Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead told attendees at Ondo’s conference that sovereign competition could become the next big driver of bitcoin demand, predicting what he called a “global arms race” for BTC “within the next two or three years” as countries rethink reserve strategy in a more fractured geopolitical environment.
Morehead then sketched out the scale he believes could follow. “I think within two or three years there will be an arms race with three or four groups, regions each trying to buy a million bitcoins,” he said. “and you just want to be long before that happens.”
Morehead Stays Structurally Bullish On BitcoinAfter the arms-race thesis, Morehead stepped back to explain why he thinks recent market weakness fits a familiar pattern rather than a broken narrative. He admitted 2025 surprised him given what he described as a more favorable policy backdrop. “If you had asked me on New Year’s Day 2025… you would have said crypto up or down I would have said up and it was down 9% last year,” he said.
Morehead pointed to a past Pantera call as evidence the cycle framework can still map price behavior. The firm projected bitcoin would hit $117,452 on Aug. 11, 2025—“and it did literally that day,” he said. He also acknowledged the usual temptation to declare an exception: “I was like, ‘Oh, no. This time’s different.’” Then he added: “and it wasn’t different.”
Morehead’s longer-term case centered on monetary debasement and bitcoin’s fixed supply. “The willingness of all constituents just to print money is just off the charts now,” he said. He described steady erosion in fiat purchasing power as a rational catalyst for hard-asset allocation. “Paper money is being debased at 3% every year,” he said, arguing that it makes assets with constrained supply like gold or bitcoin structurally attractive.
He also addressed the gold-versus-bitcoin tug-of-war, saying rotations are normal and pointing to ETF flows as evidence both trades are now institutionalized. “The total inflows to ETFs for both gold… and digital gold, Bitcoin are about the same over the last couple years,” he said. Over a longer horizon, his conviction was explicit: “In 10 years from now, Bitcoin will massively outperform gold.”
On institutions, Morehead argued skepticism at the top remains a bullish signal because positioning is still light. “How can you have a bubble nobody owns?” he said, adding that “the median holding for institutional investors… is literally 0.0.” In his view, the list of reasons to avoid bitcoin has shortened dramatically, even if adoption at the largest firms is lagging.
At press time, BTC traded at $69,418.
