Digital asset OTC market 2025
Wintermute’s 2025 digital asset OTC market review analyzes crypto liquidity flows, institutional trading behavior and derivatives growth to explain how traditional cycle dynamics are changing.
13 Jan 2026
Reports
Wintermute
2025 challenged many of crypto’s long-held assumptions. Next to seasonal patterns breaking down, Wintermute’s OTC flow shows trading activity concentrating in majors and large-cap tokens, while execution strategies matured through greater use of OTC, derivatives, and structured products. Wintermute’s position at the center of the crypto ecosystem provides a unique perspective on how markets traded in practice and sheds light on what may lie ahead in 2026.
Welcome to the biannual Wintermute OTC review, where we take a detailed look at the forces that shaped the previous year and set the stage for 2026. Below are the key takeaways.
Liquidity concentrating instead of recycling: Trading activity clustered around BTC, ETH and a narrow group of large-cap tokens, mainly due to the capital flowing in via ETFs and DATs, which caused liquidity to concentrate at the top. Unlike previous cycles, gains in majors no longer reliably recycled into altcoins, leading to sharper divergence in performance and narrower market breadth.
Derivatives, specifically options, surged: Options activity expanded sharply in 2025, with OTC volumes and trade counts more than doubling year-over-year. For the first time, flow was dominated by systematic yield and risk management strategies rather than one-off directional positioning, signaling a more mature derivatives market.
Altcoin rallies shortened: Narratives continued to emerge, but failed to persist. The average altcoin rally lasted roughly 19 days in 2025, down from around 60 days the year before, reflecting reduced conviction and more tactical risk-taking.
Execution became more deliberate: Despite muted price performance, counterparty engagement deepened. OTC execution grew in importance as participants prioritized discretion, certainty, and capital efficiency over confident directional bets, pointing to a more systematic and sophisticated approach to trading.
Wintermute’s OTC data highlights a market transitioning away from clean, narrative-driven cycles toward a more structurally constrained and execution-led regime, particularly in BTC and other large assets. In other words, the market, especially at the top, is behaving more like an established asset class.
The report outlines three key scenarios that would need to materialize for the market to recover in 2026, along with a detailed breakdown of how those dynamics could unfold.
Read the Wintermute Digital asset OTC market 2025 for a detailed look into the past year.
Disclaimer: Spot trading is offered by Wintermute Trading Ltd and derivatives referencing cryptoassets is offered by Wintermute Asia Pte Ltd (hereafter referred to as “Wintermute Entity” or collectively as “Wintermute”). Each Wintermute Entity trades for its own account and with assets (including digital assets) that belong to it.
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