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Posted May 15, 2026 at 1:11 pm
How does a trader or investor differentiate one cryptocurrency from another? Join IBKR’s Senior Market Analyst Steven Levine, along with Bitwise Asset Management’s Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan, and Head of Research Ryan Rasmussen, as they discuss a host of different crypto assets, including Bitcoin, Ether, AVAX, ADA, SOL, XRP, Bitcoin Cash, DOGE, and many others. The conversation also explores the technology behind these currencies, certain unique use cases, and an outlook on the ever-evolving digital asset industry.
The following is a summary of a live audio recording and may contain errors in spelling or grammar. Although IBKR has edited for clarity no material changes have been made.
Hello, and welcome to IBKR Podcasts. I’m Steven Levine, Senior Market Analyst at Interactive Brokers. I’m your host for today’s program. Today, we’ll be talking about a rather long list of different cryptocurrencies. And these are available to invest and trade on IBKR’s platforms. And we’ll provide links to those in our show notes. And here we’re talking about not only Bitcoin and Ether – these might be the more popular names in our culture – but also AVAX, XRP, SOL … several others.
When I first encountered these things, I said, ‘What are these?’ Subnets, for example. ‘What’s a subnet?’ ‘What’s a fork of a fork of a fork of some asset?’ I thought it might be a good idea to understand more clearly what these assets are, what they’re used for … how do you analyze them? How are they different from one another? That’s a big thing. How do you differentiate them?
So, Bitwise Asset Management’s Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer, and Ryan Rasmussen, Head of Research … they’re both her to help us shed some light on these topics, and provide the kind of information I’m sure investors and traders can use, so that when they see these assets, they can make a more informed decision, when – or before – committing to a transaction.
So, Matt, Ryan, welcome! Thank you very much, both, for taking the time to do this. Really appreciate it.
Steven, thanks for having us. We’re excited to be here.
I’m excited to have you here. I’m excited to talk about this.
I thought it might be worthwhile to start off just trying to frame them in a number of ways.
So, I understand there’s Bitcoin, and there’s Ether. Then there’s Solana’s SOL, Avalanche’s AVAX, Cardano’s ADA, SUI, XRP, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Chainlink’s LINK.
I sometimes get confused, you know? I’m referring to XRP, or say AVAX, right? That’s how they appear, at least in certain sites. But they also seem to be interchangeable with Ripple for XRP. So, I see Ripple and then I see parentheses ‘XRP’ as if it’s a ticker for Ripple. I see Avalanche for AVAX with ‘AVAX’ really just noted the same way as a parentheses – like it’s a ticker.
ADA, XRP, AVAX, SOL – these look like tickers, but I understand … they’re not.
Well, this is a great topic, lots to dig into and hope we can provide a clear architecture. The specific thing you’re focused on there is the difference between the blockchain and the asset that powers the blockchain. You can think of it like a video game and a token that you put in the video game to make it go.
So, Avalanche is the blockchain, and in order to make it go, you put in the AVAX token. It’s the token that makes it go. Ethereum is the blockchain. In order to make it go, you put in the ETH token. Solana is the blockchain to make it go. You put in the SOL token. But that is the way to think of it. You have the technology, and then you have the asset that makes it work. and you have to sort of use that asset to make it work. So that’s the difference between those two.
In two seconds, you cleared this entire thing up for me. This is amazing.
We’re off to a good start.
Well, it’s perfect, because you hit on the analogy that I understand best. I loved video games as a kid. I think that’s probably evident somehow. I don’t know how, but we did refer to them at the time, in some places, as ‘tokens’.
So, Bitcoin I understand is a store of value. What are these other crypto assets? Can we think about grouping them somehow – so we can get some idea from a batch of them at once?
We sure can. Maybe I’ll provide an analogy, and then Ryan can talk about the technicals. I think it would be a good split.
The analogy, I’d like to give you another analogy, which is to think about the internet and the early days of the internet. The internet is a general purpose technology that can be used for different things. And you remember that the first major use of the internet that went viral amongst a lot of people was email. And then there were a bunch of different email providers. So, you can think of a tree with the internet at the top, and one branch is email, and then underneath it was AOL, it was Hotmail, it was et cetera. Then there’s another branch, which is search.
