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- [00:01]
A
Bitcoin is holding strong as tokenized stocks explode to 3.4 billion in monthly volume. While that's a small number, the rapid growth of tokenized equities is definitely worth discussing as that's clearly the major trend moving into the future. To discuss that and everything else happening in crypto markets and beyond, I have my friend James Butterfill from Coinshares. Let's go, let's do,
- [00:40]
B
Let's go.
- [00:41]
A
Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday and welcome to the show. Bitcoin actually remaining relatively strong in the face of a lot of what I would say would be expected, macro headwinds. I'm going to bring on James right now and we can break it all down. Good morning, James. How are you?
- [00:57]
B
Hi, Scott. Good, thanks, yeah. Surviving the crypto winter, as they say.
- [01:03]
A
I live in Florida. Crypto winter is like 109 degrees every single day and humid. So listen, I guess we could just start with the market because broadly I think we're starting to see a, I think a slight bit of optimism, although the fear and greed and those things don't indicate it, but I am seeing a bit of optimism that people think we could be bottoming. I take a look personally at the bitcoin chart and I see the 50mA here on the monthly as, as, as glaring a potential line for an area for bottoming that you could have, and the 200 ma here on the weekly, which we temporarily broke down or above and sitting right on. And it seems like, you know, the general sentiment is extremely negative, but people I trust starting to look at these things and say, hey, you know, maybe it's just going to be a choppy summer and then we're going to rise from here.
- [01:54]
B
Yeah, I mean, I take quite a kind of a more macro approach this rather than looking moving average averages. I do think they certainly have quite a kind of important impact on sentiment. But yeah, I think there's, there's been a lot of headwinds since October, which is exactly a year and a half after the halving. And I wouldn't have thought the halving should have an effect, but it has. We've seen $39 billion worth of selling over this period and that's by Wales. And that's put a lot of pressure on, on bitcoin prices, as we can see. What's really encouraging for me is that Wells have stopped selling now. They don't buy for a while. They don't buy for around six months prior to the next halving, which puts it sort of, sort of Q4 2027, so just over a year's time. So I think the market's moving much more macro fundamentals at the moment. And we can see, well, there's Iran, there's the hawkish Fed, and even more hawkish after yesterday's FOMC minutes, so that we're not going to see much price uptick from that. But there's definitely, I think, evidence that a bottom is forming situations.
- [03:09]
A
Right. Where if bad news isn't moving the market lower, that maybe that's an indication that things are steadily improving. I know that's sort of a silver lining, but you would think that the Iran war, ceasefire ending, or like you said, a hawkish Fed, it's been a lot of things that would traditionally be bad news and potentially actually move the market down. So the fact that we're holding strong, kind of the title here maybe is a signal. It is to me.
- [03:33]
B
Yeah. I mean, microstrategy selling has not really three and a half thousand bitcoins not really had much of an effect, nor has this news from the FOMC or the recent undoing of the ceasefire in Iran. So actually the market's looking quite resilient from that perspective. And then you've got fund flows. We've seen $8 billion of outflows over the last eight weeks. That is a new record, both proportionally. If you look at the outflows as a percentage of assets under management and actually the overall figure, 8 billion, I think the last prior one that was around run of outflows, the biggest one we've seen was around 5.3, so a pretty chunky number. But over the last three trading days we've seen $600 million of inflows and that's the first meaningful inflows we've seen since the start of May. So it does suggest that. Not massively optimistic, but maybe we're at this kind of investor capitulation point right now.
- [04:38]
A
Yeah, I guess it leaves the question, who's left to sell? As you said, sort of the whales have sold. I had seen some evidence, but the on chain evidence is always so confusing. You know, tweets that they were buying again, but you've said they sort of stalled. But either way, not selling is good news. If ETF capitulation has sort of come to an end here and the people who are really eager to sell at 60 are done selling, then, you know, once again feels like that could be, you know, this sustained kind of sideways chop through the rest of the summer and then things start to rise. It Would actually blow my mind by the way, if we just go back up in October and the four year cycle was all we ever had to look look at because I was definitely a cycle denier this time.
