The rapid rise in retail and institutional demand in recent months is driving crypto startups’ growth, with crypto exchange Coinbase earning more in revenues in Q1 than all of 2020 and BlockFi reaching $15 billion worth of assets held on its platform in March, up from $1 billion in the same month last year.

Article: Coinbase Q1 earnings surpass 2020 record. Article: Blockchain technologies are increasingly leaving behind a bulky carbon footprint.

Banks want to offer Bitcoin trading in order to stanch the flow of their customers’ funds to crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, NYDIG President Yan Zhao told CNBC. NYDIG also plans to support Bitcoin payments generated by traditional banking features, such as deposit interest and card rewards points.

And Coinbase enables users to spend cryptos by using a QR code from a Bitcoin payment processor or by sending the payment directly from their account to the merchant’s Coinbase Commerce account. Coinbase Commerce is accepted by more than 8,000 merchants, including Shopify, and it processed $135 million in crypto payments for merchants in 2019.

In addition, fellow trading apps that have similarly experienced record growth in the past year are planning their own IPOs, such as Robinhood and crypto exchange Coinbase. Others will likely monitor eToro’s SPAC transaction closely to see how it fares on the NASDAQ later this year before considering going public themselves.

Institutional investors aren’t waiting on incumbents to catch up to invest: Crypto-native exchange Coinbase grew its total institutional assets to $45 billion in 2020, up from $6 billion in April, while crypto asset manager Grayscale now manages $30.4 billion, from just $2 billion in January 2020.

It counts fintechs like Coinbase among its clients, and underwrites nontraditional lenders like Affirm, Upgrade, and Rocket Loans. Strategy: It is rare for a small bank to establish a lucrative niche as a software provider, and Cross River’s success highlights the value of pulling this off.