Welcome Atralian's. I'm Joel Webber and.
I'm Eric Belchunas.
Eric, we talked about crypto a lot, and a lot of that is about Bitcoin, but one that we haven't come back to basically since the ETFs launched is Ether and Ether If you have been paying attention, or maybe if you haven't, Ether is having a heck of a year.
What's going on?
Yeah, Well, when Ether launched one year ago, it launched right into a downturn. And that's not it's hard to get assets if you if your performance is awfulver off the bat ask any issue or that. So not only did it have to follow Bitcoin, which is.
Tough, like most successful ETF launch ever.
Yeah, it really, I mean the shoes that it was trying to fill were just too big. It felt very disappointing, and then it had a rally. There's a couple narrative things that will go over the help get it going. Sover in the past three months, it's doubled, it's up one hundred percent the coin. So once that got started, people started buying the ETF and amazingly, these e three ETFs basically double their assets in July alone, just one
month double. They've got about twenty billion now. And a great fun fact is that if you remove the bitcoin ETFs and pretend they didn't exist, Black Rocks E three ETF would be the fastest ETF to ten billion in the history of ETFs. Wow, it's just I equated to having to play with Michael Jordan in the eighties and nineties, like Reggie Miller, great player, another era. He probably gets a couple of rings, but he happened to play with Jordan.
And even with all that, there's still only thirteen percent of the assets the bitcoin ETFs have, so at least they're doing something though, you know, we think they should probably get around twenty percent, so they're on their way to earning that market share. That's sort of like silver to gold. It's like they're the silver to bitcoins.
Gold, the Regie Miller to the Michael Jordan.
They are.
And you're going to get so much comment on that. On sociable, I can't wait.
And you know, Ether is interesting to me because the pitch for it is totally different than Bitcoin. It's more like we had a note we referred to it as feeling like a nineties tech stock, like the very early days of this new possible thing that could really change tech and the Internet basically, and we'll see how it pans out. And there's a lot of things to talk about here, but yeah, definitely interesting area of the market having a moment. And the reason we covered so much
is those numbers are ridiculous. So I know people are like, you know, if you're not into it, you're probably like, why do you cover it so much? But I'm like, these numbers are crazy? All right?
To join us on this episode, we've got Matt Hogan, who's the chief investment officer of bit Wise Asset Management. Before he went full crypto, he was an ETF guy, as well as Isabelle Lee Cross outset reporter with bloogrig News.
This time on trillions Ether. Matt, Isabelle, welcome back to Trillions.
We're very excited to be here.
Yeah, one hundred percent excited to join.
Matt.
It's been a while since we had you on and you're you know that full crypto transformation happened, and I'm curious a lot has gone up in the crypto world.
Why have you not retired already?
Wow? Straight at it. You know, Look, I think it's I think it's still inning too in crypto land. I think we're just getting started. I think if you're listening to the SEC, they're telegraphing that the crypto boom is ahead of us, not behind us. So I'm going to keep building. We'll retire eventually.
Okay, So a lot has happened in the Trump administration two point zero at the SEC. We've had bitcoin ETF's approved. We've had these Ethereum ETFs approved, which we talked a little bit about here. What what do you see on the ground. How do you distinguish between what's happened with Bitcoin and what's happened with Ether?
And it's yeah, so Bitcoin, you know, remember the first Bitcoin ETF was filed in twenty thirteen, so we had ten plus years of pent up demand for an asset that was easy to understand. It was digital gold. And so it came to the market and it crushed all records. As you guys talked about. It pulled in thirty six trillion dollars in its first year. It was six times as large as the second fastest growing ETF of all time.
