BlackRock's Crypto Plans for 2025 | CIO Samara Cohen

In this episode of Bankless, Samara Cohen, BlackRock's Chief Investment Officer of ETFs and Index Investments, discusses how ETFs and blockchain are revolutionizing finance. We explore Bitcoin and Ether ETFs as bridges between crypto and TradFi, blockchain's role in market modernization, and how ETFs enhance transparency and diversification. Cohen also shares insights on upcoming regulations and the importance of education in driving crypto adoption. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙 FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | BUG BOUNTY PROGRAM https://bankless.cc/Uniswap-Bug-Bounty ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐 CELO | BUILD TOGETHER AND PROSPER https://bankless.cc/Celo 🎮RONIN | THE FUTURE OF WEB3 GAMING https://bankless.cc/Ronin ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/base:0x4be6cd4d402fed49eb2de95fbc8e737e8ffd3e7f/18?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Intro 00:06:59 Role of Market Modernizer 00:09:12 Blockchains and ETFs Future 00:12:54 "Blackrock" Blockchain? 00:16:09 ETF Progress Check 00:19:22 Bitcoin & Ether ETFs Updates 00:24:08 Blackrock on Cryptos/ETPs 00:27:47 Blackrock's Research Audience 00:29:26 2025 ETF Predictions 00:33:21 Blackrock's Effect on Options 00:36:06 Options Unlock Opportunities 00:40:28 "Price is Best Marketing" 00:42:42 Upgrading ETF Protocols 00:44:49 Blackrock’s Other ETFs Plan 00:54:11 New Administration Impact 00:58:11 Blackrock's 2025 Outlook 01:00:30 Digital Assets & ETF Teams 01:03:33 Samara's Next Guest 01:05:55 Samara on 2025 Excitement 01:09:02 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Samara Cohen https://www.linkedin.com/in/samara-epstein-cohen-9a661b76/ Black Rock Research Paper https://www.blackrock.com/institutions/en-us/strategies/diversified-strategies ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  One of the misperceptions on the crypto side is that Ether ETFs weren't as successful as the Bitcoin ETFs, where really by all accounts in the ETF world, the Ether ETFs had really successful launches. So how do we measure that? First and foremost, for us in the industry, a successful ETF is one that delivers what it's supposed to deliver.

• 0:30David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. I'm David Hoffmann, just me today, and I'm here to help you become more bankless. Extremely powerful episode today. It's not every day that you have a conversation with someone who oversees $6.6 trillion. Yes, that's trillion with a T. Samara Cohen is on the show today, and she is a badass. Samara is the Chief Investment Officer of ETX and Index Investments at BlackRock. That's basically all of BlackRock's iShares ETF funds, all their index products, which is quite a large domain, to say the least. Samara has an affinity for the modernization of markets, which is something that I think we share with her

• 1:15David Hoffman?

  on Bankless. Not only is she down in the BlackRock trenches, building ETFs, talking to clients, and producing market-based intelligence, but she can also see things from a zoomed-out view and can discuss the long arc of the interaction of technology and markets, which I think is truly helpful when we are currently in an age in which blockchain tech is actually starting to disrupt traditional markets. This is one of my favorite conversations I've had on Bankless in a long time. In addition to all the other things that I've already said about Samara, she's also just so easy to talk to. So I know you're going to enjoy this one, Bankless Nation, so let's go ahead and get right into the conversation with Samara Cohen from BlackRock. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. What if the future of Web3 gaming wasn't just a fantasy, but something you could explore

• 1:58David Hoffman?

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• 2:41David Hoffman?

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• 4:08David Hoffman?

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• 4:22David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, I am very excited to introduce you to Samara Cohen, the Chief Investment Officer of ETF and Index Investments. Samara leads the team that manages 6.6 trillion, 6.6 trillion with a T, of BlackRock's index funds and iShares ETFs. Samara, welcome to Bankless.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be here.

• 4:42David Hoffman?

  So, last time we spoke with BlackRock, we spoke with Robbie Michnik, who's the head of the Digital Assets Team at BlackRock in September of 2024. It's now January of 2025, and you are also not Robbie Michnik, you are Samara Cohen.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 4:56David Hoffman?

  Can you introduce yourself a little bit more for the audience? And illuminate a little bit of who you are and what you do at BlackRock, just so we know who we're talking to.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Sure. I listened to the podcast with Robbie, which was great. And I am a listener of the podcast myself, so very happy to be having the conversation with you directly. So, I am, as you said, the Chief Investment Officer of ETFs and Index at BlackRock. I'm responsible for the portfolio management of our index portfolios, our iShares ETFs, and making sure they trade in the market with the access, high quality that investors expect from iShares. I think of myself, though, just by way of background, as really a career markets modernizer. I've been in the ETF business for just 10 years now. But when BlackRock first reached out to me at the job I was before then,

• 5:48Speaker 00

  which was at a large investment bank, I didn't know what an ETF was. I had to Google, you know, what is an ETF? Which was actually relatively typical of a person who was growing up in the fixed income and derivatives division of a bank then. But my passion has always been making markets more resilient and more transparent and pretty much more useful for more people. So that's what brought me from that job to BlackRock and into the ETF business. I work really closely with Robbie Michnik, who's our Head of Digital Assets, and who has taught me a huge amount of what I know about crypto and the digital assets world. But really, ETFs are also, and have been in markets,

• 6:30Speaker 00

  a disruptive technology that incite many of the same goals.

• 6:35David Hoffman?

  What role does technology play in your job? You called yourself a markets modernizer. Maybe you could illuminate that modernizing word a little bit more. What does it mean? And what have you done to modernize markets? Is this like an evolution of technology? Is this novel financial products? How do markets become modernized? And how have you played a role in that?

