From Hype to Reality: Sharp Commentary on 21 Mainstream Crypto Narratives for 2025

Original Title: My Crypto Narratives Tier List for 2026

Original Author: DeFi Warhol, Crypto KOL

Original Translation: Tim, PANews

Hot

Tokenization: RWA scale continues to hit new highs (around $20 billions), with more and more stocks and commodities being tokenized. As mainstream funds and custodians continue to expand across major trading platforms, this is no longer just a conceptual trend.

Stablecoins: As a $310 billions market, stablecoins are gradually becoming the infrastructure for foreign exchange, payments, credit cards, and digital banking distribution, serving as the best bridge from the crypto world to real-world applications.

Prediction Markets: Trading volume and user numbers in prediction markets are reaching new highs. With the integration of mainstream crypto applications and traditional financial institutions, their adoption is accelerating.

Perpetual Contracts: Perpetual contracts still dominate crypto market trading volumes, with derivatives trading far exceeding spot trading. Monthly trading volume on on-chain perpetual contract platforms has matched that of centralized exchanges, surpassing $1 trillion.

Top Tier

BTCFi: Bitcoin is transforming into productive capital, with billions of BTC used for staking, yield, and collateral. Babylon and Lombard hold significant shares in BTC staking TVL.

Privacy: As more traditional financial capital moves on-chain, selective disclosure becomes crucial. Institutions need compliance-friendly privacy protection in payments, identity verification, and corporate fund flows.

AI: AI and crypto technologies continue to evolve, becoming important tools for data processing, powering agents, and enabling verifiable computation, with huge potential. The scale of this industry is not to be underestimated.

DeFi: DeFi is shifting towards consumer applications. Coinbase currently offers DEX trading and USDC lending services in-app through Morpho. DeFi TVL has reached all-time highs, and emerging consumer applications are rapidly appearing.

Elite

Chain Abstraction: Smart accounts, intents, and embedded wallets have reduced user friction, making blockchain invisible. Major improvements in user experience are critical for adoption, though progress is slow.

InfoFi: Despite recent market concerns, uncertainty, and skepticism, InfoFi remains the refinery for data markets, incentive activities, and trading signals. Major progress is imminent for InfoFi—Is InfoFi 2.0 coming?

Robotics: The outlook is grander than actual progress. The pace of hardware and deployment development cannot keep up with crypto, so this is more of an early-stage infrastructure phase.

ZK: Undoubtedly a core technology, but as an investment target, it is more complex. Most value will accrue to ecosystems that can apply ZK technology at scale, rather than as a standalone concept.

Software Infrastructure: Demand remains steady (such as RPC, indexing, interoperability, data availability, etc.), but competition is extremely fierce. Nevertheless, high-quality projects may still emerge in this field.

NPC

Staking and Restaking: Restaking does work, but yields are continuously compressed, slashing risks are real, and complex operations deter ordinary investors. The narrative in this track was overheated from the start.

DePIN: Ideally, DePIN should integrate and cooperate with the real world, but many projects still struggle to achieve this. Regulatory pressure and a lack of sustainable business models are hindering its development.

L1 and L2: Rollups are already the mainstream scaling solution, but new public chains are losing momentum. Most value is now shifting to applications, liquidity, and ecosystem distribution, rather than just another base protocol.

SocialFi: Although there are occasional peaks in user activity, user retention and lasting product-market fit have not yet been achieved, and this is unlikely to change in the short term.

Weak

GameFi: The Play-to-Earn model has fundamental flaws. Although some gaming chains are still running, most GameFi projects just add extra steps and offer a worse experience as reskinned DeFi.

NFT: We have witnessed multiple attempts for the NFT market to recover, but market reactions have shown that unless it breaks through the limitations of JPEG images and avatars to create new use cases, NFTs will remain stuck in their current predicament. Even attempts at integration in gaming have failed to achieve breakthroughs.

Meme Coins: Although the meme coin supercycle is lively, liquidity is shifting to legitimate projects, and their market dominance continues to decline. Retail investors are tired of being repeatedly exploited and chasing the next 100x myth.

Modular Blockchains: Important architecture, poor narrative. Users don't care, and investors only care about clear, sustainable profit models, which most modular projects currently lack.