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In an unpublished paper shared with Magazine, Statman argues that many investors mentally divide their wealth into two layers.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