Arkstream Capital: 2025 When Crypto Assets Return to "Financial Logic"

2025-12-30 21:44:09

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Looking ahead to 2026, the industry's slope is more likely to depend on three variables: whether institutional channels can be sustained, whether capital accumulation is sustainable, and the resilience of leverage and risk control under pressure scenarios.

Author: Arkstream Capital

The main storyline of the cryptocurrency market in 2025 no longer revolves around the technological cycles of a single public chain or the self-circulation of on-chain narratives, but has entered a deepened stage dominated by "external variable pricing and competition for financial entry." Policies and compliance frameworks determine the access boundaries for long-term capital, while macro liquidity and risk appetite dictate whether trends can continue. Derivative leverage and platform risk control mechanisms reshape volatility patterns and drawdown speeds at critical junctures. More importantly, a key line that the market has repeatedly validated since 2025 is: what determines price elasticity is no longer just the "intensity of on-chain narratives," but rather through which entry points funds enter, what investable targets they land on, and how they exit under pressure. External variables and internal evolution jointly drive the transformation of the cryptocurrency industry in 2025, further establishing two clear paths for the future development of the cryptocurrency industry.

Institutional Acceleration and Breakthrough in Securities: The Dominance of External Variables in the 2025 Cryptocurrency Market

"Financialization" underwent a structural shift in 2025. The ways in which funds enter are no longer limited to on-chain native leverage but have diversified into multiple parallel and clearly layered channels. Cryptocurrency allocations have expanded from a single "asset exposure (spot/ETF)" to a dual structure of "asset exposure + industrial equity," and market pricing has shifted from a single-axis drive of "narrative --- position --- leverage" to a comprehensive framework of "institution --- capital flow --- financing capability --- risk transmission."

On one hand, standardized products (such as ETFs) incorporate cryptocurrency assets into the risk budget and passive allocation framework of investment portfolios; the expansion of stablecoin supply solidifies the on-chain dollar settlement base, enhancing the market's endogenous settlement and turnover capabilities; corporate treasury (DAT) strategies directly map the financing capabilities and balance sheet expansions of listed companies to spot demand functions. On the other hand, cryptocurrency companies have "securitized" their licenses, custody, trading, clearing, and institutional service capabilities into publicly traded stocks through IPOs, allowing institutional funds to purchase cash flows and compliance moats of cryptocurrency financial infrastructure in a familiar manner for the first time, while introducing a clearer benchmarking system and exit mechanism.

In the funding structure, the role of IPOs is to "buy industry, buy cash flow, buy compliance capability." This path rapidly opened up in 2025, becoming one of the preferred choices for leading cryptocurrency companies and an external variable in the cryptocurrency industry.

In the previous five years, this path had not been clearly defined, not because the public market had formally closed to cryptocurrency companies' listings, but because the practical aspects of listing had long been in a state of "high thresholds, difficult pricing, and difficult underwriting": on one hand, the unclear regulatory stance combined with high-intensity enforcement made core businesses such as trading, brokerage, custody, and issuance face higher densities of legal uncertainty disclosures and risk discounts in their prospectus materials (for example, the SEC's lawsuit against Coinbase in 2023, accusing it of operating as an unregistered exchange/broker/clearinghouse, reinforced the uncertainty that "the nature of the business may be retroactively determined"). On the other hand, the tightening of accounting and auditing standards for custody-related businesses has also raised compliance costs and institutional cooperation thresholds (for example, SAB 121 proposed stricter asset/liability presentation requirements for "custody of crypto assets for clients," which the market widely believes has significantly increased the asset burden and audit friction for financial institutions engaged in crypto custody business). At the same time, industry credit shocks and macro tightening compounded, leading to a contraction in the overall IPO window in the US stock market, with many projects preferring to delay or divert even if they wanted to leverage the public market (for example, Circle terminated its SPAC merger in 2022, and Bullish halted its SPAC listing plans in 2022). More critically, from the execution perspective of the primary market, these uncertainties can be amplified into real "underwriting frictions": underwriters need to conduct internal compliance and risk committee reviews during the project initiation phase to stress test whether the business boundaries may be retroactively determined, whether key revenues may be reclassified, whether custody and client asset segregation may introduce additional balance sheet burdens, and whether potential enforcement/litigation may trigger significant disclosure and compensation risks; once these issues are difficult to standardize and explain, it leads to significantly increased due diligence and legal costs, longer risk factors in the prospectus, and unstable order quality, ultimately reflecting in more conservative valuation ranges and higher risk discounts. For issuing companies, this directly changes strategic choices: rather than pushing forward in an environment where "explanation costs are high, pricing is suppressed, and post-listing volatility is uncontrollable," it is better to delay issuance, turn to private financing, or seek mergers/acquisitions/other paths. The aforementioned constraints jointly determined that at that stage, IPOs were more like a "multiple-choice question" for a few companies, rather than a sustainable financing and pricing mechanism.

