Industry Insight: The Build trend in the Crypto industry has completely changed.

Author: Haotian Source: X, @tmel0211

With just the concept of the Trump family, WLFI's market capitalization has reached $7B upon listing. There are hardly any reliable ecological projects to support it, and its market expectations have surpassed those of a number of Crypto Native blue-chip protocols like AAVE, Uniswap, Ethena, and Pendle. Tell Me Why? The answer is clear: The overall trend of building in the Crypto industry has completely changed. Here are some observations:

1) To Wall Street institutions, the rise of a new narrative for Wall Street DATs has overshadowed many previous technological narratives such as layer2, BTCFi, and ZK. It has been proven that adoption from institutions will truly bring incremental growth, even if most of the operators among them have ulterior motives;

2) Focus on capital efficiency, the market is no longer centered on the TPS arms race and superficial TVL Show, but has started to pay attention to how to generate more Yield from limited funds.

For example, Dolomite's liquidity reuse, Mitosis's programmable liquidity innovation, aPriori's MEV value capture, and high-frequency trading flywheels all tell the story of how to improve capital efficiency without exception.

3) Financial Engineering > Technical Concepts, the expansion of Crypto from the financial to the non-financial sector seems to be a vicious cycle, with each cycle talking about external Mass Adoption, but in the end, it always returns to the most essential financial trading scenarios. The allure of complex cryptography and consensus mechanisms has long faded, replaced by the structured product design that is deeply knowledgeable about financial business.

For example, the on-chain order book depth of Hyperliquid and the CEX-level trading experience make everyone almost forget about Decentralized, while Pendle's Boros protocol innovation is like opening the Pandora's box of traditional finance. It has been proven that precise financial engineering design is much stronger than complex technical concepts;

4) The B2B2C model replaces the pure C-end narrative. It has long been proven that the business model that serves retail investors well and drives them in the crypto space is only one: the exchange, which is both centralized and a somewhat uncool local monopolistic model. Generally, a typical builder wanting to innovate around Onchain should smartly and wisely choose to first serve institutions and then let those institutions serve retail investors.

Therefore, under the product positioning of TradFi, services such as customized Vaults for institutions, whitelist pools, KYC thresholds, and AMM optimization will become innovative directions.

5) Compliance has become the entry threshold for innovation. There was a time when compliance in Crypto innovation was not a first principle; it was mostly a matter of retroactively catching up. However, under the new trend, obtaining a license before developing a product is more effective than creating a product first and then seeking compliance. In other words, compliance has become a new unfair competitive advantage, such as the dimensional reduction impact of the TRUMP family, which holds advantages in government resources, on the cryptocurrency space.

Coinbase's Base, Circle's USDC expansion path, and even the market expectations and valuation logic behind the Trump family's WLFI have validated the efficiency of this path.

That's all.

In a nutshell: The next decade of Crypto may not belong to the geeks who change the world, but to those who understand how to package the on-chain world into financial products that Wall Street can comprehend. Do you agree?