Executive Summary
Digital asset trading entered 2026 having crossed a structural inflection point supported by larger institutional flows and entry of a new class of corporations building digital asset treasury. Bitcoin treasury companies now hold more than 1M Bitcoin, representing more than 5% of all supply. The passage of the U.S. GENIUS Act in 2025 established a federal stablecoin framework; the launch of regulated crypto investment vehicles such as spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs are also instrumental in driving sustained, deep institutional liquidity. Global regulatory regimes — MiCA in Europe, and licensing progress across APAC and Middle East — moved from ambiguity to enforceable rule sets enabling firms to engage with digital assets.
The effect has been a decisive shift in institutional posture: perpetual trading volumes on CEX and DEX have reached historical highs of $86.2T and $6.7T in 2025. According to a survey done by Coinbase and EY-Panthenon in 2025, 83% of surveyed institutional investors reported exposure to digital assets or planned allocations in 2025, with 59% planning to allocate up to 5% of their AUM into digital currencies.
However, a study done by Acuiti found that institutions find it challenging to navigate the complexity of digital assets that span various venues, OTC desks and service providers with 75% citing the lack of standardization as the most significant challenge. Therefore, within the institutional digital asset trading landscape, the focus of our report will be on the orchestration (OEMS/PMS/RMS) layer in which we have identified 3 structural opportunities for companies in this segment moving into 2026:
- The institutionalization of digital asset trading workflow and competitive moats of OEMS/PMS players.
- Accelerated adoption of tokenized financial instruments.
- Increasing demand from corporate treasuries, miners and DAOs to enhance yields, execute intelligently beyond onchain opportunities.
Institutional Digital Asset Trading in 2026
Institutional demand has noticeably gained traction in 2025 and 2026 is expected to strengthen this narrative. Asset managers, hedge funds (both crypto-native and multi-strategy), market makers, family offices, banks prime brokerage, OTC desks, crypto protocols and corporate crypto treasuries are all active participants. Coinbase and EY-Parthenon's January 2025 survey of 352 institutional decision-makers found that 83% planned to increase their digital asset allocations in 2025.
What is Different Versus 2022–2023 (The Catalyst)
The structural shift is meaningful with regulatory progress now driving institutional digital asset legitimacy and adoption. 2022–2023 were years of survival and compliance hardening following the FTX collapse; 2024–2025 were years of institutional build-out. Spot ETF approval removed a key product access barrier, enabling large institutional liquidity. Cumulative spot ETFs volume has surpassed $2T in under 2 years, signalling growing institutional appetite for digital asset trading.
The GENIUS Act legitimized adoption of stablecoins which can enable 24/7 transaction settlement in an increasingly digitized financial stack. Stablecoins now exceed $310B in circulating supply with adjusted transaction volume reaching $11.6T, almost double the levels seen in 2024. In December 2025, the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued guidance explicitly permitting banks to facilitate riskless principal crypto transactions — a structural green light for U.S. bank trading desks. All of these signals are forming the bedrock for institutional digital asset trading.
The Aggregation of the Institutional Digital Asset Trading Stack
As can be seen from the market map, institutional digital asset trading stack spans more than a dozen distinct provider categories — from exchanges and OTC desks to DeFi venues, custodians, prime brokers, and post-trade rails. In order to effectively navigate, institutions need to build and maintain separate exchange APIs, custodian accounts, risk views and reporting pipelines. Having to connect these providers and services in this fragmented ecosystem proves to be complex, costly and operationally inefficient. As products diversify beyond spot, to futures, swaps, options and other sophisticated structured products, having an orchestration layer to tie these integrations cohesively together can materially improve trading performance. This is exactly what the orchestration (OEMS+PMS+RMS) layer solves. This report focuses on that orchestration layer — where we identify three structural opportunities for 2026.
Within the orchestration layer specifically, two platforms have emerged with the most comprehensive offerings: Elwood Technologies and Talos Trading.
Elwood Technologies, FCA-authorized and backed by institutional investors including Goldman Sachs, Barclays, and HashKey Capital, provides end-to-end trading management. Elwood supports the full instrument lifecycle institutional clients require — from crypto spot and derivatives through to equities, T-bills, and staking — within a single execution environment. With connections to 40+ exchanges, LPs, crypto ECNs, and custodians, it compresses the operational stack, offering clients highly optimal trade execution and control. Beyond execution management, Elwood also offers a comprehensive post-trade portfolio management system tracking over 100 data points, offering granular insights and risk analytics while also providing compliant, flexible reports into institutions' portfolio performance.
Talos is also an OEMS key player which recently expanded its data capabilities through the acquisition of CoinMetrics in July 2025, creating an integrated data and investment intelligence layer atop its smart execution infrastructure. It has also acquired Cloudwall which embeds enhanced risk management capabilities onto its platform. With more than $727B processed since inception, this is testament to growing addressable market that these orchestration layer captures.
Institutional Digital Asset Trading Workflow
The use of an integrated OEMS/PMS software has significantly eased some of the operational frictions for institutions that are looking into portfolio diversification, better execution strategies, and portfolio/treasury management. Below is a simple demonstration of an institution's digital asset workflow and highlights how both Elwood and Talos simplify access and bridge the gap between traditional financial systems and the digital asset ecosystem.
