Fasanara Digital and Glassnode: Institutional Market Outlook for Q4 2025

Written by: Glassnode

Translated by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Against the backdrop of current market pullbacks and macro pressures, we have jointly released a collaborative report with Fasanara Digital, analyzing the evolution of core ecosystem infrastructure in Q4, including spot liquidity, ETF capital flows, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and decentralized perpetual contracts.

Digital assets are currently at one of the most structurally important phases of this cycle. Driven by deep spot liquidity, historic capital inflows, and regulated ETF demand, Bitcoin has moved beyond the expansion phase of the past three years. The market focus is shifting: capital flows are concentrating, trading venues are maturing, and derivatives infrastructure is showing greater resilience amid shocks.

Drawing on Glassnode’s data insights and Fasanara’s trading perspective, this report outlines the structural evolution of the market heading into 2025. We focus on the restructuring of liquidity in spot, ETF, and futures markets, changes in the scale of leverage cycles, and how stablecoins, tokenization, and off-chain settlement are reshaping capital flows. Together, these trends outline a market structure that is markedly different from previous cycles and continues to evolve. Below is a summary of the core content:

Key Takeaways

Bitcoin has attracted over $732 billion in new capital—surpassing the total of all previous cycles—pushing its realized market cap to around $1.1 trillion, with the price rising more than 690% during this period.

Bitcoin’s long-term volatility has nearly halved, dropping from 84% to 43%, reflecting increasing market depth and institutional participation.

In the past 90 days, Bitcoin settled a total value of about $6.9 trillion—on par with or exceeding the quarterly transaction volumes of traditional payment networks like Visa and Mastercard. As trading activity shifts toward ETFs and brokerages, on-chain activity has migrated, but Bitcoin and stablecoins remain dominant in on-chain settlement.

ETF daily trading volume has grown from below $1 billion to over $5 billion, peaking at over $9 billion on a single day (e.g., after the October 10 deleveraging event).

The scale of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) grew from $7 billion to $24 billion within a year. With low correlation to traditional crypto assets, RWAs help improve DeFi’s stability and capital efficiency.

The decentralized perpetual contract market has experienced explosive and sustained growth: DEX perps’ market share rose from about 10% to 16–20%, with monthly trading volume exceeding $1 trillion.

Venture capital activity remains closely tied to altcoin cycles, primarily focusing on mature and high-profile areas such as exchanges, core infrastructure, and scaling solutions.

This cycle is led by Bitcoin, driven by spot markets, and supported by institutional capital

Bitcoin’s market dominance is approaching 60%, indicating a return of capital to high-liquidity mainstream assets, while altcoins have correspondingly retraced. Since November 2022, Bitcoin’s dominance has risen from 38.7% to 58.3%, while Ethereum’s share has dropped to 12.1%, continuing its trend of underperforming Bitcoin since the 2022 Merge.

From cycle low to high, Bitcoin has attracted $732 billion in new capital, surpassing the total of all previous cycles. Ethereum and other altcoins also performed strongly, with gains of over 350% at their peak, but did not outperform Bitcoin as in previous cycles.

Liquidity deepens, long-term volatility declines, but leverage shocks persist

Bitcoin’s market structure has significantly strengthened, with spot daily trading volume increasing from $4–13 billion in the previous cycle to $8–22 billion currently. Long-term volatility continues to decline, with 1-year realized volatility dropping from 84.4% to 43.0%. Meanwhile, open interest in futures has hit a record $67.9 billion, with CME accounting for about 30%, indicating significant institutional involvement.

On-chain activity migrates off-chain, but Bitcoin and stablecoins remain the backbone of on-chain settlement

After the approval of US spot ETFs, the number of daily active Bitcoin entities on-chain fell from about 240,000 to 170,000, mainly reflecting a shift in activity to brokerages and ETF platforms, rather than a reduction in network usage. Despite this migration, Bitcoin still settled about $6.9 trillion in value over the past 90 days, comparable to the quarterly processing volume of major payment networks like Visa and Mastercard. After Glassnode’s entity adjustment, actual economic settlement volume still reaches about $870 billion per quarter, or $7.8 billion per day.

Meanwhile, stablecoins continue to underpin liquidity for the entire digital asset ecosystem. The total supply of the top five stablecoins has reached a record $263 billion. Combined, USDT and USDC process an average daily transfer volume of about $225 billion, with USDC circulating at a much faster rate, reflecting its greater use for institutional and DeFi-related capital flows.

Tokenized assets are expanding the market’s financial infrastructure

Over the past year, the scale of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) has grown from $7 billion to $24 billion. Ethereum remains the primary settlement layer for such assets, currently supporting about $11.5 billion of RWAs. The largest single product, BlackRock’s BUIDL, has grown to $2.3 billion, more than quadrupling in scale this year.

As capital continues to flow in, tokenized funds have become one of the fastest-growing asset classes, opening new distribution channels for asset managers. This reflects a broadening scope of on-chain assets and growing institutional acceptance of tokenization as a distribution and liquidity channel.