Is Wall Street adopting blockchain while the crypto world is gradually being abandoned?

Article by: Choi, Bitpush

If the approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs in 2024 is seen as Wall Street’s cautious exploration into the crypto world, then everything that has happened over the past twelve months is silently declaring: the exploration phase is over, and a systematic technological integration is becoming a reality.

From stablecoins becoming a practical bridge for traditional finance to LayerZero announcing the launch of its institutional-focused Layer1 blockchain “Zero” last night, partnering with giants like Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), DTCC, Google Cloud, and securing strategic investments from Citadel Securities and ARK Invest… every step points in the same direction: blockchain is being systematically integrated into the core of traditional finance.

Once the news broke, the market again heard the familiar question: “Wall Street is entering, is a bull market coming?”

But if you step back and look calmly, what’s truly worth paying attention to isn’t whether “Wall Street will push up coin prices,” but rather another deeper, more fundamental development: Wall Street is seriously considering treating blockchain as part of financial infrastructure. The impact on the crypto world could be more profound and complex than any short-term price swings.

Wall Street Isn’t After Coin Prices

LayerZero’s positioning of Zero this time is very clear: it aims to solve not the on-chain application ecosystem, but the foundational processes of financial markets—trading, clearing, settlement, collateral management, and so on. In other words, this blockchain isn’t trying to make retail trading faster; it’s about making the back-end systems of financial institutions more efficient.

The composition of its partners also illustrates this point. Citadel Securities is one of the world’s most important market makers; DTCC is the core infrastructure for post-trade processing in the US securities market; ICE operates major exchanges including NYSE. These institutions are engaging in blockchain discussions not because they want to allocate a particular token, but because blockchain can theoretically address long-standing pain points in traditional finance: complex reconciliation, lengthy settlement cycles, low collateral efficiency, and interoperability issues between systems.

For them, if blockchain has value, it’s in its ability to “reduce costs, friction, and improve capital efficiency,” not in “driving speculative price rallies.” That’s why Zero’s narrative aligns more with “global market infrastructure” rather than “a new generation of public chain ecosystems.”

LayerZero has addressed the “connectivity” problem, but to truly enable global finance to operate on-chain, issues of privacy, data, and asset provenance still need solutions.

Currently, besides LayerZero, three projects are especially favored by Wall Street:

1. Canton Network

If you think financial institutions will just put all their transaction data “naked” on public chains, you’re being naive. Led by Digital Asset, with deep involvement from Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, and others, Canton Network is becoming the privacy layer for top-tier banks’ clearing. It complements LayerZero: the latter transports assets in the “public domain,” while the former handles highly sensitive settlement processes within “bank intranets.” This hybrid architecture of “public chain + private network” is the form that institutions are truly willing to adopt.

2. Chainlink (CCIP)

By the end of 2025, Chainlink, through AI and oracle technology, will have automated processing of corporate actions data. This means that via CCIP, traditional messaging systems like SWIFT can directly interact with on-chain smart contracts. In Wall Street’s view, Chainlink has evolved from a “price feed tool” into a trusted financial data infrastructure.

3. Ondo Finance: “On-Chain Exit” for RWA

As BlackRock’s low-profile partner in DeFi, Ondo is tokenizing US Treasury yields, offering not virtual “inflation hedging stories,” but real cash flows from US Treasury interest. This makes it one of the most robust bridges connecting traditional capital markets with crypto liquidity.

All these projects point to a common trend: Wall Street isn’t embracing “crypto circles,” but rather extracting the financial utility attributes of blockchain and embedding them into the existing efficiency loops of traditional systems.

Does This Have Anything to Do with the “Crypto World”?

The answer is: yes, but the logic is changing.

In recent years, the growth of the crypto market mainly depended on two factors: liquidity and narrative. When macro liquidity was ample and risk appetite high, large amounts of capital flowed into high-volatility assets, driving token prices up and attracting more attention and funds, creating a positive feedback loop. This peaked in 2021, deepening the perception of a “full-blown bull market.”

However, the logic for institutional use of blockchain is different. They are more likely to approach from areas like stablecoins, tokenized government bonds, on-chain settlement, and collateral management. The reason is simple: these scenarios are directly related to real financial needs and are easier to implement within compliance frameworks.

For example, the collaboration between DTCC and blockchain companies to pilot US Treasury tokenization is a typical case of starting from “collateral and settlement efficiency,” not from trading speculation. The goal of such projects is to facilitate smoother asset flows between institutions, not to make assets easier to speculate on.

As these infrastructures gradually mature, the structure of on-chain assets will change. Currently, on-chain assets mainly consist of high-volatility tokens and stablecoins; in the future, more low-risk, collateralizable, and settlement-ready real assets may appear. This will make on-chain finance more like a financial system rather than just a speculative playground. Another key trend: once mainstream traditional assets are tokenized and brought on-chain at scale, they could become new “liquidity black holes.” Imagine if stocks of Apple or Microsoft could be traded and settled almost in real-time at low cost via tokens on-chain, global capital would undoubtedly tilt toward such assets that combine liquidity, compliance, and real value backing.

Conclusion

We must admit that the era of cryptocurrencies as “detached speculative illusions” is ending. But as a tool to improve economic efficiency, they are just beginning.

The future crypto market may gradually split into two parallel worlds: one of highly volatile speculative assets still driven by cycles and narratives; the other of infrastructure and asset layers closer to real financial needs, growing more slowly but more solidly.

In other words, blockchain is shifting from a “place for speculative assets” to a “pipeline within the financial system.” This process may not create overnight riches, but it could determine whether this industry can truly integrate into the pulse of the global economy.