On this special crypto episode of A Wiser Retirement Podcast™, Casey Smith is joined by Robert Swarthout, Founder, CEO, and Portfolio Manager of Teton Crypto Capital. They talk about the Bitcoin ETF launch, the SEC's X account getting hacked, VanEck delisting their ETF, Greyscale outflow, and Bitwise.
Podcast Episodes Referenced:
- Ep 197: Will financial advisors be using Bitcoin ETFs soon?
- Ep 202: Bitcoin Halving and the Upcoming Bull Run
Youtube Videos Referenced:
- Bitcoin ETFs Have Been Approved - Here's What You Need to Know
Other Links:
- Contact Robert Swarthout: robert@tetoncryptocapital.com
Learn More about Wiser Wealth Management:
- Our website
- Schedule a complimentary consultation (learn more about our services)
- Click here to download one of our free guides that covers financial planning topics like retirement, investing, taxes, divorce, and more!
Connect With Wiser Wealth Management:
- YouTube Channel
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Instagram
- Twitter
- Casey Smith's Twitter
- Podcast
- Blog
This podcast was produced by Wiser Wealth Management. Thanks for listening!
On this special crypto episode of A Wiser Retirement Podcast™, Casey Smith is joined by Robert Swarthout, Founder, CEO, and Portfolio Manager of Teton Crypto Capital. They talk about the Bitcoin ETF launch, the SEC's X account getting hacked, VanEck delisting their ETF, Greyscale outflow, and Bitwise.
Podcast Episodes Referenced:
- Ep 197: Will financial advisors be using Bitcoin ETFs soon?
- Ep 202: Bitcoin Halving and the Upcoming Bull Run
Youtube Videos Referenced:
- Bitcoin ETFs Have Been Approved - Here's What You Need to Know
Other Links:
- Contact Robert Swarthout: robert@tetoncryptocapital.com
Learn More about Wiser Wealth Management:
- Our website
- Schedule a complimentary consultation (learn more about our services)
- Click here to download one of our free guides that covers financial planning topics like retirement, investing, taxes, divorce, and more!
Connect With Wiser Wealth Management:
- YouTube Channel
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Instagram
- Twitter
- Casey Smith's Twitter
- Podcast
- Blog
This podcast was produced by Wiser Wealth Management. Thanks for listening!
So if you collectively lump all the Bitcoin ETFs together and, I guess, do the same thing for silver I assume there's more than one it is now the second biggest commodity ETF out there, second to gold. So it goes gold Bitcoin silver yes and that was within, that was the 18th, so that was a week later, just over a week later, pretty quick and I remember texting you. I was like I don't know if that like is a compliment to Bitcoin, or like this has a.
Speaker 2:How bad is silver going? Silver has. Silver has an industrial purpose, though, so so does gold.
Speaker 3:Oh.
Speaker 1:I guess it's in all of the technology. It's sitting on that table right here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true. Welcome to a wiser retirement podcast. We believe the best financial advice shall always be conflict free. I'm your host, casey Smith, the guiding you to financial freedom days. My co-host, robert short thou, founder, ceo, portfolio manager at Teton crypto capital. Hey, robert, hey, how's it going? Doing good? Welcome to the 206 episode of the wiser retirement podcast. It's a lot. It is a lot. It feels like we just started doing this yesterday. You're a regular. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, I enjoy it. Today is a crypto edition of a wiser retirement and we have a lot to talk about. Finally got a Bitcoin. Launch Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:ETF launch. Yes, spot ETF. Yeah, you know it's a. It was a lot of buildup for this one. You know, in some ways years, almost a decade, of making since the I guess the Winklevast 2 ends first Applied for one, probably a little bit early back then.
Speaker 2:But here we are. They didn't reapply. They're not on the list.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know when they decided to stop taking a swing at it, but I don't hear much from them anymore.
Speaker 1:No, well, you know, considering how much Bitcoin they hold, they don't really need to do much, so they're living their best life. Yeah, yes, yeah, thanks to mark so, but yeah, so we have the. The launch. It happened in on, you know, january the 10th, but first we had the fake launch. What a disaster. So the day before that would have been January the 9th. I think it was around lunchtime Eastern time there was a tweet sent out from the SEC SEC's Twitter account saying X, yeah, sorry, x, it's always gonna be Twitter to me and it's a. It said oh, we, you know, we're happy to. Basically, I'm gonna give this paraphrase your own, but wait, we're launching them, we're approving the Bitcoin ETFs. Oh, I had a picture of Gary on there. Like nice little image seemed real. In within like 30 minutes, gary tweeted from his personal account saying no, this was not us. So, effectively, the SEC's account was hacked and somebody you know sent the tweet out.
