Is the Next Bitcoin Rally Being Funded by the AI Trade? | Michael Van Poppe

**Robbie** (0:00)
Michael, let's get them on. Michael, welcome to the show.

**Michaël van de Poppe** (0:01)
Thank you very much.

**Robbie** (0:02)
Thanks for being here, man.

**Andy** (0:04)
Pleasure to have you here, Michael.

**Michaël van de Poppe** (0:05)
Thank you.

**Andy** (0:06)
Thanks for coming by. How are you finding Miami?

**Michaël van de Poppe** (0:09)
Pretty good, actually. It's a little bit hot, but we flew in from Amsterdam on Saturday.
It's okay. I like it.

**Andy** (0:16)
Beautiful.

**Michaël van de Poppe** (0:16)
I like it.

**Robbie** (0:17)
Yeah, man.

**Andy** (0:18)
Go ahead.

**Robbie** (0:18)
There's just a Money 2020 conference coming up in Amsterdam as well.

**Michaël van de Poppe** (0:23)
It's one of the biggest finance European conferences that are taking place. It's huge and very expensive, by the way.

**Andy** (0:31)
So what are you doing here in Miami? What is your purpose here in the Tokenized Capital Summit? What are you hoping to get out of this?

**Michaël van de Poppe** (0:39)
For this, primarily, we were looking for allocators for our funds. Other than that, the coming few days, I'll be doing your job. So I'll be doing podcast interviews and being on stage, but primarily podcast interviews.

**Robbie** (0:52)
Yeah. Tell us more about your fund. I was unaware, actually. I saw that you had this kind of new ex-account, but how did this start? What is the fund? What's the kind of thesis?

**Michaël van de Poppe** (1:03)
Well, I always wanted to have a fund, but I never felt I was ready for it. And I think that within the Netherlands, the funds that exist are not really good. They either are building a basket of tokens and then praying for a bull market to happen, or they are market neutral. And I wanted to be in the middle there, and that's why we created a multi-strategy hybrid fund. It's a lot of words, but it's three strategies in one, in which we try to aim for a return in any market condition.
We have a full trading strategy in there. We have fundamental tokens that we buy as a basket, but depending on the structure of the market, we allocate more or less, and then we do a lot of OTC trading.

**Andy** (1:44)
I'm most curious about the fundamentals of the market that you're talking about. What are you targeting? I mean, we've had back and forth conversations about how Bitcoin has gotten institutionalized, Zcash feels like the new Bitcoin. There's obviously the entire DeFi complex. When you're looking about fundamentals, what kind of fundamentals are most attractive from an allocator's perspective?

**Michaël van de Poppe** (2:06)
Well, use case is if they have a lot of activity on the chain itself. One of the prime tokens that we hold is near, just simply because of the amount of revenue that it generates and the growth rate that it currently has.
And then you can start to model it for the coming years to come, and then you can start to build a fuel where you can say, well, the current price is heavily underpriced based on market circumstances, not on the token itself. But I need to be honest that 95 percent, actually 99 percent of the tokens have no purpose, have no value, and even if they have a value, stuff like Aave can still happen. So Aave is one of the tokens that we hold, but then if something else happens within the ecosystem, you can still have a drawdown on the position itself. So it's not easy, that's why they are not having big allocations within the funds, and most of it is actually default trading. But these are the core principles of it, and that's why most of the tokens don't have an allocation with us.

**Robbie** (3:03)
Yeah. Man, I'm curious to understand how you're thinking about investing in this market compared to when you started, right? 2015, 2016, 2017, right?
How much has changed in the way that you approach the markets now, right? Like back then, it was much more, it was much less sophisticated in the sense of the average participant had less understanding of what was happening compared to now, whether it be unlocks, VCs, dumping, market makers, decentralized exchange, cabal. There's so many different factors now, and then throw in kind of this institutional era. Like, what has materially changed? Like, how has your strategy changed as you navigate the current market versus back then?

**Michaël van de Poppe** (3:43)
Oh, man, I want to go back in time.
2017 was so much fun. And back in the day, it was just retail traders trading against retail traders. Everybody had the same information and knew what to trade on. And the current markets are just, as you explained, super complex with a lot of insider info. Like, for instance, we have taken some OTC deals back in 2025, and those were so large that you can actually just see what the price was doing and when the unlocks were gonna come, which were not publicly available. But they were trying to lure in some people into that position, and then the unlock happens and people start to sell or the investors start to sell, and retail again gets hammered on it. So when it comes to investing in the markets right now, it's either you need to just stick to Bitcoin and eat, or you need to dedicate your entire life and find the edge of some particular project or strategies, and that is just getting harder and harder.