The Wolf Of All Streets - How Billion-Dollar Funds Actually Invest In Crypto | Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley

Episode Date: October 4, 2026

Hunter Horsley breaks down why institutional crypto adoption is becoming increasingly irreversible, with ETFs, tokenization and onchain finance pulling traditional finance deeper into the industry. He explains why ETFs are becoming the preferred way for many investors to hold crypto, what new custody rules could unlock for wealth managers, and why crypto adoption can keep accelerating even without the Clarity Act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you were someone you know is concerns about gambling, visit connectsontario.ca. Or call 1866-5-1-2-6-1-2600. Terms and conditions apply. The biggest institutions on the planet, are not scared of the Bitcoin bear market, and they believe that we're likely going into a new bull cycle now.

According to a Bitwise survey of the 15 largest institutions on the planet, none of them reduced their exposure during the bare market, and many of them actually increased it. I spoke today with Hunter Horsley, the CEO of Bitwise, about that very phenomenon. It's not just sort of one idiosyncratic case, but then to see a uniform response, which is kept the asset, want to keep the asset,

maybe want to even increase their exposure to the asset. Why one big green candle is the best marketing for Bitcoin. As the market is demonstrating yet again for the 100th time that it's not dead and not going to zero after 16, 17 years, I think that the positive price performance is very helpful. But of course, about the future of ETFs, indexes, and the kind of products that both retail institutions will be looking to as the bull market commences. If you want to know where the institutionalization of Bitcoin and crypto is headed,

this is the conversation for you. Today's video is sponsored by 21 shares. A few years ago, getting crypto exposure meant exchanges, wallets, and seed phrases. Today, it can be as simple as logging into the brokerage account you already have. That shift didn't happen on its own. 21 shares launched the first crypto ETP in basket form back in 2018 before crypto ETFs were even on the table in the United States, and they've operated through every market cycle since.

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that these products have become exceptionally popular. I saw some news this week that the SEC now is finally giving some guidance likely on RIAs and their ability to custody crypto assets. To now, my understanding is that most of them, if they were offering it, were doing it through ETFs. So products like your own, and this could broaden that. dramatically. So I mean, it's generally how much of a problem has it been that RIAs haven't had a custody solution? Has that kept a lot of them out? And do you

think that this would change things dramatically? You know, I was I was doing a we had an event earlier this week with about 80 large wealth firms in Napa and I had Mike Cagney from from figure come and speak. And you know, he was sharing his outlook and view on how transformed it is transformative it is to bring capital markets and credit on chain and the opportunities that exist therein. And one of the CEOs of the wealth firm, you know, raised his hand and said, how can I, how can I participate in this with my clients? And the honest answer is you basically can't. Because in the U.S. wealth management looks after $40 trillion, but fully relies on

a stack of infrastructure that is just not integrated with being able to operate on chain. So when I think about this new rule from the SEC, I don't think it necessarily hugely changes the journey of including crypto in portfolios, which ETFs are enabling and I think really excellent for. But I do think it starts to clear the road to more novel circumstances where a wealth manager may want to enable their client to park their stable coins with them. And even a step further, as crazy as it may seem today, may want to be able to help that client participate in a vaults or own a tokenized asset. And so I think it's more relevant and enabling for that storyline, which is emerging right now, and would then the sort of conventional storyline of advisors putting Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana

in a client's investment portfolio. Right. So we have this have and have not situation right now. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana, hyperliquid near for you guys, right? obviously, XRP and a few other novel Doge, et cetera. So there are a few that people can get access to through ETF. So to your point, RAs aren't going to really be inclined to figure out ways to custody Bitcoin for someone. Right?

Like Bitwise, B, BITU, it's totally sufficient for them to give Bitcoin exposure to their clients through the ETF wrapper. Yeah. And actually to the contrary, a sort of newer phenomenon this year is, is the, opposite, which is there are, we have, we have clients who figured out over the prior years how to set advisors who figured out how to set their client up with a crypto custodian to own spot Bitcoin. And this year they want to swap that spot Bitcoin or Solana or what have you into the ETF to simplify life. So I would say the trend we see on that side is actually in the the opposite direction, which is moving out of having the spot asset into the ETFs.

