Crystal CEO foresees boom with Bitcoin ETF adoption

Navin Gupta, the newly appointed CEO of Crystal Intelligence, expects the blockchain intelligence firm’s growth to continue throughout 2024.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Gupta said that he expects the company’s growth to further accelerate as the non-regulated part of the crypto industry shrinks, thanks to the approval of spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States, which led to an increase in the number of firms applying for operating licenses, according to Gupta. He said:

Crystal Intelligence offers blockchain analysis and investigative and compliance solutions to institutions and regulators. The firm’s global customer base doubled during 2023, with Crystal’s product now monitoring over 50,000 organizations, according to a press release shared with Cointelegraph. The company was founded by Bitfury in 2017.

According to Gupta, the growing stablecoin adoption is also expected to increase the need for Crystal’s compliance services.

Stablecoins are the most widely used crypto assets, accounting for over 50% of on-chain transaction volume to or from centralized services between July 2022 and June 2023, according to “The Chainalysis 2023 Geography of Cryptocurrency” report.

According to Gupta, the recently launched spot Bitcoin ETFs will bring a steady inflow of non-speculative investment for the first time in Bitcoin’s history, legitimizing the asset class in the eyes of global regulatory authorities. Gupta said institutional investors have already started looking at the asset class more favorably.

Gupta expects this to incentivize ETF issuers like BlackRock to launch additional funds:

An estimated 75% of new Bitcoin investments come from the 10 spot Bitcoin ETFs, according to a report by on-chain data analytics firm CryptoQuant.

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