Live: Eric Balchunas on The $ETH ETF Launch

The Ether spot ETF has officially started trading as of today July 23rd, 2024 marking a landmark day for Ethereum and crypto as a whole. We're going live today to discuss the magnitude of this moment and what it means for Ether the asset, and more broadly the entire crypto industry. This is a big deal and we're stoked to be sharing this moment live with the Bankless Nation. ------ 📣 SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap ⚡️ FUEL | EARN FUEL POINTS https://bankless.cc/fuel 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum https://%E2%81%A0https//bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Intro To Eric 02:53 $1B Daily Inflows 06:17 Mini ETH 08:13 What To Look For Next 12:25 #2 Launch Of All Time? 19:12 Pitching ETH To The World 24:08 ETH As A Tech Platform 27:43 Winners of BTC vs Winners of ETH ETFs 30:32 What To Watch ------ RESOURCES Eric Balchunas: https://x.com/EricBalchunas ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ https://www.bankless.com/disclosures%E2%81%A0

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Welcome back to Squawk Box this morning. SPOT Ethereum ETF set to begin trading today. The SEC-approved ETF applications from 21 shares, Bitwise, BlackRock, Fidelity, iShares, Benetek and Franklin Templeton, along with Invesco Galaxy.

• 0:24David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, after a long, chaotic roller coaster of drama, surprises and plot twists, we have arrived at Tuesday, the 23rd, the first day of the SPOT Ether ETFs. And at 4:30 PM Eastern Time, we have concluded the first day of trading of the ETFs. That day is behind us. Thank God that day is behind us. We've got on the show today, Eric Balchunas, one of the Bloomberg ETF boys, back for the crypto industry's second ETF debut. Eric, welcome back to Bankless. How did, how did today go? Were there any surprises? Did we overperform? Did we underperform? What were their performance expectations at all? Tell us, like, first thoughts. What stands out the most?

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Uh, solid is what I would go. I would say a solid A. Maybe not an A+, you know? And I'd say, our prediction was that these things would take or do about 20% of what the SPOT Bitcoin ETFs did, and they did 23%. So, but, you know, it could have been worse. They could, you know, the big thing that had, was in the back of my mind the whole time was the ETH Futures ETFs. If you remember, really fucked. They were almost like an embarrassment. Nobody cared. And the Bitcoin Futures ETF did really well. Now, granted, the ETH Futures launched post-SBF in the, in the dark times, whereas the Bitcoin Futures launched in like

• 1:46Speaker 02

  the 69,000 peak of 2021. But still, I would say, anybody who's an Ether person should be really happy with this. This is solid. 20% may seem like, well, you know, I'm a little jealous, but the Bitcoin ETF was the biggest launch ever. And beyond normalcy, like, almost like an anomaly in physics. So, it'd be like saying, hey, would you like 20% of Bill Gates's worth, net worth? And you'd be like, hell yeah. Like, I would lock into that, right? That's sort of what this is like. I would not compare it.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  That's how big the Bitcoin ETFs were compared to a normal launch. I mean, these blew, these blow everybody away. So like, for example, even the one that did the least good, which was 21 shares, had 8 million in trading. That's more than 90% of new ETF volume on day one. So even the last one blew away the normals, the norm. So, and it all went well. There was no hiccups, no weird pricing or nothing that I saw. So I think it went really well, smoothly and solid, is how I'd put it.

• 3:00David Hoffman?

  I will take a solid A. As a formerly B student, I'll definitely take the A. What was the final volume number for the day? What do we, we passed a billion dollars in trading volume cumulatively. What did we end up at?

• 3:13Speaker 02

  1 billion or 1.083. So just shy of 1.1 billion. And notable is that like all of them saw a double over 10 million, except for 21 shares. That's good. Like there was a, there's a strong middle class here. It wasn't like BlackRock did like almost everything and then everybody else was like starving. They all did pretty well. It was a nice cascade from like grayscale to BlackRock to Fidelity down to 21 shares. The one thing also to note is that the grayscale ETH ETF, which was a, is probably going to be like an unlock, sort of like GBTC.

