# Institutional Crypto Strategy: Stablecoins, AI, and Risk Frameworks

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-03-10

## Transcript

If you don't understand something, assume that it's actually something worthwhile and learn about it.
So you can make an informed decision.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG Du Set here, and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show, where we try to figure out whether crypto is the future of finance or just the world's most confusing casino.
Today is March 10th, 2026.
Listen, Bitcoin has been oddly strong in the last few days, despite a major conflict in the Middle East.
And our guest today is floating a fascinating theory that capital in the region may actually be flowing into Bitcoin as a kind of emergency store of value.
We're joined today by Max Grockman, deputy CIO of Franklin Templeton Investment Solutions, where he leads global research on digital assets and multi-asset portfolio strategy.
Today's episode is brought to you by Midnight, bringing rational privacy to blockchain, warbucks, the easiest way to trade crypto, and Nexo, earn interest, borrow, and trade crypto.
Max, welcome to the show, man.
Thanks so much for having me, LG.
Okay, listen, dive right into it.
Are you telling me that uh people that hold tons of cash, tons of money in the Middle East that are trying to uh get their assets out of there, trying to get out of the country, whatever they're doing, they're actually converting that to Bitcoin right now?
So I I think there's at least some element of wealth that is going into digital assets, not necessarily just to Bitcoin.
I think there's going to be a lot going into stable coins as well.
But if you think about it, if your region is being attacked, um, and you're concerned about not just going in yourself and your assets, getting them out of there, but where are you going to go?
The dollar may not be the obvious place to go or a place that you feel comfortable parking your assets.
So then you say, How do is there another major you know TradFi fiat currency that I would go into?
For some people, the answer is gonna be no.
So then, can I get onto a DeFi system, go to a brand new payment rail where I am fully outside the scope of traditional central banking, traditional government influence?
That's where that starts making a lot of sense.
And I think there's a broader concept here, which is really important that things that are worse for the dollar are going to be good for digital assets, especially digital assets that can be used as transactional rails like Solana and Ripple.
But yeah, there's definitely gonna be folks who are going into Bitcoin as well.
And is that, and and you think that that is something that could be driving the current positive price action?
I I think there's there on the margin, yes.
I think there's there's an element of that again.
I don't have specific flow data in front of me, so I don't want to, you know, say there's this much out of um, you know, the flows we're seeing into BTC, for example, that are coming from the Middle East.
Obviously, like we don't know where those flows are coming from.
By the way, that is kind of exactly the feature, which is some of that wealth may not want you to know that it's coming from the Middle East, right?
So having those really healthy on-ramps and off-ramps that we've seen created in the last uh several years really helps with that.
I think there's a broader part of, you know, we've seen such a bottoming of digital assets post the uh 1010 liquidation last year that there's been a bit of a resurgence.
I wouldn't say that, you know, the average investor, like certainly like my clients on the institutional side or or myself personally, see that Bitcoin is a you know a new gold or necessarily like something that's gonna be stable, but so far as risk assets go, we've seen more of a decoupling between Bitcoin and other risk assets.
And so that's continuing to play out now.
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That makes sense.
So, do you do you think that this is kind of like a critical moment or an example where Bitcoin I guess can finally be seen as like a safe haven versus a risk asset, right?
Because that's kind of the whole idea, right?
In terms of time uh times of financial crisis or turmoil, that was the whole reason for Bitcoin created, being created.
So, do you see this as like a case study for that?
I don't think we're gonna see Bitcoin as a safe haven.
I I think the volatility is is is well, uh the volatility would have to come down to the point that Bitcoin wouldn't be Bitcoin anymore.
The other thing is Bitcoin was created as the original case study, right?
But we have stable coins now, those didn't exist when Bitcoin first came around.
So if I'm looking for a safe haven, again, I want to take my money, put it somewhere that's outside of the traditional financial system, but still have no fee, easy on off ramps.
And I'm not worried that tomorrow, if I put you know, a million dollars in tomorrow it could be 800K or 1.2 million, right?
That's what stable coins are for.
