The Wolf Of All Streets - Live Coverage: Bitcoin Spot ETFs Approved | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

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Hey man, can you hear me? I can speak from this account. Yeah, I got you. How are you? It doesn't matter. That's so weird. How are the markets responding? Give us a live update. It's doing literally nothing.

Nothing. I'm looking right now. I mean, Bitcoin's bounced in a 300 range eth is pumping eth over 2500 eth is pumping so we were right about that i guess uh i think this is just an anticipation for the eth etf like the markets are this is yeah it's like literally it took two seconds for people to move on from caring about the Bitcoin ETF for them to start being degenerates and finding the next trade and move on to Ethereum. I mean, this is the most poetic crypto thing ever. Yeah, but this is…

There's anticipation, six months of people talking about what will happen with the price of Bitcoin. It does literally nothing and Ethereum goes up. But this is not to do with crypto. This just marks being forward looking and this should have been expected, no? I suppose. But I mean, how many shows have you listened to everybody talk about the $10,000 God candle or sell the news or it's going to die, it's going to go up and Bitcoin is literally just doing nothing. Nothing. I'm not saying it won't. I don't believe that, as I've said over and over again, the Bitcoin spot ETFs are not priced in long term. And I keep saying it's just like the having. The having comes and then everybody has a party and nothing happens for six months because it takes a long time for the reduction in supply to actually matter. It's going to take a long time for the inflows to matter. And frankly, I think yesterday's fake news took the wind out of the

sails. Anyone who was trading this aggressively with leverage got liquidated or closed their position and move on. I mean, it's the most crypto thing ever. It's unbelievable. But I feel good because I've been beating the Ethereum drum here for weeks saying it's an opportunity. And I think that it's know, it's just trailing. That's probably a good thing, not a bad thing. While everybody was celebrating the death of Ethereum. Maybe it won't last, but pretty, pretty crazy to see this happen. The rotation so quickly.

Which tells you, by the way, that this is all crypto native degenerates trading this and not any obviously new retail or new participants because it's not like uh bob and pop is up over almost nine percent bitcoin's down or flat i haven't even looked i mean in 24 hours yeah i'm looking at 24 hours down four percent i'm looking 24 hours a year is up almost 9% and out points. I'm seeing, I'm seeing Bitcoin down 1.3 and up 11, depending on the time that it's, I mean, it's, I'll seem to be pumping. I'm not sure if there's an index that you look at. Again, I don't watch the markets live, but I'm just looking at scrolling down. And I just opened it. Everything seems to be, it seems to be popping there.

Preston, Iago, your thoughts. Yeah. Gunny, I see you in the audience as well. I just invited you if you want to come up. What Muppets. What absolute Muppets. I can't believe they did it twice. Yeah, I mean, they crashed their site. I literally screen grabbed a video thinking there was this off chance

that it might happen. So I did see before I tweeted the SEC link, I did actually look at it and do a video capture of it, which is not my thing. But yeah, I went to a 404 error. We crashed their site or they moved it. But I mean, you got one day they get hacked and the next day they can't even keep the announcement on their website.

It's astounding incompetence. Can I just take a moment to talk? Bitcoin keeps on amazing me how much it's like some kind of metaphysical, mystical, spiritual miracle. Like the fact that Satoshi, nobody knows who it is, that they have a superhuman level of restraint. They disappear. They have a superhuman level of being able to maintain their privacy. They create this little piece of code. They just drop it and it's got within it the viral components, its own DNA is all that it needs to market itself and grow into infinity. has had some kind of weird poetic license. Like right now, the SEC spent 10 years fucking around and edging the entire community about whether or not they're going to give an ETF. And at the very end, just as like a subtle, you know, I don't give a crap about this. I'm unaffected.

But, you know, I'm going to destroy you. Bitcoin demonstrates to the SEC that they can't control their private keys, that they can't manage their computer systems and manages, you know, poetically to demonstrate to the world how the SEC are incompetent and exactly why we need decentralization and we can't trust these authorities. And every single time I think about Bitcoin, it does exactly, it finds some weird poetic way to be medically perfect. It's really astounding. Jago, you saw that today is 15 years to the date of how Finney's running Bitcoin tweet. Yes. It's just one thing after another. I don't understand. It's, it feels preordained. I'm not a, I'm not a religious person.

I'm not a mystical person, but it, you know, it's really, it's so beautiful. So just want to, if you could just keep the market updated there, Scott, I think it would be good. Because a lot of people are watching ETH at 2,523. Is that the highest for the day? Let me see. That's the highest since May 22. Well, that was already the case, but it's touching now levels from May 9th. I'm looking at Monday, May 9th ish uh 22. yeah it's the

highest it just made a new yearly and is is there more to it is there more to it than the than just the anticipation of the ecetf because i don't what i don't understand is how how could they price in the bitcoin etf approval but they can't price in the the eth etf afterwards well think about how much think about how much Bitcoin has gone up as this process has been dragged out. I don't remember the exact date that BlackRock filed for a Bitcoin spot ETF. We have people here who definitely do, beginning of last summer. So we're talking about six, seven months of watching that.

So imagine now you have a theoretical ETH trade in anticipation waiting for that, where that ecosystem goes wild. I'm not saying that will necessarily happen, but that's been the sort of the conjecture here that it was going to trail. But listen, I mean, we can talk about the price or all those things all day. We have a number of actual experts on the ETF. We have Matt from BitLiles, Matt from Bannock. Wow, double Matt. That's fun. And first, Matt Siegel, you lit the world on fire, man, last week on Spaces when you said that you heard BlackRock had $2 billion in flows coming on the launch. So I'm assuming nothing's changed there.

Hey, guys. Great day here with these 19B4s getting approved 20 minutes ago. Still waiting on the S1s to go effective. That's important just to make sure that this is 101%. We'd expect those in the next hour or so. Yeah, the $2 billion number from BlackRock for like first day to couple days flows. Eric from Bloomberg corroborated that with another source after I highlighted that, you know, that may sound low, right? There's some chatter now that it might be as high as $4 billion across all issuers. You saw a number of additional fee adjustments overnight. So these products are just looking extremely affordable, especially for traders, compared to finding liquidity on various exchanges. It's a historic day, pretty interesting to watch the market movement. I'm seeing it's ETH L2s, it's like Cardano, Polkadot, some kind of random coins leading here in the last hour. Bitcoin is down. I think that when all is said and done tomorrow, Bitcoin dominance will reassert a little bit. I wouldn't read too much into this news, but great day. Yeah, I agree. Oh, Matt, you dropped. Matt Hogan, you dropped. I don't know if we lost you there. I was about to ask you a question, but yeah, he dropped. It was funny because I was speaking to Matt Hogan on, I guess, Tuesday on YouTube yesterday,

and I could tell, I keep joking, that he wanted to say so many things to answer my questions and couldn't, right? I mean, Matt Siegel, you guys have had basically probably a lot of knowledge or insight as to what was likely coming and probably just couldn't say it, right? I'm not saying you knew, but you guys were pretty sure this was going to happen here. Yeah, the listing exchanges, CBOE for us

and a number of the filers, NASDAQ for others, they really take the lead on a lot of the operational communications with the regulator, especially in the final stages here. And when you saw those kind of motions to accelerate the listings this morning on the tape. Those come from the exchanges. The exchanges wouldn't do that unless a little birdie told them to. The little birdie is the regulator. And why would the regulator do that is to line these up to trade tomorrow. So, you know, there has been some back channeling between the exchanges and the regulator. That makes perfect sense. I mean, circling back to the price action, is this surprising anyone that Bitcoin's not moving tremendously at the moment?

I mean, actually, it's kind of dropping now, just went down to 45, 571, not as far as the other things. Or is it because it's been dragged on so long that effectively nothing's going to happen in the short term? Gunny, what were you watching for here with price? Yeah. Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me on, Scott. You know, I think that, you know, probably the most anticlimactic climax of the last 13 years in Bitcoin's history. You know, definitely well priced in.

I was expecting a serious dampening of volatility. I think over time, what I'm most excited about, I think you're going to see a volume explosion across all complexes that carry Bitcoin. Now that you are introducing an ETF, the amount of arbitrage is going to come into play, the amount of index arbitrage, things are going to happen. not only just the channeling of the rest of the retail

world into these spot ETFs, which ultimately, you know, I kind of sat on both sides of the fence. I had asked in a few of my smaller chat groups that have a lot of more like kind of Bitcoin OGs in there, what their thoughts are, you know, and like, does this go for or against kind of the original Bitcoin ethos? And, you know, I'm interested to hear people like Bruce and Preston and whatnot and what their thoughts are. But I think ultimately a volume explosion,

I think you're going to see some dampening of volatility over the next few months here. And then probably, as you said, as things start to filter through the system, as things filter through the markets as a whole, you probably start to see it catch them some tailwinds and hungry and upward from there. Yeah, I agree. Matthew, you said, sorry, I just want to circle back. You said roughly $4 billion you think is lined up. How fast do you think we generally see that AUM flow in? And how much of that do you think is new flows versus people that basically own Bitcoin and you guys made the calls, you know, all the issuers made the calls and said, hey, convert this into the ETF? It's really hard to tell. I think that's going to be – it's a question of whether retail shows up with enthusiasm for these products. I will say that all of those fee adjustments that were made over the last couple days, all in a downward direction, like Grayscale didn't match any of those so uh the gap between you know gbtc and all these etfs is is wider than the market thought it was going to be a day ago and probably a week ago

as well and you know we've gotten a couple phone calls from gbtc holders so there might be more churn than the market had originally anticipated uh as the billion, I think that's a reach number. I'm still kind of sticking with the two over the first week. That's still pretty exceptional and far more than anyone was talking about a couple of weeks ago. Eric, you're here. I tweeted earlier that I will not release any ETF news until I see it on your account first. I will not be fooled. Yeah, actually, a lot of the media is being held back because the site was down and or they want to wait till the S1 is effective. I get that. I get while they can't really go out with it. But that 19 before was up. You can read the language. So yeah, this is a big day, highly anticipated. Regarding the $4 billion that was said earlier,

