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Crypto is entering its “sage period,” with users, the media, smart money, and even CEXs all pivoting toward a single target—U.S. stocks.

By Frank, MSX by Maitong

If, in the past few cycles, the biggest on-chain users’ anxiety was “missing the next leg of explosive gains,” then in 2026, that anxiety is quietly taking on a new form:

What more and more people are worried about is no longer whether they failed to get on board a new coin, but that they find themselves stuck in an old market that smart money is abandoning.

This is a subtle yet important shift.

On one hand, the crypto copycat-and-scam hype has been completely punctured, and liquidity has been diluted and drained across various narrative bubbles. On the other hand, U.S. stocks are siphoning everything at an unprecedented speed: retail investors are flowing in, the media is stepping up coverage, CEXs are fully embracing TradFi, and familiar KOLs and traders are also starting to discuss indices, individual stocks, macro themes, and earnings reports more frequently.

This article also aims to answer the most core question: why is it precisely now?

I. In 2026, retail accelerates its escape from Crypto, flooding into U.S. stocks

In 2026, we may be witnessing the most paradoxical divergence in crypto history.

Not long ago, market maker Wintermute, together with JPMorgan, released its latest research on retail capital flows. This is the first time that retail behavior data from Crypto and U.S. stocks has been presented side by side in a systematic way—and, unsurprisingly, the results tell a clear story.

From early 2025 to mid-2025, the two curves basically moved in sync, reflecting an increase in risk appetite—retail investors bought on both sides at the same time, which was the common logic in the past few years. Even though there was a brief divergence for about two months starting in April, it closely matched the macro event on April 2, when Trump announced “Liberation Day” equal-tariff measures.

Of course, to some extent, this also suggests that in a broader backdrop where “black swan” pullbacks are being faced synchronously, U.S. stocks are indeed more resilient and better at repairing than Altcoins.

But starting from late 2025, this synchronized risk appetite linkage completely broke down. You could even say this is the most extreme divergence in the recent period. In the chart below, the divergence Z-value falls to around -4, reaching a one-year low—indicating that capital is casting votes with its feet, and the destination is U.S. stocks.

If we extend the timeline back to 2022, we see an even clearer change (the pink line is total market cap of copycat coins; the black line is retail net inflows into U.S. stocks): from 2022 to the end of 2024, the two tracked each other closely. Retail treated both as the same kind of asset—high risk, high volatility, and up or down together.

But the decoupling at the end of 2024 looks especially glaring across the entire chart. After that, crypto retail’s behavior patterns became more short-term and more emotional, lacking structure. Meanwhile, the money flowing into U.S. stocks not only did not retreat—it kept setting new highs.

In two markets, with the same group of retail investors, they made completely different choices.

The final chart provides statistical confirmation of the phenomenon above. Rolling correlation coefficients show that retail investors’ capital behavior between Crypto and U.S. stocks had long maintained a positive correlation (green area, correlation coefficient > 0.4). But after the dividing line at the end of 2024, the relationship turned into a negative correlation—retail investors are no longer buying both sides at the same time; instead, they are making a “pick one out of two” allocation.

Each red region means that a portion of capital that could have flowed into crypto instead rerouted to U.S. stocks. This is structural capital migration, and the trend is still continuing.

In fact, this migration is not only happening at the capital level—it is also occurring in the media and attention level at the same time.

If you open the leading Web3 media outlets in the Chinese-language sphere right now, you’ll find an increasing number of homepage slots that are already being taken over by U.S. stock individual names, macro variables, and traditional-market events. Superficially, this looks like an adjustment in media pitching, but at a deeper level, it’s actually the result of users’ attention shifting.

The media can only amplify demand that has already started to form. It will not, out of nowhere, dress a market that has no interest for it.

In other words, the fact that even “Web3 media” are starting to report on U.S. stocks more frequently is itself evidence of one thing: Crypto’s sentiment cycle has reached a stage strong enough to force users to actively look for a new exit.

II. Why is it precisely now?

This question is worth answering seriously.

“The U.S. stock market is worth paying attention to” is not new. What’s truly new is the timing in 2026—when the rules are loosening and the relative value-for-money of assets is being repriced, these two rare events happen to sync up.

First, the wall between Wall Street and the on-chain world is being actively knocked down.

For many years, U.S. stocks were not unattractive to most ordinary users; they were just too troublesome. After all, opening an account, exchanging currency, depositing funds, selling and waiting for settlement, withdrawing again… each step may not be impossible, but it is cumbersome enough that most users always, psychologically, treat it as “another system.”

And starting this month, this situation is accelerating into change.

On March 18, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) officially approved Nasdaq to launch a pilot program for tokenized securities trading. This means that the wallets you’re familiar with, the on-chain operational logic, and the stablecoin settlement pathways are no longer only for Crypto-native assets—they also begin to connect to globally core equity assets like Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla.

In the past, U.S. stocks were a system you had to actively cross over and adapt to. Now, for the first time, it is approaching you in a way that is closer to Web3 users’ habits—so maybe, we’re no further than buying a share of Nvidia and buying a meme coin, and it might already be simpler than you think.

