Annabelle Huang, co-founder and CEO of Altius Labs, said the crypto industry is moving away from its earlier phase of creating new assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs, and meme coins, and toward building new markets around things that already exist. She pointed to prediction markets, crude oil and gold perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid, and pre-IPO perpetual contracts as examples of products that are creating round-the-clock trading venues for news events, commodities, and private companies that previously lacked real-time price discovery. In her view, blockchain is no longer only about issuing assets; it is also expanding the range of things that can be priced. Huang said traditional finance often limits price discovery through trading hours, access barriers, and valuation cycles, while onchain markets can run continuously, absorb new information faster, and lower the threshold for participation. She added that if crypto wants to become a major piece of global price discovery infrastructure, the sector will need better throughput, lower latency, deeper liquidity, and stronger reliability to support high-frequency trading, risk management, and large-scale capital participation.
On Oct. 7, Annabelle Huang, co-founder and CEO of Altius Labs, said the crypto industry is shifting from its earlier focus on creating new assets toward building new markets around existing things.
Huang said the first phase of crypto brought assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs, and meme coins. The next phase, she argued, is taking shape through products that create markets for objects that previously did not have real-time pricing mechanisms.
She cited prediction markets, crude oil and gold perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid, and pre-IPO perpetual contracts as examples. In her view, these products are creating 24/7 trading markets for news events, commodities, and private companies. That expands blockchain’s role beyond asset creation and into widening the boundary of what can be priced.
Huang said price discovery in traditional finance is often constrained by trading hours, access thresholds, and valuation cycles. Onchain markets, by contrast, can operate continuously, take in new information quickly, and lower barriers to participation. She added that market participants in the future may care more about gaining price exposure to an asset than actually holding it.
She also said that if crypto is to become an important part of global price discovery infrastructure, the industry will need to improve throughput, latency, liquidity depth, and reliability. Those upgrades, she said, are necessary to support high-frequency trading, risk management, and participation from large pools of capital.
By Huang’s account, the next stage for crypto may not be about creating the next new asset, but about building pricing infrastructure for a growing range of existing assets and events.
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