Bitwise: Bitcoin is two bets in one and its biggest rally hasn't started

Transcript

It's regulatory compliance, it's highly performant blockchains, and it's vastly more capable AI. It's when those three things come together that I think it can be really exciting. Uh, and we have all those three now. What's up everybody? It's LGD said here, and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that is starting to think that a million dollar Bitcoin is a bit too conservative. And that thesis is only going to grow on today's episode. Today is April 22nd, 2026. We are recording on April 20th, a couple days early. Who is your bare market buddy? the person who has shown up every day, every week, regardless of price, especially if things have have felt particularly brutal. We have a few people who come on Milk Road that are kind of like that.

But none stand out more than today's guests who are eternally optimistic about the space and are here now in this uh rally, although it was more of a rally last week to reap the rewards from their months of appearances on the show. As things start to actually look pretty good, Matt Hogan and Ryan Rasmson from Bitwise are back for another banger episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Ferros, the layer 1 built for real, consensus Miami where the next cycle starts and Nexo earn interest borrow and trade crypto. Ryan Matt, we are back. Welcome back, guys. >> Thanks for having us. Good to be here. >> I want to know, yeah, you guys are my you were my bare market buddies. Uh it's a new term I just made up. So, okay, I want to know uh listen, last week we're rallying. Okay, we're recording this on

Monday, so who knows where we're going to be at in two days by the time people are listening to this, but what is your what is your current feeling about the market now that we've had another kind of uh geopolitical flip-flop over the weekend, but things look kind of strong. Matt, let's start with you. >> Oh, I'm still feeling relatively optimistic about the market. The market was way off sides, the negative funding rates, uh, you know, really heavy put skew and it was caught off sides and we rallied up. We're holding very strong here. I think if we can hold in the mid70s, I will be pretty excited about where we go later in the half. So, uh I'm optimistic. We're post tax day.

Remember that was my turning point. And and I think it's looking I think it's looking okay. The tax day I think that that was the huge pop was on tax day which you said two weeks ago. You're like or a couple or even a month ago you're like listen tax day like you don't think about it but everyone has filed their returns and they're ready to spend again. And we saw that big pop to like 78. I think it was right on that day. Ryan um Ryan how do you feel right now? >> I feel great. I'm very I'm very optimistic. Uh I feel very great and uh and it's really exciting times. I was just at Paris Blockchain Week last week. Tons of excitement there. A ton of great opportunities uh there. Both kind of cryptonative firms that are doing really well and doing a lot of exciting stuff

and a bunch of of institutions there uh and UK regulators. So was yeah feeling great. >> Good good. You guys uh you know we are well past Q1 now, right? Q1 was a tough one. Q4 and Q1 this time I think was going to be a time that hopefully we can put in the in the rear view pretty quick. Uh and you guys have just released uh I think hot off the press this morning or this weekend the crypto market review Q1 from 2026. Um I mean I I would love to read it in depth, but I do feel like I I preempled this that it's like it does feel like Q1 is is maybe something to to forget at least on the price action side. Matt, what is the main takeaway from this this report?

The main takeaway was Q1 was terrible. >> I mean, just >> tell me how you really feel. >> Yeah. So, my experience of these reports is Ryan and the team puts them together and then when they're nearly ready, they ship them to me to review. And usually when I go through the data, there are some things that are up, some things that are down, some assets that went up, some assets that went down. Q1 was just brutal across the board. Every major crypto asset down double digit, most major crypto stocks down double digits. Almost every onchain metric that you looked at down significantly. The only sort of silverish lining was some positive news on stable coins. But in how many years have we been doing this quarterly report, Ryan? Three or four years. Three or four years of reviewing

this? This was the most down only data report we've ever produced. >> Wow. >> The flip side of it, LG, is that the news was so good, right? Market down. Morgan Stanley launching a Bitcoin ETF. Market down. Goldman Sachs launching a Bitcoin ETF, the SEC unveiling a token framework. I mean, it was just relentless good news. And really, what it really hammered home to me is like, look, this data is backward-looking. Backward-looking really was bad. The question is, all the news flow is forwardlooking. Will it drag up the data into Q1? I think that's what people are Q2, that's what people are betting on, and that's why the markets have rallied the last few weeks.

