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Why Jan van Eck's Firm Sat Out the Digital Asset Treasury Wave | Markets Outlook
00:16:28
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- [00:00]
A
ETFs are just a better way of investing. If you want to invest in Ethereum or Solana, just buy an etf. It will do a way better job of pricing the underlying value of those tokens relative to the digital asset. Treasury companies again, which if they traded a premium, that looks fantastic and Meta Planet and Strategy looked fantastic for a while. But now that they're coming down, investors have lost a lot of money.
- [00:32]
B
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- [01:33]
A
Hey Jan. Hey Jiang, how are you?
- [01:35]
B
I'm doing well, thank you. It is a fantastic Monday morning. I gotta ask you, what have you been watching this morning? What's keeping you up at night when it comes to the crypto markets?
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A
I wouldn't say up at night, but I'm definitely watching bitcoin. You know, we're here in the fourth quarter of 2025. It's been a different, more muted bitcoin appreciation cycle and I'm curious as to how the year end action looks relative to 2026 and whether we'll get like sort of the halvening correction.
- [02:03]
B
How do you think bitcoin's going to end the year?
- [02:05]
A
Well, bitcoin's really underperformed gold because gold had this sort of parabolic rise over the last several months and it's now correcting pretty hard as one would have expected. And bitcoin's at least today and over the last several days pretty resilient against that. So it's recapturing, if you will the kind of lost ground it had against gold. I'm, you know, we are as a shop are hoping for all time highs in bitcoin before year end. So that's, that's really what we're, our base case is. But so that's where we're at right now.
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B
Do you have a target?
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A
You know, well over 150 per coin. 150,000. So you know, one never knows. That's really our base model. I would say with the Fed cutting interest rates, it should all work together. But you know, you never know.
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B
I want to dig a little bit deeper into that. You mentioned interest rate cuts coming up. This administration has generally been seen good for crypto from a policy and regulation standpoint. But on the other hand, we have geopolitical tensions that tend to shake crypto markets as it does other markets. How do you reconcile these two forces? As an investor, what do you watch more? What's more important to you?
- [03:18]
A
I care most really about adoption of bitcoin. I always like to say it's sort of like a child since we've been following it closely as a firm since 2017 when it was $3,000 a coin. And, and part of that maturation cycle, Jen, is just different investors getting involved. We're just now maybe seeing some of the giants in the wealth management space start adopting Bitcoin and allocating to them in portfolios. It really was even six months ago it was mainly retail and hedge funds. So if we see the kind of professional wealth community come in, that would be great. I think one of their concerns or one of my concerns about Bitcoin is its high correlation to risk on and nasdaq. And I think that's been kind of holding it back a little bit this cycle. So again, today is a risk on day and bitcoin's doing well. So I'm not sure we may not be tested in the short term, but that's one of the, you know, adoption by wealth and then relationship to risk on assets are two of the things I focus on.
- [04:18]
B
Do you think that correlation with other risk on assets will break?
- [04:24]
A
I'd like to see it be able to break, let's put it that way. It was really, there was no correlation up until 2020, like zero. And then suddenly it basically jumped with a kind of COVID euphoria and all that in markets. And so it sort of wavered, but it's been at that higher level. So I'm hoping for regime change at some point, but I guess it doesn't really matter as Long as gold and Bitcoin and markets are all going up, then it's fine for investors. But my expectation is that again, bitcoin has this sort of secular, like I say, child growing up kind of dynamic to it. So I'd like to see that in more in evidence.
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B
For a long time, Bitcoin and Ether were almost like the gold and silver of of crypto. It seems like that is diverging a little bit now. Curious to hear how you're watching Ether.
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A
Definitely would reject that narrative because basically Ethereum plays such a different role and the services it provides through its blockchain and it's gone through its own evolution with move to proof of stake and the L2 economics. And kind of my general point to investors is if you don't follow this really closely, that my test question is do you know what Ethereum's market share is? And if you can't answer that question. We've been offering actively managed funds and that's really the direction kind of strategically. Even though we have single token funds, we're moving more towards actively managed solutions.
- [05:50]
B
I know that you're also focused on the picks and shovels of the crypto ecosystem. Ethereum is one of the foundational layers, I would say to the picks and shovels, especially on the back of the Genius act passing in the United States. Tell me a little bit more about that kind of foundational layer that Ethereum provides for the ecosystem. I think a lot of new investors in this space might still be trying to understand that for sure.
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A
I mean when I talk to. I mean this has been such a transformational year, 2025 and just to sort of set the stage right, I think the Genius act was the biggest piece of bank deregulation in US history because it allows tech companies effectively to get involved in the payment system, which has never happened. So the banks no longer have this monopoly and Ethereum is probably the go to blockchain for Wall street is the way I put it. The real question though is where are the economics going to ally? And are a lot of corporations going to use sort of permission blockchains or variations on Ethereum or are they going to use the public blockchain and kind of who's getting the economics? So just like Coinbase has its own L1, are a lot of other companies going to follow their lead there? And. And so that would have negative consequences for Ethereum, even though it's sort of protocol is the gold standard for Wall Street. So that kind of play out is diffic figure out for for the average investor.
