The Pomp Podcast - Is Bitcoin About To Hit The Buy Zone? | Matthew Sigel

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Matthew Sigel is the Portfolio Manager of the VanEck Onchain Economy ETF ($NODE), one of the most forward-thinking institutional products in the crypto ecosystem. In this episode, we break down how major institutions are evaluating Bitcoin — from market structure and sentiment to what’s driving recent price action. Matthew shares the three indicators he uses to gauge Bitcoin’s direction, how he thinks about buying during volatility, and what he’s watching in crypto-linked public equities. We also dig into the broader digital-asset landscape — from smart-contract platforms to stablecoins and where he sees the strongest long-term opportunities.======================Bitizenship gives Bitcoin-forward investors a fast, compliant path to EU residency. Our Bitcoin Dolce Visa lets you invest in a 100% Bitcoin-aligned startup and qualify for Italy’s Golden Visa with one strategy. Claim your free strategy call at https://www.bitizenship.com/pomp.======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 80+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $1,000 in rewards.======================In this episode, Pomp spotlights easyBitcoin.app—the app that pays you 1% extra on recurring buys, 2% annual bitcoin rewards, and 4.5% APY on USD. Download it now for iOS or Android at https://easybitcoin.onelink.me/F1zP/klc4v1p8 and start earning today. Your capital is at risk. Crypto markets are highly volatile. This content is informational and not financial advice.======================Timestamps: 0:00 – Intro2:06 – How institutions are thinking about bitcoin right now6:10 – How to evaluate metrics in real time and key bitcoin price levels10:33 – Crypto-linked equities and why $NODE outperformed17:08 – What reverses the bitcoin miner downturn?23:41 – Evaluating companies holding bitcoin on balance sheet34:46 – Matthew’s outlook on altcoins and bitcoin dominance39:43 – Inside $NODE: structure, allocation, and strategy

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano many of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them

for hours while i ask questions in an effort to learn so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform watch episodes on youtube and tell your friends and family about the podcast my goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Last cycle

was an 80% decline. Since then, Bitcoin volatility has fallen by about half. So for my simple view, you know, if volatility is down by half, then maybe the correction is half as big and 40% feels like a reasonable chance to take a shot on a risk reward basis. It has the added benefit of also being... What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great episode with Matthew Siegel. He is the portfolio manager of the VanEck On-Chain Economy ETF, NODE, N-O-D-E. In this conversation, he gives us a better understanding. How are institutions thinking about Bitcoin? How are they thinking about the market action?

What are the three things that he's doing to evaluate whether Bitcoin is going up, down, or sideways? How does he think about buying Bitcoin when there's lots of chaos and uncertainty? And then we talk about public equities that relate to crypto. What is he interested in? What's he buying? What are the correlations and what are the risks? And then, of course, we got to go and we got to talk about the debt.

Who does he think are the winners? Who do you think are going to be the losers? And how should you think about these in your portfolio? And then we finish up talking about the rest of the crypto ecosystem. Everything from smart contract platforms, stable coins, and much, much more. This conversation is filled with insights. Matthew Siegel is here, and this is our latest conversation. All right, Matt, I thought a great place to start the conversation is everyone's wondering

how are institutions thinking about Bitcoin right now? There's a lot of mixed signals, some positive data points, some negative data points. Price action is pretty ugly. People are feeling a lot of pain. How are you, VanEck, and kind of institutions in general thinking about Bitcoin and allocation to the asset at the moment? In terms of investor interest, I would still describe it as very high, the number of requests for educational content, for insights around portfolio construction, and also for small allocations. But look, this is a 30% plus drawdown that we're in the middle

of right now. And volumes in some of our listed products have come down. So I think there's some evidence that people are sitting on their hands when it comes to actually making trades, but their engagement with the research of the topic is very high. That's kind of how I would frame it. Got it. And when you start thinking about some of these data points, like what do you put in the category of positive data points and what do you put in the category as negative data points? Yeah. So we generally look at Bitcoin allocation through three lenses. There's global liquidity, where you can see that Bitcoin's really only persistent correlations are a negative one with the dollar, the DXY. And so issues around risk appetite, leverage and deleveraging, this

