This 2019 paper simply re-confirms that thought. Crypto today is no different than the 1900 turn-of-the-century bucket-shop pump-and-dump scams of previous Wall Street iterations.
For example, you can issue loans to yourself using MakerDAO:
The process is permissionless, meaning, among other things, that it can be automated, and it carries almost zero fees (only the Ethereum gas fee for EVM instructions).
To take another example, the world's leading decentralized exchange, Uniswap, has now overtaken centralized exchanges in market depth for some major trading pairs:
https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3-dominance
This is a credibly neutral value exchange protocol that major centralized exchanges are coalescing around as a source of liquidity. The market depth is truly impressive. For example, you can sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ETH in one trade with almost zero slippage.
So crypto is not just another iteration of Wall Street.
And to the point of past iterations of Wall Street: the 19th century banking system was not rife with scams as the caricature suggests: