The ‘long bitcoin, short the bankers’ era is officially over as TradFi giants embrace digital assets

A pair of financial institutions managing more than $1 trillion each approved crypto products this summer, a shift Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley says shows large firms are expanding crypto access even during a bear market.

“This year everyone just put on the crypto jersey,” Horsley said during an interview with CoinDesk. “Everyone works for crypto now.”

“This summer two financial institutions that manage over a trillion dollars of investor savings and wealth looked at this space in a bear market and said, we want to make this available to our clients.”

Bitwise did not identify the firms or answer questions about what the approvals allow or when client access begins. Horsley said financial institutions of that size were not opening access during the 2022 downturn.

Crypto’s stance toward traditional finance (TradFi) was once captured by the slogan “long bitcoin, short the bankers,” Horsley pointed out. Financial institutions have now moved to “the other side of the table” and are working to expand adoption rather than debating whether the asset class should exist, he said.

Sygnum Chief Investment Officer Fabian Dori agreed that the relationship between banks and crypto has changed.

“The old ‘long bitcoin, short the bankers’ trade is over: banks have moved from resisting digital assets to building and enabling or distributing them through custody, tokenization and regulated trading,” Dori said.

He attributed the shift to client demand and clearer rules, calling it structural rather than cyclical.

Early bank entrants included Swissquote, which added bitcoin trading in 2017, DBS in 2020 and BBVA in 2021. BNY Mellon started institutional crypto custody in 2022, the same year Nubank launched bitcoin and ether trading and LGT added crypto services.

St.Galler Kantonalbank and Santander followed in 2023, while Zürcher Kantonalbank added retail trading in 2024, before other major financial industry players including Standard Chartered, Charles Schwab, SoFi and Morgan Stanley entered the space.

Anchorage Digital CEO Nathan McCauley, meanwhile, said its client roster has increasingly reflected the convergence of traditional and decentralized finance over the past two years.

Large financial firms are partnering with specialist providers rather than building their own infrastructure, he said. Still, real-world assets coming onchain and crypto wrappers being created by large asset managers is showing two worlds are increasingly becoming one.

“We’re quickly headed towards a world where there isn’t ‘traditional finance’ and ‘decentralized finance.’ There’s just ‘finance,” McCauley told CoinDesk. “

The expansion has not changed crypto’s dependence on market prices, however.

“What has not changed is the market’s character,” Sygnum’s Dori said. “Institutionalization has added a layer of infrastructure on top of crypto’s reflexive, narrative-driven trading rather than replacing it.”