Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin,, and the Big Picture Power Shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Monday, December 22nd. And today we are talking about the themes

that defined Bitcoin and crypto in 2025.

Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it,

give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation,

come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly

slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, happy week of Christmas. This will be our last episode of the year.

And so, of course, as everyone settles into a holiday lull, we want to look back on what the

biggest themes of the year were for Bitcoin and Crypto more broadly. I think it's fairly safe

to say that this was not the year that anyone really anticipated,

in both good and bad ways.

We're going to talk about the three biggest themes of 2025 and the three biggest themes

that will impact Bitcoin next year.

But what's interesting is that what's not on the list is price.

This has been an up and down year for the market.

Bitcoin hit a new all-time high of 125,000, followed by a

35% drawdown. Price has recovered slightly, and we're heading into the end of the year, trading at around 90,000. It looks like Bitcoin will be slightly down on the year. While there were moments of euphoria and collapse, this was ultimately a relatively sedate year for price action. We didn't have a blow off top where

Bitcoin moves 30% or more in a month. In fact, the best month for Bitcoin was in April at 14%.

Every other year aside from 2022 had at least one month with a 20% upside move. There also weren't

many big months to the downside, with the largest being an 18% loss in November. We didn't

get the characteristic 70% drawdown

...