In Part One, I focused on Messar's structural arguments surrounding L1 valuation traps, chain abstraction, AI agents, derivatives, and DePIN. Part Two shifts the discussion from the growth narrative to internal tensions within the cryptocurrency system—particularly Ethereum's positioning, the evolution of stablecoins, and the importance of maintaining skepticism when reading institutional research reports.
These chapters are less about where capital goes and more about where capital goes. They aim to further explore where value is quietly lost and why some long-held assumptions may no longer hold true.
Ethereum's identity crisis
One of the most compelling parts of the report is Messari's in-depth exploration of Ethereum's strategic dilemma. The report raises a thought-provoking question: Is Ethereum gradually becoming a "settlement dump" for its own Layer 2 ecosystem?
To understand this concern, context is important.
The Ethereum Cancun upgrade and EIP-4844 introduced Blobs, significantly reducing data availability costs at Layer 2. From both a user and scalability perspective, this upgrade has been highly successful. Transaction fees have decreased, and the operating costs of Rollups have also been significantly reduced.
However, these negative economic impacts are far from beneficial to Ethereum itself.
Before Blob, applications like Uniswap required users to transact directly on the Ethereum mainnet, consuming ETH and participating in fee burn. After the upgrade, most of this transaction activity migrated to the L2 layer, where fees are collected at the aggregation layer. Ethereum still receives settlement fees, but only a fraction of what it used to be.
Therefore, Ethereum's gas consumption is decreasing, the rate of ETH burning is slowing, and by 2025, the asset will transform from a deflationary asset to an inflationary one. This is not merely a technical footnote—it directly impacts Ethereum's monetary narrative.
Messari argues that unless Ethereum can restore its economic traction through mechanisms such as shared sequencers, mainnet upgrades, or some form of native sharding, its valuation will increasingly rely on the "digital gold" narrative.
In this competition, Ethereum faces a structural disadvantage. As a monetary asset, it cannot win in the competition. The success or failure of Bitcoin and Ethereum depends on their simplicity, immutability, and brand clarity. If execution layer relevance cannot be restored, Ethereum will face the risk of being squeezed out by Bitcoin's monetary dominance and L2 service application dominance.
The shift from yield-generating stablecoins to shadow banking
Another major theme of the report is the shift of stablecoins from passive settlement tools to active yield tools.
Messari predicts that interest-bearing stablecoins will increasingly erode the market share of cryptocurrencies. The reason is simple: institutions are no longer willing to forgo a 5% risk-free rate of return for holding unyielding dollars.
The report introduces the concept of "risk-free yield withdrawal." Historically, USDT holders have essentially handed over their yields to Tether, which then reinvests its reserves, reaping billions of dollars in profits annually. In a high-interest-rate environment, this inefficiency becomes glaringly obvious and cannot be ignored.
The protocol Ethena directly challenges this model. Ethena combines liquidity-staking tokens with a delta-neutral hedging strategy, distributing underlying yields to stablecoin holders. Importantly, USDe's listing on major centralized exchanges in 2025 gives it true settlement capabilities, not just DeFi composability.
However, Mesari did not ignore these risks.
Because USDe is a synthetic stablecoin backed by derivatives hedging, it is subject to structural de-pegging risk under extreme market conditions. Its returns primarily come from two sources: LST staking rewards and funding fees paid by perpetual futures traders.
In a bull market, long traders subsidize the entire system, allowing USDE holders to "collect rent." In a prolonged bear market, fund flows reverse, and the system must pay to maintain hedging. Therefore, returns are cyclical, not fixed.
Messari's optimism implicitly assumes that leverage demand will persist and the Bitcoin market environment will remain favorable. The LST premium is an indicator worth watching; persistent distortions often indicate rising underlying pressure.
Backtesting and health skepticism
While Mesari's research is insightful and historically accurate, it should not be taken as absolute truth.
As a research platform with institutional interests, Messari inevitably reflects portfolio risk exposure and strategy preferences. The report maintains a consistently optimistic tone. For example, Solana's holdings are highly consistent with its disclosed holdings. This doesn't negate the argument, but a critical distance is certainly warranted.
