Navigating the Emerging Asset Class of Bitcoin and Digital Assets with Ryan Lessard – Ep 072

Matthew Peck: Welcome, everyone, to another edition of SHP Financial’s Retirement Roadmap Podcast. I’ll be your host today, Matthew Peck. Thank you so much for joining us. One of the most controversial, complex, confusing, volatile investments, and I’d also say like modern investments that I can think of is Bitcoin. I can’t imagine all the questions that I have personally about the asset itself. What role does it play? What’s the future of it? What’s the history of it? Where did it come from and why is it so prominent even on an administrative process where during the campaigns President-elect Trump was talking about being the most pro-crypto president of all time?

So, we had to for our audience, and honestly, for my own curiosity, I had to find out more and learn more so that all of us can make educated decisions about what it actually is and just really round out what I think and I’ll be very curious about our guest’s opinion on this, about an asset class that is not going away either. And so, in order to learn more and to find out more and to see if there’s something that’s actually going to work for you in the future, I wanted to bring on an expert. So, with that in mind, joining us today is Ryan Lessard. He is a digital asset strategist from Fidelity and has been working at Fidelity for over eight years, but four years, specifically in the digital space. Ryan Lessard, thank you so much for joining the podcast.

Ryan Lessard: Thanks for having me, Matt. Appreciate it.

Matthew Peck: All right, my friend. So, how I like to start this is just almost like imagine like you’re at a cocktail party, right? A guy walks up to you, a guy like me, handsome, dashing. Guy comes up to you and he says, “Okay. Hey, what do you do for a living?” How do you answer that? Where do you even begin to explain Bitcoin to just a layperson?

Ryan Lessard: It’s funny you put it that way and ask because that’s the question I ask myself a lot of the time when my wife and I might go somewhere and how do I explain this to other people what I do? And I usually start with, how much time do you have? Right? If I tell them explicitly what my job is as a digital asset strategist, which has Fidelity as representing this emerging asset class and educating investors of all types on what Bitcoin or cryptocurrency at large might be, it inherently lends itself to more questions from whomever I’m talking to. So, it can be quite confusing, and I think that’s part of the education journey we’re on here today and how we can help people better understand what this topic is or what it might be in the future.

Matthew Peck: So, it is an interesting term, emerging asset class. I mean, I know emerging markets, which are let’s say Thailand or Vietnam or some of the countries, their economies are growing. So, how often do you have an emerging asset class? I mean, that must be a new concept. It seems like a new concept to me.

Ryan Lessard: That’s part of the fun of this, in my opinion, is you don’t have one very often. Right? You mentioned emerging market debt. That’s one of the more recent examples outside of cryptocurrency or digital assets, a word I’ll use interchangeably, but it’s usually every other decade at best that you see something like this come along. And I think as investors, whether that’s professionally or personally, it should strike us with some intellectual curiosity of, “Hey, I have a chance to understand something new. Maybe I should lean in and learn something here that I don’t know quite yet.”

Matthew Peck: Okay. And let me stop you there too, because you mentioned you use cryptocurrency and digital asset interchangeably. So, truly, they are. So, if I’m talking to anybody out there and I say, “Okay, digital asset,” that means cryptocurrency. Are they really the exact same thing or should we separate them? Because no, one is more currency, it’s a cryptocurrency and no, that’s an asset. That’s, I don’t know. I mean, I guess, are they pretty much the same thing?

Ryan Lessard: It depends who you ask. If they’re trying to use them to differentiate topic areas, which I think it’s fair to say some might. Cryptocurrency, if you break down the word, is cryptography, right, the way of encoding digital information. And then currency and I’m sure will impact us of what that even means and is this money or something of that extent. And then digital assets at large could also just mean any traditional asset or any digital-only asset that’s somehow now in a digital form. And I think that lends itself to how do these things exist, the technologies that they were built upon. The word blockchain I’m sure has been thrown around. But the idea of bringing something into the digital ecosystem, whether that’s something that only lives there like a Bitcoin or if that’s something that also lives outside in the traditional world as we know it.

Matthew Peck: Okay. So, yeah, so we’ll kind of start there. Because I guess one of my biggest questions is that I’ve also heard it referred to as digital gold. And I guess maybe we’ll start there in regards to kind of like comparing and contrasting, right? Because I think of gold and I think of Fort Knox and I think of all these guards protecting it. And I’ve always heard Buffett’s line where it’s like he never really trusted gold. Or he trusted gold but he never really invested in gold because it’s something that you dig up under armed guards and then move over here and bury under armed guards. And so, didn’t really invest in it because didn’t really sort of grow per se.

