Crypto Investors Are Looking at Fundamentals Again

Investors are increasingly weighing tokens based on revenue, adoption, and value capture, with DeFi, appchains, and tokenized assets in the spotlight. Perpetual futures still set the short-term tone.

Key Takeaways

• Crypto investors are paying less and less attention to market cap rankings and more and more to revenue, usage, and value capture.
• Perpetual futures still dominate the day-to-day price action, while fundamentals matter more over the longer term.
• Institutional investors and analysts are more often judging projects by economic value, transactions, and fee income than by market capitalization.

Crypto investors are looking less and less at market cap rankings and more at revenue, usage, and value capture. According to executives from Bitwise, Wintermute, and the Arbitrum Foundation, the market is shifting from a mostly speculative way of valuing projects to a longer-term assessment, while perpetual futures still dominate the day-to-day price action.

From Ranking to Usage

Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley called that shift the end of the era when the crypto market was mostly read like a CoinMarketCap leaderboard. In earlier cycles, new layer-1 networks were often valued at a fraction of the largest blockchain above them, which automatically priced smaller projects at a discount.

That logic is losing ground, Horsley said, because investors are now more often looking at the addressable market, adoption, and how much economic value a project can actually capture. As an example, he pointed to Hyperliquid, where investors can analyze the trading activity and economics behind the HYPE token instead of simply comparing the project to a smaller version of another chain. The token is about 20% higher than a year ago.

Horsley also said that wealth managers who have recently gained access to the sector often do not even know where a token ranks on CoinMarketCap. According to him, that simply is not relevant to their analysis.

Perpetual Futures Still Lead

Wintermute OTC trader Jasper De Maere stressed that fundamentals and trading flows work on different time horizons. Intraday, funding, positioning, and liquidations still shape the picture, while perpetual futures volumes on most major tokens are still well above spot.

At the same time, he said, over the past 12 to 18 months attention has shifted from infrastructure to applications and appchains that look more like familiar fintech and venture capital models. Especially in DeFi, perpetual futures exchanges, and decentralized physical infrastructure networks, sustainable business models and value capture are getting more weight.

De Maere also pointed out that the makeup of the market is changing. Institutional counterparties accounted for about 72% of Wintermute’s spot OTC flow in the first half of 2026, up from about 59% a year earlier. Those flows were mainly in major cryptocurrencies and a small group of tokens with revenue, while tokenized real-world assets emerged as a new category.

Why This Matters

For European crypto investors, this shift could matter because professional allocators are increasingly asking the same questions as in traditional markets: who makes money, who uses the product, and who can hold onto that value. That may be especially relevant for DeFi, tokenized assets, and other projects whose economic case is easier to measure than just a high market cap.

Brendan Ma of the Arbitrum Foundation said analysts are now paying closer attention to revenue mix, transaction activity, and value capture than they did a year ago. In his view, fee revenue, fee-paying users, and capital that stays on a network, such as stablecoin balances and tokenized assets, are harder to manipulate than things like address counts or total value locked.

Ma pointed to Arbitrum as an example of project-level analysis. The network has processed more than 2.7 billion lifetime transactions, including more than 500 million in 2026, while Robinhood Chain, according to the foundation, generates about $40 million (€34.6 million) in annual revenue. Under Arbitrum’s expansion program, 10% of net protocol revenue flows back into the ecosystem.

The broader divide is also visible between crypto and publicly traded companies tied to the sector. According to a Bitwise market overview, cryptocurrencies fell 36% in the first half of the year, while crypto stocks rose 23%. That does not automatically mean the gap will last, but it does underline that investors are increasingly judging the sector by segment.

Grayscale head of research Zach Pandl said Bitcoin remains mainly a macro asset for him, tied to demand for alternatives to fiat currencies. According to him, other cryptocurrencies will be judged more heavily on their underlying economics, while stablecoins, tokenized assets, and DeFi tools can continue to drive extra demand for digital assets.