Growing up, my family didn’t have any loyalty to sports teams. The parents were foreign and the sports rivalry was never understood. Even if I was at Duke University, I might not have cared much about college basketball (sorry). The only real organizational or brand loyalty I inherited was and still is my father’s dedication to Delta Air Lines. Then I got interested in cryptocurrencies and discovered what real tribalism was like.
tribal era
The early culture of crypto was a world of factions. Bitcoin maximalists have vowed that nothing else matters. Ethereum builders believed they were building the next internet. Every new chain arrived with the promise of being a faster, cheaper, purer fix to the last one.
As the industry grew, the debates were technical on the surface, but ideological at heart. Proof of Work and Proof of Stake — Does mining waste a lot of energy? Is proof of stake really equal? And the classic blockchain trilemma problem. Everyone had a better way to balance security, decentralization, and scalability. ICO, fair launch, community distribution, governance structure…. Full color gamut.
Today, new cypherpunk movements and privacy narratives are beginning to paint Bitcoin as a legacy asset, a store of value for institutions and wealthy individuals. What was once a frontier is now an infrastructure. The frontier simply moved forward.
ETF moment
But will everyone be in more or less the same situation when they finally reach their destination, boosted by ETP access?
Bitcoin Maxis (now often confused with the Seed Oil guys), Ethereum supporters, XRP military, LINK Marines (no, military references are not forgotten by us). A community driving exciting and promising projects like Solana, Sui, TAO, and Zcash. Everything is now in the same portfolio. Beliefs are always there in any network, and the market structure has turned the network into one asset class: the increasingly accepted and diversified crypto asset class.
why? Because ETPs have rewired the way exposure works. They have standardized storage, distribution, and access under one regulated system. Will brand loyalty start to lose pricing power when exposure becomes a single button in intermediary apps?
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and now Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, and Chainlink all flow through the same pipes: the same custodians, the same authorized participants, and the same DTCC rails. The same investors will buy them: institutional investors, RIAs, model portfolio managers. The same risk team will oversee them. What was once ideological loyalty is rapidly becoming exposure management.
Shared rails, shared dreams
The world’s virtual currency ETP currently holds assets worth billions of dollars, of which 80% is Bitcoin and 18% is Ethereum (Source: Bloomberg, December 1, 2025). The rest will follow the same route: storage by a few custodians, liquidation by DTCC, and distribution by legacy platforms.
And with the emergence of staking rewards in some of these assets, cryptocurrencies are also becoming a source of income. This is a structural shift that will change the way investors think about the place of cryptocurrencies in their portfolios.
The same thing can be seen from the correlations. Since 2022, the 90-day correlation between Bitcoin and Ethereum has averaged 83% (Source: Bloomberg, December 1, 2025)and most large tokens now trade in the same risk bucket. It’s not because the foundations are consolidated, it’s because the infrastructure is consolidated. The same pipes that brought capital to Bitcoin now also bring it elsewhere.
From Maxis to market share
There have always been tribes in cryptocurrencies. That’s human nature and, honestly, half the fun. But perhaps we will become more and more part of the same team. And perhaps we will all reach the next level together. If faith built the house, perhaps infrastructure would keep the lights on.
For the next wave of investors adopting cryptocurrencies 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. What is your weight in overall digital assets?
Tribalism once served the purpose of differentiation on the speculative frontier. It organized chaos, channeled our primitive instincts for victory, and created culture. But in the next era of cryptocurrencies, perhaps we can all win. together.
Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary is Head of Products and Research at Grayscale Investments.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those expressed within the article and do not necessarily reflect those of Grayscale or its affiliates. Past performance is not indicative of future results. This content should not be considered investment or tax advice. Please consult a financial professional for investment and tax advice. Some sources are for platforms behind paywalls and may require a subscription for full access.
