The year 2025 kicked off with a bang and a meme. Just weeks into the New Year, a frenzy of politically fueled memecoins sent Crypto Twitter into overdrive, while lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic turned up the heat on stablecoins, securities laws and tokenized assets, usually with different approaches.

It was a whirlwind first quarter, shaped by Bitcoin’s dominance in the crypto market and a US political climate that put digital assets back in the spotlight. Q1 delivered no shortage of storylines.

Who better to break it all down than the journalists tracking it in real time? In the latest episode of Decentralize with Cointelegraph, editorial team members sit down for an unfiltered newsroom roundtable.

Savannah Fortis, head of podcasts and EU reporter, is joined by Gareth Jenkinson, chief of multimedia; Zoltan Vardai, breaking news reporter on the EU news team; and Vince Quill, US news reporter, to reflect on Q1’s biggest stories and what they signal for the months ahead.

Memecoins, power and perception

As memecoins surged in early 2025, questions regarding their legitimacy and political entanglement intensified. For Cointelegraph’s editorial team, the frenzy wasn’t just a market quirk, it revealed deep tensions among innovation, opportunism and influence.

Jenkinson was first to comment on what the impact of US President Donald Trump and greater political memecoin frenzies may mean for the industry in the long term, saying, “I struggle to still trust what the Trump administration and his group of advisers are doing, when they are launching things like memecoins…”

“Yes, we’ve seen a much more favorable approach to the wider crypto industry, and that’s been really great. But a lot of the lobbying, from Ripple, Circle and others, was about making sure their cryptocurrencies were included in this bundle of assets the US wants to hold.”

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The team acknowledged that while regulatory clarity and institutional support have created a more stable environment for crypto companies in general since the new administration took office, that progress risks being overshadowed by spectacle.

More memes…

Trump’s big moves seem to domino into other political figures, namely Argentina’s President Javier Milei, to become entangled in a high-profile memecoin controversy that rippled far beyond national politics.

For an industry seeking legitimacy, this kind of involvement by world leaders sends a mixed message. “It’s terrible for the industry,” Jenkinson added. “Milei was supposed to be a savior for Argentina after years of hyperinflation. And now he’s launching a memecoin with a known rug puller.”

Still, the roundtable remained hopeful. “I’m an eternal optimist,” he continued. “At least we got the affirmation for Bitcoin. People now understand what it is, governments are starting to hold it. That’s how good the fundamentals are.”

Stablecoins and the altcoin fallout

While much attention has centered on Bitcoin’s institutional glow-up and the memecoin spectacle, several members of the Cointelegraph team voiced deeper concerns around emerging stablecoin legislation and the quiet moves behind it.

“One thing that I think kind of flew under the radar is that the Trump-linked World Liberty Forum actually launched a US dollar-backed stablecoin in March,” Vardai pointed out. 

“These stablecoins would fall completely in line with both requirements in the Genius Act and Stable Act… but it could really be interpreted as Trump trying to pass stablecoin legislation while having a vested interest. His World Liberty Financial is launching a lot of crypto-related products.”

The fallout from politically aligned memecoins has also weighed heavily on the broader crypto markets, particularly altcoins. “Altcoins aren’t really winning at all this quarter,” Vardai also noted.

“Memecoins have had this premature rally, and they’ve been rallying independently from other cryptocurrencies. A lot of people are concerned whether Bitcoin’s rise is going to come before Ether’s, and before any altcoin rise.”

So what defined Q1 of 2025? Tune in to the full episode to hear all of the insights! 

Listen to the full episode of Decentralize with Cointelegraph on Cointelegraph’s podcast page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!

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Sidechain developer StarkWare and Weizmann Institute of Science researchers claim to have created a workaround for multiple Bitcoin script limitations.

According to a recent research paper, the new design claims to allow the deployment of complex smart contracts on Bitcoin in a more capital-efficient manner. The new system may also be vastly more efficient from a computing standpoint.

ColliderVM is a protocol designed to enable stateful computation on Bitcoin, allowing multi-step processes to be securely executed over multiple transactions. Traditionally, Bitcoin script output is not accessible to other scripts, making complex calculations nearly impossible.

The researchers argue that ColliderVM could allow the use of Scalable Transparent Arguments of Knowledge (STARKs) — a type of zero-knowledge proof — on Bitcoin without requiring consensus-level changes to the network. The architecture would let Bitcoin verify complex offchain computations with minimal onchain data.

ColliderVM targets Bitcoin limitations

Each Bitcoin block can contain up to 4 million OPCodes (commands) across all transactions, and a single Bitcoin script can contain up to 1,000 stack elements (data entries). Furthermore, stateless execution means that each script executes without memory of previous state or intermediate computations from earlier transactions, making complex computations impractical.

The BitVM implementation from a 2023 paper by Robin Linus from Bitcoin research firm ZeroSync allowed for complex smart contracts on Bitcoin but required fraud proofs. Fraud proofs are cryptographic proofs that prove a particular transaction or computation was performed incorrectly, possibly triggering corrective actions.

Fraud-proof implementation typically requires operators to front capital for potential corrective actions. In BitVM, operators pay an advance to cover potentially fraudulent transactions, recovering the capital after the fraud-proof window closes.

The new system is also more efficient from a computing point of view, compared with previous implementations, but still expensive. Previous implementations used cryptographic one-time signatures (Lamport and Winternitz) that were notably computationally heavy.

ColliderVM draws from the November 2024 ColliderScript paper by researchers from StarkWare, web services firm Cloudflare and Bitcoin sidechain developer Blockstream. This system relies on a hash collision-based commitment setting a challenge to produce an input that, when run through a hash function, produces an output with pre-determined features.

