# Hyperliquid ETF Launch Signals Gen 2 Tokenomics Shift

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-05-28

## Transcript

It's a bucket flowing into a thimble because there are only a few assets that crypto investors are really looking at right now.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG Ducet here and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that desperately wants to believe in a Bitcoin all-time high this year.
And you know, in retrospect, I'm probably going to kick myself one way or another.
Today is May 28th, 2026.
We are recording on May 27th.
One of the biggest questions of the last few weeks in crypto is...
Where does Hyperliquid go from here?
It's a top 10 token and its FDV recently flipped Solanas as it surged to all-time highs.
And a big reason for that surge has been the launch of the ETFs, notably the one from Bitwise, which has recorded over a million hype.
token inflow in just over a week or just, yeah, just about over a week.
Today, we'll discuss whether the protocol can keep climbing from here, how early we might be, and of course, where the broader market goes from here with two of our favorite guests, Matt and Ryan from Bitwise.
Today's episode is brought to you by Cape, the privacy first mobile carrier, Nexo, Aaron Interest, Borrow and Trade Crypto, and Calci, where your takes finally pay out.
Matt, Ryan, where does hype go from here?
Tell me your honest thoughts.
Oh, man, that's easy.
It goes up.
What do you mean?
It goes up.
That's like an underhand pitch.
I think the reality is that the world is slowly starting to realize what hyperliquid is.
I think there's been the bullish move has been reflecting that it's gone beyond just the deepest part of the crypto DGN economy into more mainstream investors.
And I would say that that process is maybe 5% done.
The reason I set up is that as more traditional investors learn about what's happening in hyperliquid, as they understand that tokenomics have changed from the Gensler era to the Atkins era, and there's much more value capture here, I think it's going to attract continued inflow.
So it's not straight up from here.
There are lots of risks.
There are regulatory risks.
There are other risks.
But I think the world is going to re-rate hyperliquid higher.
It's an important part of sort of the modern.
financial infrastructure and i think it's still undervalued at these prices it feels like that and it's also one of the only tokens like performing you know like it's one of the only to everything else is chopping but it's one of the only ones that that has a lot of um traction behind it and also a lot of discussion and a lot of new stuff kind of coming out like the etfs is this you guys have attracted over a million net uh tokens is that expected you launched this like may what 15th or something like that like this is this is so new um is this is what you guys expected so quick I'm going to let Ryan answer that.
I'll hint at it.
We expected a strong reaction, and this one is stronger even than at least I anticipated.
Ryan might not have another view.
But I would just add to your point, one thing that I think is happening is crypto investors who have like $2 trillion of wealth are rotating a small portion of that wealth into hyperliquid.
And it's just it's a bucket flowing into a thimble.
Because there are only a few assets that crypto investors are really looking at right now.
They're looking at, you know, as Arthur Hayes said, Hyperliquid, Near, Zcash.
But those are all thimble sized and they're sitting on bucket sizes of wealth.
And I think something, one aspect of what's happening is just money is flowing in a little bit of this existing money, but it doesn't have that much.
that many places to go.
And that's part of what's pushing it up.
But Brian, what do you think about the ETF?
Yeah, no, I think it's exactly that.
It's a story of supply and demand.
And when you have this level of demand against an asset that's relatively small, and you're going to have a re-rating of the price, and that's exactly what's happened.
I think we're really excited about the demand for the hyperliquid ETF.
In general, I agree that investors are looking out there and seeing a lot of noise in markets in general and it's nice to look to specific crypto assets that have really strong narratives that are unique to what they've built and the growth and the traction that they're seeing and that's exactly what Hyperliquid has.
It dominates the perpetual futures market, which is a fast growing market that is just now making its way into the mainstream.
We've had perps in crypto for years now, but the traditional markets are just now really becoming aware of them thanks to oil perps and the S&P 500 license perps on Hyperliquid.
And then you think about the other areas that Hyperliquid is growing fast.
spot trading prediction markets, which launched earlier this month, there's a really strong narrative behind an asset that's generating a lot of revenue and now is available in an ETF format with staking in a brokerage account.
And that's where, you know, this this bucket size of wealth and demand is headed.
