10 Crypto Predictions for 2026: $1M BTC, Wall Street Onchain & ETF Takeover | Matt Hougan & Ryan Rasmussen from Bitwise

Matt:
[0:00] I think crypto Twitter has sort of lost its ambition.

David:
[0:03] Totally.

Matt:
[0:04] The chairman of the SEC, the most important financial regulator in the US and the world, said all US stocks would be on chain in a couple of years. For context, the tokenized stock market today is $680 million. US stocks are $68 trillion. I'll save you the math. That's 100,000x bigger. What are we even talking about? I think we've lost sight of how big a deal crypto really is because we've made this regulatory progress. It's entering this period where we can move the full financial economy on chain. It won't happen overnight, but the chairman of the SEC is telling you it's going to happen in the next couple of years. We're not really bullish enough, I think is my take.

RSA:
[0:49] Bankless Nation, we've got end of the year predictions going into 2026. What's going to happen in 2026? And the two best predictors we could get on the show today. We've got Matt Hogan and Ryan Rasmussen, both from Bitwise. Guys, how are you doing?

Matt:
[1:04] Doing great. Thanks for having us on.

Rasmussen:
[1:06] Excited to be here.

David:
[1:07] Is this the third year that we've done this?

RSA:
[1:10] Yeah.

David:
[1:10] It's around three?

Rasmussen:
[1:11] I think so. I think so.

Matt:
[1:13] It's a tradition.

David:
[1:13] If you guys remember 2025, last year's predictions, do you guys know how you ranked? How did your predictions hold up? Ryan said you guys were the best. So I would like to actually audit that.

RSA:
[1:25] Wait, which Ryan said that? Did I say that?

David:
[1:27] My Ryan. My co-host Ryan.

RSA:
[1:28] You have to differentiate during this episode, David. Okay.

Rasmussen:
[1:32] We didn't do terrible, but we didn't do as great as one would have hoped. 2025 was just a weird year for crypto. So we got a number of these correct that we're super excited about.

Rasmussen:
[1:41] I think we're ambitious around some that were directionally accurate. Perhaps we set the bar too high. So I would grade us decently well, all things considered. Matt, what would you say?

Matt:
[1:52] I think with one glaring exception, which was Ryan's prediction about meme coins, we had all the information right. And then some of the price returns didn't line up with the fundamentals of the space. I think the story of crypto writ large was the story of our prediction. So I'd give us like a gentleman's C for our efforts.

RSA:
[2:11] Let me see. Okay. So I actually, I ran this through ChatGPT. All right. And you're 20-20.

David:
[2:18] Yeah, we rated you guys, actually.

RSA:
[2:19] Yeah, we rated you guys. And of course, I'm not going to grade you guys, right? I mean, that's a lot of effort, go fact check everything. But ChatGPT was happy to do it. And it took about seven minutes on the response, which usually it doesn't think for seven minutes, okay? And so the net of that is... Drumroll. B minus for last year.

Matt:
[2:38] There we go.

RSA:
[2:39] So it said A minus for narrative and regime calls. So that's your higher grade. You got the direction right. C plus for the precise numbers.

David:
[2:48] Everyone gets precise numbers wrong. Giving out precise specific numbers is such a mistake. Just never do it.

RSA:
[2:54] But it said you got four solid correct, three to four partial credit, and then three were just clear misses. So that's pretty darn good for, you know, 12-month predictions, I think.

Matt:
[3:06] We'll take it. I love it. I love the B-minus from chat. That sounds right. I'll take it. Marking myself up.

David:
[3:13] Do you mind if we go through a few

RSA:
[3:14] Of these that you guys predicted last year? One of them is, and I'm trying to get into the place, into the headspace of the end of last year. We were all very bullish at the end of 2024, weren't we? We were very excited. We were very bullish. Seemed like regulatory headwinds were disappearing and we'd have tailwinds on our side going into 2025.

David:
[3:35] We had momentum. We had a lot of momentum.

RSA:
[3:36] We had momentum. You guys called a prediction, your first prediction last year was Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana will hit new all-time highs with Bitcoin trading above 200K. So we got ETH and Solana, new all-time highs. I think ETH barely like barely clipped it last year. It was a close one. Bitcoin did not hit 200K. Why do you think we didn't get to 200K last year? Or this year, I guess I should say, 2025. We're still in 2025.

Rasmussen:
[4:01] So yeah, all three hit new all-time highs. So we're happy about that. And if you do set the stage for where we were at heading into 2025, we wrote these predictions over the month of November. Trump had just won the election. Crypto had just won the election. Prices were soaring towards new all-time highs. And the market was overall...

RSA:
[4:19] Broadly euphoric.

Rasmussen:
[4:20] And I think that helped inform where we thought things were headed. And then as soon as we hit the new year, chaos ensued. I think it was January, we had fears of an AI bubble with that AI company out of China saying they're going to disrupt at a low cost what was happening in AI in the US. And then we had the tariff tantrum, and we had more macro shocks and more headwinds. And things just went chaotic from a macro factor perspective. And so So I think that was probably the biggest driver around the volatility that we saw. And then you had a number of events happen. Of course, later in the year, we had this liquidity flush that happened in October. We saw more AI headwinds. The government shut down the longest on record. I think a number of those things, combined with the fact that the Clarity Act didn't get through Congress, I think those things all combined led investors to feel uncertain about the outlook for crypto. And that led to prices not hitting that 200K mark or not sustaining all-time highs. But overall, we're headed in the right direction.

Matt:
[5:21] I have another take as well. I think what Ryan said was right. Our 200K prediction, the sort of basis of that was there's this fundamental bull thesis of institutional investment and regulatory that was going to push prices up. We thought we would get above 100K and go to the next behavioral sell wall, which I thought would be 200K. So that's the next round number. I think one... 50,000 foot way to look back at 2025 is to say, huh, turns out 100K was a big behavioral sell wall. And it took us a year to get over it. I think we will get over it and move on. But I think I underestimated the number of people who would sell at 100K to get ahead of the four-year cycle. And that kept prices from releasing from that gravity around there.

David:
[6:05] So maybe to put it optimistically, none of what you guys said is definitive no or a failure by the industry. It's more just a not yet. It's like, oh, we just didn't get it this year. You know, this time frame wasn't the right time frame. But the Clarity Act, like Ryan said, it's still on the menu. Like this Clarity Act didn't get denied. Like that is actually something that we're going to talk about for 2026. A few more predictions to recap 2025. Your prediction number four, 2025 will be the year of the crypto IPO with at least five crypto unicorns going public in the United States. I definitely remember a lot of IPO, crypto IPO activity. Did we achieve the numbers on this one that we needed to?

Matt:
[6:47] Yes. Yeah, we did. I mean, it was a big year for crypto IPOs. We even have 21 sort of de-spacking today as we're recording. So there's a lot. What were the biggest ones? I mean, we had Circle, we had Figure. Circle was huge, yeah. We had a huge year. It's sort of a year of maturity of crypto equities. We run a crypto equity ETF and it was the year of replacing like Bitfufu with Circle. And we had this general upgrade of bigger and bigger companies coming into the space, which I think shows the direction of the industry.

David:
[7:20] Yeah. Gemini was another big one that went public this year as well.

