ARK Invest released its "Big Ideas 2025" report, revealing significant milestones in the digital asset space. In 2024, Bitcoin’s annual volatility dropped to a record low, with its annualized one-year volatility falling below 50%, a stark contrast to the 80% seen in 2022 and over 100% in 2018. This decline in volatility accompanied a remarkable return of 122.2% for Bitcoin in the same year.
The report attributes Bitcoin’s successful year to several factors, including the launch of 11 spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States in January, which ARK Invest described as the "most successful ETF launch in history." By the end of 2024, these US spot Bitcoin ETFs had garnered over $100 billion in net assets.
Additionally, after the quadrennial halving event in April, Bitcoin’s inflation rate decreased to 0.9%, marking the first time its issuance rate fell below that of gold’s long-term supply growth.
According to CoinTelegraph, stablecoins also saw a breakthrough year in 2024, with their annualized transaction value soaring to $15.6 trillion. This figure surpasses the transaction values of Visa (NYSE:V) and Mastercard (NYSE:MA) by approximately 119% and 200%, respectively. While the number of stablecoin transactions per month reached 110 million, only a fraction of those processed by Visa and Mastercard, the value per stablecoin transaction was significantly higher than those of the card networks.
On the regulatory front, stablecoins have become a focus for pro-crypto members of Congress. Before the presidential election in November, Senator Bill Hagerty introduced the Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act of 2024, building on a previous proposal.
Earlier in the year, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Cynthia Lummis presented a bipartisan bill aimed at creating a regulatory framework for stablecoins. Following the Republican victory in both houses of Congress during the November elections, Representative Tom Emmer highlighted that passing comprehensive market structure and stablecoin legislation is a key step for establishing clear crypto regulations.
According to Miller Whitehouse-Levine of the DeFi Education Fund, there is now a "broad consensus" in Congress regarding the regulation of stablecoins.
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