Author: Frank, PANews
Investors who may have been immersed in the anticipation of a crypto “supercycle” six months ago might not have imagined that, six months later, BTC would actually be down by nearly half. From the $125,000 peak on October 6, 2025, it has fallen to $66.6k today, for a drawdown of 46.56% over the period.
This drop wasn’t a correction; it was a systemic liquidation. PANews pulled price data for 424 USDT spot trading pairs from Coin Security, and the results were surprising:
Only 11 assets recorded positive returns over these six months, accounting for just 2.6%; 405 assets had a maximum drawdown of more than 50%, making up as much as 95.5%; even loosening the bar to “outperform BTC,” only 50 assets managed it, and 88% of alternative coins underperformed the broader market. Out of 45 key observation projects across 8 tracks, only Maker had a positive return.
This is a brutal report card. But exposing the wounds isn’t the purpose of this article. When the tide goes out and the bubble bursts, the assets that are still profitable, the public chains that still have inflows, and the ecosystems that still see user growth—these, instead, become the most valuable signals in the entire market. Based on Coin Security spot data, on-chain metrics from 12 major public chains, and the price performance tables of 45 representative projects across 8 tracks, PANews attempts to find “signs of life” amid the ruins.
(Scope of this article analysis: the research period is from October 6, 2025 to March 30, 2026. Coin Security spot 424 pairs are deduplicated and filtered to exclude stablecoins, fiat-pegged tokens, and leveraged tokens. On-chain data comes from DefiLlama, growthepie, and Token Terminal. Track project prices are based on Coin Security prices and CoinGecko.)
I. The 10 survivors among 424 assets belong to three completely different species
First, look at the full list. During these six months when BTC was cut in half and the whole market saw torrents of blood, the assets that recorded positive returns on Coin Security spot are as follows:
At first glance, BANANAS31 is up 141%, KITE is up 111%, and it seems like a remarkable performance. But if you break down these 11 “survivors” carefully, you’ll find they are actually three completely different species.
The first is the one that truly held up: JST, ZEC, and DCR belong to this group.
Among them, JST is the most worth watching. Its price increase over the period was 78.5%, and its maximum drawdown was only 9.89%—the only positively returning asset in the entire field with a drawdown of less than 10%. Against the backdrop that 95% of assets in the whole market saw pullbacks of more than 50%, JST did the opposite and rose against the trend. The core reason is that on October 11, JustLend DAO officially released the “JST Repurchase and Burn Proposal.” The proposal uses DeFi income from the JustLend protocol: it repurchases JST transparently on-chain and permanently burns JST, achieving ongoing monetary contraction. In the market’s panic liquidation wave, this move demonstrated fundamental resilience, quickly attracting capital inflows and driving a price rebound.
ZEC and DCR represent another logic: the safe-haven effect of privacy coins in a bear market. ZEC’s maximum drawdown is 22.63%, and DCR’s maximum drawdown is 32.92%—they are rare examples of resilience in an environment of total collapse. These two long-established privacy coins can hold up not only because of the narrative, but also because of their long-term surviving community base and ongoing demand for anonymous transactions.
In addition, STG (Stargate, a cross-chain bridge protocol) is up 13.75%, and SKY (SKY after MakerDAO’s brand repositioning, the governance token) is up 3.56%; both belong to DeFi core infrastructure. Cross-chain bridges have real demand in weak markets (users need cross-chain transfers to hedge), and stablecoin governance protocols have ongoing protocol revenue—the logic is identical to JST’s.
The second is “dead first, alive later.” BANANAS31, DEXE, and so on belong to this group. Their shared feature is extremely deep maximum drawdowns (87% to 98%), followed by rebounds of several hundred or even up to a thousand percentage points from extremely low levels. BANANAS31’s maximum drawdown is 98.07%, and it bottomed at 12391%—it looks like it’s up by 124x. But in essence, because of the crash on October 11, its price fell far too much; as a result, even a tiny amount of buying was enough to trigger rebounds of hundreds of percentage points, turning it into a playground for wild-manipulation. .
