The Wolf Of All Streets - Is Bitcoin's Price Broken? What Investors Are Missing | John D'Agostino

Episode Date: April 19, 2026

"Nothing has structurally changed since Bitcoin hit all-time highs — the spring is coiled to the upside." Coinbase executive John D'Agostino sits down with Scott Melker to break down how Bitcoin price discovery really works, why the Jane Street manipulation story is laughable, and why Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs entering Bitcoin is a bigger deal than anyone realizes. They also cover AI agents using crypto as their payment rail, Hyperliquid's after-hours commodity trading, and D'Agostino's bold 2026 predictions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Tellus Online Security. Oh, tax season is the worst. You mean hack season? Sorry, what? Yeah, cybercriminals love tax forms. But I've got Tellus Online Security. It helps protect against identity theft and financial fraud so I can stress less during tax season or any season.

Plan started just $12 a month. Learn more at tellus.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. John de Agostino has a Bitcoin take that a lot of people are not going to agree with. Even with price down, he argues that Bitcoin may be fundamentally better position now than when it was making all-time highs. That is a bold claim. And in this conversation, he explains exactly why.

What has fundamentally changed since we hit all-time highs in Bitcoin to the absolute downside? We have extraordinarily better regulatory environment, better liquidity, better systems, better infrastructure, more institutional participants. We talk about institutional adoption, regulation, market structure, tokenization, and why the biggest story in Bitcoin right now may not be the price at all. Stay until the end because this interview challenges the most common narrative in crypto and John backs it up. So listen, I want to actually talk about your beginnings. I read the book rigged ages ago from Ben Mesrick, who I've actually had on the show as well. And then I want to talk

about how what you're seeing in crypto may be different or similar than what you were seeing in oil markets at that time. Love to. My favorite topic. Good. Starting well. So, well, first of all, thanks so much for having me. I'm a big fan. I've watched your show for a while. Love your history as well. You've got great lore, as my daughter would say. Yeah, I mean, the short version is, so I had this fun career.

I threw a very strange sequence of events. I graduated from Harvard Business School, and I'd gotten this odd fellowship, the National Italian American Foundation. They put me through Harvard Business School. And I was thanking them for paying for HBS. And the guy who was being honored was the chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange, Vinnie Viola. And he just pulled me aside and said, do you want to go work? I was all lined up to go work for an investment bank.

Two immigrant parents, that was the dream. And Vinny literally just grabbed me and said, I get it. I get it. I was there. But do you want to have an interesting life and maybe be rich or you just want to try to go be rich? It's literally what he said to me. and I couldn't stop thinking about it. And I turned down the investment bank and called him up,

and I was basically his assistant for the first year, but I got to do some really cool stuff because Vinny was a self-made billionaire. I got to help him buy the New Jersey Nets back in the day. It was a blast. I was a freshly minted MBA. I knew nothing. And then he turned around after about a year of working for him personally

and said, I think you should go get the NYMEX. And we created a position for me. And it was fantastic. I got to learn, I think it was the best education ever. I exchanges, my whole career has been in exchanges because I think they're phenomenal organizations. They're the epicenter of all capital market flow. There where price discovery is fomented without them, the entire market infrastructure breaks down. So I've always just been really, really interested in this sort of how do buyers and sellers come together.

And whether the underlying instrument is a bit of computer code or a counterparty agreement in the form of a swap or a derivative, it doesn't really matter to me. It's just how to buyers and sellers come to an agreement on something. something. So absolutely fascinating to I think I'm happy I learned there versus an investment banking program. My Excel skills are probably not as good as they would be, but I, it was a blast, particularly because I learned in this just psycho environment of early, you know, early aughts commodity derivatives training, which makes crypto look tame. That's probably helped me lot of Coinbase when we've gone through these volatility cycles and some of the younger people are freaking out. I'm like, try front month natural gas options. Like that makes this look like baby time

frolics. So I was trained in aggressive volatility. I was trained in more illiquid, opaque markets. And that's helped me stay calm, I think, during my crypto journey. That all makes perfect sense. It's so funny to hear your journey because it somewhat echoes mine. the University of Pennsylvania. I can't clam Wharton, unfortunately. I was an anthropology major, but it was also late 90s and jobs on Wall Street, it was like getting a Halloween candy. You know, it was just that easy. And I had a friend, my big brother, my fraternity, and he was the, he was the recruiter for Solomon Smith Barney. And he came down for, you know, interviews when I was a senior. He said, you want a job? He was like, just give me your resume. And I said,

what's a resume? It's like, I don't have one. I'm going to be a genius. Scott, remember those days? It was, it was a blast. I mean, um, look, I think you had to work hard. You had to be good. But it was, I feel, I feel for these younger people coming out into this job market. I mean, imagine, like, imagine having to have your, not just your resume, but have your visual interviews screened by AI before you can impress a human being. That's, that's demoralizing. Yeah, I mean, I'm glad that I held out on my Excel skills for 26 years until AI could do it for me. There was a big gap there where I was definitely behind all my friends. They sent me these Excel spreadsheets for, like, fantasy football that were modeled at their investment bank, and I had never even knew how to open them. Now that still sets mood. So just to quickly round out about how the book happened, I had met Ben Mesrick socially, personally, when I was in Boston. And I forget how, but I brought him to the exchange because he had written a book before that called Bringing Down the House. And the traders loved it. It was about these kids who kind of took Vegas in the early poker days.

And all the NYMEX traders, I thought he was, thought the book was fantastic. I brought Ben as a friend just to meet the traders, and he became friends with all of them, and as Ben is very good at doing, he uncovered lots of stories. And one of the stories he uncovered was this project I had done building the first Middle Eastern derivatives exchange in Dubai on behalf of NYMEX. And Ben just thought it was the most fascinating thing in the world, and he called me and said, I want to write a book about this. And if you actually read the forward, he says it took him about two years to convince me to do it.

