Digital Asset Summit 2025 - NYC | Investor Track | Day 2

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[Music] [Music] [Music] all right good afternoon everybody thanks for joining us at the afternoon investor track it's going to be a lot of fun my name is Felix I'm the host of the

Ford guidance podcast and I'll also be mcing this whole track afternoon and then we'll also be appearing on the last section we'll be doing a live Roundup of the Ford guidance podcast so that's the plan for the afternoon super excited to be here it's going to be a ton of fun and I would love to just get a round of applause for our first host for the panel here will they'll be talking about all things how to Value crypto assets so give a warm Round of Applause for our first guest here we got Matthew seagull from Vanek we got John sharino from DBA and last but not least our moderator Ryan Connor from blockworks all right let's go right let's do it

here what's up everyone thanks for joining us today we're gonna be chatting about a uh top like my favorite Topic in crypto because it's so controversial and analyst CC circles it's valuation um and we have two kind of experts on that topic here with us today um do you guys just want to do quick brief intros tell us about you know what you do in your firm sure um everyone uh my name is John um I'm one of the two co-founders and partners of DBA um pretty it's a traditional um Venture fund um primarily we do private Venture deals we also do some liquid in there um that looks similar profile of like typical um very concentrated book long-term Investments

um a lot of we do we're generalist across different sectors but in practice we end up a lot particularly infrastructure focused um lowlevel stuff hey everyone uh Matthew seagull at vanac run the crypto research and manage one of our uh token strategies at Vanek we have uh Venture early stage Venture strategy we have liquid token strategies and we have active Equity strategy that's um should soon come to Market uh so we're involved kind of across the whole life cycle uh we also have a stable coin uh and an nft platform um yep that's us awesome thanks guys so I guess just like kind of level

setting here when I when I you know look at what both of your firms do and like from the perspective of a crypto native person like I would say Vanek is more on the Trad I side just historically you know very traditional firm we have DBA which is very crypto native so like two kind of like polar perspectives here on how we tackle valuation in crypto and I guess just like level setting um you know Bitcoin historically has been viewed as a commodity or a money we now have thousands of tokens that are trading all with different toonomic models um may or may not ACR cash flows so just like broadly like do traditional valuation metrics apply in

crypto markets today sure um so while we are the crypto native side here um I'm I'm also I'll call myself reformed trafi um came from a traditional banking background was actually how I started before coming into crypto um so certainly at least colored by that um by I mean at least to me what we spend a I'd say like a reasonably meaningful amount of time on compared to a lot of other investors is definitely like thinking about valuation Frameworks and just like what like what are the fundamentals of a lot of these assets um and so while this isn't going to end up being you know you have a very specific cash flow model that in most cases you know you're going to be spitting out this is you know exactly the valuation that we want you know the cash flows are very predictable you know if you could

forecast forward the next 10 years we're going to get we're going to get a 4% growth rate you you just don't get that with the vast majority of crypto projects um even the I mean one of the big difference for crypto versus a lot of traditional markets is that even the uh public projects um that are fully liquid I mean these are still Venture style um projects at this point where they're very very volatile and still very early stage and you know you're not be able to like confidently project a lot of these cash flows um that being said you do have to still have a strong understanding of like okay does this have the market outcome possible of you know can I get those 100x returns you know and a lot of that what that will end up coming from fundamentally is can this thing generate a lot of cash flows

so I mean like as a as a literal example you know if you were buying soul I mean like it was one of the first Investments that we did in our first fund a couple years go um in mid 2023 was you know you you want to have a decent understanding of like okay I can project out I can see a world where you know soul is capturing billions of dollars of revenue from the m and the fees and everything on the network um and you know I can back into a reasonable valuation based on where we're buying today um and that was the the kind of framework that you have but you're not going to end up with you know okay yeah I'm projecting exactly these are the cash flows that Sol is going to get over the next two years and you know

I'm going to back into a DCF um the discount rates and everything would end up being ridiculous ous in most of these scenarios um so tldd I mean like the basic rules definitely apply of uh Casal and stuff like that do matter a lot but in practice pretty much all the stuff is very early stage where you're looking for is there the potential to get this you know large growth in that over you know a few years I I used to say that crypto token prices were based half on fundamentals and half flows um I'm I've reformed those views I think it's you know 90% flows and 10% fundamentals um and you can see that in you know the market cap of xrp versus ethereum and just look at how much economic activity goes across ethereum versus xrp like the market caps

should not be the same but they are so you have to I guess respect the tape um one adjustment that we've made to reflect that is just being even more selective in what projects we're going to back you may have noticed uh many of our competitors have been throwing a lot of single token ETF at the wall this year in terms of filing we've been much more judicious on that and instead doubling down on our active strategies and it just means that we're passing on more Investments because the active strategies are looking for great doxed teams that are building products that are better than the trafi equivalent where the token should be able to

actually capture value over the medium run uh you know th I can't can't say that those types of projects have outperformed uh in this tape uh so we're just you know we've pivoted more to um equities frankly where you know traditional valuation metrics are uh more applicable and kind of doing some cross vehicle valuation so the Venture team like knows how their private companies are capitalized and what their valuation should be we use those insights for the liquid token strategies and then I've noticed that the equity markets are starting to price in some of the developments in Bitcoin and the other tokens a bit more directly like

one example that comes to mind is when Phantom wallet uh raised their last funding round and it was a $3 billion valuation and you had a publicly traded comp Exodus exod that was trading at several hundred million doll market cap so that fundraising event made the public Equity look terrifically cheap and actually then the public Equity promptly doubled right after the Phantom fundraising so we're trying to apply um some of those comparative approaches but the name of the of the topic here is empirical which I looked up in the dictionary beforehand just to make sure and um it doesn't really apply because this is a new asset class so you end up

with a lot of comparative Valu valuation and sentiment based approach where a new token comes to Market it's likely to be overvalued because it's a retail Audi audence we want to wait for it to come to Market go through the trough of disillusionment you know typically down 90% re-evaluate there and see if we can get a true kind of cash flow based upside interesting so one thing I didn't here there either of the explanations was like something like money um or um you know the collateral value of a thing but I did hear sentiment there are these Crypton native stories that we tell one another that explain perhaps valuation premium

perhaps um the interesting ball that we see in the market on these assets what do you think about those like more crypto native angles on on valuation I I think all of the L1 tokens have to be money for them to work and the moneyness for a token I just say is the same as the PE valuation on a stock uh and that's assuming that fundamentals matter but um if there's you know $3 billion in ethereum fees that were paid last year you know why can't we put a 30 times multiple on it say which is what an investor might pay for a high growth software as a service company and arrive at you know hundred billion doll

valuation or whatever whatever the numbers are uh I do think that that is a legitimate approach uh and moneyness is oftentimes no different from just paying in advance for a future stream of income uh so I I I think that like when Anatoli talks about salana not beinging money that is not true he's just trying to be careful in front of The Regulators who are watching but all of these tokens need to be money to work because they need to be used as collateral uh for other purposes and that's what makes the velocity of money higher on crypto and eventually AC Cruise fees so moneyness is important in my opinion so I I definitely think it's important in ways I also think that crypto people will just call everything

money uh like whatever their token is because it very often just like sounds good and the reality is I mean like I mean you can go into the fundamental like what are the different roles of money and Medi of exchange unit account blah blah blah um but tldr I mean like these assets do definitely look different than traditional equities I mean like they are concretely used in a lot of these ways whether it's collateral Andi all these different things um for I mean for a number of assets like eth that is like definitely the case where you actually like do have cash flows and then the like gigantic exception um is obviously something like Bitcoin like there is no PE multi I mean it is strictly a negative PE multiple at all times like you you're just being inflated away and losing that value it's

not going to the Token holders um something like that I mean I what you were saying in kind of your first answer of like we're looking at flows I mean flows are the money almost kind of at that point of like are are there more buyers than sellers I I mean that that that is what a money is um like are people just like using this as a story value and Bitcoin is obviously i' say very different in practice from the majority of assets um I I think a lot of people want eth to be in that category um because it makes it easier I think to ignore the fact of like oh yeah maybe we just don't need to generate fees or get a lot of activity in these things and we could just say it's a store of value um I think in practice that's like going to

be difficult for most of these L1 assets and they're going to need to show something like you know are they capturing meaningful RV they're kind of fuse an me from the network that like there actually are good yield Dynamics for holding this token which I mean something like Soul where I mean over the past couple years where there are genu like genely just billions of dollars of fees going to the soul holders um so and then yeah I mean you can start to throw multiple on that kind of thing I I think it's still hard to put a like any kind of reasonable multiple on most of these things um because again I mean like like how predictable are these cash flows um like going forward you could easily see these things moving 10 100x in either direction of like the the revenues up and down like very reasonably um but but

yeah there's gen there's generally just like a wide range of Bitcoin is this very special exception where like the p and everything just goes out the window um and the most other stuff you're looking for like some like what are some general tokenomics that we want here of like it actually is generating earnings the token holders do get that that there is value capture Yeah you mentioned tokenomics I think the interesting thing about crypto is that we play interesting games with the structure of the token so like vote locking or these like predetermined inflation schedules um I don't know do you have thoughts on how those might impact valuations how you think about them when you're making decisions the like the inflation one is the one that I'd say probably has played a large role and is a big difference in

crypto versus um like a a lot of traditional metrics of I I mean like basically all of all of these tokens generally you know some percent of them are staked whether it's 60% 70% value uh various based on the network um that are like actually capturing most of the fees and the inflation rewards um the inflation rewards are not like actual value created by the network um and and yet you know some set sub subet of token holders may like want those and like they will actually be able to capture them if not everyone is staked um and this is the tricky one where a lot of people I think like treat inflation like incorrectly where you'll see a lot of people take like a pretty simple and I think incorrect calculation of you know when uh trying to calculate like what like what are the earnings or the

profitability or whatever this network and they'll take like what are the what are the fees being paid and then subtract out the inflation people do that all the time and it makes absolutely no sense that that is like one of the like simplest calculations I people do all the time that is just like very silly in crypto um and that that's just incorrect I mean like the token holders can get that um the thing that gets very tricky is you know what what percent of token holders are actually like getting that inflation um and what kind of assumptions do you want to make around that because you can actually have like a positive real yield from getting inflation if you think that you know the staking rate is going to uh remain relatively low because maybe there's a high utility value to using this token in some other way and so only

20% are going to be staked and so that inflation like is actually like real yield that I am getting um and so these kind of Dynamics like do meaningfully shift across different networks um and so just like understanding like where you are in that Network and how they look across each other um those can be meaningfully different um and and how the inflation is used is also a big difference um of like most of these proof State eworks you can take the token and just like get it um but a lot of other like l2s and other chains will often they will just have inflation that they will just like hand out as incentives um and that's just like a pure loss to all the other token holders I think there's two major elements to inflation um the first is to use a like trafi analog

it's quite common for a an early stage growth Equity to be issuing a bunch of stock um because they have uh high capacity for uh reinvestment and there's a lot of demand from the marketplace uh even if it's dilutive and as long as the company is growing quickly uh it's okay to pay a bunch of new shares in compensation to employees or dilute existing shareholders in a new round but if your growth slows down to zero and you're still printing a bunch of new shares it's likely that your stock price is going to be punished pretty badly so when we look at the crop of like l2s that came to Market kind of 2023 2024 um what you had was like very high

inflation rates and starting from high tvl but then they didn't really grow and you couldn't observe meaningful kind of fee momentum and in that and in that case the inflation kind of is functionally a cost because it's these new tokens for whom there is no logical buyer uh so that's unattractive tokenomics uh and then the second is around the predictability of inflation uh and we kind of had this debate with salana over the last couple weeks um yes salana inflation rate was high but they had a better mouse trap for some period of time so it was okay in my trafi example to like print new tokens because it was seeding an ecosystem that had

high demand um and the predictability of it inflation rate Falling by 15% a year at least gave people the opportunity to model with high certainty what Supply might look like in a couple of years um and then transitioning to a more fluid model where the staking rate or the inflation rate may depend on the proportion of tokens that are staked that introduces some more uncertainty into the markets the markets don't love uncertainty and all things being equal you might pay less uh for that type of uh uncertainty so those are two ways that I think about inflation want to go back to the premium that we observed in markets I'm going a little bit off script here um some most

tokens command very high valuation premiums on the market today do they deserve them most of them don't um I would be my like short answer uh I I would say a lot of them do not um and I I mean part of this also just goes to like token supplyment like a lot of like newly launched tokens for example like tend to have a small percent of the supply which makes it like very difficult to buy any of these new tokens um and so maybe they are like Justified on a market cap basis but not like an FTV which is maybe a separate Point um but yeah I I mean a lot of these are are not going to be justified by it but this again goes back to that point of like a lot of these like public you know projects I mean these are still Venture style like

outcomes that you're looking at that are like these are very small early stage products um that yeah 95% of they going to fail and then a handful of them are going to be 100 x000 X and like you you're able to underwrite that risk um and then you have I'd say a lot that are in that kind of middle area of you know people are assigning this like oh this L1 moneyness premium to it and I I think that lets you just like get away with a like a little too far with like a little bit of a ridiculous multiple when you know when you're talking about like multiple hundredx type of PE um where I don't actually like see a path to like getting any kind of cash flows out of these in the long term um what you need though is just to see like is there a

reasonable path to getting those cash flows in the long term like I I don't care if it's a th000 X or 10,000 xpe today it's like the whole point is like the thing just you know it's pre-revenue it's not making money yet um so yeah yeah I think it comes down to position sizing because the cardinal sin as a fund manager in a sector or asset class is like if if the asset class works and you don't return your fund doesn't return then you know you got to make the money in a bull market um so so and when you look at post the election uh you know what tokens worked the best the cardos the xrps you know projects that don't really have meaningful fees but are so illiquid that just a whiff of Hope and deregulation and Innovation

produces these incredible returns um so we kind of look at you know we have core positions that could be a 10% plus position maybe it's a traditional Equity like a coinbase or a real kind of um Revenue producing project like an ether a soul and then we have Fringe 3 to 5% positions and then moonshots 1% so to go into something at 1% you don't need to tick all the boxes of great team product Market fit on the product and you know return to token holders maybe you hit one and a half but you see a path to all three uh and so you'll take a tiny position flyer on something without meaningful fees but I agree like at the current levels of economic activity vast

majority of tokens um you know don't have a logical buyer we have like sub 30 seconds left I want to get your guys take on technical analysis I cannot go anywhere in crypto without seeing lines on charts do you guys use ta I have never drawn a line on a chart in my life and I do not know what any of the lines on the charts mean and I do not plan to change that uh I use ta for Bitcoin uh I think it plays into like you can know from the Bitcoin block blockchain whether every coin is in profit or loss and so that you can start to observe levels of resistance and support that correspond to those levels um for and and Bitcoin the inflation rate is so low that

generally price equals market cap right but when you look at some of these high inflation tokens you may be looking at the price chart and it looks nothing like the market cap chart and so which do you want to perform technical analysis on probably the market cap chart is more appropriate than the price chart so the tldr and is I do not use technical analysis for altcoins only for Bitcoin awesome thanks [Applause] guys all right I love that point there at the end that it's essential to be looking at a market cap in crypto as opposed to always just the price chart because it can just be a completely different world once you start to look

at that um okay next up we have a sta line up and panel here we're talking about crypto native fund management challenges and opportunities we've got John from Theta Capital we've got Sumit from nav fund Services David from coin fund Allan from multi from red belly Network and shiron from multiply so give it up for these guys get them on here and let's get going brilliant well fantastic uh fantastic to be here thank you very much uh to the to

the block Works team for having us here um yeah we've got a we've got a panel now on uh which is close to close to my heart at least uh challenges and opportunities in uh in Crypton native uh fund management and we've got a great panel to discuss these things uh I think everyone's got their own fairly unique Insight uh into this so um it'll be great to Great to grow go through a couple of things um you know we've we've we've got the the Crypton native fund management itself um there's there's we're going to talk about yield we're going to talk about uh uh Capital efficiency uh and we're going to talk about operational challenges uh um of of