The third is a new coin that listed midstream. KITE only has 147 days of trading history, while ESP has only 46 days; the high涨幅 mainly reflects post-listing performance and has not yet fully passed the test of a bear market.
After stripping away these distractions, the only ones truly worth being written into the “winter survivors” list are just five: JST, ZEC, DCR, STG, and SKY. They cover the full six-month cycle, with controllable drawdowns and genuine upside. The shared characteristics of these five are clear: either they have real on-chain usage scenarios (lending, cross-chain bridges, stablecoins), or they have a community foundation that has survived long term (privacy coins). This is the first sign of life: in the crypto world, “being useful” lasts longer than “being famous.”
II. Among the 50 assets that “outperformed BTC,” some worthwhile tracking clues are hidden
BTC itself is down 46.56%. For the 50 assets that outperformed BTC, most of them don’t represent “good performance”—they simply fell less. Looking at the distribution, besides the 11 with positive returns, 14 are down between 0% and 30%, 25 are down between 30% and 46%, and the remaining 374 all underperformed the broader market, accounting for 88% of the total.
Among these 50 names, a few clues are worth tracking.
TRX (down 8.03%) is the token of the Tron public chain. Linking it to the performance of JST in the first section, a clear picture emerges: the Tron ecosystem showed overall resilience during this bear market. The token’s decline is in the single digits; DeFi projects within the ecosystem are posting positive returns; the underlying support is the real demand for stablecoin settlement. On Tron, USDT circulates with the largest share on the entire network; the settlement-layer role is not only unshaken in a weak market—it’s even more solid.
TAO (down 7.48%) is Bittensor, the only project in the AI track whose drawdown is controlled within single digits. Against the backdrop of collective halving even collapsing to near zero for AI Agent concept coins, TAO’s resilience indicates that the market is distinguishing between “AI narratives” and “AI infrastructure.” For projects that use a real decentralized compute network, the pricing logic hasn’t collapsed yet.
VIRTUAL (down 44.32%) exists in the AI Agent track, which in the broader environment is down 70% to 90% overall; its drawdown is relatively controllable. However, judging from the actual chart movements, it looks more like it started falling even before the October 11 crash, and it is still trading sideways at low levels.
With 88% of rival coins underperforming the broader market, from the remaining 12% we can only faintly see some survivors. Behind the stubborn strength of the Tron ecosystem are the demand for stablecoin settlement and the underlying value of AI compute networks represented by Bittensor, along with real-demand needs from some large DeFi infrastructure. These clues may be weak, but they point in the same direction: real usage, not narratives.
III. “Chain-by-chain health check report” for 12 public chains: capital is reselecting, users are relocating again
If token prices reflect market sentiment, then on-chain data reflects the ecosystem’s true health. PANews performed a comprehensive health check on 12 major public chains across two dimensions: capital retention (TVL, stablecoins, and DEX trading volume) and user activity (number of daily active addresses). By taking equal-weight averages of rates of change across dimensions, and without any weighting method, it produced a scoring standard.
The result is that most public chains saw both capital and activity shrink significantly. But within the shrinkage, a few abnormal bright spots are still flickering.
Capital retention: Polygon is the only positive
First, look at capital. Among the 12 public chains, only Polygon shows the best capital retention performance. TVL grew 8.66%, stablecoin supply grew 47.99%, and DEX trading volume grew 16.52%—all three figures are positive. Against the backdrop of large-scale capital outflows across the entire market, this is the only public chain with “three green lights.”
The biggest reason behind it is likely that the explosive popularity of the prediction market Polymarket boosted Polygon’s ecosystem activity. But besides that, during this period Polygon also went through its own Rio upgrade, which, from a performance-optimization perspective, helped absorb the heat from the prediction market.
Ranked second is Tron (-20.44). Even though it is negative overall, stablecoin growth is 11.42%, and the decline in trading volume is also relatively limited, so its overall performance is still acceptable. Last place is Sui (-72.41), which suffered a full-scale collapse: TVL fell 77.64%, stablecoins fell 44.10%, and DEX trading volume fell 95.49%, nearly drained to nothing.
Stablecoin flows: the most truthful direction of capital
Among all on-chain indicators, stablecoin changes are perhaps the most worth watching.
