Variant Fund

Variant Fund

2026-10-02 07:04:13

Variant Fund partner says three crypto asset groups could draw the biggest gains if the bull market is just starting

Variant Fund investment partner Alana Levin argues that if crypto already put in a bottom sometime in July, the market’s main question has shifted. Instead of asking where the bottom is, investors should now ask whether a real bull market has begun and which projects stand to benefit the most. In her view, the first pool of incremental capital is likely to go to monetary protocols, especially digital store-of-value assets measured against Bitcoin, and to protocols that can actually generate revenue. For the latter group, she expects investors to look more closely at revenue quality, durability, margins, institutional adoption paths, and whether teams proved resilient through the last bear market. Levin also outlines a third category: onchain projects that can be valued against non-crypto businesses, especially those tied to parts of the AI stack such as routers, inference, compute, data collection, and interfaces. She sees many of those as narrative-driven trades rather than long-term investments, and says token value capture remains a key concern where equity and token economics are loosely aligned. More broadly, she argues that some assets never fully entered a bear market this year and may now trade more like traditional assets, with pullbacks in the 10% to 30% range rather than the 90%+ drawdowns seen in earlier cycles.

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Variant Fund

2026-10-01 16:40:04

Variant Fund partner Alana Levin says crypto likely bottomed at some point in July

Variant Fund investment partner Alana Levin said in her market outlook for the fourth quarter of 2026 that the crypto market most likely found its bottom at some point in July. She noted that she had written in early July that a bottom appeared to be near, when Bitcoin was at $59,000, Ether at $1,600, and ZEC at $420. In her view, the debate has now shifted away from whether a bottom is in place and toward two questions: whether the bull market is genuinely underway or just a fake move higher, and which projects stand to benefit most in the early stage of a new cycle. Levin said a growing consensus is that marginal capital is most likely to flow into value-storage protocols that function as money and into protocols that generate revenue. She argued that Bitcoin remains the dominant digital store-of-value asset, while other competing assets may be valued by their market-cap ratio to Bitcoin and changes in that ratio. For revenue-generating protocols, she expects investors to focus on whether revenue comes from crypto-native activity such as Pump or traditional finance activity such as Hyperliquid, whether revenue holds up during pullbacks, and what margins look like. She added that projects tied to real-world assets and stablecoin growth, able to attract institutional users, and still led by founders after a bear market may command higher multiples. Levin also grouped onchain projects comparable to non-crypto businesses into a third category and said most of them are narrative trades rather than long-term investments. She listed AI-related themes including routing, inference, compute, data collection, and interfaces, and said if those projects materially outperform, she would read that as a sign the market is nearing a top.

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