Latest / CRYPTO 101 / Ep. 695 CoinShares CEO on Institutions, ETFs, Treasury Companies, and Bitcoin’s Long Game

Transcript

Ep. 695 CoinShares CEO on Institutions, ETFs, Treasury Companies, and Bitcoin’s Long Game · CRYPTO 101

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the Crypto101 podcast, presented by Gemini.
• 0:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your bridge to the future of money.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alright everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Crypto 101 podcast.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am flying solo today without my compadry, Mr. Brendan, who is dealing with some reconstruction at his place of work.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we are very lucky to be having the CEO and co-founder of CoinShares, Jean-Marie Mugnetty joining us today.
• 0:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sir, welcome to the show and how are you doing?
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for having me in price and sorry Brendan can be with us today.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry, too, because this is going to be a great one and he loves talking all things institutional involvement in crypto, you know, structured products and all sorts of things like that leverage, of course.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: But we're going to just dial it back real quick and just get our audience acquainted with who you are and really what was the impetus or the catalyst to
• 1:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: So as you say, my name is Jean-Marie Monitzi, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Conchairs.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Conchairs is Europe larger digital asset manager with a listing in Sweden and we are moving this listed in Q1 to the U.S. on Nasdaq.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And how did we start, come and share, you know, we're community traders and the hedge from we're running started this life in 1998 and finishes live in 2012, 2013.
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we had that point where the partners like each other worked very well together and we're looking for what is the next big thing to do.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: We had the kind of strong, deep value investing, traumatic in our DNA, as community investors.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, we stable upon Bitcoin, almost by mistake, as everybody does, you know, there is a famous saying, everybody discovered Bitcoin and the project deserve it.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: We discovered quite early, some degree, maybe not early enough, some will stay.
• 2:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was a start of the journey, we follow Alice in the rabbit hole and never get out of it.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: We keep digging deeper and deeper and discovering new new things every single time.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love it.
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a great story and, you know, it makes me wonder or what, you know, it's wonderful that everybody kind of goes down that same rabbit hole, although everybody kind of comes to the rabbit hole from a very different world.
• 2:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, I was in the media world, you were in the hedge fund world, you know, you've heard people from all over the, you know, our producer was an IBM and heard about crypto.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so everybody kind of comes at it, but you know, Bitcoin and crypto really are a great unifier because at the end of the day, like,
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know money is has the total addressable market of like 8 billion people uh everybody needs to use it it's it but ever journey is very unique and you know this journey in crypto is also defined by the people you meet and I'll open mind it you are you can go in bitcoin and just be in crypto engineer on the bitcoin next semester and
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: and leave on the rock and don't look at anything else, but big coin.
• 3:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: All you can just like start to be a bit of a social butterfly, discover all the different innovation which are occurring.
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would say sometime at the margins sometimes as a mainstream element or the underpinning technology.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, beyond big coin you also get the technology elements attached to it.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that really was a genius act, kind of like reveal, you know, people were like always in the institution, you know, you all, yeah, stable cone are great, interesting, but we don't like blockchain, you know, and eventually they look at their genius, I say, well, actually if it's stable cone story needs to work, we kind of need a blockchain somewhere.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you can see the Wall Street Rush to buy a TV Amitia for that one was okay with someone need to buy something because other we express a view and investment view on that so it was pretty cool to see that people finally get depending drop moment was okay for all these tokens to work so they need to get some form of blockchain technology element and so there is a very strong technology angle beyond the simple kind of investment aspect of things so that's pretty cool.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: yeah and it's not just like the the private enterprise blockchains I feel like in a sense that ship is kind of sailed or sunk I should say it's like a lot of these blockchains you know based assets you know or like the middle fund from blackrock like that's on a theorem and all these other public blockchains and I saw JP Morgan chain
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our JPMorgan coin now trades on base for other institutions and stuff and so the public not change it feels like it's a win.
• 4:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's so much about sinking or burning, it's more a question of like, is it where kind of necessary evil in the evolution journey?