They're really kind of like if if if you know you mentioned crypto being a casino, and I'm going to use a casino analogy, but not from a gambling perspective.
I want to emphasize that.
But there is a there's a concept that when we go into a casino, you can't pay with your normal currency.
You have to go to a you know, um, cashier and get chips.
Stable coins become those chips.
So I so I bring in my, you know, my dollars, my dinars, my yon, my what rubles, whatever I need, I go to a cashier.
Cashier doesn't discriminate.
They give me my stable coins.
Now I can go and if I want to play a casino game, I can.
If I want to just use that to then walk around the casino with it for a while and convert it back to another form of currency, I can do that as well.
And I think that is something that's really important.
So now that there's a stable form of getting onto DeFi without worrying about volatility, I think that is is much more important.
And we're seeing significant growth within stable coins.
Uh the market's now over 300 billion.
And I I think that is gonna be something that we continue to see grow significantly.
The US, interestingly, is helping on both sides of that, both with creating an environment that's very bad for a US dollar, and also with things like the Genius Act that actually encourage institutions to adopt stable coins and be more comfortable using them.
So those two things together, I think are gonna foster broader adoption.
So okay, here's let's let's stay on the fun analogy because I like you gave a great analogy, you built on the casino thing.
If if I like what you're staying saying, is stable coins or the chips, in your opinion, what is currently the most popular game in in the crypto casino?
Like is it is it everyone's playing a form of blackjack hoping that they can beat the dealer?
Like what is the what is everyone doing right now in crypto if they're doing one casino table?
There's you know, I I think there's a lot of slot machine playing right now, which is which is to say, you know, and I I think about kind of what happened in in you know in October 10th, where you had folks super massively levered.
Um, and by the way, like as a general rule, why would you lever an asset class that has um volatility of over 70%?
You know, that just that just doesn't make sense.
And we like some of the funds that got on unwound in hyperliquid, they had like 50x leverage.
That just that doesn't make sense, you know.
If in any market, whether it is TratFi or DeFi, if you try to defy gravity, you will fall flat on your face.
So you could say that was kind of like going in and playing blackjack, but you're not counting cards, you're just kind of you know hitting the table every time you you get uh, you know, your your set.
So I I think now we're going back to more traditional crypto of people going up to the different slot machines, putting a few chips in, seeing if it works, moving on to another one.
Um also not a great strategy, by the way.
Um, I think one of the biggest issues with the space, and this is something we've been trying to solve uh from a more institutional perspective, is people don't have a strategy.
They're not looking at crypto with a risk framework in mind.
They're not looking at the multifaceted nature of crypto differentiating between different tokens and the fact that there's a you know, looking at say Bitcoin versus Ether versus Seoul, that is as different as looking at NVIDIA or Lockheed Martin or a IBM bond.
Like, but we're we're lumping it all or you know, collectively, the I think the market is lumping it all into just one component, which is why usually when I go on on shows, I try to say, like, hey, we can talk about Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is not crypto.
It's just the biggest part of it right now.
And I think that's also going to change.
So wait.
So, so okay, I I have so many questions about that because I think a lot of people kind of do do these days bundle them together despite having cases for each one.
But I'm gonna save that for a little later because I do want to talk to you about individual tokens in a bit.
I want to stay just on kind of the bigger macro picture while we're kind of getting into it.
Um you obviously have a lot of exposure to the institutional bid, right?
From from both a client perspective and also working at it in a at a massive firm, right?
Uh that manages a massive amount of money.
In times like this, right, where this conflict was brewing, and it's coming after a time where you had you had two separate days of massive mass liquidation in crypto in a short period of time.
How do these institutions kind of approach crypto?
Like what has changed in the conversations and in the language that you guys have uh day to day and and and week to week.
Well, part of it is the realization of volatility is you know everywhere.
For there was a period where we really didn't see volatility, at least downside volatility, which is the only one anyone really cares about, um, you know, in traditional equities, and it was kind of like you know, put everything on, put all your chips, I guess, into AI and let it ride, kind of uh like a um, you know, a roulette table where you always know where where the ball is gonna land, and now you're like, oh, the ball is moving in a very unpredictable way, and I don't know if I want to stay at this table anymore, right?
