During Link:NYC, Milk Road analyst and podcast host John Gillen sat down with Teddy Fusaro, Asset Management President at Bitwise Asset Management, and John D’Agostino, Head of Institutional Strategy at Coinbase, to discuss the next wave of digital asset adoption.
The launch of the first spot Bitcoin ETF in 2024 ignited the first major wave of institutional crypto adoption. Chainlink Proof of Reserve, which provides real-time updates for reserves backing digital assets, is fundamental infrastructure for crypto ETFs.
Bitwise offers a growing lineup of crypto ETFs, including CLNK, which provides spot exposure to LINK, the native token underpinning the Chainlink platform.
“ETFs were a watershed moment for Bitcoin, for crypto, for Chainlink, for the industry,” Fusaro said.
Whereas crypto ETFs were about providing access to crypto exposure for non-crypto-native investors, he believes the next industry wave will be about utilization.
According to D’Agostino, that next wave is already underway.
“We don’t need a catalyst,” he said. “It’s happening.”
This year, Coinbase expanded its platform to allow U.S. users to trade over 8,000 stocks and ETFs commission-free.
D’Agostino explained why a sudden explosion in adoption is always preceded by years of painstaking groundwork.
“The gradual replacement of 100-year-old infrastructure is happening with blockchain as we speak. These are crucially important legacy systems that have to be displaced slowly.”
“All of that takes a lot of time, and it needs to be very robust, and it needs to become a part of the infrastructure instead of this unique thing,” Fusaro agreed. Ultimately, he believes all of the exciting innovation will be abstracted away in the background.
“Nobody wants to ask how does the price feed into this product so that it’s accurate – it just needs to work. It’s not going to be visible to everyone.”
D’Agostino highlighted Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) as critical infrastructure for connecting the old world to the new.
As the only interoperability solution to achieve ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 attestation, CCIP sets the standard for bringing capital markets onchain. After a LayerZero exploit resulted in nearly $300 million in losses across DeFi this year, numerous protocols with a combined TVL over $15 billion upgraded to CCIP.
“What CCIP is doing, amongst other things, is extremely important for the practical real world we’re going to live in,” D’Agostino said.
“We have to meet people where they live and they’re going to live, to some degree, in centralized permissioned systems.”
Looking toward the future, he described an “insatiable appetite” amongst global citizens for U.S. equities.
“That is a good thing. We should want everyone in the world who can scrape together $10 of savings to want to invest it in the economic miracle that is U.S. capital markets.”
In 2027, Fusaro anticipates a shift from pilots to production.
“What we’ll notice at that time is that people won’t know or care that the underlying infrastructure is blockchain. It’ll be invisible to the user. It’s just better technology. Ultimately, it’s 10x better technology.”
Watch the full conversation.