Brendan Ma, head of investment strategy at the Arbitrum Foundation, said he met with representatives of institutions managing about €800 billion in assets over 48 hours of closed-door meetings to discuss crypto.
Private bankers and wealth managers kept returning to one problem:
“There’s been business or ecosystem traction that has been divorced from any fundamental case.”
Ma told CryptoSlate that allocators asked him how network activity connects to the asset an investor can own.
Allocate or build in crypto
Ma said institutions are drawn to networks “building towards durable, sustainable network revenues and a P&L that can be geared towards investment and reinvestment.”
He described a maturing crypto industry with “so much work” ahead to win trust. Partnerships are important to investors once they reach the income statement, and the question he hears is how a partnership “is relevant for the underlying.”
Ma separates two conversations: one covers “whether you allocate and actually invest in crypto,” and the other covers whether an institution is trying “to build a product and deploy it with the infrastructure.”
Investors in the first group ask which infrastructure will power tokenization, and builders in the second ask which assets to put on chain. He said stablecoins and Treasuries came first, and “the race is now on” across private credit, equities, commodities and even hedge fund strategies.
Private and publicly listed banks he met had advanced thinking about products and investments and “haven’t been very public with their ambitions.”
What network activity earns
Robinhood Chain offers a concrete test of that distinction. The Ethereum layer-2 network, built with Arbitrum technology, opened to the public on July 1.
In its October 9 quarterly report, growthepie counted 793.7 million transactions and $51 million in fees paid by users between July 1 and September 30. It separately measured $591.4 million in application revenue.
The fee stream was concentrated: a 12-day burst from August 30 to September 10 accounted for 74% of the quarter’s network fees. Stablecoin supply grew from $102.3 million at launch to $1.07 billion by the end of the quarter.
That leaves allocators with two questions: how much activity persists beyond the launch surge, and how the resulting revenue reaches the asset they buy. Arbitrum’s governance documentation describes ARB as a token for voting on DAO proposals. An investment case must explain how those governance rights connect network economics to returns.
What would answer the question
Institutions that value the infrastructure could build on it independently of an ARB position. For an investment committee, sustained activity and a clear route from revenue to token-holder value would make a stronger case than a partnership announcement alone.
Ma predicts that in 12 months these institutions will be “very active, very knowledgeable” participants.
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