I was, you know, Scott, there was a time when being, having a public face as a finance professional was horrible. It's taken me some time to get used to this alternative world because back then I was told if you ever do a podcast, be on TV or do anything, have a book written about you, just kiss your career goodbye, right? That was the early oughts mentality. But Ben finally convinced me to do it. And it's been fun. I'm glad I did.

So I want to dig into more of what you've learned, obviously, operating exchanges and something that you said before that I find fascinating, because you're clearly obsessed with figuring out how price discovery works. I'm assuming it's not as simple as most people believe. Can you give any insight having been in markets for so long as to how price discovery actually works in crypto specifically? So that's a great, that's an amazing topic. No one's ever asked me this question, so this is a lot of fun.

So price discovery, just technically, if you're just think about how you would, if you were a valuation agent, how would you determine whether there is good or bad price discovery? You know, technically you'd look at frequency of transactions, the volume of transaction, higher number equal better, right? More transparency, the better. You would look at not having a wide deviation of type of transactions. So if you've got like, you know, you could have a thousand transactions, but if 999 are of one type small, small incremental transactions and one huge block trade, that skews the average price. You would then have, you know, you have to choose your mechanism for settling on a finality of price.

So again, if you've got all of the activity of the day bunched in the early morning, but you settle based on the final 10 minutes, maybe that's not indicative. So it is a long window way of saying, I have yet to see any model of price discovery that is not as much art as it is science. And that's because historically, price discovery was a function of humans interacting to determine what is fair value. And so I'll give you an example. So like, you know, we up until, again, when I talk about the 1960s, up until like the mid-2000s, the final price of commodity derivatives would be determined by a, committee that would meet after the market would close and they would basically pick a couple of of trades create an options curve and then just do very simple linear interpolation just some basic math to kind of smooth out that options curve and say okay if you have an option anywhere on this

curve even if it didn't trade that day according to where we fit this curve it should be valued at x and there was a really really important thing that came out of the exchange every day because you know hedge funds had positions all along the curve but they have to mark their book on a day-to-day basis, month-to-month basis, they would accept money coming in at that NAV. They would take fees-based these were really important option curves that were being delivered that priced hundreds of billions of dollars of option value across the world. And it was like nine guys on the floor of the exchange who many of them had positions themselves. And we just kind of accepted it. And I will say this, Scott, it did work for the most part.

because there would be a vetting process, if you will. So the curve would go out and, let's say they got a little too cute that day. Everyone would complain. And there was a natural ebb and flow. And you got to sort of reasonable price discovery until you didn't. Right? And we all heard about scandals like the LIBOR, which, by the way, LIBOR, very, very similar process. Calls were made every day to kind of roughly sketch out what that curve should look like.

And so I will say, like, if I think back in my career at the NYMEX, like I think for most of the period there, I think you had very good price discovery coming from this faecotta process that occurred, you know, with lots of vested human beings. The problem with these with these models, these archaic models, is that when they broke, they broke at the worst possible time. Right. That, as I mentioned, that like that vested interests those human beings had in getting to proper price discovery. when the time when you really really needed fairness is when you didn't get fairness. So so what we have now is this wonderful opportunity. Just like, you know, I was really really lucky to be at the NYMEX when we switched for open

outcry to electronic trading. That was actually my first, my first job was I worked for the CTO, Sam Gear, amazing guy. And he sent me to the floor and we hired a developer to code this basic Python app to try to get pick cards replaced. Literally replaced the physical cards with obstacle recognition. And I got assaulted and punched in the back of the head because I was testing this technology on the floor of the exchange at like 24 years old because they saw this as the beginning of the end. And so we had one massive evolution of Open Outcry to electronic listed trading. Now we have this incredible evolution where theoretically we can go to 24-7-365 trading where we don't have this arbitrary closing price that we just kind of make up.

We snap the chalk line at 430 or 330 or whatever. we have this ability for continuous 24-7 trading where price discovery is a rolling reality of what actual liquidity is, not some arbitrary mathematical mark or some even worse arbitrary consensus by a vested group of individuals. That's crazy. So we have obviously 24-7-365 in crypto I want to talk about later what it means when every market goes 24-7-365, because I think that that is definitely the trajectory and say la vie to the guys in their Hampton houses in the summers on Sundays. But, you know, I want to know, though, that's how price discovery is done 24-7-3-65, but I guess who actually controls the price discovery in crypto, right? I think there's a lot of myths, obviously, if you read crypto, Twitter, about the market makers and their role,

even though I think they fundamentally don't understand what a market maker is. they're not the same as the whale who's pushing price around. But, you know, how do the exchanges impact that? How do the exchanges remain consistent when you have basically the same market running in 100 different instances all over the world, 24-7, 365? I mean, who's really controlling price discovery? Is it just me and you in the order books? No, no.

It's a fair price. Look, it depends on the market. It depends on the time. Not to be cute, Scott. But like a market like Bitcoin, I don't think any given point in time, look, for a tiny discrete period, if there's a major, buy pressure or major sell pressure, whether it's the OG selling in the months prior, whether it's strategy making a short-term big buy, there can be very, very discreet periods

in a market like Bitcoin where you can argue that maybe one market participant is temporarily moving price in one direction or not. Now, that's very, very different from manipulation. Let's be clear. Just because a major market participant is doing a buyer sell order does not mean they are manipulating a negative way of this market, right? Quite literally a free market. 100%, right? So at any given point, at any given point, if every time a hedge fund buys a share of IBM, they technically move the market. That doesn't mean they're manipulating the price of IBM. So, so Bitcoin now is is big and liquid enough. I think it's hard to argue that any one individual company market maker or type of market participant is is moving the price on a, on a consistent base or controlling the price, if you will. But there are obviously, and this goes for equities, credit instruments, and there are obviously thinner trade. markets where significant market participants on a periodic basis are the number one driver of buyer's sell movement. I'll tell you a quick story.

