Today, when I was browsing Web3 news, I saw this news from Grayscale. Out of curiosity, I followed the clues and went to Grayscale's Twitter and official website. At first glance, I thought Grayscale was preparing to set industry standards for this global crypto asset boom. As a result, I went in and saw that it turned out to be an "internal classification" made by its own crypto asset investment department in 2023, but it was just reposted on Twitter recently.

OK, OK, how is it set up? I will share it in the simplest way:

1. Cryptocurrency , well, that’s what everyone usually plays with on those crypto trading platforms;

2. Smart contract platform . Grayscale means a blockchain that supports smart contracts. The focus is not on smart contracts, but on the platform:)

3. Finance , which can be roughly regarded as DeFi;

4. Consumers and culture . Grayscale’s examples are all NFTs and GameFi. Even when he mentioned governance tokens, they are also for this type of community.

5. Public utilities and services . Grayscale mentioned oracles, liquidity staking protocols, decentralized solutions (such as DePIN), as well as wallets, bridges, payments, etc.

At a glance, it seems fine; but if you take a closer look, you will find something a little strange. Personally, after a quick glance, I would like to ask three questions:

Q1: Some cryptocurrencies are also governance tokens. How are they classified?

Q2: Why should the liquidity staking protocol with DeFi attributes be placed in public utilities and services?

Q3: Consumers and culture, does it include more categories, such as MEME? Then the next question will arise, MEMECoin is also a currency.

However, in general, the author sees from this report that a traditional financial institution is trying to integrate into the new ecosystem of Web3 based on its existing experience, that is, to incorporate these new things into the existing cognitive framework - in Web2, currency and products are separate, finance and products are also separate, and in Web3, these are all integrated together.

There are actually benefits to doing this, because through such classification, more traditional investors or people who don’t know Web3 can have a preliminary and quick understanding, because there is such a thing in their original cognition. In any case, if it is aimed at traditional finance, Grayscale’s classification should be successful, but if it tries to change the native Web3, it may first need to solve some problems, that is, the definition of standards.

If you ask me, how should I classify it? My suggestion is:

1. If you are new to this circle, the simplest classification is probably infrastructure (all technical development), cryptocurrency (Coin + NFT), and application (all dApps you can use)

2. If you want to be more integrated, then you can look at the classifications on platforms such as Coinmarketcap and Coinkego according to the segmentation of the native track. They have clear definitions.