Cryptoassets at a Crossroads: Volatility, Adoption, and Changing Investor Perspectives
Web title: Cryptoassets at a Crossroads
350-character version:
Crypto investing is entering a new phase as institutional adoption accelerates and markets mature. Oscar Pulido speaks with Robbie Mitchnick and Dan Morehead on volatility, portfolio roles, and how digital assets are reshaping capital markets and investor perspectives.
250-character version:
Crypto investing is evolving fast. Robbie Mitchnick and Dan Morehead join The Bid to explore volatility, institutional adoption, and what digital assets mean for portfolios and capital markets.
Episode Description:
Crypto investing is at a crossroads as digital assets move from speculative beginnings toward broader institutional adoption and integration into capital markets. As volatility persists and infrastructure evolves, investors are increasingly asking not what crypto is—but what role it plays in portfolios.
Host Oscar Pulido is joined by Robbie Mitchnick, Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock, and Dan Morehead, CEO of Pantera Capital, live from Miami at BlackRock’s Latin America Investment Forum. Together, they explore how crypto investing has evolved, why institutional participation is accelerating, and how investors are reassessing digital assets within diversified portfolios. The conversation examines the dual nature of crypto as both a volatile, risk-sensitive asset and a potential long-term diversifier. Robbie outlines how bitcoin’s unique characteristics—scarcity, decentralization, and independence from sovereign systems—differentiate it from traditional assets in capital markets. Dan reflects on early conviction in crypto and why institutional adoption may still be in its early stages, despite growing awareness.
Key moments in this episode:
00:00 Introduction
03:30 Early conviction in crypto investing
05:00 Crypto as a portfolio asset
08:00 Understanding volatility and cycles
10:10 Bitcoin vs. Ethereum and market structure
12:00 Institutional adoption trends
15:00 Crypto in Latin America
17:00 Retail vs institutional investors
19:00 Future of crypto investing and regulation
21:00 AI and blockchain convergence
23:00 Closing thoughts
Sources: Bitcoin market cap, Forbes April 19th 2026; Transforming Global Trade: Bitso Business at the Forefront of Blockchain, Bitso Business 2025
Keywords: crypto investing, bitcoin, ethereum, digital assets, blockchain, institutional investing, capital markets, AI investing, megaforces, pantera capital, blackrock, dan morehead, portfolio diversification
Written Disclosures In Episode Description:
This content is for informational purposes only and is not an offer or a solicitation. Reliance upon information in this material is at the sole discretion of the listener. Reference to any company or investment strategy mentioned is for illustrative purposes only and not investment advice.
<<TRANSCRIPT>>
Oscar Pulido: For years, cryptocurrencies were seen as a speculative corner of the market defined by volatility, hype, and big questions about their long-term value. But today, that narrative is starting to change as markets mature, infrastructure improves and institutional adoption accelerates. Investors are no longer just asking, what is crypto? They're asking a more practical question. What role should it play in a portfolio? where does crypto stand today as an asset class and what comes next?
Welcome to The Bid where we break down what's happening in the markets and explore the forces changing the economy and finance. I'm Oscar Pulido.
In this special episode, we're coming to you live from BlackRock's Latin America Investment Forum in Miami, where investors are gathering to talk about what's next for markets across the region. And one topic that keeps coming up, crypto.
Today joined by Robbie Mitchnick, head of Digital assets at BlackRock and Dan Morehead, CEO of Pantera Capital. One of the earliest institutional investors in blockchain and cryptocurrencies. We'll discuss how crypto has evolved into an investible asset, how institutions are approaching it today, and what investors should be watching as the next phase of the market unfolds.
Robbie and Dan, thank you so much for joining us on The Bid.
Robbie Mitchnick: Thank you. Good to be back.
Dan Morehead: Yeah, it's great to be here. Thank you.
Oscar Pulido: We are in Miami, we're here at BlackRock's annual Latin America Investment Forum, which brings together over a hundred investors from the Latin America region to talk about the trends that are very topical in the market today.
Dan, I would like to start with you. You're the CEO of Pantera Capital. You were one of the first institutional investment firms to focus on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Back in 2013, I did a little bit of research and I think you got involved with Bitcoin when the price was sub $100. And you'll correct me if I'm wrong when we go into this a bit more, but what did you see in the market back then that gave you conviction in this space and what do you think investors still misunderstand about blockchain and crypto today?
