When the crypto industry puts on a suit, how would the annual performance of 11 leading projects be rated?

Author: Nancy, PANews

As the curtain slowly falls on 2025, looking back on this year, the crypto world has undoubtedly reached a watershed moment. The industry has officially bid farewell to the wild gold rush era, taken off its T-shirts and put on suits, and knocked on the door of the mainstream financial hall.

In this annual test of crypto's transition to the mainstream, this PANews article reviews the performance of 11 leading projects, covering public chains, DeFi, stablecoins, cross-chain technology, and AI. These projects are not merely engaged in an arms race focused on performance metrics, but have unanimously shifted their focus to compliance, practicality, and scalability. However, the completion of this infrastructure has not yet directly led to a boom in crypto applications; the industry still faces challenges such as homogenization, value capture difficulties, and insufficient product-market fit. Looking ahead to 2026, these projects are targeting their liquidity integration capabilities, breakthroughs in various application scenarios, and sustainable economic models.

Circle: Official Status and Three Major Strategies

Since the beginning of this year, with the clarification of regulations in major global markets, Circle has been pushing programmable money and on-chain commerce from the experimental edge to the mainstream of global finance, centered around three core strategic components: assets, applications and services (Circle Payment Network CPN and Circle StableFX, etc.) and infrastructure Arc.

In terms of assets, Circle includes USDC, EURC, and USYC. USDC's market capitalization increased from $44 billion at the beginning of the year to $77 billion, with on-chain transaction volume exceeding $50 trillion and native support from 30 blockchains. EURC's market capitalization rose from €70 million at the beginning of the year to over €300 million, becoming the largest euro-denominated stablecoin. USYC's assets under management increased to $1.54 billion, making it the world's second-largest TMMF (Tokenized Money Market Fund).

To address the risks of relying on a single profit model, Circle began exploring diversified applications and services this year, launching CPN, CCTP, Gateway, Circle xReserve, Mint, StableFX, and Circle Wallets. For example, the payment network CPN has over 25 design partners and facilitates predictable, internet-native settlements using stablecoins such as USDC and EURC, eliminating the need for traditional intermediaries. CCTP enables users to transfer native USDC across 17 supported blockchains, having processed over $126 billion in cumulative transactions and over 6 million cross-chain transfers. Circle Wallets embeds USDC wallets directly into applications, supporting both developer-controlled and user-controlled modes.

Meanwhile, Circle has set its sights on infrastructure, with its L1 blockchain Arc, launched this year, aiming to become an open, institutional-grade, internet-native infrastructure tailored for lending, capital markets, foreign exchange, and payments, attracting more than 100 startup and design participants.

Currently, Circle's institutional and commercial adoption is accelerating, covering areas such as consumer banking, cross-border payments, payroll, small business finance, and remittances. Partnering institutions include the Intercontinental Exchange, Deutsche Börse, Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Nubank, and Binance. Additionally, Circle is developing an AI agent economy, enabling AI to autonomously hold funds and pay API and computing power fees through wallets and the Arc blockchain.

More notably, Circle completed its IPO in June of this year, and after its market capitalization peaked at over $77 billion, it has now fallen back to $19.4 billion. It has also received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a National Trust Bank, which will greatly enhance the security and regulatory compliance of USDC reserves.

Arbitrum: All institutions are fully on-chain, with over 2.1 billion historical transactions.

This year, Arbitrum shifted its narrative focus to institutional-grade financial infrastructure. From powering the world's largest retail trading platform to settling tokenized funds from the world's largest asset management company, Arbitrum claims to have become the platform of choice for major global institutions.

In terms of ecosystem, Arbitrum is evolving into a massive economy with over 100 chains already launched or under development, including Ethereal Perps DEX, Zama, and Blackbird. Simultaneously, over 1,000 projects are powered by Arbitrum, making it one of the top three public chains by the number of protocols. Currently, the Arbitrum network has generated over $600 million in ecosystem GDP, representing a year-on-year growth of over 30%. Furthermore, Arbitrum One surpassed 2.1 billion historical transactions in 2025, with a total secured value exceeding $20 billion. Notably, it took less than a year to reach the second billionth transaction, while the first billion took three years.