- [05:19]
B
Yeah, I mean I was too. It doesn't really make any sense, does it? But I think there are a core group of very wealthy individuals that do believe in it very much so. So whether we like it or not, it's become a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. There's one quite cool technical indicator I like to look at that I think is quite meaningful and that's mvrv. So that's market value over realized value. So realized value being it's like the weighted average price at which people purchase bitcoin at and that is close to one time standard deviation negative which it rarely gets there and it's usually at the cycle low points or just below it that we tend to see that it get this low. So it tells you sentiment is low. It tells you that a lot of people are hurting right now and to me that's indicative of us being very close to a cycle low.
- [06:18]
A
Yeah, I'm not sure if I brought up the right one. I just brought up the first thing that Google gave me when you mentioned it. But even just looking at this you can see they've drawn this sort of support zone down here and these are all the clearly all the cycle bottoms and there it is in that area right there. And this actually says I don't know if the Z score is the same thing but what you're saying is actually lower than what this is. So I'm not sure if this is dated or up to date. But yeah, I mean just there's, that's the thing it's kind of like that gets me is there's so many of these. Whichever technical indicator you choose, most of the ones that we've seen at previous bottoms are it. Which is just kind of what I find interesting. There's very few technical indicators that people have used for bottoms in the past that are not flashing at least a bottoming signal even from like rainbow charts and all these things. But like I said, 200 ma oversold RSI on massive time frames. Things that have happened only at bottoms in the past.
- [07:13]
B
Yeah, there's something that we've not had this time around and that's it. A big market player losing their scalp. So it was FTX last time and Luna and a few others. Whereas we've not seen that this time around. Usually something would break and we've not Seen, you know, it's. We've been pontificating over whether or not it'll be strategy or not.
- [07:41]
A
Spoiler. It won't.
- [07:43]
B
Yeah, I think, I think you're probably right. But I also think the markets are not paying such close attention to strategy anymore.
- [07:52]
A
Isn't that the dream scenario? Right. Like in my mind, and I've been saying this and I don't have any deep insight into their capital stack or how they manage money because I think it's more complicated than all the armchair quarterbacks on Twitter make it out to be. But in my mind, just rationally, the best case scenario is for the narrative around strategy to just dissipate for a while, to stop being the main character and to just kind of fade into the distance where we don't have to talk about what Saylor's doing every day. Matt Hogan yesterday made a great point. He said we just needed to know that he's not an irrational actor and the market was fearing that he would be irrational. And I think he did something rational this week and we can move on now.
- [08:35]
B
Yeah, he actually did the rap. We saw him last week for lunch and he did the round in London and what. His views of what investors were thinking about strategy at the start of the week changed quite dramatically to the end of the week. And I think he's. There was a big question about dividend cover and the COVID for various debt instruments he has, and I think he now is taking that much more seriously and the markets have reacted positively to that. What's interesting though is when he announced the sale of bitcoin for the first time in the start of June, he only sold 32 bitcoin. But that was a huge sentiment impact. I mean, if you look at the bitcoin price, it fell 17% over the course of the week after that. And actually he's now he's sold over the last couple of weeks, he sold three and a half thousand bitcoin and in fact the bitcoin price is up
- [09:28]
A
4 and a half percent and STRC went up right after that.
- [09:35]
B
So I think it's much more actually to do with the sentiment. He said he would never do something which he ended up doing, that had a much greater impact on the markets than actually selling three and a half thousand bitcoin did.
- [09:46]
A
Well, it makes sense because once he did it right, so then he put the fear into the market that he could become a for seller or that he'd even be willing to. But then when he controlled the narrative and sold on his own terms in a way that people thought was responsible. I think it removed the fear that he would be a forced liquidation out of the market. And also now people can just accept that he's not a buyer.
- [10:09]
B
Yeah. And I think it's becoming less relevant for the bitcoin price now. And now that people got over this point that he's broken his promise, I think it won't be as important strategy and what it does won't be as important for the bitcoin price as people believe it should have been in the past.