So so I think with that, again, it actually reinforces the idea that there's a lot of unknowns in TradFi, we don't necessarily want to dismiss DeFi anymore as this no man's land because who knows what's what is gonna be the next, you know, uh truth or tweet or whatever out of the White House, right?
And that's gonna drive commodity prices, that's gonna drive gold, that's gonna drive equities.
I mean, you know, what again, a lot of what I do day to day involves trading traditional assets.
So I saw a you know, 70% realized volatility in the in the South Korean equity market.
Um, and so those are what we would call crypto numbers.
Well, they're in TratFi.
So I I think all of that volatility everywhere actually makes crypto much more palatable because it's not like it's just existing in this totally different envelope, you know.
And it's all you know, yeah, I think that that's a really good point is that now it now it feels like all assets are could be crypto assets, especially you didn't even mention oil, which yesterday, like the last couple days for oil are historic in a way that you're seeing these massive like 50, 70% lose.
Yeah, the single biggest gap to open ever, and I believe by the time we end it, it was either the second or the biggest intraday move for high to low of all time.
So, you know, and again, why did it move?
It moved because we had a you know, a tweet by the president saying the war is gonna be over soon without any evidence to that effect.
And and and again, like the reason I bring this up is because before people would say, well, you know, you can't invest in a market like crypto because Elon's gonna tweet something and it's gonna move, you know, X percent.
Well, you had the exact same thing happen in in an oil, which has been, you know, one of the oldest assets people have traded.
So there you go.
The whole the whole world's a casino now.
That's that's basically how it feels.
Um do you, Max?
I I want to ask you about uh a specific utility that we've seen kind of emerge in in crypto.
And we saw it on the silver market uh a few months back when it also had kind of a peak peak and bust uh in a very short time frame, and that's the kind of on-chain derivative market, right?
Where you, you know, if you want to trade like I guess oil futures or oil oil derivatives, you can do that all weekend long if you want on a place like hyperliquid.
And I think there's probably a few other options.
Silver was the same thing, right?
Where um I think a few months back during that day I mentioned like three or four percent of the global volume of silver trade was on hyperliquid, which is to me was a you know, kind of a pretty understated moment um for crypto.
Do you uh obviously this trend is going to accelerate?
How does that fit into your world, man?
Is this something that's welcomed that this this stuff is possible, or are you guys keen to kind of hang on to your weekends?
Sure.
Well, I was gonna say, but you actually hit the nail on the head because on the one hand, it's great.
There's price discovery 24-7 on the on the other hand, like, man, this sucks.
I'm not gonna sleep at all.
And you know, I mean, I've already forgot what a weekend is long ago, but yeah, there's, you know, we always used to have this like analogy of you know, money never sleeps.
Well money actually always would take naps overnight and it would check out on Friday and come back Sunday when Asia opens.
That's that's no longer going to be the case.
So the reason we're seeing more demand for on-chain derivatives, we're seeing more demand for RWAs coming online is because there's so much happening.
As a trader, one of the worst things you can have is seeing something unfold and not be able to take a position on it.
So when the US and Israel launched those strikes in Iran, I mean, and by the way this was calculated, right?
Like to do it on Saturday when the markets are fully closed all around the world, at least all major markets, the only thing I could do was open up you know all my crypto dashboards because those were still trading and see like, okay, this is how that's moving can I project how that's going to affect other asset classes.
So I think that is going to be something really crucial.
And I think we're going to see a couple things.
Number one, we're going to see more and more assets move on chain.
We're going to see stocks move on chain.
I think we're going to see derivatives already, as you said, accelerate their move on chain, which will give access to both commodities, currencies, et cetera.
But what I and then we're going to see RWAs, which could include everything from like cultural assets like art to uh stakes in more traditional private equity companies.
So the you know, tokenization of privates.
But also we're going to see brand new asset classes come around.
And that's been a theme that we've been really thinking about a lot here at Franklin because that's gonna change the way your average individual actually invests and how they derive benefit from that.
