“Investments change fast; human nature and human aspirations stay constant.”

That’s how Meir Statman, behavioral finance pioneer and professor of finance at Santa Clara University, explains one of investing’s oldest puzzles. And it may be why every crypto cycle so far has been about chasing the next hot narrative rather than fundamentals, whether its DeFi, meme coins or decentralized compute.

In an industry that has spent years maturing into an ecosystem of institutional investors, revenue-generating protocols and real-world use cases, investor attention still gravitates toward the next shiny thing that can offer the promise of outsized returns.

“Crypto is still a young asset class, and price discovery in young markets tends to be driven by attention before it’s driven by analysis,” Samar Sen, head of international markets at Talos, tells Magazine.

“A new narrative gives investors a simple story to underwrite quickly, while assessing the fundamentals of an established protocol takes real work, from understanding usage and revenue to token design and competitive position.”

This behavior isn’t unique to digital assets; it’s just particularly pronounced in an industry that prizes memes over sustainable business models.

A Pokémon card, a digital asset and a tech stock

A recent MarketWise study compared hypothetical $10,000 investments across cryptocurrencies, stocks, exchange-traded funds and collectibles between January 2021 and April 2026.

The study found that a sealed Pokémon card box outperformed Bitcoin, while a pair of limited-edition sneakers nearly matched Dogecoin’s returns.

At the same time, some of Wall Street’s most popular artificial intelligence funds lagged the broader stock market despite AI dominating the investment headlines.

A $10K investment has very different outcomes. Source: MarketWise

What does a Pokémon card, a digital asset and a tech stock have in common? According to Statman, they’re driven by the same thing: investors aren’t simply looking for the best asset; they’re buying a lottery ticket to a life-changing outcome.

Investors are chasing transformation, not crypto

Traditional finance tends to assume that investors want to maximize returns while minimizing risk, but Statman argues that people often invest for a very different reason.

In an unpublished paper shared with Magazine, Statman argues that many investors mentally divide their wealth into two layers.

The first is a “not-poor” layer, which is designed to preserve their standard of living and avoid falling into poverty. The second is a “be-rich” layer, which is for transformative goals, like buying a house, becoming financially independent, or fundamentally changing their circumstances.

Within that framework, concentrated investments aren’t necessarily irrational; they exist because diversified investing, while statistically sensible, may never offer someone with limited capital a realistic chance of achieving those goals.

James Royal, a senior writer at MarketWise, tells Magazine:

“The asset class may change, but the behavior barely does… Investors aren’t exactly loyal to crypto, stocks or collectibles. Their loyalty is to whatever promises lucrative returns next.”

Statman says that, while some of today’s investors pin their hopes on meme stocks, “a century ago it was railroad stocks […] today’s investors are simply expressing the same aspirations through a new asset class.”

Investors aren’t becoming more tolerant of risk, however, just more willing to accept volatility for a chance of life-changing wealth.

“Investors aren’t necessarily on the hunt for risk, but they’ve got a case of FOMO on the next life-changing return, and that can lead them down a path of underestimated downside risk,” Royal says.

Why stories beat fundamentals

If investors are searching for transformation rather than simple returns, that helps explain why narratives so often overwhelm fundamentals, particularly in crypto.

The decentralized finance sector is a case in point. Despite some of its largest protocols like Aave or Uniswap generating substantial revenue, attracting billions of dollars in deposits and processing enormous trading volumes, their tokens struggle to capture the same excitement as newer narratives built around the latest craze.

Aave’s token was trading at around $98 at the time of writing, some 85% from its 2021 peak, but its TVL is over $14 billion, and had reached over $37 billion at the height of the bull market in October 2025.

Aave’s TVL is over $14 billion while its token price is 85% from its 2021 peak. Source: DeFiLlama.

Thomas Probst, a research analyst at Kaiko market data provider, says that while assets may outperform in the short term, fundamentals will always be more important in the long term.

“Market fundamentals continue to play an important role, particularly resilience, liquidity, and volatility… [an asset’s] ability to establish itself over time also depends on the robustness of its market structure,” he says.

