Crypto investors rejoiced late Thursday morning on news President Donald Trump was set to sign an executive order to make it easier to include alternative assets in employees’ retirement accounts. Bitcoin jumped 2% over the past 24 hours to push past $116,000, and Ethereum, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency, soared 7% to hit about $3,800, according to data from Binance.
The total value of all cryptocurrencies rose almost 2% to $3.9 trillion, per CoinGecko. The rise mirrored the broader surge in the stock market as the S&P 500 notched a slight gain after markets opened before dropping later in the morning.
“This is yet another channel of sustained, long-term demand for Bitcoin that will bid the price higher,” Ryan Rasmussen, head of research at the crypto asset management firm Bitwise, told Fortune.
The rise in the crypto and equities markets follows multiple reports that Trump will sign an executive order Thursday midday that will task the Labor Department to reevaluate guidance for fund managers about whether alternative assets can be included in 401(k)s. These assets can include private equity as well as potential crypto products, including Bitcoin ETFs.
The guidance is tied to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, or ERISA, which instructs the Labor Department to set investment standards for retirement and health plans.
Trump’s new executive order will also instruct the Labor Department to work with other regulators, including the Treasury as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission, to align rules across multiple agencies regarding alternative assets’ inclusion into retirement plans.
Beyond the initial price jump, crypto market analysts believe the order, which essentially reinstates a former policy Trump issued in his first term that President Joe Biden rolled back, will lead to further gains in Bitcoin and other digital assets.
The 401(k) market totaled $8.7 trillion in assets in the first quarter of 2025, according to the Investment Company Institute. “This move effectively opens access to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for retirement investors,” said James Butterfill, head of research at CoinShares, another crypto asset manager.
Jake Ostrovskis, an OTC trader at the crypto market maker Wintermute, agreed. “Unlike retail investors, who chase momentum or institutional traders seeking alpha, 401(k) participants typically maintain target allocations through systematic rebalancing—creating sustained, predictable demand flows,” he said.
Bitcoin’s Thursday price jump follows a week of lows in August after the cryptocurrency notched repeatedall-time highs in July, mirroring a corresponding rally in the stock market.
Jake Brukhman is a computer scientist who worked at Amazon and on Wall Street before founding CoinFund, one of the first venture capital firms dedicated to cryptocurrency investing. He is also the latest guest on Fortune’s new podcast Crypto Playbook (available on Spotify, Apple and YouTube) where Brukhman shared his insights based on a decade of investing—and offered some very practical tips for those coming to this market for the first time.
His first piece of advice for newcomers is that it’s safest to choose major cryptocurrencies that have an established track record. Doing so will let investors gain exposure to crypto, and benefit from its upswings, while also letting them stay clear of the hyper-volatility and outright scams that can come with newer projects.
“As a new participant just entering the space, it is absolutely much safer to stick with the big names. You’re not going to go wrong if you are investing in Bitcoin, investing in Ethereum. These are projects that have been around for over 10 years at this point, and have very well established communities and ecosystems,” said Brukhman.
CoinFund had the good fortune to invest in Ethereum when it was just 60 cents, compared to the nearly $4,000 it is trading for today, but his advice still holds.
In the podcast, Brukhman went on to note that, as the crypto industry has matured, a set of norms and guardrails have emerged to ensure blockchain projects are managed responsibly. These new practices focus primarily on token management and creating incentives to align founders and investors.
In the past, most notably during the Initial Coin Offering mania of 2016, blockchain project founders would rush to sell millions of tokens to retail investors—and then fail to follow through with their plans, causing the price of the token to slump or collapse altogether.
Today, Brukhman notes that responsible projects will include governance measures to protect investors and to restrict the distribution of their token supplies over a timeframe of several years. He says that 90% of the crypto projects CoinFund chooses to back have these attributes—which is a pretty clear indication that newer investors should also look for these qualities before putting down their money.
Finally, Brukhman shared that his fund shies away from projects with anonymous founders. While this may seem obvious, it’s worth remembering that the original appeal of crypto for many people was as a new form of money that was not controlled by governments, and that protected the privacy of its users.
The most famous example, of course, is Bitcoin whose founder Satoshi Nakamoto has never disclosed his identity to this day. Satoshi enjoys nearly mythical status among crypto fans for building the first and most successful blockchain, and for acting with complete integrity—but unfortunately, he is the exception not the rule. Subsequent projects run by anonymous founders have typically proven to be scams.
