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

Many crypto builders seem to have reached a “consensus” after going through several cycles: no matter what you initially intended to do, it’s ultimately better to pivot to trading.

Take the former NFT leader OpenSea as an example; its transformation path is very typical. When the NFT market cooled down and revenue shrank to around $3 million per month, OpenSea simply pivoted in October 2025, becoming an all-encompassing platform for “trading anything,” supporting tokens and memecoins across 22 chains.

As a result, the trading volume soared to $2.6 billion in the first month of transformation, with nearly 90% coming from token trading. CEO Devin Finzer’s statement, “You can’t fight the trend,” sounds like riding the wave but also reveals a sense of resignation and compromise.

OpenSea is not an exception. Looking back at this bull market, pivoting to memecoin trading has become a “lifeline” for many projects. In the “2 notes for crypto builders in 2026” report released by a16z in January this year, partner Arianna Simpson candidly pointed out that this trend is accelerating: almost every well-performing crypto company has already shifted or is shifting to trading.

While pivoting to trading for revenue is understandable, what comes next? This is evolving into a kind of “marshmallow experiment” for the crypto industry: pursuing short-term gratification often comes at the cost of losing product depth.

As Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin pointed out in a recent discussion on decentralized social media: if the industry merely shoves a speculative token into a product and claims to be “innovative,” it’s just creating corporate garbage.

If the end goal of all innovation is merely to exchange for higher turnover rates, what can individuals, projects, and this industry truly leave behind for this era?

Fortunately, as the collective begins to reflect, divisions are starting to appear. Amid the overarching trend of “everyone going towards trading,” some established trading platforms, like CoinW, are exploring whether there might be a more effective long-term path.

Divisions Amid Industry Dilemmas

Why is it said that entering trading too early and focusing solely on trading is not feasible? Friend.tech and Pump.fun, two former star products, might provide an answer to this question.

As a former SocialFi leader, Friend.tech succeeded through trading and failed through trading. It aimed to combine social intent directly with trading, making every KOL a tradable asset, with prices determined by supply and demand, and the platform taking a cut. This model allowed the product to explode quickly, with skyrocketing transaction fees, and within just over a month of establishment, it set a record for daily revenue exceeding Ethereum’s. However, once speculation faded, the social relationships themselves left no independent value, and no users remained, leading Friend.tech to ultimately declare failure.

On the other hand, Pump.fun pushed the trading-centric model to the extreme, profiting immensely from the rise of memecoins. However, most trading itself is a zero-sum game; once the market turns bearish, the platform’s trading volume can plummet by 90% compared to its peak.

How to find longer-term scenarios or a second growth curve remains unanswered.

For the entire industry, the rampant “trading supremacy” model only makes the ecosystem overly reliant on short-term games, falling into homogeneous competition, making it difficult to establish true long-term value. This is also a significant reason why the crypto industry has been criticized for lacking innovation during this cycle.

But if relying solely on trading is not the only path, where is the new way out?

Some different attempts are beginning to emerge in the industry. The starting point of this path is not to deny trading but to redefine its position: to make trading not the endpoint but rather the entrance to a richer participation ecosystem. In other words, users should not only speculate and trade on the platform but also generate value in more “consumption” and participation scenarios.

This path is not hard to understand; looking back at traditional fields, any sustainable business model must allow users to generate value naturally through their daily use, participation, or consumption, allowing such platforms to build long-term relationships and ecological resources.

However, this path is likely to be challenging. It requires the platform itself to have enough capital and patience, needing to survive first before engaging in activities that yield slow results, such as nurturing developers, managing communities, or connecting with real-world scenarios.

So currently, you can see that these adjustments are not mainstream in the industry; they are primarily being attempted by older projects with sufficient user bases and relatively stable business fundamentals. For example, CoinW, an established exchange, has reached a user scale of tens of millions, with relatively stable daily trading volume, and has enough liquidity to support building a long-term, valuable ecosystem that may yield slow short-term results.

What is the Logic Behind the “Counter-Consensus Choice”?

For some crypto projects, simply pivoting to trading signifies long-term survival issues. Yet for trading platforms like CoinW, which can easily profit, why go for slower-yielding endeavors? Reflecting on CoinW’s public discussions and strategies can reveal some clues.

This may relate to the background of the CoinW team. Its board member Omar Al Yousif has deep experience in traditional finance and investment, currently serving as Vice Chairman of 7-E Emirates Holding and a partner at 10X Capital.

He has mentioned in various internal and public exchanges that this “trading competition” and homogeneous competition is essentially the old path of traditional finance: when all players are focused on the same indicators, what remains is often just a mess. It looks prosperous but is actually overextending long-term value.

