26 Crypto, Bitcoin, DeFi, and AI Predictions for 2026

Introduction

Anticlimactically, bitcoin looks set to end 2025 at roughly the same price level where it started.

For the first 10 months of the year, the cryptocurrency markets rode a genuinely bullish wave. Regulatory reforms progressed, ETFs kept pulling in assets, and onchain activity picked up. BTC hit an all-time high of $126,080 on Oct. 6.

However, hopes for a breakout following the euphoria were dashed by a market defined instead by rotation, repricing, and recalibration. A mix of macro letdowns, shifting investment narratives, leverage wipeouts, and heavy whale distribution knocked the market off balance. Prices slipped, confidence cooled, and by December, BTC had roundtripped back to the low $90,000s, though the path there was anything but flat.

While 2025 may end with prices in the red, the year still pulled in real institutional adoption and set the groundwork for 2026’s next phase of real activation. In the coming year, we expect stablecoins to overtake legacy rails, tokenized assets to break into mainstream capital and collateral markets, and corporate L1s to move from pilots to real settlement. Further, we anticipate public chains will rethink how they capture value, DeFi and prediction markets will keep expanding, and AI-driven payments will finally show up onchain.

Without further ado, here are Galaxy Research’s 26 crypto market predictions for 2026, followed by a review of last year’s calls.

Our 2026 Predictions

Bitcoin price

1

BTC will hit $250k by year-end 2027. 2026 is too chaotic to predict, though Bitcoin making new all-time highs in 2026 is still possible. Options markets are currently pricing about equal odds of $70k or $130k for month-end June 2026, and equal odds of $50k or $250k by year-end 2026. These wide ranges reflect uncertainty about the near term. At the time of writing, broader crypto is already deep in a bear market, and bitcoin has failed to firmly re-establish its bullish momentum. Until BTC firmly re-establishes itself above $100-$105k, we feel risk remains to the downside in the near term. Other factors in the broader financial markets also create uncertainty, such as the rate of AI capex deployment, monetary policy conditions, and the U.S. midterm elections in November.

Over the course of the year, we have seen a structural decrease in the level of longer term BTC volatility – some of this move can be the introduction of larger overwriting/BTC yield generation programs. What is notable is that the BTC vol smile now prices puts in vol terms as more expensive than calls, which was not the case 6 months ago. This is to say, we are moving from a skew normally seen in developing, growth-y markets to markets seen in more traditional macro assets.

This maturation will likely continue, and whether or not bitcoin bleeds lower towards the 200-week moving average, the asset class’s maturation and institutional adoption are only increasing. 2026 could be a boring year for Bitcoin, and whether it finishes at $70k or $150k, our bullish outlook (over longer time periods) is only growing stronger. Increasing institutional access is combining with relaxing monetary policy and a market in desperate search for non-dollar hedge assets. It’s very possible that bitcoin follows gold to become widely adopted as a monetary debasement hedge within the next two years. – Alex Thorn

Layer-1s and Layer-2s

2

The total market cap of Internet Capital Markets on Solana will surge to $2 billion (it’s currently ~$750 million). Solana’s onchain economy is maturing, embodied by the ongoing shift away from meme-driven activity and the success of new launchpad models focused on directing capital to real revenue-generating businesses. This shift is reinforced by improving market structure on Solana and demand for tokens with fundamental value. As investor preference moves toward sustainable onchain businesses rather than ephemeral meme cycles, Internet Capital Markets will become a defining pillar of Solana’s economic activity. – Lucas Tcheyan

3

At least one live, general-purpose Layer-1 blockchain will enshrine a revenue-generating application to funnel value directly back to its native token. A growing reassessment of how L1s capture and sustain value will push chains toward more opinionated designs. Hyperliquid’s success in enshrining a perpetuals exchange, and the broader shift in economic value capture away from protocols and toward applications (a realization of the Fat App Thesis), is reframing expectations of what a neutral base layer should provide. As applications increasingly retain the majority of the value they generate, more chains are exploring whether certain revenue-producing primitives should be embedded directly into the protocol to strengthen token-level economics. Early signals are already visible. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s recent call for low-risk, economically meaningful DeFi to justify ETH’s value highlights the pressure on L1s to demonstrate sustainable capture. MegaEth plans to launch a native stablecoin that would return revenue to validators, while Ambient’s forthcoming AI-focused L1 aims to internalize inference fees. These examples suggest growing willingness among chains to own and monetize key applications. This sets the stage for a major L1 to take the next step in 2026 by formally enshrining a revenue-generating application at the protocol layer and directing its economics to the native token. – Lucas Tcheyan

