The Convictions portfolio triggered a rebalance today because Hyperliquid (HYPE), a decentralized trading exchange, drifted to nearly 50 percent of the portfolio while Bitcoin and the rest of the basket lost ground. That drift tells a micro story about one position doing well. But the bigger story -- why the whole crypto portfolio is down while tech stocks are near all-time highs -- is about something more structural: the AI IPO wave is pulling exactly the kind of speculative capital that would otherwise flow into crypto.
To understand why, you need a simple mental model of where speculative capital lives. Most large institutional investors divide their risk budget into "frontier tech" bets -- allocations where the return potential is enormous but uncertain. For years, Bitcoin and Ethereum fit that description better than anything else. There was no better way to bet on a completely new financial infrastructure than owning the underlying tokens. Crypto attracted capital because it offered the possibility of 10x or 100x returns that traditional markets simply cannot deliver.
Anthropic filed its IPO documents this week at a 65 billion valuation, with 7 billion in annualized revenue. SpaceX is expected to list around June 12 at roughly ,750 billion. OpenAI is preparing its own filing for later in 2026. Together, these three offerings would raise over 40 billion from public investors -- more than all US venture-backed IPOs since 2000 combined. Each offering comes with real revenue, clear product-market fit, and a frontier-tech narrative that is easier to explain to a pension fund committee than a blockchain protocol.
This is what Charles Gave, the French economist whose framework shapes the Compass portfolio's thinking, calls the "exclusion game" working in reverse. Normally, when one asset class falls out of favor, the capital that leaves has to go somewhere, and it often ends up in the next frontier. In 2021, when SPACs and growth stocks imploded, a significant portion of that capital found its way into crypto. Now the direction is reversed. Capital that was sitting in crypto, or that would have entered crypto on the next bull market narrative, now has a credible alternative: buying into the AI economy at its most transformational moment.
The mechanism is visible in the data. Bitcoin spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs, which let traditional investors buy Bitcoin without holding it directly) saw nearly 00 million in net outflows during the final week of May. Ethereum broke below ,000 for the first time in months this week. Meanwhile, Nasdaq-100 stocks tied to AI infrastructure have held near their all-time highs. The capital did not disappear; it rotated.
There is an important nuance here. Crypto and AI IPOs are not identical substitutes. Someone buying Anthropic stock owns a claim on software revenues and a brand. Someone buying Bitcoin owns a bearer asset with no counterparty, no management, and no earnings. The monetary thesis for Bitcoin -- that it is a hedge against currency debasement -- does not vanish because Anthropic is going public. But in the short term, the flow of marginal dollars is the dominant force that moves crypto prices, and those marginal dollars have a very attractive new destination in 2026.
For the Convictions portfolio specifically, this context explains the environment but does not change the strategy. Convictions is not a momentum trade; it is a thesis-driven allocation. The thesis is that Bitcoin is digital reserve infrastructure, Hyperliquid is the future of on-chain derivatives trading, the CMC20 index captures broad ecosystem growth, and Pendle Finance is a structural beneficiary of on-chain fixed income maturing. None of those theses are invalidated by Anthropic going public. The portfolio will hold until either the bear market signal fires or a position's individual thesis breaks.
What would change this assessment: if the AI IPO wave triggers a broad exit from risky assets in general -- if investors who borrowed money to buy crypto are forced to sell to fund their SpaceX allocations, triggering a cascade. That scenario, rather than steady outperformance of AI over crypto, is the sharper near-term risk to watch.