Galaxy Digital (NASDAQ: GLXY) famous of their weblog submit targeted on year-end predictions that, considerably anticlimactically, Bitcoin (BTC) now appears set to finish 2025 at roughly the identical worth stage the place it began. Really, the flagship cryptocurrency is down from round $94,000 from finish of 2025 to at the moment buying and selling for about $87,000 on the time of writing. Galaxy Digital additionally talked about that for the primary 10 months of the 12 months, the cryptocurrency markets “rode a genuinely bullish wave.”
Galaxy Digital identified that, for probably the most half in 2025, regulatory reforms progressed, ETFs saved pulling in property, and onchain exercise had picked up as nicely.
Notably, BTC hit an all-time excessive of $126,080 on Oct. 6, 2025.
However hopes for a breakout after the euphoria had been “dashed by a market outlined as an alternative by rotation, repricing, and recalibration.”
In line with the replace from Galaxy Digital, a mixture of macro letdowns, shifting investment narratives, “leverage wipeouts, and heavy whale distribution knocked the market off stability.”
The digital property agency additionally acknowledged that costs slipped, “confidence cooled, and by December, BTC had roundtripped again to the low $90,000s, although the trail there was something however flat.”
Though 2025 might finish with costs within the pink, the 12 months nonetheless “pulled in actual institutional adoption and set the groundwork for 2026’s subsequent section of actual activation.”
Within the coming 12 months, Galaxy Digital expects stablecoins to “overtake legacy rails, tokenized property to interrupt into mainstream capital and collateral markets, and company L1s to maneuver from pilots to actual settlement.”
Additional, they anticipate public chains will “rethink how they seize worth, DeFi and prediction markets will preserve increasing, and AI-driven funds will lastly present up onchain.”
A few of Galaxy Analysis’s crypto market predictions for 2026 and key observations throughout 2025 are as follows.
- Bitcoin worth: BTC will hit $250k by year-end 2027. 2026 is just too chaotic to foretell, although Bitcoin making new all-time highs in 2026 remains to be doable. Choices markets are at the moment pricing about equal odds of $70k or $130k for month-end June 2026, and equal odds of $50k or $250k by year-end 2026. These vast ranges mirror uncertainty concerning the close to time period. On the time of writing, broader crypto is already deep in a bear market, and bitcoin has didn’t firmly re-establish its bullish momentum. Till BTC firmly re-establishes itself above $100-$105k, we really feel threat stays to the draw back within the close to time period. Different components within the broader monetary markets additionally create uncertainty, similar to the speed of AI capex deployment, financial coverage circumstances, and the U.S. midterm elections in November.
- Over the course of the 12 months, we now have seen a structural lower within the stage of long term BTC volatility – a few of this transfer will be the introduction of bigger overwriting/BTC yield technology packages. What’s notable is that the BTC vol smile now costs places in vol phrases as costlier than calls, which was not the case 6 months in the past. That is to say, we’re shifting from a skew usually seen in growing, growth-y markets to markets seen in additional conventional macro property.
- This maturation will probably proceed, and whether or not or not bitcoin bleeds decrease in direction of the 200-week shifting common, the asset class’s maturation and institutional adoption are solely rising. 2026 may very well be a boring 12 months for Bitcoin, and whether or not it finishes at $70k or $150k, our bullish outlook (over longer time durations) is simply rising stronger. Rising institutional entry is combining with stress-free financial coverage and a market in determined seek for non-dollar hedge property. It’s very doable that bitcoin follows gold to turn into extensively adopted as a financial debasement hedge inside the subsequent two years. – Alex Thorn
- Layer-1s and Layer-2s: The full market cap of Web Capital Markets on Solana will surge to $2 billion (it’s at the moment ~$750 million). Solana’s onchain economic system is maturing, embodied by the continuing shift away from meme-driven exercise and the success of recent launchpad fashions targeted on directing capital to actual revenue-generating companies. This shift is strengthened by bettering market construction on Solana and demand for tokens with elementary worth. As investor choice strikes towards sustainable onchain companies fairly than ephemeral meme cycles, Web Capital Markets will turn into a defining pillar of Solana’s financial exercise. – Lucas Tcheyan
- Not less than one reside, general-purpose Layer-1 blockchain will enshrine a revenue-generating software to funnel worth immediately again to its native token. A rising reassessment of how L1s seize and maintain worth will push chains towards extra opinionated designs. Hyperliquid’s success in enshrining a perpetuals trade, and the broader shift in financial worth seize away from protocols and towards purposes (a realization of the Fats App Thesis), is reframing expectations of what a impartial base layer ought to present. As purposes more and more retain the vast majority of the worth they generate, extra chains are exploring whether or not sure revenue-producing primitives ought to be embedded immediately into the protocol to strengthen token-level economics. Early indicators are already seen.
- Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s latest name for low-risk, economically significant DeFi to justify ETH’s worth highlights the strain on L1s to display sustainable seize. MegaEth plans to launch a local stablecoin that will return income to validators, whereas Ambient’s forthcoming AI-focused L1 goals to internalize inference charges. These examples counsel rising willingness amongst chains to personal and monetize key purposes. This units the stage for a serious L1 to take the subsequent step in 2026 by formally enshrining a revenue-generating software on the protocol layer and directing its economics to the native token. – Lucas Tcheyan
