Today we will take a look at Messari, the largest market analysis, data analysis and information provider in the cryptocurrency circle. They recently launched an overall report for 2025, which is divided into 2 chapters. The first part describes the current status of the basic environment, policies, etc. The second part describes the situation of each section. Let’s take a look at the essence of the content. Because the first part is relatively simple, we will skip it and go directly to the second part, which describes BTC, ETH, SOL, DEFI, AI, DEPIN, CEFI and other sections.
BTC sector
2024BTC Asset Review
After the announcement of the approval of the Bitcoin ETF in early January, the price of Bitcoin soared from about $40,000 to an all-time high of $75,000 in the first quarter of 2024. In the following months, the price of Bitcoin has been hovering between $50,000 and $70,000. Driven by Trump's victory in the election, Bitcoin once again hit a new all-time high, soaring to more than $100,000 for the first time in early December. Throughout the year, Bitcoin's market capitalization dominance in cryptocurrencies rose to about 55%, and it has hardly declined, so it can be seen that it is still in a bull market and the bull market has not gone.
Bitcoin ETFs have seen net inflows overall, with only outflows in April. Grayscale’s GBTC net outflows have been declining and are now almost negligible, while BlackRock’s IBIT remains the largest net buyer, with inflows of approximately $8 billion in November.
ETF issuers currently hold more than 1.1 million BTC. The two largest holders are Blackrock and Grayscale, holding 45% and 19% of the total, respectively.
Bitcoin ETFs are not the only structural driver of BTC this year. Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy (MSTR) continue to dollar-cost average into the asset, recently purchasing an additional $2.1 billion worth of BTC between Dec. 2 and Dec. 8, pushing BTC past the $100,000 milestone. The purchase brings their total holdings to approximately 420,000 BTC, second only to Binance, Satoshi, and ETF issuers in terms of ownership. Saylor’s commitment to Bitcoin has remained unwavering. In comments during MSTR’s third quarter earnings report in October, he revealed plans to raise $42 billion in new capital over the next three years to fund additional Bitcoin purchases.
MicroStrategy (MSTR) continues to leverage heavily through convertible bond issuance and regular stock offerings. As of early December, the company had retained approximately $9 billion from the recent $21 billion market issuance to purchase more BTC in the coming weeks.
Currently, MSTR's stock price has fallen to $280, which is 40% lower than its high of $480. But you should know that MSTR's stock price was only $40 in early 2024.
In fact, there are certain hidden dangers here, that is, leveraging to trade in cryptocurrencies. You see, institutions are actually also leveraging, but at least the leverage is not high. The current market value of MSTR is 70 billion, but the 1x leverage has not been added yet, which shows MicroStrategy's absolute confidence in the future price of cryptocurrencies.
Forecast for 2025: The current ETF inflows have far exceeded expectations, and Trump has also shown a positive attitude towards crypto assets, so it is likely that after Trump takes office, BTC will still have a good trend. We have interpreted these before.
Inscriptions & Runes
A milestone moment occurred in late 2022 when Casey Rodarmor made his first official inscription on mainnet, resulting in the Bitcoin inscription.
During the halving in April, Casey launched a follow-up protocol called Runes, which represents a new fungible token standard for Bitcoin, similar to ERC-20 on Ethereum. Like Ordinals, Runes are etched on top of the underlying BTC, but this time, the creators can allow for unit divisibility. The result is that for the first time in Bitcoin’s history, there are “altcoins” on the mainnet without making any changes to the underlying network.
But the result is, as we know, the inscriptions produced ordi and sats, but the runes did not produce any projects. However, two projects are mentioned here, DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON and PUPS•WORLD•PEACE. The current market value of DOGS is 65 million, and the current market value of PUPS•WORLD•PEACE is 100 million.
In recent days, the rune data has been skyrocketing, and the increase is much higher than the data in the report!
BitVM has been an important catalyst for innovation, providing a way to perform arbitrary computations off-chain and verify them on the Bitcoin mainnet, similar to the mechanism used by Ethereum rollups. This development brings the possibility of rollups, decentralized bridges, EVM-compatible smart contracts, and other foundational elements to Bitcoin that are common on today’s more feature-rich blockchains.
This year, CORE, Bitlayer, Rootstock, and Merlin Chain have led the programmable layers in TVL, and it remains to be seen whether they will develop into mature ecosystems.
Therefore, we need to pay attention to Bitcoin's second-layer network. We have talked about many Bitcoin second-layer network projects before.
Babylon was launched in the third quarter of that year and is the first staking protocol for Bitcoin, allowing BTC holders to stake their assets to protect other networks and earn rewards. Similar to Ethereum's EigenLayer, Babylon uses Bitcoin's huge economic security to achieve shared security in the Proof of Stake (PoS) network. Unlike the current form of BTC staking, Bitcoin remains on its mainnet and holders can delegate security without giving up control of their BTC.
Babylon has not yet been launched, and it is also a big project. We have talked about the airdrop series before. We will analyze this project after it goes online.
Outlook for 2025
As memecoins on Solana and Ethereum continue their upward trend, attention may eventually turn to Runes on Bitcoin, the largest blockchain by economic value. For Ordinals, any resurgence in NFT sentiment will likely include leading Ordinals collections such as Bitcoin Puppets and Node Monkes, which have formed communities on crypto social media.
ETH
Ethereum has not had a great year. Ethereum has often tried to position itself as a competitor to Bitcoin's hard money narrative. Bitcoin has a limited issuance, but Ethereum challenges this through negative inflation and a decreasing supply to become "ultra-sound money." However, Ethereum's supply has been inflated throughout 2024 due to low activity. Additionally, the ETH ETF had limited adoption at first and has only recently begun to gain momentum.
The Ethereum spot ETF was approved in July 2024, however, Ethereum ETF fund flows cannot match those of Bitcoin. TradFi experts predicted that ETH is "insignificant" compared to BTC for institutional investors, and they are correct. Ethereum's cumulative fund flows are only $33.6 billion, while Bitcoin's fund flows are $590 billion. However, fund flows have started to pick up recently, suggesting a possible turnaround and growing interest in ETH among institutional investors.
The highlight of Ethereum this year is the continued growth of Layer-2. By the end of 2024, Ethereum's rollup will expand Ethereum's throughput capacity by 15 times, with a cumulative throughput of about 200 transactions per second, while Ethereum is about 14 transactions per second.
The growth of L2 also means less activity on the Ethereum mainnet. The lack of mainnet activity means that Ethereum is experiencing sustained inflation for the first time since the merger.
Layer-2 has also led to fragmentation, worsening the user and developer experience. Multiple stopgap solutions have been implemented and even more have been proposed. Holistic and neutral-chain abstraction solutions like Particle Network and Polygon’s AggLayer are still in the early stages of implementation.
The Rollup roadmap works. In fact, it works so well that even fast chains like Solana are developing Rollups (or network extensions). Layer 2 designs allow for execution flexibility that native Layer 1 cannot match.
Currently, the best dapp solution is to choose L2 for better results, while L1 only needs to bear the consensus overhead.
If this assumption is true, then DA also becomes optional, and L1 may not have the ability to capture value. This issue is also explained here.
First, the most important issue for L1 is security. For DEFI projects, security is more important than any other indicator.
Second, Ethereum can also increase fees, such as native L1 rollups, or higher DA fees, or expand the base layer.
Finally, I am still very optimistic about Ethereum, because it has many paths to success to choose from. After all, whether it is market value, ecology, or developers, it is in a leading position.