I think that was on my call or somebody else's call. I don't know. This is based on BlackRock's too. We know of a couple other people planning some BYOA, and then we think there could be some kind of organic excitement. So this is Rebecca's call on my team to before, I think BlackRock iBit probably sets the record with the 2 billion. I think that's their goal is to say we were the best launch ever, even though that's planned money. But the bigger takeaway is

how much will be an organic grassroots volume and flows. And James and I will be able to suss some of that out. Bitto was all organic. That's why it was such a special launch. We'll see how much is organic. But again, the short term is really volatile. I think long term is what we're looking at here. And no way this could be bad for the asset class. Issuers, there will be a definite fight for assets though so just got jenna yeah i've got a question but first can you just give an update on the markets before i ask a question uh for the panel question that you asked you yeah i mean it's it's about the same spot yeah it's about the same spot uh eth funny that we're talking about eth but that's a 25 20 seems to be the biggest mover um and as he, a lot of the

things in the Ethereum ecosystem have moved too. I mean, just like random layer to Matic up pretty big, looking on the daily, which obviously is one of the more popular too, is from 80 cents to 88 cents. So 20% move there. Metis is another one that's there up from like $77, $92. And Bitcoin actually dropped. It went from all the way down to about $45,351 in the last 15 minutes, but trading right at $45,722. But at this announcement, it was pretty much flat at $46,000. So within a few hundred dollars, nothing compared to the volatility, right? We saw a $3,200 30-minute candle yesterday, you know, from $47,901 at the top to $44,701. I really think, and Travis, I see your hand up, you said this earlier, and it was something I've been talking about quite a lot. I think most of

the froth was liquidated and cleaned out last week on the Matrix port day. So, you know, that was the biggest liquidation event we'd seen in over a year, over 500 million in a matter of minutes. So, you know, I think that if that was all in the system, we'd be seeing tremendous volatility and then you got the fake tweet yesterday. So, Travis, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say the fake tweet yesterday pulled some OI off as well, too. I was going say the fake tweet yesterday pulled some pulled some off as well, too. I was gonna ask Eric, I heard Eric in another space a couple days ago talking about trying

to parse through this, like, bring your own assets concept with like Bitcoin that's already been bought, versus like new incremental Bitcoin buying. And I was just curious if you could like unpack that a little bit. I think you or James mentioned that it's as much of an art as it is a science. Can you just like talk a little bit more about that? Because I think the market is seems like it will probably be pretty focused on like, what percent, you know, let's just say it's 3 billion total across all products in the first, you know, in the next five trading days or something like that. And like what percent of that hypothetical 3 billion has already been bought versus will need to be bought, I think

is going to be something the market's going to be pretty focused on. Yeah, no, good question. First of all, everything that goes into the ETF has to hold Bitcoin. So whether they bought it ahead of time to plan up a big creation, or it's something that is exercised on the first day, it still has to go into the custodian. So they, it's a one for one situation. I don't know when. I mean, you know, these issuers are really smart about what they're used to doing, rebalances on indexes, which everyone knows about ahead of time. They're going to be smart about not getting picked off or legging into something, in my opinion, probably. So I don't know is the answer. I do know that when BlackRock came out with two of their ESG ETFs over the past three or four years, those two are the ones that are at the top of the all-time leaders with $2 billion each. And what they did in those cases is they lined up

a big institution, a Finnish pension plan. So again, this BlackRock, it's still a rumor, but two really good people, including one person on the space. I think you just dropped out. Yeah, we did. We did. Travis, while waiting for Eric to come back, can I ask you, and it was Matthew, he's just dropped out as well. Can I ask you a question? Your thoughts on ETH's movements? I'm not sure if you already answered it and I missed it, but ETH and whether this is purely an anticipation for the, because no one talked about ETH pumping, ETH versus Bitcoin pumping until we saw that happen yesterday. Oh, I don't think that's true. No, I think people that were paying close attention were like thinking that this was the trade that was going to be on deck for a while. I mean, I write a monthly update.

I wrote about it, you know, two and a half months ago that it looked like it was setting up for it. The chart looked really good. ETHBTC at the bottom of a range. And then it just seemed like such a straightforward type of narrative that the ETH ETF that they're just, you know, and I think talking to kind of legal, you know, guys I consider legal domain experts, that there just wasn't going to be a leg for the SEC to stand on to approve a Bitcoin spot ETF and then not approve an ETH spot ETF shortly thereafter, because for all the same reasons they approved a Bitcoin spot ETF, you know, those that those are essentially in place for an ETH spot ETF to be approved as well, too. And ETH is just it's just a lot jumpier than Bitcoin.

You know, it's a lot smaller. It's the trading volumes are thinner. So it just historically, you know, just look at the realized volatility of Ethereum versus Bitcoin. And, you know, it just it can really get jumpy even more so than Bitcoin. And, you know, it just, it can really get jumpy, even more so than Bitcoin. And I, you know, I think you're kind of seeing that play out right now. Yeah, I think that all makes a lot, a lot of sense. Matt Hogan, I was trying to get you up before. I mean, a little victory lap here. You guys have got to be very excited.

Congrats, Matt. Yeah, yeah, we're absolutely excited. we've been working on this for five years and uh the sec website is back up sorry yeah i was gonna i was gonna ask i was gonna ask the question like are we sure because i haven't had time to look at it we're preparing for this space my guys are we sure are we sure because scott in the back channels when the team sent it that's why we launched the space a bit late he's like guys wait the website is down i don't want to be caught up again but are we sure this time it's 100% approved Matt you can

confirm that I can confirm that the 19v4s are approved as Matt from BANEC previously mentioned you still need the S1s to go effective but most people assume that will happen shortly

now that we're seeing it back on the SEC site, I'm at least taking a deep breath and reflecting on a historic day. It's really exciting. Ten years to get here, five years at Bitwise, and I think it'll change the crypto market for the better. So it's fun to be here. Is there a chance that those S1s are delayed okay go ahead i was gonna say how hard is the sec fumbled this thing like geez louise i mean it's it's like it's

really embarrassing like it's honestly embarrassing john reed stark we had john reed stark on this morning obviously who was at the SEC for decades. And he was like, yeah, I'm not really surprised that they got hacked. There's no real government, you know, they don't take the cybersecurity so seriously and probably just bureaucracy and didn't know who was supposed to do it. I mean, the tweet yesterday, literally, they got hacked, but they didn't even have their 2FA turned on. Literally, their job is to protect people, and they don't even have their own Twitter account or X account protected at the most basic level. It's astounding. Gareth, can we get – I'm the only one asking constantly for a market update.

Gareth, your thoughts on the market's reaction, and people in the audience would love to get your thoughts on this big day. It just seems after yesterday, the excitement has just been drained out of everyone. Plus, we've covered it nonstop for months now. But how's the market reacting, Gareth? It seems to be forward looking. What I'm surprised at as well as what Travis was saying earlier is that everyone was talking about the East trade and it shouldn't be too surprised. And the question is, why wasn't that priced in as well? So Bitcoin's pumps are even pricing over the last few months. How come Bitcoin pumped when the fake news came in about Bitcoin getting approved on the ETF getting approved? But I'm not talking about yesterday. I'm talking about Cointelegraph a few weeks ago. Is that because it was earlier than expected and now it's expected about now?

And then why isn't the ETH trade priced in and now ETH is pumping if the ETF was already expected to, if everyone knew that the ETF was going to be approved by the ETH pump yesterday or the day before, the week before. You got to unmute Gareth. Sorry about that. Yeah. So the first thing is that the price action is really muted. So what this tells us is that the, everyone was in the camp that it was going to be approved i think

yesterday maybe it caught a few people off off guard and kind of popped initially um but but again i think the reaction yesterday of the sell the news event or at least the downtick kind of made even more people today just kind of skeptical and just saying hey listen um it probably won't run it touched the 48 000 level yesterday and is now kind of stalled out. And in regards to Ethereum, I think that the crypto markets have been so excited about the Bitcoin ETF that no one's really talked about Ethereum. In fact, the only things I've heard going into the last month or so was negative things on Ethereum. And in fact, a very negative view comparing it to Solana and maybe Solana is going to eat its lunch.

So now all of a sudden you have this news kind of behind us on the Bitcoin ETF and people are beginning to realize that there might be a trade here on the Ethereum ETF. So I do think that that possibly is going to be the next move here. And we're already seeing Ethereum pop pretty nicely to the upside. And how are alts doing, Gareth? Let me just take a look here at the alts. Let's take a look at Solana and just bringing up the chart on my screen here. And it looks like Solana, a little bit of a kind of just a little chop. I mean, honestly, there's not much movement in the alt coin market right now that I'm seeing, at least on the bigger ones out there. So again, it's super interesting because I think this is a great example for investors to understand kind of how markets reprice things as they expect things. And you

can look to the stock market, right? And the market prices in a certain amount of rate cuts of the Fed. And as long as that's what we get, then the market has priced it in. Here, they were pricing in approval at like a 99% success rate. It's exactly what we got. And now the attention of investors is being turned towards Ethereum and potentially other things. And to the credit of Eric and James and the experts, they nailed it to the day, right? I mean, we've talked about it for months and they always kind of said January 10th and that's exactly when it happened. The SEC basically kicked the can down the road to the last possible day. And so that also gave, I would say, no surprises, right?

I mean, this process, everybody sort of just really did expect it by today. I really think that the fake tweet yesterday took a lot of the volatility out and what happened last week. I really think that. I agree. 100% agree. And I also think that it's amazing because, you know, how many people were saying it was going to go up to 60, 70, 100,000? Then I was in the camp where it was going to be a pop and then a drop. And so far, it's been almost nothing. It's kind of catching everyone flat-footed, if you will, including those people that bought options. I mean, you have a lot of options, open interest out there.

And so far, a lot of people are going to be disappointed on the lack of volatility. Let's talk about options because now I will need the research team. Maybe someone here can give some clarity, but I believe they're going to be launching imminently alongside these. Matt, do you know anything about that by any chance? Yeah, in terms of options on the ETF, I think they'll take more time than you think. There's a pretty complex process with the exchange that you have to go through. We'll get there eventually, but it's not a matter of, I'd be surprised if it's a matter of days. It could be as long as a year. So I do think that liquidity ecosystem is going to

emerge, but it'll take a while. They have some fairly strict rules at the exchange level about that. Oh, wow. I'm seeing something great. Travis, real quick. I'm seeing this in our chat, but Gensler just had a quote. While we approve the listing and trading of certain spot Bitcoin ETP shares today, we did not approve or endorse Bitcoin. Quote. Wow. What a douchebag.

Anyways, go ahead, Travis. I was going to say, I mean, a year, I think would be a lot longer than what people were thinking on options. I don't know, you know, what people's base case was, but I think people were thinking maybe like weeks to a couple months, I think. So that would be interesting. Yeah, you'll see people push aggressively it's it's uh it is more complex than than even i realized you know a handful i saw chat literally i saw chatter today that it was going to be launched imminently now i need to find it i'm sure that you guys are correct i'm just a bit surprised i know mark you skill was talking about it.

I was going to ask you a question, but I got my answer. Ryan, I think he's co-hosted now. Did it glitch for you? I think I see you as a co-host. Ryan, are you there? I knew it was glitching. David,

I know he's always like, guys, I'm not a co-host. David, we'd love to get your thoughts. I haven't had time to speak. Your thoughts on the market's response and what that means for crypto moving forward. It just seems that when everyone keeps talking about it every day, month after month, as Scott, you said it, you said it earlier today, it's like it's going to launch, it's going to market, really going to budge, and we're going to move on. And it seems that this is what's happening. Like everyone knew it's going to launch, and we've had so much time to absorb it, to digest it. ETH is the only thing that surprised me. But otherwise, your thoughts, David? I just, I think it's a historical day. I think this is all about longitudinal.

And, you know, Gary Gensler can say whatever he wants, but Bitcoin is here to stay. And I kind of look at this as when my grandmother started using Facebook. I think there are people that have been on the sidelines that have been waiting, you know, that are very conservative. And yeah, I mean, bitcoin is here to stay uh it's no longer a subjective asset yeah and in terms of the ectf just for the panel um we were debating it earlier and actually scott i haven't asked you that question what do you think will happen with it do you think it is approval ectf approval by the second quarter i think you mentioned um who was it that mentioned? Was it McKinsey that mentioned it? Yeah, standard chartered. Standard chartered in their reports.

And you thought that was a bit far-fetched. Still stand by that? I was just surprised to read it. I was just surprised to read it because most of the, you know me, I don't really like to give predictions, especially if I'm not sure I like to ask for them just like you did. All the ETF experts that I've sort of consistently asked that on here and on shows have said maybe not. But can't we say the market is disagreeing with that?

