Blocktrend 2025 Year-End Review: Most Popular Articles, and Is Crypto “Dead”?
GM,
This is Blocktrend’s final article of 2025. The next time we meet, it will be 2026. Wishing everyone a happy New Year—and thank you for spending your increasingly scarce attention on Blocktrend over the past year. I owe it to you to live up to that trust.
Year-End Reviews from Previous Years: 2024｜2023｜2022｜2021
Every year toward the end of December, the internet fills up with all kinds of annual forecasts. Yet very few people ever look back to see how many of their predictions at the start of the year actually came true. If forecasts don’t have to be accountable to outcomes, then we might as well let AI write them, right? Let’s start by reviewing a few sets of numbers.
Year-End Review
In 2025, Blocktrend published a total of 86 articles, 32 podcast episodes, and 3 videos. The top three most popular articles were:
- Owlting Goes Public in the U.S.! From E-commerce and Hospitality to Payments—A Stablecoin Meme Stock Wrapped in Storytelling
- Hitting All Three Major DeFi Pitfalls at Once: Hacks, Bad Debt, and Liquidity Drought—A Million-Dollar Lesson
- Not Just EasyCard: Are McDonald’s Stored-Value Cards Also Stablecoins? Understanding Three Major Blockchain Myths Through a Curve Article
My personal favorite was this one:
The Forgotten 402: How It Became the Most Important Payment Gateway in the AI Era
Readers are most willing to like and engage with topics that resonate emotionally. I, on the other hand, tend to prefer content focused on technology and real-world applications. But in 2025, most of the progress in applications was concentrated on the enterprise side, making it difficult for retail participants in crypto to get involved. I pointed this out at the beginning of the year in “The 2025 Timeline of Major Events”:
The market sentiment I felt at the start of 2025 was cautiously optimistic—different from last year’s sense that “the future looks undeniably bright.” … Three major events were set to unfold this year: FTX repayments, Ethereum upgrades, and innovation under regulatory oversight. These would respectively affect prices, applications, and regulation. … They all sound like good news, so why did I say I felt a bit uneasy? Because, for now, I couldn’t see a clear central theme for this bull market, unlike previous cycles with DeFi or NFTs …
Looking back now, it almost feels like I had a crystal ball at the start of the year 😂
Over the past year, we saw crypto prices hit new highs, technology go through repeated upgrades, and even regulation—once seemingly immovable—loosen significantly. Strangely, the “big moments” many people were expecting never really arrived. Instead, we collectively witnessed stablecoins (and the blockchains behind them) quietly seeping into everyday applications, much like the internet once did.
This has left many people feeling increasingly confused. Is the endgame for crypto really to become the underlying infrastructure for Visa, Stripe, and banks? An annual reflection titled “Crypto Is Dead” captured this collective anxiety with striking precision.
Tools Taking Root
At first glance, the title might suggest the author is writing off the crypto space, but the content is actually quite positive. The core message is that if you expect the entire world to eventually “join crypto,” you’re likely to be disappointed. That’s because the boundaries of the crypto world are disappearing, as it enters everyday life in a different form—users no longer need to understand blockchain to enjoy the convenience it brings:
Developers who once served only the crypto niche, relying on points systems and tokenomics to attract on-chain users, will be phased out. The future winners will be teams that start from real-world needs, hide the technical details of blockchain behind the scenes, and are willing to put in the hard work in “boring” domains. … Investors are no longer drawn to zero-sum, purely crypto-native internal competition. … Only those who can embed their products into the real economy and create external demand will succeed in the future.
The crypto space is a kind of multiverse. One group is obsessed with slicing crypto into various “tracks” such as RWA or DePIN, as if betting on the right narrative guarantees that the entire world will eventually pile in, pushing prices ever higher. But looking back at 2025, nearly all of these hot tracks collapsed. Neither users nor capital showed up. For this group, the experience surely feels like “crypto is dead.”
For another group, however, this year felt more like tools taking root. Before 2025, cryptocurrencies were hardly usable tools—high technical barriers, poor user experience, and exclusion by existing systems made them impractical. This year, many of these issues were gradually resolved, allowing blockchain to finally step outside the crypto bubble and become a technology genuinely adopted by large enterprises.
That said, this also gives the impression that crypto is being “absorbed” by Web2. The technology is now usable, but people have yet to figure out truly Web3-native business models. As a result, we see Visa, Stripe, and banks successively integrating blockchain to strengthen their existing business models. By contrast, most crypto-native applications are still far from maturity.
This is deeply awkward. Even if large enterprises are adopting blockchain, with gas fees now so cheap (and likely to get even cheaper), the crypto consumed by corporate transfers is negligible. If this is the endgame, blockchain entrepreneurs might as well pack up and go home—or simply work for big companies instead—unless they can discover new business models.
Searching for Fertile Ground
a16z partner and Read Write Own author Chris Dixon has pointed out that the development of new technologies typically unfolds in two stages. The first stage focuses on “doing old things more efficiently,” while the second stage is about creating “entirely new demands and patterns of behavior.”
Every new computing platform starts by doing old things better, then enables entirely new things.
Email was originally created to replace physical mail, prized for being faster and free. In the beginning, users mostly wrote emails to friends and family they already knew. Few could have imagined that decades later, email would give rise to paid subscription media like Blocktrend, delivering content directly to readers’ inboxes around the world. Email no longer just saved on postage—it created entirely new forms of business activity.
Today’s blockchain is still in the phase of “making sending letters cheaper.” On the positive side, it has already proven its value. On the downside, it has yet to find the kind of “fertile ground” that can sustain long-term growth. If you ask crypto founders how to make money without trading or issuing tokens, most would probably struggle to give an answer.
As we head into 2026, what I’m most eager to see is no longer which company adopts crypto next, but how entrepreneurs will cultivate unexpected new possibilities in a completely new market environment. Surviving in the crypto space is, in itself, a form of long-term discipline and self-cultivation.
