DeFi 2.0 Explosion Post-Disorderly Restructuring in 2026

Original Title: "Yang Ge Gary: DeFi 2.0 Eruption in the Disordered Restructuring of 2026"

Original Author: Yang Ge Gary

In the fourth quarter of 25th year, driven by the overlap of market and policy, the global traditional finance and emerging open finance violently collided in an increasingly disordered environment, leading to drastic changes that cleared most of the lingering heat of the first curve (Note 1), making it difficult to digest the emotional wreckage in a short time. At the same time, traditional finance was isolated in the bubble narrative of AI and the chaos of the golden age, reaching its final stage, and central banks around the world had to rigidly satisfy the market's rigid aesthetic with textbook-like monetary and fiscal policies, forcing everyone to believe that these outdated economic inertia could still be maintained for a while.

In my previous articles, I have detailed the failure of conventional economic models at the intersection of the Kondratieff Cycle, but it is still more palpable to experience it. Amidst the noise, only Coinbase's year-end market outlook report <2026 Crypto Market Outlook> provided a relatively objective summary and forecast of the current market and industry. The overall trend is not difficult to discern, but there is just too much emotion and ingrained aesthetics obscuring the brief gap. From my current perspective, I am mainly concerned about three issues:

i) The current global situation shows a high degree of similarity in entropy growth trend compared to the period of 1910-1935 (Note 2). How long is the corresponding window today, and how will the comparison be made during the process, instead of mechanically drawing on historical experience to assess risks and make decisions?

ii) The native development speed of Crypto and Open Finance and the contradiction between their collision with traditional finance in a positive market. Which potential energy is greater and will become the primary contradiction to restrain the other secondary contradiction?

iii) The combination of the first two issues forms a non-linear problem: Will the chaos in 2026 form a turning point, becoming an independent growth factor that promotes Crypto and Open Finance to rapidly enter the mainstream world and financial markets?

Coinbase mentioned a lot of good data in the <2026 Crypto Market Outlook> report, one of which is more eye-catching: As of 4Q25, the global stablecoin total supply has reached $305 billion, with a total transaction volume of $47.6 trillion. We can roughly compare this data with the current global M0 total supply of $15 trillion and the total transaction volume of global currency usage of $1500 trillion (Note 4). It can be seen that the supply of stablecoins accounts for 2.0% and their application ratio has reached 3.2% (note here that the report indicates that the average activity of stablecoins is greater than that of traditional fiat at 160%). In addition, with the report pointing out a continuous 4-year annualized compound growth of 65%, combined with various foreshadowing in 2025, we have reason to believe that Open Finance will cross the chasm and enter the Early Majority node in just about this past year.

tl;dr

1. 1011 Marks the End of Crypto's First Curve, 2025 Marks the End of the Previous Kondratiev Cycle

2. The Last Stand of Traditional Financial Inertia Aesthetics and Social Dysfunction Under Strong Data Regulation

3. The 2025 RWA Renaissance as the Issue Behind the Mainstream Narrative

4. Emerging Economies and Global Geopolitics 2.0

5. DeFi 2.0, DAT 2.0, Tokenomics 2.0

6. A Retrospective Summary of 2025 and an Analytical Outlook for 2026

1. 1011 Marks the End of Crypto's First Curve, 2025 Marks the End of the Previous Kondratiev Cycle

In the January 25th article <The Second Curve of Crypto Growth>, we discussed the issue of the unsustainability of the past Crypto market in the logic of speculation and narrative. Looking back over the full year, only the first player at the table is now left to fight alone in a different way, with almost all the original market players having exited almost entirely, or transformed and begun to develop along a more solid path.

1011 triggered the $193 billion largest single-day liquidation in Crypto history, spreading over the following days to a total of approximately $400 billion in settlements. Superficially, it was the extreme leverage structure of the end of the first curve market speculation being centrally liquidated in a low liquidity environment, but fundamentally, it was the ineffectiveness of the platform's loss mitigation controls due to too few players in a zero-sum game market. When there are only two players left at the table, all cooperative strategies will fail, and the opponent's dilemma is the inevitable reason for the end of the first curve.

