Every financial era is defined by its tools. As crypto closes out its 2024 run, three challenges are converging: retail traders need more advanced tools to be competitive in the market, liquidity is fragmented across dozens of chains and protocols, and consumers are more conscious of custody post-FTX meltdown. Together, those shifts are setting the stage for crypto’s own Bloomberg Terminal to emerge.

To understand where things are heading, it helps to look at how trading tools have evolved throughout history. Each generation of finance has solved the problems of friction and speed in a new way.

As we build Doormat, we're borrowing the most effective elements of traditional finance and leaving behind what doesn’t work for crypto. During the 90s, the Bloomberg Terminal turned institutional traders into the degens of their era. We need to talk about the history of trading terminals and why crypto is ready for one of these tools.

The first known trading terminal dates back to the late 19th century with the invention of the stock ticker, and since then, trading terminals have come a long way.

Before every trading floor was filled with a sea of screens, there was the ticker tape. Stock prices were printed on thin strips of paper that rolled out of machines in brokerage offices. Traders watched numbers emerge, waiting for the next update. Then, to place a trade, you picked up the phone and called your broker. Market access was limited, execution was slow, and information lagged by minutes or hours. The primary bottleneck was data speed and whoever could see prices first had a significant edge.

In 1971, NASDAQ launched as the first fully electronic stock exchange. Traders finally saw real-time price quotes as their paper feeds were replaced by digital feeds. Early systems like NASDAQ’s feeds and Reuters terminals provided information but still required a phone call to execute trades. That changed in 1982 when Bloomberg combined data, trade execution, and communication via chat in a single terminal.

For the first time, traders could analyze markets, talk with peers, and execute trades without switching between tools. Bloomberg didn’t just create better software, it locked in network effects. By the 1990s, traders didn’t just use their Bloomberg Terminal as a tool, they couldn’t work effectively without it.

The internet opened the gates to a new type of trader. Online brokers like E*TRADE gave retail traders access to markets that were once reserved for institutional trading only. By the early 2000s, retail trading volume had surged more than 50 percent.

Mobile apps quickly followed with Robinhood offering a “zero-fee” social and gamified trading experience. Retail participation peaked during the 2021 GameStop frenzy when speculation, internet coordination, and memes collided in a way the markets hadn’t seen before. High-frequency trading grew alongside it, accounting for over half of U.S. equity volume by 2010. Access was no longer scarce, so speed became the biggest differentiator once again.

Decentralized exchanges, perpetuals, and memecoins have introduced new primitives, but execution remains scattered and slow. DeFi regularly surpasses $100 billion in monthly volume, but still trails behind centralized exchanges like Binance, which handles over $50 billion in daily spot trades. Uniswap has processed more than $1.5 trillion in total trading volume, yet traders still juggle multiple apps, chains, and wallets to stay competitive.

Crypto has repeated nearly every past market pattern, from price discovery to speculation and social coordination, without managing to build an interface that unifies the trading experience.

Crypto trading today resembles the early stock markets in their most chaotic phase: liquidity spread across chains, manual execution flows, and traders switching between dashboards and bots to keep up.

As Edward Chancellor’s Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation chronicles, speculative manias have always funded the infrastructure that lasts. The current boom is no different. The capital and energy moving through crypto right now are pushing its tools to mature and transform emergent technology to reliable financial tooling. Infrastructure providers like Privy, Uniswap, and Bridge are simplifying execution, integrating data, and closing the gaps between retail and institutional trading experiences. Spot and perpetual volumes hit record highs in 2024 across both DEXs and CEXs (roughly $17 trillion in CEX spot volume per CoinGecko data), and consumer apps such as Telegram-based BONKbot show how ease of use drives mass participation.

The next generation of trading terminals will automate complexity and surface real-time data within the same UI. DeFi must become as user-friendly as it is open to be ready for mass adoption.

Telegram bots have solved for speed and community but introduced serious custody risk. Retail apps like Robinhood remain well-positioned to own major retail audiences but abstract much of what makes crypto unique. 

At Doormat, we’re taking a different approach. Our custom MPC key-management infrastructure lets us build features like Keychains, which let traders create and use up to a hundred keys in one account, and round-trip protection, automating orders that secure profits once targets are met. Because Doormat supports both Solana and EVM, users can see their total balances and positions across chains in one interface, even if their liquidity is distributed. Each of these offers traders the ability to compete against more advanced trading strategies and take full advantage of the novel primitives decentralized finance has to offer.

