The market is crashing! The era of Bitcoin dictatorship has ended, and these assets are secretly decoupling from $BTC. Are retail investors still foolishly chasing the rally?

Buddy, haven't you realized yet? The crypto market has already split.

For over a decade, the entire circle has been a puppet on $BTC's string—when BTC rises, everything rises; when BTC falls, there's chaos. But market analysis indicates that this era is coming to an end.

Now, the crypto economy has divided into two completely different species: endogenous assets and exogenous assets.

Endogenous assets are the altcoins we're all familiar with; their existence depends entirely on the overall market trend of crypto, essentially leveraged bets on $BTC.

But exogenous assets, nominally part of the crypto track, are increasingly moving independently of the crypto market. For example, $BTC itself: its value comes from its intrinsic properties—being called a "stellar universal currency" in a bull market, and criticized as a "digital collectible without cash flow" in a bear market. No matter how you see it, it indeed has an internal logic independent of other coins.

Take Hyperliquid, for instance: it sits between the two major camps. Most of its business still relies on the crypto market, but both supply and demand sides are expanding. On-chain financial infrastructure and real asset tokenization are gradually moving in this direction.

Data best illustrates the point: the proportion of open interest contracts in HIP-3 accounted for only 4% in November 2025, but now it has skyrocketed to 30%. And the upcoming HIP-4 prediction market will bring more users and trading targets.

Looking at Venice, this project has completely detached from the crypto market. Although its user base overlaps with the crypto circle, its business model is consumer-grade AI, not a native crypto product like Uniswap. Uniswap's core relies on user trading endogenous assets, with price fluctuations directly determining revenue; Venice packages private AI inference services, charging on-demand and via subscription.

The only connection between Venice and crypto is the use of tokens as a value carrier, and some compute providers have crypto backgrounds. Project leader Erik Voorhees has been deeply involved in the crypto industry for years, and his view is straightforward: if tokens are used well, they are an excellent marketing tool.

Public companies like Figure are also worth examining. This fintech lending company built its own blockchain to shorten mortgage approval times to under five minutes. For them, blockchain is just supporting technology; the core value still lies in the lending business itself.

The rise of these exogenous assets at scale is profoundly significant. In the past, because most business models were deeply tied to crypto asset prices, you simply couldn't do fundamental investing. There have been narratives like "heavy blockchain, light Bitcoin," but in the end, they always revert to $BTC trends.

Why? Because these tracks have never formed stable demand and sustained revenue, and even when they do generate income, it doesn't translate into token value. When token prices stop rising, the project is doomed.

But this time is different. Now, we can clearly see who is paying, why they are paying, and market demand can be quantified—no longer relying solely on emotional hype. The mechanism of tokens as value carriers is also improving. For example, Venice's revenue comes from users purchasing AI inference services; even if the crypto market crashes, it won't be affected because it doesn't depend on token price fluctuations.

The biggest difference in this cycle compared to previous ones is: there is sustainable real-world demand, and investors are starting to make decisions based on fundamentals, not just storytelling.

The stablecoin track in the private equity market is the same. In March 2026, Mastercard announced it would acquire BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, while just 15 months earlier, this company’s Series B valuation was only $750 million. Another company, Bridge, was acquired by Stripe for $1.1 billion in February 2025; according to Stripe’s annual report, Bridge’s business grew fourfold. The development of these companies has completely decoupled from the crypto bull and bear cycles.

I'm not bearish on endogenous assets. Just like gold and small gold mining companies, they will always have a place in a diversified portfolio. $BTC and a bunch of endogenous coins are the same. But the performance-driving logic and market linkage of these two asset types have already fundamentally diverged.

Here's an analogy to help you understand: the correlation coefficient between small gold mining stocks and gold prices has remained around 0.75 for years. This is similar to today’s traditional crypto market—many altcoins are like small gold mines, $BTC is gold, and the entire track is a leveraged investment on $BTC.

Another curve: gold and the S&P 500 also have slight correlations influenced by macro factors, but each has its own independent logic. This is the future direction of exogenous assets.

In the long run, these assets will gradually detach from the "follow $BTC rise and fall" trend. Of course, many exogenous assets also issue tokens, which both confirms the trend and is a special case.

Currently, most endogenous assets still move in close sync with $BTC; some exogenous assets are less correlated, but because their development cycles are short, they are not yet highly indicative. Industry rules always prioritize fundamentals first, and market correlations change afterward.

This shift completely rewrites the analytical logic. When studying exogenous assets, you need to conduct fundamental due diligence like analyzing traditional companies: identify paying users, estimate unit economics, evaluate moats. $BTC price is no longer the primary indicator; it’s more like financial tech investors’ judgment, with the added layer of asset custody.

Here are some promising exogenous tracks:

On-chain exchanges and brokerage services; liquidation/redeem schemes for long-tail asset tokenization; deep integration of crypto and AI (private inference, distributed open-source model training, etc.); new digital banking (privacy-focused Payy, Raycash, and programmable privacy infrastructure providers like Aztec, Zama); lending tracks (Morpho has become mainstream in institutional repurchase markets, while Valinor and 3jane focus on private credit); stablecoin issuers and real asset tokenization services; payment channels (general payment providers like Stripe, Tempo, and intelligent agent payments led by Coinbase); non-financial consumer products (Venice, Collector Crypt, injecting physical business value into tokens, driving adoption and marketing); intelligent agent economy (core in access layer, ecosystem of agents, service providers, and creators, with Cloudflare leading but fee models still undecided).

At this stage, the safest way to get involved in these tracks is still investing in company equity; high-quality tokens are just a few exceptions. Only as the token’s value-carrying mechanism continues to improve will its role be enhanced, which requires joint efforts from regulators and industry.

Current progress: regulatory efforts like the CLARITY Act are steadily advancing, and industry groups like Blockworks are promoting transparency. Token mechanisms still have a long way to go.

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. The focus of research is moving from interpreting $BTC charts to deep fundamental analysis of companies.

In the next decade, don’t be confused about why the crypto $BTC market no longer rises and falls together—because the landscape has completely changed.