In 2013, Dan Morehead, founder and chief executive at Pantera, 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/BTC – exactly half the price they were trading at our first meeting on May 28th. 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,” he added. 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, and the crypto 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 firms in crypto. The firm now manages $5.2 billion in assets, and backs over 200 crypto companies including exchange Coinbase COIN, stablecoin issuer Circle CRCL, blockchain-based payments company Ripple, and others.
As Morehead gained prominence, his growing influence in crypto was echoed by a handful of his Princeton 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, chairman of Fortress Investment Group who serves on the board of Michael Saylor’s Strategy MSTR and Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of blockchain software firm ConsenSys.
On a separate note, the 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, where Pantera’s portfolio company Figure Technology FIGR went public on the same day, Morehead said he expected bitcoin to double in a year, smaller crypto to outperform it in the next few years, and outlined his broader forecasts for the future of crypto.
There’s a growing debate over what’s 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 an event that occurs 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 more 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, Morehead 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 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 said. One notable distinction is that President Trump has been pushing forward a series of policies that are considered friendly to the crypto industry. He signed the GENIUS ACT in July, the first federal law regulating stablecoins, or a type of crypto whose value is linked to another asset, often the U.S. dollar. In the 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 expected altcoins, or crypto other than bitcoin, to outperform in the next three years. Altcoins could benefit more from the Trump administration’s policies, as they suffered from regulatory uncertainty during the previous administration when Gary Gensler, former chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission called most of them securities, Morehead argued. Gensler said then that bitcoin was the only crypto he would publicly label as a commodity.
Morehead also added that as bitcoin matures it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the so-called whales, typically referring to those 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 added.
Morehead, who said he was the first asset-backed securities trader at Goldman Sachs in the 1980s, said he expected “all the things of value” to eventually be issued on a blockchain. Still, he admitted that it would take time, with the tokenization of some assets arriving sooner than the others. Tokenization refers to a process of creating digital representations of real-world assets on a blockchain.
For example, mortgages and the U.S. TreasurysBX:TMUBMUSD10Y could be tokenized more easily, while tokenizing real estate would require more effort, Morehead noted.
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 more regulatory clarity from the SEC before more companies and funds feel more comfortable issuing shares directly on the blockchain, Morehead noted. While several companies including Robinhood HOOD have launched so-called stock tokens, they are crypto representations of a company’s shares but 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.
“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 noted. “So we’ve just avoided doing that, but I could see in the long run, and I think probably 10 years from now, funds like ours will typically be tokenized,” he added.
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,” Morehead said.
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.”
Pantera is also a major backer of several publicly traded companies that have adopted a crypto 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 coins to its balance sheets.
The Pantera portfolio companies in this category include BitMine Immersion Technologies BMNR, a bitcoin mining company that adopted an ether ETHUSD mining strategy and appointed veteran Wall Street analyst Tom Lee as the chairman.
However, as over 100 companies jumped into the game this year, for some of them, the premiums of their share price over net asset value, or the value of the crypto they hold, have been narrowing, or even turning negative during recent weeks.
The narrowing of the 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 pro-cyclical with the price of the underlying asset, Morehead said. “When the price of bitcoin or the price of solana 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 added.
Eventually, Morehead said he expected only a small number of companies with crypto Treasury strategies to survive. Two or three such companies may be left for each major crypto after consolidation, whether it’s bitcoin or ether or solana. “But not 100,” Morehead said.
Investors should “really focus on the ones with the best management teams that can access coins at the best prices,” he said.
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