Transcription
The way I think about this is that a truck hauling gold bars to Fort Knox spilled them all over the highway and nobody else is coming to pick them up. So, what I'm viewing this as is an opportunity because this industry is full of enormous amounts of value and it is completely mispriced, overlooked, and misunderstood by the market right now.
What's up everybody? It's LG here and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that just realized it's going to have to decide between stacking ETH and planting vegetables as the world order collapses.
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Today is March 30th, 2026. It's Monday and that means you're about to get hit with a dose of reality from our friendly neighborhood ETH bull who also moonlights as a doomsday maxer as he co-hosts the show with me to kick off the week. John Gillan is in the studio as the two best podcast hosts in the world are ready to talk crypto oil and everything that's top of mind at Milk Road this week.
Today's episode is brought to you by Midnight bringing rational privacy to blockchain and some turn crypto tax chaos into confidence.
John, how are you man? How was your weekend?
>> I'm great. Doomsday maxer is going on my LinkedIn. That's a great that's a great line. I'm gonna take that.
>> Just trying to talk like the kids, man.
>> Trying to talk like the kids. All this maxing [ __ ] is part is apparently part of the common vernacular now. So, I'm just trying to I'm just trying to fit in with people half my age.
>> Who I doubt listen to the show. I doubt they listen to us talking.
>> You never know.
>> Yeah, they got they got better things to do than pay attention to this. But, uh, yeah, I'm I'm excited to have the conversation today. There's going to be a lot to cover, so yeah, we'll get into it.
>> The cops are coming for you during the chat, too. Um, John.
Okay, so every Monday for people that don't know, uh, every Monday we kick off the week in Milk Road with an internal huddle. Uh, we talk to the broader team with with all our producers and everybody else. And then we just we siphon off to just the creators. Okay, so this is the people that write the newsletters, do the podcasts, uh, write the tweets. We all get together just privately. Uh, and we talk about what we're going to write about this week, what we're what we're watching, what's most important. We kind of grill each other on like, hey, what do you really think about this? And we don't let anybody get away with kind of like some loose points. We ask them to really drill down into it. And what we're doing these Monday shows, John, is we're kind of we're kind of bringing that to light. We're kind of going through some of those points, how different people at Milk Road feel, so you guys have a nice broad range of opinions uh about what's going on.
It's funny to start this while uh I feel like the finance and global picture uh is so unilateral. I wish we had a variety of different stories to really dig into that felt meaty, but really there's only one story it feels like in the world, John. A couple months ago, maybe that was AI. Uh, but now it's everything that's going on uh geopolitically. Uh, everybody knows about the Trump taco which is uh Trump chickens out again or something like that. But now there's a new term John that's been coined from Jim Bianca, one of your guests on the macro show that is now nacho not actually changing Hormuz's opening. U John I I want to get your your very fresh take and we'll talk about different takes from the team. Um, are we are you are you positive or negative on developments at this point?
To my mind, not a whole lot has substantively changed. I think that the straight has been closed. So, just to level set where we are, the straight has now been closed effectively for a little bit over a month. There has been a lot of jousting on Twitter about what's actually going on, if negotiations are happening, whether or not they're happening, who they're happening with. Um, just this past weekend, we saw the head of the Iranian parliament saying that Trump is going to tweet something in the morning or truth something in the morning. And he like implied to counter trade that because it's it's not true. He's just looking for exit liquidity. Sure enough, Trump this morning, two hours before market open, tweets that we're, you know, we've got regime change has effectively happened and we're trying to open the straight and if they don't, we're going to do war crimes against them to destroy their energy infrastructure or something. So, a lot of these things are playing out very publicly, very real time on Twitter. But like, you know, the Nacho thing that Jim Biano said, all of this is a lot of like back and forth, but it's not actually opening the straight of Hormuz and getting the shipping to flow again.
There was uh eight ships and then I think they let an additional two ships go through uh oil tankers go through under the Pakistani flag um as sort of like a I don't know goodwill thing or something of some kind. Um, and then Trump announced on Sunday as well on a on a a flight back to uh back to Washington. He was saying that there's going to be an additional 20 ships, tankers, oil tankers let through the straight. This is like a very small trickle though, not a resumption of the normal flow. And it's kind of like an olive branch. Like I think it's like trying to like save off mass like outages and shortages of oil and having refineries shut down and things like that. But it's also very much below levels where um anybody's going to be comfortable again. So from where I'm sitting like it's really hard. There's a lot of fog of war. It's not clear who to believe and it's not clear at all that we've really made any substantive progress right now. So I think I'm still focused on this. The whole market is still focused on this. My macro uh podcast guest for tomorrow um on Milk Road Macro is going to be Rory Johnston um who I'm really excited to talk to. He's one of the best oil market analysts in the world and I think we're all just trying to like monitor the situation and stay close to this because it's it is the biggest story. It's the the only thing that matters in a lot of situations um as far as economics and markets go.
