Cryptocurrencies have surged so much that their total value has reached nearly $2.5 trillion, rivaling the world’s most valuable company, Apple, and have amassed more than 200 million users. At that size, it’s simply too big for the financial establishment to ignore.

Firms that cater to the world’s wealthiest families are increasingly putting some of their fortunes into crypto. Hedge funds are trading Bitcoin, which has big-name banks starting to offer them services around it. PayPal lets users buy crypto on its app, while Twitter helps people show appreciation for tweets by tipping their creators with Bitcoin.

And in the latest milestone for the industry, an easy-to-trade fund tied to Bitcoin began trading on Tuesday. Investors can buy the exchange-traded fund from ProShares through an old-school brokerage account, without having to learn what a hot or cold wallet is.

It’s all part of a movement across big businesses that see a chance to profit on the fervor around the world of crypto, as a new ecosystem further builds up around it, whether they believe in it or not.

“The one thing you can say for certain is that the advent of the era of the Bitcoin ETF opens up the opportunity for Wall Street to make money on Bitcoin in a way that it hadn’t been able to previously,” said Ben Johnson, director of global ETF research at Morningstar. “The winners in all of this are the exchanges and the asset managers and the custodians. Whether investors win or not is a big, bold question mark.”

Bitcoin has come a long way since someone or a group of someones under the name Satoshi Nakamoto wrote a paper in 2008 about how to harness computing power around the world to create a digital currency that can’t be double-spent. The price has more than doubled this year alone to roughly $62,000. It was at only $635 five years ago.

Supporters of cryptocurrencies say they offer an ultra-important benefit for any investor: something whose price moves independently of the economy, rather than tracking it like so many other investments do. More high-minded fans say digital assets are simply the future of finance, allowing transactions to sidestep middlemen and fees with a currency that’s not beholden to any government.

Critics, meanwhile, question whether crypto is just a fad, say it uses too much energy and point to all the stiff regulatory scrutiny shining on it. China last month declared Bitcoin transactions illegal, for example. The chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said in August that the world of crypto doesn’t have enough investor protection and “it’s more like the Wild West.”

That hasn’t been enough to halt the immense momentum for crypto, as it’s gone from an online curiosity to a bigger part of the cultural and corporate landscape.

U.S. Bank earlier this month said it has begun offering a cryptocurrency custody service for big investment managers. That means it essentially holds their Bitcoin in safekeeping for them, and it expects to offer support for other coins soon.

Other name-brand banks have also announced intentions to offer custodial services for crypto.

“It’s not just in the fringes and dark corners of the Web that it’s happening,” said Kashif Ahmed, president of American Private Wealth in Bedford, Massachusetts.

Ahmed doesn’t recommend his clients invest in crypto. Before then, he said he’ll need to be able to “go to my local supermarket and buy things for my family and offer crypto and not be laughed out of the store.” But others are more willing to try it.

In a survey by Citi Private Bank of family offices around the world that manage money for wealthy people, roughly 23% said they have made some investments in crypto. Another 25% said they are researching it. The growing acceptance of crypto on Wall Street has created a new crop of darlings that help people buy it. Crypto trading platform Coinbase has a market value of roughly $64 billion, for example, putting it on par with such established companies as Colgate-Palmolive, FedEx and Ford Motor.

At Robinhood Markets, meanwhile, the company that became famous for getting a new generation of investors into the stock market is increasingly becoming a place for crypto trading. This spring was the first time when new Robinhood customers were more likely to make their first trade in cryptocurrencies rather than in stocks. In the end, what many on Wall Street see lasting may not be as much Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as the technology that underlies them.

Called the blockchain, it allows for a public ledger that everyone can check and trust, and many expect it to lead to a wealth of innovations. It’s akin to today’s Netflix, Facebook and other services that sprung out of the infrastructure built during the boom and bust of the dot-com bubble. “The applications built on this new software architecture appear to be growing more quickly than past technologies,” Bank of America strategists Alkesh Shah and Andrew Moss wrote in a recent research report positing digital assets are only in their first inning of growth. “New companies are likely to emerge and poorly positioned companies will exit, creating significant upside potential for some and downside for others.”

