Author: Haipo Yang, Founder and CEO of ViaBTC & CoinEx
When I wrote the first line of code for the ViaBTC mining pool in 2016, the crypto world was still a small circle composed of miners, developers, and early enthusiasts. Bitcoin was seriously discussed only within niche communities, stablecoins had not yet been widely adopted, and concepts like DeFi, NFTs, and RWA that would later emerge repeatedly were not yet formed.
Ten years later, the face of the industry has completely changed. BTC has entered the ETF system, stablecoins have become important channels for dollar liquidity in some regions, and the scale of on-chain transactions and stablecoin settlements can hardly be ignored by traditional finance anymore.
But the changes go beyond that. What has actually happened in the industry over the past decade? Standing at this ten-year anniversary point of ViaBTC's founding, I want to talk about my understanding of the value of Crypto.
What Crypto Has Left Behind in the Past Decade
If you only look at price and market cap, Crypto over the past decade resembles a prolonged fireworks display: dazzling and noisy enough. But outside the price curve, something quieter has been happening: the hardest-to-move pieces of infrastructure in traditional finance have been gradually rewritten by algorithms.
Market making, matching, clearing, issuance—these things once required substantial capital, professional teams, and a complete closed system in traditional finance; it was almost impossible for an ordinary person to be a market maker. This wasn't a technical limitation, but a structural one.
But Crypto managed to pry open this structure over ten years.
Uniswap replaced the order book and market makers with an incredibly simple formula. Anyone putting two assets into a liquidity pool becomes a market maker; users come to trade, and the price is automatically determined by the algorithm. A developer sitting on a park bench can become a liquidity provider in the global market through a single on-chain interaction. This was almost unimaginable a decade ago.
With on-chain perpetual contracts, the story went further. GMX made the LP pool itself the counterparty for traders. The USDC you deposited could become the liquidity behind a BTC long position the next second. Hyperliquid pushed the order book, matching, and clearing into a more on-chain form, striving to get closer to the trading experience of centralized exchanges. The most expensive, highest-barrier segments of traditional derivatives exchanges were rewritten into open protocols accessible and verifiable by anyone.
Stablecoins represent another quiet revolution. A decade ago, a cross-border transfer from South America to Africa took at least two days, costing tens of dollars in fees. Today, the same amount of money arrives in minutes via USDT on-chain, costing less than a dollar. No grand celebration was held for this, but it has quietly happened.
None of these mechanisms are perfect. Not all of them will survive cycles. But together, they have proven one thing: financial services don't necessarily have to exist only within closed systems controlled by a few institutions.
This is what Crypto has truly left behind from the past decade.
Of course, this decade hasn't been smooth sailing. Mt.Gox collapsed in 2014, Luna evaporated hundreds of billions of dollars in a week in 2022, and FTX went from being a top-three global exchange at the time to bankruptcy within a short period in November of the same year. After each major event, the industry's reaction was similar: first shock, then reflection, then talk of "the market needs a shake-out," and then forgetting the lesson in the next bull market.
But market shake-outs never automatically patch systemic flaws. When the next narrative rises, those unpatched weaknesses are still there.
These are more like systemic issues than cyclical ones. Systemic issues aren't solved by cycles; they are only amplified by time.
Speculation, Liquidity, and Real Demand
It's hard to discuss Crypto without mentioning speculation.
Speculation itself is not the original sin of the industry. Any financial market has speculation; it brings liquidity, price discovery, and allows new mechanisms to be tested by the market faster. What's special about Crypto is that it has been both technology and finance from day one—the existence of tokens allowed market prices to intervene early in the development of technology, applications, and communities. A new idea could gain global attention, funding, and users within weeks. Many protocols bypassed traditional financing paths, directly completing early-stage trials in open markets.
In a sense, early speculative bubbles played the role of "permissionless venture capital," acting as fuel pushing the industry to experiment and iterate. The ICO boom of 2017, DeFi Summer of 2020, and the NFT frenzy of 2021 each expanded the industry's boundaries in intense ways. What remains after the bubbles burst is far less than what was promised at the peak, but stablecoins, on-chain trading, wallets, and clearing mechanisms did emerge during these cycles.
But fuel is ultimately just fuel, not direction.
When prices rise rapidly, short-term liquidity is mistaken for real adoption, and the spread of narratives is mistaken for long-term consensus. When the cycle turns, the industry discovers that far more was promised at the peak than actually remains.
The real problem is whether speculation has overwhelmed real demand. When price becomes the only metric, the industry repeatedly falls into the same cycle: everyone talks about long-term value during a bull market, only to find in a bear market that much of the growth lacks real users.
Technology, Applications, and Assets
Over the past decade, another common misconception in the industry has been treating blockchain, Web3, and Crypto as the same thing.
These three terms sound similar, but they address completely different problems.
Blockchain is an underlying technology. Its value lies in reducing trust, settlement, and verification costs, enabling transactions and state confirmation between strangers without intermediaries. The technology itself is neutral; its value is clear.
Web3 is an application paradigm. The question it needs to answer is: Which scenarios truly need an open network and user ownership? The validity of a Web3 application should not be judged by narratives and short-term data, but by whether people continue to use and pay for it after subsidies, airdrops, and speculative expectations fade.
