The year 2025 is a milestone year for the cryptocurrency industry, but it is also a year of significant market differentiation.

On one hand, the total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency market has surpassed $4 trillion for the first time, Bitcoin has reached a new historical high, institutional participation has deepened, and the regulatory environment—especially regarding stablecoin policies—has made substantial progress. The continuous enrichment of compliant investment tools marks a deeper integration of crypto assets into the mainstream financial system.

On the other hand, repeated monetary policy changes, escalating trade frictions, and geopolitical risks have increased macroeconomic uncertainty, leading the market to frequently enter a "risk-off mode," significantly amplifying price volatility. This has caused the total market capitalization of crypto assets to fluctuate violently between $2.4 trillion and $4.2 trillion, with an amplitude close to 76%. Despite ongoing improvements in industry infrastructure and regulatory environments, the crypto market still recorded an approximate 7.9% decline over the year.

The core signal released behind this is: In 2025, the price formation logic of crypto assets is increasingly dominated by macroeconomic and traditional financial cycles, rather than solely determined by the adoption pace of the crypto industry itself.

Macroeconomic Environment: A Year of Volatility in Data Fog

From a macro perspective, 2025 can be defined as a year of "data fog" and high volatility. The market has experienced events such as the inauguration of a new U.S. government, the tariff shock of "Liberation Day," and periodic government shutdowns, leading to a significant decline in the readability of macro data. Although in early the second half of the year, artificial intelligence related speculative sentiment and the OBBBA Fiscal Act (a large-scale comprehensive fiscal act passed by the U.S. Congress in 2025) pushed Bitcoin to a new high, the pace of regulatory advancement fell short of expectations, resulting in a clear decoupling of crypto assets from the recovery trend of traditional risk assets by the end of the year.

However, the outlook for 2026 points to a clear "risk restart," driven by a "policy trio": synchronized global monetary easing, large-scale fiscal stimulus through cash rebates and tax cuts, and a wave of regulatory relaxation. This combination is expected to replace retail-driven speculative behavior with institutional capital inflows and, supported by a potential U.S. Bitcoin strategic reserve, open a liquidity-driven expansion cycle for the crypto market.

Bitcoin: Further Strengthening of the Macro Asset Trend

In 2025, Bitcoin exhibited a clear divergence between structural market strength and underlying economic activity. Although BTC reached new historical highs multiple times throughout the year, its closing price slightly retreated, underperforming gold and most major stock indices; however, its market capitalization remained stable at around $1.8 trillion, with a market share maintained in the range of 58%–60%.

Despite weak price performance, the trend of capital concentration towards BTC has further strengthened. The cumulative net inflow into U.S. spot ETFs exceeded $21 billion, and enterprise-level holdings surpassed 1.1 million BTC, accounting for approximately 5.5% of the total supply. Network security continued to improve: the total network hash rate exceeded 1 ZH/s, and mining difficulty increased by approximately 36% year-on-year, indicating that miners' investment willingness remains strong.

In contrast, Bitcoin's underlying on-chain activity has slowed: the number of active addresses decreased by approximately 16% year-on-year, and the number of transactions fell below previous cycle peaks, with speculative token activity appearing only in brief, unsustainable forms. Overall, Bitcoin's liquidity, price formation, and demand are increasingly realized through off-chain financial channels and long-term holding behaviors, while the foundational layer plays a more auxiliary role, further solidifying Bitcoin's positioning as a macro financial asset rather than a transactional network.

Layer 1: The Ability to Monetize Determines Long-Term Value

At the L1 level, 2025 clearly indicates that "activity" itself does not equate to economic relevance. Many networks have failed to convert user activity into fees, value capture, or sustained token performance. Meanwhile, the L1 landscape continues to concentrate around a few leading public chains.

• Ethereum maintains its dominance in developer activity, DeFi liquidity, and overall value, but the migration of the execution layer and the fee compression brought by Rollups have caused ETH to consistently lag behind BTC in relative performance. In contrast,
• Solana has significantly expanded its stablecoin supply while maintaining high transaction volumes and daily active users, generating considerable protocol revenue even after speculative enthusiasm waned, and successfully obtaining approval for a U.S. spot ETF, significantly enhancing institutional accessibility.
• BNB Chain, leveraging a strong retail trading base and market narrative, has driven on-chain spot, derivatives trading, and stablecoin settlement flows while actively laying out RWA, making BNB the best-performing mainstream asset in 2025.

The key signal of 2025 is: The differentiation of L1 increasingly depends on its ability to monetize recurring cash flows (transactions, payments, or institutional settlements), rather than merely pursuing maximum transaction volume.

Ethereum L2: Scale Achieved, Differentiation Accelerating

In 2025, Ethereum Layer 2 networks handled over 90% of Ethereum-related transaction execution volume, primarily due to protocol upgrades that expanded blob capacity and reduced data availability (DA) costs. However, as execution migrates off-chain, the core question remains: Can this scale be converted into sustained usage, fee income, and alignment with underlying economic incentives?

From this perspective, the results show a clear differentiation: activity, liquidity, and fees are primarily concentrated in a few optimistic Rollups (such as Base and Arbitrum) and some application chains with clear use cases and excellent user experiences; meanwhile, many projects have seen a sharp decline in usage after the incentive tide receded.

