Shadowing Practice: The Allocator's Perspective on Digital Assets | DAS 2025 | Day 1 | Main Stage - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Great to see so many of you here bright and early
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and even through these lights I can see some friends in the audience so good to see you.
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We are here to talk about the allocator's perspective
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and certainly you know if you want to fund the investments the allocators invest in the funds
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and the funds invest in the projects.
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So we're going to start at the the top of the money funnel as it were.
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And I am thrilled to be joined by a distinguished panel, Anthony Scaramucci, needs no introduction, I think, at this point.
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Okay.
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We have Ray Hindi at L1D in from Switzerland, and Chris Solars here in New York,
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but working on behalf of a London-based firm.
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So we only have 30 minutes, so we're going to dive right in.
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Where is the alpha?
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I think that's what all of you want to know in addition to how do I get these checks?
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But a big discussion in the industry has been, what is the best opportunity these days?
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Are we looking more at liquid tokens?
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Are we looking more at illiquid VC?
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So let's put all of you on the spot to address that question.
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Anthony, you wanna go first?
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I'll go first, thank you, Michelle.
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I guess for us, our bias is probably conditioned by the elements of our fund and the liquidity nature of our funds.
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We have a biannual redemption cycle.
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I'm typically more focused on liquid stuff.
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Our team is more focused on liquid stuff.
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And that's not to say that we won't do things that are early stage or pick up some tokens that are, you know, my son, AJ,
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has a big investment in Kinto.
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I don't know if you know Kinto, but it's sort of a layer two on top of Ethereum that handles the AML and KYC sort of protocol.
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So once you get into the network, you're already sort of cleared from an SEC perspective.
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So that's something we've done early stage.
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But most of our stuff has basically been in the liquid space.
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So liquid, Ray?
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Yeah, so our firm is active on the liquid side through funds and on the venture side through direct investments.
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And so we look at both.
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And I mean, I have to say that today, and we have to discuss that, obviously.
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I'm keeping it very simple.
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But on a relative basis, the opportunity set is on the liquid side,
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simply based on the simple theory that long-term opportunities come from misallocated capital, and there's a major gap in the market.
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So in 21 and 22,
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you had a crypto VC bubble that was created with roughly $75 billion of AUM,
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simply because institutions felt that this was the way to express that crypto investment, you know, lower volatility, no marks,
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et cetera, versus the liquid side of the market, excluding the ETF side, the passive side, which is at $15 billion.
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And that's a ratio that is deeply abnormal and needs to be reset.
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And this is why we believe that the opportunity set is on the liquid side
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but the venture bubble or the venture problem is healing itself
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and by this time next year i would i'm hoping that things will uh will flip again chris yeah sure so
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i invest across three different fund buckets venture liquid directional token pickers
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and liquid market neutral and i'm truly agnostic i'm looking for for alpha of course
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when you're locking up your money for 10 years you have the opportunity cost of the illiquidity.
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So factoring that in, I think you can really think about alpha across the three buckets.
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One challenge is almost the subjectivity of alpha.
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You might think that beta, that Bitcoin would be the sensible beta.
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And over the last four years, VC funds have had very little DPI.
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Very few liquid token pickers have been able to beat bitcoin
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because it has had market dominance so
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if you then look at different types of betas perhaps ethereum solana
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or altcoins you can find you can find magic in in any numbers
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that you try to try to crunch but truly there is a lot of opportunity because it's an inefficient market
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but you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince okay so i'm hearing an overall bias
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excitement let's call it for liquid opportunities i want to unpick
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what you said though about the opportunity cost um you know
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and you come at this from a long career in consulting
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institutions consulting about hedge funds can you talk about how you look at this trade-off
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if someone's going to lock up capital for 10 years what do they need to deliver yeah um you know
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if i back up a little bit for prior to getting
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into crypto full-time in 2023 i was a consultant on behalf of some of the largest big public pension plans
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and enfs in the country and how it would work would be
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on on the institutional side at the beginning of the year the institution would come up with its asset allocation
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and then have their team along with my team on the
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consulting side try to populate the very best hedge funds that the into the 10% bucket.
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We never thought about the rest of the 90% of the portfolio.
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And arguably in institutional investments, you could populate a VC fund here, a liquid fund here, a market neutral fund here, and have the very best.
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You're not necessarily thinking about the opportunity cost of that in any other bucket, because that's the way institutions work.
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On behalf of a family office now, it's almost the exact opposite.
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Where I was trying to not lose money.
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Now I'm truly trying to make money.
