# Crypto Winter: Institutional Divergence and AI Agent Finance

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-02-11

## Transcript

Crypto retail was really bearish.
It turned out that they were just in two completely market different market cycles.
Crypto retail was bearish because the bear was out.
It was already winter, assets down 70%.
We just didn't see it in institutional land.
And uh it made me realize the crypto winner was here.
It then took down Bitcoin and ETH.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG Du Set here, and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that doesn't hibernate even once winter has finally come.
Today is February 11th, 2026.
We're recording this late on February 10th.
Listen, last week's events really turned a lot of long-standing bulls around.
Even the most optimistic crypto supporter would have to have had accepted that the bear has finally arrived.
But personally, I'm kind of happy.
The ambiguity is gone.
The crash that some people said would happen has happened, hopefully.
And I feel like despite prices dropping so violently, we are still here, and we have many reasons to believe in the eventual, maybe even quick recovery for crypto.
And I couldn't think of anybody better to come onto the show and discuss that with me than today's guest, Matt Hogan from Bitwise.
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Matt, what's up, man?
Welcome back.
A different environment almost it feels in two weeks ago.
We were at 84K and thinking that that was pretty good.
Yeah, we were turning the corner, but now we're in the deep, dark depths of a full bore crypto winner, as you said.
We have to accept it.
It's here, it's chilly.
Spring will come, but it's cold right now.
I just think it's remarkable how that mentality changes where, you know.
Last time you were on, if I told you we were gonna go to 70K, we would have said, like, that's crazy.
What a terrible scenario.
And then this week we start and we're like, well, thank God we're back to 70k.
At least we're holding there.
Yes.
Well, it did feel that that $10,000 day uh down day did feel like the air dropping out of a Bitcoin.
Oh my god.
Easy to remember when Bitcoin was less than $10,000 the whole thing.
So to see that in one day was pretty shocking.
Um yeah, it's been nice to see it stabilize and recover a little bit.
That's it.
And even the fear and greed index, uh last time it was in the single digits, Bitcoin was at 3,500.
So this time it was at eight or nine, and we're at 60,000.
We're thinking that's terrible, but clearly when you zoom out, there's a lot more there.
Matt, um, you put out a piece last week prior to this $10,000 crash day prior to February 5th.
Um, you wrote a couple days before titled Crypto Winter Started in January 2025.
You discussed that actually, you kind of gave us like little exclusive on that two weeks back on the show.
But I want to know, I don't know if I asked you this last time, and this is prior to the crash last week.
So so Matt knew Matt accepted this winter thing before the crash happened, before the flash crash.
Matt, what what was the factor that made you finally accept this reality?
I guess.
Yeah, it was actually a chart, believe it or not.
So the real story behind the scenes is I was preparing a uh chart on the market for Bitwise's corporate board, which I do each quarter just to give them an update on where things are setting.
And I plotted the 10 largest crypto assets starting in January 2025.
And you saw Bitcoin and Ethereum sort of trundle along for the year.
We remember Bitcoin ran up to 126,000 and end of the year down six percent.
Ethereum a little bit worse, but it wasn't bad.
A modest pullback.
But as I looked at everything but Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP, it was down only starting in January 2025.
And when you looked at assets that had no institutional support, like Avalanche, Suey, Cardano, et cetera, they were down 60 or 70%.
What hit me is that that is a full-blown crypto winner.
So these there were there were sort of like two classes of assets.
There were assets that had ETFs where institutions were shoveling money into the fire, and those ended the year down five or 10%.
And then there was crypto retail, and those assets ended the year down 70%.
And it all of a sudden clicked to me.
One of the things we discussed late last year was the duality of crypto's personality.
I was saying institutions are really bullish, and the fear and greed index was like a 12, and crypto retail was really bearish.
It turned out that they were just in two completely market different market cycles.
Crypto retail was bearish because the bear was out.
