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.