In terms of stablecoins, supply increased by 82% year-on-year, and market capitalization reached approximately $8 billion or more. For example, the DRIP program boosted stablecoin growth by over 229% in just a few months. Regarding RWA tokenization, its scale exceeded $1.1 billion in October, 18 times that of the same period in 2024. Partner institutions include Robinhood, Franklin Templeton, Blackrock, Spiko, and others. Active lending grew by 109% to $1.5 billion, with new lending products from teams like Fluid growing by over 460%.

Financially, Arbitrum demonstrates extremely high profit margins and diversified revenue streams. Gross profit for Q4 2025 is projected to be approximately $6.5 million (annualized to approximately $26 million), representing a sequential increase of over 50%, with a gross margin exceeding 90%. Meanwhile, its revenue streams have expanded from two last year to four; for example, Timeboost generated over $5 million in revenue in the seven months prior to its launch. Furthermore, Arbitrum boasts a substantial balance sheet, holding over $150 million in non-native assets, including cash equivalents and ETH, laying the foundation for its continued ecosystem development and strategic expansion.

Looking ahead to 2026, Arbitrum aims to apply open, programmable finance to the global economy. However, Arbitrum still faces intense competition in the L2 blockchain space and questions about its value capture capabilities due to token incentive subsidies.

Aave: The Year of Absolute Domination and the Three Horsemen

The Aave protocol has become the largest and most liquid lending protocol in history, accounting for 59% of the DeFi lending market and encompassing 61% of all active DeFi loans. Currently, Aave is facing a power struggle within its governance structure. (Related reading: Price Drop, Whales Dumping and Exiting: The DeFi Governance Dilemma as Seen in the Aave Power Struggle )

Over the past year, Aave has demonstrated remarkable resilience and expansion capabilities, with all core metrics reaching record highs. Net deposits are projected to peak at over $75 billion by 2025, with a cumulative total of $3.33 trillion in deposits processed and nearly $1 trillion in loans disbursed, making it comparable in size to the top 50 banks in the United States. Furthermore, Aave is currently the only protocol with a TVL exceeding $1 billion across four different networks.

Aave thus possesses an extremely strong ability to generate revenue. It generated $885 million in fees throughout the year, accounting for 52% of all fees generated by lending protocols—a figure exceeding the combined total of its five closest competitors. This robust cash flow directly supported a large-scale AAVE token buyback program.

Looking ahead to 2026, Aave's strategic focus is on Aave V4, Horizon, and the Aave App. Aave V4, with its Hub & Spoke model unifying liquidity, will allow Aave to process trillions of dollars in assets, making it the preferred choice for any institution, fintech company, or enterprise seeking deep, reliable liquidity on Aave. Horizon is an institutional RWA lending marketplace, aiming to expand net deposits from $550 million to over $1 billion. The Aave App is a mobile portal for the general public, covering 70% of global capital markets and designed to drive millions of new users onto the blockchain.

Starknet: In its year of execution, betting on BTCFi attracted $160 million.

Starknet has supported $1.5 trillion in transaction volume and executed over 1 billion transactions. However, this year, Starknet has experienced multiple outages, raising questions about its future, and its high language barrier has resulted in a significant gap in its ecosystem development compared to EVM-compatible chains.

Starknet calls 2025 the "Year of Execution," highlighting significant progress in performance, decentralization, interoperability, BTCFi, privacy, and ecosystem.

In terms of performance, Starknet has successfully implemented several key technologies, particularly the integration of v0.14.0 (Grinta) and S-two. v0.14.0 (Grinta) makes Starknet the first Rollup driven by a centralized sorter architecture, significantly improving the user and developer experience. The next-generation prover, S-two, means lower costs and faster speeds, achieving a 100-fold increase in efficiency compared to its predecessor (Stone). Currently, TPS capacity has increased to over 1000, gas fees remain below $0.001, transaction latency has decreased from 2 seconds to 500 milliseconds, and throughput recently reached a peak of 2,630 UOPS (user operations per second). Its processing capacity is approaching the needs of Web2 giants like Stripe and Nasdaq, and there are plans to further increase capacity to over 10,000 TPS in the future.

