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- [00:00]
Indiana University Announcer
Indiana University is shaping the future of health care, advancing discoveries that become treatments for Alzheimer's, obesity and cancer, and training the providers trusted to deliver them. See how IU solves what's next iu. Edu Impact.
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Bloomberg Audio Studios Announcer
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts, Radio.
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Bloomberg Crypto Host
News Galaxy Digital and its founder Mike Novogratz have been a major force in the push by crypto into mainstream finance. Digital asset Treasuries DAT are the latest example with an astounding 85 and counting announced this year. They've raised billions from investors everywhere from the US to the Gulf to Asia. Galaxy among the top investors over the past six months. It's helped lead a fundraising round for forward industries, $1.6 billion Solana treasury. It's the largest for that token. Forward shares surged on the news, up now more than 500% so far this year. Let's bring in Galaxy Digital founder and CEO Mike Novogratz, who's going to be hanging out with us for quite a bit of time during the show. Mike, always appreciate your time. Always good to see you. We're going to talk about Solana in just a minute. First though, I just want to get your commentary on what's happened in the last 48 hours with the sell off and the volatility that we have seen. How do you explain it?
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Mike Novogratz
Yeah, listen, there are a few things that happened. One, crypto had a pretty awesome few months, right? I mean, Ethereum went up almost 3x. Solana went up a ton. And so markets at one point get a little bit long and it takes just a little bit for people to get nervous and some of the leverage to come out. We saw what it looked like, some big Chinese mining selling. You also had, you know, Arthur Hayes, who's one of the real thought leaders around crypto, he put out a pretty bearish commentary around Hyper Liquid. Hyper Liquid is the only token in the top 10 that didn't exist a few years ago. Right. It's a, it's a decentralized version of Binance, if you want to think about it. And it, it's a pretty spectacular story with the amount of growth it had. And Arthur said, hey, wait a minute, I think it's gone too far. The, the founders are going to sell. And so Hyper Liquid really got hit the hardest and that I think kind of hit some of the overall sentiment in the market. And so I think this is just a pullback. You know, crypto has been kind of soft, Bitcoin's been kind of soft because a lot of the action moved away from Bitcoin. But if you had told someone four months ago that you're going to be nervous with Bitcoin at 112, they would, they would have a big grin on their face. Right. And so you have to keep things in context. We're still up significant significantly on the year. Both Bitcoin.
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Bloomberg Crypto Co-Host
Ethan and Solana, speaking of keeping things in context, a lot of people have been saying that crypto price movement can foretell stock prices as well, more broadly. You know, it's like a leading asset class. Do you subscribe to that? Do you believe that?
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Mike Novogratz
I'm not sure. Listen, I think sometimes it feels leading and sometimes it feels lagging. We are in a euphoric moment in stocks and there is a, a lot of excitement all around this AI theme. AI is powerful. It is going to change the way we do things. I was literally just in a meeting with my management team talking about Galaxy and every single C suite in the world is having that same conversation. And so that creates bubble like excitement. And we've got valuations in the, in the NASDAQ and the S and P as high as we see them. And so it's a really hard market because it's got huge momentum and excitement around a real story. But it's got valuations that get you really nervous and the interconnectivity of Nvidia, Open Air, Oracle, the vendor financing, you know, Web, that gets you nervous, like valuation, creating more valuation. And so I think you've got a market that's, that's nervous. That doesn't mean it's not going to go a lot higher. Right. The last, the last leg of great bull markets always surprises people on how powerful it can be. And I'm not saying this is the last leg, but it very well could be.
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Bloomberg Crypto Host
So if you're looking at that in terms of the equity market right now, how does that translate over to the way you're thinking about crypto and where we be in the cycle when it comes to crypto right now? And not every token is created equally. I know you love Ether and Solana and you know you're traditionally going back to Bitcoin, but what does it mean for crypto?
