In 2013, Dan Morehead, founder and chief executive officer of Pantera, at the time, a world macro coverage fund, called on investors to invest in Bitcoin, a digital and little understood asset that was launched in 2009.
“Bitcoins are now negotiating at $ 65 / BTC-exactly half of the price they exchanged during our first meeting on May 28. I think we should buy aggressively,” he wrote in a letter to investors in July 2013. “I will buy 30,000 bitcoins this weekend, he added. Pantera launched his Fund Pantera Bitcoin and pivoted the company to concentrate on Crypto.
“”[Many] People thought I was crazy, ”said Morehead, a former merchant by Goldman Sachs and Tiger Management, recalled in an interview with Marketwatch.
Quick advance until 2025, Bitcoin BTCUSD was negotiated at around $ 115,000 on Friday, and the cryptography industry went from niche experience to an increasingly integrated ecosystem in traditional financial markets, a change that has been strengthened while President Donald Trump is advancing an agenda considered as friendly for the sector.
Meanwhile, Pantera has become one of the largest asset managers and Campto venture capital companies. The company now manages $ 5.2 billion in assets and supports more than 200 cryptographic companies, including the Coinbase exchange piece, the stablecoin Circle CRCL, the payment company based on the Ripple and others blockchain.
While Morehead has become of importance, its growing influence in the crypto was taken up by a handful of its Princeton classmates, which would also emerge as key players in industry. These include Gavin Andresen, formerly the main developer of Bitcoin Network, Michael Novogratz, founder of the investment company Crypto Galaxy Investment Partners, Pete Briger, president of Fortress Investment Group, who sits on the board of directors of the strategy of Michael Saylor, MSTR and Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of the company Concensys blockchain software.
On a separate note, the Senatoric Finance Committee has investigated how Morehead has violated the federal tax law to avoid hundreds of millions of dollars by moving to Puerto Rico, which offers residents a special tax relief, according to a February in New York Times. Morehead then declared in a press release that “I believe that I acted in a appropriate manner with regard to my taxes” and that “refused to comment on this article more.
During an interview with Marketwatch Thursday at Nasda MarketsSite, where the Pantera portfolio company, Figure Technology, Figr became public the same day, Morehead said that it expected that Bitcoin doubles in a year, a smaller crypto to outdo it in the coming years, and described its wider forecasts for the future of Crypto.
There is an increasing debate on what is called the four -year cycle of Bitcoin is always true. Morehead’s response is yes.
Historically, analysts have divided the price of Bitcoin into four phases – breakage, media threshing, correction and accumulation, on the basis of the calendar for reducing the guidance of assets. Halvings are an event that occurs approximately every four years which reduces the rewards that minors receive to check the transactions on the blockchain in two, limiting the new Bitcoin offer.
While the first three hassles in the history of Bitcoin have helped to arouse rallies by increasing the shortage, some maintain that the influence of halvings has decreased because more factors are now shaping the price of Bitcoin. However, Morehead said that the cycle study remains important to assess the next Crypto movement.
To support his argument, Morehead cited a call he made in November 2022 that the crypto would reach $ 117,482 on August 11, 2025, based on its Bitcoin performance analysis after the three previous hassles. Bitcoin exceeded this level on the target date of Morehead, then joined a record summit at $ 124,495.51 on August 14 before retreating, according to data from the Dow Jones market.
Now Morehead said that he expects Bitcoin to double in a year and will be negotiated over $ 230,000, and then increased to $ 1 million.
However, this cycle can be different from those of the past, said Morehead. A notable distinction is that President Trump has advanced a series of policies considered friendly to cryptographic industry. He signed the law on engineering in July, the first federal law regulating stabbed, or a type of crypto whose value is linked to another asset, often the US dollar. During the same month, the president’s working group on digital assets published a relationship with regulatory recommendations for industry, reporting that digital assets have become a political priority.
