What do you th- make of that process, and what's your assessment of the situation there? What needs to happen to sort of unlock more of that institutional progress towards Ethereum?

Yeah, I think the first challenge was that for a very long time, a lot of institutions knew that they could go to maybe the Ethereum Foundation, but Ethereum Foundation isn't really designed or equipped to actually speak to institutional clients.

That's not what they do.

Uh, and I think that, you know, they had narrowed the stewarding of the core protocol towards, "All right, what are we gonna do?" And, you know, there's the spinoffs into EthLab and other things as well to kind of focus on the technical side of these things.

But really, institutions needed a dedicated counterpart that speaks their language, and this isn't the most exciting stuff, I'll be honest, 'cause I worked in banking for such a long time.

So many of these things are, like, compliance, custody, how do you settle things? What are the timelines for this stuff? Um, which is- isn't really the, the, the...

These aren't the things that the Ethereum Foundation was really, uh, kind of, like, trying to handle.

Um, how do you think Bitcoin navigates the next couple of weeks while there's these major macro uncertain events still hanging over us like the FOMC and the midterms? Do you think we're gonna just, like, stay pancake and flat? Do you think we'll see, like, increased volatility up or down? Like, what are you expecting the market reaction to be to, to these major events that are coming up here?

Talk to me about the levels you're watching.

Yeah.

And the reason we saw that happen were for two reasons.

One, like long term holders started selling again because they saw an opportunity to do so.

If you look at where a lot of people got into Bitcoin, it was in the 80s.

So once they saw that recover that level again, they started to... like sell out their positions because they didn't want to miss their opportunity.

And then you also saw that a lot of this was reflected in institutional positioning on the ETF side of the equation.

How are you watching the Ethereum ecosystem? And what should investors know as they look at the various different ETH products that are available in the public markets?

Okay

... we are seeing that gold has rallied like over ten percent, uh, over the last few days.

Bitcoin's kinda coming back.

And so it's easy to assign the narrative of just like, "Well, look at what the Treasury's doing." Like, like, obviously, like we're now forty trillion dollars in terms of, uh, uh, of the burden that we actually have in this country.

Like, this is clearly what's contributing to this.

I think this is more people kinda looking at this and just kinda saying, "Hey- Gold's back at 4,000.

That looks pretty cheap, uh, to take a punt.

It seems like they're trying to avoid doing that, but, you know, how do you read this? Do you think we're gonna get a rate hike before the end of the year, or do you think they'll be able to control inflation without doing that?

I want to get your reaction to this and how you think this sets up Bitcoin going deeper into the summer here.

Yeah.

So first of all, this captures the June data, so I think people are already looking ahead to, like, the current escalation in tensions with Iran again and with the impact on oil and whether that's gonna feed back into, uh, inflation.

Now, I don't really buy that.

I didn't buy it when we were seeing that swing back to the forehandle on inflation, and I don't buy it now that we're like, "All right," like, "let's just chase this, and let's say, like, inflation's is coming back down." Like, I look at the secular trends for this stuff.

I kind of look through a lot of the cyclical noise, which is what I think the energy prices represent.

And when I think about secular, like, what really impacts inflation, what really impacts prices in the US, that's mostly, like, where you live.

Do you think this is just, you know, a mid-cycle, like, digestion and cooling? Do you think the capital is beginning to seriously rotate out of some of these AI stocks? Uh, and how do you think that this, like, slowdown we've seen in this AI trade impacts crypto? Do you think some of that capital's gonna come to Bitcoin, or, or what's your outlook on that as part of the, the larger macro backdrop?

What is your outlook on Ethereum here? Do you think that that undervaluation is likely to change? Do you think that Ethereum is faring well in this environment so far in 2026? What's your outlook on Eth been here?

I think that Ethereum is coalescing around a different narrative than the one that we saw two years ago.

You know, like two years ago, Eth, I think, suffered from concerns around whether layer 2s are going to eat its lunch.

For example, whether layer 2s were extractive to the activity, and I feel like a lot of those themes have really kind of fallen by the wayside, and it has been reflected in the Eth L1 versus Eth L2 token kinda, kinda narrative.

You've seen that, like, Ethereum's actually do perform pretty well, in part because I think the fees are also cheaper on the L1 now than they were previously.

I think, like, once upon a time, you go back two years and you're like, "Crap, I just need to send, like, 50 bucks.

It shouldn't cost me this, this much to send it," which is of course why the L2s were there and that ecosystem narrative was really attractive, 'cause I could do it for, like, a penny or less than a penny.

Do you think that we're gonna continue to see that as we get more products coming to market, more innovations, more clarity and, and regulation and so forth, that there is just a lot more capital that wants to come to crypto but hasn't been able to that's going to get unlocked in the near future here?

Is this a catalyst or is the expectation that it's going to get passed already priced in?

