Who trades crypto

Every market on this platform was institutional first, retail last. Crypto ran the film backwards - and the reversal explains more of its character than any technology does.

The cast today

• Retail, everywhere and first: the founding population, still a larger share of flow than in any other asset class here - which shapes the market's hours, its narratives and its manias; module 5 makes this structural fact the analysis module's spine.
• The knitters: market makers and arbitrageurs quoting across venues, keeping lesson 2's fragments loosely joined - the flow-without-a-view cast, doing the platform's usual mechanical majority of volume.
• Structural sellers: miners and validators earn coins as income and sell them to pay real-currency costs - a steady supply flow with no view, the closest thing crypto has to the commodities track's producers.
• Institutions, late and wrapped: funds and corporates arrived mainly after 2020, often through regulated products - their presence tightened the macro linkage module 5 teaches, and their absence in downturns loosens it.
• Derivative traders: perpetuals and futures carry volumes that rival or exceed spot, and their leverage cascades move the spot price sharply - structure the track teaches in module 3, whether or not the reader's jurisdiction permits access.

What the reversal means for a reader

Two inheritances. The crowd is the market to a degree no other track matched: with retail dominant and no valuation anchor, crypto is the FX track's crowd-reading taken to its limit - the honesty framing module 5 will state formally. And the mechanical flows still rule the tape: the knitters, the structural sellers and the derivative cascades produce most of what a chart shows - the platform's oldest lesson, surviving its youngest market: most volume has no view, and the volume that does is mostly the crowd's mood, at scale.