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you were to think about when digital asset-olding started,
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: back in 2016 probably or 2017, back by the RW and UBS and some big names, and they put a big name CEO as well from Australia to lead the ship.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very difficult for them to go talk to Goldman Sachs or any of your big bank and like in the ideas that yeah, you're going to trust this kind of
• 5:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: open permission, less blockchain situation, here it is.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's almost kind of this journey stated by stage where it's almost like the failure of the private blockchain is what makes it much more powerful in an open architecture.
• 5:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you have to go through the failure first and so the kind of like the hoops of innovation were in the sisterie and you saw this with different ideas.
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you go back 20 years ago, when Mark Bernier started marketing sales force,
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Equivalent even raised a dollar because everybody was saying nobody we want to put the data in the cloud and Salesforce the success it is today.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: So unfortunately people don't really see the capacity of innovation Far enough.
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're always on the rest image.
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: What innovation can do in the long term and overestimated the short term.
• 5:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's great to see this evolution.
• 5:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you were talking about GPMorgan coin and GPMorgan based effectively architecture, but Biddle announced this morning that we're running down the NB chain as well.
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's kind of a complete transformation as well.
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: The architecture has become cross-operative all in different blockchain.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even on the stable coin world, you do so last weekend, whilst Swift network was closed, you get GPMorgan and DBS settling.
• 6:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: through different chain and cross-operation between China as well as stuff are definitely moving at an institutional level as well.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's quite exciting for Konchia.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, so let's dive into Konchia's exactly what are your products and services that you guys are offering to institutional investors and maybe even retail investors?
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, so the way we think about it is that we started the hedge fund in digital asset.
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: The hedge fund business couldn't really scale, and the idea for us at the beginning was like, OK, how do we sprinkle a little bit of financial freedom into everybody retirement account?
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that was really the original promise.
• 7:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so the best vehicle at the time, back in 2015, to sprinkle this financial freedom, was to get an ETF framework.
• 7:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we did exactly what Greg's scale was doing in the U.S. We did the same thing in Europe back in the day.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: and we kind of like run this journey on the ETF side until 20 until today.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're still doing it very actively, both in Europe and in the US at a much smaller size, but you know, we're starting with a presence in the US.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's kind of a listed vehicle listed from approach, everybody with a brokerage account, whether they are institutional or retail, even if we don't distribute activity to retail.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the product are effectively available for retail subject to the appropriateness.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: test by the brokerage house.
• 7:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so from there, we kind of like, add also a very strong capital market division within Conceir, this capital market division enables us to bring down our private phone and an inch from product, which is a being developed as we speak.
• 7:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the question is like, why do we go from there and like, you know, we have been always setting to the market, what the market was able to consume.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, there was no point selling in 2017, D5 was a different word, and so the question is like, how do we move forward through the tokenization channel value and, you know, propose product which are more and more sophisticated and more and more kind of embracing the values of the decentralized technology.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's awesome.
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it seems like there's more and more ETFs coming out.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Obviously started with the Bitcoin ETFs, the Ethereum ETFs.
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: We just in America got staking approved as, you know, kind of a non-security transaction.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we've got the staking component in the Solana ETF.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And apparently now there's a whole host of
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: over a hundred altcoin ETFs slated for approval that have gone through the generic listing standards.
• 8:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I just kind of want to get your take are all of these like a net positive for the ecosystem.
• 8:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Uh, you know, is it just kind of confusing investors?
• 8:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like what do you kind of make of just this flurry of altcoin ETFs?
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is a bit of a formal issue, because everybody won't replicate the success of BlackRock.
• 9:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And everybody's looking at it and say, OK, BlackRock has done a massive win on Bitcoin.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So how about we can capture the tail element of it?
• 9:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's kind of a short term view in itself.
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the market needs to normalize into all the swings.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: The U.S. has been deprived of crypto ETF for 10 years compared to Europe.
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So obviously, the market is going to overswing in the other direction.
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is confusing for investors, it is confusing for advisors, you know, you talk to advisors today in the US, you know, the kind of start to get the big coming narrative and why to sell it and why to add it to your portfolio.
• 9:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: You move to Ethereum, they already look at you saying what I were talking about.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: You talk about hype, as they look at you say, what I pretty good, what is that?
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, it's just like, you know, it's great, you're very much strong retail audience from that.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's becoming more and more confusing and it's just, you know.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a fantastic business for lawyers, it's a fantastic business for custodians, a fantastic business for plenty of people, eventually it's becoming more and more for a question of like what do people want to do and at some point you better of just having a coinbase account if you really want to trade in every single token available in the market.
