What's happening now in crypto is completely normal, says Block Scholes' CEO

Bitcoin has stumbled into one of its historically weakest months, sentiment remains subdued, and investors have increasingly shifted their attention to AI stocks, SpaceX, and a wave of trillion-dollar technology companies.

For many, it feels like crypto has once again lost its momentum.

But Eamonn Gashier, founder and CEO of Block Scholes, believes the current slowdown says less about the end of crypto's growth story and more about how the market is maturing.

Speaking on the latest episode of Zero Sum with Invezz's Harsh Vardhan, Gashier argued that crypto is evolving from a speculative asset class into financial infrastructure, where projects solving tangible problems are beginning to separate themselves from the rest of the market.

Crypto's quiet period looks like a normal market cycle

Bitcoin's recent weakness has coincided with tighter monetary policy, renewed geopolitical uncertainty, and capital flowing into AI-related equities.

Yet Gashier said investors who have only experienced crypto during its explosive rallies may be misreading the current environment.

"What's happening now in crypto is completely normal."

Drawing on more than a decade and a half of experience trading emerging markets before entering crypto, Gashier said periods of sharp rallies are typically followed by corrections, lower volatility, and extended trading ranges before the next investment narrative emerges.

He also pointed to changing capital flows. Retail traders have increasingly gravitated toward tokenised equities and perpetual products linked to companies such as Tesla, while institutional investors have chased AI stocks and high-profile IPOs.

That rotation, he argued, reflects changing market preferences rather than a breakdown in crypto itself.

Investors are rewarding utility instead of hype

Perhaps the biggest change, according to Gashier, is that crypto markets have become far more selective than in previous cycles.

Unlike earlier bull markets, where most digital assets rallied regardless of their purpose, investors are increasingly distinguishing between projects that solve real-world problems and those driven primarily by speculation.

"The market is much more grown up and very selective."

He cited Hyperliquid's HYPE token as an example, arguing that the exchange's ability to facilitate large-scale trading across tokenized assets demonstrated genuine utility rather than simply attracting speculative demand.

For Gashier, that represents a broader shift in how crypto markets are beginning to price value.

Blockchain is increasingly becoming financial infrastructure

While cryptocurrencies often dominate headlines, Gashier suggested the more important story lies beneath them.

Rather than replacing traditional finance, he argued that blockchain is increasingly being adopted to modernize it.

Large financial institutions are exploring tokenized funds, on-chain settlement, and digital asset infrastructure to reduce costs and improve settlement speeds.

Block Scholes itself provides pricing data—known as oracle services—that helps decentralized exchanges settle derivatives and tokenized real-world assets.

The company now supports pricing for the vast majority of decentralized crypto options markets while also supplying pricing data for tokenized equities and commodities traded on-chain.

For Gashier, those developments suggest blockchain is gradually becoming financial plumbing rather than a niche technology.

Regulation may matter more than technology

Despite rapid innovation, Gashier argued that regulation remains the industry's biggest constraint.

"Policy plays a major role."

He likened the current regulatory environment to a 'dam' holding back a flood of capital and innovation.

While the US and jurisdictions like the UAE and Singapore have begun opening the floodgates, he believes Britain risks losing entrepreneurs and investment unless it adopts a more proactive approach to digital assets and decentralized finance.

The next wave could be defined by tokenized finance

Looking ahead, Gashier identified tokenized investment vaults and prediction markets as two of the industry's most promising areas.

Vaults allow investors to allocate capital to transparent, rules-based strategies without handing custody of their assets to a fund manager, while prediction markets could reshape price discovery by attaching financial incentives to forecasts rather than relying solely on analyst opinions.

He also expects on-chain trading to become increasingly common as financial markets move away from legacy settlement systems that can still take several days to complete transactions.

"The future is here."

The episode concludes with Gashier's market outlook, where he said he remains bullish on the convergence of AI and crypto, cautious about rising geopolitical tensions, and believes the UK could become an unexpected winner if policymakers remove the regulatory barriers holding back digital asset innovation.

Watch the full episode of Zero Sum for the complete discussion and subscribe for more conversations on markets, money, and geopolitics.