Hello,
Our team at Token Dispatch has Friday editorial calls, where we talk a little bit about a lot of things. We also discuss what’s exciting and worth writing about in the upcoming weeks. Lately, the conversations sound less and less like crypto conversations. We end up talking about lending businesses, AI subscription models and payment rails that Stripe and Mastercard are fighting over. Last Friday, we spoke about how the upcoming trillion-dollar IPOs of OpenAI, SpaceX and Anthropic will shape the broader financial markets. Even if someone brings up a crypto project, halfway through the discussion, you’d realise nobody has mentioned ‘token price’ even once.
This shift is also reflected in what we have been publishing lately. In the last couple of fortnights at Token Dispatch, we have moved toward stories that sit at the edges of crypto. Think of fintech that uses blockchains as plumbing, consumer products where the token is a distribution mechanism rather than the product itself, infrastructure companies getting acquired at valuations that have nothing to do with the cycle. The developments that keep moving, whether BTC is at $100k or $70k.
Originally published by Hepworth Iron Capital, this week’s piece puts a framework in place for this phenomenon. Charlie Booth argues that crypto’s era as a single Bitcoin-sensitive factor is ending, paving the way for a cycle driven more by non-crypto factors and not cryptocurrency prices.
Onto Charlie’s story,
Prathik
Historically, crypto has traded as one Bitcoin-sensitive factor. That era is ending.
The crypto economy is bifurcating into two groups: endogenous and exogenous.
The former is the crypto of old: tokens and projects whose value depends on crypto prices. The latter is crypto in name only, with value increasingly exogenous to crypto prices.
Bitcoin’s value comes from its properties and reflexively from its price. A rising price reinforces the perception of the properties. At the peak of a bull market, Bitcoin is perceived to be interplanetary money, the scarcest digital bearer instrument known to mankind. At a bear market bottom, it’s dismissed as a digital collectable without any cashflow.
Hyperliquid sits in between these endogenous and exogenous groups. Much of its business still depends on crypto prices, but both the supply and demand sides are broadening. A lot of on-chain financial infrastructure sits here, with the assets underneath shifting toward tokenised real-world assets.
HIP-3 Open Interest is a rough proxy for non-crypto-related Open Interest. The percentage of total Hyperliquid Open Interest attributable to HIP-3 sits at ~30%, up from ~4% in November 2025. HIP-4 (outcome markets) should further boost this, pulling in new demand (traders) and new supply (markets, assets) at once.
On the purely exogenous side, the driving forces behind a project like Venice are completely exterior to the crypto market. Customer profiles overlap, but the business model looks a lot more like consumer AI than Uniswap. The latter still largely relies on users trading assets with endogenous value, making its business a function of those asset prices. Venice packages private multi-modal inference into a usage-plus-subscription model.
The only crypto connection is the choice of a token as the instrument that captures business value, plus the fact that some of its inference suppliers happen to wear crypto labels. Perhaps also the crypto-native understanding of Venice’s steward Erik Voorhees that tokens can be an excellent marketing tool when done well.
Figure is an easy example on the listed equity side, a fintech lender using its own chain to cut home equity approvals to under five minutes. The blockchain is incidental; the business is the point.
The emergence and growth of the exogenous class at scale in listed equity and token markets is meaningful. Historically, pure bottom-up investing has been difficult given the high sensitivity of most business models to crypto prices. It’s not as though crypto hasn’t had exogenous narratives before; every “blockchain, not Bitcoin” cycle promised them. In most cases, they collapsed back into crypto-beta because demand never materialised, revenue wasn’t there (if it was, it was not captured by the token), and once the token stopped going up, there was nothing underneath.
What’s different this time is that you can answer who pays and why, that demand is measurable and less reflexive in many cases, and that the token as an instrument is slowly improving (more on that later). Venice’s signup revenue is real money from users buying inference. There’s no obvious reason it reverses when crypto draws down, because it was never a function of prices. You have two things that prior cycles lacked: usage that persists, and buyers underwriting on fundamentals rather than solely on narrative.
Consider the stablecoin corner of private markets. In March 2026, Mastercard agreed to buy BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, 15 months after BVNK’s Series B closed at a $750 million valuation. Bridge (acquired by Stripe for $1.1 billion in February 2025) is growing fourfold year-on-year within Stripe, according to Stripe’s annual letter. None of these tracks the crypto cycle.
This isn’t a bearish call on the endogenous category. Just as gold and even junior gold miners might have their time and place in a portfolio, there’s a time and place for something like BTC and the endogenous class. But fundamentally different drivers will likely continue to drive performance and correlations. You can see both relationships in the data:
The analogy made literal: Junior gold miners track gold at a correlation that never really leaves the ~0.75 region. That’s how crypto broadly trades today: junior miners to Bitcoin’s gold, and levered bets on the same underlying. The blue line is the other relationship. Gold and the S&P share some macroeconomic correlation but trade on their own drivers. That’s the destination for the exogenous class. Over time, these names should migrate from the gold line to the blue line, from levered proxy to independent assets that occasionally share the weather.
These exogenous names are tokens, both illustrating the point and serving as exceptions to it.
Much of the “endogenous class” still moves closely with Bitcoin. A few exogenous names sit lower, but the window’s too short to mean anything yet. Fundamentals change first; the correlations follow.
This changes the analytical approach. The exogenous class needs underwriting like a normal business: who pays for the product, how the unit economics work, and where the moat sits. BTC price stops being the most important variable, and you start sounding like a fintech investor with weird custody.
Exciting “exogenous” categories, in no particular order and with miscellaneous notes attached:
on-chain exchanges and brokers
credit/redemption solutions for longer-tail tokenisation (Grove Basin looks interesting here)
real crypto x AI (private inference, distributed open-source model training à la Psyche by Nous Research)
neobanks (I tend to like the more privacy-focused players like Payy and Raycash, the programmable privacy infrastructure, Aztec and Zama, that enables them is also interesting)
lending (Morpho is becoming the institutional standard for repo-like markets, smaller names like Valinor and 3jane target interesting niches in private credit)
stablecoin and real-world asset/tokenisation issuers
payment rails (Stripe with Tempo is the incumbent to beat in broad payment rails; in agentic payments, it’s Coinbase, for now)
non-finance consumer crypto (products like Venice and Collector Crypt come to mind, unique cases where imbuing a token with value derived from a non-crypto business can drive marketing value and adoption)
agentic economy (the prize is agent<>vendor/creator coordination at the access layer, which is less substitutable than the rail. Cloudflare is well placed, but whether it taxes the flow or just sells the toggle is the open question)
Most durable exposure to this theme is equity today, not tokens. Good tokens are the exception and will only earn a larger role if the instrument improves, which regulators and industry have to deal with. There’s progress on both, the CLARITY Act on the regulatory side and transparency efforts from the likes of Blockworks on the other. The token has a lot of work to do.
None of that changes the main point. The driver is shifting from one factor to many; the work is no longer reading the Bitcoin chart but underwriting businesses. Don’t spend the next decade confused about why “crypto” stopped moving as one.
Disclaimer: This piece was originally published here.
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