Will the Rotation From Gold to Bitcoin Actually Happen? w/ Matt Hougan & Ryan Rasmussen

Bitcoin is the only one that provides self-custody through holding and settlement. And for that reason, it's the ultimate end in the journey. - What's up, everybody. It's all you do set here and welcome to the milk road show, the daily crypto show that watches the metal charts every single hour and then tweets about how the big rotation will happen into crypto. Today is January 29th, 2026. Bitcoin is doing another little dippy dip, but the battle is not over. Good things come to those who wait and I am eternally grateful to today's guests who have been generous with their time and optimism these last few months, helping me and all of us navigate these challenging and very confusing times in the market. Matt Hogan and Ryan Rasselsen from Bitwise are back on the show and we're gonna chat about their debasement ETF. Of course, we have to talk about gold and silver because it is an unignorable rally. And of course, when all time hives for crypto. Today's episode is brought to by Bridge, said stablecoin payments instantly, simple global friction free and chain link, links Web3 to Walls free, Matt, Ryan. Welcome back to milk road guys. Second appearance from Matt, first appearance for Ryan this year. - It's great to be here. Thanks for having me again, LG. - Happy to be back. - Okay, listen, we cannot ignore the metals anymore, gentlemen, because I feel like if we track the price of gold and silver every single appearance for you guys the last four months, the chart would be pretty crazy. The 12 month chart on either of those looks like an NF, looks like a board apes chart from five years ago in terms of how parabolic it's gone. Gentlemen, and the other thing too for context that bitwise just launched a debasement ETF a few weeks ago, that contains a lot of these trades, I guess, or these commodities that we can get into. Matt, I'm gonna start with you. What the hell is going on, man? When will this rally end for gold, if ever? - Well, look, long term, I think this is a 10 year trade. I think 99% of investors have 100% of their money in fiat-denominated assets, and they're waking up to the fact that that is a bad idea long term. So long term, I think this continues for 10 plus years. You're seeing that at the largest institutions in the world. Two years ago, central banks owned more US treasuries than they did gold today. They own more gold than they do US treasuries. Two years ago, the Harvard Endowment did not have gold or Bitcoin in its portfolio. Last year, they put on a big trade buying both. So I think all investors are moving from wanting to be 100% fiat-denominated stocks and bonds to something else that has hard assets. So the 10 year trajectory, I think, is very strong. That's one of the reasons we launched VPro, our debasement ETF. In the short term, those charts look absolutely ridiculous, right? I mean, just straight up to the moon. They look prime for retracement. That doesn't mean that that retracement will happen tomorrow. I'm not making that claim. I don't know. Short term, I mixed, long term, I am bullish. It just depends on your time scale. - Everything you're listening to today is also covered in our daily crypto newsletter. And on Sundays, we even recap the best parts of the entire week's worth podcasts. So check it out at the link below. - Absolutely, well, Ryan, do you concur or do you have a different opinion on what's driving this and when this would end? And because I agree with you, Matt, 10-year outlook, but this has been like 10 months would have been the trade in this case, right? Like it took a year or two to triple the market cap for these, right, so Ryan, what's your take on the gold silver? And I guess now, copper, a trade. - Yeah, look, I think the same things that Matt mentioned are driving it. There's this issue that everyone's becoming more and more familiar with that spiraling debt is not a problem that we're going to solve. The US, for instance, runs at a 2 trillion deficit more or less every year, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts over the next decade. Every year, we're going to run a 2 trillion forecast. We can't agree on spending as a government, but we do agree on is that we're going to spend more money than we're going to generate in revenue. And that just means that this problem is not going away and it's actually accelerating. And so I think that that's happening all around the world and investors are finally waking up to it. As Matt mentioned, central banks have been buying gold since 2023 and accelerated pace since compared to what they were doing before that. And then we've seen this crazy run-up and the gold price once all those sellers were exhausted. And so Matt and I have been talking a lot about why this hasn't bled over into the Bitcoin market. If Bitcoin is digital gold, why is it that you're seeing this massive run-up and gold, but not in Bitcoin and the reality of that is that central bankers aren't buying Bitcoin like they're buying gold, but think eventually they will. And so I do think that this is a long-term theme that is going to mold investors' opinions of how to get exposure to markets over the next decade. I don't think it's a one, two, three month or one, two, three year trade. And I think eventually that will lead them to Bitcoin. But of