# Global Supply Chain Shocks and Crypto Institutional Maturation Trends

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-03-30

## Transcript

The way I think about this is that a truck hauling gold bars to Fort Knox spilled them all over the highway and nobody else is coming to pick them up.
So what I'm viewing this as is an opportunity because.
This industry is full of enormous amounts of value, and it is completely mispriced, overlooked, and misunderstood by the market right now.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG Ducet here, and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that just realized it's going to have to decide between stacking ETH and planting vegetables as the world order collapses.
Today is March 30th, 2026.
It's Monday, and that means you're about to get hit with a dose of reality.
from our friendly neighborhood, ETH Bull, who also moonlights as a doomsday maxer as he co-hosts the show with me to kick off the week.
John Gillen is in the studio as the two best podcast hosts in the world are ready to talk crypto, oil, and everything that's top of mind at Milk Road this week.
Today's episode is brought to you by Midnight, bringing rational privacy to blockchain and some, turn crypto tax chaos into confidence.
John, how are you, man?
How was your weekend?
I'm great.
Doomsday Maxer is going on my LinkedIn.
That's a great line.
I'm going to take that.
Just trying to talk like the kids, man.
Trying to talk like the kids.
All this maxing shit is apparently part of the common vernacular now.
I'm just trying to fit in with people half my age.
I doubt listen to the show.
I doubt they listen to us talking.
You never know.
They got better things to do than pay attention to this.
I'm excited to have the conversation today.
There's going to be a lot to cover.
We'll get into it.
The cops are coming for you during the chat too.
John, okay.
So every Monday, for people that don't know, every Monday we kick off the Week in Milk Road with an internal huddle.
We talk to the broader team with all our producers and everybody else.
And then we just, we siphon off to just the creators.
Okay.
So it's the people that write the newsletters, do the podcasts, write the tweets.
We all get together just privately.
And we talk about what we're going to write about this week, what we're watching, what's most important.
We kind of grill each other on like, hey, what do you really think about this?
And we don't let anybody get away with kind of like some loose points.
We ask them to really drill down into it.
And what we're doing these Monday shows, John, is we're kind of bringing that to light.
We're kind of going through some of those points, how different people at Milk Road feel so you guys have a nice...
broad range of opinions about what's going on.
It's funny to start this while I feel like the finance and global picture is so unilateral.
I wish we had a variety of different stories to really dig into that felt meaty.
But really, there's only one story it feels like in the world, John.
A couple of months ago, maybe that was AI.
But now it's everything that's going on geopolitically.
Everybody knows about the Trump taco, which is Trump chickens out again or something like that.
But now there's a new term, John, that's been coined from Jim.
Bianca, one of your guests on the macro show that is now Nacho, not actually changing Hormuz opening.
John, I want to get your very fresh take.
We'll talk about different takes from the team.
Are you positive or negative on developments at this point?
To my mind, not a whole lot has substantively changed.
I think that the straight has been closed.
So just to level set where we are, the straight has now been closed effectively for a little bit over a month.
There has been a lot of...
jousting on Twitter about what's actually going on, if negotiations are happening, whether or not they're happening, who they're happening with.
Just this past weekend, we saw the head of the Iranian parliament saying that Trump is going to tweet something in the morning or truth something in the morning, and he implied to countertrade that because it's not true.
He's just looking for exit liquidity.
Sure enough, Trump this morning, two hours before market open, tweets that were...
We've got regime change has effectively happened, and we're trying to open the strait, and if they don't, we're going to do war crimes against them to destroy their energy infrastructure or something.
So a lot of these things are playing out very publicly, very real-time on Twitter, but the nacho thing that Jim Bianco said, all of this is a lot of back and forth, but it's not actually opening the Strait of Hormuz and getting the shipping to flow again.
There was a...
Eight ships, and then I think they let an additional two ships go through, oil tankers go through under the Pakistani flag.
It's sort of like a, I don't know, goodwill thing or something of some kind.
And then Trump announced on Sunday as well on a flight back to Washington, he was saying that there's going to be an additional 20 ships, tankers, oil tankers let through the strait.
This is like a very small trickle though, not a resumption of the normal flow.
And it's kind of like an olive branch.
I think it's like trying to like stave off mass, outages and shortages of oil and having refineries shut down and things like that.
But it's also very much below levels where anybody's going to be comfortable again.
So from where I'm sitting, it's really hard.
