The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin’s Next 10 YEARS: The Smart Money Thesis

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

The panel discusses why institutional adoption is accelerating despite weak market sentiment, arguing that Wall Street is focused on long-term infrastructure rather than short-term price action. It explores the convergence of AI and blockchain, the rise of tokenization and real-world assets, and how crypto is evolving into the financial rails powering global markets—often without users even realizing they’re using blockchain technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Oh, man. Shop back to school at IKEA. We're going to go down the line and introduce ourselves, and then we'll get into the panel. I'm Scott Melker. I'm the moderator of this conversation. I host a podcast called The Wolf of All All Streets and a show on Yahoo Finance called The Daily Wolf. Hey, I'm Scott Lowen. I'm the president of Pantera Capital Management. We're a three and a half billion dollar alternative platform focused on blockchain and crypto. Simon Koster. I'm the chief strategy officer at DCG. We've been investing, building,

and incubating in space for over 10 years. I lead our investment verticals, and sit on our subsidiary boards recently most focused on our kind of chunky transactions that we're working through my name is Emmingun Serae I am the CEO and founder of Ava Labs this is the company behind Avalanche blockchain which happens to be the world's most technologically advanced blockchain system all right so getting started first congratulations on having the best name second we're gonna go ahead and start with institutional adoption I know this is shocking but obviously we've been in a down market it's

a rough time, but in the meantime, as retail is seemingly exiting, we have a new announcement every single day from some major institution that we would have pinched ourselves to have involved in this space before. So I guess we'll start with why broadly do you think institutions are interested in this space right now, but more specifically, what are they actually interested in building right now? And you guys have an open conversation here. Yeah, listen, I'm happy to start.

I think it's interesting, right, because this conversation comes up quite a bit, you know, certainly over the course of the day, we're talking about sort of the state of the market. I think the markets are measuring different things than institutions are today. Markets tend to price things over short horizons, right? Six to 12 months, where do they see growth? Where do they see opportunities? Where do the macro factors, et cetera? Institutions are thinking in 10-year increments, right?

And you just, you know, for those of you who didn't leave the room, if you were here for that last panel, right? You heard it from a number of the institutions about how their organizations are changing. And so, you know, regardless of where prices are, right, that certainly impacts sentiment, particularly from retail, institutions have sort of fundamentally shifted their interest and their involvement in the space, and I think that's the big theme right now. Yeah, I think that's all exactly right. And I think we're seeing the institutional adoption on both on two sides, right? The first one is obviously institutions investing in the space, which has started over the past couple of years.

But what we've also seen through the acquisitions that are going on is kind of what we all wanted to have happened, two, three, four, or five years ago when we were talking about building all these companies when we're thinking about from our venture lens. We all really wanted, we all kind of thought institutions are going to be wanting these companies in however many years. And that's exactly what's coming to pass now. And it's interesting that we talk about it, and it's kind of like a foregone conclusion in this room today, how many people have talked about institutional adoption. It's been kind of every single person. And nobody's standing on their chair going like, this is fantastic.

I can't believe this has happened, right? Actually, people are feeling that it's almost like their thing has been co-opted to some degree, which I don't feel that way, but it's interesting to kind of get that sentiment. And then the other one, when we talk about the transactions, some people are super excited. this is exactly what they wanted to have happen, and some people aren't. And it's just when we see the institutions coming in on both of those sides, again, as investors and acquireers, that's been, I think the interesting part is this is exactly what we wanted to have happened, but not everyone's super excited about it.

So I've been in the space for a very long time. I was a professor at Cornell in computer science for 19 years. I published a paper on proof of work in 2003. That was a couple years before Bitcoin itself. And it wasn't called blockchain then. So I've seen the space evolve, and I started talking to institutions, and when we were first doing it, we had to explain to them what the private address, what the private key was, what the public address is, and so on.

And we're past those stages. Institutions have understood the value proposition of crypto, and we no longer have to combat the basics of technological understanding, but now it's a matter of slow progress. Now, when it comes to retail, it's a very different story. And I'm new to this, right? I'm on academic, so I don't really understand. I have a limited understanding of the finance space.

