# Institutional Capital Drives Crypto Maturation and DeFi Re-Rating

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-07-08

## Transcript

And one thing we've been talking a lot about internally at Bitwise is that DeFi assets have been performing exceptionally well.
We have a DeFi index of 10 of the largest assets.
It's up 51% over the last three months, which has been a terrible period for most of crypto.
Usually in the deepest, darkest bear markets, you don't have small cap assets rallying.
Why are these assets rallying?
at Bitwise.
Ryan is the head of research and I am going to ask them a lot of questions about crypto.
These are two of our favorite guests here at Milk Road.
They all share a ton of alpha.
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Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
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Without further ado, welcome back to the Mokot Show.
Matt, Ryan, how are you guys today?
Oh, it's awesome to be here.
Thanks for having us.
We're really excited.
Yeah, thank you so much.
I'm getting a little better at these.
Guys, let's just start the conversation right there.
Saylor sold, or strategy rather, announced that they sold 200 million of Bitcoin on Monday.
Bitcoin seemed to barely notice.
Matt, I wanted to start with you.
Your most recent CIO memo from Bitwise was all about strategy, STRC, but that was all before this selling news.
Does this update your outlook?
What's your reaction to this?
What are your thoughts here?
No, it just convinces me that what I wrote was approximately right.
My point of view was that strategy has been a dominant factor in Bitcoin for the last handful of years.
It was the largest buyer.
And I think those days are over.
Now I think it's more of a neutral factor.
I'd actually point to two things, John, that I saw over the last week or so.
First, when we were at peak strategy stress, when we saw a stretch trade down to $74, $75, when we saw micro strategy stock trade actually below its total enterprise MNAV, we were at peak stress.
Bitcoin didn't care.
Bitcoin didn't move at all.
I think at one point, Stretch was down double digits, Strategy was down double digits, and Bitcoin was flat.
That told you something, which is that Strategy is no longer in charge.
And then, indeed, as you point out, when they actually sold Bitcoin, Bitcoin actually rallied on that news.
I think the reason it rallied is people were worried that strategy would sort of stick its head in the sand and continue down a pathway of issuing stretch and building up risk in that ecosystem.
And it turned out that they're actually what we all knew all along, which is a rational actor in this space that realized it needed to raise capital.
People downrated the probability that they'll be forced into some stressed liquidation event.
And so Bitcoin.
rallied a little bit on the news.
Look, I think I'll go back to what I said in my memo and at the start of this commentary.
I think strategy was the largest actor in Bitcoin for the last few years.
It will still be important, but it's no longer the primary source of marginal capital.
I think that's shifting to institutional investors.
And I think that's what we're seeing in the market today.
Ryan, any thoughts on that?
And I want to get your thoughts on is the fears over strategy and STRC as an overhang, is that behind us?
Or is that still something you're getting conversations about from clients?
And what are your views on this here?
Yeah, that's a great question.
And I agree with Matt's points here.
Maybe I'll add some evidence from the boots on the ground work that I've been doing this week.
This week, I've been traveling in the beautiful Pacific Northwest with...
our distribution team meeting with clients all around the region.
And what's interesting is that I've had several conversations and questions about strategy.
Those questions have ranged from, is strategy, do they represent a concentration risk for Bitcoin?
They've asked, is strategy going to blow up?
Is it a problem that Saylor sold his Bitcoin?
Each time I articulated, Essentially what Matt just said, look, this isn't a major long-term concern for Bitcoin.
I think it's actually good that the market is digesting the fact that strategy is not going to be buying a million Bitcoin every five years into the future and that they will be sellers and buyers of Bitcoin depending on the environment.
And what I found interesting was every time we had those conversations, the response from the client after they asked the question I answered, their response was, yeah, I agree.
I don't think it's a big deal.
And that to me was really, really interesting because I think that signals exactly what we're talking about.
There was a big concern about this a while ago.
Today, it's no longer a concern.
Actually, the marginal buyer are the institutional investors that we are meeting with every single day.
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Gotcha.
Okay, so I want to ask some questions around this conversation of how this relates to Bitcoin and this.
bottoming process it's been through here.
