Dan Morehead, the founder and CEO of Pantera, a global macro hedge fund at the time, urged investors to put money into bitcoin, a niche and little understood digital commodity that was introduced in 2009.
The current price of bitcoins is $65/BTC, which is precisely half of what it was during our first meeting on May 28. In a July 2013 letter to investors, he stated, “I believe we should buy aggressively now.” Using my own funds, I plan to purchase 30,000 bitcoins this weekend. Depending on what others want, the Fund may or may not make this purchase. All I want to do is become involved,” he continued. After that, Pantera changed the company’s focus to cryptocurrency and introduced the Pantera Bitcoin Fund.
In an interview with MarketWatch, Morehead, a former trader at Tiger Management and Goldman Sachs, remembered, “[Many] people thought I was crazy.”
In 2025, when bitcoin was trading at about $115,000 on Friday, the cryptocurrency industry has expanded from a niche experiment to an ecosystem that is becoming more and more integrated with traditional financial markets. This shift has been further supported by President Donald Trump’s policies, which are seen as being beneficial to the industry.
Pantera, however, is now among the largest cryptocurrency venture firms and asset managers. The organization now oversees $5.2 billion in assets and invests in more than 200 cryptocurrency businesses, including as trader Coinbase, stablecoin issuer Circle, blockchain-based payments provider Ripple, and others.
Morehead’s rise to fame was mirrored by a few of his Princeton classmates who would go on to become important figures in the crypto sector. Among them are Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of blockchain software company ConsenSys; Pete Briger, chairman of Fortress Investment Group and board member of Michael Saylor’s Strategy; Michael Novogratz, founder of cryptocurrency investment firm Galaxy Investment Partners; and Gavin Andresen, formerly the lead developer of the Bitcoin network.
Separately, the New York Times reported in February that the Senate Finance Committee has been looking into whether Morehead moved to Puerto Rico, which provides inhabitants with a special tax benefit, in violation of federal tax law in order to dodge hundreds of millions of dollars. “I believe I acted appropriately with respect to my taxes,” Morehead stated in a statement at the time, declining to speak more for this piece.
Morehead revealed his broader predictions for the future of cryptocurrency in an interview with MarketWatch on Thursday at the Nasdaq MarketSite, where Pantera’s portfolio company Figure Technology went public on the same day. He predicted that bitcoin would double in a year and that smaller cryptocurrencies would outperform it in the coming years.
What lies ahead for Bitcoin?
The question of whether the four-year cycle of bitcoin still applies is a topic of increasing discussion. The response from Morehead is yes.
Based on bitcoin’s halving timetable, experts have historically divided price movements into four phases: breakout, hype, correction, and accumulation. Halvings are a phenomenon that happens about every four years and limits the amount of bitcoin that can be created by halving the incentives that miners earn for validating transactions on the blockchain.
Although rising scarcity during the first three halvings in bitcoin’s existence sparked rallies, others contend that the halvings’ impact has diminished since other variables now influence the price of bitcoin. According to Morehead, analyzing the cycle is still crucial for predicting the cryptocurrency’s future course of action.
According on Morehead’s research of bitcoin’s performance during the previous three halvings, he predicted in November 2022 that the cryptocurrency will reach $117,482 on August 11, 2025. By the time Morehead’s target date arrived, Bitcoin had risen over that amount. On August 14, it reached a record high of $124,495.51 before declining, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
According to Morehead, he now believes that bitcoin will double in value within a year, trade beyond $230,000, and finally reach $1 million.
However, this cycle could not be like previous ones, Morehead noted. One noteworthy difference is that Trump has been promoting a number of laws that are thought to be advantageous to the cryptocurrency sector. The Genius Act, the first federal law governing stablecoins—a kind of cryptocurrency whose value is correlated with another asset, usually the US dollar—was signed by him in July. A study with industry-specific regulation proposals was issued by the President’s Working Group on Digital Assets that same month, indicating that digital assets had emerged as a top policy concern.
