As part of Gemini’s mission to offer “trusted” information to institutional and retail investors, they have released a crypto trends report, “2025 Trends: Data-Driven Insights Into the Crypto Market,” in collaboration with Glassnode, an analytics firm specializing in on-chain assets.
Gemini states that the report has been shared after President Donald Trump , who recently issued an executive order that set a roadmap for digital assets in the US.
The report examines trading activity for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, as well as futures momentum, “regional breakdowns, ETF flows, meme coin insights, and more information about institutional and retail participants in the crypto markets:”
Here are some takeaways of the document:
Retail Investors Are Really Back
The recovery of digital asset prices following the “crypto winter” was initially driven by institutional investors, especially after the “approval of spot bitcoin ETFs by the SEC in January 2024.”
The products became the fastest growing ETF in history, yet it was still clear retail had “not yet fully re-joined the party despite signaling a willingness to return to the market.”
The latest bull run makes it clear many retail traders have returned. Bull markets are “characterized by a gradual transfer of wealth from long-term investors to newer and often more speculative investors.”
A significant portion of the speculative investors are “likely to be retail investors who are intrigued by the surging prices and quick returns.”
To assess the influx of new demand, the report measured “the realized cap for coins that have changed hands (‘hot realized cap’).”
This metric, which assesses the capital held by accounts that “have been active in the last seven days, showed a huge uptick in new demand.”
When bitcoin reached its recent $100k ATH milestone, new bitcoin investors held “$99.6B of hot realized cap for the network, equivalent to 13.7% of the total network wealth.”
The last cycle peaked at a value of “$45.3B, with a network share of 22.5%.”
The increase in the hot realized cap suggests both “strong market demand and the return of retail investors, while also inferring room for further growth.”
The Rise of Solana
Since launching during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Solana blockchain has become “increasingly popular for its low fees and fast transaction speeds.”
The blockchain’s underlying coin has subsequently surged, “reaching an all-time high above $290 and pushing up more than 200% over the past year.”
The Solana network powers smart contracts, decentralized finance apps, and NFTs.
But it has arguably benefitted most from being the blockchain infrastructure that powers memecoins, “a fairly new phenomenon in crypto that has exploded in popularity over the past few years.”
Futures investors are “betting big” on Solana.
In 2024, the cryptocurrency experienced the largest “relative growth in open interest among the coins studied, surging from $1.1 billion to $4.4 billion (300%).”
Solana overtook Ethereum in new investor demand and “outperformed other assets in realized cap growth (+265.1%) and trading days.”
Additionally, active addresses (the number of unique addresses that were active in the network either “as a sender or receiver) on Solana have surpassed those on Bitcoin (~1M addresses/day) and Ethereum (~0.5M addresses/day) by a significant margin since December 2023.”
With 13.55M daily active addresses, Solana currently has “15.7x more active addresses than Bitcoin and 25.6x more than Ethereum.”
APAC Region Continues To Shine
When excluding exchanges and ETF flows, retail activity in the APAC region has grown “at a faster clip than any other geographies” featured in the report.
To measure the impact of their retail activity in the APAC region, the Trends Report timestamped all transactions “created by an entity (a cluster of addresses controlled by the same individual) with the working hours of different geographical regions.”
As a result, it determined probabilities for “each entity being located in the US, Europe, or Asia.”
As stated in the research report from Gemini, the digital asset ecosystem was driven by the introduction of spot bitcoin ETFs in the US.
But when we exclude the activity of exchanges and ETF flows, the APAC region “led the way in retail growth.”
Gemini also mentioned in the report that since the cycle low in December 2022, year-over-year supply growth “averaged 6.3% in APAC, beating out the US, EU and other geographies.”
From retail resurgence to Solana’s rapid rise and regional growth in APAC, the report “underscores key trends shaping the industry today.”
The report from Gemini concluded that while the market continues to evolve, tools like spot ETFs and analytics platforms are “enabling a new wave of participants—from institutional investors to retail traders—to engage with digital assets in innovative ways.”