Bitcoin fell 25% last week, and most of crypto followed. But this wasn't a crypto crisis - when you unravel the move, we see that the underlying market is maturing. Much of the industry points to the selloff being driven by institutional positions in ETFs and futures unwinding, the kind of growing pains that happen when sophisticated financial infrastructure gets bolted onto a maturing asset class. We've seen this pattern before, in crypto and in traditional markets. It's uncomfortable, but it creates opportunities for investors who can see past the volatility. Below, we unpack what actually happened, make the case that treating "crypto" as a single asset class is becoming outdated, and outline the three distinct stages of maturity emerging across digital assets.

Vitalik Buterin declared this week that Ethereum's rollup-centric roadmap "no longer makes sense." After years of positioning Layer 2 blockchains (L2s) as the future of Ethereum scaling, the co-founder admitted L2s have failed to reach “Stage 2” decentralization, while Ethereum's base layer has scaled faster than expected. For investors watching the ETH token price struggle despite growing ecosystem activity, this was confirmation of what the revenue data has been telling us for over four years. Meanwhile, in the perpetual futures space, Lighter continues pushing boundaries with the launch of LighterEVM, extending its zero-fee trading model into programmable DeFi applications.

Welcome to crypto current #99, the final edition for 2025, and rather than another week of news and price moves, we're stepping back to look at the year as a whole. It's been a strange one. Bitcoin hit all-time highs above $126,000, yet most tokens finished the year underwater. Clearer regulatory direction finally arrived in the US, but new layer-1s struggled to find a reason to exist. Memecoins faded while the platforms launching them printed money. The narratives that dominated previous cycles, four-year halving rhythms, alt season rotations, retail-driven pumps, didn't play out the way many market participants expected. Something shifted in 2025. The question is whether it's temporary or structural. We think it's the latter, and this note attempts to lay out our framework for why.

Polymarket secured CFTC approval to re-enter U.S. markets. Kalshi raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation just weeks after closing a $300 million round. Coinbase is preparing to launch its own prediction-market product, while Robinhood is extending its offering through a Susquehanna-backed joint venture operating a CFTC-licensed exchange and clearinghouse. The bull case would see prediction markets restructuring how sophisticated investors price information and express conviction. Below, we explore why the peer-to-peer model matters and what institutional capital sees in this infrastructure build.

October’s $40 billion liquidation event was a sharp reminder of how quickly crypto’s leverage infrastructure can unwind - and how fast stress can propagate in markets that operate 24/7. It also arrived at a moment when US policymakers are advancing the most consequential regulatory reforms the industry has seen, from the GENIUS Act to the proposed CLARITY Act. This week, we examine how emerging market-structure legislation could reshape the foundations of the industry, and we revisit the mechanics behind the 10 October forced-deleveraging to understand what it revealed about the current state of crypto market structure.

What unlocked the great exchange consolidation of 2007-2013? Regulatory clarity. Once CME and ICE knew the rules, they went on buying sprees, building full-stack infrastructure that dominates markets today. Eighteen years later, crypto is hitting the same inflection point. The M&A activity breaks down into three clear patterns: firms building complete vertical integration, bridges between crypto and traditional finance, and strategic acquisitions of profitable niche players. This week alone, Coinbase paid $375 million for Echo, while FalconX moved to acquire 21Shares - two deals that, on the surface, seem unrelated but share the same underlying driver. Crypto consolidation season has arrived.

This week, Intercontinental Exchange Inc (ICE), owner of the New York Stock Exchange, invested $2 billion into Polymarket at an $8 billion valuation this week. The deal structure matters: ICE becomes Polymarket's global data distributor and partner on tokenization initiatives. This is TradFi backing a crypto-native product that already works, then helping scale it to mainstream users. As DACM's CIO Richard Galvin put it on stage at Singapore Token2049 last week, crypto needs to move from "hundreds of thousands inside the crypto sandbox" to "hundreds of millions of users" beyond it.