From HODL to DeFi, Sharp Analysis of 21 Mainstream Crypto Narratives in 2025
Original Article Title: My Crypto Narratives Tier List for 2026
Original Article Author: DeFi Warhol, Crypto KOL
Original Article Translation: Tim, PANews
Trending
Tokenization: Real-world asset (RWA) tokenization has reached record highs (around $200 billion), with more stocks and commodities being tokenized. As mainstream funds and custodians continue to expand on major exchanges, this is no longer just a conceptual idea.
Stablecoins: With a market capitalization of $310 billion, stablecoins are increasingly becoming the infrastructure for forex, payments, credit cards, and digital bank settlements, serving as the best bridge from the crypto world to real-world applications.
Prediction Markets: The trading volume and user count of prediction markets are reaching record highs. With the integration of mainstream crypto apps and traditional financial institutions, their adoption rate is accelerating.
Perpetual Contracts: Perpetual contracts still dominate the crypto market's trading volume, with derivative trading volumes far exceeding spot trading. The monthly trading volume of on-chain perpetual contract platforms has matched that of centralized exchanges, surpassing $1 trillion.
Top Tier
BTCFi: Bitcoin is transitioning into productive capital, with billions of BTC being used for staking, yield, and collateral, where Babylon and Lombard hold a significant share in BTC collateral TVL.
Privacy: As more traditional financial capital moves to the blockchain, selective disclosure becomes crucial, with institutions needing to achieve compliance-friendly privacy protection in payments, identity verification, and corporate fund flows.
AI: AI and crypto tech continue to evolve, becoming crucial tools for data handling, driving intelligent agents, and achieving verifiable computation, with immense potential. The industry's vast scale cannot be ignored.
DeFi: DeFi is shifting towards consumer-facing apps, with Coinbase currently offering DEX trading and USDC lending services within apps through Morpho. DeFi TVL has hit a historic high, with emerging consumer-facing apps rapidly emerging.
God Tier
Chain Abstraction: Smart accounts, intent, and embedded wallets reduce user friction, making the blockchain invisible. Significant improvements in user experience are crucial for adoption, although progress is slow.
InfoFi: Despite recent market concerns, uncertainty, and skepticism, InfoFi remains the data market, incentive mechanism, and transaction signal refinery. InfoFi is about to make significant progress, is InfoFi 2.0 coming?
Robot: Its outlook is more grandiose than actual progress. The pace of hardware and deployment development cannot be compared to cryptocurrency, so this is more like an early-stage infrastructure phase.
ZK: It is undoubtedly a core technology, but as an investment target, it is more complex. Most of the value will accumulate in ecosystems that can apply ZK technology on a large scale, rather than existing as an independent concept.
Software Infrastructure: Demand remains stable (such as RPC, indexing, interoperability, data availability, etc.), but the competition has become extremely fierce. Nevertheless, this field may still see the emergence of high-quality projects.
NPC
Staking and Restaking: Restaking indeed works, but the yield continues to compress, the risk of slashing is real, and the complexity of operations makes ordinary investors hesitant. The narrative of this track has been overheated from the start.
DePIN: Ideally, DePIN should be integrated and cooperate with the real world, but many projects still struggle to achieve this goal. Regulatory pressure and a lack of sustainable business models are hindering its development.
L1 and L2: Rollup has become the mainstream scaling solution, but the development momentum of new public chains is weak. Currently, most of the value is shifting towards applications, liquidity, and ecosystem distribution, rather than just another underlying protocol.
SocialFi: While occasional peaks in user activity may occur, user retention and long-term product-market fit have yet to be achieved, and it may be difficult to achieve in the short term.
Luck
GameFi: The Play-to-Earn model has fundamental flaws. Although some gaming chains are still running, most GameFi projects merely add more operational steps and offer a worse user experience, resembling a skinned version of DeFi.
NFT: We have witnessed multiple attempts to revive the NFT market, but market reactions have shown that unless it can break through the limitations of JPEG images and avatars and create new use cases, NFTs will always be stuck in their current predicament. Even attempts at integration into the gaming sector have yet to yield a breakthrough.