which are of course are a few um maybe just to kick it off does everybody want to kind of uh say who they yeah I can start hi hi everyone nice to meet you um Sumit from nav fund Services um I currently work as the uh VP of fund accounting um nav is an endtoend uh technology driven fund administrator um we are pretty active and prominent in the crypto space we work with a lot of fund managers um where we provide them accounting uh investor onboarding AML kyc so a full Suite of fund Administration services um as a disclaimer we are not uh crypto native we have a large part of our

business uh on the traditional side uh but I think uh we have managed to kind of uh leverage the technology and the expertise that we have on the traditional side to the crypto space so uh pleased to meet you all hi I'm David Pacman from coin fund we're a 10-year-old Crypt native investing firm we have three investment strategies we operate a seed Fund invests in the earliest stages of preed and Seed stage crypto projects we have a more traditional Venture fund that sort of focuses on like series a stage Venture opportunities in crypto and then we have a liquid crypto hedge fund and um we focus really on all the different um sub sectors of crypto and and and take a

very long view on uh how to deliver returns for LPS uh we are a uh a client of nav as well as our fund administrator hi everyone Alan B from Red Network we're a real world asset focused layer one blockchain we combined a patented consensus algorithm with identity and privacy Primitives to enable real world assets to trade compliantly um we're doing a lot of work in the funds space and trying to connect the next bunch of real world assets on chain um and that's we launched in December uh we've got about 700,000 kyc users on the platform today and uh about $25 billion worth assets currently on on platform with with with a bunch more in the pipeline hey everyone this is Shan

from multiply um to Simply put uh we help institutions access Defi and get yielded in defi in the most easiest way uh we manage over hundreds of million dollars in ass sets thank you brilliant um yeah I'm John vial I'm a managing partner at uh Theta Capital um we're uh one of the largest fund of Crypton native VCS in the space um and uh yeah we've we've we were founded in 2001 but we've been specifically in Crypt VC since sort of uh 1718 um I should also full disclosure say we are invested in multiple coin fund uh uh funds and actually Shan underlying we're invested in you in you

as well but uh we can we can get into that later now so we're going to start with the the yeah I mean the fund management side which I think um you know D David and I are sort of specifically in um I'll David I'll I'll ask you a couple of questions and then uh to sort of make it a bit interactive I'll ask myself some very probing questions as well but um just to just to sort of get into it um and your perspective is quite unique here because you've got a background in traditional VC as well and there are obviously some quite sort of ideosyncratic Dynamics in uh in crypto VC as well you know how do you how do you go about sort of

portfolio construction uh and and maybe you could yeah we into that your you your your experiences sure uh so I spent 13 years as a traditional software based VC at at venrock and so I think on its face like crypto VC is trying to do the same thing your your sort of similar portfolio Theory uh of depending on your fund size you know 20 30 40 50 Investments uh you're making them at different stages in the uh value creation curve depending on your fund size and your backing teams who have not yet uh built a whole lot of economic value and hope that you can help them build that but what's different of course is the mechanisms for capturing it is more than just Equity you know in

traditional software VC that's the only Capital formation instrument you're really using so you're you're buying equity in a company but in crypto we uh capture value either through Equity or tokens or sometimes both and so as a Crypton native fund uh you need to be comfortable with both and there's a bunch of implications about doing that one is you need to find LPS who are friendly with you investing in tokens which have as you heard on the last panel uh questions about how they're valued and when to buy and when to sell um but you need to find fun administrators who understand how to um measure and you need Auditors who will help you audit it you sometimes you need custodians who help you custody it so things get uh get a little different fortunately we're you know a decade or

so into some of these questions and so they're now our service providers but so I think the portfolio theory is similar but the instruments for Value capture are different and and the opportunities for liquidity are different because often times the tokens go liquid long before the equity does which presents some questions for LPS how do they get that liquidity do we send tokens back to our LPS can our fund administrator and infrastructure uh distribute tokens back to LPS do they want those tokens or should we be selling them on their behalf and sending cash back and how are we doing that is there a fee associated with that do you use your own trading desk do you have counterparties so lots of cool questions that I think we we've spent 10 years trying to think through but uh hopefully that helps yeah yeah absolutely um and yeah know I think from

our perspective it's interesting as well that we have a slightly different approach to the space you know we're we're a fund of funds we really want to be a fund of funds and the the thinking behind it is sort of you know we we like to think we we and this sounds a bit pompous but like we're like a a sort of a generalist feast or maybe the generalist VC Fund in this space and that we really have a satellite view and we really try objectively to map out the areas where we think uh you're going to get the the largest outcomes and in order to get that exposure and we want that exposure at se round valuations we kind of you know figure out who were the right funds to partner with um uh to to

to get us that uh to get us that specialized uh exposure you know we um uh we we and that's kind of what we do we really try and get look through meaningful uh lookth through uh ownership of underlying uh uh projects and and for us the only way to do that in a on on a big scale is through very specialized VC funds I suppose there are also other things that are quite specific to to being a fund of funds uh for instance buying distressed secondary LP Stakes right um I think that's something uh that there not many groups out there who really understand the underlying portfolios very well um and you know we've been we in we've

been also have a hedge fund business you know the the trade in '08 was to buy Lan Brothers claims and that was a great trade but what was an even better trade was to buy those Leman brother claims uh at a significant discount from distressed sellers so we do that as well um our our 2023 fintage for instance is like 23% distressed uh distressed LP Stakes so um there's there's just a lot to do there there's still a lot of inefficiency uh and we uh we love using that as also you know for for our portfolio construction so you know we've we've we've talked now a little bit about the construction itself there are also certain risk reward metrics that you kind of have to have to deal with uh uh

David what what what what are your what what are your thoughts on that um I guess do you mean like will there be a higher percentage of failure in crypto VC versus traditional VC yeah well no not necessarily first as traditional VC but how do you you know how do you assess I suppose the risk when when looking at that projects yeah well I think uh in some ways it's similar to like the same odds it's a start these are software startups really at the end of the day right they're most of them are creating networks or applications and uh so there's the same set of analysis like what has to go right for this thing to be worth 100x or 1,000x or even more than that um but you have the added uh complexity of global

regulatory Nexus right which we've been confronted with for a decade now and at least in the US we feel like maybe there's some changes there that can be brighter uh but but that's a complicating Factor um and also many of them really are community-driven projects so you're it's not just like can you build a piece of software and then get a bunch of customers to pay you for it but there a lot of these are Developer layers and so can you attract enough community of developers to build on top and how does one you know measure the risks of that happening or not um how sticky are they do they exhibit Network effects does the token capture economic value or will the equity capture it and if so why um and and maybe just one other piece of complexity I wanted to touch on is that when you do

receive tokens from these projects and they're on some kind of vesting schedule and they become unvested many of them are stable well so do you stake your tokens on behalf of your LPS and hopefully because it produces economic return but what's the risk associated with that and what's the tax implications for a tax for you know tokens that come in as rewards and does your LP like utbi or not and so like there's some complexity around the the token piece too yeah yeah no sure and uh and that's why we rely on uh on the teams like like Davids to to to do that kind of that difficult stuff for us um because for us it's it's it's like a layer above nearly it's like and I'm not sure if this is a word or a term but for

us it's all about fund maths effectively for us it is really about um you know how do we get that underlying ownership in these projects how could we source for like half percent or maybe 1% and that for us is a is you know where if you look at it where for us the the asymmetry is so large and you can get to to such big outcomes um and especially because and it's interesting I think since we've been doing this since since the beginning of 18 the loss ratio is still incred L low um and you know when you think about it in terms of risk reward it's like you know the the wrof ratio is been low s well not low but let's say

single digits across and that's from a fund of funds right I mean you know thousand plus projects um so very low right off ratio if that filter works correctly uh and the outcomes you know as we've seen can be can be in the the multi multiple billions of uh of dollars so that's what we we think is very very interesting but again I'm going to it's about that fund math because you can invest in a sort of a spray and prey fund and you might get some some nice you know yeah you can say oh I was in that top project but if there no dollars in it then it's then it's kind of pointless to us so um yeah that that for us is uh uh we look for managers that can give us that

sweet that opportunity to invest in those uh in those sweet spots so um you know going going one level deeper you touched on it a little bit David but when you look at the actual allocation what do you what do you look at do you mean like what's our portfolio theory of how many companies yeah well I guess um the way I think about that is uh is where are we on the risk reward curve when you're investing in a company and so like my two favorite locations on the risk reward curve for software companies are seed and series a and why is that uh seed stage deals you're really making a team bet on and on a on a sort of Market concept right most seed

stage deals have not written a software yet really they don't have a product in the market um but uh but but you have a thesis about like this team can deliver this really exciting Innovation but we don't have a lot of data on it yet um so you you need a much larger number of bets right to to play up because failure rate is very high there so you know typically I would think of like 35 40 45 companies in a fund and depending on your your check size um because you you you might see well a much higher failure rate than you're seeing across funds you know you you you could see 30 40% failure rate um but the the series a stage typically you're investing when there is proof of concept there's a product in the market you're seeing some traction but the moment after you invest

is the steepest part there's a knee in the curve of the value creation curve so like right after you invest is the steepest part of growth customer adoption that then you'll see in the entire uh value creation curve and so you're getting paid for the risk you're taking and you have a little bit more data so so I feel like usually you hear Venture people talk about third to third a third like a third of the companies will fail a third will have like a middling outcome a third will have you know fun returning outcome and so I think that's appropriate around around series a I I feel a little bad talking so much I'd really like to hear yeah yeah yeah we're gonna don't worry you you you'll have nothing to say after this question we're kind of going going sort of sector by

sector maybe one last thing David to uh to to to stick with you anyway um just just to bring it home a little bit sort of to where we are now um what are what's what's the thing you've noticed most the last in the last cycle I mean what are what are the lessons you've learned from that uh from the like sort of FDX moment until now we've had a huge amount of normalization in investing so when I first started looking at investing in crypto you know like there was was this like hey you have to be comfortable inest nesting um investing in anons like literally the founders are not going to disclose their identities to you uh you have absolutely

no rights um for you purchase tokens but you have no equity claim on assets you have no uh governance rights there is no board you can't fire the founders these are anathema in you know traditional software venture capital and you would never as an LP feel comfortable with a manager who had to submit to that lack of protections those have all been normalized away well some people can still invest in anons we do not um but uh you know you know who your teams are you have governance structures in place we're receiving rights that have claims on assets and intellectual property and things like this so I the normalization I think is I'm I'm sad to say we celebrate it but we we do like we this is now like software VC but what what on the flip side of that is the Tams are so

unbelievably big here these are instantaneous Global markets access to all capital in the entire world so like the asymmetric return profile I think is higher than even higher than AI it's higher than any other asset and so I think in this cycle in the event that we see continued positive momentum my my view is that crypto VC will have the highest returns in any category of VC um meaningfully so so like if you are in an LP and you're investing in top desile top quartile a venture backed crypto VC I think you'll have the highest returns in that cat category in anywhere else now I'm shutting up yeah no that was it I'm afraid so so you will be able to I won't pest you anymore in that sense

yeah it's it's maybe just to add to that it's it's a it's a different way of saying it but I think the structure of VC in in in in this market I mean in effect everything's a startup for to to to to begin with but it's also it gives you some staying power you know it's like and in the end in we all know how volatile crypto markets can be to have that staying power is really really crucial and not being forced to sort of uh you know sell at the wrong time kind of thing so right we will move on now um and uh um maybe uh to move on to the more to the sort of operational uh uh challenges uh some you you're you're clearly very well uh well versed in that

you know if you're talking to a uh to a startup uh crypto crypto fund what what are kind of the the the challenges that they they got to deal with what are they what are they running into yeah U first of all great points David um so moving away from uh you know the fancy investment to the non-fancy you know the operations and compliance and those kind of challenges and um you know there's a there's a few things that uh pop up in almost every call that we that we go on with uh new fund managers um I'd say the first thing that uh they are mostly kind of deciding on is which jurisdiction to pick right um there's a bunch of options

I mean there's um there's us uh there's kmen BVI uh there's other uh jurisdictions that are coming up um you know Australia Singapore so that's that's one of the first things that they they have to decide as to which jurisdiction they want to go with um how do they want to structure the fund you know is it going to be a standalone a master feeder um the AML rules kind of um you know differ by jurisdiction um it it really depends upon uh the Investor's preference but then you know there has to be a balance between uh what you choose um the other thing is is finding the right Partners um you know which which makes your life easier especially

from an operations point of view um so you got to get the right um you know let's say the Auditors the fund administrators uh somebody who can do the taxes um and you know especially moving away from the from the tread fi to crypto it's it's a little bit complex you know uh the product in itself is complex um you know there could be a lot of investor issues um you know there's uh in-kind transactions so that's something that you that you really have to find is uh the right balance of uh service providers you know you got to look at U fund administrators you got to look at um you know compliance firms uh somebody who can handle the insurance and those kind of things

um the next I think um you know challenge that I've seen uh the most is how to build uh the team you know uh and and how much to kind of Leverage on your in-house team and how much you want to leverage on the um on the service providers you know um do you really want to be like a oneman shop or do you want somebody to kind of handle the operations from an in-house perspective so that's something that they want to um kind of look at um custody and asset security is is very important um you know we've seen a lot of cases where um you know uh the tokens are being stolen

there's there's U IR Irreplaceable losses that happens in crypto so I think uh security and custody is kind of um a very important thing to to look into so yeah these are some of the major um kind of items that we that we see most of the startup fund managers often struggle with and given your broader background are there certain things that you think the the crypto industry or the fund industry sometimes misses in that sense which you're like I see this a lot in our our wider business these guys aren't really looking at that um I think um I think the compliance part is something that uh people often ignore um you know that's

uh that's a really important piece that um you know fund manager should be looking at at um you could leverage uh a lot to uh service providers but I think you you as a fund managers you have to be like aware on you know what filings need to be made um you know are you regulatory like uh compliant with all the secc you know if you are domiciled in the Cayman are you really compliant with the Cayman Islands monetary Authority all the rules and regulations so that's something that people tend to miss which um they often realize at a later point of time and um sometimes it causes like problems yeah yeah maybe that's a Libertarian uh Beginnings that that filter through a bit too much

sometimes um Alan maybe moving moving on with you um sort of on the on the should we say the capital efficiency side which I think is something that that the the crypto's got a fairly unique uh unique angle on um you know how do you feel managers should approach that Capital efficiency side and how do you sort of help them uh in that sense I think uh obviously uh when we're talking like David earlier that the liquidity profile of the underlying assets is quite different to traditional Venture Capital type so you've got different ways of treating liquidity you know the normal lockup for VC is kind of a 5 to seven

year to get your liquidity back now some of these are faster some of them might not be some of them might be staked so the underlying liquidity is quite different and so we're finding a lot of opportunity uh with digital asset fund managers in how do they now structure their offering uh to to match that I.E do they tokenize the fund where they've now got Real Time pricing potentially of the underlying asset real time nav and does that give them option optionality over instant Redemption um which is one thing or or do they put an amm in front of that and allow you to kind of have guaranteed liquidity for the purpose of then using that unit of a fund uh in the lending and borrowing uh platform so you can start to now change the cost of capital instead of locking something up for 5 to seven years you could have the

option about redeeming you could have the option of putting it in lending and borrowing market so we're getting a lot of traction in uh first movers where they understand tokenization as a concept how do they now leverage that for themselves in their own infrastructure so how do they you know tokenize their own fund and then what does that mean for attracting capital and also with these funds are locked up sometimes it's not necessarily digital native ones but let's say it's a property fund where it's also highly a liquid you can make your cost of Capital One more attractive because you can offer offer secondary liquidity which means you can probably bring more in at a better price or you might not be fully deployed if you have redemptions right so you've got to have a bit of surplus cash to manage the redemptions and so in

