Fintechs like Robinhood and Stripe are building blockchains as Wall Street explores digital assets, but execution bottlenecks still stand in the way of institutional adoption.
Interview
The next wave of institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies is emerging as established fintech firms begin building their own blockchains.
Financial services app Robinhood recently announced that it is building its and real-world assets, while Stripe followed with plans for Tempo, a .
“That’s going to be the beginning of many others to come,” Annabelle Huang, co-founder of Altius Labs, told Cointelegraph in an interview. “The fintechs in Asia, Latin America and other emerging markets that have looked into this for many years now are also getting ready to make more moves.”
Huang has lived through the stages of crypto’s gradual courtship with Wall Street. After starting her career trading foreign exchange and rates in New York, she as its managing partner and helped scale it into one of Asia’s largest crypto liquidity providers during the decentralized finance (DeFi) boom.
The new wave of fintech-led blockchains faces the same performance issues that have dogged crypto since its inception. Wall Street firms trade in microseconds, while blockchains still process transactions in seconds or, at best, milliseconds. Huang called this the industry’s “execution bottleneck” and argued it must be cleared before fintech-built chains can carry the weight of institutional capital.
Execution bottleneck in crypto’s path to institutional adoption
Since leaving Amber Group, Huang has turned her focus to solving the execution bottleneck. With Altius Labs, she is building a modular execution layer designed to plug directly into existing blockchains, boosting throughput without forcing projects to rebuild their entire stack.
“Our goal is to bring performance to any blockchain in a plug-and-play way,” Huang said. “That way, a chain can upgrade its block execution time and throughput without having to redesign its entire architecture.”
She described the approach as bringing modularity deeper into the execution layer of the blockchain stack, which is a departure from the usual model of spinning up sidechains or new layer 2s. By focusing on the execution engine itself, Huang argues that Web3 can close the gap with Web2-level performance while preserving the distributed nature of blockchains.
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On June 27, 2025, Wall Street showed just how big the performance gap is between modern blockchains and traditional finance infrastructure. Nasdaq’s closing auction for the annual Russell index reconstitution — an event when index funds reshuffle their holdings — matched in just 0.871 seconds. The exchange’s INET system is advertised to handle more than 1 million order messages per second with sub-40-microsecond latency.
By contrast, blockchains still operate at a fraction of that speed. Ethereum about 15 transactions per second with block times of around 12 seconds. Solana — one of the fastest major networks — has a roughly block time and several thousand transactions per second in practice. Even at their best, those figures don’t meet the benchmarks institutions expect before shifting meaningful trading activity onchain.
Blockchains have improved scaling, with Ethereum L2s offloading traffic to rollups. Solana’s next-generation validator client, Firedancer, aims to narrow the gap further.
Huang claimed that the industry should not expect more “Ethereum killers” or general-purpose blockchains to emerge, adding that users prefer to consolidate around a few dominant platforms rather than .
“But within Ethereum, there was still the scalability issue, and that’s why people started spinning up new block spaces by setting up sidechains. And then L2s introduced additional fragmentation and difficult UI/UX because of it,” she said.
Institutional adoption in ETFs and treasuries
Though the next wave of institutional adoption calls for improvements on existing blockchain networks, Wall Street hasn’t waited for these technical upgrades before piling into the digital gold rush. For many large investors, exposure has come indirectly through exchange-traded funds (ETFs) or corporate treasuries. Bitcoin () funds have become easy entry points, while companies like Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) have turned themselves into .
The blueprint hasn’t worked for everyone. Throughout 2025, struggling firms latched onto the “Bitcoin treasury” narrative as a last-ditch way to spark investor enthusiasm. Some briefly saw their stock prices surge, only to retrace soon after. The weak finances of some of these companies have also raised concerns about what might happen if they .
Huang said these pivots can be risky, especially for retail investors, because not all corporate Bitcoin strategies are . She compared the stock spikes to token launches — an initial bid-up, followed by a return to “fair value.” However, she argued that demand for proxies like ETFs and treasury strategies will continue to exist.
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“Before MicroStrategy, there was Grayscale. Everyone assumed that once a Bitcoin ETF was approved, the Grayscale premium would disappear, and so would the MicroStrategy trade. But if you look closer, investors still prefer MicroStrategy over an ETF for a few reasons,” Huang said.
“First, because Michael Saylor has been accumulating for a longer period, their average cost basis is lower. Second, they’ve done several rounds of fundraising through convertible bonds, which introduces leverage. That makes MicroStrategy effectively a slightly levered play on Bitcoin at a lower cost basis,” she added.
Huang also said that while ETF options exist for Bitcoin and Ether (), investors who want altcoin exposure often turn to debt strategies instead.
Fintech chains are shaping the next stage of institutional adoption
Fintechs like Robinhood and Stripe are becoming the next stage of institutional blockchain commitment. Rather than adding crypto tickers to trading apps, they are now investing in their own blockchains — a step toward embedding digital assets into their core infrastructure.
The infrastructure around them is shifting as well. Over-the-counter desks, once discreet on-ramps for hedge funds to buy Bitcoin off-exchange, are now positioning themselves as regulated liquidity providers.
In practice, that means offering the compliance, settlement and reporting standards that institutional clients expect, bringing crypto one step closer to Wall Street norms.
“What we’re seeing now — and I expect even more going forward — is a trend of institutions adopting stablecoins or even building their own blockchains for specific use cases,” Huang said.
These are conversations she was having with institutional players four years ago at Amber Group. Now, “they’re finally ready to act.”
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