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The first quarter of 2025 was a landmark for the industry, as global economic changes opened up both new opportunities and challenges for cryptocurrencies. There is a noticeable trend away from meme coins and speculative hype around stablecoins towards projects with more fundamental developments. In their new report ‘Crypto Market Recap: Q1 2025’, CryptoRank analysts have summarised the key events and trends of this period. We will discuss the main findings of the report in today's article.
The first quarter of 2025 was eventful and volatile for financial markets. In particular, Bitcoin demonstrated strong volatility: at the beginning of the year, the asset rose sharply, updating its all-time high, but ended the quarter with a drop of -11.7%. This dynamics was to some extent driven by political events in the US, namely the return of Donald Trump to the presidency.
To better understand the geopolitical impact on the markets, CryptoRank analysts analysed the behaviour of three key assets: Bitcoin, the S&P 500, and gold.
Source: 'Crypto Market Recap: Q1 2025', CryptoRank
After Trump's election victory in November, Bitcoin began to rise sharply, peaking at $108,824 on the day of the inauguration. However, since February, the situation has changed and the asset has begun to decline, settling in the range of $96,000-$84,000. The situation deteriorated after the announcement of new tariffs, which triggered a collapse to $74,781. But, as CryptoRank analysts emphasise, the market partially recovered its losses after the news of a 90-day freeze on these measures.
The S&P 500 was able to demonstrate a similar trajectory - growth after the election, a slight correction at the end of 2024, and then a new impetus before the inauguration. In February, the index came under pressure due to concerns about new economic policies, which led to a large-scale sell-off on 19 February. However, as with Bitcoin, the S&P 500 stabilised on 13 March, and on 2 April, the asset fell after news of tariff policy - and recovered with the announcement of a temporary pause in tariffs.
Gold, on the other hand, demonstrated the classic behaviour of an asset in the face of such instability. After a slight decline in November 2024, it stabilised and began to grow steadily in early 2025. On 3 April, the price of gold hit an all-time high of $3,162, indicating rising demand amid political uncertainty.
In general, CryptoRank analysts have identified the following key findings:
Despite the downturn, Bitcoin outperformed the S&P 500 but lost ground to gold;
Bitcoin's correlation with the stock market increased, while its correlation with gold remained weak, despite its status as ‘digital gold’;
US political decisions had a direct impact on all key assets, with markets reacting immediately to the Trump administration's actions;
Interest in gold increased in response to rising uncertainty, reflecting investors' increased need for stability.
In particular, Trump's tariffs have shaken up the market, and this has had a significant impact on the price of other assets. According to Crypto.Andy, a popular analyst on the CoinMarketCap platform, other top 10 coins were affected by the restrictions, in addition to bitcoin. The largest losses were recorded among DOGE, SOL, ETH, and LINK, some of which fell by more than 50%. At the same time, TRX showed relative stability, losing only 6.94% of its value. However, amid the general decline, WBT stood out, not only holding its own in the face of high volatility but also showing an increase of 13.7%.
As for the state of blockchains in Q1, according to CryptoRank analysts, Ethereum remained an important institutional anchor, although its price suffered a significant drop of 50%, causing some pessimism among investors. As a result, this sparked discussions on social media about its future, where the ‘Ethereum is dead’ narrative gained traction. In addition, there was a noticeable gap between developers who were actively working on the development of the network and speculative traders for whom price volatility was becoming a determining factor.
The situation was exacerbated by the growing popularity of Bitcoin, supported by institutional investment and the addition of the asset to the US crypto reserve. At the same time, Solana grew in popularity in the wake of the hype, which added another challenge to Ethereum. However, despite the price problems, Ethereum managed to take a leading position in the narrative of tokenised real assets, in particular, placing 56% of all tokenised RWAs, among which the BlackRock BUILD fund became an important project. In May, Ethereum is also expecting an important update with the Pectra hardfork, which, according to CryptoRank, will bring the network to a new level of Account Abstraction (AA).
At the same time, competition between blockchains intensified, particularly in the Solana ecosystem, which saw a decline in key indicators. The loss of interest in meme coin trading and the rapid decline of the AI agent trend have led to increased internal competition between Solana projects. One of the most striking examples of this is the launch of a new DEX by pump.fun, which managed to capture 20% of the trading volume on Solana's DEX in less than a week, creating direct competition for Raydium.
However, not all blockchains have experienced a downturn. CryptoRank analysts highlighted several new projects, such as Berachain and Sonic, which continued to develop and attract interest. Berachain attracted significant funding and quickly reached $3 billion in TVL, outperforming well-known networks such as Arbitrum and Avalanche. The strategy of raising liquidity through specialised markets and a framework of incentives has proven to be effective. Sonic, which launched at the end of 2024, has also attracted attention due to its high throughput and transaction speed. Just four months after the launch of the main network, Sonic reached $1 billion in TVL, becoming the leading blockchain in terms of TVL growth in the first quarter of 2025.
Last year was an explosive year for meme coins, with hundreds of new coins and millions of dollars in circulation. At the same time, the beginning of 2025 was marked by a rapid decline in the meme coin market, which lost a significant portion of both its capitalisation and community attention in just a few months.
One of the main reasons was the natural deflation of the bubble. After a massive influx of new users and a wave of liquidity, the market began to be saturated with memes. As soon as the inflow of newcomers decreased, interest in hype assets began to wane, and trading activity dropped, which was immediately reflected in prices.
The emergence of political tokens such as $TRUMP and $MELANIA further aggravated the situation. They managed to temporarily attract the attention of investors and draw away some of the liquidity, which led to a certain ‘atomisation’ of the market. This was compounded by the controversial launch of $LIBRA, which caused a large wave of debate and scepticism, sending the meme coin euphoria into the home stretch.
Another important factor that influenced the market dynamics was the artificial injection of liquidity around meme coins, in particular through their listing on certain cryptocurrency exchanges. They were often accompanied by a hype and a short-term increase in interest, but an analysis of the results for January shows a completely different picture - the vast majority of such tokens quickly lose value after the launch of trading.
In particular, according to the data, the situation was as follows:
Binance: a median drop of 50%, with only 7 out of 44 tokens showing growth, with an average gain of +54%.
Bitget: 88% of the tokens are in the red, with a median change of -66%, while only 40 out of 339 tokens showed growth, with a median of +27%.
Bybit: 70% of coins in the median, 88% in the red zone; only 18 out of 155 managed to show positive dynamics (median +66%).
KuCoin: 86% of tokens showed losses, the change in the median is -66%, only 25 out of 188 grew (+29%).
OKX: the best relative picture is 72% of tokens in the red, a 41% drop on average, while 13 out of 47 showed growth (+25%).
Despite these disappointing results, the practice of listing dubious assets is not going away - on the contrary, it may become more common due to new mechanisms of community engagement. For example, the ‘Vote to List’ feature introduced by Binance turns the process of adding new tokens into a competition for popularity rather than quality. In this system, the listing decision does not depend on the internal expertise of the exchange, but on the activity of the community, which steps up to ensure that its token wins. As a result, the exchange receives a stream of new assets with inflated demand but weak fundamentals, which only reinforces the trend of unprofitable and overly volatile assets in the trading ecosystem.
The first quarter of 2025 was an important milestone in the development of the cryptocurrency industry, where political and economic factors had a significant impact on market dynamics. The coming months will show whether new projects and technologies will be able to adapt to the changes, creating new opportunities for investors and developers.
Vlad Hryniv
