Research Report 2025 Crypto in Review – 12 Months, 12 Narratives

Tiger Research’s year-end report reflects on 2025’s cryptocurrency market, characterized by rapid narrative turnover. While many themes flared brightly only to fade quickly, a select few took root—driving genuine structural progress and reshaping the industry.

Core Insights

• 2025 saw unprecedented narrative velocity, leaving participants fatigued and increasingly skeptical.
• Most stories consumed short-term attention without building lasting infrastructure.
• Beyond speculator-driven trends, more accessible narratives emerged, broadening retail participation—a meaningful long-term shift.

1. Narratives, Narratives, and More Narratives

The defining feature of 2025 was the astonishing speed of narrative cycling. Market attention shifted to the next story before the current one could be fully validated.

(Sources: Tiger Research)

Meme coins orchestrated the most dramatic turns. Waves built around Trump, Musk, and Sydney Sweeney drew frenzied interest, pulling focus in rapid succession.

The issue: most proved one-off spectacles. They devoured short-term hype but failed to construct sustainable industry foundations. Some participants even fabricated narratives for quick profits. The outcome—growing exhaustion and deepening doubt among market players.

Not all narratives ended in burnout. A handful established themselves as real industries, meaningfully advancing crypto’s evolution. This report examines the major 2025 narratives, extracting lessons from what endured and what evaporated.

2. Key Takeaways from 2025’s Narratives

2.1. Retention Matters More Than Acquisition

Meme coins captured the lion’s share of attention. Their simplicity attracted newcomers who previously viewed crypto as too complex or dismissive.

Platforms like Moonshot lowered entry barriers, triggering tidal waves of fresh users.

Yet most departed as quickly as they arrived—chasing fast gains and exiting just as fast. Activity rarely spilled into other services or created lasting effects. Markets saw massive inflows but only transient heat.

The lesson: proper catalysts plus low friction can drive mass onboarding, as meme coins proved. But inflows alone are insufficient. Without reasons to stay, growth remains unsustainable. Retention remains the central challenge.

2.2. InfoFi’s Dual Nature

2025 marked serious adoption of InfoFi. Platforms like Kaito thrived as users embraced incentivized information production, drawing retail deeper into markets.

Limitations surfaced quickly. Content quality is inherently subjective and hard to quantify, yet incentives demand objective metrics. This gradually warped behavior—prioritizing sensationalism over accuracy.

X transformed from knowledge repository to billboard-like space.

InfoFi demonstrated potential to spark information creation. But it left an open question: how to fairly measure and reward quality? Without solving this, InfoFi risks amplifying noise rather than enriching discourse.

2.3. Privacy Becomes Essential

Institutional capital accelerated inflows, shifting markets from retail to institutional dominance. Privacy emerged as a priority—not coincidence.

On-chain transparency, long hailed as crypto’s strength, became a liability for institutions exposing strategies.

Traditional finance’s rising off-exchange volume reflects similar unease with full visibility.

Transparency doesn’t benefit all participants equally. As institutional debates intensify, privacy moves from peripheral to core requirement.

2.4. Crypto Demonstrates Product-Market Fit

2025 was the year crypto moved beyond abstract promise to tangible applications. Stablecoins, x402, and prediction markets—despite differences—share a common edge: leveraging crypto’s borderless, trust-minimized properties to solve real problems.

Their strength: enabling transactions and outcome verification without centralized authority. In global, multi-party settings, crypto facilitates exchange and validation where legacy systems struggle.

These examples don’t prove universal applicability. But they show clear relative advantage when crypto’s unique traits align with problem structures—2025’s first sharp illustration of those conditions.

3. Rapid Cycles and What Endures

2025 produced an unusual volume of narratives. Attention jumped before validation, leaving many stories consumed and discarded. Given the pace, the year risks appearing wasted.

Dismissing it entirely would be mistaken. Short-lived narratives fueled parallel experimentation; institutions quietly positioned. Trends transcended pure speculation. More retail-friendly stories emerged and scaled, widening the participant base—a profound shift.

Fast-consumed narratives yielded no instant wins. Yet the process clarified viable architectures versus mirages. Now is the time to build on those lessons for the next phase.