Growing up, my family was not loyal to sports teams: my parents are foreigners and sports rivalries never translated. Even at Duke, I couldn’t have cared less about college basketball (sorry). The only real institutional or brand loyalty I inherited was my father’s commitment to Delta Air Lines, which I still maintain. Then I got into the world of cryptocurrencies and discovered what real tribalism is like.
The era of tribes
Crypto’s initial culture was a world of factions. Bitcoin maximalists swore that nothing else mattered. The creators of Ethereum believed they were building the next Internet. Each new chain arrived promising to fix the previous one: faster, cheaper, purer.
As the industry grew, debates were technical on the surface but ideological at heart. Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake: Does Mining Waste a Ton of Energy? Can proof of stake really be equal? And classic blockchain trilemma stuff. Everyone had a better way to balance security, decentralization, and scalability. ICO, trade show launches, community distributions, governance structures…. the whole range.
Today, new cypherpunk movements and privacy narratives have begun to paint Bitcoin as a kind of legacy asset: a store of value for institutions and the wealthy. What was once a border is now infrastructure. The frontier has simply advanced.
The moment of the ETF
But when we finally get to where we’re going, fueled by access to ETP, will we all be more or less in the same boat?
Bitcoin maxis (nowadays often confused with seed oil people), Ethereum loyalists, XRP army and LINK marines (no, the military references are not lost on us). The communities that drive interesting and promising projects such as Solana, Sui, TAO and Zcash. Everything now in the same portfolio. Conviction is the constant in all networks, and the market structure has turned them into an asset class: the increasingly accepted and constantly diversifying crypto asset class.
Because? Because the ETPs reconfigured how the exhibition works. They standardized custody, distribution and access under a regulated system. Once exposure becomes a single button on a brokerage app, does brand loyalty begin to lose pricing power?
Bitcoin, Ethereum (and now Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, Chainlink) now run through the same pipelines: the same custodians, the same authorized participants, the same DTCC rails. They will be bought by the same investors: institutions, RIAs and model portfolio managers. The same risk teams will supervise 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 them in Bitcoin and 18 percent in Ethereum (Source: Bloomberg, December 1, 2025). The rest follow the same route: custody through a handful of custodians, clearing through DTCC, and distribution through legacy platforms.
And with rewards for staking on several of these assets, cryptocurrencies are also becoming an income play – a structural shift that changes the way investors think about cryptocurrencies’ 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 are now trading in the same risk segment. Not because their foundations have merged, but because their infrastructure has. The same pipelines that brought capital to Bitcoin now also carry it everywhere.
From maxis to market share
Cryptocurrencies will always have tribes – that’s human nature and, honestly, half the fun too. But perhaps, more and more, we are part of the same team. And maybe we’ll all get to the next level together: If faith built the house, maybe the infrastructure keeps the lights on.
For the next wave of investors embracing cryptocurrencies as an investment asset, it may be less about tribal identity and more about portfolio construction. Perhaps the new question is not which chain is better; What is its weight on digital assets in general?
Tribalism once had a purpose: differentiation on a speculative frontier. He organized chaos, channeled our primal instincts to win, creating culture. But in the coming era of cryptocurrencies, maybe we can all win. Together.
Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary is Director of Product and Research at Grayscale Investments.
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