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Episode: Top 10 Crypto x AI Predictions for 2025 | Bitwise's Matt Hougan & Ryan Rasmussen

Author: Bankless
Duration: 01:13:16

Episode Shownotes

2024 was a breakout year for crypto, with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana outperforming traditional assets and spot Bitcoin ETFs attracting $31.7 billion in record inflows. Coinbase surged toward S&P 500 inclusion, stablecoins doubled, and tokenized real-world assets began their rise. Nations embraced Bitcoin as a reserve asset, and AI-driven memecoins

fueled fresh mania. Bitwise calls 2024 a prelude to 2025—a year poised to redefine crypto’s place in global finance. Bitwise’s Chief Investment Officer, Matt Hougan and Head of Research, Ryan Rasmussen join us to share Bitwise’s top 10 2025 Predictions. Trust us anon, you don’t want to miss this. ------ 📣AMBIRE | SIGN UP! https://www.ambire.com/legends ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BUG BOUNTY PROGRAM https://bankless.cc/Uniswap-Bug-Bounty 🐧CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiSimple 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⁠ 📈iYield: YOUR FINANCIAL PICTURE, SIMPLIFIED https://bankless.cc/iYield 🔒SAFE | INTRODUCING SAFENET https://bankless.cc/SAFE ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/110?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 5:19 Summarizing 2024 8:58 Bitcoin, Ethereum, & Solana 2025 Price Targets 21:40 2025 Bitcoin ETF Flows 27:20 Coinbase Surpasses Charles Schwab 32:13 Year of the Crypto IPO 38:01 AI Agent Memecoin Mania 47:39 Countries Holding Bitcoin 53:14 Coinbase S&P 500 & MicroStrategy Nasdaq-100 56:54 Crypto 401(k)s 1:02:48 Stablecoin Assets Double 1:05:26 RWAs Surpasses $50B 1:09:12 Bonus Prediction: 2029 Bitcoin Price 1:12:32 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Bitwise 2025 Predictions https://bitwiseinvestments.com/crypto-market-insights/the-year-ahead-10-crypto-predictions-for-2025 Matt Hougan https://x.com/Matt_Hougan Ryan Rasmussen https://x.com/RasterlyRock ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Full Transcript

00:00:02 Speaker_00
Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the 2025 frontier. Today on the show, we got Bitwise's 2025 predictions. They got 10 of them. They're extremely bullish.

00:00:12 Speaker_00
Matt Hogan and Ryan Rasmussen from Bitwise coming on the show to give us their, I think, very well-polished, very strong predictions. I enjoyed every single one of them. So strap yourself in. It's that time of the season. It's December.

00:00:22 Speaker_00
We're wrapping up the year. We're going to reflect very quickly on 2024, but then really get into what they think is coming down the pipe in 2025. It's some pretty exciting stuff.

00:00:31 Speaker_00
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00:01:27 Speaker_02
So we've got 10 predictions today, some about price, some about the ETF, some about countries and what they're about to do with crypto. And then toward the end, we've got actually a bonus prediction.

00:01:39 Speaker_02
At what point in time will Bitcoin surpass flipping gold? We got that number for you, too. So let's get right into the episode with Ryan and Matt.

00:01:47 Speaker_02
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00:04:42 Speaker_00
Bankless Nation, the year is coming to a close. And to help us close out the year, we've got Matt Hogan, the Chief Investment Officer over at Bitwise, along with Ryan Rasmussen, the Head of Research at Bitwise. Guys, welcome back onto Bankless.

00:04:55 Speaker_00
We had you guys on together in the ETF part of this year. I feel like we might do a little bit of a Spotify-wrapped kind of reminiscing of the year that was.

00:05:03 Speaker_00
But man, I think this year really started off not great and is ending on one of the highest notes that crypto has ever had. Really honored that you guys are able to join us and kind of wrap up this year and project forward.

00:05:14 Speaker_00
Matt, Ryan, welcome to Bankless.

00:05:16 Speaker_06
Thanks for having us. We're excited to be back. Looking forward to it.

00:05:19 Speaker_00
So, yeah, I do want to do that Spotify wrapped of crypto 2024, if you guys don't mind. How would you summarize the year that was? And maybe just to really set the tone here, we're going through your guys's 2025 predictions. You guys got 10 of them.

00:05:33 Speaker_00
They're bangers. I loved every single one of these things. It's one of the better yearly predictions that I've ever seen. But I really want to set the stage before we get into the predictions. I want to kind of, again, do the Spotify rapt of 2024.

00:05:44 Speaker_00
How would you guys characterize 2024? How would you place it as in crypto's broader legacy? How will it be remembered? Matt, let's start with you.

00:05:54 Speaker_06
Oh, man, I almost want to say it's the goat. It's pretty close to that. It was a fantastic year. I think if you think back to where we were a year ago, there was no Bitcoin ETF. The idea of institutions moving in en masse was a long way coming.

00:06:11 Speaker_06
There was no Ethereum ETF. The administration was extraordinarily hostile to crypto. In fact, a year ago, almost today, J.B. Dimon testified before the House Financial Services Committee that the government should shut down crypto. That's where we were.

00:06:30 Speaker_06
And you fast forward to today, we have crypto assets at or approaching all-time highs. You have massive institutional buying. You have a pro-crypto administration coming in. You have a crypto czar that understands crypto coming in.

00:06:44 Speaker_06
You have a chair of the SEC coming in that used to work for the Digital Chamber of Commerce and the token project there. It's unbelievable. So I'd say, you know, maybe not the GOAT, but pretty close to the GOAT from years.

00:07:00 Speaker_04
Yeah, I think if you zoomed out and you were heading into 2024, you might hope for one or two of those things that Matt just mentioned. And it's kind of crazy sitting here in December to think about that so many things have really happened.

00:07:12 Speaker_04
Bitcoin ETFs, we had, you know, a bunch of progress in Congress in May or June of this year, Ethereum ETFs. We've had a crazy amount of rallies across every crypto asset we have.

00:07:24 Speaker_04
tons of wins in the US 2024 election, the SEC, we have new positions in DC that are headed by crypto enthusiasts. I mean, any like two of those things would have made 2024 a great year.

00:07:36 Speaker_04
And I'm sure we're missing 10 other things that happened over this past year, that really contributed to how great of a year it was. So I've never been more excited about the outlook for crypto.

00:07:44 Speaker_00
I think maybe if I were to summarize this year, I would definitely say whiplash, but in a very positive direction, as in coming the 2023 might have been like crypto's worst year in terms of just sentiment, onslaught, just regulatory oppression.

00:07:59 Speaker_00
I mean, we had there was once upon a time there was Mt. Gox. But, and Mellon Cox was catastrophic, but the industry was so small. FTX was also catastrophic and the industry was large at that point. And we were attracting a large amount of attention.

00:08:14 Speaker_00
And that really defined 2022 and 2023. And now in 2024, towards the end of 2024, it seems to be a complete reversal of that. So I think it kind of went from like industry lows in terms of sentiment and price action into just industry highs.

00:08:31 Speaker_00
So one of the biggest just gaps between where the year opened up and where the year finished. Absolutely massive. Absolutely massive.

00:08:39 Speaker_06
We're still facing Operation Chokepoint 2.0. You couldn't say crypto in polite circles. I don't think people have really grasped the degree of the switch that's happened over the last year.

00:08:51 Speaker_06
I think whiplash is a good word to describe it, although sort of a positive version of whiplash, to be sure.

00:08:58 Speaker_02
That sets us up, I think, for the predictions going into 2025. And I mean, we're feeling bullish finishing the year that was 2024. So let's dive into the predictions. As David said, there's 10 of them.

00:09:11 Speaker_02
And these are neatly bundled up in a report that you guys issued that I believe comes out with the airing of this episode. So we're going to include in the show notes today. So, why don't we start with number one.

00:09:23 Speaker_02
You guys lead with price, which is like the thing that most guests make us wait for on these episodes, right? They don't lead with price, but you lead with price. So, give us the price point for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, the Mag 3.

00:09:37 Speaker_02
Give us the historic, what they did in 2024, and then what's your prediction for the price on these big three assets in 2025?

00:09:45 Speaker_04
I'm excited, excited to talk about this. This was a big debate at the team at bitwise, where do we land for price targets for 2025 in the big three, I think it's a really great way.

00:09:55 Speaker_04
Great way to put it here for the mag three is really great way to put it here for crypto. First, of course, you have to start with Bitcoin and price predictions.

