The Pomp Podcast - The Biggest Shift in Bitcoin History Is Happening Now | Dan Tapiero & Robbie Mitchnick

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

Dan Tapiero is the Founder & CEO of 10T Holdings and 1RoundTable Partners, and Robbie Mitchnick is Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock. This conversation was recorded live at Bitcoin Investor Week in New York. In this conversation, we discuss the explosive growth of the spot Bitcoin ETF, how institutions now view Bitcoin within asset allocation, the impact of macro and Fed policy on crypto markets, and why traditional finance and digital assets are rapidly converging.===================Award-winning Fountain Life - Energy supercharged. Memory sharper. Life extended. Ready for the best investment you’ll ever make? Schedule a life-changing call at FountainLife.com/Pomp Get $1,000 off the cost of a life-changing membership with Fountain Life when you schedule a call at FountainLife.com/pomp===================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.===================0:00 - Intro0:23 – Why the Bitcoin ETF was so successful & institutions enter4:38 - Building beyond the Bitcoin ETF8:03 - The bridge between TradFi & crypto13:43 - How institutions think about allocations17:40 - Macro, the Fed & liquidity impact on bitcoin22:22 - Partnerships & building in digital assets

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. The narrative about Bitcoin as digital gold is very real, is very important. It's not going away. It doesn't matter that gold is up and silver is up in the last 18 months, you know, exponentially,

and Bitcoin is down. Over the long term, of course, Bitcoin has dramatically outperformed gold. I suspect the dollar keeps going down. I think this is going to be very bullish for us over the medium term, gold and Bitcoin. Robbie, greatest product launch in the history of Wall Street, I think the Bitcoin ETF iBit is. Why was it so successful? Well, it had a lot of things converging at the right time for it, right? The pent-up demand that had existed for many years to be able to access Bitcoin in a convenient turnkey, low-cost exposure vehicle was substantial. um that was true for retail it was especially true for financial advisors and for institutions and so you had this moment where all of a sudden access got unlocked to the entire of mainstream

finance and it coincided with the fact that bitcoin is an asset you know obviously we're in a less positive moment right now but but is a asset that has massive resonance with all kinds of people and all kinds of investors all over the world. And you put those two together, and it was somewhat unprecedented in terms of the strength of the adoption. And even today, obviously, Bitcoin is down by almost 50% from the peak. But if you measure funds post-launch, and we're now two years and a month after iBit launched, it's still by far the largest ETF in history, even after this pullback, after two years. That's pretty incredible. Dan, you were on the other side, you weren't launching the product, but you and all your friends were

thinking about what is this going to mean for the industry? Have you seen a change in the conversations with people who you would consider peers after the launch? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it started in May of 23, or I think it was June when Larry changed his mind about Bitcoin. I think that was sort of the beginning of this bull phase. He really kicked it off. And then the launch in January 24th of all of the ETFs, frankly, was definitely a legitimizer. I think the big change now is that Bitcoin, and I think to some degree ETH as well, maybe not quite Solana, maybe Solana too, but are really considered established assets that now must be considered within an asset allocation model. And I think when I did this event, I don't know, two years ago, or I did

last year, two years ago, it was still a question mark whether, you know, it belonged in the portfolio. And I think now, of course, with some of these companies, the DATs that are owning Bitcoin, plus some of the IPOs, plus the successful ETFs, I think there's really no doubt now that Bitcoin is an institutional asset. And so we wanted the institutions to come. uh it it's they're here and now the price has cut in half in four months uh you know welcome those two are not necessarily the same no they're not the same but i will say um you know i've been in the broadly in the crypto space since 2012 and um You know, the sophisticated investor and the world that I used to be in, the hedge fund world, is very aggressive, very smart, very intelligent.

