Crypto Still Sees Massive Returns On Par With Stocks

David Kanellis pushed back on the narrative that crypto has been left behind by stocks, presenting return data showing certain crypto assets massively outperforming equities. Sandisk, spun out of Western Digital in February 2025 on an AI data center storage thesis, returned approximately 4600 percent over the past year and served as the top benchmark in the comparison. Against that, Zcash returned approximately 900 percent, VVV Venice approximately 500 percent, and Hyperliquid's HYPE token approximately doubled while sitting near all-time highs. On a year-to-date basis, VVV Venice returned approximately 1000 percent, more than double Sandisk's year-to-date figure, Hyperliquid HYPE returned approximately 190 percent outperforming both Intel and AMD, and Stellar is up approximately 21 percent outperforming both Google and Nvidia. Kanellis noted that crypto's total market cap of approximately 2.4 trillion dollars is roughly 1.6 percent of the roughly 151 trillion dollar total stock market, and that the smaller market cap may partly explain why certain crypto assets can generate outsized returns relative to much larger stocks.

Mike Ippolito argued that crypto's relative underperformance across most assets is not caused by regulatory barriers or access problems but by a weak value proposition. He attributed this to what he called the everything is a meme crowd, which he said produced ideas like ultrasound money, meme coins, and DAOs. Ippolito's position is that 99 percent of crypto assets will ultimately be valued on cash flows, and that the industry should focus on maximizing those cash flows rather than relying on crypto-native valuation frameworks. Kanellis added that institutional and newer investors entering crypto will apply cash flow and revenue frameworks rather than the metrics that dominated the 2021 mass adoption moment, representing a meaningful shift in how the asset class will be evaluated going forward.

US Bitcoin spot ETFs experienced approximately 12 to 13 consecutive trading days of negative flows, amounting to nearly 4 billion dollars pulled from those products. Single-day outflows during the stretch included approximately 520 million dollars on one day, approximately 483 million dollars the day prior, and a peak of 733 million dollars on May 27. Despite this, cumulative net flows into Bitcoin ETFs have not reached even a six-month low. Bitcoin price and cumulative net flows were positively correlated from the ETF launch in 2024 through Bitcoin's all-time high at the end of that year, suggesting many holders retained their positions through the drawdown rather than exiting entirely.

Joe Weisenthal offered a bearish structural read, arguing this could be the worst crypto winter ever due to several compounding factors. Institutional adoption has already occurred, removing it as a future tailwind. The regulatory environment is already as favorable as it is likely to get. The crypto drawdown is happening during a period of rising dollar anxiety, which undermines the hedge narrative rather than supporting it. The AI boom is crowding out electricity access for miners. And growing concern about quantum computing threatens Bitcoin's security model. Each of these factors individually would be manageable, but Weisenthal's argument is that their simultaneous presence creates a structurally more difficult environment than prior downturns.

Microsoft announced its Majorana 2 quantum chip, claiming it is a thousand times more reliable than prior generations with a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds and instances lasting up to one minute, and said it now expects to achieve a scalable quantum computer by 2029, cutting its original timeline in half. Henry Legge dismissed the announcement as massive PR bullshit, noting the key technical difference between Majorana 1 and 2 is the use of lead rather than aluminum as a superconductor, and that Microsoft's performance claims lack reproducible public data, with the company citing trade secrets and private data sharing with DARPA. A separate technical caveat raised was that Microsoft appears to be demonstrating its chip maintaining a classical position of one or zero rather than a true quantum superposition. The concern expressed was that most non-technical readers will only absorb headlines, and that Microsoft's PR framing has already damaged public understanding of how the crypto industry would actually respond to a genuine quantum threat, regardless of whether the chip represents meaningful progress toward a cryptographically relevant quantum computer.