frankly, if someone says that crypto is dying and is becoming "institutionalized", the first conclusion I come to is that they are incapable of rotating a shape in their head. crypto reflexivity is at the precipice of getting to FULL CULTURAL VICTORY when it comes to capital markets. Securitize, Ondo and everyone in that stack have been around for years. don't you think they wore suits when going to talk to traditional allocators and originators? people are overindexing on tokenization / vaults as being the "natural" point of convergence for "institutionalization" (whatever that means) due to fear, fatigue or a lack of optimism. it is a necessary but not sufficient condition, but it's one piece of the workflow. for example, you can conceptualize CBRS as almost a low float / high FDV play. AND NOT IN A BAD WAY. trade xyz literally ran the pre-IPO perp for two full weeks before the listing. it transitioned cleanly into a standard equity perp. CBRS opened at $350 against a $185 IPO price. the IPO became a settlement step in a market that had been clearing for two weeks. crypto unbundles the liquidity event. price discovery, synthetic exposure, hedging an instrument via perps, hedging an epistemic object via event contracts. all of these are becoming different surfaces. sometimes the perp comes first. sometimes the event contract for upside or downside protection is better. even market creation through information aggregation is getting solved for by teams like @novadotmarkets. the thing people are missing is that tokenized equity / tokenization / w.e. vaults an AM or a bank are building and how they call is only one leg. important but just a leg perps, prediction markets, tokenized equity, event contracts, sentiment markets, whatever. these are all attempts to complete markets around previously unpriced states. STUDY THE BLADE, study Arrow-Debreu / complete markets. the IPO is no longer the liquidity event in the old sense. @0xsmac tweeted something along the lines that this is dangerous and there will be a conspiracy by the private secondary shadow market and anyone engaged in those shenanigans to bury this + make it look unsafe as aggressively as possible. Fear not. IN TWO YEARS, we're going to have low-mid markets going liquid, with pre-liquidity markets where you can go long or short on whichever perps platform you want. or even go harder on proxies, hop on IBKR, use @kalshi event contracts to go long or short on any systematic theme related to it. FOR ANYTHING. underwriters and sponsors for mid-markets and IPOs are going to literally have Discord mods handing out gated passes for whales and community members (at least I wish, I really want to see that happen). imagine being an employee at some company, hitting up @terrry and @techdollarhq, using the money as margin to triple down on the company you're working for or using IBKR directly to hedge against it dying with some index on @kalshi. want something more risky and convex? not going to repeat the old adage about PMs replacing memecoins (tho to an extent may be true) but you have choices outside of the big exchanges. go try out @meleemarkets or @pumpcade . different approaches, but both aiming for forms of convexity (liquidity reflexivity vs fast resolution). you can't complain about MMs making markets on large exchanges either as at least you know the people making the markets aren't complete criminals. sentiment markets too for a lot of stuff but frankly I dont know @noise_xyz and @lucacs that well. tldr = anyone who complains about this is someone I will mentally write off in the future. can't get users or funding? maybe you shouldn't ship poopoo or launch on PooChain that has a monkey or an animal mascot (pot calling the kettle black here, biggest mistake I've made as a builder). can't find a job or a way to make money? maybe you just suck and are ignoring the fact that talent price discovery in crypto is far more efficient now due to less information asymmetry. its an exciting time, its just that you can't hold a professor coin to 1000x anymore and expect to retire. outside of that, convexity is there. imo really good