Morgan Creek's Mark Yusko Explains Why 'Crypto Summer' Is Here

Joining us now to discuss these very crypto markets is Morgan Creek Capital Management, CEO and Cio Mark Yusko. Welcome, Mark. Good morning y'all. How are you doing? Very good? And it seems like you're doing very well in the sense that you think it's summer. Crypto summer, I'm wearing a sweater, you're wearing short sleeves, you say it's crypto summer. Exactly. So explain why it's crypto summer. Well, you know, crypto is a four year or follows a four year cycle uh all around the having event in, in Bitcoin and there's a long explanation for that. But, but essentially suffice it to say that uh the having event causes a natural movement upwards in price. Otherwise the miners would, would go out of business as their block rewards get cut. So that triggers a cycle and cycles are driven by greer and greed and fear. And so we start with uh the having and that, that pushes us from summer to fall. Uh That's the, the parabolic time when, when people go crazy and, and, and buy and, and buy with leverage and, and all that good stuff that pushes us to streams in price, we end up in crypto winter, uh about a year later, uh, prices collapse. Then we get into spring. Spring was kind of June of, of 2015 or I'm sorry, 2022 to June of 2023. Spring is kind of wet, kind of nasty windy, just kind of up and down and up and down. And this spring, this past spring, we actually had hurricane Sam. You know, I live in North Carolina about once every 10 years or so. We get a, a snow, a cane, right? This, this Northeaster that, that comes in in early spring and, and throws everything off. Uh That's kind of what, what FTX did, it threw everything out. You know, we went from 25 K down to 15 K big collapse. And you know, here we are back at, at 26 K today. So Crypto Summer back to answer your question. What is Crypto Summerer? So Crypto summer started last June. I think it goes till uh next June. Uh and that is a slow but steady increase back to fair value. Now, why are we below fair value? Well, during the dump during crypto winter, people get afraid people get liquidated prices collapse. They go far below fair value as that crypto spring content or uh um people start to come back to, to the protocols. Activity starts to rise and the fair value based on Metcalf's law rises today, the fair value depending on what model you look at uh somewhere in the, the low 50 Ks. So we're meaningfully below fair value. So investors like myself like to accumulate in those periods. And that's why we see this kind of higher highs and higher lows, there's still volatility in that slow upward drift towards fair value. Uh And then we start the, the parabolic accumulation phase post having in the fall. So I wasn't very short but well, well, I I, in many ways, it was though because he kind of didn't go into some details and, and one of the details, of course, I have to ask is this is you, you describe a lot of endogenous variables, but there are a lot of exogenous variables here. You talked about hurricane Sam, but it's not just been hurricane Sam, it's been hurricane Dow, it's been hurricane uh Celsius and Meins, et cetera, et cetera. And there've been a lot of actors in this market who have uh but let's just say uh move, I, I, we could say they've moved the markets just because of the nature of what they were doing and given the, they were all tied together. That's, that's the problem. They're all tied together. This all kind of started because you had Sam and, and oh, I don't believe it was Caroline but, but she gets blamed for it. Uh and Alameda um doing some nasty stuff with algorithmic stable coins and, and Luna, but a dumb name algorithmic stable coins. It's just a stupid name. Um But, but what happened is they get big losses and when you have big losses, you basically have two options. You can either pay back the loans that you took. Uh But they didn't have the money because they stole it. Uh So what do you gotta do? Well, you go buy the banks. So they went out and they tried to, to buy Celsius. But as you said, uh there was some funky stuff going on there with the, with the token, then they did go out and quote unquote buy Voyager and, and block. They didn't do any of that because they didn't have any money, right? It was, it was vaporized. So uh it's all interconnected from, you know, Tara coming or Luna coming to Terra to three hours capital, collapsing to Voyager and Celsius and, and all the others. And then ultimately FTX gets, you know, discovered as a fraud. So I lump all that together and, and now we're past it and now we can get back to work and, and start building it. It, it was uh as they say, a rat king I think is the uh the, the, the term uh but the, this is um nonetheless, we, we have these sort of outside variables as well that are involved in crypto and II I bring it up because we saw over the weekend um the, the issue with ever grand in China and, and when I, when the reason I'm bringing up China is there seems to have been at least some aspect of the Chinese market getting into crypto as a way to get to change our exposure out of the, the Renminbi and a lot of capital went into crypto that way and then got out of crypto somehow. Uh and, and this is a variable that has almost a in many ways, it is more about Chinese economic issues rather than anything internal to crypto it. How much of these cycles that you, that you're talking about how much of them involve outside things happening such as this. And again, ever grand is an issue, we might see its effects. I mean, we we see these little uh bounces in in Bitcoin every time ever grand sneezes because of this fact that you could, if there's a collapse in the Chinese real estate market, one would assume it