As the drama surrounding FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried continues to unfold, most people are focused on the immediate questions of what exactly happened and why. I would like to ask some larger questions about where the crypto universe and its clearinghouses might be headed, given this radical change in the landscape.

One question is whether crypto exchanges are bound to evolve into a natural monopoly. By one estimate, if Binance and FTX had merged, the combined firm would have accounted for four-fifths of the market. If FTX disappears, it is no longer clear how to measure the new market size, though it’s clear Binance would be a fairly dominant firm. And the troubles at FTX do not seem to have shaken Binance’s perceived stability.

It is a longstanding belief among economists that clearinghouses tend to evolve into natural monopolies, whether public or private. For a clearinghouse to be effective, it has to enforce standards on its members, including solvency standards. If the members do not meet those standards, they eventually are kicked out and lose access to clearinghouse services, thereby losing much of their value to their customers.

But collusion does not always work in customers’ interest. A clearinghouse can kick out members for reasons other than solvency, for example. Clearinghouses are good at enforcing standards, regardless of whether those standards are good for customers.

The upshot is that there is a tendency for members of a clearinghouse to either a) fail to meet standards and go bust, or b) join or least collude with a dominant coalition.

In the “real” world there are numerous instances of multiple clearinghouses and multiple layers of clearing, including in the US. That is because the Federal Reserve and other authorities act as lender of last resort for the payments system, thereby allowing some amount of heterogeneity to evolve without creating insuperable crises.

You could argue that the Fed itself has cartelized the payments process, or alternatively you could treat the above argument as true mainly for a laissez-faire payments system. And current crypto institutions come fairly close to this laissez-faire description.

You could also argue that a dominant clearinghouse might be good for crypto. The history of banking includes dominant or semi-dominant clearinghouses stabilizing markets and helping to introduce innovations, for instance of timeliness and transparency. The collusive monopoly might take too big a share of the market surplus for itself, but it has an incentive to keep the market up and running and profitable. That is hardly the worst arrangement crypto might stumble upon.

It is also true that a dominant clearinghouse is much easier to regulate, and indeed modern central banks often sprung out of these earlier clearinghouse arrangements. Sooner or later, there is a tendency for the law to intervene and turn the dominant private clearinghouse into part of a more formalized central bank. It is no accident that member banks of the Fed are still called “stockholders.”

One complication is that Binance is not a US firm; incorporated in China, it is now based in Dubai. Regulators might hope an American or at least Western version of Binance comes along, perhaps to create a new market duopoly. Arguably that is what regulators were hoping all along for FTX, so at least one version of the previous plan now has a huge hole in it. All the more pressure will be placed on Coinbase (a US firm), which may gain business but face a heavier regulatory burden and be expected to play a more specific role in the system.

When guessing at the future of crypto, keep in mind that the future of crypto exchanges and the future of crypto assets are very different things. For many pure crypto bugs, the exchanges are a sellout and a concession to older methods of finance and settlement. The exchanges can be regulated, controlled and co-opted, even turned against the notion of individual monetary sovereignty. Instead, the pure crypto vision stresses the notion of “every person their own bank,” through the medium of a personal wallet and beyond easy purview of the central authorities.

So if the major exchanges are damaged or co-opted by the establishment, pure crypto bugs might celebrate rather than mourn. It is thus a mistake to see the possible demise of crypto in the possible demise of FTX. Instead, the purer crypto vision will be given more of a chance to flourish — or, for that matter, to fail.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include “The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.”