Chainfeeds Summary:
Polymarket and Kalshi's TGE may ignite a new cycle in prediction markets; dual-stakes token structures will further fall out of favor; whether DAT will be removed from the MSCI index (January 15, 2026) is a key variable; institutional and retail demand for privacy-focused dApps is rising.
Article source:
https://fisher8.capital/insights/fisher8-capital-2025-in-review
Article Author:
fisher8
Opinion:
fisher8: Key Observations for 2025 1) Trump's Explicit Ties to Crypto: Before the 2024 presidential election, the market widely expected a Trump victory to be a turning point for crypto regulation and valuation, including ending enforcement-style regulation, supporting stablecoins, discussing a strategic Bitcoin reserve, and Trump-related projects (such as WLFI launched in September 2024). These factors made crypto the most beta expression in the Trump trade, with a large amount of policy optimism priced in before the election. However, after the election, the Trump trade began to retrace, not only in crypto assets but also in stocks highly correlated with Trump (such as $DJT). Although the policy rhetoric was more favorable, the actual implementation was slow, making it difficult to offset the overall de-risking trend. Coupled with Trump's economic exposure to WLFI and memes, the market began to worry about the excessive personalization and financialization of crypto assets. 2) Risk appetite in 2025 did not spill over to memes and long-tail assets as generally as in the past. Even though BTC hit a new high in early October, memes remained weak. Capital is increasingly flowing to a subset of crypto-related stocks (DATs, CEXs, funds), prediction markets, and tokens with clear value capture. This shift means that narrative cycles are significantly compressed, transaction lifecycles are markedly shortened, and the illusion of high returns from long-term Altcoin holdings has become almost a fantasy. Assets with true long-term attributes remain highly concentrated in a few assets such as BTC, ETH, and SOL. 3) The proliferation of Digital Asset Treasurys (DATs): The DAT model borrows from Strategy, directly holding crypto assets through a publicly listed company structure, becoming a regulatory circumvention before ETF approval. However, with the surge in the number of DATs, the market quickly became a bubble. Many altcoin DATs employ what we consider predatory capital structures: token-for-stock swaps, extremely low-cost private placements, and extremely favorable unlocking terms. These designs create exit liquidity for insiders but transfer the risk to secondary market investors. The fundraising scale of some DATs even far exceeds their listed market capitalization, and the structural mismatch problem is becoming increasingly apparent. Core judgments for 2026: 1) Viewpoint 1: Asymmetric opportunities will appear at the application layer. The "monetary premium" of the new generation of alt-L1 is dying out. BTC, ETH, SOL, and stablecoins have taken on the role of currency, and new chains no longer automatically receive high valuations. The ATH FDV of L1 has been declining continuously since 2020, and a large part of the valuation is artificially supported by fixed-price ICOs or direct CEX pricing. At the same time, the ecosystem stickiness of leading public chains is extremely strong, with about 70-80% of DEX trading volume and TVL concentrated in three chains for a long time. We believe that the real revaluation is happening in application tokens: application revenue has grown 200-300 times in the past two years, but the valuation is still far lower than the underlying chain. 2) Viewpoint 2: Midterm elections bring higher volatility. In order to win the 2026 midterm elections, policies tend to be short-term stimulus. OBBBA increases the probability of reflation, which is beneficial to scarce assets such as Bitcoin. However, the coexistence of infrastructure bottlenecks and fiscal expansion will bring a macroeconomic environment of higher nominal growth and higher volatility. 3) Viewpoint 3: K-shaped differentiation of the token economy. The market is entering a highly selective K-shaped structure. The "equity-token segregation" model is widely rejected: insiders control equity and income, while retail investors only hold governance tokens with no enforceable rights, resulting in a systemic discount to trust.
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