Well, the market thinks so, but the market is a bunch of degenerates trying to make a quick buck. So I don't think that that tells us that it's going to get approved or not going to get approved. I mean, I would love to see it. same arguments that was made about the Bitcoin futures ETF into the Bitcoin spot ETF. And the judicial system seemed to agree, arbitrary and capricious. Everybody remembers here. But, you know, I'm not expert enough to speak to whether Ethereum is fundamentally different enough from Bitcoin that it could be a different situation or whether it's the same. Ran, you're here. There is a risk with Ethereum that it might be classified as a security.

I know that's an unpopular thing. Right, that's what I said. But there's only one regulator in the US who's taken that position so far, and that's the New York State Attorney General. The SEC hasn't gone that far. So who knows? Yeah, I just don't know. Maybe we can get some color on what it means. Obviously, the ETF itself is a security, right? So does it matter? How much does it matter if Ethereum is or is not? I would think that maybe there could be some nuance with the, obviously, proof of work versus proof of stake and the way that their assets are custodied, whether if they're

in a spot ETF, they're allowed to be staked, which could be very interesting, obviously, an Ethereum spot ETF that has interest, right, carries interest. Matt, I'm going to ask you, Matt Hogan, I mean, do you think that, uh, second quarter is a rush? I know you can't speak officially on behalf of Bitwise, but to me, that seemed shockingly early. Yeah, that, that strikes me as shockingly early, you know, spot Bitcoin ETF took the industry, uh, 10 years to be on the doorstep.

Uh, I don't know that, uh, that 10 weeks we'll get it done. Um, ETH is more complex than Bitcoin, both for its regulatory status and because you have issues like staking to consider. So I think it's an achievable goal, maybe even achievable in 2024.

But I don't think I'd be very surprised at the second quarter. Hold on. Danish, do you at the second quarter. Hold on. Danish, do you have the guts to come up on stage? Yeah, Danish, Danish, Danish. Now we're getting a rant. Now we're getting a rant.

He disappeared. I've been trying to log on. I've been trying to log on, but for some reason I couldn't hear and I couldn't speak and the Twitter was glitching but I'm here I'm here 11 11 40 p.m we're right yeah Mario you're one one o'clock in the morning yeah yeah I just saw though I saw you on YouTube and you had like 17,000 people watching that has to be a record right I mean this is big news it is big news if not the it record, it's close. Yeah, I think our record's 20. Hold on. Danish. Tell us, Danish. What do you think? Guys, I apologize in advance for anything that happens

in the next 10 to 15 minutes. If we get another fight. How are you, bro? All I know, I'm doing great. I mean, you know I'm doing great. But the point that I've made does not change. Nothing has changed. Maybe this didn't mean anything like I said it wasn't going to.

I mean, what's the big deal? And I have to say something very simple, which is for all the shit that the crypto bros talk about decentralization, welcome to the rest of finance. You are just like everybody else congratulations brandon is the one who said that this was like the end of the era for for for bitcoin right rand yeah it is an end of an era it's the end of it's the end of us having an advantage over the institutions it's the end of bitcoin acting as a non-correlated asset for all

intents and purposes because ultimately now in time, it's not going to happen tomorrow morning unless BlackRock intends to put $20 billion or $30 billion into it. It is going to start following institutional money cycles in which institutions go risk on. We're going to get

more movement in Bitcoin and when they go risk off, we're going to get less movement in Bitcoin. It is the end of an era, but you know, it's like we're like a parent and we have 20,000 kids. We've got Bitcoin and we've got ETH and we've got Solana and we've got Celestia and we've got Injective

and, you know, ultimately now only one of our kids has gone to the next level. Yeah, and the rest of them, most of them are apparently going this is an end of a new year to be clear the end of an era where we don't have an advantage let me mute you ryan because you're on the way this is the echo but there's an end of an era for bitcoin but not for the rest of the markets and we still have the edge when it comes to other uh other coins other crypto assets but bitcoin that edge is gone especially yeah but i have to say that this likely means

now that the whole time satoshi was the nsa this is probably what that means but i have no no proof of this i mean look i'm hearing they're going to launch the next etf that's going to be approved is crypto punks so you should probably get your hands on to some crypto funds all right guys well it's kind of escalated pretty quickly and your thoughts on it one more one more one more question for ryan before going to travis iran your thoughts on the price action in general and ethereum so as i said to you guys i've been saying to you guys for weeks the bitcoin Bitcoin ETF now is priced in, I said it this morning as well. And now the next trade is Ethereum.

And now we've got, we've probably got six months of an Ethereum trade. So as they say, strap on. Is it priced in because you didn't see a dump either. And a lot of people were expecting a dump since it's been priced in by the rumors tell the news. Tomorrow the new narrative is how much money is flowing into the ETF, sell the news. Tomorrow, the new narrative is how much money is flowing into the ETFs, how quickly.

And I think if BlackRock genuinely do seed the ETF with $2 billion, and we know that there's going to be a buyer tomorrow of $2 billion, because remember how a spot ETF works is if you want to seed the ETF, then you need to put money into it. And that money goes into buying spot.

And that money becomes new money on the crypto market. That's what it is. So tomorrow, if BlackRock sees their ETF tomorrow with $2 billion, that's $2 billion of a buy order, I think, going through Coinbase. It could be existing Bitcoin

that's being converted and moved, which is horizontal. Yeah. And guys seem to think that $2 billion BlackRock, that the large majority of it has already been bought. And I do think that's going to be the crucial difference in the price action over the next week or two weeks is going to be, you know, what percent of the inflows have already been bought versus our incremental buying. And that'll be the difference between us probably trading, you know, mid 40s, high 40s or low 50s, basically, in the next week or two. But the thing that I wanted to say was that, you know, Bitcoin has had, you know, I would probably argue since 2020,

Bitcoin has had a relationship with macro, you know, that is unique to Bitcoin in the crypto space. It represents something different than any other crypto asset. I've said this for a long time. It's the only non-venture bet in crypto. BTC is not a venture bet. Every other crypto asset is kind of a classically venture type of bet with venture type of returns and venture type of risk. Yeah, so I want to ask another question. Travis, you can kick it off and then get Bill and others.

Matt, you're there. He's still there. Get your thoughts. What happens next now that the ETF is approved? What's the next step and what should our expectations be? Maybe, Travis, you want to kick it off, then we'll go to Matt, Bill, and the rest of the panel. Well, I mean, I think what I was saying, we're going to look for these initial inflow numbers and then we're going to look for experts like Eric and James and others to be parsing through, you know, how much of this is is new buying versus buying of Bitcoin that has already occurred. And from what I can tell, like the everyday market participant is not going to be able to ascertain that by themselves.

Matt. day market participant is not going to be able to ascertain that by themselves. Matt? Yeah, just to pry a little bit into my world, you know, day one, there are a certain group of people who can buy it, individual investors, registered investment advisors, family offices, and hedge funds. And so ETF companies will be talking to those people, jockeying to move people from one product to another and bringing people on board. I think the net new money,

so the money that's not already allocated to crypto, that will take months, quarters, and years. You need to win approval on major wire houses just because an ETF launches doesn't mean you can buy it at Morgan Stanley. You need to win approval on major wire houses just because an ETF launches doesn't mean you can buy it at Morgan Stanley. You need to go through their due diligence process. So there are a series of steps. And really, I think the sort of net new money flow after the initial few days burst, you'll start to see that steadily influencing the market in Q3, in Q4, and then for years to come.

It starts relatively contained. It takes time. But you're going to have wholesalers from 11 issuers out there talking about Bitcoin to financial professionals controlling trillions of dollars of assets. Over time, that persistent effort is what will be transformative to the market. And I think it will be, but it definitely won't be overnight. Yeah. So just to be clear, since we kind of had a little conversation about it, even if there's two to 4 billion lined up in immediate AUM, the bulk of that is likely not to be new buying and does not mean that there's going to be spot buying necessarily, correct?

Yeah, I think that's probably likely. I do think, and based on coverage, I do think there are people who are waiting to come into the market. So I think there are people who couldn't access Bitcoin without an ETF who will be excited to do it. So I'm not saying there's no net new money, but, you know... I was speaking specifically about what we've heard about being lined up. I think there's plenty of net new money. Your guys' survey with Vetify addressed that very clearly with the

400 plus RIAs that you guys obviously spoke to. I mean, 88%, right? And 19% said that they could currently give access to their clients to Bitcoin in any way, shape, or form. And 88% said that they were waiting for a Bitcoin spot ETF to even have that conversation, right? That's right. I have a question. I have a question. If BlackRock has already bought $2 billion worth of the ETF, which money are they using? Are they using discretionary managed funds? Are they using their own balance sheet? The $2 billion that they've seeded the ETF with, whose money is that?

I think people are saying that some large chunk of that is out of that BlackRock private Bitcoin fund that they launched, I think in late 22, if I remember correctly, I can't remember when that was. But that's where people are saying that this like already bought Bitcoin is coming from, from BlackRock. Anybody else? Yeah. The first I can tell you, Travis, let me know. But yeah, I think you're correct. The first seed, I happen to know because I had him on my show that day randomly. But Scaramucci said actually, he was the first or the SkyBridge was the first to seed the BlackRock ETF. And he told me that months ago. But I think the answer is that they get on the phone and they start making calls and any of their big clients or any of their contacts that they know are in bitcoin they say listen like are you willing to

do us a solid and sell some of your bitcoin and buy the utf or convert it i don't know what the mechanics are of that but i think that the bulk of it is favors i'm assuming i mean matt is that correct do you think i i mean i don't know what blackrock is doing exactly of course um but but some version of that is right i mean look i think that's an analogy a good analogy for this in the having right everyone talks about number go up around the having uh but it doesn't go up the day of the having right uh it's a it's a cumulative effect over time and this will be a similar thing so you know a lot of that maybe some of that early that pre-lined up money already owns Bitcoin.

Some will be new. It'll be a mix. It's not 100 and zero. It's definitely going to be a mix. But really, this is a, you know, a multi-month story, just like halvings are multi-month or even year plus stories. It's the best comparison. And now, you know, we kind of get this tailwind of both at the same time, right? Even if we have somewhat disappointing demand for the ETFs, and it's steady, that is going to run into a reduction in supply in the not so distant future. It's a beautiful thing, $7 billion in annual supply removed. And, you know, people talking about, you know, 10, whatever billion dollars of ETF, that's a, that's a big delta in supply and demand.

And it is nice that they're synchronous. It's also nice that Bitcoin has another catalyst to look forward to, right? You always want to be looking forward. And there's a lot to talk about in Bitcoin right now around the ETF and even beyond the ETF. I'm going to let you speak in a second, but you'll love that. I'm about to leave that statement from the SEC. Hold on. love that. I'm about to. Yeah, I thought I thought. Hold on. Did you mention is that the same statement you mentioned before?