>> If you're not seeing this, you're trading blind right now. There are real moves happening behind the scenes that most people don't see until it's way too late. Inside Milkro Pro, you can track exactly what our analysts are buying, selling, and what's on their watch lists before it moves. Martin recently unloaded 40% of his cash off of one signal. And Melvin is up multiple calls by like 50%. And we're already up 30% this month on some alts. This is all happening every week. You can try it out for just a dollar for 7 days. The link is in the description.

>> Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Ryan, what is what is kind of like a major takeaway from this from your end as somebody who's a huge participant in it and and maybe even compared to the last like you guys you said you guys have been doing these quarterly reports the last couple years? Why does this stand out so so deep so deeply for Matt as a bad quarter once you guys actually wrap this up? >> Yeah, I mean I think I think what Matt said is right. Normally you look at this and you see a broad range of data. You see either uh price and fundamentals are showing one thing uh and news is like kind of mirroring it a little bit. But here's just like this huge divergence which you don't normally see this large of a divergence and uh and really across the board with the exception of stable

coins in tokenization and some poly market data which is is makes sense was going up uh the market was just down bad. I think one thing in particular though that that stuck out to me is that we are uh you know the starting point at the beginning of the year was was relatively high compared to uh where we finished the quarter but since the end of Q1 things have felt remarkably good for crypto and if you were to to midpoint Q1 with the Iran conflict things have felt you know pretty great for crypto uh gi given that you know we're up and have outperformed major asset classes since the start of the conflict. So I think the striking point and the beginning point of this quarter was unique in that it uh it it high and low a lot of like drastic moves and

metrics but I think long term some of these metrics that we've been looking at quarter over quarter year-over-year are up so significantly versus where they were but you get this quarter to quarter volatility which can uh especially in a bare market can feel particularly bleak. >> Yeah, that makes sense. What's what is something if if I'm kind of skipping through this report, if I'm if I'm diving deep into it, what is like one metric maybe or one data point to watch going forward that maybe stood out a lot here?

>> It's a great question. I think so. Real assets is a remarkable chart for me in this in this report for a couple of reasons. It wasn't even in our report a few years ago. That's how relatively new tokenization is. Even if we had in our report in 2024, it was below 2 billion in real world uh assets being tokenized. In the past two years, we've seen that grow to nearly 30 billion. So, more than a than a 10x, and it's it's really seen remarkable growth since the beginning of 2025. What we're also seeing is a bit of a a a spread. Yeah, there's the chart right there. We're seeing a bit of a wider spread in what types of assets are being tokenized, which I think is particularly interesting. And you can see for a long time it was basically just treasuries, maybe some tokenized

gold. And now you're seeing things like assetbacked credit, assetbacked securities and especially finance category uh and more commodities being brought on chain. And I think that that um you know spread getting wider across different assets is particularly interesting. I think we'll continue to see this chart both go up and to the right and see the categories broaden. >> Yeah. Hold on. What? Go ahead, man. >> No, go ahead, LG. I was going to pivot to another slide. >> I just want to know what others means. That's a hu it's like it's like 5 billion of this $25 billion chart. What is what's what do you group into others?

Cuz you have US treasuries, uh, commodities, asset back credit, specialty finance, which I also don't know what that means. So maybe you can tell me. What is what is others in specialty finance? A huge chunk of this chart. >> Yeah. So specialty finance is like asset back securities. I actually really don't like that categorization. I think the team's going to work on breaking it out in the in the future. It's a good question. Um but it but it's think of it like private credit but but private equity in a weird way like that. The other things in others are you know active tokenized strategies. Uh we have things like corporate credit and tokenized real estate. uh in that other category. Uh I think those are things, right? Real estate, tokenized stocks, tokenized venture capital is is a really

interesting category because now you're bringing a historically very illquid, hard to uh hard to access type of of fund structure and bring it into 247 365 liquid markets with tokenization. Uh but but yeah, those are um those are the smaller categories that are that are getting better or bigger. You know, treasury debt still dominates. commodities is getting much larger and I think we'll continue to see other, you know, more traditional categories like stocks, bonds, and some more exciting ones like real estate and venture capital that are less liquid be brought on board.