00:10:02 Speaker_04
I think this one's a little bit funky in the sense that our estimate of 200,000 might be on the lower end of a lot of the price predictions out there for next year. But that's kind of

00:10:12 Speaker_02
For Bitcoin, to be clear, not Ethereum.

00:10:13 Speaker_04
For Bitcoin, it's 200,000.

00:10:16 Speaker_02
We love our Ethereum, so you know.

00:10:18 Speaker_04
We'll get to Ethereum. I would love to see 200,000 Ethereum. I don't think our compliance team would be happy if I came out here and said that was going to happen.

00:10:26 Speaker_04
But for Bitcoin, nonetheless, we expect Bitcoin to hit 200,000 next year, driven by a bunch of different catalysts, continued adoption from institutions via growth of these ETFs. We think more and more corporations will start buying Bitcoin.

00:10:40 Speaker_04
We're already seeing signs of corporations leaning into the mini micro strategy model over the past few weeks and months.

00:10:47 Speaker_04
Now if governments start buying Bitcoin, everyone's talking about a strategic Bitcoin reserve, we think if governments start to buy Bitcoin, we could see that 200,000 price target become 500,000 or more pretty quickly.

00:10:59 Speaker_04
So we're really excited about what Bitcoin could do from here. Now you want to take aetherium? Sure.

00:11:05 Speaker_06
Yeah, I also feel like our aetherium price target is conservative. So You know, we're looking at Ethereum to trade up to $7,000. I think it may take an eye towards $10,000.

00:11:18 Speaker_06
My view on ETH is it has both actual momentum and sort of catch-up momentum built into it, which you're starting to see over the last few weeks.

00:11:30 Speaker_06
We think the market has somewhat overlooked the strong progress we've seen in the ETH ecosystem, particularly the growth. activity on the layer two networks. And it's going to come back to it. We see it as almost a contrarian bet.

00:11:43 Speaker_06
So I don't know if Bitcoin or Ethereum is more sort of understated in terms of where we think these prices are going, but I feel pretty confident about both of them.

00:11:53 Speaker_00
I'm gonna try and put my Bitwise hat on. 200,000 Bitcoin, $7,000 ETH, $750 Solana. This is a doubling of all three. All three you guys are participating in is a doubling.

00:12:05 Speaker_00
And the consumers of this report, the audience of this report, which maybe we should touch on a little bit, is going to be crypto outsiders mostly. You guys are reaching out Like, doing God's work, trying to bring crypto investors into crypto.

00:12:20 Speaker_00
And I think the crypto people are looking at these numbers and like, man, those are rookie numbers. You've got to pump those numbers up. But for outsiders, they're thinking, a doubling in a year?

00:12:30 Speaker_00
Because they're not used for numbers to double so quickly. And so I think what you guys are, the strategy here is like, let's give the highest number that we are like 100% confident that we can hit.

00:12:42 Speaker_00
And then there's more upside beyond that, you know, for the wink-wink cryptonatives. That's kind of what I think is going on here. Check my bias here. Should we ask them to give us the real numbers then?

00:12:52 Speaker_01
You also want the cryptonative numbers.

00:12:56 Speaker_06
Oh man, yeah. I love the idea of our paper winking. I mean, look. I think that's about right. I will say last year, you know, Bitcoin was trading at about $40,000. We only had a Bitcoin price target.

00:13:07 Speaker_06
We said it would get to $80,000, and that turned out to be too pessimistic. We'll see where it ends the year, but certainly above $80,000.

00:13:12 Speaker_06
I think, you know, particularly to the first two price targets, the thing about Bitcoin, once it gets above $100,000, is where would it stop? There's vastly more buying of Bitcoin than there is new Bitcoin produced at this moment.

00:13:28 Speaker_06
Corporations alone bought 250,000 Bitcoin last year, and it only produces about 170,000 Bitcoin a year. So there's more demand than supply. That's before we get to ETFs or governments.

00:13:41 Speaker_06
It's been hitting price bubbles at all time highs at $100,000 because those are levels where people will sell, long-term holders will sell. Once you get above 100, who knows where long-term holders will sell. Will they sell at 150? Why?

00:13:56 Speaker_06
Would they sell at 200? Why? I think it could easily get to 250. I think as Ryan mentioned, if there's a strategic Bitcoin reserve, you're talking about $500,000 Bitcoin. And for people who think that's crazy,

00:14:09 Speaker_06
You got to remember a few years ago, Bitcoin was at $3,000, right? And it ripped straight to 60. So you can have those kinds of returns. I feel something similar with ETH and $10,000.

00:14:22 Speaker_06
I think if ETH's narrative turns around and people look at the sort of massive growth of transaction activity on things like BASE, or they look at what's going,

00:14:32 Speaker_06
on at StarkNet and other layer twos, and they get excited about this space and the growth, I think you'd have a gravitational pull to $10,000. I don't know what Ryan thinks about that.

00:14:42 Speaker_06
At $10,000, I imagine there'll be a lot of long-term ETH holders who would be willing to sell, and that would be significant behavioral overhead. But once we get above new all-time highs, there's almost this

00:14:54 Speaker_06
price gap or this air gap until you get to the next behavioral cell level. And for ETH, that's $10,000.

00:15:00 Speaker_06
So I do think that is like a gravitational pull that we could see if we get a momentum above previous all-time highs and then good narrative, I could easily see it running up to 10 grand and then sitting there for a bit.

00:15:13 Speaker_04
Yeah, I agree with with Matt on that. I would just say a bit of how I feel about Ethereum this year is I feel it's kind of taking the spot of where Solana was heading into last year.

00:15:23 Speaker_04
Vibes in the Solana community had never been lower in end of 2022 coming into 2023. And then the narrative turned. Matt just spoke about if the narrative turns for Ethereum, what could possibly happen.

00:15:34 Speaker_04
And I think we're already seeing glimpses of that coming through over the past month or so. Ethereum's performed really well since the election.

00:15:41 Speaker_04
And I think if the narrative for Ethereum continues to shift the way it has so far for the next month or two months, and we see price continue to gradually rise, I think it gets some of that Solana-esque momentum that Solana had last year for Ethereum in 2025.

00:15:55 Speaker_04
Now, it's not as big of an asset, so it probably won't have the same amount of impact on price as this narrative shift for Solana did, but I think Ethereum is really well set up for 2025.

00:16:05 Speaker_00
What would you say are the inputs that are blowing into the sales of all of these crypto assets? Bitcoin, Solana, Ethereum, the whole entire industry. What's really the input driving the bullish year that we think 2025 will be?

00:16:18 Speaker_04
That's a really good question. I think there's a bunch of catalysts, a potential catalyst for next year that are blowing the sales forward for crypto. And then there's a few potential headwinds. You kind of have to weigh the pros and cons.

00:16:29 Speaker_04
Listen to me when I sit back and look at where the market's headed. There's so many more pros or catalysts then. potential headwinds.

00:16:35 Speaker_04
Some of those, I think, are going to be led by institutional investments, corporations, governments, institutional investors.

00:16:43 Speaker_04
One anecdote that we had last year going into 2024 was that majority of wealth managers and financial advisors had no expectations that Bitcoin ETFs would start trading in 2024. More than 90% or something like that thought it wouldn't happen in 2024.

00:16:58 Speaker_04
And then two weeks in, we had Bitcoin ETFs, and they're now the most successful ETF launches of all

00:17:02 Speaker_02
It's so weird, though. Like, why were they so wrong? Just I know that's a side point here. But like, why were they so wrong about that?

00:17:10 Speaker_06
It's, it's anchoring bias, I think, because people have been talking about those ETF approvals for year after year after year, and they had been wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong. So you know, it's a little bit of the boy who cried wolf.

00:17:22 Speaker_06
And I think that just colored everyone's views and made them not as positive as they should have been.

00:17:29 Speaker_02
Well, I interrupted your flow, Ryan. So the institutional investors arriving and now they see it, right? They have products that they can buy. What else?

00:17:37 Speaker_04
Exactly. Now they see it. They're still waiting. In some instances, you have these large wire houses like the Morgan Stanley's Merrill Lynch's Bank of America's of the world.

00:17:45 Speaker_04
This is majority of the wealth controlled in America by wealth managers, and they're still being held back by the different approvals and compliance requirements and investment committee meetings and approvals that are happening at these large firms.

00:17:59 Speaker_04
So majority of wealth managers actually haven't even been unleashed to these new products. So we see a huge It's impossible to to not know that going into 2025, the regulatory environment for crypto in the US has never been better.

