#1338 Hunter Horsley & Matt Hougan | They Bought Billions In Bitcoin In Eight Weeks!

Hunter Horsley is the Founder & CEO of Bitwise Asset Management. Matt Hougan is the CIO of Bitwise Asset Management. In this conversation we talk about bitcoin ETF launch, 20,000 meetings & calls with various advisors, where they see the industry going from here, how folks are thinking about allocating capital, and more. ======================= Buy and sell cryptocurrency in a tax-advantaged crypto IRA with iTrustCapital. Enjoy 24/7 access, lowest fees in the industry, and tax benefits for your retirement. Open an account today at www.itrustcapital.com ======================= Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ) is one of the largest public Bitcoin miners and hosting solutions providers for Bitcoin mining in North America. To learn more about Core Scientific, please visit: www.corescientific.com ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Hunter Horsley and Matt Hougan. Hunter is the founder and CEO of Bitwise Asset Management, and Matt is the CIO at Bitwise Asset Management. In this conversation, we talk about the fact

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  that Bitwise has done 20,000 meetings and calls with various advisors, what they're hearing from these financial advisors across the country, how the Bitcoin ETF launches are going, where they see the industry going from here, and how folks are thinking about allocating capital into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. This conversation was recorded at Bitcoin Investor Day, and these two did not disappoint. I'm really excited for you all to hear what's going on on the ground and in these meetings that they're having with so many financial advisors across the country. Here is my conversation with both Hunter Horsley and Matt Hogan.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:43Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:24Anthony Pompliano?

  if you do the same thing in your Roth IRA and you make a $20,000 profit, you don't need to pay any taxes. That's right. You get to keep all the profits and not have to pay taxes because it's in a tax advantaged account. So, opening a tax advantaged IRA at I Trust Capital only takes a few minutes. You have 24/7 access to the markets with some of the lowest fees in the industry. The bull run has begun and people are starting to see their accounts go up. So, start taking advantage of tax benefits with an IRA at I Trust Capital. You can start maximizing your crypto investment today. Go to Itrustcapital.com. That's Itrustcapital.com. Today's episode is brought to you by Core Scientific. They are one of the largest

• 3:07Anthony Pompliano?

  public Bitcoin mining companies and hosting solutions in North America. They specialize in transforming energy into high-value compute with exceptional efficiency at scale and recently announced a contract with CoreWeave, a leader in AI cloud compute, to provide up to 16 megawatts of data center capacity. With a substantial fleet of their own miners, Core Scientific not only earns Bitcoin for their own account, but also provides hosting services for large-scale Bitcoin mining customers, operating out of seven data centers in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Texas. You can learn more about Core Scientific by visiting corescientific.com. That's corescientific.com. Go check them out today.

• 3:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Our next two guests, Matt Hougan and Hunter Horsley, CIO at Bitwise and CEO at Bitwise.

• 4:01Anthony Pompliano?

  When you put on an event, you have to decide who finishes up the day. And they don't know this, but the reason why I picked them is because these two guys, plus their team, you have a microphone right there, have done something that pretty much nobody else in Bitcoin and crypto have done, which is what I call hand-to-hand combat.

• 4:25Anthony Pompliano?

  How many RIAs and other investor meetings do you think that the entire Bitwise team has done over the last, call it, seven or eight years?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Can you hear me? Oh, yeah. Great. It's awesome to be with all of you. I've had a chance to meet a few people in Pomp. This is such an extraordinary event. Incredible people in the room. Oh, my gosh. Last year, we did 20,000 meetings and calls.

• 4:57Anthony Pompliano?

  In one year, 20,000 meetings and calls?

• 5:00Speaker 02

  We will do 49 events around the country in the first six months of this year. When Matt joined Bitwise, he was clear with me that he was excited. Six years ago, Matt joined Bitwise after a very long career in ETFs because he saw the opportunity in the space. I think the week he joined went on Bloomberg and said he thinks it'll be the next multi-trillion-dollar asset class. And Matt said, "My one condition is I want to travel less." And I said...

• 5:32Speaker 02

  He didn't know I had my fingers crossed behind my back. Matt has been traveling every week. I've been traveling every week. But Bitwise strives to be a little bit like the teaching assistant for crypto. You know, there are a lot of investors around the country that sort of are thinking through what everything means for them. And we try to walk into the room and say, "What are you working on? And how can we help you move forward?"

