Strategy's STRC Hits Record Low as Wall Street Races to Tokenize Everything

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:00)
On today's Public Keys from the New York Stock Exchange, Strategies Preferred Stock Hits a Record Low, Ric Edelman unpacks the paradox between crypto investor sentiment and Wall Street's infrastructure buildout, and is tokenization compatible with what's actually being promised. I'm Jen Sanasie, let's get into it.
Happy Monday, everyone. Today's episode is brought to you by Kraken Pro, regulated spot margin trading. It's finally available to US traders. Size your trades to match your conviction. Trade margin on Kraken Pro. All right, a lot to watch as we get into the week. Last week, Strategies Preferred Stock Funding Vehicle, STRC, or STRECH, crashed to a record low of $82.53, falling more than 17% below its intended $100 par value, and raising urgent questions about the viability of Michael Saylor's Bitcoin-backed capital machine. Despite the mayhem, Saylor posted his signature Bitcoin tracker chart over the weekend, signaling another acquisition is imminent. Even as critics warned, the stretch overhang could cap Bitcoin's near-term rally.
Charles Schwab is partnering with Cboe to launch yes or no options contracts on the S&P 500, marking the brokerage's first move into prediction markets. The binary options will pay a fixed amount or expire worthless based on whether the index closes above or below a target price, rolling out in the coming months. Unlike PolyMarket and CalShe, Schwab will focus exclusively on financial markets with verifiable outcomes, avoiding politics and sports. The launch follows recent moves by Coinbase and Robinhood, signaling prediction markets are migrating from crypto platforms into mainstream Wall Street infrastructure.
And Franklin Templeton filed with the SEC for two new ETFs that maintain 95% in US equities and 5% in Bitcoin, automatically reinvesting all corporate dividends into Bitcoin. One offers broad market exposure, the other focuses on growth companies, with both potentially trading by September, if approved. The structure creates automatic Bitcoin exposure, funded entirely by equity dividends, delivering the recommended 1-5% crypto allocation without active management. All right, Bitcoin is down, ETFs are still in the red, and Bernie Sanders wants to kill crypto in your 401k. But while prices are depressed, the infrastructure keeps building with names like NYSE, JP Morgan and more. The founder of the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals, Ric Edelman, joins us to unpack the paradox. Hey, Ric.

**Ric Edelman** (2:30)
Jen, good to see you.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (2:31)
Nice to see you again. I know that you just came off of your conference and we're really talking about this divergence between crypto investor sentiment and what's going on on Wall Street. On this show, we cover all the news. You heard me just unpack some of the headlines coming from Wall Street. But talk to me about how you're looking at that divergence.

**Ric Edelman** (2:49)
Yeah, even the headlines you just cited were both good and bad. Tale of Two Cities. At our annual crypto conference, we had a 60% increase in the number of financial advisors attending because everybody wants an answer to that question. Is this a precarious time for crypto or just for crypto investors? And clearly, crypto prices are not reflecting what's happening in the world of crypto. The fear gauge is at an annual high. We saw a 10-day outflow of $4 billion from Bitcoin ETFs. We've seen Michael Saylor sell 32 Bitcoin, which freaked out the market. Mt. Gox moved $700-plus million to a new wallet, first movement of that wallet in over a decade, freaking people out as to whether a sale is about to occur.
We see the Clarity Act with no clarity. It doesn't really look like it's going to get passed. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are jumping on that. To try to get an ethics bill, section included in that bill, and they want to kill, as you said, crypto from 401k plans. So all that looks really, really negative and really making people wonder, is crypto dead or dying? But on the other side of the coin, we have to recognize what's really going on with the infrastructure. There's tokenization jumping by leaps and bounds with Securitize, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, all getting heavily involved in tokenization of crypto. We're getting involved with tokenization of equities, tokenization of cash, tokenization of ETFs, all being done by the biggest names on Wall Street, including State Street and Invesco, and even Fidelity getting involved in all of this. At the same time, institutional investors are jumping into crypto in ways we have never seen before. Ninety-five percent of the institutions that don't own crypto, say they're going to allocate this year for the first time. And three-quarters of those who are already allocated say that they're going to increase their allocations. We see at the same time SpaceX and the AI, IPOs draining attention away from crypto over to the shiny new thing.