Written by: Charlie

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

For a long time, the entire cryptocurrency market has revolved around Bitcoin. Now, that era is coming to an end.

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

The term "endogenous" refers to the traditional crypto categories that are widely known: the value of these tokens and projects depends entirely on the overall price fluctuations of the crypto asset market. Exogenous assets, on the other hand, are only nominally part of the crypto sector; their value trends are becoming increasingly independent of the crypto market.

Bitcoin's value stems from its inherent properties, which in turn are reflected in its price. A rising price further reinforces the market's perception of its value. At the peak of a bull market, Bitcoin is hailed as an "interstellar universal currency," the scarcest digital asset in human hands; at the trough of a bear market, it is devalued as a digital collectible with no cash flow support.

Hyperliquid sits between these two camps. While most of its business still relies on the crypto market, both its supply and demand sides are constantly expanding. Many on-chain financial infrastructures fall into this category, and their underlying assets are gradually shifting towards tokenized real-world assets.

HIP-3 open interest can roughly reflect the activity level of non-crypto trading. Currently, HIP-3 contracts account for about 30% of Hyperliquid's total open interest, compared to only 4% in November 2025. The upcoming HIP-4 prediction market will further drive growth, bringing in new trading users and trading instruments.

Projects like Venice, on the other hand, belong entirely to the exogenous category, with their development logic completely detached from the crypto market. While there is some overlap in user groups, its business model leans more towards consumer-grade artificial intelligence than native crypto products like Uniswap. Uniswap's core business remains user trading of various endogenous assets, with performance naturally fluctuating with asset prices; Venice, however, packages its private multimodal inference service and adopts a "pay-as-you-go + subscription" pricing model.

Venice's only connection to the crypto space is its use of tokens as a value vehicle, and the fact that some of its computing power providers have crypto industry backgrounds. Project leader Erik Voorhees, deeply involved in the crypto industry, believes that if used properly, tokens can become an excellent marketing tool.

Figure, a publicly listed company, is a typical example. This fintech lending company developed its own blockchain technology, reducing the approval time for home equity loans to less than 5 minutes. For it, blockchain is just a supporting technology; its core value lies in the lending business itself.

The large-scale rise of exogenous sectors, whether in the token market or listed companies, has profound significance. In the past, because most business models were deeply tied to crypto asset prices, purely bottom-up fundamental investing was difficult to implement. The crypto industry has seen its share of narratives emphasizing blockchain over Bitcoin, but past trends have ultimately reverted to Bitcoin's performance. The reason for this is that these sectors have consistently failed to generate stable demand and sustainable revenue; even if revenue is generated, it cannot be translated into token value. Once the token price stops rising, the project loses its foundation.

This round of market activity is drastically different from previous ones. We can now clearly see the paying user base and the underlying logic behind their purchases. Market demand in most sectors is quantifiable, no longer driven solely by sentimental speculation. Simultaneously, the mechanism by which tokens serve as a value carrier is continuously improving. Venice's revenue comes from real user payments for its AI inference services, and even if the overall crypto market declines, its business will not be significantly impacted because it is not dependent on token price fluctuations. This cycle possesses two core advantages that previous booms lacked: sustainable real-world demand, and investors beginning to invest based on fundamentals rather than simply market narratives.

The same applies to the stablecoin sector in the private market. In March 2026, Mastercard announced it would acquire BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, while the company was valued at only $750 million when it completed its Series B funding round 15 months earlier. 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 rate is four times. The development of these companies is completely decoupled from the bull and bear cycles of the crypto industry.

This is not to say that we are bearish on intrinsically grown assets. Just as gold and even small gold mining companies always have their value in an investment portfolio, Bitcoin and other intrinsically grown crypto assets also have their own significance. However, the performance-driven logic and market correlation of the two types of assets have become fundamentally different, and the data confirms this.

This analogy can be visualized: the correlation coefficient between small-cap gold mining stocks and gold prices has consistently remained around 0.75. This is precisely the current state of the traditional crypto market—a host of crypto assets are like small gold mines, Bitcoin corresponds to gold, and the entire sector is a leveraged investment model mirroring Bitcoin. The blue curve in the chart represents a different relationship: gold and the S&P 500 index are slightly correlated by macroeconomic factors, but each has its own independent operating logic. This is precisely the future development direction of exogenous assets. In the long run, these assets will gradually decouple from the "following Bitcoin's rise and fall" trend.

It should be noted that many exogenous assets also issue their own tokens, which confirms the above trend and can also be considered a special case.

Currently, the vast majority of intrinsically driven assets still move in close tandem with Bitcoin's price action; the correlation among a few exogenous assets has decreased, but due to their relatively short development cycle, they are not yet strong indicators of market performance. The industry's pattern has always been that fundamentals precede market movements, with subsequent changes in market correlations.

This change has also completely rewritten the logic of industry analysis. Studying exogenous assets requires fundamental due diligence, just like analyzing traditional companies: identifying paying user groups, calculating individual economic models, and assessing industry moats. Bitcoin price is no longer the primary reference indicator; analyzing these projects is more like the judgment made by fintech investors, only with the added special step of asset custody.

The following are exogenous sectors with current growth potential:

• On-chain exchanges and brokerage services
• Liquidation and redemption solutions for long-tail asset tokenization
• The field of deep integration of encryption and artificial intelligence (private inference, distributed open-source model training similar to Nous Research's Psyche, etc.)
• New digital banks (payy and Raycash, which focus on privacy protection, are worth watching; Aztec and Zama, which provide programmable privacy infrastructure for them, also have potential)
• In the lending sector (Morpho has become the mainstream choice in the institutional repurchase market; Valinor, 3jane, and other small and medium-sized projects are focusing on the niche market of private lending)
• Stablecoin issuers and real-world asset tokenization service providers
• In the payment gateway sector (Surrounded by general payments, Stripe and Tempo are industry benchmarks; in the smart agent payment sector, Coinbase is currently leading the way),
• Non-financial crypto consumer products (represented by Venice and Collector Crypt, these projects imbue tokens with the value of real-world business, which both drives product adoption and enables marketing).
• The intelligent agent economy (its core opportunity lies in the collaborative ecosystem of intelligent agents, service providers, and creators at the access layer, a segment with low substitutability. Cloudflare has a leading position in this area, but whether it will charge for traffic or only provide basic functional services remains to be seen.)

At present, investing in the equity of related companies remains the safest approach for those seeking to enter these sectors; high-quality tokens are exceptions. Their effectiveness will only increase as the value-carrying mechanism of tokens continues to improve, which requires joint efforts from regulatory bodies and the entire industry. Progress has been made in this area: at the regulatory level, the CLARITY Act is progressing steadily; at the industry level, institutions like Blockworks are promoting market transparency. However, the token mechanism still has a long way to go in terms of optimization.

However, 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 has also shifted from interpreting Bitcoin price charts to delving into the fundamentals of companies. In the next decade, there's no need to be puzzled as to why the "crypto market" no longer experiences synchronized rises and falls, because the industry landscape has been completely transformed.