# Bitcoin Miners Pivot To AI Infrastructure

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-08-11

## Transcript

Bitcoin's my largest position in the strategy.
It's 11%.
We did add a little bit on the Leo day, so definitely exposed there.
Bitcoin is showing signs of seller exhaustion, but the bulls still have not come back in full force.
Are Bitcoin miners pivoting to AI?
Is this bullish or bearish for crypto overall?
And what do investors need to know about all of this?
Hello and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that seller exhaustion is just dumping your bags at 3 a.m.
I'm your host, John Gillum.
Today is Tuesday, August 11th.
joined by Matthew Siegel.
Matthew is the head of digital assets research at VanEck, where he leads research on cryptocurrencies, tokenized assets, and the on-chain economy.
He also serves as a portfolio manager for the related strategies and sits on investment committees for the firm's private funds.
Matthew is going to share a ton of alpha with us today about crypto and a lot of other things.
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out for more information about them later on in the show but for now without further ado welcome to the milk road show matthew how are you hey john good to be with you I love how every podcast I see with you, you start with that same good to be with you line.
I think that's a great canned greeting and I'm glad to have you with us.
I would really like to start this conversation with something you've been very bullish on for a long time, which is this intersection of Bitcoin miners with artificial intelligence and Bitcoin miners pivoting in that direction.
Obviously this morning, there's a big announcement or maybe it was yesterday, but Anthropic signed a $9 billion contract with Riot, which is historically a Bitcoin miner.
Talk to me about the thesis here.
What are we seeing happen in the markets here, and what's your take on all of this?
Yeah, the basic story here is that there's an arbitrage at work that Bitcoin miners essentially manufacture tokens, Bitcoin tokens, using electricity.
And Anthropic, OpenAI, big tech companies also manufacture tokens, their AI tokens.
and the value of the ai tokens is like 10x higher than the value of bitcoin tokens if you denominate it in electricity which bitcoiners are are very used to so we noticed that arbitrage a couple years ago and the most interesting part of it is when you add leverage to the situation so bitcoin miners historically were unable to raise debt to buy bitcoin mining machines You know, it was an equity funded business and their revenues would fall by 50 percent every four years.
So, you know, just involved a lot of dilution.
And obviously now, you know, GPU is a debt financeable asset.
We can see this occurring across the world.
And so these companies are able to finance their build out using a combination of debt and equity.
And so that's bringing down the cost of capital for these stocks, at least versus two years ago.
We can talk about what's happened in the last two months.
And cost of capital is like the huge input to stock prices.
So if you can borrow more cheaply, your stock price goes up.
So give us the thesis on how all this comes back to the Bitcoin miners here because a lot of people have been speculating on AI, on crypto, on other things.
But I think you've been more so than most analysts I've seen.
Very focused on how Bitcoin miners benefit directly from this.
Sorry.
Talk me through that updated thesis on that.
Does that still hold for you?
How long do you think they benefit from this?
And what are your thoughts on that?
Yeah.
So I think the structural story is that electricity is a huge percentage of the input costs of Bitcoin.
So Bitcoin miners are very good at sourcing low-cost electricity.
via land purchases and then developing the land, adding an electricity substation, the other infrastructure requirements necessary to turn that electricity into usable power.
And that pipeline of land became much more valuable as the frontier labs began to sign these multi-billion dollar leases.
So it's a story of these stocks are a story of what's the value of the leases that they've already signed.
And you can kind of do that math pretty simply with kind of a discounted cash flow analysis.
They give you the inputs that you need to value those leases.
And then you can value the uncontracted pipeline.
And then you can value the part of the pipeline that hasn't even been developed yet.
So that's the exercise that we're going through to try to value these companies.
Now there's a market dynamic over the last couple of months, which has flipped, right?
So you can see it in the price of the semiconductor stocks, most obviously things like Micron and Hynex, where the market is clearly doubting at this point that the AI CapEx boom is sustainable and is starting to price in, I'd say a peaking out of that investment, maybe as soon as like 2028.