So back in the NYMEX days, in the mid-2000s, when commodity hedge funds were just getting really big, there was a lot of chatter at the Senate Ag Committee about the role that hedge funds had in quote-unquote moving or their terms manipulating the price of really important commodities like natural gas and crude oil. And it was understandable. You had like, you know, you went from nothing to multi-billion dollar commodity hedge funds, you know, aggressively engaging in these very, very important markets. And so they complained to us. And our first, and my job was to write the speeches that the president would give back when he went down, when he called to testify in front of the Senate committee.

And the speech is all with the same permutation, which was, guys, we're in exchange. We don't care which reduction price moves. You don't want us to care which direction price moves. But we did have responsibility to run an orderly and fair market. So we looked really closely at this. And what we found, which is what you find in every one of these markets, is that these participants absolutely exacerbate price movements. There's no question because they pile onto momentum trades, but they don't cause them. And by the way, they're exacerbating movements to the upside and the downside.

So net net, they're neutral on the market, right? So I think we have that liquidation cascade to the downside, but the short squeeze is no difference. No, I used to say to the congressional aides, you never call me when the price is. of natural gas spikes down, you don't call me and say, should we congratulate these hedge funds for lowering the price of crude oil and natural gas? You only call me in one direction. So I think for Bitcoin Ethereum, the top 10 tokens, I think you've got really good robust liquidity. You've got wide and deep markets, kind of like the markets for crude oil and natural gas. Once they go on boats, it's a global market. You've got really, really good global markets. Certainly for the thinner,

for the thinner traded tokens, you've got big, big concentration. And in any given point, one of those concentrated positions is going to be responsible for price discovery. Okay, so I have to ask you because I haven't had a chance to ask anyone who might understand it. We've had this Jane Street rumor that Jane Street was manipulating the price of Bitcoin. Every day at 10 a.m. a certain price action. And personally, I wrote it off as like not even worth paying attention to, but damn, if a narrative can't catch fire in this. I get it. Scott, I get why it catches. They're easy folks to blame. Okay. So full disclosure, Jane Street is a customer of Coinbase.

So if you think I'm being biased, think I'm being buys. I don't know them personally. I know them by reputation. They have a phenomenal reputation. Everyone who wants to go work for Jane Street. The notion that people as smart as Jane Street were, quote, unquote, manipulating a market by coming in every day at the same time and doing large buyer's sale orders is laughable. It's just laughable.

So I am a – look up Jack Vogel, who's a founder of Vanguard. passed away, and before he passed away, a legendary guy in the long-term buy-and-hold industry. Look up what he said about the high-frequency market makers. You would think if anyone was going to condemn them, it would be the founder of Vanguard. And what he said effectively, when asked about this, was Ben-ask spreads used to be like a mile wide, right? And that's what kills everyday investors entering and exiting a market. There was a technical evolution over the last 20 years that market makers like Jane Street

are a part of. that caused bid ass spreads and overall market efficiency to dramatically compress. So now you can enter or exit a market for fractions of a penny. And if you are a typical mom-and-pop retail investor, that's what matters. The fact that a Jane Street or any other market maker is making a fraction of a penny to provide that incredible market service to the overall market, I think honestly we should be thanking them. Now, where they're bad stories, of course, obviously.

But for the most part, firms like Jane Street, in my humble opinion, are part of making the U.S. capital markets the best possible capital market for retail investors. And stories about them like going in every day and buying stuff, I don't have any detail on it, but it just seems like nonsense to me. I mean, early morning price action on Bitcoin seems to make sense more related to ETF buying and selling than anything a market maker would be doing because those orders need to be filled. the actual spot market. You're picking up at a really important point about ETFs that very few people are getting. So one of the nice things about commodity markets that have physical deliverability,

or not, it doesn't really matter, but one of the nice things about commodity markets like natural gas and crude oil is they have natural hedgers. They have natural buyers and sellers, like Sarah Lee Corporation, right? They have to burn natural gas to make muffins, right? They have to go in and hedge their natural gas exposure. So healthy markets have speculators.

You need them, by the way, even though there's this nasty word about, you need speculators for a healthy market. They need retail participants, but they also, they need natural hedgers. The one thing about crypto and Bitcoin specifically, it didn't have that for a long time. The miners maybe, but a lot of the miners were hoddling, right?

They weren't naturally hedging their exposure. So the ETFs actually provide the kind of, not exactly, but close to an equivalent natural hedger la commodity markets, and that makes for a better, healthier market. I would also argue that to that end, the ETFs unlocked the evolution of more financial products that allow the hedging. Right? I mean, for example, we had sort of the first iteration of options on IBIT, and then it started to open to the other ETFs. But those started at like 25,000 contracts, whatever it was.

And then, you know, they eventually became fully usable. And that allows people to hedge in a way that they couldn't on Bitcoin. And I guess if you wanted to, you had to go to Deribit and offshore exchange or something to try to do that. So I guess the story there is that we're just going to keep seeing a maturity of Bitcoin-related products because they can use the – the ETF is the underlying asset rather than Bitcoin spot itself. And we're just going to evolve to where every sort of trading or hedging strategy that exists for other markets exists in crypto. 100%. And not to mention now that Morgan Stanley's in the game and we're happy to be a custodian for them,

you've got 16 to 20,000 highly trained financial advisors that are now finally allowed to – to go talk about this product. Scott, that's an amazing data point. The Bitcoin ETF was the best ETF launch of all time and no one was allowed to make a phone call on it. That's crazy. That's like if Laboubos were illegal to sell and they still became the world's most popular product.