There's a lot of fog of war.
It's not clear who to believe.
And it's not clear at all that we've really made any substantive progress right now.
So I think I'm still focused on this.
The whole market is still focused on this.
My macro podcast guest for tomorrow on Milk Road Macro is going to be Rory Johnston, who I'm really excited to talk to.
He's one of the best oil market analysts in the world.
And I think we're all just trying to Monitor the situation and stay close to this because it is the biggest story.
It's the only thing that matters in a lot of situations as far as economics and markets go.
Everything you're listening to today is also covered in our daily crypto newsletter.
And on Sundays, we even recap the best parts of the entire week's worth podcast.
So check it out at the link below.
It is prime time for this guy, for Rory.
Oil.
Like, imagine you're an expert in something and then years and years.
And obviously, oil is always kind of very important.
But not like it has been in the last couple of months.
Yeah, he really caught the spotlight.
It's like if you were like an expert on a buddy of mine in college, he said, like, I'm going to specialize in ferret law.
And then like someday it'll be a high profile celebrity murder involving ferrets.
And they'll call me and I'll be the star witness or something.
But it's not quite like that.
Rory has always been everybody's favorite oil quant.
But he is getting a lot of attention right now.
He's the most popular man in macro Twitter.
So, yeah.
I hope we never have to have your buddy on to talk about ferret law.
I hope that's never.
I hope there's no global story about ferrets that somehow affects crypto because that.
Actually, you know what?
I do hope.
I'm going to reverse that.
I hope that that happens.
I hope that one day, I hope that we are in greener pastures sometime soon, John, and you and I are doing the show and we can talk about ferrets or something more lighthearted like that.
And I promise you guys listening, we will get to crypto talk in just a minute, but everything kind of runs through this story right now.
So we do need to cover it.
And we want to talk about what our team was saying.
So beyond oil as well, Thomas, our macro expert, has been really cautioning as well that there's going to be such a huge effect on the rest of the energy industry.
as well, because there's so many things that run through the Strait of Hormuz and so many valuable commodities that a lot of those countries produce.
He even pointed out this morning, John, I thought it was interesting, someone never thought about that, you need a lot of helium to make semiconductors.
Right.
And Qatar makes like 30 or 40 percent of the world's helium.
It's refined from natural gas, more or less, really shortening how it's done there.
But and that's something I never even thought about.
So I feel like we're in for a lot of these other little stories of like, oh, this is going to get this is going to have a major supply crisis soon for all these different commodities, as though it's not already been a crazy commodity year.
Is there anything specifically on your radar in that that side, John, that you're monitoring in terms of the after effects outside of oil from this from this situation?
So the way I've been describing this is that the Strait of Hormuz being closed is like the global economy having a stroke, and there's no flow through one of the biggest arteries in the entire global economic system.
A lot of other things besides oil do flow through there.
I think about 20% of the world's oil goes through the Strait of Hormuz, but about 20% of the world's liquid natural gas also goes through there.
As Thomas pointed out, helium, there's a lot of other things that go through there.
For me, I think the one I'm most concerned about is that something around like 50% of urea, which is a fertilizer that's really important for crops and for growth, it goes through the Strait of Hormuz.
So if you're cutting off about 50% of the world's supply of fertilizer around the time of planting season in the United States and in India and in other places that rely on this, you're going to put the world's global harvest at risk for the next harvest.
That's something I've been watching a lot very carefully.
Oil is getting a lot of attention because that's the thing that's top of mind.
But there's a lot of other kinds of petroleum products and other things that are made in this region that go through there that are just being completely blocked off at this time.
I don't think that people really understand.
The problem with this is that it's so many things that touch so many regions of the world.
It's a little bit difficult to get your hands around.
how big and severe the impact is, what it's going to look like in different places.
The other thing too, is it's a multivariable thing and there's second order impacts that nobody can really foresee.
So for example, like if people, nations that have certain products are experiencing shortages and then have to like, you know start resource hoarding to make sure that they have enough that also changes the outcome and we could have situations where you know other like third world nations are just nations that don't naturally produce some of these things themselves are unable to get them because other nations need them for themselves and are now suddenly unwilling to sell or willing to sell but at such elevated prices that it's unaffordable You're already seeing Egypt start rationing power in Cairo and other places.
So this is already a serious crisis.
It's much worse than anybody really understands at this point.