Speaker 2:But then the very next day.
Speaker 1:So that was lunchtime on the 9th by I think it was around 4 pm or 4 30 actually. I remember I was like I rarely watch NBC. I was like I'm gonna turn on kind of watch TV and kind of see what happens is this gets announced, so it's 4 30. They were interviewing the founder of an ECC and they it was approved for real this time. And you know, then on the 11th, you know, in that morning it started trading. So Lots of drama. You know, in crypto it's kind of apart for the course. I don't think that Wall Street was ready for the crypto drama of an ETF launch in this way, but it was entertaining nonetheless.
Speaker 2:So so what the repercussions of hacking the SEC's X account?
Speaker 1:I wonder you know you would think well might. If I remember correctly, the DOJ is now involved doing an investigation. Okay, like somebody probably Went leveraged long somewhere, sent out the tweet in the new that it wasn't gonna last long insult, so there was some money made. Bitcoin, I think pop like 10 or 10, 12%, something like that on the news. So you know, with some leverage on a 10%, you know real move, you can make some money. You know it's. It's kind of a sad state of affairs because the SEC did not have two-factor authentication turned on for their account.
Speaker 2:Really.
Speaker 1:And they claim it was a SIM attack. So like somebody's phone number that was attached to that account got attacked, so they were able to get in the rate that they that was the speed at which they were able to recover this account like less than an hour later they had a control. It just blows my mind like Twitter just X doesn't really like tend to help other people that quickly. So I don't know if I buy the whole story and honestly it's coming from.
Speaker 2:And the SEC? I don't believe anything. And Musk, or right?
Speaker 1:They're not exactly good friends, so I think what Musk has won every fight. Yes. And kind of a bit of a funny anecdote. Here is before the SEC said what happened to their account. You know they said oh, we've recovered it by the next morning. So the morning of January the 10th, before they had officially launched the or said the news of the ETF, twitter comes out with their postmortem saying this is what happened to the account.
Speaker 3:Oh Jesus.
Speaker 1:They're like Twitter was not hacked, this was a third party issue. Like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:The poop is on your face.
Speaker 2:My initial take on that, when she told me, you told me, texted me, I think hey, they want this and then they say oh, it was fake. My thought was well, maybe they're testing the market, they're testing the waters, yeah, we're going to launch it. What happens when we do this? You know, it's like a. You know, sticking your head out of the foxhole going what's going to? Happen, you know, with your helmet on a stick.
Speaker 1:Yeah, part of me wondered when it was. When I, within that roughly 45 minutes after we realized it was a fake news event, I was like who's the motivation here?
Speaker 2:And like Gary's, but everybody went for it. Yeah, it was. It was the headlines on CNBC.
Speaker 1:Right. Because everybody was waiting to press, publish on their news articles, right Right, and because everyone knew that the window is the fifth through the 10th for approval. Like it was just, it was a perfect setup for manipulation event. So when the fake news came out like, my original thought was okay. Once we realized it was fake that this is Gary one more time yanking around the crypto industry, because he seems to get his jollies off that. So I don't know, it's, we'll find.
Speaker 1:Well, we may never find out who did it, but at this point it's something to laugh about.
Speaker 2:Well, even if they. Well, obviously hacking is really bad, but if they made money off of it, only the hacking would get them in trouble, not, not the market manipulation because that's not illegal in crypto Correct.
Speaker 1:So they probably get them on wire fraud or something like that.
Speaker 2:It'd be like all the gangsters, all the time ago.
Speaker 1:Right, you get them on everything but being a gangster is interesting and my guess is it was someone that wasn't in the U S. It was so like good luck.
Speaker 2:For sure yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, so well, all right, so we finally get the real ETFs launched the next day. There were 11 of them. There's been one victim already. Yes, vanak Bitcoin Trust did not make it. Yeah, what did Mike?
Speaker 1:no, not even two weeks. I think it was see um delisting, so that was on the 17th. So yes, a one week later they announced their. I mean, obviously they just didn't see the inflows that they thought.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And well, they did a lot of work for it.
Speaker 2:They didn't know for nothing Like I was wondering how much money was lost on that.