It was massive. Ethereum launched, I would say too soon, right, It launched five or six months after the Bitcoin ETF, people were still digesting bitcoin. As as mentioned, it launched into a difficult market for Ether. The underlying asset wasn't performing well, the community was in somewhat disarray, it didn't have an obvious growth youth case. But it's now has all of those things and as a result, we saw
five point four billion dollars in flows in July. To put that number in context, remember that Ether is one fifth the size of bitcoin, so that's akin to saying twenty seven billion dollars in flows in the Bitcoin ETF. From a relative size perspective, it's absolutely massive, and I actually think it's going to accelerate or continue throughout the end of the year.
Where are those flows coming from.
I think they're coming from people who bought the Bitcoin ETF. I think a lot of it's coming from financial advisors and family offices who bought the Bitcoin ETF. And this is not a new story. If you talk to any crypto investor pre ETF, probably the first asset they bought was bitcoin, and then twenty percent of them became Bitcoin maxis and that's all they wanted to do, and the other eighty percent eventually moved down to buy ethereum maybe nine to twelve months later. It's actually a story as
old as Satoshi. It's been happening in crypto for years, and I think that's what's happening here. So people who bought the Bitcoin ETF now want to diversify. There are only other choices in Ethereum ETF. It has a good narrative with stable coins and regulation. Why not add that to the portfolio. I think that's what we see a bit wise, and I assume that's what other ETF issuers are seeing as well.
Isabelle. I know you've been covering this a lot for Bloomberg News. What else has jumped out to you?
I think what Matt said is really good food for thought, because when Ether ETF's launch in July, we were almost like, I don't want to say we were making fun of how they're not getting inflows, but that's what we were thinking, like, man, this is really so paltry compared to the just monster
flows we've seen in bitcoin ETFs. But then almost yeah, almost, and then at one point I think we even saw outlows when you look at them in aggregate because of the black rock Ether fun and then now it's really interesting how you saw really this influx of cash in July and to everyone's earlier point, Like, for instance, as soon as February to July second, we were seeing outflows when it comes to black rocks Ether the biggest Ether
ETFs out of among the twenty related ETFs. But then after that, for the whole month of July, we've just been seeing inflows after inflows. So really, I think it's this perfect storm of regulatory clarity momentum and just really corporate companies piling into it. You see a lot of eater treasury companies popping up.
By the way, one more metaphor. When I would be on these podcasts of these crypto people, I would be like, they'd be like, oh, do you think Ether will be a hit, And I'm like, it's tough. It's like, you know, Bitcoin is the headliner. It's like having to follow the headliner. It's like Sister Hazel having to follow Nirvana, which is a if you know nineties rock you know that would be no one would be left on in the crowd. And so now when Ether takes and flows, all these
ethereum people tag me and they're like, sister Hazel. Is it still, sister, Hazel, It's a whole thing. They're very proud. Anyway, that's side go ahead.
That's true because when you explain it to people have no idea what cryptocurrencies are. Like my parents, Bitcoin is easy, it's digital gold. But what is the elevator pitch of ether?
The elevator pitch now it's the rails for stable coins and tokenization. But actually that is that's the big thing. I mean, we do. I think it's fifteen thousand meetings a year with financial advisors about crypto. After the Bitcoin ETF launched, it was easy to come in and say Bitcoin is like digital gold. The US has thirty six trillion dollars in debt. Don't you want to buy this?
If you had to get into let me explain how the bitcoin blockchain and the Ethereum blockchain are fundamentally different, and how value accruis in the ethereum. You just forget it. It's impossible. Part of it is it now has that easy story. Ethereum is the rails for stable coin and tokenization. If you're bullish on that, you're bullish on eth and people buy it based on that premise.
How do you feel about Eric's metaphors for sister Hazel and Reggie. Are you going to use those with potential clients?
This?
Is it the second best or is there no second best?
I love it. I think I think it's a different sport. I think that would be the more accurate metaphor, would be a a Michael Jordan Messi metaphor. I say, okay, Emailer, but you know, I'm also courting the eth vote on crypto Twitter, so I need I need.
That you might be doing a more diplomatic version than Eric.
Yeah. Yeah.
