The story of $20 trillion in the crypto circle VC made its way to Wall Street.

Written by: Cathy

In the autumn of 2008, that weekend when Lehman Brothers fell, Wall Street traders were packing boxes in their offices. A few months later, a person using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the genesis block into the Bitcoin network, accompanied by a sarcastic remark: "The Chancellor is preparing for a second bailout for banks."

That was a declaration of war on Wall Street. Seventeen years have passed, and the situation has reversed.

The declarers of war have scattered, while Wall Street has stepped onto the path they paved and entered the on-chain world. But this time, what they brought were not speculative narratives, but treasury bonds, options contracts, and banking settlement systems.

Between 2025 and 2026, the global tokenization asset scale surged over 220%. The BUIDL fund under BlackRock has stabilized its management size between $2.5 billion and $2.8 billion, becoming the stabilizing force in the on-chain short-term U.S. Treasury market. Securitize is set to land on the NYSE with a valuation of $1.25 billion, while the NYSE itself has signed a memorandum of cooperation to build a 24-hour trading stock clearing system on-chain.

Wall Street no longer wants the story of "decentralization." What they want is a set of financial channels that they can control, that yield returns, and are compliant – only this time, the channels are built on distributed ledgers.

Bringing Treasury Bonds On-Chain: BlackRock and Securitize's Tokenization Empire

The design of the BUIDL fund is entirely in line with the aesthetics of traditional buy-side institutions.

With a minimum investment of $5 million, it is only open to "qualified purchasers" as defined by U.S. law. The underlying assets are 100% allocated to cash, short-term U.S. Treasuries, and overnight reverse repurchase agreements, with the custodian bank being Bank of New York Mellon. There is no exposure to any crypto assets; it is as clean as a money market fund.

But it operates on-chain. Through Securitize's transfer agent infrastructure, BUIDL achieves daily dividend reinvestment and instant transfers available year-round. This makes it quickly become the safest underlying reserve asset in the eyes of large on-chain protocols, derivatives clearinghouses, and synthetic dollar issuers.

What is even more noteworthy is Securitize's own capitalization path. In June 2026, the SEC announced the effectiveness of the merger registration documents with Cantor Fitzgerald's SPAC, with a pre-merger valuation of $1.25 billion and a matching $225 million PIPE financing. The new company will be listed on the NYSE under the name "Securitize Corp." with the stock code SECZ.

At the same time, the NYSE signed a memorandum of understanding with Securitize in March to designate the latter as the first official transfer agent for its planned digital trading platform. This platform has great ambitions: using the NYSE's existing matching engine plus a private blockchain to enable 24/7 trading of U.S. listed stocks and ETFs, on-chain instant settlement, and stablecoin funding channels.

On the opposite side, Nasdaq has taken a different route, choosing to layer tokenized trading on top of the traditional clearing system. The NYSE, on the other hand, is building a completely new on-chain trading and transfer system from scratch.

The technology paths of the two exchanges are diverging. This itself indicates one thing: the core security clearing functions of Wall Street are migrating towards distributed ledger technology.

Meanwhile, the synthetic dollar protocol Ethena has invested $250 million in Securitize's STAC fund. This fund invests in AAA-rated collateralized loan obligations and is deployed on the Solana blockchain.

The reason Ethena is doing this is straightforward: its synthetic dollar USDe has relied heavily on crypto derivatives arbitrage to maintain its peg, and once the market cools down and funding rates turn negative, yields will be exhausted. Now, the floating rates in the traditional credit market have become its safety net.

The global CLO market exceeds $1.3 trillion. This money is flowing into the reservoir of on-chain finance through the programmability of public chains.

Making Money Even When Bitcoin Doesn't Rise: The Magic of BITA's Covered Call Options

Bitcoin pays no interest and has high volatility, making pension funds and sovereign wealth funds cautious. Wall Street's solution is to turn volatility itself into returns.

BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF (code BITA) is expected to be listed around June 19, 2026. Its mechanism is not complicated, but it is clever.