Yet, while a mature protocol generating sustainable cash flow may be an attractive long-term investment, it offers little appeal to investors allocating money toward their “be-rich” bucket. A token that might double over several years will always struggle to compete with the possibility, however remote, of a 100x moonshot.

“Investors like to confuse a great technological breakthrough with a great investment opportunity,” Royal says, which might explain why many AI-focused ETFs have underperformed, despite AI arguably becoming the defining investment narrative of our time.

“The real skill isn’t identifying exciting investments, it’s recognizing when optimism has already been priced in.”

That same skill comes in handy with market timing. MarketWise’s report found that investors who bought Bitcoin in January 2021 turned a hypothetical $10,000 investment into more than $24,000 by April 2026, with +141% gains.

Those who bought during its cycle peak in October 2025, however, saw the same investment shrink to just over $6,000 with a -38% return by April (and it’d be worth about $5,000 today).

Anyone who FOMO’d into AAAVE around the same time would be sitting on +85% losses today.

Institutions play a different game

Institutional investors approach investing from an entirely different perspective, Sen says:

“Institutional mandates simply don’t allow for chasing outsized, speculative returns. Institutions are underwriting risk-adjusted performance, liquidity, custody arrangements and operational resilience long before they look at upside potential.”

AAVE’s price performance since 2021. Source: Coingecko

And while that doesn’t mean institutions are immune to emerging narratives, they generally look at whether the underlying infrastructure can support meaningful capital allocation rather than whether the token could 100x.

“It’s usually a mix, and the order matters,” Sen says. “Most of these themes, DeFi, AI, memecoins, do start with a genuine shift: a real technical unlock or a new use case that wasn’t possible before.”

Once the narrative begins attracting speculative money, however, prices often move faster than fundamentals, he says.

“Investors arriving later in a cycle are often responding to the narrative as much as the fundamentals that started it […] Institutional capital, which tends to move on process and discipline rather than trend-following, is often a step behind the initial narrative and a step ahead of the correction.”

The next Bitcoin isn’t really the point

The search for the next life-changing investment is unlikely to disappear, and neither, Statman argues, is the human desire to improve one’s circumstances.

The next 100x token certainly exists, and investors will continue to seek it — even when the odds and fundamentals say they’re looking in the wrong place.

Magazine: The real reason DeFi projects that survived 2022 crash are shutting down now

Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor has warned that any changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules pose a far greater threat than those posed by rival cryptocurrencies and external governments.

Saylor’s comments are likely part of his broader opposition to Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP-110), a temporary soft fork that reduces arbitrary data stored on the blockchain.

Strategy Issues Bitcoin Warning

Michael Saylor issued the warning in a series of X posts, calling Bitcoin’s rules its constitution and describing how they determine ownership, scarcity, settlements, and what participants can and can’t change. Saylor stated,

“Bitcoin has won. Now it must survive victory. Its gravest threat is not an enemy at the gates, but corruption from within: factions that invent pretexts, rewrite the rules, and seize economic rights until freedom becomes permission and law becomes loot.”

According to Saylor, any changes to the protocol to benefit a single group would infringe upon the economic rights of the broader community, including miners, developers, investors, companies, custodians, and other users. He warned that if one group gained enough influence to change Bitcoin’s rules, others could use the same process for similar agendas.

Prolonged Governance Conflicts Harm Bitcoin

According to Saylor, protocol changes driven by a particular group could prolong disputes, which would drive away capital, slow development, and weaken security. Saylor has predicted Bitcoin could grow exponentially and become part of the infrastructure supporting global markets. The Strategy founder believes a poorly thought-out rule could hamper financial products and technologies in the future.

Saylor’s Opposition to BIP-110

If Saylor’s comments seem targeted, it’s because they are. Saylor has vehemently opposed BIP-110, a soft fork that reduces the arbitrary data stored on the blockchain. Supporters of the fork believe that limiting certain types of data eases storage requirements and reduces the burden on node operators. Additionally, they believe Bitcoin must focus on monetary transactions instead of tokens, inscriptions, or file storage.

