Is the flock coming? It’s here. Recent institutional crypto adoption to keep you bullish for the long term
For a couple of years, often highlighted by Galaxy Digital’s Mike Novogratz, “the herd is coming” has been a rallying cry for institutional use of crypto. There is plenty of evidence that the herd has been shuffling for some time.
No, it’s not exactly a stampede yet, but when you look at who/what’s been involved, it’s significant, and in this article, inspired by the tweet below, we’ll summarize some of the recent big crypto adoption news .
Concerns and conspiracy theories about Wall Street market manipulation aside, for the crypto market to seriously break out of (albeit quite large) niche territory and reach a market cap in the tens of trillions, mass adoption quite obviously needs to grow.
And from our point of view, it very much looks like it does, bit by bit.
A tweet from Co-Head of Venture at Brevan Howard Digital, Peter Johnson, caught our attention today, and it’s a brilliant breakdown of said institutional sentiment and crypto industry moves by major players.
“The institutions are here” 🧵
For years the crypto community has been saying “The Institutions are coming”… and for a long time we were wrong. Now, in the depths of a bear market, it is becoming clear that the institutions are indeed here. Starting with some data…
— Peter Johnson (won’t dm) (@TheChicagoVC) 6 November 2022
We recommend reading the thread yourself, but we’ll also touch on elements of it, and a few other things, below.
rendering
Boston-headquartered financial services giant Fidelity has been in the crypto news quite a bit lately. As Peter Johnson of Brevan Howard (also an investment management bigwig) notes, Fidelity recently released a fairly bullish report on institutional investment sentiment.
One of the main takeaways was this: off Of 1,052 institutional investors surveyed, 58% currently hold digital assets, and 74% plan to buy or invest in them.
In other Fidelity news, the investment titan has revealed that it plans to launch a commission-free crypto trading platform called Fidelity Crypto, aimed at retail investors to trade Bitcoin and Etheteum.
This is in addition to the EDXM crypto exchange it has established with Charles Schwab and Citadel Securities aimed at both institutional and retail investors.
BNY Mellon
America’s oldest bank, Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (aka BNY Mellon), recently announced that it can now deposit crypto (initially only BTC and ETH), after receiving regulatory approval to do so.
In the meantime, it has also carried out an investigation of 270 institutional investors, revealing that 97% agree that digital tokenization will revolutionize asset management.
And 88% of survey participants said they plan to move forward with current plans around digital assets despite bearish market conditions.
On average, 29% was the amount of their portfolio these investors said they would allocate to digital assets over roughly 2-5 years, given the right regulatory conditions and infrastructure.
CBOE
The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), one of the largest US stock market operators, recently announced that it is distributing market data on the Pyth blockchain network, also marking a tentative move into the decentralized financial landscape.
“We are curious about the DeFi landscape, and feel that participating in Pyth gives us the opportunity to learn what it’s like to be a part of this new market,” said Catherine Clay, head of data and access solutions at CBOE, in a interview, according to a Bloomberg article.
Black stone
Following the news it jumped into bed with US crypto exchange Coinbase, US$10 trillion+ asset manager BlackRock recently announced it was launching a spot Bitcoin trust for private institutions.
The world’s largest asset holding hog and true Monopoly winner also has a partnership with stablecoin USDC issuer, Circle.
A few days ago, on November 3rd, Circle revealed that its commitment is increasing and is starting to transfer USDC reserves to a BlackRock-managed fund registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Even more adoption
If these news tidbits don’t convince you of the expanding uptake of mainstream crypto and blockchain adoption, here are a few more…
• Google. Tech titan’s cloud computing platform, Google Cloud, recently announced that it will launch a “node engine” for Ethereum projects.
Similarly, the service confirmed this weekend, at the Breakpoint conference event, that it will become a node validator for Solana blockchain.
Validator nodes efficiently verify, vote on, and maintain a record of transactions on a blockchain network.
• GameFi. There’s been a lot of big GameFi funding news this year – see our recent Animoca Brands and Immutable articles for example. But here is another.
It is fresh news today that technological multinational Microsoft supports We made – a Korean-based gaming company that has made a big push into the blockchain world.
Wemade confirmed in a press release that it has raised $46 million from Microsoft, Shinhan Asset Management and Kiwoom Securities.
As TechCrunch reports, Wemade is best known for its hit title The Legend of Mir, which at its peak reportedly had more than 200 million signups/players.
• NFTs. Late last week, Meta announced that its Instagram platform will allow users to create and sell non-fungible tokens on the Polygon (MATIC) blockchain. Huge.
Both Facebook and Instagram also enable the connection of web3 wallets and NFTs, with supported blockchains including Ethereum, Polygon and soon Solana.
As Johnson also points out in his crypto adoption Twitter thread, apple “Now explicitly allows apps to list, create, transfer and view NFTs, which will lead to increased use of NFTs in app experiences.”
He notes that this, however, “comes with the disadvantage that Apple also includes NFT purchases within the IAP 30% fee.”
We’re scratching the surface here, and we’ve certainly covered quite a few more crypto adoption and big funding stories here at Coin head. (Although we also recommend this excellent October overview from Kraken, which notes some of the big events from that month.)
In short, as this nascent industry navigates a difficult year amidst bleak macroeconomic climes, and has an annoying tendency to shoot itself in the foot (Terra LUNA, Celsius… er, potentially FTX?) it is always plenty of daily news to reinforce the notion that its long-term future is brighter than Chris Langan wearing new OMOed whites.