course, it's happening slower than most Bitcoin investors would want. But I think the precious metals run is fascinating. And we've been diving more and more into it over the past couple of years as it's been happening. And yeah, it's always to expand your knowledge based into those kind of categories. Why would they want Bitcoin when they can buy an asset that is 2,000 years old in terms of its value? Relative value, right? I mean, gold and Bitcoin share a lot of the same properties, right? The multi-centralized, non-sovereign stores of value, it is easier in a lot of ways to buy Bitcoin and own Bitcoin for those properties than it is gold. If you think about the amount of capital and time and logistics it takes to purchase and self-casi gold, it's very high barrier. Of course central banks have been doing it for years and will continue to do it. But once they make that leap into Bitcoin with the least proportion of the portfolio, it's simply just much easier. It is a low cost to transport. It can move anywhere around the world at the speed of light. You can self-custody it very, very easily. You don't have to build this giant vault in the ground and have armed guards manning the doors and the vaults. And so I think it's just a similar asset. In many ways a better asset than gold. And I think eventually they will come around to that but we'll love to hear what you have to say about it Matt. - Yeah, I mean two things. One, I think demographics are on the side of Bitcoin. So if you're central bank planning for the next 100 years, are you betting on digital or are you betting on physical? Are you using Spotify or are you using records? I think people will wake up to that and want some hedged exposure. But the other one is building off of what Ryan said. Bitcoin is a fundamentally better technology in a way that central banks will realize soon. As you mentioned LG, the reason central banks are buying this is they don't want to store their wealth in an asset that depends on someone else. They used to own US treasuries. The US government seized Russia's treasury assets. Central banks freaked out, said I want to own wealth in a way that the US government can't seize it. And the answer for them was gold. Great. The challenge with gold is once you want to move it or spend it, your self-custody ends. You have to put it on a boat and send it somewhere or you have to store it in a centralized vault and have a tokenized version of it where we're relying on that centralized vault to safeguard it in a way that's not subject to seizure. Bitcoin has self-custody through ownership and settlement. So you can self-custody it until the point that you give it to someone else. And gold just literally can't match that. There is no way to disintermediate moving gold from one place to another without weakness in the supply chain. So long-term, as central banks go from just like a freak out around holding wealth in an asset that can be seized. They freaked out. Now they want to hold it in a way that they can self-custody to a world where they can use it. They're going to realize that Bitcoin's ability to serve that is just infinitely better, by andarily better than golds. And they're going to move to gold. And you're already seeing that you're seeing talk about a gold-based alternative to dollars that banks can use to settle transactions. It's not going to work in a world that doesn't trust centralized institutions. How fast we get there, I don't know, but that's where we will get eventually. Matt, from what you've told me, you're a bit of a gold buff, a maybe short-term and maybe long-term historian of this commodity, you mentioned in your piece in your most recent memo that banks were dumping in the '90s. Maybe elaborate a little bit on that and give us a brief overview of the last like a couple decades of gold. And then kind of wrap that up with what you mentioned in terms of the US seizing the treasuries and why everybody is now suddenly going into gold at an unprecedented level. - Yeah, it's totally wild to me. So I think the public has this generally viewed wrong. I think the public procession of gold is like, it walks around in a pinstripe suit with a monocle and it's the most established institutional asset in the world. And that's funny to me because if you remember or you study or you read about gold in the '80s, '90s and 2000s, it was the opposite. Like gold conferences were like Bitcoin conferences in 2010. You would go there and it would mostly be like your cranky old uncle and then a few people gathering pens and people wearing dirty teeth. It was like the least institutional asset in the world. We labeled people gold bugs and we thought they were crazy. In fact, central banks started so in gold in the late 1980s because we were in this new globalist world where we relied on the dollar as the backbone of all wealth. They sold gold and bought US treasuries. They were selling so much gold that they were disrupting the market and the G20 central banks got together and entered into a formal agreement called the central bank gold agreement, CBGA, that limited the amount of gold they could all sell in a year because they didn't want to disrupt the market. And they did this for five years and they were still dumping gold. So there is a CBGA too in 2004 and they did it for another five years and they were still dumping gold and there