What flat Bitcoin prices hide, with Fidelity Digital Assets' Chris Kuiper

Transcript

That's the holy grail in finance, to put something in your portfolio that's not correlated to everything else that can improve your risk adjusted returns. What's up everybody? It's LG Ducet here and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that spends less time arguing about candles and more time figuring out what actually changes next. Today is January 12th. Bitcoin is at $92,000, slowly creeping up, but more importantly, gold is, as usual, outperforming it, up to 4,600 today. Silver's at 85. Listen, crypto prices honestly kind of went nowhere in 2025. That's we covered that on Milk Road. And Fidelity is saying that that might be the point. In their 2026 look ahead, they argue that we're in crypto's shipping container moment. That tech is already retooling finance behind the

scenes, even if the market hasn't noticed yet. Today, Chris Kyper joins us to explain why flat prices can still signal massive structural change and what investors are missing while they stare at the charts. Today's episode is brought to you by Bridge send stable coin payments instantly simple global friction free and chain link links web 3 to Wall Street. Here he is. Chris, what's going on? Welcome back to the Milk Road. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me back. >> Okay, listen. I have a question for you. I did not interview you last time. Okay, that was Jay. Jay Jay's still around, but he's he's not hosting the show these days. But this was April 4th, 2025.

Tariffs were all the rage. Everybody was like, "Tariff is the only thing that matters right now. Liberation Day is coming." Obviously, we massively rebounded after that, very shortly after your last uh appearance. and tariffs are now gone. There's a lot of other stuff going on. Uh but conditions generally for crypto in the macro are pretty bullish. Can you tell me Chris, why aren't we higher right now? >> Yeah, I wish I could tell you with with uh definitive answers here, but of course uh this is a market. It's an organic thing. There's always something going on. So, whenever something happens, we always like to point to things that we think are going on, but we never actually know. So, with that that disclaimer out of the way, I will put on my speculative hat and give a few things. One of them is something that's

been talked about for a a lot of reasons, a lot of ways uh over the all these interviews, which is the long-term holders selling. And we've seen it in the data. We've seen it anecdotally. We saw uh a holder in the past year, a few months ago, sell 8 to9 billion dollars of Bitcoin. This was someone from I think like the 2013 era. So even though it's it's been talked about a lot, it doesn't make it not true, right? So this is a huge force and that's that's fine. In my opinion, that's a good thing. You are getting a turnover of of the investor base and this is normal. This is natural. This happens with every cycle. This is what you want to see. You want to see the investor base disperse to other people. So that's one big

force. Uh the other big force is the exchange trade products most successful products uh in the history of exchange trade products the the Bitcoin spot ones in the US especially came roaring out of the gate they've put up massive flows but they did pull back a little bit and so that's another uh selling pressure that we have and then we're also monitoring the digital asset treasury companies and of course these had really big runs and then some consolidation and pullback as well. So all of this is is uh a lot of selling pressure even though you have still a lot of of buyers on the other end and over the past few months it's made Bitcoin very boring. We have just been consolidating consolidating consolidating uh to the point where uh

people are getting fed up and I think that's part of the the sentiment around all of it as well. They're they're saying why do I hold this thing? It doesn't produce uh cash flows explicitly. It doesn't pay a dividend so I'm getting paid nothing to hold it. And people get impatient. They start looking at other assets and they start to say, "Why don't I move some of this over here? Maybe I'll come back." Of course, the question is, do they ever do that? Did they have the conviction? But that's where we're at today. And that's that's some of the things I'm seeing uh as well from our our investors and clients. >> If you've been paying attention, you know we're going heavy on AI here at Milk Road. We launched the AI podcast, the AI newsletter, and now we're taking it up a notch with AI Pro. To celebrate

the launch, we're giving you 20% off this week only. Head to the link in the show notes to lock in your discount on the only research you need to navigate the AI super cycle. So, from your investors and clients, I always love speaking to people like you who have a lot of exposure, you know, these these these meetings that are private, of course, with with people with a lot of assets and a lot of money. Out of all those factors you named, which one stands out to them? Because everything you said, the fact that there's some wallets holding like 10 billion dollars of Bitcoin to me has always been one of those things like how could people take this seriously knowing that there are secret wallets, no one knows who they are and they can just at any point just offload, you know, 10 10 figures of this