would have a negative effect on Bitcoin because of the out outsized influence say the Chinese economy has on crypto uh maybe but look, you know, short term price doesn't matter, right. Price is a liar, has nothing to do with value, has nothing to do with inherent and it's true of any asset, not, not just Bitcoin. I mean, the price is what two people agree to exchange a small amount of good or service. The value is what the inherent value is of something, whether that's a business, whether that's a piece of real estate, whether that's a piece of art or, or whether it's a, a digital asset like Cryptocurrency. So this this idea that short term price fluctuations, yes, they happen and, and yes, you know, people, you know, look at them and obsess over them, but at the end of the day, uh it's a global market and certainly Chinese ownership of digital assets is gonna have an impact and if people are being liquidated because they had too much leverage, particularly in a, in a deleveraging like that, that is like what's going on in the real estate markets in China, then you're gonna see some selling. And the one thing is, I think it is funny though is people when they say, oh, there's excess sellers in the market. No, it's not for every seller, there's a buyer for every buyer, there's a seller, it's a perfect match. And you may say, well, the marginal person, you know, initiating a transaction is a seller, ok? That's fine. But you still have to have a buyer willing to buy the asset at that said price. And so the price in the market today, whatever in 26,000, that's for a small amount that's traded. If you have a very large amount that you want to sell, you know, gonna get that price, it's gonna be a much lower price. If you have a large amount you want to buy, like what's about to happen when the ETF is approved, it's gonna be a much higher price. So when the ETF is approved and it, it will be approved, whether it's, you know, October or whether they push it into the New Year, it doesn't really matter. But that's $30 trillion address of a market. That's the amount of money controlled by advisors that today are precluded from investing in digital assets. They will be able to buy Bitcoin and other digital assets. And or in this case, just just Bitcoin and Bitcoin ETF. And you know whether it's 0.1% that would be 30 billion or whether it's 1% that'd be 300 billion on a half trillion dollar asset with about 100 billion of free float price will move up a lot. Well, mark on that topic, there was a Bernstein report that we published on Coindesk earlier this morning that said crypto fund management could have assets as much as $650 billion within the next five years. Of course, on the back of the ETF news as you were um just talking about what do you make of those comments, especially since you predict that this approval is coming by the end of the year. Yeah, look, I mean the the directionality of of all of these trends is very knowable, right? The technology Blockchain technology is one of the four pillars of the digital age. We have A I Blockchain chips and data those four things are as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow and the adoption of better technology occurs now, doesn't mean the incumbents aren't gonna fight it. They are, uh, they're fighting really hard, but at the end of the day, blockchains are a better way to store value. They're a better way to transfer value. They're a better way to transact and every asset, every stock, every bond, every currency, every commodity, every piece of property, every collectible car, every piece of fine art will eventually migrate to digital form. It will be moved and stored on blockchains and the asset management space will continue to grow and that there's $30 trillion of assets owned today by advisers not owned by people that give it to advisors to take care of. Uh and they're precluded from investing in digital assets by rule uh from their firm that will go away when there is an approved ETF and and there will be, you know, the idea that they're just never gonna approve this, all their excuses are gone. And it's very similar to what happened with GLDGLD took 2.5 years to get approved. Because at the end of the day, the institutions that, that make markets in commodities really like futures markets because they're easier to manipulate spot markets tougher because that's real demand for real physical goods. So it's one of these things where you can delay it, but you can't stop the better technology from coming. So it's coming. Whether it happens, I said in October by the end of the year or early next year, right before the having, I don't really know, I don't have any great insight. Um I think it would be hard for the sec because my, my belief is that they're only gonna approve Blackrock in the short run. I think it'd be really hard to not approve uh bit wise, which I think has the uh October 16th date and then approve Blackrock on the 17th. I don't think that would look very good. Uh So maybe they push it out another 90 days. We'll see. But, but at the end, blockchains are coming value is going to migrate 650,000,000,000 trillion over time. It's gonna be multiple trillions of dollar uh are gonna be in the asset management space and in digital assets for sure. All right, Mark, we are gonna have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us this morning. No, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it and I look forward to chatting again. I love that green dress. Beautiful. Thank you very much. Oh, no, this is blue. I know it's green is my favorite color. So if you were wearing green, I'd comment on yours too. Thank you. Wonderful to see you. See you guys. That was the Creek Capital Management, CEO and Cio Mark Yusko.