Is the traditional four-year cycle over in crypto?

Transcript

GM good morning welcome to the milroad show The Daily crypto show that's as automatic as Kobe's mid-range jumper I'm your host Jay Hamilton it's Wednesday February 19th and we are live yet again if you guys are joining us live give me a what's up in the chat great to see you today we are joined by the bitwise boys Ryan resm and Matt Hogan bitwise one of the largest crypto funds in the world managing some fantastic ETFs and some great index funds today we're going to talk about Trump's exec orders and the shift in Washington is that a big enough Catalyst to break the four-year crypto cycle that we have seen happening over

and over again could this cycle be different and extend into 2026 and Beyond we're going to ask that question and break that down with the boys also we're going to take a look at what these guys believe is the most important animportant chart in crypto right now and how that might give you an edge in your investments in the short term before we jump in guys we got some big news we are launching a milk Road Show telegram group because I want to chat with you guys directly on a regular day-to-day basis I'm an investor you guys are an investor we want to get our Edge and we want to support each other so hit the link in the show notes join the telegram group if you guys have a question for a guest you can let us know we'll ask them all these things we'll be

talking about on on a regular basis there today's episode is brought to you by bybit you guys got to check out their new trade GPT it's an AI powered assistant that makes token analysis super simple also today's episode is brought to you by crypto.com one of my favorite crypto cards great perks access to lounges and so much more check it out in the show notes without further Ado bitwise boys welcome back to the show thanks for having us excited to be here thank you always excited to have you guys also like that we spelled boys with a zed it kind of brings a little bit of edge to to this to this group here okay let's let's start with um the the big question that a lot of people have been

batting around recently is the question that Matt you you put out on Twitter a few weeks ago which is is is the four-year cycle over is it different and this this question gets brought up probably every fouryear cycle around this time and so far it hasn't been different so people are wondering if it's different this time before we before we jump into talking about is it different Matt could you just quickly explain what the fouryear cycle is and give us a little bit of context so we make sure that everybody understands it yeah 100% one of my favorite topics so historically if you look at the returns of crypto it has a marked four-year cycle three big up years and then a pullback year you can see it there

started in 2011 three big up years then we got crushed in 2014 when Mount Cox collapsed 2015 through 2017 three big up years and then crushed in 2018 during the Ico Crackdown so this is much discussed I will say that a lot of people give the wrong explanation when they talk about why this cycle exists they point to the Bitcoin having which coincidentally happens every four years but you can look at this chart and you know that the Bitcoin having doesn't happen at the start of these cycles and people sort of tie themselves up in knots with this you know 18mon delay I I just think it's wrong from my view the reason this cycle happens is there's a catalyst that gets

the market excited so in 2011 it was the launch of coinbase it's the first time retail investors could actually buy Bitcoin without having a PhD and that brought a lot of new capital into the market three big up years massive Bull Run leverage built up the system got too big for its its sort of infrastructural underpinnings and something broke and then the Leverage retreated same thing in 2015 that was the launch of ethereum people got all excited we had the Ico boom huge amount of Leverage built up in the system and then the SEC sort of broke the Egg The Leverage flushed out and it collapsed so this is the same as any economic cycle Jay if you look at the economy we get these Bull and bare

markets the reason is something starts a bull market leverage builds up the system gets overhyped and it collapses our view is that that the current cycle started when Grace scale won its lawsuit against the SEC that was March 2023 you could look at a chart crypto had been down basically only held steady and then started ripping we think that this cycle is driven by mainstream investors coming into the market for the first time ever and that chart would suggest that you know maybe 2026 would be a pullback year but as you hinted at in your suggestion I actually don't think that is going to be the case and and we can talk about

why if you're interested yeah definitely want to jump into why so just just because I think this chart is so great to really describe this where we are right now in the cycle is according to past Cycles we would be 2025 would be a great year we would continue to do well and then we would see the pullback in 2026 if we followed this pattern people for a long time have been saying this pattern can't continue forever it will eventually change it almost seems like a bit of a a cheat code that it just keeps following this same pattern uh what is making you think that this cycle could be different yeah so for one I'm

