BlackRock, Apollo, and JPMorgan are moving financial infrastructure onto blockchain networks while many investors still read the market through the memory of Mt. Gox and Silk Road. Hougan argues that this anchoring bias is distorting judgment. In his view, the market is still pricing crypto through old scandals even as major institutions are treating blockchain as part of core financial plumbing.
Past crypto scandals still shape investor perception
Hougan says a large share of investors remain fixed on earlier episodes that defined crypto’s reputation for years. That backward-looking lens, he argues, makes it harder to recognize what large financial firms are doing now. While skepticism remains tied to past failures, firms such as BlackRock, Apollo, and JPMorgan have already taken steps that make those older narratives less relevant to current market structure.
He points to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s vision of tokenizing all assets as one of the clearest signs of that shift. BlackRock has entered tokenized treasury funds and invested in Uniswap. Apollo is digitizing its credit funds. Large banks are also working together on stablecoin initiatives. In the article’s framing, these are not limited experiments. They reflect an effort to build a new operating system for finance.
Tokenized assets remain tiny beside traditional markets
Hougan describes the size gap between traditional finance and tokenized markets as a structural mispricing. Exchange-traded funds represent about $30 trillion, global equities total roughly $110 trillion, and bonds stand near $145 trillion. Tokenized assets, by comparison, are still around $20 billion.
That spread highlights how early the tokenization market remains relative to the scale of conventional capital pools. If traditional money moves more decisively into blockchain-based financial products, the room for expansion is large. The harder question is where that value will settle once the market develops at scale.
Public chains and private networks are both in play
The article leaves that outcome open. Value could accumulate on public blockchains such as Ethereum or Solana, or it could concentrate in private frameworks like Canton Network. Hougan’s point is not that the winner is already obvious. It is that alpha tends to appear when consensus thinking lags reality.
He says the real opportunity lies in spotting the gap between perception and actual institutional behavior before the broader market catches up. As institutional-grade infrastructure becomes more established, investors with broad exposure may benefit once markets start reflecting how deeply blockchain has entered banking, asset management, and credit operations. In that reading, blockchain is no longer sitting at the edge of finance. It is moving closer to the center.