Bitcoin Enters Prime Time

Published Oct 22, 2021, 5:35 PM

Dave Abner, global head of business development at crypto exchange Gemini Trust Co. and a two-decade veteran of the ETF industry, talks about the launch of Bitcoin futures exchange-traded funds, who’s buying into it and what the prospects are for a physically-backed crypto fund. 

Hello, and welcome to What Goes Up, a weekly markets podcast. My name is Mike Reagan. I'm a senior editor at Bloomberg Tumble Down the Park across asset reporter at Bloomberg. This week on the show, Well it finally happened. Bitcoin exchange traded fun hit the market this week, and the excitement was enough to push the biggest cryptocurrency to a new record high, also causing vill Donna to wear her fingertips off with all the writing shod to do about it. But anyway, what does this milestone mean for crypto and what should we expect next? We'll get into it with the head of business development at a major digital asset exchange who previously spent about two decades in the et F industry. But first, Bill Donna, I need to catch up on your vacation last week. Uh, listeners will be very interest didn't this because Dona spent the week in Boca Raton, Florida, and I believe visited our old pal Sarah Ponzac, the former co host of the show, Danna. I've heard a rumor that Sarah is cruising around Boca in like a white Lexus with cold seats. Now we in the Northeast. We have heated seats to keep our butts warm. Apparently Sarah needs cold seats in Florida. I've never heard of such a thing. Is that Is that true? Yeah, it's true. I have no idea where that you've got this rumor from. I mean, but it's true, and I had never heard of it before. Everybody in Florida basically, like of Floridians have white cars because of the heat. And I guess cooling seats are the next, you know, top feature, and Sarah has it. Did you get to try out the cooling seat that Sheila is samp I didn't. Actually, this is fun. I sat in her back seat with her doggie. So yeah, she has a cute little pup. She has an adorable Sarah. Anyway, Uh, how to tell us about this guest this week. I'm very excited for this guest. I think we got a lot to talk about. He's the most perfect guest for this week. I'm so happy he can join us. It's Dave Abner. He's the global head of business development at crypto Exchange Gemini and welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me filled out and might great to meet you, well, I want to start off with just a little bit about you and your career. I know you and I have chatted before, but just to give our audience a view of you know, your career and what you've done in your life, because you do straddle this et F and crypto world very very well, so if you can just give us a sense of some of the work you've done. I actually spent two decades in the e t F world before I came to the crypto world. And what's funny is that I actually got into e t f s from closed end funds. So I was a closed end fund trader and I ran the closed end fund trading business at bear Stearns in the nineties. And when e t f s came onto the scene in the late nineties, they were funds, they traded on exchange. People didn't really know what else to do with them, so they naturally called the close down fund trader. First. That was me, and that instantly became pretty you know, maybe not instantly, but slowly became my next venture. Right. I realized the difference early between trying to arbitrage closed down funds and saw how readily available that was in the e t F world. ETF world was growing, although it was very small back then, and I progressed into that and I I was a trader and I ran bear Stearns Global e t F business for about eight years. Then I went to BMP Paraba to build an et F trading business, and then I had an opportunity to switch sides and I did. I switched. I joined wizdarm Triasset Management in two thousand eight April first, two thousand eight and auspicious state to join any firm because it was like the beginning of the end really um and I spent ten years or eleven years building up Wisdom Trees et F business and then at the end of that the last two years we were getting into crypto as a firm and I was getting deeper into it. We ended up launching the first bitcoin e E t P in Sweden in and then that was my my entry into the space. And then when I wanted to go really full full bore, I joined Gemini about a year ago. So I see a lot and we'll talk about this. I see a lot of parallels between the growth of the ETF industry and where we are with crypto today. So I'm excited to talk about it. That's when you went full laser eye. I guess right, yeah, I haven't. I haven't adjusted my Twitter feed to be laser eyed. I'm still on my my My pandemic puppy is my is my picture there. I haven't modified it yet. But you know what that I'm curious about, giving all your experience in the business and wisdom Tree obviously specializing in some sort of innovative e t f s, you know, the hedged European equities, that sort of thing, you know, kind of pushing the envelope there in some of the strategies. To me, the big question is, all right, when the I guess it was the Winklevoss twins who originally sort of floated the idea of a bitcoin e