John Gillen on the gap between crypto fundamentals and price

Transcript

There's going to be a messy middle where everybody launches their own L1. Everybody launches their own stable cocoin. Everyone's fighting for market share trying to justify their reason for existence. What's up everybody? It's LG Dad here and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that's bullish in theory, cautious in practice, and confused in real time. Today is December 19th, 2025. Bitcoin is lost somewhere in translation. Maybe 88K. I don't even know anymore. ETH is probably below $3,000 again. And it seems like everything has gone right for crypto this year except the price action. And my guest today is here to discuss how this point right now is a major test of conviction for the markets. Do people actually believe in this thing enough to prop it up into 2026 and to have this

fabled bull rally that we keep discussing on Milkroad. You're going to recognize him from several other podcasts just this week. That's right. My guest is John Gillan, my fellow host on Milkroad and the sole host of Milkroad Macro. He's joining me for a special Friday episode where your two podcast hosts come together as one and rant like the old men that they are. Today's episode is brought to you by Chain Link which links the web 3 to Wall Street. Bridge send stablecoin payments instantly. Simple global friction-free and reserved ETFs, the onchain equivalent of ETFs. Here he is. John Old Man Gillan returns. What's up, man?

>> Hi LG. It was the week before Christmas and we couldn't find anyone else to be a guest, so here I am. No way. You know what? I think I I always love doing a show with you. We've done a couple live streams together this year. Uh we have a banked holiday episode coming up with Martin that's also a banger. And I feel like people want to hear the two hosts. They they hear our voice is the ones they hear all the time. So now we, like I said, we're together as one. Uh and maybe people don't even realize it's two different people. Maybe they think we're the same guy and now they realize that there's actually two different hosts of the show. >> I have heard a fan theory that we're we're brothers and and we're not telling anybody. And I love that rumor. That's

Isn't that great? I love that for us. >> You are the longlost Youet brother. I used to do my old podcast was with my actual brother. Uh and people always would speculate on which guest is our third brother. And maybe it's been you all along and and we just couldn't get you to come on an NFT show back in the day. >> All right. Well, this is getting weird. So, let's move on. What are we talking about today, LG? >> Listen, John, uh you're one of the hardest believers of crypto that I know, man. you you've come over to the crypto side and you joined Milk Road specifically to talk about crypto and it seems to have come at one of the worst possible times for crypto, right? You've been doing this for 6 months and the first three months of that were wonderful in terms of price and the

three months after that have been totally awful. Q4 has been a total disaster. At this point, it's like comical to say Q4 2025, right? We're we're all finally almost done Q4 2025. Nobody's saying Q1. Q1 2026 is like a term nobody has mentioned at all. Van, I I would I would s I would like to ask you how you're feeling right now because I feel like you you are angry at the bears for giving all these bearish takes repeatedly and you are still somehow deep deep down bullish. But maybe that's that's being tested.

>> I am feeling a lot of things. There's a lot of emotions going on at this moment for me and for a lot of other people. Well, the first thing I think is that everybody is a little bit surprised, frustrated, hurt, confused. There's capitulation happening for a lot of reasons. Um, people are getting liquidated. People are feeling like their their coins have been holding for years haven't moved and they're they're wondering if just like you said, like it's a test of conviction. That's what's happening right now. It's like how much do you believe in this industry, in this asset class, uh, and in the valuations of these assets. So, that's like something we're seeing playing out. Everybody is exhausted. We crypto has been in a secular bare market since the collapse of Teralun and FTX and and this has been now a point we're getting to a point

with this now where the exhaustion the frustration has gotten so bad that people are rage quitting they're leaving crypto there's an article on Twitter like I've wasted eight years in crypto there's another one that says crypto is dead and like for whatever else they're saying in there the headline is kind of the sentiment right that I think is the danger point because the just at the point you know you said it's like the best of times the worst of times is how I'm thinking about this it's the best the times of in terms of institutional adoption and like government level um support and adoption of the technology and of the assets and it's the worst of times in terms of retail sentiment. And the whole point of this industry as far as I'm concerned is to be able to reclaim financial liberty um and and