starting to see the same signs we've seen historically right Leverage is building up in the system so to some extent it's true companies are issuing debt to buy Bitcoin you can see leverage building up in the derivatives market so we see this classic cycle ccle but you can think of it as this like little wave that would naturally come down but we had this tectonic election and we have this crypto executive order that says crypto is now a national priority of the largest economy in the world to make a big thing we have institutions that are now Unleashed to come into this market and I think this this little natural fouryear cycle wave is going to look like a ripple on the water and there is

this idle wave of institutional interest and institutional adoption coming that's just going to plow it over now could we have volatility of course we're going to have volatility we're going to have the deleveraging process but when you have like Goldman Sachs JP Morgan and Pension funds and endowments and Sovereign wealth funds coming into the market none of that matters it's just going to get washed over so I think the I think the cycle will continue there'll be volatility but I think it's going to continue my guess is 2026 is an up year uh to put a fine point on it okay okay and and and to be clear 2025 you also believe is an up here 2025 is going to be great I I think I I know we're all

dancing in despair uh at the Libra mem coin and the death of meme coins my fundamental thesis on crypto was never built on memec coin pump and dump schemes it was built on something more fundamental than that and and I think the bull market there is is is going to you know take over in a few weeks um and move us substantially forward so I think 2025 is going to be a good year I think 2026 is going to be a good year I think 2027 is going to be a good year we haven't repealed pullbacks of course there will be pullbacks but this is the biggest cycle in crypto's history if you think about the Quantum of money that needs to come into the market like a trillion dollar needs to buy crypto in

past Cycles it was like $10 billion in retail investors wanted to buy it's a trillion dollars 100x so I think it's going to continue for a while yeah if I can just add add to that I think you know one of the strong reasons why we believe this time is different is because that final wave in year three to Matt's point it's not retail money this time retail's already in the market in a major way and the institutional Capital that we expect to flow in in 2025 and then extend it in 2026 is not only magnitudes larger than retail investors Capital but also it's net long-term it's not focused on shortterm you know as Matt mentioned pumpin nums or just short-term gains if

you think about the last cycle what what happened at the end of year three that led us to year four a lot of that was nft markets going crazy altcoins going crazy these CI lending platforms spinning up 25% apy on algorithmic stable coins things like that and that's not what the institutional investors that we speak to are excited about it's not why they're still bullish on the future of crypto it's the other things that Matt mentioned it's this regulatory shift happening in the US these new products that are available to institutional investors so they can allocate in their broader portfolios that one two 3% which ultimately does add up to trillions of dollars in long-term capital I think that's why this final push is in order of magnitude different than the final push we've seen

in year three of Prior Cycles so M Matt you mentioned uh that you think in a few weeks we could see a pump what's what's where's that coming from why are you saying that well when you think about the recent cycle like crypto's despair cycle has gotten much shorter I know people have forgotten this but we were in existential despair post Melania like the world was ending then we completely forgot about it and we saw you know money come back in and then we entered re existential despair for Libra and I feel like all of crypto thinks like well this is it this is it it's over it's the end we're all going to zero you might as well quit there's

just nothing in history suggests that's true you know Ryan and I spend all our time talking to uh institutions about allocating to this space I'm going to do two sessions immediately after this with large you know multi-billion dollar asset managers they don't even know Libra happened they're just plowing money into the space I don't understand how you can be bearish when you know Abu Dhabi just bought $500 million with a Bitcoin right that versus yet another pump and dump meme coin I'll take that 10 times so I think we're going to forget this despair I think the bull market forces are too strong and you know these coming months April tends to

be a great month in crypto things tend to repeat I I think by that time we're going to be doing fine Brian you have anything to add or yeah I just would add one one anecdote there as well Matt mentioned we spent a lot of our time on the road talking to institutional investors about two weeks ago I was on the road with one of the members of our distribution team and in a matter of three days we had 10 meetings with different raas uh from all different sizes some manage a 100 million some manage more than a billion some manage around five billion and the common theme across all of these these meetings that we had what was twofold one not a single one of them asked about meme coins and if you think about this this was like right after Trump took

office and Melania and Trump tokens kind of Pumped and dumped and they're just not thinking about it they're not on crypto Twitter they're not in the trenches like like some of us are and so they're they're just not thinking about it what they are thinking about the second theme that pulled through in those meetings was they're trying to figure out how Bitcoin ethereum salana these large market cap crypto assets fit into their portfolio over the long term yeah I would just I would just build on that one more thing sorry we can't shut up because we're so uh imp passionate about it the single best time to invest and this is my experience being in this market for eight years the single best time to invest is when the short-term sentiment is bad and the

long-term trends are good and I've never felt a moment in the market where that is more true than it is right now the short-term sentiment is so negative the long-term view is so positive that is always and forever opportunity for long-term investors yeah I'm going to use that I'm going to bring up the the chart here that you have labeled the most important chart in crypto right now uh it is exactly what you were just discussing but Matt I'll I'll let you uh take us through this chart what you're seeing yeah so this is our internal you know bitwise generated sentiment score it looks at a something like 35 different factors and what we've cycled circled here is that it's in Despair and you know this if you've been on crypto

