# Institutional Crypto Conviction and AI Agent Emergence

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-05-01

## Transcript

And this has been ongoing, trying to find the intersection between AI and crypto.
But now AI agents really are emerging as like the potential use case.
Bitcoin was poised for a short squeeze, but now it seems to be losing a bit of steam.
Are we finally going to break down out of this bear flag or is crypto about to shock everyone and explode higher?
Hello and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that bears sound smart and bulls get rich, but everybody gets wrecked sometimes.
I'm your host, John Gillen.
Today is Thursday, April 30th, and today we are joined by David Duong.
David is the Global Head of Investment Research at Coinbase Institutional, which is a big fancy job.
It means he's really smart about crypto.
He's also a longtime friend of The Milk Road Show, one of our favorite guests.
In this episode, David is going to fix crypto.
So if that all sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
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And welcome back to The Milk Road Show.
David, how are you, sir?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me.
Love making promises I can't keep.
Yeah, well, if by the end of this, you haven't fixed crypto, I'm going to ask for a refund.
But David, I wanted to start with Bitcoin here.
Like I said, it's been rejected after tapping its head off of ADK.
Bulls are hoping for a breakout.
Bears are hoping for a breakdown.
In your monthly outlook for Coinbase Institutional, you said your official outlook is neutral for Q2 of 2026.
What's driving this analysis for you and why can't the markets make up its mind here?
Yeah, I think that we're in a very headline driven market right now.
And I don't think that would surprise anyone.
It feels like everything is being moved by what's happening geopolitically in Iran.
And you could get a headline on, you know.
breakfast that really won't carry over at the dinnertime.
And we don't know whether there's actually a deal on the table, whether there will be a military escalation.
Any of that could happen over the next two to five weeks.
So it feels like we're kind of like jumping from day to day.
But it is interesting that equities is rallying at the moment.
The correlation between Bitcoin and U.S.
equities, for example, which actually peaked around 65 percent in February.
It's actually been coming down over the last few weeks, and I think that's really showing that Bitcoin and crypto more broadly is kind of carving out its own narrative.
Okay, well, I would like to hear your thoughts about what that narrative is.
You said in your monthly report, we are optimistic that the macro situation could shift in a positive direction in the weeks to come, which would help many crypto assets form a bottom in the near term and then recover.
Do you think that we are in the process of putting in a bottom on Bitcoin here, or do you think we might go lower from the lows we've already made?
So it's interesting because we ran a investor survey just a couple of weeks ago.
It was after the start of the conflict in Iran, but kind of before some of the capitulation we've already seen.
And there was this kind of divergence between people who thought we are deep in a bear market cycle, yet people very much seeing that Bitcoin was undervalued.
So how do you kind of square that circle?
I think that.
medium term, long term, people still think there's an opportunity here and Bitcoin probably looks cheap if you have that view.
But certainly, I think right now, Bitcoin's being driven more by some of those liquidity measures, some of those kind of idiosyncratic things that really affect its market plumbing more than anything else.
Whereas equities and other asset classes are being affected by stuff like earnings that are happening this week, for example, or where people believe the AI narrative is going.
So it seems it looks kind of similar, but it's different.
And I think from that point of view, you know, you have things like, you know, strategy putting out its stretch product, digital asset credit, for example, which is raising a lot of money that capital is being utilized for buying Bitcoin.
And that's far outpacing the amount of Bitcoin selling we were seeing.
Plus, I think the narrative we had in Q4 and probably.
early Q1 as well, was that we were seeing a lot of long term holders, the OGs in the space, actually reducing their supply of Bitcoin, which we never really bought into because you weren't seeing that go on to exchanges, which is where if you were really selling your Bitcoin, you probably would see that going up.
But over the course of Q1, we actually saw that those long term holders, anything above 155 days, actually increasing the amount of Bitcoin they're holding.
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interesting okay so i want to ask you about this this thing you've pointed out about this divergence that's happening because as you've pointed out there's a lot of headlines driving the markets a lot of macro things that aren't really crypto specific and yet the the crypto specific news has all been really constructive we've seen a lot of institutions like blackrock goldman sachs morgan stanley the list is literally too long to read, but they're all launching new products, all launching new things in crypto, moving into this industry with talent, with resources.
