In 2013, Dan Morehead, founder and chief govt at Pantera, again then a world macro hedge fund, known as on buyers to put money into bitcoin, a fringe, little-understood digital asset that was launched in 2009.
“Bitcoins at the moment are buying and selling at $65/BTC – precisely half the value they have been buying and selling at our first assembly on Could twenty eighth. I feel we must always purchase aggressively now,” he wrote in a letter to buyers in July 2013. “I’m going to purchase 30,000 bitcoins this weekend with private cash. The Fund can have this buy or not, as others want. I simply wish to become involved,” he added. Pantera then launched its Pantera Bitcoin Fund and pivoted the agency to deal with crypto.
“[Many] folks thought I used to be loopy,” Morehead, a former dealer at Goldman Sachs and Tiger Administration, recalled in an interview with MarketWatch.
Quick ahead to 2025, bitcoin BTCUSD was buying and selling at round $115,000 on Friday, and the crypto trade has grown from a distinct segment experiment into an ecosystem more and more built-in with conventional monetary markets, a change that’s been strengthened as President Donald Trump advances an agenda considered as pleasant to the sector.
In the meantime, Pantera has turn into one of many greatest asset managers and enterprise corporations in crypto. The agency now manages $5.2 billion in belongings, and backs over 200 crypto corporations together with change Coinbase COIN, stablecoin issuer Circle CRCL, blockchain-based funds firm Ripple, and others.
As Morehead gained prominence, his rising affect in crypto was echoed by a handful of his Princeton classmates, who would additionally emerge as key gamers within the trade. These embrace Gavin Andresen, as soon as the Bitcoin community’s lead developer, Michael Novogratz, founding father of crypto funding agency Galaxy Funding Companions, Pete Briger, chairman of Fortress Funding Group who serves on the board of Michael Saylor’s Technique MSTR and Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founding father of blockchain software program agency ConsenSys.
On a separate notice, the Senate Finance Committee has been investigating whether or not Morehead violated federal tax legislation to keep away from lots of of tens of millions of {dollars} by shifting to Puerto Rico, which affords residents a particular tax break, in line with a February article by the New York Instances. Morehead mentioned in an announcement then that “I consider I acted appropriately with respect to my taxes,” and declined to remark additional for this text.
Throughout an interview with MarketWatch on Thursday on the Nasdaq MarketSite, the place Pantera’s portfolio firm Determine Expertise FIGR went public on the identical day, Morehead mentioned he anticipated bitcoin to double in a yr, smaller crypto to outperform it within the subsequent few years, and outlined his broader forecasts for the way forward for crypto.
There’s a rising debate over what’s often called bitcoin’s four-year cycle nonetheless holds true. Morehead’s reply is sure.
Traditionally, analysts have cut up bitcoin’s value strikes into 4 phases — breakout, hype, correction and accumulation, based mostly on the asset’s halving schedule. Halvings are an occasion that happens about each 4 years that reduce the rewards that miners obtain for verifying transactions on the blockchain in half, limiting new provide of bitcoin.
Whereas the primary three halvings in bitcoin’s historical past helped spark rallies by rising shortage, some argue that the halvings’ affect has waned as extra components now form bitcoin’s value. Nonetheless, Morehead mentioned learning the cycle stays vital for gauging the crypto’s subsequent transfer.
To help his argument, Morehead cited a name he made in November 2022 that the crypto would hit $117,482 on Aug. 11, 2025, based mostly on his evaluation of bitcoin’s efficiency after the earlier three halvings. Bitcoin did rise above that stage by Morehead’s goal date, after which rallied to a document excessive at $124,495.51 on Aug. 14 earlier than pulling again, in line with Dow Jones Market Information.
Now, Morehead mentioned he expects bitcoin to double in a yr and commerce above $230,000, then ultimately rise to $1 million.
Nonetheless, this cycle could also be totally different from these previously, Morehead mentioned. One notable distinction is that President Trump has been pushing ahead a sequence of insurance policies which are thought-about pleasant to the crypto trade. He signed the GENIUS ACT in July, the primary federal legislation regulating stablecoins, or a kind of crypto whose worth is linked to a different asset, typically the U.S. greenback. In the identical month, the President’s Working Group on Digital Property launched a report with regulatory suggestions for the trade, signaling that digital belongings have turn into a coverage precedence.
