This article is jointly released by K1 Research & Klein Labs

2025 Monthly Event Review Calendar source:Klein Labs

Looking back at 2025, this year was not simply a bull or bear market, but a repositioning of the crypto industry within the multiple coordinates of politics, finance, and technology—laying the foundation for a more mature and institutionalized cycle in 2026.

At the beginning of the year, Trump's inauguration and the executive order on digital asset strategy significantly changed regulatory expectations. At the same time, the issuance of the $TRUMP token brought cryptocurrencies into the mainstream, rapidly increasing market risk appetite. Bitcoin historically broke through $100,000, completing its first transition from a "speculative asset" to a "political and macro asset".

Subsequently, the market quickly faced a reality check. The decline of celebrity coins, the Ethereum flash crash event, and the epic hack on Bybit collectively exposed issues of high leverage, weak risk control, and narrative overextension. The crypto market gradually cooled down from its frenzy between February and April. Macro tariff policies resonated with traditional risk assets, and investors began to re-evaluate the weighting of safety, liquidity, and fundamental value in asset pricing.

During this phase, Ethereum's performance was particularly representative: ETH was under pressure relative to Bitcoin, but this weakness did not stem from degradation in technology or infrastructure. On the contrary, in the first half of 2025, Ethereum continued to make progress on key roadmaps such as gas limit increases, Blob capacity, node stability, zkEVM, and PeerDAS, with infrastructure capabilities steadily improving. However, the market did not price in these long-term developments accordingly.

Entering the middle of the year, structural repair and institutionalization processes unfolded simultaneously. The Ethereum Pectra upgrade and the Bitcoin 2025 conference provided support for technology and narrative, while Circle's IPO marked the deep integration of stablecoins and compliant finance. The formal enactment of the GENIUS Act in July became the most symbolic turning point of the year—the crypto industry received clear, systematic legislative endorsement in the US for the first time. Against this backdrop, Bitcoin refreshed its annual high. Meanwhile, on-chain derivative platforms like Hyperliquid grew rapidly, and new forms such as stock tokenization and Equity Perps began to enter the market's view.

In the second half of the year, capital and narratives showed a clear divergence. ETF approvals accelerated, expectations for pension fund entry, and the start of the interest rate cut cycle collectively boosted the valuation of mainstream assets, while celebrity coins, memes, and high-leverage structures frequently experienced liquidations. The large-scale liquidation event in October was a concentrated manifestation of annual risk release; at the same time, the privacy sector saw阶段性 strength, and new narratives like AI payments and Perp DEX quietly took shape in局部 sectors.

At the end of the year, the market closed with a high-level阴跌 and low liquidity. Bitcoin fell below $90,000, while traditional safe-haven assets like gold and silver performed strongly, showing that the crypto market is deeply embedded in the global asset allocation system. At this juncture, mainstream crypto assets entered a阶段性 bottoming区间: whether the market will follow the traditional four-year cycle,反弹后开始进入 a bear market decline in 2026, or break the cycle律 and hit new highs driven by continued institutional capital inflows and improved regulatory frameworks, will become the core research proposition for the next phase of market trends.

Macro Environment and Policy: Structural Changes in 2025

1. Shift in Policy Direction: The Essential Difference of 2025 from Past Cycles

Reviewing past cycles of the crypto industry, policy and regulation have always been important exogenous variables affecting market expectations, but their mode of action underwent an essential change in 2025. Unlike the放任增长 of 2017, the宽松放任 of 2021, and the全面压制 of 2022–2024, what emerged in 2025 was an institutional shift from suppression to permission, from ambiguity to规范.

In past cycles, regulation介入 the market more negatively: either interrupting risk appetite at market highs through bans, investigations, or enforcement, or releasing集中 uncertainty in the form of accountability during bear markets. Under this model, policies often failed to effectively protect investors and could not provide long-term development expectations for the industry, instead exacerbating the violent fluctuations of the cycle. Entering 2025, this governance method began to undergo structural changes: executive orders先行, regulatory agency口径趋同, and legislative frameworks gradually advanced,逐步取代 the previous regulatory model dominated by case-by-case enforcement.

