Investor who called for AI pivot in 2023 says bitcoin is going to $57,000
Jason Calacanis wants investors to sell bitcoin and back artificial intelligence. He is also holding TAO, the cryptocurrency behind AI network Bittensor.
Jason Calacanis told crypto founders to pivot to artificial intelligence in 2023. Now he wants bitcoin BTC$84,459.46 holders to move their money there too.
The technology investor and podcast host urged followers to sell bitcoin on Tuesday, predicting it would revisit $57,000 within the next 12 months and never reach another record high. That’s about 28% below where bitcoin traded on Tuesday, near $79,600, according to CoinDesk data.
“Why put your resources into a dead network that offers nothing beyond a store of value?” he wrote on X.
A brutal year for Bitcoin is just getting started. Give me three minutes to explain why you should dump it now. Outflows from ETFs are signal and will continue. We will test the 57k low again in the next 12 months. Why? Because there are far too many dynamic places to… pic.twitter.com/fK8zRNvPU0
He said bitcoin had “lost the crowd” that once made owning it feel compulsory. Investors could now ignore it without being mocked, while AI offered more useful places to put their money.
He pointed to withdrawals from bitcoin exchange-traded funds as a warning that more selling would follow. Those funds lost about $774 million across Thursday and Friday, according to Farside Investors, although Monday brought $110 million back in.
Calacanis is questioning where bitcoin’s next buyer comes from. The pressure to own it has faded, ETF investors are pulling money out, and AI is soaking up the excitement. That runs counter to the trade bitcoin has leaned on for years: a fixed supply meeting a steadily growing crowd of buyers.
Tokens still have a place in his own portfolio, meanwhile, as long as they pay people to build AI. He disclosed a stake in TAO, the token behind Bittensor, a network that pays participants for providing services such as computing, AI responses and storage, with separate groups competing to produce useful results.
The attraction was laid out in a LinkedIn post in April. Crypto still left ordinary people wondering what they could actually do with it, while AI gave them something useful immediately. Bittensor stood out because its token rewards encourage people to build those services.
“I am long $TAO and love bittensor’s focus on scaling AI,” he wrote in a follow-up.
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Asanat Analysis — Why it matters
Calacanis's bearish call on Bitcoin to $57k (implying ~35% downside from current levels) conflicts with his existing TAO position, creating a credibility tension. He has a documented track record of public macro pivots—his 2023 AI pivot call landed amid genuine transformer momentum, but timing individual asset drawdowns remains speculative. The call reads as part of a broader narrative push for capital rotation rather than technical analysis.
This matters because influential LPs and newsletter hosts can move retail capital between narratives faster than fundamentals shift. A $57k Bitcoin target, if it gains traction in Calacanis's networks, could trigger forced liquidations in leveraged longs and undermine BTC's perceived 'safe haven' status during market stress. Conversely, if Bitcoin holds above that level, it reinforces the narrative that macro pessimism from early-2020s tech VCs no longer drives crypto markets—a signal of sector maturation or decoupling from traditional risk-on/risk-off cycles.
The Bittensor position complicates the message: he's simultaneously calling weakness in crypto's largest asset while holding a smaller-cap alt. This suggests either conviction that AI tokens decouple during BTC weakness, or portfolio hedging disguised as macro analysis. Either reading deserves scrutiny before allocation shifts.