Foresight said the pricing logic behind crypto assets has shifted in 2026, with markets showing less follow-through from pure narrative-driven trades and a stronger focus on fundamentals, real user scale, and revenue models.
The article breaks current market dynamics into three parts: fading marginal returns from narratives, growth data from sectors tied to real demand, and the rising influence of regulation and macro conditions.
Narrative rotations are losing some of their old force
Across previous cycles, crypto markets moved through several dominant themes, including DeFi Summer, NFTs, GameFi, restaking, and AI Agent plays. Each new narrative often brought a rapid move higher in related tokens and a short-term jump in trading activity.
That pattern has started to change over the past two years. According to Foresight, sector rotation accelerated in 2025, and after AI Agent, new concepts appeared almost every month. What changed was duration: most individual narratives did not last as long. The market has split on how to read that shift. One view treats it as a normal sign of a more mature market, while another sees it as evidence that attention-driven returns are declining at the margin.
GameFi was presented as a clear case. The sector drew about $2.5 billion in investment in the first quarter of 2022, helped by the entry of traditional game companies. User retention later told a very different story. Axie Infinity’s monthly active players fell from a peak of about 2.8 million in January 2022 to roughly 8,000 in May 2026, a drop of about 99.7%. Foresight said many market analysts cite that gap as a typical example of the distance between concept-driven heat and actual user retention.
Some sectors are still expanding on real usage
While narrative rotation continues, the article said several sectors with clearer use cases are still posting growth in market size and user metrics.
Stablecoins
Total stablecoin market capitalization stood at about $304 billion at the time of the article. Tether’s USDT accounted for about $184 billion of that figure. Its monthly settlement volume was about $1.79 trillion, and cumulative settlement over the last 12 months exceeded $10 trillion. Foresight said stablecoins remain one of the most mature on-chain capital entry points, with core use cases in transfers, settlement, hedging, and liquidity management.
Real-world assets
As of June 30, 2026, the market for publicly distributed real-world assets, excluding stablecoins, reached about $32.65 billion, up about 50.7% from the start of the year. The number of asset holders rose from 579,000 to 947,000.
Within that segment, tokenized stocks grew from $670 million to $1.8 billion in the first half of the year, while the number of holders climbed from 122,000 to 395,000. After July began, tokenized stock holders increased again to about 759,000. Foresight said Robinhood had accumulated about 328,000 holders since launching the related feature on July 1.
The article described RWA as an important bridge between demand for off-chain assets and on-chain capital allocation. At the same time, it said the sector’s development still comes with debate over custody structures, legal rights, liquidation paths, and redemption arrangements.
DeFi aggregators
In DeFi, Solana ecosystem DEX aggregator Jupiter announced on July 21, 2026 that its cumulative routed trading volume had passed $1 trillion. Dune data, cited in the article, showed Jupiter’s historical gross trading volume had exceeded $374 billion. Foresight said the core role of aggregators is to provide users with better execution routes and quote optimization, reflecting continued demand for higher on-chain trading efficiency.
Regulation and macro liquidity are back in the pricing mix
Foresight said real demand is not the only variable behind recent changes in pricing. Beyond fundamentals, regulatory expectations and macro liquidity are shaping risk appetite again.
In late July, the market traded around developments tied to the U.S. CLARITY Act and at one point read them as a sign of stronger regulatory certainty. Under that expectation, Bitcoin strengthened on a short-term basis, briefly nearing $67,000 with a gain of more than 3.2% over 24 hours.
At the same time, the rate environment, dollar liquidity, and the broader performance of global risk assets continue to show a strong relationship with price swings in Bitcoin and other crypto assets. The article also said some institutions include geopolitical conflict, competition for critical resources, and volatility in the AI industry in tail-risk frameworks, arguing that such factors can have a significant effect on risk assets, including crypto, during certain periods.
Market discussion is shifting toward project divergence
According to Foresight, crypto price formation is now being shaped by a broader set of forces. Narrative still matters, but it no longer stands alone. Regulatory expectations, macro liquidity, and shifts in risk appetite are taking on a larger role.
The article added that divergence in price performance and user activity between projects has become a central point of discussion. As the market develops, the gap may widen between projects with stable user bases, clear revenue sources, and a defined product-market fit, and those that rely mostly on concept-driven momentum.
Foresight’s conclusion was direct: narratives can still create short-term impulses, but longer-term value is increasingly tied to whether users stay, whether revenue can be verified, and whether the risk structure is clear. Future divergence between projects may revolve more around those elements and macro conditions.