The Pomp Podcast - Why Bitcoin’s Next Bull Run Could Be Unlike Any Other | Jeff Park

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Jeff Park is a Partner and Chief Investing Officer of ProCap BTC. In this conversation we talk about what’s going on with bitcoin, S&P500 rejecting Strategy, why bitcoin is lagging gold, should lower interest rates push bitcoin higher, how we are thinking about the bull market, evaluating Gemini & Figure IPOs, and why retail investors can’t be ignored. ===================== Markets are at all-time highs. Public equities are outperforming. And individual investors are driving it all. It’s officially the rise of the retail investor. On September 12th in NYC, I’m hosting the Independent Investor Summit — a one-day event built exclusively for self-directed investors. We’re bringing together some of the smartest public market investors I know for a full day of macro insights, market predictions, one-on-one fireside chats, and actionable investment ideas from each investor. This is going to be an absolute banger event. Join us if you like markets and think retail is two steps ahead of Wall Street.👉 TICKETS: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.independentinvestor.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (use promo code POMPYT25)======================Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://pompdesk.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠======================⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Core is the leading Bitcoin scaling solution, enabling you to lock in yield by locking up your Bitcoin. Simply lock it on the Bitcoin blockchain to secure the Core network, and get rewards. No bridging. No lending. Just holding. Still your keys. Still your coins. Now your yield. Start at ⁠https://stake.coredao.org/pomp⁠======================⁠BitcoinIRA⁠: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ 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 $500 in rewards.======================TimeStamps:0:00- Intro2:04 - Thoughts from S&P 500 rejecting Strategy11:25 - Relationship between gold and bitcoin19:27 - How high could bitcoin go this bull market?29:58 - Evaluating Gemini, Figure, & crypto IPOs33:16 - “We can’t ignore retail investors”

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. People tend

to buy bitcoin on the way up this is the thing that you and i know reflexive nature cycles exactly it's so reflexive it is not worth the risk of holding on to it if you're constantly worried about downside and it's not performing but when it goes up and bitcoin has high correlation to itself which is which is in itself the reflexive wheel of auto correlation people jump in so i think really this quarter coming for the end of the year is one of the best setup for Bitcoin you can ever have. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great episode with Jeff Park. Jeff is the chief investment officer of ProCap BTC. And in this conversation, we go through what's going on with Bitcoin. Why is Bitcoin lagging gold? Should interest rates and other things push Bitcoin up

higher? How are we thinking about the bull market? Is there going to be a bear market? How deep will it be? How long will it last? All those questions and much more. We also talk about Gemini and figure, both the IPOs that have happened and are coming up. And then we talk about retail investors, what's going on with Opendoor and how retail investors are reinvigorating financial markets and how things are changing so quickly, what companies should be thinking about along with these retail investors. That and much more today in my latest conversation with Jeff Park. All right, Jeff, I thought the first place to start, micro strategy or strategy now, everyone thought was going to be included in the S&P 500, be a watershed moment for

the Bitcoin space. Didn't happen. I think a lot of people felt left out. They feel like they're being targeted, biased against. I saw Michael Saylor. He was on CNBC. They asked him about it. He said, look, it's not bias. It's just, this is new. This is going to take some time to educate the committee. What is your take? Yeah. Indices are a funny thing on one hand, because they're called index and you imagine there's rules-based passive businesses around it that is methodical, calculated, predictable, but actually not all indices are the same. And if you spend enough time living in that world, then you get to observe some of the subjectivities that can exist in the lens of how these committees operate. Last year in the fall,

I made the call that MicroStrategy would be included in the NASDAQ index, but that it would not be guaranteed for the S&P index. And a lot of people had questions about it. And what you have to understand is that the ethos of how these index companies operate at some level have to do with, I think, their bigger businesses of what they're trying to promote in the space. We know NASDAQ at the cores in exchange. That means they really like volume, they like trading, and they like volatility, and all the things that you could imagine why they might be a little bit earlier to embrace crypto versus, let's say, the S&P, which is at the core a ratings agency that has a conservative mindset as to what they want to represent for the broader economy of the United