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Sure. So I'll try not to get too nerdy and weedy with this answer. But I would argue that technology innovation is foundational to the modernization of markets and has been for literally millennia. I like talking about, you know, this past spring, I took my teen daughter to Paris, where she'd always wanted to go. And we went to the Louvre Museum. And the one thing I really wanted to see, because I knew it was there, was this relic from ancient Mesopotamia. It's considered a token, actually, a clay token. But it was how, you know, trade was conducted initially thousands of years ago.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  And it was a mechanism to exchange a, what was then a real world asset and kind of difficult to bring to the marketplace. And that, you know, clay token thousands of years ago was a technological breakthrough that contributed to the next phase of markets. So it was foundational then, and it's foundational now. Now, you know, as we said, ETFs and index are both in my title. Index strategies, which are the ability for an investor with not that much money to commit to actually diversify their portfolio by buying hundreds or thousands of line items. That wasn't possible, actually, until really about 30 to 40 years ago.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  And indexing as a portfolio strategy. Actually came of age with the first commercial microchip because it actually took more computing power than had been available before to take what had been really a mathematical concept and turn it into a trading reality. So that's like a few thousand years of history with technology is the through point.

• 8:45David Hoffman?

  Very interesting. Yeah, I think Great Bankless really appreciates seeing the long arc of technology as it relates to markets. So I think that's maybe something that we share. So understanding the context of once we had clay tokens representing real world assets and, you know, going through the evolution of markets to the world of ETFs as you've just illuminated. We are now kind of entering this world of modern markets integrating with blockchains or blockchains integrating with modern markets, bidirectional. So now you've entered in the world where there's now two very large ETFs. And I think this is just the beginning. Maybe you could place us in history now and the modern era where technology blockchain assets are now manifesting in the real world and in traditional markets. But then also it's like a foot in the door, right? So where does this go for here? Just place us in history as you see it, if you don't mind.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that question. You know, the Bitcoin ETFs in the US as a category, and I should actually say, because our regulators want us to say they are ETPs, not ETFs, exchange traded products. And definitions are important, have been around like for exactly a year, almost to the day of this conversation. And you're right, this has been, I think, a watershed moment in markets. And yet also the very beginning. So what's so important about the Bitcoin ETPs? In my view is that they really created a bridge between these two worlds, between the crypto world and the tradfi world.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  One of the things that I think surprised us to a degree this year was how useful that bridge was to people on both sides. We knew there were tradfi investors that if they were going to allocate to Bitcoin, wanted to do it in a familiar wrapper. But there were a lot of digital kind of native investors who also found that the ETP wrapper served their needs. And we actually have some pretty good data showing that there are investors who Bought their very first ETP in one of the Bitcoin ETPs and are now buying other ETPs. So hopefully it's helping both, you know, digital native as well as TradFi investors,

• 10:53Speaker 00

  build more diversified portfolios that are more customized to what they need. So that's why it was such an important moment and we really saw in all of the numbers and the flows this year, how embraced this bridge was. But, you know, again, to your point, it's a story of one cryptocurrency and it's a story frankly of TradFi rails being very important, bringing that cryptocurrency more into the investor dialogue. And so I think that's why it is still the very beginning, both as we see crypto rails and the crypto financial ecosystem develop more and also hopefully in my view, and I'm

• 11:32Speaker 00

  interested in hearing your view on this as well, develop in an integrated way with what already exists and works. Because I think there's always a lot of passion out there to completely disrupt and do things differently and sometimes that is the right direction. As a career markets modernizer, I think we, you know, find a lot of times that the best world is the one that creates bridges and looks to best practices from multiple places.

• 12:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think people who are deeply crypto natives and they believe in the cryptoization of everything, might resonate with something that I want to get your take on. I think this got incepted into my brain with one of the short stories from Andreas Antonopoulos. He called it something like technology inversion and he used the metaphor of dial-up internet, where the internet and data was squeezed through telephone lines into people's homes and that's what dial-up internet was. And now, later, we actually just got broadband. We just got cable internet and was much faster. And now, when you make a phone call with someone, the phone actually goes through on the internet along with everything else that's on the internet, you know, the YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and then also, you know, phones.

• 12:48David Hoffman?

  And so, things flipped, things inverted. I think the correlation here, the way to apply this to crypto is that right now we have analog versions of these like crypto assets. We have the Bitcoin ETF, the Ether ETF, but it's kind of the analog. It's trying to squeeze the internet through dial-up, where I think crypto natives are really looking for the inversion, where all of a sudden more of what BlackRock does, more of what the NASDAQ does, is actually on a blockchain. Or maybe there is a BlackRock chain one day. Maybe that's a little bit futuristic, but I'm wondering your take on that perspective.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  So I agree with you. That's the vision that crypto natives have. I think for me, the question is, is that the vision that serves markets and investors best at this moment in time? I'm not convinced that it is. You know, it's interesting. I think my, my lens on crypto is kind of hard to extract from my lens on being a parent. My daughter is 16 and she was born October 10th of 2008. And so she was born kind of, you know, 21 days before the white paper was published, and it was also during the great financial crisis. And while these things are obviously like not correlated, that moment in time was a big one for me in my career and determining

• 14:03Speaker 00

  kind of where I wanted to spend the rest of my career and really wanting to, if I was going to continue a career in markets, which is my passion and what I love doing, I wanted to be a part of increasing resilience, access and transparency in markets. I think though, that the vision of crypto, which has huge benefits from a transparency, auditability perspective, I think where I call into question that crypto native vision is around the degree of centralization that's ultimately most important. Because again, as a parent, like the more decentralized a world, the more you have

• 14:43Speaker 00

  to become the expert yourself. And I think that really the reason trade intermediaries have grown over, you know, decades, centuries, millennia, is because people want to focus on the things that they're experts in, and they are sometimes very willing to trust an intermediary. However, crypto can make that process of trust work better.

• 15:09David Hoffman?

  I'd like to zoom into the here and now. As you mentioned, the Bitcoin ETFs are almost one year old. The Ether ETF is about six months old. How should we evaluate the development and progress and success of these ETFs? How are they tracking versus expectations?

• 15:23Speaker 00

  So I feel like I am becoming increasingly bilingual in TradFi markets as well as crypto. I'm much more of like a

• 15:30David Hoffman?

  Speak crypto now?

• 15:31Speaker 00

  No, I'm more like a tourist crypto.

