Bitcoin’s Million-Dollar Future (Uncut) 03-07-2025

Joe McCann: Solana Bull, Bitcoin’s Million-Dollar Future & Ethereum’s Fate

I don’t think the bull run is over. I think that this is pretty standard for crypto. You know, multiple, call them bull market cycles for Bitcoin have had double digit, multiple double digit pullbacks.

Structurally, I don’t see a reason for this cycle to be over. And I’ll give you a handful of reasons why. Irrespective of one’s politics, the number of positive catalysts and headlines that are coming out of DC right now, and potentially West Palm Beach, are arguably the most bullish in the history of crypto.

Welcome to Speak Up. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci on the Wealthion Network. Our guest today is Joe McCann, who I met over a glass of tequila in San Francisco three short years ago.

It feels like dog years though, Joe, because we’re both in crypto. So it feels like 200 years ago. But you’ve got over 24 years of experience working on Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

You’re the CEO and CIO of a terrific fund called Asymmetric. Thanks for joining us. You’ve been on before.

You know I’m a huge fan of yours. And so I wanna start with the basics. I want you to tell me what Asymmetric does, make a pitch for Asymmetric, a lot of people listening in.

Tell us what Asymmetric does and tell us how you’re thinking about the markets right now. Sure, yeah. So Asymmetric, I founded it in early 2022.

We’re a digital assets investment firm. We have a couple of hedge funds and now we’re launching our third venture capital fund. It will be the first crypto VC fund exclusively focused on consumer apps.

Most of these VC funds focus on infrastructure. We’re going the opposite direction. We’ve had pretty good success.

You know, 2023, we were notified we were the top performing hedge fund net of fees across every asset class. In 2024, we followed up with another triple digit gain. So we feel pretty comfortable with what we’re doing on the hedge fund side, especially as it relates to understanding global macro, but also the nuances of crypto specifically.

As you mentioned, yeah, I’ve been a trader and a technologist for now going on 25 years. And that suits us really well in crypto, which is another reason why we do some early stage venture related investing, given the kind of level of innovation that’s possible with Web3 and blockchain. Okay, so where, you tell me, are we in crypto summer? Are we in crypto spring? Are we heading into, are we in the fall heading into crypto winter? I mean, I don’t know, where are we? Yeah, I mean, you know, crypto is, it really tests your intestinal fortitude.

And there’s really only two emotional states in crypto and that’s euphoria and terror. That’s just the asset class. As this asset class continues to mature, we will start to see the volatility of these assets, theoretically come down.

You can look at US equities as a proxy to that. You know, the stock market has been around forever. The volatility is significantly less, but I would point out that the volatility in the stock market the past couple of weeks has not been low, right? If you look at some of the most high performing, call them momentum stocks or high-tech stocks, they’ve just gotten absolutely decimated.

I think Tesla down something like 33% a week or two. Even last week, the momentum factor, Goldman’s momentum factor basket was down 20% in five sessions. That’s just huge in trad fi, in traditional finance.

Crypto was not immune to this. And in fact, to some extent, one could argue that crypto led this or kind of forecasted what was about to happen to the momentum trade in trad fi. If you take arguably the fastest horse, yes, I am a Solana bull, I know you are as well.

But if you take the fastest horse and you look at it eclipsing a new all time high right around Trump’s inauguration, it basically went straight down. That was the same trade for the majority momentum stocks in traditional finance. And so I think that this is a broader unwind or de-risking giving some of the geopolitical uncertainty as well as how that geopolitical uncertainty will affect broader markets.

I don’t think the bull run is over. I think that this is pretty standard for crypto. Multiple, call them bull market cycles for Bitcoin have had multiple double digit pullbacks.

Structurally, I don’t see a reason for this cycle to be over. And I’ll give you a handful of reasons why. Irrespective of one’s politics, the number of positive catalysts and headlines that are coming out of DC right now and potentially West Palm Beach are arguably the most bullish in the history of crypto.

