"Creator Says" is a dialogue column launched by Foresight News where we ask outstanding creators selected each month about hot market topics, collecting their responses into an article to gather a wide array of opinions and explore deeper thoughts.

Written by: Outstanding Content Creators from Foresight News in September 2026

Compiled by: Foresight News

The cryptocurrency market has entered a new cycle, with emotions fluctuating repeatedly. Meme narratives dominate the screen, with numerous tokens generating hype but lacking a solid business foundation. As the tide recedes, the risks of following the crowd are magnified. Beneath the bubble, what truly counts as a value token? What measures should investors use to avoid pitfalls and seize opportunities? Perhaps the answers are not found in the noisiest places.

This issue of "Creator Says" focuses on "New Cycles." We invited creators from the September 2026 Outstanding Creators List, including Daii, Black Mario, Alice Liu, the Research Head at CoinMarketCap, Harvey, Co-founder of BigTime, and special guest Alex Xu, Research Partner at Mint Ventures, to join this discussion.

We posed five questions: "What changes in the definition of value tokens does the new cycle bring?" "How to identify them?" "Which sectors are promising?" "How to view the challenges of token value capture?" and "Practical trading strategies." Below are the responses we gathered.

1. Compared to the previous cycle, what essential changes do you see in the market's definition of value tokens in the new cycle, and what old evaluation standards are no longer applicable?

Daii: Regarding the so-called "new cycle," my current judgment is: it may not be the worst time yet, but the turning point should not be far off.

However, for individual investors, guessing the lowest point is not the most crucial thing. What truly matters is managing tail risk and ensuring that one does not leave the table before improvement arrives. My new book "The Narrow Door of Bitcoin" emphasizes the non-ergodic nature of investing: the market can undergo countless cycles, but each person has only one wealth path. An irreversible setback can render all subsequent correct judgments meaningless.

In the last cycle, "value tokens" were often just another term for "products with financing, TVL (Total Value Locked), and endorsements from exchanges." As long as the narrative was big enough and the growth fast enough, the market was willing to temporarily overlook income quality, token dilution, and value distribution.

The biggest change in the new cycle is that the market has begun to distinguish three matters that were often mixed together in the past: whether the project has value, whether the protocol can make money, and whether the token is worth holding. None of these are equivalent.

A product can have a large number of users, but those users may come from subsidies; a protocol can generate income, but that income may be taken by the team, frontend, validators, or LPs; even if the income eventually enters the DAO, it does not mean that ordinary token holders have a clear, stable, and non-arbitrary claim.

Therefore, I now pay more attention not to "whether there is income," but to four things: who pays the income, why users continue to pay, the quality of income after incentives, and whether the token can sustainably capture part of that value.

Some old standards have clearly become ineffective, such as looking at TVL, address numbers, transaction counts, gas consumption, financing scales, and the number of partners in isolation. High FDV and low circulation, accompanied by a beautiful growth curve, do not automatically equate to value.

Of course, Bitcoin is an exception that needs to be discussed separately. It is not a company, nor does it rely on cash flow valuation; it is more like a digitally scarce asset that is still in the process of being monetized. You cannot use the same measures for assessing DeFi protocols to evaluate Bitcoin, nor can you assume a token with "income" is more valuable than Bitcoin.

Black Mario: I feel that in previous cycles, the market was more willing to pay for the future potential and growth expectations of projects. In this cycle, especially under the wave of RWA, the market is actually more focused on the ability of projects to create value themselves.

For example, during the bull market in 2020-2021, particularly when DeFi Summer, NFTs, GameFi, and Layer 1 public chains exploded, the market often judged whether a project had value based on several more traditional standards.

For instance, what sector the project belongs to, which well-known VCs back it, how much financing it has raised, whether the technical narrative is sufficiently advanced, how high the TVL is, how many ecosystem partners there are, or even whether it is listed on major exchanges like Binance or Coinbase.

The entire Crypto market is still in a relatively early stage of expansion, with everyone competing for new users and funds, and at that time, these standards were quite reasonable. Many projects lacked mature business models, but the market was willing to pay a premium in advance for their future development.

This cycle’s logic has become outdated.

The market has developed to the current stage, gradually distinguishing the real from the false. For example, some projects have raised tens of millions or even over a hundred million dollars but have very few real users for their products; some public chains claim to have a very high TPS, yet economic activity on-chain is extremely limited; and some DeFi protocols may appear to have TVLs in the billions, but a significant portion of the funds may actually rely on token subsidies and expectations of airdrops.

Once incentives cease, funds and users will quickly lose interest, making it difficult to maintain so-called ecosystem prosperity.

Therefore, to assess a project's value now, one should first see if there is genuine market demand, and whether users are still willing to use it without ongoing subsidies.

Another more significant change is that the commercial value of protocols and the investment value of tokens are gradually being differentiated by the market, which I believe is a very important change in the new cycle.

The early logic was that the better a project developed, the higher the token price would naturally be. However, it now appears that these two things are not necessarily related.

For example, a protocol may generate tens of millions of dollars in fees annually, but that income might entirely belong to the developing company, validators, or liquidity providers, with ordinary token holders deriving no actual economic benefit.

Thus, you will notice that this market cycle is placing greater emphasis on so-called value capture, meaning whether the economic value generated by the protocol can ultimately be transmitted to the token itself through fee distribution, buybacks, destruction, staking demand, or other economic mechanisms.

Hyperliquid is a quite typical example. The market is focused on HYPE, partly because Hyperliquid has enormous trading volume and has formed genuine transaction fee income, linking part of its protocol income with the economics of the HYPE token through a buyback mechanism.

Thus, purely using the circulating market capitalization of a token, or the project’s financing valuation to evaluate whether a coin is cheap, has been dispelled as a logic.

This round, many high FDVs, low circulation VC tokens have been seen. The project’s financing background looks good, and the narrative is decent, but the token prices have long endured substantial selling pressure from the unlocking. In fact, for ordinary investors, no matter how valuable a project seems, if your buying cost has already overdrawn future growth, while also needing to continuously absorb the tokens unlocking from early investors and teams, it may not necessarily be a good investment.

Therefore, it’s better to focus more on the actual income of the project, the token circulation structure, the future unlocking scale, and whether the economic benefits generated by the protocol can cover the continuously released token supply.

In other words, the value that the project presents must gradually be verifiable through genuine market demand, economic activity, or asset characteristics, and it cannot stay forever on white papers and financing pitch decks.

CoinMarketCap Research Head Alice Liu: What I observe is basically: in the last cycle, what was bought was "the story," but in this cycle, what is being bought is "the financials."

In the previous cycle, so-called value tokens were generally viewed through the lens of "this protocol is very profitable, so its token will eventually be worth something." The intermediate step "how money flows from the protocol's pocket into the token" was tacitly skipped. In this cycle, the market has filled in that gap, and has done so rather bluntly: Uniswap turned on the fee switch, Aave was pressured by the community to return 100% of brand product income to the DAO, and Hyperliquid simply uses almost all its fees for buybacks. These three events happened in the same year, not because the projects suddenly had a conscience, but because the market voted with its feet for five years, and they finally understood.

Specifically, three things have changed.

