Altcoins 60% Below Highs: Why 2026 Recovery Will Be Selective

She expects bitcoin dominance to remain elevated in the near term while the shakeout among low-utility tokens continues. Her boldest prediction looks beyond this cycle: by 2030, she expects nearly 10% of all global financial assets, treasuries, money market funds, equities and private credit, to exist in tokenized form.

Eric Wade, editor of the Crypto Capital newsletter at Stansberry Research, argues that the biggest mistake investors make is treating altcoins as a single asset class. Instead, he divides the market into three tiers. The first consists of infrastructure tied to institutional demand, RWA tokenization and on-chain private credit, a sector that never stopped growing. Tokenized real-world assets have expanded from roughly $5 billion at the start of 2025 to over $30 billion by mid-2026. On-chain private credit has continued offering yields of 8% to 12%, far above treasury rates.

The clearest signal came in June, when the open lending network Morpho raised $175 million from venture firms Paradigm and a16z along with traditional financial institutions, including Apollo and VanEck. "That is what changes the conversation with treasuries and asset managers," Dennis Bree, Morpho's head of institutional growth, said. "They can finally deploy on terms they recognize."

The second tier, Wade argues, has largely disappeared: tokens with a compelling story but no revenue or users, many of them down more than 70% since 2025. The third is the category most investors dismiss: community-driven projects that continue building regardless of macro conditions. That tier is where Wade believes the next generation of winners is born and where bitcoin and Ethereum both started.

The founders building through the downturn are focused on different priorities. Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin has outlined a leaner Ethereum Foundation that sells less ETH and prioritizes censorship resistance, openness, privacy and security. Solana's Anatoly Yakovenko remains focused on execution, pointing to the Alpenglow upgrade, which could reduce finality to around 150 milliseconds as early as the third quarter. Hyperliquid's Jeff Yan has built one of 2026's rare profit machines, using perpetuals revenue to fund aggressive buybacks and burns. Cardano's Charles Hoskinson strikes the most cautious note, warning of a wave of ecosystem failures in the second half of 2026. ADA trades near multi-year lows.

For Bart Smith, CEO of Avalanche Treasury Co., the filter is simple. "What's the purpose? What problem does this solve?" he said. The coins and chains that cannot answer them will continue to struggle regardless of macro conditions. The ones that can are the projects he expects to recover and appreciate.