Dan Tapiero on the Bitcoin pullback and macro liquidity into 2026

Transcript

So, I have this view that eventually the entire analog world is going to move on chain. And of course, you know, what moves first is money. Bitcoin and digital assets have been struggling in Q4, surprising many investors who are expecting a huge rally. But is this a sign that Bitcoin is rolling over into a deep bear market or is it just an ordinary pullback on the way to new all-time highs? Hello and welcome to Milk Road Macro, the podcast that's here to remind you that buying fear is a good deal at any price. I'm your host John Gillan. Today is Friday, November 21st, and we'll be releasing this episode on Tuesday, the 25th. We are joined today by one of the world's most visionary digital asset investors, Dan Tapiero.

Dan is a renowned macro focused investor with over 25 years of experience in global markets, commodities, and entrepreneurship. Dan serves as the founder and CEO of 50T Funds, where he manages significant assets in digital and growth investments. He's also a bit of a personal hero of mine and everyone in digital assets. Uh so, in our conversation today, Dan is going to save Bitcoin. If that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe. Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it. And as a reminder before we get into it, markets are obviously rough right now, but this is the best time to zoom out and get your bearings and get educated, plugged into a good community. Pro All Access from Milk Road is 40% off for the next week. That includes everything we're building at Macro Pro, Crypto Pro, and our new AI Pro tier, which is

launching in January. If you want to stay plugged in into macro and all the above, the new AI wave that's coming, this is the move for you. The link is below in the show notes. Take advantage of that sale. And without further ado, welcome to Milk Road Macro, Dan Tapiero. How are you? How you doing? I'm doing well. Uh I don't know if buying fear at any price is the right comment. You said that in the beginning. I think uh yes, buying fear is a good idea, but look, these are the most difficult markets that I think have existed. As you mentioned, I spent over 30 years in the traditional uh world, working at various hedge funds, and having my own fund as well.

Commodities currencies bonds emerging markets, stocks. I I've traded pretty much, you know, all of those markets. There's nothing more difficult than the cryptocurrency markets. You know, Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, I think sort of the core assets. And then you start moving down the food chain, and those things are extremely difficult to trade. I think that there are people who successfully do it, but I would say for the civilian population, it's not a good idea. Um I, you know, I as you as you mentioned, I manage what is, I think, the only growth equity fund in the world exclusively focused on crypto, blockchain, digital assets, Web3. But, you know, we only invest in the equity

of the larger businesses. We don't even do venture. Most of the funds, you know, Andreessen and Polychain and Paradigm, the well-known guys, they focus on venture and they're early stage and seed. You know, those are teams that, you know, they have cryptographers, blockchain developers on staff. You know, the teams have, I don't know, 50 people, 100 people trying to extract uh money out of the early stage. And they also, you know, are involved in liquid trading. And so, and there are very few number of those compared to the number of investors and traders in the old world. So, my advice really is that the only way to build wealth in this space is to think about it over the long term.

I think you have to have a 10-year horizon. And you have to know that during those 10 years, you're going to have two or three bear faces. And there's just no way around it. And Bitcoin and ETH are going to go down 70 to 85%. And the cycle has not been repealed. However, I don't think we're in a bear market today. I think this is a bear correction in a bull phase still. And I've been saying since the bottom, I'm just going to keep rambling on cuz you're you'll I'm going to keep going. Since the bottom in in '22 and '23, uh I've thought that, you know, we would head up to about 100,000 on Bitcoin and then stop. And I said that, you know, probably 2 weeks after the FTX collapse.

Uh I've said it at the end of '22, '23. 100,000 is just a big round number. It's a number that every person who has bought, let's say, sub 5,000, and there are a lot of people. I think in their mind use that as sort of the holy grail number. Right? If I make 100x, if I make 50x, if I make 20x, I'm going to get out. Right? And so, 100,000 is here. And, you know, I I hate to say it for the sort of the short-term traders and the younger guys in the space, but from our perspective as long-term investors in the space, there is no difference to me between 80, 100, and 120.

