2025 CryptoRank Recap: From Hype to Institutions

In 2025, the crypto market crossed a structural inflection point. The expansion of ETFs, stablecoins, and tokenized real-world assets reshaped how capital accesses and interacts with digital assets, while institutional participation shifted from peripheral involvement to structural integration. This marks the early stage of a broader repricing cycle, driven by crypto’s convergence with traditional finance and real-world adoption. This recap examines the narratives, sectors, and projects that defined this transition. Global Assets Performance Overview As crypto becomes more deeply embedded in the global financial system, treating it as a standalone market is increasingly inadequate. Overlooking the behavior of benchmark assets such as gold and U.S. equities distorts our understanding of liquidity conditions, risk appetite, and capital flows, the same forces that ultimately shape crypto market dynamics. Gold From a macro standpoint, 2025 stands out for an unprecedented revaluation of precious metals. Gold’s advance from 2023 to 2025 cannot be framed as a typical commodity cycle; it reflects a structural repricing of monetary and sovereign risk. Over this period, gold appreciated by roughly 150%, while global mine supply expanded at a pace of less than 2% per year. Central banks were a key driver of this shift, purchasing over 1,000 tonnes in 2024 and extending their accumulation into 2025. This trend coincided with a gradual decline in real yields from their 2023 highs and growing fiscal imbalances, prompting reserve diversification away from dollar-denominated assets. With gold’s market capitalization climbing to approximately $31.2 trillion , the rally is best understood as the result of sovereign and institutional balance-sheet reallocation, rather than leverage-driven speculation. S&P 500 and NASDAQ In 2025, U.S. equities delivered solid but highly uneven performance. The year was marked by a sharp drawdown in April, triggered by renewed tariff pressure under Trump’s trade policy, followed by a gradual recovery led almost entirely by large-cap technology stocks. The S&P 500 ended the year up 17.8% on a price basis and 19.3% including dividends, extending the post-2023 rally to roughly 80%. This marked the third consecutive year of double-digit returns. However, gains were narrowly concentrated, with megacap tech and AI-linked companies driving performance while the broader index lagged. The Nasdaq Composite and Nasdaq-100 significantly outperformed, finishing the year up around 22%. Capital continued to cluster in speculative growth segments, particularly AI, semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, and high-growth technology, reinforcing market concentration. At the macro level, 2025 reflected a clear shift in regime: early-year risk aversion gave way to a liquidity-supported, tech-led bull phase in the second half. Expectations of easier monetary policy and resilient corporate earnings underpinned this transition. Unlike gold’s rally, which signals hedging against monetary and fiscal risk, equity markets are primarily priced in growth optimism through a narrow but powerful AI-driven leadership cohort. At the same time, the divergence between financial markets and the real economy widened materially. The Buffett Indicator, measuring total U.S. equity market capitalization relative to GDP, has moved more than two standard deviations above its long-term trend, levels historically associated with elevated valuation risk. Against this backdrop, part of gold’s strength can be interpreted as protection against equity market overheating. The unresolved question is how this imbalance transmits to Bitcoin and the broader crypto market: whether crypto continues to function mainly as a high-beta recipient of excess liquidity, or increasingly acts as an alternative hedge when confidence in traditional asset pricing begins to erode. Bitcoin In 2025, Bitcoin’s price behavior became noticeably more volatile and macro-sensitive than in prior cycles, signaling a shift away from pure speculative momentum toward an asset increasingly shaped by institutional flows, regulatory developments, and broader risk sentiment. Bitcoin reached new all-time highs above $126,000, supported by strong spot ETF inflows, strategic reserve narratives, and expectations of easier monetary policy. However, these levels proved unsustainable, with prices retracing into the $80,000–$90,000 range by year-end. With Bitcoin ending the year near $90,000, its annual performance was marginally negative. This outcome suggests that Bitcoin may have functioned less as a beneficiary of the prevailing risk-on environment and more as a forward-looking, high-volatility indicator of underlying equity market stress. Should this interpretation be incorrect, Bitcoin would be expected to reprice higher, aligning with the liquidity-driven momentum supporting both U.S. equities and gold. Unlike earlier cycles dominated by retail