An 80,000 BTC Satoshi-era sale and what it says about crypto's maturity with Slava Rubin

Transcript

GM. Good morning. Welcome to the Milkroach Show, the daily crypto show where the only thing hotter than the weather is your portfolio. I'm your host Jay Hamilton. It's Monday, July 28th. And today we are joined by Slava Rubin, managing partner of Ambition, a preede and seed early stage fund. He also built Indiegogo with which had over 38 million users and his angel investments are up 20x. Today we're going to talk about where the market is right now and where Slava sees the market going around alternative investments with this particular focus as always on crypto.

But we're also going to talk with Slava about how he sees opportunities to invest in preIPO. I'm talking about Stripe, OpenAI, Figma, and many more. Of course, we're going to touch on Bitcoin and Ethereum. No shortage of news there. Before we jump in and hear from Slava, very exciting news. We have just launched Milk Road Macro podcast as its own podcast that'll come out every Tuesday and Thursday at 11:00 a.m. Eastern. So to celebrate that, if you go and subscribe to Milk Road Macro YouTube this week before Thursday at midnight, we are going to pick one person to give you Milk Road Macro Pro, that's our premium subscription with a weekly report on what is moving markets in macro, think central banks, liquidity

and rates, and so much more. So, sign up, subscribe to Milro Macro YouTube today to enter that contest. Today's episode is brought to you by Definitive, the leading multi-chain trading terminal trusted by funds, Dows, and Protraders. It's also brought to you by Leen. Get cash without selling your Bitcoin. Without further ado, Flava, welcome to Milk Road Show. >> Thanks for having me, Jay. Excited to be here. >> Absolute pleasure. Okay, let's start with would love to get you to frame the way you are looking at the market right now. It's obviously 2025 has been a difficult year to follow the markets, a difficult year to predict what's going on. So many macro events, so much happening and so across the whole world,

but obviously Trump causing a lot of noise as well. When you sit back and look at where we are in the current market and let's focus on the alternative markets of crypto in the beginning, how do you frame them? >> I mean, it's a big question. I'll say that with COVID, everything got really front run. bubble got big, it popped. We had massive whiplash effect from that. Things got pretty bad for 23, 22, 23, 24 started to come back. I really feel a 25 is quite strong. Uh if you look at all the various uh indicators, whether it's uh recession, I think odds are low.

Whether it's inflation, it's pretty stable. Jobs pretty solid. Obviously, you have the public markets, which are an all-time high in the United States. global markets are beating the United States markets. So, there's a lot of momentum. I would say actually that uh I wouldn't want to call it Goldilocks because Goldilocks is perfect, but it's a pretty good situation, which is why you're seeing the risk on appetite come back into the various let's call it day traders. The fact that there's these meme meme trades that are happening in the stock market, that doesn't happen when things are bad, right? When you have a dark day in the stock market, you don't see a lot of meme trades. But with volatility, the VIX really low, things are really boring, let's call it, at all-time highs on the actual stock

market, you're seeing risk on. So, I think it's quite good and that's also why you're seeing some of the bid happening, whether it's on BTC, whether it's preipo, whether it's other assets that are get catching a bid. Just to touch quickly on macro. I don't want to dive too deeply into macro because we've got two episodes coming out this week around the FOMC meeting and everything that's happening there, but big news was that Trump and the EU signed a deal that obviously sent markets higher, well crypto markets higher over the weekend and markets higher this morning. And then there's a a further 90-day pause on tariffs with China, which they still haven't gotten to a deal yet. when you look at the the macro setup, are you feeling pretty good? How are you what

are your thoughts around the FOMC meeting this weekend this week and any other uh signals that you're going to be watching closely? >> I mean, in general, yes, I think it's quite bullish. I think the odds of them lowering rates right now are pretty low, but I do think they'll be lowering rates by the end of 26. If you do get 100 basis points of lowering by the end of 26, I think they'd be quite bullish. I think that's going to be a lot of uh counterweight with the potential inflation that is continuing to stay a little bit sticky. It's not bad, but if we're trying to average 2% and every year's number has been higher than 2%, the only way you could average is by going lower than 2% and that's definitely not happening this year, which is totally fine. We just have to