The key change in 2025 is that the aforementioned resistance has seen a clearer "relief/mitigation," allowing the listing path to regain continuity expectations. One of the most representative signals is the SEC's issuance of SAB 122 in January 2025 and the withdrawal of SAB 121 (effective that month), which directly removed the most controversial and "heavy asset burden" accounting obstacles for institutions participating in custody and related businesses, improving the scalability of the banking/custody chain and reducing the structural burdens and uncertainty discounts for related companies at the prospectus level. During the same period, the SEC established a cryptocurrency asset working group and signaled the promotion of a clearer regulatory framework, lowering the uncertainty premium regarding "whether rules will change or be retroactive" on the expectation level; meanwhile, legislative progress in the stablecoin sector in mid-year further provided "framework-level" certainty, making it easier for key links such as stablecoins, clearing, and institutional services to be incorporated into the valuation system by traditional capital in an auditable and comparable manner.

These changes will rapidly transmit along the execution chain of the primary market: for underwriters, it becomes easier to transform from "unexplainable, unpriceable" to "disclosable, measurable, comparable" compliance conditions ------ able to be written into the prospectus, able to be horizontally compared by buyers, making it easier for the underwriting syndicate to provide valuation ranges, grasp issuance rhythms, and invest in research coverage and distribution resources. For issuing companies, this means that IPOs are no longer just a "financing action," but a process that engineers income quality, client asset protection, internal controls, and governance structures into "investable assets." Furthermore, although the US stock market does not have a clear "cornerstone investor" system like the Hong Kong stock market, anchor orders and long-term accounts (large mutual funds, sovereign funds, some crossover funds) during the book-building phase effectively play a similar role: when regulatory and accounting frictions ease, and industry credit risks clear, high-quality demand is more likely to return to the order book, helping stabilize pricing and continuity of issuance, thus making IPOs more likely to transition from "occasional windows" to "sustainable financing and pricing mechanisms."

Ultimately, the marginal improvements in policies and accounting standards will specifically reflect in the rhythm of the annual market and the flow of funds through the primary market and capital allocation chain. From the perspective of the annual development in 2025, the aforementioned structural changes resemble a relay-style manifestation.

At the beginning of 2025, the convergence of regulatory discounts prompted a reassessment of institutional expectations, with core assets benefiting first from clearer allocation paths; subsequently, the market entered a repeated confirmation period regarding macro hard boundaries, with interest rate paths and fiscal policies embedding cryptocurrency assets more deeply into the volatility models of global risk assets (especially US growth stocks). By mid-year, the reflexivity of DAT gradually became evident: the number of listed companies adopting treasury strategies rose to the hundreds, with a total holding scale reaching the tens of billions of dollars, and balance sheet expansion became an important source of marginal demand; at the same time, ETH-related treasury allocations heated up, making the transmission of "balance sheet expansion --- spot demand" no longer revolve solely around BTC. By the third and fourth quarters, against the backdrop of multiple parallel channels and the rebalancing of funds between different entry points, the valuation center and issuance conditions of the public market began to more directly influence the capital allocation in the cryptocurrency sector: whether issuances were smooth and whether pricing was recognized gradually became a barometer for measuring "industry financing capability and compliance premium," indirectly transmitting to spot pricing through the reallocation of funds between "buying coins/buying stocks." As Circle and other trading platforms provided "valuation anchors," and more companies advanced their listing applications and preparations, IPOs evolved from "pricing references" to core variables affecting capital structure: ETFs primarily address the question of "can they be allocated, how to include them in the portfolio," while IPOs further resolve "what to allocate, how to benchmark, how to exit," driving some funds from the high-turnover on-chain leverage ecosystem to more long-term industrial equity allocations.

