Institutional Flows: Insights into Crypto Demand and Market Shifts - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Hello everybody. Good morning. Thank you for coming to our institutional PL panel. This is the TRDFI programming, but a lot has happened and we have a lot to discuss. Um, first I just want to do some quick intros so you know who we are and what we're about.

Eric Balchunis. Uh, give give, uh, the host a C on my pronunciation of my last name, but that's pretty average. Uh, I am the senior ETF analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. That's Bloomberg's research arm. I lead all the ETF and fund research, and I have been hot on this B, uh, Bitcoin and Ether ETF, uh, regulatory environment and the launch and the flows.

Uh, we've been covering it like crazy. And so we've really found a new audience frankly and it's been a pleasure and a really exciting place to be. So that's where I'm coming from and I'll pass it over to Robbie. Sure. Robbie Mitchnik.

I'm the head of digital assets at Black Rockck. Uh Yan Vanek, CEO of Van Funds. Uh Giovanni VCO, global head of cryptocurrency products for CME Group. All right. So I don't know if you've noticed, but the flows are back.

Yeah. You guys watch the ETF flows? Yes or no? No. Yeah, you should.

It's a lot of money. Anyway, 8 days of straight inflows. Obviously, we're up to 40 billion of net flows since the launch. So, we lost a couple billion, but we've made it back. So, we're back to the high water mark of total net flows, and that's a hard number in ETFs.

To get that number up is very difficult. Uh, this was the greatest launch of all time. I've never seen anything like it in 20 years that I've been covering ETFs. Um, it broke all the records. Uh, it's still breaking records.

And so I really just wanted to let you guys in on what's going on in the Tradfire world and where all this money is coming from and and what uh what you should know about it. I think that's the best thing we can do here on this panel. So let's start with who are these people, right? There's 40 billion. We can see some of it in 13F filings, but who are the faces behind the flows?

Institutions, advisers, retail, give us a sense of that. We'll just go right down the line. and Gio is uh futures. So he all his answers are going to be about the futures market. Uh Yan and Robbie will do the ETF.

Go ahead, Robbie. Sure. Well, first Eric, as as you note, the flows are back in a big way. Um and there's a very simple reason for that which we'll get to uh in a moment, but first your question on who's buying. It's been interesting to watch this shift over the course of the uh 16 or so months that we've had these ETFs in the US.

Uh at the outset it certainly was predominantly retail. Now retail means a lot of things. In this case it meant all the way from you know pretty small dollar to ultra ultra high net worth significant number of individuals holding uh hundred million plus positions in IBIT for example. Um but then you also have the two other segments that are really important here which is wealth advisory and institutional. And what we've seen uh is this pretty striking pattern where every single quarter the percentage that's in retail goes down and the percentage that's institutional or wealth advisory goes up.

And what's happening is just just a longer uh time cycle for those latter groups. uh to adopt and it's not happening all at once. It's not a sudden uh switch flip kind of situation, but we're seeing it pretty steadily and it's a big driver of some of the behavior and the flows we've seen particularly recently. Just real quick, ETFs have $10 trillion. About 70% of that money is advisers.

Advisers are the people who manage all the boomers assets and the boomers have all the money. So, the gateway to that money is what the ETFs tap into. Just want to give people some clarification. Institutions, pension plans, endowments, they have like a hundred trillion. There's they're even harder to get that assets, but we've seen some inroads there.

I think every uh all the Bitcoin ETFs have every institution represented already in the first year, whether it's insurance endowment. That said, it's still a small number, but Yan, those advisor assets, right? That's the that's the main audience eventually for these ETF. You think maybe 40 50% of the holders will be advisers. Where do you see that going?

I mean, eventually. I think we're still early early days um in terms of adoption of Bitcoin uh for traditional investors. Uh I think the it's just it's just so early. I compare that to gold. Gold is like the nirvana.

So this year, gold inflows into US ETFs is about 14 billion. Uh Bitcoin is is sort of much less than that. Uh and look, buyers like higher prices. There's not that's not a big secret. Uh but I think what's happened to gold this year is a contrast from a macro perspective as well which has been it's a real breakthrough.

