Matt Hougan: Why Bitcoin 13X is "Inevitable" (The Path to $1 Million)

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]My view is that Look, I'm an I'm an old Jack Bogle investor.

[00:00:05]I just want to own the market. So, owning the market in crypto means owning crypto assets and crypto equities. When we talk to advisors, there are some that favor one more than other, but more than that, we see people combining them both.

[00:00:18]One way to play 13X growth is to make sure you have exposure to all of those things. And that's that's what I hear a lot of investors telling us that they want to own both the equities and the assets because they want to own the space [music] as a starting point. I'll count it as like a 60/40 win for crypto. Yeah.

[00:00:36]And I feel pretty good about it. "I'm an old Jack Bogle investor. I just want to own the market", says Matt Hougan, CIO of Bitwise. For him, the market has expanded. Hougan argues that we've crossed the chasm from weird words like world computers to institutional grade digital gold and high-yield stablecoins.

[00:00:56]With the easy button of ETFs now pushed, he sees a massive wave of capital ready to flood in as regulatory clarity finally turns the tide. Before we go on, please take a moment to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and turn on post notifications for more content like this. Every action helps with the YouTube algorithm and greatly supports the channel's growth.

[00:01:17]>> [music] >> Thanks for your support and enjoy the video. I think it's actually one of the few occasions in crypto's history where the fundamentals have been ahead of the price. Often in crypto >> That's a very, very good point. Yeah, we hype things so much that the price runs ahead of the fundamentals. So, it's actually really, really nice to see.

[00:01:35]Yeah, I think there are multiple explanations for it. There's never just one.

[00:01:41]One is that this is just a natural cascade. Most of us in crypto came in through Bitcoin. And then it took us a while to learn about Ethereum and DeFi and other assets. Yeah. And I think that story is just repeating. Right? So, if if people started coming into this market new when the ETFs launched 2 years ago, they're just on this journey where they learn about these other assets, just like all of us did. It's just we forget that we went through that journey. So, I I think that's that's fairly standard. The other one was one you hinted at, which is that crypto hasn't done a good job until recently explaining why these platforms have a lot of value. Right? We didn't really settle on this stablecoin and tokenization use case for things like Ethereum. We had all these weird words that were hard for people to understand, like the world world computer, um which I don't even know really what a world computer means. It does It like sounds like the cloud. It's like a little confusing. So, I think we've just arrived at this narrative.

[00:02:41]For what it's worth, Bitcoin suffered the same thing, right? Remember it was peer-to-peer cash payments. Yeah. That was the meta in the beginning, and it didn't really hit the institutional community until we came onto this digital gold thesis, the store of value thesis. Mhm. I think Ethereum and Solana are getting there, but as an investor, I love the opportunity to find these entry prices given the growth we've seen in fundamentals. I mean, just last week um Meta announced it's going to start paying creators using stablecoins over the Solana and Polygon blockchains.

[00:03:14]Yeah. That's a massive potential piece of news. Mhm. Solana and Polygon didn't budge, right? Um when when the market ignores really big news, uh that can be opportunity for investors. The question is whether if you hold a stablecoin, which is just a digital dollar on the blockchain, can you gain interest on it the same way you do as if you hold a dollar in your bank account. Now, we'll ignore for the fact for the moment that most US bank accounts actually don't pay interest, but theoretically, the idea was uh could you have a stablecoin that would earn interest? Because the stablecoin, of course, is backed by a US Treasury instrument, which pays the risk-free rate, let's call it 4%. Can that 4% flow down to the individual holding a stablecoin?

[00:03:58]The banking lobby flipped out about this because if you had a choice between having a checking account that pays low interest and has high fees and has some element of risk cuz banks can go under or a stablecoin that is backed by a US Treasury instrument that pays 4% interest the banking lobby was worried that everyone was going to favor the stablecoins, particularly during periods of stress when you have bank failures in the US and companies going under.

[00:04:25]So, they they tried to hobble that in this Clarity Act by making it very difficult for that interest to flow downhill to the end investor. Now, to me, that's anti-consumer. It's my money, I should earn interest. But, the banks wanted to restrict that because they wanted to protect their competitive advantage.

[00:04:43]But, the breakthrough was yesterday was sort of a complex one foot in, one foot out which said that you can't earn interest just for having stablecoins sit in an account.

