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

Author: momo, ChainCatcher

After several cycles, many crypto builders seem to have reached a “consensus”: no matter what you initially set out to do, it often ends up being about trading.

Take OpenSea, once the leading NFT platform, as a typical example of transformation. When the NFT market cooled and revenue shrank to around $3 million per month, OpenSea pivoted in October 2025, becoming a “multi-asset trading platform” supporting tokens and memecoins across 22 chains.

As a result, in its first month after the shift, trading volume soared to $2.6 billion, with nearly 90% from token trading. CEO Devin Finzer’s remark, “You can’t fight the trend,” sounds like going with the flow, but also reveals a sense of helplessness and compromise.

OpenSea is not an exception. Looking back at this bull cycle, memecoin trading became a “lifeline” for many projects. In a16z’s January report, “2 notes for crypto builders in 2026,” partner Arianna Simpson openly states that this trend is accelerating: almost every successful crypto company has shifted or is shifting toward trading activities.

While focusing on trading for revenue is understandable, then what? This has evolved into a “marshmallow experiment” for the crypto industry: pursuing short-term gratification often comes at the cost of product depth.

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

If all innovation ends up just increasing turnover, what long-term value can individuals, projects, and the industry leave behind?

Fortunately, as the industry begins to reflect, divergences are emerging. Amid the trend of “everyone moving toward trading,” some veteran platforms like CoinW are exploring whether there’s a more sustainable, long-term path.

Divergence in Industry Dilemmas

Why is early entry into trading and solely doing trading unsustainable? Friend.tech and Pump.fun, two former star products, might hold the answer.

Friend.tech, once the top SocialFi platform, succeeded and failed through trading. It aimed to create social connections but pivoted directly to trading, turning each KOL into a tradable asset, with prices set by buy/sell activity and platform fees taking a cut. This model led to rapid growth and skyrocketing fees, setting a daily revenue record surpassing Ethereum within just a month. But once speculation faded, the social relationships had no intrinsic value or lasting user base, and Friend.tech eventually failed.

Pump.fun pushed the trading-centric model to the extreme. The rise of memecoins allowed platforms like Pump.fun to make huge profits. However, most trades are zero-sum, and in a bear market, trading volume can plummet by 90% from peak.

The question remains: how to find a longer-term scenario or second growth curve? The answer is still unclear.

For the entire industry, this “trade-first” approach leads to over-reliance on short-term gains, resulting in homogeneous competition and a lack of genuine long-term value. This is a key reason why this cycle’s crypto industry is criticized for lacking innovation.

But if trading alone isn’t the only path, where are the new opportunities?

Some industry players are beginning to experiment differently. This new thinking doesn’t deny trading but redefines its role: making trading a gateway, not the endpoint, to a richer participation ecosystem. In other words, users shouldn’t be limited to speculation; they can also create value through consumption and engagement in more diverse scenarios.

This approach is understandable when looking at traditional sectors. Any sustainable business model must allow users to naturally generate value through daily use, participation, or consumption, enabling platforms to build long-term relationships and ecosystems.

However, this path is challenging. It requires platforms to have sufficient capital and patience—surviving first, then investing in slow-to-yield efforts like developer cultivation, community management, or connecting to real-world scenarios.

Currently, such adjustments are not mainstream but are being attempted mainly by established projects with a stable user base and solid operations. For example, CoinW, an old exchange with millions of users and steady daily trading volume, has enough capital flow to support building a long-term, value-driven ecosystem that may take time to show results.

The Logic Behind the “Counter-Consensus” Choice

For some crypto projects, solely focusing on trading poses long-term survival issues. But why would a platform like CoinW, which can earn steadily from transaction fees, choose to pursue slower, more complex initiatives? Looking into CoinW’s public discussions and strategy offers some clues.

It’s likely related to the background of the CoinW team. Board member Omar Al Yousif has extensive experience in traditional finance and investment. He is Vice Chairman of 7-E Emirates Holding and a partner at 10X Capital.

