SwissBorg founding partner Alex Fazel believes the market is entering a multi-year, structurally different bull phase that could deliver “generational wealth,” laying out what he called an “alt season bible” for 2025–2026 in a wide-ranging interview with Altcoin Daily.
To gauge cycle magnitude, Fazel prefers total crypto market capitalization over date-calling. He mapped prior expansions—roughly 45x from 2014 to 2017 and ~27x into 2021—into a conservative inference that a 2x–3x from the last cycle’s ~$3 trillion top would imply a $6–$9 trillion total capitalization before this run is exhausted. That—along with a still-missing euphoria phase—forms one of his primary exit heuristics. “Rather than just thinking about how long, look at how high,” he said.
On sector leadership, Fazel’s team compiled a year-over-year basket (September 2024 to early September 2025) of tokens that outperformed Bitcoin on sustained timeframes to filter out “pump-and-dump noise.” The list he highlighted was dominated by DeFi and exchange-adjacent assets: Virtuals (AI-agent) with a 20x,Hyperliquid’s HYPE 7x, Sui and its DeepBook DEX as strong performers, Curve and Ethena Labs 2.5x–3x, SwissBorg’s BORG ~2.5x, and Raydium. His conclusion was blunt: “DeFi is the best sector to invest in,” with exchange tokens repeatedly among the most resilient leaders since 2018 due to clear product-market fit in speculation and fee generation.
Fazel stitched those returns to an explicit capital-flows mechanism: buybacks. He showed a positive correlation, in his view, between top token performers and sustained buyback programs, and drew a parallel to equities where many of the cycle’s strongest stocks—including AI bellwethers—have announced large, continuing repurchases. He cautioned, however, that buybacks can be overwhelmed by emissions. “If you have $20 million buying the token, but an airdrop is emitting $53 million, do the math,” he said, citing this dynamic to explain why some well-known tokens underperformed despite revenue.
From there, he proposed a simple four-quadrant framework for token “pumpamentals”: clear utility that investors perceive as valuable; loyalty via locking; strong, sustainable, and scalable buybacks; and burns or other mechanisms that reduce float. Layer-1s, he argued, typically tick only the first two boxes and still rely on inflationary issuance for staking yields. By contrast, exchange tokens and some DeFi assets can check all four—particularly if fee-linked buybacks are hard-wired, ongoing, and diversified across product lines.
Much of Fazel’s playbook is operational at SwissBorg itself. He disclosed that the company, founded in 2017 and now at “300+ employees” and “$2.4 billion” in assets under management, has shifted to a 50% revenue-to-buyback policy for its BORG token and intentionally delisted from centralized exchanges to “control supply” and concentrate liquidity and volume in-app.
Fazel repeatedly returned to risk management, urging investors to think in probabilities and to be willing to “divorce” underperforming tokens that lack real revenues or sound token economics. He also addressed dilution fears sparked by the proliferation of new tokens, contending that almost none reach meaningful size. “Out of all these coins… 0.00001% have a market cap above $1 million,” he said, arguing that the sheer number of microcap launches should not preclude an altseason in larger, revenue-generating names.
At press time, the total crypto market cap stood at $4.2 trillion.
