spring is here Spring is here Spring is here
And that means first quarter industry reports are dropping left and right So today we bring
you crypto’s Q1 by the numbers courtesy of a new report from one of the best research teams
in all of crypto They’ve given us the facts and figures to address the questions that matter most
like when alt season will Ethereum survive Q2 and how did DeFi and AI underperform Sheba Enu this is
a report you don’t want to miss My name is Guy and you’re watching the Coin Bureau Today’s report
is the 2025 Q1 crypto industry report from Coin Gecko Now these guys should need no introduction
but if you’re new here Coin Gecko is one of the best resources around for live crypto market
data prices volume trending tokens you name it Coin Gecko also has a top team of researchers who
put together a quarterly report on the state of the market and all of the most important events
that happened over a 3-month period Now we read a lot of these industry reports and Coin Geckos
is consistently one of the best That’s why today we’re bringing you the highlights from their first
installment of 2025 So let’s dig in I’ll begin with one of the most important metrics in all of
crypto Bitcoin dominance With BTC maturing as a macro asset the crypto market is more bifocated
than it has ever been In other words there’s BTC and then there’s everything else This has always
been true to some extent but what’s remarkable about the current trend is that the glut of new
altcoins that launched since last year failed to even dent Bitcoin’s dominance As the number
of altcoins vying for attention and liquidity increases you might expect them to collectively
eat away at Bitcoin’s share of the crypto market But the opposite has been happening as BTC
dominance has remained in an unbroken uptrend since September 2022 Q1 of 2025 was no different
with Bitcoin’s dominance rising by 4.6 percentage points That’s a bigger market share increase
than any altcoin saw in Q1 According to Coin Gecko’s report BTCD ended March at 59.15 a level
not seen since Q1 of 2021 It’s worth noting though that this is significantly lower than the number
you can find on Trading View which instead shows that BTCD closed the monthly candle for March at
61.59% We’re not quite sure why this discrepancy exists but well either way Anyway after reaching
a 4-year high you might expect Bitcoin dominance to pull back a little in Q2 But again that’s the
opposite of what happened BTCD instead broke out to the upside and at the time of making this video
Trading View shows it teetering on the edge of 65% Altcoin holders will be praying for BTCD to top
and then suddenly fall off a cliff because that will mean the sacred alt season is upon us But
as long as the uptrend persists it can only spell bad news for altcoins And speaking of bad news
for altcoins nobody had a worse Q1 than ETH For the 40 months between May 2021 and September
2024 ETH’s share of the overall crypto market ranged between 15% and 22% It spent most of that
time at the higher end of that range around 19% But something snapped last summer as ETH
dominance began a rapid decline that took it to a low of 7.9% according to Coin Gecko
This the report points out marks ETH’s lowest share of the crypto market since late 2019 We can
see on Trading View that ETH dominance has fallen for 16 of the last 22 months amounting to a 67%
drop since July 2023 Now of course this is in large part due to the increase in the supply
of altcoins since then but one has to wonder how low this chart can go April’s monthly candle
includes a wick below 7% which as far as we can tell is literally a new low unprecedented in the
history of Ethereum ETH BTC has been trading at extreme discount levels since last summer But
with a market cap well above $222 billion ETH still doesn’t exactly look cheap It feels like
just yesterday that crypto Twitter was fixated on the 0.03 level as ETH’s last line of defense
but that snapped like a dry twig in January 105 days later ETH BTC has fallen by a further
41% The chart last bottomed in late 2019 at around 0.016 and ETH is now within sneezing distance of
that level If ETH doesn’t reverse there it could fall to below 0.01 If ETH doesn’t reverse there it
could fall to below 0.01 01 a region not visited since January 2017 Thoughts and prayers everybody
thoughts and prayers Unsurprisingly ETH beatas including defi blue chips like unis swaps uni and
ave’s ave also took a battering in Q1 falling by 55% and 48% respectively And this makes UNI the
worst performing defy token of the year so far torments it for fun This was the vibe last year
when Salana was riding high on memecoin mania and outperforming most other major altcoins But things
took a turn for the worse this year The memecoin super cycle narrative was best described by Murad
Mahmov the Goldman Sachs analyst turned full-time memecoin evangelist whose meme portfolio reached
almost $60 million last year He explained how the likes of Gigachad SPX6900 and Popcat were new
cultural movements that filled the void in modern life once occupied by religion Well perhaps PopCat
falling by 94% between November and April was a test from the Almighty then Murad’s portfolio fell
to almost $10 million during the memecoin massacre of Q1 but it looks like he kept his faith Anyway
memecoins are divisive at the best of times and there was growing discontent with the relentless
