The Institutions Aren’t Coming, and the Digital Currency Industry Is Struggling to Find a New Narrative

By Jimmy Nguyen. Despite not grabbing many headlines, scalable blockchain technology has a bright future and will likely play an integral role in everything from cross-border payments to mitigating the worst potential impacts of artificial intelligence (AI).

Institutions not interested in crypto: JPM survey

Institutions aren’t interested in crypto, according to the latest eTrading survey by JPMorgan.

The survey, which polled 4,200 institutional traders, found that 71% have no plans to trade digital currencies. 13% are currently trading cryptocurrencies, and 16% said they planned to enter the market.

This comes despite a few institutions entering the market, such as BlackRock (NYSE: BLK) and Vanguard, with their BTC ETFs, and the price of BTC increasing significantly in the months following the BlackRock ETF announcement in January 2024.

However, the industry is struggling to find a new narrative as memecoin mania damages its credibility, trade wars weigh heavy on market sentiment, and retail traders struggle with persistent inflation and the ongoing cost of living crisis.

The survey also included a question about whether blockchain technology is an essential technology for the future. Only 7% of respondents answered in the affirmative, down from 12% last year.

This shows that serious players are losing interest, especially considering that blockchains like BSV scale to one million transactions per second (TPS) and companies like CERTIHASH are revolutionizing cybersecurity, but these blockchain breakthroughs receive little attention.

Instead, crypto publications and viral X posts focus on Solana memecoin pump and dumps and any sign that more fiat is coming to pump the price of their bags.

Just last month, the industry was celebrating the prospect of American taxpayer money being used to buy BTC, XRP, and other ‘American Made’ coins. So much for free markets and liberty!

If we were under any illusion that this madness was contained within a small sphere of the Internet and wouldn’t impact the technology’s reputation at large, that was shattered this week when Argentinian President Javier Milei found himself at the center of a meme coin scam.

Heads of state from Trump to Milei are getting caught up in the latest crypto craze that will amount to nothing.

Yet, blockchain is an important technology in the long run

Despite not grabbing many headlines, scalable blockchain technology has a bright future and will likely play an integral role in everything from cross-border payments to mitigating the worst potential impacts of artificial intelligence (AI).

While all of the focus has been on token speculation for the last decade, those who believe in the potential of blockchain have been working diligently in the background, and they’re starting to get impressive results.

Just some of the noteworthy accomplishments in blockchain recently include:

Sooner or later, the world will wake up and realize that scalable distributed ledgers are a game-changer, and the coins attached to them are only a means to write transactions to the ledger.

Until then, it looks like we’ll have to suffer another round of humiliating ‘scammery’ as Presidential memecoins and tens of thousands of Pump Fun tokens further hurt the reputation of an industry that’s already been dragged through the mud.

Nevertheless, when it’s all said and done, the utility tech will be here, the apps will be ready, and everything from payments to cybersecurity to data management and communications will be transformed.

Until then, expect the interest of serious institutions to remain subdued. The institutions aren’t coming, and with serious changes to the economic order on the horizon, another brutal bear market is more likely than the bull market many had hoped and waited for.

Watch: Developers can propel the BSV blockchain forward