From US stocks to encryption: Why will the next market trend come from "all-asset investors"?

Author: Louis, Trendverse Lab

Introduction:

In the past, the global capital markets had clear boundaries in terms of structure and participants: stocks and ETFs belonged to the brokerage system, crypto assets were hosted by exchanges, and foreign exchange was primarily operated by professional traders. Different assets were dependent on different applications, sources of liquidity, and analytical frameworks, with limited interactions among them.

Starting from 2024, these boundaries have noticeably loosened. Information dissemination is concentrated on the same batch of platforms, allowing themes and narratives to spread across markets; multiple trading platforms have integrated stocks, derivatives, and crypto assets into the same account, reducing the market switching costs for investors; at the price level, NVDA's earnings report, Bitcoin's volatility, or changes in macro liquidity, have started to produce synchronous responses across different asset classes. Markets that originally operated independently are increasingly connected by common variables.

This change is not driven by a single policy or technology, but rather is a structural result of the accumulation of multiple factors: a unified information entry point, more integrated trading tools, and more frequent cross-market linkages are changing the way investors move between different assets. Instead of saying that investors are engaging in “cross-border trading,” it is more accurate to say that their decision-making paths are no longer completely constrained by traditional market classifications.

This article will analyze the causes of this trend from the perspective of retail behavior and changes in platform structure, and further explore the possible evolutionary directions the market may present.

1. The End of the Fragmented Era - The Decision-Making Process of Retail Investors is Becoming More Integrated

In the previous cycle, the typical behavior pattern of retail investors was “whichever market they are in, they use whichever tool.”

Stocks, crypto assets, and foreign exchange rely on independent applications and trading systems, with investors' attention and operational paths clearly separated. However, in the past two years, this pattern has shown systemic loosening, driving retail investors to gradually shift from trading in a single market to narrative-centric cross-asset decision-making.

The most direct change comes from the centralization of information entry.

Regardless of whether investors ultimately trade stocks, ETFs, or crypto assets, their channels for obtaining information are highly overlapping: Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and YouTube have become common discussion hubs. The way content is organized no longer follows market segmentation but forms continuous discussion chains around themes like AI, BTC, and macro liquidity. In such an environment, narratives naturally have the characteristics of cross-market dissemination, leading to closer reactions of different assets to the same theme.

Image source: OxChainMind Twitter & OurCryptoTalk Twitter

The phenomenon of cross-market sentiment synchronization has thus become more pronounced.

In the past year, AI themes have simultaneously influenced both the US tech sector and on-chain AI concept tokens; Bitcoin's volatility is often reflected in the price performance of MSTR and COIN; changes in macro data trigger phenomenal discussions across stocks, cryptocurrencies, and related derivatives. Information and sentiment are no longer disseminated through market channels, but flow rapidly within thematic chains.

The changes on the tool side further solidify this trend.

Operations that used to require switching between different applications are now being replaced by unified interfaces. Robinhood integrates stocks, options, and crypto assets within the same account; Bybit and OKX allow users to participate in various products through a unified margin system with a single capital pool. These changes reduce the switching costs between markets, making it easier for retail investors to establish or adjust positions across different asset classes.

Chart Explanation: Comparison of BTC and MSTR Stock Prices

At the conceptual level, the “hierarchical distinction” between different assets is also fading.

Stocks are no longer necessarily viewed as more stable, and crypto assets are no longer synonymous with high volatility risk. Investors are more inclined to build portfolios around themes; for example, an AI theme may include both NVDA and TAO; a theme around Bitcoin may be represented by BTC, MSTR, and COIN. The role of assets in portfolio logic depends more on their relevance to the theme rather than the market they belong to.

These factors combined have gradually shifted retail investors' decision-making from “market segmentation” to “narrative integration.” The market is no longer understood as independent segments but more like a continuous structure linked by themes. Fragmented investment behavior is decreasing, and a more holistic perspective is beginning to form naturally.

2. The multi-asset competition of global platforms

Retail investors' cross-market behavior is not an isolated phenomenon; structural changes on the platform side are reinforcing this trend. In the past, brokers, crypto exchanges, and new financial applications served different asset classes, with clear boundaries between them. However, in the past two years, these platforms have begun to promote multi-asset integration through different paths, making “participating in more markets through the same entry point” a more common direction in the industry.

Robinhood's transformation is a typical starting point.

Image source: Robinhood official website

As a lightweight brokerage that started with stocks and ETFs, it gradually added options, crypto assets, and certain yield-generating products between 2021 and 2024. Although user activity and asset allocation are influenced by multiple factors, the platform structure has expanded from a single category to a cross-asset entry point, reflecting retail users' preference for a centralized experience: less app switching and a more consistent account structure.

The native cryptocurrency platform, on the other hand, promotes the same trend in the opposite direction.

Binance has added stock tokens, indexed products, and yield-generating tools in certain markets on top of traditional cryptocurrency trading; OKX has integrated different categories into a unified margin system, allowing users to switch between spot, perpetual, and options with lower costs. Although the scale of these features still shows a significant gap compared to the core crypto products, their existence itself indicates that the platform is reorganizing product boundaries around “multi-asset exposure.”

On-chain data also provides consistent evidence.

Data Source: RWA.xyz

The changes in the on-chain ecosystem further confirm this direction.

According to the market size chart released by RWA.xyz, tokenized treasuries have continued to grow from less than $500 million at the beginning of 2023 to several billion dollars by 2024, approaching the level of tens of billions by 2025, driven by several institutions including BlackRock, Franklin, Securitize, and Ondo. This growth does not indicate that traditional assets are migrating on-chain, but rather shows an increasing interest among crypto users in obtaining off-chain yield structures on-chain, with cross-asset allocation extending from platform interfaces to the on-chain layer.