Dan Morehead: Yeah, thanks. Great question. My career's been as a global macro hedge fund investor. Previously I was at Tiger Management looking around the world for asymmetric trades, and those are the trades that are really compelling. Where obviously there's risk, but the chance that if you do make money, you can make three times your money or 10 times your money, have always been compelling.
And in 2011, my brother introduced me to Bitcoin and I have a little bit of a libertarian streak, so, I thought this was really cool, but I didn't do anything about it. And then in 2013, Pete Berger and Mike Novogratz, a Fortress Investment Group, who were friends, asked me to help them think about Bitcoin. And I came in for a coffee in 2013 and stayed for about five hours. And I just blew my mind. I was like, okay, this seems huge. And they offered me an office in their building. They just kicked us out a couple years ago. So, we stayed for 12 years because it was just that compelling.
So, the case really is all of our financial systems, they're these extremely expensive, middlemen that take huge rents out of the middle, whether they're banks or remittance companies or what have you, and each of those are worth, collectively, trillions of dollars, extremely valuable. And a bunch of protocols that we now call the internet changed everything else in our lives, changed commerce, communication, everything else. They didn't change anything about finance, the last big invention is the credit card. Everything still the same. It's basically the internet coming to money and finance and, amazing amount of use cases and at the time I think all the Bitcoins on earth were about a billion dollars or $2 billion. And so, we set out to buy 2% of the world's Bitcoin because I thought that would be a, a great trade. And I still have that conviction. And part of the argument, and Robbie's seen the original investment memo, was this easily could blow up and not work back then. Now I still say you should be cautious, but it's reached the escape velocity. It's important. But at the time, almost nobody had any financial exposure to crypto, and we launched the first crypto funds in the world. It's still true that most people don't have exposure. The median institution has 0.0% of crypto. So, that's why I'm still so bullish. I think there's, decades more of this trade to go.
Oscar Pulido: You mentioned escape velocity, which I interpret as 'this is now real. Th this is now more institutionalized. Th this is going to be a form of payment that is around' and I don't think you felt that way, maybe in the early days of studying this space. You also talked about the payment system and how a lot of things haven't changed. And Robbie, when you and I have spoken in the past about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, you've also talked about how, bitcoin and crypto modernize the way in which we do payments. So, Robbie, maybe coming to you talk more about this market, the asset class, where does it fit in diversified portfolio?
Robbie Mitchnick: That's probably the single biggest question that we get from clients on the topic today. Part of why it's such an interesting question is there's a bunch of dualities when it comes to Bitcoin and thinking about it as an investment. On the one hand, it's clearly a risky asset on a standalone basis. It's, still relatively novel technology. It's volatile. On the other hand, it has a very unique set of properties that give it I would say a distinct set of long-term risk and return drivers from just about anything else in your portfolio, right? It's global, it's non sovereign, it's decentralized, it's scarce, it exists outside of any one country's political, economic, fiscal, monetary risk factors.
And so, from that perspective, it has the potential to be, I think, in the long run, not just a diversifier, but a hedge against some of the potential left-tail risks that exist in a traditional portfolio. Now, what confuses that is because of those first couple attributes I mentioned, there's a subset of the market that treats this as pure 'risk on', and they almost trade it like levered Nasdaq, let's say, despite the fact, I think fundamentally it's very different from Nasdaq or other, tech investments. And so, what we've observed is there's this top layer of the market that tends to be predominantly retail, highly speculative, often trades with leverage, trades a lot and short term. And for them it's pure risk on beta play. But for the lower layer in the market, which is actually much bigger, but it trades a lot less, we see a lot more institutional investors, financial advisors, ultra-high net worth, for them, they see it as this diversifier, and this long-term hedge. And so, depending on the nature of the regime at play, it can behave, very differently and even opposite, to the way it behaves in other markets. And that generates a lot of questions from clients as it should.
Oscar Pulido: I think what you're saying is there's a lot of attributes that make crypto a candidate for a strategic asset allocation in a portfolio. But you mentioned the volatility. It can move pretty quickly, both on the upside and the downside. Of course, I think investors care more when it moves on the downside. That's what worries them. So let's talk about that because that's what we've experienced in recent months with crypto and Bitcoin is downside volatility. What's going on beneath the surface when that's happening and how do you make sense of what matters versus what doesn't when we're in one of those periods?