RSA:
[7:24] I think one last prediction that's kind of fun was actually your bonus prediction for last year, because it had a longer time range than just one year. So it's still in play, guys. Your bonus prediction for 2025 is still in play. You said this, in 2029, Bitcoin will overtake the $18 trillion gold market and trade above $1 million per Bitcoin. So we have kind of two predictions embedded in one. The first is by 2029, we have over $1 million per Bitcoin. The second is Bitcoin overtaking gold. Now there's that $18 trillion number there, which is what gold was last year. Now I think it's something closer to like $30 trillion. So that goalpost has certainly moved downfield. And maybe this is a general question of, do you still think 2029, we get 1 million per Bitcoin? And do you actually think that there's some catch up here? I mean, this implies a massive amount of catch up for Bitcoin and gold. And this year, gold put distance on Bitcoin. It has raced far ahead in the race. And what do you make of that?

Matt:
[8:28] I think gold racing far ahead is because central banks have been buying gold in size for the last four years. And eventually, that excess demand overwhelmed available supply. I actually think there's a perfect lesson and a reason I'm still optimistic about that million dollar plus price target and that catch up. The central bank buying of gold started in 2022. And they bought a lot of gold in 22, 23, 24. It wasn't until 25 that we had that huge run up. And the reason was people were willing to sell to fill that demand for those first few years. But eventually we exhausted those sellers and the price went up. What's happening in Bitcoin right now is that institutions via ETFs are buying more than 100% of the supply. And they did it in 24 and they're gonna do it in 25 and they're gonna do it in 26 and in 27 and in 28 and in 29, the reason I think you can get to that million dollar price target is eventually you'll see the same thing that happened in gold, which is the price just goes parabolic. Once the sellers are completely exhausted, price skyrockets. I do think the next cycle in crypto is the cycle where Bitcoin catches up with gold. And then it's a question of how much bigger than it gets. Could 2029 be optimistic? It could be. But I think we have a very good shot at that.

RSA:
[9:45] Matt, you said the next cycle for crypto. So you still believe in cycles?

Matt:
[9:48] Well, I mean, the next phase, I don't. We'll get into that. I think the four-year cycle is dead. I think we're in something like a five to 10-year institutional cycle. So there's cycles in everything, but I think we're in a new cycle. But it's this institutional cycle where we get up to par with gold. I think that's the cycle we're in.

David:
[10:08] I think this beautifully transitions us into your guys' 10 crypto predictions for 2026. Just to talk about that cycle thing, Bitcoin, this is your first prediction, Bitcoin will break the four-year cycle and set new all-time highs. So I feel like this is an update to your guys' prediction number one from last year, which is Bitcoin will trade above $200,000. Bitcoin will break the four-year cycle and set new all-time highs. To me, this reads, we're not done yet. The continuation of the Bitcoin slow grind up will continue. To what evidence or what rationale do we think that we have to say that the four-year cycle is dead?

Matt:
[10:44] Yeah. All the reasons you would believe the four-year cycle exists are either extraordinarily weak or actually negative. So what are the reasons people think it exists? One is the halving. The halving is half as important every time it happens. So it's just not that much supply being removed. So that's dead. The other is interest rate cycles. They went way up in 2018. They went way up in 2022. No one thinks they're going up in 26. Everyone thinks they're going down. So that's moving in the other direction. The third is blowups, FTX, Mt. Gox, ICOs. But in this new regulated era of crypto with ETFs and qualified custodians, the blowup risk has been much reduced. The only other reason the four-year cycle could exist that I can think of is chance. And I just think chance suggests, you know, we got three of them. We're probably not going to get the fourth. At the same time, you have these one-time, generational, massive forces of regulatory improvement and institutional adoption. And I think they'll just overwhelm whatever lingering, tiny forces persist from the old four-year cycle. They're just things that matter more now than having. They're things that matter more than modest interest rate cycles. I just don't see it in 2026. I think it's up and to the right. There's too much institutional demand.

RSA:
[12:05] Matt, you said interest rates going down. That might not be the full global liquidity story though. We've had people like Matt, Michael Howell on Bankless before talking about the global liquidity index. And so even in a world where central banks are lowering interest rate, you can still have reduction of global liquidity. When you broaden it to global liquidity and not just interest rates going down, do you think it's still true that we have kind of easy money policy?

Matt:
[12:34] I think we're in almost a heads we win, tails we win situation. I think either we have very strong economic growth, in which case risk assets do well and some liquidity gets sucked out of this. Or we have a pullback in economic growth, in which case I think liquidity floods into the system because we've banned recessions globally. So I think either way, I think Bitcoin almost wins. And I do think we're in a monetary situation. More liquidity cycle right now. The U.S. has ended quantitative tightening. I know there's some differences in what's going on in Japan, but I think those trends paint in the same general direction.

RSA:
[13:12] I'll note that this is not a 200K price prediction. This is just Bitcoin above all-time highs. What are we all-time high? 126K, something like that? So we're looking at just north of 126K, so something more modest. But I would say it's definitely maybe immodest, the opposite of modesty here, to claim that four-year cycles are broken because that's canon in crypto. I think people are expecting that next year will be a down cycle and a down year and perhaps a more painful down year. So you guys are predicting otherwise.

RSA:
[13:46] Let's see what else you got. So number two, Bitcoin will be less volatile than NVIDIA. That's interesting. Bitcoin less volatile than NVIDIA. So we're pulling in AI stocks here. Talk about this prediction.

Rasmussen:
[14:02] Yeah, I think this one's really interesting. We spend so much time at Bitwise talking to financial advisors and family offices and professional investors, CIOs at endowments and pension funds. And time and time again, what they say to us is I could never invest in Bitcoin because it's too volatile. I wouldn't touch it. My clients can't touch it. It's against my fiduciary responsibilities to do this. And then when we talk to them about, well, what do you invest in? Of course, it's equities and it's the S&P and it's the NASDAQ and it's all these different index funds that own stocks like Nvidia. And then we pull up a chart and we show them the volatility of Nvidia versus Bitcoin. And they don't really know what to say. Because the reality is, is that those have been trending against each other for the past few years, where Bitcoin's getting less volatile as it becomes more adopted by institutions and markets get deeper. And Nvidia is getting more volatile. And we think this trend is going to continue. And it's just ignoring crypto as too volatile for them to touch and thinking of it as rat poison square, like Warren Buffett says, and they're going to have fewer excuses not to allocate to the space. So we think this one's increasingly important. I don't just think it'll be NVIDIA. I think some of the other MAG7 will also be more volatile than Bitcoin. But it's important to note that Bitcoin's on this journey to being less volatile than it was 1, 2, 5, 10 years ago. And that is a you know, marked trend as it moves from a retail asset to an institutional driven asset.

David:
[15:30] I do find that this is interesting that it's not just Bitcoin mellowing out, but it's actually the stock market getting a little bit more, more crazy. To what degree is this an NVIDIA specific property, the volatility, or is like NVIDIA kind of like some sort of high watermark relative to the rest of the equities market when it comes to volatility? Like will Bitcoin become less volatile than, you know, three out of the mag seven, maybe in the future as well? Like, what would you guys think about this?

Rasmussen:
[15:59] Yeah, that's a really good question. There is other popular equities, that Bitcoin is less volatile than today. Tesla, for instance, is more volatile than Bitcoin as well. And I think this is indicative, as you mentioned, David, of a trend of equities getting more volatile while Bitcoin is getting less volatile. And so I think those two trends combined, especially when you look at the return profiles of these assets and the lack of correlation between Bitcoin and these types of equities, Bitcoin just becomes a very attractive element to add to a portfolio. So I think it's a story of both things. Bitcoin is getting less volatile as you have institutions coming into the space. That means more liquidity. That means more institutional traders and hedge funds and participants in the market that dampen volatility. And then you have an overall increase in the stock market volatility, which I'm sure we've all experienced this year. Any given day you turn on CNBC, they're talking about the S&P up 3%, down 3%, etc. And so I think it's both. Bitcoin getting less volatile, equity is getting more volatile.

