# Crypto Megatrends: Institutional Adoption, Stablecoins, and Infrastructure

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

## Transcript

I think there's an underlying tremendously bullish market here that we keep messing up, right?
We are reinventing money.
We're reinventing intelligence.
We're reinventing health.
We're moving into space.
These are the biggest markets I've ever seen entrepreneurs and innovators go after in my lifetime.
what's up everybody it's lgg said here and welcome to the milk road show the daily crypto show that was hoping to sell in may and go away but is totally going to get sucked back into the trenches through the entire summer today is may 5th 2026 we're recording late on may 4th man it feels good to see some green candles around here and our guests today think that well i think they think that we're in a major uptrend and then all that good news we've been covering over the last several months is finally bearing fruit we'll get into why Bitcoin keeps moving up from here with two of our favorite guests, Matt Hogan and Ryan Rasmussen from Bitwise.
Today's episode is brought to you by Cape, the privacy first mobile carrier, and Pharos, the layer one built for real fi.
Matt, Ryan, another great episode on the docket today.
I was so excited to talk to you guys.
We hung out in the darkness for months.
80K is a good number, right?
It's so beautiful.
See the eight handle.
It really is.
Done with six, sevens.
I'm pretty excited about it.
Someone's got teenage kids saying six and seven.
Anyway, or children of any kind, or just spend too much time on the internet.
All those things.
All those things.
So is this, so, so Matt, we've, we've, you know, from a technical standpoint, we've kind of come to this level a few times in, in recent times, in recent weeks.
And I feel like I've seen a lot of analysts, professional and amateur analysts tell us, it's like, Hey, listen, 80K, like, if we hold here and this is such obvious theory but it's like if we hold here it's good but don't get too excited what do you think matt or was this a sustained rally here or we did we finally did we actually bottom when we say we did or what's what what do you how do you how do you interpret this what i'd say is if we hold here it's good but don't get too excited lg you're just saying what i said you can't just say what i said no i think look i think that's right look i think a couple things are true um One, I think we can have relatively high confidence that $60,000 was a really fundamental bond.
We seem to have sustainably pushed beyond that without too much hype getting into the market.
And we've talked about it here before.
I think we're in this general channel between 60 and 80.
The question is, do we push above 80 into sort of the next channel or do we retreat back and try into the 70s?
The answer, I think.
lies in what happens to risk assets in general and then what happens with the Clarity Act in particular.
I think if we see the Clarity Act continue the recent trend where it's been looking more and more likely and we see risk assets at least hold steady, then I think we could move into the next sort of 80 to 100 channel.
If we see risk assets get crushed because maybe things in Iran turn for the worse or we see the clarity act hopes fade and we go back below like 50 to 40 percent odds then it feels to me like we'll we'll head back into the into the trenches but i do think that sixty thousand dollars was the um was the end of winter and i think we'd probably go higher from here i just don't know i think it's conditional on those two events whether it's straight up or whether we reset and gather a little bit more base Ryan, why isn't this war affecting the economy at all anymore?
Well, I think it's certainly affecting the economy.
I think the economy, the price of everything.
I think investors become increasingly desensitized to these kinds of...
chaotic nature of a trump presidency in a trump economy and trump markets there's all of these short-term risks that develop and then they get blown out of proportion and then the next major catastrophe happens and then that gets blown up of course and you just kind of continue to move forward and when you when you zoom out and look long term there's an incredible number of mega trends globally both crypto and non-crypto ai other sectors that are pushing markets higher over the long term i think investors start filtering out the noise, the more noise there is when it comes to Trump.
Yeah.
Can I build on that?
Because I feel this really strongly.
I think there's an underlying tremendously bullish market here that we keep messing up, right?
We are reinventing money.
We're reinventing intelligence.
We're reinventing health.
We're reinventing defense.
We're moving into space.