You were joking before. No. So Gary, Gary said, you know, while we approve the listing and trading on certain spot Bitcoin ETP share today, we did just scrolled not approve or endorse Bitcoin. Now the SEC, these are coming from the Bloomberg terminal, I believe. SEC issued a statement. While we approve the listing and trading on certain spot Bitcoin ETP shares, today we did not approve or endorse Bitcoin. Investors should remain cautious about the myriad risks associated with Bitcoin and products whose value

is... I thought you said that as a joke, the Gary Gensler comment. The timing of it is just... No, they're coming from Bloomberg. I thought you were just joking. Yeah. So even now the team sent this, I asked for the scores because I didn't expect them to approve the ETF support. No, that's real. It's definitely real. It's definitely real. You know, one question I had was around the fees,

you know, because those kind of comments from Gensler are not surprising, but they do kind of point to hesitance from TradFi around this ETF and just the fact that this ETF, there's so many players in this. All of them are quite similar. You know, looking at the fees, the fees seem, at least from an outside point of view, to be quite low. And, you know, just trying to understand the thought process behind the fees. Why are they so low? Is it because there's low interest from RIAs because of similar

concerns like Gary Gensler is trying to propagate? Or is this because there's just competition and people are trying to be a winner take all? It's a big question around why are the fees so low? I'd love to hear from Matt, if Matt, you can comment on it. Again, I know that you're limited on what you can comment on. Yeah, still some compliance restrictions because the ETFs, the S1s are not approved yet. I can talk about the ETF industry in general. And the ETF industry, I come from the ETF industry before I moved into crypto seven years ago, is an industry that cares about fees.

Investors are trained to search out the lowest cost or low cost ETFs. And if you look at where assets have gathered in the ETFs historically, it's been in very low cost funds, much lower than in the mutual fund industry, which the ETF industry disrupted. And that's sort of the ethos of the ETF culture, is to focus significantly on fees. It's not the only thing people care about. People care about brand, they care about expertise, they care about liquidity and trading. But in many cases, fees are the main thing. And you have ETFs potentially launching into this enormous market with a huge space up for grabs. And so you're going to see issuers compete very heavily on fees. It doesn't make it a bad business because the addressable market is so large.

So, and this is, it's worth noting, net good for investors at the end of the day, the less you pay, the more you keep. And many of the people who buy ETFs hold them for you. Yeah, it's great for investors, tough for issuers, right? I mean, just back of the napkin math at 0.5-ish from what I heard, you know, you need to have 2 billion-ish, you know, in assets under management to break even, right? So the lower you go, obviously, I think it just makes this much more of a cutthroat battle. And we know that, you know, 14 or 10, 11, whatever the number of them is, can't all survive. By the way, there's additional color from the SEC, man, they're taking their shots while they can.

The SEC also stated that it had denied more than 20 applications, but the District of Columbia Court of Appeals decision on Grayscale changed the situation. Currently, it is limited to Bitcoin, a non-securities commodity, and the vast majority of crypto assets are investment contracts. Does that make anyone else question whether we'll see an Ethereum approval in the next quarter? Go ahead, Bill. And then I'll go. Hey, guys. Sorry, I'm on mute. Congrats, Matt. I think that's awesome.

I know the tenacity you guys have had in seeing this through. It's pretty cool to see. I think we've been working on some comments for clients. I'll just give you guys some highlights on some of the stuff we're focused on that clients are going to want to look for. I think the first is just the outflow from GBTC in particular. Now that it'll be trading at NAV, I think one of the most telling things, given how high their fees are relative to everyone else, will folks take the tax hit or will they continue to hold? I think Grayscale is betting that people would rather pay the fees than take a tax hit in terms of moving because you can't just basically move in kind to another ETF.

So in order to get out, you would actually have to convert to cash and then back to another ETF. And I think that's a calculated move on Grayscale's part, that their existing clients will not do that and that DCG actually needs the cash in order to deal with their other woes, which I'm sure Simon can comment on. That's number one. I think number two, the timing is amazing, just given that we're, I don't follow football, but I think we're what, three or four weeks away from the Super Bowl. And so I think that the amount of advertising we're going to see related to travel, I would I would bet significantly that we're going to see a Super Bowl Bitcoin ETF ad or potentially more than one, which is super interesting. And the other thing is, I think we're looking at Sol, and I guess this directly addresses the question you just asked, Scott. I think we see Sol and ETH as the big winners here because I don't think that you're going to see huge inflows to Matt's point in the very short term. We discussed this, I think, back in November in another town hall. And I wouldn't be surprised if we see a Bitcoin pullback with a rotation into Ethereum and Solana, which I think we were seeing after the fake announcement yesterday and even today a little bit with Ethereum.

So we're clearly looking for big rotations into other L1s as a result of this with people looking for the next buy the rumor opportunity. Kind of sell instead of instead of sell the news, we're calling it rotate on the news. And we think the rotation on the news is likely to be Ethereum and Solana. And our parting point has basically been if we've learned anything in the past week, it's that the most entertaining outcome in crypto is clearly the most likely outcome because you could, nobody here, myself certainly included, could have come up with a more entertaining model for a Bitcoin ETF launch than what the SEC has provided us this week.

Oh, the last 36 hours have been just public. Right. So now let's add staking on top of that and launch another ETF and see what the Clown Show can come up with. So while we all work for the SEC in some way, I'm not going to go further than that, but it is going to be entertaining when they have to address other L1s that deal with staking and other issues that they didn't have to deal with with Bitcoin beyond just the hard forks, which is probably the most complicated thing they had to deal with. Nobody seems afraid to say negative things about the SEC anymore. That's been the real

silver lining and winner for me over the past six to eight months. That's not true. That's not true. There's a lot of influencers that I know that I work with in the background that are just biting their tongues. So I think the audience that we're dealing with is... Can you have them and their lawyers call me? I think I might be in trouble. I don't think they're going to call anybody anytime soon. I think I've tweeted a hashtag fire Gary Gensler at least 7,000 times. I think it's in about 87% of my tweets. You're in a non-unique position to be tweeting that on a regular basis.

I am the other hand. I'll go on a limb and speak for Matt and say Matt is not either. So, we're in Bruce's. No, yeah, I know. You wouldn't associate with me anymore. No, we love you. We're just going to do things that we can't.

It's a lifestyle choice choosing not to work for a regulated company. So two things strike me as interesting in terms of the impact that ETFs will have on the exchange business structure, particularly the largest exchanges, particularly the US exchanges. So for the first time, the exchanges now have a competitor and a cost anchor for what it should cost to trade. And a number of these ETFs are pricing below the cost that exchanges are charging on a per trade basis. I think that's going to be a shakeup, especially for organizations like Coinbase, where up to 50% of the trades are Bitcoin related. And they are probably the closest of all of the exchanges to having at least that part of their business, which is by far the most lucrative part of their business, competing with a US ETF.

The other big thing is that we're aware of the fact that a lot of, particularly retail, have a very significant bias to trying to buy things on the basis of how expensive they look on a token basis. So, you know, Bitcoin, to many people, seems… Unit bias. Exactly, the unit bias. Bitcoin seems unattainable to people at $45,000. Most people can't afford that, and they don't realize that they can buy it on a fractional basis. The ETFs are going to change it. In an ETF, you're going to be buying a share and it's very, very likely that the shares will be priced low. And so this thing that the Bitcoin community have been pushing for for a long time to reprice into sats, to reprice into bits, is ironically possibly going to come.

The coordinating mechanism could be the SEC and the ETFs. And we may see that change happen this year, not just in the ETF side, but also on the exchanges side, as they realize that they're competing with the ETFs, both on price, but also on unit bias. And doing that is going to change the way people perceive it. But isn't the ETF, the ETF's market is institutional investors, and I think they're a bit too sophisticated to have unit bias. No, no, that's not true at all.

That's not true at all. That's retail. So I think the biggest issue here and the biggest question that I would have for Matt is, are these ETF issuers, Bitwise included, allowed to lend the underlying assets? Because ETF issuers are allowed to lend and do collateralized lending with the underlying collateral, right? line collateral. Right. And so I have not read all of their filings in detail and whether or not they're prevented from doing that. But it could be that that's the way that BlackRock actually intends to make the most money here. Right. Would be actually lending the underlying Bitcoin, which I would you know, I don't think that consumers can understand that. Right. I mean, we you know, we went to great pains and lengths to educate people on what that meant. And they're clearly not doing that here. So I'd be very curious to know what the lending restrictions are here. Matt, maybe, I don't know. Sorry, sorry, Scott. Trust me, I'd rather you do it than me.

Yeah, I can answer. Yeah, I can answer that. It's grant or trust, it's very hard to lend out the Bitcoin. I don't believe they can do that. You can lend out, people who buy the shares can lend out the shares for shorting, but I don't think they'll be lending the Bitcoin. I think ETF issuers are looking to make money on the expense ratio and assuming that assets will scale significantly. And just to update everyone, we crossed the final step about a minute ago when the S1s were declared effective. So there are no more hurdles. We are officially launching BitBee at Bitwise

and others are launching their ETFs as well. So it's really truly happening. There are no more rugs. Tomorrow, Bitcoin ETFs will list on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and elsewhere. Congratulations. Congratulations, man. I'm so happy for you guys.

And just to clarify, you can lend the shares? Is that what you're saying? People who buy shares can lend shares, yes. But can you lend the shares? no we we would we would not uh we're just issuing uh the product so yeah the the revenue model for an etf issuer on these grantors trust commodities are are just the expense ratio gotcha well what i what blows my mind looking back is how many months of i guess we can go out on them and say bad takes we've had and shared about the conspiracy theories and the tinfoil hat and what's going to happen while like belchunis and safer and all the experts just casually said hey

guys january 10th maybe it's ptsd from being in crypto and all the casual rug pulls and fear of the sec but like we've got a lot of credit to the people who really nailed this and for a very very long time and had confidence and said that it was going to happen while uh we debated it you know i think that there's a lot of credit to them for for that. Cameron and Tyler filed 10 years ago. I mean, I think he posted the number of days was like 3,800 days. I think I could have the number wrong, but didn't they do the initial filing like in 2000? I think it was 15. 14 or 15? 15, I think.

Sorry, eight years ago. Yeah. I mean, that is tenacity. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty. I'm sad that we had so many ridiculous events over the last few days and week that sort of took the wind out of the sails of how big this actually is with all the anticipation. I really do view this as the biggest one of the biggest days ever.

I mean, Simon, you've been here from the very beginning. Bruce as well. Where do you guys rank this in uh biggest days for bitcoin um so well firstly i'm just glad i don't have to wear my i love mishinsky t-shirt now because um i had a nice and uh it's q1 2024 so i won that bet um and uh also uh make sure everybody has 2FA on their accounts, really important thing. But yeah, I think this is a really big day because we've now got TradFi who laughed at us, who ridiculed us, who told us that we were creating a currency just for drug dealers, terrorists, gambling, and that blockchain would take us over and that

Bitcoin was not really important. And if only you could take Bitcoin out of blockchain. They did absolutely everything to try and destroy us. They choked it. They laughed at us. They did absolutely everything. And over this last 10 year period, everybody that owns Bitcoin right now did, in fact, front run most of Wall Street. So now we get all of the really professional pitches that took everything that they ridiculed and said to us that Bitcoin is just a currency for drug dealers. And Larry Fink now goes and tells the world that Bitcoin is an exit and a flight to quality. And so I don't want to gloat too much because at the end of the day, we're all on the same team here. But I think what is an important day for us right now is that we all need to double down and triple down and quadruple down on the concept of what is the difference between Bitcoin and a Bitcoin ETF. And so now is not the time to relax. Now is the time to say the TradFi people are going to put together amazing professional brochures and now they can make money out of us in a way that the regulators have blessed.

They're going to onboard the next trillion dollars of liquidity and the next trillion dollars of people. So they're now the Andreas Antonopoulos. They're now the people that were doing those pitches in the early days. They're now putting on the Bruce Fenton conferences to try and get people together. And our job as an industry is to help people understand that actually the true power is owning your own money, spending your own money, and the more and more people that can do that. So what I'll be tracking from here, from this day, and at the moment we're 100% Bitcoin to Bitcoin ETF market cap ratio, but I'll be tracking that because the ETF is going to fly up in terms of market cap over the next year probably.