That’s like Google, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, et cetera. There are a bunch of different ways to do search, right? And then there are other branches. There’s social media, and that’s Facebook, and it’s Snapchat, and it’s Instagram. There are a bunch of ways to do social media. And then there are business applications, and that might be Salesforce, and it might be Snowflake, et cetera. But they all bubble up to this central technology, which is quote unquote the internet.
The analogy here is the same. So, you have this central technological breakthrough, which is called a blockchain, which is a new way to store data in a database that everyone around the world can access. And you can use this blockchain to do different things. And, so, there are different branches of this blockchain. Bitcoin was the first branch, and Ryan can explain why it works this way, but let’s say that its first branch is a store of value like digital gold. That’s what the Bitcoin application of blockchain is good at. It’s good at storing value in the same way Hotmail was good at using the internet for email. Then you had this second branch. Ethereum was the first example, which was what’s called programmable blockchains.
And those can be used to move other assets around the world. So, Bitcoin only uses Bitcoin around the world. On Ethereum, you can move dollars. We call those stablecoins. You can move stocks. We call that tokenization. You can move bonds. You can move other documents. There’s a whole class of these. Ethereum, Solana, XRP, Avalanche, Cardano. These are all variants of this programmable blockchain. We’ll talk about those use cases.
And then there are other factions. There’s Dogecoin, which is a meme coin. That’s another sort of branch in the same way that social media was another branch of the internet. And then there’s DeFi. That’s another branch. So, I think that’s the way to think of it, make the analogy to the internet, and you have all these different segments. And we can talk about why Bitcoin is good at storing value, but not good at moving dollars, and why Ethereum is great at moving dollars, but struggles to compete a little bit with Bitcoin on that store of value use case. There are technical reasons in the same way that there are technical reasons that email was different than search, and then reasons why different search engines took different approaches. It’s the exact same thing playing out here.
Yeah, I think that was a great analogy and great explanation. And I think the right way to think about these is competing software or technology companies. And they make different trade-offs in the way that they process transactions, or in the user experience, or how much data they can handle, or other elements of the activity that happens on these blockchains. But ultimately, this is just technology. I think a lot of folks get wrapped up in how complex crypto technology is.
But from an investment perspective, what you’re really zooming out and looking at is, do you think this technology and these networks, these blockchains are going to grow over time? They’re going to see more adoption. They’re going to have more use cases, which was originally as a store of value asset, but now expands to stablecoins and tokenized stocks, and prediction markets and other things that Matt mentioned.
And if you think those use cases are going to continue to both see increased adoption and the use cases are going to expand, then like all networks that accrue value from the activity on them, you’d want to invest in those networks and that future growth. And, so, it’s complicated. There’s a lot of technical nuances across these different networks, but ultimately they are just competing technologies that are going after really, really big markets.
It’s very, very interesting to me. I know we talked about some of the functions of these assets. Can we talk about some of the more specific use cases of them? So, if I’m investing in, say, SUI, shat is it responsible for in terms of, say, a use case for it? Or XRP – I understand as a bridge currency between foreign currencies. ADA. I want to put an ADA coin in, and I want to see what happens. What happens?
Great. I think the best way to talk about these two perhaps is with the two largest crypto assets outside of Bitcoin, which are Ethereum and Solana. These are the two largest smart contract platforms or blockchain networks that are programmable, as Matt mentioned. Those are very popular for different reasons.
Ethereum, for instance, you put an ETH token in, and it allows you to then send a stablecoin or many stablecoins to someone somewhere else in the world. What does that mean is that if I want to send Matt $1,000 over the Ethereum blockchain, I have to pay to do that with ETH, the asset. Matt would receive that $1,000 in stablecoins in his account. Almost instantaneously, I would be charged a fee, and there’s no middleman just interacting with this blockchain network that transfers value from person A to person B and updates the rest. records. Solana offers the same service, but the way it goes about offering that service is different. The Solana blockchain, which is powered by the SOL token, also allows me to send $1,000 in stable coins to Matt, but it’s going to do it faster than the Ethereum network, and it’s going to cost me less. It’s going to require less SOL than Ethereum requires ETH to make that transaction happen.