And because of the way these things are going to play out and how, like I said, there's a fog of wars, it's difficult to get like solid information on some of these things.
And it's changing so fast that nobody's really quite sure what this looks like.
So I think that we'll still be seeing the impacts of this in six months to a year, maybe longer.
And it's just like.
The whole global economy is having a stroke, and there's not really another way to say it.
The longer the patient stays without blood flow, the more brain damage happens, the more we eat into demand, the more severe the risk of global economic depression is.
And so it's not going to look different in every economy.
It's going to look different in every economy.
It's going to look different for every nation.
Not everybody's going to have the same experience, but this is a very serious problem, and we have no idea how bad it's going to be yet.
John, didn't this happen during COVID, or did a version of this happen during COVID?
Nothing like this has ever happened ever in the history of the planet.
Right.
In terms of, in terms of there being so many resources for so many people that are all kind of locked into this one choke point that can be, that has been disrupted in this way.
It's a much more ubiquitous and much more long-lasting problem than we have ever seen or had.
You could put together a couple of the oil shocks and inflation shocks we had in the 70s, and that would get you about 50% of where we are right now.
The amount of loss and shortfall just in oil and liquid natural gas is extremely severe, and nobody's really quite sure how the fertilizer situation is going to play out.
Obviously, helium.
being in short supply impacts chip manufacturing.
And there's like a huge global arms race around that.
So it's just like so many things all at once.
And the difficulty is that it's not something like COVID where it's like a self-imposed thing or like we've made some changes because of like certain temporary measures or whatever.
This is just like a whole month of air in the pipes for the whole global economy.
And that's, you know, really, really bad.
Yeah, no amount of PPE can solve this.
No amount of wearing gloves and masks at work and visors can get people back, can make the gas run through the pipelines that are now broken or destroyed.
That's not exactly what it is, but just to give it a kind of general term there.
And just on the AI side, we did ask Melvin this morning, I was like, are you seeing any reactions from this in the AI market at all?
And he didn't seem very concerned with that.
He mainly wanted to chat about OpenAI.
We'll save that for the AI podcast this week.
But one thing that we did discuss, John, and I thought was very interesting as well, is Martin, our expert on the pro side, crypto side, he asked Thomas from Macro, he's like, so what does a bounce back look like?
Let's say that this nacho is real, the taco's done.
For the fourth Monday in a row, Trump's telling us that we've got a deal in place or whatever, but let's say it's for real this time.
Let's say this week everybody gets together, they shake hands, everybody's happy and say, okay, let's rebuild all that shit we destroyed for no reason the last couple of weeks.
What happens to the markets in that case?
What does an actual bounce back look like considering the damage that you're saying has been done that takes years to reverse and repair?
Yeah, so not all of it takes years to reverse and repair, but it's like we're on this – we're kind of in this place where once the oil stopped flowing, then people started tapping emergency measures.
So there had been a lot of sanctions and things put on Russia, so they weren't able to go to market with as much of their oil.
So they actually had a little bit of a surplus of reserves and were able to come to meet some of the demand with that.
Then they unsanctioned the Iranian oil that was already at sea and allowed that to be sold.
And then, you know, the Saudi Arabia has this east-west pipeline, which usually I think they put around 2 million barrels a day through it.
They've scaled it up with emergency measures to all the way to 7 million barrels a day.
However, the Houthis have also entered the war and are putting a choke point on the Red Sea now, just like the Iranians have on the Strait of Hormuz.
So it's not clear if that pipeline is going to even help.
Everybody's tapping into their reserves.
The U.S.
and other nations have released, I think, 400 million barrels from the reserves that they're going to release.
over a period of many months to try to make sure that there's a supply.
And then Asian countries that are not able to get their oil from the Middle East have also started buying from WTI or Venezuelan oil that's been shipped to the United States.
So they're tapping these temporary measures.
The effects of the shortfall are what...
we haven't yet seen because if we get through these reserves, get through these temporary measures, then you start to actually have the real problems start to hit the economy and really come down to the wire here.
The other thing too is that there's a lot of refineries.
If they don't get new crude brought in, they have to shut down.
So they are now operating at below capacity to try to stretch the amount of crude that they have because to restart a refinery, if you have to shut it down, takes a long time.
It's very expensive.
So there's just a lot of things that even though They haven't run out of oil yet.
They're trying to stretch the supply, which is reducing their output, which is driving up prices in the market for a lot of different petroleum products, gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, all these things.
