The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin & Ethereum Treasury Stocks Rally: How Long Before It Collapses?
Episode Date: July 8, 2025►► Discover Bitcoin Yield: https://archpublic.com/ Jeff Park, Head of Alpha Strategies at Bitwise, joins my friends Andrew Parish and Tillman Holloway from Arch Public to dive deep into the expl...osive Bitcoin & Ethereum treasury stocks rally. We'll also unpack what's driving the latest crypto headlines and discuss how far this market surge can realistically go. Jeff Park: https://x.com/dgt10011 Andrew Parish: https://x.com/AP_Abacus Tillman Holloway: https://x.com/texasol61 ►► JOIN THE WOLF PACK - FREE Telegram group where I share daily updates on everything I'm watching and chat directly with all of you. 👉https://t.me/WolfOfAllStreet_bot ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ ►► Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities! 👉https://archpublic.com/ ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://x.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #Investments The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Good morning everyone and welcome to Wolf of All Streets. I'm Andrew Parish with ArchPublic
and I've got Jeff Park from Bitwise.
We are gonna talk all things Bitcoin Treasury companies
as well as some Ethereum Treasury companies as well.
Jeff and I were talking offline a few minutes ago
and it's as if a week of announcements
in the crypto space these days
is about a year's worth of announcements
from a couple of years ago.
It's extraordinary the things that are happening in this space.
We're going to try and get to a bunch of them here today.
So thanks for joining us, Jeff.
Thanks for coming on today.
I appreciate the time.
Thanks for having me.
Love to be part of the show, Andrew.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I wanted to start out with, you know, Tom Lee made an announcement last week associated with,
and people were surprised,
Tom's been a big Bitcoin bull for a long time.
And oftentimes when you see Tom, you know,
his crypto discussion has most to do with Bitcoin.
So him going all in on an Ethereum treasury company,
raised some eyebrows.
I wanted you to talk a little bit about the,
let's just call the architecture and maybe mathematics
behind an Ethereum Treasury company.
And in context with some of the other Treasury company
announcements that we continue to see,
maybe get into Tom's head a little bit
and where he thinks things are headed.
Deconstruct it a bit for us if you can.
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I'm super pumped that Tom is going to be one of the faces to represent Ethereum.
Several months ago, I actually went down the exercise of listing out who I thought would be a great spokesperson for an Ethereum Treasury play.
And Tom certainly was actually not on my list for all the reasons you mentioned. To me, he always seemed like a Bitcoin
bull, but Tom's the hero we need in Ethereum. And the reason I say this is because Ethereum's
complex. And because it's so complex, it's very hard to carry the story of its value proposition
in a compelling way that can be easily understood by what is now the newest
class of investors entering the scene, the institutional folks.
And I do think Tom has that rare energy of bridging crypto native understanding for what
the ultimate movement is about, which is this unapologetic resistance towards intermediation
and exorbitant privileges that are unduly pressured by those in power, those
kinds of things. But you also understand stable coin and rails and all the network provisioning
to imagine those conversations in a fluent manner. And so I'm excited for Tom. I think
there's a lot to be done, frankly, for Ethereum. You know, we when in the past, people talked
about why there
hasn't been like an Ethereum treasury play, right?
Because if you think about it, Bitcoin was first,
and then Solana was the next one, actually.
And it kind of skipped Ethereum for a while.
And then there's other altcoins in the mix.
But Ethereum was a little late relative to its stature
as the second largest crypto asset.
And I joke, it's because Ethereum at some level is ultimately anti-financial
engineering at some level. The ethos, the philosophy of its founding vision is almost
not to participate in the frenzy of those kinds of mania. But I think the time has come
and people have reacted very well to it.
So why?
Why have people reacted well to it?
I think it's pretty straightforward.
Ethereum is a useful asset.
I always make the distinction that Bitcoin and Ethereum
are really fundamentally different,
because Bitcoin is not really a useful asset yet.
Bitcoin's useful because it stores value.
But in terms of productivity gains that it
unlocks in people's lives or actual utilities is a little bit muted for now.
And Ethereum is the other side of that coin, which is actually meant to be useful.
This is why it's a proof of stake token in itself.
And that's why there's actually active management yield that can be generated by being a smart
steward of that asset.
So you almost have to imagine a more perfect permanent capital vehicle to own something
like Ethereum, which is a living breathing technology that's constantly changing,
might have to live outside the scope of like a very highly regulated like Rick fund that can't
do all the things for how quickly technology is
changing all the time. Right? So for example, like we still don't have staking in ETH. Right. We will.