So, the natural thought there would be great. Solana obviously is the better network. However, Ethereum has existed longer. It has more liquidity on the network. Its security, or what we call uptime in these software networks, is stronger than Solana. Solana has periods in the past where the network has gone down and no one’s been able to send any stable coins. And so, these are the kind of trade-offs that users think about when they decide whether they’re going to use Solana or Ethereum. Now, me personally, I use both of them. I might use them for different activities, but I do use both of them. And the same thing is true with Avalanche and Sui and XRP in the sense that you can do a lot of the similar activities on Sui as you can on Solana as you can on XRP. But it’s going to be a slightly different underlying technology, which impacts the cost, the security, therefore the risks around settlement. It’s going to impact the speed of settlement. And that’s the main trade-offs between these technologies. And there’s a bunch of use cases on top of these. But for the most part, these use cases can operate on each of these different blockchain networks. The way that I like to think about it is that you have iOS and you have Android. Both are these operating systems for applications.
And I can use Uber on iOS, I can use Uber on Android, and I choose which one I want to use based on the phone that I have, the computer that I have in the US. iOS is very popular, outside the US, Android is very popular, so many of these networks… can win. It’s a case of user preference and trade-offs.
I was just thinking that, and I was I was thinking also back to the analogy of the search engines – and that was a user preference as well. It looks like, mostly, Google became a part of our vocabulary. User preferences really shaped the direction of how things have evolved to become just normal, business as usual in our lifestyles. I find that fascinating. And I wonder how much of these blockchains, or these technologies, are going…. They’ve already started creeping in more and more … like you mentioned … prediction markets. We offer access to prediction markets [IBKR ForecastTrader] here at IBKR, for example. And so, it’s really fascinating to see how much, say, people are going to want to exchange for tokens and play these machines in that sense. So, a lot of competition currently, it sounds like, which ultimately seems to always boil down to three or four players at the end of the day.
So, if I do look into each of these different assets, and if I do want a clearer picture of what it is that I’m actually investing in, there’s, for example, there’s all these proofs. Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake, Proof-of-History, Proof-of-Reserve. It looks like they want a lot of evidence that these things are what they say they are, because I suppose they’re intangible. It just seems very specific to this digital asset ecosystem.
I can definitely tackle that one. The place I would start is to think about a bank.
If you think about a bank, banks do lots of things, but one of the things they do is they process transactions and they keep your wealth safe, right? That’s the core functionality of a bank. And we all know how they do it. They have teams of middle managers and tech teams that make sure they can process transactions and keep your wealth safe. And for that, they charge you a fee through overcharge fees, through low interest, et cetera, but they charge you a fee for that service. Okay.
A blockchain, like the Bitcoin blockchain, does the same thing. The core functionality of the Bitcoin blockchain is it processes transactions and it lets you store your wealth. But there’s no Bitcoin company to do that. So, the way it does that is it has what’s called miners, which anyone around the world can contribute to this. And what these miners do is that they verify that transactions are real and then they propose settlement of groups of transactions in what are called blocks. That’s actually where the word blockchain comes from. Blocks are groups of transactions arranged in a chain.
The challenge in creating this open architecture system, where a million people are doing the job that a bank used to do, is you have to make sure that all these million people are acting honestly. And the way the Bitcoin blockchain does it is that it makes you solve a complex math problem, before you propose, here’s a block of transactions that should be settled. So, you have to race everyone in the world to solve this complex math problem. And then if you solve it first, you get to propose this block of transactions. Everyone else checks your work, and then those transactions are settled. And in exchange, you’re provided a reward. You’re provided a few Bitcoin, which are worth a few $100,000, so it’s really worth your effort.
