Chainlink (LINK) creator Sergey Nazarov says the recent launch of spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) is a “watershed moment” for the industry as it could mark the beginning of a massive influx of capital from global finance.
In a new interview on Bloomberg Television, Nazarov says the “net new buyers” of the current crypto market cycle are the institutions of the world financial system, who will be looking for other ways to access digital assets following the success of the Bitcoin ETFs.
He says that even under tame estimates, much more value remains left to flow into crypto markets.
“Historically the way that this has evolved, is that net new buyers drive more adoption and market cycles. And I think the question to ask is ‘Who are the net new buyers in this cycle?’ The net new buyers are the global financial system, which is a very big group of net new buyers.
The Bitcoin ETF is an initial offering that allows the global financial system to have basically investment rails, payment rails, and ways to put capital towards cryptocurrency and towards Bitcoin within structures they find comfortable for them and normal and something they can do from a risk point of view.
So I think if you look at the total net new market that’s opening up through things like ETFs and you do the basic arithmetic on that, then even within certain conservative estimates, you can see that there’s still a lot more value that can flow into not only Bitcoin ETFs but other cryptocurrency ETFs, and in my opinion, that’s really just the beginning because the next stage is then asset tokenization where banks see all these inflows into ETFs and then they make assets to compete with the ETFs or to get some of that capital.”
Nazarov says institutions – which are “really quite a massive market” – have a newfound comfort for crypto, and now have access to digital assets in a way that didn’t exist before.
“I would say it’s a watershed moment where the top asset managers in the world, the biggest asset manager, many of the other large asset managers have gotten to a level of comfort with the asset…
And that watershed moment is basically a way for a very large market to access cryptocurrency and the size of that market isn’t fully understood by even the average consumer or some of the other institutions. I think it’s really quite a massive market. So it is a watershed moment and it is really the global financial market being part of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in a way that didn’t exist before. “