After a year of regulatory change and uneven market performance, crypto investors are reassessing where value accrued in 2025. In a recent podcast, Pantera Capital partner Mason Nystrom, Hash3 co-founder Hootie Rashidifard, and Variant partner Alana Levin identified incumbents such as Robinhood alongside stablecoins and prediction markets as this year’s top performers. According to Nystrom, incumbents benefited from acting once the regulatory environment became clearer, and he pointed to Robinhood, which he said had taken a cautious stance toward crypto in recent years before moving more aggressively in 2025, adding that incumbents “have done an excellent job getting ahead of where the puck is skating” as clarity emerged.
Stablecoins were another clear winner, according to Rashidifard, who pointed to rapid growth in transaction volumes and issuer profitability, noting that “Tether is the most profitable company on the planet per employee.” He said, “In 2022-2023, no one was touting their stablecoin-founded project as the cool thing in their portfolio, and now people are like, ‘oh wow, that’s a really sticky interesting business,’ and not just because it generates revenue, but because it actually provides value to some end customer.”
Variant’s Levin highlighted prediction markets as one of the fastest-growing categories of 2025, saying platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket have moved past earlier doubts about wash trading and election-only activity. She said: “I think a year ago both Kalshi and Polymarket were under a billion dollar valuations, and then to see the Intercontinental Exchange invest $2 billion into Polymarket this year, that’s like mind-blowing.”
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