be honest. So, in a world of continued inflation and potential interest rates coming down, it's going to be a little bit tricky, but I do think that will happen. I do think it sets up to be a pretty solid, you know, next couple quarters. >> The old adage of sell in May and go away doesn't seem to be true this summer. Do you think we get a quiet August or do you think we're going to continue to go up from here? >> I don't know what happens dayto day or week to week. Yeah. Will there be a 5% uh pullback in August? If I had to be a betting man for the simplicity of it, let's say yes. But, you know, liquidity is low during August. Uh, definitely more interesting stuff is going to happen. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a little bit of a pullback

between now and let's call it September 15th. Again, that's just me for the sake of being provocative. I don't actually trade on any of that, but I do think we'll see continued rise with the leadership from the Mag 7, especially Nvidia and all the AI uh continued love into into the holidays. I would love to give our audience a little bit more background on you so that it can frank because as you said you're not a trader. You're not trying to trade short-term. You're more buy and hold long-term. Can you guess give us an idea of the way you approach investing in your portfolio and in ambition?

>> So for personally I love compounded returns. I love set it and forget it. I like the I like the idea of closing my eyes and thinking when I wake up in 10 years will the company I just chose today still be awesome? And if it's hard for me to expect that in 10 years from now, this company is going be awesome. I probably am not investing. And I know that for a lot of people, they don't want to wait 10 years. That probably feels like an eternity. But that is how I invest. So yeah, I mean that's what I did with Amazon or Apple or Nvidia, Netflix, uh a ton of other companies or uh also how I invest into the uh startup space. So I typically invest very early in the startup world. So preede and seed and it's the sort of thing that

typically takes five 10 years to even figure out if you have a there or there. But yeah, you know, I've been lucky enough to invest into some really incredible unicorns that have exited and have been uh first money there. >> When you look at crypto specifically, who are you confident that's going to be around in 10 years, it being such a new asset class and such a a nent technology that is really very, you know, yeah, we have Bitcoin that's been around for over 15 years and Ethereum 10 years. Uh but there's not many cryptos that have been around for that long. it's still so early. How do you frame that?

>> Yeah, I think that's a great question. As a matter of fact, I helped to found one of the early cryptos, which is Hideera Hashgraph, which is now, you know, just almost closing in on 10 years soon, but I guess it's considered today one of the dino coins, but uh it's, you know, has a resurgence and is doing well. Um, if I had to guess right now, and this is kind of how I invest as well, which is what will be around in 10 years. I do believe Bitcoin will be around in 10 years. Uh, I'm bullish on Bitcoin. I do think layer 1's will be around in 10 years. So, I specifically didn't use the word Ethereum because I'm not pro or anti-thereum. I just think that L1s are kind of like cloud compute.

So, if you had to invest all of your money only in let's call it Amazon cloud, so AWS or all your money only in Azure in Microsoft, I think that'd be a bad idea. I think it's really good to diversify across the basket of cloud providers. So similarly, I would try to continuously diversify across the top L1's. You know, a few years ago, you wouldn't have put Salana in there and now it's in there and probably three years from now, there might be another one that's considered one of the top hype or whatever uh up there. So, uh I would bet that 10 years from now, BTC will still be crushing it and the top basket of L1s will still be crushing it.

Beyond that, I think it's going to be really interesting to see uh which specific uh company or token still exists 10 years from now. Obviously there's great companies like like a unis swap or others but it's hard to say 10 years from now. >> Yeah. It is just so early in the evolution and the creation of blockchain technology that it is it's it's not possible to say who the winner is yet in the long term. But I think I completely agree with your take. L1 blockchains are here to stay. They are the future of not just Binance, but the future of the internet and value transfer on the internet and ownership of on the internet. You know, it's my web 3 is a term that we actually kind of stopped

