The Phone Call From Teeka I’ll Never Forget

I (Houston) am writing to you from Money20/20 in Las Vegas. 

What I saw here this week took me straight back to a phone call I got from Big T three years ago, where he told me something I’ll never forget…

“Nobody realizes how big this is.”

It was the summer of 2023. I was at my desk in Delray Beach when Teeka called me from his yacht.

“Houston, is the BlackRock news real? Please tell me this is real.” 

He sounded like he was about to reach through the phone and shake me. 

Of course, Teeka already knew. As an ex-Wall Street guy, he’s more plugged in than anyone else I know. 

But for news this big, he wanted a second set of eyes, and he knows I watch my research feeds like a hawk.

The news was real. 

That day, BlackRock – the world’s largest asset manager – had filed to launch a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).

BlackRock’s record with the SEC was 575 ETF approvals and one rejection. If this one went through, anyone with a brokerage account could buy bitcoin like a stock.

“Nobody realizes how big this is. It changes everything,” he told me. “Why is bitcoin not up $10,000 right now? Does no one understand what this means?” 

That’s when it really hit me. 

A wave of new buyers was coming, and I’d spent months sitting mostly in cash. 

We now know exactly what that meant: Within 18 months, spot bitcoin ETFs would pull in more than $35 billion of new money.      

To understand why that phone call stung, let me back up for a moment…

By early 2022, I’d moved most of my crypto into cash. My portfolio had peaked at about $1.3 million, and I wanted to protect what was left.

Then Celsius, one of the biggest crypto lenders, collapsed. A few months later, FTX’s implosion wiped out $200 billion in crypto market value in a matter of days. 

In early 2023, bitcoin started climbing anyway.     

I watched from a distance, too scared to put money back into a market that had just been devastated. 

By the time Teeka called me in June, bitcoin was up about 60% from its November low.

I felt like a fool. I’d been waiting for a starting gun and missed the run.

I estimate that waiting cost me roughly $500,000 in missed gains. 

Don’t get me wrong. Building a seven-figure portfolio from six figures of student debt taught me how to handle risk. 

But I’m still human. I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. I share them with you to spare you the trouble of repeating them. 

That summer definitely taught me an expensive lesson (I’ll come back to it in a moment). 

And today, I’m seeing a familiar disconnect between what’s happening to crypto prices and what’s being built behind the scenes. 

That’s what brought me to Vegas.

What I’m Seeing in Las Vegas

I’ve been attending crypto conferences since 2021. But Money20/20 is different.

This isn’t even a crypto conference.

It’s one of the largest gatherings of the mainstream financial technology industry. Walmart, Microsoft, and some of the biggest banks in the world have executives speaking here.

On Monday morning, I found myself sitting in an invitation-only press breakfast with representatives from Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, and the World Gold Council.

All talking about how they’re putting blockchain technology to work.

A few years ago, I had to hunt down crypto conferences to hear people talk about blockchain. When I brought up crypto with regular finance guys, they laughed in my face. 

Here, nobody’s laughing at the words “blockchain” or “stablecoin.” Execs are discussing the products they’re building with the technology… as naturally as they’d discuss any other part of their business.

After the breakfast, I pulled aside representatives from the World Gold Council – the market development organization for the global gold industry.

They’re building what they call “Gold as a Service”: shared infrastructure that lets banks and fintechs offer digital gold to their customers. Among the uses they discussed: borrowing against gold and earning income from it.

The numbers explain the urgency. The Council’s new research with Boston Consulting Group shows tokenized gold has grown fivefold since late 2024, to about $6 billion. Trading volume topped $90 billion in the first quarter of this year alone – more than in all of 2025.

And the Council estimates digital gold could unlock up to $700 billion in demand if the barriers to owning it come down.

Our subscribers have already been using tokenized gold to pursue income for about a year, sometimes earning rewards as high as 35%. 

You could say we beat them to it.

So I asked what they’d offer that was different. Their answer came down to trust: established banks, compliance, and making digital gold accessible to far more people.

Gold, the oldest store of wealth on the planet, is going on-chain. And the gold industry itself is building the on-ramp for banks.

That’s exactly what Teeka calls the Fourth Crypto Wealth Wave: traditional assets moving onto crypto infrastructure.

