Multicoin Capital managing partner Tushar Jain said on the When Shift Happens podcast that he believes crypto is at a turning point and that the market’s price lows may already be behind it.
Jain said he looks for sentiment to fully wash out before a reversal takes hold. He also pointed to a market that no longer falls on bad news. Last month’s major hacking incidents, he said, did not trigger broad selling, which he sees as a strong signal. At the same time, application adoption has kept rising while prices have lagged fundamentals.
He did not call for an immediate V-shaped rebound. Even if the low is in, Jain said the market could still spend time moving sideways while a new narrative develops. He added that a macro shock, such as an escalation in a U.S.-Iran conflict, would change the picture.
Why he still owns both Solana and Hyperliquid
Jain said his long-term thesis on Solana has not changed. He still sees Solana as the right technical architecture for what he called internet capital markets: a permissionless, open-source chain that can bring assets and applications onto one platform.
At the same time, he said derivatives volume has been shifting toward Hyperliquid, and he currently holds large positions in both assets. In his framework, Solana leads in spot trading and could host spot trading for tokenized securities, while Hyperliquid is clearly ahead in derivatives.
Jain said he is not a maximalist and does not want to anchor himself to a single asset or worldview. His approach is to hold both where the probabilities justify it.
Why traditional finance issuers may prefer Solana
Asked where traditional finance issuers would choose to launch assets, Jain said they would not issue on Hyperliquid and would be more likely to choose Solana. He cited Galaxy as an example of an institution issuing stock on Solana.
The key distinction, in his view, is credible neutrality. Jain argued that Solana has a form of credible neutrality that Hyperliquid lacks. He described Hyperliquid’s trade-off as weaker credible neutrality and opaque validator nodes in exchange for better performance, with users accepting that because they can verify the chain and monitor the exchange’s real-time solvency. Solana, by contrast, has open-source clients and a strong validator community, though that comes with costs.
He said that matters to large financial institutions. In the interview, Jain argued that firms such as Goldman Sachs would not settle on a rival’s chain, and neither would JPMorgan want to settle on DRW’s chain.
Position sizing, valuation and execution
Jain said position sizing is more art than science. For long-term investors, he argued, trying to optimize every allocation with a quantitative model can become a trap. Capital should be concentrated in the ideas you believe in most.
He said actual sizing decisions also depend on outside investor constraints, tax costs and what he called a “minimize regret” framework: if one of the positions proves wrong in one or two years, which mistake would feel worse?
On timing entries, Jain said it is not realistic to expect repeatable precision in bottom-ticking. His preferred method is a three-part approach: buy one-third immediately, deploy another third through dollar-cost averaging over a set period such as one to two months, and keep the final third flexible for sharper selloffs, such as a 10% single-day drop.
He also said Multicoin does not actively swing trade. In his view, that style is too hard to execute because emotions interfere, and chart-based indicators can quickly be invalidated by real-world events.
Zcash as a 2026 opportunity
Jain singled out Zcash as one of the clearest opportunities he sees for 2026. He said the position is smaller because of liquidity and market cap limits, but added that Multicoin has accumulated a meaningful portion of total ZEC supply.
He said he likes Zcash’s momentum, use case and community, and that the asset reminds him of early Bitcoin. After watching ZEC rise last year, Jain said he spoke with many early supporters and found that they remained committed even after the price pulled back. To him, that did not look like short-term hot money.
He also argued that Zcash has no cash flow or revenue, which means its value depends entirely on shared belief. For a store-of-value asset, he said, that can create more upside because scale itself strengthens the asset.
Cypherpunk roots and a ranking-based framework
Jain said Zcash represents a return to the cypherpunk values that helped build the industry. He said he supports stablecoins and real-world assets on-chain, but views them as centralized instruments that can be frozen. In his telling, crypto was built on self-sovereignty, while the mainstream of the market is now leaning toward regulatory accommodation.
He also said Bitcoin has, in his view, become institutionally captured, naming BlackRock and MicroStrategy. As debate around Bitcoin’s quantum risk grows, he thinks some early cypherpunk Bitcoin supporters could move elsewhere in a future fork scenario, with Zcash standing to benefit.
