When the crypto industry dresses up in suits, how well can the annual report of 11 leading projects score?

Author: Nancy, PANews

The curtain of 2025 gradually falls. Looking back on this year, the crypto world has undoubtedly reached a watershed moment. The industry has officially bid farewell to the wild gold rush era of the past, shedding T-shirts for suits, and opening the doors to mainstream financial institutions.

In this annual exam from crypto to mainstream, PANews reviews the responses of 11 leading projects, covering tracks such as public chains, DeFi, stablecoins, cross-chain, and AI. These projects are no longer merely competing in performance metrics but are collectively shifting towards compliance, practicality, and scaling efforts. However, the infrastructure build-out has not yet directly led to a boom in crypto applications. The industry still faces issues like homogenization, value capture challenges, and insufficient product-market fit. Looking ahead to 2026, these projects are focusing on liquidity integration, breaking through scenarios to reach wider audiences, and sustainable economic models.

Circle: Identity “Confirmation” and Three Major Strategies

This year, as global major markets clarified regulations, Circle centered around three core strategic components: assets, applications & services (such as Circle Payment Network CPN and Circle StableFX), and infrastructure Arc. They have pushed programmable money and on-chain commerce from experimental edges into mainstream global finance.

In terms of assets, Circle manages USDC, EURC, and USYC. USDC’s market cap grew from $44 billion at the start of the year to $77 billion, with on-chain trading volume exceeding $50 trillion, supporting 30 native blockchains; EURC’s market cap increased from €70 million to over €300 million, becoming the largest euro stablecoin; USYC’s asset management scale rose to $1.54 billion, making it the second-largest tokenized money market fund (TMMF) globally.

Facing risks of a single revenue model, Circle began exploring diversified applications and services this year, launching products like CPN, CCTP, Gateway, Circle xReserve, Mint, StableFX, and Circle Wallets. For example, the payment network CPN has over 25 design partners and can use stablecoins like USDC and EURC to facilitate predictable, internet-native settlements without traditional intermediaries; CCTP enables users to transfer native USDC across 17 supported blockchains, with over $126 billion in cumulative transactions and more than 6 million cross-chain transfers; Circle Wallets embed USDC wallets directly into applications, supporting both developer-controlled and user-controlled modes.

Meanwhile, Circle is targeting infrastructure. This year, they launched Arc, an L1 blockchain designed to be an open, institutional-grade, internet-native infrastructure tailored for lending, capital markets, forex, and payments, attracting over 100 startups and design participants.

Currently, institutional and commercial adoption of Circle is accelerating, involving sectors like consumer banking, cross-border payments, payroll, small business finance, and remittances. Partners include Intercontinental Exchange, Deutsche Börse, Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Nubank, Binance, and others. Additionally, Circle is exploring AI agent economies, enabling AI to autonomously hold funds and pay for APIs, computing power, and other expenses via wallets and the Arc blockchain.

Notably, Circle completed an IPO in June, with market cap peaking over $770 billion, now down to $194 billion, and received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a national trust bank, which will greatly enhance the security and regulatory compliance of USDC reserves.

Arbitrum: Institutional On-Chain, Over 2.1 Billion Transactions in History

This year, Arbitrum’s narrative shifted toward institutional-grade financial infrastructure. From powering the world’s largest retail trading platform to settling tokenized funds from the world’s largest asset manager, Arbitrum claims to be the preferred platform for major global institutions.

In terms of ecosystem, Arbitrum is evolving into a vast economy, with over 100 chains either launched or in development, including Ethereal Perps DEX, Zama, and Blackbird. Over 1,000 projects are supported by Arbitrum, making it one of the top three public chains by protocol count. The Arbitrum network has generated over $600 million in ecosystem GDP, up more than 30% YoY. Meanwhile, Arbitrum One surpassed 2.1 billion transactions in 2025, with total collateral exceeding $20 billion. Remarkably, it took less than a year to complete the second 1 billion transactions, whereas the first took three years.

Stablecoins saw an 82% YoY increase in supply, with a market cap roughly over $8 billion, such as DRIP, which boosted stablecoin growth by over 229% in a few months; in RWA tokenization, the scale surpassed $1.1 billion in October, 18 times the same period in 2024, with partners including Robinhood, Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, Spiko, and others; active loans grew 109% to $1.5 billion, with new lending products from teams like Fluid increasing over 460%.