• 3:53David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  That has $450 million of trading. That's probably mostly outflows. Good news is it's well overwhelmed by the inflows of the other guys. So you have 600 and something million net. The other guys did over ETH, which that's probably going to, at some point, it's a good chunk of that's going to be inflows. So look for some decent chunky inflows over the next couple of days.

• 4:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and so I think there is two big metrics that everyone's looking at right now. I think we started the day at $3,500 on Ether, dropped down $100 at the bottom, but we were staying flat overall on the day. And so you're saying that we're getting basically complete outflows out of grayscale, which is to be expected. We saw this coming because this is what happened with Bitcoin ETF. Everything else was inflows. You and James on Twitter have been talking a lot about volume, trading volume, which I know is like a very important metric of health for these ETFs that trade. But what about net inflows? Do we know, how do we have any sort of indication about like the inflows of these things?

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Well, I would just, I don't know if you can bring up the tweet I just put out like five minutes ago. This is not quite the final numbers, but it's close. Boom. No, the next one. That's my wife and kids, which is always fun to talk about. Okay, so you see how grayscale is 458? That's bad. But you see how the rest, if you subtract the total from 458, you get like 600 million and change? That's good. So in other words-

• 5:29David Hoffman?

  Grayscale can only be outflows and the rest can only be inflows?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:36David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:38David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  I mean, I guess it's possible people bought ETH at 2.5%, but-

• 5:45David Hoffman?

  But it would be silly.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  It would be weird. And normally, if you have ETFs trading on day one, all the volume is people buying it because there are no holders yet. So who would be selling it? So it's all, it's all going to be buying, pretty much. Now, there is some market makers and hedge funds who might have been doing some arb, but even that could convert into flows. But there is some trading going on that may not be like a one-to-one flow thing. But I'd say largely speaking, that's probably true.

• 6:16David Hoffman?

  Okay, so we're looking at like maybe extremely roughly, we'll know more in the future, but about $100 million of inflows into the ETF, once you net out the grayscale outflows.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:27David Hoffman?

  Can we talk about the grayscale mini ETH trust? And it's had the same exact structure with the Bitcoin trust, but I honestly still find it confusing. So grayscale put in 10% of their AUM into the mini ETH trust. It's at a much lower fee. I think it's at 0.15% yearly fee versus the 2.5% fees of the grayscale ETH trust. And this is something that I think is both very similar to the Bitcoin ETF story, the GBTC story, but it's also different in the fact that the Bitcoin grayscale mini trust came so much later in the lifespan of the Bitcoin ETFs, whereas with Ethereum, we have it right here and now. Can you talk about this, how this mini trust is impacting the story?

• 7:09Speaker 02

  It's a new variable. So it looks like it did $94 million worth of, I'm sorry, $63 million worth of trading. You know, people were, they just basically got that as a dividend almost. So a billion dollars is in that fund at the beginning of the day. Now, is that money people leaving because they're just so pissed at grayscale? They're like, I don't care if I got this new cheaper one? Or is it new people who are like, hell yeah, 15 basis points, I will buy that as a fresh person? This is where we're going to really learn about grayscale's brand and the reputation. If their brand took, because their brand took a little beating, the GBTC outflows definitely, especially in the crypto world.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  I don't know if it translates to like normal boomers or whatever, but we'll see. If ETH, if that volume is inflows, that's a good sign for grayscale, a relief. If those are outflows and their big ones outflows, that's a bad sign for them because it shows that they can't even like rectify the situation with literally the cheapest one on the market. So, unknown.

• 8:19David Hoffman?

  Unknown. How do you think this goes from here? We just got day one of trading volume, so, I mean, some data, but not that much data. What are you looking forward for as we finish off this week and as we enter next week? Is this just all trading volumes that you're looking at?