• 15:34David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  And you know, I have more fluency in TradFi markets, but it's interesting to me increasingly to see the misperceptions on both sides of that divide. And one of the misperceptions on the crypto side is that the Ether ETFs weren't as successful as the Bitcoin ETFs, where really by all accounts in the ETF world, the Ether ETFs had really successful launches. So how do we measure that? First and foremost, for us in the industry, a successful ETF is one that delivers what it's supposed to deliver. So it tracks the underlying index with absolute precision. It's one of the reasons that Bitcoin ETFs became important

• 16:16Speaker 00

  because what we were hearing from investors was that they didn't have many ways outside of actually holding Bitcoin, you know, in self custody or on exchange. They didn't have many ways to hold it in a kind of, you know, TradFi wrapper where they could view it alongside the rest of their portfolio in a way that tracked. They were buying a futures ETF, which as you probably know, for reasons around position limits, mistracked. They were buying proxy stocks. And so the tracking of the ETF, the precision of that is number one, how we measure success. Number two is market quality. And what we mean by that is it takes really an ecosystem of players to create trading volumes, liquidity,

• 17:00Speaker 00

  access on exchange. For us, it was the authorized participants who were agreeing to do create and redeem in the ETF. So making sure all of those things are in place. We call that market quality. Both the Bitcoin ETF and the Ether ETF have tracked. They've had high market quality, high participation. Now, the flows have been different. And this kind of gets me to, you know, misperception number two. And there's definitely misperceptions on both sides, but that's that creating an ETF drives flows. It doesn't. Investors and investor sentiment. Drives flows. And in 2024, for investors, the thesis around Bitcoin was much more tangible

• 17:45Speaker 00

  than the investment thesis around ETH. And that explains the disparity in flow. However,

• 17:53David Hoffman?

  Interesting.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  They've both been, I think that the Bitcoin ETF, as you probably know, really beat all ETF records in history. But the ETH ETF was still in the top 20% of ETF launches in the United States this year. So we feel the both is successful.

• 18:11David Hoffman?

  It's interesting to hear that you're saying that it's really the marketing, the narrative, the identity of the ETH ETF that can be the reason why investors buy versus don't buy. And I think this is definitely something we learned as an industry is like the Bitcoin story is just so easy to tell. It's very simple. 21 million limit. It's digital gold. That's it. And then the Ether story just doesn't have that same firepower, that same punch. We asked Robbie, I remember a similar question to this, but that was again back in September. And also since then, Ether ETF flows has picked up significantly in the last month or so. I'm wondering if there's any new conversations that you're hearing from clients. Just what's the gossip mill sound like in the terms of people who are buying the Bitcoin ETF or

• 18:55David Hoffman?

  the Ether ETF? Is there anything different than when we checked in four or five months ago?

• 18:59Speaker 00

  I don't think there's that much that's different. I will give my take on a couple of things that you just said. And actually, David, as a fun fact, I should tell you how I started listening to the podcast because I think I'd listened to it from time to time. And if you recall, the SEC really surprised the industry with its approval of ETH ETFs that happened in May. The industry was ready for it to happen and we kind of had the playbook from the Bitcoin ETPs, but that was a surprise. And if you remember, and you guys covered this very closely, that period of June through early July, we really weren't sure when trading would start. And so we were, you know, looking at everything, our portfolio readiness, trading,

• 19:40Speaker 00

  operational, as well as the education strategy around how we would position the ETFs when they came out. So I was, one weekend, a lot of my favorite content in crypto has actually been through podcasts versus a lot of the stuff that I normally read. And so I was just searching through podcasts and I saw this podcast called The Great ETH Pitch Off.

• 20:03David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  And I thought, well, this sounds like it could be useful.

• 20:07David Hoffman?

  Uh huh.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  And so I listened to that and um, and I actually thought it was really, I mean, you guys were funny, but also very thoughtful and educational.

• 20:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's what we go for.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, you get the combination of things. You've covered a lot of things really well, I think.

• 20:21David Hoffman?

  Thank you.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  But that's when I started listening to the podcast. But I will say this, I think your frustration then, which is a little bit of what you just said, was that it was just harder to explain, it was a tougher narrative. I actually think that's true, but I don't think that's the crux of the issue. Investors are smart and the, what we call self-directed or individual investors who are really driving the success right now of the Bitcoin ETP, range from, you know, really small investors to very sophisticated investors. It's a very broad space. And I think generally speaking, they understand the difference. They don't buy the investment thesis at this moment in time to the same

• 21:05Speaker 00

  degree. It's not as relevant as the Bitcoin thesis is in a moment of time where we have heightened geopolitical tension, concern over kind of broad-based disruptions, concern over the dollar, deficits. So all of these things play really well into the Bitcoin thesis. On top of which, what's really in investor psyche right now, I think, is that 2022 was a brutally hard year for TradFi investors because stocks and bonds went down together.

• 21:37David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  That was a historical, you know, event. And it really made people think about, how do I diversify my portfolio? You know, are there? Alts that can create some sort of ballast in a traditional kind of 6040 equity bond portfolio. And there's a really interesting analysis you can do around the Bitcoin plays in that scenario, where at the same time, particularly for the US investor who is in, whether it is through an active strategy or an index strategy, you know, likely pretty exposed to mega cap tech. I think often they feel that the ETH story is less of a diversifier and more of an amplifier to some of the exposures they have. So I think that

• 22:22Speaker 00

  both, you know, the industry as well as investors are on that educational journey, and it's not that they don't get it. I think that Bitcoin has just been more relevant at the portfolio conversation right now.

• 22:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's always just maybe narrative market fit, asset market fit for the times that we are inside of. And I think there is just a lot of like geopolitical relevancy over the last few years. And maybe Bitcoin is simply just a stronger player in that sort of environment. I'm wondering, does BlackRock provide any recommendations in terms of allocation for investors interested in holding exposure to Bitcoin, the Bitcoin ETP, or the Ether ETP? Is that something that you guys do? And if so, what are those recommendations?

