April 2025 Recap of Digital Assets Industry
April started with a big dip in the digital assets market. Bitcoin (BTC) dropped from around $85,000 to $74,000 within a week. Then it quickly bounced back 14% to $85,000 the following week.
Major Layer 1s didn't fare so well. Ethereum (ETH) plummeted under $1,400 (down -66% from 4-year high), Solana (SOL) dropped below $95 (down -68% from January 2025 all-time-high), while Sui (SUI) hit $1.70 (down -68% from January 2025 all-time-high).
When tariffs were announced by President Trump on April 7, digital assets looked ready to sink to the Titanic. BTC fell relative to stocks that day, but then began to show signs of life. On a daily return basis, BTC had outperformed stocks more often than not (10 out of 17 days) and posted strong gains due to heavy BTC buying.
Onchain activity was robust despite the drawdowns. Compared to March, total blockchain revenue was up .5%, stablecoin transfer volume was up 11%, and DEX volume was up 5%.
Ethereum's Pectra upgrade is scheduled to go live on May 7, and investors hope it'll help turn ETH around from its long downtrend. The upgrade will introduce significant technical improvements, including enhanced scalability, reduced transaction fees, improved security, and the introduction of smart accounts.
Vitalik Buterin proposed replacing Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM) with the RISC-V architecture. This move to RISC-V could simplify Ethereum’s execution layer, boost transaction speeds, and dramatically improve zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) efficiency. Today, proving a single Ethereum block takes around 4.7 minutes; with RISC-V, researchers hope to cut this down by up to 100x, unlocking sub-5-second proving times critical for scaling ZK rollups.
XRP underperformed in April despite Ripple’s efforts to reposition its network through several key moves. For years, many dismissed XRP as a speculative asset with little real usage. Recently, however, it has shifted toward smart contracts, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, and major acquisitions to drive activity on its chain. Time will tell if they efforts pay off.
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- View our previous recaps