Okay, so to answer your question directly, what does it look like when we restart?
There's all this stuff that has happened to try to get through this.
When we restart, they'll try to reverse that.
That timeline and that process looks different for everybody at different places and based on their circumstances and situations.
There's been energy infrastructure that's been damaged through combat attacks in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf countries.
So that repair will take time.
Getting back to normal will take time for that.
So I don't know.
When they do open the straight, I think there'll be an initial sugar rush of people being like, yay, we're back in business and this nightmare is over because certainty will help.
then the lingering impacts of how long does it actually take to restart and resume.
I'm not an expert on this.
This is why I'm interviewing Rory and like other people to try to like learn more about this.
But it's kind of hard to say, but it's not, this is not something where we can just like flip a switch and they say, okay, it's okay to use the straight and we can all go back to normal.
There's still going to be a lot of lingering impacts from this and those get worse the longer the shutdown lasts.
So the fact that we've gotten to one month is a pretty severe crisis in my opinion.
Frankly, I'm...
a little bit surprised that oil prices aren't higher than they are right now.
But if this continues for another month, they're going to go much higher.
They're going to go to $200 and they might stay there for longer than people want.
And that is when you have that risk of global economic collapse happening.
We're all watching this, and this is a crypto show.
To just say one word about crypto here, Bitcoin has held up relatively well during this, but if there is a global economic collapse, I don't think anything is going to be a quote-unquote safe haven.
So there's a lot of uncertainty in the markets.
If you're a digital asset-focused investor, this does impact you because it impacts everybody.
So yeah, this is not a time to go like...
being a hero or trying to get cute or just taking a huge amount of risk and leverage because nobody knows when this resolves, what it looks like when it resolves, who wins in the negotiations, who controls the straight, how they control it, what happens.
So there's just too much uncertainty right now to say for sure about a lot of these things.
so you also mentioned uh this is actually a good opportunity to jump over to crypto thank you for for for all that information it's very helpful um you brought up this chart in the pro chat this weekend uh from myriad markets which actually a prediction market we never we never actually cover but um they have some really good stuff there that's basically bcc's next move pumped to 84k or dumped to 55k and i feel like that's definitely the story with the written the entire economy as well john right is that it's like either this is gonna we're gonna flip we're gonna flip a switch at some point things are gonna be good or we're gonna flip a switch and things are gonna be really bad and it feels like more and more there's only these two scenarios and and these types of markets kind of um really show that off i think earlier you mentioned it was closer to 50 50 but it's actually 60 40 so 60 chance um on myriad that we dump to 55k and that's again that's just people betting on that um it's not it's not actual odds makers that doing that and then there's a very low volume on this compared to polymarket but um it's kind of flip-flopped a lot in the last month right there are times where going to 84k has been the dominant theme has topped i think it's 65 likelihood um but it's now dumped back down to the 40 percent do you would you agree that this is roughly accurate would you say that this is kind of how you feel about it I think that the reason I shared this is that it shows what's happening, which is the market is trying to make up its mind.
For the last 60 days, Bitcoin has been more or less range bound and chopping.
And there have been a couple of moments where it seemed like, oh, we're getting up towards the mid 70s.
Maybe we are going to finally break out.
And then the market changes its mind.
And that's why you see those lines flipping on this probability there because bulls and bears are trying to figure this out.
This is what I've been watching.
This is what the whole market has been watching.
I've been saying this to our pro community.
Every time anybody asks me about this, I kind of re-explain.
what I'm looking for, why these levels matter.
And that's basically what I'm looking for.
Either Bitcoin's price goes up and breaks through, retests and hopefully breaks through the bull market support band or what is now, I guess, the bear market resistance band.
And then, you know, if we retest that and get rejected, it's confirmation we're probably going to continue a bear market and see maybe lower lows.
And if we break through it and flip it into support, that means maybe this bearish period is over.
Maybe we're resuming bullish momentum.
Maybe we do break out, go back towards 100K, test that again.
But if that doesn't happen, and so far neither of them have, the downside risk is I'm watching this 60K level again because the February low that we made has not been broken in now the two months that we've been ranging.
And that's kind of what people are watching.
If it comes back to 60K to test that, does it hold?
Does it break?
Do we go down to the 50s?
Some people are calling for Bitcoin around 50 or lower in some cases.
I don't personally think that that's going to happen.
