# Institutional Rotation: Gold, Bitcoin, and the Debasement Trade

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-01-29

## Transcript

Bitcoin is the only one that provides self-custody through holding and settlement.
And for that reason, it's the ultimate end in the journey.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG Du Set here, and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that watches the metal charts every single hour and then tweets about how the big rotation will happen into crypto.
Today is January 29th, 2026.
Bitcoin is doing another little dippy dip, but the battle is not over.
Good things come to those who wait.
And I am eternally grateful to today's guests who have been generous with their time and optimism these last few months, helping me and all of us navigate these challenging and very confusing times in the market.
Matt Hogan and Ryan Raselsman from Bitwise are back on the show and we're gonna chat about their debasement ETF.
Of course, we have to talk about gold and silver because it is an unignorable rally.
And of course, went all-time hives for crypto.
Today's episode is brought to you by Bridge, send stablecoin payments instantly simple, global, friction free, and chain link.
Links Web3 to Wall Street.
Matt, Ryan, welcome back to Milk Road Guys.
Second appearance for Matt, first appearance for Ryan this year.
Uh, it's great to be here.
Thanks for having me again, LG.
Happy to be back.
Okay, listen, we can't we cannot ignore the medals anymore, gentlemen, because I feel like if we track the price of gold and silver, every single appearance for you guys the last four months.
Uh, we it the chart would be pretty crazy.
The 12-month chart on either of those looks like an NF looks like a bored apes chart from five years ago in terms of how parabolic it's gone.
Um, gentlemen, uh, and the other thing too, for context is that Bitwise just launched a debasement ETF a few weeks ago that contains a lot of these uh trades, I guess, or these these commodities that we can get into.
Um, Matt, I'm gonna start with you.
What the hell is going on, man?
Uh and when will this rally end for gold?
If ever.
Well, look, long term, I think this is a 10-year trade.
I think uh 99% of investors have a hundred percent of their money in fiat denominated assets, and they're waking up to the fact that that is a bad idea long term.
So, long term, I think this it this continues for 10 plus years.
You're seeing that at the largest institutions in the world, right?
Two years ago, central banks owned more US treasuries than they did gold.
Today they own more gold than they do US treasuries.
Two years ago, the Harvard endowment did not have gold or Bitcoin in its portfolio.
Last year they put on a big trade buying both.
So I think all investors are moving from wanting to be a hundred percent fiat dominate denominated stocks and bonds to something else that has hard assets.
So the 10-year trajectory, I think is very strong.
That's one of the reasons we launched B Pro, our debasement ETF.
In the short term, those charts look absolutely ridiculous, right?
I mean, just straight up to the moon.
They look prime for retracement.
Uh, that doesn't mean that that retracement will happen tomorrow.
I'm not making that claim.
I don't know.
Short term, I'm mixed, long term I am bullish.
It just depends on your time scale.
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And on Sundays, we even recap the best parts of the entire week's worth podcasts.
So check it out at the link below.
Absolutely wild.
Ryan, do you do you concur or do you have a different opinion on what's what's driving this and and when this would end?
And because I agree with you, Matt, 10 year, 10-year outlook, but this has been like 10 months would have been the trade in this case, right?
Like it's it took it took a year or two to triple the market cap for these, right?
So, Ryan, what's what's your take on the gold, silver, and I guess now copper uh trade?
Yeah, look, I think the same things that that Matt mentioned uh are driving it.
I there's this issue that everyone's becoming more and more familiar with that spiraling debt is not a problem that we're going to solve.
The US, for instance, runs at a 2 trillion deficit more or less every year.
The congressional budget office forecasts that over the next decade, every year we're gonna run a two trillion forecast.
We can't agree on spending as a government, but what we do agree on is that we're gonna spend more money than we're gonna generate in revenue.
And that just means that this problem is not going away and it's actually accelerating.
And so, you know, I think that that's happening all around the world and investors are finally waking up to it.
As Matt mentioned, central banks have been buying gold since 2023 at an accelerated pace since compared to what they were doing before that.
And then we've seen this crazy run up in the gold price once all those sellers were exhausted.
And so Matt and I have been talking a lot about why this hasn't bled over into the Bitcoin market.
If Bitcoin is digital gold, why is it that uh you're you're seeing this massive run up in gold, but not in Bitcoin?
And the reality of that is that central bankers uh aren't buying Bitcoin like they're buying gold, but I think eventually they will.
And so uh I do think that this is a long-term theme that is going to uh it's going to mold investors' opinions on how to get exposure to markets over the next decade.