Like that's unheard of. And so this is all great for crypto overall. Morgan Stanley News is actually just huge to me. And I think it's gone somewhat unnoticed. I'm glad you mentioned it. And just the fact that, a commercial bank, I guess on the sell side, is creating an ETF product when that's not even their core business and comes in, what, 10 bips under all of the competition, tells you

everything you need to know about the competitive landscape for Bitcoin spot ETF. It's like, it's coming to a crowded landscape where there's already 10 to undercut everybody and then to send your sales staff out to sell yours so the BlackRock doesn't earn that money. It just, to me, it's one of the biggest signals and just we have this noisy news cycle. of these things just are taken for granted at this point, but such a huge signal. And Goldman. Goldman and income Bitcoin's potty-TF coming. And I give, you know, I give credit to you?

You had them on your show. I give bitwise credit. Yeah, I love it. Matt, Teddy, I've known those guys for a long time, and they were doing the hard work, you know, five, seven years ago, the meetings in tiny little FAA offices and the middle of nowhere, Midwest. And, you know, it takes – it took all of that footwork and shoe leather to, you know, to get this to get this where it is now. Do you think that crypto markets at this point have all of the products that they need to be as mature as traditional markets or other commodity markets?

Or if not, what do we still need to develop or see become popular? That's a great question. So I think we're close. So, you know, Coinbase has a full prime offering now. And I think, you know, you probably couldn't say that a year ago. So what does it take to be a full prime, right? You have to be able to help people buy, sell, custody, not just spot, but derivatives. You got to be able to lend.

You got to be able to not just provide margin, but offer effective cross margin. And then I think there's this other bucket of stuff that primes do, like help people grow their business, cap intro. I'll put those all into like the qualitative part of it. That didn't exist, I think, eight months ago or so. now it does. So I think the suite of functions, I'll hedge slightly, I'll say, I think all the functions are there. I think, you know, I hate to say all the products are there because my job at NYMEX used to be to help the research team create new products. And what I thought would work, rarely worked. And so you have to listen to the market. And so there may be, you know, new derivatives contracts or new types of lending

functions or products that we haven't really thought of today. So they always have to evolve. But But I think the core functionality, I think we can say for the first time as of like the last six months, is now there that if you trade any other asset class, equities, commodities, real assets, anything, you can now trade crypto at an institutional level. Okay. And how close are we to be able to do all of that on one platform? I'd argue you can do it now at Coinbase. I think we can do equities, we can do derivatives, we can do lending, we can do retail lent, commercial lending, retail lending, you can now use Bitcoin to finance your mortgage. You know, I think we're there, Scott. I think the Everything app exists.

That's just crazy to me, especially before we've even gotten tokenization and, you know, real-world assets to their full. I'm working on every day. Yeah, because there was a, you know, it must have been three months ago, just guessing when we had that kind of just absolute deluge of tokenization news. I think Paul Atkins made a comment about, you know, by the end of 2026, everything will be tokenized. People said, what are you kidding me? And then the next day, the DTCC got a no action letter from the SEC that said they could basically explore tokenization.

And they said by the end of 2026, they would be clearing effectively tokenized assets, which is, I think, 4.5 quadrillion a year or something with a queue right so i mean it's going to happen fast scott it's going to happen when we when we shifted to open out from open outcry to the screen it took less than 18 months for ever for zero to 98 percent of activity to occur on screen you need a couple of things and and my dear my friend and mentor sam gear uh talked me through this last night because i called him i said hey sam like i was i was obviously part of the team back then but he was the cio i'm like like what really made it happen so definitive like to go from open outcry, 80 years of open outcry, flip like less than a year, the floors are dead.

He said basically we needed truly better tested technology. And we have that now. Obviously, you know, blockchain is a fantastic value transfer mechanism and settlement finality mechanism. And we now know it works at scale. So we have that. We need commitment to launch high quality product on that technology. And Coinbase has been doing it, but now we have NICE, LSC, every major exchange committed to doing that.

We have firms like BlackRock saying we will put high quality product onto that technology. And you need ability and willingness on the demand side. And if you look at sort of firms like hyperliquid and the fact that the volumes they're doing after hours, we're now seeing that demand side there. So when you have those three things, it happens really, really fast. and I think we're there now. I find hyperliquid fascinating. I got to get credit.

The volumes they're doing that it's decentralized and the fact that they're doing it on silver gold and oil. When markets are closed really, I think, is a roadmap for where things are headed. And I was wrong. I would say, I was asked this a bunch of times over the years. I said, you know what? The first really killer 24-7 fully decentralized markets are not going to be in things that trade liquid every day. Like why reinvent the wheel?

go to the harder stuff, go to the stuff that like, you know, maybe like palladium or uranium or rare earth metals. I thought that was going to be the killer app. I was 100% wrong. And Hyperlink proved it. And we're following suit. I don't necessarily say that you were wrong. I think that it's the crypto natives who would have been trading meme coins or alt coins if they were exciting, who are just trading oil, silver, and gold because they're volatile.

So I would argue that it's not new people. It's not like oil traders are jumping. over to hyperliquid on the weekend to participate, like from NYMEX. Some X, no, I think I think you're, I think you're right because most of those guys are retired, but I think the ones who didn't retire and understood the tech, I actually think they are on hyperliquid. I know, I know one that is for sure. That's wild.

So they're already giving up their weekends in the Hamptons. Yeah, it's a good. Well, no, they're there. They're just in their office, in their office trading at 2 a.m. Yeah. Or pretty soon their agents will be. Yeah. I mean, what about my best friends is a, you know, researcher, hedge fund guy is at Citadel and others.