was a CBGA three in 2009. In practice, in 2009, they post the financial crisis when we printed just an absurd amount of money, actually central bank gold sales flipped to positive. So the first central bank purchase in like two decades, the net purchase occurred in 2009 and then they tripped along at like 400 tons. They started being a little bit buyers, mostly in emerging markets until Russia seized the US assets and they rose 150% to 1,000 tons a year. But the point of this story is that gold went from really being completely forgotten called a barbarous relic in the dustiest, saddest convention halls in off-strip casinos in Vegas. That was what gold was with central banks selling so much that they had to form a consortium to limit how much they sold. To now, they can't get enough of it. Now they're buying it in spades and I think the story you should take from it as a Bitcoiner is that attitudes can change. And I think the attitudes toward Bitcoin are changing at central banks. We've done meetings with central banks this year already where they're thinking about Bitcoin and eventually they're gonna add Bitcoin to this mix and then eventually I think they will add more Bitcoin than gold. I think that's the direction of travel and anyone who thinks that impossible doesn't remember when we called gold holders, gold bugs and sort of belittled them in the financial media. - What's your name for Bitcoin people? - It's a smart (laughs) - Wow. - Do the silver people have a name? 'Cause we had Scott Melkor on last week and he was like the silver people get in my comments all the time and I didn't know the existence. - The silver people. - The silver people are crazy. I mean, that's a market strong with conspiracy theories and concerns about paper silver versus physical silver and actual industrial uses that make it very complex. It's also a market where there was a legitimate attempt in the 1980s by a group of people called the Hunt Brothers to try to actually corner the market and control the word silver that regulators have to step in and like prosecute them and break that up. So it's like a weird altcoiny market. It's very momentum and sentiment driven. It's not a theorem to Bitcoin. It's more like Cardano to Bitcoin or something like that. That's like how far out the alt spectrum you have to go. But look, silver has done exceptionally well and there is real industrial demand and there is a limited supply. I'm not saying silver is capped, but it is a weird audience for sure. - When I think silver, I just think pirates. It's just down that line for me. Gold totally like reserve currency until 60 years ago and now kind of central bank reserves or whatever. But now when I think silver, I'm like this is where in parts of the Caribbean or something like that and Jack Sparrow's unhappy that the chest contains silver, not gold. You know, that's not a real part of the movie, but that's just kind of what it makes you think of. Guys, let's switch this back to crypto and Matt, thank you for the history lesson. I feel like we could do a whole episode on gold. I don't know if anybody would want that. Maybe on our macro channel, we could do that. Like a brief history of gold with Madhogan would be, would be pretty cool. But guys, let's talk about crypto, 'cause that's the work crypto show and we have to focus there. We have two types of tweets that we're seeing a lot of these days as gold and silver hits all time highs. Okay, we see things like this. I really don't understand it. How can people say that gold does not rotate into Bitcoin and then there's this huge long explanation about why that's gonna happen? And then you flip, you got Ben Cohen out here saying, there was no rotation from Bitcoin to Alts. Just like there will be no rotation from metals to crypto, I do not make the rules. So guys, what is gonna happen in this case? Like is this something where, who's buying the gold? And are they gonna sell the gold at 10K and dump that all into Bitcoin? Or what's your take, Ryan? Let's go back to you 'cause we haven't heard from you in a bit. Yeah, I think there's multiple buyers of gold. And so I think you have to think of those in different channels. I think central bankers are not going to what in the next year or probably two or three years rotate from gold to Bitcoin. And they've been one of the major buyers of gold over the past, called it five years. So I don't think that there's gonna be a major rotation of central banks from Bitcoin or from gold to Bitcoin. Then you have other investors who are caught up in the momentum of gold and allocating to gold through things like ETF. So let's call these ETF investors. And those investors will eventually rotate out of gold. The reason that they'll eventually rotate out of gold is twofold, momentum will eventually fade and they'll look for alternative ways to allocate capital. But they also rebalance their portfolios on a relatively frequent basis. And if you hold an asset that's gone up as much as gold has in January alone or in the past six months, at some point you're going to rebalance and you're gonna reallocate to other assets in your portfolio. And you're gonna do that again next quarter and again next quarter and again next quarter. So at some point there will be a rotation away from gold as it continues this run up. As investors take profit and they look to allocate those