The story of crypto is a story about adoption. In the beginning, crypto was a pure retail game. This was the bootstrap era. Anonymous founders. White papers and dreams. Bitcointalk threads. Discords and Telegrams. If you wanted in, you had to live on Twitter/X and dig through governance forums and GitHub repos at 2 am. Fun era. Important era. But from an institutional perspective, mostly uninvestable. Then came the second phase: the scale-up era. Exchanges professionalized. Custody got solved.