3 Structural Opportunities in 2026 for OEMS/PMS Players
Theme 1: The Institutionalization of Digital Asset Trading
Financial institutions are demanding that digital asset trading infrastructure operate at the same standard as their equity and fixed income workflows: pre-trade analysis, transaction cost analysis (TCA), scenarios analysis, stress testing, post-trade reconciliation, and audit-ready reporting. This is not merely a product preference — it is a prerequisite for fiduciary governance at asset managers and regulated buy-side entities. Without institutional-grade workflow integration, traditional portfolio managers struggle to allocate into digital assets.
The trend of institutionalization of digital asset trading also signifies increasingly large orders being conducted. This is further accentuated with an increasing number of asset issuers looking to launch their own regulated crypto investment vehicles over the next 2 years, extending beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, into sophisticated structured products and index funds. For example, in Hong Kong, HashKey has launched a HashKey 20 Index Fund in collaboration with FTSE Russell and regulated by SFC.
Platforms such as Elwood and Talos provide unified connectivity across CeFi, DeFi, and TradFi venues, smart order routing, algorithms based on TWAP/VWAP and support a broad asset mix spanning spot, derivatives, and traditional financial instruments, enabling institutional capital to have a unified interface to execute large trades compliantly and optimally. Elwood's integration with Bloomberg AIM and BlackRock's Aladdin integration of Talos are a direct expression of this theme: traders can route digital asset orders through the same interface they use for equities, eliminating the parallel operational silo without requiring a system replacement.
Beyond providing OEMS, Elwood's comprehensive portfolio management and risk management system spanning more than 100 real-time data points capturing institutional risk exposure across venues and positions has also made them an institutional choice when institutions choose their providers.
A most recent example illustrates the importance of having an orchestration layer when a trader executed a large order swap on Aave and lost 99.9% of value due to poor visibility and access to liquidity venues. By delivering the robust execution environment and experience of traditional capital markets, these platforms materially reduce costs associated with slippage and frontrunning risks that accompany large-sized orders.
As institutional workflows increasingly embed digital assets, platforms with integrations will benefit from the network effect, capturing durable economics that come from competitive moat and high switching cost.
Theme 2: Exponential Growth of Tokenized Assets
Tokenization of real-world assets surged more than 380% to $25B in 2025 as institutional footprint across tokenized treasuries, commodities, equities and onchain credit continues to accelerate. Current numbers suggest that tokenized assets are still in their early innings but a recent State Street survey highlighted that by 2030, between 10% to 24% of institutional investments will be executed through tokenized instruments.
The case for tokenized assets is having an alternative issuance channel for issuers to tap into operational and cost efficiency. A notable category that has seen significant growth is the sector of tokenized equity. Since Backed Finance launched xStocks in June 2025, the total market cap of tokenized equity has soared to over $1B in less than a year with more players like Ondo Finance, Superstate, Figure Technology entering the scene. After receiving a No Action Letter from the SEC, The Depository Trust Company is also developing its own tokenization platform for various assets including index funds, ETFs, equities, treasuries, bonds among others. Even traditional exchanges such as NYSE and Nasdaq have signalled intent to facilitate tokenized equities amid growing regulatory clarity.
Currently, the total trading volume of tokenized equities has surpassed $40B but we believe it is expected to trend higher with more institutional uptake and regulatory compliant venues for tokenized securities. Tokenized commodities also rallied in this market cycle with market cap surging by more than 4x in 2025 amid heightened geopolitical tensions. This largely corroborates with the Coinbase survey in 2025 that showed that among the tokenized assets institutional investors are planning to deploy capital into, tokenized commodities took up a significant portion at 44%, underscoring the portfolio diversification appeal of introducing tokenized RWA assets into portfolios.
The value proposition of having DeFi composability also enables a single share of tokenized assets (e.g. tokenized money market fund, tokenized equity) to be used across chains and protocols, with various strategies and use cases being programmatically enabled. While still nascent with $1.2B in RWA assets being actively deployed in DeFi protocols, we believe this trend will scale further as institutions such as BlackRock and Apollo Global Management spearhead efforts to connect to DeFi venues.
OEMS/PMS players that are able to support institutional demand and add tokenized RWA assets into trading workflow for various strategies can benefit from the uncorrelated exposure these assets have in the crypto market cycle, buoying the impact from crypto-specific market downturns.
Theme 3: Digital Asset Treasuries, Miners and DAOs Looking to Optimize Treasury Management
Besides traditional asset managers, brokers and hedge funds, crypto-native firms like digital asset treasuries, miners and protocol DAOs are also potential clients. Having access to a network of venues enables corporate treasuries and miners to execute large order trades at optimal prices without suffering from high slippage or partial transaction fulfilment. Increasingly, DAOs with large treasury are also looking to optimize returns beyond onchain yields, engaging in portfolio diversification across assets and also managing their token holdings — which could be fulfilled by platforms like Elwood and Talos in a single unified interface.
Conclusion
Digital asset trading entered 2026 as a structurally different market from the one that existed in previous market cycles as liquidity depth, institutional-facing product offerings, regulations and mature orchestration layers help bring in institutional capital.
The three structural opportunities for OEMS/PMS software analysed in this report collectively point to the same conclusion: the orchestration layer solves the complex web of digital asset trading and platforms that are most deeply embedded in front-to-back institutional workflows providing enterprise-grade experience will succeed in capturing durable economics.