Binance Research 2025 Year-End Report: Crypto Market Reaches $4 Trillion, Bitcoin Faces Macro-Driven Volatility

2025 will be a milestone year for the cryptocurrency industry, but also a year marked by significant market differentiation.

On one hand, the total market value of the cryptocurrency market has broken through for the first time. 40 billion US dollarsBitcoin hit a new historical high, with continued deepening participation from institutional investors. The regulatory environment—especially regarding stablecoins—has made significant progress, and the range of compliant investment tools is continuously expanding. All of these indicate that crypto assets are increasingly integrating into the mainstream financial system.

On the other hand, fluctuating monetary policies, escalating trade tensions, and heightened geopolitical risks have increased macroeconomic uncertainty, frequently pushing markets into "risk-off" mode and significantly amplifying price volatility. This has caused the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies to 2.4 trillion to 4.2 trillion dollarsIntense oscillation between, amplitude close to 76%Although the industry's infrastructure and institutional environment continued to improve, the cryptocurrency market still recorded approximately... A 7.9% decline.

The core message conveyed here is:In 2025, the price formation logic of crypto assets is clearly more driven by macroeconomic factors and traditional financial cycles, rather than being determined solely by the adoption pace within the crypto industry itself.

From a macroeconomic perspective, 2025 can be characterized as a year marked by "data fog" and high volatility. The market experienced a series of events in succession, including the inauguration of a new U.S. administration, the "Liberation Day" tariff shocks, and temporary government shutdowns, all of which significantly reduced the clarity and reliability of macroeconomic data. Although the beginning of the second half of the year saw...Artificial IntelligenceRelevant speculative sentiment and... OBBBA Fiscal Law Proposal(A major comprehensive fiscal bill passed by the U.S. Congress in 2025) pushed Bitcoin to new highs again, but due to the slower-than-expected pace of regulatory progress, crypto assets became notably decoupled from the traditional risk assets' recovery trend by year-end.

However, the outlook for 2026 points toward a clear "risk reset," driven by a "policy trio":Global synchronized monetary easing, large-scale fiscal stimulus through cash rebates and tax cuts, as well as a wave of regulatory relaxation.This combination is expected to replace retail-driven speculative activities with institutional capital inflows, and potentially be supported by a U.S. Bitcoin strategic reserve.Launch a liquidity-driven expansion cycle for the cryptocurrency market.

Bitcoin in 2025 presentsStructural Market Strength and Underlying Economic ActivityA noticeable divergence occurred. Although BTC hit multiple all-time highs throughout the year, its year-end closing price slightly declined, underperforming both gold and most major stock indices. However, its market capitalization remained stable at around $1.8 trillion, with its market share staying within the range of 58% to 60%.

Although the price performance is weak,The trend of capital concentrating into BTC has instead further intensified.U.S. spot ETFs have accumulated over $21 billion in net inflows, with institutional holdings surpassing 1.1 million BTC, accounting for approximately 5.5%Network security continues to improve: The total network hash rate has exceeded 1 ZH/s, and the mining difficulty has increased by approximately 36% year-over-year, indicating that miners' investment intentions remain strong.

By comparison, activity on the Bitcoin base layer has slowed down: the number of active addresses has decreased year-over-year.About 16%the number of transactions is lower than the previous cycle's peak, and speculative token activities have only appeared in short-lived and unsustainable forms. Overall,Bitcoin's liquidity, price formation, and demand are increasingly being realized through off-chain financial channels and long-term holding behaviors.Meanwhile, the base layer plays a more supportive role, further reinforcing Bitcoin's positioning as a macro financial asset rather than a transactional network.

At the L1 level, 2025 clearly indicates that"Activity level" itself is not equivalent to economic relevance.Many networks have failed to convert user activity into revenue, value capture, or sustained token performance. At the same time, the L1 landscape continues to consolidate around a small number of leading blockchains.

• EthereumIt still maintains a dominant position in terms of developer activity, DeFi liquidity, and total value locked. However, the migration of execution layers and the fee compression brought by rollups have caused ETH to continuously underperform BTC in relative terms. In contrast,
• Solana is a high-performance blockchain platform designed for While maintaining high trading volume and high daily active users, significantly expand stablecoin supply to generate substantial protocol revenue even after speculative fervor subsides, and successfully obtain U.S. spot ETF approval, significantly enhancing institutional accessibility.
• BNB Chain Leveraging a strong retail trading foundation and market narrative, it has driven on-chain spot, derivatives trading, and stablecoin settlement traffic. At the same time, it is actively expanding into RWA, positioning BNB as the top-performing major asset by 2025.

The key signals for 2025 lie in:The differentiation of L1s is becoming increasingly dependent on their ability to monetize recurring capital flows (transactions, payments, or institutional settlements), rather than simply pursuing the maximization of transaction volume.

In 2025, Ethereum Layer 2 networks handled more than 90% The increase in Ethereum-related transaction execution is mainly attributed to the protocol upgrade, which brought about expanded blob capacity and reduced data availability (DA) costs. However, as execution moves off-chain, the core issue lies in:Whether these scales can be translated into sustained usage, transaction fee revenue, and alignment with underlying economic incentives.

From this perspective, the results show a clear divergence:Activity, liquidity, and transaction fees are mainly concentrated in a few optimistic rollups (such as Base and Arbitrum) and certain application chains with clear use cases and excellent user experiences. Meanwhile, the usage of a large number of projects has sharply declined after the withdrawal of incentives.

