This crypto investor correctly predicted bitcoin would hit $120K in 2025. He now expects it to double in the next year.

Sun, Sep 14, 2025, 2:08 PM 8 min read

In 2013, Dan Morehead, founder and chief executive at Pantera, back then a global macro hedge fund, called on investors to invest in bitcoin, a fringe, little-understood digital asset that was launched in 2009.

“Bitcoins are now trading at $65/BTC – exactly half the price they were trading at our first meeting on May 28th. I think we should buy aggressively now,” he wrote in a letter to investors in July 2013. “I am going to buy 30,000 bitcoins this weekend with personal money. The Fund can have this purchase or not, as others wish. I just want to get involved,” he added. Pantera then launched its Pantera Bitcoin Fund and pivoted the firm to focus on crypto.

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“[Many] people thought I was crazy,” Morehead, a former trader at Goldman Sachs and Tiger Management, recalled in an interview with MarketWatch.

Fast forward to 2025, bitcoin BTCUSD was trading at around $115,000 on Friday, and the crypto industry has grown from a niche experiment into an ecosystem increasingly integrated with traditional financial markets, a change that’s been reinforced as President Donald Trump advances an agenda viewed as friendly to the sector.

Meanwhile, Pantera has become one of the biggest asset managers and venture firms in crypto. The firm now manages $5.2 billion in assets, and backs over 200 crypto companies including exchange Coinbase COIN, stablecoin issuer Circle CRCL, blockchain-based payments company Ripple, and others.

As Morehead gained prominence, his growing influence in crypto was echoed by a handful of his Princeton classmates, who would also emerge as key players in the industry. Those include Gavin Andresen, once the Bitcoin network’s lead developer, Michael Novogratz, founder of crypto investment firm Galaxy Investment Partners, Pete Briger, chairman of Fortress Investment Group who serves on the board of Michael Saylor’s Strategy MSTR and Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of blockchain software firm ConsenSys.

On a separate note, the Senate Finance Committee has been investigating whether Morehead violated federal tax law to avoid hundreds of millions of dollars by moving to Puerto Rico, which offers residents a special tax break, according to a February article by the New York Times. Morehead said in a statement then that “I believe I acted appropriately with respect to my taxes,” and declined to comment further for this article.