Every cryptocurrency bull market is driven by themes—sometimes seasonal, sometimes long-lasting—also known as narratives, which fuel the performance of popular tokens. This reality defined 2025 with its rapid succession of narratives, offering some essential lessons.
Too Many Narratives Kill the Narrative
If we were to boil down the previous bull markets in the cryptocurrency sector to their essentials, they could be summarized as Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) in 2018 and NFTs in 2021. But what, then, was the narrative of 2025, when Bitcoin surpassed $125,000 for the first time?
A question raised by the X account Tiger Research that doesn’t seem so easy to answer—firstly due to a clear lack of hindsight, but also because it appears that this latest bull run was built on a succession of different themes unlike anything seen before.
Short-term speculative euphoria, to the point where “market attention shifted to the next narrative before even properly validating the previous one.” And it goes without saying that in this space, memecoins quickly emerged as the driving force behind instability during the first few months of the year.
The fundamental problem is that the majority of these narratives turned out to be one-off events. They consumed short-term attention without building structures capable of evolving into genuine sectors. Some players even created false narratives to exploit investors.
Tiger Research
As a result, it seems possible to identify a new narrative for every month of 2025, to the point where investors are being pushed to “become more critical and increasingly skeptical” of these bullish surges—even though it seems fair to acknowledge that “some have established themselves as genuine sectors to the point of helping to advance the crypto market.”
Key crypto narratives of 2025
Key Trends to Remember from 2025
Beyond memecoins—which are simple and intuitive enough to attract new investors before quickly losing them “without any lasting trickle-down effect”—the report highlights the “InfoFi” services developed around Kaito.
This is an interesting content creation model that will, however, clash with its reward system, to the point of ultimately “prioritizing sensationalism at the expense of accuracy.”
Other narratives with more solid fundamentals, meanwhile, have fostered long-term engagement, particularly through proposals capable of “moving crypto from abstract potential to concrete, functional use cases.”
In this field, Tiger Research’s analysis specifically highlights the significant rise of stablecoins, the development of Coinbase’s x402 payment protocol, and the success of prediction markets.
All of this is accompanied by “numerous experiments taking place simultaneously behind the scenes, as institutions began to seriously integrate” into the space, such as the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) or perpetual DEXs.
Between Enhanced Privacy and User Retention
Finally, particular attention is being paid to privacy-focused projects, in an environment where transparency—initially presented as a positive—is turning into “an environment that exposes transaction sizes, timing, and positions involving strategic exposure for institutional investors.”
Or how to restore opacity to the blockchain to encourage traditional players to join…
The conclusion of this article comes from the analysts at Tiger Research:
Massive inflows are possible when the right catalyst meets a low barrier to entry—memecoins are proof of this. But it also shows that inflows, on their own, are not enough. If projects fail to create incentives for users to stay, these inflows quickly turn into outflows. Retention remains a central challenge.
Tiger Research