Similar to the market harvest of the $TRUMP coin, 1011 fundamentally eroded the faith cornerstone of the first curve, destroying the residual expectations based on pure narrative, indicating that consensus based solely on gambling-like speculation will come to an end (Note 5); instead, the second curve further grew in this process, and all remaining ecosystem companies are transforming or innovating to take a more practical long-term development path. The DeFi 2.0 market based on On-chain Asset Management, RWA Finance, and Tokenization has become the inevitable direction of the next stage of the market. This includes CEXs, public chains, and Top Infra are all following suit and transforming towards rapid deployment in PayFi and RWA aspects.

On the other hand, by the end of 2025, global economic inflation has fully transitioned to "stagflation," where the fiscal and monetary policy adjustments of many central banks have become ineffective, leaving only the role of emotional value dispatch. The ultimate implosion of the traditional economy and the sense of powerlessness in pushing the AI expectation to its limit now equate to the Rockefeller era of 1910, marking the complete end of the previous Kondratieff cycle (Note 6).

On October 29, 2025, Nvidia's market value surpassed $5 trillion, becoming the world's first company to reach this magnitude. While many are still bullish on how much further this price can multiply, without even comparing it to the Rockefeller Standard Oil Company of 1910, I just want to point out that the entire annual GDP of the African continent is only half the size of this.

Entering 25H2, more and more rating agencies, hedge funds, and investment banks' advisory firms are beginning to closely monitor Nvidia's financial situation. Setting aside its upstream and downstream capacity and profitability along the industry chain, the comparison of long and short on Nvidia's systemic risk contribution has become completely imbalanced. In other words, even if the fundamentals continue to improve greatly, this trend is challenging to sustain; especially considering the industry fact about AI is not as optimistic as it appears.

It is noteworthy that in 1911, when Standard Oil was dismantled into 34 companies due to antitrust measures, the global cognition of the application demand for oil energy in automobiles, aircraft, and the next generation of automated industries had already become very clear. However, this did not successfully prevent the 30-year turmoil, depression, and systemic reorganization that followed 1911. The reason is that the inherent disorder and chaos stemmed from the failure of the previous stage of production relations, manifested in severe monopolies, widespread poverty, imbalanced development, continuous contradictions, etc., reflecting the irreversible phenomenon of social entropy increase.

At a major cycle juncture, economic policies and short-term common knowledge will both fail. The hindrances to socio-economic development and environmental benignity are not due to a lack of growth potential but because the inertial obstruction of the monopolistic production relations principle from the previous cycle has either impeded or failed to support the fair and effective integration of the next stage of productivity and labor. Focusing on today, the development of AI is inevitable, but the global widespread management mechanism of semi-feudal semi-monopolistic capitalism cannot continue to support and adapt (Note 7).

2. The Last Stand of Traditional Financial Inertial Aesthetics and Social Dysfunction under Data-Intense Regulation

Nevertheless, one of the surprises that has exceeded my expectations is that to this day, there are still so many economists and industry experts persistently clinging to the idea of interest rate cuts. A cumulative increase of over 40% in the U.S. M2 supply from February 2020 before the pandemic to April 2022 at its peak. Faced with such a massive money supply, every subsequent Quantitative Tightening (QT) and Quantitative Easing (QE) in my understanding is merely a formalistic emotional massage, where whether it's 25bp or 100bp has long lost its original economic value measurement (Note 8).

In the current environment, interest rate cuts have become a perfect combination of a recipient's emotion-driven aesthetic expectation and a policymaker's coercive decision-making. In simple terms, this is a two-way inertia-driven psychological hijacking, a tool to influence the market through emotional value. It is worth noting that in procrastinating the world's descent into chaos and comprehensive disorder and striving to use inertia-driven aesthetics in financial and policy tools, countries have all made their best efforts.

However, the process of entropy increase cannot slow down as a result. Looking back six months later at what I mentioned in the previous section about Greenspan's prophecy: "We must accept that monetary and fiscal policy cannot permanently boost economic growth in the presence of deeply rooted structural constraints," we can see that many policies under the traditional system have quickly become ineffective.