It was already winter, assets down 70%.
We just didn't see it in institutional land.
And uh it made me realize the crypto winner was here.
It then took down Bitcoin and ETH, right, in a major way, because eventually spread.
But it was really that chart.
It was just stark to me.
If you didn't have ETFs, you were already down 70.
And uh that's a dark, dark winner.
Right.
Yeah.
I I yeah, I remember you mentioning that.
So yeah, that's I mean, that's I think we all appreciate you coming coming to that reality reality.
Because like I said, it's I think it's we were stuck in ambiguity for months, and we discussed it many times with you guys and a lot of our other guests, and and it for me personally, there's some there's almost like some finality here.
You listed in your most recent uh you wrote like an emergency memo from Bitwise that you put out every couple of weeks, but this one's an emergency one on February 6th, which was just last Friday, about listing out the six reasons why that crash happened on February 5th.
Which one would you say was the leading one?
Because there's a few different ones there, like the Fed and uh different, like more more leveraging kind of chatter about uh the ETFs and everything.
What's the one that stands out to you?
Yeah, I mean, you know, that there's never a monocausal explanation.
It's always multiple straws that break the camel's back.
Uh, I think the conditioning straw, the big one if you were span out over the last year, is OG selling to exit in front of the four year cycle.
I think that is the biggest.
That was the one that I that I led with.
But in terms of what sparked it on a practical basis, why that day, I actually think it was a general risk off trend in the market.
So I think all the things that I added up before that, OG selling, quantum risk becoming a concern, the October 10th leverage overhang, uh, rumors in the market were there.
And then the the the match that ignited the spark was other assets pulled back, right?
Software companies pulled back, gold pulled back, silver got crushed.
And that just was enough to push it over the edge where everyone was like, I'm not touching this thing, let it burn.
And um, and that's how you get a $10,000 down day.
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But is that enough?
Is that is all that I feel like that stuff swore has swirled often in crypto and it doesn't cause this like like who went and sold?
That's what that's right.
Who hadn't sold yet?
That was like, oh no, all these factors finally.
I need I need to just nuke my stack.
Like how is that is it or is it that basic?
Maybe it's not that basic.
Uh uh no, I think you're right.
And people are trying to point to like some hedge fund that was unwinding.
There's talk of it's always is always an offshore hedge fund that no one knows, but an offshore hedge fund that was unwinding a complicated position and was a forced seller in the market.
That may be true on the margins.
Um, but but I think without all these preconditions, I think really what happened is a hundred percent of buyers evaporated.
All the buyers stepped out of the market.
There was still selling, maybe there was a little bit of forced selling, but when there are no buyers, when there's no bid, it can just fall off the map.
And there was no bid.
Everyone was like, quantum fears will get worse.
Fears about Kevin Wars will get worse.
Uh, the market is going risk off, AI is going to destroy all profits, companies won't live for more than five years.
There's like an apocalyptic sense.
And I think it was just buyers vanished.
So I think it became a one-sided book, and the price just fell into a vacuum.
Which of these is is still the largest threat, let's say.
Because let's just let's just go through them.
You've got you listed the four-year cycle, and that a lot of, like you said, this is this is one of the ones you led with, right?
Is that OGs have been selling to the tune of maybe $100 billion worth of Bitcoin last year, which is which is money's not even real anymore when we were talking about numbers like that.
Um the the move to AI and metals, which we've discussed with you many times, and even last show we talked about gold quite a lot.
After effects of October 10th, uh Kevin Warsh's Fed chair, that might not be a good thing, quantum fears, like you just said, and just general risk off.
From here, which one of these, if there was any of these that was going to drive the price down further, which one would it be?
Yeah, I think it's the four-year cycle still.
I think the biggest risk is um is people will disagree with my view that this crypto winner started in January, and they'll say quite reasonably, I'll say, you know, I I argue that it may have started in January.
They'll say quite reasonably that no, it's not started in October, Matt.
