The news about the NYSE planning to offer 24/7 trading for U.S. stocks has made many people feel like Crypto has completely lost its edge, but I don’t see it that way. Here are a few thoughts: 1/ We should return to the essence of Crypto: permissionless and decentralized. This is the core value and the only moat of blockchain projects, something the traditional market can never replace. 2/ Compliance makes it easier for bigger players to enter the space, but for projects within this field, it’s a dimensionality reduction attack. 3/ As long as DeFi maintains its permissionless and no-KYC characteristics, it will always remain competitive and will be in the best position to absorb liquidity when institutions enter the space. 4/ Projects that are neither here nor there will ultimately have no future. 5/ Centralized institutions/ecosystems will increasingly support their own “decentralized” on-chain projects, but in the long run, these products will gradually evolve into submodules of a company. They will never truly attempt to decentralize or build in that direction. In extreme cases, one day they might even be pressured to require users to KYC. 6/ For traditional giants, they can build their own solutions, their own chains, and issue assets on their own platforms. But if they can’t interoperate with public blockchains, they’re only serving users who already meet the conditions to open accounts, not global users. The core value of the Crypto market is that public blockchains reach every corner of the world, every individual, not just the U.S.