Three Trillion-Dollar Investment Themes: Energy, Computing and Cryptocurrencies

Author:Meltem Demirors (founding partner of Crucible Capital, former CSO of CoinShares)

Compiled by: Scof, ChainCatcher

Last week I gave a talk on “Energy, Computing, Cryptocurrencies” – the three pillars of the modern economy and the convergence of three trillion-dollar investment themes.

Calculation Dominates Capital Markets

Nvidia is the big news in 2024, but Broadcom also cracks the top ten, and TSMC solidifies its place alongside the other Big Seven. This trend is expected to continue in 2025, with energy and computing continuing to drive the development of capital markets.

While everyone is investing in semiconductor stocks, the energy sector is quietly enjoying its own rise. Vistra, an independent power producer, outperformed Nvidia and Bitcoin. This year, attention will be more focused on the U.S. power grid, which has a bottleneck far greater than GPUs.

Let’s start with first principles – we live in a thermodynamic world. The economic system consists of material, energy and information. Technology allows us to transform energy into capital and labor, and matter into products and services. We can never escape the laws of physics and thermodynamics.

The basic logic here is - among the many investment stories, keep it simple, think for fools (KISS). Energy and computing are two major investment areas in the modern economy that are in constant and enduring demand. The key question is how you get involved.

Let’s talk about Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the prototype of the future development blueprint. Energy + Compute = Bitcoin Network. Bitcoin has also given rise to an entirely new market structure that is entirely separate from Wall Street. We will do it again.

For those in the crypto community, this isn’t all that controversial, but it’s still worth reminding everyone that this is all a decade in the making. The Bitcoin computing economy is the predecessor of the modern data center economy.

As an asset, Bitcoin has gone from a contrarian trade to a consensus trade. The financialization of Bitcoin is well underway, while the professionalization and integration of its underlying infrastructure, including mining, continues.

But new opportunities are emerging. The rise of the agent economy creates huge opportunities for cryptocurrencies—a machine or agent cannot own an identity or a bank account, but it can own a wallet. We are about to see an explosion of crypto infrastructure serving agents.

Let’s talk about energy and computing

As someone who has been involved in commodity trading, I like to conduct investment analysis from a value chain perspective. We spend a lot of time thinking about the upstream, midstream, and downstream aspects of the computing economy. We will discuss this topic in depth later when we have the opportunity.

After nearly a decade of plateauing, U.S. electricity demand is expected to grow 160% by the end of the decade. The U.S. power grid will become the most valuable energy resource in the world.

We're seeing a capital investment spree - the $500 billion Star Plan announced today is just one part of the largest infrastructure push since World War II. All capital expenditures (capex) translate into operational expenditures (opex) - hardware needs software to support it. ( Here’s a quick look at CapEx and OpEx )

All credit funds around the world are currently putting as much money as possible into energy and computing. However, all the easy-to-access opportunities have disappeared, so subsequent investments will become increasingly difficult and riskier. This credit bubble will make the Internet Service Provider (ISP) bubble look like child's play.

Enough of the nagging, let’s put it all together. This is how we will invest in the future built at the intersection of energy, computing and cryptocurrencies in 2025 (we will continue to update this strategy as things change, but the process of time is slow and long).

Agreement - We need new, stronger infrastructure that can scale to support 350 million Americans buying $TRUMP at the same time. @doublezero is building a new encrypted network using dedicated fiber - this is not an L1 network, but an N1 network at a lower level of the OSI model to increase bandwidth.

I'm excited for a new generation of protocols that will fund ambitious capital projects and infrastructure buildouts - tired of optimizing TPS and other L1 solutions for the tech community's own amusement. At some point, you have to touch the hardware layer.

New goods and markets in which we can trade. Computational resources are the most obvious (although not fully solved yet), but in the future we will be able to build dozens or even hundreds of entirely new commodities on the chain. Imagine AI agents buying and hedging their own electricity and computing resources.

This field doesn't get enough attention because it's not eye-catching, but it's huge and lucrative. The introduction of artificial intelligence will optimize and coordinate work processes, turning data centers into precision-tuned form factor factories that no longer rely on the ERP modules of the 1970s.

DePIN is my least favorite term (sorry, Sal and Mahesh), but aggregating virtualized resources onto a chain is actually pretty cool. For example, @daylightenergy_ is driving the aggregation of residential distributed energy systems (DERs) at scale in a way that no platform has been able to achieve to date.

I will be writing more about these categories and company content in the coming months, this is just a brief overview. Don't make it too complicated. The story is so simple that it almost came out naturally. Energy, computing, cryptocurrencies—you can express this theme in many ways including stocks, credit, venture capital, and more.