Binance Research has released its Full-Year 2025 and Themes for 2026 report, detailing a year of historic milestones for the global crypto market alongside heightened volatility driven by macroeconomic forces. In 2025, total crypto market capitalization surpassed US$4T for the first time, while Bitcoin (BTC) reached a new all-time high, reflecting sustained institutional adoption, regulatory progress, particularly around stablecoins and the expansion of regulated investment products.

These structural advances unfolded against a backdrop of significant uncertainty. Tight and shifting monetary policy, trade tensions, geopolitical risks, and political disruption contributed to repeated risk-off episodes, producing a wide intra-year trading range of roughly 76%. Total market value fluctuated between ~US$2.4T and ~US$4.2T, and despite clear progress in market infrastructure and access, the crypto market ended 2025 down ~7.9%. The report notes that price formation during the year was increasingly shaped by macro conditions and traditional financial cycles rather than crypto-native adoption alone.

Bitcoin remained the focal point of capital concentration. While BTC reached new highs during the year, it ended 2025 modestly lower, underperforming gold and most major equity indices. Nevertheless, it sustained a market capitalization near ~US$1.8T and ~58–60% market dominance.

Across Layer 1 ecosystems, 2025 demonstrated that raw activity alone did not guarantee economic relevance. Ethereum retained leadership in developer activity and DeFi liquidity, but rollup-driven fee compression weighed on ETH’s relative performance versus BTC. Solana sustained high transaction volumes and daily active users, expanded stablecoin supply, generated meaningful protocol revenue, and secured U.S. spot ETF approval. BNB Chain capitalized on strong retail participation and real-world asset deployments, with BNB emerging as the best-performing major crypto asset. The report emphasizes that L1 differentiation increasingly depended on the ability to monetize recurring flows such as trading, payments, and institutional settlement.

Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem accounted for over 90% of Ethereum-related transaction execution in 2025, enabled by protocol upgrades that lowered data availability costs. Activity and fees, however, concentrated among a small number of rollups, notably Base and Arbitrum, while fragmentation across more than 100 rollups remained a constraint.

DeFi continued its shift toward “structural institutionalization.” Total value locked stabilized at US$124.4B, while RWA TVL reached US$17B, surpassing DEXs. Stablecoins emerged as core financial infrastructure, with market capitalization rising nearly 50% to over US$305B and average daily transaction volumes reaching US$3.54T. Protocol revenue climbed to US$16.2B, underscoring DeFi’s maturation into a cash-flow-generating sector.

Looking ahead, Binance Research identifies 2026 as a potential inflection point, driven by synchronized global monetary easing, fiscal stimulus, deregulation, and growing institutional participation. These forces are expected to support a liquidity-driven expansion across Bitcoin, stablecoins, tokenization, decentralized trading, and broader on-chain financial infrastructure.

To read the full report- https://public.bnbstatic.com/static/files/research/full-year-2025-and-themes-for-2026.pdf