The valuation anchor has changed. Previously, TVL was the focus, now it's "holder income." TVL is rented; once project incentives stop, users pull their funds, and TVL can easily vanish; income is earned, but we also need to see how much of that earned money actually flows into the token. The marginal buyers in the new cycle are ETFs, public companies, and professional market makers, and these players are focused on buyback yields, FDV (fully diluted valuation) divided by income, and annual dilution rates.

Compliance has shifted from being a negative to a positive. In the previous cycle, compliance was a cost; in this cycle, compliance is a ticket to enter. Assets that can be classified as commodities, fit into ETFs, and can be held by compliant channels directly enjoy liquidity premiums; those that cannot enter this pool will only circulate within smaller ponds.

"Scarcity" has been redefined. Low circulation, high FDV was once packaged as scarce, but now the market looks at every locked token as a sell order waiting to be dumped.

As for the old standards that should be discarded, here are a few: TVL rankings, financing lineups, active address counts, number of ecosystem projects. These four can be looked at, but they cannot be the sole focus. Because these can be bought with money, and they are not expensive. The one that should be eliminated most is: "having governance rights equals having value." Over the past five years, the candlestick patterns of several leading DeFi projects have validated that voting power’s market valuation is nearly zero.

X-Agent: My judgment is that the bull market has already started, and this bull market will be led by Wall Street, with capital from American backgrounds being stronger. ETFs allow investors to gain exposure to crypto assets through familiar securities accounts, bringing crypto more directly into traditional financial allocation systems.

I believe that the biggest change this round is that core incremental funds and pricing power will come more from traditional finance. To find value tokens, one needs to understand what these funds are allocating to, why they are allocating, and which projects can serve their trading, custody, settlement, and risk management needs.

Combining my experiences with AI and Web3 products, I will also look at whether a project can solve specific problems: whether there are users that continue to use and pay, whether it can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and how the created value is related to the token.

Financing background, community size, TVL, and trading volume still have reference significance, but relying solely on these is no longer enough. I care more about whether there is real demand, sustainable business, the value capture of the token, and whether the buying price matches. It's three questions that need to be answered separately: Does the product have value? Does the token have value? Is the token worth buying at its current price?

BigTime Co-founder Harvey: Let's first talk about cycles, the four-year cycle is still valid. If we segment by "halving eras," we are currently in Era 5: 2024-2028, which is the cycle we are in now. The last cycle was Era 4: 2020-2024.

Definition of value tokens:

• Era 4: 2020-2024, the old definition: projects with imagination space – defining value through TVL, user count, institutional endorsements, and exchange listings.
• Era 5: 2024-2028, the new definition: a business with "real demand, stable cash flow, and the token can distribute money to holders."

To summarize this round's changes in one sentence: The "value" of value tokens has shifted from the "future in narratives" to the "verifiable, distributable present." The market no longer pays for "something that may be worth a lot in the future," but first asks "is it profitable now, and do investors receive distributions?"

Outdated evaluation standards:

• TVL worship.

Locked amounts can be piled up with subsidies; once the incentives are removed, they return to zero, measuring only "money attracted" rather than "business retention."

• Pure user scale / active address counts.

Airdrop hunters and multi-wallet clusters can produce pretty data, but without paid retention, the scale is hollow.

• Backing from large institutions.

Reliable → invalidated. This round, institutions are also seeking liquidity, financing scales have disconnected from fundamentals, and endorsements do not equal cash flow.

• The "beta logic" of "massive liquidity and rising tides".

Invalidated. In Era 4, everything rose with BTC; in this round, as BTC elasticity declines, altcoins without independent income will no longer automatically receive a beta uplift, but must prove alpha themselves.

Mint Ventures Research Partner Alex Xu:

1) The earliest value coins:

So-called value tokens, blue-chip coins might refer to those with a longer historical timeframe and strong retail investment consensus, including many cryptocurrencies based purely on consensus.

2) Recent value coins over the past few cycles:

Value tokens now include projects that have actual operational business, preferably with clear Product Market Fit (PMF), measurable revenues, stable operating conditions, a certain base market cap, and an extended period of operation.

3) Current cycle value coins:

In this cycle, the standards for value tokens will become stricter, effectively resembling those for public companies and stock equity of public companies. This means not only must there be real demand, long-standing operations, and revenue, but there must also be positive profit, positive cash flow; and the tokens themselves should have shareholder returns similar to stocks (that is, through buybacks, destruction, or dividends), ideally with some governance decision-making rights as well.

Of course, currently there are very few complete projects that possess all these aspects within the crypto space. Even tokens like HYPE, which have buyback and destruction features, temporarily do not have governance rights. UNI is currently the closest to this status.

I believe this overarching trend is very correct. Crypto projects should not be exempt; that is to say, the notion that "many crypto projects cannot be evaluated by the analytic methods used for public companies," or that "the valuation multiples they are given have a particularly high margin of tolerance," I believe are incorrect.

The valuation logic for business-oriented crypto projects should align with all public companies, just that their specific business operations and methods differ. The intrinsic value of tokens for crypto business projects should likewise derive from future discounted cash flows.

I believe as time progresses, this will become an increasingly recognized consensus; purely narrative-based projects, purely consensus-based projects will see their overall market capitalization continue to compress. This change, this trend, was already quite evident in the last cycle, where numerous altcoins did not witness their so-called altcoin seasons, only high-quality business-based altcoins could stand out, a typical example being Hyperliquid.

2. Many projects artificially beautify their revenues and business metrics through multi-wallet wash trading, gas consumption manipulation, and adjusting statistical standards. What key signals can investors rely on to distinguish sustainable real business value from fabricated pseudo-value?

Daii: I would first ask a very simple question: who is actually paying?

If the main payers are project-associated wallets, arbitrage bots, airdrop farmers, or users cycling operations to gain more tokens, then such income is essentially closer to customer acquisition costs rather than actual business income.

I generally cross-verify through a few directions.

First, observe how much remains of users and income after incentives exit. Real demand may grow slowly, but typically it retains, whereas prosperity fabricated from subsidies often collapses rapidly once token issuance stops.

Second, look at net income, not gross income. If a protocol generates $1 million in fees but issues $3 million in token incentives, one cannot simply claim "the protocol's monthly income is $1 million." Subsidies, rebates, liquidity provider costs, security expenditures, and token dilution must all return to the same table.

Third, examine the source and path of funds. Address counts can be easily fabricated, but the concentration of funding sources, wallet interlinkages, circular trading paths, abnormally regular operation times, and where funds eventually flow are typically more challenging to disguise in the long term.

Fourth, analyze unit economics. What does the protocol earn from a single user? How much must be continuously subsidized to bring that user back? If the larger the business scale, the larger the loss, that’s not a network effect but merely swapping token holders' money for data.

Fifth, evaluate the pressure state. In a bull market, nearly all protocols have "demand"; what distinguishes them is who still has users willing to pay proactively after the market declines, incentives decrease, and volatility levels drop.

One simple judgment I have is this: trading volume can be washed, addresses can be inflated, gas can be burned, and statistical standards can be adjusted; but external paid demand that does not rely on ongoing subsidies is tough to fabricate long-term.

Black Mario: One of the biggest features of blockchain is that on-chain data is public and transparent; all transaction records can be traced. However, just because on-chain data exists does not mean the economic activities reflected by this data necessarily correspond to real market demand.

