In February 2026, the global capital markets presented a tense dual-track scenario. The Nasdaq index maintained structural resilience amid the lingering effects of the AI wave, while the cryptocurrency market was undergoing a silent yet profound clearing.

This was not a simple cyclical correction. According to Coinglass data, within just 48 hours at the beginning of February, the total liquidation amount across the network exceeded $2.58 billion, with Bitcoin's price briefly breaking below the $76,000 mark, retreating over 41% from its historical peak. However, compared to the red numbers flashing on screens, a more hidden and critical signal was being transmitted on Wall Street trading desks—historic correlation divergence.

For the past five years, crypto assets had been viewed as a "leveraged Nasdaq index," closely following tech growth stocks. However, in this adjustment at the beginning of 2026, this anchoring relationship was broken. Crypto assets were being systematically stripped from the "risk asset" portfolio, and their volatility characteristics began to align more closely with those of gold and commodities. This signal suggests that the market is reassessing the attributes of cryptocurrencies; they are no longer simply seen as representatives of a future technological revolution but are being downgraded to an alternative commodity more dependent on supply and demand dynamics.

The MaiTong MSX Research Institute believes that under the dual pressures of exhausted native narratives and institutional deleveraging, the crypto industry is being forced to bid farewell to the grassroots era that attempted to build a parallel financial system, instead embarking on a brutal "species evolution"—from disruptors to dependents; from creating assets to transporting assets.

The Endgame of Leverage: Microstructural Failure and Pricing Logic Reconstruction

Any significant market paradigm shift often begins with external disturbances and culminates in the collapse of internal structures. The downturn in the crypto market at the beginning of 2026 clearly illustrated this logic. Its transmission path penetrated the market's psychological defenses layer by layer.

First Layer of Impact: Asset Attribute Redefinition Triggered by Gold Price Volatility

The direct catalyst for this round of adjustment stemmed from external factors. In early February 2026, international gold prices experienced a sharp decline over the weekend. With traditional financial markets closed, liquidity pressure was transmitted to the always-on crypto market. For allocation funds, both gold and crypto assets fall under the category of alternative investments, and the volatility of the former triggered passive selling of the latter.

But this was not merely a price linkage. More noteworthy was the structural change in asset correlation.

For a long time, the crypto market maintained a high correlation with the Nasdaq index, viewed as an extension of tech growth stocks. However, during this adjustment, the trends of the two diverged. The Nasdaq remained elevated, supported by the AI sector, while the crypto market closely followed the downward trend of gold prices. This phenomenon of "decoupling from US stocks and coupling with gold" suggests that the market is reassessing the attributes of crypto assets—its independent pricing power as a "tech asset" is weakening, while its commodity attributes influenced by macro liquidity are strengthening.

Second Layer of Collapse: Resonance of Institutional Holdings and Liquidity Gaps

The reason external catalysts could cause deep impacts lies in the fragility of the market's microstructure. This fragility is primarily reflected in two aspects.

First is the exposure of holding risks among leading institutions. Market data shows that institutions like BitMine and Trend Research hold large ETH positions. BitMine's holdings exceed 4.28 million coins, with paper losses expanding; Trend Research's on-chain positions face liquidation pressure (around the $1780 level). These high-leverage positions became targets for short sellers in a declining market.

Second is the liquidity gap caused by the "1011 incident." The market clearing event on October 11, 2025, resulted in asset losses for several market makers, significantly reducing their market-making capacity. This directly led to the current market's lack of absorption capacity. When gold price volatility triggered the first round of selling, the lack of sufficient market maker depth caused prices to quickly breach support levels, creating a liquidity vacuum.

Third Layer of Reconstruction: Migration of Pricing Factors and Narrative Correction

If the funding aspect explains the decline, then the fundamentals explain the failure of valuation. The market is re-examining the pricing factors of crypto assets, especially the native narrative of Ethereum.

Over the past two years, ETH's high valuation was largely built on deflationary expectations under the EIP-1559 mechanism, where the prosperity of the on-chain ecosystem would continuously destroy tokens, making it a deflationary asset similar to tech stock buybacks. However, with the diversion of Layer 2 and the decline in mainnet application activity, gas fees have remained low for an extended period, weakening the effectiveness of the destruction mechanism, and ETH has effectively transitioned to an inflationary state.

During bullish cycles, the market often overlooks this fundamental change. But under the pressure of institutional deleveraging, this contradiction has been amplified: an asset in an inflationary cycle with stagnant application growth struggles to support its original "deflationary tech stock" valuation model.

This correction in valuation logic is universal. When Ethereum's tech premium is stripped away, Bitcoin also faces the same repricing—specifically, the removal of some technological faith premium, returning to a more pure macro-hedging asset attribute. This explains why gold price volatility can have such a direct impact on the crypto market. Once the tech filter is removed, its commodity attributes as a major asset class dominate.