But at the same point, whatever, I have a gold wedding ring, right? And I can see it, I can taste it, I cannot smell it, but I have an idea of what gold is. And I know that it’s been used for centuries and millennium to put crowns on people’s heads and different things like that. So, okay, gold, you can melt down and you can, again, you can taste it. I’m sorry. Forgive me. You can touch it. And I don’t want to taste it. Yeah, maybe the old miners back in the 1840 munching on there biting it to find out if it’s real gold or not. But I guess I can see that having value. The old man in me can see having gold having value but how does a digital asset have value?

Ryan Lessard: That’s a real challenge and I think it’s where most people stop their journey as soon as it starts is there’s just this intangible hurdle and a lot of folks’ heads of something that’s entirely digital by nature. How can it possess any intrinsic value? I think it’s fair depending on your age and not to generalize, but you grew up in different ages of technology and the Internet and investors of a younger demographic and age, they grew up alongside the Internet’s growth and the advancement of computers into your pocket in technology or even in a world now entirely where that technology already exists in its not final form, but a really usable, feasible everyday form.

And so, for those folks, and if you want to put different brackets around it, you can, to them, digital assets as an only way of access isn’t a hurdle. It’s just more of their reality, right? Something can have plenty of intrinsic value even if you can’t physically touch it or hold it. And I think we see some of these trends in terms of investment demographics of who’s allocating to this anyways. There’s a great study from Bank of America Merrill Lynch for their high net worth investors. They put this out on an annual basis, publish it in the summer.

So, this came out 6 or 7 months ago at this point, and they break down investors into just two demographics, 21 to 43-year-olds and 44-year-old plus. And they ask them a lot of questions. It’s not just about Bitcoin or crypto, but one of the questions they ask is how do you allocate your money. In those investors, 44-year-old plus come in probably where you’d expect. On average, they’re allocating 1% to crypto. So, for every person that has 0%, there’s probably one person out there with maybe 5% of their portfolio to get there. But of that 21 to 43-year-old subset, on average, 14% of their portfolio is in crypto.

And to me, I take a step back and I say, “That’s a lot,” but it’s not surprising to me in the same breath back to the origin of your question, right, of they don’t have that mental model of this hurdle of why would I own these things because they’re only digital? They start to think about why wouldn’t I as much as anything else. So, you’re coming from two different places to the same conversation of what these things are or what this is if you’re taking only Bitcoin, for example. But it is part of the framework and it’s part of the intellectual curiosity of understanding this is trying to put that aside for a second if I can’t physically touch it necessarily to just figuring out what it is, right?

Matthew Peck: Okay. Well, let’s go right there then. So, what is it? Sometimes I just think automatically of Bitcoin when I think of crypto, a digital asset, but I know there’s a whole bunch out there. So, if you are helping a layperson understand it, do you just stay on Bitcoin and just say, “Okay. Let’s just understand Bitcoin before we move on to Solana and Ether and all the other ones”?

Ryan Lessard: Yeah. I think that’s a healthy place to start. You know, we say Bitcoin first because it’s the oldest and largest cryptocurrency, right, by market cap as well. And it’s helpful if you understand some of the fundamental attributes of how it works that you can apply some of those same principles to other cryptocurrencies and those networks. And there’s unique things about all of those, of course, that investors should understand. But nonetheless, if you understand Bitcoin, it’s a healthy starting point of what this is. And really Bitcoin was created as an idea in 2008, a white paper published on Halloween by Satoshi Nakamoto, who Satoshi is actually unknown to this day trying to create this peer-to-peer cash transfer system with some sort of non-sovereign digital money.

Now, the reality of that actually is despite that being the origin of Bitcoin, right, and it starts trading in January 3rd, 2009, it’s been 16 years now, is that people have been trying to create digital money, anonymous money, if you will, in some capacity since the 1980s and 1990s. They just couldn’t figure out how to do it in a decentralized manner. All the iterations that came before, many of them were centralized, so they were just a new extension of the legacy monetary system, private money in some capacity. And so, Bitcoin for the first time was when you had this decentralized network and that enabled us to look into what is now the Bitcoin network today and how that’s evolved over time.

And the reality of Bitcoin and there’s much to unpack here still is it’s two things, and I think that’s important to understand when you’re trying to evaluate how this exists or how it works. And we grammatically differentiate them. Uppercase B Bitcoin would be the network itself, the software code, the rails on which the money moves. And then lowercase B bitcoin is the token itself, the digital bear instrument, the thing that has value that you might go purchase and then send to someone else or store or whatever you choose to do as an investor. So, there’s differentiation of the network, the rails, the asset. And then the network is also possible by that third B that I started with earlier, which is blockchain technology.

