Cryptocurrency Truths and Lies: 2025 Report Card Review

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Author: Ignas

Translation: Baihua Blockchain

One year ago, I wrote “The Truth and Lies of the Crypto Market in 2025.”

At that time, everyone was sharing higher target prices for Bitcoin. I wanted to find a different framework to identify where the public might be mistaken and to differentiate our positioning. The goal was simple: to find ideas that already exist but are overlooked, despised, or misunderstood.

Before sharing the 2026 edition, here is a clear review of what truly mattered in 2025. What we got right, what we got wrong, and what we should learn from it. If you don’t examine your own thinking, you’re not investing — you’re guessing blindly.

Quick Summary

“BTC peaks in Q4”: Most anticipated this, but it looked too good to be true. Turns out they were right, I was wrong (and paid the price). Unless BTC surges from now and breaks the 4-year cycle pattern, I concede this round.

“Retail prefers memecoins”: The fact is, retail investors don’t favor cryptocurrencies at all. They bought gold, silver, AI stocks, and anything that isn’t crypto. The supercycle for memecoins or AI Agents has not materialized.

“AI x Crypto remains strong”: Mixed results. Projects continue to deliver, the x402 standard keeps evolving, and funding persists. But tokens failed to sustain any upward momentum.

“NFTs are dead”: Yes.

These are easy to review. The real insights lie in the following five larger themes.

1. Spot ETF is the baseline, not the ceiling

Since March 2024, long-term Bitcoin holders (OGs) have sold about 1.4 million BTC, worth approximately $121.17 billion.

Imagine if there were no ETFs — what would the crypto market look like? Despite falling prices, inflows into BTC ETFs remained positive ($26.9 billion).

The $95 billion gap is the reason BTC has lagged behind almost all macro assets. Bitcoin itself isn’t the problem; there’s no need to dig into unemployment or manufacturing data — it’s just a large rotation by whales and “4-year cycle believers.”

More importantly, Bitcoin’s correlation with traditional risk assets like Nasdaq has fallen to its lowest since 2022 (-0.42). While everyone hopes the correlation will rise, in the long run, as an uncorrelated asset sought by institutions, this is bullish.

Signs indicate supply shocks have ended. Therefore, I dare to predict that in 2026, BTC will reach $174,000 (about 10% of gold’s market cap).

2. Airdrops obviously “haven’t” disappeared

The crypto community (CT) again claims airdrops are dead. But in 2025, we saw nearly $4.5 billion in large airdrop distributions:

Story Protocol (IP): ~$1.4B

Berachain (BERA): ~$1.17B

Jupiter (JUP): ~$7.91M

Animecoin (ANIME): ~$7.11M

The change lies in: fatigue from claiming, stronger witch-hunting, and valuation declines. You still need to “claim and sell” to maximize gains.

2026 will be a big year for airdrops, with heavyweight players like Polymarket, Metamask, Base (?), preparing to distribute tokens. This isn’t a year to stop clicking but to stop blindly betting. “Sniping” airdrops requires concentrated effort and heavy positioning.

3. Fee Switch is not an engine for price appreciation, but a baseline

My prediction is: Fee Switch won’t automatically push token prices higher. Most protocols’ revenues are insufficient to support their large market caps.

“Fee Switch doesn’t affect how high tokens can go, but sets a ‘floor price.’”

Looking at projects ranked by “Holder Income” on DeFillama: except for $HYPE, all high-income sharing tokens outperform ETH (though ETH is now the benchmark everyone challenges).

Surprisingly, $UNI. Uniswap finally turned on the switch and even burned $100 million worth of tokens. UNI initially surged 75%, but then retraced all gains.

Three insights:

Token buybacks set a price floor, not a ceiling.

Everything in this cycle is a trade (refer to UNI’s surge and retracement).

Buybacks are just one side of the story; consider sell pressure (unlocking). Most tokens are still in low circulation.

4. Stablecoins dominate minds, but “agent trading” is hard to profit from

Stablecoins are entering mainstream use. When I rented a motorcycle in Bali, the other party even asked to pay with USDT on TRON.

While USDT’s dominance has fallen from 67% to 60%, its market cap continues to grow. Citibank predicts stablecoin market cap could reach $1.9 trillion to $4 trillion by 2030.

In 2025, the narrative shifted from “trading” to “payment infrastructure.” However, the narrative around trading stablecoins is not easy: Circle’s IPO, after a surge, retraced all gains, and other proxy assets also underperformed.

A truth of 2025: everything is just trading.

Currently, crypto payment cards are booming due to their convenience in bypassing strict AML requirements of banks. Every card swipe is a on-chain transaction. If in 2026, direct P2P payments bypassing Visa/Mastercard become possible, it would be a thousandfold opportunity.

5. DeFi is more centralized than CeFi

This is a bold view: DeFi’s business and TVL concentration are higher than traditional finance (CeFi).

Aave accounts for over 60% of the lending market share (compared to JPMorgan’s 12% in the US).

Most L2 protocols are unregulated multi-sigs worth billions.

Chainlink nearly controls all value oracles in DeFi.

In 2025, the conflict between “centralized equity holders” and “token holders/DAOs” became apparent. Who truly owns the protocol, IP rights, and revenue streams? Internal disputes within Aave show that token holders’ rights are less than we think.

If “labs” ultimately win, many DAO tokens will become uninvestable. 2026 will be a critical year for aligning stakeholder interests with token holders.

Summary

2025 proved one thing: everything is a trade. Exit windows are extremely short. No token has long-term conviction.

As a result, 2025 marked the death of the HODL (long-term holding) culture, DeFi turned into on-chain finance, and with improved regulation, DAOs are shedding their “pseudo-decentralization” disguise.