>> Yeah. The the most important thing about that chart though is the y-axis, which is like that chart's exciting and all, it's going up and all, but that is measured in billions of dollars. That's like it's such chump change. If we're right on the tokenization thesis, this will literally look like a flatline in 3 years. You will not see this at all. Right? Remember, there's like $600 trillion of assets. 600 trillion. I can't even do the math to get from 30 billion to 600 trillion, but it's many X's. So, I really think as exciting as each of these pieces are, as nice as that slope looks, the thing to focus on is it's still so super early. It's billions of dollars. It's not much money. It's so hard to visualize this

stuff. I think like tangibly. I think that that's one of the biggest things you maybe it's something for us at Milk Road to work on as like a research product or something on our pro platform is like we see these charts as RWA.xyz you can go to and all that kind of stuff, but it's like I think we need to we need to see that projection Matt like you're saying of like here's the $600 trillion of assets, here's the tiny little sliver that's already come on and here's here's what's here's timelines for each one that are going to kind of break out. Uh and then and I think most importantly probably for investors too it's like where are the who who are the players you know like who are the companies doing that uh and the protocols right and obviously you guys have have ETFs for a lot of those like

Ethereum salon all that kind of stuff but I think maybe something a little more tangible I think that's what we need you know we want to see that so maybe that's in this report Ryan I don't know if you guys kind of go through that in the report but I think that that's that's a challenge with RWAS for me is that we know it's we know it's growing we know it's bullish and I think we just have to just see a bit more we I think personally as an investor I'm like just just just show me a little bit more like what's going to happen next you Yeah, took terminal put out a report at the beginning of April that actually did a really great job of cool looking at kind of the the >> bare base and bull case for different categories of tokenized assets. You can

look at tokenized stocks. You can look at >> tokenized commodities. >> Oh my god, that's so many companies, man. That's so many different things. >> It's a vast base. It's growing. It's growing very very quickly. Uh this this these forecasts, you know, are only through end of year 2026 if you scroll down a bit. So, um, you know, it kind of shows could staple coins go from where they're at today, 300 billion to, uh, you know, 345, 422, etc., or what if it fell? But I think what you're talking about, which would be interesting to do, is to forecast this out a decade from now. The next level that could be even more interesting, particularly to our clients at Bitwise, would be to figure out where the value of that growth occurs to. Is it the underlying blockchains? Is it the middleware like

chain link? Is it the issuance platforms, the trady companies like Figure? And I think that's where this conversation eventually uh goes. >> Yeah, definitely. And we've had we've talked about this. We've had the CEO from Figure on our show um earlier in Q1. I think it was our first episode of the year uh and it was very enlightening. A lot a little bit over my head uh for some of it, but I think that's that's a very fascinating company that a lot of people don't know. There's a lot of there's other companies like that as well. Um guys, I do want to jump back to uh thank you for showing the report and I think people can can people check that out or is that for your research research prime sub available on our website so anyone can find it there? You can find it on our

social you could subscribe to the Bitwise research distribution letter and get that in your inbox every single quarter. >> Got it. Okay. Um thank you. And people will check that out. We'll put a link below. What I do want to talk about is the memo that you guys hit me with Monday last week uh in my inbox. Not just me personally. you sent it out to everybody that Matt usually emails and it's titled why Bitcoin rallies on geopolitical uncertainty which is also something we've been hoping for for years or at least for like the you know especially in the time frame that I've been chatting with you guys on the show uh where this is this has not always played out exactly this way even though we wanted Bitcoin to be the thing that rallies but now we're definitely seeing like some really healthy action the

straight today as we're recording is closed uh and yet Bitcoin is showing some healthy signs even you guys were saying uh in the intro that you are you are relative atively bullish. Um, what I love about this piece is that you you portray Bitcoin as as two bets in one. And I think this is what really fantastic about having you guys on the show regularly is that you always have a great there's so many different great ways to look at these assets, specifically Bitcoin and different interesting projections into the future. A lot of really great um angles and content. What is this two bets in one? Explain that to me. Matt, maybe we'll start with you. Just like what what exactly are the two bets in one for Bitcoin? Yeah, you know, at Bitwise, we've always described Bitcoin as a store of value with an outofthe-oney

call option on being a current currency or a tool for international settlement. In other words, when you invest in Bitcoin, you make a bet on it being digital gold. And as we've talked about LG, we think that's a very good bet. We think Bitcoin could easily get to a million dollars a coin just by making modest progress on being digital gold. But you get this outofthe- moneyoney call option on it becoming a tool for international currency settlement maybe between countries that don't like one another. We've never really talked to institutions about that because that's such a faroff idea, right? No one's really doing it. Uh it's a theoretical concept. So we focus people on this idea of digital gold, but you still do have this international call this call