These are the biggest markets I've ever seen entrepreneurs and innovators go after in my lifetime.
right we all got excited about the internet that was reinventing media who cares right this is intelligence work money space and life these are much bigger markets who cares snapchat like we got excited about snapchat you have to be kidding me right so now we're going after these much bigger markets i think the market would just be doing even better it's just people keep mucking it up and i think the reason why we more or less quote unquote ignore uh the nonsense is because the underlying thrum otherwise would be just so bullish so i think it is slowing us down i just think the uptrend is big enough that it can't keep us down completely matt i'm pretty sure snapchat made like two billion dollars in q4 or something like that more that's more than most crypto businesses okay like you can't you can't i can't dump on them No, I actually, I think Snapchat's actually an incredible business and it's stuck around and you make a very good point.
I just meant that, I just meant the narrowly.
I should have kept it general.
I didn't mean to get scared.
I meant generally.
So reinventing media was a big deal, but it is not as big a deal as reinventing intelligence or work or money or life.
Those are just bigger.
Or a lot of infrastructure or going to space or any of that kind of stuff.
And that's kind of what we're at the precipice of.
I love Snap.
Yeah.
Go ahead, Ryan.
Not only are we on the precipice of it, but all of these megatrends and incredible innovations build on each other.
You can't advance space exploration without the AI boom that we're seeing.
And you can't reinvent internet money if there's not a...
world that is demanding that.
And we're seeing that across agentic AI.
And there's going to be a need for, I can't believe I'm going to say these words, but intergalactic commerce.
If we are exploring space, like all of these things are building on top of each other.
And so I think when you zoom out and you say, here are the things that are going wrong short-term, here are the massive things that we're tackling long-term.
Those are what the long-term items outweigh the short-term headwinds.
And I think that's why investors maybe hit a speed bump, pull back a little bit.
They zoom out and say, oh, wait, we're headed in the right direction.
I need to be exposed to this market, whether it's crypto, AI, healthcare, energy, space.
And then they come back in full steam ahead because this choppiness short-term will settle out.
We're approaching midterms.
In a couple more years, we'll have...
you know, new administration, but these long-term megatrends will still be driving markets higher at that point in time.
You don't want to be sidelined for that, whether it's crypto, AI, or any other sector.
If you're not seeing this, you're trading blind right now.
There are real moves happening behind the scenes that most people don't see until it's way too late.
Inside Milkrow Pro, you can track exactly what our analysts are buying, selling, and what's on their watch lists before it moves.
You can try it out for just a dollar for seven days.
The link is in the description.
So what do you guys say to somebody who is aware of all this, right?
Because if you follow investing, these themes are pretty clear and we discussed them in Milk Road and some of our other shows too.
But to somebody who looks at all that, and I ask you guys this every time, it was a challenge.
You guys are such good defenders of the crypto bull case.
This is why I'm throwing you this direct challenge.
They look at all that and they're like, yes, intergalactic commerce.
I love that.
And they say, I love that more than just buying more crypto.
How do you respond to that?
Because it does, you know, I think even just amongst the people that I know who are not deep like you guys, like we all are, they look at all that stuff.
They're like, yes, like I did buy some SanDisk stock a few like a year ago and I'm up big and like glad I didn't stay in crypto.
You know that there's a less obvious case for crypto unless they listen to our show, which when you guys come on, you make such a great case.
But what I'm saying is that how do you how I guess what I'm asking you is how does crypto kind of fit into that narrative?
You know what I mean?
And what how does it become part of that narrative as you guys paint such a great picture for like this giga bull run that we're at the start of?
I'll say two things about that.
First, you can like more than one thing at once.
Like when you sit down to have dinner, it's OK to like the appetizer and the main and the dessert and have a nice glass of wine and some sparkling water and to love it all.
That's all fine.
Just because I'm excited about AI doesn't mean I'm any less excited about crypto.
And then as any investor knows, these things go in seasons.
right this outperforms and then that outperforms and then the other thing outperforms if you can time it if you don't think you're late to buying sandisk then god bless you just do that just buy the specific thing that's going to go up the most tomorrow and then tomorrow rotate to the next thing but i'm not good enough to do that so my approach is just to own all the awesome things and let those rising tides move at different time periods i think the thing that we forget because intelligence is such a big market and AI is such a big market, is that money really is a very large market too, right?
The little world that we're reinventing in crypto, which is money and finance, is one of the largest addressable markets in the world.
