As 2025 draws to a close, we are taking a look at three stories that defined a year of record-breaking

volatility, political scandals, and a fundamental shift in how crypto integrates with global finance.

You're watching a special edition of Coin Desk Daily. I'm your host, Jen Sanassi.

The rise and fall of meme coins.

We begin with the story that dominated the first half of the year, the meme coin frenzy, and its spectacular collapse.

2025 was the year meme coins moved from the fringes of the internet to the White House. It reached a fever pitch in January when President Donald Trump

and First Lady Melania Trump launched their own branded tokens days before President Trump's

inauguration. The tokens plummeted more than 85% within months, leaving hundreds of thousands

of retail wallets in the red. But the face of this era wasn't a politician. It was Hayden Davis.

Named a Gen Z supervillain in Coin Desk's most influential, Davis became the avatar of financial

nihilism. For him, meme coins weren't about jokes or communities. They were instruments of extraction.

He used tactics like sniping, insider coordination, and front running to siphon liquidity from the very retail traders who believed the memes were real.

This peaked during the Libra debacle where Davis infamously claimed to control Argentine president, Javier Malay.

The ensuing scandal and the tokens collapse effectively popped the meme coin bubble, exposing the

craze as a parasitic machine rather than a cultural movement. Utility or privacy. The transparency

of traditional blockchains forces a difficult choice, break free from this limitation with midnight.

The digital asset treasury crisis. Our second story follows the rise and sudden struggle of digital asset

treasuries or DATS. Following the playbook of Michael Saylor's strategy, over 140 companies began

using their balance sheets to hoard digital assets like Bitcoin and Ether this year.

However, the model faced a stress test like no other. In October, the index provider MSCI announced it might

exclude dads from its major equity indexes, reclassifying them as fund-like vehicles. This move

threatened to cut the power to the flywheel that allowed these companies to raise billions in cheap

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