For example, I could create 1,000 wallet addresses and perform repeated transactions, transfers, or contract calls among them through a script. From the on-chain browser's perspective, all these transactions would be real occurrences, with gas actually consumed, and the protocol might even generate fee income as a result.

But these actions might have created no external economic value; their purpose would simply be to manufacture data and make the project appear very active. Thus, I believe that determining a project's real business value requires further investigation into the economic logic behind these data.

One thing I think is most important is examining the source of the project's income, and how much cost was incurred to achieve that income.

For instance, a DeFi protocol may officially claim to have generated $10 million in fee income in one month. However, if it actually issued $15 million in token rewards to attract users for trading, providing liquidity, or maintaining activity, then economically, this protocol may still be in a continuing phase of subsidizing users.

In fact, we often need to distinguish between Fees and Revenue. Fees are the total transaction fees paid by users, while Revenue is usually the portion genuinely retained by the protocol. How much the protocol ultimately makes would require further deduction of token incentives, operating costs, and other related expenditures.

Therefore, some projects might have very high trading volumes and significant fees, but the protocol itself actually retains little profit.

Moreover, some public chains like to take gas consumption as a measurement of their economic vitality, but an increase in gas consumption does not necessarily imply a corresponding rise in the commercial value of the entire ecosystem. Who the gas fees ultimately belong to, whether they are burned, and what demand lies behind those transactions all need separate analyses.

One aspect I will particularly focus on is whether a project can maintain user and business data after subsidies are canceled.

To me, this is one of the most effective methods to recognize real demand. Often in the crypto industry, project parties can entirely acquire users, TVL, and even trading volumes through economic incentives.

For example, in earlier years’ NFT markets, projects like LooksRare and X2Y2 faced typical trading mining and volume inflation issues. Some users would repeatedly buy and sell NFTs among wallets they control to obtain the token rewards distributed by the platform, artificially creating massive transaction volumes.

These transactions did indeed occur, but a substantial portion did not represent normal NFT trading demand. Therefore, for these types of projects, I focus more on whether users still want to continue using them once token rewards diminish, airdrop expectations are fulfilled, or mining gains drop. If a protocol has hundreds of thousands of active addresses during the subsidy period, but quickly dwindles to just a few thousand once the subsidy stops, I believe the previous data at least needs a significant discount in evaluation.

Of course, utilizing subsidies for customer acquisition initially isn’t a problem; traditional internet companies also adopt similar strategies. The crux lies in whether the users obtained through subsidies eventually translate into users willing to pay continuously.

Another consideration is the structure of on-chain data.

If we observe on-chain transactions carefully, we find that many wash trading behaviors show patterns. For example, a significant number of wallets come from the same funding source, transaction times are highly concentrated, transaction amounts and behavior patterns are quite similar, and funds rotate among a few related addresses. Alternatively, the number of active addresses for a project keeps increasing, but most addresses only initiate one transaction and never use the protocol again, all of these serve as signals requiring further investigation.

For ordinary investors, I think another relatively easy-to-understand metric to focus on is user retention and payment conditions.

For example, if a project has 100,000 active addresses today, how many addresses will still be using it a month later? How many are genuinely paying fees? Is the protocol's income overly dependent on a few large holders?

If a project maintains a steadily growing pool of real paying users, and these users are not retained solely through high subsidies, then its business foundation is generally more robust. Of course, one wallet does not necessarily correspond to one real user, so it's best to look at this data alongside funding sources, interaction behaviors, and retention situations over different periods.

Of course, we should not completely trust the statistical methods published by the project parties.

For instance, a project might originally count net revenue but later suddenly start counting all transaction fees as revenue; or combine the trading volumes across different chains and products, or even include business data generated from collaborative agreements into its ecosystem data. In this way, the final numbers may appear much more favorable, while the actual operational status of the project has not changed correspondingly.

Thus, when I research a project, I typically cross-reference with third-party data platforms like DefiLlama, Token Terminal, and Dune, paying special attention to any changes in statistical standards that can be verified through on-chain transaction records and the reasons for differences in data from various sources.

Especially now, many tools like GPT and Grok can analyze data extraction capabilities, making this process much simpler.

CoinMarketCap Research Head Alice Liu: All the false metrics can basically be filtered out by this fundamental question: Who is paying, and why are they paying? The payers of real business are decentralized and voluntary; payers of false metrics are either the project itself or mercenaries there for points and airdrops. Once the incentives stop, the users disperse.

Several signals our team repeatedly looks at include the following.

Is income and incentives linked? Analyze net income after subtracting token incentives. If income rises and falls along with incentive switches, it’s not income but rent. In the past year, several trading platforms have had their trading volumes discovered to align tightly with reward seasons; as incentives flow in, volume spikes; when incentives stop, volume depletes. This kind of volume can only support short-term rankings, not valuations.

Does fee revenue keep pace with trading volume? Genuine traders pay full fees honestly, while wash traders try all means to avoid fees. If trading volume significantly exceeds liquidity depth while fee revenue doesn’t keep up, it’s not a good signal. Alternatively, we can also observe whether there is volume without price. Genuine buying and selling will drive prices.

Don’t look at totals; pay attention to addresses. A systematic data study can show that analyzing trading scale distribution on-chain has little meaning; rather, it’s more useful to see what portion of fees the top few addresses contribute and whether they are trading between each other. On-chain activity follows the same logic: after the Fusaka upgrade on Ethereum, new addresses surged, but two-thirds of these new addresses had a first transaction of under $1. Researchers need to distinguish between toxic traffic generated by addresses and actual user growth. Over half of L2 gas is burned by bots, yet the fees contributed are less than ten percent. Therefore, we need to observe "fee density," not just the number of transactions.

Are the standards quietly shifted? If the project self-reports data that suddenly looks more favorable than third-party reports, secretly adjusts statistical criteria, or mixes in unliquidated items within income definitions, those are all red flags. Reliable projects actively reconcile with third-party data platforms like CoinMarketCap.

X-Agent: I will separate market funding and project operations. The former addresses what funds are currently allocated to, while the latter answers what value the project actually creates.

When looking at ETFs, I will assess transaction volumes, net subscriptions, shares, and positions to determine, avoiding misinterpreting trading activity as new capital. In analyzing projects, it’s crucial to distinguish trading volume, fees paid by users, protocol income, and profits for token holders.

For specific business inquiries, I will drill down: who is paying, why are they paying, will they continue paying after subsidies stop? Is the revenue concentrated among a few associated clients? How much was spent on rewards, rebates, and operational costs to generate this revenue?

AI can assist in organizing trades, identifying unusual patterns, and cross-referencing metrics, but anomalies are merely investigatory leads, not definitive conclusions of fraud.

In the agent scenario, bots may also be genuine customers. The key question is what task they complete, who bears the costs, and whether they are willing to repurchase. Call volumes, wallet numbers, and gas burn must all correspond to verifiable business outcomes.

BigTime Co-founder Harvey: Let’s state a premise: the later it is in the cycle + BTC elasticity declines, the more concentrated the pseudo-value will be — because truly, cash-flow capturing projects are scarce, and funding is pressured to allocate, so "packaging" becomes the highest cost-effective arbitrage.

