Custody, settlement and reporting are unglamorous problems. They are also the ones that decide which institutions can participate at all, and they have been solved incrementally enough that the change is easy to miss.
Plumbing before prices
Every asset class goes through the same sequence: a speculative phase, an infrastructure phase, and then a long stretch where the infrastructure decides who wins.
The regulatory overhang
Rules that are merely unclear are worse for allocators than rules that are strict. Clarity, even unwelcome clarity, tends to bring capital with it.
