Markets
|9 min ReadWhy The Next Crypto Cycle Will Punish Tokens Without Revenue
Carter Hayes
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
1. 2025 Was A Cleanse, Not A Funeral
Crypto did not die in 2025. It just stripped off the costume.
High-FDV, no-user tokens, memecoin bundlers and “airdrop then vanish” launches sucked liquidity out of the system and gave the cycle its “crime” reputation. Tokens listed on tier-one exchanges went straight from TGE to exit liquidity. Long-only holders got punished while teams and early insiders cashed out.
Under the noise, three pillars actually matured: stablecoins, perp DEXs and DATs.
Stablecoins grew up
The Genius Act in July 2025 forced US payment stablecoins into 100 percent cash or T-bill backing. That gave institutions what they wanted: legal clarity and clean collateral. Net inflows into stablecoins pushed past 100 billion dollars, the strongest year in the sector’s history.
On top of vanilla dollars, yield-bearing stablecoins quietly doubled to about 12.5 billion dollars in supply, led by products like BlackRock’s BUIDL, Ethena and sUSD-style structures.
The Stream Finance blow-up and the broader market drawdown hit sentiment and compressed yields, but the business model is still there: permissionless dollars that settle instantly and can be lent or re-hypothecated inside and outside crypto. For traders in Brazil or the Gulf, that is the on-ramp and hedge against local currency risk that actually works.
Perp DEXs became real competitors
Perpetual DEX open interest climbed from roughly 3 to 11 billion dollars this year, peaking near 23 billion. Weekly volume ran from about 80 billion to over 300 billion dollars at the top.
Hyperliquid alone has reached around 10 percent of Binance’s perp volume. Traders are voting with their feet for three things: no KYC, liquidity that feels “CEX-like” and the chance to farm points and tokens.
The important shift is on value accrual. Hyperliquid routed a share of profits into buybacks for HYPE using its Assistance Fund, up to about 3.6 percent of supply. That set a new meta: tokens backed by real fee flows, not just governance theater. Retail now looks at revenue and buybacks before they look at your FDV.
DATs showed how far the equity bridge can go – and where it breaks
Trump’s friendlier stance dragged Wall Street deeper into crypto via DATs, public vehicles that mirror the MicroStrategy playbook. Roughly 76 new DATs launched, taking aggregate on-chain holdings to around 137 billion dollars, with more than 80 percent in BTC and about 13 percent in ETH.
Bitmine (BMNR) emerged as the flagship ETH accumulator in that group. But the trade faded fast. Most DAT stocks spiked for ten days, then bled out. After the October 10 wipeout, inflows collapsed by roughly 90 percent versus July, mNAVs sank below 1 and the equity premium that powered the “infinite bullets” narrative disappeared. The lesson is simple: DATs amplify trends, they do not save markets.
From this cycle, one message is obvious. Trading, earning and payments still dominate real usage. The winners are the ones that turned those flows into fees and pushed those fees back into the token.
2. 2026: Prediction Markets, Stable Payments, Mobile And Revenue
Prediction markets graduate to an asset class
Being able to bet on anything with money at stake proved more powerful than most expected. Weekly volumes across prediction platforms have already retaken and surpassed the US election peak, even after stripping out earlier wash trading.
Polymarket and Kalshi have locked up most of the liquidity and distribution. Polymarket raised at around an 8 billion dollar valuation with secondaries marking it closer to 12 to 15 billion. Kalshi closed a Series E at roughly 11 billion. With a POLY token, potential IPOs and integrations into Google Search and Robinhood, this is no longer a toy niche.
There is still a lot to fix: resolutions, disputes, toxic flow, user retention over long feedback cycles. That is exactly where smaller, more personal products like Bento can carve out verticals, including in Brazil’s election-heavy environment and GCC sports-betting culture.
Stablecoin payments scale into the real economy
Monthly stablecoin transfer volume is pushing toward 3 trillion dollars. It is a crude metric, but the direction is unmistakable: more merchants, more payrolls, more cross-border trade running on digital dollars.
Visa, Mastercard and Stripe now treat stablecoins as just another settlement rail. Partnerships like Mastercard with OKX Pay mean Brazilian and Middle Eastern merchants can accept stablecoins while still seeing fiat at the bank. On the crypto side, neobanks such as Etherfi and the rebranded Argent “Ready” let users swipe cards directly against on-chain balances.
Etherfi’s daily card spend has climbed past 1 million dollars. The pain point is CAC and monetization, since users self-custody assets and banks cannot rehypothecate deposits. Expect more in-app swaps, wrapped yield products and white-label services as revenue layers on top. Tempo and Plasma are positioning as dedicated payment chains, with Stripe and Paradigm’s backing giving them instant distribution.
Mobile becomes the default gateway
Roughly a tenth of global daily payments already run through mobile, with Southeast Asia setting the standard. As cheap Androids and QR rails penetrate Brazil, MENA and the rest of the Global South, mobile habits will carry directly into crypto.
Wallet UX has caught up. Account abstraction, better sign-in flows and SDKs from players like Privy make self-custody on a phone far less painful than two years ago. a16z estimates mobile wallet usage grew about 23 percent year on year.
Products are following. Fomo, a social trading app that lets anyone ape into tokens from a unified interface, has grown to around 3 million dollars in daily volume with peaks near 13 million.
Polymarket, Aave and new entrants like Sproutfi are all targeting mobile-first saving, betting and earning. In 2026, some of the fastest growth will come from apps that never touch a desktop browser.
Revenue and value anchors decide who lives
The brutal truth is that most listed tokens still barely earn anything, and even when protocols do generate fees, they rarely flow back cleanly to holders. That is why charts go “up only” on narratives, then “down only” once the story fades.
Only about 60 protocols clear 1 million dollars in trailing 30-day revenue. Web2 has thousands of software companies doing that every month.
Trump-era policy shifts unlocked legal paths for profit sharing in the US, and teams seized it. Hyperliquid, Pump.fun, Uniswap, Aave and others pushed harder on both product and fee growth, then tied those fees into buybacks or distributions. In a bearer-asset world, that kind of aggressive value capture is not optional, it is table stakes.
Chain-level revenues are projected to fall roughly 40 percent as base fees compress. In contrast, apps, DEXs, exchanges, wallets and trading terminals have grown revenues by more than 100 percent. Value flowing to token holders is at an all-time high on an absolute basis.
Crypto’s core use cases are still trading, yield and payments. The difference in 2026 is that investors will not forgive tokens that sit on top of those flows without touching the cash.
The Plan: Make Revenue, Not Crime
This is not the end of crypto. It is the end of pretending that vibes alone can support multi-billion dollar caps.
The projects that survive this cleanse will be the ones that ship products people in São Paulo, Riyadh and everywhere else actually use, collect fees from those flows and route value back to their tokens in a transparent way. Prediction markets, stablecoin rails, mobile apps and high-margin trading products all sit in that lane.
Everything else is just a more sophisticated way to sell lottery tickets.
Not investment advice. Do your own research.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.