2024 Annual Triton Liquid Summit 

TL;DR

• We organized our 2nd Annual Triton Liquid Summit, which gathered 20 representatives from some of the top liquid and venture digital asset funds
• Managers were generally more optimistic about the macro outlook over the next 12-18 months than at this time last year
• Sentiments are that Bitcoin prices will break all time highs again this year - with some managers expecting $100-$125K by year end 2024
• Heightened volatility is expected in the near term, especially due to the US election
• BTC and ETH will likely perform strongly on a relative basis due to the structural inflows from ETF products

Last week we took a break from our regular newsletter cadence as we were on the road for a two-part team trip – a working offsite for the core Triton team followed by the 2nd Annual Triton Liquid Summit. We will resume our regular posting next week, but for this week’s edition we want to provide a quick summary of what has been happening in the Triton world over the past several days. 

Triton Offsite

Though Triton Liquid is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, the team is geographically dispersed around the world. As such, we hold working offsites a few times throughout the year where we all come together in person for focused attention on high-level initiatives and continue to strengthen our team bonds, critical in remote-first organizations. 

Sparing the minutiae, we came away refreshed and reinvigorated about how digital assets and our liquid strategy are poised for success moving forward. Most excitingly, over the past few months we have been working to unify our quant trading research and development with our data driving approach to investing.

Our new CTO John Stowers (PhD, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, focused on computer vision and robotics) has been hard at work rebuilding our tech and data stack from the ground up. The new infrastructure will provide us with an even more flexible and robust data platform, compounding our ability to track markets in real time while also providing powerful capabilities around modeling, machine learning and predictive analytics. 

2nd Annual Triton Summit 

The highlight of the past week was the resounding success of the 2nd Annual Triton Summit. Each year, we invite roughly 20 representatives from some of the top liquid and venture digital asset funds to come together and share best practices, market outlooks and strengthen relationships around the industry.

Generously hosted at the home of FJ Labs co-founder Fabrice Grinda, attendees benefitted from presentations around trading market structure, macro market analyses, exciting new ecosystem developments, business communication best practices and insightful lessons learned over the past few digital asset cycles.

Following the dedicated morning sessions, attendees had unstructured time to meet other managers while engaging in a range of water and court activities, highlighted by the many intense padel matches (a new and humbling endeavor for several of the US-based managers, your author included). 

High level takeaways:

• The pace and breadth of development across digital asset ecosystems is incredible. This is a double-edged sword: while this presents outstanding investment opportunities, especially as returns across projects begin to show true dispersion, the absolute quantity of new launches – and thus tokens - hitting the market applies a certain level of downward pressure on the market broadly. With new token generation events measuring in the 10-100s of billions (as measured by at launch fully diluted values, or FDV) and consistent unlocks, substantial new capital inflows to the space over the next several years are needed to support all of those prices. Until then, the strongest projects will likely continue to see appreciation while the long tail of less innovative launches will likely struggle to attract investment. BTC and ETH will likely perform strongly on a relative basis due to the structural inflows from ETF products
• The macro and the overall digital asset market outlook over the next 12-18 months remains largely constructive, buoyed by moderating inflation globally (including rate cuts by Bank of Canada and ECB, expected to be followed by the Fed) and renewed growth in non-US markets. Managers this year were broadly more optimistic than at this point last year
• With that said, heightened volatility is expected in the near term (equities and digital assets), especially as we approach the US election in November
• Many Bitcoin price predictions hovered around $100-$125K by year end 2024, with several managers suggesting $200-$250K is not unreasonable by December 2025