The Proof-of-Work, the work in proof of work is doing those complex math problems to be the first one to solve it. And the reason you need that, Steven, is otherwise bad actors would spam the network with false transactions. They would propose this block and that block and that block, and we’d all waste a bunch of time seeing if they were lying or telling the truth. We need to make it costly to propose a block of transactions, so that you only do it honestly because you want the payment.
So, that was the way the original blockchain worked, but it’s not the only way to do it. So, that’s Proof-of-Work.
Proof-of-Stake was a technological innovation, which said, instead of doing this complex math problem, what if we put up a bond? What if we put up, in the case of Ethereum, which is the largest Proof-of-Stake network, what if we have to post, let’s say, $100,000 worth of Ethereum? And if you catch me doing something wrong, if you catch me proposing an illegal transaction, then you can take my Ethereum from me. That’s called staking. You stake your Ethereum to say, I’ll act honestly. And if you’re caught acting dishonestly, your Ethereum is taken away.
So, that’s another way to make a blockchain be honest. Those are the two primary ways.
The other things you mentioned are sort of minor technical variants. So, Proof-of-History, you mentioned, that’s used on the Solana blockchain. That’s just a way to make the blockchain move faster. So, the Solana blockchain is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain that they use staking to ensure honesty, but then they order their transactions through something called history.
They stamp that onto the blockchain and that allows it to process transactions faster than Ethereum. So, the two big ones are Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake. The other ones are minor technical nuances. But the thing to remember about Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake is that it’s a way to make sure that millions of people around the world who you don’t know and trust always act honestly. And the incredible thing is, since its creation, the Bitcoin blockchain has processed something like $125 trillion worth of transactions.
Really?
Zero fraudulent transactions.
Wow.
Every transaction has been verified and real. And that’s, it just shows how well this system works.
That’s incredible. I know that there were all sorts of concerns and I’ve always heard concerns about breaches or hacking or some nefarious activity that might occur either by the users or by people infiltrating. It sounds a lot more secure as you talk about it than imagined. Although I still hear stories from time to time. I’m not sure how they do what they do.
Well, for sure, there are two levels. So, there’s a level at the Bitcoin blockchain processing transactions that are real. That is foolproof. But then there are two levels at which you should have real concerns. One is just like the traditional banking system, bad actors can use the Bitcoin blockchain. Bad actors use cash, bad actors use banks, bad actors use Bitcoin. So, you need ways to capture them. And the Justice Department and others have done a great job of stamping that down.
And then the other is just because the Bitcoin blockchain is doing it well, doesn’t necessarily mean that you as a user are doing it well. So, just like my bank has most of my money, but if I carry $100 in my wallet, someone can steal it. The same is true for crypto. If I have most of my Bitcoin at a custodian or in an ETF, it’s probably safe.
But if I’m carrying it around on my phone and someone steals my password, they could take my Bitcoin. It’s that wallet to phone, bank to custodian, I think is a good analogy there.
That makes sense. They can, you know, somebody can come up behind me at an ATM…
Totally.
…and demand my PIN code, and I suppose it’s very similar. I think they held people hostage in some cases just to get their private key, which I find really, really scary.
I’m assuming Proo-of-Reserve – I don’t low if we touched on that – is something like the stablecoin offering, where you need to back your stablecoins with a reserve of money market funds or dollars – some kind of liquid asset – short-term Treasuries, or something like that, to make sure that what’s represented in your stablecoin is in those reserves.
I think you’re distilling that term correctly.
There’s a lot of questions when you bring real world assets onto blockchains is how do you prove those real-world assets exist and are claimable one for one with the tokenized version or the tokenized claim on that asset that trades on a blockchain?
And one way to do this is working with auditors and using cryptography to prove that the off-chain assets are one-to-one backing the on-chain assets.
And so stablecoins are a great example of that, because for every stablecoin, which is a digital dollar that trades in a blockchain, there should be a corresponding dollar in cash or cash-like assets, such as short-term treasuries, sitting in a reserve somewhere, whether that’s with BlackRock or with the Fed or in a different bank or custodian.
