What To Know:
- Delphi Digital says 2025 will mark a convergence of social trading and financialized social media under the SocialFi umbrella.
- The $320 billion creator economy continues to grow, but platform-led monetization models leave creators misaligned with YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
- Crypto enables creators to tokenize audiences, reduce reliance on ads, and build direct, on-chain economic relationships.
Delphi Digital has outlined a sharp shift in 2026 crypto trends with how crypto applications may develop over the next year and argued that 2025 will mark a convergence between social trading and increasingly financialized social media. In its latest “2026 Application Outlook” report, the research firm said this overlap, often grouped under the SocialFi label, could reshape how creators, audiences, and capital interact online.
Delphi Digital Releases Report: 2026 Crypto Trends
At the center of the thesis is a growing frustration with the creator economy’s business model. The sector is valued at roughly $320 billion and continues to expand, yet much of that growth rests on platforms whose incentives remain misaligned with the people producing the content. A familiar cycle has repeated across media history.
Internet-native platforms now face the same pressure. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are profitable businesses with massive network effects, but their economics rely on taking a meaningful cut from creators. Even when creators succeed, platform rules, opaque algorithms, and changing monetization terms limit long-term sustainability. Many creators respond by running their own sponsored content, bypassing traditional ad infrastructure. While that increases earnings and control, it often weakens the user experience and reinforces the underlying alignment problem.
Delphi argues crypto introduces a different structure. Blockchains allow creators to tokenize their audiences directly. Subscribers can become tokenholders rather than passive followers, and monetization can occur without ad intermediaries extracting a share. The relationship between creator and audience becomes direct and programmable, something Web2 platforms struggle to replicate at scale.
This shift coincides with another trend already visible in markets. Trading behavior is becoming social. The phenomenon gained mainstream attention during the 2021 GameStop surge, when online communities coordinated around shared financial narratives. Since then, finance-oriented internet culture has continued to expand. Popular memes such as the Pelosi Tracker and Inverse Cramer have turned into copy-trading indexes through automated products. In crypto, similar behavior has appeared through copy-trader tools and social trading applications that blend feeds, performance data, and execution.
At the same time, social media itself is becoming financialized. Influencers now act as distribution hubs with economic gravity comparable to traditional media outlets. Pandemic lockdowns accelerated this shift, pushing audiences toward creators for entertainment, commentary, and community. New content formats have matured into full markets, from reaction-based videos to serialized creator-led shows. Internet-native figures can emerge quickly and command significant influence, often without the institutional backing that defined earlier media eras.Despite that influence, many social platforms remain stuck.
Twitter struggled before and after its acquisition by Elon Musk and now leans on xAI to support its valuation. Bluesky operates without a clear revenue model and relies on venture funding. Twitch’s value is tied to Amazon’s broader ecosystem rather than standalone profitability. Other platforms survive through subsidies, parent-company support, or advertising models that increasingly strain creator relationships. Delphi views this tension as an opening for crypto-native systems. By removing platform take rates and enabling direct economic participation, blockchains offer creators alternative paths to monetize attention. Major players appear aware of the risk. Instagram and others now promote creator monetization tools using language that echoes crypto narratives, though structural incentives still limit execution.
Beyond SocialFi, the report outlines staggered improvements across crypto’s financial infrastructure.Areas of focus include new automated market maker designs, deeper on-chain liquidity systems, orderbook-based lending, undercollateralized credit, non-USD stablecoins that bring foreign exchange volumes on-chain, and non-custodial crypto cards that embed yield into idle balances.Fairer launch mechanisms and maturing auction models also feature in Delphi’s outlook.
Also Read: Best Time to Trade Crypto in 2025
