The era of Bitcoin dominance in Crypto has ended.

Written by: Charlie

Translated by: Luffy, Foresight News

All along, the overall trend of the crypto market has revolved around Bitcoin.
Now, this era is coming to an end.

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

The so-called endogenous assets are the traditional crypto categories familiar to the public:
The value of these tokens and projects depends entirely on the overall market movements of crypto assets.
Exogenous assets, on the other hand, are nominally part of the crypto space, but their value trends are increasingly independent of the crypto market.

Bitcoin’s value comes from its intrinsic properties, which are reflected in its price.
An increase in price further reinforces the market’s recognition of its value attributes.
At the peak of a bull market, Bitcoin is hailed as the “interstellar universal currency,”
the most scarce digital circulating asset in human hands;
at the bottom of a bear market, it is disparaged as a digital collectible with no cash flow support.

Hyperliquid sits between these two camps.
Most of its business still relies on crypto market trends, but both supply and demand sides are continuously expanding.
Many on-chain financial infrastructure projects fall into this category, with underlying assets gradually shifting toward tokenized real-world assets.

HIP-3’s open interest can roughly reflect the activity level of non-crypto trades.
Currently, HIP-3 contracts account for about 30% of Hyperliquid’s total open interest,
but by November 2025, this ratio is expected to drop to only 4%.
The upcoming HIP-4 prediction market will further drive growth, bringing in new traders and trading targets.

Projects like Venice are entirely part of the exogenous camp, with development logic completely detached from the crypto market.
While some user groups overlap, their business models lean more toward consumer AI rather than native crypto products like Uniswap.
Uniswap’s core business remains facilitating user trading of various endogenous assets, with performance naturally tied to asset prices;
Venice packages private multimodal inference services, charging on an “on-demand + subscription” basis.

The only connection Venice has with the crypto field is using tokens as a value carrier,
and some of its compute providers have backgrounds in the crypto industry.
Project leader Erik Voorhees, a deep crypto industry veteran, believes that if used properly, tokens can be excellent marketing tools.

An example among listed companies is Figure.
This fintech lending firm developed its own blockchain, reducing mortgage approval times to under five minutes.
For them, blockchain is just a supporting technology; the core value lies in the lending business itself.

Whether in the token market or the listed company sector, the rise of exogenous tracks at scale is highly significant.
In the past, because most business models were deeply tied to crypto asset prices, pure bottom-up fundamental investing was difficult to implement.
The crypto industry has seen narratives like “blockchain-heavy, Bitcoin-light,” but past cycles always revert to Bitcoin trends.
The reason is that these tracks have never established stable demand or generated sustainable revenue;
even if they do, the value cannot be transmitted to tokens.
Once token prices stop rising, projects lose their support.

This cycle is fundamentally different from previous ones.
Now, we can clearly see paid user groups and payment logic, with market demand in most tracks quantifiable, no longer driven solely by hype;
at the same time, mechanisms for tokens as value carriers are continuously improving.
Venice’s revenue comes from real payments for AI inference services, so even if the overall crypto market declines, its business won’t be significantly impacted, as it doesn’t rely on token price fluctuations.
This cycle has two core advantages not present in earlier booms:
sustainable real-world usage demand and investors starting to focus on fundamentals rather than market narratives.

The stablecoin track in the private equity market is also similar.
In March 2026, Mastercard announced it would acquire BVNK for up to $1.8 billion,
a company that only 15 months earlier had completed Series B funding with a valuation of just $750 million.
Another stablecoin-related firm, Bridge, was acquired by Stripe for $1.1 billion in February 2025,
and Stripe’s annual report shows that Bridge’s annual business growth has quadrupled.
The development of these companies is decoupled from the crypto industry’s bull-bear cycles.

This does not mean we are bearish on endogenous assets.
Just like gold and small gold mining companies, which always have a place in a diversified portfolio,
Bitcoin and other endogenous crypto assets also have their significance.
But the performance drivers and market correlations of these two asset types have fundamentally diverged, as data confirms.

This analogy can be visualized:
The correlation coefficient between small gold mining stocks and gold prices remains around 0.75.
This reflects the current state of the traditional crypto market —
many crypto assets are like small gold miners, with Bitcoin representing gold, and the entire sector being a leveraged investment against Bitcoin.
The blue curve in the chart illustrates another relationship:
Gold and the S&P 500 are influenced by macroeconomic factors and show weak correlation,
but each has its own independent logic of operation.
This is also the future direction for exogenous assets.
In the long run, these assets will gradually detach from “following Bitcoin’s rise and fall.”

It’s worth noting that many exogenous assets also issue tokens, which both confirms this trend and is a special case.

Currently, most endogenous assets still move in close sync with Bitcoin;
a few exogenous assets have lower correlation, but since their development cycles are still short,
they are not yet highly indicative.
Industry rules have always been that fundamentals come first, with market correlations changing afterward.

This shift also completely rewrites the logic of industry analysis.
Studying exogenous assets requires fundamental due diligence similar to analyzing traditional companies:
understanding paid user bases, modeling unit economics, and assessing industry moats.
Bitcoin’s price is no longer the primary reference;
analyzing these projects is more like financial technology investing, with the added element of asset custody.

Below are some exogenous tracks with development potential:
On-chain exchanges and brokerage services
Clearing and redemption solutions for long-tail asset tokenization
Deep integration of crypto and AI (private inference, distributed open-source model training like Nous Research’s Psyche)
New digital banking (Payy and Raycash, which focus on privacy, are worth watching; Aztec and Zama, providing programmable privacy infrastructure, also have potential)
Lending tracks (Morpho has become a mainstream choice for institutional repurchase markets; smaller projects like Valinor and 3jane focus on private credit niches)
Stablecoin issuers and real-world asset tokenization services
Payment channels (Stripe and Tempo are industry benchmarks in general payments; in intelligent agent payments, Coinbase is leading)
Non-financial crypto consumer products (represented by Venice and Collector Crypt, these projects assign real-world business value to tokens, promoting adoption and marketing)
Intelligent agent economy (the core opportunity lies in the ecosystem of access layer intelligent agents, service providers, and creators, which are less substitutable. Cloudflare is a leader, but whether it will charge traffic fees or just provide basic infrastructure remains uncertain.)

Currently, the most reliable way to engage in these tracks is through equity investments in related companies;
tokens are only a minority case with high potential.
Only as the mechanisms for token value carriers continue to improve will their role be further enhanced, which requires joint efforts from regulators and the entire industry.
Progress has already been made: on the regulatory side, the CLARITY Act is steadily advancing;
industry groups like Blockworks are promoting market transparency.
Token mechanisms still have a long way to go in terms of optimization.

But none of these details can change a core trend:
the driving force of the crypto market is shifting from a single factor to multiple factors.
Industry research is moving from interpreting Bitcoin price charts to deepening fundamental analysis of companies.
In the next decade, there’s no need to wonder why “the crypto market” no longer rises and falls together — the industry landscape has been fundamentally reshaped.