The Casino is Fuller than Ever but Crypto is not the Game

That window has closed, or at the very least, narrowed considerably.

Retail attention, the speculative, narrative-chasing capital that fuels the explosive phases of any transformative asset class, has migrated away from crypto. And it has done so with the same pattern and the same behavioural fingerprint that it always has.

The destination this time is different from prior cycles. Retail attention didn't just rotate into another speculative instrument. It rotated into artificial intelligence, especially the personal, pocket-sized tools that have dominated public opinion over the past couple of years while seamlessly squaring into their day-to-day.

And retail leapt to financially express that conviction without a second thought, even more as it appears to carry a narrative durability that prior retail attention cycles lacked.

Retail attention as a migratory asset

Before crypto captured retail imagination, the same psychological cycle played out repeatedly. Each episode shares the same picture: a genuinely new technology or asset class emerges, early adopters generate visible wealth, media amplifies the narrative, retail floods in near the peak, burns out, then the attention migrates to the next story.

The dot-com boom is the closest structural ancestor to the crypto boom, and the original retail tech mania. The internet was a genuine technological revolution that most people couldn't fully understand, much like blockchain, but whose promise was universally intelligible. You didn't need to understand TCP/IP to believe the internet would change everything.

But the latter also brought online brokerage to the retail doorstep. Retail market participation exploded through newly accessible investment tools, which were themselves a UX revolution, doing for stock trading at the eve of the 2000s what Robinhood or Coinbase achieved over the past decade. This further collapsed the distance between retail users and a speculative asset class by removing friction that had previously kept those users out.

Day trading became a cultural phenomenon. From 1998 onwards, the frenzy had reached a threshold moment. Online brokerage accounts crossed 10mn for the first time, and daily equity trades had surged from under 100,000 in the mid-1990s to over 500,000, in what the SEC itself described it as one of the "biggest shifts in individual investors' relationships." Retail poured hundreds of billions into companies with no revenue, no profits and in some cases no product, purely on the transformation narrative, which led Nasdaq to surge roughly 380% over that period before finding a local peak in Mar 2000.

After the dot-com wipeout, erasing more than 80% in valuations, retail attention pivoted toward something that felt more tangible and understandable: property. You could touch it, rent it, renovate it. The "house flipping" narrative became culturally dominant, spawning TV shows, books and an entire ecosystem of accessible leverage through subprime mortgages.

Retail, burned by abstraction and complexity, sought refuge in something more immediately graspable. Home purchases, the most personal and utility-driven transaction in most individuals’ financial lives, were slowly being reframed as investment vehicles. The first-time buyer was increasingly sharing the market with the speculative flipper, the leveraged landlord and the second-home investor, representing over a third of all US home transactions, a proportion that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.

Every generation discovers speculation for the first time and mistakes it for insight. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes, and the latest verse is being written in silicon and code.

The AI boom

In late 2022, OpenAI quietly introduced the world to ChatGPT. A personal AI assistant had become the most discussed technology on the planet over a few months' span, pulling public attention in a direction that financial markets would take months to fully price.

Over the year that followed, ChatGPT started to make genuine noise and the macro backdrop couldn't have been more accommodating. Risk was back on. The Nasdaq was breaking new highs. Bitcoin was recovering from bear market lows and building toward a new all-time high, carried by institutional adoption headlines and the impending ETF approvals. On paper, the conditions for a full crypto super cycle were assembling.

(Source: Google Trends)

But something was missing. Bitcoin rallied, and the altcoins didn't follow. The classic transmission mechanism that had defined every prior cycle, Bitcoin leads, capital rotates down the risk curve, altcoins surge and retail piles in, broke down. What emerged instead was a series of selective, short-lived rallies in isolated areas and a handful of thematic plays that exhausted themselves over weeks rather than sustaining for months, far from what market participants have been used to.

And more importantly, artificial intelligence was already outweighing crypto markets in global opinion. The divergent factor wasn't the macro, wasn't regulation, wasn't liquidity. It was retail. And this was the first concrete signal that retail attention had already migrated to something else. When the dot-com bubble burst, real estate filled the psychological vacuum, something tangible, graspable that made sense to ordinary people without a technical manual. Artificial intelligence embraced the same role from 2023 onwards, with one critical difference: it didn't just make sense, it made itself useful to people, immediately, daily, without friction. It achieved in months what crypto had failed to achieve in a decade of trying.

Crypto once held a premium that was entirely its own, the uncontested claim to being the most groundbreaking new technology of its era. The ICO boom in 2017 had no competition for that title. DeFi summer in 2021 didn't either. Altcoins surged to valuations that had no fundamental anchor, purely on the narrative that this was the future and you were either early or late. Sound familiar?

That premium has been handed over. Artificial intelligence tools now sit at the top of the groundbreaking technology pile, and unlike crypto, they arrived with a product that "works" on day one, requires minimal effort from the user and compounds its utility with every interaction. The throne changed hands.

