Is Bitcoin's Price Broken? What Investors Are Missing | John D'Agostino

**Scott Melker** (0:00)
John D'Agostino has a Bitcoin take that a lot of people are not going to agree with. Even with price down, he argues that Bitcoin may be fundamentally better positioned now than when it was making all-time highs. That is a bold claim. And in this conversation, he explains exactly why.

**John D'Agostino** (0:16)
What has fundamentally changed since we hit all-time highs in Bitcoin to the absolute downside? We have extraordinarily better regulatory environment, better liquidity, better systems, better infrastructure, more institutional participants.

**Scott Melker** (0:27)
We talk about institutional adoption, regulation, market structure, tokenization, and why the biggest story in Bitcoin right now may not be the price at all. Stay until the end, because this interview challenges the most common narrative in crypto, and John backs it up.
So listen, I want to actually talk about your beginnings. I read the book Rigged ages ago from Ben Mesric, who I've actually had on the show as well. And then I want to talk about how what you're seeing in crypto may be different or similar than what you were seeing in oil markets at that time.

**John D'Agostino** (1:15)
Love to, my favorite topic.

**Scott Melker** (1:17)
Good, starting well.

**John D'Agostino** (1:21)
So, well, first of all, thanks so much for having me. I'm a big fan of watch your show for a while. Love your history as well. You've got great lore, as my daughter would say. Yeah, I mean, the short version is, so I had this fun career. I threw a very strange sequence of events. I graduated from Harvard Business School and I had gotten this odd fellowship, the National Italian American Foundation. They put me through Harvard Business School. And I was thanking them for paying for HBS. And the guy who was being honored was the chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange, Vinny Viola. And he just pulled me aside and said, I was all lined up to go work for an investment bank, two immigrant parents. That was the dream. And Vinny literally just grabbed me and said, I get it. I get it. I was there. But do you want to have an interesting life and maybe be rich? Or you just want to try to go be rich? It's literally what he said to me. And I couldn't stop thinking about it. And I turned down the investment bank and called him up. And I was his, basically his assistant for the first year. But I got to do some really cool stuff because Vinny was a self-made billionaire.
I got to help him buy the New Jersey Nets back in the day. It was a blast. I was a freshly minted MBA. I knew nothing. And then he turned around after about a year of working for him personally and said, I think you should go be at the NYMEX. And we created a position for me. And it was fantastic. I got to learn, I think it was the best education ever. And I exchanges, my whole career has been in exchanges, because I think they're phenomenal organizations. They're the epicenter of all capital market flow. They were price discovery is fomented. Without them, the entire market infrastructure breaks down. So I've always just been really, really interested in this sort of how to buyers and sellers come together and whether the underlying instrument is a bit of computer code or a counterparty agreement in the form of a swap or derivative doesn't really matter to me. Just how to buyers and sellers come to an agreement on something. So absolutely fascinating to, I think I'm happy I learned there versus an investment banking program.
My Excel skills are probably not as good as they would be, but it was a blast, particularly because I learned in this just psycho environment of early odds commodity derivatives training, which makes crypto look tame.
That's probably helped me a lot at Coinbase. When we've gone through these volatility cycles and some of the younger people are freaking out, I'm like, try front month natural gas options.
That makes this look like baby time frolics. So I was trained in aggressive volatility. I was trained in more illiquid opaque markets. That's helped me stay calm, I think, during my crypto journey.

**Scott Melker** (4:09)
That all makes perfect sense. It's so funny to hear your journey because it somewhat echoes mine. I went to the University of Pennsylvania. I can't claim Wharton, unfortunately. I was an anthropology major. But it was also late 90s and jobs on Wall Street. It was like getting a Halloween candy. It's just that easy.
I had a friend, my big brother, my fraternity, and he was the recruiter for Solomon Smith Barney. He came down for interviews when I was a senior. He said, you want a job? He's like, just give me your resume. I said, what's a resume? I don't have one. I'm going to be a junior.