The 2026 crypto market “big divergence”: a BTC bear market, but BlackRock, Franklin, and JPMorgan are all doing the same thing at the same time

Author: EX

A Franklin $1.5 trillion AUM CIO said, “Prices are decoupling from fundamentals.” In the same week, BlackRock joined the UK’s 54-institution tokenization consortium, Robinhood’s Chain surged into the top five by DEX volume, Hyundai used USDT to settle cross-border trade, and Bolivia is preparing to include USDT in the national payment system. While BTC was struggling at $62K , infrastructure was quietly going through a bull market. The question isn’t “Will BTC keep falling?”—it’s “When the infrastructure is finished, who owns the toll road?”

Part Two: Seven signals, all happening in the same week

In the second week of July 2026, the crypto market received seven seemingly unrelated but actually directionally aligned pieces of information:

1. Franklin Templeton CIO: Prices “decouple” from fundamentals

On July 13, Seth Ginns, CIO of Franklin Templeton’s crypto business, said clearly in an interview with CoinDesk: “There’s a big disconnect between where prices are and real fundamentals.” (“There’s a huge disconnect between current prices and actual fundamentals.”)

This isn’t some crypto KOL shouting buy/sell calls. Franklin Templeton manages $1.5 trillion in assets, and Ginns directly manages the investment portfolio for Franklin Crypto. When he chose to say this publicly at a time when BTC was at $62K and market sentiment was in panic, Ginns chose that exact moment of panic to speak—so the timing itself is worth paying attention to. As for changes in Franklin’s positioning, the answer will come in the Q3 13F disclosure.

He pointed to several key signals: - Robinhood’s blockchain plans show traditional finance distribution moving onto a crypto track - Tokenized money market funds can let investors earn yield on-chain - Income-driven token buyback models from DeFi protocols are pulling fundamental investors toward tokenomics

2. UK government tokenization consortium: BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan all move in together

On the same day, the Tokenization Taskforce backed by the UK Treasury officially released a list of 54 members. This isn’t a concept-validation sandbox—it comes with a 2-year roadmap: putting repo (repurchase agreements), gilts (UK government bonds), and funds on-chain. The report also lists Ripple as a “hybrid model,” aiming to generate £44 billion in annual value by 2035.

The roster includes the world’s largest asset managers, top-tier investment banks, and key operators of the UK’s financial infrastructure. When BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley all appear on a government tokenization roadmap, this is no longer “crypto narrative”—it’s an upgrade plan for traditional financial infrastructure.

3. Robinhood Chain: Built for tokenized stocks, overtaken by meme coins

Less than two weeks after Robinhood’s blockchain went live, it jumped into the top five by DEX trading volume (Bernstein confirmed), TVL broke $135 million, and it attracted 800k addresses. While active assets right now are meme coins rather than tokenized stocks, the infrastructure is already there—Robinhood’s 23 million user base is unmatched by any crypto-native DEX.

4. Hyundai uses USDT for real trade settlement

Hyundai Motor Korea completed a treasury settlement pilot using the USDT stablecoin in cross-border trade between the US and Mexico. This isn’t a POC statement—it’s a global manufacturing giant replacing traditional cross-border banking corridors with stablecoins.

Hyundai’s annual revenue exceeds $200 billion. If this pilot expands into its global supply chain, it will reshape the infrastructure landscape for global trade settlement.

5. Bolivia considers including USDT in the national payment system

Facing a dollar shortage, Bolivia’s central bank is considering officially adding Tether’s USDT to the national payment system. Annual transaction volume has reached $430 million. This is a typical case of developing countries using stablecoins to replace dollar liquidity—continuing the national crypto path taken by El Salvador, but in terms of practicality, it’s more direct.

6. BTC ETF ends 8 straight weeks of outflows

After 8 weeks of continuous outflows, BTC ETFs recorded $197 million in net inflows last week. This isn’t a small number—but it appeared against the backdrop of BTC testing $62K, escalating military conflict in the Middle East, and renewed expectations of Fed rate hikes. Money chose crypto exposure in a “risk-off” environment.

7. SBI fully pivots to Solana + a yen stablecoin

Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings is pivoting its entire blockchain strategy to Solana, including tokenized issuance and a yen stablecoin plan, and it’s partnering with convenience store chain Lawson to pilot retail payments. This is Asia’s institutions’ “first shot” at deploying stablecoins in real-world payment scenarios.