• 5:53Anthony Pompliano?

  What are people asking? What are the conversations, Matt, when you're in the room, traveling, even though Hunter told you you didn't have to? What's happening in those rooms?

• 6:02Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah. He swindled me in, but I'm glad for it. Recently, they've changed. You know, if I think about what the questions were six years ago and what they are today. Six years ago, they were sort of excuses designed as questions. They were questions about custody. They were questions about could it go to zero? There were questions about,

• 6:28Speaker 03

  you know, how do you access it? Can you access it? Post-ETF, they've really, really changed. It's now questions about position sizing. It's questions about what to sell in order to make room for it. There are still lingering questions. There's still some concerns about, you know, how do you value it?

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Are we too late? But a lot of the logistical questions have been solved, which has been a real material change.

• 6:57Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of that is just pure ETF got approved versus other things that may be going on, price going up? And some of these are related, but is it just ETF gets approved? Now I'm interested?

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Yes, it's just ETF. I mean, it's just ETF gets approved. That's a huge deal. It's an ETF gets approved. It's BlackRock's in the market. This is not the Bitcoin of yesteryear. This is now considered an institutional asset. I also think ETFs being approved and BlackRock coming in means that it's not going to zero, which is a material difference for these advisors, right? They are worried about looking foolish to their clients. And an asset that goes down in price doesn't make them look foolish. That happens all the time. But an asset that they just read wrong and went to zero, that keeps them up at night. And I think the ETF sort of solved that problem for them.

• 7:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So what is the latest public number on assets? And then Hunter, what have you guys been doing? Because you're basically going into a prize fight and you're fighting against BlackRock and Fidelity and some of these huge firms. And, you know, I'm biased. I'm an investor in Bitwise. Like, I think you guys are holding your own, right? You guys are doing a pretty good job. So like, what is the strategy when you're not the brand name, when you're not the, you know, the big dog that's got a $100 million marketing budget or whatever to throw around?

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, it's no joke, large firms. Oh, my gosh. Bitwise, for those who aren't familiar with us, we've been around for six years. We've been on the journey with all of you. And today, we manage 15 funds. There are about 3,000 wealth management firms, family offices and institutions that are invested through our funds. And we launched a Bitcoin ETF after working on it for about six years in January alongside a large pack of incredible firms. After two months, we crossed $2 billion in assets. We're one of the largest today. We also try to be good stewards of this industry and not just hand it over to the old system. So we publish the Bitcoin addresses publicly. So the transparent attribute of a public

• 9:02Speaker 02

  distributed ledger can can be accessed in that benefit. And we also donate 10% of the profits to Bitcoin developers. Thank you.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  If you've met open source Bitcoin developers, you know that it's often thankless work. Sometimes you get sued by Craig Wright, and it's your job to protect the asset that today investors own over a trillion dollars of. So you could just think of us as trying to be a great partner to investors who are busy and want to access the opportunity, but also to be good stewards to the vision that I think got everyone in this room excited about the space in the first place, which is to improve the system and to improve the way the future can be. In terms of what we're doing, you know, I say sometimes on Twitter, if any of you follow me, let me know afterwards if you're sick of me saying it, that I'm grateful to investors for choosing our product, the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF,

• 10:01Speaker 02

  and we have a host of others. There's every option under the sun today, and many accomplished managers of those products. What we strive to be is to be the specialist option. And for some investors, they want to work with a dedicated specialist that has one job, one responsibility, and one priority as a firm. And many others, of course, want to go a different way with it, but I'm really proud. And again, gratitude is sort of the honest emotion that I feel that today so many, I mean, we're seeing dozens of wealth management firms a week. We were recently approved on a very large firm. We have the first corporate that's putting the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF on their balance sheet, starting last week. So, thank you.

• 10:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that publicly known?

• 10:48Speaker 02

  It's not, it's not public at the moment, but...

• 10:51Speaker 03

  You just said it here.

• 10:54Anthony Pompliano?

  It's public now.

• 10:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it a public company or a private company?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  It's a fantastic, it's a fantastic private company, but I'm just going to say it at the moment.

• 11:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's fine. Matt, you blessed me with some education at one point, and we did a podcast episode on what happens when ETFs get approved, and GLD was like a big comparison. Could you summarize kind of what you expect to happen from here, based on those past events?