Speaker 1:And I just find it ironic. The first one to bow out was the one that was on CNBC when it got announced and he was like, literally they were interviewing the founder. Um, what's his name? The last name is Vanak, as I'll remember.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it was just kind of, I guess, coincidental, but it's just well interesting timing when you got when you got, I'm actually have eyeshares, you have the bit wise and you have um fidelity in your space already and no one's ever seen it. I've never heard of Vanak.
Speaker 1:Um, nobody, no outside of the crypto space yeah Right, uh.
Speaker 2:Same way for wisdom tree. Wisdom tree has some great products, but they've never really had enough traction um to to have even tight spreads on most of their ETFs.
Speaker 1:So one thing, maybe you know the answer to this. So Vanak is bowing out um, or they already have about. I don't know when their timeline is, but so the ticket that they had chosen for theirs was HODL, which is a rather crypto famous um acronym. He's supposed to mean hold, but somebody mistyped it years ago and now it's become a meme, right.
Speaker 2:Kind of like diamond hands on them, the whole thing.
Speaker 1:Um, so is. Is that um ticker up for grabs for someone else, or like? I don't know? It's probably a lot like um, like a copyright. They can kind of hold onto it.
Speaker 2:Well, no, I don't think it's copyrighted, but I would think that it's like you know retiring your Gmail email or something, and you know it sits out there for a while, closed, before anybody else can access it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, because I guess there's statements that kind of show up on, so it's not like it can.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wouldn't think it'd be available for a very long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but yeah, some of these other tickers are, I find, entertaining. So hashtags went with DeFi DEFI um. Valkyrie went with BRRRR Um is that?
Speaker 2:is that talking about the crypto winter? What is that?
Speaker 1:Um, I, I thought it was a play on the whole thing, the whole money, money, printer, brrrr thing, um, the name of pal and the money being shot out of a, um, a typewriter, um, and then you had the hodl. The rest of them are kind of you know a bit normal stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, kind of you know, I did. I did a quick little video on this. We can link to it in the show notes. Um, how to choose a Bitcoin ETF? Um, is it involved with the board? Yeah, well, no, I think you'd choose it. You'd choose your Bitcoin ETF the same way that you'd choose any other ETF. Where you focus on price, um, you focus on fees, um, yeah, the, the fee of the uh, of the of the fun. You focus next on volume, um, so these ETFs are going to have bid as spreads, just like any other ETF, and so that's your second level of fees. Your first fee is your management fee, right, which ranges anywhere from uh looks like a point um, point two to all the way up to 1.5%, right, um, so, but on the big uh, bid as spread. So we were monitoring that, you know, the day they launched, and it range anywhere from four cents to 40 cents.
Speaker 1:And, to be clear, the price that you're seeing is not the Bitcoin price, um, because it's shares in a thing, so it's like a much smaller number than the Bitcoin price would be Correct.
Speaker 2:So your your bid and ask is what you buy and sell it for. So that spread goes to the market, uh, market maker, right, right. So if you, if it's really tight spread, then that's a much more efficient trade. If you um, uh, if you want to get um really into it, there's a price of Bitcoin, then there's the representative price of the ETF, so that's your net asset value versus your value of ETF, right, so you're very close and market makers will arbitrage that and make money themselves or funds will, uh, large funds can, can, hedge that, hedge that gap, um, but you, you want to, uh, anyway, you want that to be a tight spread, um, so your, your black rocks, your your um, even, bit wise.
Speaker 2:Also, the fidelity one, those are going to have pretty tight spreads because they have pretty good volume, where your other lesser known name brands are going to have very widespread, Right, yeah. And the next one is just asset size, uh, so that I don't have the asset size as of today, but on the open it was very clear that bit wise, uh, black rock and fidelity, we're going to be the three largest, and now I think bit wise has even fallen to fourth now, yeah, cause the arc one is kind of arc ones get picked up with, with Kathy and her, her brand, um, being very popular and having a strong following there.
Speaker 2:Um, but yeah, so it's. It's the reason why you want to have at least a hundred million is below a hundred million. The rule of thumb is that this early not as profitable for the company and therefore they're going to shut it down. So In the ETF world, I can't think of any messy shutdown. There's been a lot of ETFs have shut down, but you have again. You have this market that's able to come in and you end up getting cash for what it's worth. It's a very organized shutdown process, but you really don't want to be caught up in that if you don't want to have to be.
