By Frances Yue
Dan Morehead.
In 2013, Dan Morehead, founder and managing director at Pantera Capital – back then, a global macro hedge fund – called on investors to invest in bitcoin, a fringe, little-understood digital asset that was launched in 2009.
“Bitcoins are now trading at $65 – exactly half the price they were trading at our first meeting on May 28. I think we should buy aggressively now,” he wrote in a letter to investors in July 2013. “I am going to buy 30,000 bitcoins this weekend with personal money. The Fund can have this purchase or not, as others wish. I just want to get involved.”
Pantera then launched its Pantera Bitcoin Fund and pivoted the firm to focus on crypto.
“[Many] people thought I was crazy,” Morehead, a former trader at Goldman Sachs and Tiger Management, recalled in an interview with MarketWatch.
Fast forward to 2025: Bitcoin (BTCUSD) was trading at around $115,000 on Friday, while the cryptocurrency industry has grown from a niche experiment into an ecosystem increasingly integrated with traditional financial markets – a change that’s been reinforced as President Donald Trump advances an agenda viewed as friendly to the sector.
Meanwhile, Pantera has become one of the biggest asset managers and venture-capital firms in crypto. The firm now manages $4.7 billion in assets, and backs over 100 crypto companies including exchange Coinbase Global Inc. (COIN), stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group Inc. (CRCL) and blockchain-based payments company Ripple Labs Inc., among others.
As Morehead gained prominence, his growing influence in crypto was echoed by a handful of his Princeton University classmates, who would also emerge as key players in the industry. Those include Gavin Andresen, once the Bitcoin network’s lead developer; Michael Novogratz, founder of crypto-investment firm Galaxy Investment Partners; Pete Briger, the chairman of Fortress Investment Group who also serves on the board of Michael Saylor’s Strategy Inc. (MSTR); and Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of blockchain-software firm Consensys.
Yet it hasn’t all been great news. The U.S. Senate Finance Committee has been investigating whether Morehead violated federal tax law to avoid hundreds of millions of dollars by moving to Puerto Rico, which offers residents a special tax break, according to a February article by the New York Times. Morehead said in a statement then that “I believe I acted appropriately with respect to my taxes,” and declined to comment further for this article.
During an interview with MarketWatch on Thursday at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York – where Pantera’s portfolio company Figure Technology Solutions Inc. (FIGR) went public that day – Morehead discussed why he now expects bitcoin to double in value in a year, yet sees smaller tokens outperforming it over the next few years, and outlined his broader forecasts for the future of crypto.
What’s next for bitcoin
There’s a growing debate on whether what’s become known as bitcoin’s four-year cycle still holds true. Morehead’s answer is yes.
Historically, analysts have split bitcoin’s price moves into four phases – breakout, hype, correction and accumulation – based on the asset’s halving schedule. Halvings are events that occur about every four years that cut the rewards that miners receive for verifying transactions on the blockchain in half, limiting new supply of bitcoin.
While the first three halvings in bitcoin’s history helped spark rallies by increasing scarcity, some argue that the halvings’ influence has waned as different factors now shape bitcoin’s price. Still, Morehead said studying the cycle remains important for gauging the crypto’s next move.
To support his argument, he cited a call he made in November 2022 that the crypto would hit $117,482 on Aug. 11, 2025, based on his analysis of bitcoin’s performance after the previous three halvings. Bitcoin did rise above that level by Morehead’s target date, and then rallied to a record high at $124,495.51 on Aug. 14 before pulling back, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Now, Morehead said he expects bitcoin’s price to double in a year and trade above $230,000, then eventually rise to $1 million.
Still, this cycle may be different from those in the past, Morehead added. One notable distinction is that President Trump has been pushing forward a series of policies that are considered friendly to the crypto industry. In July, Trump signed the Genius Act – the first federal law regulating stablecoins, cryptocurrencies whose values are linked to another asset, often the U.S. dollar DXY. That same month, the president’s Working Group on Digital Assets released a report with regulatory recommendations for the industry, signaling that digital assets have become a policy priority.
