The Best of Bankless 2025

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It was another year for the books here at Bankless.

In a year defined by DATs, regulatory wins, Trump memecoins, Ethereum leadership reckonings, privacy investments, and ETHBTC whiplash – we had an awful lot to talk about.

It wasn't easy to pick our favorite newsletters and podcasts of the year, but in today's post-holiday issue, we're taking a stab at our favorites. Here we go.

💻 Top 5 Bankless Newsletters of 2025

Restoring ETH’s Product-Money Feedback Loop

• By David Hoffman

Editor's Note: In a year filled with ETH vibe shifts, our new Ethereum Weekly newsletter gave us a place to not only track the vibes but push the conversation into more productive arenas. This May piece from David Hoffman isolated a key under-discussed piece of the L2 roadmap versus L1 scaling debate and zeroed in on a number of the sub-problems that had been pissing off ETH holders.

How to Live Privately Onchain

• By David Christopher

Editor's Note: While getting the full, unadulterated buy-in of the federal government earned crypto some major tailwinds in 2025, depending on Uncle Sam to pump our bags at every turn didn't feel quite so cypherpunk. This guide offered some access to tools that fell into a crypto use case that has gone unendorsed by the Trump admin – crypto privacy software.

Ethereum is Winning the Real-World Assets War

• By Ryan Sean Adams & Jack Inabinet

Editor's Note: At times, this was undoubtedly a year for the institutions over the crypto natives. RWAs are the next frontier for crypto to traverse and this piece from RSA and Jack sought to lay out just how significant Ethereum's head start here remains.

Ethereum Monetizes Open Source

• By David Hoffman

Editor's Note: As in other years, 2025 saw the rise of Alt L1s that looked and talked like Ethereum, but failed to align on open source values. Scaling to sky-high TPS without baking in the ideological underpinnings (which impact the technical underpinnings) is a shortcut that won't replicate ETH's magic, David Hoffman wrote in this piece.

Crypto’s Privacy Tech Wave

• By David Christopher

Editor's Note: In a year that saw new all-time highs for ETH and BTC, but few consumer-level breakout trends, an upswing of attention toward privacy-preserving tech offered some value-aligned fodder for crypto's builders looking for a place to direct their attention. Bankless senior analyst David Christopher spent much of the year digging into the latest on this front and this piece served to harvest much of the trends into a single place.

🎧 Top 5 Bankless Podcasts of 2025

The World’s Largest ETH Holder - Tom Lee on Treasuries, Ethereum Dominance, and Wall Street

Digital Asset Treasuries offered ETH the win they needed to push past all-time highs, albeit briefly, but Tom Lee became Ethereum's Wall Street cheerleader. This all-time great interview offered a deep dive into his mindset and investing frameworks.

Vitalik Buterin: How Ethereum Becomes The World Ledger

Bankless celebrated ten years of Ethereum with the man himself in an interview less focused on navel-gazing than plotting the next decade and how ETH can build on wins rather than rest on its laurels

Ryan's Personal Reboot: 5 Types of Wealth with Sahil Bloom

In this deeply personal conversation Bankless founder Ryan Sean Adams and author Sahil Bloom offered some priceless takes on priority management that were valuable to any investor that has spent a few years in crypto's trenches.

Ethereum Beast Mode - Scaling L1 to 10k and Beyond

In 2025, the conversation in Ethereum research circles shifted hard to L1 execution performance. The EF's Justin Drake offered some of the most fascinating perspectives on possible roadmaps, and this conversation showcased some of his broader thinking.

Tom Lee & Arthur Hayes: How Crypto Flips Wall Street

This all-timer crossover episode brought in Bankless favorites Tom Lee and Arthur Hayes for a wide-ranging conversation on crypto's Wall Street invasion and how investors should take advantage.

Did we miss one of your favorites? Let us know in the comments!

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