At the Money: The Tech Behind a Crypto Future (January 8, 2025)
Are you curious about the technology that underlies crypto? Are you interested in what direction this techn ology might move?
Full transcript below.
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About this week’s guest: Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise Asset Management discusses the best ways to responsibly manage crypto assets. His firm runs over $10 billion in client crypto assets.
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TRANSCRIPT: Matt Hougan on Crypto Tech
What’s going on with the technology underlying cryptocurrencies? What is Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and what are their future? I’m Barry Ritholtz. And on today’s edition of At The Money, we’re going to discuss all sorts of cryptocurrencies.
To help us unpack this and what it means for your portfolio, let’s bring in Matt Hougan.
He’s the chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management. The firm runs over 10 billion in crypto assets.
So Matt, let’s start with a really basic question. What is Bitcoin? What is Ethereum? And what use cases do these coins have?
Matt Hougan: Oh, amazing. Well, it’s great to be here. You know, Bitcoin is a crypto asset. The way I think of it is the first way that investors can store wealth in a digital format without relying on any government or any bank.
It’s built on a major technical innovation called the blockchain, which took 40 years to develop, trying to figure out how to make this possible. Bitcoin broke through that in 2008, 2009, and it’s been gaining steady adoption. Ethereum is something more complex than Bitcoin. If you think of Bitcoin as digital money, you can think of Ethereum as making money and, and compute programmable in a public setting, and you can build applications on that. You can build smart contracts, you can build stable coins, you can build other applications. I think it’s a very exciting technology, but you can think of Bitcoin as digital money, Ethereum as sort of public compute and programmable money, and you’d be pretty close to reality. So you mentioned smart contracts.
Barry Ritholtz: I’m kind of fascinated by that when, when we were talking about this a few years ago, the idea for smart contracts for concert tickets had come up where, Hey, Taylor Swift is unhappy that in the U S scalpers are buying up their tickets, keeping them away from the fans and selling them for $5,000. If we were to put Taylor Swift contracts on Ethereum, she could sell her tickets at $50 And whoever buys them, if they want to resell it at a higher price, she says, great this contract says I get half of that. And so the idea is to encourage it going to fans and making it less profitable for scalpers. But even if they do scalp it, well, then the artists themselves get it.
How realistic are our applications like that? And when might we see something along those lines?
Matt Hougan: I love it. It’s all going to happen. Barry. I think they’re all realistic. Crypto enables frictionless, programmable money. So what you’re raising there as an example of allowing money to be programmable, it’s not just concert tickets. You could say the same thing about art.
Artists are always upset that they sell their art and then a hundred Xs in price and they don’t benefit from that directly. So this idea of, of attaching revenue streams downstream from it, is something that you can do easily in the blockchain setting. The natural question is why hasn’t it happened, right? If we were talking about this two years ago and it’s such a great idea, why hasn’t it happened?
And there are two reasons for that. One is that crypto has had a regulatory cloud hanging over it. The SEC has been launching lawsuits against crypto. There was concerns in Congress, a senator was building an anti-crypto army. If you’re a mainstream corporation, are you going to build a new business in an area where a senator is building an army to crush you? You’re not.
So we didn’t see any of that.
The second is that blockchains were slow and costly, until about a year ago, sort of, we’ve gone through in blockchains. What we went through going from dial up to broadband internet. Now we have highly performant, low cost blockchains that can perform a lot of transactions. And we have a positive regulatory environment.
I think you’re going to see a flowering of a million use cases over the next two or three years in crypto. They’re going to blow people’s minds. I think they’re going to go mainstream. You’re going to be using crypto apps without even knowing it. And I think people haven’t woken up to that reality yet.
Barry Ritholtz: You’re really suggesting where like 1993 and the internet is that, is that a good frame of reference?
Matt Hougan: That is exactly right. And you’re seeing these crypto apps pop up and break through people’s consciousness. A good example was Polymarket during the election. (Oh, sure). Everyone was looking at PolyMarket for the prediction odds on who would win the presidential election. It was it was in the Bloomberg terminal, right? The data from it.
