The Four Pillars Reshape the Future of Crypto: Survival Rules in the Post-Speculation Era

Author: Go2Mars Web3 Research

This article aims to provide an analytical framework to help understand: the current “value regression” is not merely the end of a bear market but a necessary pain before the birth of the next generation of trustworthy financial infrastructure.

Over the past two years, the crypto industry has experienced Btc shifting from a speculative asset and cyclical benchmark, a liquidity pool during monetary easing, to now serving as a non-sovereign macro anchor asset and strategic reserve option; stablecoins have evolved from a speculative medium to a healthy on-chain USD, enabling cross-border on-chain payments and settlements, and providing a low-threshold channel for the world to access USD.

In stark contrast is the altcoin market, where the vast majority of projects have been discredited so far, with some of their former glory unlikely to reoccur. More broadly, many projects have perished during their preparation phase due to industry downturns.

As liquidity tides recede and speculative narratives become more scarce and dull, I believe this is a normal transitional cycle for blockchain development—a healthy phase of clearing crypto bubbles and illusions. After bottoming out, the industry will gradually emerge from the haze.

Institutional investors’ confidence in the 2026 crypto industry has significantly increased. According to EY’s 2025 survey, nearly 80% of respondents expect cryptocurrency prices to rise, and nearly 70% see it as the greatest opportunity for attractive risk-adjusted returns.

1. Emergence of Blockchain-Native Finance

1.1 Going Beyond RWA: From “Supporting Tool” to “Core of Credit Efficiency”

Currently, RWA’s essence remains in tokenizing assets and liabilities from traditional finance onto the chain. This model is feasible but only as an auxiliary tool for traditional finance, whereas blockchain’s capabilities are far beyond that. The core of financial competition today is not capital scale but “credit efficiency.”

On the surface, financial system competition involves:

(1) Capital size

(2) Interest rates

(3) Market size

But the underlying logic is: whether a system can organize credit with lower costs, fewer frictions, and less abuse—who can produce, price, and clear credit more efficiently will have a long-term advantage.

1.2 Traditional Finance’s Flaws: “Personified + Power-Driven” Credit Model

In traditional systems, credit depends on:

(1) Central banks

(2) Commercial banks

(3) Government backing

(4) Legal and violent enforcement

This raises a fundamental issue: credit is not neutral but manipulable. Those in power can decide fund flows, enjoy subsidies, and socialize losses.

1.3 Locking Power into Rules: “Trustless” Collaboration

The spirit of blockchain is to establish a system enabling cooperation without trust.

Blockchain constructs a new trust model through:

(1) Cryptography

(2) Consensus mechanisms

(3) Immutable ledgers

It locks power into rules, transforming all ownership from permissioned to factual. It embeds the “worst human nature assumption” into the system itself—despite human flaws, it still creates a credible order, a disruptive reduction of traditional credit systems.

The real advantage of blockchain lies in its underlying system’s redefinition of credit organization. Its spirit determines the system’s form, which in turn influences mechanism efficiency—ultimately reflected in lower user costs, faster speeds, and better accessibility.

(1) Lower financial service costs

(2) More efficient financial service speeds

(3) Eliminating geopolitical and some entry barriers

1.4 Path: From DeFi Starting Point to Legislative Compliance Explosion

From being labeled a “scam” to mainstream participation by traditional financial institutions, attempts at on-chain native finance and legal regulation have been ongoing. The rise of DeFi products in summer 2021, early legislative efforts at the congressional level in 2023, RWA entering mainstream narratives in 2024, leading to the “legislative explosion year” in 2025, with hopes of seeing the true on-chain financial starting point in 2026.

https://transak.com/blog/the-clarity-act#the-clarity-act-timeline

US Government Crypto Legislation Timeline 2025

2. Token Value Regression

In the early stages of crypto, many tokens experienced astonishing market cap growth despite lacking any real yield or clear value capture pathways.

Why did early tokens rise without real yields?

2.1 Market Pricing Is Not Cash Flow, But “Future Credit”

In early industry, token valuation was not based on:

Dividends, yields, buybacks

But on future credit:

1. Potential to become infrastructure

2. Potential to capture value

3. Potential to be recognized by institutions, users, and capital

Tokens are more like “options on future institutional status and network effects.” The exercise conditions depend on collective market cognition and belief.

During industry boom, as long as enough participants believe in a narrative—believe this blockchain will become the next settlement layer, believe this DeFi protocol can capture ecosystem liquidity, believe its team and community can modify tokenomics later to realize value—this shared belief becomes a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Capital inflows based on this belief push prices up; rising prices reinforce belief, attracting more capital. In this feedback loop, tokens pre-emptively realize the “future credit” option value. Essentially, it’s a game of attention, consensus, and coordination—tokens are the chips, and the option value depends on participation and enthusiasm.

