DigiTalk Podcast EP76 Recap - The Evolution of Crypto: Everything Is Now Tradable

Crypto used to be primarily about buying and selling tokens. Today, that definition is expanding rapidly. Stocks, commodities, real-world assets, sports, prediction markets, and even unconventional events can increasingly be turned into tradable markets.

This shift is particularly important as traditional crypto markets slow down and traders search for new sources of opportunity. At the same time, crypto platforms are moving beyond crypto-native assets and beginning to offer products that look increasingly similar to those of traditional financial brokers.

The latest DigiTalk explored what actually deserves to become a market, which trading models can create sustainable liquidity, where new demand may emerge, and whether crypto platforms can eventually compete directly with traditional finance.

1. Just Because Something Can Be Traded Does Not Mean It Should Be

The first question is no longer whether an asset can technically be brought on-chain. In many cases, the infrastructure already exists.

The more important question is whether creating a market around that asset provides real value.

Several speakers emphasized two major requirements: real demand and sufficient liquidity. Without them, price discovery becomes unreliable and a market may exist technically without becoming economically sustainable.

Markets around elections, economic decisions, sports outcomes, and other uncertain events can provide useful information because participants have genuine reasons to express different views.

By contrast, turning every viral event or social trend into a financial product can easily become speculation without meaningful utility.

The panel therefore highlighted an important distinction:

Tradable does not automatically mean valuable.

A sustainable market needs users who actually want exposure to the asset and enough liquidity for prices to reflect real supply and demand.

2. Prediction Markets and Perps Have Stronger Liquidity Models

The discussion compared three major forms of attention-driven markets: meme coins, perpetuals, and prediction markets.

Meme coins are highly effective at capturing attention and building communities quickly. However, their liquidity can disappear just as quickly when the narrative moves elsewhere.

Perpetuals have a more structural reason to exist. Traders use them repeatedly for speculation, leverage, hedging, and expressing directional views on assets they already follow.

Prediction markets received the strongest support from the panel.

Unlike a single meme narrative, prediction markets continuously receive new events to trade. Elections, economic releases, sports, company announcements, and unexpected global events constantly create new questions where participants can disagree and take positions.

The key difference is whether traders have a recurring reason to trade, rather than simply a recurring reason to pay attention.

3. The Next Opportunity Is Finding What People Actually Want to Trade

As more assets become technically tradable, the bottleneck is shifting from supply to demand.

The market no longer needs thousands of new products simply because they can be tokenized. New markets need clear users, practical use cases, reliable settlement, and enough liquidity to survive.

The speakers identified several areas where demand could continue developing:

• More specific economic and company-event markets
• Sports and esports
• Tokenized real-world assets
• Cross-asset perpetuals
• Localized economic and real-world risk markets
• AI-related compute and performance markets

Real-world assets were highlighted as an example of why existing demand matters.

Large institutions can bring existing clients and liquidity into tokenized financial products. This creates a much stronger foundation than launching an asset first and searching for users afterwards.

The same principle applies across the everything market: the technology can create the market, but users determine whether it survives.

4. Infrastructure Is Becoming the Real Bottleneck

Cottonia offered another perspective: perhaps the biggest unmet demand is not another tradable asset, but stronger infrastructure underneath these markets.

Creating a new financial market requires much more than an idea.

It needs reliable price feeds, efficient settlement, affordable transaction costs, secure custody, and infrastructure capable of supporting users at scale.

If settlement fails, oracles react too slowly, or transaction costs make smaller trades uneconomical, a market may never reach meaningful adoption even if demand exists.

This becomes particularly relevant for emerging markets such as AI.

As AI agents and compute become more economically important, future markets could potentially form around areas such as compute resources, model performance, or agent performance. But these markets require reliable infrastructure capable of verifying and settling outcomes.

The next stage of the everything market may therefore depend less on inventing new things to trade and more on making those markets reliable enough to operate at scale.

5. Crypto Platforms Are Moving Toward Traditional Brokerage

As crypto platforms expand into stocks, commodities, forex, prediction markets, and other financial products, the distinction between a crypto exchange and a traditional broker is becoming increasingly blurred.

The panel generally agreed that these platforms are already beginning to compete for the same traders.

Traditional financial firms have advantages in regulation, existing customers, capital, and established market infrastructure. Crypto platforms, however, have their own structural advantages.

The most important may be openness and accessibility.

Crypto markets can operate continuously, across borders, and without being limited by traditional market hours. This makes them particularly useful when users need to react to events outside normal trading sessions.

Rather than competing only through lower fees or faster settlement, crypto's deeper advantage may be:

24/7 markets + global access + broader asset availability

Traditional brokers may eventually build more products on blockchain rails, while crypto-native companies expand further into traditional financial assets.

The result may not be a simple battle between Web2 and Web3. Instead, the two systems may increasingly converge as both compete to offer users the widest range of markets through the most convenient infrastructure.

Conclusion

Crypto is evolving from a market for digital tokens into infrastructure where almost anything can potentially become tradable.

But the next phase will not be defined simply by creating more markets. Sustainable growth requires real demand, sufficient liquidity, reliable infrastructure, and clear reasons for traders to return.

Prediction markets and perpetuals currently show stronger recurring utility than purely attention-driven assets, while tokenized real-world assets and new markets around areas such as AI could expand the range of opportunities available on-chain.

As crypto platforms move closer to traditional brokerage, their biggest advantage may remain what has always differentiated crypto: global, open, 24/7 access.

The future of crypto may therefore be less about what can be traded and more about which markets people actually want to use.