sovereignty over our assets, over our rights, over our property. That's the whole point of of Bitcoin and the whole digital asset ecosystem. And at at at the exactly the time when this technology is getting more robust than ever, more adopted than ever, and has a higher potential than ever before, retail is um rage quitting. They're leaving. They're checking out. They're they're selling their bags, and they're they're, you know, aping into other things. So, I think now is a great time to not gamble, not use leverage to hold majors, zoom out, and chill like we always say on Milk Road. Um, but it's also a great test of conviction. And if you really have conviction, it's a good opportunity to buy the dip. I think that the the the thing that's really frustrating everybody is the the bare market in altcoins has never ended. And I think that that's really what's what's

frustrated everybody is the cycle is lengthening. It's never been a four-year cycle. It's been a liquidity and business cycle cycle. The the NPI, the PMIs on the ISM are picking up into 2026. There's going to be a a macro trend in a positive direction for the economy which will eventually metriculate into assets. Um, and the liquidity is going to come back and and keep rising into 2026. That's going to set us up for for a great year for risk assets. And there's going to be a lot of astonishment and disbelief in the the four-year cycle religion among Bitcoin holders when Bitcoin puts in a new all-time high in 2026. And I think that's going to radically shake things up. So, I think this point is kind of like this dark night of the soul for the industry of exhaustionbased and time based capitulation. Um, and you know, a

lot of people are calling for a year-long bare market. We might see that. I don't think we will. Um, but either way, there's going to be a sunrise at the other side of this midnight that we're all living through. Um, and that's what I'm here for. And that's I'm I'm just I'm not, you know, it's the the Wolf of Wall Street thing. I'm not leaving. >> Also, I'm angry. I'm like frustrated. I'm trying to tap into this. Listen, John, you're always you're always happy and you're cheerful. This is this is my this is my goal today is to tap into I want to know how angry you really are. You know what's funny, John, too, is I I remember this from the last um downturn right in 2022. That was my first cycle, first time being a like more active market participant of anything. And

that's when I finally re started to realize the actual factors that affect this things like global liquidity and etc. uh and rates and all that. And what surprised me then and I was looking out for this time was this cascade of capitulation not even necessarily in price right because well ETH's not great but Bitcoin is at at a is at a pretty high level you know what I mean it's not it's not at 16k right um like it was last time the psycho low but is the capitulation vocally on on Twitter right like you're saying wasted eight years.

Crypto's dead. And it's like if we were still just sitting at like 120k Bitcoin, you wouldn't see any of that You wouldn't see any of that. You wouldn't. But it's just funny. It's like as soon as things go bad, people just tap into that sentiment and they know they can get engagement and clicks by just being like, "You guys are all idiots and so am I. It's been such a waste of time being here." And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We all know you probably made millions betting on these random alts or NFTTS or memecoins or freaking AI coins last year. There's all been these other trends. You could have bought Zcash recently. There's all there's been all these other opportunities to make a ton of money here outside of holding majors, but I think as soon as the bad news starts, everyone's like, "Well, we've

all been suckers this whole time. The banks came and our coins didn't go up, right?" And um but you don't see that. You don't see that at all highs ever. You don't see that at all. >> Yeah. Exactly. And it it's it's so much like price is the best marketing and and public relations and it's also the worst, right? So, it's like it really it really exhausts a lot of people. But, you know, look, I think we've seen strong inflows into the Salana ETFs. There's an XRP ETF that I think has done over a billion dollars of volume. There is still a market for these things. These assets are not like dead in the water. It's just a capitulation from frustration that we haven't seen this like radical pump. Um, for me, I think that the the thesis has always been that eventually something is going to break

in the system. I don't know if it's going to be the private credit market or if it's going to be the housing market, but eventually there's going to be some sort of break in the system from the Federal Reserve doing quantitative tightening and from removing all the liquidity from the system that they've been doing over the last couple of years to try to like, you know, deal with the the six trillion that they dumped in in one year during COVID. But eventually that's going to happen. Eventually, they're going to have to inject a ton of liquidity. And we have this debt maturity wall of all like the the Western nations that totals up to about $40 trillion that matures over the course of 2026. that's not something that we're just going to like you know that that's the big thing that's driving markets. So the cycle is extended like I