- [10:25]
A
What do you think happens with Microstrategy and STRC with time? Matt Hogan, yesterday, once again, just to reference the conversation, we had the same conversation. He said he doesn't think that STRC floats back up to par unless bitcoin's up in the 90s or 100. He thinks it just basically remains sort of impair. I won't even call it impaired, but just trading below par and forgettable for a while.
- [10:46]
B
Yeah, I think until sentiment improves in the bitcoin price, that will. That will remain. It will remain that way. And he has several options. He can dilute shareholders further and just bear that SDRC and close it down. I don't think he's going to want to do that if he absolutely. Unless he absolutely has to. But that is an option. But yeah, I think he's. Matt's right. It was just sort of. Sort of be. There'll be less people interested in it, particularly with you've got strive now with Sato and that's looking actually more appealing at the moment from a. A yield perspective.
- [11:24]
A
Did you know that I've always pronounced it SATA or called it SATA? And then I sat down with Matt Cole and he kept calling it SATA and it blew my mind because it's his product and I don't think I've ever heard anyone pronounce it what how they pronounce it. Apparently it's SATA.
- [11:39]
B
Maybe you're more British than you realize, Scott.
- [11:44]
A
I wish, because I would kill for your accent, to be quite honest. We have some other evidence, actually. I found this story kind of interesting of people leaving the market. You mentioned FTX and it made me immediately think of this because it's Singapore's Temasek, which is their sovereign wealth fund, was famously very involved in crypto in previous cycles. Investment fund says crypto's off the table, will focus on AI. But interestingly, if you dig down, they actually said, hey, we got completely destroyed in ftx. They lost hundreds of millions of dollars in FTX and we're not interested anymore. So it's interesting that for, I would say the most active sovereign wealth fund, probably maybe Abu Dhabi and Dubai are equally. But at the time, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund has no interest in crypto and it's still because of ftx.
- [12:34]
B
So when I heard that headline, I didn't pick out the FTX bit. I just heard, oh yeah, we're more interested in AI. And this is something that's really common at the moment. And I think it's just human nature, you know, whatever is the zeitgeist people love to invest in. And the zeitgeist right now is AI. I have a view on what the zeitgeist might end up becoming in next six months to a year. But you know, and that is sucking capital out of everything. I was looking at the fund flows into AI ETFs and we've seen $5.3 billion of inflows into AI ETFs this year. Interestingly though, it had 1 billion of outflows in one week a couple of weeks ago. So it's getting a little bit wobbly. But at the moment it's flavor of the month and it is common. Admittedly when I'm seeing clients at the moment they're saying, look, it's just not the most interesting thing right now. AI is and people are investing and that to me that what's in a bubble now when all these companies, AI companies are IPOing, the price is looking rather elevated right now. Price earnings are going quite crazy. AI is in way more of a bubble potentially than Bitcoin is. Bitcoin looks on the floor and AI looks remarkably expensive right now and actually very interest rate sensitive because of the debt burdens that some of these AI companies are taking on. So if it's true that Fed's going to hike rates, AI could, could really suffer and that's potentially what could burst the bubble in AI.
- [14:05]
A
Yeah, I mean that was one of the bigger stories this week was a projection that it would be 7 trillion in borrowing basically to fund AI infrastructure by 2029 or 2030. And that's just, that's a money printing by another name, you know, whether it's private companies or otherwise. But there's going to be a massive debt burden and these companies are going to need to justify that. To your point about where the interest is, I mean, SK Hynix, which for those who don't follow, has been the bubble of all bubbles. Over in South Korea, there were stories about retirees selling off their insurance and their savings literally like at the age of 65 and 70 to YOLO into leveraged ETFs on SK Hynix, which the regulator in Korea has already said a month later he regrets approving Samsung and SK Hynix, but we reported that they're coming to the US to do an IPO NASDAQ because of the interest and it was seven times oversubscribed. Right. So if you're wondering where the crypto money is even here, you know, you have this massive appetite for AI, you know, AI adjacent companies coming here. So I mean this just shows exactly what you said.
