Prices of cryptocurrency may be down from their all-time highs but the next bull run has already begun, a panellist told an audience at the fourth annual International Tech Summit at the Hamilton Princess & Beach Club.

Pascal St-Jean is the president of 3iQ, the Canadian digital asset management firm that was the first to offer a public bitcoin investment fund.

He said: “From an industry perspective, we are in a renewed bull run, not from a market-pricing perspective but from the amount of sheer building, M&A happening, ideas, governments, regulators. I am more excited than ever.

“From an operations perspective, yes, we have to look at the macro, the markets, the impact on money and how we are going to manage our cashflow to continue growing. But from an industry perspective, I think we are in a renewed bull run.”

Mr St-Jean made the comments while sitting on the panel “Building through the Bull and the Bear”.

He was joined by Jason Park, head of strategy and partnerships at Bittrex Global; and Sean Reel, the executive director of Ignite Bermuda.

The panel was moderated by Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence.

Mr Park said lessons have been learnt from the crypto winter that saw several leading industry players implode.

He said: “Given what has happened, and this is specific to the crypto industry, what people are finally catching on and understanding is counterparty risk. I started in the space four years ago — no one was talking about counterparty exchange risk.

“As we see some really big companies fail in a tremendous way, it’s not just institutional customers, but also retail customers are understanding and doing their research on which platforms am I going to use, where they are regulated, what kind of licences do they have, what kind of leadership team that they have.

“I think that maturity will definitely help in the next bull run. Obviously, there is a lot of volatility in this space, but I think the foundation is getting stronger and stronger.”

A quarter of new businesses fail in the first year and 70 per cent fail in the first five years, Mr Reel pointed out. So, of all the digital assets, fintech businesses over the years, 70 per cent were always going to fail.

Mr St-Jean and the 3iQ founders have lived through multiple cycles in different industries — and history repeats itself.

He said: “Going back to the web … there’s a lot of lessons learnt for entrepreneurs, in terms of how to handle today.

“A lot of companies went public that had no product, no revenue. Venture capital money was being thrown to a lot of different ideas. I can tell you I know people who raised tens of millions of dollars with a napkin idea. So that was the kind of environment we were living in.”

He added: “[It is] very difficult to build and to know what’s real and what’s not when you are living in that hype cycle.

“That is where we were in the last cycle here in crypto — $60 billion of VC being thrown to multiple ideas, and not understanding where things were going, where regulation was going. It is very difficult to build during those times, to stay focused.

“At the same time, a lot of players were doing a lot of dodgy things and we saw them getting what they deserved in the sense that they may not be in business any more or are going to suffer some consequences from regulators.

“If you look at what happened in the late 1990s, early 2000s, post the dotcom bubble, regulation became clear, VCs became smarter in terms of how to analyse those opportunities and the companies that survived that, became the foundation of what powers most of the world’s economy today — the Googles, the Amazons, the Facebooks, the companies that are now billions and trillions in market cap.”

He said a similar thing is happening today in the crypto industry.

“The companies that were hype got flushed out. Regulators are becoming much more clear. VCs learnt their lesson. They got egg on their face. They are on pause now. They will come back — I can promise you that. There is a lot of capital to deploy. They are just waiting to see what’s the next idea.

“And the companies that are doing it right and that survived this cycle are going to be the dominant forces for years to come because we are doing it the right way.”