# Automated Token Portfolios Reshape Equity Access

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-08-26

## Transcript

Look, I think that we're just getting started for this next bull market.
Bitcoin is Bitcoining again.
The FOMO is intense and Bitwise has launched something called automated token portfolios.
But what does that mean and what do you need to know about it?
Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that automated token portfolios is just what you call it when you're refreshing CoinGecko over and over at 2 a.m.
during the largest short squeeze in history.
I'm your host, John Gillan, and today we are joined by Ryan Rasmussen.
Ryan is a friend of Milk Road and the head of research at Bitwise.
He's going to share a ton of alpha with us today.
He's back from London with lots of good news.
That sounds good to you.
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But for now, welcome back to the Milk Road Show.
Ryan Rasmussen, how are you, sir?
It's great to be here, John.
Thanks for having me.
I posted on Twitter, this is an emergency podcast and you are in high demand this morning, so we're not going to have too much time, but I'm glad we could get on with you to discuss this today.
Bitwise has launched something called Automated Token Portfolios.
I just wanted to jump right in with this conversation because I'm sure this is what's on your mind.
But these are institutionally designed model portfolios for tokenized stocks directly in a crypto wallet.
Tell me a little bit more about this product.
What do we need to know about what's happening here?
Yeah, well, I'm very excited about the launch of automated token portfolios, or ATPs, as we're calling them.
Look, Bitwise has been around for over a decade, and we pioneered crypto index investing.
We pioneered spot crypto ETF investing.
And today we're launching automated token portfolios, which is a way to get institutional designed investment strategies in your wallet, in a model portfolio with a single click.
of a button.
And we're really excited to partner with Coinbase and Glider in launching this and once again, pioneer a new way for investors to get access to crypto and now traditional stocks in their wallets.
Okay, so there's multiple partners here.
The announcement yesterday from Coinbase and Base was about tokenized stocks.
And that's one part of this.
Bitwise is designing the model portfolios.
Glider is doing another part.
Talk to me a little bit about these three entities and how they're partnering together on this offering and just where they all come together on this product here.
Yeah, well, I think it's a beautiful synergy across all of our areas of expertise across these three different partners.
Bitwise designs the investment strategy.
So we've been designing diversified ways for investors to get exposure to different crypto assets and different crypto themes, whether those are top 10 crypto assets or DeFi assets or crypto equities.
We've been doing that for over a decade.
Coinbase, of course, has been one of the leaders in the space for as long or longer.
And then Glider is a great infrastructure provider for on-chain things.
The way this comes together is that Bitwise designs the investment strategy.
Today, we launched with three, the Bitwise Mag7X ATP, the Bitwise Robotics ATP.
Inbitwise AI leaders, ATP.
These are three different thematic strategies that provide investors access to the leaders in those categories.
So we design the strategies, including what goes into them, when they rebalance, et cetera.
We use Coinbase's tokenized stocks platform to do this, which gives you one-to-one backed.
exposure to stocks.
You get the dividend, you get the ownership rights, et cetera.
And then Glider's underlying technology is what enables the rebalancing and strategy following for investors who want to gain exposure to these in their crypto wallets.
So the sum of the three parts is this new ATP structure, Bitwise pioneering the strategies, Coinbase pioneering tokenized stocks, and Glider pioneering the on-chain infrastructure.
I'm just going to interrupt here for a second to say that we are extending the Milk Road Pro offer.
Yesterday, it was supposed to go up by 60%.
The price was going from $25 to $39 a month, but we're actually extending it by a day by request of many members who were late to get in.
So with that, you get access to all five of our analysts.
real-time trade calls from them you can get that by email everywhere else our pro platform where they write updates every day and of course their full portfolios where they show you how they are preparing for these amazing bull markets that are coming so get into milk road pro before it goes up by 60 at the link below tonight midnight eastern is the actual deadline so do not miss that okay so let me just break this down and make sure i have this correct so there's coinbase they are the ones with the custody of the stock they have a tokenized version of that on base and then Bitwise is the one putting together the asset management ATP.
And then when Bitwise makes a change to whatever they're doing in that ATP, then Glider is the infrastructure that enables that change to follow along with whoever's invested in the ATP without them having to touch it or do anything.
Do I have that right?
Is that basically the general idea how this works?