Financially, Arbitrum demonstrates high profitability and diversified revenue streams. Estimated Q4 2025 gross profit is about $6.5 million (annualized approx. $26 million), up over 50% QoQ, with gross margin exceeding 90%. Revenue sources expanded from 2 last year to 4 this year, e.g., Timeboost generated over $5 million in revenue within 7 months of launch. It also maintains a sizable balance sheet, holding over $150 million in non-native assets, including cash equivalents and ETH, supporting ongoing and strategic ecosystem expansion.

Looking to 2026, Arbitrum aims to bring open programmable finance applications into the global economy. However, it still faces internal competition within the L2 space and questions about value capture due to token incentives and subsidies.

Aave: Absolute Dominance Year and Three Pillars

The Aave protocol has become the largest and most liquid lending protocol ever, capturing 59% of the DeFi lending market and 61% of all active DeFi loans. Currently, Aave faces an internal governance power struggle. (Related: Falling token prices, whale sell-offs, and governance struggles in Aave)

Over the past year, Aave has shown remarkable resilience and expansion capacity, with all core metrics reaching new highs. In 2025, net deposits peaked over $75 billion, with total processed deposits reaching $3.33 trillion, and loans issued nearly $1 trillion—comparable to the top 50 US banks; at the same time, Aave is the only protocol with TVL exceeding $10 billion across four different networks.

This scale gives Aave strong revenue-generating ability. The protocol generated $885 million in fees in 2025, accounting for 52% of all DeFi lending fees, surpassing the combined total of its five closest competitors. This robust cash flow directly supports large-scale AAVE token buyback programs.

Looking ahead to 2026, Aave’s strategic focus is on Aave V4, Horizon, and Aave App. V4 will unify liquidity via a Hub & Spoke model, enabling Aave to handle trillions of dollars in assets, making it the first choice for institutions, fintechs, or enterprises seeking deep, reliable liquidity; Horizon is an institutional RWA lending market aiming to expand net deposits from $550 million to over $1 billion; Aave App is a consumer-facing mobile portal covering 70% of global capital markets, aiming to onboard millions of new users.

Starknet: Year of Execution, Betting on BTCFi to Raise $160 Million

Starknet has supported $1.5 trillion in transactions and executed over 1 billion transactions. However, this year, it faced multiple outages raising doubts, and its high language barrier still leaves a gap compared to EVM-compatible chains.

Starknet calls 2025 the “Year of Execution,” with major progress in performance, decentralization, interoperability, BTCFi, privacy, and ecosystem.

In performance, Starknet achieved key technical milestones, especially with v0.14.0 (Grinta) and S-two integration. v0.14.0 (Grinta) made Starknet the first rollup driven by a centralized sequencer architecture, significantly improving user and developer experience; the next-generation prover S-two offers lower costs and faster speeds, with a 100x leap over previous products. Currently, TPS capacity exceeds 1,000, gas costs stay below $0.001, transaction latency has dropped from 2 seconds to 500 milliseconds, and throughput recently peaked at 2,630 UOPS (user operations per second). Its processing capacity is approaching the needs of giants like Stripe or Nasdaq, with plans to scale to over 10,000 TPS.

Economically, Starknet introduced a dual-token security model with STRK and BTC, where Bitcoin stakers earn governance tokens STRK, enhancing security. In just three months, BTC staked on Starknet surpassed $160 million. Meanwhile, STRK staking has increased elevenfold since the start of the year, reaching 1.1 billion tokens, with a staking rate of 23%.

In interoperability, Starknet has filled key gaps, such as launching Circle CCTP, connecting native USDC to institutional funding channels; upcoming full integration with LayerZero and Stargate, as well as Near Intents, supporting seamless exchange of over 120 assets and STRK.

In application deployment, about 50 new teams joined Starknet mainnet this year, covering DeFi, payments, gaming, and consumer apps. For example, the Perp DEX Extended built by the former Revolut team reached $100 million TVL within three months; Ready launched a closed-loop on-chain USDC and real-world payment (Mastercard) solution; cross-chain games like Realms and Blob Arena launched on mobile app stores, enabling seamless interaction via account abstraction.

On privacy, Starknet promotes a “first expand, then privacy” strategy. The L2 Ztarknet proposal, based on Starknet, offers scalability and programmability, akin to Zcash’s programmable layer. Starknet is also building a complete privacy ecosystem, including core infrastructure, privacy payments, privacy transactions, privacy pools, privacy banks, and data protection protocols.

