Crypto Review 2025: Eight On-Chain Winners

#Review #2025

The overall performance of the cryptocurrency market in 2025 was far from impressive. Global crypto market capitalization fell by roughly 15% compared to the beginning of the year. Major assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum experienced intense price volatility, while market confidence was suppressed by a combination of macroeconomic pressure and regulatory uncertainty.

However, despite weak price performance, the industry made critical progress in regulatory recognition and in its transition toward becoming part of mainstream financial infrastructure.

These developments not only laid a solid foundation for the industry’s long-term health, but also revealed a clear evolutionary path for crypto assets — from “niche speculative instruments” to “mainstream financial tools.” Below are eight areas (or individuals) that achieved significant progress or delivered outstanding performance in 2025.

Donald Trump: A Public–Private Double Win

At the beginning of 2025, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., making him one of the most influential figures of the year.

In his role as president, Trump pushed the United States to accelerate its strategic deployment in the crypto sector, directly or indirectly driving several landmark developments: the establishment of the country’s first national Bitcoin reserve, and the passage of three core bills — the GENIUS Act, the CLARITY Act, and the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act.

These actions signal that the United States no longer views crypto merely as an “emerging asset,” but is instead systematically incorporating it into its national financial strategy:

Bitcoin becoming part of national reserves
The legal status of stablecoins being elevated
Clearer regulatory boundaries
Greater room for private-sector participation

This marks a milestone moment in crypto history.

Beyond his presidential role, Trump also completed a “second crossover” through his personal brand.

As a public figure, he leveraged his influence to become the first U.S. president to openly issue tokens and deeply integrate with the Web3 community. Companies under his name expanded into NFTs, tokens, and media platforms, forming a crypto business ecosystem with strong political and traffic-driven attributes. Regardless of external opinion, this has become one of the most controversial and high-profile “personal IP narratives” in the crypto industry in 2025.

By advancing simultaneously on both public and private fronts, Trump also indirectly helped crypto break further into the mainstream.

Spot ETFs: Explosive Growth in Scale

IBIT entered the Top 10 U.S. ETFs by inflows, surpassing traditional giants. Meanwhile, the SEC approved standardized listing frameworks that simplified approvals, catalyzing ETFs tied to Ethereum, Solana, XRP, and other assets.

The true significance of ETFs lies in their ability to:

Allow traditional capital to access crypto assets in a compliant manner
Lower institutional entry barriers
Improve market liquidity and transparency

As more assets are incorporated into ETF structures, the crypto market has officially entered the era of multi-asset ETFs.

This represents the most direct convergence between crypto and Wall Street.

RWA: The Institutional Battleground

If Real World Assets (RWA) spent the past few years largely confined to whitepapers and conceptual discussions, then 2025 was the year they were truly “served at the table” by financial institutions.

The strongest signal came from the explosive adoption of BlackRock’s BUIDL fund.

This fund does not pursue speculation. Instead, it tokenizes the most traditional and conservative instruments — U.S. Treasuries and money market tools — and provides yield and redemption through on-chain representations. It sounds unremarkable, but it quietly accomplished something historic: for the first time, on-chain assets became legitimate off-chain collateral.

Institutions began managing, pledging, and lending BUIDL as a standard financial asset rather than a “crypto speculative derivative.” At the same time, the total scale of RWA surpassed USD 20 billion, signaling a transition from experimentation to standardized financial infrastructure.

In 2025, RWA adoption followed four clear paths:

Tokenized Treasuries as base-layer yield instruments: stable returns, low risk, and large-scale institutional capital entry
On-chain fund shares expanding investment boundaries: asset registration moving from paper or internal systems to blockchain ledgers, dramatically improving efficiency and transparency
Private equity mapping providing liquidity for non-standard assets: once-illiquid equity assets gaining secondary market potential
Early-stage cross-border settlement tools: blockchain increasingly viewed as a global ledger rather than an internal niche toy

This time, institutions did not stand outside observing — they walked directly onto center stage.

Hong Kong: A Pioneer in Crypto Regulation

If the United States focused more on strategy and geopolitical positioning, Hong Kong’s 2025 performance stood out for its institutional clarity and demonstrative impact.

