The crypto market in 2025 looked nothing like it did in 2021. No parabolic rallies, no vertical Reddit threads, no explosion of NFT price floors, Google Trends remained silent.
Instead, the dominant crypto narrative of 2025 has been written in 13F filings, custody agreements, and tokenized Treasury flows.
BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) held 776,100 BTC as of December 22, JPMorgan launched a $100 million tokenized money market fund, and Broadridge processed $7.4 trillion in tokenized repo transactions in November, up 466% year-over-year.
The retail trading craze that defined the last cycle is gone, replaced by Wall Street’s takeover of the asset class.
ETFs have become the gateway
Exposure to cryptocurrencies for pensions, registered investment advisers and corporate treasuries is now primarily through ETFs rather than spot exchanges.
A recent report from CoinShares noted that crypto ETPs have generated approximately $46.7 billion in net inflows year-to-date as of December 18.
Bitbo data shows that U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs hold 1.3 million BTC, equivalent to $115.4 billion in assets under management and 6.2% of Bitcoin’s circulating supply.
BlackRock’s IBIT dominates. With $66 billion in assets under management and 776,100 BTC, the fund represents more than half of the US spot Bitcoin ETF market.
This is not a retail product, but a vehicle designed for asset allocators who need regulatory packaging and daily NAV reporting without touching private keys.
Daily price coverage reflects this change. In early December, reports brought Bitcoin back to $90,000 almost entirely on ETF flows and volatility, not Coinbase retail volumes or Binance perpetual liquidations.
Weekly flow notes track ETF inflows as a key macro signal, just like bond and stock ETFs do.
A Banque de France paper used SEC 13F filings to analyze how U.S. institutions accumulated exposure to BTC and ETH through ETFs, the kind of central bank research note written when an asset class moves from “bizarre” to “systemically relevant.”
Trading volumes have become institutional
Funds and market-making firms increasingly dominate centralized exchange order books. Nansen’s analysis found that institutional clients accounted for almost 80% of total CEX trading volume in 2025.
Bitget reported that institutions accounted for 80% of its volume in September, up from 39% in January, and that it averaged about $750 billion in monthly transactions.
Surveys have confirmed this trend. An EY-Coinbase survey found that 83% of respondents plan to increase crypto allocations in 2025, and 59% expect to allocate more than 5% of assets under management.
AIMA’s hedge fund report shows that 55% of traditional hedge funds are now exposed to digital assets, up from 47% a year earlier. Statistically, most exchanges and the new marginal buyer in 2025 are institutional.
The banks built the pipes
The infrastructure layer now belongs to big banks rather than crypto-native companies.
Galaxy Research has named 2025 as the year that BNY Mellon, State Street, JPMorgan and Citi move from pilot projects to live digital asset services, bringing more than $12 trillion in assets under customer relationship management to the market.
JPMorgan has launched MONY, a tokenized money market fund whose shares exist as tokens on Ethereum and can be purchased with USDC. Additionally, JPMorgan is evaluating a dedicated crypto trading service for institutional clients, while Morgan Stanley is preparing to offer crypto trading on E*Trade in 2026.
Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon have teamed up to issue tokens representing shares of traditional money market funds.
The US GENIUS Act, signed into law in July, created the first comprehensive federal regime for dollar stablecoins, requiring 100% cash and Treasury backing.
The Treasury and the FDIC are drafting rules allowing bank subsidiaries to issue stablecoins under this framework. In 2021, “infrastructure” meant offshore trade. In 2025, that will mean banks and custodial giants regulated by the FDIC.
Capital markets have gone on the crypto rails
The main area of growth in 2025 was not memecoins, but rather tokenized Treasuries and private credit.
RedStone’s report shows that RWA tokenization grew from around $5 billion in 2022 to over $24 billion in June 2025, an increase of 380%.
BlackRock’s BUIDL, a tokenized U.S. Treasury fund, is now north of $1.74 billion and leads the tokenized U.S. Treasury market by nearly $9 billion, according to rwa.xyz. By mid-2025, BUIDL tokens were accepted as collateral on Crypto.com and Deribit, and crypto derivatives traders are literally posting tokenized Treasuries to take risk.
Around the same time, Binance partnered with Circle to allow institutional investors to use the USYC money fund as collateral for derivatives.
Broadridge’s pension platform processed $7.4 trillion in tokenized pension transactions in November, an increase of 466% year-on-year. As of December 19, they have already processed more than $6 trillion in repo turnover, according to data from rwa.xyz.
LSEG has completed its first fundraising entirely based on blockchain for a private fund. UniCredit has issued its first tokenized structured note. The World Economic Forum has dedicated a flagship 2025 report to asset tokenization, calling it the “next generation of value exchange.”
What does this mean for the future?
In the face of all this institutional development, the classic signals of retail FOMO in 2021 have collapsed.
NFT transaction volumes fell from nearly $16.5 billion in 2021 to just $2.2 billion in 2025. Google Trends data showed that while searches for “Bitcoin” have remained stable, they are well below 2020-21 mania levels, registering around 24 out of 100 over a five-year view.
The FCA found that fewer UK adults hold cryptocurrencies, but the average note size is higher. This suggests fewer small players, and more “professional” users. The price level looked like a bull cycle, but the mood wasn’t Reddit and Discord, but rather iShares fact sheets and 13F filings.
The institutional takeover of 2025 has created a crypto market that looks structurally different from any previous cycle: access has shifted to ETFs, market microstructure has shifted to institutional traders, and infrastructure has shifted to banks and custodians.
All of this happened as retail proxies collapsed, with NFT volumes down 87%, Google search interest at generational lows, and fewer small ticket holders.
The question is whether this institutional dominance is bullish or bearish. Slower, stickier capital from pensions should provide more lasting support than leverage-induced retail froth.
Yet an explosive rise depends on reflexive mania, not quarterly rebalancing. What 2025 has proven is that crypto can scale without the retail madness. Nevertheless, it is evolving into something less volatile, more readable and entirely controlled by the same institutions that dominate all other asset classes.
The question now remains open as to whether this is the maturation that the industry needed or the capture that it has always feared.