But the narrative last year already moved on where there's concepts like restaking,
right? With Eigenlayer and there's other constructs of income generation that's always going to move
ahead in technology and regulation just cannot catch up quickly
to how crypto moves.
So a treasury company as an operating entity
can harness a lot of these things, in my opinion,
maybe a little bit more efficiently,
a little bit more expeditiously,
and those things can be beneficial long-term
for how investors choose to express their investment
in Ethereum, which is, hey, it's not just I can appreciate
in price alone, but is someone doing something with that to generate yield in network provisioning
that I also get a total return exposure to that construct?
And I think that's a meaningful unlock for a treasury play for Ethereum that's fundamentally
different than Bitcoin. Yeah, there's the concept of technology
being a fast moving river.
Like you can throw the world's largest boulder into that river,
but that river is not going to stop flowing.
It's going to find its way around that river.
And to your point, staking and then restaking finding its way around
the regulatory issues associated with it I think is you know people don't think
about that people don't realize that that's what's happening in the space to
that end you know you guys at Bitwise are on the front lines right not only
with your products but with the conversations you have,
not only within the industry, but across TradFi.
So my question is, in terms of the scale of Ethereum
and let's call it inflows,
do you think there's going to be a significant uptick
associated with staking becoming part of the conversation
and the regulatory rails being adjusted
and then there being a, you know,
sort of an opening of the flood gate, so to speak,
that says, okay, now we're gonna allocate more
to this particular asset.
You think that happens?
Yes, 100%.
100%.
And I should also mention one of the reasons Bitwise
and the firm last year made the strategic acquisition
of a test and to build Bitwise on-chain solutions
is precisely for this moment, which is, I think we always knew a bitwise that while crypto
feels like a financial asset management service at some level, the reality is we're dealing
with technology and you actually have to be an expert in navigating the hybrid combination
of both to be a good fiduciary and steward of investor capital. So we knew staking would be a big component of that because that is
essentially why people are using crypto.
And I think the SEC has also made it very clear the opportunity to generate revenue
via network provisioning and running your own validator clients and actually
becoming a validator operator.
provisioning and running your own validator clients and actually becoming a validator operator. All those things are distinct from traditional asset management services, right?
It leans itself a little bit more towards being a software service provider. And that
is why ultimately that value capture through the vertical integration is really important.
For example, we launched our Nier ETP in Europe this week. We had a bell
ringing ceremony yesterday and it had staking in it. And a bunch of industry friends reached out to
us to ask, hey, like who is providing the staking services for your Nier ETP? You know, how proud
was I to be able to tell you we are like Bitwise actually is running our own on chain staking and we're running our own validators.
And I do believe that era has happened and it's entering where the competitive edge and how people are going to assess products will look different going forward.
Bitcoin is a commoditized asset at some level because it's not meant to be used in the ways that other proof of state tokens are. But once the utility comes in play, to me, that requires discretion, it requires executive
operation and skills, and those kinds of things will then make the product more proprietary to
why people will trust a crypto native asset manager versus someone who may not otherwise.
So probably medium term and longer term staking becomes a real
sort of benchmark associated with Ethereum treasury companies, right? Like that has to be a big part
of the math. You think that's part of the long-term plans associated with what Tom Lee is doing
with that particular company? You think that's part of the process there?
Yes, I absolutely do. I absolutely do. Because this construct of why, you know,
sometimes Bitcoin yield is controversial within the world of
micro strategy and meta plan, etc. is because so far, most of that yield
financialization has come from the liability
side, right? We're talking about how do you get more Bitcoin per share by taking advantage
of the cheap cost of capital leveraging its high volatility. And that is a useful measure
of yield, but it's not actually the intuitive way people measure yield, right? When people
think about yield, they're actually asking, hey, how is my asset being productive to give
me additional assets? Right. Right.
And that's what Ethereum is unlocking, which is if you're staking, then you're actually participating
in the consensus mechanism to be rewarded. And that does achieve native and organic yield to
the asset, which then you can imagine has cash flow into perpetuity that you can then discount
and imagine that deserves a premium to the multiple of the price of today.
And that I think is a much easier construct for Wall Street investors to understand how you pay for forward value today in that discounted cash flow model.
So moving off of Ethereum and back to Bitcoin for a second, because this is, you know, what we're about to talk about is something that I can't stop talking about that I find fascinating. And that's the truth
that the Bitcoin ETFs have been the most successful launch of essentially a sector ever. The pace
and speed and growth and all of those things are completely unprecedented. So you add to
that Bitcoin treasury companies, you add to that Bitcoin treasury companies,
you add to that Bitcoin balance sheet companies,
you add to that all the things happening,
options, futures, all of that stuff.