You talked about maybe the long-term concerns aren't there, but strategy was a big buyer in the short term and institutions are coming, but they may not be here yet.
Bitcoin did shrug this off.
So how do you guys land on this conversation of, is this going to create like a gap where we're trying to find a new buyer in the short term here and we don't know who that's going to be?
Or is this more of a sign that, hey, Bitcoin doesn't really need strategy anymore and the market's turning bullish and we're going to keep climbing from here?
Matt, what do you think about that?
I mean, look, the history of Bitcoin is a history of the largest buyer handing off the baton to the next group of capital, right?
So before strategy, it was GBTC who bought a ton of Bitcoin.
I think they got up to 600,000 Bitcoin or something absurd like that.
Before GBTC, it was US retail investors.
Before US retail investors, it was Asian retail investors.
Before Asian retail investors, it was cypherpunks.
And even if you go back to that beginning, Right.
People were like, well, who else will buy?
Everyone who's a cypherpunk is already in Bitcoin.
What is the next marginal buyer?
And the answer was there was this series.
It was like a Russian doll of marginal buyers.
The good thing about the point we're at right now is we know who the next marginal buyer is, is the end boss of investing.
It's institutional capital, which is talking about trillions upon trillions of money of dollars.
And we feel very confident that it's going to come into the market.
In fact, you know, we're meeting every day with financial advisors, with clients, with sovereign wealth funds, and they are all still interested in this space.
So almost unlike all those previous examples where there was really this question of who would be next, right?
We weren't talking about digital asset treasuries being the driver of Bitcoin during the peak GBTC days.
We were like, I wonder what's next.
The answer now is clear, which is institutional capital.
I think they're going to take the baton and run with it starting at the end of this year and accelerating for a number of years after that.
I think it's going to be a great bull market for Bitcoin.
Well, speaking of the final boss of institutional finance, Vanguard is an $11 trillion asset manager that had sworn and refused to do anything with crypto.
They announced, I think just yesterday or the day before, that they're going to be hiring a new head of digital assets to develop the firm's strategy for going into crypto and digital assets here.
Ryan, let's come to you with this question.
What does this mean for this baton passing?
And what is the market signal that this is sending that Vanguard is coming into crypto?
Well, I think this is a signal of that baton passing.
We've seen it, as Matt mentioned, pass among buyers.
And now we're seeing it pass among major players in the space.
You had the early exchanges that were offshore unregulated.
Now you have massive onshore U.S.-based exchanges, the Coinbase, the Krakens of the world, publicly traded companies that are facilitating this stuff.
And then you have BlackRock and Fidelity.
and Franklin Templeton, and of course, Vanguard.
And I think that's a natural evolution of an asset class that's building out institutional infrastructure.
That is the biggest market and addressable market that we could go after.
Vanguard is trillions and trillions of assets and millions of clients who now are getting access to crypto, who now will have had a head of digital assets.
kind of bringing them products and bringing them access in a way they didn't have access two, three, four years ago when strategy and DATS and GBTC were the major buyers of Bitcoin.
So I think it's just a continuation of this trend that we're speaking of where we're transitioning into a mainstream era of crypto where institutional investors and institutional infrastructure drives the next wave.
And it's not.
a small wave it's a tidal wave that's going to drive multi-year tailwinds for the crypto industry at large yeah if i can just toss one thing onto this we've seen this before right we talked today about blackrock being this huge positive force for crypto we're a handful of years removed from larry fink calling bitcoin an index for money laundering so this conversion process is something we've seen before and what happens is once they're converted, it's a one-way door and they begin to build in this space.
I'm not surprised at all by this Vanguard announcement.
I come from the ETF industry.
Vanguard originally hated ETFs.
Now, I think they're the second largest ETF manager in the world.
So look, they were going to come around to crypto and digital assets eventually.
This doesn't mean they're yet all in on Bitcoin, but it is a one-way door, as we've seen with BlackRock, as we've seen with other institutions.
To go back to our original conversations, as we saw with Michael Saylor himself, which famously tweeted in 2013 that he hated Bitcoin.
And now we're talking about him being the most largest buyer for a handful of years.