RSA:
[16:58] It's interesting that you guys are comparing Bitcoin and crypto assets to an AI stock essentially. And it has felt from a crypto investor perspective that investor attention has been on AI at the cost maybe of crypto in 2025. Wondering if that's what you guys see, right? With investors allocating capital, now AI is the new shiny toy and crypto has kind of been pushed aside. And do you think that changes in 2026 if that's the case?

Rasmussen:
[17:26] Yeah, I do think this changes a bit in 2026. I mean, AI is still going to be the front runner for what it's worth. And the reality is that most financial advisors and wealth managers spend a pretty small amount of time actually managing their investments. And most of the time they spend on gathering new clients and client relations and other elements of operating their businesses. So the time they do have to spend on investments is, I don't know, half of their time. And then within that, they allocate it to things like equities and bonds and private credit and other things and AI. And so crypto is just this tiny little thing. I think crypto will grow as a portion of what they think about. But AI just consumes so much space because it touches all the biggest stocks in the world that I think it will be the front runner.

Matt:
[18:11] Yeah, I'll just add in one more note on that. Something has changed this year with crypto, though, which is with the advent of stable coins and tokenization,

Matt:
[18:20] I think traditional investors have started to be able to feel crypto. It's almost like they can touch it like they believe it. And so I've found that in conversations, it's a lot easier to put crypto side by side with AI, right? Because they can now imagine it in their daily lives. That wasn't really true when Bitcoin was the only narrative that TradFi could get its mind around. Now that it can get its mind around stable coins and tokenization, it sort of reified it and I think made it sit more evenly. So some of that maybe envy that we've had of the AI attention has been pulled back a little.

RSA:
[18:55] I'm glad you said envy because, yeah, that's what I was feeling, honestly, Matt. So you nailed the emotion.

David:
[19:00] Let's move on to number three. ETFs will purchase more than 100% of the new supply of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana as institutional demand accelerates. I want to call out what is kind of a unique benchmark here. The broad strokes of this prediction is that ETF demand is increasing. But you guys benchmark it to the new issuance of the respective blockchains, the new mining rewards for Bitcoin, the new staking rewards for Ethereum and Solana. So I feel like there's two parts here. A, talk about why you guys think that ETF demand accelerates. And then also why benchmark it to the new supply of each respective crypto asset?

Matt:
[19:38] Yeah. So first on the why ETF demand accelerate, there are three real reasons. First is it always happens. So if you look at any ETF in history, and I was the CEO of ETF.com before I joined Bitwise. So this is like my old turf. Year one is typically the smallest year. And then it ramps from there. If you take the gold ETF, it did $3 billion inflows its first year, and then $5 billion, then $7 billion, then $10 billion, then $18 billion. It ramped for seven straight years. So this is just what happens in ETFs. One of the reasons this happens is the second point, which is big advisory platforms like Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch take a long time to turn on exposure to these ETFs. In fact, it's only been within the last six months that advisors at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, UBS, and Wells Fargo, which control north of $10 trillion, could even invest in Bitcoin or Ethereum ETFs. Now, those doors are blown wide open. So we're dealing with another audience. And then the final reason is TradFi is just slow. The average Bitwise investor on the TradFi side allocates after eight meetings with us. If they started those meetings.

David:
[20:48] Yeah. You have to suffer through eight meetings with the same person before they give you money?

RSA:
[20:52] It's not suffering. I'm sure it's a pleasure.

David:
[20:55] Welcome to CryptoLand.

Matt:
[20:56] But here's the thing. If you started those meetings when the Bitcoin ETF launched January 2024 and you did them quarterly, guess what? Your eighth meeting was this quarter, right? We're just in the sweet spot of adoption. I know that's hard for people, but we've been doing this a bit wise for eight years.

David:
[21:12] So that's like a fair- I'm so glad you guys have been doing that. Oh my.

Matt:
[21:16] Eight years feels like a hundred. But that is true. So look, I think ETF growth will go up. The comparison to the net new supply is because I'm a very simple person. Like crypto prices are set by supply and demand. You have one source of new supply, which is blockchain rewards or staking, et cetera. And then you have this novel source of incredible demand on ETFs. And if we look into 2026, you can be very precise. At current prices, the Bitcoin network will produce $15.1 billion worth of new Bitcoin.

Matt:
[21:51] ETFs did, well, they'll end up doing about $23 or $24 billion this year in 2025. And we think that will go up in 2026. So they'll far surpass it. Ethereum is an even stronger story, actually the strongest of the big three assets. Next year, we estimate about $3 billion in net new supply of ETH. We've done $10 billion in ETF inflows this year. We'll probably get to $11 billion by year end. That could be 15 or more, 20 billion next year. So you're talking about five times more demand than there is supply. That's an incredibly bullish story for ETH prices. And Solana is something similar. It's $3.6 billion. Solana ETFs have only been on the market since October, right? But in less than two months, they've pulled in over $600 million. They'll suppress that as well. What this means is that there is this gentle tide consistently lifting prices up. And from what it's worth, you've seen that this year. The fear and greed index was at 10 and Bitcoin was flat. With the fear and greed index at 10, Bitcoin should have been minus 60. It wasn't minus 60 because there's been $22 billion of institutional money of suit coiners to use the new crypto Twitter. Suit coiners. Coming in and vooing this market. And those suit coiners are coming in force in 2026.

David:
[23:13] Oh, my God. That is the greatest term I have heard out of crypto in a long time. I guess I was not out of crypto. I have an anecdote that I'm pretty sure places itself pretty well into what you're talking about and kind of the recent history of just these ETFs. Ever since the ETFs launched, I've increasingly run into, you know, people who are not in the crypto space. They're not crypto people, but nonetheless, they know about crypto and they have invested in crypto. And maybe they got in on a previous cycle and they like invested in like DentaCoin or Dogecoin and they like rode the volatility up and down and then they got burned. But these same people, I've noticed this multiple times, especially during my travels down in Argentina, which is like kind of a couple of years ahead of crypto adoption. So many times I have heard these same people or same archetypes of people who are previously invested in crypto. They are now like, I'm just going to dollar cost average into Bitcoin and forget about it. And that's the only thing that I'm doing. And that started me like running into these little stories from,

David:
[24:15] you know, ex burned out crypto investors, crypto speculators. A lot of them are just falling into the pattern of just dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin ever since the ETFs came online. And I would expect that ETFs would be actually a fine venue for them to do that in their Robinhood or account or their brokerage. This is something that I've picked up on. How does this fit into what you're talking about,

Matt:
[24:37] Matt? It's completely right because it's so normal. In those brokerage accounts, people are dollar cost averaging into stocks and bonds. It's just what they do. They don't even think about it. A lot of us save in our retirement accounts just automatically. The ETF makes it so easy. It gives us this institutional credibility. So I think that's exactly right. I think people will just continually buy it and buy it and buy it. The other thing I didn't mention about why ETF flows go up is the most obvious thing. And people always ask me, do you really think flows will go up? Ask any crypto investor, have they, the first time they bought Bitcoin or ETH,

RSA:
[25:14] Have they bought more since then?

Matt:
[25:16] I mean, no one goes 100% on day one. Why do we think it would be true for these ETF investors, right? They're going to leg in and in and in. So yeah, that story makes a lot of sense to me.