speculation and leveraged positioning, 2025 reflected a convergence of structural adoption and macro constraints. Spot ETF flows, improving regulatory clarity, and strategic reserve proposals, spanning both national and state-level initiatives, enhanced Bitcoin’s institutional legitimacy but did not insulate it from sharp drawdowns following cycle highs. Spot Bitcoin ETFs accumulated tens of billions of dollars in net inflows despite weak short-term price performance, while corporate treasuries continued to add Bitcoin as a strategic asset. This produced a mixed performance profile: Bitcoin outperformed most risk assets early in the year, reaching cycle highs in August amid record ETF inflows following the passage of the GENIUS Act and other major crypto legislation. Consistent with a classic “buy the rumor, sell the news” pattern, prices trended lower through the remainder of the year. Ethereum In contrast to Bitcoin’s relatively resilient performance in 2025, Ethereum exhibited significantly higher volatility, despite being influenced by the same macroeconomic forces. ETH began the year above $3,000 but suffered deep drawdowns, falling to multi-year lows near $1,500 in April amid renewed tariff pressure under Trump’s trade policy and a broader market sell-off. Prices later recovered, briefly reaching a new all-time high above $4,900 in August, before retracing toward the $3,000 level by year-end—mirroring the familiar “buy the rumor, sell the news” pattern also observed in Bitcoin. Beneath the price action, however, on-chain fundamentals pointed to meaningful structural progress. Two major protocol upgrades in 2025, Petra and Fusaka, enhanced execution efficiency, validator reliability, and rollup data availability, strengthening Ethereum’s role as a settlement layer for Layer-2 networks. Following these upgrades, average gas fees declined to their lowest levels since 2017, highlighting a substantial improvement in network efficiency. Adoption metrics continued to trend positively throughout the year. Daily active addresses, total value locked, and stablecoin supply on Ethereum all increased, signaling sustained ecosystem growth despite pronounced price volatility. Ethereum maintained its position as the dominant settlement layer for DeFi, and forthcoming protocol and application level improvements are likely to reinforce this role over the medium term. Digital asset treasuries also emerged as an increasingly important factor in ETH price formation. Their share of total ETH supply rose from below 1% in July to over 4% by October, surpassing the proportion of Bitcoin held by comparable treasury vehicles. Unlike BTC-focused strategies, ETH treasury holders can deploy staking and DeFi-based yield strategies, introducing the potential for non-dilutive returns on treasury capital. DATs: A Powerful New Crypto Bid With Structural Risks Beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, digital asset treasuries (DATs) are increasingly emerging around a broader set of tokens. Unlike ETFs, DATs can actively raise and deploy capital, allowing them to position for narrative-driven inflows rather than offering purely passive exposure. This flexibility, however, comes with inherent fragility. The DAT model is sensitive to valuation premium compression, regulatory changes, and disruptions in broader capital markets. Structures that rely heavily on PIPE financing or leverage are particularly vulnerable, with the potential for sharp drawdowns during adverse market conditions. At present, DATs are reinforcing a positive reflexive loop for crypto asset prices. However, if the sector expands materially, this dynamic could eventually reverse, turning deleveraging and premium contraction into a systemic headwind for the market. For now, this risk remains largely theoretical. Excluding Strategy, DATs remain relatively small, holding approximately $28 billion in assets around 0.93% of the $3.0 trillion total crypto market capitalization. Predictable Yield and Capital Efficiency Drive DeFi Growth Changes among the top 10 protocols by TVL over the past four years reveal a clear evolution in DeFi’s market structure. A four-year horizon is long enough to capture durable leadership rotation, filtering out short-term cycles while highlighting shifts in where capital ultimately concentrates. The comparison points to a decisive reorientation of DeFi TVL toward a narrower set of core primitives. In 2021, leading protocols were spread across DEXs, CDPs, and yield aggregators, reflecting activity-driven usage and transactional demand. By 2025, TVL is heavily concentrated in lending, liquid staking, and restaking protocols signaling a transition toward balance-sheet infrastructure, where capital can remain deployed passively for extended periods rather than cycling through high-frequency activity. The prominence of Aave , Lido , and restaking primitives suggests that TVL growth is increasingly driven by capital efficiency and yield stacking rather than organic user demand. Lending