Twitter or you've been on discords uh I remember watching the David Sachs conference on YouTube and I was listening to it and like cheering my heart out because you know the the the official Administration was saying we have the right to self- Sovereign crypto assets said you could code in defi said we're going to get a regulatory structure we're going to study the US buying uh Bitcoin as a strategic Reserve I was through the moon and then the cycle of comments on the right was just absolute existential despair because David Sachs didn't come in and fat finger a million Bitcoin you know within an hour right and so uh just that dichotomy that's why that chart is so

important because particularly if you're in my seat and you spend all your time with institutional investors people are unanimously bullish they look at the regulatory switch they look at the flood of institutional capital and they understand that those are just forces that cannot be denied so it's important to remember for the institutional community that retail is in this state of despair and vice versa if you're on crypto Twitter and Discord only you should know that there's another class of people managing you know hundred trillion dollar in assets who's looking at this thing and saying how fast can I get in and I think that's that's really an important dichotomy in the market right now Ryan in your mind uh why is sentiment so bad in in the retail side

yeah I think it's pretty much you know many retail investors particularly over the last six to to n months have seen enormous amounts of wealth be created via mean coins and ALT coins in a matter of hours or days and it's hard to to fight the temptation to try to get in on that so what I think we've seen a lot of retail investors do is Skip past the Bitcoins and the ethereum and the salonas of the world even skip past the S and aptose and other l1s that have performed relatively well well and go straight to these meme coins which you know as we say pump and dump you know very often and so I think has happened is a ton of retail investors have have chased gains and are down bad there's

there's this a heat map that we looked at for year-to dat returns of crypto assets and there's a few green spots and it's mostly red and those green spots are Bitcoin salana xrp yeah there's the chart right there this shows I think why retail sentiment is so bad because majority of retail investors today I believe are allocated to the Reds here and majority of them are not allocated to the greens and that's the difference between where institutional capital is flowing and where retail Capital has flowed for the past six to nine months and of course the Vibes are terrible when you're down 60 70 80% uh for you know half your portfolio or three quarters of your portfolio how could how could it not feel like we're at the end despite Bitcoin being at 100K despite

there being not a single bearish thing that happened since Trump took office as it relates to crypto so I think that's the reason why retail sentiment is just so bad and why it's so disconnected with institutional sentiment okay so let's here's the big question is is who who's right uh is are the institutions right or or is retail right I'll either of you guys can jump in yeah I mean they're probably right they're probably both right right the the thing that retail is right about and is waking up and realizing is that the median crypto asset or mcoin is going to zero and the thing institutions are right about is that the average crypto asset is going to 10x in the next 10

years right and the difference between that the median being if you take all of them and you invest equally I think the majority of them are going to go to zero but if you do it on a market cap weighted basis I think the size of the crypto Market is going to go from3 to30 trillion right but if you're a if you're if you're choosing the wrong horses you're right to be in despair right if if if you if you own meme coins if you're speculating on 100x altcoins I think a lot of that is going to go to zero we've been here before this is 2018 Redux this is the Ico boom when people woke up to the reality that these things were all worth zero and there was existential despair but that didn't stop the Bitcoin train it didn't stop the

ethereum train it didn't stop the birth of salana and new real projects the same thing is true right now so the average asset is on its way to zero but if you're allocating to the the better part of crypto I think it's a tremendous opportunity so I think they're both right okay so we've got this situation where retail is down bad there's a lot of pain institutions are super positive and very bullish to me that's an edge that's does that say that's an opportunity but the key is what you're saying Matt is it depends on which tokens you're investing in and how you're allocating for you guys when

