[AGM Podcast] Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan on how one of the founding fathers of the ETF industry saw a similar opportunity to mainstream crypto

Crypto week continues with another industry luminary discussing the past, present, and future of the crypto space.

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast, we have Matt Hougan, the Chief Investment Officer of Bitwise Asset Management and one of the leaders in the crypto industry.

On today’s podcast, we talk about:

* Matt’s views on crypto.

* How Bitwise is bringing crypto to the wealth advisory community.

* How crypto’s evolution is similar to that of the ETF market.

* How community has played such a big role in making crypto go mainstream.

Matt has had an illustrious career at the forefront of major industry shifts in financial services. He’s been a pioneer in the creation of not just one, but two major asset classes and financial products. First ETFs, and more recently, crypto. Matt is the CIO of Bitwise Asset Management, one of the leading crypto-asset investment platforms with over $1 billion of AUM. Under Matt’s leadership, Bitwise has pioneered the first crypto index fund and is the leading provider of rules-based exposure to the crypto space.

Matt and his team have brought institutional quality frameworks and learnings from the development of other industries within financial services, like ETFs, to bear as they help institutionalize crypto and work with many RIAs, family offices, and institutional investors. Matt led the development of the index that underlies the Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund.

He’s also been an educator and evangelist for the crypto space to more traditional investors and he couldn’t have a better background to do this. He’s able to share stories about how the ETF space evolved into an institutional investment product with over $4 trillion flowing into the asset class.

He was the CEO of ETF.com, initially starting as a freelance writer, and working his way up to CEO. As CEO, he helped build ETF.com into the information provider for the industry and helped guide the sale of ETF.com in three separate, highly successful transactions. He also helped create the world’s first ETF ratings and analytics service which now powers FactSet’s ETF ratings.

He also co-authored the CFA Institute’s monograph on ETFs and appeared three times as a member of the Barron’s ETF Round Table. In 2016, ETF.com was acquired by Informa, where Matt joined their team to extend Insight ETF’s position as the largest ETF conference in the world. He’s been a pioneer in both the ETF and crypto worlds and sees the exciting opportunity in all different alt asset classes.

It’s always fun to talk with Matt. He’s such a thoughtful and intellectual guy who can live in both worlds of traditional finance and crypto.

You can listen to the episode on Spotify here, Apple Podcasts here, and Transistor here.

I hope you enjoy.

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