using on this show because it it got caught up in NFTTS and in a form of uh of crypto that really was had a bit of a bubble and nobody likes to talk about that bubble right now. But definitely the long term has there will be L1's that are successful. It's just it's still so early and difficult to predict that. I want to talk about Bitcoin since you mentioned Bitcoin and uh obviously it's you know it's the the big daddy and everybody is very bullish on it this year. One big news that came out recently was that an an old wallet uh a Satoshi era wallet transferred 80,000 Bitcoin, sold 80,000 Bitcoin for about 9 billion. Uh Galaxy led that sale. To me,

the big news here was that it did not really move the market. Yeah, Bitcoin dipped to about 115,000 uh likely as a result of this sell pressure, but didn't have a big impact on the market. when you sit back and you look at this, what does it signal for you? What does it say to you? >> Uh yeah, exactly what you just said. The fact that such a big trade was swallowed up without any real major issues just speaks to the institutionalization and the demand of the asset class. Uh I must admit it's a bit surprising in a good way. the part that if you want to be a bit provocative, why did they sell today >> as opposed to when they just hit 100K or

when they hit 69K? I mean, there were so many opportunities to quote unquote become crazy rich. Conspiracy theorists might want to know why why today, right? >> Or or why did they sell at all is what >> it's packaged up in the same question as well, >> right? is you're talking about somebody who most likely is going against fiat and to sell out of Bitcoin and back into fiat is is definitely symbolic of the the growth of Bitcoin as an asset and certainly it's exciting to see that the market could handle it and the institution the institutionization of crypto was able to manage a sale of this scale without it crashing the price which you know maybe that's I I wonder

if that's why they waited is maybe they waited because they didn't want to impact the market so much but also there is this question of >> do they have to sell all at one time you know like >> there have been there have been other ways to do it if they want to sell earlier >> Galaxy has said that it was part of the state planning which is very vague so difficult to take much from that uh but but I do think that to me here here's here's a question for you is the institutionalization of crypto a good thing or a bad thing.

>> I mean, there's no question it's a good thing. Uh, it takes out some of the volatility, so some people might not enjoy that as much. But for me, which is, you know, set it and forget it 10 years from now. You know, I predicted million-dollar Bitcoin in 2017. Sorry, in 2017, I predicted million dollar Bitcoin in 20 years, 2037. I still think that's going to happen. Now, I don't look as bullish because it seems as if people are way beyond my million dollar Bitcoin. Now it's like, duh, I like obviously, you know, but I still wouldn't want to get ahead of my skis, which I would still stick to million-dollar Bitcoin in 2037.

>> Yeah, it's it's interesting how at the time that was an incredibly bullish prediction. Now it's million-dollar Bitcoin by 2030 is a common prediction. >> I think that's in my opinion just too aggressive. Uh really, >> I'm happy to be wrong, but I just think that's uh too aggressive. You know, I do think there'll be consolidation. I think there'll be slowdowns. It's going to be hard for it to, I think, drop massively the way it did before, like 75% at a time, uh, just because of the institutionalization. But I do think as you know people get more used to it even these treasury companies different access points uh the transfer of wealth from one generation to the next uh it's

just becoming more and more normal for people to have a little bit of Bitcoin in their kind of portfolio. And I I do think it's going to have a natural draw up. I I just you know wouldn't want to get ahead of myself too fast to think that it's just a straight line up. >> Yeah. I think the question is is the simplest way to look at it is to compare it to gold's market cap and to think where do you think it will be as a percentage of gold's market cap right now it sits around I I haven't looked recently but around 9 10% of gold's market cap how high can it get in terms of gold's market cap in the short term difficult to predict but we shall see >> yeah I mean I think in general when analog goes digital over time uh the

market doubles in most industries. So if you think about it eventually, my opinion is Bitcoin market cap should be double the size of gold, not just equal. Uh so I do think that sets up for a very bullish number. Uh I just think that will take some time. Gold also has been doing a great job of being what gold is. And I almost feel like Bitcoin has reminded people of the value of gold. >> And not that we really need to tell people, but uh in a world of uh fiat basement and printing money, gold's a really great place to be. And pretty much if you would have been in a uh Bitcoin uh gold uh portfolio only for the last 10 years, you probably possibly

couldn't be outperformed. I mean, it's crazy. So, yeah, I think everybody should have some Bitcoin for sure and should have some gold for sure. >> In traditional finance, Wales use the Bloomberg terminal. In crypto, they use Definitive, the trading terminal built by Coinbase alumni, which lets you trade across every major chain out there. Definitive's combination of low fees and advanced order types like limit, stop-loss, and take profit, make it one of the best onchain trading experiences there is. The kicker, Milkroad listeners trade free on their first 25,000 in volume. Visit milkroad.com/definitive and start trading like a pro today.

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You brought up corporate treasuries. Would love to chat about that for a second because that's the the biggest narrative right now in crypto and also the biggest buying pressure right now. So let me just read off some headlines from the past week. So on the Ethereum side, we had uh Bit Digital has increased their initial buy was going to be 340 million. They've increased the plan to buy 1 billion ETH. Sharplink bought another 295 million in ETH. And then on the Bitcoin side, MetaPlanet bought 92 million of Bitcoin. And a Japanese AI firm has bought 356 million Bitcoin. And then also we're starting to see other tokens have treasury strategies as well and uh Winry Therapeutics has announced their plan to

buy 700 million in BNB uh as part of their BNB treasury strategy. What's your thoughts on the treasury strategy and the impact it's having on the markets? >> I I think it's definitely a pull forward. I don't think it's good in general. I think that really what's happening is too many people don't feel comfortable or don't know how to get into these assets, meaning Bitcoin directly or Ethereum directly, holding their own keys or whatever. So, they're finding cleaner rappers or regulatory workarounds to get uh into these assets. So, I think it's good from pulling in demand, but it reminds me was it there was like some uh like ICT tea company that was like became ICT blockchain or something and they like changed their

name. You know, that eventually obviously didn't go well as a public company. So, on the short term, there's trades to be had here, but I don't think there's a lot of strong fundamentals. If you ask me back to my close my eyes in 10 years from now, what does this look like? I don't invest in anything that is trying to just, you know, frontr run one of these uh narratives for the next week, month or quarter or year and then pro probably this is going to implode on them. >> It has risk for sure, especially uh with the way the way that a lot of these companies are raising capital and the way that they are purchasing these tokens. Uh if there is you're talking about very volatile assets, right? uh you know, as you said, Bitcoin, okay, maybe it looks like it's going to be

won't have these 75% dips anymore. Uh but, you know, we're talking about other tokens here, many other tokens that are being created into these treasury strategies. Uh and so it's not just even Ethereum at this point. Uh it feels like every day there's a hook company that's going after some new token. Feels also like marketing to me. Like it feels a lot like marketing for the tokens on the public markets which a lot of these tokens don't have good marketing on public markets because a lot of people are sitting there saying well I if I'm on the institutional side I don't have the mandate to buy tokens right part of what we do or on the retail side they don't they don't know how they don't know how to go set up a wallet and sure you can do it easily and with a lot of

the centralized exchanges but there's just there's just a big hurdle to cross over right now and so I think that that is That seems to be it seems to be generated by a lot of the founders of a lot of people who have vested interest in these tokens doing really well. They have large bags and they want to get a vehicle into the public markets. >> Absolutely. Trading stocks has now had decades and decades of improvement of user experience and trading tokens is so early and it's so difficult on so many levels. um that really as that user experience continues to get better um I mean it's cliche to talk about Robin Hood but you know Robin Hood did such a great job of simplifying the user experience so much I mean that already

was starting to happen in the 80s and 90s right in the 2000s with day trading but it's just so much more difficult on the crypto side that as it becomes easier I think you'll see less of these workarounds and just more straightforward quality user experience and people just getting right into it themselves. Let's talk about Ethereum for a minute and then I want to move to uh talking about preIPL opportunities that you see which is something that we have not talked much about the show and I think it's very interesting. Uh but if we chat about Ethereum the the big news right now is that Ethereum Bitcoin ratio has reached its highest point uh since January and continues to climb. Feels like that ratio has bottomed. Uh you mentioned earlier you're not sure in 10