• 23:03Speaker 00

  So we're not an investment advisor. We don't provide investment advice, but we do put out investment research, and it's generally rooted in risk and how we look at portfolio risk. And we do that across asset classes, countries, strategies. And we have started writing about Bitcoin. We haven't yet written about ETH in the portfolio context, because most of this year, I mean, again, ETH is, you know, six months old versus Bitcoin, a year old. So initially with Bitcoin, it was really educating around Bitcoin, the asset class, and also importantly, for the digital native investors who understand Bitcoin, educating around ETPs and the ETP wrapper. And we're still on that journey with

• 23:44Speaker 00

  ETH. Over the last few months, though, we did write twice, and we'll continue to do so on Bitcoin and the portfolio. So we wrote about Bitcoin as a diversifier. And the reasons we think it's interesting or, you know, relevant for investors who are thinking about an allocation to Bitcoin, to think about the potential diversification aspects of Bitcoin versus, you know, equities and bonds and in the traditional 6040 portfolio. Then we actually took it a step further and I think probably about a month ago, we wrote a piece that I think is really interesting on portfolio interactions of Bitcoin. And that's the first place we talked about potentially sizing an allocation.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  And this, of course, is for an investor who has determined, I am, you know, interested in participating in Bitcoin because there's lots of investors, particularly on the institutional side, who aren't there yet. But for investors who want to incorporate Bitcoin in their portfolios, how do you think about it in the context of a diversified portfolio? And we thought an interesting framing, given that so many investors are already in some way exposed to the, you know, Mag7 stocks. We looked at portfolio risk contribution of different levels of Bitcoin allocation and how that would compare to a Mag7 stock. And that's not to say that Bitcoin is at all, like any of those stocks, is different.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  But taking a risk-centered approach to how to think about a Bitcoin allocation and its contribution to overall portfolio risk, we thought was something that investors would really understand. And that came out of a lot of the conversations that we have with our clients. And where we came out in that piece was that a 1% to 2% allocation to Bitcoin got you to the same level of risk contribution as a Mag7 stock. And going above 2% would exponentially increase the risk contribution. So if you were to go above 2%, you were really making a very strong view on Bitcoin,

• 25:53Speaker 00

  specifically versus trying to keep it in the bounds of this diversified portfolio.

• 25:58David Hoffman?

  Now, who are the people that are consuming this information? Who is, this is, I'm sure, very robust analysis. Who's the intended audience for who is supposed to hear that information?

• 26:09Speaker 00

  So we talked to, uh...

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Investors across the spectrum, largely the investors that we talk to directly are advisors who have their own clients. And we also talk to institutions. And then we do make a lot of information available on our website for individual investors. The Diversifier piece is out on our website for everybody. The portfolio allocation may be for advisors and institutions, but we really write for all of those audiences.

• 26:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I guess since you have $6.6 trillion in ETFs and index products, maybe the answer to who is reading this is some chunk of whoever is operating that $6.6 trillion of ETFs and index products.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  Well, but remember this, the $6.6 trillion doesn't have any crypto in it all. That's all of our equity ETFs, our fixed income ETFs. The only crypto that we hold, because you would know this, one of the things about the index and ETF portfolios is they are completely transparent. We publish holdings on a daily basis. So the only crypto in those portfolios right now is actually in the two crypto ETPs, Bitcoin and ETH.

• 27:23David Hoffman?

  I would like to get your opinion on what we want to see out of the ETFs in 2025. If there was like a rubric of sorts with things that you wanted to see the Bitcoin ETP and the ETH ETP check off as achievements in 2025 of this year, what might be on that list? What's some things that you feel like are pretty safe that we're going to get? What are some things that are maybe a little bit harder that you're optimistic for? And then maybe what are some potential stretch goals?

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Well, so first of all, I think that this work being done around Bitcoin and the portfolio construct is really important. And I hope we see more of that in 2025. I hope that conversation becomes less about Bitcoin or not Bitcoin and more about How is Bitcoin manifesting in the portfolio? Where is it useful? Where is it not useful? And look, the experience of the next few months and the next year is going to be very instructive in terms of where that goes. It's important to remember that relative to lots of other asset classes, Bitcoin still has a pretty limited history. There's lots of investors who say, hey, conceptually, this makes sense, but it's really hard for me to do the type of backtesting and analytics

• 28:30Speaker 00

  that I'd want to do with kind of, call it, 10 meaningful years of trading data. So the more market cycles we weather, the more data that comes available, the easier it is to integrate Bitcoin into the broader conversation around risk and asset return. So that's number one. Number two, which is a little bit more specific, is I think the launch of options on the Bitcoin ETPs was a really important moment in November. Generally speaking, options ecosystems are really good for markets. They tend to create more balanced trading dynamics. You will have buyers on the way down, sellers on the way up.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  And so seeing how that plays out is going to be really important. On the other hand, and I was having this conversation with someone yesterday, actually, with Bob Pisani on CNBC, innovation and complexity go hand in hand. And there are lots of people who are really excited about launching and pitching options-based strategies, and some of those will be really useful for investors. And some of them may be really hard to understand. And so I think the more options are incorporated into product strategies around Bitcoin, the more important it is that we really put out good, clear education on what investors are buying. But generally speaking, options help investors.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  Go in multiple directions. It helps them kind of tailor their exposures, participate with limited downside, you know, achieve income. And so I think the development and the use of options ecosystems is going to be interesting. You know, we've even seen interesting dynamics in in the last few weeks where as you expect, when options were launched, there was so much more demand for calls versus puts, so upside protection versus downside protection. That started flipping a little bit, and that's going to give us a lot of information and transparency around investor sentiment. And that level of transparency actually is really accretive to healthy markets. So when I think about the hallmarks of a more mature, resilient

• 30:43Speaker 00

  market, the development of this options ecosystem in ETPs, I think will be helpful both for the underlying crypto assets and also probably for their digital native derivative markets, which don't have as much transparency as they will need to really achieve more uptake among investors.

• 31:03David Hoffman?

  I'm going to quote friend of the podcast Alex Thorne here. BlackRock IBIT options are absolutely dominating. The volume on IBIT is dominating versus the vanilla ETFs. Also ETH A, the BlackRock Ether ETP, has also recently started to take the lead on volume on the Ethereum side. And the question is, what has BlackRock done to foster that growth? Or was that all just emergent and just part of the product of maybe the elections or just the times that we are in? Is there anything from the top downside of things that BlackRock did to help promote volumes on the options and the Ether A product?

