In its March 2025 edition of Bobby’s Crypto Aggregate, CoinGecko dives into a crypto market grappling with macroeconomic turbulence and fierce competition between centralized and decentralized exchanges.
Authored by Bobby Ong, the research report captures a pivotal moment in Q1 2025, where President Donald Trump’s policies and a targeted attack on Hyperliquid, a rising decentralized perpetuals (perps) platform, dominate the narrative.
The analysis released by CoinGecko reflects a market at the mercy of tariffs and shifting power dynamics in the trading ecosystem.
The report points out that Trump’s March 6 executive order establishing a U.S. Federal Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, funded by Treasury-held Bitcoin from forfeitures.
Initially seen as a bullish signal, the announcement fell flat.
Ong notes that Trump’s earlier Truth Social post hinting at a multi-asset reserve (including BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, and ADA) inflated expectations, only for the official order to underwhelm.
Market disappointment was compounded by the absence of plans for active crypto acquisitions, leading to a sell-off.
This volatility underscores how Trump’s pronouncements—amplified by his January-launched $TRUMP meme coin, which briefly hit a $14.5 billion market cap—continue to sway crypto prices in 2025.
Simultaneously, Trump’s tariff plans have rattled broader markets, with crypto caught in the crossfire.
The CoinGecko update suggests that while the tariff uncertainty clouds near-term sentiment, a resolution could bring relief.
Despite this, Bitcoin has held above $100,000 since Trump’s January inauguration, with most major cryptocurrencies posting gains before a recent correction.
The spotlight then shifts to Hyperliquid, now the eighth-largest perps exchange by volume in Q1 2025, surpassing legacy platforms like HTX and Kraken.
With perpetuals markets dwarfing spot trading (over 3x larger in 2024), Hyperliquid’s on-chain success threatens centralized exchanges (CEXes) like Binance and OKX, which rely heavily on perps revenue.
The report details a March attack on Hyperliquid, where CEXes listed $JELLYJELLY perps—a move Ong likens to “kicking someone when they’re down.”
Unlike the industry solidarity seen after Bybit’s hack, this felt like a calculated strike against a DEX rival eroding CEX market share.
Ong sees it as evidence of CEXes’ growing desperation as DEXes like Uniswap and Jupiter challenge their dominance in spot and perps trading.
CoinGecko’s analysis frames 2025 as a battleground of sorts: Trump’s policies inject volatility, while DEXes like Hyperliquid demonstrate their disruptive potential.
As mentioned in the report:
“It’s a clear indication that CEXes are definitely feeling threatened by DEXes, and are not going to see their market share erode without making antagonistic moves of their own. On the other hand, DEXes are not going to back down without a fight, and Hyperliquid’s success has shown that it is possible for DEXes to compete and take a sizable share of the pie. As the team continues to refine their mechanics, the ultimate challenge remains how to lure larger pools of capital away from CEXes to on-chain. At long last after 2020’s DeFi Summer, we’re finally seeing DEXes challenge CEXes, and the future battles are going to be exciting to witness.”
The report further noted:
“Trump shot himself in the foot by posting about a five asset (BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, ADA) reserve on Truth Social a few days before the actual EO was signed, raising hopes of a vastly expanded stockpile. Secondly some commentators were hopeful that the US Government would actually actively acquire more crypto to supplement its existing stockpile. These hopes were subsequently dashed when the official EO was unveiled.”
The report added:
“In reality, any rational person would be able to see that these were nothing more than wild hopium – the US Federal Government is staring down $36.2 trillion in national debt, and Trump has made reducing the deficit a key feature of his platform this term. There was no way that he would be able to obtain approval from Congress to expand additional government funds to acquire crypto, and this restriction is explicitly written into the EO, where any strategies for acquiring more Government BTC needs to be ‘budget neutral and do not impose incremental costs on United States taxpayers’.”
The report concludes on a cautiously optimistic note, suggesting that beneath the tariff storm, the blockchain, web3, and crypto industry’s fundamentals—driven by decentralization and innovation—remain in-tact and have been quite resilient.