00:18:32 Speaker_04
We've never had a better setup for pro crypto legislation, for relaxing some of the rules and some of the back of office or back channeling that was happening to restrict cryptos growth. That all is gone in a matter of weeks now in January. And so

00:18:48 Speaker_04
We think that the institutional adoption, the regulatory landscape shifting, the macro tailwinds, right? If we have many interest rate cuts, if we see global stimulus, we see China stimulus happening, that's more wind in the sales of crypto assets.

00:19:03 Speaker_04
And then you have kind of crypto specific things like Bitcoin's supply shock continuing from last year's halving. Layer two scaling on Ethereum. We're already seeing what's happening

00:19:11 Speaker_04
with the growth of base in the past few months, when it's now, you know, got its leadership in the L2 position, but is continuing to attract more eyes and attention from the Solana community.

00:19:22 Speaker_04
And so you have these kind of network specific tailwinds, and then you have macro tailwinds, and you have broader crypto industry tailwinds, everything headed kind of in the right direction, in our opinion.

00:19:31 Speaker_02
I get this visual of a dam bursting, right? It really feels like that's what's happened. When you guys use terms like strategic Bitcoin reserve, I'm like, that is so crazy.

00:19:40 Speaker_02
Can you imagine that large governments like the United States of America stockpiling Bitcoin? How crazy is that, that we've entered an era where this is indeed possible? Just a quick question on the ETF flows.

00:19:53 Speaker_02
So it has seemed that the last quarter or so, Ethereum Ether ETF flows have really been picking up. In fact, I looked at last week and it looked like from a market cap adjusted perspective, Ether got more inflows than Bitcoin actually on the week.

00:20:09 Speaker_02
And so I think that's a first. We've started to see inflows picking up. Does this help the price of ETH? I know you guys have always been bullish on Ether, that the institutions would want it, that there is a market for it in this ETF format.

00:20:23 Speaker_02
We're starting to see that now. Is this the beginning of something big? What do you see when you look at the ETF flows?

00:20:31 Speaker_06
Yeah, it's absolutely the beginning of something big. And we talked about this when, before the ETH ETFs launched, I think I mentioned that I was like hoping there would be a delay.

00:20:41 Speaker_06
You know, they would launch like a year after the Bitcoin ETFs, because TradFi needed time to digest the Bitcoin ETFs before they could move on to what's next and start thinking about what's next. You're starting to see that happen, right?

00:20:55 Speaker_06
People are coming around.

00:20:57 Speaker_06
The early adopters have moved into the Bitcoin ETFs and now they're expanding their knowledge in the rest of the crypto market in the same way that almost every crypto investor through time has entered in some through ETH, but many through Bitcoin and then expanded on and they all get their favorite asset.

00:21:15 Speaker_06
Many of them end up indeed with ETH. So we think it's a, it's a small down payment on what's to come from an ETF flows. The ETH ETFs have already been relatively successful in the scale of most ETFs. They've just been overshadowed by Bitcoin.

00:21:32 Speaker_06
But I think in 2025, you're going to see the flows really accelerate. And you're right that we've seen a little bit of a down payment on that in the past few weeks.

00:21:40 Speaker_00
This transitions nicely into prediction number two. So moving on to number two, Bitcoin ETFs will attract more flows in 2025 than they did in 2024. And I'll just read a bit of an excerpt here. When the U.S.

00:21:52 Speaker_00
spot Bitcoin ETFs launched in January 2024, ETF experts forecasted the group to see $5 to $15 billion of inflows in their first year. They passed the higher end of that range within the first six months. So bullish.

00:22:04 Speaker_00
Since launching, the record-setting ETFs have gathered almost $32 billion in inflows. We expect 2025 inflows to top that. So at least $32 more billion into the Bitcoin ETFs is being predicted by Bitwise. But $32 is the floor. It only goes up from there.

00:22:24 Speaker_00
Matt, give us some more color here, if you will.

00:22:27 Speaker_06
Look, I think this one is a gimme. As you guys know, I come from an ETF background. I was CEO of ETF.com, spent 15 years in that industry. I've watched 5,500 ETFs launch.

00:22:38 Speaker_06
In almost every single case, year two is bigger than year one, and year three is bigger than year two. And there are reasons for that. These ETFs need to be approved on multiple platforms. Investors need to do their due diligence.

00:22:54 Speaker_06
We move a lot faster in the crypto world than traditional investors do in the traditional world. This is a great chart showing exactly this, comparing the inflows into the gold ETF versus what we've seen in Bitcoin.

00:23:10 Speaker_06
There are two takeaways from this chart. One, you can see that the inflows into Bitcoin vastly outweigh the inflows into gold in the year one. But the more important story, the story you don't see sort of told,

00:23:22 Speaker_06
is watch how the gold inflows grow year after year after year. It's straight up and to the right in an accelerating fashion.

00:23:30 Speaker_00
It doubled from year one to year two.

00:23:32 Speaker_05
And here's the thing, everyone was so excited in year one that they lost. Everyone was like, this is the fastest growing ETF of all time. It's amazing. It's pulled in a billion dollars in the first week. This thing is outrageous.

00:23:47 Speaker_05
And the assumption was all the money that had been sitting on the sidelines waiting to come in had already come in.

00:23:53 Speaker_06
And you're going to see this asymptotic top where it was just going to level off and you get a few hundred million dollars in, but that's exactly not what happened. It hasn't happened for any ETF in the history of ETFs.

00:24:05 Speaker_06
I don't know why it would happen for Bitcoin. We're going to see these ETFs approved on Morgan Stanley, on UBS, on Wells Fargo. We're going to see sort of the regulatory overhang, the gray shadow removed from these ETFs.

00:24:20 Speaker_06
And I think $32 billion is absolutely the floor. I wouldn't be surprised if it was significantly higher than that. And I don't think the market understands this because they assume that all the flows have happened and now it's just a trickle.

00:24:35 Speaker_06
It's exactly the opposite. The slope goes up, not down. And this was our easiest prediction to make.

00:24:42 Speaker_00
The Bitcoin ETF launched during a pretty dire time in the crypto industry. It was kind of the light that brought us out of the hole. It was the thing that really kind of kickstarted the first phase of the bull market.

00:24:56 Speaker_00
And we all know what is the biggest marketer of Bitcoin? Bitcoin price. And when Bitcoin price breaks $100,000, all of a sudden, you know, it's not so scammy anymore. You know, it's a little bit more than just, you know, terrorists.

00:25:12 Speaker_00
And it's actually just, you know, the future of finance. It's the digital gold. And so all of a sudden, I think public acceptance of Bitcoin is coming back at year two, at year two.

00:25:22 Speaker_00
And so if the number this year was $31.7 billion, give us, Matt, if you will, I don't know if this is allowed, but give us your Percentage odds of it doubling that at $64 billion.

00:25:37 Speaker_00
What's your percentage that it breaks $64 billion in 2020, in this year?

00:25:40 Speaker_06
I think it'll be close. If you'd given me $50 billion or up, I would have said it's at least like an 80% chance. If it'll actually get to 60, I mean, that would be great. But I'm bullish on price.

00:25:54 Speaker_06
You also have to combine this with our prediction that price will go to $200K. Which means the number of Bitcoin it has to acquire is smaller. So I think it's, it's at least, you know, it should be better than 50% odds that it doubles.

00:26:06 Speaker_06
That's what happens in ETFs. I keep seeing people expecting things to change in crypto. They're like, there's never going to be an alt season. It's only big. Well, guess what?

00:26:17 Speaker_05
That happens every time. And then we get NFTs or debt. Well, guess what? They've come back. There's no four-year cycle. Well, guess what? In ETF land, it's year two will be bigger than year one. I think it's going to happen.

00:26:29 Speaker_05
Uh, I'm pretty, pretty confident about it.

00:26:33 Speaker_02
One other effect here you guys mentioned is one of the points for these numbers. Investors are laddering up. 3% is the new 1%. Okay, 3% is the new 1%. You're talking about assets under management.

00:26:45 Speaker_02
Let's remember how unallocated traditional finance actually is to this asset class. They just got off zero, what, in the last year or two? And some of them are still kind of on zero trying to play catch up. And now,

00:26:59 Speaker_02
the frontier is going to move away from them because 3% is the new 1% when it comes to assets under management. So there's a lot of catch up to do here. That's the point you guys are making.

00:27:09 Speaker_06
Yeah, that's absolutely right. And that includes people who, you know, have allocated to Bitcoin ETFs already doubling down. I think all these trends are working in our favor.

00:27:20 Speaker_00
Alright, let's move on to prediction number three. Coinbase will surpass Charles Schwab as the most valuable brokerage in the world. Its stock will top $700 a share. So, okay, Coin is currently trading at $340 a share. I checked it this morning.