years if Ethereum is going to be the L1 and the dominant L1. Uh any thoughts on Ethereum right now and in the short to medium term? >> I'm bullish on Ethereum. I've been bullish on Ethereum for a while. I think has kind of like the other let's call it V1 uh tokens and orgs. Um the fact that it's been around and continuing to do well is awesome. It's obviously continuing to grow and just building up such a great uh user base. You know, is it going to be outdone by the Salanas of the world or others? I think it's possible, but I do think for one reason or another, Ethereum lost a lot of love and was unloved by too much. Uh now, one can almost argue that it's overloved

because of all the Treasury hype. And I mean, that's like such classic crypto den, you know, roller coasters. Again, I'm not very good at timing the ups and downs in the near term. Do I think Ethereum will be worth more in a few years than it's worth today, for sure. So, I'm bullish on that. Do I think it would be one of those that still stand out a decade from now? I do. I do think when you open your eyes in a decade, Ethereum will still be around. So, I'm pretty uh bullish on Ethereum, but it's hard to know exactly all the use cases of how they'll evolve. Obviously, if you continue to have all these tokenization of real world assets and if a lot of this ERC20 and sitting on top of Ethereum, you know, and you know, as uh the Trady world continues to go more

crypto, um is Ethereum like a major layer to all of that? Could be huge, but it's hard to bet the farm on that. The big news recently that stood out for to me was Robin Hood deciding to launch an L2 on Ethereum in partnership with Arbitrum. That the the playbook that I I wonder what we'll see and it feels like this is the signal of this will be the playbook when FinTechs and banks and these large financial institutions want to enter the blockchain space. If they're all gonna choose an L2 on Ethereum, there you go. Like that's that alone is enough of momentum to make Ethereum

here to stay for a long time. >> I agree with that. And especially when you get into these risk averse finance companies trying to uh figure out where to invest that kind of innovation dollar. It's very hard for them to go after the new hottest thing just because it's new and hot, right? It's so important to be tested and have seen a few cycles. So, Ethereum does have the benefit of that. >> Okay, let's chat quickly about uh preIPO opportunities. So, to our audience, they're likely going to think, well, I can invest in preIPO. PreIPO is only for private markets, but you through your newsletter and through your podcast talk a lot about opportunities to invest in preIPO. Even for a retail investor,

there is ways to access this. I don't want to get in too deep into the how to do this. I think if people want to know how to do this, they can go subscribe to your newsletter and learn there. Uh but let's chat first about which preipo opportunities are you watching right now and then we can dive into a few of them. >> Sure. 20 years ago when companies were going public, the average market cap for the public company was around $500 million. These days when a company goes public, the average market cap is $5 billion. So, um, before it goes public, it's private. So, before it's IPO, it's preipo. So, it used to be that you only missed the preipo until $500 million of value. Now, you're missing it to $5

billion of value. And that's the average one, especially these big hype ones. A lot of them are way beyond $5 billion before they're going public. So, you're missing out on all of that upside um by not getting into it while it's still private. So, I do think that's a huge trend that's happening, which is um people are trying to get access to these private companies to be able to get more of that upside. I still think there's plenty of great companies you could get in the public markets at decent market caps or even at low market caps, but you know, trying to navigate both public and private, I think, is a smart way to do it. I've been doing that for a long time. Um, like you mentioned, it takes a little bit of effort to understand kind of the fees and the carry and who you

need to trust and what are the organizations you could choose between and happy to cover all of that uh separately, but or just check out our newsletter. We also have a lot of uh content about all that. But if you just want me to name a few companies, probably these companies most people listening here already have heard of. So the obvious ones are Open AI, right? Anthropic, Andural, which maybe is not on everybody's tip of the tongue, which is the defense tech company. uh you have SpaceX, you have Stripe, and just to give you a sense of these five companies. So, OpenAI, we're talking about like $350 billion valuation.

