Welcome to the 22nd edition of the Analyst of the Month

Our mission at Artemis is to help shape crypto into a more fundamentals-driven asset class by building THE on-chain metrics with  leading analysts and protocols.

Every month, we highlight a leading analyst who takes a long-term view of crypto.

This month we highlight Mike McCann, Research Analyst at North Island Ventures, crypto-focused investment firm.

Mike brings a rare mix of pattern recognition from his time at Outerlands Capital and conviction-driven investing at North Island Ventures. His path into crypto began as a curious high school senior in 2017, steadily evolving into a full-time career after hands-on roles at Horizen Labs and Outerlands. Today, at NIV, he pairs a fundamentals-first approach with the freedom to size into asymmetric opportunities.

Read on to learn more about Mike’s origin story, how his investment philosophy has shifted across firms, and the theses he’s most excited about in today’s markets.

1. What is your origin story, Mike? How did you get into crypto and investing?

I first discovered crypto towards the peak of the market in 2017.  I was a senior in high school and was trying to figure out what kind of career I wanted to pursue, and came across a bunch of research on Bitcoin and Ethereum while scrolling around different finance blogs.  At the time, I was intrigued by the concepts of smart contracts and non-sovereign money, and figured it made sense as a high-risk high-reward investment.  I didn’t dive in too deep, but I bought my first bit of BTC and continued to dollar cost average over the next couple of years while keeping light tabs on the space.

Around late 2020 after the emergence of DeFi was when I started to take crypto more seriously.  The combination of a new industry that held the promise of revolutionizing our financial system, alongside the opportunity to make money investing in an inefficient market, pushed me to learn all I could about crypto and investing.

Over the next year, I slowly became convinced that a full-time career in crypto was possible, and after my summer at Bain Capital Credit in 2021, I decided to go for it.  I tried a few part-time roles to gain experience during my senior year while recruiting for a full time job.  Right before graduating college, I accepted an offer at a Layer-1 blockchain company called Horizen Labs on the strategic investments team, which is where I began my crypto career.

2. We met when you were at Outerlands Capital. How has your investment lens shifted from moving from Outerlands to North Island Ventures?

Our thesis at Outerlands was centered around applying factor-based investing principles to a broadly diversified portfolio of digital assets.  Although I also focused on fundamental research there, that meant the core of the work was in making our model portfolio better every time we rebalanced (quarterly).  My priorities were building a high-level understanding of every asset in our 150+ token investible universe, uncovering patterns across tokens that we could apply to our model, and pitching portfolio inclusions or exclusions at the margin based on fundamental factors the model might be missing.  This model gave me a framework for recognizing which factors consistently drive outperformance in tokens, which continues to influence how I screen for investment ideas at NIV. 

By contrast, our strategy at NIV focuses on applying the traditional principles of fundamental investing to digital assets.  This means much more flexibility around where I spend my research time, position sizing, holding periods, and trading around catalysts.  Now the questions I’m asking are “Is this idea worth spending more time on?”, “What are the few key factors that will drive this token to outperform over the coming months/years?”, and “What is the strength of my conviction and how will that play into our position sizing?”.

The biggest shift for me has been moving from a model-driven, breadth-first approach to a conviction-driven, depth-first one. I still rely on the pattern recognition I developed at Outerlands, but at NIV I’ve been able to pair that with the freedom to size up my best ideas and lean into asymmetric opportunities.

3. What is your most contrarian belief in the crypto markets today?

I have a couple thoughts here.

A lot of investors are broadly bullish on RWA growth, but I think the benefits of tokenizing certain assets,  especially equities, are overrated.  Rails for equities already work well, and I don’t see any cost savings or liquidity benefits to doing this in the medium-term.

I’m also in the camp that L1s are categorically overvalued, which I suppose is contrarian given their market cap dominance.  I understand why they trade the way they do - if one of these assets catches on as money, that is a massive TAM that is hard to quantify.  I’m skeptical that this can happen in a meaningful way outside of Bitcoin, and think that most of the long-term value will come from protocol revenues.  This would imply that apps are a better place to invest right now.

4. How much do fundamentals matter for crypto markets today? How much do you think they will matter moving forward?

I think that fundamentals already matter a ton in crypto today, and they will only matter more in the future.  We’re still in an early stage market where narratives can drive price performance for extended periods, but since the 2021 market peak there’s been a clear trend towards “fundamentals dominance”.  Projects like Solana, Raydium, Aave, Euler, Maple, and others went through hard times but managed to recover and even reach new highs by generating real value and revenue.  New entrants like Hyperliquid, Ethena, and others have risen mainly based on the strength of their usage and adoption. 