And blockchain is just a digital ledger system. So, that’s important to know that a ledger is a way of record-keeping information, right? This is just a digital way of doing that. Bitcoin happens to have its own unique blockchain, but blockchain isn’t specific to Bitcoin. Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap has its own blockchain for that network too. So, blockchain can be multipurpose. But in the case of Bitcoin and its network, it’s what enables the record-keeping of that transaction.

Matthew Peck: Which I think involves a whole centralized or as a decentralized, right? So, explain that difference between what’s a centralized monetary system or asset system and what’s a decentralized.

Ryan Lessard: Yeah. The centralized system is the one that most of us are familiar with, the idea you have a government in charge that issues a currency. Maybe that currency, in the case of the US, is run by a central bank, the Federal Reserve in the US or another central bank, depending on where you are in the world. And there’s about 160 fiat currencies, as we’ll call them, issued by governments worldwide. So, there’s a lot of examples of this where there’s one ruling party, whether that’s, again, a government, an authoritarian, whomever is in charge of that central bank, a president. But the example kind of persists where they have full control over the system, right?

They choose to create more money, get rid of money, whatever they see fit, ideally for the benefit of their citizens, but at times their citizens aren’t always top of mind. And I think thinking back to Bitcoin’s origin 2008-2009 global financial crisis, people maybe having that thought, “Do institutions have me in mind as a citizen?” And that’s part of what started Bitcoin, right, this idea of an opt-out non-sovereign system where the rules of the road were really controlled by the masses rather than a single CEO, government, etc.

Matthew Peck: So, when it comes to you mentioned peer-to-peer, so peer-to-peer lending, I mean, was money put into the system at all or was this sort of just created and they just said…? Because I guess mining, I guess that’s the other one that people and me, personally, I understand the fact that okay it’s also the scarcity involved. Yeah. So, there’s a couple of terms I’m going to throw out you and then you can sort of take one at a time. Mining always confused me because it’s like, okay, data mining, I think it’s a computer and somehow it creates it with this computer. But I also know that there’s like scarcity that that’s involved too where there’s only so many Bitcoin that are going to be created. And now 95% are officially out there as well. So, tell me like how Bitcoin is created in the mining aspect. If you could just sort of walk us through that too.

Ryan Lessard: Yeah, and I think it’s important to understand, right? We think mining, we think hardhats, picks and shovels, getting the actual…

Matthew Peck: Remember, we talked about those two demographics at the beginning. I’m in the second demographic. So, you know.

Ryan Lessard: There’s nothing wrong with that. I think the opportunity here is Bitcoin can be for whoever wants to participate. But to your question, right, Bitcoin has its own unique monetary policy, which is really important to understand. And if we get to that, we get to that on how you think about valuing it as you want to understand how much Bitcoin exists or how much Bitcoin will exist in the future. And Bitcoin has this preprogrammed monetary policy where as you described, we know the exact issuance rate of Bitcoin both exactly how many exist now today in 2025, which is almost 19.8 million in the max that will ever exist, which is 21 million.

So, to your point, Matt, we’re 95% of the way there of the total supply of Bitcoin that will ever exist. Most of it has already been created and it is created through a process called mining that you’re describing. And at the end of the day, in the case of a digital asset, mining is a series of computers, right? Running the network and part of what secures…

Matthew Peck: Running the big B.

Ryan Lessard: Big B, Bitcoin network itself, right? And all that is at the end of the day is computers all around the world because it is decentralized. They can be anywhere that they plug in running Bitcoin’s code or software, very specifically. And in the old days, back when Bitcoin started, I call it 2009-2010, this was happening on your regular old computer. You could plug in a laptop and choose to run Bitcoin. Nowadays, there’s very specific computers that are needed to run the network just due to the processing power it takes, how many people are on it, how much is being input at any given time.

So, these are called ASICs, application-specific integrated circuits. But just think of them as a computer built for one purpose, which is running the Bitcoin network. And the whole purpose of that is to secure the network with energy. They are processing the transactions. If I were to send you Bitcoin, Matt, it needs to be confirmed. Someone needs to say this is a valid transaction.

Matthew Peck: On that ledger system. Decentralized ledger system. There has to be computers running, supporting the transactions wherever they may be happening.

Ryan Lessard: 100%. The way that works is they’re actually processed in batches every ten minutes on average, and they’re put into what is called a block. And so, that block is added to the blockchain, which is just a string of all the record-kept transactions since 2009 when Bitcoin launched to ten minutes ago today as we sit here in 2025 and you can see that as Bitcoin’s network is also public and auditable. So, you can go online.