So this is a tale as true as time.
Eventually, Bitcoin conquers and crypto and digital asset conquers the entirety of finance.
This is the way finance will work in the future.
Oh boy, I'm getting bullish.
OK, I want to ask a question around this.
In the past, there was something people would call career risk.
on wall street of getting involved in crypto and sort of being seen as a pariah do you think now in this next cycle that this has flipped that conversation to where now there's career risk to not having a strategy around digital assets and what does that look like as it starts to play out in this continuing institutional bull run we're seeing either one of you go with this one uh uh yeah i hit my i hit my uh you know i'm impressed go ahead yeah um No, I would just say, look, I mentioned this earlier.
I've been on the road with clients this week.
In particular, there's been a few points of evidence around the fact that it is becoming increasingly something that financial advisors and RAs in particular need to offer clients in order to retain and grow their business.
Now, it's not the end-all be-all, of course.
Clients are worried about a number of different things and they'll grow their businesses in a number of different areas.
But what we have heard directly from our clients is that They have clients of their own who are asking for crypto exposure.
Some just want Bitcoin.
Some say they want Bitcoin, but actually want crypto.
But what's important is that they're asking their financial advisors and money managers about getting exposure to the space.
And if you're a financial advisor and your clients are coming to you and saying, hey, I want to own Bitcoin.
do I own Bitcoin?
And you say, no, I don't believe in that.
Or worse, you say, I believe in it, but actually we don't have any products that we use to get exposure to it.
You risk losing that client and losing those assets.
And that's a real problem for money managers.
So I think from that perspective, there is certainly risk.
And then I would just add one other piece of evidence here is that we've been speaking a lot recently with allocators.
These are pension funds and endowments and other large allocators of institutional capital.
And what they've said is that as more and more peers allocate to crypto, it reduces the career risk of them allocating to crypto themselves.
And it's not this linear relationship.
Every time one major endowment allocates to crypto, it makes it more likely that the next five will allocate and so on.
And so I do think the career risk element is real, but it's actually a positive tailwind now, whereas five years ago, it was a headwind.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
If I can throw on one other tailwind, which doesn't get spoken enough about, you look at that Vanguard offering, they're asking for 10 years of experience in financial services and digital assets.
That was actually impossible to ask for a handful of years ago because we weren't 10 years old.
The other thing I think about is, you think about when most sort of traditional investors got their first whiff of Bitcoin, which is really 2017.
You had a whole rash of people on Wall Street who were 25 to 30 years old, who learned about Bitcoin in 2017 and have been following it now for nine years.
When they learned about it, they were a junior associate at Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs or whatever.
Now they're 37 years old and they're managing directors.
And these are the people who have grown up with crypto for 10 years.
We've never had this experience.
So I do think it's now a risk to be anti-digital assets.
You look like you have your head in the sand.
But also, we have sort of a class of financial executives that are prepared to lead these initiatives at major firms who have been following this space for 10 years.
And that demographic trend will only strengthen for another 10, 15 years, which is why part of why I'm confident it will take over sort of huge chunks of the financial ecosystem.
Matt, I'm very glad to hear that you've read the job description.
I just want you to know that when you put, you sign the contract, make sure there's a clause that says you can keep doing the interviews at Milk Road while you're running things at Vanguard.
Because I'd be heartbroken if we lost you.
Ryan, do you want to go with us?
I'm glad you picked up on that, John, because that was a little concerning.
Come on, boys.
You'll try me out a bit wise when I'm dead.
I'm a bit wise for life.
But I do, I love finding, I love reading those.
I do think it's instructive, right?
Like you really, you didn't have the possibility to even ask for that a handful of years ago.
And now that's what they're looking for.
I think it's an important signal moment.
Yeah, I also think, I'll just add to that.
Like think about the experience, someone who's been in crypto for 10 years and in financial services.
for much longer can bring to someone like Vanguard.
They're not hiring someone who has no crypto experience and saying, hey, we need to catch up in digital assets, go do something.
They're going to hire someone like Matt, who's been in the space for a decade or so and understands crypto intimately at every single level, importantly understands the history of crypto, the trajectory that it's on and that it's been on.
