This round's biggest altcoin winner reiterates the ZEC and NEAR thesis — where does the buying pressure come from?

Original author: David Hoffman

Original title: BTC:ETH:ZEC:NEAR

bainzBankless co-founder David Hoffman announced on May 21 that he had liquidated all his ETH, then bought VVV, NEAR, ZEC, HYPE, and LIT, and disclosed some of his entry prices: "NEAR at about $1.40, HYPE at about $45, ZEC at about $560, LIT at about $1.35."

"Why on earth is ZEC pumping so much?"

"Where is this endless buying 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 famous for holding their BTC tightly. 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 are humiliated, 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 unable to immune themselves to temptation, envy, and greed. Publicly they are Bitcoiners; privately they are altcoiners.

Usually Bitcoiners defect one by one, with no one noticing and no one caring. But every once in a while, 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 has gotten to the point where I know some people flying around the world just to move Bitcoin out of cold storage to buy Ethereum.

If your brand is being a Bitcoin maximalist on Twitter, you can't publicly surrender because you'll lose followers, but I'm pretty sure many of these people actually hold large amounts of ETH privately."

, Su Zhu, October 2021

ZEC in 2026 is ETH in 2021

ZEC has established a sufficiently compelling Schelling point for this Bitcoin bid. There is $1.7 trillion worth of BTC out there, and only a tiny fraction of Bitcoiners need to agree that ZEC holds up, 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 is exactly the phrase Bitcoiners use to try to convince the rest of the world that 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 drives 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 bought 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 competing for is clearly weaker than the Bitcoin bid that ZEC is wrestling with. In crypto, it has always been 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 bid likely comes from a more fragmented group of market participants than the Bitcoiners ZEC attracts. But regardless, the effect is the same.

Fewer people are willing to buy large-cap blue chips, for the simple reason that the returns aren't there. And both of these carry too much technical debt and look technically outdated in 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 volatile digital currency into a fully mature gold substitute. But lately, BTC doesn't seem to be playing that role; and gold, despite all its shortcomings, is still gold.

And after Tom Lee, who will still buy ETH? I still see no evidence or narrative to support a 10x re-rating.

If the top two don't go up another 10x from here, how does our industry move forward? It certainly will 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 created by these startups 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 upstarts than BTC and ETH. Whether BTC and ETH can capture any meaningful value from it is debatable.

If this dynamic persists, we may always get new winners, but the industry's total size will remain more niche than our ambitions once suggested.

Hopefully I'm just too impatient, and hopefully total crypto market cap really can break through $10 trillion this cycle!