MarketsOpinion
|13 min ReadCrypto 2025: Institutions, Stablecoins, Real Users
Maya Chen
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
The world comes onchain
This is the year crypto grew up. Builders endured the drawdown and the politics. They shipped. Market cap crossed $4 trillion. Wallets hit records. Throughput exploded. The world did not just talk about onchain. It moved there.
This slide sets the scene: a larger market, more users, and faster rails.
Active onchain users are roughly 40 to 70 million, up by about 10 million in a year, a subset of the 716 million who own crypto. The gap between holders and active users is the big prize for the next wave.
The graphic shows how owners outnumber active users, a clear opportunity.
Usage is global and uneven. Mobile wallets are surging in Argentina, Colombia, India, and Nigeria. Argentina saw a 16x rise amid a currency crisis. In Australia and South Korea, interest skews to tokens and trading.
This map contrasts emerging market wallets with developed market speculation.
Bitcoin still leads, more than half the market, and set a record above $126,000. Ethereum and Solana recovered heavy post-2022 losses.
The chart highlights new highs and broad rebounds.
“Real economic value” shifted too. Hyperliquid and Solana now account for 53 percent of revenue-generating activity. That is a dramatic rotation from the old BTC and ETH dominance.
This view tracks the protocols where fees are actually paid.
Builders remain multichain. Bitcoin, Ethereum L2s, and Solana attract talent. Ethereum with L2s was the top destination for new developers in 2025. Interest in Solana grew 78 percent in two years.
The image captures the spread of developer momentum across chains.
Wall Street and policy open the gates
Institutions showed up. Days after last year’s report said stablecoins had product-market fit, Stripe moved to acquire Bridge. Circle followed with a billion-dollar IPO. Then the bipartisan GENIUS Act became law, and mentions of stablecoins in SEC filings rose 64 percent. Momentum built fast.
This timeline pairs regulation with rising institutional attention.
Citigroup, Fidelity, JPMorgan, Mastercard, Morgan Stanley, and Visa now offer or plan consumer crypto products. PayPal and Shopify are deepening payments. Circle, Robinhood, and Stripe are developing new chains for payments, RWAs, and stablecoins. Distribution is massive. Integration into daily finance is underway.
The slide lists who is building and where they plug into consumers.
Exchange-traded products unlocked capital. Onchain holdings in ETPs are above 65 billion a year ago. BlackRock’s IBIT set records. Ethereum products saw steady inflows.
This chart shows how accessibility brought new money off the sidelines.
Public “digital asset treasury” companies now hold about 4 percent of BTC and ETH. Combined with ETPs, that is around 10 percent of supply. Institutions are not circling. They have landed.
Supply concentration highlights the new institutional footprint.
Stablecoins become the fast dollar rail
Stablecoins are the backbone. They moved 9 trillion, five times PayPal and more than half of Visa. One second. Less than one cent. Global. Tremendous product-market fit.
The comparison underlines how cheap, fast, and broad stablecoin rails have become.
Monthly adjusted volume hit fresh highs, approaching $1.25 trillion in September 2025, and it moved largely independent of crypto trading volumes.
Momentum here shows non-speculative use cases taking hold.
Total supply sits above 772 billion, or 64 percent of volume, while new issuers and chains gained ground.
This split shows where dollars move and who issues them.
Stablecoins are macro. More than 1 percent of all U.S. dollars now live as tokenized assets. Stablecoins are the number 17 holder of Treasuries, up from number 20, with over 3 trillion by 2030, reinforcing dollar demand even as foreign central banks tilt to gold.
The bars show how stablecoins became a real buyer of U.S. debt.
This view ties global dollar use to tokenized rails.
America flips, the onchain economy scales
The U.S. reversed course. The GENIUS Act passed. The House approved the CLARITY Act. Executive Order 14178 reversed earlier directives and created a cross-agency task force. Builders got certainty. Confidence returned.
The policy stack clears a lane for compliant growth.