4

No Solana inflation reduction proposal will pass in 2026 and the current proposal, SIMD-0411, will be withdrawn without a vote. Solana’s inflation rate was a point of contention in the community last year. Despite the introduction of a new inflation reduction proposal in November (SIMD-0411), there still remains a lack of consensus on the best approach, and instead there is a growing consensus that it distracts from more important priorities like implementation of Solana market microstructure adjustments. Additionally, changes to the SOL’s inflation policy may impact its future perception as a neutral store of value and monetary asset. – Lucas Tcheyan

5

Corporate L1s will graduate from pilots to real settlement infrastructure. At least one Fortune 500 bank, cloud provider, or ecommerce platform will launch a branded corporate L1 that settles more than $1 billion of real economic activity in 2026 and runs a production bridge into public DeFi. Earlier corporate chains have mostly been internal experiments or marketing exercises. The next wave will look more like an application-specific base layer for a defined vertical, with regulated issuers and banks permissioned at the validator layer and public chains used for liquidity, collateral, and price discovery. This will sharpen the contrast between neutral public L1s and vertically integrated corporate L1s that bundle issuance, settlement, and distribution under a single corporate stack. – Christopher Rosa

6

The ratio of application revenue to network revenue will double in 2026. As trading, DeFi, wallets, and emerging consumer applications continue to dominate onchain fee generation, value capture is increasingly shifting away from the base layer. At the same time, networks are structurally reducing the amount of value leaked through MEV and pursuing fee compression across L1s and L2s, shrinking the revenue base at the infrastructure layer. This will accelerate value capture at the application layer, allowing the Fat App Thesis to continue outpacing the Fat Protocol Thesis. – Lucas Tcheyan

Stablecoins and Tokenization

7

The SEC will grant some form of exemptive relief for expanding the use of tokenized securities in DeFi under its “innovation exemption” program. The Securities and Exchange Commission will offer some kind of exemptive reliefallowing for the growth of the onchain tokenized securities market. This could come in the form of a so-called “no action letter” or under a new kind of “innovation exemption,” a concept that SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has referenced multiple times. This will allow for the growth of legal, non-wrapper onchain securities into DeFi markets on public blockchains, not just the use of blockchain texchnology for back-office capital markets activity (as did the recent DTCC no-action letter. The early stages of formal rulemaking will commence in the second half of 2026 to codify rules for the use of crypto or tokenized securities by brokers, dealers, exchanges, and other traditional market participants. – Alex Thorn

8

The SEC will face a lawsuit by a traditional market participant or trade group over the innovation exemption. Whether trading firms, market infrastructure, or lobbying firm, some part of the traditional finance or banking industry will challenge the regulator’s offering of exemptions to DeFi apps or crypto firms in lieu of comprehensive rulemaking as it relates to the expansion of tokenized securities. – Alex Thorn

9

Stablecoins will overtake ACH in transaction volume. Stablecoin velocity remains remarkably high compared to its traditional counterparts. We have seen a continued 30%-40% CAGR in stablecoin supply growth, with transaction volume increasing in tandem. Stablecoin transactions already eclipse major credit card networks such as Visa and now process roughly half the transaction volume of the automated clearing house (ACH) system. With the GENIUS Act definitions to be solidified in early 2026, we could easily see stablecoin growth accelerate beyond its historical average CAGR as incumbent tokens grow and new entrants compete for a share of the growing pie. – Thad Pinakiewicz

10

TradFi-partnered stablecoins will consolidate. Although many U.S. stablecoins launched in 2025, the market is unlikely to support a long tail of widely used options. Consumers and merchants will not juggle multiple digital dollars; they will gravitate toward one or two with the broadest acceptance. We’re already seeing this consolidation trend in how major institutions are partnering: nine major banks, – Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, Banco Santander, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, MUFG Bank, TD Bank Group, and UBS – are exploring plans to launch stablecoins on G7 currencies, and PayPal and Paxos jointly launched PYUSD, combining a global payments network with a regulated issuer. These cases illustrate how success depends on distribution scale: the ability to plug into banks, payment processors, and enterprise platforms. Expect more stablecoin issuers to partner or integrate with one another’s systems to compete for meaningful market share. – Jianing Wu