While Saylor concedes that some on-chain data is redundant or could be linked to malicious activities, he argues that Bitcoin can’t use consensus rules to restrict block space to valid, fee-paying transactions. Saylor had said in an article dated July 18,

“Bitcoin does not need guardians of purity. It needs guardians of neutrality.”

Saylor’s latest comments also criticize proposals to add covenant functionality and increase block capacity, arguing that they create risks for Bitcoin’s base layer. Saylor is not the only one opposing BIP-110, with Adam Beck also publicly opposing the soft fork.

Fee Market and Network Security at Risk

Saylor believes imposing restrictions on valid transactions could weaken the fee market by reducing competition for block space, while larger blocks could reduce block space scarcity and raise bandwidth and hardware costs for node operators. He also argued that covenants could make Bitcoin’s consensus rules complicated and introduce new attack surfaces.

Saylor also warned that suppressing fee demand could substantially lower miner income, impacting the financial incentive that protects the network. He believes the base layer must be kept simple, neutral, scarce, and secure, while developers can build new functionality on a separate layer.

The Bitcoin Security Consortium

Strategy, along with Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Block, Blockstream, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Galaxy, has formed a consortium called the Bitcoin Security Consortium. The consortium has pledged $15 million over three years to support Bitcoin developers working on post-quantum solutions. However, the consortium will not take any position on protocol changes, nor control Bitcoin development.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Perpetual futures are entering regulated markets, and the objection to them is serious: retail-driven, high-leverage instruments will import systemic risk. But the critique is aimed at the wrong target. Systemic risk in a derivatives market is a property of the venue on which the perpetuals are traded, not the contract. The risk is set by venue choices: leverage caps, margin, funding design, default management. None inherent to a no-expiry contract.

The concern isn’t baseless. Crypto’s sharpest deleveraging episodes — with the October 2025 cascade among the most recent — have many causes: macro shocks, stablecoin de-pegs, exchange outages, oracle failures, over-leverage and thin liquidity. What turns a sell-off into a systemic event is the risk transmission mechanism, and in crypto that is usually the liquidation cascade: forced liquidations depress prices, transmit to other venues through shared reference pricing and arbitrage, and trigger more liquidations. What makes the cascade violent are venue choices: a manipulable index that liquidates on false prices, and auto-deleveraging that claws back profitable trades to cover a shortfall. Neither is a feature of perpetuals.

So the real question is not whether perpetuals belong in regulated markets; it is how a given venue is built. Regulatory requirements are necessary to secure the baseline: segregated funds, a registered clearing entity, a supervisor’s oversight. How a venue handles a default under stress is a separate choice, and it varies even inside the regulated perimeter.

There’s a sharper objection worth taking seriously, and it isn’t about risk: maybe institutions don’t want perpetuals at all. A recent JPMorgan note found limited institutional appetite for perpetuals, treating them as speculative rather than a replacement for regulated futures – no term structure, and basis risk that makes them imperfect substitutes. That is correct when it comes to the mechanics: as a substitute for dated futures, perpetuals fall short. Unlike a futures basis, funding is variable and can’t be locked in; and for a hedger who needs term structure and delivery, they are the wrong tool.

But replacement is not how institutions reach for them. Running both an options market and a perpetual one, Bullish sees it firsthand: many of the institutions trading options on our venue use perpetuals to hedge delta (the options’ directional exposure to the underlying’s price), not as a stand-in for dated futures, but because that is where the liquidity is. Term structure is less relevant to delta hedging than liquidity. Many of crypto’s dated futures are thinly-traded, while perpetuals — liquid in part because of the retail flow their critics deride — are the deepest, most continuously tradable delta-one instruments available. A desk managing risk in real time takes execution over elegance.

And that liquidity edge is structural. Retail gravitates to perpetuals for what they are: no expiry, no roll, continuously tradable. The design that draws that flow concentrates liquidity in perpetuals. That is the overlooked prize in bringing perpetuals onshore: a deep, durable pool of liquidity in the instruments a hedging desk wants.

So the two halves of the debate are one. The liquidity institutions want already exists, drawn in large part by retail. What lets them use it safely is institutional-grade default management, the same thing that contains the systemic risk the critics fear.

