Investing Billions - E65: CEO of Bitwise on How Institutions Access Crypto

Starting point is 00:00:00 Is it true that Founders Fund had a significant position in Bitcoin? There are over 3,000 wealth management teams, RAs, family offices, and institutional investors that own a Bitwise product and then tens of thousands of individuals. Digital assets are actually an incredibly powerful portfolio tool. They have a very low correlation to everything. Many of the most brilliant investors in America are investors in crypto today. They just don't like to talk about it publicly usually. What is the best thought out bull argument for Bitcoin? Hunter, we met in 2017. I had to look back on my notes. You had just raised your seed round from General Catalyst, Kosla, Naval, and Elad Gil. And

Starting point is 00:00:45 the round, I think, was closed by the time I reached out to you, but you're kind enough to bring me on as an advisor. I'm very grateful for that, and I'm excited to catch up today. Welcome to the 10x SkyBull podcast. It's great to do this with you. And yeah, it feels like a long time ago. You just crossed $2 billion in net inflows, and you did that in less than two months. But things have not always been rosy. You've been through three bear markets. What's kept you going all these years? Yeah, that's a great question. So yeah, to your point, recently with the introduction of Bitcoin ETFs, it's been pretty extraordinary. The Bitwise Bitcoin ETF, the Tickers BITB, has grown faster than GLD, the gold ETF. It's the 21st or 22nd fastest ETF to a billion in the 30-year history

Starting point is 00:01:24 of ETFs. In terms of what's kept us going, I think that there are three things that come to mind. First is we really love our clients. It's fun to get to be useful to our clients. In my prior life at Facebook, there was more distance between you and the user you were serving. But in what we do at Bitwise, we get to spend time with brilliant investors. And that's really motivating. I think the second thing is that in this space, for better or worse, it's an emerging category. It's an emerging technology

Starting point is 00:01:53 platform. And it's very meaningful to work on something new that's being invented and brought into the world. And then finally, we have the blessing of you and some other great people around the company. And Steve Jobs once said that 50% of a successful company is just not giving up. And so, you know, I think that endurance is, to myself, Hong Kim, my co-founder, and others, endurance is a goal in and of itself. You quoted Steve Jobs, 50% is not giving up. What are the benefits that accrue to a company that keeps on going? That is also a great question, David. I've been thinking about this recently because we have now been in the space for over six years. It is so much more fun and it's so much better when you've

Starting point is 00:02:33 been doing it for a while. When you're a new startup, everyone is trying to size you up and figure out what to expect and who the heck are you. And the mere act of consistency and doing what you said you would do and showing up one year and then showing up the next year and showing up a third year, I think makes an impression on people. It definitely makes an impression on clients. And it allows those to become relationships where you don't just know one another because of a meeting, but you know one another because you cross paths multiple times. to have a track record and have been in the space for long enough that people have a chance to see over an extended period of time how we act, that we do what we say we'll do. And that builds trust, which is a huge benefit. I would also say internally, there's a lot of institutional knowledge that forms. You make bets and you have a hypothesis, you have, you know, two or three options, and then you make your best bet. And you get to sort of compound the learning of those bets over time. And you get to keep a self-referential scorecard of your judgment and reference those learnings, which I think can sharpen one's understanding of how to make good decisions. One of the beliefs that I have is that product and market fit is not binary.

Starting point is 00:03:46 It's constantly evolving, constantly tweaking. Has your six-year experience with customers made it better to deliver the right product to the right market? Well, the first thing that you said there that is constantly evolving is definitely something that we experience. As an emergent space, the frontier of what's possible, of what people want, keeps changing. I feel like even within Bitwise, we've evolved the company maybe two or three times to meet the moment of what the market wants and the intersection of that and what's possible.

