As the tokenization boom and a fundamental reassessment of the role of public blockchains go on, Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley shared his "hot take" on the utility of Ethereum and Solana. Despite skepticism toward cryptocurrencies in the summer of 2026, the fund's chief mounted a forceful defense of the leading networks, calling doubts about the value of their native tokens a repetition of Wall Street's biggest historical mistakes.
The head of one of the largest crypto funds directly stated that the attempt to separate RWA infrastructure from the economic value of base-layer coins is simply the "2026 version of the 'blockchain, not Bitcoin' thesis".
Bitwise CEO calls out the market's biggest mistake
The industry has irreversibly entered an "on-chain versus off-chain" phase, and attempting to develop tokenized assets while denying the value of native tokens is an old mental error of the market, Horsley contends.
2026 version of "blockchain not bitcoin":
— Hunter Horsley (@HHorsley) July 17, 2026
I like tokenization and stablecoins, but I still don't see how Ethereum, Solana, etc are useful.
Fresh data from analytics platform RWA.xyz clearly supports this position. The leading networks now effectively host nearly the entire global real-world asset infrastructure:
- Ethereum is the absolute leader, with $15.5 billion in distributed value across 915 projects.
- Solana ranks third, with $3.0 billion and already 707 active products.
Any transactions, dividend distributions, or transfers of tokenized shares within these massive ecosystems are technically impossible without the use of $ETH and $SOL. The coins are spent on gas and secure the networks through staking, meaning their value is directly tied to the growth of the tokenization sector.
However, behind this public defense of the giants lies a pragmatic commercial interest and a bet on alternative infrastructure. Bitwise has its own favorite in this race — Hyperliquid.
While traditional on-chain tokenization remains stalled by compliance requirements, decentralized trading platform Hyperliquid, in whose development the fund has a direct interest, is demonstrating explosive expansion.
According to the platform's latest reports, open interest in RWA derivatives on Hyperliquid has reached a record $3.6 billion. By this metric, the specialized blockchain alone has surpassed the entire spot RWA market on Solana, valued at $3.0 billion, while the exchange's total open interest has reached an all-time high of $11 billion.
By defending the economics of $ETH and $SOL against superficial interpretations, Bitwise is skillfully directing investor attention toward more flexible infrastructure solutions, and the fund's capital structure shows that Hyperliquid is becoming their primary instrument for extracting maximum value from the changing structure of the crypto market.