# Institutional Bitcoin Allocation & Market Decoupling Strategies

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-06-12

## Transcript

But I always come back to fundamentals.
You know, what can we actually observe fundamentally, not in the price or the noise?
And every day I see more people adopting this.
Bitcoin is here to stay, but why do so many investors still not have any in their portfolios?
And what is it going to take for them to get off zero?
Hello and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the podcast that's always here to remind you that you do not have enough Bitcoin.
I'm your host, John Gillen.
Today is Thursday, June 11th.
And today we are joined by Chris Kuyper.
Chris is the vice president of research at Fidelity Digital Assets, where he leads the firm's research on digital assets and provides insights on the asset class to institutional investors and to self-directed investors alike.
Previously, Chris built a successful career in equity research and holds a master's degree in economics.
Chris is one of my favorite people to talk to about the institutional take on Bitcoin.
So if all that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who needs to get off zero.
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Without further ado, welcome to the Milk Road Show, Chris Kuyper.
How are you, sir?
Very good.
Thanks for having me on.
Chris, I'm really excited to talk to you.
Every time we have a conversation, we have you on the show.
I always learn a lot.
But before we dig into your recent research and reports, I'd like to get your thoughts on where Bitcoin is today.
Do you think that the bear market has bottomed?
Are we going to see new lows this summer?
What's your outlook on Bitcoin here?
The sentiment is...
probably the worst I've ever seen or experienced in my career here.
So it's pretty bad.
It's hard to imagine how it could go lower.
But that being said, of course, things can always get worse before they get better.
So certainly I'm not going to be too bold as to make a short term prediction here.
What I will see, though, is what I will say is that all the metrics we look at, they're really all flashing the same thing, which is Bitcoin is in this very depressed, deep value territory, if you will.
So meaning at least historically, When we look at these metrics, when Bitcoin was showing these levels before, these were readings at or near the bottom.
And then the subsequent 6, 12, or sometimes longer, 24 months later, Bitcoin has been much higher.
Now, again, that's just historical.
These bottoming processes can take a lot of time.
They can take months, quarters, maybe even a year or more.
So anything can happen in the short term.
But this is certainly one of the lowest readings we've gotten on both the sentiment side and just from like a momentum RSI relative strength index side as well.
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I think those two words, depressed and deep value, really capture a lot of both sides of the market here.
I'd like to get your thoughts on why we've seen this weakness from Bitcoin, especially at a time where we've seen such strong bullish momentum, this AI-driven bull run in the equities markets.
Bitcoin has sort of decoupled since October 10th.
And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts or insights around why we've seen that in the markets and what caused it, when does it end, or just any insights on that you'd like to share.
Well, I think one of the major reasons is what you just said exactly.
The momentum in the stock market, especially amongst some of these AI plays, the chip makers, anything related to that.
People want momentum.
There's a lot of people that like to ride momentum.
Momentum is a well-defined.
uh factor you know i come from the the money management world before this and it's one of the persistent factors it's a bit of anomaly almost every academic and market practitioner will tell you momentum is real it's a thing there's a lot of disagreement as to why it exists or why it can outperform but it's definitely there and so there's a lot of people that want this momentum Most people can't hold dollars in more than one thing at a time.
There's opportunity cost, right?
And so they've rotated out of Bitcoin and other digital assets and they've rotated into the latest thing showing momentum because like we just said, we were at one of the lowest RSI readings for Bitcoin especially.
And then looking over here at stock market making new all time highs, a lot of momentum there.
And so really, it is just as simple as that.
There's just been a lot of vacuuming or taking the air out of digital assets, crypto, Bitcoin, everything in between.
And everybody's mind space, the headlines, the attention, the money flows after that.
That's all going to these other things.
One of the silver linings of this, though, is that we look at correlations.
And before Bitcoin was highly correlated to tech stocks.
Now it's not correlated to anything.
Everything is going up, including things like gold and silver and all these other things.
But Bitcoin is not.
And so I think that's actually a great thing.
You don't want.
high correlations, because then you lose a reason to put it in your portfolio, you want to add things that have low correlation or even negative correlation.
So it's as one person just said, I was on another podcast, they said maybe it wasn't the the decoupling or the the break in correlation that we wanted, but it's the one that we deserved.
So here we are today.
Yeah, that's a nice silver lining on that.
But I think there's also been a lot of frustration that's come from this.