some of these models you don't need that so you can get a better a better return on that Capital so depending on where they are and the underlying asset um they've got some really interesting ideas um and we're working with them to effectively start to Leverage The defi infrastructure that they kind of understand uh for their own native asset yeah yeah and um and how do you how do you you notice that underlying LPS or or or investors in their funds react to that I mean how do you is that market already there that that people are looking for more liquidity uh in in you know when buying whatever secondaries in in these funds or secondary LPS things I think uh you know again just channeling the feedback

we're getting from our fund managers but generally the clients like the optionality of liquidity right like that's that optionality is valuable it has a price uh and so it's desirable um uh not necessarily so desirable for the asset manager who has to manage that process um but definitely their their view is that they can attract more Capital generally if uh if there's an optionality of of of liquidity that's you know of secondary liquidity so it's been driven by the customer more so than the asset manager and I think because they're also trying to live the dream if you will uh that they understand the benefit of tokenization should give us better look through to the asset um you know what the underlying is what the real time is and better liquidity outcomes that they feel kind of obliged

to to to do that but yeah yeah and and and how far off do you think we are when you think about because now it's like tokenizing a fund or a real world asset as well how far away are we from from just doing these things on chain we're already doing it so no but sorry I mean as in Native so so you're not tokenizing something that is out there in the real world world but you're just raising the fund so the fund I'm referring to is actually a digital asset native fund right so it's got It's a a fund manager allocating to liquid digital assets uh and and therefore uh they already have look through Andor uh

even self- custody in some options uh so you can kind of some of them are even pooling uh you know the third party LP funds directly into like a vault so we're getting we're getting all all levels of that so the fund manager effectively is just picking and allocating and not even necessarily being fully custodial in in in the capital sense they just direct the direct the trades by the Mandate on chain yeah well fantastic okay so uh moving on a little bit uh we're going to move into the into the yield space um there are lots of you know different yield strategies um you know what what would

could you maybe just start off by generally telling us sort of in general what the yields landscape is is looking like at the moment uh yeah um defi yield is like the wild west there are like so many different opportunities but it all comes with enormous risk if you don't really look out for the risk you're just going to lose all your capital and at the same time um defi yield is also a superpower uh like our friend David mentioned um like they're like uh people who can invest in companies you can actually gain a lot of their shares tokens Etc but there are more economical ways how you can go contribute liquidity or like do some really um not so Capital uh like intensive ways of interacting

with protocols and you can even have like a majority or like a good share of their token Holdings um and so it's all about how you solve inefficiencies at the end of the day um me personally when I see um like defy eeld farming and then like making yield in um like a whole bunch of different protocols I see one specific thing which is that what kind of inefficiencies or convenience does this platform offer for instance uh taking uh maybe even like let me take multiply as an example what does what what's the inefficiency that multipli solves there are so many decentralized exchanges in the world today but then if

you go and provide your liquidity inside these decentralized exchanges there's a very high possibility that you get prone to a whole bunch of risk like Divergence risk uh then impermanent loss and like so many different other things but then we make it super simplified and we give you the convenience where you can just like put your liquidity with us and then we manage all the things and then we give you like in incentives of like 20 30% um a year on stable coins uh even after managing hundreds of Millions ions of dollars um and there's also other examples for example if you also take a which is like a lending and borrowing Market what convenience do they solve they make it so easy for people to come

with assets and they make it so easy for borrowers to borrow their assets and that's why you are actually able to make money from them so at the end of the day it's all about looking for people who are solving real inefficiencies in Defi and deploying your assets there otherwise please forget your Capital sorry so that last bit otherwise please forget your capital capital right right right okay yeah Fair Fair Point um so you know I mean it's still something complicated for like a traditional investor base right I mean you you you have loads of yield products in in in in trafi I mean the yields you'd probably find pretty pretty pitiful uh given given what you what you look at um what what what do

you think is needed to get a broader broader group to to you know to look at yield in in crypto I suppose that's a something I can ask the others as well but uh you know how do you get that broader base to to look at this uh yeah if the question is about like you know trfi uh making it more accessible for trfi yeah B yeah basic not not necessarily accessible but how do you get a traditional investor to understand you know there's there's there's a huge opportunity here yeah it's all about it all comes to the uh the magic that defi offers the magic is that it helps you access super complicated financial instruments in a super easy way and for

example let's say um um like I'm from India and I want to access t- bus which is in the US now that offers me 4 five% and I want access to the best asset class in the world now to me uh like sitting in India to access this instrument it's probably going to take me more than a month or two to come in and start getting the US Dollars and also getting access into the tables which in turn lets me make four or 5% a year now if I'm going to do that through the crypto route it's as simple as maybe a heart or two hours and that's the beauty of crypto it helps you make and access literally anything it's just

about um it's so easy it makes me wonder people like why just they don't do this thing um that's kind of the question right yeah I mean um but at the end of the day it's also like um I think it's largely about people and the skepticism that comes with crypto right every time people say crypto people don't think of it as a reliable source of income people see it as a way of making quick money every single person every single person in fact many of the audience here I'm I'm sorry but then uh we're all here just to make uh some good money and people are here because of two things and and it's pretty true we are here either if it's going to be for greed we are here either if it's going to be for

fear and I think that's one of the main reason that has also United us today and that's also going to be the main reason that's going to be uniting us in the future too uh and I I feel personally that's what is going to happen in fact um we are like working with like a whole bunch of Institutions like paos and like everyone offering yield on instruments like gold um and before uh it was super hard to convince people to tokenize instruments like gold and bring it on chain uh for instance it took us 10 years to actually bring on board $500 million of gold but guess how much time it took um to bring like $100 million of gold out of that it literally took eight weeks and that's because now we have a

real way to go and use gold in defi which in turn gives them 9 or 10% of apy each and every single year which makes it all the more interesting for people to come in and start using it and I think this greed will be the driving Factor as to onboarding more users and would also be the reason why we would see a lot of trat five people coming on of this space well we'll uh we'll see how long that takes maybe maybe uh some of the others would you would you like to comment on that and I suppose specifically I'm look it's a I'm trying to dress it up but it's like a question that I've sure you've been asked many times you know what is needed to get a traditional you know we're on the

investor panels here what is needed needed to get more traditional investors on board with this space you know how do they look through all that noise I I think we're just in the middle of it right now like if you if you stare at the data it's happening the the first major Catalyst this year is likely to be massive staple coin increase in usage and volume you know I think we go from $223 billion of Staples to a trillion by the end of the year that's just the movement of mostly you know fiat currency on digital rails for much cheaper much faster much more transparent globally accessible banks will support it payment companies support it business business business to uh consumer to Consumer like this is

happening right now and it's the wave is is is uh upon us and that drives usage on chain which drives fees or activity or um number of wallets and more wealth on chain which leads to the dii opportunity well if you are going to hold digital assets you might as well earn yield from them and what's the safe way to do so or commen it with your risk level like this is the Catalyst happening this year and and it's just through you know 5x the amount of payment volume or usage and then the fee generation on the networks you know ethereum generated $ 1.7 billion of fees the last 12 months it peaked at $6 billion I mean these are these are companies with 30 or 40 or 50 people in

them effectively generating you know hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars of fees um so we we're just going to see massive value creation because of like payment activity on chain and that's going to lead to the the greed like I want to get I want to part of that yeah no I we're anally we're we're noticing the same thing by the way um Alan S would you like to comment on that yep um no I think um one of the big big things that um would improve investor confidence is is I think um there needs to be more and more um transparent reporting um to the investors like um you know um you need to report um timely um accurately to the investors and a

large part of it depends on um you know the Auditors fund administrators who are kind of reporting uh but as a fund manager you need to be like pretty open with the investor as to what's going on you know that's something that um that that's really important and we are already seeing uh a lot of the the trafi people um they are kind of interested in crypto we are you know um talking about tokenized funds um you know that that's another way of uh bringing in more kind of uh trafi Capital into into the the crypto world you know the underlying product could be money market it could be real estate um you know credit products uh but bringing that onchain

would kind of flow in uh more and more Capital uh into this space and and um I think um you know there needs to be more um regulatory Clarity uh which is kind of um happening now so that would definitely bring in uh more confidence into the space yeah just finally I think uh from my perspective it's when the blockchain Fades to the database so we shouldn't be thinking about some of the tech challenges and the tech risk that we have today uh I think stable coins will be a good example once everyone's got a wallet that's got an asset in it whether it's a stable coin or something else you've then got kind of the end user infrastructure that's required for us to buy anything and we won't care what database it's on it'll just be accessed like we access any other Financial

Service and I think that's when and I think David said it earlier it's a it's a global liquid 24/7 Market of everything so it's just going to be the new Capital Market and I think that'll just that'll just tip um based on more people having more wallets with more assets in them yeah I you know if if Libra went ahead yeah and we all add in on our WhatsApp we wouldn't be having this conversation but so it's like to Happ anyway on that note um we're we're up for time uh I'd like to thank all the panelists um very much um and I'll uh I'm going to pass it over to uh to the block post team I think thank you yeah

thanks you alrighty next up here we are talking about weathering Cycles in high growth Tech markets obviously crypto is one of those that is included in that and we're going to be joined by Bill hardit Bill hardit of Abra and shervin pishevar of Sherpa Capital so give a warm welcome to them both this is going to be a great one welcome all right good

afternoon so I think we have like 20 minutes so why don't we do like a rapid fire let's get right into it um let's see everyone yeah bill baright from from Abra and uh Sheran pishevar from Edison yeah so we want we're going to segue this into crypto but before we do um let's pick three let's pick three CEOs uh who are your who who are the three iconic CEOs that you've worked with in the last let's say 10 years um well I mean I as a as a kind of thesis of what I do I I I look for the smartest uh Founders that I can I can

possibly find and I've been lucky to have been able to back some great great entrepreneurs um probably the top three for me are uh Elon Musk Travis kenck uh from Uber um and Brian chesky from Airbnb so I you know backed all three of those um probably 15 years ago um and uh it it was a blessing to be able to work with them and become friends with them uh and there's there's a lot of like common ity in uh and some differences in in all of their approaches and their kind of

mental models uh and how they executed um but there's no question that they they created uh not just value in terms of the companies that they they created but but they sent ripples into into the into the world uh they fundamentally changed our world uh if you compare it to like 2010 versus 2025 um you know each one of those companies has fundamentally changed uh many aspects of our of Our Lives um you know if you remember Uber you know before Uber uh what it was like to land in a city uh and not be able to push a button and and get a car

on demand and deal with the 333 taxi numbers that used to have to call and the frustration and the and um and the the horrible customer experience that that that that uh you had to deal with um the the just a fundamental uh change uh in our in our daily lives and you know part of what I look for in my investments because my day job as a as a venture capitalist U I've been lucky to invest in great entrepreneurs and great companies and great teams um and have returned you know something like 7 billion in in uh in value from early stage Investments 88% IR are um scares

me because it's hard to keep up with that uh so I might just retire um but it's it's uh it's an exciting time to uh be investing and and and looking for the future Elon the future travises and and the the future Brian um I think in terms of not just their intelligence um probably in elon's case and Travis and Brian um the number one trait that I noticed with them was fearlessness they they weren't afraid of anything I mean it was just I and I saw it viscerally on a daily basis um and I

think all of us have seen it in many of those examples um there is a courage and a resilience that exists and a chip on their shoulders um and you know these are are kind of signals that I look for in great great Founders um is that the chip on the shoulder um you know has many different sources of where that can come from in one's life um but if you don't have it um you don't have something to prove to yourself or to the world um it's it's hard to become as courageous as they are um and I think I think it's a source of of Courage um and

and I you know I could give many examples of You Know Travis uh one time we were in a hotel room together uh in North Carolina and uh it was the RNC so we went to the DNC and RNC to launch Uber back in the day this is like 2012 and we had just launched Uber taxi so we didn't have taxis on on Uber and the taxi commissioner had told Travis that he can do that and he worked really hard with the team to launch it in time and it was it had just launched and obviously because we were fighting you know the taxi cartels and the corrupt city councils and mayors of the world uh I called them the taxi Mafia um and we

were we had death threats and all kinds of stuff going on back in the day um and uh they got to the taxi commissioner so the call came in while we're in the hotel and I so I'm listening listening to this call and and Travis just tears the taxi commissioner apart and and and he he was so upset he was like you gave me your word and that's another thing is these guys when they give their word it actually means something right and so they're very principled and uh these types of Founders and so in that case he I I was just kind of watching it in awe because most people when a taxi committ

who could just block you from business uh immediately block everything you're doing uh with one one signature uh most people would be demure and you know diplomatic and you know oh I understand like okay well maybe we can get the taxi thing back up you know what do we have to do it was none of that it was just like no you you promise me you said we can do this and and I I looked at that and I was like this is why back this guy because it worked and it it it also worked that kind of Courage actually works in our world so I think and maybe people in crypto who've been in you I've been in 10 years and doing this actually

15 since the beginning of Bitcoin maybe I think what we can relate to is that what people here uh people on the outside might call uh crazy right we simply call conviction and courage right because people don't understand why a Michael sailor would have so much conviction for what he's doing or why you know Travis would have so much conviction for what he's doing because they haven't spent hundreds or thousands of hours working on exactly the same problem and given their entire life to the same problem and failed six other ways trying to solve the same problem so I think that there's a on the outside what appears to be like a crazy element which really isn't crazy when you're on

the inside it's just conviction and courage is that yes um well courage can look crazy uh especially exactly when people don't understand why you're being Courageous about something uh um and you know a lot of times these types of Founders are Time Travelers they're they're they're seeing something in the future that we can't see and and so they're drawn to that future and and they have the courage and conviction to get there no matter what um and the other thing that I all of those Founders came close to death they stared fa deaf in the face um you know Elon was sleeping on the couch in his friend's

houses when I met him um it was like 2008 Vantage which is you know I I don't I'm a venture capist but I hate VCS I'm a self flaing venture capitalist uh I think they can be absolutely horrible you have to be very careful taking anyone's money um and because they can destroy your company look at what happened to Travis look what happened to Elon almost lost Tesla because Vantage Partners uh decided they wanted to go after him uh similar to what Gurley did at at at uh at Uber and almost destroyed Uber um and fired one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time idiot um so yeah uh Steve

Jobs same thing like there is Venture capitalists are typically um the the opposite of what I'm describing of courageous right um and and so it's extremely important to be careful you know who you take your money from and look at their track record and their behavior with other Founders especially when things get tough when things get tough you're supposed to be courageous and support the the courage of a of an entrepreneur who's facing death in the in the face they did one of the history's worst you know debacles as a venture capitalist they sold their shares uh after trying to get rid of

Elon for like 33 cents a share after all the stock splits in 2008 they would have made a hundred billion doll right yeah thank you for the laughter that's you're you're awesome um because it is funny uh you know the same thing with with Uber if I I know with conviction Uber would be a Tesla siiz company if Bill Gurley had not fired uh Travis kenck uh just an idiotic move uh at at the peak of when when Travis was just taking over the world he was doing self you were at the conference you spoke at with Peter dius at his conference last week and I

saw what he said and it breaks my heart because Travis had all of the vision he had everything right he he had the feis right he told me in 2011 when there were just a couple thousand cars in the streets of Dublin the night that I gave him the term sheet and he and he said I want to replace car ownership that's that's what I want to do it's not about taxis and black cars I want to replace car ownership and he had the vision and he was doing self-driving and way before anyone else he had it ahead of everyone and now wh's all over the streets everyone's taking whmo in the cities that it's it's launch is

taking over all the market share you know Tesla's launching robot taxis so that's another example Benchmark owned what 14% of of uber at the time if it was a trillion dollar company they they they would have made over a 100 billion they they completely destroyed that Apple they got rid of Steve Jobs it what is it three trillion uh you know uh and and and and sent him into the Wilderness for years we lost think about that if if Steve Jobs had actually stayed at Apple from 1989 88 whenever they fired him the world would have accelerated we had to

wait until he came back in order for him to have the platform again and do what he did at Apple with the iPod with the iPhone with the iPad and everything else it's happened since um so those are those are some examples of Courage and the lack of Courage and the cost of of those two things yeah so people talk about grit for entrepreneurs right which is something that everybody in our space understands now um if you've been in the space more than four years but I guess grit for the right investors is equally important right because you're weathering a storm with the same people around the table and you really are in the same boat at that point right I never thought of this analogy but because

