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Ruud Smets By Ruud Smets, Chief Investment Officer and Managing Partner, Theta Capital. Data and developments as of 4 September 2026.

For the first time in blockchain's history, capital is lagging adoption.

Finance is moving onchain. Assets and financial functions such as exchange, lending, settlement, collateral and liquidity are moving onto shared blockchain infrastructure and into open protocols. Yet the infrastructure driving this shift remains almost entirely outside institutional portfolios.

Adoption has turned real

The first phase of blockchain was dominated by speculation. That was inevitable for a technology combining native capital formation with grassroots adoption. It damaged trust. It also funded the infrastructure.

That phase no longer defines the market. The GENIUS Act is law, the CLARITY Act is advancing, and rulemaking continues in parallel. Most recently, the SEC proposed a tailored framework for token capital formation. Founders can build in the open. Institutions can engage.

Adoption shows up in the numbers. Stablecoin supply has reached approximately $315 billion. Adjusted stablecoin transaction volume reached $8.8 trillion in the first half of 2026, compared with $10.8 trillion in all of 2025. Tokenized real-world assets outside stablecoins are approaching $40 billion.

Stablecoins are email for money: instant, global, programmable. Tokenization of equities, credit, bonds, commodities and funds is following. New native markets include perpetual futures, prediction markets and onchain credit. As assets move onto common infrastructure, liquidity and collateral trapped across institutions, geographies and asset classes can connect. Blockchain can turn the world into one global liquidity pool.

The biggest recent unlock is distribution. For years, protocols grew from the grassroots up, with almost no access to established financial distribution. Robinhood is the clearest first example of the model we expect others to follow.

From intermediaries to protocols

In July, Robinhood launched Robinhood Chain, built using Arbitrum technology and settling to Ethereum. Across its wallet and main app, eligible users can access trading through Uniswap, lending and yield through Morpho, and perpetual futures through Lighter. Robinhood retains the customer relationship, brand and distribution, and controls access to its regulated products. Open protocols provide the financial functions underneath.

In the traditional model, offering these services means building the infrastructure internally or connecting through a series of intermediaries, each with its own systems, costs and restrictions. Robinhood can increasingly plug into protocols that already provide these functions and are available around the clock. Tokenized assets can move between applications, serve as collateral and connect trading with borrowing and lending. Financial services become easier to combine, opening up uses that the fragmented incumbent system makes difficult or uneconomic.

The effect on the protocols is already striking. Uniswap spent eight years becoming one of blockchain's most successful trading protocols, largely through grassroots adoption. Within little more than two months, it had processed over $20 billion of volume on Robinhood Chain, including more than $3 billion in Robinhood Stock Tokens. As of 4 September, the chain accounted for about 65 percent of Uniswap's tracked protocol revenue over seven days and roughly half over 30 days. The seven-day contribution alone annualizes to approximately $120 million. That protocol revenue is used to buy UNI and remove it from circulation, economically similar to a stock buyback.

Some of the activity comes from crypto-native users speculating, including on memecoin pairs. Chain activity should therefore not be equated with Robinhood customers moving their existing stock trading onchain. But the stock-token volume is already substantial in its own right. The broader point is how quickly an ecosystem can develop when established distribution and new assets meet open infrastructure.

For investors, this changes the potential scale of the underlying protocols. A protocol that previously had to attract users individually can become infrastructure for an established financial platform. And that infrastructure remains available to other platforms, which can bring their own customers and products to the same markets. Distribution can remain with competing financial brands while liquidity, activity and revenue accumulate in shared protocols.

This is the architectural shift: financial functions moving from closed intermediaries into open infrastructure. Blockchain lets parties that do not know or trust one another transact on shared systems, with the assets, transactions and rules independently verifiable. That is the product.

AI agents: a new class of financial actor

Finance was already moving onchain. Now a second force is arriving that could materially accelerate it.

AI agents are moving from generating information to initiating economic activity. They can discover services, allocate capital and transact within rules set by people or organizations. They need infrastructure built for software: global, always available, programmable and accessible through code.

Public blockchains provide that architecture. Stablecoins give agents native digital money. Smart contracts make rules executable. Open protocols provide exchange, lending, collateral and settlement.

AI is not the reason finance is moving onchain. But it could become a powerful accelerator. AI commoditizes intelligence. Blockchain commoditizes trust. Two of the most expensive inputs to economic activity are being pulled into software at the same time.

The convergence was also visible at Jackson Hole. Isabel Schnabel argued that central banks themselves need to go onchain as finance becomes tokenized and programmable. Markus Brunnermeier examined how increasingly autonomous AI agents could reshape financial markets and central banking. Taken together, the discussions put programmable financial infrastructure and increasingly autonomous decision-making at the center of the world's leading central-bank gathering. It illustrates how themes that sat at the edge of financial debate only a few years ago are rapidly moving to its center.

Still, it remains underowned

Retail drove blockchain's first adoption phase. Institutional capital is entering this one, but mainly through the instruments investors already know: ETFs, listed companies such as Coinbase and Circle, and digital asset treasury companies. The most direct play, investing in the onchain infrastructure itself, remains almost untouched. Protocol tokens sit outside almost every institutional portfolio.

This is a striking anomaly. One of the most consequential redesigns of financial infrastructure in decades is being built through assets with almost no natural institutional investor base. The debate is increasingly about the speed and shape of the transition, not its direction. The absence is largely structural: regulation kept value capture ambiguous, while sell-side coverage, consultant models, custody, mandates and investment processes were built for different instruments.

Hyperliquid is the cleanest example. It turns exchange infrastructure from a company into an open network. Users retain custody, transactions are verifiable onchain, and other businesses can own the customer while using shared liquidity and execution. Through HIP-3, independent builders can launch perpetual markets that bring equities, commodities, indices, foreign exchange and pre-IPO exposure onto the same infrastructure.

Hyperliquid has generated more than $1.2 billion in cumulative protocol revenue. The HYPE token that captures those economics is only 21 months old. The protocol routes roughly 99 percent of core trading fees to a fund that buys HYPE in the market, with those tokens permanently removed from circulation.

The economics are visible, yet professional capital generally reaches them only through a traditional wrapper, where one exists, and such wrappers are largely limited to the largest protocols. For investors prepared to do the technical, legal and economic work, this mismatch may offer a generational opportunity before the broader institutional wave can follow.

The conviction

Every payment, every financial transaction today moves through a web of intermediaries, each introducing costs, friction and boundaries. Blockchain enables direct transactions coordinated by open protocols. It reduces reliance on trusted intermediaries, makes settlement continuous, makes ownership digital and composable, and allows applications to connect to financial infrastructure without negotiating a separate integration with every bank, broker, custodian or payment company. It is highly disruptive.

The early years were noisy. The industry overpromised. Too many projects had no reason to exist, and too many tokens were attached to weak products. The skepticism is earned.

The next phase is different. The infrastructure works, usage is real, revenue is visible, the regulatory path is opening, and institutional capital is moving.

We are still extremely early. General-purpose public blockchains are just over a decade old. The technology has only been broadly usable for a few years. Real adoption has barely begun. This is still the zero-to-one moment. Full adoption will take decades.

At some point, blockchain stops being a speculative corner of markets and starts being financial infrastructure. When that happens, the speculative years will be no more than a blip on the adoption chart.

This is the moment for serious capital.

Ruud Smets is Chief Investment Officer and Managing Partner of Theta Capital. More at thetacapital.com.