The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin On Brink As "Hidden" Crypto Winter Nears An End? | Matt Hougan

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Bitcoin may be deeper into a crypto winter than headlines suggest, according to Matt Hougan, who argues the downturn has been quietly masked by institutional flows and ETF demand. In this discussion, we unpack how weakening retail participation, struggling altcoins, and collapsing crypto equities reveal underlying stress that Bitcoin’s price alone doesn’t show. Hougan’s key takeaway is contrarian: if this has been a hidden winter all along, the market may be closer to exhaustion than collapse, setting the stage for stabilization or reversal as excess leverage clears and weaker participants exit the system.

Bitcoin is hanging over the edge on the brink as a hidden crypto winter potentially comes to an end. Now, nobody loves crypto winter. It's been absolutely miserable, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. At least that according to today's amazing guest, Mr. Matt Hogan from Bitwise. We're going to dive into his thesis on where we stand in the market. But of course, all of the other news and events that are driving prices as we speak. I can't wait to get into it with Matt. Let's go. What is up? Everybody, welcome to the show. We are here in Crypto Winter. As you can see, we decided to be in the winter.

But Matt, this is kind of a nice winter. Honestly, it's a pleasant winter back. That looks very pleasant. It does. I was going to try to get White Walkers, you know, like you have full Game of Thrones. But that would be winter is coming, right? But your thesis here, obviously, and I think everyone's read it. I triggered a lot of people, by the way, because my team tweeted your comment about Revenant-style, full-blown winter, but without much context, just kind of as a headline, and everyone jumped

to your defense. They were like, he said it's over. You're like, it's fake news, right? But anyways, you wrote this incredible article here. Crypto Winter started in January 2025. So you kind of start, you're like, it's winter, it's terrible, but then maybe it's been winter and that means it's going to end. So maybe you can walk us through the thesis here. Yeah, that's really right. I mean, it hit me staring at some charts. Once you accept that we're in crypto winter, everything makes sense. We're no longer like waiting for one little piece of good news to give us a balance.

The performance we've seen in Bitcoin over the last few months starts to make sense. But I was staring at this chart, which is a chart of the 10 assets in the Bitwise 10. And it just stood out to me that actually what happened is we've been in crypto winters since January. So to show what that chart is showing, these are the, the 10 largest crypto assets. And you can see from January 2025 to about now. And you can see that there are really three groups. That top group is Bitcoin, Ethan, XRP.

The second group is Chainlake Slana. And the third group is real all coins like Cardano and Suey and Avalanche. And the story here, what I realized is those top assets performed pretty well last year. We didn't feel like it was crypto winner because Bitcoin was down 6%. That's not crypto winner. That's like a mild cold snap. But if you looked at assets that didn't have ETFs and didn't have debts, if you looked at suey, if you looked at Avalanche, if you looked at Cardano, they were minus 60 or 70%.

They were in a full-blown crypto winner. So what I took out of this is that crypto retail, the bulk of OG crypto, entered a full-blown winter in January 2025 and it was papered over in Bitcoin and Ethereum by $75 billion of net inflows into corporations and ETFs. So institutions were still in this summer haze, but the rest of crypto was in this dark, deep winter. And the reason that matters was the average winter lasts about 13 months. If it started in October, when many people think it started, when Bitcoin peaked, we're in it until November. If it started in January 2025,

we're getting to the end of it and we're almost crawling our way out. That's my thesis. I think it's probably true. I don't know that we're at the very bottom yet, but I think we're closer to the end of the beginning. Really interesting phenomenon is that a lot of people have sort of accepted the bear market or winter

when it ironically may be approaching an end. I think that's normal, by the way. Right? I mean, listen, if you look at the market structure of the chart, I probably have it here. I mean, if you take a look at, you know, the weekly chart, for example, I can bring it up. But I haven't sized it here. But you can see, like, since literally FTX, it's been a quote unquote bull market of higher highs and higher lows, right?