• 31:37Speaker 00

  Well, remember, we're not options market makers, we're not option traders, but we do invest a lot of time and attention in the options ecosystem. Because again, going back to how do we measure a successful ETF, high levels of market quality. And in our experience, ETPs that have developed options ecosystems around them have higher market quality than those that don't. So we think investing in Options ecosystems is an important use of, you know, time and resources. We spent a lot of time with NASDAQ on it, of course, and I bet options actually ended up launching the day before the rest of the suites, I think, because we are just, you

• 32:19Speaker 00

  know, very focused on options and making them available when we think there's investor demand for them, and there clearly was in this case. But what's differentiating about the iShares platform is that, I mean, you gave some of the headline numbers, but that's actually not the most exciting part of it. I think what's exciting about the platform is that we cover virtually all asset classes, all countries, and so we have very deep ties into the trading ecosystem and are able to work very closely across the trading ecosystem to understand what do market makers need in order to commit their own capital and technology to making markets and participating?

• 33:03Speaker 00

  And there's a lot of things around Bitcoin that are very attractive to market makers. It's a high volatility asset. The volatility of volatility is high, and it also has this, like what we think of as positive skewiness, the, you know, volatility historically generally has gone up when prices go up, right? Which also makes it attractive. So we spend a lot of time on those dynamics and we engage a lot in the options ecosystem.

• 33:29David Hoffman?

  Cello is transitioning from a mobile-first, EVM-compatible, Layer 1 blockchain to a high-performance Ethereum Layer 2, built on OP stack with EigenDA and one-block finality, all happening soon with a hard fork. With over 600 million total transactions, 12 million weekly transactions, and 750,000 daily active users, Cello's meteoric rise would place it among one of the top Layer 2s, built for the real world and optimized for fast, low-cost global payments. As the home of the stablecoins, Cello hosts 13 native stablecoins across seven different currencies, including native USDT on Opera MiniPay, and with over 4 million users in Africa alone. In November, stablecoin volumes hit $6.8 billion, made for seamless on-chain FX trading. Plus, users can pay gas with ERC20 tokens like USDT and USDC and send crypto to phone

• 34:13David Hoffman?

  Numbers in seconds, but why should you care about Cello's transition to a layer two? Layer two's unify Ethereum, L1's fragmented. By becoming a layer two, Cello leads the way for other EVM compatible layer ones to follow. Follow Cello on X and witness the great Cello happening where Cello cuts its inflation in half as it enters its layer two era and continuing its environmental leadership. The Arbitrum Portal is your one stop hub to entering the Ethereum ecosystem. With over 800 apps, Arbitrum offers something for everyone. Dive into the epicenter of DeFi where advanced trading, lending and staking platforms are redefining how we interact with money. Explore Arbitrum's rapidly growing gaming hub from immersed role playing games, fast paced fantasy MMOs to casual luck battle mobile games.

• 34:56David Hoffman?

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• 35:28David Hoffman?

  You talked about how options and volume just really make for a very high quality product, a high quality market. I would imagine that the existence of options also is just legitimizing for Bitcoin. It's something that fits into the traditional finance mental model for what finance looks like. What is that unlocking? Is that unlocking further institutions to deploy more capital? Is it, what does the legitimacy and the market quality unlock for the Bitcoin ETFs and the Ether ETFs as they achieve them?

• 35:55Speaker 00

  I think I'd replace the word legitimacy with transparency and access. So options provide a new level of transparency and access. And I would say it's been interesting to me on my own crypto journey because theoretically there is so much transparency in crypto. But actually, if you are a trader or an investor, there are so many different sources of price information. Transparency is harder to procure in crypto. Markets in some ways than you would expect it to. And so bringing volatility instruments on to exchanges and listed exchanges. So investors can kind of standardize and source and commit capital to prices,

• 36:39Speaker 00

  which allows us to really see where volatility is and where it's trading. That level of transparency and access is a game changer for markets and wasn't there to the extent I might have thought it would be, you know, a few years ago in crypto. So I think that's kind of point number one. And point number two is absolutely, we often see that investors who want exposure to an asset class, but for whatever set of reasons, aren't ready to commit in, you know, fully to the underlying, they will come to the asset class via the options market. We've actually seen that historically.

• 37:21Speaker 00

  I told you, there's a lot of parallels between exchange traded funds and options. Exchange traded funds have grown explosively over the past 20 years. And a lot of institutional investors came to exchange traded funds initially through options on exchange traded funds. They thought it would be like they appreciated the idea of the exposure, but they wanted to have more of a limited capital outlay and limited downside to start. And they came to the, you know, underlying wrapper via the options market. So that's an important dimension, too.

• 37:54David Hoffman?

  There's a famous quip in Bitcoin land that the price of Bitcoin is its marketing department. Price is the best marketing for Bitcoin. And I'm wondering if you just have any anecdotes you can share about what it was like since the Bitcoin ETFs were launched, when Bitcoin crossed $100,000, a historic milestone. What was that like on the inside of BlackRock? Was there any communications with clients or fund advisors or anything like that? Any anecdote you can share that's related to the idea that price is the best marketing for Bitcoin?

• 38:23Speaker 00

  I think education is the best marketing for Bitcoin. I think education and work around risk and how to harness risk in a diversifying way and look at portfolio interactions. From my perspective and how we talk to investors, that's actually the best marketing for Bitcoin. Actually, I think it's important that investors are reminded, despite the highs that Bitcoin was reaching into the end of the year, that although price volatility in Bitcoin has dropped meaningfully in the last few years, it still is, by any measure, a risky volatile asset versus pretty much anything else that investors have in their portfolios.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  And that's actually part of what creates relevance for it right now. If it didn't have those volatility characteristics, it might not have the same investment thesis as a diversifier that it has. But actually, keeping in front of investors, and particularly long-term investors, which is largely who we are talking to, those facts has actually been a lot more significant than the price action of Bitcoin. And actually, this gets me back to this point around misperceptions. I do think in the crypto world, there was this view that success in the ETF was that the price of the underlying went higher. And that is absolutely not how we would ever measure success of an ETP.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  It's does it effectively provide access, have market quality, and play a role in an investor's portfolio?

• 39:58David Hoffman?

