From HODL to DeFi, Sharp Analysis of 21 Mainstream Crypto Narratives in 2025

By: blockbeats|2026/03/29 22:12:00

BTC

USDC

MORPHO

Original Article Title: My Crypto Narratives Tier List for 2026

Original Article Author: DeFi Warhol, Crypto KOL

Original Article Translation: Tim, PANews

Top Tier

BTCFi: Bitcoin is transitioning into productive capital, with billions of BTC being used for staking, yield, and collateral, where Babylon and Lombard hold a significant share in BTC collateral TVL.

Privacy: As more traditional financial capital moves to the blockchain, selective disclosure becomes crucial, with institutions needing to achieve compliance-friendly privacy protection in payments, identity verification, and corporate fund flows.

AI: AI and crypto tech continue to evolve, becoming crucial tools for data handling, driving intelligent agents, and achieving verifiable computation, with immense potential. The industry's vast scale cannot be ignored.

DeFi: DeFi is shifting towards consumer-facing apps, with Coinbase currently offering DEX trading and USDC lending services within apps through Morpho. DeFi TVL has hit a historic high, with emerging consumer-facing apps rapidly emerging.

God Tier

Chain Abstraction: Smart accounts, intent, and embedded wallets reduce user friction, making the blockchain invisible. Significant improvements in user experience are crucial for adoption, although progress is slow.

InfoFi: Despite recent market concerns, uncertainty, and skepticism, InfoFi remains the data market, incentive mechanism, and transaction signal refinery. InfoFi is about to make significant progress, is InfoFi 2.0 coming?

Robot: Its outlook is more grandiose than actual progress. The pace of hardware and deployment development cannot be compared to cryptocurrency, so this is more like an early-stage infrastructure phase.

ZK: It is undoubtedly a core technology, but as an investment target, it is more complex. Most of the value will accumulate in ecosystems that can apply ZK technology on a large scale, rather than existing as an independent concept.

Software Infrastructure: Demand remains stable (such as RPC, indexing, interoperability, data availability, etc.), but the competition has become extremely fierce. Nevertheless, this field may still see the emergence of high-quality projects.

NPC

Staking and Restaking: Restaking indeed works, but the yield continues to compress, the risk of slashing is real, and the complexity of operations makes ordinary investors hesitant. The narrative of this track has been overheated from the start.

DePIN: Ideally, DePIN should be integrated and cooperate with the real world, but many projects still struggle to achieve this goal. Regulatory pressure and a lack of sustainable business models are hindering its development.

L1 and L2: Rollup has become the mainstream scaling solution, but the development momentum of new public chains is weak. Currently, most of the value is shifting towards applications, liquidity, and ecosystem distribution, rather than just another underlying protocol.

SocialFi: While occasional peaks in user activity may occur, user retention and long-term product-market fit have yet to be achieved, and it may be difficult to achieve in the short term.

Luck

GameFi: The Play-to-Earn model has fundamental flaws. Although some gaming chains are still running, most GameFi projects merely add more operational steps and offer a worse user experience, resembling a skinned version of DeFi.

NFT: We have witnessed multiple attempts to revive the NFT market, but market reactions have shown that unless it can break through the limitations of JPEG images and avatars and create new use cases, NFTs will always be stuck in their current predicament. Even attempts at integration into the gaming sector have yet to yield a breakthrough.

Meme Coins: Although the Meme Coin supercycle has been lively, liquidity is shifting towards legitimate projects, and its market dominance continues to decline. Retail investors are tired of being repeatedly harvested and pursuing the next hundredfold mythical game.

Modular Blockchain: Important Architecture, Bad Narrative. Users don't care, investors only care about the presence of a clear, sustainable money-making effect, and currently, most modular projects don't have that.

Original Article Link

-- Price

On June 9, The Kobeissi Letter, citing Goldman Sachs data, reported that global investors are selling South Korean stocks at an unusually rapid pace. In the latest trading session, foreign investors sold about $801 million worth of Kospi constituent stocks again; total foreign outflows last week reached about $10 billion, and the market has been in net foreign selling on nearly every trading day over the past month. According to the data cited in the report, foreign investors have sold about $75 billion worth of South Korean stocks so far this year. Meanwhile, South Korean retail and institutional investors together recorded roughly $69 billion in net buying over the same period, suggesting that the market’s main buying support has come from domestic capital rather than returning overseas funds. The information currently disclosed still mainly comes from The Kobeissi Letter’s retelling and Goldman Sachs data summaries, while public details on the statistical period and the specific definition of “selling” remain relatively limited.

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Scaling Crypto Derivatives: The Digital Asset Infrastructure Behind High-Volume Trading

In the fast-moving digital asset ecosystem, derivatives platforms face an extreme architectural test. High-leverage futures markets demand more than just standard security—they require absolute operational precision, zero-latency matching engines, and ironclad structural scalability, all while navigating intense market volatility.

As global platforms scale to meet these demands, the industry is shifting away from rigid, monolithic setups toward a more agile, "decoupled" infrastructure philosophy.

The Blueprint for High-Volume Copy Trading

For elite global exchanges like WEEX (founded in 2018), this architectural choice becomes critical when scaling high-volume retail features like social copy trading. When thousands of users automatically mirror the real-time strategies of elite traders simultaneously, it triggers sudden, monumental spikes in concurrent transactional volume.

To prevent execution latency or settlement bottlenecks during these peak volatility events, a platform's primary engine must remain entirely dedicated to risk management, copy-trade synchronization, and order matching.

The Architectural Rule: New-generation platforms must separate front-end user execution engines from heavy backend infrastructural overhead to eliminate operational friction.

By separating these layers, platforms can maintain complete sovereignty over their trading environments and user experiences while strategically aligning with institutional-grade infrastructure ecosystems. This strategic framework allows modern exchanges to leverage advanced Digital Asset Custody infrastructure such as Cobo’s behind the scenes, ensuring that backend wallet management scales elastically alongside trading spikes.

Capitalizing on Market Momentum and 400× Leverage

In a derivatives arena where platforms offer up to 400× leverage on perpetual contracts, capital efficiency and market agility are core business metrics. To capture market momentum, an exchange needs the ability to rapidly expand its asset offerings, supporting everything from legacy crypto assets to sudden, trending altcoins across a massive library of trading pairs.

Adopting a flexible, scalable Wallet-as-a-Service (WaaS) solution such as Cobo’s could completely rewrite the development timeline for high-growth exchanges. Instead of spending months of engineering capital building out custom backend wallet architectures for every new blockchain network, platforms can deploy localized infrastructure in days.

This agility allows platforms to instantly scale their listings to over a thousand trading pairs without compromising security or delaying time-to-market. It mirrors the exact operational advantages seen during high-velocity market events, similar to how advanced wallet infrastructure empowers platforms during sudden asset surges; allowing exchanges to pass that speed and liquidity directly to their global user base.

A Mature Foundation for Growth

The synergy between trusted infrastructure ecosystems and global trading platforms represents the natural evolution of a maturing crypto market. As WEEX continues to scale its global spot and derivatives offerings for over 6 million users, adopting robust backend paradigms proves that platforms no longer have to compromise between cutting-edge trading velocity and uncompromised structural security.

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