>> Everything you're listening to today is also covered in our daily crypto newsletter and on Sundays we even recap the best parts of the entire week's worth podcast. So check it out at the link below.
>> It >> was prime time for this guy, for Rory. Oil, like imagine imagine you're an expert in something and then and then you wait years and years and obviously oil is always kind of a very important um but not like it has been in the last couple months.
>> So that's >> Yeah, he really caught the spotlight. It's like if you were like an expert on I I had a buddy of mine in college, he said like I'm going to specialize in ferret law and then like someday there'll be a high-profile celebrity murder involving ferrets and they'll call me and I'll be the star witness or something. Um, but it's not quite like that. Ror Rory is has always been everybody's favorite oil quant. Um, but he is getting a lot of attention right now. He's the most popular man in macro Twitter. So, yeah.
>> I hope we never have to have your buddy on to talk about ferret law. I hope that's never I hope there's no global story about ferrets that somehow affects crypto because that uh actually, you know what? I do hope I'm going to reverse that. I hope that that happens. I hope that one day I hope that we are in greener pastures sometime soon, John. uh and you and I are doing the show and we can talk about ferrets or something more light-hearted like that and I promise you guys listening we will get to crypto talk uh in just a minute but everything kind of runs through this story right now so we do need to cover it and we want to talk about uh what our team was saying um so beyond oil as well Thomas our macro expert has been really cautioning as well that you know there's going to be such a huge effect on the rest of the energy industry as well because there's so many things that run through the straight of horm and so many um uh valuable commodities that a lot of those countries produce he even pointed out this Morning, John. I thought it was interesting. Someone I never thought about that you need a lot of helium to make semiconductors, right? And Qatar makes like 30 or 40% of the world's helium. It's refined from natural gas, more or less. I'm really shortening how it's done there, but uh and that's something I never even thought about. So, I feel like we're we're in for a lot of these other little stories of like, oh, this is going to get this is going to have a a major supply crisis soon for all these different commodities, as though it's not already been a crazy commodity year. uh is there anything specifically on your radar in that that side John that you're monitoring in terms of um the after effects outside of oil from this from this uh situation?
>> So the way I've been describing this is that the straight of horm being closed is like the global economy having a stroke and there's no flow through one of the biggest arteries in the entire global economic system. A lot of other things besides oil do flow through there. I think about 20% of the world's oil goes through the straight of Hormuz, but about 20% of the world's liquid natural gas also goes through there. The you know, and you know, as Thomas pointed out, helium, there's a lot of other things that go through there.
[clears throat]
For me, I think the one I'm most concerned about is that something around like 50% of URA, which is a fertilizer that's really important for um crops and for growth. Um, it it goes through the straight of Hormuz. So if you're cutting off about 50% of the world's supply of fertilizer around the time of planting season um in the United States and in India and in other places that rely on this, you're going to put the world's global harvest at risk um for the next harvest. So that's something I've been watching a lot very carefully and like it's it's you know oil is getting a lot of attention because that's you know the thing that's top of mind but there's a lot of other kinds of petroleum products and other things that are are made in this region that go through there that are just being completely blocked off at this time. I don't think that people really see the problem with this is that it's so many things that touch so many regions of the world. it's a little bit difficult to like get your hands around how big and severe the impact is, what it's going to look like in different places. The other thing too is it's a multivariable thing and there's second order impacts that nobody can really foresee. So for example like if people nations that have certain products are experiencing shortages and then have to like you know start resource hoarding to make sure that they have enough that also changes the outcome and we could have situations where you know other n like third world nations or just nations that don't naturally produce some of these things themselves are unable to get them because other nations need them for themselves and are now suddenly unwilling to sell or willing to sell but at such elevated prices that it's unaffordable. um you're already seeing Egypt start uh rationing power um in in Cairo and other places. um so this is already a serious crisis. It's much worse than anybody really understands at this point and because of the the way these things are going to play out and how like I said there's a fog of wars, it's difficult to get like solid information on some of these things and it's changing so fast that nobody's really quite sure what this looks like. So I think that we'll still be seeing the impacts of this in six months to a year, maybe longer. um and it's just like the whole global economy is having a stroke. And there's not really another way to say it. The longer the patient stays without blood flow, the more brain damage happens, the more we eat into demand, the more severe the risk of global economic depression is. um and so it's it's not going to look different in every economy. Not going to look it's going to look different in every economy. It's going to look different for every nation. Not everybody's going to have the same experience, but this is a very serious problem and we have no idea how bad it's going to be yet.
