Les marchés publics ont-ils eu un bilan positif pour le Bitcoin ? | Bitcoin 2026

All right, good afternoon everybody. Welcome back from lunch. Uh my name is Brian Dixon. I'm the CEO of Offthechain Capital. Uh we run a Warren Buffett Benjamin Graham Dodd style of deep discount value investment strategy and we've always been very Bitcoin heavy um with our investment thesis. And what I'd like to do first is just go down the line and have everybody introduce themselves and a quick background on what they do. >> Cool. Andy Edstrom, uh, Wall Street, Goldman Sachs banking, private equity, hedge funds. Then got into wealth management. Um, was the first wealth manager, investor to publish a book on Bitcoin called Why Buy by Bitcoin. And I've built some products for a couple different Bitcoin companies and uh, currently on the beach in terms of doing stuff in Bitcoin other than uh, talking at conferences. >> Hey all, I'm Ryan Gentry, uh, the CEO of Bitcoin Infrastructure Acquisition Corp. publicly trades back uh looking to target a Bitcoin infrastructure company and take them public in the next couple years. I'm an engineer by training. Uh I spent 2020 to 2025 as a head of business development for Lightning Labs. Uh and excited to chat with you all today about public markets and Bitcoin. >> Hi guys, Vijay Selam, chief legal officer at Electron Energy, which is the largest privately held um Bitcoin mining business. um also the author of the book principles of Bitcoin published by Columbia Business School. I spent most of my career at Goldman Sachs about 11 years there. So very much a trad guy who moved into Bitcoin at some point. >> So the topic we're going to be discussing today has the public markets been a net positive for Bitcoin. And what we have in the markets today in terms of new opportunities to get exposure to Bitcoin through different vehicles. We have ETFs, we have derivatives, we have publicly traded operators, we have Bitcoin treasury companies. So, there's a variety of new ways to get exposure. So, I'd love to get your guys' perspective on with these new entrance of all these different types of vehicles and different ways to invest getting Bitcoin exposure in the public markets. In your opinion, has this been a net positive or not? Start with you. >> All right. So, net positive, I guess I'll just focus on price, right? Did number go up as much as we thought? Um, so we don't have the counterfactual, so it's impossible to know. Um, I think maybe the next best thing might be sort of a historical analysis. So 2019, um, I published why Bitcoin and when I started writing it, price was between 3K and 4K and when it went to press, price was between 8K and 9K. And the book had a valuation analysis um, and a 10-year price target. And at at that time, I think it was the first published piece of analysis to suggest that Bitcoin would take market share from not just fiat and gold, but other assets like real estate, like equities, like fixed income. Um, and so, you know, I had a price target in there, eight trillion network value. So, figure, I don't know, 20 million coins conservatively, you get to uh you get to 400k per coin on a 10-year view. Remember this is back in 2019. Um so the question I asked myself is sort of are we ahead of schedule are we behind schedule like have we met expectations and what are the facts and circumstances. Um certainly I did not predict and nobody could have predicted sailor showing up right that should have been a net positive to demand. And then of course I I don't think too many of us predicted AI you know and agents showing up. maybe there'll be incremental demand for uh for BTC. And yet, you know, if the if the thought was from 8K to 400K, we're going to go like 50x in in a decade, you know, we've made, I don't know, 8x or 9x, you know, and we got another 5x or something to go to hit that target, but I don't know that I could say that we're going faster than I thought we would. And there was no anticipation that Sailor would show up and that there'd be ETFs and incremental demand and financialization. So, I guess I'm the I'll be the resident bearer and say I don't see evidence that uh that this has been extra demand that's been driving price faster than I'd expected or hoped. >> Yeah, I think that's a fair perspective. Um, one area I think if you focus instead of on price on just liquidity of the asset generally. Um, one thing a stat that I've been liking to throw out this week is, you know, IBIT options market are now the fourth most liquid options market on the planet, right? It's like V, SPY, there's one other and then and then IBIT, which is incredible. Um, and I think if you think about Bitcoin as a commodity and kind of like its maturation uh and financialization as an asset, you know, first we had really liquid spot markets and that took a long time to build and get to be durable. Then we started having you know really liquid futures markets with per you know generally offshore exchanges then kind of finally brought on shore with CME and now we finally have options markets um you know that are really liquid and allow people to you know sell volatility and do different things with with Bitcoin. So I think that um from a global liquidity perspective and from a uh you know financialization of the asset perspective and you know the more liquid Bitcoin gets the less volatile it gets the less volatile it gets in theory the more likely people are to you know hold it and larger entities are to hold it. I do think that from that perspective it's been a net positive and I think that you know in general price is just a liar uh or a lagard uh and that you know we should see the impacts of this uh you know increased liquidity globally in in the financial system um you know impact the price over time. One caveat to that that I will say though uh is you