Was 2025 the worst year in the history of crypto?
In my opinion, yes.
Here one brutal long tweet, lets make it clear what 2025 really was for crypto. 👇
Because this was the year the entire structure revealed itself.
It was the year the political class, the influencer class and the exchange class all stepped out from behind the curtain and showed that crypto is no longer an independent monetary system.
It became an extraction industry for the already rich and powerful. We need to turn the ship around. Inform people so these actors lose the power they never should have had.
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2025:
This was the year where it became obvious that presidents and first ladies use tokens as revenue engines, that the largest offshore exchange can print fake zero prices on hundreds of charts, that big money manipulates price discovery, that influencers openly farm their audiences, and that the myth of the clean four year cycle has no predictive power left.
Crypto did not become digital gold.
It became a fiat style casino with faster rails and fewer rules.
🟥1. The president as a token founder and the Trump family extraction complex
In 2025 the Trump family stopped acting like passive holders and stepped directly into token creation, governance and profit extraction.
The $TRUMP memecoin
The TRUMP token launched on Solana on 17 January 2025.
Total supply one billion tokens.
Public investors received only two hundred million tokens.
Trump owned companies held the remaining eight hundred million.
A Financial Times analysis estimated that the project generated at least 350 million dollars in token sales and trading fees.
On chain and market data suggest that more than 800.000 wallets collectively lost about two billion dollars trading the token while insiders and creators earned millions in fees.
It was a political financial product tied directly to the family of the president.
🟥$WLFI and the multi billion governance capture
The World Liberty Financial token WLFI entered the market in September 2025 with a total supply of one hundred billion tokens.
On chain distribution showed that the Trump family and close insiders controlled about twenty two to twenty five percent of the supply, about twenty two and a half billion tokens.
WLFI reached a multi billion dollar market cap within hours of launch and briefly entered the top thirty cryptocurrencies.
This instantly added about five billion dollars in paper value to the Trump family fortune, surpassing much of their traditional real estate value.
WLFI is not just a meme. It is marketed as a governance token for a decentralised finance ecosystem tied to the $USD1 stablecoin.
Reports indicate that the Trump family receives around 75% of presale revenue and holds roughly 38% of the corporate parent company.
This means the family controls token supply, fee flows, governance and commercial direction.
The token was rapidly listed on major centralised exchanges including #Binance, #OKX and #Bybit, where trading volume exceeded one billion dollars in the opening hours.
A UAE based entity named Aqua 1 invested about 100M dollars into WLFI and committed around two billion dollars to the USD1 stablecoin structure.
This entity has well documented links to Binance and Middle Eastern sovereign capital.
So in 2025 the sitting United States president and his family became one of the largest beneficiaries of a token economy whose liquidity and valuation depend on offshore exchanges and foreign sovereign wealth.
This is not decentralisation.
This is a concentrated political and financial power structure disguised as a crypto project.
🟥2. $Melania Trump, political memecoins, and the Hayden Davis extraction pipeline
2025 also revealed how powerful people use fame to push tokens that end in coordinated liquidity events.
The $MELANIA memecoin
The MELANIA token launched on Solana and briefly reached a price of about thirteen dollars before collapsing more than 99%.
A United States class action lawsuit alleges that individuals linked to Kelsier and its CEO Hayden Davis secretly controlled roughly one third of the supply before the public launch.
According to the lawsuit these individuals built an “official” narrative by using Melania Trump’s name and image to disarm investor scepticism.
They then pumped the price using coordinated influencer campaigns and sold into the retail demand.
On chain analytics from the $MASTR team found that wallets linked to insiders controlled about 92% percent of the supply.
Investigators documented at least two million dollars removed from community funds through liquidity manipulations.
About 50 million MELANIA tokens worth about 30 million dollars at the time were moved from community wallets to a single address and then spread across multiple wallets before being sold on centralised exchanges.
Additional investigations tied Hayden Davis to these flows, with more than one million dollars dumped and about two million dollars drained from liquidity pools through linked wallets.
🟥The $LIBRA scandal in Argentina
In February 2025 Argentina’s President Javier Milei publicly endorsed the LIBRA token on his official social media accounts.
He posted the contract address himself, describing the project as support for small businesses.
Within approximately forty minutes the price exploded from near zero to more than five dollars.
The market cap briefly reached around four to five billion dollars.
Most of the supply was held by insider wallets.
Then the liquidity vanished.
On chain forensics show that insiders and wallets linked to Hayden Davis removed roughly 87 to one 100 million dollars of liquidity.
The price collapsed more than eighty percent.
Investor losses are estimated at about two hundred fifty million dollars.
Between roughly forty four thousand and seventy four thousand wallets were affected.
Later analysis revealed that more than seventy five percent of honest buyers lost money.
Hayden Davis publicly claimed he personally made about one 113 million dollars from the LIBRA launch and still held a portion of the supply.
He described the event as normal behaviour in the memecoin sector.
The LIBRA event triggered investigations in Argentina, the United States and Spain.
Authorities froze assets, raided properties connected to intermediaries and sought an international arrest notice for Davis.
Argentine media labelled it Cryptogate and called it the first major scandal of Milei’s presidency.
One extraction network across multiple countries
MELANIA, LIBRA and several other political tokens now appear connected to the same network.
-Same Kelsier core.
-Same Hayden Davis nexus.
-Same pattern in every launch.
Insider preloading, political or celebrity amplification, retail FOMO, then coordinated liquidity removal and insider profit.
In 2025 the political class entered the memecoin industry not as victims but as active participants.
🟥3. Influencers, KOLs and the attention extraction economy
The influencer industry also reached peak extraction in 2025.
Crypto projects funnelled large parts of their marketing budgets into KOLs who could manipulate sentiment instantly.
