The Next Bull Market Is Hiding in Plain Sight

Crypto is moving toward regulated institutional use through permissioned rails and compliance layered onto permissionless networks, but adoption is slower than AI because it must connect hundreds of existing financial systems. Institutional buying during lower prices is presented as evidence that participation increasingly reflects independent conviction rather than purely rising-price narratives.

Tokenization could make financial assets more composable by moving them onto public infrastructure, enabling borrowing, securities lending, and competition among asset-servicing providers. However, tokenized equities may require hybrid access controls, while tokenized funds still need specialized infrastructure and remain constrained by 10- to 15-year lockups and securities restrictions.

Stablecoins have expanded beyond crypto-native use cases into dollar access, payments, cross-border transfers, and remittances, while institutional participation is bringing tokenized equities, money-market funds, Treasuries, and dollars on-chain. The speaker estimates that each $1 billion of net-new issuance could generate roughly $122 billion in annual economic activity and about $19 million in downstream protocol revenue at approximately 120 turnovers per year.

The speaker forecasts that stablecoin market capitalization could rise from roughly $300 billion to the trillions by 2030, assigning the outlook more than 90% certainty and saying $2 trillion is achievable. The proposed flywheel is that additional on-chain dollars increase liquidity, attract developers, expand applications, and draw in more capital.

Crypto’s infrastructure has shifted from scarce, expensive block space to cheap and abundant capacity: Uniswap users paid roughly $5 to $10 per exchange in 2019, while Layer 2 networks now support broader applications. The speakers argue that this cost reduction is helping value move toward applications, with application-layer fees surpassing infrastructure fees in 2025 after infrastructure captured more than 70% of user fees in 2021.