2029.
So, you know, stocks have corrected quite a bit.
And now comes the point where, you know, your conviction is really measured.
How much of this weakness is due to things like, you know, fears of the Fed hiking interest rates.
And as I said, the cost of capital is a huge determinant in the value of these businesses.
And how much of it is built on an actual bear thesis for AI coming to fruition.
So for our side, during the worst of kind of the situational awareness, forced selling of a couple of weeks ago, we doubled down in these stocks.
And I'll tell you why, but our long-term conviction was relatively unchanged.
And so if you have a long-term view and there's a forced seller in the market, you're really doing your investors a disservice by not picking up that stock.
uh at a discount so why did our conviction um why is our conviction strong i i think it comes down to first the financial results from the hyperscalers especially in their cloud businesses and ceo of amazon andy jassy saying the return on capital for this ai investment is similar to what they saw in the cloud 1.0 evolution you know, 10 or 15 years ago.
So that was really encouraging.
There's been data out just like canvassing the S&P 500, how many of these companies are calling out the impact of AI in their quarterly reports.
That percentage continues to rise.
They're pointing to concrete margin enhancements as a result of adopting this technology.
So that keeps our conviction high.
We look at the financial metrics around some of these leases that are being signed what's the how many millions of dollars per megawatt are the tenants paying those numbers keep rising and then we look at the debt side how's it being structured?
How's it being securitized?
And there's been a bear case about, oh, this is like a great global financial crisis type build out, irresponsible leverage.
And I think back on, I was in the markets those days and I remember the ninja loans, no income, no job, no asset.
Banks were financing these and then flipping them into the securitization market.
And they ended up on the balance sheets of german retail depository banks so there there's no such thing happening in ai in fact some of these bitcoin miners are the best example of ninjas in a way right they're developing data centers that have no leases but the early construction the speculative part of that business is still funded by equity capital or convertible notes and then once the project is de-risked and signs an investment grade tenant, then the developer can access, you know, the traditional bond markets.
And there's some securitization happening there, but there just isn't the level of abstraction between the sponsor of the project and the end user like there was in GFC.
So, yeah, all of those kind of put together are, you know, keeping us relatively constructive on the long term here.
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Okay.
So when you say, just to back up, one thing I want to clarify, when you say you doubled down on some of these stocks, are you talking about semiconductors, hyperscalers, Bitcoin miners?
What did you double down on when that Leopold selling bottom kind of came in?
What was the position you were strengthening there?
Yeah.
So the way we came into it, I mean, the strategy I manage, it's called on-chain economy.
So we're looking to invest across the entire value chain of Bitcoin and digital assets.
And that can be anywhere from the energy infrastructure to the coins themselves.
to the fintech and e-commerce companies that are adopting this technology.
And we started out very diversified a year and a half ago, kind of anticipating Bitcoin was close to an all-time high.
It's not the time to take these hero bets.
Let's start, really diversify, focus on good governance, lack of leverage.
And then if things draw down a whole lot, we'll concentrate the portfolio into our best ideas.
So that strategy.
really played out for the first year.
We dramatically outperformed Bitcoin at comparable levels of volatility.
And now with both Bitcoin and some of these miners down 50% from their peaks, we thought it was a good opportunity to concentrate into our favorite names.
So we jettisoned a number of the lower volatility peripheral type stocks like utilities, which were directionally exposed to the same theme, but much less volatile.
And we doubled down on some of Leo's names, the powered landlords where we saw force selling.
Now, unfortunately, it worked out for like a day or two.
And then this Texas data center moratorium, we can get into that, kind of hit last week.
And so some of those names, you're starting to see a differentiation here as the market is now really paying for execution and not just the dream of land.
So there's some green shoots that maybe this Texas thing might not be such a big deal.
But yeah, that's what we bought.
Okay, pulled.
You just raised like a half a dozen different subjects.
I'll come back to all of those.
