The chill that dragged digital assets down through most of the hot summer months is finally beginning to lift. Bitcoin surged about 20% last week — its strongest three-day rally since 2023 — and the obituaries written over the past few months are suddenly turning into rebound stories. But in the view of Grayscale CEO Peter Mintzberg, both narratives obscure what is really going on: market watchers are failing to see the forest — the long-term rise of digital assets — because they are fixated on the trees, represented by short-term price swings.

Mintzberg, who spent 20 years at traditional asset and wealth management firms including BlackRock, Apollo, and Goldman Sachs before joining Grayscale two years ago, writes that he observed a recurring pattern over his career: new asset classes and related technologies are often dismissed before they are understood, debated before they are accepted, and eventually incorporated into the financial system. When it comes to digital assets, he argues, that process is well underway.

Bitcoin is not the whole universe

To many, digital assets still mean crypto — or, more precisely, Bitcoin. That is understandable, Mintzberg writes: Bitcoin remains the most popular digital asset by far, accounting for about 60% of the total market capitalization of digital assets, and it surely does — and will continue to — play a core role in many investors' portfolios, despite the volatility inherent to market cycles, geopolitical risks, and monetary policy changes.

But he cautions against taking Bitcoin, a crypto asset, for the whole of the digital asset universe. The primary forces propelling adoption and expansion of the asset class today, he says, are the result of two strong currents: first, higher institutional demand, and second, wider corporate adoption of the blockchain-based technology that underlies it all.

Institutional demand

On the institutional side, Mintzberg points to 2025, when daily flows for Bitcoin-based ETPs (exchange-traded products) — the net new cash added or withdrawn — regularly exceeded $500 million, an amount roughly 12 times the new tokens added to the market every day by Bitcoin miners. That, he writes, has transformed the old supply dynamics.

Demand has reasserted itself even through this year's selloff. After eight straight weeks of outflows, US-listed spot Bitcoin ETPs — a category that has existed only since January 2024, when the SEC approved the first such funds, among them Grayscale's own Bitcoin Trust after its conversion from a closed-end vehicle — posted three consecutive weeks of inflows into late July, even as the year stayed net negative. Recent drawdowns have also been materially shallower than the 70% to 80% declines that defined earlier "crypto winters," such as the 2022 downturn that spanned the failures of the Terra ecosystem, the crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, and the FTX exchange. Further, in a 2026 EY survey of over 350 institutional investors, 73% said they planned to increase their allocations to digital assets. All of this, Mintzberg writes, suggests that institutional capital appears to be playing a larger role in setting the marginal price for digital assets.

Corporate adoption

Concurrently, Mintzberg describes a gradual but steadily rising adoption of new technologies within corporate environments. Around 60% of Fortune 500 executives in 2025 reported that their companies were working on blockchain initiatives, while firms such as Fidelity, Visa, and Stripe are advancing stablecoin initiatives. Stablecoins — digital tokens pegged to sovereign currencies, most prominently the US dollar — gained their first federal rulebook in July 2025, when the GENIUS Act established a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins in the United States. Most financial services firms are experimenting with digital asset technology in their own back offices.

These are infrastructure decisions by firms that deploy investment capital cautiously and over long horizons, he notes. That type of capital does not move on sentiment — it moves on conviction in underlying utility.

AI and blockchains are complementary

Mintzberg also addresses the consternation over whether "the AI trade" is somehow in contradiction with that of digital assets. Nothing could be further from the truth, he writes: artificial intelligence and public blockchains are complementary technologies. AI agents will make new demands on the financial system — such as machine-native micropayments and instant cross-border settlement — which blockchains are uniquely equipped to provide. Centralized AI development also introduces risks related to bias and control, which may be partly mitigated by decentralized alternatives and blockchain-based identity tools.

Moving into established regulatory frameworks

The broader direction is increasingly clear, Mintzberg writes: digital assets are moving into established regulatory frameworks rather than remaining outside them. He expects the trend to continue to accelerate as cautious investment allocation committees learn to incorporate digital assets into their governance frameworks — a process that takes time. Over the past several years, regulatory clarity has improved, investment vehicles have matured, and governance frameworks have become more established. As a result, more institutions are now equipped to evaluate digital assets alongside other long-term portfolio exposures.

Signal versus noise

Despite all this, many in the financial press will no doubt continue to search for market blips that can serve as a pretext to write off digital assets, Mintzberg writes. But focusing on short-term price volatility is missing the point, in his view. What truly matters is what is happening beneath the market's surface — in institutional quarters and in corporate IT departments across Wall Street and beyond. That is the signal. The rest is noise.

Peter Mintzberg is CEO of Grayscale Investments, a leading digital asset-focused investment platform.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.