Crypto has historically been fixated on trading screens—price charts, volumes, and market caps. But according to industry observers, the next major cycle may be defined by who owns and operates the infrastructure underneath those screens. This shift has significant implications for businesses and investors as digital assets become more integrated with traditional finance.
Barry Silbert's Digital Currency Group has long invested across multiple layers of digital assets, but one layer has become unusually tangible. DCG-controlled Fortitude has been expanding its owned computing and power infrastructure, including a new data center acquisition in Nebraska that pushed its owned power portfolio beyond 60 megawatts. This move underscores the growing importance of physical assets like power, hardware, and real estate in the crypto economy. Blockchain networks, artificial intelligence, and mining all require substantial computing resources, and the cloud still lives somewhere—crypto does too.
Meanwhile, David Ripley of Kraken represents a different version of the same infrastructure thesis. Kraken, historically known as an exchange, is expanding through parent company Payward into institutional trading, custody, tokenized securities, derivatives, payments, and regulated financial infrastructure. Kraken's xStocks offering allows eligible international customers to access tokenized representations of traditional U.S. equities and ETFs, extending the exchange model into conventional brokerage territory. Additionally, Kraken and Franklin Templeton have announced a collaboration spanning tokenized investments, custody, yield products, and institutional liquidity. This convergence shows crypto companies competing to become infrastructure for financial transactions, not just crypto transactions.
The last market collapse changed what investors notice. During downturns, questions about asset ownership, sustainable revenue, and institutional customers become paramount. Infrastructure provides a foundation that makes crypto harder to dismiss, as physical and financial assets create permanence. A data center still exists even if a token's value plummets; a regulated custody operation retains institutional relationships. While infrastructure can be mismanaged, it changes the nature of the business by creating something tangible underneath the narrative.
Kraken's evolution also highlights how difficult it is to categorize crypto companies using original labels. Once an exchange offers crypto, tokenized stocks, derivatives, custody, and payments, "exchange" becomes an incomplete description. This mirrors transformations in technology, where companies like Amazon and Apple expanded beyond their initial products. Ripley has described the future of financial markets as global, digital, and capable of operating beyond conventional trading hours. Tokenized equities provide a glimpse of that future, with the larger opportunity being the infrastructure connecting all of it.
This transition also fosters a healthier way to evaluate crypto companies, moving away from narratives and toward measurable assets. A custody platform can be measured by assets and clients; a data center has measurable capacity; a trading platform has observable liquidity. As the industry matures, infrastructure ownership may become the next moat, as regulatory licenses, institutional relationships, liquidity, and data centers require time and capital to replicate. Silbert's and Ripley's strategies reflect different versions of the same bet: the next phase of crypto may reward ownership of the rails more than attention on the train.
Crypto will always watch the price chart, but the companies shaping its next decade increasingly appear to be building elsewhere. Neither strategy guarantees success, but both reflect an industry becoming more physical, regulated, and operational than its speculative reputation suggests. The next cycle will still have winners on the screen, but the more interesting winners may be underneath it.