I think that one of the things that's confusing a lot of analysts who are trying to do market commentary on Bitcoin and crypto right now is that this market, this bull run has been much different than past ones and in a lot of key ways.
So there's like, I think it's Glassnode or not Glassnode, but in any of it, there's a website that has over 30 different indicators that they monitor for indicating a top in Bitcoin's price.
None of those 30 indicators fired.
in this bull run.
So in other words, we had a top on apathy, but because there was no blow off, because there was no euphoria, those 30 indicators that people usually use in crypto to indicate we've reached a top, none of them fired.
So it was like a top that nobody could really see from a lot of different quantitative metrics, not all, but some.
And then in a similar fashion, now that we're trying to do this bottoming structure and find where the bottom is for this bear market, bear market period, People are looking at a lot of indicators and some are saying we've already bottomed.
Some are saying we have to go lower.
Some people are saying a lot of different things.
So that's where this confusion is coming from.
That's why you're seeing a lot of these split opinions on these betting markets and in the market itself because the bulls and bears both have a lot of things to support their case and nobody's quite sure who's going to win out right now.
In bear markets.
And Ben Cowan says this a lot, and I love Ben Cowan's work, so I quote him often.
But he says that bear markets make fools of both the bulls and the bears.
So there's going to be a lot of these bear flags where price trends up, the bears think they're wrong, and then it'll collapse down again, and the bulls will look ridiculous as well.
So it's a really hard time to be trying to call this one way or the other, and that's why I'm watching those two levels.
If Bitcoin tells me that it's breaking out and...
you know, flips the bull market support band into support.
That's one piece of information.
I do one thing with my capital.
If we go down to 60K and break that, I'm going to deploy more.
But while we're in this range, I'm just watching and paying attention because, you know, like I always say on my macro show, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish.
You want to learn as much as you can from the market, even if you're not actively trading it, even if you're just observing, because everybody is getting an education in how this asset behaves, what the market is telling you about how it views the asset.
So it's a great time to be in Bitcoin and paying attention to what's going on.
on in crypto but it's also a difficult time to be calling bulls or bears right now because nobody's quite sure do you think it's hard for people to be bored Yes, it's a war of attrition.
People capitulate on this too.
They get bored.
They think it's dead.
They think it's over.
They think it's boring.
A lot of people never came back from 2022 for this exact reason.
They just haven't been paying attention and it feels boring to wait four years for a bull run, but it's coming.
And if you are still here and you are still paying attention, you have a huge, huge market opportunity and advantage.
So yeah, don't get bored.
Don't give in to boredom.
Stay engaged.
It'll pay off.
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I remember, you know, that was my first big macro lesson in 2022 when the market pulled back and crypto had all these crisis.
And I was like, what the fuck?
I was like, why would this happen?
I was promised ETH to 10K.
How could I, you know, I was so new to crypto.
I was like, this is the only thing that could happen.
And I just had that lesson on just, uh global liquidity and global markets and how that dictates everything and and rates right like this it's stuff where it's like listen man i never worked in this industry so i don't know any of that shit and since then i was like oh i get it and even think about crypto cycles at the time i was like okay what else could what other you know astrology of male astrology can we look at and it was like it was like four-year cycles don't worry and i was like four-year cycle you want me to wait three years are you freaking serious i was like three years for this and then i remember thinking that and that was four years ago that i was thinking that like late or maybe a little later but like after that you know we had a pump in april i think maybe nfts did well there's something going on and then and then there was like a major like crash through the summer and i just couldn't believe it and um for me that was like i was like that's gonna be a lesson in patience i gotta find something else to do for a couple years man because i have there's not there's not gonna be not gonna be able to dj in the streets it won't be good and that time has come and gone and now it's been four years already since then and now i'm back in the same situation like three years i gotta wait maybe not that long for crypto we don't know but um a lot of our guests definitely don't think so but it's just it's definitely been at least for me as a as a somebody just went through their second cycle let's call it it's uh definitely a lesson in patience man and one that i thought the time the time goes by faster than you think let's say but in the bear it feels like it's crawling It's crawling by when this is what you really put a lot of chips and a lot of eggs into crypto and hoping that it does well.
It's really hard to just hang on to that during these long, slow days where there's so many other stories.
This interview is starting to feel like a lead blanket, but I don't have this attitude.
I'm actually really excited.
This is going to sound crazy, but I have the opposite experience of this.