I I agree with this you know Tom Lee Ro Paul a lot of other people who've done this analysis on the liquidity picture and the macro picture and say say that things are going to pick up into 2026 and that's going to drive a stronger business cycle a stronger liquidity cycle that'll drive prices in risk assets that'll drive prices in crypto and that will drive a sentiment turnaround and then everyone's going to have a completely different narrative. They're going to talk about how all these altcoins are super valuable and like revolutionary technology again and the prices are going to go up and we're going to see an end to this like secular bare market in the digital asset space that we've seen. The other thing I think is important, it's kind of getting lost in all this is like the move towards tokenization is is rapid and it's real

and it's it's it's happening much faster than people realize. This week alone, Coinbase announc announced tokenized stock trading in the United States. Robin Hood quietly launched 500 different stocks to trade on on arbitrum to settle on Ethereum as well. Um, Securitiz launched a tokenized stock trading product. The DTCC clearing house, which is the company that actually owns all of the equities that everybody's trading around, they're working with the Canton network to tokenize all the the trading that they're doing. the the CFTC had a confirmation of a new chairman who's very pro crypto and the chairman of the SEC said publicly that he thinks that all financial markets going to be tokenized in less than two years. The the the rate of adoption that we're going through here and the proliferation

of real world assets and tokenization of of assets is is moving at much faster speeds than people realize because they're not paying attention to these headlines. They're not they don't care about the fundamentals because the prices aren't refle reflecting that. When that mismatch corrects, the sentiment shift is going to be radical and then there's going to be this euphoric blowoff top. Now, I don't know when this is going to happen exactly, but it's going to happen because the fundamentals have never been stronger and they're going to keep getting stronger. And I think that something I'll say about this too that I want to just like remind people of is the importance of decentralized true decentralization, not just, you know, distributed governance between, you know, three people who are all whitelisted and have all the money anyway. Real decentralized governance is really important because you don't own

anything. The way this is set up right now, if you buy a stock, the DTCC is the one who's actually like that's the clearing house who's settling this. The the company that actually own it owns it is called Seed and Co. CED DE and Co. You don't actually own the stock. You don't own the security. You have a you're the beneficial owner, right? Apple doesn't know you own their stock because you don't technically own their stock. You're just getting the the rights to the the price movements one way or the other, but they actually own it. If they settle it on the Canton network, then they're going to own the the security. They're going to own the network that it settles on. So, you're just renting everything. You don't own any of it because the Canton network is a like a a Wall Street. It's something

nobody knows about, right? It's a Wall Street chain that you have to get whitelisted to get any kind of access to or exposure to or control over. And so, it's a way of like making retail think that they're participating in this economy when in reality they don't own anything. And you don't get to settle anything. You're not going to own your stable coin. You're not going to own the tokenized asset. you're not gonna own the L1 that it settles on. This is why decentralized technology is so important and and one of the reasons why I'm so I'm such a strong believer in Ethereum and other decentralized L1s because it it does us no good. If all we do is develop a bunch of technologies that allow the people who already own the world to get further control over us, our capital and our activity, then this

whole industry has been, you know, co-opted and that there's no value that comes out of this at all. So, I think that a lot of these narratives of decentralization have kind of died out. People have given up on these cipher punk values and I think they're actually much more important than ever and eventually there's going to be a repricing accordingly once people realize that they need to own things and not just rent them from the powers that be. I'm going to pause there for a second. If you're listening to this and thinking, okay, but what is the move I should actually be making, then going pro is for you? Every week, our research team drops a full deep dive on the biggest themes everyone else misses. Plus, you get access to our full Milk Road Pro portfolio that has real-time buy and sell signals and access to our

Discord where our analysts will answer any question you have if you want to level up. Honestly, that's where you got to do it. Hit the link below. John, is that is it I feel like there's a huge disconnect there currently in the industry, right? Because I mean, if you zoom out, you know, you look at the larger themes of adoption, 2025 is an incredibly successful year, right? You have stable coins growing at an unbelievable rate. you have so many people adding so many funds adding crypto to their balances or to their their uh portfolios, right? But aren't those things totally opposite to what you're saying to the original values of crypto? Isn't this the opposite of what the point was? Right? I think Scott Melker earlier on the earlier this week

on the show was like, listen, like this is I guess is this what everybody wanted is for the banks to be basically controlling this or be the ones pretty much moving the price action at this point because you have a lot of the OGs getting out, right? or supposedly that's one of the big big one of the big stories the last couple months, right? So, how do you reconcile that? Especially for you, somebody's in a position, right? It's like you're you're you're a media head, right? You're here running a a macro show, coming on the milk on the doing the crypto show as well. You fundamentally believe in this stuff, but you're also really well connected to Wall Street. You know what they're doing, and you know that eventually their plans for this is not necessarily this beautiful decentralized network.

