Limited Utility for Existing Assets
Limited Utility for Existing Assets: A Persistent Nightmare for Holders
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Limited Utility for Existing Assets: A Persistent Nightmare for Holders
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Sadly, the majority of assets have no utility beyond governance and staking yield. A fraction of them are allowed on lending protocols. For most, the only option is to hold and pray for an upside given their limited utility.
Holders often pray for some way these tokens can become useful, for their own sake, as they endure the PTSD of price actions — especially when every coin seems to be pumping except the ones they hold (which is often the sad truth). Perhaps if they could enjoy the price action of shiny new assets with their existing portfolio, they might just be able to endure the nightmare.
In the early days, we had Etherdelta — one of the first spot market CLOBs powered by ETH. Then came Poloniex, a once-popular centralized exchange dominated by BTC pairs. Later, BitMEX revolutionized the market with perpetual swaps powered by BTC.
Imagine the euphoria: you bought BTC, then used it to buy ETH. As ETH appreciated in BTC terms and BTC soared against USD, your returns multiplied. You could even use your BTC to long or short other assets, diversifying your portfolio.
Those days are long gone. Now, you can’t even long BTC with anything beyond blue-chip tokens or a few stablecoins at best. Even BTC — the asset with the highest market cap and largest holder base — has almost no utility in derivatives today.
If you lost USD in BTC-based perpetual futures position earlier, Bitcoin’s price appreciation could have helped recover some of your losses. However, with the majority of derivatives now collateralized by stablecoins, the opportunity for any upside recovery has been eliminated.
On-chain markets urgently need a transformative boost. To unlock their true potential, they must be powered by the most secure and highest Store of Value (SoV) asset, creating a foundation for robust, efficient, and inclusive global DeFi ecosystems. Once established, other assets will naturally follow, amplifying the ecosystem’s reach and impact.