David:
[25:28] I'll also say anecdotally, there was another anecdote. This is me, my own story. I was down in Argentina somewhere and the crypto prices were plummeting. And I didn't have any money on Coinbase. I didn't want to wait for it to arrive, but I wanted to buy the dip. right in that particular moment. And I went on to Robinhood, which is where I get my brokerage, and I went to the crypto section. I wanted to buy a pretty substantial amount of, it was either Bitcoin or Ether, maybe a little both. And the fees on Robinhood were so goddamn high. And I was like, there's no way I'm paying these fees to buy Bitcoin and Ether on Robinhood. Why would I do that? I guess I'll just have to wait for my transfer to go through and I'll take whatever the price I'll get in like one day when it shows up on Coinbase. And then I realized, oh, I can just buy the ETF, which has no fees on Robinhood. And I can just dollar cost into that based on my Robinhood account. And so the access, that was the first time I've truly experienced the privilege of the access of the ETF in a very easy to access way inside of Robinhood. And I'm the bankless guy. I'm the guy who like self-custody is all my ETH. And so like even myself, I'm finding value in the ETFs just being at my fingertips way more accessible than the actual on-chain stuff.

Matt:
[26:45] I love that story. All about it.

RSA:
[26:47] Number four, crypto equities will outperform tech equities. It feels like this year was the first time we actually got some big crypto equities. Talk about this one. What do you think is going to happen next year?

Rasmussen:
[26:59] I think we're going to continue to see a trend that we've seen over the past three plus years, which is that crypto equities have outperformed tech equities in the aggregate by multiple orders of magnitude. You know, we have this widening group of crypto equities that we spoke about a bit earlier. or you now have Circle and Figure and other pure play crypto equities that we didn't really have one, two or three years ago. I think we're gonna have more crypto equity companies going public or more crypto companies going public. So the universe is gonna continue to grow. And again, those companies are gonna become more high quality, more pure play.

Rasmussen:
[27:34] But I think fundamentally why crypto equities continue to outperform traditional tech equities is because Wall Street and traders just don't understand crypto equities. They write them off as like these crazy companies that are tiny and only operate in the context of crypto's crazy space. But in reality, these are massive businesses. Coinbase is part of the S&P.

Rasmussen:
[27:56] Strategy is part of the NASDAQ 100. And these companies have many different business lines. I mean, Coinbase alone operates in every single corner of the crypto ecosystem, and it's continuing to expand. I think Wall Street just writes them off. And that's a huge mistake. And that's why we continue to see the growth of these companies surprise Wall Street. And you see the companies continue to run up in price over the long term is because there's alpha in understanding that these are real companies that are growing very quickly and often more quickly than a lot of traditional equity. So we think this trend will continue over time. It's also easier to allocate to crypto equities for a lot of investors. We work with a lot of these massive wealth management platforms, and many of them won't allow their wealth managers to allocate to crypto ETFs

Rasmussen:
[28:42] like Bitcoin or Ethereum ETFs in their client accounts. But they have no restrictions on their ability to invest in something like Coinbase or Strategy or a crypto equities index fund that we manage. And so I think that's another reason why we think we continue to see flows into crypto equities. It's investors that want to proxy to crypto aren't allowed to invest in crypto because their committees won't let them or their risk teams won't let them. And so they buy crypto equities and it's great exposure. It's high beta and it's outperformed tech equities over the past three years by multiple, multiple hundreds of percentage points.

RSA:
[29:15] I think what's interesting about this is this is the first year it felt like crypto natives realized they needed some off-chain assets as well in order to capture the full upside of crypto. And so that's weird. Oh, shoot, I need a brokerage. I need to own some stocks in order to get an upside on some of these crypto native companies. And I'm wondering next year and maybe the year after whether the opposite might start to become true, whether the institutions might be like, oh, I actually need some crypto native tokens in order to capture the upside of crypto that aren't available in my, you know, brokerage TradFi account. And this is kind of a, I guess, an additional question on what about our tokens? I know Bitwise has long been bullish on DeFi tokens, revenue generating tokens, for instance. It's felt like they have taken a backseat in 2025. And I don't see anything in your predictions that say 2026 might be a good year for our crypto native tokens. But I think you're still bullish on them long term. And I'm wondering if you could make the case and like what's missing from them? Do we need better investor protection? Do we need higher quality assets and projects and teams? What would you say to this, Matt?

Matt:
[30:26] I mean, look, tokens were bad because we had a extraordinarily aggressive regulator that said, if you attach economic rights to a token, you go to jail. And so that had two effects. One, it meant many of the tokens didn't have economic rights. And two, it meant many entrepreneurs didn't enter the space because they could build somewhere else and not go to jail. That's been released. So what do we need for these revenue driven tokens to sort of gain more traction? We need them to improve the economic capture of those tokens now that they're allowed to. We're starting to see that with things like fee switches and increased burns and other things. They need investor relations from the protocols to help investors understand that. And then they need continued traction of the apps. But it's absolutely going to happen. The line between equities and tokens is blurring. We've presented it as this binary. It's completely a spectrum. And investors need to allocate across all of it. Earlier today, I was meeting with a sovereign wealth fund. They asked me, what is the beta of crypto? What does it mean to own the market? To own the market in crypto, you need crypto assets and you need crypto equities. That's what I explained to them. You're going to need these tokens as well because we don't know where all the value will accrue. But I think you're starting to see it. I think better economic capture, better tokens, better teams, new apps. We're going to see an explosion of that in the year to come.

David:
[31:51] These are all words that I thoroughly enjoy. Let's move on to number five. Polymarket open interest will set a new all-time high, surpassing 2024 election levels. The 2024 election level for polymarket volumes is an incredibly high benchmark. That was when polymarket mania, everyone was saying polymarket, polymarket, polymarket, all over Tradmedia. I can't remember off the top of my head where we are in comparison to those numbers right now, but we're somewhere like one third to one half of where we were.

RSA:
[32:17] I think we hit about 500 million in open interest at that spike.

David:
[32:21] Yeah. Yeah.

RSA:
[32:22] And now we're at about 200 million. Perfect.

David:
[32:25] So we have a 2.5 X in like non Donald Trump election related prediction markets that need to happen in order for this in order for this prediction to come true. What gives you such conviction in the growth of poly market and prediction markets?

RSA:
[32:40] Oh, man, I thought you were going to say we sandbagged this one.

Matt:
[32:42] I actually thought it was going to be a different intro to this one. This seems like a gimme. Polymerhood is opening in the U.S., right? The U.S. is the world's largest market. It couldn't even invest during that previous boom. It's demonstrating traction in everything from sports to entertainment to economics, etc. It has huge investment, net new capital, at which it can do outreach to people and build itself, build its understanding. And 2026 is an election year, and a lot of people are focused on the midterms. I think when you smash all those together, you could see this go to a billion dollars. I wouldn't be shocked to see that. So I think this one is pretty easy when you combine all those things together. I don't know if Ryan has a different take.

Rasmussen:
[33:28] No, I agree. I actually, you know, two years ago or following the 2024 election, I guess, so a year ago, I was pretty bearish on what was going to happen to open interest on Polymarket. If you look at the Polymarket open interest chart, it almost mirrors the famous tulip bubble chart. Like exactly. It's this crazy spike and then it falls off a cliff. And I just felt the same thing was going to happen until the next election. Matt and I debated this a lot heading into 2025. And I'm not afraid to throw my hands up and say I was wrong about this. We've seen open interest continue to climb. And I think the fact that most US users just simply weren't using Polymarket, but it's one of the fastest growing and largest betting online gambling or sports betting markets in the world. And now Polymarket is opening new categories. And you just have this degen gambling appetite in the US. and I think that's fun to just drive

RSA:
[34:20] Open interest much, much higher.