I don't think it's a one, two, three months or one, two, three year trade.
And I think eventually that will lead them to Bitcoin, but of course, it's happening slower than most Bitcoin investors would would want.
But uh, I think the precious metals run is is fascinating.
And we've been diving more and more into it over the past couple of years as it's been happening.
And uh yeah, it's always always interesting to expand your knowledge base into those kind of categories.
Why would they why would they want Bitcoin when they can buy an asset that is 2,000 years old in terms of its value?
Relative value, right?
I mean, gold and Bitcoin share a lot of the same properties, right?
They're both decentralized, non-sovereign stores of value.
It is easier in a lot of ways to buy Bitcoin and own Bitcoin for those properties than it is gold.
If you think about the amount of capital and time and logistics it takes to self-cut to purchase and self-custody gold, it's very high barrier.
Of course, central banks have been doing it for years and will continue to do it.
But once they make that leap into Bitcoin with at least a portion of the portfolio, it's simply just much easier.
It is a low cost to transport.
It can be moved anywhere around the world at the speed of light.
You can self-custody it very, very easily.
You don't have to build this giant vault in the ground and have armed guards uh, you know, manning manning the doors and the vaults.
And so I think it's just a a similar asset and in many ways a better asset than gold.
And I think eventually they will come around to that.
But we'd love to hear what you have to say about it, Matt.
Yeah, I mean, two things.
One, I think demographics are on the side of Bitcoin.
So if you're central bank planning for the next hundred years, are you betting on digital?
Are you betting on physical?
Are you uh you using Spotify?
Are you using records?
I think people will wake up to that and want some hedged exposure.
But the other one is building off of what Ryan said.
Uh Bitcoin's a fundamentally better technology in a way that central banks will realize soon.
As you mentioned, LG, the reason central banks are buying this is they don't want to store their wealth in an asset that depends on someone else.
They used to own US treasuries, the US government seized Russia's treasury assets, central banks freaked out, said, I want to own wealth in a way that the US government can't uh seize it.
And the answer for them was gold.
Great.
The challenge with gold is once you want to move it or spend it, your self-custody ends.
You have to put it on a boat and send it somewhere, or you have to store it in a centralized vault and have a tokenized version of it, where we're relying on that centralized vault to safeguard it in a way that's not subject to seizure.
Bitcoin has self-custody through ownership and settlement.
So you can self-custody it until the point that you give it to someone else.
And gold just literally can't match that.
There is no way to disintermediate moving gold from one place to another without weakness in the supply chain.
So long term, as central banks go from just like a freak out around holding wealth in an asset that can be seized.
They freaked out.
Now they want to hold it in a way that they can self-custody to a world where they can use it.
They're going to realize that that Bitcoin's uh ability to serve that is just infinitely better, binarily better than gold's, and they're going to move to gold.
You're already seeing that.
You're seeing talk about a gold-based alternative to dollars that banks can use to settle transactions.
It's not going to work in a world that doesn't trust centralized institutions.
Bitcoin is the only one that provides self-custody through holding and settlement.
And for that reason, it's the ultimate end in the journey.
How fast we get there, I don't know, but that's that's where we will get eventually.
Matt, from what you've told me, you're a bit of a gold buff, a maybe short-term and maybe long term historian of this commodity.
You mentioned in your piece in your most recent memo uh that banks were dumping in the 90s.
Maybe elaborate a little bit on that and and give us a brief overview of the last like couple decades of gold and then and then kind of wrap that up with like what you mentioned in terms of the US seizing the treasuries and why everybody is now suddenly going into gold at an unprecedented level.
Yeah, it's totally wild to me.
So and I think the public has this generally viewed uh wrong.
I think the public procession with gold is like it walks around in a pinstripe suit with a monocle, and it's the most established institutional asset in the world.
And that's funny to me because if you remember or you study or you read about gold in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, it was the opposite.
Like gold conferences were like Bitcoin conferences in 2010.
You would go there and it would mostly be like your cranky old uncle, and then a few people gathering pens and people wearing dirty teeth.
It was like the least institutional asset in the world.
We labeled people gold bugs and we thought they were crazy.
In fact, central banks started selling gold in the late 1980s because we were in this new globalist world where we relied on the dollar as the backbone of all wealth.
They sold gold and bought US treasuries.
They were selling so much gold that they were disrupting the market.
And the G20 central banks got together and entered into a formal agreement called the Central Bank Gold Agreement, CBGA, that limited the amount of gold they could all sell in a year because they didn't want to disrupt the market.