And once an asset has the liquidity of an institutional type asset, they are very happy to short as well. And they're aggressive shorters. so when you see hedge fund performance sometimes do very well as they did in in january and let's say in q4 um you know they're on both sides of the market so it's not like uh be careful what you wish for i think we broadly as a space have won right um but along with winning comes some of the things that maybe the crypto native guys aren't so used to, which is a very aggressive investor base who will, you know, who are on both sides. Robbie, talk about you just have an advantage, right? You're kind of first to market at scale. Bitcoin, obviously, you guys

can build an amazing business by going in, you know, quadrupling assets over the next couple of years. You also are pushing horizontally, though, and offering other funds and thinking about tokenization and all these other things so how do you think about pressure advantage on the bitcoin etf but also build you know kind of diversified portfolio or diversified business uh yeah well we have to do both um but i think unquestionably uh bitcoin and i bit has been is will continue to be a massive central focus right it's not and just launch a fund and see it's gone really well okay great let's do next thing there's an ongoing investment in it in education and client engagement around it in marketing support and all of that continues to be

a focus as you note we have expanded into some other products and and filings but we've done that in a pretty judicious way right a lot of asset managers in the space have now filed for like 10 different crypto ETFs, we have two in the market today. So we continue to have a very high bar in terms of what else we would add. Dan, you're bringing venture exposure to an institutional audience. No, not venture. No, we don't do venture growth. Growth.

Growth. But you wouldn't consider the growth investing as a kind of a broader venture where there's early venture and late stage venture? No, I try to stay away completely from venture. Because it's, in our space, it's just too difficult. You know, we've invested in 24 companies at the growth stage. We're looking for companies generally with 50 to 100 million in revenue or more. We don't have any liquid token exposure at all.

You know, I think there are complications now as to within the space, you know, where does revenue actually accrue to? Does it accrue to a token? Does it accrue to equity? You know, there was a problem a few months ago with Aave. And so even projects and I consider everything except Bitcoin, ETH and Solana as a venture project on the token side and on the business side, anything sort of, as I said, south of, you know, 30 million in revenue or so is venture. And so we've invested in 24 companies, 10 board seats, 2 billion AUM. And we just had a first close on our fifth fund. That was pretty significant.

And, you know, eventually, you know, we'll have a few more closes. I'll tell you, the one thing is, it is still remarkable to me that, I mean, as far as I know, we are the only growth fund exclusively focused on crypto, blockchain, Web3, digital assets, however you want to call it. the digital asset ecosystem, of which Bitcoin is the core of. And especially now with the growth in stables and RWAs and all the explosion in polymarket and prediction markets, all these perps, all these things, the overall digital asset ecosystem continues to grow, and the companies that are building that world,

that's who we're investing in. Yeah. So, Robbie, I have been fond of saying or maybe posturing the question, is BlackRock a Bitcoin company, not a traditional finance company? Like at some point there is this, you know, like you guys are so successful with the product. If it is the most profitable, it is the largest revenue driver. People from the crypto world would be proud to say, hey, we're a crypto company. Traditional finance is a little bit different, right? you almost want to come at it and be a traditional finance company who is, you know, kind of helping

the institutional world adopt this new asset. But when you look forward, I've got to imagine people internally are like, hey, you know, there's new clients, there's new assets, there's new revenue coming from this sector. So how do you guys think about, you know, the evolution of digital asset strategy inside of the company? And is it a thing where you keep building the traditional, you know, side, but digital assets just grows faster and eventually maybe it's, know 25 or so of the internal business or like how are you guys looking at this well um i think we see ourselves as having the role of a bridge in many respects between traditional finance and and the digital asset worlds and that's a bridge in in both directions right so clearly uh with

the etfs for instance as well as what we did with aladdin in terms of the technology integration with coinbase prime that supported uh direct crypto trading but but in particular with the etfs that was a tremendous bridge helping all of mainstream finance access bitcoin and then ether but there's a bridge in the other direction too right if you think of what some of the tokenization is tokenization of money market fund for example that's kind of doing that the inverse of what ibit was which is take a digital asset underlier and put it in a tradfi wrapper tokenizing say a money fund is taking a tradfi underlier and putting it in a digital asset wrapper and these two worlds, I think, increasingly will converge. Different sets of clients are at different stages

of comfort and adoption with each. But over time, there's certainly going to continue to be a greater role for digital assets and this technology theme in general for many of our clients. Today's episode is brought to you by Fountain Life. Are you ready to seize the day that will change your life, guaranteed? You invest in wealth creation every single day, but what's the point of it without an optimal health span award-winning fountain life is the world's most advanced longevity destination and in just one day they can map an exact and complete picture of your health profile no guesswork and no blind spots from there they create a personalized plan that prevents disease and may even reverse aging using precision medicine and restorative

