The Pomp Podcast - Will Global Conflict Send Bitcoin Higher? | Jeff Park

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Jeff Park is the Partner & Chief Investment Officer at ProCap BTC. In this conversation, we discuss the idea of “wartime Bitcoin,” how rising geopolitical tensions could impact the asset, and why cracks in private credit could ultimately benefit Bitcoin. We also cover institutional adoption, stablecoins, and how crypto companies are increasingly integrating with the traditional financial system.=======================Join Arch Public this Thursday @ 2pm Et for an exclusive webinar with Anthony, where we will share professional strategies for optimizing your portfolio to outperform current bear market conditions. This session is designed to provide actionable insights into risk management and long-term wealth preservation. Resister here to secure your spot: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DVHBA2Z3QgS5X0l203-78A=======================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=======================This podcast is sponsored by Abra.com. Abra is the secure way to access crypto and crypto based yield and loan products through a separately managed account structure.Learn more at http://www.abra.com.=======================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 - Intro0:52 - Wartime bitcoin & global conflict 5:00 - Bitcoin vs Gold: which wins in a crisis?6:03 - Is bitcoin still in a bear market? 9:15 - Private credit cracks & why it could benefit bitcoin15:49 - Kraken & rewriting the banking system19:04 - Stablecoins vs Banks: the fight in Washington22:40 - Why AI models prefer bitcoin over stablecoins

And so all eyes are on oil. All eyes are on geopolitics. This, I think, is what wartime Bitcoin really means, and that the wartime Bitcoin may be the path in which we lead to higher highs. And that's actually what we are seeing unfold. Bitcoin is perhaps also the straight of her moves for what free money can mean. I think it's very good for Bitcoin because once private credit implodes, the bad private credit, everything we've always have known will come to light. What's going on, guys? In this conversation with Jeff Park, we hit on a number of things that you're probably thinking about at home. The first is what's going on with wartime Bitcoin, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, and much, much more. Then we also get into what's

going on with all of the private credit cracks in the financial system. How's that going to spill over into Bitcoin? Is it good or is it bad? And how's it going to affect your portfolio? And lastly, we do a roundup of all the institutional stories that are out there. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, and some of them may surprise you. All that and more in this conversation with Jeff Park. All right, Jeff, I thought a great place to start the conversation. The United States is on this generational run. We go into Venezuela, then we start bombing Iran. Now we're talking about Cuba. The Iran thing looks like that is going to be the really big thing everyone's

paying attention to. How does Bitcoin get affected by what looks like a conflict that may or may not at any time soon? Yeah, you and long readers of my Substack might have seen a piece I published last year called The Birth of the Ideological Investor. And in that article, I talk about geopolitics being one of the anchors to reimagine what the role of Bitcoin could be in the future, basically intimating that the death of the Washington consensus will lead to a lot of disinformation and military campaigns that re-underwrite what the risk-free rate actually means and what the role of Bitcoin could be in that. And I think what you've now seen is that thesis playing out because surprisingly, and

maybe unsurprisingly, February 28th actually did mark the bottom for Bitcoin at 63K. It also marked the low point for the 10-year rates at 3.9. Both of those have now been expanding through today, mid-March, where Bitcoin is reclaiming higher highs and yields have expanded as well now to 4.1, 4.2%. What that means is rising rates is now showing some early correlations of rising Bitcoin, which is very counterintuitive to how people used to think about free money and the era of easy money being the source for Bitcoin's fuel. In that world, I've argued that there's a wartime Bitcoin version versus a peacetime Bitcoin version, and that the wartime Bitcoin may be the path in which we lead to higher highs. And that's actually what we are seeing unfold. The correlation with

rates and Bitcoin price, I think, is an interesting one to watch. Of course, there's other things that are happening in the multi-asset ecosystem, but one that I think also even today showed that relationship to be very, very robust. There was an announcement at 10.30 a.m. where the group of seven talked about the possibility of having an emergency release of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And on that news, Bitcoin went up 2000 points. That news was actually the catalyst for Bitcoin's run up today. And so all eyes are on oil. All eyes are on geopolitics. This, I think, is what wartime Bitcoin really means. And in some sense, it goes back to the physicality of the real world that we live in. There's this book called Prisoners of Geography, which I don't know if you

