Grantham calls Bitcoin useless amid 48% drop from 2025 peak
GMO co-founder Jeremy Grantham's latest critique of Bitcoin overlooks shifting blockchain crime data and the cryptocurrency's supply-driven price mechanics.
Bitcoin is trading 48% below its October 2025 all-time high of $126,080, drawing sharp criticism from prominent market skeptics. Jeremy Grantham, the billionaire co-founder of GMO, told CNBC's Squawk Box in late June that the token is a "useless, speculative" asset. He predicted it will "dwindle away, I suspect, not with a bang, but a whimper" over the coming decades.
Grantham, who correctly called the 2008 financial crisis, joins a chorus of traditional finance heavyweights opposed to cryptocurrency. Warren Buffett previously labeled Bitcoin "rat poison squared," and his late partner Charlie Munger held equally dismissive views. For institutional investors, the persistence of these critiques highlights a fundamental disconnect between traditional value investing frameworks and digital asset valuation models.
Grantham's most concrete claim was that "All Bitcoin does is allow fraudsters to move money around." That characterization directly contradicts recent blockchain data. According to the Chainalysis 2026 Crypto Crime Report, stablecoins now account for 84% of illicit on-chain volume. Bad actors have actively migrated away from Bitcoin because its permanent, publicly searchable ledger makes transaction tracing highly efficient.
Grantham's broader macroeconomic argument focuses on Bitcoin's 48% decline from its October 2025 peak of $126,080, pointing out that this drop occurred alongside a robust equity market. This criticism assumes Bitcoin should act as a stable, correlated hedge. In reality, the asset operates on entirely different supply mechanics.
Bitcoin's fundamental value proposition rests on a strictly hard-capped supply of 21 million tokens and the pre-programmed halving of mining rewards. These mechanisms do not buffer against short-term volatility or dictate specific price floors. They simply ensure that new supply remains limited, forcing price discovery to rely entirely on buyer demand.
Historically, this structure has allowed net demand from long-term holders to outpace the selling pressure from miners and liquidations. For market professionals, the takeaway is that Bitcoin functions as a highly volatile, long-term inflation hedge against fiat currencies, rather than a traditional equity substitute. Evaluating it through the lens of short-term stock market correlation misses its core structural design.