option. The reason we wrote the piece is because what happened in in the Iran conflict is that that call option both came closer into the money because Iran talked about tolling ships paying with Bitcoin. That's like the first example of this happening. But then also importantly, the global monetary order just got more volatile. Right? We're talking about a country that's situated between the US and China. It has complicated relationships with all different kinds of adversarial countries. Maybe you don't want a political currency or currency rail like the dollar system or the yuan system. It shook that up. And one of the things you know about options is if the underlying

market gets more volatile, the option gets more valuable. And so what we think happened here, the reason we think geopolitical crisis plays into Bitcoin and in fact drove its outperformance is that the global monetary order got more volatile and therefore this out-ofthe- money call option became more valuable. So you're not just talking about digital gold, you were talking about Bitcoin as a currency. That's two bets in one. They're both bets that can lead to million dollar plus outcomes. So it made me think that our our price target which is 1.3 million by 2035 is too low. Maybe it should be 2.3 million. Uh I think this this idea of an apolitical currency is coming into the money and the

volatility is increasing as the world gets more chaotic and I think that just plays right into Bitcoin. >> Does that rely though would that would that rely on more geopolitical conflict? Well, it would rely on the world becoming less hedged to individual political currency rails, right? So, I think these things break and actually are never put back together. So, like the US seized Russia's treasury assets. I don't think you band-aid that over and all of a sudden countries are like, "Okay, I'm okay with you having my wealth on your balance sheet." I don't think that genie goes back in the bottle. So, does it need more geopolitical conflict? I'm not sure it needs more growth of non-dollar

economies and uh I think the passage of time but certainly I think geopolitical conflict will accelerate this. So yeah I you know in the end I think it's a little bit of a hedge against this geopolitical conflict. >> Trillions of dollars in real world assets are stuck offchain. Real estate commodities private credit all locked behind outdated systems that weren't built for a global 24/7 economy. The fix: bring those assets onchain. Problem is most blockchains weren't designed for that either. Ferros is it's a layer 1 purpose-built for Real Fi, a real world financial infrastructure that lets assets be tokenized, verified, and traded at institutional scale. We're talking parallel execution for serious throughput, compliance baked in from day one, and infrastructure that actually

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cashback on trades. Benefits usually reserved for loyalty program members. Get started at milkroad.com/nexo. And is that is that how much of a reason is that driving the institutional adoption, right? Is this something like is this where you have analysts at all these different companies, including yours, that it's just like listen, we're in uncertain times. You have decades old packs alliances that are being broken. The future is uncertain. the future of individual fiat currencies is uncertain especially with everything with co and now that this is a reason to kind of get into this.

>> I think it should be driving institutional interest. I don't hear many people besides us talking about it at the institutional level. This is a this is a theory that Bitcoin has had for a long time at the retail level, but I don't hear it much at the institutional level. I think I'm going to start talking about it more as I travel around. I don't know if Ryan disagrees with me, but I think it's it's a narrative that still has to penetrate the institutional lens. >> I I would just add I think about it um you know, when Matt and I were talking about this, the thing that struck me as interesting was that uh this idea of if Bitcoin is a call option on events A and B in the long-term future. And even if you know, Bitcoin is now tomorrow not going to be used as the deacto currency

to settle international trade, the odds of that happening pushed up and it actually of course is happening here. But this is one unique example where it's being used to pay for tolls through the straight. But just that move from being two standard deviations out on an option to one standard deviation out means the probability of it happening increased significantly. Any options trader would love to buy a call option that moves from two standard deviations out of the money to one standard deviation out of the money. If there's any options traders listening, they know that that's when you get a huge multiple on the premium and a huge value increase. And so, I think that's the thing that kind of clicked for us is like, oh, this is no longer something where there's like a 2% chance that this is happening at some point in the

future. It's now something like 15 or 20%. And that's a many multiples probability increase. And that's why we think this is such a a a you know big moment that we'll look back on in Bitcoin's history uh as it as it moved beyond the traditional digital store value use case being real and likely to happen to uh it being used as a rail for settling international trade. >> Did Iran take any payment in g bit Bitcoin? Did that happen or was that just a threat? >> I I don't know that it's been verified that it happened. I don't I think I think the point Ryan is making is a great one which is it's actually not a binary outcome. It's not like will China settle transactions with Russia in