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Mike Novogratz
Well, let's say crypto traditionally has traded with four year cycles and that would be ending in December. Right. Halfway between the having is usually where our peaks have been. And you know, the end of 2017, if you had sold everything in December, you look pretty smart. And the end of 2021, if you had sold everything in December, you look pretty smart. And here we are October of 2025 at all time, highs at almost every token. And you're wondering, should you sell everything in December? Listen, what could be different? And I think probably is different. We have gotten one piece of legislation out of the US called the Genius Act, Stablecoin legislation. And in all likelihood, sometime in mid October, mid November, we're going to get the second piece of legislation which will help define what a security and what a commodity is and a lot of other rules around crypto in America. That's a big deal. With those two bookends of legislation, it's going to unleash a tremendous amount of new participation. New participation in crypto. I mean, think about it. You can't use stablecoins on your iPhone yet. There's almost zero chance in the next few years you won't be able to use stablecoins on your iPhone or on your Samsung Galaxy Phone or. Or in almost any social media app. You couldn't before because they weren't necessarily legal. Now they are. Yeah. And once the US government puts its impromptu on this industry, which it has, we have the most crypto friendly sec one could imagine.
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Bloomberg Audio Studios Announcer
Yeah.
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Mike Novogratz
You know, you're going to have this new wave of participation. And so we might not be in the traditional cycle.
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Bloomberg Crypto Host
Hmm.
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Indiana University Announcer
Indiana University is shaping the future of health care. Advancing discoveries that become treatments for Alzheimer's, obesity, cancer and other rare and complex diseases. And training the next generation of providers, doctors and nurses trusted to address health challenges with skill, compassion and purpose. From the lab to the clinic, from research teams to patient care, IU talent is driving medical innovation, improving health outcomes and strengthening communities. See how IU solves. What's next IU Edu Impact.
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Bloomberg Crypto Host
Well, this week Brera holdings says it will be renamed Soulmate to become a Solana based digital asset treasury following a $300 million fundraise. Its newly named CEO Marco Santori joins us now with Galaxy Digital's Mike Novogratz. Marcos formerly worked at Pantera and Kraken. Good to have you on the program. Another digital asset treasury company. I was shocked to see in Olga Kreef's article today, actually about Mike Novogratz and other Princeton folks, that there have been 85 digital asset treasury companies just this year. Why another one?
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Marco Santori
Listen, first of all, thank you for having me. Second of all, you got to stop looking at treasury companies as trades. These things are not trades. There are going to be as many treasury companies as there are coin accumulators emulation strategies over the next 20 years. This is not a fad it's not a trend, it's not going away. This is a replacement for the traditional foundation model. So historically, what digital asset innovators have had to do is sequester all of their new coins, their newly created coins in these not for profit corporations or nonprofits in the Caymans and Switzerland. And basically these companies have watched the, their treasury go down and to the right over time. That is clearly an inefficient model. We think treasury companies are going to take the place of these foundations over time. They have access to the capital markets, they can be more dynamic, they can generate revenue, and they can still steward the ecosystems that they're supposed to steward. So you can't look at this thing like a trade. You have to look at it as an evolution.
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Bloomberg Crypto Co-Host
Having said that, and your company is rebranding itself as Soulmate, which really shows that you're betting on that particular coin. Can you explain why you've said Wall street will be building on Solana, not Ethereum? What's the basis for that, that view?
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Marco Santori
Well, I'm a, I'm a big Solana believer. Everybody at Soulmate is a big Solana believer. Bitcoin is special. Bitcoin was and remains, and I think for a very long time will be special. It's a new monetary system, a new kind of money. Then Ethereum came on the scene. And Ethereum said, you know what, there's actually more we can do with these blockchains. We can do more than just move value around. We can create smart contracts. They can be composable, they can be decentralized, they can be hardened against attack and interference. But then it didn't scale, it didn't go anywhere. Ethereum still can only handle a small number of transactions per second at the base layer. And instead it ships off the large numbers of transactions, all the high throughput, highly performant transactions, to these second layer servers where it's really just somebody else's computer and it sacrifices so many of the values that made decentralized technology valuable. Solana doesn't do that. Solana doesn't have to do that. It can scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second at the base layer, at that foundational layer that made all of those promises about financial services and what financial services could do with blockchains. So when I discovered Solana, I wasn't as early to the party as some, I'll tell you that. But it was a light bulb moment that went off. This is clearly the future. This is what sophisticated high throughput transactions are going to run on in the future.
