After attending TOKEN2049 in Singapore for the fourth straight year, Foresight News writer Joe Zhou said this was the most restrained edition he had seen when it came to chasing narratives and inventing concepts.
In prior years, the conference crowd spent more time talking about decentralization ideals, the metaverse and Web3 mass adoption, while using metrics such as TVL, active addresses and trading volume to describe project value. By comparison, there was much less discussion about when those visions would translate into real business or how they would produce recurring revenue.
The language on the ground has changed
Zhou wrote that the tone this year sounded different. More people were speaking in concrete operating figures.
He heard teams say they had launched QR-code payments in 18 countries, with Indonesia and Brazil standing out over the past year. Others said more than 100,000 users used stablecoins last month for real-world payments, including QR scans, card payments and bank transfers, with average monthly spending above $100 per user. He also heard managers discuss trading performance in straightforward terms, saying annualized returns could reach 15%, and that in the current year, 10% to 20% would not count as underperforming the market.
In Zhou’s telling, the shift was plain: from payment scenarios to actual users to investment returns, people were trying to prove their businesses with numbers rather than with slogans.
At this year’s TOKEN2049, he wrote, crypto participants seemed to have stopped relying on storytelling alone. The questions he heard most often were where the users are, where revenue comes from, and where profit ultimately ends up.
“Value capture” became the phrase heard most often
According to Zhou, the term that appeared more than any other, both inside and outside the venue, was “value capture.”
A CEO at a stablecoin company told him that the most profitable place in crypto is not always where a transaction happens, but where funds remain parked.
Zhou linked that remark to a broader trend. Over the past year, many institutions have tried to issue stablecoins, including Stripe’s OUSD and OSL’s USDGO. He also pointed to alliances formed by 21 financial institutions across the US, Europe and Asia, including Bank of America, and the Qivalis alliance formed by 37 European financial institutions, including BNP Paribas. In his reading, large institutions are moving into stablecoins because they see the business of value capture: the party creating transaction activity is not necessarily the one making the most money from it.
The stablecoin CEO used USDT as the clearest example. Exchanges provide the biggest distribution gateway, while Tether can earn interest on reserve assets.
Zhou also cited a secondary-market fund founder managing more than $100 million in assets, who framed the discussion the same way. The founder said bluntly that “Ethereum has no value” and that “there’s still no story there for the next few years.” As Zhou presented the argument, the issue is weak value capture and weak revenue generation: value created across the Ethereum ecosystem is not being converted efficiently into value that ETH holders can actually capture.
The same investor added that TRON’s value-capture ability is several times stronger than Ethereum’s.
Zhou included figures that he said support that view. In the second quarter of 2026, TRON generated about $699 million in network fees, versus roughly $52.5 million for Ethereum, a gap of around 13 times. Looking only at value captured through token burns, TRON stood at about $90 million and Ethereum at about $17.1 million, leaving TRON still more than five times ahead.
His conclusion was narrower than a blanket judgment on the two ecosystems: Ethereum’s overall ecosystem may be worth more than TRON’s, but that does not automatically make ETH the better value-capture asset.
A growth lead at a major prediction market made a similar point from another angle. The person told Zhou that the platform’s API had been adopted by multiple exchanges, and that one of those exchange-related businesses alone was generating revenue on the order of $1 million a month.
Across stablecoins, secondary funds and prediction markets, Zhou said he kept hearing the same core issue: how much of the value a project creates can actually become revenue, profit and investor-capturable value.
That is why, in his view, many people now walk away quickly if a project can only tell a story. If a team still cannot explain where revenue comes from, how the business model works and who ultimately owns the value, fewer people are willing to stay for the pitch.
He argued that the period when a strong narrative alone could command attention and financing is fading, and that crypto may be entering an era in which stronger businesses push weaker ones out.
Stablecoin payments took center stage, and five business lines stood out
Zhou wrote that stablecoin companies were occupying some of the most visible positions at the conference.
He specifically mentioned Stripe, Circle, Aeon Pay, Alchemy Pay and DCS Pay as companies tied to stablecoin activity that had a strong presence on site. In his account, payments and stablecoins formed one of the clearest themes of the event.