And also I also once I referred to Ether as small potatoes and that I get that a lot too. They're there anyway. Listen, I was reading up on Ether. You know what's interesting to me is Bitcoin came out, and it makes sense. Bitcoin is really for security. It's like built like a tank, right, it's like just for uh indestructible money. And there's a scarce amount twenty one
million only. But the blockchain people thought we could do something some other things on this maybe have speed and in this case make it so anybody can like program their own smart contracts so they to bitcoin for everything. So when you think about it being the rails for tokenization and stable coins. Can you explain how that works? Try to use a visual if you can, because they call it DeFi Web three. So it really is a new version of the Internet. So is my nineties tech stock?
Is it kind of like that should be looked at because then you have these other blockchains like Salana that are competing with ether and so it feels very much like the race for land in the nineties for the Internet to me, except crypto versions. And is that a good way to look at it?
Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it. Right. Bitcoin is a tank, it's a way to store wealth. Ethereum is a platform that lets you move wealth. An analogy that I think helps people. You think of the New York Stock Exchange. If you're a company, you list shares on the New York Stock Exchange, and to a degree, it benefits every time someone transacts in those shares. If you want to issue a stable coin, you have to
issue it on a blockchain. Ethereum is the blockchain on which the majority of or the largest share of stable coins are issued, and then every time it moves on that blockchain, Ethereum accrues a little bit of revenue. So it's sort of like New York Stock Exchange for stable coins and for tokenization. It's a new financial switching infrastructure.
So real quick, how does it monetize this? Because one of the things that I have sort of been seeing is that they don't want to People don't want to pay a lot, Like, how does is it going to sell advertising? I mean, how does it actually make money? So I get that it's a popular public ledger, but how does it turn that into cash? And is that something that the ether token will be riffing off of or do you even need cash flow for this to work?
Yeah? Absolutely, it's a cash flow drive an asset. So right now, Eric, there's about one hundred and twenty million ethereum in existence. That's it, and each year about one percent new eth is issued, so let's call it one point two million new eth. Every time you issue a stable coin or conduct a transaction on ethereum, you have to pay a fee that's denominated in eth, and that fee is destroyed. It's removed forever, so that reduces supply. You can think of it a little bit like a
share buyback. But the more activity there is, the more that supply demand dynamic tilts in favor of less supply and more demand. The idea is that if over time the majority of the world's stocks and bonds and cash move over ethereum, there'll be so many transactions, so much activity, that there'll be a huge amount of value in this ecosystem. There'll be consistent supply pressure and strong demand, and that will push the price up.
I feel like that's exactly what people should stop doing, maybe or start doing. Not trying to think of ether in terms of bitcoin, but something completely different. I'm looking at it in terms of ether treasury because so many people are asking us, Okay, why is it different? Why make an ether treasury? But I think for ether treasury, what makes it attractive is that it has yield and it's more similar to a money market fund rather than
like you. And again the digital goal of the scarcity, because Ether obviously is in scars, it's not finite, you can keep the making. In fact, we know who the founders are as opposed to do bitcoin, so I feel like it's just completely different. At least that's how I try to explain it very simplistically to sources.
I think that's exactly right. It is completely different. You could even argue that it belongs in different asset classes. People debate whether crypto is an asset class. I could argue that bitcoin should belong in the commodity space and ether is actually a technology service. It's driven primarily by revenue. That's not perfect, but it may be closer than assuming that there's the same thing. Just because they're both crypto assets, they're used for very different purposes.
Today, let's go over stable coins, because when people out there think about crypto sometimes, especially in like New York City, they kind of a it's like, oh, it's a Trump thing, I'm not into it. But stable coins to me, are the most progressive technology I've seen in a long time. If you're living in an emerging market under one of these autocratic dictators, they just crap on the currency all day long, and the currency has twenty five percent inflation
a year or worse. They used to go into dark alleys to try to get dollars because they make they go to work, make money, they don't want to keep it in their own currency, so they want dollars or bitcoin.
