Bitcoin News

Story: Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan Sees Bitcoin and Tokenization Fueling Next Crypto Cycle

By Evie Vavasseur

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Hyperliquid and Robinhood Are the Names He's Watching. Two companies keep coming up in his analysis. Hyperliquid and Robinhood.

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The Tokenization Thesis, and Why Geopolitics Matters Too. The deeper argument Hougan is making isn't really about any single asset. It's about structure.

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Utility Over Capacity. One thing Hougan pushes back on pretty directly: the idea that blockchain adoption is mainly about…

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Bitcoin is up 9% since July started. The Nasdaq-100 is down 6% over the same stretch. Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise, thinks that gap says something real about…

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Hougan put out his read on July 22, and the core argument is pretty straightforward: the next crypto bull market won't be driven by hype or meme coins or retail mania.

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Hyperliquid started as a crypto-native platform, basically built for crypto markets and crypto traders. But it's moved fast.

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Robinhood is doing something similar but from the other direction. The retail brokerage has launched Robinhood Chain, a product built to support tokenized stocks and…

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He thinks both are well-positioned. And beyond those two names, he sees a broad recovery ahead that could lift Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, along with companies that have…

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Related: Ether Funds Pull Nearly as Much Cash as Bitcoin ETFs Despite 8x Asset Gap

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Stablecoins are part of that. So are on-chain settlements. The idea is that traditional finance and crypto don't stay separate forever.

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He's also thinking about geopolitics, which is kind of an underappreciated angle. Hougan's view is that global uncertainty — the kind that makes investors nervous about…

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That matters because it changes who's buying. Institutional investors gaining exposure through ETFs tighten Bitcoin supply in a way that retail-driven cycles don't.

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One thing Hougan pushes back on pretty directly: the idea that blockchain adoption is mainly about scaling capacity. He doesn't think raw throughput is the point.

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Read also: Ethereum and Bitcoin ETFs Both Bleed on Friday Despite Strong July Inflow Totals

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He calls this the commodity blockspace angle — basically, the argument that blockspace becomes valuable when it's being used for real-world financial applications, not just…

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