Caught the hot trends, but overestimated DeFi's staying power.

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

In 2022, due to the collapse of FTX, Multicoin Capital's funds suffered a 91.4% loss that year because of the sharp depreciation of SOL.

Looking back today, 2022 may have been Multicoin Capital's darkest hour. Later, as SOL recovered and hit new highs again, Multicoin Capital was once again "deified". According to data released by Nansen in January this year, among the confirmed institutional holding addresses, Multicoin Capital's address starting with 0x2b0a led the pack with a profit of $17.84 million in the second half of 2025.

While a single address may not reflect Multicoin Capital's actual overall profits, it is enough to show that the investment strength of this institution is still not to be underestimated. From the end of 2025 to the middle of 2026, Multicoin Capital delivered a mixed report card: it reaped substantial gains from the popular HYPE and ZEC, but also stumbled with AAVE and ENA.

Due to ZEC's privacy transaction features, Multicoin Capital's ZEC holdings cannot be tracked. In May this year, Tushar Jain, co-founder and managing partner of Multicoin Capital, stated that Multicoin Capital has established a heavy position in ZEC since February.

According to TradingView market data, between February and April this year, ZEC's price fluctuated between $200 and $350, then rose to nearly $700 in May, and currently remains above $500. Multicoin Capital's overall holding cost for ZEC is unknown, but even if we calculate based on a price of $350, the return rate exceeds 40%.

Compared to ZEC, the investment situation of HYPE is relatively clear.

According to monitoring by on-chain data analyst Yu Jin, the HYPE holding address starting with 0xaB3, suspected to be Multicoin Capital's, transferred 395,000 HYPE to Coinbase in the early hours of yesterday Beijing time and applied to redeem 211,000 HYPE staked on Hyperliquid. This part of the holdings was bought via OTC five months ago, when HYPE was around $30, and there were no additional actions except staking since then.

In May this year, Onchain Lens detected that three addresses related to Multicoin Capital staked about 1.96 million HYPE, with 2.83 million HYPE remaining in the wallets, totaling about 4.8 million HYPE.

Taking the address starting with 0x76d shown in the above image as an example, all three addresses bought HYPE in a concentrated manner 5 to 3 months ago, and started selling part of their holdings in a concentrated manner a month ago. From the on-chain information collected so far, Multicoin Capital has bought at least 5.5 million HYPE, and has sold more than half of its holdings so far. The expected profit is at least over $70 million.

Although Tushar Jain, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, said that the un-staking was to transfer tokens to prevent continuous tracking, according to on-chain information, apart from some tokens transferred to new addresses, many were directly transferred to Galaxy Digital's deposit address, most likely for sale.

Combined with the ZEC position-building time mentioned by Multicoin Capital earlier, it can be inferred that Multicoin probably made concentrated investments in tokens including at least ZEC and HYPE between February and April this year, which is two months after Bitcoin fell to $60,000. This also aligns with the assertion by Tushar Jain, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, in a July interview that the crypto market has hit bottom.

However, judging from the selling situation, they do not seem to be so firm in the belief that "the bottom has been hit".

Multicoin Capital's bottom-fishing for ZEC and HYPE this year is undoubtedly successful, but at the same time, they have also started to cut losses for "last year's impulsiveness".

Multicoin started buying AAVE in early October 2025 and completed building a position of at least 338,000 AAVE by the end of November. According to Yu Jin's statistics, the average holding price of this part of AAVE is about $219.

However, on May 14, 15, and 16 this year, the address quickly liquidated all its AAVE holdings. Based on AAVE's price during those three days, the author estimates that the average selling price was around $95, resulting in an overall loss of more than $35 million.

In addition, in November 2025, Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, tweeted that he had established a "large position" in ENA in 2025.

We don't know how big the "large position" is, but at least one address holding more than 56 million ENA liquidated all its ENA holdings on June 5 this year.

According to Etherscan information, this part of the holdings was bought in a concentrated manner on October 15, 2025, when ENA's price was around $0.44. When sold on June 5 this year, ENA's price had fallen below $0.1. The loss from this investment is estimated to be close to $20 million.

Between the end of last year and the first half of this year, Multicoin Capital also traded tokens such as SOL and WLD, but their profit and loss cannot be counted for now as they are still in holding status. Overall, Multicoin Capital caught the relative bottom of both the "second round of hype" for privacy concepts and Hyperliquid's "renaissance" this year. However, its investment in AAVE and ENA—representatives of old and new DeFi—at the end of last year, on the one hand, misjudged the overall market trend, and on the other hand, overestimated the staying power of these projects.

Although Aave and Ethena did have good development during this period, the benefits from development did not ultimately fall on the rights of token holders. After the hype of concepts and narratives ended, there was no actual motivation to support the price to further rise or even just maintain the status quo.

Based on the operations on HYPE, AAVE, and ENA counted so far, Multicoin Capital still has a profit of more than $15 million. This investment institution has always had a style of placing heavy bets on assets it is optimistic about, but profit and loss come from the same source—its bold and large-scale operations have resulted in only a profit of no more than $20 million from hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, which is not exactly great news.