Brukhman says that CoinFund has backed founders whose privacy choices run the gamut from being totally open on social media, to those who shield their identity with pseudonyms. But he says the firm always makes a point to know who they are dealing with before investing.
“From our perspective, we’ve never had to invest in something that had a purely anonymous founder. We never found a project where, you know, it was so important to invest in it that we should have taken that risk on founder anonymity, and so we just haven’t done that,” he says.
Crypto may soon be a part of your 401(k). President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order Thursday midday to allow employees access to alternative assets like Bitcoin ETFs or private equity in their retirement accounts, according to a senior White House official, who asked for anonymity.
The order will direct Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer to reexamine her department’s guidance on what assets are allowed in retirement accounts. The asset rules are informed by a decades-law known as the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, or ERISA, which sets minimum standards for most employer-sponsored retirement and health plans, including 401(k)s.
Trump’s order also will instruct the Department of Labor to work with other federal agencies, including the Treasury and Securities and Exchange Commission, to collaborate on whether the regulators should implement complementary changes to their agencies’ policies.
In addition, the order asks the SEC to allow investors access to alternative assets into retirement plans the agency monitors.
Bloomberg was first to report that the order will be signed on Thursday.
In the last year of Trump’s first term in 2020, the White House directed regulators to evaluate whether alternative assets should be allowed in retirement accounts. That guidance was later rolled back under President Joe Biden.
But, during Trump’s second term, his administration has weighed for months whether and when to reinstate the old guidance. Thursday’s signing will be a boon for private equity and other alternative asset managers. It also delivers another victory to the crypto industry, whose ETFs, funds, and other financial products have largely been avoided by traditional retirement fund managers.
Under Trump, his administration has slashed regulatory red tape and opened up the markets for crypto companies, who were large donors to the president’s reelection campaign. He’s signed an executive order to establish a Bitcoin and digital assets reserve. His administration also eliminated the Department of Justice’s crypto enforcement.
Trump has also pushed Congress to pass two bills to create regulatory frameworks for the industry. Trump has already signed in July one bill, which regulates cryptocurrencies called stablecoins, into law. The House has passed another piece of legislation that regulates crypto markets more broadly. That bill awaits a vote in the Senate.
Trump’s executive order opening up retirement accounts to alternative assets also potentially benefits his business empire.
Over the past year, the president and his family have dived headfirst into crypto. Just before his inauguration, the 47th president launched his own memecoin, or cryptocurrency whose value is simply propelled by its ties to a joke or celebrity.
Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin juggernaut is at it again, buying near the highs with the kind of capital-markets firepower no other crypto firm can match.
Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy Inc., disclosed Monday that it bought $2.46 billion of Bitcoin in the past week—its third-largest purchase by dollar value since it began accumulating the cryptocurrency five years ago.
The company acquired 21,021 tokens between July 28 and Aug. 3, pushing its total holdings to 628,791 Bitcoin, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This takes the value of the company’s Bitcoin holdings to more than $71 billion at current prices.
Fueled by a steady stream of stock offerings and debt deals, Saylor has transformed his enterprise software company into the dominant corporate buyer of Bitcoin. Its latest acquisition came at an average price of $117,526 per token, the second-highest price Strategy has ever paid, just behind the $118,940 average last month, according to company data.
The move underscores how Saylor has turned public-company finance into a specialized vehicle to amass Bitcoin—and how Strategy keeps buying even as prices hover near record levels. Strategy is by far the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, according to a tally by BitcoinTreasuries.net, and has spurred a new industry of public companies following a so-called treasury strategy dedicated to buying and holding cryptocurrencies.
To fund the purchases, Saylor has employed a combination of common and preferred share sales, as well as debt. The company offers four different kinds of securities to investors—launching its latest preferred stock offering, dubbed Stretch, in late July. Strategy reported an unrealized gain of $14 billion in the second quarter, driven by a rebound in Bitcoin’s price and a recent accounting change that required the company to revalue its Bitcoin holdings.
Saylor recently promised he won’t issue new common shares at less than 2.5 times its net asset value, except to cover debt interest or preferred dividends. This comes after critics like Jim Chanos voiced concerns on the premium Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings have on its share price and the many security offerings the company offers.
Strategy’s stock has surged more than 3,000% since its first crypto purchase, outpacing Bitcoin itself as well as major stock indices like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100. Its first and second largest purchases came in November last year totaling $5.4 billion and $4.6 billion, according to company data.
