Crypto is expanding the boundaries of what can be priced

In its infancy, the crypto sector was bent on creating entirely new types of assets. First came Bitcoin and its derivatives, then Ether and its competitors. Governance tokens, NFTs, and memecoins all followed a formula: create a new digital asset class and build a market around it.

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.

Elections attract global interest. So do inflation reports, commodity prices, private company valuations, and major corporate milestones. The crypto industry is now pursuing the idea that attention itself is economically valuable. If people care about any given development, there is probably demand for a market that reflects collective expectations about it.

In effect, blockchain technology enables the transformation of observation into participation from anywhere in the world. Rather than simply watching events unfold, individuals can contribute to a market-based assessment of what those events are worth or how likely they are to occur.

So there is an expansion of scope of what can become measurable through markets. Categories of human activity that were previously discussed qualitatively can now be quantified through continuously updated prices.

At the same time, blockchain technology is redefining the role of price discovery itself. Traditional finance often treats price discovery as a byproduct of trading activity; investors trade assets, and prices emerge as a consequence. But the crypto space increasingly treats price discovery as the product.

The appeal of pre-IPO perpetual futures illustrates this dynamic. Traders may never own shares in a private company, but they value having a real-time market signal regarding its perceived worth. In this sense, the market becomes an information engine. The price is not merely the result of activity; it is the primary output.

Traditional financial markets are sporadic. Even with publicly-traded companies, price discovery only occurs during business hours. And it’s worse for private firms, which are repriced only during funding rounds or periodic valuation exercises. Despite the fact that important information can emerge at any time, conventional markets often cannot react immediately.

But the defining characteristic of blockchain-based markets is that they operate continuously, on a 24/7 basis. That means they can absorb information as it emerges rather than waiting for the next market session or valuation event. The result is a more responsive, organic mechanism for assessing value.

Furthermore, blockchain-based markets are much more accessible than conventional ones. You typically need accreditation, special relationships, and significant capital to trade private equity, which restricts the opportunity to a small group of participants. We can now see the crypto industry taking a different approach by allowing anyone with an Internet connection to express their market views. If we take the view that markets are systems for aggregating information, then expanding participation improves the quality of that information.