From Hype to Reality: A Sharp Critique of 21 Mainstream Crypto Narratives in 2025

Core Viewpoint

2025-12-17 22:43:18

Collection

The article categorizes the 21 mainstream narratives in the cryptocurrency field for 2025 into five levels, from the most sought-after to those gradually losing popularity.

Original Title: My Crypto Narratives Tier List for 2026

Original Author: DeFi Warhol, Crypto KOL

Original Compiler: Tim, PANews

Highlights

Tokenization: The scale of RWA is hitting new highs (around $20 billion), with more stocks and commodities being tokenized. As mainstream funds and custodians continue to expand on major trading platforms, this is no longer just a conceptual level.

Stablecoins: As a market with a market cap of $310 billion, 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: The trading volume and user numbers in prediction markets are reaching new highs. With the integration of mainstream crypto applications and traditional financial institutions, the pace of promotion is accelerating.

Perpetual Contracts: Perpetual contracts still dominate crypto market trading volume, with derivatives trading 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 transforming into productive capital, with billions of BTC being used for staking, yield, and collateral, where Babylon and Lombard hold significant shares in BTC staking TVL.

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

AI: AI and crypto technology are continuously evolving, becoming important tools for data processing, driving agents, and achieving verifiable computing, with enormous potential. The scale of this industry is not to be overlooked.

DeFi: DeFi is shifting towards consumer applications, with Coinbase currently offering DEX trading and USDC lending services in-app through Morpho. DeFi TVL has reached an all-time high, and emerging consumer applications are rapidly surfacing.

People Above People

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

InfoFi: Despite recent market concerns, uncertainties, and doubts, InfoFi remains a refinery for data markets, incentive activities, and trading signals. Major progress is imminent for InfoFi; is InfoFi 2.0 on the way?

Robotics: Its prospects are grander than actual progress. The pace of hardware and deployment development cannot keep up with cryptocurrencies, making this more of an early infrastructure stage.

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

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

NPC

Staking and Re-staking: Re-staking is indeed feasible, but yields are continuously compressed, and the risk of penalties is real, making complex operations daunting for ordinary investors. The narrative in this sector has been overheated from the start.

DePIN: Ideally, DePIN should integrate and collaborate 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: Rollups have become the mainstream scaling solution, but the momentum for new public chains is relatively weak. Currently, most value is shifting towards applications, liquidity, and ecosystem distribution, rather than just another underlying protocol.

SocialFi: Although there are occasional peaks in user activity, user retention and lasting product-market fit have yet to be realized, making it difficult to achieve in the short term.

Pulling Back

GameFi: The Play-to-Earn model has fundamental flaws. While some game chains are still operational, most GameFi projects merely add operational steps, resulting in a worse experience of re-skinned DeFi.

NFT: We have witnessed multiple attempts to revive the NFT market, but market reactions indicate that unless new application scenarios are created beyond the limitations of JPEG images and avatars, NFTs will remain trapped in their current predicament. Even attempts at integration in the gaming sector have not achieved breakthroughs.

Meme Coins: Although the super cycle of meme coins is lively, liquidity is shifting towards serious projects, and their market dominance continues to decline. Retail investors are tired of being repeatedly harvested and chasing the next hundredfold myth.

Modular Blockchains: Important architecture, poor narrative. Users do not care, and investors only care about whether there is a clear, sustainable profit effect, which most modular projects currently lack.