  I was wondering, potentially in the Ethereum land, there's future upgrades to the Ethereum blockchain that may or may not impact the fundamentals of Ether or just the blockchain at large. But then that's also true for Bitcoin as well. Does BlackRock have any view about future upgrades to the protocols of which it has ETFs for? Would BlackRock ever take a stance on upgrade proposals out of these blockchain systems?

• 40:20Speaker 00

  So first, I would say BlackRock is about 20,000 people. So BlackRock is never going to have a kind of monolithic view. The best person to talk to about that, of course, would be Robbie Michnik. And Robbie will certainly have views. And I think with respect to How we engage in the industry, there are many times that we do go out and, you know, speak to our views, although generally speaking, if I look at other, you know, trading environments, trading ecosystems, our views will be kind of rooted in the principles of what makes an ecosystem the most useful for us and our clients. Because we generally

• 40:59Speaker 00

  favor just open architecture and interoperability, which at its core, operating at our scale, is something we need everywhere we transact. Generally speaking, having to operate in a closed ecosystem can be very limiting for us. It's one of the reasons, from a tokenization perspective, one of the pivots we did make pretty publicly over the last couple of years, was leaning much more towards public versus permissioned blockchains. So I think in terms of stances you'll hear from us, it would be more along those lines versus one kind of, you know, crypto platform versus another. But scalability and the aspects of scalability,

• 41:43Speaker 00

  and particularly the prerequisites for our counterparties to participate, is something I would expect us to be vocal about.

• 41:53David Hoffman?

  One thing that I think the entire crypto industry is hopeful for is that we are not at all close to being done with the increased ETF-ization, the indexization of some of our crypto assets. You know, we have our number one and number two, Bitcoin and Ether. But I think we're hopeful by the end of hopefully 2025, we at least have signs of number three and number four and maybe number five. And then hopefully in, you know, five to 10 years, there's more than we can really count. Does BlackRock have any other plans for other digital asset ETFs? Or what would it look like to start to see some plans starting to come together?

• 42:30Speaker 00

  So I guess I actually have a question for you, if you want to share your thoughts on this. But it's, why do you think that is so?

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Important and of such focus if you know, because I sometimes again worry that going back to misperception, number one, that you launch an ETF and the price of something goes up. That's a misperception.

• 42:50David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  And I wonder whether some of that misperception is driving the excitement over kind of multiple coin ETFs. We root our decisions based in like investment thesis in the portfolio. But what do you think is driving that?

• 43:05David Hoffman?

  Oh, I think it is absolutely exactly what you identified.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:08David Hoffman?

  I think if you are a community member of a respective blockchain ecosystem and it does not yet have an ETF, you see the ETF as a catalyst for a price appreciation of your respective crypto asset. And to be fair, that is what happened with Bitcoin. Maybe it's not exactly what happened with Ether. Maybe Ether didn't really exactly have a very strong price appreciation post the launch of the ETF, but Bitcoin certainly did. And that is what the narrative has become in the world of crypto. And the narrative, I think, is because the ETFs unlock access to investors in a particular asset that did not exist prior. There's also some amount of legitimization. So if something is got an ETF, it's legitimized by TradFi.

• 43:51David Hoffman?

  It's opened up to potentially pools of capital that it didn't have prior. And also there is a regulatory de-risking as well. Maybe this is less relevant for the incoming administration, but for the previous administration, an ETF is kind of considered as a shield of armor against Gary Gensler and the SEC. And so I think some combinations of those reasons, everyone in the crypto industry wants an ETF for the respective asset that they hold.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, interesting. I think that there's a lot to unpack there. Categorically, launching an ETF does not magically create

• 44:26David Hoffman?

  New buyers.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  Price appreciation. And by the way, this is a conversation I have had for the past 10 years. Wherever I go in the world, I might be in a country that has, you know, a relatively less developed stock market and, you know, the CEO of the exchange there will come and say to me, hey, can you guys come and launch ETFs here? Because the idea that they have is you launch ETFs and magically it creates liquidity and demand for the underlying and it really works in the reverse way. So I think what's important is really to parse out what will the investment thesis be? For each of these native tokens of these different blockchains, how do you measure it? How do you describe cash flows to it?

• 45:10Speaker 00

  And how do you look at risk? What's unique about Bitcoin is not that it is the oldest is funny. It's a year old, but oldest, you know, US listed ETP. It's that it actually has a very unique investment thesis, where the kind of future price is entirely a function of the level of adoption, given the scarcity, finite supply and Bitcoin. You know, and this is the part, yes, it's easier to understand because Bitcoin is generally only trying to be one thing. This, you know, borderless store of value. However, despite the more complex investment theses of these other tokens, you still need a way to ascribe cash flows and to look at them, you know,

• 45:55Speaker 00

  one to the other. And that's the story that has to be told. And, you know, from my perspective, I think most successful ETP launches will follow that. But to your point, there's, you know, lots of excitement. And I think the regulatory path may become much clearer to launch an ETP on any token that you want. But, you know, without speaking for other issuers, the way, you know, we approach it is really like reading the work. And what we hear from our clients has a role in their portfolio right now.

• 46:24David Hoffman?

  Me and Ryan, we do the weekly roll up every Friday and we look at the inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs and the inflows into the Ether ETFs.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  I know.

• 46:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, BlackRock is usually like the number one there inflow on a weekly basis. And just looking at it right now, Bitcoin has 35, almost $36 billion of net inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs. And I think when people in the crypto industry hear that, they are thinking, well, that is $36 billion of buying pressure. Now, granted, there could have been maybe a majority percentage of that inflows that was sold by actual physical Bitcoins, sold by crypto investors, and then rebought in the ETF package, just for whatever reason, tax advantages, convenience advantages. And so maybe only a minority. Of that inflow pressure is actually true net buying, but nonetheless,

• 47:15David Hoffman?

  people think that some percentage of this inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs is true buying pressure that did impact the price of Bitcoin in a positive direction. Is that wrong? Is that naive? How should we think about this?