stuff. Yeah, that is a little different than the traditional markets where the big holders have to make different filings, but you still have some some big holders that can offload in uh on the OTC uh markets over the counter, you know, big blocks of trades, and you don't know who it is. So, it's not as different as people think, but to your question, yes, talking to people, it's it's more of that group where they've held it. They've probably even realized a lot of gains and they say, "Hey, we've we've made a lot here now. seems to be doing nothing or we've got an outsized position after, you know, a good run up in 2014 and and even before. Let's let's pair this back. Let's get the weight back. They're certainly not adding. So, we're seeing a lot of that from from our clients and investors. Some of them, you

know, are close to or or throwing in the towel on some of it for sure, but that just speaks to how human emotion is still alive and well. Uh it's still the driving force in the short to medium term of these markets. And so everyone is looking for that next catalyst. Even though if you just run down, and we can do it, you can run down the macro points and everything, you would have thought we'd be so much higher. But of course, the markets the markets keep you humble. The old adage is uh the market's job is to inflict the most pain on the greatest number of people possible. It definitely feels that way these days.

I think a lot of people take uh take this kind of stuff and almost take it personally, which is funny, but you're like, "The market is doing this to me." Um, I want to jump into today's most hottest topic. I know we we would chat I know I told you before we chat about this a little later and I do want to chat about your report, but I think it's very important especially when we're talking about Bitcoin. Um, you tweeted this about a month ago saying that gold and silver has been sparkling lately, up 61% and over 100% year-to date, respectively. That number has changed since a month ago. Silver 85. Like it seems like every day more and more. Personally, I feel like I've missed that trade. Um, and and what's funny, Chris, too, is last time you came on the show, you mentioned a few times that gold was

looking good and that theoretically Bitcoin should be catching up. In your tweet from a month ago, you're telling us basically to summarize this is that, you know, the it undulates. Bitcoin and and and gold have this funny kind of ratio where they just kind of come back and forth and back and forth. So now that gold is really outperforming Bitcoin, do you think we've bottomed on that ratio and are we due for a big Bitcoin rip here or how does that work in your mind? >> Yeah, I'm always cautious about the phrase do. Uh again, I'll give you an old market adage. I'm I'm I had a lot of my career in the traditional markets and one of the adages uh library books are due, pregnant women are due. Uh the market's never due for anything, right?

So, uh, take that for for what you will, but, um, I do I do think looking at that chart, according to that chart, and if if history holds, it does show this this trade-off. And I'll I'll borrow a phrase from my colleague, my intrepid colleague, Yuri Timmer, here where he says golden Bitcoin, same players or or different players on the same team. So, they often hand the baton back and forth. And I think that's a a good thing. And we talk about this in the 2026 look ahead. I I update this chart um to to the latest the data that we had at the time of writing and they're to me they're both driven by the same macro factors. They are both verifiably scarce for Bitcoin uh pretty scarce for gold that has a very low a low growth ratio, a very high stock toflow ratio and

they're both hedges against currency debasement or they can be they can both be hedges against uh geopolitical uncertainty and I think that's what's really going to be the story uh in this next year. I talked to you about in in the report how gold had its fourth best calendar year in its history ever since going off the gold standard. And all the times before that it was during the 70s and 80s which of course was the big hyper uh or or the stagflation era where you had this hyperformance of gold. Uh this time we don't have that same stagflation or very high inflation uh era era today. It's driven more by geopolitical uh in my opinion and I think that's going to be a big story

going forward and I think a lot of countries are going to start to realize that Bitcoin has a lot of these same characteristics and properties that gold have. Something that you can hold outside of the system, outside of the banking system, outside the financial system, something that doesn't have an issuer, something that people uh cannot freeze or it's very hard to freeze. And then of course it improves upon a lot of the characteristics of gold because you can move it very cheaply all anywhere around the world. You can verify it, you can use it as collateral, all these things. But it's still just very early.

These these big countries and institutions are still falling back on the millennia of history that gold has. But eventually you could start to see that turn. And this last year we saw for the very first time a central bank buying Bitcoin, dipping their toes in, which we can talk about more. And so the fact that they they trade back and forth and they have a low correlation to each other, gold and Bitcoin overall, is counterintuitively a good thing to me because that makes a better case for potentially putting it in your portfolio and getting better riskadjusted returns.

