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The gatekeepers of $175 trillion in managed assets are still interested in crypto. They’re just interested in a different part of it — and that shift could define the next bull market.
For most of the past decade, Bitcoin was the entry point. When financial advisors wanted to understand cryptocurrency, they started with Bitcoin. When their clients asked about digital assets, the conversation began and usually ended with Bitcoin. The orange coin was the gateway drug, the proof of concept, the asset that made the abstract tangible.
That dynamic is changing. And if Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise, is reading the room correctly after a week of back-to-back meetings with the people who manage trillions of dollars in client assets, it may be changing faster than most people in the crypto industry realize.
In a memo published on Wednesday, June 10, Hougan laid out what he had heard across more than 40 conversations with financial advisory teams over the previous week — in one day alone logging eight separate business calls. His conclusion was blunt: the questions advisors are asking have shifted, and Bitcoin is no longer the center of gravity.
“Their attention is more focused on stablecoins and tokenization than on Bitcoin,” Hougan wrote.
A Market Under Pressure, Interest Still Holding
Before getting into what financial advisors are asking about, it’s worth noting the context in which these conversations are happening.
The crypto market is currently in a bearish phase. Bitcoin is trading above $60,000, a level that Hougan still views as an attractive entry point for long-term investors, but which nonetheless represents a significant retreat from previous cycle highs. In past downturns, institutional and advisory interest tended to cool alongside prices — the enthusiasm of a bull market would fade, and conversations about crypto allocation would get deferred until the market recovered.
That’s not what Hougan observed this time. Advisor interest is remaining elevated even while prices are under pressure, and that persistence of engagement is itself a signal worth paying attention to. It suggests the advisory community is not treating crypto as a momentum trade to chase when prices are rising and abandon when they fall. They are approaching it as a structural feature of the financial landscape that they need to understand regardless of where Bitcoin is trading on any given week.
Hougan’s first major takeaway from his week of conversations was precisely this: crypto interest among financial advisors is holding up in a bear market. His second takeaway was the more striking one — the topics generating the most discussion have fundamentally changed.
Why Stablecoins Have the Center of the Conversation
Stablecoins are, on the surface, among the least exciting products in the crypto ecosystem. They don’t go up in value. They don’t offer speculative upside. They exist specifically to not move. And yet they have become one of the most important pieces of financial infrastructure that the crypto industry has produced, and the traditional finance world is finally internalizing that.
The use case that advisors keep returning to is cross-border payments. Moving money between countries through the traditional correspondent banking system is slow, expensive, and operationally cumbersome in ways that are almost invisible to most consumers in developed markets but are significant barriers for anyone dealing with international business, remittances, or multi-currency operations. A stablecoin transaction settles in seconds, costs a fraction of a wire transfer, and doesn’t require a business relationship with a correspondent bank in each country.
That is a real, immediate, practical application of blockchain technology. It doesn’t require understanding tokenomics or wallets or private keys at a deep level. It solves a problem that financial professionals deal with in the real world of client portfolios, business operations, and cross-border investment structures. When an advisor describes stablecoins to a client, they don’t have to explain a new financial philosophy. They can explain a better wire transfer.
Hougan identified two forces driving this particular shift in advisor attention. The first is the softening of the macro narrative that had previously made Bitcoin so compelling to advisors approaching digital assets for the first time. The currency debasement argument — the idea that governments and central banks are systematically destroying the purchasing power of fiat currency, making hard-capped digital assets an essential hedge — was powerful during the post-pandemic period of aggressive monetary expansion and high inflation. It is less compelling now. Gold, the traditional beneficiary of currency debasement anxiety, is currently trading roughly 20% below its all-time high, suggesting that the urgency of that specific concern has moderated.
The second force is the signal being sent by the people who run the institutions that advisors answer to. SEC Chair Paul Atkins, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink have all spoken publicly and substantively about stablecoins and asset tokenization as near-term priorities for the financial industry. When the regulatory chief, the leading investment bank, and the world’s largest asset manager are all pointing in the same direction, financial advisors pay attention. They may not be early adopters by nature, but they are not indifferent to consensus forming among the people they consider authoritative.
“Investors want to be part of that trend,” Hougan said..
$175 Trillion Looking for a Direction
The scale of what Hougan is describing matters enormously for what comes next.
Financial advisors collectively manage more than $175 trillion in client assets globally. The fraction of that capital that has found its way into crypto through any channel — direct ownership, ETFs, funds, or structured products — remains small relative to the total. But advisory allocation isn’t just about the capital that gets deployed. It’s about the legitimacy signal it sends, the distribution infrastructure it opens up, and the ongoing relationship between advisors and their clients that can become a sustained flow of capital rather than a one-time allocation.
Hougan’s read on where that capital would flow, if and when it arrives, is important. His assessment is that the primary beneficiaries would not be Bitcoin directly, despite Bitcoin remaining the most recognized and established digital asset. The infrastructure plays — platforms and protocols that sit at the center of stablecoin operations and tokenization workflows — are where he sees the most natural alignment with what advisors are currently discussing.
The projects Hougan specifically mentioned in his conversations include Ethereum, Solana, Canton Network, Chainlink, and Avalanche — each of which has meaningful positioning in the tokenization infrastructure space. He also flagged Hyperliquid for its trading infrastructure role, and highlighted companies including Figure, Circle, and Coinbase as potential beneficiaries of growing stablecoin and tokenized asset adoption at the institutional level.
The common thread is that these are not speculative bets on new narratives. They are assets and companies with existing, functional roles in the infrastructure that advisors are actively learning about. When a financial advisor goes from asking “what is a stablecoin” in one meeting to asking “which protocols handle the most stablecoin settlement volume” in the next, the distance to an allocation recommendation is shorter than it has ever been.
What History Says About New Capital Entering Crypto
Hougan drew on the pattern of previous crypto market cycles to frame why the timing of this advisory shift matters. Every significant recovery in crypto markets, he argued, has been catalyzed by some combination of new products and new categories of investors entering the market.
The emergence from the 2014 bear market brought Ethereum and the first wave of retail developers. The 2018 correction gave way to DeFi summer and the flood of pandemic-era stimulus capital. The FTX collapse in 2022, one of the most damaging events in the industry’s history, eventually gave way to the spot Bitcoin ETF cycle, which opened the door for retail investors and hedge funds who had been waiting for a regulated on-ramp.
The pattern is consistent: recovery doesn’t come from the same participants doing more of what they already did. It comes from new participants bringing new capital that hadn’t previously been allocated to the space.
Hougan’s thesis is that financial advisors and their institutional clients represent the most significant pool of new capital that hasn’t yet meaningfully entered crypto. The barriers that have historically kept them out — regulatory uncertainty, lack of suitable products, insufficient understanding of the underlying technology, and fiduciary concerns about recommending something they couldn’t adequately explain — are all diminishing simultaneously.
The fact that advisor interest is holding up in a bear market, rather than retreating with prices, is the data point Hougan finds most encouraging. Advisors who maintain genuine engagement with an asset class during a downturn are the ones who eventually bring new allocations when conditions improve. The ones who disengage when prices fall rarely come back with conviction.
“My biggest hope is that financial advisors and institutional investors, who still face various barriers to crypto exposure, will become the next wave,” Hougan wrote. “Their sustained interest despite market correction is a positive sign for the industry’s future.”
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