Stable coins are just literally dollars on the blockchain that all you need is an Internet connection, right, So I had heard that it's possible stable coins supersede bitcoin completely and the dollar keeps running around the world as the reserve currency, versus bitcoin taking that path and challenging all of the currencies for dominance. What's your take on that.
I think both will happen. Actually, so, I do think the existence of stable coins will extend the dollar's role as a reserve currency in the world, because you're going to crypto dollarize to borrow Nick Carter's term, huge parts of the world, because if you're somebody in one of those countries, you'd rather hold dollars than your local currency. And if you can get it from your cell phone, you absolutely will, particularly if it's in a way that
the government can't seize it. And it's more than that, if you're conducting business between two countries with imperfect financial architecture, you can use US quality financial rails with instantaneous settlement at low fees, using stable coins instead of routing through local banks. It is hugely progressive and hugely valuable for the world. So yeah, I think that's the direction of travel. Ultimately, I think bitcoin gets a seat at the world's reserve currency.
Table in the same way that gold has a small seat at that table as well. I think bitcoin is a better version of gold and it fills that role. But I do think stable coins extend the dollars position as the world's reserve currency. It's one of the ironies of crypto that's going to end up helping the dollar maintain its position for longer than it would have otherwise.
I do think so, because I don't. I think it's apples and orange like stable coins are meant to represent a digital fee at currency, and your faith is on the company backing it, like Visa, for instance, has been slowly integrating stable coins into their systems, and I feel like we'll be hearing more and more blue chip companies say that whereas bitcoin is, it's on.
The blockchain, a different asset.
A different to Matt's point.
Yeah, So, Matt, how do you think about what that stable coin race is going to look like? Is it a.
Different version of rails or is it something else entirely?
And we're starting to live in, you know, a multi dimensional world.
Yeah, I mean there are probably two races worth talking about. One is what is the infrastructure on which it moves? Because you can issue stable coins on eth on, Solana, on Tron, on XRP, on many different blockchains, So what is the one that people gravitate to and does that share change over time? I think what we see in the world today is the two leaders are actually Ethereum in Tron, and it's geographically determined, with Tron dominating in
Asia and Ethereum in Western markets. It wouldn't surprise me if that's the case going forward, but they'll certainly be competition, and I wouldn't count Solana out. The other one is who will win is the issuer of these stable coins. Remember this is an enormously profitable business because stable coins don't pay interest. So a company like Tether, which is behind the largest stable coin in the world, usd T I think, made four point five billion dollars last quarter,
which was, you know, more than Goldman Sachs. I mean, I may have that precise number wrong, but it's in that order of magnitude. I think you're gonna see all the major financial institutions issue stable coins and compete with cryptonative companies like Circle and Coinbase and Tether, and it will be interesting to see. I have my views on who will win but we'll find out in the next few years.
Is that for the benefit of the world though that there are so many stable coins issued by a lot of different companies, and like the US dollar, there's just one and that's at a full face of the US government.
Yeah, these are all private lookthrough vehicles to that. As long as there's an extremely liquid interchange market, I think it's for the benefit of the world. If you just had one issuer, they'd be likely to abuse their position in a way that competition wouldn't allow. So I like that there will be multiple I think it'll probably be an oligopoly with a few big providers. But look, I'm
pro competition. I'm anti CBDC, which is the sort of government issued version of a stable coin, and I think I think the market will sort itself out well.
And just to be clear, you buy the stable coin, right the dollar you buy, just like an ETF, gets put into a some kind of a collateral basket or reserve that is one for one to the stable coin. Because there was the big blow up right with terror Luna, where they look these tokens that these intermediaries put out screw that man. They use the token as collateral it's like, Oh, I made this magic token, I'm gonna use a collateral.
Please tell me. They won't do that. Here, they're going to actually use dollars or treasuries.
