The post Retail was promised fair market but the house keeps winning appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Crypto opened the doors to retail now Wall Street is feasting on it Retail investors were sold a story about market access that was impossible to argue with: trading would be cheaper, information would be easier to find, public blockchains would pull back the curtain, and the old hierarchy that once defined finance would lose some of its grip. What that story left out, and what has become harder to ignore across both stocks and crypto, is that broader access didn’t do much to stop the system from organizing itself around retail behavior. It’s been studying, routing, pricing, and turning it into a source of value for someone else. That’s a new kind of problem brought about by the democratization of the crypto market. Markets are now open, and retail investors are more informed and knowledgeable than ever before. But access and visibility were never the same thing as power. The real power lies with institutions, venues, market makers, token issuers, and insiders, all of whom have better tools, better timing, and better ways of converting public information into actual advantage. Arkham’s recent case for the positive role of retail in crypto captures one side of that story. Public ledgers expose more of the market than tradfi ever did, and that alone changed the balance of information in ways that would’ve been hard to imagine a decade ago. Anyone can now track wallet movements, model token supplies, follow treasury activity, and users who would have been completely blind up until a decade ago can now see quite a bit of the market that’s in front of them. Related Reading Bitcoin price falls below $70k, foreshadowing US market open after threat to “obliterate” all Iranian power plants Bitcoin’s sharp drop tracks geopolitical escalation, with risk assets repricing as traders assess conflict…

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Filed under: News - @ March 22, 2026 3:23 pm