Crypto is expanding the boundaries of what can be priced
The crypto industry is shifting its focus from creating new digital assets to building markets for real-world events and commodities. By using blockchain technology, platforms are enabling continuous price discovery for things like election outcomes and private company valuations.
Why it matters
This trend suggests that blockchain's most significant future impact may be in financializing human attention and observation rather than just currency.
As the industry has matured, however, its focus has shifted to creating new markets instead of new assets. We have now three major examples in the form of prediction markets, oil and gold perpetuals on Hyperliquid, and pre-IPO perpetuals. These products created real-time, continuously tradable markets around existing things (news, commodities, private firms) that previously lacked them.
It turns out that blockchain technology is very well suited for expanding the range of things that we can price. And that might end up being more relevant to the future of finance than the ability to create new, digital assets.
Annabelle Huang is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Altius Labs, an infrastructure company that designs high-performance blockchains.
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