Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead Talks Bitcoin and Blockchain

Back in 2014, Pantera announced a partnership with Fortress Investment Group, indicating "a significant step in the push to move Bitcoin into the financial mainstream."

In a recent blog post, Pantera Capital addressed Bitcoin's growing popularity over the past five years, and its most significant obstacles going forward.

Pantera was founded in 2003, originally focused on global macro hedge-fund investments - however, the firm turned its attention to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency assets after partnering with Fortress Investment Group.

In an interview last month with CNBC, Morehead said he believes Bitcoin is showing a strong buy signal.

Bitcoin has been growing at a rate of 165% per year for the past six years.

The CME and CBOE recently launched Bitcoin futures trading platforms, decisions that Morehead believes are incredibly beneficial for the crypto market as a whole because they will draw in more investors.

Back in 2014, Bloomberg spoke with Morehead and Susan Athey of Stanford to discuss the possibility of Bitcoin someday replacing existing monetary systems.

The number of Bitcoin wallets is up 10x.The Bitcoin network's hash power is up 100x.Bitcoin's price is up 20x. One thing that hasn't changed as dramatically though, is the network's transaction volume.

Morehead compared Bitcoin Maximalists to Yahoo! Maximalists back in the early '90s during the.com era.

As far as replacing existing monetary systems, Bitcoin still has a long road ahead. The Lightning Network should help make Bitcoin more feasible for mainstream payments, but today's existing monetary systems have a strong foothold.