So let me give you an example just to make it a little more concrete.
Let's say I'm a big fan of this athlete, um, and they're you know, currently in the minor leagues and they do some kind of fun ICO where they basically say, Hey, I'm gonna drop these tokens.
And if you buy one of these tokens, you're going to get some share of my future earnings from any, you know, direct deals, maybe not including, you know, sponsorships or whatever.
Again, they can define it however they want.
And I'm also gonna airdrop you special access to me, whether it's uh video chat or tickets or whatever.
So, okay, I buy a stake and in in that athlete, they make it big, all of a sudden that's an income stream.
And I'm getting also non-pecuniary or non-monetary benefits from that, like access to this person.
So I think we're gonna see a lot more of that come around as well.
We're already seeing tokens um having a bigger role in gaming, where as folks, you know, play video games, they're actually sometimes making an income out of it.
That used to be a totally brand new concept.
And this, by the way, this is not esports where you know, people get cash prizes from playing games.
This is just actually like playing a game and getting items in that game that have a real monetary value, or even getting directly tokens from that game that have a real monetary value.
So those are things that are just gonna accelerate further.
The line between work, play, and investing is really changing with the younger generations, and it's becoming much more blurred.
So I think that as a concept is gonna also change, you know, 10 years from now, how we're looking at all those things.
Max, you sound like a bit of a DGAN, man.
I'm gonna be honest with you.
You know, I come I come from the trenches in crypto and we used to done, we used to I used to do a show on this network called Milk Road DGen.
Um, and I feel like I feel like you're you're you're in the streets, man.
I feel like you know your, you know a little bit about your meme coins and your NFTs and your other weird AI tokens that come out.
Part part of my job as as a macro investor, and I've been doing that for over 20 years, has been to spot trends early and and see where things go.
So, you know, I mean, I I would I wouldn't call myself a DGN.
I'm sure people have before.
You're the first one to do it to my face.
So I appreciate that.
Um is that is that complimentary or is that are you offended?
I consider it a compliment, yeah.
Okay.
But you know, I I think what's really important is we don't dismiss things.
Like, look, I've been around for a while.
I I saw how people dismissed uh things that are gonna sound really boring now, like international small cap, you know, equity.
People would be like, why would I invest in small caps in you know crazy places like France?
Right?
I'm a little too young to remember, you know, the same thing with high yield when like Mike Milken introduced high yield to the world.
People were like, I'm going to invest in bonds of companies that are not perfectly like structured that have issues.
Like that's crazy.
And now that's just the most like vanilla thing you can have right so I think those are things that are really going to um change.
And I think as we see that adoption, those all those asset classes I I mentioned, they're they're commonplace now.
Crypto is going to be the same thing.
It's just gonna it's it's it's almost like the more boring it becomes the more important it becomes to have to the average investor.
And and the best way for that to happen is institutional adoption as institutions start ironically kind of centralizing some of that you know crypto holdings and like look I mean we're saw microstrategy own like I think it's like what 10% of all Bitcoin supply, right?
What's going to happen when you have, you know, again, I'm not saying tomorrow, but eventually you'd have more sovereign wealth funds, more uh central banks get into the space, large institutions get into the space, it's gonna centralize a lot of those tokens.
It's gonna bring down the volatility, and it's going to make them much more of a palatable thing for all investors.
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Okay, so I I have to ask you this because this is something I've been curious about, um, especially for places like Franklin Templeton, because I actually remember the day, and I think it was you guys.
I'm not saying it was you specifically, probably not, but maybe when I think it was Franklin Templeton that changed their PFP on X to a Pudgy Penguin.
Okay.
And clearly there has been a large shift internally there over the last few years.
Max, is this something that you have been part of?
And like how has your team that you work with kind of started to accept a lot of the stuff that you're clearly very comfortable and very bullish on, but I'm sure for people that have worked in TradFi, this has been it's been hard for them to really accept uh, you know, uh the entire bulk case for crypto and and for TradFi going on chain.
