Where Bitcoin and DeFi stand against TradFi markets – Is crypto finally reaching an inflection point?

Over the past decade, Bitcoin has grown from a niche experiment into a financial instrument that regulators, institutions, and global investors now weigh against some of the most established benchmarks in traditional finance. What once existed on the fringes of the internet is now a staple of discussions in investment committees, trading desks, and payments departments.

The launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States last year accelerated that convergence. For the first time, the largest asset managers in the world were offering straightforward, regulated access to Bitcoin, and the inflows that followed showed that demand was never the problem. The bottleneck had always been the wrapper.

That institutionalization sets the stage for a larger exercise. Bitcoin is no longer best understood in isolation. To grasp where it fits today and where it might go next, it helps to compare its size, reach, and trading structure against the systems that have long defined modern markets. By looking at the number of people who own crypto versus those who hold bank cards, by stacking the AUM of Bitcoin ETFs against equity and gold funds, by measuring the notional size of Bitcoin futures against S&P contracts, and by weighing on-chain payments activity against Visa, Mastercard, and ACH, we can place crypto in a context that traditional audiences immediately recognize.

For DeFi, the same logic applies. Total value locked and stablecoin float can be viewed alongside hedge fund AUM or money market fund balances, while decentralized trading venues can be measured against centralized exchanges and even compared to exchange volumes on Wall Street.

The exercise is not about claiming parity or announcing that crypto has “caught up” to the systems it is measured against. The gap is still vast in many areas, and in some categories, it may never close in the conventional sense. Instead, it is about showing how far Bitcoin and DeFi have already come, where the parallels are strongest, and where the differences remain most stark. For investors deciding whether to allocate, traders evaluating liquidity, or payments executives considering future rails, the only way to make sense of crypto’s scale is to place it directly beside the numbers they already live by.

Any assessment of financial scale begins with people. By the end of 2024, Crypto.com estimated that there were roughly 659 million crypto owners worldwide. That figure is already remarkable: in just over a decade, an entirely new asset class has reached hundreds of millions of participants, surpassing the population of entire continents.

Still, the comparison that matters most is not absolute size but relative reach. Visa reported 4.6 billion payment credentials in force in 2024. This means that for every individual who has touched crypto, there are seven who use Visa credentials to move money around the world.

This disparity perfectly illustrates a basic truth about adoption. Crypto has broken into the mainstream, but cards and bank accounts remain the default. The right way to phrase it for a non-crypto audience is simple: crypto is a mainstream niche, while cards are ubiquitous. This is not a weakness but a framing tool. It shows that Bitcoin and DeFi have already achieved critical mass while leaving enormous headroom for growth.

It is also worth noting that Visa’s credentials number is not identical to unique users, just as crypto owners are not measured in the same way as bank account holders. Both are proxies, useful for broad comparisons, but not identical metrics.

The simplest takeaway resonates when presenting to a room full of traditional finance professionals: hundreds of millions have entered the crypto ecosystem, but billions continue to rely on the established networks.

The most visible evidence of Bitcoin’s integration into TradFi is the growth of spot ETFs. As of Sep. 18, 2025, the cohort of US spot Bitcoin ETFs carried just under $150 billion in assets under management (AUM). This is no longer the experimental tail of the ETF industry, but a pool of capital that sits alongside some of the most recognized funds in the world.

To put that number in context, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, the workhorse of equity exposure, had $661 billion in AUM on the same date. Bitcoin’s wrapper market is still smaller, but at roughly one-quarter the size of SPY, it is already visible on the radar of any allocator.

The comparison becomes even more striking when stacked against commodity ETFs. GLD and IAU, the two dominant gold funds, together held about $176 billion around mid-September. That means that Bitcoin ETFs in the US alone are already of comparable size to the largest gold vehicles, despite gold’s far longer history and its entrenched role in reserves and portfolios. For allocators who have always thought of gold as the alternative asset, Bitcoin has now joined the conversation not as an exotic derivative but as a direct peer in the ETF wrapper.