And they did this for five years and they were still dumping gold.
So there is a CBGA two in 2004, and they did it for another five years, and they were still dumping gold.
And there was a CBGA three in 2009.
In practice, in 2009, they act post the financial crisis when we printed just an absurd amount of money.
Actually, central bank gold sales flipped to positive.
So the first central bank purchase in like two decades, the net purchase occurred in 2009.
And then they tripped along at like 400 tons.
They started being a little bit buyers, mostly in emerging markets, until Russia seized the US assets, and they uh rose 150% to a thousand tons a year.
But the point of this story is that gold went from really being completely forgotten, called a barbarous relic in the dustiest, saddest convention halls in off strip casinos in Vegas.
That was what gold was with central banks selling so much that they had to form uh a consortium to limit how much they sold.
To now they can't get enough of it.
Now they're buying it in spades.
And I think the story you should take from it as a Bitcoiner is that attitudes can change.
And I think the attitudes toward Bitcoin are changing at central banks.
We've done meetings with central banks this year already where they're thinking about Bitcoin, and eventually they're going to add Bitcoin to this mix.
And then eventually I think they will add more Bitcoin than gold.
I think that's the direction of travel.
And anyone who thinks that impossible doesn't remember when we called gold holders gold bugs and sort of belittled them in the financial media.
What's your what's your name for Bitcoin people?
Uh smart.
Do the silver people have a name?
Because I uh we had Scott Melker on last week, and he was like the silver people get in my comments all the time, and I didn't know they existed.
The silver people.
The silver people are crazy.
I mean, that's a market uh uh strung with conspiracy theories and concerns about paper silver versus physical silver and actual industrial uses that make it very complex.
It's also a market where there was a legitimate attempt in the 1980s by a group of people called the Hunt Brothers to try to actually corner the market and control the world silver that regulators had to step in and like prosecute them and break that up.
So it it's like a it's like a weird altcoiny market, it's very momentum and sentiment driven.
Um it's not Ethereum to Bitcoin, it's it's like it's more like Cardano to Bitcoin or something like that.
That's like that's that's like how far out the alt spectrum you have to go.
Um, but look, silver is done exceptionally well, and there is real industrial demand and there is a limited supply.
Um, I'm not saying silver is capped, but it is a it is a weird metal, uh a weird audience for sure.
When I think silver, I just think pirates, like it's it's just down that line for me of like gold, totally like reserve currency until 60 years ago, and now kind of you know, central bank reserves or whatever.
But now when I think silver, I'm like, this is we're in Pirates of the Caribbean or something like that.
And Jack Sparrow's unhappy that the chest contain silver and not gold.
You know, that's not that's not a real that's not a real part of the movie, but that's just that's just kind of what it makes you think of.
Um, guys, let's let's switch this back to crypto.
And Matt, thank you for the history lesson.
I feel like we could do a whole episode on gold.
I don't know if anybody would want that.
Maybe on our macro channel, we could do that, like a uh a brief history of uh gold with Matt Hogan would be would be pretty cool.
But guys, uh, let's talk about crypto because that's the we're crypto show and we have to focus there.
We have two types of tweets that we're seeing a lot of these days as gold and silver hits all-time highs.
Okay, we see things like this.
Uh, I really don't understand it.
How can people say that gold does not rotate into Bitcoin?
And then there's this huge long explanation about why that's gonna happen.
And then you flip, you got Ben Cohen out here saying there was no rotation from Bitcoin to alts, just like there will be no rotation from metals to crypto.
I do not make the rules.
So, guys, what is what is gonna happen in this case?
Like, is it is this something where who's buying the gold?
And are they gonna sell the gold at 10k and dump that all into Bitcoin?
Or what's your what's your take?
Ryan, let's go back to you because we haven't heard from you in a bit.
Yeah, I think there's multiple buyers of gold.
And so I think you have to think of those in different channels.
I think central bankers are not going to what in the next year or probably two or three years, rotate from gold to Bitcoin, and they've been one of the major buyers of gold over the past call it five years.
So I don't think that there's gonna be a major rotation of central banks from Bitcoin or from gold to Bitcoin.
Then you have other investors who are caught up in the momentum of gold and allocating to gold through things like ETFs, let's call these ETF investors.
And those investors will eventually rotate out of gold.
The reason that they'll eventually rotate out of gold is twofold.
Momentum will eventually fade and they'll look for alternative ways to allocate capital, but they also rebalance their portfolios on a relatively frequent basis.
