Despite the ongoing market meltdown on US trade tariffs, executives at major cryptocurrency firms Messari and Sygnum are bullish on institutional Bitcoin adoption later in 2025.

Speaking on a panel at Paris Blockchain Week on April 8, Messari CEO Eric Turner and Sygnum Bank co-founder Thomas Eichenberger said they expect a significant shift in the banking sector’s involvement with crypto in the second half of the year.

According to the executives, the global banking push into Bitcoin (BTC) services has great potential to happen in the second half of 2025 as regulators embrace crypto, including stablecoins and crypto services by banks.

“I think we’re probably looking at a muted Q2, but I’m really excited for Q3 and Q4,” Messari’s Turner said during the panel discussion moderated by Cointelegraph CEO Yana Prikhodchenko, forecasting “really interesting” things coming to the crypto market in 2025.

Crypto adoption is not just about Trump

While some investors focus on the pro-crypto stance of US President Donald Trump, Turner emphasized that broader regulatory momentum is what matters most.

“When you look at the potential of having market structure regulation in the US, stablecoin regulation, and just the fact that across the board, not just President Trump himself, but the SEC and all these regulatory industries are really embracing crypto,” Turner said.

Paris Blockchain Week’s panel with Cointelegraph CEO Yana Prikhodchenko, Bancor co-founder Eyal Hertzog, Sygnum co-founder Thomas Eichenberger, Messari CEO Eric Turner, AWS fintech leader Alex Matsuo and Near chief operating officer Chris Donovan. Source: Cointelegraph

Sygnum co-founder Thomas Eichenberger said international banks with US branches are also poised to enter the market once the legal landscape becomes clearer:

“I think it’s a matter of fact that US banks are preparing to be able to offer crypto custody and at least crypto spot trading services anytime soon.”

“I think by then I would agree with you, Eric,” he continued, projecting a continued phase of market uncertainty until the US establishes a clear regulatory framework.

Related: Ripple acquires crypto-friendly prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25B

Banks are no longer afraid of Bitcoin regulators

With the establishment of clear crypto rules for banks in the US, there will be a rush for crypto services by large international banks that are incorporated outside of the US but have a US-based presence, Eichenberger said.

“Some of them may have had their strategic plans in their cupboard to offer crypto-related services, but have been afraid that at some point they will be gone after by any of the  US regulatory authorities,” he said, adding:

“Now I think there’s no one to be afraid of anymore in terms of regulatory authorities worldwide. So I think many of the large international banks will launch this year.”

Magazine: Financial nihilism in crypto is over — It’s time to dream big again

Opinion by: Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs 

When CryptoKitties crashed the Ethereum network in 2017, the industry learned a hard lesson about blockchain scalability. Today, with over $100 billion locked in decentralized finance (DeFi) and millions of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) being traded, that lesson is more relevant than ever. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) — the engine that powers this activity — is reaching its limits.

So far, the crypto community’s answer has been layer 2 solutions — separate chains that process transactions and report back to Ethereum. But what if the community’s been looking for answers in the wrong place?

Layer 2s are not the solution

Layer 2 blockchains have long been touted as the solution to the EVM’s performance challenges, given their ability to offload the computational work from Ethereum to a secondary chain. Layer-2 solutions have proven to be nothing more than a “quick fix” instead of a permanent solution, as many hoped for. As Gemini reported, a new layer 2 appeared every 19 days in 2024, indicating that the competitive landscape is creating more problems instead of solving them.

Layer 2 solutions come with their own challenges, primarily tied to centralization and interoperability. Many of today’s layer 2 blockchains run with centralized sequencers that could expose the network to transaction censorship, transaction reordering and more. Additionally, Vitalik Buterin stated in a recent blog post that layer 2s are struggling to maintain interoperability. This called attention to the disorganized state of layer 2s, further contributing to liquidity fragmentation and a complex user experience. 

Recent: L2 gaming activity spikes in February, but wallets decline — Report

Advanced rollup designs have tried to fix these pain points. Recently, there has been a new design called native rollups that is trying to tackle layer 2’s centralization issues. Native rollups take value away from projects, which will significantly deter adoption. Consequently, it is doubtful that native rollups are the answer to all of Ethereum’s urgent problems. 

With just as many challenges as the EVM itself, why rely on layer 2s instead of looking elsewhere? Could there be a better solution? According to L2BEAT, it costs around $95.53 million annually to run all the major L2s. Instead of spending more money on building and running more L2s and interoperability solutions, why not focus on refining the existing foundational layer? 

