74% of Institutional Investors Are Bullish on Crypto

Institutional investors are bullish on crypto — and they know exactly what they're getting into. A new EY-Parthenon Coinbase survey of 351 institutional investors, published on March 18, found that 74% expect crypto prices to climb over the next 12 months, while 73% plan to put more money to work in digital assets through 2026. These aren't starry-eyed retail punters chasing momentum. These are professional allocators who also told researchers that regulatory uncertainty is their single biggest concern — and they're buying anyway.

What the EY-Parthenon Coinbase Survey Actually Found

The headline numbers are straightforward enough. Three out of four large investors think prices go up from here. Nearly three-quarters plan to add exposure. But the detail buried underneath those figures is more telling: 49% of survey respondents said they're specifically tightening risk management, liquidity constraints, and position sizing — not because they're scared, but because they're scaling up seriously. You don't bother refining your risk framework if you're planning to exit.

Per the EY-Parthenon Coinbase institutional investor survey, the data paints a picture of an industry that has moved from speculative curiosity to operational commitment. 66% of respondents already hold spot crypto ETFs or exchange-traded products. 81% said they'd prefer regulated vehicles as their primary access route. The 'wild west' framing that dominated crypto coverage three years ago doesn't fit this cohort anymore.

Call it the professionalization of digital asset allocation. Institutions still see the volatility — 49% explicitly flagged it as a reason to tighten controls — but they've stopped using it as a reason to stay away.

Stablecoins and Tokenization: From Experiment to Infrastructure

The stablecoin numbers in this survey deserve more attention than they're getting. 86% of respondents are already using stablecoins or actively scoping them for cash management and cross-border money movement. That's not a niche use case. That's a majority of large investors treating stablecoins as operational plumbing — right alongside traditional treasury tools.

Companies are building formal counterparty risk protocols and reserve transparency requirements specifically to fit stablecoin workflows into existing internal controls. The compliance infrastructure is catching up with the technology, which is exactly the maturation signal institutional capital has been waiting for. Mastercard's $1.8 billion acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK, announced on March 17, is the most visible sign yet that legacy financial rails are actively purchasing their way into on-chain payment infrastructure — not just experimenting with pilots.

Tokenization is following the same arc. The share of asset managers who want to tokenize their own assets jumped from 40% to 64% in a single year. 63% said they're willing to allocate directly to tokenized assets, and 61% believe tokenization will materially reshape trading, clearing, and settlement within three to five years. Kraken's partnership with Nasdaq to develop tokenized equities through its xStocks product — which has already processed over $25 billion in transaction volume — is the kind of institutional-grade collaboration that makes those projections feel plausible rather than aspirational.

Why Does Regulatory Fear Coexist With Bullish Conviction?

Here's the contradiction at the heart of this survey, and it's the part that's actually interesting. 65% of institutions planning to buy more crypto in 2026 cited clearer regulations as their primary motivation. But 66% of the same group named regulatory uncertainty as their biggest investment concern. Same institutions. Bullish because of clarity, scared because of ambiguity — simultaneously.

What that tells you: institutions aren't waiting for perfect regulatory certainty before moving. They're pricing in the uncertainty and buying anyway, because the opportunity cost of sitting on the sidelines is now higher than the regulatory risk. That's a fundamentally different calculus than two or three years ago, when the standard institutional answer to crypto was 'we're monitoring developments.'

The regulatory picture is genuinely improving, even if slowly. 78% of respondents flagged market structure as the area most needing clearer rules, followed by digital asset firm licensing at 56% and tax treatment at 54%. Progress has arrived on some fronts — the GENIUS Act established the first federal stablecoin framework in the U.S., and the SEC recently issued guidance on tokenized securities while relaunching its joint Project Crypto initiative with the CFTC to align both agencies on digital asset oversight. None of that resolves all the ambiguity. But it moves the needle enough that institutions with a twelve-month view are apparently satisfied.

The telling number isn't the 74% who are bullish. It's the 66% who are scared and buying anyway.