The Institutional Wave

The institutional wave in Bitcoin has a clear starting point: August 2020. One company — MicroStrategy — put $250 million of corporate treasury into Bitcoin. The financial press thought Saylor had lost the plot.

What followed was the fastest adoption by major financial institutions of any investment in history.

2020: MicroStrategy, Square (now Block), a handful of others. Total institutional exposure in the billions. The conversation: cautious and fringe.

2021: PayPal enables Bitcoin for 300 million users. Tesla puts $1.5 billion in. Goldman Sachs reopens its crypto trading desk. The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust swells to $40 billion. The conversation: mainstream but contested.

2022-2023: the bear market and FTX collapse hurt sentiment badly. But something important happened underneath the bad news. The serious players separated from the frauds. Institutional infrastructure — custody solutions, trading desks, regulated products — didn’t disappear. It deepened.

2024: BlackRock, Fidelity, and nine other major asset managers receive SEC approval for spot Bitcoin ETFs in January. Over $50 billion in ETF assets in the first year — the fastest ETF launch in history. Bitcoin crosses $100,000. The US president publicly discusses a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

The wave didn’t peak in 2021 and recede. It went underground during the bear market and came back with more infrastructure, more regulatory clarity, and more capital than before.

In four years, Bitcoin went from one eccentric CEO’s treasury bet to a product available in retirement accounts at Fidelity.

Tomorrow: MicroStrategy revisited — what the numbers look like now.

— The Daily Bit