protocols, in particular, structurally reinforce this trend: overcollateralization, collateral reuse, and leverage loops mechanically expand TVL, even in the absence of proportional growth in end-user activity. The State of Leading Blockchains: BNB Chain, Solana, Baseк BNB Chain leads 2025 in daily active addresses BNB Chain saw a strong comeback in user activity in 2025, setting new highs across several key metrics. It led all chains in daily active addresses, even surpassing Solana. Stablecoin market cap reached an all-time high of $14B in mid-October, while TVL climbed to $16B, its highest level since April 2022. By DEX volume, BNB Chain ranked third overall, behind Solana and Ethereum, with activity steadily increasing through the year and peaking at $119B in October. A major driver of this growth was the Binance Alpha flywheel. Binance Alpha highlights early-stage tokens that may later be listed on Binance, and users receive additional rewards for on-chain activity on BNB Chain. This structure successfully redirected traffic to the network: on peak days, BNB Chain added over one million new addresses, alongside strong growth in DEX volumes and transactions. Given its effectiveness, this strategy is likely to remain central to Binance’s approach in 2026. Another important catalyst was the launch of Aster , a BNB-native perpetual DEX endorsed by CZ. Aster quickly attracted traders and liquidity, reporting daily trading volumes in the tens of billions at its peak. The ASTER token surged roughly 10x in its first week, amplifying interest, and the platform managed to hold momentum, ranking third by perpetual volume in November. BNB ’s price also performed strongly in the autumn, supported by institutional inflows and rising network activity. On October 13, BNB reached a new all-time high of $1,369. However, volatility remained elevated, and subsequent market pullbacks erased part of the gains, leaving performance mixed by year-end. On the technical side, BNB Chain rolled out major upgrades via the Lorentz and Maxwell hard forks. These reduced block times to 0.75 seconds, cut median gas fees to 0.05 gwei (below $0.01), and lowered malicious MEV by 95%. The upcoming Fermi upgrade, scheduled for January 14, is expected to reduce block finality to 0.45 seconds, with longer-term goals including sub-150ms finality, 20K+ TPS, and on-chain compute hubs. Solana leads all chains by revenue in 2025 Solana ’s year was marked by sharp swings. It opened 2025 with record activity: $241M in monthly fees and $313B in DEX volume in January, alongside near-peak transaction counts and active addresses. Early momentum was driven by the ongoing memecoin cycle from late 2024. However, a series of controversial launches — including TRUMP and MELANIA — absorbed large amounts of liquidity and left many traders at a loss. As capital dried up and expectations of quick gains faded, the memecoin sector entered a clear downturn, with meme-related volumes, traders, and launches falling sharply from January highs. Despite this, overall DEX volume rebounded from a March low and steadily recovered through the year. Total volume reached $1.55T, securing Solana’s position as the top chain by DEX volume. In parallel, Solana generated $1.3B in revenue in 2025, the highest of any blockchain. Prop AMMs became a major contributor to this growth. These protocols manage liquidity internally rather than relying on external LPs, making them well suited for high-frequency and directional trading. Solana’s low fees and fast finality enabled this model to scale, with players such as Humidify, Tessera, SolFi, and goonFi leading the segment. By year-end, prop AMMs accounted for nearly 45% of Solana’s DEX volume and 85% of SOL/stablecoin trading pairs. SOL ’s price reflected the volatility of the year. It hit a new ATH of $293 on January 19, completing a multi-year recovery from post-FTX lows, before falling to around $100 in April. The token rebounded to $250 in October but finished the year near $130. Institutional access improved in late October with the launch of Solana ETPs and ETFs. By December 25, net inflows into spot SOL ETFs reached $755M, with Bitwise’s BSOL accounting for roughly 80% of the total. On the infrastructure side, Solana increased block capacity by 20% in July, raising it to 60 million compute units per block, while the upcoming Alpenglow upgrade aims to cut finality to 0.1–0.15 seconds. Base captures the majority of L2 revenue Base delivered one of its strongest years to date, expanding across DeFi and payments. For the first time, it reached $400M in monthly transactions, $53B in monthly DEX volume, and $10B in TVL. This places Base fifth among all chains by TVL and first among L2s. Revenue dominance was even clearer: Base led all L2s every month in 2025, with its share of cumulative L2 revenue reaching 69% by November. Much like BNB Chain, Base benefited heavily from its connection to a major CEX. Coinbase ’s distribution allowed Base to onboard users with