The crypto industry is in the midst of a transition. Over the past decade, the core competency of crypto was asset issuance — launching chains, tokens, governance tokens, and economic models, then pushing them to the market with narratives, airdrops, liquidity incentives, and community consensus. Now, native assets are entering a chronic decline, and every dip-buying attempt has been futile. The liquidity and attention have been siphoned away by traditional assets: US stocks, Treasuries, gold, crude oil, indices.
What’s happening is no longer just cyclical price swings or rotation among sub-sectors; it’s a fundamental functional migration. The crypto industry is changing from a “new asset factory” into a “global asset channel.” Stablecoins are the earliest and most successful example. The large-scale adoption of USDT and USDC is not crypto defeating the dollar, but rather crypto building a more efficient circulation method for the dollar on-chain. Ordinary users don’t care about inventing a new world currency; they only want the dollar to move faster, cheaper, and with fewer barriers. The capability of blockchain that has been truly validated at scale is not value storage or complex financial innovation, but the original peer-to-peer transfer and global settlement — Satoshi wins.
Except for Bitcoin, the value-storage function of other cryptocurrencies has been largely disproven. When hot money flooded in, we compared L1 TPS, DeFi TVL, and meme community heat, all floating in the same narrative pool without much real-world anchor. Now, internal narratives are exhausted while external wealth effects are everywhere. US stocks, gold, and crude oil have been placed on the same chain trading interface; meanwhile, AI has crashed into everyone’s life in a sci-fi-comes-true manner. A shitcoin used to only need to tell a more compelling story than another shitcoin. Now it has to compete against two external rivals: traditional assets with real cash flows, global pricing, and asset backing; and AI, which offers both future narratives and tangible products.
The Lost Promise of Ethereum and DeFi
The “Ethereum problem” should also be viewed through this framework. Ethereum is not just facing short-term pressure from roadmap and liquidity; the “native asset worldview” it once represented has been squeezed out. On one side, traditional tokenized assets are entering the chain; on the other, AI monopolizes the global tech narrative. Ethereum remains an important infrastructure for on-chain finance and asset issuance, but without the innovative universe of “native crypto” and the belief bonus of that worldview, ETH’s ability to capture ecosystem value is very thin. Users can pay on Base, trade on Arbitrum, transfer assets between rollups, and trade US stocks on-chain, but they certainly don’t need to hold ETH.
DeFi is in the same boat. Its original grand narrative was to rebuild the financial system, but the truly sticky demand that settled is limited. Users don’t need a whole on-chain bank; they need cheaper dollar transfers, faster settlement, deeper liquidity, and price volatility to trade. Lending, DEXs, and yield aggregators still exist but are increasingly like infrastructure components, unable to carry the industry’s imagination alone. The “money Lego” narrative has become a relic of the last cycle.
The crypto industry has to admit that on-chain finance doesn’t need to reinvent NVIDIA or the dollar; we just need to enable these assets to be transferred, traded, collateralized, shorted, leveraged, and composed into new financial structures more freely. “Crypto is dying” means the era of endlessly expanding native assets has ended. Now, industry builders are busy adding a new transmission layer to traditional finance. US stocks are still US stocks, but through new infrastructure, they can have 24-hour trading, global liquidity, on-chain settlement, permissionless access, and composability — the industry is working hard to produce a new API for the old world.
Hyperliquid’s Four Waves of Tailwinds
On-chain US stocks, RWA, and on-chain perpetuals are nothing new. Years ago, there were waves of Perp DEXs, synthetic assets, on-chain stocks, and projects attempting to bring traditional assets on-chain. Looking back at some early protocol designs, their underlying mechanisms are essentially the same as many of today’s hot projects. This is why some OGs dismissed Hyperliquid and missed the opportunity — Kyle Samani’s persistent bearish stance is a classic example. It wasn’t that he had never seen such a product; he had seen it too early and too much, and had grown tired of it. Yet Hyperliquid managed to catch transformative waves one after another and became the biggest winner, leaving latecomers far behind.
