Recently, Huobi HTX Global Investment Department HTX Ventures released the latest research report "2025 Annual Review: Crypto-Assets Toward Mainstream Adoption". The report reviews the key progress made by the industry in the three dimensions of "regulatory shift, global blockchain adoption, and accelerated institutional adoption." Based on our practical perspective as a long-term ecological builder, it deeply explains how these trends have reshaped investment logic and value discovery, and clarifies our future focus direction.

The report points out that in the past year, mainstream adoption no longer remains at the slogan level, but has gradually evolved into operational, auditable, and scalable business links through stablecoin payments, RWA asset on-chain, and institutional compliance admissions.

As for the industry prospects in 2026, HTX Ventures judges that the focus of competition will further shift from "narrative and price" to "whether infrastructure can continue to precipitate value" - whoever can form replicable capabilities in key links such as compliance framework, payment and clearing, asset on-chain and institutional channels will be more likely to have an advantage in the next stage of mainstream adoption.

As long-term participants in the industry, Huobi HTX and HTX Ventures continue to focus on the construction of underlying capabilities that can transcend cycles: on the one hand, they track structural trends from a research perspective and help the market identify long-term directions; on the other hand, through investment and ecological collaboration, they support teams with real product capabilities and sustainable business models to promote encryption technology to enter a wider range of real-world scenarios in a more robust and sustainable way.

Regulation becomes “predictable”: Compliance frameworks are bringing institutional funds in

HTX Ventures pointed out that in 2025, the regulatory ambiguities in major jurisdictions around the world will significantly converge, and supervision will move from "gray tolerance" to the "rules setting" stage, focusing on stablecoin frameworks, market structure compliance, and more stringent trading, custody and information disclosure requirements. In the United States, the GENIUS Act established a federal-level framework for payment stablecoins and strengthened requirements such as 1:1 full support; in Europe, the compliance threshold was significantly raised after the implementation of MiCA, pushing the industry from "incremental expansion" to "compliance competition." Hong Kong is also advancing the issuer licensing system in terms of stable currency supervision and pushing new regulations to take effect. HTX Ventures believes that the improvement in the clarity of rules directly reduces the uncertainty of institutional participation and provides a more enforceable path for the entry of compliant funds.

The world is going on the chain: Stablecoins have outgrown the payment scale, and RWA has entered a period of expansion

In 2025, the key changes in on-chain infrastructure will come from the two-wheel drive of stablecoin expansion and the institutional adoption of RWA.

On the one hand, stablecoins will accelerate their evolution from crypto-native tools to global financial infrastructure in 2025: the total market value of stablecoins hit a new high of US$308 billion in October and stabilized at around US$309.4 billion by mid-December, an annual increase of 50.3%; the total on-chain transfers throughout the year exceeded US$46 trillion, which is equivalent to the annual sum of the three traditional payment networks of Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal.

On the other hand, RWA has entered a stage of scale: as of December 17, 2025, the value of distributed RWA assets on the chain reached US$18.74 billion (excluding stablecoins), an increase of more than three times from the beginning of the year; of which, tokenized US Treasury bonds accounted for approximately US$8.7 billion, accounting for 47.3%, and appeared in the form of BlackRock BUIDL (approximately 20.06 Billion US dollars) and other iconic products, promoting the deep integration of traditional asset management forces and on-chain tokenization. The research report believes that the "on-chain" of real assets and business processes is pushing the blockchain from "self-development" to a new stage of "serving the outside world".

The entry path for institutions is clearer: from "do you want to configure it" to "how to configure it in compliance with regulations"

HTX Ventures defines 2025 as the year when institutional adoption paths are "quantifiable": The core change for institutions is not to "bet comprehensively on high-volatility assets," but to enter the encryption field in a way that is more auditable, more standardized, and closer to traditional balance sheet language, and to dismantle on-chain capabilities into financial modules that can be deployed.

Specifically, institutional participation is advancing along several clear paths: putting crypto exposures into traditional investment containers through ETFs/ETPs; incorporating BTC into balance sheets through corporate treasury; moving payments and settlements onto the chain through stablecoins; and converting "cash equivalents and collateral" into composable assets on the chain through RWA/Tokenization. These paths jointly promote a more "institutionalized" market: liquidity is concentrated at the top, volatility is more constrained by macro and risk control, and market depth is more predictable. At the same time, institutional activities are still highly concentrated in "safe zone" assets such as BTC, ETH, and on-chain USD.

More importantly, institutional entry is changing the way the market "works." HTX Ventures summarizes this structural impact into three points: increased market concentration (funds are further tilted towards mainstream assets), the importance of compliance and risk control has increased significantly (higher requirements for data transparency and compliance reporting), and the yield curve and pricing logic are closer to traditional finance (term structure, capital cost and other concepts have entered the crypto pricing system more deeply). At the strategic level, institutions prefer low-risk/neutral return strategies such as arbitrage, market making, hedging, and delta-neutral, and their role is more like a "structure provider" than a short-term price pusher.

Where will HTX Ventures focus in 2026

Alec, head of HTX Ventures, said: "After the structural changes in 2025, the industry is entering a critical stage of infrastructure competition. Funds are flowing in along the track of 'regulatory, auditable, and scalable', so the focus of the next stage will no longer be short-term price performance, but who can continue to precipitate value at the critical infrastructure layer."

Based on the above trends, HTX Ventures, as a long-term industry builder, will focus on the following directions in 2026:

● AI × Blockchain: AI agent framework, machine account and payment, on-chain execution automation, data price feeding and settlement closed loop

● Stablecoin and payment infrastructure: compliant issuance and reserve management, on-chain clearing and reconciliation, risk control and anti-money laundering, enterprise-level wallet permissions, payment routing optimization

● RWA expansion and secondary liquidity: Extend from cash equivalents to private credit and institutional asset chain issuance, and improve trading and liquidity facilities

● User experience and productsModification: Applications and protocols that lower the financial threshold on the chain (more friendly interactions, one-click cross-chain, mobile security)

● Multi-chain strong application ecology: Looking for “strong applications” and integrated platforms that can accumulate users, cash flow and developers in the multi-chain landscape

For the crypto industry, the significance of 2025 is that it is moving from "viable" to "scalable": crypto technology is being embedded in the global financial system in a compliant, transparent, and integrable way. Facing 2026, Huobi HTX and HTX Ventures will continue to dig deep into value creation with a long-term perspective, focus on key infrastructure and real use cases, promote the popularization and mainstream adoption of encryption technology as long-term industry builders, and help build a more open, fair, and transparent future financial system.

About HTX Ventures

HTX Ventures is the global investment arm of Huobi HTX, integrating investment, incubation and research to identify the best and brightest teams around the world. As an industry pioneer, HTX Ventures has more than 11 years of experience in blockchain construction and is good at identifying cutting-edge technologies and emerging business models in this field. To drive growth within the blockchain ecosystem, we provide projects with comprehensive support, including financing, resources and strategic advice.

HTX Ventures currently supports more than 300 projects covering multiple blockchain fields, and some high-quality projects have already been traded on Huobi HTX. In addition, as one of the most active FOF funds, HTX Ventures invests in 30 of the world's top funds and cooperates with the world's top blockchain funds such as Polychain, Dragonfly, Bankless, Gitcoin, Figment, Nomad, Animoca and Hack VC to jointly build a blockchain ecosystem.