States as part of what they offer as an index service. So this is important. NASDAQ, the one thing that was challenging for inclusion in itself was they specifically prohibit financial services company in their index. This is explicitly laid out. So the only doubt I had in my mind with NASDAQ at the time was, could MicroStrategy be perceived as a financial services company because of the way that Bitcoin financialization in itself can feel like at some level an asset management business? But of course, we know MicroStrategy is in the technology sector because they have a SaaS business. So this was the one thing

that was a little bit unclear philosophically, even though the GICS code would say MicroStrategy Technology Company. NASDAQ follows the rules. It is a tech company, gets in, boom. The thing with the S&P is if you've studied it long enough, what you realize is that the committee

is made up of a group of people. They are economists. They are practitioners of the ratings agency business. and they're private. The committee members are not shared until much into retirement. And if you dig enough, you'll find some snippets of past committee members who share their experience of what it was like to be on the committee. And when you read through those transcripts, what you realize is that the most important thing that the S&P wants to do is to create a broad-based index that at the core represents the U.S. economy.

This is their North Star. This is what they want to show, that when you buy the index, you are getting a piece of the US economy. And so at a philosophical level, the question is, is the US ready to have Bitcoin as an operating business as part of a representation of the broader economy at the core? I think that's the most important part. The second thing is, they do exercise a lot of discretion beyond their rules around qualification. Tesla is, I think, mostly known for having had delays in their inclusion despite the numerical qualifications that they would have exhibited.

But another example I would give you is Moderna. Moderna met all the volume metrics, the profit metrics, and still was denied entry for some time because the lumpiness of that revenue coming from COVID-2020 was hard to model in its ability to be long-lasting. And because of that reason, Moderna was not included, even though it had also met its revenue target. So now we're talking about a pharmaceutical company that should represent the economy, generate a revenue to hit the target. And the committee still did not include it because of the lumpiness of what they thought might not be sustainable.

Of course, now we live with COVID. It has proven to have some perpetual tails to it. And now it is in the index. But it just shows you that the S&P index in itself is a conservative measure for which discretion weighs fairly heavily. So I think that those who would have been aware of it would have hedged the idea that it would not be included. And what I thought was really interesting was you can see pricing on this now with

precious markets. You could actually go on PolyMarket and Kaoshi and see what people were pricing in with MicroStrategy's chance for inclusion versus others like Robinhood and Applovin. And I thought the idea that people can actually start monetizing some of those as event-driven opportunities without having to take long, short risk of the underlying stock was a really interesting development of financialization for the predictive power of the population that can actually find other alternative incomes for the beliefs that they might be able to find alpha in.

Was the prediction market right in terms of who got in and who didn't on the probability? Yeah, I believe Robinhood was the front runner. I think most folks would have thought Robinhood would be a shoo-in. What you saw was MicroStrategy kind of hovered around 15% or so. And technically, that market hasn't closed because it's to the end of the year. There's one more chance that strategy could actually have an inclusion event in December. So that market is still alive, but it's still relatively low. But to your point, I think that the prediction market, this is a perfect example of where the prediction markets seem to be able to create significant change, right? Okay. I could go buy historically the stock of a company that I thought

was going to get included. And if they get included, the stock should go up. If they don't get included, the stock should go down. Pretty simple analysis. Now, the risk that I'm taking is anything else could happen with the company. They could announce a partnership. Their CEO could say something, you know, a macro event could have, like, I'm not able to isolate. I want to bet on, are they going to be included or are they not? I have to take broad risk of a business that should have this one event impact its price up or down. With the prediction market, now you just isolate it. It's just, hey, do you want to bet on, are they going to be included or not? Yes, that's the thing I want to bet on. I don't want to actually bet on the stock price. The stock price

was like a proxy for this thing I want to bet on. And so the prediction market introduces an isolated, very clean exposure to an idea. And you're probably more familiar with financial markets than I am. There's going to be a lot of people attracted to the idea that I can kind of very cleanly express an idea without the risks that anything else could impact the trade. That's right. That's right. It is precise and it's surgical in the kinds of event risks that you can take. And I think because of that, the information markets is very wide and there's different volatilities and betas you can associate with those markets as potentially being hedges or risk acceleration for the underlying stocks that you're investing in. I think there's going