Even though we've had these miserable times and these drawdowns, it's been, and literally here at 74,4,420, it was the April low. We just slightly swept it just to keep everybody guessing. And technically, breaking down below that would be the beginning. of the pair market, right? But this is when we have everything oversold. We've had historic levels of fear on the fear and greed index, like nonstop, endless fear. Nobody's here, as you said, and all coins are already down 70%. So does that feel more when you think about it rashly, like the bottom end of a winter? Or does it feel like, hey, we're just getting started? Yeah. Yeah. No, that's exactly right. It feels like the end of the winter. I mean, you and I

talked about this last year, how there was this sort of weird duality in crypto, which is institutional crypto was tremendously bullish and retail crypto was in the depths of despair. Even before we really broke down, you saw fear and greed at like 15, right? And it was showing that there was this deep, dark despair, but none of us could have accepted that we were in this winter because the prices were still doing okay and institutional flows were still doing okay. I really think that was We had great news all the time. Great news all the time. Every piece of fundamental news was good.

But look, if we didn't have ETFs, so we didn't have DATs, we didn't have $75 billion flow into Bitcoin last year from institutions, the price would have been down 50 or it would have been down 60, and we all would have known we're in crypto winter. I mean, look at that. Yeah, this is peak end of winter. And you know what's interesting to your thesis as I think about it, like you say prices would have been down.

They actually, if we hadn't have had the ETF approvals, which spikes that, they would have never gone up. I think like I, you know, like 1.26 or even this 80, choose your number. But all of that was because it preempted the four-year cycle. Bitcoin made a new all-time high when you guys in BlackRock and everybody got approved. And you saw these natural flows that were probably just waiting to come in already. So what if we had just had Bitcoin peak at 50 or 60?

and we're still sitting between 50 and 70, right? It would have been the most boring, brutal period ever. Instead, we still got some volatility going with it. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And just think about the scale of selling by crypto retail. I mean, they sold $100 billion of Bitcoin roughly in the last year. This is a ton. It's a ton. I agree.

And I think this is important for people to accept. You need to accept we're in a winter or else the news doesn't make sense. You need to accept we're in a winter or else you don't know what to look for, right? Winters die in exhaustion, people rage critic on Twitter, all the things we're seeing. This is sort of classic 2018, classic 2022 style winter. And that is what you need to look for for the catalyst to recover. It's not some isolated piece of news. It's going to be exhaustion, despair, and desperation that leads us out of this winter.

That's where we're going. Yeah, if we truly believe it's a winter or the day, depths of a bare market, like you said, there's no news that ever matters in a bare market. It just, that's literally a classic telltale that you're in a bare market as you get incredible news and nothing happens to price. You keep wandering down, but you literally can't go up until everyone who wants to sell is gone. That's exactly right. And that doesn't happen on a day, to your point. Like, that's a process. It's exactly right. And then when you, when you get in this mindset and then you see people rage quitting on Twitter, it makes you more bullish. When you

When you get in this mindset and then you see the fear and green index set yet another low, it makes you more bullish. When you see leverage squeezing out of the system and people just folding it in and going to other things, those are actually the signals that were closer to a bottom. Again, I don't know that we're at a bottom, but we are closer to the bottom. And all the good news that we're papering over will come back when we get out of this bottom and we start to build again. Right.

So there's all these sort of fundamental events that have happened in the news that, if six months or a year or two years, whatever it is. You look back on and go, wow, that was huge, but the market didn't know it at the time, right? And you're still having these meetings. I'm just going to bring up your tweets. I mean, just did a meeting at a major warehouse. They view the pullback is an opportunity, not a threat.

Nearly all of their clients have zero percent exposure to crypto today. They want that to be two percent off to another meeting, right? So nothing, it sounds like, you know, you can break it down, but it sounds like nothing is fundamentally changing from your conversations or from your travel schedule or the, uh, velocity of in bounds. No. The institutional interest is still strong and still there.

And the point of that tweet was they are starting at zero. They're not staring at losses, right? They are staring at opportunity. They've been thinking about Bitcoin vaguely for three or four years. All of a sudden, in Q4, they're able to buy it at these major wirehouses. And they indeed want to. I had, I think, six meetings yesterday. I mean, your great state of Florida, Scott.

And it's winter here. It is winter. And all of them were some form of positive. The people who had allocated before wanted to know if this was the bottom, but none of them were selling out. And most people were starting at zero and wanting to allocate. They were excited about tokenization, stable coins, even Bitcoin. I left pretty positive. But it doesn't matter until crypto retail has done selling.

