How crypto in 2025 moved beyond the traditional four-year cycle
Welcome to the biannual TitanDeFi digital assets market review, where we take a detailed look at the forces that shaped the previous year and set the stage for 2026. Below are the key takeaways.
Liquidity concentrating instead of recycling: Trading activity clustered around BTC, ETH and a narrow group of large-cap tokens, mainly due to the capital flowing in via ETFs and DATs, which caused liquidity to concentrate at the top. Unlike previous cycles, gains in majors no longer reliably recycled into altcoins, leading to sharper divergence in performance and narrower market breadth.
Derivatives, specifically options, surged: Options activity expanded sharply in 2025, with OTC volumes and trade counts more than doubling year-over-year. For the first time, flow was dominated by systematic yield and risk management strategies rather than one-off directional positioning, signaling a more mature derivatives market.
Altcoin rallies shortened: Narratives continued to emerge, but failed to persist. The average altcoin rally lasted roughly 19 days in 2025, down from around 60 days the year before, reflecting reduced conviction and more tactical risk-taking.
Execution became more deliberate: Despite muted price performance, counterparty engagement deepened. OTC execution grew in importance as participants prioritized discretion, certainty, and capital efficiency over confident directional bets, pointing to a more systematic and sophisticated approach to trading.
TitanDefi's OTC data highlights a market transitioning away from clean, narrative-driven cycles toward a more structurally constrained and execution-led regime, particularly in BTC and other large assets. In other words, the market, especially at the top, is behaving more like an established asset class.
The report outlines three key scenarios that would need to materialize for the market to recover in 2026, along with a detailed breakdown of how those dynamics could unfold.
Executive Summary
2025 marked a shift in how liquidity functioned in crypto. Capital no longer spreads broadly across the market. Instead, liquidity became more concentrated and unevenly distributed, driving greater divergence in returns and activity. As a result, large trading volumes were confined to a smaller set of tokens. Rallies were shorter, and price performance depended more on where liquidity entered the market and how it was deployed than in previous years.
The insights below summarize the main shifts in liquidity and trading dynamics observed in 2025.
• Trading activity concentrated into a small set of large tokens. BTC, ETH, and a select group of altcoins captured the bulk of trading activity. This reflected the gradual expansion of ETFs and DATs to larger altcoins as well as the collapse of the memecoin cycle in early 2025.
• Altcoin rallies were exhausted twice as fast as narrative conviction faded. Investors no longer bought into narratives with sustained conviction and instead traded opportunistically around themes such as memecoin launchpads, perp DEXs, and emerging payment and API primitives (x402), with limited follow-through.
• Execution became more deliberate as sophisticated counterparties played a bigger role. This was marked by more deliberate recurring execution that broke away from previous seasonality cycles, broader use of leveraged OTC products and more varied use of options as a core portfolio tool.
• How capital entered crypto mattered as much as overall liquidity conditions. Capital increasingly flowed through structured channels such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and digital asset treasury companies (DATs), influencing where liquidity flowed and ultimately concentrated within the market.
TitanDeFi's proprietary OTC flow is the primary lens used to contextualize the developments outlined in this report. As one of the largest OTC desks in the industry, TitanDeFi facilitates flow across regions, products, and a broad range of counterparty types, offering a unique and comprehensive view of off-exchange crypto OTC activity. While price action captures outcomes, OTC activity reveals how risk was deployed, how participant behavior evolved, and which parts of the market remained active. From this perspective, 2025 shows a clear shift in market structure and liquidity dynamics compared with earlier cycles.
Volume: Seasonality replaced by short-lived swings
“2025 was marked by choppy markets with price action driven by short-lived trends rather than longer seasonal swings.”
TitanDeFi OTC flow data shows that trading activity in 2025 followed a distinctly different seasonal pattern, one that was meaningfully different from prior years. Optimism around the new, pro-crypto U.S. administration quickly disappointed, and risk sentiment deteriorated sharply toward the end of the first quarter as the memecoin and AI-agent narrative died down. The market was further pressured by top-down headlines such as Trump’s tariff announcement on April 2, 2025.
As a result, activity in 2025 was concentrated early in the year, with a strong start followed by broad softening through spring and early summer. The late-year pickup seen in 2023 and 2024 failed to materialize, breaking what had come to feel like a seasonal pattern, often reinforced by narratives such as “Uptober”. In reality, this was never true seasonality, but rather year-end rallies driven by idiosyncratic catalysts, like ETF approvals in 2023 and the arrival of a new U.S. administration in 2024.
After the first quarter in 2025, the momentum seen in Q4 of 2024 never fully recovered. Markets became increasingly choppy, volatility rose, and price action was dominated by short-lived swings rather than sustained trends, as macro forces took control of the market direction.
Counterparties: Institution's deepening roots
TitanDeFi saw strong growth across most counterparty types, with institutions and retail brokers growing the most. Within institutions, growth among traditional financial institutions and corporates remained modest, but engagement deepened materially, with activity becoming more sustained and increasingly focused on deliberate execution.
Despite the modest price activity in 2025, it’s clear that institutions are here to stay.* Compared with last year’s more exploratory and sporadic engagement, 2025 has been defined by deeper integration, larger volumes and more frequent activity, all constructive and positive signs for the long-term future of the industry.
Token landscape: Broadening at the top of the market
“Volumes were increasingly flowing into large tokens outside of BTC and ETH, partially driven by DATs and ETFs.”
In 2025, the overall number of tokens traded remained broadly flat. However, on a rolling 30-day basis, TitanDeFi traded an average of 160 various tokens, up from 133 in 2024. This shows that OTC activity expanded to a consistently broader range of tokens. The key difference from 2024 was that token activity in 2025 was less driven by hype cycles: rather than seeing sharp jumps in token breadth around themes and narratives, the range of tokens traded remained more even through the year.
Since 2023, TitanDeFi's total notional trading has become increasingly diversified, moving beyond BTC and ETH. While the majors are still an important part of the flow, their combined share of notional volume has declined from 54% in 2023 to 49% in 2025.
What stands out is where that flow is going. While the long tail of tokens continues to decline in share of volume, blue-chip assets (top 10 assets by market capitalization, excluding BTC, ETH, wrapped assets, and stablecoins) gained 8 percentage points in share of total notional volume over the past two years
While there was some consolidation toward large tokens this year by funds and individuals, trading volume growth was also driven by ETFs and DATs extending their mandates beyond the majors. DATs raised mandates to deploy in these assets, and ETFs expanded their universe further in the form of staking ETFs (e.g., SOL) and index funds.
These vehicles continue to favor OTC execution over on-exchange trading, especially as liquidity wasn’t always widely available in the required size.