And if you hold an asset that's gone up as much as gold has in January alone or in the past six months, at some point you're going to rebalance and you're gonna reallocate to other assets in your portfolio, and you're gonna do that again next quarter and again next quarter and again next quarter.
So at some point there will be a rotation away from gold as it continues this run up as investors take profit and they look to allocate those profits elsewhere.
Now, will all of that go into Bitcoin or crypto?
My answer for that is no, it won't.
But some of it likely will.
And that's why I believe there will be some rotation of profits taken from gold into crypto assets, but I don't think it's going to be this one for one massive rotation.
It'll be meaningful though, for what it's worth.
And I do think it will happen to a certain extent.
Yeah, I think there's an easy mental model for this.
Like imagine you're pitching Bitcoin to someone and Bitcoin were half the size of gold, and you're saying it's half the size of gold.
I think it'll get to be as big as gold.
And they'll say, wait, this is an asset that no one trusts.
It's only been around for 15 years.
Why is it half the size of gold?
Everyone owns gold, central banks own gold.
It's a hard pitch to make.
Like that increment to invest when it's half the size of gold to get it to be gold at this stage in Bitcoin's development, doesn't feel right.
And then imagine you're at the other side of the spectrum.
You're like, this is digital gold.
It's one thirtieth the size of gold.
If it just becomes one fifteenth the size of gold because people like Ryan get older and make more money and start adding to more Bitcoin, then it's a double.
That's like such an easier pitch.
I love that we can go to people right now and talk about Bitcoin as like 5%, sub 5% of gold.
That's great.
Like it was actually a little bit harder when it was 10% of gold, right?
Because you're talking about this asset that people don't know and trust, it's already 10% of gold.
That's like pretty good.
Is it really going to get to 20?
That would be like a big if it's five, if it's three, if it's two, it's like really easy to argue that it could double, triple, quadruple and still be emerging as a new asset.
So for me, it's just strictly good.
Will the Momo money really roll directly out of gold into Bitcoin?
I'm with Ryan.
Eventually, some of it will, some of it won't.
But the bigger picture to me is this larger TAM is just strictly good.
If gold was a hundred trillion dollars and Bitcoin was two trillion dollars, I'd feel like we were back in 2015, right?
And be like, oh man, let's load up the truck.
So I'm all for this run.
I think it's positive.
What did you say?
Momo?
Yeah.
Come on.
Oh, momentum.
I don't know.
You guys, you guys are deep finance people.
Maybe I always learn new things when I speak to you.
So maybe there's someone has those terms I've never heard.
So I always have to clarify.
Okay, let's look at an actual bitwise piece of content that's been put out about this.
Okay.
So here we go.
Based on global money supply, Bitcoin, the Bitcoin to gold ratio is massively lagging.
If this and Matt, you guys and Ryan, you guys both made very compelling arguments, um, especially about the ratio cost.
Do you think this happens this year?
Is that still your opinion that this is this is bound to happen any day now?
Or have you maybe in the last couple of weeks, especially with Clarity being delayed, have you started to kind of realize we might be playing a bit of a patient game?
Hmm.
I'll take this one and Ryan can build.
I think we've been through a full-on bear market in crypto over the last year.
To put that in context, if you look at the returns of most crypto assets over the last year, Bitcoin was down like 5%, ETH down about the same.
If you look at just slightly out the alt curve spectrum, you're talking about assets that are down 50, 60, 70%, right?
Massive bear market.
That's why it feels so bad.
Bitcoin went down 5%, even though uh corporations and ETFs bought 700,000 Bitcoin, even though we shoveled $70 billion into the Bitcoin coal mine.
We couldn't keep us from going down by 5%.
So absent, absent the ETF and corporate purchases, this would feel like 2022 or 2018.
Full blown bear market, everything down 40%.
What does that mean for this patients?
When you come out of a bear market, it's a rounding.
You never come out of a bear market with a V.
It never goes straight back up.
And so my actual expectation is: look, we are behind the fundamentals from a global money supply from a Bitcoin versus gold.
We should be higher.
But the process is going to be more like a rounding than a V, is my base case because we're coming out of a full-blown bear market.
Uh, I think that's the market we're in right now.
I think we're, I think we're closer to a bottom uh than most people think.
I think there's a lot of expectations that Bitcoin could fall to 50, 60.
And I'm not saying that couldn't happen, but I think it's highly unlikely and that we are closer to the bottom than most people think.
80K-ish, 75 is probably my where I'm looking for a bottom.