VC's mostly ignored crypto you guys were so lucky that you did not have VC don't you all feel you're soy unbelievably lucky after the last four years 100% and then and then do you know who acted as the VC that tried to destroy you Gensler gansler was was Bill Gurley like SEC was the VC of the crypto space that's what happened is there any press in this room this is yeah okay that I just realized that I never had that thought but it's it's absolutely right yeah yeah well maybe Warren promised him treasury secretary as well so I don't know all right so uh greener pastures right so um

you've also um you know made a decision to obviously get into the the crypto World um although I think you've made some investments in in in crypto over the years but um you know we're thrilled to have you join Abra as coair W with myself um what are your like what excites you I mean I can give my opinion but is there are there a couple of themes that excite you now about our world or you know like you know you obviously have investment themes that in addition to Smart VCS uh smart entrepreneurs but you know what um you know what is exciting for you right now well I mean I I joined abra's co- AR because of you I I I think you're one of

the smartest people that I we have Abra staff oh yeah over here you taking notes no but I I I I mean it like I I don't join a lot of companies and and uh I'm excited about what you're working on uh I think I think uh also the resilience that you and your team have shown uh you know with the LC going after you and and surviving that and and now thriving uh is is is just going to you know your the timing is so incredible for Abra uh so I'm I'm excited about everything you're working on I'd love for you to also just touch on your vision and where you where you want to take our Ro yeah I mean I think um my whole career has been mapping Mo's law to where it's all going next right I

mean I've been very good at that from the other side of the table right VCS have been we good at that in the 90s and 2000s and I made a career of doing the same thing whether it was early internet my Netscape days or you know building mobile apps or you know crypto or whatever is next um although I think this is it for me I think the next 25 years is going to be rebuilding the banking system so I fundamentally believe that where we've progressed in terms of compute power and uh AI integration I think that the entire banking system needs to be decentralized from the ground up I think it needs to go away I think I think Chase is Blockbuster and I think what we're I'm sorry if there's anybody here from Chase um but I used to say this to my friends

at Blockbuster in the 90s as well um I think that the biggest banks in the world in 20 years are going to be 100% based on defi rails and I don't know if it's going to take five years or 20 years for hundred billion dollar companies to emerge that leverage defi U so I'll hedge and say 20 but I actually think it's going to be faster than that and so our goal is simply to facilitate that and make it happen faster right whether it's yield lending uh institutionalization tokenization of real world assets and by the way everybody here talks about tokenization of real world assets does anybody actually understand why you would want to tokenize real world assets in the first place um it comes down to

fungibility right so the ability to create a decentralized marketplace where you have fungibility between two assets that normally are not easily fungible right I used to work in when I was a kid I worked in private placements at Goldman before I got singing and went back to Tech and you know private placements in those days would take four months to close and and so now we can tokenize assets and you can borrow against Real Estate using Bitcoin you can trade Bitcoin for you know stocks and that's all basically because we're going to have these fungible real world assets why shouldn't I be able to borrow against my my Abra shares or my Apple shares or my coinbase shares the same way that you can borrow against Bitcoin using Abra today so so I think this whole idea of

decentralization is definitely the future of banking but it's going to require usability meaning it needs to be accessible to Consumers businesses in a way where they don't have to understand like they don't have to understand what a money market how it works they don't want to understand the innards of how it decentralized lending Marketplace works and so it's going to behoove all of us to put the right user experiences and service layers on top of that that take advantage of at least the first generation of lending and yield and trading capabilities that lead us into what I think is going to be a a just a fully decentralized banking system and

that's that's our vision I I I came for the decentralization as we say and I'm staying for the decentralization a it started with Bitcoin and it's evolved you know um since then but um so we have uh two minutes so do you have any um other investment themes uh like are you I have my own thoughts about AI so obviously you know everybody's talking about AI now I think the a the intersection of AI and crypto is going to be massive like the second coming of smart contracts are there other like aspects of AI that are you're looking at like data centers or other things in that area yeah uh so I've I've been doing uh investments in Ai and Quantum

Computing for well over you know 10 12 years uh I I think AI is getting all the all the attention but Quantum Computing is kind of like the the uh the hidden hidden uh you know sibling in the in the basement uh and and it's it's it's starting to to graduate um uh so I've been lucky to back uh a few Quantum companies that I believe in um you know one is Ion Q uh squantum uh and and the other is d-wave which we took public with spack that I started uh called dpcm with Emil Michael who's a new Under Secretary of Defense

and uh for R&D and Eric Schmidt um the d-wave is doing quite well um and you know quantum took 20 years of R&D to get to where it is today been tracking it since my Berkeley days um and it's going to accelerate our compute capabilities uh in a way that is you know hard to for the human brain to really imagine but um squantum for example is going to get to a million cubits using uh photonics light um and I've been in The Foundry I've seen it um by 2028 we're at like 5,000 cubits or less and so uh a million

cubits is basically the way I describe it is is it's like the mind of God um and so all the things that we have with AGI and and uh gpus and everything that's happening is with our current compute capabilities we're about to basically take that to the Moon um and so I call it kind of quantum AI convergence and when that happens um all the acceleration that we already feel that feels historic where every day is a week and a week is a month and a month is a year um uh that we can see it viscerally we can feel it every week something's happening whether it's deep seek or or some other massive news or

the development um you know and and so the idea of also uh encryption is is under threat uh so you know because at those levels of compute it's going to be uh you're going to be able to crack instantaneously yeah yeah so and so what just my final thing on that is like that the just think about in a world where you can't encrypt things then we were're going to live in a radically transparent world where it's very difficult to keep secrets uh for government's intelligence it'll have obviously implications for crypto um and so there's massive amounts of disruption that are getting happen um and I think

that's that's also an opportunity yeah I would say for institutions the way I would look at it maybe this parting thought for something you got to prepare for is that remember the millennium bug 1999 everybody thought every computer system was going to fail in six months well this is more real than that I would say we need a a moonshot level investment in kind of rethinking Quantum readying everything right and and it's going to take a decade um but as a former cryptographer for the good news is I can tell you that there's a lot of work being done in kind of quantum ready algorithms for a lot of this stuff and so a lot of the Bas layer stuff that we're all using is definitely going to have to be upgraded but the good news is so is everything else right like crypto

is like is definitely on the list but so is your banking system your government systems your everything right so so yeah all of it so so so as Quantum goes so goes the rest of of of the universe including AI so maybe we we'll leave it there since we're getting the evil yeah just scare everyone at the end we'll get back to work so it's all good all right yeah thank thanks everyone thanks ran all right hopefully we have some press in this room because shervin is dropping some absolute heater on liners there I love it um okay super excited for this next panel here we got a whole bunch of great folk talking about the

next wave of institutional crypto products so we got James safer from blueberg who I view as ETF GCR here we got John Patrick Mullen from Mantra we got Robert Lesner from superstate we got Jeff Park who I view as options and derivatives GCR and finally we got Amber uh subaran from Kao so give it up for them this is going to be a great [Applause] panel all right while we all get seated um I'm going to each one of the panelists introduce themselves tell a little about their firms and what they do um briefly I am I work at Bloomer intelligence I write research about the asset management industry and do a lot of coverage of research of anything that

overlaps between trafi and defi in the asset management space um but let's start by going down the line Robert yeah I'm Robert Lesner I'm the CEO of superstate we're an asset management firm that's tokenizing the products we create um I'm more well known as uh the host of The Chopping Block podcast if anyone in crypto listens to that um and I formerly founded compound um hi I'm Om subon I'm the CEO of Kao Kao is a market data and analytics and index company in the crypto space everyone I'm John Patrick Mullen or JP uh Co and co-founder Mantra we a purpose built reward asset focused layer one blockchain um recently received unique licensing from Vara which is the Dubai uh virtual asset

regulator for brokerage exchange uh and asset management all natively onchain defi specific um and we're one of the largest realwood asset you know tokens by market cap amazing hi everybody I'm Jeff Park um I'm the head of alpha strategies at bitwise Asset Management most of you guys will know us for having have the Bitcoin spot ETF but we're also famous we're having the world's largest crypto Index Fund um which has been around now for a long time we are seven years old we have about 100 people we manage over 10 million dollars in assets today which is a remarkable thing as a crypto company here in the United States yeah so um I'm a data guy Amber obviously focuses a lot on data Jeff is primarily funds and ETFs and then we have Robert

and JP that are going to talk about the real world asset tokenization side of things so we got a lot of different Avenues to cover and I apologize in advance if it seems sporadic but hopefully we'll keep it Lively uh why don't we start with Robert you just there was some big news with superstate uh in the last day what let's get kicked off with like the one thing that tokenization arguably has found product Market fit the one thing that in my mind crypto has found product Market fit aside from Bitcoin Digital Store value is stable coins is tokenization of money and block and uh treasury assets why don't you get into what you guys are doing and and what the news was yeah absolutely so the first major you know real world asset that got popular on blockchains wor stable coins you know people said oh let's take a dollar from

offchain and put it on chain in the form of a token super popular there's like $200 billion dollars of stable coins everybody loves them the second you know successful you know direction of RW is is definitely tokenized treasuries you know after stable coins it's like well if you can take a dollar and put it on chain what about taking a super safe you know short-term interest rate producing asset and put it on chain and so tokenized T bills or money market funds are really the next category that's beginning to grow and the growth is pretty much in line with the velocity that stable coins um grew and I think in a couple years you know the market will be the size of stable coins potentially but you know super State's first major project is a tokenized fund and it's

designed for crypto native customers being protocols and Dows and Foundations and hedge funds that are doing defi things and you know the most you know onchain investors possible and so yesterday it was announced that maker um sky in their Rebrand one of the you know original defi protocols that creates a stable coin is going to be using superstate alongside Black Rock and centu to manage the assets underlying their stable coin so their stable coin is backed by other stable coins like usdc it's also backed by you know Crypton native collateral and this is an example of one

of the largest um assets um in crypto moving its um operations into rwas moving the backend you know of their stable coin into a tokenized t Bill and so they're allocating a billion dollars um it's pretty exciting and over the next couple months and years you know it's possible that they're you know a 510 billion dollar investor in rwas yeah and I let's keep this conversational so if anyone has anything to add or chime in feel free to do it but um I guess you kind of talked about the the real use of tokenization so far at this point seems to be like the capital is already on chain and people

are looking for similar typ of instruments in trafi like what is the Catalyst to I guess bring people on chain to actually use these things like um I don't know JP what is your what is your thought here like right now it's like a chicken of the egg problem like you're building this stuff the People onchain Want it but like how do you actually bring people from offchain onchain sure so we kind of see it un like this spectrum of permissionless versus permissioned and that's why we've created a blockchain that has a permissionless layer but effectively has this area where you can actually issue permissioned assets to you know on board Ed kyc accredited investors um who are actually the people who want to buy this these type of products if you look at the permissionless side of things I think mainly of you know onchain defi

users uh they don't necessarily want to do a rigorous onboarding experience multiple times to interact with products and many times they're not actually that actively looking for a treasury product you know maybe they want like a mem coin today which is fine um but the institutional guys do want these you know these yield bearing products that being said the onchain user experience today is still very clunky and in many instances like the economics actually aren't that attractive as well because it's like almost like this fees on fees model right so one of the ways that we've seen some success is effectively you know by managing subsidies and managing kind of economic incentives you can actually reduce the costs um of issuers to come on chain so that's one thing and at the same time subsidize

yield as well so maybe just give a little bit of additional you know basis points just to make sure that people want to actually come on chain with the understanding that eventually that will wean off and eventually the onchain you know version of these type of assets will just be more programmable more usable more functional um but that's not really the case right now um so again where we've seen some success is literally going you know almost like person by person uh through our Network and and actually teaching them how to come onchain for the first time so it's actually not really going after the existing onchain Capital but actually this net New Capital coming in which I think is going to be a big benefit to the space because often times the people that we're interacting with buying a tokenized money market product or

tokenized private credit fund um they're already buying this stuff in the real world and you got to incentivized them to come onchain for the first time so you you know you figure out what those incentive structures are but you literally like have to go and teach them how to set up a wallet you know how to manage skis and like all these different things so as that be you know experience improves I think we're going to see this you know start coming in in in snowballing which would be great um but it really is like a kind of a rigorous distribution model that is not all that you know sexy and attractive but it's the way that it's going to you know start moving the needle yeah so sticking with tokenization like I feel like the more I dive in the more it seems like it's just we're taking the

backend Plumbing of the trafi infrastructure and replacing it with blockchain which isn't as sexy as just saying Block tokenization it's like we're just kind of replacing things not that sexy to be honest yeah yeah so like I guess like what is the big differentiation aside from potentially down the line being more cost-effective more efficient things like that I mean we see a lot of exchanges in different platforms are going to 247 trading and that's but like what are the downstream effects and benefits of actually doing tokenization and this this is open to the floor but we'll start with JP sure maybe just super quick I mean if you look at some of the you know bigger asset managers that have started tokenizing money market products today you know I feel like it's been a little bit of almost like a pay-to-play model where chains and protocols will be like

okay we're going to buy you know a few bucks of your money market product to put it on our chain so we get a nice you know marketing Spin and nice announcement but like if there's actually nothing happening with it like kind of what's the point right it just sits there and tokenized form as a you know maybe a treasury diversification tool fine but when you actually start having these things become composable and more functional within defi using using them as collateral using them in you know other different types of defi Primitives that's when it starts becoming quite interesting but it's not there yet right it's that's a future promise and I think the onchain user experience improving the ability to have you know regulated secondary Market venues and secondary or even just regulated applications in general uh was going to start unlocking these different

use cases but again it's you know bit by bit and I I feel like Ray or tokenization is definitely a multicycle thing right so we're still very very early on the permission side of things Jeff go ahead yeah I agree with this and in many ways ETFs also in the theme of tokenization are actually more similar than different what I mean by this is actually ETFs represent maybe one of the more first like primitive version of like what tokenization as a project is right if you think about what ETFs do it's essentially one of the capital Market's greatest invention in what I call liquidity transformation right both on the underlying assets that historically may not have had liquidity being brought on by the ETF then becoming a substitute for those flows but secondarily as collateral assets

right these ETFs then become collateral in which margin can be provided in ways that bring additional liquidity that's incredible and tokenization also provides a lot of ways to imagine this on chain with different utilities but there's a lot of similarities here so this is something I think about all the time bitwise also thinks about all the time in terms of of where is the movement of tokenization and how do ETFs play a role into it and if you ask me what is the one fundamental thing that looks really different between ETFs and the way we talk about rwas my personal opinion is custody there's an element of the custody model that really changes in the ways we think about rwas which is so entrenched in the traditional system as we know it as ETF

players the ways in which the custodians touch every aspect of the clearing to the settlement to the pricing that core piece can change with rwas and I think that's actually to your point maybe not the sexiest thing you know custodians are meant not to be the sexiest thing but that is kind of the greatest room for I think Innovations and where institutional interest will take place they're going to look at that as an opportunity and we're starting with the lwh hanging fruits of money market funds but um you know my personal belief is that real inflection point when institutions are going to start coming into the way you're describing RW that that we're preaching about it is it has to bring a product that is so different than what we know and stratify like