And they've been driving this cart for the last few weeks and months. When we talk about crypto retail, we're including those massive whales that have been here from the beginning that we saw moving tokens and selling, you know, 10,000 Bitcoin at a clip, right? I mean, this isn't your average person who has 0.1 Bitcoin finally giving up that's moving the market, although it contributes. That's exactly right. I think it's a lot of OG selling and not selling out of Bitcoin for what it's worth. We speak to a lot of these sort of OG whales. They're trimming their positions. They were trimming them ahead. of the potential four-year cycle. I think they're probably getting again close to done. They started this way back in January when Trump was elected, when all the news was sort of baked in. They started peeling back from the market. I think they're closer to the end than they are the beginning.

So I'm starting to feel bullish for the first time in a few, maybe a few months sort of really getting the itch that we might be getting closer to the bottom. About a lot. I hope I'm not wrong. I'm going to be honest. I hope it goes down way further. Because I want to buy more. This is the first cycle where I've really felt that way. I'm like, maybe I don't know. Maybe it'll impact viewership or something. But like I want to buy more Bitcoin at this point.

I really like buying it as 75 instead of 150 where I thought we would be. And I don't think we'd be any fundamentally more broken at 60 than we are at 75. I don't want to buy it at 30. I feel you, but I would. I would buy it, I agree. I agree with that. You know, the funny thing is you see all these stories, there's a Michael Burry piece in Bloomberg.

The thing about those things that are negative on Bitcoin, they're all expecting this to be different than it has been for the last 15 years. This is perfectly normal. They just haven't paid attention to a crypto winner. This is what happens in crypto winner. And the people who step into it have historically been rewarded. I think you'll be rewarded again. I don't know exactly what's going to be the catalyst that gets us out.

It'll be a slow accumulation of things. The reason I think a lot of people are having trouble framing this is because in this context, the four-year cycles obviously out the window because it says there was no bull market, right? So like we never got the bull run. It's just that that effectively says that we just haven't had a bull market since 2021 ended, right? Yeah. I mean, it's a hints of it. But like you said, if you take out

ETFs and that's pretty ugly. It's pretty ugly. And look, you know, I've talked about this before. I think we're in a 10-year grind, a painful grind hider. But all the long-term trends are really good. If you can step out of this current moment

and project yourself forward five years when all assets are tokenized, when Paul Atkins has completed Project Crypto, when stable coins are multiple trillions of dollars, when gold's at $10,000 an ounce and more central banks are looking at ways to get outside of the fiat system, that's like a pretty good story for where crypto is.

It's hard to imagine, crypto being a two and a half trillion dollar industry in that kind of world. I think people are having a hard time getting from this current moment to that future. But I think if you dwell a little bit in that future, you know that a line has to connect us from where we are today to there. I think it's a bullish line that goes up and to the right.

I just don't think it's going to be parabolic any time soon. I think it's going to be rounding and we'll get there. Okay, so that puts the marketing context. I think the next big topic we have to talk about is the Clarity Act and the prognosis for that. Once again, you know, it's kind of there's this acceptance with time. Yeah, we're in crypto winter. Maybe I'm late to accept it, but we're in crypto winter.

That's how I feel, right? Well, Clarity Act, I was one of the course it's going to pass. Genius passed. We have Trump. It's going to pass. And then it started drag its feet. Then I had some conversations with lawyers and lobbyists close to it. And I was like, wow, this thing is not passing.

Right. So it seemed like you in your, you know, you have once a week where you go massively viral. I think it was last week where he went massively viral for your Clarity Act comments. Right. And they echoed a lot of things that I've been thinking for a long time and was even saying long before it, which is that once Trump was elected, in my view, not only did we need, need all of the regulation and legislation in order, but we also needed the industry itself to show that it was worthwhile. And I spoke to this, to Noel Atchison about this last week,

and she said something great. She said, we have three years echoing your comments to make this industry too big to fail. Like if they try to kill it in three years, they can't because it's the underlying technology for everything. And, you know, it would be like a systemic risk for it to die. Yeah. No, that's exactly right. I mean, we have these examples of industries that have operated on the edges of regulation but became too big to fail. Uber was effectively illegal and it became too big to fail and now everyone uses it every day. Airbnb was effectively illegal in fact was shut down a few times in San Francisco and is now bigger than any hotel chain. So if you have enough real world impact, the regulation doesn't matter. The point I was making in my

