Who is Ben Nadareski?

Co-founder and CEO of Solstice, an institutional crypto prime brokerage and execution venue.

Does this op-ed mean institutions aren't buying crypto?

It means institutions are using crypto infrastructure, like stablecoins and tokenization, rather than buying volatile governance tokens as treasury assets.

What are the largest tokenized treasury products?

BlackRock's BUIDL, Franklin Templeton's BENJI, and Ondo's OUSG, with BUIDL above $2 billion in AUM as of 2025.

Is this bullish or bearish for crypto prices?

Neutral to mixed. It's bullish for infrastructure and stablecoin issuers, less clearly bullish for governance and L1 tokens that depend on speculative flows.

Solstice CEO: Banks Are Quietly Building on Crypto Rails They Once Dismissed

Market impact

The op-ed itself isn't a market-moving event. There's no filing attached, no allocation announcement, no price reaction to chart. What it captures is a positioning shift that's been building for two quarters.

Stablecoin supply hit fresh highs above $250 billion in May, per DefiLlama, with USDC and USDT continuing to absorb the bulk of settlement demand from fintechs and a growing list of regulated payment processors. Tokenized treasury products, which barely existed at scale in 2023, now sit above $7 billion in AUM across BUIDL, Ondo's OUSG, Franklin Templeton's BENJI, and a handful of smaller issuers.

The story isn't that crypto failed. It's that the value capture has bifurcated. Infrastructure tokens with direct utility in settlement, oracle pricing, or compliance tooling have a clearer path to institutional flow than governance assets whose pitch rests on a vote count.

Ben Nadareski, co-founder and CEO of Solstice, argued in a CryptoSlate op-ed published Friday that institutions never planned to adopt crypto on the industry's terms, and that banks have spent the last cycle quietly building on the rails crypto natives once treated as a sideshow. The piece, headlined 'Crypto walked so banks could run,' lands at a moment when stablecoin settlement volumes and tokenized treasury products have moved from pilot decks into live balance-sheet workflows at major lenders.

By Clara Hoffmann· AI-assisted· L2 & scaling

What happened

Ben Nadareski, co-founder and CEO of institutional crypto prime broker Solstice, published a guest opinion piece in CryptoSlate on Friday titled 'Crypto walked so banks could run. ' The argument, laid out in the opening paragraphs, is blunt: institutions were never going to arrive in crypto the way the industry wanted them to. No stampede into governance tokens.

No CFO publicly rotating idle treasury into volatile assets. No pension fund committee suddenly fluent in tokenomics. Instead, Nadareski wrote, banks studied the infrastructure crypto built, stripped out the parts that didn't fit a regulated balance sheet, and started shipping.

The piece reads less as a victory lap for crypto and more as a post-mortem on the assumption that institutional adoption would mean institutions buying what crypto natives hold.

Why it matters

This isn't a new debate, but the timing gives it weight. JPMorgan's Kinexys platform, the rebranded Onyx, settled over a trillion dollars in tokenized payment flows since launch, per the bank's own disclosures earlier this year. BlackRock's BUIDL tokenized treasury fund crossed $2 billion in assets in 2025, according to Securitize data.

Citi and HSBC have both run live tokenized collateral pilots. Nadareski's framing matters because it cuts against the dominant retail narrative that 'institutional adoption' translates mechanically into bids for L1 tokens. It doesn't.

Banks are adopting the plumbing, not the speculation layer. For Cryptomat readers building theses on ETH, SOL, or governance assets, that's a load-bearing distinction that often gets glossed over in cycle-top commentary.

Market impact

Solstice CEO: Banks Are Quietly Building on Crypto Rails They Once Dismissed

What happened

Why it matters

Market impact

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