Written by Charlie

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

For a long time, the trend of the entire crypto market has revolved around Bitcoin. Today, such an era is coming to an end.

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

The so-called endogenous type refers to the traditional encryption category that is well known to the public: the value of such tokens and projects depends entirely on the rise and fall of the overall market of crypto assets. As for exogenous assets, they only belong to the crypto industry in name only, and their value trends are increasingly independent of the crypto market.

Bitcoin's value comes from its own attributes, which are in turn reflected in its price. Rising prices will further strengthen the market's perception of its value attributes. At the peak of the bull market, Bitcoin was regarded as the "interstellar universal currency" and the scarcest digital circulating asset in human hands; at the bottom of the bear market, it was devalued as a digital collectible with no cash flow support.

Hyperliquid is somewhere between the two camps. Most of its business still relies on crypto market conditions, but both supply and demand are constantly broadening. Many on-chain financial infrastructure fall into this category, and the underlying assets are gradually turning to the tokenized category of real assets.

HIP-3 open interest can roughly reflect the activity of non-crypto trading. Currently, HIP-3 contracts account for about 30% of Hyperliquid’s total open interest, compared with just 4% in November 2025. The upcoming HIP-4 prediction market will further drive growth and bring new trading users and trading targets.

Projects like Venice belong entirely to the exogenous camp, and their development logic is completely divorced from the encryption market. While some user groups overlap, its business model is more geared toward consumer-grade artificial intelligence than native crypto products like Uniswap. Uniswap's core business is still users trading various endogenous assets, and performance naturally fluctuates with asset prices; Venice packages private multi-modal reasoning services and adopts a "use on demand + subscription" charging model.

Venice’s only connection with the encryption field is the use of tokens as value carriers. In addition, some of its computing power suppliers have backgrounds in the encryption industry. Project leader Erik Voorhees has deep experience in the crypto industry and believes that tokens can be excellent marketing tools if used correctly.

Figure in listed companies is also a typical case. The fintech lending company developed its own blockchain to reduce home equity loan approval times to less than 5 minutes. For it, blockchain is just a supporting technology, and the core value lies in the credit business itself.

Whether it is the token market or the listed company sector, the large-scale rise of exogenous tracks has far-reaching significance. In the past, since most business models were deeply tied to crypto asset prices, purely bottom-up fundamental investments were difficult to implement. It is not that the crypto industry has never experienced a “heavy blockchain, light Bitcoin” narrative craze, but past rounds of trends will eventually return to the Bitcoin market. The reason is that these tracks have never been able to form stable demand and generate sustained revenue; even if there is revenue, it cannot be transmitted to the token value. Once the token price stops rising, the project loses support.

This round of market conditions is completely different from the past. Now we can clearly see the paying groups and payment logic. The market demand of most tracks can be quantified, and it is no longer purely emotional speculation. At the same time, the mechanism of tokens as a value carrier is also continuing to improve. Venice's revenue comes from users' real payments for purchasing AI inference services. Even if the encryption market as a whole goes down, its business will not be significantly affected because it does not rely on the rise and fall of currency prices. This cycle has two core advantages that previous rounds did not have: sustainable actual use demand, and investors began to invest based on fundamentals rather than pure market narratives.

The same is true for the stablecoin track in the private equity market. In March 2026, Mastercard announced that it would spend up to $1.8 billion to acquire BVNK, which was valued at only $750 million when it completed its Series B financing 15 months ago. 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 has reached four times. The development of these companies is all decoupled from the bull and bear cycle of the encryption industry.

This is not to say that we are bearish on endogenous assets. Just like gold and even small gold mining companies, they always have their own allocation value in the investment portfolio, and Bitcoin and a number of endogenous crypto-assets also have the meaning of existence. However, there are already fundamental differences in the performance-driven logic and market linkage between the two types of assets, and the data also confirms this.

This metaphor can be visualized: the correlation coefficient between small-cap gold mining stocks and gold prices has remained around 0.75 all year round. This is exactly the current situation in the traditional encryption market today - a number of encrypted assets are like small gold mines, and Bitcoin corresponds to gold. The entire track is a leveraged investment against Bitcoin. The blue curve in the figure represents another relationship: gold and the S&P 500 index will have a weak linkage due to macroeconomic influences, but each has an independent operating logic. This is also the future development direction of exogenous assets. In the long run, this type of asset will gradually break away from the trend of "following the rise and fall of Bitcoin".

It should be noted that many exogenous targets also issue tokens themselves. This phenomenon not only confirms the above trend, but is also a special situation.

At present, the vast majority of endogenous assets are still highly synchronized with the trend of Bitcoin; the linkage of a few exogenous assets has been reduced, but due to the short development cycle, they do not yet have strong reference value. The law of the industry has always been that fundamentals come first, and the market linkage relationship changes subsequently.

This change has also completely rewritten the industry analysis logic. When studying exogenous assets, you need to do fundamental due diligence just like analyzing traditional companies: sort out the paying user groups, calculate the individual economic model, and evaluate the industry moat. Bitcoin price is no longer the first reference indicator. Analyzing such projects is more like financial technology investors doing research and judgment, but with the addition of a special link of asset custody.

The following are exogenous tracks with current development potential:

• On-chain exchanges and brokerage service providers

• Liquidation and redemption solutions for long-tail asset tokenization

• Encryption + artificial intelligence deep integration track (private inference, distributed open source model training similar to Psyche under Nous Research, etc.)

• New digital banks (Payy and Raycash, which focus on privacy protection, deserve attention; Aztec and Zama, which provide programmable privacy infrastructure, also have potential)

• Lending track (Morpho has become the mainstream choice in the institutional repo market; small and medium-sized projects such as Valinor and 3jane are deeply involved in the private credit segment)

• Stable currency issuer, real asset tokenization service provider

• Payment channels (in the field of general payment, Stripe and Tempo are industry benchmarks; in the field of smart payment, Coinbase is currently leading the way)

• Non-financial encrypted consumer products (represented by Venice and Collector Crypt, these projects assign physical business value to tokens, which not only promotes product popularity, but also achieves marketing empowerment)

• Agent economy (the core opportunity lies in the collaborative ecosystem of agents, service providers and creators at the access layer, which is less substitutable. Cloudflare is leading the way, but it has not yet been decided whether it will charge traffic fees or only provide basic functional services)

At this stage, if you want to lay out the above-mentioned tracks, investing in the equity of related companies is still the safest way, and high-quality token targets are among the few exceptions. Only when the value-carrying mechanism of tokens continues to be optimized will its role be further enhanced, and this requires joint promotion by regulatory agencies and the entire industry. At present, relevant work has made progress: at the regulatory level, the CLARITY Act is steadily advancing; at the industry level, organizations such as Blockworks are also promoting market information transparency. The token mechanism still has a long way to go in terms of optimization.

However, none of the above details can change a core trend: the driving force of the encryption market is shifting from a single factor to multiple factors. The focus of industry research has also shifted from interpreting Bitcoin market charts to in-depth exploration of corporate fundamentals. In the next ten years, there is no need to wonder why the “encryption market” will no longer rise and fall together, because the industry landscape has completely changed.