Well let's get to the big story.
Breakdown.
Bitcoin clearing 79,000 this weekend and hitting 11 week highs.
This comes as Trump extended the ceasefire with Iran, but geopolitical uncertainty continues to permeate global sentiment.
Now Bitcoin outperforming traditional safe havens during the conflict, rising more than 15% since late February, while gold has tumbled 10%.
And Wall Street is doubling down on crypto products.
Institutional trading firm GSR is launching its first ETF under Ticker BSO and treat on the Nasdaq the GSR crypto for 3 ETF offers actively managed exposure to Bitcoin, and a lot of complete with staking rewards.
Well joining me to weigh in on what's moving markets this morning is Andy Baehr, Managing Director of Asset Management at GSR and the good morning and happy Thursday to Thursday.
Well here we are, we're buying Bitcoin prices below that 79,000 level which we cleared yesterday.
But what do you make of the price action we've been seeing?
The good news is that crypto prices are drifting higher, and I think the less good news is that crypto prices are drifting higher.
They're kind of moving with the current.
They're trying to avoid the surprises that the equity market is.
Trying to avoid with geopolitical news coming at night and over the weekend, there isn't a lot of independent momentum.
It's almost like they're sitting in a bay where the current is taking them in the right direction, but they don't have any independent way on top of that current level.
If you look at things like funding rates of perpetual contracts for Bitcoin.
Actually negative now, meaning that there's less interest in going along Bitcoin in perpetual contracts than there is selling interest, and that's notable.
It's been a while like that, so I'd say that we are still in kind of this very ambivalent time where any kind of new price recovery is fragile.
We'd love to see some more energetic momentum develop.
And I'm glad you highlight that because even when we're looking at the rally here on Wall Street, it is a unique rally, so you do really have to look under the hood.
But Andy, I understand you've been very busy over at GSR with the ETF launch.
So tell us about this core 3 ETF.
So the question we all get, and you know you're in the business now and Jane's in the business, and people say, what should I own, and it's a very simple and honest question.
You kind of don't want people to start trading crypto as a hobby necessarily, or you don't want some people to do that.
I know probably some people wouldn't want me to do that.
You kind of want them to allocate in a way where they're going to get exposure to the two major themes, right, which is Bitcoin's kind of macro asset stature now and its adoption momentum, and then the growth of layer one blockchains which fuel the things that we talk about every time I visit, which is tokenization and stablecoins.
And so core 3 just attempts to do that.
It just gives you a core portfolio of Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana.
In a neutral case equally weighted, the kind of thing that you would be comfortable if a friend of a friend of yours who is not in the business, you know, wanted to allocate to.
Pretty defendable.
So that's our core portfolio.
The key is that's not enough, right?
It's a very, very crowded ETF market.
It's very easy to get access to these things.
We wanted to make sure that ETF holders would get access to staking rewards, but we added yet another layer.
GSR is a 13 year old trading firm.
We have a lot of proprietary as well as customer market making activities.
We have a lot of research, so we thought that what we could do is actually reallocate across those three as market conditions change in pursuit of a little bit of extra performance.
So core three holders Ticker Beso, Kiss in Spanish, and a nod to our founder, will have access to that active management staking rewards in that core portfolio.
Yes, and Andy, you and I are here at the New York Stock Exchange, and we know that there are plenty of products out there that offer exposure to crypto digital assets.
But tell us about the competitive advantage here of the BESO, the Beso fund, and what about staking?
Yes, staking is super important.
If you have proof of stake tokens like ether and Solana, you want to make sure that inside your ETF somebody is putting those into validator systems so that they are.
Eligible to receive those staking rewards, the staking yield for Ethereum is somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5% depending on demand.
And for Salon it's actually kind of double that, sometimes triple that.
So you don't want to forego that.
And there are a good number of new ETFs out on the market, single name ETFs, which include that feature.
So we wanted to make sure people get that.
They're holding core 3 for a long period of time.
Those staking rewards will accrue and they will compound, but we also think that.
A lot of the multi-token crypto products out there are market cap weighted, and if you market cap weight a crypto product, you get a lot of Bitcoin and you get a little bit of Ethereum, a tiny bit of Solana.
And your weighting isn't necessarily what you would want to associate with a growth of blockchain adoption kind of objective.
So we think equal weight is a good place to start, and then we move those sliders around as market conditions change to try to do best for performance.
And speaking of which, we know when we look at the major crypto.
Assets we see Bitcoin as well as E and Solana seeing plenty of volatility whether we're looking at 2026 or even on a monthly basis given everything that's happening so far in 2026.
So how does the fund actually use its weekly rebalancing signals to capitalize on that volatility?
Absolutely.
And you know, People coming in from the outside may look at these three assets and say they're kind of the same thing, but when you look at their function, they're actually quite different.
Bitcoin has a different liquidity profile.
It has a different objective, right?
It's a currency.
It moves from point A to point B.
That's kind of all Bitcoin does, but it's finite and it's well understood, and it has this tremendous network effect.
So to hold it as sort of the real core of the core is important.
Ethereum and Solana are in a race against other layer one blockchains and against themselves in some cases to be at the forefront of this adoption of blockchain technology which has accelerated so much.
So customers who work with financial advisors may read about.
Things in the news and say how do I make sure I get a hold of this right and so a lot of names come and go in these spaces but Ethereum and Solana are really two of the bedrock names that represent that growth.
That's why they earn a place in our core portfolio.
As the market mood shifts, you'll see Bitcoin sometimes kind of cushion the blow with a little bit more foundational support.
When the market takes off, you'll see Ethereum and Solana tend to really move a little bit faster because the market is in a more growth, growth happy environment.
So the rebalancing will tend to reallocate across those three, recognizing the state that the market is in.
And making the investor feel that the product is working for them and pursuing a little bit of extra performance on top of allocation to the asset class.
Well, Andy, it's always great talking to you.
Thank you so much for joining us here at the New York Stock Exchange and thank you so much for peeling back the layers of the fund today.
Thanks, Remy.
Thank you.