t F. However many years ago, you know, and back then, um, it made a lot of sense to want to put it into an et F because buying and sort of providing the custody of bitcoin was a lot trickier back then. You know, the famous amount Cox hack, you know, and and bitcoin while it's we're being compromised left and right. Now we've gotten to the phase where you know, your firm, Gemini, coin Base, all the other exchanges are available to purchase bitcoin. You can even buy it on Venmo and PayPal. You can buy it at the coin star machines at the supermar market. So at my point, bit it's just very easy and presumably a lot more secure to buy and hold bitcoin than it was years ago. And so I wonder how much demand is uncorked by uh bitcoin et s. I mean, obviously this one is just the futures et F, but presumably if we get a spot you know et F as well. Um, how much demand uh sort of uncorked by being able to buy it as an ETF now? Or is it you know, going to cannibalize the demand that's already in place in the traditional places to buy it. And the reason I ask is, I'm wondering, No, we've obviously seen this, this pop in the price of bitcoin coinciding with with the launch of the CTF, and I'm wondering, how you know sustainable that is to sort of be this this new spiggot of demand for bitcoin or whether we sort of cannibalize demand that's already there. That's a that's a new record for you for length of question Mike, Yeah, that's my thing. Okay, so I'll just talk for the rest of the podcast. Right, try to pull that all apart and answer. Let's go back to the beginning from me, right, the um. We really have to give the Wigglebox Twins a lot of credit here. They were so far ahead of the curve with their filing in and I think it was when their first filed for bitcoin e t F that like nobody even really thought that would Like they were like, what what you know? Most of the e t F industry, all of the investment community was like, what what's the bitcoin e tf Nobody knew anything that they what they were even talking about? Right, they were denied time and time again, uh from the SEC, right, like four or five times they were denied. Now, let's think about that. What were they trying to do, right, They were trying to make bitcoin investable for people. They kept getting denied with their e t F and so they actually what they do. They turned around and they went out and built Gemini. Gemini didn't exist when they first filed. So they said, Okay, we think this is going to be a valuable thing for the American public, for the global public. We think this is the future of financial products, and we think this should be accessible. So they went out and they built Gemini, which is like, you know, the most highly regulated, probably the most secure storage facility for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on the planet today. And it's actually easy to use via the exchange and via the app, and it's it's expanding as a global crypto platform. Right. Um, you're you're so the if I take all of your sort of questions and I boil them down to do we really need an e t F today, the answer is, in general, for most investors, no, it's really easy to open a Gemini account and get access to cryptocurrencies or to open it, you know, like you said, use other any of these other venues to get through. But there are and what I've learned in the industry, there are two things. Um, money moves really slowly in this industry. People don't change investment products, you know, readily. Right, So if you think about like we talked about the growth of the TF industry, it's it's twenty years later and they're at ten trillion dollars. The last sort of fur to six trillion, or you know, the real money moved in the last five to seven years. It took fifteen years for people to even think about putting ETFs in their portfolios right and using new products, launching going into new platforms to access cryptocurrencies is hard for a lot of people. So accessing bitcoin via and e t F is a great sort of gateway for people to get their feet wet and start investing in the cryptocurrency arena. Now there's a big problem with that actually, because it took you know, we're talking about eight years for the SEC to approve a Bitcoin futures et F. And that's basically like you've got this castle full of cryptocurrencies. They just open the gate, but they actually won't even let you into the rest. You can you can stand at the gate, which is what bitcoin is. It's the gateway, and but you can't go anywhere else. And and it's unclear how long it's going to take to see other products. So what I really think is when you talk about is there going to be a news figat of demand, yes, I think, uh, the doors open for a whole new swath of investors who might not want to go directly to a platform, who want to use bitcoin in a specific account or alongside of portfolio et F s UM. So there is new demand coming, but it's going to be limited because what they're gonna do, what they're gonna want is broader exposure. So they're gonna probably use the e t F and then say oh I want more, and then pursue other ways to get access to the wider cook the landscape. That's where I think about it. I'm going to pull a