What stories and topics left the most significant impression in 2025? In a way, it wasn’t about big events or announcements that stopped everyone in their tracks. This year was more like a plane flying over our heads as we trudged along, dropping a shower of tiny tokens of information and data that look pretty, but no one knows how they’ll really change anything… yet.
- Jon’s impression of 2025
- London Blockchain Conference—the big one
- Creating a healthy blockchain ecosystem
It has a cumulative effect. My personal highlights here may seem mixed and almost random, but there’s a common theme: potential. 2025 gave us plenty of reasons to question whether the future will truly be great, but reporting on this industry is always rewarding and a reminder that it still can be.
London Blockchain Conference, the annual kick-starter
When your job involves working from home, reporting mainly on software releases and regulatory shifts, anything that drags you back into the world of live human interaction automatically counts as a highlight. The London Blockchain Conference is always the big one, and 2025 marked the third year since the COVID-19 era’s travel restrictions, which I’ve been lucky enough to fly out and report on in person (four, if you count its prototype, 2022’s Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai).
Conventions and conferences are a reminder that this isn’t all just faceless technology that magically appears with an X post. It’s built, promoted, and discussed by real people staking their very-real futures on how we might all live better through technology. It’s easy to become disillusioned about the future when you interact with news feeds, so in-person events are a much-needed infusion of optimism.
At London Blockchain, my primary tasks involved exploring issues such as asset tokenization and stablecoins. Previously, I’d never have imagined these would become two of the more compelling topics in Bitcoin and blockchain. Still, I’ve come to realize they’re actually the quiet achievers of the industry. Their magic happens mainly on the back-end and in longer-term impacts from their use in international commerce, and understanding this requires a deeper knowledge of financial world operations and the power politics behind countries’ monetary policies. In 2025, I’ve had plenty of random “a-ha” moments just listening to interviews and podcasts that were more geopolitical than technological. I expect to see a lot more tokenization and stablecoin highlights in 2026 and beyond. Stay tuned.
CoinGeek‘s designers excel at creating video sets where conference presenters and attendees feel at ease sitting in front of cameras to expand on their ideas one-on-one. I was able to ask Richard Baker and Steve Haigh from Tokenovate about their plans for the financial system (tokenizing settlement processes rather than assets themselves), and Brendan Lee about tokenizing artistic IP and trading it on the Origin Exchange. Angus Brown from Minit Money discussed how digital remittances are boosting economies in Africa and elsewhere, while Boston Consulting Group’s Dr. Bernhard Kronfellner elaborated on making stablecoins more trustworthy instruments for users and regulators.
The London Blockchain Conference targets a broad audience, so many of its speakers are external to the BSV world. While I’ll always be dedicated to a proof-of-work, scalable blockchain backbone for everything, it was also great to interview people like MiCA Crypto Alliance’s Juan Ignacio Ibañez about helping businesses stay legit in the European Union, and Laura Estefanía of Conquista PR about marketing blockchain’s message.
Integrated services, social networks, hubs, and app stores
This section examines the conversations I had with other individuals and companies in 2025 about projects that run exclusively on BSV, the integration of on-chain apps, and how they contribute to creating a healthy ecosystem. It also explores how these efforts help discover new uses for blockchain that will ultimately lead to greater advancements.
Treechat wasn’t new in 2025, but it always deserves a mention in a BSV highlights list. Developer Dmitriy Fabrikant continues to add compelling new features to the user-oriented social network, making it something far more than just a clone of existing platforms, “but with blockchain”. In 2025, Treechat introduced generative AI features and support for 1Sat Ordinals, along with a new mobile app, thereby creating more opportunities for artists to engage and grow their communities. Fabrikant himself remains a committed advocate for Web3-based, ad-free social media models. He frequently posts video updates explaining why on-chain platforms are the only logical option for users who want to maintain control over their online existence.
The social network “Metanet.page” operates on similar principles. “I want to create a truly open marketplace of opportunity where merit earns its rightful place, free of institutional gatekeeping and algorithmic suppression,” said its founder, ModernDeucalion, back in April. Metanet and Treechat both have similar goals and feature sets (Metanet uses STAS789 tokenization while Treechat prefers 1Sat Ordinals), and serve as Web3 hubs for other apps, so there’s bound to be some rivalry between the two. Ultimately, it depends on which interface you prefer, and hopefully, any competition between them serves as motivation to continue building and adding new incentives.
Babbage’s Hackathons are now key events on the BSV calendar, and with the London Blockchain Conference opening up with a more blockchain-agnostic approach (at least, officially), you could say Babbage’s events are actually the primary BSV-focused developer gatherings each year (that said, someone please bring back BSV DevCon!).
Founder Ty Everett is one of the best-known personalities in the BSV space, and his presentations always have a rapt, gape-jawed audience (OK, the jaw-gaping is mostly for non-devs like me) hungry to hear about a potential Bitcoin use case they’d never imagined before. Babbage upgraded its AI-assisted app developer tool, BitGenius, in 2025, training it specifically on the latest BSV documentation and features, such as Overlay Services and the BRC100 standard for integrated apps and wallets.
Babbage launched the Metanet App Catalog as part of its Metanet Desktop platform. As of December 2025, it has been renamed “BSV Desktop” and “App Catalog”. The apps featured there are built using Babbage’s developer resources: libraries, SDKs, and other toolkits, and follow the BRC100 standard. If you’re looking for cutting-edge ideas, download the latest version of BSV Desktop and explore the prototype apps available there.
Speaking of integrations and new ideas, Richard Boase‘s “Bitcoin Corporation” isn’t just an app hub; it’s aiming to be a whole new business model for using Web3 apps and investing in scalable blockchain development. Not shy about its ambition, Bitcoin Corporation aims “to onboard 100 million users to the Bitcoin ecosystem through intuitive, subscription-based productivity tools that reward users with Bitcoin,” and “to become the dominant productivity platform on the BitcoinSV blockchain.”
There’s already a suite of distributed productivity, financial, and media apps (called “bApps“) and even a Bitcoin OS accessible via a browser window. To help users learn how to use and navigate all this, with a view to building their own apps, there’s the AI-powered “Senseii” ready as a guide. Altogether, it’s an entire tokenized blockchain economy that will most likely feature in another highlights article next year.
Full disclosure: I’ve known Boase for about 13 years now—in fact, I knew him for a while before he knew me, and he was one of the people whose perspectives first lured me into the Bitcoin rabbit hole. One lesson I’ve learned is that, whenever he has a new idea, it’s worth further investigation at least… even if you don’t understand initially what he’s getting at.
Whew, that was an eclectic mix of issues, but when I sat down to think about the stories that stuck in my memory from 2025, those were the ones that emerged first. It feels like every year since 2020 has been wilder and crazier than the last, and I’m not expecting that trend to change. Covering news in the blockchain world has been a great source of stability and reassurance in the turmoil, something to remind us there are still plenty of people working to make the digital future seem less oppressive and more trustworthy.
Watch: What’s ahead for crypto regulation? Highlights from Blockchain Futurist Conference 2025
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Jon Southurst