Why Crypto Will Grow 10x in The Next Decade | Dan Tapiero

All right, welcome, everybody, to another 1000x podcast. We are here today at the Digital Asset Summit in the Franklin Templeton booth with none other than Dan Tapiero, founder of what used to be 10T, now 50T Holdings. 50T Funds, correct? And that change happened recently, did it not?

50T Funds. Yes, all 5.

I guess that's fair.

No, it wasn't—I mean, it depends on what's recent when you're in our space.

The speed of things—it was about a year ago. Yeah. We rebranded with the launch of our 5th fund, which had its first close in December, and now we're sitting on a nice chunk of capital waiting to invest in growth-stage companies. As you know, we are, as far as I know, the only growth-stage private-equity fund in the world exclusively focused on cryptocurrency, blockchain, Web3, and digital assets.

We're generally looking for companies that are doing over $50 million in revenue. That's sort of rare. Most of the names that you know—guys you speak with, Pantera, Polychain, and Andreessen—they're mostly more focused on venture. They're venture funds out of Silicon Valley, usually. We are not out of Silicon Valley. We're here in New York and in Greenwich.

Our focus is at the growth stage, making larger investments later on in the evolution of these companies. We had quite a few IPOs last year: Circle and Figure. Deribit, which we owned, was purchased by Coinbase. So, we're making larger investments in more developed, larger companies in the space.

1. The Next Era of Crypto

We don't own cryptocurrency. We're not doing seed or pre-seed. We're not trying to YOLO into a 1000X, the name of your podcast. I'm not a venture guy, so 1000x is not for us. We're just trying to make a 5X to 8X over the roughly 10-year life of our fund. That's what I've been up to.

What's funny with the 1000x name is that the name is very tongue-in-cheek.

Yeah, I know.

It's because when we first started, whenever you're in crypto, people just assume that you're gunning for the moon, that the only opportunities that exist out there are the meme coins, where maybe you get a 1000X. Our approach—and I think your approach—is that there are actually some pretty amazing bets that you can take continuously over the years that might return 5X to 10X, maybe 15X. You don't need to take these immense risks, right?

Well, I think there are a lot of very high-quality companies that people just aren't aware of. I mean, if you look at our portfolio, I've mentioned a few. Figment is another one, Ledn, Ledger, and Animoca. These companies are doing significant revenue. Some of them are on the brink of being public, maybe once this macro turbulence subsides.

I just think we're now in a very important transitionary phase where, in the previous bull phases, there was always this bro-euphoria thing, pumping and dumping, and all of this kind of 1000X mentality. I think what's happened now with the institutionalization of crypto and blockchain really got kicked off by the launch of the ETFs and Larry Fink's about-face in the summer of 2023. Then, of course, there are all the companies that are putting Bitcoin and ETH on their balance sheets.

Now, the infrastructure rails, the blockchain rails, are being adopted and adapted by leading financial institutions. I was on a panel this morning—you saw it—with Raoul and Brett. The topic was what had been gained or lost by this move toward institutionalization. I said, “Look, we’ve won.” The goal was always that the 2 worlds, the TradFi world and the crypto-blockchain world, would come together.

I was not part of the group of people who thought, “Okay, all the banks are going away.”

Right.

But they need to adapt to this new reality and this new technology, and we're seeing it. That's why you have success with companies like Circle. Coinbase, I think, has done a phenomenal job becoming more than just a retail trading platform, which is really what it was 5 years ago.

As I look out over the next 5 years, if you think about tokenization of real-world assets and financial assets, I really think that we're just now beginning this move, which I call the move where all value and money moves on-chain.

Mhm.

This was my thought 5 years ago. I thought even 10 years ago that eventually we'd move to this place. I always say to new people in the space, “Look, in the ’90s, the internet was the digitization of ideas and information. Bitcoin and blockchain—cryptocurrency—is the digitization of money and value.”

We're really in the first inning now of this period where all value and money moves on-chain. It couldn't be a more exciting period, I think. If you listen to Brett talk about what Coinbase was doing today on the panel, I thought that was excellent.

I'm hoping, honestly, that we put behind us some of this insane speculation. The space—the whole digital-asset ecosystem, as I call it, the altcoin world—is a very creative place. The innovation, certainly from the financial-markets side, is something I have never seen in financial markets before. That's fantastic.

But the degree to which people have gotten churned up and eaten up by the volatility and the bogus projects and bogus people has been highly problematic, and I think it's slowed us down. It's funny because now we're in this phase where everything feels bad: Bitcoin is down by 50%, ETH is down, and the alts are still down 90%. People don't feel good. They feel like, “Where's the momentum? Where's the—” It's hard to get a 1000X.