In mid-December 2025, Nasdaq publicly stated that it would submit an application to the SEC to change stock trading hours to 24/7. This move essentially represents traditional finance pushing back against Crypto and Onchain Market facing significant transformation and at the same time testing regulatory waters in a defensive protection. In fact, many traditional financial institutions in North America and East Asia have been adjusting their posture since the Genius Act earlier this year, struggling repeatedly between facing the challenges of Crypto Finance, embracing the risks of change, and trying to maintain their previous barriers to entry as much as possible.

An interesting phenomenon is: this contradiction received strong reactions from various institutions in Q2 of this year, seemingly breaking the previous game balance and cartel moat (Note 9) all at once. Everyone felt threatened, knowing that this trend was inevitable, and the traditional financial system is about to be completely transformed. However, as time progressed to Q3, everyone found that the market's reaction was too intense. The market iteration process will not be as rapid as imagined. Traditional financial practitioners and policymakers miraculously reached a short-term reverse equilibrium, with the main logic being: change is inevitable, but policy compliance will be the reassuring pill to help everyone smoothly transition to the new equilibrium and moat. As long as certified parties and policymakers upgrade together, they can smoothly complete the transition together. This stage of Q3 is very delicate, equivalent to everyone participating in a prisoner's dilemma and all agreeing midway to temporarily reverse their decisions to cope with greater external pressure. This is only a psychological illusion of the cartel alliance before its actual collapse. As we enter Q4, the most cutting-edge players know that, with methods like Hyperliquid and Robinhood crossing the river by feeling the stones, the complete collapse of the traditional financial cartel alliance will still quickly arrive. So, whether it's Nasdaq or Coinbase, they will step forward again to speak the truth, by facing more realistic on-the-ground changes, such as changing trading hours and building their own RWA Tokenization system, to gain a real advantage in the next stage.

The process described above is actually very classic, involving all players forming a Gartner Curve psychological sandbox before facing a major transformation and engaging in gameplay within it.

The twilight of traditional financial inertia aesthetics does not refer to the failure of economic principles. On the contrary, the Crypto Economy and Open Finance are further developments entirely based on economic principles. However, the bottleneck lies in the systemic issues that have arisen in managing the economic and market production relationship mechanisms, especially after fully entering the digital age, where the existing management systems are completely unable to reconcile the balance between regulation and freedom. The world has fallen into a major misconception of excessive digital regulation, leading to an accelerated deterioration of entropy within a short decade.

Over the past decade, globally, sooner or later, has fallen into the huge misconception of "exploit data if available, regulate through any means." The rule costs and barrier costs of outdated systems have far exceeded the opportunity cost and risk cost. The rigidity of data management has not only failed to break the dogmatic reliance on historical paths but has also resulted in paying a greater price for it, creating a terrible "Data Medieval" effect.

This phenomenon has permeated every corner of industries worldwide from top to bottom. Excessive digital abuse and financial restrictions have hindered the development of every industry. For example, with my experience in VC for over 15 years, if you dogmatically use an individual's bank KYC to judge if they can receive funding, then 99% of companies and innovations worldwide will be wiped out.

Faced with the failure of entropy in the global financial system and societal management environment, 2026 will inevitably enter further disorder and reorganization, with a large number of rules and industries being rewritten. It will also unavoidably plunge into a chaotic transitional period lasting at least 10 years.

3. The Resurgence of RWA in 2025 and the Issue behind the Mainstream Narrative

In 2025, the narrative of RWA made a remarkable comeback for a simple reason: the first curve's credit collapse and the temporary absence of a new consensus term on the second curve, allowing RWA to temporarily step in and win this year's MVP.

Two months ago, during a conversation with a Silicon Valley industry OG friend, upon learning about Cicada Finance's upcoming IPO announcement, he advised me to focus on RWA Finance. I heeded his advice, while also retaining Onchain Asset Management as the core, leading to today's Onchain Asset Management for RWA Finance. Undoubtedly, both Onchain Asset Management and RWA Finance will remain the mainstream tracks in the 2026 market.

RWA, other than its name, is not undergoing a revival but a reconstruction from scratch. The issue lies in the wildly different interpretations by those using the term. As of 25H2, the understanding in most parts of the world still closely resembles: a crowdfunding fundraising activity that tokenizes assets.