profits elsewhere. Now will all of that go into Bitcoin or crypto. My answer for that is no, it won't. But some of it likely will. And that's why I believe there will be some rotation of profits taken from gold into crypto assets. But I don't think it's going to be this one for one massive rotation. It'll be meaningful though for what it's worth. And I do think it will happen to a certain extent. Yeah, I think there's an easy mental model for this. Like imagine you're pitching Bitcoin to someone and Bitcoin we're half the size of gold. And you're saying it's half the size of gold. I think it will get to be as big as gold. And they'll say, wait, this is an asset that no one trusts. It's only been around for 15 years. Why is it half the size of gold? Everyone owns gold, central bank's own gold. It's a hard pitch to make. Like that increment to invest when it's half the size of gold to get it to be gold at this stage in Bitcoin's development doesn't feel right. And then imagine you're at the other side of the spectrum. You're like, this is digital gold. It's one 30th the size of gold. If it just becomes one 15th the size of gold because people like Ryan get older and make more money and start adding to more Bitcoin, then it's a double. That's like such an easier pitch. I love that we can go to people right now and talk about Bitcoin as like 5% sub 5% of gold. That's great. Like it was actually a little bit harder when it was 10% of gold, right? Because you're talking about this asset that people don't know and trust, it's already 10% of gold. That's like pretty good. Is it really going to get to 20? That would be like a big, if it's five, if it's three, if it's two, it's like really easy to argue that it could double triple quadruple and still be emerging as a new asset. So for me, it's just strictly good. Will the Momo money really roll directly out of gold into Bitcoin, not with Ryan? Eventually some of it will, some of it won't. But the bigger picture to me is this larger tam is just strictly good. If gold was a hundred trillion dollars and Bitcoin was two trillion dollars, I'd feel like we were back in 2015, right? And be like, oh man, let's load up the truck. So I'm all for this run. I think it's positive. What did you say, Momo? Yeah, who's that? Oh, momentum. You guys are deep finance people. Maybe I always learn new things when I speak to you. So maybe there's no one in terms I've never heard. So I always have to clarify. Okay, let's look at an actual bitwise piece of content that's been put out about this, okay? So here we go, based on global money supply, Bitcoin, the Bitcoin and gold ratio is massively lagging. If this, and Matt, you guys, and Ryan, you guys both made very compelling arguments, especially about the ratio cost. Do you think this happens this year? Is that still your opinion that this is bound to happen any day now? Or have you maybe in the last couple weeks, especially with clarity being delayed? Have you started to kind of realize you might be playing a bit of a patient game? I'll take this one and Ryan can build. I think we've been through a full-on bear market in crypto over the last year. To put that in context, if you look at the returns of most crypto assets over the last year, Bitcoin was down like 5% each down about the same. If you look at just slightly out the alt-crum spectrum, you're talking about assets that are down 50, 60, 70%. Right, massive bear market. That's why it feels so bad. Bitcoin went down 5%, even though corporations and ETF have bought 700,000 Bitcoin, even though we shoveled $70 billion into the Bitcoin coal mine, we couldn't keep us from going down 5%. So absent the ETF in corporate purchases, this would feel like 2022 or 2018, full-blown bear market, everything down 40%. What does that mean for this patient? When you come out of a bear market, it's a rounding. You never come out of a bear market with a V. It never goes straight back up. And so my actual expectation is look, we are behind the fundamentals from a global money supply, from a Bitcoin versus gold, we should be higher. But the process is going to be more like a rounding than a V is my base case, because we're coming out of a full-blown bear market. I think that's the market we're in right now. I think we're closer to a bottom than most people think. I think there's a lot of expectations that the Bitcoin could fall to 50, 60. And I'm not saying that couldn't happen, but I think it's highly unlikely and that we are closer to the bottom than most people. Think 80K is 75 is probably my, where I'm looking for a bottom. I do agree with Matt though that if you look at the data, last year was actually like a horrific bear market, but it didn't feel like it because we had nothing but positive headlines when it came to crypto. We had positive regulatory headlines, we had positive institutional adoption, everyone was talking about stable coins and tokenization all over CNBC and Bloomberg TV and Paul Atkins, the SEC was giving speeches on it. And so from that perspective, the crypto market was up only, but when you look at the actual prices of crypto, it was pretty much down only. Some of these alts that we're talking about, outside of Bitcoin were down massively last year. For instance, Polkadot, 73% down last year. Sweet down 67%, Avalanche 65%, Cardano 60% like, these are massive draw downs that you see