So I think that that's sort of the interesting state of play there. I think the ETFs served them very well. I don't think that there's a ton of demand to invest in a $400 million market cap crypto asset, which is something interesting we could talk about more. I really think that the enabling policy. possibilities here have to do with what we might call on-chain finance, but participating around stable coins and vaults and unique tokenized assets, which is not part of the present for the wealth management category, but I think is likely to start to show up next

year. Okay. So in theory, you could, if you're a RIA, you could offer someone exposure to coin number 75 on coin market cap in custody. them, but that's a one in a million youth case. Nobody wants that. So in theory, it's not something that they're going to need to offer right now. I did find it interesting. The SEC was actually proposing that some of these RAs could custody the assets basically in their own self-custody on behalf of clients, which was a step further than I would have anticipated, right? Because it's not just saying you can use these qualified custodians, but if it's an asset that they want that doesn't have a qualified custodian, you can do it. I thought that was actually a pretty good step,

whether it'll be used or not. Yeah, right, right, right. Right. Right, right, right. Yeah. So again, I think that it's an even bigger step when you imagine that the thing an advisor may want to help their client with is maybe not buying asset number 57 and then, you know, setting up a custody configuration. But perhaps rather is equipping their client with a non-custodial wallet where they help them secure the seed phrase, but then enable them. to earn a 5% yield on their stable coins through a vault, the same way that they might help a client earn yield on their cash. So I think it has much bigger implications for sort of the on-chain finance universe, and I think is clearing the road there, and I think we'll enable more to happen in 2027.

How much will also enable actively manage strategies by RIAs within the vault? So maybe a product, defy index that doesn't exist or a Metaverse index as if anybody would want that in 20206. Or, you know, utility coins, hyperliquid and something else exposure, right? How much if an RAA is actually knowledgeable in the space would they then be able to, because of this, custody a basket of assets for a client and sort of present them something that would look like an ETF, but actively managed by that RAA, that's their own sort of portfolio construction, which, by the way, I think, is the next conversation is that'll just all be done by AI. Right, right, right, right, right. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. You know, so I think that the,

that the, the, the big picture of what crypto broadly is experiencing in 2026 is that for, for a decade, there were all of these barriers to adoption that were so specific to crypto. You know, it was too nascent. You know, there were no exchanges. Then you remember in 2019, there were no qualified custodians. Then there was, you know, concern that the government would shut it down. And sort of the crypto spaces just worked through this progression of reasons that people weren't doing things in the space and progressively solved them.

I think where we find ourselves in 2026 is that it has encountered sort of the final boss of reasons that people aren't doing something, which is they're just busy. You know, they've got a lot of other things going on. They're trying to figure out what to make of the bond market. They're trying to handle development in a client's life. They're wondering if they should take some risk off in U.S. domestic equities or if they should keep it on. wondering where the AI journey is going. They're looking at their credit exposure. And oh, yeah, there's some interesting stuff happening in crypto as always.

And so I think increasingly, while there continue to be idiosyncratic barriers to somebody doing something, I think increasingly the barrier for crypto use cases in crypto adoption is going to be punching through the very busy world that investors face. with clarity and compellingness around something that they could participate in. So I think as it pertains to actively managing portfolios of assets, I would be, I'd be, you know, I think everything will be tried, but I'd be a little bit bearish on that because that by its nature consumes more time from the wealth manager.

them actively managing separate accounts. I think that about a month ago, we introduced a thing we call ATPs, automated token portfolios, which we design the portfolio. It gets automatically rebalanced, but the end investor ultimately is holding all of the tokenized equities. So we have a bitwise mag 7X. It holds eight tokens, the mag 7 plus SpaceX. The Bitwise strategy determines the holdings, the weightings.

