Post-Crypto Era Outlook: Asset Valuations Normalize—What to Watch in the Next Decade?

Đăng 2 giờ trước 10 phút đọcTh08 11, 2026 02:04 UTC

Post-Crypto Era Outlook: Asset Valuations Normalize—What to Watch in the Next Decade? KuCoin

Original source: Co-founder of Syncracy CapitalRyan Watkins

Compiled by Odaily Planet Daily, Qin Xiaofeng (@QinXiaofeng 888 )

Editor’s Note: Ryan Watkins, co-founder of Syncracy Capital, recently published an article titled “The Twilight Zone: Envisioning the Crypto Economy Beyond 2026.” He notes that crypto assets were overhyped in 2021, and since then, valuations have steadily returned to rational levels—with high-quality assets now fairly valued. The growth of the broader crypto economy is shifting from cyclical drivers to long-term secular trends, and the industry has already spawned several real-world use cases beyond Bitcoin. “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come, and the emergence of the crypto economy has never been more inevitable.”

The following content has been translated by Odaily Planet Daily. Enjoy～

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The crypto economy is undergoing the biggest transformation I've witnessed in my eight years in the industry.

Institutions continue to accumulate digital assets, while early crypto pioneers are dispersing wealth and cashing out. Enterprises are positioning themselves for S-curve growth, while disillusioned native users are exhausted. Governments worldwide are driving the global financial system toward blockchain integration, while day traders remain anxious over a few candlesticks on a chart. Emerging markets celebrate financial democratization, while American cynics lament it all as nothing more than a giant casino.

Recently, there has been much discussion about which historical period the current crypto economy most resembles.

Optimists compare it to the recovery period after the dot-com bubble burst, believing the era of speculation in the industry has ended, and long-term winners like Google and Amazon will emerge and climb along the S-curve. Pessimists liken it to an emerging market, similar to China in the 2010s, arguing that weak investor protections and a lack of patient, long-term capital that only buys and never sells could lead to poor asset performance even as the industry thrives.

Both perspectives have merit. After all, history is the best guide for investors beyond their own experience. However, the utility of analogies is ultimately limited. We must also understand the crypto economy within its own unique macroeconomic and technological context. Markets are not monolithic—they are made up of many individuals and stories, interconnected yet distinctly separate.

This is my best assessment of the source and destination.

The Red Queen's run

In the British author Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," the Red Queen tells Alice: "You see, here you must run as fast as you can just to stay in place. If you want to go somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast!" In 1973, evolutionary biologist L. van Valen used this to propose the "Red Queen Hypothesis," which aptly describes the fierce rules of survival competition in nature: standing still means falling behind; stagnation equals extinction.

In many ways, the only thing that matters in financial markets is expectations. Above expectations, prices rise; below expectations, prices fall. Over time, expectations swing like a pendulum, and long-term returns are often negatively correlated with them.

In 2021, the expectations extrapolated from the crypto economy far exceeded the awareness of most people. This was evident in some ways, such as DeFi blue-chips trading at price-to-sales ratios of up to 500x, or eight smart contract platforms achieving valuations exceeding $100 billion. Not to mention the dazzling absurdities surrounding metaverses and NFTs. But the clearest indicator of the situation was the Bitcoin-to-gold ratio chart.

Despite all the progress we've made, Bitcoin's price relative to gold has not reached a new high since 2021—in fact, it has declined since then. Who would have thought that, in Trump’s “crypto capital,” following the most successful ETF launch in history and amid systemic dollar depreciation, Bitcoin’s performance as digital gold would be worse than it was four years ago?

For other assets, the situation is much worse. Most of these projects entered this cycle with significant structural issues, compounded by the challenges of responding to extreme expectations:

The revenues of most projects are highly cyclical and depend on continuously rising asset prices.
Regulatory uncertainty hinders institutional and enterprise participation.
The dual ownership structure leads to misaligned interests between insider shareholders and public market token investors.
Weak disclosure practices have created information asymmetry between the project team and the community.
Lack of a common valuation framework leads to excessive volatility and no fundamental price floor.

