Coinbase’s David Duong: The Institutional Shift in 2026 Behind Crypto’s Next Tipping Point
Summary
Macro Liquidity: Emphasis on global M2 and a ~110-day lag suggests continued support for risk assets into 2026 as stealth QE and cash moving off sidelines boost markets.
Stablecoins: Framed as crypto’s killer app with rapid growth in remittances, payroll, and cross-border payments, aided by new frameworks; companies like Coinbase, Circle, BlackRock, and Franklin Templeton are key participants.
Tokenization: Real-world assets and tokenized equities are progressing toward a tipping point, with institutional moves (e.g., Morgan Stanley) and an expected U.S. market structure bill timeline into 2026.
Prediction Markets: Expansion beyond politics into sports and economics, with potential tax and regulatory advantages, and use as granular hedging tools on crypto rails.
Perpetual Futures: Anticipated adoption beyond crypto into equities as a capital-efficient trading primitive with growing composability.
Quantum Risk: Quantum computing poses a medium-term threat to Bitcoin signatures and potentially supply, but mitigation pathways (soft fork and post-quantum standards) are being developed.
Regional Dynamics: Venezuela developments likely boost USD stablecoin demand more than Bitcoin, with broader implications for inflation, energy, and global liquidity.
Transcript
probably sometime in 2026. I think that institutions are increasingly getting involved and they're trying to figure this out themselves. Like they clearly have Bitcoin in their portfolios. Stable coins were already like announced, for example, that remains the killer app inside of crypto. And our projection is that that could grow to like a $1.2 trillion market cap by the end of 2028. The nature of tipping points that you can't predict when the tipping point actually happens. Like it's a confluence of events that actually drives it. like the stickiness of the event, the conversations around it and in some part this is happening across the real world asset space right now. >> Don't forget to sign up for a free portfolio review with one of our endorsed investment partners at wealthon.com/free. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Wealthon Pod. My name is Chris Perkins. I'm president and managing partner of CoinFund. Though yesterday, we did announce that uh I'm going to be spinning off with my partner Seth Gins. Um so until that time, I am still that person. Today I am with a really good friend of mine, David Dong. Uh he is the global head of investment research at Coinbase, if you've ever heard of that company. And uh David has an just an incredible view, comes from a background in Tradfi. Um maybe David just kick off with a little bit about your background and what got you into crypto and then I really can't wait to hear about your views today. >> Sure. Thanks for inviting me Chris. Uh so I guess a little bit about myself. So I joined Coinbase uh about four years ago now and before that I as you mentioned I worked in traditional finance for about 17 years. I've been covering macro I guess for the better part of 20 years now. And uh you know like even though I started out more as a quant researcher I think over time I gravitated towards covering more macro kind of concepts and I primarily worked in emerging markets uh fixed income and FX. So before joining Coinbase I was the head of Latin America FX strategy over at HSBC. >> You know EM FX those markets really rhyme I think a lot with crypto. It makes a ton of sense. You know, there's Bitcoin itself is is really struggling with its identity. For some people, it is a it's digital gold, but for others, it's this frontier risk asset. It still seems to be in the frontier risk asset camp, you know, like like kind of like an EM currency almost, you know. How do you see Bitcoin right now? >> Yeah, I feel like we're in between states at the moment. I mean like I I still think nothing has changed in so far as Bitcoin remains kind of a mix of like FX commodities even like equity elements to some extent. Uh but I say that you know we're probably in a place where fundamentals are becoming a lot more prevalent in our space. Part of that's because of the regulatory environment. I think now that we're getting more regulatory clarity, it seems that a uh market structure bill, for example, is likely happening in probably sometime in 2026, but my guess would be first quarter of 2026. I think that institutions are increasingly getting involved and they're trying to figure this out themselves. Like they clearly have Bitcoin in their portfolios. Uh but I think some in the past have treated it more as a tech sleeve. Others have seen it more as a store of value. I feel like the store value argument is definitely more winning the day. Uh and you know as the world kind of changes as we're seeing like a greater shift because you know many people aren't necessarily I I'm thinking about sovereign central banks out there. They're not necessarily happy with uh the place of the dollar in portfolios today. You know, like the dollar represents 80 90% of all transactions in the world because if you're thinking about balance of payments, for example, you need dollars reserve currency in order to kind of make those transactions. A lot of them are thinking, well, maybe that's not the best place. Uh maybe there should be something else that kind of takes it, but it can't be another sovereign. Bitcoin really kind of fills that role nicely. So, I think that that increasingly is starting to become part of the dialogue as well. >> Wow. You unpacked about 10 things in that statement that we need to dig into. I think the first one is let's just talk about where we are um from a macro perspective. You've been opining a ton about this. Um you know h how do you see the macro environment? I mean last year we had some you know we've we've continued to see some issues. We just went through a pretty interesting geopolitical stress where where crypto responded favorably. But if you were to set the table from a macro perspective, you know, how would you do it? >> So I think if you're looking at any one factor, I mean it's probably not right. I think there are multitude of factors that really kind of contribute to this, but if you were going to just pick one, and obviously I'm doing that for the ease, the dimensionality of it, I would say that liquidity is probably the biggest factor. And when I'm thinking about that, like this is a pretty common chart now. A lot of people look at the M2 money supply. Either the US money supply or the global M2 money supply. I think that for simple reasons, a lot of people just kind of use like the US because it represents a lot of liquidity in the world. Some people try to get a little bit more fancy and go into the global side. We go even a step further and we actually customize a global M2 uh money supply index and we do that by trying to find the pockets of liquidity in the world which are most meaningful to crypto and we try to weight those more heavily and we also lag it appropriately because there's a certain lag when it comes to this stuff. I mean isn't this that like money kind of flows through and it immediately goes into risk immediately goes into crypto? It takes time. Um, so we ran a regression to say like how long does it take for that money to kind of hit and then reach people and get spent inside of the uh risk assets. Is it 30 days, 60 days, 90 days? Uh, we've landed on about 110 days with the highest aggression. Uh, that seems to be the best correlation coefficient that we can find. And you know, like if you're looking at that, it seems that there's still more upside uh over the course of Q1 2026, at least based on the available data so far. Understood. So I think one thing you're referencing is that in December the Fed pivoted from QT to QE or it ended Q it ended QT and so what are you saying that now we have another 110 days as you know liquidity as that liquidity regime changes that we should start seeing upside is is that your thesis? So I think that already the liquidity environment was improving about you know 110 days ago uh which is starting to hit now and I mean some of that I think it's very intuitive you know we still have around 7.5 trillion dollars of capital sitting in money market funds in the US for example and that's just the US I'm not talking about even other countries and what what cash is sitting on sidelines there um and you know I don't know about you I I I try to invest as much of risk as possible possible in my PA. Uh but over time I had to like put some uh in the side. So I kept some capital in those exact money market funds. And I'm getting emails right now telling me that it's now worth 3% like 3 and a half%. Which basically barely covers me on inflation. So I think increasingly a lot of people are probably going to be looking at that and saying like I need to invest further out the risk curve in order to take advantage of higher yield somewhere else. And I think that that will be in other asset classes. Probably it's going to be in equities, but some of it's also going to go into crypto as well. And I think that for me is what's really going to be driving these things. But certainly to what your point about the Fed is, you know, they ended quantitative tightening on December 1st. Um, they are doing stealth QE. I mean, you can call it what you want, but they're also buying T bills, and it's not a small amount either. So I think that a lot of that will continue to add liquidity to this environment. We're not in a vacuum. It's not just about the US. I think we have to think about what's going on abroad as well. But certainly I think it's going to be a big factor. >> Yeah. So let's let's stay in the US for a second though. So Coinbase has been at the heart of stable coin distribution literally, you know, since day one pretty much uh particularly in the US. And we saw the Genius bill pass. Uh I'm going to push back on your bullishness around market structure. We're going to get into that in a second, but we saw the Genius bill passed that's now getting implemented. What role do stable coins uh have on the macro environment today and going forward? >> Yeah. And I think that the discussion around stable coins, even though we got the Genius Act, uh hasn't necessarily been fully settled yet. And some of those elements are starting to kind of peek through inside the market structure bill. And of course, as you said, we can discuss it uh more in a moment. But I will say that right now what we're seeing for stable coins is like it's changing rapidly uh compared to what we saw in previous years because I think prior to 200 I I want to say 2025 but probably a little bit even earlier than that you know like stable coins are mostly used for trading inside the crypto space and I don't think anyone should kind of dispute that. I mean really like you're talking about trading ETH and oftentimes your denominator against that was a USDC or USDT pair. Uh but increasingly you're seeing stable coins being utilized for remittances, crossber payments, payrolls. So it's really starting to have real utility uh in the traditional space. So you're seeing like companies use utilizing it. Uh I think that more and more probably what we're going to see is that block space is going to become more of a commodity in part because these rails are being utilized more for stable coins for tokenized versions of real world assets. So I think that the genius bill couldn't come at a better time because now we actually have a framework of which across which we can actually utilize those kind of platforms. when you're talking about block space um you're talking about the blockchains themselves and the blockchains that these stable coins will I guess run on uh do you have a view on you know right now Ethereum is in is is largely in pole position um Ethereum based in its layer 2s um do you have a view or thesis on how that plays out is there a particular ecosystem or token that benefits based on on this influx of stable coins >> that's interesting because you're right Ethereum right now I think is where most of this stuff is taking place and often times when we have a large institution your black rocks Franklin Templetons of the world they're kind of coming in and you know once upon a time you had banks like JP Morgan who said well we want to create our own private network and they realized that that just was unfeasible right and so a lot of those things like we saw canton pivot and make its own kind of network but that's where it's things kind of start coming in because we're seeing a lot more competition from newer L1s and you saw saw the announcement from Circle suggesting that they're going to build ARC. Uh you have Stripe and Paradigm supporting Tempo. So the question comes is is this going to fragment liquidity across these newer L1 networks or is are people just going to be using Ethereum for example? Is that where things are going to be consolidating? Like I don't think the siloed approach is ultimately going to pan out. I don't think that all the liquidity is going to like fall on just one network. I think that increasingly people are trying to figure out how do we bridge across like different networks. So I think there will be a network of network kind of framework a network of networks excuse me kind of framework and that's kind of where I see the future of kind of blockchain going uh but it's far from settled as a question. If you're looking for a simple, secure way to invest and own physical gold and silver, visit our sister company, Hard Assets Alliance, at hardassetsalliance.com. That's hardassallalliance.com. >> Got it. So, for the investors listening, uh, what what verticals are you excited about? >> So, I think that some of them are very obvious. stable coins were already like announced, for example, that remains the killer app inside of crypto and our projection is that that could grow to like a 1.2 trillion dollar market cap by the end of 2028. Uh, and we base that precisely for the