The adoption numbers make the structural difference impossible to ignore. Crypto assets’ first mass retail wave arrived in 2017, eight years after the bellwether launch, with the bulk of user base expansion compressing into a frantic few-year window driven almost entirely by speculative expectations rather than utility. But still, it took many years, the clearest indictment of how complex the interface remained. One that persists today, despite years of abstraction layers, wallet upgrades and interoperability patches plastering over the underlying complexity.

ChatGPT crossed 100mn active users in 64 days, the same threshold that took Bitcoin the better part of a decade, the internet seven years and Facebook four and a half years. To put that in full perspective: Robinhood, after a decade of operation and a meme stock frenzy, has never exceeded 30mn funded accounts. Revolut, eleven years in and the most-downloaded financial app in Europe, reached 50mn users only in late 2024. ChatGPT passed both on the way to 100mn before either had time to issue a press release about it.

Every major crypto cycle was, at its core, a retail story. When that cohort momentarily found more fertile ground elsewhere, it revealed, for the first time, how much of its momentum had always depended on a crowd that was never there for the technology stack but to chase the next "big thing."

The great flow migration 

During last cycles, moving capital out of crypto meant navigating fragmented off-ramps, limited fiat conversion options, unclear tax treatment and a legal infrastructure that was at best a work in progress. Capital didn't just flow out slowly. In numerous instances, it was effectively trapped inside the ecosystem by the friction of leaving it.

That friction is gone. Platforms and brokers have quietly built the infrastructure that makes asset class rotation a two-tap decision. Crypto and equities sitting side by side under the same roof, with the same settlement rails. A retail participant sitting on an underwater Solana position in 2024 didn't need a new account, a new exchange or a new learning curve to rotate into Nvidia. They just did it. The removal of that structural barrier didn't cause the rotation, but it removed the last reason not to.

Equities hence became the direct beneficiary. With the most consequential artificial intelligence companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, still privately held and inaccessible to retail, the straightforward trade for anyone seeking exposure to the next transformative wave was to buy the infrastructure it runs on. Nvidia leads the charge, semiconductors behind it, data centre operators behind that and the hyperscalers anchoring the whole supply chain.

(Source: Robinhood Earnings Press Releases & 10-K)

Robinhood, the leading venue for retail trading, lays the structural shift bare. Since 2023, the crypto assets’ trading volume has only been reignited around precise events, episodically and without any structural trend. The Bitcoin spot ETF approval momentum in early 2024 and the "Trump trade" by November that year were the only two episodes where it meaningfully broke above the floor. Both are traceable to a single catalyst each, and both unwound just as fast. The Republican inauguration euphoria alone was followed by a 68% unwind in crypto volume in just the quarter that followed, as retail attention was increasingly drained by US hyperscalers.

Strip those two events entirely and crypto's share of total trading volume, equities included, sits in a 4-7% range for the entirety of 2023 through 2025. At the Q2 2021 absolute peak of the retail crypto frenzy, that share was roughly 26%. Robinhood's user base traded roughly $70bn in crypto in a single quarter, neck to neck with the late 2024 crypto retail participation.

Meanwhile, in Q2 2025, with Bitcoin riding to all-time highs, regulatory clarity materially improved, and with a user base that had grown 26% since that peak, the same platform generated $28.3bn in crypto volume. This is a 59% decline against a structurally larger and more financially engaged user base.

On the flip side of the same application, retail was doubling down with conviction. Equity trading volumes nearly doubled from $413bn in Q1 2025 to $710bn by Q4 2025. Over the past year, retail didn't come with less capital, it came with more, drawing $68.1bn in net deposits, the largest Robinhood's annual capital inflow, where most of every dollar found its way into equities.

Retail sentiment around the latter is now running hotter than it did during the GameStop era. The casino is fuller than ever, crypto just isn't the game being played.

Buried inside Robinhood's equity surge headline is a more granular signal, one that speaks directly to how retail is expressing that conviction, not just where.

Options contracts traded on the platform have grown roughly 156% since January 2022, with the bulk of that growth significantly concentrated in late 2024 and compounding through 2025. Behind that growth are the zero-days-to-expiration options (0DTE), contracts that expire the same day they are purchased, requiring less capital and delivering a very short-term binary outcome before the market bell. In October 2024, Robinhood introduced 0DTE's index options to its retail base investors through a partnership with CBOE Global Markets, flipping the options market's centre of gravity entirely.

According to a CBOE report, 0DTE contracts now represent roughly 60% of total SPX options volume, up from 21% in 2021. It is a near-complete transformation of how the most liquid options market in the world is being used, with retail claiming a front-row seat.

(Source: Chicago Board Options Exchange)

CBOE estimates retail accounts for more than half of all 0DTE SPX options trading volume. While the institutional-to-retail split has held roughly at 50/50 since 2021, that ratio no longer represents the same notional. As the market grew sevenfold, the absolute capital retail is deploying into short-dated derivatives scaled with it to the point where retail now accounts for roughly a third of total SPX options total volume.

