Castrum Pad

When markets are down, capital usually moves first into $BTC, stablecoins, and cash. 💵 ✅ Cut weak positions. ✅ Hold conviction trades. ✅Keep cash for better entries. ✅ Don’t force trades just because prices are lower.

Ethereum still holds the majority of DeFi TVL, even with higher fees. Why? Liquidity, security, and composability. Capital stays where the deepest markets are, and moving that takes more than cheaper transactions.

Bitcoin sits at ~$1.4T market cap. ETH is ~1/3 of that. Everything else drops off fast. For anything to match BTC, it would have to absorb a huge share of global crypto liquidity, which is something no asset has come close to doing. Ever.

🧐 Most crypto trading still happens off-chain. CEXs handle ~85–90% of total volume. DEXs account for ~10–15%. For a decentralized market, the majority of trading still runs through centralized platforms. *sighs in irony*

DeFi still holds over $100B in TVL and remains the main source of on-chain activity. NFT volumes are a fraction of what they were last cycle, but AI tokens have grown fast in market cap. Gaming is moving, but slowly.

Did you know that stablecoin supply isn’t evenly distributed? ⚖️ Ethereum and Tron actually hold the majority of USDT and USDC. Other chains are growing, but still operate at a much smaller scale.

Ethereum is still pulling in roughly $10M/day in fees. Solana sits a few million below that. After those two, most chains barely cross $1M. The drop-off is steep once you move past the top.

₿ When is the next BTC ATH? Last cycles peaked ~12–18 months after the halving. April 2024 → puts the window in mid–late 2025 into early 2026. We already saw ~$120K+. If the cycle extends, new highs would still fit the pattern.

If you look at where users actually are in crypto, a few wallets dominate. Top wallets by monthly active users: 🦊 MetaMask ~30M 🛡️ Trust Wallet ~17M+ 🔵 Coinbase Wallet ~3M

➡️ BTC starts Q2 2026 at ~$72K. Down from the ~$120K+ highs, but still holding a ~$1.4T market cap and ~$38B in daily volume. Price cooled off. Scale didn’t.

USD stablecoins dominate the market with $140B+ supply. EUR stablecoins remain below $1B. Most on-chain liquidity, trading, and settlement still happen in USD.

Estimates from 2025 show ~80–90% of crypto trading activity comes through mobile apps. 📲 Desktop usage remains concentrated among higher-frequency and derivatives traders. Most retail flow is executed on mobile.

Uniswap and Aave still generate more fees than most of the market combined. 🔍 Scroll past the top protocols and revenue drops off quickly. There’s a big gap between what trades and what actually earns. ⛓️

🤖 AI tokens have run hard. But most still show limited on-chain usage, low fee generation, and small user bases. At the same time, funding and attention keep accelerating. There’s a clear gap between activity and valuation. 👀

Are NFTs still relevant? 🖼️ Trading volume is down sharply from peak years. Most collections have little to no liquidity. But a small group still sees consistent activity. 📈 🤏 The market exists, but it's just much more selective.

$118B locked in DeFi. 🔑 $142B when adjusted. 👈 And most of it sits in a handful of protocols. Aave V3 leads the pack.

3/What Q1 shows? Capital isn’t spreading evenly across the market. It’s clustering around assets with liquidity, infrastructure, and staying power. $BTC and $ETH continue to absorb most of it, shaping everything else.

2/Ethereum held its position in the stack. ~14% market share ~60% of DeFi TVL L2s continue expanding its footprint, pulling more activity into its orbit.

Q1 2026 in crypto: Market cap pushed toward ~$3.8T. Prices moved. Narratives shifted. But under the surface, capital stayed surprisingly concentrated. Here’s what stood out 👇