reasons we kind of talked about earlier. Like I think that if we're going to like project for out, we need to wait the current period much more heavily because there are newer use cases, newer regulations in place uh for stable coins. Whereas I think a lot of people kind of say like oh take a percentage of like the current M2 mining supply and that's our projection. We don't do that. We we ran like you know 20,000 Monte Carlo simulations and uh you know did an autogressive model to actually come up with that figure. And even then it's it's really hard to have full confidence about what the ultimate projection of that is going to be. But this is going to be a major use case uh for many institutions. It's probably going to be one of the preminent themes in 2026. But also prediction markets are absolutely growing. I think that's going to be massive. Again, the question of fragmentation of liquidity comes up again. But I think that we'll see like I don't know prediction market aggregators or something start to come up to kind of fill that space. Uh I think perial futures are also going to be a massive lift. uh you know it's right now pre predominantly used inside of crypto if not almost exclusively used in crypto but you're seeing more and more retail users actually step into equities for example and they want more capital efficient ways to trade it and I think that they're looking at the potential of per being used in equities to actually bridge that gap so equity pers could potentially become a thing so I think that the potential of per to become a you know uh financial primitive I think are fairly high. And if that's going to be the case, I think there's going to be increase in composability for those instruments as well. >> Based on your stable coin projections though, like as you model it, what are your assumptions of equity markets and and their ability to tokenize? Because I I see like a one to one correlation, and maybe I'm crazy, but if you have tokenized equities, you're probably going to pay for them in stable coins. And so like I think of the $127 trillion equity global equity market and if you're saying that there's less than you know $2 trillion in stables by 28 and I realize that's not too far away then that I have to assume then you're saying equity markets aren't ready to tokenize. Is that right? >> Not that's not what I'm saying. And again our projection is the midpoint of a of a wide range. I think that, you know, definitely two trillion to three trillion is on the upper side of that range by the time we get to 2028 to 2030. Uh, but we're kind of just calling for a more conservative kind of like midpoint of it. But what I am implying is that it's going to take steps. It's not going to be immediate. We're not going to immediately jump in tokenized equities. Like if by the end of 2026, we're not all trading tokenized equities. I don't think we should be saying to ourselves, well, this didn't work. We tried it. it was an experiment and let's throw the baby out with the bath of water. No one wants this. I think that it's going to be incremental steps in part because you need the institutions which you and I both know we've worked in these big institutions. They are giant battleships that take a you know a long time before they can turn and maneuver. Um and they are working on it right now like it is in process. You're right that I think stable coins are going to become an incremental or an integral part of the trading process of tokenized equities. But right now, like the only tokenized equities we have are outside of the US. That's important because not a lot of people actually even trade equities outside of the US. I mean like the US like it's it's a stronghold of where a lot of retail and institutional investors actually trade this stuff. But you know like I I remember a few months ago months it wasn't even like a long time ago where like the German government was saying like crap we got to incentivize our populace to actually uh invest more in risk because otherwise they won't be able to have an assess to retire on. So they're trying to like figure that out because you know I can't remember the exact number anymore but I think the only like u they only invest in like 16% of like the the stocks that are available out there. So I would say that like you know as this becomes more clear in the US and you know even if we get it done a market structure bill done in the first quarter of 2026 it'll probably take another year after that uh along across which this will need to be implemented. So you got to keep that in mind when we're talking about you know how big this can grow in a short period of time. Yeah, I think of like the the the the shift to tokenization almost like the shift to e- trading that we saw in like the future space and it was you know slow and then all a sudden it was all at once and boons moved from pits over to to to now your ex. So when does that flip happen? like is is it going to be 10 years, five years, three years, you know, because I I appreciate your your modeling of stable coins, but I have to think at a certain point it just flips because like, you know, I'm a fiduciary. We invest in liquid assets. Um, given the choice, I say this all the time, I have to buy the token because I can risk manage it when the US invades uh Venezuela on a Saturday night or Saturday morning, right? You know what I mean? So, when does that flip h that that sort of flipping happen? Yeah, that's a great question because you know we know that there are a lot of historical analoges here where like when there's a tipping point like you it it's by the nature of tipping points that you can't predict when the tipping point actually happens. Like it's a confluence of events that actually drives it like the stickiness of the event the conversations around it like the the the people that come out who actually actually rely on this kind of stuff. And in some part like this is happening across the real world asset space right now. You know like we saw like the headline coming from Morgan Stanley more recently for example that they're also thinking about building tokenized versions of certain funds ETFs as well. Um and just like a few months ago they were allowing their RAAS to actually uh you know recommend crypto to their investors. So that's kind of a good example of like well it seemed like it took a very long time because ETFs were approved back in January 2024 and it took them up till like you know now until they could finally recommend it. But now it's kind of the dam is breaking and it's happening all at once. Now everything's happening. Now that's not that's a non-answer to your question. Is it going to be three years, five years? But the point is I don't know. My guess would be that it's going to take that like two, three year period and then it's all going to happen at once. I think that that's the only thing we can definitely count on that when it does happen, it's going to be like rapid and it'll just be a tipping point and it's going to be completely viral. >> All right, let's talk about long-awaited market structure, Bill. Um whether it's clarity uh or something similar. Uh you seem to be bullish. I'm hearing a lot of bullish signals out of DC. I personally don't buy it. I I I hope that I'm wrong, but um I want to hear your bullcase, man. >> So, I think that a lot of people were concerned during the government shutdown in Q4 uh last year and a lot of people were worried that we wouldn't see a market structure bill wouldn't see the light of day and it was actually quite the opposite. And if you're tuned in to what's happening on Capitol Hill for example, what happened was the you know US government went into a shutdown and a lot of senators were still working like them. They had a skeleton staff of like you know 10 15 people around them and they could have just been twiddling their thumbs and saying like oh man we got nothing to do here like let's let's like but you know like they were picking up bills and saying like well let's kind of get prepped on things and one of those things was the crypto market structure bill. But I think this is kind of where things the the communication breaks down because people don't fully understand like there's so many layers of bureaucracy. There's so many steps to get things done on Capitol Hill. Um and effectively you have the the clarity bill that was passed by the House of Representatives in July of 2025. But the analog in uh the Senate is that there are two bills. There's one bill from the Senate Bank Committee and one bill from the Senate A Committee. Why do they do that? Well, the Senate Bank Committee basically is in charge of has oversight of the SEC and the Senate a committee has oversight of the CFTC. And so they wrote their separate bills to particularly deal with the SEC and the CFTC. But at the end of this process, once both bills are agreed upon by the committees, basically marked up, then they're going to be unified into one bill and then that can be presented on the Senate floor. Once that's done, that then gets sent over to the uh House of Representatives and then the House of Representatives has to reconcile that with the clarity bill that they've already passed. And once that's done, then it can be approved and sent to President Trump's desk. So, as you can see, still a lot of steps to go, but we're getting closer than we ever have before. We're seeing that there's still a lot of bipartisanship uh on Capitol Hill. Like, there's a lot of working across the aisle on the cryptoru market structure bill. And I think that that's something that people don't appreciate because they kind of see this as a red and blue issue and it's really not. Like if you look at the members of like the House of Representatives, there's 289 members of the House of Representatives who are pro crypto. That's why we got like the like the clarity bill passed so easily. That's why the genius bill like passed and now we have more clarity around tokens. Mostly are commodities. Commodities are regulated by states. If you had a federal regime, it's just much more seamless to comply. And I know it's been a little bit clunky dealing with all those states. Um that said, I agree with you that there's a lot of bipartisan support, but there's also a lot of partisan hate and discontent right now. And I don't know, I I remain skeptical. Uh I hope you prove me wrong. Uh I think that there's a lot of folks that are really angry about a perceived ethics issue uh related to Donald Trump and crypto. That said, there's a huge eth ethics issue related to all all of government and it needs to be much bigger than crypto that we need to just sort through. But when I talk to senators, they're like, "No, like we got to get we got to figure out Trump's crypto stuff." Second one they have an issue with is near and dear to your heart interest on stable coins. They're like, "We need to close that loop." Which I think you and I will both agree. What loop? That's the law's been written. Like it's done, guys. Game over. Like, let's go on to the next one. that's an issue. And then of course DeFi, like DeFi is, you know, it's hard enough for us to explain what Ethereum is or Bitcoin, but when you start getting into DeFi, it really blows people's minds. And I just don't think um based on some of the language I've seen, people understand DeFi. They they don't understand that it's it's tech. It's it's it's an internet. It's, you know, you don't regulate the internet. It's, you know, you regulate the activities. I don't think that light bulb has gone on for most members of Congress. So, do you think all three of those are going to get overcome? Like, and by the way, the other thing that's in the back of my mind, having lived through a couple of these things, Genius Act should have been a slam dunk. And at the last minute, it was really hard to push over the line. Uh, I just see there's just so much complexity with power moving from from banking, to your point, over to Agg based on certain outcomes. like lot of power politics, partisan and even, you know, nonpartisan power politics within committees. I don't know, man. Um, how do you respond to all that negativity, which and I'm not usually the negative guy. >> No, I don't think that you're wrong, by the way, Chris. I think that you need to have a healthy dose of, you know, not skepticism per se, but definitely realist, you know, take a realistic approach to what's happening. I think it's going to cross over the line and I think we're going to get it done, but I'm not going to say it's easy. Far from it. I think there are a lot of interest at play. Like take stable coins that you mentioned, stable coin yield. I mean, like like you said, I thought this was done and dusted by the time we got the Genius Bill and Gus Act passed, but you see the bank lobby is still kind of coming in here and I get it. They're trying to protect their own interests and that's why you still kind of see this process ongoing. Um, but that said, do I think that they won't resolve it at all? I absolutely think that's not going to be the case. I think they will find a path to actually getting this approved. Uh, you know, like some of those institutions that I said that, you know, have you like the banks for example that are trying to kind of defend it at the moment and using their lobbying power to kind of defend it. I think they are getting the crypto. It's not a question of hey, like they don't want to do it at all. It's a question of like they just want to be ready for it and then once that happens then you know they're they're kind of okay. At least that's kind of my my realistic take on it. That's my view, not Coinbase's view. But you know like I I think that if we're taking that kind of peace meal and like each of those parts that you kind of discussed, I think all of them can be broken down in that kind of way and I can say like actually yeah, it's not going to be easy. I don't think it's going to be easy at all, but I do think that it can happen. >> Got it. All right. So, I