ever had the chance to read. Tim Marshall wrote this fantastic book. And he talks about how everything that we know about conflicts in the modern era and the ancient era is driven by geography. That geography is destiny. It's not ideology. It's not culture. It's not clash of the civilizations. It really comes down to the underpinnings of the geographical world that is conflict-ridden. It talks about how often Russia and the role of Russia in being an insecure region is precisely because of its geographical weakness in which most of Western Europe is basically without terrains and without natural barriers to protect it from war. And that insecurity that Putin has is not just Putin himself, but a Russian mentality cultivated over 500 plus years

of having no geographical barrier towards the West. Similarly with China, the reason why China feels very insecure is that they have no sea access to the East because there's a chain of islands that barricade their maritime access. So that insecurity speaks to the Taiwan crisis and all the things in the future. We're talking about the Strait of Hormuz at the center right now of geopolitics. And I think in some sense, it is really interesting to imagine that Bitcoin is perhaps also the Strait of Hormuz for what free money can mean. What I mean by that is if you think the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Gulf is kind of where the money system exists today in compliance across the ecosystems of the players that can traffic in that Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz

represents the only path in which you can escape towards the Indian Ocean, where freedom is and unlimited access. And if Bitcoin is that conduit that allows money to go from the compliant level in which we play to freedom money that is censorship resistant and totally permissionless, one may imagine Bitcoin is actually the Strait of Hormuz of freedom money. Now, gold is up 20% to start the year. Bitcoin is down 20%. Those two assets used to be married together. I think people now think of Bitcoin trading in line with software stocks. Those are down 16%, 18%. The mental framework that you just outlined, how does gold play into that that is different than Bitcoin? Or do you think these two things eventually come back

together and people look at the assets very similarly? I think they will eventually come back together because the core fuel that is riding behind them is debasement. And maybe the timeframe looks a little bit shifted. Maybe the autocorrelation isn't so precise to be measured in the latency that we wanted to. But the end terminal state is that both gold and Bitcoin are proxy trades in money debasement, where the fiat value itself that you're debasing most of asset valuation is going to decrease. So I think eventually, maybe it's not tomorrow, maybe it's not next quarter, but several years from now, I feel very confident that gold and Bitcoin will show similar correlation to where it's having outperformed owning dollars.

Now, when you look at what's driving Bitcoin, you know, it obviously fell off significantly. People have really, I think, overanalyzed even why did it sell off. If we are in a bear market, which it looks like we are, we only went down to 60. Traditional bear markets, we would have went down 85%. You know, so we went down 50. Is that because muted volatility to the upside also means muted volatility to the downside? Or how are you thinking about, you know, was that a true bottom to a bear market when we kind of puked down to $58K, $60K?

Or could there still be some downside risk and kind of talk through your current thought process? Yeah, most dislocations in all financial markets, and this is not exclusive to Bitcoin, it's exclusive to almost all asset classes, is that those types of dislocations tend to happen when there's a gap in liquidity and an asset liability mismatching issue. That's usually the case for what has happened to Bitcoin historically, when things like FTX imploded or Luna imploded, or also in the traditional markets when we had the global financial crisis with RMBS and ABS and mortgage-backed securities, but also maybe now with private

credit and all the ways that in itself is a liquidity transformation mismatch. So I think that's the key. When there's a drawdown, there's two kinds of drawdown. There's one that is driven by sentiment in which people are rotating capital for costs and opportunities. But then there's the other version, which is a forced liquidation. And I think historically, Bitcoin's patterns have been driven by forced liquidations. The one that we're watching now, I won't say is a clear, explicit forced liquidation catalyst that is unique to the crypto sector. In the past, most of Bitcoin's problems came from within. But now, because

