Recent moves by Crypto.com, Coinbase, and S&P suggest that the next phase of crypto may be built around infrastructure—not another trading screen.

For years, crypto exchanges competed on a familiar set of features: more tokens, lower fees, faster trading, and increasingly complicated charts.

That competition is starting to change.

Several recent developments suggest that major crypto platforms no longer want to be places where users simply buy and sell digital assets. They increasingly want to become broader financial systems—bringing crypto, stocks, derivatives, tokenized assets, payments, and custody into the same account.

The idea sounds convenient. Building it safely is much harder.

The exchange is expanding beyond crypto

On…