And I think some of that got priced in when Trump won the election. I don’t think most of it has actually been priced into the market. I think you’re just seeing a broader de-risking of momentum given the kind of the uncertainty and potential headwinds that come to risk assets.

But structurally, this is the most bullish time for crypto as an industry, particularly as the United States appears to be on a path of trying to be the crypto capital or the center of crypto for the entire world. Okay. I mean, it’s very well said.

And what you said about euphoria and terror, we have to come up with a word, Joe, because I feel both of those simultaneously on the same net. You know what I mean? Like literally, I’m like euphoria or something like that, or terror or something. Right.

So I guess where I wanna go with this though is I want you to be a time traveler. And you’re coming to us from 2030. It’s five years from now.

And you’re coming to us from 2030 and you’re joining my podcast. And tell me what the world looks like for Solana in 2030. Tell me what the world looks like for Bitcoin or other assets.

Tell me where regulatory rubric is globally. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, as we sit here today, based on the information that we have, I would argue that Bitcoin is trading an order of magnitude higher in price by 2030.

So, Bitcoin’s trading roughly mid 90 thousands right now. I think we’re close to a million dollars Bitcoin by 2030. And part of the reason is that, whether it’s the United States leading in this effort, or it’s the sovereigns that are out there that are already accumulating quite a bit of Bitcoin, whether that’s through ETFs or spot, this is not going to slow down.

And Bitcoin is ultimately a hoarded asset. There is a fixed amount of supply as everyone is aware. And as these larger accumulators of the asset come into market, that the price should move pretty significantly, right? So five years out from now, it’s not that big of a stretch to see Bitcoin 10X higher.

Now let’s talk about the broader blockchain space, the smart contract kind of platforms like Solana. One of the reasons that I maintain a bullish position on Solana, again, as we sit here today and extrapolate out further, is there’s a pattern that emerges in high technology over time that we’ve seen time and time again, that when there is a new breakthrough in innovation, let’s say in this case, Ethereum invented smart contract programming, there’s a lot of innovation and excitement around that. And then it reaches some sort of a bottleneck or threshold as to what is possible on that particular platform.

We’ve seen this with things like the Palm Pilot or BlackBerry. And then what ends up happening is you have a leap in innovation that dramatically improves the user experience, not just the core underlying technology, which drives mass adoption. That would be something like the iPhone.

We’re having that moment now with something like Solana. And this is another reason why we just announced that we’re launching this consumer app focused VC fund, because we believe the infrastructure is actually sound enough for something like Solana to drive mass consumer adoption. Now let’s couple that with arguably the best use case of crypto today, which is stable coins, just cross-border payments or frankly access to US dollars.

That desire for US dollars is not going away anytime soon. I don’t buy into the belief that the US dollar as a global reserve currency is going away anytime soon. And if anything, this level of technological innovation will continue to kind of bolster the US dollars hegemony and dominance as a global reserve currency, because we’re just putting it on better rails.

I would argue by 23, you have a significant number of breakout applications in web three and blockchain. I think Bitcoin becomes a reserve asset at myriad reserve banks, as well as various sovereign wealth funds. We’re already starting to see that happen today.

And then US dollar continues to kind of remain the global reserve currency, because we’re just digitizing it and providing access to the rest of the world, where in a lot of cases, as you know, study Latin American history, a lot of these countries, you wake up one day and your local currency is devalued 50%. There is a demand for dollars that is incredibly strong, well outside of the United States. And I just don’t think that’s going to change.

I got to do this to you. I’m sorry. I got to get price targets.

Okay, so let’s go. It’s 2030. We’re a million dollars for Bitcoin.

Where’s Ethereum? Ooh. So I know you’re not a real fan of Ethereum, so go ahead. You know, I catch a lot of flack for my dunking on Ethereum and I just, I view the fundamentals of Ethereum as challenged.

And so where’s Bitcoin? Probably a million bucks, you know, that’s my guess. As you have an order of magnitude increase where the price is today over five years. The problem with Ethereum, and this is a question I get a lot, this is why it’s hard to forecast for five years out for something like Ethereum is that they could have a kind of leap in a technological breakthrough that enables them to actually compete with these high performance, high throughput chains like Solana and SWE and Aptos.

