Growing up, my family was not loyal to sports teams: my parents are foreigners and sports rivalries never materialized. Even at Duke, I could have made fun of college basketball (sorry). The only real institutional or brand allegiance I inherited is my father’s commitment to Delta Air Lines, which I still maintain. Then I got into cryptography and discovered what real tribalism looks like.
The era of tribes
Crypto’s early culture was a world of factions. Bitcoin maximalists swore that nothing else mattered. The builders of Ethereum thought they were building the next Internet. Each new channel arrived promising to fix the previous one: faster, cheaper, purer.
As the industry grew, the debates were technical on the surface but ideological at the core. Proof of Work versus Proof of Stake: Does Mining Waste a Ton of Energy? Can Proof of Stake really be egalitarian? And classic blockchain trilemma stuff. Everyone had a better way to balance security, decentralization, and scalability. ICOs, trade show launches, community distributions, governance structures…. the whole range.
Today, new cypherpunk movements and privacy discourses have begun to describe Bitcoin as a legacy asset – a store of value for institutions and the wealthy. What was once a border is now infrastructure. The border has simply moved.
The ETF moment
But when we finally get where we’re going – driven by access to ETP – is everyone more or less in the same boat?
The Bitcoin maxis (these days often confused with the seed oil people), the Ethereum loyalists, the XRP army and the LINK marines (no, the military references don’t escape us). Communities that run exciting and promising projects like Solana, Sui, TAO and Zcash. All now in the same wallet. Conviction is the constant in every network, and the market structure has made it one single asset class: the increasingly accepted and ever-diversified crypto asset class.
For what? Because the ETPs have reprogrammed the operation of the exhibition. They standardized custody, distribution and access under a regulated system. Once exposure becomes a simple button in a brokerage app, does brand loyalty start to lose its pricing power?
Bitcoin, Ethereum – and now Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, Chainlink – now go through the same pipes: the same custodians, the same authorized participants, the same DTCC rails. The same investors will buy them: institutions, RIAs and model portfolio managers. The same risk management teams will oversee them. What was once ideological loyalty is quickly becoming exposure management.
Shared rails, shared dreams
Global crypto ETPs now hold billions in assets, with 80% in Bitcoin and 18% in Ethereum (Source: Bloomberg, December 1, 2025). The others follow the same path: custody via a handful of depositories, clearing via DTCC, distribution via traditional platforms.
And with the emergence of staking rewards on many of these assets, crypto is also becoming a revenue play – a structural shift that changes how investors view crypto’s place in their portfolios.
Correlation tells the same story. Since 2022, the 90-day correlation between Bitcoin and Ethereum has averaged 83% (Source: Bloomberg, December 1, 2025)and most large-cap tokens now trade in the same risk category. Not because their fundamentals have merged, but because their infrastructures have merged. The same pipes that transported capital to Bitcoin now transport it everywhere else.
From maxis to market shares
Crypto will always have tribes – it’s human nature, and honestly, that’s also half the fun. But perhaps we are becoming more and more part of the same team. And maybe we’ll all take it to the next level together: if faith built the house, maybe infrastructure keeps the lights on.
For the next wave of investors who embrace crypto as an investment asset, it may be less about tribal identity and more about portfolio construction. The new question may not be which channel is better; what is your weight in relation to digital assets in general?
Tribalism once had a purpose: differentiation within a speculative frontier. He organized the chaos, channeling our primal instincts to win, creating a culture. But in the next era of crypto, we may all be able to win. Together.
Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary is Head of Product and Research at Grayscale Investments.
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