So I think it's a it's really exciting.
We're very excited about it.
I think there's a lot of room for for Hyperliquid to grow from here.
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I'm a big Hyperliquid fan.
I have been for a while.
I use the platform, unfortunately, a lot sometimes, and especially in exciting times.
What do you guys think of all the good reasons to support this protocol to either buy the token or even just use it or whatever?
of all those reasons, what is the one that you think is attracting investors the most right now?
Because you've got an extreme amount of buybacks built on a really big chunk of revenue, really kind of third in on-chain revenue behind the stablecoin providers too.
So it's like, this is kind of the leading protocol that isn't just a stablecoin.
And then everything else you guys kind of mentioned too, 24-7 access to markets.
What do you think is the, if you had to single one thing, what would that be, Matt?
I'm going to let Ryan go first.
Oh, nice.
I think it's growth and a clear mechanism to translate that growth into value for investors, which is something that crypto has longed for and hasn't had.
And this is the most clear version of that.
And I think that's what's doing.
It's growth translating into value for investors.
I think that's right.
I'd also add there's this meta narrative that's been live in crypto for the last year, which is that crypto is starting to penetrate into real world use cases.
That's something that institutional investors believe.
That's something that crypto believes.
We talk about stable coins.
We talk about tokenization.
People are looking and have been looking for ways to express that as an investment.
And they've been a little fuzzy.
It's like, oh, buy some ETH and some Solana and some Avalanche and get exposure to the growth of tokenization.
Or maybe you buy USDC.
or by Circle, but it's sharing revenue with Coinbase and with others, it's an easy answer to say, like, look, here is an example.
It's a modern version of providing derivatives exposure to all financial assets.
It's a super app.
It has, you know, 99 point whatever percent token value capture.
And so I think there is also this meta role it's playing of people are looking for the crypto hits the real world narrative and hyperlink is like, one of the best answers to where that is happening.
Right.
So that's also, as people kind of track all these narratives of crypto being adopted by institutions and being legitimized, you know, on the legal side as well.
We talk about this on the show and I've asked you guys many times, like, well, how do we get exposure to this kind of large shift that's happening, right?
As retail investors as well.
And it feels like Hyperliquid is kind of now part of that conversation, not just through you guys, you know, offering ETFs, but also through everything it's been able to do and kind of what you're saying about it.
It's a bit of crypto growing up, I think, which is what you called it, Matt, in your memo.
You refer to it as a Gen 2 token for crypto, which I feel is kind of.
It refers to what you just said, right?
That it's kind of like this next generation of what these protocols and tokens can be.
Yeah, I think it's actually an important differentiation.
I think you have these Gen 1 tokens for great protocols and great projects like Uniswap and Aave that are all very exciting, but the token capture mechanism is imperfect.
IPE is really the first token in the post-Gensler era.
And in the post-Gensler era, you can have value capture without going to jail.
And so it does have that value capture.
And I think investors are waking up to that reality.
The reason I said it's the first Gen 2 token is I suspect there will be many more.
I actually expect there's going to be a dozen of these major new interesting projects that actually attract value to the token and that therefore create this flywheel of interest and demand.
In fact, many of the sort of failed projects of cryptos past, I bet will be reborn as Gen2 tokens.
So I wouldn't be surprised if there was a whole new class of Gen2 crypto tokens with strong value capture that become multi-billion dollar protocols, some of which we don't even know the names of today.
Why does Hyperliquid need a token?
Why does Hyperliquid need a token?
Ryan, you want to tackle it first?
Why not?
Yeah, why not?
Everything needs a token.
This is crypto.
This is crypto.
Tokenize it.
No, but I mean that as in like, it's a broad stroke kind of question, but just to kind of clarify where I'm coming from is that it's, you know, this thing, if it didn't have a token, it would still be a great company.
You know what I mean?
Or no, or you don't think so.
Okay.
So one of the most interesting thing that crypto tokens do is they solve the cold start problem.
which is the most bedeviling problem for creating network effect businesses in the world.
Go try to start a derivatives exchange, LG.
Find your first thousand high-profiled users who are willing to put their capital at risk on your new exchange that has no track record, et cetera, et cetera.