Do you think eventually that this institutional bull run, for lack of a better word, is going to result in higher prices?
Or are we going to continue to see this languishing sideways action?
And what breaks us out of this?
I think we will.
You know, it's interesting because some of those institutional themes are being played out in tokenization or stable coins.
Those are things like the NYSE or NASDAQ kind of announcements that they want to go 24-7.
or move into like tokenized equities, settled all of these things with stable coins, for example.
But yeah, you're also right that, you know, Morgan Stanley launched a crypto ETF.
Their RIAs are starting to recommend it for the first time.
We haven't really seen like the magnitude of those flows just yet.
It's only been like two, three weeks.
So it's still fairly early in that process.
Goldman, you know, they also are launching like a covered call kind of ETF on Bitcoin.
So, I mean, these are definitely like massive themes.
At the very least, it shows that, you know, crypto is not going away anytime soon.
It's definitely an established asset class at this point.
I mean, I thought that two years ago, but even more so now.
Granted, you know, some of that is on the expectation.
that more regulatory clarity is coming.
So I think that that still represents a pretty important theme in this space.
But for the most part, yeah, you know, I think that ultimately many of the people we've surveyed and we've run multiple ones with different kind of tweaks on the question, but it shows that more people, I think 65% of the people we polled, and this was in January, still want to allocate or increase their allocations into crypto.
There's been a series of headlines that haven't been positive for crypto recently, mostly around hacks.
Obviously, the biggest one is the Layer Zero, KelpDAO, Aave situation.
I'm curious if you've heard any changes in investor sentiment based on that, because Aave's price, the token of Aave's price.
has been relatively stable, still around 100.
There's this DeFi United movement that's already started to plug that hole.
And I'm curious if that has moved the needle or shaken faith in DeFi or if people are seeing this as sort of like, oh, this is more battle-tested now.
They can handle these sorts of things.
What's been sort of the takeaway you've had from that?
I mean, this is a part of a lot of discussions.
It's interesting, though, because it's not making its way into concerns around the price action itself, to your point about, well, Aave has actually looked okay.
relative to all of this despite suffering the downstream effects of that kelp dao hack i think that to some extent some people are worried when you put it in combination with what's happening with the mythos moment for example mythos being an you know potential ai model that could find a lot more security vulnerabilities and you know there's a lot of stuff in d5 that was built fast break things kind of mentality and you know like this is the concern that you know Even if you had a good audit of the smart contract code, other things, I mean, Mythos' potential is that it could also find things on a composability basis, i.e.
it might take three or four steps.
It might need to combine a few things, but ultimately you could use those things to find a way to potentially exploit a potential protocol or some bridge or something.
Now, of course, KelpDAO was very specific to the Lazarus Group.
what happened with potentially North Korea.
But I think that, you know, this is still kind of raising concerns around like, well, if I'm an institution that is interested in DeFi, and I think there are institutions who are interested in either, you know, using this inside of their own infrastructure or playing with it, you know, like I think many of them are saying, well, how do we get another layer in between there?
And I think that technology does exist, you know, somewhere between zero knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption and decentralized identity.
I think there's a path towards having a permissioned DeFi kind of platform, which I get it.
Some people who believe in the DeFi ethos might be, you know, kind of put off by that prospect.
uh but i think if you know there's a ton of capital that can be unlocked with institutions getting into the space uh that i think that's something we really have to consider Gotcha.
Okay.
So you're expecting there to be some innovations and solutions iterated on here to try to protect from some of these risks in the future.
Interesting perspective there.
What about the DeFi United aspect of this?
Because I think in TradFi, if there's a bank run or a theft of some kind, you're kind of on the government to bail you out or the FDIC.
But in crypto, that doesn't exist.
But this DeFi United thing has shown that the community will come together to support the other investors in the community and in the ecosystem.