>> John, didn't this happen during CO or did a version of this happen during CO?
>> Nothing like this has ever happened ever in the history of the planet.
>> right? In terms of in terms of there being so many resources for so many people that are all kind of locked into this one choke point that can be that has been disrupted in this way.
>> It's just it's a much more ubiquitous and much more longlasting problem than we have ever seen or had. There's like you could you could put together like a couple of the oil shocks and inflation shocks we had in the 70s and that would get you to about like 50% of where we are right now. The amount of loss and shortfall just in oil and and liquid natural gas is is like extremely severe. um and then nobody's really quite sure how how the fertilizer situation is going to play out. Obviously helium being in short supply impacts chip manufacturing and there's like a huge global arms race around that. So it's just like so many things all at once. um and the the the difficulty is that it's uh it's not something like CO where it's like a self-imposed thing or like we've made some changes because of like certain temporary measures or whatever. This is just like a a whole month of air in the pipes for the whole global economy. And uh that's, you know, really really bad.
>> Yeah. No amount of PPE can can solve this. No amount of wearing gloves and masks at work and visors can can solve can get people back can make the gas run through the the pipelines that are now broken or destroyed. just that's not exactly what it is, but but just to give it a a kind of a general term there. um and just on the AI side, we did ask Melvin this morning. I was like, are you seeing any reactions from this in the AI market at all? And he he didn't seem very concerned with that. Uh, he mainly want to chat chat about Open AI. We'll save that for the AI podcast this week. um but one one thing that we did discuss, John, and I thought was very interesting as well is Martin um our our our expert on on the pro side, crypto side. um he asked he asked Thomas from Macro. He's like he's like so what what does a bounceback look like? Right? Let's say that this nacho uh is real. The taco's done uh for the fourth Monday in a row. You know, Trump's telling us it's we've got a deal in place or whatever. But let's say it's for real this time. Let's say this week everybody gets together, they shake hands, everybody's happy, and say, "Okay, let's rebuild all that [ __ ] we destroyed for no reason the last couple weeks." What what then what happens to the markets in that case? like what does an actual bounce back look like considering the damage that you're saying has been done that's that's that takes years to reverse and repair.
>> Yeah. So, not all of it takes years to reverse and repair, but it's like we're on this we're kind of in this place where, you know, once the the oil stopped flowing, then people started tapping emergency measures, right? So, like there had been a lot of sanctions and things put on Russia, so they weren't able to go to market with as much of their oil. So, they actually had a little bit of a surplus of reserves and like were able to come to meet some of the demand with that. Then they unsanctioned the uh Iranian oil that was already at sea and would allowed that to be sold. um and then you know the the Saudi Arabia has this east west pipeline which usually I think they put around 2 million barrels a day through it. They've scaled it up with emergency measures um to all the way to 7 million barrels a day. However, the Houthies have also entered the war and are putting a choke point on the Red Sea now just like the Iranians have on the straight of Hormuz. So it's not clear if that pipeline is going to even help. Uh everybody's tapping into their reserves. US and other other nations have released I think 400 million barrels from their reserves that they're going to release um over a period of many months to try to make sure that there's a supply. So I think that and then you know Asian countries that are not able to get their their oil from the Middle East have also starting buying from you know WTI or or uh Venezuelan oil in that's been shipped to the United States. So they're they're tapping these temporary measures. the effects of the shortfall are what what we haven't yet seen because if there we get through these reserves get through these temporary measures then you start to actually have you know the the real problem start to hit the hit the economy and and really come down to the wire here. The other thing too is that like there's a lot of refineries if they don't get new crude brought in they have to shut down. So they are now operating at below capacity to try to stretch the amount of crude that they have because to restart a refinery if you have to shut it down takes a long time. It's very expensive. um so there's just like a lot of things that like even though you know they haven't run out of oil yet, they're trying to stretch the supply which is reducing their output which is driving up prices in the market for a lot of different petroleum products, gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, all these things. um so okay, so to answer your question directly, right? What does it look like when we restart? There's