You know, like Ethereum is worth more than 20 Hyperliquids.
What's up everybody? It's LG here and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that has not sold its ETH yet and might be the last people still holding it. Today is May 25th, 2026. Ethereum feels like it's in danger. Just last week, many very vocal figures capitulated on the asset after many years of being permables, which coincided with many people at the Ethereum Foundation departing. But our guest today tells me that it's way too early to make a call on the asset and that the subtext of what Vitalik Buterin is saying is that there should actually be a second Ethereum Foundation that focuses more on the business interests of the protocol to help prop up its price and adoption going forward. We're going to discuss all that as well as why certain alts are pumping like Hyperliquid, Venice, and Near, and what it would take for institutions to bid on them with our guest today, Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital. Our usual Monday episode with John Gillan will be recorded tomorrow. Today's episode is brought to you by Cape, the privacy-first mobile carrier; Nexo, earn interest, borrow, and trade crypto; and Kashi, where your takes finally pay out. Haseeb, welcome back to the show, man. Good to see you again.
Thanks for having me. Always good to be here.
Yeah. Okay. So listen, we last chatted on December 9th and Bitcoin was in the low 90s, and I think then we were talking about like, okay, are we going to recover? Are we going to not? A lot has happened since then. Price action-wise today, I want to ask you about fundamentals that you discussed last time and just kind of, you're always so great at giving us really nice analogies. So, we'll kind of go through some of those. But I do want to ask you probably the most pressing thing for me, especially at the end of last week, was the drama around Ethereum. And I feel like there are so few majors out there, you know, out of everything you look at top 100 coin list, it's like Ethereum is always this, has really become this super polarizing asset or protocol or whatever you want to refer to it as. A lot of people leaving or slightly being shown the door. The Ethereum Foundation, Vitalik kind of painting a slightly new direction there with his post. How do you feel about Ethereum because I feel like you are generally a supporter, but do you feel like any of this is kind of shifting your view?
So, first thing I'll say, you know, we own a lot of ETH. I wrote a tweet about four or five days ago where I wrote Ethereum is the Microsoft of crypto and it ended up getting a ton of debate about like, okay, is this a good thing, is this a bad thing? And my response to that was like, well, it's neither a good thing nor a bad thing, right? It's like, much like Microsoft, Ethereum is very big, it's very slow, it's very enterprise-friendly, doesn't have the best UX, you know, it's not the first to innovate on anything at this point, but it's extremely important and irreplaceable and it's worth a lot of money. Now, Microsoft, if you look over the last couple years, Microsoft has not been the fastest horse in the top tech companies. Hasn't done that amazing as a stock. It's obviously not that exposed to AI. All things speaking of their AI products, been pretty shit. And Ethereum similar, right? Ethereum has been kind of a laggard. It had this moment where it was doing really well last year. And since then, it's been kind of in the doldrums. I mean, it's kind of neck and neck with Solana. Solana is also kind of in this valley of darkness right now with respect to, you know, people not feeling like it has a lot of energy and a lot of catalysts. But Ethereum is unique because it's got so much baggage as a protocol, you know, and yet it's second largest asset in crypto, extremely liquid, extremely highly traded. Like people sometimes act like Ethereum has somehow become like it's, you know, lost the mantle, but it's still number two. Still, you know, a $270 billion protocol. So, you know, it's like I pointed this out to somebody last week is that if you take all of the public companies in crypto combined that are not DATs, if you exclude the DATs, all the public companies combined, so you take, you know, the Coinbases and the Circles and the eToros and Galaxy and all that stuff, add them all together, it's less than half of Ethereum. Ethereum is huge. It is absolutely enormous. So it's important to keep some sense of scale of how big and important Ethereum is relative to all the other stuff that we talk about like, oh, the revenue meta and this and that and blah blah blah, you know, like Ethereum is worth more than 20 Hyperliquids. Okay.