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, what the, so, so before I joined Hunter Bitwise, I ran ETF.com. So that was my, my time. So covered the space. What happens is there's a lot of excitement and a lot of flows initially. And then it actually just builds over time. So for instance, with GOD, when it launched, it was the fastest growing ETF in its first week. It pulled in a billion dollars. It pulled in $3 billion in year one. That was almost a record and everyone was excited. And then it got more assets in year two and more assets in year three and four and five and six and seven and eight. And actually, the largest inflow year was year 16 in 2020.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  And the reason for that is that we like to think of the ETF approval as a step function. One day institutions can't buy and the next day they can. But it's actually like, like a, like a slowly turning valve, right? So when it first turns on, retail investors can buy and RAA's independent financial advisors can buy. But Morgan Stanley and UBS and Wells Fargo and Merrill Lynch can't. And there are actually like 100 smaller platforms below that as well as institutional consultants. It's not one decision. You have to make two decisions. You need two approvals. And the reason it builds over time is that those two approvals take, take time. So, look, I mean, we're off to a great start. We've pulled in $12 billion of flows.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  But the US wealth management industry is like $45 trillion. So we have a few basis points, like 2% down, 98% to go. And I think that's, I think that's what we're going to see. I think it's going to build from here as those approvals turn on.

• 13:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you expect to get to 100%? Or is there like some number where you're like, yeah, this probably is, based on what wealth managers are going to allocate, we could expect the kind of finish line to be 2, 3, 4%?

• 13:19Speaker 03

  I mean, that number's going up. I will say at bitwise, Hunter can probably attest to it. In the early days, it was 1% of the portfolio. And now I think we're seeing a lot more 2.5 and 5. It will scale with the size of the asset, but I don't think it's unreasonable to think, you know, there could be multiple hundreds of billions of dollars in these ETFs. And allocation sizes could be, you know, between 1 and 5% and maybe scaling as the asset matures.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  If I could just add to that, you know, I don't think that every wealth manager in America, every investor in the world will own the asset. But I just want to use that as a pivot point into what is so remarkable about the Bitcoin ETF, which is that the conversation can start to be about, do you want to invest in this asset in the same way some people want to invest in Microsoft? And others think it's overvalued and some people want to invest in Exxon and others don't want to. And the conversation can be about the actual opportunity and asset instead of the operational complexity and the accounts that have to be opened and the diligence that needs to be done because the ETF cuts through all of that and allows people to focus on the asset and whether they want to invest in it.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Whereas for the prior 15 years, probably everyone in this room has been one of those people who's been able to figure out how to power through that complexity. But for most, that complexity was just ultimately overwhelming and made it impossible to really seriously consider. We've taken a survey of wealth managers every year for the last six years. And every year, they have said that their number one preferred vehicle for investing across eight options, you can imagine them, is ETFs. And in January, we took the most recent survey and 88% said they were waiting for a Bitcoin ETF to invest in the space. So I think that it's so powerful because it allows them to focus on whether they want to make the investment. And I think like other investments, the whole world will not all pick the same stock

• 15:20Speaker 02

  and all buy it in the same size over time.

• 15:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So you've built a multi-billion dollar asset manager. You have been there the longest as the founder. You have the most context. You also have, I'm going to again, refer to a hand to hand combat of 20,000 calls and meetings and all this stuff. But there's a lot of technology. This is still a technologically advanced industry. So how do you think about building a team? How much to focus on technology versus like we have to go build relationships and kind of do the whining and dining and education and all that stuff? And like, those are two very, very different things. But for this business to be successful, you got to do both very well at a world-class level.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  In my prior life, I was a software product manager at Facebook and Instagram before. And when we wanted to, you know, spin something up, you would try to draft people onto the team or get headcount to hire new people and you'd be competing with, you know, the established revenue streams. And I think the opportunity that we have with Bitwise, from my point of view, is that we have a clean sheet of paper and we can build, you know, my aspiration is an Olympic team and pull the best player and purpose build it specifically for this asset class. So if you're, you know, going to be the best to breed manager for real estate, maybe you're Blackstone, you want to make sure that you have people on the team that understand zoning for commercial real estate in Atlanta.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  And you want to make sure that you understand architecture and general contractors in addition to portfolio management. And for our asset class, you want to make sure that you understand open source software and that you can speak with developers about code proposals, that you can comment on those proposals, that you can think through scaling software and you have that embedded in a fiduciary asset management team. So we have, you know, people from Google and Facebook and Slack, military software security, and then also from BlackRock and Blackstone and Millennium and Vin over there, Mercer and Northern Trust.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  And we think the combination of those two is how we can be the most useful partner for investors who say, I want to participate here, but it's 5% of my portfolio. So I need a team with all the expertise that I can call or email and, and know that they have their eye on all the moving parts.

