Which predictions landed this year? One ignored model actually nailed the 2025 market cycle

At the start of 2025, crypto’s biggest names issued bold forecasts: Bitcoin to $200,000, Ethereum to $7,000, a US strategic reserve, and stablecoins going mainstream.

Twelve months later, the scoreboard reveals a pattern. The price targets mostly crashed and burned, while the structural calls on regulation, ETFs, and payments infrastructure quietly came true.

Here’s who nailed it, who missed the mark, and what the gap between hype and reality says about how this market actually works.

Bitcoin $200,000, Ethereum $7,000, Solana $750

Bitwise’s December 2024 outlook opened with blockbuster numbers: Bitcoin to $200,000, Ethereum to $7,000, Solana to $750, all riding ETF-driven adoption and institutional momentum.

The thesis wasn’t crazy, as spot Bitcoin ETFs had launched in January 2024, pulling in tens of billions, and the President Donald Trump administration’s pro-crypto stance suggested regulatory tailwinds would persist.

Reality delivered a different script. Bitcoin peaked around $126,000 in mid-October, then sold off hard on tariff headlines and macro headwinds, finishing the year near the high-$80,000s.

Ethereum topped just under $5,000 in August and closed around $3,000. Solana traded in the low-$100s into year-end.

Although the price predictions missed the mark, the regulation and institutional adoption predictions were on target.

Bitwise was directionally right that 2025 would be an “up only” year for most of its duration, but the point targets overshot. The firm’s real contribution was calling for the expansion of ETFs and policy shifts on stablecoins.

For price prediction purposes, this belongs in the “enthusiastic but wrong” bucket.

Cycle peak in Q1, Bitcoin to $180,000, tokenization at $50B

VanEck’s late-2024 prediction deck forecast a peak in the first quarter, with Bitcoin hitting $180,000, another new high by year-end, and aggressive growth in on-chain activity: $50 billion in tokenized securities, $200 billion in DeFi TVL, $30 billion in NFT volume.

The timing was wrong. Bitcoin’s peak came in October, topping out around $126,000 and never revisiting that level after the tariff shock.

The tokenization market peaked at $19.2 billion, total value locked in DeFi reached $170 billion and then declined, and NFT volume was roughly $5.6 billion, all far below VanEck’s numbers.

VanEck was over-optimistic on scale but broadly right that tokenization and DeFi would grow meaningfully. The firm gets credit for identifying the themes, it just priced in two years of growth instead of one.

Bitcoin $300,000, Ethereum $8,000, total crypto $10T

HashKey Group’s “Top 10 Market Predictions for 2025” became a sentiment snapshot when nearly 50,000 community voters backed the boldest scenario: Bitcoin breaking $300,000, Ethereum above $8,000, total crypto market cap at $10 trillion, and USD stablecoins above $300 billion.

The only number that has held is the supply of USD-pegged stablecoins, which sits at $308 billion as of press time.

Bitcoin’s high was roughly $126,000, Ethereum’s around $4,950, and the aggregate crypto market stalled far below $10 trillion.

This prediction is useful as the purest expression of 2025’s bullish groupthink.

Bitcoin $185,000, DOGE above $1, miners become AI shops

Galaxy put out one of the most granular 2025 prediction sets: Bitcoin to $185,000, Ethereum above $5,500, Dogecoin breaking $1, plus ambitious targets for DeFi and NFTs.

They also argued that most public miners would pivot into AI and high-performance computing.

Bitcoin and Ethereum undershot those price objectives by roughly 30% and 10%, respectively, and DOGE never cleared $1.

However, in terms of structure, Galaxy was much closer. Miners did aggressively invest in AI and HPC capacity throughout 2025.

MARA Holdings, Riot Platforms, and others announced AI compute partnerships and retrofitted facilities to capture GPU demand.

This is a neat example where “who was right” depends on whether you cared about tickers or business models. Galaxy’s price calls mostly whiffed; their industry-structure call largely hit.

Bitcoin to $200,000 by year-end

In October, Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick reiterated a long-running view that Bitcoin could reach $200,000 by the end of 2025, framing Trump’s pro-crypto stance and ETF inflows as catalysts.

Bitcoin did set a new all-time high above $126,000 in early October, but then sold off hard on tariff headlines, roughly 30% below the peak and more than 50% below the $200,000 target.

