A panel of experts believes 2024 approvals of crypto ETFs were a "watershed moment" for institutional adoption—but "full-throated demand" won't emerge until regulatory clarity is achieved in the U.S.
SkyBridge founder Anthony Scaramucci, CF Benchmarks CEO Sui Chung, and Bullish head of institutional Chris Tyrer gathered at the Digital Assets Forum in London to discuss how "big money is transforming the crypto ecosystem."
It was a discussion chaired by Bloomberg's Anna Irrera, and the consensus seemed to be that we're still at an early stage when it comes to Wall Street's embrace of Bitcoin and blockchains.
"Every year it's like 'all the institutions are here,'" Tyrer said. "So did they arrive in 2024? I'd say yes and no. Activity at the end of the year was orders of magnitude higher than at the beginning. We can celebrate that. But do we have the kind of market penetration that you would expect in a $3 trillion asset? The answer is decidedly no."
Scaramucci predicted that crypto legislation will be finalized by this November—failing that, March 2026 at the latest.
Nonetheless, Chung says there's been a "big structural change" in the realized volatility of Bitcoin. Whereas this used to be "much more evenly spread throughout the day," it's now concentrated between 9am and 10am EST, coinciding with when Wall Street opens for business.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Scaramucci—who served as the White House director of communications for 10 days during Trump's first term—warned Bitcoiners are suffering from impatience, and regulatory changes will take time to emerge.
"If you just think about the progress we've made over the last five years, it's been monumental," he said. "I think you'll get exponentially more monumental progress over the next five years."
Zooming out, and the panel argued that traditional finance's interest in crypto doesn't just center on digital assets and blockchain technology, but how the sector operates.
"[Operating] 24/7, instant settlement … all of these things we take for granted in the crypto world, the TradFi ecosystem is as interested in that—and how to co-opt that—as it is in potentially trading Bitcoin and tokenizing things," Tyrer argued.
Irrera went on to ask whether measures are in place to ensure banks can enter the space safely, and emerge relatively unscathed in the event of another crypto crash.
"If you look at what's happened in the past, it's less of a failure of technology—it's a failure of people," Tyrer said.
Going forward, Scaramucci argued that, despite the "vagaries" of Donald Trump, he remains optimistic for three reasons.
"One, Bessent, Atkins, Lutnick, all these guys are pro-Bitcoiners," he told the audience. "Two, the Democrats have had the daylights scared out of them, particularly by the Sherrod Brown case, where crypto political action committees knocked him out of that seat. Guys, these senators have a 95% incumbency success rate. You have to think of the magnitude of an 18-year-old veteran who was head of the Senate Banking Committee getting knocked out of the game."
The third reason? "Great momentum" in the industry.
"Guys like Bryan Armstrong are not going to let up now in terms of where they think regulation needs to do," Scaramucci said. "Even if you come up with a Barron coin, or an Eric coin, or pick the number of coins the Trump family is going to put on-chain, it's not going to disrupt that momentum from a regulation perspective."
Edited by Stacy Elliott.