these money market funds are great but to be honest like all of us probably prefer to just buy our money market funds and Fidelity the way we know it right the reality is crypto can do much more interesting things on the longtail of assets the projects you're working on where there historically hasn't been a liquidity transformation in the way that I was able to describe and that's the opportunity and I think that's the product Market fit that's really going to bring institutional interest very deeply I fully fully agree that the big opportunity when it comes to conization in rwa is operational efficiencies and what you can kind of what existing problems you can solve and and I don't think that the lwh hanging fruit is things that already work very well uh it's clearly about fixing things that are um not you know fully operational uh

yet and so um you know private credit is one of them and then the first thing is obviously bringing on operational efficiencies for things that do not have that natively in trafi but then the second thing is not creating a tokenized version of something just for the sake of adding a tech layer to the thing it needs to enable some applications then on chain and whether that's using the tokenized thing as collateral to enable uh you know lending or any other traditional application that actually makes a lot of sense and when you think about the more IL liquid parts of uh The Lending World typically back to private credit if you can then use that uh as collateral and have that much much more

mobile and much more kind of easy to transfer across entities um that is one of the things that is interesting uh from that angle do you have any thoughts Robert before I chime in uh let's move to the next question and keep okay well I just want to say something real quick I like that you called it an invention the ETFs or technology I've actually argued we we're we're kind of we have sister podcast Robert and I and I argued with Laura Shin about this because we called the ETF technology and invention and a lot of people like what how can you call it that but it really is and one of the main things I hear about it reminds me of talking about ETFs from like five or seven years ago or 10 years ago even um people are like talking about tokenization like you can't make

things liquid that aren't liquid but actually you can and ETFs do that all the time it's constant like the S&P 500 ETF is more liquid than all of its underlying and yes at the end of the day if there's like something breaks the liquidity of the ETF is going to fall to the level of the underlying assets that it holds and I feel like that's kind of the same thing as like tokenization but at the end of the day when things are operating smoothly you can add liquidity and there's like this Theory out there that we had a lot of hedge fund managers years and years ago saying that etss were going to blow up the traditional Financial system because they're making things liquid it's like we call it the Jurassic Park problem you're taking you know dinosaurs and putting them in like computers today um but like I think

tokenization will be the same way and I think the analogy between ETFs and tokenization makes a ton of sense to me personally um but Jeff you said you were saying the real benefit here is going to be things that like you know aren't working well in the trafi world but you didn't like what's an example of something you think makes the most sense that would be tokenized because you kind of hinted at it but you never actually said anything yeah yeah totally and by the way it's not to actually discount all the great work that is being on the be very basic of stable coins and tbos these are actually foundational things we need so actually I give a lot of uh praise for the sacrifice that is being made by the pursuant of that business because these are necessary rails we have to build but the adoption part will

come when the product is interesting in my opinion and the product that I think that is interesting is the kinds of alternative assets that investors want to access today but the traditional system makes it very challenging so private credit is a really good example private credit is a catchall phrase as an asset class of something that can be private for many different reasons right it could be Middle Market lending it could be asset back Securities it could be esoteric litigation financing whatever it is it all becomes classified as private credit but the reality is it's not really meaningful in that definition and so each of these things can be explored more thoughtfully if you thought there was liquidity at the underlying level that would match differently than the investment wrapper

itself these private credit funds are just locked up vehicles of underlying assets for which you don't know what the liquidity is so one great use case and this is something we did at bitwise very recently is that we partnered with Maple Finance which is one of the oldest defi protocols that are perming per mitting lending operations on bitcoin collateral um with stable coins and so the idea of you know over collateralized Bitcoin loans right this is as simple as like the birth of civilization you have assets and you want to borrow against it and you can do that on chain with Bitcoin in ways that is called private credit because it's an asset-backed loan but there's nothing illiquid about what that loan is worth because the

underlying collateral is Bitcoin and that is extremely liquid and and so there's no reason this should be private credit but it is and so that as a construct in which tokenization can bring liquidity that it can deserve I think is kind of interesting pockets of opportunities and the ones that um you know we'd like to keep an eye on and focus and bring institutional adoption for Robert you look like you wanted to say something there did you want to add anything or no I was just gonna tell Jeff to leak all the alpha about what superstate should tokenize yes yeah be really specific which funds um I actually will because I the thing that I pay attention very closely is superstate by the way this is full fact I I would I would admit it um there are things that also like superstate is

doing where they're bringing investable opportunities on like trades right like things that you give hedge fund managers and pay fees to do that doesn't really require that much active management that actually could be made into something more investable in a tokenized format I actually think this is a big thesis as well uh amber let's let's get into what Koo does you're dealing with a lot of Institutions I believe you even deal with my employer Bloomberg can you can you talk about like what it's like the differences between between working with data in the trafi world and how you're taking like the defi data and plugging in the backend apis things like that just give us a little insight into like the the nuances and differences between defi data and trafi data absolutely so

for me when it comes to crypto data there's going to be two phases and maybe we just move back away from tokenization back into crypto um the first phe phase of kind of Institutions looking at crypto was to say this is a new investable asset class and so we need Market data like we do for any traditional asset class so that was the and still is kind of the main uh product that we offer is literally Market data apis and plumbing to enable access to Market data on crypto as an investable asset class and that there's like order books and and individual tick trades and everything that happens across every Market including dexes and lending and boring protocol all the financial Market information that is kind of slightly more commoditized but somebody needs to

do it and somebody needs to do it well and we power about you know a couple hundred clients globally with those Market data feeds um that's part one and we are uh not doing any kind of front end stuff so we power we on the plumbing side powering uh terminals such as uh Bloomberg anded um and then what I think and it takes as best tokenization is that the if you believe in an increasingly onchain World especially uh an chain world that enables Capital markets application you are going to be in a world where uh the execution of financial contract will be much more disintermediated that's the whole point right uh making uh uh kind of the whole operational workflow more efficient and more disintermediated but thereby it

means that the data that you input into the smart contract representing your financial contract is increasingly critical uh because there's no more failovers you're not going to have middle office calling you and say oh I disagree with that Margin Call or that like liquidation or coupon payment or whatever it's just you know the whole um workflow is automated within the contract and um thereby data becomes even more critical in a tokenized world and for all of the tokenized Securities we've mentioned there is today no native onchain Market where price formation happens meaning that if you want to enable Financial applications using those tokenized Securities on chain you actually need to get the valuation data

of those assets from not the blockchain and provide it on chain to enable Financial applications so that's kind of the you know the world I think we are at the beginning of an inflection point obviously the first step is tokenizing assets the immediate next steps is to say now that those assets are tokenized what can we enable and that will be data Hungary in the same way that tried toy today is data Hungary right it's just a different network different platform different infrastructure um but still requires calculation agents nav Cals option pricing and and all these prices do not live on chain natively um so that's also some of the things we're looking at within the tokenization angle

is the whole data application layer um which involves reading from the blockchain and offboarding that data through an API to people who need to consume it um it involves the whole data um workflow and the whole data capabilities and then also the ability to to enable the execution of smart contracts with data that needs to be accountable and accurate and uh you know there's no roll back so um what you guys are doing and what I feel like a lot of Institutions are doing including the likes of Black Rock Wisdom Tree uh Franklin Templeton and what JP and Robert are doing there's the there's kind of seems to be this you're creating

bridges that go both directions like I think of the ETF as a bridge you're taking a defi asset put in a trafi rail in the case of the money markets and some other assets which we I would love to get into the real estate that JP was talking about you're taking that on the the trafi real world and putting on dii um but like for the most part all the stuff I've seen it's like dual track we were talking about this a little bit before you're still doing things the old way you're still keeping things with like a clearing agent a transfer agent and things are operating on on the the um blockchain side of things so I guess I'll start with you JP like one why is it being done that way right now two are we going to get to a point where

everything is actually going to be taken care of on the blockchain uh and like is there any risks or anything that you're you're worried about with how things are working yeah sure great question I mean I think um you know there's clearly not a whole lot of like institutional people on chain today actively in permissionless environments so that's you know one of the big hurdles that we have to overcome uh as an industry in general you know there's a bigger compliance risk when you get into this like permissionless world right um so that's a that's a challenge uh we're see see within the real estate use case are just some context you know we're doing a lot of stuff in the UAE um we've been tokenizing uh a number of different real estate assets um we have a big partnership with dmak Group which is the

largest private property developer in the Middle East um they we actually announced about a billion dollar minimum transaction that we're doing with him but instead of just actually tokenizing like an SPV rapper for a real estate asset we're actually collaborating with them to tokenize the underlying title natively um and actually today uh the Dubai land Department which is effectively the Dubai land registar the Dubai government I came out and said that they're actually working to tokenize titles which is pretty exciting stuff obviously they're doing it with us as well um they didn't put that in announcement though little little Alpha um but anyway what this actually unlocks is is a number of interesting things right so you know when you have a wrapper is effectively you're actually just creating another layer of

obfuscation between the onchain asset and the real world asset but when you're directly tokenizing title like we're doing uh what it means is that if there's some sort of you know issue with that asset uh whether it's in a you know def5 primitive a lending protocol or something like that there's an actual enforcement capability in the real world right it's actually recognized by the government in the tokenized form that's one of the biggest issues that we're seeing is like in order to have this you know two tracks going into one you need to have the real world you know recogn Rec real world Rec recognizing sorry I'm I'm really jet lagged right now I've slept for like four hours I live in Hong Kong um basic recognation of the of the token being the real word asset right and until you have you know intermediaries like a

government agency or uh you know a regulator that says hey this is the real thing that becomes a problem so you know when you tokenize something hold it in a in an SPV or a wrapper you know you're not actually owning the real thing the the the SPV owns the the underlying asset right so um this is really exciting stuff that we're working on the UAE um I think it's probably the only major Market that we're seeing this happen in and obviously when you have you know a one voice uh system uh it helps that you can have you know a central government or or Sovereign Nation that says hey this is the right way to do it um and things move a lot quicker uh in environments like that that bring that kind of reminds me of the whole nft crase where people like you're not actually owning

anything in some of these you're just owning like a link to something yeah you're owning a JPEG that's in a link somewhere uh whereas obviously some of them are actually onchain but I I going to Robert I want to hear more about like one huge thing I hear that I personally have questions about is like regulation like I feel like that's the biggest hold up in this space um it's one like there's a reason we have adrs and all these regulations about whether a stock can trade in one place or another place and I feel like people are like yeah we're going to be able to trade at 247 around the world and I'm like there's a reason you can't do that with stocks and bonds and different things so Robert I'm curious like what your in uh expectations are for for the regulatory environment for all this

stuff yeah I mean at a really high level regulation is a layer on top of legislation and I think in the US we're seeing two things that have changed very quickly one is the regulatory interpretation of what should happen given the legislation in hand has shifted radically um as you know the guinsler SEC has become the you know UA Atkins SEC um and all the other regulatory bodies as well have shifted dramatically um but that's a layer on top of legislation I think what's really exciting is this year we're going to see stable coin legislation we're going to see Market structure legislation we're going to see an actual codification of the rules in the US around crypto and the way it's supposed to be operating in

a way that we haven't had ever and you know regulation has existed to interpret a lack of rules basically going back to the 1930s um and how that might apply to crypto but we're about to have for the first time you know legislative interpretation I mean with like 98% certainty you know that this actually goes through and passes about how all this stuff should work and actually the role of Regulation decreases when we have modernized legislation there's less to interpret there's less to you know suppose and so you know the environment is incredibly optimistic I think you know hopefully we don't bounce you know back and forth between two different guard rails of like you know hostility

to crypto and you know an extreme support of it over the next you know couple cycles and we reach an equilibrium where there's very clear rules and everyone knows how they work and like everyone's happy with it um but we're definitely headed in a great Direction right now it seems like anything is possible you wouldn't know by the prices uh Jeff let's go to you uh he he is like one of the best titles I've ever heard of so head of alpha Strat it's just give us some Alpha no um give us the alpha Jeff yeah give us the alpha no but like what what do you like on the ETF side of things like one of the huge things is there's a lot of derivatives now uh ETF Bitcoin ETFs now have options I've seen a ton of filings for a whole

bunch of different ETFs that are focus on convertible debt focus on uh companies that are holding Bitcoin in their balance sheet like do you think those are going to be institutionally adopted like is it the people that don't want to hold Bitcoin might go out a different way in the same way that like you know saor always talks about stepping up and stepping down your exposure to bitcoin which you have a lot of thoughts on micro strategy but I'm curious like what you think the next wave of adoption is and we're going to get some altcoin ETFs some index ETFs like what are you most bullish on for institutions and investors in the ETF space yeah uh to put it really simply as I've been able to engage with institutional investors there there's basically two things that they really care about in the context of like crypto

and what crypto and Bitcoin in particular represent one is is there a risk-managed way to access it and the second is is there a more Diversified way to access it that might also include some risk mitigation strategies and so on the first point it is true that institutions have different degrees of risk preference right every financial institution has varying uh Comfort levels and that's why we have things like securitization technology tranching technology and all of these things to create derivatives and overlays and ways people manage their programs and so to me it isn't surprising that someone might say we like Bitcoin but we actually need to access it in XYZ kind of way with these kinds of risk

parameterization and Michael sailor's micro strategy story is a particular version of that right when he's coming to the market with a variety of instruments in the capital structure from convertibles to preferred Equity that has a conversion right or preferred Equity that actually has a Perpetual cash dividend like these are all like a buffet of options for investors to be like what kind of flavor of Bitcoin do you want today like here's four choices and so in my opinion everyone knows instinctively besides price which we love we want Bitcoin to go up the other thing that people recognize is that volatility is extremely extremely worthwhile and that if you monetize the volatility there's a premium there and so the Advent of Bitcoin ETF options last December was

huge because this is really the moment now where we're going to see like Structured Products and I do think institutions are interested in the idea of like yes I want Bitcoin exposure but maybe I want to cut my tail to a loss Max loss of 20% by having a put and also at the same time financing that by selling a call that's like 160% or something where they're like I don't need to make more than 60% a year like it it's it's possible institutions have these kinds of preferences uh and so the things that we're focused on a bitwise is to think about imagining these structured product categories where we harness volatility and diversity in the rapper we know which is ETFs and actually kind of take it to the next level like what's more interesting than just like a Bitcoin spot ETF so one of

the products we launched last week is actually the first of its kind it's called the Bitcoin Corporation standard ETF and what it does it's a rule-based methodology where we go out and buy public equities that own 1,000 Bitcoin or more on their balance sheet so so this is a way to get exposure to of course crypto companies but also companies like block or Tesla or some global companies like metap planet or a medical device company called semler and you actually can build a diversified uh basket of crypto adjacent companies with Bitcoin beta plus so I think these are the kinds of things that institutions have some interest to explore that doesn't look so singularly dependent on you know the price of Bitcoin day-to-day which we all know we love and want it to

go up but sometimes it doesn't so you your most of your fund is it's a private fund right it's a hedge fund real quick couple one sentence answer like is the stuff you're doing in that fund ever going to be viable in a public fund rapper like an ETF or a mutual fund oh boy I would love it I mean this is my dream of tokenization in the future we were you know folks like securitize are working towards the idea is that these private funds actually don't need to have no like a lack of secondary liquidity right like going back to the point like these private credit hedge fund Vehicles these 3C 506b type funds they're basically just investment structures and and and it's to maybe accommodate the liquidity of the

underlying assets but it's most often to accommodate the business and so if you can actually provide a world in which there's secondary Market liquidity to these types of private funds I think it's a GameChanger the idea that you can invest in private Equity Funds but you don't actually have to wait for 10 years because you know there are buyers who can look through the asset and pay for it and create some transparent secondary Market maret is is a liquidity transformation of an existing ACC class that's never had it and I think that is kind of the tokenization story that really does permit the fund for example that I manage that could one day be accessible to a more broad-based audience than qualified professionals Amber you're very familiar with like the European ETF Market which is much more uh amenable to different