The question was never “are perpetuals dangerous?” It is “when the market is under stress, how does a venue handle a default?” Regulated clearing has established the standard for decades, which is also the standard Bullish is building toward, having filed with the CFTC to operate as a regulated contract market and clearinghouse.

When a liquidation’s shortfall outruns the insurance fund, the backstop is to socialize losses: auto-deleveraging force-closes offsetting profitable positions at an off-market price in order to absorb the defaulter’s loss. The clearing model works differently. It starts with the defaulter, whose own margin and fund contribution absorb the first loss. The position is worked off through the order book or, if large, auctioned to other clearing members. Behind that sits a pre-funded guaranty fund sized to regulated clearinghouse standards, with broad loss-sharing only beyond that, and rarely.

None of this completely eliminates risk – nothing does. What it does is break the chain that turns one blown-out account into a market-wide cascade: a default absorbed at its source, not force-fed into a falling market. That is the difference between a venue that contains a failure and one that transmits it, and the transmission is the systemic risk the critics fear. Meet that standard and perpetuals become infrastructure institutions can use; miss it and we have the hazard critics describe, regulated or not. Perpetuals were never the whole story. The design is.

Emirates, the Dubai-based flagship carrier, has launched Crypto.com Pay on its website and app, enabling eligible United Arab Emirates residents make flight bookings with cryptocurrencies, the airline said Tuesday.

Mobile users are sent to the Crypto.com app to authorize payment from their wallet, while desktop customers scan a QR code at checkout, the companies said in an announcement. Emirates settles in UAE dirhams rather than holding crypto, with Crypto.com handling the conversion.

The move “reflects the rapidly evolving preferences of a younger, digitally fluent generation who manage their money and plan their journeys primarily from their phones,” said Adnan Kazim, Emirates’ deputy president and chief commercial officer. Neither company indicated whether they would expand the Emirates service beyond eligible UAE residents.

The launch implements a partnership announced in July 2025. Cointelegraph reported in May that Crypto.com had received a UAE central bank Stored Value Facilities (SVF) license, which the company said at the time could support integrations with Emirates and Dubai Duty Free.

An SVF license allows non-bank companies to hold customers’ money or crypto in a digital wallet and process payments under central bank oversight. It lets customers fund payments with cryptocurrencies while merchants receive dirhams or approved dirham-backed stablecoins.

According to CoinGecko, Crypto.com handled around $686 million in trading volume in the 24 hours up to the time of writing. 

Emirates is not the region’s first airline to add a crypto checkout option. Air Arabia began accepting the dirham-backed AE Coin stablecoin for flight bookings in May 2025.

Related: Bhutan launches tourism crypto payments with Binance Pay and DK Bank

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

The battles ahead for India

Emirates has added a new way for eligible customers in the United Arab Emirates to pay for flights using cryptocurrencies. The Dubai-based airline launched Crypto.com Pay on its website and mobile app, allowing users to authorize payments from their Crypto.com wallets at checkout.

According to an Emirates announcement shared with Crypto.com, mobile users are prompted to complete the transaction inside the Crypto.com app, while desktop customers scan a QR code to proceed. Emirates will receive payment in UAE dirhams rather than taking custody of crypto itself—Crypto.com handles the conversion during the process.

Key takeaways

• Emirates customers in eligible UAE markets can use Crypto.com Pay to book flights with cryptocurrency, subject to wallet authorization and checkout flow.
• The airline is paid in UAE dirhams; Crypto.com performs the conversion, reducing direct crypto exposure for the merchant.
• Mobile and desktop users follow different checkout mechanics—app authorization for mobile and QR code settlement for desktop.
• The rollout follows a partnership first flagged earlier and comes after Crypto.com received a UAE central bank Stored Value Facilities (SVF) license.
• Emirates is joining a small set of regional airlines testing crypto-linked payment rails, alongside Air Arabia’s AE Coin option.

How Emirates’ Crypto.com Pay checkout works

Emirates says the new payment route is designed for customers who prefer to plan and book travel directly from phones. The airline’s process differs by device: smartphone users are directed to the Crypto.com app to confirm payment from their wallet, while desktop shoppers scan a QR code at checkout to complete the transaction.

