Welcome back to Fast Money Galaxy Digital jumping in its first day here at the NASDAQ. Mike Novagrat's crypto firm moving uh over from the Toronto Stock Exchange following a year'slong battle with US regulators. It is the latest regulatory win for a crypto industry boosted by a big run in Bitcoin crossing above 100,000 104,000 I should say and back within a whisper of all-time highs.
Our next guests say new highs could be close at hand as more companies take a page out of the Micro Strategy playbook and pile Bitcoin onto their balance sheets. Chief Executive Officer Cory Clipston and Chief Investment Officer Ben Workman of Swan Bitcoin join us now. Gentlemen, great to have you with us.
Great to be here. Thanks for having us. It's rare that we have a duo here in Bitcoin, but so we'll make it work.
Uh Corey, I'll I'll start it off with you. Um part of your thesis at Swan is that Bitcoin is maturing. It's maturing from a speculative asset to a full hedge.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Because I I would think part of Bitcoin's allure in the past has been the volatility, the big gains that it can have. Does this smooth out the volatility, which is there's a good side obviously and a bad side, too?
Yeah, it's it's inevitable. That's something that is going to be worth as much as we all believe that it will be in the future. It's not going to be a smooth ride on the way up, but as it gets larger, as the price and the market cap go up, by definition now, you're going off of a larger number.
And so, you're going to see that volatility smooth out over time. Still going to be a very bumpy ride from here on the way up for the next few decades, though. Um, Ben, what is your view in terms of the the biggest driver from this point forward for Bitcoin?
Is it more companies putting it on the corporate balance sheet? Because even though more and more companies are doing that, it's still I don't know, you could probably count them on two hands. You can and it just lets you know exactly how early we are to this cycle.
Shareholders have woken up and they really want their executives to start focusing not only on the income statement, but on deploying the balance sheet in the right way to generate value for shareholders. So I think what you're starting to see here in these early days is that the companies are jumping on board and I think they're going to be a major driver for us pushing forward because they've never had a better riskadjusted time to get involved. So I I'll address I guess I should ask someone.
So I'll ask you Corey um because you know I've been on the other side of that um where you're not sure if you're supposed to answer or not. Cory, so it it couldn't we be talking about gold? Couldn't we be talking about anything that companies could have been putting on their balance sheets for years that that really made some sense?
I mean, in other words, you can make an argument why dollars are yesterday's fiat, you know, but but it just seems to me I understand when someone's making a levered call on something, but um it just seems to me that that completely changes what companies do. Why not be a BDC? Why not be something that actually is intended to be just that?
Yeah. So, there there are a few things at play here. One is that uh Bitcoin is regulated as a commodity.
So, it is on that very short list of potential options. It's also, you know, maybe alongside gold, one of the only commodities that tends to go up and keep pace with monetary inflation as gold has kind of historically and Bitcoin obviously has far outpaced that uh throughout its history. So, I think it's that and then the reason that I think these companies that are uh going down this path like Micro Strategy, Metaplanet, Similar, Strive, etc.
I think they are the ones that are that are led by people that truly believe that Bitcoin has a lot more upside than uh than any other asset out there. And then as far as kind of the other side of your question, which is, you know, essentially the the perfect target here, and Ben can probably elaborate a little bit, is something that used to be more of a private equity target. It's a company that maybe actually has pretty good cash flows, but the market it is not loving it is giving it a low multiple because it doesn't trust the company to reinvest those cash flows in the business.
And that's how you end up with uh dividends and share buybacks. But if you put it into Bitcoin now, all of the sudden cash is king. The cash that you're making actually rides that Bitcoin keer that again historically has been fantastic and we expect it to be that way for decades to come.
Um, Ben, what's interesting about this run is that it's coming alongside the historic run in gold. Bitcoin obviously is there's a case for it being digital gold. Um, but where are the dollars coming from in your view?
Where are the inflows coming from? I think when people have been looking at all the issues with tariffs and they've started to really wake up to the problems that face even the United States with the reserve currency with monetary debasement inflation, they're looking for ways to opt out of that system. And you saw that recently with all the tariff action when people were really expecting the risk assets to take a dive and Bitcoin showed a lot of strength during that period.
So, I do think you're starting to see that rotation out of US dollars and into hard assets where they believe that they're opting out of that system and taking a stance.
