Review of the 10 Most Milestone Events in the Crypto Ecosystem in 2025

#Review #CryptoEcosystem #SuperEx

December is the final month of 2025, and it’s time for a full review series. We started with the review of global crypto regulatory progress across major countries and regions in 2025, and this series will continue to include (but is not limited to): a stablecoin market review, a Memecoin market review, a review of crypto attack incidents, a SuperEx platform review, and more.

Today is the third installment of the series. The theme is “Review of the 10 Most Milestone Events in the Crypto Ecosystem in 2025.” The rankings are not in any particular order. Instead, the sorting is based on a timeline as the anchor point.

The Opening of 2025: The Most Crypto-Friendly President Returns to the White House

In early 2025, Trump took the oath of office in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., becoming the 47th President of the United States. Originally, this would have been a very ordinary event, but due to Trump’s special identity as a “crypto practitioner,” this inauguration felt particularly “grand” in its impact on the crypto world.

During the 2024 U.S. election, Trump’s influence helped make the crypto ecosystem one of the core battlefields of the presidential race for the first time. And Trump’s return to office did not disappoint the crypto community. Just three days after taking office, he issued his first crypto-related executive order. The specific content centered on: protecting citizens’ right to use public blockchains and freedom of digital asset operations; promoting U.S. dollar stablecoins and prohibiting CBDCs; revoking previous orders; establishing a working group; building a regulatory framework; evaluating a national digital asset reserve, and other measures.

It can be said that the opening of most of the milestone events this year originated from this “crypto president” returning to power.

The United States Establishes the First National-Level Bitcoin Reserve

If Trump’s return is the “political starting point” of the 2025 crypto narrative, then the United States establishing a national-level Bitcoin reserve is one of the most symbolic and most disruptive events of the year.

In the first half of 2025, the U.S. Treasury Department and the White House jointly released an announcement confirming that, through lawful and compliant means, Bitcoin would be incorporated into the national strategic reserve asset system. This is not a traditional “foreign exchange reserve replacement,” but rather a national-level endorsement of a decentralized asset.

The significance of this step is far more than simply “the U.S. bought Bitcoin.”

First, it redefined Bitcoin’s asset characteristics. Before this, Bitcoin in official discourse hovered between “speculative asset,” “high-risk asset,” and “alternative asset.” The establishment of a national-level reserve is effectively a default acknowledgment that Bitcoin possesses:

Long-term value storage attributes
Potential as an inflation hedge and a hedge against sovereign currency risks
Financial safe-haven value during extreme geopolitical conflicts

Second, it directly triggered a chain reaction in global sovereign competition. The Middle East, Latin America, and some emerging market countries began publicly discussing “whether Bitcoin reserves should be allocated.” For the first time, Bitcoin jumped from “market consensus” to a “tool of inter-state strategic game.”

From a historical perspective, this is the first time since Bitcoin’s birth that it truly stepped into the outer edge of national credit systems.

Trump Imposes “Sky-High Tariffs”

In 2025, Trump restarted and escalated his signature trade protection policies, imposing high tariffs on certain countries and key industrial supply chains. This move triggered enormous controversy in traditional financial markets, but in the crypto market it produced a chain effect that has been underestimated.

The essence of high tariffs is rising global trade costs, restricted capital flows, and intensified friction within the U.S. dollar system. And that is precisely the kind of soil where crypto assets are best at surviving.

Tariff policies intensified:

Uncertainty in cross-border settlement
Corporate dependence risks on the dollar clearing system
Emerging market demand for “de-dollarization tools”

In this context, the usage frequency of stablecoins, Bitcoin, and on-chain settlement tools rose noticeably. Especially in regions directly affected by trade frictions, crypto payments were no longer merely “efficiency tools,” but gradually evolved into real-world choices for bypassing institutional frictions.

It can be said that Trump’s “sky-high tariffs” unintentionally provided a macro-level boost to the crypto ecosystem.

Hong Kong Passes the “Stablecoin Bill”

If the U.S. actions were more about “strategy and competition,” then Hong Kong’s performance in 2025 was the clearest institutional path and the most demonstrative example.

The passage of the “Stablecoin Bill” means Hong Kong became one of the first financial centers in the world to establish a complete legal framework for stablecoin issuance, custody, auditing, and operations.

This bill released three key signals:

Stablecoins are no longer gray-area financial tools, but financial infrastructure that can be regulated and made compliant
Fiat-backed stablecoins will become an important supplement to future payment and settlement systems
Asia is proactively competing for stablecoin discourse power

This also directly fueled the concentrated outbreak of stablecoin public chains, payment protocols, and RWA narratives in 2025. Hong Kong is not merely “allowing” stablecoins — it is clearly welcoming stablecoin innovation, which has had profound impacts on global project location decisions, compliance pathways, and capital deployment.