ZK Rollups have made continuous progress in proof efficiency and decentralization, but in terms of TVL and fee scale, they still lag behind optimistic Rollups by an order of magnitude. The fragmentation brought by over a hundred Rollups, diminishing marginal effects of incentives, and uneven progress in the decentralization of sequencers remain limiting factors.

DeFi: Moving Towards "Structural Institutionalization"

In 2025, DeFi made further strides towards "structural institutionalization," with a core focus on capital efficiency and compliance. TVL stabilized at $124.4 billion, with the capital structure clearly leaning towards stablecoins and interest-bearing assets, rather than inflationary tokens.

A historic moment occurred: RWA TVL ($17 billion) surpassed DEX for the first time, primarily driven by tokenized government bonds and stocks. Meanwhile, the U.S. GENIUS Act provided clear regulatory guidance for stablecoins, pushing their market capitalization beyond $307 billion and establishing them as an important global settlement infrastructure.

From a business model perspective, DeFi has become a mature cash flow system: protocol revenue reached $16.2 billion, comparable to large traditional financial institutions, and governance tokens are gradually evolving into "crypto blue chips" supported by real earnings. The proportion of on-chain transactions continues to rise, with the spot trading ratio between DEX and CEX approaching 20% at one point.

Stablecoins: The Year of True Mainstreaming

2025 is a breakthrough year for stablecoins to fully enter the mainstream. Thanks to the regulatory certainty brought by the GENIUS Act and institutional participation, the total market capitalization of stablecoins grew by nearly 50% year-on-year, surpassing $305 billion. Daily trading volume increased by 26% to $35.4 trillion, far exceeding Visa's $13.4 trillion, fully validating the advantages of stablecoins in fast, borderless payments.

New heavyweight participants continue to emerge: Six new stablecoins, including BUIDL, PYUSD, RLUSD, USD1, USDf, and USDtB, have all surpassed a market capitalization of $1 billion, bringing new competition and real-world application scenarios to the market. These changes collectively lay the foundation for the continued expansion of stablecoins in payments, savings, and fintech.

Consumer Crypto: From Infrastructure to Application

Consumer crypto is entering a critical phase: blockchain infrastructure is maturing, and the industry's focus is clearly shifting towards real-world applications and seamless experiences. Leading this transformation are new banking and fintech platforms—whether Web2 giants or Web3 native projects—that are rapidly evolving into "bank-like services" built on blockchain rails.

Although the enthusiasm for crypto games and social applications has cooled in 2025, the deep integration of blockchain in global payments and fintech has laid the groundwork for the next wave of truly native application networks. At this stage, the industry's mission is also evolving: no longer merely pursuing decentralization itself, but consciously building trustworthy, verifiable systems to win the trust of both consumers and institutions.

Cutting-Edge Technology: The Intersection of AI Agents and On-Chain Payments

In 2025, cutting-edge technology focuses on AI Agents, on-chain payments, and decentralized coordination of real-world infrastructure. The most substantial progress comes from Agent payments: through the HTTP native settlement standard (re-enabling the 402 "Payment Required" path), achieving pay-per-call for APIs, data, and automated processes.

By the end of the year, this payment system had processed over 100 million transactions, with a cumulative transaction volume exceeding $30 million and daily transaction volume surpassing 1 million, of which over 90% was driven by Agents.

Meanwhile, decentralized physical AI (DePAI), as an extension of DePIN, is gradually heating up, but its development bottlenecks stem more from data quality, the gap between simulation and reality, capital intensity, and security and regulatory requirements, rather than the token design itself. In contrast, DeFAI and DeSci are still in the exploratory stage and have yet to demonstrate sustainable economic output.

Institutional Adoption: Embedded, Not Just Exposure

The core feature of institutional adoption is: crypto is embedded into core financial processes, rather than merely serving as a price exposure tool. Banks are gradually approaching the mainstreaming of crypto-backed loans, with increased acceptance of BTC (and some ETH) as financial-grade collateral; compliant crypto ETFs are continuously expanding in breadth and structure, further solidifying ETFs as the preferred entry point for institutions.

Tokenized money market funds have become credible RWA use cases, viewed as on-chain "cash equivalents" due to their faster settlement, collateral flexibility, and auditability. Meanwhile, the scale of crypto asset treasury (DAT) is rapidly expanding, but data from 2025 also shows that as high-leverage treasury tools underperform compared to simple, yield-generating ETFs, the sustainability pressure on this model is increasing. This reflects a trend in cryptocurrency development shifting from pure asset accumulation to an infrastructure and yield-oriented model.

Global Regulation: Differentiated but Converging

Global crypto regulation matured in 2025, but the paths varied and complemented each other: the U.S. established the first federal-level stablecoin framework through the GENIUS Act (in July); Europe officially implemented MiCA and strengthened its licensing system; Hong Kong consolidated its crypto hub status through the Stablecoin Ordinance and tax incentives; Singapore further raised compliance and licensing thresholds in June.

At the international level, countries are accelerating their commitments to the OECD's Crypto Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), laying the groundwork for tax transparency and cross-border information exchange.

Looking Ahead to 2026

As we enter 2026, we are particularly looking forward to several key themes and expect significant progress in these areas throughout the year. These themes span multiple narratives and tracks, including the macro environment, Bitcoin, institutional adoption, policy and regulation, stablecoins, tokenization, decentralized trading, and prediction markets.

Click here to download the full report

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。