in bear markets, but no one's really talking about that. And so I think one thing I've been thinking about recently is that not to say it's to the same scale as this was, but do you think about what really led us to the bottom of the 22 bear market? It was the collapse of FTX. This was a systemic shock for crypto that had many may ripple effects through the ecosystem. It was a black eye on crypto for institutional investors. It liquidity just left the system at a massive, massive rate. And it took time to recoverable. You saw in 2023 this black rock started coming into the market. Then you saw the wins in court for crypto. Then you started to see sentiment turn around. And I think October 10th is that moment for the 2025 bear market where you saw the systemic shock liquidity leaving the ecosystem, the black eye in the view of institutional investors and investors more broadly. And I think we're slowly turning that corner. So I think there's parallels here in that most people think that 2025 was a net positive year for crypto. And for a lot of reasons it was, but from a price perspective, I think that we were in a bear market like Matt mentioned and that we're emerging from that bear market sooner rather than later. Stable coins are reshaping the financial order, but most companies don't have the opportunity to participate in the rewards they generate. Plus launching a stablecoin means wrestling with complex regulations, building bespoke infrastructure and burning endless developer hours. Enter bridge and its new product, open issuance. Bridge lets companies send, store, accept, and even launch their own stablecoins instantly. Seamless fee up to stablecoin flows control over reserves and rewards and full interoperability across every bridge issued token. No more patching payment rails, no more months long launches. Visit milkrow.com/bridge to see how it works. Sure, tokenized financial products are the future, but there is a big sticking point. They all need to speak to each other. This is a tough problem to solve. But Chainlink does exactly that. It's the universal language for financial markets, linking Wall Street to Web 3 banks to blockchain and so much more. See how Chainlink is leaking the world by going to milkrow.com/chainlink. Is clarity going to happen? Or it's 61%. Matt, last time we spoke, okay, you came on the show and it was the clarity draft day, okay? And it was fresh. You were riding hot. Everyone bit wise, riding hot. Crypto Twitter is going off. The next day, Brian Armstrong comes along and he's like, you know what, we're not doing that. No way, I am not supporting that thing. We need our yields on stablecoin. I don't like this bill. Now, about about 10 years worth of geopolitical events have happened since then, something two weeks ago. And now it feels like it's in a bit of purgatory, right? Where it's 60, we're up to 60, back up to 60% for it passing in 2026. But it also, it feels like it's just completely out of the headlines is something that we're barely even factoring it. Brian, you want to tackle it? Look, yeah, I think, you know, that's a good question. I, you know, I want to say the more important question is should it pass if we don't address some of the issues that have been holding it up? For instance, stablecoin yield, of course, is a major debated topic right now in the Clarity Act. Should we be passing on stablecoin yield to end users? And of course, banks are lobbying hard against that. And we know why because banks love to consume that yield for themselves. But I think, you know, there's the question of will it pass? And I think it probably will pass this year. I think should we pass it without fixing these issues? No, I think net net the industry would be better over the long term if we fixed these issues. That eventually would hold crypto back or crypto adopted in back or innovation back. But I do think it will pass this year. Is the government about to shut down? 'Cause I know we're at, okay, so we're at 79% on government shutdown. 'Cause that's a huge, this was supposed to happen last year, right guys? Like I think people forget so quickly that this was all supposed to happen last year. Clarity was supposed to be a Q4 thing and then the government shut down for what? Like two months or something like that. Over two months, two and a half months and coincided with our hyper bear market here, whatever's going on. And now government shutdown on Saturday is back as of a few days ago is back up to a, or even this morning I think is back up drastically to 78, 79%, a lot of volume coming into it on Pauli market. Matt, if the government shuts down, does it ever reopen? (laughs) I think it'll be a while actually. I think this is one of those that if you close the door, it's hard to reopen it because the two sides will really dig in. I think it's much easier to get a compromise agreement. You know, we saw those odds dip. I think it was yesterday or the day before I don't have them up on my screen. When you start to see both sides sort of come together, some changes from the Trump administration on ice enforcement and some words from the Democrat. Yeah, there it is. It looked better. Apparently those have reversed. Yeah, I think a bit closes. I would take the, I don't know how long the odds are for it to stay closed. But I think if it closes, I would take the odds as pretty high that