# The Financialization of Bitcoin and the Rise of On-Chain Markets

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-04-16

## Transcript

The playbook that he's teaching Wall Street is that if you own Bitcoin, you can find different ways to monetize it.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG Doucette here and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that is going to long the longs and short the shorts and still can't decide what any of that means.
Today is April 16th, 2026.
All right, we're finally revealing another crucial part of what Milk Road has been doing in private for a long time, our weekly crypto research meeting.
Every Thursday morning, the pro team gets together and discusses what matters most in crypto and then that informs our research, our tweets, our podcasts, our purchases.
And from now on, we're going to be doing it right here in public.
Today we're going deep on Hyperliquid.
We're talking about if Lighter can ever hope to catch up to them, despite how much Martin wants to love it and is actually writing a pro report that's coming out today about it.
And then we're going to swan dive into Michael Saylor's stretch and its success so far in the market.
Today's episode is brought to you by Consent.
Consent is Miami where the next cycle starts.
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All right, everybody listening.
Welcome to the first ever public Milk Road research meeting.
We have these every week.
We've been having them every week for a long time secretly, and now it's public.
So you guys are going to hear what Kyle, Martin and Sean really think about the market, which hopefully is not that different than what you see publicly or you see in Milk Road Pro, but we're going to find out today.
Kyle, let's start with you.
We always go do these and kind of go.
We're on the horn and see what kind of your thoughts are on the market.
A very green week.
Is this going to continue?
Yeah, I mean, a very green week.
It talked to us on the AI podcast earlier this week, too, which is I think we overpriced the doomsday scenario.
And so everyone was kind of caught offside.
And, you know, inflation was not as bad as we thought.
The war seems to be not resolved, but like we can see the light in the tunnel, I think.
At least there's some sort of control there.
And so and then, you know, everything else looks pretty good in terms of the macro world.
So I think everyone had to come back.
Yeah.
S&P and Nasdaq are now back at all time highs.
So everything looks good.
The one thing I would say, though, is, you know, the stock market's back at all time highs, but Bitcoin's still sitting below 75,000, which isn't that great.
So I'm very bullish on AI and in the AI world at the moment because that buildup is continuing.
You know, TSMC had their earnings this morning and their margins and revenue were huge.
And so there's still this tons of demand for chips.
So I think like that world is not stopping, which is bullish overall for just the market.
For some reason, though, crypto is not playing ball.
I do feel very bullish on Bitcoin, though, because of what Saylor's doing.
The guy's buying more Bitcoin than he ever has this year.
And I don't think that stops because of his new product, Stretch, which I'm sure we'll talk about later, guys.
It's like I feel good about pockets of crypto, but it's still not really performing like equities.
So I don't know.
It's a it's a weird it's a world war for crypto.
But my guess is the four year cycle is broken and we're going to get all time highs at some point.
There we go.
Martin, you're back at the top of the leaderboard.
In Milk Road Pro in our portfolios, John briefly held the pole position for a couple of days last week.
But Martin has leapfrogged back ahead, man.
What do you think?
You're going to stay up there.
And do you concur with Kyle?
You have a different take on what's going on.
Why do you sound so surprised, Oji?
Up 20.7 percent, Martin.
Not bad.
Not bad.
Well, I think I was more concerned about the situation.
In Iran than Kyle.
And I guess I can feel it because I'm based in Europe and I can feel the impact here.
Like my cousin is building his house and he said, like, hey, all all the materials and everything just went nuts.
And I'm not going to show that I will be able to, you know, finish my house anymore.
And it's like, yes, like in U.S., it's still not visible in the economy, really.
And.
It might never will, because, you know, U.S.
is oil exporters, so they don't really care.
But like for Asia, Europe and like everyone else, I'm still not 100 percent sure that we saw all the effects and like second order effects of what that should cost.
But we will see.
Anyways, right now, S&P, Nasdaq, all indices at all time highs.
It tells me like, OK, maybe the market is not seeing that as a high risk.
So.
I probably also not be, you know, huge in cash.
So I deployed some capital a few weeks ago back into the markets because it's OK to be to be risk aware and sort of try to manage your risks.
But also I need to react to what markets tells me.
And I don't want to be like, you know, extreme contrarian and like S&P and like all the markets hitting all time highs except crypto.
And I will be like, no way, guys, this is going to still.
It's still not resolved.
I think we can still go down 10 percent.
So, yeah, it's I was more bearish than Kyle.
But right now, it seems like market took it.
We are now up again.
So it seems it seems pretty good right now.
So as we're going through this episode, just remember, there's a difference between hearing ideas and actually seeing how they're being traded.
Milk Pro gives you the portfolios, the buy and sell signals, the research and direct access to our analysts making those moves.
The link.
Is below.
Great, John, you and I have been doing episodes every Monday on on this show, on Milk Road, on the main channel.
And we've got we've we started the last couple of weeks up until this week with like the bearish take where John was like, we're totally fucked.
Like, you're you're screwed.
Like, everybody dooms doomsday.
And then this week we said, like, let's start with the optimistic take.
And that's been that's been our best episode in a while.
So clearly people want to hear that.
And also we timed it with having a clear turnaround on the market.
But you're the one out of the three here who has had probably the most pessimistic kind of long term view, especially since Martin flipped a lot more bullish a couple of weeks ago.
How do you feel right now?
I have the most bullish long term view, first of all, of everybody.
What is long term is what we're getting.
And long term view.
The short, mid and long term.
Okay, let's let's put it that short is like months, mid is like a year or two and long is like 20 years.
Like whatever, whatever measuring stick you want to use on this.
