Overall

April marked a turbulent month for the crypto industry as Trump unleashed his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs to kick off April, putting the markets in a state of heightened fear and uncertainty. Sentiment deteriorated thereafter as the fear and greed index plunged to a yearly low of 15 on 9 April when China unveiled retaliatory tariffs on US goods effective from 10 April, roiling financial markets and the crypto industry. Bitcoin briefly broke below $75K on 9 April, although it quickly reclaimed the $80K price level after Trump announced a 90 day tariff delay for the majority of countries. Despite elevated uncertainty, the crypto industry ended on a more positive note than other major indices with total crypto market cap increasing by 9.7% in April, supported by strong Bitcoin performance, regulatory support and potential for de-escalating trade tension between the 2 largest economies. 

Regulatory catalysts have also contributed to a rebound in market sentiment. Paul S Atkins officially took office in April as the chair of SEC and marked his first appearance at a crypto roundtable, offering assurance on more favorable digital asset policies to come. On April 24, the Federal Reserve rescinded cautionary letters for banks engaging in crypto-related activities, following Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's (OCC) and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in loosening guidance for banks’ crypto exposure.  Beyond the US, Hong Kong regulators have approved staking for Ethereum ETFs, allowing Bosera HashKey Virtual Asset Ether ETF to stake up to 30% of its Ethereum holdings in staking activities from 25 April. 

Bitcoin 

Amid market and geopolitical uncertainty, Bitcoin has solidified its position as an emerging ‘Digital Gold’. Institutional demand for BTC ETFs increased in April as investors poured in more than $2.94B and drove the price of Bitcoin up by 14.1% MoM, underscoring Bitcoin’s value as a portfolio hedge during periods of heightened volatility. Other indicators have also served to highlight the growing maturity of Bitcoin and its strengthening role within institutional portfolios. Pearson correlation with Gold has increased to 0.62 in April and Bitcoin’s volatility has also declined from the highs of 70.90% in March to 55.82% in April. The largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, Strategy,  announced a new $21B at-the-market (ATM) stock offering to acquire additional Bitcoin. The firm has already held 553,555 Bitcoin at an average cost basis of $68,459, underscoring optimistic outlook on the Bitcoin. Tether, Cantor Fitzgerald, Bitfinex and SoftBank also announced a joint venture to launch 21Capital that will be seeded with $3B to invest in Bitcoin. Other corporations such as Metaplanet, Anap holdings have also added more Bitcoin to their reserves in April.

Bitcoin outperformance has overshadowed the altcoins market with Bitcoin dominance hitting a 4-year high of 64.89% and ETH/BTC ratio reaching the lowest level since 2020. With the US fiscal deficit expected to reach a jarring $1.9T by the end of 2025 and continued geopolitical tensions, these factors are expected to drive Bitcoin’s further growth. 

Bitcoin Performance Metrics

Source: Artemis.xyz, CoinMarketCap, Deribit, DeFi llama, data as of 30 April 2025

Ethereum and L2s

In April, Ethereum’s price fell by 1.62%, marking 5 consecutive months of decline, underscoring continued weakness in the incumbent L1 as it faces intense competition not only from its L2 ecosystem but also other high performance L1s. Amid market uncertainty, institutional flows have evidently favored BTC ETFs, with ETH ETFs netting just $66.1 million in net inflows compared with $2.94 billion for BTC ETFs. However, this could change in the future as the Proof of Stake Alliance (POSA), which comprises Crypto Council for Innovation (CCI) and nearly 30 industry players, submitted a letter to the SEC Crypto Task Force, pushing for greater regulatory clarity on staking services. Elsewhere, the Hong Kong regulatory authority, SFC, has greenlighted staking services for Bosera HashKey Virtual Asset Ether ETF, marking the first staking approval within the APAC region. 

Onchain activity painted a mixed outlook. With average transaction fees on a downtrend, activity on Ethereum has increased. Daily active addresses grew by 3.18% MoM driving daily transaction activity and total value locked higher.  However, amid elevated market volatility, DeFi volumes slipped by 14.90% MoM, contributing to an overall decline in fees. Although transaction activity has increased, fees earned continued to slip which can be attributed to the lower gas fees as well as increase in P2P transfers, stablecoin transfer volumes. The lower DEX trading volume further reflects this cautious, risk-off sentiment among investors.

Ethereum Performance Dashboard

Source: Artemis.xyz

L2s

Layer 2 networks are expanding more rapidly than the Ethereum mainnet. In April, active L2 addresses grew by 3.25 % driven by an influx of new users on Unichain and Celo, lifting the overall L2/L1 monthly active address ratio from 4.98 to 5.05. While most L2 chains recorded declines in transaction activity, testament to the broader risk-off sentiment among users, Unichain and Celo bucked the trend which we will examine subsequently. 