minimal friction, and this year token trading on Base DEXs was integrated directly into the Coinbase App. Traders gained access to a wider set of tokens, while developers benefited from exposure to Coinbase’s user base. Base App, formerly Coinbase Wallet, was repositioned as the main gateway to the ecosystem, combining a wallet with native access to Base dApps such as Zora and Football.fun. The app opened to the public only a few weeks ago. Base also incubated a new narrative in 2025: x402 . The protocol allows services to charge for access on a per-request basis using stablecoins, directly within standard web requests. Payments happen at the moment of the request, without accounts or subscriptions. While x402 is chain-agnostic, Base has been its primary testing ground so far, positioning it as infrastructure for APIs, agents, and on-chain commerce rather than classic DeFi. Still, Solana began to challenge Base’s early lead by volume in December. Finally, speculation around a potential BASE token remained a major topic. While the team confirmed it is exploring tokenization, no timeline has been announced. JPMorgan estimated that a Base token could reach a $34B market cap, citing TVL growth and the potential for up to $23B in new liquidity from a token launch and airdrop. Altcoins: Why Altseason Didn’t Come in 2025? It is safe to say that the altcoin season many expected in 2025 never arrived. While several large-cap tokens managed to set new ATHs (BNB, SOL, HYPE), their momentum was short-lived, with most now down 40–50%. Bitcoin dominance did not fall below 50% this year, with the lowest level recorded on January 2. The Altcoin Season Index (ASI) briefly hovered around 80 in September but has since dropped below 30 and remained there for several months. There are several key reasons why an altseason failed to materialize. One of them is the fragmentation of capital across narratives. New themes constantly replace older ones, making previous runners irrelevant. Each year, thousands of new tokens enter the market, diluting both attention and liquidity. As a result, the number of tokens tracked by CMC grew from 5.8M a year ago to 29.2M today. In this environment, even newly launched tokens struggle to hold value. According to research, only 15% of altcoins launched this year are trading above their TGE price. In 2025, low-float, high-FDV token launches continued to limit the emergence of a broad altcoin season, as most of the upside was captured by private and early investors, leaving little room for public markets. With only a small share of supply circulating at launch, prices were often driven up on thin liquidity, creating inflated valuations disconnected from real demand. As unlocks began, steady sell pressure absorbed incoming capital, limiting upside and discouraging rotation into altcoins. VC-related sell pressure can be tracked using dedicated dashboards . Earlier this year, a large share of retail capital moved out of altcoins — especially VC-backed tokens with high FDVs — and rotated into memecoins instead. For a time, memes captured most speculative activity, but after repeated collapses and failed launches, that liquidity exited the segment as well. Crucially, it did not return to altcoins, leaving the market structurally thinner and reducing the conditions needed for an altcoin season. Institutional capital, meanwhile, focused on large, resilient assets that performed relatively well under uncertain conditions. High-cap tokens such as ETH, SOL, and XRP saw solid ETF inflows, signaling sustained institutional demand. The emergence of DATs further expanded access by offering regulated exposure beyond spot ETFs. Together, these instruments reflect a clear preference for lower-risk assets and regulatory clarity over higher-risk opportunities. Large ETF inflows supported the market rally from summer through October. Once significant outflows began, the market quickly reversed. In November, Bitcoin recorded $3.5B in net outflows, followed by another $1.1B in December. At this point, it is clear that a broader market recovery remains difficult without renewed institutional inflows. By contrast, retail behavior has shifted toward high-risk, high-reward strategies. While meme trading slowed, other speculative sectors gained traction. Perpetuals and prediction markets stood out, offering faster returns in a market that favored short-term positioning. Since investing in altcoins is largely a mid- to long-term bet, many participants preferred to chase quicker gains. A few years ago, alts were one of the main ways to build capital quickly. Today, as the market has evolved, altcoins are forced to compete with other instruments for user liquidity. Despite the broader weakness, a few token categories managed to perform well, notably privacy and CEX tokens. According to our data, three privacy tokens ranked among the top 10 gainers this year: ZEC (+861%), XMR (+123%), and DASH (+12%). This performance reflects a broader shift in how privacy is