They'll use treasuries. Yeah, thank you. The Genius Act stable coin bill that just got signed into law requires it to be short term treasuries. So back to one for one. The lunar thing was a crazy experiment. You know, we never owned it a bit wise, and obviously it was going to fail. It was self referentially going to fail. So the new stable coins under the Genius Act will be one for one back by short term treasuries. I would argue that they'll be safer than traditional bank accounts.
Imagine that though, oh here you want a dollar. Here, here's your digital dollar. I'll take my dollar, do something with it. Maybe I'll buy a nice car, and then I'll again make the error coin. That is that's that's now what your dollars based on.
You would call it the you'd call it the Reggie coin.
By the way, this whole idea of these intermediaries, who are usually under the age of thirty, I have this overall theme that the adults have arrived, whether it's the ETFs, people like you, the government SEC. It just feels like, are we maybe beyond this sort of massive scam part of the crypto era, because I just don't see any of this happening anymore. But man, it happened pretty regularly before. Honestly, the black rock eto all ETFs, it kind of we've seen.
There's like a turning point, I think, and then a bunch of other things happened. Does that give you more confidence that it's now a mainstream, mature and safer.
Huge, huge amount of more confidence. Right when you refuse to regulate something, which was essentially what we did in the past, you create the space for these scams and frauds. You get the space for something like Luna, or you create the space for something like FTX. I do think the market is more safe. I think there'll be fewer blow ups. And actually you can see that in the numbers.
If you look at bitcoins volatility. Since the ETF launched, it's actually been below about half of the mag seven stocks. It's been the lowest it's ever been. Volatility has been squashed, and I think that's because better regulation just removes some of the risks. So it's not just a vibes thing you're pointing out, Eric, It's actually reflected in the data.
It's a less risky investment. Still plenty risky, lots of volatility, still very new, unproven, but fewer of those blow ups that have sort of defined the first fifteen years of crypto.
We've got a lot of places so far.
I do want to bring us back to ethereum and ETFs and Matt, it's been a while since we actually talked to you about ETFs, but since you started there and then went full crypto, when you look back on ETFs, how do you feel about them?
I mean, they're great. They've saved Americans billions of dollars. They've made investing cheaper, more tax efficient. They let my father buy the same investment as sovereign wealth funds that invest in ETFs and hedge funds that invest in ETFs. They've been an enormous democratizing tool. I think the analogy I tied to crypto, which is what I've made before, is people didn't trust ETFs either. Right. They were weapons of mass destruction. They were going to destroy the bond market.
They were going to collapse American entrepreneurial spirit and now they're the apple Pie investing. I think the same thing is going to happen to crypto. Love ETFs. I think they'll be here for a while. They're great financial technology and I love seeing ETFs and crypto. Clyde.
We had you on maybe four or five years ago, and I said, you know, because I had that phrase, half crypto, full crypto, and I said, how what percent crypto are you? And I think you said fifty five percent? What is that percentage? Now?
Oh, I'm full crypto, full cryptoire.
You're gone.
And by the way, you can never come back, right, it's like Hotel California, Like, but I've never seen anybody go into the crypto world, whether it's investment or their career and like come back.
No, we're going to drag all of finance into crypto. You know, it used to be you were an internet company or a physical company. Now now it's just a company. You're the same things. It's gonna be. There's not gonna be crypto finance companies. We're pulling everybody, including JP Morgan, kicking and screaming into the crypto market.
I liked your hedge though, of like the ETFs will be with us for a while.
Well, let's go over this because I know, you know, because like there's all these like tokenization people who are predicting like everything's everything's token. Reminds me that everything's computer, everything's token. Okay, Relax. ETFs still record launches, record flows, and last year was really tough to top, and they're gonna top them. And the market's not even up that much. Clearly,
it's still hot, red hot here. But this idea that the Ethereum blockchain is going to allow people to just buy these tokens that are based on stocks and ETFs and indexes and it will render ETFs, it'll be a competitor at ETFs, even the stock exchange. I don't know. I get it for people in emerging markets who don't
have access. But do you really think the whole mainstream en shalada of stocks and ETFs and the exchanges are gonna be sucked over to web three and Ethereum and all this like are are ETF's possibly gonna start to plateau this year and then start to over the next fifteen.
