Even the most oblivious participant can sense that the crypto industry is undergoing a generational change. Over the past decade, the core competence of crypto was asset issuance—launching a chain, a coin, a governance token, and a set of economic models, pushing them to the market with narratives, airdrops, and liquidity incentives in a pass-the-parcel game. People once boldly hypothesized that blockchain would create an entirely new asset system: new currencies, new financial protocols, new gaming assets, new social networks, even new organizational forms. Yet now, those native assets are slowly dying, turning every dip-buying into a futile struggle.
The liquidity and attention have been drained by old-world assets: US stocks, Treasuries, gold, crude oil, indices… The protagonists on-chain have changed: native assets are ignored, mapped assets are thriving. Every bear market someone says “ETH is done,” “altcoins are dead,” “DeFi is over.” But why does ETH at $2,000 feel more hopeless than ETH at $200? Because the complaint is no longer about price cycles or narrative rotation; it reflects a migration of the industry's entire function—crypto is shifting from a “new-asset factory” to a “global asset conduit.”
Stablecoins' Victory: Blockchain as the Dollar's Conveyor Belt
Stablecoins are the earliest and most successful example. The massive adoption of USDT and USDC clearly does not mean crypto defeated the dollar; rather, crypto found a more efficient circulation channel for dollars on-chain. Over the past decade-plus, countless projects shouted the slogan “create a new monetary system,” but only stablecoins were adopted by global users at scale. Apart from speculators, ordinary users do not obsess over mining a new world currency; they only care that dollars move faster, cheaper, and without time or geographic constraints. The capability blockchain has truly validated at scale is not value storage, nor complex financial innovation, but the primitive peer-to-peer transfer and global settlement—Satoshi lives.
Except for Bitcoin, the value-storage function of other tokens has been falsified: they exhibit extreme volatility, thin cash flows, fuzzy governance, and demand driven entirely by speculation. After many detours, the market has returned to blockchain's primitive functions: transfer, settlement, cross-border movement, collateralization, and trading. This regression exposes the awkward position of crypto-native assets—the so-called altcoins.
Twilight of Native Assets: Exhausted Internal Narratives, Crushed by External AI
When hot money poured in, we used to compare assets within crypto—public chains against TPS, DeFi against TVL, memes against community heat—soaking in the same narrative pool, every story brimming with imagination. But now internal narratives have dried up, while external wealth effects flourish everywhere. On one side, real-world assets like US stocks, gold, and crude oil are placed inside the same on-chain trading interface. On the other, AI has crashed into our lives in a science-fiction-come-true manner. Crypto was once the best at telling futures and earning a valuation premium on “futurism,” but the stories remain trapped in whitepapers, roadmaps, financing news, and token prices. Meanwhile AI, beyond a powerful story, has become a tool ready on every computer and smartphone. An altcoin no longer competes only against another altcoin’s narrative; it simultaneously faces two external rivals: traditional assets with real cash flows, asset backing, and global pricing; and a new tech cycle with both future narratives and practical products.
The “Ethereum problem” should be viewed through this same lens. Ethereum faces more than short-term roadmap and liquidity pressure; its once-representative “native-asset worldview” has been squeezed from both sides. As traditional mapped assets enter on-chain and AI monopolizes global tech narratives, Ethereum remains critical infrastructure, but stripped of the belief in a native-crypto innovation universe, ETH’s ability to capture ecosystem value is miserably thin. Users can pay on Base, trade on Arbitrum, transfer assets across Rollups, and even trade US stocks on-chain—without ever needing to hold ETH. The same applies to DeFi: its grand narrative was rebuilding the financial system, yet the truly rigid demand that materialized is limited. Users don’t need an entire on-chain bank; they need cheaper dollar transfers, faster settlement, deeper liquidity, and tradable volatility. Lending, DEXs, and yield aggregators still exist, but they increasingly resemble infrastructure components, unable to sustain the industry’s imagination alone. “Financial Lego” is a legacy of the last cycle.
Crypto must admit it doesn’t need to reinvent Nvidia, let alone the dollar—nor does it have that ability. We only need to enable these assets to be freely transferred, traded, collateralized, shorted, leveraged, and combined into new financial structures. So when we say “crypto is dead,” we mean the era of inflating native assets has retired. No one dares to proclaim crypto will upend legacy finance anymore; now industry players are busy building 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.