Starting point is 00:04:16 So that resonates with me relative of Bitwise has only existed for two months, which is the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF, which I think is a simple way of demonstrating what you said there. So that, yeah, that really resonates with me. We spent almost a week together going in New York in 2017. We had a lot of really fun and intellectual nerdy conversations. Are you disappointed that the best product that Bitwise has created essentially is the most basic and the most simple? Honestly, not in the slightest. I think when you're starting out with a company, sometimes you have a projection of what the world wants. And then the journey of a startup is actually discovering the benefit of seeing what people do versus what they say. And I would say with the Bitcoin ETF, it has been so unbelievably clear to us for years that the wrapper, the vehicle rather than the exposure.

Starting point is 00:05:13 So the exposure to Bitcoin ETF is just Bitcoin, but the vehicle, having a vehicle that you can have peace of mind about that can fold in with the other 99 things. For most people, digital assets are one to 5% of what they're doing, um, which means that they've got the majority of their time and, um, what they need to focus on is other things. And so, um, creating a vehicle that, uh, can give them peace of mind and easily fit into how they're running, um, their portfolio or their practice. Um, I think it's been clear to me that, that, that the vehicle itself is, um, unbelievably valuable. So even if the strategy of the exposure is straightforward, I'm actually very excited based on what we've learned over the years

Starting point is 00:05:52 to be able to offer a first-class vehicle. And I do think we'll be able to do more in the future as well. Today we have 15 different investment solutions and I don't think we'll stop here. You've evolved your products over the last six years. What's the latest evolution of Bitwise? The aspiration for Bitwise is that we think that public blockchains are a candidate to

Starting point is 00:06:10 be a part of how the world is different and better post the internet age arriving in the 21st century. And that's not guaranteed. And it's still being sorted out the ways in which it will make a difference. But as a result of that, a new asset class emerges. My view is that for most investors, it will be, again, one to five, in some cases, a little bit more percent of what they're doing. Because ultimately, it's open source software that you're investing in. With Bitwise, the vision is that people are going to want to partner with a purpose-built, best-of-breed specialist that

Starting point is 00:06:42 can help them access the opportunities, but always be a phone call or an email away from easily accessing what they need to know or what they want to know. So we want to be that partner in the same way some people turn to Oaktree on credit or Blackstone on private real estate. We want to be that for this space, which is fundamentally different from a lot of other asset classes. So today we have on one end of the spectrum, you know, what you could think of as a very simple product, like the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF. And on the other, we have alpha solutions, multi-strategy solutions that extract alpha from the volatility and inefficiencies in the space and are quite different, running arbitrage strategies, quant strategies, quite different from just buying a coin and going

Starting point is 00:07:23 long the coin. We have four different vehicle types. We have ETFs and publicly traded funds. We have private funds. We have separately managed accounts. We have hedge fund solutions. And all of that is in service to each of those things benefits from the insights and scale of the platforms. Each of them is better because they exist on the same platform. And they're all in service to being able to be the best partner to a client where we can say, let's talk through how you're thinking about the opportunity set here. And we're not going to try to push you into one way of accessing it or another.

Starting point is 00:07:54 We have a solution for whatever you want to do. You have different types of investors, all the way ranging from non-accredited to pension funds and sovereigns. Tell me about what product resonates with which market. Yeah, I've done a few of these, David. These are incredible, incredible questions. Thank you. So today, Bitwise serves, there are over 3,000 wealth management teams, RAs, family offices, and institutional investors that own a Bitwise product, and then tens of thousands of individuals who sometimes own it in a taxable account,

Starting point is 00:08:23 sometimes in an IRA. Some have even figured out how to get it in their 401k. It does vary a lot. On the institutional side, it tends to be Bitcoin or Ethereum in the ETF wrapper or in an offshore, in one of our offshore wrappers, which is helpful for tax considerations and kind of also harkens back, David, to the point that sometimes the vehicle adds a lot of value, even setting aside the exposure, as well as our multi-strategy solutions, which can play a role in their alternatives. I would say are sort of the three that resonate there, either because it's a vehicle and then a best-of-breed asset manager relationship that fits into the way that they're managing their portfolios. For wealth managers, it tends to be publicly traded funds.