Well, I don't think over the next fifteen. I think it's going to take a while the direction of travel is ultimately in favor of tokenization, and I think ETFs will sort of dematerialize in the ip of the index being separated from the hands on asset management, which won't need to be in an ETF rapper. But this is going to take a long time. This is like you and I calling the end of mutual funds. You know, fifteen years ago mutual funds still have trillions of dollars
of assets. But I don't think it's right that we're at the end of financial innovation. I don't think we got to the ETF and then we're done. It's perfect. I think there is another phase, which is sort of direct asset ownership. I think tokens can unlock that, but
the timeline is going to take a while. But I would say if you read Paul Atkins's recent speech on Project Crypto, where he talked about the rise of super apps that allow you to to cross all categories of assets, I think that is pointing the way to an eventual post ETF future. But it's not. We're not peaking this year. ETF facets are going to keep going up for you know, another five to ten years.
But Joel, you know, Nate Dracy, friend of the show. He has a company called ETF Store. He changed the name. Yeah luckily our our podcast trillions. Yeah, we could cover anything. We're good to go.
What's the name.
Nova Das It was like at least he didn't call it the token store. That would have hurt.
He's going full crypto too, He's going, you're covered with trillions where you know we are?
We Go is a great name.
Although my title senior ETF analyst, you.
Have to change it to.
Senior.
That's fair to Eric's point, to push your tokenize everything, I understand it. It's really for faster transaction, reduced costs. But then in my inbox almost every day I get a tokenization pitch, and you just it's been a struggle to weed out which is noise and which are true efforts. I mean, firms like black Rock and Franklin Templeton, they have been pushing into this space to tokenize funds or
really create infrastructure around that. But for others, I'm just not sure if they're just trying to get on with what's hot or whether this are real, genuine.
Yeah, what's real, Matt, what's real?
I think real is pilot projects, and the idea that tokenization will win eventually. A little bit of real is tokenized treasury funds that trade on the weekends. That's finding real use as marketable collateral. But we're very early on tokenization. The whole tokenization markets like twenty billion dollars in assets under management. I Unlike stable coins, which I think will ramp really quickly, tokenization is still going to take a while.
There's still some regulatory hard yards to go there. But the pilot project phase is an exciting phase. I would say the hit rate on projects is going to be low at this phase because we haven't defined exactly how it will all work. But you see things like the Canton network doing interesting work with THETCC. You see black Rock building on tokenization, but you should think of it as experimentation. We're not main main time. This is not
game time on tokenization. It's the experiment and learned phase.
Ethereum is one blockchain, but then Solon is another. I went to a Slona event this year.
I was actually, I'm interested in Solana too, which I was like, pending ETFs, right.
Yeah, they got ets and there's a tron ETF coming out Avalanche Cardano Solana, and the Solana event that I was at was pretty you know, booming like and so what's going to happen? Is there going to be this race for the prize? Obviously a basket may make sense for investors, but how many? How many can win?
Yeah, especially since you know Ethereum it took a year after launch to get to a point where it's seeing this right, So what about how many times can we replicate something like that?
Look, I'm going to talk my book. You know, we create the first crypto index fund. We're trying to turn it into an ETF. I think that will be the second biggest category after bitcoin.
Shocker.
Yeah, I know, I know, but I mean it because who knows who's going to win. These are all software programs that are optimized in interesting ways to be the most efficient and most scalable. Ethereum has one vision on how to build an efficient blockchain. Solana has a different vision. Other assets have different visions. It's really hard to know who will win. I imagine it'll be again an oligopoly.
