2025 Rewind: End of the Infinite Money Glitch and Looking Ahead to 2026

**Sebastien Couture** (0:00)
The year is coming to an end. 2025 has been an interesting year, at least for the industry, also for us personally, because lots has happened. What's your notable memories that sort of stuck out?

**Brian Crain** (0:11)
I think so many things that worked in the past are failing now, and it's totally changing. You know, Bitcoin really is a sort of viable alternative to fiat currencies today, right? So it's this like macro hedge, peer-to-peer, decentralized, like asset, like it's really succeeding, like on a massive way now.

**Friederike Ernst** (0:31)
If you look at how banks kind of use the Web3 stack, it's kind of as a back-end upgrade, right? Kind of like it doesn't change the status quo in terms of distribution, ownership and agency at all.

**Sebastien Couture** (0:46)
I think that it's entirely possible, though, that even self-custody in the coming years becomes less and less viable due to regulatory constraints.
Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies project and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastien Couture and I'm here today with my co-host, Friederike Ernst and Brian Crain. So this is our annual yearly wrap up for the year, which has been, I guess, pretty consistent over the last three years. I don't think we've actually missed any of these recently. But yeah, we're going to be chatting about what's happened over the last years, with notable moments, notable moments for us, but also for the industry, and sharing our haunt takes for 2026 and where the industry might be heading. Hey guys, how are you doing? I'm good. So, yeah, the year is coming to an end. 2025 has been an interesting year, at least for the industry, also for us personally, there's lots of losses happened. But maybe before we get started, what's your perhaps interesting for us to each share notable memories or notable moments that sort of stuck out this year. This episode has brought you my gnosis. Building the open internet one block at a time. Gnosis was founded in 2015, and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user owned finance. Gnosis is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that of so many others, like Safe and CowSwap. At the center is Gnosis Chain. It's a low fee layer one with zero downtime in seven years and secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real world financial applications like Gnosis Pay and Circles. All of this is governed by Gnosis DAO, a community run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects and even run a validator from home. So if you're building a Web3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring at gnosis.io. Flake, do you want to start?

**Friederike Ernst** (3:03)
There were so many things, right? So I actually wrote the hour, end of the year Slack post to our Gnosis folks this morning. So I mentally revisited the entire year and there was so much, starting with the buy a bid hack.
Then kind of we had kind of crazy price action over the summer, then Polymarket kind of completely exploded into the mainstream. And then kind of we went out on the balance hack in November. To me, the thing that stood out most was how much incumbents are actually pressing into the space, and how much we are at risk of losing our values, or kind of like what most of us kind of got into this space for originally. But I'm sure we'll touch upon that in the episode.

**Sebastien Couture** (4:04)
I think those are all great points. Brian, what do you think?

**Brian Crain** (4:06)
Yeah, I agree. I think just the overall, it's been a weird year. As sort of we've had times of, especially for Bitcoin, right? But it's kind of this stuck euphoria, it's going mainstream, new all-time high. So I feel like everyone was expecting, okay, this is the beginning of some other epic run, and everything is set up. And I remember being at the maybe Selene Summit in the summer, and people were like, it's definitely like 160k, 200k end of the year.
And then it didn't happen, right? And at the same time, of course, Bitcoin gets down a bit, I think over the year. But I think what has been just brutal and sort of devastating for, I think, a huge part of crypto has been the entire like altcoin market. And I think so many things that like worked in the past are failing now, and it's totally changing. People are kind of maybe still doing some of the things they used to do, and they used to work really well, and now it's not working, and they're like, damn it, what are we doing? I mean, of course, one, for example, one way we've also, you know, sort of seen that, we've just been shutting down a lot of networks, right? So a lot of networks that we've been running for years, and, you know, running early on, and just not really working anymore, right? They don't generate any revenues, just the prices are going down and down. Activity is not there. Like you realize that, you know, in the past, it seemed to be all abundant, right? There was a lot of tokens and, you know, for the team and for Airdrop and for Valor, for staking and, you know, for decentralization and like to pay, you know, and now it's just like, let's forget about all of that, right? Let's just try to survive somehow. So I think that's probably going to continue, right?