know because all of this new liquidity generally has been generated within the existing traditional financial system which all which has all sorts of tricks and you know rehypothecation scares and paper bitcoin scares and all that sort of stuff. I think if we could build all of this same you know uh liquidity infrastructure natively on Bitcoin where those kind of tricks can take place that would be obviously better. uh but you know we've got some work to do before uh that's really possible or scalable. >> Yeah. Look, I think the way I look at it is any publicity is good publicity, right? Um like the biggest risk to long-term Bitcoin adoption is that people just stop talking about it and it's ignored, right? So I would say that you know IBIT and other Bitcoin ETFs have onboarded hundreds of thousands of people into the Bitcoin space who probably would not have touched Bitcoin without the ease of access to it via an ETF. So, so maybe they, you know, sort of you they they bought the Bitcoin uh you know, IBIT ETF when Bitcoin was 30,000 40,000 and ran it up to 120,000 saw their account go up like, you know, all green and they said, "What is this asset? Let me read more about it." And they and they read about it and they understood the censorship resistance and unconfiscability and permissionlessness and all the core properties of Bitcoin. And then who's to say they didn't sell their their IBIT and and buy cold storage Bitcoin, right? Um, so that's how I see it. And and and there's the the realist's view here and there's the idealists view. So the idealist would say, "Oh, but you're losing your, you know, all these core properties of Bitcoin." But I think the realist view is, look, corporates are a given. Like they're not going away, right? In a hyper bitcoinized world, corporations will exist, right? Corporations have proven themselves to be extremely efficient ways to coordinate human resources and capital and they're going to exist. So if hyper bitcoinization is the end state, a stepping stone is corporate adoption. And so yeah, I'm it makes me happy to see that you know that we are actually passing all these stepping stones along the way. There's a a very important distinction when you think about it between what's good for Bitcoin the asset versus what's good for uh Bitcoin the network and I'm curious from your guys' perspective. Do you think the public markets have been good and or bad for the for both the asset and the network and how you think about that? Let's start with you. >> All right. I guess I'll take the first shot which is you know think think in the limit. Think about the extremes. If everybody has, not to pick on Coinbase, you know, Coinbase account and all the coins are at Coinbase and they're just matching buys and sells, you know, on platform and nothing ever hits the chain, then there's no transaction fees, right? The miners don't make any money. It's not great for Bitcoin. So, you know, at the margin, uh, is are we moving volume, transaction volume off the chain with all this financialization? Yeah, seems to me like seems to me like we are. So, you know, is that going to make the network stronger or weaker? Well, it seems like less economics to the base chain and the miners and it seems like more economics to uh yeah, the matching engines I guess or the or the matching systems uh on top of the network. So, yeah, there's there's like a possible end state here where a lot of the volume gets moved off the base chain uh and then the security becomes more at risk which I don't like. You can't quantify that. You know, you got to assume uh there's there's going to be always going to be some of that. You know, lightning has the same uh the same issues associated. Somebody's got to somebody's got to transact at the at the base level. So, I'm not too worried. Uh we're nowhere near that that end state where, you know, everything's up on level two or above, but it's something that I think about, I sort of keep my eye on and uh ideally I'd like to track the trending on. Yeah, I fully agree with that. I think one thing that we used to see often uh whenever there was big price movements one way or the other, they would always correlate with a ton of onchain activity, right? The chain would get really congested because people are trying to top up margin on different exchanges or trying to rebalance between different venues. You know, there's always a ton of activity. We have not seen that uh the last couple big price flushes, right? right? Like when I dropped down to 59, the chain was, you know, dead quiet. I that's not good, right? That's not a good sign. That's a sign that a lot of the trading activity is taking place you know uh you know within custodians um within kind of paper bitcoin transactions and is not in the same kind of previous healthy architecture where there was you know a decentralized ecosystem of exchanges all around the world where there was you know global kind of arbitrage making sure that the price was even across all of them all using the bitcoin blockchain to do that settlement. So you know I fully agree on that. Um the only counterpoint that I have is that uh you know Square launching as a public company uh automatic lightning acceptance for 28% of US merchants is like demonstrabably positive for the network. That's like definitely the biggest oneshot adoption uh merchant adoption of lightning as a protocol that we've had. Again, it would be like better for the network if everybody was running their own Lightning node instead of just using squares node. Um, so there's like still work to do there. But yeah, I do think that, you know, on net um, public market adoption, you know, has not been uh very positive for the network just because public markets, you know, institutions, they don't want to hold their own keys and make their own transactions. They