And we're going to disrupt that in the same way that AI is disrupting sort of intelligence and robots will disrupt.
part of work.
And again, it's totally fine to be excited about all of them.
I do think it's taken some of the ebulence out of the crypto market because the hot money, the hot ball of money that used to rotate into various parts of crypto is no longer rotating.
What's lifting crypto is a slow drip of institutional money.
That means I think we're going to have longer cycles.
They're going to be slower moving, less volatile.
So I don't think it's had no impact.
But they can all eventually rise over time, which is I think what will happen.
I like that.
Ryan?
Yeah, I mean, I agree with Matt.
You think about the people that are controlling the mass amount of capital that has not yet allocated to crypto.
They're relatively slow moving.
And so they're eventually going to get there, just like they're eventually going to have exposure to AI and space.
But crypto takes them a little bit longer because they have this preconceived bias they don't already have against other sectors.
big allocators i was just at a conference this past week in new orleans called alpha on the delta incredible name for our conference this is with large institutional allocators endowments pensions family offices multi-family offices these firms are very interested in crypto and to matt's point they're also very interested in ai and they're also very interested in biotech but one thing that they strongly believe in is having diversified exposure across these different sectors.
And so while they are excited about those other new fields that maybe are stealing attention away from crypto, they're also focusing on their getting up to speed in crypto and doing due diligence and understanding how should I allocate, which one should I allocate to?
How do I invest in stable coins or tokenization?
Or should I buy Bitcoin?
Those are questions that they're continuing to ask.
And that's the slow drip that Matt's talking about.
It's going to happen.
it just takes time you want to be on the right side of the equation when it happens it's a funny way to put it stealing attention away from crypto i like that i like it we're so we're so like self-centered and i don't mean that's a knock towards you ryan i i say the same thing all the time where i'm just we're just like why aren't you why did you love crypto you know and somebody wants to talk to me about investing and they tell me about whatever things semiconductors and stuff and i'm like yeah yeah but you know what's going on here though like let me tell you you know the latest news and they're like yeah yeah yeah i don't care you know what it is i definitely totally feel the same way that i'm just like wow you're stealing my attention you're stealing the spotlight is off this amazing thing that we love and we know it's going to do super well um and that's definitely how it feels for us but i think it's you step out of that and it's it's kind of a funny thing to think about uh ryan i do want to ask you since you've been on the road and um at events with amazing names what else have you been seeing what else what else have the you know you and the institutional team what else have you guys been having what kind of conversations you guys been having i always love hearing this from you guys one of the only people that come on the show and actually share this with us uh what these large institutions are actually asking you and what they're looking for kind of going ahead into the rest of the year and next year So I've been on the road for the past four weeks straight at a number of different conferences with different audiences.
And there's been three trends that I've observed over this period.
The first is that wealth managers love indexes.
And the reason I bring that up is exactly what you were just talking about, LG.
that the attention that they have, the attention span they have for crypto or different asset classes is limited.
They're at these conferences.
And while they're meeting with Bitwise for a half hour, they're also meeting with 15 other firms over a two day period and trying to attend panels and trying to answer their slack and email.
And so what they love and what we're seeing increasing demand for is just broad based passive exposure to crypto.
They can tell.
their clients like hey you're exposed to it and yes you own bitcoin yes you own ethereum yes you own solana or xrp if the clients ask for those things and you can sleep well at night knowing that you have that exposure and financial advisors or wealth managers can say yes i've done my job so demand for indexing and passive exposure to crypto is one trend another trend is for income on idle crypto assets we're seeing an increasing amount of bitcoin whales or ethereum whales or crypto asset you know, XYZ whales who want to put their holdings to work and they want yield, whether that's through staking or through generating out, you know, yield through options, strategies, or a combination of the two things.
And so we're seeing increasing demand for that.
You can think of family offices or multifamily offices that have, that their anchor is a multi, is a Bitcoin whale.
