E178: Tushar Jain, Multicoin CoFounder: The 3 Coins His Multi-Billion Dollar Fund Is Bullish On This Cycle

Tushar Jain, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, identifies market turning points through his own psychology, buying when he feels like an idiot for being in crypto and selling when he feels like a genius. He also watches whether bad news stops moving markets down, citing recent significant hacks that failed to cause major sell-offs as a concrete signal of a turning point. He believes the market bottom is likely in or very close but expects a period of chop and apathy rather than a sharp V-shaped recovery, with the caveat that a macro shock such as US-Iran conflict escalation could invalidate the call.

Multicoin's three primary bullish positions this cycle are Solana, Hyperliquid, and Zcash, with a fourth basket of lending protocols including Aave, Kamino, Athena, and some Morpho. Jain views Solana as the right technical architecture for internet capital markets because it integrates everything into one permissionless open-source chain. He points to Bullish issuing equity on Solana after acquiring the Equity platform and Galaxy also issuing stock on Solana as early evidence. His core argument is that Goldman Sachs will not settle on Stripe's chain and JPMorgan will not settle on DRW's chain because they will not hand competitors that much power, making credibly neutral platforms like Solana the natural destination for institutional issuers.

Hyperliquid has clearly taken the lead on derivatives trading volumes, with most spot activity now on Solana and most derivatives activity now on Hyperliquid. Multicoin has been accumulating Hyperliquid since February and published a formal report in June with a base case price target of 319 dollars per HYPE token, roughly five times the price at publication, within two years, and a bull case above 600 dollars. The four key model assumptions are 35 percent compound annual growth in crypto derivative volume, decentralized exchanges rising to 32 percent of the derivative market, Hyperliquid holding 30 percent of perp-dex volume, and USDC balances growing in line with volume. Crypto derivative volume grew at approximately 45 percent compounded from 2020 to 2025, so the 35 percent assumption is a deliberate 25 percent haircut. Hyperliquid currently holds 59 percent of open interest despite 30 percent of volume, and Jain argues open interest is harder to fake because it requires real capital on the platform. He acknowledges the trade-off: Hyperliquid's limited and opaque validator set enables better performance but makes it less credibly neutral than Solana, and traditional finance issuers have demonstrated a preference for credibly neutral platforms.

Zcash is a smaller position constrained by liquidity and market cap, but Multicoin has accumulated what Jain describes as a significant portion of the total supply. His valuation framework is based on market cap ranking rather than a price target derived from financials, since Zcash has no cash flow, and he predicts it will move into the top five cryptocurrencies by market cap. His edge came primarily from access through calls with people still emotionally attached to the project and from observing that sentiment had crashed while underlying conviction among early bulls held firm. The Multicoin thesis survived a roughly 50 to 60 percent single-day price drop after the team disclosed a bug in the orchard shielded pool, found during an AI-assisted code review, that would have allowed double spending within that pool. Monitoring of the pool size showed no evidence of draining, making exploitation very unlikely. Zcash is launching a new formally verified pool called Ironwood expected in July that will mathematically prove the absence of bugs, and the old pool will be deprecated. Multicoin did nothing on the day of the crash, then increased their position after monitoring showed no exploitation within the first week.

Jain frames Zcash as representing the cypherpunk self-sovereignty values on which crypto was founded, arguing the industry has lost direction by embracing centralized assets that can be frozen. He considers Bitcoin institutionally captured, citing BlackRock and MicroStrategy, and believes the quantum risk debate will surface corporate capture explicitly, potentially producing a fork with cypherpunks on one side and institutions on the other.

On Ethereum, Jain is critical. He says Ethereum appears to have abandoned its Layer 2 heterogeneous scaling strategy and is now moving to scale the L1 again by increasing the gas limit. He characterizes Ethereum's TVL as old TVL rather than new growth, says Ethereum is not winning on a percentage basis in stablecoin growth, and notes that most spot and derivatives activity has migrated elsewhere. The best explanation he has for Ethereum's resilient market cap is that participants treat it as a store of value or a better Bitcoin.

On portfolio construction, Jain says investors should be highly concentrated in their best ideas and questions why anyone holds money in their tenth best idea. He uses a regret minimization framework asking which wrong bet would feel dumber in one to two years. When deploying capital, he uses a one-third, one-third, one-third approach: the first third bought immediately, the second third dollar-cost averaged over one to two months, and the third third held as opportunistic capital if price drops. He identifies four sources of investment edge as access, analytical, behavioral, and structural, considers behavioral edge the hardest to genuinely possess, and warns most retail investors who believe they have it likely do not. He dismisses technical indicators as astrology for men, saying real-world geopolitical events drive most price movements.