For valuation, Jain separates assets with revenue from assets without it. Revenue-generating tokens can be valued through cash flow and a multiple. For Zcash, he looks instead at market cap rank and asks whether it can move from around No. 20, No. 15 or No. 10 into the top five. He said that framework also shifts with the size of the broader market, including whether Bitcoin is at $80,000 or $200,000.
Why Multicoin bought more ZEC after the bug scare
Jain also addressed the recent Zcash code vulnerability incident. He said the Zcash core team found and fixed a potential double-spend bug in the Orchard privacy pool while using AI tools to inspect the code.
The market, he said, panicked on fears that someone had minted tokens without limit. But transparent addresses were unaffected, and the privacy pool’s “turnstile” mechanism, which records total inflows and outflows, did not show hackers pulling funds out at scale.
Jain said he did not trade on the day of the incident because he avoids acting when emotions are extreme and liquidity is thin. After watching the situation for a few days and seeing no evidence that the bug had been exploited, he concluded the selloff was an irrational panic amplified by cascading stops. Multicoin then added heavily to its Zcash position.
He added that the team plans to launch a formally verified new pool, Ironwood, in July. In his view, the episode was ultimately a false alarm.
The logic behind Multicoin’s $319 HYPE target
Jain also defended Multicoin’s recent report that projected HYPE could reach $319 within two years. He acknowledged that the firm holds a large HYPE position, but said readers should focus on the assumptions and decide for themselves.
He laid out four core assumptions from the report:
- Crypto derivatives grow at a 35% compound annual rate. Jain said the figure is already below the 45% pace seen over the past five years.
- Decentralized exchanges reach a 32% share of the derivatives market. He noted that the segment was near zero in 2022 and is now at 16%, so doubling again over two years fits the trend in his view.
- Hyperliquid maintains a 30% share of decentralized derivatives. Jain called that conservative because volume can be washed, while Hyperliquid currently holds 59% of real open interest across the decentralized derivatives market, a metric he said is harder to fake. If competitors stop subsidizing activity, he expects Hyperliquid’s real share to rise.
- USDC collateral grows linearly with trading volume. If trader leverage preferences stay the same, he said, stablecoin collateral should expand in step with volume and open interest.
Sell discipline, Ethena and Ethereum
Jain said Multicoin’s version of taking profits is usually rotating into Bitcoin rather than cash. Because the fund is committed to staying fully invested, Bitcoin functions as its cash equivalent. In periods of extreme euphoria, he said, the firm sells higher-beta assets into Bitcoin. In sharp drawdowns, it uses Bitcoin to buy projects it still likes.
He said the firm sells in only three cases: when it finds a better idea, when the original investment thesis is disproven, or when market valuations become so euphoric that they pull forward years of expected upside.
On Ethena, Jain said it belongs in the same broad lane as Aave and Morpho, matching lenders seeking yield with borrowers seeking leverage. He said Multicoin owns multiple projects in that category, including Kamino on Solana, because lending markets tend to show strong scale effects and liquidity often concentrates in the largest platforms.
Asked about Ethereum, Jain said it is hard to assess. In his telling, Ethereum spent the last six or seven years telling users to scale through L2s, only to later revisit scaling through higher gas limits on L1. He said the plan remains unclear. Even so, Ethereum’s market cap resilience still surprises him. Since it has lost spot share to Solana and derivatives leadership to Hyperliquid, Jain said the simplest explanation may be that investors increasingly treat ETH as a store-of-value asset or, in his words, a better Bitcoin.
Why he is still at Multicoin
Jain also spoke about partner Kyle’s departure from Multicoin. He said he was surprised by the move but respects the decision. The episode pushed him to think again about what drives him.
Rather than living with an “every day is your last day” mindset, Jain said he asks a different question: if he had 10 years left, what would he want to do? His answer is that he still wants to win, and he still enjoys being right when others are wrong.
He said he continues to believe blockchains will become the base layer of future capital markets and replace today’s legacy systems. Jain closed that thought by recalling Mark Zuckerberg’s old explanation for rejecting Yahoo’s $1 billion offer for Facebook: if he took the money, he would only start another social media company anyway.