🔎 DeFi keeps winning

weekly valuable insights

Jun 13, 2025

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In today’s newsletter:

🔎DeFi’s biggest wins in 2025

📊 On-chain alpha

😂 Crypto meme of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎DeFi’s biggest wins in 2025

BTC hit a new ATH just a few weeks ago.

Yet Crypto Twitter feels very silent. This isn’t very surprising though considering that BTC kept outperforming most altcoins in the recent months.

Still, despite the poor price action, the first half of this year has been massive for DeFi in terms of developments and adoption.

So in this issue, I wanted to highlight DeFi’s biggest wins in 2025 so far.

Let’s dive in 👇

1. Circle’s initial public offering (IPO)

Circle, the company behind USDC, became public on the New York Stock Exchange just a few days ago.

And it’s safe to say that its IPO was a massive success.

Circle’s CRCL stock shares initially started trading at $31, and by the end of the first day, they increased by more than 3 times!

Now… Why does this matter?

Because it brings a lot of attention to crypto.

Historically, many institutional investors with a huge amount of capital have been skeptical of investing in crypto.

Yet the massive success of the Circle IPO might convince some of them to pay more attention to this space and even start investing in it.

The listing of crypto companies on the stock market legitimizes this industry.

2. Ethereum got a new leadership team

Why is this a big deal?

Because for a very long time, it felt like the Ethereum Foundation (EF) was completely disconnected from the ETH community.

Yet in March, Ethereum Foundation got two new co-executive directors.

And I have to say I really like the changes they announced so far:

Ethereum Foundation (EF) began using its ETH holdings in DeFi to generate yield and increase its runway
Quarterly updates regarding EF’s expenses will be published
Scaling the L1 finally became a top priority (Vitalik Buterin expects the Ethereum L1 scalability to increase by 10x over the next year)

The recent announcements regarding these changes might explain why ETH performed so well in May.

3. Pro-crypto legislation is finally here

Remember Gary Gensler?

Fortunately, he is no longer the SEC Chair, and most of the people who have been elected to the US Congress are actually crypto-friendly.

There are 2 major US crypto bills I’m keeping an eye on:

The GENIUS Act - a major bill that regulates and legitimizes the stablecoin sector, which was written in collaboration with several crypto natives
The CLARITY Act - A lesser-known bill (but very important) that will establish clear rules for classifying digital assets as commodities or securities

Both seem very likely to pass into law in the future as they have huge support.

I think that especially the GENIUS Act will significantly benefit DeFi in the long run, as stablecoins are a big part of the reason why DeFi is so successful.

4. Stablecoin market cap surpassed $250 billion

For years, most banks have been hostile towards crypto.

Ironically, this made a lot of people choose to hold their crypto profits in the form of stablecoins rather than off-ramping them to fiat via banks.

Now, stablecoins are growing so fast that they’re starting to pose a systemic risk to the same banks that tried to kill this industry.

Earlier in June, stablecoin market cap surpassed $250b for the first time ever - after seeing a $89 billion increase in the last 12 months alone.

With stablecoin-friendly regulation incoming, I wouldn’t be surprised if this sector hits a $1 trillion market cap in the next 4-5 years.

What’s next?

I also wanted to talk a bit about some upcoming major catalysts.

Q3-Q4 might be the quarters when two of the most anticipated spot crypto ETFs will finally get approved by the SEC:

Spot staked Ethereum ETFs
Spot Solana ETFs

In May, the SEC confirmed that staking is not a transaction involving securities. This significantly increases the chances of a spot ETH ETF approval.

A staked ETH ETF would be the first crypto ETF that generates yield, and I think the demand for it from institutional investors would be quite high.

Moving on, the approval of a spot SOL ETF could also happen very soon.

Bloomberg analysts Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart, the same guys who predicted the approval of the spot BTC ETFs in Jan. ‘24, are now saying there’s a 90% chance of a spot Solana ETF approval in 2025.

Blockworks is also predicting that a SOL ETF will be approved in 3-5 weeks.

This makes me think that we have a few exciting months ahead of us.

The reason why these ETFs are so important is that they legitimize this industry for skeptics, and will ultimately bring more users on-chain.

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