ViaBTC CEO Yang Haipo: Revisiting a decade, rethinking the value of Crypto

Original Author: Yang Haipo, Founder & CEO of ViaBTC & CoinEx

In 2016, when I wrote the first line of code for the ViaBTC mining pool, the crypto world was still a small circle of miners, developers, and early enthusiasts. Bitcoin was only seriously discussed within niche communities, stablecoins were yet to be widely adopted, and the concepts of DeFi, NFTs, and RWAs that would later become recurring themes were yet to take shape.

A decade has passed, and the industry looks completely different. BTC has entered the ETF ecosystem, stablecoins have become a crucial dollar liquidity channel in some regions, and the scale of on-chain transactions and stablecoin settlements can no longer be easily ignored by traditional finance.

But the changes go beyond that. What exactly happened in this industry over the past ten years? Standing at the ten-year anniversary of ViaBTC's founding, I want to share my understanding of the value of Crypto.

What Crypto Has Left Behind Over the Past Decade

If you only look at price and market cap, the past decade of Crypto looks like a long firework display: dazzling enough, and noisy enough. But beneath the price curve, another, quieter transformation has been underway: several pieces of infrastructure within traditional finance, once among the hardest to change, have been gradually rewritten by algorithms.

Market making, order matching, clearing, and issuance – these functions in traditional finance have historically required substantial capital, specialized teams, and a closed, proprietary system. For an ordinary person to become a market maker was nearly impossible. This wasn't a technological limitation; it was a structural one.

But over ten years, Crypto has managed to shift this structure.

Uniswap replaced order books and market makers with a deceptively simple mathematical formula. Anyone can deposit two assets into a liquidity pool and become a market maker. When a user trades, the algorithm automatically determines the price. A developer sitting on a park bench can, through a single on-chain interaction, deposit assets into a liquidity pool and become a liquidity provider in a global market. This was almost unimaginable a decade ago.

With on-chain perpetual contracts, the story went further. GMX made the LP pool itself the counterparty for traders. The USDC you deposit could, in the next second, become the liquidity backing a long BTC position. Hyperliquid pushed order books, matching, and clearing closer to a fully on-chain state, mimicking the trading experience of centralized exchanges as closely as possible. The most expensive and high-barrier aspects of traditional derivatives exchanges were being rewritten into open protocols that anyone could access and verify.

Stablecoins represent another quiet revolution. Ten years ago, a cross-border transfer from South America to Africa took at least two days and cost tens of dollars in fees. Today, the same amount can be sent via USDT on-chain in minutes, costing less than a dollar. No grand celebration was held for this, but it has happened quietly.

None of these mechanisms are perfect. Not all of them will survive every market cycle. But together, they have proven one thing: financial services don't have to exist solely within the closed systems controlled by a handful of institutions.

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

Of course, this decade hasn't been without its downturns. Mt.Gox collapsed in 2014. Luna evaporated tens of billions of dollars in a week in 2022. In November of the same year, FTX went from being one of the top three global exchanges to bankruptcy in a short period. After each major event, the industry's reaction was strikingly similar: shock, then reflection, then talk about "a market shakeout needed," and then letting it be forgotten until the next bull run.

But a market shakeout never automatically fixes the underlying structural vulnerabilities. When the next narrative emerges, the unaddressed issues are still there.

These are more about structural issues than cyclical ones. Structural problems aren't solved by cycles; they are only amplified by time.

Speculation, Liquidity, and Real Demand

It's hard to talk about Crypto without addressing speculation.

Speculation itself isn't the industry's original sin. Every financial market has speculation. It brings liquidity, price discovery, and allows new mechanisms to be tested by the market faster. What makes Crypto unique is that, from day one, it has been both technology and finance – the existence of tokens allowed market prices to intervene in the development of technology, applications, and communities very early on. A new idea could gain global attention, funding, and users within weeks, allowing many protocols to bypass traditional funding paths and undergo early experimentation directly in an open market.

In a sense, the speculative bubbles of the early days acted as a form of "permissionless venture capital." They were fuel propelling the industry's experimentation and iteration. The ICO boom of 2017, the DeFi Summer of 2020, the NFT mania of 2021 – each wave expanded the industry's boundaries in dramatic ways. After the bubbles burst, what remained was far less than what was promised at the peak, but stablecoins, on-chain trading, wallets, and clearing mechanisms were indeed pushed forward through these cycles.

But fuel is ultimately just fuel, not a direction.

When prices are rapidly rising, short-term liquidity is easily mistaken for real adoption, and the spread of a narrative is taken as long-term consensus. When the cycle turns, the industry realizes that what was promised at the peak far exceeded what actually remained.

The real question is whether speculation has overwhelmed real demand. When price becomes the sole indicator, the industry repeatedly falls into the same loop: everyone talks about long-term value in a bull market, only to discover in a bear market that much of the growth lacked real users behind it.

Technology, Applications, and Assets

Over the past decade, another common misconception within the industry is treating Blockchain, Web3, and Crypto as the same thing.

These three terms sound similar, but they actually solve completely different problems.

Blockchain is an underlying technology. Its value lies in reducing costs related to trust, settlement, and verification, allowing strangers to conduct transactions and confirm states without an intermediary. The technology itself is neutral; its value is clear.

Web3 is an application paradigm. It seeks to answer: which scenarios truly require an open network and user ownership? The validity of a Web3 application shouldn't be judged by its narrative or short-term metrics, but by whether people continue to use it and pay for it after subsidies, airdrops, and speculative expectations have faded away.