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So I think a lot about this opportunity cost.
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And in digital assets, of course, Bitcoin is our king assets.
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It's two-thirds of the liquid market cap right now.
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And I think if I threw a dart in this room and asked any single person, what is their view on Bitcoin over the next decade?
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Most of them will come back with something like Bitcoin will probably be up three to five, even 10x.
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If we call that 5x, with the most liquid asset in the world,
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in ETF wrapper with the largest asset manager in the world that's only charging you 25 basis points,
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then the opportunity cost for a venture locking up your money has to be a lot higher than 5x.
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And remember that in equity VC over the last decade, over the last many decades, getting 3 to 5x is top quartile, if not top decile.
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So I think the opportunity cost is very high, which is why I focused on seed and pre-seed when I'm investing in venture crypto.
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And do those VC managers seem to understand the bogey that they're being held to when they're pitching you?
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I think so.
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I think so.
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I think in the institutional world, we could put them into a venture bucket simply because we have to populate the venture bucket.
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I think when I'm thinking more opportunistically from a family office's perspective, we are really trying to maximize risk and return.
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And right now I'm seeing that on the liquid side.
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I just want to ask a question.
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Yeah.
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So when you're thinking about the investor sentiment and your clients, what you said about Bitcoin,
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obviously, I agree with, but Bitcoin is market price and it's quite volatile.
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The VC stuff you sort of locked up and people have a five or 10 year perspective on it.
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Is that better from a psychological perspective?
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Meaning I've been in situations, you know, we look like a genius in 2021.
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We look like dunces in 2022 and clients are upset
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and they want to liquidate because they can see the price every day.
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So I'm just wondering, is the VC stuff more psychologically palatable from a client perspective?
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I think it is if you think it is.
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Right?
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It's not like those prices aren't going down because you've been locked up for 10 years.
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Right?
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And this is exactly why crypto is called liquid VC, because we're actually seeing these small cap tokens, which would never have made it into IPOs, into equities, you know, actually trading.
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So I think that's the brilliance of VC, is that it protects the investor from themselves.
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It's almost like a shield in a weird way.
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It's a shield.
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Yeah.
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But this is the reason why we had that crypto VC bubble in 21 and 22,
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because some consultants pushed U.S institutions into the VC model to protect them.
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But the reality is that, you know, we're talking about sophisticated institutional investors.
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They're big boys, and they should manage their exposure accordingly.
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And I think that VC should give you, on a look-through basis, a different exposure fundamentally.
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If you want to be exposed to companies that service the space, you can only do it under a VC format.
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Of course, if you need to invest in a decentralized network in a private run, you have to do so for liquidity reasons as well.
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But the liquid venture side of things on the liquid side is really attractive
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and beneficial to institutional investors because they can choose their DPI.
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And I can give you an example of that.
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Please do.
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So we have, you know, pension funds in Switzerland have been very,
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you know, we started, we got our first pension fund in 2019.
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They actually doubled down in April 1st, 2020, believe it or not.
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and we're getting number nine this month, which is very telling.
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So the institutions are here.
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Yeah, so we're talking about Swiss pension funds.
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They're smaller than the U.S ones.
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Let's be clear, it's a smaller country, a smaller pool of capital, but they're still quite important.
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And most of those pension funds came in during the bear market, which is very, very interesting.
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This is the value of pension funds.
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They're very rational, they're contrarian, and they don't FOMO into an investment.
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Now, a Swiss pension fund puts such an exposure in the alternative bucket, but that alternative bucket is capped at 15%.
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If they go above that 15%, they need to go and speak to the regulator.
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Now, that alternative bucket is formed of private strategies in TradFi because that's where the alpha was, infra, PE, VC, et cetera.
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So when you offer them something that is liquid that has the potential of alpha, They'll take it because with the volatility of crypto,
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once you go above that 15 and that position becomes a heavy contributor from a volatility perspective in your portfolio, you can choose to your DPI.
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You get out accordingly.
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And that's the feature that is very attractive for sophisticated institutional investors not to be essentially ignored, I would say.
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Yeah.
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So they can use it as a portfolio construction tool as well.
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And Anthony, Chris referenced, now you have an ETF.
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You have it from the largest asset manager in the world at low fees.
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How has that changed your expectations of the active managers that you're evaluating and allocating to?
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I would say a lot because this is my 36th year on Wall Street.
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And what I tell people, Wall Street does a lot of things, but there's nothing that Wall Street does better than selling things.