And I think, you know, the term rage quitting has been thrown around a lot.
Mark Cuban publicly said that he thinks Bitcoin's lost the plot.
He sold most of his Bitcoin.
Michael Saylor sold a little Bitcoin and that got a very sour reaction from the market.
What are you making of this?
very strong, almost like apocalyptic sentiment that we've seen in 2026.
And like you said, the decoupling we didn't want, but we got.
And when do you think this ends?
Do you think Bitcoin eventually does rejoin that bull market?
Do you think this divergence continues for longer?
What's your thoughts on this?
I think what you're seeing, and not specifically to those people you mentioned, but just in general, what you're seeing is, if I could be so bold to say is the environment might actually be too good for Bitcoin right now.
If you just look at this from a macro perspective, and I think there's a lot to say about the K-shaped economy and some of these indicators underneath all of this, but if you take just a very surface level, very high aggregate level look at the macro economy, you've got the stock market at all-time highs.
You've got inflation relatively low, and now it's picking up, which is something we're watching very closely and something we've written on.
Unemployment's been pretty tame and low.
Job reports are pretty good.
credit spreads, narrowest they've ever been.
So this says there's not a lot of stress in the credit markets, which is also what you see when times are very, very good.
And so people are, you know, somewhat rightly asking, why do I need Bitcoin?
Everything else is working out great.
Everything is doing well for me.
Everything is going up and performing well.
The macro environment is great.
Why would I need Bitcoin?
But that's just it, you know.
We want it to have that negative correlation.
So we don't want it to be doing well when everything else is doing well.
And not that I want bad things or negative things to happen.
But as investors, we build portfolios for any environment we might come across.
And so that's, of course, one of the reasons you might consider putting Bitcoin in your portfolio, because maybe you don't need it now.
Maybe you don't think or you're questioning what's the point of this now.
But I personally believe there will come a time, whether that's inflation rearing its head.
credit spreads blowing out.
Whatever it is, people are once again going to realize that they do need Bitcoin's investment characteristics, mainly the fact that it's got absolute scarcity.
It's censorship resistant.
It's this potential hedge against monetary debasement and inflation.
And so eventually those things will come back.
And then I do think we will see Bitcoin regain some of its footing for sure.
When I was at BlackRock, the firm published a piece, a white paper called Bitcoin, a unique diversifier.
And I think that resonates a lot with what you're saying here, which is that this uncorrelation we're seeing in Bitcoin kind of does bolster the thesis because it means it's going to be a different kind of an asset in your portfolio and not just move with the whole rest of the market.
Chris, I talked about this forever, but I want to get into some of the research you've written recently.
And I wanted to start with a report that you, I believe, initially wrote on in 2020, but updated recently.
in 2026 called Getting Off Zero, Evaluating Bitcoin in 2026.
And this is around the idea of investors who don't have any allocation to Bitcoin, you know, getting to a thesis that makes sense for them, getting off zero.
Walk us through what's in this report at a high level, but why did you choose to revise this report now in 2026?
Great question.
We went back to it because number one, a lot of investors, especially institutional investors, I'm sure not your listeners, but a lot of institutional investors, the big money, they're still on zero.
So we still had to come back to this question or this idea of getting off zero.
And second, we just wanted to update the data and say, does this still hold?
So the report goes through Bitcoin's investment thesis, its core investment thesis, which we still view it as an emerging monetary good that is being adopted.
And because of that, it's one of its ultimate potential functions is as a hedge against currency debasement, and then therefore also a hedge against consumer price inflation.
And so we find those are still intact from a first principles perspective.
And then we go through the actual data.
If you're just objectively looking at this as an investor would, an institutional investor, you're looking at the returns, you're looking at the risk, the dispersion of returns.
If you're looking at the drawdowns, if you're looking at how it interacts with other things in your portfolio is the correlation we go through all of those things.
And we really want to flip this on its head where we say to institutional investors, why is your allocation zero and to be clear, some investors zero may be the right the right allocation for them for a variety of reasons.
But at least they need to do the work and come up with a good reason as to why that is and actually go through the exercise.
So we do all of that.
The next section is then more on the mechanics of it.
It's like, okay, I want some exposure.
Where do I take it from?
Which bucket, bonds or stocks, the risk bucket or not?
How big of a position do I take?
We provide a historical model as well as a forward-looking model on how to look at that.
And then some of the other stuff, like how do you rebalance or how do you maintain the position?