Right? To me, for us, the way we invest, that's all the same price. And I know that's not, you know, you move from 120 to 80 in 2 months, it's a 40% correction. It's an extremely fast correction. People are unhappy. There's blood everywhere. You know, stories about, you know, did a market maker go under? We had the October 10th flash crash, the Binance flash crash, where literally things evaporated. What happened there? By the way, that happens in the ordinary markets as You know, people complaining about crypto.

Crypto's more severe. As I said, it's more difficult. But we've had plenty of flash crashes. I can remember the '90s and 2000s in markets. You know, the most famous one of the most famous ones in currencies was the flash crash in Euro Swiss. A buddy of mine was long Euro short Swiss franc, which is something that didn't move much. Went to the bathroom, came back and was completely wiped out. You know, and you can go back and look at what I forgot what year that was. But flash crashes happen. It's just, you know, markets are a reflection of human behavior. Human condition.

Markets all trade sort of the same, whether it's Bitcoin or ETH or whether it's com- you know, corn or soy, you know, or gold. They have patterns. You know, they they're certain knowable ways that markets trade, but you need to have a lot of experience. And you have to have suffered a lot to be comfortable with the volatility. Now, why I say this space is not for civilians, it's just because everything is magnified 10x in crypto. You know, the markets are 24/7 365. The S&P future uh trades five times less, I think, the amount of hours per day. Right? So, that market for the S&P future or US stocks, I think US stocks

trade um crypto trades five times longer per year. So, every year in crypto, I'm sorry, every year in the traditional world is like five in crypto. So, after 5 years, you know, you've been bludgeoned to death multiple times. You've had these massive collapses. You know, you have whole areas that explode. You have meme coins going up and then vaporizing. You know, you've got NFTs which were huge in '21 not existing. Then you have stablecoins which didn't exist in '21 at all, basically, now doing 25 trillion dollars in volume. You know, saying there were no real-world assets to be tokenized in 2019, '20. Now that's a big theme. I go on and on and

on. The the the the the innovation speed, the ability to make a fortune uh and then also lose it uh at this speed does not exist in the old world. And so, you know, we have this current correction, not to ramble too much, but we have this current correction. And look, I feel for people who've been hurt. Um but, you know, I think this is all still within reason. The bull-bear index, the greed-fear index on coinmarketcap.com is at well below a 2-year low. It shows 11% in terms of fear. So, it would be 11% I would call it bulls. That's not a lot. You know, um can the market go down

more? Sure. I don't think it can go to zero, bulls. Uh but you can maybe drop more. I would say, and I know this doesn't help people, but I think if we drop down sort of below 50,000, I think there'd be a real problem. And I don't expect that at all. Uh I know people like, well, Dan, that's pointless to me. I'm I'm a trader. Who cares? It's too far away. I still think we're going to hit 180,000 uh in Bitcoin in this cycle. And um if you should I continue on? Should I just continue my monologue?

This is the easiest interview I've ever done because I I didn't even ask a question and you answered all like five questions I had about Bitcoin. You said where your floor was, where your top was. Um and I you think you talked about the relative strength indicator and the sentiment in the market. Um so, yeah, if there's any other thoughts you want to have on Bitcoin, I think the one question I would add is, are you accumulating here or you just sitting and watching right now? So, 180 is sort of the the conservative target that I laid out, you know, again, in late '22, early '23. And, you know, I think I use that number because it's roughly I mean, there are many reasons. So, but let's not get into all of that right now. I I would say that

if we zoom out a little bit and talk about the macro backdrop outside of crypto digital assets, I do think the Fed uh has been dragging its its heels. I think Powell has been frankly a horrible central bank chairman. I think, you know, I remember, you know, the brilliance of Alan Greenspan. You know, Bernanke in the beginning was terrible, and then after '08 was very good. You know, Janet Yellen was kind of down the fairway. But this guy, you know, he raised rates from zero to five too much too quickly, blew all sorts of things up. And then, the economy's been slowing for a while, and you know, AI has made things a little

worse. I mean, it's made things I think big picture better, but the unemployment rate is definitely going to go up. Uh I doesn't take a genius to see that. I think um unfortunately, we don't have Scott Bessent at the Fed. Scott is sort of an old-time macro guy who I know from my old world, and the guy is sort of one of the top macro thinkers and people who understand liquidity movement. I think he probably be the best guy out there to manage liquidity policy. Um but, I'm sure he and and the Trump administration have someone who they think will be competent. Uh and I think I say aligned, but I mean, policy monetary policy just has been off in my

