With cryptos, digital assets and other entities, the attitude in the financial services sector is moving from whether people can acquire them, to how they are used? The field is becoming more mainstream.

The following article comes from Arthur Azizov (pictured below), who is founder and investor at B2 Ventures, a European private fintech alliance encompassing a portfolio of financial and technology projects. He examines how the world of crypto currencies and digital assets (such as tokens) is becoming more a conventional feature of financial life. This is another way of saying it is more mainstream. Az

ivov examines developments in various jurisdictions. 

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Arthur Azizov

Once defined by a “nomadic spirit” and treated as a niche experiment – resistant to control, mobile, untethered, and borderless – crypto, in little more than a decade, is now embedded in corporate rails, from local stablecoin issuers to major global banks. The progress is visible across markets: Hong Kong has introduced a stablecoin regime, the US now lists spot bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded funds, and in August, Bitcoin climbed to a record $124,000, a surge certainly not driven by retail demand alone.

So, the journey from “nomad money” to assets locked in vaults is complete. The harder question is what comes next, and, more importantly, where this transformation will take wealthy investors who recently started to treat digital assets as part of their long-term financial strategies?

Why now?
The shift in narrative regarding crypto from “innovation” to core infrastructure didn’t appear out of the blue – it was built, and it happened only when regulation, products, and utility stopped moving in opposite directions and finally aligned to create the ground for real adoption.

Transparent rules are the cornerstone any innovation needs to thrive, and only recently have they arrived: in the US, the GENIUS Act gave stablecoins a legal framework, while Europe’s MiCA set a single standard for all member states. Across Asia, regulators are drafting playbooks on how digital money should be supervised, while in the Gulf, the trend goes furthest, embedding asset tokenization into mainstream financial architecture. Taken together, it is a launchpad for the industry because crypto, stablecoins, and tokenized assets now have a regulatory bedrock that simply didn’t exist before.

Indeed, institutions had already tested the ground with bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, approved in 2024, but only in 2025, when the key pieces of the regulatory puzzle fell into place, did these products draw record volumes and start to fit naturally into wealth portfolios.

The same dynamic is appearing in market plumbing itself, and the Gulf could be a case in point. First Abu Dhabi Bank is set to issue MENA’s first blockchain-based bond on HSBC’s proprietary platform, which is a live example of regulation and infrastructure converging to turn tokenization into reality.

For wealth managers, all of these ETFs and tokenized bonds demonstrate that calling digital assets “just speculation” no longer makes sense, as they have become a layer on which portfolios and entire strategies are built. But if this is the new baseline, where does it take the market’s participants next?

Strategies taking shape
If the first chapters of crypto were about wrapping it in familiar forms, the next one is about what those forms actually unlock. With ETFs, custody, and licensing now in place, the question transforms from “can we buy it?” into “how do we use it?”

Take stablecoins. First, they served as a convenient way of moving money between exchanges, but today they’ve grown into settlement rails for cross-border payments and treasury flows. For instance, Kazakhstan has proposed a national crypto reserve fund, which signals that governments may start to view them as reserve-grade instruments. And in Hong Kong, HSBC and ICBC are planning to issue licensed stablecoins under the new regime, proving that global banks themselves are shaping this market.

In practice, wealth teams can read this as a signal to treat stablecoins as near-cash equivalents inside portfolios – useful for foreign exchange, liquidity, and short-term reserves, but only within clearly defined limits on counterparties and settlement windows.

Tokenization tells a similar story. Abu Dhabi’s plan to list a blockchain-based bond shows how the Gulf is developing, but the bigger message is sent by BlackRock, as its BUIDL fund puts US Treasuries on a chain and is already being used as collateral on major exchanges. When the world’s largest asset manager tokenizes billions in government debt, that is a roadmap: wider issuance, collateral moving across venues, and custody that works on- and off-chain.

Knowing all this, it’s obvious that digital assets are heading deep into finance’s core systems. 

But it’s not enough just to follow the roadmap drawn today – the basics must also be systematised: keys and liability, settlement vs. reporting, pricing sources, and counterparty limits. In that case, wealth managers could build portfolios that they can actually rely on as a part of their long-term strategy.

So, the strategic takeaway is straightforward. Those who adapt to that shift early will thrive as digital assets move from the margins to the core of global wealth, while those who still treat them as a distant experiment risk being left behind.