deal with their debt. And that just leads is going to very likely lead to another asset boom which feels like it's going to be more 2026 than 2024. 20 sorry,

more 26 than 2025. Yeah. I mean, look, you said it. The the big beautiful bill uh for better or worse is probably going to lead to a big uh beautiful bull market. And that's just the reality of the situation. Clearly, the federal debt issues that the US is having and really governments around the world are having, those are not going to be curbed and the deficit's going to continue to grow an accelerating rate. And you've already, you know, you mentioned it, Europe's cutting cutting interest rates, other countries around the world and central banks are cutting interest rates. And I think the US is not far behind the the stimulus cycle and we've seen what happens in the past at a low interest rate uh you know high stimulus levels and I don't expect this time to be any different. If long meetings and

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and stay say gold and Bitcoin together. Uh because it feels like in the last six months I've never seen as many people say those two things together and really believe it. And these are non-crypto people. And a big part of why they're saying is as you said there is exposure opportunity to Bitcoin. We often forget that not everybody can just go buy spot bitcoin on chain especially not a lot of these institutions. So what that leads to is ETFs and this is your second prediction. Uh let me pull this up. So you predicted that Bitcoin ETFs would attract more flows in 2025 than they did in 2024. Uh give us an update. I got another slide here for you. Give us an update. Where are we at on this right now?

So last year collectively the spot bitcoin ETFs brought in about 35 billion of inflows in 2024. Now that shattered all previous records. The prior record for year one worth of inflows was 5 billion. So this was something like seven times the magnitude in terms of flows which is incredible. You know so far this year we've seen about 9 billion in flows into Bitcoin ET ETFs in the US. We've talked about a lot of the reason why perhaps it's on a slower rate than last year was, but we still believe there's a ton of pent up demand. You know, we speak to major RA platforms and wirehouses all the time here at Bitwise.

We are constantly knocking on the door trying to, you know, to to to lead the tip of the spear into those firms. And what we're seeing now is real progress. And I think that's a sign that there's a lot of wealth in the US that still can't access Bitcoin because the largest wirehouses and platforms haven't yet approved their wealth managers to buy Bitcoin. And now that the ETFs are around now, they've been around for 18 months. Uh that helps us get through the door. And so we believe that this year Bitcoin ETFs still will see more flows than last year. Now, will it be 50 60 70 billion? No, we don't think so. We think it's going to be right around the same

level somewhere between 35 to 40 billion and we think majority of that's going to come from financial advisors and RAS who have yet to allocate but are eager to do so. It sounds like uh the second half of the year is going to be pretty good for Bitcoin. I mean as the first half has been already. Uh that is that's an an exciting setup. um when when you look at um I'm going to skip ahead to one of your other predictions here because I'm tying in Bitcoin. Um you also had a prediction around the number of countries that would hold Bitcoin uh by year end. Let me pull up that prediction. So you guys predicted that the number of countries would double

that hold Bitcoin. What how are we doing in in in government adoption of Bitcoin? Give us a lay of the land on how we're doing there. It's going very well uh to to say the least. At Bitwise, we've been speaking with a number of sovereigns who are looking to gain exposure to Bitcoin as a reserve asset or in their sovereign wealth fund. At the beginning of the year, there were nine countries that we knew of that held Bitcoin uh on their balance sheet as a reserve asset or through their sovereign wealth fund. There was nine countries. Today, we know of at least 11. You added AB Abu Dhabi.

Yes. Who added about half a billion to their wealth fund heading into 2025. That was verified through their 13F filings reaffirmed at the end of uh the first quarter that they had added a bit more Bitcoin, but it was around the same value because of the price movements. So that was one that added. We just saw at the Bitcoin conference two weeks ago, Pakistan announced that they were going to be building a Bitcoin position on their sovereign wealth fund. Of course, North Korea is on this list now. Now, we could be very honest about how that Bitcoin was acquired. It wasn't to build a strategic reserve asset or maybe that's why they did it, but it's not, you know, they didn't go through normal means to to get that Bitcoin, right? And so, still, we've gone from 9 to 11. As I

mentioned, you know, I spent a lot of time with our institutional partnerships team who's speaking with a number of different sovereigns who are interested in gaining exposure to Bitcoin through uh ETPs or just directly holding it themselves. And so we are confident that this number is going to be higher at the end of the year uh than than it was last year than it is today. But it probably won't double. We're thinking maybe 15 countries uh because they move slow. These are the largest institutions in the world. They move slow and uh you know doubling is is unlikely. But I think 15 countries holding Bitcoin is a safe bet that we would make.

