📝 Editor's Note:

Welcome to OurNetwork's latest and last issue of 2025.

In this installment, we're highlighting four subsectors of crypto whose growth defined the year: stablecoins, real world assets, perp DEXs, and prediction markets. While crypto's overall market cap dropped 11% to $3.06T in 2025, these four subsectors showed exciting progress.

We'd like to thank RWA.xyz, Token Terminal, Chaos Labs, and OurNetwork's Diego Cabral for contributing to the newsletter to close out the year.

And finally, thank you for reading our contributors' work. We look forward to continuing to improve in 2026.

– ON Editorial Team

Stablecoins | Real World Assets | Perp DEXs | Prediction Markets

• Stablecoins had a breakout year in 2025, growing 50% to surpass $300B in market cap. Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC) still dominate with 88% share, but the next eight products added $19B, led by Sky’s USDS. Other top gainers included PayPal’s PYUSD (+$3.4B), World LibertyFi’s USD1 (+$2.8B), and Falcon Finance’s USDf (+$2.2B). With regulatory clarity from the GENIUS Act, 2026 is shaping up as a pivotal year as neobanks adopt stablecoins for instant settlement, additional yield, and user growth.

• 2025 has been the year of tokenized stocks. The year-to-date market cap growth of tokenized assets: stocks +2,695%, commodities +225%, funds +148%, and stablecoins +49%. Issuers leading the charge: Backed, Ondo, Dinari, and Robinhood. With Robinhood already tokenizing hundreds of assets per week on Arbitrum, the tokenization playbook has been established. The next 12-18 months will show which issuer is able to capture the largest share of the ~$130T public equities market.

• One of the defining shifts of 2025 has been decentralized exchanges beginning to erode the dominance of centralized venues, particularly in perps. In the third quarter of 2025, Solana DEX volume surpassed CEX volume, a milestone driven largely by growth in onchain perps. The crossover highlights a structural change, where leverage and liquidity are concentrating. The trend is expected to extend to other chains, even as DEX perps face headwinds following the Oct. 10 flash crash. Market activity suggests these events slowed momentum but did not reverse the underlying shift.

• In 2025, onchain data shows a clear separation between attention and conviction in prediction markets. While volume kept growing, open interest evolved much more slowly, indicating that only a subset of activity translates into sustained capital at risk. This divergence suggests prediction markets are increasingly serving two distinct functions: high-frequency trading around short-term events, and longer-horizon positioning where capital remains deployed to express views on structural risks. In that sense, prediction markets are starting to resemble financial instruments for risk pricing, not merely venues for entertainment.