Author: David Hoffman
Compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow
The Bitcoin Bid Trophy
“How on earth did ZEC pull so hard?”
“Where does this steady flow of buying come from?”
“How can an asset soar from a market value of US$200 million to US$26 billion without any manipulation?”
In the crypto space, every once in a while, an asset wins the “Bitcoin Bid” crown.
As we all know, Bitcoin veterans keep their BTC in their hands very tightly. The strong cohesion and narrative of the Bitcoin community created an extremely solid Schelling point (consensus focus) around “just buy BTC” and it worked extremely well. The consensus value currently stands at $1.7 trillion.
This line of defense is almost never broken. Those Bitcoin believers who defect to buy other assets will be shamed, ridiculed and ostracized. There is only one iron rule in the Bitcoin circle: don’t touch shitcoins. The second iron rule is: except for Bitcoin, all others are garbage coins.
But at the end of the day, Bitcoin veterans are human, and they are not completely immune to temptation, jealousy, or greed. As the saying goes, "Bitcoiner in the streets, shitcoiner in the sheets".
Usually, they defect quietly one by one, and no one notices or cares. But once in a while, when enough people defect and rush to the same asset, defections become contagious.
This is exactly what happened to Ethereum (ETH) in 2021. This also explains why ETH experienced such a violent revaluation that year—from a bottom of $12 billion to a top of $554 billion.
Recall the absolutely classic sentence issued by Su Zhu in October 2021:
“At this stage, some people I know will even fly around the world to move the Bitcoin out of their cold wallets and exchange them for Ethereum. If your personal brand is a Bitcoin maximalist on Twitter, you can’t surrender in public because you will lose followers, but I am sure that these people must hold a large amount of ETH privately.”
ZEC in 2026 is ETH in 2021
ZEC has created a Schelling point strong enough for “Bitcoin buying”. There is a $1.7 trillion BTC pool out there, and it only takes a tiny minority of Bitcoin believers to recognize the value of ZEC – whether on its own merits (privacy, quantum resistance) or simply as a hedge against their BTC exposure.
This is why ZEC is Up only.
Compared to the 1.7 trillion behemoth, a market capitalization of $26 billion is still just a drop in the bucket. As long as ZEC can convince a handful of Bitcoin believers to allocate a little bit of ZEC “just in case” — the same rhetoric Bitcoin believers use when trying to convince the world to buy some BTC “just in case” — ZEC will continue to rise.
It doesn’t matter at all how many dollars ZEC has gone up. What matters is the size of ZEC relative to BTC, because the power behind ZEC buying is the huge wealth of Bitcoin. I welcome corrections if I'm wrong, but I think there are very few capital allocators in the market who would buy ZEC in large numbers purely because of its technical fundamentals, while completely skipping BTC, ETH, and all other cryptoassets.
NEAR is the new Schelling point for smart contracts
I think the same phenomenon is happening again with NEAR. I think NEAR has already won the 2026 “Smart Contract Buy” trophy.
Obviously, the “smart contract buying” that NEAR is competing for is weaker than the “Bitcoin buying” that ZEC is plundering. In the encryption circle, the Store of Value always ranks first, and the smart contract public chain ranks second.
ETH’s control over the “smart contract trophy” has always been weaker than BTC’s control over the “value storage trophy”. SOL's threat to ETH is far greater than anything's threat to BTC. Moreover, the Ethereum culture has always been looser, more tolerant, and more diverse than the Bitcoin maximalism.
Therefore, the group of buyers that NEAR attracts is likely to be much more dispersed than the group that ZEC attracts from Bitcoin believers. But nonetheless, the effect is the same.
Fewer and fewer people want to buy those big blue chips, and the reason is simple: the yield isn't there anymore. And today in 2026, they have too much technical debt and look technologically behind.
The Blue Chip Curse
Unfortunately, this dynamic leaves the crypto industry with a conundrum: Someone still has to buy those blue-chip stocks.
Bitcoin needs to evolve beyond a highly volatile digital currency into a full-fledged alternative to gold. But as of late, BTC doesn’t seem to be filling that role very well, and for all its shortcomings, gold is still gold.
As for ETH, after Tom Lee, who else will buy it? I still don’t see the evidence or narrative that would make it 10x higher. How can our industry move forward if the No. 1 and No. 2 in the industry cannot grow another 10 times from their current position?
Of course, the industry will definitely progress. Hyperliquid, Venice, Lighter, Ethena, and Morpho all bring incredible innovation. However, unless the total crypto market capitalization jumps from $3 trillion to $30 trillion, the value created by these startups will most likely be captured by forces outside the crypto community rather than fed back to our local blue-chip stocks.
Robinhood, Coinbase, Apollo, and traditional brokerages appear to be better positioned than BTC and ETH to capture the upside dividends of this new wave of assets. Whether BTC and ETH can capture any meaningful value from them remains a question mark.
If this dynamic continues, we may always have new winners, but the overall size of the industry may still be much more niche than we once imagined.
I hope I’m just too impatient, and I also hope that the total market value of crypto this cycle can really exceed 10 trillion US dollars!
Zillions!