asked you about what you're what you were excited about. You said stable coins, and I think there are a lot of ways to get exposure to stable coins. Obviously, you don't want to buy USDC because it's just going to be worth a dollar. Um, but you could invest in Circle the Equity. Um, you could obviously invest in some of the distribution uh agents, people like Coinbase. Are there other investments in the stable coin vertical that people should be thinking about or ecosystems? Is it simply go long ETH? I think a lot of people who are only investing in tokens uh have just mainly thought about it in from an ecosystem kind of perspective. >> Yeah. >> But what you're kind of pointing out in terms of like more people kind of saying like well how do I get exposure to it like maybe we should be buying like circle equity etc. Um, I think it's interesting because that kind of opened a door to seeing a lot of traditional investors who have of course been happy to kind of take exposure, but also even on the crypto side of things like you know when we talk about crypton natives for example for the longest time uh you and I have heard been on the same telegram channels or heard from the same people and they were like oh I would never absolutely like invest in stons whatsoever. Like it's just not like my thing like I only want to invest in tokens. That's not really the case anymore. you know, you're you're definitely hearing a lot more capital flow over from the crypto space into the equity space in part because they're trying to find answer the exact question that you presented. they're trying to figure out well how do I get exposure to more of the stuff and you know it's even happening in the last like uh two weeks or so because you know like there was like a big dichotomy between what happened with unis swap versus what happened with a because on December 26 like unis swap took the vote and like they said we're going to turn we're going to do the fee switch and I think it was like near unanimous uh for people who wanted that to happen which would suggest that you know people want to actually have the fundamentals to actually support token projects But equally, you're seeing the A like kind of situation start to bring up questions of like, well, where is value capture ultimately going to go? Is it going to move to the tokens or is it going to be on the equity side of things? And I think that that question is going to be answered in 2026 or at least part of it. Um, I don't think we know for sure at this moment, but we're seeing these models emerge and giving investors like freedom of choice to figure out like where should the value capture ultimately be? Yeah, it's tricky and I think there's two parts to it. Uh, one part of it everybody talks about is like where's value acrew? Uh, do I buy the token or do I buy the equity? The part that people don't talk about as much is access, right? Pretty much anyone can buy the token. You know, looking at a as an example, but damn it, you know, you you it's very hard for people to get access to private equity. Um, you know, unless you're a venture fund, right? How do you reconcile that? and and and like we've seen a couple of exchanges trying to, you know, fix some of the private equity access challenges that we're seeing, but but how do you think about that? Is is there are we also going to see in 26 um you know, we're already seeing a lot of a lot of um positive momentum when it comes to IPOs and and going public. You guys famously went through a direct listing. How do you recognize that public versus private? Is it going to be like, hey, you know, I'm going to have more choice on equities or like we have DATs as well now. How do you think about all this through an investment lens? >> Yeah, there's a lot to cover there and I mean we are in seeing that increasingly private equity and private credit are big sectors in the real world asset space and you know like if you you know uh take out for example like uh you know like if you go to RWA.xyz XYZ like you'll see that you know the biggest sector that's distributed on chain still remains US treasuries but if it you know if you kind of exclude that criteria of like you know distributed on chain it's really private credit because I think that often times people for the reasons you kind of mentioned it's hard to value it's hard to mark to market um and you know tokenized kind of forms of this actually at least do a slightly better job of being able to to you know capture value and kind of get exposure to this kind of stuff. So I do think that there is a route that allows tokenization of private equity, privization of private credit to actually grow because you know it's a meaningful kind of asset class that people want to get exposure to but can't easily get exposure to. Um they are in pension funds though and other things. So it probably is in to some extent in like most people's portfolios. uh but you know like it's still a challenge because you know it might not move for like a year and then suddenly like the price has a gap because then you suddenly value it. So I do think that some of those things are starting to kind of get reconciled here and maybe with the advent of tokenized equities. Um and again like we're not there yet. most of the tokenized equities are only available outside of the US. But like once that starts getting introduced and like people start saying like okay now we are getting instantaneous settlement it's not just like T+2 anymore or T+1 anymore like let's let's kind of figure out like uh you know how this stuff kind of runs. I think that that might get us a little bit closer like one step closer anyway. Uh but I I don't think we're going to resolve that question anytime soon. >> Got it. So we talked stable coins. Um tokenization is obviously uh foremost on everyone's mind. Any other verticals that you're excited about in the crypto space going into 26? >> So it's a quasi crypto theme. Uh I say this because you know like we have both variants of it like both crypto and non-crypto variants, but I think prediction markets are going to be huge in 2026. I mean we're already seeing it. Um you know like this is something that I've been saying since like end of 2024 when everyone was like all right the US elections are over. prediction markets are going to go away and I said nope like they're they're gonna stick around and they're going to cover a lot more than just politics and a lot of people said no that's not happening and to be fair at the start of 2025 volumes did decline but they didn't go away for sure and over the course of the last three to six months they've climbed rapidly and you know they're now encompassing sectors as far as wide as like sports to economics um more people are talking about whether prediction markets can be used to actually hedge positions because you can get very very granular with prediction markets in a way that you can't necessarily do with traditional financial instruments where which is why we have proxies right like we have proxy hedges and other things like that was a famous thing in like in the FX world like there proxy hedges for other all sorts of EM currencies that I would have >> um and I think that we're going to see that prediction markets are going to play a much bigger role I mean the one big beautiful bill uh that was also passed I think sometime in July 2025 als also like you know put some regulations around uh gambling that also will probably make it more difficult because effectively you can't net your winnings uh against like 100% of your losses anymore. I think it's only 90% of your losses. So consequently like you know you could be you know making a loss and you stop to pay taxes but you aren't subject to those in prediction markets because these are derivative instruments. So I do think that this is going to be grow as a major theme. Uh, and I personally think that the crypto variants of prediction markets are going to be more important because they actually have like the settlement built right in. It's all smart contract based. Um, I I tend to think that these are a lot more efficient and just better than, you know, your non-cryptovariants. So, I do think that as a crypto theme, this could become very important. >> So, it's a tax ARB and it's also regulatory ARB. uh because gambling is is regulated to states, you know, similar to what we're looking at with the market structure bill, derivatives are uh regulated federally. So that could be another nice little ARB, couldn't it? >> Yeah, I think so. And you know, that's that's where where I think the CFTC is going to be going with this. >> All right, I want to shift over now uh for a second. Venezuela. Uh, United States just executed one of the most seamless raids in military history, uh, capturing President Maduro. And obviously, President Trump is looking at oil. Um, and and the fact that it is the largest holder, we believe it's one of the largest holders of of reserves in the world. Maybe it's not the cleanest and easiest version uh to extract and refine uh but massive oil natural resources. Um when you think about and there's also talk about a very significant Bitcoin reserve hanging out there uh that we may or may not have access to as you look at that entire geo and markets frankly typically don't like this type of geopolitical uncertainty but damn they they really didn't mind uh this particular move particularly through a historical lens. How does that shift in US policy I guess it's been a culmination of over a year. What does this mean for crypto markets? >> Oh, that is a great question. Um, I don't think we've seen it actually hit the price just yet. I think that we're seeing that obviously post uh the Venezuela raid, you know, Bitcoin has been uh better supported, but I think that those are kind of like separate things. I think that it's happening like Bitcoin's kind of pickup. I shouldn't say rally but pick up over the last few days uh has been due to the fact that we saw a lot of tax lost harvesting in December and you know it's very evident when you look at the outflows coming from spot bitcoin ETFs for example and you know over the course of the last few days inflows have started to kind of trickle back in and you know like I don't think that we're going to be completely divorced from geopolitics in fact oftentimes we we aren't I think that geopolitics actually feature pretty heavily in terms of what happens for for crypto. Um, but often times it's either from a technical perspective because that's the source. For example, like if you're worried about your currency, then are you acquiring like you know, Bitcoin to kind of you know protect yourself against uh you know devaluation of like the Argentine peso or Turkish lera and I'm not saying that's always done, but I'm saying it's a possibility. Um, so I do think that those things do exist. in the case of Venezuela. I mean, so as I said at the beginning of the call, you know, I used to cover Latin America and you said it correctly like, you know, like I think that there is this it's pretty obvious uh that a lot of people are like, "Oh, it's about oil, right?" And Venezuel has the largest stock piles of oil, but you've seen that its production has gone from like back in like the day I remember when like Venezuela used to produce like 3 million barrels of oil a day. That's down to like a million or less than a million. >> Yeah. less than a million. Yep. >> You know, it's because the infrastructure isn't there. It's because also this isn't like, you know, like sweet, light, crude. It is, you know, the the kind that needs heavy refining in order to be usable. Uh so this isn't going to be a a oneanddone kind of situation of like, all right, we we got it. Now, let's kind of go in there and extract all the oil. It's like, okay, you need to build the refineries. That takes time. Um like, how long does it take to kind of get into production? Then we're thinking about the people inside of Venezuela. They have been cut off through due to capital controls and other things for a very long time. Now they have access to the world again. Like what's going to happen to that? I mean like ultimately I do think this is going to be relevant uh for a macro lens on like what happens to Bitcoin and maybe like higher beta assets in the crypto space. But for now, I think that it's probably going to, you know, not have a significant kind of effect on the price action. And then probably as things kind of like develop and people start thinking about like, okay, how's this going to affect energy prices? Um, you know, what's that going to do to global inflation? Like, you know, do we need kind of things to kind of protect against that? When we think about deficits, it's not just about any one country. We're thinking about multiple kind of countries. Think about the spending there. I think those kind of factors are going to come into play, but for now I don't think that this situation probably will have a a lot of huge implications for Bitcoin. >> What about stable coins? Um I was talking to a buddy of mine Austin Campbell uh recently and he's just like the winner is not going to be Bitcoin. Maybe it is. I think Bitcoin will be somewhat of a winner, but he was saying you know what the real winner here is going to be stable coins. Uh people are going to purchase that oil dollars. Those are stable coins. They're going to they're going to be more demand for stables. US dollar stables rather than Bitcoin. H how do you think about that? And he's, you know, perhaps throughout uh South and Central America. >> Yeah, I've had very similar thoughts to be honest with you. Like I thought that this would help Bitcoin, but on a marginal kind of basis, but as a thinking about the dollar, it's actually much more beneficial to the USD. And a lot of that has to do with historical reasons, right? Like typically when you go to like um you know like let's let's just take like its neighbor Colombia for example like people don't buy apartments in Colombia with Colombian pesos. You would