Exchange Tokens and What the Market Often Realizes Too Late
Today in Davos, Changpeng Zhao (CZ) once again stated a simple but important idea:
the crypto industry has already proven its effectiveness at scale.
If you strip away noise and emotions, one fact becomes obvious:
exchanges are among the most resilient and profitable businesses in crypto.
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📌 A note on context and timing
For additional context, I want to point out that this is not a new thesis for me.
I already wrote about cryptocurrency exchanges as a core growth layer back on April 17, 2020 — almost six years ago — and shared a dedicated chart at that time.
What’s important here is not the post itself, but what happened after.
If you now open that historical chart and review each native exchange token that was included back then, you’ll notice an interesting detail:
Almost all of them have outperformed Bitcoin over time — on a relative basis.
Some did it by 1x, some by 2x or more, but the key point remains the same:
at today’s levels, their performance relative to BTC has increased.
That outcome was not driven by hype.
It was driven by:
growing volumes
expanding functionality
and exchanges evolving into full-scale platforms
Which is exactly why this topic keeps returning every cycle.
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🔍 What matters here
On the chart, you see native tokens of centralized and decentralized exchanges.
No marketing narratives. No promises. Just long-term performance.
There is a clear pattern:
volumes → fees
fees → business sustainability
sustainability → native token valuation
In essence, a native exchange token reflects the real state of the exchange itself.
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🔁 Why this topic is relevant again
Over rec