NYDIG Research 2025 Wrapped
This week, I’m bringing one of my favorite pieces of the year, insights from NYDIG’s weekly research note. I originally presented this as “Wrapped” in the vein of Spotify’s annual summary of your listening habits, but since that time, it feels like every company has come up with an annual list (I just got one for my cloud storage service. Thanks?). We are one year away from Microsoft highlighting your top Excel files.
Regardless, readers and I find these statistics insightful, not only as a reminder of what transpired over the year, but also as a useful framing device for thinking about what may come next. This is, of course, a (mostly) weekly research note meant to educate and inform institutional investors, focused first on Bitcoin, but with an eye toward developments across the broader crypto industry.
My Job
When I started analyzing and writing (professionally) about cryptocurrencies in 2017, I always thought my competition was going to be social media — crowdsourcing ideas from the greatest minds accessible on the Internet. But it turns out social media rewards features not necessarily prized by institutional investors. Absolutism, outrage, untestable assertions, and unqualified opinions may earn points on online forums, but they rarely lead to sound investment decisions.
I’m not shy about being vocal. I view part of my role as a gatekeeper. Crypto opinions, like crypto networks themselves, are permissionless — anyone can participate. That doesn’t mean every opinion is informed, useful, or correct. I spend too much of my time responding to what amounts to “I just saw this tweet from XYZ. Is it true?” I’ve been doing this long enough and am experienced across crypto, tech, and financial markets to separate fact from fiction in relatively short order (I sometimes picture myself like that scene from The Matrix franchise when Neo is bored with blocking Agent Smith’s attacks), which is a function I happily provide internally at NYDIG and with our clients and partners.
The internet and crypto in particular suffer from Brandolini’s law – the amount of energy required to refute…nonsense…is an order of magnitude bigger than needed to produce it. Nothing incenses me more than a notable crypto figure confidently espousing a view that is misinformed or just plain wrong, especially when it’s in a domain outside of their expertise. “Confidently incorrect,” I call it. “I don’t know” is probably the three most powerful words in the investing language. The industry, and perhaps society at large, should learn to use them more.
Still, if you are going to put forth an opinion in this space, you'd better be prepared to be wrong, a lot (guilty). Technology changes quickly, prices move even faster, plus it’s impossible to be an expert in every sphere in this industry (markets, regulation, tech, politics, psychology, etc.). “Strong opinions, loosely held” is probably the best attitude in the industry. Remember, your job as investors isn’t to sound smart (that’s my job), it’s to make money. I write my research to be educational and informational, but mainly to help investors make money (or save them from losses). I never lose sight of that.
Things Are Pretty Good, with Some Caveats
For whatever my gripes are about the state of crypto information (see preceding paragraphs), the bulk of crypto research at large today is quite good, better than it probably has ever been. There is, however, quite a dichotomy from what comes from traditional investment banks and asset managers and the crypto native business, where the crypto native stuff is usually pretty good (we may differ on timing and impact, but at least there’s a common agreement on the facts), but the stuff coming from tradfi (not all) is well, head scratching at times. Outdated ideologies (bitcoin has value even if it’s only sparsely used for payments), a lack of introspection (things that don’t produce cash flow can still have value), and just plain wrong economic beliefs (hash rate doesn’t determine price, price determines hash rate) are rife in tradfi.
The reason, I think, is that understanding Bitcoin and digital assets requires a certain degree of divergent thinking (expanding possibilities), whereas most high-level traditional finance executives have gotten to where they are precisely because they are excellent convergent thinkers (finding the exact solution). Crypto natives go off the rails when things are too theoretical or not grounded. The world needs dreamers, but where I try to position our viewpoint is both idealistic and grounded in pragmatism. It’s not always easy to achieve, but it’s something to strive for.
High-Level Statistics
- 43 Weekly Emails Sent (This is 44)
- 1.2M emails sent
Most Engaged Research Notes
- Memecoin Mayhem
- How DATs Die
- Bitcoin Treasury Corporations
- Strategic Bitcoins
- Bitcoin Decouples, Tentatively
TOPICS COVERED
A very frequent question I get asked is, “How do you come up with topics to write about?” Honestly, I just observe and listen (news, clients, internal conversations) — most of the time, the research just writes itself. Sure, I bring things to life with data, analysis, opinions, and tie them together with some humor, but the topics themselves are just begging to be put down on paper.
Price Action and Cycles
To that end, the thing I wrote about most this year was market movements – price action and cycles. This doesn’t come as much surprise. Clients want to talk about prices (what happened, where it’s going) – they are, after all, investors. Secret – I love talking about price cycles (I have an entire report on it somewhere). Bitcoin’s price cycles are the narwhal of the investing universe – an oddity that couldn’t possibly exist yet somehow does. Funnily enough, industry analysts are nearly universally convinced that narwhals don’t exist, or rather, they did exist, but they will go extinct. But 2026 is where the rubber meets the road. "Two men enter, one man leave" – secularist or cyclicalists. My best observation is that there’s an axis of secular growth, but that human emotions of fear and greed take it way above and below this line. So, cycles and secular growth.