And I, he sees these news stories, you know, he follows me or whatever, 24-7, 365 tokenization. And I just kind of troll him. I'm like, what happens to you when all of a sudden the market doesn't close? And it's terrifying for these guys. First of all, I guess they'll just triple their employees and have somebody on top of it at all times or there'll be more liquid and less liquid times. But like, how do you, how does, you know, the stock market run 24-7, 365 when all of the participants are used to market hours?

Scott, this is a great question. And I'm thinking of it, because look, I know some really, really smart people. Well, the smartest people I know in the world, actually, is the head of all quantum data science for Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. He and I have debated this and discussed this, because as exciting as I am for the optionality of 24-7-365, like nanosecond latency trade. You're bringing up a really good point. I do think markets need buffers.

Markets need time to digest information. When they tried to get me to work at the NYMEX, the way they convinced me to do it was they brought me to the observation floor. And if you're a student of markets, watching the early open outcry days was exciting, because you saw like Adam Smith's Invisible Hand operating in its purest philosophical form.

It was awesome to watch. Then when I got there, I realized we intervened all all the time because this guy wouldn't trade with this guy because he hated them. Like we had to, because humans are fragile emotional creatures. And so we process information emotionally. And so we needed to pause the market. So I'm from that school of thought. And so I struggle to imagine a market of human beings effectively trading 365, 24-7.

So I think your instincts are right. I think we'll have natural pauses. I think liquidity will ebb and flow and people will take time off. By the way, we can pass the book now. Most of the major hedge funds have offices in New York, London, Tokyo, Abu Dhabi. You can trade 24-7. Markets naturally have ebbs and flows and volumes, I think, largely because until the agents take it all over, humans need time to process information.

We need breaks. So I think you'll see a natural lightning, even if the optionality. But the key is you want the – once you have the optionality, you never go back. If, God forbid, something happens to Elon Musk at one in the morning, you'll never go back to not being able to hedge your SpaceX exposure once you're given the optionality to. You just sort of said in passing until agents, you know, to take control. If everything I asked about before is happening fast, it seems like the agentic side is happening equally fast or even faster. So how do you plan for that? And what do you think that will look like

when we have, you know, agents running everything. I've never been, well, I don't know what form that'll take, but I've never been more confident that they'll use crypto. That's the, one can make an argument that the killer app for crypto is AI. And I think that's super fair. The struggle is going to be, it's like with driverless cars, right? The struggle is not the technology around driverless cars. The struggle is the social infrastructure, the legality, the insurance, the roads,

you know, who do we sue the first time one of them plows into a family, like all that stuff, right? That's the slowdown. That's the inertia to driverless cars. I think similarly, it's going to be, you know, how do you open up accounts with agents? What do you do the first time an agent trades away your life savings? Like, right, we'll have to figure all that out before the agents can truly take over. But for certain types of trading activity, just like for certain types of driving, they're clearly better already. There's no reason why agents today can't handle tax loss harvesting end of year. the probability of them screwing it up is probably no greater than the probability of your financial advisor screwing it up. So I think we're there from a technology perspective. I think it'll take time for the social infrastructure around it.

But as that starts to be solved over time, it is very, very obvious to me that the least amount, the path of least friction in terms of the mechanism for value transfer will be blockchain-derived value transfers will be digital assets. So that's exciting for me, for someone who stake their career on working for a company that benefits from that. How quickly we'll have agents actually making investment decisions for us will be entirely a, that'll be a lawyer problem. Yeah, in your mind, how does that benefit Coinbase? Because obviously that's what you're talking about when you say you seek your career in a company that will benefit from that. Is that just because there's so many agents and who needs to go get humans to trade when you can get millions of agents? I think they'll use USDC.

I think that they'll use X4 or two. I think that that means more assets. I think we'll be the custodian of choice, not just for Coinbase itself, but I think we'll be the white-labeled custodian of choice for a lot of the partners. We have this amazing crypto as a service business that's just growing like a weed.

I think every major financial institution that decides to get heavily into crypto will look to Coinbase to build some part of their infrastructure stack. I think our payments rails will increase. So I think there's really no part of Coinbase that doesn't grow if agents, you know, septuple the amount of volume and transactions of crypto over the next five years. I mean, I started in late 2016, and I love sort of thinking about the narratives that we had in each cycle. How wrong we, I, whoever was about it.

Because I remember there was this early argument that we were going to have a billion people using crypto and we were never going to have enough block space. and then we built about 5,000, like, layer twos and layer ones. And now it's just where the people, and we've got, like, these big empty, you know, a whole empty, like Chinese cities they built, and nobody's living in them, right? And so maybe that's the answer, though. Maybe now we don't have to worry about users because it's going to be agents. And so the humans are a rounding error. So I love this question.

Can I ask you a question? Kind of a dispermitation. So I love this question. So what do you think that we take for granted now is obvious that we'll look back in three years and say, how the hell do we ever think that? Well, that's one of them, is that we finally, for our first time after all these years, actually have the plumbing laid for the infrastructure to come. Isn't it like when they laid out all the cable for the internet, nobody was ready to use

it and why the hell are they doing this and nobody's going to care and it took however many years to catch up? So I think, like, I keep saying that sort of idea about all the news that we're getting. Like that Morgan Stanley News, like, that would have moved the market 30% to a three years ago. You know, and now it's like a, yeah. We're, I don't, don't, don't you feel, but don't you feel like that's for, that's, it's like that for all markets. I mean, we're just in a naturally depressive state right now where, um, where, I mean, we've got, by way, that works to, to the downside as well. I mean, look at the news coming out of the street of our moose and the VIX

hasn't even traded above where it was during COVID. Oh, numb. I mean, that's, that's extraordinary, right? Yeah. I don't think that's a side of a healthy market permanently. We're known. I think in general, all risk-on markets are numb to new information. And the good thing about that is these things tend to act as coiled springs. And I'm betting, I'm a believer, that for core high-quality assets in crypto, the spring is coiled to the upside, not the downside. Because I look at kind of where we are now versus, say, six, eight, ten months ago. And I just ask myself one simple question. Like, what has fundamentally changed since we hit all-time highs in Bitcoin to the absolute downside we have extraordinarily better regulatory environment we've got better

liquidity better systems better infrastructure more institutional participants we have a trebling I'm sorry doubling of stable coin usage about to double again this year I I don't see anything that's structurally worse than we were when we hit all-time highs that doesn't know I'm not one of these people that say you know we we if we're not we we absolutely have to be there markets are here's the thing, man, you can't keep going up 200% a year infinitely. Like you can't keep, we'd be larger than the U.S. economy, right? So these things have to have to be a sign curve.