want a trusted custodial entity to do that for them. And that's not really what Bitcoin's all about. >> Yeah, I think that's a very key distinction that you mentioned, the difference between the asset and the network. just to explain that a little bit. I think it was um was it Peter Van Walenberg of Coin Corner first I think maybe not the first time but most publicly described it at a Senate hearing. Um so he says that uh bitcoin is public payments infrastructure right um so like the internet is public information infrastructure bitcoin is public payment instructure doesn't belong to anyone it's just like you know this pathway that you can use for payments that's incredibly powerful and and the ability like yeah you want to send dollars or you want to send pound sterling from from London to Singapore um you can do that on the Bitcoin network but neither party actually touches Bitcoin or is exposed to Bitcoin price. So that's that's super that's super powerful. Um in terms of what it does for the asset um it just makes it more ubiquitous, right? Um it is that use case. You know, many people, you know, are not not so wellversed in Hayek and Mises, right, to understand all the principles of money, but but you talk to them about, oh, here's a use case. You're actually able to send um dollars across the planet at a small tiny fraction of what it costs uh otherwise in the in the traditional financial system. That's a use case. Um, so that helps adoption and and and finally I mean with the with the lightning network, you know, yeah, I mean the more channels you have that's more sunk bitcoin that's not going to that's not going to move. So that's that's an additional source of of demand. So yeah, I think they're complimentary overall. Yeah. So you noted before that the IBIT options product is I think one the fourth most liquid product that exists today and the derivatives market just completely dwarfs the spot market and I think it's like 250 times bigger than the next biggest market behind it. So it's a massive market and the more of these Bitcoin products that were being traded in the public markets there's synthetic adjacent products that come out as a result of that as well. So, do you guys think that these synthetic products are a actually like naturally suppressing Bitcoin's price discovery? Let's start with uh Ryan and then we'll go BJ and come back to Andy. >> Yeah, I think it's you know it's it's tricky because what I think they're doing I think I think you know Sailor is is right in his uh articulation that you're you're kind of extracting the volatility um out of the underlying asset. you know, Bitcoin used to be it's it's measurable that it's it's over time as it's gotten more liquid and as these products have gotten bigger, you know, the volatility of the asset has gone down. Um, and so I I do think that's generally what's happening. I think how that directly impacts price is a little bit nonlinear where you know in the moment yes if you have you know an entity that's you know selling covered calls uh you know that pressure is going to put some downward pressure on the spot price uh just naturally because in order to you know hedge yourself you're you're going to want to um you know have a short position on on on the on the future. Um but uh you know I think over time as you are generating more of this options volume you are generating more activity and more demand for the underlying asset. So it's kind of like short-term bearish long-term bullish. uh and it's really unclear, you know, when the short-term ends and the long term begins or if it's then like cyclical where the long-term bullish happens and then, you know, the shorts get control again and and suppress the price in the short term, but then, you know, we go uh up again. >> Yeah, I I totally agree. I think this whole narrative about derivatives and paper bitcoin. So what they I think effectively do is they they delay they don't remove demand. They just delay and concentrate demand. Um so the typical product like you know that that is uh you know one of the supposed culprits for this is is a covered call right so you hold let's say you bought Bitcoin at $70,000 you sell a call option at $80,000 right and you you you basically earn the the premium from the sale of the of the call option and that's your that's your income right um and so you've given up you you've effectively sold 80 70,000 bought 70,000 Bitcoin and sold 80,000 Bitcoin. And so the the net result of that is is Bitcoin tends to fluctuate in that band, right, over a period of time. But that ignores the fact that you you mo most likely will take that premium and buy Bitcoin with it. So that's a new source uh for um new demand for for Bitcoin. The guy who sold the call who bought the call option at 80,000, he's obviously bullish Bitcoin. So, if if the price goes up, he's going to exercise his call and he's going to actually, you know, he's probably going to hodddle his Bitcoin, right? Um, so and and and then you also have a short squeeze. So, if there's this ground swell of spot demand that pushes the price up over $80,000, you're going to have this massive short squeeze. So it all it does is it it I mean it's you you can't paper over the long-term adoption story, people learning about it, understanding it, and adopting it and that that ground swell of demand. Um you can only delay the the price action. You're not going to remove it. >> Okay, it's time for audience participation. Raise your hand if you recognize the following three letters. FTX. FTX. Anybody remember FTX? All right. So, FTX, don't quote me on the numbers, but at the time that it blew up or right before it blew up or at some point during the auditing process, right, they were supposed to have had something like 60,000 BTC. And when the numbers came in, surprise, surprise, the coins were