197. Top 5 Research Backed Crypto Trends For 2025

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift. Alongside me as Bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of us scaling the leading crypto research company here in Australia. And if you like the podcast, we'd love for you to leave us a follow on your favorite podcasting app so you get the notification when we come out with a new episode or subscribe if you are on YouTube. And today we are talking about the top five crypto research backed trends for 2025. So our team at Collect have gone through. They actually had 10 different trends that we were looking at. We've now scaled this down to what Bergs and I believe are our top five. And these are some pretty big ones. Bergs. It's going to be a pretty big year. I'm pretty, pretty excited to do this. This is a little bit different to our narratives that we spoke about. Narratives was more the, the previous episodes that we did 1:195 was more about the sectors within crypto. This is more macro like just generally the trends that we're seeing that are going to grow crypto and really be a big, I guess, tailwind to continue growing the industry. So Keena, jump into these.

Absolutely, mate. I'm glad we cut this down. And these are so targeted and such massive catalysts.

Yeah.

That I think for a lot of listeners it's really going to clarify and solidify where crypto is going to head in 2025.

Yeah, bang on. Because 2024 was obviously massive. But this potentially is going to be an even bigger year and I want to start off with I guess just the new inflows of buying that's going to be happening from non crypto people. Now this is primarily coming off the back of the world's largest asset manager, BlackRock, now recommending a 2% portfolio allocation to Bitcoin. Right. This is pretty big. It's pretty big because the 2% is now the new 1% because we were at 1% last year and now these institutions are recommending 2% to get into BTC to their clients.

We've gone from rat poison to 1% to 2%. We've gone from like, you know, like snog, marry, avoid, we're a void. Then we went to snog. Now we're marrying Mary. You watch soon those percentages are going to pump up. Amazing.

This is big because this is like, this is like these are clients that are not managing their own money, that are relying on others to do the management of money for them. And this is where the passive buys of Bitcoin start showing up in big demand. And on top of this, you know, people will start to follow BlackRock. You then got micro strategy, the ticket MSTR now entering the NASDAQ 100, meaning that as people buy into the NASDAQ 100 they're going to get exposure to Bitcoin through MSDR. Meaning there's going to be continued buy side pressure on Bitcoin more than what MSD are already buying, which is crazy.

I love it. Let's just look at BlackRock. They've got 10 trillion plus assets under management and they're recommending not only internally but to everyone. They put this out publicly. You have have an allocation of 2% get off zero. Amazing. Then MicroStrategy. Now the NASDAQ 100 people don't actually understand what MicroStrategy is doing. Ben, I was talking before this. Out of a hundred people, one of them will understand Bitcoin. Out of a hundred bitcoiners, one of them will truly understand MicroStrategy. What they are doing is using Bitcoin to trade volatility. It's absolutely amazing. There's this beautiful meme of, I think it was, I can't remember as the Greeks or Romans with the Trojan horse. There's this massive Trojan horse knocking at the door and it's, you know, passive ETFs there. You've got MicroStrategy which is the horse and inside there's Bitcoin. It's what it's powered by. It is the volatility that fuels it. And they utilize option markets, zero coupon bonds, a lot of fancy financial instruments to really propel this thing. The most bullish thing. Mate. Mate. Oh dude. Sailors just lost it. He's coming out and he's like, he's like the best performing stock mine. The biggest options market mine. He's dominating. He even said it's, it's not an if. It's a when we're going to take over the market cap of Microsoft which is like 3 trillion.

And no one even knows it. No one even knows what MicroStrategy does.

Mate, he gets it. People are coming around to it. It is amazing. And this is the whole thing with the flywheel. It's very hard to push at the start but once it gains momentum it absolutely Flies. So soaking up passive ETF capital, using that to fuel MicroStrategy to buy more Bitcoin to do what they do is just beautiful.

Yeah, spot on. Huge, huge inflows of BTC coming in. Number two is the alternative layer ones to continue having their time in the sun. So this has been a big trade for us this year. SUI entry at $2.20 for members and me personally, I think it's up to $4.60 or something now, so more than doubled already. I think it's going to continue to grow. Solana has been continuing to grind higher. We believe it's going to continue to make new highs in 2025. And I think those that missed out on Solana and SUI are going to look again for that next Solana, like where Sui came in. So there's some more layer ones being launched in the market next year, like Bearer Chain and a few others. I think the, you know, people always look for something new, exciting, sexy. I have a big position, Ethereum. There's nothing against Ethereum, but this is just what a lot of people like to look at. And I do think that's going to continue to be a trend in 2025.