Yeah, that's exactly right, John.
You nailed it.
Okay, cool.
I just want to make sure because these things come at you fast and this just got announced this morning, so I'm trying to keep up with things here.
Okay, so talk to me about what the vision is for the growth of this.
You've got three of these on the market live right now.
And what about this is, I think, exciting in terms of what investors need to know about the future of this product and where you see this going from here?
Yeah, well, I think ATPs are the future of financial markets.
If you think about the journey of asset management and how investors have gained exposure to the stock market or other assets, it's really developed over the past 100 years.
It started with mutual funds, then we saw index funds, then ETFs, and today, ATPs.
In each of these evolutions of these...
fund structures, the reason that they were successful and got adoption from investors is because they were cheaper, more accessible, and more efficient from a tax and cost perspective.
And they were just better wrappers for gaining exposure to themes or asset classes.
And ATPs is using blockchain technology through tokenization, through Coinbase, through Glider to provide access to investors.
in these types of structures that are less expensive, that are 24-7, 365, that allow them to gain exposure to different themes.
Previously, on-chain, it was basically crypto assets.
Today, it's tokenized stocks.
In the future, we believe it will be all tokenized assets.
And as the world moves on-chain, we think the next evolution of asset management is ATPs.
There's other reasons why we think ATPs are such a big deal, why we think we'll see this grow into a multi-trillion dollar.
asset class relative to ETFs or mutual funds.
And I'd be happy to dive into some of those.
Okay.
Well, I think that may be a great next question then, because I think this is a question a lot of people are wondering, you know, there's already a lot of ways for investors to get exposure to equities.
Differentiate this product for me from an ETF, from just holding a spot stock.
And just talk to me a little bit about what's distinctive about ATPs that people should know about.
It's a really interesting question, right?
Because you're right.
Today, so many investors have access to stocks through their brokerage account or through apps on their phone.
And most US investors today can get exposure to any equities.
But if you think about investors globally, it's much more difficult and much more expensive to gain exposure to the US stock market, which is the largest stock market in the world and hosts the largest companies.
in the world.
Now with a crypto wallet, you can gain exposure to those stocks through ATPs or model portfolios that hold those stocks through ATPs.
And if you think about ETPs, that gives you exposure to a single asset or a basket of assets through your brokerage account.
But they trade on market hours.
They are hard to access for non-US investors and the time to market for an ETF.
And I think this is a really important point.
The time to market for an ETF is a minimum of 75 days from an ETF issuer files with the SEC to when the product goes live.
And what that means for things like thematic investing is that by the time an ETF issuer sees a theme picking up speed and momentum, then files the ETF.
When it goes live 75 days later, you may have missed the party.
The way I like to think about it is that ETFs arrive at the party after dinner is served, but ATPs arrive during the hors d'oeuvres.
And that's a big difference for investors who want exposure early on in the rise of a specific theme rather than investors who have to wait for an ETF to come around and get exposure.
at the end of it.
And just an example of that is 75 days ago, if you're an ETF issuer and you're filing a thematic ETF, situational awareness was all the hype, right?
And those stocks and those investments were all the hype.
But if you fast forward to today and today's day 75, right, it's a much different market environment than it was then.
That's the gap that investors are closing, being able to access ATPs.
And we're happy to...
pioneer the strategies at Bitwise to help give more reactive and reflective strategies to the market for what's happening in these fast-moving, ever-evolving markets we find ourselves in.
Talk to me a little bit about that process, because you said Bitwise is curating these ATPs.
What is that process like?
Is this just you and Matt and the team every day either adding things to the ATP or taking them out or rebalancing them?
How do you guys do that?
What is the reaction function in terms of new information from the market and then Bitwise making updates or changes to the ATPs?
It's a great question, John.
This is making the market so much more reactive to what's going on from a product perspective.
I really can't emphasize that enough.
So the three that we launched today, I mentioned are the MAG7X ATP.
That's the MAG7 stocks plus SpaceX.
Then the Bitwise Robotics ATP gives you equal weighted exposure to the leading companies that are designing, manufacturing, and deploying robotics.
And then AI Leaders ATP, which gives you access to the leaders in the AI space.
Now, today we have these set up on an automatic rebalancing schedule.