That's the holy grail in finance to put something in your portfolio that's not correlated to everything else that can improve your risk adjusted returns. And so otherwise, if Bitcoin were just like gold or if it was gold on steroids or levered gold, people would say, "Why would I mess around with Bitcoin when gold's been around for millennia? It's got a a very well-worn path in the traditional finance world. I can get exposure. I can get leverage on it. Why would I do that?" Well, hopefully we have an answer here that it's it's it's on the same team, but it acts differently at different times. So, it may warrant a position in your portfolio as well.

>> Chris, what's the ceiling for gold? And maybe you can't answer that, but it's something where it's, you know, I think a lot of us have only kind of come on to this. You again, if people were listening to the show back in April, that was the time you were like the you you told people it's looking good and it's gone absolutely berserk since then. It's going to be there's it seems inevitable it's going to hit 5,000. Where does it keep going from there? I've never really tracked gold. I don't know if you're an expert there. You know much about gold. I know you're more of a crypto guy, but like what what how are we supposed to even follow this asset at this point? >> Yeah. Before I found Bitcoin, I was I was very much a gold person. I I followed it and studied it very closely.

And so I can't answer, of course, the ceiling question. I will note that I do think gold has massive tectonic moves or waves. So it's not something that goes up and down seemingly random every other year. It had a huge wave when we we depaged from the dollar uh for obvious reasons, right? The market had to figure out what is this thing worth? Before it was just pegged at $30 to $35 an ounce, US dollar to ounces and now it's free floating and it shot up to over 800 and then it came down to 200 and then of course it consolidated there for years and now we're in this this second wave where people are once again trying to figure it out. And what's different about the second wave is we have another wave of of money creation. And so

there's really no ceiling for it theoretically or I think in practice personally over the long term as long as there's no bottom for fiat. As long as you're measuring gold in terms of dollars, as long as you're printing more dollars, eventually that ratio is just going to keep catching up in quote that the price of gold, right? And so that's that's how I I see it on a very long-term horizon. Now, of course, anything can happen in in the next month or year, a few years, but I think we are in this renaissance of of hopefully people rediscovering this idea of sound money. What does it mean? What does it look like? Why is it important? Why do we why did we have it for millennia? Why

do we want to build on it? So, that's those are my thoughts on gold. If you want to get into it further, because I know that's a bit of a copout answer, you can look at things like, you know, how much gold underpinned the entire financial system when we were on the gold standard and every country was on the gold standard. You can look at like, for example, the percentage of gold is the world GDP or the percentage of gold is as trade. And you can start to do some back of the envelope calculations and figure out like if we get back to that ratio, what would be the price of gold today in in dollars per ounce? Stable coins are the biggest use case in crypto right now. But let's be real, using them on chain is still way too complex. That's exactly the problem

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Got it. Okay, that's good analysis. We'll stop there cuz we are crypto podcast, right? So, we'll leave we have a macro show and we'll leave the gold talk uh to them probably. But it is it is it is inevitably feels intertwined uh in crypto story these days. And it's interesting to hear you say that you were, excuse me, um, a a gold person prior to being crypto. I think you've been in crypto. I saw somewhere you mentioned you've been in crypto for for well over for about a decade now, if not a little bit more. I remember the point, Chris, um, I've been here about five, six years. I remember the point maybe less than two years ago where Fidelity came out, you know, another one of these massive institutions saying, hey, listen, 1% of your portfolio should be allocated to Bitcoin. It was something

like that in the last two years. But I remember Fidelity I was like this is a huge marker that you guys are saying this. What changed at at Fidelity for that to happen? You know, I just this how we're going to come back to crypto because we're leave gold aside. What changed at Fidelity to say in the last couple years be like, you know what, it's time for us to really come out and and and look at crypto, especially considering that you work there and you're a crypto guy. >> Yeah. So, you're you're correct. I discovered Bitcoin in 2012 personally. Uh I've been at Philly Digital Assets uh going on five years. I'll hit my fifth year this year. And I'm not sure the report maybe you're referring to.