JPMorgan Chase, for example, is already using blockchain technology to improve fund transfers between global banks. That’s the same JPMorgan Chase run by CEO Jamie Dimon, who said in an interview with Axios this month that bitcoin has “got no intrinsic value.”

STAN CHOE | AP News

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NEW YORK (AP) — After helping a new generation of investors get into stocks, Robinhood is increasingly doing the same for cryptocurrencies.

More than $4 of every $10 that Robinhood Markets Inc. made in revenue during the spring came just from customers trading dogecoin, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Robinhood also said Wednesday that it lost $501.7 million, or $2.16 per share, compared with a profit of $57.6 million, or 9 cents per share, in last year’s second quarter. Most of the loss was due to accounting changes related to a fundraising round it undertook early this year.

The loss was no surprise after the company had earlier given preliminary estimated results for the quarter. The company’s slowdown in revenue growth was also expected — it more than halved to 131% from 309% in the first three months of the year — and the company again said revenue will likely drop in the summer from the spring.

But the degree of the sharp rise in crypto’s importance to Robinhood’s business was striking. Cryptocurrencies made up 41% of all of Robinhood’s $565.3 million in revenue in the quarter that ended June 30. That’s up from 17% in the first three months of the year and from just 3% at the start of last year. The spring marked the first quarter for Robinhood where new customers were more likely to make their first trade in cryptocurrencies rather than in stocks.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in a recent interview with The Associated Press that he wants the company to make it easy to trade any asset its customers are interested in, and that increasingly means crypto.

“They’re interested in exploring this new asset class,” he said. “So, no doubt, crypto has been very culturally relevant through the first six months of the year.”

Tenev also said he sees cryptocurrency companies as Robinhood’s competitors, just like other stock-trading brokerages. Coinbase, a publicly traded crypto exchange, said it had $1.9 billion in transaction revenue during the second quarter, versus Robinhood’s $233 million in crypto-related trading revenue.

With cryptocurrencies, Robinhood makes money by routing its customers’ trade orders to market makers. It’s similar to how Robinhood makes money from its customers trading stocks: It gets payments from Citadel Securities and other big trading firms after sending them the stock orders made by its customers.

Interest in cryptocurrencies surged in the early part of last quarter, leading to a frenzy of trading activity. Bitcoin hit $64,829 in April after starting the year at less than $30,000.

Even dogecoin, whose fans have been trying to help it shed its image as a joke cryptocurrency, soared. It got to 74 cents in May after starting the year at roughly half a penny. The majority of Robinhood’s crypto-related revenue last quarter came from dogecoin, at 62%.

But cryptocurrencies are notoriously volatile, and their prices have continued to swing sharply since hitting those peaks. Bitcoin has since fallen back toward $45,000, and dogecoin has more than halved to roughly 30 cents.

That could hinder Robinhood’s revenue growth going forward. The company said Wednesday that its revenue will likely drop from the second quarter to the third.

“We expect seasonal headwinds and lower trading activity across the industry,” Chief Financial Officer Jason Warnick said in a conference call following the release of the quarter’s results.

Trading for brokerages is typically busiest in the first half of the year, before fading in the second half, he said. Robinhood’s revenue also does best when markets are volatile and customers are trading a lot, and the first two quarters of the year were punctuated by extreme volatility. In the first quarter, GameStop and other “meme stocks” soared to heights that professional investors called irrational, and cryptocurrencies had their own pop in the second quarter.

Worries about potentially slower growth helped send Robinhood shares down 8% in afterhours trading on Wednesday, after they rose 6.7% in the regular session to close at $49.80. Such swings are nothing new in the stock’s young life.

