BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF hits $71B, becoming the best-performing ETF in history.
MicroStrategy’s BTC stash grows to 580,250 coins, doubling down on corporate crypto.
JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley now offer Bitcoin ETFs to their clients.
Bitcoin has truly come a long way from being a fringe experiment in its early days to now commanding center stage within the global finance arena.
To this point, over the last couple of years itself, it seems as though every Wall Street titan has quietly become a Bitcoin holder with BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), for instance, swelling to about $71 billion in assets (as of May 2025), making it the best performing ETF in history.
Similarly, Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy, the poster child of corporate Bitcoin, now holds roughly 580,250 BTC on its balance sheet while even skeptics have changed their tune completely, with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently announcing that the bank will allow clients to buy Bitcoin (via ETFs) through their brokerage accounts (with rival Morgan Stanley offering the same spot-Bitcoin ETF access to its clients).
Leaving the big names aside, one can see that the ongoing institutional wave has been unmistakable, with a recent CoinShares analysis reporting that by Q4 2024 professional investors at large were able to accrue $27.4 billion worth of Bitcoin ETFs in the US alone – a 114% jump from the prior quarter.
Moreover, asset managers and hedge funds now account for about 26.3% of all US Bitcoin ETF assets under management (up from 21.1% in Q3) as even Bitcoin’s legacy players like Grayscale have witnessed renewed interest.
In short, capital that once sat on the sidelines has been massively reallocated into Bitcoin.
And, forecasts suggest this is only the beginning, with a reports projecting over $120 billion of fresh institutional capital into Bitcoin by end-2025, and a staggering $300 billion by 2026, highlighting the rise of “Bitcoin-native yield strategies” allowing holders to earn yields on their BTC.
Programmability as the foundation for a new financial frontier
So far, most of the institutional frenzy has treated Bitcoin as a safer store of value than a programmable asset.
However, over the last couple of years, innovations like Ordinals and the BRC-20 token standard have let people write code onto satoshis or even issue tokens directly atop the Bitcoin network (while various Layer-2s and sidechain projects have brought smart-contracts and even Liquid staking to Bitcoin).
These aren’t just some random experiments but a taste of what’s to come, with Sygnum Bank reporting that the “DeFi on Bitcoin” revolution is one of the fast-growing, boasting over 30 projects from lending and borrowing platforms to shared-security networks.
Amidst all this, SatLayer has positioned itself as the universal economic layer for Bitcoin, using the flagship cryptocurrency as its backbone instead of some wrapped token.
What that means is that any app built on top of SatLayer can be validated by Bitcoin’s own vast mining power and transparency.
Concretely, the team has described the result as a “Bitcoin Validated Service” (BVS), that developers can use to launch things like stablecoins, lending pools, insurance oracles, or other DeFi primitives.
Moreover, to prove the veracity of its novel concept, Satlayer has recently integrated with a host of other popular chains.
For example, late last year, the project tapped into the Sui ecosystem (a high-speed L1), bringing Bitcoin’s security model there.
The mechanism involved using Bitcoin Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs) from partners like Lombard Finance and Lorenzo Protocol.
In short, a DEX on Sui could use Bitcoin as collateral for trades, or an oracle on Sui could have its payouts guaranteed by BTC (making the currency’s trillions more accessible to new chains and financial primitives).
The broader implications of these developments
One may be tempted to ask the question, what does all of this mean for institutional money and real-world assets?
For one, it positions Bitcoin as a programmable gold standard.
Imagine tokenizing a bond or an equity on a SatLayer-secured chain such that the token’s value is ultimately backed by Bitcoin.
Or consider a stablecoin issued via SatLayer that borrows Bitcoin’s transparency and security to reassure regulators and users.
These kinds of real-world asset (RWA) scenarios have always been talked about on Ethereum, but they could equally exist on the Bitcoin ecosystem as well now.
More importantly, SatLayer also builds in the enforcement needed to prevent any malpractice as its contracts (deployed on the Babylon framework) include “slashing” logic — wherein if an operator violates rules (say by manipulating an oracle), their locked-up Bitcoin collateral can be confiscated or burned.
In effect, the platform aligns the interests of Bitcoin holders (who want security rewards) and service operators (who need Bitcoin collateral) within a single marketplace, turning BTC from a passive asset into a core component of today’s digital financial infrastructure.
