Pantera Capital founder and CEO Dan Morehead told CNBC that Bitcoin could climb to $750,000 within four to five years, arguing the asset still represents only a “very low single-digit percentage of global wealth” and has historically “roughly doubled every year” across the firm’s 12 years in crypto. Morehead coupled the price call with a stark consolidation thesis: only a single-digit number of base-layer blockchains will endure—led by Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.
Why Bitcoin, Ethereum And Solana Will Succeed
Speaking on “Squawk Box,” Morehead framed Bitcoin’s upside as a function of its penetration into global portfolios rather than a speculative cycle. “I think it could go up to $750,000 in the next four or five years,” he said, reiterating that while a $1 million handle may be conceivable, it is a longer-dated prospect. The forecast extends a through-cycle view Pantera has pushed since launching what it describes as the first institutional bitcoin fund in 2013.
The Pantera chief also dismissed “winner-take-all” narratives in smart-contract platforms, but he narrowed the field decisively. “There’s a single-digit number of layer ones… things like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana—not thousands, but definitely not one,” he said. In his view, these chains map to distinct use cases: “Bitcoin’s digital gold,” Ethereum anchors programmability, and Solana is “very good at the performance blockchain.”
Morehead underscored Solana’s technical and market momentum to explain why it belongs alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum in the long-run cohort. “Solana’s had better performance than even Bitcoin over the last four years,” he noted, adding that the network “could do 9 billion transactions a day,” a throughput he argued exceeds activity across traditional capital markets.
While the exact comparative framing is debatable, the line reflects Pantera’s view that Solana’s execution capacity—combined with low fees—has crossed a threshold where “it’s not obvious you need a next thing” for high-speed on-chain finance.
The interview doubled as a showcase for a new public-markets vehicle offering direct, unlevered exposure to SOL while capturing native staking yield for equity investors. Morehead cast the “digital asset treasury” structure as a bridge product in an era when large-cap crypto ETFs remain unevenly available.
“Right now there’s no [spot US] ETF [for Solana]. It’s very difficult to get… For people with a brokerage account, this is the easiest way to get access,” he said, describing staking as “cumbersome” for typical retail users and positioning the listed vehicle to automate validator selection and reward capture.
Pantera’s push fits a broader 2025 pattern: public companies raising capital to hold programmatic positions in major cryptoassets—often with staking overlays—and then listing on Nasdaq as equity proxies for tokens without spot ETFs.
Just hours before Morehead’s appearance, Helius Medical Technologies announced an oversubscribed $500 million financing led by Pantera and Summer Capital to launch a Solana-backed treasury strategy, with an additional $750 million in warrants that could lift the vehicle’s size to roughly $1.25 billion. Helius said it would explore staking and conservative on-chain yield opportunities around its SOL reserves.
Asked to arbitrate Ethereum versus Solana, Morehead avoided a binary call, returning to the same consolidation arc: multiple large-cap winners, but far fewer than the thousands of L1s launched over the last cycle.
The market’s job now, he implied, is to price durable differentiation: Bitcoin as pristine collateral and macro hedge; Ethereum as the generalized settlement and execution layer for tokenized assets and DeFi; Solana as a high-throughput venue for consumer-scale and market-microstructure-intensive applications. “There would be lots of blockchains that are important,” he said, “but definitely not one.”
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $115,319.
