Financial institutions are more interested than ever in crypto, says CF Benchmarks CEO

The CEO of CF Benchmarks has revealed that financial institutions are more interested in cryptocurrency than ever.

The CEO of Benchmarks, Sui Chung, told Blockworks in a recent interview that institutional interest in cryptocurrency is now higher than ever.

CF Benchmarks is a subsidiary of Kraken. The company is an index provider seeking to fill product gaps in the market related to DeFi, DAOs and smart contract functionality.

When asked about institutional interest in cryptocurrency, Chung stated that;

“Although it’s winter, we’re fielding ever more calls from traditional financial institutions who are either contemplating launching a product in the space or have actually decided that they are going to do something — and obviously want to talk about licensing our indices and understanding the methodologies.

Increasingly, we find the institutions who talk to us have a framework about how they think about it, and they want to know if we see eye to eye on that. So, that’s a change.”

Chung also talked about BlackRock’s recent partnership with Coinbase, pointing out that it is a huge development for the broader cryptocurrency market.he said;

“It’s obviously huge. Connecting those two pieces of plumbing for $40 trillion worth of assets is not trivial at all. However, I would temper that by saying it is still just plumbing. Are the [portfolio managers] and CIOs rushing to allocate? No, that’s not the case. But a very significant pain point has been taken away.

Really, what the BlackRock and Coinbase hookup means is that there are a bunch of asset managers out there who now no longer need to do all that vendor onboarding, and hooking it up, which is not trivial. So, I would say the bigger potential impact is it’s not so much that more investors will allocate. It’s that more asset managers can spin up products more quickly.”

The interest in cryptocurrencies remains despite the ongoing bear market. BTC and other leading cryptocurrencies are down by more than 60% from the all-time highs they attained late last year.

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