I'm.
Very bullish on Bitcoin, digital assets, overall Ethereum, all of these different things.
Look, I think where we are right now is I'm still in this.
I'm just sussed out in general, right?
We're sitting on the other side of what is like a 99th percentile move in the positive direction from the S&P 500.
It's easy to get euphoric.
It's easy to say the bull runs back.
It's easy to say that, you know, we're going to Valhalla and up only and we're just going to eat to infinity.
Right.
But just because we're over 7000 on the S&P 500 doesn't necessarily mean that the prior market structure of the last year and more just gets thrown out the window.
And I still don't think we've seen confirmation.
So like Bitcoin, for example, is still not over 75K and the bear market resistance band is still above us right now.
So Bitcoin hasn't even on technical metrics yet flipped back into a bull market.
So I'm kind of waiting for confirmation on that.
Same thing with the S&P 500, right?
Like we're not going to just see, you know, another 10 days of up only price action from that either.
There's going to be a pullback.
The market's going to figure some of this out.
I think this is all positive.
But I think it's a little bit of a mean reversion, right?
We've seen a lot of weakness from the S&P for a long time.
There's been a ton of uncertainty from the conflict in that situation, but it seems like the market is now expecting this to resolve.
And so I think we're seeing some positive momentum as a result of that.
I agree with Kyle's observation.
The bull run is much stronger than most people have thought throughout this period of, you know, bearishness and weakness in sentiment and in price action.
So I do think that we have a lot more reason to be bullish than most people think, but it's a little bit too soon for me to like completely flip bullish and say we're going up only here.
So I'm just still waiting for confirmation on a lot of things, particularly when it comes to digital assets.
You know, Ethereum is not over $2,400 and Bitcoin is not over the bear market resistance band, which is around like $79K, somewhere in there.
Basically, if Bitcoin spent like two weeks above $80K, I'd feel more comfortable saying the bull runs back on.
But right now, it's to me just like a really sharp V-shaped recovery, which the S&P has done before.
But we'll see whether or not it holds or if it's just sweeping the highs before rolling over.
Here's the S&P.
OK, look at it roll down and then all of a sudden V-shape.
Same thing it did last year.
Same thing it did the year before that.
Like it is fine.
And if it keeps going, that's great.
There's this is what the fiat system does.
This is why people are bullish on Bitcoin is because this is fiat system right here.
It only works this way.
These assets have to go up.
This is exactly what makes me nervous.
Everyone's like, oh, it only goes up.
It's never going to roll over.
It's never going to roll.
Like, you want me to zoom this chart out even further?
Then it'll just tell you that 100% it only just goes up.
Look, why don't you zoom back to the dot com bubble?
Why don't you do that?
See how it looks.
Look at this chart.
It's ridiculous.
But anyway, Bitcoin is the thing that just does not like everything else looks fantastic.
The chart of crypto, though, you know, just does not look that great.
And I don't know, at some point it's probably going to bounce back.
But I just don't know when that's going to be.
Wow.
Kyle, are you willing to put down some kind of hyper liquid bet on this?
Because I think that's what we want to talk about today, too, is talk about hyper liquid.
You know what?
Let's let's go there right now.
Martin, yeah, you wrote a big report about hyper liquid.
I think you're writing one on lighter, which is its main competitor this week.
Hyper liquid has been on my watch list, which, by the way, we just launched watch list and milk road pros.
I think you can actually go see not just our portfolios, but you can see what our watch lists are now.
So for pro members, that's a new feature.
That's I think it's launching today.
Anyway, hype is on my watch list.
It has been.
I feel like for forever and I just can't get myself to buy it because I always think I need to wait for it to go lower.
And I have multiple people in our discord community, our pro members that trip me every day saying, what are you going to buy?
I never do.
What's your thoughts, Martin?
Like, should we be buying this thing now?
Is it is overvalued, undervalued?
Like, is it got a lot of room to grow?
What are you thinking?
I think now you you have that, you know, I don't know how it's called, but like you miss something and now you just want you are afraid to jump on that.
Yeah, that's not the right word.
It's not FOMO because if I had FOMO, I'd just be buying it, right?
Yeah.
Let me put it this way.
I think right now what works in crypto is stablecoins and perps.
If you have exposure, if you don't have exposure to neither, you you are doing something wrong.
And, you know, you might get exposure to stablecoins through Sky or other.
But if you don't have exposure to perps at all, you are cooked.
Um.
Because like perps are just from first principles, OK, perps are just a great product.
It's something that people just want to use leverage.
Like we can see all the numbers, like look at Robinhood, look at, I don't know, Coinbase, look at perps volumes, look at options volumes.
Like all these vehicles are just instruments for leverage.
So people love leverage.
And OK, we we finally moved from trading meme coins because this is still a casino.
But it's really hard to get some real edge there.
But if you are like trading oil or something, you can have some match.
So it's a different thing.
And I think it also attracts like more sophisticated players and and perps are a great product.
And right now it the market leader is hyperliquid.
And so you have a creel leader in a booming sector and they also have a.
Huge buybacks.
So you are not waiting for someone else coming in and buying your bags.
They are just buying back like 50 million per month.
And the thing that I like about hyperliquid is that its business model and its products don't rely just on crypto.
Right.
So like what we just talked about is, hey, equities are back at all time highs.
Crypto is kind of still, you know, bitcoins are like 70, not even 75,000 still.
OK, it looks like shit.
But hyperliquid is now monetizing things outside of crypto.
Right.
It's kind of like the reason why I like Sky so much is it's it's business and its revenue.