There's there's a lot of different people in in arms and business um departments at Fidelity and and we don't have a house view. Different people can publish different things which is great for for diversity of opinion here. But I I can give you, you know, the Fidelity story was they started looking at Bitcoin as early as 2014, maybe even before. We have a pure R&D center here that just is constantly scanning the horizon, looking for things to either leverage things that could potentially disrupt our business. So, they found Bitcoin. And this group doesn't just write about it from their ivory tower and write some papers on it. They they experiment with it. They get their hands dirty. I love telling this story. They first uh started mining bitcoin in the

offices and then they said hey we want to scale this up and you had to order miners from China of course the asich miners and there's a famous story now where the finance and other departments said no you're not ordering this equipment from China like what is this and to her credit our CEO Abigail Johnson uh went around and literally you know knocked on doors and said we're doing this so we had buyin and leadership from the top the very top there was a number of key people here that pushed this forward and they just have a an attitude of looking at innovation as something to be used and harnessed and uh constantly be on the lookout for this and to integrate it.

So, uh that's really what drew me to Fidelity and the people here and it's it's been the same ever since. So, uh you'll continue to see more and more of this and this is why you've seen all the different products uh roll out from Fidelity. of course, uh, compared to our our Trady competitors, we're we're very much ahead of them. Um, but of course, compared to some of the the crypto natives, we we may look a little bit behind, but I think I think that's where we we play in our that nice middle ground of of of carefully moving forward on the things that we really think are going to be here for the future.

>> Okay. So, let's let's continue on the chat about Bitcoin. Again, I'm going to refer back to your last appearance because I think it was quite pathetic. You said as well during that time that this cycle could be the one where we do not see a blowoff top, right? And that you said that near the April lows after that in the next 6 months it almost felt like a blowoff top, right? ETH did break its all-time high just marginally. And then Bitcoin went to 125 before now, you know, the story that we've beaten to death on the show. Uh everything that's happened since uh since October 6th and October 10th naturally. Um were you right? Is it is is there will there be no blowoff top anytime soon?

It doesn't appear that way now, but of course things can change quickly. And again, getting back to my comment of of things being driven by emotion. Um, anything can happen. And uh I I'll debate myself here, which as good analysts, we always want to do that. The things that would cause in my opinion a blowoff top or could cause it would be this final moment of of realizing or at least a pocket of realizing uh how scarce Bitcoin really is. And this is one of the freest and truest markets out there. And what I mean by that is that there's no central issuer. Um, so you can't have something like a company come in and issue a lot of stock when their share price gets really high uh and take

advantage of that. You can't do that. The the supply of Bitcoin is set. It cannot be changed. No matter what the price does, you will not not change it. And that's what makes it, if you're thinking about a commodity, uh, that's what makes it different from any commodity in the world. Our demand, for example, for oil is insatiable. If you look at a chart of of oil production and demand for oil, it only goes up. Maybe the tiniest blip during an '08 recession type of thing, but it's always going up. Yet, the price, especially inflation adjusted terms, has over the long term gone down because as the price goes up, we find new ways to to produce and create more oil. Bitcoin is a commodity that that cannot be done. Even gold, getting back to gold, um you know, if

the gold price of gold keeps skyrocketing and stays up, we're going to find new ways to make gold or people are going to start melting their their jewelry and candlesticks at a certain price point that will induce them to do that, right? You can't do that with Bitcoin. So, that that could be a catalyst for a blowoff top. But I do stand by my other comment that I think what's changed structurally is you had really before Wall Street and then after Wall Street. And so before you had it driven mainly by retail by a lot of these original holders um a lot of different corners all over the internet uh smaller exchanges. And then look at today like look at our 2026 report. The first uh section is by uh someone on our team, Marta, who goes through and shows the convergence of Tradfi and the

digital asset markets. And she shows the size of the options market, the futures market, the perpetuals market. All of these things are getting to the point where they are playing in the same league as all these other asset classes. And so now you've got the exchange trade products, you've got digital asset treasury companies, you you bring in a co a whole cohort of volatility players, people who like volatility and want it, people who who don't like it and want to sell it, people who want to harvest volatility. That that tends to dampen volatility overall. So that could lead us into a cycle of just less volatility, not as big blowoff tops, but a structural bid for Bitcoin where where there's just uh a lot more demand under