to be huge markets for other things that companies report for which people as analysts are keeping track of, and they hope it would reflect upon the earnings power that leads to a stock price movement. But there's a lot of different basis risks that we're making in that assumption. And if you are a really smart, acute research analyst, and you are out there kind of trying to get the revenue target as close as possible, what a beautiful thing that you can actually bet on that target now and not actually play the proxy basis game of the underlying stock following through. The other thing too with crypto is I think people can get myopic in our industry about wanting to feel that they know all they need to bottoms up inside out to think that these are the

events that will happen. But what you sometimes forget, myself included at times, is there's a whole world out there with other exogenous things at play. So when I saw folks honing in on strategy inclusion being a shoo-in, their theory evolved a lot around what strategy was doing. Strategy is releasing these kinds of guidances. They're putting these kinds of disclaimers. All of these things make it feel like they're preparing for something. But at the end of the day, it's not so important what strategy does. It's more important what the index committee does and what the other players around the strategy might have some probabilistic opportunities to be in. So in that example, I think if you put Robinhood next to strategy and try to be as neutral about whether you're

passionate about Bitcoin or not, you can see the full picture of what the competition in itself is. And I think that's important. So, you know, there's a lesson for crypto investors to know that there's a whole world out there of other things at play. And it's not enough to be bottoms up, but also top down in the way that you assess these opportunities. I like that. It's like somebody who wants to go to the club. They take a shower, put on their nice clothes, a little cologne. They go, walk up to the door. It don't matter all the prep you did to get into the club. They're going to let you in or they're not. It's actually the bouncer at the door's decision is the one who you got to pay attention to. What are he going to decide? Not all the prep work that you did, which makes sense. um bitcoin and gold seem to be a ever increasingly popular topic um we see gold hitting new all-time highs uh bitcoin is not hitting new all-time highs um although it has done very well uh over the last year and a half or so um central banks are buying lots of gold and i think that you're starting to see this narrative of gold being uh an asset that not only can go up which we've seen you know 70 appreciation since january 2024 but also uh canter fitzgerald as an example just

launched a brand new Bitcoin and gold fund. And their whole thing is Bitcoin can be the upside, gold can be some downside protection in that type of blended fund. How are you looking at these two assets and their relationship with each other? Yeah, I think that fund that Cantu released, by the way, is incredibly interesting. And that is a structured product using exotic options. Because as I understand it, the payoff is you get Bitcoin performance over the five year, but if Bitcoin is down, you actually participate in gold performance in that period into the upside capture. And so that's a knock-in option, depending on a hybrid trigger of another asset, which in itself is fairly complicated. But the thing that makes that pricing rich or cheap

depends on the correlation of gold and Bitcoin, right? Because if you think about a hybrid option, let's say an asset A that triggers upon the price performance of asset B, what you're trying to isolate there is the correlation of their movements. So the more correlated they are, the more like a basket, therefore they're more expensive as an option to own the hybrid connection. If they're negative correlated, actually it's a much cheaper option in some sense. And so playing that correlation game is the name of how these structured products find alpha. And gold and Bitcoin, it has a very interesting correlation history. Because on one hand, And you imagine it's positive over 90, 120 day rolling window, but it's not always true.

It is episodically possible that gold and Bitcoin actually exhibit negative correlation, and it has been actually in the past 30 days. And that's because we all know Bitcoin at some level trades also like a risk asset, and that changes the dynamics with gold. So I actually think pricing Bitcoin gold correlation is a really interesting trade because that lack of stability kind of gives you some pricing spread where if you fundamentally believe they should be more correlated, you can trade long-term like five years out and make some opportunities.

What about the charts that people have probably seen online where gold runs 100 days later, Bitcoin runs? I've shared them. And I'm not, you know, Albert Einstein, but it looks like it holds. Guess what? When gold ran in Q1 into Q2, Bitcoin ran about 100 days later, right? Like in July. Do you think that that just holds constantly?