So I'm happy with natural volatility, but what I won't accept is this sort of like linear interpolation down depressive state because we're just, we're infinitely better off than we were when we were all celebrating all-time highs. Yeah, I agree with that entirely. I guess it lends to a question. We talked about price discovery earlier. but maybe the next natural question is how do price and value align. I've long said that the price of something is not the value of something, right?

I think we all accept that. So there could be an argument. They're learning that in private credit. I'm sorry to interrupt, but they're learning that. He can talk about that too, right? So, you know, a lot of people argue that in crypto cycles, you get this euphoric peak and you're over the fair value of Bitcoin, right? And then you have a natural mean reversion and come back down.

I'm not saying that's what's happening here or not. but I agree with you that the value of this asset in context of everything you just said is higher than ever and price is down 50 or 40 or 50 percent. So it's all underwater. Not to oversimplify it, man, but I always say, I always think of it just in terms of if price, to the upside and downside, if price movements in terms of their magnitude are correlated to corresponding increases or stability of volumes, then I believe price equals value. So when we hit our all-time highs, we had really, really strong volumes.

I think that was real value at the time. Volumes are pretty decent right now, so I think now is real value at the time. So I think actually for Bitcoin, price and value are aligned. If I start seeing major deltas between volume numbers and price movements, then I start to worry about a disconnect.

Like if you're going up massively on decreasing volume, classic technical analysis kind of ideas, like volume matching price. We saw, we saw, you know, by the way, even during the big drawdown in price, we saw really good, stable futures volumes, right? That's a healthy market to me. That's people not exiting Bitcoin in its entirety. So I am cautious.

I mean, I have to understand, Scott, like, my job was to partly create new contracts at IMEX. If Bitcoin, if crypto was a contract idea writ large, It would have been the most successful we ever created. So I know people are somewhat dissatisfied if you kind of grew up in crypto and you're used to things just like going up 10,000 percent every month. But for me, this is a work of genius. This is a marvel of how far we've come in five to seven years. So I am over the moon impressed with how integrated into the global economy this technology NASA class has become in such a dramatically short time.

And these are just minor volatility. blips. It's something I find interesting and think about and haven't really come to a conclusion on. Obviously, we've had crypto-native, I'll call them primarily speculators, whether they believe they're speculators or not, investing in all coins and ICOs and launches and new technology over the past 10 years, passionately believing for whatever reason that their token was going to go up massively, right? I kind of joke speculators because I think there's that classic path of first you start as a trader,

and eventually become a passionate community member, an investor when the price goes down and you refuse to sell. Right. And for all of those people, do they or how do they or do they benefit at all from the institutionalization of this asset class? And by more specifically the technology being adopted as the plumbing for all of these new products, because I can't see, I always make this joke, but like coin number 77, whatever it may be on coin market cap,

Does it benefit from Morgan Stanley launching an ETF or tokenization of assets? I think they do if, in this big if, because you made it, you made a value judgment, I think, to some degree, right? If they were truly experimenting in good faith, if they were truly experimenting good faith and not going in cynically for some type of rugpole, then I think anything that that establishes a wider user base, comfort with crypto, and better institutional infrastructure increases the probability. of a good faith idea in blockchain to be successful the next time. Right? I mean, so NFTs, people kind of mention NFTs and people kind of roll their eyes.

So that was a massive failure. And a lot of NFTs were nonsense. But the notion that an up-and-coming artist with no resources, tucked in the middle of nowhere, can finance the creation of their music career using NFTs as a financing mechanism is a solid, wonderful notion.

Like I always say, Scott, Like if I can't, I can't, I have no artistic ability. I can't play music. I can't draw a circle. And because I have, I have no ability to contribute to the body of art and beauty in this world, I hope and pray that blockchain technology like NFTs can can help finance the creation of more of that because the world's a better place if there's more of that. And so that's a good idea.

That's a non-synical good idea. And there's a higher probability of that working if payments increase, stable coins increase. Bitcoin increases, coin basis increases. So for the non-cynical, true attempts at innovative use cases, as wacky as they may sound, selling books on the internet, who the hell would have thought that would have worked in 1994, as wacky as that might sound, I think all of this institutional infrastructure, as boring as it may be to those people, and I get it. They view it as selling out. I understand their point of view. It makes the probability of their next insane idea. that has the ability to change the world,

it increases the probability of it working. So the rising tide of adoption could... They'll have a bigger market. Yeah, I guess, I mean, I guess, you know, as a corollary to that question, then, does that mean they'll have to buy the new stuff that comes out and that the dinosaurs of, you know, the 2016 and 17 cycles maybe never catch a bit again?

You can have NFTs do very well in the future, but it might not be your bored ape, right? Fair enough. I mean, again, I'm not here to give like a value, like a price prediction on Bitcoin. But like, look, there are, there are, you know, pick your boring market. There's credit. There's junk bonds. There's equities.