Clarity Act memo is we have sort of two pathways to success and one to failure. pathway one is we get a reasonable version of the Clarity Act passed. It now looks, according to Polly Market, that those odds are tricking up. So that's a great pathway. That cements the regulatory floor underneath crypto and I think is a catalyst for a bull market. Pathway 2 is what Noel is saying. If we get too big to fail in three years, if all assets are tokenized, if stable coins are a multi-trillion dollar industry, it's making money for BlackRock and JP Morgan,

if Coinbase is a multi-100 billion dollar company, they won't. be able to put this back in the bucket. The failure case, and I loved how people pulled out of my memo, the one failure case out of three, but the failure case is that crypto isn't systematically important in three years, and there's a democratic electoral sweep, and they install Elizabeth Warren as the new chair of the SEC, and that's just objectively bad. That's what we don't want. So we want one of those other two cases. I think we'll get them, but we really don't want this. third case. And that's why the Clarity Act is important. It removes that third case from the scenario. I actually tried to bet on this a few weeks ago and I got blocked for being an American

and it didn't pursue the like VPN or Kalshi rally or anything. But I was betting it probably right around when it was actually this price before, you know, 67, this chance before and it dipped a 40 and I thought I missed it. But honestly, I would take, I would still, I think, take the other side of this one. I think I think the 33. percent chances much likely. I think people are too optimistic from what I've heard. And it doesn't come down to any of the parts that anyone's discussing. I think it literally just comes down to ethics. I think the Democrats are not signing something that lets Trump be a major part of the crypto industry and Trump isn't signing anything that bans him from doing it. I think defy, tokenization,

stable coin yield, all really important, but that's misdirection because I don't really think that's the major sticking point. I could be totally wrong, by the way, but this is just perspective. I've gotten from private conversations and quiet parts people literally won't say out loud. I'll have a guest on and they'll be like, let me tell you privately. I'm not going to say it on the show. Right? You know, it's like, great. I completely agree.

I mean, that's been my sort of somewhat skeptical thesis toward the Clarity Act all along, which is you have that fundamental sticking point and that's something people will dig in. The only hope is that the lobbying weight and dollars of the crypto industry will get enough Democrats to hold their nose and pull it over the line. That's what you're betting on. And indeed, Fair Shake has raised, what, like a couple hundred million dollars? It's a big dog now in Washington. So that's what you're betting against. But I do agree that it will come down to ethics. Everything else is posturing and important topics, but they will find a middle path and you're seeing that progress. I agree. I would take the under on that 6733 right now. Unfortunately,

I wish I were as confident as Polly Market, but I'd be with you on the other. of that bet. Maybe that's my mental hedge, right? I want it to pass, but if it goes wrong, I make some money. It's like betting against your own team in the game on the spread. Like the 10-point spread, we can still win. I can make money, you know, but this is, you had a great point on the stable-coin interest debate because I think it has become so bipolar and ridiculous, right? You said, we really took the stable-coin interest debate to the extremes, current talking points. Banks, if stable coins pay interest will destroy the modern banking system. Crypto. If stable coins do not pay interest, China will dominate the globe and the U.S. will be a second generation, right? But that's

where we're pretty much at. It's so true. Literally, this is what both sides are saying. They haven't quite gone to nuclear war, but they're getting pretty close. And stable coins, remember, our chump change right now, they're $300 billion. It's amazing that they could consign the U.S. to second-class citizenship. For what it's worth, when I was in Davos, the Europeans were on the other side of that, they thought stable coins were guaranteeing that Europe would be dollarized and they were absolutely panicked about it. I think it makes me really bullish on stable coins that people see them as being so important that they're making these extreme arguments. But this is, this is, this is, this is what Washington does. It was just amazing to be how far the talking points got away from a

