jakiro
Author: Charlie Liu
The year 2025 may be viewed as a watershed year in the history of mankind when encryption goes mainstream.
This year we not only have a new narrative to tell, a mature business model that can be scaled up, and laws and regulations recognized by the mainstream market that can rectify the name.
Structured ETFs and DATs, the U.S. dollar with regulatory status (stablecoins, tokenized deposits), regulatory-bound institutions (Wall Street), the secondary market itself (Nasdaq), and even the White House and Capitol Hill—all are making a very forward-looking judgment:The benefits brought by moving traditional finance and commerce to the encryption track are worth the operational and compliance risks we were worried about before.
If 2024 is the year of the “return of the encryption king” (arguably a “king-maker”, in a sense a key factor in Trump’s election), then 2025 is undoubtedly the year of “the mainstreaming of encryption”.
Now let me talk about what I think is the most important thing in 2025ten themes, and — if I had to bet on 2026 — what I think will really impact next yearThree macro main lines.
1. Crypto Shell Distribution Channels: ETF Channels, DAT Craze, and Crypto IPOs
In a year seemingly dominated by stablecoins, putting these shell products first does require some explaining.
My reason is: what stablecoins change is ‘what people do on the chain’, at best it is an encryption product that has found PMF (product market fit); and what these shells change is ‘who can hold these assets and under what rules’, which is the distribution channel of encryption.
Friends who have started a business know that,Distribution channels are more important than specific products——Because only through distribution channels can products with PMF be truly accepted by the mainstream in the real world.
In the United States, the SEC relaxed the “physical subscription and redemption” of crypto ETFs/ETPs on July 29.This is not only a conceptual change in legal provisions, it means that ETF products track the price of underlying assets more closely, have less friction, and are structured more like ordinary commodity ETFs, rather than stitching monsters specifically designed for crypto.
Then in mid-September, the SEC passed the general listing standards – the market naturally regarded this as a signal of acceleration: this is not a special approval of a single product, but a shelf that can hold a whole row of crypto ETFs, and it actually accelerates the process of other cryptocurrency ETFs besides BTC.
The story of “hugging” is not limited to the ETF field.
DAT digital asset enterprise treasuryIt has become another distribution channel – using listed company entities instead of fund structures for public market casing.
Public data shows that there are close to 200 Bitcoin-based DAT companies.By the end of 2025, what is more interesting is the second-order effect: the market’s pricing for the “shell” itself begins to become more rational, the premium is compressed, and mNAV is under pressure when sentiment is cold.
Then came the true shelling: the IPO public market restarted itself.
Circle was listed in August (code CRCL). This is not only a milestone for Circle, but also a stamp of approval from Wall Street for the “stablecoin” track as a real business.
Kraken chose to submit the form confidentially, hoping to go public before the 2026 political cycle.
In Hong Kong, HashKey completed its IPO in December and continues to consolidate its position as “Asia’s Compliance Portal.”
The so-called “mainstreaming” in the real world means not only more discussions and more gimmicks, but also more compliant, more and larger distribution channels. This is a moment that the encryption circle has been looking forward to for many years.
2. Stablecoins are everywhere: PMFs, white label issuers and the “new dollar species”
Whether calculated in terms of actual usage or the influence of public opinion, the protagonist in 2025 will definitely be stablecoin.
It has become the default dollar interface in the crypto system and even in the broader fintech field.Moreover, the entire technology stack is being seriously productized by mainstream players.
Stripe is the clearest signal.
In terms of team structure, this year it completed the acquisition of Bridge to complement its stablecoin orchestration capabilities; it acquired Privy to incorporate embedded wallets into the system; and it invited the Valora team in to enhance the C-side encryption product experience.
From the product matrix, it directly embeds stablecoin payment into the Optimized Checkout Suite, making stablecoin account capabilities a default option. It is not just a PR for fintech and crypto, but a company that truly treats stablecoins as the underlying product logic. It is betting that the future US dollar stack will be programmable.
At the same time, some “new dollar species” have proven to everyone that there is still room for design in the word “stability.”
For example, Ethena’s USDe, whether you like its risk model or not, has indeed risen to a “systemically important” size, with a peak supply of nearly $150 billion.
Hyperliquid not only reigns supreme in perpetual contracts, but also makes stablecoins part of the platform strategy through USDH, introduces issuer bidding, and directs a good show on X, attracting almost all white-label stablecoin issuers.
The underlying logic behind these phenomena is that stablecoins have become the unit of account and transaction medium for cross-border balance sheets on the Internet.
It is this fait accompli that makes it impossible for policymakers and banks to continue to turn a blind eye.
