Cr Crypto Infrastructure Loading... : Investor Sentiment and Bull/Bear Views

The crypto market is maturing from pure speculation to actual utility. Investors should focus on infrastructure and 'plumbing' projects that enable institutional adoption, such as stablecoins, RWA, custody solutions, and oracle networks like Chainlink.

Infrastructure is contrarian but attractive now. Last cycle was overdone and people did not know what infra was needed; now applications are growing, investors know what networks need, and it is easier to underwrite, so there will be new kinds of infrastructure winners this cycle.

There is a question whether pre-product-market-fit infrastructure ever gets a bid again. In a world where net new activity returns to on-chain systems via new infra, these projects could get a speculative bid, similar to Celestia's first launch.

Ben argues AI creates a set of problems—proving humans vs bots, authenticating content, preventing fraud, and enabling AI economic actors—that will require crypto infrastructure. He expects many opportunities in crypto generated by AI and says crypto will become essential infrastructure in an AI-dominated world.

There is still a bull market in crypto infrastructure even as old crypto tokens struggle. Traditional banks and finance companies are moving quickly into digital assets, creating opportunities in wallets, staking, tokenized real-world assets, and on-chain credit. Stablecoin volumes are exploding as the world moves onto blockchain rails. This infrastructure growth is not correlating with the prices of legacy tokens such as Ethereum, Solana, and Ripple, and he is leaning into the infrastructure opportunity through hiring and engineering.

Novogratz says there is still a bull market in crypto infrastructure. Traditional banks and finance companies are moving into digital assets quickly, creating opportunities in wallets, staking, tokenized real-world assets, stablecoin volumes and on-chain credit, and Galaxy is leaning into those businesses.

In 2026, crypto infrastructure and tokenization will be a major theme, and anything attached to it should perform well. The market is too focused on crypto prices; tokenization improves capital markets through transaction efficiencies, standardization and homogeneity that create liquidity, and lien perfection and ownership verification that enable lending and cross-collateralization. Figure is a leader in tokenization within private credit, stablecoins, and crypto infrastructure that touches the real world.

Value capture in crypto will accrue to deployers and applications that control the user relationship and use open infrastructure, not to the infrastructure layer. The last decade's infrastructure-investment thesis is unlikely to work over the next 10-15 years; user aggregation lets companies monetize users and capture activity.

Ignoring Bitcoin, the only investable part of crypto is killer apps. Infrastructure investing is like buying Cisco or AT&T in 2000, overbuilt and unlikely to capture value, while applications like Google and Amazon led the post-bust cycle.