It could be monthly.
could be quarterly, but you can imagine different types of strategies, rebalancing periods or triggers that automatically are executed by Glider's technology.
For instance, if you want to harvest losses, both in crypto or an equities market, as volatility has been so high, there's been many opportunities to do that.
We can build an ATP strategy that does that automatically for...
investors.
And that's really important because tax loss harvesting is one way to gain alpha in your portfolio and beat the market.
But traditional investors don't typically take advantage of that.
Now we can design a strategy that gives them that kind of ability.
What are some of the other things you're able to do with this?
Because for a long time, we've heard about the benefits of tokenization and how it unlocks the ability for investors to use assets in different ways and in DeFi and so forth like that.
Are there things that are unlocked with this that allow investors in ATPs to do things with their equities they couldn't do with other ways of getting exposure to those markets?
Yeah, I love that question.
And I think that's exactly why ATPs and tokenized assets are the future of finance.
So with ETFs that sit in your brokerage account, maybe you can borrow against them if you have a high enough net worth or if you use a platform that allows you to do that.
Maybe you can take margin, etc.
But you can't access them 24-7, 365, things like that, right?
With ATPs...
You're going to have composability across DeFi.
That means that you can take an ATP position in a basket model portfolio of traditional equities.
You can deposit those equities because you own the assets in your wallet.
You can deposit one or every asset in the strategy into a DeFi lending platform like Aave.
You can start earning yield at the market rate for which borrowers of that equity are willing to pay.
borrow against it yourself if you need cash or you want to take on margin.
It just gives you the composability that simply does not exist today on traditional finance rails and certainly doesn't exist for a large segment of the world that doesn't have access to the brokerage accounts and to the financial applications that we have here in the US.
I think that's another big part.
of this story is allowing investors outside the U.S.
to access U.S.-based companies and the leaders across things like robotics and AI.
I'm very happy for investors outside of the U.S.
However, as someone who is inside of the U.S., I'm really curious if, I mean, this may be speculation or too soon to tell at this point, but the Clarity Act is still in Congress.
There's been a lot of push by regulators at the SEC and CFTC to sort of unlock tokenization in the United States.
Talk to me about the time horizon or what you're expecting in terms of the ability to offer a product like this to US investors as well.
Yeah, well, the move of financial markets on chain is just getting started.
It's like a fraction of a fraction today on chain of what the actual global equities market and global asset market is, right?
So we're very, very early.
And what we believe is a mega trend, and it's not just us by the way, the largest regulators in the world, the largest financial institutions in the world also believe that this mega trend of assets moving on chain is kind of the next evolution of finance.
So today, the Bitwise ATPs are not available to US investors.
We expect the regulatory environment will continue to change over time and hope that these will someday be available to US investors.
Paul Atkins, the SEC chair, or what the CFTC is saying, or even what was said by Donald Trump last week about bringing hyperliquid onshore in a regulatory compliant way.
If you think about those things and where markets are headed, I think it's easy to see a world or paint a picture where investors are accessing baskets of equities, model portfolios in their crypto wallets on chain where traditional brokerages like E-Trade or others that you and I might use for accessing stocks traditionally, where they're integrating with blockchains and have the ability to access things like ATPs or tokenized stocks.
And then I see the ATP world expanding to other assets.
beyond equities.
You can think of things like gold or real estate or other commodities that you could package together in ATPs in a thematic way or in a specific strategy around debasement.
Now you can own Bitcoin and gold, other precious metals in your wallet through tokenized equities and commodities via strategies designed by Bitwise and ATPs, like the composability and what's possible here.
It is really, really fascinating.
And I'm really excited that Bitwise was able to pioneer bringing these to market alongside our partners.
You know, one thing we've talked about a lot on this show is that crypto is quickly becoming a huge part of the global payments infrastructure, and nowhere is that more obvious than in Asia.
But if you're actually running a remittance company or a payment business, you know that the hard part isn't moving the stablecoins.
It's dealing with local banking partners, compliance, liquidity, and all of the operational headaches that come with sending money into places like India and Southeast Asia.
That's why today's partner is Sabre.
They give payment companies stablecoin-powered infrastructure to collect and make payouts across Asia without having to build all of that complexity themselves.
already processed more than $3 billion in transactions across 40 different countries.
So this isn't just a concept.