all this stuff that has happened to try to get through this. When we restart, they'll try to like reverse that. that that timeline and that process looks different for everybody at different places and based on their circum circumstances and situations. There's been energy infrastructure that's been damaged through uh you know combat attacks in Iran, in in uh Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. um so there's just like that repair will take time. Getting back to normal will take time for that. So, I I don't know when when they do open the straight, I think there'll be an initial sugar rush of people being like, "Yay, we're we're back in business and this, you know, nightmare is over because certainty will help." But then the lingering impacts of how long does it actually take to restart and resume. I'm not an expert on this. This is why I'm interviewing Rory and like other people to try to like learn more about this. um but it's kind of hard to say, but it's not this is not something where we can just like flip a switch and they say, "Okay, it's okay to use the straight and we can all go back to normal." There's still going to be a lot of lingering impacts from this and those get worse the longer the shutdown lasts. So the fact we've gotten to one month is a pretty severe crisis in my opinion. Frankly, I'm a little bit surprised that oil prices aren't higher than they are right now. But if this continues for another month, they're going to go much higher. They're going to go to $200 and they might stay there for longer than people want and that is when you have the that risk of of uh global economic collapse happening. So we're all watching this and you know this is a crypto show to just say one word about crypto here. um Bitcoin has held up relatively well during this, but if there is a global economic collapse, I don't think anything is going to be a quote unquote safe haven. So, there's a lot of uncertainty in the markets. If you're a digital asset focused investor, this does impact you because it impacts everybody. um so yeah, it's just this is not a time to go like, I don't know, being a hero or trying to get cute or just, you know, taking a huge amount of risk and leverage. uh because nobody knows when this resolves, what it looks like when it resolves, who wins in the negotiations, who controls the straight, how they control it, what happens. So there's just too much uncertainty right now to say for sure about a lot of these things.
>> So you also mentioned uh this is actually a good opportunity to jump over to crypto. Thank you for for for all that information. It's very helpful. um you brought up this chart in the pro chat this weekend uh from Myriad Markets which actually a prediction market we never we never actually cover but um they have some really good stuff there. That's basically BTC's next move pump to 84K or dump to 55K. And I feel like that's definitely the story with the the entire economy as well, John, right? is that it's like either this is going to we're going to flip we're going to flip a switch at some point and things are going to be good or we're going to flip a switch and things are going to be really bad. And it feels like more and more there's only these two scenarios and and these types of markets kind of um really show that off. I think earlier you had mentioned it was closer to 50/50 but it's actually 6040 so it's 60% chance um on myriad that we dump to 55k and that's again that's just people betting on that. um it's not it's not actual odds makers that doing that and there's a very low volume on this compared to to poly market but um it's kind of flip-flopped a lot in the last month right there are times where going to 84k has been the dominant theme is has topped I think it's 65% likelihood um but has now dumped back down to the 40%. Do you would you agree that this is roughly accurate? Would you say that this is kind of how you feel about it?
I think that the reason I shared this is that it shows what's happening, which is the market's trying to make up its mind. For the last 60 days, Bitcoin has been more or less rangebound and chopping and there have been a couple of moments where it seemed like, oh, we're we're getting up towards the the mid70s. Maybe we are going to finally break out. um and then the market changes its mind. And that's why you see those those lines flipping on this probability there. um because bulls and bears are trying to figure this out. This is what I've been watching. This is what the whole market's been watching. I've been saying this to our pro community. You know, every time anybody asks me about this, I kind of reexlain what I'm looking for, why these levels matter. And that's basically what I'm looking for. Either Bitcoin's price goes up and breaks through, retests, and hopefully breaks through the bull market support band or what is now, I guess, the bare market resistance band. um and then, you know, if if we retest that and get rejected, it's confirmation we're probably going to continue a bare market and see maybe lower lows. um and if we break through it and flip it into support, that means maybe this bearish period is over. Maybe we're resuming bullish momentum. Maybe we do break out, go back towards 100K, test that again. But, you know, if that doesn't