11

A major bank/broker will accept tokenized equities as collateral. Tokenized equities have so far remained peripheral and limited to DeFi experiments and private blockchains piloted by major banks. But core infrastructure providers in traditional finance are now accelerating their shift toward blockchain-based systems, with regulators increasingly supportive. This coming year, we’re likely to see a major bank or brokerage begin accepting onchain deposits of tokenized equities and treating them as fully equivalent to traditional securities. – Thad Pinakiewicz

12

Card networks will plug into public blockchain rails. At least one top three global card network will route more than 10% of its cross-border settlement volume through public-chain stablecoins in 2026, though most end users will never see a crypto interface. Issuers and acquirers will continue to show balances and obligations in traditional formats, but behind the scenes a meaningful slice of net settlement between regional entities will move through tokenized dollars to reduce cutoff time, prefunding, and correspondent banking risk. This development will lock in stablecoins as core financial plumbing for incumbent payment networks. – Christopher Rosa

DeFi

13

Decentralized exchanges will capture more than 25% of combined spot trading volume by the end of 2026. While centralized exchanges (CEXs) continue to dominate liquidity and onboarding for new users, several structural shifts are pushing a growing share of spot activity onchain. Two of the clearest advantages are no-KYC access and more economically efficient fee structures, both of which increasingly appeal to users and market makers seeking lower friction and greater composability. Today, DEXs account for roughly 15%-17% of spot volume, depending on the data source. – Will Owens

14

There will be more than $500 million worth of DAO treasury assets governed exclusively by futarchy. Building on our prediction a year ago that futarchy would gain broader adoption as a governance mechanism, we now believe it has demonstrated enough real-world effectiveness for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to begin using it as their sole decision-making system for capital allocation and strategic direction. As a result, we expect the amount of DAO-owned capital governed through futarchy to exceed $500 million by the end of 2026. Today, roughly $47 million in DAO treasuries are governed exclusively by futarchy. We believe the growth will primarily come from new futarchy DAOs launching, but the growth in the treasuries of existing futarchy DAOs will also play a role. – Zack Pokorny

15

Total crypto-backed loans outstanding will clear $90 billion using an end-of-quarter snapshot. Building on the momentum from 2025, the volume of crypto-backed loans outstanding across DeFi and CeFi will continue to expand in 2026. Onchain dominance (the share of loans originating from decentralized venues) will continue to rise as institutional players lean on DeFi protocols for lending and borrowing activity. – Zack Pokorny

16

Stablecoin interest rate volatility will remain tame and borrow costs will not exceed 10% through DeFi applications. As institutional participation in onchain borrowing and lending grows, we should see a meaningful decline in rate volatility driven by deeper liquidity and stickier, lower-velocity capital. At the same time, arbitraging between onchain and offchain rates continues to get easier while barriers to accessing DeFi are rising. With offchain rates expected to trend lower into 2026, onchain borrow/lend rates should remain low—even in a bull market—with offchain rates serving as a key floor. The core idea is that (1) institutional capital brings stability and persistence to DeFi markets, and (2) a declining offchain rate environment will anchor onchain rates below levels typically seen during expansions. – Zack Pokorny

17

The combined market cap of privacy tokens will exceed $100b by end of 2026. Privacy tokens have gained significant traction in the last quarter of 2025, with onchain privacy top of mind as investors park more money onchain. Out of the top three privacy coins, Zcash has rallied roughly 800% over the same quarter, while Railgun is up about 204% and Monero has seen a more modest 53% gain. Early Bitcoin developers, including pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, explored ideas for making transactions more private or even shielded, but practical zero-knowledge technology was not widely available or ready for deployment at the time. As more money sits onchain, users (not least of all institutions) are starting to question whether they really want their entire crypto balance visible to the public. Whether completely shielded designs or mixer-style approaches win out, we expect the combined market cap of privacy coins to exceed $100 billion, up from CoinMarketCap’s current estimate of $63 billion. – Christopher Rosa

