ViaBTC CEO Yang Haipo: A Decade in Review, Reunderstanding the Value of Crypto

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

In 2016, when I wrote the first line of code for ViaBTC's mining pool, the crypto world was still a small circle of miners, developers, and early enthusiasts. Bitcoin was only seriously discussed within niche groups, stablecoins had not yet been widely adopted, and concepts like DeFi, NFTs, and RWA, which would later become recurring themes, had not yet taken shape.

A decade has passed, and the industry has completely transformed. BTC has entered the ETF ecosystem, stablecoins have become an important dollar liquidity channel in certain regions, and the scale of on-chain transactions and stablecoin settlements can no longer be ignored by traditional finance.

But the changes go beyond that. What exactly has happened in this industry over the past decade? Standing at the tenth 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 prices and market capitalization, the past decade of Crypto has resembled a long fireworks display—dazzling enough, and noisy enough. But beneath the price curves, something quieter has been happening: several pieces of traditional finance infrastructure, once the hardest to move, have been rewritten piece by piece through algorithms.

Market making, matching, clearing, and issuance—these functions in traditional finance once required substantial capital, professional teams, and a closed system. It was nearly impossible for an ordinary person to act as a market maker. This wasn't a technological limitation; it was a structural one.

But Crypto has pried open this structure over ten years.

Uniswap replaced order books and market makers with a deceptively simple formula. Anyone depositing two assets into a liquidity pool becomes a market maker; when users trade, the price is determined algorithmically. 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 the global market. This was almost unimaginable a decade ago.

With on-chain perpetual contracts, the story goes further. GMX makes the LP pool itself the counterparty for traders. The USDC you deposit could, in the next second, become the liquidity backing someone's BTC long position. Hyperliquid pushes order books, matching, and clearing further on-chain, striving to replicate the trading experience of centralized exchanges. The most expensive and highest-barrier components of traditional derivatives exchanges have been rewritten into open protocols 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 tens of dollars in fees. Today, the same amount of money, sent via USDT on-chain, arrives in minutes at a cost of less than one dollar. No grand celebration was held for this, but it has quietly happened.

These mechanisms are not perfect. Not all of them will survive every market cycle. But together, they prove one thing: financial services do not have to exist solely within closed systems controlled by a few institutions.

This is the true legacy of Crypto over the past decade.

Of course, the past ten years haven't been smooth sailing. In 2014, Mt. Gox collapsed. In 2022, Luna evaporated tens of billions of dollars in a single week. In November of the same year, FTX, then one of the top three exchanges globally, went bankrupt in a short period. The industry's reaction to each major event has been strikingly similar: first shock, then reflection, followed by claims that "the market needs a shakeout," only to forget it all when the next bull market arrives.

But a market shakeout never automatically fixes structural loopholes. When the next narrative emerges, the unaddressed issues remain.

These are more about structural problems than cyclical ones. Structural problems are not solved by cycles; they are only amplified by time.

Speculation, Liquidity, and Genuine Demand

It's hard to discuss Crypto without addressing speculation.

Speculation itself is not 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 more quickly. What's unique about Crypto is that, from day one, it has been simultaneously technology and finance—the existence of tokens allowed market prices to intervene early in the development of technology, applications, and communities. A new idea could gain global attention, funding, and users within weeks, allowing many protocols to bypass traditional funding paths and conduct early-stage experimentation directly in the open market.

In a sense, early speculative bubbles acted as "permissionless venture capital," fueling the industry's trial and error and iteration. The ICO boom of 2017, the DeFi Summer of 2020, and the NFT mania of 2021 each 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, after all, just fuel, not direction.

When prices rise rapidly, short-term liquidity can be mistaken for real adoption, and the spread of a narrative can be mistaken for long-term consensus. When the cycle turns, the industry finds that what was promised at the peak far exceeds what actually remains.

The real issue is whether speculation has overwhelmed genuine demand. When price becomes the sole metric, the industry repeatedly falls into the same loop: everyone talks about long-term value during bull markets, only to realize in bear markets that much of the growth was not backed by real users.

Technology, Applications, and Assets

Over the past decade, another common misconception has been treating blockchain, Web3, and Crypto as the same thing.

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

Blockchain is an underlying technology. Its value lies in reducing the cost of trust, settlement, and verification, allowing strangers to complete transactions and state confirmations without an intermediary. The technology itself is neutral; its value is clear.

Web3 is an application paradigm. It asks the question: which scenarios truly require an open network and user ownership? Whether a Web3 application is valid should not be judged by its narrative or short-term data, but by whether people continue to use it and pay for it once subsidies, airdrops, and speculative expectations have faded.

