Pure lobbying made necessary by the fact that they cannot afford to be cut off from crypto regulation activities that could rain down on them and cause drastic problems to their respective business models. Of course they don't give a damn about the small fish but they are interested in maintaining and increasing their sphere of interest in the world of institutional investors.
If they cared, they wouldn't form a lobbying group. This council is just a conglomerate that plans to dominate the crypto space and control every aspect of the market, they may deny it right now but I am sure that they are going to do that.
Stop dreaming then because that it is exactly what lobbying is for. Of course, they will lobby for their interest! Are we so dumb to believe these guys have any kind interest in advancing, improving and protecting the crypto space? Obviously not.
They only need to make sure that they will keep operating no matter what happens at a regulatory level.
I agree this is purely self serving, Fidelity Investments, Square, Coinbase and Paradigm
are forming this trade group in order to smooth the path for institutional investors to get
into Bitcoin because those investors (a.) will bring a lot of wealth and (b.) they will use the
services of the "trade council"
To a small degree I like the idea of this trade council educating policy makers and officials
in government about Bitcoin but in the end of the day we dont care what these policy makers
think about Bitcoin anyway.