There's an important nuance to this: enough unsophisticated people think it's money, so there's lots of opportunity for finance people to make money.

Traditional finance is well-trodden, every arbitrage opportunity has been tried decades ago. But crypto is full of doe-eyed innocents who think they're reinventing finance. Of course experienced traders want to take advantage of them. It must be more fun than ye olde eurodollar bonds, or whatever.

> enough unsophisticated people

Well, sophisticated people also think it's money, but they entered '12-'17 and stopped talking about it. A more recent example though is Neuberger Berman's entrance.

The tragedy of the crypto moment is serious folks who didn't come from crypto made up their minds about it and did it a while ago, but articles like OP run interference against "everyone else" doing the same.

Some links:

https://medium.com/john-pfeffer/an-institutional-investors-t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wences_Casares > Casares was the entrepreneur to convince Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, and other tech veterans in Silicon Valley to invest in bitcoin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantera_Capital - scope out Morehead's background.

There are financial mechanics that exist only in the scope of DeFi and not in traditional finance. It actually IS new in a lot of ways and skilled folks are teaming up to make a killing, not just experienced traders. Take a look at what's happening in the "MEV" space. None of this existed in traditional finance.

Sure it does. Front-running is not new. Payment for order flow is not new. Altering the recent transaction history (the thing blockchains are supposed to prevent) is a criminal offense in other markets.

you're mistaking the mempool with tx history unless you believe they're essentially the same? Issue there if so is the mempool isn't consistent from node-to-node so can't call it a tx history.

It's more like pending TXs which end up landing in a certain order that's possibly different once confirmed (which current banks do with checking/debit TXs and isn't a criminal offense).

Ya this is more my point. Taking traditional algorithmic trading skills into a place specifically designed for it and with new market mechanisms.

Whoever spends some time building DeFi/L1 protocols is going to make a killing jumping over to Jump/Jane Street/HRT in a few years with that knowledge.

There's money to be made in trading even when the asset trades at prices that are fundamentally wrong; as long as people are buying and selling, you will find market makers taking the spread. There's also money to be made in asset management for the same basic set of reasons.