3. A 180-degree turn by policymakers:Hong Kong, GENIUS and the SEC’s new playbook
2025 is the year when the international financial market’s encryption policy shifts from “total denial” to “total embrace”.
Hong Kong has moved from a “regulatory sandbox” to a complete system.The Legislative Council passed the Stablecoin Ordinance in May, and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority stated that the relevant licensing system will officially take effect on August 1.Hong Kong’s positioning is not just “crypto-friendly” but strives to be a “compliance bridge” between global capital and the Chinese market.
In the United States, President Trump signed the GENIUS Act on July 18, establishing a federal framework for payment stablecoins.Regardless of your political stance, the message to the market is clear: stablecoins are no longer viewed as guerilla hacks, but as a formally recognized class of financial instruments.
At the same time, the SEC’s posture has also changed from the repressive stance of former Chairman Gary Gensler to strategic leadership.“Project Crypto” was officially launched and is regarded as the general guideline for digital asset supervision.
Even the Federal Reserve, which is often criticized for its slow action, held a “Payment Innovation Conference” in October with the participation of many fintech and crypto leaders.Everyone’s speeches on the panel all pointed in the same direction:Stablecoins are being viewed as true payment infrastructure rather than alternatives.
4. Tokenized deposits: Banks fight back
When stablecoins really start to erode the payment scene, banks are bound to play their own “digital dollar” card – they want to retain customer relationships, but also maintain compliance boundaries, and they are not willing to give up profits from deposits.
The most iconic of 2025 is, of course, JPMorgan Chase.
In June, it made a POC of USD deposit tokens (JPMD) on Coinbase’s Base chain, clearly describing it as: a representation that maps bank deposits to the public chain within a group of permitted participants.
Tokenized deposits are not “bank-issued stablecoins”. There are different political and economic considerations behind the two:
Stablecoin issuers are essentially competing with bank deposits for funds, while tokenized deposits are maintaining the existing status of deposits.
Stablecoins pursue cross-platform interoperability; tokenized deposits focus on continuing the existing order of their own territories.
Relative to the “fintech dollar” of stablecoins, tokenized deposits are the banking system saying: We can also become programmable, but we will not hand over our balance sheets and our user relationships.
5. Putting everything on the chain: Tokenized stocks, RWA and the temptation of “7×24 hours market”
“Everything onchain” is no longer just a slogan, it has become a real product roadmap in 2025.
Robinhood has opened tokenized holdings of more than 200 U.S. stocks and ETFs to European users, marking the transition of tokenization from a traditional financial pilot to the main battlefield of retail distribution.
When tokenized holding of stock exposure becomes possible, mortgages, lending, structured products and even corporate operations will naturally be attracted to this track.
What will follow must be further improvement of supervision – tokenized stocks force everyone to face issues such as investor protection and rights boundaries that have been blurred.
On the institutional side, tokenization is supplementing the “income layer”: a combination of “old wine in new bottles” such as monetary funds, commercial paper, real estate, etc., becoming an income option that stablecoins cannot provide.
The biggest unlock in 2025 is not technology, but institutional attitudes – institutions begin to regard on-chain issuance as a normal distribution option for traditional products, rather than an innovative experiment.
6. The battle of payment networks: CPN vs Global Dollar Network, and the rise of stablecoin native chains
Stablecoins require not only issuers, but also networks—uniform standards, compliance collaboration, and distribution partners that can reduce pre-recharge and friction.
Circle launches Circle Payments Network (CPN), positioned as a compliance-oriented global stablecoin payment coordination layer.
Paxos’ Global Dollar Network (USDG) emphasizes “open network”, and Visa and Mastercard directly announced access to multiple stablecoins.Compared to CPN’s USDC-based game, Paxos’s bet is:The real competition for stablecoins will occur at the network level, not a price war between issuers.
At the same time, a number of new chains designed by “payment service providers” rather than “public chain idealists” emerged:
Circle launches Arc, a first-layer chain specially built for stablecoin financial scenarios;
Tempo comes from the lineage of Stripe + Paradigm, positioning itself as a “payment-first” infrastructure;
Plasma relies on Tether to directly promote the banner of “stable currency dedicated chain”.
The harsh reality for fintech operators in 2026 is:Distribution is becoming a game between payment networks, and your stablecoin strategy is increasingly about choosing your side, not just who issues the stablecoin.
7. Perpetual DEX grows up: Hyperliquid, on-chain microstructure and the blurring of CEX boundaries
CEX was once the dominant player in the industry, but the story began to change in 2025 – even CZ publicly expressed his belief that DEX trading volume will eventually surpass CEX.