And then eventually we're going to hit an equilibrium. And I think the most important thing for us as an industry is to educate people that, yeah, you got into Bitcoin. You used to have this portfolio. Your bonds were giving you 5%. If you're lucky enough that the Fed gives you another round of QE, your stocks give you 20%. But what is this little pesky asset class on the corner that is giving you 115%? And you have to keep rebalancing because it keeps outperforming the other parts of your portfolio. And when they go through their next 70% correction and 80% crash, because all the ETFs take the Bitcoin and they start lending it out and they start doing all the leverage game and

figuring out how to get zero fees and making Bitcoin the product. And they blow up the market that we still get the more and more people get to understand that there is a significant difference between Bitcoin and the Bitcoin ETF. We welcome all the new players and all the new liquidity and all the new innovation to the market. But never forget, there is a difference between gold and paper gold. And there is a significant difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin ETF. And as an industry, we need to tell people and remind people because at one stage, the TradFi system is going to completely blow up some of those products. And there's going to be some systemic risk event. And that's when you're going to really want Bitcoin in cold storage.

And we've got to always remind people, because hopefully we can prevent less people doing that. But we welcome everyone to the market. It's a big day. And I'm so glad that we can stop talking about approvals and speculation. I think, Scott, you've been looking forward to this day because these spaces were driving you nuts. Driving me nuts and my wife is just ready to kill me. So I finally get some relief. Yeah. Bruce and then Matt. Bruce, obviously you've been here since the very beginning. Where

would you rate this? I think this is one of the big days. Sometimes we go months without much happening and then a lot happens in a week. This is one of those weeks and one of those days. I think we'll all remember this. Simon and I yesterday were talking about it was the same day that HSBC got announced their huge fine, was the same day that Charlie Shrum got arrested, and it was the same day Ethereum was announced, and it was the same conference that Tiger Direct announced that they were going to do Bitcoin. And Roger Ver gave a speech and Charlie Lee joined Coinbase. All that happened basically the same day. And so this is one of those weeks, one of those days. I think it's big news. I think, I mean, one thing that it does, hopefully it's one of the big representations in a bigger, broader trend right now is being in a fourth turning where old systems and old power structures are falling and failing. You know, the Clintons or the IMF and the World Bank and the SEC and CNN and New York Times and all these other jokers that were important a couple decades ago are

no longer important. And people are seeing that because it's all, you know, right there before our eyes. We see the, you know, the media just completely failing and, you know, falling and lying. And we see political structures failing. And here we see this, you know, cream of the crop elite, you know, regulator just completely and totally fumbling. And by the way, I think it's funny, you know, they fumble this so bad. It's hard being in financial services and talking about, you know, mission-critical financial products on social media and websites, you know, things like scaling and websites crashing and coordinating your announcements. It's hard. And my sympathy to the SEC with the caveat that, you know, at least you clowns don't have the SEC to deal with. I mean,

you can't even get your act together when you don't have regulators breathing down your neck. I mean, think about how hard it is for us folks who actually work for a living out here trying to do things important and serve the market need. And we have to, you know, we have to get our announcements together. We have to get our announcements together. We have to get our website together. And we're roasted if we don't. And we could, you know, get in big trouble. But then meanwhile, we also have to deal with the regulators. We also have to deal with these same, you know, these same people bugging us. So it's just such a hypocritical thing. But on a positive note, you know, I think we could see, you know, a lot of demand come in right now.

There is pent up demand, you know, out of the 600,000 registered financial professionals and the thousands and thousands more RIAs and wealth managers and family offices, a whole mess of them have access to this. It's only a limited number where their firms say, you can't have this, especially when you have a product like a BlackRock. Almost everybody's allowed, unless they're a direct competitor, almost everybody's allowed to sell BlackRock Fidelity. These investments, as of tomorrow morning, are going to be available to hundreds and hundreds of thousands of financial advisors and tens of millions of customers. And that's a big deal. Some percentage of that has been sitting there like, oh yeah, I can't wait for that ETF to come along along and they're going to buy. And the neat thing is these are smash buys. You know, they're going to have to fill those orders. If tomorrow a bunch of new inflows come in, the money managers are not just going to sit around. They have to put that money to work. They have a very limited amount of time on how to, you know, implement those orders. So if you have a billion in inflows, that's a billion dollar

green candle that somebody's going to have to buy that most likely during the market hours that the ETF is open or when these inflows are coming. Certainly, they're not going to be able to sit around and wait around for a week or something. So I think there's going to be a lot. And then here's the big thing. We have this finite supply asset versus unlimited goofy fiat. And the immovable object, it's the whatever, the unmovable thing. And that's a big deal. And so if you have even a few hundred million that comes in, they've got to buy that on the market. And they don't get to do what Saylor did where he buys it in little $1,500 increments over the course of weeks. They don't have that option. They have to buy it. And there's not enough supply on the OTC desks and the

exchanges. So you're going to be in the opposite of freefall. You're going to be in upward free fall price discovery, inverted free fall price discovery. Let's call it that. Inverted free fall price discovery. They're going to, because who knows what the price is? We don't know. There's a whole bunch of people who ain't selling their coins. And by the way, if you're listening, you got some bankers sniffing around for your coins. Don't give them up.

Hold them. Don't give them your coins because there's only 21 million. And if you hold them, the price is going to go to the moon. It's pretty epic, I think. Exciting. Matt? Yeah, I do think it's epic. One note on the historical thing.

You know, I come from an ETF background. It reminds me a lot of pre-gold ETF when gold was a $2 trillion asset. And people talked about people who bought it as gold bugs wearing tinfoil hats. Now it's $15 trillion and held by the largest institutions in the world. And I do think an ETF can be positive for the Bitcoin ecosystem. The comments about remaining true to the core of what Bitcoin is really resonate with me. I think that's really important. We just announced 10% of the profits from our ETF will go to Bitcoin open source development to bring OpenSats and Human Rights Foundation. And hopefully the other people who are bringing ETFs to market

also recognize that you have to support and pay back into this industry and this movement, and that they can exist side by side. And so excited what we're doing, and I hope to see others do it as well. I have very strong doubts that Larry Fink will be donating to Bitcoin Core Development. I call it, I call me skeptical, but I think that we will see a very, very clear bifurcation of the Bitcoin native companies and those who are opportunistic. James, I'll tell you, lift your mic. Go ahead, James. There you go.

I'm here. I just, yeah, it's a great day. I had one question for the brain trust there. Is this going to change the course of choke point 2.0? Is this the beginning of the end of people and companies having their bank accounts pulled because they're involved in crypto? I think if you're not a TradFi player, then you won't get your bank account.

I'm starting to see Chokepoint 2.0 being ultra, ultra aggressive. UK just launched regulations. If you're from the UK, you you probably get an email after email from exchanges saying uh we're on board with closing services um we're getting like the traditional players are getting more pressure than ever more regulatory crackdown than ever more bank accounts like literally we we just got um a request from our bank that every single time a client deposits or every single time a client withdraws, we have to send them a three months recent proof of address. And we have to send them a new contract of the terms and conditions signed within the last three months for every

single transaction. The more requests are getting ultra, ultra aggressive, but TradFi will obviously try and use the choke point in their favor. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt. Guys, we have some incredible quotes from Hester Purse. Anyone who knows, she's one of the SEC commissioners. We read Gary's comments. Obviously, this is an endorsement of Bitcoin, the SEC's comments. Well, we get our dissenters and we get the amazing quotes from Hester Peirce, who, by the way, may become the chairperson of the SEC, at least temporarily, if we have regime change in the United States. But here's just some amazing quotes, what she had to say about

disapproval. Today marks the end of an unnecessary but consequential saga. For reasons I have explained many times before, the logic of the long string of denials is perplexing. The commission has driven retail investors to less efficient means of attaining Bitcoin exposure in the securities markets. Until a court reminded us that our unexplained discounting of the obvious financial and mathematical relationship between the spot and futures markets falls short of the standards for reason decision making we persisted in denying a spot bitcoin atp the commission rather than admitting error offers a weak explanation for its change of heart

we squandered a decade of opportunities to do our jobs we keep going today's order does not undo the many harms created by the disparate treatment of spot Bitcoin products. First, our arbitrary and capricious treatment of applications in this area will continue to harm our reputation far beyond crypto. Diminished trust from the public will inhibit our ability to regulate the markets effectively. Second, our disproportionate attention on these filings has diverted limited staff resources away from other mission critical work. Over 10 years, likely millions of dollars of staff time has gone toward blocking these applications. Third, our actions here have muddied people's understanding of what the SEC's role is. Fourth, by failing to follow our normal standards and processes and considering spot Bitcoin ETPs,

we have created an artificial frenzy around them. Had these products come to market in the way other comparable products typically have, we would have avoided the circus atmosphere in which we now find ourselves. And finally, fifth, we have alienated a generation of product innovators within our space. I don't know if we have like a clapping sound effect or something, but holy crap. There you go. See, I knew there was one somewhere. That's an SEC commissioner. And those comments come right on the back of Gary casually saying, we don't endorse Bitcoin. Can you post a link of that in our news group, Scott? I did. I did. I posted a tweet.

I posted it. Hey, Scott, hearing that makes me... That's the part of America that I absolutely love. That's the freedom of speech that I've got so much respect for that you don't necessarily get. You would never have

a structure in any other regulator that I've known in the world where someone could speak like that towards their own organization. So that's the part of America that I think we need to see more of, where you can push back on each other like that. It's amazing. Yeah, I would say I think there's a very interesting dichotomy of the bull and the bear case you can make today. Bull. Let's start with the downside. The bear is, I think, actually kind of building off of what Simon said there and the whole choke point 2.0. You know, there will be forces.

I think if you're being really conspiratorial, you could say this is the intent. I don't think it's the intent, but I think there'll be forces that the same as they want you using credit cards instead of cash, people will be pushing to make this the only acceptable way to own Bitcoin, like as part of a long-term play to kill it and shut it down, right? Why in God's name would you want to go through all that trouble? Only criminals would ever want to have their own Bitcoins and their own hardware wallets to do it. If you want to own Bitcoin, why don't you just buy this nice, safe, regulated ETF that goes through the account you already have in an effort to ultimately turn it and squash and be able to trace everything around it, same way they want you using credit cards instead of cash. So

I would absolutely, along with Bruce, tell you, do not roll out of your own coins into the ETFs. Like your own coins are your own coins for a reason. But the upside to it is, and what it does is, you know, I think there's something like 25 million already robo-advisor accounts just in the US, people who are getting averaged across whatever is big in the finance world. And I'm curious to see, given that a lot of the companies like Betterment that are already very big in robo also have separate crypto products now, how many of them move to offer this now that they, now that they have like truly good, truly neutral ETF options. You know, there's been the crypto innovator ETFs and things like this before,

but not direct Bitcoin exposure. And so I'm very curious to see, you know, if any of those firms start to offer and say, hey, you know, as part of your robo, you can have exposure directly to Bitcoin in it. And we onboard the next 10 million users of Bitcoin that way. Go ahead, Joe, and then Simon. Yeah, I had a question for the ETF guys. As this gets more competitive, the ETF, how quickly would we see like a covered call ETF? Maybe they use the DeFi of Bitcoin and lend Bitcoin and get yield that way.