it stays closed for a while because I think these two sides are just going to dig in on a divisive issue. Maybe no, maybe it never reopens. We just run straight through the midterms and then see where we are. Why does it feel like crypto kind of needs this permission from clarity? Because you have, I understand what clarity is. We've gone over that. We know why it's important. It gives a market structure and everything. But Matt, even in what you just said a few minutes ago, it's like, listen, BlackRock's been involved in crypto for three years now, right? It's like, so clearly they're not waiting on some kind of permission to get involved. Obviously it's way more complicated than just them getting involved or not. But why is it starting to feel like that? And if you're right, which is not great, the government shuts down for a really long time, does crypto just sit around and wait again for that to reopen, wait, however long? I think if the government, well, it's a good question. I've described the Clarity Act as the pucks-a-tony fill of this crypto winner. It's the groundhog. And if it doesn't pass, it'll go back into its hole and we'll have another six weeks of winner. That doesn't mean there won't be spring. It just means that there'll be a setback. I'm sort of a Clarity Act maximalist in that I really want to see it passed in a good format. The reason I want to see it pass is if it doesn't pass, and then we head into the midterms, and then we get to change an administration in two years, we could have Elizabeth Warren running the SEC. And that doesn't sound so great. So I would love to see this positive regulation get put in place. But do we need it to rally? No, I don't think we need it to rally. I just think it changes the shape of the rally. If it passes, I think we pull forward a lot of value. If it doesn't pass, I think you have to see the fundamentals get even more ahead of price. Ultimately, I think the market gets to the same place. But I do think the shape of how we get there is pretty different. It stinks, though, that we're very ripped out. We're just trying to build a better financial ecosystem, and we're being held hostage and spending time on the US government politicking around, should it stay open and pass this bill? It does seem absurd to me. Yeah, I hope it didn't miss its chance with the draft a couple of weeks ago, right? Because it was like, OK, government's open, New Year's started, this thing's coming to the floor, gets rejected, and now you're back. It's like, you had this break from the chaos in the turmoil, and now you're just right back into it, right? So it feels like it hopefully didn't miss its chance. It's not the way a long time. Ryan, what happens from here? What happens from here? Give me your prediction. Is the government going to-- does it close? And for how long? And what happens to clarity? I want to hear from you. Yeah, well, I would just know on that point, you made LG that the government shut down, long shut down history at the end of last year. And already, again, in January after it was reopened, we had a lot of attention on the clarity act. And there was a huge debate about it. It was being covered everywhere on business news and in the crypto world. And I think that's really interesting. When it reopened, one of the first things that was trying to be tackled was the clarity act. So I think that is a net positive in shows how big an issue this is in Capitol Hill, which is remarkable if you were to go back two years or three years, no one would have guessed that it would be one of the first things that the government tries to tackle after it's reopening after the long shutdown history. I think we'll see a partial shutdown at the end of this week. I think they're going to find ways to fund majority of the departments. There are these few hangups that are going to withhold funding on certain departments. But I think net net that won't be as big of a deal as people think it will be. And I think we'll move towards a resolution sooner rather than later. So I think on my view is that if it does happen, it'll be short. And that it most likely won't happen across the entire government. It'll be a partial government shutdown. OK, good answer. And it's clear guys to it. And again, you can comment on this. And I feel like this has been a regular commentary from you. There's two headlines I saw this week that it's clearly the industry is still building. And I'll share them with you. And I want to get your comments on them. We have Fidelity launching a stable coin on ETH, which was announced. And then also, I'm pretty sure Morgan Stanley put up job postings for an entire digital assets division. It's like six or seven or 10 job postings. Clearly, and you guys comment on this, it's clearly the industry's full steam ahead, regardless of clarity in terms of really preparing a long term here. Full steam ahead. That's exactly right. And those job postings are not just at Morgan, although they are running 500 miles an hour at crypto. They're at every major institution. I do think the world looks at particularly tokenization, but also stable coins, to some degree, as fate accompli, that they've just accepted that the world is going to run on blockchain-based rails. And it is only a matter of time until that happens. And that's why you're seeing those things. So yeah, if you zoom out, we're