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Yes, all trading volumes.

• 8:40David Hoffman?

  And why are trading volumes so important?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Because, okay, first of all, most investors and traders and institutions, anybody of any size, even retail, they just like to see some volume. It's like you don't want to buy something that never trades. It's like the spreads are wider, you don't want to be the only person at a party. So volume is just good to get like something going, a little mojo. They also lower the spread. So the price of going in and out is lowered by the more people that trade it, the more market makers are making markets in it. And so you have a tight spread. And then you have a, over time, the volume is big fish bait. The more volume, if these ETFs, this couple of them can

• 9:24Speaker 02

  start trading, you know, three, $400 million a day, there's going to be bigger and bigger fish that are like, well, I think I could go in there, nobody would notice. Big investors like to put on positions and not have anybody know they're there. And if they become too much of the volume, they don't like that. So the more volume you have, the more chance you have of catching a big fish. So that's why it's important. And on day one, again, ETH is unusual, E T H E, but mostly the volume is new people buying. So it's a signal of inflows, like hitting indicator. So those would be the reasons that we really look for volume. As I said earlier, and I always

• 10:05Speaker 02

  say that the two most important ingredients for an ETF category to grow are low fees and high volume. And these already have a lot on day one. They got the low fees, obviously. And then here comes the volume, you're in good shape. Then there's no reason outside of just not being into Ether to buy them, not buy them. It just removes all the possible hurdles to purchasing them. Like, I'm into it, but it's too expensive. Or, I'm into it, it's enough, I don't know, it's just not enough liquidity. You eliminate all that. Or I'm into it, but there's no big brand names. So again, you've got, you check all the boxes.

• 10:47David Hoffman?

  And so I think the point that you're really trying to drive home is there are some people who just will include most things into their portfolio because they want a diversified portfolio across all different asset classes, all different investments. And so if we have a certain number of boxes checked, which are big brands, like perhaps BlackRock, low fees, like perhaps, you know, 20 bips, 0.15 percentage points, all the low fees that we see here, and then also a high number of trading volumes, which we are definitely seeing. You're saying that this checks a lot of boxes for potential investors' portfolios. And so it almost puts the bearer of investment, of the bearer, the burden of proof onto the bear rather than the bull. Is that kind of what you're saying?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say so. Again, this reminds me of the Bitcoin launch. Like, I see launches all the time. There's two ETFs launch every day in America, and about six globally. It's weird for them, you know, if one trades over a million dollars on day one, it's like, ooh, that's interesting. You notice that.

• 11:56David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  So if you have a list of some that are trading well over 10 million, it's weird. It's completely abnormal. So it's just a little bit in the shadow of Bitcoin. So all this stuff is relativity here. But this is, this is, in the end, you're looking at the second biggest launch ever, probably.

• 12:17David Hoffman?

  The second biggest launch ever.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say so. I mean, there's a couple caveats to that, but largely speaking, and these are all organic numbers. I want to see the flows after a couple of weeks to start comparing it, but it's right up there. We're talking top 1% launches.

• 12:33David Hoffman?

  Top 1% launches. And we already know that Bitcoin is on a trajectory to just demolish the gold ETF record. I think it already has in its early days, and every single day it continues. Bitcoin continues to beat gold volume records. And Bitcoin, if I'm, if I'm understanding correctly, is the number one ETF launch in terms of all plausible metrics. And you're saying Ether is coming in at number two? Is that true? Do we need to qualify that? How true, how true is that?

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Sorry, one more time?

• 13:04David Hoffman?

  Is ETH the number two, if Bitcoin is the number one ETF launch of all time, passing, surpassing gold, is ETH number two? And if it's not, like, how do we need to qualify that? Or is it straight up just number two?

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Um, well, you know, we have to see what happens. Uh, gold traded over a billion on day one, and that was back when a billion was like, not as...

• 13:28David Hoffman?