valued, with institutions favoring compliance-friendly, auditable privacy tools, while retail users continue to prefer assets focused on anonymity and censorship resistance. RWA Growth: Treasuries, Private Credit, Tokenized Stocks, and Beyond The RWA sector was one of the strongest performers in 2025. Total on-chain RWA value more than tripled over the year, rising from $5.6B to $18.7B, while the number of RWA holders reached 550K. U.S. Treasuries remained the core driver of the sector, accounting for $8.5B, or nearly half of total RWA market value. In practice, these products tokenize T-bills and government money market exposure, allowing them to move alongside stablecoins and be used as collateral across both DeFi and centralized platforms. At the same time, other asset classes continued to grow and mature. Commodities expanded from $1B to $3.47B in on-chain value, while institutional funds grew from $185M to $2.5B. The fastest growth came from private credit, which increased from just $6M to $2.13B. This pattern shows that tokenization has gained traction first in areas where blockchain offers clear advantages, particularly fixed income and private credit. These assets translate well on-chain, supporting yield generation, collateralization, and treasury use cases without introducing significant volatility. Ethereum remained the largest hub for RWAs, hosting $12.3B in asset value. It was followed by BNB Chain, Solana, Arbitrum, and Stellar. These figures include only so-called distributed assets, meaning RWAs that can be freely transferred between wallets. Several RWA products stood out in 2025: xStocks brought more than 60 fully collateralized U.S. equities, including AAPL, NVDA, and TSLA, on-chain as SPL tokens on Solana, each backed 1:1 by real shares held in custody. Ondo Finance saw strong growth across its flagship products: OUSG, a tokenized short-term U.S. Treasury fund backed by institutional money market funds (including BlackRock’s BUIDL), and USDY, a yield-bearing token backed by short-term Treasuries and bank deposits. OUSG alone reached $829M in on-chain value. Maple Finance also delivered solid performance, growing assets under management to $4.3B, with syrupUSDC at $3.1B and syrupUSDT at $0.94B. Monthly revenue rose from $0.41M to $2M. Centrifuge surpassed $1.3B in RWA TVL, driven mainly by the Janus Henderson Anemoy AAA CLO Fund ($1B) and the Janus Henderson Anemoy Treasury Fund ($263M). Despite this growth, market fragmentation remains a key challenge. As highlighted in the Canton Network report, RWAs are spread across multiple blockchains with different standards, liquidity environments, and protocols, creating inefficiencies in pricing, capital allocation, and liquidity formation. Addressing this issue depends on interoperability that allows assets, data, and settlement to move smoothly across networks. This fragmentation also explains why stablecoins have become the most scalable on-chain RWA, as they already operate across chains with deep liquidity and consistent standards, effectively serving as the settlement layer for other tokenized assets. Stablecoins Set Multiple Records as Legislation Accelerates Adoption In 2025, the stablecoin sector firmly established itself as the backbone of the crypto industry. Regulatory clarity was the dominant theme, and the rollout of formal frameworks enabled the sector to take a major step toward institutional adoption. The most important development was the GENIUS Act, a U.S. legislative proposal designed to create a clear federal framework for stablecoins. It introduced rules around issuance, reserve backing, and oversight, allowing issuers to operate legally in the U.S. while improving consumer protection and regulatory certainty. At the same time, the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) implemented a unified framework for stablecoins and crypto assets across all member states. Stablecoins also became far more visible in mainstream payment flows. Large fintech and commerce platforms began supporting them directly, with Stripe expanding stablecoin settlement for merchants, Shopify rolling out stablecoin-based checkout options for selected merchants, and PayPal continuing to integrate PYUSD into peer-to-peer transfers and merchant payments. Regulatory progress and growing institutional adoption were reflected in on-chain metrics. Total stablecoin market capitalization grew by 50% in 2025, rising from $205B to $308B. This growth was led by USDT, whose circulating supply increased from 137B to 187B, while USDC supply expanded from 44B to 76B. In November, stablecoin active addresses reached 44.3 million. Once again, USDT and USDC dominated activity with 29M and 13.6M active addresses, respectively, while no other stablecoin surpassed the 1M mark. By chain, 2025 marked a shift in leadership: after years of dominance, TRON was overtaken by BNB Chain, driven by a broad increase in user activity that also boosted stablecoin usage. The ranking of the top five chains by