Crypto’s Future Lies in Pricing Existing Assets, Not Creating New Ones

pricing existing assets — The future of cryptocurrency may hinge less on inventing novel digital assets and more on building infrastructure to price a vast universe of existing real-world assets, according to an opinion piece by Annabelle Huang, co-founder and CEO of Altius.

Huang argues that the industry’s focus has matured from its early days of creating new asset classes like Bitcoin, governance tokens, and NFTs. The current shift is toward creating new markets for things that already exist but previously lacked real-time, continuously tradable venues.

She points to three major examples of this trend: prediction markets, oil and gold perpetuals on the Hyperliquid exchange, and pre-IPO perpetuals. These products use blockchain technology to establish pricing and trading mechanisms for commodities, private company shares, and event outcomes.

The core thesis is that blockchain’s ability to expand the boundaries of what can be priced in a transparent, accessible market could prove more consequential for finance than the creation of purely digital assets. This represents a fundamental evolution in the sector’s application and value proposition.