Blockstreams exec says Bitcoin is the only “institutional grade asset”

While the rest of the crypto industry debates which chain wins, Blockstreams has spent over a decade betting that Bitcoin is the only foundation worth building on. Founded in 2014, it is one of the oldest companies in the space.

Peter Bain, chief marketing office at Blockstreams, sat down with TheStreet Roundtable to make the case that Bitcoin is no longer just an asset, but the infrastructure layer for the future of finance.

Bain argues that Blockstreams has already built the full financial stack institutions need, with real-world adoption and a security track record that other chains simply cannot match.

Bitcoin is the only institutional grade asset

Bain does not hedge on this point, saying “we feel pretty strongly about Bitcoin. We do believe that Bitcoin is really the only institutional grade asset in this space.”

His reasoning is structural, not speculative.

“It’s truly decentralized. There is no kind of oversight or individual or corporation that is in charge of Bitcoin. It is certainly the most battle tested.”

Institutional adoption is already accelerating on the back of this confidence, with Bitcoin ETFs pulling in billions since their approval and the broader institutional landscape increasingly treating Bitcoin as a core holding.

The Bitcoin stack

Blockstreams’ vision is a three-layer Bitcoin-native financial system that covers everything traditional finance needs.

The base layer handles settlement and security. The Liquid Network serves as the financial programmability layer and Lightning handles payments.

The Liquid Network was the first Bitcoin sidechain, launched in 2018, and enables asset issuance, rapid settlement, confidential transactions, and low fees. Think of it as Bitcoin’s capital markets layer, built for the kinds of settlement and asset issuance that Wall Street needs.

Today, Liquid has more than $3 billion in total value locked (TVL) for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, behind only Ethereum and BNB Chain, with assets including tokenized private credit and promissory notes.

The Lightning Network is Bitcoin’s payments layer. It processes transactions off the main Bitcoin blockchain instantly and for fractions of a penny, making everyday purchases and microtransactions practical.

It recently reached $1 billion in transaction volume.

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Security is the differentiator that institutions cannot ignore

Bain points to Liquid’s track record as the core argument against competing chains.

“It was launched in 2018. It’s had almost a flawless track record of uptime and no security issues. We do get concerned by the security issues that show up on some of these other chains. Just last week, there was another incident on another chain that lost upwards of $250 million,” he said.

The incident referenced was the KelpDAO hack, where North Korean group Lazarus stole over $605 million from the staking protocol.

For institutions managing large capital pools, a single security incident can be existential. Liquid’s architecture, inherited from Bitcoin, is specifically designed to eliminate that vulnerability.

Blockstream has been building this infrastructure for over a decade, the Liquid Network has $3B in real-world assets and a near-perfect security record, and institutions are quietly migrating to Bitcoin-native rails. The trend Bain describes, where the industry sees Bitcoin as infrastructure rather than just an asset, is still early but accelerating.