Starting point is 00:09:05 So ETFs, we have a publicly traded partnership that's the largest crypto index fund in the world. And there, the publicly traded nature is very compatible with how they run their practice. They like the index fund because oftentimes the way that they want to get exposure to a space is through a diversified portfolio rather than trying to pick a winner. For individuals, I would say it's sort of similar. The publicly traded funds are the only funds that are available to non-accredited investors. Those are public funds with public reporting.

Starting point is 00:09:33 And there are Bitcoin ETF and our index fund are the two most popular. I recently interviewed the Northwestern Endowment. I was shocked that they've been holding crypto for a while. Obviously, it's worked out pretty well for them. What types of institutions are investing into crypto today? There is a bit of a misperception that the investors in crypto are sort of tech enthusiasts or unsophisticated retail investors. Many of the most brilliant investors in America

Starting point is 00:10:05 are investors in crypto today. And they just don't like to talk about it publicly usually. So for instance, we've had a huge cross-section. We've had a corporate start putting on its balance sheet. We've had a bank just approve our Bitcoin ETF for all of their clients. This week, we have mutual funds looking at incorporating in portfolios. There are several very large family offices, and none of them have said anything about

Starting point is 00:10:32 it on LinkedIn. They haven't gone to the press and said, I have invested in the space. So I think just as a meta comment, the state of play continues to be that there are, from my vantage point, a lot of investors who see the opportunity and want to be organized around it and participate in it, but don't yet really see a lot of upside in publicizing what they're doing. But in reality, we have dozens of firms investing with us almost weekly right now. And many of them are some of the best in their respective categories. So to the specific question, it's every category of investor. There are endowments that own it.

Starting point is 00:11:07 There are pensions that own it. Is it true that Founders Fund had a significant position in Bitcoin? That's my understanding, but I'm not in Bitwise and so I can't speak on their behalf. So we were talking about the rational case for holding one to 5%

Starting point is 00:11:21 and there's been some academic literature on that, holding one to 5% of Bitcoin in's been some academic literature on that, holding 1% to 5% of Bitcoin in your portfolio. Can you unpack that? Modern portfolio theory is about combining different elements that are not all exactly the same. So it's not pick the very best investment and then put all of your money into it. It's about pick some investments that are high risk, high reward, other investments that have a low correlation. And through that lens, digital assets are actually an incredibly powerful portfolio tool. Why is that? They have a very low correlation to everything, which means that they

Starting point is 00:11:59 can add a diversification benefit. Because if bonds are down, crypto may not be down. If stocks are down, crypto may not be down. If gold is down, crypto may not be down. It has a correlation of around 0.2 to 0.1 to all of those things. And it has the benefit of volatility. Why do I say the benefit of volatility? If you want that correlation to have an impact on the portfolio and it is low volatility, then you're going to need to size it larger. But because crypto has higher volatility, meaning it can move more significantly, you can move 20%, 30% in a quarter, the overall portfolio can experience the impact of the low correlation, even with just a small dose or a small allocation size to digital asset. And when you run an analysis and you look at contribution to return to volatility or standard deviations and thus Sharpe ratios, you really have the optimal contribution somewhere between 2% and 5%.

Starting point is 00:12:59 Now, in practice, firms typically do that analysis or we have white papers and can run custom analysis for clients. And they will look at that, but then they'll dial it depending on a few other things. They'll consider it in the context of some of their other objectives. Just to play devil's advocate, you mentioned a 0.2 correlation. We all saw 2021 seemed like every asset was correlated, every risky asset. Why is that intuition wrong? The reality is that in public liquid capital markets, if you have a moment like in 2022 and in 2021, to some extent, in two different ways, where the liquidity due to the Fed and monetary policy or fiscal policy changes drastically, either hugely tightens or hugely

Starting point is 00:13:45 expands, those dollars have an impact on all asset classes or all liquid asset classes. So in 2022, the NASDAQ, QQQ, was down maybe 25%, 30%. The ag was down. The bond index was also down over 10% that year. The public liquid real estate index was down that year. Gold was down. The bond index was also down over 10% that year. The public liquid real estate index was down that year. Gold was down that year. And crypto was down too. So why did all of those things become highly correlated that year? Because as the Fed took rates from 25 to 500 basis points, liquidity was getting sucked out of the system. Assets were getting sold for cash. And if you were liquid, you were getting sold. And so that affects all liquid assets uniformly. And that pulls them together because the motive