The interplay of these issues has caused most tokens to continue losing value, with only a handful sensing the momentum of pre-2021 highs. The psychological impact is immense, as few things in life are more discouraging than consistently putting in effort with no return.

This disappointment is especially profound for speculators and opportunists who believed crypto assets were a shortcut to wealth. Over time, this struggle has led to widespread burnout across the industry.

This is certainly a healthy development. Minor efforts should no longer yield extraordinary returns as they did in the past. The era before 2022, when vast wealth could be accumulated merely through conceptual embellishment, was clearly unsustainable.

Nevertheless, a glimmer of hope lies in the fact that the aforementioned issues are well known and have already been priced in. Today, aside from Bitcoin, few crypto-native players are willing to seriously consider any other asset’s long-term fundamental narrative. After four years of hardship, this asset class now has the necessary conditions to deliver another surprising rally.

The Awakening Cryptoeconomy

As mentioned in the previous section, the crypto economy entered this cycle with numerous structural issues. The good news is that everyone now recognizes this, and many of these issues are becoming relics of the past.

First, beyond digital gold, numerous use cases are demonstrating compounding growth, while many others are in transition. Over the past few years, the crypto economy has spawned:

A peer-to-peer internet platform that enables users to execute transactions and enforce contractual relationships without the need for government or corporate intermediaries.
The digital dollar can be stored and transferred anywhere in the world with internet access, providing billions of people with affordable and reliable money.
A permissionless exchange that enables anyone, anywhere, to trade top global assets across all asset classes, 24/7, in a single, transparent venue.
Novel derivatives such as event contracts and perpetual swaps provide society with valuable predictive insights and more efficient price discovery mechanisms.
Global collateral market that enables users to access credit without permission through a transparent, automated infrastructure, significantly reducing counterparty risk.
A democratized asset creation platform that enables individuals and institutions to issue publicly tradable assets at extremely low cost
An open fundraising platform that enables anyone in the world to raise capital for their ventures, breaking free from the constraints of local economies.
A physical infrastructure network that builds more scalable and resilient infrastructure by crowdfunding capital and distributing operations to independent operators.

This is not an exhaustive list of all valuable use cases built in the industry to date. The key point is that many of these use cases are already demonstrating real value and continuing to grow, regardless of fluctuations in cryptocurrency prices.

Meanwhile, as regulatory pressure eases and founders recognize the costs of misaligned incentives, the dual model of equity and tokens is being corrected. Many existing projects are consolidating assets and revenues into a single token, while others clearly delineate: on-chain income belongs to token holders, and off-chain income goes to equity holders. Additionally, as third-party data providers become more sophisticated, disclosure practices are improving, reducing information asymmetry and enabling more reliable analysis.

Parallel to this, a consensus is forming around a time-tested, simple principle: 99.9% of assets must generate cash flow, with only a very few exceptions such as BTC and ETH serving as stores of value. As more fundamentally driven investors enter this asset class, these frameworks will only strengthen, and rationality will gradually increase.

In fact, after a sufficiently long time, the self-sovereign holding of on-chain cash flow may be understood as an unlock of equal magnitude to self-sovereign digital value storage. Ask yourself: Has there ever been a time in history when you could hold a digital bearer asset and autonomously receive payments simply by invoking the program from anywhere in the world?

In this context, the winning blockchains are becoming the monetary and financial底层 of the internet. Day by day, the network effects of Ethereum, Solana, and Hyperliquid grow more entrenched through their expanding ecosystems of assets, applications, businesses, and users. Their permissionless design and global distribution enable their applications to rank among the fastest-growing companies worldwide, with unmatched capital efficiency and speed of revenue flow. In the long term, these platforms are likely to underpin the total addressable market of the “financial super-app” that nearly all leading fintech companies aspire to capture.