in a generational bull market in crypto and blockchain. And that remains the case. We focus on these short-term things, because they do influence the short-term price. But Wall Street is still building. And importantly, they're building on public blockchains. I think that part of the fidelity announcement is really notable. The third largest financial firm in the US, I think. So they're not like a small pop. Yeah, absolutely. OK, that's good to hear. I've got two quick community questions that I feel like we did cover. But this is from our milk road pro community, who are always very excited when you guys come on. So the first question is-- and you touched on this a little bit earlier, Matt, but I think it's very specific. Should regular retail investors be rotating into gold-backed stables as opposed to dollar-backed? Gold-backed stablecoins. That's interesting. Who is that? Let's clarify who that is. Who has a gold-backed stablecoin? I think taxes has a gold-backed stablecoin. I think Ted there all sounds like gold-backed stablecoin if I'm mistaken. Ted, there's like the third biggest holder of gold now, aren't they? They are. Look at you guys. They bought more gold than any central bank this year, except for Poland. They are number two. It is the People's Central Bank, which is just an incredible turn of events. It really is. I can't imagine a more remarkable story. Should they be-- you know, look, I think most people hold stablecoins for functional reasons. And it remains the case today that functional dollar-backed stablecoins are a better bet. Which one will hold its value more over the next 10 years? I would bet in gold, for sure. But for functional trading purposes, the liquidity and dollar-based stablecoins is still through the roof. Yeah. I think the conversation I'm tokenized gold or gold-backed stablecoins, rather, is just indicative of assets in the real world moving on chain. First, you brought dollars. Now gold's having its moment. That's coming on chain. Soon it will be stocks. Then it will be other alternative assets, commodities, private equity, real estate, et cetera. And that's just indicative of where we're headed. And so I do think that it expands the market for gold investors, because those of us that do predominantly invest on chain and either stablecoins or other crypto assets now can easily allocate to gold in those same accounts, rather than having to open a TD Ameritrade account and buy a GLD ETF or order gold coins from some website. Next, community questions, the only other one. And you guys did answer this a little bit, but maybe get to clarify. What is changing? Okay, there's like six questions in one paragraph, okay? So one different stuff. What is changing since the last time they were on in terms of what they're hearing in the rooms? Appetites up. Which ETFs are people most excited about? Are people pulling the trigger? Are institutions institutional approvals to buy getting the green light? Literally, whatever alpha they think they're allowed to say out loud based on what they're hearing and saying. - All right, I can give two pieces of alpha, I think. The institutional approvals of exposure to crypto ETPs at the largest national account platforms are running ahead at a hundred miles an hour. Almost every day, we get a new approval. Almost every day, a large platform asks us for crypto models. That is just a one-way train. The second piece to that is that the allocations take time there. So even when you get turned on at Morgan Stanley or at a Merrill Lynch or Wells Fargo or UBS, you then need to send your sales team in to have an educational session. And then Ryan or I has to go and give a speech and then you have to follow up with them. And then those people have to have a conversation with their clients. So we will start to feel the flows from that, I don't know, Q4 and into next year. But it is happening at an extraordinary pace. So if you're waiting for those flows, you're still going to be waiting. But if you're skeptical of those flows, you're wrong. They're going to start showing up in the coming quarters at an accelerating pace. So that's maybe one thing. The other thing I would add is that anything like the stablecoins and tokenization is what they're asking about. They're asking about Bitcoin kind of, but really what they're asking is how to invest in stablecoins and tokenization. So if you have an asset that's linked to that or a stock that is linked to that, that is where the institutional capital wants to go, at least in the meetings I'm in. Ryan, I don't know if you're hearing anything different. Yeah, I've heard a similar thing. One anecdote I would share from a meeting I was in a couple of weeks ago at one of the largest advisor groups, managing hundreds of billions of dollars at one of the largest wirehouses in the country. And what they said to me, which I found really interesting, was that we haven't been paying attention to crypto, because we haven't been able to invest in it. We probably should have been paying attention to it, because now we can and we feel like we're behind. And so they bring us in to get up to speed. And they're asking all the right questions. And they told us that their investment committee meeting that was happening later that week, they were focusing a portion of that on crypto really for the first time ever. I think that is