Has there been any reaction to that that we've seen this grassroots move?
movement that's grown I think that we have seen this happen in the crypto space before and people are you know I think it's always seen as a positive for crypto um I don't think that's different here uh but certainly you know you're right it's you know this is like the the the pros and cons with crypto because if you're talking about the Tradify Market you have central banks and others like buyers of last resort uh you know Beyond that, you have marketing departments and all these kinds of things, which we don't have inside of crypto.
And like some people like love that, but other people are like, well, this is why like Bitcoin's not getting the traction it has.
It doesn't have a marketing department to tell people what we're doing in the space.
And that works for better or worse.
And I think that in the case of a community coming together to actually bail out some of these problems that we've seen inside of DeFi, I mean, I think it very much shows that they're.
are ways to get towards resiliency but it looks very different for what you're used to in the chatify world David, before we go on to, I have a lot of questions about the institutional investor survey that you guys recently did.
But before we go on to that, I want to ask you about something you said the last time you were on the MillCard show, which was that ETH is one of the most undervalued assets on the market.
We've seen ETH finding some footing.
The ETH BTC ratio has seen some strength here recently.
What is your outlook on Ethereum here?
Do you think that that undervaluation is likely to change?
Do you think that Ethereum is faring well in this environment so far in 2026?
What's your outlook on ETH been here?
Ethereum is coalescing around a different narrative than the one that we saw two years ago.
You know, like two years ago, ETH, I think, suffered from concerns around whether Layer 2s are going to eat its lunch, for example, whether Layer 2s were extractive to the activity.
And I feel like a lot of those themes have really kind of fallen by the wayside.
And it has been reflected in the ETH L1 versus ETH L2 token kind of narrative.
You've seen that.
ethereum is actually performing pretty well in part because i think the fees are also cheaper on the l1 now than they were previously i think like once upon a time you go back two years and you're like crap, I just need to send like 50 bucks.
It shouldn't cost me this much to send it, which is of course why the L2s were there.
And that ecosystem narrative was really attractive because I could do it for like a penny or less than a penny.
But now, you know, it's becoming tolerable again.
And you could send a fairly decent amount on Ethereum and not feel like you have to pay a ton of.
Capital.
So I think the gas concerns around it have kind of moderated.
You're seeing that Ethereum has really kind of jumped at the forefront on the, you know, quantum discussion, for example, showing that they're actually trying to tackle this, which I think, you know, smartly, they kind of position that in juxtaposition to what's happening on Bitcoin.
So I feel like there are those things.
Plus, I also like that from an activity perspective, Ethereum's also kind of.
you know leaning into the ai agent narrative by saying like you know what let's enable that ai agentic commerce kind of environment because you have these protocols like x402 and other things but you also need to say have ai agents be able to verify other ai agents so ethereum is enabling that in its eips so i i think that this is a good trajectory for where ethereum is going prior to this it was somewhat more kind of you know directionless a little bit because you know they're trying restaking they're trying like this narrative composability and all this kind of stuff and i think there were good things from an you know academic perspective but not one that i think really resonated with people who were looking for the you know the investment opportunity of eth Gotcha.
Okay, so the asset is evolving, the ecosystem is evolving, the narrative is evolving, and all that's generally constructive on Ethereum there.
One more question about this.
Your outlook for Q2 is neutral.
Is that across all of crypto, or do you think that there will be pockets of outperformance continuing in the crypto industry, even though the overall outlook for crypto is neutral right now?
I'm neutral because it's such a hard, you know, it's hard to kind of prognosticate in any environment, but especially in this one where we are getting whipsawed by headlines, not even on a daily basis, but on an hourly basis.
Like it's, you know, it's too tough to actually say like, hey, for the rest of Q2, I'm optimistic or pessimistic.
Honestly, that's kind of why I'm playing it like by year.
But I am optimistic short term.
I do think that at least over, let's say, the next few weeks, we could see a fairly decent environment evolve.
That's because I also the macro environment is kind of amenable to it.
But also some of the medium term risks in terms of where rates are going to be are.
where like midterm elections are going to put us or how does like AI transform like the labor, you know, like all those things I think represent medium term concerns, i.e.
not necessarily things that would qualify as downside risks yet or even if they, you know, whether they present the prospect of that.
But at the very least, it's not a now kind of moment.