I mean, it absolutely has been difficult uh for some folks.
I think honestly, like it helps when you have someone who's been in the TradFi space come in and say, actually, this this is real, guys, like it's important.
I guess it also helps when they're your boss.
Um, because that you know, there's the carrot and the stick.
But what what I've tried to do with my team is say, look, let's approach this like we approach any other asset class.
Let's approach it like we would approach high yield in the 80s, let's approach it like we would approach international small caps in in the 90s.
And you know, it's so on and so forth.
Like private credit was not a thing, you know, during the financial crisis.
Now it's a very big thing.
So we've we've learned how to incorporate new asset classes.
It's just most new asset classes didn't have you know dank memes attached to them.
Um, maybe they should have.
Maybe that would have gotten us faster adoption of high yield.
I don't know.
But right, like that's a uh uh a facet where I think because there's dose components to it, people would kind of dismiss it.
Um, and the reality is once we started really looking at this, we've been working on building validation models for different tokens where we evaluate everything from you know commits uh on on GitHub relating to that token usage, where we analyze um network effects in terms of like the daily average transactions, where we look at real-time on-chain metrics through our nodes.
So, as we've started getting all that data, and actually that's still one of the beautiful things about blockchain and and crypto in general, is you can support a lot of your views with hard data, and there is a lot of data.
So, before coming to Franklin, um, I I was a founder of a digital asset hedge fund, which probably helps explain some of the DJ in this.
Um, and the the fund was built fully using artificial intelligence.
The the reason why it did well is because we were just coming in with this really fast AI model that was trading against humans who were slow, you know, and not necessarily stupid, but I would say AI was smarter and being able to scrape tons of data aggregated real time and then trade you know across exchanges across venues that humans couldn't.
So here, you know, we are a quantitative and a fundamental uh shop.
So we have really smart researchers who can take all the data, build signals out of them.
We also have really smart top-down researchers who can, you know, think about what the model is missing.
So, with that combined, we're able to get a lot more depth on the space.
And as we've gotten depth, we've gotten confidence that this is really something where there is a there and it's gonna become bigger and bigger.
Yeah, that makes sense.
How do you how do you uh Max?
Like clearly you're so on top of the ball, and you're doing it?
Yeah, you it's almost like you're you're a DGEN in disguise, honestly.
Like it's like you're secretly like people wouldn't expect that from kind of like your title.
And and honestly, your demeanor, uh, you seem very professional.
Uh and unlike most of the DGs that we know, but you're so you're clearly incredibly good at spotting trends and being early to them.
How do you do that?
How do you what is your what is your methodology or the rules you've learned for being able to spot these things as they happen and gain the confidence to to clearly like go hard into them?
Well, there's thank you.
Uh I like DGen in disguise.
Um that's just keep the compliments coming, uh, LG, but there part of it is experience.
And you know, like I think that's one of the interesting things.
Some of the folks um I know, like like the first person who I ever talked to about crypto was Mike Novogratz, you know, who was again also a macro guy with even more experience than me under the belt, right?
And we just learn from seeing these things.
I mean, I remember when I saw the unraveling of uh subprime loans, like the writing was on the wall, and some of us saw it.
So ironically, right around the time of the GFC is when Bitcoin was created for those very reasons, right?
And so I was like, okay, this is interesting.
Why is this happening?
I I think the number one thing is to not dismiss things outright.
Like, that's my first key tip.
If something new is happening and you don't understand it, the natural human impulse is to dismiss it.
Go hard against that feeling.
If you don't understand something, assume that it's actually something worthwhile and learn about it.
So you can make an informed decision on whether it is in fact something you should understand or not.
There's never a downside to getting more knowledge.
Number two, look at who is moving in the space.
Are there other folks who you respect who seem to have a view?
So for me, again, it was you know, some people like Mike, where I'm like, you know, you're a legitimate um investor.
Like you clearly have changed your entire career to do this.
Um, you know, I think we're we ourselves, like as a company, Franklin, with Jenny at the helm.
Um, you know, we're really pushing into the space.
So ask yourself like, well, this is a 1.7 trillion dollar asset manager.