DATs and mNAV
The other topic that I could not stop writing about was DATs. It was just so fascinating. At one point last year (2024), we theorized on the desk what would happen if all these SPACs and public shell companies all simply became DATs (they weren’t called that back then)? It only made logical sense that if Strategy could show it was possible to convert $1 worth of crypto into $2 of equity value (or pick your mNAV multiple), that other companies should follow suit (logically equities should collectively do this until the supplier surplus (premium to NAV) goes to zero – the squeeze was squoze).
While on the surface it’s easy to say I’ve been critical of DATs (I think our sales team and trading desk would prefer it if I kept my mouth shut), here’s the thing – there is merit to what they are doing. If they just issue equity and do no active treasury management, they should trade at no premium to NAV — that’s an ETF. But if they even simply issue debt, there is leverage for equity holders and therefore a premium (or discount) to NAV dynamics that come into play.
I do hate poorly defined financial metrics and economic terms, though, and nothing has frustrated me more than the industry’s insistence on doing so. I remember once writing about this fact using the term “inflation rate,” which to crypto participants means the “growth in token supply” but to literally every other else in the investing world means “loss in purchasing power” or “the price of money.”
To that end, I’ve focused my ire on mNAV, which is not universally defined, hard to calculate, and impossible to independently verify. I’ve spent more time this year trying to simply find or verify share counts than I would care to admit. It is also simply the wrong measure to make capital markets decisions. I don’t run a DAT, but I would not use that as a metric for making business decisions.
Memecoin Piece Wins It
Surprisingly, the most engaged piece this year had (mostly) to do with memecoins. It felt like memecoins were one of the industry narratives, but while some prognosticators thought they would be the thing to prop up the cycle, they turned out to be fleeting (I wasn’t fooled). Propping the cycle on coins that could be literally pumped out programmatically, churned out by the millions (I just noticed Coin Market Cap took off its coin counter. Last I looked, there were 2.2M “cryptocurrencies” in existence, many of them probably memecoins), was not realistic.
The interesting thing about the past year is just how quiet the rest of crypto was. This cycle has been very bitcoin-dominated. The chart of its dominance (ex-stablecoins) is nearly a 45-degree angle up and to the right. In previous cycle peaks, 2017 and 2021, bitcoin rapidly lost share as other narratives (real or not) crept in — NFTs, DeFi, alt layer ones, ancient alts, depin, move 2 earn, social credit tokens, layer 2s — these were just some of the narratives in the past. But today, outside of tokenization, stablecoins, and privacy coins (hello, 2017), there seems to be very little going on. It almost feels like the probability envelope of what crypto could be is narrowing in on a few things: money (the original use case) and financial primitives.
Quantum Computers, the Risk Du Jour
Final observation: while my piece this year on quantum computing may have been short (judge for yourself here), the risks posed by quantum computing are THE “bitcoin investment objection” reason du jour. Prior reasons have been bitcoin’s use in illicit activity, volatility, lack of use for real-world payments, Tether manipulation, and lack of valuation frameworks. Now it is squarely quantum computers. I suspect this has something to do with the current fervor over AI (tangential technology), a bevy of public quantum computing companies, and scientific advancements in the field.
While the field of quantum computing will continue to advance, my observation is that it has been “10 years away” for 25 years now. Quantum computers appear on Gartner’s “Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle” in…2000 (as far as I went back). I don’t want to be dismissive of the risks because they are existential in nature, but perhaps quantum computers are one of those systematic risks for which investors have been rewarded handsomely for enduring. Regardless, there’s some interesting analysis that hasn’t been done on quantum computers and Bitcoin that I hope to bring to light next year.
Topic Count:
- Price & Cycles - 18
- DATs - 11
- Regulations & Politics - 9
- ETFs - 8
- Blockchain Data and Technology - 7
- Macro - 6
- Stablecoins & Tokenization - 6
- Industry - 4
- Quarterly Wraps - 4
- Gold - 3
- Capital Markets - 2
WHAT’S IN STORE FOR 2026
My first resolution is to do less in 2026. Oh, not less output, but specifically less with the weekly note. It has become something of an in-betweener — not quite a fully-fledged thought piece and too much for a weekly update note. As a result, I ended up jamming a lot of content and research into a weekly piece that, honestly, didn’t get the room it deserved. Some things I’m particularly proud of this year:
- DAT and NAV work
- Cycle Narratives Framework
- Price Target Framework
- Gold vs Bitcoin Comparisons
So, I plan to put less heavy analysis in the weekly note and do more regular, longer thought pieces. I used to be able to do that when I had a research associate (NYDIG Research is still a one person show, but I plan on bringing in someone under me — hint: reach out if interested (and qualified)). I am currently sitting on a mountain of 75% finished research pieces, some of them absolute dynamite (objective opinion). Absent help right now (or more hours in the day), I plan to rejigger how I allocate my time.
The other thing we are working on is producing more video content. We have a gorgeous studio and, more importantly, some of the brightest minds in markets, regulations, and technology available to us. Showcasing that talent in a way that expands beyond the 1-on-1 calls we do with partners or even my written research is something we’ve been working on. I need a new wardrobe (my wife told me), and I have a face for emails, but expect to see a lot more of “me and the gang” in 2026. Here’s the latest from me and Pete Janney, head of our Institutional Finance business:
Greg Cipolaro
December, 2025