More importantly, this "entry competition" is not merely a theoretical framework but can be directly observed in funding data and market behavior. Stablecoins, as the on-chain dollar settlement base, saw their supply scale rise from approximately $20.5 billion to the $30 billion range in 2025, stabilizing near the end of the year, providing a thicker settlement and liquidity buffer for on-chain transaction expansion and deleveraging; ETF fund flows solidified as explicit pricing factors, achieving approximately $25.4 billion in net inflows for the year despite macro volatility and institutional rebalancing disturbances, increasing the explanatory power of "net flows/rebalancing rhythm" on price elasticity; the scaling of DAT allowed the balance sheets of listed companies to directly influence the supply-demand structure of the spot market, potentially reinforcing trend expansion during upswings, while during downturns, valuation premium contractions and financing constraints could trigger reverse transmission, thereby coupling the volatility of traditional capital markets with that of cryptocurrency markets. Meanwhile, IPOs also provided another set of quantitative evidence: In 2025, a total of 9 cryptocurrency/crypto-related companies completed IPOs, raising approximately $7.74 billion, indicating that the public market financing window not only exists but also possesses real capacity for absorption.

Source: rwa.xyz / Growth of Stablecoins in 2025

Source: CoinMarketCap / Annual Data of ETF Funds

Source: Pantera Research Lab / Data of DAT

In this context, IPOs have become an "external structural variable" in the 2025 cryptocurrency market: on one hand, it has expanded the range of compliant funds that can be allocated, providing valuation anchors and benchmarking systems for stablecoins, trading/clearing, brokerage, and custody; on the other hand, its marginal increment is not linear and will still be constrained by macro risk appetite, secondary market valuation centers, and issuance windows.

Overall, 2025 can be summarized as a year of "institutional acceleration, reinforced macro constraints, and the restart of securitization": the advancement of institutional and compliance pathways has increased the configurability of cryptocurrency assets, expanding the entry points for funds from a single on-chain structure to a parallel system of ETFs, stablecoin bases, DAT, and IPOs; at the same time, interest rates, tariffs, and fiscal frictions continue to shape liquidity boundaries, making market trends closer to the "macro-driven volatility" of traditional risk assets. The resulting differentiation of sectors and the return of "listed company carriers" will constitute an important prelude to 2026.

IPO Window Warming: From Narrative Premium to Financial Lexicon

In 2025, the IPO window for cryptocurrency-related companies in the US stock market clearly warmed, evolving from a "conceptual window opening" to a set of publicly marketable samples that can be quantitatively tested: throughout the year, a total of 9 cryptocurrency/crypto-related companies completed IPOs, raising approximately $7.74 billion, indicating that the public market has restored its capacity to absorb financing for "compliance-accessible digital financial assets" to a considerable scale, rather than symbolic small amounts. In terms of valuation, the valuations of these IPOs ranged from approximately $1.8 billion to $23 billion, essentially covering key segments such as stablecoins and digital financial infrastructure, compliant trading platforms and trading/clearing infrastructure, regulated brokerage channels, and on-chain credit/RWA, enabling the industry to begin to have a trackable and comparable equity asset sample pool; this not only provides valuation anchors for the "stablecoin --- trading --- brokerage --- institutional services --- on-chain credit/RWA" chain but also allows the market's pricing language for cryptocurrency companies to systematically migrate towards the framework of financial institutions (emphasizing compliance and licensing, risk control and operational resilience, income quality and sustainable profits). In terms of market performance, the 2025 sample generally exhibited the common characteristic of "strong during the initial public offering phase, followed by rapid differentiation": in terms of issuance structure, many companies had tight initial circulating shares (approximately 7.6%--26.5%), making short-term price discovery more elastic when the risk appetite window opened; the secondary market showed overall strength on the first day, with some targets experiencing double-digit re-pricing, while others also saw double-digit positive returns, and many companies maintained strong performance in the first week and month, reflecting that buyers had a "sustained absorption" of such assets during the window period rather than one-time pricing; however, after 1--6 months, differentiation significantly increased, aligning more closely with the traditional risk asset logic of "macro + quality" ------ companies more focused on retail and trading businesses were more sensitive to shifts in risk appetite and experienced faster drawdowns, while assets more focused on upstream infrastructure and institutional absorption capabilities were more likely to receive sustained re-ratings.

