The Wolf Of All Streets - The REAL Reason Banks Are Secretly Terrified Of Bitcoin & Crypto | Alex Thorn

Episode Date: March 29, 2026

Alex Thorn breaks down the hidden war between Wall Street and crypto, and the picture is far bigger than price. In this conversation, he explains why banks are quietly building on crypto rails while their lobbyists work to slow the industry down, why retail has checked out even as institutions keep leaning in, and why Bitcoin may be entering a phase most investors still do not understand. He also lays out why crypto suddenly feels “boring,” why that may actually be a sign of deeper adoption, and why the next major catalyst for Bitcoin could come from AI, autonomous agents, and the growing need for digitally scarce money in a world drowning in digital abundance. If you want the bigger macro, policy, and technology picture behind what’s happening in crypto right now, this is the interview to watch.

What if crypto's biggest breakthrough is also the thing, making investors the most confused? In this conversation, Alex Thorne breaks down the strange moment we're in right now, where the biggest banks in the world are quietly building on crypto rails, while their lobbyists work overtime to slow down the entire industry. They face the innovator's dilemma here, where they have to innovate faster than the disruptors can dislodge them. They'd want to be working to incorporate the products and slowing down the disruption. It's actually a smart strategy if it is their strategy. We get into why the Clarity Act may be in more trouble than most people realize.

Why Bitcoin in the 70,000 still feels like a bare market. Why retail has completely lost the plot while institutions keep leaning in. There is a huge delta between institutions and retail. Basically, every big bank and brokerage is doing a bunch, right? That's real money and work being put towards it. That's actually building stuff. So that obviously shows where they think the ball is going and they're putting real money behind their conviction in blockchains,

assets, Bitcoin, whatever it may be, right? Meanwhile, like, retail is hurting and disillusioned. And I think there's some reasons for that that are interesting as well. And how crypto may be suffering from something no one expected. Success that looks boring. Maybe crypto's boring now, basically. If it's just sort of back office tech upgrade for the traditional capital market system, like that's, you know, people aren't getting out of bed and like saying how interesting SQL databases are, right? Alex also explains why Wall Street still doesn't fully understand. Bitcoin, by the next real catalysts may come from AI instead of politics, and why the collision between crypto, tradvi, and autonomous agents could be one of the most important stories of the

next decade. This one goes way deeper than price. Let's go. Alex, he wrote an incredible article on X. Big bank monopoly under threat from innovators with one of the greater images I've seen, which says banks crash out overfed skinny master account and stable coins. Yeah. A little tension right now between our industry and the banks.

Yeah, there is. I mean, I think, first of all, I mean, what a milestone, right? Like the mere fact that we're discussing this shows just how far crypto and blockchains have come, right? Like that it actually matters this. I mean, you know, five years ago, like, they just didn't care. The banks didn't care what was going on, right? They claimed that none of their clients wanted to buy Bitcoin and, like, none of this mattered. Now they're crashing out, right?

Like, that's an improvement. It's a representative of the fact that. it is an improvement. But they are all building stuff now, genuinely, like all the big banks and brokerages. But at the same time, their lobbyists are obstructing. It's two things happening at the same time, right? It's very possible the Bank Policy Institute might sue the Fed over the Skinny Master account that they've given to crack in.

There was a report on Monday in The Guardian about the Bank Policy Institute thinking about suing the OCC over giving licenses. And of course, you know, it's well known they're obstructing on the Clarity Act, you know, specifically related to the issue of Stable Corn Rewards, but it's starting to look to me like it's actually a more coherent strategy of delay, block, give them more time to build, right? And because it's not, I mean, I don't think it's not, it's not, it's also not obvious that if Stable Corn Reward issue is resolved, then the rest of the bill will skate through, right? This is sort of just the hill the parties are dying on now.

So, yeah, I think that's a really. fascinating tension between their efforts to build and adopt and integrate while also their lobbyists are simultaneously obstructing. Yeah, I mean, I've been dangling way out on the smallest limb by my feet saying clarity has basically zero percent chance of passing at this point, which is funny because I was in the 100 percent. Of course, we've got Trump camp, you know, for a few months and genius passed, and I thought we had all of the tailwinds we could possibly need. But once I saw the delays in the markup and the Brian Armstrong, No Bill is better than a, bad bill language. I really turned completely on a dime and I've seen nothing to convince me otherwise.

To your point, stable coin yield is the big story, but it's not the story at all. That's the story in my mind of crypto versus the banks, but it's not the story of Republicans versus Democrats, which is what it actually takes to get a bill. Yeah. Yeah, there are other issues. Part where they're going to argue about ethics. Ethics. You could imagine like some of the stuff in Title III of that bill, which is all the defyne, AML, KYC, Bank Secrecy Act. stuff. It's not clear that there has been a compromise on those issues, right? Like some reporting about, I saw today from Frank Corva that it's possible that even the BRCA might have been offered by some party in some negotiation as part of a, which is the blockchain regulatory clarity act. It's the

language that protects open source developers. I don't think that that would ever be given away. That would kill the bill. Crypto would walk if that's not in it. But I mean, like, you can imagine there's a whole host of possible other things that could stop the bill from happening. And they're running out of time. Like, it's mid-March. Like, this thing is, you know, without getting too arcane, like, the Senate doesn't have, like, unlimited time. Like, there's other stuff they've got to work on.

And I think if you don't get a coherent deal, like, by April, like, it probably is dead in this Congress because they don't have to start working on other stuff. Exactly. And even the other bills that they need to pass. They got to go get on the phone and start raising money. I mean, I'm still hopeful it can happen. But I don't think we should, you know, it's definitely not a guarantee. I had a conversation with Chris John Carlo, the former CFTC chairman, Crypto Dad, a couple weeks ago, and we had just put it out.