Starting point is 00:14:33 for selling is not a change in some development with the company stock, et cetera, but rather than the tightening of credit and monetary policy. So 2021 and 2022 were kind of unique in that in 2021, you had a huge expansion of the monetary base and suddenly a flood of dollars that needed to own assets. And so all asset classes did well and were sort of keen off of that development. And in 2022, sort of the inverse happened. And so correlations came up to 0.6 or 0.7 for a period of time. So we've observed over the many year history of digital assets, low correlations, but in those moments, they can draw together. We expect them to be low over the long run and the go forward in general because they have different drivers. So corporate earnings growth, employment numbers,

Starting point is 00:15:19 these are things that drive a stock. Y, credit risk, drive fixed income markets. What drives digital assets usually has to do with things that would be more familiar from thinking about technology platforms, user adoption, the security of the blockchain. In the case of many blockchains, concern around geopolitical risk or monetary policy. Hunter, you've probably heard over the last six years, hundreds of arguments for and against Bitcoin. What is the best thought out bull argument for Bitcoin? I have to give you three. It depends a little bit on the investor. One is that it's sort of an emotionless argument, which is you may or may not like ExxonMobil, or you may or may not like Facebook, but you're investing for a financial objective and you're evaluating the risk return opportunity of a security, there are many investors who are simply doing that. And they say, this doesn't have to be a philosophical thing.

Starting point is 00:16:17 Let's run an analysis and see if it'd be additive to the objectives of the portfolio. That drives some investors in the space, which is academic in nature and dispassionate and just thinking about how to construct their objectives. And because of the low correlations, as I mentioned, it can be quite powerful in a way that a 1% allocation to something else can't quite achieve. A second is what I would call thesis-driven investing in the space. To use an analogy to Uber, in the early days of Uber, people said the taxi conglomerates will never allow Uber to take over in their cities. And then as Uber started to take over, they said, well, the taxi market is small. It's only $400 million of revenue in the US. And then as Uber blew through that, they had to accept that Uber was a better version of taxis.

Starting point is 00:17:00 So it expanded the market because it's simply better. I think that for thesis-driven investors in the space, some of them similarly think there is value in having a store of value asset like gold. And we are absolutely in the internet age. And this is just a substantially better version of what people want from gold. And now has 15 years of track record, which is over half as long as the euro has existed. Some investors are motivated because they're concerned around monetary policy and the fiscal deficit, and they don't see politicians as being capable of reining that in. And then finally, some are motivated because they see geopolitical tensions and nations around the world nervous about using the U.S. dollar, U.S. denominated debt, and they see potentially a world that will be fragmenting and the value of a non-political asset, global asset in that context. So those are some of the themes that I think drive people from a thesis perspective towards Bitcoin. And then finally, in the case of wealth managers, if they have clients who want to own digital assets, they want to serve clients.

Starting point is 00:18:06 They may not have thought that it was a good idea that their client really wanted to invest in Reddit or in Facebook at its IPO. But ultimately, in the wealth management category, which is a very large space in the United States, including multifamily offices, they're there to serve their clients. And that means constructing portfolios, giving them advice on how to accomplish their objectives. But ultimately, if a client wants to participate in an opportunity set, they want to help make that happen. So I, you know, I would say that's sort of a third dimension of why investors embrace the space is, and then there's business considerations. And each of those is driving different people towards the asset class right now. We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsor. Most businesses use up to 16 tools to hire, manage, and pay their workforce.

