In September 2017 the chief executive of one of the largest banks in the world called Bitcoin a fraud and said he would fire any trader caught touching it.
Bitcoin was around four thousand dollars. Today it is $78,265, and that same institution offers clients exposure to it.
I am not telling this story to mock anybody. The reversal is interesting for a much less satisfying reason.
He wasn't being stupid in 2017. From where he sat, the assessment was reasonable. The asset had no regulatory framework, no institutional custody, no clarity on accounting treatment, and its main visible use cases were speculation and things nobody wanted on a compliance report. A bank can't allocate to something it can't categorise.
What changed was not the technology. Bitcoin in 2026 works roughly the way Bitcoin worked in 2017. What changed was everything around it.
Custody got solved by regulated entities. Accounting bodies issued guidance. Regulators built frameworks, slowly and unevenly, but they built them. Once those pieces existed, the same asset became allocatable, and institutions moved.
This is the part people misread constantly. They treat institutional adoption as validation of the idea, as though large firms studied the whitepaper and were persuaded. That isn't what happened. Institutions arrived when the plumbing let them arrive, and not one day sooner.
Which means the useful signal was never sentiment. It was infrastructure.
And notice how long that took. Custody solutions people now take for granted were being built quietly for years while the timeline argued about price. None of that work generated a single exciting headline.
Ethereum at $2,468 followed the same sequence with a lag. Staking looked unusable for regulated capital until custody and tax treatment matured, and then it did not. BNB at $723.06 has its own version of this question, tied to how its issuer is regulated across jurisdictions.
And this cycle the pattern is repeating with two things at once.
Stablecoins moved from unregulated curiosity to instruments with actual legislative frameworks in major economies. Real world assets went from a slide in a pitch deck to tokenised treasury products holding real money. Neither happened because sentiment improved. Both happened because rules arrived that let serious money participate.
So if you want to guess what gets adopted next, the question is not what excites people on your timeline. It is what is currently blocked by a missing rule, a missing custodian, or a missing accounting standard, and which of those blockages is being worked on right now.
That's a much less fun question. It also has a far better track record.
What do you think gets unblocked next?
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A personal observation, not a recommendation to buy or sell. Do your own research and carry your own risk.