# Bitcoin Geopolitics, RWA Growth, and AI-Driven Token Innovation

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-04-22

## Transcript

It's regulatory compliance, it's highly performant blockchains, and it's vastly more capable AI.
It's when those three things come together that I think it can be really exciting.
And we have all those three now.
What's up, everybody?
It's LGG said here and welcome to the Milk Road show, the daily crypto show that is starting to think that a million dollar Bitcoin is a bit too conservative.
And that thesis is only going to grow on today's episode.
Today is April 22nd, 2026.
We are recording on April 20th, a couple of days early.
Who is your bear market buddy?
The person who showed up every day, every week, regardless of price, especially if things have felt particularly brutal.
We have a few people who come on Milk Road that are kind of like that, but none stand out more than today's guests who are eternally optimistic about the space and are here now in this rally, although it was more of a rally last week, to reap the rewards from the months of appearances on the show as things start to actually look pretty good.
Matt Hogan and Ryan Rasmussen from Bitwise are back for another banger episode.
Today's episode is brought to you by Pharos, the layer one built for RealFi, Consensus Miami, where the next cycle starts, and Nexo, earn interest, borrow, and trade crypto, Ryan, Matt.
we are back welcome back guys thanks for having us good to be here okay i want to know yeah you guys are my you're my bear market buddies uh that's a new term i just made up so okay i want to know uh listen last week we were rallying okay we're recording this on monday so who knows we're going to be at in two days by the time people are listening to this but what is your what is your current feeling about the market now that we've had another kind of geopolitical flip-flop over the weekend but things look kind of strong matt let's start with you Oh, I'm still feeling relatively optimistic about the market.
The market was way off sides.
The negative funding rates, you know, really heavy put skew.
And it was caught off sides and we rallied up.
We're holding very strong here.
I think if we can hold in the mid 70s, I will be pretty excited about where we go later in the half.
So I'm optimistic.
We're post tax day.
Remember, that was my turning point.
And I think it's looking I think it's looking OK.
the tax day i think that that was the huge pop was on tax day which you said two weeks ago you're like or a couple or even a month ago you're like listen tax day like you don't think about it but everyone has filed the returns they're ready to spend again and we saw that big pop to like 70 and i think it was right on that day ryan um ryan how do you feel right now i feel great i'm very i'm very optimistic uh i feel very great and uh and it's a really exciting time i was just at paris blockchain week last week tons of excitement there, a ton of great opportunities there, both kind of crypto native firms that are doing really well, doing a lot of exciting stuff and a bunch of institutions there and UK regulators.
So it was, yeah, feeling great.
Good, good, good.
You guys, you know, we are well past Q1 now, right?
Q1 was a tough one.
Q4 and Q1 this time, I think it was going to be a time that hopefully we can put in the rear view pretty quick.
And you guys have just released.
I think hot off the press this morning or this weekend, the Crypto Market Review Q1 from 2026.
I mean, I would love to read it in depth, but I do feel like I preampled this, that it's like it does feel like Q1 is maybe something to forget, at least on the price action side.
Matt, what is the main takeaway from this report?
The main takeaway was Q1 was terrible.
i mean just tell me how you really feel yeah so my experience of these reports is ryan and the team puts them together and then when they're nearly ready they ship them to me to review and usually when i go through the data there are some things that are up some things that are down some assets that went up some assets that went down q1 was just brutal across the board every major crypto asset down double digits most major crypto stocks down double digits almost every on chain metric that you looked at down significantly the only sort of silverish lining was some positive news on stable coins but in how many years have we been doing this quarterly report ryan three or four years three or four years of reviewing this this was the most down only data report we've ever produced wow the flip side of it lg is that the news was so good right market down morgan stanley launching a bitcoin etf market down goldman sachs launching a bitcoin etf the sec unveiling a token framework i mean it's just relentless good news and really what it really hammered home to me is like look this data is backward looking backward looking really was bad the question is all the news flows forward looking would drag up the data into q1 i think that's what people are q2 that's what people are betting on And that's why the markets have rallied the last few weeks.