>> I think it validates the thesis, right? because if they they weren't taking this seriously, if they didn't see it as a legitimate threat, they wouldn't be so desperate to try to control it and to come up with a product to kill it. Um I think, you know, JP Morgan is a great example of this. Banks, you know, technically or or not technically, but theoretically blockchain technology should make banks obsolete, right? Um JP Morgan has responded by creating their own chain called Kexus, which nobody in our industry really knows about or thinks about, but they've settled like the Canton network and Kexus have both respectively settled trillions of dollars of value that's cleared on both of them because they're they're leveraging users and and a capital base that's already in this legacy system and that is, you know, accumulated trillions of dollars of value already. So they're

just using that to kind of like bootstrap these networks. The the the thing I think is so interesting is that it's like the proof of the like first they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win. This we're entering now. A lot of people think cryptos won. We're entering the then they fight you stage. And the then they fight you stage looks like, hey, we made our own chain and our own stable coin and our own tokenized everything. And people have to understand that that's not the same thing as Ethereum or a decentralized blockchain ecosystem. and to understand the difference and why because decentralization doesn't matter at all until it does matter and then it's the only thing that does matter, right? If you're getting rich on paper but you don't actually have any control or ownership of your a assets and you know

you tweet something they don't like, right? At some point in the future, suddenly you know you're locked out of everything and you've got nothing. That makes a big difference. Um so you know it's not your keys, not your crypto. But I think that the the thing I take away from all of this is the fact that they are trying so hard, moving so quickly to try to compete with all of these products that have come out of decentralized finance and Ethereum and other blockchain ecosystems is a validation of the the the the use case, the value proposition. Um, and it's not something that you should like look at as an attack or like a a destruction of Bitcoin or Ethereum or any of these cyberpunk values, but it's a it's a validation of them. And the way we win is to not adopt the the banker coins and

the banker chains and the banker everything, right? Like not let them put the handcuffs on us and just keep the decentralized things. Now, here's the trade-off, right? And this has frustrated a lot of people. When you have a decentralized ecosystem, economy, government, any kind of decentralized, you know, entity, it's a it's going to have some trade-offs, right? When you're highly centralized, you can be much much quicker. Um, and you can you can move with more decisiveness and precision. In a decentralized entity there, we have to move things together as a community and through more um like deliberative processes. There's a trade-off that comes with that, but in my opinion, it's worth it because you actually have credible neutrality, immutability, ownership, right? All these things are not just um, you know, like nice to

haves. They're they're fundamentally essential to the value propositions of these assets and of this technology. And I don't think it's it's not fair of us or wise of us to give that up in exchange for, you know, a centralized entity that we all quote unquote trust, right? Like that's that's not going to work out for me. FINRA is like the the regulatory agency that governs financial adviserss and financial investment activity on Wall Street. The the previous owner of FINRA, that's the the the company, the the organization supposed to keep everybody compliant and safe and following the rules. The previous head of that before FINRA was formed was Bernie Maidoff. So, I'm not trusting Wall Street with anything and I don't want to have to. And if there's if you tell me the product is great, but I have to trust anybody, right? Like, I'm

not I'm not in We don't We're moving past that. We must move from a system of trust to a system of truth. That's what we're here for. That's the value proposition. And people have forgotten all this, >> John. But aren't there aren't there bad actors like that in crypto, too? >> No. Nobody in crypto is capable. It's We've gone from a system of don't be evil to a system of can't be evil. All of the bad actors in crypto have done it based on things that they could do in the legacy system, not leveraging anything about the decentralized crypto technology. They've done it through oldfashioned scams, right? Like uh like uh SPF was just, you know, frankly very similar to Bernie Maidoff, right? Um and a lot of this technology, I mean, look, sometimes there's bugs in the code, things don't work the way they expect,

etc., right? But like, um and you know, the other thing too is that when you're when you're pioneering new kinds of assets and new kinds of markets, you're going to have some bleeding edge technology. It's bleeding because you cut yourself sometimes. I think a lot of exchanges and market makers didn't fully understand the implications of auto deleveraging associated with perpetual futures contracts and they've learned that now and they're de-risking accordingly. Right. Yeah. It was it was insane. We we learned really quickly what that looks like. Right. So look, you know, when you have innovations like this, there's a lot of benefits that come from them. There's also some risks from pioneering new things. Um we're going to see super apps coming out.