And I think that will inform how they approach the space.
And that just means we're going, to have more sophisticated and better products and companies and access points overall as an industry.
I think that's really important.
Okay, so I want to follow this thread of this progression and institutions coming to crypto.
Matt, I saw you tweeted this out just this morning that DeFi has been showing a lot more strength than a lot of people expected with the recent hacks and so forth.
You said that a lot of people thought that the total addressable market of DeFi was crypto, which is around $2 trillion, but it's really more like all of finance, which is closer to $400 trillion.
Walk us through a little bit of this thesis here and just, yeah, your thought process on this.
Well, I mean, think about what the biggest news in finance is this month.
It's probably Robinhood launching its own layer two and people accessing tokenized stocks and getting prepared to borrow and lend them on platforms like Morpho.
Think about the largest story in finance last month.
It was hyperliquid, challenging CME and ICE and other futures markets on perpetual futures and how finance will work in the future.
Not about trading Bitcoin perps, about trading oil perps.
And one thing we've been talking a lot about internally at Bitwise is that DeFi assets have been performing exceptionally well.
We have a DeFi index of 10 of the largest assets.
It's up 51% over the last three months, which has been a terrible period for most of crypto.
Usually in the deepest, darkest bear markets, you don't have small cap assets rallying.
Why are these assets rallying?
They're because of what I wrote.
People are re-rating this market upward 200x, right?
It's tackling a much bigger market.
Uniswap is not about trading ETH versus Solana.
It's about trading stocks versus commodities versus crypto versus bonds.
That's a 200x bigger market.
And I think people are going to continue to re-rate these assets upward.
The total market cap of the DeFi space.
is way too small for the market it's going after.
Once you get beyond hyperliquid, the next largest DeFi assets are like $2 billion protocols.
I think that could look just absurd in a year or so if it continues on the progression that it's been on.
Ryan, I want to ask you a question that has come up over and over again.
Our audience is mostly self-directed investors.
Obviously, there's a huge market here and a lot of capital, but with things like stable coins, for example, maybe there's a trillion-dollar market there, a multi-trillion-dollar market there, but it's difficult for self-directed investors to capture the value.
As we see this on-chain migration happening, on-chain finance, DeFi for Wall Street, where do you think that value accrues?
Is it into some of these smaller protocols?
Is it going to be mostly with the institutions and the companies themselves?
How do you see that playing out?
Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question.
It's one that we get all the time is, look, if stable coins are going to grow 10x over the next three years, how do I get exposure to that as an investor?
And I think the answer is that it's several different areas of the technology stack or the stable coin stack where investors want to have exposure to capture some relative portion of that growth.
And so I think the layer one blockchains are inevitably going to benefit.
from this all of that activity that happens with stable coins settles on top of blockchains like Solana or Ethereum or Hyperliquid.
So I think that's one way to gain exposure and to express your view as an investor that stable coins are going to generate a lot of value.
Another area is the level up in the infrastructure like Chainlink, for instance, or oracles that are necessary for all these applications to speak to each other and blockchains to speak to each other and DeFi apps to work in the way.
that they do or prediction markets to work in the way that they do as stable coins grow with as they're in their usage and prediction markets so i think those will also be areas to capture value and then of course stable coin issuers i think will be large you know beneficiaries from the growth of stable coins and that you know is is relatively clear but like think about the size of these markets us stable or stable coin issuers are the 15th largest holder of US treasuries, right?
That's like an insane number.
It's more than Germany and Norway and UAE.
And that means that they control an incredible amount of capital that's only going to grow.
And they're earning a large margin today on the interest those reserves generate.
Now, maybe it'll shrink over time, but I believe...
that the assets they manage or the reserves they manage backing the stablecoins will grow at a much faster pace over the long term.
And so I think it's stablecoin issuers and infrastructure companies like Coinbase and Circle.
I think it's the middleware companies like Chainlink and other Oracles and the layer one blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, Hyperliquid and others.
Matt, anything to add on that?
Is that kind of how you view this as well?
Well, I think it's a big piece of it.
I also think just the direct apps.
are going to be an incredible, you know, Robinhood launched a chain and Uniswap is integrated on it.