Uh, I do agree with Matt, though, that if you if you look at the data, last year was actually like a horrific bear market, but it didn't feel like it because we had nothing but positive headlines when it came to crypto.
We had positive regulatory headlines, we had positive institutional adoption.
Everyone was talking about stable coins and tokenization all over CNBC and Bloomberg TV and Paul Atkins, the SEC was giving speeches on it.
And so, from that perspective, the crypto market was up only.
But when you look at the actual prices of crypto, it was pretty much down only.
Some of these alts that that we're talking about outside of Bitcoin were down massively last year.
For instance, polka dot 73% down last year, Sui down uh 67%, Avalanche 65%, Cardano, 60%.
Like these are massive drawdowns that you see in bear markets, but no one's really talking about that.
And so I think, you know, one thing I've been thinking about recently is that not to say it's to the same scale as this was, but if you think about what really led us to the bottom of the 2022 bear market, it was the collapse of FTX.
This was a systemic uh shock for crypto that had many, many ripple effects through the ecosystem.
It was a black eye on crypto for institutional investors, it liquidity just left the system uh at a massive, massive rate.
And it took time to recover.
But what you saw in 2023 was BlackRock started coming into the market.
Then you saw the wins in court for crypto.
Then you started to see sentiment turn around.
And I think October 10th is that moment for the 2025 bear market where you saw the systemic shock, liquidity leaving the ecosystem, the black eye uh in the view of institutional investors and investors more broadly.
And I think we're slowly turning that corner.
So I think there's parallels here in that most people think that 2025 was a net positive year for crypto.
And for a lot of reasons it was, but from a price perspective, I think that we were in a bear market like Matt mentioned, and that we're emerging from that bear market sooner rather than later.
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Is Clarity gonna happen?
Or at 61%.
Matt, last time we spoke, okay, you came on the show, and it was the clarity draft day.
Okay.
And it was fresh.
You were you were you were riding hot.
Everyone at Bitwise is riding hot.
Crypto Twitter is going off.
The next day, Brian Armstrong comes along and he's like, you know what?
We're not doing that.
No way.
I am not supporting that thing.
We need our yields on stablecoin.
I don't like this bill.
Now, about a about 10 years worth of geopolitical events have happened since then.
Uh that's only two weeks ago.
Um, and now it feels like it's in a bit of purgatory, right?
We're at 60, we're up to 60, back up to 60% for it passing in 2026.
Um, but it also uh it feels like it's just completely out of the headlines is something that that we're barely even factoring in.
Brian, you want to tackle it?
Look, yeah, I think uh, you know, that's a good question.
I, you know, I want to say the more important question is should it pass if we don't address some of the issues that have been holding it up?
For instance, stablecoin yield, of course, is a major debated topic right now in the Clarity Act.
Should we be passing on stablecoin yield to end users?
And of course, banks are lobbying hard against that, and we we know why, because banks love to consume that yield for themselves.
But I think, you know, that there's the question of will it pass?
And I think it probably will pass this year.
I think should we pass it without fixing these issues?
No.
I think net and net the industry would be better over the long term if we fixed these issues uh that eventually would hold crypto back or crypto adoption back or innovation back.
But I do think it will pass this year.
Is the government about to shut down?
Because I know we're at, okay, so we're at 79% on government shutdown.
Because that's a huge this was supposed to happen last year, right, guys?
Like I think people forget so quickly that this was all supposed to happen last year.
Clarity was supposed to be a Q4 thing, and then right government will shut down for what?
Like two months or something like that, over two months, two and a half months.
Um, and coincided with uh, you know, uh our our our hyperbear market here or whatever's going on.
And now government shutdown on Saturday is back as of a few days ago, is back up to a, or even this morning, I think is back up drastically to 78, 79%, a lot of volume coming into it on Paulymarket.
Matt, if the government shuts down, does it ever reopen?
I think it'll be a while, actually.
Uh, I think this is one of those that if it if if you close the door, it's hard to reopen it because the two sides will really dig in.
Uh, I think it's it's much easier to get a compromise agreement.
You know, we saw those odds dip.
Uh, I think it was yesterday or the day before.
I don't have them up on my screen.
When you start to see both sides sort of come together, some changes from the Trump administration on ICE enforcement and some words from the Democrat.
Yeah, there it is, that looked better.
Apparently, those have reversed.
Yeah, I think if it closes, I would take the, I don't know how long the odds are for it to stay closed, but I think if it closes, I would take the odds as pretty high that it stays closed for a while because I think these two sides are just going to dig in on a divisive issue.
