Goldman Sachs bows down, Bitcoin finally breaks through Wall Street's gates

Written by: Sylvain Saurel

Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News

In the past few days, the axis of the financial world has been completely reversed. We have just witnessed what is arguably the most rapid, most dazzling, and most unabashed value reorientation in human history.

Wall Street—this fortress of traditional finance, this ivory tower of fiat currency—has officially raised the white flag.

They are not merely surrendering; they are scrambling, eager to crown the winners.

For 15 years, the giants of traditional finance have told everyone that Bitcoin is a joke: a Ponzi scheme, a bubble, an illegal trading tool, a digital tulip, a publicity stunt cooked up by basement-dwelling crypto punks. They first mocked it, then suppressed it. And now? They’re going mad trying to hold it.

Let’s see how, over these past few days, institutional dignity has collectively collapsed.

Fortress Collapse: List of Surrenders

Goldman Sachs: From “Fraud Tool” to a Bitcoin ETF

Yes, that’s Goldman Sachs. The global investment banking behemoth—once jokingly described by Rolling Stone as “a bloodsucking squid wrapped around the face of humanity”—now has its tentacles reaching into a new digital asset realm.

For years, executives at Goldman have seized every opportunity to mock decentralized currencies. We remember the disdain on financial channels: suited executives adjusting their ties while confidently telling the public that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. Its CEO once publicly and loudly declared that Bitcoin is a “fraud tool.” The purpose of this narrative was to keep wealth locked inside their closed circle, so they could keep charging tolls.

But now, the tone has completely changed. Goldman Sachs is rolling out a Bitcoin ETF. This hypocrisy is both shocking and, somehow, predictable. The institutions that once warned you to stay away from “the scam” are now collecting management fees while helping you hold it.

Why the sudden change of heart? Because Wall Street has no eternal morals—only eternal interests. When high-net-worth clients threaten to move their funds away and strongly demand allocation to the best-performing asset of the past decade, those so-called morals vanish overnight. “The scam” has morphed into an “innovative alternative asset.” Goldman Sachs didn’t suddenly have an epiphany—it felt the pressure.

Morgan Stanley: Forbidden Words Turn Into the Biggest-Ever ETF Launch

If Goldman’s reversal is a comedy, Morgan Stanley’s is a textbook case of historical irony. Not long ago, Morgan Stanley was said to be extremely hostile toward digital assets, even banning the use of the term “cryptocurrency” in internal emails. It became Voldemort—an asset category whose name cannot be spoken. They treated it like a plague, like a virus that would pollute their noble, heavily regulated mahogany boardroom.

And now, just these last few days, Morgan Stanley has welcomed the largest ETF launch in the company’s history.

What is the underlying asset of this record-breaking heavy-hitter financial product? You guessed it: Bitcoin.

This asset—one they once tried to erase from the company dictionary—has now become a jewel in their modern product lineup. Advisors who once weren’t even allowed to say the word are now calling, one by one, the wealthiest clients, urging them to allocate 1%–5% of their portfolios to “digital gold.” This cognitive dissonance is staggering, but institutional FOMO overrides every ban. They finally understand: you can’t ban the future, but you can slap a stock ticker on it—and sell it to the masses.

Charles Schwab: Opening the Door to Spot Trading for Retail Investors

While investment banks are playing the ETF game, Charles Schwab takes a more direct route: deciding to open up cryptocurrency spot trading directly to its massive client base.

Charles Schwab represents ordinary investors—the gatekeeper of middle-class wealth, retirement accounts, and everyday investment portfolios. For years, they kept clients confined to safe, predictable lanes such as mutual funds, traditional stocks, and municipal bonds. Want to buy Bitcoin? You have to leave Schwab, go into the wild cryptocurrency exchanges, and manage the private keys yourself.

Times have changed. By connecting to spot crypto trading, Charles Schwab effectively admits: a portfolio without Bitcoin is incomplete. This isn’t just about offering an ETF—it’s about enabling millions of ordinary investors to directly hold the underlying assets through trusted brokerage accounts.

The significance of this for Bitcoin’s adoption can hardly be overstated. It places this decentralized orange coin right next to Apple, Amazon, and the S&P 500—on the dashboards of ordinary American investors. It lowers barriers, erases stigma, and opens the floodgates for vast amounts of capital that have long been watching, yearning to get in, yet hesitating.

New York Stock Exchange: Building Infrastructure with Full Force

Then there’s the heart of traditional finance: the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). In the past, that sacred hall where traders used to shout at pieces of paper is now quietly and efficiently building dedicated crypto infrastructure.

The NYSE isn’t just facilitating trades—it’s laying pipes. This infrastructure is up and running, integrated, and “flows as smoothly as a cat sprawled on a warm laptop.” When the global equity system decides to build roads and bridges for digital assets, the debate is already over.

The New York Stock Exchange will not build infrastructure for fleeting trends, nor will it invest millions of dollars in technical integration for Ponzi schemes. They build systems for what will last forever. By integrating crypto assets at the exchange level, the old system is officially connecting itself with the new digital paradigm. They acknowledge that future value transfers, settlement, and asset ownership will at least partly run on crypto networks.

Hypocritical Economics

To understand this enormous and rapidly unfolding shift, we have to go beyond surface-level announcements and get into the underlying psychology and economic logic of Wall Street.

“First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they attack you—until you win.”

This line is often mistaken as something Gandhi said, but in the realm of disruptive innovation, it holds a universal truth. It perfectly matches the confrontation between Bitcoin and traditional finance.

The Period of Ignoring and Mocking (2009–2017)

In the early days, Wall Street paid no attention. Bitcoin was just a toy for crypto punks and libertarians. When it began to emerge, mockery began too—dismissed as “a billionaire’s game coin.” A network with a fixed total supply of 21 million, decentralized, leaderless, and yet it wants to challenge the dollar’s sovereignty? At Davos and the Wall Street cocktail parties, this was the top-tier joke.

The Period of Attacking (2017–2023)

When Bitcoin repeatedly rose from the ashes in bear markets, the laughter turned into fear. This was the phase when Daimon’s people threatened to fire any trader who dared to buy Bitcoin, the SEC launched relentless crackdowns, and the media churned out obituary after “Bitcoin is dead,” repeating it hundreds of times.

They attacked it because it threatened their business model. Traditional banks rely on gatekeepers, intermediaries, and fractional-reserve alchemy—whereas Bitcoin doesn’t need any of that. It’s peer-to-peer, self-custodied, and mathematically transparent. That’s what terrifies them.

The Surrender Period (Current Stage)

What happens when you spend 15 years trying to choke an idea to death, and it simply won’t die? What happens when it grows into a fully uncontrollable multi-trillion-dollar asset class?

You have to surrender.

Wall Street’s shift did not come from a sudden awakening of conscience. They didn’t read the Bitcoin whitepaper last night and suddenly understand the brilliance of Satoshi Nakamoto’s proof-of-work mechanism.

No—they surrendered because Wall Street is, at its core, a machine for extracting fees. Over the past decade, a historic transfer of enormous wealth unfolded entirely outside their ecosystem. Native crypto exchanges earned hundreds of billions in revenue, while established banks—bound by arrogance and regulation—could only stand by.

In the end, the numbers told the whole story. The opportunity cost of ignoring Bitcoin is too high to bear. They recognized the ultimate truth of this era: if you can’t eliminate it, join it.

They decided: since people want to buy Bitcoin, it’s better to buy through Goldman’s ETF—so Goldman can collect a 0.25% management fee; since people want to trade, it’s better to trade on Charles Schwab. Wall Street didn’t embrace the core ethos of Bitcoin—it merely acknowledged its inevitability and tried to take a slice of the pie.

The Inevitable Math

This series of events is filled with poetic justice.

Traditional finance relies on trust: you must believe that the central bank won’t devalue the currency, that commercial banks won’t gamble away your deposits, and that clearinghouses will settle normally.

And history has repeatedly proven that this trust is often abused—from the 2008 financial crisis to the raging inflation of the 2020s.

Bitcoin relies on mathematics. It depends on open-source code, cryptographic hashes, and rigid rules enforced by the entire network of nodes. It doesn’t care about your lineage, your ZIP code, or your scale of management. It simply produces a new block every 10 minutes—tick-tock—and then the next block.

It is precisely this ruthless, unwavering, uniform consistency that ultimately breaks down institutional resistance. Wall Street realized they were trying to fight gravity. You can’t abolish math through legislation, and you can’t dissolve absolute numeric scarcity through PR.

The fiat currency system is wobbling under astronomical sovereign debt, endless printing, and geopolitical turmoil—while Bitcoin is completely the opposite. In a world crowded with financial fiction, it is a pure, unmanipulable ledger. Smart money finally saw it: Bitcoin isn’t a hedge against the old system—it’s a lifeboat.

Everyone Finally Lowers Their Head

Let’s just call the past few days a “great surrender” recorded in the history of finance.

A tribute to the early holders: crypto punks, retail investors, believers who held on through an 80% crash, people mocked by their families at Thanksgiving, and dreamers who saw the future earlier than institutions did.

They were right, and the suited big shots were wrong.

And now, these big shots are forced to buy this asset at prices that reflect their years of ignorance—from the very people they once mocked.

Goldman Sachs bowed. Morgan Stanley bowed. Charles Schwab bowed. The NYSE bowed.

They have no choice. The financial architecture of the 21st century is being rewritten—built on decentralized protocols.

The narrative has completely flipped. Holding Bitcoin is no longer seen as a risk. In traditional finance, the biggest professional risk is actually not allocating to Bitcoin. Institutions realized the train has already left the station—they’re sprinting toward the platform, throwing their briefcases onto the train, afraid they’ll miss out on a seat.

We’ve moved past the adoption phase and entered the assimilation phase. But don’t get it twisted: it’s not that Wall Street assimilated Bitcoin—it’s that Bitcoin assimilated Wall Street.

The Trojan horse is already in the city, and soldiers are pouring out. Infrastructure is ready: ETFs listed and trading, spot markets opened. The old gatekeepers put down their dignity just to take a slice of the pie.

Bitcoin cannot be stopped. It was never meant to be stopped. It’s an idea that emerged with the most powerful computational network in human history.

So, welcome to this revolution—Wall Street’s giants.