This is a clear miss. Standard Chartered gets points for conviction and for being right that Bitcoin would make new highs, but the $200,000 anchor became a meme as the year closed with BTC in the $80,000s.

Perma-bulls pointed to Bitcoin at $250,000

Two of 2025’s loudest individual forecasters were BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes and Fundstrat’s Tom Lee. Hayes repeatedly floated scenarios in which Bitcoin would hit $200,000 to $250,000, and Ethereum would hit $10,000, leaning on Fed easing and a “doom loop” in sovereign debt.

Lee told multiple outlets he saw Bitcoin at $250,000 in 2025. Same result as Standard Chartered: the cycle topped out at roughly half those levels for BTC and about half for ETH before a violent liquidation episode in October reset leverage.

Hayes and Lee weren’t wrong that Bitcoin would rally or that macro liquidity mattered. They were wrong about the magnitude and the market’s ability to sustain parabolic moves without a shock.

That’s the perma-bull tax: you’re always bullish, so you’re always a bit too bullish.

US strategic Bitcoin reserve, major digital asset legislation, XRP and SOL ETFs

Gemini’s Jan. 22 blog, “Five Crypto Predictions for 2025,” argued that the US would formally establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve, driven by Trump’s campaign rhetoric and growing bipartisan interest in alternative reserve assets.

In March, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Treasury to build a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” initially seeded with BTC seized in prior enforcement actions and authorizing additional purchases subject to congressional appropriation.

This is one of the cleanest “nailed it” calls of the year. VanEck also predicted a reserve, but Gemini’s 2025 version framed the politics especially well.

In the same post, Gemini predicted Congress would move past gridlock to approve comprehensive digital asset legislation, with special emphasis on a federal stablecoin regime.

The GENIUS Act cleared both chambers and was signed in July, creating a national licensing and reserve framework for dollar-backed stablecoins and explicitly banning algorithmic models.

The broader market structure bill is still being negotiated, but the stablecoin piece arrived essentially as Gemini described.

Gemini also bet that ETFs would spread beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, specifically naming Solana and XRP as likely 2025 spot ETF candidates.

Spot Solana ETFs debuted in the US on October 28 via Bitwise’s BSOL, pulling in over $400 million in the first week. In November, US regulators green-lit the first spot XRP ETF, following earlier XRP products in Brazil and Europe.

This is a high-impact structural call that reshaped trading in both assets and validated the “ETF-palooza” narrative heading into 2026.

Gemini’s three-for-three record on non-price predictions makes them the clear winner in the “structural vision” category.

Stablecoins, DeFi, and consumer crypto go mainstream

Coinbase’s 2025 Outlook avoided hard price targets and focused on three big trends: a more crypto-friendly Congress, stablecoins shifting from trading rails to payments, and a DeFi revival.

Delphi Digital similarly predicted that 2025 would be a “key development node for consumer DeFi,” with on-chain cards and tokenized US stocks entering the mainstream app stack.

The GENIUS Act and ongoing CLARITY debates produced exactly the “most crypto-friendly Congress in history” dynamic that Coinbase anticipated.

Stablecoins expanded their role as Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, and Shopify rolled out USDC and other coins for cross-border payments and subscriptions.

DeFi TVL climbed back to roughly $170 billion, its highest level since late 2021, and on-chain cards plus tokenized-stock access in apps like Robinhood validated the consumer-DeFi thesis almost point-for-point.

These are the quiet winners. No viral $200,000 chart, but almost everything they said about structure, regulation, and usage broadly happened.

Coinbase and Delphi get the highest marks for useful prediction, as they told where the market was going, not where the price would spike.

The verdict

The scoreboard is clear. Price predictions overshot, while structural predictions on regulation, ETFs, stablecoins, and infrastructure mostly landed.

The firms that focused on “what will change” rather than “how high will it go” delivered the most value. Gemini went three-for-three on non-price calls.

Coinbase and Delphi nailed the thematic arc. Bitwise, VanEck, Galaxy, Standard Chartered, Hayes, and Lee all missed badly on targets but captured pieces of the directional story.

The lesson for 2026: ignore the price targets, track the structure.

The people who got 2025 right weren’t the ones calling $200,000 Bitcoin or Ethereum $10,000. They were the ones calling for stablecoin legislation, ETF expansion, and a UX rebuild for DeFi. That’s where the actual alpha lives.