Tiger Research: 2025, a year of narrative surge

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This report is authored by Tiger Research. In 2025, the cryptocurrency industry witnessed the rise of numerous narratives. Some were fleeting, collapsing quickly; but those key narratives left us with profound and lasting insights.

Core Insights

The cryptocurrency market in 2025 experienced intense shifts in narratives, with market fatigue and skepticism building throughout the year.

Most narratives merely consumed short-term attention, but some fostered real application scenarios and market structures, steadily driving industry evolution.

Beyond trends centered on speculators, more narratives that facilitate retail participation emerged and expanded, broadening the market’s participant base. This is also a deeply meaningful shift.

1. Narrative, Narrative, or Narrative

The most notable feature of the 2025 cryptocurrency market is the astonishing speed of narrative switching. Market attention shifts to the next hot topic before the current narrative has been fully validated.

Meme coins drove particularly dramatic turns. New narratives around Trump, Musk, and Sydney Sweeney emerged one after another. Investors’ focus also shifted rapidly.

The core issue is that most narratives turn out to be one-time celebrations. They devour short-term attention but fail to build the foundational infrastructure that can evolve into a real industry. Some market participants even fabricate false narratives to harvest investor gains. The result is increasing market fatigue and growing skepticism.

That said, not all narratives end in exhaustion. Some establish themselves as genuine industries, truly advancing the evolution of the cryptocurrency market. So, what endures, and what vanishes? This report will delve into the main narratives shaping 2025 and extract lessons from their rise and fall.

2. What insights do the narratives of 2025 reveal?

Source: Tiger Research

2.1. Retained value far exceeds new customer acquisition

Source: Dune

Meme coins captured the most market attention this year. Their simple and intuitive features even attracted those previously dismissive of or overwhelmed by cryptocurrencies. Trading apps like Moonshot further lowered entry barriers, causing a flood of new users in a short period.

However, most users did not stay long. They came for quick gains and left just as swiftly. Their activity neither spread to other services nor generated any lasting spillover effects. Despite large inflows, it was merely a one-time participation surge.

This case clearly shows that when the right catalyst meets low entry barriers, large-scale user influx is possible. Meme coins proved this potential. At the same time, they also reveal that inflows alone are far from enough. If projects fail to design reasons for users to stay, inflows will quickly turn into outflows. User retention remains a core challenge.

2.2. The dual nature of InfoFi

2025 was also a year when InfoFi received serious attention. Platforms like Kaito saw thriving InfoFi services, with users adopting a model of producing information and earning incentives. Combining incentive mechanisms with information production was a meaningful experiment, bringing many retail participants into the market.

However, limitations soon became apparent. Content quality is inherently subjective and difficult to quantify. But incentive distribution requires objective standards based on metrics, which gradually distorted participant behavior. Participants began prioritizing sensational content over accuracy. As a result, platform X transformed from a space for information accumulation into something more akin to an advertising billboard.

InfoFi demonstrated the potential to stimulate information production. But it also left an unresolved question: how do we evaluate and reward information quality? Without solving this, InfoFi cannot expand the information ecosystem and may even worsen market fatigue.

2.3. Privacy has become a necessity

Source: rwa.xyz

As institutional capital accelerates inflows, the crypto market is shifting from retail-led to institution-led. Alongside this change, privacy sectors are beginning to gain attention. This is no coincidence.

Source: Tiger Research

On-chain transparency has long been regarded as a key advantage of cryptocurrencies. However, exposing transaction size, timing, and holdings means strategies are fully revealed to institutional investors. The rising proportion of off-chain trading in traditional finance also reflects growing unease about fully transparent structures.

Transparency has not benefited all participants equally. As discussions about institutional involvement and market expansion deepen, privacy issues can no longer be considered secondary.

2.4. A year of demonstrating product-market fit in cryptocurrencies

2025 was the year cryptocurrencies moved beyond abstract potential to showcase real, feasible application scenarios. Stablecoins, x402, and prediction markets, though diverse in form, share a core advantage: they organically combine the borderless currency properties of crypto and the ability to provide transactional trust to solve real-world problems.

The key is that cryptocurrencies can facilitate transactions and provide results trust without central authorities. In an environment with global participants, cryptocurrencies can execute transactions and verify outcomes without intermediaries. Traditional systems struggle to offer such advantages. These cases show that in certain fields, cryptocurrencies can demonstrate relative superiority.

These examples do not prove that cryptocurrencies are a panacea for all areas. But they indicate that when the unique attributes of crypto align with the problem structure, projects can achieve clear product-market fit. 2025 was the first year to reveal these conditions with some clarity.

3. Rapid narrative cycles and the sedimentary objects

The 2025 crypto market saw an unprecedented number of narratives. Before current narratives could be fully validated, attention shifted to the next story, with many narratives fading quickly after brief consumption. Given the astonishing speed of these shifts, 2025 may seem superficially like a waste of time.

However, it would be overly simplistic to dismiss 2025 as meaningless based solely on this impression. Although narratives are short-lived, various experiments advanced behind the scenes, and institutions began to seriously plan integrations. The trends of this period have gone beyond mere speculative stories. Compared to small-circle stories centered on speculators, more narratives accessible to retail investors emerged and expanded, beginning to broaden the market participation base.

Fast-consuming narratives failed to produce immediate tangible results. Yet, this process helped us clarify which structures are effective and which are illusions. Now is the time to use these lessons as fuel to move to the next stage.