Does Every Great Financial Infrastructure Begin with a Speculative Frenzy?

Uniswap, Hyperliquid, and Robinhood Chain are all on the same path.

Written by: Prathik Desai

Compiled by: Saoirse, Foresight News

"When the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of casino trading activities, the undertaking of capital construction is likely to fail." ------ John Maynard Keynes, 1936

The cryptocurrency industry has been heavily criticized, with many believing it is entirely driven by speculation, often referring to it as a casino devoid of fundamental support. However, many fail to realize that speculation is often a leading signal of market evolution. A group of speculators, scorned by the mainstream, come together to create liquidity, which will later support the establishment of mature and compliant businesses.

In this article, I will analyze this evolutionary path in light of recent phenomena in the cryptocurrency market: a public chain originally intended for stock trading launching a meme coin issuance platform; a perpetual contract trading platform transforming to build infrastructure for commodity trading; and a brokerage relying on funds from a frog-themed token to support its on-chain stock trading system.

The story unfolds...

In the cryptocurrency space, speculation has many synonyms: market noise, bubbles, casinos. Yet, people have rarely acknowledged one point: during the process of industry maturation, speculation can become the cornerstone upon which higher-level business models grow.

However, it must be clarified: not all bubbles can be transformed into a foundation. Bubbles that remain purely speculative will eventually burst quickly. But if a bubble can combine with sustainable trading scenarios and continuously generate trading activity, it can become a foundation that supports more business implementations.

This is not a new phenomenon; it has been repeatedly played out throughout the long history of financial development.

Let’s revisit the Chicago grain market of the 1840s. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange launched the futures market with the intention of helping farmers, who faced uncertain harvests, lock in prices in advance to minimize losses. However, every farmer wanting to sell grain forward needed a counterparty willing to take on the long position and bear the price risk. Speculators filled this gap. The risk transfer market operates essentially because speculative capital actively takes on the price risks that farmers want to shed.

The key to the birth of the futures market was the separation of "physical grain" from "grain as a trading commodity." American historian William Cronon referred to this process as the abstraction of grain. Once grain trading was simplified to warehouse receipts, ownership could freely circulate, allowing speculators to participate in trading on a large scale. The massive speculative trading created ample liquidity, enabling farmers to find counterparties at any time. This abundant liquidity ultimately allowed Chicago to grow into the global pricing center for wheat.

Interestingly, at that time, a large number of people resisted and detested such trading. The Grange Movement publicly criticized exchange speculators, accusing them of profiting from the labor of farmers. However, this mechanism eventually evolved into an indispensable price discovery infrastructure for the global agricultural economy. Without speculators acting as counterparties in the 1870s, the global wheat market would not have a mature pricing system today.

Economist John Maynard Keynes's discussions on speculation are well-known, and his complete viewpoint more clearly reveals the dual role of speculation. Keynes classified market activities into two categories: real investment, which anticipates the returns generated during the long-term existence cycle of an asset; and speculation, which anticipates the upcoming trading behaviors of the market at large. He worried that in a market with ample liquidity, speculative behavior could backfire on real investment.

A deep reading of his discourse reveals the dual nature of speculation.

"If speculators are merely bubbles that rise above the waves of real industry, they will not cause serious harm. But when real investment becomes a bubble swirling above the vortex of speculation, the situation becomes very dangerous. When the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of casino activities, the undertaking of capital construction is likely to fail."

Speculation that exists independently of underlying assets is highly risky; however, if speculation is anchored to valuable underlying assets, it can play a positive role.

As early as the first securities market book—"Confusion de Confusiones" written by Joseph de la Vega in 1688—the author mentioned that the Amsterdam Stock Exchange attracted both investors and gamblers. Most existing exchanges started this way. However, over time, this history has gradually been forgotten, and people have formed a stereotype that serious investment needs are the original intention behind the establishment of exchanges. This is not the case.

Looking back at the present

On August 5, the largest decentralized exchange in the cryptocurrency industry, Uniswap, launched the Pools issuance platform, allowing users to issue and trade meme coins on the Robinhood Chain. This blockchain was created by the brokerage of the same name, initially aimed at serving the platform's 30 million funded accounts and facilitating tokenized stock trading.

The story goes beyond this. Before the official launch of the Pools platform, traders discovered an undisclosed smart contract, completing over $150 million in transactions through it. This forced Uniswap to simultaneously accommodate both the test version and the official version of the contract, delaying the launch plan. The platform's leading token, FRONG, named after the filename of a frog video used for Uniswap's pre-launch product, was minted six days in advance using the same contract; on the day the platform officially opened, the number of token holders reached 12,141.

