Wall Street moves fast…

When it’s chasing momentum in familiar lanes (tech stocks, housing bubbles, hot IPOs).

But when it comes to paradigm shifts like Bitcoin or ETH, it tends to sit on its hands until someone else takes the reputational risk first.

Think about it from their perspective.

In 2021, many of the biggest allocators in the world—pension funds, endowments, insurance giants, large asset managers—formed “digital asset working groups.”

They studied, debated, and prepped proposals. They were ready to go in. Then came the crash. Then FTX. Then Operation Chokepoint 2.0.

Boards killed the idea. The staffers who ran those working groups went back to their day jobs.

Death by Powerpoint.

Now? Bitcoin is north of $100,000. ETH just hit a new all-time high.

Nothing leaves a scar quite like missing a trade you spent years studying. Nothing fuels FOMO like watching the train pull away and convincing yourself you can still grab the last car.

That’s in part why you see sovereign wealth funds like Norway's buying MicroStrategy stock instead of Bitcoin itself.

It’s why ETH “treasury companies” are springing up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Institutions are trying to find frictionless proxies for exposure.

Why? Because the working groups that began in 2021 were exploratory. What’s happening now is execution—a whirlwind of ETFs, structured products, tokenized funds, and stablecoin supports.

Why This Cycle is Different

The last cycle was retail.

The cycle before that? Crypto-native hedge funds (Pantera, Galaxy Digital, Polychain, etc.).

This one? This is the institutional cycle.

Bitcoin and ETH ETFs are already vacuuming up supply. The Genius Act gave dollar stablecoins the greenlight. Treasury companies are creating billions of dollars in demand for specific tokens.

Why the rush?

Eric Peters, CIO of Coinbase Asset Management, said it’s because the signal in the noise is this: “In 5 years, all of Wall Street assets will be issued in digital form.”

By that, of course, Peters doesn’t mean the kind of “digital” we already have—stocks as database entries at DTCC, mirrored through brokers and banks.

Right now, most of what we call “digital finance” is really paper processes with a digital skin.

Peters means digitally native: assets issued directly on the Internet (via blockchains).

Instead of paper systems digitized with endless middlemen, you get instant settlement, provable ownership, programmability, and global interoperability.

Old system → The “real thing” is still a paper certificate (or its legal fiction). Computers just keep ledgers pointing back to that paper.

New system → The digital token/code itself is the instrument of record. No hidden paper lurking behind it. If you own the token, you own the thing—and the transfer, rules, and settlement are embedded in the code. Welcome to the future.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting.

The Macro Recipe

The most probable playbook in the coming years looks like this: run the economy hot, hold rates low, inflate the debt away.

In that world, real yields collapse.

Store-of-value assets—gold, Bitcoin, ETH—thrive.

Add income inequality: younger generations are shut out of housing, drowning in debt. They’re not buying 7% index funds—they’re chasing asymmetric upside.

Add in tokenization: treasuries, bonds, equities on-chain. The plumbing gets rebuilt. Liquidity fragments, then recombines into something global.

Add AI to the mix: billions of AI agents needing to transact, authenticate, and settle value at machine speed. This is crypto’s second killer app after tokenization.

Put it all together and you don’t just get another cycle.

You get crypto cemented as the operating system of global finance.

The Scar Tissue Cycle

Tom Lee doesn’t care about price. He’s buying ETH whether it’s up or down.

Michael Saylor doesn’t care about price. He’s buying Bitcoin whether it’s up or down.

Why? Because it’s not just about price. It’s about permanence.

When BlackRock, the SEC, and the Treasury all start treating crypto infrastructure as inevitable…

We’re beyond the exploratory phase.

The scars of missed trades never fade.

But for Wall Street, chasing this train feels like the only way to keep from being left behind for good.

They might be right.