That was a crypto app. It could only be built on crypto. Crypto enabled it to happen, and yet no one was talking about that.
So yeah, it’s 1994, 1996, and the internet. We’re starting to see a few examples. Yahoo’s jumping up. You know, email is jumping up. Hotmail is happening, but it hasn’t gone mainstream yet. It’s about to.
Barry Ritholtz: It sounds like there are a lot of new use cases for things like Ethereum. Give us some other examples because you’re obviously much more knowledgeable about this.
Matt Hougan: Stablecoins are one of the great killer apps to develop in crypto. A stablecoin is a money market fund, but on a blockchain. Right? It’s a way to access dollars on a blockchain. So why is that a killer app? There are two reasons. One, it puts a U. S. bank account at the fingertips of anyone with a cell phone anywhere around the world.
And if you’re in Argentina or you’re in Turkey and you can’t easily access a U. S. dollar bank account, but your currency has high inflation, you’re going to want access to stablecoins. That’s built primarily on Ethereum.
If you’re in sub-Saharan Africa, there’s a company called Yellowcard that’s using stablecoins to do country-to-country payments between business entities. It’s growing at an exceptional rate.
The U. S. dollar is a phenomenal tool and most people don’t have access to it, Stable coins make that instantly accessible globally. And so I think that’s a good example of how crypto can really go mainstream at a very fast rate.
Barry Ritholtz: So let’s talk a little bit about security. I recall 10 years ago, crazy numbers, something like a lot of hacks, a lot of thefts. And we talked previously about passwords, something like 20-25% of all Bitcoins have been lost because the owners either misplaced the drive it was on or misplaced the password. That sort of security issue seems to have been taken care of as this has become financialized and you can buy coins in ETF fashions. Tell us a little bit about custody and security of crypto assets.
Matt Hougan: I mean, it’s worth noting those, those stories always sound so ridiculous. How could these crazy people lose their passwords now worth a billion dollars.
But remember at the time it wasn’t worth a billion dollars. It was worth a few bucks, right? Somebody bought. Two pizzas for 80,000 Bitcoin. That’s now worth a billion dollars. I sure hope they were good. But you know, you have to think back to then when Bitcoin was trading for a few cents, people weren’t as careful as they would be today.
But the technology has improved exponentially.
Now, the way most people custody their Bitcoin, their Ethereum, their other crypto assets is through regulated, qualified custodians with insurance from leading insurance providers who have been doing it this for years. And have hundreds or thousands of people who help manage that securely. And the track record for those qualified custodians is sterling. Um, and so I think it’s really improved sort of exponentially.
Barry Ritholtz: And to give you a sense of how long that’s been going on in November, 2017, there was literally an episode of the Big Bang Theory where they talked about mining coins and putting it on a drive that subsequently got lost, and back then in 2017, it was. You know, tens of thousands of dollars today. It’s, uh, it’s a whole lot more than that.
I keep hearing from some skeptics who are saying this is a bubble. All these crypto-currencies are just speculative excess. How do you respond to that?
Matt Hougan: They may be right, of course, that’s what makes a market, but many of the smartest investors in the world are allocating to Bitcoin and crypto. Stan Druckenmiller is allocating to crypto. Abbey Johnson at Fidelity is allocating to crypto. Blackrock is building a huge business in this. 60% of the world’s largest hedge funds have a position in Bitcoin. It may be that those people have a right point of view as well.
When I look at crypto today, it looks to me like a technology that is just crossing the chasm from early adopters to mainstream and is yet to gain that sort of mainstream attention. It’s of course, possible, Barry, that the price will pull back. It’s been the best performing asset in the world for the last couple of years. It could be due for a pullback.
