A version of this article appeared in our The Roundup newsletter on January 9. Sign up here.
Happy New Year! Eric here.
Traditional financial firms are falling over each other to grab a slice of the crypto market in 2026.
BlackRock, Revolut, and Robinhood are actively recruiting to bolster their crypto teams. Elsewhere, executives from Wall Street stalwarts like PwC and PayPal have spent the past few weeks extolling the merits of blockchain moolah — a sharp shift from their previous scepticism.
“2026 is going to be massive,” Leonid Bashlykov, crypto head of product at Revolut, said on LinkedIn when talking about the neobank’s plans for the year.
The financial industry’s volte-face is fuelled by a rapidly evolving environment for. In short: things changed for crypto in 2025.
US President Donald Trump’s administration turbocharged legislative efforts to bring the industry into the fold of traditional finance. That meant light-touch regulations, a new stablecoin law, and appointing supporters to key government roles.
Competition, however, will be fierce.
Not only are traditional financial firms competing against each other, but crypto-native players aren’t taking Wall Street’s incursion lying down.
Crypto exchanges like Kraken and Coinbase have made it clear that they’re muscling into traditional financial firms’ territory as their Wall Street rivals elbow into theirs.
Not only are they busy launching new services, but they’re also actively looking for smaller firms to acquire to strengthen their position in 2026.
“We do want to become a super app and provide all types of financial services,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in September. “We want to become people’s primary financial account.”
That, in other words, throws down the gauntlet.
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Post of the Week
Institutions are ploughing into crypto at a time when industry veterans reminisce about, if not a simpler time, at least a… weirder one.
this is what crypto used to be like haha pic.twitter.com/sEbglHiNFx
— banditxbt (@banditxbt) January 8, 2026