These guys are actually doing this for real.
If you're building payment infrastructure or expanding into Asia, make sure you check out Sabre.Money.
I'm really enjoying this conversation.
It's so obvious how stressed out and excited you are.
There's so much going on right now.
Ryan, I want to talk a little bit more about what you said, which is that tokenized assets is a fraction of a fraction of all of these different markets, yet the upside in all of them, right?
Like not just in equities, but in real estate and precious metals, many other things.
There's a huge addressable market there.
This product Bitwise has launched is with Coinbase on the base app.
Robinhood has also been pushing, launching a lot of tokenized equities products as well.
They're kind of like the first movers in major ways in sort of these markets here.
Talk to me about what you think happens next.
Do we see the second and third order effects of this be that all this tokenization accelerates even faster?
And just what do you see in terms of the development of tokenized asset trading in all markets here?
Look, the possibilities with tokenization and blockchain-based rails are essentially infinite.
That's why it feels inevitable to us and many of us who have used crypto rails and DeFi over the past five, 10 years, why it feels inevitable to us that traditional markets are moving on chain.
There's this history, as we kind of talked about before, of...
traditional wrappers being disrupted by themselves because they're faster, more efficient, more liquid, more accessible.
Tokenization, crypto-based rails just innovates on that to a level we've never seen before.
in financial markets.
And so I think what's possible is really whatever dreamers can come up with in terms of the types of strategies, the types of products that you can access through tokenization.
I think it's really bullish for the underlying infrastructure, whether that's Coinbase and their tokenized stock platform, or it's the layer one blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, Hyperliquid, which of course has performed remarkably well over the past.
few weeks i don't think these things are unrelated you have regulatory tailwinds you have tokenization tailwinds stablecoin tailwinds now we have price momentum in our favor all of the those things point to a bull market led by several different themes and catalysts rather than historically we've had like one catalyst to lead us into bull markets i think this is the first time in crypto's history we've had several different catalysts picking up steam at the same time, driving the market higher.
And that's really exciting for investors who are positioning themselves, not just for the next three months, but for the next three years.
Well, let's talk about that too, because as you said, the president stepped up to a microphone last week and said hyperliquid and the perps markets exploded.
What happens if the CFTC does achieve that objective of bringing hyperliquid into the United States?
I assume that also means like it's bullish for lighter and other perps contracts.
Do we just see like a huge knife fight for market share in the perp space?
Or what do you anticipate happens in terms of changes to markets once perpetual has become another option on the markets in the United States?
Yeah.
So if and when perpetual futures on blockchains make their way into the US in a more regulated format, I think we're going to see the acceleration of tokenized assets and perps really hit a new speed, right?
We've already seen it happen this year with the US-Iran conflict driving this huge growth in perps activity on hyperliquid around oil.
Then we had the S&P 500.
Then we had pre-IPO of SpaceX.
We're seeing it still with gold and with pre-IPO for Anthropik.
All of these things are enabling price discovery and access to traditional assets.
when markets are closed before they become public on traditional stock exchanges.
And so what I see here is just this massive growth in perpetual futures beyond what we've already seen, which by the way, has been like one of the fastest growing segments of the crypto market for years.
I do think you see this massive, you know, perps race going on from traditional.
platforms and from crypto platforms.
Of course, Robinhood and Hyperliquid and Coinbase are pioneering it from a kind of crypto side.
But you're also seeing the CME and other platforms also pushing into perps because this is like a crypto native invention and innovation on traditional futures.
And you can see the volume, you can see the activity, you can see the price discovery.
And that's because these are really, really great.
products that are innovative and investors have demand for.
And whenever there's investor demand and there's client demand, you can believe that traditional financial institutions are going to be meeting their clients there.
The SEC and the CFTC announced a regulatory framework for crypto after the meeting at the White House with President Trump.
This includes some rules around how to do ICOs, fundraising for tokens in the United States, as well as an innovation exemption.
You know, you've talked a lot about new innovations that are unlocked by tokenization, by perpetuals coming to the United States.
do you anticipate there's going to be a reignition of venture capital, of startups pioneering things in digital assets?
Because a lot of people have heard this stuff from the SEC and been like, this would have been helpful in 2018, but now it's kind of like, we don't need this anymore.
What's your outlook on that?