mic and ask a two part question, and I get the right to do that because I never do that, Mike, But to two parts that is amateurs your part, Yeah, all right, Yeah, that was great, But I wanted to ask you. A lot of people have called the launch of the Futures Back TTF fund a watershed moment, and then I also have people who call me and say it's not a watershed moment, don't call it that. So I'm wondering where you would fall in in that description. And then the second part is you you were talking about you know, this opens it up to a whole new base of investors, So I'm wondering who who that basis? Is it for the retail crowd? Our retail investors do anticipate will they be buying the e t F. Okay, Uh, great questions, two parts I can manage. I'll actually probably remember both. So let's start with watershed moment um. It is a watershed moment. Uh, this is unique, right, This is US regulators acknowledging bitcoin and saying this is an investable asset. We will approve a product to make it available for you. Right, Like you know, there have been funds available, they've been they've been unregulated, they haven't worked like an e t F. This is a fund that looks like a lot of what investors are using in their portfolios today, and that's helpful for them. So I think it's a watershed moment in that sense. Right. I think this is that that acceptance is important because I think it will lead to greater regulation on the industry going forward. It is, and like I said before, it's sort of this is the beginning of an entirely new segment of investable assets and the new investors. There is absolutely a crop of investors. I don't call them retail I actually don't like the name retail right. Direct investors are one thing, it's we should get away from using the term retail. Right. Direct investors are already buying bitcoin in the robin Hood accounts, They're buying it in PayPal, they're buying it on Gemini in coin based direct investors are not going to be the new investors to bitcoin because they actually realize they don't need to pay basis points or two hundred basis points to on bitcoin directly. They can do it um. The new set of investors, though, is the huge swath of money in advised accounts in the US. Advisors control really most of the money in this country, and they run generally now that ten jillion dollars is et F portfolios that they are building for investors, and those investors are not going out and selecting their own ets. They're generally advisor lead and advisors who were building those portfolios are now going to incorporate bitcoin. Many of them are using s m A s and have built procedures already to get to bitcoint But for a huge swath of them who really couldn't be bothered or didn't have the time, or we're waiting for the regulatory approval, this will be a new path for them to say five percent of our portfolio should be in crypto assets. It's the best performing asset over the last you know, one, three, five, and ten year periods, we need to incorporate a piece of them. So I think there is this new swap of investors that will commit you know, Dave with UH ETFs that hold futures. There's always this issue of the role you know, and the cost of rolling in the futures further out the curve um. Especially when you look at the bitcoin futures curve, it's in contango upper least sloping, meaning the prices in the further out months or or higher than the much higher than the UH near months um. And it even looks like the CTF is gonna sort of bump up against its limits on how many futures that can hold at the you know, the CFTC rules. All this is kind of leading people to worry that that this thing is not going to track UH at least spot the price of spot bitcoin as closely as as maybe uh, you know, it would be hoped what what you're thinking on that as far as the sort of the perils of a futures based et FU when it comes to tracking the spot asset price closely. You you you you you lead the question with the answer I think really right, like those are you know, future space ttfs are not new. There are a lot of them trading in the market. We know exactly how they trade. We know how futures work. They do trade at contango, they trade in sometimes intergradation. There are limits to how many, so quick growth can be can be detrimental potentially to the funds. These are all things that UM come into play when you are trading a future spaceed TTF. So if I go, if I put my e t F had on. When we were at the et F Fisher room, we were explaining to people, you know what you should be thinking about when you're buying e t F s. Structure mattered right. For years, Black Rock and all the other issuers were spent, you know, millions of dollars in marketing explaining to investors how structure matters a lot. This is what you need to be aware of, aware of if it's a future space TTF, if it's a physical et F. These things are incredibly important in understanding what your future potential returns will be. And this is all about UM. You know, it's funny right the SEC is talking about they went this path focused on investor protections, but what do investors really want. They really want an experience where they can read the label of an e t F and and