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.