stablecoin supply remained unchanged from January 2025. Ethereum continued to host 56% of total stablecoin supply, with circulation growing from $115.6B to $171.4B. TRON’s stablecoin supply rose from $57.9B to $80.6B, while Solana’s more than tripled during the year, reaching $16.3B. Stablecoin transaction activity also surged. According to Visa, adjusted transaction count reached 2.2 billion in 2025, with adjusted transaction volume totaling $11.1 trillion. Notably, retail-sized transactions under $250 accounted for just 0.6% of total volume but represented 56% of transaction count. Over the past 12 months, there were 246M unique stablecoin sending addresses and 306M receiving addresses. Prediction Markets in Focus: Polymarket vs Kalshi Prediction markets re-emerged as one of the strongest narratives in 2025, capturing significant CT mindshare. Although sector volumes declined after the U.S. elections in November 2024, user activity and traction returned. Monthly volumes hovered around $2B from winter through summer before breaking out in autumn. November became the strongest month on record, with total prediction market volume reaching $14.5B — more than 600% growth since February 2025, the first full post-election month. Broader adoption was driven by several factors, including expansion to new audiences (such as Kalshi’s partnership with Robinhood), regulatory progress (notably Polymarket’s return to the U.S.), and increased institutional capital support. Another important driver was the emergence of new prediction dApps across multiple ecosystems, primarily on BNB Chain and Solana. Despite this broader growth, competition remained concentrated between two dominant players: Kalshi and Polymarket. Polymarket Polymarket’s most important milestone this year was receiving approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to resume operations in the U.S. The decision cleared a three-year regulatory overhang and allowed Polymarket to operate again in the world’s largest market. It also signaled growing regulatory acceptance of prediction markets more broadly. Another major achievement was securing three funding rounds in 2025 : an undisclosed $150M round at a $1.2B valuation led by Founders Fund, a strategic round backed by 1789 Capital, and an October $2B round at a $9B valuation led by Intercontinental Exchange. In less than a year, Polymarket’s valuation increased 7.5x, highlighting strong institutional confidence in its model. Key metrics improved steadily throughout the year. Monthly volume grew from $1.5B in February to $4.3B in November. Over the same period, spot transactions increased from 3.5M to 18.6M, while open interest rose from $92.6M to $241M. The team also confirmed that the POLY token is planned for launch in 2026, following the full completion of its U.S. relaunch. In addition, Polymarket is exploring a potential airdrop for active users, which drew further attention from the market. Kalshi Like Polymarket, Kalshi secured three funding rounds in 2025 : a $185M Series C at a $2B valuation in June, a $300M Series D at a $5B valuation in October, and a $1B round in November at an $11B valuation led by Sequoia Capital and CapitalG. These funds supported product expansion, fintech integrations, and infrastructure scaling. Sports markets continued to dominate Kalshi’s activity, accounting for nearly 93% of total volume. At the same time, the platform began expanding into additional verticals, including politics and crypto. While Kalshi remains a centralized Web2 product, it has started moving on-chain by launching tokenized event contracts on Solana and partnering with Pyth Network to stream real-time, regulated market data on-chain. To attract a crypto-native audience, Kalshi onboarded several well-known CT influencers, including John Wang, ICO Beast, and 0xultra. Kalshi also expanded into consumer markets through partnerships such as StockX, allowing users to trade outcomes linked to sneaker resale prices, collectibles, and brand performance during major retail periods. Larger integrations, including with Robinhood, enabled users to trade outcomes of professional and college football games via a CFTC-regulated prediction market directly inside the broker’s app. At the same time, regulatory challenges remain. Several U.S. states continue to classify Kalshi’s contracts as gambling, and the company is actively appealing these rulings. Kalshi’s growth outpaced Polymarket’s in several metrics. Monthly spot volume rose from $175M in January to $5.8B in November, a 3,200% increase. Spot transactions increased from 1.4M to 22.1M, while open interest declined from $476M to $335M. Beyond the two leaders, several newer projects are competing for market share. One of the most notable is Opinion, backed by YZi Labs, which raised a $5M round this year and ranked second by spot volume at $1.4B as of December 21. Another BNB ecosystem project is Probable, also incubated by YZi Labs. Perp DEX Competition Heats Up: Hyperliquid, Aster, Lighter