is kind of the hundred thousand foot topic that has moved Bitcoin since COVID more than it used to pre-COVID. And unfortunately, the Bitcoin miners are kind of at the center of this because the recent de-risking and tightening of credit conditions is, in my view, predominantly because of all the debt that the hyperscalers, companies like Oracle, are raising to build out their AI capacity. The Bitcoin miners are the tip of the sphere on this because they are actively repurposing their Bitcoin operations to address this market opportunity. But it requires a lot a CapEx. The CapEx is debt funded if they're lucky, convertible funded, equity funded, or frankly funded from Bitcoin sales. And you can see that the miners through October were really pretty

aggressive sellers of Bitcoin in order to fund this AI build out. And so you get into this kind of double whammy situation where if credit conditions are tightening because the market is doubting the return on investment from the hyperscalers. And if Bitcoin is correlated to global liquidity and those tightening credit conditions, and it starts to fall for the same reasons, then the miners who need that debt in order to make their AI economics worse, better work rather, they actually end up as bigger sellers of Bitcoin than they otherwise would have been. And that leads to this vicious cycle that I think we're seeing right now. So long answer to your question. The first lens that we look at it through is global liquidity. And I'd say there, the evidence is mixed. These projects are still getting funded, but spreads are widening. And it's a more questionable outlook on that front.

What are the other two? You said there's three. Yeah. So the other two, the second one is leverage in the crypto ecosystem. There, we describe it as a green light, right? We had a washout in the middle of October, which brought leverage levels in crypto down. Funding rates have collapsed. There was another, you know, I think it was 1.7 billion of liquidations over the last 12 hours. So we're not seeing optimism in the crypto leverage market. I would take that one as bullish, right? The first one would be kind of mixed to bearish. And then the third one is on-chain activity. What's happening with transaction fees? What's happening with on-chain addresses, number of transactions? That one we would describe as negative. So how do you evaluate?

You've got global liquidity. Let's call that a yellow light. You've got leveraging the system as a green light. And then you've got on-chain activity as a red light. you would, I hope, or I would think you want all three to be green or all three to be red. And it's very clear you get mixed signals. How do you think through, do you put more weight on, you know, global liquidity or leverage in the system? Or how do you kind of like maneuver when you're actually getting green, yellow, and red across the three things that you guys care

about? Yeah. I mean, it's a personal decision. It goes back to the answer to my first question that volumes have come down. So we're noticing just people not making that call for me personally, in the on-chain economy ETF that I manage. We sold about 15% of our Bitcoin mining position about two or three weeks ago, just noticing a lot of optimism and the beginning of this credit tightening situation. And the Bitcoin miners had driven

a large percentage of our gains. And so it felt prudent at year end to kind of de-risk that a little bit. We have not yet redeployed that. there are some levels for Bitcoin that I'm thinking about. One of them is in the kind of 77, 78 range. So what that would be, that would be a 40% decline from the peak. And last cycle was an 80% decline. Since then, Bitcoin volatility has fallen by about half. So for my simple view, You know, if volatility is down by half, then maybe the correction is half as big and 40% feels like a reasonable chance to take a shot on a risk-reward basis.

It has the added benefit of also being the breakout of the post-election. 69,000. It was mid-70s where we really got that election day move. And then April of this year, we retested that high 70s level. So there's a fair amount of, I think, technical support that has been built at that level. And then below that, a lot of folks are looking at the 55K level, which is the 200-week moving average. God forbid we talk about if we had another 80% decline, then you're back into 27K or so, which is actually right at the level when BlackRock filed their S1 for Bitcoin ETF. So that would wipe out all the ETF gains.

I really think that's unlikely. But the 40% decline, the high 70s, that feels like a good shot to take a stab with positive risk. Now, we touched 80, 80K. And, you know, one of the things I always think about is as an individual investor, you can kind of lick your fingers, stick it in the air, right? 77, 80, dropped from 126. It's kind of all the same, right? You don't play an institutional risk management game. You're not doing it with other people's capital.