And then the final part of the paper is we take more of a forward looking view.
The 60-40 portfolio, we look at both the 60 side and the bond 40 side and say, here's some headwinds that we see coming for both of these.
And this is why Bitcoin may make sense to add into a portfolio.
Okay, that's a really helpful overview, Chris.
And I want to drill down on some of the details in this report.
And you mentioned this a little bit, but you talk a lot about the 60-40 portfolio in this report and evaluate how investors think about this allocation, where it sits in that.
How do you see this evolving?
Because a lot of asset managers I've heard say that the 60-40 portfolio is just dead.
But talk to me about that and where you see this situated in that, how you think about it.
Yeah, so our forward-looking part on the end, we'll take each in turn.
So on the 60 side, the equity side, which, of course, everyone's talking about today, stocks at all-time highs, which is great.
It's been one of the best runs, the best decade for stocks in a very long time.
And there could be a number of great reasons for that.
But if you look at the valuation of the stock market on a very aggregate basis, A pretty crude measure is the PE ratio.
We take the CAPE, the CA, Cyclically Adjusted PE Ratio from Professor Robert Schiller at Yale.
And it's a pretty simple measure where it's just taking the last 10 years of PE data.
So you're smoothing out some of the fluctuations you get in earnings, hopefully getting you more towards a true cash earnings, not just accounting earnings for these companies.
And it shows that when you've invested, when this CAPE ratio is very, very high, your subsequent 10-year returns are quite low.
And there's a great chart in the report that you can see this.
The relationship is very, very tight for almost 100 years.
And this should make sense to investors.
It's the old Warren Buffett adage or whoever said it.
In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine.
In the long term, it's a weighing machine.
So you've got a lot of sentiment and noise and narrative, exactly like we're seeing with digital assets right now in the short term.
But in the long term, the fundamentals usually bear out, right?
And so what's really interesting is recently that CAPE ratio and the subsequent 10-year returns have diverged.
And they've diverged the most they've ever diverged.
So you're left with a conundrum here as an investor.
Number one, you can say the four most dangerous words in finance.
This time is different.
I'm only half joking about that.
Of course, there's good reasons that this time may be different.
We're in a totally different economy with some of these mega corporations.
They've got massive moats, great free cash flow.
They've got network effects like you've never seen.
And maybe...
the latest ai capex excluding they've been very fairly capital light businesses so you might say well well that's the difference here you know years ago you were talking about railroad companies or something so that those those models no longer hold so that's a fair point maybe this model doesn't hold anymore and this divergence is is not a concern The other way to look at it, though, is to say, no, there will be some mean reversion here.
And even though the stock market's done very well, this tells you that you probably should temper your expectations for the stock market to do as well as it has in the next 10 years.
Doesn't mean it has to crash or anything, but it might take a long.
time of just moving sideways for these earnings and cash flows to catch up to the valuation.
So in other words, you're already priced for perfection here.
You're priced for these companies to continue to deliver absolute stellar excellent results, which they may do, but if they fall short, you're going to see that in your returns.
That's one headwind we see for the equity markets.
And then the bond market, I think, is even more interesting because typically this has been your ballast, your counterweight in your portfolio.
It's had low to negative correlation to stocks, and its risk in terms of its standard deviation, you know how much it moves, is very, very low.
And so if you look at the nominal drawdown for bonds, it's it goes down maybe you know long-term bonds even you know longer duration which which have even more fluctuation they go down you know a few percent uh every so often and that's why people love them they say you know i can keep my money safe here But the chart we show is that you really need to look at your bond returns on an inflation adjusted basis, because that's what you can take home.
That's what you can eat.
That's what you can retire on or spend your retirement in.
And so that's what really matters.
And if you look at that in periods of high inflation, you had a four decade, 40 year period where you were underwater on bonds and you had a drawdown of 40, 50 percent at one time.
Today, you're looking at a 30% drawdown for long-term bonds because inflation continues to run above the Fed's target.
And again, we got another hot CPI print this morning or yesterday, was it, right?
So that's one of the concerns we have with the 40 portfolio.
Again, not to say that, you know.
what's right for people is to not allocate at all.
But just to start thinking about like, we've got a couple big headwinds on the two biggest asset classes.
Maybe it makes sense to look at Bitcoin in varying amounts as an alternative to help offset or alleviate some of that stress.
Do you think institutions think of Bitcoin as an alternative?
