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Figure Heloc Kaito and Avantis Are Ripping Into Year-End So Which One Has the Cleaner Runway for 2026?
Timothy Young 
Kaito has been having one of those “wait… this thing is alive?” weeks. After spending most of the year getting dragged by its own community for messy staking, painful drawdowns, and a few promises that didn’t land the way holders hoped, the token suddenly snapped back with a sharp move. Reports pegged the jump at roughly 26% on the day, the kind of candle that instantly turns yesterday’s “dead project” into today’s group chat topic.
Avantis, meanwhile, isn’t exactly sneaking around either. The Base-native perps DEX has been on a steady tear, up around 25% over the same stretch, helped by a noticeable pickup in activity and attention on Base trading venues.
The funny part is that neither move is happening in a perfect market. Liquidity is still picky, narratives rotate faster than most people can rebalance, and the “Santa rally” vibe has felt… selective. Yet both tokens are printing green anyway, which is exactly why traders are now asking the bigger question: is this just a year-end pop, or the start of something that actually carries into 2026?
Two rallies, two different engines
Kaito’s move feels like sentiment whiplash. When a token gets written off for months, you don’t need a miracle to spark a rebound — you just need the selling to exhaust itself and a reason for buyers to show up at the same time. That “reason” can be anything in crypto: a product update, a fresh integration rumor, a sudden volume spike that pulls in momentum traders, or simply the market realizing the downside got crowded. The key detail is that Kaito’s rally looks like a classic relief move: fast, emotional, and powerful, but also the type that can retrace if there isn’t follow-through.
Avantis is running on a cleaner narrative: perps and leveraged trading, but on-chain. Perp DEX trading has become one of the stickier behaviors in crypto because it gives traders the tools they already love, just without relying on centralized exchanges. And Base has been one of the more active L2 arenas for that conversation lately, which is a big reason Avantis keeps showing up on radars.
One Base trader put it to me like this: “Kaito feels like a comeback trade. Avantis feels like a flow trade. One is about the market changing its mind. The other is about users actually showing up.” That’s not a guarantee either way, but it’s a useful mental model.
Where things get interesting is what each token needs next. Kaito needs continuity — more proof that the project can rebuild trust, ship consistently, and keep volume from evaporating once the initial excitement fades. Avantis needs the perps trend to keep expanding on Base and to keep converting that attention into durable usage, not just speculative churn.
There’s also a bigger backdrop here: traders are increasingly hunting for “infrastructure-adjacent” plays heading into 2026, especially anything tied to scaling and faster execution. That’s part of why Bitcoin L2 chatter keeps popping up, including presale projects like Bitcoin Hyper, which has been marketed as a Bitcoin Layer-2 with staking yields advertised around 39% and a raise approaching the $30 million mark.
So if you’re trying to “pick the next runner,” the most honest answer is this: Kaito is the higher-emotion rebound story, and Avantis is the more straightforward “usage plus narrative” bet. The market will probably reward whichever one keeps its engine running after the holiday glow fades.
About the Author
Ryan Moore 
David Rich 
John Wood 