Are they going to go that way to start attracting more people or that's a long ways from that? I don't know the answer to that, but Matt, you were saying it would be quite a while, right? That's a long way, a long ways from that. If one of the. But Matt, you were saying. I mean, I'm happy to jump in. Yes, the ETF innovation machine is a real thing and people are going to be cranking on those ideas. I suspect you'll see people try to develop risk mitigated strategies that protect against some of the downside. I suspect you'll see people working to do covered calls. There are complications with all of that.

But if you look at any ETF space, there is competition on every aspect. You'll see people compete on custodians and other product design as well. So that's certain to happen, particularly once and if we get options on these ETFs that will open up new strategies as well. I think that's when it gets really exciting, Matt, because I worked at American for a while and I do straddles on Ethereum, Solana, when it was available, not really too available now, covered calls.

And during these low years, you know, I get 25, 28% return on just from the yield. Like I think once ETFs start doing that, it's a whole different ballgame. They're no longer looking at, you know, Coca-Cola and Apple for these yields. I think it's going to get really, really exciting then. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I'll also say that once people buy Bitcoin, they tend to look at other crypto assets as well. So there is a trickle down effect into the broader crypto ecosystem. But I agree that the derivative overlay strategies can be really attractive to people. There's a lot of opportunity in this market and there'll be products to fit it.

Yeah, and that's going to be a tremendous amount of volume too. How's the market update? Is it still the same? Has it changed much? Bitcoin's up a bit actually. It just went up to about $46,740, currently $46,530, and obviously it was in the low $45s at one point here. I think I'm

looking before the announcement. And that's Bitcoin Dominance doing. The L1s are screaming. Cardano 12%. Bitcoin Dominance is falling off a cliff. I shared a chart so lana in the last hour is up uh like i was sure it was up 20 percent yeah yeah yeah uh i gotta do my daily bonk check bonks up 16 percent um so uh the bellwether for the market exactly exactly the bellwether for the market. Exactly.

Exactly. The bellwether is bonk. I mean, it's clearly, like I said yesterday, it's clearly. What happens to publicly listed companies? How's Coinbase doing? David, I think you've got publicly listed companies. Well, how's crypto doing in the equities? Well, the equities markets were closed for um the announcements what would you

coinbase was down i think like half a percent but i suspect you'll see a huge you can check after hours they're up two and a half percent but it's very thin um but uh i suspect you'll see it you know assuming there's no other macro negative news i don't know when the cpi print's coming that could affect everything but um I would expect a really, really nice bump. But yeah, Alts are screaming right now. I mean, ETH Classic is 14%, DOTS 12. Let's see, what else am I seeing here? Yeah, Maddox up 11 plus, all in the last basically hour. Bill, do you think it's fair to say that the SEC's fake tweet and now approval of an ETF that Gary Gensler has gifted us with unregistered security season?

I don't know what you want me to say to that, except the market was going to do what the market was going to do anyway. But there's literally nothing funnier in the entire world than Gary finally approving a Bitcoin spot ETF and altcoins going up. There's literally nothing funnier than that. 100%. But it was going to happen anyway. So it may as well be the SEC front running it for us. I mean, you just can't, like I said, the most entertaining outcome in crypto is exactly what's going to happen. And this is clearly the most entertaining outcome in crypto is exactly what's going to happen. And this is clearly the most entertaining outcome, at least for today. God knows what the entertaining outcome of tomorrow and what day is it, Wednesday, tomorrow and Friday will be. But, you know, buckle up. Here we go.

Scott, there is an effect I didn't even think of. This kind of legitimizes to people internationally. It legitimizes Bitcoin. And, you know, besides like these random countries like turkey and argentina u.s is one of the biggest holders this might give people in you know europe for example reason to buy uh now that they're like okay america's kind of saying this thing's okay uh it's not as crazy as It's not just for scammers as They once said I wonder how much of that plays into it And what is this doing to Elizabeth Warren

Right now I mean she must be having a coronary I can't I can't even imagine to Joe's comment He's got Gary in the basement right now It's not great It's like a scene from Billions with those two Remember Or Chuck Rhodes Exactly right now it's not it's like a scene from billions with those two remember i i remember

exactly so how do you want to go there never mind oh man we're degenerating uh quickly quickly here but i i it is i mean yeah go ahead side i'm not gonna say anything go ahead so i'm still trying to recover from my ptsd around bitcoin yield and the products that tradfire are going to say anything. Go ahead, Simon. Sorry, I'm still trying to recover from my PTSD around Bitcoin yield and the products that TradFi are going to create. My question for the panel, actually, do you think that we're still going to see our 75% to 80% Bitcoin crash that we've seen pretty much every cycle? And how do you think the ETF...

You mean next cycle or do you mean again? Yeah, do you think we'll see like a rapid 75% crash in Bitcoin again? And how will ETFs and TradFi react? I have no idea. Great question. Anyone have an opinion on that, Matt? I don't think that's going to happen. I think that there's validity in this. And I think, you know, going back to the commentary

about Betterment, we were one of the first investors in Betterment and everybody thought that wouldn't work. That company's on its way to managing 100 billion in assets. So I kind of look at this like crowdfunding or even cannabis. This is still very early on. I think Bitcoin is going to reach, again, an all-time high. Obviously, it's going to be a gateway for a lot of other products. And all the other coins will be very bullish. We're in a bull run now. I think if you look at Tesla, Scott, I think whatever that's done that is on the market, people can trade it. There's been huge drops in that. Bitcoin is going to be just as susceptible to that as well as Tesla is.

And they've had, I don't know what the biggest drop is. I'm going to look and I'll let you know. Yeah, I don't know if we'll be as volatile as 30-year treasuries have been, but I still think we're going to see some cyclicality in the space. I don't think that's over. I think there will be pullbacks, but it's probably appropriate to think that they'll be attenuated. And the reason they'd be smaller than in the past is we'll have a more diverse set of investors with different time horizons so um you know are the days of 50 fullbacks or 40 pullbacks over i i doubt it uh still going to be a very volatile asset we're still really really really really early but um

but it should help dampen it to some degree yeah tesla had 73% drop over the course of a year. We're still going to be susceptible to that. It just might not be as rapid, I think. Yeah, Josh, I sat through $30 Bitcoin to $3 Bitcoin in one day. Yeah, I

I'm in since 2012. So I've seen the huge drops. I still just can't believe that all coins are all going up i really can't i mean i can believe it it's just so funny to me why why why is it why is it funny why is it funny why is it unbelievable oh mario you're here you're here thank you you're no longer a red icon i just think that you know you you talk about this anticipation in general and what's going to happen with Bitcoin spot ETF approval and the price. And Gary Gensler finally throws a bone and says, here's your approval.

And all of the things he hates immediately go up massively in value. It's just poetic. Regardless of what he says. And that's the way a lot of people are going to take it because they don't see Bitcoin and crypto as different. I mean, most of us do, but the public by and large, who probably doesn't even know that these ETFs have been approved or exist, is going to associate Bitcoin and crypto. And people are going to be looking for what's next, whether it makes sense or not. I mean, that's just how people think.

I think that's true of retail. And I also, Bill, I deeply believe that that's also true of the degenerate trading hedge fund guys who are going to get bored with Bitcoin and go right down the risk curve like the rest of us with huge, huge balances behind them. And to Arthur's point, with all the liquidity coming, those two groups are going to converge like they did in 2020. I don't think it'll be as bad as 2020 when it was just like mana from heaven, but they're certainly going to converge more than where they were in 21 and 22 when they were pulled apart by the interest rates. So that you know, that's the best case scenario for risk on assets, right?

Is when the degenerates and the retail converge. I wanna go through the comments. I'm curious what people, you know, are they getting, now I was more excited when I saw the announcement yesterday than I am today. And I'm curious what others in the audience, you know, are you feeling any different? Are you so exhausted from the, the market say that you're pretty exhausted. Are you exhausted from us discussing the ETF for so long that you were

expecting this? Because remember, we're talking as if this was a hundred percent sure thing, but just what, four, six weeks ago, we're still unsure. I remember we were talking with, um, with say five, the two experts that we always had on stage, uh, the Bloomberg, Bloomberg experts that we had on stage. And we saw that percentage increase the likelihood increase over the last few months. So it wasn't a short. That was a great scale. Yeah. They were, they were, they were at, uh, I think basically when Larry, yeah. When, when, when BlackRock came into the fray, they put it at 70, 75%, something like that.

But when Grayscale won, that's when they bumped it to 90%. And once again, like for anyone who wasn't here, to their credit, they also said probably January 10th. And here we are on that very exact date. Right. So they really nailed it. The SEC took every last second they could, based on, you know, the ARK deadline. And the other interesting thing, like remember, I'm pretty deep outside of crypto as well. And I'm seeing a lot of the accounts and

news accounts that have nothing to do not only with crypto, with finance in general, like Rose Alerts, there's a pretty big account on Twitter. He tweeted about it. There's people that don't even know how Bitcoin works. And again, I know know rosalys which is one of the bigger news accounts on twitter um and for him to tweet about it he usually tweets about like some train derailment or some new war starting just shows that stock talk good you know good time for you to jump in is that is is that becoming part of the narrative for people outside the industry now it's impossible not to notice and it's impossible to dismiss. Is that fair to say, Stock Talk?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think the primary effect of this entire saga is validation. I mean, people are going to speculate on what the price outcomes will be over the next week or next month. I think that's less relevant. I think this is certainly a point of validation. I mean, there was an argument that was being made a few days ago. I've been on a few spaces talking about this, obviously, like many of us have. But there's an argument that was being made in a space I was on a couple of days ago that, look, everyone who already wants to own Bitcoin already owns it. And I think that's not a good argument because that's not really the way that adoption works when you have early stage assets like this. I mean, people need to be convinced and whether right or wrong, and I'm sure a lot of the

independent thinkers and the panel and the audience probably don't think this way, but masses of people move like sheeps, especially in markets. And, you know, getting validation from some of the biggest financial institutions in the world to launch these products, to be involved in these products either directly or to be participants in their issuance, that is a point of validation, objectively speaking. I mean, there's no other way to paint it. Now, when you talk about the price and what's going to happen, what happens today and tomorrow is far less relevant than what the inflows look like into these ETFs. Because we can talk about it being, by principle, a point of validation.