The passage of the Stablecoin Ordinance marked Hong Kong as one of the first global financial centers to establish a comprehensive legal framework covering stablecoin issuance, custody, auditing, and operations.

The ordinance sent three key signals:

Stablecoins are no longer gray-area instruments, but regulated and compliant financial infrastructure
Fiat-backed stablecoins will become a critical supplement to future payment and settlement systems
Asia is actively competing for stablecoin leadership

This directly fueled the concentrated growth of stablecoin public chains, payment protocols, and RWA narratives in 2025. Hong Kong did not merely “allow” innovation — it explicitly welcomed it, significantly influencing global project location choices, compliance strategies, and capital allocation.

Strategy: The Driver of the DAT Wave

In 2025, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) was no longer just “the publicly listed company with the most Bitcoin.” It unexpectedly ignited an entirely new narrative: DAT (Digital Asset Treasury).

As Strategy continued expanding its Bitcoin exposure through debt, preferred shares, and structured financing instruments, the market began systematically reconsidering a fundamental question: can holding crypto assets themselves become a core corporate strategy?

The emergence of the DAT model led to:

Changes in corporate valuation logic
Reconstruction of traditional financial metrics
The rise of the narrative that “companies are leveraged Bitcoin instruments”

This wave came with significant controversy — high volatility, financing dependency, regulatory risk — but it undeniably forced the market to recognize that crypto assets are now influencing corporate capital structure design.

Stablecoins: One of the Biggest Winners of the Year

With total market capitalization surpassing USD 300 billion and holders reaching a record 200 million, stablecoins have become a core settlement layer of global fintech. The GENIUS Act also provided legal clarity for banks to enter the space.

In 2025, the role of stablecoins upgraded from “trading medium” to:

Cross-border settlement tools
Liquidity bridges for financial markets
Emerging payment infrastructure

More enterprises, financial institutions, and fintech companies integrated stablecoins into their treasury and cash management systems, driven by real-world pressures:

High inflation
High interest rates
Rising global FX costs

Through low cost, high efficiency, and openness, stablecoins reshaped part of the financial infrastructure. In this sense, they became one of the crypto industry’s true cash cows and key traffic gateways in 2025.

Prediction Markets: One of the Year’s Dark Horses

In 2025, prediction markets regained attention, no longer viewed merely as “gambling,” but as:

Sentiment aggregation tools
Risk pricing mechanisms
Decentralized information discovery systems

In elections, policy, and macroeconomic forecasting, prediction markets demonstrated stronger foresight than traditional polling. Polymarket and Trump Media Company became focal points, signaling the sector’s resurgence and expansion.

Other platforms also posted strong results. Kalshi and Polymarket set records, while traditional institutions and crypto-native firms such as Gemini and Coinbase entered the space, bridging the gap between speculation and finance.

As U.S. regulatory attitudes shifted from resistance to cautious tolerance and framework-based oversight, prediction markets began taking on more substantial roles:

Political expectation barometers
Investor sentiment indicators
Event-driven trading platforms

Especially under U.S. political catalysts, trading volumes repeatedly hit new highs. The maturation of this sector marks the migration of information pricing power from Wall Street onto the blockchain.

Circle’s IPO: Crypto Listings Become a New Trend

In 2025, Circle’s successful IPO was widely seen as a milestone signaling crypto’s entry into a mature capital phase. Unlike miners or exchanges, Circle represents:

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

Its listing indicates that traditional capital markets are beginning to accept “crypto-native companies” as a legitimate category, rather than viewing them solely as cyclical speculative vehicles. Following Circle, multiple crypto firms launched IPO plans, marking the industry’s transition into a phase where it seeks not just survival, but full integration into mainstream capital markets.

Summary

In 2025, price performance was uninspiring, but the industry’s structure quietly upgraded:

Regulations became progressively clearer
Traditional capital entered deeply
Financial infrastructure attributes strengthened
Crypto narratives continued to break into the mainstream

If the past decade was the “technical experimentation phase,” then 2025 was the pivotal year of transition — from a Wild West to a quasi-financial system. Prices are surface-level signals; structure defines the future.

Looking back from today, the real winners were never the trend chasers, but those positioned at the inflection points of institutions, compliance, infrastructure, and asset pricing systems.

This may be the most genuine wealth lesson the crypto industry learned from 2025.