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There are over 100 live apps in the network and the deepest liquidity in all of Bitcoin DeFi. Get off zero and start earning yield on even just 1% of your Bitcoin by going to stake.cordow.org slash POMP. Again, that's stake.cordow.org slash POMP, or go click the link in the description. Yeah, yeah. Both gold and Bitcoin have shown to have the highest correlation to M2 supply. And because of that, that tends to be the factor in which how people grade their performance.

And I think it's not hidden to folks that those two are still today the highest performing assets year to date. So I think that's good. The question of Bitcoin specific underperformance to gold, in my opinion, has a lot to do more with the lack of volatility. because I think the aspect of why Bitcoin is favored upon gold at times is not just the store value narrative, which is important, but it's also the velocity in which the price moves that provides a lot of attention and excitement to the mainstream adoption of the

asset in itself. And so some time ago, I tweeted that the worst thing that could happen to Bitcoin this year would be if gold's volatility goes higher than Bitcoin's volatility. It feels a little unimaginable, but there were windows in which that happened because of the extreme moves that gold experienced day by day, where gold's 10-day realized volatility actually superseded Bitcoin's. And I thought, wow, this is actually the worst thing that could happen because people still ultimately want return. The reason young people gravitate towards Bitcoin really at the end of the day, I think beyond the narrative of its ideology is

its volatility. They like the idea of owning volatile assets. And if gold's actually going to be more volatile, hey, gold has an ideology too that I think young people can also wrap their head around and appreciate if they felt that there was a buy-in for it. And so the number one thing that matters is Bitcoin's volatility has to rise. And so I think right now, this is really the best setup for Bitcoin ever. I posted back in February this year, my big 2025 macro thesis, which was if Trump is able to accomplish all of his macroeconomic agenda, the end game would be achieving the holy grail of fiat alchemy, which is lower dollar and lower yield, which historically is not possible because of the Triffin dilemma. Many, many pundits said this

isn't going to happen and Trump's not going to get his way. And I said, never, ever doubt, never, ever doubt the ability of a transparently profit-motivated person who's in power, who's going to accomplish these things. And lo and behold, the DXY has come down from 120 to now below 95. The 10-year upon Trump's start in January was at 4.6. Now it's at 4.0. It's happened. And this is incredible acceleration for Bitcoin. And it is incredible acceleration for gold as well, which is why gold has done so well. So why is Bitcoin lagging? It's lagging because the vol is low. But here's the beautiful thing. This is how the Bitcoin coil spring happens. Because it's lagging gold to where I think we all expect it to go higher and prior pursuit of the price should

be closer to 170K or so, it'll happen very fast. This is the kind of stuff that Bitcoin does. When there's such a gap in where it should be priced relative to other assets, it moves really quickly. And that then becomes a self-fulfilling volatility machine that can actually fuel further acceleration into adoption. Because really, people tend to buy Bitcoin on the way up. This is the thing that you and I know- It's got a reflexive nature to it. Exactly. It's so reflexive. It is not worth the risk of holding onto it if you're constantly worried about downside and it's not performing. But when it goes up and Bitcoin has high

correlation to itself, which is in itself the reflexive wheel of autocorrelation, people jump in. So I think really this quarter coming for the end of the year is one of the best setup for Bitcoin we can ever have. What do you think Bitcoin's price could go to? You say, hey, it's mispriced right now it can catch up um i talked to a lot of people i hear 140 150 i hear 500 right and pretty much every number in between maybe the fact that we're laughing 500 is maybe you know the extreme but um what you know and that's so much like a price target as much as just like like how do you think through okay when the coiled spring starts moving like how severe is the move? Is it $10K, $20K per coin? Is it $100K per coin? I think that it can move really

fast. We could have a series of days where it's moving $5K a day, and it will just feel really exuberant. But it won't be so crazy that people don't think there's an opportunity to buy into it. Right. It's actually Bitcoin is truly an asset that you try to buy high and sell higher than try to buy low and sell high. The distinction here I'm making is that Bitcoin is generally really boring and generally goes down when people aren't focused on it. But when it goes up, the trend has a long lasting effect, more so than people think. So in the first, second innings of the run-up, it's never late. It will keep going. So I think the price target most people have in mind is it should really be right now around

$150,000 to $170,000 just based upon what we're seeing in its relative underperformance to gold. And I think if you were to think there was going to be more buying coming from a structural perspective with these treasury companies that have cash waiting to participate in the market for, that's an inelastic price bid. that could push it up to 200K plus. I believe at Bitwise, our price target we had since the beginning of the year was that it could hit 200K.

