Block recently applied to establish Builders Bank & Trust, a federally regulated national trust bank intended to provide custody and fiduciary services for digital assets including Bitcoin and stablecoins.

It follows a broader trend involving companies such as Circle, Ripple, PayPal and others seeking banking or trust charters.

At the same time, traditional banks are moving in the opposite direction:

• launching stablecoins;
• providing crypto custody;
• experimenting with tokenized deposits;
• offering institutional trading;
• building blockchain settlement infrastructure.

Five years ago the debate was often framed as:

crypto vs banks.

The direction now looks more like:

crypto infrastructure being absorbed into the financial system.

That could be bullish for adoption, but it also changes what crypto becomes.

Institutional integration usually brings:

• stronger compliance;
• identity requirements;
• regulated custody;
• surveillance;
• capital requirements;
• fewer permissionless access points.

For investors this may reduce risk. For crypto purists it can look like the traditional financial system simply adopting blockchain technology without adopting the original philosophy behind it.

Where do you think this ends?

Do banks eventually become the dominant gateway to digital assets, or will crypto-native institutions remain a separate financial layer?

S&P Global has led a $110 million funding round in Kaiko, the crypto market-data company. Other investors include BNP Paribas, Nasdaq and Royal Bank of Canada. Kaiko currently aggregates data from more than 150 crypto exchanges and protocols.

I think this says a lot about where institutional adoption is going.

Traditional finance does not only need access to crypto assets.

It also needs institutional-grade infrastructure around them:

• reliable pricing;
• reference rates;
• market surveillance;
• liquidity analytics;
• risk models;
• historical data;
• benchmark construction.

That is exactly what happened in traditional markets.

The asset itself is only one layer. An entire industry develops around pricing, custody, clearing, analytics and compliance.

If major financial-data companies are investing directly into crypto-data infrastructure, that suggests the sector is being integrated into traditional finance rather than remaining a separate market.

It may also mean the biggest institutional opportunities are no longer necessarily exchanges or tokens themselves.

Which part of institutional crypto infrastructure do you think has the strongest long-term business model?

Custody, data, tokenization, stablecoins, settlement, or something else?

U.S. Bank recently completed a live cross-border pilot using USBDC, its own dollar-backed stablecoin, on the Stellar network. The transaction connected blockchain settlement with the bank's existing risk, compliance and operational systems.

At the same time, a consortium including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citi, Deutsche Bank and other institutions is planning a joint dollar stablecoin initiative for 2027.

That is a very different adoption path from banks simply offering crypto custody.

Stablecoins can potentially improve:

• 24/7 settlement;
• cross-border payments;
• treasury transfers;
• collateral movement;
• tokenized securities settlement;
• interbank liquidity.

But there is an obvious question:

Why would users choose a bank-issued stablecoin instead of USDT or USDC?

Banks have regulatory distribution, existing customers and integration with the financial system. Crypto-native stablecoins already have liquidity and strong network effects.

Institutional adoption may therefore produce two parallel markets rather than one replacing the other.

Do you expect bank-issued stablecoins to become serious competitors to USDT and USDC?

Or will their main use remain institutional settlement behind the scenes?

Strategy still dominates the category with roughly 845,000 BTC, but a growing number of public companies now hold Bitcoin directly on their balance sheets. Public-company treasury data currently shows well over 1.2 million BTC held across tracked corporate entities.

What interests me is that the strategy itself is also evolving.

Some companies are no longer simply using excess cash to buy Bitcoin. They are issuing:

• common stock;
• convertible debt;
• preferred shares;
• other structured securities

specifically to increase BTC exposure.

That effectively turns the company into a leveraged Bitcoin acquisition vehicle.

The upside is obvious when BTC appreciates and the company can repeatedly raise capital above the value of its underlying holdings.

The risk is equally obvious when:

• Bitcoin falls;
• equity trades below NAV;
• financing costs increase;
• dilution becomes excessive;
• investors stop rewarding the treasury strategy.

So I think the real question is whether this becomes a durable corporate-finance model or remains something that only works under favorable Bitcoin market conditions.

Would you invest in a Bitcoin treasury company instead of simply holding BTC or a spot ETF?

If yes, what premium to NAV would you consider reasonable?