PvP struggle that Pump Fun brought to Salana last year Some of those who launched tokens on pumpf
fun performed desperate and lentious acts on video to draw attention to their tickers Bears and
people of good conscience would say that they were all destined for zero But few could have imagined
just how this ended up happening in 2025 What began as a niche of memecoins lampuning American
politicians during the 2024 presidential election somehow turned into governments and heads of
state themselves promoting and launching their own memecoins on Salana Donald Trump’s launch of the
Trump memecoin 3 days before he was sworn in as the president of the United States was a seismic
event for the crypto market Virtually every other crypto dumped as liquidity rushed into the
presidentelect memecoin sending it to a high above $77 on the eve of his inauguration The top came
however when Melania Trump announced via Twitter quote “The official Melania meme is live You can
buy Melania now.” in a post that was retweeted by Donald Trump This caused Trump to collapse by
40% in a matter of minutes Melania also rugged up soon after launch Now this series of events
was a blow to crypto in general and Salana specifically but most of all to Salana memecoins
In the week of Trump’s inauguration the value of Murad’s portfolio fell by $16 million It was
all downhill from there as Trump’s inauguration proved to be Bitcoin’s macro top for the year to
date Argentina’s President Javier Malay kindly stepped up in midFebruary to give us a hand on
the steep scramble back down when he promoted a pump and dump scam on Twitter telling the world
that it was an investment in his country’s economy This was Librigate in which a cartoonish family
of crypto crooks allegedly bribed their way into Malay’s inner circle Shortly after Malay’s tweet
they rugged the token causing its market cap to fall from a peak of $4.6 billion to $221 million
in a matter of hours Now the story of Libra only gets weirder from here so I suggest you check
out our full video report if you missed it Long story short the fallout led to allegations
of rampant insider trading on Salana’s Dexes Not only by memecoin pushers but by the people behind
the Dexes themselves One DeFi founder close to the situation compared the scale of the alleged
crime to the FTX debacle But well we’ll leave it to the courts to find out whether that’s true or
not For the time being the Trump Melania Libra trifecta is a painful memory for Salana and for
memecoin bulls But this time the debauchery on Salana could not be contained to just crypto
Twitter as the world’s media marveled at the presidential memecoin spectacles and started
asking if there might not be any conflicts of interest involved That’s a conflict of interest
Anyway Coin Gecko’s report shows how activity on Pump Fun cratered after Librigate The number
of tokens supplied on Pump Fun peaked at almost 73,000 in a single day in January 2025 with the
highest graduation rate recorded at 1.76% For reference this means that 1.76% of these tens
of thousands of tokens deployed via Pump Fun made it onto a Salana Dex A sharp decline in
activity in Q1 brought these numbers to lows of around 17,400 tokens deployed and fewer than
0.5% of them graduating in one 24-hour period in March And this was not good news for the price of
Soul as a key source of demand suddenly dried up After ETH Soul recorded the second largest loss
among the top five cryptos in Q1 with a quarterly return of minus 34.1% In January Trump’s memecoin
propelled Soul to a new all-time high of $293 as 24hour trading volume soared by $28 billion
But by early March Soul had fallen to as low as $115 and volume continued to slide reaching just
$1.6 billion on the 30th of March Meanwhile the top five memes by market cap fell by around 40 to
60% including a 64% haircut for Ethereum’s Pepe Notably though the two top memes Doge and SHIB
outperformed not only other meme coins but also DeFi and AI coins Oh and ETH So for example
you would have been better off holding Sheba Enu ship throughout Q1 than ostensibly serious
projects and utility tokens like Tao Render Near ICP Ave Onondo Hype and so on Now this is pretty
interesting considering that DeFi and AI cryptos didn’t suffer catastrophic reputational damage the
same way memecoins did in Q1 As I mentioned unis swaps uni fell by almost 55% in Q1 And this was
despite unis swap enjoying a very bullish catalyst in the form of the SEC dropping its investigation
into unis swap in February We’re not sure what Uni’s excuse is but one explanation for these blue
chip DeFi and AI cryptos underperforming Doge and SHIB is simply that they are well much smaller in
market cap terms Doge and SHIB are to all intents and purposes majors and therefore in a different
league from the rest of the memecoin market DeFi and AI altcoins though are typically more volatile
because less money is required to move the needle so to speak That makes sense But hang on If
that’s the case then why did SHIB outperform ETH all right All right I know No need to fogg
a dead horse But you know what there may still be hope for Vitalik’s chain at least Visav Salana
Coin Gecko’s breakdown of DEX trading volume by chain reveals a dramatic reversal of fortunes in
Q1 For context Salana flipped Ethereum for DEX trading volume in 2024 In Q4 Salana attracted $217
billion in trading volume giving it a 31% share of the onchain trades among the top 12 blockchains