You're not having to rebalance, right? There's a lot of things that are somewhat constrictive to a institution when they are deploying capital here, but also they tend to have a lot of data tools and experience that maybe the individuals don't have. And so how do you think about the difference between like, I'm going to wait until, you know, $77,500 to deploy versus 80 is close enough and, you know, we'll take a shot at 80 because we don't know if it actually gets to 77. How do you think through the specifics of putting a position on when you're in a fairly

volatile pretty emotional you know extreme greed is or excuse me extreme fear is single digits uh volatility in the stock market vix hit 28 i mean like there's a lot of stuff going on here do you just take a shot or do you stay try to stay as disciplined as possible and kind of have a price target and kind of set like a limit order or something yeah for me i i like to go slowly uh so dollar cost averaging from a certain level even doing that on a time basis every two days by a certain amount. We are privileged in that I have a couple of traders who are there. I can literally message them from here and they will hit the buttons and find the liquidity for me. So I think that's an advantage that the pros have where we have infrastructure to help us

execute on this disciplined approach. But I don't think there's a really a right or a wrong answer. It's about answering to yourself and answering to your clients that you've made decisions that are prudent and based on some logic, right? My personal style is to go slower. All right, let's talk about public equities that are related to Bitcoin and the crypto industry. You've got this ETF node, N-O-D-E, that you guys have done a pretty good job of since inception.

I think it's up like 28 to 32%, somewhere in that range. It's significantly outperformed Bitcoin. But you're kind of actively managing public equities in the industry. And so I think a lot of folks have historically thought the Bitcoin or crypto assets themselves should outperform the public equities. We kind of see some different stuff happening over the last year or so. So talk through, you know, the public equity approach and how are you guys thinking about allocating right now into these different names that you've been talking about? Yeah, I think there's a really large audience of institutional and retail investors, frankly, who just like getting exposure through equities because the information disclosure is more standardized and the assets fit into their normal brokerage account. One of the biggest change since the election, from my perspective, was that the investment banks are willing to underwrite this stuff.

And that's why we've seen so many IPOs and SPACs, pipes, secondaries throughout the last year. And we were fortunate at VanEck to pivot a little bit after the election and move away from altcoins into the equity space, I guess, in hindsight, rightly appreciating this dynamic. And so this product, you mentioned the performance. Bitcoin is down 16% since we launched, and these equities are up significantly. So we've been able to, I think, identify that AI was going to transform specifically the Bitcoin miners and then build a portfolio that is not hyper volatile. So, I mean, we've still had a drawdown here, but relative to some of the competing products in our index, we've managed to preserve some of that downside by being disciplined around position sizing. I feel like in an industry that is as early stage as this one, a lot of small cap companies, a lot of companies with leverage, there's execution and operational risks as well. I just don't feel the need to be a hero and take a bunch of 10% positions.

I'd rather huddle my exposures in the like 1% to 4% range and then use the volatility to our favor. So we took an expansive view of what it means to be a crypto equity. We're not only focused on the companies that have a majority of their business exposed to the space, because a lot of the names that are adopting tokenization or selling into the Bitcoin value chain are doing it as much for cost saving reasons as they are for revenue generation reasons. and the impact on the multiple can be considerable. So my style is smaller position sizes, highly diversified and on the margin, trying to sell greed and buy fear in the market. So far, it's playing out. Today's episode is brought to you by Bidicenship.

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is either selling into the industry or is using the technology but people wouldn't think of them as a crypto company? Yeah, I mean, so one example of a name that we bought pretty well is Hynix. Hynix is a South Korean maker of memory that sells into the semiconductor industry. So they compete with Micron and Sandisk. It's really an oligopoly.

When Bitcoin mining machines are selling well, this DRAM business, the memory building blocks, Bitcoin mining has been kind of single digit, mid-single digit percentage of the DRAM industry. So on the margin, it moves the needle, but it's not the dominant force. But when you combine the impact that AI is having on this business, it actually has really tightened the supply-demand dynamics. And a company like Hynex sells at something like five times PE. So that's an example of a 1% position that we think is peripheral to digital assets, but riding some other structural tailwinds as well with

really good valuation. So I think that's one example. Yeah. It's interesting because it's basically like Bitcoin and AI in a weird way in that example, or actually like the overlap is Hynix, right? And so looking at what are two major trends and finding that overlap could be an interesting way to play it. I know the Bitcoin miners they've drawn down uh maybe substantially since uh bitcoin peaked um what reverses that right you know one of the things that we've been talking a lot about in the last couple of days is um howard marks has this great uh interview that he did in 2018 at wharton and they basically ask him you know like uh how do you avoid catching knives uh falling knives and he's like no no i