So I think, look, five, six years ago, there was a lot of discussion of the use of tokens as a solution to the cold start problem, which remember is...
The biggest problem in traditional venture capital for consumer facing tech companies over the last 30 years is how do you solve the cold start problem?
Once you solve the cold start problem, you get this incredible snowball.
It's not the only reason Hyperliquid succeeded, but without a token, without this way to solve the cold start problem, I think it would have had difficulty scaling.
Like it's a super, it's a super exciting project.
It combines multiple technological advances to create an incredible consumer app.
But I don't think you can unpeel the solution to the cold start problem from the existence of the token.
I think it's actually an extraordinarily powerful crypto primitive that we've sort of derated because it failed so many times.
But I think the reason it failed so many times was because the tokens weren't allowed to accrue value.
So all we saw were like pancakes, sushi, other food swaps, vampiring, attacking.
these things that did solve the cold start problem but then were vampire attack to nothing we saw the same thing on nft platforms but when you tie that capability which did work remember those platforms scaled really fast it's just they fell just as fast when you pair that with a real token value capture mechanism that keeps the flywheel going you get something like hyper liquid which is part of why i think this sort of gen 2 version is going to be so exciting because you can You can do what we are trying to do, but you can keep the wheel spinning, which we never were able to do before.
So that's one of the reasons it needs a token.
I like that.
And even kind of listening to everything you said, you're referencing a lot of the DeFi summer stuff, the vampire kind of attacks from other DeFi protocols too.
I think one thing that people forget is that Hyperliquid was an airdrop and that there was a protocol that was live for like a year or two.
They had some users and a lot of those users, were the early adopters people who wanted to use a good protocol for on-chain perps and then and then a lot of those people help you know and and have done well if they're still holding because they really like the product like they built a good product and then they they actually rewarded their users and um versus now like i just think about in reverse if there was no token and people were trying to farm it for a token or something like that it might create something a bit more of a skewed dynamic but that that it's like they've already got their tokenomics kind of settled in a way even though they have They have a huge portion they don't know what they're going to do with.
Yeah, I mean, the really interesting thing about the perpetual flywheel is that you need there to be a belief that the token will accrue more value than you would gain by rotating into Aster or whatever.
right you see other the vampire attack was that you could you could capture the value through rotation and therefore the wheel would spin once and spit you off and the real unique thing about the 99 buyback and the scale of the ambition is that the wheel keeps spinning and you're incentivized to stay on that wheel long enough for it to create real network effects I do think one thing we're going to find out is that crypto had lots of great ideas in its first decade that didn't work for very narrow, specific reasons, for throughput reasons, for regulatory restrictions, etc.
But you're going to see many of those ideas reborn.
And I think Hyperliquid is maybe the first example of that.
This sort of cold start solution reborn without the leaky vampire attack goes to zero problem.
And the reason it can do it.
is all regulatory structure so i do think that's going to be sort of a meta theme for this next bull market is the reinvention of these old ideas what do you think of um what do you think of hyper evm Because that's something they've developed their own kind of, I guess it's an L1, but it's something where they have tried to seed community there.
There has been a minimal, and I'm talking from DGEN streets level.
There's been like some meme coins.
There's been some other like DeFi protocols that have kind of spun up different airdrops, some activity, but it's pretty, it's peanuts compared to.
just hyper liquid the platform and what people are doing there and what people are using it for too, right?
Like that they've had so much more success.
Like I think the volume of all of their oil and SMP trading, especially over the weekends is more than like 2X the volume of basically anything else on the platform except for maybe Bitcoin.
And I think their volume on Hyper-EVM is like nothing.
It's barely anything.
Do you guys feel like that is something that they're going to keep around?
Should they?
Should they try and turn it into something or does it make more sense for Hyperliquid to just kind of shutter that or sweep it under the rug and just focus on the platform, which works so well?
I think it makes sense for them to keep it.
I think building an ecosystem where others can come and build on top of it and launch new ideas and focus on new ideas that can lead to more user growth and ultimately lead to more revenue, et cetera, is a good thing.
They shouldn't shutter the platform that they have.
They shouldn't stop focusing on that and start focusing solely on Hyper EVM.
