Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead said Bitcoin will massively outperform gold over the next 10 years, even as the market remains difficult in the near term. Speaking at the Ondo Summit in New York alongside Bitmine Immersion Chairman Tom Lee, Morehead said long-term investors should be focused on the bigger time horizon rather than current weakness.
Morehead framed the argument around fiat debasement. He said paper money is being debased by 3% a year, yet is still treated as stable money. Over a lifetime, he added, that amounts to roughly 90%, which is why he sees it as rational to hold assets with a fixed supply, specifically gold and Bitcoin.
Capital rotates between gold and Bitcoin
According to Morehead, both assets move through cycles and investor attention shifts between them. Gold has run far ahead at times, he said, but the pattern tends to alternate. Over the past few years, total ETF inflows into gold and Bitcoin have been roughly similar.
Tom Lee, also bullish, pushed back on the idea that the current downturn can be explained by a simple four-year cycle. He said he does not view it that way, pointing instead to diverging signals such as rising Ethereum activity and the fast deleveraging seen during the October 2025 crypto crash. In Lee’s view, that washout was even more severe than the one in November 2022.
Institutional ownership is still near zero
Morehead argued that institutional exposure to crypto remains extremely limited despite major developments such as the launch of Bitcoin ETFs. He said many alternative investment firms managing around $100 billion still hold no Bitcoin or crypto at all, and he cited that as a core reason he remains bullish.
In his words, a market is hard to call a bubble when the median institutional allocation is literally 0.0. He added that the list of reasons large institutions once used to reject crypto used to be long, but has now been mostly crossed off, with custody improving and regulation becoming clearer.
Blockchain seen as a rare mix of growth and diversification
Morehead said blockchain has delivered 80% annual returns over 12 years while maintaining low correlation with stocks, making it unusual as an asset class that combines high growth with portfolio diversification. He described it as the best asset class in history.
Lee said crypto infrastructure is gradually becoming embedded in the financial system in ways users may not immediately notice. He pointed to stablecoins, tokenized assets, and crypto-powered neobanks, saying people may end up using crypto without realizing that crypto is what powers the experience.