For basically the entire history of crypto, Wall Street has been late.

Retail bought Bitcoin before institutions cared. Retail piled into ICOs before banks knew what Ethereum was. Retail kicked off DeFi summer, the NFT boom, and just about every speculative frenzy crypto has ever produced.

This time, something strange appears to be happening. The order may have flipped.

“I think it’s the first cycle,” ARK Invest Director of Research for Digital Assets Lorenzo Valente told Coinage from our Brooklyn studios this week. “The previous cycles were retail driven.” But now?

“There’s never been like more interest, honestly, in crypto from institutions,” he said.

That might sound like an…