Author: Lukas
Compilation: Saoirse, Foresight News
You are standing on the eve of the largest transformation in the history of cryptocurrencies. To continue deeply engaging in this industry, you must keep a close eye on everything happening now.
Currently, the entire industry faces three core problems:
- What ultimately determines the value of a token?
- How to integrate various cutting-edge technologies into the blockchain ecosystem?
- What happens when cryptocurrencies are no longer a standalone asset class but become the underlying infrastructure of traditional finance?
I could theoretically analyze these three problems one by one. Countless people do this every day, but empty theory can never lead to a definitive conclusion. Therefore, I intend to take a different approach: outline the real changes the industry will undergo from now until 2029 in stages. The article specifies concrete entities, data, and timelines. The content is concrete enough that in three years, everyone can look back to verify the accuracy of my predictions. This is just one of many possible futures; some inferences will inevitably be wrong. Vague and ambiguous future predictions cannot be falsified, and unfalsifiable opinions are worthless. I would rather give clear but potentially wrong judgments than say ambiguous, risk-free nonsense that will never be disproven.
The perspective of this prediction stems from my work environment: I have long been deeply involved in the intersection of crypto startups, industry regulation, and venture capital, having in-depth weekly communications with alternative asset managers and capital allocators. This does not mean my judgments are necessarily correct, but my deductions fully consider various real-world constraints.
Mid-2026: Quality Assets Are No Longer Various Tokens
By mid-2026, before the market has unified standards for token value, the market for perpetual contracts of non-publicly traded companies has already achieved product-market fit.
This transformation began on the Hyperliquid platform. The non-public perpetual contract for SpaceX launched on the platform was initially criticized due to Ventuals' malicious liquidation manipulation. However, it later became the most referenced price benchmark for both primary and secondary markets. By July, major banks and hedge funds will reference this contract to price their privately held assets. Retail-focused trading platforms like Robinhood will also use it to predict post-IPO opening prices. In the weeks before a major company's IPO, the price of this perpetual contract will accurately align with the final opening price, to a degree that embarrasses underwriting teams charging seven-figure fees for pricing services. The open interest for OpenAI and Anthropic perpetual contracts will hit record highs. For a period, this native crypto exchange became the world's most reliable channel for obtaining real-time valuations of top unlisted companies.
Simultaneously, a basic question arises among ordinary traders: What justification is there for continued trading of all other coin types on-chain? The altcoin market will have been in a bear trend for 18 consecutive months, with project founding teams and investment institutions gradually exiting through large block trades and time-weighted sell-off algorithms. In contrast, $HYPE, the only token that has built a complete value capture loop, will outperform all other market assets. The industry has introduced over a dozen token value capture mechanisms, but most failed to form a positive feedback loop because the projects they were attached to had no asset value. The industry ended up solving the technical problem of how tokens capture value first, only to then search for tangible assets worth carrying that value.
This cart-before-the-horse industry reality is the underlying driver behind the non-public perpetual contract frenzy. What the market truly craves is never the perpetual contract product itself, but quality assets. And by mid-2026, the only quality assets tradable on-chain will be synthetic yield certificates of real-world enterprises unrelated to the crypto industry.
End of 2026: AI Sector Does Not Need Cryptocurrency
Anthropic and OpenAI achieve technological breakthroughs. Competition in the foundational large model arena intensifies, and the market begins pricing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). A chain reaction follows: capital continuously flows out from all non-leading foundational large model companies. Capital starts viewing AGI as a core asset held on corporate balance sheets, not a standardized tool for industry-wide adoption.
In this environment, the "AI + Crypto" track quietly fades into obscurity. It's not that this logic has been disproven, but the industry has no time to debate it. The x402 payment protocol officially launches but has no paying users. The envisioned on-chain agent economy fails to achieve scale; all existing agents settle through APIs in USD, no different from the traditional software industry model. A consensus forms among venture capital practitioners: the AI industry itself does not require cryptocurrency as support, and investors stop forcibly promoting this narrative.
Currently, the only "AI + Crypto" product that has truly achieved product-market fit is the prediction market. Trading volume around the performance of major foundational models grows rapidly. It also becomes the most precise financial instrument for betting on the core variable moving massive capital—which company will have the best-performing large model in the next month.