And the average winter is 13 months.
So talk to me at Thanksgiving.
I'll buy then.
I think that's probably the biggest risk to the market.
I know that's unsatisfyingly reflexive, right?
Like the market will go down because people think well, the market will go down, is like a six-year-old analysis of crypto.
I just happen to think that it's probably true in this case.
The other risk that I think will, I actually think many of those other risks will turn around.
So I think quantum will turn from a headwind to a tailwind.
I do think the Bitcoin community is now listening on the quantum risk.
I think developers are doing calls on the quantum risk.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of roadmap or chatter emerge in the next few months that becomes a positive.
I think on the Kevin Wars side, I think he's probably going to surprise to the upside on the rate cutting expectation.
And I think the treasury will do all the money printing it needs to do effectively, and he'll be somewhat constrained there.
So I actually think maybe the war negative Warsh impact is at a bottom and is going to turn around.
I think the biggest risk is still just people assume the winter will last 13 months, start in October, you know, call me in November and we'll bottom there.
It's possible that that happens.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy until it's not, right?
I feel like that's that's the most everybody saw that weird like 4chan post in early October that was like, here's the amount of days and the amount of days of bear winter or bear and bull.
And it was like, there's no way some obscure internet post could possibly be right.
And it was spot on from the top.
It's like, there's no way all of this is that simple.
And yet it feels like it's like maybe it is until it's not.
It absolutely is until it's not.
Um, I think people like me overintellectualized uh the market at the start of 2015, 2025 and said it's going to be institutionally driven, and the factors that drove the four year cycle in the past are no longer as true as they are today.
And that turned out to be incorrect.
The institutional part was correct.
Massive inflows, 75 billion dollars of inflows into ETFs and corporations and Bitcoin alone last year.
It's just, as you mentioned, 100 billion dollars of selling by OGs, and and that's a bigger number.
So yeah, you know, sometimes it's as simple as it is until it's not.
Again, I I'm not sure that it's right because I think the winter may be a little long in the tooth.
Uh, we do have the lowest fear and greed measure in history.
We got down to five, which is if you think about that, it can go to zero or it can go to a hundred.
That's a pretty asymmetric skew.
So maybe we're closer to the end than the beginning.
That's my optimistic take.
From an investor perspective, maybe it's a good time to dollar cost average in.
Uh, I wouldn't be trying to pick a precise bottom and assume we're gonna V back up.
Right.
Yeah.
I think that yeah, that's always that's always a little dicey.
And I I think I think most people need to zoom out as well.
And if you think Bitcoin will go back to all-time highs in 200k or whatever in the future, does it does it really matter if you're buying it at 70 or 60 or 50?
Probably not.
But it's hard to it's hard when your fear and greed is five, man.
It's so hard to think about that that very basic sage advice, right?
Like it doesn't, you can't really it's so his hysteric still at this point.
Um one one question I have for you is is when is the exhaustion gonna really settle in?
Because I feel like you know, uh, people like us who track this stuff every day, it's we're like, okay, this is you know, it's been four or five months now, this like time to get on.
But clearly, do sellers still have more in the bank to offload?
And where where would we go from here if we were continued to go down?
Yeah, my my my basic view, having spoken to some, but obviously not all of the OG crypto investing community, is they're not excited about selling at these levels.
Uh the flip side is I hate to be the bearer of bad news, they're probably excited to sell again at 100,000.
So we may be uh there may be some overhead when we get back into that range.
But look, I don't think we're gonna see the kind of heavy selling that we saw earlier.
I don't think people are giving up on crypto.
I think I think it is going to bottom.
It tends to bottom in exhaustion, to use your word, um, and apathy.
It doesn't sort of bottom in excitement.
So maybe once people stop paying attention to crypto is is when it's going to be a great time to buy.
Has to be officially dead, has to be officially dead before it can come back.
Why why would OG sell at 100k?
