By Paul Quickenden, Swyftx New Zealand Country Manager

If 2021 was the year crypto went ‘mainstream’ - with institutions piling in, NFTs exploding into culture and Bitcoin becoming dinner-table conversation - 2022–23 were the ‘hangover years’ marked by collapses, contagion and a hard reset in trust and leverage for many. In 2024, we hit the ground running with BTC ETFs, then halving and a new all time high but 2025 has been something very different altogether…

We’re now 12 months into what I’d call a new era: governments buying it, corporates putting it on balance sheets, institutions treating it like digital gold and yes, even teeny tiny New Zealand making headlines with its first listed Bitcoin treasury (proof that the ‘Is this real?’ debate is over).

And yet… this year’s price action has confused everyone. New all-time highs were reached earlier in the year and then we endured a strange sideways grind. No hysterical FOMO; no melt-ups; no blow-off top. Bitcoin even dipped under $80k recently before bouncing… but instead of panic, the markets just… breathed. A bit weird, right?

So let’s unpack the year: what happened, what changed and crucially - what might come next.

2025: The year institutions took the wheel

If 2024 gave us the first wave of spot ETFs, 2025 was the year they fully re-wired the crypto market. BlackRock, Fidelity and others turned Bitcoin into something really simple: a ticker you buy in your retirement account next to the S&P 500.

All of a sudden, institutions became part of the backbone of global crypto liquidity, and you can see it in the numbers: ETF outflows no longer crash the market. Drawdowns are smaller, bounces are faster and volatility is somewhat compressing.

We also saw tokenisation move from talk to action where everything from treasuries to property to commodities was transformed into on-chain, programmable assets.

Put simply - digital assets have moved on from a purely speculative play. We're in asset-allocation land.

Governments have entered the conversation

A decade ago, the idea of a government buying Bitcoin was very fringe but in 2025, it’s becoming actual policy.

We now have El Salvador doubling down on crypto. The Trump administration has nationalised its seized crypto and put it on the balance sheet while openly supporting Bitcoin in legislation; multiple EU and Asian governments are researching sovereign Bitcoin strategies and central banks experimenting with custody frameworks. Regional authorities are also allowing corporate treasuries to hold BTC.

Bitcoin on balance sheets

When corporations and governments start behaving like Michael Saylor, you know we’ve crossed the rubicon.

The MicroStrategy playbook that was once the outlier is now being copied everywhere from mid-cap US tech firms to manufacturing companies hedging USD exposure. Just like that, Bitcoin on balance sheet has moved from being a ‘Wild idea’ to a ‘Hedge’ to a ‘Treasury strategy’ because three things changed this year: liquidity deepened as ETFs and institutional desks reduced execution risk, custody standards matured with insurance and audited cold-storage becoming normalised and a year of macro instability turned Bitcoin’s independence into a strategic feature rather than a bug.

The price cycle: broken, stretched or evolving?

For more than a decade, Bitcoin followed a rhythm you could almost set your watch to. The halving arrives, supply drops, price runs and things get euphoric, then the market tips over and we all pretend we ‘knew it was going to happen’.

2025 didn’t behave like any of the past cycles and we saw an all-time high arrive earlier than expected, a long sideways grind, volatility that stayed surprisingly muted and most noticeably, the complete absence of a classic mania phase. Historically, the end of a Bitcoin cycle is a frenzied final leg where prices outrun fundamentals… but this time the sprint never arrived (or hasn’t yet). Instead, Bitcoin started acting like a macro asset whose movements are dictated by macro signals.

Some have explained this as the cycle becoming macro-synchronised, i.e. Bitcoin isn’t dancing to crypto sentiment anymore - it’s moving with global markets.

So… what happens next?

Here are the three most realistic paths for 2026:

Path 1: The classic ‘late-cycle surge’

If the Fed cuts rates, liquidity will loosen and confidence lift, and we may still get that traditional parabolic final leg…just delayed by macro drag.

Path 2: The mature asset plateau

Bitcoin could stabilise at the $85k–$100k range, grind upwards slowly and begin behaving more like digital gold than a highly volatile asset. It has some catching up to do to reclaim that title.

Path 3: The ‘two-track market’

Bitcoin could take on the role of macro anchor while the speculative energy shifts back to altcoins, creating two distinct market behaviours. Within this setup, Bitcoin moves more steadily with macro conditions, while ‘risk-on’ capital chases the volatility and big swings of altcoins…leaving Bitcoin as the stable benchmark and altcoins as the experimental, fast-moving frontier.

Time will tell around which pathway will win but what’s clear is that Bitcoin no longer feels like an experiment. It feels like an asset class that has done a lot of growing-up.