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MH Matt Hougan Matt Hougan On Unchained

“Our average client allocates to us after eight meetings. … If you count from when the ETFs launched, which was like two and a half-ish years ago, if you did a meeting every quarter after they launched, you're just sort of now getting to the point that you're accepting of Bitcoin. … Central banks probably do one meeting a year, but after eight years, they're going to get there too.”

Unchained · Crypto & Web3 · November 2026

“Our average client allocates to us after eight meetings. … If you count from when the ETFs launched, which was like two and a half-ish years ago, if you did a meeting every quarter after they launched, you're just sort of now getting to the point that you're accepting of Bitcoin. … Central banks probably do one meeting a year, but after eight years, they're going to get there too.” — Matt Hougan, Unchained

Context

Laura Shin asked why pension funds and sovereign wealth funds are only now coming online for crypto. Hougan, Bitwise's CIO, said it is mostly the passage of time, and laid out his rule of eight for how long institutions take to normalize a new asset.

Transcript

Unchained Around 15:37 into the episode
Matt Hougan

…market is starting to come online, but it's still early. The real big change is we've gone from individual wealth managers to largest wealth management platforms in the world, treating Bitcoin and crypto as a normal asset. And that is a dramatic change from where we were a handful of years ago.

Laura Shin

Wow, that's so interesting. And why is it that you think this last group is finally coming online now?

Matt Hougan

Yeah, I've said this before, but an old fact from early days of Bitwise, we've been doing this since 2017, is that our average client allocates to us after eight meetings. And the reason that I bring that up, Laura, is that if you count from when the ETFs launched, which was like two and a half-ish years ago, if you did a meeting every quarter after they launched, you're just sort of now getting to the point that you're accepting of Bitcoin. And it's just that number of meetings is what it takes to normalize Bitcoin. I'm not just saying it's Bitwise doing it. There are other great firms doing it, Fidelity and BlackRock and VanEck and Franklin. I think they have just been doing this for many years and it's normalized crypto and Bitcoin in their mind. It's just, if you think of even retail investors, no one just sees it for the first…

Laura Shin

Wow. So it's not even anything related to crypto itself.

Matt Hougan

No, I mean, it's almost like anything new, right? Anytime you're assaulted with a new technology or a new idea that's out the norm, you have to learn about it. You have to digest it. You have to ask hard questions. You have to come back. You have to do it personally. You have to tiptoe in. And then…

Laura Shin

So to go back to the security question, I did also just want to get your opinion. So I find it fascinating that these institutions have not actually been asking you about security. That really blows my mind. But I'm curious for your thoughts, because obviously we're talking about the quantum…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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