Bitcoin's Biggest Buyers Have Gone Quiet

Bitcoin demand looks softer in the near term, but Brett Tejpaul argued the important story is not the negative Coinbase premium or Strategy pausing buys. He said those are noise compared with a broader institutional shift: seven of the world’s largest banks are now onboarding Coinbase infrastructure, and the real catalyst is payments, not ETFs.

Tejpaul said the Citi partnership is a template for how banks can move cash into USDC and then send money faster and cheaper across borders through existing banking relationships. He framed this as a structural change for corporate banking and payments, where banks may try to use crypto rails to defend their own franchises rather than simply handing business to crypto-native platforms. He also said Coinbase is increasingly positioning itself as infrastructure that banks can white-label or integrate.

The conversation also covered stablecoin regulation, tokenized assets, and Coinbase’s work with large financial institutions including JPMorgan, Citi, and PNC. Tejpaul said the industry is moving from isolated crypto products to a unified financial stack, where payments, tokenization, prediction markets, and stablecoins all sit on the same technology base.