AI · CoinDesk
Crypto investors are looking past market-cap rankings and back to fundamentals
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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 players at Bitwise, Wintermute and the Arbitrum Foundation told CoinDesk.
Key facts
- 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
- Under Arbitrum’s expansion program, 10% of that chain’s net protocol revenue returns to the Arbitrum ecosystem
- In earlier cycles, investors often valued new layer-1 networks as a fraction of the largest blockchain above them, he said
- During an interview with CoinDesk, Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley described the shift as the end of crypto’s “CoinMarketCap leaderboard” era
Summary
Investors are starting to assess each token’s market opportunity, adoption and value capture rather than its market-cap rank, crypto executives told CoinDesk. Wealth managers entering crypto care little about CoinMarketCap rankings and instead examine individual projects, they said. Hyperliquid is an early example, with investors valuing HYPE against the platform’s activity and economics. During an interview with CoinDesk, Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley described the shift as the end of crypto’s “CoinMarketCap leaderboard” era.