Transcript
Jeff Park (0:01)
That's dope. Let's go.
Andrew Parrish (0:17)
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Wolf of all Streets. I'm Andrew Parrish with Arch Public and I've got Jeff park from Bitwise. We are going to talk all things bitcoin treasury companies, as well as some Ethereum treasury companies as well. Jeff and I were talking offline a few minutes ago and it's as if a week of announcements in the crypto space these days is about a year's worth of announcements from a couple years ago. It's extraordinary the things that are happening in the space. We're going to try and get to a bunch of them here today. So thanks for joining us, Jeff, thanks for coming on today. Appreciate the time.
Jeff Park (0:55)
Thanks for having me. Love to be part of the show, Andrew.
Andrew Parrish (0:58)
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I wanted to start out with, you know, Tom Lee made an announcement last week associated with and people were surprised. Tom's been a big, big bitcoin bull for a long time and oftentimes when you see Tom, you know, his crypto discussion has most to do with bitcoin. So him going all in on an Ethereum treasury company raised some eyebrows. Wanted you to talk a little bit about the, you know, let's just call the architecture and maybe mathematics behind an Ethereum treasury company and in context with some of the other treasury company announcements that we continue to see, you know, maybe get into Tom's head a little bit and where he thinks things are headed. Deconstruct it a bit for us if you can.
Jeff Park (1:50)
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I'm super pumped that Tom is going to be one of the faces to represent Ethereum. Several months ago I actually went down the exercise of listen out who I thought would be great spokesperson for an Ethereum treasury play. And Tom certainly was actually not on my list for all the reasons you mentioned. To me, he always seemed like a bitcoin bull. But Tom's the hero we need in Ethereum. And the reason I say this is because Ethereum's complex and because it's so complex, it's very hard to carry the story of its value proposition in a compelling way that can be easily understood by what is now the newest class of investors entering the scene, the institutional folks. And, and I do think Tom has that rare energy of bridging crypto native understanding for what the ultimate movement is about, which is this unapologetic resistance towards intermediation and exorbitant privileges that are unduly pressured by those in power, those kinds of things. But you also understand stablecoin and Rails and all the network provisioning to imagine those conversations in a fluent manner. And so I'm excited for tomorrow. I think there's a lot to be done frankly for Ethereum. When in the past people talked about why there hasn't been an Ethereum treasury play, right? Because if you think about it, Bitcoin was first and then Solana was the next one actually. And it kind of skipped Ethereum for a while. And there's other altcoins in the mix, but Ethereum was a little late relative to its stature as the second largest crypto asset. And I, and I joke, it's because Ethereum at some level is like ultimately like anti financial engineering at some level, right? The ethos, the philosophy of its founding vision is almost not to participate in the frenzy of those kinds of mania. But I think the time has come and people have reacted very well to it. So why, why have people reacted well to it? I think it's, it's pretty straightforward. Ethereum is a useful asset, right? I always make the distinction that Bitcoin and Ethereum are really fundamentally different because Bitcoin is not really like a useful asset yet, right? Bitcoin's useful because it stores value, but in terms of productivity gains that it unlocks in people's lives or actual utilities is a little bit muted for now. And Ethereum is the other side of that coin, which is actually meant to be useful, right? This is why it's a proof of stake token in itself. And that's why there's actually active management, management yield that can be generated by being a smart steward of that asset. So you almost would have to imagine a more perfect permanent capital vehicle to own something like Ethereum, which is a living, breathing technology that's constantly changing, might have to live outside the scope of a very highly regulated Rick fund that can't do all the things for how quickly technology is changing all the time. So for example, we still don't have staking in ethics. We will, but the narrative last year already moved on where there's concepts like restaking, right, with eigenlayer and there's other constructs of income generation that's always going to move ahead in technology and regulation just cannot catch up quickly to how crypto moves. So a Treasury company as an operating entity can harness a lot of these things in my opinion, maybe a little bit more efficiently, a little bit more expediously. And those things can be beneficial long term for how investors choose to express their investment in Ethereum, which is, hey, it's not just I can like appreciate in price alone, but is someone doing something with that to generate yield in network provisioning, that I also get a total return exposure to that construct. And I think that's a meaningful unlock for a Treasury play for Ethereum that that's fundamentally different than Bitcoin.