Do they think of it as a tech stock?
Do they think of it as something else?
How do they think about that?
positioning in their portfolio?
Or does it matter at all?
Or like, how do you see those conversations evolving?
It does for the institutional investors, they have to be very clear on how they look at these things.
And it really depends on the investor.
it's still the case today that a lot of them look at it from a risk perspective.
A lot of institutional investors are more concerned about risk than they are return because they need to preserve capital, especially if you're thinking of like a pension fund or endowment.
You do not want to lose that seed capital, right?
Again, Warren Buffett's rule number one, don't lose all your money or destroy all your capital rule number two.
Don't forget about rule number one.
So they look at it from a risk perspective.
So they're looking at some of them have a risk budget.
where they actually have only so much volatility they can handle.
And then they look at blending in Bitcoin, like how much of that risk budget will it take up?
Others of them look at it other ways.
I do think characteristically, if you look at the characteristics of the investment asset or class itself, it looks a lot more like an alternative.
And institutional investors have been investing in alts for years now, decades.
They're actually a larger percentage of a lot of institutional.
portfolios than even bonds now.
So they'll have 20, 30, even up to 40% in the alts bucket.
But that can range anything from precious metals, real estate commodities to really exotic stuff, you know, antiques, art, collectibles, whatever have you.
The point we like to make, though, is like if you're already investing in alternatives.
Bitcoin has the same characteristics that you want an alternative.
Why do you invest in alternatives?
Well, you want some more return.
You want non-correlated returns.
You want some asymmetry or a potential asymmetry where you've got more upside than downside.
Bitcoin has all of those things, but it improves on a lot of the drawbacks of alternatives, which are.
They're not liquid.
You can't mark to market.
You have no idea its value until you try to go and sell it.
You got to store it, transport it, insure it, make sure it's not a fake or genuine.
Those are all things that come along, especially with the exotic alternatives.
And Bitcoin has none of those things.
So there's, you know, a couple other little risks with Bitcoin in terms of the technology.
But if you look at it compared to alts, I think it's a really interesting proposition for institutional investors to consider it from that lens.
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Yeah, there's a lot of advantages to having Bitcoin as opposed to a Picasso painting.
I can see why that would be a more liquid market there.
Okay, so let me ask you this.
You've talked a lot about how to think about this in terms of positioning it in an investor's portfolio.
What are the biggest objections you're still hearing?
Because after six years to go back to this get off zero thesis, there must still be a lot of friction, a lot of objections.
What is it that you think is holding up a lot of institutions right now?
Is it regulatory clarity?
Is it something else?
What are you hearing the most right now?
The hardest part of this question is we get the reasons or excuses, I like to say, the excuse du jour as to why someone's on zero.
And it's always hard to tell if that's the real hang up or if they're just saying, like I said, the excuse du jour because they know they don't want to or can't for whatever reason and they just want to give the latest sophisticated sounding.
reason for that.
And when I first started at Fidelity, almost five years ago now, the excuse to juror was was really, really elementary.
It was like, this isn't a real thing.
This isn't real technology.
It's just code.
There's no value here.
It's only used for illicit purposes.
And now they've moved to two reasons such as, you know, I don't know how to hold it in a compliant way, or I'm not sure about, you know, some of the other technicalities of it.
So the goalposts have moved.
And I think that's a good Good thing to see because they're at least taking it more seriously.
They're thinking about it more from an actual mechanical perspective, not like just writing the whole thing off.
But we still have yet to see a huge amount of movement here.
You know, it's always happening at the margin.
But eventually, I think that will come, especially as we do get more regulatory clarity, as we do get more infrastructure from the major banks being announced and built every single week or day almost that we've seen.
So I think it will come, but it just takes a lot of time.
One of the things that stuck out to me from this report personally was a question you answered around how to think about building the position, right?
Like, should you sell or trade the cycles?
Should you DCA?
A line that really stuck out to me was funding choices and rebalancing approaches tend to have marginal impact relative to the initial allocation decision.
And I wonder if you could just elaborate on that, what you mean by that, and just tell us a little bit more about what that means for investors.
Yes, this is directed at...
Some of the people who say, okay, I want exposure, but then they go back and forth over deciding where they get the funding from.
Do they take it from the equity side, the risk side, or the bond side, or out of the alt sleeve, or whatever it is, and then maybe they decide that, or another person is going back and forth with their board on how to rebalance.