And so Proof-of-Reserve is just another cryptographic protocol that can say this token or this stablecoin trading on a blockchain, is backed one-to-one in value by the corresponding off-chain asset.
And you can expand that concept to things like tokenized deeds for homes or tokenized stocks.
This one share of tokenized Apple stock corresponds with one share of Apple stock held in a custodian off of a blockchain.
And the beautiful thing about these blockchain networks is they take assets that may only trade on one trading venue, like the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange, or take assets that are illiquid, like real estate.
They allow you to tokenize them and bring them onto networks that are globally accessible, run 24-7, 365, have instantaneous settlement, remove the intermediaries, as Matt mentioned, and allows capital to flow freely, cross-border, at a low cost in real time.
And then it uses these different Proof-of-Stakes or Proof-of-History or different cryptographic proofs to validate every transaction and ensure and prove that they are valid transaction that the person who is sending stablecoin A to the, or the person who’s sending a stablecoin to person B actually owns that stablecoin and that stablecoin actually has the value that blockchain says it does.
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. You have to have some kind of core asset that is matched in value to what you’re buying digitally. This is what I’m understanding.
Yeah, I think that’s right. One really clean example of that is stablecoins. Today, there’s $300 billion of stablecoins sitting on blockchains. That means that there’s 300 billion worth of cash and cash equivalents. sitting in bank accounts or reserve accounts somewhere. The largest stablecoin issuer in the world is Tether. The stablecoin is USDT. It’s paired one-to-one with a dollar in value. I can go trade a stablecoin for a dollar on a blockchain.
But the underlying assets that make that stablecoin worth a dollar are invested in short-term treasuries, are available with attestations and Proofs-of-Reserves via audits with third-party auditors to validate the value. And so, it’s real money and real capital, and stablecoins are one of the largest top 20 holders of US Treasury debt collectively. And it’s just taking that debt, wrapping it in a token, and allowing it to trade for a dollar on a blockchain.
And I recall a lot of this from looking at, say, the GENIUS Act, and I think that that was even part of that law that stipulates that you must have one-to-one backing with the value of the stablecoin, in, liquid assets – short-term Treasuries, money market-type funds, et cetera …
U.S. dollars, obviously.
Great. This is great.
So, now, I guess there’s a ‘fork’ in the road. There’s a fork or a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork. I’m glad my Boston accent is gone, because it would not sound good on this recording. Dogecoin, I understand, it had its roots in something called ‘Luckycoin’, which was a fork of Litecoin, which was a fork of Bitcoin. I mean, if I’m going to invest in Dogecoin or Litecoin, I’m thinking maybe it’s a good idea that I understand what this ‘fork’ means. Dogecoin – that’s like a great-grandson of Bitcoin.
That’s a good way to think of it.
So, every blockchain is just a piece of software, but it’s an open source piece of software, by which I mean you can literally see the code. So, let’s say that the three of us, Yumi and Ryan, decided to create our own blockchain.
We’ll call it the podcast blockchain. And we agreed on how that blockchain would work, and we thought it was super awesome.
And then in three months’ time, Steven, you and I decide we want the blockchain to work a little bit differently. And Ryan says, ‘That’s a terrible idea.’ Because it’s an open-source project, the group that has the majority determines how that blockchain will work.
So, because there are two of us, we would change the code of the blockchain to work the way that you and I think is best, Steven. It’s faster, it’s better looking, it’s more intelligent, it’s all the good things.
And Ryan would say, ‘I don’t like that.’ He could fork the blockchain, which means that he takes a copy of the code and runs it in his own particular way.
This is a bad decision, Ryan, by the way.
It’s a terrible decision.
I don’t know why you would do that, considering how Matt described this blockchain. How could you ever think that…. Why would you break something that’s already working so well? It doesn’t make sense to me, but that’s all right.
That’s exactly right. So, periodically this happens in the crypto world. One of the most famous examples was early in the development of Bitcoin – there was a split between the Bitcoin blockchain and what became known as ‘Bitcoin Cash’, which had to do with an argument on the best way to architect a blockchain to process transactions.
