Why Crypto Businesses All Look the Same Now

Many onchain crypto experiments from the idealist era are shutting down or pivoting without proving product-market fit, a trend that has become clearer in 2026. The onchain market is polarizing between speculative areas such as memecoins, perpetual futures and prediction markets, and real-economy areas such as stablecoins, RWAs and vaults. Companies including Coinbase, Robinhood, MetaMask and Kalshi are converging on the same product stack. Examples include the Terra ecosystem's UST, whose value fell to zero, and restaking, whose TVL peaked near $30B and sits at roughly $8B today.