In terms of its economic model, Starknet introduced a dual-token security model of STRK + BTC, where Bitcoin stakers can earn governance tokens (STRK), thereby enhancing economic security. Within just three months, Starknet's BTC staking volume exceeded $160 million. Meanwhile, STRK staking volume has increased 11-fold (1.1 billion tokens) since the beginning of the year, with a staking ratio of 23%.

In terms of interoperability, Starknet has addressed the shortcomings in fund inflows and outflows, such as launching Circle CCTP and natively enabling institutional fund channels through USDC; it will soon fully integrate LayerZero and Stargate, as well as Near Intents, supporting seamless exchange of over 120 assets with STRK.

In terms of application implementation, approximately 50 new teams joined the Starknet mainnet throughout the year, covering DeFi, payments, gaming, and consumer applications. For example, Perp DEX Extended, created by the former Revolut team, achieved a TVL of over $100 million within three months of its launch; Ready launched a closed loop between on-chain USDC and real-world payments (Mastercard channel); and full-chain games such as Realms and Blob Arena were launched on mobile app stores, achieving seamless interaction through account abstraction.

Regarding privacy, Starknet is pursuing a "scalability first, privacy later" strategy. A key proposal is L2 Ztarknet, built on Starknet, which offers scalability and programmability, serving as a programmable layer for Zcash. Simultaneously, Starknet is building a complete privacy ecosystem, including core infrastructure, privacy payments, privacy transactions, privacy pools, a new privacy bank, and data protection protocols.

In 2026, Starknet aims to further shift towards commercialization and scaling. For example, it plans to directly link network revenue to the value of the STRK token; deepen its positioning as a "Bitcoin smart contract layer," setting hard targets of 10,000 BTC staking and a STRK staking ratio of over 35%; drive at least a threefold increase in the number of privacy products and launch an exclusive product combining BTCFi + privacy; and integrate the EVM wallet to significantly improve distribution and user experience.

NEAR: Sharding Scaling, Cross-Chain Execution, and Private AI

Having weathered multiple bull and bear market cycles, NEAR has made several narrative adjustments. This year, NEAR is driving its transformation into a general execution layer for cross-chain DeFi and proxy economies through three key technologies: sharded blockchain infrastructure, intent-driven cross-chain execution, and hardware-supported private AI.

In terms of technological infrastructure, NEAR has achieved a qualitative leap in underlying technology, laying a solid foundation for supporting large-scale AI agents and high-frequency financial transactions. For example, NEAR achieved a public benchmark test of 1 million TPS on consumer-grade hardware, with throughput far exceeding that of traditional payment networks. At the same time, network performance has been further optimized, with NEAR achieving final confirmation in 1.2 seconds and block time in 600 milliseconds, enabling it to compete with traditional financial systems in terms of settlement speed. NEAR has also launched sharded smart contracts on its mainnet, enhancing decentralization and execution capabilities.

NEAR Intents has become the fastest-growing cross-chain infrastructure this year, enabling universal execution from DeFi to the AI market through chain abstraction technology. Intents' core data is also quite impressive, with a total historical cross-chain transaction volume exceeding $7 billion and more than 13 million cumulative swaps; it connects more than 25 major blockchains, supports one-click swaps and unified liquidity for more than 125 assets; and supports more than 1.6 million unique users, becoming a core hub connecting multi-chain ecosystems.

NEAR AI introduces a new privacy-first category of intelligence for businesses and consumers, addressing the data breach challenges faced by enterprises adopting AI by supporting the deployment of models that provide end-to-end encryption of user data. It has already established deep partnerships with Brave Nightly, OpenMind, and TravAI. Notably, SovereignAI, a digital asset vault and confidential AI cloud platform, received $120 million in investment from PIPE and launched NEAR Digital Vault.

In terms of economic models, NEAR completed a key halving upgrade, reducing the maximum annual inflation rate by 50%; the digital asset vault and confidential AI cloud platform SovereignAI received $120 million in PIPE investment and launched the NEAR Digital Vault; Bitwise also launched the collateralized NEAR ETP, officially entering the asset allocation list of traditional financial institutions.