They could have that happen. The current architectural design and the design decisions that they’ve made disables them from becoming a consumer adopted chain. And so then the question arises, well, then why own Ethereum, the asset, if it is not gonna be something that is widely adopted? Again, I look at the history, right? What happened to research in motion about a year or two after the iPhone came out? The stock got absolutely crushed, right? And BlackBerry today, I mean, you can find it contemporaneously in the hands of people around the world, but for the most part, it doesn’t have a meaningful market share in the smartphone market.

Did they kind of pivot into other aspects? Yes, they’re tied into a lot of governments and they have cybersecurity capabilities, et cetera. Ethereum can’t really pivot into an entirely other different vertical. Now what they can do is carve out a specific niche and really hyper focus on that.

But that TAM is much smaller than the general use cases of say a smart contract platform. So, look, barring some huge technological innovation, I don’t see Ethereum an order of magnitude higher than it is right now. It’s probably, it will trade as a correlated asset to things like Bitcoin and Solana.

But since 2021, it has dramatically underperformed Bitcoin and dramatically underperformed Solana. I don’t see that trend changing any time soon because the fundamentals don’t actually support it. So what’s the price target? I mean, pick a number, 15,000, 20,000, it’s not gonna be anywhere close on a relative value to something like Bitcoin and Solana, which is why in 2024, we owned exactly zero Ethereum at the fund and we still see no real reason to own it this year based on the fundamental analysis that we have.

Where is Solana in 2030? Right now there’s a proposal in place to change the inflation rate for Solana from a fixed number to a dynamic number. It’s kind of tough to say what the price target will be if you have a fluctuating interest rate as it relates to inflation. Could Solana be, you know, $10,000? Sure.

Could it be $5,000? Sure, pick a number. I just think it will actually eclipse Ethereum’s total market cap. And that’s kind of the metric that I would use is that if you kind of, if you can put a pin in where you think Ethereum is gonna be in five years, Solana should eclipse that.

And right now Solana’s worth about a fourth of the value of Ethereum. Solana will probably change, not to get too technical with our viewers on this, but they’ll probably change their staking methodology, right? It’s a little inflationary. From what I’ve seen, I mean, listen, there’s, you know, this is a true test for the Solana community because there’s two kind of camps here.

One is the technologists and then there’s the other folks that are more kind of institutional investor-y finance types. And historically, as you’re probably aware, that’s like oil and water mixing. The technologists make a very good case, but so do the folks on the kind of institutional side or the finance side.

And so if I, you know, gunned ahead, I had to pick one right now, it probably passes the proposal, which would then imply a dynamic inflation rate as opposed to a fixed one. But I think that one of the biggest concerns that I have is Solana is really kicking ass, pardon my French right now, right? Like five months in a row, they have eclipsed every other chain combined in terms of trading activity and what we call decentralized exchange trading volume. The fundamentals are just lights out right now.

And so when you introduce a potential large change to the underlying protocol, the question arises, why? You know, like if it’s working well, why now? And I do think that there’s an argument to be made that, hey, while things are working well, it’s time to actually continue to innovate and kind of, you know, leapfrog the potential competition, so to speak. So gunned ahead, yeah, I think that it probably passes. I think it will be okay.

Like I have a lot of confidence in the teams and the open source developers that are behind this project, but it is not without any risk, right? Any fundamental change to an underlying protocol introduces some level of risk. So you, Tushar, and Kyle are gonna be the three richest people that I know then, other than, yeah, totally, right? I think Kyle and Tushar are probably much wealthier than me, but we will see. I mean, look- I’m just trying to keep up with the young people.

My, Kyle and Tushar are great friends of mine. And like, you know, they deserve all the credit. They had extreme conviction in their early days at an institutional level.

I had extreme conviction at a kind of individual level. And they are trying to continue to push the project forward, right? They’re not just sitting on their stacks of cash and kind of, you know, riding off into the sunset. They’re still actively involved in the project.