Compared with previous years, stablecoins are no longer just exchange infrastructure in his view. They are moving deeper into payments, settlement and real-world fund flows.
Other segments looked quieter. Zhou said NFTs, the metaverse, blockchain gaming and BTCFi were less visible at the venue than in earlier years. He also wrote that layer-2 projects no longer receive the same level of attention on the strength of a fresh narrative alone, and that projects once favored by the market, including Blast, are facing slower growth and weaker ecosystem activity.
That does not mean those sectors have disappeared, he added. It means narrative by itself is becoming less capable of sustaining long-term attention. Questions around users, transaction sources and durable revenue are becoming harder to avoid.
Looking back to the period before 2024, Zhou wrote that crypto had only a small number of sectors with recurring demand and relatively clear business models. Exchanges and stablecoins were the most obvious examples: exchanges monetized trading activity, while stablecoins built businesses around reserve-asset income and related services.
Now, he said, three more industries are showing clearer commercial logic: public chains and DeFi, perpetual DEXs, and prediction markets. The latter two are not new ideas, but in his view they only saw a fresh wave of demand growth and market expansion over the past two years.
He grouped the crypto businesses most likely to survive across cycles into five categories:
- Public chains and DeFi
- Exchanges
- Stablecoins
- Perpetual DEXs
- Prediction markets
These models are different, but he said they share one trait: users are not coming because they want to support a grand narrative. They use these products because they deliver specific financial services.
In his framing, exchanges serve trading demand, stablecoins handle the circulation and settlement of digital dollars, public chains and DeFi offer open financial infrastructure, perpetual DEXs meet on-chain derivatives demand, and prediction markets let users trade around future events.
Zhou was careful not to overstate the point. He wrote that this does not mean every project in those five sectors will survive, nor that all of the business models are fully mature. What matters is that they correspond to demand that can persist, rather than to attention sustained only by market mood.
Crypto has more real business now, but it still repeats itself
Even as the industry develops more tangible businesses, Zhou argued that one of crypto’s oldest habits remains in place: rebuilding the same wheel over and over.
There are more perpetual DEXs, more prediction markets and more stablecoin-related chains, he wrote. The sector may be moving toward a more rational footing, but that does not mean blind expansion has stopped. In his view, a new wave of chain building is taking shape.
He pointed to examples including Circle’s Arc and Stripe’s Tempo, adding that Stable is also planning its own chain. Stablecoin firms are building chains, perpetual DEXs are building chains and prediction markets are exploring chains as well. Across sectors, applications increasingly want to own their infrastructure layer.
Zhou did not say these chains are all destined to fail. His question was simpler: if almost every segment wants its own chain, does the market really need that many public blockchains?
Crypto already has too many chains, he wrote. Whether new ones can attract enough users, liquidity and developers, and whether they can remain alive into the next cycle, is still a major open question.
He said the pattern is familiar. When perpetual DEXs became hot, a group of projects rushed in. When prediction markets gained momentum, another group followed. After enthusiasm cools, what usually remains is a small set of leading players. The market can support competition, but it may not be able to sustain dozens of similar products in every fashionable sector at once.
Agent Payment may still be ahead of itself
Zhou singled out Agent Payment as an area where the story may still be moving ahead of the business.
He noted that the official TOKEN2049 agenda directly included sessions such as “The Agent Economy: Why AI Needs Crypto” and “Bitcoin for the Agentic Economy,” a sign that the industry is actively betting on the combination of AI agents and crypto.
But after speaking with people from 10 stablecoin companies, he said the feedback was much less optimistic. In the business contexts those firms were seeing, there were still no signs that AI agent payments were close to scaling in practice.
That does not mean Agent Payment has no future, he wrote. It means current market discussion may already be running ahead of real demand and commercial progress.
For Zhou, that makes it a useful warning sign. Crypto is starting to care more about real business, but it can still pay in advance for a future that has not arrived. The industry is maturing, he wrote, though not to the point where it has stopped making mistakes.
He closed with a contrast from the conference floor: people on stage were talking about agents, while the people actually working in payments were telling him that Agent Payment has not really happened yet.
Zhou noted that the article was an observation note reflecting his own views and those of interviewees, and said it was for discussion only and did not constitute investment advice.