Anthropic last valued around 60 billion, rumor now of $150 billion valuation raise. SpaceX uh last valued at 350 billion. They just are talking about a tender right now at 400 billion. Stripe uh just did a tender, I believe, at 90 billion. Oh, and Andrew uh last raised at 31 billion uh after 14 billion just just before that and is trading much higher right now. So these are way beyond just $5 billion. So everybody that's not participating is missing out on that upside. I do believe every company I just mentioned uh has a strong opportunity to be a trillion dollar company.

>> Just to ask the obvious question, can anybody access these investments preo? The short answer is yes. The longer answer is if you want to get to the good deals at decent prices, you need to be accredited. And I'm sure your audience is very familiar with what that means. >> Yeah. And so if our audience is interested in learning more about these preIPO opportunities, uh how do they how do they check out your newsletter? How can they learn more? >> Yeah. So just go to withvincent.com, sign up for the alternative investment report. We have an entire preo series where I actually do an analysis of each one of these companies one at a time where we have one of these conversations about each of these companies. We talk

about what's the price point today, what can you get into. We also have, you know, opportunities to get into these deals sometimes through us. So, uh, yeah, or just follow up with me at Golava. Uh, happy to be helpful. But yeah, I personally do think that if you get in one of these five companies, this is my opinion. And I'm obviously bullish and it's not investment advice, but you know, you have an opportunity to get many many X up just by getting in earlier. >> Within those five, which one would you say you're most bullish on? >> Of those five, I would say that SpaceX has the opportunity to potentially be the biggest, but it's already $400 billion valuation. So, let's even assume it hits a $5 trillion valuation. that's still

quoteunquote only a 12x. So, it's hard to pick that one there. I actually like Anthropic only because I think Anthropic is a little bit of a sleeper because I think everybody knows OpenAI and it had such a massive valuation because of that. I think uh Anthropic is really sneaking up on people because Anthropic is what's really powering the code vi vibe coding movement and I wouldn't be surprised if it kind of catches on par with openai in terms of its uh valuations which means if you got in today at 60 billion which I'm not saying it's really so easy because I think they're already getting an offer right now for 150 but if you got in today at 60 or obviously a previous round when it does reach a

billion sorry a trillion you're already up like what is that like uh 16x right uh and that's at 1 trillion and uh I do think these are multi-t trillion dollar companies personally >> we will uh put the link uh to uh your newsletter in the show notes for those who want to subscribe to that uh because I do think we we talk all the time about crypto opportunities here uh but there's other alternative investments uh and you guys cover a lot of those very well thank you so much for your time today and thanks for joining us.

>> Absolutely. Thanks for having me. >> Thanks all for listening in. I have to remind you before we let you go, none of today's episode is financial advice. I'm not your investment advisor. Slava is not your investment advisor. If you need help with your investments, you should speak to a professional. And as I said earlier, we have just launched the Milkro Macro podcast. And this week, if you subscribe to Milkro Macro on YouTube, you could win a free subscription to Milro Macro Pro, which is our membership that gets you all the reporting and all the charts and everything you need to understand what is going on in the macro world and how that is going to impact your investments. Thanks for tuning in, y'all. Have a wicked awesome day. We'll see you back again tomorrow. And finally, I've got to give a shout out to

our partners over at Nexo have just partnered with the DP World Tour, one of the leading golf tournaments in the world, 45 tournaments across four continents, and they're going to have the Nexo Championship debuting this August in Scotland. So keep an eye out for that because this is one of those things that feels very marketing talk, but I get super excited because when you think about sports and the crossover with the attention that it has and how many leading global brands are sponsoring massive sports tournaments, it's pretty exciting to see crypto brands sponsoring large sports tournaments as well. So hat tip to Nexo, way to go, guys. Thanks as always for

doing what you guys do in the space. Thanks for tuning in, y'all. Have a wicked awesome day. We'll see you back again tomorrow. As always, if you liked today's episode, please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us so you don't miss out on the next one. There's also a link in the description to our free 5minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh. And if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game, we're going to also leave a link for Milk Road Pro. You get access to our portfolio where you can see exactly what we are buying.

This is your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto. One final note, this show is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice. Investing in crypto or any asset is risky and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose. Thanks so much for listening in my friends. Have a wicked awesome