State Of Crypto 2025 | a16z Crypto — Eddy Lazzarin & Daren Matsuoka
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Bankless station, we are very excited. This has become an annual tradition, so we're doubly excited to do this, every year. The state of crypto in 2025, we've got two fine folks from a sixteen z crypto, Eddie Lazarin and also Darren Massocca. He is a partner at a sixteen z. He leads, data science and strategy. Eddie, of course, is CTO. Okay. Let's get into the state of crypto for 2025. We'll start with this slide here, which is our cycle slide. We've got total crypto market cap. We always like to look at price. That is all time high, at least up until recently. We've got crypto developers. We'
I think the way that we have always approached this space, you know, of course, there's many lenses, you know, that you can look through to try to see where we're at in the cycle, you know, one being, you know, the the macro environment, which we think is very important. But I think our perspective on the market has always been rooted and defined by kind of this feedback loop that we call the price innovation cycle. And the feedback loop really is kind of between the prices, which generate interest, the developers, which come in as a result of that interest, and then the products that they bui
I think the developer count, Ryan called it flat. I'll call it dwindling since 2022, has been kinda just this thing in the background that's really defined what is felt like to be in crypto over the last few years. And I wanna pair this with the next slide. Bitcoin still 50% of market cap is the the next slide that we're gonna talk about. You guys have it highlighted as Bitcoin still dominates. Now this slide has just a huge story in it. And if you were to extrapolate some of the first early years of this slide, you would think that, like, Bitcoin dominance is going to inevitably approach, you
Well, there's a lot of factors at play. Right? So charts trying to explain in, like, one or two sentences is not possible. But I'd say that here's generally how I think about it. I don't think of Bitcoin as stabilizing here. Right? I think of Bitcoin as continuing its feedback loop as developing and establishing itself as a store of value, as something like, look at look at gold, for example. We have a little comparison with gold, but not a time series on gold. Gold has done really, really well over the last two years if you were to look at the price graph. I think if you think of and you beli
It's funny you say that, Eddie, because if bit Bitcoin is kind of a proxy for gold, you'd sort of expect it to trade or, like, price, you know, more correlated with gold. And yet you guys have a slide here, which is, like, sometimes it does that. But most of the time, it's more correlated with stocks, actually, in the Nasdaq. Is this the market trying to figure out whether Bitcoin is sort of a a tech play like the Nasdaq or whether it's a debasement trade like gold and it's just in the process, the messy process of deciding what it is, or maybe it'll always be both. How do you explain the the
It's tough to explain, but I will say this is that Bitcoin is even if you fully buy the theory that Bitcoin is like a digital gold, it's not a pure digital gold. Right? It's digital gold with some layers on top. It has this this weird cypherpunk origin. It has this current sort of culture, which has proliferated into several different forms. It had a regulatory climate where there was no access to ETFs. All of a sudden, there was access to ETFs. People thought that that might never happen, then it definitely did happen. Right? There was the backdrop that the SEC kind of begrudgingly recognized
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