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

Original Author: Charlie

Original Translation: Luffy, Foresight News

For a long time, the market trends of the entire crypto market have revolved around Bitcoin. Now, this era is coming to an end.

The crypto economy is now divided into two major camps: endogenous assets and exogenous assets.

Endogenous assets are the traditional crypto categories familiar to the public: the value of these tokens and projects is entirely dependent on the overall rise and fall of crypto assets. Exogenous assets, on the other hand, belong to the crypto track only in name, with their value trends becoming increasingly independent of the crypto market.

Bitcoin's value stems from its own attributes, which are in turn reflected in its price. Price increases further reinforce the market's perception of its value attributes. At the peak of a bull market, Bitcoin is hailed as an "interstellar universal currency," the scarcest digital circulating asset in human hands; at the bottom of a bear market, it is dismissed as a digital collectible with no cash flow support.

Hyperliquid sits between the two camps. Most of its business still relies on the crypto market conditions, but both supply and demand sides are continuously expanding. Many on-chain financial infrastructures fall into this category, with underlying assets gradually shifting towards tokenized real-world assets.

The open interest of HIP-3 can roughly reflect the activity level of non-crypto related trades. 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 belong entirely to the exogenous camp, with their development logic completely detached from the crypto market. Although there is some overlap in user groups, its business model leans more towards consumer-grade artificial intelligence rather than native crypto products like Uniswap. Uniswap's core business remains user trading of various endogenous assets, with performance naturally fluctuating with asset prices; Venice packages private multimodal reasoning services and adopts a "pay-as-you-go + subscription" pricing model.

Venice's only connection to the crypto field is using tokens as a value-bearing carrier, and some of its computing power providers have a background in the crypto industry. Project lead Erik Voorhees has deep roots in the crypto industry and believes that if used correctly, tokens can be an excellent marketing tool.

Figure, among publicly listed companies, is also a typical case. This fintech lending company has developed its own blockchain, reducing the approval time for home equity loans to under 5 minutes. For it, blockchain is just a supporting technology; the core value lies in the credit business itself.

The large-scale rise of the exogenous track, both in the token market and the public company sector, has profound significance. In the past, because the vast majority of business models were deeply tied to crypto asset prices, purely bottom-up fundamental investing was difficult to implement. The crypto industry has seen narrative booms "emphasizing blockchain over Bitcoin" before, but previous waves eventually reverted to following Bitcoin's price trends. The reason was that these tracks failed to generate stable demand and sustainable revenue; even if there was revenue, it couldn't be transmitted to the token's value. Once token prices stopped rising, the projects lost their support.

This market cycle is fundamentally different from the past. We can now clearly identify paying user groups and the logic behind their payments. Market demand in most tracks is quantifiable, no longer relying purely on sentiment speculation; simultaneously, the mechanism of tokens as value carriers is continuously improving. Venice's revenue comes from real user payments for AI reasoning services. Even if the overall crypto market declines, its business won't be significantly impacted because it doesn't depend on token price fluctuations. This cycle possesses two core advantages absent in previous waves: sustainable real-world demand and investors starting to invest based on fundamentals rather than pure market narratives.

The stablecoin track in the private market is similar. In March 2026, Mastercard announced it would spend up to $1.8 billion to acquire BVNK, a company valued at $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 current annual business growth rate is fourfold. The development of these companies is decoupled from the crypto industry's bull and bear cycles.

This is not to say we are bearish on endogenous assets. Just like gold and even small gold mining companies have a place in a portfolio, Bitcoin and a host of endogenous crypto assets also have their reasons for existence. However, the performance drivers and market correlations of the two asset classes have fundamentally diverged, and data confirms this.

This analogy can be visualized: the correlation coefficient between small-cap gold mining stocks and the price of gold has long been around 0.75. This is the current state of the traditional crypto market – a host of crypto assets are like small gold mines, Bitcoin corresponds to gold, and the entire track is a leveraged bet on Bitcoin. The blue curve in the chart represents another relationship: gold and the S&P 500 index have a weak correlation influenced by macroeconomics, but each follows its independent logic. This is the future development direction for exogenous assets. In the long term, these assets will gradually break away from the "follow Bitcoin's rise and fall" pattern.

It should be noted that many exogenous targets themselves issue tokens. This phenomenon both confirms the above trend and represents a special case.

Currently, the vast majority of endogenous assets remain highly synchronized with Bitcoin's price movements; a few exogenous assets show reduced correlation, but due to their short development cycle, they are not yet strongly indicative. The industry rule has always been that fundamentals come first, followed by changes in market correlation.

This change has completely rewritten the analytical logic of the industry. Researching exogenous assets requires fundamental due diligence similar to analyzing traditional companies: identifying the paying user base, calculating unit economics, and evaluating the industry moat. The Bitcoin price is no longer the primary reference indicator. Analyzing such projects is more like a fintech investor making a judgment, merely with the added special element of asset custody.

Below are the current exogenous tracks with development potential:

• On-chain exchanges and brokerage service providers
• Clearing and redemption solutions for long-tail asset tokenization
• Crypto + AI deeply integrated tracks (private reasoning, distributed open-source model training similar to Nous Research's Psyche)
• New digital banks (Payy and Raycash, which focus on privacy protection, are worth watching; Aztec and Zama providing programmable privacy infrastructure also have potential)
• Lending track (Morpho has become a mainstream choice for institutional repo markets; smaller projects like Valinor and 3jane focus on private credit niches)
• Stablecoin issuers, real-world asset tokenization service providers
• Payment channels (In general payments, Stripe and Tempo are industry benchmarks; in agent payments, Coinbase is currently leading)
• Non-financial crypto consumer products (represented by Venice and Collector Crypt, these projects endow physical business value with tokens, driving product adoption and marketing empowerment)
• Agent economy (The core opportunity lies in the collaborative ecosystem of agents, service providers, and creators at the access layer, which has low replaceability. Cloudflare is ahead in layout, but whether it will charge traffic fees or just provide basic functions remains undecided)

At this stage, investing in the equity of related companies remains the safest way to position in these tracks, with high-quality token targets being rare exceptions. Only when the value-bearing mechanism of tokens continuously improves will their role be further enhanced, requiring 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, institutions like Blockworks are promoting market information transparency. There is still a long way to go in optimizing the token mechanism.

However, these details do not change a 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 delving into corporate fundamentals. In the next decade, there will be no need to wonder why the "crypto market" no longer moves in unison, because the industry landscape has been completely renewed.