I mean we've talked about ddollarization but Trump's tariff scare you really that he put into the markets have really gooed demand for gold. Um and listen not everyone's paying attention to what's going on. I just did a Twitter poll two weeks ago after talking to investors and the question was which asset hit all-time highs this year? gold, Bitcoin, neither or both. And in your own mind, I know this crowd knows the answer.

The question is how many got that poll correct? Shockingly no low number of only onethird of people who answered the poll and it was a good number uh said identified that both had hit all-time highs this year. So um again, gold has been bought by foreign central banks, foreign institutional investors. Everyone wants to get away from US Treasury risk. Bitcoin is so far away from penetrating those dark rooms where the big money lies.

Now, sorry, long answer to your question about the wealth channel. I think we're seeing the beginning of adoption. Um, but even for, you know, individual investors, some of the biggest retail brokerage firms wouldn't allow the sale of Bitcoin ETFs. Vanguard for example, right? I mean, that's a big exception.

That's for the first wave. Right now, if we're looking at financial advisors, long ways to go before most allocators include Bitcoin, and we can talk about why, into their portfolios. Long ways to go. And kudos to Black Rockck for uh for doing some of that. By the way, you're probably thrilled Vanguard is banning Bitcoin ETFs, aren't you?

Listen, a VFZ, a Vanguard free zone is coveted in the ETF space. you can charge more fees and and get more assets there because Vanguard is a brutal competitor, but uh Gio, let's talk about futures. They came around first. You have more traders institutions. What's that market been like over the past year?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, we first introduced uh Bitcoin futures back in December of of of 2017, right? At at that time, you know, we designed those products with ETFs in mind. We thought that ETFs would come six months later or so, but but it took uh the futuresbased ETFs about four years to come to market and certainly the spot-based products, you know, uh coming to market last year. Uh but we'd like to think that the liquidity that we've built that the the trust uh that we've built uh in in in our products, CME is a 180 year old institution.

We've been helping um institutions um individuals uh hedge risk across major asset classes and and of course um entered the the crypto space in um in in in 2017. But those products really become sort of like the benchmark the liquidity of those products um really helped uh the ETFs launch. some of the work that we did in terms of um establishing uh information sharing agreements with with with the spot markets and and the ability say to surveil those spot markets I think helped the SEC in the first approving the the futuresbased products and then eventually the spot-based products but it's also interesting to to learn how these markets are all interrelated. the ETFs have been extremely successful. Um they've been successful on the on the back say of futures but then also so have the spot markets because all these markets are related.

If you consider say you know a black rockck product or a van product they all need spot for their spot uh based products. So what happens is that liquidity providers uh authorized participants for those ETFs lean on the liquidity of the futures contracts to lock in a price. They then have uh about a day or so to deliver a physical coin to the ETF issuer. So then they work out of that futures position into a spot market position either trading at some of the centralized exchanges or um OTC. So very symbiotic relationships.

If the ETFs are doing well, it means that the futures are doing well and it also means that spot is doing well. Now let's follow up with that. The United States hedge funds, right? If you look at the owners of the Bitcoin ETFs, about 20 25% are owned by the biggest hedge funds in the US, um, some of the most famous names, what they're doing isn't necessarily going by buy and hold, right? They're not going long like an adviser where they're doing what's called the basis trade.

And maybe can you give us insight into the hedge funds keeping the pricing between spot, derivatives, and the ETF all in line because all they're doing is arbing that, which I think is good. That way, wherever you're buying Bitcoin, you're not getting a price that's a little out of whack with something else you could get. Yeah. For uh for sure. I think when you know when you look at um so what the ETFs help to do, right?

Uh when you consider uh say traditional macro uh hedge funds who really didn't have access to um you know the crypto markets either by mandate, they couldn't trade spot. So with the introduction of of the spot um uh crypto bitco bitcoin and ether ETFs it really allowed those macro hedge funds access to this market. So, a lot of these um hedge funds, if you look at those uh early 13F filings, you tended to see a lot of these large hedge funds. And essentially what they were doing is if you consider a futures contract and what a futures contract is, um a futures contracts offers um leverage if you will, right? So, it's uh you can think of it almost as a financing trade.