Rasmussen:
[34:21] You have the World Cup coming in 2026. We have the Super Bowl coming in early 2026. We have the midterms. I just think all of those things, as Polymarket expands, are going to drive open interest. Yeah, like Matt said, probably significantly higher than 500 million.

Matt:
[34:34] Yes. Yeah, that is right. Can I add one more thing on this that I think is maybe important? A thing we don't talk enough about in 2025 in crypto is that we went from this one narrative of Bitcoin to three narratives, Bitcoin, stablecoin, and tokenization. We sort of just feel today like those narratives have always been there. But from a public perception, crypto was a one-trick pony until maybe this year. And now it's a three-trick pony. One thing that I like about this prediction is it's going to be, crypto is going to be a 10-trick pony, maybe next year. Prediction markets is probably the fourth leg, but we're also going to see privacy and DeFi and D-Pin and all of these things. And I think this is sort of the signal that we're expanding from these three giant narratives to something like 10. And I think that will make crypto significantly, you know, more important, more understood, feel more real in people's day-to-day lives.

David:
[35:27] That's the special thing that I really feel about Polymarket is, yeah, it's on a blockchain. It's got stable coins, but it's really, it created its own category in of itself. And that's finally crypto coming through on a promise of just like, you'll be able to use crypto infrastructure to build out entirely new categories of things. And we're finally starting to see some of that, as you said. But one question I have for you, Matt, as I'm sure investors come to you and be like, you know, I saw maybe the value of Bitcoin, but beyond Bitcoin, I didn't really see anything until I found Polymarket. How do I get exposure to Polymarket or prediction markets? And you as the ETF guy, I don't know what answer you tell them because Polymarket is privately owned and the prediction market category as an indice sector is probably not all that strong. So when people come to you and say, hey, I want exposure to prediction markets, what do you tell them?

Matt:
[36:19] Man that's a great question do you have a good answer i don't know you can get tangential exposure by owning things related to stable coins because that will of course have to scale as polymarket scales you can get tangential exposure by owning layer one blockchains because those things start to scale but it's hard to get direct exposure without underlying exposure to the equity as far as i know i do think it's good broadly for crypto but the specific tie in, you know, we're going to, you know, get two in the weeds. The specific tie-in is relatively limited. It just grows it up.

David:
[36:51] Do people actually ask that question? Are they expressing that level of interest in prediction markets or is that just my imagination?

Matt:
[36:57] I haven't heard them express that level of interest. I think those people are probably talking to the VC side of the equation. An analogy back to the internet, it's sort of like taking one narrow piece of the internet and saying how does that benefit the internet? It actually helps that it's everything, that you can stream, that you can do teams, etc., etc. So I think of it in that case, it's broadly positive.

RSA:
[37:19] I love the idea of crypto having a dozen different use cases like the internet does today, right? It wasn't just e-commerce or just like one thing. It's all of the things, certainly, and that's the internet of value meme that we've been talking about, and now it's coming true. Let's talk about prediction number six, which is a somewhat political prediction. Let's call it, stable coins will be blamed for destabilizing an emerging market currency. Oh, that's interesting. So what do you mean by this?

Matt:
[37:48] Well, we always love to throw in one or two predictions that have this sort of negative tinge to them because I think it's important to be realistic. Everyone talks about stable coins dollarizing the world from a positive perspective because it is a positive story. You think about people in countries facing high levels of inflation, escaping that inflation with their savings into the relative stability of dollars, escaping the high fees that banks charge into the relative efficiency of stablecoin-based payments. That's a wonderful story from an individual perspective, but for the people running the central banks in that country, it's less of a wonderful story, right? It's capital flight, it's dollarization, it's escaping and putting pressure on the local currency.

RSA:
[38:31] Would you say it's loss of sovereignty, isn't it?

Matt:
[38:34] It's loss of sovereignty. It's loss of control over currency, which is like one of the fundamental things that many governments do.

Matt:
[38:41] So I think not enough people think about it from that perspective. We've seen some emerging market economies form tasks forced to study stable coins. They're now getting of a size where you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, where you're really talking about high impacts on commercial activity. I'm sure, David, you saw in Argentina significant stable coin use. It's really penetrated there. It's penetrated in places like Nigeria. You see it in other places. I think we might see someone blame stablecoins for harming their current. We might see countries try to ban stablecoins. I think we've gotten to the size that we're big enough that we matter. And I think you'll start to see the other side of that come into the equation. Well, if you

RSA:
[39:24] Project that a little bit further, you wonder how successful they will actually be. I mean, stablecoins and crypto adoption is very much a bottom-up phenomenon. That's what the bankless thing is. It's about creating self-sovereign individuals who can... Leave their banks, and go bankless. There's a small version of this with, if you guys were following kind of everything going on in Nepal and the overthrow of the Nepalese government, prior to that, the, I guess, revolutionaries, maybe we'll call them, were using crypto assets because bank accounts were frozen, communication was frozen, all of these things. And that was made illegal by the government in charge. And you could imagine that happening in other countries as well as they acknowledge the existence of this threat of stable coins that they impose capital controls and flat out make it illegal, but then will they be successful? I mean, don't you have to de facto ban the internet in order to get these freedom tools out of your country?

Matt:
[40:22] That's the thing. You can't really do it. And it's the wrong thing to point the blame at. The blame is not the stable coin. The blame is you're destroying your currency.

David:
[40:31] Or a mismanaged government account.

Matt:
[40:34] That's exactly right. That is where the blame... So I think they will try. I do think broadly they will fail because you can't ban the internet. At least it's very difficult. And ultimately... The optimistic version is what you want to see is better government controls on their spending and their currencies. Like that's how they should actually fight it is to get their house in order from an inflationary perspective. And then people won't feel the need to take on this alternative approach.

Rasmussen:
[41:02] The thing that I love about this prediction is that the people who lose, if this prediction is true, are the central banks and the government leaders who are abusing their currencies and are abusing their citizens. And the people that win are the sovereign individuals and stablecoins win. And so to me, this is like a beautiful prediction because it sounds scary. Stablecoins will be blamed for destabilizing an emerging market currency. That seems dark and ominous, but it's actually a function of the individual and the sovereign individual winning. And that to me is really, really powerful and is what crypto is here to do and

Rasmussen:
[41:38] why all of us got into crypto in the first place.

David:
[41:41] We actually definitely saw a canary of this this year. If people remember that Nigeria jailed, arrested this Binance cryptocurrency executive, Tigran Gambiron. He was a US citizen. I'll get a quote from this BBC article. The 40-year-old was in charge of financial crime compliance at Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, that Nigeria blames for much of its recent economic turmoil. Are these maybe some of the words that you guys might expect to be thrown at stablecoins in 2026?

Matt:
[42:11] Yeah, that's precisely right. I think that is the canary in the coal mine. And now we're of a sufficient size where we're going to start to see those ramifications, you know, more broadly in some of these countries that face really challenging conditions. Yeah.

David:
[42:23] Well, like Ryan said, crypto represents an escape valve for a lot of the economic activity going on in these countries to escape oppressive regimes like this. And so I don't necessarily think this is actually a pessimistic prediction. I actually think it's an optimistic one. Let's move on to number seven, on-chain vaults, aka ETFs 2.0, will double in AUM. I think we might need a lesson here. Matt, what is an on-chain vault and why do you guys think it's going, whatever they are, think

Matt:
[42:53] That they double? Yeah, absolutely. Ryan, you want me to take this? You want to take it?