opinion. There's not been any real concern that we should have on inflation. The blip up that we had in '22 '23 was just obviously as a result of the post-COVID fiscal stimulus. I mean, it's very straightforward. It was not a structural change, and you know, 2 3% CPI, it's irrelevant. You know, 6% Okay, that But, we knew that was a blip. So, whether it's three or two, it just it it's like, you know, minutia that's irrelevant. And I think he he you know, Powell having come from the private equity world, not really as skilled as previous Fed chairmans in the past 34 years 40 years on on markets.

I I don't really see him as a market practitioner. Um has kept rates too high. I think rates should be closer to two. Uh the dollar will eventually be weaker, and then I think we're going to have a run in the markets, and I mean all markets into the November 26 elections. So, I just I think that the the purging of the excess in Nasdaq, which hasn't quite happened yet, but I think potentially will now. You know, Bitcoin tends to lead things. Despite Bitcoin leading, gold has been actually quite strong and holding in a lot of uh structural uh um tailwinds there. We can get into that in a second, but um

I I really I really do think that the administration is happy to have weakness now. Let the Fed keep rates too high now, and then in potentially Q1, or as the markets begin to sniff, you know, I'm not sure when Powell's final date is, but that he'll be moving on, and that we can have a nice ramp into the elections. I I think that'll carry everything higher. I mean, that's sort of my macro backdrop. And then the crypto, if you look at where we were in '21, Bitcoin was 65,000.

Today, it's what, 83, 85? So, the fundamentals today versus '21 are like 10 times better. Now, I know we have the DATs, and the DATs now have sucked in a lot of liquidity. I've not really been interested in investing in any of the DATs. We did offer one as a co-investment to our investors because we we believe that it it actually will be an operating business. We only invest in operating businesses. And and I think Michael Saylor's a genius, and I think strategy is just fine. But, all of these other ones, I don't think they're enough professional people managing all these other DATs. So, they've sucked in a ton of liquidity. And as usual in the crypto space, you've had a lot of,

you know, good money throw itself after bad things. And that money needs to be expunged. And that's what this, you know, that's what's so fascinating about, you know, cryptocurrency, blockchain, whatever you want to call it, um as a market is that it's such an empty playing field. It's so complicated. Understanding the tech of certain chains and use cases, you know, really being deep in the weeds in DeFi. I mean, you know, there probably aren't 10,000 people on the planet who really deeply understand what's going on in decentralized finance. However, you know, in '21, that world didn't exist, I would say, or

barely existed. And today, you know, you've got $200 million of revenue per month being thrown off in the world of DeFi. So, there are so many more fundamentally super bullish things today versus '21 that are not discounted. I mean, the most important being this administration. I mean, we all remember how much under attack we were in '21, '22, '23. Gensler is probably the worst SEC chairman of my lifetime. Completely I mean, suing companies that we have in our portfolio that are actually today public.

Like, think about that for a second. 18 months ago, they were being sued, and now they're public companies. So, clearly, that whole administration had the wrong take on crypto and blockchain. And frankly, I will say something maybe a little bit out there, but I do believe that our world helped turn the election in Trump's favor. There are 50 million Americans who own cryptocurrency. You you know, and the the PACs that were involved from the crypto community contributed it I think quite a lot of capital to that campaign. And I think the Democrats now realize it. You know, with the bipartisan passing of the Genius Act,

the I think eventual passing now of the Clarity Act, I don't think the Democrats are going to attack the space again. People ask me, "Oh, you know, is this administration thing just a one-off, and it'll revert back?" I don't think it's reverting back. I think um that it's a big enough voting cohort in America, and I think the US now realizes that it should be the leader in what I call this is the digitization of money and value, which is essentially what Bitcoin and blockchain is. It's just like the internet in the '90s was a digitization of information and ideas.

