Variant Fund Investment Partner: Crypto Market Bottom Likely Appeared in July; Three Asset Categories to Benefit from Market Recovery

PANews reported on October 2 that Variant Fund investment partner Alana Levin said in her Q4 2026 market outlook that the crypto market bottom most likely appeared at some point in July. She had written in early July that the bottom seemed near, when Bitcoin was at $59,000, Ethereum at $1,600, and ZEC at $420. She said the question has shifted to whether the bull market is a genuine launch or a false rally, and which projects benefit most in an early bull market, assuming the market is in the early stages of a new crypto bull run.

Levin said the growing consensus is that marginal capital is most likely to flow to value-storage protocols that function as money, as well as protocols capable of generating revenue. She believes Bitcoin is currently the dominant digital store-of-value asset, and other competing assets may be valued based on the ratio of their market cap to Bitcoin's market cap and how that ratio changes. For revenue-generating protocols, she expects investors to examine whether revenue comes from crypto-native activity (such as Pump) or traditional finance activity (such as Hyperliquid), whether it persists during market pullbacks, and profit margins; projects with exposure to real-world assets and stablecoin growth, that are positioned to attract institutional users, and that remain founder-led after surviving a bear market are more likely to command higher multiples.

She also listed on-chain projects that can be benchmarked against non-crypto businesses as a third category, believing most of them are narrative trades rather than long-term investments, with themes including AI-related directions such as routing, inference, compute, data collection, and interfaces, and she doubts whether blockchain is needed in most scenarios; if such projects clearly outperform, she would view it as a signal that the market is approaching a top.