Bitcoin is more broadly accepted in the Tratify rails and systems, it found its escape hatch to being more intermingled with other assets. So you could make the argument that perhaps the drawdown we experienced was due to some sell-off in software or some kind of factor neutralization that is happening at the multi-strat pods, or it could be traditional investors deleveraging and using Bitcoin as a proxy trade for risk assets. And there's those kinds of trading dynamics. But the takeaway point is this, there isn't a forced liquidation as I see it today. The Bitcoin ETFs have held strong. One might argue that actually the Bitcoin ETF buyers have been more diamond hand like than almost any other class of Bitcoin cohorts that's ever existed in history. That's a good sign. I think we're also broadly seeing the financialization of Bitcoin proliferate towards ownership by different types of investors across different kinds of risk segmentations. So on the back of that, if you think about the only consistent buyer today having thus

far been MicroStrategy, their bid coming from the issuance of preferred securities, which is transforming Bitcoin's volatile risk into a yield engine that other investors are underwriting for that short-term benefit, we are finding different ways to financialize Bitcoin introduction now that is muting some of the downside. In other words, imagine if there was no MicroStrategy. Imagine if there was no persistent bid week after week that would have been supporting Bitcoin's price. I could argue that we should probably be a little bit lower, of course, structurally,

than if strategy had not been there. So to unlock that strategy had through credit creation is actually the kind of floor that is being provided today that we didn't have before. Speaking of credit, private credit has come into the limelight, if you will. Obviously, the private credit has risen over the last decade or so. Passing of Dodd-Frank really kind of boxed a lot of the banks out. Now these financial organizations step in and say, we'll lend to small and medium-sized businesses. Sounds great until maybe those businesses aren't what you thought they were, or they can't pay back, or there's some sort of contraction in the economy. As we see these cracks in private credit, does that have any spillover into Bitcoin?

Yes, 100%. And I think it'll be a spillover in the positive. So let me explain that. Before I joined Bitwise, I spent 10 plus years at a multi-strat hedge fund where private credit was one of the domain expert products that we built and launched through. And private credit often is a bit of a misnomer. I think people use private credit as a catch-all phrase to describe a certain kind of asset in the system, but it can really range from anything, as you said, from direct lending to mezzanine, small private equity operators. It could also be secondary NAV trading and the credit that backs portfolios. It could also speak to asset-backed securities, or it could be litigation financing, anytime there's some kind of credit provisioning that

is not what is liquidly traded, I think gets bucketed as private credit. So what does that mean? It means there's no mark to market. It probably means it's a bilateral trade where it's not totally syndicated with public discovery of price through information symmetry. And it also probably means that at some level, because of those features, it's a liquid. And I think that's the unifying force of how people talk about private credit. There's probably some good kinds of private credit. For instance, litigation financing, I think, is a kind of a good type of private credit, which by definition will most always be bilateral because it's case by case, but also one that requires a certain kind of duration. And the payoff of a lawsuit has nothing

to do with equity market beta because it's idiosyncratically event-driven. But that kind private credit is different than, hey, I'm going to lend junior subordinated debt in a loan format to somebody and I'm underwriting it with very low risk limits because I'm a BDC and I'm a machine that needs to be in the business of issuance. Very different incentive alignment. So not all private credit are bad actors. However, what I think is common is the investors who put their money in private credit. And this is also my learning from my days at Bitwise when I used to talk to hundreds of institutions every day to will the enthusiasm to consider Bitcoin as an investment. And the same CIOs of these pensions funds and endowments and institutional investors

would say, Bitcoin's volatility is a problem. I can't wear that kind of risk and the uncertainty in an exogenous event that I seem to have no control over. And you'll often find that this exact same cohort of investor loves private credit, loves it. They don't have to market. It's like a seven-year investment in some cases where they don't ever have to kind of seek accountability for that underwrite and go to committee. And three, it's entirely based on this idea of information asymmetry where you feel like you're sourcing better deals than somebody else because you have some edge in that ability to build a better mousetrap. And so you feel like you have more control over your destiny. And therefore that agency leads you to private

credit. Bitcoin, you have low agency. It's volatile. I don't know what it is. And so to me, that correlation was almost one. Those who hated Bitcoin loved private credit. So that brings me to my final point and your final question. What does this mean for Bitcoin? I think it's very good for Bitcoin because once private credit implodes, the bad private credit, everything we've always have known will come to light. Just because you don't market doesn't mean? It's not actually being impaired or expanding in value. It just means you're living without truth. And two, if it's a liquid, you should actually consider that to be a negative effect, not a positive effect, because you don't have to mark to market because liquidity is

