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Key Takeaways
- Huang says platforms are building real-time markets for election outcomes, commodities and private company valuations rather than creating new asset classes.
- She argues crypto treats price discovery as the product itself, though holding a perpetual contract on a private company is not equity ownership.
- Huang says continuous global pricing needs better blockchain throughput, latency, liquidity and reliability, the infrastructure layer her own firm builds.
Annabelle Huang, co-founder and CEO of blockchain infrastructure company Altius Labs, argues the crypto industry’s defining activity is shifting away from inventing new digital assets and toward building markets that can price things that previously had no continuous market at all. In a column, she points to prediction markets, commodity perpetual contracts and pre-IPO perpetual futures as early examples of that shift already underway.
From New Assets to New Markets
Huang traces crypto’s early years to a pattern of creating new asset classes and building markets around them, pointing to Bitcoin, Ether, governance tokens, NFTs and memecoins as examples of that formula. She argues the industry’s more recent activity looks different: rather than inventing new assets, platforms are building continuously tradable markets around things that already exist but previously lacked a real-time price, including election outcomes, commodity prices and private company valuations.
Prediction markets, Hyperliquid’s oil and gold perpetual contracts, and pre-IPO perpetual futures products are the examples Huang cites. In her framing, these products do not create a new asset so much as they create a new venue for pricing something that was previously assessed only periodically or informally.
Treating Price Discovery as the Product Itself
Huang argues traditional financial markets generally treat price discovery as a byproduct of trading activity, with prices emerging from investors buying and selling an asset for other reasons. She contends crypto markets increasingly treat price discovery as the primary product itself, pointing to pre-IPO perpetual futures as an example: traders using those products typically never own actual shares in the underlying private company, but value having a continuous market signal reflecting the company’s perceived worth.
She contrasts that structure with traditional markets for private companies, which are typically repriced only during funding rounds or periodic valuation exercises, leaving significant gaps in how current information gets reflected in a company’s assessed value. Blockchain-based markets, in her view, can instead operate continuously and incorporate new information as it emerges rather than waiting for a scheduled pricing event.
Broader Access, but Exposure Rather Than Ownership
Huang also argues blockchain-based markets lower the barriers to participating in pricing activity that has traditionally required accreditation, specific relationships or significant capital, such as trading private equity. She frames wider participation as improving the quality of the resulting price signal, on the premise that markets function as systems for aggregating dispersed information, and that aggregating from a larger pool of participants tends to produce better signals.
She is careful to note what these products are not: holding a perpetual contract tied to a private company’s value is not equivalent to owning equity in that company, and carries no shareholder rights or direct claim on future cash flows.
Huang argues many market participants increasingly treat that distinction as acceptable, drawing a parallel to how traditional derivatives markets have grown for decades on the premise that investors often care more about expressing a view on an asset’s value than about owning the asset itself.
What Huang Says the Infrastructure Still Needs
Huang’s argument carries a direct implication for the infrastructure layer her own company builds. She contends that supporting continuous, global pricing markets demands considerably more from underlying blockchain infrastructure than issuing a token requires, citing throughput, transaction latency, liquidity depth and system reliability as critical requirements.
She argues many existing blockchain networks still face meaningful limitations in those areas, which she says can undermine the quality of the resulting price signals and limit how many participants a market can support.
In Huang’s view, crypto’s long-term value may ultimately rest less on creating novel digital assets and more on building infrastructure capable of supporting continuous pricing for an expanding range of things that previously had no real-time market at all.
