While Everyone Watched BTC, Crypto Quietly Became Financial Infrastructure

For years, crypto’s success was measured in price charts and trading volume. Maksym Sakharov, Co-Founder and Group CEO of WeFi, believes that era is coming to an end. 

Sakharov has watched the industry’s center of gravity shift from retail traders refreshing screens to corporate treasuries quietly integrating digital asset infrastructure over the years. 

In his view, the real adoption story begined when CFOs and risk teams got comfortable enough to sign off on tokenized instruments and stablecoin settlement.

Sakharov explains, in an exclusive interview with , why tokenized equity is not about replacing markets, but about upgrading market plumbing — reducing settlement times from days to minutes, lowering operational costs, and opening access to global capital. This is how crypto enters corporate balance sheets without headlines or hype.

You argue that crypto adoption shifts only when CFOs and risk teams get comfortable. What, specifically, has changed in the past 12–18 months that finally moved them off the sidelines?

Regulated custody and clearer accounting treatment. Two years ago, holding crypto on a balance sheet was an audit nightmare. Now you have the GENIUS Act providing a stablecoin framework, the SEC shifting from automatic opposition to active engagement, and the Basel Committee revisiting capital requirements for banks holding digital assets. 

At least 24 out of 30 surveyed jurisdictions saw financial institutions announce new digital asset projects this year. CFOs sat out for years because their auditors and risk teams gave them no choice — and that’s finally changing now.

Tokenized treasuries and money-market funds are gaining traction, but many critics say this is still “niche.” What threshold — in volume or usage — turns tokenization into unavoidable financial infrastructure?

Honestly, the threshold already passed for the major players. J.P. Morgan is settling deals on Solana. Goldman and BNY Mellon are tokenizing money-market products together, and BlackRock’s BUIDL fund is active now. 

The question now is how long it takes for everyone else to catch up. My guess is that once a few more deals close quicker and cheaper on tokenized rails, the rest will follow pretty rapidly.

Stablecoins processed trillions this year, yet regulators still worry about systemic risk. At what point do stablecoins stop being a “crypto issue” and become a core financial stability concern?

They already are; regulators just haven’t fully admitted it yet. Stablecoins hit $309 billion in market cap and over $9 trillion in payments this year. USDT alone is larger than most national payment systems. The GENIUS Act and MiCA both recognize this implicitly. 

The language changed from “ban it” to “regulate it properly” because the alternative is ceding that infrastructure to offshore issuers entirely. When a single issuer can affect dollar liquidity at that scale, you’re not dealing with a crypto sideshow anymore.

You suggest that regulation has shifted from enforcement to integration. Where is that shift genuine, and where is it still more rhetoric than reality?

The genuine integration is simple to spot if you follow where incumbents benefit. Stablecoins, ETFs, and tokenized money-market funds all moved forward because they work within existing structures and assist established players expand. 

The SEC softened its stance, Europe passed MiCA, and Goldman gets to tokenize without friction. But DeFi still gets enforcement actions dressed up in innovation-friendly language. Anything that actually threatens the current financial order gets treated as a difficulty, not an opportunity.

Many institutions say they’re “experimenting” with tokenization. How do you distinguish between experimentation and true balance-sheet adoption?

Watch who’s talking about it. If it’s the innovation team at a fintech conference, it’s probably still experimental. If it’s the CFO on an earnings call explaining a treasury decision, it’s real. 

Most firms are stuck in the first phase, recycling the identical pilots and announcing partnerships that never ship anything. The ones who actually adopted tokenization got quiet about it because there’s nothing left to trade internally. It just became part of how they operate.

If crypto’s future is balance sheets, not price charts, does that mean volatility becomes a feature to eliminate rather than tolerate?

For the infrastructure layer, absolutely. Nobody running treasury operations wants volatility. Stablecoins exist precisely because CFOs need predictable value. But volatility won’t disappear from crypto entirely; it just gets segmented. 

The settlement and payments layer runs on stable instruments. The speculative layer keeps its price swings for people who want that exposure. As more income-generating real-world assets move onto blockchain rails, the networks become less susceptible to pure sentiment-driven flows. The correlation between crypto and tech stocks may finally fragileen.

You argue that crypto’s real disruption was always settlement infrastructure. Does that mean blockchains ultimately become invisible to end users — like TCP/IP for finance?

Honestly, that’s the only way any technology truly wins: when people stop talking about it because it just works. Right now, blockchain is still a tradeing point, something companies announce and put in press releases. In five years, a treasurer won’t know or care that their settlement ran on tokenized rails. They’ll just view that the payment cleared quicker, and the report will say everything reconciled.

Looking ahead five years, what metric would convince even a hardened skeptic that crypto has “made it”?

Boredom. When tokenized assets show up in a Fortune 500 earnings call and analysts don’t bother asking about it because it’s just another treasury line item. When your bank offers stablecoin settlement as a standard option and the marketing team doesn’t even mention it. 

Right now, every deal on rails gets a press release. The moment that stops — the moment nobody cares about the technology because it just works — that’s when the skeptics run out of arguments.