To verify this, I used AI-assisted analysis to backtest Messari’s major predictions in recent years.
The results were mixed, but quite insightful. In late 2023, Messari predicted that Solana was the only L1 token capable of truly challenging Ethereum, a prediction that proved remarkably accurate, with SOL's price soaring from around $20 to over $200 in 2024. Their relatively bearish stance on Ethereum was also validated, with the ETH/BTC price continuing to weaken in 2025.
The predictions regarding DePIN were partially correct. Large projects like Render and Helium performed well, but many smaller projects ultimately failed. The predictions for stablecoins were more accurate, with yield-bearing stablecoins poised to be one of the most stable growth sectors in 2025.
Overall, the hit rate was high—but not perfect.
This further underscores a broader point: the best way to interpret the Messar Report is... as a directional compass, not a trading manual. They excel at identifying structural shifts early on, but they don't account for liquidity timing, narrative decay, or retail-driven reflexivity.
Different timelines of AI agents
One of Messari's boldest claims is that by 2026, AI agents will dominate on-chain activity. Conceptually, this argument is quite compelling. Autonomous software cannot open bank accounts, requires 24/7 settlement, and naturally gravitates towards crypto-native monetary systems.
The area where I remain cautious is timing.
Even today, on-chain latency and gas fees remain significant friction points. This applies not only to Ethereum but also to high-performance blockchains like Ethereum. For a network of thousands or even millions of frequently interacting AI agents, this cost structure is currently unworkable.
Every signature, every status update, and every arbitrage attempt incurs real costs. As the scale increases, these costs quickly become unsustainable.
Therefore, I believe 2026 is more likely to be a breakthrough year: AI infrastructure rather than a fully autonomous agent economy. Computational tokenization, model validation, privacy-preserving inference, and decentralized verification feel closer to market maturity.
A true "native agent economy," where AI systems independently earn, consume, hedge, and reinvest capital on the blockchain, may still take one to two years to achieve.
This doesn't mean we should ignore the field. Rather, it means our investment strategy should be selective. Instead of buying a broad range of narrative-driven AI tokens, focus on the hard infrastructure—the protocols that run AI systems. These are essential. For example, BitTorrent-style architectures, particularly optimized subnets focused on model validation, performance scoring, or privacy computation.
Whether intelligent agents are fully realized in 2026 or 2028, these are closer to the "hard currency" in the AI stack.
Why Messari is still worthy of respect
Despite these disagreements, the overall value of Messari's work is undeniable.
The 2026 cryptography technology outline is approximately 100,000 words long, totaling 275 pages. To better understand its key points, I used artificial intelligence technology to estimate the weight of each chapter based on its length. The results are thought-provoking.
The real focus of Messari is on the following three chapters: Chapter 3 (Cryptocurrencies), Chapter 1 (Investment Trends), and Chapter 5 (Infrastructure and the Multi-Chain World). These three chapters together form the conceptual framework of the report.
This is no coincidence. These chapters correspond to asset definition, survival rules, and execution efficiency—three levels that determine who survives when the narrative disappears.
Chapter 3: The Ultimate Use of Assets
Chapter Three is the most important part of the entire report. Its core objective is to define... one of the most important tools for ultimately identifying cryptocurrencies.
Here, Messari attempts to demonstrate that Bitcoin has completed its transformation from a speculative risk asset to a reserve asset. Within this framework, Bitcoin is no longer the last resort for venture capital, but is becoming an essential asset allocation.
This aligns perfectly with my own macroeconomic research focus. Bitcoin has historically been at the extremes of the risk spectrum. Today, it increasingly resembles an alternative store of value—volatility is present, but its structure is fundamentally different from growth tokens or venture capital.
The unresolved issue is no longer whether Bitcoin should be included in an investment portfolio, but rather how much the debate has shifted from inclusion itself to the allocation ratio.
In contrast, Ethereum is portrayed as still undefined. Its pricing dilemma reflects uncertainty about whether it is a commodity, a settlement asset, or merely infrastructure rent for secondary servers. Meanwhile, stablecoins are seen as monetary weapons—tools capable of exporting yields, liquidity, and influence across borders.
