The BeInCrypto Institutional 100 Awards 2026 enters its final stage with the Access to Digital Assets pillar narrowed to 16 shortlisted firms across four categories.
This pillar focuses on companies that help institutions enter, evaluate, and manage digital asset exposure. The shortlist includes product issuers, asset managers, global banks, and market data platforms. The winners were announced at Proof of Talk in Paris on June 2, 2026.
The firms below are listed alphabetically within each category. They are not ranked.
Best Digital Asset Product
This category recognizes regulated investment products that give institutions exposure to digital assets. The shortlist covers spot ETFs, multi-asset crypto products, and tokenized funds.
| Shortlisted Firm | Why It Made the Shortlist |
|---|---|
| Bitwise | BSOL became the largest US spot Solana ETF after its October 2025 NYSE launch. It captured over 80% of the category’s cumulative inflows. BITB also anchors Bitwise’s $15 billion-plus crypto product platform across the US, UK, and Europe. |
| BlackRock | IBIT scaled to roughly $67 billion in AUM by early May 2026, making it the institutional benchmark for spot Bitcoin ETF exposure. BUIDL also crossed $3 billion, leading the global tokenized money market fund category. |
| Fidelity Investments | FBTC ranks second behind IBIT in the spot Bitcoin ETF cohort, with about $17 billion in AUM. Fidelity also custodies the product in-house through Fidelity Digital Assets, NA, its national trust bank. |
| Franklin Templeton | The BENJI tokenized money market fund suite crossed $1.98 billion in AUM by April 2026. It is now deployed across more than eight public blockchains, giving it the broadest chain coverage among institutional tokenized funds. |
Fund Manager of the Year
This category recognizes firms managing major dedicated investment vehicles in crypto. It covers venture capital, hedge funds, and tokenized strategies.
| Shortlisted Firm | Why It Made the Shortlist |
|---|---|
| a16z Crypto | a16z closed Crypto Fund V at $2.2 billion in May 2026. The firm remains one of the largest crypto-dedicated venture managers, with portfolio companies including Uniswap, Anchorage Digital, Jito, and Kalshi. |
| Bitwise Asset Management | Bitwise manages more than $15 billion in client assets across 30-plus crypto investment products in the US, UK, and Europe. Its BSOL launch in October 2025 helped reshape the spot Solana ETF market. |
| Pantera Capital | Pantera was the first US institutional asset manager dedicated to blockchain. Founded in 2003, it now operates across venture, hedge, and tokenized strategies with more than $5 billion in AUM. |
| Paradigm | Paradigm raised a $1.5 billion fund in February 2026 to expand into AI and frontier technologies alongside its core crypto thesis. Its portfolio includes Coinbase, Uniswap, Optimism, and Flashbots. |
Leader in Digital Asset Adoption
This category recognizes institutions putting digital assets, tokenized instruments, and blockchain settlement infrastructure into live client service at scale.
| Shortlisted Firm | Why It Made the Shortlist |
|---|---|
| BlackRock | Kinexys by J.P. Morgan brought JPM Coin (now JPMD) to public blockchains. The rollout included Base in 2025 and Canton Network in January 2026, expanding institutional access to bank-issued deposit tokens. |
| Fidelity | Fidelity combines spot crypto ETFs, including FBTC and FETH, with in-house custody through Fidelity Digital Assets, NA. This gives the firm one of the most vertically integrated institutional digital asset stacks in the US. |
| HSBC | HSBC Orion has enabled more than $3.5 billion in digitally native bonds globally. The bank also received an HKMA stablecoin issuer licence ahead of a planned HKD stablecoin launch in the second half of 2026. |
| JPMorgan Chase | Kinexys by J.P. Morgan brought JPM Coin, now JPMD, to public blockchains. The rollout included Base in 2025 and Canton Network in January 2026, expanding institutional access to bank-issued deposit tokens. |
Best Market Intelligence & Data Platform
This category covers platforms that provide the on-chain, market, and index data institutions use to evaluate and monitor digital asset exposure.
| Shortlisted Firm | Why It Made the Shortlist |
|---|---|
| Coin Metrics | Talos acquired Coin Metrics in July 2025 for more than $100 million, marking Talos’s largest deal to date. The acquisition integrated Coin Metrics’ on-chain, market, and index data with institutional trading and portfolio management infrastructure. |
| Dune Analytics | Dune hosts more than 200,000 dashboards, 6.5 million queries, and 1.5 million datasets across 100-plus blockchains. In 2026, it launched AI Agents and the dbt Connector for institutional data workflows. |
| Glassnode | Glassnode supports institutional on-chain analysis across more than 1,700 assets and 900 metrics. It also publishes quarterly Charting Crypto reports with Coinbase Institutional and launched a Glassnode MCP server in 2026. |
| Kaiko | Kaiko serves more than 200 enterprise clients globally and joined ISDA in April 2026. Its collaboration with S&P Dow Jones Indices also brought the iBoxx US Treasuries Index on-chain as a tokenized benchmark. |
About the BeInCrypto Institutional 100
The BeInCrypto Institutional 100 is an annual research program covering 25 categories across six pillars: Capital Markets & Infrastructure, Access to Digital Assets, Tokenization & On-Chain Finance, Enterprise Blockchain, Regulation & Governance, and Retail to Crypto Bridge.
The 2026 evaluation window ran from April 2025 through March 2026.
Shortlists were selected through BeInCrypto’s editorial research methodology and blind scoring by an external panel of institutional digital asset practitioners.
Each category follows one of three scoring tracks, depending on the data profile of the market. Public filings, regulatory registers, audited reports, on-chain data, ETF flow trackers, and nominee disclosure forms were used where available.
Final blended scores are not published. Inclusion on the shortlist reflects the combined outcome of research and judge review.
Editorial contact: awards@beincrypto.com
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