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The mood around digital assets has shifted again among the world’s largest allocators, according to Ron Biscardi, CEO of iConnections, which runs one of the largest capital introduction conferences globally.

Biscardi, who has spent more than 25 years in the alternative investment industry and runs a platform that represents over $55 trillion in assets, has a front-row seat. His firm tracks thousands of meetings between fund managers and institutional investors each year. That data shows how quickly sentiment can turn.

After a couple of "rough" years following the crypto market crash following the FTX collapse in 2022, interest began to stabilize at last year's conference, he recalls. “[In 2025] we started to see funds wanting to come back, wanting to spend some money,” he said. Optimism around a more crypto-friendly regulatory stance in Washington helped, even if progress has been slow.

“I feel like what we're seeing now at the event [this year] is a more normal experience,” Biscardi said. “It's not extremely crazy, but it’s also not [like] 'I don't want to go anywhere near it.'”

A change of tone

More than 75 digital asset funds participated in this year’s event, generating roughly 750 meetings between managers and allocators, a level comparable to 2022 when crypto interest soared before the FTX collapse. Nearly one quarter of limited partners on the iConnections platform now indicate interest in digital asset strategies, reinforcing that crypto has become an established sleeve within alternatives rather than a fringe allocation.

Family offices represent the largest LP cohort expressing interest, consistent with their track record of backing emerging and innovation-driven asset classes.

And this trend has been growing in recent years. While some family offices remain cautious about the asset, many traditional wealth managers are under mounting pressure to deliver digital assets to wealthy clients, particularly in crypto hotspots like Dubai, Switzerland and Singapore.

This interest is very much alive despite the crypto winter, with the price of bitcoin BTC$65,706.94 down nearly 25% since the beginning of the year and its market cap losing more than a trillion in value since October's all-time high. Stocks of popular crypto companies, like Coinbase (COIN) or Strategy (MSTR), are also trading significantly lower this year, underperforming most other tech stocks.

Biscardi, however, believes digital asset managers are “very, very close to achieving institutional legitimacy.” Bitcoin, he said, has already crossed that line, but altcoins are close. “The last piece is really the regulatory framework that lets them do it safely.”

For chief investment officers, that issue dominates. “The regulatory hurdles are number one,” Biscardi said. “It just always goes back to that.”

Large allocators, he noted, are fiduciaries. “It's not their money, they’re fiduciaries for other people's money, and it might be a super interesting category, but they're just not going to allocate there until they can tell their board that they’re doing it in a responsible, safe way.”

The tone of the debate has also changed. In 2022, some investors still questioned whether crypto was real or a Ponzi scheme. “That I don’t hear any of that anymore,” Biscardi said.

In fact, some traditionally conservative pools of capital, for example, have stepped in. Endowments, which tend to focus on long-term stability and avoid sharp swings in new asset classes, have begun allocating to bitcoin and ether exchange-traded funds. The idea is not to overhaul portfolios but to add measured exposure that could lift returns in years when crypto markets perform well, especially as many investors expect equities to deliver more muted gains than in the past decade.

Still a risk asset

Nevertheless, allocators treat bitcoin “much more as a risk asset” than a store of value. “Bitcoin just hasn’t behaved that way,” he said, pointing to its correlation with equities rather than gold during market stress.

Similarly, direct token buying remains rare among institutions. Instead, he hears more about ETFs and fund structures. Limited partners rely on general partners to choose specific coins. “The LPs who get bought into the space are really looking to the GPs to make those decisions.”