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Bloomberg Crypto Co-Host
Mike, I want to bring you into the conversation because Tim mentioned There are about 85 companies that are involved in DAT and you've said that you don't think all these DAT will be successful, but if you get critical mass enhanced yield on the underlying token and build the ecosystem, I think they're net positives for crypto. These are public companies that will be around for a long time. Mike, what will determine success and longevity?
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Mike Novogratz
Yeah, listen, I think you're going to need scale, right? Because scale begets scale. And so you know, you think of something like MicroStrategy, which came out first, now strategy, it's got scale and you know, it will, it will probably, you know, what do these companies do? They bring energy into the ecosystem in lots of ways. And what I was a little wrong on early on and then, then it dawned on me was the access to capital through the equity infrastructure is so much greater than it was through the crypto infrastructure. Right. Crypto is a 12 year old business and equities have been around for a long, long time that the wonderful thing about these data center of these treasury companies is these, they brought in so much more capital at a quick pace and that capital is what will build this industry. And so I think in each of these buckets, like I love the fact that Marco is doing another Solana company because it's also based in a different.
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Bloomberg Crypto Co-Host
Part of the world.
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Mike Novogratz
It's going to attack a different set of new investors. You know, we're, you know, Ford Industries is a very US focused investor base and company but it's a global technology and so in some ways the more the merrier. I think in order to survive you're, you're going to have to prove to the investors that you bring value. Right? Like listen, if we all trade to Navy, it's hard to, it's hard to raise a lot more capital. And so you've got to do something that allows you to think, hey, on our $1.6 billion of Solana, just through staking in other things, if we can get that yield from 7 to 10%, you're making $160 million a year in dividends and you can use that hundred sixty million dollars a year to do other cool stuff with. You can use that leverage to maybe get a good deal on getting free, free equity in a program that's building on top of the blockchain. And so you have to be creative. We partnered in Forward with Jump Capital and Multi Coin. Jump is probably the premier builder of Architecture of a financial market, architecture on blockchains and certainly on the Solana blockchain. And so to me, that's just thrilling right there. There are four companies in the world, I think, that can compete with jump right frequency trading. And so they see the Solana blockchain as what will be the foundation for capital markets in America. And when you have the new head of the sec, Paul Atkins, saying, I want everything to move on chain, that's a big deal. I mean, it's a stunning deal.
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Bloomberg Crypto Host
We're going to talk more about the regulatory environment in just a moment. In the meantime, I do want to thank Soulmate CEO Marco Santori for joining us on set. Mike Novogratz is sticking with us.
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Eric Trump
Now, I'm committed to this company because they did everything they could to try and cancel us. They did everything they could. I'm talking about traditional finance to put us out of business. I was the guy that was getting hundreds of letters from the big banks, Capital One, JP Morgan, you know, I mean, all of them. Bank of America, I saw one hand was just on trying to take away accounts for, for golf courses, for hotels, for residential buildings, for doing absolutely nothing wrong. And it drove me to, to crypto because I realized that there was nothing that couldn't be done in crypto. Better, faster, cheaper, more transparently. And it's an amazing industry.
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Bloomberg Crypto Co-Host
That was Eric Trump speaking to us last week. We're back with Galaxy Digital founder and CEO Mike Novogratz. Mike, the White House, as we know, has ushered in this new era for crypto in terms of regulation and of course, in terms of this friendly stance toward growing the industry. Are you comfortable with the First Family being this active, so active in this industry? Some make the argument that there's an inherent conflict of interest there.
