Original Author: Charlie
Original Compilation: Luffy, Foresight News
For a long time, the entire cryptocurrency market's movements revolved around Bitcoin. Now, that era is coming to an end.
The crypto economy is now diverging into two major camps: endogenous assets and exogenous assets.
So-called endogenous assets refer to the familiar traditional crypto categories: the value of these tokens and projects is entirely dependent on the overall rise and fall of the crypto asset market. Exogenous assets, on the other hand, nominally belong to the crypto track, but their value trends are increasingly independent of the crypto market.
Bitcoin's value stems from its own properties, which in turn are reflected in its price. Price increases further reinforce market perception of its value attributes. At the peak of a bull market, Bitcoin is hailed as "interstellar currency," the scarcest digital circulating asset in human hands; at the trough of a bear market, it is dismissed as a digital collectible with no cash flow support.
Hyperliquid sits between the two camps. Most of its business still relies on crypto market conditions, but both supply and demand sides are continuously expanding. Many on-chain financial infrastructures fall into this category, with underlying assets gradually shifting towards tokenized real-world assets.
HIP-3 open interest volume can roughly reflect the activity of non-crypto transactions. Currently, HIP-3 contracts account for about 30% of Hyperliquid's total open interest, compared to just 4% in November 2025. The upcoming HIP-4 prediction market will further drive growth, bringing new trading users and trading pairs.
Projects like Venice belong entirely to the exogenous camp, with their development logic completely detached from the crypto market. Although there is some overlap in user bases, its business model leans more towards consumer-grade AI rather than native crypto products like Uniswap. Uniswap's core business remains users trading various endogenous assets, so its performance naturally fluctuates with asset prices; Venice packages private multimodal inference services, adopting a "pay-per-use + subscription" revenue model.
Venice's only connection to the crypto field is its choice of tokens as a value carrier, and some of its compute suppliers have crypto industry backgrounds. Project lead Erik Voorhees, a veteran in the crypto industry, believes that tokens, when used properly, can be an excellent marketing tool.
Figure, among listed companies, is also a typical case. This fintech lending company developed its own blockchain, reducing the approval time for home equity loans to under 5 minutes. For it, blockchain is just a supporting technology; its core value lies in the lending business itself.
The large-scale rise of the exogenous track, whether in the token market or the listed company sector, holds profound significance. In the past, as most business models were deeply tied to crypto asset prices, purely bottom-up fundamental investing was difficult to implement. The crypto industry has seen narratives emphasizing "blockchain over Bitcoin" before, but previous waves ultimately reverted to Bitcoin's performance. The reason was that these tracks never formed stable demand or generated sustainable revenue; even with income, it couldn't be transmitted to token value. Once token prices stopped rising, projects lost their support.
This market cycle is fundamentally different from the past. Now we can clearly see paying user groups and payment logic; the market demand for most tracks is quantifiable, no longer driven solely by sentiment hype. Meanwhile, the mechanism of tokens as value carriers is also continuously improving. Venice's revenue comes from real payments by users purchasing AI inference services; even if the overall crypto market declines, its business won't be significantly impacted because it doesn't rely on coin price movements. This cycle possesses two core advantages that previous waves lacked: sustainable actual usage demand, and investors starting to invest based on fundamentals rather than mere market narratives.
The stablecoin track in the private market is similar. In March 2026, Mastercard announced it would acquire BVNK for up to $1.8 billion. This company's valuation was only $750 million during its Series B round 15 months prior. Another stablecoin-related company, Bridge, was acquired by Stripe for $1.1 billion in February 2025. According to Stripe's annual report, Bridge's current business growth rate is fourfold annually. The development of these companies is entirely decoupled from the crypto industry's bull-bear cycles.
This is not to say endogenous assets are bearish. Just as gold and even small gold mining companies always have a place in an investment portfolio, Bitcoin and a host of endogenous crypto assets also have their raison d'être. However, the performance drivers and market correlations of the two asset classes have fundamentally diverged, and the data confirms this.
This analogy can be visualized: The correlation coefficient between small gold mining stocks and gold prices has long remained around 0.75. This is precisely the current state of the traditional crypto market — a host of crypto assets act like small gold mines, with Bitcoin corresponding to gold; the entire sector is essentially leveraged investments benchmarked against Bitcoin. The blue curve in the chart represents another relationship: gold and the S&P 500 index may show weak linkage due to macroeconomic influences, but each follows its own independent logic. This is precisely the future direction for exogenous assets. Long-term, these assets will gradually decouple from "following Bitcoin's rise and fall."
It should be noted that many exogenous projects themselves also issue tokens. This phenomenon both confirms the above trend and represents a special case.
Currently, the vast majority of endogenous assets still move highly in sync with Bitcoin; a few exogenous assets show reduced correlation, but due to their short development cycles, they are not yet strongly indicative. Industry patterns have always been that fundamentals lead, followed by changes in market correlations.
This change has also completely rewritten industry analysis logic. Researching exogenous assets requires fundamental due diligence like analyzing traditional companies: identifying paying user groups, calculating unit economics, and assessing industry moats. Bitcoin price is no longer the primary reference indicator. Analyzing such projects is more akin to fintech investors making judgments, with the added complication of asset custody.
The following are currently promising exogenous tracks:
- On-chain exchanges and brokerage services
- Settlement and redemption solutions for long-tail asset tokenization
- Deep integration of crypto + AI (private inference, distributed open-source model training like Nous Research's Psyche, etc.)
- Neo-banks (Payy and Raycash, focusing on privacy protection, are worth watching; Aztec and Zama, providing programmable privacy infrastructure for them, also have potential)
- Lending sector (Morpho has become a mainstream choice for institutional repo markets; smaller projects like Valinor, 3jane specialize in private credit niches)
- Stablecoin issuers, real-world asset tokenization service providers
- Payment rails (Stripe and Tempo are benchmarks in general payments; Coinbase currently leads in agent payments)
- Non-financial crypto consumer products (represented by Venice, Collector Crypt. These projects imbue tokens with real business value, driving product adoption and enabling marketing)
- Agent economy (The core opportunity lies in the access layer's agents, service providers, and creator ecosystems, which have lower substitutability. Cloudflare is ahead in deployment, but whether it will charge for traffic or merely provide basic services remains unclear)
At this stage, investing in equity of related companies remains the safest way to gain exposure to the above tracks; high-quality token investments are the exception. The role of tokens will only increase as their value-carrying mechanisms are continuously optimized, requiring joint efforts from regulators and the entire industry. Progress is being made: on the regulatory front, the CLARITY Act is advancing steadily; on the industry front, institutions like Blockworks are promoting market transparency. Token mechanisms still have a long way to go.
But none of these details change a core trend: the driving force of the crypto market is shifting from a single factor to multiple factors. The focus of industry research is also shifting from interpreting Bitcoin price charts to delving into company fundamentals. In the next decade, there will be no need to wonder why the "crypto market" no longer rises and falls in unison, because the industry landscape has been completely transformed.
