Following a year defined by regulatory change and continued innovation across market structure, trading and digital assets, industry participants are reassessing what truly mattered in 2025, writes Sam Belden, Head of Content at Forefront Communications. In this first of three articles, Mr. Belden provides perspectives from across the capital markets ecosystem to examine the developments that reshaped infrastructure, workflows and market behavior over the past year, and the emerging dynamics that may prove even more influential in 2026.
The year 2025 offered no shortage of headlines – from a new administration and new SEC leadership in Washington, D.C. to continued innovation across prediction markets, overnight trading, tokenization and the evolution of institutional crypto. Across these areas and more, there was considerable evolution in the infrastructure, regulation, data and services that underpin the capital markets and financial services more broadly.
To make sense of all these shifts, we spoke with a diverse group of market participants, technology providers and industry leaders to get their view of what truly mattered in 2025 – and what may prove even more important in the year ahead. What follows is a snapshot of the shifts that are genuinely changing how markets function, as well as some emerging dynamics still flying under the radar.
Here are the two questions we posed:
- From your perspective, what was the most important or impactful story from 2025?
- What do you anticipate will be the “big story” of 2026? Is there a key trend or topic that you believe is flying under the radar that few people are paying attention to?
The perspectives that follow offer grounded insights into how industry leaders are interpreting the past year – and how they’re positioning for what comes next.
EDX Markets
Tony Acuña-Rohter, CEO
EDX delivers trusted, liquid and efficient crypto trading experiences for institutions.
2025 Review: The October 10 flash crash was the clearest reminder that, for all the innovation crypto has brought to financial markets, its market structure is still fundamentally fragile. A single volatility shock triggered billions in liquidations, exchange outages, cascading liquidations and unstable price feeds. Traders didn’t just lose money, they lost trust.
The core problem wasn’t the asset class, it was the surrounding ecosystem.
Crypto markets have spent the last decade trying to reinvent financial plumbing from scratch, with vertical integration, instant settlement, cloud-based matching engines and hyper-leveraged perpetual futures. But under extreme stress, these design decisions worked against market integrity. What happened on October 10 made it obvious that the structures that underpin traditional finance, such as net settlement, delayed settlement windows and hardened non-cloud infrastructure, exist for a reason.
They were engineered precisely to prevent the kind of cascading failures that crypto keeps experiencing.
Thanks to EDX’s market structure, operations through these times of stress were a non-issue because of key design choices:
- Net Settlement: EDX centralizes risk management to look at a firm’s entire portfolio, giving it a clear snapshot of risk.
- Trade on Credit Limits: Allowing firms to trade on credit limits and not forcing instant settlement enables institutions to re-balance inventories, manage collateral and resolve any operational discrepancies that may arise during times of market stress.
- On-Prem Match Engine: EDX’s match engine is not hosted on the cloud and has response times measured in tens of microseconds. This enables EDX to absorb hundreds of millions of orders without breaking a sweat.
The year also coincided with growing regulatory clarity and renewed momentum under a new administration, which provided institutions with greater confidence to engage, invest and scale in digital assets. These proof points signal a clear maturation of the asset class and reinforce the need for venues engineered to institutional standards from day one.
2026 Outlook: We’re extremely excited to see the tide of regulatory clarity accelerate institutional adoption in 2026. All the regulatory developments in 2025, including the Market Structure Bill, Genius Act, OCC and CFTC guidance, have given large institutions the clarity they need to solidify their crypto plans and begin engaging in 2026.
EDX was specifically created to service this customer segment. From expanded collateral flexibility and centralized clearing to deeper liquidity networks and seamless integration paths, digital assets will become a part of standard trading workflows.