In 2026, Starknet aims to further commercialize and scale. Plans include linking network revenue directly to STRK token value; deepening the “Bitcoin smart contract layer” with a target of 10,000 BTC staked and over 35% STRK staking rate; tripling privacy product offerings and launching exclusive BTCFi + privacy products; integrating EVM wallets to greatly improve distribution and user experience.

( NEAR: Sharding Expansion, Cross-Chain Execution, and Private AI

Having weathered multiple bull and bear cycles, NEAR has undergone several narrative shifts. This year, NEAR has driven its transformation into a general execution layer for cross-chain DeFi and agent economy through three key technologies: sharded blockchain infrastructure, intent-driven cross-chain execution, and hardware-supported private AI.

In infrastructure, NEAR achieved qualitative leaps, laying a solid foundation for hosting large-scale AI agents and high-frequency financial services. For example, NEAR’s public benchmark testing on consumer-grade hardware achieved 1 million TPS, far surpassing traditional payment networks. Network performance further optimized, with finality confirmed in 1.2 seconds and block times of 600 milliseconds, capable of competing with traditional financial settlement speeds; NEAR also launched sharded smart contracts on mainnet, enhancing decentralization and execution capacity.

NEAR Intents became the fastest-growing cross-chain infrastructure this year, enabling universal execution from DeFi to AI markets via chain abstraction. Its core data is impressive: total cross-chain transaction volume exceeded $7 billion, with over 13 million swaps; connected to more than 25 major blockchains, supporting over 125 assets for one-click swaps and unified liquidity; serving over 1.6 million unique users, becoming a central hub for multi-chain ecosystems.

NEAR AI introduces a new privacy-first intelligent category for enterprises and consumers, supporting deployment of models with end-to-end encryption to address corporate data leakage concerns. Deep collaborations include Brave Nightly, OpenMind, and TravAI. Notably, the digital asset vault and confidential AI cloud platform SovereignAI received $120 million PIPE investment and launched the NEAR Digital Treasury.

Economically, NEAR completed a key halving upgrade, reducing maximum annual inflation by 50%. The digital asset vault and SovereignAI also secured $120 million PIPE funding, and NEAR launched a digital treasury; Bitwise introduced a staked NEAR ETP, entering traditional financial asset allocation lists.

On developer ecosystem, 2025 saw significant growth in resources, including seamless wallet onboarding innovations, multi-language support expansion, and tooling improvements, providing a unified and convenient path for developers building on NEAR.

Looking to 2026, NEAR will accelerate adoption and strengthen token value capture. It will deepen Intents adoption, expand integration scope and transaction volume, and broaden distribution channels to reinforce its role as a universal execution layer. It will also accelerate NEAR AI’s real-world applications, moving agent economy from concept to reality. Additionally, NEAR is establishing a new ecosystem sustainability framework, planning to channel fees generated by NEAR Intents into community governance treasuries, directly enhancing NEAR token value and aligning protocol revenue with token holder interests.

) Celo: Rejecting Empty Talk, Payment Emerges

Celo defines 2025 as the year of rejecting empty talk, completing multiple key tech upgrades and ecosystem expansions, making positive progress in real-world payments. However, Celo still faces challenges like limited distribution channels and fierce competition.

This year, Celo conducted four hard forks, abandoned its independent L1 identity, migrated to Ethereum L2, and further upgraded to ZK Rollup. These bold decisions achieved notable breakthroughs on both technical and commercial levels. Data shows on-chain costs dropped by 99.8%, and on-chain revenue increased tenfold.

In user and transaction data, Celo surpassed 1 billion transactions, with peak daily active users reaching 790,000, ranking first among all L2s. More critically, among 5.2 million new users this year, up to 79% were first-time users of the chain. This indicates that the main incremental growth is not just migration of existing on-chain users.

A key driver is the deeply integrated MiniPay wallet with Opera browser, which, through integration with Apple Pay and local payment systems in Nigeria, Brazil, and other countries, has brought over 11 million users to Celo this year, covering more than 60 countries. This real-world payment scenario directly fueled the explosive growth of stablecoins on Celo, with total stablecoin trading exceeding $65.9 billion since the start of the year, up 142%. USDT’s weekly active users peaked at over 3.3 million, even surpassing Tron.