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And so you've got legions of people,
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financial consultants, financial advisors, wholesalers at places like BlackRock or Fidelity that are putting together these very extensive PowerPoint presentations.
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And they're reaching people at all different types of scale.
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You know, the state of Wisconsin, several hundred million dollars now into Bitcoin.
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Mubatala, I guess a half a billion dollars at current prices into Bitcoin.
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And so what's starting to happen is the floodgate for institutional investing is opening.
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And now that it's become more regulatory acceptable in the US, I think you're going to see more of that.
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And there's a high likelihood now that there will be other coin ETFs.
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Yes, there's an Ethereum ETF, but there will likely be a Solana ETF.
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ETF.
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I mean, I can't guess it when, but let's call it maybe, you know, by the second quarter, possibly third quarter of this year, you'll have a Solana ETF.
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And there will be people out there selling that as well.
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So I think this creates a tremendous amount of demand, particularly in Bitcoin's case, there's a fixed supply of Bitcoin,
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which leads me to worry about the market dominance issue.
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Because if we're all buying venture coins, or we're buying new coins, how do they set up against Bitcoin?
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It's a very hard comparison if you've got that type of money coming into something that has a fixed supply like Bitcoin.
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And we've certainly seen this dynamic of passive versus active managers in the hedge fund space, rate and or just broad trade by asset management.
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And you have sort of a barbell of the ETFs on
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one side continuing to grow as well as the alternative asset managers,
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smaller scale, but higher emergence and it's really that middle long only mutual fund space that's gotten heavily, heavily squeezed.
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Do you think that's going to change the type of managers?
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Is it already impacting the type of managers you're seeing, Ray?
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Yeah, so most managers out there on the crypto side are not good enough, to be fair.
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I mean, quality is extremely scarce and most of them are gonna underperform any most passive vehicles out there.
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Now, if we compare them to Bitcoin, yeah, probably 98%, 99% will underperform.
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If you start coming up with baskets of other coins, well, the quality collapses very quickly.
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So they've got a chance then to maybe outperform.
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But I wanna say that Alpha, active management, allocating to active managers in crypto is extremely hard,
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but once you have access to the very few, which are gonna be capacity constrained at some point,
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I think you need to stick with them.
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So I'm not sure, it would be very difficult to compare to traditional markets,
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specifically if your benchmark is Bitcoin only versus the entire pallets of ETF products.
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And you're still seeing capacity on the liquid side more so than on the VC side for the top tier managers?
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It depends on the strategy itself.
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There are like, there's a manager in this room I think runs $30 million is capacity constraints.
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Everyone wants to invest in them.
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We're their largest investors, we're very happy about that.
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But you've got the best liquid fund out there that has capacity and no one, and the flows are not aggressive enough to capture that capacity.
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And I would say that if, whenever those guys launch a VC fund, they'll probably be oversubscribed where there's less capacity, so sorry.
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I'm just going to ask you, is the easy part over?
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Or are we entering the easy part?
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I think it's getting harder and harder over time.
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Getting harder.
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And then, Chris, you also mentioned you have this bucket for market neutral.
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And I know you've also done some work about market neutral funds denominated in Bitcoin.
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So can you talk a little bit about the role of, you know, why an allocator would go for a pure alpha play in a growth market like crypto?
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Sure.
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So I've reviewed at least 100 different market neutral funds in crypto.
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And I would say about a third of them are doing in-kind subscriptions.
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So you can invest in Bitcoin or maybe ETH or maybe some other tokens.
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Largely, they're still doing U.S dollar type returns.
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And as I'm always kind of bringing this back to the opportunity cost of capital, If my view is that Bitcoin will be up 5x in a decade,
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that's roughly a 16, 17% return.
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That's roughly what managers are doing in US dollar returns in crypto market neutral land.
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So I think the tradeoff just holding Bitcoin versus locking up your money for a quarter, you know, not nearly as bad as venture,
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but still getting the same type of returns is a challenge.
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So one of the angles I've taken is to do it in kind.
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So I'm able to get the beta plus the alpha.
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I believe in Bitcoin.
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I believe that it's gonna be 5X in a decade.
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But then I'm able to compound 15%, even 20% Bitcoin on Bitcoin.
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And perhaps the easiest example, if Bitcoin is at 100K and it's at 500K in a decade, if we can make 20%,
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compound it over to double your Bitcoin over that decade, you're able to go from $100,000 US dollar investment to two Bitcoin,
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which are now worth a million, right?
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You're getting a 10X return because you're compounding beta plus alpha.