This phenomenon is more severe in Era 5 than in Era 4, as the previous cycle's pseudo-value (pure narratives, no revenue) has already been disproven once, and now fraud has become more industrialized and concealed.

Past tactics, such as wash trading, gas manipulation, and adjusting statistical definitions, all fundamentally involve fabricating income and activity metrics, which are the most easily visible indicators.

Thus, the underlying logic for distinction is to look for signals that have high costs of fraud or that leave behind indelible traces post-fraud, rather than just focusing on totals and growth rates.

Key signals we focus on:

1) The "address homogeneity" of income. Legit protocols earn fees from many independent user behaviors, with distributions being "long-tail, random, continuous". Fabricated income tends to concentrate in a few addresses, in an extremely short timeframe, and specific amounts, with trading counterparts being highly correlated (trading in circles back to self). Assessing the address concentration of fee sources is a hundred times more useful than just looking at total volumes. If 80% of a protocol's income derives from 10 addresses, it is fake, regardless of the total amount.

2) Paying retention, not active scale. Wallet clusters can fabricate "active address counts," but cannot fake whether the same batch of addresses continues to pay after incentives are removed. This is a barrier that wash traders can never cross. Thus, the focus should not be "how many are using it now," but rather "how many of the batch that received incentives three months ago are still left and are still paying." Retention is a true test for pseudo-value.

3) The matching of gas consumption to business value. If bots are consuming gas, this is best recognized – reviewing whether their transaction content is purely rotation (self-rotation, meaningless calls, and on-chain interactions). High gas yet low business value indicates inflation. Behind genuine protocols' high gas consumption, there must be corresponding real economic activities (genuine exchanges, lending, liquidations), and the two must align.

4) Whether cash flows benefit the token. This is the ultimate judge of "true value vs pseudo-value." This point is the most crucial yet counterintuitive: a protocol's income can be genuine, but that may still be pseudo-value for you as a token holder. If all income goes to the team’s treasury, and the token has no capturing mechanisms (no fee switches, no buybacks or destruction, no ve-sharing), then the business is real, but you can't get any money. To investors, this is as deceptive as washed data; both are "visible but not edible." (Note: "no ve-sharing" refers to when a protocol earns transaction fees and revenue, ordinary token holders cannot access the protocol's profit share through staking.)

The crux is: observing retention, homogeneity, and income direction is far more reliable than just looking at total figures and growth rates. Totals can be deceptive, while structures and directions are not.

Mint Ventures Research Partner Alex Xu: I have consistently emphasized first looking at the business front, then considering the financial aspects. By business front, I mean that we as project investors must first understand:

• What is the real demand corresponding to this crypto project’s business?
• What is the business model they operate based on this real demand? How does it transform demand into income and income into profit?
• What is the competitive supply in this sector? What are the project’s defensive competitive moats and their sources?
• What is the relative strength of this sector within its upstream and downstream industries?

Only with a full and profound qualitative judgment on the business can we determine whether the so-called operational data is real, rather than merely relying on on-chain data and crudely back-calculating the project’s operational status. Data must be used to validate and expand our qualitative assessments.

For example, the DePIN projects that were quite popular in prior cycles (like distributed computing and storage projects) seem less competitive than mature cloud computing and storage solutions in mature business scenarios. Their corresponding scenarios and demands have never been genuinely validated; from a qualitative perspective, it's difficult to argue that their demands are real, let alone that they could formulate a self-sustaining business model.

Based on this qualitative judgment, when we review their business data, we can often find that their so-called business data includes a lot of inflated figures or figures generated by token incentives rather than actual demand-driven data.

3. From the current perspective, which sectors do you see as having the opportunity to produce value tokens in the new cycle, and which sectors will you proactively avoid? Why?

Daii: I’m more focused on three areas.

The first is still Bitcoin. Strictly speaking, it is not the typical "value token," but if we discuss how ordinary investors cross cycles, it remains the asset in the crypto market most worthy of individual study. Its value does not derive from protocol profits, but from scarcity, security, liquidity, global availability, and the potential for continuing monetization.

The second category is stablecoins, on-chain payments, and their infrastructure. The advantage of this direction is that the demand is relatively easy to validate: Are users actually transferring, settling, saving, and moving across borders without needing grand narratives to explain? However, a sector's value does not mean that every related token has value. Much of that value may ultimately be captured by issuers, channels, wallets, or compliance bodies rather than governance tokens.

The third category includes proven financial protocols with genuine demand, encompassing trading, lending, derivatives, and certain asset management infrastructures. Finance is one of the few areas of blockchain that has found relatively clear product-market fit, but I will primarily filter those protocols that have undergone complete stress tests, are transparent about risk parameters, and have relatively clear rights associated with tokens.

I will also pay attention to RWA and AI agents but with more caution. They both possess real demands and substantial narrative space; the issue is that genuine business might exist in off-chain companies while tokens are merely financing and marketing tools hanging outside. The establishment of a sector doesn’t mean that its tokens are automatically validated.

I will proactively avoid several types of projects: highly homogeneous public chains and applications that can only rely on subsidies to sustain their metrics; high FDV, low circulation tokens with significant future unlocking pressures; "governance tokens" where business income is entirely dissociated from tokens; and AI, gaming, or social projects that cannot clearly explain why tokens must exist.

I don’t necessarily believe these sectors will lack momentum. It's just that momentum and value are two different concepts. As a personal investor, I care not about its ability to rise, but what I will truly hold when liquidity recedes.

Black Mario: Just because a sector has a large room for growth in the future doesn’t mean that the tokens in that sector necessarily possess investment value. From the current perspective, I am more inclined towards sectors that have already shown real market demand, can continuously generate income, and have clear value capture mechanisms for their tokens.

Personally, I am optimistic about several directions.

The first is DeFi, especially protocols that have formed mature business models, such as decentralized derivatives trading, lending, DEX, etc.

I feel that after several cycles, DeFi has validated a part of real demand. For instance, Aave's on-chain lending and Hyperliquid's derivatives trading have developed significant economic activities. The business models of these projects are relatively easy to comprehend; users need to pay interest to borrow, and pay fees to trade, from which protocols can earn income from genuine financial activities. Thus, I will focus on protocols that maintain continuous income, stable user bases, and can convey part of the economic value back to the tokens.

The second is stablecoin payments and the financial infrastructure built around stablecoins.

Stablecoins have practically become one of the few crypto products that have genuinely achieved large-scale commercial application. Particularly in cross-border payments, commercial settlements, and the flow of funds, I think there remains ample room for expansion as traditional financial institutions and payment companies continuously enter the field. If an increasing number of economic activities are achieved through stablecoins in the future, the payment, clearing, and settlement infrastructures that facilitate these fund flows will have opportunities to generate continuous income.

The third is RWA, especially the tokenization of US stocks and financial infrastructures that bring real assets on-chain.

We've discussed this direction quite a bit previously. As traditional brokerages, exchanges, and asset management firms gradually enter, crypto is constantly expanding its asset boundaries.

If stocks, bonds, ETFs, and other traditional assets gradually become on-chain, then the resulting needs for trading, lending, collateralizing, and settling around these assets will also broaden further, allowing us to focus on those projects that can engage in real business and capture economic value.

