In 2025, the market sent a clear message: it wants power, chips, and anonymity.
Here’s a breakdown of the year’s winners and losers against correlation:
winner
AI demand has engulfed global energy capacity, creating vertical gains for some crypto miners and infrastructure companies that have successfully pivoted to high-performance computing (HPC) or secured nuclear deals.
ZCSH (Grayscale Zcash Trust) is this year’s surprising outlier. This trust product was completely separated from the altcoin market and recorded huge profits. It stands alone as a top performer in the digital assets space.
The energy crisis has led investors to invest in everything nuclear-related. BW (Babcock & Wilcox) is up +282%, LEU (Centrus Energy) is up +270% and Sam Altman-backed OKLO is up +238%. The market has realized that baseload power is required, whether mining blocks or training LLMs.
Miners who diversified from pure SHA-256 hashes to AI computing were rewarded handsomely. IREN (Iris Energy) soared 280%, followed by APLD (Applied Digital) 215% and NBIS (Nevius Group) 207%. Investors no longer view these as just “crypto stocks.”
HOOD (Robinhood) recorded an increase of +210%. This remains the ultimate retail gateway for both stocks and cryptocurrencies.
losers
If we hadn’t focused on securing AI and nuclear reactors, 2025 would have been a disaster. The market did not tolerate inefficient miners and speculators.
ARBK (Argo Blockchain) wiped out shareholder value, dropping 97%. Similarly, GPUS (Hyperscale Data) is down 96% and CAN (CAN) is down 65%. The halving and stagnation of BTC prices has made pure mining a losing game for those with high energy costs.
High-beta plays, which typically act as leveraged proxies for Bitcoin, also collapsed. MSTR (MicroStrategy) felt the gravity of the premium unwinding and crashed nearly 50%.
The enthusiasm for retail gambling evaporated. The memecoin index plummeted 72%. This left us with a penny on the dollar in our 2024 Favorite Dog and Cat Coin Bag Holder.
Comparison of gold and digital gold
It turns out that the most “traditional” assets are the best hedges. Gold crushed all major indexes with a +65% return, leaving the Nasdaq (+21%) and Bitcoin (-6%) in the dust.
It remains to be seen whether cryptocurrencies will be able to catch up with gold in 2026.
