Why hasn't your coin risen?

Original Title: Why Your Coin Isn’t Pumping

Original Author: Santiago R Santos

Original source:

Reprint: Daisy, Mars Finance

Why hasn't your coin gone up?

“Dear LPs, our performance has outperformed ETH - but the fund is still down 80%.” We are valuing casino-like cash flow as sustainable software revenue. Thank you for participating.

Everyone in the crypto industry is watching the same headlines:

ETF has been launched.

Real enterprises are integrating stablecoins.

The regulatory attitude is more friendly.

This is exactly everything we have always said we wanted.

Then why the hell is the price still falling?

Why has Bitcoin given back all its gains, while U.S. stocks have risen +15–20% this year? Why are your favorite altcoins still deeply underwater, even though the view that “cryptocurrencies are no longer a scam” has become mainstream?

Let's talk.

Adoption ≠ Price Increase

The encrypted Twitter has a deep-rooted assumption:

“Once the institutions enter the market, once we gain regulatory clarity, once JPMorgan issues tokens… it's over, we're going to the moon.”

Alright, they're here. We've also got the headlines. But we're still stuck in place.

There is actually only one question in investing:

Has the market been priced?

This is always the hardest to judge. But market behavior is telling us something uncomfortable:

We got everything we wanted - but the price didn't move.

Is the market possibly inefficient? Of course.

Why? Because most crypto projects are seriously disconnected from reality.

$1.5 trillion… what is it all for?

Let's broaden our perspective.

Bitcoin stands out — the perfect meme coin, just like gold. Its market value is about $1.9 trillion, while gold is about $29 trillion. Less than 10% of gold's market value. Here is a clear logic of hedge + option value.

Ethereum + Ripple + Solana + all others combined is about 1.5 trillion USD, but built on a more fragile narrative.

People who take it seriously hardly question the potential of the technology anymore. Very few still think the entire industry is a scam. That phase is over.

But potential cannot answer the real question:

Is the entire industry really worth trillions of dollars with around 40 million active users?

At the same time, there are rumors that OpenAI will go public at nearly $1 trillion, with the number of users being about 20 times that of the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem.

First, calm down and think for a moment.

Such moments force us to confront the real issues:

What is the best way to gain actual exposure to cryptocurrencies from now on?

History: Infrastructure. Early ETH, early SOL, early DeFi.

That transaction used to work.

What about today? The pricing of most things seems to imply that we must have 100 times the usage and 100 times the cost. Perfect pricing. No margin of safety.

The market is not foolish, it is just greedy.

This cycle has given us all the headlines… but a few facts have become clear:

The market doesn't care about your story—it cares about the gap between price and fundamentals.

The gap will be widened enough that the market will eventually stop giving you the benefits of doubt, especially when you start showing some income.

Cryptocurrency is no longer the hottest trade. Artificial intelligence is.

Capital flows chase momentum. This is how the modern market operates. Now, artificial intelligence is the protagonist. Cryptocurrency is not.

Businesses follow commercial logic, not ideology.

Stripe's launch of Tempo is a warning. Perhaps, just perhaps, companies won't use public infrastructure just because they heard on Bankless that Ethereum is the world's supercomputer. They will go where it is most beneficial for them.

So, I'm not surprised that your position hasn't risen just because Larry Fink discovered that cryptocurrency is not a scam.

When things are priced perfectly, a small action from Powell or a strange squint from Jensen Huang could destroy the entire argument.

Quick calculation: ETH, SOL, and why “income” ≠ profit

Let's do some rough calculations on the main L1.

First, staking (not yield):

Solana:

About 419 million SOL staked × about 6% ≈ 25 million SOL/year

Calculated at about 140 USD → approximately 3.5 billion USD/year in “rewards”

Ethereum:

Approximately 33.8 million ETH is staked × approximately 4% ≈ 1.35 million ETH/year

Based on approximately 3100 USD → about 4.2 billion USD/year in “rewards”

Someone pointed at staking and said:

“Look, stakers have income! That's value acquisition!”

No. Staking rewards are not a means of value acquisition.

They are issuance, dilution, and security costs, not profits.

Real economic value = transaction fees paid by users + tips + MEV. This is the closest thing to “revenue” in blockchain.

In this regard:

Ethereum generated approximately $2.7 billion in transaction fees in 2024, leading all chains.

Solana has recently been leading in network revenue, with quarterly earnings of hundreds of millions of dollars.

So, roughly estimating today's situation:

Ethereum, with a market capitalization of about $400 billion, generates an annual fee + MEV “revenue” of $1-2 billion. This is based on a P/S ratio of 200-400 times the peak cyclical casino revenue.

Solana has an annualized revenue exceeding 1 billion USD with a market capitalization of approximately 75–80 billion USD. The P/S ratio is around 20–60 times, depending on how generously you calculate the annualized figure (please do not pick peak months and base your calculations on that).

These are not precise numbers, nor do they need to be precise. We are not reporting to the SEC. We just want to see if we are in the same galaxy.

And this doesn't even touch on the real issue:

The real issue: this is not sustainable income.

These are not stable, enterprise-level revenue streams.

They are highly cyclical, speculative, and recurrent flows of funds:

Perpetual Contract

Meme Coin

Clearing

MEV Peak

Low-level Fluctuation

In a bull market, transaction fees and MEV grow explosively. In a bear market, they disappear.