But I do think that broadening the ecosystem and allowing entrepreneurs and innovators to come explore new ideas that maybe wouldn't have worked on other blockchains or wouldn't have worked five years ago for the reasons that Matt outlined.
infrastructure or regulatory or other types of blockers.
And so I do think it makes sense.
Like a lot of companies do one thing very, very well.
And when they branch out, they aren't as good as those other things.
And they probably would have been better off staying focused on the one thing they do very well.
But these networks have ways of...
of growing and attracting more use cases over time.
I think we've seen that with Solana.
We've seen that with Ethereum.
I think we'll see that with HyperEVM.
It just does take a bit of time.
And they've had such success with the HyperLiquid platform that it's hard to measure up against.
But I think we'll look back 10 years from now in HyperLiquid, the ecosystem will be significantly larger and there will be things that exist that we can't even think of today or haven't been created today.
But the underlying infrastructure being there is really important.
Yeah, I think I agree with that.
I don't feel like, oh, this team is unfocused.
They're finding their lead on the perp side.
If only they would buckle down and work a little bit more.
That's not the sense that I get.
And therefore, yeah, I like sort of the optionality that Ryan's throwing out there.
Absolutely.
My last question for you guys about Hyperliquid is actually more related to what you guys are doing with the ETF, which is I think you're taking 10% of the fees and just buying hype or holding hype.
on the bitwise balance sheet tell me tell me how that works is that something you guys do for for all etfs or is that only a hyper liquid thing i think the goal there was to to align with sort of hyperliquids uh buyback mentality right and uh and show our alignment with that community it's also a great asset to hold on the balance sheet so we made that commitment on hyperliquid we do hold other assets on the balance sheet as well but but in in you know, we're huge fans of hype and huge fans of Hyperliquid and the community ethos.
And so that's just one more way of aligning behind that.
Yeah.
I would just add to that is the single asset crypto ETF space is highly competitive.
There's...
a ton of issuers and a lot of being first to market has to do with timing of regulatory filings and you're constrained in different ways and how you can go about that, whether it's legal resources or priorities or something like that.
Right.
And so the way to compete on these things is through the management fee or otherwise.
Right.
And the otherwise in the case of Hyperliquid is using a portion of those fees.
to buy hype and hold it on the balance sheet.
So yes, it's a way to be aligned with the community.
Yes, it's reflective of our conviction, Hyperliquid and what it's built and where we think it'll go from here.
But it's also a way for us to show investors in ETFs that, you know, when you choose a crypto specialist that, you know, for lack of a better term, puts their money where their mouth is, then you can believe they're going to be there for the long term and next to you.
And there's other things you can do as well, right?
Like publishing the address of the underlying holdings so that investors can see the assets that you hold or staking in-house the hype assets to ensure that you get the best rewards and the lowest take rate of those rewards so that the end investor ultimately gets the best experience and the best return.
And so I think it's just one of the ways to compete in this highly competitive space.
And so, you know, it's great.
Yeah, but we do recognize that we sit on top of this incredible ecosystem.
So whenever we launch products, we think about ways that we can give back to that ecosystem.
You know, we donate 10% of the proceeds from our Bitcoin ETF to open source core devs.
That's an example of ways to support the ecosystem that support the products that allows Ryan to pay for lunch.
So we like to do that.
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Okay, I just realized there's a bunch of other stuff I want to ask you guys about today.
And I don't want to run out of time.
One thing I do want to mention, Matt, is that...
you've said many times on the show that there's 600 trillion dollars of assets in the world and that we are the very start of bringing those things on chain and i actually repeat that to other people and i and i and i quote it back to you okay i don't i don't i don't i don't plagiarize it i use it to plug your appearances while i'm talking to other people on other episodes that people keep listening for when you come back um but it does feel like do you feel like hyperliquid like this is an obvious question but how well is hyperliquid positioned to continue to capture that and what and what do they need to absolutely nail over the next couple of years yeah be a big part of that like we all think they can be Great question.
Enormously well, right?
Like half their volume is now non-crypto assets.
As I said in my memo, I think this is one of the mistakes that people are making.