There's, you know, penny stocks, right? There's always in every established market, there's fringe parts of that market where if your goal is to 100 extra money, you can give it a shot. So I think there's always going to be, for people who want to come in and swing big for the fences. There's always that opportunity. My point simply is that the creation of larger institutional infrastructure, the embedding of this technology into the global economy, if we do get to a point where a billion people are comfortable owning value on chain, the probability of building a successful business or launching a successful token that is backed by a successful, that a real non-cynical use case and idea goes up. I can't tell you it's going to make you a millionaire overnight. but you have a higher probability of success for non-cynical use cases if more people are comfortable with the technology. So assuming now that the largest institutions are generally in, whether by choice or not, I mean, even Vanguard now saying that they will participate in some way, shape, or form in Bitcoin, what do you think the existing remaining impediments are for the big wall of money, pensions, endowments, sovereign wealth?

I mean, are they here? Are they still doing their due diligence? Where do you think that stands? I am, so of course I want clarity to pass. I want a good clarity bill to pass, of course. I'm a little bit of a contrarian on this in the sense of, everyone's so regulatory clarity. We need regulatory clarity. There is no market with regulatory clarity. Let's make this clear. Equities, there's things that people are still arguing about.

So I think we are at a point now where if you can trade, if all you do is trade large-cap U.S. equities and muni bonds, maybe crypto's not right for you. But also, by the way, maybe commodities is a right for you. Maybe real, like, there's lots of markets that you are not going to trade. But if you're comfortable trading anything outside of large-cap U.S. equities and munibonds, certainly derivatives, certainly real assets, certainly commodities. Everything you need is there. So I think that excuse is, quite frankly, passe.

Because all of these, everyone you just mentioned, sovereigns, endowments, they all trade way wackier stuff than crypto, right? Harvard Endowment owns Uruguayan Farmland. That's a harder thing to value in custody than crypto. So I don't buy that anymore. I think that liquidity is the bigger problem. If you're a major sovereign, your minimum position size could be at a level where outside of Bitcoin, it's challenging to find enough liquidity to justify the investment.

But that's just that we're still $2.5 trillion market get. We're still less than 3% of equities. As that grows, that to me, that is a when when crypto is three five ten times where we are which is where we're headed that's the barrier to getting these entities interested not regulatory clarity we can make the argument then that bitcoin is already big enough or close itself and they're in it we all we all know we know i know i know some that aren't public about it yeah we know the ones that are public about it so they're all they're all in it where do you think clarity stands right now i mean we're mid-april

as we're recording this we know that it's about to be mid-term season, you know, these guys aren't going to be caring about clarity for much longer. It's a hot topic. My feeling, I'm, God, I hate being cynical because I'm not, but I just feel like it's gone a little too long and there's a few too many things still on the table for this to get done fast enough. I had such a good time today that I'm going to bet you. I'm going to throw my quiet.

Bring me back on because I'll take the opposite of that. And I'll full disclaimer, I'm not in policy. We have an amazing policy team. I am over my ski tips on this totally, but I am naively optimistic. Love it. I think the administration has put all the right people behind it. I've had the chance to meet Patrick Witt a few times.

He's a brilliant guy. Steve Maren, Paul Atkins, Seleig. I just, I'm a real optimist on this. I think the right people are, the adults are at the table. I think it's the right thing to do for the country and the consumer. And so I am going to be naively optimistic and say, I really think this gets done. I love that.

Do you think that assuming it does that it will be a situation where we're over the moon at the results, or do you think this will be one of those, you know, good compromises where nobody's really happy? Everything's priced in, Scott. Everything's priced in, right? There's a famous post, whatever you think isn't priced in is priced in. So I think people should just be tempered in their how they think the market will respond because there's so much, you know, we have the prediction exchanges now.

we have so much information now that we didn't use to have. There's no surprises anymore. So I think this is, I think, again, if your goal is to just get a price bump, you might be disappointed. I don't think that's going to happen at all. Yeah, I'm just talking about that. I literally don't think it all. I think it's a rounding year. No, yeah, I'm agreeing with you.

I think that that was a really good narrative a year ago. You know, when we were really excited and there were a lot of question marks as to whether when this administration came in, we would see all the things that we wanted to. but I think clarity is really important plumbing once again, but I don't think it's a price catalyst. It makes it harder for future administrations to roll things back. That's really the big thing. And we have to worry about that, unfortunately. We have to, you know, we have to, we could go back to the dark days when there was anti-innovation and targeting of a specific industry. I mean, look at the repeal of SAB-121. I mean, that is, I mean, the fact that crypto was treated, you know,

vocally, acknowledged as being treated unfairly. Like there was pride, and we're going to treat this asset class unfairly and make you hold it on balance sheet, even though you're not a counterparty to the transaction. And we don't care that no other asset. So the junkiest of junk bonds,

the crappiest equity that's listed at below EBITDA negative earnings, that's okay. You can hold that off balance sheet. But Bitcoin with settlement finality and no counterparty, risk, you have to hold on balance sheet. That's, that's, that's insane. And so when you have, when you have, when you've experienced unfairness like that, you want rule at legal finality because you're

worried about unfair leadership coming in again in the future. So I get it. I get the push for it. But the SEC is putting out great rules. Rules are not laws, but they're hard to roll back. And so I'm, I'm just, Scott, I'm a, again, I'm just a massive optimist. I think, I think things are going great. I think they're going to go even better. I think things are going great as well. And I actually think the regulation is very important that you just mentioned because it really gives, regardless of what happens at midterms, we got like a solid two and a half years to set a whole lot of precedent and for the industry effectively in my mind to be too big to fail. Right? They can't fight us because we've become so big in the next two and a half years,

regardless of clarity. I guess on clarity where I get stuck is just because maybe I'm too deep in the news flow is all the Trump stuff. You know, the ethics. clause where like I think that the Democrats are feeling emboldened again, or I should say a certain part of the Democrats, the Elizabeth Warren anti-crypto army school, and they're seeing Trump participate and profit and what's going on with World Liberty Financial. And I just wonder how they sign anything that doesn't have an ethics clause and how he signs anything that does. Maybe that's a pit bull to view. You're not wrong about the horse trading. I just don't know how we got here. Like it's at the end of the day, cryptocurrency is mathematics. And I don't understand why like I don't see anyone protesting the

Pythagorean theorem. Like it's just so bizarre to me that we've reached a point where just just better better value transfer for consumers has become a political issue. So it's a shame. But again, we have a phenomenal policy team that is doing God's work. And, you know, I'm still, this country, this country, you know, people think genius just went by easily. But I remember a lot of horse trading and a lot of people saying it wasn't going to happen. So I do think, I do think, say what you will about the folks in D.C. You know, I've been, I don't know them. I knew the regulators really well.

