Joey Krug, the co-chief investment officer at Pantera Capital, has recently sat down with Caroline Hyde to share his thoughts on the Bloomberg Markets segment. Mr. Krug, who has also co-founded such blockchain projects as Augur and Beam, believes that increased scalability of digital assets is needed to fuel the next surge of their prices.

Krug has revealed that his company has actually invested in a number of companies that are trying to solve the scalability issue. According to him, solving it nowadays will be a lot easier than in the early days on Internet, when you had to “lay down copper wire”, while blockchain scalability is essentially a computer science problem. He went on to compare the current state of decentralized apps (dApps) to the Internet before dial-up, when it was not scalable and thus people did not use it.

Pantera Capital is one of the leading blockchain investment firms, which is also among the largest institutional holders of crypto. Founded in 2013, the company claims to be the first American bitcoin investment firm. Pantera has invested in more than 60 cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups, including bitcoin, ethereum, ripple, zcash, 0x, Circle, Earn.com and many others.

With regard to crypto prices, Krug said that, “I think we are close to a bottom at this point. I think that the market is essentially rangebound, waiting for some catalyst to change that pattern.“ Later in the interview he added that, “If you look at that next bull run, I think the crypto space overall could hit 10x from here.“

When asked why the news of institutional investors, such as Fidelity, entering the crypto market, did not spark a price surge, Krug claimed it would have happened a couple of years ago. However, as the market is gradually maturing, crypto investors are waiting for concrete examples of adoption as a catalyst for the next bull run.

However, for this to happen, we have to back to the scalability issue. According to Krug, “If you look at the internet, it’s easy to say, ‘Well, you just create an app, get some users, and then you solve the scalability problems.’ But these are all markets, and so if you don’t have scalability, you don’t have market makers, and so you don’t have liquidity.“

Pantera Capital‘s digital asset fund has had a tough 2018, posting losses of over 40 percent to date.

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