  Bigger deal, yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, a bigger deal. Um, but there's a couple of caveats here. Let's say there was only one Ether ETF, right? There was only one gold ETF, so it had the whole thing to itself. Well, you're looking at potentially a billion if it was only one. You know, let's say ETH converted, that's a weird, the whole thing's a little weird because of ETH, but you're looking at a billion in the group. Again, GLD traded a billion on day one, and that was the record for a long time until Bitcoin came along. So the group thing makes it a little weird, but let's just see how it plays out in the next days. My guess is if we look at ETF, the fastest ETFs to say, um, a billion, or five billion, or 10 billion,

• 14:10Speaker 02

  uh, one or two of these will be in the top 10, top 20. Do you know what I mean? Again, the problem is nothing's gonna really knock off iBit. I think iBit's gonna hold a lot of those records, and, uh, ETH won't, won't catch iBit, but it'll, it'll be in the mix. So, um, yeah, I would say as a group, you're looking at, it tied gold.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Eric, I remember you...

• 14:36Speaker 02

  There's one caveat there.

• 14:37David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  I will say gold took in a billion in flows the first day, sorry. So these will not do that. But the, the, the billion in volume is gonna be, again, right up there with any launch we've ever seen. Now, again, the next couple of days will be interesting to see how much comes in as, as cash, and where we are after, say, a week or so.

• 14:57David Hoffman?

  Do you have any indication as to like the speed of grayscale outflows as it relates to the Bitcoin grayscale ETF outflows? I think if I remember correctly, we all kind of got caught by surprise when the Bitcoin ETFs launched because both of you were caught by surprise because there was so much demand. But then there was also so much outflows out of grayscale. Both things caught us by surprise. Do you have any sort of indication as to like the speed of the ETH outflows out of grayscale? Do you think that will happen faster? Do you think that will happen slower? Or do you have any data about that whatsoever?

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Hard to tell. I will say that the grayscale GBTC traded like 2 billion or over 2 billion on the first day. And that was a lot for the market's stomach, right? Remember the first couple of weeks of that thing were brutal. 458 isn't that bad, but the market's smaller. So proportionally speaking, 458 would be about 20, 23% of GBTC's volume. So I guess if we're gonna proportionalize it, this will be a much smaller unlock, but maybe percentage wise the same, if you know what I mean. So if this thing sees like 50 million of outflows, that would be the equivalent of like 250 million a day for GBTC.

• 16:15David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  So we have to sort of like, I think we almost have to like divide everything by five. Is that right? Divide by, yeah, or multiply by one-fifth, whatever you want to do. I think we sort of have to like do that thing to get an answer. It looks like it's gonna be this similar in a parallel universe, but the numbers will all be smaller.

• 16:38David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah, right, right, right. Eric, I remember after the Bitcoin ETFs and as we get into the ETH ETF season, you were talking about the liner, the one liner for explaining Ether. Ether has always had a harder story to tell Wall Street, TradFi about like why people should be interested in it. And I want to get your perspective on that. But first, before we get to all that conversation and a few other things I want to talk to you about, we got to talk to our sponsors that make this show possible. So we'll be right back with some of these other topics.

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• 19:37David Hoffman?

  And we're back and Eric is on better internet. I want to bring up the marketing conversation here about the Ether ETFs because that's always one of the most interesting things about these ETF stories is all of a sudden we have an army of salespeople on Wall Street talking to large capital pools about why they might be interested in the Bitcoin ETFs and now the Ether ETFs. Here's a tweet from you yesterday, Eric, saying, "Here's BlackRock's Ether pitch to normies via J. Jacob. While many see Bitcoin's appeal and its scarcity, many find Ethereum's appeal and its utility. You can think of Ethereum as a global platform for applications that run without decentralized intermediaries." This is just the BlackRock pitch, so this is the BlackRock marketing material to their

• 20:21David Hoffman?

