October 13, 2025 · Old Billingsgate, London
There is a joke buried in the venue, and I refuse to believe anyone planned it. Europe’s most senior gathering of traditional finance and crypto took place at Old Billingsgate, which for the better part of a thousand years was London’s fish market. Bankers from Goldman Sachs, Citi and Barclays spent the day debating the future of money in a hall that once reeked magnificently of cod, and somewhere a Victorian fishmonger is having a quiet laugh at all of us. If you wanted a single image for crypto’s journey from the fringe to the very heart of the City, I’d suggest the old trading floor for haddock does the job beautifully.
I pay attention to this particular event mainly because of what it isn’t. The Digital Asset Summit is not a retail conference, and nobody there wants to sell you a token, a dream, or a course on manifesting wealth. There are no hoodies with venture funding behind them, no strangers materialising at your elbow to explain that a cartoon frog is a store of value. It is curated, quite deliberately, for the people who actually move institutional money — the heads of digital assets at banks, the portfolio managers, the allocators, the policymakers — which makes the room a far better guide to where finance is heading than any price chart, and considerably worse company at a party.
Who was actually in the room
The guest list did most of the talking. Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum, shared the bill with Mathew McDermott, Goldman Sachs’ head of digital assets, and with Matt Kunke from BlackRock’s digital asset strategy team, and around them gathered Citi and Barclays, Franklin Templeton and KKR, the venerable Scottish investment house Baillie Gifford, and — because Britain cannot help itself — an actual member of the House of Lords.
Do sit with that combination for a moment, because it repays the effort. A decade ago, an Ethereum founder and a Goldman Sachs division head would have been speaking different languages in different buildings, the latter politely pretending the former did not exist, possibly while checking that the door was locked. That they now share a stage in a converted fish market, swapping notes on custody arrangements and portfolio allocation, is the whole story of 2025 captured in a single photograph. Nobody stormed the establishment. The establishment booked a venue and put the rebels on the programme.
The magnificently boring questions
What struck me most was how unglamorous the agenda had become. There was very little appetite for whether Bitcoin is the future of money, which is a question best left to dinner parties and the men who corner you at them, and a great deal of interest in the workmanlike matters that determine whether a large institution can participate at all. They wanted to know how you hold the stuff safely, which is the small matter of custody, a subject that sounds crushingly dull and turns out to be everything. They wanted to know how you satisfy a compliance officer, how far tokenised real-world assets have travelled along that long march from clever pilot to boring plumbing, where exactly stablecoins slot into the machinery of institutional settlement, and what on earth Bitcoin is doing in a portfolio that also owns gilts.
None of these is a thrilling question, and I rather love them for it. They are the questions asked in the hushed moments just before enormous sums of money move, and long after everyone who shouts about price has grown hoarse and wandered off to find a livelier room.
The Brussels Effect, and Britain’s bet
Here is the idea worth taking home with you. The legal scholar Anu Bradford coined the phrase the Brussels Effect to describe a genuinely remarkable trick, whereby the European Union sets a rule, it quietly becomes the world’s rule — not through force, but through the sheer gravitational pull of a market too large to ignore. Comply to sell to Europeans, and it is usually cheaper to comply everywhere else as well. It is why your phone charger looks the way it does, and why every website you visit now begs you to think carefully about cookies.
Europe’s crypto rulebook, MiCA, is a serious attempt at exactly this: comprehensive, prescriptive, and, say its supporters, a genuine protection for consumers that finally allows firms to operate across the bloc without collecting twenty-seven separate headaches along the way. Britain, standing outside it, has made a rather different wager on a principles-based framework, which its champions describe as room to innovate and its critics describe as room to wriggle. Both readings are honest, and anyone who tells you confidently which one wins is guessing with unusual conviction. What is not in doubt is that these two approaches are now courting the very same institutions, and that rooms like this one are precisely where those firms decide, over a coffee, in a fish market, whose rules they would rather live under.
How I read it
I find rooms like this far more instructive than any rally, because watching what conservative institutions actually do, rather than what enthusiasts loudly say, gives you a slower and infinitely sturdier signal. A bank moves only once its risk committee, its lawyers and its custodians have all run out of objections, a process that proceeds at roughly the pace of continental drift, and the fact that those objections are now being worked through in public, at a fish market, in front of the House of Lords, strikes me as the actual news of the day. It also reminds me that the interesting money is patient. Institutions plan in decades while the rest of us refresh a chart, and there is a great deal to be said for borrowing that unhurried habit in our own affairs. None of it tells you what anything will be worth on Tuesday, and it was never meant to. It tells you the direction of travel, and I would far rather know that slowly than guess at the other, quickly.
This is me thinking out loud in your company — a read on the room, not financial advice. What you make of the institutions arriving is entirely your call.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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