I'm not sure that that's something that people expected, right?
It almost doesn't make sense.
Robinhood is a brokerage, Uniswap is a disruptor of brokerage services, and yet it's one of the beneficiaries of that.
I think people need to reconsider these applications specifically.
I also think, you know, historically under the previous regulatory guidance, applications couldn't accrue value to their tokens.
I think that has been suspended and they're increasingly capturing value.
Probably today is the worst they'll ever be in the future.
I think they're going to continue to capture more and more value.
So the only thing I would add on to what Ryan said is I think people have mis-underestimated the app space.
in a couple of different ways.
One, the size of it, not $2 trillion, $400 trillion.
And second, the value capture, not zero, definitely more than zero.
And I think when you combine those two, it looks pretty attractive.
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Gotcha.
Okay.
So there's a lot of places where value is going to accrue.
People can kind of like find their own way to articulate that thesis, but there's just a lot of levels to this and a lot of value that's going to be created.
I want to ask you guys about Hyperliquid.
We saw a lot of outflows from ETF products for Bitcoin, for Ethereum, but… Alts like Hyperliquid, XRP, Solana have held up reasonably well.
And I think you're, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but Bitwise's Hyperliquid ETF product had over $300 million of inflows, really strong demand for an altcoin here.
What's the signal you're seeing on this?
Do you think this means that Wall Street or like investors are voting for the disruptor platform?
Or what's the signal on this particular, the strength we're seeing for this particular Hyperliquid product here?
Ryan, let's start with you on this one.
You know, I think, you know, there is a natural relationship between flows and price, which makes sense and speaks to, you know, hyperliquid is up 100% or something year to date.
And so, of course, there's going to be flows into the ETF, which then drives the price higher and so forth.
And then you have the counter.
factual happening to things like Bitcoin.
But I think the broader picture actually is investors sitting back and saying, what do I want to own for this next bull run?
If crypto is repeating the four-year cycle, which clearly it is, what do I want to buy today that three years from now will have done remarkably well?
And I think Hyperliquid stands out as one of those kind of super apps that Matt's speaking about that is purpose-built to accrue value.
to the token in a way that you couldn't do three years ago or two years ago.
And I think that's what investors are seeing.
I mean, if you look at how much revenue Hyperliquid generates, it's like a billion dollars a year.
And 99% of that goes to buying and burning the token.
And so that creates an incredible amount of demand from a buyback perspective higher than most companies in the S&P 500.
And they're just getting started.
I mean, these oil futures started.
Three months ago, four months ago, the first pre-IPO where they saw a lot of traction was SpaceX.
But you have OpenAI and Anthropic and a bunch of others coming over the next few years.
You now have the S&P index licensed on Hyperliquid.
You have HIP4 and the growth of prediction markets on Hyperliquid.
So I think what investors are doing is taking a step back and saying, well, I want to own this asset that has incredible tokenomics, is shipping new features and new products, and is on this incredible growth trajectory.
Gotcha.
OK.
I want to ask you a question, Matt, about something you brought up, which was Robinhood's announcement about their crypto involvement.
They had this event called The World is Flat.
They launched all these new products.
For Perps, they partnered with LIDR, not with Hyperliquid.
And I'm curious your thoughts on this because… Hyperliquid obviously has had enormous success, but there is a big market.
A lot of people are offering perps and it seems like there's going to be sort of like this, let's say, fight for market share.
What do you think that investors should take away from that?
Do you think that there's a signal that the perps space is about to get more crowded, more competitive?
What is this alliance between Leiter and Robinhood signal?
What are your thoughts on this?
Yeah, well, I think everything you said is true.
It's going to get more competitive.
There are going to be more providers.
It's not going to be a winner take all.
Most of these markets settle into something like an oligopic distribution where one firm has 60% share, another has 30, another has 10.
And then there are a few residual startups.
That's like what we see throughout history.
I wouldn't be shocked to see that repeat here.
I think the mistake most people make, though, is they focus more on market share than market size.
The bigger story here than market share is that the size of this market could 10x or 100x.
in the future.
That's what we've seen.