In 2016, Dan Morehead embarked on a world tour to preach the gospel of Bitcoin. A former trader at Goldman Sachs and Tiger Management, Morehead had become orange-pilled just a few years before, convinced that Bitcoin would reshape the global economy. He believed in the currency so fervently that he came out of semi-retirement to remake his hedge fund Pantera Capital into one of the world’s first Bitcoin funds.
The new operation, launched in 2013, got off to a roaring start, with backing from two of Morehead’s fellow Princeton alumni, Pete Briger and Mike Novogratz, both from the private equity giant Fortress. The trio watched with glee as the Bitcoin purchased by Pantera at an initial price of $65 soared to over $1,000 by the end of the year. But then, disaster struck as hackers cleaned out the fledgling crypto industry’s main exchange, Mt Gox, and the price of Bitcoin plummeted 85%. “People would say, ‘Didn’t you do that Bitcoin thing that died?’” Morehead recalls. “It’s still alive!” he would respond.
During his 2016 trip to evangelize Bitcoin, Morehead took 170 meetings, each time going into a prospective investor’s office and spending an hour arguing why the new currency was the most compelling possible opportunity. The result: He managed to raise just $1 million for his flailing fund. Even worse, Morehead’s own fees totaled around $17,000. “I earned $100 a meeting, going out there trying to evangelize people to buy Bitcoins,” he tells Fortune.
Less than a decade later, as Bitcoin pushes $120,000, Morehead’s brutal early slog feels like the stuff of founder mythology— right up there with the tales of Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak tinkering in Jobs’ parents’ garage, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger trading stock tips at an Omaha dinner party.
Today, Pantera manages over $5 billion in assets across different crypto funds. Its holdings comprise digital assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as venture investments in projects such as Circle, which went public in June, and Bitstamp, which was acquired by Robinhood earlier this year for $200 million. But what sets the firm apart from the crowded field of crypto VCs is its early-mover status as a storied bridge between the buttoned-up world of traditional finance and the once-renegade crypto sector. At the center is Morehead, an unsung figure in an industry dominated by larger-than-life characters.
“I’m very stubborn, and I am totally convinced [Bitcoin] is going to change the world,” Morehead tells Fortune. “So I just kept going.”
The Princeton mafia
Back before Wall Street infiltrated the blockchain industry, Morehead’s stuck out in the chaotic world of early crypto. A two-sport athlete at Princeton in football and heavyweight crew, Morehead still has the broad shoulders and square jaw of his youth. The figure he cut was a far cry from the wiry, iconoclastic types who spent most of their time on internet message boards. Morehead, in contrast, came from the conventional world of finance. He’s still rarely spotted without a blazer.
Morehead had already had a long trading career before learning about Bitcoin. After stints at Goldman Sachs and Tiger, he began his own hedge fund, Pantera, which flamed out during the 2008 financial crisis, right around the time that a shadowy figure named Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin to the world in an online white paper.
Morehead first heard about Bitcoin in 2011 from his brother and was vaguely aware that a classmate from Princeton, Gavin Andresen, was running a website that gave out 5 Bitcoins to any user for solving a captcha (current street value: $575,000). But Morehead didn’t think much about it until a couple of years later, when another classmate, Briger, invited Morehead for coffee at the San Francisco office of Fortress to talk crypto, with Novogratz calling in. “Since then, I’ve been possessed by Bitcoin,” Morehead says.
Tech is famous for its so-called “mafias”—clusters of employees from prominent organizations like PayPal who go on to lead the next generation of startups. In crypto, it’s not a company but a university, with Princeton responsible for some of the industry’s most influential projects. Briger and Novogratz both served as key backers of Pantera, with Morehead even moving into empty office space at Fortress’s SF office. Briger remains a powerful, albeit behind-the-scenes, presence in crypto, recently taking a seat on the board of directors of Michael Saylor’s $100 billion Bitcoin holding firm, Strategy. Novogratz went on to found Galaxy, one of the largest crypto conglomerates. And another classmate, Joe Lubin, went on to become one of the cofounders of Ethereum.
But back in 2013, it still seemed far-fetched that Ivy League graduates working in the rarified fields of private equity and macro trading would be interested in Bitcoin. Briger tells Fortune that he first learned about it from Wences Casares, an Argentine entrepreneur and early crypto adopter, while sharing a room at a Young Presidents’ Organization gathering in the San Juan Islands. Briger quickly saw the appeal of upending the global payments system—a point he sticks by today, though he argues that Bitcoin is still in its infancy. He says that Bitcoin mirrors the promise of the internet, which facilitated a new form of information flow. “The fact that money movement doesn’t happen in the same way is a real shame,” he says.
