From Followers to Price Setters: The Role of the Crypto Market is Reversing

Author: Gracy Chen @Bitget CEO

Last night, a college classmate working on Wall Street suddenly sent me two charts: the contract trends for the AI chip company Cerebras (CBRS) on Bitget and Hyperliquid.

He said these two charts appeared in an internal meeting at their company. The topic of discussion was quite interesting: the crypto industry is providing a unique value that Wall Street does not have—giving the opening price of IPO assets earlier than Wall Street.

Taking CBRS as an example, on the eve of its official listing on May 14 at Eastern Time, the entire Wall Street was waiting for its opening price. However, on platforms like Bitget and Hyperliquid, the market had already started moving ahead.

Around 10 AM Eastern Time that day (when Nasdaq was still matching the opening trades for new stocks), both platforms showed similar trends: the CBRS contract price quickly surged from about $290 to around $380. Later that day, CBRS officially listed on Nasdaq, with an opening price of about $350, peaking at $386 during trading.

In other words, in the case of CBRS, the crypto market completed a fairly accurate price discovery ahead of time.

This is quite exciting. For a long time, the crypto industry has been waiting for Wall Street's recognition, for institutions to enter, and for traditional finance to endorse us. But now, the situation is reversing, and Wall Street is starting to seriously look at the price signals from the crypto market.

This is not a coincidence, but a reflection of the mechanism advantages of the crypto industry. For price discovery of Pre-IPO contracts, several exchanges have adopted similar mechanisms, such as:

• Oracle-based internal pricing and smoothing mechanism: During the "blind box" period when the U.S. stock market has not opened and there are no external price references, how does the system price? Our mechanism extracts large transaction price differences from the order book through endogenous oracles when there are no external price references, adjusting prices at a frequency of once per second. However, the price is calculated based on the exponential moving average (EMA) of prices from the past minute, allowing the current price to gradually approach the target price.

💡 Simple analogy: The oracle acts like a radar capturing large real-money transactions on the market, calculating the true target price. But to prevent prices from jumping around and harming retail investors, the system enters "slow-motion" mode—making slight adjustments every second to smoothly approach the target price, avoiding malicious liquidations due to sudden volatility.

• Dynamic price cage mechanism balancing risk and flexibility: The system sets an initial price fluctuation range of ±5%. Once the price touches 90% of the boundary, it triggers an automatic re-anchoring, thereby expanding the maximum price discovery space within the week to about ±25% without changing the risk model for market makers.

💡 Simple analogy: This is somewhat like a retractable leash when walking a dog. The system initially defines a safe activity range for the price (for example, ±5%). If buying pressure is extremely enthusiastic and the price is about to break through the ceiling, the system will not rigidly lock the trades but will automatically adjust the "ceiling" upwards (to ±25%). This controls the risk of single-instance price spikes and provides the market with ample space to probe the true "opening price."

What is truly important behind this is: the crypto market is transforming from a "follower" to a pioneer in the global asset pricing system.

A few days ago in an interview with CNBC, I mentioned a "10% vision": by 2030, about 10% of global financial assets will exist in tokenized form. We are truly accelerating towards this vision.

As I write this, I also recall the time I took my son to Wall Street and saw the "Fearless Girl" standing in front of the New York Stock Exchange, hands on her hips. She held her head high, stubbornly and firmly staring at the massive, ancient, seemingly unshakable traditional financial empire before her.

Early crypto was like this girl—standing outside the doors of traditional giants, seen as a rebellious outlier and challenger.

In the last cycle, we eagerly hoped that Wall Street would turn around and embrace crypto. In the next cycle, Wall Street will discover: they have to embrace crypto and tokenization.

Because the most cutting-edge market experiments, the fastest liquidity organization, and the most open price discovery are happening here. In this irreversible integration, the massive capital of traditional finance is actively connecting to the superior underlying tracks of Web3.

Wall Street remains the largest container of global capital, but Crypto is becoming the "pricing hub" of this container.

── Wall Street brings the scale, but Crypto dictates the future of price discovery.