This setup keeps the customer experience tied to Crypto.com’s payment infrastructure while maintaining traditional settlement on the airline’s side. By receiving dirhams instead of crypto, Emirates can continue operating its standard accounting and fare ecosystem without needing to hold or manage volatile crypto assets.

Why Crypto.com’s SVF license matters for merchants

Crypto.com Pay’s availability is tied to the company’s regulatory posture in the UAE. Earlier coverage from Cointelegraph noted that Crypto.com received a UAE central bank Stored Value Facilities (SVF) license—an authorization Crypto.com said could support integrations for payments with entities such as Emirates and Dubai Duty Free.

An SVF license generally allows licensed non-bank entities to hold customers’ money or crypto in a digital wallet and process payments under central bank oversight. For merchants, the practical implication is that customers can fund payments with cryptocurrency while the merchant receives fiat (in this case, dirhams) or approved dirham-linked stablecoin instruments, depending on the specific payment design.

That distinction is important: it changes the operational question from “can a merchant accept crypto directly?” to “can a regulated payment processor convert and settle in the merchant’s preferred currency?” Emirates’ approach appears to follow the second model, using Crypto.com for conversion and settlement.

Partnership timing and what the launch signals

Emirates and Crypto.com say the new checkout option implements a partnership first announced in July 2025. In the meantime, regional players have also been experimenting with stablecoin-linked rails. For example, Air Arabia began accepting the dirham-backed AE Coin stablecoin for flight bookings in May 2025.

By launching now, Emirates becomes the latest major travel brand in the UAE to test crypto-enabled payments—specifically through a regulated wallet and payment pathway rather than taking on direct crypto settlement risk. Emirates’ deputy president and chief commercial officer Adnan Kazim described the move as reflecting “the rapidly evolving preferences of a younger, digitally fluent generation” that manages finances and plans journeys largely from mobile devices.

Still, the airline did not specify whether Crypto.com Pay will expand beyond eligible UAE residents. For users outside those eligibility boundaries, the immediate impact is limited, even if the payment rail could theoretically be rolled out further later.

What to watch next for crypto payments in travel

Crypto payments in mainstream commerce tend to advance in stages: first through pilots, then through expansion across more routes and payment channels, and finally through deeper integration with loyalty programs and broader customer identity checks. Emirates’ decision to route crypto payments through Crypto.com’s infrastructure suggests it views this as a distribution and customer-experience upgrade rather than a wholesale shift in how fares are valued.

For the broader market, readers should watch whether the service expands to more customer segments in the UAE, whether additional airlines in the region adopt similar models, and how settlement practices evolve as more merchants rely on SVF-regulated payment processors.

With crypto payments still uneven across jurisdictions and consumer segments, the key uncertainty remains rollout scope: Emirates has launched Crypto.com Pay for eligible UAE residents, but the timeline for broader availability—and whether it will include more payment options beyond crypto-to-dirham conversion—will determine how meaningful this becomes for everyday travelers.

BNY, which has more than $59tn in assets under custody and administration, is moving one of its core record-keeping businesses onto blockchain as Wall Street builds the infrastructure for tokenized funds, the Financial Times reported Thursday.

“We think of BNY as modernizing a function that sits behind every single fund transaction by bringing the books and records onchain,” Carolyn Weinberg, chief product and innovation officer at the 242-year-old financial services giant.

BNY, which services about $8.6 trillion in assets across 7.6 million accounts, said moving its transfer agency onto blockchain would create a single record of ownership, cutting out the need for multiple intermediaries.

“We fully recognize you’ve got trillions and trillions of dollars’ worth of funds that… will continue to exist on traditional rails,” said Emily Portney, BNY’s global head of asset servicing, the bank’s largest business.

BNY did not immediately respond to a CoinDesk request for further information.

Baillie Gifford, a BNY client with more than $261 billion under management, will use the service for what the companies describe as the first fully native U.K.-regulated tokenized fund, according to FT. BlackRock and Dreyfus, BNY’s money-market and cash-management business, are expected to use it for planned funds.