Um we're going through the dis- digitization of money and value, and the US must take the lead, and I think that's like, if I look at like the 10 most important things going on today, they basically didn't exist in '21. So, I think Bitcoin's probably worth a lot more than what, 30% higher than today. And then last thing I'll say before I let you cut in is that the digital asset ecosystem, which is how we measure things, was worth about That's Bitcoin, ETH, all the alts, and then the value of all the equity in the space was worth about 3 trillion, 2 and 1/2 3 trillion in '21 at the peak. And today, it's now around four, you know, four and a half or something like that. So, I'm

still expecting, you know, another big chunk of this bull market. ETFs provide investors with a structured, disciplined, and diversified approach to crypto, which is cool, but the world is moving on chain. We need a crypto-native equivalent. That's exactly what Reserve's decentralized token folios, DTFs, [music] bring to the table. Reserve DTFs are rule-based baskets of crypto assets packaged into a single token, like CoinMarketCap's CMC20, crypto's version of the S&P 500. Go to milkroad.com/reserve to find out what's on offer. There's there's a lot of room to go higher. Uh Dan, this is maybe the easiest interview I've ever done because you're you're just spouting great wisdom and insights on the market, things people want to know. Um and I do agree with you. I think something that's kind of going to

fool a lot of people is a lot of people expect a midterm election year to be sort of down for the markets, but the new Fed chairman in May and the the impact of the big beautiful bill, many other things, I think we we are going to see a bullish 2026, which will which will surprise some people. Um I do want to ask you about um 50T and specifically how you're thinking about the digital asset space, because you're invested in a lot of different companies. One of the ways I've seen you break down how you think about the market is you bucket these companies and the way you think about the space into consumer, infrastructure, and finance.

Um just walk us through a little bit about how you think about the digital asset space, why those three buckets, and and what's your view of the whole market like that? Yeah, look, the digital asset ecosystem, which is a term that we started to use, you know, when I had the idea for these funds in 2019, 2020, sort of a catchall for this broader digitization of of everything and the application of the decentralized ledger to all aspects of business and life. You know, and I did this interview first time I ever really talked publicly in the middle of 2019 uh with Raoul Pal, and I called uh the Bitcoin blockchain, but you know, the the the the invention of Bitcoin,

you know, as a as a truth machine, as a machine uh through which all things could be verified and legitimized. And I I and I posited that, you know, human beings tend to exaggerate. I don't want to say that all human beings lie in some form or another, but, you know, everyone certainly has told white lies and certainly exaggerated and exaggerates. But, there are certain areas where that is not a good thing. You know, maybe, you know, your wife asks you, I've been married 26 years, your wife asks you, "You know, does she look pretty tonight?" And like, you know, you're going to say yes no matter what, right?

So, that's a place where you're you definitely have to say, you know, you you you you have to sort of say yes. But, like as an example, just take, you know, just take something as simple and basic as, you know, your passport, right? Why is it that we're walking around with these like pieces of paper, you know, and they're getting stamped manually? So, I have this view that eventually the entire analog world is going to move on chain. And of course, you know, what moves first is money. Because the money guys they they're the fastest. They're the quickest. They care the most. They're going to work 24/7.

You know, we had this big boom in Web3 blockchain gaming in '21. Hasn't come back quite, but you know, we all thought there are 2 billion gamers out there. Oh, it's obvious they're they're they're digital natives. You know, oh, they're they're going to want to trade their skins. They're going to want to have, you know, all of their various in-game items, you know, on blockchains and then of course fungible with other items and be able to trade them on OpenSea, right? Well, that didn't quite happen because at the end of the it will happen, but it didn't quite happen because the reality is people who play games, their first priority is to have fun in the game, okay? And so, they want to have fun in the game. The second priority is

maybe like trading, you know, and extracting value from their in-game items. That is not the case with money people, Wall Street people, guys from my old world in the hedge fund business. They care about one thing, return on their capital for their LPs. And so, that's why you've seen, for instance, stablecoins take off. And we've been super bullish on stablecoins, you know, since 2020 '21. We were fortunate to be able to invest in Circle at a $3 billion valuation. That's been one of our big hits in our third fund. Um I know the price has come in a little bit, but you know, that company is going to do 300 uh 3 billion in gross revenue, you know,