18

Weekly trading volumes on Polymarket will consistently exceed $1.5 billion in 2026. Prediction markets have become one of the fastest-growing categories in crypto, with Polymarket already approaching $1 billion in weekly notional volume. We expect this figure to consistently exceed $1.5 billion in 2026 as new capital efficiency layers deepen liquidity and AI-driven order flow increases trading frequency. Polymarket’s improving distribution also continues to accelerate inflows. – Will Owens

TradFi

19

More than 50 spot altcoin ETFs, and another 50 crypto ETFs (excluding spot single-coin products), will launch in the U.S. Following the SEC’s approval of generic listing standards, we expect the pace of spot altcoin ETF launches to accelerate in 2026. In 2025, we’ve seen more than 15 Solana, XRP, Hedera, Dogecoin, Litecoin, and Chainlink spot ETFs come to market. We expect the remaining major assets we’ve identified to follow with their own spot ETF filings. In addition to single-asset products, we anticipate multi-asset crypto ETFs and leveraged crypto ETFs to launch. With more than 100 filings in the pipeline, expect a sustained influx of new products in 2026. – Jianing Wu

20

U.S. spot crypto ETF net inflows will exceed $50 billion. 2025 already generated $23 billion of net inflows, and we expect that figure to accelerate in 2026 as institutional adoption deepens. With wirehouses lifting restrictions on advisor recommendations and major platforms such as the once-standoffish Vanguard adding crypto funds, BTC and ETH alone should surpass their 2025 flow levels as they make their way into more investor portfolios. On top of this, a large slate of new crypto ETF launches, particularly spot altcoin products, will unlock pent-up demand and drive incremental inflows, especially in the early stages of distribution. – Jianing Wu

21

A major asset-allocation platform will add bitcoin to its standard model portfolios. After three of the four wirehouses (Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America) lifted restrictions for advisors to recommend BTC to investors and endorsed a 1%–4% allocation, the next step is getting BTC products onto their recommended lists and into formal research coverage, which would meaningfully increase visibility to their clients. The final step is inclusion in model portfolios, which typically requires higher fund assets under management (AUM) and sustained liquidity, but we expect BTC funds to clear those thresholds and enter models at a 1%-2% strategic weight. – Jianing Wu

22

15+ crypto companies will IPO or uplist in the U.S. In 2025, 10 crypto-related companies (including Galaxy) successfully IPO’d or uplisted in the U.S. With over 290 crypto and blockchain companies completing $50M+ private rounds since 2018, we believe a sizable pipeline is now positioned to pursue U.S. listings to seek access to the U.S. capital, especially as regulatory conditions ease. Among the most likely candidates, we expect CoinShares (if not closed in 2025), BitGo (which has already filed), Chainalysis, and FalconX to move toward IPO or uplisting in 2026. – Jianing Wu

23

Five or more digital asset treasury companies (DATs) will be forced to sell assets, be acquired, or shut down completely. In Q2 2025, we saw the frenzy of DAT formation, and starting in October, market to net asset value (mNAV) multiples began to compress. BTC, ETH, and SOL DATs were trading at mNAVs below 1 on average at the time of writing. After the rush of companies across disparate business lines converting into DATs to capitalize on market financing conditions, the next phase will separate durable DATs from those without coherent strategies or asset management capabilities. To succeed in 2026, DATs will need a sound capital structure, innovative approaches to liquidity management and yield generation, and strong alignment with related protocols if those relationships are not yet in place. Additional advantages may come from scale, such as Strategy’s sizable BTC holdings, or jurisdictional positioning, as seen with Metaplanet in Japan. However, many of the DATs that quickly entered the market during the initial surge did so without meaningful strategic planning. These DATs will struggle to sustain mNAV and consequently may be forced to liquidate assets, or be acquired by larger players, and in some worst cases, close altogether. – Jianing Wu