That's going to be an interesting thing, too. combining all these entities that normally were split up into one thing. We we'll see how the all these things play out. But, you know, I I don't think it's fair to say that like crypto is like any more or less prone to any kind of abuses or anything like that cuz the actual technologies themselves are what is true, right? Like that that has never been breached or compromised. It's just the the the people and u you know the basically fraudulent activity um that that happens anywhere there's an opportunity for that. We have to protect ourselves against that and account for it and not be, you know, suckered by it basically. Um, but the technology of crypto is is has never been compromised.

>> When you say super app, are you talking about Coinbase? >> I'm talking about Coinbase. I'm talking about Robin Hood. I'm talking about X. I'm talking about a lot of things that even have haven't come to market yet. I think there's going to be a lot of innovation in that area and there's there's an appetite for it. So, I think that's going to be something to watch for in 2026 because there's a big knife fight going on. And by the way, Coinbase is trying to launch a super app and they they launched a bunch of great new products recently. Robin Hood is trying to do the same thing and there's a big knife fight. But you know what? Uh if if Coinbase does really well, they've built all their stuff on base, which is on Ethereum. So Ethereum will do really well. And if Robin Hood does really

well, they're building all their stuff on Ethereum on arbitum. So that's going to do Ethereum is going to do well really well if they win, too. So it doesn't really matter which one of these super apps becomes dominant for institutions or for retail. And they have different strategies for both. But it doesn't really matter who wins. Ethereum is going to benefit enormously and continue to benefit long into the future. Um, so if anybody has a long view of their investments, Ethereum is is looking pretty good right now. Stable coins are the biggest use case in crypto right now. But let's be real, using them on chain is still way too complex. That's exactly the problem Bridge is solving. Recently acquired by Stripe.

Yep, that's Stripe. Bridge helps businesses send, store, accept, and launch stable coins instantly. Explore the future of global financial infrastructure at milkroad.com/bridge. 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 crypton native equivalent. That's exactly what Reserve's decentralized token folios bring to the table. Reserve ETFs are rule-based baskets of crypto assets packaged into a single token like Coin Market CMC 20, crypto's version of the S&P 500. Go to milkroad.com/reserve to find out what's on offer. Yeah, but John, I mean, okay, so this is this is something I still don't fully understand

is how the uses usage of the chain drives price action because something like ETH is a really good example. You've got a major dilution across L2s of I guess, you know, of of capital, but it still is technically on Ethereum. Something like Bass, which has been a top like six or seven, maybe five TVL chain despite being in L2 for a long time now, right? It's not new that they're in that ranking. They've been there for a long time. They were the that was a top chain when ETH was at 1500 in April. And the thing that drove ETH from 1500 to 4,800 wasn't people using Bass. It was people like Tom Lee buying it up and people speculating on that or whatever drove that 3x. But it

wasn't it wasn't suddenly this this usage of Bass. So even if the super app for Coinbase, if that does come to fruition and everybody's using Bass and it's great, how does that or or same thing for Arbitum on Robin Hood, how does that actually drive back to the price of ETH because inevitably that's that's that's the main question we want to ask. >> So there's something called a loss leader in business, right? which is like you you run things below what you should be charging or below where you you're making a profit in order to incentivize the market to come to your product and to cut out your competitors to gain market share and to kind of establish yourself as a dominant player. Walmart ran this strategy. Amazon ran the strategy. Ethereum is running the strategy right now. This is what's happening with the L2 um roadmap. They

are incentivizing people to build L1's or to build rather L2s on Ethereum and they are allowing these L2s to parasitically extract value from the main chain. The trade-off is they are radically increasing the number of weekly active users on Ethereum. If you watch it, it's still going up. It's going up faster and faster. All these upgrades, Fusaka, Dancon, it's amaz the the the the speed of Ethereum, the scalability, the costs have all come down. They they've done a lot of amazing upgrades to that technology to that to that L1 and they have also incentivized a lot of other people to start building L2s on Ethereum. So as this proliferates there's going to be more and more momentum, more traction, more entrenchment, more adoption. The metaf