Rasmussen:
[42:56] You have more love for ETFs than anybody.

Matt:
[43:00] I have love for ETFs. We both love. So an on-chain vault is like a fund, but it exists on-chain. So users will deposit assets, typically a stablecoin like USDC, into a vault. And then third-party managers, we call them asset managers in TradFi. They're called curators in crypto. It's a pretty highbrow term. Curators allocate the funds in various ways often to generate yield but sometime just to generate total returns in the same way a traditional asset manager like a BlackRock will take in dollars and then invest in yield bearing bonds or invest in stocks that might deliver total returns

Matt:
[43:40] A vault curator will take in stable coins and invest in yield-bearing DeFi protocols or generate total returns through some sort of strategy. We think it's the way that asset management will exist when we are in this fully on-chain world. We think Bitwise will be a vault manager as much as it is an ETF manager. And vault sort of emerged in 2024 from effectively nothing and assets ramped to about $2 billion They continued to run up in 2025. They hit almost $9 billion. That's a pretty reasonable size. And then they washed out in the October volatility spike. And a few of the poorly managed strategies by weak curators had issues. And AUM is down. We think they come roaring back. We think large, high quality, professional crypto managers will come into the space as curators. And this will be seen as an institutional way to get diversified exposure to yield or total return. I love calling them ETFs 2.0 because, of course, ETFs were a disruptive technology when they were created in 1993. They replaced effectively mutual funds, which is how people invested until ETFs came along. Now ETFs have replaced mutual funds. I think the next version of that is vaults.

Matt:
[44:59] Someday we'll be sitting here talking about multiple trillions of dollars in vaults. You know, today there's $20 trillion in ETFs. Someday we'll get to $20 trillion in volts. I think it's that big of a deal. It's a really big idea.

David:
[45:12] Well, when the ETF guys tell me that the ETF 2.0, the on-chain version of ETFs, are going to be trillions of dollars, I think you guys have a little bit better, more informed of a perspective than the average person here. So that is supremely interesting to me. If I'm reading between the lines and the ETF guys are super bullish on on-chain ETFs, aka volts, this would go, it goes to follow that y'all would be wanting to be building directly in this space. Maybe I won't pin you down for anything specific here, but If theoretically Bitwise would be building on-chain vaults and would be growing out that business line, what year, this is a prediction that you didn't put in, but I'm asking you for one, what year do you think that the on-chain vault AUM would flip Bitwise's off-chain ETF AUM?

Matt:
[46:03] I don't know. I'm bullish on both. I'm not going to be able to be pinned down on that. I do think this is a really big deal. It is something that we're looking at. No commitments from Bitwise here. I do think it is one of the ways asset management works in the future. So maybe we'll come back on the show next year with a prediction like that. All right.

David:
[46:21] We're just not ready for that one.

Rasmussen:
[46:22] I would just add to that, to your point, David, Bitwise is already managing assets on-chain. We have been now for a number of years through our on-chain staking solutions business.

Rasmussen:
[46:33] And that already is a decent size in terms of AUM. And it's expanding from Ethereum to Solana and other crypto assets, which is one of the ways that we can offer staking in our ETFs in kind of a vertically integrated way. So we are, and I'm very happy about this because when I joined Bitwise as DeFi analyst in 2021, we weren't really doing anything on chain. And over the past five years, we have started doing a lot of things on chain and it's grown to be a sizable amount of our overall AUM. So I wouldn't be surprised if some point in the future, those two things are split 50 50 or if on chain assets gets the tilt but but you know we already do that for staking and so vaults is a natural evolution of what we do on chain well

RSA:
[47:15] Speaking of tilt number eight, talks about tilt for Ethereum and Solana. Ethereum and Solana will set new all-time highs, but there is a contingency here in parentheses. If the Clarity Act passes, ETH and Sol, new all-time highs dependent on the Clarity Act passing. You already called for Bitcoin all-time highs this year. So clearly we've discussed, do not believe in the four-year cycle, believe that next year, 2026, will be bullish. ETH and Solana won't just hit all-time highs. They'll only do so if the Clarity Act passes. Talk about that. Why is there contingency on the Clarity Act? And then, of course, we all have the follow-up question is, well, is the Clarity Act going to pass?

Matt:
[48:02] The Clarity Act passing would be like a starter's gun for ETH and Sol to run into trillions of dollars of value. You know, what we have from a regulatory framework in the U.S. Right now is we got the Genius act encoded, you know, written in stone, stable coins are regulated, they can exist, they can be used for payments. The rest of the regulatory progress we've made over the last year is written in pencil, because it's all regulatory decision making, and it could be reversed in a new administration. So we feel really good about the state of regulation, but that could be reversed. And that prevents...

Matt:
[48:40] Some high-quality entrepreneurs, some high-quality VC, some Wall Street firms from building on this because you're not building on the most sound, robust foundation. If the Clarity Act passes, we have the full regulatory spectrum to build the future of finance, to build a bankless world, to build real DeFi disrupting all financial action. And I think you're going to see just an incredible explosion of entrepreneurial activity, of Wall Street investment, of investor interest of a thousand different themes. So if we get it, we'll see this massive explosion. I think we pushed really higher. If we don't get it, I think it'll be a real negative shock to the ecosystem. I think the market expects us to get it. There's some risks that that won't happen. And I think it would be a psychological setback. I don't, I'm not saying that Ethan Soul can't get to all time highs if we don't get the Clarity Act, but I do think it will be a big setback and it'll take some time for the industry to work through.

RSA:
[49:38] It's interesting. It's almost like you're saying, Matt, the Clarity Act is like the genius bill, but for tokenization. And if you're talking about the three things that crypto is doing right now, it's sort of the store of value thing and it's stable coins. And then Clarity would be the tokenization lever. I do have to ask you though, I'm sure you're monitoring the situation in DC. What do you think? Are we going to get the Clarity Act done next year?

Matt:
[50:04] Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think we have better than even odds, but they're not at 100%.

RSA:
[50:10] To some extent, it's become personal.

Matt:
[50:12] To some extent, it's hung up on how many limitations there are on White House activity in the crypto market. And that makes me worried because that can be a place where the two parties just butt heads for reasons that have nothing to do with what's best for America and instead are sort of personal bias issues. I'm hopeful we can get it through. If you had me to put odds, I'd put it like something like 60%. Some people say it's a little bit higher than that. But it's not a guarantee. We need to continue focusing on it because it's really existentially important. I love how you framed it as sort of the regulatory pillar supporting tokenization. I would add DeFi underneath that as well.

Matt:
[50:53] And I think if it passes, it's going to be great.

David:
[50:56] Prediction number nine, half of Ivy League endowments will invest in crypto. I want to, again, zoom out a little bit on this one and ask why do Ivy League endowments matter? I know that they're very large, but is that why they matter? Do they matter for other reasons? And what's the overall significance of them, half of them investing in crypto? And then also maybe how many of them are invested in crypto right now? So all of the context, please.

Matt:
[51:22] Great context. I'm sorry to keep talking, but this is one that I was a big fan of.

