Crypto in December 2025: A Red Year-End

2026-01-01

There was no Santa rally. December capped a year that began with a record and ended with crypto's first annual decline since 2022. But beneath the weak tape, the plumbing of the industry kept maturing. Here is the recap, and a look back at the year.

No Recovery

Bitcoin traded from the low-$90,000s down to around $86,000 before closing 2025 near $87,500 -- roughly a 3-4% loss for the month. Ethereum bounced to ~$3,100 after a network upgrade and ended the year around $3,000. The December 10 Fed cut (25 bp to 3.50-3.75%, the third straight) came with a hawkish dot plot signaling just one more cut in 2026, and crypto largely sold the news.

Tech and Policy Kept Building

On December 3, Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade went live, bringing PeerDAS blob scaling. On December 8, the CFTC issued tokenized-collateral relief, letting futures merchants accept stablecoins, BTC, and ETH as margin. And on December 12, the OCC conditionally approved five crypto national trust-bank charters -- Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos -- a major step toward regulated crypto banking under the GENIUS Act.

A Record Year for Theft

On December 18, Chainalysis reported that North Korea stole a record ~$2.0 billion in crypto during 2025, part of a record ~$3.4 billion total for the year -- driven heavily by February's Bybit hack, which alone accounted for roughly 44% of the total. Otherwise, December was quiet on the security front (~$76 million stolen).

The Year in Review

2025 was a year of paradox. Crypto won nearly every political and regulatory battle it had fought for a decade -- the GENIUS Act became law, a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve was established, the SEC stood down, and ETFs proliferated to Solana and XRP. Yet:

• Bitcoin finished down ~6%, its first-ever negative post-halving year, while gold rose ~63%.
• Total market cap ended near $3.0 trillion, down ~10% from January and ~30% off the October peak.
• The corporate-treasury trade that powered the summer turned into a liability: roughly 40% of major treasury firms traded below the value of their holdings by December.
• Despite the selloff, ~$14.6 billion was raised across ~11 crypto IPOs -- Circle, Bullish, Gemini and more -- and Kraken filed for a Q1 2026 listing.

The Takeaway

2025 proved that good news and good prices can fully diverge over a year. Regulation matured, infrastructure expanded, and prices still fell. The traders who did well were the ones who priced regimes and managed risk rather than trading the narrative. That is exactly what we build. See our AI forecasts for the year ahead on the dashboard.