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Ryan, what is kind of like a major takeaway from this from your end as somebody who's a huge participant in it?
And maybe even compared to the last, like you said, you guys have been doing these quarterly reports the last couple of years.
Why does this stand out so deeply for Matt as a bad quarter once you guys actually wrap this up?
Yeah, I mean, I think I think what Matt said is right.
Normally you look at this and you see a broad range of data.
You see either price and fundamentals are showing one thing and news is like kind of mirroring it a little bit.
But here's just like this huge divergence.
You don't normally see this large of a divergence and and really across the board, with the exception of stable coins and tokenization and some poly market data, which is makes sense was going up.
The market was just down bad.
I think one thing in particular, though, that that stuck out to me is that we are, you know, the starting point at the beginning of the year was was relatively high compared to.
uh where we finished the quarter but since the end of q1 things have felt remarkably good for crypto and if you were to to midpoint q1 with the iran conflict things have felt you know pretty great for crypto uh given that we you know we're up and have outperformed major asset classes since the start of the conflict so i think the striking point in the beginning point of this quarter was unique in that it uh it it high and lowed a lot of like drastic moves in metrics.
But I think long term, some of these metrics that we've been looking at quarter over quarter, year over year are up so significantly versus where they were.
But you get this quarter to quarter volatility, which can, especially in a bear market, can feel particularly bleak.
Yeah, that makes sense.
What is something, if I'm kind of skipping through this report, if I'm diving deep into it, what is like one metric maybe or one data point?
to watch going forward that maybe stood out a lot here it's a great question i think so tokenized row on assets is a remarkable chart for me in this in this report for a couple of reasons it wasn't even in our report a few years ago that's how relatively new tokenization is even if we had in our report in 2024 it was below 2 billion in real world assets being tokenized in the past two years we've seen that grow to nearly 30 billion so more than a than a 10x and it's it's really seen remarkable growth since the beginning of 2025 what we're also seeing is a bit of a a spread yeah there's the chart right there we're seeing a bit of a wider spread and what types of assets are being tokenized which i think is particularly interesting you can see for a long time it was basically just treasuries maybe some tokenized gold and now you're seeing things like asset backed credit asset backed securities and especially finance category uh and more commodities being brought on chain and i think that that um you know spread getting wider across different assets is particularly interesting.
I think we'll continue to see this chart both go up and to the right and see the categories broaden.
Yeah.
Hold on.
Go ahead, man.
No, go ahead, LG.
I was going to pivot to another slide.
I just want to know what others means.
It's like $5 billion of this $25 billion chart.
What are you grouping to others?
Because you have US treasuries, commodities, asset-backed credit, specialty finance, which I also don't know what that means.
So maybe you can tell me that.
What is others in specialty finance?
A huge chunk of this chart.
Yeah, so specialty finance is like asset-backed securities.
I actually really don't like that categorization.
I think the team's going to work on breaking it out in the future.
It's a good question.
But think of it like private credit, but private equity in a weird way like that.
The other things in others are...
you know, active tokenized strategies.
We have things like corporate credit and tokenized real estate in that other category.
I think those are things, right?
Real estate, tokenized stocks, tokenized venture capital is a really interesting category because now you're bringing a historically very illiquid, hard to access type of fund structure and bringing it into 24-7, 365 liquid markets tokenization.
But yeah, those are the smaller categories that are getting better or bigger.
Treasury debt still dominates.
Commodities is getting much larger.
And I think we'll continue to see other more traditional categories like stocks, bonds, and some more exciting ones like real estate and venture capital that are less liquid be brought on board.
Yeah.
The most important thing about that chart, though, is the y-axis, which is like that chart's exciting and all.
It's going up and all.
But that is measured in billions of dollars.
It's such chump change.
If we're right on the tokenization thesis, this will literally look like a flat line in three years.
You will not see this at all, right?