  customers, but also we are seeing Bitwise, the websites, the BlackRock websites, the Fidelity websites, all kind of popping up, trying to sell the Ether ETF. And I'm wondering, Eric, you've kind of been watching this journey of the Ethereum community, myself and Ryan included, try to really figure out how to sell Ether. Is there anything you've, any like knowledge that you've gained either today or in the last like month or so about Wall Street appetite, Wall Street interest, or just the marketing narrative for Ether, the asset?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's interesting, you know, I feel as though one of the strongest ways to sell Bitcoin is as digital gold, but why do you want gold anyway? You want gold to store value. Why do you want that? Well, the dollar is being devalued by government, so the Bitcoin is to protect you from your government devaluing the dollar. That's, that's the pitch. I would take a parallel, which is that, you know how the two or three tech companies seem to run the internet and can like completely like take you out whenever they want? This is an internet that nobody can do that on. That's sort of, in my opinion, the problem or the worry that a normal person would have.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  I don't think anybody's comfortable that like Amazon and like two other tech companies like can just do whatever they want on the web. It's, it is centralized and it'd be scary. There's a little Orwellian factor to that. I think most people, that makes them nervous. Ether is something, and I'd even go to the guy who came up with it, his story of like not liking his freedom taken away from him in this video game. He's, "Hey, look, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do something where that can't happen." That's understandable business, people, all business all the time, or start off, if somebody's pissed off about a current state of things, and like, I want to do it a better way. It's a perfect capitalist story.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  And here you have really smart people developing these, this new way of doing it. And Ether is the gasoline that you have to buy to do the apps and stuff. So I like that story and the fact that it's a little more of a tech play. There's more, like, it's a little more like a tech stock, whereas Bitcoin is truly like gold. But I, I do find that one thing I haven't seen anyone bring up is this idea of, hey, or does it worry you that like a couple of companies have so much power? A couple of tech companies, they're getting bigger and bigger.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  That's my one thing. Otherwise, you're just gonna sell on, hey, don't miss out on this thing that you don't understand. And that's a little weaker. I think you have to really go through, I'd even, like, when I explain ETFs to people, and I'm like, why they work so well, I go to the story of the guy who invented the ETF and what problem he was trying to solve. He was third in exchange trading. He was, American Stock Exchange was lagging Nasdaq and NISI. And they wanted, no, no stocks would list there. It's like, well, F it. We'll, we'll make our own thing that's really cool and people want to trade. And they invented a basket of the S and P 500, and it was, and it worked. They, they got, they were able to,

• 23:37Speaker 02

  it was a, invention is the mother of, no, wait, necessity is the mother of invention. So they were kind of forced to do this. And then I go over where they got the idea for the design and the paradigm they used. I know in Bitcoin, one thing that worked with me is the military. Background that the system was based on and in the Cold War. Again, I never hear anybody, I was like, that's really cool. I would, again, I would go through the actual story. Instead of just, it's this thing over here. And, and, because I think people can't even conceptualize, how do I even get to it? What, where does it live? What does it do?

• 24:18Speaker 02

  I would almost like do a little more storytelling if I were trying to explain this to somebody. Um, you know, and that's normally you have to read a book to get all that. But I, you know, iShares doing their best here. But that'd be one thing I would, uh, recommend.

• 24:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think people are going back and forth on the tech platform angle. Some are seeing that as, uh, the more interesting aspect for Wall Street investors. Because tech is generally associated with very high returns. That's been the sector of investment over the last 10 plus years or so. That has outperformed most other things. Uh, but then others are saying like, well, tech is also undifferentiated. Because, you know, with Bitcoin, you know, there's only one gold on the internet. But, you know, there can be many tech, tech platforms. Do you have a take, uh, between these two takes?

• 25:08Speaker 02

  There could be many tech platforms. In other words, wait, Ether would not be the only one?

• 25:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they're like Ethereum is not the only smart contract platform that exists.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know what you mean.

• 25:17David Hoffman?