Crypto Regulation Development Chart source:Messari

In this process, the advancement of ETFs and stablecoin legislation played a key role in "anchoring expectations." The approval of spot ETFs provided Bitcoin and Ethereum等 crypto assets with compliant channels for long-term capital allocation through the traditional financial system for the first time; by the end of 2025, the scale of ETP/ETF products related to Bitcoin and Ethereum had reached the hundreds of billions of dollars, becoming the main载体 for institutionalized capital allocation of crypto assets. At the same time, stablecoin-related laws (such as the GENIUS Act) clearly delineated the stratification of crypto assets from an institutional perspective: which have "financial infrastructure attributes" and which are still high-risk speculative products. This division broke the笼统 pricing of "crypto as a whole" and pushed the market to begin valuing different assets and sectors differentially.

It is important to note that the policy environment in 2025 did not create a "policy红利式爆发" like in previous cycles. Instead, its greater significance lies in providing the market with a relatively clear lower bound: defining the boundaries of permissible behavior, distinguishing between assets with long-term viability and those destined to be marginalized. Under this framework, the role of policy shifted from "driving the market" to "constraining risk," from "creating volatility" to "stabilizing expectations." From this perspective, the policy shift in 2025 was not the direct engine of the bull market, but an institutional foundation.

2. Capital First: The "Low-Risk Channels" Built by Stablecoins, RWA, ETFs, and DAT

In the 2025 crypto market, a counterintuitive yet crucial phenomenon became clear: capital did not disappear, but prices did not respond. Stablecoin market capitalization and on-chain transfer volumes remained high, spot ETFs maintained net inflows during multiple time windows, and yet, with the exception of a few mainstream assets, the prices of most altcoins remained under long-term pressure. This divergence between capital activity and price performance constitutes the core entry point for understanding the market structure of 2025.

Stablecoins played a completely different role in this process than in previous cycles. In the past, stablecoins were seen more as "intermediary currencies" within exchanges or leverage fuel in bull markets, their growth often highly correlated with speculative activity. In 2025, stablecoins gradually evolved into instruments for capital parking and settlement. The total stablecoin market cap grew from about $200 billion at the beginning of the year to over $300 billion by year-end, with an annual increase of nearly $100 billion, but the overall market capitalization of alt assets did not expand simultaneously. Meanwhile, the annual on-chain settlement volume of stablecoins reached the trillions of dollars, even nominally exceeding the annual transaction volume of traditional card networks. This shows that the growth of stablecoins in 2025 came mainly from payment,清算, and capital management needs, not speculative leverage.

The development of RWA further reinforced this trend. The RWAs that were truly implemented in 2025 were mainly concentrated in low-risk assets such as government bonds, money market fund shares, and short-duration notes. Their core significance lies not in creating new price elasticity, but in verifying the feasibility of compliant assets existing on-chain. From on-chain data, the TVL of RWA-related protocols began to accelerate growth in 2024 and continued to rise in 2025—by October 2025, the TVL of RWA protocols had approached $18 billion, several times higher than at the beginning of 2024.

Although this volume is still insufficient at the macro capital level to directly drive crypto asset prices, its structural impact is clear: RWA provides on-chain capital with a parking option接近无风险收益, allowing some funds to "stay on-chain, but not participate in Crypto price volatility." In an environment where interest rates remain attractive and regulatory boundaries become clearer, this choice marginally weakens the traditional positive correlation between on-chain activity and token prices, further explaining the structural特征 of "capital growth but declining price elasticity" in 2025.