Source: nasdaq.com / Total IPO Amount of Cryptocurrency Companies in the US Stock Market in 2025

More critically, the "return" of US stock market cryptocurrency companies' IPOs has been highly sought after because it simultaneously meets three key concerns of the public market during a window period: buyable, comparable, and exitable. First, it transforms the previously hard-to-access "cash flows of cryptocurrency financial infrastructure" into stock assets that traditional accounts can directly hold, naturally fitting the compliance and risk control frameworks of long-term funds such as mutual funds, pensions, and sovereign funds; second, IPOs provide the industry with a batch of horizontally comparable equity samples for the first time, allowing buyers to no longer rely solely on "narrative intensity/transaction volume extrapolation" for valuation but to layer using familiar financial institution language ------ compliance costs and licensing barriers, risk preparedness and internal control governance, client structure and retention, income quality and capital efficiency ------ when pricing methods become more standardized, buyers are more willing to offer higher certainty premiums during the window period; third, IPOs shift the exit mechanism from "on-chain liquidity and emotional cycles" partially to "public market liquidity + market making/research coverage + index and institutional rebalancing," enabling funds to confidently provide stronger order quality during the issuance phase (including more stable long-term demand and anchor orders), which in turn reinforces the re-pricing momentum during the initial public offering phase. In other words, the enthusiasm is not solely driven by risk appetite but stems from the risk premium decline brought about by "institutional accessibility": when assets become easier to audit, easier to compare, and easier to incorporate into risk budgets, the public market is more willing to pay a premium for them.

Among these, Circle serves as the most representative case of "stablecoin sector equity valuation anchor": its IPO was priced at $31, raising approximately $1.054 billion, corresponding to an IPO valuation of approximately $6.45 billion, while the secondary market strongly repriced it during the window period ------ approximately +168.5% on the first day, approximately +243.7% in the first week, approximately +501.9% in the first month, peaking at $298.99 with a maximum increase of approximately +864.5%, and even maintaining around +182.1% over a six-month dimension. The significance of Circle lies not in the "increase itself," but in that it transformed "stablecoins" from assets that previously relied more on on-chain growth narratives into a publicly traded equity that the market prices as an auditable, comparable, and risk-budgetable "financial infrastructure cash flow": compliance moats and settlement network effects are no longer just concepts but are directly reflected in the elevation of valuation centers through issuance pricing and sustained secondary absorption. At the same time, Circle also validated the typical "buying method" of the US stock market for such assets ------ when the window opens, a small circulating supply combined with high-quality buyer demand amplifies price elasticity; however, after the window closes, valuations quickly revert to fundamental realizations, with cyclical sensitivity and profit quality differentiation. This also constitutes our core reason for being optimistic about US stock market cryptocurrency company IPOs: the public market does not indiscriminately raise valuations, but it completes layering faster and more clearly, and once high-quality assets establish benchmark valuations in the public market, their capital costs will decrease, refinancing and acquisition currencies will strengthen, and the positive cycle of growth and compliance investment will be easier to realize ------ this is more important than short-term fluctuations.

