Crypto’s fundamentals have never been stronger, yet degens keep chasing hot new narratives. Behavioral finance may explain why get rich quick stories continue to beat substance.
“Investments change fast; human nature and human aspirations stay constant.”
That’s how Meir Statman, behavioral finance pioneer, professor of finance at Santa Clara University and author of A Wealth of Well-Being, 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 it’s 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.
This behavior isn’t unique to digital assets; it’s just particularly pronounced in an industry that prizes memes over sustainable business models.
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.
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.
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