Speaker 1:Because you got a taxable event if it's going to cash.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, you're headed to cash no matter what right. So you want to make sure that you have a reputable company. That'd be the fourth one, just their size of the fund. But then also like who are you working with? You're working with a BlackRock Fidelity A bit wise even a wisdom tree you have. You have a name brand company where, if you go to Franklin Bitcoin, hashtag's Bitcoin, you're paying a lot more and you mean no one ever really does conducts business with these companies, right, you know?
Speaker 1:What's interesting is you're talking about the fees, and those are either right now or after six months, because some of them have been doing no fees up to a certain AUM or free for six months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so your your arc a bit wise wisdom tree and Vesco Fidelity Valkyrie they're all offering no fee for the first six months of not when you purchase it, but the first six months of their issue day, right, yeah, what's been interesting to kind of watch in I don't think we talked about in our last podcast, but the, the, the fee war that happened leading up to the launch of this because I think then when they first started publishing their fees late December, they were somewhere around 40 basis points, the lowest, and then they kind of like work their way down to.
Speaker 1:I think the lowest is at point two, but like Right. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to kind of see the positioning there.
Speaker 2:There, yeah, your cheapest is still bit wise at point two percent. But you've, you've got ARC, which is at point two one, which is probably why they're getting shares, because it's free right now. Yeah, and I'll go to point two one. Even I shares is offering free. They're offering point one, two, no good, at point two five.
Speaker 1:But you just have that brand recognition of BlackRock and the I shares, the I shares brand, yeah, and I would say in my in and probably going to be a little biased here, but the bit wise one I have found the most fascinating. They're the pure, the. They're the only pure crypto player that has launched one and they've done a masterclass my opinion of how to market an ETF relative to these others, oh yeah. Because the amount of inflows that they've had relative to the brand size of it has been impressive.
Speaker 2:You've got Matt Hogan running that yes. Matt. Matt knows what he's doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they've had some great commercials and yeah, they have great commercials, matt.
Speaker 2:Matt was one of the pioneers and analyzing the ETFs when they were first launched back in 2002, three and four. Our you know, our friend Don Friedman was a part of that part of that movement as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so they had soft to them because they've done a great job. I think he was. He probably doesn't think this, but I think he was just very early in that space for a lot of people to follow. Right, and then have to last that horrible year and a half where everything was falling Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, welcome to crypto.
Speaker 2:But they kept it together and they've they seem to have made a good product, so kudos to them, yeah, but yeah I you know it's been fun to watch and I will say that it has a flashback to like four, five, six, seven, eight, when, when they were in, etfs are launching every day.
Speaker 1:Two thousand four, five six seven Correct and.
Speaker 2:I had me and my trusty sidekick, kyle Waller also very grad, I think, he was a class of 08 hired as an intern. There was no jobs, yeah, I said, well, since you can't find a job, just stay with me. Yeah, and we had a great time analyzing ETFs, speaking all over the world talking about ETFs that were launching ETFs for his ETNs Anyway it was. It was a really good time in our young company's history and I remember just being so excited. Oh no, these real estate funds are going to launch, like. I remember you know. Oh no, there's small cash funds coming out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh yeah, you know we don't have in our notes here, but like now, all the speculation and anticipation has turned to an Ethereum ETF.
Speaker 2:That's right that might happen.
Speaker 1:Some people think as soon as three to four months. I don't think there's a chance that happens that soon. Right, because the SEC can not clearly state that Ethereum is not a security? Well, why can't they? Because the lawsuit they lost the lawsuit. Well, not about Ethereum, they lost the XRP lawsuit. Oh, that's right. So in some ways I think there's a higher chance that XRP happens, but Ethereum is just so much bigger, it seems like the next natural one from a market cap standpoint.
Speaker 2:But it's with that conflict with their some of their current legal proceedings.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean again the SEC's eyes. Even though they've lost the lawsuit in the ripple case, they still believe that all crypto is a security outside of Bitcoin, like they have never publicly said because they're still in the whole, like they didn't have a chance to an appeal.
Speaker 2:The XRP rule and Bitcoin because of this, its origin of some person creating it. Yeah, there's no entity you can go after yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's really what it comes down to for them, which is crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but you know we was that person again.
Speaker 1:Satoshi Nakamoto. That's right, he them she.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:We don't know. If you listen to Jamie Diamond, he thinks this person's gonna show up and just create more Bitcoin. I saw that Davos interview.
