Crypto
Institutional Bitcoin Adoption Leads to Centralized Market Structure
Bitcoin's institutional adoption has led to a record high of 44.2% institutional holdings in US spot ETFs by 2026, but this growth has not produced structural diversification.
The process has consolidated an oligopoly of issuers, with BlackRock and Fidelity capturing more than 90% of net flows from new capital, and IBIT managing 61.3% of assets across all US spot Bitcoin ETFs.
Custody centralization worsens the situation, as over 80% of Bitcoin underlying US ETFs sits with Coinbase, introducing a single point of failure for nine out of eleven approved ETFs.