They're evaluating hype as playing on the $3 trillion crypto economy, not something 200 times bigger, right?
That is their playground.
It's all global assets.
They're extremely well positioned.
They're the best positioned within crypto to tackle that today.
What they will need to do, obviously, is carefully negotiate.
the open global composable approach they're taking to the market with modern regulatory infrastructure because right now uh they're attracting individual investors and they're attracting hedge fund investors they're attracting some market makers but there's a huge chunk of international capital that won't feel comfortable playing in the hyper liquid sandbox until there is more additional regulatory progress things like the etf actually help because it brings access to the asset within a regulated wrapper but it doesn't solve the core question so i think that's going to be it look one thing you're seeing in the market is everyone realizes that perps in particular are going to play a bigger role in our financial future than they are today so you've seen large entities uh like ice and cme push back on the growth of hyperliquids specifically on that regulatory question because they're trying to carve out their own space in this rapidly emerging uh sort of perps worldview so i think the big thing they have to nail is how they balance their crypto native roots with the modern regulatory infrastructure and tap into a broader wave of assets i suspect that they're well positioned to figure that out over the coming years however and we certainly have a regulatory environment that's relatively supportive for that sort of effort.
Got it.
Ryan, what do you think?
Yeah, I agree with what Matt said there.
I think that, you know, when you see incumbents.
trying to push back and fight back, then you have a, you know, that's a sign that the newcomer's onto something and that they see opportunity there, not only for their market share to be taken, but for them to stand up businesses of their own, take advantage of this new, fast growing market.
So I think the regulatory question is extremely important.
One of the things that...
Hyperliquid has going for itself is that it's emerging at this time where the regulatory environment is welcoming and friendly, whereas many of these things that emerged in the prior cycles were fighting against regulators and had to actively avoid some of the biggest markets in the world because if they tried to get into those markets, they would be sued and arrested.
And Hyperliquid right now doesn't...
doesn't exist in that kind of market.
It's not emerging into that kind of a market.
And I think that's really important and part of the reason why timing matters when it comes to these things.
You can have a great idea, but horrible timing, or you can have a great idea and timing can work as a tailwind.
And I think for Hyperliquid, it's a great idea in the regulatory environment and the timing is a big tailwind.
Makes sense.
All right.
All right.
Last, last question on Hyperliquid.
If you go on Hyperliquid, you can...
place, you can leverage longs and shorts on Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, and others too.
There's other pre-market companies there.
Which one out of those three, Anthropic's at 1.4 trillion, OpenAI at 1.4 trillion almost, and SpaceX at 2.3 trillion.
Which one is overpriced or underpriced?
It's not a crypto question, but it's a hyper liquid question.
It's something I'm looking at.
It's a fun answer.
It's not financial advice.
We have to pick one?
Sure.
Any hot take on any of those.
I just find it so fascinating that you can do that and that you can track it.
And there's other ways to track it, non-crypto ways.
But I do find that that's one interesting thing that gets a decent amount of volume as well.
And those three combined have like $12 million of open interest, which it's not peanuts.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think I'm just looking at some other companies.
It feels to me strongly like Anthropic is undervalued at that level.
So that's my first take.
Wow.
The reason for it.
It's an AI show now.
Well, look, I don't know.
You look at other $1.4 trillion companies.
Is it?
Do I use Anthropic more or less than Facebook today?
I use it way more.
Do I use it more or less than, I mean, Samsung?
I don't know.
It feels like a reasonable valuation.
$3 trillion for SpaceX is a very big bet.
That's Amazon level.
I'm excited for SpaceX, but that's a very big bet.
I think it depends on your time horizon.
But if you zoom out and say, what will the world look like in 20 years?
It's easier to see a world where AI is absolutely a smashing success and these Anthropic and OpenAI are still the biggest companies in the world.
It's easy to say, well, of course, if we crack space exploration, then like SpaceX is going to be the biggest company in the world.
But I think that's a much riskier bet.
So on a risk adjusted basis, I go with one of the AI companies.
Claude's done a remarkable job gaining market share from OpenAI.
I mean, it's really been incredible to see.
And they've attracted a lot of really strong talent.
And they're an organization that focuses on talent.
