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Bitcoin in 2025: What the Market Got Wrong and What's Actually Happening

Benjamin Graham famously wrote that in the short run, the market is a voting machine. In the long run, it is a weighing machine. 2025 was a year when the voting machine was extraordinarily loud, and the weighing machine was doing something more interesting.

Bitcoin's price performance in 2025 left many holders frustrated. But underneath the short-term sentiment, a set of structural developments were advancing that matter far more to Bitcoin's long-term trajectory than any single year's returns. This letter from Brian Cubellis of Onramp Bitcoin reflects on what the market misread, what actually changed, and why simple, direct Bitcoin ownership remains the most defensible position.

The Psychology of the Casino

2025 brought an acceleration of speculative activity that was hard to ignore. Memecoins, prediction markets, and narratives built around short-term price momentum captured enormous attention and capital. The market's attention was drawn toward assets designed for speculation rather than assets designed for sound monetary storage.

This is not unusual in the context of Bitcoin's history. Speculative cycles attract capital, generate noise, and eventually resolve. What matters is not the noise but what is being built underneath it.

Bitcoin's fundamentals, its fixed supply schedule, its decentralized enforcement mechanism, its global liquidity and settlement depth, did not change in 2025. What changed was the degree to which the broader market was focused elsewhere.

The Problem with the Digital Asset Treasury Trade

One of 2025's more prominent narratives was the corporate bitcoin treasury trade. Following the high-profile success of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), a wave of imitator companies began wrapping Bitcoin exposure in complex corporate structures, often at significant premiums to net asset value.

The appeal is understandable. Bitcoin's long-term return profile is compelling, and corporate treasury adoption adds institutional legitimacy. But the execution matters enormously.

Owning a share of a company that holds Bitcoin is not the same as owning Bitcoin. The wrapper introduces layers of additional risk: management decisions, leverage, dilution, premium compression, and corporate governance. When the premium collapses, and premiums on NAV have historically compressed, holders of the wrapper may face losses that holders of the underlying asset do not.

The simplest, most defensible position is direct Bitcoin ownership. Adding structural complexity around that position adds risk without adding the fundamental property that makes Bitcoin worth holding in the first place.

Bitcoin's Distribution Phase

A useful way to think about where Bitcoin is in its adoption curve is the analogy of American frontier settlement. The early homesteading phase, characterized by a small number of risk-tolerant early movers, has largely passed. Bitcoin is now in something closer to a township phase: infrastructure is being built, institutions are arriving, and the rules of engagement are becoming more defined.

The evidence for this in 2025 was substantial. The repeal of SAB 121 removed a regulatory barrier that had prevented federally chartered banks from holding Bitcoin on behalf of clients. The GENIUS Act and stablecoin integration advanced the infrastructure for digital dollar settlement. Harvard, Brown, and Emory disclosed Bitcoin exposure through their endowments. Sovereign capital from the Middle East began flowing into the asset class.

These are not speculative developments. They are structural changes to the institutional landscape that will shape Bitcoin's role as a reserve asset over the next decade.

The Macro Turn

Beyond the institutional infrastructure, the macro backdrop shifted in ways favorable to Bitcoin over the course of 2025. The tightening cycle of 2022 to 2023 gave way to a return of liquidity conditions, with central banks broadly moving away from the aggressive rate environment that had pressured monetary assets.

The narrative around Bitcoin shifted in important ways as well. Where institutional investors had previously cited reputational risk as a reason to avoid Bitcoin exposure, fiduciary duty arguments began to emerge: the question of whether a failure to consider Bitcoin exposure was itself a breach of investment responsibility to beneficiaries.

This reframing matters. It signals a transition in how the asset is perceived at the institutional level, and it suggests that the demand-side dynamics over the next cycle may look different from those of prior cycles.

On Performance and Direct Ownership

The Onramp Bitcoin Trust returned 414.89% from its inception in November 2022 through December 31, 2025, compared to 415.75% for spot Bitcoin over the same period. Year-to-date in 2025, the Trust returned -7.85% against spot Bitcoin's -6.34%. These numbers reflect the modest drag associated with any fund structure, and are worth understanding in context.

The goal at Onramp has never been to outperform Bitcoin. Bitcoin's properties, fixed supply, decentralized enforcement, global liquidity, are what make it worth holding. The job of the Trust is to provide a professionally managed, institutionally structured vehicle for accessing those properties. But the underlying point holds: the closer holders can get to direct, simple Bitcoin ownership, the less structural friction they introduce between themselves and the asset they are trying to hold.

The Long View

Ludwig von Mises observed that sound money is a tool for the protection of civil liberties against despotic government. Whatever one's view of that framing, the monetary properties of Bitcoin, fixed supply, no central issuer, global settlement, irreversible transactions, represent a meaningful departure from every other financial asset class in existence.

2025 was a year when many in the market were distracted by things that will not matter in five years. The structural developments, institutional adoption, regulatory clarity, sovereign capital flows, macro liquidity tailwinds, are the things that will.

Direct, simple Bitcoin ownership. Appropriate position sizing. Long time horizon. That remains the framework.

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