I don't mean the small print on the label because they're never going to read that. They want to read the title and understand what they're buying. And they want to get returns that look like the underlying asset that they're trying to get. So when you buy bitcoin, if you look at your e t F returns on a Bitcoin futures et F, they could be potentially very different. And I look at the gray scale funds is a good example of this. Right, the only way to access bitcoin in a fund before the futures et F and US has been the gray scale fund. The returns of bitcoin and the gray scale bitcoint fund are extremely different, like hundreds of percent different, right, you know, hundreds of basis points different. Excuse me, Right, So I don't think the returns between a future space ETF and bitcoin will be as dramatically different, but there is the potential for those two things to diverge. And that means there is the potential one day for an investor to look at think they bought a bitcoin at et F, look at the price of bitcoining and it's change and performance, and look at their e t F and see two different numbers in the performance. That's the problem, right, that's the whole risk with this, and that's what we try and avoid in building good investment products. And look, sometimes you're just subject to the regulatory environment. And this is the best that an investor can get today based on the regulations. But you know, they could have gone a lot further. In my month, argument for a physically backed bitcoin e t F and if we were to see one, what are the propects when potentially might we see one approved by the SEC? The best argument is um that the like all of the all of the underlining mechanics, underlying mechanics of custodying bitcoin safely, providing you know, security and um execution and clearing those trades, everything already works and has been proven to work for a bitcoin e TF. Gemini is actually the largest provider of infrastructure to bitcoin e t F providers on a global basis. If you look at our nearest neighbor, Canada, we are the infrastructure of all of the Canadian bitcoin and the theory ets. So there are you know, there's a bunch of products up there. They're doing really well, and they've already proven the model that a physical bitcoin et F works. So it's very clear to me that I think that's the next step. And you asked about like when might we see that. I saw that gray scale file to convert to an e t F. I mean, no brainer, that should happen immediately. There's no reason why the SEC shouldn't follow up disapproval with a physical bitcoin e t F approval in the very near future. UM. So you know, I would hope you might see something by the end of this year, even we have two months left. UM. But if I were being more conservative, I would say the first quarter, excuse me, next year, we would see some approval. Beyond that, I mean, it's just getting ridiculous. There's no reason to not approve this at this point. I think one of the more fascinating innovations of crypto in recent years has been the notion of earning some kind of yield on your holding, you know, whether through lending products or staking that sort of thing. Obviously, quin Base made a lot of headlines with the Wells notice they got from the SEC basically warning that they're they're lending product. Um. Essentially could violate securities laws. Um. Also, I did a piece looking at just the notion of staking and even in the risk factors that at coin base. Um. You know, there's not a lot of clarity according to them about um how staking fits into the securities laws as well. I know, you know, Gemini offers chances to earn on your holdings through lending and staking. You know, is this a risk to Gemini doing that too? You know is obviously coin bases a public company, so they're bound to get more scrutiny from the sec But has the thinking that Gemini changed it all about these products given the coin based wells. Notice, so the think he hasn't changed because we have a different approach to the business in general. Right, Gemini takes a very very conservative stance with regards to regulation and everything we do. We do from a ask first before we move forward, right, we don't. We don't do first and then ask for forgiveness, and we don't sort of you know, come off with you know, we we are trying to be and we already are this sort of you know, collaborators with the regulators to bring something to market that works within their eyes. Right, So we are you know, we're a New York trust company regulated by the New York Apartment Financial Services, qualified custodian. All of these things are We are already incredibly highly regulated and we're very confident that our product has been vetted deeply by our regulators. We um and on that note, right, like if you if you get back to it, we're we've got more than four billion dollars in our earned product. People are coming to us every day looking for higher return, not just on their bitcoin, but also on their stable coins. Right. So Gemini dollar is a stable coin that tracks, that replicates the US dollar basically. And what's important is you asked if you mentioned the risk right, the risk factors, and there's not a