Matthew Peck: So, if you lend your ASIC, if you lend your computer, let’s say, whatever your infrastructure data set or whatever it is, just for lack of a better term, if you lend it to run in the kind of support that system, it’s decentralized again so it’s hundreds of these little sort of stations around. I know some of them are actually more sort of concentrated nowadays. So, you have all these 100 PCs. I’m just going to break it down to simplify. They have thousands of PCs, personal computers, obviously. I know they are a lot more tech or a lot more sophisticated now, but it’s like, okay, as a reward for running, helping to run and keep the system alive, you’ll get awarded a Bitcoin for helping to contribute. Is that kind of what it is?

Ryan Lessard: You’re dead on. And I think that’s the beauty of how Bitcoin was created is the process in which you verify transactions, which you’re describing, running the software and going through this guess and check math formula to prove out that you have the right to verify these transactions. There’s only one miner at a time, gets this every ten minutes, but they verify the transactions and they’re rewarded for their efforts. And that reward is the new bitcoin that’s created actually. So, it’s a dual-sided process of record validation and new Bitcoin issuance. And we know exactly what that looks like in terms of how many Bitcoins. So, every ten minutes when this verification happens, 3.125 Bitcoins in 2025 are created net new and given as a reward to that miner.

Matthew Peck: To that miner for again, just for being the support system, the bells at the backup IT system.

Ryan Lessard: Yeah for running the network for being a participant and for verifying transactions at the end of the day. So, they are the infrastructure that keeps the network moving.

Matthew Peck: Okay. So, you mentioned about transactions because I imagine mining where they’re creating new ones, how much transactions happen? I mean, from your knowledge, I mean how much is not just new ones getting created but, Ryan, you and me, we’re exchanging Bitcoin. I mean, would I Venmo you a Bitcoin? How much transactions themselves in your knowledge are actually out there versus how much are people just sort of mining or buying Bitcoin on the open marketplace and then just like putting it in their pocket or their digital wallet? You know, in other words, how much are people actually exchanging it versus how much are people just buying and holding it?

Ryan Lessard: Yeah, I think that’s a good place to almost pause and reflect on what is Bitcoin anyways, as you start to ask about are people transferring it to each other? Are they using it to pay for things, coffee, or what’s the purpose of those transactions? How often are people doing that? And that’s where I usually get the question of, “Hey, Ryan, you call this thing that is Bitcoin some sort of decentralized monetary network or decentralized monetary asset. What is that?” “Are you just trying to say money?” I think is the question I usually get. Are people just having it to be money and using it as money?

And, Matt, I think we were talking earlier, you described that money, I agree, is really three things principally. If you were to break it down into what are the characteristics of money, it’s a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. And now as we sit here in the United States, we don’t think about that very often. And that’s a great luxury because the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. And for the last 40 years plus on the fiat standard, it’s worked as we expect it as designed. So, we went to bed every night not thinking too much about it, woke up the next day and it still worked just as we expected, more or less.

And so, we didn’t have to principally think about how money works. But then we remember we’re 330, 350 million people here in the United States, and there’s billions of people worldwide that don’t have that luxury and they do think about how it works more often in terms of does it accomplish what they’re hoping. So, unit of account, right? Straightforward enough, it’s just how you price goods and services. It’s how you differentiate value.

Matthew Peck: Yeah. The price of this microphone, the price of this cup of coffee.

Ryan Lessard: Yeah, they’re posted in dollars, at least especially here in the United States but you can differentiate that value easily that the microphone is worth a lot less than a new car or something to that extent. So, medium of exchange is how most people think about money. And in fairness, that was the principal reason money was created to get rid of a barter system where thousands of years ago you show up to market.

Matthew Peck: Yeah. I’ll trade you 300 microphones for one car. I mean, that’s not going to work that well.

Ryan Lessard: Yeah. It’s not efficient. And it never was, especially in the old days. And you had many iterations of that medium of exchange, seashells, right, pelts of animals. You can think of beads or other examples across time. And they were just ways of exchanging in lieu of real physical goods or services, but medium of exchange, what we forget, given that there’s 160 or so fiat currencies worldwide, it’s usually very jurisdictional besides the US dollar. So, the dollar’s great as the world’s reserve currency because you can go most places and still just pay in dollars. Whoever you’re paying will probably still take your dollar.

