#夏日创作营 From a single narrative to real needs—the survival rule of the crypto market has changed

In the past, a single narrative could drive the entire market. Now, the market is shifting to be driven by real demand. Even in a sluggish environment, mature sectors such as stablecoins, DeFi, RWA, and meme coins continue to survive and grow. Ultimately, only projects that find product-market fit and can generate real revenue from real users will be able to survive.

1. In the past: a narrative-driven crypto market
In the crypto market, narratives have long been the core force for gathering attention and attracting liquidity. Tracks like DeFi Summer that drove large cycles each had distinct narratives. When a narrative declined, liquidity quickly rotated to the next one, forming a typical cycle-rotation pattern.
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, GameFi’s bubble was the most extreme. Traditional game giants such as Square Enix and Ubisoft rushed in. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, the gaming sector attracted $2.5 billion in funding. But sectors lacking real product-market fit are hard to sustain. Axie Infinity, then the flagship project, saw its monthly active players plunge 99.7% from the peak of 2.8 million in January 2022 to only about 8,000 by May 2026. This clearly shows how fast narratives built purely on concepts and capital can collapse.

2. The rapid consumption of narratives last year
2025 was the peak of the narrative consumption model. After the AI Agent narrative, new narratives appeared almost every month, with the rotation speed continuing to accelerate.
On the surface, this looks extremely wasteful. But it’s undeniable that these fast narrative changes kept retail traders’ attention engaged and became an important driver supporting the market. However, the underlying demand behind these narratives points more to the token itself than to the real problems that the product truly solves.

3. Innovation on the supply side, but lack of demand
Most narratives in the past followed highly similar development paths. Take decentralized social media projects as an example:
Project claims the existing platforms monopolize revenue and that creator compensation is insufficient, laying out a vision of reducing fees and returning content ownership and revenue to creators.
Token incentives: early participants receive token rewards, and the story of “making money while lying down” quickly spreads, driving surging market interest.
User inflow and expansion: similar projects follow suit, attracting users through airdrops and liquidity incentives, rapidly inflating ecosystem market cap and trading volume.
Product development stalls: token prices and reward sizes far exceed the product itself. After fundraising and initial distribution are completed, development and user growth stall, and the creator compensation issue remains unresolved.
Liquidity exits: there weren’t enough users who genuinely felt the pain. Incoming capital chased price rather than the product; once the narrative peaked, funds and users quickly left.
This pattern keeps repeating across multiple narratives. Eventually, the market recognizes: 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 that creates demand
In the past, it was “solve the supply first, then manufacture demand.” Now, in the PMF era, the opposite is true—match existing real demand first, then build the product. The market is shifting toward real projects where user numbers and revenue grow together with the product and the brand, rather than projects that rely solely on inflating token market cap.
Stablecoins: from non-volatile payment tools to cross-border settlement infrastructure
Stablecoins are tokens pegged to fiat currencies, used for payments and settlement. Their total market cap is currently $304.2 billion, approaching the historical high of $321 billion.
Tether (USDT): market cap $184.08 billion, monthly settlement volume $1.79 trillion (month-over-month +63%); in the past 12 months, cumulative settlements exceeded $10 trillion. In 2025, net revenue was over $10 billion, and it holds $141 billion in U.S. treasuries.
Circle (USDC): market cap $73.25 billion, the default stablecoin used by major exchanges and institutions such as Coinbase.
Stablecoins originally served as a trading medium to avoid crypto volatility. Now they have 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 (KRW, JPY, EUR, etc.) may have a total market cap of only $1.2 billion, but the number of token-holding wallets jumped from 40 thousand in January 2023 to 1.2 million by March 2026, a 30x increase.
Stablecoins are evolving from a simple fixed-value payment tool into a settlement infrastructure that isn’t constrained by national 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 a decentralized idea: “return the profits of 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 trading of institutional assets. Hyperliquid supports trading of traditional assets rather than only crypto assets.
Although they deviate from some of the original founder ideals, it is precisely this decisive turn toward real demand that allows protocols to survive and grow.

