2025 is nearly in the books, and in the canon of Bitcoin history, it will go down as one of the most transformative years for the teenage crypto sector.
And also one of the most disappointing.
Bitcoin hit multiple all-time highs this year, but it’s probably going to end the year in the red. Despite this air-ball for bitcoin’s price, there were plenty of swish and dunk stories.
The bitcoin mining industry’s expansion into AI comes to mind, as do stories that defined how institutions — both political and financial — are moulding new frameworks around the cryptocurrency and its band of misfit altcoins.
These are the stories defined 2025, hand picked by the Blockspace’s core team and recapped here for posterity and your reading pleasure.
Indisputably, though, the biggest story for bitcoin mining this year comes as an initialism: AI.
There’s no one deal I specifically want to call out. But the larger trend of bitcoin miners expanding to AI basically saved the industry.
It allowed Bitcoin to spin out of a death loop: mine bitcoin as cheaply as possible, but the market’s always competing against you.
Just look at hashprice – it’s continuously going down. And there hasn’t been much of a shift, even with Bitcoin price going downwards the latter half of the year, or at least since October.
Now, in addition to the Bitcoin network, there’s a second bidder for power capacity in the burgeoning AI market. And this bidder is paying A LOT more than the Bitcoin mining network, essentially de-risking these firms’ business models.
Bitcoin miners have been successful in pivoting to another market, with the larger players taking a lead, but I think we’re going to see opportunities trickle down the stack to smaller players who are starting to build custom infrastructure for smaller AI clusters.
The AI revolution has completely altered the business models of hundreds of bitcoin mining companies in the course of a single year, and for that, it deserves consideration for the year’s biggest story in Bitcoin – even though it has nothing to do with Bitcoin, at least not directly.
Earlier this year ICE conducted a raid on a Bitcoin mine in Texas, targeting an on-site Bitmain-affiliated repair shop called ADW Tech.
The story was notable for a number of reasons, including the fact that it showed the Trump Administration won’t let just anything stand between immigration reform, even if it’s an industry that Trump seems to favor (or at least pretends to).
More importantly, it airs legitimate concerns for the lack of workers rights for illegal immigrants, who can become indentured servants for companies that sponsor their travel stateside. And it also exposes how, more often than not, undocumented immigrants often remit money home instead of circulating it locally.
Case in point: the income from undocumented ADW Tech workers was going straight to bank accounts back in China, according to sources we spoke to for this story.
According to them, a lot of these Chinese nationals come over under an agreement with Bitmain. They often skip on a tourist visa and stay longer than they should and then rotate sites to stay in the country. And then they get money wired directly into their Chinese bank account. So then they’re not paying taxes.
I saw that in one of the LinkedIn comments on this story, an oil and gas professional mentioned how this is a reoccurring pattern in that industry as well. Chinese nationals would show up, they’d live in RVs, and they wouldn’t pay taxes to the area. And then they would kind of bounce to a new location once they knew that they were getting scoped out.
In our little microcosm, the whole ordeal brings even more urgency and tension to the conversation around Bitmain, which as you’ll see in our other stories of the year, is under mounting government scrutiny.
But zooming out, our little BTC microcosm is really a reflection of the macrocosm of industries impacted by loose immigration policy, as evidenced by the comment from the oil and gas professional.
-WSF
Many Americans might recall President Biden’s tenure with a mix of humor and disbelief, as the end of his term was punctuated with questions of his cognitive abilities, questions goaded by numerous examples of Biden’s long history of oratory gaffs and non seuiturs (my personal favorite, “Cornpop was a bad dude,” occurred in 2017).
But Bitcoiners, and especially those working in crypto, will remember him for Operation Chokepoint 2.0, the shadow campaign to debank crypto companies and founders.
It’s hard to overstate how close this operation came to euthanizing America’s crypto industry, the largest in the world. In 2023, it put many startups and established firms on life support as it engineered the failures of Silvergate, Signature, and Silicon Valley Bank.
Trump promised to put an end to the directive, and so far, he’s made good on that promise. A U.S. House Financial Services Committee investigation revealed, for the first time in full, how far the operation went, the agencies involved, and the actions they took to sever crypto companies from the world of traditional financial.
The ending of OCP 2.0 — and the investigation that definitely exposed the operation — should go down as one of the defining story of the 2020s for the fledgling crypto industry.
The Trump administration promised to go easy on crypto, but the salad days of his second term were still tossed with controversy regarding the sector.
But per the prior section, it’s unclear how much of this came from holdouts from the prior administration.
Specifically. the Customs and Border protection agency began holding ASIC miners at ports of entry at the end of 2024, and this escalated to asset seizures in 2025.
Officials were apparently searching for a sanctioned computing chip made by Huawei, reportedly used in Antminer ASICs.
The whole ordeal is an extension of fears that Bitmain is a CCP boogeyman bent on undermining U.S. national security.
Maybe there’s something there, but the official narrative doesn’t pass the first smell test without hard evidence.
Still, the CBP seizures provide another example of how far Bitcoin — and in particular, its mining industry, for which the U.S. is now the locus — has come if officials are (rightly or wrongly) flagging hardware for supposed national security risks.
Sometimes, winning looks a little like losing.
-CMH
In anticipation of the Trump administration putting tariffs on imported mining machines last spring, Bitcoin miners rushed to get their rigs stateside by chartering planes at $2m – $3.5m a haul. This drove an estimated $860 million in mining rig imports for Q1, compared to an estimated $2.33 billion for the entire year previous.
This is my choice for best story of the year because it hits multiple mega-trends and isn’t localized to just Bitcoin.
Trump tariffs were arguably the story of the first half of 2025, and this vignette perfectly portrays a specific moment in time for the American mining industry.
It goes to show that we may have a pro-crypto president in name, but the first thing he does is drive the domestic bitcoin mining industry to pay 4x over rate to rush order critical hardware.
This is a fun story to tell over Christmas dinner: the image of a giant freight airliner filling up with mining rigs does help push back against your drunk uncle who thinks 45 & 47 is just handing out freebies to “you crypto guys.”
This July, a long-dormant wallet moved 80,000BTC, about $8.6 billion at the time. Conspiracies swirled – was this asset forfeiture? Satoshi? The US government caught someone?
I wrote a pretty prescient piece on this that broke the disappointing news: it was probably an OG Bitcoin whale finally cashing out.
It was actually pretty edgy at the time not to have a conspiracy about this one. I had a lot of folks reach out (normies too) linking various articles about how it could be asset forfeiture due to some suspicious on-chain messages sent to the wallets.
I’ve been around the block a number of times, though, and these mysterious messages matched a common spray-and-pray scam tactic, famously used by Satoshi impersonator Craig Wright.
Later in the summer Galaxy Digital confirmed that they liquidated this BTC on behalf of an OG whale.
This was particularly fun to cover because it hit on a number of topics: OG whales selling, on-chain data, and gut-checking against the rumor mill as someone in the media.
We even did a few podcasts on the topic you should check out (including one with Galaxy Digital!).
-CBS