Bitcoin CRASHES Below $62K On Worst ETF Streak Ever – Matt Hougan

**Scott Melker** (0:01)
Bitcoin has crashed below 62,000 American dollars for the first time since February, as ETFs absolutely bleed out on a historic heater in the wrong direction. Now, if we wanna talk about ETF flows, obviously we bring on Matt Hougan. But if we also wanna talk about the prospect of Bitcoin bottoming and stop being so damn depressed, we also bring on Matt Hougan. We're gonna have a great conversation today. Let's go.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to The Hellscape. That is the crypto market. This is a modern day Pompeii. All we need is Michael Saylor and Peter Schiff running through the rubble, and we would have the perfect background. Good morning, Matt.

**Matt Hougan** (0:58)
Good morning. Good to be here, Scott. Feels like that picture, it definitely does.

**Scott Melker** (1:02)
We need the smoke to be moving. I'm gonna be honest, I don't wanna be too hypercritical, but I think it would look much more like I was actually in The Hellscape if that happened.
Listen, as I said, you and I have a long history, I think, of optimism when things are going wrong, so probably the perfect conversation for today. I mean, maybe just broad strokes, obviously. We dropped below 62 earlier today. Still a little bit higher than that February low, but I see a lot of bottoming signals. I kind of made a full case for it, but I assume that you believe we could be at least approaching something like a bottom in the not-too-distant future.

**Matt Hougan** (1:41)
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I thought your case for it was good. If you've been around crypto for a while, this feeling feels very familiar. This feels a lot to me like early 2019 era crypto winter, where you have this period where you go sideways and then a little period down. People get angry, people rage quit, fear and greed spikes towards zero.
It's not comforting to say that this feels familiar, and maybe that's a little bit too glib. But it is worth noting that effectively, all of the negative news that I can imagine is already well known in the market. Micro strategy is well known in the market, the Clarity Act is well known in the market.
The substitution effect is well known in the market. I do think we're in the process of bottoming. Doesn't mean we pinpoint here and go back higher. I think it's totally possible we trade into the 50s. But what I was telling some folks at a advisor conference I was at yesterday, is this is an interesting moment to sort of T-wap into Bitcoin and your high conviction bets, and know that in a year from now, you'll be happy. If in a month from now, you might be wishing you had waited, but in a year from now, I think you'll be pretty happy.

**Scott Melker** (2:57)
Yeah, I also am aware that in a month from now, you might be pissed off that you didn't buy now, right? So I can't tell the future. So I think either is like, I bought Bitcoin today, I bought Bitcoin very publicly at 70 Pretty happy with both of those.
I'm really happy buying Bitcoin, not at 125 again.

**Matt Hougan** (3:13)
That's exactly what I mean. I was thinking back to that 2018-2019 bear market, and you could have bought Bitcoin at 5,000, or you could have bought it at 3,500. Was it better to buy it at 3,500? Of course.
But were you happy that you bought it at 5,000 when it raced up into the 60s? Yes, you were. And I think it's that sort of situation. Look, the institutional bid, I know we'll talk about ETF flows, but the institutional bid is still coming into the market over time. You're still seeing large wirehouse platforms open up. We're still seeing institutional adoption coming. That's still going to put a bit into crypto over the long term.
So I think you'll be happy in the long term. But of course, bottoms are painful and uncomfortable and awkward. We're transitioning from a momentum asset to a contrarian asset. That's a brutal transition, but that's where we are.

**Scott Melker** (4:09)
I think people have a recency bias when we talk about how bad it is. It's bad.
I think also we've matured, so it doesn't feel as bad if you've been here before. So I think that's an element of it. But it's not as bad as like FTX and those things collapsing when we really felt like we had an existential crisis and everything might go to zero. Even the worst case scenarios now that you kind of alluded to, like I don't think Saylor is going to blow up, but even if Saylor blew up, I think everybody realizes Bitcoin would go on and eventually go up after that was flushed out of the market. So we don't have the existential going to zero, our industry will never exist in the United States, again, feeling that we had in the past. So I think maybe the one thing that's different this time is the FOMO of everything else. You sat in Bitcoin while NVIDIA and Sandisk and all of these things pulled old school altcoin type moves.