Where are we headed in terms of the Bitcoin ecosystem?
And talk specifically about Wall Street,
because you and I know Wall Street loves volatility.
You know, the ability to essentially farm volatility, the ability to use
volatility and the ability to you know take a new asset and there's different
pricing now. A new asset that has performed the way that Bitcoin has.
You know Wall Street is a little bit of this right. So where are we at in the timeline of this right. Where are we at in terms of you know Wall Street is a little bit of this, right? So where are we at in the timeline of this, right?
Where are we at in terms of Wall Street conversations
in terms of where are we headed with the creation of product?
And what does that look like 12 months, 18 months, 24 months
out?
Yeah, great question.
Great question.
This moment where every day you wake up
and there's a new announcement of a company buying Bitcoin
on their balance sheet, therefore becoming a Bitcoin
treasure company and finding mimetic distribution for free,
really reminds me of the same rushed energy
of how unstoppable retail investors were 10 years ago when
they were trying to buy Bitcoin, which is to say,
at some level, the
opportunity is so great that everyone just does what is in their best self interest.
And maybe, you know, a year ago, it was somewhat controversial to imagine GameStop doing this. And
of course, Sailor has paved the way to at least make it not as controversial at the time. But now
you wake up and every day there's a new company. Another one got announced, Morano, I think, was announced yesterday. You may have seen
the press release come out of a company called Reserve One, which is actually a new, new
D-Spec to come to market to raise a billion dollars to buy indexed crypto assets. And
it's actually spearheaded by really institutional people, right? You got Jamie Leverton from Hut8 and you got Sebastian from Coinbase.
And these are not your typical kind of kids in the garage, like trying to trade on Moncox.
These are real people.
And so I think what you're seeing is there's an insatiable appetite for people understanding
what the opportunity is and it's coming.
And you have to almost overwhelm the energy to get it all through the door in the way that it's just becoming unstoppable. And the meta here is that it's coming. And you have to almost overwhelm the energy to get it all through the door
in the way that it's just becoming unstoppable. And the meta here is that it's global. So
once it's global, it's really not up to one jurisdiction to be able to halt it because
it'll just pop up elsewhere. And capital flow is actually the most important thing in modern
day finance to imagine the empowerment of a sovereign of the financial engine. So you actually you actually are entering that world where capital is competitive
at a global scale with these treasury companies.
And that's why you see the success of MetaPlanet, for example, where it's trading at a
richer multiple to something like MicroStrategy, because Japan has its own conditions
rate of yield starvation that gives it a structural moat.
And people are now deciding, do I buy MicroStrategy
or do I buy MetaPlanet?
These are American investors, by the way.
And so you actually can't just imagine
you're railed into your own jurisdiction,
and that decision doesn't have ramification across the world.
It absolutely does.
So I think all of this is starting
to hit reality
where Wall Street understands there's opportunity
as you've hinted.
And so where are the opportunities coming?
First of all, I think I've counted over 15 billion,
it's probably higher now, dollars that are coming to market
in these treasury companies in the next few months
and quarters upon SEC approval of the merger consummations.
And hey, the bankers are doing really well.
Let me put it that way.
Yeah, yeah.
Bankers are doing really well.
And actually, I say that a little facetiously,
but the truth is that there's gonna be more businesses now
around these opportunities too,
because every one of these tickers will be volatile.
There's going to be an option chain associated with it.
There's going to be retail investors
who want exposure to it.
And then it's going to be structured products around it.
So we launched, I want to say about three weeks ago,
the first GameStop covered call strategy at Bitwise.
And it's another way to get volatility harvesting
while being aligned to the business of a Bitcoin
treasury that also happens to be a video game retailer and slash Pokemon card distributor.
I don't even know that.
That's actually like their biggest business at this point, which I find hilarious.
I was walking in New Jersey at a mall and there was a huge line of people.
It was like 10 a.m. and I was like, gosh, what is, what game is coming out today where
there's like this line of adults like trying to get in the store and I asked one of the dads and he's with
his kid and he's like, oh, we're here for like the Pokemon baiting card drop and I was like, oh my god.
Yeah, yeah, it is, it is, so it sounds ridiculous until it's no longer ridiculous, right? Like,
It sounds ridiculous until it's no longer ridiculous, right? Like right like like that's the truth of any
Opportunity slash trend
That it sounds ridiculous until it isn't so again the concepts of Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana all were ridiculous at some point
To at some point on the the pyramid of finance, right? All of that ridiculousness has gone away. Where do you find volatility?