not all there. So, what literally happened? What literally happened? We don't know the details and the order of operations, but at some points, you know, some uh buyer of Bitcoin hit buy on the FTX exchange at FTX on the screen said, "Congratulations, you have a Bitcoin." Except for they didn't actually go on chain and get a UTXO, right, and get the actual coins. So, you know, in that uh in that runup, I guess maybe into the peak of the prior bull market, some demand that should have been flowing into actual UTXOs on the network did not get there. Or maybe it got there first and then got sucked out. We don't know. But the point being that as long as there are exchanges that are representing that they're selling actual Bitcoin to buyers that aren't buying all the coins that maybe aren't well audited that you know might start with the letter B I don't know um that still exist today just as as an example there's a possibility there's a risk basically that demand that should be manifested is not actually making it uh into UTXOs onto the chain. >> That makes sense. >> One, if I can just add like one more closing thought to that because I thought you made a really good point is um by this kind of volatility suppression uh of the derivative markets. One entity that is probably not as interested in Bitcoin now that used to be really interested are the Moonboys that want to see, you know, 100x gains in four years. and that and you know I I don't say I say that kind of derisively but also like that's been a really important part of the Bitcoin you know hodler base for its entire history and so I do think you know we're seeing a lot of that kind of retail get-richquick demand instead speculating on you know AI stocks and Robin Hood and different things like that and that that demand is you know not coming to Bitcoin anymore because we just don't see the same you know upward price action you know 10% weeks like like we used to um and so that is I think one I I don't think that's the most important area for Bitcoin's long-term growth and success and and price action, but it is in the short term one casualty of this like growing derivatives market. I want to dial in now specifically on Bitcoin treasury companies. And when these initially launched, the play was to be a pure play. So like what strategies accomplished and then to MetaPlanet in Japan and then we saw it with Smarter Web Company in London and some of these other ones. Um, now how the market's changed over the last year, we're seeing the Bitcoin treasury companies pivot and acquire businesses or merge existing revenue generating businesses that they have under their operating model and then using Bitcoin as a treasury strategy. What's your guys' opinion on the new model for Bitcoin treasury companies? like will pure plays continue to work in the future outside of the few that like strategy that really caught on and were able to stack a tremendous amount of Bitcoin early on or do you see the future of these types of businesses with operating businesses beneath them? Um, let's start with you. So, I don't know, maybe I'm the wrong guy to to answer this question. I like sort of have the have the, you know, the cynical view generally of uh of pivots of strategy pivots uh among publicly traded uh traded companies. uh you know on the one hand I think that uh every strategy will be tried you know so we'll see which ones succeed and which ones fail um you know on the other other hand I think of the I think of this conference a year ago and how completely bananas all the treasury co stuff was and now I think of pivots and I think of uh first I think of uh of all birds recently uh pivoting to AI which reminds me of course Here's another audience participation. Who remembers Long Island Blockchain? Anybody? Now, granted, this this is, you know, I'm I'm uh I'm overstating the case here. I'm exaggerating, but I guess the point is, you know, I guess I'm uh I'm sort of wary and cautious about uh about major pivots. But equally, you know, uh whatever people are willing to put money into and and uh pump and sell, uh you know, will get tried. So, we're we're going to try all the things. We're going to see what happens. >> Yeah. When I when I raised uh my my spa, my vehicle uh in every fundraising meeting, I I I started off being like, "So, this is, you know, a Bitcoin infrastructure acquisition corp. We are not pursuing a treasury strategy." Like that is that is not the goal explicitly. Please do not bucket me in with with that crowd. Um because I think you know the the thing that makes the most sense to me is having real products and services and generating real cash flow and you know maybe organically building a Bitcoin treasury over time as you know from real cash flows as normal companies build you know a dollar denominated treasury today. Um, but I do think that there's I don't know how long there's going to be room for a Bitcoin treasury companies that purely create income based on financial engineering. I think that, you know, today there's only really two that can do that, you know, debatably in the US. And we'll see just how long, you know, Micro Strategy and Strive uh can keep this up before they need to go acquire new kind of cash flowing lines of business uh to help kind of support the dividend obligations. Um yeah, look, I think um it's it's at the minimum necessary that the company can pay its GNA, right? It should be able to pay salaries. It needs to be able to pay rent because otherwise the narrative is going to be they sold some of their Bitcoin to pay salaries. So, you need to be able to avoid that. But otherwise, I mean, it's it's such a small tiny fraction of companies around the world that are doing this, right? I mean, we live in this little bubble where everyone is, oh, this new Bitcoin treasury company, but in the grand