think they would but they buy their col those apartments in US dollars and there's a reason they do that and it's the same reason they do that in a lot like why like people in Mexico like when people send remittances home from the US into Mexico they just take those dollars and put it in the mattress. They're not like convert I mean they convert it into pesos only when they need it to use it for their day-to-day purchases. But like the dollar holds a very powerful position inside of most people's like incomes inside of Latin America and Venezuela is no exception to that. So, I think that when we're talking about the potential, I wouldn't say reopening, but definitely like the the growth of the energy sector inside of Venezuela, um, and you know, basically people having access again to like USD and other things, I think, yeah, you know, like there's going to be a rush of demand for dollars coming in there that will probably support stable coins more than, you know, crypto assets like Bitcoin, at least as first blush. Got you. All right. Big question for you. You recently published a piece talking about the big boogeyman, something we call quantum. And you know, this seems to come up every so often. And I'll remind people that the idea of quantum physics has been around, you know, since like the late 19th century. I think Colombia started its quantum initiatives in like 1909. So like quantum is not a new concept, but it does seem like it's getting quantum computing itself is getting kind of real. And recently you published a piece, you know, suggesting that it could place parts of Bitcoin at risk. And I know people freak out when they hear that because they think it will destroy uh the price, you know, and you talk about mining uh as well as have people with quantum computers having unfair advantage. Can you unpack uh the quantum thesis and what that means for price going forward? >> So, let me just say upfront that I think the near-term probability of successful quantum attack is still very low. But that said, the quantum threat I think is there. And as you said, like I think people should not underestimate how quickly quantum is developing right now. Like quantum computing is coming whether you know they want it or not. And I don't think that's a bad thing by the way. I think there's going to be a lot that's going to be un unlocked because of quantum computing from like medical innovations to uh things. So I think that we should welcome that. But certainly trying to get to a post quantum or post quantum cryptography kind of world I would say or it's actually I think it's called postquantum cryptography excuse me world. I think that that is going to be massively important. So, how does this affect Bitcoin? Because I don't think a lot of people fully grasp how like what the issues at play are because there's really kind of like two potential vectors that we need to think about when we're talking about, you know, the the potential risk of quantum computing to to Bitcoin. And the first is that, you know, the signatures, the transaction signatures depend on a certain type of uh quantum of of cryptography, excuse me. And basically, we call it the lifted curve digital signature algorithm. Um, and that means that if you're an attacker who is capable of, you know, using quantum computers to actually crack the code very quickly and you could use Shor's algorithm or Grover's algorithm to kind of do it. Um, the attacker could potentially just spend all these coins by forging valid signatures. So, that's the first attack vector. The second is that you know like Bitcoin specifically uses like SHA or SHA like 256 for its proofof work mining processes which means that if it kind of like attacks that then you could see there could be a wellspring of like new Bitcoin that wasn't previously like uh you know that didn't previously exist and so that would obviously affect the supply. Now, of those two, I would say that the first issue like the elliptic curve attacks probably are the more relevant ones because I think that affects us right now. And this is what we see under threat because at the moment we think that the Bitcoin at risk of a quantum attack because they're relying on old signatures, for example, is around 6.8 million Bitcoin. So that means there's about $630 billion or so of Bitcoin that could, you know, potentially flood the market. But again, like I would say that like that would be a concern if we didn't have a roadmap to actually mitigate this. And we do uh like there's people who are working within like the crypto space definitely like core members of like the the you know bitcoin developers who are working on this as well as like you know like national kind of international kind of like uh organizations that are working on this. >> Got it. So uh it's a threat threat's getting mitigated. Does that impact you know your should that impact your investment thesis if you're thinking about getting into Bitcoin for the first time? Now, this is something that's interesting because, you know, like when we were talking, so I don't know if you ever talked about it on your show, but like last year, one of the big things that we were looking at in the second half of 2025 was what are long-term holders of Bitcoin doing? And we saw some movement of wallets. We saw some selling and people kind of conflated the two and said like, "Oh man, this is kind of forcing like like pressure on this to to people kind of like just just selling the Bitcoin or maybe they're just like saw it at like good, you know, take profit levels." Like I think that there was definitely a bunch of OGs or long-term holders who had it in vulnerable wallets were also trying to mitigate the risk by actually moving uh their Bitcoin. And that was something that a lot of people like downplayed or didn't really kind of like look at. And I think that that was definitely part of it. So like that there's kind of like a part of this where I'm just like hold on. It's not just that all these long-term holders are just trying to like dump their Bitcoin. Like just keep in mind that like there are other reasons and quantum the quantum risk is part of that. But I think that we heard from Michael Sailor like an interview like a few weeks ago who also brought up Quantum and he took it as a kind of a positive kind of like approach because he said like listen um you know it's very possible that some of those uh those wallets and that Bitcoin will need to be excluded or held offchain until we deal with the quantum problem. And if that's the case then we're talking about even more finite supply of Bitcoin which would be good for the value. So I think that there are arguments people are making on both sides of the equation about like the potential like supply risk if like you know someone is able to crack like uh quantum like soon um which you know there is by the way like a short-term path like you know there there there's good papers that I can direct you to which say that like if there is a sudden breakthrough in quantum computing like there would be a soft fork path that could take about roughly two years in order to kind of like migrate uh some of that Bitcoin coin and then there's the current path that we're on which is would take about seven years to actually standardize all the postquantum signatures and actually let the wallets and the nodes kind of adapt to it and actually move to a you know a more quantum resistant kind of world. So I would say that you know like I don't think anyone like fully knows just yet. A lot of it depends on the timing of whether or not we could see a quantum breakthrough. >> Got it. All right, man. Last question. uh as you're looking forward between now and into 26, any big predictions, anything that you're looking for plus or minus that would influence, you know, your view of the markets? >> So, I think that there's a lot of things flying under the radar right now. A lot of it still tends to be macro to be honest with you. >> Yep. I think that people are rightly paying attention to what's happening with uh you know the the Federal Reserve and whether rate cuts are coming, who the next Fed chair is going to be and it's it's important although some of that I don't think you can fully price in uh just yet. New Fed chair definitely I I think there's too many outcomes to kind of do it. Um the Supreme Court ruling on tariffs I think are is another one like again not something you can play right now because the there's just a number of outcomes here but I think that there is David, I'm going to cut you off, man. Cuz like there's a 77% chance, I think, on poly market that the tariffs are going to be deemed no bueno uh by the Supreme Court, right? It's like what does that mean for markets in your mind? Is that good or bad for cryp particularly crypto? >> This is where I think things require a bit of nuance because let's say that 77% chance is right. Heck, let's say it's done. Let's say it's a done deal. 90% odds, 100% odds that the Supreme Court actually rules against uh tariffs or at least rules against being able to use the Emergency Powers Act to actually have tariffs. >> Well, there's two routes ahead of. Number one, President Trump and the administration can just accept it and say, "Well, guys, we tried like uh we're going to actually have to give back some of the cash uh that that we earned on these things and that goes to imports importers or corporates in effect becoming a stealth form of stimulus to the economy, which would actually prolong like good times even more. That would actually be like very supportive for risk assets in general and crypto in particular. So I think that's something that people may or may not be missing, but I think that's definitely important like something important to kind of mention. >> The other possibility is that it actually comes out and says like, okay, they struck down tariffs, but don't worry guys, we have these, you know, other things that we can use. We can definitely put on tariffs for like a finite amount of days, not using the Emerging Powers Act, but other things. Or the Treasury can actually open up an investigation and then that could actually have like uh tariffs like over a longer period of time. So there's other things. It really depends on what happens next. So that's what I mean when I say like there are a number of outcomes that could still happen. It's not just about the Supreme Court's decision, but it's about what the administration does in reaction to that. >> Yeah. Sorry I I cut you off, but like I really appreciate that nuance because no one's really unpacked it. Uh I think thoughtfully that that was really helpful. Uh what else? So So I I cut you off when you were saying tariffs. You're watching that. Anything else as we got out into 26? I think that the measures of AI productivity are only going to grow. So that's going to be a very big part of the macro kind of picture for me. Uh I think that this is you know disintermediating jobs which is kind of contributing to like a a deeper kind of like K-shaped economy than we had kind of seen previously. But at the same time it's been very supportive for a lot of companies. And I don't think we fully thought through the implications of that because typically when you see like you know uh people like companies laying off workers they're you know it's because the company is not doing well. It's quite the opposite. They're doing a lot better profits are going up. They're more efficient. Uh productivity is is increasing and they're laying off people. Um but that means companies are more profitable. It means at least stocks are more profitable. Uh but what is the implication on crypto? I think that we're we're still kind of dealing with those ramp ramifications right now. So, I think it's going to be a really important theme. But that's all in the macro side of things. I think inside the crypto space, you know, we're thinking about the next upgrade for Ethereum. Uh they're now like progressing towards like two upgrades a year. I think that's going to be massive. Uh we haven't even fully priced in I would say the the Petra upgrade from two upgrades ago. Uh because, you know, Lido is still finishing up like the consolidation of their validators. So I think that those things are being missed because we're kind of so focused on the momentum plays and what's been happening on the macro picture and myself included. But you know that I think is going to be important on the Salana side. I think we need to think about the fire dancer upgrade that's coming in like because you know they're going to migrate from Franken Dancer into like fire dancer. Uh so fully like on like on the mainet I think that's going to be important. Uh you're also seeing like other upgrades that are going to be like more important to its supply demand dynamics. Um and then you know it just kick off the year we saw the XRP take like a huge kind of stride forward. Uh so you know like you can't discount like you know what the maybe people in the institutional side may not be paying attention to right now that are becoming a lot more relevant uh to our space. So I think all these things are going to be hugely like significant. And then thinking about whether privacy themes are still important, AI themes are still important. Um, you know, like I I think that like that's still an open question at the moment. >> Love it, David. Really, really appreciate you coming on, ladies and gentlemen. David Dong, uh, global head of investment research at Coinbase. Uh, how can people reach you, sir? >> Uh, yeah, you can find me on Twitter at David Dwang, all one word, 10 10 letters. Uh, you can also find me on LinkedIn. >> Amazing. Thanks again for coming on, man. Have a great day. >> Thank you. Don't forget to sign up for a free portfolio review with one of our endorsed investment partners at wealthon.comfree. With markets hitting all-time highs, now is a great time to stress test your strategy and be prepared for what comes next. Thank you all for watching. We'll see you again next time.