We often say since BlackRock came into the crypto market, I guess our share of AUM as an asset manager in crypto is smaller.
No surprise, BlackRock's an amazing firm, but our assets are up like 15x, so I'll take it.
I think the same thing is happening here.
This is like a giant stamp of approval that perps are a huge part of the future.
that they don't have to be on traditional regulated platforms, that you can have large regulated entities with huge customer bases working with a project like Leiter.
That's bullish perps, broadly speaking.
So again, I would focus as much actually more on market size than market share.
And I think there'll be a couple of winners here.
And right now, both Hyperliquid and Leiter look well positioned.
I can be bullish on both.
I know that sort of...
Crypto tribalism says I have to pick sides, but I love all three of my kids.
I love multiple different crypto projects.
I'm good with that.
I don't know about you, but I think one team has to win and everybody else has to lose.
No, I completely agree.
I think this has been a mistake in crypto for a long time.
It's like this, I don't know, just like a winner-take-all mindset and everyone has to lose in order for me to succeed.
Ryan, I want to ask you a question about something I saw you say on a podcast recently.
You said that Hyperliquid is punching above its weight class.
And I thought that was interesting because the question that comes to mind is...
Is hyperliquid going to grow into that weight class?
Or do you think a lot of these big incumbents are going to be able to beat them down and sort of like, you know, break their moat and take perps and run with it themselves?
How do you see that resolving?
Yeah, yeah.
Great question.
And thanks for being a listener.
But no, I think that it's going to continue to punch above its weight and it will grow into that kind of higher tier, right?
I mean, what you see is this small...
or market cap asset generating hundreds of millions of inflows into ETFs within the first few months of launching, which is an incredible amount of inflows into in any kind of ETF crypto or not over the first few years.
We've gotten used to it.
in crypto.
And that was kind of my point.
We've gotten used to the fact that ETFs see hundreds of millions of inflows when they launch in the crypto space.
But Matt will tell you more than anyone with his ETF experience, that's pretty abnormal.
And so when you think about what Hyperliquid's done on a relative market cap basis to something like Solana or Ethereum or Bitcoin, I think that's very remarkable and speaks to the demand for this asset and the adoption of crypto ETFs.
relative to other industry ETFs.
So I do think that Hyperliquid is doing remarkably well for a relatively young project and a smaller market cap asset in terms of flows and growth and adoption.
And I don't think that it's going to be beat down by its larger competitors.
I think it's going to continue to perform.
well and all i see are more people asking about it more people becoming aware of it and more people finding ways to use hyperliquid i think that's bullish for it over the long term gotcha yeah and i agree and i think you know matt your point about the pie growing as all these things grow.
Hyperlibrary doesn't have to unseat everybody as long as perps keep growing the way they are.
Everybody can benefit from that.
Okay, we're getting close to time here, but I do want to ask a question around these new Ethereum nonprofits that have been launched.
Matt, I saw you tweeted this out.
You said it's kind of awesome to watch a decentralized system heal itself and find ways to make progress, inspiring stuff.
And I think this is in reference to the launch of ETH Institutional.
You guys walk the institutional client beat more than anybody else in crypto.
crypto, I think.
And I'm curious what you're hoping to see from this new organization and what this means for the future of Ethereum in your eyes.
Just, you know, either one of you, I guess both of you guys on this one.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, I'll take a first stab.
I think what we saw ETH do, it went through this sort of personality crisis where the Ethereum Foundation became very market focused.
The market loved it.
It felt like ETH had its mojo back.
And then the ETH Foundation pivoted.
Some of those leaders left or were encouraged to leave.
ETH focused down, the foundation focused down on some core principles.
You saw just a deflation in the environment that surrounded ETH.
That was reflected in price, but it was also reflected in vibes in crypto Twitter.
I think it got pretty sad.
But the beauty of a decentralized system is that the leaders can emerge organically.
What did the investment community that cares about ETH, not just from a principal's perspective, but from a price perspective do as well.
They funded new institutions to take over that mantle, not to supplant what the ETH Foundation is doing around crops and core principles, but to take other parts of the ecosystem and move it forward.
And that's like what you would write on a paper.