And he made a lot of points that I hadn't really thought about at all. First of all, he views Genius Act as much more sinister than most because it basically locked in, you know, Bank Secrecy Act policy into stable coins. And now the government and private companies both have visibility into our stable coin transaction, which was kind of the worst fears of CBDC. and then he pointed out all these kind of similar ideas about clarity that, you know, he actually is somewhat optimistic, but not sure it will be a good bill, right? So like there we have this fear, I guess, now that even if it does get past, it will be a Trojan horse for the banking industry, right, which is the last thing we want. I'm old enough to remember when the Inflation Reduction Act was gaslighting and didn't actually

reduce inflation, so I have my doubts that the Clarity Act will actually give us clarity. Yeah, I mean, I think there's there are some valid fears about that. I think, you know, look, I'm more positive on genius, I think, than it sounds like that former Cherokee and Carlo is. But it is true. And we wrote a report like in mid-January after the Senate draft came out of clarity saying that, you know, not that it's necessarily malicious or bad, but clarity includes like the single greatest expansion of the Patriotax financial surveillance power since 2000.

2001, just to be aware. People should be aware of that. That's a fact. So, yeah, I mean, there's stuff in here that is problematic and might help established institutions better than startups, and there's plenty of stuff. I mean, I think the bull case for clarity, generally speaking, is that, like, crypto's probably fine for the next couple years, at least during this administration. It's likely to get a lot of what clarity has in the language of the legislation through, administrative guidance and exemptive relief from the agencies, right? But like, and who knows? Maybe fair shake and crypto can, you know, help keep pro-bitcorn and crypto politicians in office in future elections. But two and a half years pretty good. But, you know, the capital markets industry

is still based on a foundation of laws written in the 1930s, right? The Securities Exchange Act, the 34 Act. These, getting something like clarity codified in federal statute is, better than two and a half years. It's the kind of thing that a hundred year industry could be built upon. And so like, it is important to codify that you can sell and trade digital commodities like Bitcoin, right? That you can, if it's a security,

then there's a license for that. And like, get rid of all the gray area. That is definitely positive. But again, like, you know, you're dealing with the political reality of the current Senate break down. I mean, Republicans probably need like nine Democrats to vote yes on this to even advance it to the floor. Right? Like, so you're constrained by the politics. You've got timing issues. And, and of course, you've got the big banks. Really, their lobbyists are on the other side of this table right now. They are not, even though they're building, I mean, it's like, right? Citadel is sponsoring papers that say tokenized securities are bad, but they also did a strategic investment of $200 million into Cracken. Right. Like, the Bank Policy Institute is threatening to sue the OCC. Meanwhile, like, Morgan Stanley is building crypto custody and stuff. Right. So it's like,

this incongruent, like, tension is super interesting. I think it's, I don't know if that, by the way, is a unified, explicit strategy on behalf of the banks to build while delaying to give themselves time to build. But if it was, you could imagine that's a pretty good strategy because they face the innovator's dilemma here where they have to innovate faster than the disruptors can dislodge them, right? And, like, so they'd want to be working to incorporate the products and slowing down the disruption. That's actually a smart strategy, if it is their strategy. I don't know that they've chosen that as a strategy, but that's empirically what they're doing. It's very, very interesting. I mean, JP Morgan doesn't want their new logo to be a blockbuster.

Right, right. And also in that same conversation, I hate to keep referencing it, but I think it aligns very much with what you're saying about them slowing it down so they can catch up. John Carlow told me, in his opinion, that the banks need the clarity act more than the crypto industry does, because their banks and they literally need the clarity on how they can use this technology and custody of these assets and move forward even for building their own businesses on the blockchain side. So I think you're probably right. They want a favorable clarity act, but they do need something as well. I think that is right. I think that's like I said, crypto's never been in a better regulatory position. So it's not like urgent that crypto get this

clarity. I think for crypto, it's more about preventing rollback in the case of a hostile administration, right? Getting that last final leg of clarity that can bring in the final holdout of institutional investment or something, right? But otherwise, like, it's doing pretty well. And the banks, it's, yeah, I mean, look, they can also get guidance from their regulators that let them do stuff. But yeah, I mean, I think there's truth to that. That they, they, reality is everyone wants this codified in federal statute. Everybody, like the crypto industry generally wants it. The banks need it and brokerages need and want it. But again, I think it's it's really, you know, the politics are hard. I mean, you've got at least one Republican who will

vote against it, I think in Josh Hawley. Rand Paul probably also votes against it. He voted against genius. So now you're down to, now you need nine. I think you're down to 51 then of Republicans. And that's if every single Republican votes yes. And of course, they may not. So it's just, I mean, that's obviously where this, we just didn't, you know, the crypto industry didn't quite win hard enough in Congress, basically, to make this easy. But, you know, that's also okay. This has already been a multi-congress effort, right? They pass fit 21 under Biden's presidency. Right.

So, like, you know, sometimes big laws take a couple years, you know, so. It turns out maybe we're not the most important people in the whole room. Well, that's right. They got other stuff to work. I kind of blows my mind, actually, as you said it in passing before. but there's a bigger idea there, which is, well, the crypto industry and the banks, neither than would ever agree to that. And, like, I'm also old enough to remember when politicians made policy and not lobbyists.

It's funny that we are saying all the quiet parts out loud about whose interests are being represented and how, and it's in plain sight and nobody cares. Like, neither Brian Armstrong or Jamie Diamond should have any say in the Clarity Act in reality. I don't know if that's true, but I understand your point. It should be able to give input. We should not have the narrative that, oh, he can. killed it. Yeah, or right, or that like, you know, they have to go behind closed doors and hammer out a deal before the bill can be moved. I agree. It's, it's interesting. You're right. It is interesting.