Beyond payments, Celo also expanded infrastructure this year. For example, in identity, Self Protocol’s explosion and support for Google Cloud and India’s Aadhaar ID addressed on-chain identity verification challenges, crucial for regulated financial services (RWA, unsecured lending); in privacy, Celo’s collaboration with EY on the Nightfall L3 testnet aims to solve privacy issues in enterprise payments and settlements on public chains.

To address token price capture issues, Celo proposed a tokenomics restructuring in December, including burn and buyback mechanisms, aiming to build a healthier economic cycle.

Looking to 2026, Celo aims to make stablecoin payments as seamless as native payments everywhere, expand the “Mini-app” economy, and strengthen trust and security (identity, user protection) on the basis of scale.

( Aptos: Optimizing Performance and Developer Experience

This year, Aptos’s smart contract language Move continued to advance in expressiveness, performance, and security, aiming to build a new generation of smart contract language. However, in the high-performance public chain sector, Aptos has yet to see a flagship application, and its token faces early-stage sell pressure from institutions and teams.

Language-wise, Move 2 expanded expressiveness, including higher-order functions, on-chain storage, signed integers, and more details; performance-wise, the Move tech stack was optimized, including Rest API, indexers, Move compiler, and Move VM. Next year, the Move VM will be redesigned to improve parallelism, single-thread performance, and security; developer experience saw major enhancements like IDE support, transaction simulation sessions, new decompilers, and mutation testing.

Next year, Aptos plans to redesign the Move VM and execution stack to elevate parallelism, single-thread performance, and security to new levels, and introduce a TypeScript framework to make development more mainstream and user-friendly.

) Sui: Year of Technology Deployment

In 2025, Sui shifted from speed battles to a full-stack platform, providing a complete stack—Sui Stack—to solve computing, storage, privacy, identity, and liquidity issues, enabling developers to operate without relying on centralized services. Sui still faces competition from high-performance chains, ecosystem adoption challenges, and token unlock pressures.

This year, Sui completed several key pieces, achieving native interoperability:

Storage Layer: Walrus, a decentralized storage built for scale, integrity, and programmability, allows large data like videos, audio, and AI models to be stored cheaply and decentralizedly. Walrus Sites offers a model for hosting decentralized frontends without relying on centralized hosting infrastructure.

Privacy & Security Layer: Seal provides programmable access control, enabling complex, Web2-like permission management systems, all verifiable on-chain, pushing enterprise adoption.

Data Layer: Verifiable compute layer Nautilus uses TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) for on-chain verification and off-chain computation, allowing applications to handle heavy computation or private data without burdening the main chain, while maintaining verifiability.

Liquidity Layer: DeepBook V3 becomes shared liquidity infrastructure for the Sui ecosystem, supporting permissionless liquidity pools for all DeFi applications.

Identity & Governance: Identity and naming system SuiNS upgraded to infrastructure status this year, launching Move Registry (Sui’s NPM package manager), making code packages human-readable.

Additionally, Sui optimized infrastructure and user experience. Mysticeti v2 improved core performance; Passkeys support FaceID/Fingerprint signing transactions without mnemonic; Slush Wallet & Enoki 2.0 enable seamless app use without perceivable blockchain presence.

Sui’s full-stack capabilities have fostered more innovative applications, including cross-chain hubs, cross-chain games, full-chain finance, and AI payments. It is also accelerating into mainstream markets, with Canary, 21Shares, and Grayscale submitting spot ETF applications; inclusion in Bitwise 10 index; and Nasdaq listing leveraged SUI ETFs.

Reflecting on 2025’s end, Sui states it has laid a solid foundation, and future development depends on community choices on how to build upon it.

Hedera: Targeting AI and Tokenization, Reshaping Brand and Architecture

If the previous years aimed to prove that public distributed ledger technology (DLT) can handle real business workloads, Hedera believes 2025 proved it is a trusted layer for institutions. Yet, challenges remain, such as concerns over centralized governance and a relatively weak ecosystem due to fierce competition among public chains.

In tokenization, Hedera demonstrated a transition from theory to practice. For example, tokenized funds and UK government bonds issued via Archax on Hedera serve as collateral for FX trades between Lloyds Bank Group and Aberdeen; Canary HBAR ETF ###HBR### launched on Nasdaq in October 2025; the Stablecoin Studio launched the Australian Digital Dollar on Hedera; Hedera Foundation invested in Archax’s tokenized Fidelity MMF product.

In AI, Hedera entered the verifiability niche, launching open-source modular toolkit AI Studio, and collaborating with Accenture and EQTY Labs to create verifiable AI governance solutions.