Starting point is 00:18:57 But there's one platform that's replaced them all. That's Deal. D-E-E-L. Deal is the all-in-one HR and payroll platform built for global work. Smartest startups in my portfolio use DEEL to integrate HR, payroll, compliance, and everything else in a single product. Focus on what you do best. Scale your business and let DEEL do the rest. DEEL allows you to hire, onboard, and pay talent in over 150 countries from background checks to built-in contracts. You can manage the entire worker lifecycle from a single and I think the question is framed incorrectly, which is implicitly, should I invest all my money in Bitcoin or not? I think that's a silly question. I think the serious question is, should I invest the 2% to 5% that you mentioned?

Starting point is 00:19:44 I think that this is a rare thing that's taking place here. The analogies that I like to it are the birth of the personal computer when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs said that every home in America should have a personal computer in it. And an American said, why do I need a mainframe in my home? And they said, for recipes and to balance your checkbook. And then there was a process of realizing the potential of that new platform. You made a similar journey with the internet. We had the journey again with mobile. In the first year, I think the iPhone sold something like three and a half million units. It

Starting point is 00:20:15 was paltry. And I think here again, there's a new platform, public blockchains. And I think that there is a very valid role for what they can do. So I think it's worth consideration by most types of investors at some size. Common criticism for institutional investors is a lot of institutional investors are conceding the use case for Bitcoin, digital gold store of value. But the criticism is, what about the rest of crypto? If it was so great, why aren't there 100 use cases? I understand why there might not be thousands, why it's in its infancy. But shouldn't there be several use cases that are prevalent in the industry?

Starting point is 00:20:52 That is a very reasonable and it's an important and good question for investors to be asking to understand where this sector is and if it's making the progress you want to see. I think to stick with the iPhone analogy for a moment, there's a reasonably common pattern with a new computing platform, which is first, you get the capabilities. So iPhone comes out and you have internet, you have a camera, you have GPS, you have an accelerometer. And people say, what do I need all this for? And then of course, you have WWDC, the Worldwide Developers Conference. The second thing you need to see is you need to see developers trying to apply those capabilities, build use cases, and they have to put a lot of shots on goal. I think the iPhone today has something like a million apps, and we probably have 60, 70 on our phone and maybe 12 that we use daily. So for software innovation, there just has to be a lot of shots to get a few things that are powerfully useful. And we got Google Maps very early. Instagram came relatively fast. It required that you had a camera

Starting point is 00:21:51 on the phone. Then you got Uber, which required the GPS. And it wasn't until I think 2016 that you got TikTok, for example. Along the way, you got Venmo, you got Apple Pay, and so on and so forth. But they didn't all arrive in the same year or at the same time. There was sort of the walk of discovering use cases. And as new use cases were discovered, more people wanted to be on the platform. And I expect the same thing with public blockchains, which are ultimately an innovative piece of software that allows people to settle transfers any time of the day, any day of the week. And one of the big innovations is that there's no corporate leader or company that you have to trust. The first set of use cases that has really gained traction tend to be financial use cases,

Starting point is 00:22:44 where people are very glad to have much faster performance, the ability to use a service on the weekend, the ability to use a service at 11 PM, the ability to settle something in a minute, and the ability to not have to worry about, if you think back to the financial crisis and that moment where there was the shuffle and AIG didn't know what it had risk exposure to, and many of the banks weren't sure if they had exposure through the assets in a CMO or the credit default swaps that they sold or the reinsurance they bought on the credit default swaps.

Starting point is 00:23:12 And so financial use cases have been the first that have been approached. Today, one of the biggest is actually quite advanced. One application that I think people are probably familiar with is using public blockchains to settle dollar transfers as an alternative to a wire or ACH with the benefit that you can do it any day of the week, any time of the day, at any size for a buck. And that compares quite favorably if you're trying to transfer money to London, which will take multiple days and be quite expensive, or even if you're just trying to send a wire. That use case today is doing three times the volume of PayPal and has over 5 million entities and individuals using it. So that is one of the early use cases. People refer to that as stable coins. I don't love evoking the word stable coins because I think that makes people think that it's an investment because the training of the space is that a coin is an investment asset.

