Three recent events make a strong case for crypto in portfolios
10 JUN, 2026
By Samir Kerbage from Hashdex
Crypto prices have been down this year, but what has been happening underneath the surface is what investors should be paying attention to.
In May alone, three events underscored how fast digital assets are becoming embedded in the global financial system. The stablecoin market cap crossed $320 billion, making the sector one of the largest structural buyers of short-duration US Treasuries on the planet. Iran began accepting bitcoin as payment for passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most critical oil shipping lane. And the CLARITY Act, landmark digital asset market structure legislation, cleared the US Senate Banking Committee.
Each event tells a different story but together, they tell one: Crypto is no longer speculative infrastructure waiting for adoption.
I've spent much of the past year in advisor meetings where the question is still "should I?" May answered that question. The new question is "how?" Here's what I tell advisors.
The instinct when you hear 'crypto' is to ask: bitcoin or something else? That question served investors well enough in 2017, when bitcoin was essentially the only institutional-grade option. It doesn't serve them well now. The asset class has matured. There are smart-contract platforms with real usage, stablecoin infrastructure processing trillions in settlement volume annually, and tokenization protocols attracting some of the most sophisticated capital in traditional finance.
Trying to pick winners in this environment carries the same risks as picking individual internet stocks in 1998. Most investors got that wrong, not because they were unsophisticated, but because the future distribution of value across the ecosystem was genuinely unknowable. The investors who won were the ones who owned the market.
This is the case for the Nasdaq CME Crypto Index (NCI), a rules-based, market-cap-weighted benchmark with the same type of methodology that made the Nasdaq-100 investable for institutional portfolios. Constituents are selected on transparent criteria: liquidity, regulatory compliance, custody standards. It rebalances quarterly. No active bets on individual protocols. No discretionary overrides.
What that gives advisors is something the crypto market has historically lacked: discipline. A 5% allocation to an NCI-based strategy in a 60/40 portfolio, based on data from April 2022 through September 2025, improved annualized returns from 7.2% to 8.7%. The volatility that came with it was manageable precisely because of the sizing. This isn't speculation. It's portfolio construction.
May 2026 didn't change the thesis. It accelerated the timeline.Advisors who have been waiting for clarity have most of it now. Our view is that professional investors should aim to own the crypto market, and let the speculators try to pick the winners and losers.