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Mike Novogratz
Listen, the, what I've said before, and I'll say again, as long as the Trump family and their associates play by the rules, I'm completely fine by it. And, you know, the one thing about this new FCC is they're all about disclosure and, you know, people. And it's a little bit of a buyer beware sec. And I would guess if you read through most of the, the different protocols the Trump guys have participated in, it's everything they do is pretty well disclosed. And so I don't think there should be any mystery around, you know, what they're doing. Listen, they break the rule. If I break the rule, we should get in trouble. But I don't think you can, you can prevent the children of, of, of people in power from Participating in business. I do think it's an issue in politics. Right. The Democrats are going to make a big deal about what they perceive as grift, that the President shouldn't be doing this and that that has a potential to slow down the market structure bill. The far left will push. I think the optimistic news is the, there's enough Democrats. Right. You know, and you can think about guys like Mark Warner, Ruben Gallegos, our own New York Senator Kristen Gildebrand, that see the value in crypto, that see the political value in being seen as pro technology, pro innovation. That market structure will get passed and will probably get passed with a lot more than 10 Democratic votes. Yeah.
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Bloomberg Crypto Host
And so that, so it sounds like we spoke. I just want to jump in because we don't have a ton of time. But we spoke to Dan Morehead last week and he made the point of saying that it really seems like this is important to voters. I push back a little bit on that because we saw in the last election, a year ago, that even the pro crypto candidates weren't being messaged in a, in a way that even mentioned cryptocurrency in a lot of cases. Do you think that Democrats now are getting the message if you think that they have to be on board with this type of asset?
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Mike Novogratz
I do. I think Democrats, a lot of them think, oh shit, crypto swayed the election Trump's way. Why were we so dumb not to.
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Bloomberg Crypto Host
Like you think that swayed the election?
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Mike Novogratz
I think crypto had a big deal. It had the big deal in the election in the Ohio Senate.
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Bloomberg Crypto Host
But was that crypto or was that just the messaging around Bernie Moreno?
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Mike Novogratz
I think it was crypto. It was the money that crypto brought. Crypto was the crypto. PAC was the single largest donor to the Trump campaign.
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Bloomberg Crypto Host
But they didn't message around crypto. They messaged around the border. They messaged around other issues that seem to resonate more with voters.
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Mike Novogratz
They listen. There were 80 million crypto owners in America. A lot of them are single issue voters who care a lot about this industry that more people in crypto than own dogs. Can you imagine being the party that said, I don't like dogs, I don't care about like, like it was so dumb for Democrats to be anti crypto. It turned people off. It was, it wasn't the only thing, but it was a pile on effect of all those issues that swayed young men. I mean, young men voted for Trump much more than they did in any past election. And young men are the crypto people.
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Bloomberg Crypto Host
Yeah, yeah. Go ahead.
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Bloomberg Crypto Co-Host
No, no, no, I think that's a, that's a good point. And it's something, it's a distinguishing factor. We only have about a minute left. I'm just wondering, as we wrap up our conversation here, it's been a banner year for crypto overall. What is next on your to do list?
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Mike Novogratz
Mike, listen, I think any cryptocurrency company has to be looking on chain to figure out how do we move more of our business on chain, how do we bring on chain access to our traditional customers, Right? When the head of the SEC says we think markets should move on chain, we should listen. And so we spent a lot of time here figuring out that exact question. We are building, we are investing. You look at our stock, it's, it's gone from the lower left to the upper right in a. And a pretty good line. So we feel good about, you know, we're having a great quarter, you know, and a great year. And so it's a whole different, different feeling here than it was 12 months ago.
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Bloomberg Crypto Host
Hey, Mike, we only have 10 seconds. You're known for that Luna tattoo that you got a few years ago. Did you get the Solana, the soul tattoo yet?
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Mike Novogratz
All my, all my tattoos are, are going to be kept hidden for a long time.
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Bloomberg Crypto Host
Yeah, we'll keep talking about them as long as you keep coming on. We appreciate it.
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Bloomberg Crypto Co-Host
Mike Novogratz, founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital, really appreciate your joining us for the entirety of Bloomberg Crypto.
- [19:21]
Indiana University Announcer
Indiana University is shaping the future of health care. Advancing discoveries that become treatments for Alzheimer's, obesity, cancer and other rare and complex diseases. And training the next generation of providers, doctors and nurses trusted to address health challenges with skill, compassion and purpose. From the lab to the clinic, from research teams to patient care, IU talent is driving medical innovation, improving health outcomes and strengthening communities. See how IU solves. What's next IU Edu impact Every business has an ambition.
- [19:57]
Bloomberg Audio Studios Announcer
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