Headline: Wall Street wants blockchain tech — just not the open kind
Wall Street firms are warming to blockchain’s potential, but many are rejecting the open, fully transparent ledgers that defined early crypto. Speaking at the Digital Asset Summit in New York, Don Wilson, founder and CEO of DRW — the TradFi trading firm behind institutional crypto desk Cumberland — made the case that public blockchains clash with how traditional finance operates.
“There is no world in which institutions are going to say, ‘Oh yeah, just publish all of my trades onchain,’” Wilson said. “Any money manager would view it as a failure of fiduciary duty to publish to the world every trade that they’re doing.”
Why transparency is a problem for institutions
Wilson argued that visible, immutable trade histories undermine core institutional needs: protecting trading strategies, managing risk and complying with fiduciary obligations. If large holders’ trades are visible to all market participants, the market can detect and exploit patterns, creating “huge price impact” on subsequent trades. That transparency can enable front-running and transaction reordering — behaviors that run counter to fair, orderly financial markets.
“The problem is not the technology itself, but how it is implemented," Wilson added. "I think that it’s a mistake to put stuff on these chains that have complete transparency.”
TradFi’s alternative: private, permissioned chains
Ethereum and other public chains are often pitched as gateways between crypto and Wall Street, thanks to extensive DeFi ecosystems and early tokenization experiments. But, as Wilson noted, their visibility is a deterrent for large financial institutions.
Instead, many banks and asset managers have spent years building or backing private, permissioned networks that restrict who can see and validate transactions — giving firms tighter control over data, access and compliance. Large institutions including JPMorgan have developed in-house systems or supported platforms aimed at limiting transparency and tailoring governance.
“Privacy is kind of at the top of the list,” Wilson said, also pointing to market-structure concerns like front-running as reasons why public chains “are just not suitable for financial markets.”
Tokenization is coming — just not in the same form
Wilson acknowledged the broad opportunity in tokenizing traditional assets — stocks, bonds and other major asset classes — but expects that onchain versions of these instruments will look different from today’s public networks.
“I think it’s obvious that that will not happen,” he said, referring to wholesale institutional adoption of fully transparent chains. “Everybody thinks I’m crazy … so I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. We’ll see.”
DRW’s early involvement in crypto — the firm launched Cumberland in 2014 as one of the first institutional crypto trading desks — gives Wilson a front-row perspective on how digital-asset infrastructure has evolved. His remarks reflect a wider industry pattern: enthusiasm for blockchain’s efficiencies and automation, coupled with a preference for architectures that preserve confidentiality, compliance and established market mechanics.
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