With prices so low, choosing the right timing is no longer important.

Since June, the crypto market has been sliding with no letup. The fear index has been firmly held in an extremely low range of 10 to 20, and the market’s “water temperature” has dropped to a near five-year low. The bulls who had been dipping in several times have gone completely silent; the market is in a state of dead calm, and no one dares to talk about going long easily anymore. To make matters worse, the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes in the second half—like the sword of Damocles—remain suspended without landing, while DAT and ETFs, two major funding arteries, have also bled out one after another. Under pressure from both external and internal factors, pessimism is no longer just a mood—it has become a consensus expectation.

Although there are still no clear “right-side” go-long signals right now, for long-term investors, many tokens have already fallen into price ranges that are effectively “buy-with-your-eyes-closed” in terms of absolute valuation and risk-reward.

On-chain data from Glassnode as of June 25 shows that Bitcoin’s loss supply has reached 10.83 million BTC, accounting for 54% of total circulating supply—hitting the historical extreme seen during the 2020 “3·12” crash. Looking back at Bitcoin’s on-chain history over the past fifteen years, whenever the share of loss supply breaks above the key threshold of 52.3%, the market has always entered a large-scale trend-driven rally in the subsequent cycle—no exceptions for late 2018, March 2020, and late 2022. Now that the 54% level has clearly crossed this “bull-bear divide,” extreme losses often mean that market clearing is nearing the end.

More worth focusing on is the structure of the losses: the current loss amount among long-term investors (holding for more than 155 days) is as high as 5.58 million BTC—just 20k BTC short of the historical peak of 5.6 million BTC in March 2020. This means the “diamond hands” that have crossed multiple bull-bear cycles are bearing nearly the same level of mark-to-market pressure as during “3·12.” The difference is that, if you view the downturn through a four-year cycle time frame, the drop in 2020 was at the end stage of the C-wave acceleration—an “ugly dump” that shook out quickly. The 2026 drop looks more like a 4-wave correction: a long, low-volume grind lower, a “blunt knife” cutting while slowly draining conviction—every inch of downside erodes belief. That’s why the pain now is more intense and closer to the psychological limit.

While the market’s characterization still falls in the middle switch of an up-cycle, in the next leg of a rising market, we are more inclined to bet on assets like ETH, AAVE, UNI—ones tightly linked to the application ecosystem—rather than pure store-of-value currency types like Bitcoin. This judgment stems from multiple shifts across macro narratives and the application layer.

A turn in the dollar cycle is weakening the logic of sovereign credit hedging. As the geopolitical risk premium rises and the market’s expectations for the Fed’s monetary policy shift hawkish, the US Dollar Index gains support, and consensus about medium- to long-term USD depreciation is starting to loosen. The “de-dollarization” premium accumulated by Bitcoin and gold over the past two years is facing pressure from macro factors being repriced; the core logic behind their prior uptrends is weakening at the margin.

At the same time, the Chen Zhi case has completely shattered Bitcoin’s anonymity myth and sent a clear signal to the market: Bitcoin’s on-chain activity is not untraceable. Law enforcement has reached a highly mature level of tracking capability. The core demand of trillion-level dark pool funds is privacy and untraceability. Once this attribute is disproved, this large pool of capital will be forced to reassess how it is allocated: some may flow into privacy coins like Monero, while some may rotate toward ecosystems like Ethereum that have rich application scenarios—hiding fund flows through complex on-chain interactions.

Beyond narrative rotation, the application layer is also seeing multiple substantive catalysts.

The tokenization wave has fundamentally expanded DeFi’s addressable market. As of July 2026, the RWA market size has surpassed $43 billion, growing about 37% over the past 180 days. This expansion happened against the backdrop of a relatively soft overall crypto market, reflecting rigid demand for traditional assets to be brought on-chain. Standard Chartered Bank expects the stablecoin and RWA market size to expand to $2 trillion by 2028, while Citibank is more optimistic, believing the RWA market could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030. In this $1 trillion-scale migration of assets, Ethereum—thanks to its dominance in stablecoins, RWA tokenization, and DeFi—has become the most core settlement layer. And with Uniswap and AAVE as leading DEX and lending protocols, they will respectively play the liquidity hubs for tokenized assets and key on-chain credit infrastructure roles. The application layer’s value-capture capability is now entering a qualitative leap.

The intersection of stablecoin finance and AI payments is also simultaneously opening the gates to incremental demand. At the infrastructure level, SWIFT officially launched a blockchain-based shared ledger in July 2026. The first batch of 17 global banks (including Citibank, HSBC, Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas, etc.) will be the first to roll out 7×24 hour cross-border payment services based on tokenized deposits. SWIFT’s Chief Commercial Officer clearly stated that this capability will enable the cross-border transfer of tokenized value with the speed and flexibility required by modern commerce, while also laying the groundwork for future innovations such as programmable money and smart-agent commerce. Meanwhile, the Open USD project, with 140+ partners (including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, and multiple international banks), has made a high-profile debut. Its core design is to distribute reserve yields to ecosystem participants rather than concentrating them with a single issuer, aiming directly to become shared infrastructure for enterprise stablecoin payments. These two signals indicate that stablecoins are upgrading from a crypto-native “product” to a global “payment rail.”

At the same time, stablecoins themselves are quietly evolving—from a trading medium in the crypto world to interest-bearing assets and mainstream payment infrastructure. The entry of traditional giants like PayPal and Stripe—and especially Stripe’s record deal to acquire Bridge for $1.1 billion—signals that stablecoins are accelerating into everyday commercial scenarios. Their low cost and high efficiency advantages have already been recognized by the mainstream business world. Stablecoins have become the most solid bridge connecting traditional finance with on-chain economic activity. The rise of an AI agent economy injects even stronger momentum into this trend. Payments between machines don’t require credit cards, bank accounts, or manual authorization. They only need a programmable, low-friction, globally unified settlement layer—and stablecoins provide exactly this infrastructure.

When narrative and fundamentals resonate together, the valuation trough for leading DeFi stands out especially clearly. Take AAVE as an example: the protocol’s annualized revenue is about $134 million, corresponding to an approximately $1.28 billion circulating market cap—an earnings multiple of only 9.5x, less than half of PayPal’s and Visa’s. Annualized fee revenue is as high as $930 million, while the amount locked has remained in the range of $12.8 billion to $14 billion; the ratio of market cap to locked amount is only 0.09 to 0.10. These figures point to the same conclusion: the market is not pricing AAVE’s strong cash-flow generation ability sufficiently.

Now look at the competitive landscape. AAVE’s debt share on the Ethereum mainnet is as high as 82%, its overall market share exceeds 50%, and so far there has been no challenger with disruption-level capability of the same order. Its moat is far deeper than expected. The earlier KelpDAO attack incident that hit the balance sheet shock is being gradually absorbed as protocol revenue keeps accumulating. The price trough caused by the event, instead, offers a mid- to long-term allocation window worth watching.

History repeatedly proves that when bottoms arrive, 90% of people don’t dare to act. They always wait for an even lower price—one that often never comes again. A bottom is never a single precise point; it’s a region where most people go silent out of fear. When loss supply hits historical extremes, long-term holders are broadly in the red, valuation is compressed to single-digit P/E multiples, and regulation and narrative shift simultaneously—when all these signals stack together, the question is no longer “Should you buy?” but “Can you buy it this cheaply anymore?” The market won’t always give you a ride opportunity. When it does, what you shouldn’t do is agonize over the last few tenths of a percent difference—you should look up, and see clearly the road ahead.