Crypto investors are looking past market-cap rankings and back to fundamentals

Crypto investors are increasingly using revenue, usage and value capture to sort tokens over longer horizons, even as perpetual futures continue to drive prices day to day, industry players at Bitwise, Wintermute and the Arbitrum Foundation told CoinDesk.

During an interview with CoinDesk, Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley described the shift as the end of crypto’s “CoinMarketCap leaderboard” era. In earlier cycles, investors often valued new layer-1 networks as a fraction of the largest blockchain above them, he said. Smaller projects were then priced at a discount.

That approach is losing ground as investors focus on addressable markets, adoption and how much economic value a project can capture, Horsley said.

He cited Hyperliquid as an example. Investors can examine the derivatives platform’s trading activity and economics when assessing its HYPE token rather than treating it as a smaller version of another blockchain. The token is up around 20% in the past year.

“When we speak with wealth managers at a firm that has recently approved access to the space, they have no idea where something ranks on CoinMarketCap,” Horsley said. “It’s irrelevant.”

Perpetual futures set short-term prices

Wintermute OTC trader Jasper De Maere told CoinDesk fundamentals and trading flows matter over different time horizons.