• 17:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Matt, you're the Chief Investment Officer, which means that you have a hand in what products get launched, how people should be allocating capital, et cetera. How do you go through, should you launch the next altcoin, the meme coin, an index, an active fund? You guys have quite a diversity of products today, but obviously you're thinking about others as well.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  All the good ideas are Hunter, I think is what he wants me to say. Next question. Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  In terms of, I mean, you know, our job at Bitwise, as Hunter mentioned, is to be the trusted crypto asset manager for people for whom it's 3, 5, or maybe 10% of their portfolio. So they're looking to us to build high-quality products to give them those exposures. So we think a lot about what areas of the market they need exposure to. The first product we launched was the first, and today the largest, diversified crypto index fund, because not everyone knows how crypto will turn out and they may just want to capture the beta of the market. As DeFi became an exciting area, we launched the first DeFi index fund. We launched the first NFT index fund. We launched ways for people to express their opinions. So as we look at the market today,

• 18:58Speaker 03

  there are plenty of those that are coming. One of the reasons having this combination of tech and asset management is that we're not at the end of crypto history. There, of course, will be other things. I think you'll see us look at income generating strategies. I think there's significant room for strategies that embed through some technique an element of downside protection, because I think that still worries people. But look, we have 19 products today. We're going to have more in the future.

• 19:28Anthony Pompliano?

  How many more? Like, how many? And I ask that somewhat joking, but also for an industry that, I didn't realize this. I used to always cite there's 20,000 cryptocurrency coins. I went and I had to do a presentation for someone recently, so I just Googled it. I was like, maybe it's like 25,000. There's 2.3 million cryptocurrency coins now. And I always said, that's a lot more than I remember. And so I started Googling around and looking on Twitter. And there's a gentleman who tweeted and said that in one hour on Solana, at one point, there was 2,500 meme coins launched in one hour. And so again, 2.3 million coins doesn't mean that they're all going to be, you know, really serious projects or anything like that. But like, how many products can a firm

• 20:13Anthony Pompliano?

  support? And then also, an industry that does seem to be expanding at such a rapid rate?

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Well, I can talk about products, but one thing I just want to share as a mental model that I have for this. One of the things that's so amazing about this space is the different backgrounds and disciplines that it brings together. There are people with financial backgrounds that are excited about an alternative asset class, about, you know, a non-sovereign, potentially currency or store of value. There are people who come to it from a philosophical or sociopolitical perspective, who like reducing the control over them by central authorities. There are people who come to it from a technology perspective. And depending on which perspective you come from, there are different analogies, different mental models. One that I just want to share on how I think about there being 2 million

• 21:01Speaker 02

  coins is ultimately, all of these things are open source software projects. And in software, the general rule is that you need an unbelievable amounts of shots on goal to get a few useful things. If you have an iPhone, there are over a million apps in the App Store. You've probably downloaded 70, and you probably use 12 on a day-to-day basis. The fact that there's 990,000 that you've never heard of or never used, does nothing to make Google Maps worse for you, or Uber worse for you. It's just the nature of software innovation, that they're easy to create, they're hard to scale, but lots of things need to be tried. And I would point out how extraordinary it is, Moon Eve is

• 21:41Speaker 02

  here, building stacks, which is innovation on Bitcoin, which is extraordinary. It is so extraordinary that people, that this ecosystem of innovation has been conjured without the stimulation of a corporation. I mean, think about corporate innovation officers, you have R&D budgets, companies try to have hackathons or venture centers. Meanwhile, you know,

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Tens of thousands of developers and hundreds of thousands of people around the world have come together to dream up how we can make the world better in the 21st century, leveraging the insight that Bitcoin has introduced. And I just think that that is so extraordinary and so many have tried to reproduce it in a corporate context but haven't been able to. So I think it's a really special thing. Our relationship to that is for investors who are busy and don't have the privilege of meeting with developers or getting to say to you, Pomp, what are you excited about or seeing? We're supposed to wade through the rainforest and identify the things that have developed to a stage of maturity that they are a relevant opportunity to bring forth and then make them accessible through a product that can afford peace of mind through professional portfolio management

