Grayscale Research Director Zach Pandl told Cointelegraph that public blockchains and digital assets will play a major role in the financial markets over the next five to ten years, with a scale larger than most people envision. He also discussed whether Bitcoin has bottomed out around $58,000, the Clear Act, and the balance sheets of leveraged Bitcoin companies on the Trade Secrets program.

His existing narrative frames tokenization as a decades-long capital shift. Grayscale's research highlights Ethereum, Solana, Canton, BNB, Avalanche, and Chainlink, connecting the narrative of "over $300 trillion in assets on-chain"; Boston Consulting and Ripple have projected the scale of tokenization to grow from about $27 billion to nearly $19 trillion by 2033. Pandl stated that Ethereum is the largest vessel for stablecoins, tokenization, and on-chain finance, and that the Clear Act, if passed, will accelerate issuance; he described Canton as a near-term target for institutional permissioned chains, while Avalanche subnets are in a hybrid phase, with fully open global on-chain finance still not ready in terms of technology and institutions. He singled out AI-related protocols, stating that this segment could see trillions in assets, citing examples like Bittensor, NEAR, and Worldcoin.

Grayscale manages multiple spot and thematic trusts, and the research director's five-year window aligns with the product shelf: Bitcoin is priced as digital gold, with incremental stories in tokenization tracks and compliance frameworks. The Clear Act is stalled in the Senate over the 60-vote threshold and stablecoin reward controversies, which he listed as two conditions for whether the market has bottomed, the other being whether companies like Strategy can stabilize their balance sheets.

Five to ten years is not a K-line target but a timeline for migrating the settlement layer from accounts to a shared state. Products are already being sold according to this timeline.

The market mechanism is narrative configuration. Buy-side expresses funding channels for "financial infrastructure upgrades" in trusts and ETFs; sell-side positions public chains as the asset managers of future market operating systems. Funds are shifting from single Bitcoin to a basket of platform tokens and thematic trusts. Beneficiaries are Grayscale, which already has issuance licenses and research branding; those under pressure are short-term traders who only operate on a four-year cycle and do not buy into the settlement layer narrative. Event-driven narratives are interview slices, not new custody scale disclosures.

Writing the next decade as a major role is meant to permit today's configurations. The volume of on-chain finance still depends on whether the legislation and institutional systems can read each other.

Source: Public Information