Everyone can interpret this event: a transaction of approximately $150 million in funds trading a frog-themed token on infrastructure that has not yet officially launched, while this public chain was initially built for securities trading. Now, FRONG has also become the unofficial mascot of the Pools platform. It is hard not to speculate that this was a deliberately planned action aimed at driving traffic to Uniswap's latest V4 version public chain. Even if it was not intentionally arranged, the on-chain trading volume for Uniswap V4 surged from $86.2 million to $228.3 million in a single day, nearly tripling.

But as mentioned at the beginning of the article, not all bubbles and speculation can foster sustainable business models. Whether a speculative business can last depends on what it is speculating on. We can refer to shturl.c.

For many years, shturl.c has made speculation its core product and is now the largest meme coin issuance platform. Seventy percent of meme coins on the platform have a lifecycle of less than a day, with only a few surviving beyond a month.

@Coingecko

From January to July 2026, the protocol's fee income nearly halved compared to the same period last year, totaling only $420 million. Nevertheless, it remains one of the most profitable protocols in the cryptocurrency industry, with total revenue of $620 million last year and a net profit of $584 million.

Another similar platform is Hyperliquid. Initially, the platform focused on high-leverage cryptocurrency trading to meet traders' directional betting needs. Later, it expanded its leverage trading model to various all-weather trading and non-crypto assets. Relying on the HIP-3 governance framework, the platform has now launched perpetual contracts for assets such as Nvidia, Tesla, Nasdaq tracking targets, gold, crude oil, silver, and stock indices. Whenever there is breaking news about oil on Sundays, traders can immediately establish positions, while traditional markets have to wait until Monday to open.

In early July, the trading volume of perpetual contracts for real assets surpassed that of cryptocurrency trading for the first time in history, accounting for 52% of total trading volume.

Although Hyperliquid's overall trading volume has shrunk by nearly half compared to its peak in 2025, the growth in real asset trading volume has offset the decline in crypto trading pairs. This is the value that speculation can create: Hyperliquid has migrated the leveraged speculative model that attracts native crypto users to categories such as gold, pre-IPO company equity, and stock indices, building a new all-weather pricing layer, a model that many traditional trading platforms are now emulating.

Robinhood Chain is currently replicating this development path in real-time.

Although the team positions this public chain as the underlying infrastructure for on-chain stock trading, CEO Vlad Tenev is very pleased with the traffic brought by meme coin traders.

"We built Robinhood Chain to become the optimal public chain for trading real assets... but it also provides an excellent experience for trading meme coins."

Relying on the meme coin trading boom, this public chain surpassed the Base chain in daily active users just three weeks after its launch. The traffic and funds brought by meme coin trading are the seed capital for the future development of the on-chain stock trading system.

Of course, this does not mean that speculation will inevitably upgrade to mature business models. Whether it can complete the transformation depends on the platform's own choices.

Robinhood has 30 million funded users and multiple business lines, and its strong distribution capability is expected to convert the traffic brought by meme coin trading into a user base for on-chain securities trading. We can see that its second-quarter forecast market revenue surged more than tenfold year-on-year to $156 million, accounting for 20% of the platform's total trading revenue.

The Essence of Speculation

Many people still cannot understand speculation. Speculation itself is not inherently good or bad. Stripping away all additional labels, speculation is simply one of humanity's oldest instincts.

When people convert their views into financial bets, speculation naturally arises.

From its most primitive form, speculation is the liquidity that seeks pricing targets everywhere; wherever liquidity flows, it will price that target. The target can be a bag of wheat, Nvidia stock, a frog video named frong.mp4, the outcome of a football match, or the probability of a presidential candidate winning.

The attributes of the underlying assets themselves determine the direction and boundaries of speculation. Once the support of valuable underlying targets is lost, the same amount of capital used for speculation will ultimately struggle to yield long-term, valuable results. This rule runs through the history of financial development, and the cryptocurrency industry is on the same path.

Hyperliquid has bound leveraged trading to targets like gold, establishing a new pricing system in just two years; Robinhood is simultaneously building the underlying channel for on-chain securities trading, leveraging the unexpected traffic brought by meme coin speculation.

What kind of system speculation can ultimately construct depends on how much value the underlying targets can carry.

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