IS IT OVER?! The Crypto Market’s Uncertain Future in 2025

the crypto Market is at a Crossroads BTC has fallen to a level not seen since November and those postelection gains are starting to look very threadbear we wanted alt season we got altcoin armagedon the US government is now a cabal of Crypt Bros but macroeconomic uncertainty is shaking the markets it's a confusing time now to make sense of where we are in the market it helps to look back on how we got here so today we break down a new report that does just that analyzing Trends in crypto's capital flows derivatives growth retail behavior and of course memes my name is guy and if you want to stay on top of the markets this is a video you can't afford to miss today's report is the 2025 Gemini glass node Market Trend report and as the name suggests it's a collaboration between the centralized crypto exchange Gemini founded by the winkl Vos twins in 2014 and glass node one of crypto's top onchain analytics providers since 2017 to be precise the report was published by and bears Gemini's name but it was authored by glass node data analysts now research reports of this kind often cover Market developments during a single year or even a single quarter but this one has a slightly longer time Horizon this is clear from the start as the report begins with a look back at the cycle low of 2022 this was crypto's Rock Bottom in a brutal bare Market that's thankfully now long in the past it was a year when macroeconomic headwinds dovetailed with the collapse of Luna FTX Celsius blockfi and others bringing crypto into existential crisis territory BTC fell below $116,000 eth hit $1,100 and before the year was over Soul dropped under $10 if you bought fought and held BTC or Soul since then congratulations you've nerves of Steel and you're probably rich now a toast in particular is in order for soul which has outperformed BTC and eth on 344 out of 727 trading days since November 2022 for the rest of us let's not dwell on it we'll only give ourselves nightmares instead look at what a remarkable comeback crypto has staged since then the report illustrates this using What's called the realized cap of BTC soul and eth to show how far we've come since January 2023 now realized cap isn't a term you hear every day in crypto and it's quite different from market cap whereas market cap is just price multiplied by Supply realized cap is the cumulative sum of all realized profits minus realized losses this measures the actual money invested in an asset set by tracking the price at which each coin last moved in other words realized cap is the aggregate inflow of capital into an asset so here we can see that from January 2023 to January 2025 btc's realized cap grew by 121% from $381 billion to $843 billion Souls realized cap grew by 295 from $21 billion to $83 billion and eths grew by a whopping uh 45% from $176 billion to $256 billion eth underperformance aside it's amazing how far crypto has come looking back on bitcoin's Journey from the bare Market bottom to now consolidating near $100,000 makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside but unfortunately the further we get from the previous bare Market the closer we get to the next one so we'd be wise to let triumphalism turn to caution at some point because one day the top will be in and suffice to say it's a long way down from the top of course now we have the confounding influence of the US government being reborn as crypto-friendly this is very positive for crypto per se and it feels like a spanner in the works for the Bears we're just weeks into the new Trump Administration which will now be humming along in the background for the next four years however whether a pro crypto US government is enough to prolong crypto's historical Market cycles of boom and bust remains to be seen we don't have a crystal ball but we are pretty sure that the next bare Market will arrive under a very Pro crypto Trump Administration and this will likely catch a lot of permes with their trousers down hey everyone sorry to interrupt the video but I just want to very quickly tell you about the coin Bureau deals page this is the place where we put together all the amazing deals and promos that we're able to offer you guys exclusively as viewers of this channel head on over and you will find such things as discounts on Hardware wallets some seriously impressive trading fee discounts on some of the best exchanges as well as some frankly mindboggling signup bonuses for some of those exchanges too the link is down below check it out when you have a moment thank me later and now back to the video now the second Trend covered in this report is almost certainly how the current market cycle will be remembered meme coins the first few weeks of 20125 have been a real bloodbath for memes but they had an incredible run last year attracting the greatest share of capital in the altcoin universe of course no discussion of the memec coin Mania of 2024 would be complete without salana last year speculators flocked to the salana casino where fast transactions and low fees combined with userfriendly infrastructure like the Phantom wallet to establish a spiritual home for memecoins once and for all you can see the scale of this phenomenon from the daily active address count on salana ethereum and Bitcoin the price of Soul began a parabolic Ascent in October 2023 and shortly after the number of daily active addresses on salana broke out from the sub 1 million range that it previously shared with Bitcoin and ethereum but it wasn't until September 2024 that salana active addresses exited the stratosphere completely now Soul did begin a new rally around this time but the real Bull Run came after the US election in November as such the velocity of sana's address count increase in September is intriguing I'll remind you that pump. fun launched in January 2024 and salana memes went on an insane tear for the following two months but this wasn't accompanied by any explosion of active addresses comparable to what happened in September so if you think you know what sparked the Autumn increase in addresses do let us know in the comments now Solana's daily active addresses pulled back in January of this year settling at around 12. 3 million which is still 16.

