Space Review｜Farewell to Narrative Frenzy, Web3 Enters a New Structured Phase of Pragmatic Foundation Building
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Space Review｜Farewell to Narrative Frenzy, Web3 Enters a New Structured Phase of Pragmatic Foundation Building
As the market collectively shifts towards pragmatism, this article deeply decodes how the TRON ecosystem builds systemic strength to navigate cycles through the synergistic evolution of its five pillars.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAs the clock struck midnight on the final night of 2025, a unique gathering of minds unfolded within the TRON ecosystem. A New Year's Eve Space, jointly initiated by five major projects—SunPump, JUST, AINFT, BitTorrent, and WINkLink—blended festive celebration with profound industry reflection, creating a distinctive annual "thought salon" through relaxed interaction.
Centered around the core narrative of "Review × Sentiment × Choice × Outlook," the event aimed to systematically review the pivotal shifts in the crypto market over the past year and, on that foundation, build consensus regarding future value trends. The discussions delved deeply into the structural changes impacting the market while collectively exploring the truly noteworthy signals of innovation and value foundations as the industry transitions toward a more pragmatic development phase.
This article systematically organizes the highlights and industry insights from the Space dialogue. It not only presents reflections from market participants on extreme volatility and observations of capital flows but also deeply decodes how the TRON ecosystem, through synergistic practices in areas like decentralized finance, cross-chain infrastructure, and AI integration, is building a value ecosystem characterized by resilience, vitality, and long-term development potential amidst complex cycles. This gathering was not merely an annual review but can be seen as a collective contemplation and forward-looking perspective on the future evolutionary path of the Web3 world.
Looking Back at 2025: The Collaborative Evolution and Value Accumulation of the TRON Ecosystem
The year 2025, now behind us, was one of profound "realism" calibration for the crypto market. The participating guests, who experienced the market firsthand, reached a consensus in their discussion: the industry is moving away from narrative-driven frenzy and entering a cooler, more pragmatic stage. As guest Anna Tangyuan summarized, this was "a year of gradually cooling down after being taught by reality." The simplistic logic of "narrative driving price" repeatedly failed, and market sentiment gradually shifted from optimistic expectations at the beginning of the year to prudence and pragmatism by year's end.
One catalyst for this shift was the "10.11" market flash crash, which left a deep impression on several guests. Anna Tangyuan, a firsthand witness, pointed out with her experience of "still having 40% of leveraged positions liquidated" that market risk lies not only in misjudging direction but also in severely underestimating extreme market conditions and the sudden drying up of liquidity. In the face of systemic risk, any leverage strategy appears insignificant, and "survival" becomes the primary rule for navigating cycles.
Furthermore, the market's sobriety is also reflected in capital selection. Guest web3 monkey highlighted the structural flow of capital with the phrase "the strong get stronger": after numerous emerging projects were validated (or invalidated) by the market, capital instead accelerated its flow back to core assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, indicating the market's pursuit of more solid value anchors.
Despite numerous challenges, innovation did not halt; it simply became more demanding of meticulous execution. It is precisely within this new industry tone—pursuing genuine utility and emphasizing risk management—that the TRON ecosystem's annual performance provides an excellent case study for observing "how to navigate cycles."
Throughout 2025, the five core projects of the TRON ecosystem—SunPump, JUST, AINFT, BitTorrent, and WINkLink—wrote a vivid footnote for "pragmatic building" and "ecosystem deepening" through concrete actions. They not only achieved breakthrough progress in their respective tracks but also, through close collaboration, jointly constructed a more resilient and vibrant decentralized ecosystem.
Firstly, at the DeFi application level, JUST has established its position as the value anchor of the TRON ecosystem through its solid protocol performance. The Total Value Locked (TVL) of its core protocol, JustLend DAO, once approached the $10 billion mark mid-year and consistently ranks among the industry's top, demonstrating the market's high recognition of its security and innovative model. Simultaneously, the ecosystem's robustness is reflected in the broad participation in core activities: as of December 31, 2025, the on-chain staking volume of TRX exceeded 9.25 billion tokens, with over 13,417 addresses participating in staking, and a stable annualized staking yield of 6.65%, forming a solid yield foundation within the ecosystem.
Beyond the protocol's solid performance and market recognition, the token buyback and burn mechanism driven by community consensus has also become a key decision boosting long-term confidence among JST holders. This mechanism transparently links protocol revenue directly to token value on-chain. The inaugural burn utilized existing revenue from JustLend DAO, totaling 59,087,137 USDT, with 30% (17,726,141 USDT) used for the first buyback and burn of 559,890,753 JST, approximately 5.66% of the total supply. This substantive deflationary action laid a credible foundation for JST's long-term value model.
While JUST is committed to creating value through buyback and burn, it also works to lower participation barriers through its GasFree feature, ensuring users can deeply engage with the ecosystem. Currently, the number of GasFree partners has expanded to 9. In November, the total transaction count reached 423,173, averaging 14,105 daily, with a total transaction volume exceeding $7.5 billion. This innovation significantly benefits small and medium-sized users and promotes the sustained, healthy growth of the ecosystem's scale.
Secondly, at the forefront of exploring innovative applications and asset paradigms, AINFT and SunPump have played the role of ecosystem pioneers. In 2025, AINFT successfully completed its brand strategy upgrade from a digital art platform to an "AI+Web3" infrastructure, aiming to bring layered empowerment—from intelligent interactive tools to decentralized AI models—to the TRON ecosystem. Its platform token NFT successfully listed on Binance Alpha in September 2025, gaining liquidity support and market exposure from a top global exchange.