Meme Coins: Although the Meme Coin supercycle has been lively, liquidity is shifting towards legitimate projects, and its market dominance continues to decline. Retail investors are tired of being repeatedly harvested and pursuing the next hundredfold mythical game.
Modular Blockchain: Important Architecture, Bad Narrative. Users don't care, investors only care about the presence of a clear, sustainable money-making effect, and currently, most modular projects don't have that.
You may also like
WEEX Deposit/Withdrawal Dynamic Island: Your Asset Status, Always in Sight
Scaling Crypto Derivatives: The Digital Asset Infrastructure Behind High-Volume Trading
In the fast-moving digital asset ecosystem, derivatives platforms face an extreme architectural test. High-leverage futures markets demand more than just standard security—they require absolute operational precision, zero-latency matching engines, and ironclad structural scalability, all while navigating intense market volatility.
As global platforms scale to meet these demands, the industry is shifting away from rigid, monolithic setups toward a more agile, "decoupled" infrastructure philosophy.
The Blueprint for High-Volume Copy TradingFor elite global exchanges like WEEX (founded in 2018), this architectural choice becomes critical when scaling high-volume retail features like social copy trading. When thousands of users automatically mirror the real-time strategies of elite traders simultaneously, it triggers sudden, monumental spikes in concurrent transactional volume.
To prevent execution latency or settlement bottlenecks during these peak volatility events, a platform's primary engine must remain entirely dedicated to risk management, copy-trade synchronization, and order matching.
The Architectural Rule: New-generation platforms must separate front-end user execution engines from heavy backend infrastructural overhead to eliminate operational friction.
By separating these layers, platforms can maintain complete sovereignty over their trading environments and user experiences while strategically aligning with institutional-grade infrastructure ecosystems. This strategic framework allows modern exchanges to leverage advanced Digital Asset Custody infrastructure such as Cobo’s behind the scenes, ensuring that backend wallet management scales elastically alongside trading spikes.
Capitalizing on Market Momentum and 400× LeverageIn a derivatives arena where platforms offer up to 400× leverage on perpetual contracts, capital efficiency and market agility are core business metrics. To capture market momentum, an exchange needs the ability to rapidly expand its asset offerings, supporting everything from legacy crypto assets to sudden, trending altcoins across a massive library of trading pairs.
Adopting a flexible, scalable Wallet-as-a-Service (WaaS) solution such as Cobo’s could completely rewrite the development timeline for high-growth exchanges. Instead of spending months of engineering capital building out custom backend wallet architectures for every new blockchain network, platforms can deploy localized infrastructure in days.
This agility allows platforms to instantly scale their listings to over a thousand trading pairs without compromising security or delaying time-to-market. It mirrors the exact operational advantages seen during high-velocity market events, similar to how advanced wallet infrastructure empowers platforms during sudden asset surges; allowing exchanges to pass that speed and liquidity directly to their global user base.
A Mature Foundation for GrowthThe synergy between trusted infrastructure ecosystems and global trading platforms represents the natural evolution of a maturing crypto market. As WEEX continues to scale its global spot and derivatives offerings for over 6 million users, adopting robust backend paradigms proves that platforms no longer have to compromise between cutting-edge trading velocity and uncompromised structural security.
Morning Report | BitMine increased its holdings by 126,971 ETH last week; trader Eugene announced his exit from the crypto market
Wang Chuan: How can one not feel anxious after the neighbor Old Wang made thirty times profit by investing in storage stocks? (Seven) - A quarter-century cycle
Get Paid to Onboard? Try WEEX’s New Homepage with Rewards for Registration, Deposit & Trade
WEEX Custom Layout: Build Your Perfect Trading Workspace in Seconds
See “Buy Walls” & “Sell Walls” Instantly: WEEX Launches the Depth Chart for Smarter Trades
What Is Quick Trade on WEEX? 2 Ways WEEX Ends Chart-Panel Jumping
Morning News | Five major virtual asset platforms in South Korea have experienced 57 incidents of hacking and system failures in six years; Grayscale submits registration application for Canton ETF
Should we escape the peak? The principle of the tail-end market in the stock market
RootData: May 2026 Cryptocurrency Exchange Transparency Research Report
Founder of Baixing.com: My Experience with Claude Code in Fourteen Points
Yang Ge Gary: Agent Economics and AI Microeconomics
When reasoning becomes a scarce resource, who captures its value?
