Original author: Charlie
Original source: Luffy, Foresight News
For a long time, the entire cryptocurrency market’s price movements have revolved around Bitcoin. Now, that era is coming to an end.
The crypto economy is now divided into two camps: intrinsic assets and extrinsic assets.
Endogenous assets refer to traditional cryptocurrency categories well-known to the public: the value of these tokens and projects is entirely tied to the overall market performance of crypto assets. Exogenous assets, while nominally part of the crypto space, are increasingly decoupled from crypto market trends in terms of their value movement.
Bitcoin's value stems from its inherent properties and is reflected in its price. Rising prices further reinforce market perception of its value attributes. At the peak of a bull market, Bitcoin is hailed as a "galactic medium of exchange" and humanity's most scarce digital tradable asset; at the bottom of a bear market, it is dismissed as a digital collectible with no cash flow backing.
Hyperliquid occupies a middle ground between the two camps. While much of its business still relies on cryptocurrency market conditions, both supply and demand are continuously expanding. Many on-chain financial infrastructure projects fall into this category, with underlying assets gradually shifting toward tokenized real-world assets.
The open interest in HIP-3 can roughly reflect the activity level of non-crypto trading. Currently, HIP-3 contracts account for approximately 30% of Hyperliquid’s total open interest, compared to just 4% in November 2025. The upcoming HIP-4 prediction market is expected to further drive growth, bringing in new traders and trading assets.
Projects like Venice, on the other hand, fully belong 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 leans more toward consumer-grade AI rather than native crypto products like Uniswap. Uniswap’s core business remains facilitating user trades of various endogenous assets, with performance naturally fluctuating alongside asset prices; Venice, by contrast, bundles private multimodal reasoning services into a “pay-as-you-go + subscription” pricing model.
Venice's only connection to the crypto space is its use of tokens as a vehicle for value, and some of its computing power providers have backgrounds in the crypto industry. Project lead Erik Voorhees, a seasoned veteran in the crypto space, believes that when used appropriately, tokens can be an excellent marketing tool.
Figure, a publicly traded company, is another prime example. This fintech lending firm developed its own blockchain technology to reduce the approval time for home equity loans to under five minutes. For Figure, blockchain is merely a supporting technology; the core value lies in its lending business itself.
The scalable rise of exogenous sectors, whether in token markets or public company listings, holds profound significance. In the past, because the vast majority of business models were deeply tied to cryptocurrency asset prices, purely bottom-up fundamental investing was difficult to implement. The crypto industry has seen periods of hype centered on “blockchain first, Bitcoin second,” but previous cycles ultimately returned to Bitcoin-driven rallies. The reason is that these sectors never established stable demand or generated sustained revenue; even when revenue existed, it failed to translate into token value. Once token prices stopped rising, projects lost their foundation.
This market cycle is fundamentally different from previous ones. Today, we can clearly identify paying users and their payment logic; demand across most sectors is quantifiable, no longer driven solely by emotional speculation. Meanwhile, the mechanism of tokens as vehicles of value continues to improve. Venice’s revenue comes from real user payments for AI inference services—its business remains unaffected by broader crypto market downturns, as it does not rely on token price fluctuations. This cycle possesses two core advantages absent in earlier cycles: sustainable, real-world usage demand, and investors increasingly basing decisions on fundamentals rather than mere market narratives.
The stablecoin sector in the private market is no different. In March 2026, Mastercard announced it would spend up to $1.8 billion to acquire BVNK, a company that had been valued at just $750 million when it completed its Series B financing 15 months earlier. Another stablecoin-related company, Bridge, was acquired by Stripe in February 2025 for $1.1 billion; according to Stripe’s annual report, Bridge’s annual revenue growth has now quadrupled. The growth of these companies is entirely decoupled from the crypto market’s bull and bear cycles.
This is not to say that native assets should be shorted. Just as gold and even small gold mining companies maintain their allocation value in a portfolio, Bitcoin and other native crypto assets also hold inherent significance. However, the performance drivers and market correlations of these two types of assets have fundamentally diverged—a distinction confirmed by the data.
This analogy can be visualized: the correlation coefficient between small-cap gold mining stocks and gold prices has consistently remained around 0.75. This is precisely the current state of the traditional crypto market—where numerous crypto assets function like small gold mines, Bitcoin corresponds to gold, and the entire sector operates as a leveraged bet on Bitcoin. The blue curve in the chart represents another relationship: gold and the S&P 500 exhibit weak联动 due to macroeconomic influences, yet each follows its own independent logic. This is precisely the future direction for exogenous assets. Over the long term, such assets will gradually detach from the pattern of following Bitcoin’s price movements.
It should be noted that many exogenous assets also issue tokens—a phenomenon that both confirms the aforementioned trend and represents a special case.
Currently, the vast majority of endogenous assets still move in close alignment with Bitcoin; a few exogenous assets have shown reduced correlation, but due to their early stage of development, they are not yet strongly indicative. Historically, industry trends follow a pattern where fundamentals lead, and market correlations shift afterward.
This shift has fundamentally rewritten the industry's analytical framework. Analyzing exogenous assets requires conducting fundamental due diligence as one would for traditional enterprises: mapping out the paying user base, calculating unit economic models, and assessing industry moats. Bitcoin’s price is no longer the primary reference point; analyzing such projects resembles the decision-making process of fintech investors, with the additional unique step of asset custody.
Here are the current exogenous sectors with growth potential:
- On-chain exchange and brokerage service provider
- Settlement and redemption solutions for tokenized long-tail assets
- Deep integration of cryptography and artificial intelligence (private inference, distributed open-source model training similar to Psyche by Nous Research, etc.)
- New digital banks (Payy and Raycash, which emphasize privacy, are worth noting; Aztec and Zama, which provide programmable privacy infrastructure for them, also hold potential)
- The lending sector (Morpho has become the mainstream choice for institutional repurchase markets; smaller projects like Valinor and 3jane are focusing on niche private credit markets).
- Stablecoin issuers, real asset tokenization service providers
- Payment channels (in the general payments space, Stripe and Tempo are industry leaders; in the agent payments space, Coinbase currently leads).
- Non-financial crypto consumer products (represented by Venice and Collector Crypt, these projects assign real-world business value to tokens, driving product adoption and enabling marketing empowerment).
- The agent economy (the core opportunity lies in the access layer’s collaborative ecosystem of agents, service providers, and creators—a segment with low substitutability. Cloudflare is leading the way, but it remains unclear whether it will charge transaction fees or simply provide foundational services).
At this stage, investing in equity of related companies remains the most prudent way to enter the aforementioned sectors, as high-quality token assets are rare exceptions. The role of tokens will only further grow as their value-carrying mechanisms continue to improve—a process that requires joint efforts from regulators and the entire industry. Progress has already been made: on the regulatory front, the CLARITY Act is advancing steadily; on the industry front, organizations such as Blockworks are promoting market transparency. However, there is still a long road ahead for optimizing token mechanisms.
But none of the above details change a core trend: the driving forces behind the crypto market are shifting from single factors to multiple factors. The focus of industry research is transitioning from interpreting Bitcoin price charts to deeply analyzing corporate fundamentals. Over 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 transformed.