Crypto’s Next Bull Market Could Be Led by Wall Street, Not Retail

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For basically the entire history of crypto, Wall Street has been late.

Retail bought <a href="https://xpertsstudio.com/big-on-income-this-bitcoin-etf-is-worth-examining/” title=”Big On Income, This Bitcoin ETF Is Worth Examining”>Bitcoin before institutions cared. Retail piled into ICOs before banks knew what Ethereum was. Retail kicked off DeFi summer, the NFT boom, and just about every speculative frenzy crypto has ever produced.

This time, something strange appears to be happening. The order may have flipped.

“I think it’s the first cycle,” ARK Invest Director of Research for Digital Assets Lorenzo Valente told Coinage from our Brooklyn studios this week. “The previous cycles were retail driven.” But now?

“There’s never been like more interest, honestly, in crypto from institutions,” he said.

That might sound like an odd thing to say after one of crypto’s nastier bear markets. But if you stop looking exclusively at token prices, it’s getting harder to ignore what is happening underneath them.

“The amount of interest from banks, brokers, just financial institutions in general on stablecoins, how you integrate them, or tokenized assets… is at all-time high, honestly,” Valente said.

Just last week, 38 state bankers associations announced the creation of the BankChain Alliance, a blockchain network designed to let banks offer tokenized deposits, stablecoins, automated settlement and other on-chain financial services. The group is targeting a 2027 launch.

At the same time, The Wall Street Journal reported that more than a dozen banks — including Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Santander — are exploring a joint stablecoin venture. JPMorgan, which already operates its own tokenized deposit infrastructure, is also evaluating its stablecoin options as customer demand develops.

And earlier this month, nearly 40 major Wall Street firms — including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Invesco and Citadel Securities — participated in a test showing how tokenized stocks and Treasurys could move through real institutional workflows involving trades, collateral and margin calls.

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It’s indicative of a larger trend Valente thinks investors may still be missing.

Stablecoins have already grown to roughly a $300 billion market, he noted. Tokenized assets have grown more than 50% this year to roughly $40 billion — during a crypto bear market.

And yet those numbers remain almost comically small when compared with the markets they are potentially attacking.

U.S. equities alone are worth roughly $65 trillion to $70 trillion.

Source: finance.yahoo.com