But if you go to dinner tonight in the United States and have a friend visiting from Europe and the waiter or waitress brings your bill and your friend goes, “Hey, Matt, let me take this. I’m going to cover this. Thanks for having me,” and tries to pay in euros, the waiter or waitress kind of look at them sideways, shake their head, “Hey, I know this is real money, right? I’ve seen this before, but we just don’t accept this here.” And so, that’s where you start to realize that most monies in terms of payments are only as good as where they’re issued or where you live sovereignly as a citizen. And so, Bitcoin’s unique as it’s non-sovereign.

It doesn’t have a single jurisdiction in which it operates, but rather it’s just a network of whoever is participating in it, whoever chooses to accept it. Doesn’t matter if they live here in the United States or across the world. And to be fair, in pause, I’m not saying people use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange today. Actually, most people don’t use it to pay for coffee or anything of that nature. Now, you could. Places like Tesla have accepted Bitcoin for cars across time. There’s ways you could find someone to accept it. But really, it gets down to the store of value aspect of money, and that’s the most important part of it. It’s just the idea of preserving purchasing power.

You earn $1,000 today with some expectation that a year from now that $1,000 can buy the same amount of goods and services that it could today, right? And that’s the idea of a savings account at a bank. You put it away and you kind of let it sit and save it for a rainy day. And that’s worked again for 40-plus years in the United States at least. Until the last four years, people started to familiarize themselves with this concept of inflation. And inflation is the intentional debasement of your purchasing power by that central bank when we’re talking about a few minutes ago, who controls money anyways? The targeted annual inflation rate has been 2% and we were running sub that for a long time in the United States.

So, it wasn’t really top of mind. You more or less preserve purchasing power. But when you get the high single digits in the case of the United States or anywhere else in the billions of people in the world that live under hyperinflation, you don’t have the luxury of going to bed and waking up the next day with your money being worth the same thing it was yesterday. So, people seek out inherently store of value assets, things like gold, real estate, collectibles, other things that are scarce historically to preserve that purchasing power. And you mentioned it. Is this an emerging asset or emerging asset class? That’s where Bitcoin fits in as this we’d call it emerging store of value.

Matthew Peck: Yeah. Well, and I think too just to go back for all of our listeners, as you mentioned earlier, economists have defined a currency as those three things, a unit to measure, a store of value, and then a medium of exchange. And so, easily Bitcoin can fit under three of the three but normally the two of the three, two out of the three is by far, which is why I think the regulators have a tough time with it because I’ve heard it both. I’ve heard they say, okay, no, it’s currency. I’ve heard it’s argued it’s a currency. I’ve also heard argued it’s a commodity. I don’t want to get in either one of us into hot water but it’s like, I mean, I guess I’m trying… I don’t want your opinion if there’s one or the other, but, I mean, I guess, have you seen it defined one more than the other in your daily life?

Ryan Lessard: Yeah. I’d say from a regulatory standpoint, that’s the challenge. Depending on who you ask, it’s defined different ways as well. Commodity in terms of how is originally regulated by the CFTC. Now, I think thinking of it as a commodity is helpful just to get a mental framework of valuation or where it might go in the future akin to a digital gold as we were talking about. And that’s probably the easiest analog for most people of supply and demand and valuation. And the uniqueness to what you’re describing a little bit ago is Bitcoin’s hard cap supply.

And again, as a perfectly inelastic asset, meaning you can’t just create more besides what’s preprogrammed, that makes it really unique in terms of how it’s going to work into the future versus what is potentially the growing demand. And I think you’re at Fidelity, that’s part of the future we see. We’ve had ten years of researching this space, long before it was commercialized at our business or long before we even knew for sure what the future looked like. But it’s not if digital assets will be part of the future. It’s more of a how, right? And that’s what we’re trying to understand alongside everyone else, is this is an ever-changing, fast-moving space and staying on top of it.

Matthew Peck: Well, I think what really stood out to me was the international sort of view of there and forgive my Homer-ism, because I’m thinking in terms of, okay, I’m not going to use it that often. But wait a second. If I’m in Argentina, Türkiye’s got some terrible I know it’s been getting better and worse, Brazil issues there. But I mean, talk about yeah, again, we have 350 million, but we have a 7 billion. There’s a whole lot of people out there that do think of it day to day and I think the dollar dominance is something that we all take for granted, as we should, because it’s been that way for such a long period of time, but there’s so many people out there in the world.

So, I guess that international aspect of it, international growth, and supply and demand honestly did not cross my mind as I started looking at it at that point. Off the wall question on because it’s like you hear about it every single day, any impact of AI on this space or not really? We’re talking apples and oranges?

