Crypto investors are looking past market-cap rankings and back to fundamentals

Crypto investors are increasingly using revenue, usage and value capture to sort tokens over longer horizons, even as perpetual futures continue to drive prices day to day, industry participants at Bitwise, Wintermute and the Arbitrum Foundation said.

Bitwise chief executive Hunter Horsley described the shift as the end of crypto's "CoinMarketCap leaderboard" era. In earlier cycles, investors often valued a new layer-1 network as a fraction of the largest blockchain above it, and smaller projects were priced at a discount from there.

That approach is losing ground as investors focus instead on addressable markets, adoption and how much economic value a project can actually capture, Horsley said.

He cited Hyperliquid as an example: investors can examine the derivatives platform's trading activity and economics when assessing its HYPE token rather than treating it as a smaller version of another blockchain. The token is up around 20% over the past year.

"When we speak with wealth managers at a firm that has recently approved access to the space, they have no idea where something ranks on CoinMarketCap," Horsley said. "It's irrelevant."

Wintermute over-the-counter trader Jasper De Maere said fundamentals and trading flows matter over different time horizons. Perpetual-futures volumes still run at a multiple of spot across most major tokens, and funding, positioning and liquidations set the tone intraday.

Over the past 12 to 18 months, however, attention has moved from infrastructure toward applications and appchains that fit more familiar fintech and venture-capital frameworks, De Maere said. Fundamentals are starting to carry more weight in areas including decentralized finance, perpetual-futures exchanges and decentralized physical infrastructure networks.

"Fundamentals set the floor and the shortlist, while flows set the price," De Maere said. Revenue and usage can determine which tokens survive drawdowns or make it onto allocator shortlists, but they rarely determine the price on a given day, he added.

Wintermute's flow data suggests the clearest change is in who is trading. Rather than a wholesale migration from spot to derivatives, institutional counterparties accounted for roughly 72% of its spot over-the-counter flow in the first half of 2026, up from around 59% a year earlier. Those flows have concentrated in major cryptocurrencies and a shortlist of revenue-generating tokens, with tokenized real-world assets emerging as the main new category.

De Maere cautioned that the signal is not clean. "Part of the outperformance of revenue-generating tokens reflects fundamentals being rewarded, and part reflects the fact that fundamentals are the current narrative, so those tokens attract the flows," he said. "The two are hard to separate."

The split is also showing up between crypto tokens and the listed companies tied to the industry. Cryptocurrencies fell 36% in the first half of 2026 while crypto stocks rose 23%, according to a Bitwise market review. The divergence does not mean equities will keep outperforming tokens, but it does show the two groups drifting apart.

Brendan Ma, head of investment strategy at the Arbitrum Foundation, said analysts are now arriving with a better understanding of revenue composition, transaction activity and value capture than they had a year ago.

"The credible metrics are the ones that cost something to produce and can be verified onchain," Ma said. He identified fee revenue, fee-paying users and capital that stays on a network — including stablecoin balances and tokenized assets — as the hardest figures to manufacture. Address counts and total value locked, by contrast, can be inflated by incentives or bots, and rising transactions are only meaningful when accompanied by higher fee revenue and user retention.

Ma pointed to Arbitrum, the network he works on, as an example of the project-level analysis now taking place. The network has processed more than 2.7 billion lifetime transactions, including more than 500 million in 2026, while Robinhood Chain is running at roughly $40 million in annual revenue, according to the foundation. Under Arbitrum's expansion program, 10% of that chain's net protocol revenue returns to the Arbitrum ecosystem.

Horsley said index products can still give investors broad exposure without requiring them to pick individual winners. Bitwise, his firm, offers such products, as do other asset managers including 21Shares.

Grayscale head of research Zach Pandl said bitcoin remains a macro asset tied to demand for alternatives to fiat currencies, while other cryptocurrencies will face greater scrutiny of their underlying economics. The outlook for the sector itself is "very bright as stablecoins, tokenized assets, and decentralized finance tools will drive demand for digital assets beyond Bitcoin in the years ahead," he said.

"A small number of tokens with strong fundamentals will play a central role in digital assets' next chapter," Pandl said. "Weaker projects with poor fundamentals will be left behind."