Every once in a while, an asset wins the "Bitcoin Relay" trophy.

Written by: David Hoffman, Co-founder of Bankless

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

"How did ZEC rise like this?" "Where is this continuous buying coming from?" "How can an asset rise from 200 million dollars to 26 billion dollars without anyone questioning its manipulation?"

In the crypto world, every so often, an asset wins the "Bitcoin Relay" trophy.

Bitcoin holders are notorious for clinging tightly to their bitcoins. The strength of the Bitcoin community and its narrative, built around the idea of "only Bitcoin matters, not anything else," has formed an extremely solid Schelling point, and it has indeed worked. The current scale of this effect is 1.7 trillion dollars.

This front line almost never wavers. Bitcoin holders who defect to other assets are shamed, mocked, and ostracized. Bitcoin has one rule: do not touch altcoins. Another rule is: everything other than Bitcoin is an altcoin.

But unfortunately, Bitcoin holders are also human. They too cannot resist temptation, jealousy, and greed. By day, they are Bitcoin maximalists, and by night, they are altcoin speculators.

Usually, Bitcoin holders defect one by one, unnoticed and uncared for. But every so often, enough people defect towards the same asset, making the defection contagious.

ETH in 2021 was exactly like this. This explains why ETH's revaluation was so fierce, rising from 12 billion dollars at the bottom to 554 billion dollars at the top.

Listen to this brilliant statement from Su Zhu in October 2021: "We’ve reached a point where I know people who fly around the world just to transfer their bitcoins from cold wallets to buy Ethereum. If your public persona is that of the biggest Bitcoin maximalist on Twitter, you cannot publicly surrender, or you will lose followers; but I am sure many of those people secretly hold a lot of ETH."

ZEC in 2026 is like ETH in 2021

ZEC has created a sufficiently effective Schelling point for the "Bitcoin Relay." With Bitcoin's market capitalization at 1.7 trillion dollars, as long as a small portion of Bitcoin holders recognize ZEC's value, it is enough. Whether due to its own merits (privacy, quantum resistance) or simply as a hedge against their Bitcoin exposure, that's sufficient.

So that's why ZEC only rises and never falls. An asset with a market capitalization of 26 billion dollars is still just a fraction compared to the 1.7 trillion dollar asset. As long as ZEC can convince a small number of Bitcoin holders to "hold a bit of ZEC just in case," it will continue to only rise and not fall. "Just in case" is exactly the rhetoric Bitcoin holders use to persuade the world to hold BTC.

How much ZEC has risen in dollar terms doesn't matter. What matters is ZEC's size relative to BTC, as it is BTC's wealth that drives the buying behind ZEC.

If I'm wrong, please correct me, but almost no capital allocators would skip BTC, ETH, and all other crypto assets to buy ZEC solely based 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 "Smart Contract Relay" trophy for 2026.

The smart contract buying behind NEAR is clearly weaker than the corresponding Bitcoin buying behind ZEC. In the crypto world, value storage always ranks first, while smart contract chains are second.

The control ETH has over the smart contract trophy has always been weaker than BTC's control over the value storage trophy. The threat SOL poses to ETH is greater than any asset poses to BTC. Furthermore, Ethereum's culture has always been more loose, tolerant, and diverse than what Bitcoin maximalists allow.

Therefore, the buying for NEAR likely comes from a more dispersed group of market participants than just "Bitcoin holders." But even so, the effect is the same.

Fewer and fewer people want to buy these large blue-chip coins, and the reason is simple: no returns. Moreover, both carry too much technical debt, making them seem technically outdated by 2026.

The Blue-Chip Curse

Unfortunately, this dynamic poses a question for the crypto industry: someone has to buy blue chips.

Bitcoin needs to evolve from a volatile digital currency into a truly maturing substitute for gold. But recently, it seems BTC is not playing that role. And regardless of the shortcomings of gold, gold is still gold.

Who will buy ETH after Tom Lee? I still see no evidence or narrative that could make it rise tenfold.

If the first and second ranked assets cannot increase tenfold from their current positions, how can our industry advance? Of course, the industry will advance.

Hyperliquid, Venice, Lighter, Ethena, and Morpho have brought incredible innovations. But unless the total market cap of crypto increases from 3 trillion dollars to 30 trillion dollars, the value created by these startups is likely to be captured by people outside the crypto world, rather than by our own blue-chip coins.

Robinhood, Coinbase, Apollo, and traditional brokerage firms seem more capable of capturing the gains brought by this latest batch of projects than BTC and ETH. Whether BTC and ETH can capture any meaningful value from this is highly debatable.

If this dynamic continues, we may welcome new winners, but the overall scale of the industry will still be more niche than we ever expected.

Hopefully, I'm just too impatient and hope that the total market cap of crypto can really break 10 trillion dollars this cycle!