Bitwise CIO: Regulatory Compliant ICOs Will Become a Core Theme in 2026, Incarnating as the Fourth Pillar of Crypto Disrupting Traditional Finance

BlockBeats News, November 12th, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan stated that Coinbase's newly launched token sale platform marks the strong comeback of crypto-based capital formation. Compliant ICOs are expected to become a core theme in 2026, reshaping the startup financing model, becoming the fourth pillar of cryptocurrency disrupting traditional finance, with the previous three pillars being: Bitcoin's reshaping of gold, stablecoins' reshaping of the dollar, and tokenization's reshaping of trading and settlement.

Matt Hougan said that early ICO experiments proved that blockchain technology could connect entrepreneurs and investors faster and at a lower cost than traditional IPOs, even though the previous boom failed. The key difference this time is regulation and structure. Current SEC Chairman Paul Atkins (who previously co-chaired the Token Alliance, a crypto advocacy group supporting ICOs, and served on the board of tokenization company Securitize) has recently called for new rules and safe harbor mechanisms to support compliant token issuance, and Coinbase's new platform is the first major implementation in this direction.