I want to kind of continue on this Bitcoin miner thesis here because you did publish a framework for valuing Bitcoin miners as AI infrastructure.
But I'm curious how that has evolved and how that has changed.
And then talk to me about some of the risks here because obviously New York has issued a data center moratorium.
Other jurisdictions have followed suit and there seems to be like some rising backlash to that.
How do you discount that in the investment thesis here and where does that shake out for you?
yeah for for our framework for valuing these uh we do uh bottoms up site by site analysis handicapping the possibility that the data center will actually get a lease and become energized, what economics might be likely, what's the cost of capital of the sponsor, and that we use kind of our best guess at what the deal economics would be.
And that can give you a value for a specific site.
And you can add up all those sites and handicap their probability of reaching.
um energization and that'll tell you kind of what the existing capacity is worth then you can look at the pipeline of the company beyond what is actually leasable and that becomes like a you know you then then you can ask the question is the market paying anything for the pipeline So what's really happened in the last month, I guess there's three elements to valuing these companies.
One is just the discounted cash flow of a lease, which is signed.
And most of these leases are being signed by investment grade counterparties.
So you get a pretty good idea of the probability that they'll actually get paid on it.
The second part is what's the terminal value of that asset?
These are very long data deals.
Some of them are 20 years long.
So at the end of that, the developer, the Bitcoin miner, will still own the facility.
How much will that facility be worth?
So did I give the three things?
I said it was the current value of the lease, the terminal value, and then the uncontracted pipeline, right?
The decline that we've seen in the share price is basically the market is no longer paying.
In some cases, it's not paying anything for terminal value.
And then in most cases, it's not paying much for the pipeline.
So you can buy these names, some of them for just the value of the existing contracts that they've signed.
From my point of view, that's a pretty good margin of safety.
Your second question, how has it evolved?
I mean, it's evolved because the prices have come down.
But that kind of lack of terminal value, lack of value for the uncontrolled pipeline, that's new.
But it's happened for a reason.
First was the New York moratorium, Governor Hochul delaying new data center construction for about a year.
And then last week, the Texas governor introduced a new audit, which may delay what comes online in Texas by.
a couple months as well so the market quickly removed all of the pipeline optionality from many of the texas exposed names Okay, I want to ask you about the valuations on these things because there are a lot of crypto businesses or Bitcoin mining businesses that theoretically stand to benefit a lot from this new market participant, this new demand source from AI.
However, a lot of their stock prices are not reflecting this.
One of the biggest ones that we've been focused on here at Milk Road is Galaxy Digital.
They have this great institutional-grade crypto business.
They also have a huge amount of data centers and power for AI, yet the stock price is still showing a lot of weakness, and the market still seems to not be understanding how to value these things.
What are your thoughts on this?
When do you think this turns around, and what do you think needs to happen for the market to start to appreciate the value and the opportunity here?
You're really trying to bring out the Galaxy Maxis on my timeline, huh?
They are an eager bunch.
They're passionate people.
They are.
They are.
Galaxy has a great asset with that Texas Helios data center, which they've leased the first couple of tranches to CoreWeave.
And actually, they have a large amount of power, which theoretically could be leased irrespective of this Texas delay.
probably won't deliver until 2028 but i think the hyperscalers have indicated they're now leasing for for 2028 so there is a lot of optionality and great value in that asset the downside i would say is that their initial tenant core weave you know wasn't an investment grade tenant when they signed the deal and Many are asking Galaxy to just spin off this business and have two publicly traded companies.
But their data center assets are very geographically concentrated.
And it's basically the lion's share of the values in that one Helios asset.
So I'm not sure if the public equity market wants a stock with.
one asset.
And then there's also significant tax implications, I would imagine, if they were to try to spin that off.
