Crypto’s Biggest Bull Run Is Still Ahead w/ Roger Bayston

**John Gillum** (0:20)
Bitcoin is fighting to hang on to the $60,000 price level, but institutions have never been more bullish. When will this bear market end, and what are the big players building now to prepare for when the bulls come back? Hello, and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that Benjamin Franklin would have loved Bitcoin. I'm your host, John Gillum. Today is Wednesday, July 1st, and today we are joined by Roger Bayston. Roger is the Executive Vice President and Head of Digital Assets at Franklin Templeton, where he leads the firm's strategy and product development in digital assets, tokenization, and the integration of crypto into traditional finance, which is something we're all excited about these days. Roger has over 35 years of experience in the financial services industry, and he's going to share a ton of alpha with us today. So if that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe, share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it. Today's episode is brought to you by BitGet, Stocks 2 with real liquidity, real dividends. And without further ado, welcome to The Milk Road Show. Roger, how are you, sir?

**Roger Bayston** (1:15)
I'm great. Thank you, John. Thanks for having us. Happy early 4th of July to the country.

**John Gillum** (1:21)
Well, I hope there's a lot to celebrate this 4th of July. Roger, in June, you all completed an acquisition of 250 Digital and launched something called Franklin Crypto. And I think this has gotten a lot of attention. And I'd love for you to just sort of explain a little bit about this dedicated digital asset management business. Where does this sit in the larger strategy for Franklin Templeton in terms of their digital assets initiatives here?

**Roger Bayston** (1:43)
Well, Franklin Templeton has been engaged in digital asset journey for lots of years now, going on nine years since we piloted our first projects about how we could use blockchain infrastructure in the underlying asset management business.
Our core business is advice, offering advice, advice on a vast array of assets, public and private. And digital assets are one of those that we see as being increasingly important for investors to hold in their portfolio as a diversified basket of strategies and solutions, depending on where they are in their investment cycle, or those individuals or institutions. So Franklin Crypto has been created as a kind of an offshoot of maturation of our digital asset ventures to be able to really focus specifically on offering that advice to customers and clients globally as that asset class continues to grow and emerge and play important roles in client portfolios.

**John Gillum** (2:40)
We are deep in a bear market. It's early days of Franklin Crypto. How's it going so far and what's the conversation and the advice you've been giving been like in this deep bear market that we're seeing here?

**Roger Bayston** (2:53)
Well, I think we have a pretty unique situation or at least an understanding of what's happening in the overall industry. That's because we are so deep into the infrastructure build. The shifting of capital markets and asset management underpinnings into blockchain environments for their obvious benefits, the decrease in the friction and the costs that might customers and clients might bear in receiving services. And so we are building and building and building and building. And despite the asset values themselves in crypto being relatively flat, or as you point out, a bear market, boy, you can only think about positive outcomes because in the past year and a half, RWA has been a super popular topic. And you see the explosion, a continuing explosion of RWA, and you think about the total amount of public or private assets that can migrate on chain, we're just beginning to just scratch the surface of that in this journey. So we have a lot of positive thoughts about the integration and the replacement of the legacy underpinnings of the capital markets and asset management specific using these blockchain environments. And so we just remain super positive. And we would expect as momentum investors shift around, that maybe they were in crypto and now they're in AI and what comes next. We just see these infrastructures.
These are like utilities in the same way that we put up poles and strung electricity and built other sorts of infrastructure to allow the economy to grow over time. But we see these pipes, these utility pipes, these blockchain infrastructures being extremely critical for the information-based economies that are continuing to grow and grow and grow and grow across the planet.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:53)
Guys, listen, we are at a very crucial point in time right now. AI stocks have ripped. They're going to keep ripping. Our analysts on the AI side are up literally 100 percent or more on quite a few calls.