• 10:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's kind of the flip style of everything, you know, when we look at
• 10:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the game, we're doing for the next 10 years, but we've been doing for 10 years already, so we're looking at stuff and the evolution of things and trying to position ourselves where we're really trying to add value to the investment value chain and try to figure a way to to bring product which are differentiated and differentiating.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we don't trust in the US
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: a product called dime and dime is like listing 10 different coins in the basket.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have a clear risk budget of 10% per coin, but this is going to have no chance to be listed in the U.S. any time soon as single coin under the current framework.
• 10:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, in bringing a kind of a diversification.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, okay, I want to have a little bit of optionality, a bit of corruption element.
• 11:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: into a portfolio which is already long a black rocket year for any kind of big coin in CF and at that point you can get that as almost like an overlay which makes sense in your portfolio.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we try to think about stuff a little bit differently and try to bring a different narrative to just like, okay, here's a kind of plethora of listing opportunity and pick and choose what you like, we just a super exchange.
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense and I think it it's the right approach, but of course it's not the only approach.
• 11:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a there's a whole slew now of these digital asset treasury companies as well and everybody's trying to replicate the same success that Michael sailor kind of had and I'm curious as well to kind of get your take.
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you think that this trend is sustainable, you know, or not and and kind of what's your rationale around these.
• 11:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Seems like it's worth pretty enough.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I bump into Michael in Miami at the Kentalkon's friends a couple of days ago and
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: People are confused with one thing.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like the same weather is only one Satoshi.
• 12:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is only one Michael seller.
• 12:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, not everybody can replicate Zora and the kind of investment test is that Michael put into this kind of micro-sporting story.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, yes, again, the bankers and the lawyers replicate it all.
• 12:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: and scale Michael said a proposal, but you know it's very difficult to create something which is as successful.
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was a very first treasury company.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It has a first move rather than the gemote.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was also run by people who understand capital market in depth and the kind of structuring and structuration of all this kind of products very very in a very very advanced manner.
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, basically, not all treasury companies are born equally.
• 12:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: They are very, very different, shaped, different sides.
• 12:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And actually, I think the softness you see in the market right now, on Bitcoin is specifically, is down to most of the market maker are being long Bitcoin and short treasury companies, because they were like arbitraging the spread.
• 13:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now that the spread are collapsed, they're just like unwinding the thread and basically setting Bitcoin to be able to buy by the Treasury company trade.
• 13:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so you very much in this situation where the Treasury company has been a formidable accelerator in time of accumulation of capital into digital asset, they are creating
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: to digital asset.
• 13:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think their live shelf is limited.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're going to probably see a lot of M&A activity, consolidation or take over activity around them.
• 13:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Between themselves and between external raiders or private equity decide to say, okay, we're going to dismantle that and set it in pieces.
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you're probably going to see a lot of restructuring happening in the next
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: are disappearing and some of them start to trade at significant discount.
• 14:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's a lawyer season and investment banker season.
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it's a season is always on.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a season who never stopped, never stopped.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Man, I got into the wrong business.
• 14:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: We do.
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: When you talk to the institution, they are still at the very, very first inings of the understanding of what is Bitcoin.
• 14:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that's really what the driving is.
• 14:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's okay.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: They want to understand that.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the next question is, okay, what do we do next?
• 14:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Our late hour in the journey.
• 14:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And effectively market allocation or capital allocation is following, I would say to you.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: The cap table of Bitcoin token, you know, it's like a, or the total market cap of every single token.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you have effectively a weakening factor here where you're going to get less allocation on Solana that you have on Bitcoin.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, she looked just as a treasury company.
• 14:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can see that kind of tail events.
• 15:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: You look at the ETF.
• 15:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can see the tail event as well.
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so very strictly.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: People start with Bitcoin and then they start to depending which direction to the goals.
• 15:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: They stop at Bitcoin because they're okay.
• 15:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Our investment community is very understanding crypto.
• 15:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we're not going to blows a brain away with more than Bitcoin.
• 15:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or they have a serious appetite to say, okay, we already late on Bitcoin.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: How do we start catching up?
