Bitwise CIO: Wall Street Onchain Shift to Drive Next Crypto Bull Market

The next crypto bull market won’t look like the last ones.

That’s the argument from Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan, who laid out in a new memo that the coming cycle will be driven by the convergence of traditional and onchain finance, stablecoins, tokenization, 24/7 trading, instant settlement, and institutional DeFi, rather than the speculative demand that powered previous rallies. His key claim is that because this cycle would be built on real financial activity and revenue, it could be bigger than what came before, even if it arrives slower and with less volatility.

Hougan framed the opportunity as two “lanes.”

The first is the “Hyperliquid Lane”—crypto-native protocols that generate serious revenue and route it back to their tokens. For those unfamiliar, Hyperliquid crossed $1 billion in cumulative revenue in June, is on pace for roughly $800 million this year, and directs 99% of that revenue into buying HYPE on the open market.

The second is the “Robinhood Lane”—established companies building real financial services on blockchain rails instead of running pilots. Robinhood Chain went live July 1 and has already passed $3 billion in volume.

The Hyperliquid Lane fixes crypto’s chronic flaw, where applications rack up fees and volume without creating any demand for their token. He named Uniswap, Aave, and Morpho as protocols moving the same direction, along with onchain darlings like Pump.fun. The TradFi stampede, Citadel into Crypto.com, Morgan Stanley onto E*TRADE, the DTCC going live on tokenization, is his Robinhood Lane.

So here we have a credible institutional voice arguing that revenue and crypto rails will drive the next cycle, not speculation. This is not necessarily a new opinion, as many on CT (Crypto Twitter) have made Hyperliquid their shining star for months now. And as for the institutional driver, that’s not really a new concept either. But it is important when the CIO of Bitwise writes the thesis up formally covering these two factors.

It’s no longer “the institutions are coming.” It’s “the institutions are here—and they’re going to drive the next bull cycle.” We’ll find out soon if he’s right…

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