Crypto promised a revolution in 2025, but ended in decline, scandal, and a clash between technology, politics, and human greed. What awaits us in 2026?
The crypto world in 2025 played out another familiar script: first euphoria, then exhaustion, and finally — a “Red October” and a painful grounding. In the first half of the year, Bitcoin broke new records above $120,000, total crypto market cap pushed toward $4.4 trillion, and talk focused on a “mature bull run” fueled by new ETFs* and Donald Trump’s return to the White House. By early October, it seemed the story was finished: crypto had defeated the skeptics, entered Wall Street, entered politics, entered institutions. And then, in just a few weeks, almost everything gained up to that point was wiped out.
*ETF (exchange-traded fund) is a type of investment allowing investors to buy fund shares on the stock market that track the price of an asset (e.g., Bitcoin) without holding the asset directly.
The crash at the end of the year had a very classic cause: too much leverage and too much belief that “this time it won’t break.” In just a few days in mid-October, around $19 billion in long, highly aggressive positions was erased — liquidations cascading one after the other — and Bitcoin slipped about twenty percent from its peak around $126,000, dropping below the psychological $100,000 level again. Others followed: Ether toward $3,100, Solana around $150, and crypto-stocks like Coinbase and Robinhood collapsed alongside them. ETF outflows followed, open interest in the futures markets* fell, and the thing the industry despises most emerged — investor indifference, the absence of the classic “buy the dip” reflex.
*Futures markets — places where “contracts for the future” are traded, agreements to buy or sell Bitcoin (or something else) later at a pre-agreed price. In practice, it’s a way of speculating without actually owning Bitcoin, often with high leverage — which amplifies both gains and losses.
The macro environment didn’t help. Uncertainty around interest rates, talk of a potential U.S. government shutdown, geopolitical tensions — all of it, as always, pushed capital toward bonds and big stocks, not toward assets that much of the establishment still views as “casino fiat.” At the same time, the halving* cycle played out “by the book.” Historically, the largest peak comes a year after the halving, but 2025 showed that saturation now comes earlier, because the market mostly consists of players who have memorized these patterns. Some analysts therefore speak of a “lost bitcoin year” — formally prices are up, but the whole story ended with a déjà vu feeling from 2018 or 2022.
*Halving — an event in Bitcoin that occurs roughly every four years, when the reward miners receive for a new block is cut in half. This makes Bitcoin “scarcer,” so many expect the price to rise afterward, though the market does not always react the same way.
At the same time, the “hype” had visibly worn off. Survey data in the U.S. shows that the share of small investors even considering buying crypto has fallen to around a quarter, down from a third in 2021 — in other words, most of the audience has been burned at least once. Millennials and younger investors, who once saw crypto as their generational rebellion against banks and the old system, now increasingly watch ETF issuers, exchanges, and political dynasties grow rich on their backs. The cycle of “promising revolution — inflating a bubble — rescuing big players — moral lessons for the little ones” looks less and less like an unfortunate accident and more like a structure.
Crypto’s reputation was further damaged by an explosion of scams and hacks. Although on-chain data still shows that less than one percent of transactions go to addresses classified as illegal, the absolute sums are terrifying. Tens of billions of dollars annually end up with ransomware gangs, narco-cartels, offshore schemes, and various “pig butchering”* investment scams where victims are convinced for weeks or months that they are investing in a sophisticated crypto platform while actually filling the pockets of criminal groups. In the U.S. alone, citizen losses to crypto scams amount to billions of dollars per year. Police and regulators are therefore speaking more loudly about the professionalization of crypto crime and the need for a crackdown — which in turn feeds the narrative that crypto is a “nest of scammers,” even though most volume occurs legitimately.
*Pig butchering — a long-term scam in which fraudsters pretend to be a friend or romantic interest, build trust for months, then persuade the victim to invest in a “crypto platform” that is in fact fake. When the victim deposits a larger amount, the scammers disappear. If you follow local media, you’ve likely seen numerous cases of this happening in Croatia as well.
One of the most visible experiments — El Salvador’s state adoption of Bitcoin — was in 2025 effectively declared a failure. Bukele became a crypto-world star in 2021 by declaring Bitcoin legal tender, speaking of financial inclusion and liberation from the dollar. Four years later came the cold shower: around 92% of the population didn’t use it for everyday transactions, most merchants didn’t accept it, the state Chivo app was full of technical problems and security flaws, and the promised leap in financial inclusion simply didn’t happen. Under pressure from the IMF, which conditioned a $1.4 billion loan on withdrawing legal-tender status, the parliament formally restored the dollar as the only official currency in early 2025. Bitcoin remained allowed as an asset, and the state still occasionally buys it for the treasury, but the great experiment of the “first bitcoin nation” was quietly shut down.
No major economy rushed to copy that model. Instead, states shifted focus to their own digital currencies — CBDCs. China is expanding the digital yuan pilot, the European Union is preparing groundwork for the digital euro, and many central banks are studying how to use blockchain or similar technologies while maintaining full control over the monetary system. In other words: the technology is welcome, but only as a tool of the state, not as a competitor to the state. For a crypto scene that once dreamed of a “Bitcoin standard,” this is a sobering message — the system will not collapse; it will absorb whatever suits it.
Another story exposing the nature of today’s crypto capitalism is the saga of meme coins and politics — especially Dogecoin, Elon Musk, and the Trump administration. The name of Trump’s new “government efficiency” agency — DOGE — was perfect meme material, and with Musk’s role in the story, Dogecoin jumped over 250% in 2024. The media had fun with headlines like “DOGE in the White House,” while small investors once again believed history was being made. By mid-2025, the bubble had deflated. Musk publicly fell out with Trump, it became clear the acronym had nothing to do with the cryptocurrency, and Dogecoin plunged — down more than 50% since the beginning of the year, far below its 2021 highs. The merging of political spectacle and meme culture may have briefly pumped the price, but in the long run it only highlighted how dependent crypto is on pure marketing when it lacks real utility.