Strategy Sparks the DAT Craze

In 2025, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) was no longer merely “the publicly listed company holding the most crypto,” but unexpectedly ignited a brand-new narrative track — DAT (Digital Asset Treasury).

As Strategy continued to expand its Bitcoin exposure through debt, preferred shares, and structured financing tools, the market systematically began to ask a question for the first time: can a company treat “holding crypto assets” itself as a core strategy?

The emergence of the DAT model led to:

A change in corporate valuation logic
A restructuring of traditional financial metrics
The rise of the narrative that “a company ≈ a leveraged Bitcoin instrument”

This craze also came with huge controversy: high volatility, financing dependence, regulatory risks… But undeniably, Strategy made the market realize that crypto assets have begun to influence how publicly listed companies design their capital structures.

Circle Goes Public, and Crypto IPOs Become a New Trend

In 2025, Circle successfully went public and was viewed as an important marker of the crypto industry entering a mature capital stage. Unlike mining companies or exchanges, Circle represents:

A stablecoin issuer
A financial infrastructure provider
A highly compliant crypto enterprise

Its IPO means traditional capital markets began to accept the form of “crypto-native companies,” rather than treating them only as cyclical speculative targets. After that, multiple crypto companies launched IPO plans, and the crypto industry formally entered a stage of: “not only surviving, but also stepping into mainstream capital markets.”

“Crypto Week” in the United States: Three Major Bills Pass the Vote

In 2025, the U.S. Congress unusually established a “Crypto Week” to集中审议 a series of crypto-related bills. Among them, three core bills passed: the GENIUS Act, the CLARITY Act, and the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, covering:

Market structure
Stablecoin regulation
Digital asset custody and compliance

This does not mean regulation has become “looser.” It means — rules are finally starting to become clear. For the market, uncertainty is often more fatal than regulation itself. These three bills mark the beginning of the U.S. building a predictable, long-term framework for the crypto industry.

The 10/11 Crypto Market Flash Crash

Between 04:50 and 05:20 on October 11, BTC saw a maximum decline of 12.7% within 30 minutes, briefly falling to a low of 102,000.00 USD. ETH saw a maximum decline of 14.3% within 30 minutes, briefly falling to a low of 3,435.00 USD. Altcoins also experienced varying degrees of sharp drops. In the past 24 hours, total liquidations across the entire network approached 20 billion USD, with over 1.65 million people liquidated. This crash not only shook the crypto market, but also affected global traditional financial markets: the three major U.S. stock indices all hit one-month lows, crude oil hit a five-month low, while gold rose against the trend and became a safe-haven harbor.

This flash crash was the result of multiple factors stacking together — macroeconomic influences, internal market leverage, stablecoin de-pegging, and whale account operations, among others.

The 10/11 flash crash once again reminded investors that the crypto market is highly leveraged and structurally fragile. Exchange systems, whale operations, stablecoin de-pegging, and macroeconomic factors can all trigger extreme market moves.

Polymarket Returns, and Prediction Markets Heat Up Again

In 2025, prediction markets regained attention, but they were no longer simply viewed as “gambling.” They began to be seen as:

Emotion aggregation tools
Risk pricing mechanisms
Decentralized information discovery systems

In elections, policy, and macroeconomic fields, prediction markets demonstrated greater forward-looking power than traditional polling. Polymarket and Trump’s media company became the focal points, signaling the return and expansion of prediction markets.

The Ethereum Fusaka Upgrade: A Brand-New Stage

Fusaka is not an ordinary upgrade. It is completely different from past upgrades that patched vulnerabilities, optimized costs, or slightly adjusted user experience. This is a true network-structure upgrade. It rewrote Ethereum’s “data availability logic,” bringing the entire ecosystem closer than ever to a so-called “infinitely scalable L2 world.”

If Dencun was “making data cheaper,” and Pectra was “making L1 stable,” then Fusaka is telling the market: we don’t just want to scale — we want to push scaling capability to a theoretical extreme without sacrificing security.

Fusaka opened up an Ethereum era of:

Ultra-large-scale scalability
Decentralized data availability
The dominant position of modular architecture
Near-zero fees on L2 for users
Global financial-grade settlement capability

Summary

The crypto ecosystem in 2025 is no longer a year driven by a single narrative in a bull or bear market, but a year where institutions, capital, technology, and macro politics were intertwined on multiple fronts.

From national-level Bitcoin reserves to stablecoin legislation; from the DAT craze to the revival of prediction markets; 2025 truly accomplished one thing: pushing crypto from “marginal innovation” into “a part of the real-world system.”