Maven 11: The institutional crypto revolution: no tulip mania
While the tulip mania analogy holds true for the speculative retail fringes of crypto, fixating on this noisy periphery blinds observers to the profound institutional infrastructure and innovation scaling at its core.
By Victor van Eijk, Director Global Business Development, Maven 11
Can today’s crypto market be compared to the tulip mania of the seventeenth century, as suggested by a recent column in this magazine? In principle: yes, provided we only look at the fringes of the market. The argument that most crypto tokens are purely speculative and driven by a psychological retail narrative absolutely holds merit. However, by focusing on this noisy retail periphery, readers are withheld insights into the true innovation taking place at the core.
To truly grasp what is happening, one must look past equity-based thinking. In the early 1990s, it was architecturally impossible to invest directly in the internet’s foundational layers (TCP/IP or HTTP). Investors could only capture the internet revolution by backing application-layer equities like Netscape, Amazon, or Cisco years later.
Public blockchains have inverted this dynamic. For the first time, market participants can invest directly in the opensource, global protocol layer itself. Holding native assets of Ethereum or Solana is analogous to buying a direct fraction of the internet in 1993, where every subsequent application built on top drives transaction fees and economic finality directly back to the base layer.
The institutional foundation
While the tulip mania ended with tears, blockchain innovation is surely but slowly evolving into the financial infrastructure of the future. This is not a repetition or echo of 1637, but the birth of a new capital market that will be too impactful to ignore by professionals currently working in finance.
Tokenization
Asset tokenization has become a Wall Street priority, with BlackRock’s Larry Fink predicting the ‘tokenization of all assets’ and giants like Apollo and Janus Henderson already offering tokenized access to private credit and Treasuries. The Boston Consultancy Group* projects tokenized assets to reach $ 14 trillion by 2030 and $ 55 trillion by 2035 elevating digital assets into a structural force across payments, capital markets and financial infrastructure.
Stablecoins
Compounding at a 60% CAGR past five years to $ 320 billion, stablecoins have triggered massive institutional deployment. Mastercard acquired infrastructure provider BVNK for $ 1.8 billion, while Stripe launched its Tempo payments blockchain. Concurrently, JPMorgan clears billions of dollars via JPM Coin, and Europe’s 37-bank Qivalis consortium looks to deploy regulated Euro stablecoins for instant settlement.
Capital markets
The NYSE is developing a tokenized securities platform while its CEO noted that the decentralized, blockchain-powered exchange Hyperliquid has grown ‘bigger than Nasdaq’ in specific contexts. Processing $ 2.9 trillion in 2025 derivatives volume with $ 900 million in revenue, it routinely handles $ 4 billion daily in commodities and equities outside traditional exchange hours.
Reconsidering the ‘narrative fallacy’
The previous column rightly warned against the narrative fallacy, but an inverse pitfall looms. Analyzing the market exclusively through the lens of tulip mania casually lumps a technological revolution, billions in institutional capital, and structural banking integration into the same bucket as speculative retail hype.
The real lesson for finance professionals is twofold: remain highly critical of the retail market’s emotional excesses, but do not ignore the structural transformation at the core. Blockchain technology is fundamentally rewriting global ownership, liquidity, and transaction rails. Forwardlooking professionals must look beyond the fleeting hype and pay attention to the future infrastructure of the financial sector.