Do you think uh I'm trying to think about two questions. Does does every country hold Bitcoin one day or the majority? I mean, maybe not every single one, but do the majority hold Bitcoin someday? And when when do you think at some point there has to be a I would assume this has to pick up pace because there would be a tipping point at which I mean maybe like the US if the US actually started buying Bitcoin like that would be a tipping point when everyone would say okay we have to move faster here. Is that do you think that might come? Yes, I think you're exactly right. So I do believe that majority of countries will hold Bitcoin someday.

There is this element of okay great the US established a strategic Bitcoin reserve but they aren't buying Bitcoin today that we know of and it wasn't actually established via legislation right through the Bitcoin act that Senator Lumis is putting forward. It was an executive order that can be just as easily put into place by President Trump as it can be repealed by the next administration if they don't find that to be a great policy. And so I do think you need that catalyst of the US government or a government, you know, similar to the US government, one of the G7s to start actively acquiring Bitcoin at a rapid pace. And I think that's when you start to see the acceleration of Bitcoin adoption across all these different countries. No one wants to be

last to the to the party. And you know, you're seeing the same thing from corporations, right? Once once strategy did it, it took some time. Then others started doing it and now it's every single week you see news of two, three, four, five corporations who are raising capital to go buy Bitcoin and add it to their balance sheet. And I think you'll see that same kind of, you know, trickling and then booming with the nation state adoption of Bitcoin. Some people bringing up the uh corporations buying Bitcoin. Uh some people talking about that possibly being the biggest narrative of the rest of this year. you can already see it's getting a lot of attention, a lot of traction. Uh what's what's your thoughts on on that that narrative and do you think that'll be a

a large part? Are we going to see hundreds more corporations buy Bitcoin? We already I think sit around 200 I think that hold it today. Yeah, it's it's pretty remarkable the amount of companies that have been leading into the space, public corporations who have been raising capital. And I do think that we're going to continue to see that accelerate. If you just look at some of the recent uh adopters, right, those are well-known companies. GameStop, of course, is very popular amongst retail investors. They just announced that they officially bought Bitcoin, but there's a number of other companies, not just in the US, but globally, who are doing the same thing.

And uh it certainly is a an interesting element of the Bitcoin price action. If you think if you take a step back and think about what's driving the price of Bitcoin through the end of the year, why do we think that Bitcoin could hit 200,000 through the end of the year? We spoke about ETF flows and once you have wealth managers in the tunes of billions of dollars coming into the Bitcoin market, that drives the price higher from a demand perspective. Once you have corporations accelerating the rate at which they adopt Bitcoin on their on their uh balance sheet, that drives the price of Bitcoin higher. And so, yes, here and there it's some companies that you haven't heard about, but every now and again there's going to be a large company that comes into the space and buys 10,000, 15,000, 20, 50, 100,000 Bitcoin at some point. And that's going

to have a dramatic impact on the price of Bitcoin from the demand side. I think one thing that we talk to investors about who ask us about, well, how do you value Bitcoin? Says, look, the Bitcoin network produces about 165,000 Bitcoin per year currently on its current issuance schedule. We already saw public corporations buy 90,000 Bitcoin in the first quarter of the year. So if you just run that out without assuming any acceleration or any additional companies and that the existing companies kind of purchase at the same rate, you're already going to top the supply side of the equation just in corporations alone.

And that doesn't even take into account the fact that we're going to have tens of billions of inflows through ETFs. And what we spoke about earlier, if governments start buying, that's also a large inflow of demand. So the structurally I think what drives the price higher is all this demand and corporations are certainly the biggest the biggest of that equation right now. Okay. Uh if people are buying Bitcoin obviously one of the companies that does well is Coinbase. You guys predicted that Coinbase would surpass Charles Schwab as the most broke most valuable brokerage in the world and its stock would top $700 per share currently today sitting at around $250 per share. What's your take on this prediction update?