It then gets rebalanced on behalf of the investor, but the investor is ultimately not in a commingled fund or a pooled vehicle. It's just a service being delivered into their wallet. I think something like that has the potential to be the frontier of innovation around what's possible here, where it doesn't consume more time, but it is giving the benefit of sort of breaking the bulk and allowing a lot of flexibility around the investment exposure someone has and the individualization of that investment exposure. So I said a lot there, but I do think that there will be new formats

that can enter the wealth space. ATPs are one version of that. I think the vaults are another. I think more broadly, the barrier to adoption these days has a lot to do with the finite amount of time that mainstream investors have. Yeah, it sounds to me like even if the most active RIA wanted to do all of this, they would just wait for a bit wise to kind of lead the way and do it for them and then just offer the exposure rather than trying to figure the salad on their own. In most cases, right?

Yeah. Yeah. That's how they approach almost every other asset class, right? So, you know, I think that there will, of course, be some who want to manage manage portfolios themselves, but I think many of them view it as their job to find the expert managers. So something like an ATP, how does that make the jump from novel product for someone who understands crypto to product that your average, every day? advisor, average everyday investor who's just passively putting money into things understands is not

scared of and would actually participate in because that sounds dramatically better than anything on the market right now. And that's kind of the promise of using blockchain and tokenization to do these things. Right, right. Yeah. So I think that it has to do with making it simple for people. So I think the two things that need to get solved for a lot of people to be using ATPs are the strategies themselves have to be compelling. Any new investment solution in crypto land has to compete with every other investment that somebody could make on any given day. So why is a Mag 7X strategy more compelling than buying Nvidia stock today or buying QQQ regardless of format? So I think there needs to be more work done on the strategies. And then the second, which I think is hugely important, is distribution.

And I think distribution looked at another way is if you take the premise that investors are busy, they are drowning in opportunities and things to think through. Distribution is really the question of how do you make it unbelievably simple for an investor to do something? So I think that the journey that a lot of on-chain investment solutions will go on is they'll get developed as something that people can access through non-custodial wallets, a little bit harder to reach. But then ultimately, if they're going to be very successful, need to be distributed where they're just a button that appears in an app or an interface that somebody already uses. So those are the things that we're thinking about relative to ATP's, and that I think would be necessary ingredients to see a billion dollars or tens of billions of dollars flowing into that new investment format.

It's interesting because it just comes back to the same old crypto question, which is UXUI. At the end of the day, it's like, when does it become simple enough for Grandma to do it? And she doesn't even know she's doing it on a blockchain, right? I kind of joked the other day, we keep talking about tokenized stocks. I was like, we haven't made it until they're just,

stocks. Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, I think that's totally, it's totally right. And in some ways, unsurprising because it's true of every other business in the world and and everything else. But yeah, definitely what we what we see in 2026 is that that is that is where the challenge sits today. So I think I mentioned before, but you just launched the near ETF. I think last I had spoken to Matt Hogan, he sort of alluded to the fact that maybe the days of the single asset ETF were going to slow dramatically. probably eventually grind to a halt, but seemingly there's still enough interest in certain assets to roll out new ones. I guess, do you still feel that way or do you feel like it's going to

become more indexed ETFs? Obviously, there's going to be more products, but, you know, how many, I guess how many single asset ETFs can the market support from crypto? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the short answer is, I don't know. Yeah, I was actually just on an internal call with a bunch of colleagues and people are asking, you know, how does BitWise decide what products to launch? And what came to mind was a Dwight Eisenhower quote, which you may have heard before, which is something like plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. And that's sort of how I feel about this question, which is ultimately BitWise is here to create and deliver useful things for investors.

