The moment index funds hold Coinbase, Wall Street has put the reins around the neck of crypto freedom

May 19, 2025, the last 30 seconds before the New York Stock Exchange opens. The trading terminal of the S&P 500 index fund flashed red instructions - hundreds of millions of dollars poured into Coinbase's (COIN) stock pool. Fund managers are blankly tapping on the keyboard, they don't care about the philosophical ideals of Bitcoin, they don't understand the technological revolution of blockchain, and they never even have a wallet address. But they know one thing: index rules dictate that they must hold Coinbase, which is now the new upstart to the S&P 500. Wall Street's capital machine has quietly put the reins around the neck of crypto freedom.

269 million U.S. pension holders "unconsciously hold coins" through 401K accounts, and 5 million teachers become indirect participants in the crypto economy;

Logical reconstruction of stock price fluctuations: passive allocation forms a cushion, and some hedges the violent fluctuations of the crypto market;

Wall Street pricing power expansion: Coinbase controls the Bitcoin options market after the acquisition of Deribit, and capital penetrates into the core of crypto asset pricing;

This forced bundling is changing market behavior. Robinhood data shows that COIN searches have skyrocketed by 300%, but only 12% of users understand the essence of their business. When ordinary people's pension accounts are tied to the COIN share price, the free volatility of the crypto market is being domesticated by the steady-state demand of Wall Street.

3. Freedom Twilight: The Institutionalized Survival of the Spirit of CryptoThe

crypto community has cheered for Coinbase's inclusion in the S&P 500, but the keen-eyed have sniffed the crisis. When Michael Saylor hailed this as a "major milestone for Bitcoin" on X, he omitted the second half of the subtext: the financialized nature of Bitcoin is the co-optation of traditional capital.

Coinbase incorporates the long-short game landscape after the S&P 500

multi-party logic chain

Regulatory amnesty→ index inclusion→ institutional holdings→ liquidity premiums → industry ETFs accelerate

, bearish warning line

compliance costs→ innovation curbs → user churn→ valuations are decoupled from the crypto market→ Wall Street manipulation intensifies

The real threat is at the level of values. When the crypto spirit of "not doing evil" came under pressure from quarterly earnings reports, Coinbase began to delist anonymous coins and restrict access to DeFi. The essence of the acquisition of Deribit is to take over the derivatives market with centralized exchange logic, which is contrary to the peer-to-peer electronic cash system envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto.

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