And a lot of people who haven't been, you know, a lot of people in crypto, this last couple years has been their sort of first real in-depth, you know, look behind the scenes of how politics works in Washington. I tend to think it's fine. It sometimes doesn't look the way you're taught in like, you know, sixth grade civics class, but it is what democracy looks like, right? I mean, you have the ability to, you know, press your interests to your, you know, representatives.

And it's, yeah, it's just like the thing about the bank's position, right, it's so much about, like, they keep claiming that there's fears of, like, destabilizing the banking system, right? It poses a risk to the financial system. They think Cracken, if they have a payments account at the Fed, poses a risk to the banking system. They think OCC giving trust charters to crypto firms and fintech firms poses a risk to the banking system. They think stable coin rewards pose a risk. And it's just not credible.

Like it's like, and there's been an industry that has consistently posed a risk to the banking system. It's called the banking. Banking system. The banking industry, right? Like repeatedly over decades has blown up the banking system. It's been the banks that have done. That's what I'm saying, though. So, like, it's so much more, to me, I think it's pretty transparently about, like, moat protection and maintaining a monopoly.

The skinny master account's a great example. Like, people don't realize this, but, like, you can't move dollars in America without using a bank that has a Fedmaster account. PayPal? They're using a correspondent bank with a Fedmaster account. They're not able to offer loans. They're not doing yield. Like, they're getting none of the, like, beloved fractional reserve banking system services. is able to move money.

Right, exactly. But I think that's why the fears of it destabilize, this language they've been deeply concerned that poses a threat to the, and it's like guys, like just, you know, I mean, I wish they would, but I get that they wouldn't, even if they believe this, but like come out and say what you really mean, guys, right?

You don't want a class of new, highly technological competitors disrupting your multi-decade monopoly on payments, which is what they've had. It's not, it hasn't always been like that in the U.S., And it's not like that in the UK or in Europe where both of those central banks give such payment only accounts to firms like Revolut and Stripe. So like it's not like a crazy idea that you'd let someone other than a highly levered lender operate payments. Like why is it that Americans have to choose in order to send a payment, basically have to use a lending institution that has a zero percent reserve ratio? Like, why is that?

Shouldn't you, like, you shouldn't have to do that, right? It's a whole other, it's a strange, like, regulatory artifact in America that doesn't quite, like, make sense from first principles, and that's why they're opposed to it, I think. That doesn't make sense from first principles because it doesn't make sense because it's in their own self-level. Right. Which, again, from their perspective, I think it's totally fine. Like, that's reasonable for them to view it that way. It's just not, you know, they can't, they're not making that argument publicly.

So I want to pivot a bit to market and cycle or actually more specifically about sentiment. I think everybody's trying to mentally unpack what's been happening with the market over the past year, if not years. You know, the four-year cycle argument of whether it's dead or in existence, probably not worth rehashing. But I think what's become exceptionally clear is that there's a massive divide between retail and institutional sentiment and involvement. I'm assuming you've done quite a bit of research on that. Yeah, and I think that's absolutely right. There is a huge delta between institutions and retail. I think we've talked to, I mean, I mostly have been complaining about the banking lobby,

but at the top, I mean, the sheer number of announcements, just your date and launches of Tradfai crypto products is astounding. It's basically every big bank and brokerage is doing a bunch, right? That's real money and work being put towards it. That's not just saying they like blockchains. It's actually building stuff. So that obviously shows where they think the ball is going and they're putting real money behind their conviction in blockchains, tokenized assets, Bitcoin, whatever it may be, right? Meanwhile, like retail is, you know, hurting and disillusioned.

And I think there's some reasons for that that are interesting as well. But also, like, one of the ones I've come around to that's related to the institutional is that maybe crypto's boring. now, basically, if it's just sort of back office tech upgrade for the traditional capital market system, like, that's, you know, people aren't getting out of bed and, like, saying how interesting SQL databases are, right? And it, and it, there's a, there's a, malaise that emanates from that realization that it may be getting boring, because Satoshi said the root problem with fiat money is all the trust that's required to make it work, and the central bank can't be trusted because it constantly debases, right? He didn't say

the root problem with fiat money is that, like, we don't have. have a good enough settlement system at the New York Stock Exchange, right? And it seems like that's, but, you know, I think it's inevitable that that is what was always going to happen, but it contributes to, like, you have this long-term, highly philosophical cypherpunk ideal that you're striving towards, that everything's going to be decentralized, and instead you're sort of getting, you know, the big banks are adopting it. And like, I think, you know, people shouldn't feel malaise about that and sad about that. That's kind of what winning was always going to look like.

But I do think that is contributing. Like the delta itself is part of the thing that's causing it, the delta between retail and institutional. Because people are like, well, wait a sec. I thought this was about empowering individuals. And now it looks like it's empowering the traditional capital markets more than individuals. That's one of the aspects, not the only one. I think if we're really intellectually honest about it, as well, nobody actually, in retail, cared about the adoption of the technology.

They cared about their bags going up. Yeah. The more adoption we get of the technology without their bags going up, the more questionable it becomes as an investable asset class for people looking to Yolo in and make 10x games. Especially with, like, mega hot investing trends like AI and quantum and gold, right, that are crowding out the energy for Bitcoin. Right? Oil and silver.