  Crypto space, yeah.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's definitely a little bit of a challenge. I think also the idea that people wanted to make something that was faster. You know, Bitcoin is very secure, but it's not fast, right? It, it, it doesn't, it doesn't want to be fast. So I would all maybe with the idea that this is a way to use the blockchain technology for speed. And that you don't get that at Bitcoin. You know, Bitcoin is security. This is more utility and speed. Am I right? I'm not, I'm novice at this. So I'd almost turn it over to you on whether that's too simple. But you are right, there would be now competitors to Ether for sure down the road.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  But you got a good head start on them, I think. And you got a bigger market cap, so.

• 26:11David Hoffman?

  One thing I'm interested to see is some of the surface area between the cross pollination of BlackRock's products specifically. So you have BlackRock trying to promote their Buildal fund, their tokenized treasuries on Ethereum, and now they also have an Ethereum ETF, which means Ethereum has two products that it has been able to create for BlackRock. And hearing Larry Fink talk about tokenization and identity, I kind of think that there is going to be more than just a handful of Ethereum-based products that BlackRock's going to be able to serve. And all of a sudden, when like more than a handful of products come out of BlackRock, all based on Ethereum, all of a sudden, I think maybe that starts

• 26:52David Hoffman?

  to really fill in gaps of what investors understand what Ethereum can be.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  I would agree with that. That said, a little more bear tokenization than most people. I feel as though-

• 27:06David Hoffman?

  You like the tokenization, the securitization, not the tokenization?

• 27:12Speaker 02

  I don't know, maybe it's like just the words we're using, but I don't know if there's a, it's going to be difficult for tokenization to disrupt ETFs. Now, there are places ETFs can't go where tokens, I think, would be a great solution. But the ETF is a mutual fund, the highest regulatory standards. I don't even know how you get a token through that law. It'd be difficult. And now with an ETF, they're fast, good, and cheap. I mean, you can get almost anything now with a click of a button. It's very convenient. There's no friction, and there's almost no cost. It's very difficult to disrupt. You'd be like trying to disrupt Amazon as a startup. It's going to be very difficult. But I'm

• 27:55Speaker 02

  keeping my mind open. But certainly, if BlackRock starts doing things like money market funds, which are not that, they're a little clunkier than an ETF. If they can tokenize a couple of things here and there, yeah, I think that would help Ether's case because it shows it in practice.

• 28:10David Hoffman?

  One last question I got for you Eric before I let you go. We have a lot of the same contenders here with the ETH ETFs that we have in the Bitcoin ETFs. In fact, I think it's the same set of players. One thing I'm keeping my eye on is Bitwise's market share of the ETH ETF as it compares to their market share of the Bitcoin ETF. And if you've been paying attention to kind of like the inside baseball in the crypto space, Fidelity are known as these Bitcoiners. The Fidelity people are Bitcoiners and the Bitwise people tend to be a little bit more Ethereum, Ethereum aligned. They are much more into some of the on-chain Ethereum products. Fidelity was, got into crypto, I think even before Ethereum was even a thing.

• 28:54David Hoffman?

  And one thing I've noticed is that the Bitwise's share of the Ethereum volumes is higher proportionally to what it was with the Bitcoin ETFs. I'm wondering if you've picked up on any differences in the shakeups on the winners of the Bitcoin ETFs versus the winners of the ETH ETFs?

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I would say that Ark, Ark not being part of 21Shares, I don't, it seemed to hurt it a little bit because Ark was in the top three. It was like tied with Bitwise for third place. That's a little unusual. I, 21Shares is largely a European company, so I think Ark gave them like a US face here a little more, but I have no doubt they'll get some share. That's one noticeable thing. Bitwise always outperforming, you know, this is an indie small company. They don't really have any business being nestled between Fidelity and Grayscale. Good for them. And VanEck Franklin about where I thought, you know, so, and you know, Fidelity has always

• 29:56Speaker 02

  been like a strong second, especially in the Bitcoin race. They now have 10 billion in flows, whereas iBit is about to hit 20 billion. But then there's a next, the drop off to 3 billion. So I would see, it looks like we're going to be headed to the same place where you're going to have iShares, say at, let's say hypothetical 5 billion, Fidelity at 2.5 billion, and then maybe like a couple at 800 million. I could see a world where it's like that. It looks like it's shaping, this is one day, but we'll see. But Fidelity. Has something BlackRock doesn't even have, which is a massive army of advisors.

