Fu Peng discusses the underlying logic of Bitcoin: large investors have become "landlords," and retail leverage trading is just paying rent

BlockBeats News, April 25 — New Fire Group’s newly appointed Chief Economist Fu Peng posted a series of tweets on the X platform today, breaking down the underlying logic of Bitcoin as he sees it. Fu Peng said that the underlying business model of Bitcoin perpetual contracts and ETFs is essentially the same as the “deferred fee/overnight fee” of gold/industrial commodities spot exchanges in traditional finance. It is a stable cash-flow model in which large holders collect rent through long-term positions, retail investors pay for going long with leverage, and platforms indirectly extract funds from it.

Large-scale spot holders are not just going long for simple speculation, but are like “landlords”: holding positions long term + carrying out hedging operations to collect funding rates, continuously lowering their holding costs. As long as the position does not shrink, the longer the time, the lower the cost, almost achieving “zero cost or even negative cost.” “Many people mistakenly think large holders are only shorting. In fact, they are rent-collecting landlords.” The premium/discount on CME Bitcoin futures is, in essence, the market pricing of this holding cost/rent, and it is completely consistent with the logic of spot warehouse receipts, financing, and delivery back then.

BlockBeats believes that Fu Peng’s remarks are not about being bullish or bearish on Bitcoin. Instead, from the perspective of a hedge fund manager, he described Bitcoin’s evolution: Bitcoin has evolved from a speculative product driven purely by sentiment into a mature asset with structural positive returns—like gold and industrial commodities—(rent/funding rates). Large holders and platforms are the long-term beneficiaries of this game, and retail investors’ long-term leverage enthusiasm essentially pays rent to others.