• 22:49Speaker 02

  and custody and audit and so on and so forth. So that's sort of our objective function is what is an opportunity that's possible now that can be relevant to investors. It's helpful when investors give us feedback on opportunities they're seeing. But I think we could have dozens more. But we won't launch products just for product's sake. We ultimately are serving investors. And one last thing, and it's the most longer to answer, I'm really proud also, if Jeff Park was here, who's our head of Alpha Strategies, he would talk about this less visible part of the space that's maturing right now, which is the financialization of the space, but options markets, derivatives, the ability to drive

• 23:31Speaker 02

  alpha and absolute return. And he runs an incredible strategy with Vin that isn't directional. And I think Dan and Brett both spoke about a little bit about needing to have all of the elements of a mature asset class. And that's happening too and creates other opportunities for investors on the Alpha side.

• 23:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Matt, you go on TV and the reporters and the journalists seem a little bit more enthusiastic, sympathetic at this point than they were maybe a couple of years ago. What have you seen in those conversations that's really changed?

• 24:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, you probably see the same things as well. They definitely are. They are much more optimistic. I think right now they're much more Bitcoin focused. I feel like in the in the bear market, they were looking for quote unquote real world use cases and sort of skeuomorphic examples of how crypto is going to disrupt things they know and love. And now I think you've seen a real pivot in the media, Joe Kernan and others, to embrace Bitcoin as Bitcoin, right? As this digital store value that you can't touch, that may disrupt how finance works, but isn't changing, you know, how people go about their lives on a minute to minute basis. And I think that's been a

• 24:42Speaker 03

  real change, sort of an embrace of Bitcoin. I think I think media was embraced blockchain or hope to embrace blockchain in real world use cases, which there are some really exciting ones now that are bubbling up. And now they're starting to embrace Bitcoin a little bit more as Bitcoin.

• 25:02Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see them doing that, is that a main driver of maybe inbound interest that you guys see? Like, the media talking about it seems like a pretty big deal, right? And, you know, I envision the classic RIA manager who's going to their office, they turn on the TV, it's on mute, they've got Bloomberg, CNBC, Fox, whatever on, they're doing some email, they look up, they see either the Bitcoin price, they see people talking about it, they see Matt's beautiful face on TV, and they say, I gotta call Bitwise? Like, is that happening?

• 25:32Speaker 02

  I think, you know, if I if I came up to you and said, what do you think about AI? You have an answer. It's probably not based on setting aside a week and taking vacation and researching, you know, every piece of public information about AI. It's based on a combination of impressions from people in your life, from what you've read, you know, what you've heard in the media. And so I think, you know, I'd be curious what Matt has to say, but I think it definitely creates the background noise. And I would say, you know, hats off to you for having Eleanor and Tanaya and Brad here, who are all fantastic. And there are many reporters that have really worked to understand what's going on and cover it. Really thoughtfully, but I think it definitely, definitely creates an important context for people.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  And it is an amazing thing for our space that the people that you've had on stage can be really productive representatives. You know, if you had anyone that you've had on stage today on CNBC, and you do a phenomenal job of this as well, by the way, you know, hats off to Pomp for being such an amazing representative of our space. You, you, you, you, you know, in that context, you want thoughtful people to speak on your behalf to all of us as, as members of the Bitcoin ecosystem and community. And, and I think that that has gotten so much better in this cycle.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was just going to build on that. I never think it's one thing. Like you remember the last cycle, we were so excited about Paul Tudor Jones, must've talked about that for months, and that was a real thing, but it was one person and that's easy to dismiss. And now it's, uh, it's, it's hundreds of people, right? It's not atypical. And I think, I think that's really different. And I also think the general tone and tenor has changed. You know, there's this, the website that tracks how many times Bitcoin has died. Uh, it's a fun website and it's like, it's like 14,000 times, but it's only died once in the mainstream media in the last six or seven months. Uh, it's really changed, really in a noticeable fashion. It's the longest run of very few deaths that we've ever had. And so it's a big deal.