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This setup requires significantly fewer computing resources from honest operators than from malicious actors.

Computational resources needed by honest and malicious actors depending on collision difficulty. Source: ColliderVM paper

Hash, but no food or weed

A hash is a non-reversible mathematical function that can be run on arbitrary data, producing a fixed-length alphanumeric string. Non-reversible means that it is impossible to run the computation in reverse to obtain the original data from a hash.

This results in a sort of data ID identifying data to the bit, without containing any underlying data.

Hash function examples. Source: Wikimedia

This system — somewhat resembling Bitcoin (BTC) mining — requires significantly fewer hash operations compared to BitVM, reducing both script size and processing time. ColliderVM researchers claim to have reduced the number of those operations even further, by at least a factor of 10,000.

The researchers seemingly suggest that this implementation is nearly making a STARKs-based Bitcoin sidechain practical. The paper reads:

“We estimate that the Bitcoin script length for STARK proof verification becomes nearly practical, allowing it to be used alongside other, pairing-based proof systems common today in applications.”

STARKs are a ZK-proof system recognized for their scalability and trustless nature (no trusted setup is needed). ZK-proofs are a cryptographic system that allows users to prove a particular feature of a piece of data without revealing the underlying data.

Many early ZK-proof systems necessitated a one-time secure setup that relied on “toxic waste” data. If a party were to keep hold of the toxic waste, it would allow them to forge signatures and generate fraudulent proofs. STARKs do not rely on such a setup, making them trustless.

Traditional implementation of STARK verifiers would require scripts that exceed Bitcoin’s limits. Now, researchers behind ColliderVM argue that their more efficient system approaches make an onchain verification script for STARK-proofs “nearly practical.”

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Bitcoin-based trustless sidechains?

Bitcoin is widely considered the most secure and reliable blockchain, but its critics raise issues with its feature set being significantly more limited when compared to many altcoins. Sidechains such as Blockstream’s Liquid exist, but are not trustless.

Director of research at blockchain firm Blockstream and mathematician Andrew Poelstra told Cointelegraph as far back as 2020 that ZK-proof-based systems are “one of the most exciting areas of development” in the cryptography space. Cypherpunk, a developer cited in the Bitcoin white paper and Blockstream founder, explained in a 2014 paper that more work was needed to implement trustless ZK-proof-based sidechains on Bitcoin.

Still, even 10 years later, a system based on ColliderVM would be trust-minimized rather than trustless. This is because users would still need to trust that at least a minimal subset of network participants will act honestly to ensure the correct functioning of the system.

The study’s lead authors include Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder of StarkWare, along with researchers Lior Goldberg and Ben Fisch. Ben-Sasson is one of the original developers of STARKs and has long advocated for the use of zero-knowledge proofs to improve blockchain scalability.

In a recent interview with Cointelegraph, StarkWare co-founder Ben-Sasson noted that a real Bitcoin layer-2 solution would need to have “the security of Bitcoin itself.” Instead, current solutions rely on trust in signers or fraud-proof-based economic incentives. Still, he recognized the Lightning Network:

“We should also acknowledge there’s, of course, today, lightning networks, which have the security of Bitcoin.“

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United States President Donald Trump’s official memecoin is set to unlock $321 million worth of vested tokens on April 18.

Token vesting tracker Tokenomist data shows that 40 million Trump tokens will be released in a cliff unlock, meaning the tokens will be available all at once. With the tokens currently trading at about $8, the unlock represents about $321 million in supply entering the market at once.

Token vesting is a common practice in the crypto space to incentivize long-term holding and prevent early investors or team members from dumping tokens during the start of the project. Instead, projects impose a vesting period that allows individuals or entities to gradually get access to the tokens. 

Trump memecoin down 89% since its peak

While the token’s creators reportedly profited by more than $350 million, retail investors have not fared as well. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis estimates that at least 813,000 wallets suffered losses totaling roughly $2 billion following the memecoin’s rapid rise and fall.

Trump’s official token has seen a sharp decrease in value since its peak. On Jan. 19, the token reached an all-time high (ATH) of $73.43. This happened a day before the then-incoming US president was inaugurated. The hype surrounding the token has died down since. Its current value of $8 represents an 89% drop since its ATH. 

The forthcoming token unlock might also cause a further price drop for the Trump memecoin. Massive token unlocks are often followed by sharp declines in crypto prices as holders who previously couldn’t sell will be allowed to offload their crypto. 

In March 2024, Arbitrum unlocked $2.32 billion in vested crypto tokens. At the time, its ARB token was worth $1.89. However, the event was followed by a decline in the crypto asset’s value, with the token trading at $0.29 at the time of writing, an 84% drop since the unlock. 

The Trump token is the largest single crypto unlock scheduled for the week of April 14–20. It accounts for roughly 61% of the total $519 million in tokens set to be released across several projects, according to Tokenomist.

$519 million in locked crypto tokens will be released next week. Source: Tokenomist

Related: Trump administration reportedly shutters DOJ’s crypto enforcement team

Tokens worth $519 million are to be unlocked next week

In addition to Trump’s memecoin, projects including Arbitrum, Fasttoken and Starknet will release vested tokens next week. 

FTN’s unlock is the second-biggest release after Trump’s memecoin. Tokenomist data shows the project will release 20 million FTN worth $80 million. The crypto assets are allocated to the team and its founders. 

Arbitrum will release ARB tokens worth over $27 million next week, which will be unlocked for its founders, team members and private investors. Meanwhile, Starknet will release 127 million STRK tokens worth $16 million. 

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