actually price discovery. And once people realize private credit is actually not only kind of not being priced correctly for the risks you're taking, but realize the antidote to that is something like Bitcoin, which actually gives you a perfect symmetry of information and price discovery and liquidity and all those things that private credit is not. I think people will see that there's a rule for that in a portfolio because a portfolio always needs to be dynamically managed with an ability to see what are the risks. The biggest problem with private credit because you don't know the risk until it's too late. Something that marks at 100 and then 100

and then 100 and then 100 and the next day goes to zero. I mean, that's not a question of volatility. That's a question of the worst case scenario of fraud. 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,

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It feels like the crypto companies are not only growing up, the crypto companies are really trying to partner, morph, evolve into legacy finance companies. Yeah, it's funny. I feel like for a long time, the crypto community kept talking about the institutions are coming and the institutions are coming. But maybe the end story is that crypto is just going to the institutions and the flows have reversed. It's funny. I think these are incredible news, and yet there is a little bit of lethargy in the community as to digesting whether it's good or bad or not a lot of excitement or enthusiasm, which I think goes back to where we started our conversation.

Right now, it's such a wartime Bitcoin story that these things would have been like a peacetime Bitcoin, peacetime crypto institutional adoption story that people seem to have less appetite for. But I would nonetheless say these are hugely important milestones. And Kraken in particular, getting the skinny master account is, I think, a very big deal because at the root of that permission is the possibility that you can re-underwrite the financial system that American history has ever known it. What I mean by that is, if you go back in time, one of the limits of being able to get a master account with a Fed was that there was an underwritten assumption that if you become a bank, you must be involved in the lending business.

They didn't really allow you to get the license to just be a deposit-only business. And that, at the core, is insinuating we must support fractional reserve banking, right? to access the discount window, that comes with the privilege and the liability thus of you having to be a lender. It was a bundled service. Now, I think what the world is potentially permitting the possibility to imagine is that you can actually engage in a version of narrow banking where you're not a deposit taking institution, and therefore you're not having to be involved in a lending business, but you can still have access to the Fed and have a banking application and customers are facing you as a bank.

And that's a big deal because in the end, I think if you asked anybody in the room, that's what crypto has always been about. How do we move away from fractional reserve banking as a system by default in which everything is built? How do we just underwrite that whole mythology altogether? And this Skinny Master account is the first move that I think is signaling that possibility.

It's hugely exciting. Now, I think a lot of crypto communities are probably not enthused there's no way to make easy money off of it. There's no token that's trading on the back of that. But long term- Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's a good thing. And this is actually perhaps why a lot of the best and most exciting things that are happening in the institutional adoption of crypto so far is not being caught on by the retail community. They're not token place. These are meaningful infrastructure

re-underwrites where the value, I think, will accrue in equity in some format, maybe in tokens in other ways, but it'll be more thoughtful, deliberate, and longer lasting and permanent. What about the stablecoin market? Obviously, we've seen Tether continue to just print a ridiculous amount of cash. We've seen Circle continue to do lots of B2B deals and really kind of push adoption of their stablecoin. World Liberty now has kind of come on the scene. They've got five or six billion in deposits there. And then there's a plethora of other challengers, whether it's the athene and kind of different variations or flavors um it just seems to me like that is the simple thing for the finance people to wrap their head around right it's like oh i get it

it's a dollar on the blockchain i love that idea right what are you seeing there well there's two versions of stablecoin i think there's the tether story which is fundamentally different than the circle story right the tether story is exporting dollar ownership at a spread that foreigners are willing to absorb that americans are not going to absorb that's a totally different tether story stablecoin adoption out of the United States. The stablecoin story in the United States is mostly to date a payment story. And the major conflict that is happening in DC, of course, right now is that banks don't want yield provisioning permitted for stablecoins because they think that's a banking business where some of the crypto proponents want the ability to pass on