Where do you find opportunity?
And if it happens to be in a line
for Pokemon cards at GameStop,
then that's where you find it, right?
It's compelling to me that even four or five months ago,
Goldman put out a note about,
hey, listen, if you want to be involved in crypto, we'll do this, this, this, this, this,
this, and this for you. Just call us, just get involved. Right. And that was six months
ago. You know, where are we at now? That's going to continue to happen. You know, I,
I take a look at the scale of, again, the broader Bitcoin ETF market, and it's just
huge, right? It's, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin now
are essentially stationed in Bitcoin ETFs. That's going to happen across probably the entire crypto class. And I think that we find ourselves in 2026, again, to your point about volatility,
again, to your point about going and finding performance,
we're going to have a 2x version on both sides with new ETFs, right?
A 2x long, a 2X short.
And it'll be Bitcoin, it'll be Ethereum,
it'll be others.
There will be additional versions of these ETFs that say,
well, if you get 20% upside in Bitcoin,
we'll lock that in and we'll protect you from the downside.
One of those already exists, I forget who it is.
So there's not going to be a slowdown of this asset class because the the
appetite on Wall Street for new and you and I know this, okay, so there's not been much new across Wall Street for about 20
years, right? I mean, the IPO market almost went to nothing. And this is, again,
something that we should really talk about. The crypto IPO market, where that's headed over the
next 12 months, and all that capital that's going to rush itself into the space, forget about ETF
flows, forget about Bitcoin treasury companies. We're going to have enormous amounts of inflows, whether it's exchanges or otherwise.
Public companies essentially printing new currency out of thin air when they go public.
Now you have equity shares that are new money.
Talk about what that may do to the space when we see it again, a continued rush of IPO opportunities.
We watched what happened with Circle.
My goodness, there's so much to talk about.
Circle versus Coinbase, where do we go?
Let's start with the IPO stuff.
Let's go down that road.
What are your thoughts there?
Yeah, I think what the IPO of Circle has shown you
is that crypto has really become mainstream in a pretty
domineering way. So the convergence of crypto and TradFi is actually happening right in front of
your eyes where the line to distinguish the businesses are just becoming less clear. And
that's actually a good thing ultimately, right? So when you have Coinbase and Kraken, for example,
saying they're going to digitize securities to let them trade on chain,
and you have Robinhood essentially bringing crypto trading capabilities,
plus actually building their own chain on Arbitrum to provide on-chain trading solutions for crypto assets
and other securitized tokenization products.
That just shows you that it's no longer a black and white decision.
When you're a Robinhood investor,
you are ultimately betting on the upside of an engine
that will come from tokenization now.
So that's becoming normalized.
And likewise with Coinbase,
when they are buying Daribit,
and it's the largest derivatives exchange for crypto assets.
And that's then you're making a bet a little bit on
is Coinbase going to build the next big Trafigura kind
of entity in the world, which is like, you know, commodities financing is a huge business.
And it's actually the underbelly of most of the global economy that doesn't get enough
attention by the news and retail investors. But folks like you and I who have looked at
these over the years through the lens of Wall Street recognize like that that is a beast like what what Trafigura does is is actually like so
mission critical for commodities trading as a business around the world that like
without them the world would actually kind of like suffer quite quite
meaningfully and now like if you accept crypto as something of a strategically equal value of a commodity,
and you're building the largest trading houses around those, well, that's a very valuable business.
So people can start doing the math and drawing the connection.
So all to say, I think that the continued IPO of crypto equities will be hugely significant for the industry, not because people are saying, I want crypto exposure, because it signals that crypto has matured
to the point of integration for where it's possible to imagine revenue that is more akin
to the business models that people understand.
So I think that's why Circle was a big hit.
People understand stablecoin at some level deeply because it's a financial product above all. And when you have the likes of Gemini and Kraken and Chain
Analysis and others in the mix that are actually useful in the service provisioning that they've
had for years, I think underwriting that is not like underwriting a crypto company anymore.
These are operating companies that are building real revenue generating businesses
with real clients and customers that are understandable
to a model that Wall Street understands.
So I think it's gonna continue.
Has the tokenization conversation found its way
in a meaningful sense to Wall Street?
Are they aware of where this is headed?
Are they preparing for the tokenization of assets
that end up trading 24 seven?
Where is that conversation right now?
Are they resistant?
Are they understanding, hey, it's only a matter of time.
I think Wall Street is still trying to understand tokenization from the perspective of the practical implications of their existing business that might be challenged.
And then on a going forward basis where new opportunities are.