But there's a lot of capital moving toward things like Polymarket and HYPE, and toward real, actual uses of the rails. Stablecoins are exploding. I was told by the Blockworks guys that this is their single-largest turnout ever.

I look around and I'm like, “Okay, it feels like a bear phase. Things don't feel great in the space. But then what's going on here?” Polymarket, I think, is just now raising at a $20 billion valuation, which is, what, 50 times revenue or something like that?

Mhm.

That's not really a bear phase when a company can raise at 50 times revenue. So, it's become very selective and fractured the whole space in a way where, to me, the important part of the space is flourishing. I know that was very long-winded. Sorry about that.

2. Crypto’s Path to $50T

No, I mean, that makes total sense. And I'm actually curious: when you first started 10T Holdings, you called it 10T because you were looking for the market to go to $10 trillion, right?

Well, the value in 2019 of Bitcoin, ETH, the alts, and all the equity in the space was $300 billion. I said to myself, “My view over the next 10 years is that the value of the digital-asset ecosystem will go to $10 trillion.” So, that's a 30X return—30X.

I come from the old macro hedge-fund business. I've worked for various well-known guys and had my own fund as well. You can Google all that and read about that. But the reality is that I'd never called for, or even imagined or envisioned, a 30X return on anything ever.

I thought, “Well, no one is going to—none of my buddies are going to believe that I called for it if it happens.” So, if we go to a $10 trillion valuation, no one's going to say, “Oh, Dan, you nailed that.” I'm like, “We've got to put that in the name of the fund. I want it marked on the blockchain. I want it on the ledger there. I want it there permanently so that people see that that was my view.”

At the time, the value was $300 billion, and I think today we're around $4 trillion to $5 trillion. So, we're halfway there. But that fund has 5 years left on it. From 2019—we still have, that was when I had the idea. The first fund launched in 2021. So, we have until 2031, about 5 years, to be right on that forecast.

As I came to doing funds 1, 2, 3, and 4, all of a sudden we're at fund 5. This was about a year ago. The space had grown, and I'm thinking to myself, “Oh, we're going to hit $10 trillion no problem. Let's go back and really look out at the next 10 years. From 2025 to 2035, what do we really think?”

Calling for a doubling from $5 trillion to $10 trillion is not very interesting.

Yep.

To keep the name of the fund the same made no sense. That would be disappointing to me. So, we think that over the next 10 years, Bitcoin can get to $20 trillion in value. That would be Bitcoin at $1 million. That's a 10X, or now roughly a 12X, from here. Not a big deal.

Bitcoin at $20 trillion, ETH and the alternative cryptocurrencies—Solana, et cetera—we think $10 trillion. Then we think $20 trillion will be the value of all the equity in the space. That's potentially a little low.

So, that adds up to $50 trillion, and we're at $5 trillion today. I'm not calling for a 30X now, but I do think that the space will grow by 10 times over the next 10 years. We're owning the successful core companies in the space.

3. Crypto’s Token vs Equity Problem

I'm curious, how do you define “company”? For example, Hyperliquid is doing extremely well and running a ton of revenue.

A token.

Exactly. So, I guess the question is here…

That’s the token value. Do you think that there are tokens that can have sustained value, like Hyperliquid, which is generating revenue, or maybe a SYRUP that’s leading more institutional activity, or a Canton that’s leading institutional activity? Do you view tokens and equity as being separate forever, or do you think maybe—

We’re right now trying to resolve this. You saw the debates about Aave and how revenue is now very clearly moving toward the token. I think that, for the traditional world, they need clarity around where the revenue accrues. You can’t invest in a token and then have the revenue accrue to the equity. It can’t be.

One of the big problems in our space right now that’s being resolved is that there has to be clear delineation. I think you can be one or the other. I mean, your revenue can accrue to a token. That’s fine, as in the HYPE case, or it can accrue to equity. I think traditional investors at the moment are more comfortable, of course, with equity because there’s law around it. There’s precedent. There’s lots of case law.

That’s where we are in the space now. It’s a moment of transition where I think projects or businesses are deciding how to make it clear to investors where revenue accrues. I think that’s very exciting, actually. Imagine—innovation is happening every day.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a tremendous amount happening. I think right now what people are struggling with a little bit in this market—you alluded to this before—is that there has been a massive bifurcation. That’s why people feel a little bit upset right now if you look at the more traditional crypto-native people.

