Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan says the next crypto bull market could be led by the convergence of onchain finance and traditional finance, not by a narrow token-specific trade.
In the article, Hougan says the market is finally showing signs of bottoming. Since July 1, Bitcoin has risen 9%, while the Nasdaq 100 has fallen 6% over the same period. Crypto ETF flows have also turned from negative to positive, and sentiment has started to improve. He stops short of saying the market has fully stabilized, but argues that the setup is strong enough for investors to ask what could lead the next leg higher.
The core thesis: finance is moving onchain
Hougan writes that this kind of question is usually difficult to answer during a crypto winter because the defining theme of a new cycle often becomes obvious only after the move is largely over. This time, he says, the answer is already visible.
He argues that the next major market narrative will center on the overlap between onchain systems and traditional financial rails. The key areas, as he frames them, are stablecoins, tokenization of assets, 24/7 trading, instant settlement, and the rise of institutional decentralized finance. In his telling, blockchain is positioned to reshape financial infrastructure in the same way the internet reshaped media and retail in the early 2000s.
He gives two reasons for that view. First, he says this cycle is being built on real utility and real revenue rather than pure speculation. Second, the addressable market is much larger than in prior crypto cycles because the target is global finance, not just the internal crypto economy.
Hougan also notes that this view is not limited to crypto insiders. He says the chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the chief executive of the world’s largest asset manager, and the chief executive of the world’s largest bank have all expressed agreement with the direction of travel.
Even so, he argues that most investors have not positioned for that outcome. Many are still asking whether crypto has already lost its momentum. He says that gap between the direction of the market and investor positioning is where the opportunity sits.
Two names he uses to frame the trade: Hyperliquid and Robinhood
To explain how investors might approach the next cycle, Hougan highlights two different routes into the same theme. One starts inside crypto and expands outward. The other starts in traditional finance and moves inward through blockchain infrastructure. His examples are Hyperliquid and Robinhood.
Hyperliquid: a crypto-native platform pushing into traditional assets
Hougan describes Hyperliquid, and its token HYPE, as a layer-1 blockchain, comparing it with Ethereum and Solana. He says the network was originally designed around a perpetual derivatives venue focused on crypto assets, where users traded instruments tied to Bitcoin, Ether, and other digital assets.
That has started to change. According to the article, Hyperliquid’s technical experience, including ease of use, instant settlement, and round-the-clock trading, has helped it expand beyond crypto. Hougan says nearly half of trading volume on the platform now comes from traditional assets such as oil, silver, and the S&P 500.
He adds that the platform is expanding into spot commodities, prediction markets, and options, while putting competitive pressure on venues and operators including CME, Nasdaq, Intercontinental Exchange, Kalshi, and Coinbase.
Hougan says that pressure is already being felt. The article states that CME has even sued the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission in an effort to block the regulator from accepting perpetual futures products first introduced by Hyperliquid.
On performance, he notes that HYPE is up 146% this year even during what he describes as a difficult market period. He ties that to business metrics rather than momentum alone. Hyperliquid’s cumulative revenue passed $1 billion in June, and full-year revenue is projected at $800 million, according to the piece. The platform is said to use 99% of revenue to buy back HYPE on the open market, reducing circulating supply over time. Hougan writes that even if HYPE were to double again, he would still view the valuation as reasonable.
Robinhood: a traditional broker using blockchain to extend financial services
Robinhood represents the other side of the same thesis. Hougan describes it as a traditional brokerage that competes with firms such as Charles Schwab for retail and professional investors. He says Robinhood has long been more open to crypto than many of its peers and was the first major broker to offer direct crypto trading.
He also says Robinhood shares the broader convergence view. The article cites Chief Executive Officer Vlad Tenev as saying tokenization will “reshape the entire financial system,” and that crypto and traditional finance, while long separated into two distinct systems, will eventually merge completely. Tenev is cited as saying the line between them will ultimately disappear.
On July 1, Robinhood launched its in-house layer-2 network, Robinhood Chain. Hougan says the chain is open to users in 120 countries, though not in the United States, and is designed to let users trade tokenized stocks around the clock throughout the year.
The network also integrates with established DeFi protocols. Users can swap assets on Uniswap, borrow against collateral on Morpho, or stake assets as margin and trade perpetual contracts on Lighter, according to the article.
Hougan says that just two weeks after launch, assets held on Robinhood Chain had topped $300 million and daily transactions had reached 3.6 million. He draws a clear point from those numbers: with a single product launch, Robinhood put a functioning financial service stack into 120 countries, giving users a way to trade tokenized equities in real time without market-hour limits and to access margin and leverage-related activity onchain.
He acknowledges a common criticism that early activity on the chain has been concentrated in memecoins rather than stocks. He says that criticism is valid. At the same time, he argues that tokenized equities already show real trading activity and a real user base, and that both categories can continue to grow.
Hougan adds that Robinhood’s competitors are watching closely and beginning to ask whether they need similar products of their own. He frames that as a question of whether markets will eventually see something like a Schwab chain, a UBS chain, or a Bank of America chain. The level of activity seen shortly after Robinhood’s launch, he says, is not something large institutions can ignore.
The two categories of assets he thinks could outperform
Hougan says the next bull market, if it develops along these lines, could be large enough to lift most of the sector. He reiterates that he remains positive on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and publicly traded companies tied to crypto.
Still, he says two categories could offer more upside than the rest.
1. Crypto-native financial applications with real revenue and strong token economics
The first category is the Hyperliquid type: native crypto financial applications that generate durable revenue and tie token value directly to platform economics. In Hyperliquid’s case, Hougan points to the model in which 99% of revenue is used to buy back HYPE. He says that structure addresses a common frustration among investors who have seen crypto applications produce large user numbers and high trading volume without translating that activity into token performance.
Over time, he expects more emerging crypto projects to adopt mechanisms similar to HYPE’s. He says that could create a new class of token opportunities. He also mentions several established projects that he believes are moving in the same direction, including Uniswap and Aave, which he describes as large platforms that are rapidly improving token economics, as well as Morpho.
2. Established traditional companies using crypto infrastructure at scale
The second category is represented by Robinhood: mature companies using crypto rails to expand financial services. Hougan says the spread of stablecoins, the tokenization of assets, and the deployment of blockchain-based market infrastructure together amount to the biggest technological change in finance in the past 50 years.
Because of that, he says investors looking for winners should focus on companies that are already operating crypto businesses at scale rather than firms still running low-cost proof-of-concept projects. Pilot programs can attract headlines, he writes, but they rarely produce the same depth of operational learning. By contrast, Robinhood’s experience running a public chain available in 120 countries gives it a base of knowledge that smaller experiments do not have.
Hougan says he is also watching Coinbase, Figure, and BlackRock, along with Visa, Stripe, and JPMorgan. In his view, these firms are not merely discussing the transition. They are already participating in it in a material way.
A long-term view: blockchain becomes invisible
Hougan closes with a broader point that he says has long shaped his view of the industry. The clearest sign that blockchain has succeeded, he argues, will be when the technology becomes effectively invisible because it is embedded deep inside the financial system and users no longer notice it as a separate layer.
He says that if the next bull market arrives with crypto and traditional finance becoming inseparable, that vision will move much closer to reality. For investors, the more useful signal is not how loudly a company talks about crypto, but what it is already building and operating.
The views in the article are attributed to Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan. The piece was translated and published by Foresight News.