$300 billion market that wants to pay 4% interest to regular Americans. It's just, it's, it's, it's wild to me. And three weeks ago, we weren't even talking about any of this. Maybe it was three weeks. I don't know how many weeks, but probably three weeks ago that Coinbase backed out of their support of the Clarity Act over Stable Coin yield. Interestingly, though, I mean, Coinbase is in a pretty good situation right now. They kind of can't lose, to be honest, because they are offering rewards or yield right now, which almost nobody else can. So they have a competitive advantage with the current structure. But if it becomes clear, yeah, they'll get more competition, but they'll also be able to do a lot more things. So I can understand why Brian Armstrong is in a kind of a position of power and can

go over to Davos and dunk on everybody and trigger Jamie Diamond and all the fun things that happen. That's exactly right. I mean, I do think if clarity doesn't pass, there's a degree of regulatory capture for the largest in the industry. I think I think Coinbase does well in that world. I think ETH does well in the asset world. You know, the lack of regulatory clarity locks in the few things that have made regulatory progress. So I do think Coinbase is a little bit on both sides of that equation. The terrible thing about stable coins is there's no lobby for everyday Americans or everyday citizens around the world that just want to generate yield directly on their dollars. There's no one lobbying for that. There's the banks lobbying. There's the crypto industry with

their rewards program, no one is lobbying for what should actually be true, which is that everyday Americans should be able to earn interest on the cash that they have. I wish there were a lobby for that. Seems strange to me that there's not, but I guess that's not the way power aggregates. It's crazy to watch. Because you would need the poor people who can't get yield on their assets to somehow come together and raise a whole lot of money to have a powerful lobby. So that's exactly right. I mean, the strange thing about that are stable coins are deeply progressive technology. But the democratic side of the aisle is so anti-crypto that they can't see how progressive they are. And somehow, and so this weird Washington world, that progressive arm has like aligned with

the largest banks in the world to declare this technology that would help normal people earn money to be bad. It's really an up is down. kind of space. Yeah, I just have to imagine that they're kind of bought and paid for by the banks. I mean, it's just my cynical view, unfortunately, but there's, you know, we all know that the lobbying and interest, political interest drive political opinions. So it's not too hard to figure out who's paying for what. That's right.

Sad. But let's talk about those. So we've had basically every single wirehouse, every single major platform now come online. I mean, we've got news here that UBS, I thought they already were, to be quite honest. So Justin's 7 trillion UBS group, CEO said the bank is considering offering access to crypto for individual clients. You got your good friend Hunter Horsley here. Wells Fargo has over 12,000 advisors stewarding over 2 trillion of clients. You can look down and they're just hammering digital assets information to all these people.

Right. I mean, it's just got to be coming. And we've been saying it for too long. Maybe we were early. But, I mean, if everybody has access to this everywhere, how do we not see a major market uptake? Yeah, you will over time. The thing about this money, though,

the thing that maybe crypto misses is it's slow. I mean, you and I have had this conversation before. It takes eight meetings with Bitwise to allocate for the average advisor. I think that's shrinking down to like four. But, you know, I'm in Miami right now, meeting with financial advisors from major wirehouses. I'll be back in three months. I'll be back in three months.

At the end of the year, they'll probably be allocating. But it moves at that kind of pace. The other side of this being slow is the scale of these institutions is just absolutely enormous, right? $2 trillion, $5 trillion, $10 trillion for Morgan Stanley. If you start to see Bitcoin be 2.5% of that portfolio, the flow is blow this out of the water. There's no amount of retail selling that can sort of stick their finger. in the wall of that kind of capital flow, it's coming. It is coming. And I don't think the market

pullback based on my meetings is going to stop that or reverse that. There is extraordinary interest. There's a top-down push from these banks. But it is slow and it will build over time. And that's just the market we're in. Again, it goes back to my thesis that it's going to be a grind. I think it's a 10-year grind that ends with Bitcoin well north of a million dollars. But it's going to be a grind. It's not going to be a flood of money all at once from these wirehouses. Okay. So you show that incredible chart, which basically shows the haves and have-nots of the institutional

world, right? Bitcoin, Eith, XRP, sort of a bare market, but not feeling it like the assets that are down 60, 70%. That said, those aren't the only assets that you're bullish on, right? So you gave this great interview here. This is quite a quote. If I'm thinking of my Mount Rushmore of crypto assets, it's Bitcoin, Eith, Salana, and I think ChainLink may be the fourth asset on that mix.

