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

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 seriously discussed only in niche groups, stablecoins were not yet widely adopted, and concepts like DeFi, NFTs, and RWA, which have since become recurring themes, had not yet taken shape.

A decade later, the industry’s landscape has completely transformed. Bitcoin has entered the ETF system, stablecoins have become crucial channels 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 to the industry over these ten years? Standing at the ten-year milestone of ViaBTC’s founding, I want to share my understanding of the value of Crypto.

The Last Decade: What Crypto Has Left Behind

If you only look at prices and market caps, the past decade of Crypto resembles a long fireworks display: dazzling enough, and loud enough. But beyond the price curves, a quieter transformation has been underway: some of the most rigid infrastructure pillars in traditional finance have been incrementally rewritten by algorithms.

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

But over a decade, Crypto has managed to pry open this structure.

Uniswap replaced the order book and market maker 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 determined automatically by the algorithm. A developer sitting on a park bench can become a liquidity provider in the global market through a single on-chain interaction. This was almost unimaginable ten years ago.

The story advances further with on-chain perpetual contracts. GMX turns the LP pool itself into the counterparty for traders. The USDC you deposit could, seconds later, become the liquidity behind a long BTC position. Hyperliquid pushes order books, matching, and clearing towards a more native on-chain form, aiming for a trading experience close to that of centralized exchanges. The most expensive and high-barrier components of traditional derivatives exchanges have been rewritten into open protocols that anyone can access and verify.

Stablecoins represent another quiet revolution. A decade 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 of money can be sent on-chain using USDT and arrive in minutes, costing less than a dollar. No grand celebrations were held for this, but it has happened, quietly.

These mechanisms are not perfect. Nor will every single one survive the cycles. But together, they have proven one thing: financial services do not 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 decade wasn't without its setbacks. 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 very short time. After each major event, the industry's reaction was remarkably similar: first shock, then reflection, followed by "the market needs a shakeout," and then forgetting about it until the next bull run.

But market shakeouts never automatically fix the underlying structural flaws. When the next narrative emerges, these unrepaired issues are still there.

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

Speculation, Liquidity, and Genuine Demand

It's difficult to discuss Crypto without addressing speculation.

Speculation itself is not the industry's original sin. All financial markets have speculation; it provides 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 simultaneously. The existence of tokens brought market prices into 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-stage testing directly in the open market.

In a sense, the speculative bubbles of the early days acted as "permissionless venture capital," fueling the industry's experimentation and iteration. Each wave – the ICO craze of 2017, DeFi Summer of 2020, the NFT mania of 2021 – 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 propelled forward during these cycles.

But fuel is ultimately just fuel, not direction.

When prices appreciate 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 realizes that what was promised at the peak far exceeds what truly remains. The real problem is whether speculation has overshadowed genuine demand. When price becomes the only metric, the industry repeatedly falls into the same loop: everyone talks about long-term value in a bull market, only to find 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 in the industry has been equating blockchain, Web3, and Crypto.

These three terms sound like the same thing, but they actually solve entirely different problems.

Blockchain is an underlying technology. Its value lies in reducing the costs of trust, settlement, and verification, enabling strangers to complete transactions and confirm state without a middleman. The technology itself is neutral, but its value is clear.

Web3 is a form of application. It needs to answer the question: which scenarios truly require an open network and user ownership? Whether a Web3 application is viable should not be judged by narratives or short-term data, but by whether people continue to use 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 value of blockspace, such as users paying Gas for transactions, settlements, and smart contract calls – the "fuel cost" of the network; second, the sovereign liquidity premium, where certain assets, due to their borderless, censorship-resistant, and transparent rule-based nature, possess hedging value under macro liquidity cycles.

Few assets may possess both layers of support simultaneously. Bitcoin is the most typical example. However, the vast majority of tokens do not have this status. Ultimately, they must pass the test of genuine usage, protocol revenue, and network effects.

For example, the logic of blockspace as a commodity is sound because users genuinely paying Gas validates it. But what 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 curve for almost every new L1 is the same shape: bustling before a snapshot, and plummeting after it.

The sovereign liquidity premium also applies here. Bitcoin's global consensus and censorship resistance are rare exceptions, not a universal attribute of all Crypto assets.

A direct question can be asked here: if we remove speculative demand and look only at genuine usage, real revenue, and actual 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 anyone's permission.

But openness merely lowers the barrier to entry, not the risk itself. In the traditional financial system, barriers kept many people out, but they also kept many risks at bay. Crypto tore down the doors. More people entered, which also meant more people faced risks earlier and more directly – no one performs 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 was "open participation." But for the next decade, the key phrase may need to change: "sustainable participation."

This is something I feel deeply. The mining pool business is unlike DeFi protocols or Meme coins; it lacks explosive narratives. Its value is not noticed when the market is hottest. But during every network congestion event, every period of extreme price volatility, when users are most anxious, it's the ability to consistently pack blocks and settle transactions on time that determines whether users are willing to entrust their hash power to you.

The value of infrastructure is often validated at these moments: not in the booming bull market, but in the bear market when everyone else is running away.

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

Over the past decade, the industry has been fond of grand narratives: replacing banks, remaking finance, putting all assets on-chain, getting all users into Web3. These narratives served a mobilizing purpose 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 lean towards the view that the industry will not expand infinitely, but will instead consolidate around a few networks. Liquidity, developers, users, and security are not evenly distributed across all public chains. The fact that Bitcoin and Ethereum have long dominated the majority of the total crypto market cap is not a coincidence; it's the natural outcome of network effects. Over the next decade, value will concentrate on a few networks that truly possess security, liquidity, and ecosystem density. Many under-differentiated L1s aren't technologically unusable; they simply lack the strong network effects needed for long-term competition.

A similar trend will likely occur 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, yield farming, and airdrop farming, not the everyday financial needs of regular users. Going forward, 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 wealth management 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, and RWA is rewriting the issuance methods of some assets. However, this integration is a two-way street. As traditional finance brings in capital, it also brings custodial centralization, access barriers, and asset screening mechanisms. One of the costs of mainstreaming is trading some degree of censorship resistance and permissionless access for acceptance by the mainstream system.

There is another possibility: future genuine demand may not only come from humans. AI agents, automated workflows, and the machine economy could generate high-frequency, micro, and cross-platform payment and settlement needs 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 Machine-to-Machine (M2M) collaboration. However, just because both AI and Crypto are hot topics, it doesn't directly lead to the conclusion 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 finality, 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's ability to more accurately discern which needs truly require a blockchain and which are merely short-term narratives packaged around it.

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 will always remain. The value of Crypto ultimately comes down 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 its service through cycle after cycle?

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