Wall Street is Bought in On Crypto’s Upside Potential, But Not Its Tech

Despite significant institutional investment, evidenced by record ETF inflows, Wall Street firms are largely avoiding on-chain crypto trading, preferring traditional rails and private servers for settlement and market-making. According to Annabelle Huang of Altius Labs, this is because current blockchains fail to meet institutional performance standards regarding speed, data reliability, and operational resilience. Issues like network congestion, unpredictable gas fees, and reliance on optimistic settlement techniques make current blockchains too chaotic for high-stakes institutional operations, especially when traditional markets offer near-instantaneous settlement via optimized infrastructure.

To attract on-chain activity, blockchains must surpass traditional market speeds and offer institutional-grade reliability through custom engineering, such as implementing instruction-level parallelism and eliminating I/O bottlenecks. Institutions require proof of performance on real hardware before switching. Currently, keeping activity off-chain concentrates liquidity and limits transparency, potentially turning tokenized real-world assets into static instruments. However, the trend suggests institutions like Robinhood are taking the initiative to build better on-chain solutions, signaling a future where crypto technology underpins global market movements.

(Source：CoinDesk)