Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise, said that the next stage of growth in the cryptocurrency market will be driven by the deep integration of traditional financial institutions with blockchain infrastructure. According to him, the key drivers of development will be stablecoins, tokenization of real assets, round-the-clock trading and instant settlements. The expert predicts the scaling of the institutional segment of decentralized finance to trillions of dollars, which, in his opinion, will transform the global financial system as significantly as the Internet changed media and e-commerce in the early 2000s. The statement was made against the background of a noticeable market recovery: since the beginning of July, the value of bitcoin has increased by about nine percent, while the Nasdaq-100 index of technology companies has decreased by about six percent, and capital inflows into spot exchange-traded funds have regained positive momentum.

Hougan cited Hyperliquid and Robinhood platforms as illustrative examples of companies leading the process of bringing the traditional financial system closer to the on-chain infrastructure. The first of them has transformed from a specialized platform for cryptocurrency derivatives into a universal trading ecosystem, where almost half of the volume of transactions already accounts for traditional assets, including oil, silver and the S&P 500 index. The expert paid special attention to the tokenomics of the project, according to which about ninety-nine percent of the proceeds are used to buy back tokens from the open market, which supports their value. In early July, the second platform launched its own second-level blockchain, which in just two weeks attracted more than three hundred million dollars in deposits, processed about three and a half million transactions per day, and opened access to tokenized shares with continuous trading to users from one hundred and twenty countries.

According to Hougan, two categories of organizations will receive the greatest advantages in the new market cycle. The first category includes crypto projects with proven revenue and an effective economic model, among which he highlighted Uniswap, Aave and Morpho, which are gradually linking the value of their tokens with the actual use of protocols. The second category is represented by traditional financial companies that are actively implementing blockchain technologies into their products, including Coinbase, Figure, BlackRock, Visa, Stripe and JPMorgan. The expert emphasized that the most significant changes are not taking place in experimental pilot projects, but in solutions already operating on a global scale. According to him, it is in the upcoming cycle that traditional finance and the crypto ecosystem can finally merge into a single infrastructure, where the blockchain will become such an integral part of the financial architecture that users will no longer notice its presence in everyday transactions.

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The material has been prepared solely for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice or recommendation.