Matt:
[51:27] There are eight Ivy Leagues. Two of them are invested in crypto, Brown and Harvard. The reason it matters is not just because they're large. That matters. They manage whatever, you know, $60, $70 billion in assets. That's a big deal. Maybe more. Actually, I think more. I just don't have the numbers in front of me. But the reason they matter is because they set the tone for institutional investors. For instance, we all think of hedge funds as like one of the primary way institutions around the world invest. And that is true today. But it wasn't always true. 30 years ago, hedge funds were this like tiny corner of the market where family offices and a few rich guys invested. And then Yale started investing a huge amount of its portfolio into hedge funds. They delivered exceptional returns. David Swenson became like the best investor in the world in most people's eyes. He wrote a book that everyone read. Every major institution wanted to follow the Yale model, which is what it was called, which was to concentrate in privates and hedge funds. And that industry became a giant industry. I think if we get half or more of the Ivies investing in Bitcoin, it validates it for every institutional investor. The fact that Harvard Allocated was brought up in my conversation with the Sovereign Wealth Fund today. The fact that Harvard Allocated was brought up the last time I was on a national accounts platform. It really does matter because it's seen as a leading light. So this is a big deal.

RSA:
[52:53] So they're institutional KOLs, basically.

Matt:
[52:55] That's exactly what they are. That's exactly what they are. Well said, yes.

RSA:
[53:00] Again, all the influencers on board. All right, let's talk about number 10. And then spoiler alert, there is a bonus prediction. All right. But number 10 first. More than 100 crypto-linked ETPs will launch in the US. So this would be an ETP explosion.

RSA:
[53:19] Ryan, why do you think this will happen?

Rasmussen:
[53:22] You know, part of what's really interesting about crypto ETPs is that it's been...

RSA:
[53:27] Almost 15 years since the first crypto ETP application was filed by the Winklevoss twins.

Rasmussen:
[53:32] And we just now only have a handful of spot crypto ETPs, which is insane. It's taken so long to get where we're at today. And I think from here, we're going to just accelerate forward at ridiculous speeds. Something huge happened in October, and that's that the SEC published what's called generic listing standards, which was essentially a playbook letting ETP issuers like Bitwise know that if an asset meets certain criteria, then you can list an ETP. And we no longer have this 240-day listing period or waiting period that we all went through and probably came on and talked to you guys about for Bitcoin ETPs and Ethereum ETPs. And what that means, and what we've already started to see since these generic listing standards came out, is that ETF issuers can now just launch all kinds of single asset ETPs. We're going to see more and more, more and more ETPs that look and feel like traditional equities, ETPs, index funds, momentum strategies,

Rasmussen:
[54:31] Smart beta indexes, and things like that. And so it really matters that we have this regulatory clarity that we all talk about as this kind of big term over and over and again. But this is what it looks like actually written in paper and provided to the players in the field like ETF issuers is now we know what we can and what we can do. And we have that roadmap. and we're marching down that roadmap. We think over 100 crypto linked ETPs will launch next year. I think those will be spot crypto index, equities, smart beta, momentum, all kinds of things. And it matters for investors because now they have a big menu to choose from on how they want to allocate. You can imagine an investor is like going to a restaurant and having like two things on the menu. They're not going to be very excited about it and it's not going to be a very great experience. But now they're going to go and have a menu that's like the cheesecake factory of ETPs

Matt:
[55:23] Where it's like

Rasmussen:
[55:23] More than you could possibly choose from. And we're super excited about it.

David:
[55:27] The cool thing with this is that when you get a sufficiently large number of crypto assets being put into ETPs, ETFs, you start to get permutations and different combinations that might be interesting to people. Something that you guys launched today or announced today is that the Bitwise 10 Crypto Index ETF is now an ETF trading the New York Stock Exchange. Talk about what this milestone is and what it means for just the ETF sector of crypto.

Matt:
[55:55] Oh, man, I'm so excited about this. This is actually why I joined Bitwise in 2018. So this is like an eight year story in the making. And yeah, it uplisted into an ETF format. It's a market cap weighted index of the 10 largest crypto assets, starting with Bitcoin and ETH. And then it screens out assets with significant risks, right? So as an example, today, it doesn't hold Trump. You know, in the past, it didn't hold Luna, even though that became the fourth largest asset. The reason it's important is because most traditional investors, financial advisors, just want to invest in crypto. They don't have an opinion about ETH versus Solana. They probably can't even pronounce Solana. They just want to own crypto. And a market cap weighted index lets them own crypto with the push of a button. Index funds are the primary way people invest in stocks. They buy the S&P 500. They're the primary way people invest in bonds. They buy the Bloomberg Aggregate Index. I think they're going to be one of the primary ways people invest in crypto. I think this fund will eventually be tens of billions, maybe even more. Could be the second largest category. And it's going to mean inflows into high quality, top tier projects. So we're really excited about it.

RSA:
[57:07] Wait, that's really cool because this is a product I can tell my family when they ask the question of like, Ryan, should I buy XRP? Which everybody always asks, right? And I'm just like, well, let's talk about that. OK, but now I can just direct them to something like an ETF that holds top 10 market cap adjusted, filters out sort of the high risk. I'll call them the scams, filters out the scams. And then you get just the top 10 and that's just going to be market adjusted. And they don't have to text me and ask me for specific crypto asset picks. Right. That's what this product is for.

Matt:
[57:41] That's exactly right. It's the easy button, B-I-T-W. It's the easy button for crypto. And if a new coin comes along that's legitimate and bubbles up, it goes into the index. But it's always screened by the professional team at Bitwise. So I love it. Yeah, it's the solution to the pesky relative who wants to ask you about Cardano.

RSA:
[58:00] Yes. Is Cardano in there, by the way? L-N-B-I-T-W.

Matt:
[58:03] You have to go look at the assets. It is.

RSA:
[58:06] Cardano's in there. Litecoin's in there. Chainlink's in there. So you're capturing a few things that I wouldn't necessarily recommend. But you know, they're in there for index purposes. All right, that's great. Let's talk about maybe the bonus prediction. So we've covered 10. These have all been fantastic. This is bonus prediction. Bitcoin's correlation to equities will fall. Talk to us about the correlation at this point in time. They've been highly correlated, I believe. I mean, there are times when it's not, times when it is, but Bitcoin is kind of trading like a risk on asset the way equities are as well, mostly, despite our best efforts to tell the market otherwise. Talk about this.

Matt:
[58:49] So the correlation between Bitcoin and stocks is higher than it's been. It's still relatively low. Like statistically, it's 0.4-ish. In statistical terms, when you're below 0.5, it's considered a low correlation. But it's not zero, which is- What's gold,

RSA:
[59:06] Just for a benchmark?

Matt:
[59:07] What's a gold statistical correlation? Gold correlation to stocks is very low, probably like 0.1. Okay.

David:
[59:12] It's very low.

Matt:
[59:13] So Bitcoin is much more correlated to stocks than gold is, but it's less correlated than like different stocks. If the correlation between US stocks and emerging market stocks is probably like 0.7, right? So there's your spectrum. US and emerging market stocks, 0.7, stocks and Bitcoin, 0.4, stocks and gold, 0.1. It's like rough numbers. And it's been going up a little bit. We think it's going to go down substantially, not too much, but somewhat in 2026 for a simple reason, which is that correlations don't just appear out of nowhere. They're driven by what drives each asset. The reason the correlation between Bitcoin and equities exists is because they're both influenced by macro conditions, right? Macro conditions drive stocks, macro conditions drive Bitcoin. So when macro conditions are primary, you see them moving together. But Bitcoin is also driven by crypto-specific factors, by regulation, by institutional adoption, by things that only matter to the crypto market. I think one big meta for 2026 in crypto is that crypto-specific factors will be more important than they were in the past.

