ViaBTC CEO Reflects on Crypto's Value Over the Past Decade

Original author: Yang Haipo, Founder and CEO of ViaBTC & CoinEx

In 2016, when I wrote the first line of pool code for ViaBTC, the crypto world was still a small circle composed of miners, developers, and early enthusiasts. Bitcoin was only seriously discussed among niche groups, stablecoins had not yet been widely adopted, and concepts like DeFi, NFTs, and RWA had not yet taken shape.

Ten years later, the industry has changed completely. BTC has entered the ETF ecosystem, stablecoins have become vital channels for USD liquidity in certain regions, and the volume of on-chain transactions and stablecoin settlements can no longer be ignored by traditional finance.

But the changes don't stop there. What exactly has the industry experienced over the past decade? On the occasion of ViaBTC's tenth anniversary, I’d like to share my understanding of Crypto’s value.

If you look only at price and market capitalization, crypto over the past decade has resembled a long-lasting fireworks show: dazzling enough, and loud enough. But beyond the price curves, something quieter is taking place: some of the most entrenched infrastructure in traditional finance is being slowly rewritten by algorithms.

Market making, order matching, clearing, and issuance—these activities in traditional finance once required substantial capital, specialized teams, and an entire closed system, making it nearly impossible for an ordinary individual to engage in market making. This was not a technological limitation, but a structural one.

But Crypto has disrupted this structure over the past decade.

Uniswap replaced order books and market makers with a shockingly simple formula: anyone who deposits two assets into a liquidity pool becomes a market maker; when users trade, the price is automatically determined by the algorithm. A developer sitting on a park bench can, through a single on-chain interaction, deposit assets into a pool and become a liquidity provider in a global market—something that would have been nearly unthinkable a decade ago.

When it comes to on-chain perpetual contracts, the story goes further. GMX turns the LP pool itself into the counterparty for traders—your deposited USDC could, moments later, become the liquidity backing someone else’s BTC long position. Hyperliquid pushes order books, matching, and liquidations even further on-chain, striving to replicate the trading experience of centralized exchanges. The most expensive and high-barrier components of traditional derivatives exchanges have been rewritten into open protocols accessible and verifiable by anyone.

Stablecoins are another quiet revolution. A decade ago, a cross-border transfer from South America to Africa would take at least two days and cost dozens of dollars in fees. Today, the same amount sent via USDT on-chain arrives in minutes for less than a dollar. No celebration was held for it, but it has quietly happened.

These mechanisms are not perfect, and not all of them can survive every market cycle. But together, they prove one thing: financial services don’t have to exist only within closed systems controlled by a few institutions.

This is what truly remains from Crypto's past decade.

Of course, this decade hasn't always been smooth. In 2014, Mt. Gox collapsed; in 2022, Luna lost hundreds of billions of dollars in a single week, and later that November, FTX went from being one of the world’s top three exchanges to bankruptcy in a short time. After each major event, the industry’s response has been similar: first shock, then reflection, followed by the assertion that “the market needs a cleanup,” and then forgetting about it all until the next bull market.

But market shakeouts never automatically fix underlying vulnerabilities. When the next narrative emerges, those unaddressed issues will still be there.

These are more like systemic issues than cyclical ones. Systemic issues are not resolved by cycles; they are only amplified over time.

Talking about crypto is hard to avoid speculation.

Speculation itself is not an industry sin. Every financial market has speculation—it brings liquidity, price discovery, and allows new mechanisms to be tested by the market more quickly. What makes crypto unique is that it has been both a technological and financial phenomenon from day one—the existence of tokens has enabled market prices to intervene early in the development of technology, applications, and communities. A new idea can gain global attention, funding, and users within weeks, allowing many protocols to bypass traditional financing paths and complete their early-stage experimentation directly in open markets.

In a sense, early speculative bubbles served as “permissionless venture capital,” fueling the industry’s experimentation and iteration. The 2017 ICO boom, the 2020 DeFi Summer, and the 2021 NFT craze each expanded the industry’s boundaries in intense ways. Although far less remained after the bubbles burst than had been promised at their peaks, stablecoins, on-chain transactions, wallets, and clearing mechanisms were indeed developed during these cycles.

But fuel is ultimately just fuel, not the direction.

When prices rise rapidly, short-term liquidity is mistaken for genuine adoption, and the spread of narratives is confused for long-term consensus. Only when the cycle turns does the industry realize that far more was promised at the peak than actually remained.

The real issue is whether speculation has overshadowed genuine demand. When price becomes the only metric, the industry keeps falling into the same cycle: everyone talks about long-term value during bull markets, but only during bear markets do we realize that much of the growth lacked real users.

Over the past decade, another common misconception in the industry has been treating blockchain, Web3, and crypto as the same thing.

These three terms may sound like the same thing, but they actually address completely different problems.

Blockchain is a foundational technology whose value lies in reducing the costs of trust, settlement, and verification, enabling transactions and state confirmation between strangers without intermediaries. The technology itself is neutral, but its value is clear.

Web3 is an application paradigm that seeks to answer: Which scenarios truly require an open network and user ownership? The viability of a Web3 application should not be judged by narratives or short-term data, but by whether users continue to use and pay for it after subsidies, airdrops, and speculative expectations have faded.