• 15:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this one just started looking into a 50-piece technology play, which is on the pinning Bitcoin and digital asset in general, which is on tire, I would say, differentiation between all the L1 and what's happening on the L2 level and so, different institutions after different stage of the journey, you know, very secretly the vast majority is at the stage of one, which is by trying to understand Bitcoin and how to start, you know, getting there,
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: brain, if it did not to explode, when they start looking at the power of tokenization and what it can do for the world.
• 15:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's got to be like a slow grind, the slow sort of adoption, and it's like, you know, it's but like, the real thing is like crypto is very, very first asset class, which was an inverse parliament of allocation.
• 16:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nobody institution gets a first shot at everything and then retail can get a little bit of the crumbs and in this specific case, it is exactly the opposite of the retail market and got everything first.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: and the institution are playing catch-up and so they need to play catch-up even faster because normally there's one dictating the timing and now the market is moving ahead of them so there's a little bit of a kind of the institution are not used to be driven by by the retail market and to have to react to the retail tempo you remember the COVID event with GameStop
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So in addition, we're like all saying, oh yeah, GameStop is just a fade, you're gonna stop in five seconds and then they get it run over by reading the market It was okay.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: You want to play.
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna play because the entire return market was sitting at home doing nothing and say, okay Well, we can have a bit of fun and it's like
• 16:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes, I was in the old institution in mind, it's not really to understand how powerful the return market has become through this kind of effectively self-directed trading capacity, which is available to them, through Robin Hood or all this kind of platform, which has democratizing massively access to capital market.
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I want to kind of jump over or back to the conversation that we kind of had about the digital asset treasury companies and you're talking about the weakness in the market,
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: huge premium and they were long Bitcoin or the underline.
• 17:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now that trade, they're essentially covering their short, which implies that they might be buying back the digital asset treasury companies.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: What's, do you think that this, is the start, are you at the start of a bear market because of this trade?
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or do you think that, you know, we could have pockets of optimism
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, I think there is two different narrative, you know, effectively conflicting in some way.
• 18:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: On one hand, the macro terrain are very, very clear, and all the signal on the macro terrain are kind of a line to explain that Bitcoin should go higher.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: You see the story around gold right now, it is kind of like exactly what it should be doing.
• 18:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bitcoin should have the same journey.
• 18:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now the problem is there is this kind of macro trend and then we find this trend you enter to have some micro level elements which are much more tactical than strategic and so
• 18:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: a more among all this kind of trainer run macro, okay, Bitcoin should be an allocation factor for the development and trade, so digital goal narrative.
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: All the narratives, the dead sailing, the government spending, all this kind of narrative, we know very, very well, and which had been explained at length, and which is only going worse in the worse.
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so from that perspective, the big constraint is winning now.
• 19:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: The big constraint is also suffering from the kind of much more local factors and the local factors on the journey right now, for instance, is like the unwinding of this treasury company trade.
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like everybody who bought a convert on some micro strategy or something, yes, at some point was also showed to the stock.
• 19:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there is plenty of short in the market who were playing for the volatility, associated with this digital asset treasury company.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: The short element of it, when the premium collapse, which is basically the delta between the price of the treasury company and the SNAP, is collapsing to zero, and that point the people who are holding the effectively
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: long Bitcoin short treasury company position need to rewind the trade to capture the profit and that's exactly what's happening right now so you have like a market which I will say in a secular manner as some very very good narrative playing in front of him and head of him at the same time it's referring from
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: this kind of unwinding in the market and this kind of softening in the market at the same time.
• 20:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, you need not to confuse is the journey broken or is the narrative broken and we've kind of the technicality of the moment.
• 20:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, right now is the technicality, which has been driven by, you know, this and warning of the trade, the absence of liquidity in the market, as it should then in the US, all this stuff coming, link rating effectively, so we're discussing right now.
• 20:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wow, very well said.
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's like always have to zoom out, right?
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like I think the rate cuts and the lack of or the winding down of the quantitative tightening and like all these things that are happening, not just the US but globally.
• 20:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: But look, I absolutely right, but I guarantee you on Monday morning, we're going to wake up in the US and Microsoft are going to annancy by a ton of Bitcoin this week's weekening moment.