And so the question is, what do they want and how do we know? And I think if you asked Matt and I two months ago, we would have said, you know, Behype, the hyper-liquid ETF has done very well, but it seems like the ETF investor doesn't have the timer space to do a lot more. But we wanted to launch a near-ETF. We think there's a ton of merit and interesting dimensions to need. year. And so we brought that to market and it's taken 50 million of assets in three days, which is a very strong result for a new ETF. So I would say that as of as of this particular

juncture, it seems like there's more to do. But more broadly, it's something that we're always trying to wrap our arms around. And of course, we spend a ton of time with investors and clients to try to understand what they want from us. So I think you'll see more from us and hugely excited about NRR and the response from investors to the BitWise Near ETF. Sometimes I tweet out things like, you know, delighted to see investors have conviction in this. And that is really what, you know, what I'm thinking. which is, you know, we invest a lot of time and resources in building these solutions.

But you don't ultimately know completely how useful they'll be to investors. So that's how I'm feeling this week, you know, delighted that it looks like NRR is opening up access to NIR. And that, you know, so far there's $50 million that are finding that enabling and useful. I mean, I feel like if I had just been smart enough to buy the things that you guys decide are viable for ATFs, my portfolio will look a hell of a lot better than it does right now. Because I totally missed hyperliquited. I was just missing out of it. I totally miss Zcash, but I do own NIR. So I was really excited about that one.

But it seems like you actually make your decisions, but it seems like you really have focused in on the winners in their vertical to some degree. I mean, Zcash is clearly carrying the privacy narrative. I think NIR is probably the most reasonable way to invest in AI and blockchain convergence. Hyperliquid, obviously. You can understand the tokenomics for once of a project and say, Yeah. Borgon of these token, right? So it seems like you're not picking winners, but you're picking like the very obvious leaders in the verticals

that will probably be the biggest narratives for the coming cycle. Yeah, yeah, I think I, yeah, totally, totally. I think you just touched on a few themes. I mean, you have to be blind in 2026 not to recognize that AI is going to be a dominant part of the economy in years ahead. And so there's a very valid question that everyone has encountered. And, you know, Scott, you've encountered countless times around how do AI and public blockchains intersect. There are many examples of that today and many credible intersections. I think something like near that sits at that intersection.

becomes all the more relevant to investors. I think in an indirect way, AI is also reminding people of the value of privacy as they contemplate even more of their personal information being online. And I think that that's very constructive to Zcash. And then finally, I think in 26, on the revenue front, if you think way back to the 2000, and internet companies, the metrics that people talked about were eyeballs and page views.

And those are like the metrics of success for an internet company. And if you roll the clock forward, the space matured. And now people talk about ARPU, average revenue per user. They talk about Dow and Mao, daily active, monthly active. They talk about net revenue retention, et cetera. So the understanding matured and the metrics people wanted to see matured. I think that that's also happening with public blockchains. And one of the key ways that's maturing is people want to see revenue, so to speak,

but they want to see the mechanism by which usage of the blockchain creates value that flows to the token. So I think that that is another big theme of this. year and if you look at those themes I think it can help explain why certain assets are doing well this year and and exactly as you said I think near near is in is in a very strong lane relative to that. So one thing that's lagged on the ETF side in my opinion or something I thought would happen faster would be indexes. In my view it always seemed like that's how people just generally invest right.

open a IRA or whatever, you know, your 401k, you just buy some retirement targeted fund or something and you never think about it again. I would imagine that's how most people do it. We still really have. Now, I remember when you guys got one approved and then it got like magically frozen by the SEC indefinitely or something. I don't remember the details of it. But, you know, is that the next wave? When do you, or am I totally missing that that's what people want? It feels like that's what people would want. It feels like your average person would say, I just want crypto exposure, give it to me. And they don't want to choose. Yeah, yeah.