At bottom, tokenization frees U.S. stocks from the three major hurdles of “account opening, depositing, and withdrawing,” turning them back into an asset form that a wider range of users can access with a lower barrier. For people familiar with on-chain operations, it may only be a new experience. But for users who have long been kept out of the door, this is a true liberation in a meaningful sense.

The second shift is that, against the backdrop of global liquidity tightening, capital is repricing the value-for-money between these two categories of assets: Crypto vs. U.S. stocks.

U.S. stocks are essentially a “liquidity–earnings” double-cycle market. When liquidity is loose, valuations expand; when liquidity tightens, valuations contract. But unlike Crypto assets, which rely more on sentiment and narratives, the more core support for U.S. stocks is earnings themselves—meaning they can obviously fall too, and may even experience deep pullbacks due to macro pressure. Yet as long as corporate profits, cash flows, and industry logic remain, the market will eventually find a repair anchor again.

That’s why U.S. stocks always show a very typical characteristic: they may not fall lightly, but when they fall, there is usually logic behind it; and when they rise, they often repair faster.

Crypto is different. It acts more like a high-leverage amplifier of risk appetite. When liquidity is flooding, upside far exceeds most traditional assets. When liquidity shrinks and risk appetite declines, pullbacks are usually deeper, faster, and less “underpinned.” Especially as the institutionalization process driven by ETFs deepens, Bitcoin increasingly becomes a core asset recognized by mainstream capital, while many Altcoins gradually lose the ability to sustain follow-through after liquidity retreats.

In other words, the rough-and-ready era of chasing excess returns by “sector rotation + widespread copycat-coin rallies” is accelerating toward an end. This “institutionalization” has not made it easier for ordinary retail investors to make money; instead, it has pushed Alpha to concentrate more and more, with marginal returns converging toward the leading assets.

And this, in turn, raises the appeal of U.S. stocks.

Compared with most Altcoins, U.S. stocks have stronger certainty. It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll make money. But most of the time, you can clearly explain what you bought, why it fell, and what logic underpins the rise. For Crypto users who have been through multiple rounds of on-chain high-volatility “washing,” this kind of “explainability” is unquestionably the scarcest value right now.

III. Learning U.S. stocks as new users—what’s actually hard?

If you’ve made it here, your first reaction might be: “I really wanted to get into U.S. stocks for a long time—I just never started.”

That “never started” often isn’t a lack of willingness. For most users, the traditional path into the U.S. stock market is not user-friendly from the very beginning. Requirements like overseas or Mainland China/Hong Kong/Macau ID verification, address proof, cross-border deposits, T+1/T+2 settlement, holiday carryovers, and so on—taken individually, none of these steps is fatal. What discourages people is that, once they stack together, they form friction costs.

So many people aren’t unwilling to learn U.S. stocks. It’s that whenever they prepare to start, they get pushed back into a vague notion by this whole process. That’s also why the emergence of on-chain U.S. stocks is not just “one more option” for everyone, but the first time it truly unblocks the path:

Zero-threshold account opening, stablecoin deposits/withdrawals directly, on-chain self-custody, 7×24 settlement with到账… None of these features, taken in isolation, might count as revolutionary innovations. But when they are combined, they precisely fill in every bottleneck that most users face when trying to enter the U.S. stock market.

It’s not simply moving the old world onto the chain. It uses the on-chain way to make “learning U.S. stocks” something that, for the first time, can genuinely be started immediately.

After solving the “how to get in” problem, another roadblock appears: where do you even begin learning the knowledge system of U.S. stocks?

Actually, crypto users have an advantage that most people don’t realize. The years you’ve spent navigating on-chain have already—unconsciously—completed the hardest parts of investment education, such as how to make judgments when information is incomplete, how to manage the mindset of your position sizing for highly volatile assets, and how to identify the gap between narrative hype and fundamentals.

These abilities also apply in U.S. stocks. It’s just that it comes with a different set of language:

FDV divided by protocol annual revenue, and P/E (price-to-earnings) are asking the same thing. A stock that falls after the announcement, and “Buy the rumor, sell the news,” follow the same game-theory logic. Liquidity provided by the Fed driving BTC higher, and rate cuts pushing Nasdaq up—both are flows of money from the same pool.

What everyone lacks is not investment thinking, but a translation dictionary written in the language you’re already familiar with.

Based on this judgment, MSX has specifically launched the “U.S. Stocks Learning University” activity—not a generic introductory course, but a systematic path that starts from foundational U.S. market understanding and breaks down the core concepts of U.S. stocks. It covers a complete framework from the underlying mechanics of the U.S. stock market, the three major indexes, and the logic of earnings seasons, to valuation methods.

After all, the wall separating ordinary users from U.S. stocks is being pushed down, and U.S. stocks will enter more people’s lives faster and more thoroughly than anyone expects.

Those who learn how to cross first are often the ones who end up standing firm first. Therefore, while it hasn’t fully collapsed yet, it’s best to fill the lessons that still need to be taken.

It’s not too late to start this now.