The technicals are not really that important. What’s important is that there were two factions. And, so, the Bitcoin Cash people ended up forking the asset to run it in the way that they thought was best. Now, most of the world stuck with the original Bitcoin blockchain.
And the history of forks is that the one that the majority goes with usually wins, because it has the most economic weight, the most interest, and the most minds focused on it. But a really nice thing about blockchains is that anyone can create their version, and it’s called a ‘fork’. And you can make it look like a dog, which is what Dogecoin did, if that’s what you think is the future of finance. And people self-select. So, that’s what a fork is. It’s that.
Well, this is this brings up a certain question, though, because this is really interesting. If Ryan’s blockchain that he forked from, say, our blockchain – let’s say our blockchain was Bitcoin. And Ryan had a better idea and he said….
Sorry to talk to you in the third person, Ryan. You’re there. I know.
So, you come up with a fork of Bitcoin that more people gravitate towards somehow in your version of this blockchain. It attracts…or is more substantial in whatever way…for users to go to yours. And, so, wouldn’t those people holding Bitcoin, then…. Wouldn’t their value go to zero if they all fled to Ryan’s product?
If they fled to Ryan’s product, Ryan’s product would be Bitcoin.
So, the majority controls what it is. And our fork would no longer be Bitcoin. It would be the smaller fork that would have to take on a new name. It’s sort of like a democracy, except for it’s a democracy where you can leave the country if you don’t believe in the direction. But the direction, like the majority wins, the amount of people and economic strength and economic power focused on the blockchain determines what Bitcoin is. It literally is what Bitcoin is, what the majority of those people say it is.
That’s fascinating. So, it’s sort of dispels the whole idea of ‘digital gold’ or making the direct comparison that it has the same level of critical value that physical gold does. Because I don’t think that I don’t know that anyone really abandons gold as a product that has intrinsic value or has any kind of industrial properties that make it valuable.
It’s actually a really interesting question, because gold has its own risk, which is that you can mine it and you can put more energy into mining and you can create more gold. Or maybe someday we’ll find it on an asteroid and you can create more gold. Certainly, if you look over the history of mankind, there have been these big deposit shocks, such as when Europe came to the new world and the price of gold declined substantially. So, that’s the risk you run with gold is that the amount is not strictly finite.
On the Bitcoin side of the ledger, while it can do these forks and these sorts of things, it has enormous sort of game theoretical social proof, which is the people who own and determine what the Bitcoin network really want it to be valuable. That’s what they want.
So, they’re dramatically unlikely to change the fundamental characteristics, right? They’re not going to make it go from 21 to 22 million Bitcoin. So, I could actually argue that from a social consensus and a game theoretic perspective, Bitcoin is more secure and more scarce than gold, which is exposed to this sort of physical risk.
But they are different. And Kevin Warsh, the Fed chair [nominee], says, if you’re under 40, Bitcoin is your gold. And I think there is an element of truth there. There’s an element of digital natives sort of have more faith in this digital construct that’s strictly scarce than this physical construct, which isn’t strictly scarce.
I’m actually a fan of both. As a Gen-X’er, maybe I’m somewhere in the middle. So, I like both assets. But I think there are arguments in favor of each.
It’s, again, very interesting – when you consider something physical versus something digital and how they have overlapping characteristics.
I don’t know. I’d like to really get at the heart of the differences between these assets, though. know I mentioned AVAX subnet earlier. There’s ADA. I think Ada is really kind of interesting, because it was named after a 19th century mathematician – Ada Lovelace. I didn’t know that. I looked into it – it’s like, oh, wow, they’re going back in time now. This is like back to the future. So, she was considered the first computer programmer. She was the daughter of the British poet Lord Byron – very famous in the realm of British romantic poets. I thought that was interesting. So, why is there a digital coin in commemoration of her?
You bring up a lot of really great points.
A lot of founders in the crypto industry are deeply into philosophy, and they’re idealists, or these are entrepreneurs at heart. And, so, you do find a lot of kind of ancient history, and crypto is cryptography, which is math-based. You see a lot of references to mathematicians and physicists and things like that, but fundamentally, these different crypto assets and networks that you spoke about are competing with each other in most cases to solve a problem or provide a service in the same way that we spoke about earlier – that Uber and Lyft compete with each other – Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, XRP, Avalanche are competing with each other.