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And it's interesting, because this is a very similar conversation that's playing out in traditional finance as well, under the moniker of Gurtable Alpha, which is not new.
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It's been around for decades, but it's going through a bit of a resurgence period because of the same sort of challenge where you have hedge funds,
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which have a track record of durable alpha, but you also have an S&P 500 that's up 10% for the last 15 years.
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And it's hard to not get that beta exposure.
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And you've seen this resurgence of folks structuring either their portfolios or products to take advantage of that.
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Anthony?
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So I think what Chris is, I mean, both these guys are brilliant, but I think what Chris is saying is very compelling, but I just want to provoke you a little and get your reaction.
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So I look at it and say, you're probably right.
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It could be 5x, it may be 10x.
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But I also look at the state of the world and more money.
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Let me ask you the question.
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Is more money going to be printed over the next 10 years by central banks or less money?
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More.
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OK.
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OK.
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And Elon's talking about magic money.
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Everybody see that today?
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I was like, OK, we got 14 computers that are just printing the money.
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I want to own one of those computers personally.
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And so I'm just wondering if taking the directional bet and shutting off your computer or turning off your data management
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so you can't see the prices is the best idea as opposed to, you know, overworking the transactions to make it market neutral.
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What's your reaction to that?
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You mean just keep it simple?
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Just keep it simple and I own Bitcoin Solana
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and maybe a few other tokens and I'm going to shut the computer off
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and go to Bali and surf and I'll see you in 2035.
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I think that's a fair argument.
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I'll be a hundred years old in 2035 but that's fine but I'm just wondering about you.
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This is almost your point about Wall Street selling products right like that is almost a great
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argument for setting it and forgetting it for any type of asset allocation, whether it be 60-40, whether it be 5% to crypto,
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whether it be just Bitcoin or the majors.
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I don't disagree with that.
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But the compounding effect of being able to make double-digit returns on top of Bitcoin can really get you there.
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If you believe in this asset class, you believe in the inefficiencies of the market right now, which are vast, spreads are really wide,
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you can truly compound your Bitcoin over the next decade.
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You make a compelling argument.
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I'm just wondering because, and I'll just share this with everybody, in my 36 years of doing this,
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the mistakes I have made are generally related to doing too much.
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Selling things too early, buying new things as opposed to old things, thinking that I have to earn the fee every day,
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and so I'm in the marketplace trying to do things, which creates friction in the account and costs where maybe Buffett's right
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and we just sit on some great assets
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and not do too much maybe maybe the maybe the cell is you're paying me not to do much
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and to be fair there's no free lunch right so
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if you're applying those strategies you're gonna run an extra layer
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of risk whether it's counterparty risk small contract risk etc that's why you're getting paid
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so I I fully agree with Anthony in that I think investors, or the way we educate our investors,
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and that came from Tushar from Multicoin, so I want to attribute it to him.
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He presented it very eloquently during our summit last year where he said, listen, it's very simple, keeping it really simple.
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You've got crypto money, you've got crypto tech.
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Crypto money is Bitcoin.
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Ideally, you have it in self-custody.
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If not, you own the ETF, it's all good.
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Crypto tech is fundamentally a very different exposure.
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And there you can, you know, you express it through some of the best liquid managers out there,
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ideally fundamentally driven strategies and VC.
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And this is how we educate our investors and tell them, advise them to, you know, express their exposure to crypto.
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Yeah, and I think Meltem did a great job setting us up for
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that this morning and kind of reminding us why we're all here and what we're doing.
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But you bring a, you highlighted the ability that Tushar has to sell crypto, right, to tell this story.
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Anthony, you talk to lots of people all around the world in different forms.
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What are the arguments that you find resonate most at this point in time?
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Well, I mean, I think it's a regulatory argument.
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Ultimately, I think people, you were talking to people three years ago, particularly people of my vintage that have been around the industry,
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they were very hesitant and they would always point to US regulation and the SEC.
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And, you know, you're going to be hamstrung forever.
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And you have all this great difficulty.
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And just say, I mean, just think about what Gensler actually did with the Bitcoin ETF you have cash you then buy the ETF and then
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if you want to come out of the ETF you've got to take cash you couldn't get delivered the Bitcoin
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and so we're fixing that now
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because we have more we have smarter people now involved with the regulation
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but but all of that stuff was a big headwind and
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so when I'm out speaking or I'm in the Middle East
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or I'm in parts of Asia or even Europe is a little bit more hesitant if I'm just being brutally honest.
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That's been my experience.
