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    8 crypto coins that defined 2025

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    8 crypto coins that defined 2025

    Key takeaways

    • 2025 marked a turning point for crypto, as investors prioritized real utility and institutional integration over hype-driven speculation.

    • Bitcoin’s performance was supported by US spot ETFs, keeping it near or above the $100,000 mark for much of the year despite market pullbacks.

    • Ether rebounded after an early-year slump, supported by growing institutional interest and renewed confidence following the Ether ETF approval.

    • Privacy coins, such as Zcash and Monero, saw fresh demand, fueled by tightening supply and rising interest in financial anonymity.

    2025 has been a remarkable year for crypto. It was the year the industry took a major step toward becoming an integral part of global finance. Instead of hype-driven tokens dominating the market, attention shifted to projects that delivered real economic value and onchain utility.

    This article explores the coins that stood out in 2025, not for the hype they generated but for the way they shaped the future of digital money.

    1. Bitcoin (BTC)

    Bitcoin’s (BTC) progress in 2025 was supported by the success of US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). These funds began trading in early 2024 and maintained strong institutional interest throughout the year.

    Bitcoin, which began the year at $93,425 on Jan. 1, 2025, climbed to $124,752 on Oct. 7 before slipping to $101,298 on Nov. 7. After crossing the $100,000 milestone several times in January and February, it briefly fell below the mark on Feb. 5 before rebounding above it on May 9 and maintaining levels above $100,000 through early November.

    At the start of November, Bitcoin experienced a slight decline, with its price falling to around $100,000, while the broader crypto market remained bearish. Still, the cryptocurrency has a history of rebounding after each downturn.

    Did you know? Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, released as open-source software in 2009. The first transaction took place that same January.

    2. Ether (ETH)

    The approval of spot Ether ETFs in the US on July 23, 2024, marked a turning point in how institutions viewed Ether (ETH). Large investment funds began closely monitoring Ether’s activity and started investing.

    This triggered a sharp rally, but a price slump began in mid-December 2024. The decline continued through the Christmas holidays and into the following year. Ether, priced around $3,880 on Dec. 13, 2024, fell to about $1,500 by mid-April 2025.

    When retail investors had grown pessimistic about Ether, the asset began another upward run. Aside from a brief pause in June, it climbed to around $4,500 by Aug. 15, 2025, before turning downward again.

    The slump was linked to concerns over the US Federal Reserve rate policy, major decentralized finance (DeFi) hacks and more than $1 billion in crypto liquidations that hurt trader confidence.

    3. XRP (XRP)

    At the start of 2025, XRP (XRP) traded near $2. It climbed above $3 in January before dropping to its yearly low of around $1.7 in April. By November, it was back near $2.2.

    In 2025, XRP made headlines following the settlement of its case with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. In August, the litigation concluded with a $125-million fine and an injunction against institutional sales of the token.

    After the settlement, the coin hovered around $3 for several weeks. At the start of October, it fell below the $3 mark and had not regained it by the first half of November 2025.

    Did you know? After the 2025 SEC settlement, XRP became the first cryptocurrency to achieve clear US legal differentiation between institutional and retail token sales.

    4. BNB (BNB)

    BNB (BNB) began 2025 near $700 and stayed around that level through January. It dipped below $600 in early February and remained range-bound until late June, when momentum picked up. By Oct. 8, BNB had surged to its yearly high of about $1,310 before easing to around $990 in November.

    In November, BNB Chain partnered with blockchain investigator ZachXBT to audit ecosystem projects and publish vulnerability reports. Coinbase also added the BNB Chain-based token ASTER to its listing roadmap, signaling the continued growth of the BNB ecosystem.

    5. Solana (SOL)

    Solana (SOL) began 2025 by slipping below the $200 level in early February. It stayed weak for months before regaining strength midyear, briefly crossing the $200 mark in July and again in late August. By mid-October, SOL had rallied to around $247, its highest point of the year.