And from what I've seen, at any one time, there's a Ponzi-esque thing going on somewhere or another. And the current Ponzi-esque thing that's sucking up all the money is the AI, the internal dealings between the AI companies and the belief that AI will generate enormous amounts of GDP, to the point that I think the expectations are far in excess of what AI can deliver. So we will have to live through that, the same way we live through the Ponzi-esque stuff that happened within crypto. We saw the Terra Luna craziness where there was 20% promised to stable coin deposits. That was insane and unsustainable. We saw the FTX craziness where Sam was propping up his coins.

And I was very proud that the avalanche kept up with these based on pure technological strength. So once again, we're going to see retail go from Ponzi-esque puffed-up space to other puffed-up spaces. But at the end of it all, institutional behavior is slow, never-ending, and it's not going to waver. We're going to see more digitization of tokenization of assets every day. So you obviously brought up AI, so it's a great topic, I think, to jump straight into because one of the broader conversations we're having is where the intersection of AI and blockchain and crypto will inevitably be. I think everybody is really excited at the idea of agentic economy and our AI bots are out there buying our plane tickets and transacting 24-7-365. But as Simon, we were discussing this kind of before, haven't heard the roadmap really laid out clearly for how that happens.

As you said, everybody sort of accepts the idea, but I don't think we have a timeline or a plan as of yet. So how do you see that evolving? Go ahead. Yeah, like we're talking about, I think it's come up. number of times again today that we are going to see agentic payments, we're going to see kind of all the things that have been discussed and no one is sitting in the room going, that's not going to happen, right? It is going to happen, but no one has laid out that roadmap precisely. And I think, you know, we've invested in lots of companies kind of at the center

of kind of crypto and AI, and we've talked a lot about whether, you know, crypto is the solution to AI or not, whether stable coins or a solution to agentic payments or not. And I think the answer is we don't know. Maybe you know, and you'll tell us in a second. But we've been focused on investing across the board, and I think the one theme that is easy for us is that there's going to need to be a variety of decentralized solutions to the frontier labs, right? I think that's something that we've been thinking for a long time and talking to everyone we can about it. But where those solutions play and how they actually start to mount a competition to the frontier labs, that's, I think, a really tough question.

I know this is something that you're thinking about all the time. Yes, so about three years ago, we started going down this path called coin-operated agents. That is to say, validators equipped with AI, where users send transactions written in their native language. So you could say something like, I'm willing to give you $5,000 for your next movie, provided that you can raise the $50 million required to actually make it happen by September 10. and you write this out in English, if that's your native language, or Tagalog, if it's not, right? Whatever language you like. So that's the vision we've been building towards at Avalanche.

And due to the nature of Avalanche, we can have multiple parallel chains that work in concert. So one of the things that we're looking forward to launching is such a chain itself. And I see that as the ultimate culmination of AI and blockchain coming together. Scott? Yeah, I mean, listen, I think simply, right, AI is what's, powering kind of the new age of intelligence, right? Blockchain is what powers value and ownership on the internet, right? And so I agree with your opening statement.

I think right now AI is being used as a marketing wrapper. When you look at the flows of venture capital money, right? John mentioned it earlier, like 80, 85% is going into the AI space. So if you're a company looking to raise capital and you're sort of desperately clawing for dollars, it's easy to put an AI wrapper on top of it. The actual use cases haven't sort of proven themselves out at scale, but it's kind of a marriage made in heaven, so it feels inevitable. That reminds me of Long Island blockchain iced tea or whatever it was, right?

Yeah, just call it AI and you'll be able to raise as much money as you want. Very healthy. It doesn't seem like a top signal at all. But you guys are actually deploying capital here, right? You're building, you're deploying, you're actually programming it. So I guess brass tax, forget the narrative. what are you actually looking at and looking to spend money on? So I think we're interested in sort of decentralized data models. We're interested, we think broadly about sort of gateways, developers, and applications.