- [15:15]
B
Where's the money going next? Where's that? When the AI money leaves the the sector, where's it going next? And I think what we're going to see increasingly over the next year is increasing usage of stablecoins and real world assets. Look, I know real world assets are still pretty small, but it is quite a sharply growth, growing sector of the industry. And if we're to believe Scott Bessant, he thinks stablecoins will grow from $300 billion today to 2 trillion by 2028. There's huge growth potential there and I think people will start to step up and notice that. And so I can see that being the next. It's a really big buzzword. I know we've got the Clarity act and a few other things to kind of wade through, but that to me is where the money's going to go next. And it's certainly in our portfolios. It's how we're starting to think about how we're positioning portfolios next in our Blockchain equities fund.
- [16:18]
A
Yeah, I mean here's that headline that we actually used for our title here. But Breaking Tokenized equities saw a record 3.4 billion in volume for the month of June. This marks 279 month over month growth and 1400% year over year growth. Of course a lot of this was driven by pre IPO trading on SpaceX and I'm assuming a lot of that now. I actually, I don't even know how it's qualified because I was going to say, and I'm probably wrong, like on a hyper liquid or any of those, you know, we had perps on pre IPO shares but actually there's no underlying there. So I don't think that actually counts for volume on the actual tokenized equities. But maybe you can correct me either way. 3.4 billion is a drop in the bucket. Right. I mean that's a fraction of daily trading on Bitcoin and this is for a month. But the growth, I think there is the story. And also I mean you could just look at how many companies are focused on this. I mean you can see how fast this is growing.
- [17:11]
B
So I think hyper liquid is one of the best and investors are funding is very compelling. The best examples and uses of blockchain right now is blockchain infrastructure. That theme seems to be doing quite well in certain spaces. I mean to put things in perspective with hyper liquid at times it's trading up to $6 billion a day. So in, in perps that is more than the most liquid equity exchange in Europe, the London Stock Exchange. So these are big numbers. And it's interesting on hyperliquid it does tend to trade the kind of zeitgeist. So we had a debasement trade late last year and only this year and massive trading on, on hyperloop billions of dollars traded on precious metals and hyper liquid. And then obviously when Iran hit it was energy commodities, particularly oil on hyper liquid were being traded. And that makes sense. Like you know the Bombing starts at 8:15 on a Saturday morning in the tradfi markets. You've got to wait two days to execute any kind of opinion or any trades. You can do that immediately on hyperliquid. And then the last One has been SpaceX. I find that fascinating. And actually SpaceX perps on Hyperliquid pre IPO were trading actually very similar figures to where the IPO settled. And I think I was just summing up the numbers. I think there's been $6 billion of volume settled on the hyperliquid for SpaceX alone. So it's becoming a hugely popular network and it's very accessible for people, very easy to connect your wallet to it. I think it's actually testament to the price outperformance of hyperliquid this year. It's becoming a real bright spot and I think it's one of a few kind of real world asset executions places that's doing very well this year.
- [19:06]
A
I feel very stupid for not owning it as the first caveat because it's not like everybody didn't come on the show and say exactly what you've been saying for I don't know, like the last year. But interestingly also what you just described, the actual use case and the actual usage and the actual volume and the products they're building align with beneficial tokenomics which is something we haven't seen as well. You can actually, I think your average investor can look at Hyper Liquid and say, okay, I understand where the value is on the actual token based on the way that it interacts with the platform.
- [19:41]
B
Yeah, I mean if you look at it, if you look at its tokenomics, it's really interesting. So I always compare it to XRP and Ripple, the Ripple Foundation. So the Ripple foundation can do some cool stuff and perhaps negotiate with the load, more banks to do international transactions, et cetera, but that won't be reflected in the underlying ripple or xrp. There is no value accrual mechanism between Ripple and what the foundation does and what happens to xrp. So as an investor I think it's quite hard to rationalize an investment in that. Whereas something like Hyper liquid, if it has a huge amount of revenues, 99% of hyper liquid revenues are burned through hype. So there's direct value accrual mechanism, a bit like a share buyback. The more revenues it makes, the more they buy back of the hype token. So there is that direct link between the activity and the revenues on Hyper Liquid and the underlying token. So that is that value accrual mechanism. And I think that's what makes it a much sounder investment than many other tokens. They've really thought deeply about the tokenomics.