Right now, I would say you've got the U.S.
Treasury General account balance having been built up to about, you know, i think a trillion dollars uh over the course of the last two weeks because of you know u.s tax receipts now like that spending is probably going to come in in may so that should unlock more liquidity if some of that goes to say like digital asset credit or other things then i would say uh you know the financial conditions are going to look very like like you know very favorable to risk assets more broadly but crypto in particular so that's kind of what i'm looking at when i'm looking at the very short term but that also kind of hinges on like i have no idea what's going to happen in iran like you know all of the marines have been moved to over from like guam and namibia and everything over the last week now they're sitting in iran are they going to go in are they not are we going to get a deal like i have no idea what's going to happen on that side I appreciate the honesty of the shoulder shrug on this and just be like, I don't know what's going on, man.
Because I think that's where we all are right now.
And I think there's a lot of value in just being authentic about that.
David, Coinbase and E&Y did a joint survey of institutional investors on digital assets.
The report you all published on the survey was called Volatility Drives Discipline, Not Retreat.
And I really liked that title.
So I wondered if you could just start with that.
Explain why you all settled on that title and who exactly you all surveyed for the survey.
Yeah.
So I believe we got around 350 institutional investors to respond to the survey.
And, you know, they had to meet a certain threshold in order to be able to participate.
Like, so I can't remember the number right now, whether it was like 50 billion or something, but like effectively you need to have like some capital because we wanted to measure like real decision makers in the space.
And I think, you know, in previous cycles, we've seen that.
given the move we had in uh on 1010 like we were expecting that people were going to pull back from wanting to take crypto risk or that you know they were going to be you know at the very least more reservations about whether the you know uh opportunities that they saw in crypto wouldn't necessarily be there that wasn't the case It was super interesting the results in the survey because, if anything, it showed that people were still very much adamant about trying to invest in the space.
They wanted to be careful about it.
Obviously, they were more thoughtful about some of the risks.
But I think this is why we chose that title, Volatility Drives Discipline.
It's not that they don't want to be participants at all.
Quite the opposite.
They do.
It's just that they're now thinking, OK, how do we consider custody?
How do we consider like all the back end stuff that we need in order to be able to trade this?
So, you know, people are not tightening their belts in response to some of the market structure developments that we saw around 1010.
If anything, I think they're just kind of leaning into the idea that like they need to have better risk management.
You need to have better position sizing.
So that's what we mean when we say that we're seeing people become more disciplined investors when it comes to this stuff.
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One of the key takeaways from this report reading it that stood out to me was that 73 percent of the respondents said they plan to increase their allocation to crypto in 2026.
74 percent said they're also expecting prices to rise from here.
And, you know, like you said, I think is a completely valid outlook to say you're neutral right now.
These people seem to be far more bullish.
I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about where all this conviction is coming from for them, if there's any transparency into that.
And, you know, just were you surprised to see such high conviction from this investor segment?
Yeah, first of all, like, I think that the numbers you just cited are staggeringly impressive.
And I think I misquoted some of that earlier.
I think I thought it was 65%, you know, 73%.
It's very, very high.
I wrote it down because it's so high.
And right there, it tells you that institutions view this, you know, the volatility we saw in Q4.
more as a commercial opportunity rather than a systemic risk, you know?
And that was what surprised me because they didn't give us this impression that like, oh yeah, like we're worried that, you know, we saw auto deleveraging or all this kind of stuff.
You know, quite the opposite.
You know, like there's no specific kind of breakout expectation here, but the consensus is just kind of pointing towards this recovery that they expect.
you know, maybe not in the first half of this year, but potentially in the second half, 2026, because that's where the macro additions themselves might normalize.
Maybe the vehicles have also changed because now we have like ETFs and, you know, digital asset treasuries and other things that allow them to take exposure.
But it's the way they're doing it that I think really matters to them.
It's not necessarily a binary question of like, do we or don't we?
Yeah.
And so I think that's the big takeaway for me there was the word discipline you used in the title.
There's a lot of just patient capital that is disciplined and not panicking about the environment that we're in or the price action we've seen.
