Bitcoin Magazine

Debasement Trade Is Here Thanks to Government Debt — And Bitcoin Will Benefit: Grayscale

The debasement trade is back — and will benefit bitcoin. 

That’s according to asset manager Grayscale’s crypto research team, who wrote in a note this week that the U.S. government debasing its currency would lead to cash hitting digital assets. 

“Unchecked government debt growth undermines the credibility of fiat currencies and drives investors to seek out alternative stores of value like physical gold and certain cryptocurrencies,” the note by the firm’s head of research, Zach Pandl, read, adding that primarily bitcoin would benefit. 

The so-called debasement trade is when investors buy an asset as a way to hedge against a currency losing value. The trade was hot last year, and helped bitcoin’s run, but the digital asset’s run lost steam after October as traders turned their attention to stocks related to artificial intelligence. 

But since last week, bitcoin has benefited from news that the U.S. Treasury would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations. The announcement last week hurt the dollar but non-yielding assets have benefited. 

“That buybacks are needed at all is the problem: heavy growth in government debt is driving up the cost of borrowing,” the note continued. “The Treasury is treating the symptoms (rising bond yields) because they cannot cure the disease (structural deficits).” 

The note added that on the same day last week as the buyback announcement, the Treasury also said the U.S. public debt exceeded $40 trillion for the first time.

As debt and interest payments grow, the government needs to either raise taxes, cut spending, or issue more debt. 

Bitcoiners see the more politically likely path as expanding the dollar supply — which is ultimately bad for the dollar, and good for scarce assets like bitcoin. 

After bitcoin started surging last week, the dollar had its worst week of August and was trading at a three-month low. 

Bitcoin was trading for $77,493 on Friday afternoon in New York after hitting a high this week of $81,281. Over a 24-hour period, the coin now sits unmoved, but over a 30-day period, it has jumped by more than 20%. 

This post Debasement Trade Is Here Thanks to Government Debt — And Bitcoin Will Benefit: Grayscale first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price May Be Battered, but Structural Adoption Story Still Intact: Grayscale

Bitcoin’s price has shown signs of stabilizing after a rough stretch, but even setting aside where prices go in the near term, asset manager Grayscale says adoption of the cryptocurrency over the medium and long run remains largely unchanged.

The reason: continued, unsustainable growth in government debt as a factor that keeps inflation and currency-debasement risk elevated. 

That backdrop, Grayscale argues, could push a widening range of investors toward scarce assets and alternative stores of value — a category where Bitcoin, with its fixed supply, is increasingly well positioned as a candidate.

It added that the adoption of stablecoins and tokenization are set to make blockchain infrastructure commonplace across financial services. Top banks and asset managers have piled into the tokenization space the past year and are fast adopting crypto technology. 

Grayscale argues that as that spreads, more banks, brokerages, and other intermediaries will have both the technical rails and regulatory clarity needed to hold and transact in Bitcoin — eroding the wall that has historically kept it structurally separate from mainstream finance.

“As the spread of the technology continues, many more intermediaries will have the necessary infrastructure (and regulatory clarity) to transact and store balances in Bitcoin — it will no longer be structurally apart from the rest of the financial system,” the note by the firm’s head of research, Zach Pandl, reads.

The firm added that younger investors show a markedly higher appetite for digital assets, and alternative investments have become a standard portfolio component rather than a fringe allocation. 

The analysis expects institutions, wealth platforms, and individual investors alike to keep folding Bitcoin into diversified portfolios — largely through exchange-traded products, a shift it describes as already well underway.

Taken together, the report says that a cyclical downturn in price doesn’t undercut the longer-term adoption thesis. 

The Bitcoin price was recently $63,549, down close to 50% from its October record of $126,080. 

This post Bitcoin Price May Be Battered, but Structural Adoption Story Still Intact: Grayscale first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.