The 2025 Bitcoin Year in Review

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Monday, December 22. And today, we are talking about the themes that defined Bitcoin and crypto in 2025. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you wanna dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly/breakdownpod. Alright, friends. Happy week of Christmas. This will be our last episode of the year. And so of course, as everyone settles into a holiday lull, we wanna look back on what the biggest themes of the year were for Bitcoin and crypto more broadly. I think it's fairly safe to say that this was not the year that anyone really anticipated, in both good and bad ways. We're gonna talk about the three biggest themes of 2025 and the three biggest themes that will impact Bitcoin next year, but what's interesting is that what's not on the list is price. This has been an up and down year for the market. Bitcoin hit a new all time high of 125,000 followed by a 35% drawdown. Prices recovered slightly, and we're heading into the end of the year trading at around 90,000. It looks like Bitcoin will be slightly down on the year. While there were moments of euphoria and collapse, this was ultimately a relatively sedate year for price action. We didn't have a blow off top where Bitcoin moves 30% or more in a month. In fact, the best month for Bitcoin was in April at 14%. Every other year aside from 2022 had at least one month with a 20% upside move. There also weren't many big months to the downside with the largest being an 18% loss in November. We didn't get the characteristic 70% drawdown at the end of a Bitcoin bull market. All in all, it was a pretty sedate year which speaks to Bitcoin maturing as an asset class. What this means is that price action wasn't one of the biggest themes of the year as it usually would be. So what were the biggest themes of the year? Number one with a bullet was, of course, institutional adoption. Basically, every week this year featured a huge institutional adoption story. 2024 was the year that Bitcoin first became available to institutional investors with the launch of the ETFs, but 2025 was the year when Bitcoin became normalized in the TradFi world. We saw every major US institution slowly add Bitcoin access to their platforms. That trend was capped off by Vanguard at the December when they backed down from their dogmatic anti Bitcoin view. Most major wealth advisers are now approved to put Bitcoin in their clients' portfolios, and allocation suggestions …