1. The Reversal
Begin with the contradiction at the heart of 2025: Jamie Dimon—who for years called Bitcoin a fraud, dismissed crypto as a pet rock, and compared ownership to “your right to smoke”,now presides over a bank quietly assembling a crypto trading apparatus.
Bloomberg’s Monday report didn’t describe a side-experiment. It described the biggest bank in America building spot and derivatives capabilities ,the very instruments Dimon said had no purpose.
Contextualize that this isn’t a sudden epiphany. JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM) has been signaling a silent strategy shift for over a year:
a tokenized money market fund on Ethereum,
a tokenized short-term bond on Solana with Galaxy Digital,
and internal frameworks for accepting BTC/ETH as loan collateral.
What looks like a “pivot” is actually a breadcrumb trail. The world’s most influential bank has been preparing for crypto’s institutional phase while publicly downplaying it.
2. The Convergence Narrative
Pull back to the macro lens: 2025’s numbers look like the future already arrived.
$57B flowed into spot Bitcoin ETFs this year alone.
BlackRock’s ETF now holds $68B, effectively becoming a shadow central bank for Bitcoin.
Tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) surpassed $33B—up 500% in two years.
Binance rolled out a white-label “crypto-as-a-service” stack so banks can launch trading desks overnight.
- Standard Chartered, Goldman (NYSE: GS), BNY Mellon, Intesa Sanpaolo (BIT: ISP)… the list of incumbents experimenting grows by the month.
The infrastructure is in place: regulatory-compliant exchanges, institutional custody, tokenized treasuries, settlement rails that operate in seconds.
On paper, the convergence of TradFi and crypto looks complete. But that’s the illusion.
3. The Gap
This is where the mainstream narrative breaks.
Sygnum’s 2025 research cuts through the hype: despite the infrastructure and the headlines, the most conservative pools of institutional capital are barely participating.
Who is allocating?
Hedge funds
Certain asset managers
Crypto-native trading firms
Who isn’t?
Pensions
Endowments
Sovereign wealth funds
Insurance portfolios
The very allocators whose participation would signal true mainstream adoption remain on the sidelines.
Why? Three systemic barriers persist:
1. Legal enforceability
There is still no global clarity on how courts treat tokenized ownership or smart contracts during insolvency, default, or cross-border disputes.
Fiduciaries can’t deploy billions into legal ambiguity.
2. Custody complexity
Key management, wallet infrastructure, multi-sig vs MPC, counterparty risk.
Institutions are not yet operationally designed to handle digital bearer assets without introducing new layers of liability.
3. Liquidity reality
Tokenizing real estate or private credit is easy.
Creating a liquid, regulated, deep secondary market for those tokens is not.
Until liquidity exists, tokenization is mostly a technological demo, not a risk-adjusted investment product.
This is the gap: headlines celebrate adoption, but actual capital from fiduciary institutions remains microscopic. Crypto is being adopted—just not by the institutions that would define “true adoption.”
4. What JPMorgan Actually Signals
So what does JPMorgan’s alleged crypto trading desk truly mean?
Not that Wall Street has fully embraced crypto.
But that client demand has reached a point where even the biggest skeptic cannot ignore it.
The Bloomberg report makes it explicit: this is reactive, not visionary. JPMorgan is building rails because clients—wealthy families, funds, corporates—are asking for access.
This distinction matters. It reveals the current phase of institutional adoption:
Banks are building on-ramps, not taking positions.
Clients want access, but conservative allocators aren’t deploying yet.
Infrastructure is maturing, but usage remains uneven.
The analogy fits historical patterns:
Banks announced “AI strategies” years before deploying real AI workflows.
Cloud adoption took a decade longer than vendors predicted.
Tokenization may follow the same curve:
Announcements now, meaningful capital later.
JPMorgan’s shift signals permission, not conviction.
A recognition that crypto has become too large, too regulated, and too demanded to ignore.
It’s the infrastructure phase ,not the capital rotation phase.
5. What Would Change the Equation
For conservative institutional money to move at scale, three prerequisites must be satisfied:
1. Regulatory clarity
Explicit frameworks around:
smart contract enforceability,
tokenized asset bankruptcy treatment,
cross-border recognition of digital ownership.
MiCA is progress. US guidance is improving. But the puzzle is incomplete.
2. Liquid secondary markets
Tokenization is meaningless without tradability.
Institutions will not hold assets they can’t exit efficiently or price reliably.
3. Time and precedent
Fiduciary institutions move at generational pace, not market pace.
They need:
peers deploying first,
years of operational data,
real court precedents.
Until these emerge, capital will watch from the sidelines—even if the infrastructure is ready.
6. Close
JPMorgan exploring crypto trading is symbolically powerful—the industry’s loudest skeptic now building the pipes.
But symbolism shouldn’t be confused with capital rotation.
The rails are almost finished, yet the heaviest allocators haven’t stepped onto them.
2025 might not be the year TradFi “arrived,” but rather the year it accepted inevitability and finished building the roads.
Whether those roads fill with traffic depends on the one thing banks can’t manufacture:
institutional conviction.