Infrastructure Transformation: RWA and Stablecoins, Rediscovering Value Beyond Native Narratives

The retreat of native narratives does not mean that blockchain technology itself has lost significance. On the contrary, when the idealistic narrative of "creating new assets and rebuilding financial order" is repeatedly falsified by reality, the true advantages of blockchain begin to be systematically absorbed by the mainstream financial system. In 2026, the crypto industry is shifting from a competition of imagination at the asset issuance end to a competition of efficiency at the financial infrastructure level.

This shift is not spontaneous but is a result forcibly "filtered" by market structure. The MaiTong MSX Research Institute believes that when tech growth premiums are stripped away and token prices no longer pay for narratives, if blockchain cannot still embed real assets and real cash flows, its space for survival will continue to be compressed. In this context, RWA and stablecoins are not new speculative directions but the only value channels through which the crypto industry can still form positive coupling with mainstream finance after losing its allure.

The essence of RWA is not simply "moving stocks or bonds to chain trading." The real structural significance lies in its reconstruction of the clearing and settlement layers of capital markets. In traditional financial systems, the friction of asset trading does not primarily come from matching but from clearing cycles, inter-institutional credit risks, and capital occupation efficiency. The T+1 and T+2 settlement mechanisms essentially exist as "safety redundancies" to compensate for the credit opacity and operational risks under centralized systems. In a blockchain environment, asset ownership and capital flows can be verified in real-time, making settlement delays a historical legacy cost that can be technically resolved.

For this reason, the exploration of RWA by traditional financial core institutions like Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange is not driven by an emotional embrace of the crypto market but by a rational demand for infrastructure upgrades. When clearing risks can be compressed, capital turnover rates significantly improved, and the friction costs of cross-border asset allocation systematically reduced, blockchain ceases to be "alternative finance" and becomes a pluggable efficiency module within the traditional financial system. In this process, the crypto industry has not played the role of disruptor but has been repositioned as the "underlying pipeline" of the financial system.

More importantly, RWA changes the asset structure of the crypto market itself. For a long time, the core issue within the crypto market has been that the vast majority of assets do not generate exogenous cash flows, and their value can only be maintained through internal capital circulation. Once incremental funds stop flowing in, the price system inevitably trends toward collapse. Introducing US stocks, government bonds, and credit-type assets on-chain essentially embeds the yield curves of the real world into the crypto market, giving it the first opportunity to possess value support that does not rely entirely on narrative-driven dynamics. This may not lead to explosive growth but significantly reduces the system's fragility.

Supporting RWA is the comprehensive infrastructure of the stablecoin system. If early stablecoins were merely "settlement tools" and "hedging assets" within the crypto market, by 2026, their role has clearly overflowed into the real economy. Stablecoins are no longer just intermediaries in speculative markets but are becoming the "value transmission layer" in cross-border payments, trade settlements, and global capital allocation. When mainstream financial institutions incorporate stablecoins into their payment and clearing networks, their significance no longer depends on "whether they are decentralized" but on whether they are faster, cheaper, and more reliable.

The expansion of stablecoins reveals a harsher reality: the true competitive advantage of blockchain has never been about "anti-regulation" but about reducing institutional friction costs. When compliance becomes a prerequisite and efficiency becomes the goal, blockchain finds its most realistic position for survival. This also explains why the development paths of RWA and stablecoins almost entirely point toward compliance and infrastructure, moving further away from the "parallel financial world" emphasized in early crypto narratives. This narrative shift is a significant marker of the crypto industry's transition from "adolescent restlessness" to "adult pragmatism."

Conclusion: Disillusionment is the Beginning of Maturity

The adjustment in the crypto market in 2026 was never a simple cyclical decline; it shattered the inertia narrative of "high growth, high returns" for crypto assets, stripped away unreasonable tech premiums, and pushed for a fundamental reconstruction of asset attributes, pricing logic, and industry development direction. The vision of establishing a parallel world independent of traditional finance is being replaced by a more pragmatic integration development concept. Crypto assets are no longer an isolated speculative sector; their underlying technology is becoming an indispensable upgrade component of the modern financial system.

The investment logic in the crypto market has shifted from betting on disruptive technological dreams to allocating those infrastructure assets that can genuinely enhance financial operational efficiency and possess real application value. The once-crazy premiums may never return, but a crypto industry that is more closely integrated with the real economy, more compliant, and more practically valuable may possess the true vitality to transcend cycles.

From Nasdaq's high beta to the island of digital gold, and then to the infrastructure of mainstream finance, this is both the industry's growing pains and the inevitable path toward maturity. When the noise fades, what remains will be the core value of blockchain technology—empowering finance with technology and serving the real economy with innovation. This may be the most anticipated direction for the future of the crypto industry.

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。