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The cryptocurrency industry underwent a profound structural transformation in 2025, cementing its transition from a market driven largely by retail speculation into one increasingly shaped by institutional capital, compliant infrastructure, and mature on-chain technology.
According to the CoinGlass 2025 Crypto Derivatives Market Annual Report, the year represents a clear watershed in the evolution of digital assets, redefining market structure, risk transmission, and pricing power across centralized and decentralized venues.
CoinGlass describes 2025 as the year crypto assets became more deeply embedded within the global financial system.
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The derivatives market expanded dramatically in scale and complexity, replacing the earlier single-driver model of high-leverage retail speculation with diversified institutional demand.
Traditional financial capital entered through clearer compliance pathways, including BTC spot ETFs, regulated futures and options, mergers and acquisitions, and structured treasury strategies.
This institutionalization coincided with parallel advances in decentralized technology.
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On-chain derivatives, supported by high-performance application chains and intent-centric architectures, matured into functional alternatives to centralized exchanges in niche scenarios such as censorship-resistant trading and composable strategies.
While centralized exchanges (CEXs) retained dominance, decentralized platforms began exerting measurable competitive pressure at the margins.
BTC continued to be characterized as a high-beta asset class, with a full-year correlation to global M2, and price movements driven by liquidity conditions and risk sentiment.
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BTC surged from $40,000 to approximately $126,000 amid liquidity expansion, with gains largely driven by leverage exposure.
These gains were driven largely by a beta coefficient of 2.5–3.0, reflecting leveraged exposure to liquidity expansion rather than independent value discovery.
As a result, BTC proved highly sensitive to shifts in liquidity expectations and was often the first asset liquidated during risk-off episodes.
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Geopolitical and policy uncertainty played a central role in shaping derivatives trading narratives in 2025.
The United States shifted toward a legislation- and licensing-based framework, reducing uncertainty previously caused by regulation through enforcement.
The European Union continued to prioritize consumer protection and leverage restrictions under MiCA and MiFID.
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In Asia, Mainland China maintained its hardline stance, while Hong Kong and Singapore positioned themselves as compliant testing grounds.
Notably, the Singapore Exchange launched BTC and ETH perpetual futures, signaling deeper integration of crypto products into traditional financial infrastructure.
The UAE emerged as a regional compliance hub under a unified digital asset regulatory framework.
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CoinGlass data shows that 2025 marked a significant exchange-level supply rebalancing for BTC.
Exchange reserves peaked at approximately 2.98 million BTC in April before entering a sustained destocking phase, falling to around 2.54 million BTC by mid-November.
This net outflow of roughly 430,000 BTC, or about 15%, reflected a structural shift toward self-custody and long-term holding rather than short-term trading.
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Stablecoins and Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs) expanded in tandem in 2025, increasingly interfacing with traditional finance at a foundational level.
Stablecoin market capitalization temporarily exceeded $230 billion, with annual on-chain settlement volume reaching approximately $1.5 trillion.
Supported by legislation such as the GENIUS Act, stablecoins solidified their role as a settlement layer for cross-border payments and on-chain finance.
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DATs provided institutional investors with a standardized pathway to crypto exposure via compliant equity or fund vehicles.
At their peak, DAT-held BTC and ETH exceeded $140 billion in market value, more than tripling year-on-year.
Over the course of 2025, public DAT companies increased aggregate BTC holdings from about 600,000 BTC to roughly 1.05 million BTC by November, accounting for approximately 5% of total theoretical supply.
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While “Strategy” remained the largest holder, its share declined from around 70% to just over 60%, as smaller and mid-sized DATs drove incremental growth.
Real World Assets (RWAs) acted as a crucial bridge between traditional finance and on-chain systems.
Tokenized stocks saw market capitalization grow by 2,695% in 2025, driven by regulatory easing and strong global demand for U.S. financial assets.
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Platforms such as Ondo and xStocks emerged as representative players, while exchanges including Bitget and Bybit supported liquidity and trading.
Bitget reported that its stock contract trading volume surged 4,468% quarter-on-quarter in Q3, with cumulative volume surpassing $10 billion.
The global cryptocurrency derivatives market reached unprecedented scale in 2025.
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CoinGlass estimates total annual trading volume at $85.7 trillion, with an average daily turnover of $264.5 billion.
A single-day peak of approximately $748 billion on October 10 highlighted how derivatives became the primary arena for price discovery during periods of market acceleration.
Binance led with $25.09 trillion in annual volume, representing 29.3% of the global market.
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OKX, Bybit and Bitget followed, and together with Binance accounted for about 62.3% of total derivatives volume.
Below the top tier, a steep drop-off underscored the “Matthew Effect,” with smaller platforms increasingly pressured to find niche positioning.
Global derivatives open interest (OI) traced a volatile path in 2025.