comfortably above Ethereum which had a 25% share The gap widened dramatically in January as the
Trump effect caused Salana’s market share to spike to 52% This came somewhat at the expense of
Ethereum whose share fell below 20% for the first time ever But by March Salana share had collapsed
to just 23% and Ethereum was back on top with 30% If you’re bullish on ETH soul then you’re going
to want to see this lead hold and not disintegrate on contact with the next memecoin rally It’ll
be interesting to see how these numbers change over Q2 As it stands Salana still comes out
on top at the end of Q1 with quarterly trading volumes up 35.3% to $293.7 billion and an overall
market share of 39.6% Speaking of Dexes the top 10 recorded a collective $700 billion in spot
trading volume in Q1 Now this is up just 6.2% 2% from last quarter but almost double the $357
billion recorded in Q1 of 2024 Spot DEX volume was still only a fraction though of the $5.4
trillion of spot trading volume recorded on the top 10 sexes in Q1 but it’s a crazy figure
nonetheless especially considering that these are real asset flows we’re talking about and not
levered derivatives contracts On the derivatives front though perpet saw approximately $800
billion of trading volume in Q1 This is up almost 40% from 572.6 billion in Q4 And it’s also
more volume than was recorded in the entire year of 2023 Now of that $800 billion recorded in Q1
around $550 billion came from a single exchange And no prizes for guessing which one it was Yes
Hyperlquid continues to steal the perp deck show and indeed market share from everyone else
The app chain survived several rounds of FUD to reach a market share of 73% in March up from
35% in October It says a lot about Hyperlid that Jupiter remained the second biggest perex through
Q4 and Q1 despite its market share plunging from 18% in November to just 5% in March Meanwhile DYDX
aka the old guard of perexes looks like a murder victim Dydx was the number one perex this time
last year with a market share of 31% in February 2024 But one year on Hyperlquid appears to have
eaten every last crumb of its lunch because this has since fallen to around 3% Moving on we’re
glad to report that DeFi share of the overall crypto market stood firm at just under 3.5% in Q1
To put this into perspective DeFi’s association with Ethereum could have left it on shaky ground
considering the wash out that ETH experienced this year And indeed the total DeFi market cap
fell by 19% from $119 billion to $96 billion And according to Coin Gecko ETH’s underperformance in
Q1 was responsible for $20 billion of this loss The report’s breakdown of DeFi categories tells a
similar story here Overall TVL was down by almost 23% lending down 19% restaking down almost
37% and liquid staking down 39% In fact nine of the 11 DeFi categories named by Coin Gecko
ended Q1 in the red and most deep deep in it So perhaps you can see why it’s encouraging that
DeFi’s losses in Q1 were no larger than the rest of the crypto market On a related note multi-chain
DeFi TVL took a 27.5% haircut in Q1 down from $177.4 billion at the end of 2024 to 128.6 billion
at the end of March 2025 Now most of this loss can be attributed to collapsing altcoin prices And
as you might imagine this means that Ethereum lost a bigger portion of its TVL than most other
major chains down 35.4% from 112.6 billion to 72.7 billion Salana and Bass also suffered heavy losses
with TVL dropping 23.5 and 15.3% respectively But despite this both networks actually increased
their TVL Meanwhile Q1 also saw the launch of Berachchain whose TVL rapidly increased from
zero to 5.2 billion at the end of March Notably this means that Barerchain has flipped base to
become the sixth largest chain by TVL which is quite an accomplishment in just 3 months Although
as the report points out Berachchain gave itself a large head start with its Boyco pre-eposit vaults
which attracted $2.3 billion in day one liquidity Berachchain also makes for an interesting contrast
with Bass here Bass has been the top Ethereum layer 2 for quite some time now and with a market
share of 13% was the third largest chain by DEX spot trading volume in Q1 TVL however is a
different story Bass comes in seventh with just 2.3% of multi-chain TVL That’s well behind
BSC’s 4.7% Barerchain’s 4% and Tron’s 3.6% All right folks Now I could keep reeling off numbers
from Coin Gecko’s report until the cows come home but I think that’s probably about enough for the
moment Q1 is now firmly in the rearview mirror and BTC looks like it could be turning over a new leaf
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that if we get a high timeframe candle closure above $100,000
the party is likely back on In that case I’ll look forward to sharing a much more bullish Q2
roundup in 2 months time But on the other hand BTC could touch 100K and get rejected leaving only
a wick rather than high time frame candle closure above it This would be a pretty bearish sign and
warrant a more cautious approach You know how it is folks When BTC sneezes the whole cryptoverse
catches pneumonia So here’s to a healthier crypto market in Q2 We hope it will be a swashbuckling
comeback story But while the market is still slow why not learn something new with our report on
the global race for mineral wealth okay that’s all from me for now though As always thank you for
watching and I’ll see you next time This is Guy