And that Bitcoin whale is long.
for the next 10 to 20 years doesn't plan to sell but wants to put that capital to work and so they come to us and say what can you guys do a bit wise to help us generate yield on this big kind bitcoin and they do the same thing for ethereum xrp and other crypto assets so indexing is one trend yield is another trend so the third trend is they're just asking for a crypto market update and the questions that they're asking show that they don't spend a lot of time paying attention to crypto they're like oh yeah isn't there some piece of legislation that is like getting attention from banks or something like that or oh yeah when did did they launch salon etfs yet right like they ask these questions and you just realize that we focus on this each and every day 24 7 365 we've talked about clarity so many times this year we look at the poly market every single day they don't even know the name of the act they just saw some headline about the the banking lobbies fighting crypto legislation and they just want to know what's happening How do I think about it?
And what does it mean for the long term?
And so those are the trends that we're seeing.
And to me, those are all three headed in the right direction.
Six months ago, we weren't seeing these kinds of trends.
They were really focused on, oh, didn't crypto just wipe out and just go, isn't it headed towards zero?
Now they're actually interested in how do I think about it?
How do I put my assets to work?
How should I allocate?
What's your thesis to the end of this year and over the long term?
And when they ask you about the crypto market, you just send them one of our podcasts together, right?
You're like, listen to this.
Here's my thoughts.
Here are Matt and I's thoughts.
And I say, if you wait till the end, there's always going to be some Polymarket Alpha.
You want to learn about Clarity Act?
Just listen to the last three minutes of every single one of our episodes together.
And also, you want to learn about Josh Shapiro, potential president in 2028.
That's where you can do that.
Matt, how about you?
I feel like you guys have both been traveling so much.
Conference season.
I feel like a similar...
Yeah, the only thing I'd add to that is just how much the Overton window has shipped, has changed over the last year.
I remember, you know, for the first six years of Bitwise, we were like struggling to talk to people about a 1% allocation to Bitcoin.
Remember the whole get off zero concept, 1% of your portfolio.
If you lose it, you're only down 1%.
That was like six years of repeating this story.
And then Charles Schwab comes out with a video that says 2% to 7%.
Which 7% is above what Bitwise has historically said for most people, which is 1% to 5%.
And that has just changed the conversation at these conferences that I go to.
Like some combination of that and what Morgan Stanley is doing and what Wells Fargo is doing, Goldman Sachs is doing.
Like there's just, it's been normalized so much that we've completely shifted from this like, well, maybe this crazy thing for 1% to like, ah, why don't we put 5% of our portfolio in it?
And just shrugging our shoulders.
It's really remarkable to me how much it's changed.
It makes it way less of a risk asset, doesn't it?
It completely does.
And it completely is.
And it's just really remarkable.
Like sometimes we forget it because we've been down in sort of the doldrums of the 60 to 80 channel.
But it is really dramatically changed, right?
It's become completely normalized.
And we've just become almost inured to that, which when I go out on the road, it just really strikes me how much more welcoming people are and the size of the allocation that they're considering has really stuck with me.
Oh, wow.
The size.
Okay, cool.
Nice.
That's cool.
That's good to hear this.
There's some more, maybe some more buys in the pipeline.
Or I mean, there's a lot of buys in the pipeline, you know what I mean?
But that's cool.
That's cool.
That's great.
That's great that people are looking at it that way.
Your phone carrier knows more about you than your best friend does.
Where you go, who you call, when you sleep, and they're selling all of it.
AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, they've all been caught leaking data or caching in on it.
And your VPN, your encrypted messaging app, they can't fix what's broken at the network level.
That's where Cape comes in.
Cape is America's privacy-first mobile carrier.
Same premium coverage you'd expect, built with privacy from day one.
Your phone's network identifier rotates every 24 hours, so you look like a different subscriber every day.
Call logs are deleted after 24 hours.
You get two encrypted secondary numbers for signups and 2FA included in your plan, plus SIM swap protection that puts you in control of your number, so no one, not even Cape, can hijack it.
Use code MILKROAD at MILKROAD.COM for 33% off your first six months.
Trillions of dollars in real world assets are stuck off chain.
Real estate, commodities, private credit, all locked behind outdated systems that weren't built for a global 24-7 economy.
The fix?
Bring those assets on chain.