yield through stablecoins. And those two are incongruent. Again, because it goes back to that legislative and regulatory liability of what it means to be a bank and the kinds of business you have to be involved in a bank that allows you to earn these kinds of yields. But actually, this is a distraction. Sidestep for a second and realize what payments versus yield is. When you have money in a bank and it's not doing anything, your instinct is correct in that you should be paid for that because the money is at rest. When the money is in motion, I think most people would realize, yeah, I don't deserve yield in that scenario because the money is moving. It's actually being practically useful. So the stablecoin question to me in my mind is that we

are now talking about a payment scheme, which is neither money at rest, and it's not money in motion. It is kind of like this quantum Schrodinger state of money. And that is where money moving basically means that you don't have to think about yield in this like very old concept of like daily and monthly returns. Like these are money that can just move at all times and be productive in its own case. That's why I think if you squint hard enough, you might even realize like stable coins, like biggest success story in a publicly traded company might be Starbucks. Like having your Starbucks gift cards and deposit account where you're depositing money in there constantly, makes Starbucks one of the biggest, I think, actually deposits of dollars.

I don't know what the latest number is, but at one point, they were up there. But Starbucks is not a bank. Starbucks is in the business of turning that into coffee. But imagine that at a much higher autonomous scale that the crypto industry is trying to imagine with tokenized equities and instantaneous settlement. And now we're really talking about a use for service for money that is neither at rest, but also maybe not totally always in motion. And that I think is where it's going. So stable coins are going to be useful, not because it's going to pay a yield. In my opinion, it'll be useful to Americans because it will be more free and it'll move more seamlessly, which may then allow the possibility of a gentic finance where everyone's been talking about what

is going to be the medium of choice for autonomous transactions. Those are the things in which I think value will be accrued. It is interesting. I think it was the Bitcoin Policy Institute came out with this study that showed they asked a bunch of the AI models, like what is your choice for currency? And more of them selected Bitcoin than anything. And a big reason was because they can't be shut down versus the stable coins could be frozen or shut down. And so maybe the machines care about that more than humans do. Yeah. I mean, not to be too cheeky, but it's almost kind If you pose that question through Anthropic, maybe they would have said, yeah, stablecoins are better.

And then maybe if you asked ChatGPT or Grok, yes, Grok's the better example, it would have gone Bitcoin, right? Meaning at some point, it is political governance. All of these AI models in the end, I think, will be at the whims and victim of being under some political prerogative. And depending on how you choose to play in that compliance system or the resistance system that these AI models will continue to build out, this is the fundamentally open, I think, question and challenge that all these foundation model companies are facing. You would have seen

this week that Anthropic is now suing the Department of Defense for having been labeled as a supply chain risk, which probably does feel a little bit unfair, but you could also see in the other scenario why that might be deserved. And that kind of political tension is going to define, to your point, what is the right medium of exchange? If Anthropic can be called a supply chain risk what does that mean stable coins can be that could also potentially be a supply chain risk but bitcoin however i don't know this to be true my theory on the anthropic thing is one person some random person at anthropic called a relatively random person at palantir and asked a pretty innocent question that kicked this whole thing off and then anthropic felt like they had to dig

their heels in and a multi-billion dollar mistake? Yeah. Well, this story too, I don't think exists in isolation. I think there's always been this undercurrent of the tech industry feeling like it's at odds with government. And this is just one example of that manifesting itself to what is now a very highly sensitive and delicate situation. I think it's a little exaggerated, but it isn't kind of isolated as its own incident where people have genuine questions about who is ultimately responsible for these empowerment of technology that is actually so far reaching and who is going to be able to be behind that governance model. I think it's the question of our lifetime. And so that's why it's just escalating to levels where we're seeing some

extreme outcomes. But I think it's, to be honest with you, just a preview of the kinds of things that we're going to continue to see, especially as we, on the other side, start having potential downside effects like labor displacement, and then the question of who's responsible for then the socialization of that particular social contract. If it's going to be anthropic, it's going to look a little different than a government issuing some kind of UBI. Yeah, makes sense. Where can people follow you on Twitter? You can find me on X.

My handle is dgt10011. And also my sub stack, which the profile link should have a link to my sub stack as well. Amazing. All right. Thank you. We'll do it again in the future. Thank you.