Billionaire Grantham: Crypto Will Go Out "Not With a Bang, But With a Whimper" 🥱

Billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham, co-founder of GMO, dismissed cryptocurrencies as a "useless, speculative mechanism" in a Friday appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box," predicting the asset class will "dwindle away" over "years and years, decades and decades" with "not with a bang, but with a whimper." Grantham pointed to Bitcoin's recent 52% decline from its all-time high of $126,080 set in October as evidence of its unreliability, noting the drop occurred even as gold reached a new all-time high above $5,500 per ounce before falling more than 25% to trade at $4,096. "You can't depend on it in that way," Grantham said. "People don't use it to make serious trades, they don't use it to buy their dinner and pay at the supermarket." He added that crypto "allows crooks to move money around without leaving a trace," calling it "brilliant at that," while conceding that blockchain rails could play a transformative role in the future.

Bitcoin traded at $60,529 at the time of Grantham's remarks and dipped below $59,000 Friday morning, reaching a 24-hour low of $58,189 amid a fresh wave of ETF selling ahead of one of the year's largest options expiries. The largest cryptocurrency was changing hands around $59,100, down 6.4% over the past week and roughly 53% below its October record, leaving its market cap near $1.18 trillion. The drawdown has weighed on Strategy's dividend-paying preferred stock Stretch (STRC), which fell to a record low of $71.25 at the open before firming to $75.30, a nearly 0.5% decrease on the day and a roughly 25% decline from its engineered trading level, according to Yahoo Finance.

Grantham's critique echoes comments made last month by billionaire investor Mark Cuban, who said Bitcoin "is not the hedge I expected it to be" given its underperformance relative to gold, and disclosed that he has sold most of his BTC. On the prediction market Myriad, operated by Decrypt's parent company Dastan, traders have grown increasingly bearish on near-term price action for both Bitcoin and Ethereum, with positioning pointing toward further downside toward $55,000 for BTC and $1,500 for ETH.