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

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

Retail bought 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.