Looking ahead to 2026, the market focus will shift from "whether a window exists" to "whether subsequent listing projects can continue to advance and form a more continuous issuance rhythm." According to current market expectations, potential candidates include Anchorage Digital, Upbit, OKX, Securitize, Kraken, Ledger, BitGo, Tether, Polymarket, Consensus, etc., totaling about 10 companies, covering a more complete industrial chain from custody and institutional compliance entry, trading platforms and brokerage channels, stablecoins and settlement bases, asset tokenization and compliant issuance infrastructure, to hardware security and new information markets. If these projects can continue to land in the public market and receive relatively stable capital absorption, their significance will not only be "a few more financings," but will further standardize investors' logic of buying into cryptocurrency companies: they will be more willing to pay premiums for compliance moats, risk control and governance, income quality, and capital efficiency, while also being quicker to filter through valuation centers and secondary performance during macro headwinds or weakened issuance conditions. Overall, we are optimistic about the directional trend of US stock market cryptocurrency company IPOs: 2025 has already validated the public market's absorption capacity through quantity, financing scale, and market re-pricing; if 2026 can maintain this trend of "continuous issuance + stable absorption," IPOs will resemble a sustainable capital cycle ------ pushing the industry further from "narrative-driven episodic markets" towards "sustainable pricing in the public market," and allowing companies with genuine compliance and cash flow quality to continuously expand their leading advantages at lower capital costs.

Industry Structural Differentiation and Product Line Formation: Internal Evolution of the Cryptocurrency Industry

To determine whether this public market path can continue and which companies are more likely to be "accepted" by the market, the key is not to reiterate "whether a window exists," but to return to the structural evolution that has already occurred within the industry in 2025: growth drivers are shifting from single-point narratives to multiple sustainable product lines, forming volatility and differentiation mechanisms closer to traditional risk assets under macro and regulatory constraints ------ it is within this mechanism that the capital market will decide which business models deserve a more stable valuation center and lower capital costs.

In 2025, the structural changes within the cryptocurrency industry became clearer than ever: market growth no longer primarily relies on the spillover of risk appetite driven by a single narrative but is jointly propelled by several more sustainable "product lines" ------ trading infrastructure is becoming more specialized, application forms are closer to mainstream finance, and funding entry points are becoming more compliant, gradually forming a closed loop across chains and off chains. Meanwhile, funding behavior and pricing rhythms are also more deeply integrated into the global risk asset framework: volatility resembles "risk budget rebalancing under macro windows," rather than the relatively independent market driven mainly by on-chain narratives and internal liquidity cycles. For practitioners, this means that the focus of discussion shifts from "which narrative will explode" to "which products can stably generate transactions, retain liquidity, and withstand stress tests from macro volatility and regulatory constraints."

Within this framework, the traditional "four-year cycle of cryptocurrency" further weakened in 2025. The cyclical logic has not disappeared, but its explanatory power has been significantly diluted: ETFs, stablecoins, corporate treasuries, and other channels have brought larger volumes of funds into observable and rebalancable asset allocation systems; at the same time, interest rates and dollar liquidity boundaries have become harder constraints, making risk budgeting, leverage pricing, and deleveraging paths closer to traditional markets. The result is that upswings increasingly rely on the resonance of "macro risk appetite + net inflows," while downswings are more easily amplified in "tightening liquidity + deleveraging." The performance of various sectors throughout the year resembles a collaborative evolution: what truly drives structural upgrades is not a single narrative explosion, but the continuous thickening of funding entry points and trading scenarios through stablecoin expansion, deepening derivatives, and event contracts, while simultaneously reinforcing risk transmission.

Stablecoins in 2025 exhibited two main lines advancing simultaneously but at different paces: one is "compliance certainty elevation," and the other is "cyclical volatility of yield models." The key to the former is that with the emergence of compliance frameworks and more comparable market samples, the business models of stablecoins are more easily priced by mainstream funds based on cash flows and risk attributes; the latter is reflected in yield-type/synthetic dollars being highly sensitive to basis, hedging costs, and risk budgets, showing significant contractions after expansion. Taking Ethena's USDe as an example, its supply fell from a high of approximately $14.8 billion in early October to around $6-7 billion by the end of the year, validating its structural attributes of "expanding in favorable winds, contracting in adverse winds."