So it still looks very cheap to us, but for kind of TradFi institutional investors who are looking to access this arbitrage, there's other names that have more favorable leases, more favorable tenants.
maybe a more uh diversified pipeline so i'd say that's why galaxy has lagged okay well i hope you enjoy the galaxy max is coming after you for this but i think that's also some some helpful insight on on the context there uh matthew there's a ton of things i want to talk to you about so i want to move on now to you know something you've referenced a couple times which is this uh The ticker is Node, which is the VanEck on-chain economy ETF.
This is an actively managed ETF that I believe you're supervising.
And when you're talking about these trades you're making, a lot of this is going on in this ETF.
Could you talk to me about what this product is, why you brought it to market, and what makes it unique among some of these crypto ETF products that are on the market today?
Sure.
So I joined VanEck now six years ago, and we had a bunch of Bitcoin and Ethereum on our...
company balance sheet and a lot of venture investments.
But we didn't have any products for clients.
And that was in large part a regulatory barrier.
So first it was Bitcoin ETFs, Ethereum ETFs.
We ran a number of experiments in Europe.
We have more than a dozen like single token, multi-token baskets for crypto.
So we've learned a lot.
And one of our biggest learnings was that passive investing doesn't really work in this space.
All of our active strategies have just trounced the passive indices by a wide margin.
And we get into why that is.
I think it's pretty obvious from looking at altcoins why that is.
But we wanted to develop active strategies.
to avoid the pitfalls in the space.
And then after the election, we just got a lot more bearish on old coins.
We reasoned that much of the capital formation in the space was gonna come through public equities, that the lack of enforcement would actually put kind of scams and legit projects on an equal playing field in a way which was not gonna be attractive to investors.
And with the...
bank charters and other positive regulatory developments in the kind of in the regulated part of the space right circle has a blockchain stripe has a blockchain coinbase has a blockchain a lot of the value was actually going to be captured by public companies so that was the idea to combine public companies and crypto tokens into one flexible mandate.
And then when we looked at the peer group, what we found is there are kind of other products that specialize in crypto equities, but they tend to be super concentrated, market cap weighted often.
And so you end up owning the most leveraged stuff at the top of the market.
So many of our benchmarks had like 10% micro strategy weights.
And we just, we thought, okay, we've got a rising tide here in terms of tokenization adoption.
um you know bitcoin we have kind of long-term conviction and there's no need to add a bunch of leverage and concentration into the space let's just bring a relatively low-cost product to the market stay diversified avoid the pitfalls and that worked really well since inception of may of last year through uh the end of june or so of this year we were beating bitcoin by you know almost 100 percentage points more than that uh and and then we had this correction and you know the the part of the market that was generating our alpha bitcoin also corrected so that more diversified lower vol I don't think it makes sense at this part of the market where we're, you know, I think we're kind of bottoming out for some of our favorite stuff.
So we've concentrated the book.
We sold probably 15 stocks and could double down on our favorites.
Now the fund, like fair warning, I have to change my pin tweet, but it's no longer a low volatility approach to the space.
Now it's high conviction.
Bitcoin's down 50%.
Our favorite names are down 50%.
So let's double down.
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Okay, so you're doubling down.
That's good to hear.
Some confidence here as we go through this bottoming process.
I want to talk more about that, but first, you said in your answer, and I've heard you say this before, you have...
of a preference for some of the crypto-focused equity names that you like as opposed to the liquid tokens themselves, especially at this point in the market.
Could you just elaborate a little bit more on that?
You said you've trimmed a lot of positions.
You've doubled down on some winners.
We talked about how you're very bullish on Bitcoin miners.
What else falls into that bucket of things that you're bullish on at this point in the market?
Well, I'll start with what we're not really in, which is alts.
Some of the kind of Ethereum, DATs, these are big parts of the crypto equity benchmark.
So we never really participated in the DAT story, just feel no need to add leverage on top of what's already a very reflexive asset.
So our alts exposure is pretty small.
And the fundamental thesis there is that these...
Finally, on its third attempt, the corp chains are finally winning.
Institutions that adopt blockchain, they want predictability.