The impact of ETFs is more reflected in capital stratification rather than全面扩散. Spot ETFs provide a compliant, low-friction allocation channel for mainstream crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, but this capital entry path is highly selective. In terms of actual承接规模, by early 2026, top BTC/ETH spot ETFs were接近 holding over 6%/4% of the total circulating market cap of their respective coins, forming a clear承接 of institutional capital at the mainstream asset level. However, this increment did not spill over to broader asset tiers. During the ETF advancement, BTC Dominance (the proportion of Bitcoin's market cap to the total cryptocurrency market cap) did not experience the rapid decline常见 in historical bull markets, but instead remained in a high区间, reflecting that institutionalized capital did not diffuse into long-tail assets (typically指 tokens outside the top 100 by market cap). The result is that ETFs strengthened the capital absorption capacity of头部 assets, but objectively intensified the structural分化 within the market.

Equally noteworthy alongside ETFs is the rapidly emerging phenomenon of "coin-stock companies" DAT (Digital Asset Treasury Companies) in 2025: listed companies incorporate digital assets like BTC, ETH, and even SOL into their balance sheets, and use capital market tools such as secondary offerings, convertible bond issuances, buybacks, and staking收益 to shape their stocks into "leveragable crypto exposure载体 that can be financed." In terms of scale, nearly 200 companies have disclosed adopting类似 DAT strategies, collectively holding digital assets exceeding $130 billion. DAT has evolved from individual cases into a class of trackable capital market structure. The structural significance of DAT lies in: like ETFs, it reinforces the capital absorption of mainstream assets, but its transmission mechanism is more "equitized"—capital enters the stock valuation and financing cycle, rather than directly entering the secondary liquidity of long-tail tokens, thereby further exacerbating the capital stratification between mainstream and alt assets.

Overall, the incremental capital in 2025 was not absent, but systematically flowed towards "compliant, low-volatility, long-term parking" channels.

3. Market Outcome: Structural Stratification Between Mainstream Assets and the Altcoin Market

From the final price outcome, the 2025 crypto market presented a highly counterintuitive but logically consistent state: the market did not collapse, but the vast majority of projects were in持续下跌. According to Memento Research's statistics on 118 token launches in 2025, about 85% of tokens had secondary market prices lower than their TGE price, with a median FDV drawdown exceeding 70%, and this performance did not significantly improve during subsequent market recovery phases.

2025 Token Issuance Situation source:MEMENTO RESEARCH

This phenomenon was not limited to尾部 projects but covered most small and mid-cap assets, and even some projects with high valuations and high market attention at issuance significantly underperformed Bitcoin and Ethereum. It is worth noting that even when calculated on an FDV-weighted basis, the overall performance was still significantly negative, meaning that larger projects with higher issuance valuations反而 dragged down the market more. This result clearly indicates that the problem in 2025 was not "disappearing demand," but the directional migration of demand.

Against the backdrop of gradually clearer policies and regulatory environments, the capital structure of the crypto market is changing, but this change is not yet sufficient to completely replace the short-term dominance of narrative and sentiment on prices. Compared to past cycles, long-term capital and institutional funds began to enter assets and channels with compliant attributes and liquidity depth more selectively, such as mainstream coins, ETFs, stablecoins, and some low-risk RWAs. However, these funds acted more as "underlying承接者" rather than short-term price engines.

At the same time, the main trading behavior in the market was still driven by high-frequency capital and sentiment, and the token supply side continued to use the issuance logic of the old cycle,持续扩张 under the assumption of a "普涨型牛市." The result was that the systemic "altseason" the market expected never materialized. New narratives could still obtain short-term price feedback driven by sentiment, but they lacked the capital承接 capable of spanning volatile cycles. Price declines often occurred faster than narrative realization, resulting in an obvious阶段性 and structural mismatch between supply and demand.

It is under this dual structure that 2025 presented a new market state: at the large-cycle level, allocation logic began to concentrate on mainstream coins and assets with institutional承接 capabilities; at the short-cycle level, the crypto market remained a trading-oriented market driven by narrative and sentiment. Narratives did not fail, but their scope of effect was significantly compressed—they were more suitable for capturing sentiment fluctuations than for承载 long-term valuation.

Therefore, 2025 was not the end of narrative pricing, but the starting point where narratives began to be筛选 by capital structure: prices still react to sentiment and stories, but only those assets that can attract long-term capital to stay after volatility can complete true value沉淀. From this perspective, 2025 was more like a "transition period for pricing power" than an endgame.