you're talking to institutions what's what's the allocation that they're looking at are they just doing Bitcoin are they going into other tokens and I kind of want to lead into we talk a lot about on the show about you know keep the allocation simple right like invest 80% of your portfolio Bitcoin eth and soul I know it sounds boring and not exciting but at least you know the the line I love to give is look at least if you hold held eth this whole time sure you're not up but you're not at zero and you're never going to zero so and I still feel pretty good about East but would love to get your thoughts on portfolio allocation yeah I'm happy happy to take

this one and Matt can build on it uh from from there think what's important to remember when we're talking to these institutional investors these wealth managers financial advisors family offices it's really a small portion of their overall portfolio that they're thinking about or are starting to allocate to crypto and that's important because when you think about their day-to-day of managing their Investments they don't want to spend two three four five hours a day checking in on crypto Market scrolling crypto Twitter checking in you know the trending tokens on coin market cap or coinbase they just want to set and foret forget and so I think that's important because when we talk to these investors majority of them are asking about Bitcoin ethereum I do get

questions on xrp in salana more recently I will say got a ton of questions on xrp when I was on the road a couple of weeks ago more than I've ever gotten talking to investors I think that's just a signal of these these investors looking at you know what are the bigger market cap assets I think they're also looking at what assets will I be able to allocate to you have to remember that a lot of these wealth managers are only able to invest client assets in ETFs in certain products that are approved in the platforms they trade or clear or custody through and because of that they're really Limited in what they can invest in and they're Limited in the the the the capacity they have to monitor the crypto market so they really want set and forget strategies a lot of investors ask us how to build a crypto

sleeve should it be that 80% Bitcoin 10% ethereum 10% xrp should it be a market cap weighted approach we think indexing is going to be a huge narrative over the next two years in the same way that indexing is is a huge part of traditional Equity investing and that many investors are going to want to just allocate to an index fund that tracks the top 10 20 30 crypto assets by market cap rebalances and follows a set of rules or a certain methodology and that allows them to set and forget it and spend most of their time focused on what the majority of their portfolio is allocated to which is equities uh and bonds and other Al alternative assets yeah I would I would just add on that I love your you know Holy Trinity of

Bitcoin eth and salana as 80% of the portfolio that also allows you to take real risks with the 20% of your portfolio and you know as I look at the market I see some green shoots in areas that people aren't talking about where I think you have early signs that we're going to get a substantial revaluation of these markets so I think there's some exciting places to play with that 20% but I agree completely with Ryan the people we talk to basically just want to bet on crypto which means an index based portfolio and it means a lot of Bitcoin I know we don't like to talk about bitcoin's two-thirds of the market right so if you're less than two3 Bitcoin in your portfolio you're making a very specific active bet on altcoins and I

think that's hard for people to uh to Gro but I do think there's some interesting areas for risk on trading as well okay with I gotta naturally ask you that question but before I I do Matt uh you you mentioned a few moments ago that we're at three trillion crypto market cap now you think we're going to 30 TR trillion we had Dan tapiero on the show a few weeks ago he said 50 trillion he just launched his new fund 50t uh R Paul likes to say a 100 trillion so we have these big numbers being being thrown out there by incredibly smart experienced investors who've been in the space for a long time where did you get your 30 trillion number from is that and what's

the time frame that you marker that on yeah I think you know look I think bitcoin's going to be as big as gold in five or six years that's $20 trillion right there so that only leaves $10 trillion left I think it's easy to look at the programmable blockchain space and suggest that if it's successful so that's the important caveat but if you think the world of Finance is going to move over public blockchain rails there's just no way it doesn't 10x right like the that you have to get 100x more people onto this Market if you look at the the coins people love to hate the most from a token economic perspective like let's take xrp if the number of people transactions on xrp 100 xes that

blockchain is burning 1% of its supply per year and I think it gets substantially revalued and that's probably the most difficult token economic model to support so if we export that to something like salana or something like eth or something like sui with a more normalized token economic model that puts more value onto the underlying chain and you 100x the users how does it not 10x so that gets to 30 trillion right maybe Dan is right like you know Bitcoin could be much more than that depends on our time frame but I don't see a world where this Market is successful and we're not at least at that kind of level and that's that's sort of how I think about it I I also think that you know Matt spoke about if

