Why Bitcoin Is a 90-Year Trade And We’re Just 20 Years In

Bitcoin investors keep searching for the next catalyst — the ETF approval, the next halving, the next government headline that will prove adoption is accelerating and supposedly send prices higher.

But according to Swan Bitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten, that entire framework may be missing the point.

Klippsten, who has spent nearly a decade in the Bitcoin ecosystem, argues the market’s obsession with short-term triggers is fundamentally flawed — because Bitcoin’s trajectory isn’t driven by single events at all, but by a slow, structural shift playing out over generations.

“Bitcoin will continue its inexorable rise,” Klippsten told Coinage in a new interview. “This thing is going to take like 60 to 90 years for a full install. I'd say 60 to 80 years is usual for a technological revolution."

While Bitcoin may have begun as a technological revolution, it's just as quickly accelerating into a financial revolution of equal footing. For the purist of Bitcoin believers, the last couple of years have been an interesting chapter. As a hard currency movement that was once framed around proselytizing self custody and a message of "not your keys, not your coins," it's now evolved into a game increasingly played well by Wall Street.

In fact, the Bitcoin ETFs have become so large (with more than $85 billion in assets under management) even financial giant holdouts like Morgan Stanley are now entering the fray. The Wall Street giant just announced its Bitcoin ETF will make its debut this week at a fee of just 14 basis points to try and take on BlackRock's IBIT, which carries a fee that's nearly twice as high.

But for as interesting as the ETF wars are as an on-ramp into Bitcoin exposure, they are just one tentacle in the growing Bitcoin Wall Street monster. As Klippsten notes, Bitcoin capital market instruments getting spun up by Michael Saylor's Strategy and its competitor Strive are beginning to unlock engines that go well beyond that. Both have begun offering perpetual preferred stock to unlock yield stemming from the Bitcoin the companies hold.

"I do think that a perpetual preferred instrument paired with Bitcoin in the way that they've done it ... it's genius and it's exactly what I would do if I were in charge of a big pile of Bitcoin like they are and like Strive is," Klippsten said.

Strategy has gotten a little more aggressive in marketing their preferred stock as of late. Not only did Saylor refer to it as something like a "money market fund" in a CNBC interview, he also posted an AI ad to X promoting the 11.5% variable dividend rate with a caption that read, "You weren’t meant to live an uncomfortable life."

While Klippsten disagreed with the messaging, he applauded the message.

"Just like [as] a matter of taste, maybe AI ... hot girl videos is maybe not the best way to promote a serious financial product," he said. Nonetheless, the playbook is now on the table.

Just last week, Strategy's preferred instrument — and its 11.5% variable dividend rate for holders — powered the bulk of the company's latest $330 million Bitcoin buy.

"The goal is to provide leveraged exposure to Bitcoin in a ticker in a brokerage account with no duration on the debt," he explained. "It took five years to figure out that that was the goal, but when they figured out Stretch and launched that, that is the sort of ultimate perfection of the model."

While some in the Bitcoin camp see Wall Street products getting built on top of Bitcoin as somehow sacrilegious, Klippsten is taking a different view. In fact, he says his Bitcoin company is even exploring ways to tap into Strategy's STRC to use it to bolster their trading offerings.

"We're trying to figure out how to park limit orders on Swan to have that at the customer's option to have that parked in Stretch if they choose so that you can be getting 11% interest while you wait for your stink bid at $58,000 to actually hit," he said. "So I think we'll have that live hopefully sometime later this year."

Traders continue to anchor narratives around catalysts — whether it’s institutional inflows, sovereign adoption, or macro shifts — but Klippsten argues those explanations are often retroactive storytelling. For now, Wall Street is getting in on promoting assets that are fueling Bitcoin demand.

“At some point the selling will be exhausted and people are continuing to buy Bitcoin,” he said. “And then we will all look at what happened recently… and we’ll claim that that was the catalyst… but it’s rarely actually the thing that happened,” he joked.

Instead, the real driver is much simpler: More buyers than sellers. Over time.

That simplicity is part of what separates Bitcoin from the rest of the crypto market in Klippsten’s view. While Bitcoin continues to mature as a digital asset, much of the broader crypto ecosystem has shifted toward speculation that remains mostly separate from the Wall Street engine.

While Bitcoin undergoes its own evolution fueled by new capital entering the space, Klippsten remains more convinced the risk-reward equation continues to skew in favor of those who set investment horizons that aren't measured in days or months.

“We always recommend to our clients… don’t go heavy into Bitcoin unless you plan to hold it for at least 5 to 10 years,” he said. “And frankly, we expect them to hold it pretty much forever.”

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