Crypto may be entering its next phase of financial reinvention, according to Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan, who argues that the industry's latest breakthrough lies in capital formation.

In a note to clients late Tuesday, Hougan said Coinbase's token sale platform launch on Nov. 10 marks the start of a new, regulated era for initial coin offerings — a development he predicts will shape the market in 2026.

Hougan framed capital formation — the process through which entrepreneurs raise money, start new businesses, build products, and create jobs — as the fourth major pillar of crypto's disruption of traditional finance, following bitcoin's reinvention of gold, stablecoins' reinvention of dollars, and tokenization's reinvention of trading and settlement.

"These are each multitrillion-dollar opportunities, and enough to power a bull market in crypto for a generation," he said. "I expect that eventually most assets will be tokenized, most dollars will move on stablecoin rails, and bitcoin will be as widely accepted as gold." The latest addition, Hougan added, is crypto's push to democratize how new ventures raise capital — a process he currently described as being "sclerotic and heavily skewed against individual investors."

The concept isn't new — crypto attempted it before during the ICO boom of 2017 and 2018, when unregulated token sales let retail investors back new projects directly. That wave, however, collapsed amid fraud and regulatory crackdowns. Nevertheless, Hougan said the early ICO experiment proved that blockchain technology could connect entrepreneurs and investors faster and more cheaply than traditional IPOs, even if it failed on execution.

"As bad as ICOs were, they did prove something interesting: Crypto could be used to raise capital rapidly for new projects," he wrote, in stark contrast to the traditional IPO route featuring "high fees, big procedural hurdles, and a tendency to distribute rewards to the wealthiest."

According to Hougan, the difference this time is regulation and structure. He pointed to recent calls from the now-Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins — who previously co-chaired the pro-ICO crypto advocacy group Token Alliance and served on the board of tokenization firm Securitize — for new regulations and safe harbors to support compliant token offerings and highlighted Coinbase's new initiative as the first major step in that direction.

Under the program, Coinbase will list one fully vetted crypto project per month, with strict disclosure requirements and insider lockups to prevent speculative selling. Monad will be the first project to debut on the platform, with its MON token sale scheduled for Nov. 17 to Nov. 22 ahead of the Monad mainnet launch on Nov. 24, as The Block previously reported. "In short, through self-regulation, it aims to fix a lot of what was wrong with the 2017–2018 ICO era," Hougan said.

The Bitwise CIO predicted that 2026 could see "a half-dozen or more billion-dollar ICOs" emerge through platforms like Coinbase, potentially rivaling parts of the traditional IPO market, noting that there were 176 IPOs in the U.S. in 2024, raising a collective $33 billion.

Hougan said this new approach could offer entrepreneurs better terms and direct investor access while giving individuals early exposure to promising projects. The winners, he argued, will include Coinbase itself, saying "it's not just the Charles Schwab of crypto; it's Charles Schwab + Goldman Sachs + NYSE" — and programmable blockchains like Ethereum and Solana that host many of these projects.

For investors, Hougan concluded, a resurgence of ICOs would strengthen the broader case for crypto exposure. "Crypto is more interesting today than it was a few years ago because we've added stablecoins and tokenization to its story," he wrote. "If we start seeing billions more raised through rapid ICOs, that story will only get stronger."

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