it, and you're not you're on the flip side, the good thing is you're also not going to get the massive draw downs that we saw before. >> So hold on. Wouldn't wouldn't more open interest imply more volatility though for Bitcoin? Because if we're at these kind of I guess it's gone down a lot since October, right? that was kind of a huge part of that crash. But wouldn't wouldn't higher interest imply more volatility in the price? >> So I I have to be careful not to get outside my circle of of competence because I'm not a derivatives person. But uh the academic research does show that looking at a a very broad view of anything. When you have a commodity and you introduce derivatives markets, you lower the volatility overall because you're bringing in all these different players who are willing to take the other sides of these these volatilities

and you're you're creating a market around these things. Now, I do think you're right that in the short term, and we've seen this like October 10, the the little mini flash crash and things like this, it is leverage. These are leverage products and sometimes the tail wags the dog where the derivatives market is actually pushing the spot price around rather than the other way around. So I agree with you. It depends on the time frame you're looking at though. Shortterm, yes, it could be more volatile. Longer term though, I think it takes away a lot of it over time. So, a lot of these a lot of these institutional clients like some of not you guys, but like the people that you service, what level of risk are they taking on by by adding crypto to their portfolio, right? Like, do they look at

this report and say, "Okay, you're there's a lot of innovation going on here. There's a lot of positive trends. Chris is telling me that volatility should slow down. It's going to be more durable." I and yet are they approaching this as a risk asset as a result or are they seeing this as like Chris is right it will be stable and this is this is stability for them you know because it's it's not stability for us but this is maybe for them it is >> yeah we we see it across the board there are some clients who want to dip their toe in they want exposure they don't want to to miss it and you know it's like the classic getting off zero it's like is zero the p the correct allocation probably not for a lot of people Because again, if something is

volatile or it's quote risky because it's volatile, that's not usually a reason not to own it. It may be for some it doesn't fit in their mandate, but usually it's a it's a question of managing the risk and position sizing is the easiest way to do that. So, we've put out a lot of research on this. Our one of our most popular pieces by Zach and our team is is Bitcoin's volatility, showing it volatility is less than a lot of the Magnificent Seven companies. So if you own those in your portfolio, uh why don't you potentially own Bitcoin, right? So for for some clients, it's it's getting off zero, it's a little bit um others of them that it is seen as a technology play, especially some of the other coins like Ethereum or uh Salana or something like that. And then there's some who are in the the the Bitcoin camp

of store of value. I don't care about the volatility. We're going to keep a core position. We have corporate clients who just push a certain number percentage of their cash flow quarterly or monthly cash flow into Bitcoin because they're they want to strengthen their balance sheet, right? So, it really depends on the client and and it ranges, but we've seen a lot of them and then our job is to educate them with these things, how the market is changing and that might therefore influence how they think of the position. Maybe they're comfortable with a larger position then.

>> Right. All right. That makes sense. I I want to ask you I want to zoom way out because you did refer to your report and that was kind of you know one of the reasons we wanted to have you on. I love how you opened this report and I think kind of kind of helped us zoom out here as we're kind of getting close to the the end of the show. You said that a year ago when you guys wrote the same report, the main question on many investors minds was am I too late and that that was shaping because it listen of 2024 was bullish man like going into the inauguration where like everybody was stoked on crypto hasn't hasn't been that great of a year 12 months later and you're saying that the main question now is what is happening? So Chris, if

that's the main question, what is your what is your general answer without without kind of circling back and recycling a lot of the stuff you told me already? Like what what is happening to crypto? Uh, and how do you answer that to to to your clients and people that are curious? >> Yeah. Again, with the comment of of creating the most pain for the most number of people, >> we're being shaken out. You could just say that it's just shaking people out. You know, speaking of like all of our time in in this industry, the one thing I constantly do is do this little thought experiment where I say, "Okay, go back a year and then say you had a crystal ball or or a genie or someone who told you like, okay, I'm going to tell you all the things that are going to happen in 2025. We're going to get an