Yeah, absolutely. Like we've seen and if you remember, like when Solana first came out, it was seen as a VC chain. There were huge unlocks. A lot of people made a lot of money very early on and we're like, oh, it's crap, it's not a blockchain, it breaks all the time, it pauses. It's not like, you know, truly, you know, decentralized and all this sort of stuff that you want censorship resistant on and on. But it found product market fit and it did that with Meme Coins and a lot of gaming innovation, which is absolutely amazing. So people have seen this and they're like, well, what's the next L1? We've got Sui, which is kind of like the next one and then a few after that. So I think this is going to be a huge narrative and especially if one of those L1s hits product market fit and has adoption, that's where it really comes into its own. The other thing that Solana did with that was really successful, apart from the meme coins and gaming, was doing significant airdrops to people, got them really interested. You had the Jupiter airdrop plus a couple of other ones and that got people excited. People that have been in this space. Solana price isn't appreciating, but then you get this fat airdrop to be rewarded. For your participation on chain in those networks that really got people excited. And then once that those people had that money, they were more excited in the ecosystem. They're willing to spend it. And this goes with Murad's thesis on meme coins about building a cult. When you make poor people rich and you reward them for participating, they're going to be zealots and advocates of that chain. So if any new L1s can achieve what Solana has achieved in that way, there is now a roadmap. We're going to see significant growth.

Yeah, bang on, mate. And also like something like SUI also genuinely saw a lot of like, growth, you know, you know, you know, internally with the TVLs and developers building on top of it. Same with Solana. So, yeah, these next gen layer ones, there's a lot of them, but they're genuinely, you know, creating, creating a lot of hype and attention, which is really exciting. Now the next one. Bergs, I know you've been very bullish on this. This is a, this is a very exciting one. The bitcoin strategic reserve, potentially the biggest narrative if this actually goes through and the biggest impact on the bitcoin price will be this bill being passed in the Senate. Now at the moment, according to Polymarket, it's market pricing and a 35% potential approval that Trump will create a national bitcoin reserve within the first hundred days of his presidency. This bill essentially is for the US government and to buy and acquire 5% of the total Bitcoin supply. So 1 million Bitcoin and to be held for 20 years. And in part, it would swap part of its gold reserve into btc. How bullish would this be if this.

Gets passed, bro, they're just dominating their competitors. Sailor would call them enemies. Where you sell your gold for bitcoin, it's a free. It's a free trade and then you kill the gold market. You dominate in bitcoin and all the innovation happens and you own a significant part of the network. There is this counterpoint of government's only a significant part of the network and there are mechanisms around that where we can take back control. But this is really, really bullish for bitcoin. I love to see it. I think it's going to happen. We actually did. We. We deleted that episode, didn't we? Because it went out late. That had our bitcoin price predictions in it. Was that the one?

Yeah, it was actually.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So even with bitcoin price predictions, I was maybe three months ago thinking like 150k for the top of this cycle, I'm now 200 plus and if this strategic reserve goes through, 300 plus us yeah, I'm that bullish on it. And it's not just the us, it's other countries. They're starting to move away from gold companies as well now going after it. People are starting to understand what this thing is. People take little bits and pieces like the Microsoft vote and 0.5% of people voted for bitcoin. That's for a couple of reasons. One, not everyone understands bitcoin. Fine, you're not going to do it the first time. You understand it took Saylor years to explain it to his board and his executives to the point that they were on board. Second thing is not everyone votes in shareholder stuff. I get shareholder forms all the time. I never vote because it doesn't matter and I don't care. So the proxy votes go to the executives. Executives will not vote for this. Are you going to be the executive that puts your hand up and be like, yeah, we should do this. Go against everyone else in the company and get your head chopped off from tall Poppy syndrome? You're not going to do that. You'll go with the consensus. So these things will happen, but they will take time and when it does happen, it's game on. What that means for us is we can front run all these slower organizations, get our bitcoin before they do and we will profit significantly more than they will.

Yeah, spot on, mate. And also the, the corporate. Sorry, the sorry the institutional FOMO from governments if this gets passed is going to be insane because if the no one ever wants to be first, no one ever wants to be last. And that could be a huge, huge inflows following following if they do approve it, if they don't. Well, doesn't say it won't happen ever. But this is just, you know at the moment that 35 likelihood in the first 100 days.

Yeah. And like a lot of people saying it'll be unlikely in 2025. I think think it'll happen in 2025. Whether that's we're going to have a strategic reserve or they just start buying or there's even more favorable rulings where there's no CGT or tax on it. Like they're things people haven't discussed. All of those things are significantly going to incentivize buying cryptocurrencies and that may be the last push that businesses need to get it over the line because they now have financial tools as well where even if they don't want to custody the assets, which is difficult for them. They can buy an ETF and they can still profit from that amount, or they could buy a microstrategy. They can do a whole bunch of stuff that's tax efficient. It's going to be fireworks, man.

