Let's get to the big story breakdown.
On Wednesday, Bitcoin soaring past $124,000 to record highs with surging to the brink of its all-time high.
This rally is about inflows, policy shifts, and a wave of new access points for investors.
Now institutional money is pouring in, including a stunning $1 billion single day inflow into spot EPTS.
That demand is being fueled by clarity out of Washington DC from the Genius Act stablecoin framework to the White House, opening up 4. plans to alternative assets.
Now there is a shift in sentiment that's bringing skeptics off the sidelines and pushing traders to look beyond Bitcoin.
Well, joining me this morning to weigh in is Andy Barrow, head of product and research at Coin Desk indices.
Good morning, Andy.
Welcome back to the New York Stock Exchange.
I know it feels like we're here almost every day now.
I mean, you have to be in a room in the summer, this isn't too bad.
Yeah, and 24 hours ago you were here for the opening bell, the IPO of bullish.
Let's start with access to digital assets for investors and traders.
How has that changed?
Well, it's changed a lot, and I think seeing assets migrate into ether ETFs is exciting because it means the story, which was dominated a lot year by Bitcoin is starting to broaden out.
We're always big fans of breadth and rallies.
We want people to understand Bitcoin's store of value proposition to people, but also ether and other layer ones and the rest of crypto as.
Chain technology which can change the way we do things.
Ether actually ether's inflows into ETFs this month were more than all of the new ether that was issued since the merge several years ago.
So it's been a pretty dramatic shift.
It's helped Bitcoin dominance go below 60%, which is a sign of breadth.
So we're pretty happy about the rally, the breadth, the education, the messaging, and the development of the narrative.
And Andy, overnight we're keeping a close eye.
On the price section for Bitcoin as well as ether, as you mentioned, we saw Bitcoin hit new record highs, breaking above that key level above 124 and even touching 124, 500, but there has been a lot of focus on it.
So tell us why this time it's different as we fast approach those 2021 highs.
I mean, in a way it's great because the narrative is expanding.
I think a lot of the conversation about stable coins and a lot of the activity.
The on the Ethereum network revolving around stablecoins has helped popularize, helped make this message sink in a little bit.
If people were curious about what blockchain technology can do for me, the idea about stablecoins helps fuel that.
Yes, Bitcoin hit an all-time high and Ether kind of hit a local all-time high, of course, several years ago it got higher, but our indices also touched all-time highs.
The Coin Dusk 20 nearly hit 4500, 4493, and the Coin Dusk 5 hit 2227.
So the all-time highs there show the breadth of the market really kind of powering so coin 20s outperformed Bitcoin this year.
A lot of that participation or attribution has been to ether and been to XRP.
The thing that's difficult now is that investors have more and more tokens to think about as the SEC allows more individual ETFs to be launched, it can start to get confusing, right?
You can start to get mixed narratives.
This idea of picking individual names or trying to time the market becomes tempting, but not for everybody.
So we're very hopeful that as the SEC reviews new multi-tokken ETF applications.
Greyscale digital large cap fund that those will be available to advisors and investors who can just kind of buy the index, allocate to the asset class and let the index do the work.
Yeah.
And Andy, building on what you just said, what does that mean for retail?
For retail for both self-directed and advised money, it means that investors can if they're really thinking about 5% allocation to. assets as a long term investment, it gets very, very hard to think about that 5% and parse it out into individual allocations or into timing decisions.
If most people were going to allocate into a traditional asset class 5 to 10 or 20%, they might just say give me a low cost index fund and let me do that.
Let me ride you know that through the asset class and let the index do the work.
We think that that will keep things simple.
One of the Great things about crypto is it's getting a lot of positive narrative and help from Washington, but that's going to invite more complexity.
Last year it was pretty easy.
You just had to think about Bitcoin.
Now you have to think about more.
Just think about it as an asset class.
Look at the indices like you would in another asset class like equities or commodities and just approach it that way, at least from an education perspective.
Yeah.
And finally, Andy, since you mentioned education, it is back to school season and Maybe viewers out there who are watching this right now and thinking, oh, I want exposure to crypto, and they might not be in this space as of yet.
So in terms of what's happening in the nation's capital and tailwinds you're paying attention to as well as Catalysts, what's important?
There's going to be no better place to watch than this very room right here to see what kind of new products potentially could get listed on the New York Stock Exchange and give them access.
Keeping up with the news is fun.
Keeping up with experimentation, we always kind of say, hey, experiment with a little bit of crypto in a wallet with with not serious investment money, but enough that you can help educate yourself on how things move from address to adjust and how different chains compete with each other.
All that's great.
Maybe when the kids are back to school and the parents have more time to focus on this.
Certainly that's the case in our household.
Um after that though, when it really comes to allocating for the long term.
We're thinking that it's been a great year to expand the conversation beyond Bitcoin, and again we're just going to go back to these very basic principles of do what you would do with another asset class, look at the asset class as a whole, think about what kind of benchmark you want to attach yourself to, and then look to that to guide you.
OK, Andy, well, some sage words of advice there.
So thank you so much for weighing in today and thank you as always for all of your insights.
Thanks.
Thank you.
