Mark Yusko, CEO and CIO of Morgan Creek Capital Management

In this episode of The Scoop, Frank Chaparro and Matteo Leibowitz interview Mark Yusko, CEO and CIO of Morgan Creek Capital Management. Mark is also Co-Founder & Partner of Morgan Creek Digital, an asset management firm focussed on investing across the blockchain and digital assets industry. Over the course of an hour-long conversation, Mark discusses his investing philosophy, bullishness on Bitcoin, and blockchain, which economic theories best describe reality, the mistake of moving off of a gold standard, and why financial markets in 2019 may be a repeat of the dotcom bomb. As Mark says in the opening "I'll give you the give you the short version although I don't do short well."

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Yusko, a longtime allocator who built his reputation running the University of North Carolina's endowment before moving into hedge funds, had co-founded Morgan Creek Digital roughly six months earlier as a dedicated vehicle for bringing institutional capital into bitcoin and blockchain investments.

The conversation lands during bitcoin's recovery from the depths of the 2018 bear market, when prices had fallen from near 20,000 dollars to roughly 3,200 dollars before beginning to climb back above 5,000 dollars in the months leading up to this episode, and Yusko uses that backdrop to explain why he remains confident in bitcoin's long-term investment case despite the volatility.

Much of the discussion ranges into monetary history and macroeconomics, with Yusko walking through the historical decision to abandon the gold standard and arguing that bitcoin represents a modern analog to sound, scarce money in a world of expanding central bank balance sheets. He also draws direct comparisons between the 2019 crypto market and the late-1990s dot-com bubble, suggesting that many blockchain projects would ultimately fail the way most internet startups did, while the underlying technology and a handful of durable winners would go on to reshape finance much as the internet reshaped commerce.

Chaparro and Leibowitz press Yusko on how that framework should inform allocation decisions for institutions still on the sidelines. The episode captures one of institutional crypto's earliest and most vocal advocates making the case for bitcoin at a moment when mainstream Wall Street interest was still nascent and most large allocators remained firmly on the sidelines. Yusko also fields questions from the hosts about which other blockchain projects, beyond bitcoin, he thought had a realistic shot at surviving the shakeout he expected to follow the prior year's downturn.