You would say there are all these people who are economically incented to grow the size of the ecosystem, make sure price goes up, make sure we do institutional BD, make sure we get messaging right into the market, give people valuation frameworks.
You would write on paper that they should coalesce to contribute money to a new platform that makes that happen.
But so often those theoretical exercises don't manifest.
What was amazing to me is that this manifested tootsweet.
I mean, people recognize the problem.
And before it got too bad, before ETH sort of spiraled, the community lost energy, it lost momentum, they took action to form these different pieces.
So what do I hope that they do?
I hope they do kind of what the ETH Foundation was doing before the pivot, kind of what you see from the Solana Foundations and other market-focused institutions.
I hope they drive BD.
I hope they incentivize projects and investment.
I hope they communicate about the investment opportunity and they provide another voice talking to institutions about why ETH is exciting.
I would be, you know, we own ETH in our index funds.
We run ETFs.
I was enormously pleased to see this.
As I said, I really do think it was a beautiful example of capitalism.
and incentives working in a decentralized format.
And I think it shows how these decentralized formats can compete in a harshly competitive world really effectively.
I kind of loved it, to be honest.
It makes me want to stand up and salute.
Ryan, what about you?
Do you see this institution as a peer, as an ally, as a resource?
How do you think they're going to enter into the framework that's already going in this dialogue with institutions?
Yeah, well, I hope...
that this is a phoenix rising from the ashes scenario for ethereum because what we've seen time and time again over the past few years is the ethereum foundation alter its course or say it's altering its course and then you never really know what that means or see that reflected in their actions or rather developments and price action of Ethereum.
Now, this sounds ultra critical of the folks that are contributing to the Ethereum development, and it's actually not.
But what I think has been missing is this urgency to commercialize Ethereum, particularly when you have competitors that are highly focused on doing that.
And five years ago, Ethereum dominated.
by such a large magnitude that it didn't have to focus on commercialization and finding ways to ship new competitive features, maybe raising fees, which sounds crazy.
And I know some people are going to hate it's against the values of why Ethereum was built.
Great.
But as an investor in Ethereum, you want to see some elements of monetization and commercialization.
I think.
they really need to focus on that.
And when you start to think about these institutional focused Ethereum nonprofits, you can start to see a world where they're thinking about it from a capitalistic point of view.
So I think that's really important.
I hope this is a Phoenix rising from the ashes moment from Ethereum.
On Monday, I did a podcast with Joe Shalom, who's the CEO of Sharplink, one of the largest Ethereum dats, and Joe Lubin, who's the co-founder of Ethereum.
We talked through a lot of this, so I agree with you guys.
I'm hoping that this is a turning point for them because I think it'd be good for all of crypto.
Guys, I'm going to land the plane there because I got in trouble this week for going over an hour with somebody, so I'm going to stop here.
But I want to end with one last question.
Ryan, where can we send our audience to find more of you and your work online?
Yeah, well, thanks for having us.
And this was a lot of fun to chat with you.
You can find any of the research or content that Bitwise produces at bitwiseinvestments.com.
Matt writes a weekly memo called our CIO memo.
That's five minute or less read on how he sees the market.
And we produce all of our research, including quarterly reports and white papers.
My content can be found on Twitter at Rasterly Rock.
That is a Game of Thrones reference.
that I can't escape seemingly.
But Matt, why don't you go from there?
No, you should definitely give Ryan a follow.
He is the brains of the organization.
Look, I'm online on Twitter or X at Matt underscore Hogan.
It's got a U in it.
That's H-O-U-G-A-N, which is odd.
And one shout out on the CIO memo is next week's is a special edition, I believe written by Mr.
Rastoli Rock, if I'm not wrong.
Right, Ryan?
It's true.
This is true.
So don't miss that.
It's going to be epic.
This is huge breaking news.
If anybody is not following the weekly CIO memo from Bitwise, it's one of the most important reads in crypto.
And it's the best way to sound smart without actually knowing what's going on.
So I definitely recommend you check that out.
Gentlemen, thank you so much for being on the Milk Road Show.
I always enjoy these episodes.
Our audience loves you guys.
So thank you so much for being here.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of The Milk Road Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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