- BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF hits $71B, turning into the best-performing ETF in historical past.
- MicroStrategy’s BTC stash grows to 580,250 cash, doubling down on company crypto.
- JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley now provide Bitcoin ETFs to their shoppers.
Bitcoin has really come a great distance from being a fringe experiment in its early days to now commanding middle stage throughout the world finance area.
Thus far, during the last couple of years itself, it appears as if each Wall Road titan has quietly develop into a Bitcoin holder with BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Belief (IBIT), as an illustration, swelling to about $71 billion in property (as of Might 2025), making it the most effective performing ETF in historical past.
Equally, Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy, the poster little one of company Bitcoin, now holds roughly 580,250 BTC on its steadiness sheet whereas even skeptics have modified their tune utterly, with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently announcing that the financial institution will permit shoppers to purchase Bitcoin (by way of ETFs) via their brokerage accounts (with rival Morgan Stanley providing the identical spot-Bitcoin ETF entry to its shoppers).
Leaving the large names apart, one can see that the continued institutional wave has been unmistakable, with a latest CoinShares evaluation reporting that by This autumn 2024 skilled buyers at massive have been capable of accrue $27.4 billion worth of Bitcoin ETFs within the US alone – a 114% bounce from the prior quarter.
Furthermore, asset managers and hedge funds now account for about 26.3% of all US Bitcoin ETF property beneath administration (up from 21.1% in Q3) as even Bitcoin’s legacy gamers like Grayscale have witnessed renewed curiosity.
In brief, capital that after sat on the sidelines has been massively reallocated into Bitcoin.
And, forecasts recommend that is solely the start, with a reports projecting over $120 billion of contemporary institutional capital into Bitcoin by end-2025, and a staggering $300 billion by 2026, highlighting the rise of “Bitcoin-native yield methods” permitting holders to earn yields on their BTC.
Programmability as the inspiration for a brand new monetary frontier
Up to now, many of the institutional frenzy has handled Bitcoin as a safer retailer of worth than a programmable asset.
Nonetheless, during the last couple of years, innovations like Ordinals and the BRC-20 token commonplace have let folks write code onto satoshis and even problem tokens straight atop the Bitcoin community (whereas numerous Layer-2s and sidechain tasks have introduced smart-contracts and even Liquid staking to Bitcoin).
These aren’t just a few random experiments however a style of what’s to come back, with Sygnum Financial institution reporting that the “DeFi on Bitcoin” revolution is without doubt one of the fast-growing, boasting over 30 tasks from lending and borrowing platforms to shared-security networks.
Amidst all this, SatLayer has positioned itself because the common financial layer for Bitcoin, utilizing the flagship cryptocurrency as its spine as a substitute of some wrapped token.
What which means is that any app constructed on prime of SatLayer might be validated by Bitcoin’s personal huge mining energy and transparency.
Concretely, the staff has described the outcome as a “Bitcoin Validated Service” (BVS), that builders can use to launch issues like stablecoins, lending swimming pools, insurance coverage oracles, or different DeFi primitives.
Furthermore, to show the veracity of its novel idea, Satlayer has just lately built-in with a bunch of different in style chains.
For instance, late final 12 months, the venture tapped into the Sui ecosystem (a high-speed L1), bringing Bitcoin’s safety mannequin there.
The mechanism concerned utilizing Bitcoin Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs) from companions like Lombard Finance and Lorenzo Protocol.
In brief, a DEX on Sui may use Bitcoin as collateral for trades, or an oracle on Sui may have its payouts assured by BTC (making the foreign money’s trillions extra accessible to new chains and monetary primitives).
The broader implications of those developments
One could also be tempted to ask the query, what does all of this imply for institutional cash and real-world property?
For one, it positions Bitcoin as a programmable gold commonplace.
Think about tokenizing a bond or an fairness on a SatLayer-secured chain such that the token’s worth is in the end backed by Bitcoin.
Or contemplate a stablecoin issued by way of SatLayer that borrows Bitcoin’s transparency and safety to reassure regulators and customers.
These sorts of real-world asset (RWA) situations have all the time been talked about on Ethereum, however they may equally exist on the Bitcoin ecosystem as nicely now.
Extra importantly, SatLayer additionally builds within the enforcement wanted to forestall any malpractice as its contracts (deployed on the Babylon framework) embody “slashing” logic — whereby if an operator violates guidelines (say by manipulating an oracle), their locked-up Bitcoin collateral might be confiscated or burned.
In impact, the platform aligns the pursuits of Bitcoin holders (who need safety rewards) and repair operators (who want Bitcoin collateral) inside a single market, turning BTC from a passive asset right into a core part of immediately’s digital monetary infrastructure.