catch falling knives and you know he's got a very eloquent way of saying it but essentially what he says is look at some point i decide i start buying i know it's going to continue to fall further i keep buying and on the recovery, I keep buying, right? And so like, I'm not trying to bottom ticket, but when I'm near the bottom, I want to be accumulating both continuing down and on the way back up. What reverses the trend of the Bitcoin miners to have them turn around and kind of head in the direction everyone wants them to? Yeah, I'm happy to hear that quote, because that's kind of what I just described, which is, you know, once you're going to buy, there's no need to do it all at once and just, you know, take your time. It's okay not to bottom ticket. I think there's two

major things that are going to turn around this market. One would be top line revenue surprises from open AI. So one of the big controversies in the market is, is there going to be a return on this AI investment? In my view, a lot of it won't be seen except on the cost side, right? The math of taking costs out of your business flow more directly to your earnings per share than adding additional revenues. That's kind of a dystopic view of the economy that a lot of folks are not quite willing to embrace. And instead, they want to see top-line revenue momentum

from OpenAI, specifically on the enterprise front. So they announced a big deal with Target this week where Target is going to integrate OAI infrastructure into their app and their store assistance and the checkout process. But that's one deal. It's probably a nine-figure deal, but it's one. And given that OpenAI is private and the information doesn't come out of there in a standardized way, you know, that's an overhang, I think, for the markets until we get more clarity there.

And then the second would be the Fed cutting rates. Obviously, a lot more skepticism has now been built into the markets. And there seems to be a really perhaps politically polarized view on the FOMC board about rate cuts in December. So I think those are the two things that would turn around the liquidity, you know, the first of the three elements that we look at when analyzing when analyzing Bitcoin. And when you start looking at some of these other public equities, so you've got like, you know, hardcore things like the Bitcoin miners, but there's stablecoin provider, you know, Circle, you've got Gemini, you've got Coinbase, and you start to get infrastructure, maybe some of these other themes. How do you look at some of those companies? Yeah. Well, let's take a company like Circle. It came public in the middle of this year at $30 a share. It hit $300. So at $300, we were out, right? And there was this enormous IPO lockup that actually just hit in the last week or two. Stock's now down in the 60s. I would argue that if liquidity stays tight and the macro environment is a little trickier, which is what the equity market seems to be discounting, then competition in the stablecoin market may actually be less than people think.

It's going to be really helpful for Circle to be a public company, even if the stock price is $40 or $50. With the IPO lockup selling in the rearview mirror, they printed a pretty good quarter just last week. that's an example of a name that had a lot of euphoria that made it unreasonably valued from our position now we're kind of going through that trough of disillusionment meanwhile they actually are taking market share so i wouldn't be surprised to see a name like that uh be a higher weight in our portfolio going forward and just going back to the bitcoin miners i think one of the really interesting um things that we're going to learn from this shakeout is how much the cost of capital matters. Almost all of these companies have raised money in the last three months to try to build out

their AI infrastructure. It's very capital intensive. And we're starting to see a dispersion where a company like Cypher that just announced an expanded deal with Fluidstacked back by Google this week, and they're able to raise straight debt now to build this out. Whereas a smaller company like a Bitdeer had to do a convertible, CleanSpark had to do a convertible, much more dilutive events. So that cost of capital could start to diverge and we could see some more kind of winner-take-most characteristics emerging out of the Bitcoin miners, which would tell you, you know, buy the big guys really with the capital that you have for the space. Scale does feel like something that historically was not part of the conversation, but now,

and maybe it's just the industry was so small, right? Both in the private market and the kind of liquid crypto assets and also even some of the early public companies. Now, Coinbase is a really big company, right? Strategy has become a very large company. The miners, there's a couple that have really kind of broken out as large scale. Scale is very important in the traditional world. It does feel like now through the maturation, now you're going to either get scale or kind of die of irrelevancy. Yeah, I think I agree with that.

uh in the early days bitcoin mining was really around hunting out the cheapest electricity and uh bootstrapping your way to domination in that individual region but it was very hard to get economies of scale because wall street wasn't funding this these businesses uh that's changing now with the intersection of ai where um you know tara wolf cypher you know they're able to to raise debt. And it's junk rated, but it's a step change in terms of the impact on minority shareholders. I still think it's a regional business, largely. You've got Iron and Cipher down in Texas. You've got Tarawolf up in New York. You've got Bitfarms in PJM. They're not stepping on each other's toes too much yet, but the signs are on the wall that they're going to start to. So Tarawolf was hinting

last week that they're going to start regionally diversifying, maybe following, they already did in Texas, in fact, following some customers to Texas. So I think a little more benefits of scale, but like the utility business, there's still a large regional element to it as well. I see. Strategy obviously has incredible scale when it comes to putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. There's a number of companies that have now come to market. Some of them were existing public companies have started to put Bitcoin or other crypto assets on their balance sheet. Some of them have gone public via RTOs. There's some that are coming via SPAC. How do you think about this entire digital asset market and kind of where value may accrue over time?