Maybe no, maybe it never reopens.
We just run straight through the midterms and then see where we are.
Why does it, guys?
Why does it feel like crypto kind of needs this permission from clarity?
Because you have I I understand what clarity is, right?
We've gone over that.
We know why it's important.
Um, gives market structure and everything.
But, you know, Matt, even in what you just said a few minutes ago, it's like, listen, BlackRock's been involved in crypto for three years now, right?
It's like so so clearly they're not waiting on some kind of permission to get involved.
Obviously, it's way more complicated than just them getting involved or not.
But why does it is it starting to feel like that?
And if you and if you're right, you know, which would which is which is not great.
The government shuts down for a really long time.
Does crypto just sit around and wait again for for for that to reopen, wait however long?
I think if the government, well, it's a good question.
Uh, you know, I've described the Clarity Act as the puxatani fill of this crypto winner.
It's the the groundhog, and if it doesn't pass, it will go back into its hole and we'll have another six weeks of winter.
That doesn't mean there won't be spring.
It just means that there'll be a um uh a setback.
You know, I I I'm sort of a Clarity act maximalist in that I really want to see it passed in a good format.
Uh the reason I want to see it pass is if it doesn't pass, and then we head into the midterms, and then we get a change in administration in two years, uh, we could have Elizabeth Warren running the SEC.
And that doesn't sound so great.
Um, so I would love to see this positive regulation get put in place.
But do we need it to rally?
No, I don't think we need it to rally.
Um, I just think it changes the shape of the rally.
If it passes, I think we pull forward a lot of value.
If it doesn't pass, I think you have to see the fundamentals get even more ahead of price.
Uh ultimately, I think the market gets to the same place.
Um, but I do think the shape of how we get there is uh is pretty different.
It stinks though that you know, we're doing crypto, we're just trying to build a better financial ecosystem and we're being held hostage and spending time on like the US government politicking around should it stay open and pass this bill?
It does seem um absurd to me.
Yeah, I hope it didn't miss its chance with the draft a couple weeks ago, right?
Because it was like, okay, government's open, new year started, this thing's coming to the floor, uh, gets rejected, and now you're back.
It's like you had this break from the chaos and the turmoil, and now you're just right back into it, right?
So it feels like it feels hopefully would they didn't miss its chances after wait a long time.
Ryan, what what happens from here?
What happens from here?
Give me your prediction.
Like, is government gonna does it close and for how long?
And what happens to clarity?
I want to hear from you.
Uh yeah, well, I would just I would just note on that point you made, uh, LG, that the government shut down long shutdown in history at the end of last year.
And already again in January after it was reopened, we had a lot of attention on the Clarity Act.
And there was a huge debate about it.
It was uh uh being covered, you know, everywhere uh on business news and and in the crypto world.
And I think that's really interesting.
Like when it reopened, one of the first things that that was trying to be tackled was the Clarity Act.
So I think that uh is is a net positive and shows how big of an issue this is uh in Capitol Hill, which is remarkable if you were to go back two years or three years.
No one would have guessed that it'd be one of the first things that the government tries to tackle after it's uh reopening after the longest shutdown in history.
I think we'll see a partial shutdown at the end of this week.
I think they're gonna find ways to fund majority of the departments.
There are these few hangups that are uh that are going to, you know, withhold funding on certain departments, but I think net net that won't be as big of a deal as people think it will be.
And I think we'll move towards a resolution sooner rather than later.
So I think I'm um uh, you know, my view is that if it does happen, it'll be short, and that it most likely won't happen across the entire government, it'll be a partial government shutdown.
Okay, okay, good answer.
And it's clear, guys, too, and again, you can comment on this, and I feel like this is this has been a regular uh commentary from you.
There's two headlines I saw this week that it's like clearly the industry is still building, and I'll share them with you.
And I don't want to get your comments on them.
We have Fidelity launching a stable coin on ETH, right?
Which is which was announced.
And then also, I'm pretty sure Morgan Stanley put up job postings for like an entire digital assets uh like division, right?
Like it's like six or seven or ten job postings.
Clearly, and you guys comment on this, it's like clearly the industry's full steam ahead, regardless of clarity in terms of really preparing long term here.
Full steam ahead.
That's exactly right.
And those job postings are not just at Morgan, although they are running 500 miles an hour at crypto.
Um they're at every major institution.
I I do think the world looks at particularly tokenization, but also stable coins to some degree as fate accomplished that they they've just accepted that the world is going to run on blockchain based rails, and it is only a matter of time until that happens.
