Crypto opened the doors to retail now Wall Street is feasting on it

Retail investors were sold a story about market access that was impossible to argue with: trading would be cheaper, information would be easier to find, public blockchains would pull back the curtain, and the old hierarchy that once defined finance would lose some of its grip.

What that story left out, and what has become harder to ignore across both stocks and crypto, is that broader access didn’t do much to stop the system from organizing itself around retail behavior. It’s been studying, routing, pricing, and turning it into a source of value for someone else.

That’s a new kind of problem brought about by the democratization of the crypto market. Markets are now…