Another thing I wanted to call out, you touched on briefly, was these investors are very strongly favoring the ETF and the ETP products that have come out for their spot crypto exposure.
What are the flows into the ETPs recently telling you about investor confidence in general?
And are you like...
zeroing in more on ETP flows as a metric now knowing this information?
Yeah.
First of all, I would say over the last couple of weeks, inflows into spot Bitcoin and spot ETFs have been back on the rise.
Now, some of that is because the basis has become a lot more attractive too for anyone who is looking to like buy spot, sell futures, for example, which is a common expression for a lot of people.
And typically when you see volatility start to dampen, that's where carry trades like the basis become.
attractive but here it's interesting because you know we have a geopolitical conflict yet we're so seeing people kind of access these such vehicles or structures but the survey also said that around 66 percent of investors are now accessing crypto through these etfs and you know like i think that this means a lot of these vehicles have become institutional on ramps for many players so the steady flows that we've been seeing tells us that you know like even though some of that initial hype from, I don't know, I want to say like early 2024 when these ETFs were first approved, really started to bring people in, even though some of that has moderated, that structural buying is really still at the beginning.
And, you know, that's why headlines like Morgan Stanley's kind of endeavors into the space or Goldman Sachs, I think that's why they're so meaningful because it really shows you that.
to us who have been here and crypto just moved so fast that we're kind of just like oh yeah like of course etfs like what hasn't anyone everyone already been doing this um there's still a ton of buyers out there who are just getting into this game yeah so i wanted to ask you about this just like you said there's a ton of buyers who are just getting into this game it seems like there's a ton of buyers who are just getting products that they feel comfortable engaging with in order to get into this game, meaning there's a lot of capital that wants to come to crypto but hasn't been able to up to now.
And I think that Michael Saylor's STRC, his stretch product, kind of shows that.
It's unlocked a lot of capital that's come into Bitcoin and into crypto in a bear market that is coming in with bull market sizing.
do you think that we're going to continue to see that as we get more products coming to market more innovations more clarity and regulation and so forth that there is just a lot more capital that wants to come to crypto but hasn't been able to that's going to get unlocked in the near future here yeah i think this is where the real world meets crypto um not that crypto is in the real world but you know what i mean like the traditional finance space and and uh you know and crypto intersect Because, you know, like some of those things that I mentioned earlier in terms of where is liquidity getting unlocked in Q2?
And, you know, we've seen some of that happen already, like the TGA balance, the Treasury General Account balance, for example, that $1 trillion will start migrating its way out of that balance sheet into the real economy.
And as that happens, I think that people are going to be looking around for opportunities.
And Stretch offers, I believe, like a variable rate, but right now it's paying around 11.5%.
So it's capable of raising like $5 billion at a nominal clip, which is, you know, then like making its way into the market.
And, you know, the amount of buying power that gives you relative to what's being sold into it, you know, like.
who are the non-discretionary sellers well like bitcoin miners others for example like i think that you're talking about something like 1200 1300 bitcoin a day that is being purchased through the use of um you know strategies like you know bonds the stretch product other things like it's equity so you know it's a staggering amount when you really think about it but other things too the fact is that like people are also like If you haven't received your tax return check already in the US, you'll probably notice it's a lot higher than it was last year, in part because of the one big beautiful bill that was passed in July 2025.
So that's also stimulus that's making its way into the economy.
But a lot of people forgot about it because that was almost a year ago now when that happened.
But you're probably feeling the real effects of that at the moment, the Federal Reserve.
And we just got the Federal Reserve meeting yesterday.
But, you know.
Granted, it was Powell's last meeting, but I don't think anyone's expecting rates to be hyped in 2026.
You might not expect further rate cuts because of where energy prices are, where inflation might be going.
But the very least, like we're talking about real rates that are still very accommodating for taking risk at the moment.
So I think that those things are definitely going to converge and you'll really feel it probably in May or in the.
you know, back half of Q2.
Again, though, you know, it's predicated on where real rates are going, whether that could be influenced by what happens with the war in Iran, you know, that's the stuff you can't predict.
But for now, all those conditions still look very favorable.
Gotcha.
