However, as various asset classes such as stocks, bonds, and real estate become tokenized, Uniswap's target market will expand infinitely. The global stock market size is approximately $150 trillion, and the bond market size is $350 trillion. Once Uniswap can tap into these sectors, the market space will far exceed the crypto market itself, potentially reaching 100 times.
This logic also applies to other crypto applications, such as Hyperliquid, Aave, and Chainlink, which is positioned differently. People always view them as "crypto-native products," just like everyone once thought Amazon was just an online bookstore.
There is now a consensus in the industry that tokenization will eventually penetrate all asset classes. But investors have not yet applied this logic to the valuation of platforms carrying asset transactions.
Misconception 2: Underestimating the Competitiveness of Crypto-Native Projects Relative to Traditional Financial Institutions
Since I entered the crypto industry, there has always been a mainstream view: traditional financial giants will eventually enter the game and easily crush crypto startups.
The most typical example is PayPal launching its stablecoin in 2023. PayPal is a globally renowned brand and a leading payment enterprise. People believed that while lesser-known institutions like Circle and Tether dominated the stablecoin market, PayPal's entry would bring traditional financial credibility, and funds would inevitably flock to PayPal.
However, the facts are not so. To this day, Tether and Circle combined occupy 88% of the stablecoin market share, while PayPal's stablecoin market share is only about 1%.
Similarly, when Fidelity launched its crypto custody business in 2019, many asserted it would monopolize the sector. Fidelity is a top-tier financial institution in global credibility. Its crypto custody business has developed reasonably well, but the largest crypto custodian in the US remains the crypto-native enterprise Coinbase.
There are many similar cases. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange was once favored to dominate the crypto derivatives market, but its trading volume is negligible compared to the offshore perpetual contract market; Bakkt, created by the Intercontinental Exchange, was originally seen as a mainstream on-ramp for the crypto industry, but ultimately developed below expectations.
Why do crypto-native projects continue to win? They iterate faster, and all resources are focused on the crypto sector; most importantly, they have already accumulated user and community trust. Simply put, within the crypto world, far more people understand and trust Tether than trust PayPal.
Of course, there are counterexamples; BlackRock owns the largest Bitcoin ETF (I know this firsthand). The general rule is that traditional financial platforms excel at traditional financial categories; while crypto-native applications demonstrate extremely strong user stickiness in crypto scenarios. I believe this trend will continue.
The corresponding investment opportunity lies in this: next time a traditional financial giant loudly announces entry into the crypto-native sector, do not blindly follow the market's optimistic consensus. As the industry enters the next development cycle, more confidence should be placed in mature crypto-native leaders.
Misconception 3: Seriously Underestimating Future On-Chain Trading Volume, Actual Trading Volume May Expand 10–100 Times
Most blockchain profit models rely on transaction fees. When investors evaluate the value of a public chain, they are accustomed to referencing current real-world data: current stock trading volume, current number of payments.
This valuation approach contains significant biases.
Take stock trading as an example: Currently, US stock trading hours are Monday to Friday, 9:30–16:00 ET, only 33 hours per week. After entering the era of asset tokenization, stocks can be traded 7×24 hours uninterrupted year-round, reaching 168 hours per week, a direct 5-fold increase in duration. I'm not saying trading volume will necessarily grow 5 times synchronously, but liquidity expansion is almost inevitable.
This does not yet account for the changes brought by artificial intelligence. Combined with 24/7 trading and technology iteration, in the future people will likely use AI agents to monitor investment portfolios and execute trades automatically. Will AI trading be 2 times? 10 times? Or 100 times more frequent than humans?
Combining the two variables of 24/7 trading and intelligent agents, it is completely reasonable for the number of stock transactions to easily achieve 10-fold growth, with 50 times or even 100 times also within the realm of imagination. This means that public chains and applications handling transactions will gain significantly increased revenue. Although rising trading volume may lead to lower per-transaction fees, such a magnitude of volume increase is enough to cover the impact of fee declines. The same applies to the payment sector; the scale of payments driven by intelligent agents may far exceed current levels in the future.
Summary
The above three misconceptions are not themselves low-level errors. Estimating market space based on existing volume, trusting well-known big brands, and linearly extrapolating the future based on current data are all very natural ways of thinking for ordinary people. But the speed of change in the crypto industry has far exceeded the update speed of this traditional thinking.
The gap between the industry's evolution speed and the public's perception catch-up speed is exactly where the huge opportunities lie.
