Relai Co-Founder Says Bitcoin Is Having Its Institutional IPO Moment

Julian Liniger, co-founder of the Swiss Bitcoin-only exchange Relai, joined the show from Lugano to talk through where Bitcoin adoption actually stands nine years into his own time in the space. His framing: Bitcoin is going through something close to an IPO moment, and the people driving the next decade of adoption are not going to look like the people who drove the last one.

THE TORCH IS PASSING TO INSTITUTIONS

"I feel like we're experiencing some sort of an IPO moment for Bitcoin," Liniger said, comparing it to how early employees and angel investors at companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook cashed out once those companies went public, handing control of the next growth phase to institutional money. He pointed to a pattern Relai has watched play out in its own user base this year: long-time holders who bought a decade ago and built real wealth have been selling, and the buyers on the other side have been BlackRock, Strategy and the wave of Bitcoin treasury companies. "The next 10 years would be Larry Fink, Michael Saylor, the Trump family, etc, driving the adoption," he said, where the last decade was driven by early engineers and enthusiasts meeting in cafes trying to convince merchants to accept Bitcoin.

WHERE THE BEAR MARKET ACTUALLY BOTTOMED

Liniger said Relai's own activity and trading-volume data, which the exchange tracks as a proxy for market sentiment, bottomed in April 2026 and came close to retesting that low again in July. Since then, activity has climbed steadily. "I'm not saying we're in full bull market mode until we hit 100K again and then the new all-time high," he said, placing Relai's read as somewhere between the end of the bear market and the start of the next bull phase, with a new cycle likely arriving within six to nine months, helped along by catalysts that could land before the end of the year or early next.

WHY MOST PEOPLE STILL WON'T BUY

Asked what keeps new users away, Liniger's answer was not price or skepticism about returns, it was complexity. "It's basically everything we don't understand about computers mixed with everything we don't understand about money," he said, arguing that exchanges and educators have spent too much energy explaining Bitcoin's mechanics and not enough time explaining what's actually broken about the money people already use. Relai's own numbers back up a pattern he described as near-universal among new buyers: a small first purchase, a slightly bigger second one, then a shift into automated weekly or monthly buying once someone crosses roughly $1,000 to $2,000 held. From there, some move into hardware wallets for self-custody, and a smaller group become private clients moving six- and seven-figure sums, often after an inheritance, a business sale, or a company deciding to hold Bitcoin on its balance sheet.

Liniger was direct about the cost of the industry's slower path to this point. "I think the space grew, but it could have grown so much faster," he said, pointing to how often the pitch to newcomers leaned on arguments, like currency debasement or distrust of the Federal Reserve, that resonated with people already primed to hear them rather than meeting new audiences where they are.

This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.