According to Morehead, in light of this, he anticipates altcoins—cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin—will do better over the next three years. Morehead contended that altcoins might gain more from the policies of the Trump administration since they were subject to regulatory uncertainties during the previous administration, when Gary Gensler, the former chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, labeled the majority of them securities. The only cryptocurrency Gensler would openly refer to as a commodity, he stated at the time, was bitcoin.
Morehead also mentioned that the so-called whales, who usually store thousands of bitcoin, are finding it harder and harder to influence the market as the bitcoin develops.
From 2013 until 2015, Pantera held 2% of the whole bitcoin supply. Since then, the company has progressively reduced its position. Morehead stated that Pantera now has almost $1 billion in bitcoin. “We’ve been selling them to invest in new businesses, and we have investors in our Pantera bitcoin fund that have been redeeming to take profits over the course of 12 years,” he continued.
The future of tokenization
“All the things of value” would eventually be issued on a blockchain, according to Morehead, who claimed to have been the first asset-backed securities dealer at Goldman Sachs in the 1980s. He acknowledged that it would take time, though, and that certain assets will be tokenized before others. The process of generating digital representations of real-world assets on a blockchain is known as tokenization.
Tokenizing mortgages and US Treasury securities, for instance, would be simpler than tokenizing real estate. The technological difficulty is not an issue with stocks, but “the regulatory thing is slowing it down,” he stated.
According to Morehead, more firms and funds won’t feel comfortable issuing shares directly on the blockchain until the SEC provides greater regulatory certainty. Although a number of businesses, such as Robinhood, have introduced what are known as stock tokens, these are digital representations of a company’s shares that do not grant shareholder rights.
Because of the regulatory uncertainties, Pantera does not presently have any intentions to tokenize any of its funds.
“It’s unclear how the SEC would respond if we take what is traditionally considered a private-placement security venture fund and turn it into a token, as we already operate in a highly scrutinized industry,” Morehead stated. We’ve merely avoided doing that, but I can see how funds like ours will likely be tokenized in the future—probably within ten years,” he continued.
Even while it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the majority of stocks, if not all of them, would be issued on a blockchain, Morehead predicted that within a few years, a significant number of stocks will be trading on the blockchain, making them accessible to everybody with a smartphone.
In light of this, the regulatory picture seems to be becoming better. In order to “modernize[s] the securities rules and regulations to enable America’s financial markets to move on-chain,” SEC Chairman Paul Atkins unveiled a new crypto agenda last month.
Crypto purchases by public firms
Pantera is also a significant investor in a number of publicly traded firms that have embraced one of the year’s most popular trends: crypto-treasury. Regardless of whether the company’s initial operation is related to cryptocurrency or not, it is a tactic wherein it generates capital, purchases cryptocurrency, and adds the coins to its balance sheets.
One of the firms in this area of the Pantera portfolio is BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin mining company that switched to an ether mining approach and named seasoned Wall Street analyst Tom Lee as its chairman.
Still, as more than 100 businesses entered the market this year, several of them have seen their share price advantages over net asset value or the value of the cryptocurrency they own—narrow or even go negative in recent weeks.
Morehead expects the premium to diminish. Such a premium is a barometer of excess demand for public assets in the blockchain domain, and it will ultimately fall in the long term, he explained. At the same time, Morehead said that the premium is pro-cyclical in relation to the underlying asset price. “When the price of bitcoin or Solana rallies, premiums rise little. And when they come off, as they did in the last several weeks, the premiums fall,” he explained.
Eventually, Morehead predicted that only a few organizations with crypto Treasury strategy would survive. After consolidation, each major cryptocurrency, like as bitcoin, ether, or Solana, may only have two or three such organizations. “But not 100,” Morehead explained.
Investors should focus on those with the finest management teams and access to coins at the greatest pricing, he added.