A more accurate alternative to TPS

To create the most performant layer 1s, the industry must first reevaluate the approach to track blockchain performance. Most blockchains focus on throughput, using transactions per second (TPS) to compare chain performance. While many argue that reaching the most significant transactions per second is the way to enable mainstream adoption for crypto, TPS unfortunately doesn’t allow for apples-to-apples comparisons since different types of transactions require different amounts of compute. 

For example, an Ether (ETH) transfer requires 21,000 units of gas, whereas an ERC-20 transfer needs 65,000, confirming that TPS conveys zero value when tracking mass transactions and network throughput.

A new standardized performance metric that better reflects network computing capability must be developed to understand a blockchain’s full potential. This is where an alternative performance metric called “gas per second” emerges — a measure that evaluates the gas fees required to process transactions, better reflecting different transaction types. While TPS is best served to assess simple ETH transfers, gas per second shows the bigger picture by considering all computational efforts, even for complex transactions. 

Given the novelty of this metric, measuring gas per second across all chains will be a long process but a crucial step in blockchain’s evolution. 

Going back to the basics: Layer 1s

The capability of layer 1s has historically been overlooked, as many Ethereum researchers focused on a rollup-centric roadmap. As the backbone of the entire crypto ecosystem, layer 1s are the key to scaling the EVM. To solve EVM’s scalability challenge, layer 1s must start rebuilding the EVM from scratch with performance in mind above anything else. 

The EVM faces severe network congestion and high gas prices as volume increases. It’s time for layer 1s to scale to onboard the next generation of users. Approaches such as parallelization will help improve throughput and, combined with transforming the EVM’s consensus mechanism and storage solutions, will set a new performance standard for the industry and establish a more developer-friendly environment for projects.

The proper solution to scaling the EVM 

For the past few years, Layer 2s have been presented as the answer to providing the cheapest and fastest way to execute transactions. Layer 2s are not what the EVM truly needs. From day one, Layer 1s have always been the true solution to the EVM’s scalability problem. 

It is time to be open to adopting more accurate performance metrics and divert attention to improving network performance. These changes will pave the way for the EVM to achieve its highest potential, introducing levels of scalability and efficiency never seen before. The EVM is here to stay, but its future depends on the industry to build. 

Opinion by: Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Ripple’s $1.25 billion acquisition of prime broker Hidden Road is a “defining moment” for the blockchain payments company, potentially unlocking more use cases for the XRP Ledger among institutions, said David Schwartz, Ripple’s chief technology officer. 

“Ripple’s acquisition of Hidden Road is a defining moment for the XRP Ledger and XRP,” Schwartz said on social media on April 8. 

Hidden Road is a prime brokerage and credit network with more than 300 institutional customers. On a typical day, it clears more than $10 billion and processes more than 50 million transactions across traditional rails. 

“Now imagine even a portion of that activity on the XRP Ledger — and that’s exactly what Hidden Road plans on doing — not to mention future use of collateral and real-world assets tokenized on the XRPL,” said Schwartz. 

Source: Ripple

Ripple has long touted the XRP Ledger as a scalable platform for real-world assets (RWAs), having partnered with crypto exchange Archax to launch a tokenized money market fund in November. 

However, until now, tokenization on the XRP Ledger has been minimal. Industry data tracks only two RWAs on the XRP Ledger valued at roughly $50 million. 

The XRP Ledger has yet to take off as a tokenization platform. Source: RWA.xyz

Related: VC Roundup: 8-figure funding deals suggest crypto bull market far from over

RWA market continues to scale

The value of onchain RWAs has grown by 9.2% over the past 30 days, bucking a general downtrend in the cryptocurrency market tied to global growth fears and tighter financial conditions. Over that period, the number of asset holders increased by 6.2%, according to RWA.xyz. 

Analysts across the traditional finance industry expect tokenized RWAs to become a multi-trillion-dollar market by 2030 due to large addressable markets across bonds, commodities, equities, real estate and the M2 money supply. 

According to various estimates, the value of tokenized securities could reach at least $2 trillion by 2030. Source: Tokenized Asset Coalition

Some of the world’s largest companies are already experimenting with asset tokenization, with CME Group and Google recently partnering to explore how the Google Cloud Universal Ledger could improve capital market efficiency. 

Prometheum CEO Aaron Kaplan recently told Cointelegraph that regulatory conditions in the United States are ripe for tokenization to really take off. The biggest gap to adoption is a lack of secondary markets for buying and selling tokenized assets. However, this could soon change as crypto-native companies and traditional brokerages compete for market share.

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