Yahoo Finance

Jean-Marie, you did, you all did a survey recently, financial advisors, getting their opinions on broader digital assets. What were some broad takeaways from that survey? Were there any data points that surprised you in that survey work?

Yeah, this survey was quite interesting because, you know, the idea that people are getting more aware of cryptocurrencies was kind of an obvious outcome of it. What was much more interesting for us is the perception of the crypto industry by the investment advisor, which are struggling to reconcile effectively with this massive shift in wealth, which is happening from one generation to another, and which will force them to start looking at things like cryptocurrency because they're new kind of investees are looking at cryptocurrency with very sharp eyes, and their lack of capacity to get good education or what they perceive as unbiased education from cryptocurrencies firm. And that's where CoinShares is trying to effectively step up as the adult in the room and say, look, we understand your problematic. We understand you need unbiased information. We're not just here to tell you it's going to the moon, like the saying says, but we try to be reasoned, to give reason and to give a bit more of a of a thinking beyond what we propose. And it's funny because we had an advertising campaign in Germany in Q4, and the advertising campaign was work with the brokerage house where the brokerage are saying we need to tell our clients to not invest too much in cryptocurrency. So as a cryptocurrency investment firm, we were making a messaging saying be reasonable, be in the way you invest in the same way a lot of lottery company make advertising saying gamble responsibly, drink responsibly. Well, we were trying to do invest responsibly as well, and don't just like put all your eggs in one basket and diversify.

And is that, do you diversify within the cryptocurrencies as well? I'm curious where you're allocated right now at CoinShares.

Now you can diversify outside of cryptocurrency, and we there's a lot of researches which has proved that having a little bit of cryptocurrencies in your, especially Bitcoin, in your investment portfolio goes a long way in terms of improving the risk return parameters of your portfolio and its volatility adjusted return as well. So it is a good thing to have as a diversification methodology. If you look as risk premium portfolio, it adds a lot of value as well. So there's plenty of things you can do. And you know, yes, we've been doing single coin ETF effectively in Europe for 10 years, but the future is not really in that direction. We're not going to do in the US what we've been doing for 10 years in Europe. So the real future is like how you start mixing cryptocurrencies with traditional assets and bring better risk-adjusted products to the market.

You know, Jean-Marie, I'm just curious, in that survey work you did, was there any kind of, did you pick up any kind of meaningful generational differences among advisors? Did younger advisors, did they seem to think differently about digital assets and maybe their relatively older colleagues and peers?

It's a good question you're asking because effectively what we're seeing is like the pressure, the peer pressure among financial advisor is very strong. And like, they're very, very wary of what their older colleagues are going to think about them. So the younger generation pushing up is still very much looking at, okay, how is my boss going to look at me for doing that? You know, we used to say in traditional cryptocurrency world that it used to be a risk for your career to invest in cryptocurrency, and now it's becoming a risk for your career not to do it. But when you come to financial advisors, it's still perceived as a risk because the older generation of risk advisor are still not embracing it completely. And you can see this dichotomy the same way at the family table when the dad or the mother, whoever is like running the portfolio of the family, which is the older generation, is being told by the kids or the daughter of the son, why don't you have Bitcoin in your portfolio? And then the the Thanksgiving debate in the table is transposing as the investment advisor kind of investment committee where you get these generation kind of having a bit of friction together. It will take time, it will solve, and we want to position CoinShares have these kind of tools for them to be able to help resolve that kind of narrative, I would say, breakout.

Jean-Marie, thanks for coming in. Appreciate it. Good to see you.

Thank you very much. Good to see you.