The Trump family went a step further — from memes to outright business. In 2025, they launched a small crypto conglomerate: a “mining” company claiming to “process 2% of the world’s Bitcoin,” their own token, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), aimed partly at wealthy foreign investors, and even a coin carrying the family name. In the first half of the year, they raised hundreds of millions by selling tokens and shares, increasing the family’s estimated wealth by over a billion. Then came the market downturn: the mining company’s stock collapsed nearly 80%, WLFI lost much of its value, and the strategy boiled down to the classic story — sell as much as possible during euphoria, leave the risk to the masses. For an audience that once believed crypto was “the people’s money,” this is a sobering reminder of how, in practice, the biggest benefits concentrate among those who already have a name, political position, and access to capital.
On the environmental front, 2025 brought both real progress and plenty of greenwashing*. Ethereum had already switched to proof-of-stake**, and this year the numbers became clear. Energy consumption dropped by more than 99.9%, CO₂ emissions virtually disappeared compared to previous levels. A network that once consumed as much electricity as a small country now has a footprint smaller than many mid-sized data centers. For those who claimed “blockchain and ecology cannot be reconciled,” this is a hard counterargument. It turns out that protocol design can almost completely eliminate the energy problem.
*Greenwashing — when a company or industry portrays its activities as “green” or environmentally friendly even when they are not, using marketing to mask real negative impacts.
**Proof-of-stake (PoS) — a way some cryptocurrencies secure their networks and validate transactions without enormous energy consumption. Instead of miners using powerful computers (as in Bitcoin), PoS works by users temporarily locking up some of their crypto — staking.
These users are then randomly selected to validate new transactions and receive rewards. The more tokens they have staked, the higher the chance of being selected — but without consuming vast electricity like mining farms.
In short: PoS replaces expensive hardware and energy use with a financial stake, and is considered a more environmentally friendly and modern approach to blockchain security.
Bitcoin is a different story. It still consumes about as much electricity as a mid-sized country, with CO₂ emissions comparable to the national inventory of countries like Greece. It’s true the energy mix is improving: more than half of mining is estimated to use renewable or low-carbon sources (hydro, wind, nuclear), and parts of the industry are innovating by linking mining to surplus energy or gases that would otherwise be flared. But at the same time, there are regions where miners are connected almost exclusively to coal and gas. Ideas of carbon taxes on mining, mandatory transparency of energy mixes, and even “tagging” bitcoins by emission levels are being mentioned more often. The paradox is obvious: a network that wants to be neutral and global is becoming the subject of very local energy and political battles.
Finally, 2025 was the year crypto intersected with another major technological wave — artificial intelligence. Big funds and market makers have long used machine learning for trading, but this year a true wave came from the “democratization” of AI tools: small investors trying to force models like ChatGPT to develop the “perfect strategy” and trade automatically for them. The results are, to put it mildly, mixed. Some disciplined traders use AI to scan news faster, test strategies, and execute predefined rules without emotion. But many viral experiments showed the other side: accounts where AI reduced $10,000 to barely a third within a week, or series of tiny positions ending at zero. A model can calculate, but it cannot change the fact that the crypto market is chaotic, manipulated, and prone to sudden regime shifts.
Even more dangerous is that the same AI is becoming a weapon for scammers. Deepfake videos featuring Elon Musk “live” promising to double your coins, perfectly convincing chatbots posing as exchange support, “romantic” social-media profiles that aren’t humans but generative models — all are part of a new generation of crypto scams. Meanwhile, forensic firms and regulators are using machine learning to monitor suspicious patterns on the blockchain. The old pattern of technological arms races continues — what today is a tool for profit becomes tomorrow a tool for theft and the day after a tool for surveillance.
What, then, should we expect in 2026? In a pessimistic scenario, 2025 proves to be the cycle top and the entrance into an extended “crypto winter.” Bitcoin slowly slides toward $60,000, altcoins lose even more, and total market cap falls below early-2024 levels. Regulation tightens after several more major scandals, and public interest shifts to some new “tech miracle-currencies.” In a middle scenario, prices stabilize: Bitcoin moves broadly between $80,000 and $120,000, ends the year around $100,000, and crypto becomes a “boring” asset — part of fund portfolios, but without euphoria. In the optimistic version, a combination of looser monetary policy, renewed ETF inflows, and some new technical or political catalyst (a major tech company integrating crypto into its services, new pro-crypto regulation) pushes Bitcoin toward $150,000–$180,000, total market toward new records, and FOMO returns — more restrained, but still very human.
On a deeper level, more important than whether the number is $80,000 or $180,000 is the question of what crypto is becoming at all. 2025 showed that the myth of “people’s money” bypassing banks and states is increasingly at odds with reality. The market is dominated by ETFs, political projects, mining corporations… Meanwhile, crime and scams cast a shadow on legitimate use, while the technological side of the scene — from Ethereum to smaller projects — tries to prove concrete usefulness, from DeFi to infrastructure solutions for AI and digital identity.
For those whose trust in banks, currencies, and political elites is already low, crypto will remain a temptation: an appealing idea of escape from chaos into the “frontier zone” of global money. But 2025 reminds us that this world is not an empty space but a new front of global capitalism, with all its inequalities, interests, and top-down pressures. Whether 2026 is a year of recovery or further sobering depends less on technology and more on who will actually control the infrastructure of digital money — and whose interests will shape the next chapter of the crypto story.
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