The above question is one that scores of investors are thinking, maybe publicly on X, but probably privately as they consider reallocating to crypto coins or not in the dead of this bear market.
And yes, crypto is indeed in a bear market. Sure, Bitcoin is about 30 percent up from its $60k lows in February, but it’s also 30 percent off its all-time highs set in October. We’re not here to argue whether the bottom is in or not, but just about every other major financial market is past all-time highs or close to it, except Bitcoin and the rest of the industry (most alt coins are down much more than Bitcoin from its highs).
But the bigger question is will crypto mount its usual comeback? Every four years, if you believe in cycles, crypto dies. Only for it to rise from the ashes phoenix-style and ascend to new highs. But investors are less certain this time, shaken by another brutal bear market.
So is it over or is crypto about to be so back? We actually think it’s both. That might sound like an oxymoron, but hear us out on this one as we lay out our case.
Crypto As A Speculative Bet Is Over
Once upon a time, not long ago, the best investment thesis for crypto was its “moonshot” ability. No other asset class tantalized investors with the ability to hit 5- or 10-baggers and get rich overnight like crypto.
And here’s the thing: crypto delivered on that promise for many. Never mind Bitcoin’s unreal performance, but coins like Dogecoin and Trump Coin could pull multiples in hours. This brought in the crowd, a mish-mash of stock pickers, would-be bettors on the Bovada mobile app, Uber drivers, and everyone in between, all wanting the chance to change their life with minimal effort.
That crowd is still out there, but they’ve migrated. Crypto is no longer the best avenue to get rich quick; it’s AI stocks now. This sector has pulled crypto-like moves over the last few years over and over again. Nvidia (the Bitcoin of AI, essentially) has 10X’d in three years. “Altcoin” like stocks, think Intel or Coreweave, have done violent moves up. And if analysis on OnlineSportsBetting.net is to be believed, those moves aren’t close to being done yet, not with this AI rollout still in progress.
And here’s the thing: those stocks, at least until now, don’t come with the enormous downside potential of crypto. In stocks, your popular project can’t be copied into oblivion, which splits up the pool of buyers, like it would in crypto. There’s no “dev” to ready to full-sell in stocks either. No 10/10 event, which will drop stocks by half in minutes as we saw in crypto-land (thanks, Binance).
Crypto believers will argue that this AI speculation is temporary, and the migration will come back. We’re not so sure. Crypto doesn’t have the benefit of the biggest companies in the world, Amazon, Google, Meta, etc., spending nearly a trillion dollars a year to build out its infrastructure. Neither does it have automatic buyers, such as stocks, thanks to retirement funds buying the S&P500 in mass. Bitcoin’s main buyer is a man famous for losing $6 billion in a hurry.
Michael Saylor and his MicroStrategy company have become the biggest net buyers of Bitcoin in the past 5 years by a massive margin.
Here’s the sad part: crypto had its chance to be this in 2021. That’s when it was the “hot thing” that was attracting investment capital and tech talent. But it failed to live up to the hype. The big innovation of the time, NFTs, proved to be a zero-interest-rate phenomenon and scammers like Sam Bankman-Fried zeroed out thousands more participants.
So yes, we can confidently say that crypto as an online casino is effectively over. Not $0 over, but it’s never reaching the mania it had in 2021 or even 2024 during the meme coin craze. Crypto has to mature to attract capital, and we think it actually can, as we explain next.
The Few Crypto Sectors That Can Still Moon
We’re not crypto doomers, ok? No, we prefer to be called realists. Sure, we think meme coins and 98.8 percent of alt coins are cooked, but the crypto industry still has opportunities and upside. Here are the sectors still worth betting on and HODL’ing onto:
Exchanges: no sector in crypto prints real, tangible money like crypto exchanges. They stand to gain from any narrative that sweeps through crypto, whether that’s AI agent coins (possible use case in the future), tokenized stocks, or something else. Hyperliquid is one of the few altcoins not that far off from all-time highs, which proves the value of this sector. Binance’s coin is also an obvious beneficiary here.
Tokenized assets: Stablecoins have already proved that people want dollars on-chain. The next step is tokenizing everything else that’s “real”, stocks, treasuries, private credit, mortgages, and so on. Crypto rails make doing all these things cheaper and easier to prove ownership. That matters more than you probably think.
Privacy coins: let’s face it, Bitcoin isn’t private enough. Anyone who knows what they’re doing can track a wallet’s IP address and find a Bitcoiner's identity if they’ve ever KYC’d somewhere. Privacy coins allow crypto to remain anonymous. Of course, regulation and censorship could be an issue, but that might just strengthen this narrative even more.
We feel confident in slowly allocating across these three sectors right this moment. We’re not calling a market-wide bottom, but current price levels are fair enough given the upside we foresee in all three in the coming years.
So yeah, we do expect another bull run in this industry. However, this time, it’ll be fueled by proven crypto businesses, not speculative moonshots like past crypto cycles. Maybe that’ll make high prices last rather than crashing every four years again…