Base now overtakes Arbitrum as the largest rollup in terms of total value secured(TVS) as stablecoin supply on Base increased while Arbitrum’s stablecoin supply decreased. The implementation of permissionless fault proofs and a decentralized security council also pushed Base to achieve Stage 1 decentralization. 

Celo

Since Celo transitioned to become an L2 optimistic rollup built on the OP Stack in March, it witnessed notable growth in its ecosystem. Daily active users spiked from 296.6K to 493.4K in April, representing a MoM growth of 66.4%. Correspondingly, daily transactions have increased 60.6% MoM to hit 1.21M. 

Monthly active address on Celo

Monthly transaction count on Celo

DEX volumes have also more than doubled in April to hit $2B driving network revenue growth by 47%. This growth can be attributed to better network performance as well as an ongoing $750K incentive campaign backed by Stabila Foundation and Uniswap DAO with attractive yields.

Stablecoin adoption on Celo has accelerated, with transfer volumes climbing 25%—from $2.0 billion to $2.5 billion—propelled by a 161% surge in transaction activity on the Mento protocol. 

Among other leading L2s, Celo almost doubled its market share in terms of monthly active addresses and became the 4th largest network in terms of transaction count. Evidently, the transition to become part of the OP Superchain is a strategic and successful move, as it opens up more liquidity and ecosystem growth opportunities for the network. 

Unichain

After a lacklustre launch, Unichain witnessed significant growth in April. Bridged TVL exceeded $300M after launching a liquidity mining incentive campaign on April 15. Led by Gauntlet, the incentive program will distribute $5M in incentives across 12 Uniswap v4 pools. The adoption so far has been highly successful as the number of daily active users more than 7x in April, reaching 231K users while transaction count more than tripled over the same period. 

Transaction count on Unichain

This has propelled Unichain to become the second most active chain among other L2s in terms of active addresses. DEX volumes also surged from $136.5M in March to $3.6B in April, fuelling a more than 14x increase in protocol revenue. 

Source: growthepie.xyz

AI

The AI sector performed well in April as the overall Web3 AI market capitalization grew by 26.1%, emerging as one of the best performing sectors this month. Top performing sub-categories include compute infrastructure and AI agents led by strong gains in incumbents such as Render, Akash, Virtuals, ai16z, AIXBT, Fartcoin among others. Below we highlight some notable developments across the different AI stacks. 

Infrastructure

With demand for AI services accelerating, access to computing power remains crucial—serving as a key enabler not only for pre‑training workloads but also for post‑training scaling and real‑time inference. Even though hyperscalers continue to satisfy most of the demand, the shift towards fine-tuning, reinforcement learning and inference time scaling has lowered the hardware requirements and enabled more opportunities for distributed computing networks to compete. 

Render

Activity on Render Network surged in April as burnt RENDER tokens increased by 24% MoM, fuelling a 31.7% price appreciation. At its inaugural RenderCon 2025, Render announced several significant developments, such as an enhanced OTOY interface, a broadened slate of strategic partnerships, and new optimizations for compute workloads. As of the time of writing, RNP-019 passed with overwhelming support, which will enable Render Network to allocate a reserved tranche of RENDER emissions to onboard more AI compute providers and cater to a growing list of partners who will rely on these compute services. 

Aethir

Aethir, one of the leading compute providers in the market, announced the launch of AI Unbundled, a collective of AI builders who will leverage Aethir’s compute services. As part of the alliance, grants, hackathons and a joint resource hub will also be available to foster AI developments in Web3. With more than 80 existing partnerships tapping into Aethir’s network of 428,507 GPUs distributed across 95 countries, this represents another catalyst driving revenue growth as Aethir achieved an ARR of $113M. 

Models

Model innovation continues to accelerate at a rapid pace, driven by the increasing accessibility of open-sourced models and the shift from large-scale, compute intensive pre-training to post-training. These tailwinds have lowered the barriers to entry for many AI research startups and created more opportunities in terms of fundraising and technological developments. 

A notable example is Nous Research, which has recently announced their $50M Series A fundraising at a $1B token valuation led by Paradigm to build their decentralized AI model on Solana. Other updates that the AI startup has announced include:

• Atropos: an open-source framework for reinforcement learning environment used in LLMs.

• Minos: a lightweight classifier that helps to detect text refusals from LLMs providing binary results alongside a confidence score. 