You know, of course, the first thing Bitwise ever did in 2017 was introduce the first crypto index fund at the time it wasn't publicly traded. And I continue, even just this week, an advisor of a $30 billion firm, we were chatting over dinner and he's like, you know, what do you like best? if you could only own one thing, what would you own? And I said, BITW, the BitW, the BitWX-T-W, the BitWX-E-T-P, or E-F, excuse me. And so I still feel that way today. I do think that, you know, if you look at Bit-W-E-T-Fs and ETPs, the Bitcoin product is the largest,

followed by Solana. now. And then BATW, the index of crypto assets comes after that. BATQ, the index of crypto companies after that. So I think the evidence on the field, as you said, is that indexes have not been as popular here to four as one could have imagined. I think it's only a matter of time, is maybe the punchline. I think that the early adopter has a lot of information about the space and therefore has a lot of opinions. They may think that Morpho is awesome and Ave sucks.

They may think that Ave is awesome and Morpho sucks. They may think that Ethereum is awesome and Solana sucks or the other way around. And therefore, they're more inclined to express their specific views based on the information in front of them. And so I think because the space has been a lot of early adopters for many years, that's led to the more specific instruments and products being the most popular. We are definitely now stepping into the mainstream chapter. We're only in the beginning of this chapter.

And I think in this chapter, you'll see things like BATW, BATQ grow in popularity because to the prior topic, the investor has been. busy. The investor has intellectual humility about the fact that there's a lot of things they don't know in the space and the index helps them solve that. So I think that this story is just getting started on the index front. Does BITW evolve? Do you change the assets that are in it to actively manage? Does anything fall out because something happened or anything come in because its market gap has grown tremendously? It's so interesting. So, you know, it's now The index has been running now since 2017 and on the website,

BATW ETP.com, there's actually a chart that shows every constituent that has ever been held by the Bitwise 10 since 2017, and their time in and then out of the index. And it's kind of a, Scott, I think for you would be a fun walk down memory lane, some tickers you probably haven't seen in a while. But the index rebalances monthly. The rule set, it's not up to discretion. There's a set of rules that determine what comes into the index.

And I think if you look at it today, you see maybe some old names, but you'd also see hyperliquid. You'd see Uniswap in there and Zcash in there, which I think is the index doing its job its job and adapting to reflect the portfolio of assets that investors are most highly valuing. And so it definitely evolves, and I think that's the point. And somebody can invest in the index and wake up in four years and know that they will own the winners, however it plays out.

And so it's sort of fun to see how the constituents of the Bitwise Tend have evolved over time. Yeah, I'm looking at now. I should have done my own research at advance, but I see definitely a lot of classic Bitcoin Cash, of course, was in everything back then. That's right. Classic Filecoin. I mean, there's a good ones here, Polygon, obviously, Tesos. I mean, there's some, there's some killers in here that have been, you know, eliminated over time. See, yeah, I think that that that's the reasonable way that most people are going to want this. So what I ask you then, for a BITW, it's been around forever. it's still as viable as ever.

Do you pitch that to RIAs or to retail or both? If that was going to become your biggest, most popular asset right now, how does that happen? You know, like what? Go ahead. Yeah, I think that the way it happens is through wealth management. They're the largest constituent in the U.S. They're the largest buyer of allocator to ETS.

and they place a very high value on indexes. I think for individuals, it can make sense as well. You may know people who own indexes in their brokerage account and invest their own money. Certainly many people own QQQQ. But for individuals, as discussed, I think a lot of people have had specific convictions. They want to own Solana and they want to own hyperliquid and they would just want to own those two things. For the wealth manager, BATW is, or even BITQ, the crypto equity ETF, which, by the way, is up this year and has had divergent performance from Bitcoin, is a hugely useful tool. It's one decision, one instrument, gives you broad exposure.

You know, you have a lot less risk of having seen the internet, but then, you know, invested in AOL and not Google and against a backdrop of a portfolio that has, you know, 95% of the money allocated to other things, an advisor can't be spending 95% of their time tracking crypto. So I think the way that indexes get much bigger is adoption by the mainstream wealth manager looking after exposure for their client. And I'll say that an exciting development on that front, you know, BHW is the the largest crypto index fund in the world, BITQ also quite large. Between those two products, there are multiple trillion dollar wealth firms that have approved access in just the last six months during a bear market.

