Author: Jeff Dorman, Chief Investment Officer at Arca;
Compiled by: Shaw, Jinse Finance
For years, one of the biggest challenges facing digital asset investors has been figuring out what exactly to allocate to. There are thousands of cryptocurrencies, hundreds of blockchain protocols, dozens of publicly traded companies, and seemingly endless new projects launching every week. Despite the abundance of choices, the number of truly attractive investment targets has historically been very small—and it keeps shrinking.
This year we have written extensively about how this situation is finally beginning to change. Continuously improving fundamentals, optimized token economic models, increasingly clear regulatory frameworks, and a steady influx of institutional capital are driving digital assets from a market purely dominated by speculation toward one where investors can apply traditional fundamental analysis frameworks.
While the broader crypto market is still searching for its own identity, we believe the investment opportunities are actually becoming clearer. In fact, we believe there are primarily four categories of crypto asset investments worth allocating to today.
I. Public Company Stocks—Investing in Companies Building Industry Infrastructure
The first category is the most intuitive: stocks.
Despite the complexity of the digital asset space, investing in equity in a high-quality business is not complicated in itself. Companies generate revenue, control expenses, allocate capital, and have the potential to achieve long-term growth in profits and free cash flow. Shareholders have a legal claim on the residual value of the business, and when enterprise value rises, equity value typically rises alongside it.
Unfortunately, the number of high-quality crypto public companies is still small. Frankly, even the number of high-quality private companies worth investing in is scarce.
We continue to be bullish on companies like Galaxy Digital (GLXY) and Securitize (SECZ), which allow investors to gain exposure to the fastest-growing segments of the digital asset ecosystem. Galaxy covers institutional trading, asset management, and the rapidly expanding AI data center industry; Securitize will benefit from the broader trend of traditional financial assets migrating to blockchain infrastructure—that is, real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.
The investable universe will continue to expand. Kraken is expected to launch its IPO next year. We anticipate that if crypto sector IPOs stop consistently breaking issue price (see COIN, BTGO, GEMI, BLSH), a large number of other high-quality crypto startups will eventually enter the public markets.
We have written extensively about the trend of traditional financial institutions entering digital assets. As this convergence accelerates, investors will have an increasing number of high-quality public company targets through which to participate in the industry's growth.
But stocks are only one way to capture the industry's growth.
II. Existing Tokens with Real Revenue and Sound Token Economic Models
The second category is what we have been writing about almost continuously this year: tokens that are backed by mature businesses and capable of accumulating real economic value.
For most of the crypto industry's history, the business success of a blockchain protocol or project has been severely disconnected from its token performance. A protocol or company can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, attract millions of users, and become an indispensable part of the digital asset ecosystem, yet token holders receive at most meaningless governance rights (e.g., LINK, XRP).
This mechanism itself is fundamentally unreasonable.
As we have repeatedly argued, this problem is largely self-inflicted: it stems from misleading legal advice, poor token architecture design, and a previous regulatory environment that discouraged projects from creating tokens with economic value. Fortunately, the situation is changing.
As we have mentioned countless times, multiple companies and protocols have proven through value capture mechanisms such as revenue buybacks, staking rights, and fee sharing that tokens can have real economic value. These projects no longer simply tell stories painting a vision of the blockchain future; instead, they operate real businesses, generate actual revenue, and continuously build mechanisms that allow token holders to share in the business growth dividends.
The core logic is simple: if a protocol's revenue continues to grow, its market share expands, and it returns economic value to token holders, investors finally have a tangible target on which to conduct due diligence.
However, even more exciting than projects that have already proven this model is new projects being developed according to these principles from the very beginning.
III. New Token Issuances with Compliant Design from the Ground Up
For many years, the playbook for token issuance has been highly standardized: raise from VCs, issue a token with questionable utility, release a small portion of the circulating supply to the public, and hope that speculation drives the price up before insider unlock selling pressure arrives.
This model is extremely unfriendly to secondary market investors, and unsurprisingly, the vast majority of these tokens have ultimately performed poorly. Exchanges like Binance and Coinbase listing these doomed new tokens is complicit behavior, and this is an important reason why a large number of retail investors have permanently left the crypto market.
But a new generation of projects is taking a different path. They no longer treat tokens as an afterthought tool or a fundraising instrument; instead, from the very beginning of project design, they embed tokens deeply into the business's economic system.
Venice AI ($VVV) is an interesting case. Venice provides privacy-oriented AI services, allowing enterprises and individuals to access top-tier AI models without handing over personal data to centralized platforms. The most striking aspect of the project is its token design: users stake VVV to receive proportional access to Venice's AI inference compute, thereby creating a natural link between business demand and token demand. Venice has also introduced a revenue-funded buyback and burn mechanism, further tying business operations to token holder returns. As demand for privacy-focused AI inference rises, the economic value corresponding to compute access rights will rise alongside it. Of course, this does not mean VVV's current valuation is attractive as an investment, but at least you can seriously evaluate it and make a value judgment based on fundamentals, and it does not need to adopt a traditional stock dividend model to create economic value.
The key point is: VVV and similar tokens that follow have real meaning beyond speculative hype. Whether Venice ultimately succeeds remains unknown, but this is exactly the kind of innovation we hope to see from a new generation of digital asset issuers.