happen, and so far neither of them have, um, the the downside risk is I'm watching this 60K level again because the the February low that we made um has not been broken in now the two months that we've been ranging. um and that's kind of what people are watching if it if it comes back to 60K to test that. Does it hold? Does it break? Do we go down to the 50s? Some people are calling for Bitcoin, you know, around 50 or lower in some cases. um I don't personally think that that's going to happen. I think that, you know, one of the things that's confusing a lot of analysts who are trying to do market commentary on Bitcoin and crypto right now is that this this market this bull run has been much different than past ones and in a lot of key ways. So, there's like I think it's um Glass Node or not Glass Node, but in any event, there's a website that has over 30 different indicators that they monitor for indicating a top in Bitcoin's price. None of those 30 indicators fired um in this bull run. So in other words, we had a top on apathy, but because there was no blowoff, because there was no euphoria, those 30 indicators that people usually, you know, use in crypto to indicate we've reached a top, none of them fired. So it was like a top that nobody could really see from a lot of different quantitative metrics. Not all, but some. And then in a similar fashion now that we're trying to do this bottoming structure and find where the bottom is for this bare market bare market period. um people are looking at a lot of indicators and some are saying we've already bottomed. Some are saying we have to go lower. Some people are saying a lot of different things. So that's where this confusion is coming from. That's why you're seeing a lot of these split opinions on these betting markets and in the market itself because the bulls and bears both have a lot of things to support their case and nobody's quite sure who's going to win out right now in bare markets. and Ben Cowan says this a lot and I I love Ben Cowan's work so I I quote him often but um he says that bare markets make fools of both the bulls and the bears. So there's going to be a lot of these bare flags where like price trends up, the bears think they're wrong and then it'll collapse down again and the bulls will look ridiculous as well. So it's a really hard time to be trying to call this one way or the other. And that's why I'm watching those two levels. If Bitcoin tells me that it's breaking out and you know flips the the bull market support band into support, that's one piece of information. I do one thing with my capital. If we go down to 60k and break that, I'm going to deploy more. But while we're in this range, I'm just watching and paying attention because, you know, like I always say on my macro show, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish. You want to learn as much as you can from the market, even if you're not actively trading it, even if you're just observing because everybody is getting an education in how this asset behaves, what the market is telling you about how it views the asset. So, it's a great time to be in Bitcoin and paying attention to what's going on in crypto, but it's also a difficult time to be calling bulls or bears right now because nobody's quite sure.
Do you think it's hard for people to be bored?
>> Yes. Empathy is Yes. It's a it's a war of attrition. It's it's um and people capitulate on this, too. They get bored. They think it's dead. They think it's over. They think it's boring. A lot of people never came back from 2022 for this exact reason. They just haven't been paying attention. And it feels boring to wait four years for a bull run, but it's coming. And if you are still here and you are still paying attention, you have a huge huge market opportunity and advantage. um so yeah, don't get bored. Don't give in to boredom. Stay engaged. It'll pay off.
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>> [laughter]
>> I remember, you know, that was my first big macro lesson in 2022 when when the market pulled back and crypto had all these crisis and I was like, what the [ __ ] I was like, why would this happen? I was promised ETH to 10K. How could I, you know, I was I was so new to crypto. I was like, this is the only thing that could happen. And I just had that lesson on just global liquidity and global markets and how that dictates everything and and and rates, right? Like this it's stuff where it's like, listen, man, I never worked in this industry, so I didn't know any of that [ __ ] And since then, I was like, oh, I get it. And even thing about crypto cycles at the time I was like okay what else could what other you know astrology of male astrology can we look at and it was like it was like four year cycles don't worry and I was like fouryear cycle you want me to wait 3 years are you freaking ser I was like three years for this and then I remember thinking that and that was four years ago that I was thinking that like late or maybe a little later but like after that you know we had a pump in April I think or maybe NFTs did well there's something going on and then and then there was like a major like crash through the summer and I just couldn't believe it. And um for me that was like I was like that is going to be a lesson in patience. I was