Coinbase’s David Duong: The Institutional Shift in 2026 Behind Crypto’s Next Tipping Point
Summary
Transcript
probably sometime in 2026. I think that institutions are increasingly getting involved and they're trying to figure this out themselves. Like they clearly have Bitcoin in their portfolios. Stable coins were already like announced, for example, that remains the killer app inside of crypto. And our projection is that that could grow to like a $1.2 trillion market cap by the end of 2028. The nature of tipping points that you can't predict when the tipping point actually happens. Like it's a confluence of events that actually drives it. like the stickiness of the event, the conversations around it and in some part this is happening across the real world asset space right now. >> Don't forget to sign up for a free portfolio review with one of our endorsed investment partners at wealthon.com/free. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Wealthon Pod. My name is Chris Perkins. I'm president and managing partner of CoinFund. Though yesterday, we did announce that uh I'm going to be spinning off with my partner Seth Gins. Um so until that time, I am still that person. Today I am with a really good friend of mine, David Dong. Uh he is the global head of investment research at Coinbase, if you've ever heard of that company. And uh David has an just an incredible view, comes from a background in Tradfi. Um maybe David just kick off with a little bit about your background and what got you into crypto and then I really can't wait to hear about your views today. >> Sure. Thanks for inviting me Chris. Uh so I guess a little bit about myself. So I joined Coinbase uh about four years ago now and before that I as you mentioned I worked in traditional finance for about 17 years. I've been covering macro I guess for the better part of 20 years now. And uh you know like even though I started out more as a quant researcher I think over time I gravitated towards covering more macro kind of concepts and I primarily worked in emerging markets uh fixed income and FX. So before joining Coinbase I was the head of Latin America FX strategy over at HSBC. >> You know EM FX those markets really rhyme I think a lot with crypto. It makes a ton of sense. You know, there's Bitcoin itself is is really struggling with its identity. For some people, it is a it's digital gold, but for others, it's this frontier risk asset. It still seems to be in the frontier risk asset camp, you know, like like kind of like an EM currency almost, you know. How do you see Bitcoin right now? >> Yeah, I feel like we're in between states at the moment. I mean like I I still think nothing has changed in so far as Bitcoin remains kind of a mix of like FX commodities even like equity elements to some extent. Uh but I say that you know we're probably in a place where fundamentals are becoming a lot more prevalent in our space. Part of that's because of the regulatory environment. I think now that we're getting more regulatory clarity, it seems that a uh market structure bill, for example, is likely happening in probably sometime in 2026, but my guess would be first quarter of 2026. I think that institutions are increasingly getting involved and they're trying to figure this out themselves. Like they clearly have Bitcoin in their portfolios. Uh but I think some in the past have treated it more as a tech sleeve. Others have seen it more as a store of value. I feel like the store value argument is definitely more winning the day. Uh and you know as the world kind of changes as we're seeing like a greater shift because you know many people aren't necessarily I I'm thinking about sovereign central banks out there. They're not necessarily happy with uh the place of the dollar in portfolios today. You know, like the dollar represents 80 90% of all transactions in the world because if you're thinking about balance of payments, for example, you need dollars reserve currency in order to kind of make those transactions. A lot of them are thinking, well, maybe that's not the best place. Uh maybe there should be something else that kind of takes it, but it can't be another sovereign. Bitcoin really kind of fills that role nicely. So, I think that that increasingly is starting to become part of the dialogue as well. >> Wow. You unpacked about 10 things in that statement that we need to dig into. I think the first one is let's just talk about where we are um from a macro perspective. You've been opining a ton about this. Um you know h how do you see the macro environment? I mean last year we had some you know we've we've continued to see some issues. We just went through a pretty interesting geopolitical stress where where crypto responded favorably. But if you were to set the table from a macro perspective, you know, how would you do it? >> So I think if you're looking at any one factor, I mean it's probably not right. I think there are multitude of factors that really kind of contribute to this, but if you were going to just pick one, and obviously I'm doing that for the ease, the dimensionality of it, I would say that liquidity is probably the biggest factor. And when I'm thinking about that, like this is a pretty common chart now. A lot of people look at the M2 money supply. Either the US money supply or the global M2 money supply. I think that for simple reasons, a lot of people just kind of use like the US because it represents a lot of liquidity in the world. Some people try to get a little bit more fancy and go into the global side. We go even a step further and we actually customize a global M2 uh money supply index and we do that by trying to find the pockets of liquidity in the world which are most meaningful to crypto and we try to weight those more heavily and we also lag it appropriately because there's a certain lag when it comes to this stuff. I mean isn't this that like money kind of flows through and it immediately goes into risk immediately goes into crypto? It takes time. Um, so we ran a regression to say like how long does it take for that money to kind of hit and then reach people and get spent inside of the uh risk assets. Is it 30 days, 60 days, 90 days? Uh, we've landed on about 110 days with the highest aggression. Uh, that seems to be the best correlation coefficient that we can find. And you know, like if you're looking at that, it seems that there's still more upside uh over the course of Q1 2026, at least based on the available data so far. Understood. So I think one thing you're referencing is that in December the Fed pivoted from QT to QE or it ended Q it ended QT and so what are you saying that now we have another 110 days as you know liquidity as that liquidity regime changes that we should start seeing upside is is that your thesis? So I think that already the liquidity environment was improving about you know 110 days ago uh which is starting to hit now and I mean some of that I think it's very intuitive you know we still have around 7.5 trillion dollars of capital sitting in money market funds in the US for example and that's just the US I'm not talking about even other countries and what what cash is sitting on sidelines there um and you know I don't know about you I I I try to invest as much of risk as possible possible in my PA. Uh but over time I had to like put some uh in the side. So I kept some capital in those exact money market funds. And I'm getting emails right now telling me that it's now worth 3% like 3 and a half%. Which basically barely covers me on inflation. So I think increasingly a lot of people are probably going to be looking at that and saying like I need to invest further out the risk curve in order to take advantage of higher yield somewhere else. And I think that that will be in other asset classes. Probably it's going to be in equities, but some of it's also going to go into crypto as well. And I think that for me is what's really going to be driving these things. But certainly to what your point about the Fed is, you know, they ended quantitative tightening on December 1st. Um, they are doing stealth QE. I mean, you can call it what you want, but they're also buying T bills, and it's not a small amount either. So I think that a lot of that will continue to add liquidity to this environment. We're not in a vacuum. It's not just about the US. I think we have to think about what's going on abroad as well. But certainly I think it's going to be a big factor. >> Yeah. So let's let's stay in the US for a second though. So Coinbase has been at the heart of stable coin distribution literally, you know, since day one pretty much uh particularly in the US. And we saw the Genius bill pass. Uh I'm going to push back on your bullishness around market structure. We're going to get into that in a second, but we saw the Genius bill passed that's now getting implemented. What role do stable coins uh have on the macro environment today and going forward? >> Yeah. And I think that the discussion around stable coins, even though we got the Genius Act, uh hasn't necessarily been fully settled yet. And some of those elements are starting to kind of peek through inside the market structure bill. And of course, as you said, we can discuss it uh more in a moment. But I will say that right now what we're seeing for stable coins is like it's changing rapidly uh compared to what we saw in previous years because I think prior to 200 I I want to say 2025 but probably a little bit even earlier than that you know like stable coins are mostly used for trading inside the crypto space and I don't think anyone should kind of dispute that. I mean really like you're talking about trading ETH and oftentimes your denominator against that was a USDC or USDT pair. Uh but increasingly you're seeing stable coins being utilized for remittances, crossber payments, payrolls. So it's really starting to have real utility uh in the traditional space. So you're seeing like companies use utilizing it. Uh I think that more and more probably what we're going to see is that block space is going to become more of a commodity in part because these rails are being utilized more for stable coins for tokenized versions of real world assets. So I think that the genius bill couldn't come at a better time because now we actually have a framework of which across which we can actually utilize those kind of platforms. when you're talking about block space um you're talking about the blockchains themselves and the blockchains that these stable coins will I guess run on uh do you have a view on you know right now Ethereum is in is is largely in pole position um Ethereum based in its layer 2s um do you have a view or thesis on how that plays out is there a particular ecosystem or token that benefits based on on this influx of stable coins >> that's interesting because you're right Ethereum right now I think is where most of this stuff is taking place and often times when we have a large institution your black rocks Franklin Templetons of the world they're kind of coming in and you know once upon a time you had banks like JP Morgan who said well we want to create our own private network and they realized that that just was unfeasible right and so a lot of those things like we saw canton pivot and make its own kind of network but that's where it's things kind of start coming in because we're seeing a lot more competition from newer L1s and you saw saw the announcement from Circle suggesting that they're going to build ARC. Uh you have Stripe and Paradigm supporting Tempo. So the question comes is is this going to fragment liquidity across these newer L1 networks or is are people just going to be using Ethereum for example? Is that where things are going to be consolidating? Like I don't think the siloed approach is ultimately going to pan out. I don't think that all the liquidity is going to like fall on just one network. I think that increasingly people are trying to figure out how do we bridge across like different networks. So I think there will be a network of network kind of framework a network of networks excuse me kind of framework and that's kind of where I see the future of kind of blockchain going uh but it's far from settled as a question. If you're looking for a simple, secure way to invest and own physical gold and silver, visit our sister company, Hard Assets Alliance, at hardassetsalliance.com. That's hardassallalliance.com. >> Got it. So, for the investors listening, uh, what what verticals are you excited about? >> So, I think that some of them are very obvious. stable coins were already like announced, for example, that remains the killer app inside of crypto and our projection is that that could grow to like a 1.2 trillion dollar market cap by the end of 2028. Uh, and we base that precisely for the reasons we kind of talked about earlier. Like I think that if we're going to like project for out, we need to wait the current period much more heavily because there are newer use cases, newer regulations in place uh for stable coins. Whereas I think a lot of people kind of say like oh take a percentage of like the current M2 mining supply and that's our projection. We don't do that. We we ran like you know 20,000 Monte Carlo simulations and uh you know did an autogressive model to actually come up with that figure. And even then it's it's really hard to have full confidence about what the ultimate projection of that is going to be. But this is going to be a major use case uh for many institutions. It's probably going to be one of the preminent themes in 2026. But also prediction markets are absolutely growing. I think that's going to be massive. Again, the question of fragmentation of liquidity comes up again. But I think that we'll