00:27:35 Speaker_00
And so, you guys, his third prediction is that it's going to hit $700, which is in line with the crypto assets. Let's just double the prices. Seems kind of safe.

00:27:44 Speaker_00
Talk about the significance of if Coinbase, I've never heard of this kind of flippening before, Coinbase flippening Charles Schwab as the most valuable brokerage in the world.

00:27:54 Speaker_02
What is Charles Schwab?

00:27:56 Speaker_00
I don't even know. I don't know. I'm not a client of Charles Schwab. Talk to us about the significance of Coinbase flipping Charles Schwab in just like public mindshare. Ryan, you want to take this one?

00:28:06 Speaker_04
Yeah, yeah, I'm happy to take this one. I mean, when you think about what Coinbase is business is, I think we all know, because we probably use Coinbase in a number of different ways.

00:28:14 Speaker_04
It's much more than just a brokerage, you can use it as a checking account. And a lot of instances where you can instantly earn four or 5% yield on on USDC unstable coins.

00:28:25 Speaker_04
They have a infrastructure business that spans everything from custody and staking to wallet services, they have a subscription based model, they have huge exposure to the booming stable coin. ecosystem.

00:28:36 Speaker_04
So in some ways, it's kind of unfair to to compare them to Charles Schwab, because they're very different businesses.

00:28:42 Speaker_04
But when you zoom out, and you think about the fact that Charles Schwab is kind of the king of the trading world when it comes to traditional equities, then it kinds of kind of starts to look really impressive if Coinbase flips Charles Schwab, because here's this, you know, little industry of crypto that was born 15 years ago, that now all of a sudden,

00:29:00 Speaker_04
has a single company that's worth more than the behemoth Charles Schwab. I'm so excited about Coinbase's business model. They continue to be undervalued by Wall Street.

00:29:22 Speaker_04
Last year, one of our predictions was that their revenue of Coinbase would grow by more than 100% in 2024. Wall Street had their year-over-year revenue.

00:29:32 Speaker_04
After 2023, which we've spoken about was a bad year for crypto, Wall Street had assumed that Coinbase's revenue would only grow 9% year-over-year. So they just fundamentally misunderstand this business.

00:29:45 Speaker_04
They actually do view it as a replicate of Charles Schwab, but for the crypto industry. And as we know, it's so much more than that. So I think as Wall Street

00:29:54 Speaker_04
continues to get surprised by the growth of Coinbase as Coinbase continues to infiltrate every single corner of the crypto market and continues to, you know, see growth and benefit from this shifting regulatory environment from this, you know, potential pro legislation on stable coins to these growing ETFs, most of which custody with Coinbase as they start to benefit from all of those different types of tailwinds.

00:30:18 Speaker_04
I think Coinbase hitting 700 is a slam dunk.

00:30:22 Speaker_02
I just looked, relative market caps wise, Charles Schwab is $150 billion, I believe. Does not currently make the top 100 assets by size. The top 100, the lowest on that is $162 billion, but I'm sure Charles Schwab is in there from time to time.

00:30:40 Speaker_02
So you're calling for a Coinbase to go higher than Charles Schwab's 2025 price, which would place them, I don't know, 150, 160 billion or something like that, one of the top 100 assets in the world, that's what you're saying?

00:30:55 Speaker_06
I think it could go higher than that. I mean, if you look at this list, I do this sometimes, look at that list of companies and ask yourself, what company do you think could be a trillion dollar company?

00:31:06 Speaker_06
Try to feel like you think Motorola is going to be a trillion dollar company. The National Bank of Australia is going to be a trillion dollar company.

00:31:12 Speaker_02
Some of these are on the decline, aren't they?

00:31:14 Speaker_06
Yeah.

00:31:15 Speaker_05
Illinois Toolworks, bigger than Coinbase, is going to be a trillion. They may be great companies.

00:31:20 Speaker_06
But Coinbase, for various reasons, including that it got through the regulatory window before competitors could build up, has this extraordinary position in the fastest growing, most exciting industry in the world.

00:31:35 Speaker_06
Nearly, like not quite a monopoly position, but something approaching that with multiple different business lines. I think in a few years, you could be looking at this as a trillion dollar company. I could think you could be talking about the Mag 8.

00:31:48 Speaker_06
I think it's that scale of opportunity if Coinbase continues to execute well.

00:31:53 Speaker_02
Is there something about like, is there at some point where Coinbase would get into the S&P 500? Is that a catalyst for things like it starts being included in indexes and such?

00:32:02 Speaker_06
That's exactly right. We have a prediction about that later on.

00:32:07 Speaker_02
Well, I'm front running the opportunity as usual. What's our next prediction, David?

00:32:13 Speaker_00
Prediction number four, 2025 will be the year of the crypto IPO with at least five crypto unicorns going public in the United States. Now, I don't think there's that many selection of possible companies that could go public.

00:32:27 Speaker_00
So, I think we're picking from a pretty small crop here. So, when you tell me that five crypto unicorns will go public, I'm pretty sure that you guys have some idea of which ones these are.

00:32:37 Speaker_00
So, walk us through who these possible contenders are for the companies that can join the ranks of Coinbase and Bitcoin miners as the only public companies that are coming out of the industry. Which ones should we be paying attention to this year?

00:32:52 Speaker_06
Yeah, I mean, I think there are quite a few, actually, but we listed out five in the report, Circle probably being the most obvious one.

00:32:59 Speaker_06
You know, Circle has been trying to go public for a number of years and has a huge position in the stablecoin market. And that is a market we're very optimistic on on the year ahead. So we think Circle could be one of those.

00:33:12 Speaker_06
Figure is an interesting company that makes really extensive use of blockchain technology behind the scenes to do mortgage lending. You almost don't know it when you're using it, that it's blockchain-based, but indeed it is.

00:33:26 Speaker_06
And if you talk to them, they derive enormous cost savings from doing that. But there are others, we think Kraken, Anchorage, Chainalysis.

00:33:35 Speaker_06
The reality is there are a variety of really high quality firms out there that are earning revenues in excess of $100 million a year across exchange, custody, trading, etc.

00:33:48 Speaker_06
And I think, you know, a lot of those could be liable to go public in the year ahead. The IPO window has been more or less closed and deeply closed for crypto for a while.

00:33:59 Speaker_06
So there are these firms are really almost bigger than you would expect to go public. They're already way in excess of that. But there's a longer tail here. I think we could see, you know, as many as 10, but certainly five in the year to come.

00:34:14 Speaker_00
of

00:34:32 Speaker_00
going public demand that we have not expressed over the last four years that is now going to be brought forward into these four years, which makes me very excited because they were squeezing eight years of companies that are wanting to go public into the next four.

00:34:45 Speaker_02
Well, we've barely seen any crypto. It's just like, it's a bunch of Bitcoin miners and there's just like Coinbase. And when did Coinbase do? Is that like four years ago? Yeah, it was 2021. Top of the

00:34:56 Speaker_06
Yeah, it got through the window. And this is important for a couple different reasons, right? You know, there are a lot of traditional investors who don't believe crypto is a real industry because there are only one or two publicly traded companies.

00:35:07 Speaker_06
You also see Wall Street firms starting to build analysis and hire analysts to cover this space, which improves the focus on it and the quality of coverage in the space.

00:35:17 Speaker_06
There are a number of knock-on effects that are positive for the industry to have more names in the public equity circle.

00:35:24 Speaker_00
Yeah, I really actually want to double tap on that. The second order consequences of having many public crypto companies in the United States seems to be significant. And I think maybe as we see one or two happen, maybe it snowballs.

00:35:38 Speaker_00
But I think this does a lot for crypto legitimacy, for crypto branding.

00:35:43 Speaker_00
Once there's sufficient supply of public crypto companies, it really just gets hard to tarnish the name of crypto, as some in the political apparatus have done just for the dark web of the internet, shadowy supercoders.

00:35:55 Speaker_00
That brand gets harder and harder to justify. Talk to us about just the second-order positive impacts of this, Matt.

00:36:02 Speaker_06
Yeah, I think you called out those. Those are very real, and I think they have a very long impact. I mentioned the analyst coverage being a big deal, the media coverage being a big deal.

00:36:11 Speaker_06
It also recycles money back into the crypto VC community, which then gets reinvested in the next slate of startups. And you just get companies paying much more attention. I'll tell you that Stripe's acquisition of Bridge

00:36:26 Speaker_06
opened up the eyes of other payment companies to what's going on in stablecoin in a major way, right?

00:36:32 Speaker_06
That did not get unnoticed and nor would a billion dollar, you know, stablecoin issuer coming to market or a firm that was using blockchain to innovate on costs like figure come to market.