I do think that the changes to the protocol, but more importantly, the continued improvements to the project underscore its strength and reliability. So for example, now again, politics aside, the Trump family or Trump consortium launches their meme coin three days before its inauguration. I can assure you, without a doubt, if that was launched on any other L1 or any of the hundred plus Ethereum L2s, it would not have worked.

First of all, it’s a weekend. So, you know, trading volumes are typically depressed. You have less liquidity in the markets.

But secondly, the amount of- this was launched on-chain, right? This was not a token that was on Coinbase all of a sudden, right? This was an on-chain, a true kind of meme coin launch. And the amount of activity on the chain was setting records and the chain was fine. There was no issue, right? If you look at that as a test, forget the actual event itself, that it was the president-elect of the United States doing this.

Look at the test of the technology and ask yourself, why is this thing one-fourth the value of Ethereum when it handled arguably the biggest test of any blockchain at scale in history? I’m with you on all of that. And I totally agree with that. And that is the positive.

The negative is these meme coins, particularly the president of the United States launching one 48 hours before he becomes president again, is probably not the best optics for the industry. That’s just me. It’s my opinion.

And so I think it causes, and it could have actually contributed to the meme coin debacle that we experienced in February, but whatever. I mean, we can differ on that. But I do think it did prove or sort out the prowess of Solana, which is the reason why you and I are such bulls on Solana.

All right, let’s take some audience questions, Joe. Sure. All right.

So, could you share one book or mentor who significantly influenced your investing philosophy? This is Andrew. You could say me at this moment, Joe. You could, but that’s okay.

That’s okay. It’s like, if you have a kid, you can name the kid. Anthony? Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. Answer Andrew’s question, honestly, it’s okay. Sure.

So, I get this question a lot because I’ve been trading for a long time and people ask me like, what trading books did you read? And I said, I didn’t read anything. I didn’t read any trading books or investing books. I studied philosophy in university.

I have a focus in logic, but I did study the classics. And so I tend to look for philosophical articles in writing to influence things like risk-taking and investing. And so I would argue probably the most influential book and say what you want about Massim Taleb.

You know, he’s kind of a, he can be abrasive is probably the diplomatic way of putting it, but his book, Anti-Fragile, frankly, changed my perspective on life, especially as it relates to risk-taking. In fact, this is where I got the name asymmetric for the fund. The concept of anti-fragility is that you benefit from shocks to the system and you want to look for opportunities in life in general that provide asymmetric upside with limited to no downside.

And so looking at life through that lens can really influence and shape your investment views, which is primarily how I’ve had, I think the success that I’ve had as an investor today. All right, let’s go to the next one. What’s one piece of advice you’d give someone who’s just starting, who just started investing in crypto in 2025? This is Rachel from California.

Yeah, clearly I’m not granting any financial advice. Move your head, Rachel, that’s the advice, okay? Because he was losing his hair from being so stressed out. He just went for the full head shave.

No, but go ahead, sorry, Joe. No, no, I know. We can’t get through one of these without a ball joke.

Anthony, I know that. No, look, so if you’re starting in 2025, I would think about investing in crypto as another part of your portfolio. I would not suggest to anyone to put 100% of their money into crypto.

It’s too volatile of an asset class. So if you say you have a portfolio of stocks and ETFs and maybe some real estate, maybe you have some private equity or venture capital exposure or something like that, crypto should just be another part of that allocation. Let’s just, we could pick any number.

It could be 1%, it could be 10%, it doesn’t matter. So let’s assume it’s 10%. And for simple math, let’s say you have a million dollars.

That’s $100,000. The easiest way to get involved would be to open up an account on Kraken or Coinbase. I’m assuming you’re US-based.

And within there, you could position your portfolio to absolutely include things like Bitcoin, absolutely include things like Solana. And then depending on your risk tolerance, you could dabble in what we call the longer tail of tokens. So this could include things like meme coins, but it doesn’t have to.

There are myriad other tokens that are available on places like JITO, excuse me, on Kraken and Coinbase, like one of our portfolio companies, JITO. JITO is a protocol that’s built on top of Solana. It’s generating, its annualized revenue run rate is in the billions of dollars.

It’s wildly undervalued, at least in my opinion, and I’m certainly biased, but that’s an example of another token that you could add into the portfolio to get a little bit more beta, but you don’t wanna go all in on something like that. I think holding a core position around Bitcoin and Solana and kind of dabbling in these other tokens will educate you in a way because as the market is volatile, Bitcoin and Solana definitely were volatile in the month of February. You actually learn about some of these other projects that have tokens and why they may or may not be valuable to you.

All right, well, I mean, it’s really good, really good. Let’s go to the next one. What’s the one macro economic indicator you closely follow to predict changes in crypto markets? Good question.

Yeah, that’s a great question. From Canada. So the short answer is that it isn’t just one, but I am a disciple of global liquidity.

I think that if there is one to point to, basically since the Fed kicked off QE post global financial crisis, I mean, there’s a reason that GDP stocks relative to GDP in the United States is now 6.3X GDP, whereas it was 4X prior to QE kicking off. That’s not a change in fundamentals of the stocks. That’s a liquidity game.

And that absolutely affects crypto. And so crypto tends to lag things like global M2 and the broader global liquidity cycle by about six weeks. And quite literally we’ve seen that over the past few months.

It isn’t a silver bullet, but it is something that I provide a lot of weight when I’m looking at the broader macro outlook to see is global liquidity increasing and improving? And then how can we position our portfolio understanding that there tends to be a six week lag? I think the other thing that’s a bit more maybe specific in the global liquidity picture is what’s happening in China. I just saw a headline today that Xi is going to come out with potentially this large stimulus package out of China, potentially the Chinese bazooka as it is colloquially referred to. The reason China is I think a huge wildcard if not benefactor to things like crypto is historically when China’s M1 actually increases, you see Bitcoin price correlate really strongly to that.

China has been in a liquidity trap for years. They have no domestic demand. The yields on their bonds continue to reach all time lows.

They just need to find a way to stimulate. And now if you add on to that, the potential trade war with the United States, Xi has to do something. And so that pretty much implies some level of money creation slash money printing.

And so I think monitoring what happens in China, because remember crypto is very much a global concept. If you start to see liquidity really start to get injected into the Chinese economy in a meaningful fashion, not these kind of things that they did last October, which were frankly a bit piecemeal. I think that that is gonna be another strong indicator from a macro level as to what happens to crypto.

All right, I think we’ve got a few more questions. Let’s fire it up. Is the rise of pro-crypto politicians good for the industry or could it backfire? This is Sam from Washington.

Yeah, this is a great question. I mean, one’s personal politics will certainly influence this decision. I try to zoom out a little bit and just look at what has the political landscape looked like certainly for the past four years, if not the entire history of crypto, right? There was a point when Larry Fink from BlackRock was against Bitcoin, right? He came around.

Again, irrespective of one’s political views, I would argue that having pro-crypto politicians in the U.S. provides the industry with a chance of having clarity on what is what in crypto and web three. The enforcement actions as a form of policy out of agencies like the SEC, in my opinion, were clearly politically motivated. We had arguably one of the largest frauds in U.S. history in 2022 while Gary Gensler was at the helm of the SEC.

After that, they’re playing catch up, so to speak, with egg on their face by pushing forth these enforcement actions, which have now all been thrown out. And yes, one could say, well, the politics has changed in D.C., that’s why they got thrown out. But if you look at the details of these cases, they’re utterly nonsense.

And even today, I think the folks over at Coinbase are requesting additional information to understand how much money was spent by the SEC on these kind of frivolous lawsuits. So could it backfire? Sure, I think anything could backfire, but I would actually argue that it’s enormously more valuable to have people that have a pro-crypto, I would even argue pro-innovation view in D.C. than what we’ve had certainly the last four years, if not the entire history of crypto. Let’s go to another question.

What institutions entering crypto do you think Bitcoin will become less volatile and less exciting? David from Florida. David, I hope so. I mean, I’ll let Joe answer it, but that’s my prayer.

