#夏日创作营 The shift from a single narrative to real needs: crypto market survival rules have changed

In the past, a single narrative could drive the entire market. Now, the market is shifting to being driven by real demand. Even in a sluggish environment, established tracks such as stablecoins, DeFi, RWA, and meme coins are still alive and continuing to grow. In the end, only projects that find product-market fit and can generate real revenue from real users can survive.

1. The past: a narrative-driven crypto market
In crypto, narratives have always been a core force for gathering attention and attracting liquidity. Narratives behind major cycle drivers like DeFi Summer were distinct, and when a narrative faded, liquidity quickly rotated to the next one, forming a classic pattern of cyclical turnover.

From a macro perspective, the crypto market has gone through four major cycles dominated by a single narrative:
2020: DeFi
2021: NFT / P2E / GameFi
2022: L1/L2 competition
2024: Restaking
Among them, the GameFi bubble was the most extreme. Traditional gaming giants like Square Enix and Ubisoft rushed in, and by the first quarter of 2022, the gaming sector had absorbed $2.5 billion in funding. But tracks that lack real product-market fit are hard to sustain. Axie Infinity, the flagship project at the time, saw monthly active users plunge 99.7% from a peak of 2.8 million in January 2022 to only about 8,000 by May 2026. This clearly shows how fast a narrative built purely on concepts and capital stacking can collapse.

2. Rapid narrative burn last year
2025 was the peak of the narrative burn pattern. After the AI Agent narrative, new narratives appeared almost every month, and the rotation speed kept accelerating.

On the surface, this looks like extreme waste. But it’s undeniable that this kind of fast narrative churn continuously attracts retail attention, becoming an important driver supporting the market. However, the underlying demand behind these narratives points more to the token itself, rather than the real problems that products actually solve.

3. Supply-side innovation, but lack of demand
In the past, most narrative development paths were highly similar. Taking decentralized social media projects as an example:

The project raises issues like monopolized revenue on existing platforms and insufficient compensation for creators, then paints a vision of lowering fees and returning content ownership and revenue to creators.
Token incentives: early participants receive token rewards; stories of “making money while lying down” quickly spread, and market interest surges.
User influx and expansion: similar projects follow suit, using airdrops and liquidity incentives to attract users, rapidly inflating ecosystem market cap and trading volume.
Product development stalls: token prices and reward sizes far outstrip the product itself. After fundraising and initial distribution are done, development and user growth stall, and the creator compensation problem remains unsolved.
Liquidity exit: the user base that truly feels the pain behind this issue isn’t large enough. Capital inflows chase price rather than products, and once the narrative peaks, funds and users quickly drain away.

This pattern repeats across multiple narratives. Ultimately, the market realizes: supply-side innovation without underlying demand is meaningless. Only projects that generate real revenue and have a stable user base matter; only projects that truly achieve product-market fit can survive.

4. 2026: the product-market-fit era of creating demand
In the past, it was “provide solutions first, then manufacture demand.” Now, in the PMF era, it does the opposite—match existing real demand first, then build the product. The market is turning toward real projects where the number of users and revenues grow together with the product and brand, rather than projects that rely solely on inflated token market caps.

Stablecoins: from a non-volatile payment tool to cross-border settlement infrastructure
Stablecoins are tokens pegged to fiat value, used for payments and settlements. Currently, total market cap is $304.2 billion, close to the historical high of $321.0 billion.

Tether (USDT): market cap $184.08 billion, monthly settlement volume $1.79 trillion (up 63% month-over-month). Over the past 12 months, cumulative settlements exceeded $17.9k; in 2025, net revenue surpassed $10 billion, and it holds $141.0 billion in U.S. Treasuries.
Circle (USDC): market cap $73.25 billion; it’s the default stablecoin for major exchanges and institutions like Coinbase.

Stablecoins initially served as trading media to avoid crypto volatility. Now, they’ve expanded into cross-border remittance and on-chain payment infrastructure. In June 2026, more than 140 traditional companies—including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinb, and BlackRock—jointly launched the Open USD (OUSD) consortium. Non-USD stablecoins (won, yen, euro, etc.) may have a total market cap of only $1.2 billion, but the number of wallets holding them surged from 40k in January 2023 to 1.2 million by March 2026, a 30x increase.

Stablecoins are evolving from a simple fixed-value payment tool into settlement infrastructure that’s not constrained by borders or time zones.

DeFi is financial services built on smart contracts, enabling lending, trading, and derivatives without a centralized intermediary.

DeFi emerged in 2020 from the decentralized idea of “returning profits from intermediaries like banks directly to users.” Today, its continued existence depends more on institutions’ real demand for on-chain financial infrastructure. Morpho and Aave provide risk management vaults and lending infrastructure that institutions need. Uniswap supports asset trading for institutions. Hyperliquid supports trading of traditional assets rather than only crypto assets.

