Blockchain.com's Co-CEO Calls It a 'Crypto Spring.' The Real Bottleneck Isn't Congress

Lane Kasselman isn't hedging. The co-CEO of Blockchain.com says crypto spring has arrived, and the buyers driving it aren't retail traders chasing memecoins at 2 a.m. It's institutions.

Here's the gist: the big money showed up and it didn't leave. That changes how this market behaves. Fewer violent liquidation cascades, more slow, deliberate allocation meetings. Boring is fine. Boring is what a maturing asset class is supposed to look like.

Kasselman's bigger argument is political, and it's timed to the calendar. With midterms just weeks out, he says the digital asset sector has the most bipartisan backing it's ever had in Congress, and that the support keeps growing no matter who holds the gavel. That's a claim worth testing. But the evidence isn't crazy. Crypto has gone from a partisan talking point to a state-level jobs story in a handful of election cycles, and candidates in both parties now want to be seen as friendly to it.

The CLARITY Act, though, is still stuck. Market structure legislation has been parked while regulators write rules on their own. Kasselman puts the pending queue at more than 30 SEC and CFTC rulemakings. That's a lot of rulebook to read before anyone can plan a product roadmap. So the industry keeps waiting on guidance that keeps almost arriving.

And here's the part that gets less airtime: state money transmitter licenses. Crypto firms still have to patch together approvals across dozens of states to move money legally in the US. That's not a partisan problem. It's a plumbing problem. It's also, in my view, a bigger drag on everyday consumer products than any single bill in Washington. A startup can survive a stalled act. It can't survive 50 compliance departments.

On the business side, Blockchain.com is launching options trading. Makes sense. Institutions that want to hold crypto also want to hedge it, and options are how you do that without selling your position. No derivatives desk, no serious institutional client.

The current cycle has been more institutional than retail, and that's a healthier mix. Watch the rulemaking calendar, not the campaign ads. Bottom line: regulation by agency memo is still regulation, and it moves slower than the market wants.