Yeah. I'd say we've been pretty vocal bears in the space. Skeptical that there's going to be a long tail of smaller cap digital asset treasury companies that can sustain a premium. And not to say there will be none, but that there's kind of no reason for the long tail. And I started my career covering like Asian equities. There's a lot of NAV type companies out there that own assets. And it's not unusual for them to trade at 50% discount to the NAV, especially when there's no clear path towards a change in control or there's no way for the minority shareholders to get their cash back. So our base case has been to avoid these companies with a few exceptions. I think now with valuations quite a bit lower, some of the small caps starting to sell their coins and buy back stock, the emergence of some activism in the space, there could be a play on some of the smaller cap ones. The things I'm watching there, is the Strive-Semler deal actually going to close?

There's a lot of complexity around getting that deal closed. Do you think it will close? I don't know. So I think that Semler has the better risk-reward if it does. So there's a lot of skepticism in the Semler price that the deal will close. So from a risk-reward perspective, it's not a terrible bet to make. But the price of Bitcoin moves around so much that it's really hard to tell. Um, and then the other thing that I'm watching in the DAT space is how these preferred securities

are architected. Um, Saylor has done an incredible job of getting an entire yield curve out into the market. And I think that his relationships with the convertible bond arbitrageurs is very, very powerful. and over the cycle, they should be able to trade at a premium for some of the time. But if there's a nitpick to make about how they built that yield curve, it's that many of these preferred investors, they can still be taken out by strategy. They still have a call option strategy to us to take out these debt issues. And so it makes it tougher to calculate your

upside downside, if you're a debt holder. And when Strive came to market a few weeks ago with their preferred, they had a slightly different architecture where the takeout price, the call option that Strive has is defined. It's at 110. And it makes it easier for the fixed income investor to measure his upside downside. And then they sold it at $75, par is 100. And they're going to manage the interest rate to achieve that like 95 to 105. So, and I look at who's running that company. It's a former CalPERS fixed income guy. I think that they've re-architected that company around the preferred holders and what the equity holders have now is actually less valuable. And other DATs may have to make that tough decision. I think there's some evidence that MetaPlanet is

actually doing it. If you look at what they announced yesterday around how their preferred is going to be built kind of closer to the Strive addition, but that might not be a positive for MNAVs. So I kind of like the preferreds here on a risk. Why do you say it won't be positive for the MNAVs? Because the bondholder's getting more power, essentially, right? So they're really getting paid first. The option value for the equity piece kind of disappears

if you're the bondholder. You're really in it for the cash at that point. The price premium that you're not getting the same torque from the price of Bitcoin going up or the equity going up. It may be better for the sustainability, but worse for the MNAV. It might be what's weighing on some of these companies. One of the critiques I see online, and I always say there's sophisticated critiques and then there's kind of very smooth brain critiques and everything in between. But one of them is, how are all of these companies going to be able to pay back what they owe to investors on these preferreds? preferreds and i think we've seen sailor talk a little bit about you know hey if bitcoin just

goes up i think it's like less than two percent a year then they can fund it for a long time if it doesn't go up at all they can fund it for something like 70 years or something by selling stock well i think that there's a couple of different things because they also have the bitcoin on the balance sheet right there's all these kind of different components with that said um i do think that there's a fair question to each one and each one's gonna have a different answer but how do you guys think about are there right or wrong answers for people who are offering these prefers as to how they plan to continue to pay the interest? When MicroStrategy says that there's 70 years of dividend coverage, I think what they're referring to is if Bitcoin goes up,

