‘It’s All One Trade’ — Crypto Bull Run Isn’t Done, | Crypto News
Pantera Capital founder and CEO Dan Morehead argues the core driver of this cycle stays the same “one trade” uniting macro and crypto: fiat debasement pushing capital into scarce, higher-beta belongings. In a wide-ranging dialog with Real Vision’s Raoul Pal, the pair body the current rally—and what comes next—through the lens of coverage error, structural deficits, sticky inflation, and the slow-rolling migration of institutional and sovereign portfolios into digital belongings.
The Debasement Trade Powers The Crypto Bull Run
Morehead’s start line is blunt: “We have full employment. Inflation is debasing our assets by 3% a year… and they’re cutting rates. Like, it’s crazy.” He calls 2020–2021 “a policy error”—“there was a time where inflation was 8%, and the Fed Funds rate was zero”—and says easing into today’s backdrop “when everything’s booming” undermines the financial test on “record fiscal deficits.” The consequence, he argues, is that price ranges across real belongings look high not because they’re rallying independently, but because the denominator is falling: “It’s the price of paper money that’s plummeting.”
Pal extends the body to a single macro issue. “We use [Global Macro Investor’s] total global liquidity index as our benchmark for debasement. The Nasdaq, since 2012, has a 97.5% correlation, and Bitcoin is about 90%.” In his phrases, “None of it matters. It’s all one trade.” The implication is a regime where liquidity and debasement overwhelm the same old cross-asset nuance: “It’s the greatest macro trade of all time.”
That regime, in Morehead’s view, also explains why adoption retains broadening. The pair be aware how the “debasement trade” has migrated from crypto-native circles into bank research. “JP Morgan’s talking about it. And I got an email from Goldman today, the debasement trade,” Morehead says. “I’ve been talking about it for 12 years.” Pal provides that even large banks “openly” speak about currency debasement now, while purchasers are being provided wider access to crypto publicity.
The wedge, they contend, stays institutional under-allocation. “How can you have a bubble nobody owns?” Morehead asks. “The median institutional investor’s exposure to crypto and blockchain ventures is literally 0.0.” Asked where steady-state allocation may land, he factors to “8 or 10” p.c over time, echoing Pal’s commentary that many household workplaces that start at 2% “end up being 20% really fast” as price motion mechanically will increase weightings and conviction follows.
Morehead also sees coverage politics and geopolitics accelerating adoption. He argues the US election reset a regulatory headwind—“we went from… aggressively negative… to being extremely positive”—unlocking public pensions and sovereign funds that “got scared away in 2022” after the FTX/Luna/Celsius cascade and high-profile enforcement circumstances.
He goes additional, sketching a sovereign “arms race” for reserve Bitcoin: US holdings via seizures, “roughly the same” in China, and GCC states “aggressively getting into the blockchain space,” with room for acquisitions “tiny compared to balance sheets.” In his phrasing, if a number of blocs each goal million-coin stockpiles, provide dynamics may “squeeze up like a watermelon seed.”
Why This Crypto Bull Run Extends Into 2026
If liquidity and adoption anchor the bull case, both still respect crypto’s cyclicality. Morehead has modeled four-year dynamics around halvings and says Pantera’s prior cycle targets hit with eerie precision: “We forecast… Bitcoin would hit $118,542 on August 11th, 2025. And it did… one day [early].” He also notes past peaks coincided with celebratory “events”—the 2017 CME futures itemizing and 2021 Coinbase direct itemizing—adopted by ~85% drawdowns.
Yet he argues “this time” could also be meaningfully prolonged by the coverage and allocation backdrop: “The regulatory changes in the US, I think just trump everything… I think the next six to 12 months are still a big rally.” Pal, while acknowledging the web’s penchant for hanging forecasters, concurs: “I think it’s going to extend.”
The social dimension of adoption runs through the dialog. Debasement’s distributional results have made housing and rents the stickiest CPI parts—“35% of [core CPI] is shelter,” Morehead says—pushing youthful cohorts toward arduous belongings. Meanwhile, the “virality rate of crypto is like 95%,” he claims: “you get a smart person… to think about it for an hour, they’re all like, ‘Oh yeah, I should buy some crypto.’”
Evangelists matter, too: “Michael Saylor has done a great job. He has Messianic following… Tom Lee [on ETH]… We’re gonna endeavor to do that on Solana.” Visibility through ETFs, DATs, and media segments pulls newcomers into the funnel, where small initial slices have a tendency to scale. As Pal places it, traders who lack publicity really feel “like you’re short the upside calls.”
I like it when technology, crypto, and macro come together in somebody’s journey… and there’s no one better than my pricey pal @dan_pantera, an OG in the space! Please get pleasure from pic.twitter.com/ShZAd2tB3u
— Raoul Pal (@RaoulGMI) October 23, 2025
For all the optimism, the macro warning lights keep on in the background: structural US deficits “literally in the best of times,” a monetary-fiscal loop trapped between refinancing wants and price stability, and a demographic drag on productiveness that leaves AI-driven features still forward of the curve. “Debasing your fiat currency against everybody else’s fiat currency is a race to the bottom,” Morehead cautions. In that world, gold and crypto operate as life rafts: “That’s why everything’s at record prices… except for paper money.”
Both males close by zooming out. The web is “53 years old and they’re still doing cool internet companies,” Morehead says; Bitcoin turning 17 means the asset class stays a teenager. The majority of establishments “still have 0.0” publicity. If the “one trade” persists—liquidity up, fiat down, adoption rising—then the trail of least resistance, in their telling, still factors increased.
Or as Morehead compresses the thesis into a single line: “If you hold crypto for four or five years, I think it’s like 90% that you make money… It is that simple.”
At press time, the whole crypto market cap stood at $3.7 trillion.
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