Starting point is 00:24:07 In reality, stable coins refer to the architecture of this sort of alternative to SWIFT and ACH. I can take you through a few others. We have a report on 10 of the most promising use cases today. But the early ones that have millions of users and billions, tens of billions of volume have been financial. And there, I think it's because the benefits of trust, transparency, uptime, and throughput are just, it's easy to get 10x better than traditional financial services. People are now also innovating on social apps. There's a Twitter competitor that allows people to basically take their audience with them and not worry about getting deplatformed.

Starting point is 00:24:49 If they don't like the algorithm of one app, they can just plug their user base and their followers into a different app that runs a different algorithm or has some different features. And there are a few different developers trying to apply the capabilities. And really, the question is, are there developers building things? A platform you definitely aren't interested in is a platform where there are no developers building things. We think back to Palm, was it WebOS by HP and Palm was their mobile operating system, and nobody was developing for that. And that was a very bad sign. And indeed, it was a correct predictor that that was not going to be an important platform. But what we see in this space is there continue to be tens of thousands of developers who by a miracle are working on things. It's not that they're being staffed to do it by Microsoft or by Apple as an R&D project. Of their own volition, they see these capabilities and they're working to apply them.

Starting point is 00:25:53 And I think that that is miraculous and is also the important ingredient in this space continuing to develop its use cases. It's kind of like a global country that anybody from all across the world could develop on and monetize without having to get visas, without having to get LLC agreements. That makes me think of Balaji talking about digital assets as facilitating new nations. But I always wonder, there are many interesting vectors for looking at this space and different audiences are interested in different ones. But

Starting point is 00:26:17 I would say that two things along those lines, many people have heard Stripe's mission of growing the GDP of the internet. In a lot of ways, public blockchains are just expanding the capabilities of what can be done on the internet. They introduced the ability to have a title registry, complete online settlement. You don't have to step offline and walk to a local title office or get a notary involved or go to a bank to sign a wire. They're taking a lot of things that heretofore have not been possible to bring into the internet economy. And they're bringing those building blocks so that the internet, the GDP of the internet can expand even further than some of the things that were possible before. One of the things I chime in with here at

Starting point is 00:26:59 risk of going too far off the run is that I was the teaching assistant for the history business at Wharton and always loved studying that. And one thing I would note that people may know or may not know is that when the Big Bang or God created the earth, the C Corp wasn't created at that time. They didn't hand down from heaven the C Corp. The Limited Liability Joint Stock Corporation was created in the 19th century. It was created less than 200 years ago. And it was such an incredible invention for organizing the undertakings of people that it is one of humans' favorite things in the world.

Starting point is 00:27:41 And we have tens of millions of them now because it is such a popular apparatus for coordinating an endeavor and the people in that endeavor. That doesn't mean that that can never evolve and the world can never do any better than a C-Corp. I got to sort of view a lens into Facebook at a point in time I was working on Facebook groups. And as we've stepped into the internet age, a really interesting dynamic has evolved. There was, to tell the story through the lens of Facebook groups, there were many Facebook groups. It could be Corgi owners in San Francisco. It could be spouses of military members on their fourth tour in Afghanistan. It could be people who have a condition that doctors don't seem to be able to diagnose and they found each other and they're

Starting point is 00:28:23 working through ailments or approaches to living with that condition. But they form a lot of communities that really matter to people. And the problem that emerged is that sometimes you'd have a dispute. And in fact, this is so common that many Facebook groups would pin basically a self-written constitution to the top of their group. And then the administrator would be the authoritarian that would adjudicate those rules. And if you were on the wrong side of that individual or on the wrong side of those rules, and you, for instance, got excommunicated from the group, you had no recourse because the courts don't care. It's all happening in the internet, on the internet, in the digital space. And I think something that's happened in the 21st century is people really value things in the digital world. If I said to you, David, would you be more upset to lose all of the photos on your phone or your most expensive pair of shoes? You would say all

Starting point is 00:29:14 of my photos. You pay more money for the shoes though. If I said to you, what's more important, the contacts that you have on your phone or your email, of course, or your favorite shirt, it's the contacts. For members of these Facebook groups, if you found a community of 100 people of the same undiagnosed medical condition, what's more important to you? A membership in that community or your neighborhood block that you live on in your neighbors? It's a membership in that community. But the property rights system, the court system was designed for an analog world and for corporations that exist in analog world. And there's a real shortfall of how should humans organize natively on the internet.

