Crypto Still Sees Massive Returns On Par With Stocks

**David Canellis** (0:00)
It is Wednesday, June the 3rd. I'm your host David Canellis, and this is The Breakdown. Chatting about a few things this morning, we're looking at this idea that crypto has been left behind by the stock market. Seen a lot of takes about that over the past few days, over the past few weeks. We're gonna take a look if that's truly the case and how crypto stacks up against the stock market over the year gone and the year to date. We're also looking at ETF flows. I mean, Bitcoin ETFs, we're seeing a lot of outflows. We're gonna be looking exactly how much Bitcoin and how that compares to the overall arc of cumulative flows and so on. We're also gonna be looking at Microsoft's new quantum computing chip that it says is accelerating the timeline to Q day. We will take a look at those claims and some of the reactions to that. So enough Chiba Jabba. This is The Breakdown. Let's get to it.
Nothing said on The Breakdown is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Hosts and guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. Alrighty, so first up, yeah, I have this tweet from Blockworks co-founder, Mikey Polito, that kind of outlines the general vibe out there when it comes to crypto versus the ever-pumping stock market right now. I'm just gonna read it out. If you're wondering why crypto has been left behind while the stock market takes off, look no further than the everything is a meme crowd. That type of thinking, which birthed ideas like ultrasound money, meme coins, dats, et cetera, is why we're lagging. It's not because the regulators are out to get us, or because crypto has an access problem, it's because the value prop of most crypto assets is not as good as other sectors. We must, we must accept the crypto assets are subject to the same rules of gravity as every other asset on earth. They will have to compete in the same arena as other industries like robotics, AI, et cetera, for capital. We should accept that 99% of crypto assets will be valued on cash flows and dedicate all of our efforts to making those cash flows as high as possible. Just look at which coins are outperforming today, tells you everything you need to know. So, I mean, super reasonable take here. And it is just something that we have seen happening over the past, I mean, especially since the 2021 bull market. I mean, that was earmarked by NFTs. Like I know that there was so much going on in other parts of the market. And Solana was ripping all of this sort of stuff. But I mean, NFTs, there's no cash flows for NFTs. That's not a thing, but they were still super successful in breaking through into the mainstream. And I just want to throw back to one of the first episodes of The Breakdown when I took it over, this chat with Paul Dylan Ennis about just crypto as a culture and all of that kind of stuff. And he made the really good point that for the longest time, we're all wondering when we're going to hit mass adoption with crypto. Well, 2021 was a mass adoption moment. But this concept of cash flows was not at all prevalent back then. But a lot has changed in the past four or five years. I'm sure you already know. So we are entering this era of crypto. We're not really early anymore. We might be early to certain matters like agentic finance perhaps or agentic commerce. Perhaps we're early there. Perhaps we're early on in tokenization, I suppose. But this stuff has been going on for years now. And whatever innovation those parts of the market are going to do is kind of happening. I mean, it's kind of happened. So we do need to start respecting this idea that external investors, new investors coming into the crypto space, institutional type investors, family officers or whatever, whatever they are, they're going to be looking at cash flows and revenue and have their own frameworks for how to value these tokens. That is not the same metrics as what the crypto Twitter of yesteryear would use to value assets. So all of that said, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the top end of the crypto market and compare it to the stock market over the year to date and over the past year. Just to get a grasp, how much is the crypto market really being left behind compared to semiconductor stocks, space stocks, what have you? So I have this up on my screen here, which is, if you're listening, again, I'm going to do my best to convey what's happening on my screen here. This is the one year performance of basically the hottest, most best performing stocks on the market against the hottest, most best performing cryptocurrencies on the market. And every stock, everything that's a stock is labeled in blue, everything that's a cryptocurrency is in red. So and this is over the past one year. So as you can see, the best performing by a long stretch is SanDisk with a 46x over the past year, 4,600% return. And this is like due to the RAM shortage or NAND flash memory and storage. And SanDisk was actually spun out of Western Digital in February 2025 and then exploded on this notion that AI data centers would really flock to SanDisk for their storage needs.