Crypto, as an asset class, requires the most complex judgment. To deconstruct its value drivers, there are roughly two layers: first, the commodity value of blockspace – for example, users pay Gas for transactions, settlements, and calling contracts, which is the network's "fuel fee"; second, the sovereign liquidity premium – for instance, certain assets, due to being borderless, censorship-resistant, and having transparent rules, possess a hedging value within macroeconomic liquidity cycles.

A few assets might possess both layers of support, with BTC being the most typical example. But the vast majority of tokens don't have this status. They ultimately must be tested against real usage, protocol revenue, and network effects.

For example, the logic of blockspace as a commodity holds up because users genuinely pay Gas fees. But if you strip away the Gas consumption driven by airdrop expectations, subsidies, arbitrage, and wash trading, how much real demand remains? This is a question every public chain must face. The on-chain activity curves for newly launched blockchains are almost identical in shape: bustling before a snapshot, then a cliff-like drop-off afterwards.

The sovereign liquidity premium is similar. BTC's global consensus and censorship-resistance are unique exceptions, not universal attributes of all crypto assets.

A direct question can be asked here: if you remove speculative demand and look only at real usage, real revenue, and real cash flow, how much support would remain for the current total market valuation of the crypto market?

From Open Participation to Sustainable Participation

One of Crypto's most valuable aspects is its openness. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can connect to the network, hold assets, and participate in protocols without needing a bank account, proof of residence, or permission from anyone.

But openness only lowers the barrier to entry, not the risk itself. In the traditional financial system, barriers like these kept many people out, but also shielded them from many risks. Crypto removed that door. More people came in, but that also means more people face risks earlier and more directly – no one conducts due diligence for you, no one screens projects for you, and no one bears the consequences of your wrong decisions.

So, the key phrase of the past decade was "open participation." But the key phrase for the next decade might need to change: sustainable participation.

This is something I feel deeply myself. The mining pool business isn't like a DeFi protocol or a Meme coin; it lacks that explosive narrative. Its value isn't noticed when the market is hottest. But during network congestion, violent price swings, and times when users are most anxious, whether each block can be stably produced and every settlement can be processed on time determines whether users will continue to entrust you with their hashing power.

The value of infrastructure is often verified in these moments: not during the most exciting bull run, but during the bear market when everyone is fleeing.

Next Decade: Crypto Doesn't Need to Replace Everything

Over the past decade, the industry loved grand narratives – replacing banks, rebuilding finance, putting all assets on-chain, onboarding all users into Web3. These narratives were motivating in the early days, encouraging many to come and explore.

But today, Crypto may need a more realistic understanding of its own boundaries.

I tend to believe the industry won't expand indefinitely but will converge towards a few networks. Liquidity, developers, users, and security – these things won't be evenly distributed across all blockchains. It's no coincidence that BTC and ETH have long held the majority of crypto's total market cap; it's a natural result of network effects. Over the next decade, value will concentrate on a handful of networks that genuinely possess security, liquidity, and ecosystem density. Many L1s lacking differentiation aren't that their technology doesn't work, but they lack the sufficiently strong network effects to sustain long-term competition.

A similar trend will happen in DeFi. DeFi's long-term value lies in being open, transparent, and composable. But recent years have also shown that much DeFi activity stems from leverage, arbitrage, yield farming, and airdrop expectations, not the everyday financial needs of ordinary users. In the future, DeFi is more likely to serve on-chain traders, market makers, cross-border liquidity needs, and digitally native assets, moving towards specialization rather than mass adoption. DeFi won't directly replace ordinary people's bank accounts and savings apps, but it will become a more frequently used tool for a specific class of users and institutions.

At the same time, the boundary between Crypto and traditional finance will become increasingly blurred. In the past decade, Crypto was a relatively isolated asset class; in the next decade, it will become one piece of a multi-asset allocation puzzle. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have already pulled Crypto into the asset allocation framework of traditional finance, while RWAs are also rewriting how parts of assets are issued. But this integration is a two-way street. As traditional finance brings in capital, it also introduces custodial centralization, access barriers, and asset screening mechanisms. One price of mainstreaming is trading a degree of censorship-resistance and permissionless access for acceptance by the mainstream system.

Another possibility is that future real demand won't only come from humans. AI Agents, automated workflows, and the machine economy could generate high-frequency, small-value, cross-platform payment and settlement needs in the future. These "silicon-based users" don't have bank accounts and can't go through KYC. So open settlement networks, stablecoins, and permissionless accounts are naturally the financial infrastructure prepared for this kind of M2M (machine-to-machine) collaboration. But just because AI and Crypto are both hot topics doesn't automatically lead to the conclusion that "AI Agents inevitably need on-chain payments." What truly needs to be on-chain are collaboration scenarios across entities, across borders, requiring strong settlement, and operating in low-trust environments.

The sign of maturity in the next decade might not be "more things on-chain," but the industry finally being able to more clearly judge which demands truly need a blockchain, and which are just short-term narratives packaged using blockchain.

Final Thoughts

After ten years, I've become increasingly convinced of one thing: building infrastructure is a long-term endeavor.

Cycles will change. Narratives will change. Prices will change. But the user's demand for stable, transparent, and reliable services remains constant. The value of Crypto ultimately needs to be tested against a few fundamental questions: Does it reduce trust costs? Does it improve the efficiency of value transfer? Does it give users more choices? Can it continue to provide services cycle after cycle?

Things of value aren't necessarily the most hyped, but they will endure.