    In September, Forward Industries (ticker: FORD) adopted a Solana-based treasury model, signaling growing corporate confidence in the network. On Oct. 31, 2025, Solana rolled out its v2.0 upgrade, introducing parallel transaction processing and native Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility.

    6. Hyperliquid (HYPE)

    Hyperliquid (HYPE) delivered an impressive performance in 2025, especially as a newly launched token (Nov. 29, 2024). It began the year at around $23, dropped to its yearly low of $10.21 in April and surged to a peak of $58 on Sept. 19.

    HYPE’s growth can be credited to strong onchain fundamentals, including rising revenue, a dominant position in decentralized perpetual trading and deflationary token burns. In August, the platform generated $106 million in fees from nearly $400 billion in perpetual contract volume, marking a 23% increase from July’s $86.6 million.

    7. Zcash (ZEC)

    Zcash (ZEC) saw a dramatic surge in late 2025, climbing above $640 and returning to the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. From a modest $48 in early September, the coin soared past $600 within a month. The rally was fueled by growing demand for privacy-focused assets.

    The mid-November halving of Zcash is set to reduce block rewards and tighten supply, potentially serving as a further catalyst for price growth. Earlier, in August 2025, the network activated its NU6.1 testnet upgrade, which introduced improvements to shielded transactions and critical bug fixes.

    8. Monero (XMR)

    Monero (XMR) began 2025 near $190 and climbed steadily through the first half of the year, reaching about $410 by late May. It later dipped to around $235 before regaining momentum and trading near $440 by November.

    In 2025, capital rotated toward privacy coins, benefiting XMR. On Oct. 10, the network implemented the Fluorine Fermi upgrade, which strengthened protections against spy nodes. Monero remains one of the leading privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, featuring stealth addresses, ring signatures and RingCT technology.

    What comes next for crypto assets

    2025 proved that crypto’s long-term success depends on real-world use, transparency and institutional confidence rather than short-term hype. The year’s leading performers, from Bitcoin’s ETF-driven growth to the renewed strength of privacy coins, showed that innovation and utility now guide the market. The lessons of 2025 will continue to shape how investors, builders, and regulators define the next phase of digital finance.

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    Privacy tools are rising behind institutional adoption, says ZKsync dev

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    Privacy tools are rising behind institutional adoption, says ZKsync dev

    Privacy tokens bucked the trend to surge in price and popularity during the recent market slump, but most of the discussion has centered on consumer-facing projects like Zcash.

    At the same time, banks and financial institutions have been exploring zero-knowledge (ZK) systems that enable private transaction flows on blockchains, a technology known for transparency and immutability.

    As Alex Gluchowski, CEO of Matter Labs, put it, “There is cypherpunk privacy, which is account-level privacy, and then there is institutional privacy, which is system-level privacy. Institutions need full visibility over their own flows while keeping that data private from everyone else.”

    Gluchowski first encountered Bitcoin in 2014 while working in the startup world but shifted his focus during the initial coin offering era when Ethereum’s smart contracts enabled new use cases. The scalability problem, and ZK-proofs in particular, drew him into building Matter Labs, the developer behind the Ethereum layer-2 network ZKsync.

    More than 140 companies held around $137 billion in crypto assets on their balance sheets as of early November, according to CoinGecko. But the next stage, where financial institutions move payment or settlement flows onto public blockchains, will only happen with a reliable privacy layer due to confidentiality obligations, Gluchowski told Cointelegraph.

    The next stage of institutional adoption is financial institutions using blockchain for transactions and settlements. Source: CoinGecko

    Consumer growth has stalled, but privacy opens the door for institutions

    Crypto bull cycles in recent years highlighted long stretches of speculation, dominated by trends that have little connection to real-world utility.

    “We have had a weird obsession with non-productive assets for a long time in crypto, and it was clearly not sustainable,” Gluchowski said, adding that the consumer side of crypto’s growth has hit a plateau.

