Stablecoins and tokenization are crowding out Bitcoin in conversations with traditional finance advisers, according to Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan, who spoke with more than 40 advisers last week and found sentiment had shifted sharply toward crypto’s real-world utility layer.
The Shift in Adviser Conversations
‘It was pretty hard to engage with advisors on Bitcoin this week,’ Hougan wrote in a note on Wednesday. ‘In call after call, they expressed much more curiosity over the real-world applications of crypto that are quickly reshaping everything from capital markets to global payments.’
Bitcoin is down almost 30% year-to-date, trading around $62,500 at time of writing. That kind of drawdown, without a clear near-term catalyst, tends to cool adviser enthusiasm fast.
The shift fits a broader narrative Bitwise outlined in its Q3 2025 Crypto Market Review, which characterised the quarter as the one where ‘crypto got a second story, with “stablecoins and tokenization” taking its place alongside “digital gold” as a key narrative for crypto.’ That framing is now showing up directly in what advisers want to discuss.
Hougan said Ethereum, Solana, Chainlink, Avalanche and Canton were all mentioned during his conversations, alongside trading platform Hyperliquid and companies including Figure, Circle and Coinbase. The list is a reasonable proxy for which protocols and equities advisers consider the plumbing for the next infrastructure cycle.
Where the New Money Is Expected to Flow
Hougan’s thesis is that TradFi advisers and institutional investors are the next cohort to enter crypto in scale, and their entry point is not BTC. Bull markets have historically been triggered by ‘new product breakthroughs and new types of investors,’ he wrote, and the ‘best hope’ is that this cohort fills that role via stablecoin and tokenization exposure.
‘It’s hard to turn on CNBC and not hear someone like SEC Chair Paul Atkins or Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon or BlackRock CEO Larry Fink talking about stablecoins and tokenization,’ Hougan said. ‘Investors want to be a part of that.’
The regulatory backdrop is moving in the same direction. Galaxy Digital’s submission to the SEC Crypto Task Force, dated April 14, 2026, urged the Commission to ‘provide a clear pathway for tokenized securities trading’ on automated market makers and decentralised exchanges. Separately, a July 2025 submission from the Healthy Markets Association to Task Force Chair Paul Atkins referenced entities already offering tokenised equity trading to investors. The SEC is reportedly weighing whether to permit tokenised stock trading more broadly, which would give domestic institutional capital a regulated on-ramp.
Circle’s IPO and the Tokenised Securities Pipeline
Circle is the clearest public-markets expression of adviser interest in this theme. Circle Internet Group filed its S-1 with the SEC on 1 April 2025, describing itself as ‘a global financial technology company and stablecoin market leader.’
The IPO itself was eventful. Circle debuted at $31 and ran to a peak of $240 before giving back most of those gains in the broader crypto equity rout, closing just under $79 on Wednesday.
That trajectory tells the stablecoins and tokenization story in miniature: the initial appetite from advisers and institutions was real, the valuation ran well ahead of fundamentals, and the correction has been steep. Whether the theme re-accelerates depends largely on whether the SEC’s tokenised securities framework moves from consultation to actual rule.
The protocol-level catalyst to watch is any SEC guidance that formally permits tokenised stock trading on US venues. That single rule change is the binary that converts adviser curiosity into allocable product.
