CMS co-founder warns the bull market’s most crowded crypto trade may be breaking down

Dan Matuszewski, co-founder of CMS Holdings and former head of Circle Trade, said the barbell setup that has worked in this cycle — hard-money assets on one side and cash-flow-generating onchain businesses on the other — is becoming dangerously crowded. Speaking on The Rollup podcast aired on Sept. 15, 2026, he said the framework is not necessarily wrong, but once everyone piles into the same logic, the edge starts to disappear. Matuszewski argued that crypto still lacks the kind of structural inflows seen in equities, making the asset class more vulnerable when positioning gets concentrated. He said crypto-native and liquidity funds appear to be only about halfway through their buildout, with the next marginal buyers likely to be high-net-worth investors using ETFs, then larger Wall Street institutions, and eventually retail traders driven by FOMO and social trading. He also laid out how he thinks about layer-1 value, saying native assets accrue value when they become useful inside their own systems, citing BNB, ETH and Solana as examples. On tokenized equities, he said the category could become larger than stablecoins because many people globally still cannot access U.S. stocks directly. He described social trading as closer to a substitute for gambling than investing, saying participants should expect to lose money.