The upgrade of trading infrastructure accelerated in 2025, centered around on-chain derivatives. Platforms like Hyperliquid continuously approached the engineering standards of centralized exchanges in terms of depth, matching, capital efficiency, and risk control experience, achieving a monthly transaction volume of approximately $300 billion, indicating that on-chain derivatives have the foundational capacity for large-scale carrying. Meanwhile, new entrants like Aster and Lighter have driven the sector from "single platform dividends" to "market share competition" through product structure, fees, and incentive systems. The essence of competition lies not in short-term trading volumes but in whether usable depth, clearing order, and stable risk frameworks can be maintained during extreme market conditions; the expansion of derivatives has also made volatility more "macro-oriented" ------ when interest rates and risk appetites switch, on-chain and off-chain deleveraging often synchronizes and accelerates.

Prediction markets expanded from crypto-native applications to a broader event contract market in 2025, becoming a new incremental trading scenario. Platforms like Polymarket saw significant increases in participation and trading volume; monthly trading volume grew from less than $100 million in early 2024 to over $13 billion in November 2025, with sports and politics becoming the main categories. Its deeper significance lies in that event contracts transform macro and public issues into tradable probability curves, naturally adapting to media dissemination and information distribution, making it easier to form cross-layer user entry points and further strengthen the coupling of crypto with macro variables (and even political variables).

Overall, the structural upgrade in 2025 is pushing the industry from "narrative-driven price discovery" towards "product-driven capital organization." The layering of stablecoins, the infrastructuralization of on-chain derivatives, and the scenarization of event contracts collectively expand funding entry points and trading scenarios, allowing for faster and more systematic risk transmission; against the backdrop of enhanced macro and interest rate constraints, the market cycle structure further aligns with mainstream risk assets, and the explanatory power of the four-year cycle continues to weaken.

Dual Main Lines of Stablecoins: Compliance Certainty and Yield Cycles

In 2025, stablecoins upgraded from on-chain trading mediums to the dollar settlement layer and funding base of the crypto system, completing a clear layering: USDT/USDC continue to form the mainstream fiat stablecoin "cash layer," providing a liquidity network covering global transactions and settlements; USDe/USDF and other yield-type/synthetic dollars resemble "efficiency tools" driven by risk appetite and basis, exhibiting significant cyclicality in expansion and contraction.

The most direct signal throughout the year is the substantial thickening of the on-chain dollar base: the total supply of stablecoins expanded from approximately $20.5 billion to over $30 billion, highly concentrated in the top tier (near the end of the year, USDT was approximately $186.7 billion, USDC approximately $77 billion); issuers collectively held approximately $155 billion in US Treasury bonds, making stablecoins closer to a "tokenized cash + short-duration Treasury" infrastructure combination. The usage side also strengthened: stablecoins accounted for approximately 30% of on-chain cryptocurrency trading volume, with cumulative on-chain activity exceeding $4 trillion throughout the year, and payment-type on-chain transaction volumes estimated at $20-30 billion per day, with real demand for cross-border settlements and fund transfers continuing to rise.

On the institutional level, the GENIUS Act, which took effect in July, incorporated payment-type stablecoins into licensing issuance, 1:1 reserves, redemption, and disclosure requirements, and set access paths for overseas issuers, beginning to institutionalize the pricing of "compliance premiums": USDC benefited more from enhanced compliance and institutional availability, while USDT should not simply be classified as a compliant stablecoin under the US framework, as its advantages lie in the global liquidity network, but its availability in the US market will depend more on implementation details and channel compliance.

The yield-type sector has also completed repositioning: taking Ethena's USDe as an example, its supply fell from approximately $14.8 billion in early October to around $6-7 billion by the end of the year, validating its structural attributes of "expanding in favorable winds, contracting in adverse winds."