Stay same change. So, we're going to revise this one. I would I would caveat and say it's hard for for me to find a company that I'm more bullish on than Coinbase. Uh, you know, it became the first crypto company to enter the S&P 500 this year, which is a a major milestone. Uh, and and certainly means that a large amount of capital flows in into Bitcoin's stock, but alone there, you know, the revenue is up 25% year-over-year. Trading volume's up even more than that. But the the stock is like flat year to date. And I think, you know, my take on that is that just Wall Street continues to greatly misunderstand and to greatly mispric Coinbase. I think at some point they'll catch on, but I'm and I'm surprised at

how slow the uptake is on that. I think it's not going to happen until 2026 or later at this point. So, we are revising our end of year price target for Coinbase from 700 down to about 400. that'd be above, you know, current prices a significant amount. It' be it'd be a new all-time high for the stock. But I think Wall Street is just very slow to understand the kind of company that that Coinbase is. It's the Amazon of the crypto industry, which is a multi-t trillion dollar industry that is growing very fast. And I think that's not reflected in Coinbase's current price. And I think that Wall Street's just ignoring it for some reason that I will never understand. Yeah, I feel the exact same way. And it's funny because uh the analogy the Amazon of crypto

makes so much sense. The problem is everyone gets what Amazon is, but these Wall Street guys don't get what crypto is. So they're thinking the Amazon of of a scam, right? To them, it's amazing how much negative sentiment there still is outside of crypto that just takes a long time to change, right? Takes a really long time, really long time to change and they have to focus on learning about it. And the reality is is that, you know, a lot of investors just don't have as much time to think about crypto as we do. And and if they haven't ever bought crypto, then they've never interacted with Coinbase. And so, yeah, they hear these stories and they do think it's a scam. But I think where Coinbase is currently in its in its evolution is that most of Wall Street, you know, if

you're going to use that Amazon analogy, most of Wall Street thinks Coinbase is still just a bookstore, an online bookstore, when in the reality is that they share in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from stable coins. They custody majority of the Bitcoin ETFs. They have a very successful and fast growing staking business. They have hundreds of venture deals that they've been deployed to across the space. They have one of the fastest growing Ethereum layer 2s and a number of other things like a fast growing subscription business that people don't talk about. And I think that is what Wall Street just does not understand. And uh I I would have thought by now they would have caught on. But again, I don't think that's happening this year. And uh you know the price eventually will go higher when it does but uh in our opinion but

slower than it's going to take some time. Takes some time. Yeah. One of the things that is going to help Wall Street understand that is more public companies more public crypto companies will attract Wall Street to will force Wall Street to learn. And we just had I mean well let me tell you your prediction here. Your prediction was that 2025 would be the year of the crypto IPL with at least five crypto unicorns going public in the US. Uh and you called out circle kraken figure anchorage and chain analysis as the potential five. Uh give us the update on this. Yeah, I mean this one, you know, I is something to get really excited about and you're right, this will allow Wall Street to start or force them to start seeing what a big deal crypto companies are, especially

those that uh, you know, have have been building a large brand for many years. You know, so far we've seen three crypto unic unicorns go public in the first half of 2025. We saw Weeble go public at a 1 billion plus valuation. we saw it Toro go public and then of course last week we saw circle go public and you know I think given the wild success of circle's IPO which was up uh in dramatic fashion not just its first day but its second day and third day of trading it's clear that investors have quite the appetite for crypto IPOs I think they want to get in early in some of these exciting businesses in particular stable coins is something that a lot of investors we've spoken with are excited

about because they see policy makers and legislators talking about it. They see the CEOs of the biggest financial institutions and banks in the world talking about it. I think the CEO of Uber just said that stable coins make sense in their business and other global businesses. So, they see this exciting stable coin boom that's inevitably happening and they want to get exposure to it. And one of the best ways you can currently get exposure to it now is Circle, which is the really the only pure play uh publicly traded crypto company out there. And so I think this just goes to show there's demand for crypto companies and and we believe that we'll see more than two additional crypto IPOs. So we'll probably see more than five. I think Gemini it was just just rumored or announced. I I think it was like yeah I think it was leaked

actually but yeah just just leaked I think is what it was confidential and now we all know about it. But yeah that's what happens in crypto. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Uh let's go to your fifth prediction. Uh this is an interesting one tying more into narratives. Uh you predicted uh that tokens launched by AI agents would lead to a memecoin mania bigger than 2024. Uh thoughts on this prediction? Yeah, I think this narrative died out uh remarkably remarkably fast. You know, full disclosure, I was very excited about this at the end of last year. I was fascinated what was happening with Clanker and with autonomous agents. But uh unfortunately for better or worse, this narrative was

