A multi-year bull market is now starting, according to the CEO of Bitwise, the largest crypto index fund manager in the world, propelled by a long-awaited wave of institutional interest.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Matt Hougan claims that despite increased regulatory scrutiny, cryptocurrency prices have demonstrated remarkable resiliency.

According to Hougan, BlackRock’s recent entry into Bitcoin (BTC) could be the icing on the cake for the current bull market.

“In fact, prices have been growing since the FTX fiasco in November of last year.

In light of the mounting anxiety, the biggest asset manager in the world, BlackRock, has now declared that Bitcoin is important and that institutional investors will want to possess it for the ensuing five to 10 years. I believe a new cryptographic era has begun. I refer to it as “the mainstream era of crypto,” and I believe we have just begun a multi-year bull market.”

Beyond asset prices, the CEO predicts a new growth phase. He asserts that cryptocurrency stocks are about to take off and foresees a massive influx of new cryptocurrency businesses to the stock market.

“As Bitcoin and other crypto assets continue to increase, there is a pent-up pipeline of interest companies in the crypto space, including crypto infrastructure companies, who will have materially stronger outcomes.

So I anticipate that the pipeline for IPOs (initial public offerings) to open up. More generally, I’d suggest that prices for crypto assets have underperformed those of crypto equities. We’re definitely going to see more debuts given that our index of cryptocurrency stocks has increased by more than 100% this year. It’s going to be a tremendously exciting time for cryptocurrency as we watch this business grow rapidly.”

Stocks that have a significant exposure to the digital asset markets or the underlying distributed ledger technology are known as “crypto equities.”