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Late Friday night, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would stay public, less than three weeks after the CEO initially tweeted that he was considering taking the electric-car company private.

There were many reasons Musk cited for why Tesla was “better off as a public company,” but one of them particularly struck me: “There is also no proven path for most retail investors to own shares if we were private,” Musk wrote in his official statement.

No proven path. Of course, he’s right. U.S. financial regulators restrict ownership of shares in startups and other private companies to so-called “accredited investors”—those considered wealthy enough to be able to afford the additional risks that come with owning stock that doesn’t trade on mainstream markets, making it illiquid.

But there is one risky investment that retail investors can own no matter how rich (or not) they are: cryptocurrency, obviously. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t prohibit individuals from buying Bitcoin and other digital assets directly—largely because it can’t, due to the decentralized structure of the blockchains on which those cryptocurrencies run. On the other hand, the SEC has prevented cryptocurrency from becoming even more widely available—such as it did this week by rejecting the rest of the pending applications for Bitcoin exchange-trade funds, or ETFs.

More info here: http://fortune.com/2018/08/25/the-ledger-cryptocurrency-tesla-bitcoin-etf-indiegogo/