[00:04:58]But, if you do something with those stablecoins, if you spend them, if you stake them, if you take an activity with them, then you can earn interest or income on that. So, in the same way that we earn points when we spend with a credit card on an airline, if you spend with stablecoins, maybe you can earn some version of interest.

[00:05:20]I think it's um woolly enough language that it will allow significant growth for stablecoins to provide this kind of yield. I think that's why you're seeing Circle, which is the largest stablecoin issuer in the US, uh react positively to the news because it's seen as a growth catalyst for this market. So, I'll count it as like a 60/40 win for crypto. Yeah.

[00:05:43]And uh and feel pretty good about it.

[00:05:45]Look, we're big fans of the crypto space. We've had a crypto equity ETF BITQ since 2021 and investors love that ETF. It's done It's done well recently.

[00:05:57]My view is that you know, look, I'm a I'm an old Jack Bogle investor.

[00:06:01]I just want to own the market. So, owning the market in crypto means owning crypto assets and crypto equities.

[00:06:09]When we talk to advisors, there are some that favor one more than other, but more than that, we see people combining them both. Yeah. Because if you take something like stable coins and you think stable coins are going to be huge, right? People say we're going to go from 300 billion to 4 trillion dollars in assets in the next 4 years.

[00:06:26]That's the bullish scenario in City Group's stable coin report. That's like 13x growth. That's massive. Where will that benefit flow through to? Will it go to Ethereum and Solana, which are the two platforms on which those trade? Will go to DeFi assets, which people can use stable coins on, so protocols like like Ave? Will it go to companies like Circle that are building stable coins? Will it go to firms like PayPal that are experimenting with stable coins?

[00:06:57]The answer is it's hard to know. One way to play 13x growth is to make sure you have exposure to all of those things and that's that's what I hear a lot of investors telling us that they want to own both the equities and the assets because they want to own the space as a starting point. And importantly, if you're a trad-fi investor thinking about investing in this space and you're worried that the regulations might shift 180 in 2 years, how much are you going to invest? Right? Once we have that stability of having legislation, which is very hard to undo, that's when you'll see the sort of flood of investment because that's when the banks will feel comfortable that the the rules on the field won't shift. So, I do think it's a it's if we can get this bill passed through Congress, which remember it's Washington D.C. So, anything could happen. Yeah. Uh you should you should err on the side of expecting sort of incompetence. Um but if it can get past, I think uh I think it will be a major catalyst for crypto. I think it will sort of uh help set off a very strong second half of the year. Yeah, I'll share a an experience that kind of blew me away. Uh week and a half ago, I was in Phoenix for a traditional financial advisor conference. This was not a crypto conference. Most of the discussion was on stocks and bonds and private credit uh private equity. Crypto was a small piece of the conversation, but I gave a talk there. There were about 170 advisors in the room, and I asked at the start of my talk, "How many of you own Bitcoin?"

[00:08:27]Or own a crypto asset. And usually when I do that, it's like 10 15% of the room.

[00:08:33]Uh Alex, it was 150 people raised their hand. Wow.

[00:08:37]>> The number of people who didn't own it in their personal account was vanishingly few.

[00:08:43]Now, I subsequently asked them how many own it in their client accounts, cuz these are advisors who manage money for other people. It was only about 20 30% of the room. That's pretty good.

[00:08:53]It's still pretty good. Um I'll share two things. You know, first of all, I've been going to this conference for years.

[00:08:59]Uh 2 years ago, no one raised their hands. Like no one owned crypto. Now they all do. The other thing we know from from working at Bitwise for 8 years is that advisors allocating in their personal accounts is the immediate precedent to them doing it for clients. They want to touch it first before they do it for clients.

[00:09:18]I share that because I think crypto is really gone mainstream. It's crossed the chasm.

[00:09:23]It's no longer this crazy idea. When you have 150 advisors in a room out of 170 saying they own it, when you have Charles Schwab posting videos on X saying maybe between 2 and 7% of your portfolio, When you have Morgan Stanley launching their own Bitcoin ETF with their name on it, something that they've done very rarely in the past.

[00:09:45]Look, I think the wave of institutional capital that's going to come into the space is going to be extraordinary and based on what I'm seeing in the field, it's really starting to accelerate. I think that's one of the reasons we've recovered from where we were in February to today. I think everyone who wanted exposure would gain proxy exposure most through like strategy, some through GBTC which was that sort of closed-end fund type structure that traded at premiums and discounts.

[00:10:15]Uh some through Coinbase stock.

