Major players on Wall Street, including BlackRock, are starting to embrace the crypto industry. BlackRock's founder and CEO, Larry Fink, who once called Bitcoin "an index of money laundering," has now submitted an application for a Bitcoin spot ETF and praised the cryptocurrency's potential to revolutionize finance. Other financial giants, such as Citadel Securities and Fidelity Investments, are also entering the crypto space.

However, this shift towards crypto adoption by traditional finance is happening during a weakened state of the industry, with regulatory crackdowns and a year-long crypto winter. The question remains whether the industry's ambition to democratize finance can survive this treatment.