After sharing the idea with Novogratz, they thought that Morehead, who had experience working in foreign exchange markets, would be the right person to bring on. When Morehead decided to devote the rest of his financial career to crypto, he rebranded Pantera as a Bitcoin fund and opened it back up to outside investors. Briger and Novogratz both signed on as limited partners, with Fortress and the venture firms Benchmark and Ribbit taking general partner stakes, though they would later withdraw. His old mentor at Tiger, the legendary investor Julian Robertson, even backed a later fund.
Pantera’s rebirth
In the hurley-burly early days of crypto, entrepreneurs had to confront dramatic booms and busts that make today’s volatility look like minor blips. But the wild price roller-coaster wasn’t the biggest headache, Novogratz recalls. It was simply trying to procure BTC in the first place.
He went to Coinbase, then just a year old, to try and buy 30,000 Bitcoins, which would have sold for around $2 million. He was met with a pop-up that his limit was $50. After trying to work it out with Olaf Carlson-Wee—Coinbase’s first employee, who would go on to become a famed crypto figure in his own right—the firm agreed to increase his limit all the way to $300.
Morehead’s most impressive achievement, however, may be sticking it out during the doldrums of 2013 through 2016, when prices remained in the basement and no one outside of the insular blockchain community paid Bitcoin much mind. “In those quiet years where crypto wasn’t doing shit, Dan was out there beating the pavement,” Novogratz tells Fortune.
That epoch still had its highlights, including three annual conferences hosted by Morehead out of his Lake Tahoe home. At one, Jesse Powell, the founder of the exchange Kraken, opted out of taking a private plane chartered by Morehead and drove instead. “There was a large enough fraction of the Bitcoin community [there] that he feared if the plane crashed, it would take Bitcoin down,” Morehead recalls.
Unlike many of his compatriots, Morehead never positioned himself as a “Bitcoin maxi,” or someone who argues that no other cryptocurrencies should exist. After buying up 2% of the global Bitcoin supply, Pantera became an early investor in Ripple Labs, which created the digital asset XRP. “The way I think about it is Bitcoin is obviously the most important,” Morehead says. “But there isn’t one internet company.”
According to Morehead, Pantera has made money on 86% of its venture investments. It’s a staggering figure considering that the vast majority of VC-backed startups fail. Crypto may be more forgiving given that many projects come with an accompanying cryptocurrency, meaning speculative value often endures even if a startup’s product goes nowhere.
Morehead now spends half his year in Puerto Rico, which has become a hotbed for crypto. Joey Krug, then a partner at Pantera and now at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, had relocated down there, and Morehead decided to make the move. He estimates there are 1,000 blockchain entrepreneurs on the island, though they’ve drawn scrutiny for driving up real estate prices. Morehead faced an inquiry from the Senate Finance Committee over whether he violated federal tax laws by moving to the island and earning more than $850 million in capital gains from Pantera. He told the New York Times earlier this year that he believed he “acted appropriately with respect to my taxes” and declined to comment further to Fortune.
Bitcoin’s future
Morehead acknowledges that much of the crypto industry is saturated with gambling, with Pantera staying away from memecoins, unlike many other venture firms. Still, he argues that it shouldn’t distract from blockchain’s broader goal of reshaping global finance. “It’s ridiculous to try and take down the blockchain industry because of a little sideshow,” he says. “[GameStop] doesn’t mean the entire U.S. equity market is tainted.”
Pantera continues to grow, including raising a fifth venture fund with a $1 billion target, which Morehead says the firm will close after finishing investing out of its fourth fund later this year. Pantera has also moved into the red-hot field of digital asset treasuries, where publicly traded companies buy and hold cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets.
But Bitcoin remains at the core of Pantera’s strategy. At the end of last year, its Bitcoin fund hit 1,000x, with a lifetime return of over 130,000%. When asked for a prediction of where Bitcoin is headed, Morehead has always had the same answer: The price will double in a year. For the most part, the simple model has worked, though Morehead admits the days of rapid growth are likely slowing down. He argues Bitcoin will still go up another order of magnitude, meaning it will approach $1,000,000, though he thinks that will be the last time it has a 10x increase.
Morehead is happy to shoulder the criticism if Bitcoin never reaches that milestone. In 2016, after all, he was struggling to make the case for the cryptocurrency at $500. And less than a decade later, he’s just getting started. “I have the same conviction—the vast majority of institutions have zero,” he tells Fortune. “It feels like we have another couple of decades to go.”
Updated to reflect the latest regulatory filing figures on assets under management.
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