The next wave of adoption of the institution of cryptocurrencies is emerging as established FinTech companies begin to develop their own blockchains.
Financial Services App Robinhood has recently announced that it is its development own layer-2 blockchain to support tokenized stocks and real-world assets, while Stripe followed by plans for tempo, a The payment -dedicated chain developed using paradigm.
“That would be the beginning of many others to come,” Annabelle Huang, co-founder of the Altius Labs, told Cointelegraph in an interview. “Fintechs in Asia, Latin America and other emerging markets have looked at it for many years that are also preparing to make more motions.”
Huang lived in the stages of the gradual courtship of the crypto along with Wall Street. After starting her career on foreign exchanging and Rates in New York, she Join Amber Group in Hong Kong In management of its partner and assisted size at one of the largest Asian liquidity providers during the decentralized financial boom (DEFI).
The new wave of FinTech-led blockchains has faced the same performance issues that have acted in crypto since it started. Wall Street companies trade in microseconds, while blockchains are still processing transactions in seconds or, at the best, millisecond. Huang called it that the “Bottleneck” implementation of the industry and argued that it should be cleared before the FinTech-developed chains could carry the weight of institutional capital.
Bottleneck implementation on the Crypto path in institutional adoption
Since leaving the amber group, Huang has turned his focus on solving the bottleneck of implementation. In Altius Labs, he builds a modular implementation layer designed to be exposed directly to existing blockchains, which strengthens the throughput without forcing projects to rebuild their entire clamp.
“Our goal is to bring performance to any blockchain in a plug-and-play way,” Huang said. “That way, a chain can upgrade the implementation time of the block and throughput without having to redesign its entire architecture.”
He described the approach as bringing the modularity deeper into the implementation of the blockchain stack layer, which is a removal from the standard rotation model of sidechains or new 2s layer. By focusing on the implementation of the machine itself, Huang said the web3 could close the web2 level performance gap while maintaining the shared nature of the blockchains.
Related: The firedancer will speed up Solana, but it does not reach the full potential
On June 27, 2025, Wall Street showed how much the interval was performing between modern blockchains and traditional financial infrastructure. NASDAQ auction closure for annual Russell Index Reconstitution – an event when index fund 2.5 billion shares in just 0.871 seconds. The Exchange’s inet system has been advertised to handle more than 1 million order messages per second with a SUB-40-microsecond latency.
Conversely, blockchains are still operating at a small part of that speed. Ethereum processes About 15 transactions per second with block hours of about 12 seconds. Solana – one of the fastest major networks – has more than 400-Millisecond I -block the time and hold Many thousand transactions per second in practice. Even as they can, those figures do not meet benchmark institutions before transferring significant onchain trading activity.
Blockchains have improved the scale, along with the Ethereum L2S that offloads traffic to rollups. The next generation of Solana’s validator, the firedancer, aims to narrow the gap.
Huang claimed that the industry should not expect more “Ethereum killers” or general-purpose blockchains to appear, adding that users prefer to combine around some dominant platform rather than Scatter throughout the twelve -two new chains.
“But within Ethereum, there is still a scalability issue, and that’s why people have started circulating new block spaces by setting up sidechains. And then the L2S introduces further fragmentation and difficult UI/UX because of this,” he said.
Adopting institution to ETFs and Treasury
Although the next wave of institutional adoption calls for improvements to existing blockchain networks, Wall Street has not waited for technical upgrades before riding in digital gold rush. For many large investors, exposure is not directly by funds exchanged (ETF) or corporate treasury. Bitcoin (Btc) Funds have become easy to enter points, while companies such as approach (former microostrategy) have become their own Leveraged proxies for possession.
Blueprint has not worked for everyone. Throughout 2025, difficult companies have been placed in the “Bitcoin Treasury” narrative as a final way to spark investor enthusiasm. Some short seen their stock prices are moving forward, just to re -re -re -ree. The weak finances of some of these companies also raised concerns about what might happen if they Falter during the unpleasant market conditions.
Huang said these pivots can be dangerous, especially for retail investors, as not all corporate bitcoin techniques are outlined in the same way. He compared stock spikes to the token launch-a preliminary bidding, followed by the return to the “fair value.” However, he argued that demand for proxies such as ETFs and Treasury techniques will continue to exist.
Related: Bitcoin Treasury Flops: These firms have filed their BTC bets
“Before microstrategy, there was a grayscale. It was all assumed that once a Bitcoin ETF was approved, the grayscale premium would disappear, and so did the microostrategy trade. But if you were closer, investors would prefer microstrategy to an ETF for some reason,” Huang said.
“First, since Michael Saylor is accumulating longer, their average cost basis is lower. Secondly, they have done some fundraising funding through convertible bonds, introducing the action. It makes the microstrategy effective a slight -play in Bitcoin on a lower cost,” he added.
Huang also said that while ETF options exist for Bitcoin and Ether (Eth), investors who want altcoin exposure often turn to debt techniques instead.
Fintech chains shape the next phase of institutional adoption
Fintechs such as Robinhood and Stripe are becoming the next stage of the institutional blockchain promise. Instead of adding crypto tickers to trading apps, they are now investing in their own blockchains – a step towards geming of digital assets in their primary infrastructure.
The infrastructure around them is also a transfer. Over-the-counter desks, sometimes careful with ramps for fence funds to buy Bitcoin off-exchange, now positioning themselves as regulated liquidity providers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPZQD7TSQMG
In practice, this means that it offers compliance with compliance, regulating and reporting that institutional clients expect, bringing crypto a step closer to Wall Street standards.
“What we see today – and I hope more forward – is a trend of institutions that adopt stablecoins or even develop their own blockchains for specific use cases,” Huang said.
These are the talks that he has been with with institutional players four years ago in Amber Group. Now, “They’re ready to act.”
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