see like I don't know prediction market aggregators or something start to come up to kind of fill that space. Uh I think perial futures are also going to be a massive lift. uh you know it's right now pre predominantly used inside of crypto if not almost exclusively used in crypto but you're seeing more and more retail users actually step into equities for example and they want more capital efficient ways to trade it and I think that they're looking at the potential of per being used in equities to actually bridge that gap so equity pers could potentially become a thing so I think that the potential of per to become a you know uh financial primitive I think are fairly high. And if that's going to be the case, I think there's going to be increase in composability for those instruments as well. >> Based on your stable coin projections though, like as you model it, what are your assumptions of equity markets and and their ability to tokenize? Because I I see like a one to one correlation, and maybe I'm crazy, but if you have tokenized equities, you're probably going to pay for them in stable coins. And so like I think of the $127 trillion equity global equity market and if you're saying that there's less than you know $2 trillion in stables by 28 and I realize that's not too far away then that I have to assume then you're saying equity markets aren't ready to tokenize. Is that right? >> Not that's not what I'm saying. And again our projection is the midpoint of a of a wide range. I think that, you know, definitely two trillion to three trillion is on the upper side of that range by the time we get to 2028 to 2030. Uh, but we're kind of just calling for a more conservative kind of like midpoint of it. But what I am implying is that it's going to take steps. It's not going to be immediate. We're not going to immediately jump in tokenized equities. Like if by the end of 2026, we're not all trading tokenized equities. I don't think we should be saying to ourselves, well, this didn't work. We tried it. it was an experiment and let's throw the baby out with the bath of water. No one wants this. I think that it's going to be incremental steps in part because you need the institutions which you and I both know we've worked in these big institutions. They are giant battleships that take a you know a long time before they can turn and maneuver. Um and they are working on it right now like it is in process. You're right that I think stable coins are going to become an incremental or an integral part of the trading process of tokenized equities. But right now, like the only tokenized equities we have are outside of the US. That's important because not a lot of people actually even trade equities outside of the US. I mean like the US like it's it's a stronghold of where a lot of retail and institutional investors actually trade this stuff. But you know like I I remember a few months ago months it wasn't even like a long time ago where like the German government was saying like crap we got to incentivize our populace to actually uh invest more in risk because otherwise they won't be able to have an assess to retire on. So they're trying to like figure that out because you know I can't remember the exact number anymore but I think the only like u they only invest in like 16% of like the the stocks that are available out there. So I would say that like you know as this becomes more clear in the US and you know even if we get it done a market structure bill done in the first quarter of 2026 it'll probably take another year after that uh along across which this will need to be implemented. So you got to keep that in mind when we're talking about you know how big this can grow in a short period of time. Yeah, I think of like the the the the shift to tokenization almost like the shift to e- trading that we saw in like the future space and it was you know slow and then all a sudden it was all at once and boons moved from pits over to to to now your ex. So when does that flip happen? like is is it going to be 10 years, five years, three years, you know, because I I appreciate your your modeling of stable coins, but I have to think at a certain point it just flips because like, you know, I'm a fiduciary. We invest in liquid assets. Um, given the choice, I say this all the time, I have to buy the token because I can risk manage it when the US invades uh Venezuela on a Saturday night or Saturday morning, right? You know what I mean? So, when does that flip h that that sort of flipping happen? Yeah, that's a great question because you know we know that there are a lot of historical analoges here where like when there's a tipping point like you it it's by the nature of tipping points that you can't predict when the tipping point actually happens. Like it's a confluence of events that actually drives it like the stickiness of the event the conversations around it like the the the people that come out who actually actually rely on this kind of stuff. And in some part like this is happening across the real world asset space right now. You know like we saw like the headline coming from Morgan Stanley more recently for example that they're also thinking about building tokenized versions of certain funds ETFs as well. Um and just like a few months ago they were allowing their RAAS to actually uh you know recommend crypto to their investors. So that's kind of a good example of like well it seemed like it took a very long time because ETFs were approved back in January 2024 and it took them up till like you know now until they could finally recommend it. But now it's kind of the dam is breaking and it's happening all at once. Now everything's happening. Now that's not that's a non-answer to your question. Is it going to be three years, five years? But the point is I don't know. My guess would be that it's going to take that like two, three year period and then it's all going to happen at once. I think that that's the only thing we can definitely count on that when it does happen, it's going to be like rapid and it'll just be a tipping point and it's going to be completely viral. >> All right, let's talk about long-awaited market structure, Bill. Um whether it's clarity uh or something similar. Uh you seem to be bullish. I'm hearing a lot of bullish signals out of DC. I personally don't buy it. I I I hope that I'm wrong, but um I want to hear your bullcase, man. >> So, I think that a lot of people were concerned during the government shutdown in Q4 uh last year and a lot of people were worried that we wouldn't see a market structure bill wouldn't see the light of day and it was actually quite the opposite. And if you're tuned in to what's happening on Capitol Hill for example, what happened was the you know US government went into a shutdown and a lot of senators were still working like them. They had a skeleton staff of like you know 10 15 people around them and they could have just been twiddling their thumbs and saying like oh man we got nothing to do here like let's let's like but you know like they were picking up bills and saying like well let's kind of get prepped on things and one of those things was the crypto market structure bill. But I think this is kind of where things the the communication breaks down because people don't fully understand like there's so many layers of bureaucracy. There's so many steps to get things done on Capitol Hill. Um and effectively you have the the clarity bill that was passed by the House of Representatives in July of 2025. But the analog in uh the Senate is that there are two bills. There's one bill from the Senate Bank Committee and one bill from the Senate A Committee. Why do they do that? Well, the Senate Bank Committee basically is in charge of has oversight of the SEC and the Senate a committee has oversight of the CFTC. And so they wrote their separate bills to particularly deal with the SEC and the CFTC. But at the end of this process, once both bills are agreed upon by the committees, basically marked up, then they're going to be unified into one bill and then that can be presented on the Senate floor. Once that's done, that then gets sent over to the uh House of Representatives and then the House of Representatives has to reconcile that with the clarity bill that they've already passed. And once that's done, then it can be approved and sent to President Trump's desk. So, as you can see, still a lot of steps to go, but we're getting closer than we ever have before. We're seeing that there's still a lot of bipartisanship uh on Capitol Hill. Like, there's a lot of working across the aisle on the cryptoru market structure bill. And I think that that's something that people don't appreciate because they kind of see this as a red and blue issue and it's really not. Like if you look at the members of like the House of Representatives, there's 289 members of the House of Representatives who are pro crypto. That's why we got like the like the clarity bill passed so easily. That's why the genius bill like passed and now we have more clarity around tokens. Mostly are commodities. Commodities are regulated by states. If you had a federal regime, it's just much more seamless to comply. And I know it's been a little bit clunky dealing with all those states. Um that said, I agree with you that there's a lot of bipartisan support, but there's also a lot of partisan hate and discontent right now. And I don't know, I I remain skeptical. Uh I hope you prove me wrong. Uh I think that there's a lot of folks that are really angry about a perceived ethics issue uh related to Donald Trump and crypto. That said, there's a huge eth ethics issue related to all all of government and it needs to be much bigger than crypto that we need to just sort through. But when I talk to senators, they're like, "No, like we got to get we got to figure out Trump's crypto stuff." Second one they have an issue with is near and dear to your heart interest on stable coins. They're like, "We need to close that loop." Which I think you and I will both agree. What loop? That's the law's been written. Like it's done, guys. Game over. Like, let's go on to the next one. that's an issue. And then of course DeFi, like DeFi is, you know, it's hard enough for us to explain what Ethereum is or Bitcoin, but when you start getting into DeFi, it really blows people's minds. And I just don't think um based on some of the language I've seen, people understand DeFi. They they don't understand that it's it's tech. It's it's it's an internet. It's, you know, you don't regulate the internet. It's, you know, you regulate the activities. I don't think that light bulb has gone on for most members of Congress. So, do you think all three of those are going to get overcome? Like, and by the way, the other thing that's in the back of my mind, having lived through a couple of these things, Genius Act should have been a slam dunk. And at the last minute, it was really hard to push over the line. Uh, I just see there's just so much complexity with power moving from from banking, to your point, over to Agg based on certain outcomes. like lot of power politics, partisan and even, you know, nonpartisan power politics within committees. I don't know, man. Um, how do you respond to all that negativity, which and I'm not usually the negative guy. >> No, I don't think that you're wrong, by the way, Chris. I think that you need to have a healthy dose of, you know, not skepticism per se, but definitely realist, you know, take a realistic approach to what's happening. I think it's going to cross over the line and I think we're going to get it done, but I'm not going to say it's easy. Far from it. I think there are a lot of interest at play. Like take stable coins that you mentioned, stable coin yield. I mean, like like you said, I thought this was done and dusted by the time we got the Genius Bill and Gus Act passed, but you see the bank lobby is still kind of coming in here and I get it. They're trying to protect their own interests and that's why you still kind of see this process ongoing. Um, but that said, do I think that they won't resolve it at all? I absolutely think that's not going to be the case. I think they will find a path to actually getting this approved. Uh, you know, like some of those institutions that I said that, you know, have you like the banks for example that are trying to kind of defend it at the moment and using their lobbying power to kind of defend it. I think they are getting the crypto. It's not a question of hey, like they don't want to do it at all. It's a question of like they just want to be ready for it and then once that happens then you know they're they're kind of okay. At least that's kind of my my realistic take on it. That's my view, not Coinbase's view. But you know like I I think that if we're taking that kind of peace meal and like each of those parts that you kind of discussed, I think all of them can be broken down in that kind of way and I can say like actually yeah, it's not going to be easy. I don't think it's going to be easy at all, but I do think that it can happen. >> Got it. All right. So, I asked you about what you're what you were excited about. You said stable coins, and I think there are a lot of ways to get exposure to stable coins. Obviously, you don't want to buy USDC because it's just going to be worth a dollar. Um, but you could invest in Circle the Equity. Um, you could obviously invest in some of the distribution uh agents, people like Coinbase. Are there other investments in the stable coin vertical that people should be thinking about or ecosystems? Is it simply go long ETH? I think a lot of people who are only investing in tokens uh have just mainly thought about it in from an ecosystem kind