Speaker 2:I'm like dude man, you're a smart dude and that makes me no, no, wait a minute, I missed that part. Say that, say that again.
Speaker 1:So he was on in CNBC for 10 minutes. He could talk about whatever he wanted.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he talked about Trump for a while he talked about Trump, and he talked about Bitcoin for like five minutes and rambled, and then, as part of that, he goes oh, how do we know that there just can't be more Bitcoin? And one of the other interviewers was like well, the code says so. And he's like well, why can't Satoshi just show up and create more Bitcoin? It shows such a fundamental Either he's being disingenuous and he knows the answer, and I'm guessing that's what's going on but you would have to get 51% of the network to agree to change the code that allows and Bitcoin. People are like hardcore that they have a limited supply, but it is no chance that's happening. So it's just like man, like, of all the things you could have said, you chose to say that.
Speaker 2:So yeah, he was in a role. I only saw the portion where he talked about Trump being the next president and yeah, it was the same segment. He had good policies, but he was just a crazy dude. So yeah, interesting Jamie Dimon unhinged.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, he. I mean, if anything, he's being consistent about Bitcoin. He also said this was the last time he's ever gonna talk about it, so hopefully he sticks to his work, because I'm tired of hearing him talk about negative Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:But his company has a huge investment Right.
Speaker 1:He's a sponsor, a participant in these ETFs, right, I don't know. Watch what they do, not what they say.
Speaker 2:I guess the moral of the story there, well, the train's left the station at this point there's no pulling it back. I mean sure you could have mass sell-offs, I guess. But you could have that in large cap stocks, right.
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Speaker 2:Let's talk about Bitcoin being larger and market share than silver.
Speaker 1:Bitcoin is a commodity. I think that's everyone is. They're right in Greece yes, if you collectively lump all the Bitcoin ETFs together and do the same thing for silver, I assume there's more than one. It is now the second biggest commodity ETF out there, second to gold. So it goes gold Bitcoin silver yes.
Speaker 1:And that was within, that was the 18th, so that was a week later, just over a week later, Pretty quick and I remember texting you. I was like I don't know if that like is a complement to Bitcoin or like this has this how bad is silver going?
Speaker 2:Silver has an industrial purpose, though, so does gold?
Speaker 1:I guess it's in all of the technology. It's sitting on the table right here. Yeah, that's true. Small amounts, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I don't know. Yeah, people, I'm shaking my head for all the people over 70 years old who are still like what, what am I investing in?
Speaker 1:Well, there was technology that came along that they understood that their previous generation didn't either.
Speaker 2:It's true.
Speaker 1:Part of the cycle. It just happens quicker and I think it's more magnified these days.
Speaker 2:So you know it's very interesting. So I have a group that I have breakfast with once a month and he was one of the guys in the group is talking about okay, Bitcoin in price actually goes to a million and you look at all the dollars and what the dollars are worth around the world, Okay, You'd actually surpass Bitcoin would have a higher market value than current, than the M2 money supply Than any currency. Yeah, if it goes to a million dollars or 1.5, kind of what Arc was talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I don't know. I've never researched that exact scenario, but the first thing that comes to mind is how much more devalued is the dollar between now and Bitcoin going to a million dollars?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the rate that the government's printing.
Speaker 1:it can function be today's dollars, but what does that mean?
Speaker 2:What does that translate to? What does that world look like?
Speaker 1:I think, what you may hear as an argument, there is Bitcoin being limited in supply or finite right 21 million ever and government's being willing to inflate. It's a bit of a flight to safety. So it's almost like a gold that you can like, put in your pocket and walk away with. Gold's hard to transport, hard to custody, somebody can come and take it from you. It's a little, I mean, obviously people can steal your Bitcoin, but it's a little easier to hide.
Speaker 2:Well, you can't transact in gold, you can barely transact in Bitcoin. Correct, it's a whole lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, I mean, it's almost a novelty when you can. It's not a real thing. Yeah, is it more liquid than gold? It depends on who you're transacting with. Yeah, I mean, it's a generational thing. The 70-year-old's going to want the brick of gold, that's true.
Speaker 2:So so all the gold, all the precious collecting stores, what do you call them? Coin stores? Yeah, in 30 years they'll be gone. It's just going to be Coinbase, right.
