Cryptocurrency market trends in 2025: what to prepare for?

The year 2024 was a landmark year for cryptocurrencies: the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the Bitcoin-ETF and Ethereum-ETF, major investment firms such as BlackRock and Grayscale launched their blockchain funds, and the primary cryptocurrency Bitcoin updated its all-time high (ATH), rising above $100,000. In this article, let's take a look at what trends to expect in the cryptocurrency market in 2025.

1. Strengthening the position of stablecoins

In late 2023, VanEck analysts predicted that the capitalization of the stablecoin market in 2024 would exceed $200 billion, which is precisely what happened. According to data from the CoinMarketCap monitoring service for December 2024, the market capitalization of stablecoins has reached $212 billion and continues to grow.

This is because new capital flows into the crypto market, and digital assets such as stablecoins are increasingly used for commercial purposes, including business.

Bills such as Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) in the European Union are only pushing harder to integrate stable assets into real-world businesses. Some issuers, such as Banking Circle CA, have already issued assets in full compliance with the new bill: the Eurite (EUR) stablecoin pegged to the euro exchange rate.

While directly investing in stablecoins will not generate dollar-equivalent returns (except for investments in other fiat currencies), they provide access to a wide range of DeFi protocols that allow for income generation on decentralized and exchange-traded platforms.

Stablecoins to watch out for in 2025:

• Tether (USDT) — the leading stablecoin in the cryptocurrency market by capitalization, which exceeds $140 billion, tied to the U.S. dollar exchange rate;
• USDC (USDC) — the second largest centralized stablecoin by capitalization, virtually identical to USDT;
• Ethena (USDe) — a new algorithmic stablecoin that recently became one of the top three leaders in the segment;
• First Digital USD (FDUSD) — a stablecoin that replaced Binance USD (BUSD).

2. Developments in the regulatory environment for cryptocurrencies

Various large-scale incidents, such as the collapse of blockchain platform Terra and the bankruptcy of one of the largest crypto exchanges, FTX, demonstrate the importance of regulating the cryptocurrency sector and creating an extensive regulatory framework. Russia, the United States, the European Union, Turkey, India, Canada, and Taiwan are only a small part of the countries that have taken an active stance on regulating the crypto market.

Experts believe that regulation of the digital asset sector will be most active in 2025. At the very least, this is due to the arrival of new institutional players who simply need a regulatory framework to protect investors and their interests.

3. Memcoin narrative

Dogecoin, the first memcoin in history and created for the sake of a joke, has steadily taken its position as one of the leading digital assets on the market. According to CoinMarketCap data for December 2024, the market capitalization of the leading memcoin is more than $44 billion, and according to this indicator, Dogecoin ranks 7th in the overall ranking of cryptocurrencies.

The success of the DOGE memcoin has spawned many followers and, as a result, an entire memcoin segment that has become one of the top trends from 2023-2024. Analysts expect the trend to continue into 2025, and the capitalization of the leading memcoins will continue to grow amid the overall rise of the crypto market.

Here's a list of some memcoins worth keeping an eye on in 2025:

• Dogecoin (DOGE) — the first and foremost memcoin with its blockchain-based on the Litecoin protocol;
• Shiba Inu (SHIB) is the second most capitalized Ethereum-based memcoin, with its own developed ecosystem, including the Shibarium blockchain and the ShibaSwap decentralized exchange (DEX).
• Bonk (BONK) — one of the first and now the leading meme tokens in the Solana ecosystem by market capitalization;
• Notcoin (NOT) is one of the first and now the top meme token in the TON ecosystem. It started the trend for mini-apps on Telegram ("tapas").

4. Artificial Intelligence and blockchain

The transformation has also touched the cryptocurrency market after the emergence of neuralgies and other AI-enabled tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT from OpenAI.

The popularity of AI-based technology has led to the creation of a separate sector in the crypto market — AI. Developers began to create decentralized platforms that provide access to AI applications running on blockchain and based on tokenomics. In other words, decentralized AI applications make neural networks more accessible to users, especially in the face of sanctions that prevent the use of such solutions.

Here are a few cryptocurrencies from the AI sector to watch out for in 2025:

• NEAR Protocol (NEAR) — the leading platform of this segment, aimed at creating a large ecosystem of decentralized applications (DApps), including those based on AI;
• Internet Computer (ICP) — blockchain network, which is essentially a global "decentralized cloud" and allows to manage computing resources;
• Render (RNDR) — a network for sharing computing power of graphics processing units (GPUs);

5. Real World Tokenized Assets (RWAs)

Over the past two years, users have seen two very different and previously unrelated sectors come together — traditional markets (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi). Major investment firms and banks have played no small part in this:

• JP Morgan Chase is developing a blockchain platform for issuing tokenized assets;
• BlackRock, the world's largest investment company, is creating BUIDL (BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund), which is already integrated with blockchains such as Aptos, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon;
• Grayscale launched the closed-end XRP Trust, which gave accredited investors access to Ripple assets.

The RWA sector continues to grow rapidly: in the last few years alone, the total blockchain value (TVL) of DeFi platforms in this segment has grown more than 10 times to $7.9 billion. Here are some of the RWA sector cryptocurrencies to watch out for in 2025:

• Avalanche (AVAX) — the undisputed segment leader both in terms of market capitalization and number of partnerships with large investment companies;
• Chainlink (LINK) — a leading blockchain oracle platform, also used for issuing tokenized RWAs;
• Hedera (HBAR) — a platform that provides users with access to decentralized services;

6. New "superstars"

Almost every year, new "rising stars" appear in the crypto industry and eventually take leading positions. In the early stages of crypto market development, they were, of course, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin.

During the "DeFi boom," blockchain platforms such as BNB Chain, Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink emerged. In 2023-2024, the TON and Sui ecosystems showed rapid growth.

Therefore, in 2025, you should pay attention to projects such as:

• Solana (SOL) — one of the leading blockchain platforms in the DeFi segment, which, according to analysts' expectations, will become one of the top three leaders in terms of market capitalization shortly;
• XRP (XRP) — a platform that rose to fourth place in the overall cryptocurrency ranking in 2024 on the back of partnerships with major companies in the Web2 sector;
• Toncoin (TON) — this blockchain platform was the fastest growing in 2024 and even ranked among the top ten in the crypto market for a while;
• Sui (SUI) is a next-generation blockchain that climbed to the 15th position of CoinMarketCap in terms of market capitalization in December 2024.