Robbie Mitchnick: Certainly volatility and cycles have been an intrinsic part of Bitcoin and crypto since the beginning. And, Dan's been, around it certainly longer than I have, but this is the end of the fifth cycle, in Bitcoin's history that it's had. And so that, now famous investment memo that Dan referred to - which should probably be in the investment hall of fame somewhere - that was the start of the second cycle, which is 2013. We've had five now spectacular bull market runs, followed by five pretty spectacular corrections. And in each prior one, the trough at the end of the bear market is actually higher than the prior cycle's peak.
And over time, each cycle has been progressively significantly higher then the last to the ultimate result that, Bitcoin is up, just shy of a million X since it first started trading on, exchanges. It's up about a thousand x since, you wrote that memo, Dan, you missed the first three 10 Xs though. Maybe next time, but it's an extraordinary run through this volatility and through multiple 70, 75, 80% drawdowns, and obviously since October, 2025, we had a significant draw down. Pulled back basically 50%. It's up around 20%, off of that but that's where it's so important to be a long-term investor in this space and to take that long-term perspective,
Oscar Pulido: Right, there is volatility in the space. We've talked about that in prior conversations But again, to reiterate the point, when we've seen these drawdowns, the trough of that drawdown is still higher than the previous cycle. So, the market keeps moving higher in the crypto space. And Dan, roughly two thirds of the of the crypto market around 3 trillion in market cap are things like Bitcoin and Ethereum. And these are the two that we generally hear a lot about. Why have these two come to dominate the space? And do you think that will continue or do you think it's going to broaden out? Or are we going to be talking about other cryptocurrencies as well.
Dan Morehead: So, I think it'll broaden. There were attempts to make what are now called cryptocurrencies for decades, Bitcoin was the first one to get it all together and right. And Bitcoin has won the use case of storing your wealth and sending your wealth across borders. It is amazing and I don't think anyone will ever challenge it. But it doesn't do a lot of other things like smart contracts, things like that. So, I think Bitcoin is incredibly important, always will be here. And Ethereum invented smart contracts, and then there are other ones like Solana that are, much faster and cheaper and things like that.
The way I like to think about it is, there won't be only one blockchain. But there won't be thousands, right? It's kind of like the internet. There are a dozen really important internet companies in, the next tier. The way I like to think about Bitcoin is, it's like Microsoft in the nineties. Microsoft in the nineties was the entire tech industry basically. It's gone up 10 x since then, but it's lost 90% market share in technology market cap, right? And so, think of Bitcoin like that. It probably will lose market share as more projects come in line and other things, become useful.
Oscar Pulido: Robbie, what do you see, you talk to a lot to investors as well about the crypto space. Is it mostly a conversation about Bitcoin and Ethereum, or is it starting to broaden out
Robbie Mitchnick: It's still pretty heavily focused on those two, and I think justifiably. If we zoom out and we think about the most impactful use cases of blockchain technology generally since it came into existence with the Bitcoin White paper 17 years ago. It is still Bitcoin as having solved three longstanding centuries old challenges around any form of money that had prior thereto existed, which is how do you create something that's difficult to increase the supply of and not have arbitrary debasement and inflation? Two, how do you create something that is easy to transact across borders, across banking systems, political jurisdictions, and how do you create something that's difficult to seize or to censor?
And Bitcoin though it's not a perfect form of money, solved all three of those centuries or even millennia old challenges. So, that's very significant and it owns that store of value use case, as Dan described, without any real competition at this point. So, there's a reason it's 60% of the market cap of the whole space. And then Ethereum has a lot of competition for what it's doing, which is very different from what Bitcoin's doing, building out the, decentralized computing architecture, of the future with a particular emphasis on opportunities in our view, like stable coins and tokenization and decentralized finance applications. but as I said, lots of competition for that. Ethereum has a big advantage today as the largest, as, the network effects supporting that are significant, very large developer community. Every application typically, at least considers Ethereum as a starting point. Then there's this sort of long tail of assets, hundreds of thousands of different crypto assets. So, although I don't necessarily share Dan's view that Bitcoin's market share is going to go down, I think that you could make an argument that it stays the same or even goes up.
