Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Bankless Nation, I'm here with Mike Ippolito.
Chapter 2: What made 2025 the best worst year for crypto?
We're going to talk about what we think is coming down the pipe in 2026. Mike, welcome to Bankless. David, it's been a while since we've done one of these. I thought you were angry with me. Wasn't getting my invites. You know, I like to rotate who the guests in are out. And, you know, I go in phases, you know.
Chapter 3: What predictions are made for the crypto landscape in 2026?
Saving the best for last of 2025. Right. Best for last. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is coming into people's podcast feeds on the 31st. So this might be people's very last podcast of 2025 as we go into 2026.
Chapter 4: How will investor relations evolve in the crypto space?
On that note, how would you rate or describe or evaluate 2025 for our industry? 2025 was the best worst year ever, in my opinion. And what I mean by that is, obviously was not, in a lot of ways, it was a sort of disappointing year. And the way that I would say it was disappointing was one, we certainly didn't get the bull market from a price perspective that I think a lot of us wanted.
And we got new all time highs in Bitcoin for some of the other majors even that did better than most of the other alts. Ethereum, Solana had very minor all-time high breaks. They occurred at different times. It was generally confusing.
I think this was one of the hardest years that it's ever been to be an investor in crypto, especially if you were out along the risk curve on alts and you got destroyed, most likely, unless you were very, very lucky and picked one of the handful of five or six that actually did well on the year.
Chapter 5: What revenue models are expected to gain traction in 2026?
So I think it was very confusing, or I think it was very challenging from a price perspective. I do think that the industry makes more sense, to me at least, than it ever has. And I think one of the themes of the year that I would call out is cognitive dissonance. And I think that there are a lot of people who are saying, wait a second, this doesn't make sense.
The US just did a massive bear hug of crypto. We got genius this year.
Chapter 6: What trends in VC investment should we anticipate?
We've got clarity potentially right around the corner. I thought my bags were supposed to be going up. And I think what's confusing people is Because a regulated route is emerging, I think that a lot of this kind of Wild West, very irrational market is starting to get much more rational and much more fundamentally driven. And this is something that people have called way too early.
But I think that it's finally, this is a market that's starting to follow a very predictable curve around maturity. And I think what's confused a lot of people is there are very good projects in the space that have continued to improve, but the price has still gone down.
And I think that that is probably going to be a theme that extends into 2026 as we transition from kind of speculative relative valuation methodologies into fundamental valuation methodologies. So
Chapter 7: What is the significance of the Ethereum renaissance?
There are very good projects in the space. Unfortunately, they've just been really mispriced. And so I think that's going to continue to confuse people going forward in 2026. I think there are great projects that just started off with the wrong valuation.
But I think the opportunity is if you can spot the compounders and pick the right protocols, then you can do really, really well in 2026 and beyond. Yeah, I think if you told people at the very start of 2025, Ethereum hits an all-time high, Solana hits an all-time high.
Chapter 8: How does the quantum threat impact Bitcoin's future?
Did Solana hit an all-time high this year or was that last year? I think it was at the very beginning of this year. It was whenever the Trump endpoint happened. Yeah, it was January of 2025. So if you told investors, both Solana and Ethereum hit all-time highs this year, everyone would be like, hell yeah, bull market's on, let's go, max bid, put the chips on the table.
And while technically true, it's not really meaningfully true. Ethereum just grazed all-time highs. It's kind of a simulation in the sense that, okay, whoever's coding up the simulation, we just need to make Ethereum touch all-time highs, and then we can just bring it back down and disappoint everyone.
And kind of similar to Solana, I think Solana had a little bit more sustain, but it wasn't meaningful in any particular way. And the only thing to meaningfully be above all-time high and sustain it is Bitcoin. And even Bitcoin is something like 30% to 40% off of all-time highs right now. So it was weird in the sense that we got the all-time highs, But no one feels that way.
The market doesn't feel that way. And I think there's also, we both know since we're both in media, there is a lack of a class of 2025 crypto. Like who do you know came into crypto this year or even in 2024? Like there is not really a class of 2024, 2025. And so all of the people in crypto are in crypto for three plus years. And like maybe maybe maybe the median is five years at this point.
And so we have if you're in crypto for five years, you have a certain level of expectation or idea about what these markets look like and can do. And I think those expectations have been dashed this year, to your point about. We were getting really mature. Things just aren't the Wild West anymore. And a lot of the market expectations of being the Wild West are not being manifested.
And I think that has resulted in just like a low activity market. I agree with that. And yeah, I think also... Where I would situate listeners is everyone loves an analogy to the internet. So here's the analogy that I would use. I think that we are in the equivalent of late 2001, early 2002 for Web 2. And what I mean by that is I think the parallels here are one,
during the dot-com bubble, you had a bunch of ideas and everything was a possibility and we're going to build the whole world on the internet. That ended up being right, but the path dependence and the timeline was certainly wrong. And you had a bunch of build-outs of infrastructure and One thing that I, you know, I've been listening to a lot of AI driven content and talking about GPU usage.
There was kind of the opposite of what's going on with GPUs today with dark fiber back in 2001, 2002, which was there was a huge build out of, you know, undersea cabling and bandwidth. And all of these investors got very excited about the telcos and they're going to own the rails for the Internet. And they just way overbuilt.
And there was this huge, huge bear market, obviously, and people wrote the internet off for dead. And it took a couple of years, one for sentiment to build back up, but also for a new class of builders to come in, recognize all of the infrastructure that had been built, and for new creative entrepreneurs to figure out how to leverage that infrastructure to build generational businesses.
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