Bitfinex head of derivatives Jag Kooner says the crypto market's days of easy, indiscriminate capital raising are over — and a fresh Bitcoin rally won't bring them back. A rebound could still revive treasury buying, Kooner said, but the broader free-money environment that defined last year's fundraising looks unlikely to return.
The distinction matters. Treasury buying and broad capital raising aren't the same thing, and Kooner is drawing a line between the two.
A rally that revives treasuries, not the raise
Kooner's view is that Bitcoin strength can still pull corporate treasuries back into the market. That part is plausible enough: treasuries tend to move when the price does. What he's less convinced by is the wider pattern of the past year, when capital seemed to flow toward almost anything crypto-adjacent regardless of fundamentals.
That's the indiscriminate part. Kooner doesn't see it coming back, even with a rally doing some of the work.
The two stories get bundled together a lot. A rising Bitcoin tends to get read as a rising tide for everything else — treasuries, token sales, new vehicles, whatever's being pitched that week. Kooner's point is that the tide was doing more of the work than anyone wanted to admit.
What 'indiscriminate' actually covered
The phrase is doing real work here. Last year's capital raising wasn't one market. It was treasuries, it was new funds, it was whatever structure could get a check written. When the price went up, the checks got written faster.
Kooner's argument is that the price going up again won't restart that machine on its own. Treasury buying, yes. The broader raise, no.
That leaves the market with a narrower path back. Fewer structures, more scrutiny on the ones that do get funded.
The test is the next rally
There's no way to settle this until it happens. The next meaningful Bitcoin move up will be the test case — if treasuries come back but the broader raise doesn't, Kooner's read holds.
Until then, the claim sits as a call from one of the larger derivatives desks in the market. Bitfinex's Kooner is saying the easy money is gone. The next rally gets to decide whether he's right.
