A friend of mine always gets drained emotionally by Crypto exchanges' "inaction," constantly fuming about why CEXs keep sucking up liquidity, why they always stray from innovation, and why they constantly "do evil," etc.

But I told him, the essence of Crypto exchanges is just like traditional brokerages; they position themselves as the "faucets" and toll booths of the capital market, so they are inherently "short-sighted" and prone to "disruptive innovation." After all, their main clientele has never been long-term builders but rather highly FOMO'd retail investors, new issue arbitrageurs, quant structures, and other "speculators." So first, drop the stupid idea of being disappointed in the industry because of CEX inaction.

Instead, take a broader and longer perspective—go back to Wall Street in the late 18th century. Those early brokerages didn't care about great innovations that would change the world either; they were just thinking about how to monopolize trading channels and earn more commissions. So in any industry or sector, during the frenzy of any bull market, casino owners are always the first to get rich. But when the market's existing funds are drained and there's no profit feedback from the real economy, it inevitably devolves into a pure zero-sum PVP-style internal competition and exhaustion.

But but but, hundreds of years of capital market history also prove one point: no market can forever rely solely on "brokerages" to hold up its facade. CEX's value and significance to the crypto industry are huge, but they are nowhere near the point of being a "bottleneck."

Crypto's resilience over more than a decade means it will never stop progressing just because of exchanges' short-sightedness or inaction. A truly great capital market will eventually hand the spotlight to industry giants:

In the late 19th century, when New York stockbrokers made a fortune by flipping railroad stocks, what ultimately gave the U.S. a century of deep foundation were the industrial tycoons like Carnegie and Vanderbilt who actually built railroads and smelted steel. During the 2000 dot-com bubble, the ones who earned buckets of money first were the Wall Street investment banks that wildly underwrote junk stocks with .com suffixes. But now, what truly dominates Nasdaq and controls global pricing power are tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. Even in the ongoing frenzy of the AI tech narrative, the core assets are not the brokerages providing trading channels, nor the tokenization of US stocks themselves, but the underlying computing engine providers like NVIDIA, Micron, Broadcom, etc.

So, it's crucial to see clearly the essence of CEX being brokerages. Every emerging industry's explosive phase goes through a brutal period of speculative frenzy and channel monopolization, but that doesn't change the industry's ultimate direction.

Crypto natives should see how $BTC has step by step become digital gold, see how $ETH has steadily built the trust foundation of a decentralized global settlement network, and see how $SOL and $HYPE are diverting attention and capital from the wave of US stock tokenization.

Only by recognizing these potential Crypto "industry giants" can you avoid being overly pessimistic and disappointed about the industry's future. (Besides, CEX may also become part of the force driving industry innovation due to internal competition; they can't keep just harvesting forever.)