Ryan Lessard: I’d say mostly apples and oranges right now, at least as we sit here today. I think there’s a future state of our world and these questions and concerns come up often. It’s less AI, maybe quantum computing. How does that drive the future of digital assets? There’s questions to be asked not just of Bitcoin or crypto, but just encryption as we know it, and how do we protect ourselves from some of these systems? And we’re far ways off from solving that problem. But I think the good news is both folks in the Bitcoin digital asset space are researching that, staying on top of those trends as well as the traditional security agency space.

So, probably more to come. I think naturally, though, it makes sense that there would be some sort of intersection of these worlds if they’re both digital in nature and topic areas in the future that we’ll probably be discussing more than less.

Matthew Peck: Okay. And then to go back to the international nature of it, the dollar, etc., I’ve heard that there are… Will they create a digital dollar? And I’ve heard no, the Fed’s going to do it. I’ve also heard President Trump might want to have a Bitcoin storage system and different things along those lines. Again, this is just headlines that I’ve seen along the way. I mean, have you seen any movement? I think the yuan has a digital version of it in China. I mean, how much of these centralized banks getting into their own digital asset space?

Ryan Lessard: Sure. Yeah. It unpacks a few different trends and advancements in cryptocurrency at large when you start to think about this. And it gets back to the idea of you’re a citizen in an emerging market country where you don’t have stability of your local currency. You’re always seeking out alternatives. If you were living in Egypt of March of last year, 2024, you went to bed in one night and woke up and the purchasing power of the Egyptian pound was devalued by 40% overnight. And so, it’s one of many examples of local currencies not working. But what do you do if you’re a citizen in one of these countries?

Most often they’re actually seeking out US dollars, right, the idea of having a currency that’s been historically more stable. The challenge is how you get them a lot of the time, right? You don’t have access to US capital markets. Maybe there’s a black market on the streets with physical dollars or you’re storing your wealth in gold bars or in real estate valuations or some other alternative, back to the scarcity aspect of how do you try to preserve purchasing power. And so, Bitcoin’s really unique because, again, it’s decentralized, it’s accessible where you have the Internet, and it’s as simple as having a device where you have some sort of account to help you access it. Right?

And there’s many iterations of that in practice but the idea of just being connected to the Internet. Now, there’s this other technology that was created to your question called Stablecoins a number of years ago. And what a Stablecoin is, is a privatized version of the digital dollar, if you will. So, rather than being issued by the US government, it’s issued by private corporations and it’s a stable value asset, right? Different than a store of value, meaning it’s pegged 1 to 1 with the US dollar. Its value doesn’t fluctuate and it’s backed in most cases, at least the collateralized examples we’ll use by T-bills or other short-term fixed-income instruments.

And so, there’s $200 billion worth of market cap in that type of instrument today with stablecoins and that’s another access vehicle for someone in Egypt or somewhere around the world who’s trying to access US dollar markets. They can buy this somewhere else as long as they’re connected to some sort of vendor or intermediary on ramp that lets them purchase it. But it is a little bit different to your point of like issuing by a government, a central bank, digital currency, CBDC, is a topic that’s come up and that’s the example in China. They tried a beta version of a digital yuan and it hasn’t really proliferated yet. They’re experimenting as much as anything else, but there’s a lot of concerns or questions on how do you do that ethically.

What do you do with people’s money? Is it an oversight? Not questions for probably me or you to answer, but regulators and legislators at large. Alas, I think these stablecoins, these privatized versions are filling that void in the interim, at least if someone wants some sort of digital dollar exposure.

Matthew Peck: Yeah, kind of bridging it. But that also brings up a good point. So, there are many coins. So, how does, I mean, what’s the difference? You mentioned, okay, maybe there are different rails so I’m taking notes, dutifully taking notes here. And maybe it’s different rail system and it’s different technology behind it. But I mean, there are so many different coins. Then you get into the Doge, not the new Doge, but the old Doge. And sometimes people are just like, “Wait a second, is this all just a joke and a farce to get people to lose money?” And there’s also obviously some shenanigans with Bankman-Fried and FTX and all that other stuff.

So, it’s like walk us through the different coins and why is that important or kind of how they differentiate and why is that important? And then, yeah, I guess as you start there, I’ll stop with that question. But why the different coins? Why are they different, if you don’t mind walking us through that?

Ryan Lessard: Of course. Yeah. The challenge ultimately is not just for any investor or someone listening to this, you, and also me who is doing this full time every day, is there’s no moat to creating a coin. Someone can spin one up in 10 seconds, Ryan Lessard coin and there’s thousands of these things.

Matthew Peck: Is there a Ryan Lessard coin?