And um, and that's why you're seeing those things.
So yeah, if you zoom out, we're in a generational bull market in crypto and blockchain, and that remains the case.
We focus on these short-term things because they do influence the short-term price, but yeah, Wall Street is still building, and and importantly, they're building on public blockchains.
I think that part of the Fidelity announcement is really notable.
Um, you know, they're the third largest financial firm in the US, I think.
So um, they're not like a uh a small pop.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, that's good to hear.
I've got two quick community questions that I feel like we we did cover, but this is from our our Milk Road Pro community, uh, who are always very excited when you guys come on.
So the first question is, and you kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, Matt, but I think it's very specific.
Should regular retail investors be rotate rotating into gold backed stables as opposed to dollar backed?
It's a gold back stable coins.
That's interesting.
Who is that?
Let's clarify who that is.
Who has a gold backed stable coin?
I think Taxos has a gold-backed stable coin.
I think I think Tether also has a gold back stable coin, if not mistaken.
Tether's like the third biggest holder of gold now, aren't they?
They are.
They bought more gold than any central bank this year, except for Poland.
They are number two.
Um, it is the people's central bank, which is just an incredible turn of events.
Um, it really is.
I can't imagine a more remarkable story.
Uh, should they be?
Uh, you know, look, I mean, I think most people hold stable coins uh for functional reasons.
And it remains the case today that that functional dollar-based stable coins are a better bet.
Which one will hold its value more over the next 10 years?
I would bet in gold for sure.
But for functional trading purposes, the liquidity in dollar-based stable coins is still uh through the roof.
Yeah, I think the the conversation on tokenized gold or um gold-backed stable coins rather, is just uh indicative of assets in the real world moving on chain.
Like first you brought dollars, now gold's having its moment, that's coming on chain.
Sooner will be stocks, then it will be other alternative assets, commodities, private equity, real estate, et cetera.
And uh, that's just indicative of where we're headed.
And so uh I do think that it expands the the market for gold investors because those of us that do predominantly uh that predominantly invest in on-chain in either stable coins or uh other crypto assets now can easily allocate to gold in those same accounts rather than having to open a TDM Air Trade account and buy a GLD uh ETF or you know, order gold coins from some website.
Next community question is the only other one.
Uh and you guys did answer this a little bit, but maybe get to clarify.
What is changing?
Okay, there's like six questions in one paragraph.
Okay.
So so a lot of different stuff.
What is changing since the last time they were on in terms of what they're hearing in the rooms?
Appetites up.
Which ETFs are people most excited about?
Are people pulling the trigger?
Are institutions appropriate institutional approvals to buy getting the green light?
Literally, whatever alpha they think they're allowed to say out loud based on what they're hearing and saying.
All right, I can give two pieces of alpha, I think.
Institutional approvals of uh exposure to crypto ETPs at the largest national account platforms are running ahead at 100 miles an hour.
Uh, almost every day we get a new approval.
Uh, almost every day, a large platform asks us for like crypto models.
That is just a one-way train.
The the second piece to that is that the allocations take time there.
So even when you get turned on at a Morgan Stanley or a Merrill Lynch or a Wells Fargo or a UBS, you then need to send your sales team in to have an educational session.
And then Ryan or I has to go and give a speech, and then you have to follow up with them.
And then those people have to have a conversation with their clients.
So we will start to feel the flows from that.
I don't know, Q4 and into next year.
But it is happening at an extraordinary pace.
So if you're if you're waiting for those flows, you're still going to be waiting.
But if you're skeptical of those flows, you're wrong.
They're gonna start showing up in the coming quarters at an accelerating pace.
So that's um that's maybe that's maybe one thing.
Um the the other thing I would add is that anything linked to stable coins and tokenization is what they're asking about.
They're asking about Bitcoin, kind of, but really what they're asking is how do I invest in stable coins and tokenization?
So if you have an asset that's linked to that or a stock that is linked to that, that is where the institutional capital wants to go, at least in the meetings I'm in.
Ryan, I don't know if you're hearing anything different.
Yeah, I'm hearing a similar thing.
Uh, one anecdote I would share from a meeting I was in a couple of weeks ago at one of the uh it was it was one of the largest uh advisor groups managing hundreds of billions of dollars at one of the largest wirehouses uh in the country.
And what they said to to me, which I found really interesting, was that we haven't been paying attention to crypto because we haven't been able to invest in it.
We probably should have been paying attention to it because now we can and we feel like we're behind.