Clear rules let tokens act like a new digital primitive. Networks can close the loop and send revenue back to tokenholders. That creates a self-sustaining internet economy where users have a stake.
This diagram shows how value can flow to network participants.
Nearly one fifth of spot trading now happens on decentralized exchanges. Perpetuals volume is up nearly 8x. Hyperliquid alone processed trillions and generated more than $1 billion in annualized revenue.
The slice of onchain spot trading continues to expand.
The chart captures the surge in onchain derivatives and fees.
Real-world assets climbed to $30 billion, almost 4x in two years, as Treasuries, money market funds, private credit, and real estate moved onchain.
The growth points to deeper TradFi integration.
DePIN became tangible. Helium’s grassroots 5G network serves 1.4 million daily users across more than 111,000 hotspots. Big, ambitious, and live.
This map shows a community-built telecom network at work.
Prediction markets broke out during the 2024 U.S. election cycle. Polymarket and Kalshi saw billions in monthly trades, and volume is nearly 5x higher since the start of 2025.
The line shows resilience beyond the election spike.
Memecoins flooded the zone with more than 13 million launches in a year, then cooled 56 percent from January to September as policy matured.
The decline mirrors a shift toward more productive use cases.
NFT volume is below 2022 peaks, but monthly active buyers are rising as cheaper blockspace on Solana and Base makes collecting practical again.
The bar chart highlights the shift from speculating to collecting.
Infrastructure and AI reshape the map
Throughput jumped more than 100x in five years to 3,400 transactions per second, comparable to completed trades on Nasdaq or Stripe’s Black Friday traffic, at a fraction of old costs.
The performance curve shows why new apps are possible now.
Solana’s high-throughput, low-fee design underpins everything from DePIN to NFTs and generated $3 billion in app revenue over the past year. Planned upgrades aim to double capacity by year end.
The slide pairs technical gains with business results.
Ethereum keeps executing its scaling roadmap. Activity migrated to L2s like Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism. Average L2 fees fell from about $24 in 2021 to less than one cent today.
Low fees and abundant blockspace are driving new usage.
Bridges stitch the multichain world together. LayerZero and Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol move assets across ecosystems. Hyperliquid’s canonical bridge reached $74 billion year to date.
The diagram shows the routes that keep liquidity moving.
Privacy returned to the foreground. Searches spiked. Zcash’s shielded pool neared 4 million ZEC. Railgun crossed $200 million monthly. The Ethereum Foundation formed a new privacy team. Paxos partnered with Aleo on USAD. OFAC lifted sanctions on Tornado Cash.
The visuals track the comeback of privacy tech.
Zero-knowledge systems moved from papers to production, now used in rollups, compliance tools, and mainstream web services, including Google’s new ZK identity system.
This graphic shows ZK becoming standard infrastructure.
Post-quantum work accelerated. Roughly $750 billion in bitcoin sits in addresses vulnerable to future quantum attacks. The U.S. plans to transition federal systems to post-quantum cryptography by 2035 using NIST standards.
The slide underlines the urgency of migrating critical keys.
AI and crypto are converging. Crypto brings provenance, licensing, and agent payments. Decentralized identity like World has verified more than 17 million people for proof of human. Standards such as x402 could power autonomous agents, a market some estimate could reach $30 trillion by 2030.
This chart connects identity, APIs, and automated payments.
AI’s compute layer is highly concentrated. OpenAI and Anthropic control 88 percent of AI-native company revenue. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google hold 63 percent of cloud. NVIDIA owns 94 percent of data center GPUs. Blockchains offer a counterweight to that centralization.
The graphic shows where the power sits in AI today.
Some talent moved to AI after ChatGPT, about 1,000 roles, but crypto gained a similar number from TradFi and tech. The bench stayed strong.
The arrows show a balanced flow of builders.
With better policy, stronger rails, and huge distribution, tokens can generate real revenue, stablecoins can modernize payments, and the next generation of consumer products can bring millions more onchain. The pieces are in place. Time to build with confidence.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.