lot of clarity. It gets back to just understanding in general what's happening in the financial markets. Right in the crypto asset arena and the cryptocurrency world, it's hard to actually get banking partners right, So there's a there's a limited funnel on access to dollars and back again to facilitate lending and borrowing. So there's demand. And on top of that, we have what's called pre funded trading across all of the exchanges. So if you want to trade on Gemini, you need to pre fund, You need to have money on the exchange to trade. Same thing for every other exchange out there. So if you're a trading firm and you're pursuing trading on a bunch of different exchanges, you need to borrow assets and set them on the exchanges so that you can have them. This has created incredible yields for both dollars and for cryptocurrencies because there's demand to borrow, because the trading firms will use those assets and generate even more money for themselves and then pay back those borrows. I actually think as long as you're on the major venues, we see the risks of doing this as very low. It's a very it's a standard business that looks exactly like traditional finance, right. I think stock loan in traditional financial services. This looks exactly like that, right. So it's a it's a it's not something that is completely new. It's it's similar, different words, right, staking versus stock loan, but a lot of this is very similar, and I think it's uh, it's gonna be very It's going to continue to grow in that sense, because if you think about we're talking about bit woin et F Storry, Mike, but the you know, you were asking like what's the best way to hold bitcoin, sort of like do you want to hold the e t F or do you want to hold bitcoin directly? Well, if you hold bitcoin directly and you put it in gemin iron, you can earn one and a half percent on your bitcoin holdings with no fee on the holding. Versus if you hold bitcoin in the futures e t F, you're paying points and you're getting no yield on the surface. So it's you know, you need to think carefully about structure. So Dave, just to wrap it all up, I know at the start of the conversation you were saying you see a lot of similarities between the e t F world and the crypto world, and so I'm hoping you can tell us about those similarities and whether or not it can tell us the growth of the e t F industry, can tell us anything about the potential growth of the industry. Yeah, so great question. It's probably one of my favorite questions because I feel like I'm sort of like back to the future. You know, ten years ago we were educating institutions how to implement e t F s into their portfolios. Right. And today we're doing the same thing. I'm going out and speaking to the largest institutions on the planet and my team, and we are educating them on how they can start to implement cryptocurrencies into their portfolios. Right, And it's uh. You know, so I wrote the UH in two thousand nine, I wrote the t the first edition of the et F Handbook, which was designed to take the details that are happening in the market and presented in a way that institutional managers can understand the markets enough so that they can start to implement ets into their portfolios. And I think it was you know, it's widely used around the industry and by institutional investors when they're building et F portfolios, like how the mechanics of these products work. We were at the same sort of that was two thousand nine when I when I sort of published that, we're at the same stage as I think in cryptocurrency land, like institutions are. You know. I like to say that Gemini, actually we don't need keypads on our phones. Our phones are so busy that we we actually make no outgoing phone calls. Right, People institutions are calling us on a daily basis asking for you know, they're not even ready to implement yet. They're still at the education stage for a lot of this, right, so they understand bitpoint very well. But this is a there's a very broad spectrum of of cryptocurrencies and there's a lot to learn and they need to get up the curve. And we're spending a ton of resources that educating institutions around this business. Well, speaking of that acating vill Donna, I think it's time to educate the listeners on some crazy things. But first I got Dave, I have to get one thing out of you before we switched to crazy things. We'll not to notice you're wearing a University of Pennsylvania shirt. I believe your daughter goes to pen that's right, sophomore. So there's a requirement on this show that if you have any sort of filled out the connection, you have to give us your favorite cheese steak pick in the city, brother Lee Love, So where do you go for your cheese steaks? There's no question, Abner's Cheese Steaks. It's right by the campus. It's the best, No, no no relation. I take it all right, all right, he's not talking his book. That's the same. That's the second Abner's recommendation we've gotten. That's interesting. You know, I confess I've never tried them. I'm not in that part of the Philly much. But next time I'm definitely gonna hit Abners. Let's take a road trip. Let me know, all right for sure stand clearer of the