So, anybody that's offering you a futures contract and in case of our contracts, they're month-long contracts. that other entity in terms of pricing that is thinking about what's the price of spot today? What are the borrow costs? If if somebody's going short, how much is that going to cost me? What is the cost of dollars?

How much is that going to cost? So that uh forms a price of that futures contracts. So futures contracts tend to be priced at a premium to spot. So what a lot of uh you know that cash and carry uh trade or basis trade essentially entails um buying the ETF and then shorting futures against that. and and and when you do that, you're locking in that differential.

That differential has moved around a lot. If if we look at early 2024 with with the launch of the ETFs, that basis was running around 20% or so. Fast forward to this year, the base has collapsed a bit. It was um sub 5% for a while. So, at those levels, that trade starts to become perhaps a little um unattractive for some market participants, but we've seen that basis jump back up and currently it's now running about 8 to 10%.

Okay, so let's talk about the last the this the tariff tantrum is what we're calling this sell-off by the way. So stocks were down. I've always thought that Bitcoin, this is just my view, was you know like high beta. Like if stocks went down, Bitcoin would go down worse. That's why I've always said it I always consider Bitcoin and the other altcoins to be somewhat hot sauce.

So you would use it in small portions in your portfolio because it moves a lot. It's about three times more volatile than gold. That said, couple uh like eight, nine days there, there was a decoupling and lately it's almost really it has acted like a real alt, a safe haven. And my theory on this and I want to get your take on my theory is I feel like the holders got better. The price of Bitcoin was pretty stable during the sell-off.

It only went down about the same as stocks. Then it started going up when stocks were down. that stability. It occurred to me that over the last 15 months, you saw a huge transfer of Bitcoin from like governments who didn't want it, FTX, refugees, lawsuits, GBTC unlock, just not good holders. And these were called dumps.

And the ETFs and Michael Sailor bought all the dumps because if you add up all the buying and selling ETFs plus Sailor, everybody else was a net seller and Sailor is not selling. And the ETFs only saw about 34% of all their assets leave during the sell-off. So my theory is the price is going to get more stable and more safe havenish because the holders are getting more stable. Thoughts? Um well I think it's it's a good theory.

Um and uh I I won't read into that. Well I I I think there's a lot to this. Right. So, um, the transfer from, uh, less stable hands to more long-term fundamental is definitely happening. So, I agree with that.

I think there's a larger dynamic that's really interesting here, which is if you or anyone who says, you know, Bitcoin's going to be lever beta to equities, the only reason you would ever say that is because sometimes you see it in the trading data, right? it makes no fundamental sense and yet when it's repeated enough it can actually become a little bit self-fulfilling right I think anyone would have a very hard time you know standing on a stage and and debating why that actually makes any sense it doesn't but um it's become something that reflexively now can happen because enough pundits and research outlets and other commentators have have said it like it ought to be Well, so what happened with uh the rally out of the Trump Fed um dynamic was that decoupling just one day of Bitcoin fulfilling the role that many have said that it would, which fundamentally makes a lot of sense as a scarce global decentralized asset that's detached from economic, political, monetary risks of of any particular country. It behaving like that was an incredible switch that caused a lot of the capital that had been sitting on the sidelines trying to figure out well fundamentally this feels like it should be a diversifier and a hedge but sometimes it trades like it's it's uh lever beta to to NASDAQ and if it's that I don't need it in my portfolio but if it's this if it actually is a diversifier and a safe haven then I absolutely need it in my portfolio. I would what surprised me was that just one day Eric of that and all of a sudden the flow machine came back on in a massive way like we've barely seen since these ETFs launched. and Yan you I wanted to give a little context to this discussion rather think that was a lot of great points uh there but uh you know I like as a historian like to look at data points in terms of decades not days um and and I just want to kind of be clarify like for the audience the correlation between Bitcoin and and traditional assets until uh covid until 2020 was like zero and since then it's just been much higher it's you know point4 or whatever or so, you know, one being perfect correlation.