Ryan Lessard: Unless someone else made it, I have not made one yet. And the reality of it though where you see people creating these things, they’re termed meme coins quite often and often they don’t even have ever any sort of intrinsic value. Right? They’re not really sought out to have it. Sometimes there are. So, I like to separate that. Meme coins might just be a coin that anyone can create. There’s never meant to be really a purpose of it. Maybe it’s fun, right? Or something of that extent.

Matthew Peck: Sorry. Would NFTs, non-fungible tokens, fall under the meme coin or is that a different category?

Ryan Lessard: I would say it’s more of a different category. NFT in its simplest form is more of a technology in some extent too. It’s popularized mostly by art and other things like examples. But non-fungible token, the way to think about that is you have one iteration of something and it’s provable via the blockchain. So, you can point back to the blockchain that I am the true owner, even if it is a picture of a rock or something example, whatever the point may be. But you can prove ownership via the blockchain and it’s non-fungible, meaning it’s not exchangeable for a different version. It’s unique in its form.

But there’s other verticals, and that’s how I usually think about this in terms of cryptocurrencies at large. Bitcoin in this kind of non-sovereign monetary asset is in a certain vertical of what it’s trying to do and how that’s evolved over 15, 16 years. Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is probably in a bigger vertical with more players at this moment. I think about that as a decentralized compute network to build decentralized applications on. So, think about how today you have an application on your phone, right? If you have an Apple iPhone, it’s built via iOS is the App store, it’s via the operating system.

Ethereum can be thought of as more of the operating system in which you build these applications. But similar to Bitcoin, in a way, it’s non-sovereign. It’s decentralized. There’s no one company like Apple in charge of that, right? So, it creates a neutral framework, a neutral foundation to build things on. And there’s more people trying to compete for that land space, right? In terms of when I say people different coins or networks, rather, that are trying to build something similar with different tweaks on the margins for efficiency or what have you. And so, we’ll see that evolve. We’ve seen it evolve over decade past in crypto. I always say buyer beware in some of this stuff, right?

You have to do your homework. There’s a lot to understand in many of these facets and aspects and the takeaway is most of it’s still technically unregulated. And I think that’s where we’re hopefully going in the future is healthy regulation legislation that gives us guardrails to operate, that lets us know what are the rules of the road, both as builders, managers, investors, and so we can have a healthy ecosystem developed around that and give folks more comfort about what this is or what it might be.

Matthew Peck: And then but when the ETF did come out, Fidelity and obviously some competitors have it, are they just staying in the Bitcoin space or do some of these guys blend or the funds themselves have multiple coins within them?

Ryan Lessard: Yeah. In the United States today, so this would vary even by where you are in the world, but in the United States, the only two cryptocurrencies that are allowed to be put in an exchange-traded product are Bitcoin and Ethereum. So, we’ll see if that changes, right? The world is ever-evolving. There’s not much to say yet until that happens to change and we know but that’s where we stand today, Bitcoin, Ethereum.

Matthew Peck: Okay. And so, then to kind of be crystal clear for all of our listeners, this is not a recommendation by any means to invest in. Everyone’s situation is unique. You know, it’s funny, I heard a good term and then realized that it has like filled with other terms. They say like every snowflake is unique. And I’m like, “My clients, they’re unique, they’re snowflakes.” And I’m like, “Oh, I think people use snowflakes in a negative term nowadays.” But anyway, every situation is unique. So, certainly, talk to your advisor at that point. But how do people if someone says like, “Yep, I’m actually…” Well, two questions. Number one, how do people actually invest in it?

And number two is like in your experience and yours alone, I mean, is it people that I’ve heard people that are just people that like Bitcoin are either sort of like technocrats and they love the technology of it. And also, there are people that are just sort of pessimists, right, where they think, “Oh, gosh the debasement is going to happen.” Almost the bunker type of guys they say like, “Okay. Not the world’s going to end but with the type of debt and deficit that we have, debasement is the only option that the US is going to do.” So, I’ve heard it called a very pessimistic investment. So, let’s start with sort of one at a time, right? How do people actually invest in it? Right.

And assuming it’s right for them? Again, not a recommendation. Sorry, I hit that again. And then secondly is who have you seen the people that are really jazzed up about it?

Ryan Lessard: Yeah. I think what’s been unique about Bitcoin from its origin until now, it’s been a retail-first phenomenon. The idea that it was just a coin accessible via the internet with no barriers of entry if you had an Internet connection and could figure out how to buy it in the early days, right? And so, there’s many ways to own it in 2025 in terms of continuing to just go by spot, right, just buying the coin outright through some intermediary, buy a wrapped product like an exchange-traded product that gives you exposure to that single asset that is Bitcoin or other iterations of being your own bank, taking ownership of it and self-custodying would be an example.