And really, when I think about tokenization, there's two vectors. One of them is what I would call kind of more of like a tokenized security model,
where you're actually becoming the unit swap of long tail assets that historically hasn't had
liquidity for. So think about all the private equity funds, private credit funds, even venture
capital, venture equity exposure that doesn't have a lot of liquidity beyond like the occasional
secondary's market, right? If you could bring liquidity to those things
in a tokenized security format,
that is a pretty powerful vector.
And then the other is the opposite, securitized token,
which is then to say, there are ways to imagine
offshore investors wanting access to American assets
that historically have not been able to do so easily, right?
So for all kinds of reasons, it's really hard sometimes if you're living in Japan, for example,
to buy American stocks, in Korea to buy American stocks and whatnot.
But crypto is really good at actually permissioning this flow in a very easy way,
where that doesn't have to necessarily be a border of friction.
So I think there are some innovations happening right now.
And this is like, I think the alpha of the moment, which is some of these crypto companies
are finding clever ways to allot a certain amount of shares that otherwise would be on
shore to be available for offshore investors.
So what does that mean?
It means you can now create parallel markets. You can create a pricing differential for those who want stocks as a jurisdiction of one versus others who might want it for another.
This might sound really familiar to you because it sounds a little bit like Tether, which is there is the cost of holding treasuries at Americans' demand. But we know that offshore investors have a much cheaper
cost of capital in wanting to hold treasuries, right?
For example, they don't even need to earn interest on it
and they're happy to hold it
because they just want dollar exposure.
That pricing differential, right, can come to stocks.
And when that comes to stocks,
it's actually a big boon, I think,
for American exceptionalism
because it'll lower the cost of capital in some ways,
where offshore investors want to own things like Tesla,
and they're willing to get lower compensation
than an American otherwise would,
because their opportunity cost is just different
from where they are versus us.
And that's actually, I think, long-term, like,
very good for America.
So explain to people that are trying
to figure out the difference between, let's just call it
trading quote unquote traditional stocks here
in the United States.
Let's call it 930 to 4.
And then you have Gemini doing something
where they're doing a different version of it. they, you know, did a bunch of announcements last week.
And it's in the EU and it's a version of tokenized trading of these same assets, the same big names.
What is the material difference there that people should be aware of?
Material difference as in like the operational risks?
Yeah, just, you know, you're talking about the difference
between, you know, something that is tradable 24 seven
versus not being tradable 24 seven.
Is there a material difference?
Maybe that's the question.
Is there a material difference or is there not?
No, I'm not totally sure about the value proposition of a 24-7 market for all securities in the
sense that liquidity is still best when there's a flywheel.
And that's why even today, most of the trading happens between 9.30 and 10.30, and most of
the trading happens between 3 and 4 PM.
It doesn't really matter that it's open from 11 AM to 2 PM.
I mean, of course it does, and you need it.
But it's not like that's when people decide they're going to trade, meaning liquidity
begets liquidity. And there is some value to having these opens and closes because it
accelerates the urgency to trade an act per day. I do think the real value proposition
is that you're opening a whole new class of investors
who previously couldn't access these assets before.
I think that's the win.
The win is there are Europeans who want to own American stocks, who can't own American
stocks very easily unless they go through some roundabout ways to opening special brokerages
or getting special financial advisor relationships.
And if you build something on chain in a sandbox that is regulatorily blessed, then you could
have those capital flow much more easily onshore.
Right.
Right.
Which is what you want, right?
At the end of the day, the number one goal of the United States will always be, can we become the center of the
financial economy where capital continues to flow into our markets, our securities, our assets?
Yeah, yeah. It is a, it's something to really watch the, the sort of the mind meld associated
with crypto exchanges becoming
traditional financial centers and then traditional financial
centers becoming quote unquote crypto friendly.
What's happening there? Last week, Scott didn't know this, you probably do.
Coinbase has 120 million customers.
And I said on the show, they've got 120 million customers
and JP Morgan has about 85 million customers.
He's like, what?
What, is that real?
And he Googled it while we were on the show
and he's like, oh, it's real.
So talk about where that goes, right?
So we can talk about day-to-day announcements.
We can talk about shifts and changes in technology.
But there's also a demographic shift
going on here associated with the scale of customers
at Coinbase, the scale of customers at Robinhood,
versus take any significant regional bank,
like a Fifth Third or a Huntington or whatever,
a PNC, whatever it happens to be,
they don't have as many customers as Robinhood does.
So where does that shift go?
And again, what does it mean for crypto folks?
It's something, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I think, great question.