Perpetual DEXs re-emerged as one of the strongest narratives in 2025, as many traders shifted their focus from memecoins to perp trading. This shift drove record volumes: October 2024’s $89B expanded to $1.8T in October 2025, marking a 20x increase. Perp DEXs also began capturing a meaningful share of CEX activity, with the DEX-to-CEX perps volume ratio rising from 4% to 12% over the year. The main driver behind this growth was a structural shift in the competitive landscape. Over the course of the year, on-chain perp trading evolved from a near-monopoly dominated by Hyperliquid into a more competitive market, with multiple platforms actively competing for users and liquidity. Another notable trend in 2025 was projects launching their own trading-focused chains. Lighter and edgeX introduced chains optimized for low latency, high throughput, and high-frequency trading. Aster also joined this trend and is developing its own L1, with a launch targeted for Q1 2026. Hyperliquid’s year was relatively controversial. The platform remained one of the most profitable projects in crypto, generating $902M in fees and $837M in revenue in 2025. Perpetual trading volume grew year over year from $564B to $2.9T, while open interest peaked above $13B. Since August, however, Hyperliquid’s metrics began to decline. Monthly perp volume dropped by roughly 60%, marking the first time in over a year that it lost its volume lead. Open interest also fell by around 60%. As noted earlier, the emergence of new competitors played a key role in this shift. Both Aster and Lighter launched aggressive incentive programs, attracting a large influx of airdrop-focused users. On one hand, this rapid growth confirmed that liquidity follows incentives. It also highlighted how difficult it is to build lasting user loyalty in crypto, even for Hyperliquid, which arguably has one of the strongest communities in Web3. On the other hand, it remains to be seen whether Aster and Lighter can retain traders once incentive programs end, something Hyperliquid has historically achieved through its advanced CLOB engine, intuitive UI, and broad asset coverage. Aster became one of the leading perp platforms almost immediately after its September launch. The debut coincided with the ASTER token’s TGE, during which the token surged roughly 10x in its first week. Activity metrics were strong from the outset, with the platform reporting billions in daily trading volume and millions of traders at its peak. That rapid rise drew close scrutiny. Concerns over reported volume accuracy and token distribution concentration led some data aggregators to temporarily remove Aster’s metrics. After these issues were addressed, Aster regained visibility and continues to rank among the top three perpetual DEXs by trading volume and fees. Lighter is built on a custom zk-rollup deployed on Arbitrum, where all trades, liquidations, and settlements are verified using zero-knowledge proofs. This design provides cryptographic guarantees around execution that currently exceed what most competitors offer. Lighter’s main competitive edge is its zero-fee trading model. Instead of charging users, the platform earns revenue through Payment for Order Flow (PFOF), routing orders to market makers in exchange for a fee. Traders benefit from zero commissions, market makers profit from spreads, and the platform captures revenue from liquidity providers. This model, combined with an active incentive program, proved highly effective. In November, Lighter became the leading perp DEX by volume, processing roughly $300B. Outlook for 2026 Institutional adoption will remain the primary growth driver for the crypto market. This will accelerate the development of institution-oriented segments such as RWAs, stablecoins, low-risk DeFi, and enterprise-grade payment and custody infrastructure. As a result, more B2B-focused projects will enter the space, explicitly designed to meet institutional requirements. These projects are often non-tokenized and largely ignored by retail investors, yet they will play a decisive role in shaping the long-term structure of the industry. At the same time, the retail segment is undergoing a structural shift toward deeper integration with traditional finance. Crypto products are moving away from an inward, crypto-native focus, toward broader, mainstream use cases. Instead of solving niche Web3 problems, leading projects are targeting universal financial needs such as payments, savings, and access to financial instruments. Another emerging trend is the convergence of real, sustainable protocol revenue with token value capture mechanisms. Projects with stable cash flows are increasingly linking financial performance to tokens via buyback-and-burn or similar mechanics. If supported by clear regulatory frameworks, this evolution could mark the beginning of a new phase for the crypto market, one grounded less in speculation and more in measurable economic value. Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.