But even if it does go down, I think the important point to remember is that it's probably not going down relative to any, randomly selected token that you may include. It's that there's this creative disruption process as more and more blockchains and tokens get created, of which some will be successful and many will not. But you have to take a very discerning view. We don't think industry is yet at a point where you could credibly offer a broad based index product 'cause there's just not enough tokens, despite the fact there's hundreds of thousands in total, there's not enough that are at the stage of maturity and liquidity and clear product market fit that you could credibly make an investment case around.
Oscar Pulido: So it sounds like there's a first mover or first and second mover advantage that Bitcoin and Ethereum have established and we'll see more evolution in the space, but that could play out over many years and two people who are very knowledgeable in the space even have different opinions of how it could play out. So, I guess that speaks a little bit about how interesting a space that this is. But Dan, I mentioned at the beginning that we're at the Latin America Investment Forum, and so the audience, resides from many countries in Latin America. And so, we have to ask, how are you seeing the crypto space evolve in the Latin America region as compared to other regions? What similarities or differences are you seeing?
Dan Morehead: Citizens of Latin America have one huge advantage over Americans in seeing this as an opportunity. If you go to an American and you say, ‘Hey, we got a new currency that's better than the paper money you have.’ They don't often get it right. 85% of Americans don't even have a passport. They have no idea what foreign currency means. If you go to a citizen of a Latin American country. And say, 'Hey, don't trust your government with paper money.' They get it right and they buy Bitcoin. And Latin America's always been a huge place for us. One of our earliest investments was in Latin America because you don't have to explain why people would want to sell their national paper currency and buy Bitcoin. It's self-evident to them. So that's been probably the biggest one.
The other, thing that's important, Latin America, remittance are huge for a lot of the citizens of Latin America. And if you think about it, it's really crazy, what the remittance market is currently. There are gatekeepers that own these rails that people move money. For the migrant, that's a month's wages. They literally spend an entire month doing really difficult jobs in order to just pay the remittance company and their family only gets 11 months bitcoin and crypto stable coins. That's the answer. And already 10% of all US to Mexico remittance is going over Bitso. That is great. People in Latin America get that kind of stuff.
Oscar Pulido: What you're saying is if you live in the US like I do, and we use the US dollar as the means of exchange, the, we hear a lot about the US dollar and the exorbitant privileges that it enjoys and the reserve currency status that it enjoys. So, maybe it takes a little longer to think about how this thing called Bitcoin works alongside it. But in other parts of the world where your currency isn't the world's reserve currency, you get there a little bit quicker.
And Robbie, people are getting there quicker because institutional adoption of crypto is increasing and you're having a lot of these discussions with the investors who are, interested in this space. So, tell us a little bit about what those engagements sound like and what does this mean for this space going forward.
Robbie Mitchnick: Dan's absolutely right about that geographic disparity, but the US is, as you said, Oscar starting to get there. And the drivers of that are first you had in the US significant inflation for the first time in 40 years.
And so most people hadn't had any experience with this idea that, their, government issued money could lose value in a rapid way. and the second is, unfortunately, there's declining trust in institutions and governments all over the world, and certainly, that's very much the case in the US as well. we're seeing what's been this extraordinary, gradual trend, particularly around bitcoin interest, where quarter by quarter, the mix of our investor base that's focused on this, that's adopted this, is shifting more and more towards institutional and wealth advisory from, and investors.
End investor segment continues to grow each quarter, but the share continues to accelerate faster from institutional investors and from, the wealth space and the wealth space in particular a lot of barriers to access, had to come down. And that journey is probably 30% of the way along, there's still another 70% of sort of frictions being taken out in terms of who's actually just even allowed, to invest in this.
Oscar Pulido: And Dan, this reminds me, I was listening to something you had said, I think just a few weeks ago, and you pointed out that most times in financial markets, the smart money, quote unquote, the institutional investors, they identify something and then the end investor eventually catches up and invest in this area. And what Robbie just said, and I think what you said was that crypto is actually the opposite and maybe one of the few examples you can think of where many end investors got in early and now the quote unquote smart money is starting to catch up. Maybe talk a little bit more about that and again, what do you mean, what do you think this means going forward then?