Problem is, most blockchains weren't designed for that either.
Pharos is.
It's a layer one purpose built for RealFi, a real-world financial infrastructure that lets assets be tokenized, verified, and traded at institutional scale.
We're talking parallel execution for serious throughput, compliance baked in from day one, and infrastructure that actually connects on-chain and on-chain systems.
They've got a $10 million incubator backing builders who want to make RealFi a reality.
Join the Atlantic Ocean testnet and start building at milkroad.com slash Pharos network.
Matt, you had also pointed out a few other things that have happened the last couple of weeks.
And again, you know, I kind of threw this out there in the intro that it's like I feel like most of the episodes I do with you guys were covering a lot of the great news, the institutional news, the institutional adoption news.
Whenever I do a show with my co-host, John Gillen, we do the same thing where he's just like listing off every every week.
He is like, listen, you're not even this morning.
He told me I was burying the lead because then he then listed off like five.
major institutional moves that have been made in crypto in the last week alone.
So, and Matt, you were pretty keen on talking about the ones from Meta and DoorDash, which are not even, this isn't even like the Schwabs and the Fidelities, right?
Like this is, these are just consumer brands, you know, or consumer brands with huge online like databases of people moving into stable coins.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
There've been so many big things.
Yeah.
These two really caught my eye.
There's this, this thing about stable coins which is their 300 billion dollars today and everyone's like they'll get to three trillion dollars and we'll be using stable coins instead of our visa card but no one ever explains how we go from degen's trading with stable coins to them my grandmother using it instead of her visa card right we don't talk about that bridge and we had these two pieces of news that i think gave me a view um one was that doordash talked about paying It's dashers via stable coins on the Tempo blockchain, right?
And the other was that Meta said it was going to start paying creators in two countries, eventually 160 countries using USDC on Polygon and Solana.
And what I love about these is it points out exactly how we get to the mainstream, which is we start with the edge cases.
If you think about DoorDash's business, they have these employees that come and go over short periods of time.
in like 40 countries around the world where they have very tangential relationships with them they're not onboarding them with a month-long onboarding process and paperwork the way we do when we hire someone they're like gig workers right how do you pay a globally distributed group of gig workers in a quick way well stable coins make that push button easy same thing with content creators right globally distributed how do you pay them in a quick easy button way stable coins are a nice solution so of course that's how it starts But then you can imagine having millions of people who get used to stable coins in this venue.
And that's how we start to get into the mainstream.
So I just, you know, those are such big brands rolling these things out.
And we used to have a few of these stories.
We used to have Starlink sort of paying some people in stable coins.
But now we're starting to see like multiple of these stories each week.
And it just painted a road that I could draw.
to the end point where stable coins are as normal as debit cards and uh i really i really like those two stories i like that too i think that you know i'm very curious to know how the nuts and bolts look you know like that's like what is that this is great news and like what is it how does it actually manifest right is it going to be something one thing that you guys have in the united states for some reason we don't have in canada is cash app um it's a really easy way to pay other people right and i feel like that's you know even that concept has already laid the the bones for how these apps these you know some cases trillion dollar companies are going to be able to use this stuff and it almost seems like a no-brainer the way you described it matt that's just like listen you have these gig workers in 40 different countries that's a logistical nightmare right and yeah and they're they're doing microtransactions every day right there's the payment from the you know from the food vendor and there's the tip and then all that you know all the surcharge all that kind of stuff right so um moving that to stable coins makes a lot of sense.
Is that, is that, so I think the metal one, they announced that they would be using USDC and DoorDash is working with Tempo.
Does Tempo have their own stable coin?
I don't know.
I actually have no idea.
Yeah.
But is this, but Matt, what I wanted to ask you or Ryan as well, we ask this all the time, right?
Is that like when you see these kinds of things, What, you know, from the investor standpoint, are you, is that, does it make you more bullish on a meta or on a circle or on a Bitcoin?
You know what I mean?
Like, and the obvious one is like, well, you should buy circle because they're using USDC, but it's not that, I don't think it's not that specific, right?
Like where, where do you kind of look for the value to accrue over time from this adoption, right?
