Three trillion-dollar investment themes: Energy, Computing, and Cryptocurrency

Author: Meltem Demirors (Founding Partner at Crucible Capital, former CSO at CoinShares)

Compiled by: Scof, ChainCatcher

Last week, I gave a talk on "Energy, Computing, and Cryptocurrency"—these three are the three pillars of the modern economy and the convergence of three trillion-dollar investment themes.

Computing Dominates Capital Markets

In 2024, Nvidia made big headlines, but Broadcom also entered the top ten, and TSMC solidified its position alongside the other "big seven." This trend is expected to continue into 2025, with energy and computing driving the development of capital markets.

While everyone is investing in semiconductor stocks, the energy sector has quietly begun its own rally. Vistra, as an independent power producer, has outperformed both Nvidia and Bitcoin this year, with more focus shifting to the U.S. power grid, where the bottlenecks are far greater than those of GPUs.

From a fundamental perspective— we live in a thermodynamic world. Economic systems consist of matter, energy, and information. Technology enables us to convert 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 many investment stories, keep it simple, stupid (KISS). Energy and computing are the two investment areas with sustained and enduring demand in the modern economy. The key question is, how do you participate?

Let's Talk About Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the prototype of the future development blueprint. Energy + Computing = Bitcoin Network. Bitcoin has also spawned a completely new market structure, entirely detached from Wall Street. We will do this again.

For those in the crypto circle, this is not so controversial, but it is still necessary to remind everyone that this has been a decade in the making. The Bitcoin computing economy is the precursor to the modern data center economy.

As an asset, Bitcoin has transformed from a contrarian trade into a consensus trade. The financialization process of Bitcoin has been smoothly advancing, while the specialization and integration of its underlying infrastructure (including mining) are also ongoing.

But new opportunities are emerging. The rise of the agent economy creates huge opportunities for cryptocurrencies—machines or agents cannot own identities or bank accounts, but they can have a wallet. We are about to witness explosive growth in crypto infrastructure serving agents.

Let's Talk About the Situation in Energy and Computing

As someone who has worked in commodity trading, I like to analyze investments from the perspective of the value chain. We have spent a lot of time thinking about the upstream, midstream, and downstream of the computing economy. We can delve deeper into this topic another time.

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

We are witnessing a capital investment frenzy—the $500 billion "Interstellar Plan" announced today is just part of the largest infrastructure build-out since World War II. All capital expenditures (capex) will convert into operational expenditures (opex)—hardware needs software to support it. (Here is a brief introduction to capital expenditures and operational expenditures)

All global credit funds are currently pouring as much capital as possible into the energy and computing sectors. However, all easily accessible opportunities have disappeared, so the upcoming investments will become increasingly difficult and riskier. This credit bubble will make the ISP bubble look like child’s play.

Enough with the rambling; let’s integrate everything. This is how we will invest in the future we will build at the intersection of energy, computing, and cryptocurrency in 2025 (we will continuously update this strategy as things evolve, but the passage of time is slow and long).

Protocols—We need stronger new infrastructure that can scale to support 350 million Americans simultaneously buying $TRUMP. @doublezero is building a new crypto network using dedicated fiber—this is not an L1 network but an N1 network located at a lower level of the OSI model to increase bandwidth.

I am excited about the new generation of protocols that will fund ambitious capital projects and infrastructure—tired of those L1 solutions optimizing TPS and other tech circle self-indulgences. One day, you have to touch the hardware layer.

New commodities and markets where we can trade. Computing resources are the most obvious (though not fully resolved yet), but in the future, we will be able to build dozens or even hundreds of brand new commodities on-chain. Imagine AI agents buying and hedging their own power and computing resources.

This area has not received enough attention because it is not flashy enough, but it is vast and highly profitable. The introduction of artificial intelligence will optimize and coordinate workflows, turning data centers into finely-tuned shape factories, no longer relying on 70s ERP modules.

DePIN is my least favorite term (sorry, Sal and Mahesh), but aggregating virtualized resources on-chain is actually pretty cool. For example, @daylightenergy_ is scaling the aggregation of residential distributed energy resources (DERs) in a way that no platform has achieved so far.

I will write more articles about these categories and companies in the coming months; this is just a brief overview. Don’t overcomplicate it. This story is very simple and almost writes itself. Energy, computing, cryptocurrency—you can express this theme through stocks, credit, venture capital, and more.