• 30:36David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  So, once they, you know, get into something or want to put it in their model or their clients' models, it's like they can just get a lot of money just like that. Like they are, it's a captive audience to a degree for them. BlackRock doesn't even have that, although they have models for other things, but it is powerful.

• 30:58David Hoffman?

  Well, Eric, we're at the end of the trading day. Like I've said, 5pm. Time to, to wrap up the workday for us on the, on the East Coast. I appreciate you coming on the show. Give us a little sneak peek of your life as you are paying attention to the ETH ETFs up until the remainder of this week and also for next week. What are, what are the things you're looking at? What are the places you're going to get information? What are the conversations that are going around in this space that you're paying attention to? Overall, just give us a sneak peek of your, of your ETH ETF related life as this week draws to a close.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Well, I'll be watching the, the flows in the, in the assets this week, see where we're at. And then the second day volume, third day volume, volume tends to drop off. Will these have a little lift? The Bitcoin ETFs actually had a little lift. And then will they have a second win like in week two or three? Or will they just have this big launch day and then slowly trickle off? We'll see. The other thing I'm looking for is just, you know, how the messaging plays out. I saw Bitwise's attempt at it. I saw BlackRock's. You know, Ether to me, it's potentially has more angles you can approach it from. So I'll be interested to see the marketing and how that is different by issuer. Again, this is such an interesting case study for analysts because you've got all these launching on the same day.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  So you, you sort of have a lot of variables removed and you can sort of then isolate things like fees, but all the fees are the same. So then, you know, it really comes down to marketing and hustle and size. And so it helps us get some knowledge for like what works in the ETF market overall. So, like I said, this is a, it's small relative to the whole size of the ETF market, but is a very useful case study for an analyst to monitor. So we will look at all angles of it.

• 32:43David Hoffman?

  Well, Eric, it's been great to have you and James's commentary, both with Bitcoin ETFs and now the ETH ETFs. When do you think we'll have you back on? I'm kind of sad that this is over because now we have these two main products that are out and live. We have over 70% of the total crypto market cap represented on Wall Street in these ETF formats. Where do you think our relationship with the Bloomberg ETF boys goes?

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Well, we're available. You know, we'll, I would say maybe check back in in two or three weeks, then we can really pick apart the flows and the assets and the grayscale unlock and we're all shook out. This will take a couple of days, if not a couple of weeks to really see like, okay, what the hell happened?

• 33:27David Hoffman?

  Well, Eric, thanks again for coming on. You guys heard it from Eric. We got a solid A of the ETH ETF launch. No small potatoes. Isn't that right, Eric?

• 33:37Speaker 02

  I remember I take that phrase back. It was too dismissive. That said, we, you know, we were kind of right. This would be a smaller, you know, a fifth of what the Bitcoin ETF, but small potatoes is not, it's not my style to be that dismissive. It was the bad choice of words and I reminded of that almost every day.

• 33:59David Hoffman?

  I'm sure you are, as crypto Twitter will always do, if you say something that they do not like. Eric, thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. Talk to you later. Bye.

• 34:08David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky, whether it's on-chain or in Wall Street. You know the deal. You can lose what you put in, but we are headed west, even though the ETFs are something fantastic to celebrate. It's a milestone in the industry. It's a mark of maturity for us all. It's something that is required for our number to go up. But nonetheless, I prefer my Ether on-chain. I prefer my Ether in my wallet. So I'll celebrate this, but I will still be self-sovereign and I'll still be bankless. So thank you for joining us here today on the Bankless Nation. Cheers.

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