Crypto markets became more institutionalized and controlled in 2025, however the familiar “altcoin season” that many traders expected never fully arrived.
Bitcoin (BTC) hit recent highs early within the cycle, but much of the remaining of the market lagged behind. According to TradingView data, Bitcoin is down about 7% year-to-date following a sell-off in early October, while the overall market capitalization of altcoins is down greater than 46% from its 2025 peak.
BTC and others, year-to-date chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView
Still, a handful of tokens managed to outperform in a 12 months marked by selective risk-taking and intense scrutiny. XRP (XRP) gained recent momentum from regulatory developments, Zcash (ZEC) rallied as interest in financial privacy returned, and Algorand (ALGO) received a lift from real-world tokenization efforts.
XRP gains as regulatory overhang eases
XRP was among the many 2025 crypto market winners, outperforming most cryptocurrencies despite the absence of altcoin season.
XRP rose over 35% in July to hit a one-year high of $3.60 on July 23, an eight-fold increase in price from its year-ago low of $0.43 on August 5, 2024, data from TradingView shows.
The token received significant tailwinds from increasing regulatory clarity, including early reports of the tip of the US Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) long-running lawsuit against Ripple Labs.
Weekly XRP/USD chart year-to-date. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView
According to the corporate's court filing, Ripple and the SEC ended their long-running dispute on August 8 after filing a joint transient asking the court to dismiss the SEC's appeal and Ripple's cross-appeal, with both sides paying its own costs and costs.
“The market is clearly pivoting toward assets that regulators can classify, institutions can model, and compliance teams can approve. XRP matches that profile higher than most altcoins this 12 months,” Alex Davis, founder and CEO of blockchain ecosystem Mavryk Dynamics, told Cointelegraph.
He said lifting a multi-year regulatory cloud helped reopen the door to institutional participation.
The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020, alleging that the corporate raised $1.3 billion through unregistered XRP sales.
Timeline for the SEC vs. Ripple Labs litigation. Source: Cointelegraph
The debut of exchange-traded fund (ETF) Canary Capital
XRP has outperformed most other altcoins for 3 essential reasons, including “regulatory clarity, recent institutional inflows and a growing perception of real-world usage,” he told Cointelegraph, adding:
“If ETF demand stays strong next 12 months and payment volumes proceed to extend, XRP could proceed to evolve from a speculative altcoin to a more established a part of the worldwide payments infrastructure.”
XRP ETFs generated $756 million in positive net inflows in the primary eleven days of trading.
Zcash Recovers as Privacy Trading Returns
Zcash continued to face out in 2025, helped by renewed interest in privacy-focused cryptocurrency as regulators tighten oversight of transactions and identity.
Zcash went from a low-profile cryptocurrency to probably the most searched cryptocurrency on cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase in mid-November, surpassing each Bitcoin and XRP when it comes to investor interest.
Zcash rallied over 12-fold, rising from a one-year low of $48 to a high of $744 on November 7, a month after the record $19 billion market crash in early October, data from TradingView shows.
While Zcash managed to set a brand new annual high in 2025, it didn’t surpass its all-time high of $5,941, recorded nine years ago on October 29, 2016.
According to Narek Gevorgyan, the founder and CEO of crypto portfolio management platform CoinStats, privacy-focused assets like Zcash outperformed the broader market as a consequence of a growing demand for “financial confidentiality” amid increasing “surveillance” within the digital economy.
“The recent momentum is more as a consequence of structural aspects – stricter KYC/AML rules for exchanges, increasing government control of crypto transactions and renewed interest from institutions and developers in zero-knowledge technologies,” he said.
ZEC/USD year-to-date chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView
Launched in 2016, Zcash combines a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus model with zero-knowledge proof technology, allowing users to send either transparent transactions or fully protected transactions where amounts and addresses are hidden.
In an indication of growing demand, the quantity of ZEC tokens held in protected addresses rose to about 4.5 million coins as of November 25, up from 1.7 million in 2025, with 1 million tokens transferred in three weeks.
Other demand drivers included the recent Zcash halving on November 23, 2024, which reduced the block reward from 3.125 ZEC to 1.5625 ZEC and reduced every day recent issuance from 3,600 to roughly 1,800 tokens.
Algorand relies on tokenization push
Algorand flagged signs of expanding real-world deployment earlier this 12 months.
ALGO rose about 48% in three weeks, from $0.33 at the tip of December 2024 to a yearly high of $0.49 on January 17, based on TradingView data.
On January 21, Algorand partnered with Enel Group, one in all Europe's largest electricity providers by number of shoppers, to permit Italian residents to buy fractional shares of Enel's solar farms and wind turbines via tokenized Energy Utility Tokens.
According to Lacie Zhang, market analyst at Bitget Wallet, Algorand’s real-world integrations “position the chain well for long-term relevance.”
“These developments strengthen Algorand’s underlying technical strengths and its deal with enterprise-grade, environmentally sound use cases,” she said.
“However, the poor annual performance reflects a wider structural trend slightly than project-specific weakness,” Zhang said, attributing the broader altcoin sector's underperformance to macroeconomic headwinds, including higher rates of interest and the “continued” dominance of Bitcoin, which attracted most crypto liquidity.
ALGO/USD chart for the present 12 months. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView
“In this environment, strong technical progress has not translated into price performance,” she said, adding that Algorand and projects with real-world integrations will eventually get well as investors move from “speculation to utility-driven adoption.”
Despite the token's poor performance after January, Algorand continued to see growing blockchain activity as the quantity of ALGO staked increased 28% quarter-on-quarter, surpassing 1.95 billion ALGO tokens within the second quarter of 2025, based on a Messari research report.
Algorand key metrics Q2 2025. Source: Messari
In March, Algorand launched AlgoKit 3.0, an improved developer toolkit intended to supply advanced tools for constructing on the network.
The network continues to work on developer tools, including the launch of AlgoKit 4.0, scheduled for early 2026. The recent toolkit will introduce composable smart contract libraries and support for Rust, Swift and Kotlin.
A selective market goes into 2026
Because of the gap between Bitcoin and the broader market, 2025 looked less just like the playbooks of past cycles and more like a selective, fundamentals-driven market.
While some crypto enthusiasts should still expect an altcoin season based on previous historical market cycles, the present market structure points to a mature crypto landscape where projects need a fundamental underlying utility to realize more traction.
