Crypto Market 2025 Year-End Review

Q4 started strong for crypto and DeFi after a broadly bullish Q3, but the markets quickly slid into fear and uncertainty as hopes of macro easing faded and amid renewed artificial intelligence (AI) overvaluation fears.

Over-leveraged positions in Bitcoin and DeFi unraveled, triggering forced selling and a painful reset.

“Q4 was defined by a major leverage reset, with Bitcoin’s sharp pullback forcing a broader reassessment of risk,” Bitget CMO Jamie Elkaleh wrote in correspondence with the Investing News Network (INN).

Risk-off sentiment sent Bitcoin falling from an all-time high near US$126,000 in October to a late-November trough below US$86,000. It had stabilized in the US$92,500 to US$93,000 range by early December.

Q4 marked Bitcoin’s second worst quarterly return after 2022’s post-peak capitulation.

“Yet beneath the volatility, the market showed growing maturity: capital and developer attention shifted toward utility-driven sectors. This quarter reinforced that the next phase of crypto growth is being built on fundamentals, not leverage,” said Elkaleh, also noting a decisive shift in Q4 from short-term trading to long-term portfolio integration.

“Compared to Q3, Q4 showed a clear pivot toward tokenized assets, stablecoins and on-chain yield instruments becoming core allocations,” he continued. In his view, the shift reflects confidence in crypto’s key role in global finance.

Keep reading to learn more about what trends drove the crypto market in 2025.

Bitcoin price, October 1 to December 5, 2025.

Chart via CoinGecko.

At the infrastructure level, Bitcoin miners pivoted aggressively into high-performance computing and AI workloads. Companies like Hive Digital Technologies (TSXV:HIVE,NASDAQ:HIVE) have repurposed data centers to rent GPU capacity to AI firms, using the same power infrastructure for steadier HPC revenue alongside mining.

This convergence deepened ties between crypto energy assets and the AI buildout.

Privacy coins showed relative strength amid the downturn, led by Zcash’s roughly 700 percent rally from September lows on technical upgrades and accumulation, although most still corrected with the market after peaking.