The era of decoupling is here: Bitcoin is no longer the sole compass for crypto

Original Author: Charlie

Original Compilation: Luffy, Foresight News

For a long time, the market movements of the entire crypto space have revolved around Bitcoin. Now, that era is coming to an end.

The crypto economy has now split into two major camps: endogenous assets and exogenous assets.

So-called endogenous assets are the traditional crypto categories the public is familiar with: the value of these tokens and projects is entirely dependent on the overall ups and downs of the crypto market. Exogenous assets, on the other hand, belong to the crypto space in name only, with their value trajectories becoming increasingly independent of the crypto market.

Bitcoin's value originates from its own properties and is, in turn, reflected in its price. A price increase further reinforces the market's perception of its value attributes. At the peak of a bull market, Bitcoin is hailed as an "interstellar universal currency," the scarcest digital circulating asset in human hands; at the bottom of a bear market, it is dismissed as a digital collectible with no cash flow backing.

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

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

Projects like Venice, however, belong entirely to the exogenous camp, with their development logic completely detached from the crypto market. Although there is some overlap in user groups, its business model is more akin to consumer-grade artificial intelligence than native crypto products like Uniswap. Uniswap's core business remains users trading various endogenous assets, making its performance naturally fluctuate with asset prices; Venice, on the other hand, packages private multimodal inference services under a "pay-as-you-go + subscription" model.

Venice's only connection to the crypto field is its choice of tokens as value carriers, and some of its computing power providers have backgrounds in the crypto industry. Project lead Erik Voorhees is deeply rooted in the crypto industry and believes that if used correctly, tokens can be excellent marketing tools.

Figure, a publicly listed company, is also a typical case. This fintech lending company developed its own blockchain to reduce the approval time for home equity loans to under 5 minutes. For it, blockchain is merely an enabling technology; the core value lies in the credit business itself.

Whether in the token market or the listed company sector, the rise of the exogenous track on a large scale holds profound significance. In the past, because most business models were deeply tied to crypto asset prices, purely bottom-up fundamental investing was difficult. The crypto industry has seen narrative booms favoring "blockchain over Bitcoin" before, but previous cycles always ended up reverting to Bitcoin's price movements. The reason was that these tracks failed to generate stable demand and sustainable revenue; even when revenue existed, it couldn't be transmitted to the token's value. Once the token price stopped rising, the project lost its support.

This current cycle is completely different. Now we can clearly identify paying user groups and their rationale for payment. Market demand in most tracks is quantifiable, no longer driven purely by sentiment and speculation. Simultaneously, the mechanism of tokens as value carriers is continuously improving. Venice's revenue comes from real user payments for AI inference services; even if the broader crypto market declines, its business won't be significantly impacted because it inherently doesn't depend on token price fluctuations. This cycle possesses two core advantages that previous cycles lacked: sustainable real-world usage demand, and investors beginning to invest based on fundamentals rather than mere market narratives.

The stablecoin track in the private market is another example. In March 2026, Mastercard announced it would acquire BVNK for up to $1.8 billion. Just 15 months prior, when the company completed its Series B funding, its valuation was only $750 million. 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 has quadrupled. The development of these companies is all decoupled from the crypto industry's bull and bear cycles.

This is not to be bearish on endogenous assets. Just as gold, and even small gold mining companies, always have a place in an investment portfolio, Bitcoin and the cohort of endogenous crypto assets also have their reason to exist. However, the performance drivers and market correlations of these two asset classes have fundamentally diverged, and the data confirms this.

This analogy can make it concrete: the correlation coefficient between small gold mining stocks and the price of gold has consistently remained around 0.75. This is precisely the current state of the traditional crypto market – a collection of crypto assets acting like small gold mines, with Bitcoin corresponding to gold, and the entire track serving as leveraged investments benchmarked against Bitcoin. The blue curve in the chart represents another relationship: gold and the S&P 500 index may have a weak correlation influenced by macroeconomics, but they each have their own independent operating logic. This is precisely the future development direction for exogenous assets. In the long term, these assets will gradually decouple from the pattern of "following Bitcoin's ups and downs."

It should be noted that many exogenous projects themselves issue tokens. This phenomenon both confirms the aforementioned trend and also represents a special case.

Currently, the vast majority of endogenous assets remain highly synchronized with Bitcoin's price movements; a few exogenous assets show reduced correlation, but their development cycles are too short for strong reference. The industry pattern has always been that fundamentals come first, and market correlations change later.

This change has also completely rewritten the analytical logic of the industry. Studying exogenous assets requires conducting fundamental due diligence as you would for a traditional enterprise: identifying paying user groups, calculating unit economics, and evaluating industry moats. The Bitcoin price is no longer the primary reference indicator. Analyzing these projects is more like a fintech investor making a judgment, with the added special element of asset custody.

Below are the exogenous tracks with current development potential:

• On-chain exchanges and brokerage service providers
• Clearing and redemption solutions for long-tail asset tokenization
• Deeply integrated Crypto + AI tracks (private inference, distributed open-source model training like Nous Research's Psyche, etc.)
• Neo-digital banks (Payy and Raycash, focusing on privacy, are noteworthy; Aztec and Zama, providing programmable privacy infrastructure for them, also have potential)
• Lending track (Morpho has become a mainstream choice for institutional repo markets; smaller projects like Valinor and 3jane specialize in private credit niches)
• Stablecoin issuers and Real World Asset tokenization service providers
• Payment rails (Stripe and Tempo are industry benchmarks for general payments; Coinbase currently leads in the agent payments space)
• Non-financial crypto consumer products (represented by Venice and Collector Crypt, these projects vest the value of a physical business into a token, driving product adoption and enabling marketing)
• Agent economy (the core opportunity lies in the collaborative ecosystem at the access layer involving agents, service providers, and creators, which has lower replaceability. Cloudflare has a leading position, but whether it will ultimately charge traffic fees or only provide basic functional services remains undecided)

At this stage, to gain exposure to the tracks mentioned above, investing in the equity of related companies remains the most reliable method, with high-quality token targets being rare exceptions. Only when the value-capture mechanism of tokens is continuously optimized will their role be further enhanced, which requires joint efforts from regulators and the industry. Progress is already being made: on the regulatory front, the CLARITY Act is steadily advancing; within the industry, organizations like Blockworks are also working to improve market information transparency. There is still a long way to go in optimizing token mechanisms.

However, these details do not change a core trend: the driving forces of the crypto market are 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 moves in unison; the industry landscape has been completely reshaped.