This is not sustainable SaaS revenue. That's Las Vegas.

You wouldn't give a company that only makes a profit when the casino is full every 3-4 years a multiple of Shopify.

Different businesses. Different multiples.

Return to fundamentals

There is no coherent universe like this:

The market capitalization of Ethereum is approximately over 400 billion USD, while the transaction fees may only be 1 to 2 billion USD and are highly cyclical, yet it is considered a “value” buy.

This is about 200-400 times P/S, with slowing growth and increasing value loss in L2. ETH's performance is not like the federal government operating in the tax system; it acts like a federal government that can only collect state-level taxes, while the states (L2) retain most of the upside.

We meme ETH as the “world computer”, but the cash flow story does not match the pricing. Ethereum feels very much like Cisco to me: an early leader, a multiple miscalculation, and a historical peak that may never be reached again.

In comparison, Solana doesn't seem as crazy on a relative basis—it's not cheap, but it's not outrageous either.

Its annualized revenue under a market cap of approximately $75–80 billion is in the low single digits of billions of dollars—generously calculated at 20–40 times P/S.

Still very high. Still expanding. But relative to ETH, “relatively cheap.”

“Dear LPs, we have outperformed ETH - but still lost 80% of the fund.”

It turns out that we have priced casino fund flows as recurring software revenue. Thank you for participating.

Put these multiples in the background:

Nvidia, the most revered growth stock on Earth, trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of 40-45 times (not sales!) — and the premise is:

Real Income

Real Profit Margin

Global enterprise demand

Repeatable and contract-based sales

And clients outside of crypto casinos (fun fact: crypto miners were Nvidia's first real wave of hyper-fast growth)

To reiterate: this is based on periodic casino revenue, rather than stable and predictable cash flow.

If there are any, these chains should be traded at a discount multiple - rather than at a premium higher than tech stocks.

If the entire industry's transaction fees cannot shift from speculative fluctuations to real, sustainable economic value, most valuations will be repriced.

We were early… but not that kind of early.

One day the price will realign with the fundamentals. But we are not there yet.

Now:

Most tokens do not have fundamental reasons to pay huge multiples.

Once the issuance and airdrop farms are stripped away, the value capture of many networks ceases to exist.

Most of the “profits” are related to speculative activities on casino-like products.

We have built an infrastructure that allows for all-weather, low-cost, instantaneous transfer of global funds… and we decided that the best use case is slot machines.

Short-term greed; long-term laziness.

Quoting Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph: “Culture is not what you say, but what you do.”

Don't talk to me about decentralization when your flagship product is a 10x leveraged perpetual contract for Fartcoin.

We can do better.

This is the only way for us to upgrade from a “niche casino of over-financialization” to a truly secular industry.

The starting endpoint

I don't think this is the end of crypto. But I do believe this is the end of the beginning.

We have over-invested in infrastructure—investing over $100 billion in chains, bridges, L2, and infrastructure projects—while being extremely under-invested in deployment. In products, in actual users.

We have been bragging:

TPS

block space

fancy rollup architecture

Users don't care. What they care about is:

Cheaper,

Faster,

Simpler,

and truly solve their problems.

Back to cash flow.

Return to unit economics.

Back to basics: Who are the users, and what problems are we solving?

Where is the real upside potential?

I have been bullish on crypto for over a decade. That hasn't changed.

I still believe:

Stablecoins will become the default payment channel.

Open and neutral infrastructure drives global finance behind the scenes.

The company will use this technology because it makes economic sense, not out of ideology.

But I don't think the biggest winner of the next decade will be today's L1 or L2.

Historically, the winners of each technology cycle have been at the user aggregation layer, rather than the infrastructure layer.

The internet has made computing/storage cheaper. Wealth has flowed to Amazon, Google, Apple—companies that serve billions using inexpensive infrastructure.

The rhythm of encryption will be similar:

Block space is a commodity.

Infrastructure upgrades are becoming increasingly marginalized.

Users always pay for convenience.

User aggregators will capture most of the value.

The biggest opportunity now is to introduce this technology into enterprises that are already operating at scale. Dismantle the financial pipelines of the pre-internet era and replace them with crypto channels, enabling companies to truly reduce costs and improve efficiency—just as the internet quietly upgraded every aspect of retail to industrial companies, because the economics are too good to ignore.

Everyone adopts the internet and software because it makes economic sense. Cryptocurrency is no different.

We can wait another ten years for it to happen.

Or we can start doing it now.

Update Prior

So, where does that take us?

The technology is feasible.

Huge potential.

We are still in the early stages of real adoption.

Reassessing everything will bring rewards:

Evaluate the network value based on actual usage and cost quality, rather than ideology.

Not all costs are the same: Repetitive vs. Recurring.

The winners of the past decade will not dominate the next decade.

Stop treating token prices as a scoreboard for technological validation.

We are still at such an early stage that we still regard token prices as an indicator of whether the technology is effective. No one chooses AWS over Azure just because Amazon or Microsoft stock went up that week.

We can wait another ten years for the company to adopt it. Or we can start doing it now.

Putting real GDP on the blockchain.

The work is not yet finished.

Upside down.