Remember, there's like $600 trillion of assets.
$600 trillion.
I can't even do the math to get from $30 billion to $600 trillion, but it's many Xs.
So I really think as exciting as each of these pieces are, as nice as that slope looks, the thing to focus on is that it's still so super early it's billions of dollars not much money it's so hard to visualize this stuff i think like tangibly i think that that's one of the biggest things maybe something for us at milk road to work on as like a research product or something in our pro platform is like we see these charts as rwa dot xyz you can go to and all that kind of stuff but it's like i think we need to we need to see that projection matt like you're saying of like here's the 600 trillion dollars of assets here's the tiny little sliver that's already come on and here's here's what's here's timelines for each one that are going to kind of break out uh and then and i think most importantly probably for investors too it's like where are they Who are the players?
You know, like who are the companies doing that?
And the protocols, right?
And obviously you guys have ETFs for a lot of those, like Ethereum, Solana, all that kind of stuff.
But I think it may be something a little more tangible.
I think that's what we need.
You know, we want to see that.
So maybe that's in this report, right?
And I don't know if you guys kind of go through that in the report, but I think that that's the challenge of RWAs for me is that we know it's growing, we know it's bullish.
And I think we just have to just see a bit more, which I think personally as an investor, I'm like, just show me a little bit more, like what's going to happen next, you know?
Yeah, token terminal put out a report at the beginning of April.
that actually did a really great job of looking at kind of the the bear base and bull case for different categories of tokenized assets you can look at tokenized stocks you can look at wow tokenized commodities oh my god there's so many companies man that's so many different things it's a vast space it's growing it's growing very yeah very quickly uh this this these forecasts you know are only through end of year 2026 if you scroll down a bit so You know, it kind of shows could staple coins go from where they're at, say, 300 billion to, you know, 345, 422, et cetera, or what if it fell?
But I think what you're talking about, which would be interesting to do is to forecast this out a decade from now, the next level that would be even more interesting.
particularly to our clients at Bitwise, would be to figure out where the value of that growth accrues to.
Is it the underlying blockchains?
Is it the middleware like Chainlink?
Is it the issuance platforms, the TradFi companies like Figure?
And I think that's where this conversation eventually goes.
Yeah, definitely.
We've talked about this.
We've had the CEO from Vigor on our show earlier in Q1.
I think it was our first episode of the year.
It was very enlightening.
A little bit over my head for some of it, but I think that's a very fascinating company that a lot of people don't know.
There's other companies like that as well.
Guys, I do want to jump back to thank you for sharing the report.
Can people check that out?
Or is that for your research prime?
yeah our quarterly report is screen available on our website so anyone can find it there you can find it on our social you can subscribe to the bitwise research distribution letter and get that in your inbox every single quarter Got it.
Okay.
Thank you.
And people will check that out.
We'll put a link below.
What I do want to talk about is the memo that you guys hit me with Monday last week in my inbox, not just me personally, you sent it out to everybody that Matt usually emails and it's titled why Bitcoin rallies on geopolitical uncertainty, which is also something we've been hoping for, for years, or at least for like the, you know, especially in the timeframe that I've been chatting with you guys on the show where this is, this has not always played out exactly this way, even though we wanted Bitcoin to be the thing that rallies, but now we're definitely.
seeing like some really healthy action the straight today as we're recording is closed uh and yet bitcoin is showing some healthy signs even you guys were saying uh in the intro that you are you are relatively bullish um what i love about this piece is that you you portray bitcoin as two bets in one and i think this is what really fantastic about having you guys on the show regularly is that you always have a great there's so many different great ways to look at these assets specifically bitcoin and different interesting projections into the future a lot of really great um angles and content.
What is this two bets in one?
Explain that to me, Matt, maybe we'll start with you just like what, what exactly are the two bets in one for Bitcoin?
Yeah, you know, at Bitwise, we've always described Bitcoin as a store of value with an out of the money call option on being a currency or a tool for international settlement.