In terms of the developer ecosystem, NEAR's developer resources have grown significantly in 2025, covering innovations such as seamless wallet entry, expansion of multi-language support, and improvement of the toolchain, providing developers with a unified and convenient path to build applications on NEAR.

Looking ahead to 2026, NEAR will focus on accelerating adoption and strengthening the value capture capabilities of its token economy. On one hand, NEAR will deepen Intents adoption, continue to expand integration scope and transaction volume, broaden distribution channels, and solidify its position as a universal execution layer across the entire chain. On the other hand, NEAR will accelerate the application of NEAR AI in real-world scenarios, driving the proxy economy from concept to reality. Furthermore, NEAR has developed a new ecosystem sustainability framework, planning to channel fees generated by NEAR Intents into the community governance treasury, thereby directly enhancing the value capture capabilities of the NEAR token and aligning protocol revenue with the interests of token holders.

Celo: Rejecting empty talk, payment is emerging.

Celo has defined 2025 as a year of no more empty talk, and has completed several key technology upgrades and ecosystem expansions this year, making positive progress in the real-world payments field. However, Celo still faces challenges such as limited distribution channels and fierce competition.

That year, Celo underwent four hard forks, relinquishing its independent L1 identity to migrate to Ethereum's L2 platform and further upgrading to a ZK Rollup. From a results-oriented perspective, this bold decision achieved significant breakthroughs both technically and commercially. Data shows that its on-chain costs decreased by 99.8%, and on-chain revenue increased tenfold.

In terms of users and transaction data, Celo has surpassed 1 billion cumulative transactions, with a peak daily active user count of 790,000, ranking first among all L2 blockchains. More importantly, of the 5.2 million new users throughout the year, a remarkable 79% were first-time users of the chain. This data indirectly confirms that Celo's main growth did not come from the migration of existing users on the chain.

The core driver of this achievement is the MiniPay wallet, deeply integrated with the Opera browser. By integrating Apple Pay and local payment systems in countries like Nigeria and Brazil, MiniPay has brought over 11 million users to Celo this year, covering more than 60 countries worldwide. This payment scenario based on real-world needs has directly fueled the explosive growth of Celo's on-chain stablecoin business, with stablecoin trading volume exceeding $65.9 billion year-to-date, a 142% year-on-year increase. USDT's weekly active users peaked at over 3.3 million, even surpassing Tron's activity level.

In addition to its payment business, Celo also increased its investment in infrastructure in 2025. For example, in terms of identity, the emergence of Self Protocol and its support for Google Cloud and India's Aadhaar ID solved the problem of on-chain identity verification, which is crucial for the subsequent introduction of regulated financial services (RWA, unsecured lending); in terms of privacy, Celo's L3 testnet Nightfall, developed in cooperation with EY, aims to address the privacy pain points of enterprises when conducting payment settlements on public blockchains.

It is worth mentioning that, in order to solve the problem of token price capture, Celo also proposed a proposal to restructure the token economic model in December, planning to introduce a burn and buyback mechanism in an attempt to build a healthier economic closed loop.

Looking ahead to 2026, Celo aims to make stablecoin payments as simple as native payments anywhere, and to fully expand the "Mini-app" economy, while strengthening trust and security (identity and user protection) on the basis of scale expansion.

Aptos: Optimizing performance and developer experience

This year, Aptos's smart contract programming language, Move, continued to advance in terms of expressiveness, high performance, and security, aiming to build a next-generation smart contract language. However, in the high-performance public blockchain sector, Aptos has yet to see any phenomenal applications, and its token faces selling pressure from early institutions and the team.

In terms of language, Move 2 continues to expand its expressiveness this year, including the introduction of higher-order functions and on-chain storage, signed integer types, and detailed improvements. Regarding performance, the Move technology stack has been optimized, including the REST API, indexer, Move compiler, and Move VM. Next year, the Move VM will be redesigned to improve parallelism, single-threaded performance, and security. In terms of developer experience, Aptos has made several significant feature enhancements, including IDE support, transaction simulation sessions, a new decompiler, and mutation testing.

Next year, Aptos plans to redesign the Move VM and execution stack, raising parallelism, single-threaded performance and security to a whole new level, and making the development experience more mainstream and convenient by introducing the TypeScript framework.

