Crypto will remain ‘narrative-driven’ for a while: Eric Peters

Coinbase Asset Management and One River CEO Eric Peters explains why crypto’s not yet focused on fundamentals

March 26, 2025 10:08 am

Coinbase Asset Management and One River CEO Eric Peters | Permissionless I by Blockworks

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If you thought we were done talking about the Digital Asset Summit, think again!

This morning, we got an extra episode of the Empire podcast, which is a conversation between Jason Yanowitz and Eric Peters of Coinbase Asset Management and CEO of One River.

Yanowitz picked Peters’ brain about the four-year cycle (he doesn’t think there is one on a forward-looking basis) and, of course, fundamentals.

Here’s a tough pill to swallow: Despite all our hopes and dreams for a more fundamental-based crypto, Peters isn’t so sold.

“I suspect it’s going to be narrative-driven for a while. There are just a lot of people that need to buy these assets, and — unless they’re just gonna dismiss them outright — they need to get a position on [them]…This next wave is gonna be driven by investment committees, at least from an institutional perspective,” he said.

“A lot of things are starting to be built on Ethereum, and Wall Street seems to be more engaged. I keep hearing more about tokenization, and ‘Oh my God, we actually own nothing.’ Nothing is the wrong number.…That doesn’t sound super fundamental. I mean, at a very high-level macro argument, I think it is fundamental,” he added, but it’s not like the TradFi firms are “building a discounted cash flow for Raydium,” to Yanowitz’s point.

None of this is to discount fundamentals, which — as we’ve talked about — will still become more important as the industry matures.

But perhaps we have to pump the brakes on getting too excited about shifting away from narratives just yet.

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