So the fees that, say, Ethereum had last cycle, super volatile, really hard to predict if you're an institution with a lot of flow, what you're going to be paying for transactions.
And meanwhile, for all of the deregulation.
banks still can't touch open source so it doesn't seem to me like that's going to become a a mainstream you know multi-trillion dollar uh financial rails but these quasi kind of open customizable corp chain blockchains uh are finding you know some product market fit so uh that's where our focus has been probably and and kind of um you know Let's call it fintech and infrastructure names.
But those stocks also have this headwind of like crypto is making it easier to enter.
Look at Hyperliquid, like entering new markets very quickly, very nimbly.
CME is trying to follow, but it's bringing down pricing across the space.
It's great for the consumer.
I think there's a lot of consumer welfare that's being generated through lower cost trading options.
I'm not so sure it's amazing for the stocks.
So, you know, our favorite space where we've concentrated now is in Bitcoin, Bitcoin miners, energy infrastructure, I'd say Bitcoin value chain.
I appreciate the thoughts on that.
I want to ask about how you go about thinking or navigating rebalancing this ETF and making decisions like this.
Was there a specific catalyst this deep into this bear market that made you decide to cut so many names and to double down on these concentrated positions?
Was there a specific catalyst that you saw that drove this, or what was the thinking there?
Yeah, the catalyst was situational awareness busting.
So there were, you know, a couple days there, the last days of July when...
Yeah, there was a narrative shift and the companies that were spending a lot on CapEx were suddenly getting punished by the market.
So the market definitely shifted in June.
But the degree of the selling in those last days of July was pretty obvious.
There was a liquidation going on.
We have no leverage, so I'm not getting any margin calls.
And it just it feels like the responsible thing to do, actually, to.
buy those uh favorite names from from a fourth seller who took on too much leverage so yeah that that was the catalyst but but remember at the outset i said like some of our north stars in this space uh the economics on on gpus um the the the sizes of the leases that are being signed what S&P 500 companies are saying about the adoption of AI, specifically with regards to their margins and their revenue opportunities.
All those things heading in the right direction, prices heading in the wrong direction.
Of course, you have to ask yourself, where might you be wrong?
But where I kept coming back to that we would be wrong was on macro things that, you know, our companies can't really control things like interest rates.
And so, you know, the fact that tenure was already at multi-year highs, you know, just gave me the sense that the responsible thing to do is actually take the other side.
All right.
Well, sometimes the responsible thing to do is double down.
And I think that's helpful because there's a very highly volatile moment in the markets for a lot of people and hearing your thought process for how to navigate that.
I think it's helpful for people.
I want to pivot to Bitcoin.
And I think a way to make this segue is to ask, you know, a lot of people are hearing about a lot of these Bitcoin mining companies pivoting to AI or maybe not.
Pivoting completely, but adding that as an optionality, another thing that they can do with their power, their compute.
Is there a risk in your mind to the Bitcoin network's health if so many of these miners begin to power AI as opposed to Bitcoin?
Or do you think this is really just going to help their business in the bottom line but not fundamentally damage the Bitcoin network?
I think it has damaged Bitcoin in the sense that these companies are sellers of Bitcoin more than they used to.
They're not adding hash rate.
They're not buying ASICs.
So the hash rate has been falling.
It's been a record amount of time now that hash rate is falling.
It's very unusual.
And I think it does lead to less confidence in the network.
But that's kind of the case every four years.
Folks find a reason to think that no one's going to be buying Bitcoin machines anymore.
And then for whatever reason.
Well, we know the reasons.
It's because government money printing continues and people increasingly want hedges to that debasement.
And the power that Bitcoin uses is actually a geopolitical strategic.
So a lot of countries are mining BTC without the economics in mind.
But these things just have a way of reversing.
And the folks that stay hooked up to the network will earn better margins as things improve.
I think it's self-correcting, but if you look at your brokerage statement every day, like the correction, you know, often cannot come soon enough.
So it just takes patience, you know, not spending all of your kind of double down money in one shot and being judicious about it.
