From HODL to DeFi, Sharp Analysis of 21 Mainstream Crypto Narratives in 2025

Original Article Title: My Crypto Narratives Tier List for 2026

Original Article Author: DeFi Warhol, Crypto KOL

Original Article Translation: Tim, PANews

Trending

Tokenization: Real-world asset (RWA) tokenization has reached record highs (around $200 billion), with more stocks and commodities being tokenized. As mainstream funds and custodians continue to expand on major exchanges, this is no longer just a conceptual idea.

Stablecoins: With a market capitalization of $310 billion, stablecoins are increasingly becoming the infrastructure for forex, payments, credit cards, and digital bank settlements, serving as the best bridge from the crypto world to real-world applications.

Prediction Markets: The trading volume and user count of prediction markets are reaching record highs. With the integration of mainstream crypto apps and traditional financial institutions, their adoption rate is accelerating.

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

Top Tier

BTCFi: Bitcoin is transitioning into productive capital, with billions of BTC being used for staking, yield, and collateral, where Babylon and Lombard hold a significant share in BTC collateral TVL.

Privacy: As more traditional financial capital moves to the blockchain, selective disclosure becomes crucial, with institutions needing to achieve compliance-friendly privacy protection in payments, identity verification, and corporate fund flows.

AI: AI and crypto tech continue to evolve, becoming crucial tools for data handling, driving intelligent agents, and achieving verifiable computation, with immense potential. The industry's vast scale cannot be ignored.

DeFi: DeFi is shifting towards consumer-facing apps, with Coinbase currently offering DEX trading and USDC lending services within apps through Morpho. DeFi TVL has hit a historic high, with emerging consumer-facing apps rapidly emerging.

God Tier

Chain Abstraction: Smart accounts, intent, and embedded wallets reduce user friction, making the blockchain invisible. Significant improvements in user experience are crucial for adoption, although progress is slow.

InfoFi: Despite recent market concerns, uncertainty, and skepticism, InfoFi remains the data market, incentive mechanism, and transaction signal refinery. InfoFi is about to make significant progress, is InfoFi 2.0 coming?

Robot: Its outlook is more grandiose than actual progress. The pace of hardware and deployment development cannot be compared to cryptocurrency, so this is more like an early-stage infrastructure phase.

ZK: It is undoubtedly a core technology, but as an investment target, it is more complex. Most of the value will accumulate in ecosystems that can apply ZK technology on a large scale, rather than existing as an independent concept.

Software Infrastructure: Demand remains stable (such as RPC, indexing, interoperability, data availability, etc.), but the competition has become extremely fierce. Nevertheless, this field may still see the emergence of high-quality projects.

NPC

Staking and Restaking: Restaking indeed works, but the yield continues to compress, the risk of slashing is real, and the complexity of operations makes ordinary investors hesitant. The narrative of this track has been overheated from the start.

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

L1 and L2: Rollup has become the mainstream scaling solution, but the development momentum of new public chains is weak. Currently, most of the value is shifting towards applications, liquidity, and ecosystem distribution, rather than just another underlying protocol.

SocialFi: While occasional peaks in user activity may occur, user retention and long-term product-market fit have yet to be achieved, and it may be difficult to achieve in the short term.

Luck

GameFi: The Play-to-Earn model has fundamental flaws. Although some gaming chains are still running, most GameFi projects merely add more operational steps and offer a worse user experience, resembling a skinned version of DeFi.

NFT: We have witnessed multiple attempts to revive the NFT market, but market reactions have shown that unless it can break through the limitations of JPEG images and avatars and create new use cases, NFTs will always be stuck in their current predicament. Even attempts at integration into the gaming sector have yet to yield a breakthrough.

Meme Coins: Although the Meme Coin supercycle has been lively, liquidity is shifting towards legitimate projects, and its market dominance continues to decline. Retail investors are tired of being repeatedly harvested and pursuing the next hundredfold mythical game.

Modular Blockchain: Important Architecture, Bad Narrative. Users don't care, investors only care about the presence of a clear, sustainable money-making effect, and currently, most modular projects don't have that.

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