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and tell them I sent you. Dan, you guys are investing. I know many of the companies you've invested in, they are, I would say, infrastructure related, many of them. And so we have figure together, I think, right? Figure, quick node, there's a bunch that we've invested together, right? What I think is interesting is like, the reason why I wanted to talk to both of you together is it does feel like you kind of represent the traditional finance world and creating that bridge. Many of the companies that you're investing in, they're coming from more of a crypto, you know, side of this, but they're building infrastructure that can go back and forth and so it just feels like these two worlds are getting pulled together and almost like it

will be successful when we stop talking about crypto or decentralized finance and it's just all finance once again right yeah i think it is uh integrating and it'll integrate via all value moving on to blockchain rails in one form or another so i think um you know i think it's happening now. Yeah. I think it's happening now. What are you guys telling the institutions in terms of allocations, how to think about the asset, you know, gold is flying. Bitcoin is not, are they calling you up Robbie? What the hell you promised me to basement, you know? Yeah. So I think that it's a really interesting moment because narratives are so important in this space and i think the fundamentals of bitcoin is this global emerging monetary alternative

right that is scarce decentralized digitally native that exists outside of any one country's political economic fiscal monetary risk factors that that is an incredibly intriguing and important innovation in the world that has i think a significant amount of of, uh, adoption trajectory, uh, to come. Right. But then you have just a, uh, procession of her self-inflicted wounds that, um, our space has done. And, you know, look at one part of that obviously is an incredible amount of leverage and leverage speculation on some of these, um, levered purpose platforms in particular you know why someone needs to be 100x long anything bitcoin dogecoin what like i'm not sure but what it's done is turbocharge the volatility so

bitcoin's volatility trending down down down and that's attractive to more conservative allocators well that's actually now come back up because even has become more sophisticated more institutionalized there's this countervailing force of this growth in levered perpetual futures and the speculation that that has now invited. And so these days where you have a tiny little thing that shouldn't have any price impact really at all, and if it does, it should be small, like for example, October 10th, you know, some tariff related thing. And next thing you know, it's down 20%. And that's because you get cascading liquidations and auto deleveraging, et cetera. And the reason that's particularly harmful is it undermines the narrative that's driven by fundamentals of

this as a diversifying asset, as a potential long-term hedge against some of the risks that exist elsewhere in a portfolio. The marginal adopter then looks at it and says, oh, I kind of get that it's this global scarce monetary asset, but it's looking really correlated right now and really volatile. It kind of looks like levered Nasdaq. I don't know that I need that in my portfolio, right? So the facts are more on the side of how I characterized it, but now the trading data, at least lately, looks very different. And the bar to adoption, if it trades like levered Nasdaq, is much, much, much higher. There's no good reason that you should think of Bitcoin as a risk-on asset, right? Yes, it's emerging technology, but its fundamentals are so different

from all these other assets. But now it starts to become a little bit self-fulfilling. I think on the hedge fund piece, I think there's a misperception out there that it's a bunch of hedge funds in ETFs that are creating volatility and selling. That's not what we're seeing. We look at iBit last week on a week that was tumultuous, obviously, in the Bitcoin market. We had 0.2% of the fund redeemed, right? So if there actually were hedge funds that were massively unwinding trades that they were running in the ETF, you would have seen billions there. We saw many billions liquidated on these levered PERT platforms.