So there's a lot of things changing in the market, but they're favorable for crypto and for Bitcoin.
And that longer term setup is getting stronger.
David, another thing that stood out to me from this was 78% of respondents said that they believe that regulatory clarity and the Clarity Act is the most important thing that they need to get more involved, whether that's as an investor or launching their products.
The Clarity Act has been delayed several times, but the SEC and the CFTC have been very proactive about trying to bring regulatory clarity to the market.
And I'm curious if you've seen any impact from this.
because there's been a lot of coordination between these agencies to sort of give the market a lot of clarity here.
And I'm wondering if that's moving the needle on your side or if you have any thoughts on that and how that impacts the investment landscape here.
Yeah.
i i think it absolutely does and it's interesting because you know we saw in the high 70s like the response rate for what is driving people into the market it's regulation but also where people most concerned about it's regulation and those numbers score almost like uh comparably and it's really interesting now how do you you, you know, reconcile those two things.
You know, I think that, yes, the regulatory clarity coming is absolutely why a lot of these institutions are now stepping into space.
No one, none of them wanted to be early.
We rolled it back five years ago.
You were still getting like.
comments from very high profile banking figures saying like, ah, I don't believe in that.
That's all speculative.
And we don't, you know, and I don't have to tell you like our names, you know who I'm talking about, but like they've completely changed their tune.
And some of them are saying like, oh, we always believe in a blockchain or we believe in tokenization.
Like some people even go further.
So I do think that that has shifted, but the, you know.
A lot of the activity is coming from executive agencies like the SEC, like CFTC.
They are actively trying to provide clarity for the crypto markets and fill in an area that they know legislators haven't quite stepped into just yet.
So I think that many of them are kind of institutions, you know, that institutional capital is kind of waiting for the permission slip.
But at the same time, they are already kind of planned forward for the eventual clarity that they believe is going to take place.
So I absolutely think there is a wave of capital that's kind of waiting in the wings.
In the meantime, we can rely on those executive agents to kind of provide that taxonomy for crypto, for example, or provide more clarity around perpetual futures, other things.
And incrementally, I think that.
Even if we still need the legislation to come in the form of a clarity bill or a market structure bill, I think those incremental pieces are starting to be put in place so that a lot of these institutions can actually operate.
Where in the market do you see a need for legislative action that this sort of regulatory guidance hasn't really covered yet, right?
Is it your example of, is it perps?
Is it DeFi activity?
Is it some other kind of product around tokenization?
Are there specific sticking points that you're hearing a lot from people in these conversations saying, I'm interested in this aspect of digital assets and I've blocked because I don't have clarity there.
Where do you think that those biggest choke points are or next places of innovation that can be unlocked by legislative action?
Yeah, I think that's the perennial question because I think the way people want to frame it from an investment perspective is like, well, what sectors?
does the mark structure bill actually unlock for me?
Because that's where I want to put my money, right?
I think that's how a lot of people are thinking about things.
And we have iterated on a number of those because early on, people thought that, well, it's going to be where there's no regulatory clarity for the tokens themselves, a la Uniswap or other DeFi tokens, which is why I think Uniswap back in December 2025 finally had the fee switch vote.
I think it was once upon a time, the concern that a lot of people had.
that you couldn't actually access the revenues that these projects had because there wasn't regulatory clarity.
And, you know, to like the case of Uniswap or even like, you know, Aave's governance conversations that have been ongoing over the last couple of months, a lot of people were trying to figure out, well, where does this all fall in line?
And are we going to see like further, like, you know, propagation of tokens or is there going to be a migration over to equity instead um how is it going to be managed because if you are a decentralized project and you like are required to provide and you know an earning statement every quarter who's going to do that and so there were these questions outstanding questions still about like whoa i don't know like Where do you go from like a decentralized project to a like, or decentralized project, decentralized one?
And I think that those are the places that I think that Clarity Bill, we're supposed to finally settle.
But there's new stuff now too.
You know, perps are becoming a huge thing.
It's a huge market.
People really want to know, like, how do I trade this stuff?
Because getting access to it in the US, it's, you know, near impossible, which is why all of it's done abroad.
And we have perp-like products at Coinbase.
