Nansen’s Jake Kennis on Asia’s Next Crypto Growth Wave

Asia’s crypto story is starting to look very different. It’s no longer just about chasing the next big token. Capital is moving into real projects, stablecoins are finding everyday use, and tokenized stocks and commodities are bringing more traditional assets onchain. At the same time, wallets and 24/7 trading are making it easier for people to enter the market without thinking too much about the technology behind it. Jake Kennis, Senior Research Analyst at Nansen, is watching these shifts through the data. Kennis spoke with Coin Edition about where Smart Money is moving, how Asian users are adopting crypto, and why the line between traditional finance and onchain markets may soon become much harder to see.

1. Nansen spends a lot of time tracking where the money is actually moving onchain. When you look at Asia right now, what are you seeing that tells you the region’s crypto market is changing? 

Capital is rotating back into liquid majors and real projects rather than broad risk-on froth. Smart money balances have jumped sharply, and Solana-native names like PUMP are absorbing real capital, and activity continues to be spread across many assets: RWA perps on Hyperliquid, prediction markets for sports or politics, Robinhood-chain tokens showing up in our top-mover lists, and social and trading apps becoming real onboarding venues. Trading onchain is becoming asset-agnostic; anyone can trade a memecoin, a stock perp, or a commodity from the same venue, 24/7. Layer on the recent positive developments like ETF inflows, an improving regulatory backdrop, and early signs of new retail entering over the last few months, and you have a strong confluence for crypto markets into year-end, whereby new users and money are touching all parts of the onchain economy. 

2. “Smart Money” has become a popular term in crypto, but what does the data really tell us? Are there particular types of investors or onchain behaviors in Asia that you think people should be paying more attention to? 

We define Smart Money as a labeled group of traders with a highly proven PnL history. Each Smart Money label comes with its own set of strategies, and the data shows it’s most useful as an early-positioning and confirmation signal. Because there are so many strategies onchain, Smart Money on Solana looks very different from, say, Hyperliquid perp traders, given the nature of the assets being traded and the types of traders in each. What we’ve noticed is that perps, specifically on Hyperliquid, have really dominated markets, especially in sideways or downward conditions where Smart Money can make money regardless of direction and expand their asset selection to RWAs like stocks and commodities, which trade 24/7 and can be traded on venues such as Nansen. The trend of everything moving onchain is quite clear here: an increasing share of Smart Money’s volume and PnL is concentrated in RWAs via Hyperliquid versus the crypto majors, a trend that continues to accelerate as the available assets continue to expand. And on this latest leg upward, onchain is heating up, especially across Solana, Base, and Robinhood Chain, based on the increase in Smart Money activity across them and the early signs of retail trading coming back. 

3. Institutional interest in crypto seems to be growing, but it’s not happening evenly across every market. From the data you’re seeing, where in Asia are you seeing the strongest signs of institutional adoption, and what’s driving it? 

Beyond ETFs and stablecoins, the more structural shift is that traditional finance is starting to adopt onchain rails themselves. Tokenized treasuries and RWAs are growing fast because institutions want yield-bearing assets that settle 24/7, and you’re seeing major venues move in the same direction, whether that’s Robinhood tokenizing equities, prediction markets going mainstream, or exchanges extending toward round-the-clock trading like Hyperliquid. The common thread is that markets are converging on crypto’s market structure: always-on, globally accessible, transparent by default. Put it together: ETFs brought institutional capital, stablecoins brought real-world usage, and RWAs and tokenized venues are now bringing the assets themselves onchain. That transparency is exactly where Nansen sits, as more of the world’s assets and flows move onchain, they become legible, and Nansen gives you the most powerful onchain analytics and trading to access all of it. 

4. We’re also seeing more real-world use cases around stablecoins and onchain payments. Are Asian users starting to use crypto differently from investors in other regions, and what does that tell you about where adoption is heading? 

Yes, usage is clearly bifurcating by market, but it is increasingly converging in that stablecoins continue to power more and more use cases: onchain yield, trading, dollar savings, remittances, and payments, often as a hedge against local currency weakness. The use cases are broad and appeal to institutions and individuals alike, because stablecoins are simply a major improvement on how money works today. We are seeing strong confirmation of this from the builders: payment companies like Stripe and Visa are doubling down on stablecoin initiatives, Stripe is building Tempo as a dedicated payments chain, and new primitives like x402 are enabling machine-native payments where AI agents can pay for services directly onchain. That last piece is the most forward-looking signal, because stablecoins are becoming not just better rails for human payments but the default money layer for the emerging agent economy. Put together, that tells us global adoption is heading toward stablecoins as invisible financial infrastructure that people and agents use without ever thinking of it as crypto. 

5. Wallets are becoming much more than places to store tokens; they’re increasingly becoming the front door to trading, payments, DeFi, and other onchain activity. What does wallet behavior tell you about where the next wave of crypto users is coming from? 

Wallet behavior shows the onboarding funnel has fundamentally changed. New wallets, meaning retail, are increasingly touching stablecoins, payments, and memecoins directly through an app experience first, rather than having to download a wallet, figure out how to fund it, and learn what a DEX is. Smart wallets, account abstraction, and embedded wallets inside fintech and social apps are pulling in users who don’t think of themselves as “crypto users” at all, but simply as traders who want access to 24/7 markets. The next wave, in other words, arrives through the continuation of all assets moving onchain paired with better UX, like Nansen’s agentic trading, giving users access to all of these assets plus the tooling to make more winners onchain. 

6. You’ll be joining us at CoinFest Asia in Bali, where builders, investors, and industry leaders will be looking closely at what comes next for Web3 in the region. If you had to pick one trend from the data that could really shape Asia’s crypto market over the next couple of years, what would it be? 

The single biggest trend in our data is the tokenization of everything converging with agentic activity. Assets, payments, and increasingly AI agents all transact onchain, 24/7. Stablecoin settlement volumes and tokenized asset growth are compounding regardless of price cycles, which suggests the market’s center of gravity is shifting from speculation to key trading infrastructure and use cases. If that continues, the distinction between “crypto markets” and “markets” starts to disappear, and everything trading onchain means everything becomes analyzable onchain, which is exactly the world Nansen is built for, with our agentic trading empowering the best possible trading UX.