Grayscale Is Looking Past Bitcoin for the Biggest Upside in Crypto
Grayscale's head of research laid out where the firm sees value in a beaten-down market, and his answers are more measured than a simple "buy everything."
Key Takeaways
- Grayscale’s Zach Pandl says Bitcoin is cheap, but not at historic-extreme levels.
- He sees the Clarity Act as the single biggest catalyst for ending crypto winter.
- He’s structurally bullish on Ethereum as the leader in tokenization.
- He calls AI crypto the biggest asymmetric opportunity Grayscale sees.
- Grayscale is an asset manager, so its bullish framing carries that context.
Speaking with Cointelegraph, Zach Pandl made the case that Bitcoin is cheap but not screaming, that one piece of legislation could end the downturn, and that the most asymmetric opportunity isn’t Bitcoin at all.
Bitcoin: Cheap, but Not “Close Your Eyes and Buy”
Pandl’s read on Bitcoin is nuanced. On-chain valuation indicators confirm it’s cheap relative to its long-term average, but he draws a careful distinction: cheap isn’t the same as exceptionally cheap. After the FTX collapse, those same indicators flashed extreme undervaluation. Today they’re below average, not at historic extremes. As he put it, “It’s not quite the time to close your eyes and buy.”
His guidance splits by investor type. For long-term holders, the answer is simpler, dollar-cost average now rather than trying to time the exact bottom. For tactical allocators, he flags two conditions that would confirm the low: progress on the Clarity Act in the Senate, and Strategy stabilizing its balance sheet. If both happen, in his words, it’s a “green light” that the market has probably reached bottom levels.
Here’s a snapshot of where Grayscale sees opportunity, ordered from the nearest-term call to the most speculative, and what each one depends on:
Bitcoin (Near-term)
View: Cheap, but not extreme; prioritize DCA over timing.
Catalyst: Clarity Act progress + Strategy stabilizing.
Ethereum (Long-term)
View: Structurally bullish; the “biggest boat” in tokenization.
Catalyst: Tokenization adoption (long-term), Clarity Act (short-term).
Hyperliquid (Emerging)
View: Buzziest name; perps going mainstream.
Catalyst: Revenue-to-token-holder model gaining institutional traction.
AI Crypto (Asymmetric / Speculative)
View: Biggest asymmetric bet; potential for a trillion-dollar asset.
Catalyst: Network-effect winners in decentralized AI networks.
The Clarity Act: The Single Biggest Catalyst
Pandl is direct that one event matters more than any other: if the Clarity Act passes, he believes crypto winter likely ends. Not because the rules change overnight, he points out the Genius Act passed last year and its rulebook still isn’t finished 18 months later, but because institutional confidence would unlock immediately. The signal it sends, as he frames the mindset, is “now’s the time to write the big checks.”
He describes a practical sequence: Clarity passes, M&A transactions follow, IPOs follow, and Wall Street and the major banks finally get the signal to deploy capital that’s been sitting on the sidelines. He’s honest about the downside too, if Clarity doesn’t pass, a longer crypto winter becomes a real possibility. It’s a catalyst with a clear binary attached.
Ethereum: The Biggest Boat in a Rising Tide
Despite ETH’s price weakness and the turbulence around the Ethereum Foundation, Pandl is structurally bullish, and his reasoning rests on one megatrend. Tokenization, he argues, is a 10-, 20-, even 30-year shift that will reshape capital markets, and Ethereum sits at the top of the blockchain pyramid by nearly every metric that matters: on-chain assets, stablecoin volume, DeFi value locked, ecosystem depth, and architecture. “Ethereum is the biggest boat,” he said, in a tide he expects to rise.
That structural view is echoed beyond Grayscale. PwC’s 2026 Global Crypto Regulation Report frames the current moment as a shift from regulation-as-constraint to regulation-as-architecture, with 2026 marking a move from policy design to operational implementation, tokenization pilots scaling and major institutions beginning to issue regulated digital instruments.
The report argues that as institutions fold crypto into their treasury and settlement layers, the utility value of core smart-contract platforms begins to decouple from retail sentiment. This is precisely why institutional players remain bullish on infrastructure-heavy assets like Ethereum: they are betting on the migration of global financial plumbing onto regulated, on-chain rails, rather than speculating on a short-term price cycle.
So the framing splits cleanly by time horizon. Short-term, ETH’s direction depends on the Clarity Act like everything else. Long-term, it depends on tokenization adoption, and on that score Pandl thinks Ethereum is better positioned than any other technology to capture the trend.
Hyperliquid: The Buzziest Name With Institutions
Asked what’s generating the most interest among Grayscale’s investors, Pandl points to Hyperliquid, “probably the most buzzy thing with our investors today.” The appeal, in his telling, is that it represents something genuinely new to institutional eyes: a crypto-native exchange exporting perpetual-futures technology into mainstream finance, with a direct revenue-to-token-holder model that traditional finance can actually understand and value. Grayscale has launched its own Hyperliquid ETF (ticker HYPG), one of several now on the market alongside products from Bitwise and 21Shares, so its enthusiasm here comes with a commercial stake worth noting. His broader point is that perpetual futures are following the same path stablecoins and tokenized assets did, from crypto-native curiosity to mainstream financial infrastructure.
AI Crypto: The Biggest Asymmetric Bet
This is where Pandl gets most forward-looking. His logic: Bitcoin is already a large asset class with much of its upside priced in, while the AI crypto sector is still an emerging segment. Grayscale tracks it as a distinct category, made up of AI-focused decentralized networks, protocols that use blockchain to coordinate and pay for machine-learning resources, including names like BitTensor, Near, and World. His call is bold: “I think there will be a trillion-dollar asset in that market segment,” adding that there certainly isn’t one today. BitTensor is the current category leader on network effects, but he stresses the race isn’t over. For investors hunting asymmetric upside rather than established exposure, this is where Grayscale is looking, though it’s worth remembering that’s also a category Grayscale builds products around.
The Through-Line.
Pull Pandl’s views together and a consistent logic emerges. Bitcoin is cheap but not a layup; the Clarity Act is the hinge the whole market turns on; Ethereum is the long-term tokenization play; and the genuinely asymmetric bets sit further out the risk curve, in Hyperliquid and AI crypto. It’s a coherent framework, and a useful window into how a major asset manager is positioning. Two caveats keep it honest, though: nearly every bullish call here hinges on the Clarity Act actually passing, which Pandl himself admits is not guaranteed, and Grayscale has product interests across several of these themes, so its enthusiasm is informed analysis rather than neutral observation. The ideas are worth weighing on their merits, with that context in view.
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coindoo and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