In other words, when you invest in Bitcoin, you make a bet on it being digital gold.
And as we've talked about LG, we think that's a very good bet.
We think Bitcoin could easily get to a million dollars a coin.
just by making modest progress on being digital gold.
But you get this out of the money call option on it becoming a tool for international currency settlement, maybe between countries that don't like one another.
We've never really talked to institutions about that because that's such a far off idea, right?
No one's really doing it.
It's a theoretical concept.
So we focus people on this idea of digital gold, but you still do have this international call option.
The reason we wrote the piece is because what happened in the iran conflict is that that call option both came closer into the money because iran talked about tolling ships playing with bitcoin that's like the first example of this happening but then also importantly the global monetary order just got more volatile Right.
We're talking about a country that's situated between the US and China.
It has complicated relationships with all different kinds of adversarial countries.
Maybe you don't want a political currency or currency rail like the dollar system or the yuan system.
It shook that up.
And one of the things you know about options is if the underlying market gets more volatile, the option gets more valuable.
And so what we think happened here, the reason we think geopolitical.
crisis plays into bitcoin and in fact drove its outperformance is that the global monetary order got more volatile and therefore this out of the money call option became more valuable so you're not just talking about digital gold you were talking about bitcoin as a currency that's two bets in one they're both bets that can lead to million dollar plus outcomes so it made me think that our our price target which is 1.3 million by 2035 is too low maybe it should be 2.3 million uh i think this this idea of an apolitical currency is coming into the money and the volatility is increasing as the world gets more chaotic and i think that just plays right into bitcoin does that rely though would that would that rely on more geopolitical conflict well it would rely on the world becoming less hedged to individual political currency rails right so i think these things break and actually are never put back together So like the U.S.
seized Russia's treasury assets.
I don't think you bandaid that over and all of a sudden countries are like, OK, I'm OK with you having my wealth on your balance sheet.
I don't think that genie goes back in the bottle.
So does it need more geopolitical conflict?
I'm not sure.
It needs more growth of non-dollar economies and I think the passage of time.
But certainly I think geopolitical conflict will accelerate this.
So, yeah.
In the end, I think it's a little bit of a hedge against this geopolitical conflict.
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And is that, is that, how much of a reason is that driving?
the institutional adoption right is this something like is this where you have analysts and all these different companies including yours that's just like listen we're in uncertain times you have decades old packs alliances that are being broken the future is uncertain the future of individual fiat currencies is uncertain especially with everything with covid and now that this is a reason to kind of get into this i think it should be driving institutional interest i don't hear many people besides us talking about it at the institutional level this is a this is a theory that bitcoin has had for a long time at the retail level but i don't hear it much at the institutional level i think i'm going to start talking about it more as i travel around i don't know if ryan disagrees with me but i think it's it's a narrative that still has to penetrate the institutional lens I would just add, I think about it, you know, when Matt and I were talking about this, the thing that struck me as interesting was that this idea of if Bitcoin is a call option on events A and B in the long term future, and even if, you know, Bitcoin is now tomorrow not going to be used as the de facto currency to settle international trade, the odds of that happening pushed up.
And it actually, of course, is happening here.
But this is one unique example where it's being used to pay for tolls through the straight.
But just that move from being two standard deviations out on an option to one standard deviation out means the probability of it happening increased significantly.
And any options trader would love to buy a call option that moves from two standard deviations out of the money to one standard deviation out of the money.
If there's any options traders listening, they know that that's when you get a huge.
multiple on the premium and a huge value increase.
And so I think that's the thing that kind of clicked for us is like, oh, this is no longer something where there's like a 2% chance that this is happening at some point in the future.
It's now something like 15 or 20%.
And that's a many multiples probability increase.
And that's why we think this is such a big moment that we'll look back on in Bitcoin's history as it moved beyond the traditional digital store value use case being real.
and likely to happen to it being used as a rail for settling international trade.
Did Iran take any payment in Bitcoin?
Did that happen or was that just a threat?
