Increasingly, I feel that those truly impressive individuals possess a powerful ability to derive mental models, or fundamentally, a thinking ability based on first principles. They can abstract a transferable thinking model from a scenario at a high level and then use this thinking model to connect the past and present, integrating both Eastern and Western ideas.
This is not just about the accumulation of experience, but also about the disassembly and interpretation of structures. They can break something down to its core and then reverse-engineer applicable boundaries from the most fundamental logic. Thus, chatting with them always gives a feeling of mental pathways being opened.
For example, recently, due to analyzing many PIPE deals, I learned a lot from a liquid partner about past crypto deals on Wall Street. He told me that the evolution from GBTC to ETF and now to treasury management actually reflects a deeper structural shift in macro finance. As crypto assets gradually become a legitimate and institutionally classified asset category, this evolution has roughly gone through three key stages:
- GBTC Stage: As an important channel for institutional investors to first encounter Bitcoin, GBTC provided a regulated market exposure. However, it lacked a redemption mechanism, leading to prices becoming long-term detached from net asset value. Although this stage laid the foundation, traditional financial packaging methods were clearly subject to strong structural limitations.
- BTC ETF Stage: BTC ETF products introduced a daily subscription/redemption mechanism, making prices closer to net asset value and greatly enhancing liquidity and institutional accessibility. However, due to their passive management attributes, they could not capture staking yields, on-chain value creation, and other native mechanisms, still leaving a gap with the local potential of crypto.
- Corporate Financial Strategy Stage: From MicroStrategy and Metaplanet to our recent participation in SBET, more and more companies are integrating crypto assets into their financial operations. This stage has surpassed passive holdings and is beginning to enhance capital efficiency through debt financing, yield reinvestment, on-chain yields, etc., further driving shareholder returns.
Each step represents a leap in the complexity and institutionalization of crypto financial instruments. Only by recognizing this historical evolution can one grasp the next opportunity for structural change.