Bitcoin. >> That doesn't have to happen before the market recognizes that it's it's has the probability of that increased from something like 1% to 10%. I would argue that that definitely has happened. It's now been raised as an idea by Iran in difficult geopolitical system situations where you're pegged between the US and China. You default to this a-olitical asset. The probability of that happening again in the future has gone up. And I think that's why you're seeing the value of Bitcoin going up again. It doesn't have to get all the way there. It just has to increase in probability. And I think that objectively is happening >> like a true true market kind of

reaction, right? It's just the prospective idea that this can and will happen at some point. Doesn't need to happen right away, but the idea that it could uh and it feels like a lot of these events that Bitcoin is very much in the conversation, right? Even when everything started, you had this narrative of of of a lot of wealthy people and non-wealthy people as well in the Middle East starting to convert their money to Bitcoin so they could easily get out if they needed to and keep it in a safe spot in case their currency had an issue or if they needed to leave the country and they could access it. uh leaving you know being elsewhere and not have to pay some kind of crazy export tax that gets imposed on them or something like that right um so you definitely you definitely see it be

part of all these conversations so um I like what you guys are saying I don't want to I don't want to get too deep on Bitcoin guys because a lot of us hold things that aren't Bitcoin as well okay listen we always talk about Bitcoin Bitcoin very good Bitcoin is a good token but Matt listen I saw you last week okay I saw you on Scott Melker's show great shout out Scott he's come back on our show very soon and you said something to the effect And this was a clip that I saw in X. Okay. You said that AI capabilities combined with a new token framework is the alt season of 2026. Okay. And whenever you mention alt season, people go absolutely berserk whether it's you or anybody else really on especially on Milk Road. Please explain the statement.

>> Yeah, absolutely. That is that is designed for click farming. I'm pretty proud of look the thing about the token framework is really interesting, right? So if you think about the history of crypto and all season, what entrepreneurs have tried to do is build projects with tokens that capture some form of the value, right, to incentivize community development or do interesting things. But we've always been kneecapped in that approach by the fact that the previous SEC would put you in jail if you succeeded in building a token that had value. So, we had these goofy governance tokens and everyone sort of wrote off the idea of using token infrastructures to incentivize people to create a new network and build a new thing. Paul

Atkins, the SEC chair, comes from a a lobbying background that included lobbying specifically for tokens, and I think he believes in the ability of tokens that can capture real value to incentivize new networks that are economically important. And so he's created a safe harbor for people to start experimenting with that. When you take that new capability, which I think will surprise people because they sort of remember it not working, I think it will work in this new regulatory environment. And then you take the new capabilities of AI, which allow people to do much more with fewer people than they have in the past, and you smash those together. I can just see a million sort of uh flowers blooming and new

ideas blooming of actually valuable token projects. Look, I I think there's this idea that tokens don't capture value. We're starting to see proof points that they can look at Hyperlquid and now you have a token framework that allows you to do that in a legally compliant manner. I think we're going to see a huge new wave of innovations, a new ICO boom. I think all of that is going to come back, but this time some of it's actually going to work. >> Man, I don't IO boom. Those are scary words, man. I don't >> They were scary words because they were illegal securities offerings by uh scammers.

>> But the idea of using valuable tokens to incentivize community activity to build new networks and solve the cold start problem is a very interesting entrepreneurial idea, maybe one of the most interesting ideas. And the fact that we can now do that in a regulatory compliant fashion. Just because something didn't work under the past format doesn't mean it won't work, right? Like I just ordered pet food from Chewy. Uh but Pets.com definitely failed. It was just not at the right time. I think tokens uh failed because they were not at the right time. But I do not think that means they won't work in this new environment of highly performant blockchains of a strong regulatory environment uh of AI enabling people to do things. I do think there'll

be a new boom in new interesting projects over the next 18 months. >> Okay. Optimist. You know that gets the DJ in me really excited. Matt, this is this is I'm like, all right, forget it. Like somebody else got to host the show. I got to we got to fire up Milkro Dent again. Uh and I have to be ready for for this boom. Uh, if not even just take that clip, clip what you just said and go and create the narrative. Listen, Matt's telling us, be ready for these AI tokens. I like that. You know, I I I had a I really liked a lot of the stuff that virtuals had done and promised. Naturally, in crypto, there's some stuff that wasn't real um within that. Uh, and a lot of it was just LLM rappers just put into like an X account. Um, but