I think the most unique thing about crypto
is that at the core, it's a retail business.
And what that means is that ultimately, it's
a little bit of a distribution business
where the value of the customer relationship you hold is incredibly powerful. And that's actually not that different
from like, for example, how Apple has wanted to enter the financial arena through partnerships,
right? Because Apple actually doesn't want to become a bank, right? There's a lot of issues and
challenges from a regulatory perspective, the cost of capital, become a bank. So Apple
saying, Hey, I'm not going to be the bank, but I know my customers are amazing and they
love me and I can give you the Goldman branded credit card or I can do the things with Wall
Street and financial services to build distribution engines where I own the customer relationship
and therefore I own the pricing power. I think crypto is unique because while at the core it's a financial service,
it's really actually a distribution business too, just like Apple.
And so for companies like Coinbase, I'm very bullish on their stature in this country and beyond, because it's a gateway to which there is a trusted relationship
that is extremely captive.
So there are times people say, why would people
trade on Coinbase at the fees they charge to retail
versus other cheaper providers?
Coinbase is expensive.
And look, people pay it because they like the distribution
relationship. And at the same time, why did Circle and Coinbase is expensive and look, people pay it because they like the distribution relationship.
And you know, at the same time, like why did Circle and Coinbase achieve on the consortium
where Coinbase achieves like half of the distribution rate for onboarding USDC?
Because people use Coinbase to get onboarded and Circle is right there being popped up as the
choice of your deposits and that's worth something. So I think the future of most of these crypto businesses
will have to be really focused on distribution
by engaging the clients and customers at a really, really
direct level.
I would say it's even similar for us
at Bitwise, which is we're a little unique in the sense
that we have a social presence amongst the crypto and financial advisor community where
we're very available, active, and we're engaged. You know, you don't really get to see that
across some of the other ETF issuers, especially like in the traditional space, right? Think
about like, for example, like, how often you've thought about like, I don't know, calling
up like, like, like an ETF issuer that like
is peripherally in this space, but you don't even know who to talk to.
Like who is the person that I would reach out?
I don't know.
Think about Kalamazoo, for example, they're building structured products notes, they're
building it on Bitcoin.
I think it's super exciting.
Who is the person at Kalamazoo you want to talk to?
Nobody knows.
You don't know. But the thing is, it's actually really important to know who that person is.
Yeah. Because crypto is a direct
retail customer facing business that's ultimately ethos of how we think about the certainty mediation, right?
And so I think that will continue to be evergreen and true.
Yeah, it is. Let's just say I'm not bullish on bank branch builders.
You know, the space, the traditional banking space,
even though JP Morgan just directed a sizable structure
in New York City that has diamonds all over it,
surprisingly, it remains something
that in three to five years, where are we at?
Right?
In three to five years, are we in a position where some sizable, traditional financial
organizations have purchased crypto exchanges or crypto assets, and that's how the meld
actually happens?
Or do we find ourselves in 1997 through 2001,
and it's potentially the other way around,
again, because equity values actually matter.
I mean, the reality is, Coinbase's equity
is pretty powerful stuff right now, right?
So do we find ourselves in a place
where traditional organizations surprisingly
may get acquired by a crypto tech firm?
It does it, which one happens, right?
I think both will probably happen.
You know, I've got a lot of friends
at your former firm, Morgan Stanley. There are a lot of rumors
swirling around about them making some pretty significant crypto acquisition. Won't say what
else I've heard, but that's running around at that firm. So to that end, there's going to be some
cross-pollination that either happens organically or is somewhat
forced via the acquisition process.
Again, just talk about that, because that
has to be part of the conversation that you
hear from time to time, right?
Sure, for sure.
Absolutely.
And yet, what I would say is financial services companies
in general have a very, very poor history of acquisitions.
Very, very poor.
And it's actually not that hard to intuit why,
which is so much of the business in themselves
carry a kind of culture where it can sometimes be difficult
to bridge across the various verticals
that can be a part of the industry.
So for example, right, when Morgan Stanley acquired
Smith Barney and Dean Witter in his early years,
that was a very tough integration
because the culture of like, you know,
YHG Investment Bank partnering with something
that's a little bit more readily available, if you will,
as like a commoditized kind of financial service is,
like they're different cultural brands,
they're different human capital
and they don't see eye to eye.
And so that took a lot of work
and James Gorman deserves so much credit for how he's actually
built wealth management into a powerhouse at Morgan Stanley.
But that's an exceptional story, right?
Because we've also seen how it didn't work in many other places like Goldman, for example.