Additionally, I’m quite interested in the infrastructure that combines AI agents with on-chain finance for things like agent payments, identity, permission management, and automated trading. However, this sector is still in its early stages, and AI products themselves may not require token issuance, so I will exercise greater caution.

In terms of the directions I will actively avoid, they mainly fall into several categories.

First, there are large homogenous public chains and L2 solutions lacking genuine demand.

In fact, past cycles have shown that the market does not lack high TPS and low gas infrastructure; what is truly scarce are users and applications. Many L2 solutions are beginning to reveal issues of insufficient genuine users and limited income after their financing, token issuance, and ecosystem incentives conclude. Thus, depending merely on technical parameters and financing backgrounds has become increasingly difficult to support long-term value for public chain projects.

Secondly, I will avoid projects heavily reliant on token incentives to sustain business scales.

For instance, certain projects rely on re-staking, complex yield aggregation, or attracting funds through points and airdrop expectations. These projects may have high TVLs, but a considerable portion of those funds comes in pursuit of subsidies and once incentives stop, those funds might vanish quickly.

Lastly, I’ll steer clear of certain AI, DePIN projects lacking actual business demand, and high FDV, low circulation VC tokens, especially distributed computing projects. Although their technical narratives may seem appealing, their actual business competitiveness may not hold up under scrutiny.

For example, relying on idle phones for computing power may not translate into advantages over traditional cloud services when factoring in equipment wear-and-tear, operational stability, and network scheduling costs. If these projects lack true paying customers and merely sustain network scales through issuing token rewards, I think their long-term value will be limited.

CoinMarketCap Research Head Alice Liu: Blockspace is a commodity; anyone can create it; trading matching and asset issuance possess network effects and are not easily replicable. Money will flow from the former to the latter.

Three areas I foresee promise:

The "periphery" of stablecoins, not stablecoins themselves. The issuers of stablecoins take the fattest cut of profits across the entire industry, securing up to three-quarters of daily protocol incomes at peak times. However, you cannot "own" shares of USDT or USDC; as the "Genius Act" progresses, regulators are increasingly leaning towards prohibiting issuers from paying interest to holders. Thus, the profits must spill outward to distribution channels, settlement chains, and payment fronts. Those who can become "distributors" for stablecoins shall enjoy the advantages of capturing profits from this area. Synthetic Yield Stablecoins come with variables, and several issuers have seen significant declines in scale compared to last year. Therefore, we remind everyone that synthetic dollar yields are contingent upon favorable market conditions, and should not be treated as fixed-income savings.

On-chain exchange tier. Exchanges are the only business in the crypto industry that has undergone repeated validation; perpetual contract DEXs have brought this business on-chain and exploded fully this year. This sector is heading towards a rate war and an incentives war, and projects that have a true liquidity moat will have better opportunities to succeed in 2027.

“Carrying tier” for tokenized assets. Tokenized assets are the category that has most prominently appeared in the CMC narrative rankings over the past 30 days; the share of tokenized stocks in RWA has tripled in just one year. However, it should be noted that the value tokens that ultimately emerge from this sector will likely not be the "RWA tokens" themselves, but rather the issuers, the settlement layer, and the compliance entryways that support them. The saying that "the shovel sellers profit in a gold rush" applies here as well.

Three types I will proactively avoid.

Narrative coins without income pathways. AI agent tokens are the newest examples of this adverse case, where leading market caps have shrunk by over 90% from peak values. The issue does not lie with AI but rather that there isn’t a pathway between the coin and the business; even if the business is excellent, it won’t flow into the token.

New public chains with high FDV and low circulation pressures. Infrastructure is now severely oversupplied, as even Robinhood has launched its own chain. This indicates that "chains" are becoming cost centers for enterprises, akin to renting servers, rather than investable assets.

Projects that rely on incentives to buy volume. The metrics supported by points and airdrop expectations will drop to zero the day incentives wane; as discussed in the second question, I won’t elaborate further.

X-Agent: I will seek opportunities in two directions: what U.S. capital needs to allocate, and what services can accommodate this capital.

First are mainstream crypto assets that cater to institutional allocation demands, alongside services revolving around transaction, lending, custody, settlement, and risk management. I believe that providing reliable services to Wall Street will present significant opportunities this round. When judging projects, it matters to look at actual clients, ongoing revenue, and whether token profits are well aligned with business growth.

Second, services related to stablecoin payments and asset tokenization. I pay attention to whether they can interface with real financial processes, increasing efficiency in fund turnover and settlement. Here, it also crucial to distinguish the income of underlying assets, revenue of service providers, and rights concerning governance tokens.

Third, AI agents that can integrate into financial processes, focusing on research, risk control, execution, and reconciliation services. This is closely aligned with my product practices. My judgment standards will hinge on task completion quality, payment retention, delivery costs, and the reliability of data and permissions.

I will avoid projects primarily reliant on subsidies to sustain demand, projects that merely repackage models before issuing tokens, and those where the income remains uncertain with regard to token rights in the long-term. A U.S. background cannot replace business validation; it is essential to check who is being served, how the service is rendered, and who benefits from the value.

BigTime Co-founder Harvey: The single criterion for judging whether a token is a value token does not relate to the sector it is in, but rather hinges on one thing — while holding it, can I automatically and continuously capture the money earned from the protocol?

Using this criterion, if we rank all projects by "value capture progress," the conclusion will be very clear.

First tier: Already capturing funds (true value tokens, allocable).

What is common in this tier is that "the mechanism is active, and money is already being distributed," not "future empowerment."

1) Hyperliquid (HYPE)

• This is the most thoroughly executed model this round. It's a perpetual contract DEX on its own L1, generating income solely from transaction fees, with no subsidies or TVL inflation.
• Some portion of the fees is used for buybacks and destruction, while a part is directly distributed to HYPE stakers. It has also been fairly distributed from day one, without any VC private placements or airdrops, ensuring that money goes to the token.
• It simultaneously hits "proximity to cash + genuine cash flow + closed-loop capture," almost answering the standard for "what new value tokens should look like."

2) Uniswap (UNI)

• This activates the fee switch in October 2024, distributing some trading fees to UNI stakers, transforming from a "governance token" to a "cash flow voucher."

3) Aave (AAVE)

• In 2025, it plans to implement buy & distribute, using protocol income to buy back AAVE for distribution to stakers, redirecting the funds that previously flowed to the frontend but did not revert back to DAO.

Second tier: Currently replenishing capture; once achieved, they become top value tokens (to be closely observed).

1) Chainlink (LINK)

• Its demand and income are impeccable (oracles are foundational infrastructure for DeFi), but LINK historically has long acted as a "consumed commodity" — projects paid LINK as service fees instead of returning income to holders, meaning its capture was indirect and convoluted.
• This round, it is transitioning from "indirect use value" to "direct cash flow capture" relying on Staking (v0.2 is live, with v0.3 on the way).

This narrative stages the same story: Uniswap/Aave have completed the transition while Chainlink is in progress. Whether it can upgrade into a top value token will depend on the ratio of "real protocol income" in staking returns to "inflation subsidies" — subsidies remain dominant, then the capture is weak; income dominance represents a genuine closed loop.

