Recently, Huobi HTX Global Investments, the global investment arm of Huobi HTX, released its latest research report , "2025 Year in Review: Crypto Assets Towards Mainstream Adoption." The report reviews the key progress made by the industry in three dimensions: "regulatory shift, global blockchain adoption, and accelerated institutional adoption." Based on our practical perspective as a long-term ecosystem builder, the report deeply explains how these trends are reshaping investment logic and value discovery, and clarifies our future focus.

The report points out that in the past year, mainstream adoption has moved beyond mere slogans and has gradually evolved into a viable, auditable, and scalable business chain through stablecoin payments, RWA asset on-chaining, and institutional compliance entry.

Regarding the industry outlook for 2026, HTX Ventures predicts that the focus of competition will shift from "narrative and price" to "whether infrastructure can continuously accumulate value"—whoever can develop replicable capabilities in key areas such as compliance frameworks, payment clearing, asset on-chaining, and institutional channels will be more likely to gain an advantage in the next stage of mainstream adoption.

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

Regulation is becoming “predictable”: Compliance frameworks are bringing in institutional funds.

HTX Ventures points out that by 2025, regulatory gray areas in major global jurisdictions will have significantly narrowed, with regulation shifting from a "gray area tolerance" phase to a "rule-setting" phase, focusing on stablecoin frameworks, market structure compliance, and stricter requirements for trading, custody, and information disclosure. In the United States, the GENIUS Act establishes a federal-level framework for payment-based stablecoins and strengthens requirements such as 1:1 full backing; Europe, following the implementation of MiCA, has significantly raised compliance thresholds, driving the industry from "incremental expansion" to "compliant competition." Hong Kong is also advancing an issuer licensing system for stablecoins and pushing for new regulations to take effect. HTX Ventures believes that increased regulatory clarity directly reduces uncertainty for institutional participation, providing a more feasible path for compliant funds to enter the market.

The world is going blockchain: stablecoins are outpacing payment volumes, and RWA is entering a period of expansion.

In 2025, key changes in on-chain infrastructure will be driven by a dual engine of stablecoin expansion and the institutionalized adoption of RWA.

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

On the other hand, RWA has entered a stage of scaling up: as of December 17, 2025, the value of on-chain distributed RWA assets reached US$18.74 billion (excluding stablecoins), more than three times the value at the beginning of the year; among them, tokenized US Treasury bonds accounted for approximately US$8.7 billion, or 47.3%, and iconic products such as BlackRock BUIDL (approximately US$2.006 billion) have emerged, promoting the deep integration of traditional asset management with on-chain tokenization. The research report believes that the "on-chaining" of real-world assets and business processes is pushing blockchain from "self-growth" to a new stage of "serving the outside world".

The entry path for institutions is clearer: from "whether they want to allocate resources" to "how to allocate resources in compliance with regulations".

HTX Ventures defines 2025 as the year when institutional adoption paths become “quantifiable”: the core change for institutions is not “going all-in on high-volatility assets,” but rather entering the crypto space in a more auditable, standardized, and traditional balance sheet language, and breaking down on-chain capabilities into deployable financial modules.

Specifically, institutional participation is progressing along several clear paths: ETFs/ETPs are channeling crypto exposure into traditional investment containers; corporate treasuries are incorporating BTC into their balance sheets; stablecoins are bringing payments and settlements "on-chain"; and RWAs/Tokenization are transforming "cash equivalents and collateral" into on-chain composable assets. These paths collectively drive a more "institutionalized" market: liquidity is concentrating at the top, volatility is more constrained by macroeconomics and risk management, market depth is more predictable, and institutional activity remains highly concentrated in "safe zone" assets such as BTC, ETH, and on-chain USD.

More importantly, institutional entry is changing the way the market "operates." HTX Ventures summarizes this structural impact in three points: increased market concentration (further shift of funds towards mainstream assets), a significant increase in the importance of compliance and risk control (higher requirements for data transparency and compliance reporting), and yield curves and pricing logic that are closer to traditional finance (concepts such as term structure and cost of funding are more deeply integrated into the crypto pricing system). At the strategy level, institutions prefer low-risk/neutral return strategies such as arbitrage, market making, hedging, and Delta-neutral, acting more as "structure providers" than short-term price drivers.

What areas will HTX Ventures focus on in 2026?

Alec, head of HTX Ventures, said: “After the structural changes in 2025, the industry is entering a critical phase of infrastructure competition. Funds are flowing in along the lines of ‘regulation, auditability, and scalability,’ so the focus in the next phase will no longer be on short-term price performance, but on who can continuously accumulate value at the critical infrastructure layer.”

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

● AI × Blockchain : AI Agent Framework, Machine Accounts and Payments, On-Chain Execution Automation, Data Price Feeding and Settlement Closed Loop

● Stablecoins and Payment Infrastructure : Compliant issuance and reserve management, on-chain clearing and reconciliation, risk control and anti-money laundering, enterprise-grade wallet permissions, and payment routing optimization.

● RWA Expansion and Secondary Liquidity : Extending from cash equivalents to on-chain issuance of private credit and institutional assets, and improving trading and liquidity facilities.

● User Experience and Productization : Applications and protocols that lower the barriers to on-chain finance (more user-friendly interaction, one-click cross-chain, mobile security)

● Multi-chain strong application ecosystem : Finding "strong applications" and integrated platforms in a multi-chain landscape that can accumulate users, cash flow, and developers.

For the crypto industry, 2025 is significant because it is moving from "feasibility" to "scalability": crypto technology is being embedded into the global financial system in a compliant, transparent, and integrable manner. Looking towards 2026, Huobi HTX and HTX Ventures will continue to pursue value creation with a long-term perspective, focusing on key infrastructure and real-world use cases. As long-term builders of the industry, they will drive the popularization and mainstream adoption of crypto technology, contributing to 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 globally. As an industry pioneer, HTX Ventures has over 11 years of experience in blockchain development and excels at identifying cutting-edge technologies and emerging business models in the field. To drive growth within the blockchain ecosystem, we provide comprehensive support to projects, including funding, resources, and strategic advice.

HTX Ventures currently supports over 300 projects across multiple blockchain sectors, with some high-quality projects already traded on Huobi HTX. Furthermore, as one of the most active fund of funds (FOFs), HTX Ventures invests in 30 top global funds and collaborates with leading global blockchain funds such as Polychain, Dragonfly, Bankless, Gitcoin, Figment, Nomad, Animoca, and Hack VC to jointly build the blockchain ecosystem. Visit us .

For investment and cooperation inquiries, please feel free to contact VC@htx-inc.com

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