It's a round number.
I keep going back to these all right.
The four-year cycle is definitely alive if that's if that's the reasoning they're using.
It's so absurd.
I mean, we have all you know, look, I'm looking at my my Bitwise office.
We have a team of like 50 people here, and uh you and I are talking about well, it's a four-year cycle and they sell at 100k, but it is a behaviorally driven asset.
And I think that is uh just just objectively true.
We are humans.
I think you know, I don't necessarily mean that we'll bounce our head off of it and come back down.
I think that will be context dependent.
So, in other words, if we have a rip-roaring equity risk on market, if the Clarity Act passes, if Warsh actually cuts rates more aggressively than people expect, if Japan stimulates the way people expect, if China China's M2 continues to grow at the rate it's been growing, I think that's enough catalyst that we could push back and actually go to new all-time highs.
If we have a more modest series of developments, if the SP 500 is middling along, if Wars doesn't do anything when he takes over, um, if the Clarity Act fails, then I think that $100,000 will be a pretty um a pretty hefty uh head uh for crypto this year.
So it's really context dependent on where we go.
What is your take on this uh crypto being bucketed and with in with in with software, right?
Because one of your listed reasons you listed was the kind of loss of narrative to AI and metals.
Um we have a separate AI podcast where we we talk about AI, capex is increasing for all the mag 7 this year, right?
And which the market is kind of unsure about, and there's this massive narrative last week that software is like dead, you know, that all once the new cloud comes out, the new whatever comes out, and basically all software will be useless pretty soon.
Um, and for some reason, crypto is part of that.
Yeah.
Well, my actual take is that the reason it's part of it is largely because of a chart crime.
There's a there's a chart, there's a chart circulating that plots Bitcoin versus the software market.
But the unfortunate piece about that chart is it uses two different y-axis.
So Bitcoin is measured on a scale that goes up 600% and software on a scale that goes up 100%.
If you plot them on the same y axis, they actually look remarkably different.
You could pull up Bitcoin versus IGV, which is a uh a software ETF and plot them since 2024, and you'll see that they look they look nothing alike.
I think I I think I'm seeing a few of them, yeah.
Um yeah, yeah, like like you have to take into account that the chart, the the y-axes are just on completely different scales.
This one may even be using three different axes, which is um a chart crack.
That's a lot of different stuff third order.
If you actually plot these like a normal human would on a percentage return, uh they look nothing alike.
I think what happened is Bitcoin was trading similar to all tech stocks until October because the market was in a general risk-on moment, bitcoin is a risk-on asset, and then in October, two things happened.
Bitcoin had 1010 and Claude destroyed the software industry, and those are separate events, and they both cause the market to go down, but they're not correlated at all.
I can't tease out why the discruption of Salesforce should be negative for Bitcoin.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
I don't think it's in the data.
I think it's uh I think it's chart crimes run amok uh that is that is putting this narrative into people's minds.
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You told me something months ago, I think on one of the first shows that we did together.
And I'm hopeful, hopefully I'm not misquoting you, but you had said that Bitcoin specifically, and maybe crypto rest of crypto tends to front run the rest of the market.
And that if you look at the last couple of years, that's what kind of happened is that as the market started to recover and price in a change of government and everything, Bitcoin really started to run with that first, and then you had the stock market now follow.
Do you think that's happening again?
Yeah, I wonder about that.
You know, I I think uh it it it was definitely true.
And I think it does work that way in specific market regimes.
The specific market regime that it works that way is a steady state market regime where monetary liquidity is growing or shrinking at a great rate because Bitcoin is more sensitive to those monetary liquidity changes than other assets, and therefore it's a leading asset.
Yeah, part of me worries, a part of me worries for the broader ecosystem that Bitcoin has been quite so crushed.
The question in my mind is is it crushed because of this reflexive four-year cycle that we talked about?
Or is it crushed because at least US uh monetary liquidity hasn't been as forthcoming as people thought.