the programmable blockchain ecosystem is successful in disrupting and overhauling the traditional Financial system what is that opportunity five trillion 10 trillion could be something like that but you start thinking about some of these other forecasts like R Paul is you know very bullish on web 3 as a whole disrupting many different Industries and I think that's when you start to get the even higher multiples when you start to look at the different addressable markets that the broader programmable blockchain and crypto ecosystem is going after Beyond just the gold market and the traditional Financial ecosystem and that's you know where you get those really exciting numbers from that are you know 50 100 trillion yeah and and that the the disrupting Finance feels so obvious it's an how how could it not happen it is better technology that is

cheaper and more profitable for these Banks and these businesses and and then we have regulation coming and the president who believes in it so that feels obvious the other stuff the web 3 stuff is definitely further down the road so we'll see whether that stuff happens or not uh Matt CH question in the chat I got to come back you you talked about some areas you see for green investment right now what are they yeah so so I'm looking at what are the early signals that the change in administration is going to reshape the market and there three that I've seen that really stand out to me so one is just institutional investment into Bitcoin right like if we look at the flows into ETFs since the administration came in there's huge institutional investment flows are accelerating into ETFs so I think Bitcoin is a very easy

bet the two other sort of green shoots that I noticed you know Jupiter turned on a fee switch and all of a sudden it's burning $100 million uh per year that's really a notable fact to me I don't think that would have happened two or three or four months ago because there's too much regulatory pressure and that suggests to me that in the def5 space we're going to see protocols go from sort of this fuzzy economic value governance token to cash flow driven governance or cash flow driven tokenomics and I think you're going to see a substantial revaluation of the defi space when we get away from these soft squishy governance-based tokens to tokens that actually have real economic

value I didn't see many people talk about that but I don't think that is a shift we would have seen in the past the other sort of defi related shift I saw was Ono Finance talking about offering tokenized stocks to a global audience that's not an announcement that they would have made pre- November or pre the January executive order and I think that's another signal that we're going to see defi moving aggressively into traditional regulated markets so the things people have been always dreaming about is actually starting to unfold so I think defi is particularly attractive because I think it's suffered from this sort of weak connection to token value and I think they're early signs that

that's going to be reversed and it's suffered from being willing to interact with the regulated World which is of course orders of magnitude bigger than the crypto world and I think they're early signs that that is going to happen as well so Bitcoin Defi and then of course you know you look at the growth of stable coins it's it's The Little Engine That Could uh so anything in the stable coin ecosystem I think is an interesting area to think about but those are a few areas I don't see people you know talking enough about Ryan anything uh anything that you're liking well I do think Matt has a really good point about defi which you know has been uh really has really gotten battered since the the heights of the 2021 Mar Market but I think defi is

this really unique space right now where we're seeing because of the regulatory shift that's happening and because of just the growth of the crypto ecosystem we're seeing these def5 protocols or experiments finally turn a corner and turn into real businesses and I think an analogy to make there is when you when you had companies like uber who were being fought by Regulators in major cities that weren't able to grow their business weren't able to deploy their business it really hampered their growth and I think what we're seeing today with protocols like Jupiter and Unis Swap and and defi protocols uh defi lending protocols like maker you just saw run uh the founder of maker put out a proposal

to cut Opex to Zero by a certain uh uh date right these these D5 protocols now are finally seeing the opportunity where they can unleash new business models that you know don't put them in the regulatory crosshairs because this new Administration is more crypto-friendly and it's going to put clear rules and regulations in place for how these protocols can operate like companies I think that's really bullish for the long-term growth of the defi sector especially you know those protocols like Unis swap the most popular crypto application out there built on built on uh the blockchain right and now they're generating fees that are being distributed to stakers of the uni token through the uni chain right that's a new business model they're deploying and they're able to do that with a little

bit more confidence that they're not going to be hit with the wells notice and sued by the SEC uh next month or six months from now and that's going to allow investors to feel more comfortable investing in that token for the long term how do we how do we Save retail here that's that I feel like that's the position we're in here you know because it just seems you have it seems so obvious like Bitcoin seems so obvious I know maybe it's only like one and a half X from here maybe it's 2X and maybe it's not the you know is the 10 or the X that retail so desires but it just you know D we've been talking about D5 for for

