Perpetual-futures volumes still run at a multiple of spot across most major tokens, while funding, positioning and liquidations set the tone intraday, he said
Over the past 12 to 18 months, however, attention has moved from infrastructure toward applications and appchains that fit more familiar fintech and venture-capital frameworks, De Maere said.
Fundamentals are starting to carry more weight in areas including decentralized finance, perpetual-futures exchanges and decentralized physical infrastructure networks.
“Fundamentals set the floor and the shortlist, while flows set the price,” De Maere said. Revenue and usage can determine which tokens survive drawdowns or make it onto allocator shortlists, but they rarely determine the price on a given day, he added.”
Wintermute’s flow data suggests the clearest change is in who is trading. Rather than a wholesale migration from spot to derivatives, institutional counterparties accounted for roughly 72% of its spot over-the-counter flow in the first half of 2026, up from around 59% a year earlier, De Maere revealed.
Those flows have concentrated in major cryptocurrencies and a shortlist of revenue-generating tokens, with tokenized real-world assets emerging as the main new category, he said.
“Part of the outperformance of revenue-generating tokens reflects fundamentals being rewarded, and part reflects the fact that fundamentals are the current narrative, so those tokens attract the flows,” De Maere cautioned. “The two are hard to separate.”