So we have to be very careful about what the markup means, because there's actually two bills in the Senate that we have to be paying attention to, one being pushed by the Senate Bank Committee and one by the Senate Ag Committee.

And the reason that happens is because the Senate Bank Committee has regulatory oversight of the SEC, whereas the Senate Ag Committee has oversight of the CFTC.

So once those markups get done for both bills separately, then they can be unified in a single bill and that bill can then go to the Senate floor.

So it's very pedantic.

There's a lot of steps to it.

I think it's a good step forward because we heard at the end of December that they wouldn't be trying to mark it up before the Christmas holidays.

Yeah.

And it seems like people are diametrically opposed on that view.

Yeah.

So I subscribe to the idea that we're going through a K-shaped recovery.

And this doesn't necessarily mean that things are going.

In fact, it precisely doesn't mean that we're going to see a bounce back towards new all time highs again.

Like I think that over the next six weeks, it's going to be very difficult for us to reclaim like the 126 level on Bitcoin, for example.

But from probably early December onwards, I could see us kind of grinding back again.

Is 2026 going to be a good or bad year? Do we believe in the four-year cycle, which means it's terrible? Or have we broken free of those chains and can expect that some of these tailwinds will finally kick in?

$20 billion would be a lot of Ethereum.

That's a really good point because the volumes in E are like 5x lower than they are for Bitcoin.

So every billion dollars more of like buying flow that kind of goes in is a lot more meaningful than the same amount that goes into Bitcoin.

So I think that this is clearly what's driving price.

But you made a really good point because if you look at the altcoin market cap versus the altcoin or altseason index, I'm looking at like coin market cap, for example.

Like you see that there are very divergent paths, like we're kind of like a new all time high as far as the altcoin market cap is concerned.

But if you're looking at altseason index, we're like in the mid 30s, not even breaking 50.

And we just had news story after news story and kind of pump after pump here.

um and i think there there's you know substantial demand there's a lot of people who would love to own a piece of spacex or own a piece of open ai and today have zero access

yeah so i think that i'm not surprised to see that financial industry groups are trying to protect their moat because obviously this would eat into uh their business model but what i kind of worry about is that we're going to learn the wrong lessons from all of this because we're still looking at tokenized securities 1.0 and there's nothing wrong with that.

It's just that this model basically still needs a custodian like DTCC to kind of sit there, hold these assets in custody while you tokenize the replica on-chain.

And that's fine, except that that's not where the benefits of being on-chain and what blockchains actually offer, like in terms of instantaneous settlement, in terms of being able to reduce intermediaries, in terms of being able to reduce the cost, like all that stuff, I think is going to be a lot more powerful Because then you won't have guys who need to actually like trade the stuff, have assets sit there for T plus two, actually being a cost to them at like, say, 5% interest rates, because like they're going to need to accumulate like, you know, $5 billion in order to kind of pay that off over like over a few days.

Like those things go away when you have tokenization.

And by the way, when you start to actually have real tokenized assets, that is assets that are natively securities that are natively on chain, then you can actually start integrating this stuff into derivatives.

If you need to have collateral that can actually be margin called instantaneously, like that is where.

I mean, David, are you a massive Bitcoin treasury company bull or do you share the skepticism of Scaramucci and Franklin Templeton here?

And it's very hard, I think, to have a consistent view on the future when you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow on tariffs and all the trade wars.

Yeah, I think normally I don't tend to trade the medium long term perspective on Bitcoin, even though I have a very strong one in terms of what I think it represents as an alternative to the traditional financial industry.

But I think here, given the circumstances around tariffs and what effectively does look like a Trump put emerging.

I think that we're seeing that Bitcoin is really kind of establishing its own trend that's kind of separate away from US equities, as well as even gold to some extent.

I think that we've talked so much about this digital gold narrative around Bitcoin, but You know, like the reality is that, you know, it kind of trades better in risk on situations, sometimes resilient inflation, sometimes it's not, but it's more of a fair weather friend.

But now it's starting to really kind of take on its own track.

And we saw it this week.

thought you know uh it just it really blows my mind but david like how do you in this context of such uncertainty how do you forecast what you think is likely to happen like i know that bitcoin could follow gold but if trump goes with 250 tariffs against china nothing's gonna go pumping uh into the into the clouds right i mean it's really hard to imagine that

But I guess like is this are we finally going to see the promise of the Morgan Stanley's and the JP Morgan's maybe ramping up activity?

I think so.

I mean, we've actually ran a survey very recently where we talked to, I think, like 300, 400 different institutional entities.

And we asked them like how they want to participate in crypto markets, for example.

And still, I think we saw in 2024, it was somewhere around 75% that invest via spot and ETFs slash ETPs.

That number has gone up for the 2025 year to around 87%.

So you see a massive increase in people wanting to participate in market through these vehicles.

What do you think the rest of this cycle or the coming year may likely look like?