Recently observing the changes in the crypto market, I’ve come up with an interesting phenomenon— the old "retail casino" playbook is being completely rewritten by the logic of "institutional allocation."

Think back to before 2021. A single joke on social media could trigger FOMO across the entire internet, a Meme coin suddenly explodes in popularity, leveraged speculators follow suit wildly, then crash, with chain liquidations. Price movements were entirely driven by retail sentiment and leverage games.

But now, it’s different. The market is no longer driven by scattered small-scale speculators, but by long-term capital such as hedge funds, asset management firms, and publicly listed companies. They focus on macro liquidity, regulatory progress, and product innovation. Whether Bitcoin can break new highs no longer depends on who shouts the loudest on social media, but on how much institutional-grade USD real money is flowing in.

This shift can be seen from several landmark events. MicroStrategy treating its treasury as a digital asset allocation tool and continuously buying Bitcoin. After Bitcoin spot ETFs were approved, institutional investors could allocate Bitcoin just like traditional assets, making capital inflows the norm. The development of compliant derivatives has provided tools to ensure large funds can enter the market smoothly.

So, the seemingly contradictory market phenomena recently can all be explained within this new framework.

For example, Bitcoin’s recent correction. It used to be interpreted as another round of "retail panic selling," but under the new paradigm, it’s actually institutional-level value discovery and rebalancing. The price repeatedly hovers around the key support level of $81,000, no longer an unruly crash, but a game between long-term holders and new entrants. Volatility will still exist, but it’s been buffered by structural demands like ETF inflows and corporate asset allocation.

Those individual speculators still chasing Meme coins in frenzy, and news of high-leverage liquidations, actually reflect the residuals of the old paradigm gradually being cleared out. This isn’t market failure; it’s a sign of market maturity—assets with real value are being gradually absorbed by institutions, while speculative bubbles driven purely by emotion are being squeezed out of the system.

What does this shift mean? It means that crypto assets are truly evolving from a "casino" into a "financial asset." Volatility will become more rational and structured, no longer characterized by wild surges and crashes, but more like traditional risk assets—rising and falling, but with the overall trend determined by fundamentals and capital flows.