• 27:33Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you guys think about retail interest? And, you know, I mentioned earlier, uh, Google searches really haven't come back yet. I think Coinbase for maybe two or three days cracked top 100 apps, but hasn't really kind of pushed into the top 50 or 20 or even 10. Is that kind of in parallel, you all will see a lot more interest from RIs and stuff? Because there's just the same way the media is that background noise, like clients are going to their wealth managers and they're kind of demanding or like pushing them to get more exposure to it. And so as you see retail come back on a Coinbase or, you know, Google searches, we should expect wealth managers to kind of be hearing it from both. You guys are doing 20,000 meetings, but they're also hearing their clients come to them?

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think if all of you could leave today and email your financial advisor and say you should reach out to this firm, bitwiseinvestments.com, that definitely makes an impression on them. I think that what we were just at the Barron's Top Advisor Summit last week, Matt spoke, it was amazing, Matt. And I, you know, from a few conversations there, I think actually at the moment, a common refrain is, I'm actually not getting that many questions from clients, but I want to figure it out. So we have dozens of wealth firms now allocating with us every week, and it's mostly driven by the advisor. It's actually not being pulled by the client. I do think if clients, if the market gets

• 29:03Speaker 02

  to a place where clients are indicating their enthusiasm, it will accelerate that. But it's kind of a beautiful moment right now where the advisor is actually independently saying, this is thoughtful, and we have advisors now are putting 2% across all of their clients. So I don't think yet it's sort of that, that level of individual driven, but it would accelerate things.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it will accelerate things. One thing that surprised me that no one has commented on is I still think there's a lot of retail demand. I just think it's different retail. You think of retail as a bucket. Retail drove crypto. Now it's brokerage-driven retail. And whether we like it or not, those people have more money. So I do think, I do think retail is a big piece. I think eventually advised assets and then family offices will be a much bigger piece because they control more money. But as Hunter said, that's, that's building.

• 30:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I have one question for each of you, and then I'll let you go. Hunter, for you, fees. You guys came out, you were the lowest fee provider on day one. I think people were shocked at the disparity of the fees. How have you all thought about the ETF fee? And, you know, you want to make money, but also low fee does drive inbound, you know, interest. So have you thought about that? And where are you guys today?

• 30:25Speaker 02

  I think that where, so in the last week of December, issuers filed amended S1s and a few decided to disclose fees. The highest, I think, was 80 and I think the lowest was 39. And that's the range that I sort of expected. Of course, where it ended up settling is, is people came down a ton and ours today is at 20 basis points, which was the lowest out of the gate. My first thought on fees is that it's a real gift to investors. I mean, the, the package of what you're getting for 20 basis points is the best institutional grade custody. You also get an audit by KPMG. BNY also does the books and records.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  You know, the incredible portfolio management team at Bitwise will trade it for you. We're executing with one to four basis points of cost to buy hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin right now. And you get the convenience of it flowing into a retirement account or a will and trust. So I think it's an amazing price point. We've even seen, there's a venture fund that decided to use the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF instead of buying Bitcoin directly because of those benefits of that price, I think is so compelling. It means that it's not, it's not a sort of an insanely lucrative pursuit. So I hope that firms will continue to, to put their energy behind it because ultimately for large firms to prioritize business initiatives, they need to generate revenue.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  But it's, you know, it's a fantastic, I think it wound up being a fantastic price.

• 31:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Matt, when you left the ETF world, you've boomeranged, you've come all the way back around. What are your friends saying now? Is this like a look at me now situation?

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're asking for jobs. No, look, it's really exciting to see them come together. ETFs are the great, they're not, you know, they're not tokens. Yeah, I have to be careful in this crowd, but they're the greatest packaging tool for traditional financial investments. And on the fee front, an easy way to think about ETFs, if you want to think about ETFs, is that they're a product wrapper that lets my dad buy the same exposure at the same cost as the Harvard Endowment. And they're doing the same thing in Bitcoin, right? You can now get the stack that Hunter talked about, which you could get if you were the Harvard Endowment, at very low fees, working with some of these great custodians. But now, literally, everyone can get that same deal. That's what ETFs do. So it's beautiful to see these come together, and I think it's just the start.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  We're going to see Ethereum ETFs. Eventually, we'll see ETFs on everything, and it'll be a multi-hundred-billion-dollar-plus business.

• 33:02Anthony Pompliano?

  You said it. Bitwise, everyone.