What’s happening right now is all of the actual advancement is happening with institutions. It’s happening with Goldman trying to integrate stablecoins. It’s happening—

Right. I know Morgan Stanley is moving into this space.

[Speaker?]

It’s happening with integrations, which almost makes the growth equity strategy more interesting. Do you find that now your strategy is more interesting than it was before, or has it always been as interesting? Are you finding more opportunities today in this world because of everything that’s happening?

No, there are always opportunities. Look, when I had the idea for the fund in 2019, there were only 20 or so companies that were in our investable universe, maybe 30. Companies, again, with $40 million to $50 million in revenue or more. We tend not to want to pay more than 5 to 10 times revenue. We’re very tight on the multiples that we pay for the businesses we own.

Today, there are probably 150. This is something that never gets talked about because almost no one is doing growth. Essentially, no one is. The successful venture projects—the companies and projects that companies like Andreessen invest in—are going to need growth capital.

Yes, Andreessen will do follow-on rounds. They’re huge. That’s a different story. But you look at Paradigm and Polychain, some of the venture guys, Multicoin—when their equity investments get to a place where they’re a little more mature, they’re going to need growth capital. The ratio of venture deals to growth deals is like 98 to 2.

Yep.

Over the next 5 years, I think we’re going to be in a very robust period where the successful venture companies and venture projects are going to be coming to us. Hopefully, there’ll be others like us. I’m thrilled to have more potential growth investors come in and look at blockchain and crypto.

The problem is that many of them—the best and smartest guys in the world—came in in 2021. You had Silver Lake, Thoma Bravo, CPPIB, Temasek, Tiger, and Coatue. But the problem is they all got—not all, but they all were blown up or damaged by some of the nonsense. They invested in FTX. You had Sequoia losing $400 million. It’s crazy. You had BlockFi, bankruptcies, and companies that raised capital at preposterous valuations.

I think that’s the one thing the founders in this space are really doing themselves and the space a disservice with. You don’t bring in someone like Silver Lake as a long-term partner at 100 times revenue. It’s extremely difficult for a fund like that, an investor, to make a return for his LPs when you demand 100 times revenue.

Silver Lake—they’re big boys. They made the investment, and they know what they’re doing. But for the space, it’s terrible. The founders need to be reasonable. They need to have long-term expectations, and they need to know that they’re going to grow with the capital partner.

I just think that’s a problem now. The only people who I see looking at the rounds that we’re looking at are maybe strategics. Someone like PayPal might come in. You have Tether doing all sorts of deals, but at crazy valuations.

4. Crypto's Valuation Reset

Tether keeps announcing a new deal every week.

That makes me curious about the strategy. When I look at these private companies, I don’t look at them as much as you do. But when I look at the public companies that are listed, like Circle, I see valuations that are still totally out of whack.

Well, Circle’s a little different. I don’t know that Circle’s valuation is out of whack. And, by the way, Coinbase trading at 7 times is not out of whack. Coinbase is way too cheap, excuse me. Circle, I think, is unfortunately down 20% today on some nonsense. But broadly, a $20 billion to $25 billion valuation, I don’t think, is unreasonable at all in terms of its multiple.

Figure, I think, is doing quite well. Unfortunately, Gemini for us has been a little disappointing, but now they’ve cleaned house. I think—tabula rasa—I think they’re going to, over the medium term, come back and do great.

Public markets are difficult. They’re merciless. They’re short-term in nature. For a founder in the space to be a public company, it’s difficult. If you’re a founder raising in the private markets at an absurd valuation, it just makes me think that you’re not really going to have the ability necessarily to navigate the vicissitudes of being a public company.

I think it takes a very steady character with some maturity. We basically spend our life passing on deals. I’ve passed on probably 350–400 deals in the last 5 years, not because we didn’t love the investor. I mean, unfortunately, I would love to do more.

We’re sitting with a big chunk of cash now, but the markets came in and some founders are still wanting to raise capital at valuations where they were in the summer of 2025, when Bitcoin was $125,000 and revenue in DeFi was exploding. It’s just not okay. So, we wait, we find our reasonable founders, and then we partner with them.

It’s only been a few months since Bitcoin came down to 60K, right? Are you seeing those valuations start to come in? Are people coming to you more and saying, “Okay, we’re ready to raise at lower valuations?”

Only just now, yes. Only just now. Bitcoin doesn’t affect everything, but obviously it does affect sentiment and, at times, certainly with certain companies, revenue, because with a higher value, obviously, it benefits them, especially exchanges as an example.