So, I don't know if we know kind of we're not in the best of area codes right now, uh, or zip codes, whatever the right analogy is, um, to have this higher correlation, which is, I think, why we're focused on it in this discussion. So, I think it's a really important thing to watch. Um, I would love it. It would be fantastic for Bitcoin if we reverted to a world where there was zero correlation, right? It was its own animal.

We'll just have to see now if if the ETFs not just in the US but Canada, Europe, globally have caused it to be more of a part of the global flows on a daily basis, right? And we will never go back to the zero correlation days. And then what does that mean? It means we'll hold less, right? I mean all investors will hold less if it has higher correlation.

To totally and and more if it's lower correlation. And to to your theory, Eric, if you look at just the ETF flows, they have been uh not phased by some of the equity market sell-offs that also caught Bitcoin up in them. There have been a lot of days where equities were down, Bitcoin was down even though there was, you know, no u specific reason why it should have been and IBIT flows were positive, for example. What can I just you know what drives or what drove Bitcoin before right what was the market structure and uh you know one of the things you have to mention is just the amount of leverage that was provided into the system some of that was by um you know Genesis and different players in the last cycles and we're starting to get we need a lot more leverage it's weird for me to say that in this in the kind of crypto ecosystem right because and we'll get that I think in the United States this year and I know we're going to get to it later But we so liquidity has been a big driver of the Bitcoin cycles in the past. FTX was the nadier, right?

Everyone was out. Everyone had gotten their margin calls. Everyone needed to sell whatever they could. Um, and so that's just that's one thing in the background. That's sort of well behaved right now.

There aren't these big liquidity providers into into the Bitcoin ecosystem. Tether's a big lender. Uh, so it's it's it's out there. We have derivatives. the pers market, but it's not nearly to what it was at the height of bull markets.

And you guys both sell gold ETFs, which is interesting. So, gold I, you know, I know we're at a Bitcoin crypto conference, but you got to you can't deny gold had a big W in Q1. It went up. It, you know, and there was touchdown dances. They spiked the football even though Bitcoin still crushed it over like the last two years, but it definitely had a good quarter in terms of looking like that safe haven early on.

You have IAU. Do you have to also pitch IAU to people or is that like another person? Do you guys ever get into arguments? How's that work? Well, generally the the people who are bullish and believers in uh gold are also bullish and believers in in Bitcoin.

I think there's a lot of sort of shared uh analysis and uh worldview in a sense and you know we have a lot of great conversations with clients around this. You see various different funding sources for those adding bitcoin to portfolios. Sometimes it's equities, sometimes it's prorat of the whole portfolio, sometimes it's alts generally, but a lot of times it has been gold. Um, where you see some uh holders or maybe you know they are all gold, no bitcoin, now they move to 8020 or 50/50 or in some cases they they move it uh entirely. I think that's less common.

So um it's it's a constructive thing actually to have those combined voices uh in the room. Good answer. Um I don't it looks they there's a lot of there's a lot of fighting on Twitter though at least I I guess uh between the gold and the crypto world. Uh it's interesting because you're right they do share a lot of world views. But anyway I guess they're competing over the same assets.

Um Yan I want to ask you something. We just ran into your son. Your son is like uh I he's in his 20s maybe. 28. Yeah.

Yeah. And Yan, in my opinion, has been one of the most aggressive people to move into. Like, he is truly from Tradfi, but he moved into crypto very quickly, way faster than most Tradfi people. And I have to think, you know, your son got into it early. Did that, you know, kind of open your eyes to it?

Did that speed up your movement into it? Can you talk about that a little bit? Sure. Um, I mean, people have different philosophies about investing. You know, I was listening to a Warren Buffett uh interview and he'll never invest in gold or Bitcoin because they don't generate income.

They're not kind of growth assets. He doesn't care about store value, but for for Van um is a macro shop. So, we kind of look at these big picture trends and like what's you know, not just to chase every fad, but what's happening in the world will affect the financial markets. Americans don't really get that because they equities always go up. But if you live in any war torn country, Europe, you know, Latin America, you understand that the financial markets are just a subset of what's happening in economics, politics, and technology.