tokens and coins I'm just curious if you could tell us a little bit more about what you're seeing from institutions on that side of the pond yeah I mean so in Europe we've had ETP since I think 2013 first ETP listed on the in Stockholm on the NASDAQ Stockholm exchange um so we've been like we tend to do in Europe sometimes we are good at you know the early Innovation and then we struggle to get AUM in scale and then the US comes in and does it 10 times better um so the European ETP Market is much more kind of fragmented uh there's a lot of smaller etps uh including some interesting things I mean we launched a uh something called The Bold index which is a vol control Bitcoin coin gold rebalanced uh index that is a European ETP a few years

ago and uh and so I I would say that we've been early on in creating all those way to invest in a ETF ETP like product uh to get exposure to crypto and um and then yeah it's been you know a year now that the US ETFs over a year that the US ETFs have uh been approved and clearly it kind of crushed the uh the AUM uh of of European etps but the still a very interesting market and I think it's going to grow so um Jeff kind of mentioned like the private credit stuff that I mean KKR Hamilton Lane Apollo like all of these people are talking about doing tokenization things I'm curious from mainly from Robert and JP like to talk about like do you are

you like worried that they're going to come in and like be like take out you guys as kind of incumbents in the space are you looking to partner with them like how do you view these like Behemoth from the trafi world including Black Rock to name like coming over into the space competing so I mean specifically for you like that deal you were talking about I know the Biddle fund from Black Rock got some of that money as well I'm curious to hear your thoughts Robert yeah I mean there's going to be early movers to adopt a new technology right from asset managers from Banks whatever and then there's going to be late movers which will be probably like four fifths of the industry um I think it's great that there's asset managers who are excited about doing things on chain I think it's great that there's banks that

are excited about doing stuff on chain it's still the reality that like 98% of the those Industries is not interested in doing stuff on chain yet and so I think it's a great sign you know I think you know we're at like the starting line or like chapter one and a half of what this looks like and what comes on chain and what are the products and who are the major players and you know all of this will evolve but I don't think anything is competitive I think it's you know shared signs of enjoyment and optimism you you were very vigorously waiting to say something JP so go ahead I mean I think um any rwa focused uh you know project particularly if you have a

coin would love to have a black rock or a KKR or AP paollo as a partner right um and we've seen that right there's companies that try to associate with with those big players they Coast on The Branding yeah exactly it's an important thing right so for sure we would want to work with these type of people and you know obviously when you're talking about a lot of these products coming on chain you need to have something that is easily stod by people and those big big brands are you know easy to explain and um when we're talking in distributing some of these products to to investors you know they they already are buying this stuff in the real world they're already buying it from their private bank particularly in the UAE like they're already getting exposure to some of these products but actually what toiz

offers is a little bit of a smorgus Bard or a buffet where now it's not just the private bank offering but it's actually this private bank offering this private bank offering this private bank offering in this private bank offering so you can get everything under the sun um which is something that we've seen uh people are quite you know attracted to so we've done a number of different tokenization U products in private Credit in Money Market funds um that you know bring those big bring those big brand names to the table um and it's something that uh you know again down the line if they want to do it more directly and natively it's fine but in the in the meantime uh you know happy to to you know have that Association just by having good quality product on that's really important because like tokenization for the sake

tokenization just you know if you have a shitty asset it's still a shitty asset yeah we we like to say the same thing for for investment strategies just because you're putting a the if the dog doesn't like the food just because you're putting in a goldplated bowl doesn't mean it's going to be good food um we only have two minutes left so I'll keep I'll keep these quick I just want basically all of you are building right you're all building in the space and the question is like will the institutions come that's kind of been answered for the Bitcoin ETFs maybe even a little bit for the ethereum ETFs tokenization we're seeing it's a start but I'm just curious like one there it's mostly institutions kind of Dipping their toes in the water at this point when do you think well one are they going to fully jump in and two

when do you think it's going to happen I'm curious like Jeff more for your point of view like these other altcoin ETFs and stuff do you think there's G to be interest and then from from the rest more so uh tokenization side of things so uh my view and this is my personal view this is not bit wise's view is um institutions for now really are focused on bitcoin um they're focused on bitcoin for all the reasons that we understand what it represents it has like a singular narrative as a store of value that's not very difficult to understand once you leave Bitcoin the story on technology the utilities kind of beutal various motivations that make the conversation challenging uh the thing that I Feel Again going back to the

evolution of bitcoin's financialization is that um historically people really liked trading these altcoins like Ripple or salana or Doge or whatever else because they gave you some levered beta exposure to bitcoin and people thought it's a it's it's a it's a it's a levered way to play the crypto price game the reality is I actually think most institutions now will realize the power of Bitcoin options and get the same kind of thrill with less basis risk in that you don't need to like play the lead lag relationship of Bitcoin versus Solana and play like that game you can literally just buy you know a long-dated out ofe money call leap that has 10 Delta and actually like play that and so I think institutions are more interested today in like the opportunity and the

financialization of Bitcoin and crypto volatility in general now altcoins are tremendously volatile so as they have staying power I'm certain institutions will also have a way to financializing quick because we're a little bit over time but JP I'm curious when do you think tokenization when are we going to get off the Dual track when when is it going to be actually um I mean I said like it's a multicycle thing so actually the next like proper bear is when a lot of the real Foundation elements of secondary Market liquidity is going to start getting built up um so I you know I think maybe five years three five years I think the inflection point is starting Robert yeah I mean I agree it's starting institutions are just like any self-motivated capitalist actor in that they just want more money and so you

know the reality is that everyone's interested in crypto because there's the opportunity in some corner of it in some way to make more money great all right that's all we have time for thank you everyone all right thanks again from those panelists I love the uh honesty of Robert there just saying the best incentive is just making money that is a true fact um okay so for our second last panel for the day we're going to be hearing about the allocators perspective on crypto so give a warm welcome we're going to have Omar Naim up on the stage

as well as Minaj vasu Devan welcome aboard no no I think you should sit on the other end do you guys have a preference is this okay it's just too weird if we're on opposite ends of the of the stage okay I'll sit closer hi hi everyone um I was questioning oh hi Lori if the room would thin out and it really did yes but you know you're not really going to miss anything everyone leaving so um if if you can actually you can stream it um so I'd like to introduce sort of I should

say myself first I think so my name is Omar Naim I'm the founder of lw3 um lw3 digital is um part of lw3 and our mission there is very simple uh we want to maximize the adoption of digital assets by the institutional allocator community so basically exactly what the last question was on the previous panel like how do you actually accomplish that right it's not our opion is that it's not by going on CNBC it's not by uh launching meme coins and it's certainly not by by uh runting for president um I guess I'm referring more so to some of that happened a few years ago um it's through education and creating a safe space for the allocator community to

actually learn about the space not be sold on the merits of it God knows they're sold on everything else um next to me is someone who is I call him the the Indiana Jones of the industry um one of the big challenges for allocators uh getting anything p with their own advisory committees is that they're so far removed and it's a really um one of these terms I use is um there's a Japanese word that's called kuchi saishi which means uh lonely mouth uh when you eat um because your mouth is lonely so to speak right and I say do you know what um how do you say in Japanese I spend 99% of my time on 1% of my portfolio

it's called investing in crypto right and so very few people actually have done it so far and the guy next to me has done it in a way that I haven't seen anybody else do it um but we can get into that in a second man maybe go of your background a little bit hey guys um Manoj vasudevan I'm with C investment management company so for those of you who don't know C is um King Abdullah University of Science and Technology so we are the endowment fund or the investment arm of C University uh this is a university based in Saudi Arabia it's the think of it as the legacy of the late King King Abdullah and um fun fact it's one of the three largest endowment funds in the world uh university endowment funds it the

university probably has one of the largest university campuses on Earth about 8,000 Acres of contiguous land um and we've been around for 15 years now um the team that runs the endowment is based in Washington DC uh product of the early team uh being from the World Bank um and run like a typical university endowment um have a strategic asset allocation across publ privates hedge funds real assets um and crypto sort of um a new technology segment for us um I shouldn't say it's new because you know we've been added our journey into blockchain actually goes back to 2018 it was the year when we experimented in terms of having a small allocation in

blockchain to learn about it it was wasn't as if we had a thesis around it it was also the year when uh the First Institutional crypto funds were launched so it was a way for us to learn and it actually sort of fast forwarding to 2021 it was that year when we actually came up with a robust thesis around the space um which we've been implementing quite actively over the past 18 months post FDX um so today um we're probably we're close to a percent of the endowment in terms of crypto exposure and given how large the endowment is it's pretty meaningful has anybody watch Doctor Who remember so we're going to get a bit of a time machine right now and go back to before minoan and and uh C had any

exposure to the AET class so I won't provide any sound effects right now um so Manos most most allocators dismiss and still often uh crypto outright um yet you took the time to deeply understand the space was there a personal like aha moment you like saw the blockchain potential and and to put time into it so I think there were two aha moments personally um I think for the for for the firm the aha moment happened more recently I would say uh post FDX um but for me this goes back to 2020 the you know you know we we' already invested a little bit sort of like

learned about the industry um and then come 2020 what really sort of like stood out were the network effects around Bitcoin like I think this is an underappreciated aspect of Bitcoin um as in you know people understand Bitcoin for the most part most institutions understanding it's all about the scarcity it's about the 21 million cap it's about being store of value but you know even even if they had understood that most people don't Value Store of values as institutions right most institutions and when I say institutions I'm not talking about the family offices I'm talking about my peers who happen to be endowments foundations uh Pension funds most of them don't have a gold

allocation so why would they care about Bitcoin right um but the network effects that I was seeing especially in the year 2020 was around you know you know these hedge funds that we had admired you know for years Paul Tuda Jones and you know on the corporation side Michael sailor um One River Asset Management in terms of the Bitcoin trade that it pulled out uh pulled off in November 2020 and and they had a sharehold you know one of their biggest shareholders was Alan Alan Howard of brevan Howard so we we started to notice all of this in 2020 and and and Bitcoin is something you can't really value in terms of intrinsic value and it's all about

imputed value which really takes you to network effects and truly truly understanding network viets was what got us over the hump in terms of like you know valuing that asset so that was Bitcoin right so you got to sort of like keep that aside um what really got me uh like what sort of like gave me Thea mov on blockchain in general was something um that Naval said you know Naval rikan said in one of his podcasts about blockchain being a network of scarce resources and um you know it giving um a system of orchestration between the demand side and the supply side um through a token system through through a crypto ad ET and that sort of like

really stood out to me because you know you couldn't have you really can't like pull off um orchestration of demand and supply side through a traditional Equity system because you know value does not stream seamlessly value does not transfer seamlessly and you could now do that through a a token or a crypto asset and and when I had applied that concept through to helium which is what my phone runs on today um your phone runs on on helium yeah how many people in the audience have helium on their phone there you go like one person like for those of you who don't have helium I highly recommend you guys get on a helium plan it's a it's you know it's about $30 per month Allin unlimited data

unlimited talk time there's even a Premium plan so you could get a telecom communication uh Telecom connection for $0 per month um like he's pitching right now this ising it's a it's it's a it's a live use case like you know for anybody who questions like you know what are the use cases of crypto this is this is it helium uh i' I've used helium balloons but that's a little different um and and and and by the way it's a Harvard case study right now so it's and and I highly recommend people go and like read about it so but that was a haha mov right you know and I had seen that and I sort of like saw all of that happening in 2020 so you were uh what he didn't mention in terms of the growth of um the endowment um and their uh digital acid exposure is

that um which I found to be the most um eye openening was that he was essentially you were essentially running like a multi-year internal education like campaign like quarterly or sew emails to their his entire IC about what was happening in crypto including uh post FDX email which I still remember that you wrote uh what kept you motivated to do that when it wasn't your job oh at least not directly because you covered obviously you covered real estate c as well and when there was no immediate sort of upside I guess in some ways some maybe some downside so I think when I sort of had these aha moments personally the first thing I did was I think towards the end of 2020 I made my

first presentation to the internal team and it didn't fly you know I had like 30 minutes with them none of it really like sort of hit the spot and I was discussing with some of my peers who were also in my in the same spot as me as to like you know how they were also facing challenges in terms of like getting the message across on how to really appreciate this asset class and I think in 2021 there was this idea that like you know maybe you know no matter how many presentations I make internally it's just not going to fly and maybe I should try the writing method so I wrote a bunch of internal memos and they were more like long essays on what I was learning uh so it was real time sort of translating my learning through podcast through reading

into a long memo of thoughts and sending it to the entire team about and this would be about how we as allocators should think about um uh Bitcoin as an asset blockchain as an asset class uh what's the market structure at this point in time in terms of like how a life cycle of a blockchain company actually sort of plays out and these were new Concepts because we were dealing with a extremely unique Financial instrument called the token which people were not used to right so most people really didn't know where to bucket this in their systematic asset allocation so it was a bunch of educ and memo writing um that that sort of like did the job over a period of time was constantly sending out memos and

most of the time nobody read those memos you could actually see that in the like you know if you if you've used Outlook and sent out a mass email to your team you can actually see how many people open that email and what's the average reading time and the a i team of four it's still at zero and the average reading time was actually 30 seconds uh in these long essays and but what like you know but I had like three or four actual read readers within the team wow um one of whom was my CIO and sort of like you know that sort of like kept me going so well like so so people were dismissive confused intrigued did anyone P ever pull you aside and saying Hey listen no people were not dismissive and

typically you don't find people writing internal memos like this on Technologies especially in a in a in a in know in a setting like an endowment or a foundation or a pension fund um so obviously they were intrigued why I was doing that but it was my way to sort of slowly induce education without any expectations so if because I was I was sort of like I was doing selfishly myself because I was trying to refine my own thoughts and trying to like build my own thesis um um as I was writing those essays um but most like you know I would never like you know nobody was like it wasn't as if people were dismissive one because you know most of them would reading it um and and and I think I think people were like you know like

amongst the words that you used it was mostly Intrigue yeah amongst the team so like I guess if you hadn't taken the time written those emails so to speak do you think that they have gotten to the point where they would have invested definitely not impossible uh you know it's just um I was like a dog with a bone constantly nipping and and constantly talking about blockchain to a point right everybody got tired uh because there were these constant memos you know I was constantly talking about it um in fact you know I sort of like you know question in 2020 like you know why are all these hedge funds buying Bitcoin right um and obviously that you know asked most allocators at that point in time they would say oh they're

talking all their they're talking their book right that's why they're talking about buying Bitcoin but it was more about the network effects at that point in time and that's what gives Bitcoin its reflexivity its convexity um and and and so I I feel like you know if you if you're not constantly educating your internal team especially for in environments like a endowment or a foundation whose main job is not to like explore Technologies uh it's to actually underwrite managers across these four asset classes um it's you know you're never going to go deeper into uh you know blockchain as an asset class so yeah it's really interesting when I mean it's almost like a structural sort of

challenge for the institutional allocator Community is that very few of them have the resources dedicate to you know this asset class certainly the way that mono has done it but I have to say that you know it was it's not as if people didn't allocate you know there was this 2021 bull run every Tom Dick and Harry sort have allocated to venture funds in blockchain um but I think most of them are pencils down today like post FTX most of them are pencils down and I think the if you sort of don't have a strong Foundation within your team and then allocate a blockchain because it was hot and it was hot in