I imagine this will look a lot like the traditional software market, where there's Microsoft and Oracle and Salesforce and every once in a while a new company like Slack or Snowflake emerges that enters the big leagues, but mostly it's a a handful of big providers that stick around for years. There are network effects in crypto that are important, but I don't think it'll be just one. I'd be surprised if it.
Was just one.
The other thing is, if we're going to do all this business of the blockchain and a smart contract is like the computer telling you who's right and wrong and whether it works. Who are you going to call when something goes wrong? I mean sometimes on on Twitter that there something will happen and a couple people will come to the conclusion that centralization has its benefits. You can call somebody like decentralization, I get it. Who you know?
These big internet companies have too much power, the government has too much power. But you know, when you're on the free decentralized platforms, is it? Is it a fragile system because of the lack of people you can call when something goes wrong.
Well, let me, this is an ETF show, so let me make an analogy to ETFs. One of the big criticisms early in ETFs is what if you messed up trading. When you buy a mutual fund, at the end of the day, it's push button easy. You get nab based execution. You can't muck it up. What if you put in a market order for an ETF and you get blown out on the spread. The reason we tolerated that risk in ETFs is you got a huge number of advantages
in order for taking more personal responsibility. Crypto is the same. Money moves instantly, it moves frictionalsly, It moves it maybe one hundredth of the cost, but you have to take on the personal responsibility for doing it right. The short answer to your question is there is no one to call. But the longer answer is maybe we should decouple sort
of fraud and accident from the core transaction. Right now, if you go and buy a coffee at Starbucks, part of the fee you're paying on your visa card is what if you want to reverse that transaction. But no one's reversing their transaction at Starbucks. It's just assigning more personal responsibility. And I think if you think of that ETF example versus mutual funds, that's the same thing as the existing system versus crypto. You take on more personal
responsibility and you get huge benefits as a result. Is it perfect? Of course not Well, some people want the old version, of course, but people should have the choice and it can be much more efficient and better.
I mean, Joel has sent his frappuccino back when they don't put half and half in it. So I've seen that.
They're just saying there's always one ticket to Americano. Totally black can't go round, Matt. We always ask a question, which is a favorite ETF ticker other than your own? I'm going to modify it slightly. My question for you is favorite crypto related ETF other than anything?
Yet you're in other thing other than anything bit wise issues. Yeah, I have to talk about a friend's ETF. Yeah, let me think about that. That's a hard one, do you What am I going to say? You said it?
Yeah, I'm gonna type it so Jule can see it, and then.
Okay, I don't know what I'm going to say. To be honest, our products are better, but I'm glad that black rock products exist.
Oh, Eric was wrong?
What did you say?
Eric?
I thought you were going to say total? Which was the van Eck? I love? Yeah, I love it too, silly.
It's just niche. When you're launching an ETF, you need to appeal to a community. That's a smart way to appeal to a community. Yeah, we compete in most markets in the ETF space, so there are not many that I'm envious of. But this is the early phase. I want everyone to win. I'm happy with everyone.
If there was an ETF crypto ETF, that's a top your jealousy list, what would that be?
Oh? The black Rock products for sure? Yeah, I mean, god, we're twenty percent cheaper, they're twenty times bigger. That makes no sense to me. But we'll get them a vent.
That's good. He had that in his back pocket.
You might have said that one before.
I know that thing is a machine.
Yeah, I bet I would say it's mine too. And a fun fact is it's inching closer to GLD in terms of total assets. So I think that's poetic.
It's almost a foregone conclusion.
All right, Matt Isabelle, thanks for joining us on trillions, Thanks for having me, Thanks for listening to Trillions. Until next time. You can find us on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else.
You'd like to listen, we'd love to hear from you.
Hit us up on social I'm at Joel Weber Show, He's at Eric Faulcini's. Trillions is produced by Magnus Hendrickson. Brendan Newman is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcast