Bitcoin ETFs Buy $900 Million in Longest Streak Since October

**Scott Melker** (0:01)
Bitcoin ETFs have added almost a billion dollars in their longest inflow streak since October, price holding strong even in the face of higher oil prices, and of course, escalating conflict in Iran. And of course, the other biggest story of the day is updates on the Clarity Act, which we will dig into. I've got Ian Weisberger here from CoinRoutes. We're going to talk about all that and more.

**Ian Weisberger** (0:24)
Let's go.

**Scott Melker** (0:41)
Good morning, everybody, happy Thursday. It's Thursday, right?
Happy Thursday. It's been a whirlwind of a week, obviously. Still not back in the studio right now, I was recording live at the Out East Summit for the TIE. Out in Long Island I'm on Long. Island and still on the road. Good morning, Ian. How are you, man?

**Ian Weisberger** (0:58)
Hi, Scott. Thanks for having me.

**Scott Melker** (1:00)
So I've just got to do this story as a quick shout out because BitMEX, the exchange that invented Perps, shutting down, right? So like, I don't know if you have BitMEX stories, if you were here early, but I'm seeing a lot of them coming out on social media right now. I personally was trading on BitMEX back in the day. And then one day, my position got randomly closed. I got a message about being an American. I tried to contact customer service. I said, your email is no longer associated with an account. I never got my money back.

**Ian Weisberger** (1:28)
Wow, that's definitely worse than any story I can think of. But yeah, I mean, they were big back in the 2017 cycle because we started corner ops in 2017 And I remember doing volume there. But recently, I'm not surprised that they're starting to be honest.

**Scott Melker** (1:46)
Yeah, they became a non-entity. But I guess we do have to pour one out for the homies and A, and B, give them credit for inventing the perpetual swap, which I think is coming to every market near you now. Yeah, he's brilliant.

**Ian Weisberger** (2:01)
Arthur Hayes is brilliant. But I don't think anyone's really crying for him. I think he's doing pretty good. So yeah, pour one out for him.

**Scott Melker** (2:07)
I don't know if he's going to be okay. But I think in the presidential part and in probably a couple billion, I think he'll probably survive.
So it kind of leads to a conversation that you and I were having just before the show, which is since you're obviously at CoinRoutes, you can see what people are doing, what people are trading, what they're interested in, how they're using all of these instruments. So now what was invented on BitMEX came to every exchange, then kind of found its newest form in hyperliquid and now it's even stocks and everything. So what are you seeing at CoinRoutes?

**Ian Weisberger** (2:38)
Yeah, you know, it's really funny. He kind of started a movement. So CoinRoutes is trading, you know, we traded SpaceX per free IPO, our clients were trading it. And so now all of our clients are trading these equity perps on crypto exchanges. But there's something interesting. The actual TradFi exchanges are now launching single stock futures. I think it's happening next week or the week after we're supporting it. But that there's no way that would have been a thing if these perps hadn't come around and allowed people to trade equities. So now these TradFi people are basically rapidly trying to catch up. First, it was the 24-7 trading, which has been being rolled out pretty slowly. And now with the single stock futures, they're really feeding off each other at this point. I think it's going to be interesting to see how that evolves.
In equities traditionally, the single stock futures were never really a thing. No one really traded them.
But they became popular with perps on crypto. And now that same market structure is kind of going back into tradfine.

**Scott Melker** (3:38)
So the people that you used to see trading crypto, now trading all of these other things using the same instruments like perps?

**Ian Weisberger** (3:45)
Yeah.

**Scott Melker** (3:46)
Yeah.

**Ian Weisberger** (3:46)
I mean, the thing is people are still trading Bitcoin. It's still like the store of value that's non-sovereign. And beyond being a store of value, it's actually pretty cheap to send between exchanges. Like I think our transaction fees were like 20ish cents, 50 cents, something like that for a slug of Bitcoin.
And it's non-sovereign, so you don't have to worry about dollars. Like people worry about what's happening with Circle, what's happening with Tether, whatever. Like I personally think they're great, but different people have different views. And so what our clients are able to do now is keep Bitcoin as collateral on Hyperliquid and Binance to trade Tesla perp, right? And then we give them tools to see, okay, what's my risk? What happens if Bitcoin falls 10%? How does that affect the liquidation price of my Tesla perp? And so you have all these correlated instruments now, and it's still extremely useful as a collateral asset. I think as a non-sovereign collateral asset, it's here to stay and it's pretty powerful for people to be able to use that to trade different assets.