A rule of thumb I've used in both career and investment decisions is that to make money, at a minimum, one has to be in the vicinity of where money moves. Fint

A rule of thumb I've used in both career and investment decisions is that to make money, at a minimum, one has to be in the vicinity of where money moves. Fintech - in any of its forms, as you note - takes the maxim to its conclusions and seeks rent over transactions themselves, which gradually inclines it towards zero-sum "find a mark to dump my toxic assets on" shenanigans. So the industry perpetually leverages itself into fragility on the backs of "rip to them but i'm different" leadership and whomever they can convince to come along. At the nation-state level this creates nasty entanglements of regulatory capture and debt that let market leaders who play the game well make rules for themselves and pay off enforcing bodies, which contributes to macro-scale misalignments in who is getting funded or regulated for what, and therefore many "ills of the market". The tech of crypto assets themselves, on the other hand, is antifragile in construction: Winning at the trading game does not result in regulatory capture or bailouts, since the settlement ultimately takes place on-chain, and on-chain is an automated consensus, one relatively hostile to political machination. Rent-seeking doesn't scale up well with this kind of asset. You can pull a small-time scam, but it doesn't lead to an empire lasting for generations. And if your asset becomes too hard to trade in because you've come up with some crafty way of polluting it or gatekeeping it, it's substitutable in a way that state-backed instruments are not. Price survival over a crypto bear market is a pretty strong signal for a project, and as the market gets bigger it attracts bigger players trying to remake the rules with a slant so that they can win. It's escalated every cycle, and really is a phenomenon beyond retail now. What this past cycle entailed was an attempt by larger fintech players to muscle in on the crypto game and apply various strategies to capture it by adding obfuscating instruments in the name of liquidity and yield. The ones who survived made an early exit or successfully derisked, but many of them committed to their strategy in a way that ensured they would lose. And from here on, the only remaining escalations of that game involve some of the largest amounts of capital on the planet - the biggest banks, or actual governments.