In a live interview on NYSE TV, Blockworks co‑founder Jason Yanowitz discusses the upcoming DAS Digital Asset Summit at the Javits Center, highlighting its growth to over 2,500 institutional attendees—including sovereign wealth funds, endowments, pensions, and major banks like BlackRock and JPMorgan. He predicts multiple partnership announcements and strategic initiatives from both allocators and banks as they increase crypto allocations. Yanowitz frames the current crypto market as a lull preceding the next 4‑year bull cycle, expecting consolidation through spring and a resurgence in the fall that could push Bitcoin beyond its all‑time highs. He contrasts Bitcoin with gold, emphasizing a massive generational wealth transfer where younger investors are more attuned to Bitcoin than traditional equities. Yanowitz argues that many institutional views of crypto are outdated, likening the industry’s evolution to the early automobile era and declaring that it is now at a “Henry Ford” moment, with real‑world use cases such as stablecoins growing 10‑20× in the past four years. He notes the possibility of former President Trump making remarks supportive of crypto during the summit. The interview is aimed at institutional investors and financial executives, offering a macro‑level perspective on market cycles, adoption trends, and upcoming industry milestones.
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Joining me now with more, Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks, which is hosting this summit here at the Javits Center in Midtown Manhattan. Blockworks is a cryptocurrency news and data business. Jason, welcome.
Thanks for having me. Exciting week.
Yeah, exciting indeed. This summit is going to run from Tuesday to Thursday. What can our viewers expect?
It is the— we've been hosting this event since 2019. This is our 9th or 10th instance of the summit. Usually we've had 500, 600, 700 people. We'll have over 2,500 institutional attendees this week at DAS. It is the DAS Digital Asset Summit, is the largest gathering of institutional participants. So hedge funds, venture firms, big allocators. We have sovereign wealth funds from several, several of the largest countries coming on, on site. We have endowments, pensions, big banks, big players like BlackRock, JPMorgan. And so I think you'll hear a lot of big updates and announcements from both the banks and from the allocators about how they're playing in the digital asset ecosystem.
Interesting. So are we expecting news, perhaps more partnerships in store?
I think we'll have not only partnerships, but several news announcements coming out of the summit specifically related to allocators and institutions starting to turn on their allocations, as well as some of the big banks announcing big strategic initiatives into the digital asset world.
Interesting. And of course, we've seen a pullback here in equities as we're based at the New York Stock Exchange. We've seen cryptocurrency after a very strong run, give back some of its recent gains as well. What do you make of the recent market action?
I basically think that we're in a lull between before the second period of the bull run. Right. So these crypto cycles move in these 4-year periods. 2017, if people remember that Bitcoin ran from $1,000 to $20,000 and then pulled back. 2021, we, you know, we ran up all the way to $65,000, big bull run. And this is the same thing 4 years later, 2025. So What we saw was after Trump got elected, Bitcoin went up 100%, 100% in 60 days. I think right now we're just seeing a period of pullback. There's things with Ukraine, there are things with the tariffs. I think there's just a period of uncertainty in all the markets, not just in crypto. I'm pretty sure what we end up seeing is this period of consolidation— March, April, May, June, maybe into the summer and then this fall and through into the winter. I think we'll reenter this period of like exorbitant price action driving Bitcoin well above its all-time highs.
Interesting. So some have said that in a market that is pulling back or a volatile market, at least in equities, some people might move assets into gold, for instance, as a defensive play. We've heard gold and cryptocurrency like Bitcoin compared before, perhaps in some circumstances similar. Is that how you see it?
I, I basically treat— there's Bitcoin and then there's all the rest of the cryptocurrencies. And cryptocurrency is probably even the wrong name for them. There's businesses that are getting built on, you know, this digital asset economy, on things like Ethereum and Solana. For Bitcoin, I think the best way to understand it is really there's a massive wealth transfer, right? There's tens of trillions of dollars getting passed down from maybe the boomer generation, folks who are 60, 70, 80, 90 years old right now. If you go ask a, you know, my, my 18-year-old niece right now about the price of Tesla or the price of the S&P, she won't know even maybe what the S&P is. But if you ask her what the price of Bitcoin is, She can tell you down to the dollar. So there's a massive transfer of wealth. And I think that as those— maybe the Gen Z crowd gets older, as millennials get older, they're going to be buying Bitcoin, they're buying cryptocurrencies. They're not buying the S&P.
Interesting. How do you see the use case of cryptocurrency changing? Do any of these announcements that might happen this week at your event change that dynamic?
Yeah. Okay. So maybe from a macro scale, the The best way to frame this is that I think your audience, and I would guess your audience are mainly institutional investors, financial institution executives, their views about crypto are wrong. And their views about crypto are wrong because they built this belief at a time when the industry was— it wasn't even really an industry. There were cryptographers talking in public forums and they were doing experiments, right? They built their beliefs around things like Mt. Gox. And the Silk Road. And these were just that, they were just experiments. And it's kind of like forming your belief about— I mean, if we— I'm a history nerd, so if you flash back to the late 1800s, it's like building your belief about cars when Frank and Charles Duryea created the first car company. I'm sure you have no clue who those people are. Nobody does, because the car industry was created with Henry Ford, obviously.
It's—
if you started investing in cars, if you built your belief around cars Frank and Charles Duryea, you would have been on the, you know, you would have thought the car industry was never going to be anything. If you built your belief around cars with Henry Ford, that was a generational trade. And I think we're at the Henry Ford moment with this industry where it's been 10 or 15 years of experiments. We're now starting to get on the other side. And you've got these big real-world use cases like stablecoins, which have gone up 10 to 20x in the last 4 years.
Jason, I wish we had more time. Maybe you can join us again throughout the week as this event is underway. President Trump has been very friendly to the cryptocurrency community. Anything that we might be expecting from the president this week?
I don't know his schedule, but I think it's not out of the picture that he maybe makes some remarks. I mean, that would be, that'd be amazing for the industry if he were to do that.
Jason Yanowitz, he's a co-founder of Blockworks. Jason, thank you so much for joining.
