Traditional finance advisors are showing more appetite for stablecoins and tokenization than for Bitcoin, according to Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at crypto asset manager Bitwise. In a note this week, Hougan said the trend reflects a broader shift in how professional money managers are approaching digital assets—less as a pure speculative bet and more as infrastructure for existing financial products.
What advisors are actually buying
Hougan pointed to conversations with advisors and wirehouses that indicate growing demand for funds and products tied to stablecoins like USDC and tokenized real-world assets. Bitcoin, by contrast, is getting a cooler reception on the traditional advisory side. The logic, Hougan argued, is that tokenization and stablecoins offer tangible use cases that fit neatly into existing portfolio frameworks—yield, collateral, settlement—whereas Bitcoin is still often viewed by advisors as a volatile commodity without clear income or utility.
That’s a marked change from a few years back, when Bitcoin dominated nearly every advisor conversation. Now, advisors are asking about how to get yield from stablecoins, or how tokenized Treasuries work, rather than how to allocate to BTC.
Tokenization’s quiet momentum
The shift didn’t happen overnight. Tokenization of traditional assets—things like private credit, real estate, and government bonds—has been creeping into institutional workflows throughout 2025 and into 2026. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund and similar products have given advisors a familiar wrapper for on-chain yield. Stablecoin supply has also grown steadily, with USDC and USDT circulating in the hundreds of billions.
Hougan’s note is one of the clearer signals yet that the advisor community is starting to treat crypto less as an asset class and more as a technology layer. That’s good news for projects building on-chain financial rails, but it may mean Bitcoin’s dominance in the narrative—if not in market cap—is fading among professional allocators.
None of this means Bitcoin is irrelevant. It remains the largest crypto asset by market value and the gateway drug for many retail investors. But the advisor channel is a different beast. Advisors move billions, slowly, and they prefer products that behave predictably. Stablecoins and tokenized assets offer that predictability in ways Bitcoin doesn’t.
The timing is notable. Bitcoin’s price has been rangebound for months, while interest in tokenization protocols and stablecoin yields has picked up. If Hougan is right, the next wave of institutional money flowing into crypto may skip Bitcoin entirely—at least on the advisory side.
Bitwise itself has been pushing into both areas. The firm launched a tokenized fund last year and continues to offer Bitcoin and crypto index products. Hougan’s comments suggest the firm sees where demand is heading.
