An eight-year-old established exchange's "anti-consensus" choice: why give up easy profits and not treat trading as the ultimate goal?

Author: momo, ChainCatcher

After going through a few cycles, many crypto builders seem to have reached a “consensus”: no matter what you originally wanted to do, in the end you’re better off cutting into trading.

Take the former NFT blue-chip OpenSea as an example. Its transformation path is very typical. When the heat from the NFT market faded and revenue shrank to around $3 million per month on average, in October 2025 OpenSea simply pivoted again. It became an “everything can be traded” all-in-one platform, supporting tokens and memecoins on 22 chains.

As a result, in its first month after the pivot, trading volume surged to $2.6 billion, with nearly 90% coming from token trading. CEO Devin Finzer’s line, “You can’t fight the trend,” sounds like going with the flow—but it also carries a sense of reluctant compromise.

OpenSea is not a special case. Looking back at this bull market, cutting memecoin trading has become a “lifesaver all-purpose tool” for many projects. In the “2 notes for crypto builders in 2026” published by a16z earlier this year in January, partner Arianna Simpson also plainly said that this trend is accelerating: almost every well-performing crypto company has already shifted or is in the process of shifting to trading businesses.

While it’s not unreasonable to chase revenue through trading, what comes after that? This is how a “cotton candy experiment” for the crypto industry is taking shape: choosing the path that offers short-term gratification often comes at the cost of losing product depth.

As Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin pointed out in a recent discussion about decentralized social, if the industry merely stuffs a speculative token into a product and calls it “innovation,” then it’s just creating corporate waste.

If the endpoint of all innovation is only to achieve a higher turnover rate, what—if anything—can individuals, projects, and the industry as a whole still leave to this era?

The good news is that as the collective starts to reflect, differences are starting to emerge. In the big trend of “everyone is moving toward trading,” are there platforms like CoinW and other established exchanges exploring whether there’s another longer-term, more effective path?

The logic behind the “anti-consensus choice”

Why do we say that entering trading too early and only doing trading is not feasible? Friend.tech and Pump.fun—these two former star products—may help answer this question.

As a former top SocialFi product, Friend.tech rose and fell with trading. It started from the original goal of “social,” then pivoted directly into trading: making every KOL a tradable asset, with prices determined by buy and sell, and the platform taking a cut to profit. This model enabled the product to explode quickly, with fees spiking. Within just over a month of launching, it set a record for daily revenue exceeding that of Ethereum. But once speculation faded, the social relationships themselves did not have independent value left behind, nor could it retain any users. In the end, Friend.tech could only announce failure.

Pump.fun, meanwhile, pushed a trading-centered model to the extreme. With the rise of memecoins, platforms like Pump.fun that focus on memecoin trading made a fortune. But most trading is essentially a zero-sum game. Once the market turns bearish, a platform’s trading volume can drop by as much as 90% compared with its peak.

As of now, no clear answer has emerged on how to find more long-term use cases or a second growth curve.

For the industry as a whole, the proliferation of this “trading above all” model can only cause the ecosystem to become overly dependent on short-term speculation and fall into homogeneous competition, making it difficult to build real long-term value. This is also one important reason why the crypto industry has been criticized for lacking innovation in this cycle.

But if it can’t be only the trading path, where is the new way out?

Some different attempts are starting to show up in the industry. The starting point of this path isn’t to deny trading, but to redefine its role: trading should not be the end goal, but an entry point into a richer participation system. In other words, it can’t be that users can only speculate and trade on the platform; value should be generated across more “consumption” and participation scenarios.

This path is actually easy to understand. If you look back at traditional industries, any sustainable business model must allow users to naturally generate value through everyday use, participation, or consumption—only then can a platform build long-term relationships and ecosystem resources.

But this road may be destined to be hard to travel. It requires that the platform itself has enough capital and patience: it has to survive first, and then do those things that take longer to show results—such as cultivating developers, operating a community, or connecting to scenarios in the real world.

So for now, you can see that this kind of adjustment isn’t mainstream in the industry. It’s mainly being tried by platforms whose user base is solid and whose core business is relatively stable—such as CoinW. This established exchange already has a user base in the tens of millions, and its daily trading volume is also fairly stable, providing enough funds to support building an ecosystem with long-term value that may take time to bear fruit.

What’s the logic behind the “anti-consensus choice”?

For some crypto projects, though, cutting only into trading creates long-term survival problems. And for a trading platform like CoinW—which could clearly just “lie back and earn”—why would it be necessary to do something that’s slower to see results? By going back to CoinW’s public discussions and strategy with that question in mind, you can find some clues.

This may be related to the background of the CoinW team. Omar Al Yousif, a member of its board of directors, has extensive experience in traditional finance and investment. He currently also serves as Vice Chairman of 7-E Emirates Holding and a Partner at 10X Capital.

In multiple internal and public exchanges, he has mentioned that this “race to trade” and homogeneous competition are essentially the old playbook of traditional finance. When every player is competing over the same metric, what usually remains is only a mess left behind. It may look prosperous, but it’s actually consuming long-term value.