executive order for a strategic Bitcoin reserve. We're going to get uh legislation, specific legislation, uh the very first one passed, uh Genius Act. We're going to get um favorable people in the SEC, the CFTC. We're that are favorable on crypto. We're going to get massive inflows. We're going to get all these digital asset treasury companies. I'm going to tell you all that and then now you can, you know, make your decision of what you think the price of these things will be at the end of the year. No one would say, "Oh, we're going to be down a few percent." Nobody would have thought that. But that is the market, right? This is a tough tough thing to do. But again, tune out the noise. Look at the fundamentals. We had all these amazing fundamentals tick by. We're setting up in my opinion for a

pretty good macro setup here. And so, you know what's happening? Um, it the market's being the market in terms of of of its short-term price, right? So, I used to be an equity analyst. It's like look at the fundamentals, not the price. Look at the value, not the price. Um, and so again, if you go back, has anything broken in the thesis for something like Bitcoin? No. In my opinion, it's only uh gotten better uh in the thesis for Bitcoin. So, the the price is short-term. We'll see what happens, but I understand why people are asking that question. And then to get to the comment of of the the retooling the shipping uh box moment, what did happen in 2025 and what a lot

of people don't see, especially on the finance side, the trady side is so much retooling is going on and this was this is what makes me incredibly bullish and optimistic as well. every major bank pretty much announced that they are or they are going to do something with digital assets whether that's custody trading products uh using it as collateral uh you name it these things are getting embedded into the traditional finance system it is not going away and then one other point that was not in the report that I just saw this week was you know some of these sites that they categorize or or tag every time Bitcoin has died they tag an article or journalist who claims that Bitcoin is dead. I think 2025 was the

very first year in history where there was zero mentions, zero mainstream publication mentions that Bitcoin is dead. And that again is is a signal to me that it went from consensus to calling this thing a fad that's going to die, tulip bulb, bulbs, whatever. Then it became like, well, it's not consensus, but you're you're still edgy or you're going to get some clicks if you say it's dead. To the point where if you're now saying it's dead, you're going to look like a fool. like there's just no consensus that this thing is is going away. And it's the same with like other things like AI. Like it used to be like, oh, this these things are just like uh sophisticated robots that are paring back strings of words that you trained on them. So, they're just kind

of paring back to you and it makes it sound like a human. It's a niche thing. It's a fad. It can create some fun images. Okay. Now, AI might be useful for some very specific things, but it's never really going to take out like now we're to the point where nobody is going to say AI is going going away. Like, this thing is not real, right? And so, we see this with with all kinds of technologies. So, I think it's the exact same thing with Bitcoin and other digital assets. You're you're risking your integrity as a journalist or looking like a fool if you call it dead at this point. And we're past we're finally past that point. Um, and so this is where we go from here. A quick little timeout from the pod here because we've got a huge problem. You're listening to

the show, but most of you are not actually subscribed, which is crazy because we're here every single day dropping the stuff you actually want to know, the liquidity, the charts, the major players, and which way the market's going to go. So, hit subscribe, hit like, and let the algo know that you actually kind of like this. Okay, here's here's a question for you, Chris. As somebody who you're you're quasi Bitcoin OG, right? Because you're since 2012, 2013. like that's that's a long time ago for a lot of us uh compared to our adoption of our involvement in crypto. Um you work at a massive financial institution.

You guys are heavily involved in this obviously and you're a huge part of that. Is crypto's destiny to truly decouple from the rest of the financial system or with with people like Fidelity, companies like Fidelity being involved, is it now intertwined forever? Is it now part is it now part of that larger financial system for the rest of its its time? >> I think 2025 gave another data point that it's more the latter, right? And this is the the catch22 that some uh OGs find themselves in, right? They they they were interested in Bitcoin from the perspective of this is outside the financial system. It is um it's something against it. It's going to blow

it up. It's you know all these things. Um, but then it's become so successful, it's like, well, if something becomes so successful, why would some of the the biggest and most successful companies in the world adopt it? It's an open tool that anybody can use. And so, why would you not expect other people to to do that? And that's what's going to propel it on to further success, further adoption. Uh, you know, price goes along with that. Uh, so so I it is it is kind of odd. I recognize that. But I think again drawing back to the shipping container analogy, what we what we drawn is that that book the box by Levenson and the shipping container. We're talking about the steel rectangular shipping container. So obvious. It seems so simply obvious to us today. But of

course it wasn't. Before people unloaded and loaded ships largely by hand, things were all different shapes and sizes. Nothing was standardized. the shipping container comes along and as obvious as it is to us and everyone else nowadays uh it wasn't at the time and it was fought for decades and it took decades to retool the entire logistics and trade industry. You had to move entire ports. You had to build things like cranes. You had to train crane operators. You reshaped the flows of global trade. And that's what digital assets are doing.