2021 it's it's bound to happen that when there is a significant correction or an event like FTX everybody goes pencils down um and that's pretty much what happened and is what happen it's still happening now so so how do you feel in terms of um your uh your internal sort of uh situation do you feel validated do you walk around with a cape on or do you feel it's still very early in endings in terms of whether or not this was how in terms of also C exposure to the AET class I mean I don't I mean I wouldn't say validated validated yeah it's a that's you know we we're far from sort of like achieving the goals of the uh the industry and what the industry is setting out to do I

mean maybe that validation will happen when we all have our first iPhone moment it's still not happened like you know people say stable coins are sort of a iPhone moment but a crypto product that really takes off and has 100 million users right overnight like chat gbd that hasn't happened like I think that's when I think the industry will truly be validated um but I don't think you know even though you know we have significantly grown our allocation and and the team now believes that this is something real I don't take it for granted because a a lot of allocators came onto the scene in 2021 right and they're no longer there because of what happened with FTX right so there's constant educ like I am very cognizant of the fact that we might have something

break later this year or in 2026 something like a lunar something like an FTX which sort of like again takes our industry back to a GFC type of a moment and then everybody goes pencils down again um and my job is to constantly educate it and and keep the team a breasted across all these developments and so that like you know if something like that happens we know why and we sort of like truly Embrace that bust and sort of continue allocating it's very easy to sort of like take a step back when especially when things go wrong so we have a few minutes um what's a what's a crypto analogy that um you wish that more

people in traditional Finance would would understand sorry I think traditional Finance as a rule doesn't like uh volatility right if you think about the you know classical endowment model you know you know if you just if you were to just like simply invest in the markets you have sort of this SNP curve that's volatile over a period of time and the whole point about the endowment model model or like an Institutional model is to sort of mute that volatility and still achieve uh equal if not better returns than the S&P right so it's all about like having a smooth

curve and the thing about the thing about crypto is that it is more it is one technology that is also a market right you don't have a technology that is also a market and with any technology you can't build anything substantial important without ex like I would say um you know exuberance irrational exuberance like you need this type of retail mania this type of speculative Mania like investors like us to open up our pocketbooks to really invest in the traditional rails to invest in the backbone and the infrastructure that the industry needs and I the analogy that I will make here is think about what happened in the

late '90s during the com bust like overnight $5 trillion of value vanished a lot of people lost money um I think the draw down in the NASDAQ was 78 to 80% but even though a lot of even though a lot of the capital was lost a lot of that Capital that was invested in the '90s went to building the backbone of the internet that we know of today it went to building Google it went to build building Amazon and I think it's and I think as an industry as as as as straty looks into blockchain it's about really embracing those booms and Buss because no technology will ever be built and will ever succeed without booms and bus

and which is what straty gets scared about right like you know everybody sort of like went pencils Downs After FTX but FTX was just a normal sort of like a blip in the the traditional progression of a of of a of a futuristic technology right and so as you as you sort of like think about these booms and bus and they're pretty violent especially in blockchain and crypto you have to consider the fact that it's always about whether the technology is going two steps forwards and one step backward and if that's and that's always been the case with blockchain and if you see that just you know it's about embracing that technology then one step forward one two steps back no two steps forward one step

backward okay so that's like a country dance I think country music dance anyway thanks guys everyone give him some Applause [Applause] all right thank you Omar and Minaj so for the last panel of the day I am going to be here and I'm also going to ask for Mike AO and Quinn Thompson to join me up stage here and we're going to be doing a live Roundup edition of Ford guidance live from Das it's going to be a lot of fun let's do this okay so I want to ask before we get into

it uh raise your hand if you've listened to the Ford guidance podcast ever just curious who's in here nice okay so we got some listeners Wicked um well we'll spare ourselves too much of an introduction in that case but you know we do have the live stream so we will introduce ourselves anyway but my name is Felix I'm the host of the Ford guided podcast I interviewed macro thought leaders every week and then I also host the Roundup alongside Quinn Thompson feel free to introduce yourself hey guys uh good to be here uh Quinn Thompson founder and CIO of leer Capital we are a global discretionary macro hedge fund with a outsize focus on crypto and digital assets hey everyone my name is Mike bito I'm one of the co-founders of pod uh of block works and a Avid

listener of the forward guidance podcast whenever they have me on I'll Yap with you guys too yeah occasional participant and leader of the guys Emporium in in that respect at least C culturally and philosophically we need Tyler here for the full guys Emporium uh you know reunion rip I know I know he miss that guy a lot but he's off doing some big things right now um okay so we are recording this a couple hours after the fomc meeting and there's a lot to unpack there so we're going to start the conversation by just level setting on what's going on so going into it obviously the expectation was for them to not really do anything they're going to pause there's no expectations of a ray cut no expectations of rate hike that wasn't the news what was the news is trying to get an understanding is how

is the fed and drill and Powell thinking about what's going on on the fiscal side of things obviously tariffs and those different policies so with that we got the SCP data today the Dot Plot and that provided an interesting line of sight into gauging how are they thinking about inflation risks how are they thinking about growth risks and how does that all come together into what is their perspective for implementing monetary policy so I'm going to keep it simple here and just go through a couple data points to understand how are they thinking about it so for the growth forecast for 2025 they're expecting it to come down from 2.1 to 1.7 from there they see that level setting out and seeing it as so much like a short-term growth risk now what's interesting is it's the complete opposite in terms of

inflation risks from there they're looking at core PC for 2025 to go from 2.5 to 2.8 and then eventually trickling them back down to two um overall in terms of the rate cuts that they expect it's actually quite similar to the December meeting which is the last time we had the SCP data and that's two cuts which is pretty close to where the market's at so there's a lot of different mixed points in there and then we also got some updates on the balance sheet and liquidity and what's going on there so we got quantitative tightening updates heading into it you know we we saw from the fomc meeting minutes that there was going to be some talk of pausing it having to do with the debt sealing Dynamic so we'll get into that but interestingly enough they only tapered the the treasury component of QT

so they brought that that down from 25 to 5 billion a month um so still doing a little bit but pretty negligible but then they're holding NBS constant so the mortgage back Securities and I think this is key and we can get into this but they want to get those NBS off their book and you know they they are not interested in slowing that down by any means so there's a lot to unpack there um Quinn you've been pretty quick to the trigger here in calling it hawkish despite markets rallying so I want to pass it to you to to get an understanding of what did you see there and and how are you thinking about it in terms of the fomc yeah so I like to look at the meeting over meeting change in obviously the statement and rhetoric and press conference but also the the dot

plots which only come out quarterly and when you compare the two obviously we had growth expectations down with GDP lower unemployment rate higher and inflation expectations higher which is very stagflationary uh with the median or mean uh interest rate projection cuts the same however under the surface you had the distribution move to a much more hawkish stance you had the number of of participants expecting one or fewer Cuts go from four to eight and expecting uh three or more go from five to two so it was a very meaningful shift in kind of the the mean of the group and I think I

understand the doish interpretation as well they marked up in inflation expectations but they didn't introduce potential potential for hikes or something more something worse for risk assets however there's it's not good news there's there's nothing here for me to really celebrate in a particularly in a backdrop of the first time in Pre since covid uh even pre- probably that fiscal has been is is a a negative impulse on asset markets with Doge and immigration being effectively halted from a percent plus growth of of

population every year since Biden became president to to zero overnight from the southern border so I just think that the overarching backdrop for the economy growth and what I expect to eventually show up in corporate earnings for the first time since we've had all these Market pullbacks is kind of deterioration with no positive impulse on the side yes okay they're not hiking the QT reduction is positive but it it doesn't you know give give an impetus so we can chop around here but I just it doesn't make me excited yeah I think um I think that it wasn't particularly good or particularly

bad there was another um interview that went live today with a treasury secretary Scott bessent um where he outlined in uh quite a bit of detail how uh Treasury and honestly this Administration is thinking about growth inflation Etc over the course of the next couple of years and I think if you just look at this uh I think this Administration in politics is in the driver seat at the moment much more so than inflation or the FED um and so if you look at this Administration they are very very focused on balancing the budget we know that debt is something that they care about for the first time in a long time and during this interview uh Scott Besson sort of went through how they think about alleviating the situation um and there are couple of things that you can do you can do

austerity um you can try to grow your way out of the situation you can do Financial oppression politically Financial oppression is not going to work I think with this president in particular he's very sensitive to the Common Man uh and so I don't think that's a great option Scott bezant was very uh against austerity um or severe austerity because that um negatively impacts your ability to grow your way out of it and so growth seems like the priority and so when you look at kind of the three big components that they've thrown out so far there's tariffs which is negative growth but then there are tax cuts and there's also deregulation and so what he outlined in his speech was they started with tariffs first which is obviously not good for growth and you've seen markets throw a little

bit of a hissy fit for the course of the last month but what they have in their back pockets and what they're counting on is deregulation to drive growth and tax cuts to drive growth and obviously spending is going to be a lever that they can pull how much they really end up cutting on the Doge side of things and so I think markets are pricing in tariffs because that's what's happened so far uh but ultimately you do have the promise right of tax cuts and deregulation later this year but it's an un it's kind of a Known Unknown we don't know what that's actually going to do in terms of generating growth in the real economy so I think that's what's it's yeah it's very choppy in the midterm but I think later on towards the end of this year you have things to look forward to

yeah I think that's the good point to bring up is the direction and sort of uh who's moving the pieces on monetary and fiscal policy I I firmly believe it really starts with the treasury and uh people probably don't account for how closely intertwined fed and treasury policy actually is it's been very obvious the last number of years and I don't think it's changed in in the new Administration in fact I think Powell much probably against what consensus view is of this tension between the Trump White House and Powell is actually much more aligned interests this go around at least now you know if we go through a big deep cut of Doge and

growth gets hit and we tip into a recession later in the year and they have to start stimulating pre- midterms 2026 and inflation's not down yet there might be tensions but in this point in time I I view uh very aligned interests and incentives between the two camps and I can kind of feel that from Powell where they're very comfortable waiting and I think they're they're being assured of that from from Besson and team so that's a a bit different Dynamic than prior you know at least last year where it's like hey we got an election to win you got to juice these markets uh so yeah I think that's such a good way of framing things because I think a lot of people are getting it wrong right now in that interplay between Scott bessent and

chair J pow I've seen a lot of takes where they say oh look you know Besson and Trump are trying to tank the economy to force the FED to cut rates and I I don't think that's the way to think about it I think you're correct in the way to think about it which is okay let's think about what pal has been thinking about and dealing with for the past 5 years four years now since Co basically which is a couple things you know he's trying to get a handle on inflation and with the tools that the FED has they're limited for a number of reasons we've talked about them before um but overall he's been going you know you always have to think about the economy through the lines of of fiscal and monetary and the interplay between those two and on the fiscal side of

things we've been running some of the loosest fiscal regimes you know we've been running a recessionary Playbook doing an expansion right so you know we have huge deficits we have stock prices at all-time highs all the time that's leading to this further consumption of you know higher income classes of society so you know I think those are the two big reasons why we haven't seen inflation return to 2% and now you have this Administration come up and and go to Powell and say hey look you know we're trying to get the 10-year yield down we're trying to get a handle on things we're trying to pull back you know fiscal retrenchment I think Po's over the moon yeah I mean the most clear trade to me here is longing bonds because you know you have the FED attempting to

respect the value of the dollar by not you know adding liquidity uh in the regime and and being very patient on on potential future cuts and my view is that they're in a fairly hawkish stance um and then you have the same thing on bessent bessent knows there's a big treasury Supply issuance problem on the horizon if they don't fix the deficit and you know how do you fixed you know if you're the largest Bond salesman in the world uh and you want to tell a good story about why your bonds should be at lower yield either can get growth down get inflation down or both and you know there's another pillar to this which is energy you've noticed how they have been dead set on solving Russia and Ukraine very very

obvious strategy to to lower oil prices the deal with the Saudis that I don't think got enough attention but you know we're that that was Monumental in terms of uh trying to you know add more Supply but on the other hand they do have things like uh bringing Iran from 1.5 million barrels to zero maximum pressure the potential that the Russian conflict doesn't end so soon so it's a TI tight needle to thread but uh the the main point for me is that that the Trump admin is willing to go through pain we have not seen a Administration in in a long time willing to do that and they seem very willing so I'll take take them at their word as long as their actions

cooperate which they have yeah um Mike I want to ask you because you know you are a student of History that's that's one of those traits that I feel I a nice way of calling me a nerd but thank um but okay look so you know they're playing with fire here you know if if you're trying to do what they're trying to do which is to get you know grow slow and pull things back and actually pull it off without diving into recession because I'm still not in that camp um but you know when you look at history of these moments where you go through these cycles of you know decrease in liquidity decrease in growth and then you know swooping underneath and trying to catch it you know basically a soft Landing but from a fiscal side and not letting it go to a

hard Landing um when you look at previous crises during history like what's your perspective on How likely this is for them to pull off without it going too far and then you know oh now we have to you know run up even greater fiscal deficits because we went too far too low and now we got to revitalize the the economy because you know we messed up and we're in a recession um I think that the perspective from this Administration that I agree with is that you need to grow your way out of this actually I think that there's a sort of an incorrect view that you can you know cut it the actual verbatim uh phrase from secretary uh Scott bessent was uh we don't have a revenue problem we have a spending problem and so I think his

perspective you know you often hear that you can't look at a government like household financing or startup and I think in a lot of ways you can't but I think in this one way you can there are definite revenues there were definite costs and if you were looking at a company or a startup here there's not a massive problem we've gotten out ahead of our skis but we still have the most robust economy on Earth um it's growing in a very organic and steady way um and so I think you can largely look at Doge um as a way of just riging our cost in or running at a more Break Even rate and I think a pretty decent framework for looking at the economy right now is over the course of the last two years we had a spending problem um and most of the

job growth has being driven by government and I think there's an attempt to shift growth onto the private sector through deregulation and tax cuts and I think it's a good plan like I don't really see a path here where we everyone tightens their belts and you know we take huge cuts and I just don't see without a massive crisis so I think this administration's perspective is we're going to move the impetus of growth from the public sector and government and giving away a bunch of jobs like that into the private sector and we're going to try to incentivize job growth and I think alongside that um they're very sensitive about honestly terming out our debt um so there have been some I think critical there's a lot of question marks around um uh Janet yellen's shift in terms of how she ran

uh Bond auctions for a little while moving much uh more toward uh shorter dead dated uh bills as opposed to longer dated uh treasuries and I think that um and I think that they're going to change that moving forward with uh they can mess with things like the SLR uh for banks um and actually Bon's quote was he thinks that they can reduce bips 70 basis points alone uh with just that lever yeah something that's I I want to pull into this discussion here and I'll ask you Quinn in a second here but um okay so their goal is to get the 10year down um you know they they've achieved I think 50 bits so far at the cost of a 12% Equity correction that's a that's a pretty large tradeoff I would say um and

then in the same vein I I don't think they anticipated such a fiscal reac action especially from Europe you know I I I wonder and I'm curious on your guys' takes but you know did they expect for Germany to to unleash potentially $500 billion do in in defense investment and for them to actually start running deficits again and taking off the debt leash because that's that leads to higher boond yields that leads to a higher Euro that leads to a weaker dollar that all leads to marginally also you know just from the correlation of of you know if if Capital goes back to Europe and chases those higher yields they're going to be selling mag 7 they're going to be selling us bonds that leads to higher bond yields um do you think they expected that because

that to me is a headwind against their goal of getting the 10e lower if we got every other you know we got China fiscal coming online too um those are those are negative headwinds for bond yields do you think Besson anticipated that he's I love Besson he that's I when I want to be best when I grow up but uh he he definitely KN knows this uh uh but one the trade after the trade here that I don't think most are speaking about is how you pointed out out big of a headwind that is for his uh objectives to bring inflation down and bring yields down because it's all thus far it's been two months and uh you know for all the

progress or some people view lack of progress that's been made uh things have gone quite smoothly right we've cut the deal with the Saudis to pump more oil we've uh Russia and Ukraine have largely fallen in line all our other trading partners have largely fallen in line in tariffs there hasn't been a big big breakout of global conflict or trade trade War uh noise but mechanically there are things you can't control and that is the flows which in this case lower growth lower us bond yields weakens the dollar and by definition strengthens rest of currencies it makes you know there's a reason we've had extreme concentration in our large cap

