This article is merely a personal market opinion and does not constitute investment advice. Any profits or losses incurred from actions taken based on this article are the sole responsibility of the reader.

The content of this article is sourced from Twitter author — Santiago R Santos.

Crypto ETFs are now live; stablecoins have been integrated by mainstream companies; regulatory attitudes have become more favorable. Everything we wanted has arrived!

So why isn't your coin rising?

Why has Bitcoin given back all its gains while the US stock market has risen 15-20% for the year?

Now that mainstream views have shifted to "crypto is not a scam," why are your favorite altcoins still underwater?

01 The Gap Between Ideal and Reality

There has always been a deep-seated assumption in Crypto Twitter:

"As long as institutions come in, regulations become clear, and JPMorgan or BlackRock issue tokens… crypto will conquer everything, and we will go to the moon."

Everything we wanted has arrived — but they haven't driven prices. Why?

Because the entire crypto market is often disconnected from reality.

Bitcoin is a unique existence — a perfect narrative: digital gold. Its market cap is about $1.9 trillion, while gold is around $29 trillion. Less than 10% of gold's market cap, with room for growth in the future. This is a well-understood combination of hedge + option value.

But Ethereum + Ripple + Solana + everything else combined has a market cap of about $1.5 trillion, and the narrative isn't as stable. Although no one questions the potential of this technology anymore, and few still call it a scam, the real question is — does an industry with possibly only 40 million active users really justify a valuation in the trillions?

Meanwhile, OpenAI is rumored to have an IPO valuation close to $1 trillion, with a user base about 20 times that of the entire crypto industry. How much real value have these chains created? Can they support so much money?

In the past, the answer to making money was simple: invest in infrastructure. Early holders or participants in ETH, SOL, DeFi. But now, many projects are priced with the assumption that there will definitely be 100 times the usage and 100 times the revenue in the future, and after issuing tokens, they have become ghost chains. This forces us to ask the real question: What is the best way to invest in crypto now?

02 Three Cruel Facts Under Triple Benefits

This cycle has seen a resonance of regulatory, industry, and corporate benefits, but the market and prices reflect three facts:

1. The market doesn't care about your story; investment returns to fundamentals.

No matter how a chain claims to be the "mother of all chains" or the "world computer," it ultimately comes down to: How much money does it actually make each year? Does this income come from real economic activity?

2. Crypto is no longer the "only hot spot."

Previously: the "high Beta gambling table" for global risk capital was in crypto. Now: AI has taken center stage, and crypto has become a supporting role. Liquidity is selective; AI is the main character, and crypto is not.

3. Companies follow business logic, not crypto narratives.

Companies only care about: compliance costs, integration costs, operational costs, and stability.

The launch of Stripe's Tempo is a warning: companies won't think ETH is the world's supercomputer just because they listened to Bankless. They will choose the option that is most beneficial to them. If private chains or consortium chains are more useful, they may not come to L1 or L2 public chains. When prices are overly inflated, all it takes is a cough from Powell, and the entire narrative collapses.

03 Valuation Misconception: Mistaking "Casino Revenue" for "Software Income"

Many people use the Web2 framework to value public chains: "Public chains have revenue, transaction fees, MEV, staking, so they are somewhat like SaaS, right?" This is actually a very dangerous analogy.

🔹 Staking rewards ≠ corporate profits, but rather inflation, dilution, and security costs.

The real "economic value" roughly comes from: transaction fees, tips, MEV (extractable value), which can barely be considered the "gross income" of public chains.

In this regard: Ethereum: about $2 billion in annual revenue, market cap around $400 billion, about 200-400x PS (and it's still cyclical revenue). Solana: annualized over $1 billion, market cap around $75-80 billion, about 20-60x PS. Moreover, there is a more frightening fact: this is not "compoundable income." This income is not stable, enterprise-level regular income, but highly cyclical speculative flow. This is not SaaS income; this is Las Vegas.

When is income highest? — At the peak of a bull market, perpetual contracts surge, meme coins explode, leverage is rampant, liquidations are everywhere, and bots are arbitraging crazily.

When does income nearly disappear? — During the vacuum period of a bear market, when no one is trading, no one is minting, liquidations decrease, and on-chain activity is sluggish.

This is not long-term contracts or predictable income, but rather "three years without opening, and when it opens, it eats for three years" cyclical revenue. You cannot apply Shopify's valuation multiples to a casino that only fills up every 3-4 years.

04 Comparing NVDA to See the Crypto Bubble

Compare it to the "god" of the tech world — Nvidia, which has a valuation of 40-45x earnings (not revenue). Nvidia has: real income, real profits, global corporate demand, predictable contract sales, and non-casino users. If the industry's transaction fees cannot shift from speculation to real economic value, most valuations will need to be repriced.

05 The Industry is Still Early, But Not Early Enough to "Buy Anything and It Will Rise"

Prices will eventually return to fundamentals, but we are not there yet. Currently: most tokens have no reason to support huge valuations, value capture is limited, and income mainly relies on the cyclical speculation of casino products. We have built the world's fastest value transfer system… but are using it to play slot machines. As Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph said: "Culture is not what you say, but what you do."

Industry bigwigs keep saying: we need decentralization, yet the most important product in the crypto industry is 10x leveraged perpetual contracts on memecoins. Only when we do better can we move from "over-financialized niche casinos" to real industries.

06 This is the "End of the Beginning," Not the End

I do not believe this is the end of crypto. But I think this is the "end of the beginning." We have over-invested in infrastructure (over $100 billion) while severely underestimating the real application layer, products, and users. Investors have focused their energy on: TPS, block space, fancy rollup structures.

But users do not care at all. Users only care about: cheaper, faster, simpler, and whether it can solve their problems. Returning to first principles: Who are the users? What problems are we solving?

07 Where Are the Real Investment Opportunities?

I still believe: open, neutral infrastructure will drive global finance, and companies will adopt crypto technology for economic advantages, not ideology. But I do not think the big winners of the next decade will be today's L1 or L2.

Tech history tells us: winners are always at the user aggregation layer, not the infrastructure layer. The internet made computing and storage cheaper, and the real money was made by: Amazon, Google, Apple.

Crypto will also follow a similar rhythm: block space is a commodity, infrastructure upgrades have diminishing marginal returns, users will always be willing to pay for convenience, and user aggregators will capture the most value. The real big opportunity is: embedding crypto technology into already large enterprises, replacing outdated financial pipelines, and improving real business efficiency. This is the trillion-dollar opportunity. The internet changed every industry because the economic calculations made sense. Crypto will be the same.

The question is: do we wait another 10 years, or start now?

08 What Should We Do Now?

• Blockchain technology is not the problem
• The potential is huge
• The industry is still in its early stages

What we need to do next is to reassess:

• Evaluate projects based on real usage and "income quality," not ideology
• Distinguish between "sustainable income" and "cyclical casino income"
• The winners of the last cycle may not be the kings of the next cycle
• Stop treating token prices as indicators of technological validation

No one will choose AWS over Azure just because Amazon's stock price outperformed Microsoft's one week. We can continue to sit and wait for corporate adoption, or we can start pushing for it now.

Bring real GDP on-chain

Job's not finished.

Follow me to maximize trend profits with minimal actions.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。