SunPump, by building an active Meme trading ecosystem, has become the core hub connecting cultural creation and asset flow within the TRON network. Its AI-powered one-click token creation tool, SunGenX, significantly lowers the barriers to creation and issuance, seamlessly transforming cultural creativity into tradable assets. Driven by this innovative tool, the cumulative number of Meme tokens created on the platform has surpassed 100,000. Concurrently, the SUN.io ecosystem deeply collaborates with SunPump, executing a series of strategic moves—including establishing a CEX alliance, upgrading the AI assistant SunAgent, and launching the decentralized perpetual contract platform SunX—to build a complete ecosystem loop encompassing issuance, trading, and derivative services.
Finally, the expansion of oracle and cross-chain infrastructure has opened channels for the ecosystem to connect with the real world and diverse blockchain networks. The decentralized oracle WINkLink, with its reliable data services, deeply penetrates key areas such as payments, trading, wallets, and even privacy computing, becoming the secure cornerstone driving innovative applications like DeFi and RWA. Over the past year, WINkLink established strategic partnerships with 17 new projects, bringing its total ecosystem partners to 36.
Meanwhile, BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) completed a leapfrog upgrade to version 2.0, with its total cross-chain volume exceeding $1.63 billion. Even more noteworthy is its BitTorrent File System (BTFS), which boasts over 2 million global nodes and an annual storage capacity exceeding 800 PB. The synergy between WINkLink and BitTorrent collectively constructs the underlying network for data and asset circulation within the TRON ecosystem, providing solid assurance for its interconnectivity and value expansion.
As the market scrutinizes projects' intrinsic value amidst macro volatility, the TRON ecosystem, through its solid accumulation over the past year in technological infrastructure, economic models, and community operations, has proven its ability not only to withstand turbulence but also to possess the potential to continuously lead innovation waves.
Looking Ahead to 2026: Pragmatic Development and Value Signals in the Web3 Market
In the latter half of this New Year's roundtable, the focus of discussion shifted from reviewing the past to envisioning the future. Based on their profound insights from 2025, the guests shared their expectations for 2026 and the market signals they value most. Their discussions collectively paint a picture of industry consensus: the market is moving away from expectations of a broad-based bull market and entering a new, more demanding stage where opportunities and challenges are more structured. Individual success will increasingly depend on building systemic capabilities and grasping core trends.
Regarding the overall market in 2026, guest Peter from the crypto sphere maintains an "optimistic" stance on the support for mainstream assets based on macro perspectives like continued institutional accumulation and traditional capital inflows. However, he astutely points out that capital will become more selective, and the Matthew effect of "the strong get stronger" will intensify the divergence between mainstream and altcoin trends.
This judgment aligns with the current trend of value flow in the market, namely that capital is shifting from assets reliant solely on narratives toward those possessing genuine utility, stable cash flows, and robust ecosystem support. For example, the TRON ecosystem, leveraging its absolute dominance in the stablecoin settlement space (handling over half of the global on-chain circulation of USDT) and the powerful DeFi ecosystem derived from it, has constructed a "digital financial infrastructure" that does not rely on short-term subsidies and possesses endogenous circulation capabilities. This ecosystem, driven by real payment and lending demands, exemplifies precisely the resilience and sustainability the market seeks.
Regarding "which market signals are most worth carrying into 2026," the guests' analysis focused on a triangular framework of liquidity, innovation, and compliance. Firstly, innovative application scenarios with genuine utility, such as AI, prediction markets, and RWA, are highly anticipated. This reflects the market's demand for sophisticated, native on-chain applications. These are not merely "narratives" but pragmatic explorations attempting to create new demand and business models.
Secondly, the profound change in capital structure is a fundamental signal of the market's maturation. This is evident in two irreversible trends: First, the sustained, large-scale inflow of institutional capital through transparent, compliant channels like ETFs. This is not just incremental capital; it also brings higher demands for risk management, custody services, and fundamental analysis, raising the market's professional threshold and stability. Second, the structural growth and multi-scenario penetration of stablecoins on-chain, elevating them beyond mere transaction mediums to become foundational assets for on-chain finance. Their scale and reliability directly determine the DeFi and broader crypto ecosystem's capacity to absorb incremental capital.
Finally, the weight of compliance and fundamentals will continue to increase. As global regulatory frameworks evolve rapidly and institutional investors become significant market participants, being "regulation-friendly" and "audit-worthy" will transition from bonuses to prerequisites. This means that a project's compliance progress (e.g., license acquisition, operational transparency), actual utility (user activity, revenue generation capability), and token economic fundamentals (value capture mechanisms, inflation/deflation models) will completely replace vague visions and marketing narratives as the core basis for capital decisions. As the guests insightfully noted, those capable of navigating future cycles will undoubtedly be projects that have built transparent, robust economic systems with genuine value capture capabilities. Their growth will rely more on endogenous value creation within the ecosystem than on external liquidity hype.
In transforming compliance momentum into capital kinetic energy, the TRON ecosystem's practices in 2025 serve as a landmark example. Tron Inc. not only went public on Nasdaq but also initiated the "TRX MicroStrategy" plan, listing TRX as a reserve asset on the balance sheet of a publicly traded company, opening a core channel for the entire ecosystem toward mainstream, compliant capital. The strong confidence and transparency dividends released by this move directly drove the simultaneous rise in its DeFi ecosystem's Total Value Locked (TVL) and network revenue, powerfully demonstrating the systemic value that compliance building can bring.
In summary, the crypto market in 2026 will reward ecosystems and projects that can establish advantages across the "triangular framework": those capable of opening new frontiers in innovation, attracting and accommodating institutional-grade liquidity, and simultaneously building solid fundamentals within a compliant framework. This indicates that the Web3 market is transitioning from a speculative market chasing hotspots toward a mature ecosystem based on value discovery and sustainable construction. The TRON ecosystem's advancements in 2025 represent a preliminary answer delivered in anticipation of this future.
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