Yeah, yeah. Super bullish. Now the next thing is one that is a little bit controversial, I guess, within the whole crypto ecosystem, but I think it's something that is very positive is that the banks to actually custody crypto. So we do expect now that there's a, you know, a bit of a reset in the US Government that banks typically up until this point have been restricted to hold and custody crypto based on a ruling called SAB121. Trump said he will repeal this and when he does, it could mean that major banks would actually start to hold crypto for their customers, opening up a huge opportunity. And this would just essentially mean that you would log into your normal banking system and be able to see Bitcoin and crypto within that, which is massive because a lot of people that don't trust many places and there was a recent poll from Zero Hash that found 80% of people would prefer using traditional financial services to access crypto, which is massive. Right. And predominantly this would be the people in the U.S. so, like, if this was to open up and you start to be able to buy bitcoin and crypto through your brokerage account or normal bank account, like this is going to open up a whole new audience segment as well.

Yeah, man comma did this. They had a working proof of concept where you could just say, I want to buy Bitcoin within my normal banking app and how easy would it be? Instead of saving in cash, I just click the bitcoin button and I save in Bitcoin. And I remember going to talk in for last year at Oz Cryptocon in Melbourne from a nab banker and she was saying.

They don't want to. They don't look at cryptocurrency as a competitor, they look at it as how they can fit in. And what do you banks do best? They do custody the best. They hold your assets, they make sure they're available and that is what they do, that is their core competency.

So having your cryptocurrency in a bank and imagine if that cryptocurrency as well is insured, like your cash is up to 250k per bank with a government guarantee. That is an amazing option for the majority of people compared to a Lot of things we've seen with exchanges. Banks are definitely more safe in that regard.

Yep.

And just having that available, I think would be an amazing, amazing step forward.

It just adds a lot of credibility and trust, you know, and, and for the, for the normies, they, they trust banks, like that's the reality of the situation.

So, yeah, if it's in your bank, it's legit, right? Yeah, like most people don't even trust going on a share platform, let alone a crypto exchange platform.

Yeah, totally agree. And again, no one wants to be first, no one's be last. We could see some domino effects there as well with more and more people getting involved. Now, last but not least, this is where I think a lot of people have been pretty bearish on Ethereum up at this point. We believe, or I believe anyway, and the team at Collective Shift is that, you know, I think Ethereum rebounds as the fifth trend for 2025. So a lot of the other blockchains have been outpaced. People wondering if Ethereum's dead. Ethereum has struggled over the last couple of years just to really, you know, position itself outside of everything else that's going on and probably really lacked a good marketing narrative, but it's continued. A strong market led in important metrics like developer adoption, real world asset adoption, major partnerships, tvl. A lot of things continue to grow. And with these advancements, along with the L2s, I do see adoption continuing to grow and could potentially start to see a bottom of the BTC eth chart in 2025. So I'm still very bullish on Ethereum. I think a lot of people have given up and I think that's going to be one of the core reasons that we start to see a turn and, and things go shift back to eth.

So many people have been shaken out of this. I, I think 30% of my crypto holdings are in ETH. And I've talked to the analysts, had opportunities to swap it to Solana or Sui, but the risk to reward wasn't there. For me, I saw those as too risky. Right. And I do believe that Ethereum will have its day simply from all the metrics we get bombarded with that people don't want to see. So Nick gives us tons of metrics, even like Anthony Sassano on Twitter, the amount of activity there, the developers that are working on it, the innovation that's happening, just because it's not the flavor of the month doesn't mean it's doing amazing, not doing amazing stuff. And the people that are talking about doing things on Chain are the real degens. The people that are into, you know, Solana and doing stuff there with like, you know, pump fun or, you know, crazy Metaverse shit that I've never even done. You know, all these, all this kind of thing. But all the institutional side of things, when they want to go to a blockchain, they go to Ethereum. You can literally go to like Azure AWS with your cloud stuff and roll your own blockchain. Like they've got all that functionality built in. All of that is not going away. You can be assured Ethereum will be around. It's just not the flavor of the month at the moment.

Totally agree. And the narratives change very quickly and I think that'll change as things start to push that. Yeah, things will be pretty positive.

And Ethereum now is at about 4,000 bucks. All time highs about 5,000. So we're not too far off and I think you will see significant gains coming into the first quarter of next year.

Yeah, I agree. So There are top five trends for 2025. If you want to see more of that, we've got a lot more in the membership platform. For those that are collective members, go and check that out. We continue to look and try and be two or three steps ahead of the curve and that's how you can really make money in crypto. You want to let the narratives come to you, not chase the narrative. So hopefully that's helped you out and give you a bit an inclination as to where do we think the space is going next year. But yeah, what a big year it's going to be. Berg's very excited for 2025.

I can't wait, mate. Like things have just gone so well and I think I didn't expect all of this to happen in 2024, but it has and now we have this beautiful foundation to build on in 2025.

Yeah, totally agree, man. Awesome folks. Hopefully you enjoyed that episode. If you liked it. If you think of a family member friend, someone at work would appreciate this content, please share it with the mate. We grow the podcast each and every week and we' coming back to you folks, Benneberg's listeners. We love you guys. Thank you for listening to the podcast and we'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks champions.