The retail pivot toward artificial intelligence-driven equities is not a US-centric phenomenon. South Korea offers perhaps the most striking international case study, and one of the most data-rich illustrations of how artificial intelligence semiconductor exposure became a vehicle for mass retail speculation far beyond Silicon Valley.

Rather than a broad-based advance, the +157% KOSPI rally was, in practice, a two-stock trade. Over the past year, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, heavyweight suppliers of high-bandwidth memory, the critical chip architecture that makes artificial intelligence training possible at scale, posted gains of +315% and roughly +500% respectively, becoming the Korean index’s undisputed centre of gravity. While compelling policy tailwinds, including domestic investment incentives echoing Japan’s TSE reform playbook, gave both retail and institutional participants structural reasons to start it all in 2024, the artificial intelligence semiconductor trade is what had everyone scrambling for a ticket into 2025 and beyond.

According to Korea Exchange data, the "Dhongak ants," a moniker for Korean retail investors, represented roughly 60% of total KOSPI trading volume at its peak last year, making them the single most consequential price-setting force in one of Asia's largest equity markets. While that share now sits around 42%, KFIA shows that investor deposits at Korean retail brokerages recently hit a record of 132tn won ($89.7bn), a war chest flooding the market and pushing the KOSPI deep into uncharted territory.

The shift is equally visible on the other side of the ledger. Korean retail was once among the most active and consequential forces in global crypto markets, a domestic trading culture so intense that the "Kimchi premium." the persistent price gap between Korean and global crypto exchanges, became a reliable barometer of the cohort's speculative intensity.

(Source: Coin Metrics)

Setting aside the recent brief volatility-driven spikes, the October crash, the November drift and the early February liquidation cascade, daily average Bitcoin trading volume on Korean exchanges collapsed to $246.7mn over the April-to-October 2025 window. This is down 76.1% from the $1.03bn recorded at the peak of the Trump inauguration mania a few months before.

Crypto trading volumes on both Robinhood and Korean exchanges, befitting the 2022 wipeout levels rather than any bull market, should be striking enough on their own. But the most telling detail is not the absolute figure. It is timing.

Retail barely participated in the very rally that carried Bitcoin to its most recent all-time high. Largely spectators on the way up, watching from the equities tab, for the first time in its history, Bitcoin climbed to uncharted territory without the retail wave that had defined every cycle before it. The attention, the capital and the conviction that once made retail traders a gravitational force in crypto price discovery had, by then, already found a different ground.

The crypto markets’ clearing phase 

History offers a template, and it is more instructive than it first appears.

The Nasdaq took 15 years to reclaim its March 2000 highs. Fifteen years during which retail had long since moved on, attention had permanently relocated and the technology sector was largely left to the institutionals, the operators and the builders who had never confused the narrative with the infrastructure. The tourists left. The architects stayed. And when the index finally reclaimed its peak in 2015, it did so on the back of companies, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, that hadn't existed or barely registered at the prior top. The bubble didn't kill the technology. It cleared the room of everyone who was there for the wrong reasons.

Crypto is likely in that room-clearing phase right now.

Coinbase's volume mix shows what that clearing process looks like in numbers. At the peak of the 2021 cycle, retail trading represented roughly 32% of Coinbase's total volume. In the years since the drawdown, that share has effectively been cut in half, as retail activity collapsed far more sharply than institutional participation. The space that retail vacated was not left empty, it was absorbed by institutions that remained engaged through the downturn. Today, slightly more than four out of every five units of Coinbase trading volume are institutional.

(Source: Coinbase Earnings Press Releases & 10-K)

The parallel isn't perfect. Markets are more reflexive than they were in 2001, capital moves faster, narratives cycle in weeks rather than years and the institutional infrastructure now embedded in crypto has no equivalent in the post-dot-com wreckage. That suggests the fallow period will be materially shorter. Institutions are already here, not watching from the sidelines, but accumulating, integrating and building. The ETF approvals, the sovereign reserve conversations and the bank custody frameworks - these are not the signals of an industry in retreat. They are the signals of an industry being quietly repriced by people who know what they are looking at.

The overhang most likely to resolve this is sitting in plain sight. When OpenAI, Anthropic and the generation of artificial-intelligence companies that have absorbed retail's attention finally come to public markets through their IPOs, the narrative cycle will likely slow down. The "invest in the future" trade that currently runs through Nvidia and hyperscalers will have its natural conclusion. And when that happens, the next relatable story will need to be found.

Crypto and blockchain have not stopped being groundbreaking because retail stopped paying attention. They are experiencing something more specific, the first serious doubt cycle in their history. A cycle in which the technology is being stress-tested, the speculation has been purged, and the builders are doing the work that bull markets make it too easy to skip. That is not a bad thing. That is, historically, exactly what has to happen before the next real leg begins.