somewhere north of 500 million between 500 million and a billion in net profit. Circle is one of the core companies of the space. It's not going anywhere. You could buy it here and hold it for 5 to 10 years and you're going to make money. You know, I come from this world where I knew believe it's extremely difficult to make money and extremely difficult to hold on to it. And so, when I say something or when I see something that I can see with a high degree of certainty, like if you buy Circle today, whatever the price is, I have a very high degree of certainty you're going to make money in 5 to 10 years if you hold it for that period. You can't really say that about that many things. And then I also say, "Look, crypto is the easiest market to

make money in. It's just the most impossible market to keep it." And so, you know, you can get lucky. Anybody can get lucky, but over time this just doesn't exist. And you have to have a process, do a huge amount of diligence. You know, I've got a team of 21 people. We have 2 billion under management, 2 billion AUM today. I invested in 24 companies. We have 12 board seats. We get involved with our companies and we own, you know, the growth names, companies making at least $50 million or more. I invested $600 million just in just in in four companies, in Ledger and Animoca, uh Kraken and Deribit. And you know, Deribit got bought by Coinbase, um which is the largest deal in the

history of the crypto markets. And the funds have had six realizations this year. So, in terms of private equity generally, cuz I don't compare us with venture. We don't take venture risk. We don't do seed or pre-seed. We just You know, venture is make 10 investments, nine go to zero, and then hopefully one of them is Google or Amazon. We're just that's not our business and we're not trying to make those home runs. We're trying to make a 5 to 8x return over the 10-year life of the fund. And you know, we're buying companies now in the private markets at ba- basically between, you know, four and eight times revenue and they're trading some of them at 15 to 25 times revenue in the public markets. I think there's the public

markets are clamoring for crypto blockchain equity. I know things have have come in a little bit recently, but until recently there was only Coinbase really as a large public crypto blockchain company. Now we have a few more. Some of the ones in our portfolio, Circle, uh Figure, you know, eToro. >> about this. Just so our audience knows, explain what a realization is and then talk about this IPO process cuz you've been involved in so many of them, Circle, eToro, Gemini, Figure. I know Kraken is coming soon. Um and so like from your perspective too though, right? Like after the IPO, after the realization, do you go back out looking for new investments? Like what is the next step for for 50T after these realizations

happen? >> we're launching a new fund. No, we we return the we return the stock back to the LPs. So, you know, my our value add is uh us buying stock in the in the uh primary or in secondary markets in the private markets. We don't really have much competition today. Many of the traditional tech growth growth equity investors, the very well-known, very successful larger names, Thoma Bravo, Silver Lake, uh and even some of the large sovereigns like CPP and, you know, Temasek, they came into our space in '21. And unfortunately for some of them, you know, they were hurt in FTX and

Celsius and BlockFi. They invested in companies at 50 to 100 times revenue and they really haven't come back into the space. And but we you know, we we didn't invest in those. We passed on over 200 deals. Uh our portfolio has pretty much remained uh nicely intact through the bear phase. Our max drawdown in any fund from the absolute peak in '21 was about 10 to 15%. So, we didn't really get hurt in the bear phase. And now we're seeing these realizations, which is just simply companies we bought in the private market going public or getting purchased.

And, you know, once we have those realizations, we deliver the stock to our LPs or, you know, sometimes they prefer to own cash. We give the stock, they can sell it for cash. Uh if they want me to manage it, you know, in a public vehicle, we can do that as well. But the reality is we're launching our fifth fund now, which will close in March, but we're having a first close actually in a week. And that's going to be well north of $100 million on our first close. And then I think our final close will be somewhere between 500 million and a billion. Uh could be more actually given how much capital we're returning. Before March, I think we're going to be returning north of 500

million. And therefore our DPI, uh which is basically how much capital of the what percent of your committed capital got returned, we're going to be returning over 50% of all of our investors' committed capital. That's my estimate in our funds 1, 2, 3, and 4. And that is even fund 4, which closed in November of '24, that fund's up 300% today, uh even though it just closed in November of '24 because we were able to buy a lot of stock during the bear phase. But now we're going to be returning likely over 50% of that committed capital, which is really unheard of in the PE world. These are 10-year life funds. And the first two funds were '21 vintages. Fund 3 was