years and it seems so it is going to these these protocols that have real revenues that are really working that have these very healthy tokenomics you mentioned Jupiter you know it's it is and not to mention all of these defi protocols a lot of them take advantage of me coins because they're involved in the trading aspect of it so it's it just feels so obvious but I guess you know gamblers be gamblers like I don't I don't know how to how do we how do we help everybody not fall and trip on their own feet in this truly life-changing opportunity right like you could be sitting here five years from now and you could have compounded and

probably gotten you know twox a year like I'm going to be really conservative here and you'd be laughing or you could sit here and basically probably be be zero maybe lost all your capital or not gone anywhere and it just I don't know I just feel I don't want I I want everyone to win 100% yeah I'd hate to see you know people have been in crypto through the difficult period fumble it at the one yard line which I think you're seeing to some degree look from my perspective this is the single best time in history on a risk adjusted basis to invest in crypto because the it's been so significantly der risked we're not going to get you know 10 ,000 X returns but it's been so significantly

de-risked over the last year that on a risk adjusted basis there's never been a better moment so I really love your you know keep most of your portfolio broadly based in crypto to make sure you capture this opportunity you're going to be really sad if 10 years from now crypto is enormous and you were early to this space but you were in only in meme coins or you know thousand X effort and you missed the boom you don't want to do that so keep most of your portfolio in broad-based crypto and then set aside 20% you know Ryan and I do this as well to invest in the things that you could think could 10 or 100x I think that's pretty good uh pretty good

way to approach it yeah I I think there's a certain element of this where uh you know retail has to save itself in a in a certain way because a lot of this is behavioral right you wouldn't walk into a casino or you shouldn't walk into a casino inp your entire paycheck week after week at the blackjack table right many people love gambling some people love sports gambling some people like gambling at the casino right but doing in a way where whatever you lose uh isn't going to you know force you to uh to miss your your rent payments and whatnot I think it's really important I think that's the way to think about investing in in these meme coins is that a little can go a long way but you shouldn't uh you shouldn't get lost uh you know in in the narrative that Meme

coins are going to be the one thing that that 10x is over the next five years and so I think that's really important uh and also I think macro Will Save retail a bit here I mean I think Trump wants lower interest rates I think we'll get lower interest rates you're seeing talks of you know Elon proposing a $5,000 stimulus to uh to every American citizen right we saw if that happens we saw what happened to markets when we had stimulus back in the covid era so I think there's an element here where you know there there could be some uh macro ta inss that help save retail and and you get one of those Rising Tides scenarios but most importantly I think it's important to have a base to your portfolio and then you can you know have

shoots out from there but don't really stray from those major crypto assets which are going to transform the finance industry and other types of Industries over the next five or 10 years let's let's touch on macro quickly before we let you guys go uh because this is the the big thing that retail tends not to understand or to pay attention to uh but it is liquidity is the tide that lifts All Ships and as you said uh Ryan macro is probably Gonna Save A Lot of retail here uh when we look at the current macro setup we got a we got a high US dollar we had a high US dollar last time trumping came into office so maybe

history repeats itself that comes out we got China in like crazy debt deflation they got a crisis over there so they need liquidity but they can't put in liquidity because of the high US dollar we got Trump talking tariffs which maybe it's a negotiation tactic maybe it happens how do you how do you guys frame the current macro setup and what do you think might happen throughout the rest of this year Brian go ahead yeah I think we're in a period of uncertainty and Chaos before we see Green Pastures ahead is my honest take on it and of course markets hate uncertainty and in times of uncertainty investors sell liquid assets and Bitcoin and crypto being 247365 liquid assets you can sell from your phone or computer as opposed to uh you know stocks and equities which are

only traded during business hours or other assets people might own like like real estate and other alternative Investments crypto is just there it's easy to sell in times of uncertainty plus it's a market where people take excess leverage and so in times of uncertainty and in times of chaos you do see these leverage flushes you do see these bigger sell-offs on the weekends for instance when when the tariffs were announced you saw a major selloff in crypto assets because you couldn't go sell after or Nidia stock right so I think you do get some extra uncertainty and choppiness in crypto markets from the macro but I think longterm the Tariff threats we've already seen are somewhat of a negotiation tactic and and you know Trump loves tariffs has said he loves tariffs but it's already been one

of those threaten them and then pull back once you get what you want type situations I think we'll continue to see that back and forth happening and ultimately the fear of what tariffs could do to inflation or to the economy were likely overow loan I also think that just over the long term we're going to see interest rates come down from where they're at today and crypto's one of those asset classes that thrives in a low interest rate environment many of the investors that we speak to for instance who who manage endowments and Pension funds were very happy allocating to treasuries when they could get five six% yields but they're far less happy to do so when those yields are one two% they start chasing other types of returns and that's when I think you