law of this is going to so we had this big debate on on L1 valuations right and everyone's like oh you should use price to earnings ratios. The metaf's law value of networks is is a much bigger value driver and it is a much more sticky value driver and it is an exponential value driver. It's not going to grow linearly like a business like oh we opened another franchise. No, it's going to grow exponentially. The valuation of that is in the trillions and that's what Ethereum is buying by temporarily allowing themselves to be parasitized by the L2s. There's a huge value proposition coming from that and this is where this is ultimately going and you're asking like when is when are when are the users and the transaction volume that's on on the L2s and on Ethereum as an ecosystem going to

generate value in a right now as we're sitting here the estimates are that about half of online human online activity is human half of it is agentic or non-human in origin as we get towards 2030 and towards 2035 that number is going to get to be more like 10 to one so instead of having you know 8 billion people on the planet you're going to have like 80 billion agentic operators conducting economic activity on behalf of or at the behest of human beings that are not going to know what they're doing or how they're doing it and they're going to be using blockchain technology. And if the Ethereum ver the EVM ecosystem is the sort of coin of the realm, all of that is going to settle to or be conducted on some form or flavor of Ethereum. And that value proposition is enormous and incalculable. The growth

trajectory of the digital asset asset class has been ex like I said exponential. We've gotten to three trillion. I think we're going to directionally get towards somewhere between 6 to 10 trillion maybe if if this bull run continues and by 2035 2040 that number starts to get closer to 100 trillion. Now you can discount that by you know 50% and say it's going to go towards 50 trillion right because maybe the growth will slow down whatever but that's the directionally the trajectory that we're on. It's not going to just be human adoption that gets us there. It's going to be agentic adoption to the order, you know, like I said, multiple dozens of billions of AI agents that never sleep, never eat, and just conduct activity online on ETH all day and microtransactions and all these things.

Um, so look, you know, I think people are radically mis misappraising the potential future of this and how big exponential adoption is in terms of creation of value and driving value. And so Ethereum's trade-off is they are allowing themselves to like, you know, be parasitized on the L1 for the moment in order to get a bigger stake in ownership of that future that we're moving towards. And you know, I just don't think that a lot of the legacy players from Wall Street are going to be able to compete with this because they don't have the technology, they don't have the focus, they don't have the skills, and and they're not going to be able to compete. They're going to be able to compete in the short term, but not in the long run. And that's what I think is the thing here is like there's

going to be a messy middle where everybody launches their own L1, everybody launches their own stable coin, everyone's fighting for market share trying to justify their reason for existence. We're going to see super apps coming from legacy, you know, apps from from crypto. There's going to be a tons of things that are tried here, but product market fit has to be acquired and market share has to be captured and defended. And I think Ethereum has done the best job and is best positioned to capture, continue to capture and to defend that market share. Holy man. This guy this guy loves ETH and I love it. I love that's such that's a perfect rant, man. I want to clip that and put it everywhere. No, I mean that. I'm not making fun of you, John. I think that that I think that that's a fantastic way to put it. Uh

probably the most succinct answer to that question that I've heard on the show. Um so, thanks for putting that out there. Are we currently at that market share battle right now? Is that what you're saying? That it's like that's basically every Wall Street has woken up to like, holy we're behind uh trying to have our own chains. We're behind on stable coins. are behind on basically uh RWAS and everything else and now they're rushing in and be like, "Okay, this is going to happen. We all have to make our own apps. We have to at least try even if we're behind to take as big a market share from this before it eventually all consolidates back to a few players."

>> Absolutely. This is absolute blind mad panic. These kinds of institutions do not move this quickly about anything. This is a red alert, four alarm crisis. Oh my god, we're obsolete. How do we make people think that we're not obsolete? How do we capture how do we they're trying to they're literally trying to put handcuffs on the capital that they have and the market share that they have because they realize that if they don't quickly it's going to migrate elsewhere. Um and so that yes I think this is panic. I think this is what panic looks like and everyone's couching it in terms of like we're innovating we're launching new products. They're scared out of their minds because if everybody realizes that there's no need for these businesses anymore to control their capital, to manage their lives, to own them, you know, lock, stock, and