And I do think, even though it feels kind of far from where we are, it's very much in play that this could happen by the end of the year. And do you think that's like a blow-off top type scenario? And then the faster and higher it goes, the more likely the big, bad bear market drawdown happens? Or do you not see a relationship between the speed in severity of the move up with what could be a bear market afterwards?

I think historically, the way Bitcoin has found new floors had to do with the cost basis of the new capital coming in every cycle. And so historically, what we haven't had great data for is that there weren't many permanent capital vehicles or permanent capital investor types coming into the Bitcoin space. So every cycle, yes, you were getting new people in, But the new people tended to be still retail, or sometimes more fast moving kind of family offices. And it never really dawned upon endowments or sovereigns or ETFs. And I think the unique aspect here of the run up is, if that comes from permanent capital bases, and ETFs, where people are buying crypto for the very first time, they're generally not sellers. Because a 1% to 2%, 1% to 5% allocation you're making into a fund will neither make or break you. And so you're not really incentivized for a profit taking until there is actually a

more meaningful ROI on that. And that's why I think it's important to watch the ETF flows. Because if the Bitcoin price move happens with ETF flows, and these ETF flows are driven by RIAs and financial advisors that are making foray into Bitcoin for the first time into someone's portfolio, that is money good. That will stay. Even if there was a 40% drought on, they're not really selling because it wasn't a position sized for them to feel hurt by it. And that's why Bitcoin, I think, is always going up in cycles because people don't sell, but then they buy on a lower cost average because they want to build their position.

And then they are able to participate on the upside. And so because this particular cycle there's so much of new capital coming in. I think that it is quite unlikely we're going to have the kinds of drawdowns historically that we've experienced. Yeah, it is. It's really interesting, right? Thinking through the cycles. And I think my base case has been, we will get drawdowns, they will be more muted. But to think that you've probably seen this chart of like, you know, you get kind of the logarithmic, you know, it goes up, it comes back down, it goes up, comes back down and then etfs get approved and then it's pretty much like a 45 degree angle just like a grind up yep um now within there there's still 30 drawdowns right i haven't been

as many of them but there still have been a couple um but it's like you know maybe we see a 50 drawdown that's the next bear market i don't know right like i i think it's um uh as i've gotten older i'm more uh comfortable just leaving the questions out there and just saying i actually don't know what's going to happen it's going to be fascinating yeah and then once we get that data then we'll be able to better understand like, where is Bitcoin? How do the cycles work now? And it's kind of a missing data point in this entire analysis. It is. I mean, at this point, 10% plus Bitcoin supply is owned by institutions. We have to acknowledge that as a fact that it's different from prior cycles. And really violent sell-offs tend to happen upon capitulation or liquidation

risks. And liquidation risks can happen from idiosyncratic events like an FTX, but it could also happen from credit. And as I see it, Bitcoin still hasn't really found leverage in a way that I think shows more upside than it would be a cause for concern today. I think the next run-up for Bitcoin will potentially have leverage embedded in a way that is compliant to traditional Wall Street infrastructure. And that leverage cycle, we haven't ever really seen it, but I think could be like the next big leg up. And then it could be the contributor to actually a meaningful drawdown. But we're not there. There actually just isn't enough room to imagine why there would be a sell-off from any of those points. Let's talk timeline. Because I think

it's another thing, right? If you were to put some monkeys in the lab and show them a bunch of old charts, and they could just close their eyes, forget about price, and just say like, I think top of the market is going to be, they would probably pick October or November, right? October, November, after the halving year seems to be the top of the market. We've been talking a lot about like at what price level does timeline still hold? Like, do you think that later this year will be kind of the top of the cycle? And then we'll see kind of how deep or severe a drawdown is. But is there something to the timeline to pay attention to?

