Entering 2025, the competitive landscape of cryptocurrency exchanges is undergoing a profound reshaping.

Let's first look at the overall market. The total crypto trading volume for the year reached $58.3 trillion, a 18.2% year-over-year increase. Although market capitalization experienced a correction in Q4, trading activity showed no signs of cooling down; in fact, turnover rates hit new highs—indicating that market participants' trading appetite is beyond imagination.

On the centralized exchange front, a leading platform still holds an absolute dominance, capturing about 38% of the global derivatives market share. Despite ongoing regulatory scrutiny from various countries, its trading depth remains significantly ahead, with the gap between the first and second place nearly impossible to compare.

However, dark horses are also emerging. Between November and December, the growth in data for a certain derivatives exchange was staggering—its contract trading volume directly approached the industry's second-largest platform, even surpassing several well-known platforms. The secret to this exchange's success is straightforward: low fees plus the appeal of long-tail tokens. The retail funds driven by the Meme coin craze in the second half of the year largely flowed into platforms with lower fees and more diverse tokens.

Meanwhile, on-chain trading is quietly rewriting the game rules. DEXs' market share has reached a historic high of 14.2%. The Solana ecosystem is especially aggressive—Raydium and Jupiter, two DEX platforms, repeatedly surpassed traditional centralized exchanges in daily trading volume during Q4. On the derivatives side, a certain decentralized derivatives platform is also attracting professional traders constrained by regulations. The market is gradually evolving into a direct confrontation between the "emerging on-chain forces" and "traditional centralized banks."

Looking at the full year over a longer timeline: the first half was dominated by institutional investors, with spot ETFs boosting the trading volume of compliant exchanges; the second half belonged to retail traders and Meme culture, with mid-sized exchanges and DEXs gaining more benefits.

The future outline of this track is already quite clear—either become an extremely compliant fiat on-ramp or an extremely aggressive Degen casino. Mediocre players stuck in the middle will only become more uncomfortable.