ViaBTC CEO Haipo Yang published a reflection on crypto industry evolution to mark the mining pool's 10th anniversary. Yang founded ViaBTC in 2016 when he wrote the first line of the mining pool's code, at a time when crypto was a niche community of miners, developers, and early enthusiasts. Ten years later, Bitcoin has been integrated into the ETF framework, stablecoins have become a meaningful dollar rail in some regions, and on-chain trading has grown too large for traditional finance to ignore. Yang stated the purpose of the essay was to share how he has come to understand the value of crypto over the past decade. The reflection covers infrastructure transformation, the role of speculation, and the distinction between blockchain technology, Web3 applications, and crypto assets.
Financial Infrastructure Mechanisms Rewritten Over Past Decade
Yang described how the hardest-to-move pieces of traditional financial infrastructure were rewritten through open protocols. Market making, matching, clearing, and issuance traditionally required deep capital, specialized teams, and closed systems that made participation impossible for ordinary people. Uniswap replaced the order book and market maker with an automated market maker formula that allows anyone to provide liquidity to a global market in a single on-chain transaction. On-chain perpetuals protocols like GMX turned liquidity provider pools into traders' counterparties, while Hyperliquid pushed order book matching and clearing on-chain to approach centralized exchange trading experiences.
Stablecoins enabled a cross-border payment infrastructure that Yang contrasted with traditional rails. A cross-border transfer from South America to Africa previously took at least two days and cost tens of dollars in fees; the same payment now moves on-chain in minutes for under a dollar. Yang stated these mechanisms proved that financial services do not have to live inside closed systems controlled by a handful of institutions.
Yang cited major industry collapses as unresolved mechanism problems rather than cycle problems. Mt. Gox collapsed in 2014. Luna erased tens of billions of dollars in a single week in 2022. FTX went from a top-three exchange to bankruptcy in November 2022. Yang stated that after each disaster, the market talked of needing a reset, but the next bull run made everyone forget, and cycles do not solve mechanism problems.
Speculation Provided Liquidity and Exposed Demand Gaps
Yang described speculation as providing liquidity, price discovery, and faster testing for new mechanisms, but cautioned that it can drown out real demand. Tokens pulled market pricing into technology development early, allowing protocols to skip traditional fundraising and run trial-and-error in the open market. Yang characterized early speculative bubbles as "permissionless venture capital" that pushed the industry to iterate.
The 2017 ICO wave, 2020 DeFi Summer, and 2021 NFT mania each expanded the industry's boundaries in intense bursts. After bubbles cleared, stablecoins, on-chain trading, wallets, and clearing mechanisms genuinely emerged from those cycles. Yang stated the real question is whether speculation has drowned out real demand, as short-term liquidity gets mistaken for real adoption and spreading narratives get mistaken for lasting consensus during price spikes.
Yang questioned how much of the crypto market cap is supported by real usage, real revenue, and real cash flow when speculative demand is removed. He noted that on-chain activity curves of new chains almost always show a frenzy before airdrops and a cliff after, and asked how much genuine demand remains after stripping out airdrop farming, subsidies, arbitrage, and wash activity.
Blockchain, Web3, and Crypto Serve Different Functions
Yang distinguished blockchain as a base-layer technology whose value is lowering the cost of trust, settlement, and verification. Web3 is an application form that must answer which use cases actually need an open network and user ownership, judged by whether people keep using and paying after subsidies, airdrops, and speculative expectations are gone. Crypto as an asset rests on two layers: the commodity nature of block space (users pay gas to transact) and a sovereign liquidity premium (borderless, censorship-resistant assets carry hedging value across macro cycles).
Bitcoin has both properties, but Yang stated most tokens have neither and must prove themselves through real usage, protocol revenue, and network effects. Yang posed a question: if you remove speculative demand and look only at real usage, real revenue, and real cash flow, how much of today's crypto market cap is actually supported.
Sustainable Participation Requires Risk Awareness
Yang stated that crypto's openness lowers barriers but does not lower risk. In traditional finance, barriers kept people out and kept risk out; crypto removed the door, meaning more people face risk earlier and more directly with no one to do due diligence or absorb the cost of mistakes. Yang stated the defining phrase of the past decade was "open participation," and for the next decade it may need to change to "sustainable participation."
Yang described his experience running a mining pool as infrastructure that proves its value in moments of network congestion, violent market swings, and user anxiety—not in the loudest bull market, but in the bear market when everyone else is running for the exit. Whether each block gets packed reliably and each settlement arrives on time decides whether users keep trusting the service with their hashrate.
Industry Concentration and Integration With Traditional Finance
Yang stated the industry will concentrate into a few networks rather than expand forever. Liquidity, developers, users, and security will not spread evenly across every chain. Bitcoin and Ethereum dominating total market cap is the natural result of network effects. Over the next decade, value will concentrate in the few networks with real security, liquidity, and ecosystem density, while many undifferentiated L1s lack the network effects to compete long-term.
DeFi will become professional rather than mass-market, serving on-chain traders, market makers, cross-border liquidity, and digital-native assets as a high-frequency tool for a specific class of users and institutions. Yang stated DeFi will not replace the average person's bank account and savings app. The line between crypto and traditional finance will keep blurring as crypto becomes one piece of multi-asset allocation. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have pulled crypto into the traditional allocation framework, and RWAs are rewriting how some assets get issued. Yang noted integration brings capital but also custodial centralization, access barriers, and asset-screening gatekeepers, trading away some censorship resistance and open access for mainstream system acceptance.
Yang stated future real demand may come from AI agents, automated workflows, and the machine economy generating high-frequency, low-value, cross-platform payment and settlement needs. These "silicon users" have no bank accounts and cannot pass KYC, making open settlement networks, stablecoins, and permissionless accounts naturally suited as financial infrastructure for machine-to-machine coordination. Yang cautioned against concluding that AI agents must use on-chain payments simply because AI and crypto are both popular topics, stating what truly needs a chain is coordination that is cross-entity, cross-border, settlement-heavy, and low-trust.
FAQ
What infrastructure changes did ViaBTC's CEO describe over the past decade?
Haipo Yang stated that protocols like Uniswap replaced traditional market makers with automated formulas allowing anyone to provide liquidity in a single transaction, while on-chain perpetuals like GMX and Hyperliquid moved matching and clearing on-chain. Stablecoins enabled cross-border payments to move in minutes for under a dollar compared to traditional rails taking over two days and costing tens of dollars.
How did Yang characterize speculation's role in crypto development?
Yang described speculation as "permissionless venture capital" that provided liquidity and faster testing for new mechanisms, with cycles like the 2017 ICO wave, 2020 DeFi Summer, and 2021 NFT mania pushing industry iteration. He stated the real question is whether speculation has drowned out real demand, as short-term liquidity gets mistaken for real adoption during price spikes.
What distinction did Yang make between blockchain, Web3, and crypto assets?
Yang defined blockchain as a base-layer technology lowering trust and settlement costs, Web3 as an application form that must prove use cases need open networks, and crypto assets as resting on block space commodity value and sovereign liquidity premium. He stated Bitcoin has both properties but most tokens have neither and must prove themselves through real usage and protocol revenue.