And so they bring us in to get up to speed.
And they're asking all the right questions.
And they told us that their investment committee meeting that was happening later that week, they were focusing a portion of that on crypto, really for the first time ever.
I think that is indicative of this slow but powerful force of institutional capital flowing into the crypto space slowly and over time.
That continues to build.
Good answers, guys.
Thank you for the the insight and the alpha.
That's very helpful.
Listen, every time we do a show at Bitwise, we always end with one specific theme, which is we would go on to polymarket and speculate irresponsibly.
And we're gonna we're gonna start with a long-term Matt Hogan uh preview or uh not bet, but uh prediction, which was that Josh Shapiro, a pretty much an unknown guy, would be the potential presidential election winner in 2028, if not at least the Democratic nominee.
When you said this first the first time, Matt, he was at one or two percent.
Now he has climbed to four, and he's tied with Kamala Harris, which it feels that feels like that should be at zero, but he's only two two basis points, two percentage points behind uh AOC and pretty far behind Gavin Newsom in terms of being democratic nominee.
But hey, he's still he's still fifth place, man.
He's still in fifth.
That's pretty good.
Yeah, I'm running that straight to 12 cents.
I'm taking my profit at 12 cents.
Um, not because I don't think he'll be the winner, he might, but I think that's where the easy money will end.
Um, I also really love the long Josh Shapiro, short Kamala Harris trade.
If you can pull that off, I think is a market neutral uh polymarket bet.
That's that's a really attractive bet to me.
One is ascendant, one is is fading.
So maybe I'll maybe I'll put that on this afternoon.
How could it possibly be Kamala?
I don't understand that.
Who's betting on like, yeah, they'll bring her back?
Like that doesn't that just seems so unlikely.
Uh, but hey, who knows, man.
That's what that's the fun of polymarket.
Sometimes it tells you something you don't know, but definitely it's something that Matt, you've known uh for quite a while.
Um okay, let's jump into something more exciting, which was Matt last year of most famous thing was that you told us Wicked Two would uh absolutely knock it out of the park as as or wicked one, I don't even know which one it is, but would knock it out of the park as the highest-grossing film.
Didn't pan out, didn't make enough money.
The Oscars are coming up.
Center is nominated for a record-breaking 16 nominations, but one battle after another with Leonardo DiCaprio by Thomas to Paul Thomas Anderson, the clear front runner for Best Picture.
I haven't seen either film.
Maybe you guys have.
I don't know if this kind of this is what you want to predict on, Matt.
I don't know if this is what you if you were like a uh cinephile.
Yeah, but Ryan's the Ryan's the movie guy.
Uh I just went once on Wicked, so uh, which was right for a while.
I just didn't ring the bell.
Um, so I'll let him apply on this.
You were in profit.
Yeah, you were in the green for a while on Wicked.
Brutal.
Yeah, I I think this is severely mispriced for what it's worth.
Leo, uh, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio has a uh a bad success rate in at the Oscars.
Like he's one of the greatest actors of our generation, but he typically doesn't do well at the Oscars uh for whatever reason.
So I think that this is uh in the same way that uh the Minecraft movie out of nowhere just flipped wicked.
I think we're gonna see a similar flipping here uh of the uh I see I think it could be Sinners.
Sinners was a crazy movie.
Uh it was a great movie, and uh I I think it could win.
Begonia is probably the one that I think is gonna come out of nowhere.
Uh I hear amazing things about that movie.
I don't even know what that is.
Uh I what is it?
It's I don't even it's uh Emma, it's Emma Stone and Jesse uh Plemens, and it's the same director that did um Poor Things, which also had a really strong uh track record at award shows last year, and I think this one's coming out of nowhere.
It is a very Oscars thing to pick the most obscure film to win that nobody's seen.
So if the fact that those two more popular high mind share ones are at the top two, that's that's a good bet, man.
That's a that's a sub one percent bet, point seven point seven points right now.
So Ryan, that could be that could be that's your hundred X.
That's your hundreds waiting for you, man.
Yeah.
They're giving away dollars for uh point point seven cents.
Yeah, they're selling a dollar for set for for not even, yeah, for 0.7 cents.
Uh gentlemen, another fantastic episode.
Thanks so much.
Uh, we'll see you guys again very soon, Matt.
We'll see you in a couple weeks, Ryan.
We'll see you uh next month, I believe.
And who knows where we'll be in crypto.
But I'm happy you guys are here and always a pleasure to have you on.
Thanks, LG.
Good to see everybody.
Thank you.
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