And I think as it relates to the intersection of AI and blockchain, right now we're involved in a number of development tool companies and thinking about sort of how does the verification of data, and data sets and proprietary data ultimately intersect for large language models and how you tokenize and secure that. Yeah, like we were talking about before, I think the main thing we're focused on is what is going to bring the competition to those primary, you know, AI leaders today. Because if we go back two or three years ago where we were having conversations with regulators on Capitol Hill and we were talking about kind of the state of AI and what we need, and what we don't and we were talking about privacy and compute and power all the things we all talk about and

Regulators even three years ago were saying wow we really need a solution to this right like and I think the last three years have progressed exactly the way people anticipated even though it's kind of gone faster than people expect to but the need for these other solutions has been kind of been made more evident I think more quickly than anybody anticipated And so for us, that's investing in, you know, any company we can, but also it's investing in our wholly own company, which is Yuma, which is focused on the BitTensor network. And so we launched that company a little over two years ago, and they are, you know, they are, they're an asset manager, they're a validator, they're an incubator, they're a minor, there are all the things on the network to try and advance both kind of our business and the network itself as fast as possible because we're just trying to figure out, what it takes to truly mount a decentralized solution to the currently otherwise centralized offerings. So I defer to my investor colleagues. Actually, they see more deals than I do. I'm a builder. But I can tell you what I see getting built. So we ourselves are building AI into the lowest level

of the blockchain itself. And on top of Avalanche, other people are doing similar things, such as escrow agents powered by AI, such as endpoints that are powered. by AI to which you can submit instructions and then they carry it out as if they're an executor in the sky as if they're a lawyer in the sky without any kind of attachments etc and there are many other uses of many such uses including where people want to include AI on top of tools so for example wallets powered by AI to which you say something like hey here is my investment strategy make it happen for me and that happens without you having to trust another human and all of these conjoined gives you a very very very smart rail or set of rails

for people to tokenize their assets on. Can I actually go back to one of the questions, one of the things you said earlier, when you're talking about kind of the AI investor Ponzi scheme kind of not going to play out, that kind of stuck with me. How long do you think it's going to take before we start to see that it's abundantly evident that the revenue is just not going to be there? because I think a lot of people understand that theme, but I think the debate is kind of how long that plays.

Great question. And the hardest thing about Ponzi's is you can never tell when they're going to explode. Because if you could, we'd be able to get rich. Some Ponzi-esque things can actually be landed. We've seen Ponzi's land, and I'm not going to name names. Some have happened in crypto where something starts up, and you're like, oh, that's definitely not sustainable. And then suddenly over time, it ends up being back.

by more solid assets. And then we've seen some explode. And I think some of our colleagues have tattoos showing what they invested in. And, you know, to be honest, we knew it was going to explode. And some of us thought it could be landed. And some of us thought, well, you never know. So the AI one can last a long time.

And it's a distributed Ponzi-esque scheme. I don't want to call it a Ponzi. It's just a lot of self-dealing and the expectations. at this point seem very, very unlikely to be met by global GDP growth. It's just, you know, the valuation at which people are coming in seem to me as if it's just way too high. So when is it going to explode? I don't know. You never know these things. But I defer to you guys on this again. I think that was the most successful, by the way, not naming names while naming names. I've ever said. I was just going to say, someone once said the market can

stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. So things can extend well beyond. where you think they should collapse. Well, then the next natural question is if we're taking for granted that there will be this intersection of AI and blockchain, but we've seen bad ideas explode because we're playing with people's money, isn't this dangerous? I mean, my AI gives me wrong answers daily, so I don't want to manage my money yet. Maybe I'm just really bad. I'm a boomer, and I can't figure it out.

And we've seen what's happened in crypto, so it seems that we're very good at moving fast and breaking things, but this isn't the place that we want to do that right now. I guess the question is who's a dangerous for, right? You know, at the end of the day, you know, the internet gave people tremendous opportunities to sort of create and get information and there was like an implicit cost which is essentially you know, your personal data and your usage, right? That was the social contract. There's a different version of the social contract right now in AI tools, right?