Beyond the trading noise, another low-key transformation is underway: When the CLARITY Act passed the Senate in mid-2026, most traders considered it irrelevant, and the market saw no rally. But by year-end, various asset tokenization projects accelerate. Large asset management institutions move from pilot phases to full-scale operations, doing so quietly without publicity—a core task of compliance departments is to avoid high-profile promotion. Tokenized assets focus on middle-of-the-balance-sheet categories like money market funds and private credit. These assets have no KOLs promoting them on social media, no price charts to speculate on.
By the end of 2026, the crypto industry splits into two nearly independent economies with little interaction: one is noisy and lively, profiting from betting on AI sector trends; the other is silent and low-key, gradually being absorbed by the traditional financial system through compliance documents. Most practitioners' attention focuses on the former market.
Early 2027: Major Public Chain Foundations Clarify Development Roadmaps
General-purpose public chains can no longer serve two masters with ambiguous positioning.
For years, major mainstream foundations have consistently told two completely disjoint narratives: publicly promoting a vision of mass adoption for ordinary users, while privately pitching institutional services to firms during negotiations. These two narratives never intersected. By early 2027, the contradiction between the two development paths becomes fully apparent.
The retail-facing track is highly concentrated. The only retail products with genuine user demand see all trading volume aggregated on a few trading platforms. Meanwhile, the institutional business is currently the only track bringing stable paying customers. Major foundations successively finalize their core development directions, with a highly unified choice: build enterprise sales teams, provide compliance services, launch universal compliance developer toolkits for tokenized asset transfers and brokerage license processing, expand Wall Street partnerships, and enhance private transaction features.
Media and crypto social platforms interpret each strategic shift as a trade-off: prioritize institutions over retail, choose serious financial clients over speculative casino attributes.
However, practitioners within foundations disagree. Teams double down on crypto services for ordinary users, just with a different implementation logic. For years, accredited investor qualification thresholds have been continuously relaxed, expanding the eligible pool. The institutional infrastructure built by foundations will soon be opened to ordinary users not currently classified as "accredited investors." Infrastructure teams know this well but won't announce it publicly. Compliance infrastructure teams only discuss bank clients externally because banks are the current paying customers.
And the low-key institutional market formed at the end of 2026 welcomes unprecedented growth: a future influx of ordinary, compliant investors. The previously disjointed two economies finally connect via "accredited investor qualification verification."
Mid to End of 2027: Triple Development Ceilings
A new generation of tech startups reignites the private market: AI-bio fusion, embodied AI, and humanoid robotics sectors see oversubscribed funding rounds, valuations skyrocket, but all remain years from IPO. Perpetual contract platforms list corresponding contracts within weeks. The open interest for synthetic contracts of these companies with minimal revenue repeatedly sets new records. The market pattern of 2026 repeats, with larger capital volumes: the world's most sought-after quality assets are concentrated in the primary private market. The only corresponding assets users can trade on-chain are synthetic perpetual contracts settling funding rates every 8 hours.
However, three types of markets hit their respective development ceilings, constraining industry growth:
Non-Public Perpetual Contract Ceiling: Real private assets grow steadily through traditional private channels, compounding quarterly, invisible on crypto social platforms obsessed with explosive gains. Perpetual contract growth lags far behind real private assets, primarily limited by the prohibition on general solicitation for private securities. The crypto industry's most effective traffic model—showing gains to attract retail—is legally inapplicable to these assets. Additionally, perpetual contracts have a structural flaw: they need near-IPO events as price catalysts, covering only later-stage mature companies. Mid-stage startups like bio-AI and humanoid robots, far from exit paths, cannot have corresponding synthetic contracts. For most primary market assets, regulated, real equity channels are not the second-best choice but the only compliant, viable trading instrument—just legally barred from public promotion.
Stablecoin Ceiling: Stablecoin circulation continuously and steadily increases, never stopping expansion, but institutions quietly scale back expansion plans. Midterm elections shift Congressional committee dynamics. The 2028 presidential candidate list takes shape, with several frontrunners publicly opposing private USD token issuance. Bills passed in 2025 and 2026 remain law, but enforcement authority belongs to the new administration. Banking treasurers formulating ten-year settlement plans must incorporate scenarios of stricter next-administration regulation. The industry won't halt stablecoin projects entirely but will extend implementation timelines and reduce pilot scales. Everyone watches the November 2028 election results. On-chain USD velocity is entirely tied to policy uncertainty, which is high by mid-2027.