• 20:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, if you zoom in again, or zoom out again, anybody who bought Bitcoin for more than four years never lost money.
• 20:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, the question of like, are you, you know, yes, if you try to date Red Bitcoin, you probably are in a bad position.
• 21:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, if you are leveraging yourself way too much, you're probably in a bad position.
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, the very principle of Bitcoin is like, Bitcoin is going to be all...
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: long term and leverage by many, many people, you know, so anything else, and it's funny because like, you know, everything else doesn't matter and the journey, but there's a whole other ecosystem.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think we even started the conversation was you can't just be a bit coin maxi.
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have to kind of extend your view and understand there's all these other, you know, crypto ecosystem.
• 21:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, so what do you think the future for altcoins is and does coin shares dabble in altcoins at all?
• 21:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, first of all, you can be a Bitcoin Maxi if you want to.
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is nothing wrong with being a Bitcoin Maxi.
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is plenty of gold bug as well, so it depends on how much you want to have a pleasure in life.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: But if you want to really blow your mind, you have to get into the alkaline narrative and realize that there is all the stuff but Bitcoin to start to play back.
• 22:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: But at the end of the day, the alkaline need to be measured at the light of the benchmark, which need to be Bitcoin.
• 22:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if you measure your alkaline performance, you can dollar.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, okay, great, but you're ready to measure it against your internal benchmark, which is to be Bitcoin.
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, CoinShare has been happening into Bitcoin, you know, we offer product in Bitcoin, and we were the first one to list Ethereum, we were the first one to list many, many product in Europe to bring that to the market, we bring sticking to the market as well as part of all of that narrative.
• 22:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: We actually do sticking a bit better in Europe.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then in the US where we don't have to pay a dividend of the sticking reward, it kind of naturally embedded in the products, people just get the capital gain appreciation on that itself, an income, interesting, on that which is a better tax structure for investors.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: But over all, you know, like we were always looking at new things, you know, like we've been very,
• 22:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, our research was looking at hyper�quid, our research was looking at many, many different tokens, so we are kind of like very interesting in the narrative.
• 23:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, we went from, I would say, a 2021 era where everybody was building much more by our position to another blockchain.
• 23:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was like, the team wasn't satisfied with this blockchain, so there's been out to create something else, because it was like that there are all that different.
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now we're building an era where people are really building products, and stuff which are usable and have a utility or a real kind of utility.
• 23:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's become very, very interesting, and the way you see all traditional asset, nothing to be injected into DFI, is also very interesting, and you can see how to colonization slowly, but surely, going to become the back and middle office of financial service.
• 23:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love it.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, Jean-Marie, I've got one final question for Maria, and it's a little bit more of a psychological, personal journey kind of question, but you've been in the hedge fund business, obviously like you said for a long time, run public companies.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of us traders are, you know, we have our stress and our emotion, euphoria or depression tied to the price of the market with its altcoins or Bitcoin.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a question I get a lot of the times is just, how do you manage, how do you measure, make sure your emotions are measured when you're just so steeped in crypto markets.
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: How do you handle it personally?
• 24:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Just don't have a motion.
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have to seriously medicate yourself, is that what it is?
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, I will not recommend anything like that.
• 24:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Don't try to medicate it, it's definitely not a good idea.
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, look, we think about it in a very simple way.
• 24:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's about being right to wrong, it's just being about to change your mind quick enough, as you make the right decision.
• 24:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, nobody care that other day, if you're right to wrong, people just care about, like, did you manage to make money and your opinion is what matter?
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, just don't fall in love with you.
• 24:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: position just like stay honest around what you're doing and the rest would take you off himself.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love it.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hey, keep it simple self honesty.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love it.
• 25:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: John Marie, where can people kind of follow along on your journey?
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Are you big on X?
• 25:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you have a sub-stack?
• 25:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what websites can we put in the show notes?
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Consciers.com.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: We publish a written newsletter.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: I write a monthly piece for
• 25:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: awesome.
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for joining us today.
• 25:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: We hope to have you back on again after you have a smash hit on the US NASDAQ.
• 25:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everybody at home watching and listening.
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for joining.
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Come back.
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Same time, same place next week.
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're going to have some more great guests for you.
• 25:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks, y'all Marie.