there were some interesting ideas floated there and that was a funny little kind of startup environment two years back um that I thought was neat but was a little early to the AI narrative. Um, and now I like what you're saying that it's like with well with clear kind of token framework um maybe you'll have you know that was a very startup environment kind of individual you know unknown individuals launching stuff. So it's a little challenging and not to say those people can't come up with great ideas but what you're saying is like you might have something uh more polished let's say a little bit more professional coming to the table. Now no knock against virtuals. just saying that you might have a another push of that type of idea and where people may be electing tokens to kind of help their their ideas get

off the ground. >> It it's three things just to be clear. It's regulatory compliance. It's highly performant blockchains and it's vastly more capable AI. >> It's when those three things come together that I think it can be really exciting. Uh and we have all those three now. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Is this something that that is this something you've always foreseen as as crypto kind of having? You know what I Is this is like what is this something you've seen as kind of like an endgame that's like listen these are big things that we need to have for there to be really great projects. >> I I always thought that the ideas that we experimented with in 2018 in 2020 and 2021 were good ideas just at the wrong time. I thought the idea of solving the cold start problem through crypto incentives was a good idea but

handicapped. I thought uh many of the DeFi projects were really great ideas but handicapped by the lack of highly performant blockchains. And having been around through like the internet boom, you know that it takes regulation and technology and the right market conditions in order to have these two things. So I've always I I've sort of had this thesis that everything we've tried in crypto will work. It just wasn't working at the specific time. So I I do think that this is an eventuality and I think it's going to uh catch many people off guard. >> Matt, I don't know, man. And I used to sling, you know, sports highlights as NFTTS. So, I don't know. I don't know if that I don't know if that should come back.

>> All right. Maybe not every I think it like I someone will crack will crack tickets. Someone will crack rights. I don't think those things were wrong. I just think they were early. And um I suspect that we will figure those out over the next five years. Maybe not. >> Digital collectibles. Absolutely. I think is is is a very worthy thing and that the parallels we used to draw back then that's like listen people your kids already spend thousands of dollars in Fortnite buying skins that it's like there's you know owning that digital property has legs in one way or another um that just it hasn't maybe at the wrong time right or the wrong >> execution now's the time that even further back man okay uh Ryan I want to switch over to you I

actually don't want to run out of time here and I do want to take a bit of time to um discuss what's going on at Bitwise these days. Uh we on the last couple episodes we I grilled you guys on what you were learning at uh the digital asset summit at DOSS and I did see this thing um from Block Works showing that you guys were the fourth most discussed company uh or protocol or whatever however you you classify that uh at the entire conference. Man, this is crazy. Ryan, is this is this what is this from? How you so I'm just going to read it for people listening on audio only. It's top companies mentioned at DOS 2026. The top one is Coinbase naturally. After that is Kraken, uh, who is who's furiously doing marketing right now as they they kind of they try and position for their get

ready for their IPO. After that is Swift, which is the the international payment system, which I don't even I is I don't even know if that's a company. I guess it's a company, but to me, I've always just seen it as like a service. And then there's you guys, Bitwise. That's amazing. Right there at DTCC, Stripe, Franklin Templeton, you're ahead of them. You're way ahead of Visa or Binance or everybody else. Ryan, what is this from? What what was the buzz about Bitwise at DOSs? >> Yeah, I mean I love I love to see it see this uh and appreciate Blockworks for doing this analysis and the shout out here. I think much of this credit needs to go actually to to Matt for specifically his coining of the term vaults are the next ETFs. I think that was, you know, vaults continue to be a a

top spoken about topic at these crypto conferences. I was just at Paris blockchain week and vaults was talked about in every single conversation that we had with every single different type of of partner or potential partner up and down the technology or investment uh stacks. And so I think the reason at DS why we were talked about so much as Bitwise as a whole is is two parts. one because uh Matt gave a great keynote presentation which is on YouTube and it's one of the best presentations I think I've seen uh in a in a long time uh bias bias of that being my boss presenting it >> tomorrow >> removed yeah great performance reviews actually coming up so there you go um but but but I mean look everyone talks

about vaults as this thing that's like going to be huge and matter and like and all these things but I think like putting into context on how vaults are a fundamental improvement in the way that funds operate and we've seen this happen with fund structures time and time again going back 250 years to when the first fund was created uh in Holland to mutual funds to ETFs and now to vaults and thinking about it through that lens is really really important and why it's the next ETFs 2.0 I know is something that Matt articulates extremely well and making it more concrete and talking about the different types of strategies that will be wrapped in vaults, why vaults are going to grow, why where they are today and and where they're going was a big part of what we talked about uh with media and at our