indicative of this slow but powerful force of institutional capital flowing into the crypto space slowly and over time that continues to build. Good answers, guys. Thank you for the insight and the alpha that's very helpful. Listen, every time we do a show a bit wise, we always end with one specific theme, which is we go onto polymarket and speculate irresponsibly. And we're going to start with a long-term Matt Hogan preview or not bet, but prediction, which was that Josh Shapiro, a pretty much an unknown guy would be the potential presidential election winner in 2028. If not at least the Democratic nominee, when you said this first, the first time Matt, he was at one or two percent. Now he has climbed to four. And he's tied with Kamala Harris, which that feels like that should be at zero, but he's only two basis points, two percentage points behind AOC and pretty far behind Gavin Newsom in terms of being Democratic nominee. But hey, he's still fifth place, man. He's still in fifth, that's pretty good. Yeah, I'm running that straight to 12 cents. I've taken my profit at 12 cents. Not because I don't think he'll be the winner, he might, but I think that's where the easy money will end. I also really love the long Josh Shapiro short Kamala Harris trade if you can pull that off. I think it's a market neutral, a polymarket bet. That's a really attractive bet to me. One is ascended, one is fading. So maybe I'll put that on this afternoon. How could it possibly be Kamala? I don't understand. Who's betting on like, yeah, they'll bring her back. That doesn't, that just seems so unlikely. But hey, who knows, man, that's the fun of polymarket. Sometimes it tells you something you don't know, but definitely it's something that Matt you've known for quite a while. Okay, let's jump into something more exciting, which was Matt last year of the most famous thing was that you told us wicked two would absolutely knock it out of the park as, or wicked one. I don't even know which one it is. But would knock it out of the park as the high-scrocing film didn't pan out, didn't make enough money. The Oscars are coming up. Sinner is nominated for a record breaking 16 nominations, but one battle after another with Leonardo DiCaprio by Paul Thomas Anderson. The clear front runner for best picture, I haven't seen either film, maybe you guys have. I don't know if this kind of, this is what you want to predict on Matt. I don't know if this is what you, if you were like a cinephile. - Yeah, Ryan's the movie guy. - Yeah, it's just my wumps on wicked. So, which was right for a while, I just didn't ring the bell. So I'll let him the line on this. - You were in profit. - Yeah, you were in the green for a while on wicked. - Brutal. - Yeah, I think this is severely mistraced for what it's worth. - Ooh, ma. - Leo, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio has a bad success rate at the Oscars. Like, he's one of the greatest actors of our generation, but he typically doesn't do well at the Oscars for whatever reason. So I think that this is in the same way that the Minecraft movie out of nowhere just flipped wicked. I think we're gonna see a similar flippening here of the-- - Cinder? - I think it could be Cinder. Cinder's was a crazy movie. It was a great movie. And I think it could win. Bagonia is probably the one that I think is gonna come out of nowhere. I hear amazing things about that movie. - I don't even know what the-- - And what is it? - What is it? - I don't even know. - It's Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. And it's the same director that did poor things which also had a really strong track record at award shows last year. And I think this one's coming out of nowhere. - It is a very Oscars thing to pick the most obscure film to win that nobody's seen. So if the fact that those two more popular high-mind chair ones are at the top two, that's a good bet, man. That's a sub 1% bet, 0.7 points right now. So Ryan, that's your 100x. That's your 100x. - I like that. - I like it. - Yeah. - They're giving away dollars for a 0.7 set. - Yeah, they're selling a dollar for not even, yeah, for 0.7 sets. Gentlemen, another fantastic episode. Thanks so much. We'll see you guys again, very soon, Matt. We'll see you in a couple weeks, Ryan. We'll see you next month, I believe. And who knows where we'll be in crypto. But I'm happy you guys are here and always a pleasure to have you on. - Thanks, LG. Good to see everybody. - Thank you. - If y'all are making swaps or trades right now, highly recommend you check out MillcroedSwap. And this is a Dex that we built in partnership with Cal Protocol. Why did we build it? Not to make money just honestly, so we could have a place to do our swaps for the lowest fees that we could find. This is the fees on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and base are only 0.15% fees. This is a huge difference from other centralized exchanges that charge half a percent or even up to 1.2% fees on their swaps. Also, you could swap on Solana. Oh, @swap.milcroed.com. Check it out today, you won't be upset. And you can join me in my favorite place to make swaps along chain. Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event? Subscribe to our channel and join the milk road daily and pro newsletters and start investing like the top 1%. 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