Crypto Investors Shift Focus from Market Cap to Fundamentals
Crypto investors are shifting their focus from market-capitalization rankings to fundamentals such as revenue, usage, and value capture. According to industry players at Bitwise, Wintermute, and the Arbitrum Foundation, this trend is driven by a growing recognition that perpetual futures can drive short-term prices while failing to provide a long-term perspective.
Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley described this shift as the end of crypto's 'CoinMarketCap leaderboard' era. He noted that investors are no longer valuing new layer-1 networks as a fraction of the largest blockchain above them, but rather focusing on addressable markets, adoption, and how much economic value a project can capture.
Horsley cited Hyperliquid as an example of this trend. The derivatives platform's trading activity and economics are now being examined when assessing its HYPE token, rather than treating it as a smaller version of another blockchain. The token has seen a 20% increase in the past year.
Wintermute OTC trader Jasper De Maere agreed that fundamentals matter over different time horizons. He noted that perpetual-futures volumes still run at a multiple of spot across most major tokens, while funding, positioning, and liquidations set the tone intraday. However, attention has moved from infrastructure toward applications and appchains that fit more familiar fintech and venture-capital frameworks.
De Maere's flow data suggests that institutional counterparties accounted for 72% of Wintermute's spot over-the-counter flow in the first half of 2026, up from around 59% a year earlier. This concentration has been seen in major cryptocurrencies and a shortlist of revenue-generating tokens, with tokenized real-world assets emerging as the main new category.