ZK Rollups continue to make progress in proof efficiency and decentralization, but they still lag behind Optimistic Rollups by an order of magnitude in terms of TVL (Total Value Locked) and transaction fee volume. The ecosystem fragmentation caused by over a hundred different Rollups, diminishing marginal returns on incentives, and uneven progress toward decentralizing sequencers remain key constraints.

In 2025, DeFi takes another step forward on its path toward "structural institutionalization," with the focus shifting toward...Capital Efficiency and ComplianceTVL has stabilized at 124.4 billionDollars, capital structure is clearly towardStablecoins and Yield-Generating AssetsA slant, rather than inflationary, token.

A historic moment has arrived:RWA TVL (17 billion USD) has surpassed DEX for the first time, mainly driven by tokenized government bonds and stocks.Meanwhile, the U.S. "GENIUS Act" has provided clear regulatory guidance for stablecoins, driving their market value to exceed $307 billion and establishing them as a significant global settlement infrastructure.

From a business model perspective, DeFi has evolved into a mature cash flow system: protocol revenue has reached $16.2 billion, comparable to that of major traditional financial institutions. Governance tokens have also gradually transformed into "crypto blue chips" supported by real earnings. The proportion of on-chain transactions continues to rise, and at one point, the spot trading volume ratio between DEXs and CEXs approached parity. 20%.

2025 is the breakthrough year for stablecoins to fully enter the mainstream. Benefiting from the regulatory certainty and institutional participation brought by the "GENIUS Act," the total market value of stablecoins has grown nearly year-over-year. 50%, Breakthrough 30.5 billion US dollarsDaily average trading volume growth 26% Up to $3.54 trillion, far exceeding Visa's $1.34 trillion, fully demonstrating the advantages of stablecoins in fast, borderless payments.

New heavyweight players are constantly emerging:The market capitalizations of the six new stablecoins—BUIDL, PYUSD, RLUSD, USD1, USDf, and USDtB—have all exceeded $1 billion., bringing new competition and real-world application scenarios to the market. These changes collectively lay the foundation for the continued expansion of stablecoins in the fields of payments, savings, and financial technology.

Consumer-grade cryptography is entering a critical phase: blockchain infrastructure is becoming mature, and the industry's focus is clearly shifting.Real-World Applications and Seamless ExperienceLeading this transformation are new types of banks and financial technology platforms—whether Web2 giants or Web3-native projects—that are rapidly evolving into "blockchain-based infrastructure builders."Bank-like services"。" translates to

Although the popularity of crypto gaming and social applications has cooled somewhat in 2025, the deep integration of blockchain into global payments and financial technology has laid the foundation for the next wave of truly native application networks. In this stage, the industry's mission is also evolving: it is no longer solely about pursuing decentralization itself, but consciously building trustworthy and verifiable systems that can earn the trust of both consumers and institutions simultaneously.

The cutting-edge technologies in focus for 2025 include: Decentralized Coordination of AI Agents, On-Chain Payments, and Real-World InfrastructureThe most substantial progress comes from Agent Payments: by re-enabling the 402 "Payment Required" pathway through the HTTP-native settlement standard, it enables pay-per-invocation for APIs, data, and automated workflows.

By the end of the year, the payment system had processed over 100 million transactions, with a cumulative transaction value exceeding 30 million USD, and a daily transaction volume of more than 1 million transactions, of which... 90% Driven by the Agent above.

Meanwhile, decentralized physical AI (DePAI) as an extension of DePIN is gradually gaining momentum, but its development bottlenecks are more fromData quality, the gap from simulation to reality, capital intensity, and safety and regulatory requirements.Rather than the token design itself. In contrast, DeFAI and DeSci are still in the exploratory stage and have not yet demonstrated sustainable economic output.

The core characteristics of the organization are as follows:Encryption is embedded in core financial processes, rather than being used solely as a pricing exposure tool.Banks are gradually moving closer to mainstreaming crypto-secured loans, with BTC (and some ETH) gaining broader acceptance as financial-grade collateral. Compliant crypto ETFs continue to expand in both breadth and structure, further solidifying their position as the preferred institutional entry point.

Tokenized money market funds have emerged as a credible real-world asset (RWA) use case, viewed as on-chain "cash equivalents" due to their faster settlement, collateral flexibility, and auditability. Meanwhile, the scale of crypto asset treasuries (DAT) has expanded rapidly. However, data from 2025 also shows that as high-leverage vault tools underperform simple, income-generating ETFs, the sustainability of this model is increasingly under pressure. This reflects a shift in the development trend of cryptocurrencies toward...The focus shifts from mere asset accumulation to a model oriented toward infrastructure and returns.

Global crypto regulation is maturing in 2025, though with diverse and complementary paths: The U.S. passed the GENIUS Act (July), establishing the first federal stablecoin framework; Europe officially implemented MiCA, strengthening its licensing regime; Hong Kong passed the Stablecoin Ordinance and introduced tax incentives to solidify its position as a crypto hub; and Singapore raised compliance and licensing requirements further in June.

At the international level, countries are accelerating their commitment to the OECD's Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), laying the foundation for tax transparency and cross-border information exchange.

As we move into 2026, we are particularly excited about several key themes and anticipate significant progress in these areas throughout the year. These themes span across macroeconomic environments and Bitcoin, institutional adoption, policy and regulation, stablecoins, tokenization, decentralized trading, prediction markets, and more narratives and sectors.

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