State Of Crypto 2025 | a16z Crypto — Eddy Lazzarin & Daren Matsuoka

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Tech News, News, Technology

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2025

⏱️ 71 minutes

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Summary

a16z crypto’s CTO Eddy Lazzarin and partner Daren Matsuoka return for our annual State of Crypto to map where 2025 really is on the curve: a price–innovation cycle poised to hand the baton back to builders, Bitcoin holding ~50% share, and 70M people now using crypto on-chain out of 716M owners. We dig into why institutions are actually shipping (not just PR), how stablecoins now rival Visa-scale volumes and sit among top U.S. Treasury holders, why DEX spot share near 20% changes price discovery, and how perps, infra throughput, and fee-switch economics are reshaping revenue across chains. Plus: prediction markets’ second act, the AI×crypto handshake (agents, proof-of-humanity, IP), and Bitcoin’s long-dated quantum dilemma. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAXNET | MINT, REDEEM, EARN https://bankless.cc/fraxnet 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR L2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌳KGEN | REQUEST A DEMO https://bankless.cc/KGEN-podcast 💠BIT DIGITAL ($BTBT) | ETH TREASURY https://bankless.cc/bit-digital We’re being compensated by Bit Digital (NASDAQ BTBT) for this segment promoting their company and BTBT. The compensation is paid in cash as a one time payment. You can find additional information about Bit Digital and BTBT on their Investor page at https://bit-digital.com/investors --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Price–Innovation Cycle: Where We Are Now 3:46 Bitcoin Dominance & Market Correlations 12:09 User Geography & Adoption: MAUs vs Owners 20:15 Institutions & TradFi: Motives, Stablecoins, Integration 27:40 Stablecoin Scale: Volumes, Treasuries & Dollar Power 39:03 Stablecoin Decoupling & DeFi Growth 42:33 Perps, Protocol Revenue & Prediction Markets 47:55 Infrastructure: TPS, Scalability & Bottlenecks 49:51 Token Valuation & Chain Revenue 59:24 Bitcoin’s Quantum Risk: Paths & Responses 1:02:48 AI × Crypto: Use Cases & Decentralization 1:04:00 Outlook & Closing: Predictions & Cycle Top? --- RESOURCES Eddy Lazzarin https://x.com/eddylazzarin Daren Matsuoka https://x.com/DarenMatsuoka a16z’s Quantum Computing Podcast https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/podcast/quantum-computing-what-when-where-how-fact-vs-fiction/ --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Transcript

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0:00.0	Bankless Nation, we were very excited. This has become an annual tradition. So we're doubly
0:06.4	excited to do this every year. The state of crypto in 2025. We've got two fine folks from A16Z
0:13.7	crypto, Eddie Lazarin, and also Darren Matsuoka. He is a partner at A16Z. He leads data science and strategy. Eddie, of course, is CTO. Okay,
0:25.6	let's get into the state of crypto for 2025. We'll start with this slide here, which is our
0:32.1	cycle slide. We've got total crypto market cap. We always like to look at price. That is all-time
0:37.4	high, at least up until recently. We've got crypto developers. We've got total crypto market cap. We always like to look at price. That is all-time high, at least up until recently.
0:39.5	We've got crypto developers.
0:41.2	We've got crypto-mobile wallets.
0:43.9	Price at near all-time high.
0:45.8	Crypto developer, sort of all-time high, but flat from our 2020 high.
0:52.0	And crypto-mobile wallets, I guess that's up a little bit. What is this telling us about
0:56.9	the cycle and why do you guys look at these three numbers to measure crypto cycles?
1:01.7	I think the way that we have always approached this space, you know, of course, there's many
1:06.3	lenses, you know, that you can look through to try to see where we're at in the cycle,
1:10.8	you know, one being, you know, the macro environment look through to try to see where we're at in the cycle, you know,
1:10.9	one being, you know, the macro environment, which we think is very important. But I think our
1:16.2	perspective on the market has always been rooted and defined by kind of this feedback loop that
1:23.0	we call the price innovation cycle. And the feedback loop really is kind of between the prices,
1:28.5	which generate interest, the developers, which come in as a result of that interest,
1:33.7	and then the products that they build, which bring in new users, right? And so throughout
1:37.7	crypto's history, we've seen this feedback loop take shape. We saw it in 2017 with the ICO boom.
1:43.8	We saw it in 2020 with Defy Summer. We saw it in 2017 with the ICO boom. We saw it in 2020 with DFI summer. We saw it in
	...

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