Dan Morehead: Yeah, so I think that is the big opportunity is the success that we've already seen in our industries. Really just from retail and in individuals. Institutional investment is yet to come. Robbie's point about kind of barriers that were imposed by regulatory bodies or whatever, that's really held the industry back. Even some of the massive, Wall Street firms are just now allowing people to own any simple product like an ETF, that should have been 10 years ago, right? And for whatever reason, all that was held back. And so, to my mind, that's the opportunity. like we're just getting started with most people addressing this.
And I would say, it's really out of ignorance, is that I've been doing this for 14 years and I keep asking people for any well-written paper that's saying why crypto is not an important investment in a portfolio. There really isn't one. You get the Warren Buffet, 'it's rat poison' lines once in a while, right? But you don't, no one ever actually sits down and writes a 20-page paper on why you shouldn't invest in crypto and that, that'd be my advice to any of you out there that haven't yet done it, spend a couple hours read about it. When someone actually spends the time and they're like, oh man, I really should put one or 2% of my portfolio into this. Because it, it might keep going up 10 x every couple years.
Oscar Pulido: Well, Dan, you have spent just yourself probably more time studying this space, you and Robbie together, so we have to ask, when you think about this space going forward, it's evolving quickly, but where are we going to be in the next few years? What are the developments that you're looking at?
Dan Morehead: Som a huge one is we were talking about the restrictions that have artificially held it back. The US SEC wouldn't allow IPOs for a long time. And great companies like Circle that we were invested in for 12 years couldn't go public. They're now public and we've had five companies in our portfolio go public in the last, nine months.
Another kind of example of that would be there are now crypto companies in the S&P 500. So, you have to have an opinion now. if you don't own any crypto companies, you're short the index. So, all those things are really good. It's just forcing people to have an opinion, and bringing people, into the industry because, it is an important new asset class. And I've actually seen this before I was the first asset backed securities trader at Goldman in the eighties, people thought I was crazy, I bought a lot of loans, right? But now everyone thinks ABS is a thing and emerging markets is a thing, commodities is a thing, Blockchain will be an asset class.
Robbie Mitchnick: Yeah, I think the convergence of this with AI is the most important thing because AI is the most important thing. And obviously I'm a believer in digital assets as Dan is, but I think, it would be foolish to try to claim. That digital assets is on a par with AI because nothing's on a par with AI in terms of the disruptive force that it represents.
The important thing is to consider what the interplay of those two forces looks like. And to me it's quite significant. and if we start with, value movement, if you think about the AI agent economy, which we're just starting to see, the beginnings of that, and I think it's going to accelerate massively. AI agents are not going to go get bank accounts, they're not going to use Fedwire or Swift or ACH they're going to use some sort of, blockchain based monetary instrument. Why? Because what is AI? It is machine data and intelligence, right? What is crypto? Crypto is machine native money. And so, whether that's Bitcoin or ether or Stablecoin or something else. That is, I think, the clear favorite to be the natural currency mechanism of that economy.
And then the other big element to it, which is less talked about, is in the disruption that's set to come. There's a lot of things that give value to something like Bitcoin, which is this global, decentralized, non-sovereign, scarce, asset that exists outside of these country specific risk factors. In particular, as we think about the pressure that's likely to be exerted on government balance sheets all over the world to support their citizenry through this, disruptive phase, that's a massive catalyst. Anytime you talk about money printing, debt deficit accumulation, people start to think about gold and Bitcoin as these, attractive alternative assets in that environment.
Oscar Pulido: I think if this room had seen that investment memo that you wrote back in the day, Dan, I think a lot of people would've been left scratching their heads. And what is Dan talking about? I think if we'd had this conversation even just a few years ago. The terminology was still pretty new to people and people were starting to figure it out. I do think that this is a topic that have become more mainstream, so people are starting to understand a little bit more about this space and this conversation and bringing both of you together has helped being. Has helped bring more transparency to the subject. Thank you guys for joining us on The Bid and talking about crypto, and thank you to the audience for joining us.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Bid. If you've enjoyed this episode, check out episode 2 35 titled Gold and Bitcoin, why Investor Interest is Rising Now, and subscribe to The Bid wherever you get your podcasts.
<<SPOKEN DISCLOSURES>>
This content is for informational purposes only and is not an offer or a solicitation. Reliance upon information in this material is at the sole discretion of the listener. Reference to the names of each company mentioned is merely for explaining the investment strategy and should not be construed as investment advice or recommendation.
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