You're bullish on stable coins of tokenization, then you're bullish on the intersection of crypto and real world assets. I mean, we can dig into all of that. But Salana also wasn't on that kind of top list, although now I think since they've gotten the late start with the ETFs and such, and XRP, I guess, to be fair, too, has got that. But Chainlink has not, right? But still an asset, you're clearly very, very bullish on.

Yeah, I think when you start to understand how Chainlink actually works, and you understand the core problem it's solving, which is essentially that blockchains exist in isolation and need to talk to each other and the real world. And they have like 90 plus percent market share of that. It's just a remarkable service. I think of it as like a software program. It's not even really a blockchain.

It's like a software program playing an integral role between crypto and the real world. And the thesis that crypto and the real world will intersect more over the next 10 years is probably the most obvious bet in finance. And you have one entity with 90% plus share of how it does that, an entity that, by the way, is executing very well that has partnerships with every major Wall Street institution

and is only like a $10 billion asset. I swear if this were a company, if Chainlink were listed on the New York Stock Exchange, providing the services it provides, we'd be talking about it in the same context that we talk about, circle and we talk about figure and we talk about coinbase. It would be in that group. It just happens to be monetized through link. I do think it belongs on the Mount Rushmore or Crypto.

I don't know what else you would put up there that has more real world application than Chainlink amongst all the list of assets. You could make arguments for things like hype. You could make arguments for some defy assets, but those are niche applications. Chainlink is central to everything stable coins and tokenization. I'm surprised more people aren't excited by it. I think it's because it's somewhat complex. I think it's complex. And I mean, Dave Weisberger rants about this all the time. I think it's just because there's never been much clarity on how all of what you just described accrues to the token itself. And that's a crypto problem in general. I think we just people still don't know how to value the token in context of what the company or what the actual platform does.

Yeah, sounds like Facebook in 2011. I think that stuff doesn't ultimately matter. There's a good reason why the economic alignment with the token is complex, and that reason is named Gary Gensler, who made it illegal for there to be at a direct economic tie. You're not going to have this persist for the next 10 years. You're already seeing experiments to better align token value and underlying economic activity.

You're seeing experiments at Uniswap. your streaming experiments further down the defy chain. I think it's going to happen over time. So yes, you're taking on the monetization risk, but betting on scaled technology that is struggling with monetization has been a good bet for the last 20 years. Maybe it won't be a good bet this time. But in a new regulatory environment, look, I think they're going to figure it out. It's in their interest to figure it out. I don't think Chainlink Labs wants to accrue all the revenue. I think it wants to be the red hat to Linux in the the chain link ecosystem. I think it can do well and link can do well. I hate to say just like

sort of ignore the imperfect connections, but I think you can almost ignore the imperfect connections. And those connections are getting better, right? You have the chain link reserve. You have tighter allocations. I think it will work out over time and the opportunity is just too large to sacrifice it for those challenges that it's working through. Yeah, Sergei actually announced the reserve on a live show here. And I thought that that was a great step because it was sort of like short of giving people the answers they're asking for, but maybe the lawyers are like screaming from behind the camera. I don't know.

But the reserve was kind of a middle ground for finding a way to show people that they were serious about the token itself and, you know, accruing value. So maybe it's the equivalent of a burn or a buyback, whatever it is, they're taking supply off the market. Yeah. And I would just emphasize for people who weren't working in the crypto industry that the regulatory pressure was extraordinary. and extreme. And the important thing to remember about that is the regulators didn't tell you what would be over the line. And as a result, you couldn't even come anywhere close to the line. You had to design something that was like in the middle of the field because you didn't want to get anywhere close to the edge. And that is the reason why the economic connection is so small and why you see

them tiptoeing, as you said, with things like the reserve to get closer and closer. But just I would say continue that direction of travel. The regulations continue to improve. We're clarifying where the lines are. These tokens have it in their interest to make their tokens valuable or these entities. And I think that they will. I mean, that's where we've been going for the last year. I think that's going to accelerate. And Chainlink has been a leader amongst that. So I want to just go right back to clarity because I didn't finish the conversation when I should have. I mean, you have Patrick Witt here who's at the Ondo Finance Summit. I think yesterday he's saying that market structures, the crown jewel as important or perhaps more important than genius. I think it's way more important than genius because it answers so many

more questions for crypto. Stable coins are almost not crypto at this point. When do you look at the way that they're in the Genius Act? So, hey, I guess we've discussed what happens if it doesn't pass. But I guess the next question is, if it doesn't pass, can the regulators do enough because we know we have that three-year period? That was the other major point you made that I didn't get to dig into. But do you think the CFTC and SEC with Project Crypto working together, you know, can do enough to make the legislation less important in the next three years? Because we know we're going into gridlock in seven or eight months, probably. That's, yeah, we're definitely going into gridlock. If we don't get it now, we're probably not going to get it.

I think that seems pretty clear. By now, I mean, before the November midterms. They're certainly going to try. you couldn't imagine or ask for a more pro-crypto SEC than we have right now. They're a little bit constrained in what they do, but they're certainly going to try. The important piece is, is the profit motive big enough for the big firms to build in this space aggressively despite the fact that you could have regulation clear or change three years from now? And I think that's actually the initiative.

I think the regulators will do all they can to make it as clear as they can. but is the profit opportunity large enough in the eyes of traditional finance to really start incorporating defy and really push on tokenization? My guess is that it is for what it's worth. I think the profit motive is big enough for them to want to do that, so I'm optimistic. But the regulators will do their part. It will really be on the industry as to whether it can deliver or not, and I think that it will. They also announced at that conference that Ando has received EU regulatory approval to list the first round of Ando tokenized stocks and ETF. So this is happening in Europe.

We thought that this was imminent in the United States after the DTCC got there, you know, no action letter from the SEC and said they're going to tokenize everything. But then the Clarity Act, some of the language says tokenization could be basically banned. Right. So it seems like once again now we somehow have the EU moving forward on things that we, have been stalling on. I mean, it feels like tokenization's inevitable. It's inevitable. I mean, the old saying about the U.S. doing the right thing after it's exhausted, all their opportunities is probably true here. You do see experiments in Europe, but I'm going to fade Europe being the regulatory leader on tokenization. We're going to get it right here in the U.S.

Every major firm that I've met with in Wall Street is aligned with this, is hiring into this, sees this as the future. I don't think crypto, for what it's worth, has thought about the scale of what tokenization means. The numbers are so much bigger than people imagine. Again, stable coins are $300 billion. Equity is $110 trillion. It's like 300 plus times bigger. And I think it is inevitable. I think it's inevitable in the next five years. I think all assets are going to be tokenized, which will make the defy industry a hundred times bigger. Like, the tam of that 300 times bigger, 500 times bigger. That's the scale of what you're talking about.

I think it's great that Europe is a little bit ahead on some of these things, but I don't think that's going to sweep the world. It's going to sweep the world when the world's largest capital market gets its act together and figures it out. I do think that's fate accompli. I think that's going to happen almost regardless of what happens in the Clarity Act. I think it's what the industry wants. I think the DCC settles four quadrillion in transactions in a year or something.

That's right. Yes. Yeah, yeah. A quadrillion is a really big number too, Scott. I thought it was fake. I didn't know that was a real number. I thought that was like a bazillion. Yes. Yeah. It's massive in scale. The scale of transactions is massive. And then the adjacency to defy lending and borrowing and using it as collateral. I think the scale of that is just so enormous people haven't really reckoned with it. So just back to the chart that you showed of the top assets sort of obviously having less of a bare market and down to 60, 70%.

Okay, so I can see that even if just general interest in money flows start to come back, that almost everything on that chart can perform well. I'm not saying you throw a dart and every all-coin goes up or that they'll even return to their all-time highs. But, you know, you're down 70% and you pull a 3x. It's still a pretty good move, right? What about the other thousands of assets that are not on that chart? Yeah, look, 99% of them will go to zero. I think that's just the case. You have this phenomenon in bonds called on the run and off the run bonds.

