Bitcoin in 2025: Mainstream Momentum, Price Weakness, and a Pivotal Year Ahead

Bitcoin has had an eventful year in 2025: US President Donald Trump boosted BTC’s importance, but the Bitcoin price curve weakened towards the end of the year. Our review and outlook.

Anyone who looks solely at the Bitcoin price curve to gauge the mood in the crypto markets will enter the new year with mixed feelings. Shortly before New Year’s Eve, Bitcoin is trading at around $88,000, while twelve months ago, at the turn of the year, BTC was still at approximately $93,000.

For the first time since 2023, the leading cryptocurrency is closing a calendar year with a loss, even if the roughly 5 percent decline for BTC is moderate. On the other hand, initiatives by US President Donald Trump have pushed BTC deeper into the mainstream than ever before. Let’s take a look back.

With Donald Trump as US president, Bitcoin becomes a political issue

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump had made Bitcoin and the crypto industry a positive topic. When Trump took office on January 20th, Bitcoin promptly reached an all-time high of nearly $109,000 that same day. In total, BTC came close to setting new price records five times in 2025. However, in April, BTC also experienced a drop to levels below $80,000, and as so often this year, Trump’s policies played a role in this.

Threats by the US president to make aggressive trade tariffs part of his foreign policy triggered fears of an economic crisis in the spring. Bitcoin failed to live up to its reputation as “digital gold,” offering a safe haven in uncertain times. Indeed, the frequently used comparison between gold and BTC in 2025 proved unequivocal: Gold climbed to a new record high at the end of the year and gained a good 70 percent over the past 12 months – Bitcoin couldn’t keep up.

While a Deutsche Bank analysis from September emphasized increasing similarities between gold and BTC, price developments only partially supported this thesis.

Gold or Bitcoin? Strategic BTC reserves show potential

In the medium and long term, the final word has not yet been spoken. The US strategic BTC reserve, promised by President Trump, was launched in March, and more and more countries are working on plans to incorporate BTC into their monetary policy. However, for the time being, the US intends to fill the Bitcoin reserve only with seized assets; the hoped-for purchases are not happening.

Bitcoin ETFs have been a huge success story despite temporary setbacks

Thus, in 2025, Bitcoin’s price performance relied heavily on ETFs and so-called Bitcoin companies like Strategy. Bloomberg expert Eric Balchunas noted an unusual observation on X before the holidays : Among the 25 US ETFs with the largest capital inflows in 2025, BlackRock’s IBIT Bitcoin ETF secured an impressive sixth place with $25 billion.

This puts BTC ahead of gold, whose flagship ETF, GLD, attracted around $20 billion. The real kicker, however, is that among all US ETFs with more than $10 billion in capital inflows in 2025, the IBIT Bitcoin ETF was the only one to close the year with a negative performance of -9 percent. In other words, ETF investors largely weathered Bitcoin’s sometimes dramatic price fluctuations and even increased their holdings.

Strategy and other Bitcoin companies in a complicated situation

Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), a pioneer among Bitcoin companies, continued its steady course of BTC purchases throughout 2025. Observers see serious risks in this , as Strategy resorts to various methods to finance its BTC strategy. This is also reflected in a ” B- ” rating from S&P in October, which attests to the Bitcoin company’s “elevated default risk” and “speculative credit quality.”

In December, Strategy reacted by building up a cash reserve to weather BTC price fluctuations with more composure. However, doubts about Strategy’s business model remain; other Bitcoin companies may also have miscalculated.

Bitcoin miners discover artificial intelligence as a business opportunity

This allowed large BTC miners to tap into a new business area and they were rewarded for it on the stock exchanges. ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and others need additional computing capacity as quickly as possible for the further development of artificial intelligence (AI).

Publicly traded BTC miners like IREN are now signing multi-billion dollar contracts with Microsoft, OpenAI, and other AI developers to lease computing resources. For example, IREN’s stock closed 2025 with a 300 percent gain; the AI ​​boom is providing Bitcoin miners with profitable additional business opportunities and reducing their dependence on the BTC price.

Technological questions surrounding BTC revolve around quantum computers

From a technological perspective, two key issues for Bitcoin in 2025 were on the agenda. Quantum computers are increasing their performance faster than predicted, and experts say BTC needs to find a way to adapt the system’s security.

This will likely require an update to the BTC code, and several proposals are already on the table – but the BTC community has yet to reach a consensus on how to counteract the risks posed by quantum computers.

BTC and Smart Contracts – Developers hope for a breakthrough in 2026

The second key technological theme for Bitcoin in 2025 revolved around making BTC natively usable in smart contracts. Cardano (ADA) claims to be a pioneer in this area. The concept involves integrating Bitcoin into smart contracts via the Cardano network.

This was successfully demonstrated in June with a Bitcoin NFT, and further progress is possible in 2026. The Alkanes metaprotocol takes a slightly different approach, keeping BTC within its own network and channeling it into smart contracts via a virtual machine. Currently, Bitcoin Alkanes is limited to NFTs, but this is expected to change soon.

Conclusion: Bitcoin consolidates in 2025 – Will there be an upward breakout in 2026?

Almost all BTC price predictions for 2025 turned out to be wrong; they consistently predicted BTC would reach levels above $160,000. Now, these targets are being carried over to 2026.

What the past year has taught us is that capital inflows in the billions for Bitcoin purchases mostly come from ETFs and BTC companies, and the influence of retail investors on price formation is diminishing. This trend is likely to continue in 2026; Bitcoin is definitively no longer an anomaly on Wall Street.

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(Featured image by Traxer via Unsplash)

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