The head of digital assets research at exchange-traded fund (ETF) provider VanEck says that Bitcoin (BTC) and one or two layer-1 blockchains will outperform the market.
In a new interview on the Bitcoin Macro YouTube channel, VanEck executive Matthew Sigel says that in the long run, the economic value of the digital assets industry will overwhelmingly consist of just a few layer-1 networks.
According to Sigel, once this happens, traders will turn to investing into decentralized applications (DApps) and DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure networks) technology.
“One to three kinds of layer-1 blockchains are likely to take 99% of the economic value that’s created in the space…
My hunch is that an overwhelmingly large share of the economic value accrues to Bitcoin plus one or two layer-1s and then with the riskier capital, we go hunting for DApps, whether it’s gaming or DePIN that have the best chance at mass adoption.”
According to Sigel, one of the layer-1s VanEck believes will win out is Ethereum (ETH) competitor Solana (SOL). He goes on to note that VanEck is “overweight” on investments built on top of SOL, such as DePIN project Hivemapper (HONEY) and decentralized mobile phone network Helium (HNT).
“We’ve been very vocal and early bulls on Solana… my weighting to Solana is much higher relative to ETH than the market caps would imply…
I’d say as a shop, VanEck has made a number of investments in DePIN projects like Hivemapper, which is a mapping application that aims to compete with Google Street View – it’s built on the Solana blockchain.
We’re [also] investors in Helium which started out as an Internet of Things network and has now pivoted to a 5G mobile network.”
According to the executive, VanEck is underweight on layer-2 scaling solutions, particularly Ethereum-based ones.
Solana is trading for $135.05 at time of writing, a 4% increase during the last 24 hours while BTC is valued at $57,596.