These personalities no longer acted as neutral reviewers. They became liquidity drivers.
$MASTR analysis shows that KOL driven tokens often followed a predictable pattern.
-Wallets were preloaded with supply.
-Influencers promoted the token with coordinated narratives.
-Retail bought in.
-The preloaded wallets sold into the pump or pulled liquidity through side channels.
-The token collapsed.
-Influencers faced no consequences.
Platforms like Pump fun accelerated this model.
It enabled creators and KOLs to launch hundreds of tokens with minimal friction and almost no oversight.
This allowed rapid generation of new memecoins that could be pushed through influencer channels to extract liquidity from retail audiences.
Analysts describe this as a new type of financial engineering where attention becomes the underlying commodity.
Influencers trade their audience’s trust for instant capital.
Tokens become temporary vessels for monetising social media influence.
In practice this means that both political elites and influencer elites used the same playbook in 2025.
Attention in. Liquidity in. Retail out.
🟥 4. October ten: the day the market structure died
On 10 October 2025 the market experienced one of the most chaotic liquidation spirals in the history of crypto.
The immediate trigger was geopolitical.
The United States administration announced an additional one hundred percent tariff on Chinese imports, effective on the first of November.
This created a macro shock across global markets.
The crypto market reacted violently.
Approximately 19 billion dollars of open interest was erased within about thirty six hours.
#Bitcoin dropped roughly fourteen percent from highs near one hundred twenty two thousand dollars to lows around one hundred five thousand.
Ether fell more than 10%.
This would have been severe but still within historical norms.
The real disaster was on Binance.
Binance prints fake zero prices across hundreds of markets.
Independent analysis revealed that Binance listed around four hundred thirty USDT trading pairs during the event.
Four hundred ten of these pairs also traded on OKX, Bybit, Bitget or Gate at the same time.
On 10 October at least one hundred three Binance pairs printed lows more than ten percent below the second lowest exchange.
Dozens printed fifty to seventy five percent deviations.
Dozens more printed seventy five to one hundred percent deviations.
And a large group printed more than one hundred percent deviation including established tokens such as ATOM, APT, API3, ENJ, ENS, SUSHI, GMT, RVN, IOST, IOTX, KAVA, UMA and WIF.
Some of these pairs effectively touched zero on Binance while other exchanges still showed stable prices.
Binance later acknowledged that multiple altcoins traded near zero on its platform between 20:50 and 22:00 UTC but maintained value elsewhere.
Stablecoin USDe briefly dropped to about 0.65 dollars on Binance while staying above 0.90 on other exchanges.
This caused margin calls for users whose collateral valuations depended on Binance prices.
Many users were liquidated at absurd prices even though other exchanges showed normal levels.
Users publicly accused Binance of later modifying historical chart data for specific pairs.
Whether intentional or not, the outcome was clear.
Binance had become the de facto price discovery engine for the entire altcoin market.
When it malfunctioned, hundreds of markets collapsed.
Without these Binance specific wicks the liquidation event would have been a fraction of its size.
This is not decentralisation.
This is a single centralised oracle dictating market outcomes.
🟥5. The four year cycle myth dies in real time
The halving cycle narrative served the industry for more than a decade.
-A halving event reduced supply.
-A clean bull cycle followed.
-Then a bear.
-Then the cycle repeated.
The 2024 halving did not generate a recognisable four year pattern in 2025.
Bitcoin reached highs in the six figure range but price action was driven by macro news, regulatory actions and exchange dynamics.
Ether underperformed and behaved more like a regulated tech asset than a decentralised monetary token.
Most altcoins failed to reach previous cycle highs.
Memecoins dominated attention but most collapsed into predictable extraction patterns.
When the dominant signals in the market are Federal Reserve decisions, United States election news, ETF inflows and exchange liquidations, the halving cycle becomes irrelevant.
The cycle still exists mathematically but no longer drives market structure.
Crypto now behaves like a high beta extension of the fiat world.
🟥6. Crypto becomes fiat collateral
The original vision was separation from fiat.
In 2025 the integration became complete.
Bitcoin, Ether and major altcoins are deeply embedded in derivatives structures dominated by a few large players.
Spot ETFs convert crypto into traditional financial wrappers.
Most stablecoin supply is controlled by a handful of issuers subject to political and regulatory pressures.
DeFi governance is increasingly shaped by institutional capital and political actors.
When the president of the United States can mint a token, control its supply, direct its cash flow, list it on the dominant exchanges and generate billions in value, the system is no longer decentralised.
When first ladies and presidents in multiple countries front memecoin operations that generate nine figure insider profits, the system is not grassroots.
When influencers can launch hundreds of tokens per month through platforms built for extraction, and when one exchange can delete billions in open interest by printing artificial lows, you are no longer dealing with a free market.
Crypto did not integrate with traditional finance.
It became an appendage of it.
🟥7. Why 2025 is worse than the FTX year
FTX was one fraud.
A spectacular one, but still a single collapse.
In 2025 the failures were systemic.
Presidents and first ladies participated in token launches that wiped out retail.
Influencers industrialised attention extraction.
Binance printed structurally broken prices on more than one hundred markets during the largest liquidation event in crypto history.
Sovereign wealth and political money intertwined with token governance and stablecoin structures.
Market dynamics followed macro shocks rather than crypto specific fundamentals.
The halving cycle lost explanatory power.
Crypto pricing became an extension of fiat decision making.
That is why, in my opinion, 2025 is the worst crypto year ever.
Not because the dream disappeared.
Because the real architecture finally revealed itself, and it is built on extraction, manipulation and centralised control.
Thanks for reading, likes, follow and rt.
Leave a comment with you thoughts.
- by $MASTR crypto project