Outside of, you know, we asked you, I asked you guys this every single time.
I would buy circle.
I think in some sense it is that simple.
Right.
They're going to use this circle benefits from it.
We can we can sort of take the easy approach and just buy circle.
I think that's the next thing I would buy is like DeFi or Bitcoin, because the thing about stable coins is they put you one jump away from the rest of crypto.
Once you have stable coins, your probability of using DeFi, I think probably goes up 100 million fold.
And so I would look at even some of the isolated, unloved DeFi protocols out there.
that are trading at really low valuations and find those attractive in a world where there are 100 million or a billion stablecoin users.
I don't know if Ryan has it.
I mean, the other obvious answer is like buy Solana or buy Polygon, right?
Those are direct beneficiaries.
But I think you can go one step further into DeFi.
Right.
So I hope that a lot of those people that are going to eventually be using stablecoins and putting more of them.
money on chain will then be like, well, what else can I do with this money now that I have it on chain?
And be like, well, look at this amazing DeFi infrastructure that exists here that has been developed for years.
Yeah.
Hey, did you know you could earn yield on your stable coin?
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
From, hey, you should buy some stable coins and then earn yield on them.
And you're like, put it in the bank.
But if you're getting paid stable coins and you're like, you can instantaneously earn yield on them, then all of a sudden you're in.
Morpho or you're in Aave or you're like you're in a DeFi protocol, right?
You're in a vault.
So I think that's what I mean when I say like this is this is a huge push for the DeFi ecosystem is it just brings you so much closer to taking that step and they're all going to be marketed to.
And maybe even DeFi protocols will market through Meta to get to the people that it's paying.
Like it's very easy to see how that ecosystem blows out from there.
So.
That's how I would approach it as an investor if I had a long-term time horizon.
Is there a world as well, Matt?
And Ryan, I want to hear from you because I've heard from you in a bit.
Is there a world as well where like, let's just skip ahead and you've got this hypothetical like Meta gives you a wallet, right?
And they've got their USDC loaded up on Solana and Polygon.
And that's for anybody listening.
That's why Matt mentioned those two.
Those are the two blockchains that Meta has announced they'll use for their creator stablecoins payments.
Is there a world where Meta is like, okay, you've got this wallet.
Obviously, Meta is going to eventually want you to do all the stuff in Meta with your stable coins, right?
Like buy things on Marketplace and like sign up for these apps and all those different, any other kind of payment you need to make.
Is there a world too where Meta wants to be some kind of bank, right?
Where they're like, okay, listen, like, you know, don't just put $100 in your stable coins so you could buy some, or I guess your creator, I think about DoorDash, but just stop buying your Marketplace stuff.
But also like, why don't you put...
all your money here and earn some juicy yield.
Right.
And that's, is that, is that something even possible for these companies?
I mean, I think there are regulatory challenges, but that direction is definitely possible.
Right.
Okay.
That's kind of, that's how I'm trying to tie those dots together.
And they're going to get them.
Yeah, exactly.
Like they don't want you to leave their ecosystem.
So the more integrations they can make, whether it's with circle or with Solana or with polygon.
or with the defy app xyz or a vault curator right with what maybe they integrate with morpho and then you're holding these traders are holding the stable coins and then they just can choose to deposit them into a high yield uscc vault while they're not using them right and then uh the process of paying for that good on the facebook market place is as easy as one click of a button but then it withdraws money from the vault pays for the good you get the right like it all starts to be integrated and so i think that is that's the the the bullish thesis around these mega integrations from these gigantic networks is you now have stable coins and by connection defy and layer one blockchains and oracles and it's like everything tied into this immensely valuable network that everyone uses whether you're a facebook user or an instagram user or a whatsapp user you're using meta somewhere and if they're going to start rolling out stable coins that are easily accessible and integrated with defy or with vaults or with marketplaces that's just going to expand the use of stable coins the use of d5 and that is bullish for all of the underlying infrastructure that the industry's been building for over a decade now and that investors you know want to gain exposure to that kind of growth they want it through equities they want it through blockchains they want it through d5 and i think that then they want it through meta to you know otherwise that it wouldn't be doing it so i think it's it's just incredibly bullish and so matt and i going back to we talked about the beginning is like there's these long-term mega trends like stable coins that and reinventing money that investors want to have exposure to.
