Matt Hougan got on the phone with more than 40 financial advisers last week, and Bitcoin barely came up. That's the detail worth sitting with. Hougan, who runs investments at Bitwise, said in a Wednesday note that the people steering money for some of the largest institutions in the country still want crypto exposure. They just don't seem to want it through the orange coin anymore.
"It was pretty hard to engage with advisors on Bitcoin this week," Hougan wrote, according to Cointelegraph. The interest, he said, has moved toward stablecoins and tokenization: the parts of the industry that touch payments and capital markets directly rather than sitting in a wallet as a store of value.
Which, given where Bitcoin's price has gone this year, isn't shocking. BTC was trading around $62,700 when Hougan published, down close to 30% since January. A digital gold story is a harder sell when the gold keeps slipping.
The advisor conversation has changed
Hougan's read is that the next wave of crypto buyers won't look like the last one. The early adopters chased Bitcoin as a hedge and a bet on scarcity. The advisers he's hearing from now are asking about the plumbing: what stablecoins do for global payments, what tokenization does for settlement and access to private markets.
That's a meaningful shift in framing. For years the pitch to traditional finance was essentially "own a slice of this scarce asset." The pitch now is closer to "here's a faster, cheaper version of the rails you already use." One is a speculation. The other is an infrastructure upgrade, and infrastructure upgrades are an easier conversation to have with a compliance officer.
Hougan named names when describing what came up on those calls. Ethereum, Solana, Canton, Chainlink and Avalanche all got mentions. So did Hyperliquid, the perpetuals trading platform, plus the companies Figure, Circle and Coinbase. Notice what's missing. The advisers were talking about networks and businesses, not about Bitcoin as a holding.
His broader argument is historical. Crypto bull markets, he's said before, tend to start with two things: a new product that works and a new class of buyer. If financial advisers and institutions become that buyer this cycle, their money is likely to flow toward stablecoins and tokenized assets rather than into a spot Bitcoin position. He called that scenario the "best hope" for pulling the market out of its slump.
The money behind the move
There's a reason advisers are suddenly fluent in this vocabulary, and it's not organic curiosity. It's that the loudest voices in finance won't stop talking about it.
Hougan put it bluntly: turn on CNBC and the names making the case are heavyweights. He pointed to SEC Chair Paul Atkins, alongside the chief executives of Goldman Sachs and BlackRock (David Solomon and Larry Fink, respectively), all circling back to stablecoins and tokenization on air. When the people who run the largest asset manager and one of the largest banks on earth keep returning to the same two themes, advisers take the cue. Clients start asking. The flywheel turns.
The stock market has been less kind to the theme than the talking points suggest. Circle, the issuer behind USDC, ran one of 2025's most talked-about IPOs back in June. It debuted at $31 and tore up to roughly $240 before reality set in. By the Wednesday Hougan wrote his note, Circle closed just under $79, caught in a wider sell-off across crypto-linked equities. So the enthusiasm is real, but it hasn't translated into a one-way trade. Anyone who bought the top is deep underwater.
That gap between the narrative strength and the price action is the part I'd keep an eye on. A theme can dominate the conversation and still lose people money. Both can be true at once.
Tokenized stocks and the regulatory tailwind
The tokenization push has a potential catalyst sitting at the SEC. The agency is reportedly preparing to permit tokenized stock trading, a step that could give cautious traditional investors the regulatory cover they've been waiting for. If you're an adviser, the difference between an offshore product and an SEC-blessed one is the difference between a footnote and a recommendation.
The action so far has mostly happened outside the United States. Crypto exchanges have rolled out tokenized stock offerings abroad, where investors have used them to get exposure to hot names and high-demand listings. The clearest example on the calendar is SpaceX's planned market debut on Friday. Bybit said it would offer tokenized access to that IPO through the xStocks platform, Cointelegraph reported. For investors who can't normally touch a private offering like SpaceX, a tokenized wrapper is the door.
Coinbase and its peers have been pushing past plain trading for a while now, building out blockchain-adjacent business lines to meet exactly this kind of demand. The exchanges read the same tea leaves Hougan did. The growth isn't in moving Bitcoin back and forth. It's in becoming the connective tissue between traditional assets and on-chain rails.
The data backs the appetite, or at least one slice of it. Active tokenized real-world assets jumped almost 600% even as the broader market pulled back, according to a Binance figure cited in early June. A 600% move in a down market is the kind of divergence that gets noticed. Money is rotating, not just leaving.
What this means for Bitcoin
Here's the awkward question Hougan's note raises without quite answering. If the new institutional buyers skip Bitcoin, who's left to bid it up?
The bull case for Bitcoin always leaned on adoption as the long-term engine: ETF flows, corporate treasuries, sovereign curiosity. If the freshest pool of professional money is more interested in stablecoin yield and tokenized equities than in holding BTC, then the asset that defined the last cycle could find itself oddly sidelined in the next one. Not abandoned. Just no longer the headline.
There's a counterpoint, though, and it's worth stating plainly. Stablecoins and tokenization still run on blockchains, and a healthier on-chain economy tends to lift the whole space eventually. A rising tide and all that. Bitcoin has been written off before and kept showing up. The 30% drop this year is painful but it's hardly the first time.
What I'd watch over the coming weeks: whether the SEC actually moves on tokenized stocks, how the SpaceX tokenized listing trades, and whether Circle's stock can find a floor after that brutal round trip from $240. Those three data points will tell us more about whether the stablecoins-and-tokenization story has legs than any amount of CNBC airtime.
For now, the advisers have spoken, at least the 40-plus Hougan reached. They're curious about crypto. They're just not especially curious about Bitcoin. Whether that's a temporary mood or a structural turn is the open question, and Hougan, to his credit, framed it as a hope rather than a forecast.