Crypto Investors Turn to Revenue, Usage to Separate Strong Tokens From Weak Ones

Crypto investors are increasingly selecting tokens based on fundamentals such as protocol revenue, actual usage and how much value accrues to holders, instead of relying primarily on market-cap rankings, CoinDesk reported.

Bitwise Chief Executive Officer Hunter Horsley told CoinDesk on August 16 that the crypto market is moving away from valuation methods centered on what he called the "CoinMarketCap leaderboard."

In the past, investors often valued new Layer-1 blockchains by comparing them with larger projects by market capitalization and applying a discount. More recently, they have focused on a project's addressable market, actual user adoption and how much of the economic value generated by a protocol flows back to token holders.

Horsley cited Hyperliquid's HYPE token as a leading example. Rather than treating Hyperliquid as a smaller version of another blockchain, investors have started valuing HYPE on its own business metrics, including derivatives trading volume and revenue structure.

Short-term prices, however, are still driven largely by supply and demand in derivatives markets such as perpetual futures. Jasper De Maere, an OTC trader at Wintermute, said fundamentals determine the floor and the investment universe, while capital flows determine price. Because perpetual futures volume in major cryptocurrencies still exceeds spot trading volume, funding rates, positioning and liquidations have a more direct effect on short-term price moves.

Fundamentals carry more weight over longer investment horizons. That is particularly true in sectors such as decentralized finance, perpetual futures exchanges and decentralized physical infrastructure networks, or DePIN, where revenue and usage are increasingly being reflected in investment decisions.

Institutional trading is also reinforcing the shift. According to Wintermute, institutional counterparties accounted for about 72% of OTC spot trading in the first half, up sharply from about 59% a year earlier. Institutional money was concentrated in major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and a small group of tokens that generate real revenue, while tokenized real-world assets, or RWAs, emerged as a new investment theme.

The metrics used to assess projects are also becoming more sophisticated. Brendan Ma, head of investment strategy at the Arbitrum Foundation, said indicators that can be verified on-chain and involve real economic costs are relatively more reliable.

Examples include fee revenue, the number of users who actually pay fees, and the amount of stablecoins and tokenized assets that remain on a network. By contrast, active addresses and total value locked, or TVL, can be inflated through incentives or bots, limiting their usefulness as standalone measures.

A sharper divide in crypto valuations based on fundamentals may also be emerging. Zach Pandl, head of research at Grayscale, said Bitcoin is likely to retain its role as a macro asset tied to demand for alternatives to fiat currencies, while other digital assets will face stricter scrutiny over their own economic viability and revenue models.

"A small group of tokens with strong fundamentals will play a central role in the digital-asset market's next phase," Pandl said. "Projects with weak fundamentals will fall behind."