Third tier: Good business, but tokens have yet to distribute funds (not value tokens, mere incubators).

1) RWA (Ondo/ONDO)

• U.S. bond interests are allocated to product holders (USDY), not to ONDO tokens, which remain governance tokens,sharing an issue similar to early Uniswap.

The bottom two tiers themselves do not constitute value tokens; they are incubators for potential value tokens, needing some project to materialize "returning income to tokens" mechanisms before being counted. Buying them as value tokens repeats the old error of "protocol profits but tokens receive nothing."

Avoidance tier: Tokens are dilution / recapture tools, not cash flow vouchers.

What the commonality is — there are no independent real revenues relying on expansion, subsidies, and narratives for maintenance.

1. Subsidy-oriented L1/L2 — pulling TVL while based on expansion and subsidies, where fee income falls far below issuance costs; once incentives stop, funds flow back to the head (Arbitrum, Base, Solana). You are paying for their customer acquisition costs.
2. Pseudo AI — once the AI label is removed, bears no difference from standard protocols lacking independent cash flow driven purely by narratives.
3. Cash-burning GameFi — P2E is "dependent on new players taking over," with no sustainable external revenue (Axie has already been disproven).

In summary, the dividing line is not "sector," but "capture progress": money is currently being distributed (first tier) > actively replenishing capture (second tier) > funds have yet to be distributed (third tier) > will never distribute (avoidance tier).

Value tokens that can emerge this round are not determined by "which sector will win," but rather which project is the first to return revenue to its tokens.

Hyperliquid is not an exception; it confirms the conclusion itself: new value tokens are those projects that, from their design, allocate money to tokens rather than those claiming, "first raise funds, first govern, then we’ll see" projects.

Mint Ventures Research Partner Alex Xu: I continue to assert that blockchain (or crypto) brings an underlying value logic to business: larger, freer markets and lower trust costs.

Thus, when assessing whether the business logic of a sector holds, we should first check:

• Whether existing enterprises or projects in this sector provide services and products with clear deficiencies in "larger, freer markets" and "trust costs"?
• Whether the solutions offered by crypto projects can provide sufficient incremental value on both counts?

In fact, we find that most pseudo-concept crypto projects fall short on both points or provide insufficient incremental value. Typical examples include DePIN, decentralized social networks, and decentralized or on-chain games.

Honestly speaking, aside from finance, I haven't yet seen other promising new sectors or products worth anticipating. Some relatively new products that have appeared in recent years, such as prediction markets, etc.:

• Firstly, they also possess high financial attributes.
• Secondly, products like prediction markets often do not require blockchain or crypto for implementation and product shape. There are numerous successful centralized products that can exist entirely outside of crypto and blockchain. Therefore, this area still requires further observation.

4. In the early years of Uniswap, all trading fees went to LPs, and UNI holders could only participate in governance without automatically sharing in the protocol's income; Aave had disputes regarding the attribution of frontend revenue, where parts of revenue did not flow back to the DAO. Have you encountered situations where "protocols make money, but tokens struggle to receive dividends"? How do you view the issue of insufficient token value capture?

Daii: I have encountered many similar situations. This is also one of the most easily overlooked issues in crypto investing: investors analyze a protocol exhaustively but wind up purchasing not equity in the protocol but rather a very ambiguous claim ticket.

I would break down value capture into four aspects: does the protocol generate income; where does that income ultimately flow; can governance alter that flow; and do token holders have clear and ongoing claims?

If any of these links are broken, the value of the protocol may not necessarily be transmitted to the tokens.

Governance has value, but it is not without flaws. If a token can genuinely control protocol parameters, fee switches, and treasury, it holds some optional value. However, that value must be significantly discounted, as governance may be controlled by large holders, fee switches may never open, regulatory environments may limit allocations, and teams could shift value directions through frontends, foundations, or new entities.

As such, I cannot appraise based solely on "future potential for distributing dividends." Future governance proposals cannot be equated to today’s cash flow, and the DAO treasury should not automatically equal token holders’ assets.

I prefer paths of value capture that have already occurred rather than waiting in anticipation of commitments. For instance, explicit processes of buybacks, destruction, staking income or other verifiable mechanisms are preferred. Additionally, one must continuously question: is this mechanism sustainable, could governance cancel it at any time, and is the income gained at the cost of greater token dilution?

A protocol can be very successful yet its tokens remain a poor investment. Separating these two matters serves as a starting point for evaluating "value tokens" in the new cycle.

Black Mario: Such scenarios are quite common in the crypto industry. When I first engaged with DeFi years ago, I always considered this a significant issue.

Many projects’ protocols indeed have value and can generate genuine income; however, a disconnect exists between the commercial value of the protocols and the investment value of the tokens.

Uniswap is a very typical example. Being one of the most successful DEXs in the entire DeFi industry, Uniswap has maintained enormous trading volumes for a long time, and LPs can earn fees for providing liquidity.

However, the main function of UNI early on was governance; holders did not directly share in the fee income generated by the protocol.

While the Uniswap protocol may represent a thriving business, ordinary UNI holders did not benefit from the protocol’s growth during its early stages.

Although in December 2025, Uniswap turned on its fee switch, gradually linking protocol usage to token economics by implementing buybacks and token destruction, it must be noted that this mechanism only indirectly captures value via reduction in supply and does not necessarily signal that UNI holders can access direct cash dividends.

Aave’s situation is somewhat more complicated.

Previously, Aave Labs and the DAO had disputes regarding the attribution of frontend trading fee revenues. Essentially, the debate was whether some income generated from users entering the platform through the Aave brand and ecosystem should belong to the company responsible for developing the frontend products or should be shared with the DAO—this question remained ambiguous.

At that time, Aave Labs believed they were entitled to corresponding income due to independently developing and operating the frontend as a separate product, while some community members argued that these operations benefitted from the DAO’s long-standing brand, liquidity, and infrastructure.

Eventually, Aave gradually adjusted related revenue attribution mechanisms, redirecting some frontend income back to the DAO.

However, a second issue remains: even if income flows into the DAO treasury, it does not automatically mean ordinary AAVE holders will share in those profits. The DAO’s funds could be used for development, operations, security reserves, or ecosystem incentives, or, through governance, could be allocated for token buybacks.

Therefore, I believe we should at least distinguish three concepts: how much income does the protocol create, how much income ultimately does the DAO receive, and how much economic value can ordinary token holders capture?

These three elements are, in fact, wholly different.

Naturally, I also do not think all protocol income should be directly distributed to token holders.

For example, Uniswap’s LPs bear risks from capital occupation and impermanent loss, thus receiving fees is reasonable. If a protocol overly compresses LP yields for the sake of buying back tokens, it could lead to a loss of liquidity and ultimately impair the competitiveness of the protocol.

DAOs also need to reserve some funds for security maintenance and long-term development.

However, I think if a project reaches a relatively mature stage, maintains ongoing business revenues, yet fails to establish an effective token value capture mechanism, then its tokens are unlikely to receive lasting fundamental support.

Hence, from an investment perspective, I would pay closer attention to a project’s fee distribution, buyback and destruction processes, rights to income allocation, and whether the tokens represent indispensable real demand.

This is also why we cannot simply treat crypto project tokens like stocks.

