In this year 2025, the Bitcoin market has been dominated by different trends at different times.
But there is one trend in particular that has really taken center stage this year, especially since many of the other trends have to do with the crypto market in general rather than Bitcoin specifically.
Instead, the dominant trend was specifically about BTC and much less about other cryptocurrencies. This is what is called institutional adoption, or is a trend of the Ministry of Finance.
Institutional introduction of Bitcoin
Institutional introduction of Bitcoin does not refer to the introduction of Bitcoin by public institutions. Instead, it refers to the adoption of BTC by so-called institutional investors.
The term “institutional investor” refers to any investor who allocates significant financial resources on behalf of others and invests them in a systematic and professional manner.
These are professional investors who, rather than investing for themselves like the general public (known as retail investors), invest on behalf of their clients and therefore using their clients’ resources rather than necessarily their own funds.
For example, the now famous BlackRock Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) falls into this category, having raised over $62 billion from investors and purchased over 770,000 BTC to date.
Instead, individuals who invest their own funds for themselves, regardless of the amount invested, are simply referred to as retailers, even if in most (but not all) cases it is a small to medium amount.
Institutional investors, in particular, are expected to operate according to strict ethical and regulatory standards, be transparent, and act in the best interests of their clients.
In fact, institutional adoption of Bitcoin among major institutional investors is a phenomenon that first emerged on a large scale last year, when major ETFs debuted on stock exchanges, and this year has solidified the trend.
In particular, 2025 was marked by the massive entry of institutional investors into the Bitcoin market, which may have even managed to reduce BTC price volatility by 40% compared to 2021.
The main result of this is that Bitcoin has turned into a fairly “mature” asset that is also suitable for many diversified portfolios.
Ministry of Finance
Some of the major institutional investors include companies that have become true BTC vaults. In other words, they buy Bitcoin just to hold it in their portfolio in the hopes that it will increase in value.
The most famous is Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), which now holds over 660,000 BTC. This is smaller than IBIT, but the size is the same.
Several other companies have also started buying BTC just to hold in their portfolios, and although Strategy started five years ago, 2025 was the year of the Bitcoin financial boom.
As of today, there are over 1.3 million BTC in wallets of dozens of private companies around the world, which is not much less than the 1.6 million BTC held in ETFs.
Notably, even the United States has set up its own Bitcoin vault called the Strategic Reserve, where over 300,000 BTC seized by the Department of Justice over the years have been accumulated.
Regulatory trends
Another important trend affecting the overall cryptocurrency market is related to the development of public regulation.
In fact, over the course of 2025, especially thanks to the new Trump administration in the US, regulation has turned from an obstacle to a stepping stone, as the US enacted the specific GENIUS Act, which created a framework for stablecoins, and the CLARITY Act, which classified BTC as a commodity, exempted it from SEC Rule 204A-1, and reduced its overlap with the CFTC.
In reality, this trend is primarily related to stablecoins and only secondarily to cryptocurrencies, but it is of such historical importance that it cannot be ignored even in the specific case of Bitcoin.
To be honest, this had the downside of increasing compliance costs by an estimated 13%, but importantly for the purposes of this analysis, 2025 was a year of legislative progress.
technological innovation
A minor but important trend is related to technological innovation.
To be honest, the trend of technological innovation is dominating the financial market and has a great impact on the cryptocurrency market, but the impact on Bitcoin is not so great.
In fact, on a technical level, Bitcoin has changed very little, even though the entire protocol continues to develop from Layer 2 on top of the slowly evolving Layer 1.
In 2025, there are real developments taking place that increase Bitcoin’s usefulness, even though they are not directly related to the core protocol. These are additional solutions that can still have a significant impact.
Correlation with stocks
A trend that has a significant impact on BTC price movements is its correlation with the performance of the stock market, especially the US market.
In fact, technically it just appeared a correlation with other risk-on asset trends that had already appeared in the past, but this year it has become more robust.
Even if a few years ago it was a fairly common opinion that Bitcoin’s price trends could follow a different logic than the stock market, as of 2025 it has become pretty clear that its risk-on nature will necessarily make Bitcoin very similar from this perspective to other risk-on assets, and very different from risk-off assets like gold.