What really matters is what the money flow is going to do. And, you know, there's been an enormous amount of money prior to this ETF conversation coming up. There's been an enormous amount of money to the tune of tens of billions of dollars of inflows into equities that were related to crypto. So, you know, market participants who, for whatever reason, whether it's by virtue of just not wanting to participate in crypto or skepticism about the entire industry, whatever the justification is, there's a number of market participants and an enormous amount of capital that didn't want to buy the products outright. And so you saw a plethora of things happen really. But from the end of 2019 through now, you've seen like well over 50 Bitcoin mining companies go public when prior to 2019, I think there were none,

maybe two or three. And, you know, there were a couple of OTC companies as well. But really, in the last four years, you've seen just an enormous surge of of new public companies related to crypto. And people used these as vehicles to get exposure to the industry without, like I said, just buying the assets directly. Now, whether you think that's stupid or not, it happened. And that tens of billions of dollars now is in question. I mean, the tweet I just put out recently was talking about this, which is that, you know, what happens to the correlation now? There were some Bitcoin related products that were trading at premiums to the actual product. And if you look at some of these sympathies, sympathies being the Bitcoin miners, being

stocks like Coinbase and Robinhood, being stocks like MicroStrategy, which is one that a lot of people are familiar with, that's used as a vehicle. When you look at the premium that these names have been trading at, not only on an objective basis, but on a percentage performance basis, you have to ask yourself, what happens to that premium now? Does the existence of these pure play exposures now dampen that premium for these other peripheral products, or does it accelerate it? And that'll be a great thing to watch in the coming weeks. Yeah, I haven't looked today. I can bring it up, but I did notice that MicroStrategy was getting absolutely rocked the

last few days. Yes, it was. I don't know if that proves your point, but there's a lot of people who probably say, hey, now I can buy an ETF, right? If that was their purpose in buying MicroStrategy and not for their actual underlying business, they might move on, right? I think that's the point that you're making here. Yeah, but I think there are dozens of companies that are waiting. This is going to be a gateway for many companies that are going to want to go public now. We probably have multi-dozen companies in our portfolio that have just been waiting for this inflection point so i think the next 12 months is a lot of companies that are in the crypto blockchain space outside of mining that are going to go down this road on being a on a big board exchange i think this is going to be that's

fair i think in terms of the derivatives and the and-on effects, this is going to be a very interesting year for Bitcoin. The setup is remarkable. So we've got companies like you mentioned, David, that are likely to benefit from it, that will go public. There's going to be a huge amount of credibility that is now introduced into their business models but beyond that bitcoin this year um is going to see the release of multiple new uh on-chain token protocols so there's runes there's tap assets which is is coming out of Alpha soon. There's other ones which are in the pipeline. So Runes is the fungible asset version of Ordinals. And Ordinals is a crazy example of what happens when Bitcoin enters a market which it wasn't in before? It's been dominating in the NFT market for much of the last year,

where it had no footprint there before. So the year is starting with a Bitcoin ETF. In April, we expect to see Runes, which I think is going to be absolutely huge launch, as well as the halving. Rollups are being developed to come probably before the middle of this year. We'll see the first significant roll-ups being deployed. There are already some which are working, but they're a bit janky still. Gensler put a description. Sorry to interrupt you. I'll let you finish off, Yago. It's long. Yeah, he put out a full statement um

yeah it is pretty long um so we'll get someone to break it yeah we'll get someone to break down the key points yeah and then i think get some the key points and read them out in a bit so again let's put out his official statement probably bashing bitcoin um but yeah sorry to interrupt you and we'll read it out in a bit. Sure. And effectively, I can tell you that as the very quick summary, he basically said, this is the summary we have from the four, at least four of them. Gensler supported due to the earlier grayscale court decision. That was the gist as he got out of the way of the courts. Purse, a longtime supporter of crypto currency. She supported Crenshaw, Pose, and she, her, I believe it's a woman, retirement accounts would be damaged.

She was really aggressive, talks about, we can get into her quotes later, I think, if I'm right, about SPF and fake volume and all the other things that we've heard before. And Ueda supports the approval order but opposed the legal analysis. That's what we have from four of them others yeah and blackrock just put out the their website for the for their spot etf has just come online so i'm just gonna post that the link now if anyone will see it i know these are small things so it's pretty big for us anyone's learning cryptos like saying why the they care about websites already approved again for blackrock to have bitcoin on their website means a lot to us so

sorry yeah go ahead and go to phil sure i'll just finish up by saying that um in um uh november so just a couple of months ago uh robin lenis introduced bitvm which allows for turing complete contracts to be deployed and executed on Bitcoin. And that's being worked on. And I've been engaged in that. What's going on with the devs there is crazy. More than 1,000 devs have begun working on this in just the last two months. Well, 1,000 devs have shown interest, but there's like many tens actually doing work. And so what's happening in Bitcoin this year is remarkable. I don't think we've ever seen a confluence of this many things happening to Bitcoin at the same time.

And there's going to be an opportunity now for devs to start developing things on Bitcoin, which would have been big anyway. But now they can start developing on Bitcoin with the knowledge that this chain has effectively got a pipeline into institutional funds, a stamp of approval from the most difficult regulator in the world. And I was talking just yesterday to one of the largest wallets, the CEOs of one of the largest wallets who are looking to deploy a roll-up. And they were thinking about Ethereum, but now they're thinking from a regulatory perspective, it may be easier to do it and better for them

because they're a regulated company to do it in Bitcoin. So I think we haven't even begun to see the impact, not just of the cash that will flow in to Bitcoin, but the way that this is going to elevate the entire industry and specifically things around Bitcoin in terms of their credibility. Go ahead, Bill. I brought up Kyle as well to get his thoughts on the market's response and what we could see next. But yeah, sorry, Bill.

Thanks. Yeah, thanks, Mero. So a couple of thoughts that we've been sidebarring on here on my team while you guys are talking is the first is we're just thinking about, kind of thinking out loud about the magnitude of the impact from a marketing perspective because people don't really, I think,

understand how big the registered investment advisor space is in the United States. We're talking about tens of thousands of employed people who act as fiduciaries effectively on behalf of trillions of dollars, literally trillions. And they are all basically going to be fielding questions over the next few weeks on Bitcoin and whether or not I should basically get some kind of exposure to Bitcoin. I think with the upcoming presidential election, there's going to be a big emphasis on debt and who is going to basically do the most to deal with the debt problem. And that's going to put another kind of magnifying glass on, you know, Bitcoin versus the existing monetary system. And then the other thing that we've been

looking at is this whole SMA market is exploding in the United States. So separately managed accounts basically went from obscurity to, you know, one of the fastest growing segments of the investment landscape in the United States, separately managed accounts, not the expert, but basically they are off balance sheet for the advisor. In other words, they're your assets. They're not a liability to the underlying company. The implication there is you're going to see a lot of people who don't trust the system, but need to buy equities, move, or commodities, for that matter, move more of their assets into these separately managed accounts. And I think those are exactly the kind of people who are going to want to hold crypto, because they don't trust the system. But they know that they need to invest within the framework of the existing system.

And so this is just a massive marketing play for all of us in our opinion. And that's just as important as the inflows. Obviously, we all want the inflows, but I think the marketing effect here is going to have a massive multiplier on the narrative and the awareness within the narrative. So I'm probably more excited about that than I am about people buying ETFs. I wanted to catch up on what Iago said with a bit of... I mean, yes, first of all, I agree to what Bill said. The marketing narrative is huge, believe me. I'm a big DeFi lover.

And the next big narrative we're all looking forward for is DeFi on Bitcoin. But what Tiago said, I might be missing a few things, but Tiago, all these assets are doing great. I love Stacks. I love Ordinals. I have a big bag. But these are not composable into Bitcoin or vice versa, unless, of course, the newer technologies can create those integrations. So I don't see anything except just a large, large marketing campaign on the back of,

and by the way, I should use the word, unsymbiotic back of Bitcoin. So there's no contribution these added assets or technologies or ZKs or anything would do. And let's not forget that the Bitcoin core developer group is still not on to incorporate the primary changes. So the reason Ethereum evolves into this massive layer 2 ecosystem and even more is because the core development team

is constantly developing hooks and brackets to engage all of that. But nothing like that is happening around Bitcoin. And it seems like it's not meant to happen soon. That's absolutely true. But everything that I mentioned requires no changes to Bitcoin, which I think is, you know if if bitcoin has one unique property it's that it doesn't change the ethereum code base has becoming has become so huge and so complex it's now um i actually by coincidence tweeted this today it's 26 times the size of bitcoin's code base now and it's

continuing to grow whereas bitcoin remains constant um and it's a a duty optimizations is actually getting smaller and so there's a simplicity to building on bitcoin which is extremely attractive because you know that it's consistent uh as a developer you want to be building on a platform like that uh so it's true that um Bitcoin has taken a much longer time it still isn't quite there right I mean it's not like um I do want to bring you back I just want to bring you back to to and I'll read Gensler's statement in a bit guys um Kyle when I'm bringing back to the markets probably the question I've been asking the most your thoughts on the on the maybe the east pump and and a bunch of alts pumping um was that

expected and and what could we see next yeah i was expected i made a video on this i think um at least a month ago then another one but two weeks ago uh especially when everyone was you know saying solana was gonna completely surpass eth uh you know i think attention our markets uh describe you know when price is up the tech is good when price is down the tech sucks um and we we knew for we knew the whole time that this eth the next narrative to look forward to was ETH narrative. And then ETH would come back. I opened up an ETH long quite a while ago. And I actually made a video the other day saying literally exactly the second that the Bitcoin ETF is approved, all attention will flip to ETH.

And you have a lot of interesting developments. But why? I don't get why. If we've priced in the ETF approval, then shouldn't we price in the ETH ETF getting likely approved not long afterwards? It's definitely not priced in. The Bitcoin ETF wasn't priced in either.

You quoted me last time, Mario, and the last time I was on, it was, what is, it was, the ETF is priced in for all of us who have been in the markets, right? We bought everything that we wanted to buy, coming into, but it wasn't priced in for everybody who was not able to buy. And on the last time that we were on too,

we talked about that study that showed how many people weren't able to buy from institutional level because it wasn't legally allowed for them to do so um like michael saylor just tweeted like an hour ago talking about that tomorrow bitcoin publicly starts trading and so even though we saw like a pretty good sell-off and people taking profits as soon as the etf was approved it doesn't mean it was priced in it just meant that miners were selling and that people who open up longs leading up to the ETF approval were taking profits.

And now they're rotating into ETH because they know that ETH is the next evolving narrative. But let me, it's how we work. We always look forward to the event, right? And so now it's down to ETH. But I have another, I wanted to interrupt because i'm just going through gary's statement and he says the following and let me know this event this statement changes uh your opinion on the likelihood of the eftp of getting approved importantly today's commission action is capped this cabin to etp is holding one non-security commodity bitcoin

it should in no way signal the commission's willingness to approve listing standards for crypto asset securities nor does the approval signal anything about the commission's view as to the status of other crypto assets under the federal securities laws or about the current state of noncompliance of certain crypto asset market participants with the federal securities laws. So that's just a traditional statement you'd expect? Or is it taking a jab at the ECTF? No, I had this discussion with my research team earlier too. They were leaning toward the same direction that you were because Bitcoin is the only crypto that we have had clarity on that wasn't a security. Even though ETH previously had been hinted at with that same statement. But the fact is,

I mean, we saw this interview with Gary Gensler before when he was interviewed by, I think someone from Fox, right? And it was the second, I think I talked about it. I wasn't sure if I was on your show or my show, but you could tell it was the first time that Gary came out

with a different tone about the ETF, right? And what he said was that he basically came out with his old educational professor type of attitude where he was saying, you have to understand that ETFs are securities and they will be regulated by the SEC as securities. And the Bitcoin ETF is a commodity wrapped in a security regulated by the SEC. So even if there's not clarity on Ethereum, whether it is a commodity or security, it doesn't matter.

The Ethereum ETF will be a security regardless. And so that's why I don't think it matters whatsoever because the second you wrap it in an ETF, it can be regulated by the SEC. Yeah, and then you're still taking jabs that I'm going through the statement, though, we're merit mutual, I'd know that the underlying asset in the metals ETPs have consumer and industrial uses. While in contrast, Bitcoin is primarily a speculative, volatile asset that's also used for illicit activity including ransomware money laundering he just approved the ETF and he's pointing this out again money laundering sanction invasion and terrorist financing uh so she came in for I did not see Kyle how an ectf

um last time I checked um dollar was used for all of this. Yeah. Yes, David. David and Jason. They say that about crowdfunding too. Real quick. I think what's going to be really interesting is... I just want to clarify. Let me get Jason to jump in. Go ahead.