Crypto as an asset faces the most complex judgment. To break down its value support, there are roughly two layers: first, the commodity attribute of block space—for example, users pay Gas for transactions, settlements, and contract calls, which is the "fuel fee" of the network; second, the premium for sovereign liquidity—for instance, certain assets, due to their borderless, censorship-resistant, and transparent rule sets, possess hedging value under macro liquidity cycles.

A few assets may possess both layers of support, with BTC being the most typical example. But the vast majority of tokens lack this status. They must ultimately be tested against real usage, protocol revenue, and network effects.

For example, the logic of block space as a commodity holds because users genuinely pay Gas for it. But if you strip away the Gas consumption driven by airdrop expectations, subsidies, arbitrage, and wash trading, how much genuine demand remains? This is a question every public chain must face. The on-chain activity curve for a newly launched public chain is almost always the same shape: bustling before the snapshot, and a cliff-like drop afterward.

The premium for sovereign liquidity is similar. BTC's global consensus and censorship resistance are rare exceptions, not a universal attribute of Crypto assets.

Here’s a direct question: if you remove speculative demand and look only at real usage, real revenue, and real cash flow, how much support remains for the total valuation of the crypto market today?

From Open Participation to Sustainable Participation

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

But openness only lowers the barrier to entry, not the risk itself. In the traditional financial system, barriers kept many people out, but also kept out many risks. Crypto has removed the door, bringing more people in, but also meaning that more people face risks earlier and more directly—no one does due diligence for you, no one screens projects for you, and no one bears the consequences of your wrong decisions for you.

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

This is something I feel deeply. The mining pool business is not like a DeFi protocol or a Meme coin; it lacks explosive narratives. Its value is rarely noticed when the market is at its hottest. But during every network congestion, sharp price fluctuation, or period of user anxiety, whether every block can be packaged stably and every settlement can arrive on time determines whether users are willing to entrust their hashrate to you.

The value of infrastructure is often validated in these moments—not in the most exuberant bull market, but in the bear market when everyone is running.

The Next Decade: Crypto Doesn't Have to Replace Everything

Over the past decade, the industry has loved grand narratives, like replacing banks, reinventing finance, putting all assets on-chain, and bringing all users into Web3. These narratives were motivating in the early days, encouraging many people 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 instead consolidate around a few networks. Liquidity, developers, users, and security will not be evenly distributed across all public chains. The fact that BTC and ETH have long dominated the majority of total crypto market capitalization is no coincidence; it's the natural result of network effects. Over the next decade, value will concentrate on the few networks that genuinely possess security, liquidity, and ecosystem density. Many undifferentiated L1s are not technologically unusable; they simply lack the strong network effects needed to sustain long-term competition.

A similar trend will unfold in DeFi. DeFi's long-term value lies in its openness, transparency, and composability. But the past few years have also shown that much DeFi activity stems from leverage, arbitrage, liquidity mining, and airdrop expectations, not from 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 digital native assets, moving towards specialization rather than mass adoption. DeFi will not directly replace the bank accounts and wealth management apps of ordinary people, but it will become a more frequently used tool for a certain class of users and institutions.

At the same time, 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 puzzle in multi-asset allocation. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have already pulled Crypto into the asset allocation framework of traditional finance, and RWA is rewriting the issuance methods of certain assets. But integration is a two-way street. While traditional finance brings capital, it also brings custodial centralization, entry barriers, and asset screening mechanisms. One of the costs of mainstreaming is trading a degree of censorship resistance and permissionless access for acceptance by the mainstream system.

Another possibility is that future genuine demand will not come solely from humans. AI agents, automated workflows, and the machine economy may create high-frequency, micro-payment, and cross-platform settlement needs in the future. These "silicon-based users" don't have bank accounts and can't pass KYC. Open settlement networks, stablecoins, and permissionless accounts are naturally the financial infrastructure prepared for this kind of M2M collaboration. However, just because AI and Crypto are both hot topics doesn't mean we can directly conclude that "AI agents necessarily need on-chain payments." What truly needs to be on-chain are collaboration scenarios that are cross-entity, cross-border, require strong settlement, and operate in low-trust environments.

The mark of maturity in the next decade may not be "more things on-chain," but rather the industry finally being able to more clearly distinguish which needs actually require a blockchain and which are just short-term narratives packaged with the blockchain label.

Final Thoughts

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

Cycles will change. Narratives will change. Prices will change. But the user demand for stable, transparent, and reliable services remains constant. The value of Crypto ultimately comes back to a few fundamental questions: Does it lower the cost of trust? Does it improve the efficiency of value transfer? Does it give users more choices? Can it continue to provide services cycle after cycle?

Valuable things are not necessarily the most attention-grabbing, but they will persist.