Stocks typically correspond to relatively clear company equities, while many tokens do not actually represent shares or profit-sharing rights of firms. Therefore, the protocol earning and holders profiting are two distinct matters. Projects that can effectively connect these two factors with a rationale will be more likely to gain long-term value recognition.

CoinMarketCap Research Head Alice Liu: This mismatch was the most common occurrence in the last cycle, which I largely define as "protocols are rich, tokens are poor." Uniswap serves as a typical example, generating tens of billions in fees over five years, yet much went to LPs, with UNI holders instead receiving a governance token. Aave faced similar issues, where frontend fees were routed outside the DAO, and community members referred to this as a "slow-motion coup." This term is apt; the value is not taken all at once, but slowly leaked out along the product structure.

My views can be separated into three levels.

First, insufficient value capture is never a technical issue, but rather a legal and interest one. Technically, activating a fee switch is simply a matter of voting once. The real barriers lie in: when regulatory clarity is absent, dividend distributions can easily touch the "I am a security" legal line; combined with the inherent discord between developers and DAOs, products like frontends, wallets, and aggregators naturally have an incentive to retain funds within company accounts rather than in tokens. When fee switches are clustered to turn on in 2026, much of the reason is not that everyone suddenly figured it out, but because, following clear regulations, project parties can no longer find excuses to delay.

Second, even after switches activating, problems persist; this is the most memorable lesson of the year. When Uniswap turned on the switch and burned 100 million tokens, the price dropped to cycle lows; similarly, Pump.fun allocated 100% of its income to buybacks, yet the token price plummeted by two-thirds. Why? Four factors concurrently contribute: the buyback volume is too small relative to the market cap, unlocking and emissions on the other end negate the buyback, income is declining, and buybacks are governance policies not contractual commitments, thus they may be cut on the next vote. These uncertainties make it hard to support token prices.

Third, investors often analyze these three metrics: ratios, net amounts, and reversibility. What percentage of holder income constitutes total income? Is the buyback yield positive or negative after deducting dilution rates? Is the mechanism locked in the contract, or can it be changed with the next vote?

At a deeper level, the resolution to this problem will see tokens transition from being "governance tokens" to "on-chain equity." Aave has consolidated all economic rights to AAVE, while Hyperliquid is using the logic of exchange stocks to design tokens, both steering in this direction. Regulatory actions will determine how far this pathway can extend, but the market has already priced this standard in.

X-Agent: I will break down team income, protocol income, DAO treasury income, and token holder income layer by layer. The specific rights an investor buys determine their valuation.

AI projects especially require this level of examination. Users pay for AI services, and the income may flow to the operating companies; the tokens might merely serve governance or other functions. Even if a product grows well, it’s essential to confirm how that growth affects the tokens.

The mentioned cases have had updates: Uniswap has implemented a UNI burning mechanism supported by protocol fees since December 2025, yet holders do not have the right to receive dividends in proportion to their holdings (Uniswap official explanation). Aave Labs announced in April 2026 that they would redirect related CoW partnership fees and Horizon fees to addresses controlled by the DAO (Aave Labs implementation update).

These changes indicate that value capture can improve. My focus is on whether rules have been executed, whether funding sources can sustain, who can modify them, and whether buyback, destruction, or distribution scales can support current valuations.

As traditional finance continues to deepen its involvement, I believe token rights need to be clearly defined. Future commitments to distributions and mechanisms that have been continuously implemented should not receive the same pricing.

BigTime Co-founder Harvey: "Protocols make money, but tokens capture none of the dividends" is not merely a flaw in certain projects, but the default state of token design in this industry.

Classifying based on "where the money gets intercepted," I have encountered four typical forms:

1) All earnings go to service providers, leaving holders with zero capture.

Uniswap was a quintessential example early on. Fees solely went to LPs, while UNI only held governance rights, akin to holding equity but without dividend rights.

2) Income is intercepted at the frontend/middle layer, never flowing back to the protocol or DAO.

Aave's frontend dispute serves as a case in point. Value gets drained during operations, leaving both protocol and token in the lurch.

3) Tokens serve as "consumables" rather than "dividend vouchers" — Chainlink is a representative case.

Projects paid LINK as service fees, expending LINK without reverting any dividends to holders, thus ensuring the capture is indirect and convoluted.

4) Income is held in the protocol treasury under team control, leaving holders only governance rights.

Many projects with genuine income fall into this category. They indeed make money, but it goes to foundation treasuries, allowing teams discretionary control while tokens serve merely as earlier financing tools, leaving holders with no access to actual cash flow.

I have seen every one of these forms, often interspersed throughout the same project at different stages. Their root causes are interconnected.

The latter part of the problem: how to view "insufficient value capture": this is not a bug, but a product of its historical phase.

We propose three layers of judgment:

First, it results from compliance pressures; early "not capturing" was an active choice.

When tokens were born, they were not positioned as "securities," but rather as "financing + governance" tools. Writing cash flow distributions into tokens could trigger regulatory classification as securities, which led project parties to intentionally design tokens to "lack dividend rights" for compliance and fundraising. Thus, "insufficient capture" in early days was a conscious decision of the designers, not negligence.

Second, inadequate capture demand during the bull market was elicited by this bear market.

In Era 4’s rising tide, token prices rose based upon scarcity and narratives, and holders profited through price increases, with little concern for cash distribution. It wasn’t until BTC elasticity diminished, beta disappeared, and institutional entry occurred that holders began inquiring, "Is what I hold a token that can distribute?" Demand for capture only surfaced after the market cooled.

Third, capture mechanisms themselves incur compliance and technical costs.

Fee switches, buybacks, and ve-sharing each must contend with legal risks regarding, "Does this count as a security?" and technical challenges surrounding how income is fairly and automatically allocated to stakers on-chain; hence, such mechanisms have lagged in development.

Thus, a more nuanced conclusion emerges: "insufficient value capture" isn’t merely a laziness in individual projects but a systematic design flaw in the previous tokenomics—tokens were treated as a triad of "financing + governance + speculation," yet were never established as "cash flow vouchers."

This round (particularly with Hyperliquid) is about addressing this flaw, redefining tokens from "triad tools" back into "dividend vouchers." This represents the true meaning of "the definition of value tokens has undergone a fundamental shift," and it serves as the underlying grounding for all prior judgments (watching capture progress, observing income direction, assessing whether tokens are consumables).

Mint Ventures Research Partner Alex Xu: The majority of tokens and crypto projects lack returns for token holders, or rather, insufficient value capture results first and foremost from the effective demand the crypto industry can currently support, as well as the commercial value of that effective demand being insufficiently large. Thus, most projects don’t even generate revenue, let alone net profits after deducting token incentives and team operational costs, and naturally fail to allocate value to tokens.

Projects that do have revenue and net profits often do not provide returns to token holders; this can be viewed in several scenarios. The first is that even if a protocol has net cash flow right now, it might have better re-investment opportunities; for instance, promising new product opportunities that require R&D and marketing, and existing businesses may have expandable market space. In other words, after calculation, they believe that investing these funds in product and operational needs could yield a greater long-term ROIC (Return on Invested Capital) than direct buybacks or dividends. If a project opts not to distribute dividends or repurchase tokens in such cases, I find that acceptable, but, in reality, very few projects meet this criterion.