indices in the mag 7 because it's been the safety trade when the rest of the world wasn't growing when China was in recession when Europe's in recession and the US is propped up on fiscal larg s but that's reversing and so we've seen the first shot across the bat here but there's two two effects one you mentioned is the relative attractiveness of non- us assets so the US has 4% of the world's population but 60% of the global Equity market cap uh there's some mean reversion to be had making higher Global bond yields putting pressure on the US bond yields but the other thing is the downward pressure on the dollar also is importing of inflation where in the last 3ish plus years we've been actually importing

deflation relatively or disinflation relative to the rest of the world because we've had a strong dollar and so what that does is puts a sort of a floor bid under Commodities structurally that doesn't mean Commodities have to go up you know they're doing Supply things they're hurting demand so they're trying other methods but there's structural headwinds that come in that make it more difficult you could even see a situation where China Europe Japan start running so hot relative to to what best it needs to do to get our yields down that he just the global cost of capital is rising inflation starts Rising for for no reason of of his where you you could even see a situation where for him to

achieve his goals he'd have to say hey guys like you got to tighten up the belt like we are like you know this is inflationary I don't know if that's going to happen yet but so it's a it's a very tight tight Loop to thread and uh I I have to at this moment be in the skeptic Camp if that if it can actually fully get done without more pain first for for risk assets I don't know I think um I mean I think that you can look at some some of the actions of uh this administr I mean this Administration does tell you exactly how they think and what they want right I mean this is Trump has been super consistent on this you can find yields or uh interviews going back to the 80s where he thinks that the rest of the world especially Europe does not pay

their fair share for defense and he said repeatedly this is what I want and then he sent JD Vance to Munich and he makes a fiery 15minute speech and you know two weeks later they're spending you know they're proposing a $500 billion fiscal investment in into rearmament right uh um I don't know I don't I'm unclear if that's a good thing for the rest of the world um or for all but that's I think that's kind of the trend and that's they made it very clear that that's what they want yeah so another piece of the puzzle here which is you know related to the reason that we're actually here today which is a digital asset Summit but there's a lot of cross currence between you know what can we what can the administration do with stable coins as a marginal buyer of debt what can the

administration do with a Bitcoin strategic reserve and how does that sit within the interplay of everything we're talking about so I want to I want to you know maybe start with you Mike just I'm not actually sure where you stand right now on the Bitcoin strategic reserve and all of that and how you think about that from like the super high level macro goals here of of this Administration and and achieving the goals that they're talking about like where does that sit within it and then also stable coins in terms of being the fastest growing marginal buyer of that debt um on the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve I'm not sure if I get it um I don't really like it actually I think that the US still is in this position of enormous privilege of being the issuer of the global Reserve currency um the only thing better than having to back

your currency with high quality collateral is not having to back it and being the collateral itself right and so I just sort of wonder if you have a strategic Bitcoin Reserve you're saying this is strategic to my country for some reason Bitcoin doesn't exist in the real world right we don't have liabilities denominated in Bitcoin um like we do with petroleum and so what is the message that you're sending the only thing that you could be back stopping is your currency to be honest I just I don't love it um that's part of the reason I've never really loved it on corporate balance sheets either which I know people love in this space um but yeah so I'm not a huge fan of the the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve or honestly the stock Pile in general um but that's just my personal perspective um on the

stable coin front I think that's massive for the United States and I think it's not uh it's not an accident that the only you know when you hear about you know H like cabinet members um or Scott Besson talking about anything related to crypto he's talking about stable coins um and actually Brian moan the CEO of Bank of America when he was talking about Bank of America potentially launching a stable coin I thought he phrased it very interestingly he's like I don't see the difference between this and Bank deposits and I think if you squint at it it's kind of hard to see what the difference is between that and Bank deposits but they're certainly a large uh buyer and already a very large owner of uh you know us treasuries and so I think Scott Besson is a guy who knows monetary Plumbing very deeply like

I mentioned before he's already talking about messing with uh the SLR of banks to allow them to be more deregulated and buy more us bonds I think he sees this as an incremental buyer of bonds so I think it's extremely it's part of the reason why you know it's one of these massive Tailwinds I think that exists for stable coins in the US in general yeah on the Strategic reserve the the best idea I've heard is if the US has some stranded power assets that they could they could you know use to to mine Bitcoin with with excess energy um it's a not great business though hash price and revenue profitability for miners is is back to extreme lows sort of bare Market lows just given the growth and

and hash rate and difficulty um but when you zoom out and just take off the like tinted goggles of being a crypto fanatic like you see the the four countries that have Bitcoin reserves is North Korea El Salvador Bhutan and the US and like I don't know is that like super exciting if if you're another country like it doesn't feel like there's this Global race to acquire Bitcoin to me um and you know we're a deor nation we're running massive deficits it's fungible right bence like we're talking about how intelligent and logical and rational he is and he's not going to just say like

oh well we could sell gold to buy like no it's all fungible like debt deficit like if we spend somewhere here we have to cut here if we add here we like and he gets that so I just I don't I think it's a fulfilled campaign promise th far and I don't really see a lot of legs to it um but on the stable coin front you know two goals right get yields down so increase demand for your debt he's the largest Bond salesman us treasury bond salesman and they like I just mentioned a weaker dollar is a headwind because it's inflationary and so he wants to higher demand for US dollars so both of those things when you see stable coins go from non-existent to a top 20 holder of your national debt is pretty

inspiring and something I would be doing everything possible to increase around the globe so stable coins continue to be the most obvious uh you know thing for for them to focus on within digital assets I also I want to ask you I want get your opinion on the um this uh Sovereign wealth fund us Sovereign wealth fund as well this has been I'm torn between being excited about it thinking it's interesting and not 100% understanding it you by my understanding of sovereign wealth funds is you know if you're a country and you're generating Surplus Revenue that you can't reinvest back into your own domestic economy then you move it mostly into the United States um but we're deor Nation so that makes less sense for us but you know if you had done that you know if you had

put one of these together 50 years ago You' have done extremely well um and Social Security might not be underfunded but on the uh on the stable coin front I also wonder if they are looking at this this is potential disruption to the commercial banking system uh I don't have folks in this room uh has anyone heard the term narrow banking before um my man uh so narrow banking was something that um has been tried you know a couple times over the course of the past decade but there have been pushes to allow um different institutions or even individuals to bank directly with the Federal Reserve so the advantage of this would be there's zero risk you have no counterparty risk um the disadvantage of this would be and why the FED is always pushed back against it is one they don't

want a Direct Banking relationship with everyone um but they also don't want to do is undermine their own commercial banking system because who would bank with JP Morgan uh if you could Bank directly with the fed and take absolutely no risk right so it's undermining to them and so you kind of have on the one hand over here banking directly with the FED on the other hand over here you're banking with a commercial bank which is backed up by a pretty diverse set of loans right like different duration uh treasuries you know private credit whatever it is and then there's this kind of Middle Ground here which is stable coins which are Bank like global bank deposits which are just backed by very short dated government debt um and sort of a low overhead Global from day one sort of bank deposit actually that looks maybe like a new

form of banking and could actually be pretty disruptive to Commercial Banking in the US not in one or two years but maybe in five or 10 so I wonder if they're thinking like that also on the uh Sovereign wealth fund I think I'm probably only suppor supportive if Tim Walls is CIO and Nancy Pelosi's running the options book I got number one trador I got some spicy takes on The Sovereign wealth fund too um to your point the US is a deor nation I almost said my country but I'm Canadian um 51 51 maybe maybe maybe for now already in slip already in slip yeah I know yeah um fenar look if you're a Dead Nation and

you want to run a seven Sovereign wealth fund setting aside all the fancy tricks that they're talking about like you know taking the gold reserves and marking at the market and put in there or you know the the ass the digital assets that they've already seized putting that in that that's all great but if you get to the point where you're like okay we want to actually structurally run a sovereign wealth fund but we're a deader country you have to start asking where does that Capital come from and it comes from the private sector it comes from taxpayers so if it's coming from taxpayers if if you're in agreement with that you're making the admission that you are willing to allow the government to work as a pension fund basically on your behalf you know I myself you know I I definitely lean more libertarian I'm not

really interested in that premise I'm much more interested in deciding myself what pension fund what head fund I want to provide my Capital towards I'm not really interested in taking it you know in letting them take the taxpaying money and and letting that fund The Sovereign wealth fund so I don't like you know the idea of it is great because yes they're going to you know infinite T our bags and that's all awesome and good but I think that's why people like it let's just be real that's why people like it and this is the issue with so much of crypto sometimes is that it leads people to lose these ideological beliefs that they have it's like okay well if we're all like free market Believers and we're also excited about this idea that we create like a tax funded hedge fund I'm just I'm not on board with that idea I

think there's like an underlying I agree with that it it just it's more government uh there's things that make for governments to help incubate and I think they do that already quite a bit with all these other agencies and things but um the underlying thing that maybe people don't talk about is uh if you have a balanced budget responsible monetary policy and uh people respecting the value of Fiat uh you sort of don't need Bitcoin like you you know so that's I mean I'm a longrun Believer because I don't think those things are going to be achieved by government governments globally in in perpetuity but that is the truth if if

if Bitcoin was born and exists and as a flight of safety store value and protection of of purchasing power so if you don't have those which is what a smart treasury secretary is attempting to do uh yeah and and then on the other side I think that doesn't get enough talk is at least the possibility that the US's strong State sponsorship ship of Bitcoin makes it at least relatively less attractive to countries like Russia who just got uh hundreds of millions of their reserves confiscated essentially and and ir and sanctions and and all these sorts of things that like you said are the ideological Foundation of it

being an outside the system asset versus something that has State sponsorship and and embrace um okay Mike I want to get into you with you about what I felt like is the big theme of this conference so far which is you know it's it's a lot of an Institutional audience and they are very excited about the crypto industry right now it feels like you know finally the regulatory unshackling is occurring they can finally start to allocate in ways in confidence you know we can have Banks start to actually custody digital assets this is like fantastic stuff but then you know you go on crypto Twitter you go and and check out what retail is feeling like right now and it's just it's it's it's abysmal it's it feels like a bare Market Market um there's just been the

meme coin Market implosion like what is what is going on which which side is right right now is institutional just exit liquidity and that's a smart money or is it the opposite um I don't know I mean I think the thing that's working right now right is I mean you know keep in mind bitcoin's been around for 17 years right that was it it was the opposite of a smooth run and now it looks so good there's a strategic Bitcoin Reserve that the US is uh laid out um everyone knows what the narrative is but man I mean there were so many times when it looked like it wasn't going to make it it took a long time to get here everything else in crypto is much much newer than that I mean even like the second most battl tested ground

here would be sort of defi built on ethereum that's been around for six years you know if you're being pretty generous um it just takes a long time for these things ultimately to get built out and I think underneath the these undeniably positive headlines um there are still big ideological and almost Technical and frankly like political challenges to deal with like one of the big unanswered questions is how has largely much less regulated and importantly non kyc defi going to interact with um traditional Finance like that is still a very open question that people don't have great answers to these are thorny questions but they're not impossible questions and eventually

they will get answered I would guess that and the reason why none of the crypto natives really like that is how do you invest in a stable coin right like is USD going to5 that just you there's nothing to buy I mean it's pretty buy or sell and so it's not going to be sexy but there is going to be a long buildout where you know you have at what you have at the end of the day is a better and very different Financial system only once that has been solved and rolled out to enough people can you get businesses that wouldn't be able to exist um otherwise and so I kind of think we're in for a couple of years I think the other thing that's going to be difficult for people to Wrangle with as well is you know there have been different phases of Builders and

investors in this space that have done well you know if you got here in the early days I mean you were an idealogue like there was no reason for you to be messing around with Bitcoin in 2010 or 2011 unless you were very pretty libertarian and you had an ideological reason for being here and the next phase was kind of honestly was catalyzed mostly by ethereum and it's like hey we can actually build stuff and you brought in these tinkerers you know these like Visionary Founders who like look way into the future and somehow you know will what we have today into existence but now what we need today is scalers and um operators and so you know that's going to be disappointing that's going to be actively disappointing to ideologues and tinkerers who don't want that to be the case and there's going to

be a lot of churn um while the hard stuff actually gets built out and so I I see you know I see a lot of optimism because I think a lot of this stuff is going to finally start to work at scale but it's going to actively upset the group of people that are currently here is my bet um okay we got about 5 minutes left here and I just want to go through I'll start with UK Quinn but I want to ask and I'll go last as well but what is your uh highest conviction trade or bet for the next four months yeah for me it's um longing duration bonds tltv type of 10 to 30y year um until the FED blinks and cuts which is at least a couple

months off so or we get a or further further enough correction in Risk assets to elicit a change in in in tone from the administration and uh Treasury and fed so other than that you know if you the Reason by the dip has worked so well for stocks and risk over the last two years is because it never affected the economy and earn so going back to uh late summer issues last year with the Yen that was more kind of nuance technical deleveraging it wasn't an economic issue the April real yield scare of 24 with kind of Middle East issues again sort of an inflation

scare but not an earnings thing October 23 similar deal uh March banking crisis back stopped immediately but there was concerns but this is the first time where it's like oh actually no there's actually down downside earnings potential with everything that's happening from the fiscal side and no liquidity support from the fed and and that is what I think drove such a steep deleveraging in the equity markets and why I maintain a bit more caution than maybe the average person here and again I I just really until the treasury starts to do until their words and actions don't line up then I'll start to

maybe question it but it's very clear to me at this stage that and we're so early right I mean the correction was Swift but it's like one month like like 2022 was 12 or whatever 10 uh so these things can last and there's just really no reason for them to if they reignite the economy here yields go up and this is very counterproductive and they have plenty of time midterms is the next stop you know the stop Gap and you work back a little bit we know how short people's memories are and so I kind of think for the remainder of the year it's like you can imagine the administration is like selling calls on

the equity indices and and risk assets like they don't want it to collapse they but they they don't really want it to you know be ripping face like yelling and and Biden into the election so yeah I think selling selling upside when when on rallies and and uh being long bonds until they're forced to Pivot Mike um I'm not a Trader so you should not listen to me um but I actually uh I kind of like Robin Hood here uh as an individual stock it's um you know there's an enormous amount of attention that gets paid towards coinbase is an index bet on crypto Robin hoods are a very similar business they have more

monthly active users they have an even more retail user base and more valuable order flow they have a really competent team in crypto you can see Vlad ten of posting on Twitter every other day about all the stuff that they want to do they want to tokenize a bunch of assets there's a huge amount there from launching an L2 to doing a stable coin basically just running the Playbook that coin bases run um so something to watch do not not investment advice not trainer you're believer in the tech that's for sure long-term High Time Horizon um okay my trade for this is something that I've been shopping around still thinking about but um I'm bearish mag 7 generally speaking I think there's too much capital in it versus what's happening in the rest of the world so the thing is that you know the rest of the world Europe equities

they've just been going gang busters and parabolic so I don't really want to touch that either and I've been thinking more and more about uh short short QQQ short NASDAQ long Bitcoin and here's why own Bitcoin is a global asset that is affected by liquidity yes mostly us liquidity but the fact is is that when you have what's happening in Europe on the fiscal when you have what's happening in China on unleashing you know they've been doing the monetary thing but now they're really coming in size on the fiscal thing I have a feeling that as there's outflows out of NASDAQ out of Mag 7 going back home that Bitcoin will you know this is always the debate right is that is Bitcoin just highly correlated to NASDAQ and I I I might see this opportunity for a

decoupling there where just the the liquidity impulse from the rest of the world starts to uplift it so you know obviously you want to you want to match the vola ility or the Delta there but I think short NASDAQ long Bitcoin is interesting for that reason particularly as long as gold keeps its as scent I think it's a reasonable if Bitcoin succeeds it has to decouple from longtail De at some point yeah there you go um all right that's all the time we had thank you all so much for coming um quick plug we are doing a Ford guidance Meetup in a couple hours so come by for a beer we'll be there it'll be fun um yeah thanks for thanks for listening everybody cheers everyone thanks [Music]

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