In opposition to that backdrop, Morehead mentioned he anticipated altcoins, or crypto aside from bitcoin, to outperform within the subsequent three years. Altcoins may benefit extra from the Trump administration’s insurance policies, as they suffered from regulatory uncertainty through the earlier administration when Gary Gensler, former chair of the U.S. Securities and Trade Fee known as most of them securities, Morehead argued. Gensler mentioned then that bitcoin was the one crypto he would publicly label as a commodity.
Morehead additionally added that as bitcoin matures it’s changing into more and more troublesome for the so-called whales, usually referring to people who maintain 1000’s of bitcoin, to maneuver the market.
From 2013 to 2015, Pantera accrued 2% of bitcoin’s whole provide. Nevertheless, the agency has regularly trimmed its place since then. Pantera now holds roughly $1 billion in bitcoin, Morehead mentioned. “We’ve been promoting them to put money into new corporations, and we now have a Pantera Bitcoin fund which has buyers, and so they’ve been redeeming to take earnings over 12 years,” he added.
Morehead, who mentioned he was the primary asset-backed securities dealer at Goldman Sachs within the Eighties, mentioned he anticipated “all of the issues of worth” to ultimately be issued on a blockchain. Nonetheless, he admitted that it might take time, with the tokenization of some belongings arriving ahead of the others. Tokenization refers to a course of of making digital representations of real-world belongings on a blockchain.
For instance, mortgages and the U.S. TreasurysBX:TMUBMUSD10Y could possibly be tokenized extra simply, whereas tokenizing actual property would require extra effort, Morehead famous.
In terms of shares, the technical problem shouldn’t be a priority, however “the regulatory factor is slowing it down,” he mentioned.
It could require extra regulatory readability from the SEC earlier than extra corporations and funds really feel extra comfy issuing shares immediately on the blockchain, Morehead famous. Whereas a number of corporations together with Robinhood HOOD have launched so-called inventory tokens, they’re crypto representations of an organization’s shares however don’t confer shareholder rights.
Pantera at present doesn’t have any plans to tokenize any of its funds, as a result of regulatory uncertainty.
“You understand that we’re already in a extremely scrutinized trade, so if we take what’s traditionally considered a non-public placement safety enterprise fund after which make it a token, it’s not clear how the SEC would deal with that,” Morehead famous. “So we’ve simply prevented doing that, however I might see in the long term, and I feel most likely 10 years from now, funds like ours will usually be tokenized,” he added.
Whereas it’s exhausting to foretell an actual timeline when most, if not all shares could be issued on a blockchain, “inside just a few years, you’re going to see fairly a variety of shares buying and selling on the blockchain, which might open entry to everybody with a smartphone,” Morehead mentioned.
On that notice, the regulatory outlook seems more and more favorable. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins final month introduced a brand new crypto agenda aimed toward “moderniz[ing] the securities guidelines and laws to allow America’s monetary markets to maneuver on-chain.”
Pantera can also be a serious backer of a number of publicly traded corporations which have adopted a crypto treasury technique, one of many hottest developments this yr. It’s a method by which an organization, whether or not its unique enterprise is related to crypto or not, raises cash, buys crypto and provides the cash to its stability sheets.
The Pantera portfolio corporations on this class embrace BitMine Immersion Applied sciences BMNR, a bitcoin mining firm that adopted an ether ETHUSD mining technique and appointed veteran Wall Avenue analyst Tom Lee because the chairman.
Nevertheless, as over 100 corporations jumped into the sport this yr, for a few of them, the premiums of their share value over internet asset worth, or the worth of the crypto they maintain, have been narrowing, and even turning unfavourable throughout latest weeks.
The narrowing of the premium is anticipated, Morehead mentioned. Such a premium is a barometer of the surplus demand for public belongings within the blockchain area and would inevitably go down in the long term, he famous. On the identical time, the premium can also be pro-cyclical with the value of the underlying asset, Morehead mentioned. “When the value of bitcoin or the value of solana is rallying, the premiums go up a bit. And after they’re coming off, as they’ve been for the previous few weeks, the premiums come down,” he added.
Ultimately, Morehead mentioned he anticipated solely a small variety of corporations with crypto Treasury methods to outlive. Two or three such corporations could also be left for every main crypto after consolidation, whether or not it’s bitcoin or ether or solana. “However not 100,” Morehead mentioned.
Buyers ought to “actually deal with those with the very best administration groups that may entry cash at the very best costs,” he mentioned.