- [20:51]
A
I'd like to congratulate you on getting me in trouble today with the XRP army. Thank you very much. James, you said the same thing I say all the time and I agree. And listen, it's a different time and back then things were launching in a different way. But I often get in a lot of trouble with the XRP army for simply stating that I'd much rather own Ripple Equity than the XRP token. I don't even understand how that's a controversial take because they own 30 or 40% of the XRP token and are the ones who control when they sell it. So don't you want to own the thing that owns the thing and gets all the value accrual? But apparently I'm nuts for that. But Hyper Liquid, clearly they've done it the other way after seeing hundreds of. Listen, there's hundreds of XRP type tokens that were launched in that era. Right. To their credit they're still building things and using that money instead of running away with it.
- [21:43]
B
Well, you just have to look at the relative volumes, transactional volumes on the, on the platform and they're so much higher on Hyper Liquid and the relative performance of the two different assets. I mean, I don't want to dig into xrp because I still think that there is some investment case. But there are other tokens as well, I think that are starting to have quite interesting tokenomics or quite interesting potential. Ton is another one. You know, Telegram's got 1.3 billion users. The conversion rate is still quite low in time, but it's got that potential. I think it's not in the same place as hyper liquid in that respect, but we're seeing around a 0.12% conversion from telegram to ton and it is growing. So I think that's quite compelling. But it has mixed within it some quite complex political challenges to deal with. But I think there's a semblance of different tokens, particularly infrastructure tokens, that seem to be standing out in this recent crypto winter.
- [22:52]
A
Yeah, people wonder what it'll look like if we ever get an alt season again. And I think if you look ahead, you just have to say something that people can actually understand the value of will probably perform well. Actual utility and actual beneficial tokenomics, and that's it. And the rest, you know, will remain sort of, you know, driven by community or FOMO or, you know, religious fervor, whatever you want to call it. I'm sure some of those will still continue to do well. I think the ones that gain any meaningful institutional adoption, people are going to have to look at them like they do a stock and try to value it.
- [23:28]
B
Yeah, I mean, if you just look at the ETFs in this space, there has been no altcoin season. If you look at the flows, they've just not flowed into altcoins other than, you know, you've got the top four and now I include the top five, which would be hyp Hype. We've seen considerable inflows into hype, around 300 million this year. That's not on the same level as XRP or Solana in that respect, not yet at least. But there's really only Ethereum, Bitcoin, XRP Hype and Salana that are releasing any meaningful inflows at all. Outside of that, there's nothing. So that just tells you investors are being still hugely selective and there's no real altcoin season anymore.
- [24:14]
A
Last year that altcoin season was effectively just crypto adjacent equities. We saw, obviously, once we had the Circle launch, those things were all behaving like altcoins used to because I think it was just easier place for people to place their money in a way they understood. I actually wrote my newsletter about it this morning. But Bitcoin's down 50%. These crypto stocks are down 89. I mean I didn't realize really until I dug into it last night how much of a bloodbath all these IPOs and crypto have been. Now in hindsight, because they kind of happened, were forgettable. I mean Gemini 89% from opening. Bit goes down 77. Bullish down 71. EToro, which did exceptionally well at the beginning, down 41%. I mean there's not even, you know, if this was alt season, there's not even still any thirst for these, you know, in public markets.
- [25:00]
B
Well, if you're selective, it's worked. I mean our blockchain equities fund is still up 20% year to date and trading on a sharp ratio of one. So I think if you, you can pick the right names and they're very successful. I mean hyper liquid strategies that has done remarkably well this year. And where we've sort of really benefited actually is bitcoin mining companies who looked like their sort of income model was broken have now pivoted into AI to a certain extent. We estimate that revenues at the moment from bitcoin mining companies in AI is around 30% and by the end of the year based on corporate announcements, it'll be 70% of revenues. And actually they've really benefited from that AI boom to some extent and that's really helped our fund. But yeah, at some point if that
- [25:53]
A
bubble you have to remove them because we can't call them bitcoin miners anymore.
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B
Yeah, that is an ongoing challenge for us. At what point do you not call it a bitcoin mining company in that sense?