Currently, for established platforms like CoinW, promoting ecosystem construction may not only stem from the capability guaranteed by an already stable foundation, but also be a strategic choice made with “foresight”: in the next round of competition, relying solely on trading will be insufficient to form an advantage. The earlier one lays out value scenarios beyond trading, the more likely one is to occupy a first-mover advantage amid industry differentiation.

So, how to specifically implement value scenarios beyond trading? CoinW announced a full-stack upgrade at its eighth anniversary milestone. Upon closer inspection of this upgrade, it can be summarized that they primarily aim to achieve this through two strategies: “internal loop” and “external loop.”

1. Internal Loop: Making it Easier for Users to Stay

The internal loop can be understood as CoinW redesigning the “stay path” for users within the platform: no longer assuming that users will only repeatedly trade the same category of assets, but rather extending their effective participation time on the platform as much as possible.

For example, as exchange users, we typically start by engaging with the most familiar spot and contract trading. However, many people are not just looking to “place more orders” but are hoping for other on-chain participation opportunities beyond market movements. On CoinW, this demand is not cut off but rather captured and addressed.

Under a unified account system, users no longer need to prepare wallets or deal with Gas fees to quickly try more diverse play options:

For instance, on GemW, users can directly explore on-chain assets, with costs and thresholds significantly lowered; in DeriW, while still doing perpetual trading, the on-chain structure is more transparent, and the zero Gas design encourages me to try different strategies; in PropW, trading is no longer just about bearing profits and losses; users’ trading capabilities can be treated as a “skill” that receives funding support within platform rules, and the means of participation change accordingly.

In the short term, such design may not immediately amplify trading volume, but a very tangible change is that I no longer leave the platform immediately due to market cooling. When trading opportunities diminish, other participation options can sustain my attention; and when new assets or play styles emerge, they can naturally integrate into existing pathways.

The result is that the psychological barrier for users to explore new things is significantly lowered, and their stay time on the platform is extended, increasing engagement. From this perspective, the internal loop is not pressuring users to “trade more,” but rather making it easier for them to stay.

2. External Loop: Moving Beyond Pure Trading and Pure Crypto Scenarios

The external loop essentially involves CoinW actively pulling the platform from a singular “trading space” into a broader industry ecosystem. By connecting externally, CoinW allows users and the platform to participate together in project growth and resource allocation rather than continuing to engage in internal trading competition.

In practice, CoinW does not equate ecological cooperation with simply listing coins or traffic exchange; rather, it establishes deeper cooperative relationships with projects that have long-term potential. The platform opens real user entry points, liquidity, and infrastructure support to projects, which are then incorporated into a long-term ecological structure rather than being treated as one-off trading targets.

This mindset is reflected in its industry collaboration approach, such as through flagship events like WConnect, where CoinW builds cross-ecological dialogues between exchanges, developer communities, and project parties; simultaneously, it continues to participate in regional industry conferences like Coinfest Asia, embedding the platform within a broader global crypto collaboration network, rather than just as a trading infrastructure.

For users, the logic of participation subsequently changes. Users are no longer limited to repeatedly trading predetermined assets but can engage during the early stages of a project, establishing more sustainable relationships through product use and participation mechanisms, with their involvement time noticeably advanced.

At the same time, CoinW is also attempting to take crypto assets beyond pure financial contexts. In the sports domain, it collaborates with events such as LALIGA La Liga and the East Asian Football Championship; in the cultural realm, it sponsors events like TAIWAN GQ Style Fest, bringing crypto into more tangible public scenarios.

These external loop actions do not aim for an immediate increase in trading volume but change the platform’s role, shifting from a mere matchmaker to a hub connecting projects, users, and real-world scenarios. In an industry long dominated by trading logic, this choice may not yield short-term effects, but it provides the platform with confidence for long-term competition.

Conclusion

Looking back, this industry division is difficult to assess with just one or two sets of data. However, it at least reflects a different understanding of the long-term form of the industry from a certain type of platform.

As trading capabilities gradually become standardized, true differentiation may not come from higher-frequency matching efficiency but rather from whether one is willing to reserve space for value beyond trading. CoinW’s choice is an attempt made under this judgment.

CoinW’s eighth anniversary theme “Trot On To Infinity” is less a slogan and more an attitude: it does not provide a definite endpoint but assumes that this is a long race requiring patience and constant direction adjustments.

In a highly utilitarian market environment, such a path may not be the most clever, but it at least offers a possibility that when the tide recedes, what sustains the platform’s continued growth may not be a greater “extraction ability,” but whether it is genuinely rooted in a more long-term valuable ecological soil.

Disclaimer:

The content of this article is for general informational reference only and does not constitute any investment or legal advice. The services or products mentioned may not be available in all regions. Trading in crypto assets carries high risks; please fully understand the associated risks before participating.