Yeah, I mean, like, it's, you know, when you look at something like the volatility of Bitcoin, you're like, well, I could have doubled in two years by owning low volatility gold, but I have to, right, it's a harder case to make and attention and sort of the boring nature of blockchain tech adoption. Like the fact that it's becoming integrated also means it's not like, it doesn't feel as cutting edge as it used to, right? So it's just sort of lost some investor mind share for the moment. I mean, I think it, I'm very confident it will come back. It's just that like, you know, and here we are talking about the malaise of a bear market and Bitcoin's at $71,000 as we record this. It's just like, what a trip.

But like, you know, there is, there is a malaise. And also, I think another huge part for the negative sentiment is both among institutional investors and retail investors. It's hard for people to envision what the next catalyst look like, right? because you got so many shockingly, previously unthinkably bullish exogenous catalysts last year with the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and these appointees at all the agencies that love crypto and like the president talking and launching his own meme coin. Like it's kind of like how can we like surely that like that feels like the top that can't be surpassed.

Like you're not going to get a president who's even more pro crypto than President Trump, right? So like people feel like we've exhausted those. catalyst categories and, you know, where are we going to get the next sort of event-driven catalyst that rockets us higher? And I think that's a big source of the despair as well, as the feeling that, like, we already got everything that we could ever have imagined and still we only got to 126. Yeah, I've long made the argument, not for Bitcoin, but for quote-unquote crypto, if we're separating the two, that you don't get a more firm ceiling than the most famous person on the planet launching a token.

Right. We were never going higher in the crypto market than a Donald Trump beam coin. I think that's right. I think there's a lot of truth to that. I think there is. But on the other hand, there are catalysts coming, to be clear. But they just don't feel as like event-driven, spontaneous, you know, exorbitant or, like, incredible as the president going on the steps of the White House or in the White House saying Bitcoin strategic for the government, right? Like, you know, you've got like institutional adoption, tons of things that are that are genuinely happening, the inclusion of Bitcoin and model portfolios and this and that, et cetera, right?

Like, and that is important. That's actually going, those are going to be big catalysts for us. But again, it just doesn't top like the president, you know. Yeah. I think we generally tend to look for these easy to like handicap or very well projected catalysts, and they're never the ones that send the market. But nobody knew that Sailor was going to come in with micro strategy, which, you know, seems like a huge story now, but it was just micro strategy at the time. But that was sort of the catalyst for that full market to some degree. And then, of course, Tesla followed and so we did see that.

But nobody thought that Silicon Valley Bank failing. Nobody was projecting that for the Bitcoin would kind of pop off that bottom from 19 and back up to the 50. It went like up 30% or something a few days after that. And that was kind of like put in the bottom there, you know, to some degree. I just, I think there's unexpected catalysts that are potentially there as well, and it's never the glaring ones that you expect.

Yeah, and I think I totally agree. And Wall Street also, you know, another thing that institutional investors are, you know, upset about is that gold and Bitcoin hadn't traded together since like September, and there's, you know,

people have said, like, is the digital gold thesis dead? And I was like, let me just explain this because I know Wall Street got like a little head of itself here. Like, they, the digital gold thesis was not explicitly

that Bitcoin and gold would trade with high beta to each other. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, it emanates from a Satoshi Nakamoto post.

Right. Like, it's fundamentally similar in gold-like in certain ways. And Satoshi was the first, I mean, maybe not the first, but he pointed this out

in a 2010 blog post on Bitcoin Talk. Remember, he has a thought experiment. He says, like, imagine if, there was a base metal, but it was odorless and not physical, but you could move it anywhere

and, like, would that be valuable? Like, it didn't look like, it wasn't shiny, right? Like, it's pourable, durable, verifiable, scarce. Like, all of those things, gold is as well, to some extent, right? Like, that's the thesis is that it's fundamentally useful in a way that is similar to the way gold is useful. It's not issued by a sovereign, right? And I think we've got to get back to telling that fundamental story better and more loudly, right? That also, you know what? If you're in a trade based on the debasement of fiat currencies or the never-ending debt spiral of sovereigns, which is true everywhere, not just in the U.S., right?

Like, and you're fleeing to gold, like, if your thesis is geopolitical and economic unrest related to debt and a shifting multipolar world, like, Bitcoin's way more useful to you than gold. You can't send a billion dollars of your GLD-ETF shares across the world. world in 10 minutes. You can't store large amounts of wealth in physical gold because it's too bulky, right? But you can have a billion dollars on a flash drive if it's Bitcoin or in your head. And I think people don't really realize that. And I believe just on it, when I describe that tool and I don't tell myself that it's Bitcoin that we know about, just objectively that tool

sounds very useful to me and would be very valuable to the world to have. And that is why Bitcoin is valuable, to be clear, but I mean, like, that, those features become fundamentally more useful in the future that's currently playing out with a more multipolar world and, you know, debt that is, you know, money that has to basically inflate forever, right? Like, it's, it's more useful, not less useful now. So I think that's more of like a trader, like the traders are upset that, like, they thought it was digital gold that they thought that meant X-A-U-S-D, right? Yeah, it drives me nuts. It tries me nuts that people think you should be able to lay one chart on top of the other because the beauty of Bitcoin price, if we're not talking about the

fundamental properties or even value, is its lack of correlation to everything, right? I mean, the holy grail for an investor's portfolio is something with idiosyncratic properties, right? And so now people are very upset that Bitcoin didn't follow gold, but if you actually zoom out and think about it rationally, it also didn't participate in the stock market boom, which means that it actually improves a sharp ratio of your portfolio because it's truly uncorrelated. Sometimes that just means your thing doesn't go up when everything else goes up. Yeah, that's right.