Crypto as an asset faces the most complex valuation considerations. Breaking down its value drivers, there are roughly two layers: first, the commodity nature of block space—users pay gas fees to conduct transactions, settle payments, or execute smart contracts, serving as the network’s “fuel cost”; second, the sovereign liquidity premium—certain assets possess hedging value in macro liquidity cycles due to their borderless nature, censorship resistance, and transparent rules.

A small number of assets may have support at both levels, with BTC being the most typical example. However, the vast majority of tokens do not hold this status and ultimately must be validated by real-world usage, protocol revenue, and network effects.

For example, the logic of block space as a commodity holds because users genuinely pay gas fees. But if we strip away gas consumption driven by airdrop expectations, subsidies, arbitrage, and bot activity, how much true demand remains? This is an inescapable question for every blockchain. The curve of on-chain activity when a new blockchain launches is almost always the same shape: bustling activity before the snapshot, followed by a sharp drop afterward.

The same applies to the sovereign liquidity premium. BTC’s global consensus and censorship-resistant properties are rare exceptions, not universal characteristics of crypto assets.

Here’s a direct question: If we remove speculative demand and look only at real usage, real revenue, and real cash flow, how much valuation would the current crypto market still have left?

One of cryptocurrency’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 approval.

But opening up lowers the barrier, not the risk itself. In traditional financial systems, barriers keep out many people—and also many risks. Crypto removes the door, bringing in more people, which means more individuals encounter risks earlier and more directly—no one is conducting due diligence for you, no one is screening projects for you, and no one is bearing the consequences of your poor decisions.

So the most important keyword over the past decade has been “open participation.” But for the next decade, the keyword may shift to “sustainable participation.”

I’ve felt this deeply myself. Mining pool operations aren’t like DeFi protocols or meme coins—they don’t have explosive narratives. Their value isn’t noticed when the market is hottest. But every time the network congests, prices swing wildly, and users feel most anxious, whether each block is stably packaged and every settlement arrives on time determines whether users will continue entrusting their hashpower to you.

The value of infrastructure is often proven in moments like these—not during the busiest bull markets, but during bear markets when everyone is running.

Over the past decade, the industry has been fond of grand narratives—such as replacing banks, reinventing finance, putting all assets on-chain, and bringing all users into Web3. These narratives held motivational power in the early stages, encouraging many to come and explore.

But today, Crypto may need to more realistically understand its boundaries.

I believe the industry won’t expand indefinitely but will instead consolidate around a few dominant networks. Liquidity, developers, users, and security won’t be evenly distributed across all blockchains. BTC and ETH consistently accounting for the majority of the total crypto market cap is no coincidence—it’s the natural result of network effects. Over the next decade, value will concentrate in a small number of networks that truly possess security, liquidity, and ecosystem density. Many undifferentiated L1s aren’t technically unviable; they simply lack strong enough network effects to sustain long-term competition.

Similar dynamics will occur in DeFi. The long-term value of DeFi lies in its openness, transparency, and composability. However, the past few years have also shown that much of DeFi activity stems from leverage, arbitrage, liquidity mining, and expectations of airdrops—not from everyday financial needs of ordinary users. In the future, DeFi is more likely to serve on-chain traders, market makers, cross-border liquidity demands, and digitally native assets, evolving toward specialization rather than mass adoption. DeFi will not directly replace personal bank accounts or investment apps for the average user, but it will become a higher-frequency tool for specific users and institutions.

Meanwhile, the boundaries between crypto and traditional finance will become increasingly blurred. Over the past decade, crypto has been a relatively isolated asset class; over the next decade, it will become one piece of a multi-asset allocation puzzle. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have already integrated crypto into the framework of traditional financial asset allocation, while RWA is rewriting part of how assets are issued. But this convergence is two-way: while traditional finance brings capital, it also brings centralized custody, access barriers, and asset selection mechanisms. One cost of mainstream adoption is trading some degree of censorship resistance and open access for acceptance into the mainstream system.

Another possibility is that future real demand may not come solely from humans. AI agents, automated workflows, and machine economies could generate high-frequency, low-value, cross-platform payment and settlement needs. These “silicon-based users” have no bank accounts and cannot undergo KYC. Therefore, open settlement networks, stablecoins, and permissionless accounts are naturally the financial infrastructure designed for such machine-to-machine (M2M) collaboration. However, just because AI and crypto are both hot topics does not mean that “AI agents necessarily require on-chain payments.” What truly needs to be on-chain are collaboration scenarios involving cross-entity, cross-border, high-integrity settlement in low-trust environments.

The hallmark of maturity over the next decade may not be “more things on-chain,” but rather the industry’s ability to clearly distinguish which demands truly require a blockchain from those that are merely short-term narratives wrapped in blockchain terminology.

Over the past decade, I’ve become increasingly convinced that infrastructure development is a long-term endeavor.

Cycles change. Narratives change. Prices change. But users’ demand for stable, transparent, and reliable services remains constant. The true value of crypto ultimately comes down to a few simple questions: Has it lowered the cost of trust? Has it improved the efficiency of value flow? Has it given users more choices? And can it continue to deliver service through cycle after cycle?

What has value isn't always the most popular, but it will endure.