It's not impacted by crypto volatility.
Right.
It's a completely different thing.
It's bringing credit on chain and creating like a tokenized yield form of that.
And so hyperliquid is kind of similar.
It's like it's now, you know, it used to be just perps on what Bitcoin, ETH, etc.
Now it's perps on oil, perps on everything else.
And so it's like it's moved past the crypto world, which is like the one thesis that I absolutely love.
And then obviously, like you said, the other thing is buyback.
Is it growing?
No, it's not.
It's going sideways.
That's my actually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
My issue.
Why?
Why is it not growing?
Is it competition or just no new net net new people using perps?
Yeah, that's what I think.
Like they are struggling to grow from here because the recent growth lever was HIP3, which was that anyone can build front end and just bring, you know, your own assets to the hyperliquid.
You can trade there.
So that was the big boom.
With real world assets like oil and silver.
And but now what's next?
What's what's next catalyst?
And I think they are bringing prediction markets to hyperliquid as well.
I think the same roadmap bill is on the on lighter, lighter roadmap as well.
So you start with perps, then you bring spot, then you bring other builders.
You invite other builders into the ecosystem to build on top of you.
Then you have prediction markets and pretty much everything else.
But I am not sizing up with hype.
And the reason is that I believe that lighter is a better product because if you use hyperliquid, yes, it's market leader today.
They have much more liquidity, much, much higher open interest.
But the thing is, if I'm probably a big hedge fund or asset manager and I'm thinking about using hyperliquid, I'm thinking about using hyperliquid.
Then I have two trust assumptions.
One is I need to believe that their validators are behaving honestly and follow the rules, which I have no way to verify.
So I hope that no one is stealing and like everything goes as it should.
But I have no idea.
And the second is if I bridge my money to hyperliquid, I'm always hoping that they will.
There will always be some bridge.
How I can.
Withdraw my money back.
And, you know, if I'm a big, big money manager, those might be like two big issues that might stop me by deploying capital on hyperliquid.
And then you have something like lighter, which is built on top of Ethereum, so I can keep my native Ethereum on Ethereum mainnet.
And lighter will just see, oh, OK, this guy has Ethereum on the mainnet, so I can just give you credit on our layer two.
And even if.
If our sequencer goes off or something, you can always and because they also post ZK proofs to the Ethereum, you can always come back to Ethereum and say, hey, their sequencer went off.
Here are all the proofs.
So can you just rebuild the whole blockchain again and return me my money?
Yes, we can.
So like the trust assumptions are pretty much zero here.
You believe in Ethereum security, which is, you know, the best in the industry by a long shot.
And second thing is there is no bridge.
So it's it's built in the smart contract.
So I will be able to withdraw my money any time I want.
And there is no one who could ever block me my money.
If you think from that perspective, lighter is simply just a better product.
But right now it's not it's not seeing in the numbers yet.
I hold both in my portfolio, by the way.
Hyperliquid is 10.7 billion market cap, but fully diluted value of 43 billion.
What that's that's Martin pouring water, not taking a piss for anybody listening, pouring water.
So people that are audio only, you don't know that it's off camera.
A lot of things.
Who knows?
Yes, we didn't see it.
He hasn't moved, but that doesn't mean anything.
Go ahead, Kyle.
So ten, 10.7 billion market cap, 43 billion FTV for hyperliquid.
Where should that be valued, Martin?
Higher or lower?
You know, what's the problem is like, are you like 10 billion?
Sounds good, but 40 billion sounds not good.
So it's like I don't I don't know their token schedule.
If there are obviously there are some blessings for a team.
I think they don't have any investors, but I don't know.
And that's the problem with like pretty much all crypto tokens that are not that they still have some tokens unlocked because you don't know how much is going to be in circulation and what like in two years or something.
So well, that's the issue with lighter here, right?
Like lighters market.
Cap 268 million FTV, 1 billion, right?
So there's 750 million tokens that need to come in supply.
One of those companies.
I don't want to be like you can think about it like it's FTV is 1.5 billion and I am willing to buy it at 1.5 billion.
I'm assuming that FTV, I'm not looking in market cap like I talk about about why I'm so bullish here in my report, despite all these token unlocks.
And I said like many times to myself, I'm never going to buy token that's going to have a huge future unlocks.
But this time it's different because if you go and learn more about the team behind lighter and who are the founders backing this team, you will be like, OK, I want to be in that trade as well, because those are just, you know, funders fund who never who barely invest in crypto.
And they invested in into lighter that guy who later he was handpicked by CEO of Citadel was the biggest market maker.
He was recruited by him at 18 because he was just super smart guy and he was represent.
He was selling hard work and and then he also knows Vlad and Vlad from CEO from Robin Hood.
He's now advisor to lighter.
Then you have Tom Lee.
Who is, you know, interviewing Vlad from lighter during the investors call because I guess they are cooking something together.
So like those are so many things.
And like if I am, you know, Tom Lee or if I'm Vlad Tenev and I'm associating my name with that company and I invest in those guys, they invested last round when they were raising funds were at one point five billion and they all invested at that valuation.
And now we are.
Like 50% below the valuation.
So like it tells me these giga brains were okay to give him money at one point five billion and now it's sitting at one billion.
So either these guys are not as smart as they look or there is something wrong or it's a huge opportunity right now.
So a couple of things, but I'm bullish.
You.
You.
John, I guess.
Do you have any.
On purpose?
I don't know if you're buying hyperliquid at all.
I assume not.
Why are you laughing?
I could be.
You have no idea.
I could be totally a DJ and nobody would know.
No.
So I think that prediction markets.