very tied to memecoins, right? You had um was it AI16Z? You had agents that were, you know, autonomous agents launching their own coins. You had something like Clanker, which you know, you could you could tweet at or or tag on Farcaster and it would launch a token. But the memecoin economy really collapsed in Q1 2025, right? And we spoke about this a bit earlier, but the the spectacular rise and fall of President Trump's Trump and Melania coins and then you had the Argentinian president launched Libracoin which which rugged in a matter of I think minutes if not hours. Uh, and so while AI agents remain a fascinating and evolving space, I think will have a a big role in crypto in the long term, I think they've taken

a backseat in 2025 from a narrative perspective and and unless you have, you know, extreme bullishness returned to the market around memecoins, I don't really expect this prediction to come true. Yeah, my I I feel I feel the same way. I I also predicted that AI agents would be a massive narrative in 2025 because we ended 2024 and it was so it was it was everywhere at the time and I think you and I still believe in AI so that hasn't changed and that narrative hasn't gone any gone anywhere and I know there's a lot of people retail people that would love to be able to invest in AI more and get upside to AI and it's difficult to do because most AI investment is private companies right now there's you know you could buy

Nvidia sure but there's not a lot of invest investment opportunity in AI. Do you think that the AI crypto narrative still has a a a pump or a a moment in in this year? Yeah, it's a really interesting thing to think on because these are both disruptive high- growth technologies and they're futuristic technologies in a lot of ways. And so the convergence of AI and crypto to me is still one of the most fascinating areas that one would want to invest in.

I think right now a lot of the attention for that convergence is happening across Bitcoin miners who have spent the past decade or so building out these massive data centers that are now very well positioned to satisfy the you know up into the right demand for AI computing space. And so I think for a lot of investors who who want to have that, you know, AI crypto intersection in their portfolio, some of these uh some of these Bitcoin miners who are well positioned from a data center perspective are probably the the best way to do that. And and it kind of circles back to what I was saying earlier where so much of this AI agent meta originally was tied into memecoins.

And I actually think that probably hurt the adoption of of AI agents in the long run because that's what everyone focused on. But to your point, people want to invest in AI and a lot of what the decentralized nature of crypto markets and crypto technology allows for is access to earlier investment opportunities. And so it's still something that needs to get figured out. And I don't think memecoins is the right way to do it. But I certainly think that crypto and AI continues to have a you know have a lot of synergies and yeah Bitcoin miners right now are a fascinating spot to think about when you when it comes to um you know where AI and where Bitcoin converge applied digital was up like 100% last week on

some announcement that it um had struck multiple deals with an AI hyperscaler right and so that's just something that Bitcoin miners wouldn't have thought of three four years ago likely as a huge part of their business. Maybe they did, but a lot of investors would have been ignoring it. And so, I think it's it's a got a lot of surprise to the upside there. That's a really it's a really great take that I hadn't considered. Uh, okay. Your seventh prediction. You you nailed this one. It's already done. You predicted that Coinbase would enter the S&P 500 and that Micro Strategy would enter the NASDAQ 100. Boom. High fives all around. Let's uh let's celebrate.

Midway through the year. One prediction already done. Your next prediction also happened. And I don't think anybody is paying attention to the fact that this happened. So you guys predicted that the US Department of Labor would relax its guidance against crypto in 401k plans enabling billions of dollars to flow into crypto assets. Break down this prediction and and what happened here because I think most people missed this. Yeah, this one is something that nobody was thinking about last year. Uh when when when Matt Hogan, our CIO, brought this to me, I kind of thought to myself like, who cares about whatever the Department of Labor is telling 401k platforms? Like, I don't care. Uh and then he and then we sat down and we thought about it and I dug into the

data. It's like, wow, this is incredible. It's incredible for a number of reasons. So, there's, you know, something like 9 trillion worth of assets in 401k plans today. And what's fascinating about 401k plans in particular is that uh it's just passive capital flowing into these plans. That's why when you look at the AUM of 401k plans, it's up into the rise because every two weeks people get paid, they put a percentage of that into 401k plans, employers contribute to them, and it just continues to grow. A lot of those are passively invested. And so once you make an allocation, most people don't touch those for, you know, a year, two, three, five, 10 years. Now, what's interesting about this is that the Department of Labor back in 2022 issued