00:36:44 Speaker_06
That really, you know, raises the profile for competing firms to look at this space.

00:36:49 Speaker_02
Oh yeah, I wonder if some of the knock on effect here is some acquisitions, even from existing publicly traded companies.

00:36:55 Speaker_02
It's like rather for some of our crypto startups that have kind of made it big, rather than them going public, maybe they're just acquired by publicly traded companies and that becomes a more legitimate path in the wake of this as well.

00:37:08 Speaker_06
I think you're going to see a lot of this. I particularly think you're going to see a lot of this once we see the first major acquisition and we see the stock rally on that fact, right?

00:37:18 Speaker_06
If Stripe had been publicly traded and acquired Bridge and rallied, you can better believe every other company like them would be looking at this. So there is a snowball element to this.

00:37:28 Speaker_04
Yeah, I was just gonna highlight one more thing around around the knock on effects of this. I mean, we spoke about if, if crypto companies go public venture capitalists then have some profits, they can then cycle back into the ecosystem.

00:37:39 Speaker_04
But if you look at what happened with Coinbase after they went public, and how many early employees of Coinbase then made some wealth, and we now have this like Coinbase mafia across crypto, where they've been gone and started all these different companies that are now growing into

00:37:53 Speaker_04
you know, very great products, fast growing products getting a lot of attention. I think you start to see that happen across some of these other, these other companies once they go public as well.

00:38:02 Speaker_00
So going public is where crypto touches tradfy. The next prediction is where AI touches crypto. Prediction number five is tokens launched by AI agents will spearhead a meme coin mania even bigger than 2024.

00:38:14 Speaker_00
Now, this is a prediction that has gotten me very excited, that I'm currently very excited about, that Bankless is investing some of our time and energy and content sphere into this sector. So I'm very excited about this one.

00:38:24 Speaker_00
You guys are calling for an AI agent spawned meme coin mania. Maybe you could add a little bit more color to this prediction. Ryan, why don't you take this one?

00:38:33 Speaker_00
Because I'm guessing, no offense, Matt, but between you and Ryan, I think Ryan might be a little deeper in the trenches on this AI meme coin mania. So, that's why I'm throwing it to Ryan. Hey, don't fade Matt. Okay?

00:38:42 Speaker_06
There you go. We'll get to it. We'll get to it. We'll compare portfolios, Ryan.

00:38:46 Speaker_04
Let's go. Yeah, Matt loves to laugh at these AI meme coins that I throw his way and what my portfolio is doing any given day or week when I'm deep down these rabbit holes. But this is an area to me that's so fascinating.

00:39:02 Speaker_04
I mean, meme coins in general, I get the excitement around it. There's tons of hype. People are making crazy amounts of money. It's hard

00:39:07 Speaker_04
not to see that it's hard to ignore that when you see it happening and so you get drawn in I've been victim to that as well going into the salon and meme coin rabbit hole trying to chase chase chase the money but I think what's happening in this AI agent driven meme coin kind of narrative or meta that's boiling up

00:39:25 Speaker_04
is you have these two really interesting, really high growth and new disruptive technologies finding a way where they together create value in a way that people probably wouldn't have thought of two, three, four years ago.

00:39:37 Speaker_04
When you were talking about crypto a few years ago, we wouldn't have been talking about AI agents launching crypto coins. And we were talking about AI a couple years ago, we wouldn't have been talking about AI agents launching tokens on blockchains.

00:39:49 Speaker_04
But today we have a bunch of these different AI agents launching tokens on blockchains. Of course, a lot of that's being triggered by people in the real world tweeting or casting at these different agents to launch tokens.

00:40:01 Speaker_04
But to me, it represents a really, really interesting conversion of technology that particularly for the crypto culture is really exciting. And it's hard if you're an enthusiast about crypto to not be consumed by this. I spent the week of Thanksgiving

00:40:15 Speaker_04
like refreshing clinker on my phone, and opening deck screener and like Coinbase wallet over here and like, just doing like, I just found it so fun. It was honest, it's exhilarating. And, and I just think it's super interesting.

00:40:25 Speaker_04
And then you have things like a non right where you can now take the different technology layers that goes into all of this, right, you have

00:40:34 Speaker_04
AI agents, you have stable coins, you have blockchains, you then have Farcaster, right, this decentralized social media app where you're using that kind of as the base layer to trigger these token launches, and you have wallets on your phone that makes it easy to trade in and out of them, you start to see this technology stack that I think nears what happened in DeFi summer,

00:40:54 Speaker_04
but in a world that we're ready for today, which is low cost, high growth, decentralized, social, easy to use wallet infrastructure, stable coins that are easy to access and to get in and out of quickly.

00:41:05 Speaker_04
And to me, it just feels like this is a convergence of two super exciting technologies in a really strong narrative.

00:41:10 Speaker_02
We are totally with you on the AI agent bull case. We're totally there. It's a very crypto-native, crypto-frontier case right now. Let me ask you guys, because you guys talk to the suits too. Do you have to sort of whisper this one?

00:41:23 Speaker_02
Are you allowed to talk about this to them, or is that just for us? Is that just for the crypto-natives?

00:41:28 Speaker_02
This is frontier stuff, and you talk about meme coins, they don't necessarily see where AI agents can move inevitably, so is this kind of a whisper type of thing? It's in the report. It's in the report. I'm surprised it made it, honestly.

00:41:47 Speaker_04
I'm shouting it from the rooftops myself.

00:41:50 Speaker_04
But I do think there is generally, especially these slightly bigger firms, there's generally always one or two really deep crypto enthusiasts that you go in and when you're meeting and doing presentations, they start to they're thinking about these things.

00:42:01 Speaker_04
They're deep in the weeds of crypto. And so I think it resonates with one or two of them. And then they talk about it at work, they talk about it at the water cooler, and it starts to kind of infiltrate the minds.

00:42:10 Speaker_04
And again, you see these massive amounts of money being made, or, you know, for lack of a better thing happening, right, you see, I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but the Hawk Tua meme coin rug that happened last week.

00:42:24 Speaker_04
And it just, it infiltrates mainstream media in ways that's hard to ignore. So I think as this becomes more popular, it will pique the interest of those kinds of, you know,

00:42:34 Speaker_04
traditional investors, but they're not going to be investing client money in these. And I don't think they'll be investing in these for the most part.

00:42:41 Speaker_06
Yeah, I mean, I would just add a nuance to that, which is, yeah, I really love this example. Because if you back up 12 months or 24 months, you had people talking about the intersection of crypto and AI.

00:42:52 Speaker_06
And people were like, oh, yeah, crypto will be the native money of AI. And I think when the people we talked to heard that, what they imagined was like an AI bot buying their airplane tickets using stable coins or something like that.

00:43:06 Speaker_06
But this is an example of how those two technologies really do overlap. You're seeing proof of concept in how it can grow.

00:43:14 Speaker_06
And even if Ryan's going to zero meme coin portfolio isn't a great investment bet, the idea that the crypto native money and AI agents come together, you now have a proof of concept.

00:43:28 Speaker_06
And we can talk to investors all day long about, yeah, this is the proof of concept. It's going to 1000X in the future in all sorts of interesting ways. And you can see that it works here. And that's where this story can be discussed with SurtaSuits.

00:43:43 Speaker_00
So when my Ryan, Bankless Ryan, said that we totally agree and see the same writing on the wall on this, you know, meme coin, AI driven meme coin mania, I do want to put a pin in the AI meme coin mania and differentiate it from the other manias that crypto has spawned before it.

00:44:00 Speaker_00
The 2013 blockchain fork and fair launch. mania, the first ever bull market, followed by the ICO mania, followed by DeFi summer, followed by NFTs. All of those were insular technologies that we made ourselves internally to crypto.

00:44:15 Speaker_00
If this bull market is spawned, AI is the first time that two separate frontier technologies are coming together to make something new. And that's different. That's a little bit more legitimizing because AI is already impacting people's lives.

00:44:30 Speaker_00
People can understand it. People can relate to it. People are using it with chat GPT. And now it's also infiltrating crypto. And so it's different that it's an external technology coming in. and creating something new with crypto.

00:44:42 Speaker_00
And so the optimistic case is that difference does put dividends, does put wind behind the legitimacy of this particular mania. Even though all manias, sometimes people resist them and they find them distasteful. It is a bubble.

00:44:56 Speaker_00
Nonetheless, I do think there's something a little bit more real about this one.

00:44:58 Speaker_02
David, so you're saying we got two manias, right? And they're both going to smash into each other, like two massive hype cycles.

