Brendan Ma says bankers want a link between network activity and investable value. Robinhood Chain’s first-quarter fee surge shows what that test involves.

Brendan Ma, head of investment strategy at the Arbitrum Foundation, said he met with representatives of institutions managing about €800 billion in assets over 48 hours of closed-door meetings to discuss crypto.

“There's been business or ecosystem traction that has been divorced from any fundamental case.”

Ma told CryptoSlate that allocators asked him how network activity connects to the asset an investor can own.

Ma said institutions are drawn to networks “building towards durable, sustainable network revenues and a P&L that can be geared towards investment and reinvestment.”

He described a maturing crypto industry with “so much work” ahead to win trust. Partnerships are important to investors once they reach the income statement, and the question he hears is how a partnership “is relevant for the underlying.”

Ma separates two conversations: one covers “whether you allocate and actually invest in crypto,” and the other covers whether an institution is trying “to build a product and deploy it with the infrastructure.”

Investors in the first group ask which infrastructure will power tokenization, and builders in the second ask which assets to put on chain. He said stablecoins and Treasuries came first, and “the race is now on” across private credit, equities, commodities and even hedge fund strategies.

Private and publicly listed banks he met had advanced thinking about products and investments and “haven't been very public with their ambitions.”

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