Part Two: The essence of the “big divergence”: the “price narrative” can’t outrun the “infrastructure narrative”

Over the past decade, the core narrative in crypto has always been “price”: when it rises, how much it rises, and when to sell. This narrative framework makes BTC’s price fluctuations act as a proxy variable for the industry’s “confidence index.”

But 2026 is bringing a fundamental change: infrastructure construction no longer depends on BTC prices.

• When Franklin Templeton launched its tokenized funds, it didn’t wait for BTC to return to $100K

• When BlackRock joined the UK Tokenization Taskforce, it didn’t wait for market sentiment to improve

• When Hyundai tested USDT cross-border settlement, it didn’t wait for the SEC to clearly define the regulatory framework

• When SBI deployed Solana tokenization, it didn’t wait for yen depreciation pressure to ease

These decision clocks reflect 5–10 year shifts in market structure—not a 3–6 month BTC price cycle. This is the core of the “big divergence”: the decision frequency for infrastructure-leading indicators isn’t aligned with the fluctuation frequency of price-lagging indicators in the same time dimension.

As Franklin’s CIO put it: the depth of institutional participation is “years strongest” (the strongest in years). But price hasn’t reflected it—because price is still driven by retail sentiment and macro liquidity, while infrastructure is driven by institutional strategy and regulatory roadmaps.

Part Three: This isn’t a “valuation correction” story for crypto

A common market interpretation framework is: “Fundamentals are strong, and price will eventually catch up.” This is an overly simplified—and dangerous—conclusion.

What’s really worth watching isn’t “whether price will correct,” but “when the infrastructure is finished, who will charge fees for the use of this infrastructure?”

The characteristics of this infrastructure cycle right now:

1. From “decentralization” to “traditional infrastructure upgrades”: The UK Taskforce’s goal isn’t to create new DeFi protocols, but to run repo, gilts, and funds on-chain. This means blockchain is becoming a “second-layer operating system” for financial infrastructure—not an alternative.

2. Permissioned chains and public chains coexist: A tokenization consortium of 54 institutions can’t run on permissionless public chains. More likely, permissioned chains handle compliant clearing, while public chains handle settlement, distribution, and programmability. This means the infrastructure middle layer—compliance bridges, custody, KYC/AML—becomes a critical chokepoint.

3. The entry speed of sovereign nations and enterprise entities exceeds expectations: Bolivia’s national payment system, Hyundai’s trade settlement, and SBI’s retail payments—these aren’t stories about “crypto natives.” They come from real-world demand for more efficient financial rails, and crypto just provides the technical solution.

4. Stablecoins evolve from “trading tools” to “real-economy pipelines”: Hyundai’s cross-border settlement isn’t using USDT for speculation—it’s replacing SWIFT with it. Bolivia isn’t using USDT for DeFi—it’s using it to replace dollar cash. This fundamentally changes stablecoins’ TAM (addressable market).

Part Four: History won’t repeat, but it will rhyme: the outcomes of three “price–infrastructure divergence” cycles

If the “big divergence” of 2026 feels unfamiliar, history has echoes. Over the past 25 years, there have been at least three cycles highly similar to the current one—each time, price crashes masked the acceleration of infrastructure building. And each time, infrastructure wins happened 12–24 months after price bottomed.

📉 Cycle One: The 2000–2002 dot-com bubble → AWS is born

What happened: The Nasdaq fell from 5,048 to 1,114, a drop of 78%. Pets.com and Webvan went bankrupt. But at the same time, Amazon’s stock price fell from $107 to $7 (down 93%). Jeff Bezos didn’t stop investing—he was secretly developing an internal project called “Amazon Web Services.” In 2002, Google launched AdWords, laying the foundation for search advertising infrastructure.

Divergence between infrastructure and price: Fiber broadband installation volumes hit a historic peak between 2001 and 2003 (during the bubble, Global Crossing laid 100k miles of fiber; after bankruptcy, those fibers were bought back at a 10% cost). Server infrastructure, e-commerce logistics networks, search engine algorithms—every piece of “Web 2.0” infrastructure was completed while the stock market collapsed and nobody was paying attention.

Outcome: AWS officially launched in 2006 and, a decade later, became Amazon’s largest source of profit. Google AdWords became the most profitable advertising product in human history. Fiber networks became the transport layer for YouTube, Netflix, and Zoom. Infrastructure built in the darkest days became the toll road in the next cycle.