Most people getting involved in RWA do not start from industry-building but rather from their own needs, which is understandable. However, just like the issues faced by P2P and E-commerce-era Crowd Funding, a demand-driven market will force platforms, channels, and the market itself to exhibit a one-sided problem, leading the industry to develop rapidly in the wrong direction.

What is the difference between RWA without fair value and the equity crowdfunding of yesteryears? Is there a need for Tokenization for illiquid RWA assets? Conversely, does every RWA asset really need liquidity? These questions clearly have not been thoroughly considered or reached a consensus in the overall market by 2025, and some more profound business-sensitive issues cannot be discussed here temporarily.

The current asset distribution data of RWA is provided in Coinbase's report with a detailed analysis. T-Bill, Commodities, Liquid Funds, and Credit Loans still remain the four mainstays, demonstrating the importance of quantifiable financial assets in RWA. In our view, there will be a certain proportion of changes in the RWA landscape by 2026, with the above-mentioned assets still present, but the practical business of DeFi and Crypto Finance brought by emerging economies will also enter the RWA market as asset providers, with Stablecoin Payment and SupplyChainFi becoming rapid growth directions.

4. Emerging Economies and Global Geopolitics

In 2025, while developed countries and regions in the global economic and financial sectors were struggling with how to enact management policies regarding Stablecoin and Crypto Finance, the development speed of global emerging economies and regions was astonishing and beyond imagination.

"What they all want is a stablecoin, or a platform coin will also do." This was the consistent feedback from cross-border trading companies and payment companies this year. Apart from Nigeria, India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, numerous other countries and regions in Africa, South America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East have also shown exponential growth in the application of Stablecoin and Crypto Finance for three consecutive years, with their actual proportions far exceeding those of developed economies, with many surpassing or catching up with the local mainstream fiat currency usage volume (Note 10).

These newborn economies of many emerging markets are rapidly expanding in an "off-balance-sheet asset" manner, forming a stark contrast with the management dilemma in the current mainstream world environment mentioned earlier. Despite the large temporary differences in economic strength and consumption capacity in different regions globally due to years of historical accumulation, it is obvious that the analysis data of the global mainstream economy has long been completely distorted. Faced with both over-regulated stagflation and rapidly growing new environment, in less than 5 years, the global economic landscape will be reshaped, and the geopolitical relationships will undergo drastic changes.

For the opening question ii), it is obvious that I have a clear answer. The true Nash equilibrium reshaping is not a break-and-remodel within the global original economic system but must be a complex new reshaping formation broken by external forces in the new global context. The native development speed of Crypto and Open Finance will far exceed the speed of acceptance and understanding by the traditional economic system and markets, and 2026 will probably become a significant turning point for this disruptive reconstruction.

5. DeFi2.0, DAT2.0, Tokenomics2.0

In this report, Coinbase begins to bet on some new terms, including DAT2.0 and Tokenomics2.0, which are essentially development branches of DeFi2.0 that the industry is already familiar with. The definitions of these concepts are still good, so let's elaborate on them here.

In 2025, the DAT concept was successfully disseminated to the global mainstream financial market by MSTR, and its essence is very simple: DAT Premium Multiple = Market Cap of Stock ÷ NAV (Net Asset Value) of its held BTC (or other mainstream Crypto); however, this premium multiple rapidly declined and even inverted from Q3 to Q4, quickly ending this year's globalization wave of DAT1.0.

The fundamental reason for the devaluation of DAT1.0 and the end of the financial effect is that the friction coefficient of the capital multiplier is too small, the story is simple, the price transparency expectation is limited, the David double-click and double-kill are too direct, and once the bull-bear reverses, confidence will quickly dissipate.

The industry value essence of the DAT concept in 2025 lies in the fact that the traditional financial stock market concept has exhausted, the bubble is too large, and the EV is unsustainable. Crypto's first-curve bubble and credit collapse, the two markets mutually transfer vision and huddle for warmth.