So I think all markets are prediction markets and I think that the market is now beginning to realize the power of these as a product.
And but I think, you know, everyone's always known this for a long time.
Markets are forward looking.
They're information generating engines as well as risk distribution and capital aggregation methods.
But I think that the problem for me is that there's not really a moat around what hyperliquid is.
But people are going to eat me alive for saying this.
But there isn't a clear moat around what hyperliquid is offering in terms of prediction markets other than the loyalty from the community and people's preference for trading there.
And the fact that they have so much liquidity on their platform that's making that a great place to go to express these ideas.
I think that it's one of those things where I think they've got a great product.
They found product market fit.
They're defending their moat.
They've got a loyal community and user base.
But it also seems to me like something that's going to get at some point get folded in or incorporated into other financial platforms, products and services will just be nothing that's offered.
And so to me, it's a little bit too soon to tell for sure what the long term like with how this all this plays out, where this ends up, if it just ends up with something you can do on Robin Hood, etc.
But I think it's a huge, a huge emerging financial primitive that is yet to be fully incorporated into the financial marketplace.
Yeah.
I think you're definitely able to do these on like Robin Hood and Coinbase soon for sure.
I mean, you already kind of can already.
Can you do it on Coinbase?
I don't know if they have purpose, but I think they do actually.
But it's just like Hyperliquid has so much so many more users and so much more liquidity that most people go there still.
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Yeah, yeah.
Okay, yeah.
You talked about Tom Lee.
I want to have a conversation around Saylor because he's getting a lot of conversation right now, which is like the one thing that's actually making me kind of bullish on Bitcoin.
I just want to know what your guys have to say.
Let me just show this chart first because it's insane.
Okay, so this is a chart I just made this morning of Saylor's basically accumulation of Bitcoin year over year.
The red one here is this year.
So it's the fastest that he's ever accumulated Bitcoin so far.
It's like 108,000 Bitcoin by mid-April.
So it was 107,000 by the end of April last year.
So he's already outpacing that.
And he's outpacing it not because he's really diluting incentives.
He's really diluting and selling MicroStrategy shares.
He's done a little bit of that, but I think he hasn't tapped that ATM for a couple weeks now, maybe even more than that.
It's through his Stretch product, which is basically a preferred share that he's got where yield seekers can come, basically give their capital to Michael Saylor, get 11.5% APY, and he goes and buys Bitcoin with that.
And then he's got like $2.25 billion of cash just kind of reserved away to pay out those dividends.
And it's absolutely ripping.
But every time that those shares, those Stretch shares, which are at $100, go above $100, he can tap the ATM on those.
And I think this week so far, he's already tapped $1.8 billion just from Monday and Tuesday of this week to buy more Bitcoin.
So it is an absolute money printer.
Now, obviously, there's risk to it, and we don't need to go into that whole conversation unless we want to.
But he's buying so much damn Bitcoin right now that it's crazy the price is not moving a lot more than it currently is.
Have you guys looked into this?
Do you think that this is going to continue and we're going to go much higher as a result?
Because he's buying more than double the amount of Bitcoin that's mined every day right now.
And he's accelerating, which is crazy.
So what do we think?
I think two points for me.
One is the fact that Saylor is buying like crazy and the Bitcoin is still not moving is probably showing that the Bitcoin is quite weak because we have this one huge buyer and probably no one else buying it.
Well, we also had a billion inflows so far in April from the ETFs.
So it's not the only buyer.
Maybe it's starting now, but, you know, until now, not really.
And like this shows something like if you have long term horizon, like, you know, Bitcoin will do just fine in a couple of years.
So don't worry.
But it just shows me that I'm quite surprised that there are not new buyers even for Bitcoin.
Yeah.
That's kind of surprising.
And second thing is it's great that you see you show the chart how Saylor is accumulating.
But you didn't show chart how much it costs him because right now he is buying.
But the cost of that capital that he is using to get for these buys are pretty high.
Twelve percent.
That's pretty insane.
So, like, you know, if I want to buy more Bitcoin, I can.
Like, am I willing to borrow money for 10 percent or 15 percent or 20 percent?
Like, you know, that's the game he's playing here.
And 12 percent right now, that's pretty steep.
Yeah.
I mean, he's not technically borrowing it for 12, 11.5 percent.
Like, it's not like this is like he can get liquidated or something on this.
Like, he can lower that rate at any time he wants to.
Right.
It's a variable rate that they set each month.
So it's a bit more nuanced than that.
But I see what you're saying for sure.
It is a worry to me that it's still not going up when he's buying this much.
That just seems wild to me.
Either it's like, OK, they're running out of supply here and this thing's got to go much higher very soon, which is kind of what I'm leaning towards if he continues down this path.
I just like what's the next catalyst for Bitcoin?
Does the genius act?
Sort of.
I guess that helps.
It definitely helps.
It's not just an Ethereum based thing, but it helps.
What do you what do you think, John?
I see you laughing over there.
I think you guys are completely missing this.
First of all, there is no second best.
Bitcoin is digital capital.
So he's look, he's he's found.
Look, OK, this is what you got to understand about this.
Everybody's like, that's what he says.
He calls it digital credit.
That is not digital credit.
It's a preferred equity.
And this is what I think Martin is getting at here.
He's paying 11 percent, but it's something he is choosing to do.
The market, he can suspend that payment if he if he chooses to.
If he can't make that payment.
So everybody's taking whatever risk and they're taking and buying that.
But that's not the point here.
This is OK.
The reason he's not walking up the order books is he's doing this not on the spot markets, but OTC.
