The first month of 2025 has set the tone for what could be a pivotal year in crypto. With regulatory shake-ups in the U.S., leadership shifts in Ethereum, and continued momentum in DeFi, the industry is moving fast.
This month, we cut through the noise to bring you the key developments that matter—from shifting political dynamics to major protocol updates and market moves. This edition of Maven’s Insights gives a breakdown of the key developments in our industry.
The first month of 2025 has set the tone for a potentially pivotal year in the crypto space driven by the new administration in the US. This includes Gary Gensler’s departure from head of the SEC, and being replaced by the more crypto-friendly chairman Mark Uyeda. Head of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell stated that US banks can serve cryptocurrency clients as long as they manage the risks involved. This follows the SEC’s repeal of SAB 121, allowing greater flexibility for banks to offer crypto custody services. Despite this progress, Powell highlighted that banks must still navigate high regulatory thresholds to engage with the asset class. And most importantly, President Donald Trump laid out his plans for 2025 during his inauguration. On top of that, Trump announced the launch of his $TRUMP memecoin on Solana, reaching a fully diluted valuation of $75 billion on the second day of trading. Following the initial success, Melania Trump introduced her own memecoin, which unfortunately did not meet the same level of success. This underperformance generated some discontent within the community towards the $TRUMP token.
Ethereum, and more specifically, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) was the center of attention and much discussion over the month of January. Many significant builders, projects and founders in the ecosystem expressed that they felt the EF has not focused in their efforts and has not been doing enough to keep Ethereum competitive in the ever tighter L1 space, mostly in response to Solana’s growth. Towards the middle of the month, Vitalik announced that in response, they are beginning a process of large changes to the EF leadership structure, while remaining neutral when it comes to actively lobbying regulators and politicians as it is part of their core ethos of being a global neutral platform. Instead, the EF will improve communication with ecosystem participants and more actively support application builders as well as stake EF’s ETH reserves and participate more in DeFi. At the same time, different members of the broader Ethereum community used the fundamental discussions around Ethereum’s future as a catalyst to announce the launch of EF alternatives in attempts to steer Ethereum in the ‘right’ direction. One of the more prominent examples was the announcement of Etherealize, which will attempt to be a more institutional-oriented organization within the Ethereum community. Even though the Ethereum community and the EF are going through a period of soul-searching, Ethereum researchers are still pushing the Pectra upgrade and have launched the expected timeline, with hard forks on test networks in February and Pectra likely reaching mainnet in March. Similarly, Justin Drake published his proposal for a new rollup design called native rollups, which is a pathway for EVM-equivalent rollups to remove the need for security councils together with other potential attack vectors while having the full security that the Ethereum L1 offers. Furthering the notion that Ethereum is still arguably doing well, Kraken launched its layer 2 network, Ink, built on Ethereum and using Optimism’s OP Stack. Their network is likely intended to compete with Coinbase’s layer 2 Base.
The broader DeFi ecosystem also underwent significant developments this month, with Coinbase reintroducing crypto-backed loans for US customers, partnering with DeFi lending protocol Morpho to offer loans without directly facilitating them. This partnership enables Coinbase users to borrow against their Bitcoin holdings via a DeFi back-end, but using the front-end of Coinbase. On the institutional side, Ethena announced its plans for 2025 indicating a strong focus on entering the $190 trillion fixed-income market with its sUSDe product. Ethena aims to integrate its stablecoin into traditional finance through regulated offerings like iUSDe (a regulated version of sUSDe with certain transfer restrictions). To support this, Sky’s lending subDAO, Spark, plans to allocate $1.1 billion in direct exposure to Ethena’s USDe and sUSDe tokens as Ethena contributed over $120 million in annual revenue to the Sky ecosystem. Uniswap announced the launch of their long-awaited v4 protocol, which began rolling out for developers to test the newly introduced ‘hooks’. Hooks are smart contract plugins that allow for better customization of liquidity pools, which can enable developers to build more complex financial products and strategies directly on the Uniswap platform, without the need to fork the application. Solana DeFi stalwart Jupiter further cemented their position as the premier DEX in the ecosystem, announcing a buyback program funded by protocol fees, and also the acquisition of a majority stake in Moonshot, a popular mobile memecoin trading platform on Solana. In addition to that, Jupiter announced the burn of $3 billion JUP tokens and major airdrop of 700 million JUP tokens to its users. Lastly, Hyperliquid launched its native staking, with 16 validators and over 430 million HYPE tokens staked, representing 43% of the total supply. The trading platform also facilitated more than 60% of all perpetual DEX volume over the month.
Portfolio company Movement Labs is set to close its $100 million Series B investment round, valuing Movement at around $3 billion. Additionally, GTE, a MegaETH-based DEX, announced their seed fundraising round, which we led. Additionally, GTE raised another $2.5 million round via crowdfunding on the now-popular Echo platform, which sold out in seconds. Lastly, Celestia’s upgrade proposal to expand block sizes to 8MB was successfully approved and implemented on the Mainnet, now supporting a data throughput of 1.33MB/s. This upgrade enhances the blockchain's scalability and overall data-handling capacity.