Industry and Narratives: Key Directions Under Structural Stratification

1. Tokens with Real Yield: The First Sector to Adapt to Changes in Capital Structure

1.1 2025 Review: Yield-bearing Assets Become the Object of Capital承接

In a context where narratives still dominate short-term prices but long-term capital begins to set承接门槛, tokens with real yield were the first to complete their adaptation to changes in capital structure. The reason this sector showed relative resilience in 2025 was not because its narrative was more attractive, but because it provided capital with a participation path that did not rely on持续情绪上行—even if prices stagnated, holding itself had a clear return logic. This change was first evident in the market's acceptance of yield-bearing stablecoins. Represented by USDe, it gained rapid capital recognition not through complex narratives, but through a clear, explainable yield structure. In 2025, the market cap of USDe once突破 $10 billion, becoming the third largest stablecoin after USDT and USDC. Its growth speed and scale were significantly faster than most risk assets during the same period. This result indicates that some capital已经开始 view stablecoins as cash management tools rather than trading intermediaries. In an environment of high interest rates and gradually clearer regulatory boundaries, they began to stay on-chain long-term in the form of stablecoins. Its pricing logic也随之 shifted from "whether it has narrative elasticity" to "whether the yield is real and sustainable." This does not mean the crypto market has fully entered a cash flow pricing stage, but it clearly shows: when narrative space is compressed, capital will优先 choose asset forms that can stand without needing a story.

1.2 2026 Outlook: Capital Will Further Concentrate on Core Value Assets

When the market enters a rapid decline or liquidity contraction phase, the so-called "assets worth watching" are essentially not about what narrative they tell, but whether they possess two types of pressure resistance: first, whether the protocol layer can truly continue to generate fees/revenue in a low-risk preference environment; second, whether this revenue can form a "weak support" for the token through buybacks, burns, fee switches, staking yields, etc. Therefore, assets like BNB, SKY, HYPE, PUMP, ASTER, RAY, which have "more direct value capture mechanisms," are more likely to be prioritized as修复标的 by capital during panic periods;而 assets like ENA, PENDLE, ONDO, VIRTUAL, which have "clear functional positioning but greater differentiation in the intensity and stability of value capture," are more suitable for structural screening after a decline in sentiment: those who can convert functional usage into sustained revenue and verifiable token承接 are qualified to advance from "trading narratives" to "configurable标的".

DePIN is an extension of the real yield logic on a longer-term dimension. Unlike yield-bearing stablecoins and mature DeFi, the core of DePIN is not financial structure, but whether it can, through tokenized incentives, transform highly capital-intensive or inefficient infrastructure demands in the real world into sustainable distributed supply networks. The market completed preliminary screening in 2025: projects that could not prove they had cost advantages or relied heavily on subsidies to maintain operations quickly lost capital patience;而 DePIN projects that could对接 real demand (computing power, storage, communication, AI inference, etc.) began to be seen as potential "revenue-generating infrastructure." At the current stage, DePIN is more like a direction that is being closely watched by capital against the backdrop of accelerating AI demand but has not yet been fully priced. Whether it can enter the mainstream pricing区间 in 2026 depends on whether real demand can be transformed into scalable, sustainable on-chain revenue.

Overall, the reason tokens with real yield became the first sector to be retained is not because they have entered a mature value investment stage, but because in an environment where narratives are筛选 by capital structure and the altseason is absent, they were the first to meet a very practical condition: giving capital a reason to continue staying without relying on持续 price increases. This also determines that the key issue for this sector in 2026 will no longer be "whether there is a narrative," but "whether the yield still holds after scaling."