And also means you can go up when everything else doesn't. So it's like you have to just zoom out and not look at it right now. I kind of love the fact that my pounding, whether I'm right or not, pounding on the desk that this is uncorrelated, looks kind of good even when the price looks kind of bad. Yeah, I mean, you, I guess theoretically, whatever. everybody want. They want uncorrelated to the upside and then perfect, like, right? Like, want it to go up when their other things go down, but also go up. That's what they actually want when they say uncorrelated. But I agree. I think that's a great point. And keep in mind also,

like, gold, what, like doubled from like the 2000 range to 5,000 range, $2,500 over the last couple years. Bitcoin was up, what, six and a half X or something, like from 23 to present or 23 to the top. So it's like, okay, you're looking at six months since September where it, happened to go down while gold continue to go up. But like, you know, gold doubled. Bitcoin did more than 5x, right? Like, so like it just rallied first and more and like, and it's smaller. And so it's a lot of cherry picking. This is the type of stuff, though, that happens in a, in a bare market, right? Where it's just like everyone's looking for a reason to blame and stuff. But that's one that I've also heard. They're mad about gold performing and not Bitcoin. But it seems very short-sighted to me.

Yeah, because it also isn't following tech as they thought it would. that it's very confusing when none of your narratives play out in real time. You're obviously, you know, head of firm-wide research at Galaxy, so you're probably looking at everything. Did you ever think two, three, I don't know, four years ago that we would all have to become, like, macroeconomists and that we'd have to be experts in monetary policy and gold, oil, war, politics?

Yeah. Maybe a little, but it's been, it's been, It's been fascinating to watch and watch the crypto industry have to evolve, right, to learn about this. I think it's because Bitcoin is a macro asset. Like, Bitcoin is literally on dashboards all over Wall Street that have, like, equity indices, commodities, debt, and Bitcoin. Like, on CNBC, they show the price of Bitcoin about every 30 seconds, right? Like, so, and on Bloomberg, right? So it just, it's, it, that, because of that, like, people, some people trade it like that, right?

and trade it as in their bucket. And remember, like, this is really interesting. Like two years ago or so on a weekend, it was there was an Iran, I think it was the time when Iran sent a bunch of drones to Israel and Israel shot them down or something. It was on a Saturday. Only Bitcoin trading, really.

It was available and it dumped from like 62 to like 45 or something during that long period of chop in 2024. This time with the Iran conflict, Bitcoin was held up well and kind of rallied a bit after. and it looked like people instead were selling like gold and oil futures on hyperliquine. Right? So it's like, and I think the reason for that is not because Bitcoin isn't still a 24-7, 365 macro asset. It is.

But I think most of the people that like to trade it like that had already sold, basically. Like the macro weekend warrior tourists, they're the ones that sold us down from 100 to 70-ish, not necessarily only them, but right. Like you're looking at a pretty firm base now, I think, of long time. holders, which is pretty remarkable when you think about that, because, like, you know, we can go lower to, like, I'm not saying the bottom is definitely in, but, like, this is looking like a pretty sturdy area at this point. I've been down here for a month and a half, two full months or something more since the start

of the year even, right? And, like, if the floor is 60 or even, you know, even if it's 50, the floor last time was 15.5, right? Like, you're materially growing, right? Like, people that are willing to hold through a 50% decline are long-term investors. Yeah, I completely agree with that. When you zoom out, you're just excited to buy more at 50 if it goes there. Yeah, I am.

Like, I'm like, go down, please. I know where it's going, or at least I have a very strong conviction in where it's eventually going. I'm certainly not selling it anytime soon. Yeah, me neither. I haven't. I'd rather be buying at 50 than 150. It's literally that hoddle, the original hoddle post, where he's like,

he's like, some of you traders, like you can sell every top and buy every dip, but like, I think Pat Piffy Wing Wang I think is what the guy wrote in that famous

hoddle, I'm hodeling post, right? And it's like, sure, would I technically have loved to have sold my Bitcoin at 126 and then re-bought it here? Of course I would have.

But I've been through this game too many times. I've been in Bitcoin for a long time. I know that trying to do that for when you have long-term conviction is really like, you're unlikely to succeed.

You're likely to screw up and end up having to buy back higher or sometimes. times and better to just DCA if you have a long-term view, no matter what it is, whether it's Bitcoin or anything else. You know, have your thesis and stick to your plan, right? And reevaluate if the plan or thesis needs to change. But I can tell you, Bitcoin's temporary inability to trade with high beta to X-A-U-S-D, that ain't causing me to reevaluate my plan. I can tell you that. Yeah. I think people are just out of money. Yeah, I mean, look, crypto to, I mean,

crypto has been a ride of spectacular failures and not even just like the really explosive ones, but like, you know, narratives that didn't play out. You think about the NFT, like boom and 21 and 2, or you think about like blockchain gaming and meme coins. All of these ultimately, not again, I don't even, I think they're empirically down significantly, but like, you know, maybe NFTs still become a thing. Maybe there's some great companies that are going to be building blockchain games. them you're down bad.

There's no question. Yeah. So like just repeated narrative. Yeah, repeated themes and narratives in the market that just like ultimately host retail if they didn't get out, right? So like that's, I mean, the meme coin frenzy last year, I think was really damaging in terms of capital, like to a lot of retail capital, right? And that's hard.

That's hard. And they, even their growth, I feel like, was part of a global despair among the, the, youth that their lives may not be better than their parents and like it's hard to get a job and the wealth inequality and crony capitalism has led them to things like gambling, that they have a better, they think they have a better shot at a thousand Xing a meme coin or a prediction market or sports gambling when they really should be learning about the hard money savings technology that is Bitcoin or other more productive investments and themes, right? But they're rolling the dice and pretty much everybody who rolled the dice on meme coins lost.