Even though they deviate from parts of the founders’ original ideals, it’s precisely this decisive pivot toward real demand that lets these protocols survive and grow.

RWA: from democratizing traditional assets to improving efficiency
RWA (real-world assets) refers to tokenizing traditional assets like government bonds and private credit and placing them on-chain. Currently, total market cap is $65.2 billion, of which the tokenized government bond subcategory is $13.4 billion.

RWA initially aimed to bring traditional asset management on-chain, improving settlement speed and accessibility. Early users weren’t institutions; they were synthetic-asset trading venues that leveraged regulatory gaps on-chain. Now, institutions have become the largest user group.

Tokenized equities are especially worth watching. Firms like Securitize and DTCC have increasing adoption rates. In July 2026, DTCC began conducting spot trading of tokenized securities with more than 50 institutions. Securitize listed its own stock SECZ on the NYSE, and also issued tokenized shares on multi-chains like Avalanche and Solana. By mid-July 2026, this subcategory’s market cap reached $2.3 billion; after first breaking $1.0 billion in March, it’s nearing a doubling.

At present, DEX trading volume is still far lower than DeFi, and collateral usage relies heavily on permissioned whitelist structures. Achieving “Lego block” style deep on-chain composability similar to DeFi may take time. For now, it’s still in the stage of proving the practical utility of on-chain asset management.

Prediction markets: from simple betting to market-leading trends
Prediction markets are platforms that let users bet on real-world event outcomes via on-chain contracts. Total market cap is $9.58 billion, the newest of the five tracks. Notably, the leading players in this space—Kalshi and Polymarket—have not yet issued tokens.

The World Cup is both an opportunity and a challenge: trading volume surged in June, but after the final on July 19, the two platforms’ total open interest fell by nearly 20% from the roughly $2.0 billion peak at the beginning of July. Sports contracts account for about 80% of total trading volume during the event period. Therefore, ahead of the next major event (U.S. midterm elections), trading volume may stay sluggish.

Regulatory risks remain.

On July 21, 2026, a Washington state court issued a preliminary injunction banning Kalshi from selling sports event contracts, arguing that it constitutes an illegal “DB” under state law.

Before 2024, prediction markets weren’t even considered an independent track, yet now they’re one of the fastest-growing areas in crypto. Their growth doesn’t rely on token market caps or TVL. Instead, by bringing off-chain users on-chain through real trading volume and revenue—this is also one of the clearest examples of blockchain technology “becoming everyday life” to date.

Meme coins: from pure speculative assets to liquidity-guiding strategies
Unlike other tracks, meme coins have no clear utility. Their value comes from community and attention. Total market cap is $25.68 billion, higher than prediction markets.

The Robinhood chain case in July 2026 shows that meme coin narratives can still temporarily pull liquidity across the whole chain: TVL jumped from $17.0 million on July 3 to $312.0 million on the 13th. DEX daily trading volume reached as high as $846.8 million, mainly driven by $CASHCAT .

The real value of meme coins lies in quickly attracting early users and bringing in liquidity. New chains or apps can use meme coins to rapidly build a community, which naturally encourages users to bridge assets and trade on DEXs. Some users then continue using other DeFi services in the ecosystem and stick around. Therefore, meme coins are more like an efficient entry point and marketing channel rather than a long-term holding asset. Whether early attention can turn into real product usage and ecosystem retention is the key to success or failure.

5. The essential conditions for project survival
Projects that have survived until now have captured real user needs that bring people back repeatedly, and have proven it with clear indicators like trading volume, TVL, and fee revenues.

In the 2026 market, demand concentrates at both ends of the spectrum:
One end is speculative demand seeking high volatility and instant returns—meme coins, perpetual contract DEXs, and prediction markets deliver efficiency through fast trading cycles and high capital turnover.
The other end is real financial demand seeking stable custody, transfers, and efficient management—stablecoins, RWA, and DeFi infrastructure handle core functions such as payments, collateralization, yield generation, and risk management.

On top of that, sustainable revenue structures and network effects are what form true product-market fit. Token prices can bring initial attention, but long-term survival depends on usage frequency, retained capital, revenue levels, and operational capability.

At the end of September 2026, KBW (Korea Blockchain Week) will provide an excellent opportunity to closely observe this transition. Key figures pushing the change—such as Tether U.S. CEO Bo Hines, Hyperliquid co-founder Jeff Yan, Robinhood Crypto SVP Johann Kerbrat, and Apollo’s Christine Moy—will appear together. Through conversations with leaders in stablecoins, perpetual DEXs, asset tokenization, and the RWA sector, participants can personally feel the industry shift that currently only shows up in data.