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The founder of a crypto-focused hedge fund is looking ahead to see which industry niches might thrive once the current bear market cycle ends.
In an interview with RealVision, Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead tells host Raoul Pal that the world of crypto is cyclical because as projects either complete or fade away, there are always new opportunities to seize upon such as decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
“Things have gone in eras. Things that were important four or five years ago are either all built out now and don’t have much opportunity.
I think DeFi is incredibly cheap right now, so [it] should be a huge chunk of what somebody’s investing in.
The next frontiers are things like gaming [and the] NFT space really just now getting to a critical mass that enough people are using. Blockchain gaming, that it’s relevant.”
The CEO says that there are still opportunities to invest in more traditional aspects of crypto such as exchanges, noting that many large countries worldwide still lack a centralized marketplace to buy and sell digital assets.
“In our venture investing, we’ve invested across the whole spectrum of things. Even things like exchanges, you could say, ‘Hey, they’ve got to be all completely built out.’ They’re not!
There’s a lot of countries that are massive, like Indonesia – we invested in Pintu recently. 120 million people and they’re all going to be using blockchain, and there really wasn’t a big exchange a year ago.
There still are countries like that that need exchanges.”
Morehead goes on to stress the importance of layer-2 scaling solutions because both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have capacity limitations that need to be resolved in order to accommodate increased blockchain use.
“We’ve been big investors in layer-2 scaling solutions. Bitcoin and Ethereum are amazing, but they only do a very limited number of transactions, so we need that.
There’s borrowing and lending protocols, very important. So you’re going to have both consumer and infrastructure plays be very important in this next cycle.”