The ETFs have been very steady. It's a much more long-term buy and hold type investor base. I think the first time we ever talked on the phone was six years ago next month. And I called you and I said, this COVID thing seems real. What's going to happen to the dollar? And you gave me a 20-minute masterclass, probably the single best thing that anyone's ever given me, which means you really understand macro. You spend a lot of time in that world. How do you look at macro and Bitcoin?

And I think of Bitcoin a decade ago, you couldn't spell macro. now everyone thinks that they should be the next fed chairman with their opinions yeah i thought you were gonna bring up the our many gold and bitcoin conversations because i think i was trying to get out of this on the dollar because i've as you know i've always been a gold and bitcoin guy yes and i have my physical gold business that i launched in 09 called gbi that's obviously thriving now um but let me just tell you for years that business flatlined and gold was trading 15 1800. And I had the debasement thought post 08. OK, we're going to have negative real interest rates for a long time. Oh, I'm going to have to have some physical gold. Hey, why don't I start

my own company? And now we're the third largest vaulter of gold in the world outside of the banking system. And the AUM has exploded. It's been wonderful. But my coming to Bitcoin was through that gold business. We integrated in 2012 with this firm called Bit Reserve, which today is the uphold wallet and still today you can go on uphold and buy and sell gold to buy or sell bitcoin or ripple and we that was a business we launched with them in 2012 so why mention all this i think the the narrative about bitcoin is digital gold is very real is very important it's not going away it doesn't matter that gold is up and silver is up in the last 18 months exponentially, and Bitcoin is down. Over the long term, of course, Bitcoin has

dramatically outperformed gold. I have both. I believe that you should have both. I think they serve different roles within a portfolio, a little too complex to get into with only two minutes. But the markets always are going to cause the most amount of pain to the greatest number of people. they're going to at the moment where you know the market says oh gold is no uh bitcoin is no longer digital gold then all of a sudden maybe besant decides he's going to add a little bit for the reserve and then it's all of a sudden it is gold again or or whatever it is um whatever the name but the the characteristics that we've talked about at this conference over the years on our interviews about sort of the pristine collateral aspect of Bitcoin is still there and at the core

of the whole ecosystem. And in terms of macro moving around, look, I put out a post last week and, you know, I think the Fed chairman Powell, he's definitely not a criminal. I think the whole Trump attack is really misguided. But he is a very bad Fed chairman. He was no disrespect. The worst the worst that i've i've seen in my life and and i think if you talk to someone like scott besant who's a macro guy like me who worked for the same guy that i did and um i think you know quietly he would probably say the same thing not in a public venue um you know kept rates too low for too long and then over hiked and then left them too high for doing and now you know it's been clear the employment situation here has been, I call it quite dire for the last year.

And with those revisions yesterday, the rates are just much too high, given where the underlying economy is, where employment is, and also what the capital needs are of the country right now. And I think this is another very important part of why we've had this correction in crypto. It's just that you're having a company come out with a $1.2 trillion IPO. You've got AI, robotics, space, all these other things pulling capital away from crypto. That's OK. But we're feeling it because there isn't enough liquidity out there because policy is too tight. And so I suspect the dollar keeps going down. This is the best and essential policy, even though he won't say it. And I think this is going to be very bullish for us over the medium term, gold and Bitcoin.

I don't necessarily disagree. Rob, maybe the last thing I'll ask you is there's a lot of people in here who are building companies, various technology, various asset managers, et cetera. How are you guys thinking about what you're going to do internally versus what you're going to partner with people externally? And are there specific things that you're looking for from a partnership standpoint, et cetera, with the industry players? Well, in general, in this space, we have invested in sort of, at the outset, one kind of best-in-class provider in each of the key areas. And so, you know, at the start, that was Coinbase and Circle and Securitize, and Bank of New York certainly has played a significant role as well. And now that's expanding. So we added Anchorage

as an additional digital asset service provider. And so we'll continue as our footprint grows to add very selectively in a targeted way, you know, capabilities providers who are best in class in solving for what we're doing across crypto, stable coins, tokenization. Makes sense to me.

I appreciate you guys both coming. I always enjoy talking to both of you. So thank you so much.