Wall Street is building more of its business on blockchain. Crypto investors now have to work out which tokens give them a meaningful stake in that growth.
On October 8, Securitize announced blockchain-based trading in 12 US stocks, including Apple and Nvidia. The products are backed by underlying shares and initially trade on Solana. Round-the-clock trading remains a future ambition.
Meanwhile, JPMorgan reported in September that its Kinexys blockchain business processes approximately $7 billion in transactions daily.
For Pantera Capital president Scott Lawin, this shift brings the industry into “the somewhat less exciting but more sustainable part of the blockchain story.”
“It may be less exciting because it’s less flashy and, you know, we won’t be talking about everything going to the moon, but we will be talking about real adoption, revenues, and scale”
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Lawin sees institutions becoming customers for crypto firms that can improve how they operate. Some of those suppliers could eventually become acquisition targets.
“But institutional adoption is not an overnight thing. It happens over time.”
That gradual adoption brings a familiar investment question into sharper focus: can the underlying business earn money?
Lawin argues that institutions need a way to assess the businesses behind tokens. His firm has a commercial interest in developing that approach through its partnership with S&P Dow Jones Indices.
“And so we believe as we go forward into the future, as more and more institutions start to allocate capital to the space, they need a framework to start to think about tokens and protocols as businesses with real customers, with real volumes, with real revenue.”
The S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index, announced in July, puts that thinking into practice. Among its requirements, the blockchain projects behind eligible tokens must have positive total revenue over the previous two completed quarters.
Yet the index’s own methodology makes a crucial distinction. Revenue generated by a blockchain project demonstrates economic activity. The measure makes no assumptions about investor returns or cash flows.
For investors, that leaves another question: what financial benefit does owning the token actually provide?
Revenue alone cannot establish whether a token is worth its price. The mechanism connecting business income to holders matters too.
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The rules governing these businesses also remain unsettled. On October 5, the CFTC proposed a federal framework for exchanges offering leveraged digital-asset trading, following the Senate’s failure to advance the CLARITY Act. The proposal does not settle the broader question of oversight across crypto markets.
Lawin expects regulators to keep moving.
“And it would always be great to have it codified into law. But we feel pretty confident that the regulators are going to do the right thing.”
He expects businesses seeking institutional money to face closer scrutiny of their performance over the coming year.
“I think what the next year is going to be about is continuing to prove that this technology is better, faster, and cheaper, that it can actually generate revenue.”