00:45:04 Speaker_00
The perfect storm. They're smashing into each other in 2025.

00:45:08 Speaker_06
That's great I'm here for it.

00:45:10 Speaker_00
All right guys, so that is predictions one through five We got six through ten later that are gonna come up.

00:45:16 Speaker_00
They got number of countries holding Bitcoin Coinbase entering the S&P the Department of Labor and what it's gonna do to our bags So I'm gonna get you guys as predictions on all of this and more but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible

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All the details from eligibility and scope to the rewards are there. Bankless Nation and we're back with Bitwise's 2025 predictions coming in at number six. The number of countries holding Bitcoin will double.

00:47:48 Speaker_00
I think it's no surprise that people know that United States, UK, China, El Salvador, these countries all hold Bitcoin. Nine countries hold Bitcoin in total. I'm learning this from your report. Thank you very much. You guys are calling for a doubling.

00:48:01 Speaker_00
Maybe you could put the why behind this one. Why are countries ready for Bitcoin? What makes 2025 the year in which there's going to be a doubling in crypto-owning countries? Matt, why don't you take this one?

00:48:15 Speaker_06
Yeah, I mean, the short answer to that is because the U.S. said it might. And if the U.S. says it might, you might as well do it before them. Right.

00:48:24 Speaker_06
We're already hearing that there are a handful of countries that are moving forward on their own Bitcoin strategic reserves.

00:48:31 Speaker_06
If you're a smaller nation and you're looking at, you know, America, the largest economy in the world, talking about buying a million Bitcoin. And there's maybe a, you know, 30, 40, 50% chance of that taking place.

00:48:46 Speaker_06
Why wouldn't you go ahead and buy your own Bitcoin? And it's really as simple as that. There are other elements to it that, of course, matter, right? There is the breakdown of dollar hegemony.

00:48:57 Speaker_06
There is concerns about the seizure of central bank assets post the Russia seizure. the BRIC nations, which are looking for ways to buy real-world assets without using the dollar. Maybe they want to use an apolitical alternative.

00:49:12 Speaker_06
So there are these longer-term forces which have been in place for the past few years that are going to eventually get us to the point where Bitcoin is held by most countries around the world. But the massive accelerant has to be the U.S.

00:49:26 Speaker_06
election and the talk about the U.S. acquiring Bitcoin for a strategic Bitcoin reserve. I just don't see how other countries don't try to front run this. And I think, you know, our prediction of it doubling may be low.

00:49:39 Speaker_06
I think it could be higher than that.

00:49:40 Speaker_02
That's crazy. Let's just read off, because a lot of people, like David and I, might not be familiar with the names of the countries on this list right now.

00:49:47 Speaker_02
So the US has Bitcoin, the UK has Bitcoin, Finland, Bhutan, Ukraine, Georgia, China, Venezuela, El Salvador. And some of them are small, like Finland has 90 Bitcoin, right? Where the US almost has 200,000. So this definitely varies.

00:50:03 Speaker_02
Notably, somebody's not on this list. Germany, fumbling the bag, could have been Germany. They fumbled the bag, they sold all their Bitcoin sometime over the summer.

00:50:16 Speaker_02
We're in this era of geopolitics, and this plays out exactly like, honestly, Bitcoiners sort of predict it. I mean, so if we're looking here, the United States has 198K, China has 190,000.

00:50:29 Speaker_02
Do you think the US, its geopolitical rival to China, wants to have less Bitcoin or more Bitcoin than China? And how about China? Do you think they want to just keep that Bitcoin just in case? Just to have around the same amount as the US?

00:50:44 Speaker_02
This is just a basic space race kind of dimensions.

00:50:48 Speaker_00
It's like game theory at play. It is pretty funny that the United States has 198,000 Bitcoin. China has 190,000 Bitcoin. Those are real close. Those are real close numbers.

00:50:57 Speaker_02
In both the primary geopolitical rivals right now. I guess one bit of pushback. Let's have on this is let's talk about how these countries have acquired them mostly through seizure, right? That's how how did the US get 200,000 Bitcoin?

00:51:10 Speaker_02
It didn't buy these Bitcoin it like took them from different, you know seizures Silk Road this kind of thing. And so is this really like permanent? Do you actually think they're gonna hold it is is this? Yeah, how sustainable is this? Oh

00:51:25 Speaker_04
That's a really good point, Ryan, is if you look at this at this visual here, and you look at the nine countries, majority of these countries have acquired this Bitcoin through seizing it right through some kind of law enforcement action or a number of law enforcement actions where they've seized this Bitcoin for people who acquired it maliciously.

00:51:39 Speaker_04
And you can't you shouldn't hide around that fact. It's very true with the exception of El Salvador, who went out and purchased Bitcoin, but the numbers relatively small compared to majority of the other countries on this list.

00:51:51 Speaker_04
Most of them acquired it through law enforcement actions or seized it. But I think what really is important here is that if the US decides not to sell it and we definitively know the US isn't going to sell it.

00:52:04 Speaker_04
If Trump says yes, let's make a strategic Bitcoin reserve and let's start with the 200k Bitcoin that we own and let's keep that. I think that's a signal to the market that we've never had before.

00:52:15 Speaker_04
I think even as recent as last week or the week before, there was some commotion on Twitter about Bitcoin or the US government moving its Bitcoin around and are they going to sell before Trump takes office?

00:52:26 Speaker_04
I think you remove that fear or that potential cloud over the market if the US decides to stockpile the existing reserve and then anything that's on top of that they decide to add or acquire is really just gravy from there.

00:52:42 Speaker_04
We're all familiar here with Donald Trump's personality, and I think he doesn't like being second at anything. And so if other countries start to acquire Bitcoin, start to have this strategic reserve, I think the US follows in suit very quickly.

00:52:56 Speaker_04
And I think that creates this kind of space race. that you spoke about. And will these countries sell? I don't know. Germany sold, obviously. I think they sold somewhere around 50K. So, they're missing on a 2X here.

00:53:07 Speaker_04
I think I must have some German in my DNA, because I've done that once or twice, too. All right, guys.

00:53:14 Speaker_00
Coming in at prediction number seven. Coinbase will enter the S&P 500. MicroStrategy will enter the NASDAQ 100, adding CryptoSpokeshare adding crypto exposure to nearly every U.S. investor's portfolio.

00:53:27 Speaker_00
Can you just walk us through the significance of this? For the people that don't speak trad, which is me, what is the significance of Coinbase entering the S&P and for MicroStrategy to enter the Nasdaq 100? How does that change the game?

00:53:40 Speaker_04
Look, this changes the game in a major way. I think there's two things that this really impacts significantly. The first being that most investors say the average investor have no crypto exposure in their portfolio.

00:53:52 Speaker_04
Most investors own index funds, ETFs, they aren't going out and buying Bitcoin on Coinbase or some, you know, some hardware wallet or something like that. And they're probably not even and we know they're not even allocating to ETFs today.

00:54:04 Speaker_04
But what they do allocate to whether it's in their 401k or their traditional brokerage account, they do allocate most likely to some kind of index that tracks the S&P 500 or some kind of index attracts

00:54:15 Speaker_04
the NASDAQ 100 or is benchmarked against that it to give you a sense of how much capital that is. There's $10 trillion today directly indexed against the S&P 500.

00:54:27 Speaker_04
So that's $10 trillion in funds out there that by the assets that the index, the S&P 500 index holds.

00:54:35 Speaker_04
That means if Coinbase enters the S&P 500, which we believe it will do at the annual reconstitution this December, that means that a portion of that $10 trillion will be forced to buy Coinbase stock.

00:54:47 Speaker_04
We calculate, based on the current market cap of Coinbase relative to the other constituents of the S&P 500, that Coinbase will be somewhere around $15 billion worth of coin stock will have to be purchased if they enter the S&P 500.

00:55:02 Speaker_04
So going back to my point earlier is that now you have all of these investors who have no crypto exposure, gaining exposure to crypto through owning the S&P 500, whether they like it or not, whether they even know it or not.

00:55:12 Speaker_04
Most people don't pay attention to the companies that are shuffling in and out of the S&P 500 on an annual basis.

00:55:17 Speaker_04
So you have this element now where most us based investors will have some kind of crypto exposure to either micro strategy or Coinbase by them entering one of these indexes, Coinbase into the S&P micro strategy into the NASDAQ.

00:55:30 Speaker_04
And you have this billions of dollars in buying pressure going into these stocks from these funds.

