Anyone can feel it: the crypto industry is undergoing a generational shift. Over the past decade, its core capability was asset issuance — launching new chains, new coins, new governance tokens, and selling them through narratives, airdrops, and liquidity incentives in a game of pass the parcel. Now, those native assets are slowly dying. Every dip purchase looks like a futile struggle. Liquidity and attention are being drained away by old-world assets: US stocks, Treasury bonds, gold, oil, indices... The protagonists on-chain have turned from native tokens to mirrored assets. Crypto is shifting from being a “new asset factory” to a “global asset channel.”
Stablecoins are the earliest and most successful example. The mass adoption of USDT and USDC does not mean crypto defeated the dollar; rather, it means the industry found a more efficient way for dollars to flow on-chain. For more than a decade, countless projects have trumpeted the creation of a new monetary system, yet only stablecoins have been used on a massive scale globally. Everyday users don't need a new world currency — they just want dollars to move faster, cheaper, and without time or geographical barriers. The blockchain’s most widely validated capability is not value storage, governance, or complex financial innovation, but the simplest form of peer-to-peer transfer and global settlement. Satoshi Nakamoto would be proud.
Apart from Bitcoin, almost all native tokens have been proven false as stores of value. They have extreme volatility, thin cash flows, and demand driven purely by speculation. Internal narratives are exhausted, while external wealth effects are everywhere. On one side, traditional assets like US equities, gold, and oil are being piped onto the same on-chain trading interface. On the other, AI has invaded everyone's life in a way that feels like science fiction dropping into reality. Crypto used to earn a valuation premium from its “sense of the future.” Now it faces two kinds of external rivals simultaneously: traditional assets that have real cash flows and global pricing systems, and an AI wave that possesses both a future narrative and real products. Junk tokens with no revenue, no demand, no value capture, sitting next to NVIDIA, Micron, and crude oil, look truly embarrassing.
Ethereum & DeFi: A Squeezed Worldview
The frequently debated “Ethereum problem” should be viewed within this framework. Ethereum faces not only short-term roadmap and liquidity pressures but the collapse of the “native asset worldview” it once represented. Traditional mirrored assets are flooding onto the chain at one end, while AI monopolizes the global tech narrative at the other. Ethereum remains a critical on-chain financial infrastructure, but without the belief that comes from the native crypto innovation cosmos, ETH’s ability to capture ecosystem value is meager. Users can pay on Base, trade on Arbitrum, move assets across rollups, and even trade on-chain US stocks — but they certainly don’t need to hold ETH for any of that.
DeFi is in a similar spot. Its original grand narrative was to rebuild the financial system, but very little hard demand has stuck. Users don’t need a full on-chain bank; they need cheaper dollar transfers, faster settlements, deeper liquidity, and tradeable volatility. Lending, DEXs, and yield aggregators still exist, but they increasingly look like infrastructure rather than imagination-drivers. The “money Lego” narrative has become a relic of the last cycle.
From Asset Factory to Global Asset Channel
When we say “crypto is dead,” we mean the era of endless native asset inflation has ended. No one dares to claim that the crypto industry will overthrow old finance anymore. Now, industry participants are busy installing a new transport layer for traditional finance. US stocks remain US stocks, but through new infrastructure they gain 24-hour trading, global liquidity, on-chain settlement, permissionless access, and composability. The industry is working furiously to produce a new API for the old world.
On-chain equities, RWA, and perpetual swaps are not new ideas. Years ago, the market already saw wave after wave of Perp DEXs, synthetic assets, and on-chain stock projects. Looking back at some early protocol designs, you’ll find their core mechanisms are essentially identical to today’s hot projects. That’s why some old-timers looked down on Hyperliquid and missed out — Kyle Samani’s persistent criticism is a textbook example. It’s not that he’d never seen such things; he had seen them too early, too many times, and grew bored. The PerpDEX projects Odaily covered in 2020 had mechanisms no different from today’s. Hyperliquid, too, was rough early on, with mediocre liquidity and much-maligned regulatory risks, but it kept catching wave after wave of transformation and became the biggest beneficiary.
Hyperliquid’s Four Waves
The first wave was the CEX-ification of on-chain perps. Hyperliquid’s earliest brilliance wasn’t building yet another Perp DEX, but making on-chain derivatives feel less like DeFi and more like a centralized exchange. Order books, low latency, APIs, rebates, ecosystem front-ends, the HYPE airdrop, no VC backing, and community wealth effects combined to turn it from a protocol into a trading arena. The hardest part for any trading venue is that first taste of liquidity — once traders come, market makers follow, and the ability to host bigger assets grows.
The second wave was the post-October 10 trust migration. CEX black-box risks were exposed again, and many whales preferred to play in the open on-chain rather than be ambushed in a dark forest where you can’t see your counterparty’s true face. “Decentralized” isn’t just a slogan; it’s a trader’s need for a clear death in extreme markets. The third wave came from macro asset volatility — gold, crude oil — as wars and geopolitical conflicts pulled global markets back into a macro narrative; users needed a venue to trade global assets 24/7, free from opening hours and regional restrictions. The fourth wave is the explosion of US equity trading. When hot assets are placed into a 24/7, global, low-barrier perpetual market, the assets themselves bring traffic, traffic attracts B-side market makers and ecosystem front-ends, and makers then enhance liquidity — creating a snowball effect.
Perpetual Contracts: The Most Successful and Most Dangerous Invention
If you want to trade spot US equities, you face a whole chain of complex issues — compliance, custody, underlying asset mapping, trading hours, settlement, equity rights, dividends, corporate actions. Every link means dealing with old financial systems and every link can be a bottleneck. But if you trade a US equity perp, the platform just needs to build a contract pool around the price, with liquidity provided by ecosystem partners; users trade price exposure without directly holding the underlying asset. It bypasses the heaviest parts and captures what traders most want.
This is also its sinister side. Perps reduce an asset to a price symbol you can bet on, compressing complex ownership relationships into long/short direction and leverage multiples. It doesn’t care whether you own the stock or understand the company; it only cares whether the price moves and whether someone is long or short.
Yet this is also what makes it so tantalizing. People don’t necessarily want to own NVIDIA, but they want to trade its volatility. They don’t necessarily want to hold gold, but they want to bet on its direction. They may not need crude oil, but they want the risk exposure that oil prices bring. Perps refine this demand to an extreme. They create no new assets, only new casinos; they offer no ownership, only risk exposure; the goal is not to rebuild the financial world, but to turn every asset into a “price” that can be traded 24/7.
From a financial perspective, it’s almost absurd. Futures have delivery dates, but perpetual contracts remove delivery, turning a finite-term product into one that exists forever. Traditional exchanges have opening and closing bells because markets need rest; perps eliminate rest and keep the market always online. Traditional finance relies on brokers, clearing houses, and geographical regulation; perpetual markets inherently cross borders. Perpetual contracts may be the most successful, and most dangerous, financial innovation in crypto history — truly a financial monster unleashed by a demon (Arthur Hayes: blame me?). Countless people have been liquidated, countless fortunes evaporated, amplifying humanity’s greediest side; yet at the same time, they’ve created unprecedented liquidity and price-discovery efficiency.
Looking back, in the blink of a few years, crypto’s most successful currency is the dollar, its most successful asset is Bitcoin, its most successful application is trading, and now the “most exciting new growth” comes from US stocks. This is a defeat for idealists, and more likely the market finally completing its selection. Today’s crypto industry no longer obsesses over inventing new assets; it is trying to turn existing assets into always-online, globally accessible, permissionless trading pairs. Crypto is dead, long live perps.