Do you do it quarterly or around certain targets or bands or annually?
And what we showed with the data is there's very marginal difference in all of these decisions.
not surprisingly, get off zero.
That's going to make the biggest impact on your portfolio to just get exposure.
So again, getting back to that previous example of excuse to juror, like if you find yourself in a boardroom or someone going back and forth or arguing over these things, just remember, this is probably not going to make or break whether or not this outperforms or not.
The question will be whether you decide to get off zero and get exposure in the first place.
Chris, you and your team publish a lot of incredible research, not just on Bitcoin, but on all digital assets.
Another report that you recently published I want to talk to you about is your Q2 signals report.
And this is driven a lot by on-chain metrics and things like that.
Tell our audience a little bit about this report.
And then, yeah, we'll dive into a little bit more what's in this.
But like, talk to us about the signals report and the takeaways from Q2.
Yeah, we first started this report trying to get the institutional investor base to understand that there's these new...
data sets, these new signals that can be derived from on-chain metrics, on-chain data.
And that's very new.
You know, I come from the traditional equity research world and everyone's familiar with all the financial ratios, but now all of a sudden you have visibility into actual transactions and who's holding how much, and it's a whole new world.
And so we really wanted to introduce people to what are these metrics?
What are some of the ones to watch?
We published them in a wonderful interactive PDF, we explained them, and we really threw a ton of metrics in there.
And then just most recently, we revamped this entire report.
And we said, rather than throwing everything out there, let's, let's whittle it down to what we think are actual signals here.
What's what are the ones that if you run them through the statistical analysis, do some more rigor, rigorous work on this statistically.
which metrics actually show a relationship between where the reading's at and then where, at least historically, returns have gone 3, 6, 12, 24 months after that.
And so that's what we did.
filtered it down to those that actually show some statistically significant signal or relationships.
And then we put that in the report as well.
So it's like if a reading is at x, historically, when it's been at this level, the forward returns have been y.
And so hopefully that gives our investor base a lot more context as to how to read these and actually use them.
Do you think that the institutional investor community is beginning to understand the value of a lot of these on-chain analytics and these metrics that you're able to derive from this?
Is this still something that's new and foreign to them?
Or like, what's the adoption or just like understanding you've seen the uptake from these reports and all this research you've been doing?
It varies quite widely.
There's some that are barely dipping their toes in and they're just understanding Bitcoin first, which we highly recommend.
Not saying you have to buy that one only or first, but it does make sense to start there.
And Bitcoin, as you know, it's an...
its own unique category, right?
So it's got its own bucket of on-chain metrics.
The one where we see more uptick, though, are institutional investors that come from backgrounds like myself.
Maybe they're used to analyzing companies.
And then they start drawing these analogies.
They start looking at some of these other chains, and especially like L1s and stuff.
And they say, oh, these things have fees.
They have revenue.
They have expenses.
They're doing token burns.
That's somewhat like a stock buyback or something like that.
So they can start to make these analogies and parallels.
And that really allows them to catch on to some of this a lot a lot faster i think okay so the people who are used to research and equities research A lot of this resonates with them.
And then some people are still getting up to speed.
I think that's where a lot of the market is.
Some people are still new.
Some people are experts.
I want to ask you about this.
This stood out to me a lot from this report because this is something I've felt personally.
You said that network activity increasingly diverges from price.
I think this was referring particularly to Ethereum and Solana.
But you said this highlights sustained utility at the protocol level.
And I'd love to hear you elaborate a bit more on this.
What do you think is causing this divergence between this accelerating protocol usage?
and sort of this, you know, let's say softness, this bear market we've seen in some of the prices of these digital assets?
The basic answer is just sentiment, right?
Prices down because everyone has got really negative sentiment.
They're going to sell no matter what the fundamentals are doing.
But I think there's really two different layers or levels to this.
Number one is there are some, and of course, some who have come up publicly recently saying this protocol or this chain or whatever has no way to capture.
value, there's no value accrual to the token holder.
And that's, that's a very fundamental view, like a first principles view of like, there's no way this thing is ever going to be worth anything, basically, they've come to that decision.
But there's, there's others, though, where what you're really just showing or saying is that every one of these, especially if you look at it through an investor lens, all of these chains have have embedded expectations in them about their growth.
And you're signing on to that as an investor, whether you realize it or not.
It's no different than buying a stock, right?
The market is forward looking.
