According to external sources, the ARCA Chief Investment Officer, Jeff Dorman, in a recent podcast, stated that the current weakness of the encryption market cannot simply be attributed to the weakness of the entire industry. In his view, there was a clear division within the market, with bitcoin under pressure, but some of the plates that had real income and used the scene were still moving up.

Market performance has been divided

Dorman argued that encrypted assets should no longer be seen as a single market. Bitcoin’s recent underperformance is partly related to Strategy’s concerns; however, DeFi, stabilization currency, payments, and RWA have continued to grow since this year, with relatively higher prices.

Dorman mentioned that the market began to place more emphasis on real value accumulation than on mere narratives. In Hyperliquid, for example, such projects with greater income capacity are gradually creating a gap with highly speculative coins. In his view, that meant that the encryption market was moving towards a more mature pricing approach.

Four class participants were named.

Dorman attributed part of the poor market performance to structural problems within the industry. He named four categories of participants: exchange, marketer, venture capital and token issuer.

  • There is often a lack of adequate user education when the exchange goes online
  • Market vendors support the entry of overvalued projects
  • The Windwards Agency has funded too many Layer 1 projects that lack necessity
  • Issuer underperformance in investor communication

According to him, these problems together weakened investor confidence and exacerbated market challenges to token pricing.

Views on Strategy and the macro environment

Dorman also criticized Federal Reserve Chairman Powell for his policy communication, arguing that he relied too much on forward-looking guidance and did not adjust policy more flexibly to real-time economic changes. He stated that, in times of relative economic stability, smaller and more responsive policy adjustments were usually more favourable to market performance.

He also stated that AI had entered the ARCA staff ' s day-to-day workflow and was improving productivity. This change is more conducive to profitable enterprises and to assets supported by cash flows, and thus the beneficiaries are more likely to be stock and more basic encryption projects than traditional value-storage assets such as bitcoin and gold.

For Strategy, Dorman particularly criticized his recent decision to sell approximately $2.5 million in bitcoin. In his view, the limited role of the transaction at the financial level magnified market panic, weakened investor confidence and unnecessarily reduced the company ' s business value.

Looking back to the market, he said that Strategy ' s debt burden and financing structure remained a risk point for the market. If the company were to sell bitcoin on a larger scale in the future, it might continue to slow down the whole encryption market.