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2025-12-09 15:26:00
Growing up, my family didn’t have loyalty to sports teams — my parents are foreign, and sports rivalries never translated. Even at Duke, I could have cared less about college basketball (sorry). The only real institutional or brand allegiance I inherited was my father’s commitment to Delta Air Lines, which I still maintain. Then I got into crypto — and discovered what real tribalism looks like.
The age of tribes
Crypto’s early culture was a world of factions. Bitcoin maximalists swore nothing else mattered. Ethereum builders believed they were building the next internet. Every new chain arrived promising to fix the last one: faster, cheaper, more pure.
As the industry grew, the debates were technical on the surface but ideological underneath. 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, fair launches, community distributions, governance structures…. the whole gamut.
Today, new cypherpunk movements and privacy narratives have started to paint Bitcoin as something of a legacy asset — a store of value for institutions and the wealthy. What was once frontier is now infrastructure. The frontier has simply moved on.
The ETF moment
But when we finally to get where we are going — pushed along by ETP access — is everyone more or less in the same boat?
Bitcoin maxis (nowadays often conflated with seed oil people), Ethereum loyalists, XRP army, and LINK marines (no, the military references aren’t lost on us). The communities driving exciting and promising projects like Solana, Sui, TAO, and Zcash. All now in the same portfolio. Conviction is the constant across every network, and market structure has made them one asset class: the increasingly accepted, ever-diversifying crypto asset class.
Why? Because ETPs rewired how exposure works. They standardized custody, distribution, and access under one regulated system. Once exposure becomes a single button in a brokerage app, does brand loyalty start to lose pricing power?
Bitcoin, Ethereum — and now Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, Chainlink — now clear 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 teams will oversee them. What used to be ideological loyalty is quickly becoming exposure management.
Shared rails, shared dreams
Global crypto ETPs now hold billions in assets, with 80 percent of that in Bitcoin and 18 percent in Ethereum (Source: Bloomberg, December 1, 2025). The rest are following the same route: custody through a handful of custodians, clearing through DTCC, distribution through legacy platforms.
And with staking rewards emerging across several of these assets, crypto is also becoming an income play — a structural shift that changes how investors think about 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 bucket. Not because their fundamentals have merged, but because their infrastructure has. The same pipes that carried capital into Bitcoin now carry it everywhere else too.
From maxis to market share
Crypto will always have tribes — that’s human nature, and honestly, also half the fun. But maybe, increasingly, we are part of the same team. And maybe, we all get to the next level together: If belief built the house, perhaps infrastructure keeps the lights on.
For the next wave of investors adopting crypto as an investment asset, it may be less about tribal identity and more about portfolio construction. The new question may not be which chain is better; it’s what’s your weight to digital assets overall?
Tribalism once served a purpose — differentiation in a speculative frontier. It organized chaos, channeling our primordial instincts to win, creating culture. But in crypto’s next era, maybe we can all win. Together.
Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary is Head of Product and Research at Grayscale Investments.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are of those listed within and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of Grayscale or its affiliates. Past performance is not indicative of future results. This content should not be considered investment or tax advice. For investment or tax advice, please consult a financial professional. Some sources are for platforms which sit behind a paywall and may require a subscription to access them in full.
