Infrastructure construction is a long-term endeavor.

When I wrote the first line of mining pool code for ViaBTC in 2016, the crypto world was still a small circle of miners, developers, and early enthusiasts. Bitcoin was only seriously discussed in niche communities, stablecoins were not yet widely adopted, and concepts like DeFi, NFTs, and RWA, which would later become recurring themes, had not yet taken shape. Ten years later, the industry looks completely different. BTC has entered the ETF system, stablecoins have become an important channel for dollar liquidity in some regions, and the scale of on-chain transactions and stablecoin settlements can no longer be easily ignored by traditional finance. But the changes don’t stop there. What has happened in the industry over the past decade? Standing at the ten-year anniversary of ViaBTC’s founding, I want to share my understanding of Crypto’s value.

What has Crypto left behind in the past decade? If we only look at prices and market capitalization, the past ten years of Crypto have been like a long fireworks display: dazzling and noisy. But beyond the price curves, something quieter has been happening: some of the most intractable infrastructures in traditional finance have been rewritten, algorithm by algorithm. Market making, matching, clearing, issuance—these functions once required substantial capital, professional teams, and a complete set of closed systems in traditional finance, making it almost impossible for an ordinary person to engage in market making. This was not a technical limitation, but a structural one. Crypto, however, has managed to shift this structure over the past decade.

Uniswap has replaced order books and market makers with an incredibly simple formula. Anyone who puts two assets into a liquidity pool becomes a market maker; when users trade, the price is automatically determined by an algorithm. A developer sitting on a park bench can become a liquidity provider in the global market through a single on-chain interaction by depositing assets into a liquidity pool. This was almost unimaginable ten years ago. With on-chain perpetual contracts, the story goes further. GMX makes the LP pool itself the counterparty to traders. The USDC you deposit might become the liquidity behind someone’s BTC long position the next second. Hyperliquid pushes order books, matching, and clearing further on-chain, striving to approximate the trading experience of centralized exchanges. The most expensive and highest-barrier aspects of traditional derivatives exchanges have been rewritten into open protocols that anyone can access and verify.

Stablecoins are another quiet revolution. Ten years ago, a cross-border transfer from South America to Africa would take at least two days and cost tens of dollars in fees. Today, the same amount of money can arrive in minutes via USDT on-chain for less than a dollar. No celebratory conferences have been held for this, but it has happened quietly. None of these mechanisms are perfect. Nor can every one of them weather the cycles. But together, they have proven one thing: financial services do not necessarily have to exist within closed systems controlled by a few institutions. This is what Crypto has truly left behind over the past decade.

Of course, this decade has not been smooth sailing. Mt. Gox collapsed in 2014, Luna evaporated tens of billions of dollars in a week in 2022, and in November of the same year, FTX went from being one of the top three global exchanges to bankruptcy in a short period. After each major event, the industry’s reaction is similar: first shock, then reflection, then talk of “market consolidation,” and then waiting for the next bull market to forget about it. But market consolidation never automatically fixes systemic flaws. When the next narrative emerges, those unrepaired issues will still be there. These are more like systemic problems than cyclical ones. Systemic problems are not solved by cycles; they are only amplified by time.

Speculation, Liquidity, and Real Demand. It’s hard to talk about Crypto without mentioning speculation. Speculation itself is not the original sin of the industry. All financial markets have speculation; it brings liquidity, price discovery, and allows new mechanisms to be tested by the market more quickly. Crypto’s uniqueness lies in the fact that from day one, it has been both technology and finance—the existence of tokens has allowed market prices to quickly influence 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 conduct early trial-and-error directly in the open market. In a sense, the early speculative bubbles played the role of “permissionless venture capital,” acting as fuel for the industry’s trial-and-error and iteration.

The ICOs of 2017, the DeFi Summer of 2020, and the NFT craze of 2021 each expanded the industry’s boundaries in intense ways. After the bubbles burst, far less remained than promised at the peak, but stablecoins, on-chain transactions, wallets, and clearing mechanisms were indeed pushed forward during these cycles. But fuel is just fuel, not direction. When prices rise rapidly, short-term liquidity is mistaken for real adoption, and the spread of narratives is mistaken for long-term consensus. When the cycle turns, the industry realizes that far more was promised at the peak than truly remained. The real question is whether speculation has overshadowed real demand. When price becomes the sole metric, the industry will repeatedly fall into the same cycle: in bull markets, everyone talks about long-term value; in bear markets, it’s discovered that much of the growth lacked real users.

Technology, Applications, and Assets. Over the past decade, another common misconception in the industry has been treating blockchain, Web3, and Crypto as the same thing. These three terms sound similar, but they solve entirely different problems. Blockchain is an underlying technology whose value lies in reducing the costs of trust, settlement, and verification, enabling strangers to transact and confirm states without intermediaries. Technology itself is neutral; its value is clear. Web3 is a form of application that aims to answer the question: which scenarios truly require an open network and user ownership? The viability of a Web3 application should not be judged by its narrative or short-term data, but by whether people continue to use and pay for it after subsidies, airdrops, and speculative expectations have subsided.