So it's pricing what they think this company or stock or chain will earn in the future for a certain period of time or indefinitely.
So really what's going on then is those expectations that were very, very high before.
are coming down or the fundamentals are not matching those really, really high expectations.
And so the price or the value has to come down.
And so that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Of course, it hurts for anyone who's experiencing that, but it's the market at work figuring out what these things are worth, right?
And so that's why you can have price coming down while fundamentals are still going up.
Fundamentals might be going up in a positive direction, but if they're not going up as fast or they're not at a high enough level, that people thought they were going to be years ago, then those expectations are not matching reality.
And so price has to come down to account for that.
Where do you land on this debate?
Because I actually got into a debate with a guy named David Hoffman, who hosts an Ethereum podcast about this exact question.
But do you think that...
prices for things like Ethereum, Solana, or just generally digital assets are going to resolve higher as this sustained and strengthening fundamentals and protocol adoption continues?
Or are you more in the camp that says that these projects are going to add value and create value, but not capture a lot of that value?
Where do you fall on that spectrum right now?
And how do you think about that question?
I'll be I'm always careful to not get out of my circle of competence or wheelhouse.
So I'll definitely have one of our analysts on or point you to some of our research by them because this is something they are really in the weeds on and not to put words in their mouth.
But I think they're certainly in the camp of, look, these things, these things obviously have value.
People are using them.
We can see that people are paying to use them of real hard money, whether that's a token or not, that's worth something.
And so obviously there's value being created.
But I think it's more a question of what is that value worth?
What are the embedded expectations?
So I think it's more of the latter part of just differences in valuation versus the former of the debate of like, oh, this thing has no value whatsoever.
Right now, it does get really nuanced, right?
Like, how does it actually capture that?
And that's where I think it gets really interesting.
And I'm not going to stray too far out of what I know, only to say that a lot of this is changing.
change both its narratives and through its upgrades as to what it does with L2s and who gets to capture that, right?
So this is why you have to stay on top of this stuff, because it does change.
And some of it is narrative based, and some of it is fundamental based.
But, you know, this is what the market does.
And this is what we do, we try to we try to figure this stuff out.
Chris, I appreciate you being so candid about these things.
And I think it's really helpful because we are all trying to figure this out.
So thanks for sharing your thoughts on that.
We're getting towards time here, but I wanted to ask you about one more thing you wrote about a research report you did sort of like a mid-year check-in on 2026.
We're halfway through the year.
A lot of people had a lot of wild predictions for what would happen in 2026.
But halfway through the year, how do you feel about what your expectations were for 2026?
What has surprised you?
What are you still doing?
expecting for the rest of the year and just what's your outlook for the rest of 2026 and and where we are so far and in terms of what you expected for 2026 yeah we don't put you know big big price targets or anything like that.
But obviously, as people working this space and believing it, I think myself, speaking for myself and a little bit for the team, I think we were a lot more positive at the beginning of the year.
And of course, the negative sentiment has weighed on us all.
But I always come back to fundamentals.
You know, what can we actually observe fundamentally, not in the price or the noise?
And every day I see more people adopting this.
I see more institutional players, large banks, brokerages.
you name it, adding capabilities, announcing, actually rolling out product.
And that's what I think a lot of people don't see, especially on the retail side.
They don't see that these institutions take years to plan and build these products, especially if they're building them in-house.
And they're making multi-year bets.
They're not making these decisions based on...
what the price is today they're looking ahead and saying yes this is real technology this is really going to uh to help us in in whatever way depending on the on the institution and so they're um they're putting real capex into it right and they're they're starting to change their workflow around these and roll out new products so that's what i look at and really um that would be the marker right if these things start to roll back or you see less activity on these chains or less adoption or just more apathy, which, you know, in all honesty, I think is one of the greatest risks to Bitcoin, especially in this space at large is if people just just throw up their hands and say, why do we need this?
I don't care about this.
That is one of the biggest risks.
But again, going back to our our conversation at the top of this, I think as good as things are and as much as some of all this other stuff is taking up taking up the narrative right now, people are going to come back and rediscover or remember all of these characteristics about Bitcoin and other digital assets that make them unique and make them have such a good value proposition.
Chris, the standout line from this report for me, again, was 2026's digital assets landscape reflects a balance between near-term pressure...
and longer term progress.
And I think that speaks to what you just said in your answer there.