Now with that all having been said, Vitalik recently came out and issued a statement where he basically said like, look, the point of Ethereum is to be quote unquote exceptional, to be a special chain. And the way in which we're special is because we are decentralized and we're focused on the core properties that make Ethereum different. The censorship resistance, the security, the credible neutrality, like the CROPS acronym that he's become fond of lately. And he's like, look, we are not the Ethereum Foundation, despite the fact that people have been leaving and there's all this uncertainty about the direction of the foundation, we are not a price or we are not a number go up or we are not going to be a number go up org and that maybe there's room for other orgs within the Ethereum ecosystem that can do that but at this point I think he said that they own like 12 bips or something of the total ETH supply and we're just not, like there are many many people who are larger holders of ETH than us and they are in a better position to play that role than the EF is today. So his claim is that the EF is going to be leaner. They're going to be focused purely on shepherding the protocol as well as stewarding these particular core properties of Ethereum but Ethereum is not, the EF is not the number go up org. So now a lot of people, well I was reading some of the comments trying to understand what the vibe response is to this post and it seemed like half negative. So half people were saying like, oh okay this means that Ethereum is fucked and that like okay Vitalik doesn't really care about the price and then other people fixated on this one comment that he made in this post that was like, you know, he said ETH is the core financial asset or financial output of Ethereum and it's important that ETH does well and people like just clipped this one part of his statement. He was like, look, ETH is the most important export of Ethereum. This is great. Finally, you know, Vitalik is full of ETH. Which I don't think is really the right reading of the statement that he made. Although on some level, what people read and what they amplify is going to be what the statement means at the end of the day. So maybe they sort of contorted what he was saying into a, oh you know, number go up, I guess if Vitalik is still on board with that project. So I think on the whole, I think it's bearish. I think the statement is bearish. I think the direction for ETH is bearish is that in the Tomas era when Tomas came back into the EF, he was the person who was appointed as a new executive director or the co-executive director of the EF. He very clearly came in with this muscular mandate of we need to scale the L1. We need to focus more on ecosystem development and BD and entrepreneurial support and making Ethereum great again. Like that was the whole vibe of the post-Tomas shift into EF. And then Tomas left and then a bunch of people left the EF and now all of a sudden they're publishing mandates and they have this whole, oh, CROPS is the new important thing, like that acronym emerged into the forefront after Tomas left the EF and all of that I think is unequivocally bearish for the EF but it does create room and the room that it creates is for this thing that Vitalik is talking about about there being a new organization that steps in that is more focused on the more entrepreneurial and more business-oriented side of Ethereum. It potentially creates room for that to step up. And what he said explicitly is that the EF is open to working with those people who can step into that position. And so what I'd love to see and I think this will be the thing that kind of reclaims the mandate for Ethereum is if there is some organization that's given institutional legitimacy. Right now, you know, there's Etherealize. Etherealize is this company that was venture-backed that's kind of doing like Ethereum for enterprise. I don't think Etherealize has that. It's, you know, it's a good, or they've got good people, but it doesn't really have this megaphone. And it doesn't have the muscle necessarily to like carry this torch forward. Tom Lee kind of has it with Bitmine, but it's not his job to do that for the rest of the world. It's his job to like sell his equity and to get people to buy his shares and to, you know, affect his own buys of ETH in the public markets but he's clearly not the second foundation, you know, so I kind of feel like the call that Vitalik made if you sort of read between the lines is he's almost softly calling for a second foundation. That's how I read it. That's at least the optimistic read that I make of what he said.
And a lot of people have talked about the need for a second foundation. So actually there was a, Dankrad talked about, oh what we need is like a second foundation that's more focused on price and adoption. Many people have talked in the past about this. I think, you know, the Curve founder Michael, he talked about hey maybe there needs to be a second foundation. I think if that emerges that might be the really bullish turnaround that Ethereum needs that carries forward the energy that Tomas originally started with last year when we saw the big run up in Ethereum.
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Wow. I never even thought about that there being like a second foundation that is like, so you think the role of the second foundation would be to what, exactly? Like what would they focus on, value and price, you know what I mean? Just be like this, like what Tom Lee kind of is right now but just Tom Lee, you're saying as okay...
