In this week’s episode, we speak with Mike Novogratz, the CEO of Galaxy Digital. He started his career at Goldman Sachs and then led a macro hedge fund at Fortress, which was shuttered in 2015. He then went all-in on crypto, in part thanks to convincing from his college roommate Joe Lubin, and founded Galaxy Digital, an investment bank for digital assets. After grinding through the 2018 and 2019 bear market, Mike says he can finally breathe.

He is convinced that Bitcoin is finally derisked. To him there’s no doubt that Bitcoin is never going to zero, and there’s enough critical mass to say it’s an asset class. Novo, as he’s known, thinks we are going through a paradigm shift and we’ll see from Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan to Google and Facebook all announce big crypto projects in the next few months.

While Bitcoin is firmly established as digital gold, to him, Ethereum is a venture bet because it’s not totally finished yet. It's getting there, and so the bet is whether it's going to happen, not that it has happened. Novo is wildly bullish DeFi. He says the threat to the banking system and payments is DeFi, not Bitcoin. But that also means the big guys are going to fight back with lobbying and regulation because protocols like Uniswap and Aave are going after their business.

About the hype and rally in the crypto market, Novo says this time it’s different. Unlike in 2017, he doesn’t believe we’re in a bubble. He says we’re in a movement.

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