This round's biggest altcoin winner reiterates the ZEC and NEAR thesis — where does the buying come from?
Author: David Hoffman, Bankless
Original title: BTC:ETH:ZEC:NEAR
Editor's note: Bankless co-founder David Hoffman announced on May 21 that he had liquidated his ETH, subsequently buying VVV, NEAR, ZEC, HYPE, and LIT, and disclosed some of his entry prices: "NEAR at around $1.40, HYPE at around $45, ZEC at around $560, LIT at around $1.35." The results speak for themselves — everything took off. ZEC, VVV, HYPE, and LIT all hit all-time highs, and NEAR was extremely strong as well. His successful rotation validated his thesis, and now he's emphasizing that thesis once again — why he swapped into these coins.
The following is the original text
"Why is ZEC up so much?"
"Where is this infinite buying pressure even coming from?"
"How can an asset go from $200 million to $26 billion without being manipulated?"
In the crypto world, every so often, some asset wins that "Bitcoin rotation" trophy.
Bitcoin maximalists are famously tight-fisted with their BTC. The strength of the Bitcoin community and its narrative has built an extremely powerful Schelling point around "only BTC, nothing but BTC," and it has worked. The current scale of that effect is $1.7 trillion.
That line almost never breaks. Bitcoiners who rotate into other assets get shamed, mocked, and ostracized. Bitcoin has only one rule: no altcoins. The second rule is: everything other than Bitcoin is an altcoin.
Yet Bitcoin maximalists are still human. They are equally immune to temptation, envy, and greed. Publicly Bitcoiners, privately altcoiners.
Usually Bitcoiners defect one by one — no one notices, no one cares. But every so often, enough people defect to the same asset that the defection itself becomes contagious.
This happened with ETH in 2021. It explains why ETH's re-rating was so violent, from $12 billion at the bottom all the way to $554 billion at the top.
Listen to this absolutely explosive quote from Su Zhu in October 2021:
"It's gotten to the point where I know people who fly around the world just to move Bitcoin out of cold storage to buy Ethereum.
If your brand is a Bitcoin maximalist on Twitter, you can't publicly capitulate because you'll lose followers, but I'm pretty sure many of these people privately hold large amounts of ETH."
— Su Zhu, October 2021
ZEC in 2026 is ETH in 2021
ZEC has already established a sufficiently compelling Schelling point for this Bitcoin bid. There's $1.7 trillion worth of BTC out there, and only a tiny fraction of Bitcoiners need to agree that ZEC has a leg to stand on — whether for its own merits (privacy, quantum) or simply as a hedge for BTC exposure.
So this is why ZEC only goes up. A $26 billion market cap asset is still just pocket change relative to that $1.7 trillion; and as long as ZEC can convince even a small subset of Bitcoiners that they should hold a little bit of ZEC "just in case" — and that's exactly the phrase Bitcoiners use to try to convince the rest of the world they should hold BTC... "just in case" — ZEC will continue to only go up.
How much ZEC has gone up in dollar terms doesn't matter. What matters is ZEC's size relative to BTC, because what's driving the bid behind ZEC is BTC's wealth.
Happy to be corrected if I'm wrong, but there are almost no allocators out there who skipped BTC, ETH, and every other crypto asset and are buying ZEC purely 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 2026 "smart contract rotation" trophy.
The smart contract bid that NEAR is wrestling with is clearly weaker than the Bitcoin bid that ZEC is grappling with. In crypto, it's always store of value first, smart contract chains second.
ETH's grip on the smart contract trophy has also always been weaker than BTC's grip on the store of value trophy. SOL poses a bigger threat to ETH than anything poses to BTC. And Ethereum's culture has always been looser, more tolerant, and more pluralistic than Bitcoin maximalists would allow.
So NEAR's buying pressure likely comes from a more diverse set of market participants than the Bitcoin crowd that ZEC attracts. But either way, the effect is the same.
Fewer people are willing to buy large-cap blue chips, for a simple reason: the returns aren't there. And both of them carry too much technical debt, looking technically outdated by 2026.
The Blue-Chip Curse
Unfortunately, this dynamic leaves the crypto industry with a problem: someone has to buy the blue chips.
Bitcoin needs to evolve from a highly volatile digital currency into a fully mature gold substitute. But lately, BTC doesn't appear to be playing that role; and gold, despite all its shortcomings, is still gold.
And after Tom Lee, who else is going to buy ETH? I still see no evidence or narrative to support a 10x re-rating.
If the top two don't 10x from here, how does our industry move forward? It will certainly move forward. Hyperliquid, Venice, Lighter, Ethena, and Morpho have all brought amazing innovation. But unless total crypto market cap goes from $3 trillion to $30 trillion, the value these startups create will likely be captured by parties outside of crypto, rather than by our native blue chips.
Robinhood, Coinbase, Apollo, and traditional brokerages look far better positioned to capture the upside from this new cohort of rising stars than BTC and ETH. Whether BTC and ETH can capture any meaningful value from this is debatable.
If this dynamic persists, we may always get new winners, but the industry's total size will remain more niche than we once aspired to.
Hopefully I'm just being too impatient, and hopefully total crypto market cap really breaks through $10 trillion this cycle!
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