Starting point is 00:29:51 Public blockchains through one lens are a new format of human organization, specifically in the digital world. And it makes a lot of sense to me that there can be innovation in that as there was less than 200 years ago, and that we would need a new innovation 20 years into but, and, and, and so the lens I just shared is a little bit more abstract, but I think that that lens, which I think Bology thinks about as well is also quite resonant to me as a reason why this, this is something that is probably here to stay in the internet age. We'll get right back to interview, but first to stay up to date on all things, emerging managers and limited partners, including the very latest data on venture returns and insights on how to raise capital from limited partners, subscribe to our free newsletter at 10xcapitalpodcast.com.

Starting point is 00:30:54 That's www.10xcapitalpodcast.com. You were kind enough to invite Jessica and I to the New York Stock Exchange bell ringing for BITB. What's the future for Bitwise? My aspiration is that Bitwise becomes one of the enduring brands that people think of when they think about participating in and understanding the opportunities emerging here. In the same way, again, that people may think of Oaktree or Apollo and Credit, they might think of Blackstone Real Estate and so on and so forth. Do you not worry that you've built a commoditized product? That could be said of many different areas of asset management and different asset classes.

Starting point is 00:31:33 But I don't worry so much about that because I believe that even more than people realize in the expertise and capabilities that we bring to bear. And I sometimes spend more time worrying that it's just hard for people to perceive the value of that. But today we're the largest specialist. And I think that there is always a role for a specialist in an asset class. Hunter, as a shareholder, I've known personally at least one significant offer that came to sell Bitwise.

Starting point is 00:32:04 Do you regret not selling in the last bull market? No, no. I've known personally at least one significant offer that came to sell Bitwise. Do you regret not selling in the last bull market? No, no. As I've said at other junctures, I love the work that they've been reading about crypto for a long time now. I think that 2024 is in some ways the beginning of the main event. With the launch of ETFs, crypto has really arrived. And for many investors, it feels, okay, this thing I've been watching is finally something that I can participate in. So I love doing that work. And I think that there's a lot of opportunity for us. And so I'm excited to continue pursuing that. As a shareholder, I'm hoping you continue to hodl

Starting point is 00:32:50 and continue to compound the asset. What would you like our audience to know about you, Hunter, about Bitwise or anything else you'd like to shine a light on? I think the main thing is that Bitwise is really motivated by getting to serve clients. We love serving smart investors who are busy and want to understand the space. And Bitwise is not a website or an app. It's a group of humans. If you email investors at bitwiseinvestments.com, a human will get back to you. And if there are things that an investor is thinking about, we talk through that with investors. And we really are a partner that people can have in the space.

Starting point is 00:33:25 I think that sometimes people don't feel that that's available in crypto. They read articles, they'll look at different applications, they'll read some things on Twitter, but ultimately feel like they have to go it alone and become a PhD in cryptography and an expert in this frontier. And I think the thing I wish every investor realized was that Bitwise is actually a partner to thousands of firms and investment professionals across the country and can be a partner to them too. It's the reason that we all work at Bitwise and love doing what we do. It's amazing what you and Hong have built over the last seven years or so. And thank you for inviting me to the last Bitwise ETF bell ringing. I'm inviting myself to the next to come Ethereum bell ringing. So I'm looking forward to attending that and catching up live.

Starting point is 00:34:06 Right on. Thanks, Hunter. Thanks, David. Thanks for listening to the audio version of this podcast. Come on over to 10xCable Podcasts on YouTube by typing in 10xCable Podcasts into youtube.com and clicking the subscribe button. On the YouTube version of this podcast,

Starting point is 00:34:21 you could see the graphs, visuals, and key takeaways that accompany every episode.

Investing Billions - E65: CEO of Bitwise on How Institutions Access Crypto

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.