Written by: Charlie
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
For a long time, the entire crypto market's trends have revolved around Bitcoin. Now, such an era is coming to an end.
The crypto economy is now splitting into two major camps: endogenous assets and exogenous assets.
So-called endogenous assets are the traditional crypto categories familiar to the public: the value of these tokens and projects is entirely dependent on the overall rise and fall of crypto asset prices. 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 attributes and is reflected in its price. Price increases further strengthen the market's perception of its value attributes. At the peak of a bull market, Bitcoin is revered as an "interstellar currency," the most scarce digital circulating asset in human hands; at the trough of a bear market, it is denigrated as a digital collectible with no cash flow support.
Hyperliquid falls between these two camps. Most of its business still relies on crypto market trends, but both supply and demand sides are continuously broadening. Many on-chain financial infrastructures fall into this category, with underlying assets gradually shifting towards real-world asset tokenization.
HIP-3 open interest can roughly reflect the activity of non-crypto trades. Currently, HIP-3 contracts account for about 30% of Hyperliquid's total open interest, whereas in November 2025, this proportion was only 4%. The upcoming HIP-4 prediction market will further drive growth, bringing new trading users and trading pairs.
Projects like Venice completely belong to the exogenous camp, with their development logic completely detached from the crypto market. Although there is some user overlap, its business model leans more towards consumer-grade artificial intelligence, rather than native crypto products like Uniswap. Uniswap's core business is still 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" fee model.
Venice's only connection to the crypto field is using tokens as a value carrier, and the fact that some of its computing power suppliers have backgrounds in the crypto industry. Project lead Erik Voorhees, a veteran in the crypto industry, believes that when used effectively, tokens can be excellent marketing tools.
Publicly listed company Figure 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 Figure, blockchain is merely a supporting technology; its core value lies in the credit business itself.
The large-scale rise of exogenous tracks, whether in the token market or the listed company sector, has 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 not been without narratives emphasizing "blockchain over Bitcoin," but previous cycles eventually returned to Bitcoin's performance. The reason was that these tracks failed to form stable demand and generate continuous revenue; even with revenue, it couldn't be transmitted to token value. Once token prices stopped rising, projects lost support.
This cycle is fundamentally different. Now we can clearly see paying user groups and payment logic. Demand in most tracks is quantifiable, no longer relying solely on sentiment-driven hype. Simultaneously, the mechanisms for tokens as value carriers are continuously improving. Venice's revenue comes from users genuinely paying for AI inference services. Even if the overall crypto market declines, its business wouldn't be significantly impacted because it doesn't rely on coin price movements. This cycle possesses two core advantages absent in previous ones: sustainable real-world usage demand, and investors starting to invest based on fundamentals rather than pure market narratives.
The stablecoin track in the private market is also like this. In March 2026, Mastercard announced it would acquire BVNK for up to $1.8 billion; this company had a valuation of only $750 million when it completed 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 annual business growth is fourfold. The development of these companies is entirely decoupled from the crypto industry's bull and bear cycles.
This is not to say we are bearish on endogenous assets. Just as gold and even small gold mining companies always have their 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, a fact confirmed by data.
This analogy can be visualized: The correlation coefficient between small gold mining stocks and gold prices consistently remains around 0.75. This is precisely the current state of the traditional crypto market—various crypto assets are like small gold mines, with Bitcoin corresponding to gold; the entire sector represents leveraged investments relative to Bitcoin. The blue curve in the chart represents another relationship: Gold and the S&P 500 Index may show weak联动 due to macroeconomic influences, but each operates on its own independent logic. This is also the future direction for exogenous assets. In the long run, these assets will gradually decouple from the trend of "following Bitcoin's rise and fall."
It should be noted that many exogenous assets themselves also issue tokens. This phenomenon both confirms the above trend and represents a special circumstance.
Currently, the vast majority of endogenous assets remain highly synchronized with Bitcoin's price movements. A few exogenous assets show reduced correlation, but due to their short development cycles, they do not yet provide strong reference points. Industry规律 has always been fundamentals first, followed by changes in market correlation.
This change has also completely rewritten industry analysis logic. Researching exogenous assets requires fundamental due diligence like analyzing traditional companies:梳理付费用户群体, measuring unit economics, and assessing industry moats. Bitcoin price is no longer the primary参考指标. Analyzing such projects is more akin to fintech investors making judgments, with the added special环节 of asset custody.
Here are the currently promising exogenous tracks:
- On-chain exchanges and brokerage service providers
- Clearing and redemption solutions for long-tail asset tokenization
- Deep convergence tracks of crypto + AI (private inference, distributed open-source model training like Nous Research's Psyche, etc.)
- New digital banks (Payy and Raycash, focusing on privacy protection,值得关注; Aztec and Zama providing programmable privacy infrastructure also have potential)
- Lending track (Morpho has become a mainstream choice for institutional repo markets; smaller projects like Valinor and 3jane focus on private credit细分领域)
- Stablecoin issuers, real-world asset tokenization service providers
- Payment channels (in general payments, Stripe and Tempo are industry benchmarks; in agent payments, currently led by Coinbase)
- Non-financial crypto consumer products (represented by Venice, Collector Crypt; these projects赋予实体业务价值 to tokens, driving product adoption and enabling marketing empowerment)
- Agent economy (core opportunities lie in the agent接入层, service provider and creator协同生态, where substitutability is low. Cloudflare leads in布局, but whether it will charge traffic fees or merely provide basic services remains unclear)
At this stage, investing in equity of relevant companies remains the safest way to gain exposure to the above tracks, with优质代币标的 being rare exceptions. Only as the value-carrying mechanisms for tokens continue to optimize will their role be further enhanced. This requires joint推进 from regulators and the entire industry. Current work is underway: on the regulatory front, the 《CLARITY Act》 is稳步推进; on the industry front, institutions like Blockworks are推动市场信息透明化. Token mechanisms still have a long optimization journey ahead.
But none of these details change one 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 corporate 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.