Policy

24

Some Democrats will take up debanking as an issue – and warm to cryptocurrency as an answer. This one’s a longshot, but consider: In late November, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) urged financial institutions “to be vigilant in detecting, identifying, and reporting suspicious activity connected to cross-border funds transfers involving illegal aliens.” While FinCEN's alert emphasized risks like human and narcotics trafficking, it said money services businesses’ (MSBs’) responsibility to file suspicious activity reports (SARs) “includes the cross-border transfer of funds derived from unlawful employment.” This could include remittances sent by undocumented plumbers or farmhands or waitstaff, i.e. migrants whose employment violates federal law but who are viewed sympathetically by constituencies on the left. The alert followed FinCEN’s geographic targeting order (GTO) earlier in the year requiring MSBs to automatically report cash transactions in designated border counties as low as $1,000 (well below the statutory $10,000 threshold for currency transaction reports). These measures broaden the range of everyday financial behaviors that may trigger federal reporting, increasing the likelihood that immigrants and low-wage workers encounter fund freezes, denials, or other forms of financial exclusion. As a result, they stand to make some pro-immigration Democrats more sympathetic about debanking (largely a right-coded issue in recent years) and more receptive to permissionless, censorship-resistant financial networks. Conversely, populist, pro-bank, and law-and-order Republicans could start to sour on cryptocurrency for the same reasons, despite the strong support for the industry among the Trump administration and the GOP’s dynamist wing. Ongoing work by federal banking regulators to modernize Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money-laundering compliance requirements will only further draw attention to the inherent trade-offs between the policy goals of financial inclusion and crime reduction — trade-offs that various political factions will prioritize differently. If this realignment comes to pass, it will prove that blockchains do not have fixed political constituencies. Their permissionless design means they will be embraced or opposed not on ideological grounds but depending on how they affect the political priorities of different groups in different eras. – Marc Hochstein

25

There will be a federal investigation into insider trading or game fixing connected to a prediction market. With U.S. regulators giving onchain prediction markets the greenlight, volumes and open interest have surged. At the same time, several scandals have emerged involving insiders allegedly front-running markets with private information, along with federal raids targeting game-fixing rings in major sports leagues. Because traders can participate pseudonymously rather than through KYC’d betting desks, insiders now face greater temptation to misuse privileged knowledge or manipulate markets. As a result, we’re likely to see investigations sparked by suspicious price action on onchain prediction markets, rather than traditional surveillance of regulated sportsbooks. – Thad Pinakiewicz

AI

26

Payments following the x402 standard will reach 30% of Base daily transactions and 5% of Solana non-vote transactions in 2026, signaling greater use of onchain rails for agentic interactions. Improvements in agent intelligence, continued stablecoin adoption, and better developer tooling will open the door for x402 and other agentic payment standards to drive a larger share of onchain activity. As AI agents increasingly transact autonomously across services, standardized payment primitives will become a core part of the execution layer. Base and Solana have emerged as the leading chains in this vertical—Base due to Coinbase’s role in creating and promoting the x402 standard, and Solana due to its large developer community and user base. But we also expect new payment-focused chains like Tempo and Arc to see rapid growth as agent-driven commerce grows. – Lucas Tcheyan

Looking Back at Last Year’s Predictions

At the end of 2024, optimism about the prospects for bitcoin and crypto in the year ahead were unbounded. The incoming presidential administration had made sweeping promises about ending the “regulation by enforcement” of the Biden Administration and then incoming President Trump had promised to make America the “crypto capital of the world.” With the President’s second inauguration still a month away, longing bitcoin became the hottest trade in the world.

On December 31, 2024, we published our 23 predictions for 2025 and projected that the year would see an expansion of market breadth and narratives. Some of these predictions were spot on, some of them were way off. On many of them, our team was directionally right but not quite perfect. From the resurgence of onchain revenue sharing to the expanding role of stablecoins and the steady march of institutional adoption, the big picture themes we identified continue to play out.

In the section below, we take a discerning look at our 23 predictions for 2025 and assess their accuracy. If there was a theme we underestimated for 2025, it was the proliferation of digital asset treasury (DAT) companies. The Summer of 2025 saw an explosion in these vehicles, even if it was short-lived. We take a strict view on our successes and failures, but offer commentary where appropriate.

Bitcoin

❌ Bitcoin will cross $150k in H1 and test or best $185k in Q4 2025.

