The biggest news of 2025 and the hottest takes on 2026

This is the best round-up of the year. That other one you read was smooth-brained, forget it.

Here we are at the actual end of the year. Other newsletters did their year-end lists weeks ago. But you never know with crypto! Anything could happen!

One day you’re plugging along amidst the liminal space of an unraveling bull market, then you wake up one morning and it turns out a YouTube rapper has four billion dollars worth of stolen bitcoin.

Life comes at you fast!

So we waited, because: journalism. We waited to give you the true final year-end list of the most important news in crypto that happened across 2025. So you may have read other lists, but those lists were lame not definitive. This one is.

The historically definitive list of the 11 biggest news items of 2025 (plus, predictions!)

Eleven. The other new ETFs. Dogecoin. Solana. HBAR.

• Bitwise likes to get seriously bullish about all of these, but the adoption looks lackluster from where I am sitting and the returns appear to be rapidly diminishing. Still, the fact that it’s happening is itself major-signal of the TradFi/DeFi coll…