Traditional financial institutions set their 2025 budgets before the regulatory tide turned. Now they're scrambling.
Shelved blockchain projects are back on roadmaps. Incubation labs have become strategic priorities. But institutional appetite is running ahead of institutional-grade infrastructure.
Privacy, real asset representation, and 24/7 backend liquidity remain unsolved on most networks. Trillions in unrealized value has remained trapped… until now.
The following is a recap of key themes from the conversation. For the full discussion, watch Episode 2 here.
Eric Saraniecki, our co-founder, traces his institutional crypto career back to building out Cumberland around 2010. He watched Bitcoin evolve from a reputational liability into what he calls the newest entrant into the high-quality liquid asset space.
His collaborator Yuval Rooz appeared in Episode 1.
Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo, has spent longer thinking about crypto market structure than most participants in the space. His position: holders of digital assets, institutional or retail, deserve fiduciary protection. The separation of duties between exchanges, custodians, and broker-dealers needs resolution before digital capital markets can absorb real scale.
Justin Peterson has been CTO of Tradeweb since 1999. Most major products the platform has shipped started in a client's office, and Peterson built or oversaw them. Tradeweb has facilitated 3.2 quadrillion USD in trading volume since launch, across treasuries, derivatives, mortgages, and credit.
"Every innovation started in a client's office... it's not secondhand knowledge, it's firsthand knowledge." — Justin Peterson, CTO, Tradeweb.
Belshe describes a mad scramble across traditional finance. Firms were caught off-guard by how favourable regulation became this year, and projects that had been shelved are now being resurrected faster than internal teams can absorb them. But the infrastructure that those firms are scrambling toward has problems.
Most tokenized assets today are synthetic constructions: SPVs, wrappers, and claims on claims. They carry depository, liquidity, and withdrawal risks that institutional counterparties understand and price accordingly.
Pension funds and large lending desks won't scale exposure past single-digit billions when the underlying infrastructure introduces risks they can't evaluate.
"These things that are wrapped but have all the frictions of a real security... are already dead man walking." — Eric Saraniecki, Co-founder, Digital Asset.
Saraniecki sees the current wave of tokenised real-world assets as a messy middle. Wrapped RWAs carry the frictions of a real security without the same risk profile as holding the real thing. Two categories will survive at scale: perfected, registered assets with full capital market infrastructure, and permissionless wrappers built for creative structuring.
Everything in between faces a natural ceiling.
The wrapper problem isn’t the only barrier. Even with the right asset structure, institutions need confidence that their activity stays private.
Tradeweb ran early proofs of concept on a DLT platform several years ago, using treasury trading and repo as test cases. Peterson saw the problem right away: data was distributed throughout the network with no mechanism to protect order flow or transaction details. His clients pick up the phone the moment they suspect front-running. A transparent ledger was a non-starter.
"There was no privacy... there was going to be no way we could hide orders." — Justin Peterson, CTO, Tradeweb.
Stablecoins are proliferating, but their backend infrastructure is still fragile. Belshe points to a recent fat-finger minting incident as evidence that creation, redemption, and reserve transparency safeguards haven't kept pace with issuance.
The guests agree that stablecoins will proliferate massively over the next 12 to 18 months before a consolidation phase winnows the field. Belshe expects dozens of new entrants as traditional firms realise the economics of stablecoin float.
"They're like, hey, why is it that these other two big networks are going to be able to get all of the Treasury yield?" — Mike Belshe, CEO, BitGo.
Privacy on Canton gives issuers of a stablecoin full visibility over holdings and transfers, as regulators require. Holders see their own wallets and interactions. Everyone else sees nothing.
The model mirrors how the internet already works. A browser reveals nothing about what happens at chase.com unless you hold an account there.
The hard technical challenge: preserving those visibility boundaries when two assets with different privacy requirements compose in a single atomic transaction. We handle that composition correctly.
“DA (Digital Asset) is the only one who's built a network where privacy is built in from the beginning." — Justin Peterson, CTO, Tradeweb.
Our collaboration with Tradeweb and the DTCC puts the real, registered digital treasury onchain. Not a synthetic version. Not an indirect claim. Demand for that asset starts wherever existing treasury demand sits today. The utility profile, 24/7 movement, new collateral arrangements, and lower operational cost will push demand even higher.
Canton enables round-the-clock creation and redemption of stablecoins against tokenized government bonds. That creates a common denominator across stablecoins and currencies, opening an alternative FX settlement path through local government bonds and local stablecoins.
We designed Canton for the most demanding institutions first, then opened the ecosystem to challengers who move fast and prove business models that incumbents can follow at scale.
Figure 1: Eric Saraniecki's three-phase adoption framework
Saraniecki frames the sequencing as a chess game. The opening establishes foundational pieces: custodians, wallets, stablecoins.
The middle game is where challengers build creative products unique to Canton. The endgame is large-scale institutional adoption driven by efficiency and correctness. Belshe argues the industry still lacks fiduciary protection as a base layer. Institutional or retail, participants should be able to count on whoever holds their digital assets to protect them with fiduciary care.
That gap has limited adoption while giving TradFi incumbents pause about committing capital at scale.
Exchanges tend toward monopoly, bearer instruments create catastrophic risk if custody fails, and counterparty credit risk remains underappreciated in crypto market structure.
We expect institutional adoption to start decoupling from crypto price cycles. Budgets are being set around rail utility rather than token speculation.
"People are going to get blown away at the pace at which people adopt these technologies." — Eric Saraniecki, Co-founder, Digital Asset.
Tradeweb is building a scalable 24/7 OTC market across treasuries and whatever instruments clients demand.
Belshe gives faster-moving traditional firms until early 2026 to ship, with laggards following through 2027. By then, Saraniecki believes the ecosystems built on real utility will look nothing like the rest of crypto. A decade of infrastructure work is about to compound.
Next in the series: Episode 3, "Privacy or Perish," on privacy as the hard requirement for TradFi adoption, the state of crypto's privacy solutions, and bringing institutional capital onchain.
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Quadrillions is a miniseries produced by Blockworks and sponsored by Canton Network. Listen to the full episode at quadrillionspod.com or click one of the links below.
Disclaimer: Nothing on this show is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. Views expressed are solely those of the guests.