2. AI and Robotics × Crypto: Key Variables in the Productivity Revolution

2.1 2025 Review: Cooling of AI and Robotics Narratives

If there is any sector that "failed" in terms of price in 2025 but became more important in the long-term sense, then AI and Robotics × Crypto is undoubtedly the most typical representative. Over the past year, DeAI's investment heat in primary and secondary markets明显降温 compared to 2024. Related tokens overall underperformed mainstream assets, and narrative premiums were quickly compressed. But this cooling did not stem from the direction itself failing, but because the productivity changes brought by AI are more reflected in the systemic improvement of production efficiency, and its pricing logic experienced a阶段性错位 with the crypto market's pricing mechanism.

From 2024 to 2025, a series of structural changes occurred within the AI industry: inference demand rose rapidly compared to training demand, the importance of post-training and data quality significantly increased, competition between open-source models intensified, and Agent economies began to move from concept to practical application. These changes collectively point to one fact—AI is transitioning from a "model capability race" to a systems engineering phase of "computing power, data, collaboration, and settlement efficiency." And these are precisely the areas where blockchain may play a role in the long term: decentralized computing power and data markets, composable incentive mechanisms, and native value settlement and permission management.

2.2 2026 Outlook: The Productivity Revolution Remains Key to Unlocking the Narrative Ceiling

Looking ahead to 2026, the significance of AI × Crypto is shifting. It is no longer the short-term narrative of "AI projects issuing tokens," but rather providing complementary infrastructure and coordination tools for the AI industry. Robotics × Crypto is the same; its real value does not lie in the robots themselves, but in how to achieve automated management of identity, permissions, incentives, and settlement in multi-agent systems. As AI Agents and robotic systems gradually gain autonomous execution and collaboration capabilities, the friction of traditional systems in permission allocation and cross-entity settlement begins to show, and on-chain mechanisms offer a potential solution path.

However, the reason this sector did not receive systematic pricing in 2025 is precisely because its productivity value has too long a realization cycle. Unlike DeFi or trading protocols, the business闭环 of AI and Robotics has not yet fully formed. Real demand is growing but difficult to transform into scalable, predictable on-chain revenue in the short term. Therefore, in the current market structure where "narratives are compressed and capital prefers承接able assets," AI × Crypto is more like a direction that is continuously tracked but has not yet entered the mainstream配置区间.

AI and Robotics × Crypto should be understood as a layered narrative: in the long term, DeAI is a potential productivity transformation infrastructure; in the medium to short term, protocol-level innovations like x402 may率先 become high-elasticity narratives repeatedly verified by sentiment and capital. The core value of this sector lies not in whether it is immediately priced, but in the significantly higher ceiling it can open once it enters the pricing区间 compared to traditional application narratives.

3. Prediction Markets and Perp DEX: Speculative Demand Reshaped by Institutions and Technology

3.1 2025 Review: Stable Speculative Demand

Against the backdrop of compressed narratives and cautious long-term capital, prediction markets and decentralized perpetual合约 (Perp DEX) became one of the few sectors that achieved counter-trend growth in 2025. The reason is simple: they承接 the most native and最难消灭 demand in the crypto market—pricing uncertainty and the demand for leveraged trading. Unlike most application narratives, these products do not "create new demand" but migrate existing demand.

The essence of prediction markets is information aggregation. Capital "votes" on future events through betting行为, and the price continuously corrects to approach collective consensus. Structurally, this is a naturally existing and relatively more compliant "casino form": there is no house manipulating odds, the outcome is determined by real-world events, and the platform only profits by charging fees. The sector's first high-profile appearance was during the US presidential election. Prediction markets围绕 election results quickly gathered liquidity and public attention on-chain, elevating them from a marginal DeFi product to a narrative direction with real influence. In 2025, this narrative did not fade but continued to发酵 as infrastructure maturity improved and multiple protocols had token issuance expectations. From a data perspective, prediction markets in 2025 were no longer a niche experiment. The cumulative transaction volume of prediction markets had exceeded $2.4 billion. Meanwhile, the total market Open Interest remained at around $270 million, indicating this was not short-term博弈流量 but truly had持续 capital承担 event outcome risks.

