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 collabs kicking off. Blockchain life will be real life, before long.

Ten. Coinbase joining the S&P 500.

• Not only is this traditional market validation, but it also put a load of indexes on autopilot buying COIN. COIN powered up quite a bit in the two months following the announcement, but here at the end of the year it’s basically back to its May price.

• There have been noises about Michael Saylor’s company, Strategy, the biggest Bitcoin buyer of late, also joining, but it hasn’t happened yet. Carvana beat it, which had to hurt.

Nine. Billions in acquisitions.

• Coinbase, Ripple and Kraken gobbled up companies on their way to becoming permanent fixtures in the global future of finance, dropping billions of dollars.

• Coinbase dropped $2.9 billion to acquire the main venue for futures trades, Deribit. Kraken also stepped into futures with Ninja Trader, at $1.5 billion.

• Ripple’s buying everything it can on the way to a stablecoin powered business model that may but probably won’t have anything to do with the cryptocurrency that made all these acquisitions possible, XRP.

• It might be magic space money but it spends real.

Eight. Memecoin resurgence.

• Memecoins kicked off bigly in 2024, and most suspected that the trend would come to an end. In fact, at one point it looked like the Official Trump (TRUMP) meme coin would be the market top, but the memecoin trend held on, to an extent.

• Real ones know that the true pinnacle of the memecoin story so far has been when Pump.fun raised $600 million in its 12-minute long initial coin offering.

• Not only is that a lot of money for a memecoin factory with its eyes on disrupting Twitch, but it also extended a narrative about revenue sharing with token holders, also exemplified by HYPE, BNB and others.

Seven. Prediction markets end the year strong.

• Prediction markets in general don’t look like they will be a one-year boom-and-bust. Volume at the end of the year looks as good as at the height of last year’s presidential election.

• The success has fed a looming battle with some states over sports betting.

• See my predictions further down, however.

Six. Trump’s pro-crypto stance.

• Most people would rank this higher, but the president has under-delivered in year one.

• He kicked things off with his TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins which undermined his credibility (not to mention World Liberty). He still hasn’t given us any numbers for the strategic reserve. He’s not putting the screws on to get market structure done.

• That said, having a president who likes Bitcoin and wants this new industry to grow the nation’s wealth is, on its own, a whole vibe.

Five. The appointment of Paul Atkins to the SEC and the appointment of Michael Selig to the CFTC.

• The upshot of Selig is that the two financial regulators in the U.S. are going to be effectively one agency, working hand-in-glove. I suspect that realizing this was The Way™️ sank Brian Quintenz’s nomination in the end.

• Quintenz would have wanted to make his own mark. Instead, Trump changed course and appointed someone from Atkins’ circle, so Selig will know he needs to dance with the girl that brung him.

• I’ve heard even Democratic commentators say that it’s ridiculous that these two agencies aren’t merged anyway, so this is probably the best way to get to the best good government workaround.

Four. Digital asset treasury companies, or DATs.

• DATs are companies that exist to just buy cryptocurrency. In 2025, they bought $42 billion worth. There always has to be some surge of a bad strategy that makes money for a hot minute that a million people copy.

• Simple explanation for these things: heavy profits for first movers and relatively little risk to their creators if they sink.

• Like, sure, if you started a DATco and it has to close up shop next year or the year after, you’ll take a hit to your reputation, but you will still get paid.

• This one got more mainstream attention than the next one, but if you look at the flows of money it’s not even close.

Three. Hyperliquid’s ascent and the triumph of perps.

• We all learned about auto-deleveraging this year because of the massive wipeout across the various venues in October, but Hyperliquid, which had become the gigantic on-chain derivatives marketplace, made it more transparent than any other similar events ever have been before.

• Hyperliquid has had an epic year, with astounding revenue and a nice side helping of purely symbolic drama, for a treat.

• It’s been so good, in fact, that challengers are coming for it, notably Aster (from CZ and Co.) and Lighter. Who will win? I don’t know, but I’m old enough to remember when we were told that it was impossible to build an on-chain exchange, and look at us now!