guidance to 401k platforms and employers that they should exercise extreme care before adding crypto investments to the menus of what their users could invest in. Now, this is something that had never happened before for any asset class. So again, you saw crypto being treated differently than other asset classes, which is a whole another discussion of course, but uh what what did happen now in May was that the US Department of Labor rescended this guidance. And I think in particular what's interesting here or one one anecdote is that the US Secretary of Labor uh said that the agency was rolling back this and called it overreach and uh said making it clear that investment decisions should be made

by fiduciaries not DC bure bureaucrats. So, some pretty Yeah, it was some pretty strong language saying that we made a mistake and this was political and nonsensical. And now that this barrier has been removed, that just means that some of that capital can now flow into Bitcoin. And if you think about what it would mean if 1% of the 401k assets were allocated to Bitcoin, that's 80 billion in capital flowing into Bitcoin initially. That's more than twice as much as capital that flew into the Bitcoin ETFs in their first year. And we saw what happened to the price of Bitcoin when you had that kind of capital coming into the ecosystem. And that's why this one is so important. And

we're very happy that of all the predictions to uh to have gotten right. This was one that we're really excited about. We think massively moves the needle for Bitcoin adoption and for investors ability to get exposure to Bitcoin, which they haven't been able to do for political reasons, which is very very uh sad, frankly. And a lot of investors were hurt by that. Yeah. It's uh it's amazing how how many I don't think we all appreciate the impact that the previous administration and Gary Gendler had on our ability to to to experiment and to use crypto and to get adoption. It's there were so many

little things that you wouldn't pay attention to as you said, you know, you think Department of Labor, like who cares what they're doing, right? But these are these have big ripple effects throughout the industry. Uh, okay. You had two other predictions that I'm actually going to skip today because uh I want to keep on time here. I want to go to your last prediction uh just because it was a bonus prediction and uh my guess is you're not changing this prediction, but it gets me hyped up to think about the long term and the future. You guys had a bonus prediction which which was that in 2029, Bitcoin would overtake the $18 trillion gold market and trade above 1 million per Bitcoin. You still feeling good about this? Feel great about this and I actually will will do you one better is

that at the time when we released this prediction, the market cap of gold was around 18 trillion. And so we took a step back and we said, look, we see all of this adoption happening at the government level, at the corporation level, at the institutional investor level, across many different investor types. And so what do we think that's going to do for the price of Bitcoin? We said, well, look, it's it's a digital version of gold, many people say, but we actually think that the addressable market's much larger than that for Bitcoin payments, remittances, a number of other uh interesting use cases. And so we think that by 2029 we do think that Bitcoin will hit parody with gold.

But this again million dollar target was when price of gold was at 18 trillion from a market cap perspective. Today that's 20% higher. So I think you know our our if we were to rewrite this prediction we would say that gold will hit or that Bitcoin will hit the price of gold uh in from a market cap perspective in 2029. And it's not tied to a million. It's actually tied to the market cap of gold. Wow. which is incredibly bullish because I gold is very very very very likely going to be higher as a market cap in 2029 than it is today. Mhm. That's right. I love it.

Ryan, thanks so much for joining the show today. Matt, sorry you couldn't make it. I hope you're feeling better. Uh really appreciate Ryan you breaking this all down for us. Got to remind everybody to go check out Bitwise. And if you want to stay up to date on Ryan and Matt's thoughts, you can follow Ryan or Matt on Twitter. Uh, and you can check out Matt's regular weekly or bi-weekly newsletter that he puts out. We'll put the link in the show notes. Really appreciate your time today, Ryan. Thank you, Jay. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening all. I got to remind you, none of today's episode is financial advice. I'm not your financial adviser. Ryan is not your financial adviser. You should always do your own research when you're making financial decisions. If you need any help staying on top of the crypto markets, you're

going to want to subscribe to the Milk Road daily newsletter, five minutes a day in your inbox, getting you everything you need to know with a little humor thrown in. Check that out. Link is in the show notes. Thanks again for listening and y'all have a wicked awesome day. Hey guys, the Milkro team is going to be at Permissionless in New York at the end of June and we would love to hang and meet up with you there. We've got an event on Monday, June 23rd at 700 p.m. Hit the link in the show notes to register. It's free free beers and the team is going to be there. Great opportunity to meet up with us and others in our community as well. If you want to get a ticket for permissionless, you can get $100 off using the link in the bio. Hope to see you there. As

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