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But I'm in places where there's a little bit more of a gambling instinct.
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The sell now is that you have a ceiling that's basically unlimited.
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As the Navy says, it's cavu ceiling and visibility unlimited, and you have that now.
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And so therefore, you can move people off of zero.
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You can get somebody into one of Chris
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or Ray's strategies a lot more easily today than you could three or four years ago.
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Yeah, and, you know, EMA, each year we've been surveying traditional hedge funds about crypto and their exposure, and we've seen it tick up year over year.
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But not surprisingly, the biggest obstacle has always been regulatory.
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And while it's not fixed yet, there's a visibility and a path, and we're seeing folks get themselves in order to participate in the spot market
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that they've been active certainly in the futures and the ETF, but you're going to see that unlock as there's a path forward.
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So Chris, what about you?
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I mean, again, you've had to counsel these very traditional pension funds over the years on quantitative hedge funds.
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So not the most straightforward asset class either.
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Are you seeing a shift in investor sentiment? For sure. For sure.
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The shift is happening.
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I think a few years ago it was still considered, you know, non-standard.
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Now I think it's quite standard to be, there's everyone has a dog or they have a crypto advocate within the group.
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People are reviewing this.
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A lot of the multi-strat hedge funds are trading it in really small size.
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All of the futures managers have been trading it since it arrived on the CME.
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So everyone on a look through basis has a little bit of exposure.
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I think what resonates the most still is that beta plus alpha story.
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And I think what also resonates well is to consider it within the venture bucket, even if it's liquid, in the sense that we know this type of asymmetry.
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And that's one of the best parts about crypto from a portfolio construction perspective is the asymmetry you get.
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You know, I've run a few numbers.
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In the traditional world, we would talk about CTAs and even gold as having positive skew.
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And this is why they should be a part of your core portfolio.
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But when you run the numbers of Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana or any altcoin index, the skew is significantly more than even CTAs.
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So it just means that you get that asymmetry.
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And when you add in the asymmetry of this secular trend of everything being disintermediated,
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everything potentially going on the blockchain and the low-hanging fruit of alpha, I think that story really resonates to institutions.
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And Ray, you mentioned you've had the success with the Swiss pensions, and they are smaller than their U.S counterparts, but that's still significant.
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And beyond the portfolio construction benefits that they can use with Liquid VC, what are the arguments that are resonating with them and getting them comfortable in crypto?
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Yeah, funny enough, most of the discussions over the last six years, they were always more comfortable with crypto tech versus crypto money.
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They never really liked Bitcoin or most of them didn't like Bitcoin
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and preferred to have exposure to To that crypto tech element from a fundamental perspective
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Now Anthony said something that is really true, which is the regulatory trigger is what got number nine Which is a very difficult one to get?
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You know through the finish line coming in this month the first meeting we had with them was six years ago.
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And there's obviously within those six years, you had boom, bust, you have a lot of data.
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They saw that, okay, you did say that crypto tech, liquid venture is extremely volatile.
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There's the benefit of liquidity, but you know what?
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You've survived 2022, which is a good thing.
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Good point.
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And so long-term, I think the regulatory, So the fundamental exposure to crypto tech,
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the positive asymmetry that can transform the portfolio.
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So they typically start with 75 base points of 1%.
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And that means that can have an impact in the end of portfolio.
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And finally, short to medium term, the recent price action is what,
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you know, gives them the courage to start stepping in in steps.
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When you, Ray, when you get the resistance on Bitcoin, which happens to me all the time in Europe.
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What is your counter?
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I mean, they've been wrong, obviously, so what's your counter narrative?
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What do you say to them?
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So the counter is, I mean, for me, it's a bit of a personal story.
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I grew up in Beirut and Lebanon, and everyone knows that as a Lebanese, you're trained not to trust anyone,
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no institution, no government, et cetera.
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Everyone knows that, you know, Lebanon went through a major financial crisis.
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You know, if you had $100,000 in the bank, it's probably worth 15 cents on the dollar today.
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And you can't take it out, right?
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So, you know, this is a personal angle that I use that,
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you know, this is what got me personally involved in crypto in the first place.
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But the reality is that we don't focus on Bitcoin itself.
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We focus on the crypto tech angle because that's what we do from an active management perspective.
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So none of our product ever gave them Bitcoin exposure.
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So we were very adamant of this from the start.
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So the only way in the early days where you could provide an active layer over Bitcoin is either yield on top,
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as Chris mentioned, which we're not big fans of.
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or actively trading crypto, which we don't believe works either.
