The encryption market's token filtering is changing. Many of the institutions interviewed by CoinDesk stated that investors no longer used market value ranking as the main reference, but rather focused more on the actual use of the project, the ability to earn and the economic value of the network of tokens.
The agency looks less at the market value list.
The Chief Executive Officer of Bitwise, Hunter Horsley, stated that over the past few cycles, the market had often priced new projects on the basis of “who ranks ahead”. The new public chain is often seen as a discounted version of the head chain, and valuations are then pushed down.
He claims that this practice is weakening. The new wealth management agency that enters the encrypted market is more concerned with the market space, adoption and value capture capacity of individual projects than with CoinMarketCap.
Horsley, for example, says Hyperliquid that investors now look directly at the trade dynamics and economic models of such derivative platforms and then evaluate the HYPE token rather than simply view it as a downsized version of another public chain.
Long-term contracts still dominate short-term prices.
According to Wintermute's off-site trader Jasper De Maere, the fundamentals and the flow of transactions are at different time scales. The turnover of long-term contracts in most mainstream currencies is still significantly higher than on-the-shelf, and the pace of prices in day-to-day transactions continues to be determined by financial rates, changes in warehousing positions and liquidations.
Over the past 12 to 18 months, however, market attention has gradually shifted from infrastructure to application layers and appchain. According to De Maere, the weight of fundamentals is rising in areas such as decentralisation of finance, the platform for the renewal of contracts and decentralisation of physical infrastructure networks.
- 2026 Institutional cash in the first half of the year
- About 59% a year ago.
- Increased focus on mainstream and income-type coins
There's more emphasis on verifiable indicators on the chain.
Arbitrum Foundation Investment Strategy Manager Brendan Ma stated that analysts are now more concerned with income formation, trading activities and value capture, and more about verifiable data than a year ago.
In his view, more credible indicators usually required real costs to be generated and could be verified on a chain basis, such as the revenue from fees, the actual payer, and the funds retained in the network, including the stabilization of currency balances and the size of monetized assets. In contrast, address numbers and total locking value are more likely to be affected by motivational activity or robotics.
- Arbitrum cumulatively over 2,7 billion transactions
- Of which, in 2026, the volume of transactions exceeded 500 million.
- Robinwood Chain, annualized income is about $40 million.
Ma also mentioned that, under the Arbitrum expansion plan, 10 per cent of the net revenues of the Robinhod Chain agreement would flow back to the Arbitrum ecology. Bitwise and Grayscale, on the other hand, believe that only a few more basic currencies in the future than bitcoin can receive sustained funding attention.