The rise of institutional Bitcoin adoption has divided the crypto community. While some purists believe Bitcoin was created to operate outside of government and institutional control, others welcome the involvement of financial giants like BlackRock and the U.S. government, seeing it as a catalyst for mainstream adoption.
Speaking on TheStreet Roundtable, macro investor and 10T Holdings founder Dan Tapiero acknowledged the dilemma.
“The ETF really changed things in terms of awareness, making it easy for people to just push a button, and all of a sudden, in their equity account, they’re long Bitcoin,” he said. “Again, they’re long the ETF, they’re not actually long Bitcoin.”
Tapiero compared the situation to the gold market, where some investors prefer holding physical gold bars, while others are content trading gold ETFs or futures. He sees Bitcoin evolving similarly.
“The world is big enough for both the people who want to self-custody Bitcoin on their ledger, walk around with it in their pocket or have it in their safe and never touch it,” he said. “But there are also those who just want to trade it, use it for collateral, or generate yield.”
Roundtable host Scott Melker raised the fundamental question of whether Bitcoin’s increasing integration with institutional finance aligns with its original ethos.
“The original cypherpunks would’ve said, we created these assets to have parallel systems so that we could avoid governments and institutions,” Melker said. “But then, those who maybe want the number to go up are cheering for BlackRock and the U.S. government coming into the space.”
Tapiero believes institutional involvement is ultimately a net positive for Bitcoin’s adoption. “The overall pie in terms of people understanding Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, digital assets, Web3—it’s going to seep into everything we do,” he said. “I still think you’ll have those people self-custodying and they’ll be off the grid. So I think you can have both.”