Shares of Robinhood, which is based in Menlo Park, California, have veered between $33.25 and $85 since they began trading at $38 on July 29.

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Wall Street racked up more losses Wednesday as the stock market pulled back for the third straight day. The broad sell-off went beyond stocks, with the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies falling sharply.

The S&P 500 index dropped 0.3% after recovering from a 1.6% slide earlier in the day. The benchmark index is on track for its second weekly loss in a row.

Bank stocks were among the biggest decliners. Goldman Sachs fell 1.7% and Wells Fargo lost 1.5%. A range of retailers and other companies that rely directly on consumer spending also pulled the market lower. Home Depot slid 0.7%, Gap fell 3% and L Brands dropped 3.1%.

Energy sector stocks, the biggest gainers so far this year, bore the heaviest losses as the price of U.S. crude oil skidded 3.5%.

Digital currencies fell sharply after China’s banking association issued a warning over the risks associated with digital currencies. A statement posted on the industry association’s website said all members should “resolutely refrain from conducting or participating in any business activities related to virtual currencies.”

“Stocks and cryptocurrencies have been showing signs of froth over the past few months and were due for a pullback,” said Richard Saperstein, chief investment officer of Treasury Partners.

The S&P 500 lost 12.15 points to 4,115.68. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 164.62 points, or 0.5%, to 33,896.04. The blue-chip index had been down 586 points. The Nasdaq fared better than the rest of the market, shedding only 3.90 points, or less than 0.1%, to 13,299.74.

Smaller company stocks also lost ground. The Russell 2000 index gave up 17.24 points, or 0.8%, to 2,193.64.

Bitcoin’s price was down 10.8% to $38,723, well below its all-time high of over $64,800 reached a month ago, according to the crypto news site Coindesk. It swung in a huge range of as low as $30,202 and as high as $43,621 over the course of the day.

That the headline out of China rattled crypto investors suggests the market was already weak, said Willie Delwiche, investment strategist at All Star Charts.

“If Bitcoin had been holding up better, a headline like that would be dismissed more readily, but it comes at a time when Bitcoin was already well off its highs,” he said. “It gave people who were looking for a reason to sell cover.”

The Bitcoin skid comes after longtime Bitcoin advocate Tesla recently recently said it would no longer accept Bitcoin as payment for its cars, reversing its earlier position.

The selling was so intense that the web site of Coinbase, an online brokerage for digital currencies, was temporarily down in the morning. Coinbase’s stock dropped 5.9%, ending about 34% below the peak it reached on April 16, just two days after its IPO.

Investors continue to be focused on whether rising inflation will be temporary or whether it will endure. Prices are rising for everything from gasoline to food as the economy recovers from its more than year-long malaise.

The Federal Reserve expects that rising inflation will be temporary and related to the recovering economy, but investors are still uncertain and have been more cautious.

“That’s one of the things people are struggling with,” said J.J. Kinahan, chief strategist with TD Ameritrade. “They go to get gas and get in line at a grocery store and they see higher prices; there’s this mixed message for the average investor.”

The fear is that the Federal Reserve will have to dial back its extensive support if inflation persists. That includes record-low interest rates and the monthly purchase of $120 billion in bonds meant to goose the job market and economy.

The minutes from the central bank’s April meeting of policymakers, which were released Wednesday afternoon, reaffirmed the view that the Fed’s decision to keep its benchmark interest rate ultra-low remains the best policy approach, though some officials cautioned that some factors pushing inflation higher may not be resolved quickly.

For all the worries about inflation, however, many professional investors are echoing the Federal Reserve in saying that they expect rising prices to be “transitory.”

Higher interest rates drag on most of the stock market, but they are particularly painful for stocks, especially technology shares, considered the most expensive and those bid up for profits expected far into the future.

Treasury yields mostly rose. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 1.67% from 1.64% late Tuesday.

Target gained 6.1% after reporting strong results as consumers, some flush with U.S. stimulus payments, were eager to spend as the pandemic eases.

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