Crypto Investors Weather ‘Treacherous’ Market as 2025 Closes

Cryptocurrency investors began the year in a festive mood, with prices hitting record highs.

Now, those same investors have little to celebrate as 2025 winds down, Bloomberg News reported Saturday (Dec. 20). The price of bitcoin, the most popular form of cryptocurrency, is down 10% since this time last year, with billions erased after around $1 trillion was wiped out from the total market value of all coins.

Among the investors feeling pain as the year closes is Joaquin Morales, a 21-year-old student from Madrid, Spain. As the price of bitcoin dropped, he purchased more of the coin, banking on an eventual recovery. However, the price kept plummeting.

“I caught the falling knife like five times,” said Morales, using one word to describe the year in crypto: traicionero, or “treacherous.”

Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, told Bloomberg that “momentum-loving investors” were drawn to cryptocurrencies by changing attitudes towards digital assets in Washington, coupled with a range of stock market methods for garnering exposure.

“The crypto flash crash on Oct. 10 was a very unpleasant wake-up call,” he said.

The report noted that the downturn is causing traders to rethink their strategies heading into the new year. Some are recalling 2022, when the implosion of the FTX exchange ushered in a “crypto winter.”

In other crypto news, PYMNTS wrote last week about the evolution of stablecoins in 2025, a year in which the economy surrounding these tokens became “increasingly real, increasingly regulated and increasingly institutional.”

There was a disruption happening, that report said, though perhaps not one easily viewed by retail investors. That reality was illustrated by a series of recent developments from the sector, such as SoFi’s launch of an enterprise stablecoin, and Coinbase’s debut of a white-label stablecoin issuance product designed for corporations and banks.

Meanwhile, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) formerly undertook new rulemaking around the implementation of the GENIUS Act, a sign of a new stage of regulatory clarity. And PayPal rolled out stablecoin financial tooling created for AI-native businesses, while Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement capabilities in the U.S.

“Looming over it all, JPMorgan poured a bucket of cold water on market hype, stating it does not foresee a trillion-dollar stablecoin market any time soon,” PYMNTS wrote. “The banking giant, for its own part, likely prefers tokenized deposits to stablecoins.”