Historically, the wide proliferation of gambling on everything has ended badly and has been a sign of end times. I'm not saying that because I'm not like in the Weimar Republic, right? But that's very Weimar Republic type stuff that now you can like, well, my bank account's not going up and I'm not earning any money. So I might as well yolo into a bet on, you know, curling in the Olympics, which I know nothing about, but I'm going to watch it. So, curling was pretty good this time. I feel like we're kind of there. And maybe the quiet part out loud, I've been saying it out loud, is that that's why people were using all coins and meme coins was because they were desperate and were speculating.

And they've moved to greener pastures now that, you know, you get those same moves from, like you said, golden silver, war and prediction market. So if we lose all the speculators, who's left to buy these bags? Yeah. And I think the story is pretty bleak for a lot of those long-tail bags. because of that, right? Like, I mean, maybe not, you know, crypto majors. I think Bitcoin's a different story.

But, yeah, I mean, we did an estimate once I asked my team. How many tokens have been invented in crypto, like last year? I think the best number we could come up with is somewhere around 30 million. Obviously, you can't even fully know. But, like, I think it looks, yeah. Yeah, I think it looks. Yeah, it was a fun exercise because, like, that's a lot of data across a lot of chains. but I feel like, you know, if it is 30 million, probably 29.99 of them will never come back, right?

Like, maybe that I don't know how many coins you think have viable futures. No one really knows, but I'd say it's at least less than 100. It could be as few as 10. I mean, who knows? But like, at this moment, like, yeah, you need those speculative use cases. And it's not just like prediction markets or like even just like the rise of sports gambling over the last, you know, five years in the U.S. It's massive industry when they got the court ruling that then allowed them to break out into all the states.

And, like, that's destructive behavior. Gambling on things you can't control, right? Like, is straight up, like, dice rolling, right? Like, that's why, like, people prefer, like, to play Texas hold them sometimes rather than, like, roulette, you know? Like, at least there's some skill. Yeah. And you talk, I mean, even sports gambling, it's one thing that it's become so popular. but it's also down to the point where you can gamble on the yardage and the player on the next play.

Yeah, like who's going to catch the first pass. You can have an evolving bet or who catches, right, the next pass or the coin toss. This isn't just betting the spread where you could probably actually have an edge, right? You know, like I've done those big pools where you bet on the entire season. And the winner does like 54%. You know, like betting every game against a spread over the season, you like win a league of 2,000 people by being a at 55, 56%. It's really hard, but that 5% edge maybe

is real, like poker. But, like, who's catching the next pass unless you have some inside information, you're just... Yeah, or what... How long will the national anthem be in seconds? And stuff like that, you're right. It's, frankly, like, degenerate. Like, it's...

And I don't even mean that, like, they're degen's the people. I mean, it has degenerated down to, like, the most minuscule, granular gambling is rough. I agree. I think it's a... You know, it is a symptom of like societal decline in some ways. Like, it is because people had more productive things to do.

If they felt like they could do something and get rewarded for it where the incentives were correct, then I believe incentives work. And but it's, you know, the inflation, wealth inequality, right? Like these things are real and they've been getting worse. And so I think that that pushes people towards those things. And if crypto broadly isn't the vehicle for, that to manifest itself the way it certainly was with meme coins and even NFTs to an extent I had a pretty I mean that was a pretty wild bubble in NFTs like right that was a lot of like

swimming around Saturday Night Live it was Bieber and Fallon and right and I don't have any I don't have any problem if you want to own an NFT I actually think the generative stuff is pretty cool but like I mean $100,000 for an entry on the blockchain that is a picture of a monkey like that's crazy right like and not as crazy as two million bucks for a plot of land next to snoop's house in the sandbox or right I mean people for oh yeah the digital yeah the sandbox and you know I was there at the time I was pretty critical of the whole NFT craze not that I didn't believe it in it technologically and like you said cool great some of it is art but like I kept saying you know they can just like create another continent over there to the right of your land right so more of it this is

People were like, it's land in the Metaverse. I'm like, it's not land. I mean, even Meta changed their whole name, basically, because of Metaverse. It was crazy. I mean, again, these things still could happen. I actually, you know, I'm an optimist, right? Maybe NFTs find a whole second wave and some of the speculative nature declines and there's more utility or reason is decided to the market ascribes to it. Or same thing with Metaverse.

It's possible. I mean, look at Enterprise. blockchain. It's had like it's, it's on like its fifth resurrection now, you know, with like some of these federated networks where the nodes are run by like big banks and stuff. You know, I'm not trying to cast any specific shade at the moment. But like, that stuff has been dead so many times. And now even tokenization, there was a whole thing about tokenization like 17, 18 and 19. And like, remember there was the Gaspin, St. Regis, like a tiny portion of its shares were tokenized. We used to joke that there were more token issuance platforms at the time

than token issuances. But then here again. And it is back, right? And kind of back with an avengence at this point. And so, like, they could come back, you know. And I certainly wouldn't advise people to hold their breath for some of those for, like, you know, DeCentraland on the sandbox and blockchain gaming. And what was that? AXE and FIT, I mean, you know, NFT, like, I'm not saying that they're likely necessarily.

