Institutions, States & the Bitcoin Shift | BTC Prague 2025 Panel

At BTC Prague 2025, our panel tackled the big questions around Bitcoin’s institutional and nation-state adoption: is it actually good for Bitcoin, who benefits, and what does the coming shift really look like? Here’s where we landed.

Institutional Adoption Is Already Here — We Just Haven’t Felt It Yet

When we talk about institutional adoption, we’re talking about a few different things at once. There’s the corporate treasury play — companies like Strategy paving the way and opening the door to fixed income markets, convertible bonds, and significant capital flows. Then there’s the pension fund angle. I work for what is effectively a pension fund in Australia, and we were the first in our country to invest in Bitcoin. In the pension space globally, there’s only a handful of funds that have done this — but it’s starting to pick up. The ETF launch was a real trigger. And from the banking side, institutional adoption also means providing Bitcoin services — settlement, trading, peer-to-peer — to the mainstream public.

Is There Such a Thing as Bad Adoption?

Bitcoin is an open standard and always should be. Nobody should try to stop adoption through technical means — that’s neither realistic nor desirable. But there are things that are bad for the people around Bitcoin, even if Bitcoin itself survives everything. The biggest concern is paper Bitcoin — the same way we’ve seen paper gold. Rehypothecation, no real proof of reserves, fractional holdings. That said, this risk is much lower with publicly traded companies audited by major financial firms than it was with players like FTX. And even proof of reserves has limits — you might see the coins on-chain, but you can’t always see the liabilities or hidden agreements sitting on top of them.

Nation State Adoption: A Double-Edged Sword

Cards on the table — I’m an anarchist. I don’t think nation states should exist. So should they hold Bitcoin? No. But they do exist, and that’s the world we operate in. The honest question isn’t whether governments will get Bitcoin — they will get it eventually. The question is how. Will they tax it, seize it, or mine it with excess energy? We can try to steer that. What concerns me more is a future where a government amasses a huge Bitcoin reserve and then a completely different administration comes into power and uses it as a club. That’s a real risk. The best counter to it? Individuals holding more Bitcoin. It’s a fixed supply. The more we hold, the less they can.

El Salvador is the most interesting case study here. The government declared Bitcoin legal tender, but the real adoption happened bottom-up — Bitcoin Beach, Berlín in the mountains — communities that didn’t actually need the government to do what they did. That grassroots energy can happen anywhere the government simply stays out of the way. Top-down adoption from the US strategic reserve did send a powerful signal to institutional investors like us, though. Seeing that made the case for our own Bitcoin allocation significantly stronger.

Should Bitcoiners Be More Politically Active?

There are two types of political engagement — working within the system and working outside it. Both have value. But when it comes to influencing politicians, I’m not interested in creating new regulations. I’m interested in removing existing ones that are in the way. Capital gains tax is one of the clearest examples. In New Zealand, capital gains tax doesn’t exist on any asset class — and that makes Bitcoin so much easier to actually use as money. I’ll happily talk to governments about eliminating capital gains tax on Bitcoin, even despite my feelings about governments generally. That’s pragmatism, not endorsement.

The Bitcoin Shift: Faster in Some Places, Slower in Others

When you look at the S-shaped adoption curve, we’re somewhere around 5% — but on the chart, you can barely distinguish where we are from zero. The slope is starting to take off. All the pieces are in place: ETFs have removed the old onboarding bottlenecks, corporate treasury vehicles give institutions easy exposure,