00:55:35 Speaker_04
And by the way, most of these funds that traffic indexes, people are funneling new capital into them every month, every two weeks, every year as they get paid. And have automatic allocations to these funds. So it's a really big deal.

00:55:48 Speaker_04
It gives exposure to investors who haven't had it and it adds buying pressure to the stock. But I'd love Matt to double click on that a bit.

00:55:55 Speaker_06
No, that's absolutely right. I mean, it's worth noting that 15 or $16 billion is a big chunk of Coinbase's market cap, right? It's only a $75 billion company. So that's a lot of buying pressure.

00:56:06 Speaker_06
The Nasdaq 100 is much smaller in scale in terms of the amount of assets tracking it, but it's some buying pressure for MicroStrategy as well. But I just love the idea of every large institution and nearly every investor in America

00:56:22 Speaker_06
owning some Coinbase stock, it brings me great joy, right? You don't like crypto, you already own it. Uh, you know, you're already starting to get off zero.

00:56:30 Speaker_06
So I think it's a big sort of signal moment that crypto has matured and made it, and it'll have an immediate impact on, on, on the stock itself.

00:56:38 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's funny because if you own the S&P 500, basically through MicroStrategy, you're owning straight Bitcoin. That's all Michael Saylor's doing over there. And through Coinbase, you're owning a piece of a layer too.

00:56:49 Speaker_02
You're owning non-custodial wallet. That's a chunk of actual real world crypto. Let's go to number eight, which kind of dovetails nicely with this.

00:56:57 Speaker_02
So prediction number eight, the US Department of Labor will relax its guidance against crypto in 401k plans, enabling billions of dollars to flow into crypto assets. I think we have to set the stage here.

00:57:08 Speaker_02
So some people are listening to this and saying, wait, there's guidance against crypto and 401ks? And I'm wondering if my story is actually relevant to this. And David, this is a fun fact for you, a little Bankless company fact.

00:57:18 Speaker_02
You know, we have a 401k provider at Bankless. And you know, they keep telling me, I don't know if they're telling you the same thing. We can't invest more than like 5% of our 401k holdings. Bankless, our own 401k.

00:57:34 Speaker_02
We'd like to be like 98% allocated to crypto in our 401ks. And they won't let us. They only want us to have 5% of our 401ks inside of crypto, I guess, because it's risky or there's some sort of law on the books. Does that relate to this at all, Matt?

00:57:50 Speaker_02
What are we talking about here?

00:57:51 Speaker_06
I mean, first of all, say you're lucky. Most people, that number is zero that they'll allow. And second, it's not a law. This is almost an Operation Choke Point 2.0 style tactic.

00:58:02 Speaker_06
You had the Department of Labor, which oversees 401k providers, come out with a warning

00:58:08 Speaker_06
basically out of nowhere in 2022 that told 401k providers that they should exercise quote-unquote extreme caution when allowing people to allocate to crypto through 401ks and then if they did they would face

00:58:24 Speaker_06
audit risk and close scrutiny of their entire business if they proceeded down that path.

00:58:29 Speaker_02
Oh my God. So that's what's happening. So we specifically, we set up 401ks for Bankless this year and we specifically found like one 401k provider who would do crypto, right? So we're like, oh, we found a crypto friendly one.

00:58:41 Speaker_02
And it turns out every time we ask for more than 5%, they act like we are like, I don't know, dealing some drugs or something. They seem We're like, no, it's okay. We're fine, we're comfortable with the risk. And they are just not having it at all.

00:58:55 Speaker_02
And it's because regulators put the fear of God in them that they can't have it.

00:59:00 Speaker_06
They are heroes. I've never seen a letter like this. I've been looking at the 401k market for 20 years.

00:59:05 Speaker_06
I've never seen the Department of Labor come out and say, thou shalt not invest in this, or we're going to audit your firm and make your life a living hell. It's really smart. The gatekeeping. Right?

00:59:16 Speaker_02
It's wild.

00:59:17 Speaker_06
Yeah, God forbid American people saving for retirement should have exposure to the best performing asset class of all time. I'm glad that we have cordoned that off and protected people from that.

00:59:31 Speaker_06
I think crypto is up a couple hundred percent since they put this regulation out. So it's absurd and kudos to you for finding the one out there that lets you do anything at all.

00:59:40 Speaker_02
But you're saying this will be lifted. You expect this to be lifted. This is an Operation Chokepoint thing that I don't think we've covered. Probably most in crypto aren't aware of it.

00:59:47 Speaker_02
But just to make things clear, most 401k providers will not allow you to have Bitcoin in any way or crypto in any way, right? The tiny fraction that do, it's only a 5% max, basically. And you're saying that in 2025, that all goes away?

01:00:02 Speaker_02
You can max up to 100%?

01:00:04 Speaker_06
I'm really hopeful that it goes away. You know, I think most of crypto missed this because it's a trad-fi tool, right? There's nothing more trad-fi than 401ks, the last thing most crypto people want to talk about. But this is a big deal, right?

01:00:19 Speaker_06
I mean, look at the chart there. You're talking about $8 trillion in assets. We use the example of if 1% of this allocated to crypto, you'd be talking about

01:00:30 Speaker_06
$80 billion of inflows, but we just said 3% is the new 1%, so 3% of this is a quarter trillion dollars, right? And then more than that, every month when you save money in your 401k, you would have an exposure to crypto.

01:00:43 Speaker_06
Right now, like Bankless is maybe one of the only firms for which that is true in the world Imagine if everyone had that opportunity. I think this would be a game changer.

01:00:53 Speaker_06
Everyone has their particularly regulatory thing that they're looking for in the year to come. I haven't seen much discussion of this, but I think it's a really big deal. It's my personal windmill, so I hope it comes down.

01:01:05 Speaker_00
I really want to drive this point home. And 7 and 8, Prediction 7 and Prediction 8, both have the same theme of flows. Coinbase entering the S&P 500 means it gets flows of people buying the index.

01:01:17 Speaker_00
The Department of Labor Relaxing Guidance for 401k plans means crypto assets, crypto companies, crypto assets can get flows, 401k flows. And you just said, Matt, that 401k is like, it's boring, right? People don't really want to talk about it.

01:01:30 Speaker_00
It's not thrilling. That's why it's so big. That's why it's massive. It's massive and boring, because this is the whole United States economy's money. This is all of the country's money. And so, yes, it's boring.

01:01:44 Speaker_00
But also, I feel like once you are an asset that is receiving flows, either from the S&P or from 401ks, You've made it. That's the end. GG. Game over. You just ride these flows into $1 million Bitcoin.

01:02:00 Speaker_00
Coinbase rides these flows into the top of the charts. That's the message that I think I want to send out to the world. Do I need to be checked or is that about right?

01:02:11 Speaker_06
No, that's that's exactly right. Yeah, this is the end game. This is the end game for where you get the permanent asset flows. You're part of the ecosystem.

01:02:20 Speaker_06
It's incredible we've gotten to this point with effectively zero percent of the way most people in America invest, even being able to allocate to crypto. Think of us getting to multiple trillions of dollars without that.

01:02:33 Speaker_06
And then think of what happens when that switches. And I'm hopeful that we see this switch in 2025.

01:02:39 Speaker_02
It's hilarious that that's the prediction I'm actually most excited about, the nerdy 401k tax one. I guess that's kind of on brand. But that's something I didn't know. Amazing. So let's go to the ninth prediction here, and we're almost through.

01:02:52 Speaker_02
Two more left. So stablecoin assets will double to more than $400 billion as the U.S. passes long-awaited stablecoin legislation. Wow, that's a big deal. Refresh me, I think we're at what, 160 billion, 170 billion, something like that now.

01:03:08 Speaker_02
Oh, there's a graph. Almost 200 billion? We're already halfway to that prediction. Okay, tell us about the stablecoin prediction and the legislation that you expect in 2025.

01:03:19 Speaker_04
It's really funny that you frame it that way, Ryan, because Matt and I were just talking about this on Friday, that we've been working on these predictions here for the past month or so.

01:03:28 Speaker_04
And in that time, the market has grown from that 160, 170 number to 200 billion. If we would have released these a month ago, we'd already be filling up the progress bar on this prediction here. But it's really exciting.

01:03:43 Speaker_04
Stablecoins, to me, is one of the most interesting and fascinating areas of crypto, despite it being, in many cases, kind of relatively boring to many people. But stablecoins address so many different

01:03:55 Speaker_04
types of markets, there's tradings, there remittances, there's savings, there's access to the US dollar. These are all really, really big markets. They're huge markets. And we haven't yet had stable coin legislation in the US.

