The "anti-consensus" choice of an eight-year-old established exchange: Why give up easy profits and not treat trading as the end point?

Many crypto builders seem to have reached a "consensus" after several cycles: no matter what you initially intended to do, it’s better to pivot to trading in the end.

Take the former NFT leader OpenSea as an example; its transformation path is very typical. When the NFT market cooled down and revenues shrank to around $3 million per month, OpenSea simply pivoted in October 2025, becoming a comprehensive platform for "anything can be traded," supporting tokens and memecoins across 22 chains.

As a result, the trading volume surged to $2.6 billion in the first month of the pivot, with nearly 90% coming from token trading. CEO Devin Finzer's remark that "you can't fight the trend" sounds like going with the flow, but it also reveals a sense of helplessness in having to 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” 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 pivoted or is in the process of pivoting to trading.

While pivoting to trading for revenue is understandable, what comes next? This is evolving into a "marshmallow experiment" for the crypto industry: pursuing short-term satisfaction 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 claims to be "innovative," it is merely creating corporate waste.

If the endpoint of all innovation is merely to achieve a higher turnover rate, what can individuals, projects, and the industry leave behind for this era?

Fortunately, as the collective begins to reflect, divisions are starting to emerge. Under the overarching trend of "everyone moving towards trading," some established trading platforms like CoinW are beginning to explore whether there is a longer-term, more effective path.

Divisions Amidst Industry Dilemmas

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

Friend.tech, once a top player in SocialFi, succeeded and failed through trading. It directly pivoted to trading under the guise of social interaction, making every KOL a tradable asset with prices determined by buy and sell, and the platform taking a cut. This model led to rapid product explosion and skyrocketing fees, setting a record for daily earnings exceeding Ethereum within just over a month of its establishment. However, once speculation faded, the social relationships themselves left no independent value and could not retain any users, ultimately leading Friend.tech to announce its 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 is a zero-sum game; once the market turns bearish, the platform's trading volume can drop 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 leads to an ecosystem overly reliant on short-term games, falling into homogeneous competition, making it difficult to solidify true long-term value. This is also a significant reason why the crypto industry has been criticized for lacking innovation in this cycle.

But if we cannot rely solely on trading, where is the new path?

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: making trading not the endpoint but an entry point to a richer participation system. In other words, users should not only speculate on the platform but also generate value in more "consumption" and participation scenarios.

This path is not difficult to understand; looking back at traditional fields, any sustainable business model must allow users to naturally generate value during daily use, participation, or consumption, so that the platform can solidify long-term relationships and ecological resources.

However, this path may be destined to be challenging. It requires the platform itself to have sufficient capital and patience, needing to survive first before engaging in those slow-yielding activities, such as nurturing developers, managing communities, or connecting real-world scenarios.

Thus, currently, you can see that this adjustment is not the mainstream of the industry; it is mainly some established projects with a sufficient user base and relatively stable business fundamentals that are trying. For example, CoinW, an established exchange, has reached a user scale of tens of millions, with relatively stable daily trading volume, and has enough capital flow to support building a long-term valuable ecosystem, even if it yields slow short-term results.

What is the Logic Behind the "Counter-Consensus Choice"?

But for some crypto projects, pivoting solely to trading signifies a long-term survival issue, while for a trading platform like CoinW, which could easily profit, why must it engage in these slower-yielding activities? Looking back at CoinW's public discussions and strategies with this question in mind, some clues can be found.

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 Partner at 10X Capital.

He has mentioned in several internal and public communications that this race to compete in trading and homogeneous competition is essentially the old path of traditional finance: when all players are competing on the same metric, what often remains is just a mess. It appears prosperous but is actually over-drafting long-term value.

Currently, for established platforms like CoinW, promoting ecological construction may not only stem from the ability guaranteed by an existing stable foundation but also represents a strategic choice made under "long-term consideration": in the next round of competition, relying solely on trading will be difficult to form an advantage; the earlier one lays out value scenarios beyond trading, the more likely they are to gain a first-mover advantage in industry differentiation.

So how specifically to implement value scenarios beyond trading? CoinW announced a full-stack upgrade at its eighth anniversary, and a closer look at this upgrade can be summarized as mainly achieving it through two strategies: "internal circulation" and "external circulation."

1. Internal Circulation: Making It Easier for Users to Stay

Internal circulation 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 type of assets, but rather extending their effective participation time on the platform as much as possible.

For example, as exchange users, we generally start operations from the most familiar spot and contract trading. However, many people do not just want to "place more orders," but hope for other on-chain participation spaces beyond the market. On CoinW, this demand is not cut off but is instead caught and addressed.

Under a unified account system, users do not need to prepare wallets or handle gas fees separately, allowing them to quickly try more gameplay:

For instance, on GemW, users can directly explore on-chain assets, with costs and thresholds significantly lowered; in DeriW, while still doing perpetual contracts, the on-chain structure is more transparent, and the zero gas design makes me more willing to try different strategies; in PropW, trading is no longer just about self-risk, as users' trading abilities can be treated as a "skill," receiving financial support within platform rules, thus changing the way of participation.

In the short term, such design may not immediately amplify trading volume, but a very intuitive change is that I no longer leave the platform immediately when the market cools down. When trading opportunities decrease, other participation methods can capture attention; and when new assets or gameplay emerge, they can naturally integrate into the existing path.

The result is that the psychological threshold for users to explore new things is significantly lowered, the time spent on the platform is extended, and participation stickiness increases. From this perspective, internal circulation is not about forcing users to "trade more," but about making it easier for users to stay.

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

External circulation, in essence, is CoinW actively pulling the platform from a single "trading ground" into a larger industry ecosystem. By connecting externally, CoinW allows users and the platform to participate together in project growth and resource allocation, rather than continuing to compete at the trading level.

In terms of specific practices, CoinW does not equate ecological cooperation with listing coins or traffic exchange but 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 one-off trading targets.

This thinking is reflected in its industry collaboration methods, such as through flagship events like WConnect, CoinW builds cross-ecosystem dialogues between exchanges, developer communities, and project parties; at the same time, it continues to participate in regional industry conferences like Coinfest Asia, embedding the platform into a broader global crypto collaboration network, not just as a trading infrastructure.

For users, the logic of participation changes accordingly. Users no longer trade repeatedly around established assets but can intervene in projects at an early stage, establishing more sustained relationships through product usage and participation mechanisms, with participation time significantly advanced.

At the same time, CoinW is also trying to bring crypto assets out of pure financial contexts. In the sports field, it collaborates with events like La Liga and the East Asian Football Championship; in the cultural field, it sponsors events like TAIWAN GQ Style Fest, bringing crypto into more tangible public scenarios.

These external circulation actions do not pursue amplified trading volume in the short term but change the platform's role from a mere matcher to a hub connecting projects, users, and real scenarios. In an industry long dominated by trading logic, this choice may not yield immediate results but provides the platform with confidence for long-term competition in the future.

Conclusion

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

As trading capabilities gradually become standardized, the real difference may not come from higher-frequency matching efficiency but 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 of a slogan and more of a stance: it does not provide a definite endpoint but assumes that this is a long run that requires patience and constant direction correction.

In a highly utilitarian market environment, this path may not be the most convenient, but it at least offers a possibility that when the tide recedes, what supports the platform's continued growth may not be a greater "extraction ability," but whether it is truly 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 in the text may not be available in all regions. Trading crypto assets carries high risks; please fully understand the relevant risks before participating.