Crypto did not become a casino by accident. It became a casino because two forces pushed it there:

1. Regulation that cornered the industry into pretending everything is “not a security,” which inevitably produced memecoins, stunt tokens, and a culture of trading without responsibility.
2. Price discovery mechanisms copied from public equity markets, especially the continuous, high-frequency, limit-order-book model of exchanges like the NYSE—an architecture built for speed, frontrunning, and microsecond games, not for long-term fundamental value.

If you combine a regulatory regime that avoids fundamentals with a market structure that rewards speculation, you get the environment we have today: more roulette than research, more noise than signal.

It’s not a moral failure. It’s a mechanism failure. And mechanism failures can be redesigned.

What Would Happen If Every Company Were Public on Day One?

My intuition is brutal but simple:

If every early-stage company were publicly listed from day one, innovation would die.

Young companies don’t have stable fundamentals. They have hypotheses, fragile trajectories, and extreme downside volatility. If their market price were updated 24/7, second by second, before they even had product-market fit, the feedback loop would be toxic:

• panic instead of exploration
• short-termism instead of discovery
• defensive strategy instead of contrarian thinking

Innovation requires informational darkness—time for ideas to evolve without being re-priced every minute by traders with no context.

Crypto accidentally exposed early-stage projects to public-market-style price discovery—instantly, globally, relentlessly.

No wonder the space evolved into a casino:
you imposed public-market trading on pre-seed projects.

But continuous markets are not the only way to discover prices.

Before explaining alternatives, let’s understand the baseline:

How the NYSE Actually Works

(A Beginner-Friendly Explanation)

Most people think the NYSE is a simple place: people buy, people sell, and the price moves.

Reality: it is a highly engineered mechanism built to absorb asymmetric information, liquidity shocks, and strategic behavior.

Here’s the simplified version.

1. Continuous Trading Is not Natural — It is Managed

The NYSE uses a central limit order book (CLOB):

• buyers place bids
• sellers place asks
• orders match continuously whenever prices meet

But this continuous system is extremely fragile. That’s why NYSE adds layers of mechanism design:
market makers, liquidity obligations, volatility interruptions, and circuit breakers.

2. The Most Important Parts of NYSE Are Not Continuous

The opening, closing, and volatility restarts are call auctions:

• all orders are batched over a period
• a single clearing price is calculated
• everyone trades at that price

These batched auctions exist because continuous matching is vulnerable to high-speed attacks, price manipulation, and thin liquidity.

3. Market Makers (DMMs) Are There to Prevent the Casino

Designated Market Makers are obligated to:

• provide liquidity,
• stabilize imbalances,
• prevent disorderly prices,
• take inventory risk when the book disappears.

They are not optional. They are structural.

Without these constraints, NYSE would look exactly like the worst parts of crypto trading: thin, jumpy, manipulable, and dominated by speed games.

Crypto Copied the Worst Part of Finance and Ignored the Best

Crypto exchanges copied the continuous limit-order-book, but without:

• market makers with obligations
• volatility auctions
• disclosure rules
• listing requirements
• circuit breakers
• insider-trading enforcement
• governance structures
• custodial protections

They took the mechanics of price discovery without the institutional scaffolding that protects participants.

Continuous markets work only when everything else around them is mature.

Crypto launched continuous markets in an environment where nothing else was.

The result was inevitable: volatility, manipulation, memecoins, and speculative churn.

It’s Time to Open Research Into Non-Continuous Price Discovery

If we want crypto to graduate from the casino phase, we must redesign the market clock.

Continuous trading is not a law of nature.
It is a design decision.
And for early-stage assets, it is the wrong one.

We need fresh research—real economic and game-theoretic work—on alternative mechanisms:

1. Monthly or Quarterly Auctions

A system where:

• assets trade only once a month or once a quarter
• all orders are aggregated
• a single, fundamental price is computed
• no 24/7 trading
• no microsecond games

This aligns markets with the information cycle of real projects.

2. Incentive-Compatible Price Discovery

Mechanisms that:

• reward research, not speed
• reduce manipulation surface
• lower noise
• give long-term holders the dominance they deserve

3. Dynamic Frequency Based on Liquidity

As projects mature, frequency increases:

• quarterly → monthly → weekly
• never continuous
• because continuous trading is a privilege, not a default

4. Auctions, Band Markets, and Hybrid Models

There is room to explore:

• sealed-bid uniform-price auctions
• Dutch auctions
• random-end call auctions (used to prevent gaming)
• periodic batch auctions (Budish–Cramton–Shim)
• bounded trading corridors
• hybrid AMM-order book systems with low-frequency auctions

Crypto needs this research.
Crypto needs these mechanisms.
Crypto needs to decouple innovation from 24/7 repricing.

A Starter Library for Anyone Who Wants to Dive Deeper

These are the works I would hand to anyone who wants to understand market design beyond the casino model:

Foundational Microstructure

• Glosten & Milgrom (1985) — adverse selection, spreads
• Kyle (1985) — insider trading, price impact
• Madhavan (2000) — microstructure survey
• Biais, Glosten & Spatt (2005) — microstructure foundations

Auction Theory & Batch Markets

• Budish, Cramton, Shim (2015) — frequent batch auctions
• Vickrey (1961) — auction theory foundations
• Milgrom (2004) — classic auction theory textbook

Mechanism Design

• Myerson (1981) — mechanism design basics
• Mas-Colell, Whinston, Green — general equilibrium & information
• Rochet & Tirole — platform economics

Modern Market Architecture

• Harris (2002) — \emph{Trading and Exchanges}
• O’Hara (1997) — microstructure theory
• Hasbrouck — information share, price discovery

Crypto and AMM Theory

• Angeris & Chitra — AMM mathematics
• Uniswap v3 whitepaper — concentrated liquidity
• MEV research — priority, extraction, fairness

These texts are not crypto-native.
They are the intellectual tools crypto needs to stop reinventing the casino.

If You Want to Work on This, Write to Me

If this direction resonates with you— if you want to design the next generation of crypto markets— if you want to build mechanisms that favor innovation, fundamentals, and real price discovery— then reach out.

dux@daedalium.com