So anyway, so you have to as an investors, and I'm sure everyone in this crowd does this, what's going on out there? What's new? What what can I get higher returns out of or how can I reduce the risk of my portfolio? And uh you know, technology is one of them. And it did help to have teenage at the time, teenage boys around uh because they were all like buying crypto, right?

And their friends were um and they were mining. I mean, they were mining in their dorm rooms, right? And that kind of that doesn't confirm a trend, but it alerts you to something. And then the question is as investors, what do you do to confirm it? So, um yeah, I think it it did help.

Um and his project, by the way, is a is a stable coin called Agora. Uh, and I'll just flag that not just Van but Black Rock's doing a ton of stuff in the onchain world as well, which is not the topic of this panel, but is very much happening today. I I have uh tokenization if time. So, okay. All right.

Because it's a whole other thing, but Gio, let's talk about the next what's up next. Obviously, Ether futures and then the ETF came. Ether didn't do quite as well. I think it's 4 billion today, but it peaked at 12. Just real quick on Ether, it bad timing.

It went down after it launched. The Bitcoin ETF was just so unusual that it made Ether look a little um like a failure, but if you take Bitcoin out of picture a 4 billion to 12 billion, so first year is amazing. So I'll say that Ether did good relative. It was like silver. It was like silver to Bitcoin's gold in a way.

Um, now we have Salana, XRP, Litecoin, and a variety Dogecoin, and a variety of others. I think those are the main ones that have true 33x spot Bitcoin ETFs ready. And then there's some futures based products. But in order to really have a nice ecosystem, you need futures. So, where are we at with the altcoin futures?

And how are the issuers leaning on you to get them out so they can roll their products out? It's a a great question. And I think you know for us you know we in addition to uh futures and options we also have a family of uh reference rates covering uh 24 different coins and tokens right so so we have these reference rates and all our products are cash settled so theoretically you know the plan is that we would eventually look to hopefully like launch futures on those on those um reference rates but before we do that we really do need that regulatory clarity right so we need to know that these underlyings are considered commodities because were regulated by the CFTC. CFTC regulates commodity products. So, we got some of that that clarity or or more rather say regulatory comfort um earlier this year with um some of the changes in the US administration, some of the changes that we're seeing um on on the regulatory level.

Uh some of the cases that have been dropped against some some prominent firms. So, that gave us some comfort around Salana also gave us some comfort around XRP. I think when you look at those and XRP incidentally goes live on May 19th. Um when you look at those four Bitcoin, Ether, Salana, XRP, you know, taking out meme coins, taking out stable coins, that's covering roughly about 85% or so of of of the market capitalization of of of cryptocurrencies. So, you know, do we let let's assume that we have that regulatory clarity?

Do we go ahead and just start launching futures contracts? I think from my perspective, we wouldn't like launch them just for the sake of launching. I think that there really needs to be um a client demand uh for for those products. I think where we are seeing interest is in perhaps index based products that consists say of the of of the major ones and then the tail you know just you know the the next six or or so uh uh coins would would give you exposure say to to other cryptocurrencies. Right.

Okay. U let's just do a quick rapid fire with you. Uh, can I just speak to the ETH launch for a second because um, you know, we we mainly get our assets from financial advisers and investors in the United States and the ETH ETF came out. I said, "Do not buy this ETF if you don't know what's going on with ETH's market share." You may argue with that phrasing.

No one I talked to knew what the hell I had just said or even to think about that. And so that's got me really changing my mind in that even though we're an ETF provider, we're also an active fund manager and most people in traditional finance should not be Bitcoin aside should not be investing in crypto because they had no idea um I mean I like to point out just at a very simple level that 2023 was the most important year in crypto in the last 10. And I say that because that's when blockchains became cheaper and their their usage became reliably cheap. Right before that, gas fees and you know, Bitcoin transaction fees were all over the place. You'd never build on them if you were like a real company.

And I think since then, you know, we're layer 2 and Salana, so it's a different world. But did the average investor have any idea? I would say not at all. And so that's where I really think active management, uh, we're going to come out with an actively managed ETFs. I'm talking my own book here a little bit, but I really think that maybe everyone in the room might know what's going on, but boy, out back home, it's tough.