So he's intentionally trying to accumulate as much Bitcoin as he can without radically impacting the price.
That is not a bearish thing.
It just means that he is now he's now becoming, you know, the central bank of Bitcoin.
Effectively, he's accumulating more and more of the spot supply.
But he's trying not to radically impact the price.
He's trying not to radically shift the price.
So that's intentional and it's a deliberate market strategy.
And a lot of major accumulators do that.
So that's nothing unusual.
The next major catalyst for Bitcoin will probably be the Clarity Act and the resolution of the war.
But I think all of this is beside the point.
The second and third order impacts of what he's done is what's so important to understand here.
The history of how we got here is important as well.
So Michael Saylor realized that MicroStrategy was effectively a zombie company and he was going to get eaten alive slowly by Microsoft over time back in 2020.
In August, I think, of 2020, he begins buying Bitcoin.
Then he starts issuing MSTR to buy more Bitcoin.
That's reflected in those charts that you have there.
What he's doing now is he's iterated on a lot of other different kinds of financial instruments and products to bring to market until he found product market fit.
STRC is the one that's allowing him to accumulate.
Like I said in the recent episode that went semi-viral, he's accumulating with bull market size during a Bitcoin bear market.
That is a huge change.
And the second and third order impacts of that is what people aren't seeing.
Retail is missing.
So let me explain what I mean by this.
So what he did was he launched all these.
There's Stream and Stretch and Strife and Strike and all.
But none of them are really found.
It's like 18 products or something like that.
Exactly.
He's got a whole suite of these.
But the one that found product market fit is Stretch.
The reason this is such a big deal is he's now straddling the volatility curve.
So if you want a lot of volatility and upside, you can buy MSTR.
It's going to have more performance.
It's going to outperform Bitcoin, more beta to Bitcoin in a Bitcoin bull run.
But it's also going to be way more volatile.
But if you want low volatility, Stretch has basically no volatility.
It's an equity product with like a 1% to 2%, something like that vol rating.
But it has a 12% payout on it.
And that's what he's found as product market fit in the market.
There's a huge demand for that.
The reason this matters so much is who that demand is from is what's causing the problem here.
It's from people who are clients of Morgan Stanley, of BlackRock, of Franklin Templeton, of Schwab.
A lot of capital is coming into Microsoft.
It's not a strategy, but it's who it's coming from is the big deal.
So now what you're seeing is this like big push from Wall Street to react to this, to bring out products to compete with Stretch to keep those clients and that capital at those firms.
That's what he's doing here that's shaking this up so much.
The thing that's such a big change in the marketplace to me is how all these other institutions are being forced to respond to Saylor himself.
So Goldman Sachs has launched a Bitcoin income ETF product.
BlackRock is launching a Bitcoin income ETF product.
Morgan Stanley is trying to tokenize their whole firm.
They've launched their spot big products.
Those are the best performing Morgan Stanley ETFs they've ever had in the history of their company.
Schwab Crypto is launching.
Franklin Crypto is launching.
Franklin Templeton bought out a company and is launching their own crypto platform.
All of these major Wall Street institutions are being forced to come to the market with their own products to try to compete with MicroStrategy because he's found a new kind of product market fit with Bitcoin.
As digital capital offering digital credit.
Sorry, I just love doing a Michael Saylor impression.
It's the most fun thing in the world.
But that's the thing everyone's missing right now is that it's not just the fact that he's buying Bitcoin with bull market size in a bear market.
He's forcing all of the rest of Wall Street.
All of them are forced to do the same.
Yes.
And that's the big unlock.
So this is what I'm saying that a lot of people like I did this great interview with Michael Nadal recently.
And he has all this analysis on why he's still a little bit bearish.
He thinks we're going to go down.
But I think a mistake that a lot of analysts are making right now is they're looking for the next marginal buyer of Bitcoin to be the same next marginal buyer that it was during the last bull run.
And that's not going to be the case.
It's going to be different kinds of capital, different kinds of net marginal buyers coming in.
They're going to be coming in indirectly through a lot of these new products that are being offered.
So that's what I think is so bullish here.
And that's what I think everybody's missing by saying, you know, he's not moving the price and it's not changing things right now.
It is changing things radically.
And Wall Street's never going to be the same.
Yeah.
And I guess he's also just buying this, putting it in a little vault.
And he's not.
I mean, hopefully he's not selling it.
Right.
And so, like, whenever the excitement comes back, I mean, Bitcoin is most reflexive asset probably in the world.
And he's now taking he's got what he's getting.
By the end of this month, he's going to 800000.
So that and that none of that's getting sold.
Right.
Which is crazy.
So I think like this, I mean, there's a big set up here coming if we get whatever that callous is.
And I don't want that comes.
But I would imagine it's actually going to come pretty soon here.
When everyone else is sort of building the the other products like similar products or like competitive products to Saylor, they are using the same kind of financial engineering or they are just like a different.
There is a great question.
They're using.
Well, so, like, I haven't read the prospectus for the Goldman Sachs filing.
Actually, this is something I'd like to talk to James Seifert about.
But BlackRock's filing for their Bitcoin income.
ETP.
Is using a covered called strategy.
So they're basically using options to capitalize on the volatility of Bitcoin and then passing on the income that they're generating from that to users.
But a lot of this kind of comes down to Saylor's fundamental assumption, which is that Bitcoin tends to go up.
And so, you know, if Bitcoin crashes to eight thousand dollars, Saylor has problems.
But if you kind of assume that the dollar keeps depreciating in value against Bitcoin, which it should, you know, it's like betting on gravity continuing to work.
He should be fine for.
