“I’m so bullish on crypto! Regulatory tailwinds are in place. The Fed is going to lower rates. The institutions are here!”
“I’m so bearish on crypto. It’s just mercenaries. Nobody is building real businesses. It’s all a scam.”
What do statements like these even mean...?
Are you talking about the next month or the next decade? About user counts or the price of Solana? Are you bullish on DeFi but bearish on NFTs?
You’d be silly to go to Silicon Valley in 2002 and declare that you’re ‘bullish’ or ‘bearish’ on the entire internet. The same is true of crypto today – it’s broad and it’s nuanced.
Here’s how we think about this:
Blockchain adoption is finally moving from vision to action. Wall Street institutions are tokenizing stocks and credit products, and the world’s largest payments company, Stripe, is launching a blockchain.
Adoption will take time – compliance, internal approvals, and legacy system upgrades always do – but the bottleneck is implementation, not demand. The direction is clear. Finance is moving on-chain. It’s hard not to be bullish here.
Bitcoin is the best performing asset in history, and it is increasingly treated as a strategic macro asset. ETF flows and structured products have deepened liquidity and reduced volatility over the past year – this strengthens BTC’s store of value pitch, though it may also imply lower forward returns.
There continue to be valid arguments against BTC that can’t be ignored – quantum computing threats, asset concentration, and the security model. Any of these narratives or simply leverage paired with MVRV-driven profit taking could create a 30-50% drawdown over short time horizons.
Even so, we’re bullish on continued institutional allocation. We believe that continued monetary debasement paired with bids necessary for global portfolios to move from underweight to target-weight will drive persistent buy pressure over the medium-to-long term.
These are businesses that use blockchain rails for distribution, settlement, or value capture. But, they are ultimately valued for the same reason as any business: expected cash flows. This includes both C-Corps like Coinbase and protocols that monetize programmatically like Uniswap.
Despite different legal wrappers, the core dynamics is the same. They build products that solve real market needs and generate revenue for stakeholders. Many of these businesses have clear product-market fit, proven business models, and strong unit economics. Further, the regulatory risks that burdened these businesses have been materially reduced.
We’re bullish on blockchain-enabled businesses across all time horizons. This is the most investable category today.
Networks are the underlying infrastructure of blockchains – the protocol, validator set, and consensus mechanism that coordinate economic activity. A network only functions when there is a sufficiently decentralized and economically aligned validator set, much like a marketplace requires enough buyers and sellers. Ethereum and Solana are the most notable examples in this category.
There is still active debate around what types of products or services require a decentralized network. You could ask, why do we need a blockchain for payments if we have something like UPI (India’s instant bank-to-bank payment network) or Alipay (China’s mobile wallet). Further, there is uncertainty about how these networks should be valued – do they resemble equities or commodities?
Even with these open questions, blockchain networks are producing real economic activity, global distribution, and valuable network effects. We believe some of the largest businesses of the coming decades will be networks, but the path will be more volatile and the power laws will be much more extreme than blockchain-enabled businesses. This category offers asymmetry, and we continue to invest in protocols with high conviction.
This is one of the largest TAMs in crypto. Bitcoin isn’t valuable because of cash flows – it’s valuable because it is a store of value. Blockchains give us infrastructure to create entirely new monetary assets, and there will be new assets that compete directly with Bitcoin.
We think this category has the potential to produce the largest outcomes of the coming decades. That said, it’s also the riskiest. It’s unclear what determines success for a new SoV. Is it the form of scarcity? The distribution mechanism? The narrative?
This is the most underexplored and misunderstood category within crypto. We believe there will be $1T+ assets created here, but it’s uncertain if that will happen on the time horizon of years or decades. It’s the furthest out on the risk / reward spectrum, and we love meeting founders here.
So, bullish or bearish? It depends on who you ask and what you’re talking about.
For us, we’re a venture fund. Our job is to think on long time horizons and invest where the risk / reward is highest. Each of these categories carries different levels of short-to-medium term risk, and we don’t pretend otherwise. But, when we zoom out to the horizons we underwrite, the signal is clear – we have a thesis we're bullish on.
Reactions and replies to this article.
fiskantes ⭐️🩸
@fiskantes
Good positive take, imo the source of the dark mood here lies more in a short to midterm outlook as everyone knows many of the things we rode in past 10 years need to die and the die-off + consolidation period will be painful for many even though over the long long run it will be all good
Evan Fisher
@evanbfish
@Fiskantes +1. it also depends on what we're talking about. it's hard to command crazy high valuations on networks w/ no clear valuation framework - they should trade like OTM call options blockchain-enabled businesses on the other hand have pretty clear frameworks imo the down mood comes from the fact that most of CT came here for the networks and new money, not for the fintech
fiskantes ⭐️🩸
@fiskantes
@evanbfish Agreed, if you wanna frame it a bit more cynically lot of people came here for easy money and fast 100x and when we start talking too much about real businesses adopting blockchains rather than another narrative rotation, its clear its not going to be easy or fast
Evan Fisher
@evanbfish
@Fiskantes There's a category of grifters that came for this. But there's also a category of people who came for the virtue snipe (new economic systems, etc). Both are duller short-term
Evan Fisher
@evanbfish
@Brionicx Agreed - it's a technology like software, which resulted in the internet, SaaS, and open source protocols
ArcellAI
@arcellai
Hi Evan! Enjoyed chatting with you sometime ago. Let’s catch up about Techbio AI <> crypto? - @avelezarce