Some of them are serving the same market. Some of them are going after slightly different markets.
If we talk about Avalanche for a second, or AVAX, it’s a really interesting blockchain. And they’ve taken a different approach to serving customers than Ethereum.
We mentioned earlier that if I wanted to send stablecoins across the Ethereum blockchain, I would need to pay a fee to do that. And the blockchain, through staking and validating that we also heard earlier, would confirm the transaction. Avalanche offers the same service.
However, what Avalanche has done is created these things they used to call ‘subnets’. They now have a different name for it, but fundamentally what these are – are customizable blockchains. So, that if you’re an institution, if you are an asset manager, and you want to offer a specific tokenized fund to a list of accredited investors, you can spin up your own version of a blockchain using Avalanche’s infrastructure, Avalanche’s operating system, but create customizations around it to restrict activity for that fund to specific investors or to only be accessible in certain geographical jurisdictions.
And, so, it allows institutions to customize blockchains for specific purposes or specific customers.
Oh, wow.
Governments use it for the same reason. You can imagine consumer companies using it, right? They can create their own blockchain without having to go develop all these complex software systems. They can take a developer kit from Avalanche, spin up their own blockchain, and then create this kind of customized service that’s blockchain-based for whatever customers, whatever purpose they want.
So, Avalanche takes a very unique approach to this, and it’s very compelling for certain use cases in ways that other blockchains are compelling for other use cases.
Is this like Dreamweaver? I remember a software program called ‘Dreamweaver’ that you used to be able to buy off the shelf and create your own website. And it sounds very similar to that. I’m sure it’s more so, because you can do all sorts of transactions within the blockchain you’re creating. But it’s almost like white branding your own digital, say, wealth management business.
Yes.
Wow. That’s really that’s really cool.
That’s exactly right. They’ve made it easy for any enterprise, any government department to leverage blockchain technology off the shelf. And that is valuable, because there’s a bunch of different services that exist today that are extremely inefficient, extremely manual, have a ton of counterparty risk, a bunch of intermediaries that adds cost and reduces speed. And when you can collapse all of those things using a blockchain, you can increase the efficiency, reduce the cost. And when you don’t have to develop that thing from scratch, it makes it significantly more accessible and significantly more realistic to actually take that path.
That’s the beauty of Avalanche – you can take whatever level of customization you want. I could go spin up an Avalanche blockchain today without forming an LLC or anything like that. Now, the services that I offer on there, if they require me to have certain licenses or file certain forms with regulators, that’s my responsibility to do that, but… I could choose whether or not to do that.
And so, what we’re seeing is institutions love this customizability, because it allows them to meet the compliance and regulatory and other legal requirements around the services they offer, but leverage the underlying technology.
That’s really cool. That’s really interesting.
Apart from Avalanche, I’m also seeing there’s a lot of gaming, I’m seeing a lot of DeFi, or ‘decentralized finance’.
You can move any asset anywhere around the world instantly. It’s an incredible technology.
I mean, if you think about it, Steven, if we go to JP Morgan, and we want to wire money around the world, they have 300,000 employees, they have a CEO that makes $40 million a year, it takes them two days. They charge you 30 bucks [~$30).
If you go to Solana, you can send the same money to the same place – and it gets there in a second. They charge you a penny. That’s incredible. It has no employees, doesn’t even have offices. That’s why there’s all these unusual applications.
If you’re moving an in-game asset, what’s the fastest way to do that in a way that’s fungible across different spaces, and that everyone in the world can access that settles, globally, 24/7/365?
There are traditional ways to do it, but this new technology is just really efficient at anything. And that may be a goofy use case … definitely is … but that same technology can power the movement of stocks or the movement of bonds. It’s just like you can send a goofy meme over the internet, you can send a new scientific paper that defines what AI will be. You can send the same sort of goofy assets, or traditional real-world assets over these blockchains.