• Perps (which Hyperliquid made even more popular) quintupled in on-chain volume this year. ‘Nuff said.

Two. GENIUS Act signed into law. This was the first law passed in the United States that codified something about blockchain technology.

• Stablecoins remain the killer app of blockchains so far. They broke $300 billion in total assets in October. The future here seems bright, though I can understand why normies will be wary for a while.

• Enough people heard about Terra but don’t understand that it had a different design than tether and its copycats.

• Meanwhile, some progressives try to build the will for a left-wing vision of internet cash. Who has a hard time believing that this effort would actually lead to superior financial privacy, though?

One. The fact that Bitcoin’s last all-time high (so far) hit right in the two or three week range that the 4-year cycle theory predicted it would, which is just so freaking weird.

• Anything and everything indicates that a new era has begun, and yet Bitcoin is following the old ways, like it really is either a new god come to life or an old one, reawakened, and going by another name. Striking that final, modest gong before beating its strategic retreat feels like the O.G. cryptocurrency saying: “You thought you were in control? You were never in control, mortals.”

• I’m not spooked. You’re spooked.

Predictions for 2026

Here are some things that I think will happen over the next crypto-time decade (a.k.a. — one calendar year), with my subjective guesses of how confident I feel about them. Ranked here by a gut-level algorithm buried deep inside my heart, legible to no one:

1️⃣ Some new category of real world assets gets successfully tokenized (confidence: 70%) and it becomes actually too bullish (confidence 40%).

• RWAs will drive the final peak of inflated expectations (confidence 50% — because it could be 2027) before a trough of disillusionment that precedes crypto entering its long age of enlightened usefulness.

2️⃣ Some crypto-native category from the past will take off again. Maybe it will be NFTs. Maybe Olympus. Maybe ICOs. (confidence 66%)

• The resurrection of Euler Finance was, I think, foreshadowing

3️⃣ Neither the Clarity Act nor its derivatives will pass Congress (confidence 65%), but the SEC and the CFTC will promulgate the rules folks hoped for around 2017 and 2018. (Confidence: 88%)

4️⃣ Prediction markets have a bit of a craze and some set of markets will have an unfortunate consequence that causes soul searching in policy circles. (confidence: 71%)

• Big bets on an event have a way of causing people to take action to make that event happen. It doesn’t have to be an assassination market for it to be awful and creepy.

• The round of sportsworld busts was not an encouraging sign.

5️⃣ AI-powered crypto hacks 🎢 (confidence 93%)

• Folks believe the $120 million Balancer hack, for example, was (probably) vibe-coded.

6️⃣ Some AI-powered trading app comes along that makes early adopters a lot of money but also gives the rest of us a feeling of fresh, new existential dread.

• It will make the traders think: “What’s the point of thinking?” Think pieces and long X-posts rain down biblically. (confidence 55%)

7️⃣ Stablecoins continue to ascend at an accelerated pace but Tether and Circle will end the year with relatively the same dominant market shares, even as name brands pile in. (confidence 55%)

8️⃣ Something, something DePIN (confidence 40%)

• (yes, this will be hard to score, I just think the world is gonna be ready next year somehow, for something)

9️⃣ Founder and early team departures from the fake and empty gosh-we-run-so-fast chains that don’t rhyme with “Solana.” (confidence 47%)

🔟 Europe continues to be completely irrelevant for everything except hosting conferences. (confidence 93%)

1️⃣1️⃣ Ethereum shows the haters. (confidence 77%)

• Time is going to show that Joe Lubin has been right all along. I don’t necessarily buy Ethereum flipping Bitcoin, but I do buy that Ethereum has a very bright (if surprisingly delayed) future as the blockchain world’s permanent and meaningful #2.

• Ethereum will be like the cicadas. Long dormant period, then comes at ya big.

(If you already follow me on X, I posted these predictions there a little while ago, but without quite as much context.)

There you go. I’ve charted the course of the future. BUIDL accordingly.