What do you think happens here?
John, I'm so excited for what's going to happen, right?
This is really important for fundraising, as you mentioned, right?
And we've seen the ICO boom and bust.
Maybe some of us have like blocked it out of our memory because the bust was particularly, remarkable.
But what we can have today is a way for innovators and entrepreneurs to raise capital via digital assets in a regulatory compliant way.
So I think that's going to lead to a big influx of capital into the venture space and into the early stage companies in crypto.
I think it's going to allow for a lot more innovation and accelerate product development and company development in the US.
for crypto startups, which is massive, right?
But zooming out, this is just this broader trend, which really was established back at the end of 2024 of pro-crypto posture in the US by regulators, by the Senate, by Congress.
We get hung up on the Clarity Act, but I think if you can set that aside for a moment in your mind, you can look at things like the Genius Act, which is broad legislation for payment stable coins that was passed last year with bipartisan support that goes into effect the beginning of next year.
You can see all of these different initiatives and rules and guidance put out by the SEC and the CFTC.
Now you see folks in Congress and the Secretary of the Treasury embracing stable coins.
This is the type of regulatory momentum that breakthrough technologies and industries have had in the past, whether it was FinTech in the mid-2000s or social media or rideshare, right?
You can see parallels to breakthrough technologies in the past and just look at what those have done kind of post-regulatory clarity from pre-regulatory clarity, right?
It's this massive boom in growth, in investment, and in innovation.
So I think it's very important.
that we're seeing this regulatory development continue to move forward despite the Clarity Act being hung up.
We'll find out what happens with the Clarity Act in about three weeks, which I'm excited to see that drama unfold as crypto drama always does unfold in a miraculous way.
But nonetheless, the regulatory momentum is a major catalyst.
It's something we talk to investors about at Bitwise all the time.
It's something they ask about all the time.
It's one of the reasons why the world's largest financial institutions are investing heavily in blockchain technology, are expanding their menu of products to include crypto, why the largest payment companies in the world are building out stablecoin infrastructure or buying stablecoin infrastructure to catch up to the market.
These are all signs that the regulatory transition from...
anti-crypto to crypto supportive has had a massive impact on where the market's headed.
And that's not a one-year or a one-week impact.
That's a multi-decade impact that's going to drive growth, asset prices, company prices higher in the crypto space.
It sounds like everything is accelerizing, to use your word.
Ryan, you are the most popular boy in crypto, so I'm going to have to let you go get on television.
Before I let you go, I've got to ask you one question.
We saw the biggest short squeeze in Bitcoin's history, a half a trillion dollars of market cap added to the digital assets markets in a couple of days.
Is the bull run back, and do we finish the year above or below 100K for Bitcoin?
I love it.
I love it, John.
And thanks for having me on today.
I really appreciate it.
Look, I think that we're just getting started for this next bull market.
Yes, the short squeeze was a massive accelerant or accelerizant.
Maybe I'll coin that term as well.
But we also saw ETF flows massively come into the crypto market, not just for Bitcoin, but for Ethereum, for Hyperliquid, for XRP, right?
We're seeing capital deployed across the crypto stack.
Crypto equities have been performing.
well this year, continue to do well.
So look, I think we're in a multi-year bull market.
I think many investors are sidelined because they've been playing the four-year cycle and expected crypto to continue to bleed this year.
Those investors will come back into the market.
Traditional investors who have been sidelined are excited about where things are headed.
We know this because we speak to traditional investors every single day.
at Bitwise.
I think those are the things that drive markets higher for the next one, two, three years.
So where are we headed from here?
I do think we end the year higher from where we started for Bitcoin and many other crypto assets.
And I think 2027 is also going to be a remarkable year where crypto outperforms.
Ryan Rasmussen, head of research at Bitwise.
Thank you for coming on the Milk Road Show and telling us about automated token portfolios and all the other alpha you shared with us today.
I hope we can have you back again very soon because we need to catch up more.
It's been a while since I've talked to you.
Yes.
Thank you, John.
Appreciate you having me on here today.
Can't wait to be with you next time.
And thank you.
Thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
So until next time, as I always say, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish.
Hopefully next time we have more time with Ryan, but he's very popular today.
So I'm going to let him go.
But we'll see you all on the next episode of the Milk Road Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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