Why can DAT2.0 continue the value of linking coins and stocks? Simply put, DAT1.0 is the value transfer from the first curve of Crypto to traditional finance, while DAT2.0 is the value fusion from the second curve of Crypto to traditional finance. Unlike the former, the value of the latter is sustainable in the long term. In 2025, Ondo, Ethena, Maple, Robinhood, and Figure have actually set good examples in DAT2.0, and there will be more emerging companies rapidly developing in it in 2026.

Tokenomics 2.0 is a broader concept. This year, we have proposed various derivative products related to Tokenomics, such as Liquid Engineering and Yield Engineering, all of which are further deepening of Financial Engineering. In different real-world financial cases, Tokenomics, like a financial circuit (Note 11), continuously adjusts and optimizes every financial scenario. Each case is different, but in the process of the industry's overall evolution, it will gradually form innovative general-purpose protocols with overall impact, such as the PT-YT provided by Pendle.

In its report, Coinbase only briefly touched on a few issues when mentioning Tokenomics 2.0: Value Capture, Token Buybacks, Financial Engineering, Regulatory Clarification as Catalyst, and Protocol P&L. There was no logical connection or detailed elaboration.

Let's break it down here:

Value Capture actually has nothing to do with Tokenomics 2.0. It is merely a necessary condition for the application and promotion of the second curve to assets. Tokenomics exists independently of value capture. In other words, Tokenomics without sustainable value capture has been proven to be Ponzinomics in the first curve and will no longer be mainstream in the Crypto Market and Open Finance after this year;

Token Buybacks are an important condition for Asset Tokenization in RWA and DAT 2.0, and in my view, they are even a necessary condition. More precisely, Asset Clearing Capability is a necessary condition for all asset investments. The benign development of RWA Finance next year largely depends on whether the market can build a consensus on this point;

About Regulatory Clarification, this point has been discussed earlier in this article. After Chapter 2 and Chapter 4, it should be objectively expressed as Pros and Cons. Coinbase's discussion perspective has its own uniqueness, but as discussed, global larger and faster flexibility is actually in the emerging developing economies and nascent economies;

In addition, the process of Financial Protocolization is not determined by Regulatory Clarity. It is highly correlated with certain financially developed regions in North America and East Asia. The P&L of Protocol Finance is entirely a transactional phenomenon of an upgraded Open Finance Market, determined by the objective market itself.

Whether DAT 2.0 or Tokenomics 2.0, they are only temporary terms. The Second Curve and DeFi 2.0 are also the same, describing a fundamental shift and inevitable trend in the current Crypto Market and Open Finance post the year 2025.

6. Review Summary of 2025 and Analysis Outlook for 2026

At the end of 2025, a review summary of the past year's predictive analysis:

February <The Second Curve of Crypto Growth>

"Zero-sum Game and the 7 Giants at the Table," "Trend of RYA/RWA and the Rise of PayFi," "Crossing the Chasm: The Second Curve of Crypto Growth," "Development Patterns of Crypto under Compliance Issues and the Global Situation";

April <Trump's Tariff Policy Triggering the End of the Convergence and a Fundamental Change in Bitcoin>

"The Triple Kill of Bond-Stock-Forex and the Failure of the Merrill Clock," "Thucydides Trap and a Comparison of the last stages of 5 Historical Convergence Cycles," "Greenspan's Prophecy and the Significance of Crypto at Convergence Cycle Inflection Points," "Bitcoin's Changing Correlation with Chaos: Shift in Inertia Perception and Similarities with the Merrill Clock Issue";

May <GENIUS Act and On-Chain Shadow Money>

"Root Causes of the Decline in Traditional Dollar Control," "GENIUS Act's Nominal Purpose and Substantive Purpose," "Insights from DeFi Restaking to the Fiat World and the Monetary Multiplier of Shadow Money," "Gold, Dollar, and Crypto Stablecoins";

September <Asset On-Chainization Trend under Stablecoin Pricing Methodology>

"The essence of the Genius Act is to delegate currency issuance and settlement rights, thus gaining strengthened currency pricing power," "Stablecoins triggering global financial on-chainization and asset on-chainization reform through changes in currency pricing forms," "The reform rapidly dismantling the traditional long-standing cartel alliances in finance, bringing opportunities for interest restructuring amid chaos," "Two directions of coin-stock linkage: Securitization and Tokenization, along with market characteristics," "Stablecoins, DAT, stock tokenization, RWA, and on-chain asset management industry characteristics and issues."