of perspective. >> Yeah. >> But what you're kind of pointing out in terms of like more people kind of saying like well how do I get exposure to it like maybe we should be buying like circle equity etc. Um, I think it's interesting because that kind of opened a door to seeing a lot of traditional investors who have of course been happy to kind of take exposure, but also even on the crypto side of things like you know when we talk about crypton natives for example for the longest time uh you and I have heard been on the same telegram channels or heard from the same people and they were like oh I would never absolutely like invest in stons whatsoever. Like it's just not like my thing like I only want to invest in tokens. That's not really the case anymore. you know, you're you're definitely hearing a lot more capital flow over from the crypto space into the equity space in part because they're trying to find answer the exact question that you presented. they're trying to figure out well how do I get exposure to more of the stuff and you know it's even happening in the last like uh two weeks or so because you know like there was like a big dichotomy between what happened with unis swap versus what happened with a because on December 26 like unis swap took the vote and like they said we're going to turn we're going to do the fee switch and I think it was like near unanimous uh for people who wanted that to happen which would suggest that you know people want to actually have the fundamentals to actually support token projects But equally, you're seeing the A like kind of situation start to bring up questions of like, well, where is value capture ultimately going to go? Is it going to move to the tokens or is it going to be on the equity side of things? And I think that that question is going to be answered in 2026 or at least part of it. Um, I don't think we know for sure at this moment, but we're seeing these models emerge and giving investors like freedom of choice to figure out like where should the value capture ultimately be? Yeah, it's tricky and I think there's two parts to it. Uh, one part of it everybody talks about is like where's value acrew? Uh, do I buy the token or do I buy the equity? The part that people don't talk about as much is access, right? Pretty much anyone can buy the token. You know, looking at a as an example, but damn it, you know, you you it's very hard for people to get access to private equity. Um, you know, unless you're a venture fund, right? How do you reconcile that? and and and like we've seen a couple of exchanges trying to, you know, fix some of the private equity access challenges that we're seeing, but but how do you think about that? Is is there are we also going to see in 26 um you know, we're already seeing a lot of a lot of um positive momentum when it comes to IPOs and and going public. You guys famously went through a direct listing. How do you recognize that public versus private? Is it going to be like, hey, you know, I'm going to have more choice on equities or like we have DATs as well now. How do you think about all this through an investment lens? >> Yeah, there's a lot to cover there and I mean we are in seeing that increasingly private equity and private credit are big sectors in the real world asset space and you know like if you you know uh take out for example like uh you know like if you go to RWA.xyz XYZ like you'll see that you know the biggest sector that's distributed on chain still remains US treasuries but if it you know if you kind of exclude that criteria of like you know distributed on chain it's really private credit because I think that often times people for the reasons you kind of mentioned it's hard to value it's hard to mark to market um and you know tokenized kind of forms of this actually at least do a slightly better job of being able to to you know capture value and kind of get exposure to this kind of stuff. So I do think that there is a route that allows tokenization of private equity, privization of private credit to actually grow because you know it's a meaningful kind of asset class that people want to get exposure to but can't easily get exposure to. Um they are in pension funds though and other things. So it probably is in to some extent in like most people's portfolios. uh but you know like it's still a challenge because you know it might not move for like a year and then suddenly like the price has a gap because then you suddenly value it. So I do think that some of those things are starting to kind of get reconciled here and maybe with the advent of tokenized equities. Um and again like we're not there yet. most of the tokenized equities are only available outside of the US. But like once that starts getting introduced and like people start saying like okay now we are getting instantaneous settlement it's not just like T+2 anymore or T+1 anymore like let's let's kind of figure out like uh you know how this stuff kind of runs. I think that that might get us a little bit closer like one step closer anyway. Uh but I I don't think we're going to resolve that question anytime soon. >> Got it. So we talked stable coins. Um tokenization is obviously uh foremost on everyone's mind. Any other verticals that you're excited about in the crypto space going into 26? >> So it's a quasi crypto theme. Uh I say this because you know like we have both variants of it like both crypto and non-crypto variants, but I think prediction markets are going to be huge in 2026. I mean we're already seeing it. Um you know like this is something that I've been saying since like end of 2024 when everyone was like all right the US elections are over. prediction markets are going to go away and I said nope like they're they're gonna stick around and they're going to cover a lot more than just politics and a lot of people said no that's not happening and to be fair at the start of 2025 volumes did decline but they didn't go away for sure and over the course of the last three to six months they've climbed rapidly and you know they're now encompassing sectors as far as wide as like sports to economics um more people are talking about whether prediction markets can be used to actually hedge positions because you can get very very granular with prediction markets in a way that you can't necessarily do with traditional financial instruments where which is why we have proxies right like we have proxy hedges and other things like that was a famous thing in like in the FX world like there proxy hedges for other all sorts of EM currencies that I would have >> um and I think that we're going to see that prediction markets are going to play a much bigger role I mean the one big beautiful bill uh that was also passed I think sometime in July 2025 als also like you know put some regulations around uh gambling that also will probably make it more difficult because effectively you can't net your winnings uh against like 100% of your losses anymore. I think it's only 90% of your losses. So consequently like you know you could be you know making a loss and you stop to pay taxes but you aren't subject to those in prediction markets because these are derivative instruments. So I do think that this is going to be grow as a major theme. Uh, and I personally think that the crypto variants of prediction markets are going to be more important because they actually have like the settlement built right in. It's all smart contract based. Um, I I tend to think that these are a lot more efficient and just better than, you know, your non-cryptovariants. So, I do think that as a crypto theme, this could become very important. >> So, it's a tax ARB and it's also regulatory ARB. uh because gambling is is regulated to states, you know, similar to what we're looking at with the market structure bill, derivatives are uh regulated federally. So that could be another nice little ARB, couldn't it? >> Yeah, I think so. And you know, that's that's where where I think the CFTC is going to be going with this. >> All right, I want to shift over now uh for a second. Venezuela. Uh, United States just executed one of the most seamless raids in military history, uh, capturing President Maduro. And obviously, President Trump is looking at oil. Um, and and the fact that it is the largest holder, we believe it's one of the largest holders of of reserves in the world. Maybe it's not the cleanest and easiest version uh to extract and refine uh but massive oil natural resources. Um when you think about and there's also talk about a very significant Bitcoin reserve hanging out there uh that we may or may not have access to as you look at that entire geo and markets frankly typically don't like this type of geopolitical uncertainty but damn they they really didn't mind uh this particular move particularly through a historical lens. How does that shift in US policy I guess it's been a culmination of over a year. What does this mean for crypto markets? >> Oh, that is a great question. Um, I don't think we've seen it actually hit the price just yet. I think that we're seeing that obviously post uh the Venezuela raid, you know, Bitcoin has been uh better supported, but I think that those are kind of like separate things. I think that it's happening like Bitcoin's kind of pickup. I shouldn't say rally but pick up over the last few days uh has been due to the fact that we saw a lot of tax lost harvesting in December and you know it's very evident when you look at the outflows coming from spot bitcoin ETFs for example and you know over the course of the last few days inflows have started to kind of trickle back in and you know like I don't think that we're going to be completely divorced from geopolitics in fact oftentimes we we aren't I think that geopolitics actually feature pretty heavily in terms of what happens for for crypto. Um, but often times it's either from a technical perspective because that's the source. For example, like if you're worried about your currency, then are you acquiring like you know, Bitcoin to kind of you know protect yourself against uh you know devaluation of like the Argentine peso or Turkish lera and I'm not saying that's always done, but I'm saying it's a possibility. Um, so I do think that those things do exist. in the case of Venezuela. I mean, so as I said at the beginning of the call, you know, I used to cover Latin America and you said it correctly like, you know, like I think that there is this it's pretty obvious uh that a lot of people are like, "Oh, it's about oil, right?" And Venezuel has the largest stock piles of oil, but you've seen that its production has gone from like back in like the day I remember when like Venezuela used to produce like 3 million barrels of oil a day. That's down to like a million or less than a million. >> Yeah. less than a million. Yep. >> You know, it's because the infrastructure isn't there. It's because also this isn't like, you know, like sweet, light, crude. It is, you know, the the kind that needs heavy refining in order to be usable. Uh so this isn't going to be a a oneanddone kind of situation of like, all right, we we got it. Now, let's kind of go in there and extract all the oil. It's like, okay, you need to build the refineries. That takes time. Um like, how long does it take to kind of get into production? Then we're thinking about the people inside of Venezuela. They have been cut off through due to capital controls and other things for a very long time. Now they have access to the world again. Like what's going to happen to that? I mean like ultimately I do think this is going to be relevant uh for a macro lens on like what happens to Bitcoin and maybe like higher beta assets in the crypto space. But for now, I think that it's probably going to, you know, not have a significant kind of effect on the price action. And then probably as things kind of like develop and people start thinking about like, okay, how's this going to affect energy prices? Um, you know, what's that going to do to global inflation? Like, you know, do we need kind of things to kind of protect against that? When we think about deficits, it's not just about any one country. We're thinking about multiple kind of countries. Think about the spending there. I think those kind of factors are going to come into play, but for now I don't think that this situation probably will have a a lot of huge implications for Bitcoin. >> What about stable coins? Um I was talking to a buddy of mine Austin Campbell uh recently and he's just like the winner is not going to be Bitcoin. Maybe it is. I think Bitcoin will be somewhat of a winner, but he was saying you know what the real winner here is going to be stable coins. Uh people are going to purchase that oil dollars. Those are stable coins. They're going to they're going to be more demand for stables. US dollar stables rather than Bitcoin. H how do you think about that? And he's, you know, perhaps throughout uh South and Central America. >> Yeah, I've had very similar thoughts to be honest with you. Like I thought that this would help Bitcoin, but on a marginal kind of basis, but as a thinking about the dollar, it's actually much more beneficial to the USD. And a lot of that has to do with historical reasons, right? Like typically when you go to like um you know like let's let's just take like its neighbor Colombia for example like people don't buy apartments in Colombia with Colombian pesos. You would think they would but they buy their col those apartments in US dollars and there's a reason they do that and it's the same reason they do that in a lot like why like people in Mexico like when people send remittances home from the US into Mexico they just take those dollars and put it in the mattress. They're not