Adrian Fritz: Trillions Are Coming — Here's Where They Land

**Robbie** (0:00)
Alrighty guys, we are live here in the Tokenization Tower, presented by our friends at Plume. Let's give them some love, man. We have got Adrian J. Fritz, good to see you. Welcome to the tower. Adrian, the Chief Investment Officer at 21Shares. Adrian, good to see you in the city, man. How's the city treating you?

**Adrian W. J. Fritz** (0:16)
Man, it's been amazing. Weather's fantastic, I'm having a great time. And thanks for having me as well.

**Robbie** (0:21)
Of course, first time here in the Empire State Building, so it's good to have you.

**Adrian W. J. Fritz** (0:25)
I just took some photos of the view, being a little tourist, but yeah, it's a stunning office, you can be lucky.

**Robbie** (0:31)
Thank you, man. Thank you, man. Well, hey, it is an interesting time in the industry right now, that is for sure. We're gonna talk high level on the markets, kind of how you're thinking about this, how your firm is thinking about this. Before we do, Adrian, you've got an interesting background prior to joining 21Shares. Maybe you just kind of tell us a bit about your foray into being a portfolio manager and an investor and kind of how that all came about.

**Adrian W. J. Fritz** (0:57)
How I ended up in crypto basically. I mean, yeah, my background is more traditional, I would say. So I worked in merchant acquisitions, like in investment banking, management consulting, but also corporate M&A.
But always been close to markets and always had, yeah, a massive passion for investing, specifically crypto, because it's always been the most fascinating one. For me, it's kind of like the perfect combination of real technology and finance and investing.
And therefore, yeah, I actually bumped into crypto 2013 because of a colleague from university. And yeah, back then, I thought that could be an amazing investment pitch. I actually asked my stepdad for some money. It took a while until he finally wired me a thousand bucks. I invested, and two weeks later, the market dropped like 70, 80 percent. So and I sold at the bottom. Yeah, but I was hooked. I was hooked on Bitcoin, kind of lost interest. But then 2016, when Ethereum came up, I was back into crypto. Back then, I did it more out from kind of like passion, aside from my corporate job. But then five years ago, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to make it, yeah, a full-time job, pay my bills.

**Robbie** (2:27)
There you go.

**Adrian W. J. Fritz** (2:28)
And that's how I joined 21Shares.

**Robbie** (2:30)
Amazing.

**Adrian W. J. Fritz** (2:30)
Ever since, been a wild ride.

**Robbie** (2:33)
Great, man. We just had Cathie Wood on the show, and we were talking about kind of how her and her firm at ARK Invest is thinking about this space. And she laid out this kind of big four asset thesis, which is obviously Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and then she put in hyperliquid in there. And she kind of spoke about these being her kind of big three plus maybe hyperliquid. And that with her ETFs, her firm, this was kind of how they were thinking about the space currently as far as like investible DeFi platforms is kind of what she called them.
When we're thinking about this space holistically, we've kind of started to get sectors in this space, right? You've kind of got this Bitcoin as this digital gold and everything else thesis, or you've got Bitcoin smart contract platforms and everything else at the institutional level. In the dealings with institutional allocators with higher net worth clients, what are they truly looking for from exposure to digital assets? Is it just a little bit of extra beta on their portfolio? Is there, just like generally curious, your spectrum of interactions with institutions, high net worths who are coming into this space and just kind of what they think, what the education is required. Just kind of give us a bit of a sense of like what that looks like.

**Adrian W. J. Fritz** (3:49)
There's a lot to unpack, I would say. Yeah, so first of all, I think I would agree with Cathie Wood. I think we're very much aligned on that point. And it comes down, it's the first step is the classification. I think there's still a bit of a misconception. They see crypto assets as kind of like one asset, but of course, there are different sectors, different value propositions and even just the nature of the projects are widely different. And that's where the education starts. And I think you laid it out perfectly. We always position Bitcoin as kind of like the monetary anchor of the entire asset class. So, of course, it acts more as a digital commodity, a digital gold. Then Ethereum Solana really act as those platforms for innovation, really the base layer for a lot of things that build on top of it. And then you have all the structural trends, all the innovation, decentralized finance, stable coins, tokenization that build on top of the innovation layer, how we like to call it, all the different applications, all the different projects. When we speak to traditional investors, that's kind of the first thing they need to understand, that those are different assets, different value propositions.