Bonds that are currently liquid and currently in the market and have the right tenor tend to trade much more frequently than bonds that maybe are at an odd duration. Those off the run treasuries are typically traded a discount. You're going to have the same thing in crypto, assets that are within the institutional spectrum, which again is orders of magnitude bigger than the retail spectrum. I don't think people forget that. Assets that are within that perimeter are going to do well. Assets outside of that perimeter are mostly going to struggle with one interesting exception,

which we can get into. But yeah, I think if you're not one of those top 10, 20, 30 assets, I think it's going to be really hard to get up there because the institutional doors are going to close for you. Let's get into that one thing really quick. Well, yeah, another thesis I have, and Bitwise has no products here, but I think the market is playing this out as true, is that people like me dressed in suits are dragging crypto into the regulated entity in regulated world. And that's creating a space on the far, far other end of crypto. I think when you think about the rally in Zcash and you think about the rally in Monero,

you can't disconnect that from the movement of Bitcoin into the regulated sphere. I think it's opened up a very large opportunity for privacy coins and true sort of OG Dgen crypto assets that occupy that far corner of the market. I think that's part of why those assets are doing so well. And as we continue to drag Bitcoin and Ethan Salana in this direction, I think there is more space for those assets. And I think it's the stuff in the middle that's going to suffer. I think the poles of regulated and deeply unregulated crypto will probably do pretty well.

I wish we had product in the space, but we don't and can't. But I think that that is a phenomenon that's happening in crypto in a major way. I thought you were going down the full D-Gen beam coin road. It was going to be like the worst, like most garbage gamble stuff on one side of the barbell, since that's what we actually saw for a while, right? It was like Bitcoin did good and memes did good and nothing in between. But I think you're right. There's people who are coming back to the purpose of all of this and privacy is one of the huge

narratives that we've seen. And Zcash has held up relatively well, I think, actually, and these have even on these downturns. It's held up great. I think Monaro is doing fine. Look, I think there is a part of the world that's non-trivial that wants that exposure. Those assets are still relatively small. And they have momentum from a narrative perspective with that community. Again, I think that that is not going away.

So it doesn't surprise me that they're rallying. It makes sense in the broader narrative of where crypto is. This market is disgusting. It just happened to like scan through. Salana at 94 bucks. I mean, that just, I'm sure. I'm definitely not calling the bottom on something that's gone from 300 to 94. But damn, does that look like a good price long term to me?

That does look like, wow, that is amazing. Look at it. It's down, what, 25% in the last week, right? That is, this is the Leo in the Revenant crypto winner with ice dripping off of our face. That's the world that we're in. It's pretty remarkable. It always feels bad to buy at moments like this. It always feels awful.

I wish I could find it because I saw a hilarious response to my, I tweeted your Revenant headline. As I said, in J.P. Richardson, the CEO of Exodus, responded something like, we've had worse bear attacks than this before. It was like so true. I was like the Revenant with the bear and Hunter just gave him the smiley face emoji like as a thing. But, you know, it's the Revenant thing. It's just a, it makes for just great fodder for the media. Anything else I might have missed here? I know we got to go in a couple minutes. But, you know. No, I mean, I think that's it. I've been keeping, you know, my mind on what all the good news that's happening that's getting forgotten by the market right now. One of my theses we've talked about it before is that good news gets ignored. but it gets stored as potential energy for the full market that eventually comes. So it's still worth monitoring that good news. It's still worth monitoring what UBS is doing, monitoring that Charles Schwab is moving full bore into the market,

monitoring that the sort of epicenter of Wall Street yesterday was the Ando Finance Summit. I mean, think about the words that I just said there. That was where all the attention was was that the Ando Finance, that's unbelievable, and what an event it was. So keep monitoring that good news, but right now it's not going to matter until we go through that bearish period. I hope next time we're on, you know, some like tulips in the background instead of this luxury snow. I don't know about tulips. That was a bad choice.

Maybe just a nice summary field. Some flowers, yeah, some flowers. Non-tulip, non-tulip flowers. We've gotten a tulip comparison way too many times. Matt, as always, man, really a pleasure. Thank you so much. And I really do appreciate you always poppy in in between your meetings from whatever hotel or conference you happen to be at all times.

You're out there really speaking for the entire industry and we appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Scott. All right, I'll be back tomorrow, of course, everybody at 9 a.m. Matt, give Matt a follow. And thank you. We'll see you guys tomorrow. Thanks again. Bye.