The Wolf Of All Streets · Oct 9, 2026 · 55m · 37m saved
With Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise Asset Management
Institutional money moving into crypto this year is two to four times what it was at the same point of the last cycle, Matt Hougan said, measured against 2022.
The headlines that morning said crypto was crumbling ahead of the anniversary of last October's flash crash. Hougan, who had spent most of the past month at wealth-management and brokerage conferences, said the advisers he met no longer treat bitcoin as fringe.
"I've never felt sort of the normalized feeling of Bitcoin as I have over the last month at these wealth platforms." — Matt Hougan
Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise Asset Management, on The Wolf Of All Streets, helps run a crypto manager with $9 billion in client assets as of June 30, by the firm's own count, and one that launched the first US spot NEAR ETF on September 29. He was previously CEO of ETF.com and co-authored the CFA Institute's monograph on ETFs.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 55 minutes of audio, 18 minutes of reading.
Here are the 12 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
A pullback of a few percent is not the end of the bitcoin bull market, Hougan said
Daily ETF flows mostly follow price, so he reads them over five days
Institutional crypto inflows are up 2–4x on the last cycle, by his reading of a JPMorgan note
JPMorgan counted ETFs, derivatives and corporate buying, not ETFs alone
Advisers no longer see bitcoin holders as cranks
Morgan Stanley is launching ETFs and Wells Fargo is putting bitcoin in model portfolios
A misreported OpenAI revenue figure moved markets because investors fear the AI boom will end
NEAR works today as a blockchain, with an AI-agent business as a free option on top
He compared it with Netflix streaming while the DVD-by-mail business paid the bills
New ETFs fill in two waves: the existing community first, financial advisers later
Wall Street is moving from 3 crypto tokens it believes in to 50, which he called the birth of an asset class
Crypto ETFs will go from single assets to baskets to active management
The coming altcoin rally will pick winners, with 20 to 25 of the top 50 tokens worth owning in his view
Abandoned "zombie" tokens rallying hundreds of percent would worry him as a sign of a top
The FTX years made selling crypto to institutions impossible, and he is surprised how fast the industry recovered
1. Not Dead After 3 Months
The host opened by reading a headline: crypto crumbles as the anniversary of the flash crash nears. He said it was strange that, a year on, nobody seems to know exactly what happened during last October's liquidation event.
Several shocks hit at once on the day of the flash crash
Hougan said a stablecoin problem and a macro sell-off came together on the same day. What struck him more was how fast the media gave up on the current rally.
"So still is pretty crazy, but it's also crazy that the media is willing to kill the Bitcoin bull market after three months and say that we're over because we pulled back a few percent." — Matt Hougan
The host put up a bitcoin chart and said the price was sitting right on the level where, for chart readers, the bear market technically ends: it had made a higher high and was now holding at a price level it had failed to break through for months. He called it one of the best-looking buys he had seen, though he said he is not a technician. Bitcoin was in the 82,000s that morning. Hougan agreed it was "certainly not dead."