Flows also tell an important story. September 18 was not a day of heavy movement, as about $163 million net flowed into the US Bitcoin ETFs, but the week around it saw larger swings. The important part for a narrative is that flows exist and are reported daily, like they are for SPY, QQQ, or GLD. This makes Bitcoin ETFs measurable with the same tools used for any other fund. Analysts can compare week-over-week flows, measure them against price moves, and evaluate them as signals of retail or institutional demand.

For now, most of the growth is concentrated in the United States. The Hong Kong cohort of spot Bitcoin ETFs, launched with significant publicity, holds about $500 million, which is tiny compared to the American total. That contrast shows the regulatory advantage the US enjoys. It also hints at what could happen if other large markets open the door with similar products.

While ETFs have transformed access for long-only investors, derivatives markets remain the backbone of trading. On CME, Bitcoin futures and options have been live for years, but the past year has seen them settle into patterns that resemble traditional equity index and commodity contracts. Standard contracts coexist with micro contracts, weekly and monthly expiries are available, and options allow desks to express convexity and volatility views without touching the underlying asset.

The right comparison is not about claiming that Bitcoin derivatives rival S&P futures or options in size. They do not. Instead, the point is that the tools exist in the same format and through the same clearing house. A trader who already trades ES futures or SPX options can add BTC futures or BTC options on CME without new pipes. The desk risk, the margining, and the clearing processes are all consistent.

To quantify the difference, one can look at daily bulletins. On September 18, S&P options at Cboe moved orders of magnitude more contracts than CME Bitcoin options. Open interest in ES futures dwarfed that of Bitcoin futures. Yet the fact that both exist on the same screen is itself a statement of maturity. The liquidity is there, and though thinner, it is growing in a pattern that traders recognize.

Outside CME, offshore venues like Deribit dominate Bitcoin options, with open interest measured in the tens of billions of dollars. Including them is important for a holistic view, but the institutional lens often prefers the regulated CME contracts. Therefore, the narrative is twofold: the regulated path is growing, and the offshore path remains deeper in raw numbers but outside the remit of many institutional mandates.

Parallel to CME and centralized exchanges, decentralized perps markets have become a force in their own right. DefiLlama data shows that perpetual DEX volumes now exceed half a trillion dollars over a rolling 30-day window, with most of that concentrated in a handful of venues. Hyperliquid alone carried over $300 billion in 30-day activity, while dYdX and Aevo contributed smaller but still material amounts.

For Bitcoin specifically, on-chain perps markets are a growing slice of activity. They are designed differently from CME futures, with oracle dependencies, liquidation mechanisms, and custodial risk distributed across smart contracts rather than a central clearing house. But for traders who operate primarily within crypto, they are the native way to take leveraged exposure.

It is not necessary to equate these on-chain venues with CME. What matters is that they represent another liquidity pool, one that institutional desks cannot yet access directly but that increasingly sets the tone for funding, basis, and volatility in the broader market. The half-trillion 30-day figure is large enough that ignoring it means ignoring a driver of sentiment and price formation.

The most striking comparisons often come in payments. Visa processed more than $17 trillion in total volume, including payments and cash, over the 12 months ended June 30, 2025. That number is so large it risks becoming abstract, but it is grounded in everyday consumer spending.

Mastercard reports similar magnitudes in its global gross dollar volume, while ACH, the US account-to-account rail, processed $86 trillion in 2024 alone, with $23 trillion moving in the second quarter of 2025.
SWIFT, which does not publish consolidated annual TPV, instead frames its reach in daily terms. Over $300 billion moves through its GPI network daily, equivalent to about $110 trillion annually if annualized. These are the rails that underpin cross-border settlement and treasury operations, invisible to most consumers but essential to global commerce.

Against these numbers, Bitcoin’s settlement footprint looks small, but the right comparison is to use the adjusted transfer value series from Coin Metrics. That measure filters out self-churn and captures value actually transmitted on chain. On a daily basis, Bitcoin moves tens of billions of dollars, with trailing twelve-month totals running into the trillions. The scale is nowhere near Visa or ACH, but it is already a non-trivial slice of global value transfer, especially considering Bitcoin’s shorter history and lack of integration into point-of-sale networks.