barrel, you know, from the crown of your head to the sole of your foot, then everybody's going to go be like, "Oh, okay. Well, there's a better future. There's a better alternative. Let me go explore that. Let me learn about these things. Let me go and and, you know, avail myself of the benefits of DeFi and actually keep ownership of my digital life and my digital value instead of letting another company have all of it for no reason." Uh so yeah, I think this is what panic looks like and the benefit of this I think really is is going to be the consumer because all of this competition is going to be very healthy in terms of driving down margin costs, driving down um adoption costs, driving down the cost of these products and services and forcing companies to innovate and improve on them and not

just stagnate, right? So like I think that there's going to be a lot of benefits for for the everyday um user of these financial services and financial products. But yeah, I think they're scared and that's why they're moving so quickly and that like this is super fast, LG. Like the the tokenization blitz is is super fast and it's because they're scared. >> Mhm. So, who was who was the first mover for all this on Wall Street? Like who who is actually well positioned because they were ahead of the curve? >> I think Larry Frink greenlighting the Bitcoin ETF, which like I'll tell you another story about that off camera. I was I I knew a lot of the guys who orange build him and that was that was a hell of a time, my friend. That was the most exciting. I I I've never been that

excited about crypto in my life. When we we got the green light on that, I was like, "Oh my god, oh my god, it's happening." So like look, the the first mover, they they have an advantage. The first mover really, I think, I would say, is Ethereum in many ways. Like obviously Bitcoin and Ethereum were the first movers. Um and and that that's given them a position of dominance. That doesn't always hold historically, but I think the innovations that both of and Bitcoin is not stagnant either, by the way. Everyone thinks Bitcoin is just this like, you know, kind of like gold, like a a an orange rock that doesn't do anything. and it's like this dead asset. There's a lot of innovation happening in Bitcoin. There's a lot of innovation happening in Ethereum. That's what's allowed them to remain relevant and to retain their market share because

there's a lot of things that have come out since Ethereum launched that have proclaimed themselves ETH killers and they haven't been able to innovate. They haven't been able to to grow and defend themselves the way ETH has. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so bullish on things like Ethereum, like Salana, because they've gone through, you know, extinction events and come out stronger, grown after it, and and improved on on themselves. So you know and I think Bitcoin has done that as well. So I think that the market tests all these projects and all these assets and the strongest ones continue to acrue value, continue to generate revenue, continue to to add value um and they survive. So yeah, I don't know if there's like a first mover on Wall Street who I I would say has a clear advantage. They're all trying to establish that. Obviously

Bitcoin or rather Black Rockck got an advantage in the ETF space with their their products. Um but you know there's there's a big world out there in terms of possibilities for things that you can you can do with digital assets. um and and different products and services that can be launched. And it's going to be an interesting thing to see who launches what and and which kind of users and how many of them they get and how much capital they get because there's another thing where you can get a ton of users don't have a lot of capital or you can do like the Canton network route and get very few users that have a ton of capital and you know >> yeah so we we'll see it's too early and there's too much going on to like for me to clearly say who's got the the lead on

this but the fact that everybody is in this big race and knife fight to get into it is is what I think is the signal there and that's what's important. So, we'll have to see how it plays out. >> John, are there any large dominoes left to come in terms of institutions, right? Because DD DD uh DTCC that's a massive one, right? Like they have an obscene amount of assets under management, I guess, or however they do that. But is that is there anybody else left to come? Because it does feel like in the last year and a half, it's like you have every major institution has come. Like I remember specifically the day where Fidelity came out and said, "Listen, 1% of your portfolio should be crypto, should be Bitcoin, right?" That's like a m that was a massive one and there's been many other similar ones. Is there

anybody left? >> Apple, Google, Meta, Open AAI, Microsoft. >> Once once we get the Clarity Act, I think you're going to see like this actually kick into high gear because like you know SU and Aptos came out of a a a project that that Meta had worked on for years that just they weren't given regulatory clarity to do. So they had to spin these things off and launch them. I think that you're going to see a lot of things happen very quickly once that once that bill comes through. Um, and I think that there's going to be a lot more. There's just gonna be a lot more of everything. There's going to be everyone's going to do I have an L1. I have a stable coin. I have this. I have tokenized that, right? Everybody's going to try it because everyone sees that there's a an improvement for all

stakeholders in the process. And so there's no reason not to try it and then and to see what happens. I I don't think people know for sure if they're going to be able to to get any adoption with these things, but um the the incentives to launch a lot of them are very clear for a lot of players in the industry. And so I think there's going to be a lot of that. And again, what I said like the beneficiary of this is going to be users. It's going to be consumers because they're going to have they're going to be very spoiled for choice in terms of products and services and super apps and all kinds of different competitors. So yeah, I think once the clarity act falls that unlocks a lot of new competition in the space but also unlocks a lot of um investment of