He should be fine for 50 years.
The playbook that he's teaching Wall Street is that if you own Bitcoin, you can find different ways to monetize it.
And that's the key thing.
Right.
It used to be you just own Bitcoin and you hope it goes up and make it.
Michael says, like, no, no, no.
You own Bitcoin and you can do things that allow you to monetize if you do proper financial engineering like you're talking about with options and different things like that.
And so, like, that is a good lesson.
And then you think about, well, what about Tom Lee?
Right.
Tom Lee owns.
I don't know how much ETH.
But like close to four percent of the entire supply.
He's still just running the micro strategy playbook.
When does he go and do the stretch playbook now that he knows this thing works?
Because he's got a shit ton of another digital asset very similar to Bitcoin, except he can actually get native yield from it around three percent.
So he can do what Saylor's doing with stretch, but actually even something even different.
And he could even you know, there's more he could do with it with DeFi as well.
So, like, that's the thing that I'm wondering is when does Tom Lee make a move or does he make a move?
I think he probably does.
Because he could run the same playbook here and then that's huge for ETH.
So I don't know what he's going to do it.
But my guess is something's coming soon with that.
So I want to say something about Ethereum here.
You said that, you know, Michael Saylor's accumulating a lot of Bitcoin and that's just going to be diamond handed forever.
And it's coming off the market.
A similar thing is happening with Ethereum.
There are a lot of people aggressively accumulating that.
Tom Lee's now got over four percent of the ETH supply.
He's applying this and bringing this out in a lot of different ways.
He's launched this proprietary Maven staking solution.
Which, you know, BlackRock is doing.
BlackRock has launched their staking Ethereum product, ETHB.
There's a lot of other staking Ethereum ETPs coming to market.
I agree with you.
There's a lot of other things that can be done with digital asset treasury companies around Ethereum as an asset and in the ETH ecosystem.
Those things haven't come to market yet.
But I think once we see a lot of capital, enthusiasm, interest return, there's a lot of opportunity to come to market with products there, too.
And the same thing you described before.
There's no ETH to go around, right?
People have gotten a lot of the supply of Ethereum off the market.
The amount that's available on exchanges is near historic lows.
So I'm very bullish on the setup here overall for digital assets.
Because once this huge, like, you know, apocalyptic sentiment level we've had changes and people start to see the value and some of the price action starts to come back.
People are going to realize there's an enormous amount of opportunity that the market has been missing and mispricing here.
And we're going to, you know, like I said, yeet to Valhalla pretty quickly.
So I'm very bullish on what the future holds for digital assets.
Are you using the word yeet, John?
Are you in a suit and then also saying yeet?
Look, we do a lot of things here, okay?
This is a secret research meeting and nobody has applied, right?
Wow.
That's awesome.
Wow.
Who's got the birds chirping?
That's what I want to know.
Who's some birds started chirping as this happened?
It can't be Mark.
Those are not birds.
Those are sirens in the background.
Those are sirens?
Oh, you know, I think it might be here.
It's probably where I live.
LG's out west in the forest and the mountains just like chilling.
It's true.
And John's just like fighting to stay alive in the forest.
It's true.
He's fighting to stay alive in New York City.
Saying yeet and shit so he doesn't get run over by the kids running around there.
If I say yeet on this street, man, all the seniors here are going to be so confused.
So either way, we are quite bullish on the two largest assets in crypto, ETH and Bitcoin.
You know, it's funny.
Last year, and I'm so mad I didn't follow this, but last year when DATS became a thing, I remember saying when they were picking up in terms of how much they were all buying, and it was accelerating.
And I was like, the moment that stops accelerating when the rate of change comes back the other way and we decelerate, that's the time to take profits and sell.
And I never did that.
And it exactly played out that way.
As soon as MicroStrategy and Tom Lee and Joseph Shalom couldn't buy any more ETH and Bitcoin or like slowed down their buys, you know, we went down 50, 60, whatever it was percent.
And I was like, fuck, I knew that that was it.
Someone was talking about it on a video.
I think it was Tykee actually.
You guys know Tykee?
I think that's his name.
He was talking about that.
And I was like, man, I had that same thesis and I just honestly never even looked at it or thought about it.
But now we're starting to see it accelerate again.
So that's generally a good thing for bull market vibes.
What else?
What else is going on?
One thing I was looking at is, well, two things.
You know, you talked about prediction markets or not prediction markets, perps, Martin.
Are they at all time highs in terms of use?
Have you looked at like the usage of them?
Is it growing in terms of users and that?
Or it's kind of, you said staying flat, right?
It's flat, yeah.
Yeah.
I was looking at the stablecoin chart recently in terms of supply, which just hit all time highs, over 320 billion.
But the transaction volume is just going berserk the last few months.
So that's really cool to see.
Obviously, a lot of that happening on Ethereum.
And then prediction markets is going absolutely berserk too.
In Q1, prediction markets hit 60, well, 58 billion in volumes just in Q1.
Last year, it hit about 50 billion in the entire year.
So prediction markets are also going through the roof.
Now, that's not like a lot of transactions or anything on chain.
So I don't think it really impacts something like Ether or any of that that much, unless some of the on-chain prediction markets start to pick up.
But a lot of the use cases that we have in crypto are starting to really take off, right?
Which is really cool.
And then you have that happening at the same time as the most important assets, Bitcoin and ETH, are also being financially engineered in various different ways.
And so there's like, there is a really good setup here in terms of both adoption and accumulation, right?
Which is pretty cool.
So I don't know.
I'm pretty bullish coming out of this crazy war, which never had me that bearish to begin with.
