The year is 2025. It’s more than 16 years since the Bitcoin whitepaper was published and 10 years since the launch of Ethereum, and the programmable smart contract layer that came with it. With billions of dollars invested in the industry, and tens of thousands of developers contributing thousands of applications, primitives, and protocols, surely there would be plentiful turnkey Web3 toolsets available to broaden adoption? 

Unfortunately the answer is a resounding “No.” 

Yet, crucial toolsets that made technology easy and enjoyable to use sprung up quickly in the early days of the internet. It’s hard to pin down the exact year the web became large enough to start impacting peoples’ lives, but I’ll suggest it occurred sometime in the late 1990s. By 1995, AOL had crossed the 3 million user mark and Yahoo! had just launched as a secondary default gateway to the web.  Google was founded three years later and basic search became a feature that opened the door to new users around 1999.

The Web2 era, starting in the early 2000s, was dominated by easy-to-use, template driven tools to bring a broad user base to that revolution. Within one year, Amazon Marketplace (2000) brought a turnkey e-commerce solution to market. Less than five years after Google wrote its first line of code, WordPress (2003), MySpace (2003) and Facebook (2004) were already allowing people to share their own personal profiles and stories on the web. 

Was it the wild success of the internet that encouraged multiple companies to quickly offer easy-to-use, less-technical tools to expand the industry’s reach? Or, was it the existence of those better user experiences themselves that made it possible for the industry to soar? Probably a bit of both.

Nonetheless, here we are in 2025 and the number of Web3 platforms that resemble those which helped drive the internet’s rise are very few. The majority of projects or protocols that go live are targeted explicitly to either developers or other hardcore crypto natives. Can an industry that continually suggests it wants to aggressively expand its reach do so without actually building tools for a broader user base? 

We have to understand the incentives. Web3 participants are frequently incentivized, through tokens, to get involved early on in a given project, regardless of how usable it is. Priority is often given to projects with robust social media followings that might respond well to a token launch. But unless that early version of the product plugs a critical hole, users are rarely incentivized to continue working with it over longer periods of time.  

In fact, it’s actually worse than that. Many crypto-native participants are often encouraged  to switch to whatever new early-stage operation is in vogue.  In other words, ease-of-use and long-term adoption aren’t crucial to “success” in Web3, so it’s not surprising that they are frequently overlooked.

For Web3 to transition past being perennially “early” and instead parallel the explosive growth of Web2, we need to re-focus our attention to tools and UI/UXs that broaden both our user base and our underlying use cases. To hold attention long term, Web3 products themselves must seamlessly solve common, genuine problems for users and keep adding value for the long run.

–  William Herkelrath, CEO and co-founder, K3 Labs

Our analysis for 2025 forecasts bitcoin reaching a target of $150,000 in the first half of the year. However, an initial pullback may occur in Q1 if the newly inaugurated Trump administration fails to introduce the anticipated “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” at the pace expected by the fast-moving crypto market.

Even without a fully implemented reserve strategy, bitcoin is expected to rally, driven by bullish momentum. We anticipate the price to enter the $130,000–$150,000 range by Q2 of 2025, supported by strong market catalysts.

Key catalysts driving growth

This widespread interest signifies a strong foundation for bitcoin’s upward trajectory in 2025.

Quantitative models and risks

While optimism runs high, our quantitative models flag no potential risks under $90,000. Specifically:

Insights from DeMark indicator

The DeMark TD Sequential indicator suggests bitcoin is on a bullish setup on the weekly timeframe after reaching its propulsion target of $108,300 and completing one of its typical 10% corrections down to $90,000, which was bought with conviction. A propulsion target is a predefined price level derived from a series of calculations that help traders identify key areas of potential support or resistance. These targets are designed to indicate where the price might move in the future, often serving as potential breakout or exhaustion points.

Dollar strength and macro risks

The U.S. dollar’s weakness in the coming weeks and months presents another catalyst for crypto:

Summary

Despite potential near-term volatility and choppy price action, we maintain a strong bullish outlook for bitcoin in 2025, with projected highs reaching $150,000 or more. Key risks include corrections toward the $90,000s, should buy signals fail to emerge. We will be navigating this dynamic market for potential long-term value investing at around the $82,000 and $85,000 range. Additionally, weekly price closes below $99,000 should be the trigger for the next bearish leg down.

– Nathan Batchelor, managing partner, Biyond Trader

As always, get the latest crypto news from coindesk.com and market updates from coindeskmarkets.com.