You hear it all the time, the dollar cost averaging, but that, you know, we really do try to practice that.
Just take your time, be patient.
Well, this is a great segue into the next question that I had for you.
Last week on the Milk Road AI channel, I interviewed Jan VanEck, who's the head of VanEck.
And for anybody who missed that conversation, I highly recommend you check that out.
We talked about Bitcoin, crypto, AI, a lot of things there.
But Jan told me that the disagreements right now at VanEck is just not around whether or not to buy Bitcoin, but how to go about getting into that position.
And he is more on the side of just...
just get the exposure and he said that you've been advocating more of like a dca approach and targeting october to have the full allocation could you walk me through what these conversations have been like internally at vanek and how you all are think about getting positioned on bitcoin here Yeah, I think one of the reasons he said that there isn't too much disagreement is that actually one of our oldest portfolio managers who was pretty anti-Bitcoin just retired.
So it's like one less bearish voice, which I think is totally symbolic of how this asset evolves.
I often compare it to video games where 30 years ago it was only kids playing video games.
Now Elon's 55, still plays video games.
So people don't quit.
But the old people who never played video games retire.
And that's kind of the same thing that goes on, I think, with Bitcoin and tokens.
So, yeah, coming into this year, Jan nailed it.
He was quite bearish on Bitcoin, took some profits.
And then, you know, the second time that BTC hit 60, a lot of folks here started to started to warm up.
And.
yeah i think he's just got like a longer term horizon where he's not trying to beat his benchmark every month and uh you know feels like if you don't have exposure here you know, down 50 is a really good spot to start adding.
You know, from my perspective, I'm like a little bit more worried about, don't want to catch that last down 30%.
And, you know, I prefer maybe sometimes to push in once I see the price move on good news and there's some volume associated with it.
Like I don't need to bottom tick the exact bottom.
yeah that's i guess that's kind of where the where the differences are Okay.
Well, let's talk about this because there has been a lot of attention to strategy selling some Bitcoin.
However, the market price of Bitcoin is not really reacting to that anymore.
And some people are indicating that this is a sign that the bottoming process is played out, right?
That we may not get that last 30% drop, that last puke, but some people are so worried about that.
What are your thoughts on that?
Do you have any more confidence that we have seen Bitcoin's bottom be put in here?
Are you still concerned that we'll see another drop between now and the end of the year?
Yes.
No, I mean like the anecdotal bottom indicators are starting to add up just in terms of like the headlines that you see when you can.
Play the two sailor clips back to back, never sell your Bitcoin.
And then they've sold billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin ETFs are closing.
I just saw some DAT M&A in Europe yesterday.
That's pretty interesting.
DATs are now net sellers of Bitcoin.
So there's definitely a lot of, I think, bottom indicators that are starting to tick.
And in a year, I think this is going to look like a really good.
entry price uh but you you have this kind of coiled spring in terms of the volatility where bitcoin volatility is at an all-time low the gap between the 50-day moving average and the 200-day moving average there's only like five thousand dollars between that gap so there will probably be a resolution a volatile resolution here over the next couple months and i i don't know anyone who has who can have super high conviction on how something's going to move in two months uh there's just tons of variables that that go into it so yeah i think i'm being a little more careful on the bitcoin side in terms of pushing all the way in just want to see it go up on good news Gotcha.
Yeah.
Well, Jan said something that stuck with me.
He said, don't get cute and just get a position on Bitcoin, which I like that perspective as well.
But I do want to get your thoughts on this, Matthew.
It seems like there's broad consensus that the bottom of Bitcoin will be in October or around October of this year.
And to me, it seems like because everyone is expecting that, there's an increasing likelihood that people are going to start front running that and that the price is going to.
react in a volatile way but to the upside, and then a lot of investors are going to be chasing that.
What are your thoughts on this?
Do you think that there's any worry in your mind about this broad consensus of a bottom in October and that the market won't actually play out that way because everyone's expecting it to?
