Grayscale 2025 Q1 market outlook is out! New HYPE, ENA, VIRTUAL and a variety of Solana protocol

Grayscale recently released the industry report for the first quarter of 2025, which not only mentioned that Ethereum's performance lags behind Solana, but also pointed out that investors are increasingly following Altcoins such as SUI and TON. In addition, the top 20 coins in this Grayscale report have also seen new additions such as HYPE, ENA, VIRTUAL, JUP, JTO, and GRASS. Established Decentralized Finance protocol Maker, Stacks, UMA, TON, NEAR, and CELO have been removed.

Trump's election victory drives a strong fourth quarter

Grayscale's strong performance in the fourth quarter was largely attributed to Trump's victory in the US presidential election. According to Grayscale's Crypto Industry Market Index (CSMI), the total market value of the industry increased from $1 trillion to $3 trillion this quarter. This market share is roughly equivalent to the value of the global inflation-linked bond market, which is more than twice the size of the US high-yield bond market, but still significantly smaller than the global hedge bond market fund industry or the Japanese stock market.

Grayscale points out that ETH, SOL, SUI, and OP are leading competitors in the altcoin race

Returning to the competition on the smart contract platform, although Ethereum has gone through the Cancun upgrade and also passed the US ETF, the performance of the altcoin still lags behind Solana, the third largest market cap, the high-performance public chain SUI, and TON, which is backed by Telegram.

One way to measure the value of a smart contract platform is through network fee revenue, although other indicators such as TVL are also important, Grayscale believes that fee revenue is the key for public chains. There is a positive correlation between smart contract platform transaction fee revenue and market value. The stronger the ability of the network to generate fee revenue, the stronger its ability to pass value to the network in the form of token burning or staking rewards. That's why ETH, SOL, SUI, and OP were mentioned by Grayscale in the first quarter.

Source: GrayScale What to Watch in the First Quarter? AI, Solana, and Decentralized Finance

Looking ahead to the first quarter of 2025, Grayscale will focus on the following three altcoins:

The potential impact of the US election on industry regulation, especially in the areas of Decentralized Finance and staking;

The continuous breakthrough of decentralized artificial intelligence technology and the use of AI agents in blockchain;

The growth of the Solana ecosystem.

Grayscale names six major coin types

Hyperliquid (HYPE): Hyperliquid is a Layer 1 blockchain primarily focused on Decentralized Finance. Its main applications include a decentralized exchange for perpetual futures and a fully on-chain order book.

Ethena (ENA): The Ethena protocol issues a new stable coin called USDe, which mainly profits from arbitrage with Bitcoin and Ethereum collateral.

VIRTUAL: Virtual Protocol is a platform that creates AI agents on the Base chain. These AI agents mimic human decision-making and autonomously execute tasks. Users can create AI agents using VIRTUAL token on the platform and tokenize them.

Jupiter (JUP): Jupiter is the largest DEX aggregator on Solana, with the highest TVL on Solana. As more and more retail investors enter the cryptocurrency market through Solana, and meme coins and AI agent coins thrive on Solana, Jupiter will be in a favorable position.

Jito (JTO): Jito is a liquidity staking protocol on Solana, with a significant increase in adoption rate over the past year. What's impressive is its financial condition, with revenue exceeding $550 million in 2024.

Grass (GRASS): Grass is a decentralized data network that rewards users for sharing unused network bandwidth through a Chrome extension. This bandwidth is used to fetch online data, which is then sold to AI companies and developers for training machine learning models, effectively carrying out online data fetching while compensating users.

The Grayscale 2025 Q1 Market Outlook is out! HYPE, ENA, VIRTUAL, and a number of Solana protocols are newly introduced in this article, first appearing on ChainNews ABMedia.