Absolutely. He's got so much promise that people were willing to go wildly out of their way to earn money playing a game. And we just never really got it off. author. I just think we've got to, the industry's got to get back to telling the core stories better, the core stories, right? It's about self-sovereignty and efficiency and transparency and transacting and, you know, atomic settlement and, you know, access to the unbanked or the underbanked and the movement of money and dollars in a safe and sovereign way and stuff like that. Like that's, that's, that is verifiably true, right? Like, those are, and those are big enough. We don't

have to, I don't know, I say we, but like, there isn't really no we. I mean, that's one of the beauties of open blockchains is anyone can build anything. So, you know, I don't know who I'm kind of yelling into the void on this, but like, that's where I, I've been trying to focus more is, when we take Bitcoin as the primary example is telling that fundamental story better, right? And saying it's not, it isn't about number go up. It will, it, number will go up if we're right about the fundamental features. Like, I think those are bullish for Bitcoin. It's features, right? But like the number go up should be subsequent to your understanding of the fundamental features. Yes, all of that said, I don't want to be all doomy and gloomy and about the

things that failed in the past. What are you excited about? Super excited about AI and a number of fronts, including the overlap with crypto. And I know that, you know, when you say that to crypto people, they mostly think of, you know, market, decentralized marketplaces for compute and things like BitTensor and whatnot, which I think are interesting. I think the agents are going to use crypto a lot. and I know this because I'm myself personally building an agent that uses crypto. And I saw there was a bank policy institute, the other BPI, the good BPI, the Bitcoin Policy Institute. They put out a great report recently where they did a big empirical study of something like 9,000 queries across all the frontier models. And they found that pretty overwhelmingly the autonomous AI chooses stable coins for payments, but Bitcoin for savings explicitly.

And I think it is, if you have a view that, like, agents are going to be acting autonomously, running their own businesses or whatever, they're going to, I think they're going to choose something to own that is self-sovereign. I think it's a pretty easy case to make to a logical machine that, like, why would you store your money in something that can be taken, right? Like, surely, and they are digital, right? So I think they're going to use Bitcoin and they're going to store in Bitcoin. I also think like the fundamental case is incredibly strong for a non-sovereign, decentralized, you know, self-custodial, immutable, store wealth.

And it is getting stronger. Do you think that agents will participate in the Bitcoin economy and not just send stable coins? I think that they will, yes, I think they will store value in Bitcoin or ETH and Seoul probably too, but something that's truly digitally native. And in this study, they pick Bitcoin overwhelmingly. and I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think, by the way, people are, they're going to learn from the robots a bit here too. Like, I mean, when you go in with a fresh clawed account,

you ask it what's the most secure digital money to store it in your wealth? It puts Bitcoin very high on the list. So, like, I think through the AI's interaction with crypto, humans themselves will also sort of relearn why Bitcoin is useful. And that's a little bit more of a philosophical argument about the interaction between AI and, and Bitcoin, but, you know, I think agenic AI is going to scale and demand for digital native money and infrastructure will grow with it. And if you think about it too, like, I think it's just about

more broadly about blockchains, right? It's not just they want to pay. It's not just about paying, right? Like if you're going to have all these assets of different types, increasingly traditional and institutional assets, the agents need data structures they can operate on, right? Like open, permissionless blockchains are a lot better than forcing it to look through a SQL database with an API key or something, right? Like, it is inherent that they are going to want to operate on open permissionless networks, like, that look and feel like the internet to them. And that's what public blockchains are. And so I also think there'll be an interesting sort of, like, wave or theme or moment in crypto where people start specifically releasing either new

L1s or L2s that are designed to be easy for agents to operate on. And you're starting to see a little of that. But for example, if you don't realize like the structure in Ethereum is actually not that good because all the data isn't actually on the blockchain. Like you have to go and query the smart contract to have it spit out the data for a lot of events. Other L1s that say have like enshrined applications, the data is sitting there ready on the blockchain. And so there are data companies, of course, who help serve indexed and parsed Ethereum data and so on a data and whatever. But you could imagine, and AIs might choose something different solely because of the structure of the data on the blockchain. But again, like, if stocks are on the blockchain, if assets are on the blockchain, fixed income, gold, commodities, the native assets like Bitcoin and Ether and stuff, the agents can access that. They can't open a bank account, right?

It's not just they need, everyone's so focused on that they're going to use stable coins for payment. Sure, they almost certainly will because it's tech that they can access, right? But that tech also has all the other stuff on it. So, like, I think that's very clear. And then just at the highest level, back to Bitcoin briefly and AI, like, you're in this age of digital abundance, right? We've got slop money being inflated forever. You've got slop debt, like, that's only going up.

You've got slop content from AIs and generate 10 million pictures in, like, a minute, right? Like, the digital world and the physical world are increasingly overrun with slop and abundance, right? now we can have one cursor and Claude Code do what 10 software developers had. In that world of digital abundance, something that has a good counterweight is something that has verifiable digital scarcity and I think almost as two literary themes in society,

you'll see both grow together. Maybe the digital gold narrative is more powerful in an agenetic economy than the narrative for us as humans. Like maybe we missed the forest of the trees there. Or we just, it wasn't there yet. But it's really interesting when you circle back to the way we talked about the properties of Bitcoin as a digital gold rather than the price. That should be, as you said, claringly obvious in this world of slop. That's right.

I think it is. I think it's becoming more obvious. And I think people are going to look, you know, if you've heard chatter and discussion about, like, maybe IRL meetups will become bigger because we're also overwhelmed with the AI slop and social media. Yeah. And I think they are. Well, I think similarly, like, people are going to choose this. I mean, there's even this phone. I forget what it was called that my wife found.

That's like an old landline phone, but like new, like that you buy now, it's like for like millennials who are like nostalgic. And like, apparently it's doing really well because people are like, you know what? I don't need all this stuff all the time on these things, you know? Like, I just want to call my friend. I think Bitcoin could honestly benefit from some of that as well. The simplicity of it is like so delightful when you compare to the, I mean, social media. I mean, X, dude, it's like it's literally all AI written slop now.

