The following is a guest post and opinion from Ben Nadareski, Co-founder & CEO of Solstice .

Institutions were never going to arrive in crypto the way crypto wanted them to. No stampede into governance tokens. No CFO proudly announcing that idle treasury had been rotated into volatile assets. No pension fund committee suddenly speaking fluent DeFi. That was always the fantasy version.

The real version is less theatrical and far more important. Institutions will not buy crypto as a belief system. They will instead use it as infrastructure.

Not because banks cannot copy the code. They can. But because they cannot copy the jungle that made the code useful: the speed, failure, pressure, and live-market iteration that web3 has been refining in…