The rise of Perp DEX more directly points to the core product form of the crypto industry—contract trading. Its significance does not lie in "whether on-chain is faster than off-chain," but in introducing an opaque, high-counterparty-risk contract market into a verifiable, liquidatable, trustless environment. Transparent positions, liquidation rules, and fund pool structures give Perp DEX security attributes different from centralized exchanges. However, it must be admitted that in 2025, the vast majority of contract trading was still concentrated on CEXs. This is not a trust issue but a result of efficiency and experience issues.

3.2 2026 Outlook: Institutions and Technology Will Determine Their Ability to Become Cross-Cycle Products

Looking ahead to 2026, Polymarket and Parcl's collaboration to launch a real estate prediction market could allow prediction markets to reach a broader non-crypto user base and become a breakout application. Furthermore, the World Cup, a global event with天然存在博弈, is highly likely to become the next流量拐点 for prediction markets. Additionally, a more important variable lies in the improvement of infrastructure maturity: continued improvement in liquidity depth, including market-making mechanisms, cross-event capital reuse capabilities, and price承载能力 for large orders; and the perfection of outcome adjudication and dispute resolution mechanisms. These two will determine whether prediction markets can evolve from "event-based gambling products" into a probability pricing infrastructure that can long-term承载 macro, political, financial, and social uncertainties. If the above conditions gradually mature, the ceiling of prediction markets will not be limited to short-term traffic, but whether they can become one of the few core application forms in the crypto system with跨周期 vitality.

Whether Perp DEX can持续 expand does not depend on "whether it is decentralized," but on whether it can provide incremental value on the demand side that centralized platforms cannot currently offer. For example, further improvement in capital usage efficiency: by deeply integrating unused contract margin with DeFi protocols, allowing it to participate in lending, market making, or yield strategies without significantly increasing liquidation risk, thereby improving overall capital usage rates. If Perp DEX can unlock this type of structural innovation on top of safety and transparency, its competitiveness will no longer be just "safer" but "more efficient."

From a more macro perspective, the commonality between prediction markets and Perp DEX is: they do not rely on long-term narrative premiums but on repeatable, scalable speculative and trading demand. In an environment where narratives are筛选 and the altseason is absent, such sectors are反而 more likely to gain持续 attention. They may not be the first choice for long-term配置型 capital, but they are highly likely to become the core stage in 2026 where sentiment capital, trading capital, and technological innovation repeatedly converge.

Summary

Reviewing the overall situation, 2025 was not a "failed bull market" but a deep reshaping围绕 the crypto market's pricing power, participant structure, and source of value. At the policy level, regulatory logic shifted from a highly uncertain state of suppression to a clear delineation of boundaries and functions; at the capital level, long-term capital did not directly return to high-volatility assets but first established compliant, auditable, low-volatility承接 channels through structural tools like ETFs, DAT, stablecoins, and low-risk RWA; at the market level, the price mechanism underwent substantial changes. Narrative diffusion no longer automatically triggered linear upward feedback, the普涨型 altseason gradually failed, and structural分化 became the norm.

But this does not mean that narratives themselves have exited the market. On the contrary, on shorter time scales and in more局部 sectors, narrative and sentiment remain the most important trading drivers. The repeated activity of directions like prediction markets, Perp DEX, AI payments, and Meme indicates that the crypto market is still a highly speculative, decentralized information and risk gaming field. The difference is that these narratives are increasingly finding it difficult to沉淀 into long-term valuation foundations across cycles. They are more like阶段性 opportunities围绕 real use cases, trading demand, or risk expression that are constantly筛选 by capital structure, quickly verified, and rapidly cleared.

Therefore, entering 2026, a more realistic and operational framework is taking shape: at the large-cycle level, the market will continue to concentrate on mainstream assets and infrastructure with real utility, distribution capabilities, and institutional承接 capabilities; at the small-cycle level, narratives are still worth participating in but are no longer worth believing in. For investors, the key is no longer betting on the arrival of the "next全面牛市," but more pragmatically judging which assets and sectors can not only survive in an environment of market contraction, regulatory constraints, and intensified competition but also gain elasticity and pricing power first when sentiment warms and risk preference is released阶段性.

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