Closing the Book
As the year winds down, the market slows just enough to look back.
2025 gave us memes, infra, prediction markets, payment rails, and everything in between. Some narratives burned bright. Others quietly stuck around. Through it all, one thing stayed constant: momentum never really stopped; it just changed shape.
This final Digest of the year is both a snapshot of what's still moving now, and a quick look at how far we've come together.
New & Noteworthy
As the year closes, listings are shifting from stories to systems.
• Execution Is the Trade: The likes of TradeTide and VOOI aren't about calling direction. They're about how you get filled. In a market that whips around, routing, aggregation, and slippage matter more than bravado. Execution quality is quietly becoming the edge.
• Yield, Without the Fairy Tales: RateX and Harmonix suggest yield is back, with less theatrics. Rate discovery, structured returns, and liquidity that knows what it's pricing.
Weekly Events Highlight
Here's our ongoing effort to make this festive season more rewarding:
• Zero Is a Number: Year-end housekeeping could be fun. All Spot pairs are trading at 0 fees. No tricks, no thresholds, just clean trades while everyone else is closing books.
• ETHFI Euphoria: ETHFI season is having a moment. More trading, more rewards, more reasons to stay glued to the screen.
2025 Wrapped
Bitcoin had a strong year on paper, and a humbling one in context.
BTC printed fresh all-time highs in dollar terms. Against gold, a cleaner proxy for long-term purchasing power, it actually peaked earlier and finished 2025 down more than 50%. Macro did most of the work. Markets spent the year pricing Fed cuts, the end of quantitative tightening in December, and a BOJ pivot. Historically, that combination tends to precede big BTC rallies. This time, demand told a different story. Long-term holders distributed roughly 7 to 8 million BTC through the year, while ETFs and treasury buyers absorbed closer to 2 million. Liquidity was there. Conviction was thinner.
Ethereum quietly rebuilt its footing.
Ethereum spent the year rebuilding instead of performing. The recent Fusaka upgrade (activated early December) delivered major scaling wins like PeerDAS, dramatically boosting data availability for L2s while keeping nodes efficient. ETH heads into 2026 with a tighter relationship between price and fundamentals than at any point since the NFT era, poised for further gains as planned blob throughput increases roll out in January and L2 economics continue maturing. Fee mechanics stabilized. Upgrades focused on reliability rather than spectacle. ETH did not dominate headlines, but it quietly gained ground as institutions leaned into tokenization, stablecoins, and on-chain settlement.
Memes cooled, but culture didn't disappear.
The memecoin market shrank from a peak north of $150 billion to under $50 billion by year-end as traders rotated toward cleaner payoff structures. What vanished was not speculation, but patience. Cycles got shorter. Launchpads stayed busy. Attention moved faster, and capital followed. The game did not stop. It just sped up.
The real growth story: stablecoins and RWAs.
Stablecoins crossed the line from trading utility to financial infrastructure. Tokenized money market funds, on-chain cash management, and regulated issuance moved from experiments to production. RWAs stopped being a concept deck and started behaving like a market. Capital markets did not just show up on-chain. They stayed.
Two late-cycle surprises stood out.
AI and crypto stopped competing for attention and started converging, with blockchains emerging as coordination and settlement layers for AI systems. And privacy made an unexpected comeback. Privacy coins ranked among the year's top performers as surveillance, compliance, and data ownership became market concerns rather than philosophical ones.
The takeaway?
Crypto is no longer the only frontier for risk capital. It now competes with AI, robotics, and energy tech, and that is probably healthy. 2025 was not about one narrative winning. It was about crypto proving it can function as infrastructure, culture, and capital market at the same time.
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