In this context, Morehead said he expected him to expect altcoins, or crypto other than Bitcoin, to outdo over the next three years. Altcoins could benefit more from the Trump administration policies because they suffered from regulatory uncertainty during the previous administration when Gary Gensler, former president of the American Securities and Exchange commission called most of them, said Morehead. Gensler then said that Bitcoin was the only crypto he would publicly label as a product.
Morehead has also added that Bitcoin matures, it becomes more and more difficult for so-called whales, generally referring to those who have thousands of bitcoin, to move the market.
From 2013 to 2015, Pantera accumulated 2% of the total Bitcoin offer. However, the company has gradually cut its position since then. Pantera now has about $ 1 billion in Bitcoin, Morehead said. “We sell them to invest in new companies, and we have a Pantera Bitcoin fund that has investors, and they have exchanged to make profits for 12 years,” he added.
Morehead, who said he was the first securities trader supported by active in Goldman Sachs in the 1980s, said he expected that “all things of value” are emitted to a blockchain. However, he admitted that it would take time, with the tokenization of certain assets arriving earlier than the others. The tokenization refers to a process of creating digital representations of active world active ingredients on a blockchain.
For example, mortgages and US Treasurysbx: TMUBMUSD10Y could be more easily tokenized, while token real estate would require more efforts, Morehead noted.
Regarding actions, the technical challenge is not a concern, but “the regulatory thing is to slow down,” he said.
It would take more regulatory clarity of the dry before more companies and funds no longer feel comfortable to issue actions directly on the blockchain, noted Morehead. While several companies, including Robinhood Hood, have launched supposedly tokens, they are cryptographic representations of the actions of a company but do not allow the rights of shareholders.
Read: Transforming shares and obligations into crypto style transactions will not occur soon. Here is why.
Pantera currently has no Tokenize projects none of its funds, due to regulatory uncertainty.
“You know that we are already in a very examined industry, so if we take what is historically considered as a private investment capital fund and that we make it a token, it is not clear how the dry would manage this,” noted Morehead. “So we just avoided doing this, but I could see in the long term, and I think that probably in 10 years, funds like ours will generally be token,” he added.
Although it is difficult to predict an exact calendar while most, if not all, all the actions would be issued on a blockchain, “in a few years, you will see a certain number of stocks are negotiating on the blockchain, which would open access to all those who with a smartphone,” said Morehead.
On this note, the regulatory prospects seem more and more favorable. The president of the Sec, Paul Atkins, announced last month a new crypto agenda intended for “Moderniz[ing] The titles settle the titles to allow American financial markets to move in a chain. »»
Pantera is also a major support for several listed companies that have adopted a cryptographic cash strategy, one of the most popular trends this year. It is a strategy in which a company, whether its original company is relevant to the crypto or not, collects funds, buys crypto and adds the documents to its balance sheets.
Pantera portfolio companies in this category include BMNROLIES Bitmine Immersion Technologies BMNR, an operating company of Bitcoin which adopted an extraction strategy of Ether Ethusd and appointed the veteran analyst of Wall Street Tom Lee as president.
However, while more than 100 companies have accessed the game this year, for some of them, the bonuses of their course of action on the value of net assets or the value of the crypto they hold, shrink, or even become negative in recent weeks.
The narrowing of the premium is expected, said Morehead. Such a premium is a barometer of excess demand for public assets in the blockchain arena and inevitably descended in the long term, he noted. At the same time, the premium is also pro-cyclical with the price of the underlying asset, said Morehead. “When the price of Bitcoin or Solana’s price rally, bonuses are increasing a little. And when they stand out, as they have been in recent weeks, bonuses have been falling,” he added.
Finally, Morehead said that he only expected a small number of companies with cryptographic cash strategies to survive. Two or three of these companies can be left for each major crypto after consolidation, be it bitcoin or ether or solana. “But not 100,” said Morehead.
Investors should “really focus on those with the best management teams that can access parts at prices,” he said.