And those that can sift through the short term macro uncertainty and noise know they want to have exposure to that and they just buy and hold and wait.
And so historically, that's been a really great approach to investing in megatrends.
Ryan, I have a question about an alt coin, if you will.
I will.
How does Chainlink fit into all this?
So you guys, you wrote, you tweeted about this.
You guys wrote a report recently, Chainlink in plain English.
And what's funny is this morning I was recording with John.
He was like, I really want to talk about Chainlink.
And I was like, no, no, no, no.
We're going to talk about other stuff.
But like, we'll do an altcoin episode soon and talk about all these other tokens.
And it's funny that you guys put out this report, Chainlink in plain English.
So even kind of based on the thesis, everything we just said in that lens, Ryan, like what I think for a lot of people who maybe have looked at Chainlink in the past, they understand kind of what it does a little bit.
What is the thesis for it going forward in all these long-term bull cases we're seeing?
The thesis behind Chainlink is that it's critical middleware infrastructure for all of these things that we keep talking about to work and to function, to connect meta.
with stable coins and for those stable coins to then relay a price on chain and whether it's in a wallet or in a defy app and for those defy apps to then value the tokenized assets that their vault strategies are wrapped around and so on and so on all of that requires some piece most likely of chain links infrastructure now whether it's their interoperability protocols whether it is their data relayers, whether it's their compliance and related software that they run.
They have a different product suite that are different product within their suite that almost every intersection of what we talked about today relies on.
And many of them rely on multiple of those of those products in their suite.
And so the bullish thesis for Chainlink is that all of these things happen.
Every asset in the world is tokenized.
Stablecoins grow.
from $300 billion to $5 trillion.
We're using stablecoins and crypto-based rails for payments and for borrowing and for lending and for trading.
And all of that requires software and infrastructure, and Chainlink is a critical piece of that software.
And so if you think those things are all going to happen, then the Chainlink network should become more valuable alongside that growth, and you should want to invest in the networks that increase in value over time.
Wow.
that's that's that's what's in this paper is that basically what the whole paper says i feel like i just quizzed you on it i feel like i just quizzed you on it and you gave the class presentation but it was only two minutes that's basically so i need to read this now or did you just tell me the whole thing No, I told you the only other thing that I would add is that they have an incredible market share because they were the first mover.
They have an insane advantage in that regard.
There's not another space in the crypto stack, perhaps besides Bitcoin itself, where there's a specific network and piece of infrastructure that has as much market share and as much of a moat as Chainlink has.
And that's, I think, one reason why people have slept on Chainlink for so long has always confused me.
You would think over the past decade.
there would have been newcomers that have eaten their market share and they just really haven't that just speaks to how dominant chain links uh chain links positioning in the space is and i think they'll hold on to a lot of that market share as this all grows over time Here's a DGN question for you.
Does Chainlink suffer at all from its cult followers?
Because I remember when I joined crypto, there was Chainlink God and the Link Marines.
I was like, I don't even want to look at this thing because I think that's so strange.
Then I became a freak myself, not for Chainlink, but for other things.
I just wondered, on the other side, if you're building a brand, my marketing brand is like, dude, you have cult people.
That is a moat that nobody else can just make up.
You have freaks who love your thing you know how does that how does that kind of how does the community aspect factor in ryan I think it's a huge asset to Chainlink to have Link Marines and Chainlink God and enthusiasts and evangelists who use the technology, advocate for the technology and try to bring new fans into the space.
I mean, it's hard to find any kind of anything out there where the amount of fans you have advocating for your technology or your brand or whatever ends up hurting it in the long run.
So I think it's a positive.
And we love the Link Marines and think that they're pushing the ecosystem forward.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Well, they're going to show up in the comments.
I guarantee it.
They're going to hunt this episode down.
One last question for you guys about this report.
Well, I was going to pull it up.
Whose hands are these?
Whose beautiful hands are those?