Asset Tokenization Ceiling: This cautious sentiment spreads across the institutional crypto market. Tokenized private credit and fund share products continue launching, all compliant, but institutions deliberately control project scale. No one wants to be the negative case study in next year's Senate hearings.
The commonality across these three tracks is clear: the product logic is sound, market demand validated, but external policy forces tightly constrain growth speed. Setting aside crypto's own volatile price standards, 2027 is actually a year of steady industry growth—it's just that the crypto industry, accustomed for a decade, considers only vertical rallies as success.
2028: Compliance Access Ceases to Be Scarce
(From here on, prediction precision decreases: previous predictions specified quarters; post-2028, deductions are yearly, and error margins widen. This article states a core assumption: the Democratic candidate wins the November 2028 election. If the result is opposite, event timelines shift, but the overall development framework remains unchanged.)
The speculative casino attribute of the crypto market gradually fades, with almost no one pinpointing the inflection point. Market capital extraction mechanisms become too efficient. Each round of new liquidity from 2026 to 2027 is smaller than the last and extracted faster by a few top players. No landmark crash occurs. Meme coin frenzies still appear intermittently, with single-day surges, but after some point in the first half of 2028, speculative trading is no longer the industry's core focus. Trading volume exists merely as statistics, no longer dictating industry culture. Some traders shift to prediction markets capitalizing on hype; some remain in the shrinking speculative sector; many traders spend the past year accomplishing something no one foresaw in 2026—obtaining accredited investor status.
Policy-related panic is gradually priced in by the market throughout the year. Frontrunner candidates from both major parties accept industry donations, differing only in rhetoric, united in core stance: the crypto industry needs regulation, not a blanket ban. Practitioners who viewed the previous administration's lenient regulation as a harvesting window face investigations. The industry slowly realizes regulatory cleanup is a positive signal: the government distinguishes speculative harvesting operations from financial infrastructure, and only infrastructure can attract confident capital investment. Banking treasurers who scaled back pilots in 2027 quietly resume expansion plans before the election. By the time election results land, most policy risk premiums have already been digested.
The industry's most profound lesson in 2028 comes from the trading market everyone watches: early in the year, a large position on a top trading platform, significant enough to move markets, unwinds across several popular non-public perpetual contracts. The chain liquidation risk feared since the Ventuals manipulation incident fully materializes. Within hours, tens of billions in open interest are wiped out. The system automatically forces deleveraging, losses shared by the market, winners' profits severely reduced. Post-mortem, parties cannot determine if the volatility resulted from malicious manipulation or pure market accident. This ambiguity is itself the core takeaway: markets lacking underlying spot anchors have no fair benchmark price. "Market manipulation" cannot even be defined, let alone proven. Listed company perpetual contracts have spot price constraints, but non-public ones lack underlying anchors. Real private shares do have compliant trading channels but prohibit large-scale public solicitation and broad pricing. Each perpetual contract price is merely the platform's own estimate, with ample room for human intervention. This chain liquidation is not a failure of the synthetic contract market itself but the inevitable outcome of market mechanisms operating without underlying real asset support.
For the past decade, the ban on general solicitation for private securities has been packaged as investor protection policy. But this market crash proves: this rule merely excludes ordinary investors from legally protected trading channels, pushing them into high-leverage, unanchored synthetic contract markets. The real dividing line is never synthetic vs. real assets, but whether trading rights have legal enforceability.
Post-crash, new regulations emerge, less a reform than a refinement of financial infrastructure: regulators issue guidelines allowing public promotion of secondary market transfers of private securities (limited to secondary shares, excluding company primary rounds) to verified accredited investors. The pool of eligible investors has been expanding for years. The logic is straightforward: synthetic contract markets need underlying price anchors. The lowest-cost solution is opening public liquidity channels for real private assets. A promotional restriction rule in place for ninety years sees its scope significantly relaxed merely to improve derivatives markets.
The first week under the new rules sees hype comparable to a new meme coin listing, with the sole difference being the trading asset is equity in real companies. Listing private secondary shares, screenshot sharing, and community promotion all become legalized, a first in this asset class's history. Social media views polarize: half the industry sees it as a new foundational financial tool; the other half fears retail becoming exit liquidity for VCs. The latter intuition is correct but lags behind the times: this concern held when assets were vaporware tokens with no real backing. But now, the trading assets are the yield rights to real companies whose market-wide demand was proven by the perpetual contract market over the past two years.
