Total market capitalization fell by 10.4% year-on-year to $3.0 trillion, marking crypto’s first annual contraction since 2022. The downturn was driven largely by a violent fourth-quarter correction, which followed a brief surge to a record $4.4 trillion before a historic $19 billion liquidation event in October abruptly reversed market momentum.
Key Takeaways from the Report
- •Crypto ended 2025 with its first yearly decline since 2022 despite reaching new all-time highs earlier in the year.
- •Stablecoins emerged as a structural winner, expanding to a record $311.0 billion in market capitalization.
- •Bitcoin underperformed traditional assets such as gold and US equities, signaling further decoupling.
- •Derivatives, prediction markets, and trading infrastructure continued to grow rapidly despite falling prices.
Volatility Rises as Prices Fall
While valuations retreated sharply in the final quarter, trading activity told a different story. Heightened volatility pushed average daily trading volume to a yearly peak of $161.8 billion, underlining that market participation remained strong even as prices declined. Stablecoins played a central role during this period, absorbing capital and facilitating risk management, with the sector expanding by 48.9% over the year to reach a new all-time high.
2025 also highlighted a growing divergence between crypto and traditional markets. Gold dominated the year with a 62.6% gain, supported by central bank accumulation and geopolitical uncertainty, while US equities benefited from the ongoing artificial intelligence narrative. In contrast, Bitcoin fell 6.4% over the year, underperforming most major asset classes and reinforcing the view that crypto is increasingly driven by its own internal market dynamics.
Institutions and Derivatives Drive Structural Growth
Beneath the surface-level price weakness, institutional participation continued to deepen. Digital Asset Treasury Companies deployed at least $49.7 billion in 2025 to acquire crypto assets.
By the start of 2026, these entities collectively held more than $134.0 billion worth of crypto, including over one million BTC and six million ETH, representing more than 5% of the total supply of both Bitcoin and Ethereum. Although acquisitions slowed in the fourth quarter as prices collapsed, the scale of these holdings reflects sustained long-term conviction.
Speculative activity also reached unprecedented levels. Prediction market volumes surged more than 300% year-on-year to $63.5 billion, while perpetual futures trading hit historic highs across both centralized and decentralized platforms.
Centralized exchanges processed $86.2 trillion in perpetual volume in 2025, while decentralized exchanges recorded $6.7 trillion, lifting their share of the total market to nearly 8%. Incentive programs and airdrop-driven participation fueled much of this growth, helping several decentralized platforms rival established centralized venues.
Market Outlook and Ecosystem Resilience
Overall, CoinGecko’s 2025 Annual Crypto Industry Report presents a nuanced picture of the market. Although prices declined and correlations shifted, crypto’s underlying infrastructure, institutional involvement, and trading utility continued to scale at a rapid pace. The year may have closed with weaker valuations, but it also reinforced how resilient and deeply embedded the crypto ecosystem has become within the global financial landscape.