ViaBTC CEO杨海坡：十年回看，重新理解Crypto的价值

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 of miners, developers, and early enthusiasts. Bitcoin was seriously discussed only within niche groups, stablecoins had not yet been widely adopted, and concepts like DeFi, NFTs, and RWA, which would later become recurrent themes, had not yet taken shape.

A decade later, the industry looks completely different. BTC has entered the ETF system, stablecoins have become an important channel for dollar liquidity in some regions, and the scale of on-chain transactions and stablecoin settlements is increasingly difficult for traditional finance to ignore.

But the changes go beyond that. What exactly has happened in the industry over these ten years? 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

Looking only at price and market cap, Crypto over the past decade resembles a long, spectacular fireworks display: dazzling enough, noisy enough. But beyond the price curves, something quieter has been happening: several pieces of traditional financial infrastructure, once the hardest to move, have been rewritten algorithmically, bit by bit.

Market making, order matching, clearing, and issuance – in traditional finance, these activities required substantial capital, professional teams, and a closed set of systems. 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 over ten years, Crypto has managed to shift this structure.

Uniswap replaced order books and market makers with a deceptively simple formula. Anyone can deposit two assets into a liquidity pool and become a market maker; when a user trades, the price is automatically determined by the algorithm. A developer sitting on a park bench could, through a single on-chain interaction, deposit assets into a 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 allows the LP pool itself to act as the counterparty for traders. The USDC you deposit could, in the next second, become the liquidity backing someone else's BTC long position. Hyperliquid pushes order books, matching, and clearing further into an on-chain form, striving to get as close as possible to the trading experience of a centralized exchange. The most expensive and high-barrier parts of traditional derivatives exchanges are being 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 dozens of dollars in fees. Today, the same amount of money can be sent on-chain using USDT in minutes, costing less than a dollar. No one held a celebration 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 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, the past ten years haven't been smooth sailing. Mt. Gox collapsed in 2014. In 2022, Luna evaporated tens of billions of dollars in a week, and in November of the same year, FTX went from being one of the top three exchanges globally to bankruptcy in a short period. The industry's reaction after each major event has been similar: first shock, then reflection, followed by "the market needs a shakeout," and then forgetting about it all until the next bull run.

But market shakeouts never automatically fix the underlying structural flaws. When the next narrative emerges, those unfixed problems are still there.

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

Speculation, Liquidity, and True Demand

It's hard to discuss Crypto without mentioning 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. Crypto's uniqueness lies in the fact that it has been both technology and finance from day one. 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 undergo early-stage trial and error directly in open markets.

In a sense, early speculative bubbles acted as "permissionless venture capital." They fueled 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 wave aggressively expanded the industry's boundaries. 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 during these cycles.

But fuel is ultimately just fuel, not a 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 question is whether speculation has overwhelmed genuine demand. When price becomes the only metric, the industry repeatedly falls into the same loop: everyone talks about long-term value during a bull run, only to realize in a bear market that much of the growth had no real users behind it.

Technology, Applications, and Assets

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

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

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

Web3 is an application paradigm. The question it answers is: which scenarios truly require an open network and user ownership? Whether a Web3 application is viable shouldn't 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.

Crypto, as an asset class, faces the most complex judgment. To analyze its value support, there are roughly two layers: first, the commodity nature of block space, e.g., users pay Gas for transactions, settlements, and contract calls – this is the network's "fuel fee." Second, the sovereign liquidity premium, e.g., certain assets, due to their borderless, censorship-resistant, and transparent nature, possess hedging value during macro liquidity cycles.

A few assets might possess both layers of support, with BTC being the most typical example. However, 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 is valid because users genuinely pay Gas fees. But if you strip away Gas consumption driven by airdrop expectations, subsidies, arbitrage, and wash trading, how much genuine demand remains? This is a question every public chain must confront. The on-chain activity curve for new public chains almost always looks the same: bustling activity before a snapshot, a cliff-like drop afterward.

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

A direct question can be asked here: If you remove speculative demand and look only at genuine usage, real revenue, and real cash flow, how much support remains for today's total crypto market valuation?

From Open Participation to Sustainable Participation

One of Crypto's most valuable aspects 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 they also blocked many risks. Crypto has removed the door; more people have entered, but this also means 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.

So, the key phrase for the past decade has been "open participation." But for the next decade, the key phrase might need to change to "sustainable participation."

This is something I feel deeply myself. The mining pool business is not like DeFi protocols or Meme coins; it lacks explosive narratives. Its value often goes unnoticed during the market's hottest moments. But every time the network is congested, prices fluctuate wildly, and users are most anxious, whether each block can be stably packed and each settlement can be processed 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 exuberant bull market, but during the bear market when everyone else is running away.

In the Next Decade, Crypto Doesn't Have to Replace Everything

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

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

I'm inclined to believe the industry won't expand infinitely but will concentrate towards a few networks. Liquidity, developers, users, and security won't be evenly distributed across all public chains. The fact that BTC and ETH have long dominated the majority of crypto's total market cap is not a coincidence; it's the natural result of network effects. Over the next decade, value will concentrate on the few networks that possess genuine security, liquidity, and ecosystem density. Many undifferentiated L1s aren't technically unusable; they simply lack a strong enough network effect to sustain long-term competition.

A similar thing will likely happen with DeFi. DeFi's long-term value lies in its openness, transparency, and composability. However, the past few years have also shown that much DeFi activity stems from leverage, arbitrage, liquidity mining, and airdrop expectations, not from the daily financial needs of ordinary users. Going forward, 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 ordinary people's bank accounts and wealth management apps, but it will become a more frequently used tool for a certain class of users and institutions.

At the same time, the boundaries 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 one piece of a multi-asset allocation puzzle. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have already pulled Crypto into the asset allocation framework of traditional finance, and RWA is rewriting the issuance methods of some assets. But this integration is a two-way street. While traditional finance brings capital, it also brings centralized custody, 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 won't come solely from humans. AI agents, automated workflows, and the machine economy may generate a need for high-frequency, small-value, cross-platform payments and settlements. These "silicon-based users" have no bank accounts and cannot go through KYC. Therefore, open settlement networks, stablecoins, and permissionless accounts are naturally suited as the financial infrastructure for this kind of M2M (machine-to-machine) coordination. However, just because both AI and Crypto are hot topics doesn't automatically mean "AI agents must 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 sign of maturity in the next decade may not be "more things on-chain," but rather the industry finally being able to more clearly judge which needs *truly* require a blockchain and which are just short-term narratives packaged with blockchain buzzwords.

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 users' demand for stable, transparent, and reliable services will always be there. The ultimate value of Crypto must return to a few simple questions: Has it lowered the cost of trust? Has it improved the efficiency of value flow? Does it give users more choices? Can it continue to provide services through cycle after cycle?

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