2.2 Narrative Premium and Cognitive Asymmetry Drive Early Super-Premiums

In recent years, blockchain narratives have remained highly novel:

• Financial infrastructure narrative (DeFi primitives): Terra, Uniswap, Synthetix, Curve

• Applicability narratives: NFT, SocialFi, GameFi

• Platform narratives: Layer2, public chains

• Interoperability infrastructure: Cosmos, Polkadot

• Web3 middleware infrastructure: Oracles, cross-chain bridges, sequencers, modular wallets, account abstraction

These narratives generate cognitive premiums, attracting incremental capital. New narratives inherently have an advantage at the cognitive level because they create “attention asymmetry + understanding asymmetry,” leading to early pricing advantages.

1 Attention Scarcity Effect

Human attention is extremely limited.

When a narrative is “first appearing”: it’s more likely to be noticed, amplified by media, KOLs, and capital. Uniswap broke the traditional notion that no liquidity without market makers, with minimal cognitive cost, using the formula x*y=k. This counterintuitive but explainable model creates strong memory and dissemination effects.

2 Cognitive Framework Vacuum

When a domain is new:

1. No unified valuation model

2. No success/failure precedents

3. No “rational price anchor”—for example, CosmosHub succeeded as a “cosmos ecosystem project shovel” because it lacked fundamentals, enabling a short-term narrative of “capturing Cosmos ecosystem projects” for years.

In an environment of macro liquidity abundance, participant inflows combined with early narrative premiums, and due to market reflexivity, we saw many projects flourish in 2021, with talented young people realizing wealth through crypto.

Now, macro liquidity and market conditions no longer support the previous speculative frenzy. Most narratives have been discredited, and most tokens have fallen to zero or near-zero.

Participants are increasingly aware that most “air coins” only have short-term market game value without real backing.

Future crypto projects must demonstrate long-term profitability and have tokens capable of capturing value to gain investor “faith.”

Over the past few years, the market has begun systematically punishing high-inflation, weak-value tokens driven by outdated narratives. Pricing power has shifted from “future credit” and fuzzy expectations to assessments of real fundamentals, profitability, and cash flow sustainability. The crypto market is transitioning from an early narrative-driven phase to a more fundamental valuation stage.

3. Privacy is shifting from “marginal feature” to “core infrastructure”

In early crypto, privacy was mainly seen as an ideological appeal or niche function:

Anonymous transactions, censorship resistance, personal freedom. These needs exist but have not historically been core metrics in blockchain competition.

3.1 From an investment perspective, privacy tracks also meet the characteristics of a future blockchain development trend

1. Strongly related to institutional adoption and government legislation—privacy shifting from “fully anonymous” to “composable and auditable” is a real-world necessity.

2. Strong network effects + high switching costs—difficult to copy or commodify.

As crypto assets move toward real-world finance, privacy’s role fundamentally changes: it’s no longer a question of “whether needed” but “whether available.”

As a16z pointed out in its 2026 outlook:

Privacy is the one feature that’s critical for the world’s finance to move onchain — and also the one feature that most blockchains lack.

Privacy is evolving from an ancillary capability to a decisive moat in chain-level competition.

Privacy transaction volume has entered a rapid growth phase since Q4 2025.

3.2 Why is privacy a “necessary condition” for “financial on-chain”?

Real-world finance cannot operate on “completely transparent” ledgers:

1. Enterprises cannot disclose all counterparties and cash flows

2. Institutions cannot expose positions, trading strategies, or capital structures

3. Users cannot accept permanently traceable asset histories

Therefore: without privacy, on-chain activity is only speculative; with privacy, it can support finance. This is why stablecoins, RWA, and institutional DeFi inevitably point toward privacy layers at certain stages.

Compared to public chains, privacy-enabled chains hide transaction amounts, account relationships, and behavior paths, making user states on-chain non-reproducible and hard to migrate, greatly increasing migration costs and potential exposure risks.

People are highly sensitive to privacy leaks; once in a privacy ecosystem, they tend to maintain the status quo, conducting as many financial activities as possible on the same chain.

This “user stickiness” plus network effects creates a winner-take-most structure: larger ecosystems attract more users and capital, forming positive feedback loops.

Meanwhile, privacy introduces non-complete information games and cross-chain weak links, making advantages hard to copy or be replaced by other chains. Overall, privacy is not just a functional difference but a core mechanism for changing market structure, locking in value, and establishing long-term competitive advantages. Therefore, in the future, a few high-quality privacy chains are likely to dominate key infrastructure and trading ecosystems in crypto.

Privacy is moving from the ideological fringe of cryptocurrencies to the core of financial infrastructure. In an era of declining performance competition and narrative fatigue, privacy may become one of the strongest and most enduring moats in the blockchain world.

4. AI and Blockchain Integration: From “Pseudo-Combination” to “True Paradigm”

In past cycles, “AI+Crypto” was often a speculative narrative. Most attempts were superficial: either forcibly grafting AI onto Web3, creating unnecessary “AI compute tokens,” or viewing blockchain merely as storage for AI data. The essence of this “pseudo-integration” is superficial stitching of two transformative technologies, without addressing their core complementarities—AI lacks a trustworthy economic and collaboration layer, while blockchain lacks intelligence and adaptive capabilities.