Yeah. But let let's you know, I I have this rhyme I created. The further away you get from BTC, the less assets there will be. So, as you get further and further into these like altcoins, I just don't see a lot of demand. Maybe there's a flavor of the month.

You know, one of them has a great quarter and like, oh, let me buy that for a while. But it seems like Bitcoin, like you're you're talking to some heavyweight investors. Are are they looking past Bitcoin and how far down the down the chain are they going? I think overwhelmingly the focus of um at least institutional and wealth advisory today is is Bitcoin. Um a little bit ETH.

Every once in a while we get questions about other assets, but I think it's actually a positive reflection, Yan, of what you were alluding to. um which is that most of those investors kind of recognize they don't understand beyond Bitcoin and the Bitcoin investment thesis is pretty easy to grasp right as this non-s sovereign store of value and emerging monetary alternative it's much more complicated for these other assets and the competitive dynamics between them and so most are frankly kind of tuned out of that plus it's a different investment value prop The comments I made about Bitcoin being fundamentally a logical uh portfolio differentiator and and uh potential hedge don't really apply to the rest of crypto, right? The rest of crypto, you're making a technology bet. You're making a bet on innovation around blockchain and digital assets, which can be a compelling bet, but that's going to trade that's going to sit in a portfolio very differently than what Bitcoin does. And for now, the interest, particularly with with the state of things, is is still overwhelmingly Bitcoin.

So, we have this new SEC. Just real quick, do you think they're going to allow ETH staking in the ETH ETF? Uh, I don't want to forecast that. I I just, you know, I'm most excited. Can you answer that, too?

Uh, I I I got asked that twice at the conference. Yes, it has to happen through legislation, and my answer is yes. It comes through legislation this and do you think we're going to see staking? Yeah. Now, we'll go to the next question.

Do you think we'll see in kind creation redemptions in the Bitcoin ETFs? Well, I think there's a lot of reasons that that makes sense from a market efficiency perspective. And um so, you know, I think we're optimistic on that one. It's a wonky phrase, but it just it's just helps the it's it's like making the plumbing a little better for an ETF. I'll leave it at that.

There's a lot of risk. You know, Bitcoin is a bearer asset. There's a lot of risk in its treatment. And there's been a major hack as long as uh you know as recently as two months ago, right? I I think the SEC is going to be very careful because under Gendler, they really weren't paying attention to anything and how it really operated.

And I think now they realize, whoa, there's the custody of Bitcoin ETS is not guaranteed. It's not guaranteed by Black Rockck's, you know, balance sheet and it's not guaranteed by Coinbase's balance sheet. So there's risks in there, I think. So the SEC will take a little while for that. Do you see it as a Pandora's box where they're just going to approve everything because um Atkins is in charge now and Gendzer's out?

Like that's sort of the word on the street. We also our odds approval for like Salana XRP spot went from 1% to 50 just on the election. Now they're now up to 70 because there have been no withdrawals and they're going along the line. But I mean, well, we're very What will they say no to? Yeah, that's a good question.

F firstly, you guys have a pretty good track record. So, thank you. I appreciate that. But I would say um that those who believed that just because you have a new administration, new SEC chair, like everything goes, um I think will be disappointed. I think that uh there will be a regulatory process that puts frameworks in place around some things that just were kind of undefined before.

And in some cases that may actually um make things uh you know more difficult in pockets of this industry than uh before because there are some thorny questions around regulation. It's not just all about, you know, going from, you know, tight to to loose. I think um I I would not expect like a blanket uh approval of whatever comes before. We're we're hoping for a Salana ETF approval. We were the first to file and we hope they go back to, you know, respecting the order of filings.

Um so I just want to ask I want to ask you Yan Jan was first in line for Ether, right? Yeah. And Salana doesn't matter. And they were told, but then they told him to all launch together. And so that's what he's That's not the joy.

The joy is if Salana ETFs flip ETH ETFs, will you sing that diddy again about going further away from Bitcoin? Um, okay. There are some really crazy stuff filed, too. So Rex shares and Tuttle and they filed for a Trump ETF, a Trumpcoin ETF, and a 2x Melania. Uh, who here's who here will buy that?

