Macro investor and fund manager Dan Tapiero says that institutional interest in the crypto industry has accelerated throughout the bear market.

In a new Real Vision interview, Tapiero says that institutions like endowments, teachers’ funds and pension funds have had their eye on the crypto space as of late, and are noticing fundamental strength building within the asset class.

Tapiero, the co-founder of digital asset equity fund 10T Holdings, says that increased activity in decentralized finance (DeFi), stablecoins and the Bitcoin (BTC) ecosystem have caught the attention of larger players.

“Right now, it’s really picking up. You’d be surprised, it’s from people who have no exposure, but who sort of – especially in the last six weeks – they’re sort of seeing, ‘Oh well, Bitcoin’s up 70% on the year, or 30% during this banking crisis, and you know what, that kind of makes sense, and they didn’t need a bailout in that world, and there are some bad actors, but there’s a lot of value there and a lot of different things going on. There’s stuff going on in the DeFi world, there are stablecoin businesses, there are NFTs (non-fungible tokens). A lot of different things, ordinals on Bitcoin even.’”

The investing veteran says that the latest bear market differs from the last downtrend as there are more developments in the crypto ecosystem besides a simple focus on the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH).

Tapiero says institutional investors are seeing improving fundamentals like the massive spike in Bitcoin’s hashrate, the number of developers in the space and the amount of new layer-one blockchains surfacing as potential evidence that crypto is growing fast.

“So the space itself is not just relying upon the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum. That’s the big difference to me from 2018 and 2019 is that there’s so many things going on underneath the hood. The number of developers that have entered the blockchain space is now at an all-time high. Through 2022, it kept increasing. 

The Bitcoin hashrate, it just hit an all-time high. The number of players in the NFT space from 18 months ago is up exponentially. The number of layer-ones that have the top five or six usage is at an all-time high. So it’s no longer just about the price of those two leading ones and some of the other cryptocurrencies. So I think that’s also attracting institutional people who are understanding that this is a once-in-a-generation type of technology.”

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