So as I said before, I think that the sort of mainstream investor, the busy investor, engaging with the space, as hard as it is for many of us to believe, is new. and it's the start of a new chapter of the journey. And I think that the wealth management segment will be ultimately the big buyer of the index solutions. I mean, you mentioned them coming in during the bear market. I would almost make the argument based on your last survey that I just read that there was no bear market for institutions.

Right? I've been sending this to everyone to dunk on them, that you guys did the survey in 15 large investors, obviously, And then none of them sold any of their crypto holdings during the quote unquote bear market. In fact, most have added every single one owned Bitcoin with exposure to other things. But I mean, Taylor's all this time, I guess, is that retail sentiment was terrible and everybody was puking at the bottom while these guys were just laughing and saying I like buy a dip with an asset I want to own for the next four, 10 or 20 years. But that was the biggest value of me that you, you know, you guys surveyed 15 of them and not one of them reduced their exposure. Yeah, yeah, and also, you know, a broad cross-section, endowments, corporates, sovereigns, pensions.

So it's not just sort of, you know, one idiosyncratic case, but then to see a uniform response, which is kept the asset, want to keep the asset, maybe want to even increase their exposure to the asset. But I think that what two things that are underway this year is if people are wondering whether institutions, investment professionals, CFAs, billionaires, brilliant people want to own the asset class, they do. It's not worth spending a lot of time, I think debating that, thinking about that. And the other thing happening this year is that as a byproduct of institutions engaging in the space,

the mainstream investor engaging, more and more of the adoption by investors is not going to token 2049 to announce that they've taken a position. There's no knock on token 2049. But it's not part of their nature to share these things. It's not common for them to share. There's not a lot of benefit for them to share. So, you know, I think one of the fascinating things about life inside a bitwise is that, you know, we have a surface area to a huge cross-section of types of investors in Europe, in Asia, in the U.S.,

and what they're doing. And, but a lot of that activity these days doesn't show up on, on Twitter. And so it can be hard to perceive the progress, the strength of conviction. And that was the reason that we wanted to put out this report with these interviews, with actual, you know, we couldn't use their names, but quotes and descriptions to really give people a flavor for another side of the story that's not maybe showing up in their day-to-day community. So I was delighted that those 15 were up for it. And I totally agree with you. It's a resounding demonstration of the conviction that the most brilliant investors think that

there is enduring merit to owning this asset class. Are we at the point where every person who wants exposure to crypto in the United States outside of buying the spot assets? I know not every asset, but if someone says I want some crypto exposure through my RIA or through my platform, can everybody get it now? Because that wasn't the case for a long time. Matt and I actually do this every time I talk to him and be like, okay, so what percentage are we at now? I'd be like 27%. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think in the US something like 5% of the population doesn't have an internet connection. So maybe I'd start by saying, you know, the goal post is not 100% I think probably two-thirds of the way there. BitWise has products approved on more than $6 trillion-plus AUM wealth platforms. The ETFs open up access to IRAs, which, you know, $15 trillion plus in the U.S. hedge funds have access, $4 trillion in the U.S.

So, yeah, so I think a lot of progress is being made here. But I will say that it's not if you get it approved or if access opens, then money just comes piling in. And this is why I'm sort of like a very boring, broken record on this topic of investors being busy. We have, you know, we do maybe 100 events a year with clients. And we have conversations even in Q3 of this year with advisors at some very large firms that have approved our products over a year ago. The firm sent out an announcement. We sent out an announcement.

We cover clients. And in 2026, we still have conversations with advice. at these firms, they say, I had no idea I had access to a Bitcoin ETF. And that's almost hard to fathom. But I think speaks to, again, just how much is going on in the mainstream investors world. So while access, I think, is maybe two-thirds of the way there, at least for Bitcoin, I think that adoption requires a lot of additional work. and we're really excited about the momentum there.

