If Crypto is dead… so why are institutions still shipping?

Feels like we’ve been in a “BTC only” market for a while. Not saying ETH is dead or anything, it just hasn’t been doing that usual “ETH outperforms BTC” thing people got used to. And most alts vs BTC still look awful.

What’s interesting though is that a lot of the building that matters right now is not random microcaps, it’s boring institutional-ish sectors that keep shipping whether crypto Twitter is happy or not.

RWAs and tokenized funds are a big one. You’ve got Ondo pushing tokenized treasury exposure (USDY), BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund BUIDL getting used as collateral, and then stuff like Centrifuge doing onchain credit / real-world lending rails that keep expanding even in a slow market.

Bitcoin staking is another obvious trend. Babylon is the headline example here, but the bigger point is “BTC as security” becoming a thing people actually build around instead of just talking about it. It’s basically the most politically acceptable crypto primitive right now, so it keeps attracting effort.

Interoperability is also getting more real and less “bridge got hacked again.” IBC Eureka is a good example of that direction, Union is pushing ZK-based interoperability, and you can feel the pressure for everything to become connected without trusting a multisig. Toki is coming too, and even LayerZero keeps showing up in these conversations whether people love it or hate it.

Stablecoins keep quietly eating the world. Circle is still the default “payments infra” name, Paxos keeps launching and expanding products, and we’re seeing more regulated / compliant flavors show up because that’s what institutions actually want.

And yeah, commodities is the sleeper category. Most crypto people don’t care until it’s already big, but if you can trade oil/gas style markets onchain with decent UX and settlement, that’s not a meme narrative, that’s real volume. Sphinx is one example that’s explicitly going after that lane.

Payments and settlement is the other “boring until it’s everywhere” sector. Ripple’s ODL is still a reference point for how crypto gets used when the goal is moving value, not farming points.

Not trying to shill any coin here (don't even hold most of them), just feels like the market mood and the build activity are totally disconnected right now. Anyone else seeing the same thing, or is this just coping in a slow cycle?