加密真相與謊言：2025 年成績單回顧
Author: Ignas
Translator: Baihua Blockchain
One year ago, I wrote “The Truths and Lies of the 2025 Crypto Market.”
At that time, everyone was sharing higher Bitcoin target prices. I wanted to find a different framework to discover where the public might be wrong and to position myself differently. The goal was simple: to identify ideas that already exist but are overlooked, despised, or misunderstood.
Before sharing the 2026 version, 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 review your thinking, you’re not investing — you’re guessing blindly.
Quick Summary
- “BTC peaks in Q4”: Most people anticipated this, but it looked too good to be true. Turns out they were right, and I was wrong (and paid the price). Unless BTC surges from now and breaks the 4-year cycle pattern, I concede this round.
- “Retail preference for memecoins”: The fact is, retail investors don’t actually prefer cryptocurrencies. They bought gold, silver, AI stocks, and anything that isn’t crypto. The super cycle of memecoins or AI Agents has not materialized.
- “AI x Crypto remains strong”: Mixed results. Projects continue to deliver, x402 standards keep evolving, and funding persists. But tokens have failed to sustain any upward momentum.
- “NFTs are dead”: Yes.
All of these are easy to review. The real insights lie in the following five bigger themes.
- Spot ETFs are the floor, not the ceiling
Since March 2024, long-term Bitcoin holders (OGs) have sold about 1.4 million BTC, worth approximately $121.17 billion.
Imagine what the crypto market would look like without ETFs: despite falling prices, capital inflows into BTC ETFs remained positive ($26.9 billion).
The roughly $95 billion gap is the reason BTC has lagged behind almost all macro assets. BTC itself isn’t the problem, and there’s no need to dig into unemployment or manufacturing data — it’s just the big players and the “4-year cycle believers” doing a “big rotation.”
More importantly, Bitcoin’s correlation with traditional risk assets like Nasdaq has dropped to its lowest since 2022 (-0.42). While everyone hopes for correlation to break upward, in the long run, as an uncorrelated asset sought by institutions, this is bullish.
Signs indicate supply shocks have ended. Therefore, I dare to forecast BTC at $174,000 in 2026 (equivalent to 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 airdrops:
- 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 detection, 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; it’s a year to stop blindly betting. “Grinding” airdrops requires focused, strategic positioning.
3. Fee Switch is not an engine for price appreciation but a floor
My prediction: Fee Switch will not automatically push token prices higher. Most protocols’ revenues are insufficient to support their large market caps.
Fee Switch doesn’t influence how high tokens can go; it sets a “floor price.”
Looking at projects ranked by “Holder Income” on DeFillama: aside from $HYPE, all high-income revenue-sharing tokens outperform ETH (though ETH is now the benchmark everyone challenges).
Unexpectedly, $UNI . Uniswap finally enabled the switch and even burned $100 million worth of tokens. UNI initially surged 75%, but then retraced all gains.
Three lessons:
- Token buybacks set a price floor, not a ceiling.
- Everything in this cycle is about trading (refer to UNI’s sharp rise and fall).
- Buybacks are just one side of the story; consider sell pressure (unlocks). Most tokens are still in low circulation.
- Stablecoins dominate minds, but “proxy trading” is hard to profit from
Stablecoins are entering mainstream. When I rented a motorcycle in Bali, the other party even asked to pay with USDT on TRON.
While USDT’s dominance has decreased 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 trading stablecoin narrative 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 bank AML requirements. Every card swipe is a on-chain transaction. If in 2026, direct P2P payments bypassing Visa/Mastercard emerge, 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, conflicts between “centralized equity holders” and “token holders/DAOs” became apparent. Who truly owns the protocols, IP rights, and revenue streams? Internal disputes within Aave show that token holders’ rights are less than we imagine.
If “Labs” ultimately win, many DAO tokens will become uninvestable. 2026 will be a critical year for aligning stakeholder and token holder interests.
Summary
2025 proved one thing: everything is about trading. 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.