Bankless Co-founder: Bitcoin buying pressure spills over, ZEC and NEAR steal the blue-chip narrative

Author: David Hoffman, Co-founder of Bankless

Compiled by: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

Bitcoin Bid Trophy

"Why the hell is ZEC skyrocketing? Where is this endless buying coming from? How can an asset rise from $200 million to $26 billion without being manipulated?"

In the crypto industry, every so often, a single asset wins the "Bitcoin Bid" trophy.

Bitcoin holders are notoriously protective of their BTC. The power of the Bitcoin community and its narrative, centered around "only BTC, only BTC," has formed an extremely strong Schelling point, and this approach has worked. The current scale of this effect is $1.7 trillion.

This boundary is almost never broken. Bitcoin holders who shift to other assets face humiliation, ridicule, and ostracism. There is only one rule for Bitcoin: no altcoins. The second rule is that everything other than Bitcoin is an altcoin.

But unfortunately, Bitcoin holders are human too. They are not immune to temptation, jealousy, or greed. On the streets are Bitcoin holders, while in their beds are altcoin players.

Typically, Bitcoin holders defect one by one, unnoticed and uncared for. But occasionally, enough people turn to the same asset, making defection contagious.

This happened with ETH in 2021. This explains why ETH was repriced so dramatically, rising from a bottom of $12 billion to a top of $554 billion.

Listen to this absolutely brilliant statement by Su Zhu in October 2021: https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2102764770256437554?s=20

"At this point, I know some people who are flying around the world just to take Bitcoin out of cold storage to buy Ether. If your persona is that of the biggest Bitcoin maximalist on Twitter, you can't publicly surrender, because you would lose followers, but I am sure many of these people actually hold a lot of ETH privately." ------Su Zhu, October 2021

ZEC in 2026 is like ETH in 2021

ZEC has created a strong enough Schelling point for the Bitcoin Bid. There is $1.7 trillion of BTC in the market, and it only takes a small portion of Bitcoin holders to agree that ZEC is reasonable, whether based on its own merits (privacy, quantum) or merely as a hedge against their BTC exposure.

So this is why ZEC only goes up and never down. An asset with a market cap of $26 billion is still just a fraction compared to the $1.7 trillion asset, and as long as ZEC can convince a small portion of Bitcoin holders that they should hold a little ZEC "just in case," ZEC will continue to only go up and never down—this is exactly the same reasoning Bitcoin holders use to try to convince the rest of the world to hold BTC… "just in case."

How much ZEC has risen in USD doesn't matter. What matters is the scale of ZEC relative to BTC, because the buying power behind ZEC is driven by the wealth of BTC.

If I'm wrong, please correct me, but there are very few fund allocators out there who would skip BTC, ETH, and all other crypto assets just to buy ZEC based solely on its own merits.

NEAR is the new smart contract Schelling point

I believe a similar phenomenon is happening with NEAR.

I think NEAR has won the "Smart Contract Bid" trophy for 2026.

https://x.com/mert/status/2102114026922578230?s=20

https://x.com/mert/status/2101227605391274302?s=20

The smart contract bid that NEAR is competing for is clearly weaker than the Bitcoin Bid that ZEC is contending for. In the crypto industry, value storage has always been prioritized, with smart contract chains coming second.

ETH's control over the smart contract trophy has always been weaker than BTC's control over the SoV trophy. SOL poses a greater threat to ETH than anything has to BTC in the past. Moreover, Ethereum's culture has always been looser, more tolerant, and more diverse than what Bitcoin maximalists allow.

Therefore, NEAR's buying power is likely coming from a more dispersed group of market participants than ZEC attracts from Bitcoin holders. Nevertheless, the effect is the same.

Fewer people want to buy large blue chips, and the reason is simple: the returns are not there. Both are burdened with too much technical debt, and they appear to be technically lagging in 2026.

The Blue Chip Curse

Unfortunately, this dynamic leaves the crypto industry with a problem: there still needs to be someone to buy these blue chips.

Bitcoin needs to evolve from a highly volatile digital currency into a mature alternative to gold. Recently, BTC does not seem to be playing this role, and despite its various shortcomings, gold remains gold.

And after Tom Lee, who will buy ETH? I still don't see any evidence or narrative that could reprice it tenfold.

If the first and second places cannot rise tenfold from here, how will our industry progress? It will certainly progress. Hyperliquid, Venice, Lighter, Ethena, and Morpho have all brought incredible innovations. But unless the total crypto market cap rises from $3 trillion to $30 trillion, the value created by these startups is likely to be captured outside the crypto industry rather than by our native blue chips.

Robinhood, Coinbase, Apollo, and traditional brokers seem to have a better advantage in capturing the upside of this latest batch of projects than BTC and ETH. Whether BTC and ETH can capture any meaningful value from them remains to be seen.

If this dynamic continues, we may eventually see new winners, but the overall scale of the industry will still be more niche than our past aspirations.

I hope it's just my impatience, and that the total crypto market cap will really break $10 trillion in this cycle!