A translated article published by ChainCatcher argues that speculation in crypto is not always just froth. In some market cycles, it gathers liquidity first, and that liquidity later supports more mature financial products and pricing systems.
The piece was written by Prathik Desai and translated by Saoirse of Foresight News. It opens with a 1936 line from John Maynard Keynes: 「When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.」 From there, the article challenges the common view that crypto is purely a speculative casino with no underlying fundamentals, saying many later-stage businesses are built on top of liquidity first brought in by speculators.
Speculation and mature markets can grow together
The article says speculation in crypto is often described as noise, a bubble, or gambling. But it argues that during an industry’s path toward maturity, speculation can also become the base layer that supports later business activity. That only works if the bubble does not remain pure hype and instead connects with sustainable trading use cases that keep activity alive.
To make that point, the article turns to financial history. It revisits the Chicago grain market in the 1840s, when futures markets were introduced to help farmers lock in selling prices in advance and reduce the risk tied to uncertain harvests. For that market to function, however, farmers needed counterparties willing to take the other side of forward exposure and absorb price risk. Speculators filled that role.
The article cites U.S. historian William Cronon, who described this as the “abstraction” of grain. Once grain could be traded through warehouse receipts rather than only as a physical good, ownership could circulate more freely and speculative participation expanded. That trading activity created deeper liquidity, allowing farmers to find counterparties more easily and helping Chicago develop into a global wheat pricing center.
It notes that this model was deeply unpopular at the time. The Grange movement attacked exchange speculators, accusing them of profiting from farmers’ labor. Even so, the mechanism evolved into a core piece of global agricultural price discovery. In the article’s telling, without speculators acting as counterparties in the 1870s, the global wheat market would not have developed a mature pricing system.
Keynes’ warning focused on what speculation is tied to
The article then returns to Keynes’ broader framework. It says Keynes divided market activity into two categories: enterprise, which involves assessing an asset’s long-term yield, and speculation, which involves predicting how the wider market will trade next.
His concern was not simply that speculation existed, but that in highly liquid markets it could begin to dominate real investment. The article quotes that view at length: 「Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.」
The article’s interpretation is direct: speculation detached from an underlying asset is dangerous, while speculation anchored to something with real value-bearing capacity can have productive effects.
It also points to Joseph de la Vega’s 1688 book Confusion of Confusions, described in the article as the first book on securities markets. According to the piece, de la Vega showed that the Amsterdam exchange attracted both investors and gamblers. The article argues that most exchanges began that way, even if later narratives tended to erase that origin story.
Uniswap Pools and Robinhood Chain put Meme coin traffic first
The article then moves to recent crypto events. On Aug. 5, Uniswap launched the Pools issuance platform, allowing users to issue and trade Meme coins on Robinhood Chain. According to the article, the chain was built by the brokerage of the same name and was originally intended to serve 30 million funded accounts and support tokenized stock trading.
Before Pools formally went live, traders had already discovered unpublished smart contracts and used them to complete more than $150 million in trading. The article says that forced Uniswap to support both the beta and production contracts at the same time and delayed the launch.
It adds that FRONG, the top token on the platform, took its name from the file name of a frog video used in Uniswap’s product teaser campaign. The token was minted six days early through the same contract set, and by the day of the official opening it had reached 12,141 holders.
The article presents that episode as a revealing one: roughly $150 million traded a frog-themed token on infrastructure that had not been formally switched on, even though the chain itself was originally built for securities trading. FRONG later became the platform’s unofficial mascot.
The author says readers can draw their own conclusions, including whether the sequence looked like a deliberate campaign to drive traffic to Uniswap’s latest V4-based chain rollout. Even without making that claim outright, the article notes that daily trading volume on Uniswap V4 rose from $86.2 million to $228.3 million, almost tripling.
shturl.c and Hyperliquid show why the underlying asset matters
The article stresses that not every bubble becomes a durable business. The central question is what, exactly, the speculation is attached to.
As one comparison point, it highlights shturl.c, which it describes as the largest Meme coin issuance platform and one that has centered speculation as its core product for years. On that platform, 70% of Meme coins last less than one day, and only a very small share survives for more than a month.
Citing @Coingecko, the article says the protocol generated $420 million in fee revenue from January to July 2026, nearly half the level of the same period a year earlier. Even so, it remained one of the strongest revenue-generating protocols in crypto, with $620 million in revenue and $584 million in net profit last year.
It contrasts that with Hyperliquid, which started with high-leverage crypto trading built for directional bets. Over time, that leveraged trading model expanded into around-the-clock markets for assets outside crypto.
Under the HIP-3 governance framework, the article says, Hyperliquid now lists perpetual contracts tied to Nvidia, Tesla, Nasdaq-linked instruments, gold, crude oil, silver, and stock indexes. One example in the piece is that if oil-related news breaks on a Sunday, traders can open positions right away rather than wait until Monday for traditional markets to open.
In early July, trading volume in Hyperliquid’s real-world-asset perpetuals exceeded crypto trading for the first time, reaching 52% of total volume, according to the article.
While Hyperliquid’s overall volume is down nearly half from its 2025 peak, the article says growth in real-asset trading has offset weakness in crypto pairs. That, in the author’s view, is where speculation creates value: Hyperliquid took a leveraged model that first attracted native crypto users and extended it to gold, pre-IPO equity, and stock indexes, building a 24/7 pricing layer that traditional trading platforms are now trying to copy.
Robinhood Chain is trying to convert Meme activity into on-chain securities flow
The article says Robinhood Chain is now following the same path in real time. Even though the team positions the chain as infrastructure for on-chain stock trading, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has welcomed the traffic coming from Meme coin traders.
It quotes Tenev as saying: 「We built Robinhood Chain with the goal of becoming the best chain for trading real-world assets... but it is also excellent for trading Meme coins.」
According to the article, the chain’s daily active users surpassed Base within three weeks of launch. The author argues that the traffic and capital coming from Meme coin trading could become seed capital for a future on-chain equity trading system.
Still, the article does not present this as automatic. Whether speculation evolves into a mature business depends on the platform’s own choices.
Its case for Robinhood rests on distribution. The company has 30 million funded users, several business lines, and the ability to direct attention from one product into another. The article also points to Robinhood’s second-quarter prediction market revenue, which it says jumped by more than tenfold year over year to $156 million and accounted for 20% of total transaction revenue.
The article’s conclusion: the asset sets the limit
In its final section, the article argues that speculation is not inherently good or bad. Stripped of labels, it is one of the oldest human instincts. Once people convert a view into a financial wager, speculation appears.
At its most basic level, the article says, speculation is liquidity searching for something to price. Wherever liquidity flows, a market forms around that object. That object can be a bag of wheat, Nvidia stock, a frog video file called frong.mp4, the outcome of a football match, or the odds of a presidential candidate winning.
The conclusion is simple. The properties of the underlying asset determine where speculation can go and where it stops. Without an underlying asset that can carry durable value, even large pools of speculative capital are unlikely to leave behind lasting results.
That is why, in the article’s framing, Hyperliquid could tie leveraged trading to assets such as gold and build a new pricing system within two years, while Robinhood is using unexpected Meme coin traffic to build the rails for on-chain securities trading. What speculation ultimately becomes depends on how much value the underlying asset can support.