The traditional "four-year cycle" framework is no longer enough to explain the market.

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In 2025, we witnessed a historic dislocation between verified economic activity and asset pricing. While valuations faced headwinds, the industry’s infrastructure solidified at an industrial pace. This is the basis of our 2026 House View.

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We are entering a year of "Strategic Re-Rating," where the compounding utility of the settlement layer forces a convergence between depressed valuations and institutional reality.

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The trade for 2026 is no longer about riding a cyclical tide, it is about capturing the arbitrage in this new structure.

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Introduction

The year 2025 represented a definitive structural inflection point for digital assets. We witnessed a stark disconnect between Price Discovery and Value Settlement. While asset valuations faced headwinds and decoupled from underlying fundamentals, the industry infrastructure scaled at an industrial pace. This divergence is not a contradiction. Rather, it signals the final transition from a programmatic retail driven cycle to a complex institutional regime governed by macro liquidity, interest rate sensitivity, and reflexive capital flows.

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Under this new structure, the traditional “four year cycle” framework has been rendered obsolete. While institutional participation expanded via ETFs, flows proved reflexive as they followed price rather than anticipating it, and late year shifts in interest rate expectations capped risk appetite. Speculative capital was structurally diluted by an unrelenting flood of 100,000 new assets per month. Bitcoin’s price consolidation should therefore be read not as an asset level failure, but as a signal of a maturing and liquidity constrained market.

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Yet beneath the volatility, the settlement architecture of the digital economy has solidified. Stablecoins have evolved from a trading tool into a definitive Global Settlement Layer processing nearly USD 27 trillion in volume. Concurrently, the proliferation of tokenised Real World Assets and the expansion of the digital asset ETF universe around the globe have integrated digital rails into institutional portfolio architecture, creating a flight to pristine collateral.

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This structural reality forms the basis of our 2026 House View. The market enters the year with a historic dislocation between verified economic activity and asset pricing. If 2025 demonstrated the limits of the legacy cycle narrative, 2026 is positioned as a year of Strategic Re-Rating where the compounding utility of the settlement layer forces a convergence between depressed valuations and institutional reality. The trade for 2026 is no longer about riding a cyclical tide but capturing the arbitrage between this compounding industrial value and a market that has yet to price it in.

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TL;DR

Regulation & market structure
MiCA/CARF in effect, U.S. stablecoin framework advancing, Swiss developments accelerating institutional access.

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Stablecoins as settlement rails
2025 transfer volume hit ~$27 trillion. Supply now ~$307 billion. This is no longer experimental infrastructure.

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RWA & tokenization
The "flight to pristine collateral" is real. Treasury-backed tokens and on-chain credit are scaling.

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On-chain signals
Late-cycle characteristics with near-term asymmetries pointing to stabilization. Not a call, just what the data shows.

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Sectors to watch
Interoperability, ZK/privacy infrastructure, prediction markets, decentralized AI.

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The market is moving beyond narrative-driven cycles toward a regime defined by regulation, institutional rails, and on-chain financial infrastructure.

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This report is your playbook for a market that is transitioning from a retail-driven cycle to a complex institutional regime.

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DOWNLOAD HERE

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For more information, please visit our website or contact our team.

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Disclaimer: This content is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute trading, legal, or investment advice. It is directed at our followers in Switzerland and may not represent the views of FiCAS. The author may hold assets mentioned in this article and assumes no obligation or responsibility for any actions taken based on the information provided.