capital in the space because there will be regulatory clarity from Congress, from the CFTC, from the SEC about who and under what circumstances and you know how um can invest in these assets. So I think that there's there's only bullish things in the future. The the regulatory environment is continuing to get more and more positive. Um and so I think that there there's there's a lot to still be discovered, a lot to be learned and a lot of new participants to come to the market still. So the the best days are still ahead of us. We're we're still really just getting started. I think that chapter one is is what we're still getting through here. Like everything up till now was prologue and once the Clarity Act comes through, we'll have genius, we'll have clarity, we'll have uh regulatory clarity and then we can actually see what this

industry looks like when it doesn't have these artificial constraints of of regulatory ambiguity that's held it back for so long. >> What's the latest of the Clarity Act? Like when is that actually supposed to happen? >> January. basically they were supposed to get it done by Christmas and now it's it's just the top of the list of the the the agenda for for next year. So we we'll see if it comes through or not. But I think that there's a a clear understanding of a need for bipartisanship on this. Like Democrats kind of learned that like oh hey maybe it's not a good idea if we just make enemies of 50 million Americans, right? Um so I I think I think that there's there's a need for clarity and there's a bipartisan view of this. the specifics of the bill are what are important and

that's I think something people should pay attention to and take seriously. Um but I I think it's the next thing on the agenda once we come back next year. >> Sure, tokenized financial products are the future, but there is a big sticking point. They all need to speak to each other. This is a tough problem to solve, but chain link does exactly that. It's the universal language for financial markets, linking Wall Street to web 3, banks to blockchain, and so much more. See how Chainlink is licking the world by going to milpro.com/chainlink. I love it, John. Well, I think we'll wrap up there. Thank you, friend, for sharing all your thoughts. I feel like it's it's a nice it's a breath of fresh air for people to hear from you instead of just hearing you ask questions. Uh and clearly, you know, you're you're the

right host for this show and for macro, man. You're very passionate about everything that we do here and everything we talk about. And I think we're lucky to have you. >> I say this at the end of all my episodes of Milro Macro. Stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish. You have to stay safe because you don't want other people to take advantage of you or get you to fumble your bag. You have to stay educated because you have to know the difference between FUD and truth. You have to know what you hold, why you hold it. You have to have your own conviction, your own thesis. You can't borrow mine or anybody else's. You have to research these things, understand what they are, why you hold them, what your thesis is, what your time horizon is, and then stay bullish because there's only one way this goes, right?

It's like that there's the Federal Reserve is backed into a corner, the Treasuryy's backed into a corner. For me, the thesis has always been I'm short them. I'm short the dollar. I'm short everybody. Everybody the emperor has no clothes. Don't forget that. And uh yeah, I think I'll leave it at that. That's that's that's my thoughts for today. >> Beautiful. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode. The two hosts come together or well, I mean, one of them just listens to the other one, but uh clearly you've got you one half of the the hosts on the show uh are insanely passionate about this. I'm passionate as well, just so everybody knows. Okay. I also feel strongly. I'm also not here just by mistake, okay? I'm not I I'm sure there's other I could host podcast about other things, but I choose to be here.

All right, just so everybody knows. Uh anyways, John, thank you, man. Um and uh hope you guys enjoy everything that you've heard from John today and uh this past year and from myself as well. And we've got a couple really fantastic holiday episodes uh kicking off next week coming up for you guys. >> If y'all are making swaps or trades right now, highly recommend you check out Milkroad Swap. This is a DEX that we built in partnership with Cow Protocol. Why do we build it? Not to make money, just honestly so we could have a place to do our swaps for the lowest fees that we could find. This is the fees on Ethereum, Arbitum, and Bass are only.15% fees. Uh this is a huge difference from uh other centralized exchanges that

charge half a percent or even up to 1.2% fees on their swaps. Also, you can swap on Salana all at swap.mmillgrow.com. Check it out today. You won't be upset. And you can join me in my favorite place to make swaps on chain. 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 the top 1%. This show is for educational purposes only. Nothing we say is financial advice. Investing is risky. Never invest more than you can afford to lose.