This chapter brings cryptocurrency to the most direct intersection with real-world capital flows, regulation, and macroeconomic policies. For this reason, it is more important than any purely "Web3 narrative."
Chapter 1: The Paradigm Shift from Story to Narration
If Chapter 3 defines assets, then Chapter 1 defines survival.
Messari believes that by 2026, the cryptocurrency market will have completely transitioned from "storytelling" to "accounting." The era of unlimited token subsidies masking weak demand is coming to an end. In its place will be the DF model—a framework designed to weed out artificial growth and identify protocols with genuine intrinsic motivation.
The formula is simple yet brutal:
DF = (Organic Growth Rate / Incentive Subsidy Rate) × Capital Efficiency × Cross-Industry Penetration Rate
Every component is meticulously designed, leaving no stone unturned.
The ratio of organic to subsidized revenue acts as a dehydration filter. If a protocol's total value locked (TVL) increases tenfold, but its token issuance increases twentyfold, its DF score will plummet. This indicates that the project is driven by resource exploitation rather than sustainable development.
Capital efficiency measures how much economic activity an agreement generates for every dollar of liquidity it injects. A highly capital-efficient system can turn one dollar into ten dollars of trading volume or revenue. A low-capital-efficient system, on the other hand, wastes capital on vanity metrics.
Cross-domain penetration is perhaps the most important long-term variable. Does the protocol only serve native cryptocurrency users, or can it also meet external needs? DePIN selling computing resources to AI companies, or the RWA protocol introducing traditional funds, score far higher than internal loop protocols.
Essentially, the DF model is not about growth—it's about wealth redistribution. It asks whether an agreement changes who gets paid or simply redistributes incentives among insiders.
Chapter 5: Efficiency Determines Victory or Defeat
The infrastructure section concludes with a sobering observation: the competition in blockchain is no longer a contest of technological superiority, but rather a contest of friction.
From a technical standpoint, most public blockchains are “good enough.” The real difference lies in how effectively they address user pain points. Wallet management, gas fee abstraction, and cross-chain complexity—these are the bottlenecks preventing funds from flowing into the cryptocurrency space.
Messari believes that blockchain abstraction is the key to success. The ecosystem that can most effectively hide complexity will not only attract native cryptocurrency users but also capital migrating from the traditional financial system.
This is the same thing I mentioned about marginal capital in my previous analysis: the capital of unwillingness to… Learning about cryptocurrency, but being willing to use it, will disappear if friction disappears.
Efficiency, not ideology, determines victory or defeat.
Which ones are worth watching, and which ones can be postponed?
Based on the Messari framework—and tweaked with my own skepticism—the priorities became clearer.
In the short term, the focus should remain on Layer 1 ecosystems that can control liquidity flows or effectively implement on-chain abstractions. Staking perpetual coins serve as a strong bridge between DeFi and global markets, possessing genuine fee potential. DePIN is worth watching, provided its external revenue streams are validated. Yield stablecoins will continue to challenge the existing stablecoin market, despite their cyclical risks.
AI-powered agents are worth watching—but patience is required. In the next phase, infrastructure is likely to outperform application-layer agents.
Crucially, all of these analyses remain confined to the cryptocurrency sphere. The most important factors determining returns remain hidden outside these sections, in the longest and most impactful part of the report: the interaction between cryptocurrencies and real-world capital.
This is also the focus of my broader research, and will be an important complement to the focus of my next series of reports—such as the outlook for the market and Coinbase's market forecasts.
Conclusion
Messari's "Cryptovision 2026" is not without its flaws. It contains institutional biases, overly optimistic assumptions, and an overly aggressive timeline. However, it remains one of the few documents that accurately predicts structural change before a consensus is reached.
Read critically. Understand the framework. When to question.
In the cryptocurrency world, the future is often defined very early on—but the profits belong only to those who enter the market neither too late nor too early.
The above viewpoints are all referenced from @Web3___Ace