Yeah, so first on the don't get cute, I don't want to overemphasize my… position here bitcoin's my largest position in the strategy it's 11 like we did add a little bit on the on the leo day so um definitely uh exposed there but i think for the folks who are saying um what you said which is hey if everyone already thinks it's going to bottom in october then the bottom will probably come before october then you have to get into counting days like okay what happens if we're at you know we go up by a little bit every day between now and September 15th.
And we're at like 74K on September 15th.
Well, October is still a couple of weeks away.
Like at some point that exhausts itself just because things don't go up every day.
So it just depends on the details, like where we are, what does the derivatives market look like?
What is positioning?
What's the macro?
We have this like three-pronged analysis that we use.
It's global liquidity, you know, what's happening there, ecosystem leverage, like, you know, what does it cost for calls versus puts?
What's open interest like?
How is that changing?
And then the on-chain economy for your cycle, you know, hash price, things like that.
And, you know, it's not a perfect science, but those are kind of the three things that we look at.
Do you have a specific indicator that you're watching to say I'm convinced that the bottom is in?
Is there a specific price level that you're looking for Bitcoin to clear or some other metric you're looking at to say like that's my signal?
I know you said you're looking for the market to react to good news and for volume to come in to support that price action.
But just give me a little bit more thoughts on what would confirm a bottom for you.
Yeah.
So like big picture, we're down 50 percent from the peak and volatility is also down 50 percent from last cycle.
So, you know, last cycle was an 80% decline.
So now volatility is half of what it used to be.
So like 40 to 50% actually, you know, unless something changes, I think it's going to look really good in a year, a 60K entry price.
Other than that, it's the individual positioning.
Like are funding costs negative?
That would mean people are totally wiped out and there's nowhere to go but up.
No, funding costs are not.
totally negative are people paying twice as much for puts as for calls uh well that was the case in april the first time btc had 60k and we we saw a really nice rally off that level it's not the case now so we we don't get the sense that the market is super wrong way positioned bearish for bitcoin modestly yes but but not in a way that that gives me comfort okay the next three weeks are going to be up only like let me go all in Okay.
Yeah, I think that's very helpful.
We talked in this conversation about how you're not particularly bullish on anything in the alt space right now, but just outside of Bitcoin.
You said you added a bit to the Bitcoin position on the Leopold dip.
Is there anything in the crypto space that you are bullish on?
Maybe it's like a narrative, right?
Like are you particularly bullish on perps or on DeFi or like what are you looking at to get into in addition to or outside of Bitcoin and crypto?
I still have a little ETH and SOL.
Clarity Act odds are so low that any positive surprise there in September probably leads to a decent rally for L1s, although I don't know how sustainable that'll be unless we see some follow through.
like ethereum changes at the governance level that happened earlier this year i think are are positive uh so have some exposure there have some some hype you know just emerging competitor to to cme um zcash i think zcash leadership uh in this market is is pretty interesting and they were really the first project to face i'd say like an existential threat from ai uh in the sense of like who uh who found that vulnerability so which project actually had to react uh earliest to make themselves future-proof to to ai software so i think zcash leadership is a really kind of interesting dynamic and uh have some of that as well Matthew Siegel, head of digital assets research at VanEck.
Thank you so much for being on the Milk Road Show and sharing all these insights and wisdom with our audience.
I know everyone's going to love this episode.
So thank you so much for being here.
Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
Yeah, follow me at Matthew underscore Siegel on X or VanEck underscore US.
And we put out two research pieces a month.
Very transparent.
All our holdings are updated daily on VanEck.com.
So yeah, check us out there.
For anyone who hasn't read it, Matthew wrote an amazing, very long article comparing the AI CapEx expenditures to the railroad boom.
And I think that's worth everyone's time.
So make sure you check out Matthew's work.
But Matthew, I hope we can talk again and catch up once the bull market comes back.
I think it'll be an interesting conversation.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks, Sean.
And 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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