• 47:27Speaker 00

  I don't think it's wrong. I just think that there's Bitcoin buying in all wrappers. And you see that in the ETP flows. Now, one of the things that we really like to look at, we call it the secondary primary ratio, is that imbalance of demand in those net inflows, like when people actually, because of course, a market maker doesn't have to create new shares of the ETF, and it's when they create new shares of the ETF, they deliver coin to the ETF, and you actually see the inflows. There is nine times as much trading that is actually happening between buyers and sellers of the ETP, such that no coin gets exchanged at all.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  That's a really interesting statistic, I think, in terms of looking at market sentiment, is how much like incremental exchange is happening outside of actual inflows. But yes, categorically, inflows show an imbalance of, you know, buying versus selling, and some of that is net new buying, but there's net buying happening across other wrappers as well. I don't think it's a function of the existence of the ETP. Yet, I think that there are institutions that may do their first sizable Bitcoin allocations via the ETP wrapper, where they haven't had any allocations so far. That has not largely been the story, though, of 2024.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  And that gets back to, this was a big year, but it really is the beginning. That conversation around institutional adoption.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  And also a wealth advisor adoption. That's going to be the important story of 25 and beyond.

• 49:11David Hoffman?

  Beautiful. I do actually want to get back to the original question of does BlackRock have any plans for other digital asset ETPs? And what can you share with us on that front?

• 49:20Speaker 00

  We're pretty public about it, and I do get a lot of commentary on crypto Twitter, which we should talk about for a second because I think crypto Twitter can be unproductively mean.

• 49:30David Hoffman?

  Oh, I'm aware.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, our plans right now are around Bitcoin and ETH. That's where we hear from our clients. There is the, you know, portfolio level interest, you know, with respect to where our focus is right now. And we have focuses, obviously, in digital assets beyond the ETP. We're very focused on tokenization and tokenization of treasury funds. We're, you know, very interested in kind of the future path around stable coins. And our, when we think about our digital asset strategy, it's kind of those pillars of crypto, stable coins and tokenization. So for us, there is a world beyond new coins in an ETP.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  But with respect to our near term strategy, our focus is really Bitcoin and ETH.

• 50:17David Hoffman?

  Understood, understood. I want to get into a little subject about regulation, but maybe first, before we get there, we are about to have a new administration, one that has positioned itself to be more free markets, more pro markets. Gary Gensler will be resigning in six days. Maybe that's more relevant to us crypto natives than it is to BlackRock, but we are very excited about it on the crypto side of things. Has this incoming new administration changed any strategy or impacted anything at all as it relates to BlackRock's involvement in the crypto industry?

• 50:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, I think first of all, nobody's in place yet, to your point.

• 50:49David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  We are a few days away from inauguration. And to be super clear, the SEC impacts absolutely everybody in financial markets, certainly in the US, and I would argue as well around the world. So we care deeply and we engage very closely with the SEC. I think taking a pretty big step back from kind of the current administration, US markets have generally done a better job at supporting innovation and supporting investors at the same time than anywhere else in the world. And that's why US markets kind of have the prominence that they do today. It is that combination of support for innovation and

• 51:31Speaker 00

  Appropriate investor protections that I think are really the hallmark of what we do really well. So I'm pretty excited and optimistic that that is the direction we will return to. There's been, you know, less transparency and that's played out pretty publicly, certainly around the crypto ETPs, but in other ways as well. Now, recall a lot of what impacted this SEC, some of the stock market volatility and dislocations that characterized 2020, 2021, like one of the big themes in global markets right now is this heightened participation

• 52:13Speaker 00

  by individual investors. So like you or me, trading through an online brokerage account. And there was a huge spike in that in the US at the beginning of 2020 because a lot of trading platforms started offering commission-free trading. People were at home over COVID and getting more comfortable with technology. And then a lot of people got stimulus checks. And so those three things combined created a lot of like individual traders in the markets. And importantly, a lot of those traders actually kind of stayed in the markets and became index and ETP investors. But markets have changed and are changing in the US and around the world because of the participation of retail. And, and that has just created

• 52:56Speaker 00

  a wave of regulatory focus that has really dominated the last few years. But I think, to your point, yes, I think that it is exciting to be looking ahead to a more innovation supportive environment. But I will say, I really hope, and I think that you and Ryan have done a really nice job of covering in a balanced way, the impact, just positive and negative of regulation. A lack of regulation, a lack of guardrails can really undermine investor confidence. And maintaining and growing investor confidence is one of the single most important things for this market to meet its potential.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  So my hope, you know, and my engagement, and I hope, you know, yours as well, is going to really be around how do you strike the balance between those two things?

• 53:48David Hoffman?

  Is there anything that BlackRock is anticipating for, for regulation in 2025? There's a potential set of bills out there, stablecoin bill. Anything that BlackRock is hopeful for or anticipating in 2025?

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we're hopeful that a lot of the basics get established. So things like definitions, things like jurisdiction, like who's the regulator, who's responsible? There's a lot of work that has to be done to simply figure out like who's going to engage, who can you ask questions to, who do you work with? Because to get this right is really going to require collaboration by the public and private sector, which is why I think it's generally a positive sign that there's a number of private sector experts that are signaling the fact that they are going to be engaged in positions of influence. That's going to be really important. That's always important in terms of areas of new technologies.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  So number one, the basics like jurisdiction, who's responsible, definitions, you know, what's a security? And in terms of the existing bills, whether it's Fit 21, which I think is, you know, an important step forward that probably could be a little better integrated with some of, you know, what exists in TradFi. I think what happened in the last couple of years is what you see in some of the bills is a footprint of a lot of crypto engagement and in some cases, the development of a separate crypto ecosystem, which I'm not sure in the long term that that's the best outcome because

• 55:19Speaker 00

  you want existing players to be able to invest and not face a whole duplicative set of regulations. So ideally you have something that works for people that are new and something that works for people that like aren't new but want to participate in this space. But I think Fit 21 goes in that direction as does the stablecoin bill. And I think outside of those bills, my hope And I think my expectation as well is that there will be more work around interoperability so that more TradFi market experts can play a bigger role in the future.

• 55:55David Hoffman?

  Now specifically about the way that BlackRock is built, there are two teams at BlackRock that I know of that touch digital assets, the digital assets team, and then also the ETFs team, which you run. How do these two teams engage with each other? What does it look like when these two teams are talking with each other?

