Report: The Maturation of the Onchain Economy
Our view on where things stand as we move quickly toward the halfway point of this year.
At Ethereal, in addition to investing in startups, we often step back and look at the underlying numbers to stress-test our conviction against what’s measurable. We want to share what we saw in the first quarter of this year, demonstrate where value is beginning to compound at scale, and show where we see trends aligning with the opportunities for innovators in 2026, as previously published:
In order to do so, we looked at five distinct factors: our own internal deal flow and how it has evolved, tokenized real-world assets coming onchain, blockchain-based payment volume, on-chain protocol fees compounding, and value distribution to token holders.
The first read we have on where founders are spending their time and how narratives continue to develop is our own inbound deal flow. This quarter, AI led at 32%, followed by DeFi at 20%, with payments, prediction markets, applications, and stablecoins rounding out the top categories as they continue to solidify as a standout group following the digital asset space’s maturation. This is followed by a long tail of protocol infrastructure, security, identity, RWA, DePIN, and more. The growing verticalization we wrote about is also showing up in diverse ways across categories and conversations we’re having with teams, with more ownership across their respective value chains.
Across the other four factors, the picture is consistent with structurally compounding growth.
Tokenized real-world assets are up roughly 30× over four years and still represent less than 0.05% of the US equities market cap.
Stablecoin payment volume is climbing against Visa and Mastercard’s mid-single-digit annual growth.
On-chain protocol fees grew to a tens-of-millions daily baseline through the current deep cyclical drawdown.
Finally, the share of protocol revenue flowing back to token holders shows that tokens are starting to behave less like commodities and more like cash-flow-generating assets.
Our Q1 2026 report includes the underlying charts, source data on every figure, our read on the data, and the related markets and concepts we are investing in.
You can find our market report here:
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by EV. (An offering to invest in an EV fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by EV, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Ethereal Ventures (excluding investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for EV to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets) is available at https://etherealventures.com/#portfolio.
Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://etherealventures.com/terms for additional important information.
thanks for the article! what we also see is that maturation = separation. the on-chain economy that institutions care about and the on-chain economy that retail still talks about are diverging fast