scheme of things, it's such a tiny fraction of companies that have realized, oh, this is hard money and we're going to adopt it. So, I actually think that this has a long way to go. Um and and and like I said, I think at the at the very least you need to be able to pay your salaries, but beyond that, I think if you're s sufficiently sophisticated to be able to deploy fin traditional finance financial engineering tools um effectively and efficiently like what MetPanet is doing just by selling put options. So they raise fiat, they said and and between the the the raising of the fiat and the purchase of the Bitcoin, they sell put options, right? and that's a revenue stream. Um, so there's various it's obviously very risky. You need to know what you're doing. You need to model it and and all of that, but if you can do that, um, I think that's a business model. So, yeah. >> Welcome to predict. The world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct, your prediction, your edge. Dual Bits predict where everything is a market. One of the things we're seeing more of is the, you know, the corporatization of Bitcoin via ETF and some of these other institutional rappers. One of the, you know, counterarguments to that is that this takes away a lot of the foundational principles of Bitcoin. The unconfiscability of it, the censorship, the ability, you know, to move the asset how you want to move it. What's your guys' opinion on that? What do you think the trade-offs are of having the corporate rappers like we have today versus being able to like hold it yourself with self- custody? And do you think we have a risk of regulatory institutional capture basically by having all of this Bitcoin at Coinbase as an example that's the predominant custody provider for the Bitcoin ETFs? Um let's start with you VJ work your way back down. >> Sure. I mean there's definitely a risk uh with um the amount of Bitcoin that Micro Strategy Strategy and and Coinbase have right like for I mean in in the instance of a fork for for a hard fork for example the you know whatever the whatever side of the fork the exchange lists as BTC is going to have a huge advantage right in fact that it is going to win so they have tremendous amount of control over that and it's at the end of the day it's economic nodes that determine which fork succeeds right it's not you have 20,000 nodes. Most of them don't matter. It's the economic nodes. It's who can sell, you know, one chain and buy the other chain. Those are the guys that actually will determine the winner uh in a fork. So, it is definitely very very risky. Um but look, I think at the end of the day, the beauty about Bitcoin is that it gives you the option to always swap your shares or your ETF, whatever. I mean, assuming it's not FDX, but it gives you the option to sell your your your corporate shares and and buy Bitcoin. So, so, you know, that's not available with gold, that's not available with any other asset in in history. So, I'm okay with this. You know, the fact that you can do it in in I don't know, maybe like 15 minutes effectively or less, right? You can sell your IBIT and and and buy Bitcoin. That's tremendously powerful and it doesn't worry me that much. Yeah, it's uh I think the concentration of Bitcoin in you know just a couple uh corporations is definitely unfortunate but it isn't mutually exclusive where you know you have corporations holding Bitcoin versus individuals holding Bitcoin like both are happening and I I you know do know that you know some of the self-custodial companies are are seeing you know great growth among um you know their user base and their kind of like Bitcoin under custody uh type products. Um so that is happening I think. Um and you know to your point earlier about corporate adoption being kind of inevitable. Corporations are people too. Um and so you know it would be better if these corporations were holding their own keys just like it would be better if every individual holder of Bitcoin was holding their own keys. But the most important thing is that everybody has the option uh to do that and everybody has and you know that on the protocol level and on the you know service provider level we keep blow making the barrier to entry to holding your own keys as low as possible. Uh and so I I do think that that's you know we're doing all the right things and a couple entities amassing a ton of Bitcoin is just part of the game. >> All right, I'll keep it quick because I think we're out of time. So on the one hand I'll speak from my perspective as a wealth manager. So my clients, they own the ETFs and to be honest with you, most of them will probably not, you know, buy actual coins and and cold store them. And that's just a reality. So there's some demand there that probably won't ever transfer into, you know, onchain coins. Um on the other hand uh the positive view is this was one of the genius elements of Satoshi and the design of Bitcoin of course was that the issuance schedule of coins put enough in the hands of early adopters who knew exactly what they were doing. Uh, and many of those coins, I mean, some are lost, but many are are cold stored. And those, uh, a lot of those coins, I think, are in very, very strong hands. And I suspect that there are enough of those holders out there, enough of those whales still swimming around in these waters that uh, they're going to be a pretty strong defensive bull work for the network uh, even in the long run, even as uh, Paper Bitcoin continues to grow uh, on top of it. >> That's wonderful. I want I want to thank Andy, Ryan, and VJ. And thank you all for joining us today. We really appreciate it. Every year, this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year, the stage gets bigger. Sound money center stage. So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville, July 2027.