Speaker 1:Or something similar. Something similar, I mean, it's one man's trash and another man's treasure.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Hey, you know what? I had this happen in my own family, but also in clients that we talk with. All those gold coins you buy on TV or you buy them from dealers. Okay, you buy all these stuff, these collectors, they pass away and usually the spouses are like I don't know how you bought all this stuff. This is ridiculous. I want to get this out of my house. So they go to sell it 20 to 30-year holding period. They're selling them for less than what they bought them for. That's the reality, because the spread on gold is huge.
Speaker 1:Yes, huge. Yes, you know I'm not one that buys gold, but, like I often wonder, is it always, like the prepper, doomsday people that are buying gold? Like who buys gold these days? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Like people, the people that are fearful. I think it's what it comes down to now. You still might say, hey, I'm gonna take $20,000. I'm gonna buy some gold, sure I don't need anything wrong with that Right.
Speaker 1:It can't be a core position.
Speaker 2:No, I just. I just don't think you make money at it. I think it's a hobby.
Speaker 1:That's what I think. Yeah, yes, people like buy guns.
Speaker 2:now there are periods there are periods where you don't track the price of gold someone's safe, but we track the price of the gold ETF and there are certainly periods where it does well, but I just don't. I don't think that we're in the world, or gonna be in a world, where gold is gonna be worth anything. We hope not to be our game game.
Speaker 1:I should say it'll always be worth something, but it's not gonna have substantial gains.
Speaker 2:Yeah you know, if you want to hedge the world falling apart Well, not the world, but the market's falling apart there's nothing better than short-term treasuries, and that's repeated itself over and over and over again three month treasuries. If you're scared, go buy three month Treasury. You're gonna get a great yield right now, right, right, versus buying gold, which pays you nothing and you get a hope that the price may well and then you have to custody it, so you have to pay out.
Speaker 1:whether you're cussing your house, you're paying someone else to custody it. Like correct, there's potential cost there, so but but then they say Bitcoin's a new gold.
Speaker 2:So if Bitcoin's a new gold, you have to accept that extreme price volatility. Because I don't. If I was looking at a portfolio and had precious metals, I'm not replacing my precious metals with gold. I'm replacing my equities, right with with. I'm sorry, I'm not placing my precious metals with Bitcoin, mm-hmm, I'm replacing my maybe my equity right or bonds or something. Yeah, I don't even know about bonds, I'd say I would go to my equity and take it out of there at 1% the um.
Speaker 1:So just to give you listeners idea of volatility this month. So the day before the launch of the ETF, bitcoin was at 45 46,000 it. It ran up. On the day of launch, it ran up to 49 and change, and then since then we've been down to 38 39,000. We're back up to 43 and change. So a year ago right, well, but I'm the same. That's all with them three this week three weeks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's some serious volatility, which is why you don't have 20 30% of your money inside, right when you you keep it below 5 to. That's gambling, yeah yeah, it is, and we're only talking about Bitcoin. If you go outside Bitcoin, there's even more volatility absolutely. Um, so it's a gray scale.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great scale.
Speaker 2:So the gray scale is one of the Funds trust that was able to convert to an ETF.
Speaker 1:Correct, they're the one that one and a half percent fees to. Just to be clear, like there's a huge double between them and everyone else wasn't.
Speaker 4:The trust over 2% trust, was it two, two and a half.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they lowered it up to one and a half.
Speaker 1:So they're just trying to, just trying to make up for the well to me that in some ways, they kept their word because before they announced what the fee would be, they're like we will be lowering it when we come to an ETF. Okay, they went from two to one and a half, thanks, right, it was almost as surely not gonna go down to something that was competitive with everybody else because they would just cut their Business off at the knees. I want to say that they had like fee revenue of something like four to five hundred million dollars a year. Wow, on that 2% or whatever the number was, that is obviously gonna come down because their fees come down and they're also having outflows, and I would imagine where they came up with. The one and a half percent may just be a pure math game of okay, what does it cost the average investor to get out of this? Because they're gonna pay capital gains of 20?, maybe higher percent?
Speaker 2:yeah, and. Versus them just paying the 2% and because the trust has been around for a very long time years, yeah, I think since 2017, maybe, right so? But the house. I had a very famous investor right.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, ftx. Well, I just had many famous investors, but maybe this one is a little bit different, as the.
