One of the more interesting institutional crypto stories today is not about buying Bitcoin.
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?