Against that backdrop, Morehead said he expects altcoins, or crypto tokens other than bitcoin, to outperform in the next three years. Altcoins could benefit more from the Trump administration’s policies, he noted, after suffering from regulatory uncertainty during the previous administration when Gary Gensler, former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, called most of them securities. Gensler said that bitcoin was the only crypto he would publicly label as a commodity.
Morehead added that as bitcoin matures, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the so-called whales – investors that hold thousands of bitcoin – to move the market.
From 2013 to 2015, Pantera accumulated 2% of bitcoin’s total supply. However, the firm has gradually trimmed its position since then. Pantera now holds roughly $1 billion in bitcoin, Morehead said.
“We’ve been selling them to invest in new companies, and we have a Pantera bitcoin fund which has investors, and they’ve been redeeming to take profits over 12 years,” he said.
The future of tokenization
Morehead – who describes himself as the first asset-backed securities trader at Goldman Sachs in the 1980s – said he expects “all the things of value” to eventually be issued on a blockchain. Still, he admits that it will take time, with the tokenization of some assets arriving sooner than the others. Tokenization refers to the process of creating digital representations of real-world assets on a blockchain.
For example, mortgages and the U.S. Treasurys BX:TMUBMUSD10Y could be tokenized more easily, while tokenizing real estate would require more effort, Morehead noted. And when it comes to stocks, the technical challenge is not a concern, but “the regulatory thing is slowing it down,” he said.
It would require further regulatory clarity from the SEC before more companies and funds feel more comfortable issuing shares directly on the blockchain, Morehead said. Several companies, including online brokerage Robinhood Markets Inc. (HOOD), have launched so-called stock tokens – crypto representations of a company’s shares that don’t confer shareholder rights.
Read: Turning stocks and bonds into crypto-style trades won’t be happening soon. Here’s why.
Pantera currently doesn’t have any plans to tokenize any of its funds due to the regulatory uncertainty, according to Morehead.
“You know that we’re already in a highly scrutinized industry, so if we take what is historically thought of as a private-placement security venture fund and then make it a token, it’s not clear how the SEC would handle that,” Morehead said. “So we’ve just avoided doing that – but I could see in the long run, and I think probably 10 years from now, [that] funds like ours will typically be tokenized.”
While it’s hard to predict an exact timeline when most, if not all, stocks would be issued on a blockchain, “within a few years, you’re going to see quite a number of stocks trading on the blockchain, which would open access to everyone with a smartphone,” he added.
On that note, the regulatory outlook appears increasingly favorable. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins last month announced a new crypto agenda aimed at “moderniz[ing] the securities rules and regulations to enable America’s financial markets to move on-chain.”
Public companies buying crypto
Pantera is also a major backer of several publicly traded companies that have adopted a crypto-focused treasury strategy, one of the hottest trends this year. It’s a strategy in which a company, whether its original business is relevant to crypto or not, raises money, buys crypto and adds the tokens to its balance sheets.
Pantera portfolio companies in this category include BitMine Immersion Technologies Inc. (BMNR), a bitcoin-mining company that adopted an ether-mining (ETHUSD) strategy and appointed veteran Wall Street analyst Tom Lee as its chairman.
However, more than 100 companies jumped into the crypto-reserve game this year – and for some of them, the premium of their share price over net asset value, including the value of the crypto they hold, has been narrowing or even turning negative during recent weeks.
That narrowing of premium is expected, Morehead said. Such a premium is a barometer of the excess demand for public assets in the blockchain arena, and would inevitably go down in the long run, he noted. At the same time, the premium is also cyclical with the price of the underlying asset, he added.
“When the price of bitcoin or the price of solana (SOLUSD) is rallying, the premiums go up a bit. And when they’re coming off, as they have been for the last few weeks, the premiums come down,” he said.
Eventually, Morehead expects only a small number of companies with crypto-treasury strategies to survive, he said. Two or three such companies may be left for each major crypto after consolidation, whether it’s bitcoin or ether or solana – “not 100,” he said.
In turn, investors should “really focus on the ones with the best management teams that can access coins at the best prices,” Morehead said.
-Frances Yue
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