Sui: The Year of Implementing the Technology Stack

In 2025, Sui shifted its focus from speed to a full-stack platform, providing a complete Sui Stack technology stack to address issues of computing, storage, privacy, identity, and liquidity, freeing developers from reliance on centralized services. Sui also faces competition from high-performance blockchains, challenges in ecosystem development and adoption rates, and pressure to unlock tokens.

That year, Sui completed several key pieces of the puzzle, achieving native interoperability:

Storage Layer: Walrus' decentralized storage, built for scale, integrity, and programmability, enables the inexpensive and decentralized storage of massive amounts of data such as video, audio, and AI models. Walrus Sites provides a model for hosting decentralized front-ends without relying on centralized hosting infrastructure.

Privacy and security layer: Seal brings programmable access control to the stack, allowing the construction of complex, Web2-like permission management systems, all of which are verifiable on-chain, driving the entry of enterprise-grade applications.

Data Layer: Verifiable Computation Layer Nautilus utilizes a TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) for on-chain verification and off-chain computation, allowing applications to handle computationally intensive or privacy-sensitive data without placing all the burden on the main chain, while maintaining data verifiability.

Liquidity Layer: DeepBook V3 serves as the shared liquidity infrastructure for the Sui ecosystem, supporting permissionless liquidity pools and serving all DeFi applications.

Identity and Governance: SuiNS' identity and naming system was upgraded to infrastructure this year, and Move Registry (Sui's NPM package manager) was launched, making code packages more human-readable.

In addition, Sui has optimized infrastructure and user experience. For example, Mysticeti v2 further improves the performance of the base layer; Passkeys supports direct Face ID/fingerprint signature transactions without the need for mnemonic phrases; Slush Wallet & Enoki 2.0 allow users to use applications without being aware of the blockchain's existence, and so on.

Sui's full-stack capabilities have driven the development of more innovative applications, including cross-chain hubs, full-chain games, full-chain finance, and AI payments. Meanwhile, Sui is also accelerating its entry into the mainstream market, with Canary, 21Shares, and Grayscale submitting applications for spot ETFs; it has been included in the Bitwise 10 Index; and a leveraged SUI ETF has been listed on Nasdaq.

Looking back at the end of 2025, Sui said that the foundation has been laid, and the next step will depend on how the community chooses to build upon it.

Hedera: Targeting AI and tokenization, reshaping its brand and architecture.

If the past few years were about proving that public distributed ledger technology (DLT) could handle real-world business workloads, then Hedera believes that 2025 will prove it to be a trust layer that institutions can rely on. However, its development is still hampered by issues such as questions about centralized governance and a relatively weak ecosystem due to intense competition in the public blockchain market.

In the realm of tokenization, Hedera has demonstrated a shift from theory to practice. For example, tokenized shares of money market funds and UK government bonds issued by Archax on Hedera were used as collateral in foreign exchange transactions between Lloyds Banking Group and Aberdeen; the Canary HBAR ETF (HBR) was listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange in October 2025; the Australian Digital Dollar was launched on Hedera using Stablecoin Studio; and the Hedera Foundation invested in tokenized products of Fidelity International's MMF issued by Archax on Hedera.

In the AI field, Hedera has entered the sub-field of verifiability, including launching the open-source modular toolkit AI Studio and collaborating with Accenture and EQTY Labs to create verifiable AI governance solutions.

On the architecture side, Hedera launched HashSphere in 2025, allowing organizations to deploy private permissioned networks while conducting settlements and interoperability through the Hedera mainnet, meeting regulatory requirements for privacy and the public's demand for transparency. For example, the Reserve Bank of Australia's (RBA) Project Acacia and the Qatar Financial Centre project both adopted this model.

In terms of internal governance and structure, Hedera has undergone a complete overhaul. For example, the HBAR Foundation has transformed into the Hedera Foundation, establishing a closer and more consistent brand system; partners such as Arrow Electronics and Repsol have joined the council, and the Hedera Enterprise Applications Team (HEAT) has been launched; in 2025, Hedera also launched several builder tools to lower the barrier to entry for developers and held several hackathons.

