January 2025 Recap of Digital Assets Industry
In January, Bitcoin (BTC) led all major asset classes with a 9% gain. In the top 100 crypto tokens by market cap, a majority were in the red in January despite large gains by Bitcoin, which typical boosts the appreciation of other tokens. Some large cap L1s like SOL (+18%), HBAR (+14%), ALGO (+13%), and ADA (+12%) saw strong gains in January.
Along with Bitcoin, investors are increasingly concentrating on blue-chip tokens, signaling a shift away from non-utility tokens like memecoins and towards projects with utility.
Solana dominated L1s across key metrics by leading DEX volumes (45% market share), chain revenues (45%), and daily active wallets (33%). A majority of this came from the constant flow of flash-in-the-pan memecoins launched on Solana.
Ethereum (ETH) sentiment remained weak, but is expected to see a recovery soon. Institutions and President Trump's World Liberty Fund started buying hundreds of millions worth of ETH in January.
Ripple (XRP) launched the Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin. It is natively issued on XRP and Ethereum blockchains, is fully backed by a segregated reserve of cash and cash equivalents, and is redeemable 1:1 for US dollars. In January, RLUSD began to see adoption as Ripple minted 1,050,000 RLUSD.
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