It's a good question. Jeff Barkley's asking a good question. I do think there are self-fulfilling seasonalities in all markets. And it's not escaped all Bitcoin investors that generally Q4, Q1 are the strongest, always. And it's proven to be the case most of Bitcoin's history. And that in itself has some self-fulfilling effects to it. At the same time, the historical things that used to matter, like the halving or how much actual mining profitability there are, I think are becoming maybe less scrutinized as it

used to be in the past as the driver of marginal price action. I think it was this week that the Bitcoin network hit one Zeta hash, which is in itself like a pretty incredible output. But I haven't heard people talk about it because it's not really in their considerations anymore about that meaning anything about kind of difficulty for computer miner profitability. So I think some of the seasonality, more likely if there were ones to come, would probably be just tied to macro risk on risk off assets and how people are pair trading Bitcoin with other global macro risk assets.

Because that's kind of, I think the pros and cons of the trade-off of graduating Bitcoin into the adults in the room, which it's now a part of a broader portfolio. How does it play with other assets? Yeah. And I always think about whether gold and Bitcoin are complementary or actually substitute goods. This is like an open question for me still, because I meet a lot of investors who are really into Bitcoin, but they also like gold. But you don't see a lot of gold investors who like Bitcoin. It doesn't percolate the other way around the same way. But that has some impact for the price and path dependency of how their price action might relate to each other. So if gold goes up and Bitcoin's price action versus Bitcoin goes up and gold's price action

depends a little bit on that sentiment there. So I think that's the other thing that could change in cycles where gold investors will accept Bitcoin more as a complementary good and is now a part of the portfolio and not necessarily a substitute trade-off. And that could in itself be like a pretty meaningful inflection point for more adoption across these cycle curves. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account, but don't have any crypto in your retirement account? Listen up, this is for you. Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for retirement by helping smart investors diversify their savings with access to over 75 cryptocurrencies.

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search for bitcoin ira in the app store or visit bitcoin ira.com slash pomp to join 200 000 americans on their journey to upgrade their retirement that's bitcoin ira.com slash pomp to upgrade your retirement today let's talk about the ipos coming out of the industry so gemini is about to go public a figure just went public um at like a five plus billion dollar evaluation um i invested earlier in that business was on the board at some point um it's been fascinating because like they are a crypto company but not a crypto company right they're doing the helix and you know things that like crypto people are like why would we ever think about that stuff like we just want coins that go up you know 100x um but you know then you get like the gemini's of the

world that are pure play exchanges and they have you know the credit cards and all this so like it does feel like companies that were built in prior cycles have now reached a maturity level and a scale and significance that when this IPO window opens, they're going through? How do you evaluate some of these companies, maybe like the figure in Gemini, et cetera? Yeah. I think that it is a testament to the fact that everyone is ready to have crypto in their portfolio and they want more options. For the longest time, if you wanted crypto equity exposure, there was only a handful of things you could buy, right? You could really buy miners or you could buy exchanges. And those were kind of like your predominant categories. Maybe you could buy asset management companies

and some onshore, some offshore. But that was really it. You didn't have things like figure, which actually is a plug into fintech in ways that is more relatable to the broader economy. So I think all of those things are just coming from the demand of investors. You saw that clearly with Circle's price action in the way that the exuberance led to really interesting price action, the stablecoin complex overall. But Gemini in particular has a soft spot for me and one that I think is worth celebrating because if you recall, Gemini was one of the players involved in the very nasty bankruptcy of Genesis in the downfall post FTX. And the fact that we now are in a period where Gemini can actually come out and be a public company is really a moment to

realize that era has ended. So they were able to solve the bankruptcy issues from Genesis and the Gemini Earn program. Actually, they paid back all of their customers at 2x what the initial loss was thanks to Bitcoin's price appreciation. So this is a turning point. The other thing that is worth appreciating is part of the big IPO stick is that they're going to do more things with NASDAQ. And that's about tokenization, staking, and custodial services. So having a NASDAQ-like partner in this scenario shows you that institutions are here in a meaningful way. And the third thing is they actually have opened up their IPO to more retail access than historically other companies have done. And I continue to believe that the mission of

getting companies public earlier so retail can participate in the growing economy that is accelerating is really kind of important um so we should also cheer for the fact that we're now allowing that as a possibility you know whether your view on gemini's um you know financial health is one or another the opportunity is there which i think is worth celebrating speaking of uh retail investors, the open door, open army, which I think you're a part of. I'll say it's probably the single most successful activism campaign in recent memory, right?