- [07:45]
B
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- [08:51]
A
Yeah, I mean there's kind of two phenomenons that I think are not positive in the space generally. One of the digital asset treasury companies or DATs, and the second is altcoin. So it's been a bear market for altcoins pretty much all year long. And then the secondly for the dats there was this huge enthusiasm, a lot of issuance and now a lot of them are trading below their net asset value or their mval. And so I think the question on the DATS and Vaneck really didn't participate in that trend at all. Just I look at them as closed end funds. They were trading at a premium, now they're trading at a discount. Now that they're trading at a discount against, they're starting to look kind of attractive to some of our actively managed strategies. They're about a 20% discount, some of them to their nav. As far as altcoins are concerned, there's always optionality. And I should have said this in an answer to your Ethereum question. They're way overvalued when you just look at the kind of fees that are generated from the blockchain. So there's this optionality and, and I think the market is coming to realize that there shouldn't be optionality value to some of these altcoins that they just are software protocols that will not get a lot of fees over time. So those are two kind of iffy areas of the, of the crypto market.
- [10:09]
B
Jen, why did Vaneck choose to sit out the digital asset treasury wave?
- [10:15]
A
I think ETFs are just a better way of investing. If you want to invest in Ethereum or Solana, just buy an etf. It will do a way better job of pricing the underlying value of those tokens relative to the digital asset treasury companies again, which if they traded a premium, that looks fantastic and Meta Planet and strategy looked fantastic for a while, but now that they're coming down, investors have lost a lot of money. And so one of the things that we care about is communicating with investors and setting expectations. And if there's this premium discount noise, I think that's just a negative for your average investor.
- [10:53]
B
Are digital asset treasury sustainable, do you think?
- [10:56]
A
I think some who have absolutely no ancillary business should probably just be merged out of existence. Some however, have some very talented personnel involved and hopefully they will be able to find some, some related businesses to offer. So it's not just the underlying digital asset, maybe some kind of valuable business service or product that they have as well. So I think some of them will be able to do that. But right now the market is in a show me state of mind.
- [11:26]
B
I mentioned picks and shovels when we were talking about Ethereum. What are the plays investors should be watching when it comes to the infrastructure of crypto ecosystems?
- [11:39]
A
Well, I think that the main trend that's happening right now, Jen, is because of the deregulation. You're seeing a convergence of, I would call it traditional securities players and crypto players. So Robinhood is my favorite example there, right, where there have been very aggressive efforts into offering tokens to be traded as well as securities. So I think you have, I know this is going to be revolutionary, but you have stable coins, tokenization and prediction markets all kind of converging on top of each other. So we have an early stage fund that invests in some of the, you know, the, the, the software companies because if you take a Schwab for example, they're not going to write all their own code to enable their clients to offer stables. So that if you want to kind of oversimplify it, which sometimes I like to do, everyone, even banks, are going to offer stablecoins to their customers. They're going to need to use third party software to do that connectivity and to kind of create the new hybrid ecosystem that I foresee with stablecoins and the traditional banking rails.
- [12:44]
B
Where do bitcoin miners come into the picture?
- [12:46]
A
Well, we love the fact that bitcoin miners are adjacent to the big investment trend over the last 18 months, which is of course AI. And the Bitcoin miners, we thought that they would be able to use their energy contracts to pivot into to providing data center services. And the ones that have, have done super well. So again, you know, that's kind of that, I don't know, 6 to 12 month trend that we can capture in an actively managed ETF like we have one, but I'm not sure is sustainable in the long term. So that's why we don't kind of have a bitcoin miner ETF per se.
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B
You mentioned prediction markets. There a lot of momentum around prediction markets still some things to figure out from a regulatory standpoint. But what's your perspective? Do you think they're here to stay?
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A
I think they're absolutely here to stay. And they're being valued as such. Right. But when I woke up this morning, I turned on the news and we have a mayoral election in New York. And what are they reporting? They're reporting the prediction odds. A lot of active investors, well, obviously passive investors too, think about risk management and the beauty of prediction markets is they allow you to isolate a particular risk and really allocate your assets directly at it, not trying to guess which stock or bond might reflect a certain outcome. So it's just a great new invention. I think some of the regulatory issues need to be settled, obviously, especially when it gets into sports prediction markets. But I think it's a really great additional tool and I really expect it to be institutionalized as well.
- [14:19]
B
And finally, I would love to hear your perspective here. Your firm has been really a pioneer in digital assets for, for years. If you look back at the journey from the first filing of the Bitcoin ETF to where we are today, what's been the most surprising development in the maturation of this asset class for you?
- [14:36]
A
I mean it has to be the regulatory shift in the United States. I kind of have never seen such a hostile regulatory environment change on a dime to being so maybe over permissioned under the current administration. So I mean that has really accelerated adoption and forced, like I said before, established banks and brokerage firms to deal with this because it's going to hit their earnings in the next several quarters. I mean within the next year or two they're going to have to have their strategy, their crypto strategy, their stablecoin strategy in place. So that's really fun to see.
- [15:21]
B
As a spectator if market structure doesn't pass this year. Is that concerning to you as an investor?
- [15:27]
A
It's a great question. It will be disappointing to me, but I think so much was accomplished through the Genius act, the stablecoin bill. Look, I mean, like, what I was rooting for is some kind of safe harbor for software companies that are early, that do disclosure under some kind of SEC safe harbor. Ideally, it would have been legislation to be allowed to develop their software and deploy it without having to spend millions and millions of dollars on regulatory enforcement action, defense and things like that. So I think we're getting the innovation now already, but it's not necessary for the changes to happen is how I look at it. But it would be disappointing. But the clock is running out, right? So if it doesn't get done this year, next year already we have midterms.
- [16:17]
B
Yen, it's always a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for taking the time to be with us this morning.
- [16:21]
A
No, thanks for having me. It's good to see you.