Crypto for retail and institutions should be all-in-one

A decade ago, holding cryptocurrencies in one’s core investment portfolio felt like an all-in gamble. Today, it’s a calculated strategy with over 90 public companies and some countries now holding Bitcoin (BTC) on their balance sheets.

What began as a retail revolution is now reshaping the corporate playbook. Crypto’s integration into treasury reserves signals a shift from pure speculation to a viable balance-sheet tool. Yet, we must not forget the roots of crypto’s origins — risk-on retail traders who built the foundations of what institutions once dismissed as the Wild West.

Centralised exchanges and crypto players now face a critical dilemma: to continue capitalising on retail zeal or to cater to institutional rigor? This shouldn’t be a binary choice. While retail and institutions have distinct needs and goals, their forces are symbiotic — each influencing the ecosystem’s evolution. To navigate what’s next, we must first unpack this duality, understand key design tensions, and outline practical strategies for building crypto markets that serve both.

Retail roots, corporate branches

Crypto’s growth has never been zero-sum. Institutions bring capital and credibility; retail drives culture and price momentum — all essential components to ecosystem growth.

Since its boom-and-bust era driven largely by retail speculation in the early 2010s, Bitcoin’s institutional rise signals a broader shift in financial ideology and advocates a new way of money. Fiat and real-world assets are increasingly moving on-chain and taking digital forms, with stablecoins serving as a key bridge between traditional finance and token economies.

But what’s actually accelerating adoption is not the merits of currency stability alone, but the technology. Users are choosing stablecoins and crypto rails simply because of better blockchain infrastructure: faster transaction speeds, lower costs, better interoperability, and ultimately better efficiency than legacy systems. This evolution has sociocultural consequences, paving the way for the integration of digital assets into corporate strategies and treasuries as a signal of digital progressiveness and alignment with web3-native communities.

Furthermore, Bitcoin has also evolved beyond an inflation hedge and is becoming a strategic signal for the digital economy’s future. DeFi platforms that were once built solely for retail are now powering treasury strategies for industry giants like MicroStrategy and Semler Scientific. In addition to corporate treasury use cases, crypto is also increasingly used as a multi-dimensional tool for capital efficiency and optimisation. This ranges from institutional adoption of crypto yield products, treasury diversification, to even altcoins like Solana (SOL) as payment rails.

Resultingly, crypto is embedding itself, not just in our wallets, but also in our financial systems, both strategically and ideologically. As crypto matures, we’re seeing recurring feedback loops: grassroots dynamics drive institutional interest, which in turn fuels broader adoption through progressive infrastructure and platforms. The industry’s next phase depends on designing for both, and only then will it beget success that outlasts market cycles.

Designing for duality

Crypto’s adoption flywheel has driven critical infrastructure advances, from regulatory clarity to accounting standards under FASB and IFRS, banking-grade AML standards, and treasury platforms offering institutional-grade yield optimisation tools — all working to safeguard consumer assets.

But on a servicing level, serving both markets requires navigating a high-stakes design paradox: balancing retail’s appetite for speed and innovation with institutions’ demand for security and stability.

Retail markets value fast listings, gamified experiences, and seamless UX. Institutions require robust high-volume APIs, audit trails, and compliance-heavy onboarding. These priorities often conflict, but they don’t have to. The key is intentional segmentation and in-depth customisation across various layers of the platforms, from trading interfaces, listing protocols, to customer support services. This means marrying mobile-first interfaces and community incentives for retail with granular permissions and enterprise-grade support for institutions. Just as TradFi offerings have evolved to serve diverse user groups through tailored services, crypto platforms are expected to follow a similar path as the industry matures.

Exchanges that thread this needle will unlock total market opportunity, while those who compromise security for speed risk losing institutional trust and liquidity.

The assetisation of attention

This symbiotic relationship between retail and institutional flows reveals a deeper truth about crypto’s evolution: attention itself is becoming a tradable asset.

Memecoins, for example, derive value not from crypto fundamentals and utility, but from community, virality, and engagement. Increasingly, web3 builders and investors are moving away from product-market fit evaluations to tracking engagement metrics like DAUs and social velocity as leading indicators of token value. The rise of influencer-driven token launches and creator coins — like RAC and WHALE — also underscores this dynamic, where popularity and fan engagement alone can drive valuation.

In this new economic model, community narrative drives price, and social visibility is the currency. The 500% growth boost of the memecoin market in 2024 alone proves that participation, not just technical contribution, creates value.

Such dynamics create fertile ground for attention arbitrage. Retail assigns early value through hype and engagement; institutions validate it via ETFs, indexes, and structured exposure. For exchanges, this arbitrage materialises through new listing frameworks that track attention-based metrics such as online sentiments or engagement velocity—tools like Gate.io’s Gate Live’s real-time user feedback and Coinbase’s “experimental” label highlight tokens with outsized public interest.

Still, hype comes with risk. Rug pulls and scam projects became more evident with each cycle. Here, exchanges play a vital role in filtering noise to spotlight projects with genuine utility and steadfast community support.

The future is hybrid: Retail-driven, institution-backed, attention-powered

The way markets move and what moves them has fundamentally changed. Institutions are now taking cues from the crowd, and centralised exchanges must serve both with speed, agility, and deep liquidity.

As crypto regulations gain mainstream influence, it is also becoming increasingly politicised; crypto now serves as subtle (or overt) ideological signals. In the U.S., crypto was used as a political differentiator, and pro-crypto narratives featured prominently in South Korea’s recent presidential campaigns, appealing to younger, digitally native voters. With crypto’s growing state-level influence, it becomes more critical that clarity and consumer protection must scale in parallel with innovation to ensure trust.

We’re in an era where attention is currency, but credibility and community are paramount. Only when the industry’s innovators and creators continue to listen will there be an impact. At Flipster, we’re driven by our philosophy of combining user-centric agility with institutional-grade infrastructures to empower the crypto community.

Crypto’s future isn’t either-or, it’s all-in-one. When exchanges enable retail creativity and institutional stability in the same breath, they don’t just follow the market — they lead it.

Benjamin Grolimund

Benjamin Grolimund is a seasoned fintech executive with over 17 years of leadership experience across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He currently serves as General Manager, UAE for Flipster, where he leads the company’s global expansion in the Middle East. Before joining Flipster, Benjamin was General Manager at Rain, the region’s leading regulated crypto platform. He also founded Finally, a payments startup later acquired by Slice. Earlier in his career, Benjamin spent over a decade at Bloomberg, where he served as Regional Head for the MEA, leading regional strategy, building trading infrastructure with banks and government bodies.