Inflection Point Cross-Post: Crypto Is Forcing Traditional Finance To Upgrade

**David Lawant** (0:00)
If you ask me whether we would see Perps in the US three or four years ago, I was like, I don't know, I think this is going to take a very long time. I don't know if this is going to happen in my lifetime. I mean, and here we are.

**Matt Hougan** (0:09)
I think what you're seeing, which is really interesting if you can step away from it, is the traditional financial system reacting to the innovations of crypto. Perps is a good example of that, right? They are seeing the pressure coming from what crypto is providing.

**David Lawant** (0:24)
I think crypto and stable coins and tokenized assets are probably the first threat to this extremely well established model.

**Michael Marcantonio** (0:40)
They may not be characterized as participating in unregistered swaps, but the CFTC didn't simply bless offshore perps for everyone.

**Marc Arjoon** (1:07)
Nothing said on Inflection Point is a recommendation to buy or sell securities, tokens or any other assets, nor does it constitute a solicitation or offer to invest in any fund, product or financial instrument. This podcast is for informational purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by hosts and guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official positions or views of their respective employers or affiliates. Hosts and guests may hold positions in companies, funds, tokens or projects. Everyone, welcome back to Inflection Point. I'm joined as always by David Lawant, Matt Hogan and Michael Marcantonio. This is the pod for the institutional adoption of crypto.
If you're a first-time listener, welcome. If you're a second-time listener, I hope that you've subscribed already. There's a lot of information specifically to do with the institutional adoption of crypto. Speaking of which, I'm going to plug DAS, Blockworks DAS. There's DAS Asia on October 7th in Singapore, and then DAS London in November 10th, 11th. These are, in my opinion, the best institutional high-signal events of the year.
There's early pricing available right now. As always, I don't like when people message me on LinkedIn the day before, the week before, tickets will sell out and I will not be able to help you out so close to the time. So please try and get there early and that's it for my little plug. Let's dive into the markets, guys.

**Michael Marcantonio** (2:35)
And can I just say like and subscribe to Inflection Point? Let's get that out early.

**Marc Arjoon** (2:43)
How are we feeling? I know the markets are a little bit rough.
We spoke about this last week and somehow the seas are even choppier. What's on you guys' plates? Maybe Matt will start with you.

**Matt Hougan** (2:56)
Oh, I just think it's going to be grindy for a while. That's my honest take. It's one of those, you know, I've never been more bullish on the long term outlook for crypto. And there's so many cross currents in the short term, whether those are macro, policy related, strategy related, you know, ETH community related. I wish I could just give a full bullish answer, but I think it's going to be choppy. I will share one thing, Marc. You know, I did more sales calls yesterday than I've done since I joined Bitwise in one day. I spoke with eight different advisor teams, more than 40 different advisors. Probably the two interesting takeaways from that is they're still interested in crypto. So these are people who have been studying the space. They're not scared by the pullback. They want to know if the bottom is it. That's one fact. The more interesting thing I found is that they were interested specifically in stable coins and tokenization and not in Bitcoin, which I thought was a little bit of signal. Usually in a bear market, it's Bitcoin that leads us out.
If you think the marginal buyer is actually an institutional buyer, I think it might be stable coin and tokenization related plays that lead us out.
This might be one of the rare sort of early bull markets where Bitcoin dominance falls because their interest was explicitly outside of Bitcoin into the real world of crypto. Eight calls in a row, they said the exact same thing.
I thought that was an interesting takeaway.

**Michael Marcantonio** (4:30)
Matt, how do they plan to get exposure to this real world of crypto?

**Matt Hougan** (4:34)
They would love for me to tell them how.
Look, I think they don't know. They're feeling around the edges. There are two schools of thought. One is investing in an array of tokens that are related to this. They're hoping that one hits. That means everything from ETH to SOL to LINK. Maybe it means Hyperliquid. It means just sort of spray in that area and hope that it hits. The other thing that really did appeal to them were the companies. I think there might be a specific bid for crypto-linked companies that are using the platform here. I told the story of Figure a few times and that really resonated. Circle certainly resonated. Some of the financial giants that are playing this space really resonated. I wonder if the meta is not actually the infrastructure but the apps or companies that are building on this new blockchain base.