Will the ETF Era Usher in the End of Crypto Tribalism?

The age of tribes

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.

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.