Matt:
[1:00:25] Things specific to Bitcoin will drive Bitcoin. Things specific to ETH will drive ETH. Things specific to Chainlink will drive Chainlink. I think those will be more important than they have been in the past when what really mattered the most was just the macro liquidity conditions. So if you think the relative importance of the real world use of crypto is rising, then you think correlations are going down. And just to put a pin on this conversation about why this matters, we've covered sort of three things about crypto's returns in 2026. We started by saying returns are going to go up, four-year cycle is dead, price is going in a positive direction because there's more demand than supply. We've talked about volatility going down because risks have been squeezed out of the system, right, by increasing regulation, liquidity, stability in the market. And now we're talking about correlations going lower. Good returns, lower volatility, lower correlations is sort of a magical mix. And that's part of the reason we think institutional adoption will continue to increase because those are the three ingredients they're really looking for. You can get them all in a single investment in crypto. I think it's a pretty good service.

David:
[1:01:34] As we look backwards on the year of 2025, it's a big year. It's kind of like a messy year, but overall it was a big year. How does 2025 rank? I know this is kind of a complex question, but just, you know, give me your gut take. How does 2025 rank in terms of just like industry progress? How much did we get done this year? How far forward did we move collectively as an industry?

Rasmussen:
[1:02:00] I would argue that 2025 is the most important year so far in crypto's history. It doesn't feel like that from a price perspective. But if you just think about all of the things that have happened over the past year,

RSA:
[1:02:13] It really is remarkable.

Rasmussen:
[1:02:15] We've had continued adoption of ETFs. We've had an overthrow of an SEC regime that was trying to outlaw crypto in the US. We've also had a number of executive orders and legislative pieces be finalized and solidified to help push the regulatory framework forward for crypto. We've had crypto companies that have gone public. We've had Harvard double down on Bitcoin. A number of central banks and sovereign wealth funds allocate to Bitcoin. Stable coins and tokenization became mainstream terms across Wall Street. I think all of those things are incredibly important for the long-term growth of crypto.

Rasmussen:
[1:02:55] I think sometimes people get too hung up on price and can't look one layer beneath that. And the foundation of crypto has never been stronger. And if you would have said all of these things that I just mentioned have happened over the past year when we were in mid 2024, I would have said you were crazy. There's no way all of that could happen. Yet here we are talking about it as if it's no big deal. So I think 2025 was the most important year in crypto's history.

David:
[1:03:18] Yeah, I do agree that there seems to be a massive dislocation between some of the fundamental progress and institutional acceptance and cultural acceptance of crypto as an industry mixed with the kind of mediocre price action, maybe with the exception of Bitcoin, mediocre price action and kind of like just like sentiment of despair, at least on crypto Twitter and on the crypto side of things. But don't listen to them. I don't listen to them anyways. And so hopefully the price relocates with the fundamental progress that we made this year in 2026.

RSA:
[1:03:49] I would just add.

Matt:
[1:03:51] I think crypto Twitter has sort of lost its ambition. Just to put a pin on what Ryan just said. The other day, the chairman of the SEC, the most important financial regulator in the U.S. and the world, said all U.S. Stocks would be on chain in a couple of years. For context, the tokenized stock market today is $680 million. U.S. stocks are $68 trillion. I'll save you the math. That's 100,000x bigger. What are we even talking about? This is the chairman of the SEC saying the tokenized stock market is going to 100,000x in the next couple of years. I think we've lost sight of how big a deal crypto really is. It's really entering this period. The reason what Ryan said is true is because we've made this regulatory progress. It's entering this period where we can move the full financial economy on chain. It won't happen overnight. But the chairman of the SEC is telling you it's going to happen in the next couple of years. We're not really bullish enough, I think, is my take.

David:
[1:04:52] Yeah, he's probably worthwhile to listen to. So take note. I have one question, which is just irrelevant to all these predictions, but it seems like an okay point to ask this question. I think you guys are the right people to ask this question. When I was getting into crypto, 2017 through 2020, one of the big... The big narrative catalysts for like why crypto is going to get adopted was intergenerational, cross-generational wealth transfer. It's like eventually, you know, back in 2018 to 2020, we're talking about the millennials are going to grow up. They're going to come into wealth. And what are they going to do? Are they going to buy the stock market, which is at all-time highs, or are they going to buy Bitcoin, which is at, you know, $8,000? And

Rasmussen:
[1:05:33] That was the

David:
[1:05:33] Narrative at the time. And like that, that worked for me. I've, I felt resonant with that. And I haven't really heard the conversation of generational wealth transfer being a catalyst for crypto in at least a handful of years. So you guys talk to investors across all ages. When you guys talk about or just think about wealth transfer from the old to the young, update me on that conversation. Is that a big deal? Is that a little deal? Maybe that's in the rearview mirror and we're kind of in a lull period. Update me on where we are with this.

Matt:
[1:06:03] I think it's another one of those steady drips in the bucket lifting the industry higher. I mean, it happens. It happens every day. When we talk to family offices, they talk about it a lot. When we talked to financial advisors, they mentioned that they need to get into crypto and understand crypto because they're worried when their existing clients pass away that the new generation will fire them if they don't understand this space. So it is very resonant with us. There's actually another sort of aging of crypto phenomenon that's also equally important is, you know, the people who were early and interested in crypto in 2015, 2016 are now, you know, many of them in their mid 30s and 40s taking senior roles at large Wall Street institutions. That's one of the reasons Wall Street is coming into crypto, because you're seeing the people who were interested in crypto back in 2017 have moved up in their positions in those banks. So all of these are on the side of lifting crypto slowly, slowly higher.

RSA:
[1:07:03] This has been great, guys. And Matt, I noticed you've been calling it crypto throughout this conversation. Of course, that's what we call it, crypto. Is it now okay to talk to institutions and use the term crypto? Or like, what's the accepted language? which I know we've went through renditions of this. Oh, we should call it Web3 or, you know, I don't know. Some people have said we should just call the whole thing Bitcoin or whatever. Is crypto the term used?

Matt:
[1:07:24] Yeah, crypto is no longer a four-letter word in traditional finance. We're back, baby, on crypto. I do think it's safe now. I think it's been defanged. It is the term. Some people use digital assets, but most of the people I speak to talk about investing in crypto. It's been normalized. I think the ETFs have done a lot of that work. They brought it into the normal course of conversation. But yeah, it's crypto. And I think it'll be crypto going forward.

RSA:
[1:07:50] Do you know what's so funny is you guys were talking about crypto Twitter sort of losing its, being depressed, more depressed than the progress would dictate that they should be. I see maybe the opposite among the, I'll use the term, Sue coiners. The Sue coiners seem so bullish going into next year. And they're more bullish on crypto than some of the crypto natives, ironically, which is an interesting place to be.

Matt:
[1:08:14] I think that's totally true. But what they see is the next generation of buyer. If you go back to when crypto Twitter was insanely bullish in 2016, what they saw was that there were these additional people who were going to come into the space as soon as they learned about Bitcoin. The suit coiners are looking around and they're like, everyone we talked to now is starting to engage with this. So they're at the frontier of adoption. They can see it. And that's why they're more bullish. The people on crypto Twitter aren't having those meetings. They can't see that frontier, but it's really, really there. Ryan and I see it in our meetings every day.

RSA:
[1:08:51] Incredible. The Sioux coiners are bullish. Their peers are bullish. Ryan and Matt, thank you so much for joining us today on these predictions. We will be sure to score them next year as well. And very excited about what 2026 will bring.

Matt:
[1:09:05] Thanks for having us.

Rasmussen:
[1:09:06] Thank you, guys.

RSA:
[1:09:07] Bankless Nation, got to let you know, none of this has been financial advice. We have no idea how these predictions will hold. But we are excited going into the next year. Crypto is risky. As you know, you could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.