RWA: from democratizing traditional assets to improving efficiency
RWA (real-world assets) refers to tokenizing traditional assets such as government bonds and private credit and bringing them on-chain. Its total market cap is currently $65.2 billion, including $13.4 billion in tokenized government bonds.
RWA was originally intended to move traditional asset management on-chain, improving settlement speed and accessibility. Early users were not institutions, but synthetic asset trading platforms that leveraged regulatory gaps on-chain. Now, institutions have become the largest user group.
A category worth focusing on is tokenized stocks. Traditional institutions such as Securitize and DTCC are seeing rising adoption. In July 2026, DTCC began conducting live tokenized securities trading with more than 50 institutions. Securitize listed its own stock SECZ on the NYSE, while also issuing tokenized shares across multiple chains such as Avalanche and Solana. By mid-July 2026, the subcategory’s market cap reached $2.3 billion—nearly double after first surpassing $1 billion in March.
At present, trading volume on DEXs is still far lower than in DeFi. Collateral usage relies heavily on permissioned allowlist structures. Achieving a DeFi “LEGO-style” deep on-chain composable portfolio similar to that may take time—right now, it’s still at the stage of proving the practical usefulness of on-chain asset management.

Prediction markets: from simple betting to market-leading trends
Prediction markets are platforms that let users place bets on the outcomes of real-world events via on-chain contracts. Their total market cap is currently $9.58 billion, the newest among the five sectors. Notably, the current leaders in this space—Kalshi and Polymarket—have not issued tokens yet.
The World Cup is both an opportunity and a challenge: trading volume surged in June, but after the July 19 final, the two platforms’ total open interest fell nearly 20% from the roughly $2 billion peak in early July. Sports contracts account for about 80% of total trading volume during event periods. Therefore, before the next major event (the U.S. midterm elections), trading volume may remain sluggish.
Regulatory risks still exist.
On July 21, 2026, a Washington state court issued a preliminary injunction banning Kalshi from selling sports event contracts, arguing that they constitute an illegal db under state law.
Before 2024, prediction markets were not even considered an independent sector. Now, they are the fastest-growing area in the crypto market. Their growth doesn’t rely on token market cap or TVL, but on real trading volume and revenue that bring users from outside the chain into on-chain ecosystems. This is also one of the clearest examples of blockchain technology becoming “part of everyday life” so far.

Meme coins: from pure speculation assets to liquidity-routing strategies
Unlike other sectors, meme coins have no clear utility. Their value comes from community and attention. Their 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 million on July 3 to $312 million by July 13. The highest DEX daily trading volume reached $846.8 million, mainly driven by $CASHCAT .
The real value of meme coins lies in quickly attracting early users and routing incoming funds. New chains or applications can quickly build a community by leveraging meme coins, naturally encouraging users to bridge assets and trade on DEXs. Some users will continue to use other DeFi services in the ecosystem and stay. Therefore, meme coins are more like efficient entry points and marketing channels rather than long-term hold assets. Whether early attention can translate into real product usage and ecosystem retention is the key to success or failure.

5. The essential conditions for a project to survive
Projects that have made it this far have already captured real needs that make users come back repeatedly, and they have proven it with clear indicators such as trading volume, TVL, and fee revenue.
In the 2026 market, demand concentrates at both ends of the spectrum:
One end is speculative demand seeking high volatility and immediate returns—meme coins, perpetual-contract DEXs, and prediction markets efficiently capturing demand through fast trading cycles and high capital turnover.
The other end is real financial demand seeking stable asset custody, transfer, and efficient management—stablecoins, RWA, and DeFi infrastructure take on core functions such as payments, collateral, yield generation, and risk management.
On top of that, sustained 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.
By late September 2026, KBW (Korea Blockchain Week) will give us an excellent window to observe this transformation up close. Key figures driving 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 on the same stage. Through conversations with leaders in stablecoins, perpetual DEXs, asset tokenization, and the RWA space, participants can personally feel the industry shift that currently only shows up in data.