Right now, for an established platform like CoinW, building ecosystem capabilities may be not only about having the ability guaranteed by already-stable foundations, but also a strategic choice rooted in “foresight.” In the next round of competition, relying solely on trading becomes difficult to form an advantage. The earlier you lay out value scenarios beyond trading, the more likely you are to secure a first-mover advantage amid industry segmentation.

So how, specifically, do you implement value scenarios beyond trading? At its eight-year anniversary, CoinW announced that it had completed a full-stack upgrade. If you look closely at this upgrade, it can broadly be summarized as achieving it mainly through two strategies: an “inner loop” and an “outer loop.”

1. The inner loop: make it easier for users to stay

The inner loop can be understood as CoinW redesigning the user “stay path” within the platform. It no longer assumes that users will only repeatedly trade the same kind of assets. Instead, it aims to extend their effective participation time on the platform as much as possible.

For example, as exchange users, we usually start by operating with spot and futures trading that we’re most familiar with. But in reality, many people don’t just want to “place more orders.” They also want room to participate on-chain beyond market moves. On CoinW, this demand is not cut off—it’s picked up and connected along the way.

Under a unified account system, users don’t have to prepare additional wallets or handle Gas separately. They can quickly try more ways to play:

For example, on GemW, you can directly explore on-chain assets, with both costs and barriers kept very low. On DeriW, it’s also about perps, but the on-chain structure is more transparent. The zero-Gas design makes me more willing to try different strategies. And on PropW, trading is no longer just about personal profit and loss. A user’s trading ability itself can be treated as a kind of “skill,” supported with capital within the platform rules—so the way people participate changes as well.

In the short term, this design may not immediately amplify trading volume, but one very intuitive change is that I no longer leave the platform as soon as market activity cools down. When trading opportunities decrease, there are other participation methods to capture attention. And when new assets or玩法 appear, they can naturally connect into the existing path.

As a result, users’ psychological entry barrier to exploring new things drops noticeably, and their time spent on the platform increases—so participation stickiness also rises. From this perspective, the inner loop isn’t forcing users to trade more; it’s making it easier for users to stay.

2. The outer loop: move beyond pure trading and pure crypto scenarios

The outer loop, at its core, is CoinW proactively pulling the platform from a single “trading venue” into a larger industry ecosystem. By connecting outward, CoinW lets users and the platform participate together in project growth and resource allocation, instead of continuing to compete inward at the trading layer.

In specific terms, CoinW does not equate ecosystem cooperation with simply listing projects or swapping traffic. Instead, it builds deeper cooperative relationships with projects that have long-term potential. The platform opens real user entry points, provides liquidity and infrastructure support to the projects; and the projects are integrated into a long-term ecosystem structure rather than being one-time trading targets.

This thinking shows up in its industry collaboration methods. For example, through its flagship event WConnect, CoinW builds cross-ecosystem dialogue among exchanges, developer communities, and project teams. At the same time, it continues to participate in regional industry conferences such as Coinfest Asia, embedding the platform into a broader global crypto collaboration network—not just trading infrastructure.

For users, the participation logic changes accordingly. Users no longer only repeatedly trade established assets. They can get involved at the early stages of projects by using the products and participating in mechanisms, building more sustained relationships with projects—so their participation time is pushed noticeably earlier.

At the same time, CoinW is also trying to take crypto assets out of a purely financial context. In sports, it cooperates with events such as LALIGA La Liga and East Asian football tournaments. In culture, it sponsors events like TAIWAN GQ Style Fest, bringing crypto into more concrete public scenarios.

These outer-loop actions don’t pursue trading-volume expansion in the short term. Instead, they change the platform’s role—from a single matchmaker to a hub connecting projects, users, and real-world scenarios. In an industry long dominated by trading logic, this choice may not show results quickly, but it provides confidence for the platform’s future long-term competition.

Conclusion

Looking back, this kind of industry split is hard to judge by just one or two sets of data in terms of effectiveness. But it at least reflects a different understanding by a category of platforms about the industry’s long-term shape.

As trading capabilities gradually become standardized, the real differences may not come from higher-frequency matching efficiency, but from whether there’s a willingness to reserve space for value beyond trading. CoinW’s choice is precisely the attempt unfolding under this kind of judgment.

CoinW’s eight-year anniversary theme, “Trot On To Infinity”—rather than saying it’s just a slogan, it’s better understood as an attitude. It doesn’t provide a fixed endpoint; it assumes this is a long-distance run that requires patience and ongoing adjustments to direction.

In a highly utilitarian market environment, this path may not be the most convenient choice. But it offers at least one possibility: when the tide goes out, what sustains a platform’s continued growth may not be more “capital-pumping” capacity, but whether it’s truly rooted in ecosystem soil with more long-term value.

Disclaimer:

This article is for general information only and does not constitute any investment or legal advice. The services or products mentioned in the article may not be available in all regions. Crypto asset trading is highly risky—please fully understand the relevant risks before participating.