Original author: Yang Haipo, 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 only seriously discussed within niche groups, stablecoins had yet to be widely adopted, and concepts like DeFi, NFT, and RWA, which would later recur, were still not fully formed.

A decade later, the industry has changed completely. BTC has entered the ETF system, stablecoins have become an important dollar liquidity channel in some regions, and the scale of on-chain trading and stablecoin settlements is now hard for traditional finance to ignore.

But the changes do not stop there. What has really happened in the industry over the past ten years? Standing at the tenth anniversary of ViaBTC, I want to share my understanding of the value of crypto.

What Crypto has left behind in the past decade

If we only look at prices and market capitalization, the crypto of the past decade resembles a long fireworks display: bright enough and noisy enough. But beyond the price curves, something quieter has been happening: some of the most challenging infrastructures in traditional finance have been incrementally rewritten by algorithms.

Market making, matching, clearing, issuance—these tasks once required large amounts of capital, professional teams, and a complete closed system in traditional finance. It was almost impossible for an ordinary person to engage in market making. This was not a technical limitation but a structural one.

However, crypto has shifted this structure over the past decade.

Uniswap replaced order books and market makers with an unbelievably simple formula. Anyone can add two types of assets to a liquidity pool, and they become the market-making party; users trade, and prices are automatically determined by algorithms. A developer can sit on a park bench and, through a single on-chain interaction, add assets to a liquidity pool, becoming a liquidity provider in the global market. This was almost unimaginable ten years ago.

With on-chain perpetual contracts, the story advances further. GMX allows the LP pool itself to be the counterparty for traders. The USDC you deposit can become liquidity backing a BTC long position the next second. Hyperliquid pushes order books, matching, and clearing towards a more on-chain form, striving to approximate the trading experience of centralized exchanges. The most expensive and highest barriers in traditional derivatives exchanges have been rewritten into an open protocol that anyone can access and verify.

Stablecoins represent another quiet revolution. Ten years ago, a cross-border transfer from South America to Africa would take at least two days and cost dozens of dollars in fees. Today, the same amount can arrive in minutes via USDT on-chain, costing less than one dollar. No one has held a celebratory event for this, but it has quietly happened.

These mechanisms are not perfect. Not every one of them can survive the cycles. But they collectively prove one thing: financial services do not necessarily have to exist within closed systems controlled by a few institutions.

This is what crypto has truly left behind over the past decade.

Of course, this decade hasn't been smooth all the way. In 2014, Mt. Gox collapsed; in 2022, Luna evaporated hundreds of billions of dollars within a week; in November of that same year, FTX went bankrupt in a matter of days after ranking among the top three exchanges globally. After every major event, the industry’s response is quite similar: first shock, then reflection, followed by the assertion that “the market needs to be reshuffled,” and subsequently waiting for the next bull market to forget about these events.

However, market reshuffling will never automatically patch up the vulnerabilities in the mechanisms. When the next narrative unfolds, those unpatched areas will still be there.

These are more like structural issues rather than cyclical ones. Structural issues won't be solved by cycles; they will only be magnified by time.

Speculation, liquidity, and real demand

It is hard to discuss crypto without addressing speculation.

Speculation itself is not the original sin of the industry. Every financial market has speculation, which brings liquidity, price discovery, and allows new mechanisms to be quickly tested by the market. What sets crypto apart 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 can gain global attention, funding, and users within weeks, allowing many protocols to bypass traditional financing paths and conduct early trial and error directly in the open market.

In a sense, the early speculative bubble played the role of "permissionless risk investment," driving the industry to experiment and iterate like fuel. The ICO of 2017, DeFi Summer of 2020, and the NFT boom of 2021 all aggressively expanded the boundaries of the industry. After the bubbles burst, much less remained than what was promised at the peak, but stablecoins, on-chain trading, wallets, and clearing mechanisms were indeed pushed out during these cycles.

However, fuel is ultimately just fuel, not a direction.

When prices rise rapidly, short-term liquidity is often mistaken for real adoption, and the spread of narratives is interpreted as long-term consensus. Once the cycle turns, the industry realizes that the promises made at the peak far exceed what truly remains.

The real issue is whether speculation has overshadowed real demand. When price becomes the only metric, the industry repeatedly falls into the same cycle: during bull markets, everyone discusses long-term value; only in bear markets do they discover that many of the growths lack genuine users behind them.

Technology, application, and assets

In the past decade, a common misconception in the industry has been treating blockchain, Web3, and crypto as the same thing.

These three terms sound like they're referring to the same concept, but they actually address completely different issues.

Blockchain is a foundational technology; its value lies in reducing trust, settlement, and verification costs, enabling transactions and status confirmations between strangers without intermediaries. The technology itself is neutral, and its value is clear.

Web3 is a form of application; the question it seeks to answer is: which scenarios truly require open networks and user ownership? Whether a Web3 application stands or falls should not be assessed by narratives and short-term data but by whether there are users continuing to use it and pay after subsidies, airdrops, and speculative expectations recede.