An understatement, then we'll go back to you, Kyle. Yeah. Sorry, I apologize. Yeah, just to be clear, when Gensler says non-security commodity, those are very specific words and words he's used in testimony before in Congress. And because what he's saying is that everything is basically a security,

like all commodities are securities. And that if you're able to label something, you're going to label it as a non-security commodity. Everything else that's a security asset token, such as Ethereum and everything else, he's drawing a line in the sand. And he's saying, just as I want to say Ethereum is not a security, he's now created an argument where he's saying no other ETF can get approval until you show the commission that you're a non-security commodity. And as far as he's concerned, only Bitcoin's met that test. So for an Ethereum ETF to be launched, they would have to meet the same rule here that Gensler's put out. And so those words are very specific, non-security commodity. And he's only

given that to Bitcoin, both in his testimony and here now. So there's just no likelihood of any other ETF from any other coin whatsoever. For how long? That's today. Until they meet this test of a non-security commodity, which to be a little cynical is probably until Gensler actually leaves office. Because I think that Gensler here is crowning Bitcoin as the champion, even though it's related to all these other things. And it's the only one that he actually wants to give anything to.

He wants his legacy to be, OK, I supported Bitcoin. I have supported a Bitcoin ETF. But all this other stuff, just it has to leave it. Why do you think Standard Chartered made the projection that an ETH ETF could be approved by the second or third quarter of this year. Well, I mean, it could. And if Standard Chartered understands the direction that the SEC is heading with Ethereum. But I don't know exactly who analyzed it at Standard Chartered.

But I'll say this, is that the reason that Gary Gensler has never answered in Congress or said why Ethereum is a security is it's a dilemma for him because then he opens it up to all the other ETFs like Solana and everything else. Yeah, so you're dropping out, Jason. Yeah, you're cutting out, Jason. But let me go, Kyle, I want to go back to you. I think, Jason, you're cutting out. I think it's on Ethereum. Okay. Yeah, Kyle, I'll give you the mic.

In the meantime, in the audience, I want to just get the audience's thoughts. In the bottom right corner of the purple circle, do you think an ETH will be approved this year or not? Is that a logical trade to make, Kyle? By the way, just really quick, really quick. So Barry Silbert and DCG just put out a statement. Mary, if you want to read it or take a look at it.

Please, yeah. If you can send it to me, that would be yeah but i i've got it right here dcg statement on spot bitcoin etf approval you can read it uh since launching in 2013 as the first bitcoin fund in the u.s the grayscale bitcoin trust has amassed nearly 1 million investors and more than 28 billion in aum under management, with hundreds of millions of dollars in daily trading volume following Grayscale's historic court victory last year. Today's approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States represents a monumental shift towards mainstream adoption of digital currencies. We look forward to seeing the growth and innovation that results across our industry in the years ahead. And Barry Silbert tweeted,

since its first day of trading on the OTC markets in May of 15, GBTC has generated returns of 8,000 plus percent, vastly outperforming the S&P, NASDAQ, gold, and tech stocks, et cetera, et cetera, over the same time period. David? Yes, Mario? I thought you were responding to the Siamian. Yeah, I just want to say it's 6 a.m. here,

so let me just say this and then I'll tap out. While it's been easy for people to criticize Bitcoin because of its earlier days and how it was used and because its only purpose essentially is either a store of value or you could say a peer-to-peer digital cash in a way, I think what will be an eye-opener for people, especially on the Ethereum narrative, is when you look at the efficiency of capital that's being created is unbelievable, right? Like the traditional finance people cannot even wrap their heads around the kinds of innovation that's being created in DeFi. You know, a huge narrative that's developing in the Ethereum ecosystem is restaking or eigenlayer, which is being developed, which will allow you to essentially take your staked ETH and run it on something like eigenlayer, which allows you to transfer the ownership of that staked ETH to validate or secure another protocol. So let's say that you stake your ETH,

and then let's say a Chainlink oracle needs security or validation as well. You'd be able to stake your ETH, take that, put it through Eigen layer, take that staked ETH. And then you can also secure a chain link oracle and earn yield from the securing of the chain link oracle and earn yield from the staked ETH on top of that. And that can be done multiple times to where you're able to earn something like 15% on something like Ethereum. And there's already a lot of talks in the traditional world about how Ethereum, because of its ability to be used as a validator, to be staked and earned 4.5% a year as an amazing asset to hold, validate and earn that 4.5% because that's good by any traditional financial means. But as we start to innovate, remove middlemen

and create the most efficient financial system in the world, it will be a whole different way to look at it, right? But this is such a nascent industry. We're only kind of as a global world kind of starting to understand Bitcoin. But when people start to understand what Ethereum and applications can do and DeFi, it's going to completely change the game to an entirely different view. I think another thing I want to ask you, David, I saw you earlier,

and I think this is going to become like a massive marketing machine for crypto. It's more than the inflows that we're going to see. It's going to become part of the narratives. You're going to see all the ads in the Super Bowl. And people are already talking about it more than probably the most we've seen since the last bull market. Your thoughts, David? Yeah, I mean, going back to this again, and again, I look at Betterment. That was like 2008, 2009.

And then 2012, 2013, I was at Y Combinator. Coinbase was there. WeFunder was there. And even looking at crowdfunding, that rapidly changed. All of a sudden, you went from raising a million where Exodus Wallet raised $75 million in one day. So again, I think we're talking about subjective conversations. I think this whole thing with this ETF getting approved is many other things are going to come about it.

Yes, the ETF is going to happen. You log into Fidelity. You can buy ETH. You can buy Bitcoin. Again, just like with crowdfunding, just like with cannabis, just like what I call this utopian asset class. Now we're going to be able to have some type of a credit card where we can spend our Bitcoin and actually have real balances where you can go to

a hotel somewhere. So that's what I'm looking forward to is actually seeing critical mass adoption. And I would candidly tell you, if Bitcoin in the next few weeks goes back to a $60,000 plus level, I wouldn't be surprised because there are people like my family, my grandparents that are waiting to buy, and they were waiting for the validation of these bigger firms that are in now. And I just don't think we're looking at that empathetic standpoint. Yeah, so I think I want to end it with like a question for all the panel, Scott, maybe starting with you. I don't know if you can unmute, you've got the kids. But what do you see Bitcoin? What is happening to Bitcoin and crypto over the next, maybe a boring summer and then a really, really, I would say bullish fall going into 2025. Numbers.

It should be a huge year based on the four year. No, no, no, thank you. Numbers. Numbers. You have to lead by example. We need everyone to give numbers. If you're the co-host- $4 billion per Bitcoin. Put it in the title. Come on, let's see how many people we get. Do you think we'll hit 100k for bitcoin this year yeah i think we'll go way above absolutely 1000

jesus all right stock talk the only time we can bring them back to earth all right great um 100k i think i think crystal ball yeah i think crystal balling the price is anyone's prediction. But what I'm going to be paying most attention to is what the inflows look like into these ETFs. I think that will be a great substitute for tea leaves, if you will, to see what the inflows look like. In fact, while we were talking on this conversation, Bloomberg dropped their expectations for tomorrow. So Bloomberg sees $4 to $5 billion of inflows tomorrow into these ETFs, and they see that number growing to $50 billion over the next two years. I think their number for tomorrow and for the next two years is probably conservative. That seems low to me.

Just off the top of my head, that feels like a very underwhelming amount. I would expect it over the course of two years to be probably much closer to 100 billion, if not more, in inflows. I think there will be an enormous appetite for these products going in the first year. I think what you can do,

which is a very simple thing to do that anyone can do, is just check the AUM on these ETFs on a weekly basis. And that will be a great gauge for any regular person to be able to tell what the institutional interest looks like for these names. Because if you look at the ownership for Bitcoin, it's still only 6% of people over 55 that own it. And so now you want to see, are those people going to get drawn in from these etfs and that's what the inflows will tell you and we're starting to see the market pump um not great i think over the last hour bitcoin is up three percent east is up another two percent east is over ten percent now it is pumping uh the market's got can you look at it the markets are doing pretty well now yeah

there's a market now including bitcoin now finally i think bitcoin i'm seeing 47 370-ish uh eth 2 573 bitcoin kind of catching up interestingly but yeah 23 but i didn't even know bunk is already in the top 100 coins it's up 23 percent single crypto market like 10% after hours to everything's up the central end is up shit yeah bonkers above the central end and stuff and even above suey um Simon 100 000 Bitcoin Simon your false hundred thousand dollar Bitcoin this year? Oh man, I'm not- You can't dance around. Today's the day the ETF got approved. You can break the tradition for one day to celebrate. Like for you, you've been in Bitcoin long enough.

Like you were there in the early, early days where you were last at. So this would mean a lot more to you than people came into the industry like me in 2017 or in Scott in 2023. Yeah, well, okay. Yeah yeah you know i hate doing prices but um a hundred thousand by the end of the year does that's i mean that doesn't seem unrealistic at all in relative to what we've done in the past and if we carry on the same cycle as we always have then yeah yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.

Bill? Yeah, I mean, look, you guys had me on, I think it was last summer or spring when everybody was super bearish. Everybody's probably forgotten that by now. And I think I told you guys liquidity had bottomed in Q4 and I think we're going higher for the year. And I'm pretty sure I was the only one on the call that said that. Significantly higher, I think I said. And I think Bitcoin was in the for the year. And I'm pretty sure I was the only one on the call that said that. Significantly higher, I think I said. And I think Bitcoin was in the low 20s at the time.

And I think that we're going to get at least two, probably four rate cuts this year. I think the reverse repo program is going to basically be drained. I think they're going to start bringing out all of the election year tools to pump more liquidity in the system, which is going to basically have a massive effect on risk on assets. And crypto this year is basically going to be a levered play on that. You know, whether you like your projects beyond Bitcoin or not, it is what it is. And so yeah, i think uh you know whether it turns out to be december this year or q1 next year i i do think we're going to uh the low hundred thousands and probably a melt up to one 140 150 before we see a huge pullback yeah go well i i my my feeling is it's

going to continue to grind up i think there's a good likelihood for another big drop probably before the halving. So my guess would be March. But I think we're going to see a grind the last quarter of this year, I think we'll be well above last all-time highs, and I'll be very disappointed if we're not at 120 by the end of the year. But I think that there's a pretty good chance that it will continue to grind up from there for quite a while, and that this may prove to be a more grinding and longer bull market than previous. We'll keep it short.

David, Jason, Gorav, and Alex, we do have to wrap it. David, 100,000 Bitcoin by the end of the year? 111,000 by the end of the year. Love it. Jason? Only if a Republican is elected president in 2024. I agree. I agree.

That's a fair statement. Gaurav? 100, of course, any time. But way more than that, I'm sure. All the challenges the previous speakers have mentioned will be covered by people like yourself who will keep doing shows, like Bill said, on the amount of bitcoin accumulated

by these etfs and their you know weekly changes and stuff like that and they'll keep the people informed that the institutions are are bagging you know big time so i'm sure it's any time bigger than i mean 100k or 150k easily alex alex, it's definitely north of 100k, but even more than that, as I'm sure Yago will agree with me, what you're really going to see is two orders of magnitude increase on all the DeFi built on top of Bitcoin.

And I think that's going to drive it even more. Cool. Well, on that point, I think we can wrap it. We'll see everyone tomorrow. The ETF is finally approved for the second time this week and is a great coverage I appreciate everyone joining last minute and Scott you can go and have fun with the kids thanks everyone