• 56:10Speaker 00

  I actually think it's cooler than that. So we have a digital assets team, and I think one of the most important things we did as a firm in terms of progressing our digital asset strategy was putting in place the team, you know, with Robbie's leadership. But what Robbie did is he really made digital assets the work of everybody at the firm. So years ago, I mean, we were spending hours together. Robbie, you know, to his credit is an incredibly patient, resilient, and thoughtful person, but he spent a lot of time educating the businesses and giving all businesses, so ETFs, index, trading, cash, securities lending, derivatives, giving all the businesses the opportunity to consider

• 56:53Speaker 00

  what are your use cases, you know, helping us, bringing in, you know, kind of being a digital asset consultant so that every business could consider what the applications were to them. And what we found in our business, you know, when I started working with him years ago, was we had this initial excitement, and this was very typical in TradFi, Lego, Bitcoin, let's put that to the side. It's like this blockchain technology that's really going to be the game changer. We came up with all of these use cases. We piloted some things. Nine times out of 10, we realized, okay, we need a better technology solution, but blockchain isn't necessarily the answer. But that was actually the, you know, impetus for some of our bigger technology upgrades was doing that work where we knew there was a friction.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  And we had to fix it. But then eventually, you know, both of those things really became clear where there were more industrialized use cases. But I guess that's a long-winded answer to your question. These aren't teams that sit in distinct verticals. We have a digital assets team that kind of cuts across as a horizontal that lets us really consider in a much broader way what our potential use cases and opportunities are.

• 58:06David Hoffman?

  So I guess it's really just a matter of Robbie innovating with all the other parts of BlackRock and really convincing them that crypto for that particular part of the organization is the right tool for the job if and when the moment comes that crypto is truly the right tool for the job. Is that a way to interpret things?

• 58:23Speaker 00

  I think that's right. And it also means, you know, you have to have somebody who has skin in the game and is accountable for their actual business results to commit and then to partner with the digital assets team. And that's worked pretty well.

• 58:34David Hoffman?

  Well, Robbie, we're rooting for you. Samara, I think I can also speak for Ryan, who's not here at the moment, obviously, that we were both very honored that you listened to the podcast on such a frequent basis. Who would you like to hear as a guest on the podcast? Who would really nerds snipe you as a very fascinating guest that you'd like to hear from?

• 58:50Speaker 00

  Well, I'm incredibly interested in some of the new policy voices that come out, particularly over the next couple of months. I think I told you, one of my favorite episodes was when you had Austin Campbell on. I actually reached out to him after the podcast and just met up with him and talked to him. He, like me, has a derivatives tradify background. So I knew we had a lot in common. And he wants to like create a better financial system. And so I think people like that who, oh, I have another misperception for you, David. Sometimes when you do these episodes, like the ETH pitch off or Austin Campbell, you

• 59:28Speaker 00

  guys preface it with, okay, bankless citizen, this episode is not for you. It is for your like grandparents who were trying to educate around this. And I would say like, we're not all that old.

• 59:46Speaker 00

  There have been a few times I'm like, really, really like, I'm not your like, parent maybe, but like grandparent, that's a little bit of a stretch. I actually think that there are a lot of people in positions like mine who care deeply about like the legacy they're leaving in markets. And again, I'm a parent of two teen kids. There's nothing that's more important to me than what their financial futures are going to be and how they engage with the financial system and how we create resilience and access and transparency for them. So I do think that my hope for you, I know you guys get super excited when you talk about like blocks and blobs and you know, this-

• 1:00:25David Hoffman?

  We do like the blobs.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  I know you like the blobs. And I know it's a thing that scales ETH, but like, that's kind of the extent for me. But I think thinking about how you can talk to that broader audience with people like the Austin Campbells of the world would be really impactful.

• 1:00:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. Austin Campbell was a great guest, as you have also been a great guest. And sometimes it's actually really the guest that really helps us get the message out. And I think that's something that we've done here today on the podcast. One last question for you, Smar, before I let you go, just open ended. What are you excited about? What are you excited about for 2025? What are you looking forward to either professionally or personally in the world of markets? I know you really like markets. So what keeps you going? What gets you excited for 2025?

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  This is going to sound corny, but I'm going to go with it. What gets me excited is hope and optimism. And I have a lot of that right now. I think that 2423 was a tough year. I think you and I saw each other at-

• 1:01:19David Hoffman?

  Permissionless?

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, at Permissionless, where you actually like, had a fight with someone, right?

• 1:01:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I fought a guy, yeah.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. So, so like, you guys are like, there is some branding there, but I, I get it. But, but I guess we'll say-

• 1:01:36David Hoffman?

  To be clear, it was a karate combat orchestrated fight between two consenting adults who agreed to do this inside of a professional environment.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  Fair enough.

• 1:01:45David Hoffman?

  Not just a random fight.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  I get that, but a lot of the promotional material was like, I felt like around this fight. And I just bring that up because there was a lot of anger. At the system like more than I had expected. And that was very, there were a couple of things that were eye opening for me at that conference. That was one of them. Crypto and digital assets.

• 1:02:06David Hoffman?

  Anger at the system. What do you mean by that?

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  I think anger at the state of the regulatory environment. Like anger at the idea that it was just like it was a moving target to know what you could do and couldn't do and how do you invest your capital? And I think that's, you know, that's a bad environment for innovation and for growth. But the degree of just kind of the atmospherics around it was a bit diverting from the mission and the goals. So my hope is now we can really focus on the mission and the goals, which is, I believe, to create a more transparent and accessible financial system for, and obviously crypto is way beyond finance. I just live in the financial realm of it.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  So that's really my hope for 2025. And I think that we are on our way towards doing that.

• 1:02:57David Hoffman?

  Well, I hope that there are some things that are lining up in the crypto industry and outside of the crypto industry that really can foster that. Some people are calling for a golden age in crypto innovation. We finally have very abundant, very cheap block space. Developing has never been easier. And now regulatorily wise, we have pretty clear skies. And so hopefully we can put that optimism to some use and kind of get back to exactly what we were saying, which is mission driven to espouse what is so good about blockchain and crypto and bring this industry into its golden era. So Tamara, thank you so much for joining me on the Bankless Podcast today. We really are very honored to have had you.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  Thanks a lot for having me. This was fun.

• 1:03:36David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.