Didn’t cross $150k but new high of $126k. In November, we lowered our EOY price target to $125k. At the time of writing, BTC is trading in the $80-90k range and looks unlikely to meet our updated EOY price target for 2025. – Alex Thorn

❌ The U.S. spot Bitcoin ETPs will collectively cross $250bn AUM in 2025. Currently up to $141bn (Nov. 12) vs. $105bn on Jan. 1.– Alex Thorn

❌ Bitcoin will again be among the top performers on a risk-adjusted basis among global assets in 2025. Through the middle of 2025, this held true. Bitcoin had a YTD Sharpe ratio of 0.87 YTD as of Jul. 14, putting it above S&P 500, NVDA, MSFT, etc. However, Bitcoin is poised to finish the year with a negative Sharpe ratio and will not finish among the top performers of the year. – Alex Thorn

✅ At least one top wealth management platform will announce a 2% or higher recommended Bitcoin allocation. Morgan Stanley, one of the four major wirehouses, removed restrictions for advisors to allocate bitcoin to any accounts. In the same week, Morgan Stanley published a report recommending up to 4% allocation to bitcoin in a portfolio. Ric Edelman’s Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals released a report recommending 10%-40%. On top of that, the founder of Bridgewater, Ray Dalio recommended a 15% allocation to bitcoin and gold. – Alex Thorn

❌ Five Nasdaq 100 companies and five nation-states or sovereign wealth funds will announce they have added bitcoin to their balance sheets. Although just three companies in the Nasdaq 100 index currently hold BTC, approximately 180 companies globally now either hold or have announced plans to purchase cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets, across 10+ different tokens. More than five nations have invested in BTC, either through establishing official reserves or allocating in sovereign funds. These countries include Bhutan, El Salvador, Kazakhstan, Czech Republic, and Luxembourg. The DAT trend has been one of the major institutional forces purchasing cryptocurrencies in 2025, especially in Q2. – Jianing Wu

❌ Bitcoin developers will reach a consensus on the next protocol upgrade in 2025. Not only did no consensus emerge for the next protocol upgrade, a dispute within the Bitcoin developer ecosystem has emerged over how to treat non-monetary transactions. Version 30 of Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin’s most widely used software implementation, was released in October, controversially expanding the OP_RETURN limit. The expansion of this arbitrary data field, enacted as a way to incentivize the most harmful arbitrary data transactions into the least abusive location, led to significant pushback among some members of the Bitcoin community. A new Bitcoin Improvement Proposal was published by an anonymous developer in late October which advocated for a “temporary soft fork” to “combat spam.” While momentum for this proposal has waned in the months since, the debate has largely consumed efforts to gain consensus around other, more progressive upgrades While proposals like OP_CAT and OP_CTV still gained traction in 2025, the unresolved governance issues meant developers did not achieve consensus on the next major protocol upgrade by December. – Will Owens

✅ More than half the top 20 publicly traded Bitcoin miners by market cap will announce transitions to or enter partnerships with hyperscalers, AI, or high-performance compute firms. Miners across the board have transitioned to a hybrid AI/HPC-mining model, to more nimbly monetize their infrastructure investments. Substantially more than half of the top 20 publicly traded bitcoin miners announced a transition to AI. Of the top 20 public miners, 18 announced a transition to AI/HPC as part of a business diversification. The two that didn’t are American Bitcoin (ABTC), and Neptune Digital Assets Corp (NDA.V). – Thad Pinakiewicz

❌ Bitcoin DeFi, recognized as the total amount of BTC locked in DeFi smart contracts and deposited in staking protocols, will almost double in 2025. The amount of BTC in DeFi grew by ~30% in 2025 (from 134,987 BTC on Dec. 31, 2024 to 174,224 BTC on Dec. 3, 2025). The growth largely stemmed from lending activities, with Aave V3 Core adding 21,977 wrapped bitcoin token units over the year and Morpho adding 29,917 such units. Bitcoin staking protocols saw the largest flight as a category, hemorrhaging more than 13,000 wrapped bitcoin units. – Zack Pokorny

Ethereum

❌ Ether will trade above $5,500 in 2025. Ethereum’s native token briefly made new all-time highs in September 2025, but did not trade about $5000. Much of the increase between April 2025 and the Fall has been attributed by analysts to purchasing by treasury companies like Bitminer, and as treasury company activity has waned so too has Ether’s price, which has struggled to hold the $3000 level since October. – Alex Thorn