their unrealized gains allow them to borrow more, all things equal. So it's not really a cash accounting. It's more of a theoretical accounting. Whereas the smaller companies have the benefit of just being able to say, look, we'll sell Bitcoin. If this doesn't work, we'll sell our Bitcoin. That's what Strive's saying. That's what a bunch of companies are saying. And that gives the minority shareholders a lot more confidence that they would eventually actually see cash out of this business if the mnavs fell too steeply so i i think that's more sustainable but it also raises questions around like what bitcoin would do in a bear market if all of these debts were selling their coins um what do you think would happen i think it

exacerbates the downside clearly yeah and do you think that they'd be for sellers like you know people continue to say michael saylor will get liquidated right and i think that there's been a lot of pushback from people who are investing in these saying like basically there's almost no point at which he could be liquidated how do you start to evaluate you know what i would consider like true forced seller not from a half the fund my preferred but more so the price has fallen so far that then you get like capitulation yeah i mean i think sailor is more right than wrong that if if bitcoin's down 50 percent peak to trough he doesn't have to sell and he can get his bondholders to fight each other in creditor-on-creditor violence, so to speak, and then

he refinances, right? But I think the risk as I see it would be if the stock's trading at a 50% discount to their NAV and you start to get activists who are looking for board seats and suing the company for not acting as a fiduciary, that may be less likely for strategy where he controls such a large percentage of the voting, but we're already seeing some activism emerge in the smaller cap debts. You may be familiar with some of it. And there, it's going to get down to the governance of the company, how easy it is to oust management and essentially liquidate the company and return value to shareholders. That's going to be a long process, right? A lot of executives want to keep their paychecks. The board members want to keep their seats on the board.

And it could take a year or two for that to play out from the first time that the lawsuit is filed. converted to bitcoin it's a simple set it and forget it way to grow your bitcoin easy bitcoin is live right now on ios and android hit pause click the link in the description download the app and start earning while your bitcoin stash grows your capital is at risk crypto markets are highly volatile and this content is informational and not financial advice now when you think about uh companies that are holding bitcoin but not considered part of this tesla there's a couple of others block i think has some bitcoin right um do we think that that will become more and more popular or are we getting a bifurcation in the market it's like there's like regular companies

and then if you're going to put this stuff on the balance sheet you pretty much end up as let's go do the financial engineering and and kind of you know bitcoin back credit or whatever yeah great question i remember last time we we chatted um we kind of talked about this topic and And one of the things that we learned from managing the Node ETF when it launched, we had a few of these names in there. I mean, Tesla we have, but there's a coal mining company in Kentucky called Allied Resources, A-R-L-P. It's the only coal miner who also mines Bitcoin. They actually own a considerable stake. Market doesn't pay anything for it.

all the companies that have small amounts of Bitcoin as a percentage of their balance sheet have basically underperformed. That's starting to reverse now. And with yesterday's news that MSCI is considering removing MicroStrategy from some of its indices, it could be that these companies that take a small bet on Bitcoin, and they are still able to get index inclusion, Because I think MSCI is considering a 50% cutoff if more than half of your assets are in digital assets, you may not be eligible for these indices. So a lot of companies may go for that like 49% and then they would get some benefit if Bitcoin works. So, you know, markets are always changing. And that's one thing I'm kind of on the lookout.

Maybe the market will pay more for these smaller Bitcoin stakes. Interesting. It's like, you know, most of the MetaPlanet strategy, it was kind of like the Hail Mary that always got caught, right? Always worked, right? You're still the Hail Mary and stock goes up. For some of these other companies like coal mining business or whatever, it sounds like that's not what they were doing. They weren't doing it as a Hail Mary as much as they were essentially either hedging or they started to participate in mining or whatever. And they were just keeping it on their balance sheet.

So it's more of like the organic acquisition of it that may be a different way to kind of approach getting the balance sheet. Totally. All right. Let's talk altcoins. You guys have spent a lot of time looking through both on the actual crypto asset side, but also maybe some of the public equities that touch this stuff. What's your current view kind of on everything else outside of Bitcoin? point. Yeah. Objectively, we've been less aggressive than some of our ETF competitors at bringing some of these single coin solutions to the market. We've had less demand from our traditional client base for those solutions. Fortunately, after the election last year, We took some profits in some of those coins that acted really well and anticipated that maybe the equity markets would be the place to be for 2026. That's largely played out.

