ViaBTC CEO Yang Haipo: Rereading the past decade to rediscover the value of Crypto

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

When I wrote the first line of code for the ViaBTC mining pool in 2016, the crypto world was still a small circle composed of miners, developers, and early enthusiasts. Bitcoin was only seriously discussed within niche groups, stablecoins were not yet widely adopted, and concepts like DeFi, NFTs, and RWA, which would later appear repeatedly, had not yet taken shape.

A decade later, the industry looks completely different. BTC has entered the ETF system, 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 easily ignored by traditional finance.

But the changes go beyond that. What exactly happened in this industry over the past decade? 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 capitalization, the past decade of Crypto seems like a long fireworks display: dazzling enough, and noisy enough. But beyond the price curve, something quieter has been happening: several pieces of infrastructure that were hardest to pry open in traditional finance have been rewritten bit by bit by algorithms.

Market making, order matching, settlement, issuance – these things in traditional finance once required massive 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 technical limitation; it was a structural one.

But Crypto has pried open this structure over ten years.

Uniswap replaced order books and market makers with an incredibly simple formula. Anyone can put two assets into a liquidity pool and become a market maker; when users trade, the price is determined automatically by the algorithm. A developer sitting on a park bench can, through a single on-chain interaction, put assets into a liquidity pool and become a liquidity provider in the global market. This was almost unimaginable ten years ago.

The story goes further with on-chain perpetual contracts. GMX makes the LP pool itself the counterparty for traders. The USDC you deposit could, in the next second, become liquidity backing a BTC long position. Hyperliquid pushes order books, matching, and settlement further onto the chain, trying to get as close as possible to the trading experience of a centralized exchange. The most expensive and high-barrier aspects 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 took at least two days and cost tens of dollars in fees. Today, for the same amount, using USDT on-chain takes just minutes and costs less than a dollar. No one held a celebration for this, but it has happened silently.

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

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

Of course, these ten years haven't been entirely smooth. Mt. Gox collapsed in 2014, Luna evaporated tens of billions of dollars in a week in 2022, and in November of the same year, FTX went from being one of the top three exchanges in the world to bankruptcy in a short time. After each major event, the industry's reaction was similar: first shock, then reflection, then saying "the market needs to wash out," and then forgetting about it all when the next bull run arrived.

But a market washout never automatically fixes structural flaws. When the next narrative emerges, the unresolved issues are still there.

These seem more like structural issues rather than cyclical ones. Structural issues are not 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 is not the industry's original sin. Speculation exists in every financial market; it brings liquidity, price discovery, and allows new mechanisms to be tested by the market more quickly. What makes Crypto unique is that it has been both technology and finance from day one. The existence of tokens integrated market prices into the development of technology, applications, and communities very early on. A new idea can gain global attention, funding, and users within weeks, allowing many protocols to bypass traditional funding paths and conduct early-stage trial and error 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, DeFi Summer of 2020, and the NFT craze of 2021 each expanded the industry's boundaries in intense ways. After the bubbles burst, much less remained than was promised at the peak, but stablecoins, on-chain trading, wallets, and settlement mechanisms were indeed pushed forward through these cycles.

But fuel is ultimately just fuel, not a direction.

When prices surge 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 far more was promised at the peak than what truly remains.

The real problem is whether speculation has overshadowed real demand. When price becomes the only metric, the industry repeatedly falls into the same loop: everyone talks about long-term value during a bull market, only to realize during a bear market that much of the growth lacked real users.

Technology, Applications, and Assets

Over the past decade, there has also been a common misconception in the industry: treating blockchain, Web3, and Crypto as the same thing.

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

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

Web3 is a form of application. It asks the question: which scenarios truly need open networks 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 after subsidies, airdrops, and speculative expectations have faded away.

Crypto, as an asset, faces the most complex judgment. To deconstruct its value support, there are roughly two layers: First, the commodity attribute of block space, where users pay Gas for transactions, settlements, and contract calls – this is the "fuel fee" of the network. Second, the sovereign liquidity premium, where certain assets, due to their borderless, censorship-resistant, and transparent rules, hold hedging value under macro liquidity cycles.

A few assets might possess both layers of support, with BTC being the most typical example. But the vast majority of tokens do not have this status. They must ultimately return to real usage, protocol revenue, and network effects to pass the test.

For example, the logic of block space as a commodity holds because users genuinely pay Gas. However, if you strip away the Gas consumption from airdrop expectations, subsidies, arbitrage, and wash trading, how much real demand is left? This is a question every public chain must face. The curve of on-chain activity for a new public chain after its launch is almost identical. It's bustling right before a snapshot, and plummets sharply afterward.

The same applies to the sovereign liquidity premium. 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 the most valuable aspects of Crypto 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 permission 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 tore down the doors. More people came in, but it also means more people face risks earlier and more directly – no one does due diligence for you, no one selects 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 for the next decade, the key phrase might need to change: sustainable participation.

I feel this deeply myself. The mining pool business isn't like DeFi protocols or Meme coins; it lacks explosive narratives. Its value isn't noticed when the market is hottest. But every time there's network congestion, drastic market volatility, or when users are most anxious, whether each block can be packaged stably and whether each settlement arrives on time determines whether users are willing to continue entrusting their hashrate to you.

The value of infrastructure is often proven in these moments: not during the most vibrant bull market, but during the bear market when everyone is running away.

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

Over the past decade, the industry loved grand narratives: replacing banks, remaking finance, putting all assets on-chain, bringing all users into Web3. These narratives were mobilizing in the early days, getting many people to come in 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 won't be evenly distributed across all public chains. BTC and ETH dominating the majority of the total crypto market cap for so long is no coincidence; it's a natural result of network effects. Over the next decade, value will concentrate towards the few networks that truly possess security, liquidity, and ecosystem density. Many undifferentiated L1s aren't technically unusable, but they lack the strong network effects needed to sustain long-term competition.

A similar thing will likely happen in DeFi. DeFi's long-term value is openness, transparency, and composability. But the past few years have also proven that much DeFi activity comes from leverage, arbitrage, liquidity mining, and airdrop expectations, not the daily 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 won't directly replace the bank accounts and financial 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. In 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 method for a portion of assets. But the integration is two-way. While traditional finance brings capital, it also brings custodial centralization, access barriers, and asset screening mechanisms. One of the costs of mainstreaming is sacrificing a degree of censorship resistance and permissionless access in exchange 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 may create demand for high-frequency, micro, cross-platform payments and settlements in the future. These "silicon-based users" don't have bank accounts and can't go through KYC. Therefore, open settlement networks, stablecoins, and permissionless accounts are naturally the financial infrastructure prepared for this kind of M2M (machine-to-machine) collaboration. However, just because AI and Crypto are both hot topics, we shouldn't directly conclude that "AI Agents necessarily need on-chain payments." What truly needs to be on-chain are collaborative scenarios involving cross-entity, cross-border, strong settlement, and low-trust environments.

The sign of maturity for the next decade may not be "more things on-chain," but rather when the industry can finally more clearly judge which demands truly need the blockchain and which are just short-term narratives wrapped around it.

Final Thoughts

After ten years, I believe more and more in 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 has always been there. The value of Crypto must eventually return to a few simple questions: Does it reduce the cost of trust? Does it improve the efficiency of value flow? Does it give users more choices? Can it continue to provide services cycle after cycle?

Valuable things aren't always the most hyped, but they will endure.