❌ The Ethereum staking rate will exceed 50%. The share of Ethereum staked topped out around 29.7% this year after opening up the year around 28.3%. Over the last few months, the unwinding of looping trades and key reorganization from large validatorve has put a lid on the amount of ETH staked as the exit and entry queues were disrupted. – Zack Pokorny

❌ The ETH/BTC ratio will trade below 0.03 and also above 0.045 in 2025. This prediction was nearly correct. The ETH/BTC ratio traded as low as 0.01765 (April 22), meeting our downside threshold, and traded as high as 0.04324 (August 24), barely missing our topside prediction of 0.045. Despite the rally, the ratio is likely to finish the year lower YoY. – Alex Thorn

❌ L2s as a collective will generate more economic activity than Alt L1s over 2025. This prediction did not play out. At both the network and application levels, layer-2s broadly underperformed relative to the leading Alt-L1s. Solana extended its position as the de facto retail speculation chain, consistently capturing the largest share of transactional and fee-generating activity across the space. In parallel, Hyperliquid emerged as the dominant venue for perpetual futures trading, and on its own generated more cumulative application revenue than the entire L2 ecosystem. While Base was the lone L2 to approach Alt-L1-level traction —averaging nearly 70% of all L2 application revenue in 2025 — even its growth was insufficient to surpass the economic gravity of Solana and Hyperliquid. – Lucas Tcheyan

DeFi

✅ DeFi will enter its “dividend era” as onchain applications distribute at least $1 billion of nominal value to users and token holders from treasury funds and revenue sharing. Buybacks from application revenue minimally reached $1.042 billion through November 2025. Hyperliquid and Solana-based applications were the largest buyers of their tokens through the year. Buybacks generally were a significant narrative through the year, with the market minimally questioning, and in some cases rejecting, projects that did support the activity. Just the top apps alone have returned $818.8 million to end users so far this year. Hyperliquid is the leader of the pack, returning almost $250m in token buybacks. – Zack Pokorny

✅ Onchain governance will see a resurgence, as applications experiment with futarchic governance models. Total active voters will increase by at least 20%. The use of futarchy in DAO governance increased meaningfully through 2025, with Optimism experimenting with the concept and Solana-based MetaDAO onboarding 15 DAOs through the year, including notable organizations such as Jito and Drift. Nine of these DAOs now exclusively use futarchy to govern strategic decisions and capital allocation. Participation in these decision markets increased exponentially, with one of MetaDAO’s markets clearing $1 million in traded volume. Additionally, nine of the top 10 MetaDAO proposals by volume occurred this year. We’ve seen an explosion of DAOs using futarchy for strategic decision-making and a few DAOs launch purely under the futarchy model. Still, the vast majority of DAO experimentation with futarchy is happening on Solana and led by MetaDAO. – Zack Pokorny

Banks and Stablecoins

❌ The world’s top four custody banks (BNY, JPM, State Street, Citi) will custody digital assets in 2025. This prediction was nearly correct. Bank of New York Mellon did launch crypto custody in 2025. State Street and Citi did not, but they did announce intentions to offer it in 2026. Only JPMorgan Chase remains on the sidelines, with a top executive telling CNBC in October that “custody is not on the table at the moment” though the megabank will trade digital assets. Bottom line: three of the top four custody banks have offered or announced plans to offer crypto custody. – Alex Thorn

✅ There will be at least 10 stablecoin launches backed by TradFi partnerships. Although some of the stablecoins are not yet launched, at least 14 major global financial players have announced plans to do so. To list a few, in the U.S. there were banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo, forming a U.S. bank consortium to launch a joint stablecoin; brokerages such as Interactive Brokers; payments and fintech companies such as Fiserv and Stripe. Outside of the U.S., the wave was even bigger. There are Klarna, Sony Bank, a global bank consortium of nine major banks mentioned in the prediction above, alongside several other international banks exploring similar launches. New competition is also coming from crypto-native stablecoin issuers such as Ethena, which has entered into a partnership with Anchorage, a federally regulated bank, to issue its native USDtb token. – Jianing Wu