So yeah.
Anything else you guys want to add?
Yeah.
I'll add this.
There is no way to get exposure to prediction markets, is it?
No, not yet.
Well, there is.
So there are some like on-chain ones, like, is it Murad?
Murad Markets or something.
There's like a new one.
There's a new one.
There's a new one.
There's a new one.
There's a new one.
There's a new one.
There's a new one.
There's a new one.
There's a new one.
There's a new one.
There's a new one.
There's a new one.
There's like another one called A Few, but like none of them are remotely close to what's going on with Polymarket and Kalshi.
You guys think they'll actually launch a token?
Are they going to go public?
Well, hold on.
If I can interject as the former host and writer of Milk Road Degen, just to be clear about a couple of things here, is that the anticipation of a token to me is what I would attribute a lot of volume to.
And I think that that is something really to keep in mind.
said everything's a prediction market in a way sure it's the only way you can get access to like betting on freaking who's going to say what in a speech but i would say that a lot of volume uh people have automated but no one's expecting calci to provide liquidity it doesn't mean they won't it doesn't mean they won't and it doesn't mean poly market will a billion 60 billion calci's not a crypto company i don't think anyone's like farming a token on calci that makes no sense it's like well why are we talking about on the show then what do you mean it's still prediction this is like this is like this is a crypto show isn't this a good if we're talking about our show why are we talking about this stuff it's not crypto because prediction markets were invented through crypto companies sort of and it uses stable coins sort of and there are becoming on-chain versions of it which might be even better than the off-chain versions binance wallet just integrated a on-chain prediction market for example so like it's starting it any any financial product and any financial instrument is getting put on chain right so if you have a financial asset it's getting tokenized if you have a financial service whether it's perps or prediction markets or whatever it's moving on chain and it all works better and lives better on chain right so i think anything that's happening in the financial space that is growing and is important you should think okay how are we going to wrap that and put that on chain or how are we going to reconfigure that and put it on chain because that's really what's happening like one one example is like stretch we just talked about it there's already defy versions of stretch so wrapped versions of stretch on ethereum 300 million worth that's how much it's it's uh there is already in like a matter of of weeks we've put 300 million dollars of tokenized stretch on chain on ethereum it's crazy and then pendle has launched their version of fixed yield for stretch and it's got 100 million already so like anything that's happening the financial market that is relevant you want to go and look okay what's the opportunity on chain because it's going to move there because it's like i was writing a post this morning and i was like financial assets live better on chain just like information lives better online right information on a piece of paper is useless information online can do way more right it's way more functional it can distribute way faster um it's way more uh has way more use cases the same thing is is true with financial assets moving on chain so anything that's financial you got to figure out where is that going to go on chain that's how you can get ahead of it so prediction markets are going to become the next big thing which currently you know 60 billion and a quarter is huge you want to be thinking about okay what are we gonna do with that on chain same with you know anything else wall street is here the white house is here all of crypto is here we're talking about consensus the world's longest running and most influential digital assets conference happening in miami may 5th through 7th this is where 20,000 plus decision makers from 100 plus countries gather to shape the future of finance 72 percent are director level or above representing over four trillion in crypto and that's where we're going to be talking about crypto aum three days six stages 500 plus speakers including michael saylor brad garlinghouse anatoly yakovenko and eric trump tackling the three forces driving trillions on chain crypto scale institutional integration and agentic commerce deals get signed here funds get raised here the next cycle starts here register and save 20 with code milk road at consensus.coindesk.com i've got a few other things to say before the other two guys say something is that one thing to note for polymarket and calchi is that their volume is different in terms of sectors 75 of calchi's volume is sports whereas it's only like 40 for polymarket the other 30 like there's a huge chunk of polymarket that is politics and 10 of it is just trump as a category so there's definitely a delineation between what they're being used for and maybe what they're targeting and where calchi is advertising i would say right um and the other thing too is that with the launch of hia pipe hip4 um i think that that's a really big thing to watch because i wonder how much they're going to be trying to get into that volume as well um and how big of a piece of the pie hyperliquid is has existed for so long as the dominant force in its perp sector um but now i wonder how they're going to approach trying to get a piece of pie or if it's just natively going to come to them but i'll let the other guys give their analysis there too uh no so something i was going to say is you could just go on polymarket and make up a prediction market about whether calchi is going to launch a token and then go on calchi and make a prediction market about whether or not polymarket is going to launch a token and then you know you've you've cornered the universe um so one thing i think is interesting about this is the power of predicted market predictive markets in forecasting the future accurately i think that you know i'm going to get these numbers wrong but it's somewhere around like 90 accuracy of of polymarket prediction markets up to like it's like 86 percent percent accuracy up to one month out from the actual event um and this is just like the statistics so far but the reason i think that's so powerful is that that's much better than traditional metrics of like expert forecasts or polling or any other thing um and so you're seeing a lot of predictive power that's like really reliable and accurate from these these information generating machines these prediction markets that's a whole another piece of of uh information and just opportunity utility that these are creating that i don't think has been figured out how to be quite captured monetized by the markets yet so that's something i'm thinking about a lot is like how are you going to use you're creating these prediction markets to get information it's pretty reliable historically now and from pretty far out in advance so how is the market going to find ways to make that a product or a service or charge for that, monetize that?
I think that's an interesting thing that could come out of this too, that nobody's quite figured out yet as well, which is kind of what I was saying before about the market has found these new financial primitives that have emerged from these digital asset companies and use cases, and it's still figuring out how to incorporate these and it's still maturing.