They're really looking to get into this.
Like, does that make sense, right?
And I think then you start going through and making your own views.
That's that's the third and most important part.
Like, is this something that as an investor I can generate a view on?
Is that view going to be differentiated?
Is that view going to have some kind of reliability and consistency in how I can deploy it?
As you answer that question, that's when you basically figure out if this is a trade or a longer-term investment or even a strategy that you can make.
So I'd say those are my top three things that I look at when I'm trying to figure out if there's a tr if the trend is even there, if it's a trend I should care about, and then can I exploit that trend?
Are you are you are you into Galaxy?
Are you long Galaxy?
Um can't comment on any any positions, obviously.
Damn, all I can say is I I Mike's a good guy.
That's that's all that's that's the extent of it.
Yeah.
I personally I still have like we we've written a lot about Galaxy at Milk Road.
Um, some of our analysts are are carry galaxy in their portfolios.
And uh I I will always have this bias of him with his Luna tattoo that I just can't.
I'm like, but you know, he he had the Luna tattoo, and that was like as wrong as you could be.
Like, I just cannot do that.
You know, I'll tell you a story that that I haven't shared before ever.
So when I had my crypto fund, I was talking to a potential um L LP, and you know, like I was explaining like why he should invest into my phone.
And this guy actually was like a legit DGM.
Like, this guy made a lot of money and he was gonna go all in on DeFi.
And he said, uh after after like meeting number three or four, he said, Max, I like what you're doing.
I think this AI thing maybe will be important, but I found this new thing that my advisor told me about.
The my this advisor is like 20 years old.
Um, and I think literally is just like some kid who hodled his way in college and you know made a couple hundred grand.
So he's like, my advisor told me about this new thing, and it's called an algorithmic stable coin.
And you don't understand the yields.
I'm guaranteed here.
And I was like, look, there is no such thing as a guarantee in anything in finance.
I mean, you could say maybe a treasury if you believe in the you know in the US government, but there is a really big problem when something that's supposed to have collateral does not actually have collateral, like that's just a basic thing.
We saw this in the financial crisis with like you know, triple derivatives and things like that, and at least those had some collateral somewhere something somewhere.
Like, there is zero backstop here.
Like you are walking on, you're like Wiley Coyote, literally walking off the cliff, and the moment you and everyone else looks down, you're gonna go full flat down.
And I said, like, don't invest in my fund.
I don't even care.
Just please don't go into Luna.
Like, this is such a clear bad idea.
And you can guess what this person did.
And they did call me afterwards.
I was like, unfortunately, now you don't longer meet the minimums to invest in my fund.
Because they lost it.
Oh no.
So look, everyone makes bad decisions.
Can't can't have all the wins without a lot of the losses.
That's that's I think that that's a good idea.
And I think the most important thing with that is when you make a loss, learn from it.
Failure is is one of the best educators there is.
You know, one of the ways in which I've learned how to avoid mistakes is by making some mistakes before.
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Very important part of the journey.
Let's let's look to the future, Max.
We're talking, we're talking it's a great story, great anecdote, but that's that's pretty far in the past now, the Luna collapse, right?
Part of the big part of the last bear market.
Let's look to the future.
If you were starting from scratch from here, and I'm speaking strictly like crypto, digital assets, with everything that's happening, everything that we know is being built towards, right?
Like you're saying, even where you're working, uh, you know, 1.7 trillion dollar asset manager is going full on into this.
How would you build out how would you what what kind of trends would you look at as to continue or to emerge?
And how would you go about, I guess, your your investment strategy from here?
So, number one is to be diversified, and you can't be diversified on a market cap-weighted basis in crypto, because then you're just gonna own Bitcoin and ETH, right?
And I think that's not how you should deal with.
So I would look at what are the value propositions of different tokens?
Can I get behind them?
Right.
So I mentioned we have different models that we've built.
I would deploy those models.
So I would have some tokens that are, for example, in the uh gaming space, some tokens that are utility tokens, DeFi tokens, utility tokens, and cryptocurrencies, and then you know, general like tech networks like ETH.
