The era of decoupling has arrived; Bitcoin is no longer the sole compass for crypto.

Original Author: Charlie

Original Compilation: Luffy, Foresight News

For a long time, the price movements of the entire crypto market 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.

Endogenous assets are the traditional crypto categories the public is familiar with: the value of these tokens and their projects completely depends on the overall rise and fall of the crypto asset market. Exogenous assets, on the other hand, only belong to the crypto space nominally. Their value trends are increasingly independent of the crypto market.

Bitcoin's value derives from its own properties, which in turn is reflected in its price. Price appreciation further reinforces the market's perception of its inherent value. At the peak of a bull run, Bitcoin is hailed as an "interstellar universal currency," the scarcest digital liquid asset in human hands; at the depths of a bear market, it is dismissed as a digital collectible with no cash flow backing.

Hyperliquid, however, sits between the two camps. The majority of its business still relies on the crypto market cycle, but its supply and demand are both continuously expanding. Much of the on-chain financial infrastructure falls into this category, with underlying assets gradually transitioning towards tokenized real-world assets.

HIP-3 open interest can roughly reflect the activity level of non-crypto-native 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 while bringing in new trading users and instruments.

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

Venice's only connection to the crypto space is its choice to use a token as a value-bearing vehicle, and some of its computing power suppliers have backgrounds in the crypto industry. Project lead Erik Voorhees is deeply entrenched in the crypto industry and believes that, if used properly, tokens can be excellent marketing tools.

Figure, a publicly listed company, is also a typical case. This fintech lending company built 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 large-scale rise of exogenous tracks has profound significance. In the past, because the vast majority of business models were deeply tied to the ups and downs of crypto asset prices, purely bottom-up fundamental investing was difficult to execute. The crypto industry has seen narrative booms emphasizing "blockchain over Bitcoin" before, but past cycles always reverted to Bitcoin's price action. The reason is that these tracks consistently failed to generate stable demand and sustainable revenue; even if there was revenue, it couldn't transmit to the token's value. Once token prices stopped rising, projects lost their support.

This cycle is fundamentally different from previous ones. Today, we can clearly identify paying user groups and their payment rationale. Market demand in most tracks is quantifiable, no longer driven purely by sentiment and hype. Simultaneously, the mechanism of tokens as value vehicles continues to improve. Venice's revenue comes from real user payments for AI inference services. Even if the overall crypto market declines, its business won't be significantly impacted because it doesn't rely on token price fluctuations. This cycle possesses two core advantages that previous cycles lacked: sustainable, genuine usage demand, and investors beginning to base decisions on fundamentals rather than mere market narratives.

The stablecoin track in the private market operates similarly. In March 2026, Mastercard announced it would acquire BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, a company that was valued at only $750 million during its Series B round just 15 months prior. Another stablecoin-related company, Bridge, was acquired by Stripe for $1.1 billion in February 2025. According to Stripe's annual report, Bridge's business is currently growing at an annual rate of four times. The development of these companies is entirely decoupled from the crypto market'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 array of endogenous crypto assets also have their reason for existence. However, the performance drivers and market correlation of these two asset types have fundamentally diverged, and the data confirms this.

An analogy can make this concrete: the correlation coefficient between small-cap gold mining stocks and the price of gold typically hovers around 0.75. This is the current state of the traditional crypto market – a multitude of crypto assets are like small gold mines, Bitcoin corresponds to gold, and the entire track is essentially a leveraged bet on Bitcoin. The blue curve in the chart represents a different relationship: gold and the S&P 500 index may show weak correlation influenced by the macroeconomy, but each has its own independent operational logic. This is the future direction for exogenous assets. Over the long term, these assets will gradually break free from the pattern of simply following Bitcoin's price swings.

It's worth noting that many exogenous projects also issue their own tokens. This phenomenon both confirms the above trend and represents a special case.

Currently, the vast majority of endogenous assets remain highly correlated with Bitcoin's price movements. A few exogenous assets show lower correlation, but due to their short development track record, they are not yet strong benchmarks. The industry rule has always been that fundamentals lead the way, followed by changes in market correlation.

This shift has completely rewritten the logic of industry analysis. Researching exogenous assets requires conducting fundamental due diligence similar to analyzing a traditional company: identifying paying user groups, calculating unit economics, and assessing the competitive moat. Bitcoin's price is no longer the primary reference indicator. Analyzing such projects is more like a fintech investor evaluating a company, but with the additional consideration of asset custody.

Here are the exogenous tracks with current development potential:

• On-chain exchanges and brokerage service providers
• Clearing and redemption solutions for long-tail asset tokenization
• Deep fusion of crypto and AI (private inference, decentralized open-source model training like Nous Research's Psyche)
• Neobanks (Payy and Raycash, focused on privacy, are worth watching; Aztec and Zama, providing programmable privacy infrastructure for them, also have potential)
• Lending track (Morpho has become the mainstream choice for institutional repo markets; smaller projects like Valinor and 3jane delve into niche private credit sectors)
• Stablecoin issuers and real-world asset tokenization service providers
• Payment rails (Stripe and Tempo lead in general payments; Coinbase currently leads in agent payments)
• Non-financial crypto consumer products (represented by Venice and Collector Crypt, these projects vest the value of their physical business into tokens, driving both product adoption and marketing)
• Agent economy (The core opportunity lies in the collaborative ecosystem of agents, service providers, and creators at the access layer, which has low substitutability. Cloudflare is a leader here, but whether it will ultimately charge usage fees for this traffic or simply provide baseline functionality remains to be seen)

At this stage, investing in the equity of companies in these tracks remains the safest approach, with high-quality token picks being rare exceptions. The role of tokens will only increase when their value-capturing mechanisms are continuously optimized, a process that requires joint efforts from regulators and the industry. Progress is already being made: on the regulatory front, the CLARITY Act is steadily advancing; on the industry front, organizations like Blockworks are promoting market transparency. There is still a long way to go in optimizing token mechanisms.

But these details do not change one core trend: the driving force of the crypto market is shifting from a single factor to multiple factors. The focus of industry research is also shifting from interpreting Bitcoin price charts to deeply analyzing business 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 transformed.