like I got to find something else to do for a couple years man cuz I have there's not there's not going to be not going to be able to dejent in the streets. It won't be good. And that time has come and gone and now it's been four years already since then and now I'm back in the same situation like three years. I got to wait maybe not that long for crypto. We don't know but um a lot of our guests definitely don't think so. But it's just it's definitely been a at least for me as a as a someone who just went through their second cycle, let's call it. It's a definitely a lesson in patience, man. And one that I thought the time the time goes by faster than you think, let's say, but in the bear, it feels like it's crawling. It's crawling by when this is what you really you really put a lot of chips into, you know, and a lot of eggs into crypto and hoping that it does well. It's really hard to just hang on to that during these long slow days where there's so many other stories. This is this this interview is starting to feel like a lead blanket, but I I don't have this attitude. I actually really excited. I I this this is going to sound crazy, but I have the opposite experience of this. I I the way I think about this is that a truck hauling gold bars to Fort Knox spilled them all over the highway and nobody else is coming to pick them up. So, what I'm viewing this as is an opportunity because this industry is full of enormous amounts of value and it is completely mispriced, overlooked, and misunderstood by the market right now. And so if you're willing to take the time to go out and look at all this stuff, understand it, evaluate it, and see the opportunity that the market is giving you that everyone's overlooking and missing, it is an enormous opportunity for life-changing wealth. And it's the only may be the only thing you need to get right in your entire life is not to z like not tuning out of crypto right now, locking in, paying attention, allocating, and being patient. It's it sounds boring, and it may be very frustrating, but it it really is one of the best opportunities the market may ever give us. um so I think this has been a really exciting time for me personally because there's so much being built, so many innovations and developments happening, so much uh adoption going on. You know, I was at the digital asset summit this past week with with Chevy, our our newsletter writer, and it was just wild to see all the institutional adoption, commitment, um, CEOs of banks, CEOs of of major Wall Street institutions and firms hiring new products, new services, all kinds of things. The adoption is real. It's coming. ETH will get to 10K. Your promise will be fulfilled. it's just not going to be on the timeline that you want it to be. um and so I don't know, man. I just I the opposite reaction to this. I'm not depressed. I'm not sad. I'm I'm super energized because it's like this is maybe the only thing I have to get right in my entire professional career and then I'll just look like a genius for the rest of my life because I didn't, you know, I didn't I locked in for for this this bare market. um so yeah, I I understand the frustration for sure and I feel that way sometimes as well. But then I remember the opportunity and the the institutional bull run that's happening in crypto and digital assets and then I get really excited and um I start talking too fast. But uh [laughter] yeah,
>> John, I was sad four years ago because I had to learn the lesson. And this time I was just relating to the part of like where it feels long and slow and boring. I never said you should stop accumulating that there weren't opportunities. Man, if anything, when I used to do DJ show, John, I would tell people like listen, when there's going to be a bare market, you go the assets we talk about the things that are doing well, like you go hard on those. even always point to something like Salana that was $8 last time before ripping back to almost 300.
>> I bought it.
>> and [clears throat] Yeah, you bought. Exactly. Right. So, there's there's um there's always going to be those opportunities. I agree with you. It is exciting. I just think on the um on the surface it doesn't look that way and I think there's always going to be a bit of a divergence between um you know getting excited by yourself and everyone getting excited and um it definitely especially when there's other stories like this man this is it's also other stuff like this that makes it feel like a slug. It's not like it's not like the rest of the world is boring and it's just ignoring crypto. It's like a couple months ago it's like AI is going to come freaking destroy SAS and guess what crypto is SAS and now it's like well, you know, we're going to be in a global depression for 10 years and you know, there's all these stories and maybe some of them will be true but um I think that those counteract the part where it's hard to you know get excited but tell me more about Das man you were at the digital asset summary with Chevy um a huge industry event I want to know from you John who was there what kind of people were there's a lot of huge speakers a lot of huge names a lot of our guests were there Matt Hogan um from Bitwise included But what who were the attendees? Was it other crypto bros like us or or who was there?