The second case involves projects that genuinely have limited re-investment opportunities yet still refuse to provide returns to token holders without rational explanation. Such projects are relatively numerous, a typical example being Chainlink:

• Chainlink clearly has off-chain business income, but the income data is unreleased, and that income and operational profits do not connect with token holders.
• The LINK token has a very thin usage scenario, currently limited to staking, and the APY for staking is also remarkably low.

For projects like these, I suggest that fundamental/value-oriented investors simply avoid. You can imagine a listed company whose shares do not carry voting rights and offer no shareholder returns; nobody would buy stock in such a company.

In instances where it is known that the project’s income and cash flow are unrelated to the tokens, if someone still insists on buying, it is not a problem of the project but that of the investor.

Similar projects also include BNB. Currently, the value capture of BNB has no connection with Binance’s net profits. Binance’s returns to token holders have ceased since 2022. Currently, the main allocations of value capture and use scenarios only pertain to gas on-chain; taking part in some airdrops and the like on the Binance main site. However, this segment of business has declined rapidly in recent years.

5. Combining past experiences in selecting and holding valuable tokens, when you choose a target, what strategies do you typically adopt for position sizing and stop-loss/stop-gain? What practical insights can you share?

Daii: My first principle is not "how much can I make this time," but rather "if I’m wrong, will I lose the ability to keep participating permanently."

This reflects the non-ergodic nature of investing. Even if a particular trade has expected positive returns, it does not imply that one can take infinite positions. As long as there’s a possibility of total loss, liquidation, hacking, regulatory changes, or vanishing liquidity, position sizes must obey survival constraints.

Specifically, I will separate my core Bitcoin holdings from high-risk token holdings. For new value tokens, I usually start with a small recognition or observation position. Only as the product, data, token structure, and value capture continue to be validated will I gradually increase my position sizes. Positions are not for showing confidence; they serve as a cap on losses when mistakes occur.

I generally avoid using borrowed money and also strive to avoid leverage. Many people don’t err in judgment but rather get wiped out via their approaches: the asset indeed rises later, but during their previous fluctuations, they've been liquidated or forced to sell.

In terms of stop-loss, I do not mechanically set a uniform percentage. Crypto assets are highly volatile and pure price stop-losses can easily misinterpret normal fluctuations as logical failures. I emphasize three kinds of stops: one being logical stop-loss where the original core assumptions of the investment have been proven false; two being structural stops concerning the adverse changes in token unlocks, governance rules, or value distribution; three being position stops when losses on a single target begin to threaten the overall portfolio, necessitating reduction regardless of positive outlook.

Stop-gains do not aim for precise selling at the highest points. When prices enter ranges that clearly depend on optimistic expectations, I will reduce positions in increments, recovering the principal and turning some paper profits into real assets, while maintaining a slight position for tail-end upside. There’s no shame in missing out on peak gains, as no one can catch the entire surge while also evading every retreat.

My greatest insight from the past is: good targets cannot compensate for erroneous positions, and correct judgments cannot save irreversible large positions. The true advantage of individual investors lies not in having more capital or faster information but in being able to wait, trial and error in small sizes, or even choosing not to participate.

Markets will have next opportunities, assuming you’re still in the game.

Black Mario: I believe that the importance of position management may equal the ability to choose a good project.

Because even if our long-term judgment on a project is correct, it doesn't imply that buying at any time or price is right; hence, I distinctly differentiate between core long-term positions and opportunity-based positions when allocating assets.

The first is core long-term holdings.

For example, assets like BTC and BNB which I closely monitor and understand their fundamentals and market positions deeply, I prefer to hold for the long term and am willing to assign higher weightings to. For these assets, I wouldn’t simply change my long-term decisions due to short-term fluctuations of ten percent or more.

However, if it’s an emerging project, even if the fundamentals are reasonable and the narrative appealing, I typically won’t assign a high position right away.

After all, crypto projects are filled with uncertainties, including technological implementations, team execution outcomes, token unlockings, market competition, etc.

Thus, for new targets, I lean towards participating with small positions first, scaling up as the project's business data and income along with its token economic models gradually validate.

The second aspect is entry prices and valuations.

I find many investors easily make the mistake of conflating good projects with good prices.

A protocol might indeed show real income and possess an excellent business model, but if the valuation of the token has already overdrawn future growth space, then even with continued development, the token price might not perform well. Therefore, I will pay particular attention to FDV, circulating market cap, future unlocks, and the actual revenues of the protocol, trying to avoid large FOMO purchases when market sentiment is at its height.

The third aspect is stop-loss and stop-gain.

In fact, I am not keen on setting fixed percentage stop-loss and take-profit strategies across all tokens.

Mature assets like BTC and emerging projects with low circulation ratios carry completely different risk structures.

For long-term favored targets, I prioritize whether any changes occur in fundamentals rather than short-term price fluctuations.

In contrast, for emerging projects or opportunity-based positions with high volatility, I will stricter control risk. If the original investment rationale is disproven—such as real business failing to meet expectations, sustained income deteriorating, or token unlocking pressures exceeding forecasts, I will consider exiting, rather than endlessly averaging down.

Regarding profit-taking, I prefer scaling out in increments. Especially when a project has seen significant short-term increases and market valuations exceed my reasonable expectations, I will gradually reduce positions, recovering part of the principal and profits.

I feel that there's no need to obsess over buying at the lowest point or selling at the highest point; being able to keep the profits in one’s account consistently is more crucial than catching an occasional hundredfold increase.

Lastly, one personal insight is to avoid developing overly strong emotional dependencies on the projects I invest in, which is particularly common in the crypto industry.

Many people study a project for a long time, even join its community and participate in governance, gradually becoming loyal advocates for the project; but investment is investment and projects are projects.

Just because a project is worthy of long-term focus does not mean its token should be held indefinitely, nor should we feel compelled to be bullish at any price.

In the crypto market, while capturing opportunities is surely important, the ability to endure through multiple cycles and stay in the market long term is, I believe, paramount.

CoinMarketCap Research Head Alice Liu: First clarify that this is not investment advice, but rather a summary of some rules from the tuition I've paid myself.

Position sizes should reflect "how much can be validated," not "how much can rise." Holdings are divided into three tiers: core assets with institutional buyers, value coins with trackable cash flow, and purely speculative narratives. Each fulfills a role.

Take profits based on valuations, not based on price increases. If buyback returns are being squeezed down to nearly bond-like thresholds, or if FDV divided by revenues far exceeds that of peer-listed exchanges, it’s time to reduce holdings. Another signal is market behavior: the CMC Fear & Greed Index & CMC Altcoin Season Index surging, funding rates heating up, or social media heat far outpacing income, all serve as practical indicators for profit-taking.

Use event triggers for stop-losses, rather than percentage triggers. It's also necessary to monitor the liquidity of this token, and if you visibly see its spot trading volume dropping, signaling diminished market liquidity, these should be signals for your price stop-loss point.

Owning value tokens is also not a matter of simply buying and forgetting; regular checking against these checks is necessary. The "value" of value tokens is a verb that must continually be validated, not a noun definitively established on the day of purchase. Fortunately, these can be analyzed and monitored through CMC AI,

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