When I wrote the first line of ViaBTC’s mining pool code in 2016, crypto was still a niche community of miners, developers, and early enthusiasts. Bitcoin was a niche topic, stablecoins weren’t widely used, and the ideas we’d later talk about endlessly—DeFi, NFTs, RWAs—didn’t yet exist in any real form.
Ten years later, the industry looks nothing like that. Bitcoin has been integrated into the ETF framework, stablecoins have become a meaningful dollar rail in some regions, and on-chain trading and stablecoin settlement have grown too large for traditional finance to ignore.
But the change runs deeper than that. What actually happened over these ten years? On ViaBTC’s tenth anniversary, I want to share how I’ve come to understand the value of crypto.
Judged only by price and market cap, the last decade of crypto looks like one long fireworks show—dazzling and loud. But beyond the price charts, something quieter was happening: a few of the hardest-to-move pieces of traditional financial infrastructure were being rewritten, one algorithm at a time.
At the same time, the line between crypto and traditional finance will keep blurring. For a decade crypto was a relatively isolated asset class; in the next decade it becomes one piece of a multi-asset allocation. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have already pulled crypto into the traditional allocation framework, and RWAs are rewriting how some assets get issued. But integration works both ways: traditional finance brings capital, but also custodial centralization, access barriers, and asset-screening gatekeepers. Part of the price of going mainstream is trading away some censorship resistance and open access for the mainstream system’s acceptance.
There’s also another possibility: future real demand may not come only from humans. AI agents, automated workflows, and the machine economy could generate high-frequency, low-value, cross-platform payment and settlement needs. These “silicon users” have no bank accounts and can’t pass KYC. Open settlement networks, stablecoins, and permissionless accounts are naturally the financial infrastructure for this kind of machine-to-machine coordination. But we shouldn’t conclude that “AI agents must use on-chain payments” simply because AI and crypto are both hot. What truly needs a chain is coordination that is cross-entity, cross-border, settlement-heavy, and low-trust.
The mark of maturity over the next decade may not be “more things on-chain,” but the industry finally being able to tell which needs truly require a chain—and which are just short-term narratives dressed up in one.
Cycles change. Narratives change. Prices change. But the need for stable, transparent, reliable service never goes away. The value of crypto ultimately comes back to a few plain questions: Does it lower the cost of trust? Does it make value move more efficiently? Does it give users more choice? And after cycle upon cycle, is it still here, still serving