like convert I mean they convert it into pesos only when they need it to use it for their day-to-day purchases. But like the dollar holds a very powerful position inside of most people's like incomes inside of Latin America and Venezuela is no exception to that. So, I think that when we're talking about the potential, I wouldn't say reopening, but definitely like the the growth of the energy sector inside of Venezuela, um, and you know, basically people having access again to like USD and other things, I think, yeah, you know, like there's going to be a rush of demand for dollars coming in there that will probably support stable coins more than, you know, crypto assets like Bitcoin, at least as first blush. Got you. All right. Big question for you. You recently published a piece talking about the big boogeyman, something we call quantum. And you know, this seems to come up every so often. And I'll remind people that the idea of quantum physics has been around, you know, since like the late 19th century. I think Colombia started its quantum initiatives in like 1909. So like quantum is not a new concept, but it does seem like it's getting quantum computing itself is getting kind of real. And recently you published a piece, you know, suggesting that it could place parts of Bitcoin at risk. And I know people freak out when they hear that because they think it will destroy uh the price, you know, and you talk about mining uh as well as have people with quantum computers having unfair advantage. Can you unpack uh the quantum thesis and what that means for price going forward? >> So, let me just say upfront that I think the near-term probability of successful quantum attack is still very low. But that said, the quantum threat I think is there. And as you said, like I think people should not underestimate how quickly quantum is developing right now. Like quantum computing is coming whether you know they want it or not. And I don't think that's a bad thing by the way. I think there's going to be a lot that's going to be un unlocked because of quantum computing from like medical innovations to uh things. So I think that we should welcome that. But certainly trying to get to a post quantum or post quantum cryptography kind of world I would say or it's actually I think it's called postquantum cryptography excuse me world. I think that that is going to be massively important. So, how does this affect Bitcoin? Because I don't think a lot of people fully grasp how like what the issues at play are because there's really kind of like two potential vectors that we need to think about when we're talking about, you know, the the potential risk of quantum computing to to Bitcoin. And the first is that, you know, the signatures, the transaction signatures depend on a certain type of uh quantum of of cryptography, excuse me. And basically, we call it the lifted curve digital signature algorithm. Um, and that means that if you're an attacker who is capable of, you know, using quantum computers to actually crack the code very quickly and you could use Shor's algorithm or Grover's algorithm to kind of do it. Um, the attacker could potentially just spend all these coins by forging valid signatures. So, that's the first attack vector. The second is that you know like Bitcoin specifically uses like SHA or SHA like 256 for its proofof work mining processes which means that if it kind of like attacks that then you could see there could be a wellspring of like new Bitcoin that wasn't previously like uh you know that didn't previously exist and so that would obviously affect the supply. Now, of those two, I would say that the first issue like the elliptic curve attacks probably are the more relevant ones because I think that affects us right now. And this is what we see under threat because at the moment we think that the Bitcoin at risk of a quantum attack because they're relying on old signatures, for example, is around 6.8 million Bitcoin. So that means there's about $630 billion or so of Bitcoin that could, you know, potentially flood the market. But again, like I would say that like that would be a concern if we didn't have a roadmap to actually mitigate this. And we do uh like there's people who are working within like the crypto space definitely like core members of like the the you know bitcoin developers who are working on this as well as like you know like national kind of international kind of like uh organizations that are working on this. >> Got it. So uh it's a threat threat's getting mitigated. Does that impact you know your should that impact your investment thesis if you're thinking about getting into Bitcoin for the first time? Now, this is something that's interesting because, you know, like when we were talking, so I don't know if you ever talked about it on your show, but like last year, one of the big things that we were looking at in the second half of 2025 was what are long-term holders of Bitcoin doing? And we saw some movement of wallets. We saw some selling and people kind of conflated the two and said like, "Oh man, this is kind of forcing like like pressure on this to to people kind of like just just selling the Bitcoin or maybe they're just like saw it at like good, you know, take profit levels." Like I think that there was definitely a bunch of OGs or long-term holders who had it in vulnerable wallets were also trying to mitigate the risk by actually moving uh their Bitcoin. And that was something that a lot of people like downplayed or didn't really kind of like look at. And I think that that was definitely part of it. So like that there's kind of like a part of this where I'm just like hold on. It's not just that all these long-term holders are just trying to like dump their Bitcoin. Like just keep in mind that like there are other reasons and quantum the quantum risk is part of that. But I think that we heard from Michael Sailor like an interview like a few weeks ago who also brought up Quantum and he took it as a kind of a positive kind of like approach because he said like listen um you know it's very possible that some of those uh those wallets and that Bitcoin will need to be excluded or held offchain until we deal with the quantum problem. And if that's the case then we're talking about even more finite supply of Bitcoin which would be good for the value. So I think that there are arguments people are making on both sides of the equation about like the potential like supply risk if like you know someone is able to crack like uh quantum like soon um which you know there is by the way like a short-term path like you know there there there's good papers that I can direct you to which say that like if there is a sudden breakthrough in quantum computing like there would be a soft fork path that could take about roughly two years in order to kind of like migrate uh some of that Bitcoin coin and then there's the current path that we're on which is would take about seven years to actually standardize all the postquantum signatures and actually let the wallets and the nodes kind of adapt to it and actually move to a you know a more quantum resistant kind of world. So I would say that you know like I don't think anyone like fully knows just yet. A lot of it depends on the timing of whether or not we could see a quantum breakthrough. >> Got it. All right, man. Last question. uh as you're looking forward between now and into 26, any big predictions, anything that you're looking for plus or minus that would influence, you know, your view of the markets? >> So, I think that there's a lot of things flying under the radar right now. A lot of it still tends to be macro to be honest with you. >> Yep. I think that people are rightly paying attention to what's happening with uh you know the the Federal Reserve and whether rate cuts are coming, who the next Fed chair is going to be and it's it's important although some of that I don't think you can fully price in uh just yet. New Fed chair definitely I I think there's too many outcomes to kind of do it. Um the Supreme Court ruling on tariffs I think are is another one like again not something you can play right now because the there's just a number of outcomes here but I think that there is David, I'm going to cut you off, man. Cuz like there's a 77% chance, I think, on poly market that the tariffs are going to be deemed no bueno uh by the Supreme Court, right? It's like what does that mean for markets in your mind? Is that good or bad for cryp particularly crypto? >> This is where I think things require a bit of nuance because let's say that 77% chance is right. Heck, let's say it's done. Let's say it's a done deal. 90% odds, 100% odds that the Supreme Court actually rules against uh tariffs or at least rules against being able to use the Emergency Powers Act to actually have tariffs. >> Well, there's two routes ahead of. Number one, President Trump and the administration can just accept it and say, "Well, guys, we tried like uh we're going to actually have to give back some of the cash uh that that we earned on these things and that goes to imports importers or corporates in effect becoming a stealth form of stimulus to the economy, which would actually prolong like good times even more. That would actually be like very supportive for risk assets in general and crypto in particular. So I think that's something that people may or may not be missing, but I think that's definitely important like something important to kind of mention. >> The other possibility is that it actually comes out and says like, okay, they struck down tariffs, but don't worry guys, we have these, you know, other things that we can use. We can definitely put on tariffs for like a finite amount of days, not using the Emerging Powers Act, but other things. Or the Treasury can actually open up an investigation and then that could actually have like uh tariffs like over a longer period of time. So there's other things. It really depends on what happens next. So that's what I mean when I say like there are a number of outcomes that could still happen. It's not just about the Supreme Court's decision, but it's about what the administration does in reaction to that. >> Yeah. Sorry I I cut you off, but like I really appreciate that nuance because no one's really unpacked it. Uh I think thoughtfully that that was really helpful. Uh what else? So So I I cut you off when you were saying tariffs. You're watching that. Anything else as we got out into 26? I think that the measures of AI productivity are only going to grow. So that's going to be a very big part of the macro kind of picture for me. Uh I think that this is you know disintermediating jobs which is kind of contributing to like a a deeper kind of like K-shaped economy than we had kind of seen previously. But at the same time it's been very supportive for a lot of companies. And I don't think we fully thought through the implications of that because typically when you see like you know uh people like companies laying off workers they're you know it's because the company is not doing well. It's quite the opposite. They're doing a lot better profits are going up. They're more efficient. Uh productivity is is increasing and they're laying off people. Um but that means companies are more profitable. It means at least stocks are more profitable. Uh but what is the implication on crypto? I think that we're we're still kind of dealing with those ramp ramifications right now. So, I think it's going to be a really important theme. But that's all in the macro side of things. I think inside the crypto space, you know, we're thinking about the next upgrade for Ethereum. Uh they're now like progressing towards like two upgrades a year. I think that's going to be massive. Uh we haven't even fully priced in I would say the the Petra upgrade from two upgrades ago. Uh because, you know, Lido is still finishing up like the consolidation of their validators. So I think that those things are being missed because we're kind of so focused on the momentum plays and what's been happening on the macro picture and myself included. But you know that I think is going to be important on the Salana side. I think we need to think about the fire dancer upgrade that's coming in like because you know they're going to migrate from Franken Dancer into like fire dancer. Uh so fully like on like on the mainet I think that's going to be important. Uh you're also seeing like other upgrades that are going to be like more important to its supply demand dynamics. Um and then you know it just kick off the year we saw the XRP take like a huge kind of stride forward. Uh so you know like you can't discount like you know what the maybe people in the institutional side may not be paying attention to right now that are becoming a lot more relevant uh to our space. So I think all these things are going to be hugely like significant. And then thinking about whether privacy themes are still important, AI themes are still important. Um, you know, like I I think that like that's still an open question at the moment. >> Love it, David. Really, really appreciate you coming on, ladies and gentlemen. David Dong, uh, global head of investment research at Coinbase. Uh, how can people reach you, sir? >> Uh, yeah, you can find me on Twitter at David Dwang, all one word, 10 10 letters. Uh, you can also find me on LinkedIn. >> Amazing. Thanks again for coming on, man. Have a great day. >> Thank you. Don't forget to sign up for a free portfolio review with one of our endorsed investment partners at wealthon.comfree. With markets hitting all-time highs, now is a great time to stress test your strategy and be prepared for what comes next. Thank you all for watching. We'll see you again next time.