[00:10:18]But they were looking for that proxy exposure. Since the Bitcoin ETFs launched, they've become the easy button for these advisors to gain exposure.

[00:10:26]Let's just use these ETFs, they're low cost and simple. You of course still see people buying strategy stock, but it's now seen as a levered play on Bitcoin.

[00:10:35]Right, that's how they think of it. But Um yeah, really the floodgates have opened since those ETFs launched.

[00:10:42]The launch of Bitcoin ETFs marked a critical turning point. Before ETFs existed, institutional investors seeking exposure often relied on indirect proxy investments such as MicroStrategy, Coinbase stock, or closed-end trusts like GBTC. These structures introduced inefficiencies, premiums, discounts, and operational complexity. Bitcoin ETFs changed that completely. Would you say that the platforms themselves are also more open-minded? They they were limited in what they could own. So I'm wondering if attitudes have changed not just at the advisor level, but at the institutional level, too. It's it's such a good point because just when an ETF launches, that doesn't mean everyone can buy it. It means my uncle can buy it, but it doesn't mean that a Wells Fargo advisor can buy it or someone at LPL can buy it or and other major platform.

[00:11:33]There's a second approval that needs to take place at these large wealth platforms.

[00:11:38]And those really started turning on at the end of last year. I would say the second half of last year is when those platforms went from blocking people to allowing them to allocate. Now, I would say the market is roughly 80 85% open. Most of those platforms are open to it, but that means we haven't yet really seen the pick up in flows that we're going to get.

[00:12:03]When you turn on these ETFs, many people start learning about them and they don't buy them immediately. So, these large platforms that just opened up access, those advisors are on their first or second or third meeting with Bitwise or BlackRock or one of our other competitors and they're going through this education process. So, you know, this always takes longer than crypto wants, but the tide is always bigger than crypto thinks and I think that's what you're going to see here is you're going to see really significant flows, but they will you're you're just starting to get a little peek of what that feels like. We haven't felt the full brunt of it yet. I also think a lot of those advisors have studied Bitcoin's history and known that it's historically gone through these big cycles and if you buy at the bottom of the cycle, that's historically done very well, right?

[00:12:52]Those who bought in the aftermaths of the FTX collapse uh did extraordinarily well. Uh those who bought at the depths of COVID where Bitcoin whipped down to $5,000 right when that COVID pandemic started did extraordinarily well. And so, I think you have the natural dip buyers and also the Bitcoin dip buyers who have studied this asset, but weren't able to invest cuz there weren't ETFs. They weren't available on their platforms.

[00:13:21]Now, they can invest and the market was down 50% from from all-time highs.

[00:13:26]That's a pretty attractive entry point.

[00:13:28]So, I think I think you'll continue to see that throughout the year. That doesn't guarantee Bitcoin goes up, but it does mean these people see this as an opportunity if they're going to hold this asset for multiple years to get in at a pretty attractive entry point. So, the Bitwise journey started in 2017. We launched the first crypto index fund.

[00:13:46]And the thesis there was pretty simple, which is it's hard to know which of these assets will win over time. I bet people want to just buy them all in an index fund the same way we buy all the stocks in the S&P 500 or all the bonds in the Bloomberg aggregate. And that fund today is the largest index fund in the world. It's about a billion dollars.

[00:14:04]It's gone from being a private fund, which was only available to accredited investors, all the way to being an ETP.

[00:14:10]So, it's much more accessible now. But beyond that, we've launched a large number of single asset ETPs, both in the US and in Europe, because there are investors who want exposure to Bitcoin or want exposure to Avalanche or want exposure to Chainlink >> [music] >> or Ethereum. We have the largest Solana ETF in the world. Um and that's a big business for us.

[00:14:32]We found also that many of those investors who meet us in the ETF space want to do other things as well. So, we have a large business doing SMAs where we write call options against people's crypto positions to generate income.

[00:14:46]That's a very growing business. We're one of the largest staking providers in the world. We've moved into vaults, which is sort of on-chain asset management. You're going to see us do a more. The goal is to be a global crypto asset manager serving all different geographies and to meet people where they are. If that means simple ETFs, great. If it means complex derivative strategies, great. If it means something on-chain, fantastic.

[00:15:15]You know, you you think about iconic specialist asset managers like PIMCO.

[00:15:20]PIMCO serves the fixed income market, does a tremendous job there, and people trust it as experts. Or you think about Blackstone, right? Or you think about even BlackRock.