The way I think about this is that a truck hauling...
gold bars to fort knox spilled them all over the highway and nobody else is coming to pick them up so what i'm viewing this as is an opportunity because this industry is full of enormous amounts of value and it is completely mispriced overlooked and misunderstood by the market right now and so if you're willing to take the time to go out and look at all this stuff understand it evaluate it and see the opportunity that the market is giving you that everyone's overlooking and missing It is an enormous opportunity for life-changing wealth.
And it's maybe the only thing you need to get right in your entire life is not tuning out of crypto right now, locking in, paying attention, allocating, and being patient.
It sounds boring and it may be very frustrating, but it really is one of the best opportunities the market may ever give us.
So I think this has been a really exciting time for me personally because there's so much being built, so many innovations and developments happening, so much adoption going on.
I was at the Digital Asset Summit.
this past week with Chevy, our newsletter writer.
And it was just wild to see all the institutional adoption, commitment, CEOs of banks, CEOs of major Wall Street institutions and firms.
hiring new products, new services, all kinds of things.
Adoption is real.
It's coming.
ETH will get to 10K.
Your promise will be fulfilled.
It's just not going to be on the timeline that you want it to be.
And so I don't know, man.
I have the opposite reaction to this.
I'm not depressed.
I'm not sad.
I'm super energized because it's like, this is maybe the only thing I have to get right in my entire professional career.
And then I'll just look like a genius for the rest of my life because I didn't.
I locked in for this bear market.
So yeah, I understand the frustration for sure.
And I feel that way sometimes as well.
But then I remember the opportunity and the institutional bull run that's happening in crypto and digital assets.
And then I get really excited and I start talking too fast.
But yeah.
John, I was sad four years ago because I had to learn the lesson.
And this time I was just relating to the part of like where it feels long and slow and boring.
I never said you should stop accumulating that there weren't opportunities, man.
If anything, when I used to do...
show john i would tell people like listen when there's going to be a bear market you go the assets we talk about the things that are doing well like you go hard on those even always point to something like solana that was eight dollars last time before ripping back to almost 300 i bought it and yeah you bought exactly right so there's there's um there's always going to be those opportunities i agree with you it is exciting i just think on the um on the surface it doesn't look that way and i think there's always going to be a bit of a divergence between um you know, getting excited by yourself and everyone getting excited.
And, um, it definitely, especially when there's other stories like this, man, this is, it's also other stuff like this.
It makes it feel like a slug.
It's not like, it's not like the rest of the world is boring and it's just ignoring crypto.
It's like a couple of months ago, it was like AI is going to come and destroy SAS.
And guess what?
Crypto is SAS.
And now it's like, well, you know, and we're going to be in a global depression for 10 years.
And, you know, there's all these stories and maybe some of them will be true, but, um, I think that those counteract the part where it's hard to get excited.
But tell me more about Das, man.
You were at the Digital Asset Summary with Chevy, a huge industry event.
I want to know from you, John, who was there?
What kind of people were there?
There's a lot of huge speakers, a lot of huge names.
A lot of our guests were there, Matt Hogan from Bitwise included.
But who were the attendees?
Was it other crypto bros like us or who was there?
Yeah, so it's a much different event.
First of all, I want to say shout out to Blockworks.
Our friends over there are doing a great job in a lot of ways.
the industry leadership that they're doing at these conferences, I think is really important and creating a dialogue between Wall Street and crypto.
So yeah, just shout out to all those guys, great people and some friends.
But I think that the way I would characterize this is it felt very much like a Wall Street event.
It did not feel like a crypto event.
The suggested attire was business attire.
The participants were mostly from Wall Street.
It's in New York.
And I think that there were, I mean, there were some crypto native people there, some.
But most of the people on the panels, most of the speakers were from institutions, were from Wall Street, were from major companies, corporations.
And they were talking about how they're incorporating digital assets, what they're doing in the digital asset space.
New products, new services, and then just our outlook on the market, things like the appetite for digital assets from institutions.
So I think that the big theme of the Digital Asset Summit was this move towards the industry maturing, growing up, institutions coming.
The chairman of the CFTC and the SEC were both there.
They both spoke.
They both made very positive remarks about crypto.
Michael Saylor was there, obviously, talking about his new preferred offerings, SDRC, and the opportunity that that offers for investors who are looking to strip out some of the volatility from Bitcoin but still participate in the upside and get some regular returns from it.