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After bottoming at $87 billion during Q1 deleveraging, OI surged to a historical peak of $235.9 billion on October 7.
A flash deleveraging event in early Q4 erased more than $70 billion in positions in a single day.
Despite this shock, year-end OI stood at $145.1 billion, representing a 17% increase from the start of the year.
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OI was heavily concentrated among top platforms.
Binance alone held around 28% of average daily OI, while the top five centralized exchanges controlled over 80%, amplifying both liquidity efficiency and systemic risk.
Liquidations became one of the most defining stress indicators of the 2025 derivatives market.
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CoinGlass estimates that total forced liquidations across long and short positions reached approximately $150 billion over the year, equating to a routine daily average of $400–500 million.
Under normal conditions, these liquidations reflected standard margin adjustments in a high-leverage environment and had limited long-term impact.
Systemic stress was concentrated in a few extreme events, most notably the October 10–11 liquidation shock.
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Disclosed market-wide liquidations exceeded $19 billion in a single day, while CoinGlass estimates the true nominal scale may have reached $30–40 billion after accounting for delayed disclosures.
Approximately 85–90% of liquidations were long positions, revealing an extremely crowded bullish structure.
The trigger was an exogenous macro shock: the announcement of 100% U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports and new export controls, which abruptly shifted global markets into risk-off mode.
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While BTC and ETH experienced drawdowns of around 10–15%, many altcoins suffered collapses of 80% or more, exposing weaknesses in liquidation engines, insurance funds and Auto-Deleveraging (ADL) mechanisms.
Despite the scale of the event, no large-scale institutional defaults occurred, with losses concentrated in specific strategies and illiquid assets.
CME BECOMES THE GLOBAL PRICING CENTER.
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CoinGlass identifies 2025 as the year the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) firmly established itself as the global center for crypto pricing and risk transfer.
Institutional participation shifted from passive ETF exposure to active derivatives strategies, reconstructing the liquidity moat between compliant exchange-traded markets and offshore venues.
The launch of Spot-Quoted Futures (QBTC and QETH) was among the most disruptive innovations of the year, significantly reducing basis risk and roll costs.
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Basis trading normalized and scaled massively as ETF assets under management expanded, linking traditional interest rates with crypto-native yields.
In November, CME’s crypto complex reached a record average daily volume of 424,000 contracts, equivalent to $13.2 billion in notional value, up 78% year-on-year.
ETH derivatives liquidity surged in particular, with ETH futures ADV rising 355% year-on-year in Q3.
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CME also entered a multi-asset era with the launch of SOL and XRP futures and options, reflecting institutional demand for compliant exposure beyond BTC.
OPTIONS MARKET POWER SHIFTS.
The options market underwent a major realignment.
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Coinbase’s $2.9 billion acquisition of Deribit integrated crypto-native liquidity into a compliant framework, while BlackRock’s IBIT ETF options surpassed Deribit in BTC options open interest by Q3 2025.
Backed by $84 billion in AUM, IBIT became the world’s largest BTC options vehicle, demonstrating the growing dominance of traditional financial channels in volatility pricing.
Deribit, however, retained over 90% of the ETH options market due to the absence of comparable ETF options.
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DEFI DERIVATIVES, PREDICTION MARKETS AND WALLETS.
Decentralized derivatives also reached new milestones.
Perpetual DEXs recorded explosive growth, with monthly trading volume surpassing $1.2 trillion in October.
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Hyperliquid led the sector early in the year, reaching $15 billion in open interest and achieving near-CEX performance with its custom Layer 1 blockchain.
By year-end, competition intensified, shifting the market toward a multi-polar structure.
Crypto prediction markets expanded rapidly, with cumulative trading volume reaching $52 billion by November.
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Polymarket alone recorded over $23 billion in volume, with daily active users approaching 60,000 and registered users reaching 1.35 million, reinforcing prediction markets as credible information aggregation tools.
Web3 wallets evolved into comprehensive on-chain gateways.
Advances in account abstraction, chain abstraction, MPC and TEE security reduced onboarding friction to historic lows.
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The OKX Web3 Wallet emerged as a frontrunner with over 5 million monthly active users, while Binance Wallet and Bitget Wallet gained traction through early-stage project access and PayFi integration.
A MARKET OF OPPORTUNITY AND RISK.
CoinGlass concludes that 2025 was defined by a broad repricing of crypto markets, driven by the convergence of institutional capital, compliant infrastructure and on-chain innovation.
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While opportunities expanded in basis arbitrage, ETF options and high-performance decentralized trading, risks became increasingly concentrated in leverage chains, liquidation systems and DAT financing structures.
Looking ahead to 2026, the report emphasizes that the industry’s resilience will depend on whether trading infrastructure can withstand extreme leverage stress and whether capital can circulate efficiently between compliant and decentralized markets as global regulatory convergence accelerates.
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