Trump and his wife, Melania, released their own meme coinsHAKAN NURAL/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES
Eleven months later the verdict on that flurry of hope and activity is mixed. The price of bitcoin, which is by far the biggest and most closely watched cryptocurrency, initially rocketed past the $100,000 mark for the first time, slumped, rocketed again, slumped again and by the closing days of December was at $87,500, 6.4 per cent lower than at the start of the year.
Many other popular crypto-tokens have fared even worse over 2025. Solana is down 34.9 per cent. Ethereum, the number two by market value, is down 51.1 per cent. Cardano is down 57.8 per cent. Dogecoin, initially a kind of joke token that took on a life of its own after being plugged by Elon Musk, is down by 61 per cent.
It was a very different outcome from that forecast by many analysts at the start of the year. Standard Chartered, Bernstein, VanEck and Fundstrat all saw bitcoin continuing to rise dramatically, with forecasts ranging from $120,000 to $250,000. The tokens, it was claimed, were going higher, buoyed by growing legitimacy and their appeal as a kind of digital gold.
But while it was a bad year for prices, politicians and regulators have moved to embrace crypto. The Genius Act, passed into law in the US in July, set the first regulatory framework for one kind of cryptocurrency, stablecoins. In December, the British government set out its own legislation to enable the sector to be fully regulated with the aim of the UK “leading the world in digital assets adoption”.
* Britain can compete with US as a crypto hub, insists City minister
The Bank of England, too, has thawed its position, or at least doesn’t want to be accused of being Luddite. In November it proposed a regulatory regime for stablecoins and tokenised banking. Sarah Breeden, a deputy governor, referred to the need to prepare for a “multi-moneyverse”, with lots of different forms of money circulating, potentially bringing down the cost of payments and transfers.
The confused and contradictory picture is partly because the crypto sector is such a broad field, ranging from meme coins and the most speculative tokens with no intrinsic value through to stablecoins, digital assets which their promoters claim are backed dollar-for-dollar with real, traditional assets. Underpinning it all is distributed ledger technology, a well-regarded, uncheatable and versatile system for holding and exchanging any asset, which has applications far beyond bitcoin.
Interspersing the progress made in institutionalising some parts of crypto came more of the scandals, crimes and scares that have routinely pockmarked the sector since Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym, developed the first blockchain, a kind of distributed ledger technology, in 2008. The anonymity, complexity and lack of regulation in the sector continued to throw up disasters.
In February Javier Milei, the Argentinian president, was embroiled in scandal after taking to X to promote libra, a little-known digital token, to his 3.8 million followers. Libra soared from close to zero to $5 within hours before plunging back down again to $1, leaving buyers nursing heavy losses. Fraud claims poured in, and a judge-led inquiry was begun.
In May the crypto exchange Bybit said that hackers had stolen $1.5 billion of digital tokens in what appeared to be the biggest cryptocurrency theft of its kind. The tokens were taken from a “cold wallet”: a digital wallet usually stored offline and seen as especially secure.
In September, in London, Zhimin Qian, a Chinese woman who had conducted a Ponzi scheme ripping off 128,000 victims, was convicted of illegally acquiring and possessing more than £5 billion worth of bitcoin, which was first seized from devices found in a mansion in Hampstead in 2018. She was later sentenced to 11 years and 8 months in jail for money laundering offences.
In December, in the US, Do Kwon, a South Korean, was jailed for 15 years for “fraud on an epic, generational scale”. Kwon, co-founder of Singapore-based Terraform Labs, was behind two digital currencies, TerraUSD and Luna, which collapsed in 2022, inflicting losses estimated at $40 billion. TerraUSD was supposed to be ultra-safe, backed by and convertible into US dollars.
One of the big trends in crypto that caught on in early 2025 was conventional companies trying to spice up their returns by buying digital tokens. So-called bitcoin treasury companies use spare cash and borrow to buy cryptocurrency rather than conventional money market instruments. It worked fabulously well when crypto was rising, but came unstuck when it fell. Microstrategy, now called Strategy, is a Nasdaq-listed software company that first bought into bitcoin in 2020. Its shares boomed in 2024 and the first half of 2025 but have fallen by two thirds since peaking in July. Shares of crypto “mining” companies have also been savaged recently.
Next year is shaping up to be a pivotal one for crypto. Any more falls in interest rates could be good for the digital currencies, which yield nothing and therefore appeal more when rates are low. Increasingly, they seem to have been moving alongside artificial intelligence stocks, seen as attractive when investors want to turn up the risk dial.
If anything, retail interest is dwindling, at least in the UK. The latest figures from the Financial Conduct Authority found that 8 per cent of UK adults owned cryptocurrency, down from 12 per cent in 2024, but another rebound in bitcoin could easily spark interest.
The crypto sector, of course, is still bullish long-term about bitcoin. Its prosperity depends on it. But at least one independent analyst is a bear: Mike McGlone, commodities strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, suggests the price could crash “back toward $10,000” in 2026. He suggested we may already have hit “peak bitcoin” and drew parallels with the Wall Street crash of 1929, when share prices fell 90 per cent.
In the US, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Bill, due to be examined by the Senate in January, could usher in new crypto products as it sets out more detailed roles for regulation by the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The bookies’ favourite to take over as chairman of the US Federal Reserve is Kevin Hassett, a White House adviser who is seen as “crypto-friendly”. He disclosed in June that he owned at least $1 million in stock of Coinbase, a crypto trading exchange. He has also disclosed that he received a $50,001 salary from Coinbase for serving on its academic and regulatory advisory council.
A crypto believer at the heart of the conventional financial system could help to reinvigorate faith in digital tokens. But concerns about the role of crypto in enabling corruption continues to concern many Americans. Will Thomas, a professor at the Michigan Ross School of Business, has argued that the rise of crypto was turning America into “a kleptocracy”.
Those meme coins issued by Trump and his wife have since crashed, falling by 86 per cent and 99 per cent since inauguration day, according to the Wall Street Journal. Most who bought will have lost heavily. How much the president personally made from their fleeting popularity is not known.