Furthermore, Hedera gained attention from government and regulatory bodies in 2025. For example, the Wyoming Frontier Stablecoin (FRNT) selected Hedera as a candidate blockchain for the first state-issued stablecoin in the United States; and the Bank of England and Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Center DLT Challenge selected Hedera as one of only two L1 networks.

Hedera stated frankly that 2026 will not be the start of a new story, but rather an expansion of the story that began in 2025.

ZKsync: ZK technology moves towards production-grade deployment

Looking back at 2025, ZKsync propelled ZK technology toward production-grade deployment. However, it still faces multiple challenges, including a community trust crisis triggered by the airdrop controversy, uneven quality of projects within its ecosystem, and increasingly fierce technological competition.

This year, ZKsync achieved three major breakthroughs in technology and products: In terms of privacy products, ZKsync launched Prividium, enabling institutions to run private systems in compliance with regulations and natively connect to Ethereum; in terms of liquidity interoperability, L1 Interop achieved bridge-free, native interoperability between the ZK chain and Ethereum liquidity (such as Aave), establishing a new model of "private system + public market"; in terms of performance, through Atlas upgrades and Airbender technology, it significantly improved proof speed and reduced costs, reshaping the performance standards of ZK.

In terms of ecosystem expansion, ZKsync has completed numerous high-profile partnerships covering sectors such as finance and consumer goods, including UBS, Deutsche Bank, Abstract, and Sophon. Simultaneously, ZKsync launched its managed services, ZKsync Managed Services, providing enterprises with production-grade infrastructure support and lowering the deployment threshold.

At the same time, ZKsync has strategically upgraded its token and brand. Among these upgrades, the ZK token has shifted from simple governance to utility, clearly defining interoperability and off-chain permissioned tokens as the core pillars of value capture; the brand has also been repositioned as "immutable financial infrastructure".

As regulators such as the SEC begin to recognize the compliance benefits of ZK technology, ZKsync says it will ramp up its development in 2026 with a unified architecture for privacy, performance, and public liquidity access.

LayerZero: Adopted by over $50 billion in assets, interoperability enters practical application.

By 2025, LayerZero is accelerating its evolution from a cross-chain tool to the underlying operating system of the crypto world. This means its main challenges lie in achieving efficient cross-chain interoperability while ensuring security, and in developing an effective economic model.

Currently, LayerZero has three main technological pillars:

The OFT standard allows tokens to be issued and transferred across more than 150 blockchains, maintaining a consistent supply and contract address, achieving zero slippage transfers (only gas fees), and eliminating double-spending risk. Currently, over $50 billion worth of assets (such as USDT, PYUSD, and WBTC) use this standard. Issuers no longer need to develop separately for each chain, but instead use it as a distribution channel. For example, Ondo Finance has tokenized over 100 stocks using the OFT standard, and 61% of its stablecoins move through LayerZero; PENGU has expanded to Solana, Abstract, and Hyperliquid through the OFT standard.

Decentralized Validator Network (DVN): Applications can choose who validates cross-chain messages, such as Google Cloud, Polyhedra, or run their own validator nodes. Security is no longer a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather configurable, programmable, and tamper-proof. Applications have complete sovereignty over their security.

OApp & lzRead: Supports sending arbitrary data (messages) across chains, as well as pulling/reading data from multiple chains. Beyond just fund transfers, it also enables cross-chain governance, complex DeFi logic (such as EtherFi cross-chain staking), and identity verification.

Currently, LayerZero's three main practical applications of interoperability are: new chains, which solves the early liquidity cold start problem by sharing users and liquidity through interconnection; institutional tokenization, such as PayPal (PYUSD), BlackRock/Securitize (USDtb), Ondo Finance, and other institutions using LayerZero to issue stablecoins and tokenized assets on multiple chains; and providing AI agents with tools to "read and write" full-chain data, enabling AI to autonomously perform complex cross-chain arbitrage, payments, and asset rebalancing.

LayerZero envisions its ultimate goal as being as invisible as the internet's TCP/IP protocol: crucial, yet unseen. The foundation has been laid, and a truly global, open, and programmable financial system, transcending any single blockchain, is accelerating, aiming to propel the internet-scale crypto space toward explosive growth.