In the past few years, the crypto industry has repeatedly believed in a logic: as long as institutions join, regulations warm up, ETFs are listed, and stablecoins are adopted by large companies, the market will inevitably experience an explosion. However, now that these favorable conditions have almost all been realized—spot ETFs have been listed, regulatory attitudes in multiple countries have softened, and traditional giants are exploring on-chain payments—the prices have not shown the expected significant rally.
This is not due to a lack of positive factors, but rather because the market structure has changed. Today's crypto assets have already risen in anticipation, and as real events gradually materialize, they are less able to drive valuations further. A deeper reason is that the relationship between adoption and price is no longer a simple linear one. The era where narratives could drive dozens of times in price increases has ended; the entry of institutions no longer means unconditional price increases, but rather pulls crypto assets into a pricing framework closer to traditional finance: positive factors need cash flow validation, adoption requires data support, and user growth must be real and observable.
In this framework, events like "ETF launch" and "regulatory optimization" are more foundational engineering rather than the triggers for price surges. The market is shifting from being "story-driven" to "model-driven."
Looking beyond Bitcoin in the crypto world, the overall market capitalization is around $1.5 trillion, yet the number of active users is only in the tens of millions. This means that the industry is paying in advance for "potential future usage" rather than for the actual value currently generated.
The narrative of Bitcoin has already solidified globally; it resembles digital gold, with a market cap logic that has comparable references. However, the valuation logic of many public chains, ecosystem tokens, and platform tokens is more based on the premise that "there will definitely be large-scale usage in the future." Yet, the current scale of on-chain economy, trading volume, and number of paying users still shows a huge gap with their market capitalization.
This "prepaying for the future" model brings two layers of risk: first, whether future usage can be realized remains unknown; second, even if it can be realized, it may not require so many chains and tokens. Meanwhile, the traditional tech industry is aggressively attracting capital attention. AI companies have real income, massive user bases, solid narratives, and clear growth paths, while most assets in the crypto industry still remain at the "potential market options" stage. Against the backdrop of a continuous shift in valuation focus towards "cash flow" and "certainty," the imaginative space of the crypto world is being repriced.
Examining the cash flow of mainstream networks like Ethereum and Solana reveals an undeniable reality: their strongest revenue sources are still highly dependent on cyclical "on-chain speculative activities." User-paid transaction fees, tips, and MEV capture constitute the main income, and the essence of these activities has long relied on perpetual contract trading, liquidation peaks, meme coin booms, and short-term emotional surges. In other words, this is "cyclical casino-type income," rather than stable cash flow like SaaS or infrastructure services.
Using rough metrics, if we simply compare the market capitalization of public chains with their annualized transaction fees, we often find that market capitalization is several dozen times or even hundreds of times the income. In the traditional financial world, this implies extremely high growth expectations, but the basis of these expectations is that "speculative activities will not cool down," rather than "the real economy being moved on-chain." The harsher reality is that when the market cools, emotions recede, and on-chain activity declines, such income can evaporate instantly, exposing the unit economic model of the entire ecosystem. The mismatch of high valuations with low certainty cash flow is currently the most core structural contradiction in the crypto industry.
The large-scale construction of infrastructure has gone through a complete cycle, with TPS competition, modular narratives, cross-chain bridges, data availability layers… From a technical perspective, the "road" of the crypto industry has been paved sufficiently and quickly, but the actual user base and the "economic flow" that needs to be transported are still insufficient.
The key moving forward is no longer "who can make the chain faster," nor "whose network is cheaper," but rather who can reach enough users and enable these users to engage in real activities on-chain. The true next batch of industry winners is likely not the underlying chains, but those platforms that can embed crypto capabilities into real-world scenarios: enterprise-level on-chain settlement, cross-border trade payments, native on-chain content platforms, Web3 financial services, smart wallets, and payment gateways.
A simple analogy to the internet era: those who laid the fiber optics are not the companies that ultimately hold the largest market capitalization; rather, it is the companies that aggregate users and control the entry points. Block space will continue to be commoditized, and merely relying on selling "chain speed and capacity" will be insufficient to maintain a premium. Instead, products and platforms that can aggregate large-scale users and make the chain an "invisible underlying" will be the value center of the next decade.
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Original: “Narratives Fully Realized but Struggling to Boost Prices, Crypto Assets Enter a New Pricing Phase”
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