BlockBeats news, December 25th, after a year of gradually clarifying regulatory environments and divergent market performances, several top venture capitalists have begun reassessing the value attribution in the crypto industry for 2025. In a recent podcast, Pantera Capital partner Mason Nystrom, Hash3 co-founder Hootie Rashidifard, and Variant partner Alana Levin unanimously agreed that stablecoins, prediction markets, and traditional finance and internet “incumbents” are the biggest winners this year.
Nystrom pointed out that established companies like Robinhood quickly acted after regulatory clarity, significantly accelerating their crypto deployments in 2025, “effectively anticipating where the puck is going.”
Rashidifard stated that stablecoin trading volume and profitability have both surged, “Tether has become one of the companies with the highest profit per capita.” He emphasized that stablecoins are not only profitable now but also genuinely provide fundamental financial value to end-users.
Levin listed prediction markets as one of the fastest-growing tracks in 2025, with Kalshi and Polymarket having moved beyond doubts about “wash trading” and “only betting on elections.” She specifically mentioned: Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) invested $20 billion in Polymarket this year, which is astonishing.
From the perspective of losers:
At the individual level: Levin named Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison in December for fraud charges related to the Terra collapse, seen as an iconic failure case in the industry.
At the institutional level: Rashidifard believes that the U.S. SEC during the “Biden era” is one of the institutional losers, as its long-term aggressive enforcement has not yielded actual regulatory outcomes but instead forced a large outflow of entrepreneurs. He noted that with Gensler’s departure, the passage of the GENIUS stablecoin bill, and the advancement of market structure legislation, the U.S. government’s attitude toward the crypto industry has fundamentally shifted in 2025.