However, by 2026, we are witnessing this fusion elevate from a “marketing concept” to a “fundamental paradigm.” The core shift is: AI is no longer just an application on blockchain but is becoming the “intelligent layer” of blockchain protocols; simultaneously, blockchain is evolving from a mere tool for AI into the “trust and settlement infrastructure” enabling AI agents to participate massively in social and economic activities. This fusion will unfold along two profound directions:

4.1 AI as the “Intelligent Engine” of Protocol Layer

Future blockchain protocols will embed AI as a core component, endowing them with dynamic optimization and autonomous management:

1. In DeFi: Lending protocols can utilize AI models to analyze on-chain/off-chain data in real-time, dynamically adjusting interest rates and liquidation thresholds for global risk and capital efficiency.

2. In security and governance: AI can serve as an on-chain immune system, monitoring smart contract vulnerabilities and detecting abnormal transaction patterns. In DAO governance, AI agents can automate complex decision execution or simulate long-term proposal impacts, assisting humans in making better decisions.

4.2 Blockchain as the “Institutional Foundation” of the AI Economy

As massive AI agents begin to replace humans in trading, collaboration, and value creation, they need a native, trustworthy, and automated “machine economy” environment. This is where blockchain’s irreplaceable advantages lie:

1) Identity and Trust (KYA): Traditional KYC cannot apply to machines. Blockchain can establish tamper-proof identities, reputations, and histories for each AI agent via cryptographic credentials—creating “Know Your Agent,” a prerequisite for large-scale machine collaboration.

2) Payments and Settlements: High-frequency, small-value, 24/7 micro-payments between AI agents (e.g., data fees, API calls) require permissionless, global settlement channels. Native crypto and smart contracts are the perfect foundational layer for building this “Machine-Native Finance.”

3) Data and Value Rights: Blockchain can ensure transparency and clear copyright for data used in AI training, and through tokenization, data contributors can directly capture value—building a fairer, more efficient trusted data marketplace than current centralized models.

4.3 How Will This Change Industry Rules?

This deep integration fundamentally addresses a core question: in a future world with increasing AI agent density, how will value be created, transferred, and rights assigned? The answer points to a complex ecosystem where blockchain provides the institutional framework, and AI drives economic growth. It’s not just a technological combination but an innovation in economic and governance models—freeing the crypto industry from the single narrative of “financial speculation” and anchoring it into the engine of next productivity revolution.

5. 2026 New Year Outlook: Change the Game, Focus on Steady Profits

Simply put, the crypto industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The old approach of storytelling and hype-driven speculation is no longer viable. 2026 marks the beginning of a pragmatic new phase.

5.1 Old Methods Fail, New Rules Emerge

Market actions have proven: tokens based solely on grand visions and unlimited printing will be ruthlessly abandoned.

More and more, people care whether a project has real revenue, users, and profitability.

It’s like the tide receding—only then do you see who’s truly swimming naked.

Now, as the tide goes out, the industry must put on clothes and work diligently.

5.2 Predictions for the New Development Direction of Cryptocurrency

The four major trends discussed collectively mark a profound systemic shift in crypto, entering an essential phase. 2026 will be a critical starting point for this transition.

• Institutional (Blockchain-Native Finance): Reconstructing credit through code and consensus, providing a lower-cost, frictionless, more open foundational framework. The US “compliance path” is an inevitable process for mainstream acceptance of new systems.

• Asset Layer (Token Value Regression): Tokens will move beyond the speculative “bullish options” phase toward “stock-like” valuation. Their value will increasingly depend on actual profitability rather than hype.

• Security Layer (Privacy as Core Infrastructure): As on-chain activity involves real business and finance, privacy becomes akin to a bank vault—shifting from optional feature to core infrastructure. Privacy is key to protecting trade secrets and complex financial logic on-chain, unlocking blockchain’s full potential.

• Intelligent Layer (AI and Blockchain Fusion): Blockchain provides a trustworthy economic layer for AI agents; AI makes protocols smarter. Their integration will spawn a “machine economy,” the core driver of future growth.

For investors, this means a shift in logic: from chasing short-term narratives to identifying long-term structural pillars. As regulation clarifies and evaluation rationalizes, the industry will move from valuation illusions to building a solid foundation for the digital future. The noisy “gold rush” is cooling, while the silent “urban construction” is just beginning. In 2026, we may stand at a healthier, more sustainable new starting point.

Disclaimer

This content is authored by the G2M team, based solely on publicly available information and market analysis, and does not constitute any investment advice or financial consulting.

1. Non-investment advice: All viewpoints, predictions, and analyses are for research purposes only and for reference. Cryptocurrency and digital asset markets are highly volatile, with significant risks including loss of principal. Before making any investment decisions, you should independently assess your financial situation and risk tolerance, and consult professional financial advisors.

2. Risk warning: The crypto industry faces uncertainties from technological evolution, market competition, regulatory changes, and cybersecurity. Past performance does not guarantee future results. No project, technology, or asset mentioned herein guarantees future performance or safety.

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