a '22 vintage. That'll put us probably in the top 1 or 2% of all PE funds across all sectors and mandates globally. So, we picked the right spot. We've got some great companies and we still have 17 portfolio companies left in the first four funds. So, you know, pretty exciting times. You asked about the digital asset ecosystem. You know, for us the way we look at it is that there's sub there are sectors that we look to invest in. We want to have a broad diversified portfolio. We chose those three buckets that you mentioned because we think those three buckets give you a nice exposure that's leveraged to many of the developments

within the DAE. And today within within the DAE you've got 10 sectors, but then there are also 100 subsectors. And we think in our universe of companies, companies valued at around $400 million or more, there are 125 companies. And so, that's our we tend to invest, as I said, 40 to 50 million in revenue as a minimum. We don't like to pay more than 10 times our revenue. And so, >> that's basically our universe of companies. Okay. I know you made me promise to get you out of here on time, so I want to kind of like squeeze a few questions into one here.

>> That's why I was talking so quickly cuz we're short on time. >> Well, I know. Well, you got a lot in. >> all your questions before you asked them. You did an amazing job. Um so, I want to kind of put together a couple of things here. I want to basically just ask, you know, what are your your most focused on in terms of the the meta narrative in the digital asset ecosystem? There's a few things I've I've heard get some attention and you speak about before. One of them is tokenization of real world assets. Another one is the privacy narrative, which I know that Zen Rock is doing some things with. Um and then I know that you're also been talking a lot about digital identity and how the rise of AI and AI agents makes that a really important solution. So, you know,

without having time to go into all of these narratives, I I'd like to know like what is your energy going into the most? What do you see as the next narrative or the next emerging trend in digital assets? >> Well, I don't know where you got those three things that I'm focusing on from. You must have read our documents or looked at my in another interview or something because those >> some research, yeah. Cuz you nailed it. Or did you just put it in a chat GPT and say, "What is Dan looking at now?" But now you really nailed the those are the three sort of core areas. You know, uh the privacy area is really just going crazy recently. And yes, one of our companies that we operate majority owned in funds three and four Zen Rock in partnership with Solana has launched Zen

Zec. So Solana partnered with us gave us three million dollars um which was you know a huge coup for this is the only venture thing that we do I won't touch it venture otherwise but this is we operate it and own it so it's a bit different and started the company essentially from zero and we we launched about a month or two ago the first decentralized wrapped yield bearing Bitcoin on the Solana chain and I know for non crypto people that sounds like oh my goodness what is that we then followed that up with Zen BTC we then follow that up with Zen Zec and we've got a decentralized Zcash

trading on Solana the volumes have exploded and so that remarkably we've already done cumulatively I think close to 80 or 90 million dollars of volume and this is a company that basically I bought out of administration you know it it the tech was great we loved it they had a decentralized multi-party computation tech the company was mismanaged misled and um you know we were able to turn it around and actually turned into something that I think is very valuable and that is that I just in the world of DeFi it just never made any sense to me that Bitcoin wrapped Bitcoin would be held at a central counterparty like BitGo and I

love BitGo they're great guys we got no problem with BitGo but it just didn't make any sense to me you've got all these guys moving cross chain swapping doing all kinds of stuff and yet they were okay with having their Bitcoin custodied at a central counterparty so we decentralized custody and I think you know and added a few bells and whistles and that's what you know Zen Rock is doing with Zen Zec and Zen BTC but you know it's this it's this ability for the ledger to be this truth machine this stamp and I always go back and I think back to like 19th century France when the whole country was essentially run by the notaries you know to be a notaire in