Tom Lee is a, you know, he's at the end of the day he's running a public company and he is a booster of Ethereum but he's not a steward of Ethereum in any meaningful sense, right? So, think the Solana Foundation. What does the Solana Foundation do, right? Yeah. They do the, okay, the core values of Solana is like we're trying to distribute the stake and we're trying to do this and trying to do that. You know, they do some regulatory stuff. Okay, great. And they also do the core development, right? So, some of it, obviously, Anza does a lot of the development, but they also do some researchy stuff, but most of what the foundation does is they support entrepreneurs. They help the thing get adopted. They tweet about it. They talk about it. They do number go up stuff. And all that number go up stuff, basically, what Vitalik is saying is that that's not our core job, right? There is number go up stuff to be done, but we want to get away from that and focus more on being the high priests of Ethereum. We want to steward Ethereum's core values. We want to be, if anything, the bulwark against Ethereum becoming too commercial. But, okay, who are you a bulwark against? It's like, okay, well, the commercial people, right? It's like almost they're fighting against the Tom Lees, right? They're fighting against the entrepreneurs because they're saying, 'No, you guys are trying to go into the world of more centralization, more capitulation, more cutting corners. We are fighting against that.' That's what the EF is saying, right? That works if there's a dialectic between another organization that is focused on number go up. So, I think this is what Vitalik is alluding to. This idea has been in the air for years. This is not a new idea. I remember, it was not just, there was one more group that I'm forgetting now. I think it was like the Konstantin from Lido maybe who was talking about, or no, there was a rumor, that's what it was. There was a rumor that was widely reported that Konstantin from Lido was planning to start a second foundation for Ethereum. This is when Ethereum was like really, really in the dark ages. And so I think this may be the room for something like that to be created and to exist. And I imagine what might happen is that the EF still has some go-to-market people inside the EF, right? You can imagine a world where the EF basically splinters, takes some of that budget, takes some of those people, puts them in the second foundation, seeds them with some initial capital and basically says look the capital that we have that's left is purely focused on research, values, and like, you know, the privacy roadmap, the CROPS roadmap, censorship resistance, some of these core research tasks, but the actual adoption of Ethereum is going to go in the second org and that's not Vitalik. Vitalik runs the Vitalik Road or just focuses on research and kind of values stewardship. The second org is purely about go-to-market competition and, you know, winning the game.
Do you think that that's been beneficial for Solana though? Like especially at this point because you're saying kind of like they're also in a valley of kind of uncertainty of like what is next for Solana, right? Like it's like so would you say that that has worked for them? Like is that maybe what propped them up to the point where they got to in the last...
I think it's very clear that Solana could not have gotten to where they gotten but for the foundation. Foundation played a huge role in all the marketing, all the business deals, all the commercialization, you know, super team, the entrepreneurship, all the stuff that really emerged in Solana came in large part from the commercial efforts of the foundation to make Solana more adopted and they were very successful in doing that and they still are.
Right. Okay. What role did, recently I guess departed from being Ethereum super fans, what role did Bankless play in something like this? Like were they, would you see them more as just being like they were supporters of the Vitalik vision and now they have kind of decoupled from that? I mean that was kind of like the big drama last week. Whether that actually has a big impact is kind of, you know, we don't know what the large impacts are of us doing podcasts and newsletters and stuff like that. Like we don't know, you know, being influencers or whatever, like we don't know what the actual impact is on, maybe there's an impact on sentiment, but in terms of like long-term price action and mission, all that kind of stuff, we don't know. It's hard to kind of quantify that. But where does that, did they kind of occupy a bit of that role? Probably not. I feel like they were more on the fundamental side anyways.
I would say look, if this was 2022 and Bankless dropped ETH, then I think that would have been catastrophic. But it's not 2022 anymore. You know, Bankless is great. Obviously, they're a fantastic platform, but you can see, you know, the day that David announced that he didn't have any ETH exposure, ETH didn't move, you know, it like maybe went down like 50 bips or something or, you know, something tiny. So, I don't think, yeah. I don't think the market read that as like, oh my god, you know, Ethereum is fucked now. The reality is that Bankless had already moved away from being ETH boosters, like, you know, they're doing shows on AI, they're doing shows on Venice and Zcash and blah blah blah and like everything under the sun. That's part of the reason why so many of their customers or their listeners were really pissed at them. But like not just now, but also over the last, you know, couple years like, 'Oh, why do you talk about Solana? Why do you do this? Why do you do that?' So, you know, look, I feel for them because that's a very annoying audience to have. But like if your audience doesn't let you evolve as a host or as a show, that sucks. I get why that's annoying for them. But the reality is that no, Ethereum does not need Bankless. It doesn't need any single podcaster.
