An insatiable appetite for Bitcoin among institutions was a dominant theme of 2024 — but by all accounts, there wasn’t as much interest among everyday consumers.
Cryptonews has assembled a panel of experts to explore whether we’ll see growing adoption in 2025 — and the hurdles that stand in the way of BTC becoming a truly mainstream asset class.
CoinMarketCap’s head of research Alice Liu says there are signs that retail investors from previous bull markets are starting to re-engage.
“Dino/OG category coins have gained impressive momentum, signaling a retail comeback. We expect this trend to continue into next year.”
Bitcoin Supercycle author Michael Terpin says consumers are beginning to wake up from a “post-FTX slumber” — referring to the brutal bear market that began when this exchange collapsed in late 2022.
“XRP, Dogecoin, IOTA and other ‘dino-coins’ have outperformed the broader market. Meme coins are the drug of choice of new investors and there have been some parabolic pumps, like the Pudgy Penguin airdrop PENGU and Fartcoin, but it remains to be seen which ones will be long-lived. Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and newer “blue chip” memecoins like Dogwifhat and Brett should continue to rise in 2025, as will newer PolitiFi tokens like Patriot.”
Coinme CEO and co-founder Neil Bergquist agrees that retail investor participation will tick up over the next 12 months.
“In a study we recently released with CryptoLiteracy.org, crypto awareness increased from 11% in 2022 to 31.8% in 2024. Similarly, we’ve seen a massive decrease in the past two years in the number of people who only know crypto only by name, from 41.3% in 2022 to 9.2% in 2024. This data shows that crypto awareness increases every year among retail investors.”
But Bergquist told Cryptonews that challenges remain — as “knowledge gaps” continue to exist in more advanced topics such as DeFi, staking, and self-custody.
“Crypto literacy is correlated with crypto ownership. The industry must continue to make concerted efforts to bridge these knowledge gaps through targeted education programs and simple value-add use cases, like crypto payments, that drive adoption.”
YouHodler’s chief of markets Ruslan Lienkha added that a key sign of retail adoption lies in the altcoin markets, as smaller cryptocurrencies and low-liquidity meme coins tend to be embraced by consumers rather than institutions.
“This trend is likely to persist in 2025, with retail enthusiasm continuing to drive speculative assets and niche tokens.”
Retail adoption could also happen in unexpected ways — and pretty indirectly.
Setting out its 2025 predictions recently, Bitwise said:
“This trend is likely to persist in 2025, with retail enthusiasm continuing to drive speculative assets and niche tokens.”
Many of those investing for their financial futures instead turn to exchange-traded funds that track major indices such as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100.
And given crypto-focused companies such as Coinbase and MicroStrategy have seen their share prices surge in the current bull market, these stocks could end up becoming so large that they’re included in these ETFs.
“Consider: $10 trillion in assets directly tracks the S&P 500, and another $6 trillion is ‘benchmarked’ to the index. If Coinbase enters the index, we expect funds will have to buy around $15 billion of the stock. If the funds benchmarked to the index add Coinbase, that’s another $9 billion of buying.”
MicroStrategy has already made its way into the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100, with the company’s stock dramatically outperforming Bitcoin throughout 2024.
MSTR stock and BTC two-year price comparison. Source: Saxo
The pronounced arrival of retail investors will also lead to questions about when the bull market will come to a juddering halt.
As VanEck recently noted, mainstream interest is often “a reliable signal of speculative mania near the top” — especially when non-crypto savvy investors end up asking for advice on questionable projects.
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