But long-term, it’s not at a mature state. Bitcoin is not standing shoulder to shoulder with gold. Ethereum is not standing shoulder to shoulder with Amazon cloud services. We think of them at a discounted level until they’re standing shoulder to shoulder. I don’t think we’ve reached maturity or bubble level. I think we have, I think we’re getting there, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
Barry Ritholtz: So let me ask you a two sided question and you can answer them both.
What are the skeptics not understand about crypto generally?
What do you think the advocates either get wrong or overemphasize?
Matt Hougan: What do the skeptics not understand is a really great question I think many of them are anchored on the first time they heard about Bitcoin and Something that crypto needs to admit is the first time many people heard about Bitcoin or crypto was in a negative light Maybe it was FTX Maybe it was the collapse of Mt. Gox in 2014. Maybe it was Silk Road and illicit use.
And the problem is, from a psychological anchoring perspective, they have such a negative first take on Bitcoin, they’re not able to evaluate it properly. They still consider things like “What about the illicit use of Bitcoin?” Well, the Department of Justice has come out and said that Bitcoin’s illicit use is so small and it’s not worth, you know, monitoring. It’s much lower than it is for cash.
I think many of the skeptics don’t evaluate where the data is today because they’re taking a 2022 or 2018 or 2014 view of Bitcoin and crypto.
Barry Ritholtz: I mean, we’ve seen some pretty extreme forecasts on prices that, that, you know, kind of raise red flags when people are talking about, you know, 1 million or 5 million as a Bitcoin target. It seems like they’re trolling us a bit.
Matt Hougan: It does seem like they’re trolling us a bit. I think they underestimate the efficiency of markets and the ability of markets to accurately value what an asset is.
Just because Bitcoin has gone up in the past and crypto has gone up in the past does not guarantee that it will go up in the future. And there are significant foreseeable and unforeseeable risks. In the future that we should think about their regulatory risks, their technology risks, their adoption risks, you know.
Look, it’s hard to be the best-performing asset in the world for 10 consecutive years and then tack on an 11th. And, uh, I think there’s probably just too much assumption that there is a manifest destiny of Bitcoin going to a million. There is no such guarantee in the market. There’s always risk.
Barry Ritholtz: Well the trend is your friend that that’s the old trading desk statement. So that, that leads to a really interesting question. Are these coins an investment or are they a speculation?
Matt Hougan: Yeah, they’re absolutely an investment and some of them have elements of speculation. Let me give you an example of Bitcoin. I think when you’re investing in Bitcoin, you’re making two bets. One, you’re making a speculative bet that Bitcoin will stand shoulder to shoulder with gold as a store of value asset.
Right now, it’s about 10 percent of gold. You’re saying, I think it’ll be 20, it’ll be 30, it’ll be 40, it’ll be 50, it’ll be 100.
The second bet you’re making is that the U. S. government has 36 trillion of debt and is printing another trillion every 90 days. The store of value market is going to become more valuable in the future. And Bitcoin is a piece of that. To me, that’s a fundamental bet. And the other one is a speculative bet about it maturing.
The reason Bitcoin’s performed so well over the last handful of years Is both of those have come true. And if you have two bets that are both coming true, you know, it’s not one plus one, it’s two times two equals four. It’s, it’s sort of an exponential bet.
So there’s elements of speculation, but there are elements of fundamental investing behind these crypto assets as well.
Barry Ritholtz: So, to wrap up, investors should pay attention to the various coins, in particular, Bitcoin and Ethereum, as a new technology that is crossing the chasm from early adopters towards mainstream investing.
It doesn’t mean that you, outsize your position. It doesn’t mean that you oversize holding Bitcoin. Think about this as a new technology that is starting to be adopted more broadly in the world of both finance and technology. Try and, you know, every beer commercial ends with drink responsibly – invest responsibly if you want to take a few percentage of your portfolio and throw it into a Bitcoin ETF, there’s nothing terrible about that.
You just don’t want to go hog wild and get sucked into the bubble mentality. That’s where people run into trouble. Thanks, Matt. This has really been interesting.
I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’ve been listening to Bloomberg’s at the money.
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