Speaker 1:FTX the estate of FTX is was a big holder of gray scale GBDC and they, over the course of Since the launch, they've been selling. It seems like they're selling maybe over and them and me, other people as well. It's kind of the outflows on that ETF has come way down and and approaching zero. We'll see where it kind of goes in the next couple weeks or months but it's um, you know, we were talking before we started recording that had this is a bit of an aside here, but it's had SPF been able to hold on over for just over a year From when it fell apart before he would have been made whole and his fraud would have not been Found. So it's kind of glad it did. It kind of need to be cleaned up, but it was this kind of a bit ironic.
Speaker 2:You think there's any conspiracy there, that some actors or actor was was flushing people out and they were able to manipulate the markets enough.
Speaker 1:So it is the whole market was down to this whole idea that everything is kind of everybody's on a string and being impede Manipulated thing I might buy into a little bit. So, if you remember, it was CZ of finance that basically outed Sam and then he got in trouble and he got outed by the DOJ For money laundering and he's still in Seattle. He's not allowed to leave. He wanted to go to Dubai for a family surgery and they won't allow him to leave. He was willing to post like four billion dollars of stock as Collateral and they're like stay put. She has no ties to us like what, what right, and he's probably overvalued the stock and all sorts of stuff, but Anyways.
Speaker 2:So four billion for your freedom.
Speaker 1:That's probably what he was thinking right, and for him that's, he's worth more than that. So right, it's easy thing, easy cost.
Speaker 2:He might need to steal from Play sheet. Out of that was the executive for Shoot. Who's executive? They got put in a box and Fly oh, the Nissan. Ceo, I thought it was an ad in Japan. Yeah, so we just need to put him in a box and back of a G5 and off he goes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he needs anything, we might attempt it for four billion. He um. Well, it's four billion in Binance dot US stock.
Speaker 2:Oh, never mind, that's worth, that's worth zero.
Speaker 1:Probably. He's probably got a liabilities attached to it as well, so anyways. So yeah, the grayscale has been selling and it looks like they're selling largely over and, you know, the market seems to be heading the correlation of the price of Bitcoin appreciating over the last three or four days, with that coming down. There's less cell pressure, so We'll see.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. I you know it's the bad actors had to get cleared out and and basically he got in trouble for for what money sent to Ukraine and Iran not having AML policies and yeah in all sorts of other stuff.
Speaker 1:So, like he, he, if he had done the easy stuff, that being easy and I know it's not easy but like a Binance would be as big as it was, it's definitely was attracting a lot of flow. But you know, he could have also not had this headache.
Speaker 2:Well, all of them could have taken the Coinbase route right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I actually read a thing recently that made the argument that we needed people like SBF and and CZ in the industry to get it bootstrapped. Yeah it's an interesting theory. You know I haven't given it tons of thought but I, you know, I guess a bit of a mercenary there willing to kind of come in and Well, maybe it's a modern day.
Speaker 2:You know, you think some of the great Titans of industry right. Right in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, they would never be able to do what they did back then today. Oh, correct, yeah, so it probably some of that. Yeah, you could argue that there are some illegal things going on with. Rockefeller and sure a Lot. All those people right. So maybe that's how, how capitalism works. We we have to have some of the dirty people go first, yeah, make it better for the rest of us.
Speaker 2:Maybe I don't know, I say that tongue-in-cheek, but yeah, all right, so let's talk about bitwise. So this is another. We've been talking with them earlier. They have published their own Bitcoin address. Yeah, why would you do this? Why would you publish your Bitcoin address?
Speaker 1:So it just adds transparency to the whole thing. Like, yes, we do hold the Bitcoin, because there's always the critics or skeptics in the crypto industry. They're like, oh, you say you have something, but you don't really have it because all these frauds like we were just talking about right? So as a way to kind of, I wouldn't say that there was any rumor that they weren't holding it. Be very clear. I would imagine these are the most regulated crypto holdings on the planet at this point, but you know they. They published their Bitcoin address. That was on the 24th and One day later some little jokester decided they were gonna send that address some Bitcoin. So this is probably the only ETF on the planet that has more assets than it needs to have.
Speaker 2:Because some jokester decided he would just sit. Yeah, you can't block it.
Speaker 1:So it's like I mean it was like I know, if it was a dollar, I mean it wasn't much Bitcoin, but like, right, it was. Um, it made the news and I'll just say that, so that's a bit entertaining.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about Larry Fink for a minute.