I don't know that it's been verified.
I think the point Ryan is making is a great one.
It's actually not a binary outcome.
It's not like little China settled transactions with Russia in Bitcoin.
That doesn't have to happen before the market recognizes that.
It has the probability of that increased from something like 1% to 10%.
I would argue that that definitely has happened.
It's now been raised as an idea by Iran in difficult geopolitical situations where you're pegged between the US and China.
You default to this apolitical asset.
The probability of that happening again in the future has gone up.
And I think that's why you're seeing the value of Bitcoin going up.
Again, it doesn't have to get all the way there.
It just has to increase in probability.
And I think that objectively has happened.
Like a true market kind of reaction, right?
It's just the prospective idea that this can and will happen at some point.
It doesn't need to happen right away, but the idea that it could.
And it feels like a lot of these events that Bitcoin is very much in the conversation, right?
Even when everything started, you had this narrative of a lot of wealthy people and non-wealthy people as well in the Middle East starting to convert their money to Bitcoin so they could easily get out if they needed to and keep it in a safe spot in case their currency had an issue or if they need to leave the country and they could access it, being elsewhere and not have to pay some kind of crazy export tax that gets imposed on them or something like that, right?
So you definitely see it be part of all these conversations.
So I like what you guys are saying.
I don't want to get too deep on Bitcoin, guys, because a lot of us hold things that aren't Bitcoin as well, okay?
Listen, we always talk about Bitcoin.
Bitcoin, very good.
Bitcoin is a good token.
But Matt, listen, I saw you last week, okay?
I saw you on Scott Melker's show.
Great shout out to Scott.
He's come back on our show very soon.
And you said something to the effect, and this was a clip that I saw on X, okay?
You said that AI capabilities combined with a new token framework.
is the alt season of 2026 okay and whenever you mention alt season people go absolutely berserk whether it's you or anybody else really on especially on milk road please explain the statement yeah absolutely that is that is designed for click farming i'm pretty proud look the thing about the token framework is really interesting right so if you think about the history of crypto and all season what entrepreneurs have tried to do is build projects with tokens that capture some form of the value right to incentivize community development or do interesting things but we've always been kneecapped in that approach by the fact that the previous sec would put you in jail if you succeeded in building a token that had value so we had these goofy governance tokens and everyone sort of wrote off the idea of using token infrastructures to incentivize people to create a new network and build a new thing Paul Atkins, the SEC chair, comes from a lobbying background that included lobbying specifically for tokens.
And I think he believes in the ability of tokens that can capture real value to incentivize new networks that are economically important.
And so he's created a safe harbor for people to start experimenting with that.
When you take that new capability, which I think will surprise people because they sort of remember it not working, And then you take the new capabilities of AI, which allow people to do much more with fewer people than they have in the past, and you smash those together.
I can just see a million sort of flowers blooming and new ideas blooming of actually valuable token projects.
Look, I think there's this idea that tokens don't capture value.
We're starting to see proof points that they can.
Look at Hyperliquid.
And now you have a token framework that allows you to do that in a legally compliant manner.
I think we're going to see a huge new wave of innovations, a new ICO boom.
I think all of that is going to come back, but this time some of it's actually going to work.
Man, an ICO boom, those are scary words, man.
They were scary words because they were illegal securities offerings by scammers.
But the idea of using valuable tokens to incentivize community activity to build new networks and solve the cold start problem is a very interesting entrepreneurial idea, maybe one of the most interesting ideas.
And the fact that we can now do that in a regulatory compliant fashion, just because something didn't work under the past format doesn't mean it won't work, right?
Like I just ordered pet food from Chewy, but pets.com definitely failed.
It was just not at the right time.
I think tokens fail because they were not at the right time.
But I do not think that means they won't work in this new environment of highly performant blockchains, of a strong regulatory environment, of AI enabling people to do things.