There’s something ironic about all this. Teeka’s recent Daily got me thinking about it… 

Back in 2019, he wrote about why he considered bitcoin “digital gold.”

At the time, plenty of people still dismissed the comparison.

Now, as he showed you on Wednesday, JPMorgan is modeling bitcoin outperforming gold over the next decade.

And here I was, seven years after Teeka made that comparison, sitting across from representatives of the gold industry itself, listening to them explain how they’re bringing gold onto blockchains.

I couldn’t help but think back to 2022, when crypto was no longer in a bull market, yet massive institutional development kept moving forward. 

Just like then, crypto isn’t in a raging bull market today, so not enough people care. But eventually, these developments become the building blocks for the next run higher. 

The time to pay attention is now. Not when bitcoin is crossing $150,000.

The Signs Are Here Again

Anyone waiting for the all-clear could end up watching from the sidelines, just like I was leading up to that phone call from Teeka.

Back then, the signs were already there…

In August 2022, BlackRock partnered with Coinbase to offer bitcoin to its institutional clients.

That October, BNY Mellon launched crypto custody, and Mastercard moved to help banks offer crypto services.

The sign I’d been waiting for was there all along. BlackRock was building a way into bitcoin 10 months before it filed for that ETF. 

I broke Teeka’s cardinal rule: Ignore the price and focus on adoption.

Today, the price looks just as discouraging. Bitcoin reached about $126,000 last October. By June, it had fallen below $60,000. As I write this, it’s around $82,000 – still roughly 35% below its peak.

High interest rates, oil prices, and instability in the Middle East are giving investors reasons to avoid risk assets like bitcoin.

Last week, a hot inflation report knocked it down to about $80,000. That’s the kind of news that kept me in cash in 2023. 

Meanwhile, bitcoin is up more than 40% from its June low.

If you rode it down from the peak, or you’ve been watching from the sidelines, you may be waiting for confirmation that the bear market is over. I was, too.

Mine came after a 35% bounce had already become a 60% run. By March 2024, bitcoin was at a new all-time high.

But look beneath the surface, and institutional adoption of digital assets is growing.

Gold isn’t alone. Last week, Teeka and I showed you how the company behind the New York Stock Exchange is preparing to let people trade stocks on blockchains around the clock.

These moves remind me of what I overlooked in the last cycle.

Back then, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, and Mastercard were laying the groundwork for crypto adoption while prices were crashing. 

Now I’m watching the gold industry and the company behind the New York Stock Exchange do the same thing. And I’m not going to make the mistake of ignoring it twice.

The Trouble With Going “All or Nothing”

That brings me back to the lesson I learned that summer: There is no starting gun. By the time it feels safe to run, the race is already well underway.

Teeka’s call finally got me off the sidelines. Within a few months, I went from mostly cash to 100% crypto. 

Now, I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone. I was young, reckless, and convinced I was right. Fear had pushed me all the way out. Regret pushed me all the way back in.

That’s the trouble with going all in or all out. You’re forced to wait for a perfect moment, when price and adoption both say it’s “safe.” That moment doesn’t exist. Waiting for it cost me roughly $500,000.

That’s why Teeka’s mantra is so simple: Be rational. Don’t let fear or greed push you into drastic moves.

Keep a “forever” bitcoin position, and limit speculative tokens to small, equal-sized bets. That way, you can stay in the game through an ugly market… and still sleep well at night.

Bitcoin is just the start. Gold, stocks, dollars… one by one, traditional assets are being tokenized, turned into digital tokens that live on a blockchain.

During his Fourth Crypto Wealth Wave briefing, Teeka showed you the two regulatory catalysts accelerating the move of traditional assets onto crypto infrastructure. 

He also uncovered the three tokens we believe are best positioned for it… and our No. 1 publicly traded stock bridging traditional finance and crypto.

If you missed Big T’s briefing, I encourage you to watch the replay right here.

I can’t promise this chop will be over tomorrow. But I know how much it cost me to let fear push me completely out of the market.

This time, I’m not waiting for another starting gun. I’m staying in the game. 

Because sitting at that press breakfast, I understood what Teeka meant on that call three years ago…

Nobody realizes how big this is.

Don’t Watch the Future Happen. Own It!

Houston Molnar