start to see those 1 two 3% allocations to crypto from institutional investors maybe even turn into to 5% allocation so I just think the macro environment right now is chaotic and I think once the dust settles there's so much that's been happening behind the scene to propel crypto assets higher that we get that kind of second wave or third wave of this bull market that I'm really excited about yeah I just add on that I think it pays to think what does Trump really want uh that's how you see through the negotiation tactics I think he wants a lower dollar to support us manufacturing I think he wants lower interest rates because he's a real estate guy and loves lower interest rates and I think he

wants big numbers I think he wants the stock market to rip and as a result my guess is while it's confusing and it's uncertain what we're going to end up with is a lower dollar lower interest rates and uh inflation that's higher than expected which causes the stock market to go up which you get the Big Shiny numbers out out there and all three of those things are great for crypto so again I would look through the short-term issues to what the underlying sort of essence of what Donald Trump wants is and when I do that it looks like a positive environment to me long term yeah I completely agree okay last question before I let you guys go uh and I realize this is a big question so hopefully it doesn't uh we can answer it short and quick uh we talked yesterday

with Eric buunis and we were talking about uh the probability of the different ETFs coming this year and he's giving basically salana xrp Doge Litecoin All Above 70% chance of coming this year so it seems likely and I I assume you guys have probably applied for a bunch of these ETFs uh my question is does does it actually lead to flows so let's assume these ETFs come let's assume we and we don't know necessarily which ones are coming but Bitcoin is the big dog out there and everybody wants Bitcoin and it just feels like ethereum never really went and I'm just one I'm wondering if if we

get all these ET other ETFs is it going to matter is it going to lead to the flows that make a difference in the market great question um look I think many of those but not all of those will be successful and by successful I mean gather a few billion dollars in assets but it's not like you're going to get a hundred billion dollar into a you know name your name your smaller blockchain that's just not what is going to happen I actually think the big dog is going to be an index product right if you think if you look at the ownership of the Bitcoin ETFs it's going from Mostly retail it's on its way to being mostly institutional that's the marginal buyer

they're going to want to buy an index based product what that means for the market is the bigger big bigger you're going to get bigger right the it goes to the winners so look I think all of those will be successful on their own ETFs are considered Successful by the way if they get above $100 million in assets I think those ETFs that you named will probably all get above $100 million in assets but they're not going to be $50 billion that's just ridiculous but I do think an index-based product is going to surprise it's going to attract you know I think tens of billions of dollars of assets so that's what I would look at from a growth perspective more so than the 10th largest crypto asset getting an ETP great helpful but not a game changer MH do you guys have any index products

right now we have we have an index B so we we yeah I am talking my own book I should prob no no no but I but I I I bring this up because like here's how we Save retail go buy an index like this is the answer yeah we created the first crypto Index Fund it's the largest in the world it's called the bitwise 10 the challenge is right now it's in a gbtc like structure so it trades at premiums and discount and it has a very high fee we hope to convert it to an ETF but right now there's not a good index based solution for people you have to uh do your own right do it through Bitcoin and eth and then maybe hold direct some of the other assets unless you can take on that volatility risk but you know we've

seen gbtc big premiums and discounts the same thing applies to to our product for now but I do think we're going to get index based Solutions and I think if that's where you park 80% then you can go go off like Ryan be a complete dgen and try to speculate with your 20% and uh and at least enjoy the process even if if if you lose out and maybe maybe you'll pick the the right tokens as well Ryan do we need a Ryan's D gen show to to talk about talk about this more or or a counseling session counseling session I think a counseling session yeah makes sense I don't think that would save retail let's just say that Jens thanks so much for joining us

today fabulous to have you on the show as always everybody listening in let us know how you guys are feeling are you on the retail side of the sentiment right now feeling bearish and feeling negative or are you more on the institutional side where it's all all Vibes are good bullish all around let us know Matt Ryan thanks for joining us today thanks for having us fun thanks for listening in everybody remember that none of this is financial advice we are only here for entertainment purposes to give you guys the lowdown on what is happening in the markets every day if you want to learn more make sure you subscribe to the milk

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