presentations and at side events at DAS. So, I think that's one reason. I would just say the other reason why I think that Bitwise was spoken about uh so so much is that we taken our our business over the past two years and expanded from you know just issuing ETFs in the US to a global business that uh offers you know many many different types of funds both liquid illquid and a number of onchain uh solutions across DeFi and staking uh and I think that is you know one reason why bitwise now is is being mentioned a lot is because we've infiltrated bad word for it, but we have um you know, started to offer products uh in in many different categories across crypto and expanded the team to more than 200, you know, folks globally

across onchain and uh traditional solutions. And and uh I think that is really exciting for those of us that have been at Bitwise since we were, you know, under a billion in assets 5 years ago today to a 15 billion asset manager with a huge uh again growing onchain business. >> Wall Street is here, the White House is here, all of crypto is here. We're talking about consensus. The world's longest running and most influential digital assets conference happening in Miami May 5th through 7th. This is where 20,000 plus decision makers from 100 plus countries gather to shape the future of finance. 72% are director level or above representing over 4 trillion in crypto. AUM 3 days, six stages, 500 plus speakers including Michael Sailor, Brad Garlinghouse,

Anatolia Yakoveno, and Eric Trump. Tackling the three forces driving trillions on chain, crypto at scale, institutional integration, and agentic commerce. Deals get signed here, funds get raised here, the next cycle starts here. Register and save 20% with code milkroad at consensus.coindesk.com. What's up with the uh speaking of I mean ETFs on the ETF side. I mean, and congrats, guys. I mean, that's that's definitely welld deserved. Uh and Matt, you know, fantastic uh thought piece to put out there and and um you know, with a lot of depth behind it, but also great to have from a marketing standpoint.

great to have that kind of oneliner just uh you know percolate through the narrative. No, really I mean that it's great to be to to to infuse stuff into you know the general story of crypto and I feel like you guys do a good job of that. Um since we last spoke you guys we always like to celebrate some of the news that you guys have. Um you have announced an Avalanche ETF I believe that is coming soon also known as AVAX. And speaking of gaming as well Matt from my experience Avac has been a player in the gaming space in the past and still wants to be. But I would love to hear from you guys uh what is the case for for Avalanche here um you know to to be launching this product.

>> Yeah, I'm happy to take that one. You know look our view of the L1 space is that we're very early. I mentioned earlier that we're going from you know 20 billion to whatever 600 trillion. And so when we look at new projects what we want to see is L1s with differentiated architectures and some sign of real world traction. So Ethereum has one architecture and obvious massive traction. Salana has another architecture and obvious massive traction. And we have big ETFs EW and BOL in Ethereum and Salana. >> Avalanche is this third unique architecture, right? Their use of customizable Avalanche L1s that individual corporations can build with their own permissions, their own fee networks, etc. is a unique architecture.

And when you look underneath the surface, they're making real traction in real world assets, right? RWA on Avalanche up almost,000% year-over-year. They're one of the L1s that are making traction. So, I don't know how the L1 >> environment will play out over the next five or 10 years, but I know it will get much bigger. I want all the legitimate shots on gold that are leaders with their architecture. I think you're looking at Ethereum, you're looking at Salana, you're looking at Avalanche. We don't have a Canton networks uh ETF, but you're probably looking at Canton, right? There are just a few. There are only a handful of these really interesting architectures with railroad traction. Avalanche is one of them. So, we launched uh VAVA BAVA, that's our ETF. Um, and we're excited to get it out

there. >> Awesome. Awesome. Great case for it. I didn't even know that about the RD RWA part. So, a little education for myself. So, um, best of luck to you guys with the product. Love to hear it. Um, guys, we're going to wrap up there. Another great episode with you. Uh, thank you for sharing all the alpha for the the Q1 report and Matt for that beautiful setup for some DJ stuff over the next two years. Man, that gets me so excited. >> Can't wait to spend my I I I I sleep 8 hours these days and I can't wait for that to end. >> Yeah, >> uh, great. Thank you guys. Uh, we'll see you again soon. Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event? Subscribe to our channel and join the Milk Road Daily and Pro Newsletters and start investing like

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