Hyperliquid’s Four Waves: A New Winner from an Old Story
On-chain US stocks, RWAs, and on-chain perpetuals are nothing new. Years ago, the market saw wave after wave of Perp DEXs, synthetic assets, and on-chain equity projects, whose underlying mechanisms are fundamentally no different from today’s hot protocols. That’s why some veterans dismissed Hyperliquid and missed out—Kyle Samani’s persistent bearishness is a textbook example. He didn’t fail to see this kind of product; he had seen too many too early, and grew tired. Yet Hyperliquid, despite similarly rough early experience and average liquidity, rode successive waves of change to become the biggest winner.
The first wave was the CEX-ification of on-chain perps. Hyperliquid’s initial highlight was not just building another Perp DEX, but making on-chain contract trading feel like a centralized exchange: order book, low latency, APIs, rebates, airdrops, no VCs. These elements elevated it from a protocol to a trading venue and secured that hardest first sip of liquidity. The second wave was the trust migration after the “10.11” incident, when centralized exchange black-box risks were exposed. Many whales now prefer to play on-chain in public rather than be trapped in dark-forest systems where the counterparty’s true face is invisible; decentralization became not just a slogan but a real demand for “dying with clarity” under extreme conditions. The third wave was macro-asset volatility—gold, crude oil—when geopolitical conflicts pulled global markets back into macro narratives. Users needed a venue to trade global assets 24/7, and on-chain perpetual markets have no opening/closing hours or regional restrictions. The fourth wave, requiring little elaboration, is the explosion of US-stock 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-making and ecosystem frontends, and those in turn enhance liquidity, triggering a snowball. Thus, understanding it early does not guarantee a giant result: before, on-chain users were insufficient, wallet experiences immature, and market-making infrastructure incomplete; without wind, even a large ship stays stranded.
Perpetuals: The Greatest and Most Dangerous Invention
If one product truly remains from crypto’s history, it will likely be the perpetual contract. Spot US stocks require handling compliance, custody, underlying asset mapping, trading hours, settlement, equity rights, dividends, corporate actions—a whole chain of complexity where every link touches legacy finance and may become a bottleneck. By contrast, for an equity perpetual, the platform only needs to build a contract pool around the price, liquidity can be supplied by ecosystem partners, and users trade price exposure without directly holding the underlying equity. It bypasses the heaviest parts and captures the most trade-hungry demand. This is also precisely what makes it dangerous: perps reduce an asset to a bettable price symbol, compressing complex ownership relations into long/short direction and leverage multiples. They don’t care whether you own the stock or understand the company’s value; they only care whether the price fluctuates and whether there are long or short takers.
People may not truly want to own Nvidia, but they want to trade its volatility; may not really want to hold gold, but want to bet on its direction; may not need crude oil, but may need the risk exposure oil prices provide. Perps refine this demand to an extreme: they create no new assets, only new casinos; they provide no ownership, only risk exposure; their goal is not to rebuild finance, but to turn every asset into a “price” that can be traded 24/7.
From a financial perspective, perpetuals are almost absurd. Futures have delivery dates because assets ultimately need to return to the real world; perpetuals abolish delivery, turning a finite product into an eternal one. Traditional exchanges have open and close because markets need rest; perpetuals eliminate rest, keeping markets always online. Traditional finance relies on brokers, clearing houses, and territorial regulation, while perpetual markets inherently cross borders. They are the most successful, and most dangerous, financial innovation in crypto history—like a financial monster unleashed: countless people have been liquidated, countless fortunes evaporated; they magnify humanity’s greediest side, but also create unprecedented liquidity and price-discovery efficiency.
The Failure of Idealism, the Victory of Market Selection
Looking back, the most successful currency in crypto is the dollar, the most successful asset is Bitcoin, the most successful application is trading, and today’s most anticipated incremental growth comes from US stocks. This is the defeat of idealists, and more likely the market completing its screening. The story has grown old, but humanity’s pursuit of wealth, appetite for risk, and obsession with leverage have never changed. Thus, today’s crypto industry no longer obsesses over inventing new assets, but tries to transform existing assets into always-online, globally reachable, permissionless trading pairs. Crypto is dead; perps live forever.