The slogan “long Bitcoin, short the bankers,” which once encapsulated crypto’s adversarial stance toward traditional finance, is now officially a thing of the past. This summer, two financial institutions, each managing more than $1 trillion in assets, approved crypto products right in the middle of a bear market.
Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley, who pointed this out, described the shift with a vivid image: “This year everyone is wearing the crypto jersey. Everyone works for crypto now.”
He emphasized that unlike the 2022 downturn, when institutions of this caliber refused to open access to crypto, they are now proactively delivering crypto to their clients even in the midst of a downtrend.
Sygnum CIO Fabian Dori echoed this view, arguing that the era of “long Bitcoin, short the banks” is over. Banks have shifted from resisting digital assets to building and distributing them through custody, tokenization, and licensed trading. He attributed this development to client demand and clearer regulatory frameworks, calling it a structural shift rather than a cyclical one.
This process did not happen overnight; it has been building for a decade. Swissquote introduced bitcoin trading in 2017, DBS followed in 2020, BBVA in 2021, BNY Mellon rolled out institutional crypto custody in 2022, and more recently, Standard Chartered, Charles Schwab, SoFi, and Morgan Stanley have joined the fray.
Nathan McCauley, CEO of Anchorage Digital, offered a further projection on the trend’s ultimate destination: “We’re moving rapidly toward a world where there is no distinction between ‘traditional finance’ and ‘decentralized finance’—there is only ‘finance.’”
However, not everything has changed. Dori also offered a sobering reminder: institutionalization merely adds an infrastructure layer on top of crypto’s “reflexive, narrative-driven trading” nature, rather than replacing it. In other words, while the doors have opened to institutions, the market’s core speculative character remains unchanged.