Jensen Huang dramatically "rescues" the South Korean stock market
Stablecoins vs Deposit Tokens: On the surface, they seem like opposing sides, but in reality, they are interconnected
Bitcoin Crash to $50,000 or Bear Trap Before $100,000? Deep Dive for WEEX Traders
How Could the SpaceX IPO Affect Bitcoin, Altcoins season, and Crypto Liquidity?
WEEX Deposit/Withdrawal Dynamic Island: Your Asset Status, Always in Sight
Scaling Crypto Derivatives: The Digital Asset Infrastructure Behind High-Volume Trading
In the fast-moving digital asset ecosystem, derivatives platforms face an extreme architectural test. High-leverage futures markets demand more than just standard security—they require absolute operational precision, zero-latency matching engines, and ironclad structural scalability, all while navigating intense market volatility.
As global platforms scale to meet these demands, the industry is shifting away from rigid, monolithic setups toward a more agile, "decoupled" infrastructure philosophy.
The Blueprint for High-Volume Copy TradingFor elite global exchanges like WEEX (founded in 2018), this architectural choice becomes critical when scaling high-volume retail features like social copy trading. When thousands of users automatically mirror the real-time strategies of elite traders simultaneously, it triggers sudden, monumental spikes in concurrent transactional volume.
To prevent execution latency or settlement bottlenecks during these peak volatility events, a platform's primary engine must remain entirely dedicated to risk management, copy-trade synchronization, and order matching.
The Architectural Rule: New-generation platforms must separate front-end user execution engines from heavy backend infrastructural overhead to eliminate operational friction.
By separating these layers, platforms can maintain complete sovereignty over their trading environments and user experiences while strategically aligning with institutional-grade infrastructure ecosystems. This strategic framework allows modern exchanges to leverage advanced Digital Asset Custody infrastructure such as Cobo’s behind the scenes, ensuring that backend wallet management scales elastically alongside trading spikes.
Capitalizing on Market Momentum and 400× LeverageIn a derivatives arena where platforms offer up to 400× leverage on perpetual contracts, capital efficiency and market agility are core business metrics. To capture market momentum, an exchange needs the ability to rapidly expand its asset offerings, supporting everything from legacy crypto assets to sudden, trending altcoins across a massive library of trading pairs.
Adopting a flexible, scalable Wallet-as-a-Service (WaaS) solution such as Cobo’s could completely rewrite the development timeline for high-growth exchanges. Instead of spending months of engineering capital building out custom backend wallet architectures for every new blockchain network, platforms can deploy localized infrastructure in days.
This agility allows platforms to instantly scale their listings to over a thousand trading pairs without compromising security or delaying time-to-market. It mirrors the exact operational advantages seen during high-velocity market events, similar to how advanced wallet infrastructure empowers platforms during sudden asset surges; allowing exchanges to pass that speed and liquidity directly to their global user base.
A Mature Foundation for GrowthThe synergy between trusted infrastructure ecosystems and global trading platforms represents the natural evolution of a maturing crypto market. As WEEX continues to scale its global spot and derivatives offerings for over 6 million users, adopting robust backend paradigms proves that platforms no longer have to compromise between cutting-edge trading velocity and uncompromised structural security.
Morning Report | BitMine increased its holdings by 126,971 ETH last week; trader Eugene announced his exit from the crypto market
Wang Chuan: How can one not feel anxious after the neighbor Old Wang made thirty times profit by investing in storage stocks? (Seven) - A quarter-century cycle
Get Paid to Onboard? Try WEEX’s New Homepage with Rewards for Registration, Deposit & Trade
WEEX Custom Layout: Build Your Perfect Trading Workspace in Seconds