But, you know, like still people want more choices when it comes to self-autokenized equities.
So I do think that, you know, more and more like there's newer sectors that are coming up that are going to need to be addressed by something like a clarity bill.
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I think it's nice to be in an industry, though, where we're seeing so much innovation that there's always more and more regulatory clarity needed.
And that kind of goes back to your point about the biggest thing that's brought in capital is regulatory clarity.
And the biggest thing that's holding back capital is also regulatory clarity.
So it's an interesting, interesting developing area.
And we'll kind of have to keep on top of that.
David, I really enjoyed this conversation, learned a lot on this.
I want to ask you about what you're working on next, because we've talked about some of your recent reporting, your recent outlook for Q2.
this survey you've done with institutional investors.
You know, you're the head of research for Coinbase Institutional.
What are you looking at next?
What's on your radar?
And what are you focusing your research on now?
So AI agents is a very big one for me.
I think that this is a sector that, you know, if you are deep into the space, you probably already know it.
We have a lot of projects, and this has been ongoing, trying to find the intersection between AI and crypto.
And there have been a few iterations on that thus far in terms of how do we use crypto projects as a platform to sandbox and test different AI models, things like that.
But now AI agents really are emerging as like the...
you know, potential use case for this stuff because, you know, you have things like X402 at Coinbase, one of the, you know, protocols that allows these AI agents to have a micro economy for the most part in terms of being able to send these microtransactions to each other.
Like if, you know, you tell an AI agent, hey, write me a paper on, I don't know, like quantum computing.
They'll say like, okay, I can do that, but then I'll need to like go to Stanford's databases, like access some random paper.
You don't have a subscription or access to it.
They'd be like, well, just buy it.
And you know, how do you instruct them to do it?
You know, now you can give an AI agent a wallet.
They can say like, okay, we'll just pay like.
like $2 to like whatever third party platform we need to, and we'll be able to access it.
And that's where kind of like Ethereum also comes in because what if an AI agent needs to interact with another AI agent?
I mean, this whole idea of agentic commerce really, I think is a whole new sector.
And, you know, it's starting to grab headlines right now, but you can really only do it.
using blockchain rails so it's very very specific to what crypto can offer the ai space so i'm very much uh trying to figure out you know what's investable what's not like how is this all going to grow yeah well i'm i have a lot of questions around this i don't want to push you too much to say like you know name names specifically but i think at milk road you know we've launched milk road ai as well because we're very focused on this intersection between ai and crypto and you know maybe just around that right like you've said these AI agents, this agentic economy is a new rising thing.
A lot of energy and capital is going towards that.
And it seems like a natural partnership between crypto and AI.
Have you seen anything at that intersection that you think is particularly interesting or, you know, like you mentioned X4 or two, but anything else at that intersection that's caught your attention because there's so many people trying to figure this out and it's very early days, but I just wondered if there's anything else you could say about the intersection between those two.
Yeah, I can't name names, unfortunately.
Well, you said Ethereum.
That's good enough.
There is one that I'm thinking about right now, which is paired with a stable coin, which I think is very interesting.
And maybe some people will hear that and they know what I'm talking about.
But I think that that's probably the front mirror in my mind in terms of what's been interesting.
I mean, you know, like once upon a time, there are projects like BitTensor, which I think for a while we're doing very well.
for separate reasons uh not having to do with you know like the growth of this sector um i think it was it was kind of taken down a little bit but i think that it's worth watching to see like well how are people actually trying to tackle this space because you know there's so many things that have now been put in place and even like non-ai specific stuff like world coin and other things that that project that could be folded into the space i think that That for me, like that intersection where like all these kind of like moving parts are now starting to like gravitate towards one another.
Like, I think that you don't really need much to like, you know, just put them together and have something new.
So that's kind of what I'm looking for when it comes to the AI agent space.
Well, when you publish a report on that, I hope you'll come back on the Milk Road Show and talk to us about it because I know we'll be very interested to hear.
David Duong, Global Head of Research at Coinbase Institutional.
Thank you so much for being on the Milk Road Show.
It's great to have you again.
No, it's my pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of The Milkrow Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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