And as far as I'm aware, it doesn't have some of the kind of like troubled past that OpenAI has in terms of the...
the nonprofit, the for-profit, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, like, you know, ousting of the founders, this kind of thing.
And so for all those reasons, I think to answer your question, and of course, not financial advice, I would choose Anthropic, but I'm famous for buying tops.
And so who knows?
The rare AI divergence on this show with you guys.
Let's bring it back to crypto.
Guys, I got to totally, totally pivot to something that is also very hot right now, but not necessarily for the right reasons, which is Ethereum.
Going through a bit of a transition in identity, at least in terms of the public face of the company.
We've talked about it a lot on the show this week and last week, but I do want to get kind of your thoughts on it.
We had a lot of people.
depart the Ethereum Foundation.
Vitalik wrote a letter about basically saying like they're going to continue on their mission, but that somebody else needs to take up the more, you know, biz dev aspect of Ethereum to kind of proliferate a little bit like sort of like Solana Foundation has done for Solana and a bit of other drama kind of surrounding Ethereum in the space.
Price hasn't really budged.
It hasn't, it's not something that's going to immediately tank price.
Inevitably, Ethereum has also been this kind of butt end of the joke.
you know, for a while now that, you know, you could have bought Micron two days ago and not performed Ethereum for six, for the last six years.
Where do you guys, you know, as you guys, as people that deal with institutions a lot, you create products in the space where people can invest.
Where is Ethereum sitting in the conversation right now?
Especially as we see something like Hyperliquid, a totally new product that is way younger than something like Ethereum, really make inflows and really show that it's something that's very functional.
Whereas Ethereum feels like it could be a little bit more of a no man's land.
Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to start and then can see what Matt's thoughts are.
Look, I think Ethereum has been facing this problem now for many years.
And there's been signs of life that, great, they're refocused on shipping and innovation.
And the five pillar plan by 2029 to solve speed and throughput and privacy and quantum was...
really remarkable, right?
But then you have these setbacks along the way.
And so I do think they're facing somewhat of a crisis when you have these other ecosystems that are showing so much strength and promising growth that have outperformed Ethereum.
But if you look at its hold on the market.
It still has a remarkable share of tokenization, of DeFi, of stable coins.
And I think those things matter.
Like those are real moats and it's sticky capital.
And I think that I'm confident that Ethereum will figure these things out.
But would I like to see more of a focus on the economics of the platform?
Yes.
As an investor, I would love to see that in a more clear narrative.
But we're very long term oriented here at Bitwise.
And I think, you know, companies go through growing pains all the time.
And if you think of these things as companies, when you're investing in them, I think Ethereum is going through growing pains.
And, you know, but I'm optimistic on the future of Ethereum.
Yeah.
I agree with that.
I'm optimistic on the long-term future of Ethereum.
I think it faces a real narrative challenge and it will probably dwell in that challenge for the next six months.
That's my guess.
You know, it has had these departures, you know, it has the bankless forfeit as well.
Look, it ultimately needs to answer two questions.
Will the bulk of the world's financial assets move over Ethereum-based rails?
And is block space ultimately a commodity or can it...
have some degree of rent or prioritization fees or something that allows it to be economically significant.
One of the problems I see in the Ethereum community is that it's very hard to criticize the bad arguments for why Ethereum has value because you're immediately sort of attacked from the people in that community.
I think if we could have a more honest conversation about what drives Ethereum's value long term, I think the asset would be better off.
Ultimately, I think if it creates, if it continues on its trajectory of dominating the world of tokenized assets and stable coins as the underlying rail, there are lots of ways to monetize that that lead to valuations that are higher than they are today.
But there's probably too much sort of woo-woo hand raising about where the value comes from that I find sort of difficult to parse.
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Yeah, definitely.
I feel like it's also under a microscope right now just because crypto is in kind of a tough spot, which is also something we always like hearing from you guys as well.
And I think we last spoke right after the Senate Banking Committee had passed the Clarity Act draft.
I'm not sure exactly when that was.
But as usual, guys, to kind of wrap this up, I want to get from each of you.
How do you feel about the general sense of the market at this point in time?
Because there definitely seems to be some good energy, despite some of the Ethereum stuff.