Every financial era is defined by its tools. As crypto closes out its 2024 run, three challenges are converging: retail traders need more advanced tools to be competitive in the market, liquidity is fragmented across dozens of chains and protocols, and consumers are more conscious of custody post-FTX meltdown. Together, those shifts are setting the stage for crypto’s own Bloomberg Terminal to emerge.

To understand where things are heading, it helps to look at how trading tools have evolved throughout history. Each generation of finance has solved the problems of friction and speed in a new way.

As we build Doormat, we're borrowing the most effective elements of traditional finance and leaving behind what doesn’t work for crypto. During the 90s, the Bloomberg Terminal turned institutional traders into the degens of their era. We need to talk about the history of trading terminals and why crypto is ready for one of these tools.

The first known trading terminal dates back to the late 19th century with the invention of the stock ticker, and since then, trading terminals have come a long way.

Before every trading floor was filled with a sea of screens, there was the ticker tape. Stock prices were printed on thin strips of paper that rolled out of machines in brokerage offices. Traders watched numbers emerge, waiting for the next update. Then, to place a trade, you picked up the phone and called your broker. Market access was limited, execution was slow, and information lagged by minutes or hours. The primary bottleneck was data speed and whoever could see prices first had a significant edge.

In 1971, NASDAQ launched as the first fully electronic stock exchange. Traders finally saw real-time price quotes as their paper feeds were replaced by digital feeds. Early systems like NASDAQ’s feeds and Reuters terminals provided information but still required a phone call to execute trades. That changed in 1982 when Bloomberg combined data, trade execution, and communication via chat in a single terminal.

For the first time, traders could analyze markets, talk with peers, and execute trades without switching between tools. Bloomberg didn’t just create better software, it locked in network effects. By the 1990s, traders didn’t just use their Bloomberg Terminal as a tool, they couldn’t work effectively without it.

The internet opened the gates to a new type of trader. Online brokers like E*TRADE gave retail traders access to markets that were once reserved for institutional trading only. By the early 2000s, retail trading volume had surged more than 50 percent.

Mobile apps quickly followed with Robinhood offering a “zero-fee” social and gamified trading experience. Retail participation peaked during the 2021 GameStop frenzy when speculation, internet coordination, and memes collided in a way the markets hadn’t seen before. High-frequency trading grew alongside it, accounting for over half of U.S. equity volume by 2010. Access was no longer scarce, so speed became the biggest differentiator once again.

Decentralized exchanges, perpetuals, and memecoins have introduced new primitives, but execution remains scattered and slow. DeFi regularly surpasses $100 billion in monthly volume, but still trails behind centralized exchanges like Binance, which handles over $50 billion in daily spot trades. Uniswap has processed more than $1.5 trillion in total trading volume, yet traders still juggle multiple apps, chains, and wallets to stay competitive.

Crypto has repeated nearly every past market pattern, from price discovery to speculation and social coordination, without managing to build an interface that unifies the trading experience.

Crypto trading today resembles the early stock markets in their most chaotic phase: liquidity spread across chains, manual execution flows, and traders switching between dashboards and bots to keep up.

As Edward Chancellor’s Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation chronicles, speculative manias have always funded the infrastructure that lasts. The current boom is no different. The capital and energy moving through crypto right now are pushing its tools to mature and transform emergent technology to reliable financial tooling. Infrastructure providers like Privy, Uniswap, and Bridge are simplifying execution, integrating data, and closing the gaps between retail and institutional trading experiences. Spot and perpetual volumes hit record highs in 2024 across both DEXs and CEXs (roughly $17 trillion in CEX spot volume per CoinGecko data), and consumer apps such as Telegram-based BONKbot show how ease of use drives mass participation.

The next generation of trading terminals will automate complexity and surface real-time data within the same UI. DeFi must become as user-friendly as it is open to be ready for mass adoption.

Telegram bots have solved for speed and community but introduced serious custody risk. Retail apps like Robinhood remain well-positioned to own major retail audiences but abstract much of what makes crypto unique. 

At Doormat, we’re taking a different approach. Our custom MPC key-management infrastructure lets us build features like Keychains, which let traders create and use up to a hundred keys in one account, and round-trip protection, automating orders that secure profits once targets are met. Because Doormat supports both Solana and EVM, users can see their total balances and positions across chains in one interface, even if their liquidity is distributed. Each of these offers traders the ability to compete against more advanced trading strategies and take full advantage of the novel primitives decentralized finance has to offer.