Third-party investigations have corroborated this direction from the perspective of user behavior.

The “DIY Investing” survey released by BCSC in 2024 shows that young retail investors are more inclined to use lightweight platforms that allow them to operate multiple asset types within the same application, rather than splitting accounts among multiple service providers.

The UK FCA also reached a similar conclusion in its cross-agency review of 17 institutions with trading-related applications: the majority of platforms provide fractional stocks, cryptocurrencies, CFDs, forex, options, and futures simultaneously, and more than 10 others plan to continue expanding their asset lines to reduce the cost for users switching between different markets.

Data source: FCA multi-firm review of trading apps

The trend of multi-assetization is becoming more pronounced in medium-sized platforms and emerging applications.

Public.com started from a stock community and expanded to cover stocks, ETFs, government bonds, and crypto assets while maintaining a single account structure; Revolut has integrated stock and crypto trading into its payment app, allowing fund management and investment decisions to be made on the same interface. On-chain protocols like Synthetix provide cross-market price exposure through synthetic assets. Despite different paths, the goal is similarly aimed at lowering the participation threshold across assets.

Different platforms vary in terms of regulation, product architecture, and business focus, but during the same period, they show a converging direction: reducing the switching between accounts and interfaces, weakening the technical boundaries of asset classes, and restructuring the entry framework around users' investment behaviors.

The result is that the platform is gradually shifting from the past “market segmentation” to organizing products based on “asset combinations that users wish to express.”

3. Future Trends: Cross-Market Integration Platform = Retail Investors' “Super App”

The changes in retail investor behavior and the multi-asset integration on the platform side are forming an interactive relationship: users are reducing market switching, while platforms are responding to this behavior through a more unified architecture. This “two-way push” is gradually shifting the trading entry from being categorized by products to being organized around investment intentions. Although the technical and regulatory environments of each platform differ, their evolutionary paths exhibit several common characteristics.

The first phase will start from the most intuitive place: the interface is redefined.

Image Source: Antier——Beyond Robinhood

With stocks and crypto assets displayed side by side in the same account, the traditional market-segmented interface layout is giving way to a presentation style focused on themes or strategies. Unified Account, Unified Margin, and multi-asset dashboards enable users to manage different assets in a single view, no longer starting operations based on “market category.” The integration of the interface is the most intuitive change and is the first direction of platform adjustment perceived by users.

The changes in the second phase occur in places that are invisible to the naked eye: the execution layer begins to operate “by intention.”

As the interface logic becomes more unified, trade execution begins to transition to an “intention-based” approach. Users no longer need to explicitly choose where the transaction occurs, but instead express the desired outcome, allowing the underlying system to automatically complete cross-market routing. For example, the execution engine splits orders based on available prices and liquidity, hedges risks across multiple markets, or completes asset reallocation. This shift in the execution layer makes cross-market trading a more default capability for retail investors.

The third stage transforms the subject of the transaction: assets give way to strategy.

With the improvement of execution capabilities, the platform has begun to present structured products in the form of strategy portfolios rather than single assets. For example, thematic strategies around AI, macro interest rates, or Bitcoin may consist of multiple assets, allowing users to trade the strategy itself directly, rather than constructing the underlying asset portfolio one by one. On-chain standards such as ERC-4626 or ERC-8004 have been used in some ecosystems for the structuring of such portfolios, achieving automatic rebalancing and yield distribution, making strategies easier to standardize and circulate.

The fourth stage is the intelligent layer becoming the protagonist: AI becomes the default operational logic of the trading system.

The role of AI in trading tools is shifting from providing auxiliary information to participating in portfolio management. Models can generate base portfolios according to user preferences, suggest risk exposures, or rebalance based on event-driven triggers. Although the implementation methods vary across different platforms, most are exploring the use of AI as an auxiliary layer for trading decisions to shorten the decision-making chain from information to action.

The fifth stage transforms the platform from a “tool” into an “ecosystem”: incentives begin to drive the entire strategic cycle.

As the platform possesses the capabilities for strategy supply, user participation, and execution, value distribution begins to evolve towards a more ecological form, including revenue sharing for strategy authors, incentives for signal providers, a points system for user engagement, and more common tokenized incentive models in on-chain ecosystems. Different platforms adopt various mechanisms, but the core purpose remains the same: to maintain strategy supply, enhance user retention, and promote the continuous growth of trading and liquidity.

These changes are still at different stages, but they all point to a structural trend:

The trading platform is transitioning from a toolset categorized by asset classes to a multi-asset system organized around investment intent. The boundaries between assets are weakening, the interface and execution logic are unified, and strategies and intelligent capabilities are becoming the further integration direction.

This trend is not driven by a single technology, but is the result of user demand, platform structure, and cross-market interactions.

IV. Conclusion: From market segmentation to a broader asset structure

The changes in retail investor behavior, the integration paths of platforms, and the more frequent interlinkages between assets collectively outline an emerging market structure: different assets are no longer categorized but are observed within the same system through narratives, tools, and liquidity. Cross-market attention and trading behavior are gradually replacing the previous segmented participation methods.

This process does not mean that the market is being redefined, but rather that traditional boundaries are becoming less critical in practical use. For investors, the way to understand the market is increasingly relying on shared themes and structural variables, rather than the classification of asset ownership. These changes constitute the most noteworthy characteristics in the current environment and provide a more holistic perspective for observing future market behavior.

In a market where boundaries are constantly shifting, what truly matters is no longer where assets are placed, but how they connect with each other.