They are reshaping how things of value are stored. digitally uh custodied, transported, valued, traded, all of these things. And of course, that is just going to to I think get integrated into our traditional finance system. But to give some light to the the people who are maybe disappointed, one of the things we asked in a look ahead, I remember was um is is this are we just recreating the financial system but on on digital rails? Are we just going to get the same things? And my answer is no. Because you're building it, especially in the case of Bitcoin, you're building it on a firmer foundation. You're building it on a scarce, verifiable, credible uh foundation, collateral of of Bitcoin.

And that's very different than building it on some other other currency. So that's my optimism to to that other camp of of people as well. >> I like that. I think I you went in deeper into the shipping container analogy there and I think that that makes a lot of sense and uh I never really thought I should read that book. I didn't know that that was a book, The Box by Mark Levenson. That's very interesting uh about just basically how they it's like you said it's so simple but then once they figured that out it's like let's stop having all these sailors just load things into the hull of like these wooden ships. Let's actually like make steel boxes and put them on steel.

I guess they would probably had steel boats but like it's going to be way more efficient. We can move more stuff, right? So that's kind of what you're saying is that that's what crypto is doing, right? Is that it's like now it's okay, we've been we've been moving money like we're trading spice in the 1500s, you know, and now it's time to to actually put it on those giant ships and move it move it around the world way faster and more efficiently. >> Yeah. And I started my career in banking. And if you ever want to see the underbelly of of the financial system and how it's held together with 1980s code and duct tape and bubble gum, go into some some banking roles, especially when you start your career at the lower level and you're you're doing all the paperwork and everything. It is it is

mindboggling >> how much paperwork and and back and forth there is on some of this stuff. It's just going to seem so obvious to to us of of why wouldn't you move money at the speed of light just like you move any other piece of information, emails, texts, video, images, whatever else. Um, you know, young kids, they're going to grow up in a world where they're going to look back in that and say like that that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever ever seen or thought about. They'll never stand in line with their little checkbook at the bank waiting to go give it to the person for them to write in whatever the they've put $20 of deposit or whatever that is. I did that. I remember my dad taking me to the bank be like this is how money works. And I was like really man we have to stand here

for half an hour. Like get out of here. At least I'm glad we've improved in our lifetime. At least we you know at least you and I are at the at the forefront of a lot of that change uh and at least able to evangelize that for our kids. Um Chris, this has been awesome to have you on, man. Thank you so much for your thoughts. Uh thank you for this fantastic report from Fidelity and uh hopefully we see you again uh later this year. Actually, I have one last question for you. Um we've given these questions. Am I too late to start 2025? What is happening to start 2026? To start 2027, what's the question we're going to be asking? >> Oh boy. So yeah, what is our look?

>> So I'm trapping you with that. You can take a second to think about it. You can take a minute to think about it. And it's again, this is NFA. This is this is highly speculative. it's okay to to not get it right because that's that's >> yeah hopefully hopefully we're just so much more on this adoption path that once again people are are it's removed from their mind that this is this is here to stay it's not going away and they and we've seen this we've you know I've talked to even over the last four or five years I've talked to institutional investors their questions and and comments have gone from totally dismissing it laughing at it not believing it to okay I'm still a little skeptical, but I obviously there's something here I want to know more to questions of implementation. Okay, well

well how do I custody it or or how do I get my compliance department on board or or figure this out? And those are questions of like they're ready to take action. So maybe in a year or so they've they've taken some action and the questions are are okay now what now what can I do with this this Bitcoin or other digital assets? How can I how can I use it as collateral? How can I leverage it? How can I uh lend it or borrow more or or all these other things? Uh maybe that's the point we're at in 2027. >> I like that. Okay, we'll we'll end on that. Chris, thanks so much for coming on Milk Road. Uh and I'm sure we'll see you again. >> Sounds good. Thanks for having me. If y'all are making swaps or trades right now, highly recommend you check out Milk

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