You have the existing CEO steps down because of public pressure. You have the management team, which had planned to sell stock. They basically stopped selling their stock. You have a new CEO who comes in, the COO of Shopify has now become the open door ceo um and you bring back keith raboy and eric wu who are two of the co-founders of the company to join the board of directors that all happened in 60 days stock went from 50 cents to nine dollars right um in a weird way a traditional activist campaign they would be you know like pamphleting they would be you know let me get the shareholder records let me go do

the proxy battle like there's like there's a a whole thing that they would do that's like the normal playbook yeah here just a bunch of retail investors like frankly like eric jackson and company with memes just like kept beating the open door you know team over the head until they made changes and i think what's fascinating to me is like the stock price shows that people are more excited today than they were 60 days ago right so it's like not only did you get the corporate changes but you also got like a investor confidence or sentiment change how do you think about this stuff playing into some of the things you're talking about, like retail investors with companies going public and the crypto industry? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as crypto says,

you can just do things. We live in a world now where you can just do things. And that is really democratizing in certain ways for what financial access is going to look like. Activism in the past, I think, used to have a more negative tone as to what it generally would be led by players like Elliot, for example, or even Bill Ackman's different campaigns that he's run, more with an institutional lens to enacting change. Rarely is activism used to bring something that's dead to life in that fashion. So I think that's worth noting. Look, I think we can't ignore retail investors. I think retail investors hold a lot of sway. And some of this is because there's a growing trend of disintermediation of financial advisory

in itself, where people feel emboldened and empowered to manage their own personal wealth without needing guidance, without wanting guardrails that are being imposed when they think they know better and they want to invest the way they like. And because of that mindset of kind of do-it-yourself, the pool of capital that is moving in the space is just less predictable. And by the way, these retail investors, when we talk about it, we make it sound like they're shrimp-sized investors, but it's just not true. The high net worths that are out there that are able to invest on a retail level is giant.

They're big checks. And I think that's another thing that's just changed in the industry over the past 10 years in the ways that disintermediation has come for financial advisory services. You know what's funny to me is there's a, I think it's a guy, I don't know, it looks like a guy child photo um who has a pseudonymous account um i think it's mind dump is uh is the name and uh in the bio he talks about uh he's on the forbes list maybe maybe not uh usually you would be like oh yeah whatever except for his position in open door it's like 13 or 14 million dollars and he says his goal is to become the single largest shareholder he's gonna get to

100 million dollars right and uh just the things he talks about like he's sophisticated you can just tell right um you compare that to these hedge funds who are filing they're like 13fs and stuff and some of them only have you know 10 million dollar positions yeah so like again now they're managing an entire portfolio this may be like a you know 0.1 position or you know one percent whatever but you do have now individuals who are kind of like uh mark yusko one time told me institution uh insta individuals i think or something like that like they're like individuals that are big enough to act like they're uh institutions yep and um that changes the game a little bit right it's not just like what do they do on social media to your point it's like

no they have real capital yeah yeah right and like you don't get i don't know what the latest number is i mean today's gonna be a monster day obviously for that for that stock um i don't know a billion dollars, $2 billion of trading volume. Yeah. Like that's not all retail. Yeah. But that's a lot of retail in there. Yep. Yep. Yep. And what's beautiful about it is that all the communication is happening literally in open forums. It's truly an open door, no pun intended. Like people are talking about it out loud with all of us knowing whether we like the trade, we don't like the trade, whether you agree or disagree, whether they're real or not, right? Are they opportunists? Are they really coming in for the long-term vision of what AI driven real estate tech could look like?

And it's an open forum. By the way, there's also a little bit of a science to this too, which is that retail is understanding what is in their advantage to invest versus institutions, right? They know that they are not the biggest cohort of checks per account basis, right? On a numerator denominator basis. But what they do know they can do better is they can mobilize more people to build a bigger numerator than institutions really can. And so that is actually a retail edge.