Who has the nicest hands between the two of you?
And Hunter, too.
Who has the nicest hands, everybody, at Bitwise?
That's a good question.
I'm going to bet Ryan.
i met that ryan yes yeah yeah we took this yeah we took this photo uh yes he's lived a nice life you know yeah exactly i was gonna say not worn down easy life yeah no carpet tree nothing like that yeah exactly i'm not in the yard much oh that's awesome guys looking ahead i mean we have you guys on every two weeks which is great but what um obviously clarity is a big one coming up and it looks like there's something going on in the background i'd love to kind of wrap this up with your thoughts on that and anything else that you guys are watching uh in the the classic sell and may go away month take it away ryan yeah clarity is huge i think may is the window for for clarity and that's not probably surprising most of the listeners here but we're hitting a point in the timeline where it either has to happen or it simply won't.
And these delays that we've continued to see, you can see when you look at the odds of the market thinking this is going to pass, it just continue to grind lower really since the beginning of this year.
If you look at the in December, we were above 75 percent.
Today, we're sitting based on Calci around 55 percent, but it was as low as 40 percent odds of this passing.
And I think this is the critical time.
So what I would note about Clarity, though, and maybe this is a hot take, is that crypto has grown into a multi trillion dollar industry with stable coins at 300 billion and the largest financial institutions in the world and largest tech companies in the world embracing crypto technology without market structure legislation.
So is it important that it passes?
Yes.
Is it an absolute deal breaker to this bull market that we believe we're heading into?
My opinion is that it's not a deal breaker.
It's a minor setback and I think we'll grind through it.
over the long term because these other tailwinds we've spoken about institutional adoption stable coins tokenization uh those things are more powerful tailwinds than market structure legislation not passing as a headwind but that's that's something i'm focused on and i think the market will be focused on over the next four weeks yeah i think that's right that's well said i do think we'll get through it either way but it will be a short-term setback if it doesn't uh resolve positively The other thing that would really help, which I haven't mentioned, is the DeFi hack thing, chilling out for a little while.
Be nice to have a stretch of solidity there, see Aave fully unlock and rebound.
I think that would be very helpful to the community.
And the reverse would be a significant setback.
So that's another thing that's on my radar.
Is that AI based?
Right.
Because I've seen that chart.
You guys probably seen it, too, that it's like crypto hacks in the last couple of months is way beyond anything it's ever been.
And that there's a natural, you know, it's not direct, but like anthropic is teasing mythos or mythos or whatever you call it.
And then, you know, it's the idea that AI is going to massively enable hackers, although some of them were social engineering.
Right.
Like some of them were like a six months long con.
Right.
So it's not exactly AI based, but.
I actually don't.
So I don't know.
But I think the the panic around mythos and AI based cyber hacking and the coincident timing of some of these hacks means we're taking them more aggressively than we would have otherwise.
Like if we had had one of these hacks or even even even both of the major hacks a year ago, pre mythos.
I think people would have been like, oh, man, another one.
That's brutal.
But because they're happening in tandem, I think we're heightened.
We're more concerned about it than we otherwise would.
So maybe that's the third piece we need to really get this sustained rally.
We need risk on assets to do okay.
We need clarity.
And we need not another series of major multi-hundred-billion-dollar hacks.
Yeah, that would be helpful.
I think if we get those three things, we're maybe off to the races.
Oh, man.
I mean, in some cases, too, and not to single anybody out, but in some cases, too, it's some of the hacks were more so the infrastructure was not as sound as it could have been.
Let's put it that way.
From what I understand, my brain reading about it being like, hey, you know what?
They probably should have done a little bit more there security wise.
So not each one, not each one.
But in some cases.
Anyways, gentlemen, thank you for another great episode.
Great to see you guys and great to see you guys here at ADK.
Hopefully we're somewhere around there or not higher next time I see you.
But even if we're lower, I'll see you again either way.
Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event?
Subscribe to our channel and join the Milk Road daily and pro newsletters and start investing like the top 1%.
This show is for educational purposes only.
Nothing we say is financial advice.
Investing is risky.
Never invest more than you can afford to lose.