We’re just now maybe seeing some change. I’m hoping, yes.

Right. Do you see any correlation between those valuations coming in, settling down, and then potentially finding a bottom in this market?

I sort of do. But you know what? It’s funny. My space lags. Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana are the leaders. Those are the core assets of the space.

To be honest, I think—look, HYPE also, I think, has proven itself in the last few months to actually have quite strong mettle. The price of the token has held up really well, given the macro backdrop. I know you like to talk about markets, et cetera, and it’s a very confusing macro picture today. It’s quite remarkable how the HYPE token has held up as well as it has.

You’ve got oil trading and gold trading massive volumes on the weekends on HYPE. Really, hats off to them. They’ve done a great job. I’m not an investor. I’d like to be at some point, but we’re not. They only have a token, and generally we only invest in equity.

I think we have the option to do maybe 2 or 3, certainly when there’s more clarity around revenue accruing to a token. As I mentioned before, that’s still in transition. But the stablecoin business has been fantastic. My goodness, Circle has really established themselves since becoming public and taken share away from Tether, remarkably, which no one ever had anticipated.

Yep. And I would say also, one of the things that’s benefiting us here, and maybe why there’s a record number of people here, is because I think we’re entering now what I would call the Americanization of crypto.

You and I have been in this a little while now, and up until 18 months ago, it was a very hostile environment in the United States. We had a horrible administration and horrible leadership at the top in the U.S., essentially thwarting crypto. I had companies that were being sued by the SEC 18 months ago that are actually public today.

Yep. Now, what an about-face. So, this Americanization of crypto—I’ve been calling for it since this new administration.

I just saw some data yesterday: U.S. exchange volume versus the rest of the world—our market share has doubled. A year and a half ago, only 7% of total world volume was in the U.S. Today, it’s 15%. That’s Coinbase, Kraken, to a lesser degree Gemini, and some of the other handful of U.S. exchanges. There aren’t that many, but it’s phenomenal to think that we’ve doubled our market share.

Yep.

I think we have the world’s deepest capital markets. We’re the richest country in the world by far. The value of the assets of the United States is a multiple of the value of everywhere else in the world combined. The reality is that blockchain and cryptocurrency are going to be embedded into our financial system and into our markets more quickly than anywhere else in the world. It’s happening now.

I think that over the next 5 to 10 years, we could easily be 50% of the world’s volume. We were at 7% a year ago, 15% today, and we could easily be at 50% within the next 5 to 10 years. My guess is that this conference next year, regardless of the bear phase—I mean, Bitcoin is already down 50% in 5 months, right? How much more is there going to be?—will be even bigger next year than it is this year.

5. Where To Allocate In 2026?

Yeah, I think you actually just recently tweeted that there could be a tell in the market because we haven’t gone down.

You’re really looking at my Twitter closely, huh?

I did a lot of research. I have a lot of other questions. I know you got a master’s degree in European history.

Okay, hold on. Let me take them one at a time.

Well, let’s ask that question first.

No, no, no. Which is that question?

The market question, which I think our listeners are going to be very interested in. If you’re looking to invest in the markets today, let’s say you’re a new person and you’ve seen Bitcoin—

Which markets?

The crypto and Bitcoin markets today. You’ve seen markets come down a lot, and you’re really terrified about this war and all the fear-mongering about AI. But you’re saying, “Hold on, the market actually hasn’t gone down that much.”

No, well, it has gone down. What I was saying in suggesting in that tweet was that we’ve absorbed a huge amount of bad news. The war has been going on for a year and a month. People have known about our movement into Iran probably for longer than that, especially within the administration.

I think these markets broadly—Bitcoin, but also gold, oil, and stocks—have priced in a lot of bad news. Brent traded up to $115 or $120, I think, at one point. These are very high prices. We’ve priced in a lot of fear.

When I see a tremendous fear buildup over the weekends, everything in the news is negative and everyone is panicking. Then you come in and the Nasdaq yesterday didn’t even close down. Maybe it goes down today. Maybe we have a massive flush. But the market is surprisingly resilient, given how bad the news is. People are talking about a prolonged war, oil staying high forever, and Qatari gas being offline forever.

Markets work in interesting ways. They act as price incentive mechanisms. There are times when maybe something bad is happening, but a price moves to a certain place that brings on a new supply that we didn’t know about. Markets are wonderful things in that way.