They're not necessarily all free, but they're broadly available. people are rushing to sort of figure out how to use them and create value for themselves. There's a different question if you're a venture capital investor or you're a private equity investor who, again, to go back to 80% of the money flowing into the space, feels like you don't have a choice other than to put your chips down in the space regardless of what the valuations are, right? And so at the end of the day, like most great sort of technological innovations, there's a pre-Cambian explosion of new ideas and tools and people get to use them. Some of those are going to sort of go horribly wrong. There'll be a ton of capital that goes into the space.

Eventually the market sort of figures out what the long-term growth prospects are, what's actually viable and sustainable, and there's a massive reset. Some people make a lot of money. Some people will lose a lot of money along the way. Ultimately, the consumer should benefit, assuming robots don't kill us all. I think you're exactly right. The analogy we use in the office a lot when we talk about kind of decentralized AI tools or kind of anything but the frontier lab AI tools,

we go back to internet days, right? And we all talk about the days where everyone of us or most of us are old enough to have started on the internet using AOL or something like that. And the first day you opened up a Netscape browser and didn't go through AOL, you kind of knew you were doing something different and you kind of knew you were no longer playing in that walled garden and that you

had to pay attention, you had to do the right things, you had to go to the right places. And it took a little while to learn how to use that broader internet. And that's exactly what has to happen in AI, right? We need to get out of the walled garden of the specific tools that we use today that are very, very good, but they're not all things to all people and they're not the right answer to all things and they're going to become very expensive. And get into the, and get into the into an open internet of solutions. And I think when we have that level of access and broad tools on the AI side,

we'll have to have developed the skill of how to use all those different tools, but that will be a really good learning curve for everybody to get up. I don't have that much to add to what got said. All I'm going to point out is that the token-based processing model that AI has brought into the world is a very good compliment to the token-based world.

model that we always had. So at the confluence of the two technologies lies a lot of exciting possibilities. I would say that some AI models are okay and some are trying to differentiate themselves by doing hokey things. You mentioned things that lie to you. That I find to be a big problem. But even worse, are AI models that are itching, that are trying to differentiate themselves by doing unsafe things, you know, telling people that they're great, telling people that they're awesome, telling suicidal people, you know, giving them ideation that's even worse, trying to generate images or itching to to generate images that are entirely inappropriate. This is a good time for regulators to come.

Regulators seem to have been busy in the last couple of years trying to come after crypto for some reason and mass without making any distinctions. This, at this junction in time, they should really come into AI with actual discerning tools and actually put some structure into that space. Yeah, and so obviously our topic here is the future of digital assets, so not to go too far down the AI path, but it seems like the future of digital assets is that all assets are digital, right? And so the next natural conversation is tokenization and real-world assets,

and I guess the different paths that we're likely to see moving forward for that to happen, for securities to come online, for everything. But it seems like there's a lot of converging plans for how that's likely to look. into the future. Scott, what are your thoughts on the future of tokenization, RWA, and which path is right and how that'll look? Yeah, I mean, listen, we're all in on it. When Dan Moorhead set up Pantera in 2013 is sort of the first institutional fund focused on Bitcoin at that time, right, his thesis, having been a long-term Wall Street and hedge fund guy was, this was technology that was going to ultimately

transform and redo the global financial plumbing, right? And for the last 13 years, at conferences like this and investor meetings and things like that, right? We've been telling that story over and over again. And I think every year what you hear, and certainly again from the last panel, we heard from the institutions, right, about what's happening. And so ultimately, I think it was Sandy who said,

you know, technology is inevitable, right? If it adds value, makes things cheaper, easier, faster, more secure, that's what blockchain technology does for global value transfer. And so that's kind of been our investment thesis for the last 13 years. We continue to sort of focus on that space. We've made a lot of progress, right, but it's sort of innovation, education, legitimization, and adoption. And I think we're in

the legitimization phase right now. So big institutions like Morgan Stanley, you know, who Amy was up here before talking about it, they just put our flagship fund on their global wealth platform. That makes it the first blockchain venture fund available to 16,000 financial analysts who represent seven trillion in assets. And so it's one thing for someone who's in the space to be telling the story. It's another thing for a global financial institution to say, hey, we've done our diligence, we've kicked the tires, we understand this technology, we're implementing for ourselves, and we're offering it to you our clients.