Well, one could make the claim that the Morgan Stanley Smith Barney thing finally worked
because effectively the great financial crisis happened
and they were forced to almost disintermediate
their reliance on investment banking income, right?
So Morgan Stanley went from 80-20 to 80-20 the other way.
They're getting the lion's share of their revenue
from wealth management revenue.
Yeah, it was a super controversial bet at the time.
And it paid off handsomely.
And you know, Goldman too then made a bet, right, which is they're going to build a consumer
facing business.
So if you remember, they had this whole thing with Marcus, they had this whole thing with
their consumer financing business.
And they built a they actually hired a bunch of technologists to build a fintech
platform and we know how that story ended. It was not great. And people will attribute
that to a cultural problem, which is like, IT generally is kind of a back office function
within banks and if you're trying to lead with IT energy to build a front office capacity,
there's a cultural clash. And so in some ways, I think of crypto caught in a similar dilemma, which is crypto is a tech.
Yeah. But tech is not what Wall Street is known to lead with, right? Actually, it's never about the
technology that unlocks value propositions on Wall Street. It's the last thing on the list.
Well, just a reminder that Goldman bought United a huge IRA years ago. That was a complete
disaster. That was that was I mean, the transaction was the transaction and it worked out for Joe Duran. Right. But in
terms of the actual culture and it working together, it was a complete mess. Yeah. An absolute mess.
So the question then becomes, you know,
how do those two industries compete, right?
Crypto as tech, financial services as banking,
these huge behemoth organizations
that have been around for some of them 200 years, right?
There's a competition going on
and that competition is simply for customers, right?
Like scale of customers.
Again, most people in the crypto space,
because we're so siloed oftentimes,
Coinbase is Coinbase, it's just existed forever
and it's the biggest blah, blah, blah.
But in reality, if you zoom out
It is an absolute behemoth
Is an absolute behemoth that is acting like a tech company and is pressing and pressing and pressing
It's it's it's one of the stories that again two years from now
I want to look back at some of these conversations and say, did we think that, you know, did we think that
this is where we were headed? And so that's part of the conversation in crypto that I'm really interested in. Because
yeah, going that way, and somehow it's going that way, right? There's, there's not, you know, you don't have two dozen
There's not, you know, you don't have two dozen, hold on quote, crypto companies pounding on the OCC store
to get, you know, closer and closer to banking
or just banking licenses.
That's not happening just for fun.
There's a reason why it's happening, right?
Because they have, even some exchanges
that you've hardly ever heard of,
have 20 million customers, 10 million customers,
15 million customers, 10 million customers, 15 million
customers, right? That's meaningful. That's of scale across financial services and people
don't realize that, right?
That's right. I think more likely what you're going to see is consolidation even amongst
the traditional players. So you might have seen some time back, Boney and State Street
almost looked at tying together,
but it was rebuffed.
And I thought that was the funniest story on earth
because at some level, I think they're both like old giants
of the space with probably a F grade on technology.
And they're looking at crypto and ATSs
and all these custodial models popping up.
Companies like Securitize entering the arena
and they're realizing, hey, our business might change
and they would rather merge with each other, right?
And I think it goes back to some cultural understanding
of like where that gap can be
in terms of how do you protect the clients, as you said,
acquire more businesses.
But the generational trend, as you've mentioned is clear.
The young technology
embracing industry and consumers will win. And so I think there's incredible secular
tailwind for companies to exist.
So making sure I unpack a little bit of insider baseball, because there's about 12 people
watching this podcast. When Jeff says bony, there's 12 people on this watching that know what
Boney is. That's Bank of New York Mellon. B and Y Mellon and State Street are effectively
the biggest custodians on the planet. They custody a lot of money, trillions of dollars.
Just making sure I unpack Bank of New Me, which traditional folks call bony.
But those two coming together would be outrageous. But that's kind of to the point about how
do traditional financial companies look like, oh, that's a smart idea, because we both do
the same thing. And so there wouldn't be enormous adjustments or changes and maybe cultures
would work. So you're right. Maybe there is a pathway where crypto grows and traditional financial models grow as well.
I don't know. We'll see. We'll see how that plays out. Jeff, thanks for taking the time today. I'm going to let you jump off. We're going to talk some arch public stuff. But Bitwise is doing some extraordinary things.
Your work is fantastic.
We could do four more of these and talk about other concepts
that you've broached just over the past three months.
Just a huge fan of your work.
So thanks for taking the time.
Thanks, John.
Likewise.
The feeling's mutual.
And like we said, there's a news full every week.
So by the time I'm sure we get together, the world will have
shipped under their feet once more. So all right, forward to being back on. Nice to see Andrew.
