State of Crypto 2025: The year crypto went mainstream - a16z crypto

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State of Crypto 2025: The year crypto went mainstream<br>Daren Matsuoka, Robert Hackett, Jeremy Zhang, Stephanie Zinn, and Eddy Lazzarin<br>10.22.25<br>download report

TABLE OF CONTENTS<br>The market is big, global, and growing The market is big, global, and growing<br>Financial institutions have embraced crypto<br>Stablecoins went mainstream<br>Crypto is stronger than ever in the United States<br>The world is coming onchain<br>Blockchain infrastructure is (almost) ready for prime time<br>AI and crypto are converging<br>What’s next<br>Tags<br>AI & crypto<br>data insights<br>stablecoins<br>State of Crypto<br>State of Crypto<br>state of crypto 2025<br>tech trends<br>TradFi

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This is the year the world came onchain.

When we launched our first State of Crypto report, the industry was still in its adolescence. The total crypto market was worth about half what it is today. Blockchains were much slower, more expensive, and less reliable.

In the last three years, crypto builders weathered a major market drawdown and political uncertainty — but continued to make significant infrastructure improvements and other advancements. Those efforts bring us to today, a moment when crypto is becoming a meaningful part of the modern economy.

The story of crypto in 2025 is one of industry maturation. In short, crypto grew up:

Traditional financial incumbents, like Visa, BlackRock, Fidelity, and JPMorgan Chase — and tech-native challengers like PayPal, Stripe, and Robinhood — are offering or launching crypto products.

Blockchains now process over 3,400 transactions per second (100x+ growth in the last five years).

Stablecoins power $46 trillion ($9 trillion adjusted) in annual transactions, rivaling Visa and PayPal.

Over $175 billion sits in Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded products.

Our latest State of Crypto report explores this industry transformation, from institutional adoption and the rise of stablecoins to the convergence of crypto and AI. And for the first time, we’re introducing a new way to explore the data and track the industry’s evolution by the metrics that matter: the State of Crypto dashboard.

Now for the findings…

Key takeaways

The crypto market is big, global, and growing

Financial institutions have embraced crypto

Stablecoins went mainstream

Crypto is stronger than ever in the United States

The world is coming onchain

Blockchain infrastructure is (almost) ready for prime time

Crypto and AI are converging

The market is big, global, and growing

In 2025, the total crypto market cap crossed the $4 trillion threshold for the first time, marking the industry’s broad progress. The number of crypto mobile wallet users also reached all-time highs, up 20% from last year.

The shift from a hostile regulatory environment to a much more supportive one, alongside accelerating adoption of these technologies — from stablecoins to the tokenization of traditional financial assets to other emerging use cases — will define the next cycle.

We estimate that there are roughly 40-70 million active crypto users, an increase of about 10 million over the last year, per our own analysis based on an update to this methodology.

This is a fraction of the estimated 716 million people who own crypto, up 16% from last year. It’s also a fraction of the approximately 181 million monthly active addresses onchain, down 18% from last year.

The gap between passive crypto holders (people who own crypto but don’t transact onchain) and active users (people who transact onchain regularly) represents an opportunity for crypto builders to reach more potential users who already own crypto.

So where are these crypto users, and what are they doing?

Crypto is global, but different parts of the world appear to use it in different ways. Mobile wallet usage, an indicator of onchain activity, is growing fastest in emerging markets like Argentina, Colombia, India, and Nigeria. (In particular, Argentina has seen a 16x increase in crypto mobile wallet usage over the last three years, amid an escalating...