Speaker 1:Hmm, yeah, so he, while he was in Davos as well, he was Interviewed and he was talking about, you know, a lot of positives, you know saying, oh, the ETFs are going well, and he didn't spend much times Talking about Bitcoin specifically. But but he's kind of pivoted to and this is you know. We talked about this in the last podcast, where I thought one of the themes of the next bull run would be asset tokenization. That's where he spent his time talking and describe asset tokenization to so learning about this, yep.
Speaker 1:So he specifically was talking about real, real-world asset tokenization of securities. So that mean that's obviously the business he's in, so he's got some motivation there. It can it. You know, if you all sudden put an asset on a blockchain, it may make it more efficient for the back office to run, so the fees could be lower, for instance.
Speaker 1:I mean there's a lot of different reasons buying a stock fund be a Tokenization versus the traditional way correct for a bond fund a bond fund or, you know, if you're in a private equity deal, it could be tokenized on a blockchain and it also becomes more liquid. You know, illiquid markets, I think, become Liquid and markets that didn't exist can actually start to exist in an efficient manner with a blockchain, assuming there's enough people interested.
Speaker 2:The you know you could do that with paintings you could do that with.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's already paintings that are tokenized. There's like literally like somewhat decently famous paintings that they're tokenizing, so that kind of brings down the cost of being part of it, because Not many people can go buy $10 million painting. But if you own a hundred bucks of it and kind of participate in the potential upside, right yeah, but you know, in the SEC size, that is that a security. That's the problem with these things. I think you were seeing more that tokenization stuff happen. Your NFTs were going around. That was a kind of like an adult NFT of sorts like let me buy part of the painting, right? So I don't know, it's the. The SEC is in these lawsuits and probably commodity, right I? It's either commodity, some of them or it needs to have its own definition of what a digital asset is. Yeah, so you have digital asset, commodity and security.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, utility maybe it just depends on what it with the underlying, what it's supposed to do? Right, because I could, I could see that with land. I mean, that'd be a great Easy way to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's not that it's hard now, but it could be if you had many, many investors you think about.
Speaker 1:LLCs and right in it, because it takes the cost out of owning something at the cost. It reduces the cost of owning something. Like, if you're buying a house, you might need title insurance, all these other things. Well, if it's provable on a blockchain that it's owned by this, like that 1% that you're paying, you know how to pay, like, for instance, right now. So there's a lot there, but I Was just happy to see Larry talking about it because it felt like that's what the narrative might be. And then, all sudden, I'm a big believer if Larry's talking about something that's gonna happen and cuz black Rectus has so much Sway in the market, so we'll see. It's not gonna be a one-year thing. This is a multi-year, decade-long journey.
Speaker 2:I'm just glad Larry's talking about that and he's not talking about ESG anymore. Well, he's.
Speaker 1:Well, I think around that, I don't know. The week that he was in Davis, they were even saying how they laid off like hundreds of people out of their ESG department. Yeah and I was like, oh, this is making me making room for the crypto people.
Speaker 2:I Mean, I'll give him, I'll give him credit. I don't think he believes a thing he says about ESG like in his heart. I think you my outside opinion.
Speaker 2:I never met the guy likes his bank account more, yeah, and so from a business standpoint, as a block rock shareholder, he's doing, he's doing great because he's he's charging 5x for ESG and it looks just like the stuff that's not an ESG is really not much difference, right? So, yeah, good for him from that standpoint. And the wiser clients have not participated in having to pay in any more fees because we saw that who do we ain't coming from a mile away? Bravo, hey, let's re-wrap this and call it ESG, unless cars charge five times as much, kind of like. Those Was a long time ago. They called them credit default swaps.
Speaker 1:Oh yes.
Speaker 2:Not as toxic as those, but, yeah, not real positive. Well, thanks, robert, good conversation, as usual. We've got a couple of podcast episodes you might be interested in if you want more about crypto. Crypto, episode 197 will financial advisors be using the Bitcoin ETF soon? They are here. Don Friedman was on that episode. Bitcoin having an upcoming bull run episode 202. And then also we will link Our latest how to choose a Bitcoin ETF to this as well. Don't forget to look at a wiser retirement on our YouTube channel and you can like subscribe, follow us there. Thanks for listening today's episode. If you're interested in learning more about wiser wealth management, you can schedule a consultation for one of our fiduciary financial advisors, or if you want to reach out to Robert at Teton crypto capital, you can do so at Robert at Teton crypto capital calm that makes it easy.
Speaker 2:We'll see you guys next week. Thanks for listening. Take care.
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