[00:15:32]But you think about these asset managers that are experts in their space. Bitwise is trying to be expert in the space of crypto across public private funds, staking on chain, TradFi, crypto rails.

[00:15:44]And that's what we try to do. There are 200 of us globally, and the business has been growing nicely over the years. So I look specifically over the passive products, and then I'm on the risk committee on the active side. Active has to be your complete 100% job, and I do a lot of things. I do a lot of public speaking. So we have an active team that looks after that. But I help design the indexes and contribute to the product development and and help manage the risk of the business. I also look after our research team because a lot of what we do at Bitwise is educate people on crypto, right?

[00:16:15]There's not much CIO action in our Bitcoin ETF. We just buy Bitcoin. That's not that hard.

[00:16:24]You know, but but there is a lot of activity in educating people about Bitcoin. So that's the other aspect of my job. But it's a it's a fantastic position. I'm I'm blessed to do it, and I I love it every day. SMA is just a just means separately managed account.

[00:16:39]Typically, this is an investor who has a large position in Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana, and they want to maintain that position, but they'd like to generate either yield in terms of dollars or yield in terms of incremental more Bitcoin or incremental more ETH on top of that position. And so we'll have an individual account with that investor. We have a gentleman named Gordon Grant who actually has traded more crypto derivatives than any human on Earth. And he manages those positions for those investors, and that's a that's a pretty significant business for us.

[00:17:13]Vaults is a really exciting corner of the crypto market. If you think Alex what an asset manager does in the traditional world, we take investor money, we custody it, we audit it, we allocate it into the market, we send reporting, etc. In the on-chain world, that role was more or less occupied by a vault.

[00:17:33]What happens with a vault is an investor will contribute money typically through stablecoins to a smart contract. That smart contract will allocate that money into different investments searching out yield or other opportunities. And the vault curator, that's the word, manages the risk in that market and determines where those money's flow and make sure that the positions it's going into are not subject to any any idiosyncratic risk.

[00:18:01]So a vault manager or a curator is not the same as an asset manager in the on-chain world, but it's a similar activity. It's sort of the IP. And I think those are going to be a massive business. If you think the world is moving on-chain, which I do, then you think asset management and vault curation almost become synonymous over time. And so that's that's the role that we're playing in that space. When you think public private, they're both opportunities for capital returns. They have different risks, different liquidity, different challenges, but now that they're easier to access, investors can toggle between them. If you look at on-chain sort of vaults, the biggest growth area there is searching for yield. Well, isn't it nice if you're an investor, you could go buy a money market fund and get a yield of X, or you could look at the on-chain equivalent of that that might have a yield of Y, and sometimes one will be more attractive than the other, but I think people will toggle between them the same way they toggle between public and private equity. There's no reason, if you can underwrite the risk in on-chain asset management, that you might not find those yields more attractive sometimes than you will traditional and vice versa. Right? There are certainly moments where we think the traditional market yields are more attractive than the on-chain yields.

[00:19:20]>> [music] >> And slowly over time those will sort of merge together and and really really become one. I think there will be much more real-world assets tokenized on blockchains than actually underlying crypto assets. That's definitely going to That flip is going to happen over time. Um the beautiful thing about having traditional assets on chain, though, is you can do things with them that you have struggled to do with in the traditional world. Things like borrowing against assets is much easier on chain than it is in the traditional world. And uh so you can you can do different strategies on chain. It actually becomes more powerful as an instrument. New risks, to be sure, but also new capabilities. And if you have the way to manage those capabilities, it can be very interesting. People are always like, "Where are the real-world day-to-day use cases?" Well, those aren't going to be built if FedEx might be labeled a broker-dealer and founded by You know, like Like there is there's a phasing to this that has to happen.

[00:20:18]The technology has to work well, which it does now. But you also need sort of regulatory certainty uh that allows you to build in order to get that real scale. And that that's hopefully what we'll get uh if this makes it through Congress. Matt Hougan's perspective ultimately presents crypto not as a passing speculative cycle, but as a financial system undergoing institutional maturation.

[00:20:41]The market is evolving from isolated digital assets into a broad economic ecosystem encompassing public equities, tokenized assets, stablecoin infrastructure, decentralized finance, and institutional investment products.

[00:20:55]Traditional finance is no longer resisting this transition outright.

[00:20:59]Increasingly, it is integrating with it.

[00:21:21]>> Mhm.