What has really changed is not the ideology of centralization vs. decentralization, but that “on-chain execution” has found PMF, and the breakthrough point is the perpetual contract.
The CoinGecko 2025 report shows that the top ten sustainable DEXs will have a trading volume of approximately US$1.5 trillion in 2024, a significant year-on-year increase, of which Hyperliquid accounted for more than half in Q4.
This is the first time that we can say frankly: For some mature funds, on-chain venues are no longer an “alternative channel” but are becoming the default option.
CEX’s reaction is similar to that of all vested interests: copying functions, lowering fees, and launching product lines with their own “on-chain feel.”
Binance’s ecosystem around Aster is a case of combining offense and defense – the narrative of DEX, the distribution of CEX, plus a roadmap that integrates the advantages of both parties.
On the other hand, Hyperliquid’s extension to native stablecoins such as USDH also shows their ambition: once you win users, you want to win their collateral.
Boundaries are rapidly blurring, and the battlefield is no longer simply “on-chain vs. off-chain,” but rather: risk boundaries, compliance postures, distribution entrances, and—increasingly critical—who controls the margin “dollars” that support the system.
8. Agentic Commerce is truly implemented: payment enters the dialog box, and “trust” becomes the infrastructure
The most important thing in the intersection of AI + Crypto in 2025 is not that “AI agents independently speculate in coins on the chain”, but that AI agents begin to truly “spend money to buy things.”
Stripe and OpenAI make “payment in chat” a reality – through Instant Checkout, Agentic Commerce Protocol and Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite, designing the agent channel as a first-level distribution interface.
Once it is accepted that “agents can consume independently” is not a fantasy but a real need, the role of crypto will obviously shift from “speculative assets” to “settlement currency between machines.”
Therefore, protocol standards that can support AI scale become important:
The x402 project promoted by Coinbase attempts to restart HTTP 402 and turn it into an Internet-scale payment primitive;
ERC-8004 supports a “commissioning and execution constraint framework” that minimizes trust as much as possible.
Even the Fusaka upgrade of Ethereum at the end of the year can be included in this story – it is the infrastructure of “reducing costs and increasing capacity”, so that high-frequency, small-amount interactions on the chain (or on the L2 protected by Ethereum) are no longer anti-human.
For Agentic Commerce, “perfect decentralization” is not just a necessity.What is really needed: cheap verification, clear constraints, and rails that still run smoothly under real traffic.
In terms of geographical distribution of focus: AI + Crypto’s agentic commerce will still be centered in Silicon Valley; while the development of stablecoins and RWA is becoming more and more like a New York story.
9. Prediction market:Crypto-native Polymarket puts information on the chain
The prediction market really broke out in the 2024 US election – that week not only brought an unprecedented number of users, but also allowed everyone to experience the perception of “odds itself as a product” on the Internet scale for the first time.
By the end of 2025, the track continued to expand, and crucially the attention it attracted had evolved into a “capital formation” story.
Polymarket and Kalshi saw record trading volumes, even higher than during the election.
Kalshi raised US$1 billion at a valuation of US$11 billion; Polymarket ushered in a “traditional giant seal” moment – ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, announced a strategic investment of up to US$2 billion, valuing it at approximately US$8 billion.
From an encryption perspective, Polymarket, a global consumer information market platform, is completely crypto-native in its architecture – it uses USDC for trading and clearing on Polygon. When the product grows, it will naturally bring the stablecoin track and L2 throughput into the mainstream cycle.
The breakup of the two leading companies has brought about the growth of the ecosystem, and also brought a variety of new players to directly challenge the existing platforms.
The “information market/attention market” has become a new asset class, and crypto has reason to become the infrastructure of this global market belonging to the next generation of young people.
10. October Stress Test: New Highs, Retracement and Narrative Tax
No matter how good a year is, there will be moments of callbacks and questions.This moment in 2025 is in October.
Bitcoin surged to new highs above $126,000 in October before quickly retracing its trade, losing about a third.
That move didn’t feel like a “normal correction,” but rather the market collectively remembered an old question: what leverage can do to the narrative.
A landmark micro-event is the fluctuation of Ethena’s USDe on Binance – during the violent market, USDe became obviously unanchored on the top platform.
Although Binance later attributed the problem to the pricing/oracle mechanism and cooperated with the compensation arrangement, this incident brought to the table a fact that everyone knows but is unwilling to face:When the structure is complex and the platform is under pressure, “stability” is still a confidence project to a large extent.
This lesson at the end of the year is more structural.
