Crypto is always a wild ride.

Speaking of wild, it is still in a phase that resembles the West (United States) in the 1800s. We are still in the infantile stage with a lot of growing up required.

For those who are anxious to see this happen, there is hope. The larger institutions are coming and they have a habit of moving things from the embryotic to adult phase.

Of course, there is a trade off as mega financial institutions should be viewed skeptically. They have a long track record of being corrupt. As the old saying goes, they never prosecute the bankers.

New York is infamous for this.

Wall Street firms collapsed the global economy. How many went to jail? In fact, how many CEOs even lost their job? Jamie Dimon is still atop JPMorgan.

These are the people who are rapidly moving towards crypto. If you through there were crooked players before, just wait. The true thieves are about to enter.

2026: The Year of Fundamentals

Leaving this aside, what I want to focus upon is whether or not we will see some of the market driven insanity exit.

Crypto is known for its boom/bust cycles. This is not uncommon when dealing with smaller markets. The total market cap of crypto is still relatively small. If we were dealing with $50 trillion, things would move in a more confined space. We are less than 1/10th of this right now.

That means volatility and a lot of it. Anyone who spent time in the markets knows this. Just look at a Bitcoin chart and see some of the moves. It is evident.

The problem with crypto is many of the busts were due to nonsense. We saw the memecoin age where people were hoping for a 1000x on their favorite meme coin. This followed the NFT craze where people were stuck holding nothing more than worthless JPEGs in their wallets.

Crypto is great at coming up with new names yet does not excel at bringing forth useful solutions. Much of what we see, while experimental, has little chance of success. To a degree, this is needed. It is all part of the innovation cycle. We all know that many misses are part of the process.

This is, however, different from markets. Development and pricing often do not parallel.

Will we see a change in 2026?

Fundamentals On-Chain

My guess is people are going to start looking for metrics before investing. Sure, there will always be the gunslingers who go wild with their money, approaching markets like it is the craps table in Las Vegas.

These are not the majority though.

The masses are looking for something to sink their teeth into. Metrics provide this. Naturally, before then can be utilized, they need to be created. Thus far, we are lacking.

We can find some basic metrics that help.

For example, on-chain transactions can be pulled by any chatbot. Going one step further, looking at stablecoin totals (USD volume) could help. This is telling of how active the network is in the settlement market.

Will this be the year people start to look at crypto with an eye towards solid investing as opposed to speculation? The overwhelming majority is the latter at present. This will change at some point.

I think we see progress made in 2026 in this area.