When I wrote the first line of ViaBTC’s mining pool code in 2016, crypto was still a niche community of miners, developers, and early enthusiasts. Bitcoin was a niche topic, stablecoins weren’t widely used, and the ideas we’d later talk about endlessly—DeFi, NFTs, RWAs—didn’t yet exist in any real form.
Ten years later, the industry looks nothing like that. Bitcoin has been integrated into the ETF framework, stablecoins have become a meaningful dollar rail in some regions, and on-chain trading and stablecoin settlement have grown too large for traditional finance to ignore.
But the change runs deeper than that. What actually happened over these ten years? On ViaBTC’s tenth anniversary, I want to share how I’ve come to understand the value of crypto.
What the Past Decade Left Behind
Judged only by price and market cap, the last decade of crypto looks like one long fireworks show—dazzling and loud. But beyond the price charts, something quieter was happening: a few of the hardest-to-move pieces of traditional financial infrastructure were being rewritten, one algorithm at a time.