In multiple internal and public discussions, he has emphasized that aggressive trading and homogenous competition are old-school approaches in traditional finance: when all players chase the same metrics, the result is often just chaos. While seemingly prosperous, it actually erodes long-term value.

For a platform like CoinW, building a broader ecosystem isn’t just about leveraging its stable foundation; it’s a strategic move to prepare for future competition. Relying solely on trading will be insufficient to maintain advantage. The earlier it invests in value scenarios beyond trading, the better positioned it will be in industry segmentation.

So how to implement value beyond trading? CoinW announced a full-stack upgrade at its 8th anniversary, which can be summarized as focusing on two strategies: “internal circulation” and “external circulation.”

1. Internal Circulation: Making Users Stay Longer

Internal circulation involves redesigning the user journey within the platform: not assuming users will repeatedly trade the same assets, but extending their meaningful engagement time.

For example, as a trader, most start with familiar spot and futures trading. But many don’t just want to “make more trades”; they also want to participate in other on-chain activities beyond market movements. CoinW aims to meet this demand seamlessly.

With a unified account system, users no longer need separate wallets or worry about Gas fees to try different activities:

• On GemW, users can explore on-chain assets directly with low costs and barriers.
• On DeriW, perpetual trading is more transparent, and zero Gas design encourages trying different strategies.
• On PropW, trading isn’t just about profit and loss; users’ trading skills can be recognized as a “skill” and supported with platform funds, changing the participation mode.

In the short term, this design may not immediately boost trading volume, but a clear effect is that users won’t leave just because market activity cools. When trading opportunities decline, other ways to participate can keep their attention. When new assets or features emerge, they can naturally be integrated into existing pathways.

The result: lower psychological barriers for exploring new things, longer platform engagement, and increased user stickiness. From this perspective, internal circulation isn’t about forcing more trades but about making it easier for users to stay.

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

External circulation means actively connecting the platform to a broader industry ecosystem. By linking externally, CoinW involves users and the platform in project growth and resource allocation, rather than just competing on trading.

Practically, CoinW doesn’t treat ecosystem partnerships as merely token listings or traffic swaps. Instead, it builds deeper collaborations with promising projects—offering real user access, liquidity, and infrastructure support—integrating projects into a long-term ecosystem rather than one-off trading targets.

This approach is reflected in initiatives like the flagship event WConnect, which facilitates cross-ecosystem dialogue among exchanges, developers, and projects; and ongoing participation in regional industry events like Coinfest Asia, embedding the platform into a global crypto collaboration network beyond just trading.

For users, this shifts the engagement logic: no longer just trading the same assets repeatedly, but early involvement in projects through product use and participation, fostering more sustained relationships and moving engagement forward in time.

CoinW is also trying to bring crypto assets into broader social contexts. For example, partnering with La Liga, the East Asian Football Championship, and sponsoring events like TAIWAN GQ Style Fest, making crypto more tangible in public scenes.

These external actions don’t aim for immediate trading volume growth but transform the platform’s role—from a simple matching engine to a hub connecting projects, users, and real-world scenarios. While this may not produce quick results, it provides a foundation for long-term competitiveness in an industry historically dominated by trading logic.

Conclusion

Looking back, these industry divergences are hard to quantify with just a few data points. But they reflect different understandings of the industry’s long-term future.

As trading becomes more standardized, true differentiation may no longer come from higher-frequency matching but from whether a platform is willing to reserve space for value beyond trading. CoinW’s approach is an attempt based on this judgment.

CoinW’s 8th anniversary theme, “Trot On To Infinity,” is less a slogan and more an attitude: it doesn’t specify an endpoint but accepts that this is a long-distance race requiring patience and continuous course correction.

In a highly utilitarian market environment, this path may not be the most clever, but it offers a possibility: when the tide recedes, what sustains a platform’s growth may not be greater “fee extraction” but whether it is truly rooted in a long-term valuable ecosystem.