Original Author: Charlie

Original Translation: Luffy, Foresight News

Throughout history, the trends of the entire cryptocurrency market have revolved around Bitcoin. Now, this era is coming to an end.

The crypto economy is now divided into two major camps: endogenous assets and exogenous assets.

Endogenous assets refer to the traditional crypto categories familiar to the public: the value of these tokens and projects completely relies on the overall market fluctuations of crypto assets. In contrast, exogenous assets nominally belong to the crypto space, but their value trends are becoming increasingly independent of the crypto market.

The value of Bitcoin comes from its own attributes and is reflected back in its price. Price increases further reinforce the market's understanding of its value attributes. At the peak of a bull market, Bitcoin is revered as an "interstellar universal currency," the most scarce digital circulating asset in human hands; at the bottom of a bear market, it is belittled as a digital collectible with no cash flow support.

Hyperliquid lies between the two camps. Its majority of business still relies on the crypto market, but the supply and demand sides are constantly expanding. Many on-chain financial infrastructures fall into this category, and underlying assets are gradually shifting towards tokenization of real assets.

The open interest of HIP-3 contracts can roughly reflect the activity level of non-crypto trades. Currently, HIP-3 contracts account for about 30% of the total open interest of Hyperliquid, while in November 2025, this ratio was only 4%. The upcoming HIP-4 prediction market will further drive growth, while also bringing in new trading users and trading targets.

Projects like Venice fully belong to the exogenous camp, as their development logic is completely detached from the crypto market. Although there is some overlap in user groups, its business model leans more towards consumer-level artificial intelligence rather than native crypto products like Uniswap. Uniswap's core business is still user trading various endogenous assets, and its performance naturally varies with asset price fluctuations; Venice packages private multimodal reasoning services and adopts a "pay-as-you-go + subscription" payment model.

Venice's only connection to the crypto field is the use of tokens as a value-bearing medium, and some of its computing power suppliers have backgrounds in the crypto industry. Project leader Erik Voorhees has deep roots in the crypto industry, and he believes that if used properly, tokens can become excellent marketing tools.

Figure, a publicly listed company, is also a typical case. This fintech lending company has developed its own blockchain, shortening the approval time for home equity loans to less than 5 minutes. For them, blockchain is merely a supporting technology, with the core value lying in the credit business itself.

Whether in the token market or the publicly listed company sector, the scale rise of exogenous tracks holds profound significance. In the past, due to the fact that most business models were deeply bound with crypto asset prices, purely bottom-up fundamental investments found it hard to take root. The crypto industry has seen "heavy blockchain, light Bitcoin" narrative trends, but past waves of enthusiasm ultimately returned to Bitcoin's market. The reason is that these tracks have failed to form stable demand and generate continuous revenue; even if there is revenue, it cannot be transmitted to token value. Once token prices stop rising, projects lose their support.

This round of market is distinctly different from previous ones. Now we can clearly see the paying groups and their payment logic, the market demand of most tracks can be quantified, and it is no longer purely driven by emotional speculation; at the same time, the mechanism of tokens as value carriers continues to improve. Venice's revenue comes from real payments made by users purchasing AI reasoning services; even if the overall crypto market declines, its business will not be significantly impacted because it does not rely on price fluctuations. This cycle has two core advantages that previous waves lacked: sustainable actual usage demand and investors beginning to invest based on fundamentals rather than solely market narratives.

The stablecoin track in the private equity market is similarly so. In March 2026, Mastercard announced it would invest up to $1.8 billion to acquire BVNK, a company that was valued at only $750 million when it completed its Series B financing 15 months ago. Another stablecoin-related company, Bridge, was acquired by Stripe for $1.1 billion in February 2025, with Stripe's annual report showing that Bridge currently has a fourfold annual business growth rate. The development of these enterprises is completely decoupled from the bull and bear cycles of the crypto industry.

This is not to say that endogenous assets are bearish. Just like gold and even small gold mining companies, they always have their allocation value in an investment portfolio, and Bitcoin and numerous endogenous crypto assets also have their significance of existence. However, the performance-driven logic and market correlation between the two types of assets have fundamentally changed, and data supports this point.

This analogy can be visualized: the correlation coefficient between small gold mining stocks and gold prices has consistently maintained around 0.75. This is the current state of the traditional crypto market—many crypto assets resemble small gold mines, while Bitcoin corresponds to gold, with the entire track being leveraged investments that benchmark against Bitcoin. The blue curve in the graph represents another type of relationship: gold and the S&P 500 index show slight correlation due to macroeconomic influences but each has its independent operational logic. This is exactly the future development direction of exogenous assets. In the long run, such assets will gradually detach from "following Bitcoin's rise and fall."

It should be noted that many exogenous targets also issue tokens, a phenomenon that not only confirms the aforementioned trend but also counts as a special case.

Currently, the vast majority of endogenous assets still highly synchronize with Bitcoin's trends; a few exogenous assets have seen reduced correlation, but due to the short development cycle, they currently lack strong reference value. Industry rules have always been that fundamentals lead first, and then the market correlation changes.

This change has also completely rewritten the logic of industry analysis. Analyzing exogenous assets requires fundamental due diligence similar to analyzing traditional companies: sorting out paying user groups, calculating unit economic models, and assessing industry moats. Bitcoin prices are no longer the primary reference indicator; analyzing such projects resembles financial tech investors making judgments, but with the added special layer 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 integration track of crypto + artificial intelligence (private reasoning, distributed open-source model training similar to Psyche under Nous Research, etc.)
• New types of digital banks (Payy and Raycash, which focus on privacy protection, are worth noting; Aztec and Zama, which provide programmable privacy infrastructure, also have potential)
• Lending track (Morpho has become a mainstream choice in institutional repurchase markets; smaller projects such as Valinor and 3jane are delving into the private credit segment)
• Stablecoin issuers and real asset tokenization service providers
• Payment channels (in the general payment arena, Stripe and Tempo are industry benchmarks; in the agent payment sector, Coinbase currently leads)
• Non-financial crypto consumer products (represented by Venice and Collector Crypt, these projects attribute real business value to tokens, driving product adoption while enabling marketing)
• Agent economy (the core opportunity lies in the collaboration ecology of access-level agents, service providers, and creators; this segment has lower substitutability. Cloudflare leads in layout, but it remains undecided whether it will charge for traffic or only provide basic functionality services)

At this stage, the most prudent way to lay out in the aforementioned tracks is to invest in the equity of related companies, as quality token targets are rare exceptions. Only when the value-bearing mechanism of tokens continues to optimize will their role further enhance, which requires joint promotion by regulatory agencies and the entire industry. Progress has already been made in this regard: on the regulatory side, the "CLARITY Act" is steadily advancing; on the industry side, institutions like Blockworks are also promoting market information transparency. The token mechanism still has a long way to go for optimization.

But these details do not 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 changing from interpreting Bitcoin's market 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 completely transformed.

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