Would this happen? Would we have been having this conversation or version of it if Ethereum was at like 4K or so, you know what I mean? If it was at like 3500, like if it hadn't, cuz it's like Bitcoin's down from all time highs, I don't know, whatever. Still like 40% 35% or whatever it is. But it's like Ethereum is down 60%. You know what I mean? Like is that, if we were down the same ratio even as Bitcoin, would any of this, would this even be happening? Would we be talking about that?
No, clearly not. And also, Ethereum didn't hit new highs in this market, right? So, like a new high by like $10 or something. It was like a tiny little bit. But it wasn't like Bitcoin that was like a huge new high. Yeah. In the, right. I mean, if it was a Bitcoin-like high, it would have gone to 10K and it didn't get anywhere near that.
Right. Okay. So, here's one last question for you about Ethereum and then I want to talk about a few other topics that you've already kind of alluded to. For people like you guys that are holding Ethereum and, you know, you're saying the subtext to Vitalik's tweet is like, 'Hey, I want somebody else to go out there and lead the charge in really commercial or playing the commercial side of Ethereum and maybe we'll be at odds at times or we'll kind of play both sides, but we need somebody to do that for you guys to be happy as well.' That is like somebody else is going to do that, am I going to do? That's what he's saying. You guys are ETH holders. Many of us are ETH holders. A lot of people listening to the show are still ETH holders. What is the positive outlook for us then? Like what does the timeline look like then if this, like what is the good case scenario from here for Ethereum like over the next couple years based on this kind of like there's a bit of a turning point here.
Yeah. So first thing is that way too early to say. So, it's very clear there's been a lot of changes within the EF. Obviously, a lot of people have left. There's been this, it feels like a little bit of a spiritual battle happening inside of the EF itself. And I think Vitalik in saying this that hey, you know, we want to support other people who are doing more of the commercial work, it is a little bit of his capitulation to the fact that, hey, I hear you guys that this is really important and that we're not doing enough of this and we're never going to do it to the extent that you guys want us to. So we want to get out of the way and support whoever will be able to do this in a more muscular way than we currently can. I think the reality is that there has been a lot of improvements in the EF over the last 24 months, right? If you compare to, you know, when Aya was pushed out back, you know, this was like January of last year, like all the infinite garden stuff and all the kind of just the sort of Kumbaya slop that the Ethereum Twitter account was putting out at that time. Ethereum has come a long way, right? You can see that they're now highlighting entrepreneurs. They're working with founders. They're helping, like, you know, we now get intros from people who work at the EF trying to get entrepreneurs to get funding who are building on Ethereum. All that stuff is great. It's the stuff that the EF used to never do. It was almost they wouldn't deign to do it. It was like beneath them to deal with stuff like that. And now all of a sudden they're doing things that other foundations have also done which is to help cultivate capital formation on their ecosystems. That is a new kind of EF, right? So stuff has unequivocally changed and it's not going to go back in the other direction. But I think Vitalik realized look we can't, we're not going to go all the way. We're not going to be the Solana Foundation. It's just not our DNA. It's not who we are and it's not me because I, Vitalik, run this organization effectively and like, you know, this is not who I am. It's never who I'm going to be. So I think we have to be a little bit patient before we see what the new equilibrium is going to look like. And we still haven't heard from the people who left the EF what their designs are and how they intend to contribute to Ethereum in different ways because my understanding is that most of those people it's not like they're out and they're just going to go work at Tempo. The people who left the Ethereum, they have other plans of what they want to do. And I'm sure at some point they will come public about what those plans in particular are. So I think the answer right now is that we kind of have to wait and see. I don't think this is the end of the story, but we'll probably know within a few months, if I had to guess, what that is going to look like.