Looking ahead to 2026, stablecoins remain the most certain growth track: competition among mainstream fiat stablecoins will shift from scale to channels and settlement networks, while yield-type products will continue to provide liquidity in favorable winds but will be priced more strictly based on stress tests and redemption resilience.

Upgrades of On-Chain Derivative Platforms and Share Wars

In 2025, on-chain perpetual contracts transitioned from "available products" to the infrastructure stage of "capable of supporting mainstream trading": matching and latency, margin and clearing mechanisms, risk parameters and risk control interactions are increasingly approaching the engineering standards of centralized exchanges, and on-chain derivatives began to possess the capacity to divert mainstream transactions and participate in price discovery during certain periods. Meanwhile, funding and risk transmission became more "macro-oriented": during the window of shifts in US stock market risk appetite and interest rate expectations, the volatility and deleveraging rhythms of on-chain perpetual contracts became more easily synchronized with traditional risk assets, significantly increasing the market cycle's sensitivity to "macro liquidity --- risk budgeting."

A sustainable and trackable "on-chain derivatives market" has formed at the scale level. As of the end of 2025, the 30-day trading volume of on-chain perpetual contracts was approximately $1.081 trillion, with the total market open interest around $15.4 billion, reflecting that this sector has the capacity for large-scale trading and risk exposure on a regular basis. Leading platforms still occupy the core mindset of "depth and risk control," but the logic of competition underwent substantial changes in 2025: the competition for market share no longer primarily relies on subsidies and the speed of listing, but rather shifts towards depth, open interest accumulation, and the stability of clearing order during extreme market conditions. For example, Hyperliquid had an open interest of approximately $6.88 billion and a 30-day trading volume of approximately $180.4 billion, reflecting "stronger risk exposure accumulation + relatively stable trading scale."

Fortunately, new entrants in the second half of 2025 were no longer just conceptual challengers but joined the competition with quantifiable data, rewriting the share structure: Lighter had a 30-day trading volume of approximately $233.2 billion, a cumulative trading volume of approximately $1.272 trillion, and an open interest of approximately $1.65 billion; Aster had a 30-day trading volume of approximately $194.4 billion, a cumulative trading volume of approximately $811.7 billion, and an open interest of approximately $2.45 billion. According to open interest rankings, Hyperliquid, Aster, and Lighter are now in the top three (approximately $6.88 billion / $2.41 billion / $1.60 billion), indicating that the sector has entered a mature stage of "multi-platform parallel competition."

Source: DeFiLlama / Trading Volume of On-Chain Perpetual Contracts

For the industry, the competition in on-chain perpetual contracts in 2025 has entered the "quality and resilience pricing" stage ------ trading volumes can be amplified by short-term incentives, but the scale of open interest, the sustainability of fees/income, and the performance of risk control during extreme market conditions better reflect the real capital residence and platform stickiness. Looking ahead to 2026, the sector will likely evolve along two lines simultaneously: one is the continued increase in the penetration of on-chain derivatives; the other is that under fee compression and elevated risk control thresholds, the market will further concentrate on a few platforms that can maintain depth and clearing order over the long term. Whether new platforms can transition from scale sprinting to stable retention will depend on their capital efficiency and risk framework under stress tests, rather than just trading volume performance in a single phase.

Prediction Markets Transitioning from Crypto-Native to Event Contract Markets

In 2025, prediction markets completed an upgrade from the "event contracts (probability pricing)" foundation validated during the 2024 US presidential election to a more independent and sustainable trading scenario: they no longer primarily rely on short-term traffic brought by a single political event but instead leverage high-frequency/reusable contract categories such as sports, macro, and policy nodes to sediment "probability trading" into more stable trading demand and user habits. Due to the inherently externalized nature of the subjects of event contracts (macro data, regulatory bills, elections, and sports schedules), the activity of prediction markets significantly enhanced their correlation with shifts in US stock market risk appetite and interest rate expectations, further shifting the rhythm of industry applications from "internal crypto narrative cycles" to a function of "macro uncertainty × event density × risk budgeting."