Lightning adds nuance. Public capacity hovered around 4,000 to 4,500 BTC in mid-September 2025, equivalent to only a few hundred million dollars at prevailing prices. This is tiny compared to the global networks, but capacity does not equal throughput. Many channels are private, custodial solutions like Strike or Cash App route payments outside the public graph, and multi-path routing further complicates the picture. The right way to present it is that Lightning’s public footprint looks modest, but its usage cannot be captured by capacity alone.

PayPal provides a useful middle ground. In the second quarter of 2025, it processed $443 billion in TPV and reported 438 million active accounts. That is smaller than Visa but larger than Bitcoin settlement, and it serves as a bridge metric that helps audiences place crypto between consumer wallets and global card networks.

DeFi has rebuilt momentum after the lows of 2022. By September 2025, total value locked was back around $160 to $170 billion, while stablecoin float was just under $300 billion. Those two numbers give the capital base: TVL for assets committed to protocols, and stablecoins for the liquidity that circulates through them.

Stablecoin adjusted transfer value is the velocity measure, and Coin Metrics data shows that stablecoins are on pace to move nearly $20 trillion in 2025 after moving $12 trillion in 2024. That figure puts them on par with major national payment systems, even if the definition of transfer differs. It also demonstrates that stablecoins are not just sitting in DeFi pools but are actively used as settlement currency.

Within DeFi trading, Uniswap remains dominant. Its 30-day spot volume hovered around $100 billion in September, with Uniswap v4 alone adding another $30 billion. Perpetual DEXs, as noted earlier, now handle more than half a trillion dollars a month, most of which is in Bitcoin and Ethereum markets. Together, these numbers demonstrate that on-chain venues are not curiosities but sizable marketplaces with liquidity deep enough to influence pricing across the ecosystem.

The key for this narrative is to avoid overstating TVL as if it were a bank balance. It fluctuates with token prices and depends on methodology. Still, for investors familiar with hedge fund AUM or money market balances, framing DeFi TVL and stablecoin float as comparable in size to mid-tier asset classes gives a more intuitive grasp of the order of magnitude.

By holding Bitcoin and DeFi against TradFi, the story becomes easier to tell. Bitcoin ETFs are already the size of the gold ETF complex, making them impossible for allocators to ignore. CME futures and options provide standardized instruments that can be traded alongside S&P contracts, even if the size is smaller.

On-chain perps have carved out a half-trillion monthly footprint, setting funding and sentiment for the broader market. Payment rails show the distance still to travel: Visa and ACH move tens of trillions annually, while SWIFT routes hundreds of billions daily. Bitcoin’s adjusted transfer value is a fraction of that, but already meaningful. DeFi, with nearly $300 billion in stablecoin float and more than $160 billion in TVL, has built an infrastructure that compares in size to significant segments of traditional finance.

The point is not to claim equivalence but to highlight convergence. Bitcoin is not yet Visa, but it is no longer a novelty. DeFi is not yet the NYSE, but its volumes are already measured in the hundreds of billions.

The data shows that these systems are large enough to matter and structured enough to analyze with the same tools used for traditional markets.

The comparisons in this report show both the distance traveled and the distance still to go. Bitcoin has achieved mainstream adoption at the ETF level, with AUM comparable to the world’s largest commodity funds and daily flows that fit naturally into fund-flow dashboards. Its derivatives are integrated into CME, giving institutions the access they expect. Its settlement layer moves trillions annually, though far less than Visa or ACH, and its payments rail, Lightning, is still early in scale.

DeFi has re-established a capital base that is meaningful in the context of hedge funds and alternative assets, while stablecoins are now used to transfer value at a pace comparable to major national systems. Bitcoin and DeFi form a market that can be measured in terms that resonate with traditional finance.

This means that Bitcoin is no longer an external curiosity. It can be slotted into portfolios, evaluated against other ETFs, and hedged with familiar instruments. It also means crypto rails are no longer theoretical. They handle volumes large enough to justify serious consideration, even if they are not yet competitors to Visa or ACH. FLiquidity now exists across regulated and decentralized venues, shaping volatility and price formation in ways that cannot be ignored.

The mirror of TradFi does not flatter Bitcoin and DeFi in every category, but it gives them a scale that traditional finance understands. And in markets, understanding is the first step toward allocation.