Bitcoin’s ascent past $100,000 might have felt like the culmination of a long-promised milestone, but according to industry veterans, what we’re witnessing is the beginning of real institutional adoption—a trend that could fundamentally transform how global capital markets work.
“Previous Bitcoin bull runs were usually muted because exchanges needed to onboard and were backlogged for months,” explains Samson Mow, CEO of Jan3, a company focused on accelerating Bitcoin adoption. “But with ETFs, now there’s no barrier to TradFi capital flowing directly into Bitcoin.”
Speaking from the Consensus 2025 conference in Hong Kong on Wednesday, Mow acknowledged that the “torrent of capital” hasn’t “poured in” just yet for Bitcoin, with institutional investors such as sovereign wealth funds merely “dipping their toes” in the still muddy waters of crypto and only investing “a droplet of what they have.”
Mow was responding to Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream, who pointed out earlier in the talk how peculiar market dynamics have been at play for Bitcoin.
“ETF inflows are a multiple of Bitcoin mined every day. MicroStrategy and other companies are buying two times plus Bitcoin mining per day,” Back said.
That’s all setting the stage for a “massive wave of maybe 10, 20 years of bullish” price action for Bitcoin as institutions embrace it, according to Mow.
The panel discussed how roughly 1.1 million Bitcoin—worth approximately $110 billion at current prices—has been absorbed by buyers between September and October of 2024, even as prices climbed 50% from $60,000 to current levels.
This unprecedented supply absorption has occurred despite what Mow describes as “manufactured” trading ranges.
“If you look at the price movement, we kind of peak, and then we stay steady and chop sideways,” Mow observed. “It’s good to say it’s consolidation, but it just looks very manufactured. There’s a very tight range in which we’re trading at. It just doesn’t look natural at all.”
Mow’s observation is a response to how Back suggested that previous structural sellers, including bankrupted firms and miners who needed cash during the bear market, have largely cleared the market.
“If we’re talking about last year, after the DeFi contagion and bankruptcies, there were some structural sellers who were sort of ‘false sellers’ and miners who were restructuring or replacing fleets or going through a less profitable period,” Back said.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