From the data, Aptos’s stablecoin growth of 51.14% is the highest in the field, followed closely by Polygon’s 47.99%; BNB Chain grew 22.66%, and Tron grew 11.42%. On the other end, Sui’s stablecoins fell 44.10%, Optimism fell 23.08%, and Arbitrum fell 13.15%. Meanwhile, Ethereum (+1.59%) and Solana (+1.07%) are basically flat.
This dataset reveals an important fact: stablecoins didn’t leave the crypto market on a large scale—they’re simply reselecting where to dock. Capital withdrew from high-risk DeFi protocols, L2 ecosystems, and MEME pools, and flowed into chains that are relatively stable or have narrative potential ahead.
Worth special attention is Aptos: stablecoins surged by 51%, and daily active users also grew, but TVL still fell by 65.99%. Behind this contrast, on the one hand, Aptos’s original stablecoin market cap was smaller—only around $1.1 billion. On the other hand, much of the TVL decline is driven by the APT token’s crash, which evaporated market cap. Overall, Aptos’s stablecoin growth is indeed fast, and it has already climbed into the top ten public chains.
Daily active users: Avalanche’s 10x surge is the biggest surprise
Using growthepie (Ethereum and L2) and Token Terminal (L1 public chains) data, PANews also analyzed the daily active metrics of all 12 public chains during the research period.
Out of the 12 public chains, only 4 achieved positive growth in daily active users (Avalanche, Aptos, Polygon, and Ethereum are basically flat). But within that, two extremely important findings are hidden.
The biggest gainer is Avalanche: daily active users jumped from 56.3k to 652k, an increase of more than 10x. However, in the same period, Avalanche’s TVL fell 68.63%, and DEX trading volume fell 78.21%. User growth surged while capital shrank; new users’ growth couldn’t beat the bear market’s selloff in coin prices. This growth mainly came after January. According to an Avalanche weekly report in January, after January 11, Avalanche Cross-chain Communication (ICM) enabled the independent Avalanche L1 blockchain to communicate with each other and transfer assets or data. Among them, three game-related L1s—CX, Grotto, and Henesys—contributed a large amount of transactions.
The second is Ethereum: daily active users fell by only 8.44%, almost flat, but the number of transactions increased sharply by 58.19%. This indicates that users who stayed on Ethereum became more active. There were fewer users, but the ones who remained used it more and more frequently.
Aptos’s daily active users grew 30.78%. When combined with stablecoin growth of 51.14%, both capital and users grew, but TVL dropped 65.99%. The signal from combining the three is: Aptos is attracting new participants, but they haven’t entered DeFi at scale yet.
The negative case is Sui: daily active users plunged from 766k to 148.5k, a drop of 80.61%, and it fell in three-dimensional resonance with TVL and stablecoins. The last round of Sui ecosystem hype has completely faded away; capital, users, and transaction volume all withdrew across the board.
IV. Eight major tracks: DeFi is the only track with winners; L2 has no pulse anymore
PANews selected 45 representative projects with the highest market cap and recognition across eight major tracks: DeFi, AI Agent, RWA, infrastructure, exchanges, DePIN, MEME, and Layer 2. From the track perspective, the ranking from strongest to weakest is: DeFi, AI Agent, RWA, infrastructure, exchanges, DePIN, MEME, Layer 2.
DeFi: Cash flow is the only moat in a bear market
Among the 45 items, only Maker (MKR) recorded positive price performance (+1.8%), making it the only winner in the whole field. The reason Maker has maintained growth is that its real protocol revenue has been holding up well; from 2025 to today, its revenue has remained at a high level.
Hyperliquid ranks second in the DeFi track with a drawdown of 18.09%. As a decentralized perpetual contract exchange, it also benefits from the logic that “trading demand doesn’t disappear in a bear market.”