Okay. Uh, you guys will probably just buy it directly. Okay. Anyway, but here's my thing on that. You'd say, "Well, the SEC would never approve that BS."

But then you're like, "Well, that's his boss, dude. You you you're going to say that the Trumpcoin ETF is not appropriate for investors, yet your boss has basically launched the coin for retail investors. How's that work? Who wants to touch that one?" I mean, I'll I'll I'll explain, I think, how it's going to play out.

Uh, actually, sorry, we're talking our own book here again. Our both neither of our firms launched leverage or inverse ETFs and I think we didn't do it because the c expected investor experience was going to be so bad just the way they operated on the inside. And but anyway, the way investors are protected from those products is that the broker dealers in this world like the CFIs would not list them or would put a lot of constraints on which of their clients could trade them. So the SEC may approve them, but that doesn't mean that they're going to be kind of easily available. And I think that's the way it should be.

It's not really the government's job to say this is good or bad. Um they've already said that memecoins are kind of not securities, so it's fine. They can be held in trusts. But I do think it's the role of these intermediaries like the broker dealers to say, you know, put those cautionary brakes on because otherwise in it's the United States investors are going to sue. Well, to be fair, you know, the 2x micro strategy ETF is super volatile and like that you can get that everywhere.

I anyway um I do think again the further away from Bitcoin you get but uh Gio let's say I don't know the Trump ETF uh takes off for for whatever reason do you then seriously consider futures on it like where do you stop the futures launching in because the ETFs may actually go ahead of you uh earlier I mentioned we need that regulatory clarity we need client demand but I guess the other thing that you really need is utility right so what is the ultimate function of of of that particular underlying and when you consider memecoins in general there is no underlying function right so um I I wouldn't see us launching something like that uh but something that we have noticed right when we go back to the conversations that we were having with clients back in 2017 um it was all like what is bitcoin you know what is this about and when you look at who was trading at the time there was a lot of speculation and those conversations have essentially all changed now it's it's really about um sort of the utility of the of of not just Bitcoin but but but things like um Ether and and Salana X XRP, right? But we're seeing like having more conversations with hedge funds in particular that are now looking beyond say that relative value um uh basis cash and carry trade and they're also now looking at more fundamental type um in investing. When you consider the success of the the spot ETFs, when you look at you mentioned Micro Strategy, you know, a few times and other companies that that are acquiring Bitcoin, countries that are acquiring Bitcoin, you've got roughly a little bit over 15% that is being held. That that that's more than 200 uh billion dollars that that is being held. Um so it's no longer say um a product that can be ignored.

It it's not an asset class that can no longer be ignored. Okay. We have two minutes left and so this is the lightning round final question for you. You got an audience full of uh you know largely crypto natives who want to understand the institutional and ETF world more. What should they look for in the next year?

What big things excite you? Start with Robbie and end with Gio. Can I go last? You want to go last? Go.

Okay. Gio, you want to start? Um, I'd say a stable coin bill and and and I'd say um that Bitcoin crypto becomes an asset class with a 10% allocation. Wow, that would be a lot. Okay, Yan, that's pretty optimistic.

Can I use my time to do a quick poll? Who here in the audience quick poll raise your hand if you think Bitcoin hits newer all-time highs later this year? Just want to see how bullish the crowd is. Bullish. Oh my gosh.

Before Arthur Before Arthur Hayes, no one was raising their hand. So there we go. Okay. I like higher more and flows. Higher, more back the truck up.

Okay. You're going full Arthur. Okay. Yeah. I think the the big dynamic to watch is going to be whether this decoupling has follow through.

Um, like we discussed, if Bitcoin is levered NASDAQ, the marginal buyer inside this room, people will still love it, but the the marginal buyer who's been on the sidelines today, the institutional allocator, the wealth advisory firm, the model portfolios, it's not interesting to them. If it actually has zero or even negative correlation in certain uh critical disruptive events, then it becomes a very potentially important portfolio building block. And so that to me is the story to watch in 2025. Yeah. And the the investors he he's talking about are we're talking like well over 100 trillion.

So watch for decoupling and hopefully negative correlation. So that's all the time we have. Let's give a round of applause to our wonderful panel here. Thank you for coming.