Crypto as an asset faces the most complex judgments. If we were to break down its value support, it can roughly be divided into two layers: first, the commodity properties of block space, for example, users pay Gas to trade, settle, and call contracts; this is the “fuel cost” of the network; second, the sovereign liquidity premium—some assets have hedging value under macro liquidity cycles due to being borderless, censorship-resistant, and having transparent rules.

A few assets may have both layers of support, with BTC being the most typical example. However, the vast majority of tokens lack this status; they ultimately need to return to real usage, protocol revenue, and network effects for validation.

For instance, the logic of block space as a commodity holds because users really pay Gas. But if we strip away the Gas consumption caused by airdrop expectations, subsidies, arbitrage, and wash trading, how much real demand is left? This is a question that every public chain must confront. The activity curve when a new public chain launches is almost always the same shape—busy before the snapshot, then a sharp decline afterward.

The sovereign liquidity premium applies in the same way. BTC's global consensus and censorship resistance are rare exceptions, not universal attributes of crypto assets.

Here, we can pose a direct question: if we remove speculative demand and look only at real usage, real income, and real cash flow, what is the remaining support for today’s crypto market valuation?

From open participation to sustainable participation

One of the most valuable aspects of crypto is its openness. People anywhere in the world can access networks, hold assets, and participate in protocols without needing bank accounts, proof of residency, or someone to approve them.

However, openness only lowers the barrier to entry, not the risks themselves. In traditional financial systems, barriers block many people but also many risks. Crypto tore down the doors, allowing more people in but also meaning that more individuals face risks earlier and more directly—no one conducts due diligence for you, no one filters projects for you, and no one bears the consequences of poor decisions for you.

Thus, the most important keyword of the past decade is “open participation.” However, for the next decade, the key term may need to shift to: sustainable participation.

I personally feel this deeply. The mining pool business does not resemble DeFi protocols or Meme coins; it lacks that explosive narrative. Its value is often not noticed when the market is at its hottest. Yet at every moment of network congestion, market volatility, or user anxiety, whether every block can be reliably packed and whether every settlement can arrive on time determines whether users are willing to continue entrusting their computing power to you.

The value of infrastructure is often validated in these moments: not in the busiest bull markets, but in the bear markets when everyone is fleeing.

In the next decade, Crypto does not need to replace everything

Over the past decade, the industry has often spoken in grand narratives, such as replacing banks, reconstructing finance, putting all assets on-chain, and bringing all users into Web3. These narratives had mobilizing significance in the early phases, encouraging many to explore.

But as we arrive at today, crypto may need a more realistic understanding of its boundaries.

I tend to believe that the industry will not expand indefinitely but will concentrate towards a few networks. Liquidity, developers, users, and security will not be evenly distributed across all public chains. BTC and ETH occupying a large share of total crypto market capitalization is not a coincidence; it is the natural result of network effects. In the next decade, value will concentrate towards a few networks that truly possess security, liquidity, and ecological density. Many lackluster L1 tokens are not about technology being unusable; rather, they lack sufficiently strong network effects to support long-term competition.

Similar situations will occur in DeFi as well. The long-term value of DeFi lies in its openness, transparency, and composability. However, recent years have also demonstrated that many DeFi activities stem from leverage, arbitrage, liquidity mining, and airdrop expectations, rather than everyday financial needs of ordinary users. In the future, DeFi is more likely to serve on-chain traders, market makers, cross-border liquidity requirements, and digital native assets, moving towards specialization rather than mass appeal. DeFi will not directly replace ordinary people's bank accounts and financial apps but will become a more frequently used tool for certain users and institutions.

Meanwhile, 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 of the multi-asset allocation puzzle. The spot Bitcoin ETF has already integrated crypto into the traditional finance asset allocation framework, while RWA is rewriting the issuance methods of some assets. However, integration is two-way—while traditional finance brings in capital, it also introduces custodial centralization, entry barriers, and asset screening mechanisms. One cost of mainstreaming is the trade-off of some censorship resistance and access openness for acceptance by mainstream systems.

There’s another possibility; future real demand may not come solely from humans. AI agents, automated workflows, and machine economies could bring high-frequency, small-scale, cross-platform payment and settlement demands. These “silicon-based users” lack bank accounts and cannot undergo KYC processes. Therefore, open settlement networks, stablecoins, and permissionless accounts are inherently designed as financial infrastructure prepared for M2M (machine-to-machine) collaboration. However, we cannot conclude that “AI agents necessarily need on-chain payments” just because AI and crypto are both hot topics. What truly needs to be on-chain are collaboration scenarios involving multiple parties, crossing boundaries, under high settlement requirements and low trust environments.

The mark of maturity in the next decade may not lie in “more things being put on-chain” but rather in the industry finally being able to clearly judge which demands genuinely need blockchain, and which are merely short-term narratives wrapped in blockchain.

In conclusion

After a decade, I increasingly believe in one thing: infrastructure building is a long-term endeavor.

Cycles will change. Narratives will change. Prices will change. But the demand for stability, transparency, and reliable services from users remains constant. The value of crypto ultimately needs to return to a few simple questions: Does it reduce trust costs? Does it enhance the efficiency of value flow? Does it provide users with more choices? Can it continue to provide services after a round of cycles?

Valuable things are not necessarily the noisiest, but they will remain.

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