I spent a lot of time with the SEC pre-C Coinbase, even under Gensler. And, you know, I didn't like the way we as an industry villainized, the staff. Like, they're very, very smart people. They want to do the right thing for this country. I naively believe that about everybody in Washington still. I think we'll get to the right place because it's really ultimately about just helping the American consumer. So I do think this country does the right thing, maybe at the very end.

but I do think we do the right thing from a political basis, so I'm optimistic. Our industry has a really long history of own goals when things look really good, right? We've famously did that, obviously, in the last cycle by, I think, you know, a lionizing SPF, putting him up on a pedestal and throwing him into Washington. Regardless, I don't even want to talk about him. But do, is there anything on your radar maybe that you see as a risk, that people aren't seeing coming, you know, that there's some sort of situation that could really negatively impact the industry that's not necessarily on the radar or one that is

glaringly on the radar, what you think is real? So never say never, right? But what I'm super enthused about is we've had this like a tidal wave pullout, you know, this, this, since the liquidity events associated with October, we've had this tidal wave of liquidity pull out, and now it's being rebuilt. And we didn't see another. F-TX. We didn't see another Terraluna, right? That's a good thing, right? We certainly saw some bankruptcies, but certainly saw some defaults, but we didn't uncover some massive fraud, right? That's a sign the industry is evolving. That's a sign that there's a lower probability of those events occurring than before. I'm excited about that. I think you made a really good point just now,

and I give you credit, because I went back and looked at, when they told me I was going to do the show, I went back and looked at all of your guests. Not, I can't say all, but a lot of your guests. you don't put jokers on your show. I used to. I learned the same lesson as everyone else, which is that we had to get to mature and be much more specific.

Yeah, I appreciate that. We got to do that as an industry, right? It's okay to have to, I love, I debated Nureale Rubini on Carnegie Hall because I respect Noreal. He's a personal friend. It's okay for people to disagree with us. It's fine.

We should be willing to have those conversations. But we have to, we have to get better and you do a great job of, even if they're competitors, when I get asked to be on things and I can't go and they say, who else would you recommend? I recommend competitors sometimes because, you know, maybe my comms team's going to kill me when they see this, but I don't care because I want the highest quality people representing our industry. And for a while, we didn't do that, man. And I think, you know, I don't know about your history, but I know since what I've seen, you've put, you know, I don't care if they're my competitor, but you put, you put, you put, you put,

really great people, thoughtful people on your show. And I think that's our big risk, quite frankly, that we make the mistake again of elevating, you know, a cynical individual who's out for self-purposes and not people who truly want to see this industry go. I think that's our biggest risk right now. You talk about optimism and cynical, of being cynical quite a lot. I mean, it seems like that's a deep personal philosophy of yours to be eternally optimistic. So my tagline on LinkedIn is cynical enthusiast. When I use the word cynical, I mean like approaching the market for cynical purposes, right? So like rug pulling and stuff like that.

So yeah, look, I mean, whoever dies with the best stories wins and you create good stories by building great things. So, you know, we're all going to go out. We're all, none of the value accretion, none of our bags are going to matter someday. So, you know, I got to be a part of watching an industry transform open outcry to electronic trading. Now I have the luxury of seeing it go from legacy electronic trading systems to blockchain-based systems.

And that's, I feel blessed to be a part of that. So, you know, I chose Coinbase because I wanted to surround myself with really high-quality people, non-cinical people who were trying to make, you know, make money, build a business. but do it the right way. And I think that if we collectively, including media, you know, self-select for that group, then we de-risk tremendously when it comes to things like Clarity Act.

Anything I might have missed before I let you go? Anything you're dying to talk about or share? I think like some of the growth happening non-US. I think, you know, I think you mentioned Deribit and just sort of kind of this extraordinary growth that we're seeing on the derivative side, I think you kind of vote, you mentioned tokenized equities. I think that's, I think if you had asked me, like, so I did predictions in December,

and the two predictions I did that are coming true is I said stable coin usage would probably double again in 2026, and you would start seeing major, major announcements like Shopify and others launching stable coins and payment rails. I think that that is happening as we speak, and there's going to be some other huge announcements, which the industry should be proud of, no matter where you are. And I think you're going to see tokenized equity trading occur by end of year in a meaningful way. And that's transformative. Other than that, I think we covered everything. Awesome, man. Well, thank you so much. I'm glad we finally got a chance to do this. Really, really enlightening conversation. I would love to have you back

very, very soon if that's possible. I'll be on whenever you want. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for doing It would be fun to do one of these in person. Do you ever go to any of the conferences or anything? Do you make it around? I'll be at Miami Consensus. They got me on the road 24-7. I'll be there. I'll be at consensus.

We're shooting all of our shows live there and interviewing. So I'll circle back and make sure we get together there. Scott, thank you so much. Thanks, man. Really appreciate it. When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel it in their paychecks, their communities, their futures. What does this mean for individuals, communities, and businesses across the country? Join business leaders, policymakers, and influencers for CGs' national series on the Canadian Standard of Living, Productivity, and Innovation.

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