Read a crypto press release with a banking org chart in your head and you will misidentify who you are actually dealing with. In crypto the network, the non-profit that stewards it, and the companies that build on it are three separate things with three separate balance sheets, and none of them is a head office. The Ethereum network is not a company, the Ethereum Foundation does not control it, and ConsenSys, a private company founded by an Ethereum co-founder, speaks for neither. Getting the organisational map right is the difference between diligencing the counterparty and diligencing a logo.
Protocol, foundation, company
Start with the Ethereum triple, because the pattern repeats everywhere. Ethereum the protocol is a network run by thousands of independent validators and several independent client software teams, as covered in Part 1; it has no legal personality, no registered office, and no one empowered to sign a contract on its behalf. The Ethereum Foundation is a Swiss non-profit that funds research and development, employs core researchers, and convenes the upgrade process, but it does not control the chain, cannot censor a transaction, and cannot roll anything back. ConsenSys is a private, for-profit company (MetaMask, the Linea L2, the Infura node service) that builds commercial products on Ethereum and holds no special authority over it. Solana repeats the pattern with the Solana Foundation, a Swiss non-profit steward, sitting apart from the network and from Solana Labs, the company. The practical consequence for a bank is that "who do we contract with for Ethereum" has no answer, and any diligence process that requires one is asking the wrong question; you contract with service providers on the network, never with the network.
DAOs and governance tokens
A DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) is the crypto-native answer to the missing head office: token-weighted voting over a protocol's parameters and treasury. What token-holder governance actually decides is narrower than the branding suggests. Votes set protocol parameters (collateral listings, fee levels, risk limits), direct grants from the treasury, and approve upgrades. What a governance token does not do is make its holder a shareholder: it typically carries no legal claim on cash flows, no fiduciary board answerable to holders, and no equity in any entity, and in practice turnout is dominated by large holders and professional delegates. Increasingly a legal wrapper, often a Cayman foundation or Swiss association, sits alongside the DAO because someone has to sign contracts and hold intellectual property, which tells you how far pure on-chain governance goes on its own.
Exchanges are conglomerates
The word "exchange" undersells what the large venues have become. Coinbase is a US-listed exchange, plus a regulated custodian through Coinbase Custody, plus the operator of the Base L2, plus Circle's distribution partner for USDC with a share of the reserve economics, which puts one firm in trading, safekeeping, settlement infrastructure, and stablecoin distribution simultaneously. Binance is the offshore mirror image, the largest exchange by volume plus the sponsor of BNB Chain and its ecosystem. When one of these firms appears across the table, the first question is which of its several businesses is actually in the room, because the custody arm, the exchange, and the chain operator carry different regulatory perimeters and different conflict surfaces.
Money printers and the ETF complex
Stablecoin issuers are the ecosystem's money printers, the entities whose liabilities everything else settles in. Circle issues USDC as a US-listed, regulated company, Tether issues USDT offshore at larger scale and with a longer disclosure argument behind it, and Paxos is the regulated issuer-for-hire behind other brands' tokens; the full treatment is in the stablecoin chapter.
The ETF complex is the door TradFi walked through. The SEC approved eleven spot bitcoin ETPs (exchange-traded products) on 10 January 2024, and spot ether ETFs began trading on 23 July 2024, pulling the large asset managers into direct crypto exposure with BlackRock's IBIT as the flagship, the largest of the spot bitcoin funds. The plumbing detail that matters for a bank: eight of the eleven spot bitcoin ETFs approved in January 2024 named Coinbase as custodian, a concentration that makes one firm's operational resilience a systemic question for the whole complex, and one reason custody mandates keep landing on bank digital-asset desks.
Treasury companies, and three reading rules
A DAT (digital-asset treasury company) is a listed company whose principal strategy is holding a crypto asset on its balance sheet, funded by repeated equity and convertible issuance. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) is the bitcoin type specimen, holding 843,775 BTC as of 6 July 2026, by far the largest corporate bitcoin position. SharpLink is the type specimen of the 2025 ether wave, holding 886,725 ETH as of 28 June 2026 with substantially all of the position deployed into staking. A bank meets DATs as clients rather than curiosities: they raise financing through converts and structured issuance, they need institutional custody at unusual scale, and their staking and collateral activity makes them prime-services business, all of which lands on the same desks that serve any leveraged holder of a volatile asset.
Three reading rules keep the whole map straight. A foundation is not a head office, so treat steward non-profits as funders and convenors rather than as the controlling mind of a network. A token is not equity, so never read governance-token ownership as a shareholding or a claim on anyone's cash flows. And the offshore versus regulated split is the first diligence question, because the same product category (an exchange, a stablecoin, a lending venue) exists on both sides of that line, and which side you are facing determines everything else you need to ask.