>> Yeah. So, it's a much different event. First of all, I want to [clears throat] say shout out to Block Works. Our friends over there are doing a great job um in a lot of ways, but um the the industry leadership that they're doing at these conferences, I think, is really important and creating a dialogue between Wall Street and crypto. um so, yeah, just shout out to all those guys, great people um and some friends. um but I think that uh the the way I would characterize this is it felt very much like a Wall Street event. It did not feel like a crypto event. The suggested attire was business attire. um the participants were mostly from Wall Street. It's in New York. And I think that there were there were I mean there there were some crypto native people there. some um but most of the people on the panels, most of the speakers were from institutions, were from Wall Street, were from major um companies, corporations um and and they were talking about how they're incorporating digital assets, what they're doing in the digital asset space, new products, new services um and then just their outlook on the market, things like you know um the appetite for digital assets from institutions. So I think that the big theme of the digital asset summit was this move towards um the industry maturing, growing up, institutions coming. um there were I mean the chairman of the CFTC and the SEC were both there. They both spoke. They both made very positive remarks about crypto. uh Michael Sailor was there obviously talking about his new preferred um offerings SDRC and you know the opportunity that that offers for investors uh who are looking to sort of like strip out some of the volatility from Bitcoin but still participate in the upside and get some regular returns from it. There were uh you know Black Rockck's head of digital assets, my old friend Robbie Mishnik from Black Rockck um he was there talking about how the ETFs uh the Bitcoin ETFs have actually seen a lot of strength and inflows. um they also launched a new Bitcoin or uh Ethereum staking product um ETP and he was talking about that and how there's been really strong demand for that staking ETF or staking enabled ETF rather. So yeah, well it's an ETP anyway. These are details, but the point is the overarching theme was that there's an institutional bull run happening in crypto and in digital assets. And the the the institutions are not phased by the price. They're not like, you know, looking at this as like some into the world fiasco. They are more committed than ever, more um more committed to mobilizing um talent, capital, resources to grow and to innovate. They are committed to tokenization. They're committed to real world assets, stable coins. There's a lot of excitement around all these things. and then in the assets themselves, right? And and finding ways to bring this to market in a way that's accessible to um institutional clients um the ETPs and other things. So yeah, look, I mean the takeaway for me was it was very bullish. It's just much different than you would see at like an ETH Denver or um you know like an NFT uh convention or something, right? like it's a much different group of people come together to talk about crypto and digital assets and in an exciting and energizing way that makes me feel like you know the next century of finance is is going to be in crypto. So uh yeah that was kind of the the vibe and some of my takeaways there.
>> Were there any bad takes?
>> There were a few. I feel like you're trying to rage bait [laughter] me because you know you
>> Well, here's a question. Is did anybody go there and say any bearish things about crypto? like is it the kind of place that has balance of opinions or is it just like a big crypto, you know, pumpfest?
>> Yeah. So, I think that there's this narrative that's been adopted where Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only things that have value and those are sort of like separated from the rest of the pack. I think that in general, like I think Salana is a great example of this, right? Like Salana had a huge wave of in of interest and enthusiasm um from the the retail side in the last bull run and and this bull run. um but they are still trying to negotiate this pivot to being you know a more mature asset and bringing institutions in to adopt Salana. At the same time they've also seen a lot of the um revenues that they were making be kind of like taken by competitors like Pump Fund has gone off on their own. Hyperlid has taken a lot of volume and in and retail trading away from from Salana. So the vibes in Salana are not great right now even though it's still a very robust ecosystem. Still got a very bullish outlook, still growing, still building, still bringing in new capital, new users, new products. um but so there's this kind of that that's the kind of take that I'm hearing, right? Is that Bitcoin and Ethereum are great, but the rest of the stuff maybe not so much. Maybe I don't need that. Maybe we don't need to go down that curve. um and one person who I'm not going to name called it nonsense from the stage. And that's not my view of this. I think that there is an enormous amount of really uh robust ecosystems, technology, innovation, um products and and assets in the digital asset industry that are being developed and built by some of the finest minds in in the world. um and you know, like the one I go back to a lot is like Sylvia Malli, who's the founder of Algarand, is a Turing Award winner, which is like the Nobel Prize in math. And the guy is brilliant. He's the father of modern cryptography. He's the he like has been doing this for like I think 20 or 30 years longer than Bitcoin has even existed. um and a lot of his work is what all of this stuff is based on. And you know, he has a project called Algarand and they're doing a lot of really exciting innovative things. And everyone's like saying, "Oh, because there's no investment. There's no capital right now. You know, that's a a terrible project. It's nonsense." It's not nonsense. It's an amazing innovation. It's just still like waiting for adoption, product market fit to be found. And maybe that won't come. But I do think that we're going to see so many new participants to the digital economy with the rise of artificial intelligence that a lot of these major robust and really novel innovative um financial economic systems that have been built in the digital asset space will find product market fit and a lot of users in the agentic economy even if they don't find it immediately in the human economy. That is something that nobody's pricing in. That's something that people are missing and I think that there's this to me it confirms this opportunity of this gap of information. If you're an expert in your field and you come from Wall Street, that doesn't mean that you've read all the white papers. That doesn't mean that you understand cryptography. That's a academic discipline within the the sub the the area of um computer science that a lot of people from Wall Street just do not understand. They don't understand why all these ecosystems, why all this technology is so important, why it matters, why it's so important for the the future of the planet and for the financial um financial future of the species because they don't understand the technical part of it. They understand finance but they don't understand the technology. So as that gap starts to close the market will teach people why these things matter. The market will find the value in this and that will you know it'll repric that accordingly. But to me that's a huge opportunity right? There's all these people with capital and they realize now that they have to take this industry seriously but they still don't understand it fully and they're not going to for a while because they don't have to people. It's like you know there's the old saying everyone gets Bitcoin at the price they deserve. When when Michael Sailor needed had to for survival of his business understand Bitcoin, that's when he understood.