    Memecoins are a good example — those are pure speculative chips in a casino. They have zero substance behind them other than just this cultural component.”

    Solana memecoin launchpad volume has been dropping. Source: Dune Analytics

    Privacy stands apart from that pattern because it has a direct functional role in how financial systems operate. It wasn’t fully explored in earlier cycles due to regulatory pressure; privacy coins were delisted from exchanges, and the US government sanctioned Tornado Cash.

    But that sentiment has been reversed since the current US administration has taken a more selective approach, distinguishing privacy as a technical capability from uses tied to illicit finance.

    Sanctions against Tornado Cash have since been scrapped. Source: US Department of the Treasury

    “It’s night and day. No one wanted to touch crypto before — it was a taboo topic. Now the attitude is more like, ‘We need to embrace this technology, or we’re going to be outcompeted,’” Gluchowski said.

    The renewed attention to Zcash (ZEC) is the most visible part, but the more consequential driver comes from institutional requirements, he said. Banks, asset managers and corporates cannot settle transactions on transparent public ledgers without exposing internal flows, counterparty details or treasury operations on a public ledger.

    Related: Why Zcash and privacy tokens are back in the conversation

    That’s the dynamic behind the new focus on privacy inside the Ethereum ecosystem, according to Gluchowski. It is being framed as system-level requirements that let institutions transact on shared infrastructure while retaining full internal visibility and control.

    Resolving privacy trade-offs in the Ethereum ecosystem

    The privacy that institutions require is not the same model used by consumers. Instead of obscuring individual addresses, banks and corporations need a private execution environment where they can see every transaction under their control, while the outside world sees none of it.

    If sensitive payment data must be shared with external validators or third-party infrastructure, privacy becomes a contractual arrangement rather than a cryptographic guarantee.

    “You only get incorruptible privacy if the data never leaves devices under your control,” Gluchowski said. “If you share it with someone else and sign an NDA, this is not incorruptible anymore. It’s just a promise.”

    Related: How TradFi banks are advancing new stablecoin models

    Earlier enterprise blockchain experiments ran into exactly this problem. Financial institutions deployed private chains using frameworks such as Hyperledger Fabric or Corda to keep data internal, but those networks remained cut off from the broader liquidity and settlement infrastructure forming around public blockchains.

    “If you build a completely private chain, it’s not going to be connected to anything,” Gluchowski said. “It’s a slightly better version of a database, but it does not give you connectivity to public capital markets.”

    He claimed that the model now taking shape in the Ethereum ecosystem attempts to resolve that trade-off. It pairs locally operated private chains with ZK-proofs, allowing institutions to keep transaction data internal while still proving to the public network that the system is operating correctly. The public chain does not see the specifics of a transaction, but it can verify that no rules are being broken.

    Vitalik Buterin praised ZKsync’s approach to enabling shared liquidity across Ethereum L2s. Source: Vitalik Buterin/Alex Gluchowski

    The institutional privacy layer is starting to materialize

    Data from Nansen in early November showed ZKsync leading the industry in fee growth over a seven-day period. Gluchowski attributed the increase not to retail speculation but to activity following the release of new tokenomics and staking proposals.

    “We published the proposal for the new tokenomics for the ZK token, and after that, we saw a surge of interest,” Gluchowski said. “The token price went up, the volumes went up, and there was a lot of movement on ZKsync Era. We also announced the pilot staking implementation around the same time, and a lot of people are now exploring it.”

    ZKsync leads all chains in fee growth over the past month. Source: Nansen

    Consumer-facing crypto use cases continue to expand, but Gluchowski argued that the next wave of scale sits with institutions that cannot operate on transparent ledgers. Privacy is emerging as an operational requirement for participating in shared settlement infrastructure.

    ZKsync is now positioned as a network of chains rather than a single rollup, including systems operated by financial firms in controlled environments.

    Some are already running in testing, and Gluchowski said the first production deployments are expected before the end of the year.

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