2 X more than Bitcoin and 24. 6 X more than ethereum of course Bitcoin is not a smart contract blockchain and despite Innovations like runes and ordinals the chain does not have a real ecosystem to speak of as such comparing salana and Bitcoin in this regard is apples and oranges and what about ethereum it's distinct enough from salana to occupy a different Market Niche specifically ethereum's deep liquidity and relative decentralization appeal to Wales and institutions as evidenced by the high proportion of high value transactions happening on chain meanwhile sana's low costs high speed and ease of use are well suited to onboarding more casual speculators but despite these differences it's hard to ignore the fact that both are smart contract layer one blockchains competing for online mind share ethereum will soon be celebrating its 10th birthday and has a much larger and more well-established ecosystem of daps and yet salana has 25 times as many daily active addresses that is kind of nuts there are two caveats here though firstly a large proportion of salana addresses are sibles meaning clusters of wallets that belong to a single entity and thus do not all represent distinct users ethereum has sibles too but sana's extremely low transaction costs make it much cheaper to generate and fund large numbers of wallets secondly ethereum's daily active addresses count has stagnated as activity has migrated to its many layer twos it would be useful to see the daily active address count for ethereum plus its layer twos but somehow I doubt this would close the gap with salana given that there have been multiple reports of salana flipping ethereum and its layer tws combined and if Network address numbers haven't got you convinced just look at onchain volume ethereum settles 5 billion dollar worth of transactions per day Bitcoin does $22 billion a day salana meanwhile is settling $37 billion worth of transactions every single day that's an insane amount of volume especially considering that it's mostly memec coin trading just look at this chart just like sana's daily active address count Soul transfer volume began a parabolic increase around late September or October 2024 it appears that Soul transfer volume 10x or more in a short space of time and then retraced almost the entire increase you have to wonder what happened here because the size of this move is just enormous and if you need any more proof of salana memec coin Supremacy you can compare the performance of the top memes on salana to those on ethereum the combined market cap of top ethereum memes ship and pepe grew 45% from 12. 78 billion to $8.

4 billion meanwhile sana's Bonk and whff increased by 477 from $91 million to $4. 3 billion now of course this different rate of growth should come as no surprise as both shib and pepe had much greater market caps to begin with this means that more capital is required to move the needle so to speak they're much more liquid and less volatile than solanes and as such they attract more institutional Capital flows however if you're not a crypto whale it's hard not to look at that 477 increase enjoyed by Bonk and whiff and think dang those dogs could have retired me of course the volatility of Il liquid small cap memes goes in both directions and for every person who got rich flipping memes on salana last year there are probably several others who lost a lot of money trying to pull off the same trick now the third Trend highlighted in the report is derivatives trading whose volumes reached New Heights in 2024 after Bitcoin broke above $100,000 for the first time 24-hour Futures Trading volume across BTC eth and soul raced to a new all-time high of $120 billion this represents a level of demand comparable to the peak of the 2021 bull run it also represents an enormous buildup of Leverage in the market and you know what that means liquidation events waiting to happen price movements in a highly levered Market tend to be Amplified as Traders positions are liquidated and they're forced to sell or buy on mass for a clearer view into leverage buildup we can look at open interest a measure of the total amount of funds allocated in open Futures contracts from January 2024 to January 2025 bitcoin's open interest Grew 216% From 16. 1 billion to 50.