But I think what a lot of people are wondering, especially people in our pro community have asked me a lot about this is how far is long term?
How long of a wait is this?
You know, like you said, institutions make their plans in years, but it feels like, you know, you're writing a report on getting off zero that you first wrote in 2020.
It feels like it's just been a much longer wait than I think a lot of self-directed or crypto native investors expected.
What does that time horizon look like for you?
Is this a six-month thing, a six-year thing, a 10-year thing?
What does that timeline look like for you, and when do we get to the promised land, so to speak?
Oh, boy, like, I don't I don't want to make a prediction.
Like, what's the old edge, like make a prediction, but don't say the timing of it or the level at the same time.
I do think this space grows, it gets bigger from here.
We will, in my person, this is just me personally talking, we will, again, get to new all time highs in Bitcoin and maybe other things as well.
Because I see the fundamentals, the adoption going on.
And the short term, again, it's that voting machine.
It's the narrative.
It's the noise.
That's short term.
The good news is, to give you a little more specificity to your question, not evaded here, Bitcoin has very short cycles.
And this is something that's very underappreciated in the institutional investment community.
They look at the drawdowns in Bitcoin, 80, 85%, 70%.
This last one was 50, which, you know, if we stop at this, it'll be shallower than all the other ones.
So let's also mark that.
as as a potential milestone here as we mature and get bigger we'll have shallower drawdowns they look at those drawdowns and they say how could how could anyone ever own that but they don't look at from the the absolute bottom to the next all-time high is as on average been only a couple of years so again going back to my point about bonds you were underwater on a real basis for 40 years that's most people's investing lifetime stocks as well on a real basis you've sometimes been underwater for even a couple decades with stocks, which have even a shorter timeframe from the drawdown to the next high.
So people forget that that's the other part of this equation.
Yes, the drawdown is steep.
It's harsh.
It's really hard to endure.
But at least historically, we have come out of that so quickly that that changes a lot of the metrics and how Bitcoin would interact in your portfolio.
And I think that's one of the things people...
People are underappreciating about this, underappreciating about all of this.
And so, again, I look at the long time horizon.
I think that's a sobering point.
You said we wrote the report in 2020 and then we wrote it again.
And I'm saying not a lot has changed.
That's partly true, but we've actually seen a lot more.
We have way more clients and assets today than before.
And then you just zoom out and say, wait a minute, I've got hanging on my wall here a picture of the white paper.
in late 2008, October of 2008.
And we're already here talking about this, talking about every major bank in the United States adding some kind of capability.
I don't think Satoshi or anyone else at that point would have thought we would have been here, you know, 15, 16 years later.
So It's all relative.
Zooming out to see how far we've come in only a decade and a half is actually quite sobering the other way for me.
I really appreciate that perspective.
And I think a lot of people need to hear that at this time.
So thank you for that.
Chris, you and your team write, I think, among the best, if not the best research reports in the whole digital asset space.
You guys are data-driven and very clear about articulating these things.
I'm really curious what you're working on next.
Are there any reports that you're excited about that are coming up?
What are you and you guys looking into right now that you're excited about?
Give us a little preview of what's next from Fidelity Digital Assets Research.
All right.
Well, I guess you'll just have to stay tuned.
We're always looking at the latest.
We've been researching quantum quite a bit on our side.
So expect to see something on that soon.
And, you know, we've been doing a lot of internal work, making sure we understand it, but we'd love to help educate our institutional clients on that.
So that's maybe one preview I can give you.
But we're also expanding to, you know, getting institutions up to speed on things like tokenization.
We obviously just came out with our three-part series all on stable coins.
there's another, a bit of a preview of our ARCA here of how things are expanding as well.
Gotcha.
Okay.
Well, I guess we'll have to stay tuned for the alpha, but I always got to ask because I'm here to get the inside scoop.
Chris, thanks so much for being on the Milk Road Show.
Where can we send our audience to find more of you and your work online?
Yes, we put all of our research online for free on our website at leddigitalassets.com.
Click on the research tab there and you can either view it or download it if it's a report.
And then for myself, you can find me on Twitter or now X at Chris J.
Kuyper.
Chris, thank you so much for being here.
I really do genuinely enjoy these conversations.
I learned so much from you.
I know our audience does too.
So thanks for being on the Milk Road Show.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
Thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
I hope you go check out some of Chris's amazing free research.
But until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish.
And we will see you all in the next episode of The Millcrick Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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