craziest things we saw in mark gets this week. Now let's hit those crazy things. I'm gonna break with tradition. I'm gonna go first because I really want to hear Dave's take on my crazy thing. And that was Get ready, Dave, take some notes. Now this will be an easy question, at least an easy number of questions packed into this. But on Thursday, UH real eye popping move in the price of bitcoin on finances US Exchange UH fellas low Is likes something like an eight seven percent plunge. Only on that one. Exchange and Finance eventually came out with a statement and said, well, one of our institutional traders had a bug in one of their algorithms, UM, and that's what caused it. Dave, what I wondered of you is UM. Obviously that's a crazy thing to happen. And you know, there's certain sort of guardrails built into the stock market over years too allow them to bust trades that are obvious, the erroneous or circuit breakers to prevent that that sort of dramatic plunge out of nowhere. And at the same time, we have seen coin bays come out with sort of their proposals to regulate the industry, including what that they wanna self regulatory and s R s r OH organization created similar to the stock market, where the sort of the industry polices itself. But I'm wondering how you see the market structure and where it needs to go. You know, is is this a feature or a bug that someone can pick off bitcoin for because of a bad altgo on an exchange? Where do you think something needs to happen sort of a consolidated tape like we have in the stock market, um, where everyone knows the sort of the real price of bitcoin. Where do you see that sort of market structure issue going, if if anywhere? Great question. I think it is a it is a highlight of a crazy thing this week, um, but it's also something that happens in the US markets quite a bit actually. So remember the biggest one that we ever talked about was the flash crash, right two, and that really brought attention to what happens here in a world with i'll go trading and no stop losses and things like that. And after the two, after the two thousand ten flash crash, there was a big backlash and people, a lot of people came out and said, e t f s are ruining the market, They're causing these market anomalies. And in the end it was decided, no, that wasn't that wasn't the case. It was a systems issue that caused the market anomaly, and they worked on fixing the system. There wasn't any real regulation brought into place after that. We've tightened up a few things in terms of trade away rules and things like that, but nothing nothing really sort of no dramatic fixed to the market structure. But things systems got better, and also we education of investors got better. So one of the things that was highlighted and then the flash crash was that advisors were using stop losses and stop losses and they would not stop limits stop loss limits, so they were stop loss markets. So they got triggered and then everything sort of uh, waterfalled down and we moved to a we moved to world where advisors don't do that anywhere that you stop lost limits often right to protect themselves against that. This is the same thing like we've this is this is sort of you know, the Binance thing was a fat finger basically, you know, except there was no finger anymore. It's computer system that did it. The ALGA was bad. Um I I sort of agree we um. I think getting to a self regulated place for the industry that nobody wants this to happen. They still will always continue to happen, but I think our market structure is going to look a lot more like traditional market structure over time, and the biggest firms and especially forms like Gemini, we have protections in place to protect against this, so that you know, these these types of things don't happen. But in the crypto space and now in the world right like it's so easy to build an exchange that these things it's it's it's still very early. What I find fascinating that you talk about market structure right think about where we're going. The crypto exchanges, they trade twenty four hours every day, seven days a week when they do. If you think about even upgrading, Um, like when we do systems upgrades, when the New York Stock Exchanges, the systems upgrade, but it's great. They closed at five o'clock on Friday, They've got forty eight hours to fix it before they open again. We do upgrades on the fly on our system, right, so we've had to develop mechanics to be able to upgrade the system just exactly as we're running. Right. Um, So that's the thing to think about in terms of market structure, Right, we have to build towards a world where we're going to be running markets seven all the time, and we're gonna have to think about low liquidity periods depending on you know, where the volume is happening, whether it's in Asia or whether it's in the US. These are a lot of things that are coming that we're gonna have to think about as we go. Sorry, long answer, short question maybe, But well that's fascinating because, as you say, those upgrades, even though they do have time to implement them when they are turned on there there, or they used to be anyway, so often the source of anomalies and and