If it's the latter, then that does pretend poorly for the rest of the market.
But it's a it's a question we're debating here.
It was actually sounds like you're in our research channel today.
We were chatting about that a lot.
I'm feeding your own words back to you from a couple of people.
You are, yeah.
I know, but I learn a lot when I talk to you.
So I'm just I just want to I I'm coming back like a student with questions because you said this.
You said this in November.
Yeah, we're thinking about it.
I think there's a risk that it happens, but there's also the potential that in this case, Bitcoin's pullback was not driven by monetary liquidity, but rather by idiosyncratic Bitcoin factors.
But it is on my mind.
It does make me at least a little worried about the broader equity market.
What else are you guys talking about in your research meetings?
We talk about we talk about everything.
We talk about what are the new drivers.
Uh, we've been talking a lot.
We've been getting a lot of questions about the quantum risk and how people are responding to that.
Uh, we're too we we're trying to tease out what new assets will lead us out of the bear market.
You know, those are those are the kind of things.
We talk about chart crimes.
I love the term chart crimes.
That that's a whole that just like gold, that's a whole other podcast I feel like we could do together.
Totally.
Um, I want to ask you.
Um, well, we're kind of talking quantum risk, and I don't know if this is exactly correlated, but I'd still have to get your thoughts.
Another piece of news um narrative that from last week is Vitalik coming out and saying, like, listen, I was wrong.
L2s might be parasitic to the Ethereum ecosystem.
Um, a lot of people coming out saying be like, we told you that four or five years ago, and you said L2s would be great, and now he wants to refocus on really really propping up Ethereum.
Is that could that be due to quantum fears that he feels like he needs to return and really help uh you know re-fortify the the ecosystem?
I'm I'm not sure.
I don't know enough about that, but I figured maybe you've had an opinion there.
Yeah, I think broadly it's just a recognition of what happened and what went wrong, and uh a desire to make uh the L1 the most uh decentralized core force in Ethereum.
I do think Vitalik cares a lot about decentralization, and she might imagine it's easier to do on the L1.
Ethereum has also been a leader on the quantum side.
There's been an element of that as well.
I think it's a big deal for what it's worth.
I wouldn't be shocked at all to see Ethereum be one of the leaders out of this bear market.
I called it the Steve Jobs moment uh for Ethereum uh returning to the mothership to re-lead it on a new a new era of rebirth.
I think there's probably an element of that going on here.
So I think it was a big deal.
It had some association with quantum, but also just a reflection of what's changed in the market and concerns about centralization.
And um, yeah, again, I think it it puts a narrative catalyst behind ETH.
Makes me pretty optimistic it will do well coming out of the bear.
And he's smart too, coming back at the bottom so that when things recover, it's like, well, thank God you come back, man.
Exactly.
We needed you and you delivered.
Uh so you wrote also this great piece, which I thought out of out of everything you wrote in the last two weeks, I thought this would this was best because um it's titled Crypto's New Narratives, and it really summarizes a lot of the stuff that you discuss on our shows um in terms of where crypto's going, right?
And I and I feel like this is a really great way to zoom out and remember like here's all the stuff that's happening in the space that is irrelevant to price.
These are all the developments.
And um you really summarize it for us really well here in terms of like here's the reasons to still be bullish and the things that that are coming.
Matt, like what take us through this a little bit for people who maybe haven't read it.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, part of what I'm doing here is yeah, giving you a view of the long-term positive drivers, but also reflecting what I hear from the smartest people in the industry, what they think will sort of lead the market out.
Um, you know, I can just go from the top.
I think that first piece on revenue is a pretty big one.
Uh, we've been tracking the revenue that blockchains generate very closely.
Uh, Blockworks is a big leader in this space.
They have some great dashboards on it.
The industry is currently churning at about seven to eight billion dollars in annual revenue, but that has the potential to skyrocket if the things we mentioned below, like stable coins and tokenization go up.