01:04:08 Speaker_04
We still get questions all the time when we're out talking to financial advisors. Well, what about a CBDC? Is the US going to launch a CBDC? And is that going to make other stable coins?

01:04:17 Speaker_04
Or I even get the question, is that going to make Bitcoin non existent? I think that just highlights that fundamentally, people don't understand stable coins, and they're afraid of them. in this weird way.

01:04:26 Speaker_04
And I think once we get pro crypto stablecoin legislation in the US, and I think that will happen next year, because it's kind of low hanging fruit for this new admin in DC.

01:04:34 Speaker_04
I think that will open up the market for a lot of growth across the stablecoin industry. We spoke about the acquisition that Stripe made earlier this year of a $1 billion stablecoin platform.

01:04:46 Speaker_04
And I think that's just kind of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to stablecoin growth. And then Another area of this that I'm super excited about is FinTech integration. We've seen PayPal launch its own stable coin that has started to grow.

01:05:00 Speaker_04
It's starting to get really popular. Robinhood recently announced plans to partner with a handful of crypto firms to launch a global stable coin network.

01:05:09 Speaker_04
And I think once we start to see stable coins integrate into the FinTech apps that we all use every single day, integrate into Cash App, and Venmo, and PayPal, and into bank platforms like Zelle,

01:05:20 Speaker_04
The growth of stable coins is going to melt faces and I'm so excited for that.

01:05:26 Speaker_00
I want to just jump right into the last prediction, prediction 10, because this is related to stable coins. Everyone is on board with real world assets in crypto.

01:05:35 Speaker_00
Your guys' 10 prediction is the value of tokenized real world assets will surpass 50 billion as Wall Street eyes crypto revolution.

01:05:43 Speaker_00
Real world assets, good for everyone's bags in the industry, kind of like stable coins, that's just the tide that lifts all boats. But real world assets are slow. It takes a while to kind of get the real world asset engine turning.

01:05:56 Speaker_00
And Bitwise here is predicting the current $15 billion real world asset space will become $50 billion by the end of this year, which is over a tripling, which I'll note is faster than all of the growth that you guys are predicting in Bitcoin, Ether, Solana or stable coins that we've seen so far.

01:06:13 Speaker_00
So why are you guys more bullish on real world assets than you are the rest of the industry? Why is 2025 going to be such a big year for RWAs?

01:06:22 Speaker_06
Oh, fascinating framing. You want to take it, Ryan? You look eager to jump in there.

01:06:26 Speaker_04
Yeah, well, I was just going to say before talking about anything else, just look at this chart. Have you seen a more beautiful chart that's just up and to the right than this chart?

01:06:34 Speaker_02
This is a chart. So let's describe it. This is a chart of real world assets. And when we're talking about real world assets, this is not inclusive of stable coins. So even stable coins are kind of real world assets. This is not including stablecoin.

01:06:45 Speaker_02
So we've got private credit, U.S. treasuries, commodities, institutional alternative funds, non-U.S. government debt, and then other.

01:06:55 Speaker_02
And most of this is just like up and to the right, including 2024, which has been already a big year for real world assets. A huge chunk of this is private credit. and U.S. Treasury debt?

01:07:07 Speaker_02
Maybe you could talk about those categories too, guys, because I'm more familiar with Treasuries on-chain. What is the private credit portion? What are some of these other categories of RWAs where you see the growth?

01:07:20 Speaker_06
You see some of the private credit stuff on platforms like Maple and such, right, where you're seeing that direct lending, the tokenized format.

01:07:28 Speaker_06
I mean, the thing, and treasuries, of course, you can think of as interest-bearing stablecoins, is a way to conceive of that. These are funds like the BlackRock funds, and UBS has a fund that takes

01:07:41 Speaker_06
Government treasuries that pay interest and bundle them into a token and put them on public blockchains mostly on aetherium I would know this is a very aetherium story virtually all of the interesting real-world asset stuff is taking place on aetherium because it's the blue chip programmable blockchain out there You know as I look at this

01:08:02 Speaker_06
It's interesting, David, that you framed it as a bullish narrative. I look at this as one of our least bullish predictions because the scale of the real world asset space is something, you know, $100 trillion. This is still just a down payment.

01:08:18 Speaker_06
The reason the growth is so high, and you're right to frame it as high growth, is because we're still so very early. Right. We're just at the initial stage. I mean, real world assets on blockchains have been effectively illegal in the U.S.

01:08:31 Speaker_06
and still are. And maybe that gets repealed in January. But we haven't even seen, you know, Wall Street firms have been building in this space even though it's been effectively illegal and even though it invites regulatory scrutiny.

01:08:47 Speaker_06
They've been finding their ways through the cracks. If you imagine a world where it's not just allowed, but welcome, That's where you start to get the flood of assets.

01:08:56 Speaker_06
And we could see, you know, 50 become 100, become 250, et cetera, in pretty, pretty short order.

01:09:02 Speaker_02
Those have been the 10 predictions. Matt, Ryan, this has been very good. Thank you for joining us. There's actually, though, I've been informed a bonus prediction here, and this is another price call. OK, we're saving this for the end.

01:09:16 Speaker_02
I think you guys are. It's the Bitcoin price call. Can you give us this bonus prediction? I don't even know. Is it in the report? Oh, it is. Here it is. Okay. Bonus prediction. Here it is. I'm going to read it out.

01:09:30 Speaker_02
In 2029, so this is not next year, this is 2029, Bitcoin will overtake the $18 trillion gold market and trade above $1 million per Bitcoin. So you guys calling not only a number on that of $1 million per Bitcoin,

01:09:46 Speaker_02
You're also calling a year for the flippening of gold, which is 2029. Tell us about this prediction.

01:09:55 Speaker_00
What's the math here?

01:09:57 Speaker_06
Well, maybe I'll start. Ryan can fill in some of the math. You know, this was a fun prediction to make because usually when you sit down and do predictions, you're thinking one year ahead. And then one day, Ryan and I were chatting.

01:10:08 Speaker_06
We were like, why are we in this box? We could literally make predictions for any time period. A natural place to start is when will Bitcoin match gold?

01:10:19 Speaker_06
My own personal view is everyone is early in crypto, to use your guys' phrasing, everyone is front-running the institutions until Bitcoin matches gold.

01:10:29 Speaker_06
That will be the signal moment that we're past early and now we're in the sort of mature part of the crypto market cycle because it's at least reached that level. And the question becomes, when would that happen? The natural space

01:10:43 Speaker_06
If it doesn't happen, this cycle would be in the peak of next cycle, which would be 2029. But Ryan, maybe you have more to add on it.

01:10:51 Speaker_04
Well, I would add that I would love to see Peter Schiff's reaction to this prediction. I would love to be a fly on the wall in that room. But yeah, I do think it kind of just comes down to the math here.

01:11:03 Speaker_04
If you look at gold, which, by the way, is the most valuable asset in the world at an $18 trillion market, we think Bitcoin actually addresses a larger market than gold. So for us, it makes sense for at some point, Bitcoin to overtake gold.

01:11:19 Speaker_04
And we talk about 4 year cycles a lot here at Bitwise because if you look at the returns for the past tranches of 4 years, you have 3 really strong years and then a year of pullbacks. And that cycle is repeated 3 times.

01:11:31 Speaker_04
Right now we're heading into year 3 of what would be the current cycle if that continues.

01:11:35 Speaker_04
So we do think maybe there'll be a pullback in 2026, but then that bull market resumes once things kind of reset, once you flush out that leverage in the market and kind of the overzealousness.

01:11:46 Speaker_04
And I think once that happens from there, we continue to have higher highs and kind of higher lows when these cycles happen. You can see that with the price here in the table we included in the report.

01:11:55 Speaker_04
And we think that the next wave after this cycle, the next wave is going to really push Bitcoin beyond gold. And then I'm most excited about what happens from there.

01:12:07 Speaker_02
Most excited about what happens from there. Exciting times, for sure, on the precipice of a very bullish year, which is 2025. And as an ETH bull, I've got to say, I'm also looking forward to the point where Ethereum flip in silver.

01:12:20 Speaker_02
Maybe we could do that. OK, silver 1.9 trillion. That's just a 4x away. Maybe we'll do that sometime this decade. Matt, Ryan, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been great to talk to you as we close out the year.

01:12:33 Speaker_06
Thanks for having us. This was a lot of fun. Thank you, guys.

01:12:36 Speaker_02
Of course, as you guys know, crypto is risky. None of this has been financial advice. We really can't give serious price predictions.

01:12:43 Speaker_00
You could lose what you put in. Just entertain.

01:12:45 Speaker_02
I wish I was thoroughly entertained. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot.