저자: TomLee&LynAlden · 외국인
요약 보기
Tom Lee는 디지털 네이티브 은행이 10년 내 세계 상위 10대 은행 중 5곳이 될 것이며 비트코인이 가치저장 기반 체인의 승자라고 주장. Lyn Alden은 이번 중동 전쟁 중 비트코인이 금을 상회한 것은 레버리지 청산과 강한 보유자 덕분이며 바닥은 이미 형성됐다고 봄. 다만 알트코인·DeFi·NFT·밈코인 등 비트코인 외 크립토는 성장 산업으로서 끝났다고 평가. 금은 단기 급등 후 공정가치에 가까워져 비대칭성이 줄었다고 언급.
다듬은 글
Tether, which is a crypto-native, completely digital-native bank selling a stablecoin called Tether, is going to make 15 billion this year, which would rank it as the eighth most profitable bank in the world with 300 employees. So, I think that what's happening with blockchain is what happened with digital media, where there were the traditional studios and then there was Netflix or with telecom, where there was long distance and local and then there was cellular.
And that the new entrants gained a lot of power relative to incumbency because of technological innovation. And I think that's what's happening in crypto today. So, it makes sense that the boomers are descending on crypto, but my guess is that in in 10 years, five of the 10 largest banks in the world will be digitally-native companies.
So, it's still very early days and I think there's a lot of opportunity, but the base layer winner in the work we do is, you know, is Bitcoin is going to be arguably the most important blockchain because it's really good at storing value and then Ethereum because it's really the compute layer. Two of the most respected macro and crypto minds on Wall Street just looked at the same market and came back with conclusions that should make you deeply uncomfortable.
Tom Lee says five of the 10 largest banks in the world will be digitally native within a decade. He says Bitcoin is the base layer winner for storing value and that the ETF flows coming in are not pennies anymore. The institutions have arrived and they are not leaving. Lynn Alden says the bottom is already in on Bitcoin.
The fast money is gone, the leverage is washed out, and what just happened during a shooting war in the Middle East was not a fluke. It was a structural test that Bitcoin passed and gold failed. But Lynn also said something else, something that changes how you read everything Tom Lee is describing. She said, "Crypto beyond Bitcoin is essentially over as a growth industry.
Not slowing down. Over." That tension between those two views is exactly what we're breaking down today. Jeffrey Gundlach had a comment the other day that I would love to hear your opinion on that someone who's steeped in the crypto community. He was on TV and he said, and I'm going to paraphrase, he's like, "The worst insult a millennial could give a boomer is that crypto is all about boomers now." And I was laughing about that because I was thinking about crypto in general and you spend a lot of time in the Ethereum world, but thinking about competing assets, whether it's equities, whether it's themes like AI, give us a round up of what's going on in that world today.
How things looking in the crypto community and is it all just a bunch of boomers now or what's the story? Crypto has underperformed expectations. If someone was to look at why crypto matters today, I think there's two stories that are really central to what blockchain does really well. One is of course instant settlement and the ability to sort of confirm transactions quickly and that's why Wall Street is tokenizing on the blockchain and it's not even just a theory anymore.
I was at Consensus, one of the big conferences last week in Miami. Actually, we spent the first part of that week at Milken. And actually both at Milken and at Consensus, the corporates, the financial institutions were all talking about how tokenization is a big unlock for their business because not only does it allow trading to happen 24/7, it all starts to allow leverage or borrowing or monetizing non-traditional financial assets, whether it's like real estate or art, etc.
So, it's a real thing. And the second, of course, is AI is going to start to need a neutral way to both prove identity and to start to create transactions and to carry wallets. In fact, that's why Elon Musk kind of famously said multiple times in the last 12 months, you know, in the future money is just mass and energy.
Meaning the nature of money is essentially computing power. That basically it's all describing blockchains. And I think the reason it's becoming a boomer story is that the banks, who are the most powerful movers of money in the world, realize they can make a lot of money moving things on blockchains.
So, they they are kind of descending into crypto. But at the same time, blockchain is enabling the creation of new financial institutions that will compete with banks. And I think we did a presentation at Consensus highlighting this very collision. JP Morgan makes 60 billion a year, the most profitable bank in the world with 300,000 employees.
Chain Street is a firm that is newer, it just moves money around, you know, trading with a lot of quant and compute. And this year is probably going to earn $40 billion. They just reported $10 billion of profit in the first quarter with 3,000 employees. So, with 1/1000th the number of employees, they're almost as profitable as JP Morgan, and they're making more money than the second, third, fourth largest banks in the world.
So, they are more profitable than Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America. Tether, which is a crypto-native, completely digital-native bank selling a stablecoin called Tether, is going to make 15 billion this year, which would rank it as the eighth most profitable bank in the world with 300 employees.
So, I think that what's happening with blockchain is what happened with digital media, where there were the traditional studios and then there was Netflix or with telecom, where there was long distance, local, and then there was cellular. And that the new entrants gained a lot of power relative to incumbency of technological innovation.
And I think that's what's happening in crypto today. So, it makes sense that the boomers are descending on crypto, but my guess is that in in 10 years, five of the 10 largest banks in the world will be digitally native companies. So, it's still very early days and I think there's a lot of opportunity, but the base layer winner in the work we do is, you know, is Bitcoin is going to be arguably the most important blockchain because it's really good at storing value.
And then Ethereum because it's really the compute layer. Tom Lee's framing here is important because it tells you exactly who is now sitting on the other side of every Bitcoin trade. It's not retail anymore. It's not crypto natives. It's the same institutional capital that moved through telecom, through digital media, and through every other technology disruption of the last 30 years.
And when that capital decides something is the base layer, it doesn't rotate out on a bad news cycle. Now, Lyn Alden's analysis cuts deeper than the optimism because she isn't just saying Bitcoin survives. She's saying the rest of the crypto ecosystem, the altcoins, the DeFi protocols, the layer two narratives, and the tokenization promises.
Most of it was never going to make it. And the evidence she lays out is hard to argue with. Sometimes it's hard to say exactly what happened. Um, but I would say that from my perspective, cuz people were surprised that for example from the start of the war, Bitcoin outperformed gold, which you know, if you pulled people ahead of time, you know, we have a straight a straight of Hormuz closer where war with Iran is ongoing, which one outperforms, vast majority of people probably say gold.
I I think a really big factor was that going into that, gold had a lot of fast money in it. It had a very good like 18-month period. It was like, you know, gold and silver were kind of going vertical. And you know, they were they're correcting a little bit ahead of time, but in general there's still a lot of fast money in them.
And whenever kind of, you know, war or or unexpected things break out, there's often deleveraging. And And it's kind of, you know, a little bit of like a liquidity squeeze here and there. Whereas Bitcoin by that point had already had kind of a kind of two-phase down bear market. Had been kind of rolling over for months.
And a lot of the fast money was already out. And a lot of the leverage was already kind of liquidated from some of those really big down moves that that preceded it. So by the time the war breaks out, it's mostly held by really strong hands at that point. In addition, when we look at kind of you know, just global like measures of liquidity, they're not amazing at the moment, but they're not as bad as you'd expect from almost eight weeks of a straight of Hormuz closer, an energy crisis, and war.
They've actually kind of held up better than one might expect. And while it's not always the case, I mean Bitcoin tends to correlate with liquidity pretty closely. At least it's one of the major input variables among a few others that tend to kind of correlate pretty well. And that's been holding up.
So I think the combination of fast money is already out. I have seen the correlation. I would say that, you know, the sample size is not super big, you know, when when Bitcoin's a 17-year-old asset and you say, "Okay, well, the first seven years it was tiny." So let's say a decade of correlation. That's not a That's not a ton of sample size to go on.
But there it makes some intuitive sense that you have kind of like the hard money folks. There's there's fractured in a couple different camps. You know, there's Bitcoin, there's gold, there's silver, there's like altcoins. Um and you know, when one is doing really well, it tends to suck some of the capital out of the out of the room for everyone else.
Um uh whereas when one is stagnating, allows these other ones kind of a chance to to do well. Um and so, you know, because there was a pretty big um central bank bid for for gold. Uh in addition, it was just kind of it you know, a lot of us in the you know, I I'm one of those people that's bullish on both Bitcoin and gold.
So, I've been I've been tracking gold. I've been bullish gold since 2018. And you know, a lot of times things happen all at once. Like I, you know, I would have expected gold when gold was like 2,000, I expected it to be more like 3,000. And but then suddenly it goes from like 2,000 to like 5,000 way quicker than I would have guessed.
Like when it was 5,000, I would have thought that it would have been 3,500 or 4,000. So, the these moves tend to happen very quickly. Uh in my view, um you know, the sentiment in precious metals has probably topped. Not to say that the prices have topped. I'm kind of on record saying I don't think that they're in a bubble, gold and silver.
I think they re- rapidly revalued from kind of structurally undervalued to something closer to resembling fair value. So, I'm less interested in them because they're they're less asymmetric than they were several years ago. Uh when they were kind of close to their mining costs and they were kind of super cheap based on many metrics I look at.
Um they've revalued higher. I think we probably have not seen the high, but you know, I think the the the speed of which they they go up there is kind of probably behind us. Uh and I think, you know, uh all like I said, all the fast money's out out of Bitcoin. Uh a lot of the indicators look really good.
I mean, you know, the the the the funding rates, you know, if you're getting paid to short it or go long it. Uh the on-chain stuff, uh the the kind of the technical indicators, like if you look at say the weekly numbers, they're kind of rolling up. Um and so, I'm in my base case, you can always be wrong in in things.
My base case that Bitcoin has seen the bottom. It's already up pretty significantly from the bottom. Uh and I think this is an accumulation phase. Do you think crypto is over? And I mean that in the sort of disparaging non-Bitcoin sense. Because when when when I have a look at, you know, I've only been in this space for um 5 years now, you know, I allocated to Bitcoin, I went all in in um in late 2020.
And in that time, you know, there's been uh one major narrative and one sort of semi-narrative emerge, you know, we we we had the the NFT sort of thing um rise and fall. But there there doesn't seem to be anything right now that's a an alternative narrative to Bitcoin to sort of puff up that soufflé.
And it feels like when I have a look at what's happening in the marketplace with respect to the exchanges, they've all piv- they all seem to be pivoting towards um merging with um uh the the prediction market space and making offerings in that regard. So, is is that whole sector, the whole crypto sector, over?
I think so, in the sense that I define over as stagnating now. Not meaning it obviously goes away tomorrow, but that it it's not it's no longer a growth industry. Uh it never really was. It's just that now it's kind of being marked to market. Um and so, if you kind of look at I think the you can kind of measure this in terms of narrative exhaustion.
So, the really early wave of altcoins was like alternatives to Bitcoin. They're saying, "Hey, you know, the steel man case to them is, "Hey, did we get the block size right? Did we get the speed right? Did we get the privacy settings right? Let's try Let's throw Let's throw some alternatives at the wall and see what the market picks." Right?
That's kind of the the the early phase. Then there was the ICO one, basically saying, "Oh, we can just go around the SEC and issue our own securities and then get potentially sued." Uh so, that was like the second wave. Then there was the DeFi wave, which is still a really big narrative, but it's actually remarkable how compressed the initial one was.
So, it kind of really emerged scale in mid-2020, DeFi summer. Uh and then by late 2021, it hit its peak total locked value and still hasn't quite reclaimed that figure um 5 years later, right? So, it's really only had a year and a half bull market and then it's just been, you know, 4 and 1/2 5 years of stagnation.
And as NFTs, as you mentioned, were another narrative that kind of came soon after, that was kind of a flash in the pan. They still trade, obviously, but they're nowhere near the liquidity and and size that they were. Then there's been a little bit of a resurgence in privacy coins for a while. Um which yeah, I think that's kind of over now.
Uh we'll see if that you know, that that could have another round of legs to it. Uh meme coins had a couple attempts. Uh and and kind of this last cycle, there really wasn't a narrative. The narrative was kind of meme coins. Um and I think that's that's almost like the the final cycle. Uh where it's like you don't even pretend that there's something innovative here.
It's just like let's it's basically player versus player uh competition. Uh and I think this now people rightly kind of associate crypto with scams or scam adjacent. Um kind of like Ponzi adjacent, scam adjacent. Um and the I think the the just the overall kind of value that space is minimal. I think Bitcoin is valuable.
I think stablecoins are doing something for a lot of people that they they want dollars. They want pay digital payment rails in dollars. Um I think there's some legs for tokenization. Meaning that, you know, if you can tokenize gold, which people have been doing since at least 2018, um you can it's kind of like a global ETF in a way, you know, it's it's an ETF that you can have almost regardless of what country you're in.
Um tokenizing major stocks, you know, for people that want it just is is harder for them to get access to their own country and they want either an S&P 500 token or an Nvidia token or you know, uh but I I think beyond either to you know, tokenizing a handful of those kind of real things um and Bitcoin, yeah, I'm not really bullish.
It's not really else I see that I'm bullish on or nor have I been bullish on. I think it's going to continue to stagnate. When the Strait of Hormuz closed and war with Iran became real, the trade most professionals would have made was to sell risk assets and buy gold. That's the textbook move. And gold did get bought, but it also had enormous amounts of speculative money sitting on top of it after an 18-month vertical run.
Bitcoin had already bled that out. Months of forced liquidations and rolling bear market pressure had removed most of the tourists. What was left were holders who weren't going anywhere. That's not a narrative shift. That's a structural cleanup that made Bitcoin harder to crash precisely when everything else was most fragile.
And that distinction is exactly why what she said next about the rest of crypto hits so differently. Now, let's put the full picture together. Because when you hold Tom Lee's and Lyn Alden's views side by side, what you get isn't a contradiction. It is a map. Tom Lee is right that institutional capital has permanently changed the Bitcoin market.
The ETF flows are real, the boomer money is real, the idea that five of the 10 largest banks in the world will be digitally native within a decade isn't a fringe prediction anymore. It's a structural shift already underway and the flows are already confirming it. Lyn Alden is right that Bitcoin passed a test during this war that almost nobody was prepared for.
Eight weeks of a closed Strait of Hormuz, energy crisis conditions, active military conflict, and Bitcoin held, then it climbed. That doesn't happen in an asset class still dominated by fast money and speculation. That happens in an asset class where the conviction holders have taken over. But, there's the part that should actually unsettle you.
While Bitcoin is passing these tests, the system it exists inside is quietly deteriorating. $39 trillion in debt growing at $2 trillion year. Congressional trades placed minutes before classified military announcements go public. Lynn called it the looting the treasury phase. It's a description of an institution whose insiders have stopped trying to fix it and started extracting from it while the window is still open.
And crypto, the broader ecosystem that was supposed to be the alternative to all of this, has not delivered. The narratives ran from all coins to ICOs to DeFi to NFTs to meme coins. Each wave is smaller than the last. Meme coins were the final tell because at that point nobody was even pretending there was innovation anymore.
BlackRock and JP Morgan are not adopting Ethereum for settlement. They are building their own private chains. The dream is not playing out. What's left is Bitcoin, stable coins, and a narrow window for real asset tokenization. Everything else is stagnating. The fiscal spiral Lynn describes runs through the 2030s at minimum.
No clean exit, only slow debasement, rising nominal prices, and a cave-shaped economy pulling further apart between those who hold assets and those who don't. Tom Lee sees the opportunity inside that. Lynn Alden sees the structure in it. Together, what they're describing is a world where Bitcoin is not just the best option. Drop your thoughts in the comments and don't forget to like and subscribe.
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