Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon) head of digital assets Michael Demissie believes that the collapse of the cryptocurrency market in 2022 will not hinder the institutional adoption of digital assets as they are here to stay.
On February 8, Demissie said that the digital asset industry is “here to stay” due to institutional investors’ keen interest in cryptocurrencies during a conference hosted by Afore Consulting.
According to a Reuters article dated February 8, “What we find is customers are extremely interested in digital assets, generally,” he added.
Demissie supported his assertions with data from a BNY Mellon study from October 2022, which revealed that 91% of custodial bank customers were interested in investing in tokenized products based on the blockchain.
Additionally, according to the report, 86% of institutional participants used a “buy and hold” approach, which may indicate that they see the cryptocurrency market as a long-term investment.
Additionally, 88% of those polled said they still want to make long-term investments in the digital asset industry despite the sharp decline in the cryptocurrency market in 2022.
Demissie did, however, mention that more effort was required in Washington, D.C., in order for business participants to advance with greater regulatory certainty.
“We absolutely need clear regulations and rules for the road. We need responsible actors who can offer reliable services that live up to investors trust.”
It’s crucial that we go through this area responsibly, he said.
The hiring of Caroline Butler as the company’s CEO of Digital Assets was made public by BNY Mellon on February 2 in order to spur the subsequent wave of customer adoption.
Butler served as the CEO of custodial services in the past.
The hiring coincides with BNY Mellon’s October 2022 launch of its own digital custody platform, which will enable a small group of institutional customers to invest in Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).
In order to examine and evaluate bitcoin goods, BNY Mellon earlier in February 2022 announced cooperation with the on-chain measurement platform Chainalysis.
BNY Mellon and other significant banks have recently begun to enter the digital asset sector.
Following the devastating failure of FTX in November, numerous bitcoin businesses were said to have received attention from Goldman Sach.
Although Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, is not a fan of Bitcoin, his company has recently experimented with blockchain-based services. The company completed its first cross-border transaction utilizing decentralized finance (DeFi) on a public blockchain successfully in November.