When I look on a Sunday night and see terrible news over the weekend, everyone’s in a panic, and all of the Middle East is in flames, but the markets—and Bitcoin—have moved $1,000, it’s pretty remarkable how well it’s held in. It’s been holding around $70,000, and it does feel to me like $60,000 was a sort of flush panic moment.

For your listeners, I really don’t see us being able to go down below $50,000 for any demonstrable period of time. If you’re looking out for 5 to 10 years, can you buy at $70,000? Do I think you have the chance to make 5 to 10 times your money? I do, with very controlled downside.

Bitcoin at $70,000 already is just about an unchanged price for 5 years. If I look back at 2021 and see how undeveloped the digital asset space was in January 2021 versus today, it’s a night-and-day scenario. In January 2021, there were practically zero stablecoins, as an example. Last year, we traded $33 trillion.

DeFi revenue—revenue that’s being generated in decentralized finance—was essentially zero in January 2021. Now it’s $100 million to $200 million per month. When I look at the growth, forget about all the other things as well, there’s no way that the price of Bitcoin, which is the core asset of the space, is going to stay disconnected.

The Bitcoin code is what sits underneath everything that functions: every cryptocurrency, everything. It’s all a derivative of the Bitcoin code. Bitcoin is digital gold, and we don’t have enough time to get into why Bitcoin is so great today. But the reality is that you can buy it today for the same price that it was 5 years ago. That seems kind of absurd to me.

The same thing goes for ETH. I think those are the 2 core assets. Solana’s made some headway recently. I don’t know if you noticed, but in the last 2 months, stablecoin trading on the Solana blockchain has completely exploded versus ETH.

It is. It is.

I think at the beginning of the year, over 50% of all stablecoins were on the ETH network. Now that’s been reduced, and Solana, I think, has moved up from practically 0% or 10% to almost 30%. There’s lots of activity, lots of fee generation, and lots of usage of blockchains.

It is.

I think now the most exciting thing about the future, if your listeners are thinking about what’s interesting in this world, is this. I’ve talked about the past. There is a world coming now where autonomous AI agents will be using blockchain to send value back and forth to each other.

I said this on our panel: People don’t understand that blockchain is the money of the autonomous, agentic future. It’s already happening, whether it’s x402 or whatever it is.

I think it was Meltem who recently put out something—no, it wasn’t Meltem; it was Haseeb from Dragonfly. Actually, I think it was Meltem. My mistake. It was about how the old world, in a way, was enveloping the new world. But also, crypto maybe wasn’t even really built for humans because it’s very complex. All these different blockchains, the speed—it’s all code.

Maybe blockchain was really built for these AI agents. It’s code talking to code. Here we are 15 years in, and most institutions and most traditional investors still have no idea about Bitcoin or crypto. It’s starting to change now a little bit.

It is. It is.

But the reality is that it’s so complex, and the growth in the space has been so fast. You look at some of the developments happening within DeFi, and it just strikes me that it’s almost alien sometimes.

It is.

Maybe crypto was just invented for them, not for us—for agents acting on our behalf. There’s a really good talk with Arjan Sethi, the CEO of Kraken, and Haseeb, the GP at Dragonfly. It’s a 20-minute chat.

Arjan says that within 12 months—this is the CEO of Kraken, the second-largest exchange in the U.S.—he’s going to have all of his assets personally managed by an autonomous agent. I think that’s actually quite reasonable.

I mean, you and I may think that’s reasonable, but I heard him say that. Imagine all your assets. It sort of reminds me of the late ’90s, when people were afraid to put their credit card number on the internet. I don’t know if you remember that, but I do. For several years, I was afraid. I was like, “Oh, I can’t put my credit card number on the internet.”

To me, that’s the same moment. It’s a little scary.

Haseeb was saying to him, “I don’t believe that’s going to be the case. I think you’re too fast on this, Arjun. People are going to be too scared to let an agent completely manage all of their finances.” He wasn’t just talking about investing in markets. He was talking about managing all of his finances.

He’s on the cutting edge of technology at Kraken, and I’m very excited about that. All the different companies and projects that are developing around building the agentic infrastructure—that’s what we’re investing in.

I really appreciate that. That is such a great note to end it on.

You wanted to talk about my college days and all of that. Maybe we do that at a different time, all right? I think people would find it quite interesting.

But you know what? I think you did an amazing job laying out the bull case for crypto, why we’re still going to grow, why there’s still tremendous opportunity in the markets right now, and why we might actually be close-ish to a bottom. If you’re looking at a 5- to 10-year time horizon, it’s a great time to hop in.

Yeah. Thank you very much for having me.

It’s great to speak with you, and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you.