Charles Schwab & TradFi's Masterplan For Crypto Revealed! | Jim Ferraioli

**Jim Ferraioli** (0:00)
If I have to think about the 2028 to 2020-32 cycle, I think the narrative of that cycle is going to be the pivot from AI back to Bitcoin. There's a bottleneck in compute right now. I'm not bearish AI, but over time, I think the bottleneck does get resolved. So if you're running a data center, you want your utilization to be at the highest rate it can be. If that bottleneck does break up, maybe there's more competition for those inference contracts, so that drives now the revenue you can get from down. I think that starts to pivot back to Bitcoin.

**Tony Edward** (0:39)
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Link will be in the description. Hey folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm Tony Edward and we are recording at Station 3 in New York's financial district. And joining me is Jim Ferraioli, who's the head of crypto research at Charles Schwab. Prior to joining Schwab, Jim spent over a decade at Morgan Stanley, where he was a mid cap equity portfolio manager and cryptocurrency strategist. Jim, great to have you.

**Jim Ferraioli** (3:24)
Thanks for having me on.

**Tony Edward** (3:26)
So Jim, where do you hail from and how did you make your way into TradFi working at Morgan Stanley?

**Jim Ferraioli** (3:30)
So I'm a New Jersey guy. I was born in Northern New Jersey. I live there now.
I grew up there. I started my career in finance at Morgan Stanley. I actually started as a financial advisor and eventually spent the better half of my career so far at that firm. Eventually, I was in the CIO office. I was running a mid cap portfolio and I was also doing the crypto research. Last summer, I joined Schwab to build out their crypto research as Schwab was beginning to in the process of building out their crypto trading platform.
After having a pretty big presence within the ETP space, about 20% of the spot ETP assets, those actually come from Schwab clients. And so with the launch of crypto trading, they wanted to bring someone in who could actually cover the asset class for the firm.

**Tony Edward** (4:32)
Where along your journey did you discover crypto? I'm always fascinated by folks' origin story around Bitcoin and so forth. What was your aha moment?