In the first half of the year, I think we saw $1.8 billion of inflows amidst the bear market. I don't have the final numbers for Q3 yet, but I think probably about a billion dollars. So we're seeing it moving in the right direction. I sort of always joke that we have all the incredible narratives and nobody listens to them until price goes up. Like the only marketing that matters for Bitcoin is one big green candle or something.

How much does it help you when, your sales team, I should say, or even just the narrative and the sentiment when price is simply higher than it was before. It's hugely helpful. You know, it's, I don't think, I don't think that every investor in America has become an expert on, on Nvidia's supply chain and Kuda and lithography and the manufacturing process for GPUs and silicon. I think that to some extent there's a perception of the leader in Jensen that is compelling and resonant.

There's an understanding of the theme, the storyline, which is the adoption of AI and how that connects to Nvidia's business. And then there's the performance, which suggests that that understanding is true. And you get all three of those things, I think, working. and that really interests investors. So the same heuristics that people use for every other asset class are going to be the heuristics that they use for investing in crypto. The mainstream investor is not going to become a PhD

in the deep details of tokenomics or a nuance of particular blockchain's operations. They're going to start from the same place. They start looking at at Nvidia stock or SpaceX and then go deeper from there. So it's very constructive. The slightly less obvious thing that we run into relative to price that the sales team at Bitwise would know well is that when price is down, some investors, you know, I just told you we've taken in billions of dollars of new assets in a year that the price is down. Some investors definitely see opportunity. A lot of investors say, okay, I'm still interested in this, but it's not urgent.

Let's see if it goes lower. Let's see if it goes somewhere I didn't think it could go and maybe I'm missing something. You know, there's no reason I need to do this this week versus waiting a few weeks or a few months, etc. On the other end of the spectrum, if the price goes too high, too fast, if Bitcoin shot to 150,000 by the end of October, it would be almost equally pausing for investors because they're the intuition to be this thing might be overheated. I missed it.

Exactly. I missed it. And so there's actually like a sweet spot. which is positive price performance, not too slow, not too fast, and not too high too quickly. And I think crypto has a great setup relative to that right now. So I think it's a very constructive time. A lot of investors have been looking at it for the last 12 months. Haven't felt urgency because prices have been getting cheaper and cheaper.

And as the market is demonstrating yet again for the 100th time that it's not dead, and not going to zero after 16, 17 years, I think that the positive price performance is very helpful. Are there any nonsensical negative narratives that you still have to explain away in your sales calls? Like, do you guys still show up a meeting? They're like, it's boiling the oceans or, like, too much electricity or it's only for criminals,

or do we have new one? I feel like AI has now gotten all the old Bitcoin narratives, so they're the ones boiling the oceans now. and, you know, being used for hacking in North Korea. But, you know, do you still have, like, these negative narratives that have persisted through the years that you have to explain a way to get people comfortable with this? I think that the number one obstacle to adoption, the phrase, the thing that we would hear is, my clients aren't interested in crypto right now.

That would be the most common remark of the last, or the most common thing that would come up as to why somebody doesn't want to invest time in the space. That's often not true, but there's a perception. And it's of course not the case that financial advisors only invest clients money into things that their clients are interested in, quote unquote. but I think is indicative of the challenge that crypto has to conquer and will conquer, which is people are busy and everything gets prioritized relative to that zero-sum need for time. So outside of that, quantum comes up more and more. I think people occasionally wondering with clarity not passing, is there a scenario where under a new administration some things get unwound?

But a lot of those very specific one-off concerns around elicit activity or power consumption have sort of fallen away. And I would say that the enemy of crypto now is a sentence that sounds something like, my clients aren't asking me about it, don't seem to be interested right now. I'll take that. That's way better than what it used to be. So the last one that you mentioned there, you know, Clarity Act, not passing, and could any of this be unwound? Is that a legitimate concern?