I think part of what will lead crypto out of this bare win winter is is more real world use.
Uh, some of the other things that that you know I called out here, which are worth talking about, AIFi, which is a term that makes some people uh sort of choke in their mouth.
Um, but is is a term that I've heard recently.
But by that I mean that you know, there's this huge boom in AI agents.
I think it was hard for anyone to keep their eyes off of Moult Book or whatever it's called these days.
But if you think of the world in the future of having billions of AI agents operating on our behalf, they're not gonna go to the local Wells Fargo branch and open a bank account.
They're going to use crypto and DeFi.
And actually, they don't even care that DeFi's UX is imperfect.
For them, it's perfect because it's rules-based digital logic.
And so I think that is a huge driver.
That actually may be one of the big narratives that comes into the next cycle.
And then there are all these good pieces of news that we just forget when there's a bear market.
You have uh Ray Dalio effectively saying that fiat currencies are dead.
You have strong institutional adoption, right?
Um, you know, we had all the major wirehouses approved Bitcoin ETFs in the last three or four months.
We do have strong regulatory progress.
We have stable coins that the Treasury Secretary is says is going to, you know, three trillion dollars.
We have tokenization, which could be hundreds of trillions of dollars.
We have Vitalik returning to ETH in the Steve Jobs moment.
There's a lot to be positive on.
If you think about back to previous bear market cycles, what sort of led us out of those bear markets.
If you go back to uh 2018 and 2019, it was really the emergence of DeFi and DeFi summer that gave us a new thing to focus on.
If you go post FTX, it was really the hope for an ETF and institutional adoption that gave us a new thing to focus on.
I think there are all these many positives underneath the surface, but it's easy to imagine what we focus on in the rest of 2026 and 2027.
We focus on stable coins, super cycle.
We focus on tokenization really taking off.
We focus on agentic finance or AI Fi, if you can stand the term.
And we focus on institutions coming into the space.
That's like those are those are really good catalysts.
I've heard all this chatter.
There are no more catalysts.
What are you talking about?
Stablecoins are 300 billion.
They're going to 3 trillion.
Tokenization is 20 billion, going to 200 trillion.
What catalyst?
They're the catalysts.
They're just, they're just uh apparent.
We just can't focus on them right now.
It definitely feels like the market broadly is catching on and starting to price in this AI effect.
I think for a while, you know, especially tracking this stuff, it's like, well, AI has has, you know, the Mag 7 and everybody's increasing their spending and starting to find revenue and whatever.
The market worked on that for a bit.
But now it seems like zooming out and even kind of hearing what you're saying when we talked about software and crypto and even this is like, listen, there's AI is going to be important in every single aspect of all this, right?
That it's like AI is not just open AI doing an IPO the later later this year.
You know, it's it's way more complex complex than that.
And that it's it's whether you like it or not, something like AIFi is here, and it's going to be part of the things that we do all the time, and that we're going to be programming our agents to do a lot of these transactions.
And as a result, there'll be the the opportunity for so many new apps and protocols that that kind of follow that.
Like there are recycles.
That to me, Matt, sounds like a pretty good narrative and and something to be excited about for things to pick up again when they do, right?
For something to lead and for fresh, uh even retail capital, if I if I if I dare say it, to come into the market when things look greener, even if it's even if it's not this month or this year.
Totally agree.
I mean, it's easy to write the story in backwards.
Fast forward five years from now and imagine you're like, well, of course, AI agents are using DeFi and stable coins.
What did you think they were going to use?
They were gonna use bank accounts.
Like it's completely ridiculous.
Like it sounds absurd, spending five years from now to imagine that AI agents aren't primarily transacting over blockchain-based networks over digital finance.
I do think that's and and it's not something that's broadly discussed.
So I think as that narrative becomes broadly discussed, you could have uh that be the equivalent of DeFi summer a few years ago.
