Firstly, it allows for the industry to move forward as institu-tional adoption accelerates and new exchange and custody alternatives emerge. The settlement also diminishes the systemic risk of the largest liquidity crypto exchange being taken out. The replacement CEO is a former regulator and marks a potential for a fresh start for the platform to do things the right way.

The saga also underlines the demand for Bitcoin. Many com-mentators had previously forecasted that Bitcoin could crash if Binance began to wobble. But in the face of the settlement, Bitcoin has demonstrated impressive resilience – after a brief dip off the years highs, just 48hours later it was back knock-ing at the $38,000 level.

There are two strong catalysts for the unique asset looking forward just a few months: Firstly, we believe the much antic-ipated BlackRock spot Bitcoin ETF will drive mainstream retail and institutional adoption, but more importantly it unlocks trillions of dollars of 401k money. Even a few basis points implies tens of billions in inflows for an already scarce asset that keeps getting scarcer.

To that point, the second seismic demand driver is the next bitcoin ‘halving’ in April 2024. The total supply of bitcoin is capped at 21 million, and as of now, over 19.5million bitcoins have already been mined, leaving less than 1.5million yet to be issued. Bitcoin’s protocol implements a mechanism known as halving, which progres-sively reduces the number of new coins introduced with each new block, meaning that that 1.5million will take another 117 years to be issued.

This is the first time in bitcoin’s history that we approach a halving with less bitcoin available on exchanges than the pre-vious halving. Exchange balances are approximately 600,000 bitcoin less than four years ago. On top of that a further 1.3mln bitcoin have been issued over that period. A quick back of the envelope calculation shows that 1.9mln bitcoin have been removed from liquid circulation in four years, we are at 3-4% adoption, less than 1% adoption by corporate balance sheets, and less than 1% adoption by nation states. And only 1.5mln bitcoin left to be mined forever.

All this against a backdrop of traditional financial market players creating a bridge into the industry. Banks the world over have been creating trusted third-party custody alter-natives, and trading services. Swiss private and cantonal banks have been active here with names such as Syz, Maerki Bauman, Zug Kantonale bank and St Gallen Kantonale bank all providing services to their clients.

Meanwhile, in the hedge fund space, the recent volatility is providing an abundance of alpha for those employing vola-tility arbitrage, futures arbitrage, mean reversion and market making strategies. This is opening a door for traditional market investors to dip their toe into an asset class bearing the same opportunities that were harvested in the golden age of hedge funds in the eighties and nineties presented through diversified, highly diligenced vehicles like SyzCrest.

We are currently living through the scaling and adoption of a new asset class, Bitcoin, alongside an emerging but volatile digital asset industry. Institutional adoption will mean plenty more short-term pain for those participants who break the rules, but this period of industry maturation will benefit the digital asset space over the long term.