Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan says the SEC's new crypto framework and the push to drop Rule 611 open only a few of Wall Street's "million doors" to crypto. He points to the multi-year gap between the 2024 Bitcoin ETF approval and full advisor adoption as the template for how slowly institutional access actually arrives.
Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan told CryptoSlate that Washington's crypto-friendly turn is not the moment that fully unlocks Wall Street. Instead, he said the real barrier comes down to a million small, unglamorous steps rather than one landmark bill.
A busy week that Hougan calls just a start
The SEC unveiled its Regulation Crypto Assets proposal on Aug. 18, a fit-for-purpose framework for certain crypto investment contracts with exemptions reaching up to $75 million over 12 months. A day later, Trump used a White House crypto event to push the CLARITY Act, saying CFTC Chair Mike Selig was working to bring Hyperliquid into the U.S. in a fully compliant way.
His clearest example was the SEC's approval of spot Bitcoin ETP listings in January 2024, after which many assumed the door had opened for everyone. But wealth-management platforms still had to approve the products individually, decide which account types could hold them, and clear internal sign-offs before considering them for model portfolios. Morgan Stanley and Bank of America only expanded crypto access for wealth advisers within the past year, and BlackRock added its Bitcoin ETF to model portfolios more than a year after launch. Hougan's read is that it took roughly two and a half years for ETF access to move from technically true to genuinely true.
Rule 611 as one concrete blocker
Hougan pointed to Rule 611, the trade-through rule created under Regulation NMS in 2005, as a real obstacle to something like Uniswap integrating with brokerage services for tokenized-stock investors. The SEC proposed rescinding the rule in June, with comments closing Aug. 17. Hougan said a tokenized stock issued by one entity isn't the same as one issued by another, so the two can't be arbitraged against each other.
Even without that rule, incompatible tokenized-stock wrappers could split liquidity across issuers, chains, and venues. The tokenized equity market reached roughly $2.8 billion as of Aug. 17, with tokenized stocks climbing to about 15% of the broader tokenized real-world-asset market.
Cross-margining as the structural endgame
Hougan described U.S. financial market infrastructure as parallel chains for individual asset classes, with separate rails for stocks, bonds, commodities, and derivatives that are hard to move between by design. Tokenization and Hyperliquid-style infrastructure, in his view, could eventually collapse those rails into financial super apps where multiple asset classes trade side by side through shared collateral. SEC Chair Paul Atkins has separately voiced support for such super apps, and the SEC-CFTC harmonization initiative lists cross-margining among its joint priorities.
Institutions do not wait for every rule to finish before building, acquiring, and integrating, Hougan said. That threshold keeps getting crossed one unsexy rule at a time.
Source: CryptoSlate
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