The fund holds physical Bitcoin and BlackRock's own IBIT spot ETF as its underlying assets. IBIT has over $50 billion in assets under management and excellent secondary market depth. On this basis, fund managers systematically sell short-term call options on the IBIT underlying, collecting premiums, and after deducting a 0.65% management fee, pay out monthly cash dividends to investors.

In simple terms, it exchanges the potential for Bitcoin to surge for a stable monthly return.

If Bitcoin remains flat or slightly declines, BITA's performance will far exceed simply holding spot Bitcoin because the option premiums provide a downside buffer and stable income. However, if Bitcoin surges sharply and breaches the option strike price, the excess returns will all go to the option buyers, and BITA holders can only receive capped returns.

This is very similar to the fixed annuity products sold by traditional financial advisors to retirees. Wall Street has mitigated the chaotic volatility of Bitcoin and repackaged it into a standardized yielding asset that pays monthly interest.

Existing similar products on the market, such as BTCI and YBTC, have dividend rates as high as 27% to 41%, but they suffer from shallow liquidity and substantial basis risk, with principal being severely eroded in the past year's bull market. BlackRock's advantage lies in the $50 billion liquidity pool of IBIT, which other issuers cannot compare to.

Goldman Sachs is also busy and plans to launch its own Premium Income product in early July. The fact that established investment banks are directly competing in the same arena indicates that this direction is no longer testing the waters, but rather a consensus.

Stablecoins Are Not Speculative Tools, But Cash Registers

The credit card payment experience is smooth, but a cross-border transaction from swiping the card to when the merchant actually receives the money often takes several days. It goes through agents, clearinghouses, and settlement cycles, with fees being progressively siphoned off in the process.

Stablecoins are changing this.

Stripe now allows merchants in over 70 countries to directly accept stablecoins for payments. Consumers can scan their wallets to pay, and Stripe confirms it instantly on Solana, Ethereum, or Polygon, with the backend processing conversion and compliance checks through Bridge.xyz, which it acquired for $1.1 billion. Merchants can choose to receive dollars or hold USDC. The entire process incurs nearly no development costs for merchants.

Mastercard is going further. The upgraded settlement architecture launching in June 2026 supports financial institutions to execute same-day, weekend, and holiday card settlements using compliant stablecoins such as USDC, PYUSD, and RLUSD across multiple mainstream public chains. Banks no longer need to wait for business days to settle.

Even SWIFT has taken notice. This giant, which controls global cross-border payment messaging, released a roadmap in March 2026 for a minimal viable product of a distributed "shared ledger," allowing commercial banks worldwide to manage tokenized deposits directly through alliance chains, enabling around-the-clock cross-border clearing.

This is not about eliminating agent banks but addressing a real pain point: global small and medium-sized banks have long frozen up to $10 trillion in reserves in large agent banks to prevent settlement failures caused by time zone differences and holidays.

What makes all of this possible is legislation. The GENIUS Act, signed into effect in 2025, excludes compliant stablecoins from the definitions of securities and commodities while implementing two key designs.

First, it prohibits stablecoins from paying interest to holders, firmly limiting them to the category of "pure payment tools" to prevent siphoning of bank savings. Second, it mandatorily brings stablecoin issuers into the anti-money laundering regulatory framework, making dollar stablecoins an extension tool for the U.S. to expand the effectiveness of global financial sanctions.

No interest, strong regulation, programmability. This is what Wall Street wants in stablecoins.

Conclusion

Wall Street has not slowed down. They just took a different path.

No longer speculating on coins, no longer telling grand narratives about decentralization. They have replicated an entire suite of things they are familiar with on-chain: treasury bond funds, covered call options, card clearing networks, and compliant transfer systems. Every product offers rigid returns, and every channel embeds U.S. sovereign credit.

Crypto's fundamentalist believers once fantasized about replacing Wall Street with code. As a result, Wall Street learned how to code.