Capital first flows into late-stage mature companies already validated by perpetual contract hype. Because real equity has no funding rate and no IPO time constraint, capital further flows into mid-stage startups not covered by perpetual contracts. Perpetual contracts don't die but transform into a supplementary sector for late-stage company trading, no longer monopolizing core market attention.
By December, the industry enters a new bull market, supported by the financial world's oldest foundational assets, finally with legal liquidity channels.
2029: The Market Becomes the Industry's Sole Core Narrative
The first full year of this bull cycle unfolds completely differently from past crypto bull markets, and this difference is the core value. Assets experiencing sustained price increases are all tech startups with real operations and tangible social value creation. The new foundational asset class ordinary users trade is private company equity: biotech firms completing multiple clinical trials, humanoid robot manufacturers with public demos, AI labs whose perpetual contracts everyone traded in 2026—users can now directly hold real company shares.
A decade of gradual accredited investor threshold relaxation cultivates a new retail cohort. Assets accessible only to institutions five years ago are now tradable by ordinary compliant investors. Most won't even classify such trading as "crypto investment."
The token track completely diverges along the core question posed at the article's outset: public chains successfully transforming into infrastructure for new market issuance and settlement capture real business revenue flow; their platform tokens become business cash flow yield certificates. All other tokens face an extremely realistic market rule: tokens lacking legally enforceable yield rights or a complete value capture loop won't experience an 18-month slow bleed as in 2026 but will directly and completely lose trading liquidity. The industry-wide debate over token value capture mechanisms in 2026 sees no single solution prevail; the legal circulation of private real assets directly renders the debate meaningless.
Stablecoins follow their cycle-long development pattern: maintaining steady compound growth without explosive surges. By the end of 2029, total circulation roughly doubles from mid-2027, averaging a stable ~20% annual growth. The growth cap isn't insufficient demand but a bipartisan policy choice: private USD tokens develop moderately to meet practical needs while avoiding competition with sovereign monetary systems. On-chain USD velocity is tied to policy certainty, which is stable and long-term sustainable in 2029.
The speculative sector still exists, contracted to fixed niches, occasionally seeing short-term hype, but overall influence equals just one niche within the entertainment industry. Speculative traders diverge into prediction markets, the new private secondary market, and a path no one foresaw in 2026: obtaining accredited investor status.
The third core question posed at the article's beginning—how cryptocurrency transforms into traditional financial infrastructure—is ultimately answered silently: the question itself loses all relevance. Clearing and settlement functions rely on customized payment channels, public chains, or hybrid architectures. Underlying technical details are understood only by operating teams. Ordinary participants neither understand nor care, just as the average person doesn't delve into the clearinghouses behind their broker. The industry integration gradually initiated at the end of 2026 ultimately completes through "complete invisibility." The ultimate victory of financial infrastructure is becoming mundane and unnoticed. What remains in the public eye is the core product the crypto industry has been building through speculative cycles—asset trading markets.
Thus, all three core questions are answered through this deduction logic:
- What determines token value? The eternal core: legally enforceable rights to yields from real assets. The market now eliminates all tokens not meeting this condition.
- How do cutting-edge technologies land on blockchain? Through primary and secondary private markets: tech startups themselves don't need tokens, just trading liquidity channels. When channels gain legal public promotion rights, cutting-edge companies naturally achieve on-chain trading.
- What happens when crypto becomes traditional financial infrastructure? No landmark event occurs. Underlying functions become completely abstracted. The public will never discuss this proposition separately again.
Some inferences in this article will inevitably deviate, as stated at the outset. This entire deduction logic has one core verification standard: If, by the end of 2028, ordinary investors still lack legal channels to participate in private assets, and all capital relies on offshore synthetic perpetual contracts and wrapped products for circulation, then this article's core thesis—"industry bottlenecks lie in law, not technology"—fails. The entire deduction's credibility must be significantly downgraded.
Simply watch this one core variable, then fully verify the remaining judgments by 2029. I would rather give clear, falsifiable predictions than never-wrong, ambiguous nonsense.
