The head of digital asset research at exchange-traded fund (ETF) provider VanEck says Bitcoin (BTC) and one or two layer-1 blockchains will outperform the market.
In a new interview on the Bitcoin Macro YouTube channel, VanEck director Matthew Sigel says that in the long term, the economic value of the digital asset industry will overwhelmingly consist of just a few layer 1 networks.
According to Sigel, once this happens, merchants will invest in decentralized applications (DApps) and DePIN technology (decentralized physical infrastructure networks).
“One to three types of layer 1 blockchains will likely account for 99% of the economic value created in the space…
My suspicion is that an overwhelmingly large portion of the economic value will go to Bitcoin, plus one or two layer-1s, and then we’ll start chasing DApps with the riskier capital, whether it’s gaming or DePIN that have the best chance have on mass adoption.”
According to Sigel, one of the layer 1s VanEck believes will win is Ethereum (ETH) competitor Solana (SOL). He further notes that VanEck is “overweighting” investments built on top of SOL, such as the DePIN project Hivemapper (HONEY) and the decentralized mobile phone network Helium (HNT).
“We were very vocal and early bulls on Solana… my weighting to Solana is much higher relative to ETH than the market cap would imply…
I would say that VanEck as a store has made some investments in DePIN projects such as Hivemapper, a mapping application that aims to compete with Google Street View – it is built on the Solana blockchain.
Were [also] investors in Helium, which started as an Internet of Things network and has now transitioned to a 5G mobile network.”
According to the director, VanEck is underweight in layer 2 scale solutions, especially Ethereum-based solutions.
Solana is trading at $135.05 at the time of writing, up 4% in the last 24 hours, while BTC is valued at $57,596.