There's good energy behind certain narratives, like you were saying, Matt, earlier with the hyperliquids and the privacy tokens as well.
How do you see the next...
What's your thesis look like through the rest of the summer?
How much of that has changed since our last show?
Well, let me give you that.
But one more thing on Ethereum.
It's in a better place than it was a couple of years ago.
Yeah.
Right?
the Justin Drake 10-year plan to improve Ethereum when it just felt like it was foundering and lost.
It's in a much better place now, even with the Crops Initiative, which I think actually will resonate with people long-term, even with the realignment of the foundation.
So I think the trajectory has improved.
It's better positioned.
It has a better plan.
It's executing better.
I suspect that will continue.
So I'm aligned with Ryan that this is sort of like a seasonality and we're near a modal low.
And I suspect sort of the vibes will improve over time as it continues on its faster trajectory.
Broadly speaking, I think the same thing is true in crypto.
So we're in this sort of interesting malaise period where people are rotating to other hot assets.
They're printing money in memory stocks overnight.
You know, their AI is all the rage.
So it's sucking some of the oxygen out of the room.
Crypto is meanwhile in this sort of holding pattern, waiting for the Clarity Act to pass, waiting for the real growth of stable coins and tokenization to accelerate.
And during that holding period, it's picking out areas that are particularly interesting.
It's picking out hyperliquid as, oh, that's a green shoot.
It's picking out near, that's a green shoot.
This is like the most classic coming out of crypto winter experience that you can have.
Right.
Sentiment is relatively low.
Some people are exhausted and leaving the ecosystem.
But when you look closely, you can see green shoots of enormous growth.
You can imagine how those turn into trees and whole new fields.
You know, we were talking about this rise of a new generation of Gen 2 tokens.
You can imagine that being an extremely strong narrative in 2027 and 2028.
You have major VC funds like Han Ventures and A16Z raising billions of dollars to invest specifically in that.
You have exciting things going on with ARK and Tempo and Canton.
There's enough green shoots that at least I can see how this turns into the next major crypto bull market.
But just like early 2019 or, you know, just like after FTX, it still feels a little dark.
I think it's going to be a pretty great second half of the year and a really great 2027.
But I wouldn't be surprised at all if this sort of summer funk persisted because people can't sort of see past it and see this just a typical pattern repeating again.
I completely agree.
I think people are unaware of the fact that we're in a deep bear market right now.
Like, I think one of the reasons.
folks are unaware of that is because Bitcoin is trading at 75,000.
And that's a really high price for Bitcoin if you have been in the space for five plus years, right?
Like that was a number that was hard to cross many years ago.
And yes, we hit 125 last October.
Wasn't that long ago, actually, when we hit all time highs.
And so we're in this bear market.
I think people are a little bit disillusioned with where we're actually at in this cycle.
But you were in this stage of apathy.
You have people deserting.
ecosystems they've been aligned with for nearly a decade.
You know, I had a dinner with a friend the other night and they said, I'm selling all my crypto.
I'm literally going to Vegas and going to put it all on blackjack.
Like that's like the bear market.
And that's a real conversation I had.
That's like the level of bear market that we're in right now.
And I think people forget that because you have these little like green shoots, as Matt mentioned.
But if you zoom out and look at past cycles.
This is the kind of thing that happens after you bottomed out and you kind of start to emerge.
You need those people that are going to desert to desert.
And it's a good time to take a step back and say, what do I want to own for the next cycle?
And I think people are expressing what they want to own for the next cycle by investing in things like Hyperliquid.
I think there's going to be many winners in the future of crypto.
a strong believer that crypto is here to stay for the long term.
Don't get disillusioned by the fact that every day is not an update.
The reality is that we're in a bear market, but I think we're coming out of it.
And I don't even know how we could say anything else after that.
That's just Ryan summed it up so perfectly.
Gentlemen, thank you for your time.
Congrats on the Hyperliquid success.
Thank you for putting that out there as well as a Hyperliquid fan and holding myself.
I love to see support for the ecosystem and you guys making it easy for a lot of people to buy in as well.
Lots of great stuff coming there.
And we'll see you guys again in a few weeks.
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