I'm not saying it's definitely true, but there are a number of major crypto VCs who believe this is the direction of travel.
There are early signs in the in the agent universe that this is how they're actually interacting with the world.
I do think it could be one of the narratives that lift us, not the only one, but one of the narratives that lift us forward.
And how does it tie in any way, especially in your world, kind of you know, in all these meetings, how does it tie to the institutions kind of moving into all this stuff and into the stable coin?
Because those are in a way, they feel like two completely different things, right?
Where it's like you've got the dev side that's like, listen, here's how we're pushing AI forward and crypto forward, and and you go on what used to be crypto Twitter, and now it's like, here's what I'm doing with ClaudeBot.
Here's all these people really doing these cool things every day, programming agents.
And then on the other side, with you guys, it's like institutions are still interested, stable coins are coming online, trillions in RWA is coming on.
There must be a through line there between.
But you know, I mean, yeah, in terms of how you talk to institutions, the through line is that when you're talking to an institution, you need to show them concrete things and then give them long-term dreams.
And so concrete things are like stable coins, tokenization, wire houses, buying ETFs, those are all very real, and you can imagine that you can almost touch them, right?
But if you don't have like the long off dream as well, the story is much less compelling because people want to draw a line to where you're going.
And the reason the reason uh I think AI is a is a nice version of that is it's obviously true long term.
The reason it's not good, not like as concrete is how long is long term.
I have no idea.
If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said 20 years, and today I might say two, right?
Because we've seen this massive explosion.
So I have no idea how long term is.
That's why it's like that uh an a long-term option.
But but for us talking to institutions, it's like, oh, yeah, this is coming too, right?
You have all these reasons to invest now, and this is coming too.
And I think that's a pretty powerful um story.
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When are you gonna do like an AI agent ETF?
That's what I need.
That's what I need.
I don't have time to do all this homework, man.
Just give me something to buy that I could just I want exposure to everything.
Push the button, we'll get to work on it.
We'll we'll we'll start the uh we'll ask AI how to build it.
And there's a lot of slop out there.
I will say I I went back, I've been checking in like my old the streets, you know, that the things I used to check, the discords and everything when I was more DGen, and I look at it and I'm like, uh there's a lot of kind of fake stuff still going on in the in the case of circles for it.
You know, people just trying to hop on that, but um, it's definitely something I'm I'm I'm keen to to follow.
And that's uh crypto will always have that part of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I agree.
But it's it's actually a good call out because it will be a place full of slop.
And it'll be a place uh full of nonsense and then full of some very real projects.
And the real projects may be really boring.
Um but but yeah, it is that it is that kind of combination.
Absolutely, yeah.
Great.
Um, well, listen, Matt, I always save a bit of time at the end of our shows uh to talk about our favorite uh uh topic in common.
And you know where I'm going with this, which is polymarket.
And uh we'll check back on some bets we've made recently or some stuff we looked at.
Clarity Act, down to 56% chance.
Um, not looking amazing right now for 2026, but I feel like there's a lot of other stuff going on in the government that it's just it's just so hard for this to be uh, you know, at the top of the narrative bucket, let's say, for for what's going on.
Any thoughts there?
Like clarity, do you have any insight there?
What might happen?
Man, I wish I were taking the bullish side of that bet.
If you forced me to, though, I'd be fading it.
I I I worry a little bit about clarity.
I think I'd put the odds in the in the high 40s.
It still has a good chance, but um, there's a lot of politics involved, uh, sort of anti-Trump politics, anti-coinbase politics.
I don't know, it's pretty messy down there in DC.
So um, yeah, we'll see.
I I'm surprised it's still at 56, if I'm being honest.
I I would think it'd it'd be it'd be sub-50.
Okay, and then let's jump to the other one, your favorite, the presidential election winner 2028, which is like it, you know, the more we talk, the more I'm like, this is actually gonna come faster than we think.
