Cryptocurrency investors are increasingly using revenues, usage and value capture to rank tokens over longer horizons, though perpetual futures continue to drive prices day to day, according to executives from Bitwise, Wintermute and the Arbitrum Foundation who spoke to CoinDesk.
Bitwise Chief Executive Officer Hunter Horsley described the shift as the end of the "CoinMarketCap ranking" era in crypto. In previous cycles, investors used to value new layer 1 networks as a fraction of the largest blockchain above them, he noted. Smaller projects were priced at a discount.
This approach is losing ground as investors focus on addressable markets, adoption and how much economic value a project can capture, Horsley said. He cited Hyperliquid as an example. Investors can examine trading activity and the derivatives platform's economics when evaluating its HYPE token rather than treating it as a smaller version of another blockchain.
Jasper De Maere, over-the-counter trader at Wintermute, told CoinDesk that fundamentals and trading flows matter at different time horizons. Perpetual futures volumes still run at a multiple of the spot market for most major tokens, while funding, positioning and liquidations set the intraday pace, he indicated.
However, over the past 12 to 18 months, attention has shifted from infrastructure towards applications and appchains that fit more familiar fintech and venture capital frameworks, De Maere said. Fundamentals are beginning to carry more weight in areas including decentralised finance, perpetual futures exchanges and decentralised physical infrastructure networks.
"Fundamentals set the floor and the shortlist, while flows set the price," De Maere noted. Revenues and usage can determine which tokens survive downturns or make allocator lists, but rarely determine the price on any given day, he added.
Wintermute's flow data suggests the clearest shift is in who is trading. Rather than a wholesale migration from spot to derivatives, institutional counterparties represented approximately 72% of over-the-counter spot flow in the first half of 2026, compared to around 59% a year ago, De Maere revealed.
Those flows have concentrated in major cryptocurrencies and a shortlist of revenue-generating tokens, with real-world tokenised assets emerging as the main new category, he said. De Maere cautioned that part of the outperformance of revenue-generating tokens reflects fundamentals being rewarded, and part reflects fundamentals being the current narrative, so those tokens attract flows. "The two are hard to separate".
The split is also visible between crypto tokens and publicly traded companies linked to the industry. Cryptocurrencies fell 36% in the first half while crypto stocks rose 23%, according to a Bitwise market review. The divergence does not mean stocks will continue to outperform tokens, but shows that the two groups are pulling apart.
Brendan Ma, head of investment strategy at the Arbitrum Foundation, told CoinDesk that analysts arrive with a better understanding of revenue composition, transaction activity and value capture than they had a year ago. "The credible metrics are ones that cost something to produce and can be verified on-chain," Ma said. He identified fee revenue, users paying fees and capital remaining in a network, including stablecoin balances and tokenised assets, as harder to fabricate.
Address counts and total value locked can be inflated with incentives or bots, Ma said. Growing transactions are more significant when accompanied by higher fee revenue and user retention.
Ma pointed to Arbitrum, the network where he works, as an example of the project-level analysis now taking place. The network has processed over 2.7 billion lifetime transactions, including over 500 million in 2026, while Robinhood Chain operates with approximately $40 million in annual revenues, according to the foundation.
Horsley said that index products can give investors broad exposure to crypto without requiring them to pick individual winners. Bitwise, Horsley's company, offers such products, as do other asset managers including 21Shares.
Zach Pandl, head of research at Grayscale, told CoinDesk that bitcoin remains a macroeconomic asset tied to demand for alternatives to fiat currencies, while other cryptocurrencies will face greater scrutiny of their underlying economics. According to Pandl, the outlook for the crypto sector itself is "very promising as stablecoins, tokenised assets and decentralised finance tools will drive demand for digital assets beyond Bitcoin in the years to come".
"A small number of tokens with sound fundamentals will play a central role in the next chapter of digital assets," Pandl said. "Weaker projects with poor fundamentals will be left behind".