2025 Global Alts New York: Why $20-30 Trillion Of Assets Could Be Flowing Into Crypto Soon

The landscape of digital assets has undergone a remarkable transformation, moving from a niche interest to a significant area of focus for institutional investors. A panel at the 2025 Global Alts New York, moderated by CNBC crypto reporter Tanaya Macheel, brought together leading voices - Dr. Adam Back, CEO & Co-Founder of Blockstream; Paul Brodsky, Partner at Pantera Capital; Dave LaValle, Global Head of ETFs at Grayscale; and Manoj Vasudevan, Director & Portfolio Manager at KAUST Investment Management Company - to discuss the evolving institutional approach to crypto and blockchain. Their collective insights shed light on the journey, current state, and future trajectory of digital asset adoption within traditional finance.

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2025 Global Alts New York - Adam Back, Paul Brodsky, Dave LaValle, and Manoj Vasudevan on Digital Assets

The Evolution of Institutional Involvement

The institutional journey into digital assets has been a nuanced one, marked by significant growth and a shift in perception. Manoj Vasudevan of KAUST Investment Management Company, one of the world's largest university endowment funds, highlighted their early entry into the space. KAUST’s journey began in 2018, a pivotal year that saw the first signs of institutional involvement from traditional allocators like endowments, foundations, and family offices. A key indicator for KAUST was noticing talented fund managers from prestigious Silicon Valley venture capital funds leaving to join crypto funds and startups—a trend they "did not want to miss". Their first token investment, into a crypto venture fund, was made in the fall of 2018.

By 2021, KAUST had developed a "robust thesis" for why crypto and blockchain warranted a dedicated asset class within their venture portfolio. This conviction enabled them to continue investing even through the bear market of 2022 and in the aftermath of FTX, reaching a low single-digit exposure for the endowment, which is "quite meaningful in an absolute sense". KAUST’s approach is holistic, treating digital assets not merely as another technology to wedge into their venture portfolio, but as a unique asset class with its own financial instrument—the token—and "extra liquidity". They even created a "venture plus bucket" for this, recognizing that crypto doesn't neatly fit into typical strategic asset allocations for most institutions, necessitating innovation.

Adam Back, who was involved with Bitcoin "very very early before the network started" having designed hash, the proof-of-work algorithm used by Bitcoin miners, reflected on the dramatic changes. In Bitcoin's nascent years, it had "no price in the market," and early exchanges were "technologically immature". Paul Brodsky of Pantera Capital, which went "all in" on Bitcoin in 2013 when it traded at $65, further elaborated on the numerous impediments institutions faced. Many institutional investors are fiduciaries and needed assurance that assets "won't blow up," a challenge in the early days due to a lack of understanding and market regulations. There was also a lack of capacity for large capital allocations, making it difficult to justify the effort even for high-return opportunities.