Crypto-native investors, builders and in-crowd stakeholders cycled through booms and busts, chased speculative manias and repeatedly clashed with regulators, all while insisting that a mature, institutional future lay just beyond the next market cycle.
That institutional future is beginning to look less hypothetical. On Wednesday (Jan. 28), Fidelity Investments announced it will launch a stablecoin called the Fidelity Digital Dollar (FIDD), while OKX and Mastercard also launched a crypto card in the European Economic Area (EEA).
But perhaps the greatest signal is coming from public markets. Traditionally, the crypto firms that came out with initial public offerings (IPOs) were usually easy to categorize into one of two camps:…
Jan 29 2026
