2025: New Highs, New Narrative
2025 was a banner year for digital assets, but not in the way you might expect. Sure, Bitcoin hit fresh all-time highs and returned to mainstream headlines. But the real story wasn’t about price—it was about the shift in conversation. Instead of debating whether crypto was a bubble, institutions, regulators, and even mainstream media started asking what it’s actually good for. That’s a sign of maturity.
CoinShares captured this shift perfectly in their year-end letter. Chief Executive Jean-Marie Mognetti made a simple but powerful point: financial systems don’t change because prices move. They change because products become useful at scale. That’s what made 2025 feel different from the mania of 2021 or the collapse of 2022–2023.
Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. March and October both saw sudden liquidity squeezes that knocked double digits off valuations in a matter of hours. Crypto is still a frontier asset, and it reminded everyone of that fact. But what stood out was how quickly the market recovered—and how much real progress continued underneath the volatility.
Beyond Price: Infrastructure Quietly Rebuilt
While traders watched charts, something more fundamental was taking shape. Three structural trends defined the year, and none of them had much to do with memes or hype cycles.
First, stablecoins became a core settlement rail for global commerce. Payment processors started routing billions in dollar-denominated transfers over public blockchains, cutting cross-border costs and shrinking settlement times from days to minutes. This wasn’t a pilot program—it was production-scale infrastructure.
Second, real-world asset tokenization graduated from theory to practice. Sovereign debt, money-market funds, and private credit issuances moved on-chain, giving institutions real-time visibility into liquidity, compliance, and cash flow. For the first time, traditional finance could see what blockchain believers had been talking about for years.
Third, oracle networks like Chainlink deepened the connection between traditional financial benchmarks and smart-contract ecosystems. That enabled risk-managed lending, insurance, and derivatives that look a lot like legacy finance but run on permissionless rails. It’s not flashy, but it’s the plumbing that makes everything else possible.
According to CoinShares, capital flows followed this shift. Investors started chasing economic purpose over narrative hype, favoring projects with real usage metrics—transaction fees, active addresses, enterprise contracts—over meme-coin virality. The result was a more diversified market where infrastructure tokens, data services, and yield-bearing protocols captured attention that used to go to the loudest marketing campaigns.
2026 Outlook: Utility as the Next Growth Engine
Looking ahead, CoinShares argues that macro events—rate cuts, quantitative easing, geopolitical shocks—might spark volatility, but they won’t be the primary driver of value. Instead, 2026 will come down to whether crypto products can embed themselves deeper into everyday financial workflows.
Regulatory Turning Point
Legislators in the United States and Europe have started codifying rules for stablecoin issuance, custody, and secondary trading. Far from killing innovation, these frameworks give banks, asset managers, and payment giants the legal clarity they need to scale blockchain services for millions of users. CoinShares expects a wave of regulated tokenized funds to hit the market in the second half of 2026, accelerating institutional adoption and normalizing on-chain settlement of traditional securities.
On the retail side, things are getting interesting too. High-yield, app-based savings accounts backed by tokenized treasuries already offer three to four percentage points above average bank deposits. Add near-instant settlement, 24-hour liquidity, and provable on-chain reserves, and you’ve got a product that could force conventional banks to modernize or lose customers.
If 2025 marked crypto’s graceful return to mainstream relevance, 2026 looks set to confirm its assimilation into the fabric of global finance. The conversation has shifted from speculative price targets to cost efficiencies, counterparty risk reduction, and cross-border accessibility—areas where digital assets aren’t just competitive, but in many cases, superior.
