The Most Overlooked Opportunities in Crypto As Grayscale Predicts A Tokenization Boom
With tokenization heating up, Grayscale's Zach Pandl calls out top crypto opportunities
By Zack Guzman
October 13, 2026
As investors chase the latest crypto winners, the head of research at one of the top crypto firms believes some of the biggest opportunities in the market may be hiding in plain sight.
Speaking to Coinage on the sidelines of TOKEN2049 in Singapore, Grayscale's Head of Research Zach Pandl said the growing excitement around newer crypto narratives like Zcash and Hyperliquid may be distracting investors from the longer-term opportunity in established smart contract platforms, including Ethereum, Solana and BNB Chain.
"My hot take actually from TOKEN2049 is that the smart contract platforms Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain are not a consensus trade," Pandl told Coinage. "There's a lot of crypto natives that are going for things like Zcash ... going for revenue-oriented products like Hyperliquid and maybe leaving those core pieces of infrastructure aside."
It's a surprising assessment in a market where Ethereum and Solana have long been among the most recognizable crypto assets. But Pandl argues their importance could grow considerably as Wall Street accelerates its embrace of blockchain technology.
"When I look at what's happening, tokenization, trillions of dollars coming on-chain, stablecoins, tokenized deposits, all of this is going to use smart contract platforms," he said. "Don't sleep on the classics — Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain."
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Indeed, as of late, Hyperliquid and Zcash have caught the attention of Wall Street. Not only have the two notched impressive, respective gains over the last year of 100% and 389%, the two projects are also leaders in two narratives that have so far caught fire in crypto. Everyone is talking about 24/7 trading, and everyone is talking about privacy. But Pandl believes there's still something to be said about the trust some of the majors have going for them as investors wake up to tokenization.
"Investors don't so much think about the tokens at first. They think about the use cases and the value that's being created first," he explained. "We talk about digital scarcity. We talk about stablecoins for payments efficiency. We talk about tokenization as a way to upgrade capital markets or perpetual futures as a way to do hedging and speculation in lots of different markets."
For financial institutions experimenting with tokenized securities, digital deposits and stablecoin payments, blockchains could serve as the settlement infrastructure connecting traditional markets to crypto-native applications. Ethereum and Solana are among the networks competing to capture that activity, although the growth of tokenization might not necessarily translate directly into higher token prices.
On the same one-year time horizon, Ethereum and Solana are still off 40% and 45%, respectively. However, that could mark significant room to run if the bull market strengthens.
To be fair, that's not to say that Pandl is betting against Hyperliquid or Zcash anytime soon. In fact, Pandl conceded that Hyperliquid has continued to build its lead as the blockchain-based trading ecosystem that has helped popularize perpetual futures, derivatives contracts, and remains the leader allowing traders to maintain leveraged positions without a traditional expiration date.
"What an incredible story it's been for perps, for Hyperliquid, for the regulatory narrative around this topic," Pandl said. But at the same time, competition is likely to accelerate as traditional players focus on perpetual futures as another innovation that could eventually move beyond crypto markets and become commonplace in traditional finance.
"I think we're going to see perpetual futures everywhere," he said. "I think it will be a very common instrument for both institutional and retail users."
Beyond trading infrastructure, Grayscale has also played an active role in another emerging theme that has captured investors' attention: financial privacy.
Grayscale was among the first to launch an ETF for Zcash, the privacy-focused cryptocurrency. The Winklevoss twins recently threw their hat into the ring that seeks to offer lower fees with an ETF of their own dubbed "WINK," but Pandl believes the demand for private transactions could ultimately extend far beyond any single network.
"We need financial privacy," he said. "Everyone has an expectation that their assets and their liabilities and their paycheck and their tax payments will be kept private in some way."
For an industry built largely on publicly visible blockchain transactions, that creates a fundamental challenge as more financial activity moves onchain.
"We've gone a very far way with transparent blockchains, but crypto now needs the privacy layer," Pandl said. "I do think that Zcash can continue to take market share in the currencies category for users that demand privacy."
He expects privacy technology to become increasingly important across smart contract platforms, stablecoins and even perpetual futures, describing it as a potentially huge part of crypto's next cycle.
Those opportunities are emerging against a broader market backdrop that Grayscale believes has improved considerably since Bitcoin's summer selloff.
Pandl told Coinage that Grayscale's view was that Bitcoin likely bottomed around $58,000 in late June, with the subsequent recovery offering encouraging evidence of underlying demand.
"I think what's most encouraging about it is that the news hasn't been all great, and yet prices have been recovering," he said.
But Pandl doesn't believe modest additional interest-rate increases would necessarily derail Bitcoin's longer-term trajectory.
"In some sense I see it as one big green candle since 2009," he said, pointing to the enduring investment narrative around government spending, inflation and demand for scarce assets such as gold and Bitcoin.
For Grayscale, the bigger story may ultimately be what happens beyond Bitcoin.
As financial institutions begin moving more assets and activities onto blockchains, the competition to provide the infrastructure for that transition could become one of crypto's defining investment themes. Privacy networks and decentralized trading platforms may capture headlines, but Pandl argues that the established networks underpinning the broader ecosystem deserve just as much attention.
"I think they have an absolute key role to play in a crypto portfolio," he said of Ethereum, Solana and BNB Chain. "And I think it's not a consensus among crypto natives today."
If Grayscale's vision of a multitrillion-dollar tokenization boom materializes, the most overlooked opportunity in crypto may not be discovering the next blockchain. It may be recognizing the value of the ones that have proven their staying power.
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