The ‘long bitcoin, short the bankers’ era is officially over as TradFi giants embrace digital assets

“The old ‘long bitcoin, short the bankers’ trade is over: banks have moved from resisting digital assets to building and enabling or distributing them through custody, tokenization and regulated trading,” Dori said.

He attributed the shift to client demand and clearer rules, calling it structural rather than cyclical.

Early bank entrants included Swissquote, which added bitcoin trading in 2017, DBS in 2020 and BBVA in 2021. BNY Mellon started institutional crypto custody in 2022, the same year Nubank launched bitcoin and ether trading and LGT added crypto services.

St.Galler Kantonalbank and Santander followed in 2023, while Zürcher Kantonalbank added retail trading in 2024, before other major financial industry players including Standard Chartered, Charles Schwab, SoFi and Morgan Stanley entered the space.

Anchorage Digital CEO Nathan McCauley, meanwhile, said its client roster has increasingly reflected the convergence of traditional and decentralized finance over the past two years.

Large financial firms are partnering with specialist providers rather than building their own infrastructure, he said. Still, real-world assets coming onchain and crypto wrappers being created by large asset managers is showing two worlds are increasingly becoming one.

“We’re quickly headed towards a world where there isn’t ‘traditional finance’ and ‘decentralized finance.’ There’s just ‘finance,” McCauley told CoinDesk. “