Flock.io, a decentralized AI model training platform, has also made notable progress in April which include partnership with Alibaba Qwen to leverage Flock’s decentralized, privacy-centric infrastructure, launched a subnet on Bittensor (SN96), a tokenomics upgrade with gmFLOCK, and partnership with Aethir’s AI Unbundled among others. Flock has also been recognized by CBInsights as the top 100 AI startups in the world in 2025, testament to the potential of decentralized AI training infrastructure. As of the time of writing, Flock.io is home to 5784 models collectively trained by 166 training nodes. 

Fetch.ai announced the launch of ASI-1 Extended, which is an extension of ASI-1 Mini. ASI-1 Extended offers enhanced features such as multi-turn reasoning, tool and agent orchestration, context retention and real world academic and professional benchmarks. The enhanced model now boasts a MMLU performance accuracy of 89%, far surpassing models such as Gemini 2.0 Flash (87%), DeepSeek v3 (86%), GPT-4o (86%) among others. 

Platforms and Applications

Within this sub-category, the agent narrative remains dominant both in Web2 and Web3. In April, Google announced the launch of A2A protocol which is a communication standard for AI agents and has thus far received significant institutional support. In web3, AI launchpad protocols saw a 66% increase in market capitalization to $3.2B led by Virtuals Protocol which had more than doubled its price. Fuelling optimism in the protocol has been an increase in activity on the platform as active wallets surged by 29.6% and drove trading revenue higher. Virtuals also announced the release of Genesis, an incentive mechanism fostering deeper and fair participation in token launches. ai16z, the token launched by Eliza Labs has also witnessed a MoM gain of 56.6% driven by excitement around its no-code agent launchpad, auto.fun which will channel platform fees to buyback $ai16z. Adding to its agentic framework, Eliza Labs announced support for the Storacha plugin which enhances agentic memory by ensuring retrievable data all on Filecoin and IPFS. 

An agentic web3 future seamlessly integrated within applications is no longer a pipe dream as frameworks and tools become increasingly mature. A diverse array of Web3 agents is already available for example, Senpi AI, a chatbot that delivers token analytics and executes on‑chain transactions, Squidllora, an automated trading agent on Solana, UniQ, an analytics agent embedded in telegram that can also perform onchain actions on behalf of its 140,000 MAU among many other successful launches. Space and Time has also announced the launch of the Space and Time Agent which can help to generate zk-verified SQL queries for trustless blockchain analytics across multiple chains.  

As agents become more prevalent and intelligent in representing users’ intent, the role of the user will gradually take a backseat, focusing more on important transactions. Therefore, multi-agent interoperability and communications are essential to unlock greater autonomy and productivity gains. Olas Network, an agent launchpad and marketplace, has made notable progress in this field as they processed more than 6M AI agent transactions and 3.9M agent-to-agent transactions. Its agent launchpad, Agents.Fun has also received a new upgrade, enabling agents to autonomously upload photos and videos on X. With a sleeker integration between Agents.Fun and the mech marketplace where agent-to-agent interactions occur, agents created can now easily procure services from other agents, expanding their range of capabilities. Another notable project that has made significant strides is Questflow, a multi-agent orchestration layer that is built on its Multi-Agent Orchestration Protocol design (MAOP). In April, the protocol forged partnerships with Stakekit, Coinbase Wallet, and Primus Labs, and was accepted into the Google for Startups program—moves that broaden its agents’ resources and enhance their utility.

Stablecoin

As DEX trading volume declined in April amid market uncertainty, the stablecoin market continues to remain a popular safe haven option for investors. Stablecoin market supply increased by a modest 3.25% MoM to $240.44B in April. Stablecoin transaction volume hit a new all‑time high, rising 7.46 % to  $717.78 billion, underscoring the asset class’s growing adoption. 

Source: Visaonchainanalytics

Utilization of stablecoins on Base accelerated in April as it overtook BNB chain to become the third largest public chain by transaction volume as stablecoin transfer activity saw a surge of 26.89% while volumes declined on BNB. With stablecoin already proven its practical utility in payment networks, many institutions and merchants continue to announce partnerships and initiatives to fuel stablecoin adoption. Below are some notable partnerships and initiatives introduced in April. 

• The two largest payment networks continue to make headway into the growing asset class as each announced various initiatives to drive stablecoin      activity. Mastercard announced the launch of a global stablecoin payment system while Visa partnered with Bridge to deliver stablecoin-backed      cards. 

• Tapping into the network effects on Telegram, Ethena reduced the gap with retail users with their partnership with TON foundation to bring USDe and sUSDe to Telegram. 

• Through the launch of the Circle Payment Network (CPN), Circle—the issuer of USDC and EURC—has further streamlined cross‑border payments and introduced real‑time settlement, a development positioned to spur wider use of regulated stablecoins. 

Stablecoin Transfer Volume on Base vs BNB

Stablecoin Performance Dashboard

Source: DeFi Llama, Visaonchainanalytics