2025 Year in Review

Bullish:

• $COIN - Coinbase/Base ecosystem emerged as a major winner in 2025 with successful vertical integration and strong market position.

  • “Coinbase slash Base. I think they've done a phenomenal job of vertically integrating and just being the place where a lot of the new users are coming on chain.”

    Mike·38:44

  • “Robinhood and Coinbase now vertically integrating their own, like, prediction markets.”

    Myles·16:59
• $HOOD - Robinhood successfully expanding into crypto and prediction markets, showing strong execution.

  • “Robinhood, I think, has done a phenomenal job of just being a great product and continuing to execute.”

    Mike·1:08:27

  • “Robinhood and Coinbase now vertically integrating their own, like, prediction markets.”

    Myles·16:59
• $STABLES - Stablecoins experiencing massive adoption with every fintech considering implementation, derisked by regulatory clarity.

  • “stablecoins just everywhere. Right? Like, even every single fintech outside of crypto is thinking about stablecoins.”

    Myles·11:39

  • “white labeled, like, stablecoins as a service category emerged this year and, like, was was enormously derisked by the Genius Act”

    Myles·49:14

  • “this idea that every big fintech or every big institution will have its own stable coin, I think, is, like, becoming close to consensus now.”

    Myles·49:23
• $LAYERONE - New L1 launches becoming easier and more prevalent than rollups due to hidden complexity in building rollups.

  • “I think there's probably more, like, new, like, AppJL one, like, launches this year than than roll up launches.”

    Myles·26:52

  • “it's actually easier, you know, in a lot of ways to launch an l one.”

    Myles·27:06

Bearish:

• $OP - Optimism having a terrible year with talent exodus, broken superchain thesis, and being leapfrogged by competitors.

  • “I think it was a really bad year for optimism.”

    Myles·22:04

  • “pretty much everything outside of base is not doing great, which means that the super chain thesis is, like, kind of in shambles right now.”

    Myles·22:09

  • “they've lost a ton of talent to other projects like, you know, Tempo.”

    Myles·22:20

  • “ZK Sync is leapfrogging them and things like that”

    Myles·22:37

  • “the roll up thesis, roll up centric road map is in a, you know, delicate spot.”

    Myles·22:44
• $INFRA - Infrastructure as a category facing massive challenges with overfunding, broken mental models, and need for consolidation.

  • “I called the whole infra as a category the loser of 2025.”

    Mike·23:11

  • “there was just a mass amount of overfunding. There were broken mental models.”

    Mike·23:42

  • “I think that's collapsing. And I think that people now understand there's gonna be consolidation and they're gonna be valued just like regular businesses.”

    Mike·24:05
• $CRYPTOGAMING - Crypto gaming continues to be a massive loser despite huge capital raises, delivering very little value.

  • “gaming as a category. Crypto gaming, someone posted on a crypto Twitter a few days ago, like, some of the amounts of dollars raised is just insane, And the amount of value that delivered is, is, is very, very little.”

    Xavier·25:37

  • “not sure if that will ever play a role within crypto, but at least for now it's a huge loser”

    Xavier·25:50
• $BTC - Bitcoin ecosystem outside of ETFs failing to deliver on promises, with L2s being extremely difficult to build.

  • “the Bitcoin ecosystem and everything outside of people that just, like, hold Bitcoin in ETFs.”

    Myles·39:38

  • “The whole, like, promise of doing anything DeFi related or anything, you know, like, scalable building apps on on Bitcoin... it just continues to not happen.”

    Myles·39:48

  • “Babylon has had a tough year. They were trying to make Bitcoin staking, you know, a category.”

    Myles·40:18

  • “The l twos, like, it's really, really hard to build an l two on Bitcoin in the first place just as like a engineering challenge.”

    Myles·40:25