I do think there'll be a new boom and new interesting projects over the next 18 months.
okay optimist you know that gets the dj enemy really excited matt this is this is i'm like all right forget it like somebody else got to host the show i gotta we gotta fire up milk road degen again uh and i have to be ready for for this boom uh if not even just take that clip clip what you just said and go and create the narrative listen matt's telling us be ready for these ai tokens i like that you know i was i i had a i really liked a lot of the stuff that virtuals had done and promised naturally in crypto there's some stuff that wasn't real um within that uh and a lot of it was just llm wrappers just put into like an x account um but there were some interesting ideas floated there and that was a funny little kind of startup environment two years back um that i thought was neat but was a little early to the ai narrative um and now i like what you're saying that it's like with well with clearer kind of token framework um maybe you'll have you know that was a very startup environment kind of individual you know unknown individuals launching stuff so it's a little challenging and not to say those people can't come up with great ideas but what you're saying is like you might have something uh more polished let's say a little bit more professional coming to the table no no knock against virtuals i'm just saying that you might have a another push of that type of idea and where people may be electing tokens to kind of help their their ideas get off the ground it's three things just to be clear it's regulatory compliance it's highly performant blockchains and it's vastly more capable ai It's when those three things come together that I think it can be really exciting.
And we have all those three now.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Is this something you've always foreseen as crypto kind of having?
You know what I mean?
Is this something you've seen as kind of like an endgame that's like, listen, these are big things that we need to have for there to be really great projects?
I always thought that the ideas that we experimented with in 2018, in 2020, and 2021 were good ideas just at the wrong time.
I thought the idea of solving the cold start problem through crypto incentives was a good idea, but handicapped.
I thought many of the DeFi projects were really great ideas, but handicapped by the lack of highly performing blockchains.
And having been around through like the Internet boom, you know that it takes regulation and technology and the right market conditions in order to have these two things.
So I've always I've sort of had this thesis that everything we've tried in crypto will work.
It just wasn't working at the specific time.
So I do think that this is an eventuality and I think it's going to catch many people off guard.
Matt, I don't know, man.
I used to sling, you know, sports highlights as NFTs.
So I don't know.
I don't know if that, I don't know if that should come back.
Like someone will crack tickets.
Someone will crack.
Yes.
Right.
I don't think those things were wrong.
I just think they were early.
And I suspect that we will figure those out over the next five years.
Maybe not.
Totally.
Digital collectibles absolutely, I think, is a very worthy thing.
And the parallels we used to draw back then, that's like, listen, people, your kids already spend thousands of dollars in Fortnite buying skins.
That it's like there's, you know, owning that digital property has legs in one way or another.
That just, it hasn't, maybe at the wrong time, right?
Now's the time.
Yeah.
even further back man okay uh ryan i want to switch over to you i actually don't want to run out of time here and i do want to take a bit of time to um discuss what's going on at bitwise these days uh we the last couple episodes we i grilled you guys on what you were learning at uh the digital asset summit at dos and i did see this thing um from blockworks showing that you guys were the fourth most discussed company or protocol or whatever you classify that at the entire conference, man.
This is crazy.
Ryan, what is this from?
So I'm just going to read it for people listening on audio only.
It's top companies mentioned at DOS 2026.
The top one is Coinbase, naturally.
After that is Kraken, who is furiously doing marketing right now as they try and position to get ready for their IPO.
After that is Swift, which is the...
the international payment system which i don't even i don't do that i don't even know that's a company i guess it's a company but to me i've always just seen it as like a service and then there's you guys bitwise that's amazing right there at dtcc stripe franklin templeton you're ahead of them you're way ahead of visa or binance or everybody else ryan what is this from what what was the buzz about bitwise that does yeah i mean i love i love to see lit see this uh and appreciate blockworks for doing this analysis and the shout out here i think much of this credit needs to go actually to to matt for specifically his coining of the term vaults are the next ETFs.
I think that was, you know, vaults continue to be a top spoken about topic at these crypto conferences.