And at the end of the day, they’re just getting you exposure to the underlying that is Bitcoin in some different iteration whether you own that or you have price exposure to it. And it’s more to me about operational convenience for folks than anything else. And they’re trying to make that decision of how they own it. It’s choice of how sophisticated from a technology standpoint are they in terms of trying to get access or do they want more convenience, maybe in a traditional investment account.

All that aside, though as the years have gone by, Bitcoin’s volatility has come down but I still acknowledge to your buyer beware caveat that it’s still volatile relative to most things that investors own in terms of diversification and how they think about in the context of a portfolio. So, inherently, it lends itself to you as an investor or your advisor knows you better than anyone else and your risk tolerance and your ability to withstand those swings.

Matthew Peck: The volatility. Right.

Ryan Lessard: And so, that’s part of the puzzle of who owns it. It’s part of who can own it from that standpoint, right, their risk tolerance at the end of the day. And then, yes, there are people thinking about it for different reasons. Are they looking at it as some sort of tech venture play? Is that their angle of investment opportunity? Or maybe in the other case that you described. Are they looking at it some sort of hedge as this store of value asset on monetary debasement of maybe it’s the US dollar if they live here in the United States that they think is on the horizon, or maybe if they live somewhere else in the world, it’s the debasement that’s already been occurring in their local currency for a number of years or decades, and that’s a reality that they’re already forced to work through.

So, it always depends on the person. And it being non-sovereign, I think opens up a lot of avenues of who that person is, where they live, what their unique challenges might be.

Matthew Peck: Yeah. And I think that’s the point that I was going to say because I think probably our listeners’ heads are probably not spinning, but like, okay, we’ll allow this to kind of let them digest a little bit. And me personally too, because, Ryan, this has been absolutely fantastic. And I’ll try to sort of summarize a little bit here, because not to mention this is just the start. I mean, I talk about the tip of the iceberg. I know there’s the staking and there’s interest because I’m thinking like there are dividends involved. I know that you can be in some of them. There’s interest-bearing and there’s a whole other world or all other levels clearly to the digital asset world. I mean, one of the two big takeaways that I had was just the international.

And you kind of brought it up just at the last part really what I want to hit there. It’s the international aspect of it that, honestly, it did not compute for me prior to you spending your time with us, is that that international aspect of it, right? Or combining the international aspect with the idea of that purchasing power where, okay, I do mean hyperinflation. If you want to go all the way back to the Weimar Republic in the 1920s in Germany, it happens. It can happen and obviously it happened here in America, at least in the 70s and 80s but then just recently, obviously with the COVID supply chains and up to, whatever, close to 10%. I mean, that’s a scary event when that happens.

And so, if that’s the concern of the purchasing power, it makes a lot of sense. And again, seeing it from the international perspective, where it’s not just American concern. It can be of the international concern where it’s a lot higher at that point. So, those two things that were just were really my big takeaways. And then as I mentioned, we could probably have you on a whole bunch and we could probably repeat all the questions again, just to really, truly wrap our minds around it. I mean, actually, that would be my last question for you. It’s like, do you ever feel like you truly master it or are you constantly learning, too, yourself about this space?

Ryan Lessard: Constantly learning. And I think that’s part of the fun, right? There’s always something new to think about, learn about, and educate yourself on with an emerging asset, an asset class that’s still growing. And I bring it back to my four years at Fidelity in the firm’s ten years of researching Bitcoin and digital assets as the asset class evolved and the commercial businesses built along the way as we’re still in our research and development group thinking about the next 5 to 10 years, right, and how that potentially impacts our customers who want to allocate to this alongside the traditional assets.

So, the learning journey never ends and it moves a lot faster even than most spaces that we’re familiar with. And so, what I always leave people with is just be intellectually curious. I think it’s a phrase I’ve repeated many times, but I think that’s the beauty of it. If you’ve even formed some opinion from a starting point of good, bad, or indifferent, revisit this. Try to think about characteristically what this is or what these things are, why they were built, and what the future could look like depending on demographic trends or otherwise and how that may be shaped or impacted, vice versa, by these assets and technologies.

Matthew Peck: No, absolutely. All the macro events which we’re all going to be living, which we’re all living through right now as we go. So, Ryan Lessard, the digital asset strategist at Fidelity, thank you so much for joining us, the SHP Financial Retirement Roadmap Podcast. Thank you all for listening and join us next time.