Bitcoin. The same thing will happen with the rest of the digital asset space. Once people understand how vital it is, they'll start to recognize that. But in the meantime, Bitcoin and Ethereum are in high demand. Institutions are taking them very seriously. They're allocating capital to them. They're building businesses around them. They're building products on them. They're allocating new headcount, new resources, new hiring, new talent towards them. They're hiring aggressively. Just this week, Black Rockck is hiring another managing director in digital assets specifically to help Robbie Mitchnik focus on developing what Black Rockck is doing in Ethereum on Ethereum around Ethereum and Bitcoin as well and other digital assets too. So yeah, there there's a lot happening there. There's a lot to sift through with that answer. But to me, there's just still this gap of knowledge between the people who have capital and the people who have built the technology. And as that closes, the market will repric the digital asset industry accordingly.
I love these shows, man. I love that we spend the first 20 minutes talking about the end of the world and then somehow John Gillan brings us the whole way back around to feeling freaking pumped and bullish on the space, man. I love it. I think that's wonderful. I hope you guys I hope you guys if you're still listening here at the end of the episode, I hope you feel that too. John, who was the last question for you, more of a novelty question. Who was the best speaker you saw? Who was out of everybody you could have seen, who was who was the most compelling person you saw there?
I always really enjoy listening to Jordy Visser. I like his delivery. I like what he says. I like how he's always evolving his ideas. I like uh I like, you know, actually this is the this I didn't I didn't say anything about this to him, but this has really got me excited. He said the first positive thing I've ever heard him say in recent I've listened to this guy for like three or four years, but he said something very positive about Ethereum, which to me was really bullish signal because it means that even these guys who are legacy macro and Bitcoin, not maxis, but soft maxis are starting to admit that okay, Ethereum has a moat. there's something to this and they're they're recognizing that there's a lot of value created specifically by ETH and the ETH ecosystem that can't be replaced by Bitcoin, can't be duplicated by Wall Street, and can't just be spun up by a banker chain and and label the blockchain and and stolen, right? So, um that was really bullish to me because it seems to me that more people who were Bitcoin only are starting to come around to Ethereum because they see the demand, they see the adoption, and they see the value and there is a moat there. Even in a world of artificial intelligence where software as a service does not have a mode, Ethereum has one. And I'm not going to outline it for you. I think this is what I I want there to be a gap of curiosity. Figure out why Ethereum is unique. Why does Ethereum have a moat? Why is it so important? Why is Tradfi taking it so seriously? Um because I think there's a lot of value there. But that was really bullish to me hearing Jordy say something positive about ETH for the first time in a long time. Uh he's starting to get it. He's beginning to believe. I thought of the the scene from The Matrix from Morpheus says about Neo. was beginning to believe it was like, "Oh boy, we're we're going to starting to get Jordy here." So, yeah, there was a there were a lot of great speakers. I want to say that there were like a lot of great people. Re Paul was there. A lot of other people though I I sat and personally listened to Steven Mirren, who's a sitting governor of the Federal Reserve speak at a crypto event, which is something I never thought I would see happen, a a central banker at a crypto event. Um, but yeah, there was just a lot of great people, a lot of great energy, great speakers, wonderful people. Joe Shalom from Sharp Link is an old friend of mine from Black Rockck League. A lot of great people. So, yeah, really wonderful conference.
Joe Shalom that you've had on the show that we've had on this show.
Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You had him on the show a couple months back. Also, also one of our best episodes. Uh, and great. And you know what? And even with that answer, not only did you bring the whole show back all the way, you brought it back to ETH. You even brought it back to ETH with your answer. talk about how one of the best or one of the most popular like AI crypto macro like the heads of our of our especially of our circles these days uh said that he's bullish on ETH man that's I feel like that's that's pretty exciting uh for you and for us and for anybody who's an ETH maxi which I think is a lot a lot of the people listening to the show as well John another wonderful show man thank you so much let's have a great week regardless of the nachos and tacos and salsas or whatever else is going to happen uh and thank you again sir for your thoughts always a pleasure Thanks for having me, LG. Happy to be here. I'm really glad to be part of this community. So, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish. See you next time.
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