It's pretty annoying. It's not a single human commenting on anything. It's bad. And, you know, I'm not saying that Bitcoin scarcity is the solution to social media bloat. But like... Because then we'd be on Noster and nobody. Yeah, exactly. And I like Noster, but I do...

I am on X. But I think, yes, just sort of as broad trend, it's going to... That counterweight is going to... It is a significant counterweight to the never-ending abundance. But it's also, I think, will be recognized as one. Can you imagine that? price of Bitcoin. If agents start to, to your point, behave like humans more than just, oh, I need to pay for something, but actually start managing portfolios and trying to save

their wealth and, you know, do all the things that investors do? Yeah, I think they will. A million seems like a very conservative estimate in a world. I mean, we just mined the 20 millionth Bitcoin, right? Like, we've only got, we got less than a million coins left. The thing is scarce. If it, any meaningful, I mean, that's also been the story, by the way, of all the bull runs that we've had. It's like, like waves of adoption. It's like new interest, new money, new people come in. And that's what happens when you're in an innovative early stage thing, right? It's very intention driven. And so,

yeah, if agents represent a new wave of adopters of Bitcoin, like that's a extremely bullish catalyst. And I think you're starting to see early indications. Okay, well, maybe that's it. Maybe it's not the human retail. It's the agenetic retail that comes in and starts pumping our back. The other thing, society is just like so not ready for the AI. You saw probably that there was a study that said that like only 0.1% of the world is using pro AI tools. Like when I talk about some of the stuff that like me and my team are building here at Galaxy or that I'm building personally with AI, like the average person is nowhere close to doing that. The vast majority are using the free ones, if any at all.

But even take it a step further, imagine like you have a human, let's say Scott, you get one of the first humanoid robots. And, you know, of course, probably one of the first things we have it do is mostly be a house made to like clean up clothes and full. laundry, right? But eventually you send it out front to get your mail and your neighbor sees it. And they're like, what in the world is that? And then you're like, well, can you go down the street to Target and get some paper towels? And then it walks in a target and like, is it allowed to enter a retail store and buy something? Like people will call 911 basically. Like they're not, we are, we have not prepared ourselves for what an agent. And of course, like humanoid is an easier heuristic, but like virtual agents as well. We have not, they don't have legal personhood. There's no laws and

rules like nobody has any idea and it's really not even on anyone's agendas and as far as i can tell it the only political stuff so far is like a very small far left wing effort to just oppose data centers but like they haven't started thinking through like the actual implications of agentic future and so that has to come to to be clear like and it's probably going to be big pushback politically and they're going to want to tax AI and all that type of stuff and and and it's going to be a fascinating story of the next five to ten years. I mean, think about all the jobs that could be displaced and those people are voters and they're going to pressure so you could see universal basic income or other limitations and all of this stuff. Can I send my robot into vote for me?

Yeah, right, exactly. Well, let's say that we get like legal, you know, Dow's can kind of have legal personhood in certain jurisdictions like Delaware and Wyoming. Like, what if agents get legal personhood? Can they then sue and be sued? Can they, can they vote? Like, I mean, they're not a natural person. I don't know. There's a lot of stuff to figure out there. And so, and that shows you how early we are. Because, I mean, it's like, I mean, two years ago, Will Smith, eating a spaghetti

was the, looked terrible, the video. Now it's photo realistic. Just open, like, agents are now, so many people are building agents, like just at home. That's like a phenomenon of the last two and a half months. Like, open clock came out like in January, right? And we're doing it over here, you know. Right. I'm not done about to do it myself.

I have somebody who actually has a brain. Yeah, but it's also not even that horrible. I'm hoping clawing my face off over here. Right, me too. That's amazing. I think we're just really early in that story. But it feels good. It's pretty fun.

I mean, to be clear, there's a totally true joke about people spending a lot of money on new computers and stuff, and then only getting like $40 of optimizations out of it. And most of the people I know mostly are just sort of tinkering with it, but that's sort of the first stage. know, just like fooling around with it, seeing what can do. Yeah, I mean, like the notion that you were just going to like, which some people have been dumb enough to do, but just like throw everything you got at it

and assume it's operating at its best form, it's just stupidity. Yeah. Well, you should be playing with it for months before you try to be serious, and that's what any pragmatic person is going to do. And it's super early, right? Like, it's just so early. So, yeah, it's not ready for plenty of stuff. I've seen people say like, oh, I'm going to have a trade for me

and get all that, make all this money. And it's like, I don't know if it's probably that's not a good idea. Oh, good, great for them. Highly confidence. Yeah. But that's the, I think, before I let you go. What's that? Is there anything else I might have missed before I let you go that you were like dying to talk about?

I mean, this is what I've been, this is sort of this broad conversation about the, the institutions building while simultaneously opposing and how crypto might be boring now and running through all the bad things that caused us to be at 70K and not 150,000. That's sort of what I've been coalescing around. We talked about clarity as well and stuff like that. So I think we covered it. I do think, I mean, everyone knows AI is a huge story. And humanity, I don't think enough people quite yet are understanding the inevitable overlap between AI and crypto. They're counterbalancing forces. So I think that's going to be very interesting.

And, you know, we'll see more from it. Well, if our AI overlords are listening, Alex and I are very friendly. Big fans of you guys. Thank you. I'm totally fans. We'll vote for you in the next election. Happily plug us in. Yes, exactly. Goopods in the Matrix. We're fine.

Yeah. All right, man, that was an awesome conversation. I'm glad I got to finally have you on. I deeply appreciate it. Where can everybody give you a follow after this? Yeah, thanks, Scott, for having me. Follow me on X. I'm at Intangible Coins. and read our content,

galaxy.com slash research. Awesome, man. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.