France uh you know it was of high importance and everything had to be you know approved and signed and this and that now today we don't have that but when I think about all the sort of documents that live in the analog world like I your trust documents your your taxes your illegal your this it's it's a mess it's all in paper and I think one day everything of importance we're just going to have on our phone we're going to have a digital wallet everything is going to be in there you know and I think there's room for privacy there too because once you have everything in there >> [clears throat] >> is it really fair

that people should be able to track your transactions right like I I I come from the world you know I worked at Tiger worked with Stan Druckenmiller Duquesne and you know in the old hedge fund world you know when when you have like a an important investor or trader who comes into the markets the way it used to work is you know the word would get out you know that's how it would the word would get out that you know Druckenmiller is buying Euro and then all of a sudden the Euro would spike and you wouldn't be able to get your position on right so you'd have to buy it quietly because you wanted to get your position on so it's kind of like unfair a little bit like I think we're moving to that place and I'm thrilled about that but I also think you should

be able to purchase things without the entire world knowing exactly who it is and you know on chain analytics which is an area I'm very bullish on I think data I'm very bullish on you know there still are companies that are growing we think you know the block block works guys are doing fascinating stuff with data that's a company we own about little more than 10% of what that's one of the few sort of smaller companies we own but you know you mentioned RWAs and tokenization that's all happening I mean even Larry Fink is leading the charge on that one so I I think that's in the first inning and AI is very important and I I I said something I was at the

Cantor Fitzgerald conference in Miami what was it last week I can't even remember and I was did an interview there and they they published it a few days ago and I really do believe that you know in the future and I look out for this fund five that we're doing too look we're we're we're in this world where AI agents are going to be acting independently transacting independently sending value back and forth independently without a central counterpart and it's impossible that they're going to be calling up Citibank or JP Morgan and doing a wire or whatever an ACH or all of that's going to go away

they are going to be using programmable money smart contracts embedded into blockchains that's essentially what Ethereum is and and I think you know some of these chains have really been battle tested for speed you know so when people say oh you know Solana it has this problem it has that problem the memes were stupid maybe but what the meme coins showed you is that you could put a huge amount of traffic through on those blockchains and so I think the memes were important because they they they they're like they showed that the rails work

under extreme usage right and that's you know that's that's important and in a world where you've got millions of AI agents sending value back and forth the blockchains have the infrastructure to handle that right and so and so I think they're going to be businesses growing up and this is how phenomenal you know this space is how early it is still I still can't believe how early it is but how early this whole space is that there is not a single company in the world that's yet at the growth stage in this place of overlap between AI and

blockchain we have one company we're looking at that's still venture-ish again the venture capital guys I'm sure Andreessen and company they've already made quite a few investments in that you know world where AI and blockchain overlap but none of them are at scale yet none of them are are doing enough revenue for us yet there is one that we like um but I suspect within the next three four years and this is the sweet spot for our fund five I I suspect you know they'll be you know we put 10 to potentially even 20% of our portfolio into companies that are the winners from you know these early stage developments in the AI blockchain

overlap space so well look are you happy with the content if you're happy with the content I'm very very happy it's a great interview we're over time so I'll wrap it up here but just to like pull some of this together for the audience you know I want people to hear what Dan is saying he's not getting bogged down in short-term sentiment he's taking a long view he's knowing that this asset class has room to grow and looking for opportunities for the future not getting panicked about the moment I think that's a big lesson here and then you know just like a lot of the the the thought processes there on like how Powell getting replaced is bullish how there's a lot more opportunity in 2026 so I really appreciate you coming on to sort of like just share your perspective on

the market and and the outlook for the road ahead so to close with I just want you give a chance to share where can we send our audience to find more of you and your work online well I'm on X but I I'm I've been doing a little less on X D Tap Cap and then on LinkedIn I think I'm under D Tap Cap too or just pull up my name I like to put things out on on LinkedIn I found everything regarding my investments in 50T whenever I mention it on X no one cares they only want to know like my market view you know what am I thinking about Bitcoin or gold or the markets or Nasdaq and so I sort of have a bifurcated audience and I keep the 50T stuff on on

LinkedIn and the market you know stuff on X well Dan Tapiero this was a really fun conversation thanks for being on Milkroad Macro and thank you for having me and and letting me sort of just riff there because we were pressed for time today I really appreciate it was the greatest interview I've ever listened to oh come on >> [laughter] >> say that Dan you're the best thank you all for joining us I hope you all learned a lot so until next time stay safe stay educated stay bullish and we will see you all on the next episode of Milkroad Macro thanks for being here everyone bye want insights on what's really moving markets and how we're trading each event subscribe to our channel then join the Milkroad Macro and Macro Pro newsletters this show is for educational purposes

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