❌ Total stablecoin supply will double to exceed $400b in 2025. Stablecoin growth remained strong, increasing by 50% YTD to nearly $310bn, but not quite the 100% pace we predicted at the start of the year. With the passage of the GENIUS Act and implementing rules in the works, regulatory clarity for stablecoins is on the horizon, so stablecoin growth should remain robust. – Thad Pinakiewicz

❌ Tether's longstanding stablecoin market dominance will drop below 50%, challenged by yield-baring alternatives like Blackrock's BUIDL, Ethena's USDe, and even USDC Rewards paid by Coinbase/Circle. This narrative was on track in the beginning of the year with the explosive growth in USDe and yield-baring stablecoins. But with the market downturn in H2 and a modest overall decrease in total stablecoin supply, Tether continued its reign as crypto's top stablecoin issuer with nearly 70% of the supply at the time of writing. Tether has positioned itself to launch a GENIUS compliant stablecoin known as USAT, complementing its flagship token USDT, and doesn’t appear to be transitioning its collateral portfolio into a composition compatible with proposed U.S. laws. Circle’s USDC continues to be Tether’s main competitor, increasing its market share from 24% of total supply to 28% over the course of the year. – Thad Pinakiewicz

Investments and Policy

❌ The all-time tally of crypto VC capital invested will surpass $150 billion, more than a 50% YoY increase. This prediction was directionally correct but overshot the mark. Raises in the first nine months of 2025 totaled $11.4 billion, bringing the cumulative figure to $119.9 billion. At a quarterly run rate of $3.8 billion, total all-time VC investment was on pace to end 2025 at $123.7 billion. That would be only a 14% increase from the cumulative tally at the end of 2024. Nevertheless, with about $15 billion deployed in 2025 (up 40% from 2024), this was the biggest year for crypto VC investment since the 2022 crash. – Marc Hochstein

✅ Stablecoin legislation will pass both houses of Congress and be signed by President Trump in 2025, but market structure legislation will not. Congress did pass stablecoin legislation and President Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law at a jovial White House ceremony attended by numerous crypto luminaries on July 18. (“Can your mother tell you apart?” the president teased the Winklevoss twins. “I can’t tell them apart.”) Market structure – the comprehensive package to clarify crypto industry regulatory jurisdictions and questions – has not had the same success. After the House passed the CLARITY Act in July, Senate negotiators have struggled to make progress. We placed the odds that a market structure bill would make it to the president’s desk before summer 2026 at 60%, but with disagreements over how to handle DeFi and conflicts of interest still unresolved, in December 2025 it still feels like mostly a toss-up that this legislation will make it to the President’s desk in 2026. – Alex Thorn

✅ The U.S. government will not purchase BTC in 2025, but it will create a stockpile using coins it already holds, and there will be some movement within the departments and agencies to examine an expanded bitcoin reserve policy. This played out exactly as we expected. On March 6, the President signed an executive order entitled “Establishment of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile” directing government agencies to hoard any BTC or cryptos they possess and ordered Treasury to “develop strategies for acquiring additional Government BTC.” The stockpile and reserve have been established, though the U.S. government has been tight-lipped about its status or future. It’s not clear whether the Treasury has “developed strategies” to acquire BTC, but if it has acquired new BTC via such strategies, no announcement has been made. – Alex Thorn

❌ The S.E.C. will open an investigation into Prometheum, the first so-called “special purpose broker-dealer.” This was a bit of a flyer, and no such investigation was opened into Prometheum (as far as we know). – Alex Thorn

❌ Dogecoin will finally hit $1, with the world’s largest and oldest memecoin touching a $100bn market cap. However, the Dogecoin market cap will be eclipsed by the Department of Government Efficiency, which will identify and successfully enact cuts in amounts exceeding Dogecoin’s 2025 high-water mark market cap. Dogecoin maxxed out around $0.40 per coin and $70 billion market cap in January 2025, so it did not hit our target of $1. It’s unclear how much money the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was able to cut – its website claims an estimated savings of $214 billion, though some analysis has suggested that only $8 billion to $9 billion can be traced to actual cancelled contracts, leases, or grants. If the website is to be believed, then the U.S. government’s DOGE did cut more than the market cap of Dogecoin, but this is unclear, and even if true, makes our prediction only partially correct. – Alex Thorn