Could John Dutton Have Saved Open Outcry?

Crypto's MiFED Moment

🐂 Raise your hand if you think the Dutton clan would have figured out a way for trading pits to remain the international finance center. I'm talking about the rough and tumble trading floors in Chicago, New York, London, and scattered about the globe.

If you're unfamiliar with the Duttons, they're the family at the center of Yellowstone. The family patriarch, John, is adamant about keeping life as it was. Old-school cattle ranching in Montana. He's against advancement in just about every form and seems to do well in fighting it off.

📣 Spoiler Alert! I'm going to touch on the recent episode of Yellowstone here.

The Duttons are cattle ranchers and fear that a virus may have gotten into their herd. Ok, a virus. Get some meds, and everything's going to be all right. Not quite. Regulators don't see it that way. If one head of cattle has the virus, the entire herd must be slaughtered. Wiped out. Their entire livelihood.

John has an idea to salvage some of the herd by moving them to another pasture they'd rent at a considerable cost. The numbers don't mesh well, however, and Beth, the business mind of the family, envisions a pivot. A new, vertical business plan that could save the ranch.

There are, of course, challenges to the new plan, but what I'm getting at is the impact of regulation. Regulators threatened to come in with a heavy hand, and it spurred innovation. The Duttons countered by literally picking up and moving the business and building out the business with an alternative channel.

Will it work? I have no idea. Tune in next week. That's not the point. My point is that regulation drives innovation. Regulation is coming to crypto, and it's easy to believe regulators will lay a heavy hand on the space. We'll adjust and adapt.

While crypto winter continues to slosh along, I wonder how much work has been done in that space. Crypto regulation. It seems like many in the crypto space are just rolling along, waiting for regs to hit so they can try to figure out a way around them rather than proactively working together on regulation and presenting a unified plan to Washington.

Crypto's inability to unite and form a working body for self-regulation, an SRO akin to FINRA, may prove to be gut-punch as regulators may blast away and point out that crypto leaders have not done enough or anything to prevent the blowups we encountered in '22.

What happens next should that heavy hand come barreling down? Many will fold. No doubt. Others will thrive, but they need to be ready to adjust and pivot if necessary. I lived through the great slowdown in growth for tradfi fintech that MiFID introduced, and it's easy to see a similar period of adjustment coming to crypto.