Here's the thing about institutional investors – (which I'll interchangeably refer to as "Wall Street" here even though it's not technically correct) – getting into bitcoin: It was supposed to pump the price.
The moment Invesco put 5% of its $1.4 trillion assets under management into bitcoin, everyone else was going to do the same thing. The spike in demand, coupled with bitcoin's famously finite supply, would send the price of bitcoin to untold heights.
Maybe it will happen one day, but it hasn't yet.
Papering over a lot of nuance and entering the philosophical world where everything lives in a vacuum, there are two sides you can take on this highly specific point. Either: "Ha! Wall Street is going to be so screwed if Wall Street doesn't buy bitcoin," or: "Ha! Bitcoin is going to be so screwed if Wall Street doesn't buy bitcoin."
There's also a third, (subjectively) correct side: "Wall Street doesn't need Bitcoin; Bitcoin doesn't need Wall Street."
Wall Street doesn't need Bitcoin
Support for the idea that Wall Street doesn't need Bitcoin is brief. The former slave trading marketplace turned into what it is now some time in the 1800s and since then Wall Street has made, and I'm using rough figures here, tons of money, both in the metric and imperial definitions. Wall Street had no trouble making money before Bitcoin and it's certainly not having any trouble making money during Bitcoin.
More concretely, Wall Street doesn't only make money on the appreciation of assets that it holds on behalf of investors. It also makes money selling financial products on behalf of, for and to investors for fees. Wall Street doesn't need Bitcoin because no matter how "late" it is, it'll always find a way to financially engineer profit.
Bitcoin doesn't need Wall Street
Support for the opposite idea, that Bitcoin doesn't need Wall Street, is also brief. For a moment, let's set aside the bitcoin use case of bitcoin making its holders rich (also known as: "number go up technology").
Two weeks ago, I wrote that Bitcoin's true value comes from its separation from the heads of state. This idea also holds for the separation from institutions like Wall Street. Bitcoin wasn't created for the institutions, it was created as a route around the institutions. Bitcoin is money without the need for third-party intermediaries.
And there is no third-party intermediary more lucrative than Wall Street's sell-side investment bankers and trading desks. Sure, these Wall Street bankers and traders don't route everyday financial transactions from you to your local coffee shop for a fee, but they do route (in reality they "organize" or "advise on," but whatever) everyday financial transactions between investors, big companies and the like for a fee.
Yes, bitcoin was born from a desire to subvert the former, but it doesn't take too much imagination to extend the subversion to the latter. Bitcoin doesn't need Wall Street because it doesn't need any third-party intermediary.
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