I was just at Paris Blockchain Week and vaults was talked about in every single conversation that we had with every single different type of partner or potential partner up and down the technology or investment stacks.
And so I think the reason at DAS why we were talked about so much uh as bitwise as a whole uh is is two parts one because uh matt gave a great keynote presentation which is on youtube and it's one of the best presentations i think i've seen uh in a long time uh bias bias of that being my boss presenting it tomorrow remove yeah great performance reviews actually coming up so there you go um but but but i mean look Everyone talks about vaults as this thing that's going to be huge and matter and all these things.
But I think putting it into context on how vaults are a fundamental improvement in the way that funds operate.
And we've seen this happen with fund structures time and time again, going back 250 years to when the first fund was created in Holland to mutual funds, to ETFs, and now to vaults.
And thinking about it through that.
lens is really, really important and why it's the next ETF 2.0 is something that Matt articulates extremely well and making it more concrete and talking about the different types of strategies that will be wrapped in vaults.
Why vaults are going to grow, where they are today and where they're going was a big part of what we talked about with media and at our presentations and at side events at DAS.
So I think that's one reason.
I would just say the other reason why I think that Bitwise was spoken about so much is that We've taken our business over the past two years and expanded from just issuing ETFs in the U.S.
to a global business that offers many, many different types of funds, both liquid and illiquid, and a number of on-chain solutions across DeFi and staking.
And I think that is one reason why Bitwise now is...
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What's up with the, speaking of, I mean, ETFs on the ETF side.
I mean, and congrats, guys.
I mean, that's definitely well-deserved.
And Matt, you know, fantastic thought piece to put out there and, you know, with a lot of depth behind it, but also great to have from a marketing standpoint, great to have that kind of one liner just, you know, percolate through the narrative.
No, really, I mean that.
It's great to infuse stuff into, you know, the general story of crypto.
And I feel like you guys do a good job of that.
Since we last spoke, you guys, we always like to celebrate some of the news that you guys have.
You have announced an avalanche.
ETF, I believe that is coming soon, also known as AVAX.
And speaking of gaming as well, Matt, from my experience, AVAX has been a player in the gaming space in the past and still wants to be, but I would love to hear from you guys.
What is the case for Avalanche here, you know, to be launching this product?
Yeah, I'm happy to take that one.
You know, look, our view of the L1 space is that we're very early.
I mentioned earlier that we're going from, you know, 20 billion to whatever, 600 trillion.
And so when we look at new projects, what we want to see is L1s with differentiated architectures and some sign of real world traction.
So Ethereum has one architecture and obvious massive traction.
Solana has another architecture and obvious massive traction.
We have big ETFs, ETHW and BSOL in Ethereum and Solana.
Avalanche is this third unique architecture, right?
Their use of customizable Avalanche L1s that individual corporations can build with their own permissions, their own fee networks, et cetera, is a unique architecture.
And when you look underneath the surface, they're making real traction in real world assets, right?
RWAs on Avalanche up almost a thousand percent year over year.
They're one of the L1s that are making traction.
So I don't know how the L1...
environment will play out over the next five or 10 years.
But I know it will get much bigger.
I want all the legitimate shots on gold that are leaders with their architecture.
I think you're looking at Ethereum.
You're looking at Solana.
You're looking at Avalanche.
We don't have a Canton Networks ETF, but you're probably looking at Canton.
There are just a few.
There are only a handful of these really interesting architectures with real-world traction.
Avalanche is one of them.
So we launched Bava.
BAVA, that's our ETF.
And we're excited to get it out there.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Great case for it.
I didn't even know that about the RWA part.
So a little education for myself.
So best of luck to you guys with the product.
Love to hear it.
Guys, we're going to wrap up there.
Another great episode with you.
Thank you for sharing all the alpha for the Q1 report and Matt for that beautiful setup for some degen stuff over the next two years, man.
That gets me so excited.
Can't wait to spend my, I sleep eight hours these days and I can't wait for that to end.
Great.
Thank you, guys.
We'll see you again soon.