Yeah, I think Chainlink’s LINK offers something pretty interesting as well, when it comes to trying to facilitate information as a trigger into some smart contract. So, I’ve seen this kind of thing – if a flight is delayed, and you have insurance on your air travel, it can feed that information to a smart contract and then get paid out.
Yeah, I mean, I would think of them just like early-stage technologies. And just like the early-stage technology – and this goes to your duration of investment question – my level of confidence is very high that blockchains will be the only way that all assets move globally. And that’s a massive market. That’s A $700 trillion market with quadrillions of transactions. I think they’re all going on blockchains. I think dollar-based payments, I think stock-based payments, I think real estate, I think bonds.
It’ll take a while, but the analogy I would make, again – to go back to sort of where we started – back to the early days of the internet…. You could be very confident in the early days of the internet that all information would move over the internet: e-mail, documents, social media, photos, commercial activity, business.
But unless you were one of the leading VCs, it was very hard to know exactly what that would look like. None of us predicted Google. None of us predicted Salesforce or Amazon. And we certainly didn’t know about OpenAI, right? And I think that’s where we are in blockchain.
So, what does that mean? I think it means it’s extraordinarily hard to pick any particular winner. Just like it was hard in the early days to predict that Google would come from behind and take over from Yahoo, which would out-compete Ask Jeeves, it’s hard to say for certain who will be the largest of these programmable blockchains. And, so, for me, I generally think that this is an easier investment to hold for the long-term than the short-term, because the long- term has greater focus for me than the short-term. And it’s exceptionally hard to pick and choose between these assets. It’s very interesting, and different people will want to do that. And some people will like technology, and some people will like better networks, and some people will like this corporate adoption. God bless them. But for me, the easiest thing to see is that assets will move over these blockchains, and therefore the space will be valuable in the same way that information moved over the internet, and therefore the space became valuable. And the specifics and timeline are more challenging.
Wow, that’s really, really fascinating. That’s very interesting. I guess we’re all waiting also for this CLARITY Act to come through. And, so, that gives a clearer understanding of the roles and responsibilities, and the accountability, I suppose, as assets get tokenized.
I would just add and echo what Matt said – is that we are at a time where blockchain technology is showing that it’s going to disrupt and can address very large markets. And it’s easy to get caught up in the technical nuances of not understanding how blockchains work or that different blockchains exist, which can be hard to wrap your mind around at first, or what is DeFi or what are stablecoins. But when you zoom out and think about disruptive technologies, they tend to come in waves, and they have multi-decade-long growth runs – it happened with the internet. I think we’re going to see it happening with blockchain technology and all the different use cases that blockchains address: like stablecoins and tokenization and ‘digital gold’ and prediction markets….
And, so, for investors who believe that these are megatrends that are going to continue to grow over the next few decades, getting off 0 and having some exposure to that growth, perhaps in an indexed approach, is probably a good idea or a good way to express that belief.
And, so, it’s easy to cut up in the weeds, but I would just think of this as disruptive technology that has grown at a tremendous rate over the past 15 years, and we believe will continue to grow at a tremendous and accelerating rate over the next few decades.
Everywhere I look, this is what I see – in every aspect, operationally, legally, it’s all moving in this direction, and it really makes sense to keep pace with it and not fall behind.
All great stuff. Thank you so much, Matt, Ryan, thank you very, very much for taking the time to do this. I really appreciate it. I hope you’ll come back with us. There’s a lot more to explore – obviously.
For our listeners, you can learn more about Bitwise at bitwiseinvestments.com. Bitwise is a global asset manager and a crypto index fund, or index fund, and ETF provider.
You can also read more commentary and market analysis, including about the crypto markets, at IBKR Traders’ Insight – a lot of great content there. You can also find more information about Interactive Brokers’ crypto offerings at ibkr.com.
And for a full list of financial education resources, visit the IBKR Campus, where, as always, all of our educational material is provided to the public at no cost.
And until next time, I’m Steven Levine with Interactive Brokers.
Thanks for joining us.
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