Crypto, as an asset, faces the most complex judgments. If we were to break down its value support, there are roughly two layers: first, the commodity attribute of block space, such as users paying Gas for transactions, settlements, and contract calls, which is the network’s “fuel fee”; second, a sovereign liquidity premium, where certain assets, due to their borderless nature, censorship resistance, and transparent rules, possess hedging value under macro liquidity cycles. A few assets may possess both layers of support, with BTC being the most typical example. However, the vast majority of tokens do not hold this status; they must ultimately be tested against real usage, protocol revenue, and network effects.

For example, the logic of block space as a commodity is valid because users genuinely pay Gas. But if we strip away Gas consumption from airdrop expectations, subsidies, arbitrage, and wash trading, how much real demand remains? This is a question that every public chain must confront. The curve of on-chain activity when a new public chain launches is almost always the same shape. It’s bustling before the snapshot, and then plummets afterward. The sovereign liquidity premium is similar. BTC’s global consensus and censorship-resistant properties are rare exceptions, not universal attributes of Crypto assets. A direct question can be asked here: if speculative demand is removed, and only real usage, real revenue, and real cash flow are considered, how much support remains for the total valuation of today’s crypto market?

From Open Participation to Sustainable Participation. One of Crypto’s greatest assets is its openness. People anywhere in the world can access the network, hold assets, and participate in protocols without needing a bank account, proof of residency, or anyone’s approval. But openness only lowers the barrier, not the risk itself. In traditional financial systems, high barriers block many people and also block many risks. Crypto has removed the doors, allowing more people in, which also means more people face risks earlier and more directly—no one does due diligence for you, no one screens projects for you, and no one bears the consequences of your wrong decisions. Therefore, the most important keyword of the past decade has been “open participation.” But for the next decade, the keyword may need to change: “sustainable participation.”

I feel this deeply myself. The mining pool business is not like DeFi protocols or meme coins; it doesn’t have that explosive narrative. Its value is not noticed when the market is hottest. But during every network congestion, sharp market fluctuations, and moments of greatest user anxiety, whether each block can be stably packaged and every settlement can arrive on time determines whether users are willing to entrust their computing power to you. The value of infrastructure is often validated at these moments: not in the busiest bull markets, but in the bear markets when everyone is running.

In the next decade, Crypto doesn’t need to replace everything. Over the past decade, the industry has loved grand narratives, such as replacing banks, redoing finance, putting all assets on-chain, and bringing all users into Web3. These narratives had mobilizing power in the early stages, encouraging many people to come and explore. But reaching today, Crypto may need to understand its boundaries more realistically. I tend to believe that the industry will not expand indefinitely but will concentrate on a few networks. Liquidity, developers, users, and security will not be evenly distributed across all public chains. BTC and ETH consistently holding the lion’s share of crypto market capitalization is not a coincidence; it’s a natural result of network effects. The value in the next decade will concentrate on a few networks that truly possess security, liquidity, and ecosystem density. Many L1s lacking differentiation are not technically incapable, but they lack sufficient network effects to sustain long-term competition.

Similar things will happen in DeFi. The long-term value of DeFi lies in openness, transparency, and composability. However, the past few years have also shown that much DeFi activity comes from leverage, arbitrage, liquidity mining, and airdrop expectations, not from ordinary users’ daily financial needs. In the future, DeFi is more likely to serve on-chain traders, market makers, cross-border liquidity needs, and digital native assets, moving towards specialization rather than mass adoption. DeFi will not directly replace ordinary people’s bank accounts and wealth management apps, but it will become a more frequently used tool for a certain type of user and institution. Meanwhile, the boundaries between Crypto and traditional finance will become increasingly blurred. In the past decade, Crypto was a relatively isolated asset class; the next decade will see it become a piece of the puzzle in multi-asset allocation. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have already brought Crypto into the traditional financial asset allocation framework, and RWA is also rewriting the issuance methods for some assets. But the integration is two-way; while traditional finance brings capital, it also brings custodial centralization, entry barriers, and asset screening mechanisms. One of the costs of mainstream adoption is exchanging some censorship resistance and access openness for acceptance by the mainstream system.

Another possibility is that future real demand will not only come from humans. AI agents, automated workflows, and machine economies may bring high-frequency, small-value, cross-platform payment and settlement needs in the future. These “silicon-based users” do not have bank accounts and cannot go through KYC. Therefore, open settlement networks, stablecoins, and permissionless accounts are naturally prepared financial infrastructure for this M2M (machine-to-machine) collaboration. However, we cannot conclude that “AI agents will inevitably require on-chain payments” simply because AI and Crypto are both hot topics. What truly needs to be on-chain are collaboration scenarios that involve multiple parties, cross-border transactions, strong settlement requirements, and low-trust environments. The mark of maturity in the next decade may not be “more things on-chain,” but rather the industry finally being able to more clearly distinguish which demands truly require a chain and which are merely short-term narratives packaged with the help of a chain.

In closing. Over the past ten years, I have become increasingly convinced of one thing: infrastructure construction is a long-term endeavor. Cycles change. Narratives change. Prices change. But the user’s demand for stable, transparent, and reliable services has always been there. Crypto’s value will ultimately return to a few simple questions: Has it reduced the cost of trust? Has it improved the efficiency of value flow? Has it given users more choices? Can it continue to provide services after successive cycles? Things that have value are not necessarily the most exciting, but they will endure.

[Odaily]