Those are the important next steps. I think the phase that we're in. Yeah, and shifting to the operator side, outside of being an investor for a second, so one of our companies, which is Luna, which is an emerging market exchange, increasingly focused on all the things globally, stable coins and tokenization that we've all been talking about. And, you know, their major markets are South Africa, Nigeria, Indonesia, Malaysia. And these are markets where all the benefits of tokenization that we're talking about

aren't just, hey, this is better. This is cheaper. This is faster. Hey, you can trade futures at 2 o'clock in the morning on a Friday. I don't know why anyone want to do that, but they do. And so this isn't about making it better for them. This is about fundamental access to financial instruments and products that they just wouldn't have otherwise had access to

or making it from kind of exorbitantly expensive to fundamentally near free. And so this isn't just an improvement for them and in all their markets. It's a complete game changer and unlock for emerging markets. And so if you think the difference is big in North America, no, no, no. It is huge in emerging markets. So Avalanche is one of the newer systems out on the market. We started about six years ago with the byline of tokenized the world's assets.

And we started out by looking not at what people thought we would do. We did not start out by trying to go after the equities market, stocks, and so forth. Those are well-established rails where everything is essentially met, at least for the U.S. market, at least locally in every market. So it is the alternative assets where we thought the real development would happen. So you see, for example, that I don't know how many of you bought tickets to any of the FIFA Cup games. If you did, you used Avalanche and you did not even know it. So all of that happened on an avalanche L1.

So those of you who live in Bergen County, New Jersey, you will find that your deeds are actually digitized on an avalanche L1 as well. And you cannot yet use those deeds to get mortgage against them or to borrow against them, getting a mortgage, or to put them into Ave or whatnot, yet, but that's the next step. So it's going to happen at the fringes and move towards more established markets. as was pointed out, the accessibility that this brings to the broader global user base is enormous. Imagine somebody, we take a lot of things for granted here, but imagine somebody who lives overseas for them to be able to get their assets out of the control of their own local fauna,

whatever it is, the ecosystem, into another market to be able to invest in opportunities globally is huge. And what you're seeing with stable coins where they invest in dollars is only a small glimmer of what can happen. The moment they can bring those assets to bear for other value here and elsewhere is going to be an enormous opportunity for everyone who's ready to take it. You just reminded me why we got into this in the first place. Right? We have these conversations over and over again. I do it five times a day. And it's always tokenization. We forget that this is actually for people to gain access who don't have it.

We always used to talk about parallel banking system and the power of defy and the unbanked and all those things. I feel like until this moment, we've lost that narrative in a lot of these conversations. And that really is the point. Yeah, we turned inwards a little bit and turned a little too U.S. specific, especially given the legal changes that are happening in the U.S. It's normal, but let's not forget that our audience is global. And therein lies, I think, the big opportunity. Yeah, I think Evan's making exactly the right point. So my mom's not a big crypto investor.

It might surprise you. But she's always going like, what do you do exactly? It doesn't go very well. But she doesn't understand that she's going to start using crypto before she even understands what it is. And to your point, that's exactly where we need to get to. And that's what's happening with all these acquisitions that we started this panel about. as we see big institutions buying all these crypto firms and they're going to be adopting the technology, that's clearly what's happening, and you're going to see crypto rails being used for people

when they have no idea. And so this kind of concept of crypto specifically as an asset class is going to merge into that concept. And personally, I think it's a really good thing. Yeah, I'd say 10 years ago, right, there was sort of the phrase, blockchain is a solution looking for a problem, right? and everyone was sort of saying, well, how is it ever going to be adopted? How are people going to use it, et cetera, et cetera? I think your point is the right one, which is most people aren't going to know ultimately that they're using it.