There were BlackRock's head of digital assets, my old friend, Robbie Michnik from BlackRock.
He was there talking about how the ETFs, the Bitcoin ETFs have actually seen a lot of strength and inflows.
They also launched a new Ethereum staking product, ETP.
He was talking about that and how there's been really strong demand for that staking ETF or staking enabled ETF rather.
So yeah, well, it's an ETP.
Anyway, these are details.
But the point is the overarching theme.
was that there's an institutional bull run happening in crypto and in digital assets and the the institutions are not phased by the price they're not like you know looking at this as like some into the world fiasco they are more committed than ever more um more committed to mobilizing um talent capital resources to grow and to innovate they are committed to tokenization they're committed to real world assets stable coins there's a lot of excitement around all these things and then in the assets themselves right and and finding ways to bring this to market in a way that's accessible to institutional clients, the ETPs and other things.
So yeah, look, I mean, the takeaway for me was it was very bullish.
It's just much different than you would see at like an ETH Denver or, you know, like an NFT convention or something, right?
Like it's a much different group of people come together to talk about crypto and digital assets.
And in an exciting and energizing way that makes me feel like, you know, the next century of finance is going to be in crypto.
So, yeah, that was kind of the vibe and some of my takeaways there.
Were there any bad takes?
There were a few.
I feel like you're trying to rage bait me because, you know.
Well, here's a question is, did anybody go there and say any bearish things about crypto?
Like, is it the kind of place that has balance of opinions or is it just like a big crypto, you know, pump fest?
Yeah, so I think that there's this narrative that's been adopted where Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only things that have value and those are sort of like separated from the rest of the pack.
I think that in general, like I think Solana is a great example of this, right?
Like Solana had a huge wave of interest and enthusiasm from the retail side in the last bull run and in this bull run.
But they are still trying to negotiate this pivot to being a more mature asset and bringing institutions in to adopt Solana.
At the same time, they've also seen a lot of the revenues that they were making be kind of like taken by competitors.
Like PumpFun has gone off on their own.
Hyperliquid has taken a lot of volume in retail trading away from Solana.
So the vibes in Solana are not great right now, even though it's still a very robust ecosystem, still got a very bullish outlook, still growing, still building, still bringing in new capital, new users, new products.
But so there's this kind of, that's the kind of take that I'm hearing, right?
Is that...
Bitcoin and Ethereum are great, but the rest of the stuff, maybe not so much.
Maybe you don't need that.
Maybe we don't need to go down that curve.
And one person who I'm not going to name called it nonsense from the stage.
And that's not my view of this.
I think that there is an enormous amount of really.
robust ecosystems, technology, innovation, products, and assets in the digital asset industry that are being developed and built by some of the finest minds in the world.
And one I go back to a lot is Sylvia McCallie, who's the founder of Algorand, is a Turing Award winner, which is the Nobel Prize in math.
And the guy is brilliant.
He's the father of modern cryptography.
He has been doing this for...
I think 20 or 30 years longer than Bitcoin has even existed.
And a lot of his work is what all of the stuff is based on.
And he has a project called Algorand and they're doing a lot of really exciting, innovative things.
And everyone's like saying, oh, because there's no investment, there's no capital right now.
That's a terrible project.
It's nonsense.
It's not nonsense.
It's an amazing innovation.
It's just still.
like waiting for adoption product market fit to be found.
And maybe that won't come, but I do think that we're going to see so many new participants to the digital economy with the rise of artificial intelligence that a lot of these major robust and really novel, innovative financial economic systems that have been built in the digital asset space will find product market fit.
And a lot of users in the agentic economy, even if they don't find it immediately in the human economy, that is something that nobody's pricing in.
That's something that people are missing.
And I think that there's this, To me, it confirms this opportunity of this gap of information.
If you're an expert in your field and you come from Wall Street, that doesn't mean that you've read all the white papers.
That doesn't mean that you understand cryptography.
That's an academic discipline within the area of computer science that a lot of people from Wall Street just do not understand.
They don't understand why all these ecosystems, why all this technology is so important, why it matters, why it's so important for the future of the planet and for the financial future of the species.
because they don't understand the technical part of it they understand finance but they don't understand the technology so as that gap starts to close the market will teach people why these things matter the market will find the value in this and that will you know it'll reprice that accordingly but to me that's a huge opportunity right there's all these people with capital and they realize now that they have to take this industry seriously but they still don't understand it fully and they're not going to for a while because they don't have to people it's like you know there's the old saying everyone gets bitcoin at the price they deserve When Michael Saylor needed, had to, for survival of his business, understand Bitcoin, that's when he understood Bitcoin.
