00:00 Speaker A

Bitcoin making news as it hits new records of a hundred and thirteen thousand dollars. Let’s bring in our Matt Hogan, Bitwise Asset Management CIO and Yahoo Finance banking reporter. David Holarith on all this, Matt. I’ll start with you. So Bitcoin, Bitcoin hitting new highs, Matt. Walk us through what you think explains this. Is this uh, is this correlation to tech stocks, Matt? Is it just continuing enthusias enthusiasm from crypto friendly policies from the White House? What do you what do you chalk it up to? What do you make of it?

00:41 Matt Hogan

Yeah, thanks for having me on. I think both of those are part of the story, but the bigger piece is just massive unrelenting demand meeting limited supply. We’re seeing companies buying huge amounts of Bitcoin and ETFs purchasing huge amounts of Bitcoin and there’s just not that much Bitcoin to go around. I’ll mention in the last 30 days, we’ve seen Bitcoin ETFs acquire five point two billion dollars of Bitcoin. That represents institutional investors making a giant allocation to this space. We see that trend continuing and with the limited supply of Bitcoin, it’s just forcing the price up. I think we’re detaching from a hundred thousand dollars and I think we’re going substantially higher from here.

01:34 Speaker A

When you say substantially higher, Matt, give me some bogeys to watch.

01:39 Matt Hogan

Yeah, absolutely. I think once we break the gravity of around a hundred thousand dollars where we’ve been trading in and out of for the last six months. I think it’s sort of anyone’s guess where we go here at Bitwise. We expect Bitcoin to top two hundred thousand dollars by the end of the year, which I know sounds like a very large number, but the flows we’re seeing from institutional investors and corporations are really significant. They’re accelerating, not slowing down, and I think they’re going to force that price substantially higher.

02:14 Speaker A

200,000 is on the board. Meanwhile, Matt, Congress kicking off crypto week. What are your expectations there?

02:23 Matt Hogan

Yeah, absolutely. That’s the other piece of the story. At the same time, as you have this institutional allocation, you have very positive news from Washington. What we’re hoping to see is the Genius Stable Coin Act, which passed through the Senate on a bipartisan basis, get through the house onto the president’s desk and signed. That will help Wall Street move into crypto in a major way. We’re also hoping to see the market structure act called the Clarity Act make progress through Congress. Those are the two big pieces of legislation. If we get those done this year, crypto is on an extremely strong footing. You’re going to see again, Wall Street make a major move into the space. You’re going to see much fewer risks of blow ups and fraud and negative events like we saw in the past. It’s going to be a very strong foundation if those happen, and I think they might even this week.

03:27 David Hollerith

Hey Matt, David Holarith here. I wanted to ask about Bitcoin flows you were talking about earlier. I mean, last year the story was really about the Bitcoin ETFs. This year, it seems like it’s more about corporations buying Bitcoin. I wanted to ask about those Bitcoin treasury companies. What do you make of it all? It looks like they’ve actually been acquiring Bitcoin at almost a faster pace. Sometimes faster than the ETFs this year.

04:05 Matt Hogan

They have been. It’s really remarkable. It’s become a two horses pulling this card. The ETFs are still doing their part, but you’re absolutely right. These companies are buying even more. For context, Bitcoin companies bought about a hundred and sixty thousand Bitcoin in Q2 alone. That’s a hundred percent of the net new supply of Bitcoin that will come into the market this year. So in one quarter, they bought the entire year’s worth of supply. I know a lot of people out there are skeptical of this trend. If you’re on the inside and you’re seeing the proposals for new deals flowing into your inbox, you know that Q3 is actually going to probably be an even bigger quarter than Q2. So this is a trend that I think actually accelerates before it plateaus and maybe tails off at the second at the end of the year. But I would expect significant buying in Q3 from this sort of quadrant of the market.