An experiment in Prague could ultimately be more important for Bitcoin than the usual ETF inflow chart.
Speaking About “Crypto In America” show On December 10, John D’Agostino, head of Coinbase’s institutional department, highlighted that the Czech National Bank has started testing Bitcoin in its national treasury and for payments, arguing that such moves from a eurozone central bank are likely to spread.
The Czech Bitcoin Pilot Could Spread Across the Eurozone
“The Czech National Bank elected very well with their service providers,” he said, adding that the central bank is “putting Bitcoin on their national treasury and they are experimenting and learning in real time the use of Bitcoin for payments.” The pilot is small – “one million dollars Bitcoin” – but for D’Agostino the signal is not in the size, but in who is doing it and why.
He deliberately contrasted with previous sovereign experiments: “No disrespect to El Salvador… this was not ‘I want to shake up my economy because I’m going in the wrong direction’… This is to say: we are a stable country in the eurozone… we don’t have to do this.”
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Instead, the Czech move followed “all the bells and whistles” of a traditional process: RFPs, vendor selection, formal adoption into policy. That, he suggested, is precisely what makes it dangerous – to the status quo. “That kind of thing is contagious and I see more of the Eurozone [countries] to follow suit very soon,” he said.
The comment did not come on its own. Throughout the interview, D’Agostino made a consistent statement: Institutional adoption has always been less about perfect regulatory clarity and more about liquidity, credible market structure, and having the “right” types of participants in the pool.
“I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the argument that the reason institutions haven’t invested… is regulatory clarity,” he said. Clarity is in the “top three”, but in his ranking it comes after liquidity and next to alpha potential. If two of the three are present, “people will find a way.”
According to him, Bitcoin spot ETFs have already created something that was previously missing: a cohort of structurally forced participants. “The ETFs, in my opinion, are kind of surrogate commercial users of Bitcoin,” he argued. They “must restore balance… it is enshrined in their business model,” acting as a stabilizing force, similar to industrial users in commodity markets.
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A Eurozone central bank experimenting with Bitcoin on its balance sheet pushes that logic one step further up the food chain. D’Agostino did not formulate a grand theory about “Bitcoin as a reserve” – he was cautious, almost legal, about what he could say – but the implication is not very subtle: when a central bank with access to normal EU funding “doesn’t have to do this” and chooses to do so anyway, it normalizes Bitcoin within the most conservative layer of the monetary system.
That comes with a broader reputation repair job that he says the industry still needs to complete. Crypto, he argued, has not had more structural failures than other markets — he pointed to the London Metal Exchange’s cancellation of billions in nickel trades as an underdiscussed parallel to FTX — but “we tend to push the jokers into prominent positions,” while TradFi “does a good job of hiding their jokers.”
Between cleaner stories, ETF-driven “surrogate” demand and now a Eurozone central bank quietly investing a million dollars in Bitcoin, D’Agostino’s message was that the institutional story is less about a sudden surge and more about erosion. “There is no wave,” he said earlier in the conversation. “It’s this gradual erosion as opposed to this crashing wave.”
If he is right in saying that the Czech experiment is contagious, that erosion could soon also come from within the Eurosystem, and not just from asset managers in New York.
At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $90,234.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com