So we can't discount that. And then the second thing is when you start with a small market cap company that has like a 25% short interest, like there are technical reasons as to how that in itself sets up for momentum and buy-in and culture building towards there being enough kind of, I don't want to call it free money but dynamics to bring people on board it's like it's like bootstrapping a campaign knowing that there is kind of built-in uh accelerant for you if you're able to harness that the right way which which is almost like most of the stories of how these retail trades take off you know the part that people don't talk about too that um it's kind of one of those like

uncomfortable truths that people who have been really in it know um there's an entertainment factor to it too like you know uh on a lot of group chats um my brothers are in a lot of group chats and they'll screenshot stuff that like people i don't know right but like are younger uh will say and you see it and you're just like oh there's like no sports games on i'm like you know tuesday at noon these guys are watching the stock market and they're participating and you know like it's it's the same thing that sports would be you know on the weekends yep is during the week yep and again i'm not here to pass judgment whether that's good or bad frankly i think it's like probably both like you know there's elements of both um but that's where it

becomes really interesting right like when you start to combine capital social media distribution entertainment value you know all this stuff yeah markets are changing like like aggressively and you know i i think i've said before but uh i've had a couple ceos reach out to me that run public companies like not small ones you know like multi-billion dollar public companies and they're like so i got a good business but i don't have that how do i get that like that's interesting to me how do i engage those people and frankly some of them are like uh a little nervous they're like you know the uh there's two sides of the sword like you know if they're if they're on my side fighting for me like i love them but like i saw what they did the ceo of open door like she

didn't have a job right now i don't want that right like that's the part i don't want so in a weird way, I think this is like the conversation that's going on inside these corporate boardrooms is like, Hey, we want to engage retail, but we'll do it the right way. We want them on our side. How do we do? And there's just not a playbook really. Yeah, no, there really isn't. Um, but, um, but it is the new strategy of capital formation that I think has taken hold. Um, it's, it really is because, um, people are looking for just different outcomes versus what they have, I think now just seen as an over-commodification of investable opportunities, when you see the outperformance of passive versus active in general, the pushback there is that we're

going to create active alpha differently. And the active alpha that is most easy to create is those that are rooted in small cap opportunities with an ideological community that can push the narrative. And so I think more companies are going to have to be mindful of that importance because we live in a world where the information capital and the financial capital are starting to just become more commingled. Think about how many corporate accounts exist now on Twitter that historically wouldn't and why that itself is like actually become a bit of an important role. Coinbase just hired someone to lead their Coinbase Twitter account. And I mean, the amount of goodwill Coinbase built upon having this guy who the industry has loved to now represent Coinbase and that match was made has been euphoric.

But it's one where you have to have a real understanding of the cultural nuance of your investors, your customers, and your operating teams. And in a way, that shows some authenticity behind the corporate mission. I think that's what it is. I think retail investors, more than institutions and anyone else, really just care about authenticity. Institutions, they want to, but really they're driven by other fiduciary needs. But retail investors, to your point, because they're having fun with it, you're only going to want to have fun with authentic people doing authentic things. That's the entire point of why you're in the arena.

It's like cheering for your sports team. You want to know that they want to win, right? Nobody wants to cheer for the team that is phoning it in and it's like, we're going to get the first draft pick next year. like they want to be with the team who's like no we're fighting for you and by the way like we see you yeah yeah sports teams if you acknowledge the fans fans are like bigger fans 100 all right uh where can we send people to find you or or find more your writing i know some of you were tweeting at you to write more oh man yeah i feel like i've had to all come in thanks to you and it's been exhilarating um yeah it was funny i was actually at a dinner last night with a bunch of crypto

people and um and someone who i deeply admire told me that i should actually write more uh and that I should send out the transcript to all of us here for the review before, which is really just so humbling. I continue to write on my sub stack. The link is in my Twitter. My handle is dgt10011. You can usually find me there. dgt10011.

Perfect. Thank you very much. We'll do it again next week. Let's do it.