Chainfeeds Summary:
While price performance may not meet market expectations, this year could be the most significant year ever in terms of structural progress in the crypto industry.
Article source:
Article Author:
Pantera Capital
Opinion:
Pantera Capital: One of the biggest regulatory risks facing US crypto market participants has long revolved around a core question: whether a crypto asset is a security, or whether it is offered to US investors in the form of a security. Under the previous administration and former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, the SEC treated most crypto assets as securities and adopted a strategy often described as "enforcement over regulation," frequently taking enforcement action against issuers and market participants. This regulatory environment forced many crypto projects to develop offshore, issuing tokens through foundations in jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands and Panama; many crypto exchage blocked US users or simply drastically reduced or even ceased their US operations. The SEC under Chairman Atkins has clearly taken a different path. The current SEC has withdrawn several cases against crypto platforms and issuers and proposed a more lenient classification system, dividing crypto assets into four categories: digital goods, digital collectibles, digital instruments, and tokenized securities. A review of eight predictions for 2025 reveals a clear structural divergence in reality. On the one hand, substantial progress has been made in areas such as RWA, Bitcoin-Fi, fintech platforms, and the regulatory environment; on the other hand, the pace of L2 competition, the resurgence of NFTs, and restaking has been significantly slower than expected. Regarding RWA, although its size grew from $13.7 billion to $16.5 billion, its share of on-chain TVL only increased from 15% to 16%, failing to approach the predicted 30%. The growth was mainly concentrated in a few sectors such as tokenized government bonds, commodities, private lending, and institutional funds, indicating that RWA is more like a steadily expanding structured asset than an explosive narrative. In contrast, the development of Bitcoin-Fi exceeded expectations, with approximately 1.4% of Bitcoin participating in financial activities such as staking and lending. Applications such as Babylon, Lombard, and the tBTC credit market are driving the transformation of BTC from a "static store of value" to an "interest-bearing asset." This change marks the entry of Bitcoin's financialization into a substantial stage. At the application and infrastructure levels, the trends also show uneven development. In 2025, fintech platforms officially surpassed small and medium-sized centralized exchanges. Companies like Robinhood, leveraging their user acquisition, compliance advantages, and product integration capabilities, became new entry points into the crypto space—one of the most accurate predictions. Conversely, the Unichain and NFT sectors failed to achieve the expected breakthroughs: L2 transaction volume remained dominated by platforms like Base and Polygon, while NFTs, although expanding use cases in gaming, ticketing, RWA, and decentralized identity, still faced overall adoption resistance. The restaking sector also showed discrepancies; while protocols like EigenLayer completed key mechanism launches, they focused more on adjacent businesses such as AI, computing power, and insurance. In contrast, zkTLS and the regulatory environment were the biggest highlights: zkTLS has been implemented in social, identity, and cross-chain verification, generating millions of proofs; US regulation significantly shifted towards a more favorable stance in 2025, with SEC litigation concluding and asset classification becoming clearer. Overall, this year validated which sectors had genuine demand and cash flow, and which remained merely narratives.
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