coindesk.com
Crypto investors are increasingly using revenue, usage and value capture to sort tokens over longer horizons, even as perpetual futures continue to drive prices day to day, industry players at Bitwise, Wintermute and the Arbitrum Foundation told CoinDesk.
During an interview with CoinDesk, Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley described the shift as the end of crypto’s “CoinMarketCap leaderboard” era. In earlier cycles, investors often valued new layer-1 networks as a fraction of the largest blockchain above them, he said. Smaller projects were then priced at a discount.
That 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 the derivatives platform’s trading activity and economics when assessing its HYPE token rather than treating it as a smaller version of another blockchain. The token is up around 20% in the past year.
“When we speak with wealth managers at a firm that has recently approved access to the space, they have no idea where something ranks on CoinMarketCap,” Horsley said. “It’s irrelevant.”
Perpetual futures set short-term prices
Wintermute OTC trader Jasper De Maere told CoinDesk fundamentals and trading flows matter over different time horizons.
Perpetual-futures volumes still run at a multiple of spot across most major tokens, while funding, positioning and liquidations set the tone intraday, he said
Over the past 12 to 18 months, however, attention has moved from infrastructure toward applications and appchains that fit more familiar fintech and venture-capital frameworks, De Maere said.
Fundamentals are starting to carry more weight in areas including decentralized finance, perpetual-futures exchanges and decentralized physical infrastructure networks.
“Fundamentals set the floor and the shortlist, while flows set the price,” De Maere said. Revenue and usage can determine which tokens survive drawdowns or make it onto allocator shortlists, but they rarely determine the price on a given day, he added.”
Wintermute’s flow data suggests the clearest change is in who is trading. Rather than a wholesale migration from spot to derivatives, institutional counterparties accounted for roughly 72% of its spot over-the-counter flow in the first half of 2026, up from around 59% a year earlier, De Maere revealed.
Those flows have concentrated in major cryptocurrencies and a shortlist of revenue-generating tokens, with tokenized real-world assets emerging as the main new category, he said.
“Part of the outperformance of revenue-generating tokens reflects fundamentals being rewarded, and part reflects the fact that fundamentals are the current narrative, so those tokens attract the flows,” De Maere cautioned. “The two are hard to separate.”