I think it's a relevant topic. You know, I can't speak for all of Bitwise. Johanna, our general counsel has, you know, put some comments out on Twitter. Matt has shared views on this. I think my perception is that I don't see any clients or partners waiting for clarity. What I see is like the most regulated financial institutions in the world hurtling forward into this space, unrelenting as a byproduct of clarity passing or not passing. So it could be an asset if written well.

I think there will be certain use cases and scenarios where it'll be challenged not to have that clarity. But I think there's no stopping this train. And I think two years hence, when the administration changes, I think everyone in America will be on board the crypto train and there'll be a, the partisanness of the topic will have diminished even further. And, you know, doing something to the detriment of the crypto space, I think, would be tantamount to doing something to the detriment of most Americans, retirees, financial institutions, and so on and so forth. So I think the space is not lawless or ruleless. There are already plenty of laws, There's the Genius Act, which is extremely powerful.

There are rules from the regulators. And I think it's full steam ahead. There's days, I wonder if we're lucky that the Clarity Act didn't pass, honestly. I wonder about that, too. I don't trust our government to create laws that have no unintended consequences down the road. There might be a world where we look back and see a silver lining. To your point, like, if the DCCC is settling four quadrillion in volume on blockchain rails into a and a half years when the next administration comes in. Is anybody going to try to roll that back?

Right. Matt and I look about this. Like you almost become too big to fail or too big to crush or too big to even, you know, and it goes back to the same point. Like if it's just stocks and not tokenized stocks by that point, who's going to care? Who's going to fight it? Right? Totally. Totally. Yeah. I think it's a one-way train. And to your point, I think, you know, there used to be a storyline about, you know, Trad 5 versus crypto. I think everyone has now moved into the same team, banks working alongside crypto protocols, the DCC working alongside crypto companies.

I think now everyone has gotten. gotten aligned towards pushing the same visions forward. And I think it's here to stay and it's only going to accelerate from here. I know we've got a couple minutes left. Anything I missed? Anything you're excited about anything that's coming? I'm very excited about the Bitwise near-Eatf. You know, I think there's a way sometimes viewing this is the latest crypto

ETF, but I think there's a different and specific view that, that this is one of the first opportunities for investors that really squarely sits at the intersection of AI and crypto. And I think that that is an intersection that a lot of people want to look at, understand, participate in, and NRR is a very specific option and opportunity around that. So excited about that. we launched a near ATP in Europe as well that's grown. And outside that, other things, maybe one other thing that we touched on that has been interesting to me over the last several quarters is this trend of sort of the

investors moving from spot assets into the ETF shares. I think that we saw investors to do something like $60, $70 million of these swaps in the third quarter. It's been increasing. Last year, the minimum for doing this was 50 million. It's come down to 3 million. I think it'll be at 1 million in short order. And I think it's a sign of the times. Peace of mind, simplicity is the order of the day. and the concerns related to some of those incidents. So that's also been fascinating. I think that that is going to be a subtle storyline that continues to accelerate.

I can tell you, I'm not going to Singapore, but I was invited to a dinner hosted by NIR in Singapore. And when I saw the list of people that were going to be there, maybe you were on it. I'm not sure. But I actually bought more near yesterday. I never say that. I never say that.

It was literally just looking at the list. Wow. A lot of really, really, yeah. Maybe I need a little more of this. So it's very, very real. Yeah, I own it too. Yeah, happy, happy owner of it. And I think there's real substance in that ecosystem and community.

I wish we had another three hours. But we are at time. I really deeply appreciate it. You know a huge supporter of it wise and everything you guys do. So thank you so much for taking the time and have a great trip. Always a pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity. Thanks, ma'am.

My rec league goalie says he plays for the love of the game. You gave up six goals last week, Steve. Maybe play to win, huh? Like with Bet365. I get paid the second my team goes up big with early payout and can cash out at any time before the game ends. Come on, Steve. Bet365, the home of winning early.

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