On the flip side, despite how much memecoins have been in the spotlight over the past couple of years, it’s often overlooked how much the appetite for “token is the product” projects has declined.  Even with total crypto market cap near all-time highs, most narrative-driven tokens from prior cycles are still well below their peaks, and the memes of this cycle (WIF, PEPE, FARTCOIN) topped out at an order of magnitude smaller than SHIB or DOGE in 2021.   While there will be periods of outperformance in this basket, I think the multi-year trend will still be down.

What’s changed is both the availability of data and the mindset of investors.  We now have far more reliable ways to track metrics like revenues, app usage, and incentive spend.  The average liquid token investor in 2025 has a better understanding of what they’re investing in, and increasingly demand data and token transparency.  Protocols are responding by making this information accessible.  The market is still inefficient, but it’s becoming more efficient with each cycle, and I expect fundamentals to play an even greater role in driving outcomes over time.

5. What were some key learnings as an investment analyst at Horizen Labs?

Spending time working for a product-focused startup was incredibly helpful for me in my development as a crypto investor.  Most liquid crypto projects today are still essentially startups, so getting to see how one worked from the inside gave me a perspective that I couldn’t have gained by working at a fund.  

At Horizen Labs, I got to face many of the questions that we ask as liquid fund investors from a different perspective: managing community sentiment, trying to balance the utility of our token with running a for-profit labs entity, and remaining at the cutting edge of a fast moving industry.  I was able to work with people across different functions, understand why certain strategic decisions were made, and see how they shaped the trajectory of the company.  

If I were to crystalize this experience into a few key lessons that have helped me as an investor, I would say:

1. The best teams think from first principles.  Deciding to pursue a new initiative solely because it is the current hot narrative is almost always a red flag.
2. Great teams can balance their vision with pragmatism.  Especially in an industry like crypto, opportunities will come up that don’t perfectly fit your initial vision but are high EV.
3. Strong leadership that can make quick, decisive decisions is extremely important.  Look for that when you’re talking with teams.

6. What are other investors getting wrong when considering liquid crypto investments?

I think that most liquid crypto investors still pattern match too much based on what happened in prior cycles.  While the industry is getting better about this, I think most people would perform better if they erased the concept of 4 year cycles and widespread alt seasons from their minds.  There is a place for market timing, but the most successful crypto investors in the future will win by correctly identifying multi-year trends and buying tokens that will benefit at reasonable valuations.

Crypto market structure is also constantly changing, and that means that market health indicators are changing too.  To give a few examples, I still often see Coinbase or Phantom app store rankings on X, but these aren’t too meaningful in an era where the marginal buyer is institutional.  Perps funding rates at 50%+ annualized used to be a good way to tell when the market was frothy, but Ethena and the commoditization of the basis trade has pushed these rates structurally lower.  It’s not easy, but you have to often be questioning whether assumptions that worked in the past still hold true today.

‍7. What theses are you most excited about in crypto?

The thesis I’ve been spending the most time on is finding ways to capture what I expect to be a multi-year wave of stablecoins and certain classes of RWAs coming on-chain.  While most crypto investors are bullish on stablecoin and RWA growth, I think that the scale of the opportunity is still underappreciated.  This thesis could create multiple multi-year compounders out of names that people already know. 

As an increasingly frequent user of prediction markets, I’m also excited to see those gaining traction.  Although we haven’t yet found an attractive way to play their growth in liquid markets, I look forward to seeing how they’ll integrate with crypto rails.  Lastly, I remain bullish on the steady shift of trading dominance from centralized to decentralized venues, across both spot and perps.

8. How have you been able to use Artemis to help with your fundamental research?

Artemis is the crypto data product that I use most in my daily workflow.  I spend most of my time looking at DeFi, which very much trades based on how fundamental metrics like revenues, market share, user activity, etc are trending.  Artemis is the first place I go to look for this information.  I’m also a frequent user of Artemis sheets when I’m building tables or financial models.  Sheets makes it very easy to pull data, update excel models quickly, and compare fundamentals across different protocols.

9. How does one get in contact with Mike?

You can find me on Telegram @mike_niv.

The opinions expressed in this piece are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of North Island Ventures (“NIV”) or any company with whom NIV is affiliated. This is not an offer to buy, sell, or solicit securities, nor should you rely on anything I’ve written as legal, financial, accounting, investment, tax, or any other kind of regulated advice or endorsement of any product.