Architecturally, Hedera launched HashSphere in 2025, allowing organizations to deploy private permissioned networks, settle and interoperate via Hedera mainnet, meeting regulatory privacy requirements and public transparency needs. Examples include Australia’s RBA Project Acacia and Qatar Financial Center projects.

In governance and structure, Hedera underwent reorganization. The HBAR Foundation transformed into Hedera Foundation, establishing a tighter, more consistent brand system; partners like Arrow Electronics and Repsol joined the council, launching Hedera Enterprise Application Team ###HEAT###; Hedera also released multiple developer tools to lower barriers and hosted hackathons.

Furthermore, Hedera gained attention from governments and regulators in 2025. For instance, Wyoming’s Frontiers Stablecoin (FRNT) selected Hedera as the candidate blockchain for the US’s first state-issued stablecoin; the Bank of England and BIS Innovation Hub’s DLT challenge selected Hedera as one of only two L1 networks.

Hedera states that 2026 will not be about starting new stories but expanding on the stories begun in 2025.

( ZKsync: ZK Technology Moving Toward Production Deployment

In 2025, ZKsync pushed ZK technology toward production deployment. However, it still faces multiple challenges, including community trust issues caused by airdrop controversies, uneven project quality within its ecosystem, and increasing technical competition.

This year, ZKsync achieved three major breakthroughs: in privacy, launching Prividium, enabling institutions to run private systems compliant with regulations and connect natively to Ethereum; in liquidity interoperability, L1 Interop realized bridgeless, native interoperability of ZK chains with Ethereum liquidity pools like Aave; in performance, upgrades via Atlas and Airbender significantly increased proof speed and reduced costs, redefining ZK performance standards.

In ecosystem expansion, ZKsync formed heavyweight collaborations across finance and consumer sectors, including UBS, Deutsche Bank, Abstract, Sophon, etc. It also launched ZKsync Managed Services, a hosted infrastructure for enterprises to lower deployment barriers.

Token and branding strategies also evolved. ZK token shifted from purely governance to practical utility, emphasizing interoperability and off-chain permissioning as core value capture pillars; the brand repositioned as “Immutable Financial Infrastructure.”

As regulators like SEC begin recognizing ZK’s role in compliance, ZKsync plans to leverage its unified architecture of privacy, performance, and public liquidity to accelerate development in 2026.

) LayerZero: Over $50 Billion Assets Adopted, Interoperability Enters Practical Stage

In 2025, LayerZero is accelerating from a cross-chain tool to the underlying operating system of the crypto world. Its main challenges involve ensuring high-efficiency cross-chain interoperability while maintaining security, and designing effective economic models.

LayerZero’s three main technical pillars are:

OFT Standard: Enables tokens to be issued and transferred across over 150 blockchains, maintaining a unified supply and contract address, achieving zero slippage transfers (only gas fees), and eliminating double-spending risks. Over $50 billion in assets (e.g., USDT, PYUSD, WBTC) now use this standard. Issuers no longer need to develop separately for each chain but can use it as a distribution channel. For example, Ondo Finance tokenized over 100 stocks with OFT, and 61% of stablecoins are moved via LayerZero; PENGU expanded to Solana, Abstract, and Hyperliquid using OFT.

Decentralized Validator Network (DVN): Applications can choose who validates cross-chain messages, e.g., Google Cloud, Polyhedra, or run their own nodes. Security is no longer one-size-fits-all but configurable, programmable, and tamper-proof. Applications have full sovereignty over their security.

Universal Messaging & Data (OApp & lzRead): Supports sending arbitrary data (messages) across chains, and pulling/reading data from multiple chains. Not just transfers, but also cross-chain governance, complex DeFi logic (like EtherFi cross-chain staking), identity verification, etc.

Currently, LayerZero’s three practical domains are: new chains, solving early liquidity cold start issues by sharing user base and liquidity; institutional tokenization, e.g., PayPal (PYUSD), BlackRock/Securitize ###USDtb###, Ondo Finance issuing stablecoins and tokenized assets on multiple chains; and providing tools for AI agents to read/write full-chain data, enabling AI to autonomously perform complex cross-chain arbitrage, payments, and asset rebalancing.

LayerZero envisions its ultimate goal as an invisible protocol like TCP/IP of the internet: essential but unseen. The foundation is laid; a truly global, open, and programmable financial system beyond any single blockchain is accelerating, aiming to propel crypto’s internet-scale explosion.