Under this backdrop, established giants from Wall Street and Silicon Valley are unsurprisingly moving full speed ahead on blockchain-related initiatives. Every week now brings a new wave of product launches, ranging from tokenization to stablecoins. Notably, unlike previous periods in the crypto economy, these efforts are no longer experiments—they are production-grade products, mostly built on public blockchains rather than isolated, closed private systems.

As the lagging effects of regulatory changes continue to permeate the system over the coming quarters, this activity will only accelerate. With clearer rules in place, businesses and institutions can finally shift their focus from “Is this legal?” to how blockchain can expand revenue opportunities, reduce costs, and unlock new business models.

One of the more telling signs of the current situation is that few analysts in the industry are modeling exponential growth. To my knowledge, many peers at both sell-side and buy-side institutions dare not even adopt annual growth rates above 20%, fearing they might appear overly optimistic.

As valuations reset after four years of hardship, it’s crucial to ask yourself: What if all of this truly moves toward exponential growth? What if daring to dream again finally pays off?

The Twilight Zone

Light a candle, and you cast a shadow.” — Ursula LeGuin.

On a cool autumn day in 2018, just before another exhausting day at the investment bank, I stopped by the office of an elderly professor to chat about everything blockchain. After sitting down, he recounted a conversation he had with a skeptical hedge fund manager who claimed that crypto assets were entering a nuclear winter—a “solution still searching for a problem.”

After giving me a quick lesson on unsustainable sovereign debt burdens and the collapse of institutional trust, he finally told me what he had said to the skeptic: “Ten years from now, the world will be grateful that we built this parallel system.”

Less than a decade has passed since then, but as crypto assets grow ever more like a timely idea each day, his prediction appears remarkably prescient.

With the same spirit, which is the central theme of this article: to clarify that the world still underestimates everything built here. And for all of us as investors, the most practical takeaway is that multi-year opportunities in leading projects are now undervalued.

This last point is crucial, because while the arrival of the crypto world may be inevitable, your favorite coin could very well go to zero. The other side of crypto’s inevitability is that it’s attracting fiercer competition and greater pressure to deliver on promises than ever before. As the institutional and corporate giants I mentioned earlier enter the space, they are likely to eliminate many weaker players. This doesn’t mean they will dominate entirely or monopolize the technology—but it does mean that only a handful of native participants will emerge as the major winners around which the world redefines its new order.

This is not meant to make you cynical. In all emerging technology fields, 90% of startups fail. The fact that more failures may become public in the coming years should not distract you from the bigger picture.

Perhaps no single technology is more aligned with the spirit of our times than crypto assets. The decline in trust in institutions in developed societies, unsustainable government spending by G7 members, blatant currency devaluation by the world’s largest fiat issuer, deglobalization and the fragmentation of the international order, and a growing desire for a fairer new system—all of these are fueling the momentum. As software, driven by AI as its latest accelerator, continues to consume the world, and as the younger generation inherits wealth from the aging baby boomers, this is the ideal moment for the crypto economy to step out of its own bubble.

Many analysts frame the current moment through classic frameworks, such as Gartner’s Hype Cycle and Carlota Perez’s “after the frenzy” phase, suggesting that the period of optimal returns has passed, giving way to a more mundane phase of practical adoption. However, the truth is far more interesting than this.

The crypto economy is not a uniformly maturing market, but rather a collection of products and companies at various stages of adoption curves, each evolving independently. Perhaps more importantly, when a technology enters a growth phase, speculation does not disappear—it merely ebbs and flows with shifts in sentiment and the rhythm of innovation. Anyone who tells you the era of speculation is over is likely just discouraged or unaware of history.

It is reasonable to be skeptical, but do not become cynical. We are reimagining money, finance, and how our most important economic institutions are governed. This should be both fun and exciting, as well as challenging.

From now on, your task is to thoughtfully consider how to best leverage this emerging reality, rather than arguing in endless Twitter threads why everything is doomed.

Behind the fog of disillusionment and uncertainty lie unparalleled opportunities for those who bet on the dawn of a new era, rather than mourn the sunset of the old.

Attribution

Originally reported by KuCoin

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