So I would look at that, and then I would go into the L2s and see across the L2s, what do I find most interesting?
And so I would create this kind of like if you we have a concept in TratFi called core satellite, where my core are like my you know, US equities and my satellites might be emergent market equities, international small caps, um, you know, Japan, et cetera.
I would have a same concept of like L1 as a core, maybe a couple different L1s as cores visible, but really the main networks that I have high confidence in.
And then I create satellites of the L2s that are more risky, more opportunistic, but I think there's a higher chance of uh asymmetric reward there.
What I mean by that is I've looked at the downside risk, always with a volatile asset class.
You look at the downside risk first.
And I believe then, having also evaluated the upside potential, I believe the upside potential is got a longer tail than the downside one.
And that's that that is how I would construct that portfolio.
What I would also say is, on top of all that, put in a very robust risk model.
I don't think that's appreciated enough.
When I say risk model, I don't mean just look at the standard deviation of all the tokens and make sure it doesn't exceed X, but actually understand what's driving the volatility of each of those tokens.
You want you're gonna want to build specific factors for those volatility metrics, which could be, you know, um things like flows, things like wallets going in or out of cold storage, activity on the L1, et cetera, et cetera.
And then once I've got the risk modeled, then I can build an optimization platform for actually allocating a cross-dose tokens given their forward-looking risk and my forward-looking potential for their return based on metrics that I've put into my signals.
I like that, man.
That's a good, that's definitely a good way to approach it.
I want to I want to know, would you um how do you approach something like Ethan AI?
Because obviously there's new, there's a new token standards being developed, and I think that that's still kind of like a gray area for a lot of people where they know that that has a lot of potential.
They know that uh maybe a lot of on-chain transactions in the future will be done by our AI agents, and and clearly that's being developed as well.
Is that something that's of interest to you?
And how do you kind of approach it?
Yeah, I mean, look, AI is the other thing that I've been uh working really hard on here.
And um, I think we're going towards an agentic future.
Uh, that's that's that I have extremely high confidence in.
So you will have agents doing work for you.
And this is the less popular part about it, but you will be doing some work for agents.
Like agents are gonna be in the org chart.
And so, with that, yes, agents are gonna be transacting in uh in digital asset land and agents are gonna be trading and investing.
So you will be, you know, like we have a concept in in you know, investing in general and trading in particular, um, that you're always trading against someone.
Like it is a bit of a poker match, right?
To bring it all the way back to that casino analogy, right?
It's not this like there's a dealer, but really it's you against other investors in and you know, like we always say like you gotta be a little cocky to be a good investor because you have to assume that you're smarter than the market, but really you're smarter than the person taking the other side of that uh trade.
And so you will be investing against um AI agents, and AI agents are gonna be developing their own tokens.
We've actually already seen this.
Um, if for folks familiar with um open claw, though they created their own token pretty hecking fast, and they're not even the very the first AI agents to have created a token.
I think even uh over a year ago we had um a large language model that specifically built its own token to actually, I think um, similar to open claw, fund its own religion.
So interesting philosophical parallels we probably can't unpack on this episode, but you know, there's there's a lot there.
And I think that is where we're just gonna see more and more autonomy where you're gonna have agents build their own companies.
I think they're gonna build those companies on blockchain rails, and they're gonna list tokens and they're gonna trade those tokens with each other and with humans.
So, again, it's an idea.
It may sound crazy right now.
Think about who it's coming from.
Is that a person you can trust?
Is there any downside to learning more?
So, going back to those three things that I talked about earlier of how I spot trends, that's how I would approach what I just said.
Awesome.
Okay.
Well, that's a great thought.
I feel like we actually have a lot more to unpack uh when we have you back, Max.
I feel like we'll have you have to have you back and kind of keep digging into these trends because you really get me excited to get in the DGEN side of me excited.
I feel like we we can get a lot deeper.
Um, but it's been a great episode.
Max Gockman, thank you for coming on, man.
Uh, great to chat with you.
Thanks so much, LG.
Great being here.
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