The first wave was the “CEX-ification” of on-chain perpetuals. Hyperliquid’s early standout wasn’t just another Perp DEX; it made on-chain contract trading feel less like DeFi and more like a centralized exchange: order books, low latency, API, rebates, ecosystem frontends, the HYPE airdrop, no VCs, and community wealth effect. These elements elevated it from an on-chain protocol to a trading hub. Not sexy, but crucial — the hardest part for any exchange is the first sip of liquidity. Once people trade, market makers come, and then it becomes qualified to host larger asset volumes.
The second wave was the trust migration after the FTX-style black-box risk exposure. Many whales preferred to compete openly on-chain rather than be wiped out in a dark forest where the counterparty’s true face is unknown. “Decentralization” wasn’t just a slogan; it was a real demand for traders to “die with clarity” during extreme market conditions.
The third wave came from macro asset volatility driven by wars and geopolitical conflicts. Users needed a venue to trade global assets 24/7. Traditional markets have open and close times, regional restrictions, and account limitations, while on-chain perpetual markets had none of these burdens.
The fourth wave was the explosion of US stock trading. When hot assets were placed into a 24-hour, globally accessible, low-barrier perpetual market, the assets themselves drove traffic, which attracted B-side market making and ecosystem frontends, which in turn enhanced liquidity — the snowball effect kicked in. So having “understood it early” didn’t guarantee big results. Without enough on-chain users, mature wallet UX, sufficient market-making infrastructure, and adequate external volatility, building a big ship when there’s no wind just leaves it stranded.
Perpetual Swaps: Evil and Vitality
The greatest invention in crypto — perpetual swaps. If you want to do spot US stocks, you face compliance, custody, underlying asset mapping, trading hours, settlement, equity rights, dividends, corporate actions — a whole set of complex issues, each a potential bottleneck. But if you trade US stock perps, the platform only needs to build a contract pool around the price; liquidity can be provided by ecosystem partners, and users trade price exposure without directly holding the underlying equity. It circumvents the heaviest parts and captures exactly what people want to trade.
This is, of course, also its sinister side. Perps reduce assets to a bettable price symbol, compressing complex ownership 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 someone wants to go long or short.
Yet precisely that is their most fascinating and vital quality. People don’t necessarily want to own NVIDIA, but they want to trade its volatility; they don't need to hold gold, but want to bet on its direction; they may not need crude oil, but want exposure to its price risk. Perps refine this demand to the extreme. They don’t create new assets, only new casinos; they don’t provide ownership, but they provide risk exposure; their goal is not to reconstruct the financial world, but to turn every asset into a 24/7 “price” that can be traded.
From a financial perspective, it’s almost absurd. Futures have delivery dates because assets ultimately need to return to the real world; perpetual swaps cancel delivery, turning a finite-term product into an eternal one. Traditional exchanges have open and close times because markets need rest; perpetual markets eliminate rest and stay forever online. Traditional finance relies on brokers, clearing houses, and regional regulatory regimes, while perpetual markets naturally transcend borders.
The perpetual swap may be the most successful and most dangerous financial innovation in crypto history. Countless people have been liquidated, countless fortunes evaporated; it magnifies humanity’s most greedy side. But at the same time, it has created unprecedented liquidity and price discovery efficiency.
After years of rapid evolution, crypto’s most successful currency is the dollar, its most successful asset is Bitcoin, its most successful application is trading, and its most “anticipated new growth” now comes from US stocks. This is the failure of idealists — and more likely, the market finally completing its selection. The oldest stories never change: humanity’s pursuit of wealth, appetite for risk, and obsession with leverage remain the same. So today’s crypto industry no longer obsesses over inventing new assets; instead, it tries to turn existing assets into always-online, globally accessible, permissionless trading pairs.