But that's something I'm watching as well, because I think it's a huge opportunity that the market hasn't figured out how to monetize yet or productize yet.
I think they both, burps and prediction markets hit a certain threshold where it makes sense for some people to try arbitrage those markets.
So I can do some trade using my traditional broker and then hedge against it on burps and keep the profit.
The same is true for prediction markets.
I can bet who is going to win Champions League on prediction markets and then hedge against it using DraftKings or whatever.
So that's already like, because when you have millions of dollars liquidity there, you can start doing these kinds of things.
And the more liquidity is there, the more things it will just happen.
And then obviously, the more it's online, it's faster and easier to move around.
So that's the end game.
That will be the winning product.
It's not going to be like, I need to go to a branch here, open my betting account, and then go to a branch here, open my betting account, and then go to a branch here, open my betting account, and then go there and give them money to fund my account.
No, the future is online for sure and on-chain.
So I'm super bullish on prediction markets, for sure.
I think that's the killing product.
Also, burps.
But the point I want to make is, right now, there's PolyMarket and Kalshi.
Both are valued tens of billions of dollars.
And I think I said that on our meeting a couple of weeks ago.
I think that's the killing product.
And I think that's the killing product.
I think they don't have any moat.
Right now, they are the leaders.
But I use the analogy of Uniswap, who was around when DeFi summer took off in 2021.
Uniswap was pretty much default choice for anyone who wanted to trade some tokens.
So right now, today, if you want to make some prediction bet, you go to PolyMarket or Kalshi.
That's your default choice today.
But in the future, you don't really care who is originating your bet.
So you'll go to something like Kalswap, who is just an aggregator for all DEXs and crypto, and use that.
Because the only thing that matters to you is, I want you to bet that Bayern Munich is going to win Champions League.
And I only want to bet who gives me the best price for my bet.
I don't care if it's on Kalshi, PolyMarket, anywhere.
So why would anyone bet on that?
Soccer.
Oh, man.
Can we just have it after all that?
Of course, or what?
After all that.
He called it soccer, too.
That is such a nice touch.
It was a game yesterday, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid.
But I know you guys are not watching Champions League, but it's a good game.
Actually, fun fact, I've only been to two soccer games in my life, like professional ones.
Both were Champions League games.
So there you go.
That is such a fun fact.
Thank you.
Thank you for sharing with the class.
All right.
I got to jump.
I got to go to a meeting, guys.
Oh, he gets roasted.
He gets absolutely frigging...
Last place starts chirping first place, gets roasted, and then disappears.
Classic.
Look, I am in last place.
I'm not going to tell you guys why, but if you're...
Here we go.
Pull it up.
You got to zoom in, Kyle.
Don't show them all the trades.
Zoom in before I show the screen.
What?
Zoom in.
Zoom in a bit.
Yeah, go for it.
There we go.
There we go.
There we go.
Yeah, here we go.
Here's the portfolios.
You got to read it out for the people on audio only.
Kyle's last.
Martin's in first.
Yeah.
John's in second.
Melvin's in third.
Vincent's in fourth.
And I'm sitting here down in the basement.
You're very close to Vincent.
You're very close to getting to Vincent, okay?
And Melvin is very close to John now.
So it's a couple of battles going on.
My two biggest assets are sleepers.
That's what's going on.
Any takes on Tesla?
Earnings in like a week or something.
I'm thinking...
Why are you putting it on me?
What the hell?
Yeah, look.
So their earnings are not going to be great, I don't think.
But if you look at the chart, it looks incredible.
I actually just put a tweet about this.
Let me just pull that back up.
The chart looks good because I think it's sold off enough now.
Everyone already knows their earnings because they already released this stuff.
So it doesn't even matter anymore.
So it broke through this.
And then also if you zoom out, which looks like, yeah, right here, every time it bounces off this trend line, it goes up like 150% to 200%.
And it's done it for the last three years.
So it just bounced off that, then broke through the downward trend line.
So on a technical standpoint, it looks very, very good.
Its earnings are going to come out, but I think that was already priced in.
And we're kind of looking through it now.
What we're expecting is, do they launch something with robo-taxis?
Is that going to come?
And there's semis.
And we're kind of waiting for that.
And it's supposed to happen in April.
Production of the robo-taxis or cybercabs were supposed to start in April.
So we'll see.
We've got two weeks.
Maybe they're going to announce it all at their earnings, which is coming up.
I'm not sure.
So it's all eyes on that.
But otherwise, they continue to cook.
They're putting a lot of new features.
They figured out their next chip version.
So there's a lot of good things coming, but it's all the timelines right now.
And I don't know when it's going to happen.
But the moment they launch, it's going to explode.
I just don't know when that's going to come.
So I don't have any...
Any insights on any alpha.
But for me, I don't really care.
This is what I'm saying.
It's like my portfolio is...
I'm a long-term investor and I've bought a lot in an asset that I think is going to do well over time.
And this is true of multiple assets in my portfolio.
The question is when.
But I'm happy to wait and let it play out.
Melvin, though, cheers me on my Tesla because it's down.
But that's because he's got the...
He's shiny new toy syndrome.
He's over here, he's over here, he's over here.
If it's not up every 24 hours, he's going to sell it.
No, kidding, Melvin.
Wow.
Wow.
Guy's off this week and isn't even here.
So I'm chirping.
The only thing that made Kyle skip a different meeting or be late for it is to talk about Tesla.
That's the only thing that could keep him here.
Anything else he was like, it's not even crypto related, but anything Tesla, he's like, okay, yeah, I'll be late to the other meeting.
Yeah.
All right.
We'll wrap up here.
Thanks, guys.
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