As such, institutional investors themselves are starting to see Bitcoin not just as “digital gold” but, more importantly, as a high-yield diversifier, comparable to an asymmetric “call” on the digital future.
Bitcoin price therefore appears to be increasingly tied not only to the internal dynamics of supply and demand in the cryptocurrency market, but also, more importantly, to US and global fiscal, monetary, and geopolitical policies.
new cycle
One of the most discussed trends, especially in the second half of this year, is related to the so-called “long cycle” or cycle fluctuation narrative.
Bitcoin has a halving cycle of approximately 4 years (3 years and 10 months to be exact).
There have been four halvings (2012, 2016, 2020, 2024), each followed by a bull run (2013, 2017, 2021, 2025).
But in reality, this year’s bull market was not only much more limited and unconventional, it also lacked the true large-scale speculative bubble of the previous three cases.
This difference is interpreted by many as the end of a classic four-year cycle or a monumental change, but it could also simply be an anomaly.
Satoshi and the US dollar
Originally, Satoshi Nakamoto intended for the halving to occur once every four years, specifically in January. In fact, he mined his first Bitcoin block on January 3, 2009, hoping that subsequent halvings would occur in January 2013, January 2017, January 2021, January 2025, etc.
Instead, BTC mining proceeded faster than expected, reducing the average duration of the halving period to 3 years and 10 months. As a result, the first halving was in November 2012 instead of January 2013, the second in July 2016, the third in May 2020, and the fourth in April 2024.
Perhaps not only was Satoshi’s choice of four years not a coincidence, but so was the fact that he mined his first block at the beginning of January 2009.
What’s interesting is that although the Bitcoin protocol was published by Nakamoto on October 31, 2008, they waited more than two months to mine the first block.
Another interesting fact is that in January 2009, a new US president (Barack Obama) was inaugurated the previous November. Additionally, US presidential elections are always held once every four years in November, with the new president officially taking office in January of the following year. In fact, Obama’s second term began in January 2013, Trump’s first term in January 2017, Biden’s term in January 2020, and Trump’s second term in January 2025.
These curiosities may be explained by the hypothesis that Satoshi Nakamoto was aware of the USD cycle and was aiming to link Bitcoin price movements to that cycle. After all, he created this currency precisely to provide a defense tool against the loss of purchasing power of fiat currencies. Among them, the dollar is the major currency globally, and the method used to achieve this was exactly halved.
In fact, in subsequent years, especially after 2017, and even more so after 2020, the trend of the Bitcoin dollar price (BTCUSD) started to correlate with the US Consumer Price Index (USCPI) and the US Dollar Index (DXY), the USCPI/DXY ratio.
It should be noted that while USCPI almost always rises, DXY often follows a four-year cycle associated with presidential elections, rising in the election year and falling the following year.
Has the cycle been fixed or not?
Well, the dollar index cycle hasn’t changed and 2025 is showing a very similar trend to 2017. But in 2021, we were coming out of the biggest quantitative easing in history, which temporarily changed the cycle.
Therefore, although the cycle that should support the Bitcoin price trend, i.e. the trend of the USCPI/DXY ratio, has not changed, the Bitcoin price trend in the last months of 2025 is significantly different compared to that in 2017.
The problem is that two large anomalies formed in BTCUSD in both October 2017 and October 2025, making the trends of these two months incomparable.
In fact, in October 2017, BTCUSD was supposed to fall while DXY rose slightly, but in a completely unusual way, a huge speculative bubble inflated and burst a few months later. Although this anomaly did not occur this year, it is actually quite normal for the anomaly not to repeat.
Additionally, in October 2025, the US experienced the longest government shutdown in history, which had a particularly negative impact on BTDUSD in November. This is also an anomaly, as previous shutdowns have been of far shorter duration since Bitcoin has existed.
While the two Bitcoin cycles (one that culminated in 2017 and one that culminated in 2025) are currently not comparable, the cycle underlying the BTCUSD trend is not only comparable, but essentially the same.
