2025: The Year of Grand Illusions and Reality Checks

Welcome to the grand finale of 2025—a year that felt like a social experiment designed to test the limits of human gullibility and the elasticity of our collective nervous system. We spent twelve months worshipping at the altar of "imminent breakthroughs," only to realize that the promised land is always just one more tweet, one more ETF, or one more "genius" act away. It’s been a spectacular display of cosmic irony where we, the self-proclaimed masters of the new digital age, found ourselves running faster than ever just to stay in the same place, clutching our hardware wallets like holy relics while the world we knew turned into a pixelated fever dream. If you’re still here and still sane, congratulations—you’ve either achieved Zen or you’ve simply stopped paying attention.

The Crypto Rollercoaster: Bull or Mirage?

As for the crypto industry, it experienced real rollercoasters, sinusoidal rallies, and lived in constant anticipation of either a bull season that had started or had already ended. But it happened, or is happening, or never happened at all in such an unclear format that everyone was left bewildered with their hands spread: what was that even about?

There were many positive moments: three acts signed by Trump, the use of bitcoin as strategic reserves in the US after Trump's inauguration. This consideration allowed us to hope that adoption had happened and we were about to live the best life of all possible. The signing of three brilliant acts provided the legal foundation for this. Serious uncles who previously denied bitcoin as a phenomenon whispered that bitcoin has the right to be added to the list of traditional assets, and more and more old-school funds showed interest in the crypto industry and secretly or openly included crypto assets in their investment strategy and portfolio.

Institutional Flood and the Great Cleanup

The boom in institutional adoption of ETFs on major assets brought us to the threshold of incredible expectations because institutional money was supposed to flood the market. It flooded in but washed away retail traders with it, as happened, for example, in October, when the great derivatives cleanup occurred and the market experienced the largest liquidation in history — by various estimates, it was like several budgets of small countries.

Exchange hacks continued, but exchanges dealt with the consequences more independently. Our beloved American president rolled us on rollercoasters up and down, announcing 100% tariffs on goods from China and then canceling them within a few days. This led to a very unstable market situation, and all short-term traders were repeatedly liquidated, drained, and zeroed out.

And despite huge bullish expectations with Trump's arrival, with bitcoin reaching a new price maximum, by the end of the year the mood among cryptans is rather negative, and the crypto glass is half empty. Although this means nothing because no cycle repeats itself. Institutions quite possibly have a different opinion and calmly accumulate, shaking out retail and weak hands. And of course, the ordinary person, the humble hamster, is not given to know what awaits them, but only to learn lessons from all the shakeouts that shook the markets this year, and with new strength, with new deposits, hope for new luck.

The AI Quantum Leap: From Diagnostics to Robots

In artificial intelligence, there were also many discoveries and achievements: a quantum leap in the distribution of AI products among people, integration into life — more complex and at the same time simpler — interactions that models provided in medicine, in diagnostics, and in predicting treatment outcomes. This allows us to hope that the question "When will we live to 100 years and it will be the middle of our lives?" is just a matter of time.

With the growth of quantum computing and the merger of super-AI and neural networks, a quantum boom is happening that allows supercomputers to process data in very short periods of time. A new generation of language models learned multimodality in real-time, so information processing, whether video or audio, happens in the blink of an eye.

More and more AI assistants help us in our daily lives, do our work. Robots are increasingly found on the street, surprise fewer people, and there is growing understanding that the old world has collapsed and a new world is being built right before our eyes.

Of course, there was a portion of tar, but without these negative moments there would not be such rapid development. The same GPT-5 hacks within 24 hours when it started giving instructions for creating dangerous objects again. There is also a data management crisis as there is not enough quality data for training, and models often massively hallucinate, learning from content created by other artificial intelligences.

The Ethical Dead End and AGI

And the biggest question is the ethical dead end being discussed among industry leaders, as more and more questions arise about the ethical implications of data use, data collection, integration of this data into robots and language models. There are also many predictions about how AGI — artificial general superintelligence — can pose a huge threat to humanity if it is improperly configured or gains consciousness that might not like us simple leather humans.

Final Retrospective: Stay Hungry, Stay Open

And what I would like to say at the finale of this retrospective: we live in a very interesting time that does not allow us to sit still. This time forces us to constantly improve our skills, study, research, stay hungry for knowledge, for expertise. This time gives us new opportunities, this time gives and simplifies our lives. There has been a great breakdown of the traditional order, many professions are under threat. But this also frees up resources for ourselves, for strategic decisions, for improving quality of life, for leveling up our own consciousness, for improving ourselves.

Therefore, I once again urge you not to sit in one place, to be at the cutting edge of trends, news, knowledge, expertise, to match new realities, to bring education to the masses, to be happy, honest, and keep your eyes wide open, because there is so much more interesting stuff we still have to create and see.