From a data perspective, the prediction market sector saw exponential expansion in 2025: the total trading volume for the year was approximately $44 billion, with Polymarket accounting for about $21.5 billion and Kalshi about $17.1 billion, indicating that the scale of leading platforms is sufficient to support stable market making and category expansion. Growth exhibited clear event-driven peaks throughout the year: monthly nominal trading volume surged from less than $100 million in early 2024 to over $13 billion in a single month in 2025 (with November as a representative month), demonstrating that high-attention event windows possess strong elasticity. Structurally, prediction markets evolved from being "politically driven" to "sports high-frequency retention + multi-category event expansion": in November 2025, Kalshi's trading volume was approximately $5.8 billion, with about 91% coming from sports; the platform disclosed that its trading volume had reached over $1 billion per week, claiming over 1000% growth compared to 2024, reflecting that it has established a certain foundation for normalized trading.

Source: DeFiLlama / Overview of Prediction Market Data

Source: theblock.co / Trading Volume of Polymarket and Kalshi Markets

Combined with the aforementioned changes in capital structure and the industry changes brought by cryptocurrency company IPOs, the prediction market sector rapidly upgraded from "crypto entrepreneurship" to "financial infrastructure/data assets": Kalshi completed $1 billion in financing in December, with a valuation of approximately $11 billion, and in the previous two months, it completed $300 million in financing at a valuation of approximately $5 billion; at the same time, traditional market infrastructure players have begun to enter with heavy capital, with reports that ICE (the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange) plans to invest up to $2 billion in Polymarket, giving it a pre-investment valuation of approximately $8 billion. The common implication of these transactions is that event contracts are not only seen as "trading products" but also as market data, sentiment indicators, and risk pricing interfaces that can be integrated.

Looking ahead to 2026, prediction markets are likely to become one of the more "certain" structural increments in the crypto application layer: growth drivers will come from event density and information uncertainty, with commercialization closer to a combination of "transaction fees + data products + distribution channels." If compliance pathways, distribution entry points, and dispute resolution standards become clearer, prediction markets are expected to transition from episodic blockbusters to more normalized event risk trading and hedging tools; their long-term ceiling will primarily depend on three hard indicators: real depth (capable of carrying large amounts), reliable settlement and dispute governance, and controllable compliance boundaries.

Conclusion

Looking back at 2025, the core characteristics of the cryptocurrency market are the externalization of pricing frameworks and the deepening of channel competition: funding entry points shifted from an endogenous cycle driven by on-chain leverage and narratives to a multi-channel system jointly constituted by ETFs, stablecoin dollar bases, corporate treasuries, and equity channels (US stock market cryptocurrency company IPOs). The expansion of channels enhanced asset configurability and reinforced macro boundary conditions ------ market trends increasingly rely on the coordination of net inflows and financing windows, while drawdowns are more easily concentrated and released in deleveraging and clearing chains.

The internal structural evolution of the industry further corroborates this shift: stablecoins completed layering between "cash layers" and "efficiency tools," on-chain derivatives entered the stage of large-scale carrying and share competition, and prediction markets and event contracts formed more independent trading scenarios. More importantly, the return of IPOs has "securitized" cryptocurrency financial infrastructure into auditable, comparable, and exitable equity assets, allowing mainstream funds to participate in a more familiar manner and driving the valuation system towards "compliance moats, risk control governance, income quality, and capital efficiency" ------ this is the core basis for our optimism in this direction.

Looking ahead to 2026, the industry's slope is likely to depend on three variables: whether institutional channels can continue, whether capital retention is sustainable, and the resilience of leverage and risk control under stress scenarios. Among these, if US stock market cryptocurrency company IPOs can maintain more continuous advancement and stable absorption, they will continue to provide valuation anchors and financing flexibility, reinforcing the industry's migration towards sustainable pricing in the public market.