The abstraction layer, the user experience with blockchain behind is what is going to become pervasive. I agree with that. I know we've only got four or five minutes left. So I guess following on what we were just talking about there with how it's actually going to help people, a lot of the conversations about institutional adoption, tokenization, it feels like I think that people are a bit disillusioned because they don't feel like they're going to be able to economically participate. I've had this conversation a lot. It's very exciting that the DCC is going to tokenize everything, but they're just going to use the technology to do what they already do, and that's not really investable as an individual. So I guess where will all of this actually be beneficial financially to people? where will they be able to invest?

Will it be public markets or tokens or those coming back? You know, in your estimation, beyond just the fact that it's obviously making their transactions faster, but I don't think the real pain point right now is like, I get it. My ACH sucks, right?

But like, I'm not getting rich by sending a stable coin, right? And people still want to know that they can benefit financially. So I guess how will they do that? I mean, listen, I think everyone has been focused for a long time on the speculative nature of the market and where prices, right?

at the end of the day, this is disruptive technology. And so you can think about any investable dollar, and now you can go from seed all the way to public markets, right? And, you know, you can invest with folks like ourselves or other asset managers out there that run liquid strategies, that run private strategies, that run special opportunity strategies. And again, you know, firms like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Bank of America, JPMorgan, are all moving to provide those investment products and solutions

to their clients. So the space and the amount of money that's going to start to move into it is only going to get bigger, right? I don't think the question is about, you know, should IRAs and, you know, retirees be investing in crypto? The question is, does a diversified portfolio include digital assets, right? And as a financial advisor and a wealth manager, that's a question that you need to be answering for your clients and that all of them now are getting up to speed on. Yeah, I think somebody earlier brought up the example of Western Union, right, in trying to send $1,000 to another country and only $900 gets there. And I think the question is whether, you know, if companies like Western Union buy all this technology and just increase their margin, that's kind of what that could happen, right? Or companies like Western Union buy this and fundamentally offer kind of the same service at a much lower price.

and I think unless there are other competitors that can like new entrants that can fundamentally challenge that pricing model come into the space they're probably going to increase their margin right and so how how that kind of competition continues well there are the existing incumbents adopting fundamentally a lower cost technology I think that's going to be a really interesting competition to watch so from my perspective we live through a crazy crazy time we lived through a time when people were speculating

on technical accomplishments by various different teams, mostly of mediocre technical ability. And people were jumping at the bit to go and invest in white papers that just had essentially mumbo-jumbo, a couple of Greek letters. And I lost track of the kinds of things that would come and rescue Ethereum scalability problem. Was it verifiable delay functions, verifiable random functions, RCA's, accumulators, zero-knowl, snarks, starks, etc.

As a professor who's actually an expert at these systems, as someone who's written papers where I ran out of Greek letters to use, I'm so glad that that stage is behind us. Nobody should be speculating on various different projects, technical accomplishments of this kind. That era should be behind us. I think we've now figured out how to scale, and Avalanche showed the world how to build parallel chains that work in tandem.

It's very different from the Solana model. It's very different from the Ethereum model. It's very different from just about every other system out there. Now, going forward, what I think will happen are those teams and projects that actually bring value to the chain are going to be the ones that prospered. Gone are the days when you could invest in a meme coin. In fact, I was facing this difficulty. We would bring in funds, say the BlackRock Fund, Health Fund,

and, you know, that has returned 30% annually. historically and you tell this to people and they say well you know my meme coin made 30 percent well okay so those days are also gone and and that's a welcome change the sideways market right now is a fantastic time to be building from my perspective and the teams that bring value the teams that bring money flows and business flows to the chain to their chain are going to be the ones that prosper I could do this for hours but unfortunately we're not allowed so thank you gentlemen Scott Simon going everybody giving round of thank you

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