Unfortunately, last week’s Checkmate podcast did not get recorded. Stay tuned for this week’s edition. 

Six Takeaways From the Bitcoin Investor Conference

The following is an excerpt from Anthony Pompliano’s substack newsletter from today: 

We hosted the inaugural Bitcoin Investor Day on Friday. There were over 800 people who attended the event, which made it the single largest gathering of institutional investors interested in bitcoin in history. Insane to see that level of turnout for an event that was put together in less than 100 days.

The speaker lineup was really strong and I learned quite a bit. Here are a few of the biggest takeaways:

**Galaxy CEO Mike Novogratz claims bitcoin will continue to rise until government spending is brought under control: “What’s the macro story for bitcoin? It’s relatively simple. Our government can’t keep its pants on and stop spending money. That went from a problem in the early 2000s to a crisis with Donald Trump and Joe Biden. They go down as the two presidents who destroyed our fiscal stability…Until you see a government, both Dems and Republicans, that says ‘enough,’ bitcoin’s going to keep going higher.”

**Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood has updated her bitcoin price target to $3.8 million: “Last year we put out our bull case for bitcoin. It was $1.5 million. With this institutional green light that the SEC has provided, kicking and screaming though it did, the analysis we’ve done is that if institutional investors were to allocate a little more than 5% of their portfolios to bitcoin, as we think they will over time, that alone would add $2.3 million to the projection I just gave you…We think [bitcoin] has miles to go. We’re at the very beginning of really putting in place the financial ecosystem native to the internet and disintermediating all of the toll-takers.”

**Skybridge Founder Anthony Scaramucci explained his bitcoin investment strategy in simple terms: “The dead people at Charles Schwab do far better than the living people. So act like you’re dead with your bitcoin and don’t sell your bitcoin. Don’t do anything with it. Hopefully, we can continue to coach our clients to listen to that mantra.”

**Blackrock’s Head of Digital Assets Robert Mitchnick revealed that their clients have very little interest in the long-tail of crypto assets: “For our clients, Bitcoin is overwhelmingly the number one priority. And then a little bit ethereum, and very little everything else.”

**Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley highlighted that their firm did 20,000 investor meetings and calls last year, which has been a major contributor to why the crypto-native ETF provider has been able to attract more than $2 billion in AUM against formidable competitors like Blackrock and Fidelity.

**Grayscale’s Managing Director of Research explained that investors should expect GBTC’s management fee to continue to fall in the future.

My biggest takeaway from the event was how impactful the spot bitcoin ETF approvals have been to institutional interest. I knew that the approvals had been helpful, but I was blown away by the night-and-day difference between the pre-and-post approval conversations.

Many organizations are now at a point where they want to allocate to the asset, but there are bureaucratic processes that must be followed. This means that many capital flows are delayed and will take weeks or months to enter the market.

Given this detail, it is encouraging to see the price appreciation without full institutional participation, because it signals increasing future demand that will show up post-halving. If things go as planned, we should continue to see bitcoin’s price rise through the end of 2024.

For years people would predict that the institutions were coming. Now the institutions are actually here. They are allocating to the asset. They have the green light and no one wants to miss out. Such a beautiful thing to see.

Hope you all have a great start to your week. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.

-Anthony Pompliano