You will see a couple of single token ETFs from us. It's public that we filed for a BNB ETF. There's no Binance ETF. That's still pretty tough coin for the market to get its hands on in the U.S. So we think there's some scarcity value in that one. We've also filed for Avalanche AVAX ETF. There's a DAT, but there's no ETF yet. So we're taking some rifle shot approaches in the space. But candidly, the market is oversaturated. The inflation rates are still very high among the altcoins. And with a few exceptions,

they haven't really found the product market fit beyond the speculative characteristics so you know we've been we've been less less aggressive in the space i mean things have obviously sold off a lot i was at the multi-coin summit yesterday um you know i think solana has done an incredible job of really building an economy across so many different sectors that are using that blockchain as as the architecture uh but the the as we're seeing from some of the corp chains like tempo or circle these are companies that have a sales force right they're going out to acquire merchants and they're paying their employees in stock to incentivize them to go and hit the pavement and the the decentralized blockchains just like don't have that

salesforce they have community and they have the hope of being money uh so so that you know can catch some waves but there's not that transition mechanism where you have a sales force who's getting paid a certain amount to go and convince a merchant that they should adopt visa rails mastercard rails square rails solana rails like it's a less direct transition mechanism yeah That's interesting. What about performance against Bitcoin? I think that's another question I hear a lot is like, oh, cool, this thing went up, but, you know, Bitcoin went up more. In some cases, actually, the altcoin has gone up more than Bitcoin. And so this like denomination in Bitcoin or, you know, Bitcoin dominance, there's these things in the crypto world that I think the relative comparison is a very different thing than like, hey, how much did it go up in fiat terms? I mean, Bitcoin's outperformed everything in both in fiat terms, right? I'm not sure I'm getting the question. Sorry. Yeah. Well, so like in a bull market, historically, the altcoins have outperformed Bitcoin. Smaller cap, right? Now there are some select things that have outperformed Bitcoin,

but for the most part, Bitcoin has actually outperformed most of the altcoins in this bull market. And so I think that surprised a lot of people because the whole idea is you're going into a bull market, you push out on the risk curve, you go up, you come back, you know, you get into a bear market, you kind of consolidate back into Bitcoin, into the blue chip. And that should be, you know, maybe it's an 80% drawdown, but it's better than a 99% drawdown type thing right it's not what we really saw this time yeah i think i think the trump uh deregulation may have actually hurt the altcoins by eliminating decentralization as a uh as a feature right um so in the last regulatory regime like ethereum had a clear advantage

among decentralized alternatives. That distinction, I think, was obliterated with the change in regulation and everyone is now kind of on a stable competitive platform. And that's part of the reason why we're seeing, I think, these corp chains emerge that have really kind of undefined decentralization, right? Like they're not decentralized right now.

Their roadmaps are not particularly decentralized, But they're able to do things with tokens that would have been illegal in the last administration. And it makes the truly decentralized projects like ETH or to a lesser extent Solana kind of less differentiated. Makes sense to me. Explain a little bit about Node and kind of what your guys' approach is for those that don't know. Yeah. So it's an actively managed ETF that can own up to 25% of our holdings in crypto. And we do that via ETFs. So we have currently 11% in the Bitcoin ETF and about 1% each in Ethereum and Solana. And then the rest of the portfolio is equities that are geared to the space. So our hunting ground is any company that has articulated a strategy to either make money or save money from the adoption of Bitcoin, blockchain, or digital assets. My personal conviction is that the Bitcoin miners are being transformed into AI companies, and it's bringing down their cost of capital and opening up a different investor who can buy those stocks. So that's probably the largest portion of our fund by exposure. It's probably about a third of the fund is exposed to those types of names, 15% or 20% in these tokens via ETFs. And then the balance across fintech, e-commerce, energy infrastructure, and that really kind of smooths out the portfolio a little bit than if we had isolated only on pure play companies.

And then we would have 10% of MicroStrategy, 10% Coinbase, like very volatile, levered companies. And if I've gotten any feedback from institutions, it's that the volatility is the biggest sticking point to this space. So what can we do to smooth that out a little bit and still give investors the tailwind of digital asset adoption? So that's what we're trying to do in Node. Amazing. N-O-D-E. I enjoy talking to you. I'm an investor in Node now. Thank you. I tweeted that out. I said, I like talking to him. He's smart. Let's see what happens here. And you've done a fantastic job. So I appreciate you taking the time to do this. We'll do it again in the future.

Thanks, Pop.