Okay. Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. So Bitcoin, believe it or not, if you look at, say like the options markets, and I won’t bore you guys too much with that, but the options markets have shown a maturity to Bitcoin as an asset, because things like the implied volatilities of a lot of these options contracts are trading at, you know, 10th decile historically.

That’s really low volatility relative to where it’s been historically. I mean, historically Bitcoin has been like a hundred vol asset, which is incredible. That’s like your NVIDIAs of the world, right? I think last week I was actually looking at the implied versus realized vol and Tesla had a way higher implied vol.

Now, granted it did get hammered the past month. So Bitcoin is becoming less exciting in terms of the volatility associated with it because it’s becoming more mature. And I think as you start to see more and more institutions adopting Bitcoin, you will see that volatility continue to suppress.

And there’s a couple of reasons for that. One, if you take like, you know, if you look at the 13F filings from Q4 in 2024, you’ve got Ubatala, which is the second largest sovereign wealth fund out of the UAE as the seventh largest holder of IBIT now. These guys aren’t day trading ETFs.

They’re accumulating and allocating a portion of their portfolio to something like Bitcoin. Goldman Sachs has over $2 billion of Bitcoin ETFs now. Now that could be for, you know, high net worth.

It could be for, you know, hedge funds, et cetera. But that’s a meaningful number as well. But more importantly, we recently had staff accounting bullets in 121, which was put out by the SEC under Gary Gensler, which functionally made it impossible for banks to custody crypto on their balance sheets because they could only count them as liabilities, which no bank is going to do.

That has now since been reversed. And so I think that this is actually a hundred times bigger impact than something like a strategic Bitcoin reserve would be. Because banks can now offer custody services for crypto, they can actually start offering borrow lend on their prime brokerage.

They can start to create structured products, which they milk tons of fees out of to provide to their private wealth management groups. To me, this is going to continue to dampen the volatility of Bitcoin, but I don’t think it’s going to necessarily dampen what happens to the price. That’s good stuff.

How high do you think Bitcoin will go in 2025? I think the five-year question, Emily, we answered by saying a million, but what do you think Bitcoin, what’s your year-end price target, Joe? Yeah, so, you know, I’m not a big fan of price targets, but if you’re asking, I think that my base case at some point this year, Bitcoin trades 150,000. That’s my base case. Based on what could happen in DC, as well as that spilling over into other countries and reserve banks and sovereign wealth funds, et cetera, you can see Bitcoin, you know, 250,000, 300,000, if we start to actually see, you know, mass accumulation from these larger institutions.

The reason I think 150K is a base case for this year is, you know, we kind of finished the year roughly around 100K, a 50% increase in Bitcoin is not unheard of. It’s not, you know, that hard to ascertain that level of increase in Bitcoin as it relates to what’s happening in the macro right now. And I get back to things like global liquidity.

I think also that the dollar is gonna continue to weaken. We’re already seeing the 10-year yields are actually below the Fed funds rate. So it’s probably some of the cutting cycle is probably mispriced.

So as we still are in an accommodative Fed policy regime, Bitcoin, excuse me, tends to do really well. And so the reason I get to that 150K base case is it’s not gonna be as easy as last year. I wrote about this in our market updates, which are free.

You can go to read.asymmetric.financial to read them. In early January, I effectively said, the easy money is over. This year is gonna be a little harder.

We’re already seeing that play out with the first two months in crypto. That does not imply that Bitcoin won’t reach new all-time high. I think that the base case is probably around 150K at some point this year.

All right, it’s a really good spot to end this podcast. I gotta get you back, Joe. Yeah, of course.

Sorry about the hair comment. My producers are upset with me in the back room now. But I knew you could take it.

I mean, there’s only one guy I’m jealous of with hair and it’s you. Okay, I appreciate that. I do, I spend a lot of money on products, by the way.

You know what I mean? I never have a carry-on, Joe. I have to bring all the hair products with me. I’m sure.

All right, well, thank you so much for being on with us today. And hopefully you’ll come back to the show. Will do, my pleasure.