Institutional investors seem to be unaffected by current bearish movements in the crypto market, and have maintained their interest in blockchain and virtual assets, per megabank State Street.

Specifically, during the speech with Australian news outlet Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), Irfan Ahmad, the Asia Pacific digital lead for the bank’s crypto unit State Street Digital, reportedly underscored that regardless of extreme volatility from June through to July, the firm’s institutional clients have continued to carry out initiatives in the sphere.

“During the course of the June, July period where things were really hotting up in terms of activity, we saw institutional clients not necessarily double down, but they weren’t really deterred from placing strategic bets on the asset class itself.”

Three crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) from Cosmos Asset Management and 21Shares introduced on the Cboe Australia exchange in May, while asset manager Monochrome has recently managed to acquire the greenlight to roll out the nation’s first Australian financial services licensed spot crypto ETF last month. 

State Street is the fund administrator for the Cosmos Purpose Bitcoin Access ETF in particular, and Ahmad shared with the SMH that an increasing number of crypto product introductions are coming to Australia in the “very near future”, but did not outline any specific names.

“Certainly, our clients, they’ve been speaking to us more pragmatically about how they might be able to launch products, or what our capabilities may be in the future to help them support the launch of those products,”

Meanwhile, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and Australian banking behemoths like ANZ and NAB have been shifting their resources towards stablecoins and traditional asset tokenization, instead of crypto investments specifically.

The Commonwealth bank had a short lived crypto trading service play that was indefinitely halted in May due to regulatory uncertainty.