When many people encounter crypto, they say that this is a meteor that’s fallen out of space and landed on Earth. It’s bizarre and it’s unprecedented.

But in reality, the longer you are in the space, the more the more you realize this is not very different from when ETFs were first introduced as a successor to mutual funds, when mobile was introduced as a successor to desktop, when the cloud architecture for software delivery was introduced as a successor for on-premise data centers.

Probably the biggest mental shift from 2017 to today to now, three years into it, is that this is not so different from other technology paradigms that were very unfamiliar and their impact was unclear to people when they were first introduced.

In each of these instances, people said, “We don’t need this thing.” Incumbents didn’t immediately move to that platform. The markets started out small. There were concerns about risks.

Just to take ETFs as an example. When ETFs got started around the turn of the century, the following were the objections that people had — it’s a retail only product, institutions don’t need this, institutions use mutual funds, it’s a small market, why would we invest in this market? This is only a few billion, or tens of billions in ETFs, whereas there’s trillions, tens of trillions in mutual funds. People said that regulators are never gonna get comfortable with this, market makers are going to rip off investors.

And sure enough, here we are 10, 15 years north of the 5 trillion in assets and continuing to erode what mutual funds were in the late 90s. And at this point, I would say ETFs are the obvious successor to mutual funds.

If you think about it, what do people say about crypto?

It tends to be a lot of the same things. It’s a small market, why would we pay attention, regulators are never going to be comfortable with this. It’s a retail-only market where institutions and serious organizations don’t need to pay attention. People are getting ripped off by sophisticated actors.