The outlook for 2026 has been extensively discussed in this article, and apart from issue i) all points have presumably been adequately analyzed. The further disordered reorganization of the macro environment and the consequent drive of DeFi 2.0 are both characterized by clear trends and inevitability.

Issue i) is indeed a headache, whether in socioeconomics or financial assets, trends and directions are always easier to judge in terms of time and degree. Different from the paradigmatically similar environment before the two cycles of the last century, the main differences are the following 3 points:

a) The speed of information interaction to situational evolution is much faster, with differences of 2.5-5 times from various aspects (Note 12);

b) The overflow space of global geopolitical conflicts is entirely different, increasing the inevitability of conflict eruption;

c) The nonlinear effects brought by AI and Crypto are far greater than industrial electrical automation.

On the other hand, there are many aspects that have not changed much compared to a hundred years ago, such as the hardware conditions of human social management have not changed much, the natural lifespan of humans and the emotional digestion capacity of a generation are still largely similar, and the political and economic management cycles in different social forms are still largely similar.

Against this background, in the past two years of enterprise management, I have often discussed with partners and gradually accepted a fact, which is to pay attention to nonlinear issues, learn to deal with and master nonlinear trigger situations, and incorporate unexpected changes into the plan.

References:

Note 1: The first curve refers to the 16 years of Crypto development, creating a speculative environment based on consensus expectations, continuously driving up expectations to form a wealth effect.

Note 2: The reason for choosing 1935 instead of the end of World War II in 1945 is that the price of gold experienced a cliff-like surge in 1934 after decades.

Note 3: <Crossing the Chasm> is a classic paradigm of innovation development, metaphorically indicating that Crypto and Open Finance in the past few years are still in the Early Adopter stage.

Note 4: The $1500T estimate here uses the annualized trading volume of the foreign exchange market and the securities commodities market as a rough calculation basis to determine the financial scale.

Note 5: The prediction market is actually a transformation extension of the first curve, where after the consensus credit supported by speculative expectations is no longer in place, a short-term pragmatic event-based bet has become the new consensus credit soil for this type of risk appetite.

Note 6: The concept of the Kondratieff cycle end and juncture has been mentioned multiple times in previous articles, such as Chapter 2 of Trump's Tariff Policy Will Trigger the End of the Kondratieff Wave and the Transformation of Bitcoin, and the comparison of the Thucydides Trap with the end of the Kondratieff Wave in history. From 2020 to 2025, the world is in the juncture between the end of the previous Kondratieff cycle and the beginning of the next one. The main difference this time is that the end in 2025 and the associated socioeconomic phenomena mark the completion of the previous Kondratieff cycle.

Note 7: In the Tectonic Shift in the Global Landscape After Trump's Reelection in November 2024, for the first time it was mentioned that "by the end of 2024, most countries and stakeholders globally are still in an environment of semi-feudal semi-decentralized state capitalism," which has now been revised to describe as "semi-feudal semi-monopolistic capitalism."

Note 8: Objectively speaking, emotional value itself has already become an important factor in today's global financial secondary markets, where economic policies and market confidence are mutually causal under the connection of emotional value.

Note 9: The issue of breaking the cartel alliance in traditional finance was detailed in Chapter 3 of The Trend of Asset On-chainization Under Stablecoin Pricing Mechanism in May 2025.

Note 10: There is no publicly available explicit data material for the economic data of underdeveloped emerging economies, and the relevant information is based on undisclosed proprietary corporate data.

Note 11: The <Financial Circuit and Web3 Tokenomics Theory> was written in October 2022, detailing the underlying framework mechanism of the Web3 Tokenomics financial system.

Note 12: This multiple has only a relatively narrow reference significance: macroscopically, 2.5x = Merrill Lynch's 10-year clock / Bitcoin's 4-year cycle; microscopically, 5x = 7x24 hour trading / 5x6.5 hour trading; it cannot effectively represent the differences in actual production and social iteration.

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