HTX Ventures Annual Review and Outlook: Regulatory Clarity, Asset On-Chain, and Institutional Onboarding Triangulation

Article Source: HTX

Recently, Huobi HTX's global investment arm, HTX Ventures, released its latest research report "2025 Annual Review: The Path to Mainstream Adoption of Cryptocurrency Assets," which reviewed the industry's key developments in the dimensions of "regulatory shift, global on-chain, and accelerated institutional adoption,"
based on our practical experience as long-term ecosystem builders. It deeply expounded on how these trends reshape investment logic and value discovery, and clearly defined our future focus areas.

The report pointed out that in the past year, mainstream adoption has moved beyond slogans and has gradually solidified into operational, auditable, and scalable business pathways through methods such as stablecoin payments, RWA asset on-chain, and institutional compliance entry.

As for the industry outlook in 2026, HTX Ventures believes the competitive focus will shift further from "narrative and price" to "whether the infrastructure can continue to solidify value" — whoever can develop a replicable capability in key areas such as regulatory frameworks, payment settlement, asset on-chain, and institutional channels is more likely to gain an advantage in the next stage of mainstream adoption.

As long-term industry participants, Huobi HTX and HTX Ventures continue to focus on the underlying capabilities that can span cycles: on the one hand, tracking structural trends from a research perspective to help the market identify long-term directions, and on the other hand, through investment and ecosystem collaboration, supporting teams with real product strength and sustainable business models to promote cryptographic technology's entry into a broader range of real-world scenarios in a more robust and sustainable manner.

Regulation Becomes "Predictable": Compliance Frameworks Are Bringing Institutional Funds In

HTX Ventures points out that in 2025, the regulatory gray areas in major jurisdictions worldwide have significantly converged, with regulation transitioning from "gray tolerance" to "defined rules," focusing on stablecoin frameworks, market structure compliance, and stricter trading, custody, and disclosure requirements. In the United States, the GENIUS Act has established a federal framework for payment-type stablecoins and strengthened requirements such as 1:1 full backing; Europe has significantly raised compliance thresholds after the implementation of MiCA, driving the industry from "incremental expansion" to "compliance competition." Hong Kong has also progressed in stablecoin regulation by promoting an issuer licensing system and implementing new regulations. HTX Ventures believes that the increased clarity of rules directly reduces the uncertainty for institutional participation, providing a more executable path for compliant funds to enter.

The World Is Going On-Chain: Stablecoins Running Beyond Payment Scale, RWA Entering an Expansion Period

By 2025, key changes in on-chain infrastructure come from the dual drivers of stablecoin expansion and the institutional adoption of RWAs.

On one hand, in 2025 stablecoins have accelerated from a crypto-native tool to a global financial infrastructure: the total market capitalization of stablecoins hit a new high of $3.08 trillion in October, stabilizing around $3.094 trillion by mid-December, a 50.3% annual increase; the total on-chain transaction volume for the year exceeded $46 trillion, now on par with the annual sum of the three major traditional payment networks Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal.

On the other hand, RWAs have entered a phase of scalability: as of December 17, 2025, the value of on-chain distributed RWA assets reached $18.74 billion (excluding stablecoins), more than tripling since the beginning of the year; among them, tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds account for approximately $8.7 billion, representing 47.3%, and landmark products such as BlackRock BUIDL (around $2.006 billion) have emerged, driving deep integration of traditional asset management forces with on-chain tokenization. The report believes that the "on-chaining" of real-world assets and business processes is pushing blockchain from a "self-growing" stage to a new phase of "external servicing."

Clearer Institutional Entry Pathway: From "Do We Want to Allocate?" to "How to Allocate Compliantly"

HTX Ventures defines 2025 as the year when the institutional adoption pathway becomes "quantifiable": the core change for institutions is not in "making a full bet on high-volatility assets" but in entering the crypto space in a more auditable, standardized, and closer-to-traditional-asset-balance-sheet language manner, breaking down on-chain capabilities into deployable financial modules.

Specifically, institutional participation is advancing along several clear pathways: fitting crypto exposure into traditional investment containers through ETFs/ETPs; incorporating BTC into corporate treasuries; moving payments and settlements onto the chain through stablecoins; transforming "cash equivalents and collateral" into on-chain composable assets through RWAs/Tokenization. These pathways collectively drive the market to be more "institutionalized": liquidity is concentrated towards the top, volatility is more constrained by macro and risk management, market depth is more predictable, while institutional activity remains highly focused on "safe zone" assets such as BTC, ETH, and on-chain dollars.

More importantly, institutional entry is changing the market's "operation mode." HTX Ventures summarizes this structural impact in three points: increased market concentration (funds further tilting towards mainstream assets), significantly heightened importance of compliance and risk management (higher requirements for data transparency and compliance reporting), and a yield curve and pricing logic more closely resembling traditional finance (concepts such as term structure, cost of funds, etc., more deeply integrated into crypto pricing systems). At a strategic level, institutions prefer arbitrage, market making, hedging, Delta-neutral, and other low-risk/neutral return strategies, playing a role more akin to "structure providers" rather than short-term price movers.

In 2026, HTX Ventures Will Focus on Which Directions

HTX Ventures Lead Alec stated, "Following the structural changes in 2025, the industry is entering a crucial stage of infrastructure competition. Funds are flowing along the track of 'regulatable, auditable, scalable,' so the next phase's focus will no longer be on short-term price performance but on who can continue to solidify value at a critical infrastructure layer."

Building on the above trends, as a long-term industry builder, HTX Ventures will focus on the following directions in 2026:

●       AI × Blockchain: AI agent frameworks, machine accounts and payments, on-chain execution automation, data oracles and settlement loops

●       Stablecoins and Payment Infrastructure: Compliance issuance and reserve management, on-chain clearing and reconciliation, risk-controlled AML, enterprise-grade wallet permissions, payment routing optimization

●       RWA Expansion and Secondary Liquidity: Expanding from cash equivalents to private credit and institutional asset on-chain issuance, and improving trading and liquidity facilities

●       User Experience and Productization: Applications and protocols that lower the on-chain financial barrier (more user-friendly interactions, one-click cross-chain, mobile-side security)

●       Multi-Chain Strong Application Ecosystem: Seeking 'strong applications' and integrated platforms that can settle users, cash flow, and developers in a multi-chain landscape

For the crypto industry, the significance of 2025 is that it is transitioning from 'feasible' to 'scalable': Crypto technology is being embedded in the global financial system in a compliant, transparent, and integrable manner. Looking ahead to 2026, Huobi HTX and HTX Ventures will continue to dig deep into value creation with a long-term perspective, focusing on critical infrastructure and real-world adoption, driving the mainstreaming of crypto technology as industry long-term builders, and helping to build a more open, fair, and transparent future financial system.

About HTX Ventures

HTX Ventures is Huobi HTX's global investment arm, integrating investment, incubation, and research to identify the world's best and brightest teams. As an industry pioneer, HTX Ventures has over 11 years of blockchain building experience, excelling at identifying cutting-edge technologies and emerging business models in the space. To drive growth within the blockchain ecosystem, we provide comprehensive support to projects, including funding, resources, and strategic advice.

HTX Ventures currently supports over 300 projects across various blockchain verticals, with some high-quality projects already trading on Huobi HTX. Additionally, as one of the most active FOF funds, HTX Ventures has invested in 30 top-tier global funds and partnered with leading global blockchain funds such as Polychain, Dragonfly, Bankless, Gitcoin, Figment, Nomad, Animoca, and Hack VC to collectively build the blockchain ecosystem.

This article is contributed content and does not represent the views of BlockBeats.

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