While the digital asset treasury trade rose and fell last year along with crypto prices and speculation, but while the stocks of the biggest players like strategy and BitM immersion have been beaten down, research from inversion reveals that public companies have mostly outperformed the S&P 500 in multi-year periods after taking on crypto.
Now crypto adoption goes beyond storing assets on a balance sheet, and firms are embracing blockchain for secure transaction. fraud reduction, as well as real-time cross-border payments.
Now tokenization and even decentralized applications come into play here.
Well, joining me live to break all of this down is Santiago Roel Santos, founder and CEO of Inversion.
Great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks Rami.
Good to be here.
Well, it is quite a time as this digital asset summit gets underway here in New York City.
So where do you think we are when it comes to the crypto cycle?
Um, I would say there's a divergence of there's a lot of adoption happening.
In fact, public companies like Visa, like Mastercard, Coinbase, Robinhood, they're adopting crypto because they see the opportunity in the same way that they see AI.
Token prices are a different story, and tokens are just generally uninvestable.
They don't capture much value.
They don't behave like securities.
And I think investors have caught on to that, and that is probably the biggest theme of this cycle, which is you're better off investing in the public market that is appreciating the technology for what it is, and it has less risk, it has more execution.
Um, most of these are founder-led companies.
So, the risk reward is just not there to go out and invest in your DI token and your L1.
Uh, most of these are very overvalued, um, and the risk reward is is much better in the public markets.
Yeah, and Santiago, I think that distinction is very important when we're talking about digital assets as well as crypto.
And given that we are continuing to monitor geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, I do want to get your take on hyperliquid and that volume we saw.
As the conflict got underway, especially since we're seeing a lot of activity on the weekends.
Yeah, Hyperliquid, uh, since HIP 3 got implemented, uh, allowing to trade tokenized commodities, it's been an explosion of interest.
I was sitting over the weekend when the war broke out, sitting with a lot of, uh, you know, macro hedge fund guys, and they're all discussing what the open's going to be on Monday and said, have you looked at the hyperliquid?
And they were blown away.
The only time I felt that was with stablecoins.
That was over 6 years ago.
Where traditional people would say, wait a minute, I understand what this technology is all about.
I don't want to go out and send a wire transfer because the stablecoin just does that much better, and I, I think it's going to continue to proliferate.
It is explosive more so because it's attracting a lot of users to come and use Hyperloop.
Um, I think there's now over a billion dollars of open interest.
I think that 10x or 100x over the less the next five years.
Yeah, in Santiago, I think that is really significant because sometimes when we're talking about these technologies, it's about the use case here.
So as we head into the rest of 2026, there are a lot of expectations, and when we're talking about what institutions are doing, how do you think all of this is going to shake out?
I think stablecoins as a just in time money transfer is going to be a massive theme.
Um, you had Western Union here today talk about it.
It's a company that I followed and I've always wondered why they haven't implemented stablecoins.
Uh, when you think about what stablecoin, uh, does, every business is gonna use stablecoins over the next 10 years.
Um, any business like, you know, 40% of the S&P is trading internationally.
Well, that the use, the stablecoin fits a very clear use case for that type of business.
And I think that's gonna continue to be a theme regardless of where rates are, regardless of whether there's geopolitical tension or not.
This is a very much a secular trend, uh, and businesses are really waking up to that idea.
So I think that bodes well for crypto.
That doesn't mean that your token price of Ethereum or Solana or some of the other networks are gonna benefit.
There's a lot of competition in the stablecoin space.
Like if you're a stablecoin issuer, there's now 1020 of them.
And so, you know, fee compression is real.
But companies that own distribution that have a relationship with the end customer, um, you know, the end state of this technology is the end customer doesn't realize that money is moving in real time.
They just see a lower rate.
They see their money faster.
They see approval faster.
The best example of this is figure in the public markets.
Yeah, and finally we are here at the summit and we're expecting to get a lot of announcements.
We have seen some coming through so far, and of course we're paying attention to them, but when it comes to the deal making environment in 2026, what do you think that will look like?
I think there's going to be a lot of M&A activity, just companies that have really smart engineering teams.
You just saw Mastercard by BB&K.
We're going to see more of that, you know.
And again, public companies saying, OK, I have to have a crypto strategy.
Who can I go out and acquire?
Um, and, and I think there's a really good engineering teams out there that haven't had product market fit, that have struggled to get adoption.
They don't have distribution, but if you're a large financial institution that wants to leverage this technology, you're better off acquiring someone like BBNK that has done the hard work, that understands the technology, and you can just run it through your distribution.
So I think that's going to be a major trend.
And very quickly, we have less than 60 seconds here.
So for the American retail consumer that is watching right now, what is the impact to them?
I think the impact is not so much that, you know, a lot of the apps that they use in their phone are not going to change.
People don't think about money.
They don't like, they don't switch bank accounts every day.
Uh, the benefit of this is you're using your financial institution like JPMorgan and they get a lower rate.
They get their, uh, you know, HO approved faster.
The, the end state of crypto is invisible and the, the, uh, asterisk to that is polymarket and prediction markets have really been front.
Center to the interest of people to trade and to, you know, speculate on geopolitical stuff, and I think that's really the killer application of crypto and probably will continue to be well, Santiago, we will have to leave it there, but thank you so much for joining me today as the digital asset summit kicks off and thank you so much for all of your perspective.
Thanks.