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Okay. Okay. Well, maybe next time you're on we can, we'll be at that point. We can chat about it then. I think a lot of people just holding their breath as well just in the crypto market, not holding their breath, but also wondering, you know, a lot of people feeling like the...
The rest of the year is a pretty crucial time with a lot of regulatory stuff coming down the pipe or starting to move forward, and midterms in the future as well. A lot of different things that typically have some kind of effect on the direction of this stuff long term. I did want to ask you though, back when we had you on December 9th, we had discussed that institutional bid that is coming. And even since we've had you on, there's been honestly nothing but bullish news on that side. You have every major institution hiring digital asset managers, digital asset teams. You have a lot of new ETFs, even like Hyperliquid, right? The flavor of the week along with privacy and AI, you know, not just hitting all-time highs, but hitting all-time highs based on ETF inflows and ETFs being launched. And I think you had said that institutions would not necessarily bid on altcoins for a long time. Do you feel like this has been a sufficient long time? And is the bid on Hyperliquid like that? Do you consider that an altcoin bid? What's your kind of view there of the institutions finally coming for stuff that isn't just the bitcoins?
Yeah, I mean, if you're talking about DATs, it's pretty clear that the DAT bid is not institutional. The DAT bid is retail. So, you know, there's a lot of retail capital that's unable to touch crypto-native assets and, you know, they're sitting in 401ks or brokerage accounts. And for those retail, yeah, giving them access to an asset like Hype or Zcash or whatever is great, but doesn't really answer the question of when are institutions going to be entering into these assets.
I think clarity is obviously the big decision boundary. If the Clarity Act passes, that is probably the thing that's going to start getting the first trickles of institutional capital to come into the space that is able to touch tokens today. Part of the reason why they don't want to touch tokens is that they don't really understand them, don't feel like they're fully regulated. And I mean the other thing of course is that for a lot of the people in the institutional world, they don't see why they would. There's a lot of exciting stuff happening in AI. Public markets are going crazy. There's huge volatility. Things are printing all-time highs every single day. On some level, the thing that's going to attract institutions back to wanting to experiment with crypto, or sorry, experiment with altcoins, even if there is the ability to do so post-clarity, I think the number one thing you need to see first is for retail to come back. If retail comes back, then you can potentially see some of these tokens start to hit all-time highs.
And then once they're hitting all-time highs, that's when institutions want to come in. So, you kind of need assets to run for it to be attractive on a relative basis for an institution to say, 'Look, I mean, why do I even need to look at this?' You know, things are hitting all-time highs in the stock market all the time. And I see memory stocks and energy stocks and nuclear and quantum and all this other stuff is going crazy. Now look, I don't say that because I'm bearish on crypto. I'm very bullish on crypto. I express that with my own portfolio. But the reality is that we don't live in a vacuum, especially for institutions. For institutions, there's no reason in principle why they need to touch any of this stuff. Now, given enough time, they will. Given enough time, one way or another, assuming that clarity passes and there's now some regulatory guardrails around the space and institutions feel like they can get their arms around it, they will come and they will buy some of these assets. Not all of them obviously, but they will buy some. But before then, I mean if you look right now, institutions basically only own Bitcoin and ETH and a little bit of SOL, and that's pretty much it. Institutions are not touching anything beneath those three.
What about Hyperliquid ETFs? How does that fit into the picture?
I don't think those are held by institutions. I mean...
You don't think so? So you don't think that that's institutions at all? You think that that's just retail seeing that as an option and finally getting some exposure?
Right. Yes. I would say that is almost certainly what's happening now. If somebody knows otherwise, you know, I'm happy to be educated. But as far as I know, if you even look at IBIT, right? IBIT is the most institutional ETF by far, the largest. IBIT is something like 35 to 40% institutions that are holding IBIT. Majority of IBIT is held by retail, and that's for the most institutional product held by BlackRock, which is Bitcoin, right? That's the thing that everybody knows. You go further afield, you even go to ETH, right? Or Ether, sorry, which is the BlackRock Ether. That's more owned by retail. It's mainly just retail. And if you go down to like the really long-tail ETFs, there it's almost all retail.
