Web3 research firm Tiger Research said on Wednesday it published a report titled "Is it a crypto winter now in 2026? Changes in the market after regulation." With the market continuing to fall and concerns rising about a return to a crypto winter, the report said the current situation differs from past winters in both causes and market structure.

Tiger Research said past crypto winters unfolded in the order of a major incident, a collapse in trust and a talent exodus. It said the three winters in 2014, 2018 and 2022 all began with internal industry problems, including the 2014 Mt. Gox hack, the 2018 ICO bubble and the 2022 Terra-Luna and FTX bankruptcy. It said the difference now is that external factors such as ETF approvals and tariff policy are driving market swings.

The report said major events occurred, including a 90 percent plunge in the Trump memecoin in a single day and Binance's largest-ever liquidation of $19 billion following a U.S. announcement of a 100 percent tariff on China. It assessed that there was no builder exodus. It said the continued emergence of new narratives such as RWA, PerpDEX, prediction markets, infi-fi, and privacy shows a different pattern from past winters.

It also projected that future patterns will differ from the past as market structure is reorganised after the introduction of regulation. It said the market has split into three layers: within the regulatory perimeter, outside it, and shared infrastructure. It said the spillover effect in which money flowed into altcoins when bitcoin rose has disappeared. The report added that institutional funds flowing in through ETFs stayed only in bitcoin and did not flow outside the regulatory perimeter.

As conditions for the next rally, it cited the emergence of new killer use cases outside the regulatory perimeter and the creation of a favourable macroeconomic environment. It said AI agents, infi-fi and on-chain social are candidates, but are not yet on a scale to move the overall market.

Yoon Seung-sik (윤승식), head of Tiger Research's research centre and the author of the report, said, "The industry has not collapsed. The external environment has changed and the market structure has been reorganised due to regulation." He added, "As in the past, it will be difficult for a crypto season in which everything rises together to come again, and a structure in which the regulated segment grows stably while the unregulated segment shows high volatility will become entrenched."