Written by: Charlie
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
For a long time, the entire cryptocurrency market's price movements have revolved around Bitcoin. Now, this 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.
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 universal currency" and the most scarce digital circulating asset in human hands; at the bottom of a bear market, it is dismissed as a digital collectible with no cash flow backing.
Hyperliquid sits 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 users trading various endogenous assets, with performance naturally fluctuating alongside asset prices; Venice packages its private multimodal reasoning services and employs 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 properly, tokens can be an excellent marketing tool.
Figure, a listed company, is another typical case. This fintech lending company developed its own blockchain 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 the lending business itself.
The large-scale rise of exogenous sectors, whether in token markets or public company segments, holds profound significance. In the past, because the vast majority of business models were deeply tied to cryptocurrency prices, purely bottom-up fundamental investing was difficult to implement. The crypto industry has seen waves of narratives emphasizing “blockchain over Bitcoin,” 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 income 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 making decisions based on fundamentals rather than mere market narratives.
The same holds true for the stablecoin segment in private markets. In March 2026, Mastercard announced it would invest up to $1.8 billion to acquire BVNK, a company that was valued at just $750 million when it completed its Series B financing 15 months earlier. Another stablecoin-related company, Bridge, was acquired by Stripe for $1.1 billion in February 2025; according to Stripe’s annual report, Bridge’s annual business growth has now quadrupled. The growth of these companies is entirely decoupled from the crypto bull and bear market cycles.
This does not mean being bearish on native assets. Just as gold and even small gold mining companies have always held allocation value in investment portfolios, Bitcoin and other native crypto assets also have their inherent significance. However, the performance drivers and market correlations of these two types of assets have fundamentally diverged, and the data confirms this.
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 act like small gold mines, Bitcoin corresponds to gold, and the entire sector functions 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 native assets still move in close alignment with Bitcoin; a few exogenous assets have shown reduced correlation, but due to their early development stage, they are not yet strongly indicative. Industry patterns have always been that fundamentals lead, followed by changes in market correlations.
This change 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 price is no longer the primary reference metric; analyzing such projects resembles the decision-making process of fintech investors, with the additional unique element 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 blockchain and AI (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 payment space, Stripe and Tempo are industry leaders; in the agent-based payment space, Coinbase currently leads)
- Non-financial crypto consumer products (represented by Venice and Collector Crypt, which 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, where agents, service providers, and creators form a collaborative ecosystem with low substitutability. Cloudflare is leading the way, but it remains unclear whether it will charge traffic fees or simply provide foundational service functionality).
At this stage, investing in equity of related companies remains the most prudent way to position oneself in the above sectors, as high-quality token assets are rare exceptions. Only when the value-carrying mechanisms of tokens continue to improve will their role be further enhanced—and this 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. 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.