However, internal division within the DeFi track is extremely severe. Ethena is down 85.10%, Raydium is down 81.05%, and Pendle is down 77.71%. It’s worth noting that these projects aren’t without revenue. In fact, many of the DeFi track’s projects that suffered large declines still have decent protocol revenue. The real dividing line isn’t whether “there is revenue,” but how sensitive the revenue is to the cycle. Maker’s stablecoin minting and RWA earnings don’t fluctuate with market temperature; Pendle’s point trading, Ethena’s funding rate arbitrage, and Raydium’s MEME trading matchmaking depend heavily on a bull market environment—once the market turns cold, both revenue and token prices collapse together.
Layer 2: the worst track in the entire market
zkSync is down 70.73%, Arbitrum is down 80.58%, Starknet is down 81.37%, and Optimism is down 86.58%. The bottoming-and-rebound of all four L2 tokens is 0%, meaning that as of the time of data collection, the latest prices are the lowest prices in the range—still making new lows, with no sign of any rebound.
How hot the L2 narrative was in the previous cycle, the collapse in this cycle is just as thorough. Airdrop expectations, TVL competitions, and technical roadmap debates—these valuation engines that once drove pricing have all gone silent after the market cooled down.
MEME: nobody wants the old MEME anymore
From SHIB (down 55.33%) to MOG (down 82.77%), every bottom rebound is within single-digit percentage points; even the highest SHIB is only 8.51%, indicating that the old-school MEME currently seems to have no willingness of funds to step in and take over. However, the MEME market still looks somewhat lively; platform revenues and the number of token creations on sites like Pump.fun have remained at relatively high levels.
AI Agent: platforms do better than community-driven ones
AI Agent Bittensor (down 7.86%) and Virtual Protocol (down 44.36%) are the only two projects in the AI track whose drawdowns are within 50%. Meanwhile, ElizaOS is down 91.90% and AIXBT is down 75.15%. The logic behind the split is clear: projects with real compute networks or platform functionality are still being priced by the market, while pure narrative-and-social AI concept coins are heading to zero. This logic is consistent with the split in the DeFi track: what survives is “useful.”
V. Five signals read from the ruins
Stacking the data from 424 assets, 12 public chains, and 8 tracks together, the market is doing something very cruel but also very clear: it is re-pricing everything in the crypto world. The pricing standards are no longer narratives, hype, and expectations, but usage, revenue, and retention.
From this liquidation, PANews reads five signals worth tracking continuously.
First, cash flow has become a survival threshold. Among 11 assets with positive returns, DeFi accounts for 4. At the public-chain level, Polygon—where capital retention is strongest—relies on a steady stream of trading volume and active users brought by the prediction market. At the track level, the only winner is Maker, relying on protocol revenue. “Real revenue” is no longer just a bonus in this market cycle; it has become the minimum bar to survive. However, for now, this doesn’t necessarily mean these tokens’ performance will be better.
Second, stablecoins are being redistributed, not exiting. Public chains such as Polygon (+47.99%), Aptos (+51.14%), and BNB Chain (+22.66%) are attracting stablecoin capital. These chains, with clear performance advantages, seem to be receiving bets of capital in the new stablecoin narrative.
Third, the value of active users is declining. Avalanche’s daily active users surged 10x, but TVL fell sharply; Aptos’s capital and users doubled, but TVL declined. Looking closely at the logic, it may not be that hard to create prosperity in active address counts, but it takes real effort to retain the “real money” once users arrive.
Fourth, the hot narratives from the previous cycle have failed across the board. All L2 tokens are at historical lows with zero rebound; AI Agent’s tail-end is down over 80%; MEME has collapsed across the board; Sui’s three-dimensional resonance has dropped. The narratives that drove the market from the second half of 2024 to the first half of 2025 have had their valuations judged by the market as severely over-extended.
Fifth, what is truly useful is only seen after the tide recedes. JST’s lending, Maker’s stablecoin minting, Stargate’s cross-chain bridge infrastructure, and Ethereum’s infrastructure attributes. These aren’t the kind of stories that make people excited, but when users need to transfer funds, need to hedge, and need settlement, they are irreplaceable.
For ordinary investors, this data may not directly point to the next 100x coin. But it clearly outlines a survival rule that can last through cycles. When the narrative tide ebbs and liquidity dries up, what truly gets used by people will reveal itself the way riverbeds show in drought season. This might be the most valuable lesson that every bear market leaves for the market.