Thanks, Jeff. You bet. Yeah. So taking the time now to talk about ARCH public, right. So one of the things that that Jeff has
talked about again, and again and again and again associated with
not only crypto markets but traditional markets is, what is yield?
Where does it come from?
And correctly, Jeff has talked about the best place to find yield is volatility, right?
Volatility harvesting, volatility farming, whatever kind of moniker you want to give
it. farming, whatever kind of moniker you want to give it, volatility is an opportunity.
And the opportunity associated with volatility right now can really be found in not only
crypto markets, but to some degree adjacent to crypto markets.
We now have some adjacent crypto associated equities.
And we'll have more of those as time goes by.
But volatility is the thing,
and volatility is the opportunity and ours public.
Our products, our tools, our algorithms absolutely thrive
and gobble up volatility on your behalf.
So while we have a bunch of case studies,
while we have a bunch of, let's just call them,
stock products that when people reach out to us,
have conversations and say,
hey, you guys put out this post,
you guys put out this case study,
I wanna get involved with your products
and I want them to do what you talked about.
Just give me that version.
At the same time, our products are completely user-driven, right? So if you're a sort of a mid-level trader
or an expert trader and you want to grab our tools and get your hands on all the pulleys
and levers and do some really cool stuff, use 11 versions of our Bitcoin yield and arbitrage products. Use
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benefiting in ways that are extraordinary. The reality is, is our tools are institutional level tools. When institutions like Goldman,
institutions like Point72, institutions and hedge funds that you know find
themselves on this channel often talking their book, the way that they scale into
or scale out of positions is algorithmically. They use tools like the tools that we offer to the public.
They use those tools internally to be able to scale into positions or scale out of positions.
You have access now to those tools with ArchPublic and our firm. And by the way, those tools are free forever. So if you're using a
smaller amount of capital or you just want to dip your toe in before you go
all in, for example, with our concierge program, those tools are free to you. So
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on SUI with Kraken. You could be doing all of those things at the same time for free to see how our tools work, to see how our team communicates with you and serves you and get comfortable with the tools.
with the tools. Because the truth of the matter is, we just put a case study
out.
It's on our Twitter page.
From July of last year to July of this year,
if you'd been using our stock arbitrage strategy with Bitcoin,
you effectively, versus buy and hold,
you would have ended up with 1.5 Bitcoin versus 1.2 on buy and hold.
But more importantly, because of volatility farming
and taking advantage of volatility,
you'd have ended up with a significant amount of cash
as well associated with yield, right?
So you end up with, let's call it, you know, 25-30% more Bitcoin over one year,
and you ended up with almost 20% in yield associated with the strategy as well. That's
40% upside to just buy and hold, right? So our strategies can do a plethora of things for you.
It's just a question of what do you want to get accomplished?
Do you want to accumulate more of an asset
or do you want to focus on, you know what,
I've got enough Bitcoin right now.
I'm satisfied with my stack, but it just sits there.
I want it to do something for me.
Well, we can dial in our Bitcoin yield algorithm for you.
Have conversations with us.
The bottom line is institutional level tools at the crypto level are still in their infancy.
Institutional level algorithmic tools absolutely exist in traditional finance in a massive way. To give you an example of that, Chicago Board of Trade and their trading floors no longer exist. Literally,
they no longer exist. So the building that they were housed in and the floor that was
in movies with people shouting out and a bunch of different boards, that is a ghost town.
Nobody shows up anymore in the city of Chicago, doesn't know what to do with the space. It's all done algorithmically.
Anybody that's scaling into position, it's done algorithmically. Scaling out of a position,
done algorithmically. Go look at CNBC right here and what it looks like on the floor of
the New York Stock Exchange today versus 20 years ago. There were 5,000 people there yelling
and screaming at each other 20 years ago. Nobody doing that there now. It's all done
algorithmically. That technology has not made its way to crypto in a meaningful
way. It's here now with Archipublic. So talk to us, have a conversation about it,
and you know see how we can do a great job both servicing
you and putting you in a great position.
That's all we've got for today.
Great conversation with Jeff, fantastic conversation with Jeff.
Some serious alpha involved there with both Bitcoin and Ethereum treasury companies, crypto IPOs that are coming to market, volatility farming,
you know, GameStop being a bastion of Pokemon card collecting now, all things that are extraordinary.
The changes and adjustments and new technology that continues to happen in the world of finance because of crypto
is something to watch and behold.
And Jeff and Bitwise are at the cutting edge of it.
So thanks for spending their time.
We'll see ya.
Let's go.