2025 catapults crypto into the mainstream, but then quickly reminds everyone that reflexivity is still the tax this system pays for “speed + leverage + composability.”
The embrace of Wall Street has brought mainstream funds and also brought side effects of liquidity, especially at stressful moments when other asset allocations need to be balanced and liquidated.
The mainstream market dream of the crypto community has come true, but is the weight of its crown as light as you imagined?
Three main threads that may determine 2026
If we really have to make ten “accurate predictions”, I can guarantee that 80% of them will be slapped in the face when I look back next year.So it’s better to outline three main threads that I think will really drive the narrative.
Article 1: The “Everything on the Chain” that the United States continues to dominate and export
The U.S. stable currency bill has triggered a “follow-up wave” in other international financial markets, and legislation related to market structure is also being brewed.
Once the United States clarifies the trajectory of securities and commodity assets on the blockchain, other jurisdictions will gradually align their standards – not because they suddenly trust encryption, but because they are unwilling to actively lose issuance and trading volume in the global market.
By then, the meaning of “all things on the chain” will change:
It is no longer just “real assets are put on the chain in a shell”, but has begun to incubate new assets that did not originally exist——From new stocks, bonds, and fund forms to various primitive forms that were difficult to clearly define as “financial products” in the past.
Article 2: AI × Crypto, centralization and decentralization collide head-on
So far, AI has been more of an “earnings story for a few big companies”: model companies, the three cloud giants, and GPU/TPU manufacturers, all of which have far exceeded the market average in terms of revenue, capital expenditure, and net profit growth.
When computing power, data, and distribution are highly capital-intensive and concentrated on a few balance sheets, the so-called “AI economy” is essentially “cyclically held” by these companies.
In such a world, what crypto thinks about is not “whether the AI agent can use tokens”, but:
Which parts of the entire agent stack do we really want to keep neutral, open, and shareable, rather than left to the data center owner to define?
Agentic Commerce is one of the scenarios that brings this problem to reality:
On the one hand, the agent needs strong identity, responsibility tracing, and dispute resolution, which naturally leads to a centralized role; on the other hand, it needs programmable constraints and interoperable money, which naturally points to an open, trustworthy and neutral track.
I think the final winning combination will most likely admit this asymmetry frankly: use centralized AI infrastructure where it should be used, and keep the areas that should be open—especially payments, permissions, and status—try to stay on infrastructure that is still competitive and composable.
Article 3: The connection between encryption and the real world is no longer just a matter of paper.
One of the original most inconspicuous costs of AI, electricity, is likely to become one of the core entrances to its intersection with encryption.
New data centers built for training and inference are adding to the load on an already stressed electrical grid that also needs to cope with climate fluctuations.Energy is no longer a blessing in the ESG sense, but a growth ceiling in reality.
At this time, DePIN, a concept that once seemed fringe, has the opportunity to change from a “narrative” to a “tool”: using tokenized incentives to coordinate the construction and financing of computing power, connectivity, and energy infrastructure, especially in places where traditional power grid coverage is insufficient and financial models are difficult to operate, but new infrastructure is indeed needed in the era of AI and data.
Crypto will either truly take a place in the capital stack of these new infrastructures, or it will realize that most of the “RWA story” that has been hotly discussed in the past two years is still stuck in PPT.
If you see this, then share another easter egg:
Can “ownership” as the foundation of web3 philosophy solve the social problems that AI will soon aggravate?
Underneath the above three main lines, there is also a more severe macro background.
In many countries, a generation of “new middle class” is seeing their actual purchasing power diluted year by year; at the same time, the productivity revolution brought by AI is hollowing out entry-level jobs that were originally “tickets” in many industries, resulting in unprecedented high youth unemployment.
In the future, more and more income will be earned online and settled across borders, in an environment where users trust the platform more than they trust local banks and governments.
The return on capital will compound at an accelerated rate; the return on labor will find it difficult to keep up.
In such a world, encryption gradually ceases to be just a narrative and becomes a hedge against upcoming socioeconomic pressures.
What flows on the same track are not only stablecoins, various tokens and income products, but alsoA small slice of the new capital stock: networks, infrastructure, cash flow that is not locked up by a single country or a single employer, and purchasing power that is no longer eroded by over-issuance of currency and hyper-inflation.
Crypto is becoming the underlying infrastructure of this new capital formation system—andWhether young people and the squeezed middle class can obtain enough ownership slices will largely determine whether they will use this system to climb out of the AI-induced poverty trap, or whether they will be firmly locked in it.
The last part is a bit heavy, but it is indeed a realistic challenge worth pondering.