Crypto, as an asset, faces the most complex judgments. To deconstruct its value support, there are roughly two layers: first, the commodity attribute of block space, such as users paying Gas for transactions, settlements, and contract calls—this is the network's "fuel fee"; second, the sovereign liquidity premium, where certain assets possess hedging value under macro liquidity cycles due to their borderless, censorship-resistant, and rule-transparent nature.
A few assets may have both layers of support, with BTC being the most typical example. But the vast majority of tokens don't have this status; they ultimately must return to real usage, protocol revenue, and network effects for validation.
For example, the logic of block space as a commodity holds because users genuinely pay Gas. But if you strip away Gas consumption driven by airdrop expectations, subsidies, arbitrage, and wash trading, how much real demand remains? This is an unavoidable question for every public chain. The curve of on-chain activity for new public chains at launch is almost identical: bustling before a snapshot, cliff-like decline after.
The same applies to the sovereign liquidity premium. BTC's global consensus and censorship-resistant attributes are rare exceptions, not the common properties of Crypto assets.
Here's a direct question: If you remove speculative demand and look only at real usage, real revenue, and real cash flow, how much support remains for the total valuation of today's crypto market?
From Open Participation to Sustainable Participation
One of the most valuable aspects of Crypto is its openness. People anywhere in the world can access the network, hold assets, and participate in protocols without needing a bank account, proof of residence, or anyone's approval.
But openness lowers only the barrier, not the risk itself. In the traditional financial system, barriers keep many people out but also keep many risks out. Crypto removes the gate. More people come in, meaning more people face risks earlier and more directly—no one does due diligence for you, no one screens projects for you, and no one bears the consequences of your poor decisions.
So the most important keyword of the past decade was "open participation." But for the next decade, the keyword may need to change: sustainable participation.
I feel this deeply myself. The mining pool business isn't like DeFi protocols or Meme coins; it lacks explosive narratives. Its value isn't noticed during the hottest markets. But every time the network is congested, the market fluctuates violently, and users are most anxious, whether each block can be stably packed and each settlement arrives on time determines whether users are willing to continue entrusting their hash power to you.
The value of infrastructure is often validated precisely in these moments: not during the most exuberant bull market, but during the bear market when everyone is running.
The Next Decade: Crypto Doesn't Have to Replace Everything
Over the past decade, the industry loved grand narratives: replacing banks, redoing finance, putting all assets on-chain, bringing all users into Web3. These narratives had mobilizing significance early on, making many willing to explore.
But today, Crypto may need a more realistic understanding of its boundaries.
I tend to believe the industry won't expand infinitely but will consolidate into a few networks. Liquidity, developers, users, and security won't be evenly distributed across all public chains. That BTC and ETH have long occupied the majority of the total crypto market cap isn't a coincidence; it's the natural result of network effects. Over the next decade, value will concentrate towards the few networks that genuinely possess security, liquidity, and ecosystem density. Many undifferentiated L1s aren't technologically unusable but lack strong enough network effects to sustain long-term competition.
Similar things will happen with DeFi. The long-term value of DeFi lies in openness, transparency, and composability. But the past few years have also shown that much DeFi activity comes from leverage, arbitrage, liquidity mining, and airdrop expectations, not the daily financial needs of ordinary users. In the future, DeFi is more likely to serve on-chain traders, market makers, cross-border liquidity needs, and digital-native assets, moving towards specialization rather than mass adoption. DeFi won't directly replace ordinary people's bank accounts and financial apps but will become a higher-frequency tool for a certain class of users and institutions.
At the same time, the boundary between Crypto and traditional finance will become increasingly blurred. Over the past decade, Crypto was a relatively isolated asset class; in the next decade, it will become a piece in the multi-asset allocation puzzle. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have already pulled Crypto into traditional finance's asset allocation framework, and RWA is rewriting the issuance methods for some assets. But the integration is two-way. While traditional finance brings capital, it also brings centralized custody, entry barriers, and asset screening mechanisms. One cost of mainstreaming is trading some censorship resistance and access openness for acceptance by the mainstream system.
Another possibility is that future real demand may not come solely from humans. AI Agents, automated workflows, and the machine economy may bring high-frequency, small-value, cross-platform payment and settlement needs. These "silicon-based users" have no bank accounts and cannot undergo KYC. Therefore, open settlement networks, stablecoins, and permissionless accounts are naturally the financial infrastructure prepared for such M2M (machine-to-machine) collaboration. But just because AI and Crypto are both hot topics doesn't directly lead to the conclusion that "AI Agents necessarily need on-chain payments." What truly needs to be on-chain are collaboration scenarios across entities, across borders, requiring strong settlement, and operating in low-trust environments.
The sign of maturity in the next decade may not be in "more things on-chain" but in the industry finally being able to more clearly judge which needs truly require a chain and which are just short-term narratives packaged with the chain.
Final Thoughts
After a decade, I believe more and more in one thing: infrastructure building is a long-term endeavor.
Cycles will change. Narratives will change. Prices will change. But the user's need for stable, transparent, and reliable services remains constant. The value of Crypto must ultimately return to a few simple questions: Does it reduce trust costs? Does it improve the efficiency of value flow? Does it give users more choices? Can it continue providing services after cycle after cycle?
What's valuable isn't necessarily the most exciting, but it will endure.