📉 Cycle Two: The 2018–2019 crypto winter → DeFi Summer 2020

What happened: BTC fell from $19,783 to $3,122 (down 84%). The ICO bubble fully burst; “blockchain” was declared dead by mainstream media. But during the same period—

• Uniswap released its first version (V1) at Devcon 4 in November 2018
• Compound completed its seed round and began building on-chain lending protocols
• MakerDAO’s DAI stablecoin scaled in 2019
• Synthetix and Aave (then called ETHLend) both finished core product iterations during this time

Divergence between infrastructure and price: When BTC was bottoming around $3,000, DeFi’s total value locked (TVL) was under $500 million—almost negligible. Yet the infrastructure for smart contracts (AMM models, lending pools, price oracles) was built out in that “nobody cares” period.

Outcome: In June 2020, Compound issued the COMP token and kicked off “liquidity mining.” DeFi Summer exploded—TVL jumped from under $1 billion to $15 billion (15x), and UNI airdrops ($1,200+/person) became one of the most famous wealth distribution events in crypto history. Those who understood the Uniswap whitepaper in the 2019 bear market became the winners of DeFi in 2020.

📉 Cycle Three: The 2022–2023 FTX collapse → BTC ETF approval

What happened: FTX collapsed in November 2022, and BTC fell to $15,599. SBF was arrested, and BlockFi, Celsius, and Voyager all went bankrupt in succession. The crypto industry was treated by Wall Street and regulators as a “crime scene.”

But during the same period— - BlackRock filed for a spot BTC ETF on June 15, 2023 - Fidelity, Invesco, VanEck, and ARK followed closely - Traditional financial institutions accelerated behind the scenes in crypto custody, compliant clearing, and market-making infrastructure

Divergence between infrastructure and price: While retail investors exited at a cut around $16,000, the world’s largest asset managers were preparing to build a regulated, institution-accessible market access pipeline for crypto assets.

Outcome: In January 2024, the SEC approved 11 spot BTC ETFs. Day-one trading volume was $4.6 billion. Over the following 12 months, BTC rose from $25K to above $73K . ETFs aren’t the end point of price—they’re the starting point for re-discovering the value of infrastructure.

🔑 The common law these three cycles tell us

Core law: Price can fall 80%, but if infrastructure doesn’t stop building, 12–24 months later the infrastructure will prove the value it created using the price.

What’s different in 2026 right now is: the infrastructure builders in this cycle aren’t crypto-native startups (like Uniswap in 2018), but BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan, the UK government, and Hyundai. This means—

1. The probability of infrastructure completion is higher. These institutions’ balance sheets and regulatory relationships mean tokenization consortia won’t dissolve just because BTC drops to $50K .

2. But the beneficiaries of infrastructure may differ. In 2018, the team that built Uniswap was crypto-native; in 2020, DeFi users made big money. In 2026, the tokenization consortium is being built by the world’s largest financial institutions—when the infrastructure is finished, the toll road may not belong to the community.

3. The time window may be shrinking. From post-FTX to ETF approval took only 14 months, much shorter than the Dot-Com era’s 4 years. If the UK Tokenization Taskforce’s 2-year roadmap is real, we may see the first wave of results in 2027–2028.

⚠️ Past cycle performance doesn’t represent future outcomes. The current market structure, regulatory environment, and macroeconomic backdrop differ significantly from the cycles mentioned above. The historical comparisons in the article are only for reference as an analytical framework, not any prediction or guarantee of future price action.

Part Five: Valuation logic for price vs. infrastructure is decoupled

When BlackRock joins a tokenization consortium with $11.5 trillion AUM, when Hyundai uses stablecoins for real trade settlement, and when Bolivia’s sovereign government chooses USDT instead of traditional banks—crypto’s value narrative no longer relies solely on BTC price.

But that doesn’t mean BTC price loses importance. BTC is still the core liquidity anchor for the entire industry. Logically, if BTC price faces pressure, ETF outflows continue, and the macro environment worsens further (Fed hikes, oil prices pushing inflation)—the infrastructure build-out pace may slow, but it’s not expected to stop. This is the core meaning of the “big divergence”: price and infrastructure are two independent variables, and their coupling is weakening.

A final addition: This article argues that “the valuation logic for infrastructure and price is separating,” not that “infrastructure investment is superior to other strategies.” Infrastructure building may also face uncertainties like regulatory delays, technical risks, and adoption falling short of expectations. All investment decisions should be assessed independently by readers.

Part Six: Observation window—what to watch over the next 90 days?