There’s a classic Saturday Night Live sketch where Chevy Chase and Gilda Radner pitch “Shimmer”—a product that’s both a floor wax and a dessert topping. The joke works because the product refuses to be one thing.

Crypto has exactly that problem—and unlike Shimmer, the consequences aren’t funny.

Depending on context, crypto is an investment, a payment system, a speculative asset, and a piece of critical infrastructure. Each lens is accurate, and each one produces a different risk model. The challenge—regulatory and security—is that we keep trying to treat it as only one of those things at a time.

We’ve seen pieces of this before. At the speculative end, crypto sometimes behaves like Tulip Mania or the Beanie Babies…