uh, you know, sort of wild moves in the market, so uh wait to do it on the fly. It really makes you, you know, makes you worry about that, at least makes me. I worry a lot to you, I don't know. No, well, look I should, I should, I should just um look, doing on the fly. It's just the way everything is done right now, Right, Amazon doesn't shut down, uh to fix systems, right, nobody, nobody's gonna be willing to accept that in today's world. And I should talk about just a little bit more about the regulation of the market. Right. We worked very closely with the regulators on this. We want our market to look and feel two investors like they are as safe and protected as the markets that they are used to dealing in. Right, that's our goal. That's that's Gemini is sort of that's our blood, right, Like, that's what we do. So that's our that's our plan there. Like I can't believe you take away from that answer wasn't but that Dave said that we're going to have markets. Yeah, Dona can't wait for this is my scariest thing. Why is that scary? That's amazing? Dona think about it. Right, You're you're a reporter, You're that you're busy reporting all day long, you don't have time to trade your portfolio. You should be but you should be able to go home and buy and sell stocks in your portfolio. But the problem is every time you get home from work, everything is closed, so you're putting in like orders to buy for the next day or something like that. You should be able to go home on the weekends and update your portfolio with things that are trading in real time. Reason, we'll make it. We'll make her cover the market on the weekends, right, that's the That's the reason. It's scary for me because I would never get to go home. But that was one of my craziest things a couple of weeks ago. If listeners remember where there is a company that is trying to do this, Um my craziest thing does not ask you to answer a question, Dave uh. And I'm actually going out into space with with mine kind of which which I've done before because it's interesting to me. But there was a great Bloomberg article about Elon Musk potentially becoming the very first trillionaire, and a lot of it, a lot of that new amassing of money is supposed to be on the back of SpaceX and some of the space deep space exploration and and other things that SpaceX likely could be doing in the future. A trillionaire our lifetime. Who would have ever thought he's an amazing, amazing guy. I listened to a podcast with him the other day about how he's planning on really thinking. I mean, I think he's thinking clearly about colonizing Mars, and I love it, like it's so exciting for our children and our grandchildren. That's gonna be amazing. That's why I love the space stories. That's good one. Vell Data, that's a good one. How about you, Dave, what's the craziest thing you've seen this week? Look, I think it's the topic of the day. Right, A major record was broken this week, right, the fastest et F launched to get your billion dollars. This herald is the beginning of the crypto era for e t f s. But even more than that, the ability for investors to really delve into the crypto markets in in sort of ever new expanding ways. I think it's exciting, really exciting. Yeah, well that I know it's exciting for our own Eric Calcuna here at Bloomberg he got to know big Twitter war with someone about how much how many inflows he expected into the bitcoin ETFs. It's looking like I forgot what his number was, but it's look everyone took the under and it's looking like he's gonna win. He bet a dinner at the restaurant of choice, which Dave, I think Eric would probably go for Abner's cheesesteaks. That's he's a filly guy too. I know we've talked about it. I love Eric. He's a good friend of mine, UM, and I think he likes Avner's actually, so he's spoken favorably and he's on point with his predictions on the temp market. I don't think there's there's not too many people that that rival Eric in his knowledge of this market today. He's awesome. His predictions are really good. Yeah, it's cool with that. I think that's all of our time for the week. Dave, really appreciate you joining us this week. UM historic week. I guess you could say, uh in the the wacky history of bitcoint, and hopefully we can have you back again to UH talk all things crypto. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. It's been great. What goes up? We'll be back next week. Until then, you can find us on the Bloomberg Terminal, website and app, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love it if you took the time to rate and review the show on Apple podcast so more listeners can find us. And you can find us on Twitter, follow me at Rea Anonymous, Bildonna is at Bildonna hi Rich. You can also follow Bloomberg Podcasts at podcasts and thank you to Charlie Pelletto. Bloomberg Radio What Goes Up is produced by topur Foreheads. The head of Bloomberg Podcast is Francesco Levy. Thanks for listening, See you next time.

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What Goes Up

Hosts Mike Regan and Vildana Hajric are joined each week by expert guests to discuss the main themes 
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