- [26:04]
A
These are AI infrastructure companies that might some bitcoin mining on the side at this point.
- [26:08]
B
Yeah, the, a Bitcoin mining companies are known to chase a fad. You know, bitcoin hosting was a fad to some extent and they've done other things as well. You could argue that maybe if, let's say six months time the air bubbles burst, they will come back to bitcoin mining and they could say, well the AI was chasing a fad to some extent. I don't think that's the case though. There are some quite long term investment plans set in place from many of these AI companies, sorry, bitcoin mining companies that suggest that they're going to permanently transition. Some of them though there's always been need. So if you look at Texas, there's where a lot of them have been really benefiting is from load balancing. You can't load Balancing with AI, you can only do that bitcoin mining. So there'll always be that need for bitcoin mining in Texas for load balancing purposes. So I do think they'll stop at some point. There's only a few that look like they're completely shunning bitcoin mining, but most of them, I think, will have a healthy balance between the two.
- [27:13]
A
Well, I think that even if the AI bubble pops and then we're talking about price, but I don't think the need for AI infrastructure to power it is going anywhere for a very, very long time. And if they're just making the investments now to your point, they're going to be deploying that stuff for years to come. We're going to need the infrastructure. Anything else on here? I just realized we ran it right to 928. Anything else on your radar that I might have missed?
- [27:40]
B
Clarity Act. Is that, is that going to happen? I'm increasingly skeptical. The ethics component of the bill looks like it's dead in the water. Has taken a bit of a. Sorry.
- [27:54]
A
They haven't even discussed it yet. I've been saying this literally since December. I was, you know, clarity act will pass. The minute that the coinbase thing kind of happened and they started talking about stablecoin yields. I literally from that day said I put this at a 5% chance. And that's because I don't want to sound nuts by saying zero percent.
- [28:12]
B
Yeah, I mean, I have to say I was quite bearish at the floor votes in May and I was quite surprised how positive it was. 15 to 6 are voting in favor and there were 100amendments to get through. It looked really insurmountable, but they did get through them. So the more bullish take on this, although I am pessimistic bitterly, but the more bullish take on this is actually could surprise. And there's several people that are really keen to get this pushed through in the next three weeks before the summer recess. So it could surprise us. But admittedly I am a little bit bearish because the moment after recess, the US Is going to be in midterms modes. The Clarity, that's going to be a sideshow and probably not past this year.
- [28:57]
A
But I mean, to be fair, I played a lot of poker in my younger years and there were times when I was, you know, had a 5% chance to win and hit something on the river. So it does happen. I'm not saying, I'm not saying zero, but you made the point. It's the one I've been saying is that we're talking about all the wrong things. And because of the ethics clause. And even last week now the scathing report, scathing the factual report on Trump's earnings in crypto. I mean, if there, if there was any doubt that the Democrats were going to use that as fuel, now they have it all over the mainstream media that they made billions of. Of dollars. This industry. I just can't see a world where seven Democratic senators flip and vote without that provision.
- [29:40]
B
Yeah, it doesn't look bad. I mean, that's a really ugly side of crypto, isn't it? But, and actually, when I read about the ethics bill, I was like, this is actually very much needed for the industry to sort of build credibility. And it's just a shame that things like that still happen. I mean, it's a massive rug pull for investors losing 3, $0.8 billion or something while Trump made 600 million. Yeah, it's not a great.
- [30:04]
A
Yeah, it turns out that he just needed things to be traded. He didn't need them to go up. That was the part that everybody missed. I think that the sentiment was Trump Token will go up forever because he holds, you know, 80%, whatever percentages of Trump Token and he would benefit from that. But actually he just needs, you know, volume for fees and the price is effectively irrelevant.
- [30:23]
B
Yeah.
- [30:25]
A
Yeah. Okay. Well, James, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining. I know I just ran you right over time. Everybody give James a follow. It's down in the description and look forward to having you back very soon.
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B
Thank you, Scott.
- [30:37]
A
Thanks, man.
- [30:38]
B
Speak to you soon.
- [30:54]
A
That's dope.