9 billion ethereum oi increased by 196% from 6. 7 billion to $19. 8 billion and surprise surprise salana experienced the largest relative growth at $2 192% with open interest swelling from $1.

3 billion to 5. 1 billion do another Trend we can observe from this section of the report meanwhile is the sustained dominance of eth over soul on centralized exchanges previously we saw how adoption of the salana blockchain far outstripped both ethereum and Bitcoin in 2024 but when it comes to crypto trading on centralized exchanges Soul remains in a distant third across various metrics despite eth's very long-term underperformance its market cap is still far far bigger than that of Soul ethereum fans won't have to worry about eth losing its second place spot in the crypto Market any time soon or at least not to Sol anyway which would have to get through xrp first and a final metric from the Futures markets highlighted in the report is funding rates if you're not familiar this is the interest rate paid between traders of Perpetual Futures contracts the rate is determined by the deviation of the per contract price from the spot market price if it deviates higher funding rates will be positive meaning that long Traders pay short traders to keep their own long positions open if it deviates lower funding rates will be negative and shorts will pay Longs as the report points out funding rates across BTC eth and soul have expanded over the past year and now indicate a universal long bias in the market this Accords with the broadly bullish sentiment going into 2025 and suggests the market wants to climb higher however as I mentioned a moment ago a buildup of Leverage Longs creates fertile ground for Liquidations in these conditions if the market crashes it crashes hard you can also see on the chart here that funding rates tend to spike deeply into positive or negative territory from time to time these spikes indicate Market extremes but they also tell us about the liquidity of the asset concerned less liquid assets may be more prone to deviations in price between the spot and derivatives Market case in point Soul its funding rate experiences swings far greater than those seen for eth and BTC which are much more liquid and therefore less prone to price dislocation next the report highlights Regional Trends in the crypto Market beginning with the relationship between US presidential elections and btc's price performance here we have a beautiful graph that inspires confidence in the bull case for 2025 it shows us how the 6 months before the election have historically exhibited low volatility and relative stability in the price of BTC this is suggestive of Market participants treading carefully in the face of uncertainty by contrast the 6 months after elections are usually periods of high volatility and price expansion we can see here that six months after the 2016 presidential election BTC was up 100% 6 months after the 2020 election it was up 300% so what of the 2024 election this graph is just begging for us to draw a squiggly line pointing to a 1,000% gain in 2025 right well as much as we would love to do that the data we're working from include only two previous elections so it would be wise not to assume based on this limited sample that massive upside is programmed into the market for 2025 it could happen and we sure hope it does but it's important to remember that in the crypto Market nothing has to happen for what it's worth we're significantly underperforming the post 2020 election period will we catch up or is it so over only time will tell now the second Regional Trend highlighted in the report is an interesting and underd discussed one among retail Market participants the dominance of the US is subsiding to the rise of retail in the Asia Pacific region this trend is obscured by the massive footprint of Western institutions on the crypto Market since the launch of spot BTC and eth ETFs over the last year of course institutional Capital flows into crypto are one of the biggest stories of the last few years and these are mostly us institutions however if we remove these institutions and crypto exchanges from onchain data we can observe Trends in the retail Market glass node has done this using bitcoin's year-over-year Supply change they timestamped all Bitcoin transactions created by individual entities I. E users and sorted them based on the working hours of different geographical regions of the world the result is a graph that shows an inverse correlation between the US where BTC supply has been declining and APAC where supply has been increasing both at a steady Pace since early 2022 according to Glass Noe since the cycle low of 22 APAC has enjoyed year-on-year Supply growth of 6.

4% whereas the US supply has shrunk by 5. 7% meanwhile Europe has been stagnating with Supply down 0.