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So I agree with you on that point.
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So this is why we've always focused on the crypto tech side of things and essentially ignored Bitcoin and separated them.
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And I think fundamentally they need to be separated.
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Okay, so down to last 20 seconds.
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You all receive the benefit of talking to the best investors, some of the worst, but you find the best investors in the world in crypto.
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One idea that you're excited about now, starting with Chris.
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Beta plus alpha.
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Beta plus alpha, right?
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You know, I think it has to do with price action in the near future.
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You know, anything, you need to embrace volatility and excited if there's deep corrections.
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Volatility, Anthony, last word.
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I was going to say, we spent 30 minutes talking about a lot of great strategies, but ultimately if Bitcoin's gonna go 5X over the next 10 years,
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I'm gonna stick with Bitcoin.
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Stick with Bitcoin.
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Great way to end.
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Thank you all.
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Join me in thanking Anthony, Ray, and Chris.
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Thank you, guys.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “The Allocator's Perspective on Digital Assets”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: bitcoin, crypto, fund, liquid. This video has 370 sentences and 4911 words to shadow. The speech runs for 30:29. The speaker talks at a natural 161 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| bitcoin noun | /ˈbɪtˌkɔɪn/ | A unit of the bitcoin (proper noun proper noun sense 1) cryptocurrency. |
| crypto noun | /ˈkɹɪptoʊ/ | A secret supporter or follower. |
| liquid noun | /ˈlɪk.wɪd/ | A substance that is flowing, and keeping no shape, such as water; a substance of which the molecules, while not tending to separate from one another like those… |
| alpha noun | /ˈæl.fə/ | The name of the first letter of the Greek alphabet (Α, α), followed by beta. In the Latin alphabet it is the predecessor to A. |
| venture verb | /ˈvɛn.t͡ʃɚ/ | To undertake a risky or daring journey. |
| investor noun | /ɪnˈvɛs.tə(ɹ)/ | A person who invests money in order to make a profit. |
| exposure noun | /ɪkˈspəʊ.ʒə(ɹ)/ | The condition of being exposed, uncovered, or unprotected. |
| bucket noun | /ˈbʌkɪt/ | A container made of rigid material, often with a handle, used to carry liquids or small items. |
| asset noun | /ˈæsɛt/ | A thing or quality that has value, especially one that generates cash flows. |
| pension noun | /ˈpɛnʃən/ | An annuity paid regularly as benefit due to a retired employee, serviceman etc. in consideration of past services, originally and chiefly by a government but… |
| invest verb | /ɪnˈvɛst/ | To spend money, time, or energy on something, especially for some benefit or purpose; used with in. |
| beta noun | /ˈbeɪtə/ | The second letter of the Greek alphabet (Β, β), preceded by alpha (Α, α) and followed by gamma, (Γ, γ). In modern Greek it represents the voiced labiodental… |
| portfolio noun | /pɔːtˈfəʊ.liˌəʊ/ | A case for carrying papers, drawings, photographs, maps and other flat documents. |
| neutral adjective | /ˈnuː.tɹəl/ | Not taking sides in a conflict such as war; nonaligned. |
| institutional adjective | /ˌɪn.stɪˈtju.ʃə.nəl/ | Of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or organized along the lines of an institution. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| lock up verb | /ˌlɒk ˈʌp/ | To imprison or incarcerate (someone). |
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. | |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| look through verb | To take a view of the contents of; search in, either with the eyes or by hand. | |
| back up verb | To move backwards, especially for a vehicle to do so. | |
| get out verb | To leave or escape. | |
| go down verb | To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one. | |
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Are we looking more at liquid tokens?
- Anthony, you wanna go first?
- Do you think that's going to change the type of managers?
- What's your reaction to that?
- There's the benefit of liquidity, but you know what?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | we've been surveying · have been trading |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been · we've done · have had |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be joined · is probably conditioned · was created |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | side, which is · high, which is · month, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 122 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, you're, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: exposure /ɪkˈspəʊ.ʒə(ɹ)/, pension /ˈpɛnʃən/, institutional /ˌɪn.stɪˈtju.ʃə.nəl/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, institution /ˌɪn.stɪˈtʃuː.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: portfolio /pɔːtˈfəʊ.liˌəʊ/, institutional /ˌɪn.stɪˈtju.ʃə.nəl/, regulatory /ˈɹɛɡ.jʊ.lə.t(ɔː.)ɹi/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, institution /ˌɪn.stɪˈtʃuː.ʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like bitcoin, crypto, liquid.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.