IV. Established Legacy Tokens Attached to Strong Businesses with the Opportunity to Restructure Their Economic Models
The fourth category may be the most overlooked investment opportunity in today's crypto market. Ironically, we have been writing about this direction for more than six years.
As early as July 2020, we argued that one of the most attractive aspects of token investing is the flexibility of token architecture. Unlike traditional securities, token issuers can continuously modify token economic rules, add new features, and design better incentive mechanisms for token holders. In April 2025, we reiterated this view: tokenomics and use cases can be iterated throughout the entire lifecycle of an asset.
This is one of the most underappreciated characteristics of digital assets: token economics are not set in stone.
A token with poor design 5 or 10 years ago is not necessarily forever a poor investment. Token release schedules can be adjusted, buyback mechanisms can be added, revenue sharing can be implemented, and new use cases can be developed. Of course, such changes require project team determination, community consensus, and an appropriate legal structure, but the technical capacity for adjustment exists.
This gives rise to a highly attractive investment opportunity: finding projects whose businesses have already proven successful but whose tokens have been abandoned by the market, yet whose token economic system can be completely restructured.
Take the Brave browser and its native token BAT (Basic Attention Token) as an example.
Brave has over 120 million users and is said to rank among the top 50 most visited websites globally, alongside Telegram, eBay, Discord, and GitHub. By any metric, Brave has built a highly successful consumer product.
But for nearly a decade, BAT as an investment target has been essentially worthless—and that is putting it mildly.
The problem does not lie in the underlying business itself. It is that BAT is almost decoupled from the economic value created by business growth. Even if Brave continues to attract users, iterate on its product, and expand its ecosystem, it will not generate significant new demand for BAT.
But this situation may finally be about to change.
In July, Brave released the BAT 4.0 roadmap, introducing a series of initiatives to deeply integrate BAT into the Brave ecosystem. These include a stablecoin-based Brave Rewards card, an integrated wallet connecting traditional payments and cryptocurrency, expanded payment infrastructure through BravePay, and new use cases related to AI and digital commerce. Most importantly, Brave plans to use a portion of net revenue generated from wallet services, payments, and other products to buy back BAT, with the repurchased tokens used to incentivize users, creator payouts, and ecosystem development.The new rewards card reportedly surpassed 200,000 waitlist signups just two months after launch, proving the new product has gained considerable early attention. At the same time, the BAT token has been fully diluted, and investors no longer need to worry about planned token unlock selling pressure down the road.
Let's understand what this means.
Brave has completed its hardest step. It has built a product used by hundreds of millions of people, established a global brand, laid out distribution channels, and built an ecosystem used daily by millions.
But until recently, investors had little reason to hold BAT. Now Brave is trying to tie the success of its business to token economics.
Of course, the reform may not succeed. Using revenue to buy back tokens and redistribute them to users is not the same as an equity buyback that permanently reduces circulating supply. Whether the new payment product succeeds remains to be seen.
But that is precisely what creates this opportunity.
Investors have a chance to buy the token at a valuation that reflects years of a poor token model, rather than one priced on the underlying business's potential economic value. BAT is unlikely to be the only case.
A large number of crypto projects have spent years building real products, accumulating users, and generating revenue, yet their tokens have continued to languish. Some projects have thriving businesses while their tokens are worth nearly nothing. Beyond that, there are many successful non-crypto companies that could reach another level if they introduced token mechanisms (for example, consumer-facing brands like Netflix, Disney, Spotify, Nike, etc.).
For years, investors were justified in avoiding this type of asset, because token holders could not share in the underlying business's returns. But what happens when this return distribution mechanism finally arrives? What happens when a token that investors ignored for five years suddenly has real economic value?
The room for asset value re-rating could be enormous.
Outlook: Investment opportunities are becoming clearer
For most of the crypto industry's development, investing in digital assets meant investors had to set aside the fundamental principles commonly applied in other markets. Worse, most ordinary observers were misled into thinking that fundamental investing was simply impossible in crypto markets.
Revenue did not matter, profit did not matter, valuation was mostly meaningless, and whether a project succeeded often had no connection to its token price.
All of this is finally changing.
Today investors have four increasingly high-quality ways to participate in the growth of the digital asset industry (industry growth is concentrated in three major areas: stablecoins / payments, DeFi, and RWA real-world asset tokenization). Investors can choose to invest in equity in high-quality companies; mature tokens with revenue growth and value-capture capability; tokens of new projects designed from the outset around sustainable economic utility; or targets with solid businesses where established tokens may undergo an economic mechanism overhaul.
These four types of opportunities differ greatly, but they share one common feature: when the underlying business or network continues to grow, the asset itself has an identifiable economic logic supporting its appreciation.
And the fourth category also reminds us why we have always believed tokens have unique advantages over traditional securities. The underlying ownership of equity is relatively fixed, but a token's economic design can undergo enormous iteration over its lifecycle.
This flexibility has been abused in the past. But now more and more cases are using it to create real economic value. Six years ago we argued that this flexibility would become one of the most important traits of digital asset investing.
It has taken longer to materialize than we expected, but we may be witnessing this thesis become reality.
The next great investment target in crypto may not be a new company or a newly issued token. It may be attached to a mature business, where an established token has finally found a way to reward investors.