The same thing will happen with the rest of the digital asset space.
Once people understand how vital it is, they'll start to recognize that.
But in the meantime...
Bitcoin and Ethereum are in high demand.
Institutions are taking them very seriously.
They're allocating capital to them.
They're building businesses around them.
They're building products on them.
They're allocating new headcount, new resources, new hiring, new talent towards them.
They're hiring aggressively.
Just this week, BlackRock is hiring another managing director in digital assets, specifically to help Robby Michnik focus on developing what BlackRock is doing in Ethereum, on Ethereum, around Ethereum, and Bitcoin as well, and other digital assets too.
yeah there's a lot happening there's a lot to sift through with that answer but to me there's just still this gap of knowledge between the people who have capital and the people who have built the technology and as that closes the market will reprice the digital asset industry accordingly I love these shows, man.
I love that we spend the first 20 minutes talking about the end of the world, and then somehow John Gillen brings us the whole way back around to feeling freaking pumped and bullish on the space, man.
I love it.
I think that's wonderful.
I hope you guys, if you're still listening here at the end of the episode, I hope you feel that too.
John, who was that last question for you, more of a novelty question?
Who was the best speaker you saw?
Out of everybody you could have seen, who was the most compelling person you saw there?
I always really enjoy listening to Geordie Visser.
I like his delivery.
I like what he says.
I like how he's always evolving his ideas.
I didn't say anything about this to him.
But this has really got me excited.
He said the first positive thing I've ever heard him say.
I've been listening to this guy for like three or four years.
But he said something very positive about Ethereum, which to me was a really bullish signal because it means that even these guys who are legacy macro and Bitcoin, not maxis, but soft maxis, are starting to admit that, okay, Ethereum has a moat.
There's something to this.
And they're recognizing that there's a lot of value created specifically by ETH and the ETH ecosystem that can't be replaced by Bitcoin, can't be duplicated by Bitcoin.
wall street and can't just be spun up by a banker chain and label the blockchain and stolen right so um that was really bullish to me because it seems to me that more people who were bitcoin only are starting to come around to ethereum because they see the demand they see the adoption and they see the value and there is a moat there even in a world of artificial intelligence where software as a service does not have a moat ethereum has one and i'm not going to outline it for you i think this is what i want there to be a gap of curiosity Figure out why Ethereum is unique.
Why does Ethereum have a moat?
Why is it so important?
Why is TradFi taking it so seriously?
Because I think there's a lot of value there.
But that was really bullish to me.
Hearing Geordi say something positive about ETH for the first time in a long time, he's starting to get it.
He's beginning to believe.
I thought of the scene from The Matrix where Morpheus says about Neo, he's beginning to believe.
It's like, oh boy, we're going to start to get Geordi here.
That's awesome.
There were a lot of great speakers.
I want to say that there were like a lot of great people.
Raul Paul was there.
A lot of other people though.
I sat and personally listened to Steven Mirren, who's a sitting governor of the federal reserve speak at a crypto event, which is something I never thought I would see happen.
A central banker at a crypto event.
But yeah, there was just a lot of great people, a lot of great energy, great speakers, wonderful people.
Joe Shalom from Sharp Link, the old friend of mine from BlackRock, like a lot of great people.
So yeah, really wonderful conference.
Joe Shalom that you've had on the show that we've had on this show.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, you had him on the show a couple months back.
Also one of our best episodes.
And great.
And you know what?
And even with that answer, not only did you bring the whole show back all the way, you brought it back to ETH.
You even brought it back to ETH with your answer.
Talk about how one of the best or one of the most popular like AI, crypto, macro, like the heads of our, especially of our circles these days.
said that he's bullish on ETH, man.
I feel like that's pretty exciting for you and for us and for anybody who's in ETH Maxie, which I think is a lot of the people listening to the show as well.
John, another wonderful show, man.
Thank you so much.
Let's have a great week, regardless of the nachos and tacos and salsas or whatever else is going to happen.
And thank you again, sir, for your thoughts.
Always a pleasure.
Thanks for having me, LG.
Happy to be here.
I'm really glad to be part of this community.
So stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish.
See you next time.
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