Um listen, JD Vance is his his numbers are down in the last couple weeks, man.
I don't know if he the booing at the Olympics or supposed booing or something hurt his chances, but he's down a couple percentage points.
And your buddy, your your boy, let's say Josh Shapiro, uh breaking away from the pack, catching up to AOE AOC now, as uh as a as a runner in the the on the Democrat side.
It's it's gonna happen.
Remember, I'm selling him at 12 cents.
I'm selling it at 12 cents.
I'm not saying he's the winner.
No, he's gonna get to the point of being it's so it's still a triple from here.
Um I'm sticking with Josh.
He's a he's an incredible politician uh and an effective leader for what it's worth.
So get him three.
A 3x from here, and only six percent for the for the um nominee as well.
So not huge there.
That's boof balls.
That's that's gonna be double digits for sure.
I guess there's a chance he decides not to run, but right um at some point I think he'll run and he'll win the first debate.
And uh that that'll be the point to ring the bell.
He was at he was at seven percent at one point.
So that's that's pretty good.
Is this uh does do production markets come up in the research rooms for you guys?
Completely, yeah.
We're obsessed with them.
Uh so we use them as a as an input in terms of what people were thinking.
I I probably look at the polymarket on clarity every day.
Um, and then we of course think of what we can do in the prediction market space.
I don't have a good answer for that, but I bang my head against the wall all the time.
Um, I think they're only a fraction of what they will eventually be.
Uh I still think there is there's and they may not even be in their full final form, but I love that they exist.
Um, yeah, just imagine there was a few years ago where we wouldn't have an answer on what's the probability of clarity passing.
Uh pretty crazy to think of being an investor and not having that data point as a crypto investor.
That's a really important data point.
Instead, you'd be relying on like a few people like me telling you what lobbyists are telling them.
Um it's not as good as what we have now.
I think it's I think it's it's really remarkable how far it's come.
I will also say I will always say that you know, the for me the bull case came after the the last presidential presidential election in the in the states, where you looked at all the news channels and the polls are so close and they're so tight, but then on poly market, you know, you had Trump winning at 70% plus for months ahead, right?
And it was like, well, who's doing that?
Like somebody manipulating that to make it look like something was like, No, actually, those people just banked and they knew they knew something.
They they were bit the top analysts were on there.
Something happened, but they were they were far ahead, you know.
That that was far more accurate than your regular news channel.
And and I'll always say that that's you know, there's a lot of value in that, even if there's a lot of weird manipulation, like we're seeing last couple weeks, like you know, Giannis and Tetacumpo and the Bucks with Calci, all this weird stuff.
That's gonna happen, you know.
It's in the infancy, but I feel like there's long term is a lot of value, and even like you guys are saying, it's a great gauge of the market.
Totally agree.
I stand by my my view that uh polymarkets should have won the Pulitzer Prize for covering the the presidential election.
It was the best coverage of the election.
It told you what was gonna happen months ahead of time, and no one else got it right.
I think it I think they were robbed if I'm being honest.
Maybe I can make a career being a professional commenter in the polymarket bets.
You know, there's this in there.
I could become a known a known commenter or something like that of uh of all those things and edge my push my sway push my way into the conversation.
Um, Matt Hogan, a pleasure as always.
Thank you for all your thoughts.
Um, I don't know where we'll be next time we chat with you in a couple weeks, but um, I guess I hope we're at the same place.
Yeah, remember we we round out of uh of bear markets.
That's my general view, but we'll see.
Who knows?
Who knows?
What was the line you said earlier about we don't we don't hit bottom when people are excited?
They died exhaustion and apathy.
That's my experience of bear markets.
Um exhaustion and apathy, not of excitement.
So um, yeah, when no one cares, that's when you want to buy.
Perfect.
Okay.
Well, uh hopefully we get there soon.
Um, appreciate it, Matt.
Thank you so much, man.
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