JPMorgan: The biggest risk for Bitcoin is not Strategy’s sell-off, but blockchain adoption that bypasses public chains and tokens.

JPMorgan Chase’s analyst team noted that the market views Strategy’s Bitcoin sale plan as a key risk for the crypto sector, but it is not a major structural threat to Bitcoin. The more fundamental risk lies in tokenization, payments, and settlements increasingly taking place on permissioned infrastructure that does not rely on public blockchains. If this trend continues, the entire crypto ecosystem could face a "structural downgrade"—marked by slower transaction activity, reduced liquidity, and weaker capital inflows—ultimately weighing on Bitcoin. The analysts stated bluntly: "In our view, a more significant risk stems from the way blockchain is adopted in traditional finance, which continues to bypass public, permissionless networks." The analysts explained that institutional adoption so far has clearly favored permissioned chains, as they offer advantages in privacy, KYC/AML controls, governance, throughput, legal accountability, and regulatory certainty, posing a competitive threat to public blockchains like Ethereum. If tokenized deposits are widely adopted—especially in non-transferable forms favored by regulators—it could reduce demand for stablecoins in institutional payments and settlements; SWIFT’s blockchain initiative and central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects such as the digital euro and digital renminbi further strengthen regulated alternatives. In the roughly $500 billion tokenized real-world assets market, while Ethereum currently holds a certain share, this likely reflects early-stage experimentation rather than the market’s long-term structure. As institutional adoption grows, issuance, custody, settlement, and lifecycle management will likely be conducted more on private or permissioned infrastructure that meets requirements for identity, confidentiality, and operational resilience, with public blockchains used only for distribution and limited secondary trading.