Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan believes Bitcoin’s (CRYPTO: BTC) next major wave of demand will come from the "final boss of investing" which is the institutional capital.

Who Buys After Strategy?

Speaking in a Milk Road interview on July 19 alongside Bitwise research head Ryan Rasmussen, Hougan argued that Bitcoin has repeatedly transitioned from one dominant buyer group to another and is now approaching its largest potential source of capital yet.

Concerns have emerged over whether Bitcoin could face a demand gap as Strategy Inc. (NASDAQ:MSTR), slows or changes its purchasing activity.

Hougan said Bitcoin’s history is defined by its largest buyer eventually handing the baton to a new group.

Before Strategy, demand was led by the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (NYSE:GBTC) Before Grayscale, U.S. retail investors followed Asian retail buyers and Bitcoin’s earliest cypherpunk adopters.

This time, he believes the identity of the next buyer is already clear.

"The end boss of investing is institutional capital," he said, pointing to financial advisers, pension funds, endowments and sovereign wealth funds.

"I think it’s going to be a great bull market for Bitcoin," he said.

Vanguard Signals Institutional Shift

Rasmussen highlighted reports that Vanguard, which manages trillions of dollars, is seeking a senior digital-assets executive to develop its crypto strategy. This marks a major move that crypto is transitioning from offshore and retail-dominated markets toward mainstream institutional infrastructure.

Once a major institution embraces digital assets, Hougan said, that decision tends to become a "one-way door."

Five years ago, allocating to crypto represented a professional risk. Today, Hougan said appearing openly hostile to digital assets may make executives look as though they have their "head in the sand."

DeFi’s Market Is Bigger Than Crypto

Hougan said institutional adoption will not stop with Bitcoin.

Investors have traditionally viewed decentralized finance as serving only the crypto market, which he estimated at roughly $2 trillion. However, he argued that DeFi’s true addressable market is the entire global financial system, potentially worth hundreds of trillions of dollars.

As traditional assets move on-chain, decentralized protocols could compete across lending, trading, settlement and asset management.

Hougan believes Bitcoin will lead institutions into crypto, while tokenization and DeFi broaden the industry’s opportunity across global finance.

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