Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan argues that anchoring bias is preventing both traditional and crypto investors from recognizing the scale of Wall Street's move toward blockchain-based infrastructure.
What Happened: Tokenization Accelerates
Hougan, writing in his latest memo, laid out a series of developments that he says demonstrate a fundamental shift in how traditional finance engages with blockchain technology. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins launched "Project Crypto," a commission-wide effort to modernize securities regulation for on-chain markets.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said the industry is entering the early stages of tokenizing all assets. BlackRock followed through by launching its $2 billion BUIDL tokenized Treasury fund on Uniswap (UNI).
Apollo tokenized its $700 billion Diversified Credit Fund across six blockchains and announced plans to acquire a stake in Morpho. Major banks — JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo — are discussing a joint stablecoin, while JPMorgan has already launched a deposit token on Base. Fidelity is hiring a DeFi vaults manager.
Despite these moves, Hougan said traditional investors have failed to register the changes. Even crypto investors exhibit fatigue from repeated claims of institutional adoption, he added.
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Why It Matters: Perception Versus Reality
Hougan pointed to anchoring bias — the tendency to fixate on the first piece of information encountered — as the core reason investors are missing what he called one of the biggest shifts in financial infrastructure.
He noted that tokenized real-world assets have grown sharply from 2020 to 2025, though questions remain about whether value will accrue to public Layer 1 networks like Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL), quasi-private blockchains such as Canton Network and Tempo, DeFi tokens, or companies building in the space.
"The biggest alpha opportunities come when the consensus narrative is stale and reality has moved on, but investors are still anchored on the old story," Hougan wrote. "That's exactly where we are with crypto today."
Hougan concluded his memo by framing the disconnect as an investment opportunity rather than simply a market failure. He wrote that there is "a large delta between what people think is happening in crypto and what is actually happening," and argued that this gap favors building broad exposure to the space rather than attempting to pick individual winners. The structural shift, in his view, is being mispriced. "If you can see it for what it is, there's a lot of opportunity," he wrote.
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